Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The first snow fell and melted, the slush got fixed by the frost. The snow had fallen again and the winter started.
On one of the dating evenings when I unbuttoned her coat to make my way to the beloved breasts, she recoiled and said she could not allow everything to a man who, in fact, was no one to her.
Was it me that she considered no one?! After all that had been between us?!.
(…sorting out the toppled relations, like, who’s righter, who’s wronger, is just a farewell cannonball fired with the stern cannon after the ship sailing away…)
We broke up. Fare thee well, sweetest Natalie…
"Ah, tender rosebuds killed by the cruel frost…"
~ ~ ~
End February, a year after I told Mother that I agreed to be operated on, I had to lie under the knife. A manly man should keep his word, ain't it?
Starting in the evening and all night long, my stomach ached sharply and the ambulance, called in the morning, diagnosed the appendix that had to be removed before too late. I walked to the vehicle myself but there I had to lie down in the canvas stretcher placed on the floor. Mother also wanted to go, but along Nezhyn Street, there was walking an acquaintance of hers, who was late for her work, and Mother forwent her place to the woman who she always praised as a very good legal consultant deserving all the possible respect.
In the City Hospital, despite the urgency of my diagnosis, they were too lazy to carry me on the stretcher, and I had to walk up to the second floor myself. There I changed into the blue hospital gown over a white shirt with no buttons and walked to the operation room.
They helped me to lie onto the long tall table and fixed all my extremities to it by wide sturdy belts. A white sheet was thrown over a tall frame above my face so that I could not see what they were doing to my tied up parts. A nurse, whom I also could not see, stood behind my head and asked all sorts of diverting questions. The interview was obviously intended to substitute the general anesthesia because they only syringed some local anesthetic in my stomach.
The injection took effect, I followed how they were splitting me down there and getting into my abdomen but it felt somehow in a distanced way as if they were doing it to my pants, although at the moment I had nothing on but the hospital shirt on me. A couple of times it really hurt though, so that I even groaned but the invisible nurse behind my pate began to pour a fiddle-faddle of what a gutsy patient I was, she never saw so brave, so I shut up to let them finish their business without any distracting noise. However, to a cot in the long corridor, I was taken on a gurney, after all.
Two days later they brought me a note from Vladya. He wrote that he was down in the reception hall but they did not let him pass thru, and our class would come to see me when I was allowed to get up, and I should recover as soon as possible because Chuba grew violently untamed and kept jumping at Vladya like a Mazandaran tiger.
After the surgery, they warned me to hold back coughing and avoid any straining so that the stitches keep the cut. But could you really avoid it when having such friends?
"Chuba Maza.." And, crushing the paper slip in my fist, I pushed my face into the pillow to keep back the rolling up round of laughter.
"Mandara.. tiger.”
Hha! Haha!
"Ouch! It hurts!"
And even after I managed, with a lot of preservative stops, to read up the note, there was no way to ward off the jerky lines popping time and again up in my mind.
"Tiger Chuba Mazanda…”
Haha! Haha!
And tears seeped thru my eyelids squeezed so tightly. Vladya! You're worse than a tiger, O, son of a bitch!.
Ten days later I was discharged, and in one more week came to the hospital to have the stitches thread pulled from my stomach, and collect the reference releasing me from PE classes for one month…
By the by, Vladya's scrawl was more cryptic than a team of famous detectives could possibly decipher with all their methods of elementary deduction.
Half of the written essays he handed in were not even read by the Literature teacher who returned them unchecked but fiercely gashed, crisscross, in red ink. On some occasions, he even failed himself to make out heads or tails in his own graffiti and turned to me for assistance.
I was the expert arbitrator in his cryptographic disputes with Zoya Ilyinichna, "No, there is nothing wrong with the spelling, he always writes "e" that way, and this one stands for "a" by him."
"What "e"? What "a"? They're just ticks!"
"Yes, for sure, but that tick's tail is, like, a bit longer. See?"
I had a rough talk with Father when he said I should have my hair cut, for it already was as long as it’s damn hard to find a name for. And because of my looks, he was summoned to the Zampolit at the RepBase.
The enterprise repaired not just helicopters, but military machines and instead of Directors or Managers they had high-rank officers and Zampolit’s post was that of Deputy Commander at the RepBase. Now, that Commander simply ordered Father to stop his son from being a frightful sight in the city.
