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

father-in-law way too long to open the door and, eventually entering the hallway, I heard the cries of a squabble. It happens, you know, a casual family stank.

I heard angry yells of Ivan, Tonya's husband, in high-pitched tones, then she herself flashed thru the corridor to the kitchen and back to the living-room, where more voices wrangled in a confused manner. Eera peeped into the hallway, "The bread is on the table, you bring the rest of snack along from the kitchen." And she disappeared again to bicker on with Ivan.

On account of my arrival, the theater of hostilities moved over to the bedroom of Tonya's family. From the living room, it was only heard that Ivan took a circular defense in the corner, and his parents-in-law and sister-in-law, individually and then in chorus, cried out to him what particularly they were not happy with. The words remained indistinct, like, Pillutikha’s curses, but I could tell that Ivan was responding with dour short bursts, like a Bandera-guerrilla used to use the ammo sparingly. At times, some of the attackers retreated to the living room to recollect what else they could've omitted to divulge and then again rush back to join the clashes. Except for Tonya, who did not leave the bedroom, but kept monotonously banging off her dismal clue. I did not even look in there, but everything was clear enough, family squabbles do not shine with the diversity of dispositions.

And all that turmoil raged against the background of wild screams from the rebellious farmers in the Central Asia, because the TV was feeding series of The Man is Changing His Skin and they kept rushing discontentedly from one edge of the screen to the other. Hence the voices. The rioters were taking the full advantage of watchers being busy with personal sorting out in the bedroom. Then the dehkans grew so impudent that even jumped out of the TV, and continued their scrambles all over the oilcloth on the table.

And I knew that you could expect anything from that TV… One Sunday, my mother-in-law cooked soup from a raw bone and put the plate for me next to the TV where some mafia clan members were forcing a judge to commit suicide. And, when he put a bullet thru his temple, the brains splashed out smack into my plate – oops! What was there to do with my mother-in-law standing vigilant behind my back to control if I would show the proper respect to her cooking? I had to lap it hot…

Yet, no one would escape the just retribution, and now, when the TV and I remained eye to eye, I clicked it onto another channel. It turned out a neatly mellow violin quartet of chamber music. What a relief!.

But then the father-in-law jogged from the bedroom for recharging. And he felt that something was amiss, not as stimulating as expected. He did not immediately realize that it was because of the cello. What could a cello possibly do in a Central Asian bedlam? Unfortunately, he got it what was what, and clicked the channels back, directly into the wild grateful wails of dehkans, "Ala-la-ah!" He swallowed it, like a sip of energizer and, with replenished ammunition, rushed back to the interminable battle…

Since that night, on my arrival, after the hallway and the bathroom, I made straight for the kitchen. There I laid the kitchen table to have some havvage. And I never opened the fridge, so as not to give Gaina Mikhailovna the pretext for her undertone mumbling reprimands to Eera.

While I was eating, you would come running to the kitchen with agitated chatter in your own, as yet not very understandable, language… However, I again have run ahead of the events…

~ ~ ~

To keep Eera, my Eera, to ensure that she would be mine and mine only, I went down the path of righteous life.

(…they do not sell the code of righteousness at the news stalls because no one needs them. Without checking it by code, anyone knows whether they did the right thing or not. Even if your wrong-doing can be bolstered with tons of excuses and justifications, or even called for by written law, and all around glamorized your deed, "well done! good fellow!" you still know, deep in your heart, that you'd better not have done that and, at that point, you'll be right, because you can't deceive yourself and you know all along what's right from what isn't.

They finish their empty praise, disperse, and now you're left to live on and wade thru your own disgust at yourself and futile blinking at the scruples or, maybe, tries at drowning them in more and more atrocious yet commendable wiles…

Honestly, my quest for righteousness sprung from a personal interest: if I kept doing everything right then nothing wrong would happen to me, otherwise, it would be so unfair. That flimsy guesswork served the main prop to pin my hopes on. I never felt like looking under the hood of my loose construction and only tried—and real hard too—to do everything right…)

That's why it took bricklayer Peter Lysoon 2-3 hours less than me to finish the walls of a bathroom-toilet unit. No wooden insertions? Who cares? Spit a spat, and go on laying the unit walls. When the carpenters come to install the doors, they would think of something to do about fixing the problem.

The partition laid up with a "belly"? So what? Say: "they'll lap it up!" and leave it as it is. The plasterers would come and solve the issue with an additional mortar layer.

But that's not right. Therefore, my specialization in the team was gypsum partitions, and that of Peter – bathrooms. However, nothing was dogma and there always happened moments for a harum-scarum "off we drive!" and forced castlings.

Yes, doing everything right is a time-consuming undertaking, but that's not the whole story because choosing the path of stringent righteousness you can't constrict yourself to the limits of current life, you start to