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

team was young. The oldest bricklayer on our team, forty-year-old Grigory Grigoryevich, put it directly, "We're still young!"

He possessed exceptional pedagogic skills and, noticing that his son, a ninth-grader, somewhere on a streetcar, or the sidewalk, was gaping at a woman worthy of looking at, he never missed the chance of seizing the opportunity: "Wanna get you some of that sort? Study well, buster!"

His face was round in unmistakably Napoleonic way because of the thin hair strand stuck to his forehead. And he was a solid, burly man. More than once, I tried to overtake him in laying a brick course – no go. He would finish when I still had to lay about ten bricks or so.

And he was very judicious. Only once his common-sense gave in. That time he brought to the construction site his double-barreled hunting rifle, after the midday break.

The site was in "no man's but builders' land" at the frontier of At-Seven-Winds. And then a young construction superintendent Sereda stopped by coming from SMP-615 base grounds.

Grigory Grigoryevich allowed him also to hold the weapon. He even started an argument that Sereda would not ever hit his hat thrown up into the air. We went round the end wall of the unfinished building. It was the white silence all around, and only the trees in a distant windbreak belt contrasted the snow with their black trunks.

And he threw his hat up—high, so high!—and Sereda waited for a second and pulled the trigger. The hat twitched in its flight and fell like a hit bird. Grigory Grigoryevich raised it and there was a hole in the hat top, 2 fingers easily ran thru. The buckshot turned out to be too large, meant for boars. But it had been a good hat, you know, of nutria fur. It's only he did not consider logically that Sereda was from Transcarpathia and although there remained no Bandera men already, yet the firearms survived, hence the skills…

And the rigger Vera Sharapova was never sad. She was singing all the time, laughing and ready to keep up a talk with anyone at a moment’s notice. And she also was the most beautiful, but only at work, while dressed in her workman padded jacket and spetzovka pants. But when she changed to go by the local train to her Kukolka station, the beauty disappeared somewhere.

I do not know why it made me sad when she was telling about her wedding party and everyone around laughed along with her.

"The kids a-crying, Peter a-playing!"

Peter was that humpback mujik who took her even with 2 children of her own. He also was an itinerant from Kukolka to Konotop and knew how to play the accordion. Some noisy wedding it turned out.

Vera Sharapova was keen and nimble, and she noticed that when someone complained of having a headache, I would take out a handkerchief from my spetzovka pants pocket and turn it inside out. At times, she would nudge Katerina, say—watch the miracles of my training!—then press her hand to her forehead and make a pain-ridden face, "Oh, what a headache I have!"

Naturally, I saw thru all that comedy, yet, nonetheless, executed my role in the procedure. However, when Katerina also started to rub her temples, I would say that the reception is over – the facility serves 1 patient per day. Harry Potter had not been conceived as of yet…

Peter Lysoon not always was a bricklayer. Earlier in his career, he had the job of a security in railway gold transportation. There was a special squad of armed securities to accompany safes in luggage cars.

They had long trips, sometimes for weeks. The floor of the car swayed to the clang of wheel pairs on the rail joints, and thoughts of all sorts were spinning on and on. Say, what way, for example, that gold could be taken?

One day they were spinning, another day – sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But no spinning could bring an answer to that insoluble problem. He would take a look at the faces of his fellow-securities: they were also thoughtful. And what about?

And then fear started to creep in – what if some of them had thought out a working solution? Readied a plan, found accomplices and, at some point in the endless way, he would trash all the squad with one clip and leave with the gold? Peter got tired of waiting and became a bricklayer…

By his skinny, short, stature, Grynya somehow made me think of German general Guderian, whom I never saw in my life. Yet, was there in his appearance something vaguely suggestive of the General Stuff and, perceptibly, that of the Wehrmacht. On weekends, he took rest from blitzkriegs and went on fishing trips with Grigory Grigoryevich, everywhere in the reach of local and diesel trains. They were fishing with fishing rods of different lengths, longer ones in the summertime, shorties for ice fishing…

I was bribed by his faith in my healing talent. That time he stopped me on the flight of stairs leading straight into the open heaven because of absence any roof yet.

"Sehryoga, help!" And, lifting his upper lip, he showed a whitish pimple on the gum. Then he unfastened the safety pin from the inside pocket of his workman padded jacket, where he kept his wristwatch during working hours, and handed it to me, "Pierce the bitch, it smarts too much."

I started excuses that it was not possible there amid the dust, dirt, and stuff, without antiseptics because such kind of operation called for disinfection.

"What disinfection do you want of me here?"

Well, in action movies, they usually disinfect things on open fire… He held the pin tip over a lit match. The result did not comfort me though, the tip got covered with black soot.

Grynya critically examined the pin, wiped the soot off against the incrustations of brick dust and other sediments over the sleeve of his padded jacket, and held it out to me, "Take! Do it!" And I shut up because