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

I did not answer to the smile in her round face under which—I knew that without looking—a much rounder figure was expanding, so I just kept silent. I did not want to be of such a round breed and turn a blubber guts. I would not succumb to their iminazine! Some radical measures were the must.

If, for a start, we consider those same dinners at 13 Decemberists, my mother skillfully piled no less than two servings of rice or potatoes onto a plate. At the same time, everything was so delicious, that you imperceptibly ate all of the humongous portion.

Repeal of bread became the first step in my struggle to keep lean. Okay, I eat as much as you care to load, but I'm not obliged to eat bread along with it, and I will not. So, I cut it out from my diet even at canteens.

As for the "will not" that was a sham, because I always liked bread, especially rye bread, moreover when it's warm. I was able to finish off a loaf of such bread at one sitting, without any spicing stuff, except for the byword learned from my father: "Soft bread and mouth wide make the heart rejoice at every bite."

A month later, marking that the breadless diet was of no help, I just dropped going to canteens at the midday break which move brought equilibrium to the previously impaired balance. Breakfast in the canteen plus two servings at the late evening dinner stood for traditional 3 daily meals. As for the midday havvage, I devoured, by our team's definition, Vsesvit, brought once a month by me to the bricklayers' trailer for reading at midday breaks. As a result, by the New Year Eve, in the same city bathhouse behind Square of Konotop Divisions, I proudly observed my sunken, like on a healthy wolf, stomach. I always preferred that form… Some concave-bellied Narcissus.

(…there are lots of words you seemingly know because you have heard, read, and even pronounced them more than once. Sure, I know the word!.. until asked about its meaning. But overly inquisitive bastards are of seldom ilk, and you continue to interpret seemingly known words the way you vaguely feel they should mean, sort of…

The word "asceticism" is one of the brightest examples of how people do not understand what they themselves are about. 90 percent of the population, to whom the word, like, yes, clear, would imagine a man of wildly lambent eyes above a hirsute ungroomed beard, weary with his self-inflicted tortures and privations. This is just as wrong as applying the word "athlete" exclusively to sumo fighters.

In fact, the root meaning of "asceticism" is conveyed by the word "training". If, cherishing ambitions to win a beer tournament, you keep putting away 3 liters of beer daily, so as to train and keep yourself in proper form, you are an ascetic. As well, as the neighbor's girl that every day rushes violin scales thru your apartment wall. Damn her asceticism with all those f-f..er..flats and sharps!

On the whole, an ascetical ascetic, preparing themselves for future life in heaven, is nothing but a special case among all other sorts of asceticism manifest in manifold patterns, both short and long-term, depending on the purpose of training…)

And what—if I may ask—were the goals that made me so rigorously guard my being thin as a rake, and every weekday write out unfamiliar words from the newspaper Morning Star? As I have tried already to explain, my general plans were always marked by ungetriddable vagueness in their details. I simply felt that this or other something had to be done and, therefore, I did so…

The extracts from the Morning Star called for a keen attentive self-cross-checking. When meeting in the newspaper some incomprehensible word about which I definitely knew it had been met and more than once already, there rose temptation to neglect it because it was exactly same bugger! Okay, and what's the meaning, eh?

To rummage thru the pile of scribbled up copybooks seemed way too tedious, much easier was to look it up anew in Chamber's Dictionary and write it out one more time. As a result, more than once I happened to look up a word whose entry page number I could say by heart, but not its meaning. Some colander of a memory. That's what asceticism does to a person, making you go thru a certain set of actions hardly knowing why you have to…

For me, the incident of that evening was not a temptation, I rather felt amazed. And she, on her part, was not seducing me and only tried to claim fulfillment of parental duty because I was grossly indebted to Lenochka. I never took her in my arms, nor kept her in my lap, nor raffled caressingly her hair, nor fondled her cheek, not to mention other “nors” of what I owed her. We just lived in the same khutta, where she had once been told that I was her dad, yet who would earnestly consider me a father? Just some dry abstract formula, a contactless, symbolic, dad.

Of course, I never gave her the cold shoulder, and at times I could even get carried away by talking to her, but for a child that, probably, is not enough. And for me, as a father, that surely is not enough but just so turned out my relationships with each and every one of my five children…

When Lenochka was born, I simply was not ripe yet for the role of father. Dad at eighteen? With all due respect to Swan of Avon, that’s just ludicrous. Then followed the years at the construction battalion and the institute…

When you were born, I was already fit to be a father, and I loved you selflessly, but not for long enough – my reputation separated us.

I met Ruzanna at her seventh year. She called me "daddy" all along, and I loved her as my daughter but, for the first