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

was that of an on-looker. Finally, he made a decisive step, even 2, grabbed my hand sticking from under the blanket, and pulled me out. The catch plumped onto the frayed rug spread on the floor. The blanket remained atop the bed.

I stayed sprawled down there while my mother-in-law was reading Prayers at the Departure of the Soul to declare how hugely shameless I was to lay prostrate before the ladies in such an undressed state. Underpants and a tank-top may be decent sportswear for jogging in the morning, but not in the presence of your mother-in-law.

I silently got up and, quite unexpectedly even for myself, made a deep bow to shake off the non-existent dust from the hair below my knees. A ritual makes us follow its canon even if we have no idea what ritual it is.

"We shall renounce the old world of tyrants,We shall shake off its ashes from out feet!.."

I dressed and went out into the hallway. The mother-in-law followed. To make sure I would not foray into the refrigerator? She was replaced by Eera, alerted, keeping mum. I gave her one ruble and asked to pass it to Vitta, who lent me the sum a week earlier. She nodded. I took a piece of paper out of my briefcase and wrote a note to Vitta with gratitude for the ruble. Even the grave fails to correct a graphomaniac…

The night was quiet and windless. I spent it standing at the nearest bus stop, the way I was standing in front of a ticket office in the Odessa airport locked for the midday break. Only now there were no roses in my hand.

"The Sun was never any match for you,Brother Rain,That is true from any point of view,Brother Rain.Twining in the dates too rare,Stuck in love and black despair,Shedding diamond tears in vain,Tears of ecstasy and painStop your crying, get away, Brother Rain…"

It was a quiet, indifferent, midwinter, night… In all that night 3 cars passed the bus stop, one of them a Volga. I did not care. Numbness of the senses.

In the one-story building opposite, the light went on and, soon after, off, twice during the night; should be an elderly person going to the toilet and back. In the dark gray twilight, the first bus appeared from the Airfield-Area and took me to the station…

~ ~ ~

At half-past seven, I got off the local train in Konotop. I do not know where I spent the following hour because when I came to the 50-apartment block the black Saturday was in full swing. The growling bulldozer in the shroud of the blueish mist of smoke from its exhaust pipe, was burying itself in the hill of earth it moved in the middle of the would-be yard. Grynya and Lydda had already changed into their spetzovkas and padded jackets. "You did not go to Nezhyn?" Lydda asked.

"No."

I took a sheet of paper from my briefcase with the report to the trade-union committee about spending 3 rubles to visit a patient in hospital.

(…my current public position was visiting SMP-615 employees when they got to hospital, and comfort them with a delivery and for each such occasion the trade-union committee granted exactly 3 rubles.

Though visiting ill colleagues solo, I had later to present reports on spending the amount of 3 rubles signed by no less than 3 persons because the sum was serious…)

I put the paper on the side of a concrete pipe, 1.5 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters long, and they signed it without reading. "And now?" asked Grynya, "Are you changing or what?"

My stance to black Saturdays was always firmly negative but what else had I to do? I changed into the work clothes, took my shovel and went to scrape the upshot truck-dump with the mortar stuck to its insides, replacing Vera Sharapova. She was sharp and since long noticed that so was my way to drive off my jealousy fits…

At night, back to 13 Decemberists, I was lying prostrate in the unfolded bed-armchair amid the pitch-black darkness in the living room.

Lying all the time on your back is tiring. I wanted to change position and turn over, but I did not allow myself to stir because I needed to become inconspicuous, yet movements might betray your location. When motionless, I kinda became a part to the bottom of a boundless ocean, nothing but that oceanic immensity remained in all empty world. To become a part to such absolute void, you should keep smooth and streamlined and make no rips, so that nothing would cling to you and just go on floating its way. But what enormous emptiness!

(…there is a no direr curse than the old folk curse "emptied be it for to you!"

The purpose of any loss is to make you feel emptied, deprived, drained, devoid of…

Love comes to us as a protecting reaction to the endless void rotations of the life's mill-wheel, its returns to the starting point as empty as it left it.

Love comes as defense from despair, when you're empty of an idea what to do about the useless flukey gift—your life—when you find no means to kill off the eternity measured out to you. When you feel at loose ends, when you have nothing to live for except the aimless living on.

Love comes to free from empty search, brings meaning into your life – to serve! points the direction – to serve!

Love is selfless, self-denying slavery and zealous service to the object of love – a two-legged mammal, or a collection of stamps, or… doesn't matter… it depends on how lucky you were…

And suddenly, a kinda bolt from the blue, the fetters shattered, you're told, "Off with you! Enjoy your freedom!" And you find yourself in the void where there is no purpose, no sense, where you have to just live, like a crystal, like a blade of grass, like a rain-worm.

We are not slaves, slaves are not we!

No! I want back! To where love was… it would fence