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

was a very modern plant, and thru the glass walls of the canteen on the second floor, there opened the view on the field from where I was coming. And there were no problems at the check-entrance, anyone in a spetzovka was considered a workman at the plant. The havvage portions at the canteen were small but cheap, and for a couple of hours after you did not feel hungry.

Sometimes, the bale weigher Valya ordered to bring her a custard cake from the canteen. On the way back, when crossing the railway track in front of pulled up locomotives in the head of their freight trains waiting for "the green" to pass thru the Konotop junction, I made attempts at bribing the locomotives with the cake wrapped in a piece of paper. They had such good-natured faces with beards in red paint coat, like the image in the sail on the Kon-Tiki raft. But they remained incorruptible.

“Well, as you please, then!" and I was taking the cake to the bale weigher Valya…

And the half-hour breaks, were for gossip and playing dominoes, the ubiquitous "goat". Besides the mujiks, the breaks were also attended by bale weigher Valya, and a couple of younger women from Popovka, and sometimes technologist Valya came in as well. She was an able-bodied woman, sufficient to fill impulsive poetic dreams, but I had already kicked off those things.

There were 4 loaders in the locker room of whom only old Misha kept silent all the time and never chip in, and even "goat" he played very rarely. Loader Volodya Kaverin with a narrow reddish horseshoe mustache trickling down to his chin, on the contrary, was loud and passionate, but loader Sasha sporting a dark toothbrush mustache soberly pacified his partner's fervor. He was tall, calm, reliable and—what a small place the world is!—married to that very Valya from the typist pool who had typed the collection of short stories by Maugham in Ukrainian.

The fourth loader, Vanya, was chubby and he shaved all of his round face. He sometimes threatened to smash my fucking mug for some of my remarks, but I doubted it – you could see from his face that he was a kind block. Besides, he was a real, big-time woman-hater and, holding the dominoes bones in his palm he used to ofttimes declare all of them were bitches.

"I'm on top of her, pumping, digging, doing my level best and she just lays with her eyes into the ceiling, 'Oy, Vanya! there's such cobweb in the corner!', well, ain't they bitches after that?!"

Even a saint wouldn't hold back a passing remark, "Poor boy!" says I, "Such a humiliation leaves no choice but become gay indeed."

And the loader begins fiddling his customary score about breaking my fucking mug. However, odds are very poor he'd ever keep his threat because behind the firmly knitted brows of a hard-core misogynist, it was hard not to see in Vanya's round face his heart of gold and tender nature.

~ ~ ~

End winter, the factory workers traditionally went on a three-day excursion to Moscow. Not all, of course, only those who wanted to. Technologist Valya asked me if I wanted. I had to admit that I hardly had enough money to live until the payday.

"Don't talk nonsense," she said, "the trade-union pay for food and accommodation. You can go there with just 3 rubles."

That was a challenge to Experimentalist. I signed up for the tour and prepared a three-ruble bill…

We arrived in Moscow filled with the winter dark. The small column of the tourists was headed by Yura who led thru the immense railway station to the square, it was not his first year in those tours. I was the file closer keeping my hands in the empty pockets of the demi-saison camel’s hair coat. A bus was already waiting for us before the station to take to the Red Square.

Arriving there, the bus stopped, and all the tourists went out to pass by the mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum. There only remained the bus driver, the guide Olya and I.

"Are not you going?" asked Olya.

"I disgust the dead."

The driver slightly creaked his seat turning back from the steering wheel…

Obviously, to the Red Square arrived more buses with the excursionists from different other places in our vast Motherland, because the driver opened the door and 3 more guide girls climbed up inside. They knew each other and in a brisk shoptalk were discussing the internal affairs of their tour operating organization and anything else…

Their sacred tribute paid, the Konotop excursionists came back from the frosty snow-clad Red Square. Elatedly rubbing and slapping the shoulders of their coats and pea-jackets, they filled the bus with animated whoops and the stomps of treds in their footwear against the entrance steps… We were taken to the Veh-Deh-eN-Kha area, to a hotel built in the late fifties for the participants in the World-Festival of Youth and Students. The guide Olya specified details of further cooperation: on the morning of the third day the bus would take us to the railway station because we were more interested in combing thru all kinds of stores than in "look-to-the-right, look-to-the-left", wasn't it so? Everyone joined in the joyous chorus chant that, yes, it was so…

Our havvage was served at the canteen in a separate building and paid for with the stamped paper slips of the coupons distributed among the excursionists… One of the canteen employees recommended me not to leave my camel coat on the hanger by the entrance door to the hall.

"But eating with the coat off is more convenient."

"Look, Vera!" she yelled back to another worker in the canteen kitchen. "There's one more guest from Communism!"

Since I was not interested in shopping of any kind, I mostly walked about the area, had a ride on a trolley bus to its terminal, and even found a newsstand with Morning Star on sale. In Konotop, because of the explosive situation in Poland, that newspaper was often missing even