True, I did have a yan for sporting long hair like that by The Beatles. And even though the length of theirs was beyond my reach, my hair had already grown enough to touch the top of the shoulder blades when I threw my head back as far as I could to marvel my profile reflected by the mirror in the wardrobe door. At a recent CJR match, I performed the Dean Reed's hit "Jerico" hopping on the stage with a muted mike and whipping my face with my hair.
One good whipping deserved another. How would the RepBase Zampolit know that I was a son of their worker? As if few other Beatles fans were hanging out around the city. I had been told on, and no doubt about it.
However, I couldn't have words with Father for too long because I was sitting on his neck, and Zampolit threatened him with firing if I kept my hair any more…
A vigorous infection swept over our school in spring. The acutest cases of grave epidemic forms were registered in our grade which definitely turned its main locale and spiller…
Vladya and I were seated on stools at the last desk. Quite ordinary stools whose black-painted seats had oblong holes in their center to insert your hand for conveniently moving it to some different place if needed. Their commonness became a challenge… When we wiped off our foreheads the sweat from selfless toil, the black seats of our stools bore deep white scars crying out, ‘THE BEATLES! THE ROLLING STONES!”, and we looked around – what else could supply us a sufficient pastime?
Some unlimited naivety indeed – what could be out there to busy yourself with in a graduating class? Actually, nothing… Still and all, we gave the boredom a slip – we started writing poetry.
It was a prolific poetic eruption turned out in various forms and genres. At the break, we presented our creations to the classmates. We laughed and they were laughing too, unaware that the virus of poeticizing had already started the invisible undoing of their immune systems. Many of them began trying their hand at the production of rhymed lines. Even Chuba turned out some trifle of an epigram. But the indisputable crest-riders in that wave were sitting, sure enough, on the maimed stools at the last desk… Fortunately, the epidemic eventually died down without fatalities.
(…if those scattered pieces of ruled paper torn off from various notebooks were put together, it could become a collection of aspirant poets. And, stashed away in bookstores stacks, it would accumulate the dust there submerged into its drowsy dreams of eager readers' hands and rising to the fame…
It is highly improbable that any of my classmates would recollect that overweening epidemic. None of them would recognize even their own lines, betcha. But, after all, who cares? The final goal is nothing. The main buzz is in doing. Although, I'm still not ashamed of the lengthy elegy crafted at a lesson in Organic Chemistry:
“The day will come for me to join the robbers
To earn my honest daily bread
I'll sleep all day and chew on dried grasshoppers
At night, stray walkers will I intercept…”
Then, of course, I would get killed because elegy is a traditionally sad genre and, lying in the tall grass by the highway:
“I won't grasp it with my head
by nearing Death already chilled
If so urgent was indeed
For you to have me killed?
Of wood was made my pistol, it wouldn't harm a lamb,
With gentle "Hello!" I fleeced the clients
Yet left them kopecks for a tram,
“Take ‘t easy, folks! So’s my job.”
Then soft "Adieu!" and – parting bob…”
A lot of water has flowed in the river of Varanda since then and, quoting the classic poet, handled Monkey, who worshiped banks of the Neva river:
" Some aren't there anymore, and I am far away…”
Okay. That's enough for flashing up my speckles of erudition… It's time to confess that I wasn't a stranger to swindling too. There are things you'd prefer not to remember before starting to recount them…
However, showing oneself off entirely good and irreproachable is foolish and dishonest. It's not a righteous thing, I mean. Anyway, I am not a good guy, I’m way too unsteady for that…)
So, as it was said already, that year we lost the CJR final to the prestigious School 11. In the Contest of Greetings, we schlepped on stage a dummy ship of cardboard, exactly the same as two months before us they dragged out at the Central Television CJR. And they also joked our jokes there, two months before. Both the ship and jokes were still fresh in the memory of the jury members and we were accused of blatant plagiarism in the end.
The team of School 11 came out in top hats made of blackened Whatman paper and finishing their Greeting they presented the hats to our team. I did not get my share, because their Captain left his one on the jury desk to bribe them into the right choice when taking the right decision.
After the defeat, going home without shields yet in top hats, our team members were doffing the paper head-gears at the Settlement crossroads to bye-bye each other and I felt hurt that only I didn't have the thing.
