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

Lee," said I, "Go back to your class."

You turned with relief and walked to the door of your classroom. I got up from my knee and watched as the door swallowed both you and the newspaper, where between the printed pages there was an enlarged portrait of Eera standing in the summer stream, and the sparse bunch of all the postcards I received, as well as the telegrams, about how you 2 loved me and congratulated on my birthday or the Day of the Soviet Army…

~ ~ ~

I handed Salinger to Zhomnir and, in return, I asked for James Joyce's Ulysses, 705 pages of dense text without pictures, without divisions into parts or chapters. Zhomnir himself once wanted to translate it, but Joyce turned out way too unsuitable for any conjuncture. I gave my word to return the volume in 10 years.

After a split-second hesitation, he brought the book out of his archive chamber and stretched it generously out. Now I had what with to fill the eternity ahead of me.

"Where are you going?" asked Maria Antonovna.

"To Baku."

With the usual jerk, the train pulled out of the Nezhyn railway station… Everything was behind, ahead was everything. 30 and 3 years.

"It's time for you to work miracles," said I to a saxophonist I knew, when he became 33.

"I have already done miracles," he replied, "And did my time for them as well." And how only do them folks manage to live eventful lives?

I thought that I was going to Baku to pick up a job of a bricklayer of the fourth category, and gradually translate Ulysses after work. As it turned out, I was starting to the Mountainous Karabakh with its war for independence and all the issuing details common for such cases, which I'd rather not dwell on. However, behind the windows of the local train car, there still were running familiar landscapes of 1987, the last year of peace. Before the collapse of the indestructible Union of the Free Republics, there still remained 2 years. Today, they tell me that in 1987 the smack of the new era was in the air already. Alas, I did not scent the brew.

(…what was the underlying reason for the collapse of the USSR? The Union was finished off by "The Guys on the Roadside". So was named the English TV movie of 4 sequels about the life of British unemployed.

The censors at the Central Television in Moscow did not get it that at the end of that week an electrician at the "Motordetail" plant would say: "I have been working all my life, and so has my wife. Our son returned from the army and he also works now. We have a two-room apartment, and their unemployed live in two-story cottages! Fuck!" The magic power of art touched the living strings in the heart of a Konotop mujik, triggering the chain reaction that changed the face of the world.

Has it changed its essence, or was it just a case of plastic surgery?..)

Let some other "I", not a part to my personal monad, strain their brains about this question, because I since long dropped following the brandy lies in this world. Moreover, the predawn twilight, seeping thru the synthetic canvass of my Chinese tent, signals the end to this sleepless night and to this endless letter as well.

You will ask, how did my following life flow, behind the watershed of the Caucasian ridge? You may not even ask it, I will tell you all the same. First, do not ask about my life in the past tense, it still keeps flowing on. I rolled its way as best as I could. Because of the spiral nature of the current, we can only go thru multiple repetitions of what has been and will be.

"What has been will be again," says the new translation of the Old Testament, and Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary recorded the same saying in normal, human, language – "radish is no sweeter than a horseradish". But, if I may ask, have all those wisdom pieces helped a single anyone? And when there comes the moment to feel that I don't care a f-f..er..fleck, I let it rip and go with the flow to the ultimate end.

Life is predetermined like a winding mountain road with the drop-off on the right and the cliff-wall on the left, here you go along, repeating step by step the path passed before you, by you who was also "I". Of course, when I recognize a repetition of familiar situations, I try to avoid ugly deeds for which I'll be ashamed painfully. And up till now I, like, have managed to dodge. Or?.

Yes, like, haven't stepped… If only that bitter son of a bitch in my Chinese tent wouldn't unearth something else…

So, here we are – I and the Varanda. It goes to meet the Araks river and I am passing by and on, to the last limit beyond which there's the boundless blue sea and, probably, that, once lost, tiny sailing boat in it…

Something again carries me off to all sorts of epochs and philologies. But this is, after all, a private letter of a father to his daughter, and f-f..er..I mean, fairly didactic too, well… sort of… at certain passages… Seems like it's a high time to wind up already.

…and then the morning of the following day came, and Scheherazade was suffered to live that day also…

And about myself, dear daughter, I may report that the maxim "I know that I know nothing" is not applicable to me, though there were times when I also scattered this particular pearl. Today, however, I have serious doubts about having even so tiny scraps of knowledge. I doubt that I know anything at all, be it even nothing.

"We understand life only by looking back at the past," announced a lover of aphorisms.

Asshole! You will not understand it even when pulled out of the grave and poked into it with your noseless skull!. And no one will ever