The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

electrician, my neighbor opposite the corridor, died on the road from Chabanka before reaching the hostel. They found him 3 days later. I always knew that was a dangerous stretch of the road. In summer, there were constantly flying fluffy spherical balls, like to sea mines, but white and smaller, of course. Probably, one of them scraped the defunct, when he was unaware or failed dodging.

They buried him in the village cemetery, on the cliff between the highway and the sea. Kapitonovich was carrying a wooden cross ahead of the coffin, like a banner, but he himself had a sash of a long narrow towel tied in a diagonal loop from one of his shoulders, the way best men of grooms adorn themselves at village weddings, instead of pinning a handkerchief up the jacket sleeve as was the custom at funerals in Konotop. What else might you expect of them? They’ve heard the song but got the wrong sow by the ear.

In the father's black pea-jacket with yellow buttons, I presented a colorful figure, like, a seaman from the black-and-white movie "We are from Krondstadt", but I also helped to fill up the grave. Then we were taken back to the hostel by bus. The women from the mine office in the pit prepared the wake feast from their home supplies. I wolfed a disgracefully enormous amount of every viand like on the visit to the Tshombe's field camp in my student years…

The repaired radio set was brought back to the hostel, and I had to move into the room of the diseased electrician. Soon Vasya, the new roof-fastener, joined me there. At first, I doubted his sex, when accidentally noticed red-brown stains on his bedsheets, as if from menstruation. He hurried to explain, that they were from a tomato that rolled under his blanket and he kicked it to squash in sleep, although I hadn't been asking about anything at all. That hostel's just another Bellamy Isle with everyone around reading your thoughts before you had the time to think them off. However, what simple explanations might sometimes be found for incomprehensible, at first glance, facts…

Autumn came into its own. I inserted glass into the window frame of the respective room in our would-be two-room apartment, however, they still were not bringing any asphalt… And so it went on in its everyday manner until the moment when the chief engineer came from Vapnyarka and said that I was announced wanted in the all-Union hunt, and the mining management received a letter from the NGPI with accusations of sheltering a runaway who shunned working off at the place of his appointment.

"So, write the application."

"What application?"

"Requesting to fire you of your own volition."

"I have no such wish."

"We cannot retain you here after such a letter."

As I stubbornly negated any desire for leaving, a compromise was found, based on one of many articles in the Labor Code of the USSR: "dismissal by agreement between the parties". Thus, instead of a chosen, I became just a party…

In the end, I had a parting walk about Odessa streets in the sheepskin coat wide open, like a soldier from the Peasant Army of Nestor Makhno, and in rubber high boots bravely splashing across the puddles left by the recent heavy rains. When back in the hostel, I packed them in a bale with the rest of my clothes and the tools which I had started to collect already, one by one: a hammer, an ax, a saw, an iron, an electric water heater, and a white enamel kettle.

(…the night I was bringing it from Odessa it was real dark with some primeval darkness that you meet once or twice in your lifespan, darker than in abandoned galleries without the flashlight. All the way from the Dophinovka village to the same named mine I was singing to perk the kettle up, not let it get too spooky. No, not whistling in the dark but singing and shuffling the road too so as not to miss the right forks, all the way to the farm-like barracks of the miner’s hostel, which I could see by simply groping at that time, all the songs I could remember. Maybe, for personal tone up as well, yet only in part for it is a disgrace for a chosen which I was at the moment to be afraid of darkness. Only in the dark you can see light and become enlightened, right? And become an initiated chosen. Only they found me there and cut off and out of that game for kids. Damn!.)

The bale was taken to the station and sent off by a luggage car. Then I returned to the hostel where a recently bought briefcase and sports-bag Aerobica were sitting together with the guitar, before starting to the airport the following morning.

Slavic Aksyanov dropped into our room. We finished off a whole pan of fried potatoes under "The Bolero" by Ravel from Vasya's receiver. I told Slavic to fix the door to the toilet booth above the sea inlet. It was kicking back in the tall grass, I had seen it there. He swore to execute my last wish. However, just in case, I threatened that if he did not, I would haunt him the way the Hamlet's father’s ghost was molesting his sonny. A genuine funk flashed in his eyes. Who would have ever supposed that even they were afraid of spooks?!.

~ ~ ~

Eera told that they had sent a letter from the Transcarpathia to the institute, reporting my absence from the appointed school. Gaina Mikhailovna was summoned to Rector, who demanded of her to disclose my current location. After Rector declared that in summer he had personally met me in Odessa, she was forced to give away my affiliation with the mine. Now she was going to have troubles at work, and my diploma would be taken away unless the Republican Ministry of Education annulled my appointment.

I had to urgently go to Kiev, as far as the metro