By the moment when the streetcar stop at School 13 was reached, there remained just 2 of all the team – Valya Pisanko and me. And then I insidiously asked Valya for her top hat, like, just to try it on. She credulously gave it and, clapping the paper thing onto my head, I ran away along Nezhyn Street.
I knew she wouldn't follow, she lived in Podlipnoye and had to turn in the opposite direction. Indeed, she didn't chase and only screamed behind, "Sehrguey! Give it back! It's not fair!" I knew it was not fair, but I did not return and did not give it back. Why should I?
The next morning in the lean-to which served my summer bedroom already, I was nauseated by the sight of that piece of Whatman paper blackened with gouache, some disgusting loot.
(…so, I'm assembled of divers parts and meanness enters in the aggregation…)
~ ~ ~
And so the decade was over. But it was not for me to decide whether that term was long or short, because 10 years later I became a different I from that I who 10 years before was handed to the educational system for them to format me into one more usable member in the current society. It’s only fair to admit that the goals set before my didactic cultivators were, in general, achieved. I grew up from a snotty Octoberist to the Head of School Komsomol Committee. I realized that, with the universal gravitation in place, spitting into the sky was meaningless.
Even though I did not have enough of Komsomol zeal to sing "The Internationale" at All-School Komsomol Meetings along with the backup gramophone record by the Bolshoi Academic Choir, I still had no doubt that the USSR was the bulwark of peace throughout the world. (When in doubt, it’s enough to recollect those small-sized red flags with the yellow prints of a dove which Soviet people used to wave at celebration demonstrations.)
Generally, we were the best in everything, and the only area in which we lagged was music. In any song by The Beatles, there were more interesting chord sequences than in the entire Soviet song production. The reason for such a dishonorable state of affairs was that all songs by us started from A-minor… If only The Beatles would not mess around with the politics. By what right did John Lennon announced that the Soviet Union was a fascist regime? It was our country who lost 20 million people killed in the war against fascism, so why couldn't The Beatles mind just music?
However, Furtseva, Minister of Culture of the USSR, was really a nasty bitch not letting them have a tour of the Union. She personally did not miss enjoying their performance behind the closed doors and then announced, "Sorry, guys, but our listener will not understand your music." Yeah, some accomplished bitch of a Minister, because they were getting ready and had already written their hit "Back to the USSR".
As for the school curriculum, I did not comprehend chemistry at all, as well as algebra with trigonometry, and several other subjects for which I did not have time enough. Yet, I was trained to distinguish landlord Famusov from its creator, poet Griboyedov. Wasn't that a sufficient base of knowledge for entering the broad road to bright brave life?
Anyway, it was too late to supplement. The time was up. The final exams were close at hand and then Graduation Party traditionally followed by the night of collective roaming of graduates who were not classmates anymore but still had to meet the dawn of their new life together.
However, all of that was just a background to the more important matter. We were preparing for the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee. Competition in the nomination The Best Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble, aka VIA. You want a VIA? You'll get it!
All the previous winter, long before and even never suspecting they would announce the competition of VIA's, we were busy producing electric guitars as advised by instructions and blueprints in The Radio and The Young Technician magazines. For a start, we experimented in mounting piezo elements on a common acoustic guitar. As a result, the sound got amplified the way it would with a mike shoved in thru the soundhole, yet it sounded nothing like an electric guitar. Besides, the guitars for 7 rubles and 50 kopecks did not look like those in black and white pictures of different rock-groups with their hair reaching below the shoulders.
Wanna have a guitar with stylish horns? Cut its body out of three-centimeter-thick plywood. Be ready for a long hassle with the neck. The guitars which we manufactured after the drawings in the magazines for advanced technicians could not keep to key.
What is "keeping to key"? Well, if you pluck a string at the twelfth fret and then pluck the same string released, you get the same note, only over one octave. And with the necks we produced, there sounded different notes, the guitars did not keep to key; that's what it meant.
The upshot was we had to fall back on using the necks of common guitars which kept to key alright. Yet, the headstock of a common guitar with its slots for strings looked ridiculous on an electric guitar, like a saddle atop a cow. To replace the headstock in the neck, you have to saw it out and substitute with a homemade one having no slots and with all six or four tuning pegs in one row.
