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

glass raw schizophrenia, spice it with a pinch of double-barreled adjectives, shake the ingredients…Enjoy! "Fur-coat form of schizophrenia", the favorite drink of St. Inez!

Tamara at the fourth kilometer on the Chernigov outskirts was not in the know of all of my exploits. For the burned down plantation of cannabis, I could be easily stamped with "autodafic form of schizophrenia aggravated by Torquemada complex" to commemorate that absolutely normal inquisitor who regularly sent packs of heretics to the stake.

As for the term itself, they used (as is the tradition in producing scientific nomenclature) the words from old Greek which, when putting ancient roots together, reads "cracked mind". And now – lo! – "The mind cracked in the form of a fur coat."

So, who of us is schizophrenic after all?!. Do they think that if they don the white smocks, and trumpet a trump from the terminology they don't know a damn thing in, I will trust them more than I trusted the Ichnya sorcerer in his khaki shirt and mambo jumbo about the moon "quarters"?

Oh, my dear aesculapius-kindergarten kids! Mind you, I am from Konotop. My classmate Volodya Sherudillo could casually give out: "I cannot ignore the data of pseudo-quasi-illusions to avoid the ultimate diffusion of my transcommunicability skills."

After the eighth grade, he went to "the seminary", aka GPTU-4, to become a turner, otherwise, by now he would be Head of the Academy of Sciences, and you would be sitting in the ante-room to his office, waiting in nervous jitters if he would admit you, the petty CEC khannoriks.

In short, while no one knows where schizophrenia comes from and where goes to, and how much is her fee for a visit, you could just as well go and f-f..er..fumble yourself against something else. I mean it, and shove all the hep-talk-blah-blah up you know where, the Settlement fellas can share a more detailed route to those in doubt…

That is to say, get along, sweethearts, keep moving…)

On the weekends in Nezhyn, the 3 of us took walks to the kindergarten in the narrow streets of the neighborhood. It did not work on Saturdays and the entire playgrounds—all those stalls and slides—were at your disposal. The swing on iron bars when set into motion gave out brief screams, shrill, heartbreaking.

Eera stood in the distance. And then you began running over the yellow leaves strewn on the ground, from me to her and back, but even that was not bringing us closer. As we returned along the same empty streets without sidewalks, I held your hand and did not take my eyes off the smooth play of round hips under the light dress of Eera walking ahead of us. It was so too clear to me that it’s our last autumn together, no one told me that, but all the same, I knew it…

Tonya got an apartment for her family somewhere on Shevchenko Street. Gaina Mikhailovna was planning to rent the freed bedroom to one of the military pilots from the Airfield-Area, who were howling in the sky with their training flights each Tuesday and Friday. I was not present in any plans, and even could not be there because of Lenochka who I refused to leave in Konotop without a dad either. The impetuous spats between Eera and me abated in their fury, yet grew more frequent, which changes told me of imminent end closing in, creepily, to bring about the final moment and make me a chunk cut off clearly, completely.

(…probably, Dostoyevsky had the like feeling when they were carting him to the scaffold along the familiar streets, and he calculated by them how much time remained before the execution.

The difference was only that I did not know how many words remained to hear from Eera before her final: "Get lost to that Konotop of yours! And never show up in Nezhyn!"

Yet, I knew that I would hear it…)

When Eera voiced the words, they, strangely, brought not only pain but a speck of relief too – there remained nothing to be afraid of anymore. It is finished.

~ ~ ~

I went to Konotop and began to live a half-life. I worked with our team, read, wrote, talked, but half of me disappeared somewhere, together with the aim for which I was doing all that before I got cut off…

The dullness of half-life was somewhat alleviated by a business trip to Kiev. There, I was alone from SMP-615, and I did not know where the rest of the workers came from to the reconstruction of a dairy factory. We lived in a passenger car driven into a dead-end track in the factory grounds. They gave us bed linen yellow with age and fairly fretted, but gently soft because of that. I occupied the upper bunk in the compartment to skip folding up the mattress in the morning. Everywhere in Kiev there sounded one and the same song:

"The leaves of yellow are in a flurry o'er the city…"

And I remembered the leaves in the playgrounds of the desolate kindergarten…

On weekends, I visited the library of Kiev University, in the building on the left from the bulky monument to Taras Shevchenko. People were allowed there without any diploma, leaving their passports to the registry in the entrance lobby. In the huge and pretty quiet reading room with long tables but separate chairs for readers and separate lamps as well, under the green shaded one of them, I read John Stuart Mill's treatise "On Freedom" in the original. That's what real philosophy is! He instructed me that there are just two kinds of people:

1) law-abiding loyal subjects;

2) experimentalists.

As for all the race, class, confession and other differences, they only serve a means to split and set people against each other…

Then I found the House of Organ Music, which surely used to be a Catholic temple before. It’s in Red Army Street now, beneath the Republican Stadium. I was a little late for the concert and they had already locked the entrance, so I began to knock from outside.

The