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

aesthetically – by my chewing profile on the left from the TV… Then I took the plates to the kitchen and washed up, as well as all that crockery-cutlery stacked in the sink after the meals on that day. I was not ashamed to wash up even when Tonya's husband, Ivan, was entering the kitchen. On the contrary, I was proud that Gaina Mikhailovna trusted me with the task and that after a couple of strict proficiency tests I was approved for the job of a weekend pearl diver.

First of all, I boiled a kettle of water on the gas stove, because it took too long to heat it in the boiler, for which it was necessary to bring firewood from the basement. The process of washing up took place in a large enamel bowl put in the sink. Civilization had not yet come up with detergents and other useful things for washing dishes then and, for a start, with a bar of laundry soap I rubbed a large piece of gauze to give it rich foam. And in the end, of course, I rinsed them all under the tap, in strict keeping with the requirements of technology shared by Gaina Mikhailovna. Washing up helped me to pass the time. I even liked it, especially in that part of operation, when the turned on gas was hissing and burning its blueish flame under the kettle bottom.

Besides, I was trusted with dusting the carpet taken off the floor in the living room out to the yard. It was a shabby thread-bare rug, so one could feel free to beat it thoroughly when dusting. Sometimes, when I was working it over, Eera would go out in the yard and say that it was enough already because the neighbors in the apartment block were human beings too and deserved compassion. And Gaina Mikhailovna once remarked that the method of my dusting showed the temper of a born translator. I cannot imagine where she could have seen translators busy with that job…

At times, I offered some services on my own accord. Like, when Gaina Mikhailovna was very worried about her son Igor being ill and hospitalized in Kiev, because she could not go there and find out how he was, and I suggested that I would go.

Igor was very surprised and could not believe that I had come to Kiev without any other agenda but visiting him. 4 hours on a local train to see my brother-in-law, with whom I did not know what to talk about. If I disclosed having a certain interest of my own, and that in those 4 hours I had finally read The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Radishchev, would it feel better for him?

Then I had time and again to report to my mother-in-law what her son looked like. Well, he looked quite normal, except for an unmistakably monkish air, like all the other patients there. It was an officers-only hospital where they were given long blue gowns, yet allowed to keep their military forage caps. The combination resulted in an awesomely wondrous costume, especially when you watched the ostensibly strolling shut-ins in peripatetic gossip pairs along the allies in the tiny outside garden – the cape-like Merlin-style blue garbs beneath the khakied halos with the scrambled-eggs of cockades. Some special order of monks: Forage-Cappians…

And I was also entrusted to coat the apartment floor with the glossy red paint. Not at one go, naturally, because people had to live in the apartment undergoing the process of renovation; so it took two weekend-visits. But the kitchen, the hallway, and the corridor connecting them, Ivan Alexeyevich painted in my absence.

He helped me a lot when I decided to make bookshelves in the form of a bookcase without doors and walls. The shelves were, sure enough, designed for our future family library. 10 volumes of The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language were already collected. I was too late to subscribe to the Dictionary, but many of its subscribers soon stopped to waste their money, and the rejected volumes were put on free sale at bookstores. Apart from the incomplete collection of the Dictionary, there were full Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s works in 4 volumes, a dozen books in English and a hotchpotch company angled at different bookstores…

At SMP-615, I could not find the material required for the project and asked my father-in-law to have the planks planed and cut in the carpenter workshop at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. So, I supplied him with the list of measurements of what I needed… He brought the bundle of readied plank pieces and dumped it in the hallway of his apartment, then started to convince me it was impossible to make anything worthy out of them. He even called Eera to the hallway to be an arbitrary, "Look, what shelves could be made of these slats?" And those indeed looked very slim but, before asking him, I had thought out thoroughly how to make shelves that would be both light and sturdy.

The project was accomplished at 13, Decemberists because in Nezhyn there were neither conditions nor tools for such an undertaking. And when I sawed out the bridle joints in the planks and spread casein glue over the tenons to stick them into mortices and, when they dried, polished with sandpaper, and covered with light yellow varnish, then even my father approved the shelves.

Eera, on one of her solo visits to Konotop, was not too much impressed though, at furniture stores you could see more baroque items; yes, they're shelves, and so what?. As for Ivan Alexeyevich's false forecasts, it could easily be understood – the workman at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant workshop told him the planks were unsuitable for the project, and he just repeated the opinion of a specialist…

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But then my initial perambulations about Eera's parents' apartment grew even shorter because I canceled eating in the living room… The decision was made when after my arrival at Red Partisans, it took my