Father soldered the electrical rigging of guitars following the schemes printed in the magazines. Besides, he brought from the RepBase shielded cable enclosed by braided metal strands for the connection of a guitar to the amplifier. Without such a cable, electric guitars issued a godawful wail miles away from any music.
All the testing was carried out in our khutta, with the product in progress connected to the ancient radio receiver because Father said if it worked on that junk then with a normal amplifier would make it sound topnotch.
The pickups became a major headache. A pickup is a tiny box installed under the strings with an individual coil for each of them. One coil comprised six hundred spirals of hair-breadth copper wire wound by hand, now it remains only to multiply them by the number of strings to equip the guitar with a pickup…
Eventually, everything got assembled. The radio receiver shakes its case bursting from steely thundering cords and popular guitar riffs, drowning Mother's yells of protestation from the kitchen. Wow! We're delighted. The bomb! Father looks pleased too…
Now you can take everything apart, level the plywood of guitar body with sandpaper, putty it and tenaciously polish again, this time with finer sandpaper before spraying the body with paint (you’ll choose red, betcha), then re-assemble your shiny new electric guitar. Enjoy!.
Thus we got all the right, as well as equipment, to apply for participation in the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee who kept pace with the contemporary life demands. All in all, there were exactly 2 competitors vying for the laurels of the Konotop’s best:
1) VIA "The Kristall" by the House of Culture named after Lunacharsky (aka Loony);
2) VIA "The Orpheuses" by the Club of the Konotop Engine and Car Repairing Plant (aka the KahPehVehRrZeh Club).
The Loony guys were in the business for years. They had an electric organ played by Sasha Basha, who had graduated from the Music School in the piano class. He was not only the leader of The Kristall but also the Captain of the CJR team from the prestigious School 11 who beat us that year.
Besides participation in the concerts at Loony, they were also "playing trash", that is providing live music at weddings, birthdays and all sorts of parties with their 1 organ, 2 guitars, and the drum set. On the opposite side, there were 4 of us. We didn't know a damn thing about the music theory (except for Chuba who had attended the Music School for 4 years in the class of button-accordion) , but we were backed by Club, the unalienable part of the Settlement.
While our khutta served the base for technical empowering of The Orpheuses, Club provided means for our musical education. (Once again leaving aside Chuba and his button-accordion which let him easily master the bass guitar parts, because they, generally, coincide with those played by the musician with his left hand in the bass section of the accordion.)
That’s why, the concert of Classical Guitar in Club, advertised by a modest poster about the classical guitar performer Zverev from the Kiev Philharmonic, was attended by only two Orpheuses – Vladya and me because Skully did not feel like attending as long as he was the drummer at our VIA, not a guitar-player…
The lobby of Club was unusually crowded, and so was the landing at the auditorium entrance, young guys for the most part. Who would have thought that the Settlement youth were so much fond of the guitar classics, eh?
So, we stood up there in the crowd when from below, along the wide steps of the stair as well as from among the dudes around us, there rose the rustle of the low-voiced announcement to each other, like a gust of wind rushing in front of the thunderstorm: "Wafflisters! Wafflisters are coming!"
From the first floor, 2 girls were ascending the wide stairs. On their reaching the stairhead, the stares of all present were riveted to them in tense deafening silence. I was struck with the purity of the milk-white skin in the girls’ faces. Encapsulated with the wall of goggling silence, they turned right, to the mirrored gym of the Ballet Studio where that evening the seminarians from GPTU-4 had their party…
And we, Vladya and I, split from the crowd on the landing and turned to the left, to join a handful of those who attended the concert of the Guitarist Laureate in his classic three-piece black suit and thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses.
A couple of front rows were more than enough to accommodate the listeners who were seated giving a wide berth to each other. He sat above us in a chair at the edge of the feebly illuminated stage, announced the music pieces and then played them on his acoustic guitar. But that was more than what we considered guitar playing! Something unimaginable! Unattainable…
After the concert, Vladya and I knocked on the door of the room in the first floor, where he was folding his black suit to pack it into the hard black case of his guitar. We introduced ourselves as guys willing to learn the guitar playing. What’s to be done? How to begin?
