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

along the darkness and snowdrifts in the outskirt streets, would scream at the small girl wild threats of giving her away, the disgusting wretch, into an orphanage.

And it seemed to the frightened kid, it was not her granny, but Baba-Yaga, the crooked witch and mistress of the black blizzard, which scratched into the dark, ice-clad, windows, and all of them were against her, defenseless, five-year-old, wretch. Complains? To who? To hope for help? Where from?

So Lenochka learned to get along with her grandmother. She knew when to hug and how to kiss on the wrinkled cheek. And granny brought her cakes with custard filling from the "Cooking" store by the Under-Overpass. Yes, and she sewed for her everything with the Singer sewing machine.

And what good things did she see from her dad? Coming from work, he knew only to rustle pages in his book and even bought a desk lamp. Well, there were also those 30 rubles a month, yet they were just 30 rubles to the granny, while Granny insured her with the insurance and when she is 18 – here you are, Lenochka, get 2 000 rubles!

And whatever you asked, Granny could cook. She also knew all the gossip about her classmates, so that they always had something to talk about. However, when you asked what's happiness, or, say, beauty, then daddy explained more interesting. And he knew how to praise a new haircut so that it felt ticklish all over with joy. But all the same, Granny's better…

My friend Twoic did correct calculations suggesting to meet at 12.30. By that time the first local train from Konotop arrived in Kiev. He did not consider one thing though, which was my disgust to be put in frames worked out not by me. So I came to Mother of Russian Cities two hours earlier, by an express train…

Leaving the railway station, I crossed its square full of traffic bustle, car-honking, clangs of streetcars, and leisurely strolled along the inclined plane of the wide empty sidewalk, towards a busy intersection in the distance…

Half a dozen gypsy women followed me into the first canteen after the crossing. Removing my raincoat and hat on the hanger in the corner, I almost regretted the coincidence because of which I had to wait before they selected their havvage and pull the trays to the checkout, echoing to each other in their dark language.

…calm down, there’s still a whale of a time…

However, the gypsies took a wait-and-see attitude and, glancing in turn at me, clearly refrained from going first. And that's a wise move too – to check which items on the menu were safe to eat that day.

"You're missing bread," grumbled the cashier after a look-see at my tray.

"No need."

With a shrug, she threw back a couple of beads on her abacus and accepted a well-chafed ruble-note.

Seated alone, I modestly kept my eyes down, at the cabbage salad in combination with a snack of custard cake and tried hard not to follow the news announcer in his coat and cap, broadcasting from a nearby table to feed his chewing companion the latest news of his world, where the day before someone swallowed way too much of noxiron and kicked the bucket. Some first-rate dinner gossip, yes, indeed.

Yet, the most stunning thing about this metropolitan newsmonger was that he repeated, word for word, the piece which already was no news in the provincial wild. Tower crane operator Vitalya shared it a week ago. Coincidence, or plagiarism?.

Intercepting my pensive glance, the announcer swelled in vanity, the owner of breathtaking sensation…

In the barbershop on the same street, there was no queue and, when I returned to the station, it remained half-hour before the appointment. The shoe shiner in a satin blue smock polished my shoes, flicking the ponderous anchors tattooed on the backs of his hands.

Instead of eyeing up the ladies that scurried past his booth to the women's toilet and back, I steadily looked at the gray of his head bowed to my knees. The mujik got fed up with that crying anomaly. "What are you gazing at?" he asked, putting off his brush and taking a plush cloth instead.

"I seem to like you."

"Bullshit!" he grumbled grimly. "Even I myself don't like me."

"We have different tastes then." And all the same, there still remained fifteen minutes…

I passed thru the immense lobby of the station, climbed up the white stone stairs to the second floor and, up there, rested my elbows on the wide white parapet over the grandiose hall dissolving high overhead into the twilight-filled void. Idly watched I the rough confusion of human particles in the Brownian movement swarming at the tiled bottom far below. About 5 minutes later, this tiny bit of me would mix with them, but now I was just looking down at the bustling fuss.

Their hasty streams thinned about the center of the lobby and, after bypassing it, they again became denser. The reason for the phenomenon was the athletic figure in a scarlet jacket walking there in unhurried circles. Waiting for someone. Whom? Not me. Nobody waits for me except for Twoic who, probably, right now is by the metro entrance checking the waves of the passengers from the neighboring Suburban Trains Station.

Ain’t it funny? Here, in the main station, this burly block goes round and round, waiting for someone, while a bit shorter slob, Twoic, is circling now by the nearby, smaller, Suburban Trains Station, also in a state of expectation. If you extend this line, then somewhere still farther, say, at a streetcar terminal, there is a teenager waiting for somebody. And so on, just like that endless little man in a fire extinguisher on the staircase landing of the second floor in my kindergarten, the man in his cap from the somersaulting pictures who instilled the notion of infinity in me. That kindergarten "I" hadn't even heard the word "infinity", and only infinitely gazed at the fire extinguisher trying to understand: where did those men in caps