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

And then I ordered to the girls, "Fall in! March in a circle!" And they marched around the frozen Woodburner, chanting one or another exercise from a paperback collection, yellow with age, printed for the USSR universities in 1958. And when they grumbled that their heads were dizzy from that circling, I commanded to turn around and march in the opposite direction. They giggled but obeyed and chanted on… Kinda Peripatetic Methodology of Feldwebel Ogoltsoff, however, it helped to hold on until the coughing clangs of bell thru the windy corridor…

O, my!. Where have I drifted off again?!. Aha, I remembered – children are the flowers of life…

But enough of that, let's return to Lenochka's try at fixing the dismally wrong situation of having no normal dad… She entered the room and sat on my lap, cutting me off the desk with the opened dictionary, a copybook, and a Morning Star issue on it. Turning her face up at me, she raised her hand and fondled my cheek with her small palm. Probably, she tried to show her austere father how to do the trick.

(…what pushed me off? Fear of falling to incest? Not a chance, with my built-in robotic self-control.

Most likely, the pitiful smile on her face saying "Oh, you poor thing!" put my back up…)

"Well, enough, Lenochka, I have to work."

The smile gave way to a sullen look, she pouted and started to bound in revenge, still sitting on my lap.

"What?! Dreams of sweetmeats? Ain't it a bit early?" And I rose to my feet, like a soulless robot, leaving her without the pad for bouncing.

Several days later, coming back from work, I noticed a change on the bookshelves. There appeared a black hole. The high cheekbone in Eera's face, on the amateur photo in the middle of the stream, was punched thru. The tool of that vandalism and, maybe, even Voodooism served a sharp pencil or, possibly, a ballpoint pen. I did not dwell on the question: who? – it didn’t matter.

"Lenochka, come here!"

"What?"

"As a father, I have to take care of your education, so that you understand what is what. Now, look at the photo on the shelf.”

"What?"

"This is called 'baseness'."

"It's not me."

"I am not saying it's you. Just remember what 'baseness' is. And it makes no difference who does it."

The photo had to be taken to the studio opposite Loony. Their employee Arthur, a young Armenian specializing in the transfer of photo portraits to ceramics, said the hole was fixable. Only I asked to enlarge the picture to the size of a wall portrait, leaving everything as it was, and the stream too… For the restored and enlarged photo, I also bought a cardboard frame and put it back on the shelf.

Seeing the result, my mother gave out an icky snigger, and that was her only comment. I did not start any pedagogical conversations on the topic, and the photo remained completely immune to malicious attempts and stood there for the dust to gradually set in…

~ ~ ~

Before an anniversary of her son Andrey, my sister Natasha complained it was impossible to find a railway model even for the ready money. If I remembered that huge circle of tiny rails with a miniature train running along, back at the Object… I did have vague recollections of the beautiful toy and picked her complaint up as an excuse to break out of everyday Konotop life. I was a loving uncle after all!.

For a start, I went to Kiev. The saleswoman at the specialized department store Kids' World sat glumly behind the counter in a black padded jacket of workmen over her blue coat of the specialized store uniform. She perked up a bit when I reported that my wish was a chuff-chuff. She chuckled and answered in a villagers' parlance, so that the churl of me would get it easier, "Ain't a-having no chuff-chuffs here." It did not surprise me though because whatever said by Natasha couldn’t be some other way.

The next detail, popped up into the plan, became the capital of our mutual Motherland – Moscow. That's where led the caravan trails to trodden by those exasperated with empty store shelves in the semi-deserts of chronic deficit… In the metropolitan Kids' World, there were chuff-chuffs with cars, and rails, and bridges so that the train could run along, powered by a tiny battery. I took the prey to the railway station, stored it in an automatic storage cell, and returned downtown to snatch my share of the cultural life in Metropolis.

At the ticket office of the Bolshoi Theater, they told me that the tickets had to be reserved 2 weeks beforehand. A little disappointed, I left the glorious hotbed of culture discriminating against flotsam loving uncles.

Right outside, on the sidewalk, there stood a glass cubic booth entirely curtained from inside with all sorts of show bills, in which they sold tickets to the theaters and concert halls of the Moscow City. For the coming night, they offered to choose from the concert in the Kremlin Hall featuring the most prominent pop stars and the concert of a nondescript jazz band at the Central Theater of the Soviet Army. So I could visit the Kremlin for the staple stale garbage they poured for years on TV, or… "Jazz, of course!"

(…they say that the railway station in Chernigov was built under the Germans, during the occupation. And I trust those sayers. Why? Well, at least for the fact, that they are not paid for the gossip, unlike official compilers of countless Soviet history books.

And they say also, the bird-eye view of the Chernigov station presents a Teutonic cross. I had never considered the building in question from above, yet I can testify that from all the stations visited by me, only there any time of the day you could have ready boiling water from a big copper tap…)

And all that reminds me, that the building of the Central Theater of the Soviet Army looks like a