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

1. poet Kandyba, aka Olyes, who had for years been wallowing knee-deep in blood at the Kiev slaughterhouse, writing the tenderest poems imaginable;

2. writer Vasil Stephanic;

3. writer Les Martović.

Real master knows what he wants to say, because he has what to say, and he also knows how to say it even without much of learning, just as humans find out the way of natural breathing. The rest of the literature aficionados are left with jingling their cowbells in an attempt to portray the newest of the fashionable waltzes by Herr Strauss, which he creates to the delight and admiration of the decent European public.

Still and regardless! We will catch up, and overtake his orchestra because we've got our inimitable balalaikas!.)

So, after work, I had what to busy myself with. And even a local train could be easily turned into a passable study. That's why on Fridays, I came to At-Seven-Winds with the briefcase and, after work, in the train car, I took out of it a thin copybook, a pen, and a volume of stories by Maugham, in English.

Stooping over the compact print in a book page, I plunged into the tender humid night of the exotic southern seas, where the fragrance of the jungle in bloom spreads for miles beyond the islands.

Emerging back from there with a pair of rough lines for the copybook, I stacked the pinch into the ruled-paper cells, and dived away to roam forth along the sandy beach by the water's edge with white-crested, even in the dark, waves of the rolling surf, and, with a start, looked thru the pane in the car window… Pryosterny?.

Delicious rides they were…

Writing into a copybook placed atop of the briefcase was not comfortable, yet the desk problem found its elegant solution. On Fridays after work, I extracted from my locker the plywood piece intended for the shelf to keep a headgear because if you're holding a piece of plywood 50cm × 60cm pressed in your armpit, it doesn't look too outrageous and, actually, it is not in the way when boarding a bus or a train car.

Upon arrival in Nezhyn, the desk of plywood perfectly fitted into an automatic storage cell, while the briefcase traveled to Red Partisans and there under the table covered with the tulle tablecloth, on which the old pier mirror stood leaning against the wall. The expenses for storage of that single item in a cell amounted to reasonable 30 kopecks: 15 kopecks to set the code inside the door and slam it, 15 kopecks more to open it, after collecting the code from outside.

Once, on the way back to Konotop, the cell door jammed. In such cases, it's opened by an on-duty station attendant with a special key, and in the presence of a militiaman. Before opening the frivolous cell, the militiaman asked me about the things put inside.

I did not want to expose the fella to an unnecessary strain and never mentioned any desk nor shelf, but the ungrateful bonehead utterly refused to believe even in a piece of plywood.

When the attendant opened the cell door, I pulled out those 50cm × 60cm and walked away, yet the militiaman for a considerable stretch kept at the cell agape, peeping into the void of its dusty innards. He, to use the favorite byword of our team foreman, Mykola Khizhnyak, was inspecting it like a magpie the piece of busted bone. A trivial magic trick, dumbo…

And at times the briefcase was filled with also things for laundry because Eera had instructed me to bring the washing over. I readily obeyed because it felt like we were, sort of, becoming a family, even though in the mother-in-law's washing machine but still somehow, yes….

However, the first family celebration was no success. You had turned exactly 1 year old, and I invited Eera out to a restaurant. She refused because Gaina Mikhailovna was not in favor of our going to restaurants.

Well, at first, Eera a little hesitated: to go or not to go? But I failed at persuading her because of my tongue-tied manner of speaking. Most often the fits of tongue-tiedness befall me at some casual, everyday, situations, I just cannot explain obvious things. "Well, you know, let's go, eh?"

Some impressive appeal, you bet… And in the meanwhile the mother-in-law, leaning against the jamb of the bedroom door, trots out neat arguments, slick as a whistle, that it takes a decent woman at least 2 days to get prepared for going to a restaurant.

"Well, what? Come on, let's go, eh?"

And a suchlike pitiful crap instead of saying, that it's our daughter's first birthday which would never happen again and that sometimes an impromptu might be a better hit than hatched events.

Tongue-tiedness is a real curse. It calls for some abstract topic for me to be quick as a wink at turning a repartee…

When Brezhnev for the first and final time was passing Konotop by the train made of just a couple of cars, they put up his portrait, 2 months in advance, in a tin shield taller than the station itself. The giant close-up of dear Leonid Ilyich—Mind, Honor and Conscience of our Time—with all his Gold Star medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union on his jacket breast. In case, he would glance from the bypassing car and see how totally we loved him around here.

Only they forgot to warn me on the day of his traveling by, and I walked from the Settlement along the tracks until a militia sergeant stopped me, and told I could not go to the station.

Okay, said I, I was going to the Under-Overpass and not the station which I could easily bypass by taking that service path so that to keep my jeans clear of the fuel-oil-smeared rails.

The guy in the militia uniform loved and respected Brezhnev no more than I did. However, taking into account the concomitant circumstances—a person without a uniform trying to prove something to a uniform-rigged guy who, moreover, had an