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

At my stay on the next weekend, Eera somewhat shyly shared that they do accept glued bills at the bank.

(…and that's correct because banks also need money, and 70 rubles are not scattered in your path, except when you chanced to pass under a window on the first floor, but even then in a torn-up condition…)

What I, personally, was surprised by at that occasion, it's the poor quality of paper used for printing money. Say, if you cut some funny money of newspaper—the same number of bills—it would be harder to tear it up that my payment. It literally went in two of its own will, in my hands….

Then we visited the new Culture House of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant built next to Bazaar. They say the construction cost amounted to 6 million rubles. The Loony’s Director, Bohmstein, moved over there to embrace the same position. The Culture House had only two floors, less than in Loony, but on the upper one, there was a ballroom with a bar.

We came to my apartment the moment when Praskovya was driving her orgy of alcoholic widows out into the neighborhood. I introduced her and Eera to each other in the kitchen. The landlady carefully examined her and, in my opinion, she also liked Eera's loose raincoat. She even kissed her suddenly and me as well, on the spur of the moment, and then went to sleep behind her curtains.

Eera made a small grimace of misunderstanding, however, she did not dare resist, and as for me, I did not care at all. One time Eera and I were going by a local train, and some gay guy from the opposite seat started to make overtures to me. Eera simply flew in a temper; she even started bickering with him, and that was ridiculous because I always was indifferent to them. Say, once, Sasha Chalov's daddy kissed me on the cheek, and now it was tipsy Praskovya. Who would care?

Yet, in my entire life I've never come across a more sweet, lasciviously tender and, at the same time, so eagerly tight-fitting cunt than on that night; even by Eera herself it was both the first and last time that I happened to feel it that way. As for where the carnal treat of a lifetime had sprung from – the austere interior of a monk’s cell or the kinda blessing double kiss by the boozed landlady – I remain in the dark till now, and pretty firmly too.

(…there is still a whole lot of questions that I won't find answers to. Never…)

~ ~ ~

Later that autumn, I was sent to the railway station of Vorozhba to work at the construction of the three-story Communication House where the walls and the roof were already in place and my responsibility was laying the partitions. While there, I got another proof that the body of a human being is much smarter than he himself…

At both ends of the building, there were inside staircases with only one of them completed. Newly arrived at the site and not fully acquainted with the details of the current situation, I started up the right one until noticed that the steps between the second and third floors had not been yet inserted and just the pair of channels for the eventual montage of stairs were tilted up to the landing in between the two floors. Feeling lazy to traverse all of the rather long building to the other staircase, I decided to climb up the channel by the wall, whose width of 10 cm seemed enough. So, I turned sideways and, facing the wall, made a couple of careful steps upward.

Then I discovered my mistake – the channel ran too close along the wall whose surface kept my center of gravity dangerously off, too far over the void below, an offset for another inch would send my body into a dive precipitated, according to the laws of physics, by the free-fall acceleration, onto the debris interspersed by crooked spikes of rebar-rods, deep in the basement.

The undertaking did not seem worth it already. However, having moved up the channel I could not back those two steps already in the reverse direction, there was not room enough to even turn my face without losing balance, because of the shifted off location of my gravity’s center. So, I clung to the red brick wall as if to something most dear to me and viewed an unforgettable transformation: my hands turned into separate tiny asynchronous octopuses, each finger lived its individual life bending in all directions, searching for holes in between the bricks. As they got rooted in the wall, I pulled myself upward and then cautiously shuffled my feet up the sloping channel. After many a repetition of that trick, we got out.

But I remain dead sure that were the mortar slushed to fill joints in the brick courses with the proper righteousness and not in the hasty style of "off we drive!" no unknown reserves in the human body would get me off the hook.

From the ensuing surge of adrenaline simmering thru my system, I realized why cliffhangers love mountains so much, yet I, personally, would not risk it every other day….

In winter, they excavated all of Professions Street. The rumors had it as if that was done for sewer construction, but it looked like a foundation pit about a kilometer long, and four to five meters deep. The chasm was randomly crossed by a thick underground telephone cable suddenly got in the open and hanging in the air across the pit, from one wall to the other. And deep down there, a bulldozer was moving earth and leveling the gravel heaps dumped by KAMAZ trucks. Only along the concrete wall of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, there remained a meter-wide ledge with a path over the heaps and hillocks of the spoil…

With a