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

and he even opened his waistcoat for a couple of top buttons to represent a true embodiment of the Western democracy.

I decided to play along with him and, sitting on a chair a meter off the “T's” base, assumed the attitude of a kicking back cowboy – the left leg stretched out with its heel planted into the floor, and the right heel resting over the left foot.

"Don’t sprawl! Get seated as you should! Forgotten where you are?!" barked the fair-haired.

"If you demonstrate how to sit at attention, I'd be happy to ape you, Comrade Lance-Corpo.."

"Well, okay!" intervened the judge like a ref in the ring calls “break!” before the boxers turn the noble art of crushing each other’s visage into an unruly fang-and-kick street fight. "Let him sit as he likes."

Then he read up the lawsuit of Citizen Eera about the absence of a family and my diagnosis. He finished off and addressed me, "What can you say in this respect?"

"My wife is always right. Each and every her word is the holy, purest, truth," averred I solemnly.

The girl-clerk registered in the papers that not only the Caesar’s wife could be beyond any suspicion.

Then the judge used his home-made trump with which he had started, pumped, and heated up the previous pair of divorcees, "But wasn't there at least anything good in your marriage?"

"Why not? We were the sexiest lovers at the institute."

With a sidelong glance at the flash of innocent flush in the girl clerk's countenance, the judge announced that was enough and the court didn't need any more evidence.

Thus was dissolved my wedlock with Eera.

~~~~~

~ ~ ~ The Solitary Barge Hauler

My cheeky snubs to the judge at the people's court arched my chest, but not for long. All slipped back into the same ineluctable rut: "O! Woe to me! What for? I loved so much! I was doing my best! Why me?" The unanswerable questions swapped for sticky, meek, and fond dream that one of these days Eera would come and everything would be fine again… The fact, that by the divorce Eera had, with straightforward logic, cleared her way to further life without me around, did not diminish the longing for the unreachable, neither shooed off the hope that everything will, somehow, turn fine all the same…

However, uninterrupted suffering is a rather tiresome occupation and, gradually, I formed a firm opinion that the divorce had to be, after all, celebrated. But in what way? I knew no rituals for the occasion and could only improvise. One thing was clear though, I needed a day not like all other days. And it was for such a day that I went to Kiev.

The Indian summer that year transgressed all the limits of common sense and, even though it was the first week in November, I ventured there in my jacket. Taking into account the fall's depth as reached in the calendar, the dark gray waistcoat went along with the jacket. It did not belong to any three-piece suit but was sewn back in my school years by that same sharp-nosed tailor in her shop next to the bus station… Such was my rig (plus a shirt and pants) when I emerged from the metro station on Khreshchatyk Street and moved slowly along its wide sidewalks grown with gorgeous Chestnuts.

I went down to Red Army Street cobbled with polished flagstones, and walked farther down its slope to the Foreign Book store to make myself the event-marking present, which caught my eye pretty long ago, during the last year's business trip to the dairy reconstruction. On the way, I had to keep in check a nagging worry: what if they had already sold it? However, I was almost sure and I didn't get much surprised making out the bright red jacket of Chamber's 20th Century Dictionary on the same very shelf.

The salesman, observing my festive outfit—from under the waistcoat, there also peeped the open collar of my faded red shirt—asked politely if I indeed would want that particular book.

(…I was not surprised by his doubt – in that year of the then-current 20th century, not every fella could afford a book for 31 rubles 60 kopecks. Except, of course, for a bricklayer celebrating their divorce…)

I left the store with the thick volume tightly wrapped in their special lavender-colored packing paper. It had to be left in an automatic storage cell at the station. Yet, how to get there? On the subway again? No, it was another kind of day. And I approached the curb with flocks of taxis shooting by… From the station, I also dropped to "The Hunter" store, at the address given me by Grynya, who wanted some special fishing rod from there.

After the shopping spree and the subsequent storing of goods, there started the cultural part in the program. That evening The House of Organ Music was filled with the sun shimmer over the sea waves in the pieces by Debussy. Bright sparkling notes in the ripples and splashes of waves dancing happily… As I was a child, my father told me that at listening to such music people were supposed to draw some mental pictures to fit it. I never could follow his advice, the sounds overpowered all clever intentions leaving no space for anything else…

In the post-concert twilight on the sidewalk outside The House of Organ Music, the mid-autumn chill stirred up my hunger. A taxi took me to the restaurant of the Golden Wheat Shoot hotel. At first, I tried to rent a room there for a sleepover, but the receptionist assessed my rig, incongruent with the requirements of calendar, as well as the absence of any luggage, and cut me off with their usual question below the belt: if I had booked a room. They knew very well how to set back vagrant freelancers.

In the restaurant, to orient myself, I ordered a bottle of wine for a starter, and a geezer in a beret on his head immediately landed on the chair opposite