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

When I was sent on the errand to buy vodka from the liquors store on Semashko Street, they at once equipped me with the kind of jeans of which I could be only dreaming when I still cared for such things. It’s only that the maple leaf or, maybe, some kind of a flower embroidered on the right leg was some excessive, in my opinion, detail of design…

The line to the store started way far from it, and it was a pretty tangled line looping with incomprehensible twists over the sidewalk, for which fact such lines were handled "Gorbachev’s loops". But it was not advisable to share the handle too loud because, as the rumors had it, the KGB sec-cols were present midst the thirsty part of the population to pick up fresh jokes and take note of especially dissatisfied citizens.

On the strength of those rumors, I demanded a camouflage outfit from the recycling colleagues, and everyone agreed that, yes, it was necessary, though they did not manage to find me normal jeans without that effeminizing flower on the thigh.

Despite the costly disguise, I still was identified by the pair of errand-boys from SMP-615, however, they chose to keep aloft.

(…to enter such a line after the working day, and reach the store before it was closed was unthinkable. That's why the enterprises and organizations were necessitated to develop an interlayer of ‘errand-boys’ among their employees. The co-workers covered their absence doing the job "for the guy not there"…)

With its progress, the line ofttimes was shaken by grave rumors that vodka at the store was running out. And indeed, the movement stalled. But soon a truck arrived at the store back and volunteers full of unconcealed enthusiasm dragged inside the wire boxes of 25 bottles each…

I returned to the recycle factory with vodka, at half-past four. 2 loaders, in turn, had been pressing the bales to fulfill my daily norm. Because of inexperience, they produced the bales with underweight. Valya, the bale weigher, expressed her dissatisfaction with loud yells from inside her booth, while half-deaf Misha kept cheerful silence and sprightly dragged the lightweight bales away. His barrow rolled to the Hut outdoors with noticeable acceleration – moving a-pace with the rest of our boundless Homeland of Great October, loader Misha was entering the crucial phase in the reconstruction, aka Perestroika…

~ ~ ~

And with all the deficit of terry towels, the running-water pipe over the tin trough in the washing room, where everyone washed the layered dust off their hands before the meal, there hung no less than a dozen of such towels, angled from among the rags. However, my personal towel was brought from 13 Decemberists, and I kept it in the locker room, hung separately on the heating pipe in the corner by the right window. I was afraid that if left in the washing room, it would be used by inattentive folks like any other piece of garbage hanging there.

How come I had such a deficit? At some of my visits to the village, Raissa Alexandrovna, appreciating my labor achievements about their khutta, paid in kind, presenting me a towel and a brand new briefcase. It was a very nice towel, white and fluffy, not for the whole body though, just for the face and hands, judging by its size. And it had a blue squirrel sitting in it in profile with a bushy tail, also very pretty.

Yet one day, coming back from the midday voyage to the remote canteen at the "Motordetail" plant, I noticed that someone's dirty paws had horsed around the tender squirrel in the corner.

Naturally, I kicked up some dust – what the f-f..er..frivolities with my personal belongings?!. My towel was not picked up from the rags in the dirty garbage, I brought it from home! Everyone pointed at Ahmed.

Once again, in detail, I explained, specifically to him, where the towel had been brought from and I urged him to understand and never ever again, under no circumstantial conditions, use it. There were flocks of that crap hanging in the washing room, were those towels not enough for him? He apologized and said he did nah a-know…

So I had to take the towel back to 13 Decemberists and wash it on Monday. On Wednesday, freshly washed and ironed, the blue squirrel was hanging as the pennant of champions for cleanly way of life in the corner of the locker room.

At a half-hour break, I was playing "goat" with the loaders, when the locker room door slammed after belated Ahmed. Murmuring some Tajik folklore tune, he bypassed the table covered with the sketchy line of bones.

Vanya jabbed me into the side and pointed with his chin into the corner, meaning "look at the prankster!" Ahmed meticulously, like the surgeon before operating on Lucy Mancini, was wiping his wet paws on the bushy tail of my squirrel. But, by the sidelong glance from under the squint of his olive eyelids, I figured it out that he knew it as well as I did that he was no fucking doctor.

"Ahmed," said I, and general attentive silence suspended all the motion in the locker room. "As I see, you fell for the creature, eh? I present it to you together with the towel."

"Oy, I forgotta!"

"Presents are not to be discussed. Take it, it's yours."

And I slammed 2 doubles at both ends of the bones line on the tabletop.

(…he did pay back to me in full for that German poet with his letter-like seagulls, after all, or, maybe, he did not condone me "Ahmed"…)

~ ~ ~

A couple of presses were located outside the pressing section. When I got the task of pressing waste paper by one of them, it was like going out of the dungeon because the press was installed next to a big freshly installed window. And under the window, there were the baggage scales as well, on which Misha the loader checked the weight of the waste paper bales and said it to me. Then he