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

1. the kefir, which Maria brought for me when I was treated in Nezhyn city hospital for the principle's sake;

2. the boiled sausage I was treated to by my course-mate Valya with black eyebrows meeting on her nose bridge, during our joint school practice at the station of Nosovka, although I was not really hungry.

However, since I had not fallen in love with either of them, the hypothesis fails miserably, the Ichnya sorcerer gets zero points and remains on the bench of charlatans…)

~ ~ ~

When Gaina Mikhailovna, keeping her eyes aside, cautiously asked what attitude was entertained towards me among our team members, I got it easily what wind she was trimming her sails to. That was meant to ask: how do they tolerate my drenched reputation?

Yes, it should be admitted that not every collective would readily swallow presence in its ranks of someone with higher education at a position not corresponding to their diploma. Here lies the explanation to that scream from the bottom of the heart of Vasya, a roof-fastener at the "Dophinovka" mine, "Your diploma’s a sore disgrace for our enterprise!" which stood for, "You turn the mine into some worthless rabble!"…

My reputation at SMP-615 was spoiled by the cashier Komos who knew that I had studied in Nezhyn and got the diploma. Her daughter Alla once had a long, serious, relationship with my brother Sasha. At that period, I even visited the Komoses one time in their apartment. But later, Alla cut her marvelous long hair way too short, and my brother became the Adoptee to Lyouda and her mother…

The cashier Komos was meting out wages to the employees at SMP-615. For that event, once a month our Seagull bus was taking the workers from the construction sites to the SMP-615 base grounds, and in the lobby on the first floor of the administrative building, we lined to the small square loophole in the wall.

You got your payment after standing in the anticipatory excited line of workmen, then drooping forward to thrust your head into the opening of the loophole-window, low in the wall, and signing the pay-sheet… I just did not like that final juxtaposition. With your head somewhere there, not quite clear where, your behind stayed outside to the mercy and at the discretion of the line in a state of heated agitation…

When I reached the window, I did not stoop but simply pulled the sheet closer—on the window ledge—and signed it. Moreover, Komos saw that it was I who popped up. Then she cried out from behind the glass, "Sehryozha! And where is the head?"

"I was guillotined."

"What? Don't show off! Having a diploma does not make you above anything else! You once visited us with your Olga. Forgot that? We have been drinking hooch together!."

Never was I in favor of frivolous smugness nor of brusque familiarity. And, naturally, my response to Komos, the cashier, was direct enough to put her in a proper shape of attitude: "Missed by a mile!” said I, “There was no hooch whatsoever! That time at your place, we drank plain medical alcohol and flushed it down with birch sap."

So, in general, I let her know where she belonged. But she still gave me my payment, and there was enough to return Tonya those 25 rubles that she lent me for flowers, when you were some ten-minute old at the maternal hospital. Till then, it somehow did not work out at all to square up with her…

Thus, because of the talkative cheek of a cashier, I never managed to hide from our team the fact of my diploma. However, they did not apply any specific discrimination on the grounds of my having it, and after about 4 years I even screwed up on my spetzovka jacket the "float-badge", of those that they handed out along with the diploma. I just thought: why should it kick back in the hutch drawer? That’s how it got screwed up, in the summertime, naturally. And my spetzovka jacket acquired pretty spiffy look with that rhomboid enamel badge of tender blue and a golden book spread open inside it against the backdrop of the sun-bleached black cotton of my protective clothing.

For more than a month I walked around the site wearing it. And then one morning I opened the locker where my spetzovka hung in its place but the badge was whipped, only the hole pricked for its screw remained in the jacket breast. But it couldn’t be someone from our team, who unscrewed the insignia, no, at that moment the project neared its commissioning and the site swarmed with workforce driven in even from outside SMP-615 because of the solidarity of managerial suckers…

So, on my next visit to Nezhyn, I gave my mother-in-law a quite predictable answer, "Gaina Mikhailovna, 10 people from our team have a good attitude to me, and 1 person entertains a positive one."

"How do you know?"

"I conducted an oral survey. Separately, of course."

"Does it mean that you asked, 'What's your attitude to me?'"

(…an interesting question, eh? Where else could I get those data from?

By the way, one of the respondents also asked in their turn, "And what's your attitude to me?"…)

Yes, life turned upside down: once I used to go from Nezhyn to Konotop on weekends, but now from Konotop to Nezhyn. On Fridays by 17.40 local train to Nezhyn; on Mondays back from there by 6.00 local train. 3 times I overslept that 6.00 local and began returning by 19.30 on Sundays because I got into a flap to deteriorate my positioning in the line for getting an apartment.

(…when there was the Negro slavery in America, a number of the Afro-American families got split. Say, the husband was slavering on the plantation of one master and his wife was several miles away on the plantation of another one. On holidays, her husband was visiting her. Such a woman was called his "broad wife".

When I learned that, I regretted that I knew