And he gave us a free consultation. He took out his instrument from under the suit in his case and showed some tricky picks. Then he packed everything back and went to the Station to go elsewhere thru the dark of night. Yet, before leaving the room, he advised us to get some Polish music magazines where they were printing a lot of music with tablature above the lyrics. However, at the newsstands of Konotop, they never heard of such magazines…
After applying for the VIA contest, we came to the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich. We made it clear that for holding aloft the honor of Club at the City Contest we wanted a mere trifle, really, those couple of black speakers from the portable movie projector, together with their amplifier, because we had no place for rehearsals, nor a single item of the drum set.
Flaring his already flushed face under the crisp curls of a natural merchant, Pavel Mitrofanovich blared out that for the guys from the Settlement, Club would do all and everything and then everything and all over again. That is the meaning of slotting negotiations in the appropriate moment of a person's daily schedule.
Director ordered Club House Manager, Stepan, to pass us the room of the Variety Ensemble until after the contest. The Ensemble musicians led by their Head, Aksyonov, moved their instruments from the room, including the double bass and saxophone, to an unknown destination. For an indefinite interval, Aksyonov stopped appearing in Club at all. In the room, there remained only a giant desk, a piano and "the kitchen"—a drum set made up of a kicker, a snare, a hat, and two tom-toms under a wide crash. The clickety-clak, taps, dubs, bangs, clangs of the kitchen filled the room and the outside corridor for hours because Skully was practicing to give out the rock beat with all of his hands and feet.
The technique of beating the beat was shown to him by Anatoly Melai, a Settlement dude recently demobilized from the army who, before he was drafted, played the horn at the Variety Ensemble. Besides, he showed us the chords to "The Yellow River" by the rock group Christie. That song topped most of the European music charts then. We knew about the fact from the station "The Radio-Sweden" who were broadcasting in Russian one hour a week, on Sundays, and the ours did not block it with the usual static noise because they talked exclusively about rock music omitting any anti-Soviet propaganda.
Anatoly even knew the Russian adaptation of the lyrics in "The Yellow River":
"We roamed at the Yellow River
The flowers blossomed all 'round us
By the river of my dream –
Alloverida!"
And then there followed the chorus which oddly enough avoided rendering into Russian:
"Alloverida! Alloverida!
Yuza mom-ma! Yuza mom-ma!"
We started to rehearse it as the number for the contest. At some point, it dawned on me that if the song was called "The Yellow River" then the chorus also should sound "Yellow River!" but not like that fuzzy "Alloverida". So, it was not in vain that Alla Iosifovna at her English classes was driving it home to me that "London is the capital of Great Britain". Anatoly peevishly wrinkled his nose but had no trumps to ward off my stock of knowledge. To reward my linguistic feat, Chuba let me sing the backup in the chorus:
"Yellow River! Yellow River!
is in my mind and in my eyes."
That immensely inspired me, because in our VIA I had the very necessary but so inconspicuous role of the rhythm guitarist.
For the second number, we chose "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones. We knew the chords to the song and even its true title, but we did not know the lyrics and just were using dummy "doo-wop" like some seasoned scat singers:
"Doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
Doo-wop doo-wop pá-ba-baá
Yet, knowing the name, you could guess what the song was about and if you know the lines meter then – full ahead!
"Black clouds towered in the sky over the city
The drops of falling rain are black as coal tar
No stars reflected in the puddles: nor big, nor bitty
Black fog has stolen them and hidden way too far…"
(… in the film "The Devil's Advocate" with Al Pacino as Prince of Dark this song sounds at the concluding credits, the original, of course. But at that time it was too early for Hollywood to shoot that movie. And, by the by, performing "The Yellow River" in Russian, our garage VIA had outstripped The Jolly Guys of Alexander Booynov who released it a couple of years later, substituting Karlsson-on-the-Roof for the original river:
"Now we hear,
Now we hear,
The motor buzz,
The cheerful buzz.
High in the air
Straight from the roof
Our dear friend
Is flying to us…"
Thus a love song was mutated into the RepBase anthem…)
Before the VIA competition, we rehearsed for days on end leaving Club only to have a midday meal at the pavilion "Meeting" by the Station square where we ate dumplings, flushed them down with gulps of beer from a bottle of Zhigulyovsky shared between the 4 of us and considered ourselves cool dudes who could play rock.
