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

The cradles brought from the SMP-615 base were too few for all the team, and we were substituting them with ratsookha (that is how our team streamlined the word "rationalization).

Ratsookha was a series of pallets stitched with nails in twos with each pair working as a cradle. Because the pallets were shorter than needed, on top of the first decking we added further ratsookha to be bridged with boards forming the next level deck. The whole contraption looked like a house of cards, was more flimsy and shaky than the legitimate trestles, but it worked. The trickiest moment came with dismantling ratsookha trestles. Some of the boards in decking were nailed to the pallets, others not, and they all were high above your head so, when you started to knock them off and down to the floor, the scattered fragments of crushed bricks and layers of mortar spilled and dried over the planks up there were pouring down as well. Few people on our team liked dismantling trestles. And for me, it was, sort of, a chess nut to crack or guessing, like a sapper from an action movie, which wire to cut to diffuse the bomb. Only the falling fragments should be dodged in time as befits a seasoned chess-player… However, for that particular dismantling, I sent all chess to hell.

Furious, like a berserk Viking running to battle in just a flax linen tank top shirt, with a long iron breaker I pulled the boards away from the nails screeching and squealing in protest. When the top deck collapsed on the floor I, in frenzied swaying over the mess of boards under my feet, continued slashing and slitting the cradles of the stitched pallets with the sweeping blows of enraged breaker, while roaring like a wounded beast: "A wedding?! Here's a wedding for you!." My nostrils rounded, and sprawled in passion, pumping, in and out, the dust from the thick cloud whipped up by toppling crashing trestles.

It does feel good to ravish in ecstasy of cutting all the tethers, cutting loose and letting yourself go, at least sometimes… with quivering wings of your nose, taken away by the tsunami wave of raging wrath, forgetful of all at all in this delightful, mad, godlike demolition of anything on earth or in the heaven. Daamn! Get it!. Of which divine pleasure I’m, alas, deprived. Because even while raging in the unruly leveling of what was there to destroy, I still was fully aware that all that was nothing but a mere aping of Odysseus’ action in a recent movie adaptation of his wanderings. He similarly pulled his lips over the clenched teeth, when on his return home he started knocking off, one by one, the suitors to his wife Penelope. As for the wedding which "here's for you!", that also was a quotation from the same movie.

Anyway, just in a few minutes in place of the trestle, there was a heap of boards interspersed with torn up pallets. The cloud of dust hung in the air over the battle field and, in the corridor, the foreman's wife, rigger Katerina, standing still near the doorway, listened intently – what wedding was I about?.

My sister Natasha never reported on Eera's new marriage. Seems like the flash-team of Odysseus and me did a shamefully good job at derailing quite a natural course of events in the life of an innocent, unfamiliar, female, whose only error was being same-named and living at the place once dwelt by my Eera. Just another folly of mine…

(…as it turned out, I was neither a wolf nor a hooey-pricker, but an ornery dog in the manger. Like those kings that sent their divorced wives under the home arrest in a monastery. Yet, if the monastery has a proper gardener with a good lever, as depicted by Boccaccio…

Oops, I am again at it, this time carried away inventing rationales for royals as if I don't have problems of my own…)

But it was also Natasha who showed me a solution to the titanically insurmountable problem of turning the manuscripts into typewritten text. She said there was a typing pool on the street connecting Square of Konotop Divisions and the Sennoy Market and, maybe, someone there would agree to type those translations of mine…

The two-story house of the typing pool looked like the “Cherevko's school”. From the entrance, a straight flight of wooden stairs led to the second floor where, in 2 adjacent rooms, a dozen of typists were with amazing speed chirping their typewriters. One of them, named Valya, with a bob-cut blond hair, agreed to type the shortest from the short stories, which I brought along in a thin copybook for a probe. She appointed a day for me to come after the finished text. Taming my heartbeat, I said I had more translations. She replied I could bring them too, by 1 or 2 at a time. I asked her about the payment, but she waved the question away…

For a couple of months, I was visiting the typing pool on the days said by Valya. I approached the house from the opposite sidewalk, in the best traditions of underground conspirators and secret agents. Diving in the wide-open door of the entrance, I cautiously sneaked to the second floor – just only not to shoo off the crazy luck… Passing to Valya the copybook with the last of the stories, I again tried to find out about the payment, and she again dismissively shook her head.

Labor must be rewarded, so I decided to pay anyway, if not with money, then in kind. Near the streetcar stop by Peace Square, on the first floor of the five-story block, there stretched a row of shops, overhanging the sidewalk with their somewhat droopy shop windows. The last in their row was The Flowers on the right, and the first, close to the square corner, The Jewelry. There, after several circles around the glass box-cabinets with exorbitantly expensive necklaces, bracelets, and gold rings, I