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

In the early sixties, a few other secondary traitors from the book, whose names the writer did not bother to disguise, had served from ten to fifteen years in the NKVD camps and got rehabilitated as well. By that moment, the writer himself had time enough to put a bullet thru his head in May 1956, shortly after his participation in the meeting of Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the USSR, with the survived young guardsmen of Krasnodon.

At the mentioned meeting, Fadeyev grew inadequately nervous and yelled at Khrushchev in front of all the present, calling him names considered especially defamatory at that period, and two days later he committed suicide. Or else, they committed his suicide though, of course, such an expression—"they committed his suicide"—is unacceptable by the language norms.

Hence the moral – even the cleverest structure cannot guarantee from a collapse if your pyramid is not made of at least 16-ton stone blocks…)

Late September, Chairman of our School Pioneer Company fell ill and, in his stead, I was delegated to the City Pioneer Organization Account Meeting of the Chairmen of the Councils of City School Pioneer Companies. The Meeting was held at the Konotop House of Pioneers in a pleasantly secluded location behind the Monument to Fallen Heroes on the rise above Lenin Street.

By the organization regulations, an Account Meeting should elect its Chairman and Secretary. The Meeting Chairman’s job consisted of announcements whose turn it was to account while Secretary would take notes of how much waste paper and scrap metal was collected by the pioneers of the reporting Chairman’s school during the specified period, which cultural events were organized, and what places were taken by their pioneers in the city-wide contests and competitions.

The Senior Pioneer Leader of our school had supplied me with a sheet of paper to be read at the Account Meeting but, in the House of Pioneers, they charged me with the additional responsibility of the appointed Chairman of the Meeting. I was assured that presiding an Account Meeting was as easy as pie. All you had to do was to declare, “And now the floor for the account report is given to Chairman of the Pioneer Company Council from School number such-and-such!” after which the such-and-such Chairman would march to the rostrum on stage with their sheet of report. The paper read up, the accounting Chairman leaves the sheet to Secretary of the Meeting, because what’s the point in sticking all those figures down on the fly if they are written already, right?.

At first, everything went without a hitch. I and Secretary of Account Meeting, a girl in her ceremonial white shirt and the scarlet pioneer necktie, as anyone else around, were sitting next to each other behind the small desk under a dark red cloth on a small stage in a small hall, where Chairmen of the City Pioneer Companies were seated in rows waiting for their turn to read their accounts. Back in the last row, Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee—responsible for the work with the pioneers—sat in her red pioneer necktie.

The Chairmen in a well-oiled manner followed each other, read from their sheets, piled them by Secretary of Account Meeting, and returned to the audience. I also did my part as instructed but after the fourth announcement, something suddenly came over me or rather flooded over me. My mouth got full of overflowing saliva, I barely had time to gulp it before the salivary glands fountained out a new excessive portion to fill me with shame before Secretary of Account Meeting seated near me who had to surely be perplexed by my obvious hurried gulping. A spell of ease came when she went to account for School 10, yet, with her return, the disgraceful torture went on. What’s wrong with me, after all?!.

Then came my turn. Walking back those 4 steps from the rostrum, I swallowed 3 times, which did not help though. Okay, let School 14 finish and…Oh, no! Second Secretary too, with her concluding speech!.

(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn’t realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)

In October, the seventh-graders started their preparation for getting admitted to the ranks of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, aka ALYCL, aka Komsomol. The membership in Komsomol organization was not a cheap giveaway passed out indiscriminately to lined-up squads or companies. Not in the least! You had to prove that you deserved that high honor at the special admittance sitting of the City Komsomol Committee whose Members would ask you questions as in a real examination because on entering this youth organization you became an ally to the Party and a would-be communist.

For a preparatory reading up, the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school, Volodya Gourevitch—a pretty young man with black hair and bluish-skinned cheek-and-jowls because of the thick but always close shaved bristle—distributed among the would-be members the Charter of ALYCL printed in the smallest typeface so as to pack all of its sections into a small accordion-folding leaflet. He also warned that at the Admittance Sitting the City Komsomol Committee Members were especially keen about the Charter Section on the rights and duties of the Komsomol members.

Volodya Gourevitch graduated from the prestigious School 11, between the Station and the Under-Overpass, as well as the class of playing button-accordion at the Konotop Music School. He dwelt in City, rather far from the Settlement, in a compact block of five-story buildings between Peace Square and Square of the Konotop Divisions, which area among the local folks was, for some reason, referred to as Palestine.

On his arrival to school from Palestine, he