Precisely one day before the contest, our rivals—VIA "The Kristall" from Loony—dealt us a preemptive blow. They came to our school to play the trash at the graduation party of our class. Earlier, we offered the school management our music services for the pram dance free of charge, however, the proposal was turned down and they hired The Kristall instead. In our native school, we did not pass for musicians! Like prophets never heeded in their native lands, indeed…
Of course, The Kristall had a well-established reputation. Sasha Basha, educated at the piano class of Music School, played his organ very competently – both "seven-forty", and waltz, and rock'n'roll, but it, still, hurt.
The revenge took place at the contest because we had hidden reserves. Firstly, Pavel Mitrofanovich let us grab for the occasion the 50-watt amp. And secondly, we carried the day even before making any music, our looks when appearing on the stage showed at once who were predestined winners.
Okay, suppose you've got an electric organ and music education plus a team of musicians trained at "playing trash", but who would care a damn about all that crap the moment when:
"…And now in this cozy Central Park Summer Cinema, we invite on stage the vocal-instrumental ensemble… The Orpheuses!!."
At which moment, there came out four dudes with three (!) horned (!!) guitars!!!
And, on top of everything else, each of them, all the 4 rigged…
…IN WHITE PANTS!!!..
Oh, my! There is no way to bring over the meaning of white pants in Konotop of 1971, kinda divine trappings and you can’t put it any clearer because our triumph came to pass before the world-wide rise of the denim civilization.
Where had so snazzy outfit come from? In Department Store opposite Main Post, they were selling the so-called "canvas for household needs", 1 ruble 20 kopecks a meter. After the very first wash, the fabric turned into gray saggy burlap, however, we appeared on stage in pants in their pristinely virgin, unwashed, state.
Mother made them—all the four—with her sewing machine, two days before the performance. The ongoing pants fashion of the day rejected the wide waist belt in favor of no belt at all, the stylish dude's pants then started at the middle of the hips. One meter and ten centimeters of "canvas" were more than enough for a pair of trousers.
The only bad news was that I screwed up my part in the "Yellow River" vocals.
During the rehearsals, Chuba kept frowning at my third in the chorus backup, and in the knock-up chant before going on stage in the Central Park's Summer Cinema he just grabbed his head in despair. So at the moment when we had to yell together into a single microphone, "Yellow River! Yellow River!" I only opened my mouth without producing any sound at all. It was the same trick as singing "The Internationale" at the All-School Komsomol meetings or in the make-believe performing of "Jericho" at a CJR game.
Chuba made round eyes on the other side of the mike because I left him without the third, to no avail though. The Orpheuses convincingly carried the day but on my vocal career, there was put the final cross. Still and all, we did it!.
~ ~ ~
You strain yourself, you pine away in exhausting efforts to reach your goal and after you've done it triumphantly all there remains for you is just living on… Probably, that’s the hardest part.
"Where to sail?" poetically described such situation Pushkin, and Chernishevsky paraphrased the question in the artless prose, "What’s to be done?"
"That is all,
Say "bye!" to dreams
Live your life
the way it seems
Right to you.
Find your answers,
Find your ways,
Find your path to happiness.
Do it, do!"
(music by V. Sakoon, lyrics by S. Ogoltsoff)
I ventured to look for happiness at the Kiev State University named after T. Shevchenko, taking my school certificate to the Department of English Language there. Unlimited arrogance it was, considering the extent of my knowledge which encompassed a couple of grammar tables memorized from the English textbook for the 8th grade. However, audacity calls for reward and all the ride from Konotop to Kiev (4 hours by a local train) I spent on a seat next to Irina Kondratenko, the most good-looking girl among my ex-classmates. The gorgeous black eyes and long black hair made her so beautiful that I would never dare approach the girl, what’s the use to be unreasonable? And suddenly—lo!—4 hours of riding side by side filled with an eager conversation.
Irina also was going to Kiev to become a student somewhere while living at some relatives of hers and, being already acquainted with the city, she advised me by which streetcar to go from the station square to the University… The ceilings at the University were unusually high to drive it home to the folks it was the right place for getting higher education. At the dean's office, I swapped my certificate of secondary education and the reference about my excellent state of health for the address of a student hostel in about one hour's ride by a trolleybus.
