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

"Tell it to him!" exclaimed my mother, sobbing, "He wants to go to the psychiatric hospital in Chernigov!"

"What for?"

"His wife has sent him there!"

"Is she a doctor?"

"No!"

"Why then? People can send you anywhere. Is he her slave, or what?"

"Yes! Yes! He's a slave!"

(…look here, Joseph Yakovlevich, aka the Beautiful, you were sold into slavery by your brothers and that hurt, right?

How would you feel being sold by your own mother?..)

Tarasenko once again forbade me, already as to a slave, to go anywhere, and I together with my mother left his office.

On the way to the streetcar stop, my mother asked, "Now, you see? Got convinced?"

"It does not change anything."

"If they do something to you, I'll kill her!" said my mother with a suppressed sob.

"Mom," said I, "what kind of a book have you read recently?"

Of course, I knew perfectly well that since long my mother had forsaken reading books, yet you're still supposed to forward one or another clue to politely maintain a conversation, you know…

Because of the check to examine my head before submitting me into slavery, and further inconsistencies in the train traffic timetables, I reached the 4th kilometer by Chernigov late at night. However, the stipulated Monday was not over yet and I started to knock at the iron gate, giving rise to discontent yells from the securities in the check-entrance house. They switched on the light and asked what it was I was at, the name of Tamara became the password. Two more orderlies in blue flannel gowns came up and took me to the waiting room.

There I submitted my clothes and received in exchange pajamas, as well as a pair of army kirza high boots. The left boot was my size, but the right one squeezed the foot inhumanely. Probably, that was retaliation for disturbing them at so late an hour.

Then thru the cold darkness, I was taken to the fifth unit and handed over to the paramedic on duty. He led me into a wide empty corridor-hall lit dimly, because of the late hour, with a pair of shaded lamps in the wall, reflected by the dark glass of a distant window in the opposite end of the corridor. Glazed doors to the wardrooms were lined along the hall’s left wall. The paramedic escorted me into one of the wardrooms, pointed at a free bed, and went out…

In the obscure light seeping in thru the glass in the door, I could make out half-dozen beds laid with wrapped up figures, and ghostly whitish nightstands in between. I undressed and lay down, suppressing involuntary fear…

Apparently, so late addition made the population of the ward to keep low under their blankets, but gradually they thawed out. Someone invisible asked me from out of the corner if it was me. They hush-hashed at him and he fell silent… I refrained from giving any answer. Thru the glazed door, there came a faraway cry from down the corridor and cut off too… I lay—a wrapped up figure as everyone else—rejoicing that I still managed to do it on Monday, and felt the upsurging alertness because I understood who I was among.

"So what, Kostya, would you like some home-made sausage now?" asked one of the invisible figures of his invisible gossip.

I was tickled with irresistible laughter; how quickly they managed to figure me out!. When Eera and I were leaving Chernigov after our joint visit to the 4th kilometer, Eera bought a coil of home-made sausage at the station. It was really delicious.

Now, the brainstorming team in the darkness entered an expert discussion of that very sausage, and I, amused by their getting on track so casually, tried to choke the laughter and snuffle it away thru the nostrils, biting the corner of my pillowcase, so that they would not take me for a psycho. At some point, I could not keep it down anymore, and they broke off in a freaked out silence…

~ ~ ~

The morning started with the scuffing of mules in the corridor-hall. In a yoke of a waffle tower around my neck, I went out in the heavy kirza high boots and, following the mainstream of the traffic, found the washroom and toilet. Then there was a usual havvage for breakfast.

When doctors arrived from the city, Tamara looked into the huge corridor and called me, by my last name. I approached her with the apologies for being late on Monday; she generously pardoned me and retired back to her parts.

The corridor-hall society was populous, diversified and in a state of noisy Brownian movement. Absolutely unsystematic… Apart from me, only one individual, with his hair closely cropped in zek style, wore high boots. He, for the most part, lay on the floor tiles by the white radiators of central heating installed under the windowsill in the far end of the corridor. Time and again, he was pressing himself against the other patient's backside, who also was lying there. The courting wooer’s advances received a sluggish resistance expressed in reluctant squirms and languid counter pushes.

The mobile part of the crowd roamed around wearing mules, immersed in their individual inner worlds from which they occasionally emerged to issue some incomprehensible exclamations.

A cripple on a low trolley navigated the stream of their wandering legs, propelling himself with hand pushes against the floor tiles. He obviously supervised some part of the society capable of understanding instructions and orders and served the non-static hub for their hangout in the style of a loose black market…

A pair of Messrs. Pretty-Guys kept together. The dark-haired one was selling himself for the master-thief in their milieu of 2.

A young man of Central Asian appearance invited me to play checkers at a table in the far corner. Every eye in his face moved independently from its counterpart as happens when the brain hemispheres do not interfere with the sovereign internal affairs of their neighbor and each one controls their