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

Before feeding the fifth unit, they unlocked both the dispenser room—to place the brought thermos pots there—and the dining room, to have where to call the eating parties to.

The dispenser room was narrowed by the large robust shelving along the wall opposite the dispenser window. The lumber shelves' load was a dozen of gaudy cellophane packets with food belonging to the shut-ins visited by their visitors on the visiting day. Twice a week, they heralded along the corridor, "Delivery! Who has a delivery? To the dining room!" Those who knew that in the dispenser room there were things they did not manage to stove away completely during the visit of their visitors, trod to the dining room to finish the chew. If someone failed to keep in mind or rejected recollections about the cellophane packet awaiting them on the shelves, then more attentive and caring wardroom-mates would remind him and solicitously escort to the dining room to assists in eating the delivery.

I did not belong to the workmen and ate with the second party. We lined up in a noisy, diversely dressed, but equally hungry, queue along the wall by the door blocked with a paramedic's body leaned on it, while inside they were sweeping off the tables after the previous eaters. The paramedic also controlled that someone would not get in the line after having his share in the freshly fed party.

At last, he commanded, "Come on!" And we noisily barged thru the unusually narrow door into the dining room with three windows parallel to the long tables, kinda medieval refectory if not for oilcloth on the tabletops. They stood in three rows abutting two opposites walls, and the narrow cross-sectional aisle in the middle cut them into six separate tables. We sat at them, overstepping the benches screwed to the floorboards.

Amid the animated noise spiced with loose, uninhibited, gestures, we waited for the constantly on-duty blond masturbator to bring the wide plywood tray cluttered with aluminum bowls, spoons and bread slices. The tray was unloaded and those who got the havvage put in front of them started eating, while the rest watched the process and waited for the chmo dispenser, also from the shut-ins, to fill the next tray-load behind the partition with his window.

We finished everything off and began to wait for a tray with tin cups of sour-sweet kissel, whose skin I hated so much when at kindergarten.

Once I overslept the feeding and had to eat with the third party… Some grievous sight… There, people treated their faces as Plasticine, kneading out of it the most grotesque masks for no obvious purpose. But then and there I found out who produced baboon shrieks, which I heard from my wardroom, and who was answering him with the roar of a wounded elephant. There were none of conversations, even of most desultory nature, at the third party feeding.

And yet, at times, someone from the second party would mix into the third one. Not because of sincere love for living nature, but simply to use the opportunity and eat the neighbor's ration while he was making faces to the window grates. Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, was favoring the third party and often ate with them so as to curb such funny in the head, yet crafty, freeloaders.

Those 3 meals were the noisiest time of day in the fifth unit. If someone started to make a needless noise at an unreasonable hour, a pair of paramedics ran to his wardroom and, following a rectifying blow or 2 with their bunch of keys on his head, fixed the troublemaker. That is, they crucified him, in the supine position, tying his wrists and ankles to the iron corners along his bed spring mesh by means of yellowish cloth straps, obviously former bed-sheets worn-out to shreds…

After feeding, everyone dispersed to their wardrooms or strolled aimlessly over the brown tiles in the corridor floor. I would not say that we were starving there – same havvage as anywhere else. Once, each of us was even given 2 pancakes for a dinner; though being cold, they bore a drop of some sticky jam.

Another outstanding event was that incomprehensible late-night feast, when in the hall appeared 2 laundry basins brimming with sausage of two types: liver-squash and blood-mixture, and everyone might grab as much as he wanted. Except for a pair of the third party members, who suddenly grew sane enough, but the fat shut-in in charge of the basins drove them away. Discrimination happens anywhere…

Yet, the main delight in the life of the fifth unit appeared with the stately, flax-haired, nurse who brought it in a pillowcase bulging with angular pieces of refined sugar. That pillowcase she took into the "Senior Nurse" office and every day those, who had the brains to come and ask for, received a few pieces of not just pressed but a real, refined, sugar, which did not melt on your tongue in just 2 seconds.

I, for one, had brains to ask twice a day. And that sugar I tried to consume unnoticed because those too deeply troubled in their head to turn to the original source were annoyingly sane enough to beg it from me. To show that it was over, I patted at the emptied pocket, but then, recollecting that lying was not the right thing to do, I shared the sugar from the other pocket in my pajamas.

Once in 20 days a slim black-haired woman with a sharp nose and, naturally, in the white smock, came to the hall in the middle of the corridor. You could see at once that she was from the glassy-eyed, but I had already kicked that stuff and, therefore, accepted the version of the fifth unit old-timers stating that she was a former circus acrobat. The acrobat cut the stubble off our faces with a hairdresser machine, and for the haircut she used scissors if you did