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

But there was a huge "but!" – summertime removed the problem of the washed and, therefore, locked toilet because we spent all day in the Area. The Area was a square 40 by 40 meters. The 3 sides of its perimeter, including the one with the wicket in it, presented a robust fence of rough gray boards 2.2 meters tall, nailed vertically side by side. The fourth side was a sturdy 2-meter-tall iron mesh fixed to the concrete stakes. Alongside the fence in the base of the square, there stretched a thirty-meter-long canopy with its low gable roof of rusty tin propped by few and far between pillars of red brick.

Scores of broken iron beds randomly piled on each other formed one high heap rusting in the canopy’s shade. 2, still usable, ones stood close-by the heap’s slope, both covered with a cloth blanket over the spring mesh. When the syringes with midday injections were brought down to the Area, the shut-ins, called by their names, were coming to the blanketed beds to pull their pants down, lie with their backs up, and get their dosage into, one by one.

A pair of armchairs on rusting legs, with their leatherette cover in tatters, were leaned, to prevent collapsing, against the brick pillars – they were the seats of paramedics. At the far end of the canopy, nearby the mesh fence, there stood a couple of short plywood benches with perpendicularly upright backs like those in school desks.

Parallel to the fence opposite the square base, three long, separate, boards were nailed to short stumps sticking from the ground to form 3 consecutive backrestless benches. 3 benches of the same design stretched along the third board fence with the entrance wicket in it.

The iron-mesh side in the square, opposite the entrance, had nothing for sitting nearby, but close to it—in the right upper corner of the Area—there stood toilet of the sorteer type: a box of three rotting tin walls under the equally rusty tin roof. The box’s door was missing for paramedics to make sure that the shut-in inside was not attempting suicide, or otherwise abusing the facility.

The ground surface in the Area was bare and firm, with an admixture of fine clay dust trampled out of it… And that's all?

No! There were as many as 2 "but!" more – the strip of not trampled, green, grass along the outer side of the mesh fence, and the summer sky with white clouds above anything and everything else.

~ ~ ~

The sun was rising from behind the fifth unit’s building and the shadow, thrown back by the roof, started its imperceptible march from the iron mesh to the opposite lumber fence with the entrance wicket in it. While we were taken to the midday meal, the shadow crawled over the fence and we did not find it anymore after the break, and the sun in the sky was still steadily moving on – to the construction site of a one-story building, about 6 meters off the iron mesh fence, and even farther over the site until it disappeared altogether, and the clearly delineated evening shadow started creeping up the wall of the fifth unit, right up to its roof, where it would dissolve in the dusk of approaching night, which meant that now they would take us up to the unit for the end-day meal, injections, and overnight.

But before that, all of us had our feet washed in the vestibule, of course, on the first floor. All 120 people, in turn, would step, one after another, into one and the same tin basin filled with one and the same water. 2 nuts, kneeling on the floor behind the basin, would wipe all their feet, in turn, with one and the same pair of wafer towels drenched thru and thru. Those proceedings had an unmistakable biblical air about them, like, the New Testament feet ablution for the queuing apostles, sort of. Probably, the illusion appeared on account of the measly illumination by the bulb somewhere up in the staircase well…

I met about 10 familiar faces. Tsyba, on the very first evening, hastily approached me in the corridor, gave a brief glance and turned away, "Eew! Not the same!" And he never wanted to communicate with me anymore.

Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, remained sporting close-cropped hair, but he was asleep all the time. In the morning, after our joyful barging in thru the wicket into the Area, he stretched on the bed for injections and only by the middle of the day, without waking up, he conceded a part of it for laying—in turn, with their backs up—of those whose execution syringes were brought down from the manipulation room…

The first one-and-a-half hour in the Area, I usually spent laying on one of the board-benches along the upper side of the square. Behind the fence, there was the area of the fourth unit, whose powerful howling and squealing in no way was less intensive than by us.

Sometimes, I had someone from the slightly inflated standing above me, and muttering to himself it was unfair I had taken up so much space for me alone. Then I had to lower my stumps on the ground and sit up because I could not send him to the 3 board-benches alongside the fence with the entrance wicket in it – that was the grounds of the fully emancipated gymnosophists.

Those communicated with screams, while being cooked in their own juice of free life, inattentive that the skin of their bare bodies, fried in the sun day after day, became cracked and oozing blood, which, eventually, got baked up though… Now, the leader of the community where no one cared about anyone else, bored with the monotony of his swinging back and forth in a seated position, issues a Tarzan howl and plunges for a couple of meters deep into the Area, only for to come back