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

station named after Karl Marx, and up the street starting from The October Revolution Square to a gray-stone building in a row of similar ones, yet different to them by its sign of the Republican Ministry of Education, and up the white steps of polished marble to a tall leather-lined door on the second floor…

Head of the department in charge of shirkers, surnamed Baranov, looked 5 years older than me and superbly refined with the appropriate chiseling, grinding, and polishing as required by his position. The only chink in his armor was the single blonde hair on the dark gray shoulder of his jacket, donned over a snug woolen waistcoat thru whose narrow cut glimpsed a thin-pin-striped necktie against on the Tattersall shirt of squares as fine as those in the elementary school students copybooks for Arithmetic – unpierceable coat of mail.

(…yes, because the clothes we wear are not for just airing our dress-code. Their main purpose is to protect us and not only from the weather, which is too trivial. First and foremost, they have to protect us from other humans more adequately clad for the current situation.

Remember that Yalta Conference? Stalin and Churchill in the greatcoats of higher commanders at their respective armed forces and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in between the iron-clad rhinoceroses, flashing his democratic chic? Guess whose country had to bury their leader a couple of months later? I can’t keep back the tears of condolence watching his naive necktie and defenseless fly in the pictures.

But then who knows? FDR might have been in a suicidal mood right then…)

He glibly trotted it out that our state for 4 years bore expenses to give me the higher education free of charge, and it was time to compensate the charity by honest work in the Transcarpathia or say goodbye to my diploma.

I did not waste time on useless arguing. We both knew it perfectly well that the interests of state was the ace in trump suit, there was nothing to counter it with. My defense was built on my passionate desire to work in the field of enlightenment of the younger generations, and nowhere else but on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, yet how about my family?

He encouraged me to take you and Eera over there.

And what about the second or, rather, first of my daughters?

The presence of Lenochka was a surprise for him. By the force of inertia, he suggested deporting her together with the rest.

I had to show my passport to prove that she was the product from my previous marriage. After a bitter pause, I admitted lack of information of her mother's current whereabouts.

That was the checkmate. Großmeister Baranov had not been trained to parry such moves and, having got to Zugzwang, acknowledged that I had a really swirly plot. I would get the free diploma—namely, the cancellation of my obligations to return my debt to the state by honest work at the place I was appointed to—if there be presented the reference from the Head of Street Committee, that Lenochka lived at 13, Decemberists Street in the city of Konotop.

Meanwhile, the bale sent from Odessa arrived at Nezhyn. The tools did not impress my father-in-law, but he got delighted with the teapot strainer. It was his long-term dream to have such a one, only you could not find it in stores even for ready money… Eera and I started discussing at which of the construction enterprises in Nezhyn I should apply for a job to get an apartment as soon as possible when she suddenly said that I needed to be checked, as advised by her mother.

I was a little surprised because medical check was the must when you applied for a job, even without her mother's advice. As it turned out, I had to understand that there was a need for special examination, to check if I was normal at all. Some traits in my behavior were giving rise to certain fears and threatened to disrepute in the public eye the otherwise totally respectable, if not for me, family of Eera's parents.

For instance, quite recently I walked the streets in torn shoes, and I also collected every mote of dust around the baby's carriage, and any question, even of the most trivial nature, made me think for too long before answering, and when she was in the maternity hospital, I came home in the middle of night and declared that the rain was warm. Besides, Eera was shocked by the news from Konotop about my fanatical auto-da-fe of the cannabis plantation, which, though not included in the list of deviations, spoke volumes…

I had nothing to counter with, it was the King and Queen pair from trump suit, she was right on each and every point.

Yes, shortly before that talk, on a clear peaceful autumn day, I went out for a walk wearing my shoes. They were not torn, of course, but fairly worn-out along the sidewalks of Odessa and country roads in the adjacent Komintern district. The walk inspired an elegiac mood. I recollected the distant galaxies on the smooth sea under the steep cliffs near Vapnyarka, the endlessly long street of Kotovsky's Road, and the ridiculously short one of Sholem Aleichem walked by those brown leather shoes with lengthwise incut pieces the tops of toe caps. They were sort of a spaceship on the return from an interstellar expedition across the universe – still alive, but hopelessly out of vogue… When I was taking them off in the hallway, Gaina Mikhailovna remarked that it was time to use some warmer footwear. I felt really pleased with such caring attentiveness from my mother-in-law…

And I could not deny the delayed quality of my reaction to any questioning. Each inquiry that I was addressed with fired up an inaudibly rumbling computer in my mind (although I did not even know the word "computer" then) revving in a hectic round of the combinatorial analyses of all the possible responses to choose the one whose value