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

we started off to Semyanovka under the tarp top over the truck bed, there was dreadful ice on the roads. The truck driver drove very slowly not to slide and follow the suite of those vehicles whose drivers had lost control on the ice, and they loomed now, here and there, with their wheels up in the dense fog wrapping the roadside. And we cautiously puttered on thru eerie stillness and flowing fog waves that muffled the sound of the truck engine. Some panorama of the concluding stage in the Stalingrad Battle for you…

The feed mill was a gray building of three sections, at a half-kilometer off the village, surrounded from all the sides by a chilly silent field of weather-beaten snow.

The boiler room did not work, we had to bore the wall yet, with breakers, to lay pipes thru. Frosty iron sides of numb bunkers and mute conveyor-belts filled the space in the other half-dark section.

For two weeks we went there to knock steel against steel at walloping the walls and rigging the conveyor belts, or to doze over the red-hot electrical spiral in the boiler room with its frost-coated walls.

At one of such soft snoozes, a sharp awl tip pierced my brain. Starting up from pain to the jubilant guffaw from Vasya's happy snout, I noticed a piece of smoldering cotton dropped on the floor, whose bitter smoke had penetrated thru my nostrils to give the unbearable sensation… Overseer and Mykola also laughed, but not as gleefully as Vasya, that stupid dickhead or, to put it limpidly, the fucking 30-year-old miscarriage. No wonder, my Uncle Vadya was never tired to recite his favorite chant, “Heroes are what Homeland needs, yet Cunt keeps turning out morons…”

One day Mykola brought raw potatoes from a solitary clamp in the field and we undertook baking them just to have some pastime. Borya sent me to collect the pieces of crushed boards remaining on the site after they finished construction works. Mykola and Vasya fetched a couple armfuls of some straw to the unfinished weigh-bridge section for kindling the bonfire with the firewood fetched by me.

The gate to the section, with one of its wings removed from the hinges, could not ward off the wind which kept breaking in and swerved the smoke whichever way it fancied. We stood around the fire in the chilly gusts that tore inside from the white field under the gray sky, when Overseer remarked, "In four years I will retire but this here latata would not get ready yet." He threw a "Prima" stub into the fire and went into the section’s corner to blind the walls with a welding electrode set a-crackling.

What a beautiful word "latata", I have never heard anyone calling potatoes that way… Now, Borya started playing with the electric welding, Vasya went over to hold the pipe pieces for him to weld up and by the dismal fire there remained only Mykola and I with our shoulders rolled up, noses wrinkled, eyes at a squint from the smart smoke. Some boring party…

Then, grabbing the piece of chalk which we brought along with us to mark the lengths of pipe when cutting it up, I started drawing on the gate wing leaned against its shut counterpart. I did it bit by bit and tried to do my level best, there was plenty of time before the truck would come to take us home.

Perhaps, that was the most successful drawing in my entire life, almost of natural dimensions, with thorough attention to the details. Nu, of course… Hips, yummy breasts, long hair streaming over the shoulders to fall behind the back, the captivating triangle and tempting call "Come! Fuck me!" in the look of her eyes from under partly dropped eyelids. Wow! Nothing to add to nor remove from.

However, the piece of chalk had not been finished off yet. So, I used it for block letters next to the nude beauty. "BORYA, I AM WAITING FOR YOU!."

Then I went to the fire because the wind had thoroughly chilled the feet of the artist absorbed in his creative efforts. Mykola stood there too and giggled gazing at the seductive creature.

At that moment, Borya Sakoon took his face out the black box of his welder mask and traced Mykola's stare back to the gate wing. No Stanislavsky system would ever reproduce the facial expression acquired by Borya's mug a moment later. "Who?!."

Mykola and I stood by the fire pretending naive ignorance of reasons for the emotional outburst which shattered the Overseer’s soul.

As for Vasya, squatted next to Overseer to hold the workpiece pipe with both hands, his stare was quite impartially dropped down but, at the same time, Vasya’s piggy snout turned into a stubby index finger and pointed at me like the compass needle who knows where North is.

"Bitch!." The innate instinct for self-preservation did its job, and I sprinted to the conveyors' section ahead of the pipe-length tinkling along the cemented floor after me.

Why, of so too many foul words in Borya's lexicon, did he give preference to "bitch!"? To uphold the tradition of thieves-in-law? Good luck he'd never been trained at gorodki game…

I came back ten minutes later. The word "BORYA" was slavishly effaced from the gate wing with Vasya’s work mitt. The rest was left as is. The hand of vandals dared not destroy the masterpiece…

~ ~ ~

We played in the Mirror Hall, aka Ballet Studio Gym. Lekha sat at the Yonika, Skully – behind his "kitchen", Chuba, in a dormant stupor, glued his vacant gaze at nothing in the middle of the dimly lit Hall while picking sluggishly the strings of his bass guitar.

It was a slow-tempo number, the "white dance" for girls to pick their partners. Vladya's girlfriend Raya had invited and led him off into the mass of dancers to have hugs in the slow floating waves of light specks from the mirror splinters in the ball spinning overheads.

In the right corner of the small stage, leaning my behind against