The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
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Two soldiers from the previous drafts were poking thru the civilian clothes dropped on the grass in front of the bathhouse, checking whether there were any citizenka items suitable for AWOL's…
We were led to the detachment Club fitted out with a stage bare of any curtains, and rows of plywood seats lined across the hall over its tilted floor of not paint-coated timber. Our army service started there by dragging the audience seats out of the Club, washing the wide floorboards, bringing and installing 2-tier iron bunk beds for the Fourth Company personnel to sleep upon, since we, the recruits, were to be kept in their barrack.
With the first non-combat mission accomplished, they collected us by the entrance to the Fourth Company barrack and split into three platoons, each under the command of a separate Sergeant. The Sergeants compiled lists of their commandos, checked them with the general list by the lieutenant and started training the newbies. In all the three platoons were drilled the same commands.
"Platoooon! Fall in!"
"Platoooon! Fall out!"
"Platoooon! Fall in!"
"Platoooon! Fall out!"
"Platoooon! Fall in!"
"Platoooon! Fall out!"
We executed the commands keeping our hunger in check by the wishful thinking because a small group of recruits had been already sent to the Canteen for laying tables with the midday meal. And finally, "Fall in for the meal!"
"Slow.. march!"
In contrast to the Club, where you had to climb three stairs in the porch way to the door, in the Canteen, on entering the door, you went three steps down into the spacious hall filled with two quads of tables split by the central aisle.
On both sides of each table stood a bench of solid painted-brown timber allowing for ten men to sit in a row. The dark gray floor of smoothly polished concrete endowed the hall with a bouncing hum, like in the waiting rooms of passenger stations at their busy hours.
Along the whole left wall, two steps ran beneath the three consecutive windows to the rooms outside the hall. The wide uninterrupted shelf-ledge of white-painted tin stretched under all the three windows. The first (and also the smallest) of the windows was the seat of Bread-Cutter already closed from within with its tin-clad shutter. The next one—wide and having no shutters—presented the view of the kitchen with the steam rising off the wide cylinders of nickel-plated cooking boilers, and a pair of soldier-cooks midst them, in khaki trousers, slippers on bare feet, and tank tops under their half-unbuttoned white jackets in yellowish grease smudges. One of the cooks had a white-cloth beret on his head. The last, also wide and shutterless, window connected to the Dishwashers' room filled with steam and noise of hot water bursting from several taps at once in the long tin trough full of heaps of used enamel cups and bowls, and aluminum spoons.
The far blind wall opposite the entrance, in a pragmatic dark-swamp-slime paint-coat, separated the Canteen from the Club. In the right wall high up above the floor, the row of wooden frames kept the panes of hingeless windows…
The white enamel bowls, arranged in 2 long rows along the table edges, marked the seating places on the benches put close by. 20 aluminum spoons, studded with water drops, were piled in the center of the table for each eater to grab one. Next to the spoons, lay a heavy dipper accompanied by 20 enamel cups spruced up with combat scars from the pell-mell pileups in the Dishwashers' trough. Two and a half, multiply cross-sliced, loaves of "brick"-shaped brown bread on the crumpled aluminum tray provided also exactly 20 chunks…
The cooks began throwing five-liter enameled pots on the ledger-shelf of the dispenser window, issuing shrill indistinct yells. The first meal in the army began.
The borshch was red and scorching hot. It was brought in a pot from the dispenser window and ladled into the bowls with the dipper. Since thru all of the dinner each serviceman was to use just one and the same bowl, the borshch should be eaten to get the second course, or you had to refuse the first course at once and wait until the on-duty soldier brings the following pot with barley porridge, more commonly handled kirzookha.
(…take a look at the top in army high boots made of kirza [plagiarized English "kersey"], this artificial leather was invented as a war effort during the Russian-Japaneese war and though it did not prevent the defeat of the Russian Empire in that conflict yet for more than a hundred years it faithfully remained in both combatant and non-combatant service.
Now, if you ignore these deviating asides and carefully consider the fine pattern impressed into the surface layer in the top of high boots at the Russian-Soviet-(yes, here again)Russian armies made of the artificial kirza leather, you start to understand the accuracy of the unofficial term kirzookha traditionally used for the traditional meal of the barley porridge in all of the above-mentioned armies. No wonder, the considered likeness prompted servicemen on the doorsill of their hunger death to cook their boottops as it happened on the small barge that for 49 days became a plaything for storms in the Pacific before it was met by a US aircraft carrier off the coast of California. The Soviet sailors were proposed the political asylum in the United States because the Cold War proclaimed by the British hereditary political star Churchill in the Fulton piece of his orations raged globally at that time.
However,
