Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
"To the Plant Management," said, casually, Vladya and we dragged the sheet in the direction of the Main Check-Entrance next to the backside of the Club building that substituted—for the stretch of its length—the wall around Plant.
The back door, sure thing, was not locked. We dragged the sheet in and leaned it against the bunch of canvas-covered frames opposite the movie list painters' room…
When after work we came to Club to move the plywood to our room, the crisp-curled House Manager, Stepan, was already wheeling round and about our sheet. By so deficit material, anyone could be tempted into improper dreams and plans, even a do-nothing, who in all of his life did not hold in his fatty hands anything heavier than his personal bunch of keys. Which is not about Stepan though, who once was a good carpenter they said, it's about the Director of Club, who stood by and tinkled his keys hallooing Stepan to our trophy. Don't rub the soap to your cheeks, Pavel Mitrofanovich, it's not your shaving day, as ran a winged Settlement byword rather popular at those days…
~ ~ ~
The winter broke out somehow straightaway, the snowdrifts piled high up as if they always were there… Before the dances, I went to pick up Olga. She introduced me to the khutta's elders and betters who turned so glad and full of invitations to take my coat off, get seated and have a drink, but, no, thank you, I still had to work that night and it was time for us to leave. So Olga got dressed and we left.
Yet, it was a bit early for Club because we weren't moving the equipment from the stage and only locked the Mirror Hall after the dances. To pass the spare time, we visited the bench by the oil storage Base. Olga had a bottle of wine in her bag and we drank it, not too much though just to tone up in general as well as to get warm. And then we went to Club treading the crunchy snow crust tightened by the traffic's tires and treds in the passers’-by footwear…
Already at night, moonless and dark, yet with the myriads of bright star-specks pricking the sky everywhere, we came to revise the unfinished bottle of red wine stashed away in the snowdrifts… The wine felt too cold for making you warm, and as tasteless as ice. We scarcely drank half of what was still there and had a smoke.
Then I unbuttoned my coat, she unbuttoned hers and got seated in my lap. We had already used to treat each other as personal property. I might freely run my hand deep into her pantyhose to reach the convex concavity item which I missed on the crazy cuckoo's night. She, in her turn, casually undid my belt and unbuttoned the fly for a comfortable grip at my boner.
Everything went on in the usual groove with long, like a protracted dive into another dimension, kisses blended in. But, all of a sudden, there happened something of which I couldn’t understand what or how but only that it was somewhere else… where I got into… out of myself… and mingling with… the fusion grew firmer with each push… no I remained anymore just we… we… we… and nothing else… unmakeoutable… doesn't matter… and all's swimming… blurred with blindfolding mist… what's that?. What?!. Oh, no!. More!.
The connection was lost. The night slowly emerged back from nowhere… the snowdrifts… the bench… there again… A couple of thrusts after the elusive new world showed there was nothing to sustain, to return, to keep on with.
We broke apart becoming her and me again. Stunned, I stood up.
That same bulb from up its post. Winks of sparks from the snowdrifts around. The black sky in pin-pricks of stars…
When no one would think of thinking…
Where's my hat? Dammit, wherever be it can wait…
November 17… 17-year-old locksmith apprentice… lost his virginity…
And she?
(…I do not know until now.
It does not matter.
Who cares?.)
Saying goodbye to her, so quaintly quiet, by the khutta of her aunt, I realized that now it was my duty to be stronger than she and I did not have to give much thought to anything else, from now and forever and ever.
(…Here! Here! Wow!
I can present ideas in a pretty form, can I?
Subsequently though… Decades after…)
The following evening I came to the Evening School of Working Youth where Olga at times attended classes because Aunt Nina pressed for the paper about her finishing eighth grade.
After the break bell, she went out into the corridor and left with me skipping the rest of the classes. I saw Olga to her aunt's khutta following her heated report about the record-making bleeding she had the previous night.
(…as if it means anything.
What's the point in all the maidenheads, circumcisions, adulteries and faithfulness forever and a day?
“What was – is no more, for good.
What is – flows away thru clenched fingers.
