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

planted an empty pallet and started stacking bricks on it. At times, it was necessary to press my chest with the left elbow, because the pin in there got replaced with a thick knitting needle. When the standard 12 courses of bricks were stacked up on the pallet, I told myself that my case was not terminal, and climbed to the incomplete third floor. There I took the Jolly Roger down from the corner wall, tore it from its mast, and slipped into a loop-hole in the slabs, and buried with dried mortar lumps and other debris…

Kyrpa's threats remained just empty words, I was never taken to Romny that summer. Might it be I had grown wiser? Very questionable indeed. It's just because I had not run into a sore spot of some high-ranking bitch of a cadre… By the middle of May, the needle, or pin, or whatever it was to pierce my chest, gradually dissolved, and many years later I realized that it was the first of heart attacks suffered by me…

~ ~ ~

In my rough plan there cropped up another, but already pleasant, detail, that of assembling the typewritten pages into one complete volume of stories. For that purpose, I bought a folder from the Department Store, with a hard plastic cover and nickel-plated rings inside. They usually use such folders for annual accounting reports lined up on the shelves in the accountancy office; sturdy, respect inspiring rows. To punch the holes for the folder rings in the pages of text, I borrowed the puncher from the secretary of Manager of SMP-615 in the administrative building. The new boss’s complexion grew green when saw me in his poultry farm, however, his sore spots did not qualify yet to be considered high-ranking enough…

The folder with the collection of translated short stories was holstered into a festive-looking cellophane bag and I took it—bugle your trumpets, fanfarade! Roll, timpani, roll!—in the capital city of Kiev, to the book publishing house Dnipro.

In the first room, where I proudly announced the arrival of a collection of translations [Here! Here!] of short stories by William Somerset Maugham, the jovial young man informed that he was not the person in charge of Maugham, and the expert I needed was to be found 2 offices farther down the corridor. If would I like him to have me seen over there? With dignified gratitude, I declined.

In the indicated office, there sat a fat, but still young, man staring in disgust at a skinny pile of typewritten pages inside an open looseleaf folder of purple cardboard, with short white strings in its covers spread wantonly atop his desk… He reluctantly opened the heavy hard-plastic-armored file that I handed him over his desk, and glanced at the title of the first story in the collection.

The Rain

He shut the file abruptly and asked who I was sent by.

In confused bewilderment, my mind revved to its limits: …forbidden to come here on your own accord?…too high circles… I should have been sent by some or another duke***, so that the courtier-receptionist could guess whose vassal I was… to compare the duke's weight with that of his suzerain—marquis***—and know how to handle me… and then one phone call to verify—just in case—for him to decide to which drawer he might safely stick it in… and don’t you cherish no hope, under so polished a shebang, to find a hole for the f-f..er..I mean, freelancer-outsider.

Meanwhile he, just in case, opened the volume once again, someplace in the middle, and immediately slammed it shut.

"I'm just an errand-boy," clarified I, "They asked me to take it to your publishing house, so I brought it here."

"Who?"

I opened the file to show the sticker on inside of its back cover with my Konotop address. "This friend of mine," said I.

It was below his position to talk to a messenger who was not sent by even somewhat petty baron but came from.. what was it? Konotop, or something he never needed no slush from… I coldly replied to his official goodbye and left the room.

The next evening, in Konotop, coming from work, I saw on my shelves a weighty postal package wrapped in their usual mustard-brown hard-duty paper. I had no reason to open the parcel. What for? By its size and familiar weight, I knew what was inside. The annual report for the past 6 years of my life, comprising 472 typewritten pages of 35 short stories by W. S. Maugham, translated into Ukrainian.

Strangely, the posted parcel hadn't reached Konotop before I came back from Kiev. And it was also odd that the unopened package with unread stories left me so frostbitten indifferent.

(…as it turned out, those 6 years did not fit into the feudally regulated grid of book publishing system.

"Who sent you to our reality laid out in so nice rectangular way?"

"Sorry, I've knocked on a wrong door…"

Quoting the habitual byword from my Uncle Vadya: “Farewell, dear peers and peerixes, sirs and sirixes!”

And he was a great connoisseur of vassal dependencies from The History of Middle Ages school textbook …)

~~~~~

~ ~ ~ The Ivory Tower

Instead of a volume of short stories by W. S. Maugham in Ukrainian (a single copy from 150 000 published) a weighty parcel rested, dead as a doornail, on my shelves. All that depended on me for accomplishment of the undertaken project was done in full, which stripped my further living on of any goal whatsoever. Life still rolled along the rutted trail, even if aimless and unplanned already. However, when you drop asking the useless question "what for?", then a Thursday visit to the bathhouse with the steam room, concluded by 2 bottles of beer, would suffice to motivate living for another week. Marvel at monks in the Tibet, who rough it up there though deprived of even the mentioned stimulants.

In my, not quite Tibetan, yet well-structured way of life there felt an undeniable lack of carnal pleasures. I caught myself thinking this thought on the evening when, coming