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

shouted from above to the carpenter to hook the concrete slab stump intended for the installation. The stump's one side would rest onto the blocks of the traverse wall, the other side would be supported by the readied corners of the unfinished wall. They'll lap it up! And the remaining gap between the bearing corners would be filled sometime after, in the process of construction.

I tried to bring it home to Ivan, that now it was the most convenient moment for finishing the started wall. Later, to fill the gap left under the stump, the bricklayers would not have the trestle under their feet. Let him better bring the mortar and I'd finish it in 15 minutes, working under such favorable conditions. Yet, Vitalya for Ivan was a closer pal than logic, so he went and hooked the stump as told.

The crane operator raised the load, turned the boom and rolled the tower crane along the railway, carrying the stump to me for insertion as he planned. He yelled from his cab to quickly spread mortar on the corners of the unfinished wall otherwise he would drop it just as is, on dry bricks – they'll lap it up! Instead of mortar, I put my arm on a brick corner so that he did not fulfill his intention.

Vitalya poured hectic curses from his birdhouse in the height, rang the crane bell without interruption, and kept closing in on the arm, with the load. In general, it was a frontal attack of two fighter planes against each other: he who yields was nothing but a snotty chicken.

When the concrete stump neared the arm to about a meter, overseer Karenin awoke from watching the breath-taking battle of two aces and yelled to Vitalya to take the load aside. And there it hung while I finished the wall the way it was right. Overseer Karenin stood on the blocks above my head and asked, "Why did you do it, Sehrguey? He's crazy enough to crush your arm. You'd be a cripple."

"Karenin, my whole life is crushed. All that remains is just my work. I don't want them make a snot of it."

"Where?" asked Ivan standing on the other wall of blocks behind my head. "What's the talk about crushin'?"

"He means it was his written fate from birth," overseer Karenin explained to him.

I was finishing the last course of bricks, like, busy, but I could not let the erudite conversation go without me, "May his hand wither, to that writer!"

Karenin and Ivan instantly got silent, the overseer somehow shrank and turned his eyes aside. And exactly that very moment, squinting my eyes at the rays of the sun descending to the horizon, while spreading mortar for insertion of the slab stump onto the finished wall, I for the first time thought that the particulars of our lives were defined and occurring the way as we recount them in our later life. And it doesn't matter to whom and whether in gossip or writing…

(…it's scary! As it turns out, by that spontaneous curse I wished my own hand to wither away?!. Why? It is so unfair!

..shut up!. who are you to make complaints of unjust treatment?. how else could I show that cheeky puppeteer in his made-in-Germany sleeping bag that I’m not a servile marionette neither a tool to go by his drowsily scintillating blabber meant for reconstructing the past beyond his reach?.

I’m not sure if you can get it though, good news is that at least I can follow myself… however, I’d better shut up now for not to overstrain our brain.

…moreover, if not for this sleeping bag my story might very easily and more than once have ended in the nameless river at the Object…)

Ivan and I inserted the stump. Vitalya got down from the tower crane and still had time for playing cards with Ivan before we went to the road to meet and board on our Seagull. I soon forgot the whole incident, however, the new boss did not omit to add it to the dossier…

"And you all know as well as I do, how often they nab him to the psychiatric hospital… Yet, worse than anything else, he is a chronic violator of labor discipline. 3 occurrences of absenteeism in only one year! That's why I propose to fire him for systematic absenteeism."

That's right – 2 days to Moscow after the train model for Andrey, and 1 day to the publishing house Dnipro in Kiev… At the time of mentioned violations, I fully realized that it was an act of absenteeism. However, it was normal for a workman at SMP-615 to have a week of absenteeism, and a couple of champions had accrued up to 20 days, which fact I considered a guarantee of permissibility to skip 3 days, the grosser violators would serve a cover for my ass. Yet, no go! The integrity of the labor discipline couldn't be bribed by a smartie's calculations!

And now, after 5 consequential records in my workbook marking the gratitude for and appreciation of my labor achievements, on October 18, 1985, the head of personnel department of SMP-615, A. Petukhov, with that same beautiful handwriting wrote that I was fired on the strength of Article 40, for absenteeism without satisfactory excuse. The participants in the meeting of the trade-union committee unanimously raised their hands in favor of the measure proposed by the new boss. Afterward, some of them commented that such a result was exclusively my blunder, I should have stood up, and, hat in hand, humbly ask for mercy and then they would forgive me…

Why did I maintain the role of a monitor to the end and did not make a speech in self-defense, pointing out the absenteeism of others, quite a few, and did not express my bitter regret for my wrong-doings? I simply was fed up. The time had come to seek other grounds for the application of my experimentalism. Not because of so was my plan though. As always, I remained