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

them to the ankles. However hard I tried, I couldn't roll the rigging up above my knees. I had to surrender in the end, and on the plywood-bench beach, I pulled them off and wrapped my loins with the tank top.

One Sunday, the head doctor was on duty herself and got utterly shocked by the frivolity of my costume.

"And this is a person with higher education!", indignantly exclaimed she from the shade beneath the canopy.

How could she figure out at that distance that there was nothing under the tank top but me in the altogether? Deductively, the rhyme-riddle for kids about "A and B" and the rule of thumb helped her out: If the pajamas put under the head, and the blood-smeared long johns drape the back of the bench – which letter is hidden under the tank top codpiece?.

The day after she drenched my reputation by spilling that compromising stuff, I was approached by Tarattoon, from the new wave of shut-ins. He invited me to collaborate in the creation of a nuclear bomb, for which purpose they had already formed a reliable working group.

And I said, thank you, yet, said I, such a task called for the nuclei splitting, and I was fed up with even a fleeting thought of breaking, breakers and so on down that road… He never repeated the invitation…

Among the paramedics there also popped up new faces. The man of short stature with a beautiful head of crisp red chevelure and the broken right leg, for example. Or, maybe, it just was shorter, but he was heavily falling on that side.

The other one was a slender black-haired youth in an immaculately white doctor’s smock. He was the only one to call me with the plural "You", and planning to enter a medical institute in Leningrad.

In the meantime, he gave me injections above my pulled down pants and long johns and—so as to comfort me—he kept complaining sympathetically that there simply no place was left to stab into, that's why it's bleeding so.

One evening, when we, hurraying and banzaiing, came back after the day in the Area, that naked sunburned bodybuilder pressed all of his front (dirty with the dust stuck to his sweat) against the "Manipulation Room" door in the hall by the observation wardroom. The paramedic youth, so as to prevent staining his snow-white smock, drove him away with high kicks of his black shiny shoes.

"Just think of it! Now the door has to be washed!" Shared he his indignation.

That moment I seemed to understand the naked introvert – to press your sun-smitten body to such a clean, coolness emanating, door… even if locked…

Once upon a time, H. G. Wells wrote his novel The Sleeper Awakes… The skinhead sleeper Sasha woke up on the bed under the canopy and, without opening his eyes, pronounced, "What a ridiculous name he has – Tarattoon!" A second later the paramedic's yells added to the customary noise in the Area… I turned my head.

Snapping the iron mesh, Tarattoon flew over its two-meter height and disappeared behind the nearby construction site. The paramedic, falling on his right leg, ran up to the mesh, yet he had brains enough to figure out that even trying was of no use.

He doffed his white smock, passed it to his partner paramedic and left. Soon, another paramedic came to fill his place in the tattered armchair.

The Area was in the excited state until late in the evening, they even stopped masturbating. Before the rite of feet washing, the redhead cripple entered the Area, pleased like an elephant about his catching that bastard!

We went up to the unit floor and some of us visited the sixth wardroom, where Tarattoon was already lying on his bed, fixed and pacified by the shot of sulfur.

Dragging on the cigarette butt which one of the halfnuts kept in front of his lips, he spoke softly. He fled to the outskirts of the city and hid in the bushes of a deep ravine, no one saw him there, there were no khuttas around. How could that red-haired bastard have found him at all?

(…and I felt melancholic sadness about white spots in psychology books as of yet. While they got stuck and making a muck out of schizophrenia with their monographs and insulin, what fascinating horizons of incomprehensible human capabilities are unfolding around!

How did sleeping Sasha learn about Tarattoon's flying the coop a few seconds before its actualization?

What led the redhead to the right ravine and to that very bush behind which the fugitive got frozen sitting on his haunches?

There’s a hell of a lot of questions that I won't find answers to. Never… And others don't care about them at all…)

~ ~ ~

That tall, emaciated, black-haired young man stood out among the representatives of the new wave by the expression of normality in his thoughtful face, yet he got easily aroused at mere words. Once, he started talking about some fascists all too ready to walk over dead bodies so that to reach their fascist ends.

I responded with a conversational shrug, "The end justifies the means." It was an unwise observation because he interpreted my casual remark as an attempt at justifying those unspecified fascists and flared up immensely. Still, I was not hit for that clumsy clue.

Incidentally, he also was a construction worker and brought to the fifth unit at 8 o'clock in the evening, directly from the construction site.

"Your team work two shifts?"

"No, we finish at 5, I went there just to plan work for the next day."

Oh, sweetie! You did come to the workplace after five, eh? They're right – your place's in the coop!.

Ah! Yes! There was also music in the Area! It was being made by a shut-in with a button accordion.

The repertoire comprised 2 or 3 songs: "Walking the Don river…", "You're a cop, I'm a thief…", and… and that's all, I think.

The performance of those pieces began in the morning with an interval of an hour. The interval grew shorter and shorter