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

platform. The benches there were not very comfortable, lacking the backrests. Seated on one of them, I met rare night trains together with the trolleys of the on-duty workers from the luggage office, into which the workers of postal cars threw out boxes and bales of parcels. And from that same bench, I was seeing off the groups of passengers yawning from the night chill. Have a good trip!.

When the black box in the front wall of the station lit up 05:00, I walked to the waiting hall to collect the cardboard box with the birthday presents from the automatic storage cell and went from there to the bus station. It's close by, almost immediately behind the Loony park…

The Kharkov-Chernigov bus did not pass thru Nezhyn, but from the turn of the highway, nearby the round building of the traffic police post, there again turned up something, so that about 9 in the morning I was already in Nezhyn. At that hour, the local train from Konotop was only approaching Bakhmuch. But I did not want to be a bolt from the blue, that's why I called Eera at her workplace from a payphone booth.

What a beautiful voice she had! So mellow, so dear. I said that I wanted to see you and give a birthday present, and she answered that, yes, of course, and that you were at home with her mother.

I went to Red Partisans with a joyous tide in my chest because Eera on the phone sounded quite friendly, and even somehow pleased.

The door did not open, only the peephole darkened momentarily, then brightened up again. I pushed the doorbell button once more, but this time shorter, and I heard footsteps cautiously departing from the hallway. I also heard your voice complaining about something from the doorway to the living room, and how your grandmother was shushing you in a whisper.

If a person has voices from a psychiatry textbook, they tell him something. I couldn't make out any words but thru the door I could see—and very clearly—you, a four-year-old kid, anxiously looking up at your grandma – who's there? Gray Wolf? Bad Unclie? And I also saw Eera's mother in the six-month perm-wave, with her finger pressed to her lips, "Shush!"

I am not of those who kick into a locked door, and I did not want to scare you any further. I rang to the opposite door on the landing and it opened.

There lived a pair of teachers at the NGPI. Groza-husband, he taught scientific Communism, and Groza-wife, who was teaching me German in my second year of study there.

I left the birthday box with the Grozas and asked to hand it to you personally. As for coming back to Konotop, I could already use a local train. What's the difference? Just 1 ruble 10 kopecks…

~ ~ ~

(…an attempt to live a righteous life results in developing a bad habit by the person. Not a detrimental one but, at any rate, meaningless – you fall in the rut of that business and keep on even knowing that that makes no difference…)

After the final and even ritually confirmed break-up with Eera, giving back The Godfather—the last of the books I had stolen—had no sense, but it was too late because I kinda got addicted. The reason why the book tarried by my side was that I did not know where Vitya Kononevich went to work off for his diploma, but then I learnt that the actual owner of the book was Sasha Nesteryouk from whom Vitya borrowed it.

I had to go to Nezhyn again… However, at the address, provided by Vasya Kropin, Sasha Nesteryouk was no more and the place was already rented to a married young couple. The young man wore a white tank-shirt, his wife a dressing gown, and the apartment richly smelled of grease smoked herring.

What else would you need for happiness, but a separate apartment and a young woman at any time of day?. When they proposed the address of their landlady who, possibly, knew where Sasha Nesteryouk moved, I turned it down and dropped any further search because I remembered that in the last year at the institute Igor Recoon, my course-mate from Konotop, became bosom friends with Nesteryouk. So it would be easier to give the book to Igor and let him pass it instead of me. Anyway, I felt fed up with the path of righteousness.

On the train back, I for the first time was visited by the thought – maybe just so it was necessary? A woman of your own, of course, is a good thing, whichever way you turn it, but why then I did not envy the young lodger? And what was the reason for the odd, ticklish, laughter seizing me at fleeting recollections of the bliss accentuated by the herring, a white tank-top, and stuff?.

Igor's mother said that he was not home and that he worked on the first floor in the building of the City Party Committee.

The building itself was by Peace Square, behind the gray monument to Lenin where once stood the tower of the city television studio before it was dismantled. At the entrance to the City Party Committee, I answered the militiaman which room and to whom I was going, and he let me pass.

The room was empty, but the moment I idly walked up to the window, Igor got in, obviously unwilling to let me see the view outside. He had not changed at all. The same glasses of tea color in a golden frame, and the same smirk under the sharp nose. Only in his demeanor there appeared the air of condescending; clear enough though in a man who got in the tracks of a wide road to a brighter future.

The Godfather hardly surprised Igor, and he promised to pass the book to Sasha Nesteryouk… Probably, it's nice to feel superior to someone who you were looking up to when being a young entrant to the NGPI with your school