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

one day, lying on the hospital couch in the hall, he confessed to me his murder of someone else and, usually so very cheerful, he grew at once all gloomy. Maybe it was a lie because the murderers were kept at the second unit whose paramedics were brutes accomplished and his confession was simply a day-dream like my bumping Gray off in the stoker-house of VSO-11…

Yes, there happened incurable liars around. One of them, with a fat tattoo of "Kolya" on his hand, without any invitation started convincing me that his name was Peter, and after that, he took an obvious offense at me although I had not expressed any doubts.

As for Tsyba, he amazed me by his erudition enumerating the unsuccessful suicide attempts of Hemingway until he found out that a pistol was the most steadfast means for the purpose. And before that, I listed him among the unmistakable half-nuts…

There was a seemingly normal gaffer, whose queerness you could guess only from his sentimentality, he got devastatingly hurt hearing that we all lived in a madhouse. Always. For life. The madhouse thru and thru, both indoors and outside, no difference.

"Do not say so, at least here it's a mental hospital."

Such a delicate soul…

Or, say, that mujik whom I for a long stretch considered dumb. On the contrary, he was very inquisitive, it's just that he prepared his questions all too carefully. It took him a month before he approached me and, eye to eye, asked about the sorest spot, "And your wife, was she a chaste virgin?"

Firstly, no dumb have such words in their lexicon and, secondly, I hadn't checked her ears, quoting Rabentus.

And the dumb, on hearing that, began to cry. He fell silent again dripping noiseless tears.

A rather gloomy madhouse on the whole…

~ ~ ~

However crazy, the shut-ins knew everything, and 4 days beforehand they warned me that on Friday I would be called to the commission where they decide to set me free or go on with their treatment. The commission consisted of the head physician of the psychiatric hospital, the head doctor of the fifth unit and the on-duty nurse. Afraid of saying something wrong, I was amenably falling over myself to agree with anyone, grovelling even before the nurse, "Yes, yes, of course, yes!"

The head doctor said they had prepared me for discharge, but I would only be released if some of my relatives come to pick me off.

How afraid I was that no one would come on Saturday! After all, there had been such a Saturday when I waited in vain. The whole evening after the commission I had to restrain myself so as not to burst into tears. Sobs literally clenched my throat – I would not stand another week of injections…

My parents came together, and from the landing by the door, we were summoned to the office of the head doctor who said that my treatment should be continued with iminazine pills.

My mother thanked her so very much, and my father took out the money from his jacket pocket and handed it to my mother. She came up to the head doctor and put the money into the pocket of her professional white smock, but the head doctor did not even notice it.

(…as I learnt later, the amount was 40 rubles – the combined daily earnings of a team of 6 bricklayers. That day there were 3 discharges, so the head doctor earned my monthly payment in one morning.

As they say in Konotop, it depends on what you've been trained for…)

On the bus from Romny to Konotop, my mother cautiously informed me that my things had been moved from the apartment rented under the great birch tree, back to 13 Decemberists. Though saddened by that news, I had not strength to resist…

At first, our team met me guardedly as a person returning from Romny. However, at construction sites, such attitude wears off quick enough, if by the end of a working day you neither surprised anyone with your shovel over their head nor took a dive from the fifth floor then you're like everyone else.

True, Lydda noticed that I leaned against the pallet with bricks and dozed off in the sun, while the crane was fetching another batch of mortar up, which previously never happened to me. And Grigory commented to Grynya that I was not the same, and pointed at the spanner laid by me over the niche for the electric meters on the landing: one edge 5 centimeters higher than the other.

Grynya answered that they would lap it up all the same because the niche was to be screened behind the frame around the box for the meters.

So I had to put the spanner to rights during the midday break, but before Romny I wouldn't have allowed me such a slip.

And, in general, I became more compliant. The only thing that the treatment couldn't straighten out, was my ill will at falling on all four when laying from the bridging slabs the load-wall on which they rested. Everyone did it on their all four, it's more convenient that way, and safer too. Yet, I still just hunkered when laying the brick course at levels lower my feet, in disregard of protests from my center of gravity. Vitta also at times refrained from kneeling.

(…sometimes, it’s an up-hill job to get rid of the young pioneer inside you.

"Better to dive from the fourth-floor height than lay the wall standing on your knees!"..)

When I went to Nezhyn for a weekend, I took pains to keep my eyes a little squinted, otherwise, people felt creepy at my shell-shocked sight because my lower eyelids drooped as if I'd been forced to watch a documentary series about the death camps, gas chambers, and grim crematoria… I recollected the long article about Clockwork Orange in the monthly Moscow read in the stoker-house at the construction battalion, about how they applied the same technique to him…

Noticing a double chin that started to form under my jaw,