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

Americans rule out the plausibility of such an incident not because of the lack of perspicacity inherent in the mixed up nation taking root in simpletons unable to survive among the population of their origin but because of the different grammar. Since in the Russian language “mother” and “death” are of the same grammatical gender, for a Russian mujik, consciously or unconsciously, there feels some similarity in the 2. Well, how to plausibly bring over the meaning of “Death-Mommy” to Americans if all they've got is just “Mr. Death”? Not anything fits into one's mind until they got it under their skin… As a tangent effect, they shove an anti-tank mine under their belt and with the cry, “Try to bear me back, Mom!” throw themselves under the trucks of advancing tank… Then go and rack your brains over the mystery of the Russian soul. To crack the riddle check the language rules…

Unruly Gagarin was not expelled from the Cosmonauts’ Group – he already belonged to the entire Planet. He continued to attend the classes, flew jets in training flights. Did he realize that the countdown for his extermination had been already set a-ticking? I think, yes, he did. Cosmonauts were selected not only for physical but mental fitness as well. He did not only know when and where…

On March 27, 1968, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a plane crash near the village of Novosyolovo, Kirzhach District, Vladimir Region.

On that the foggy morning, the MIG jet was coming in from the training flight, before the airfield there remained a couple of minutes of flight at the altitude of 500 meters, when from the low clouds the SU jet dropped down, though by the flights plan for that morning she was supposed taking flight at the altitude of 14 kilometers in a completely different compass.

Operated by the experienced test pilot, the huge, in comparison to the training aircraft, SU jet flashed by, too close to the MIG preparing for landing. The MIG, captured by turbulence, twirled like a sliver in the breaker, entered a tailspin and collapsed into the forest. The sound of the explosion reached the airfield.

Let them endowed with ears hear. Fadeyev – Khrushchev, Gagarin – Brezhnev.

Let them capable of reckoning get it…

But again I forked off and the story of my life got entered by strangers I never have met and only recently started to see that they are also a part of me.

So much for bemoaning the belated wisdom, let's get back to the twentieth century, year sixty-eight, when I am in my fourteenth year and…)

…and how not to resent them those Czechs who succumbed to the CIA subversive propaganda and started a counterrevolution in the fraternal camp of the socialist countries! And they so inhumanely lined baby carriages to block the way before our tank bucketing along. Of course, the driver turned abruptly, in case there were babies inside, the tank fell off the bridge and our soldier died. So the Central TV news program “Time”.

Then, of course, the Czech Communist Party restored the order in their country with the assistance of military contingents from the fraternal states, and we again began to live on, the camp of socialism properly united…

By the by, the Konotop of that period outstripped many of the larger cities in the field of television because by us the TV boxes had two working channels. The first was the Central Television broadcasting the news program “Time”, and the main New Year entertainment program “The Little Blue Light”, and the contest of teams at the Club of Jolly and Resourceful, aka CJR, and the live hockey matches. The other channel was the Konotop TV studio which broadcast only in the evening when people were back home from work, yet it demonstrated movies much oftener than on Central Television.

The TV-sets in those years were all black-and-white and color ones you could only see in color films from the Western Europe, for that reason Father installed a sheet of transparent isinglass over the TV screen. The sheets of that kind had certain color tints in some of its areas – the upper part blue for the sky, the lower one green for the grass. They even said that thru that isinglass the announcers’ faces looked of more natural color than without it. I could not discern any of the mentioned subtleties though never considered myself colorblind. Such mica sheets became a fashion throughout Konotop, and Uncle Tolik brought one for our TV from the Repair Base, aka the RepBase, where he worked on a milling machine tool. The RepBase specialized in renovating choppers so there they certainly had a better notion in the advanced matters like isinglass and stuff…

For switching TV channels you turned clockwise or counter it the biggest knob under the screen, it clicked and moved to the next of the fourteen positions. However, in the afternoon both the Central Television and Konotop TV Studio showed the same mute tuning circle, while to switching the knob outside those two channels the tube responded by an unbearable sizzling noise and jumping streaks of white against coarse-grained “snow” background.

And (returning to the available two channels) every day at 3 pm., the technicians at Konotop TV Studio switched on some music for about 30 minutes or so: “The Nocturne” by Tariverdiyev, the hits of Valery Obodzinsky or Larissa Mondrus served a soundtrack for the irreplaceable fine-tuning circle. We—Sasha, Natasha, and I—always switched the TV on at that time to have some music in the khutta though the tape-recorded numbers changed rarely if ever at all, and we knew beforehand which record would follow this or that particular song…

Besides, Konotop then was flooded with a wealth of indie radio stations that went on air in the MW range. There was both “The King of the Cemetery” and “Caravel”, and whichever name an independent guy would choose to call his underground station. They all had a common weak point though, which was their irregularity. You had no idea