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

own eye. The guy obviously could not play checkers, and when there remained just one piece of his on the board, I announced the draw and did not play anymore… And I also declined playing cards with the Messrs. Pretty-Guys.

On the other end of the corridor by the window, between the locked door to the courtyard and the glazed door to the passage with medical offices, a white figure of a nurse sat in a chair. She never intervened in anything. She rose from her throne only after the midday havvage to stately walk along with the gurney, arriving from the medical staff passage, to the center of the corridor-hall.

"Medications!" sounded joyful yells from different parts of the crowd. They rushed to scramble around the movable table, grabbing up their favorites from the pills of different color and size, scattered over the oil-clothed top. Soon after, some glassy-eyed appeared in the crowd. The exchange transactions at the black market grew more animated…

To pass the time, I followed the example of Lenin and Dean Reed, measuring their cells with steps from end to end. Luckily, I had much more space and orbited the huge corridor in a sweeping ellipse, from the window in one end to the window by the locked door in the other. Being not the only moving body in that space, I carefully avoided collisions, especially since I paced at a rapid rate.

Some in the crowd paid attention. The blonde one from Messrs. Pretty-Guys started up the Indian drums beat against the cover of a thick book, which he constantly kept in his armpit, accentuating the footfalls of my high boots.

"Why are you driving a fool? You need it?" shouted the dark-haired one in my wake.

"Try it yourself, you'll get high!" yelled I back, scudding off to the next apex in the ellipse.

Then one activist in the Brownian movement by the walls suddenly got it. He issued a happy scream and also started running regular ellipses of an orbit, though not along, but across the hall-corridor.

"Ogoltsoff infected Baranov!" squeaked some rat from the crowd to the queen in her chair. But she did not intervene in anything.

Walking was painful, because the right boot, invented for the torture kit of the Inquisition under the name of "Spanish boot", was two sizes smaller than mine. I managed to withstand just one day, and on the following afternoon, I decided that was enough for playing Andersen's Mermaid and turned to the nurse with the complaint. She gave me a pair of regular mules, like on the rest of inmates, only much more rundown, so my orbiting became painless, yet markedly slowed down…

One compromise because of weakness invites another to slip in and before long your adamant determination tumbles in a crumbled heap. I mean, you start to fix one unbearable sore and there crop up a pack of others crying for amelioration… The button in the pajama pants belt kept slipping out of its too wide loop. I grew tired of living with my hand in a constant clutch at the pants top to prevent their falling down. And again, I had to bring the nurse out of her non-involvement lethargy, with the request for a needle and thread.

No sooner had the repair been over than another nurse appeared from the medical staff passage, and called the roll of those starting to Club. My name was there too…

For a considerable stretch, our caravan of 12 in pajamas followed the nurse in white, yet the concluding inmate in our single file wore also a black padded jacket of a workman. On climbing a stair flight, we entered the long indoor gallery bridging to another building. Outside the windows, there unfolded a withered fields with distant black-and-yellow arrow-shields indicating the direction towards the out-of-sight airfield. Each windowsill in the gallery was packed with multiple pots of cacti accompanied by the handwritten instruction for those meek of heart and ignorant of agriculture, "Do not water!"

Inside, Club presented the replica of a regular club with the stage in front of the plywood rows of seats, and the visual-agitation posters on the walls:

Bread is the head of anything else!The economy should be economical!If there is bread, there will be a song!

interspersed by the sheets of wordier pieces in a smaller typeset.

The workman from the end of our file pulled up at the sheet nearest to the entrance to unswervingly study it, at times scratching the cap on his head, for which purpose he had to unlock his hands from being clasped in zek attitude on his back.

I sat down in the last row of seats. The lamps above the stage lit up, and a man in a doctor’s smock came out upon it bearing a displeased countenance along with an accordion.

Two more nurses brought in another caravan – a dozen of women in gray gowns over the sturdy linen of hospital underwear. 2 or 3 of them proceeded to seats in the middle of the hall and were immediately joined by Messrs. Pretty-Guys.

The accordionist started to play for the dancers in the passage between the stage and the front row of seats… A woman of about 40 swiftly paced along the central aisle carrying her sweet smile to the last row and invited me for the white dance.

"Sorry, I'm no good at the waltz."

She went away with her face dropped down. A loss. A loss…

Despite the purpose of the Strauss' "The Danube Waves" no one was waltzing but just hugging each other in pairs, a couple of which climbed onto the stage. In one of those elevated pairs, there was the young man with asynchronous eyes. But now both of them were fixed on the tall soft fluff of gray mohair in the knitted hat of his partner – a nurse in a white smock. Who of them invited who?.

The ladies were first to be taken away before our caravan started off. The workman broke away from the same citation poster on the wall and took his