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

cellophane packet in my hand, I was walking along that trail oscillating up and down when ahead of me I marked a schoolgirl who walked in the same direction. The yellow-and-gray tartan in her coat fabric, made me realize that I should not go any further; that was not my way. Fortunately, a telephone cable was sagging nearby towards the opposite wall in the pit. I stepped on it and walked without slowing down; I did not even mind the bag in my hands. Yet, after a couple of meters, the usual story happened again – I started to doubt if I really was a tightrope walker to stride telephone cables.

(…because of the like hesitation, Simon, handled Stone, aka Peter, instead of a leisurely walk over the water started to go down into it…)

The cable went a-jitter, shallow swings turned into the sway of growing amplitude. I shot up my arms and fell. Luckily, when in the dive, my hands grabbed onto the cable. I caught breathe for a couple of seconds, then let it go and, like a parachutist, landed on the pit bottom.

There, I leaned over the face of a prostrate prostitute in a broad-brimmed hat with red lining who stared upward past me. How come the prostitute in the snow? Why was I there? It's an easy one about the hooker, she simply slipped from the bag in the fall. And it was right I got there – my way was finished on that cable, another one was starting from that depths…

So I went along the graveled bottom of the pit to its end in the distance with the ramp for KAMAZ trucks to drive down but not at this early hour. When back on the surface, I proceeded to the station square to be in time for our bus and go to work and, after the working day, I got off our Seagull by the bus station to buy a ticket, and to run, waving it, into the already starting bus, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!" Because Eera told me about her country trip to the Hare Pines forest so as to train her conjugal fidelity despite the champagne in the glove box. Because what else did I have to do? That's why I went to Romny…

It was completely dark and cold in Romny, but I found a hotel. The receptionist did not know where to accommodate a guest with a cellophane packet in his hands, so she allotted a room with 4 beds for me alone. Although she could combine me with that pair of business travelers that came from the same bus in my wake.

The room was a usual pencil-box for 4, empty and freshly painted over the paint coats from the previous 20 renovations. 4 thick terry towels hung from the backs of the 4 beds, and the radio on the wall was singing in thick bass a romance about the cold morning, gray morning.

I had nothing to do. I turned off the radio and the light too. Then I lay down and stared at the darkness until I fell asleep…

~ ~ ~

The morning, contrary to the forecast from the radio romances, was bright and sunny, and pretty soon I found the psychiatric hospital. I left the cellophane packet in the snowdrift on the lawn under a bared big tree and, without any luggage, entered the open gates keeping my hands visible.

When the guards got it that I was not visiting anyone but wanted to stay there myself, I was taken to a small office. A young man, who looked like a militia lieutenant, except for a white doctor’s smock, asked about the reason for my coming.

"I want a certificate that I am not crazy." I knew perfectly well that by those words I had burned down all the ships and blown up all the bridges behind me, and now they would lock me up for sure.

"And who says you were crazy?"

"Well, in a streetcar, for instance."

His animation grew exponentially. He started inquiring what kind of a seal I wanted on the certificate – round, or triangle?

"It does not matter as long as it's signed."

So, he called a young doctor and an elderly nurse to take me to the shower, and then to the fifth unit. Before the shower, the nurse sheared off the hair in my groin with a hairdresser's hand-machine. I felt embarrassed, but I did not resist – a strange monastery is not the right place to barge into a-preaching your doctrine.

After the shower, the doctor took me to an interview. In order to consolidate the success, I drove a couple of fools, she only moaned lustfully while scribbling post-haste in a thick notebook. When we went out into the yard, I said that I had left a cellophane packet outside the gate. The nurse refused to believe me, but then she went off and with amazement brought it.

(…and what was there to be surprised at? Who'd get the nerve to lift a packet left, like a bait, in front of the gaping gate to the regional psychiatric hospital?..)

The doctor frisked the cellophane and allowed me to keep it together with its contents: a copybook, a pen, and a book in English with a close-up of a woman in a wide-brimmed slouch hat in the front cover…

The fifth unit at the Romny psychiatric hospital was located on the third floor of the building constructed by the blueprints from the Stalinist times when the installed flights of steps formed a wide stairwell. Halfway up, there was an iron mesh across the well to surprise a would-be suicide with the failure of his shifty schemes. The stairs ended on the wide landing in front of the locked door in between the two long wooden benches by the sidewalls.

Behind the door, as you would normally anticipate, there started a corridor stretching to the right. It started from the window with vertical grates and, past the closed office door tableted "Head Doctor", went