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

along the empty rack rails above the windows, then I returned to the vestibule and exhaled: hooooey!

I did not feel like sitting in the leatherette-covered seats of the empty local train, I walked thru the underground passage and over the station square to the Loony park, to a hard, wooden, bench. There I sat for a long time without any thoughts, only now and then seeing myself in the form of a stupidly frozen statue by the handrail, while they were removing the cellophane bag. Who?!. Doesn't matter, makes no difference… Whoever the pillager, they hardly got happy with so a useless spoil, except for kindling firewood in their stove, it would do for quite a few winters.

After the stupefied shell-shock sitting for about an hour, I remembered that it was SMP-615 on-duty day in the public order squad and I dragged myself to the stronghold room to sit on further – indifferent, detached, and silent.

Only with the arrival of the militia officer, I knew what to do next. "Comrade Captain, lend me 3 rubles till our next turn on duty."

"I do not lend in rubles. Only in days of arrest. 15 enough?"

His dull wit only confirmed the correctness of my plan… The next day, 3 rubles were borrowed from our team and, after work, I went to Nezhyn. There, in the five-story block for the institute teachers in the Count's Park, I found the apartment of ever-smiling Nona and said her that, after several years of work, I lost all of my translations from Maugham. Now, for their restoration, I needed the originals of the stories, all of which were collected in the four-volume edition by the Penguin Publishing House that was in her possession. Could she, please?.

Wearing her usual sweet smile, Nona brought the books, placed them into a cellophane bag, and handed over to me. Enormous joy nearly stopped my heart pounding – thank you!.

"How do you like it, Maria Antonovna? That rapscallion Ogoltsoff lost all of his translations in the local train!"

"Because you shouldn't have made the poor boy drink so much!"

Maria Antonovna also did not know that all my misfortunes or joys, ups, and downs, all my pleasures, and deprivations sprung from that rascal on the Varanda River bank in the inconceivably faraway future…

~ ~ ~

"The habit's a heavenly giftTo substitute for happiness…"

This immortal lines of the great classic implies unequivocally, that for the third time they raked me up exclusively out of the developed habit… And that time almost everyone in SMP-615 knew that any other day they would nab me.

2 years later, at an accidental meeting on the narrow trail along the railway embankment, behind the sports grounds on the outskirts of the engineering college, that knowledge was disclosed also to me by the retired Major Petukhov, the then head of the personnel department at SMP-615. Without any pressure or leading questions on my part, Petukhov gave me an account of how the superintendent Ivan was coming every other day from the construction site to the personnel department head’s office to call psychiatrist Tarasenko about my latest deviations.

"He sang this morning. Maybe it's time?"

"Let him sing."

"He wrote an explanatory note in verse."

"What note?"

"He lost his helmet and I demanded to write an explanatory. Will you come after him?"

"Not yet."

"He shoved his shirt into a hole in the bridging slab and buried it with mortar."

"That's it! Make sure he doesn't get away."

Singing at the workplace I allowed myself not every day, but rather often. At times, especially when a construction site in At-Seven-Winds drowned in a cold dense fog, one or another bricklayer from our team would ask, "Sing, Sehryoga!"

"I had a wife,She loved me so much,And just one time she cheated,And then she made her mind:Eh! One time, yes, and once again,And many, many, many, many more times again…"

However, to the Vysotsky’s trade-mark The Gypsy Girl our team, almost unanimously, preferred his The Ballad of Gypsum:

" I lay prostrate, all plastered over,My every member's well pre-packaged!.."

As for the helmet, it was not lost, it's just that I gave free rein to my gentlemanly urbane nature. Walking among the construction sites in At-Seven-Winds, I saw by the nine-story block 2 female plasterers from PMK-7. They picked some flowers in the fresh grass, most likely, dandelions because of their yellow color. When asked for a cellophane packet, I, with a wide, hussar, gesture, threw them my helmet to use as a basket for collected flowers. Then I pointed out the brown trailer of our team, so that they knew where to return the headgear to. I saw them for the first time and it was the last time I saw my helmet…

Of all our team, only I wore a helmet, that's why the superintendent Ivan demanded of me that explanatory note. But calling "verses" what I scribbled for him is nothing but a staring flattery, just so vers libre, at most…

Well, about the shirt, yes. With that shirt, I ran into it flatly. That time I imprudently indulged in my inclination to self-invented rituals because it was the first day of summer. Now, was it possible not to observe the event? In summer, even wearing nothing but a tank top under your spetzovka, you still swim in your sweat; a shirt in summer is a redundant element.

That green shirt of some kind of finely creased synthetics I donned for 6 years. Yet, that bitch of a shirt did not want to wear off, and I had to sweat in it as in any other synthetic crap, despite its being finely creased. And so, on June 1, I got out of the trailer in kinda green artistic wrap atop of my black spetzovka worn, in its turn, on my stark naked torso. I made for the team's current workplace and buried the shirt in one of many loop-holes in the floor slabs among the unfinished walls… There were no garbage bins at the site and to simply drop the shirt into the latrine’s ochco did not seem