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

five-pointed star, if you fly over that pentacle and have time to cast a look down, so the hearsay… Inside, it had a massive interior with a large hall on the first floor, and the exhibition stands in the wide galleries on the second.

I scrupulously examined the exhibition of envelopes and matchbox stickers issued during the Great Patriotic War, because I arrived there 2 hours before the concert. And what else could I do in the unfamiliar winter Moscow? The pictures on the envelopes and stickers, notwithstanding their innocent primitivism, seemed nostalgically appealing because I grew up on black-and-white movies of that period.

Then I went down to the hall, where the jazzmen soon began to install and check their instruments on stage – the drummer kit, the vibraphone, the speakers… Having finished these preparations, the musicians attacked the bold Jewish man for coming so too late. Defensively, he drove them a fool about hardships of Moscow life, and then went on a counterattack threatening on one of those days to give up all that music altogether, and let anyone give him a good reason why he needed all that at all. They left the stage, and the hall began to slowly fill up. For the audience of about 100 jazz lovers, the rows of violet soft plush chairs in the hall were more than enough.

And the concert started… The announcer was a tall fat girl who also sang at times. I took in one number after another and wanted only one thing – let them not end. What Dixieland the vibraphone sounded! And what bass guitar riffs! For one number the bassist was left alone with the girl and his bass guitar and they, just 3 of them, performed such a blues on the wide empty stage!.

The Jew came out only once, he played a tom-tom. Played?!. The whole continent of Africa would never give out on their drums any likeness to that number. I forgave him for his bald head and dumb talk before the concert because he turned into a completely different person. He forgot that he did not need it and created rhythms filling you with joyous, fervently spumescent thrill. "Bravo!"

Apparently, in the Central Theater of the Soviet Army, aka TTSA, they held another event, parallel to the concert, because to the barrier in the cloakroom there also crowed officers in uniform, who had not been present at the performance. The cloakroom attendant girl brought 2 clothes at once, and put them on the counter: a Generals' greatcoat with red silk lining and karakul collar (so this withered mushroom on my right is a General?) and the camel’s demi-saison hair from Alyosha Ocheret. She laid them down on the barrier and gave a weeny wistful sigh.

(…and what else can you do? The everyday insoluble conundrum – either a hussar in his prime, yet without a kopeck in his pocket, or a busted disrepair of General with a secured income.

Everyone has levers to please the ladies in sighing mood, it's only that those levers are located in different spheres…)

Moscow taxi drivers were more professional than their Kiev counterparts. Anyway, the one who picked me up after the concert, having estimated my look and lack of hand luggage, guessed to take me to a hotel where they did not start the fiddle-fart talk about reservations… The hotel Polar was starting from the sidewalk and getting lost somewhere up there in the darkness. The receptionist sent me by elevator to unimaginable heights between the twelfth and sixteenth floors.

The suite was similar to the flophouse-styled doss rooms at Ukrainian railway stations, where you could spend a night if having the passport and 1 ruble on you. It's only that in the room at Polar the beds were more, about 20 pieces, for the most part laid already with the guests changed to their sportswear. At that moment, my stomach reminded me of the omission to dine after the cultural life, and also of having no snack when in the pursue after a train model. So I asked where a dining room or buffet was, and the relaxing sportsmen, kinda gloating, explained that anything of the sort was closed at seven. I felt more and more hungry as well as the growing urge to punish my neighbors too happy to break the unwelcome news, so I take off my camel coat and whipped back down by the elevator.

On the wide slab of a porch outside, alongside the hotel entrance, there also was a tall door to the restaurant which, naturally, was locked, yet well illuminated far inside where you could discern some kind of motion… I started to pound onto the brown frame of the glazed door. A man in a cap and yellow straps on his jacket sleeves appeared behind the glass. At the sight of me in the jacket wide open on a white shirt, against the black-ink background of the night pricked by the weeny sparkles of downing flakes, he had no choice but to deduce that I was a guest, who had ventured out from the restaurant to powder my nose and stuff, in the open air. He unlocked the door and I rushed past him into the hall.

The restaurant occupied a pretty wide area, which allowed for celebration of 2 unrelated weddings at once, and there still remained vacant tables. I had to wait for a long time, but at last a waiter approached me to whom I reveal my wish to have a square meal, plain, without excesses. To pass the time before he fetched my Spartan order, I watched the dance of the newlyweds from the nearby wedding. At the end of their kinda tango, the burly bride got bugged and dealt a mean elbow punch into the chest cage of the skinny groom. He clutched his tie to keep a painful gasp back, face cringed in a fake smile, where a few teeth were missing. The foundation of marital relations was being laid as early