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

"What was their reaction?" asked the artist-designer.

"A standing ovation."

The supply of foraged potatoes could see me thru the whole week, however, potatoes alone somehow did not satiate, even if sprinkled with the salt found in the common kitchen… The artist noticed when in the Red Corner room I lifted a dried bread roll, forgotten by someone on a windowsill, and ate it, hiding in my fist. He reported the incident to the head of the personnel department.

The grumpy geezer, in the unvarying mask of disdain on the face, came to Red Corner, already empty of the business trippers of whom I was the last one, and demanded explanations for so strange an action.

The money was lost from my bag.

Stolen? Who?

I knew nothing. There had been 10 rubles which were there no more.

The mask twitched in disgust and he walked out. Soon, I was summoned to his office where he informed me that my business trip papers would be stamped for the entire stretch (there still remained 3 more days) but I had to perform an urgent work: a KAMAZ truck had dumped its load of sand at a wrong place in the yard, so the sand had to be moved, yet not by a bulldozer whose caterpillars would mangle the fresh asphalt.

It took me 2 or 3 hours to shovel the sand behind the kinda screen of too small pots with the doomed Fir-tree babies. I was paid 10 rubles for the job, which money I immediately received from the cashier in the accountancy office. The local train ticket to Konotop was 4 rubles plus. So I went to a grocery store, bought a bottle of vodka, transparent as a tear of separation, something there for a snack, and returned to the Red Corner room. Together with the artist, we drank that vodka for the success of the poetry collection whose pages had to be turned backward…

~ ~ ~

The overhaul at the Konotop recycle factory was headed by Yura, one of the 3 workmen at the unit. He loved to laugh and did it ably, exposing the fixture of white metal on his fang. In the white-and-black films they usually portrayed Komsomol leaders looking like him and only the fix did not fit the image.

The second overhauler was Arsen, cross-eyed, but not too much so. He put on the airs of a dignified aqsaqal, despite his young age. The reason for his tremendous pride was having the son who reached the age of 2 years already.

I hit it off with Arsen, but Yura with his stalking horse of laughter kept trying hard to crush me, most likely, because of his aversion to my higher education. I did not tell anyone about the fact, but those 4 years were recorded in my workbook now kept in the personnel department of the factory, and Yura spent lots of time in the administration barrack, readily laughing along with everyone there. The main impediment to establishing friendly relations between us 2 were my quotations as well as sharing news from Morning Star. Arsen, for his part, tried his best to pacify our feud.

Once talking to Arsen, I cited certain lines from the work of Karl Marx On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

(…well, yes, Frederick Engels is commonly considered the author of that work, however, Fritz published it after his dear friend Karl passed away already, giving his buddy opportunity to rummage thru his archives and works in progress not seen yet thru the press. Probably, Engels, like the blond from Southern Ukraine found expropriation of the absent justifiable by inconveniences suffered previously.

Anyway, he openhandedly supported Karl, his wife, and their 6 kids with the money of his father, also Fritz…)

I did not draw Arsen's attention to all those details, keeping down to a short quotation from the work itself. Yura, who happened about, suddenly snapped in demanding that I never ever dare start provocative talks like this in his presence because he was a communist and knew where to give a phone call on statements of that sort.

For the first time in our clashes, the last word remained by him. He dumbfounded me with his threat to halloo the KGB at the founders of Marxism-Leninism. And that's no fun, they would easily run them down, for all I know…

Another time, I was depicting to Arsen the Wagner's ballet about Scottish witches which I attended during the business trip to Kiev. Dancing a solo dance, one of the hexes stumbled and with a wooden knock fell flat onto the stage floor.

"Ha-ha-ha!" cheerfully reacted Yura on his visit to the overhaul room from the administration barrack.

"And imagine, Arsen, in the whole hall there was not a single jerk to laugh at her. She got up and danced on, showed her high mettle, you know."

And Yura also showed that it was not in vain that he spent so much time by the administration. As a result, I was transferred to the factory’s production section, to embrace the position of a presser…

What, actually, was Rags? It served a place where freight cars were bringing rubbish sorted at garbage dumps. Discarded dreck clothing for the most part, as well as waste paper.

Women from the nearby village of Popovka dissected the tatters with the howling disks of their machine tools and sorted the rugs again into soft mounds on the cemented floor in the aisle between their workplaces – cotton tatters, knitted rags, artificial fur collars from winter coats, etc.

Day after day they stood in front of their machine tools in dusty spetzovka wear with dangling clusters of safety pins on their chest, which they detected and pulled out from fabrics so that the steely trifles did not damage the disk. Such grapes of pins made them evil-eye-proof forever…

Time and again, 2 loaders approached those rag mounds with a deep box on long poles, like a sedan chair. Their faces were wrapped with bandannas, in the style of bank robbers, so as not to inhale the