What is to come – can't be avoided…)
It was not possible, of course, for our love affair to melt the ice and snow of the winter all around us, yet all the winter snow and ice could not suppress our flaming ardor. Moreover, we fanned the passion's flame at the least opportunity.
The snow-clad bench by the oil storage Base was soon rejected because of its unwanted backrest… The sheet-iron trailer by the tiny ice rink in the Plant Park was more convenient, but it took an unbearably long stretch of time waiting until the bros would finish their wine, then go thru their atomic reports to each other about what kind and which dosage of alcohol they consumed earlier on that day and which circumstances led to having it in their current composition, concluding the brag session with argumentative punches at each other's mug (without drawing the knife though), before they, at last, dispersed.
Drawing the knife when Kolyan was around, a bro could just as well kiss it goodbye before the inexorably pending confiscation… Kolyan O’ Settlement was a specimen of the increasingly scanty breed of heroes. Not too large an exemplar though, he was only 1 meter and 80, and utterly laconic. On the other hand, he didn't really need to flash eloquence because a fleeting glance at those fists about 20 kilos each was enough to dry up any wish for odd discussions. Even for a dumbo repeatedly surprised with a sandbag on his conk from around the corner, it was immediately clear that Kolyan would make a toast of him in less than 6 secs flat. Among the bros, of course, he could say a thing or 2, only you had to sit on a sufficient stock of patience while waiting till his words were out, after all.
Admittance to the trailer was granted us because he miscalculated me for a champion-bro in a specific line which irrevocable mistake he entertained since my "engagement" with Olga back in summer as we just started going out together.
One evening starting off to the Plant Park, I spruced my little finger up with a ring cajoled out of my sister. A casual tawdry fake it was with a splinter of glass or something. Rather reluctantly, Natasha farmed it out after I swore it was just for that one time.
In the Plant Park, Olga and I climbed up to the projectionist booth in the summer cinema whose key was obtained from the younger projectionist, Grisha Zaychenko. The moment she saw the ring on my little finger, Olga clung tighter than a leaf from the sauna whisker in the steam-room: who gave me that?
Borrowed from Kiddy, said I, my younger sister.
With outright disbelief, Olga demanded the thing for a closer inspection. Hardly had I passed the ring when she clapped it on her finger, some other than the little one though.
Okay, says I, that was enough for showing off and let her give it back for I had promised Natasha to return, it was, like, from her boyfriend.
At that point, Olga took heed and tried to take the ring off but – no go! She twirled, and pulled, and spat at the darn thing to no avail, the ring snapped real tight on. The date turned into a dungeon torture session until she somehow managed to force it over her finger joint.
When, at last, I shoved the cursed ring into my hip-pocket, we were not fit for kisses and stuff with Olga's finger hurt and swollen and me feeling sorry for her. So I locked the booth and we left…
Now, Kolyan at that same period was picking up steam in the ticket office together with the Plant Park watchman, and he observed who it was coming down from above. And what could he possibly have thought, if from the booth portholes, for some half-hour the female moans were floating over the entire summer cinema?
"Oh, my! Mmmm! Ouu! Ay!"
That’s why, he kinda thought: where, in such a small…well.. thing…could it…sort of…be sitting? In a word, he respected me as a bro hero, only from another branch.
And for all those reasons, coming on a visit to the sheet-iron trailer and having sat in heated expectation thru the ongoing stupid debates of the present booby jerks on that it was high time to kick the ass of the Peace Square hippies who lately had become way too hippy, and when at last they’d free the premises of their presence happy with their being such cool goons, we still had to wait until Kolyan would finish his endless explanation as to where…well…to…kinda put…the key…well…of…sort of…the trailer…
The warmest feelings were left by the long sheepskin coat of Aunt Nina in which Olga once ventured from the khutta wicket. We descended into the snow-filled Grove with the patches of smooth hard ice of the frozen Swamp and it was good, but, as always, not enough…
~ ~ ~
At Plant, the term of our apprentice training expired and we began to get the payment of 70 rubles a month – almost as much as other locksmiths. Now, cutting the iron with a chisel, we no longer hammer-squashed our fingers and we (the hairy yobbos) were even trusted with the manufacture of an experimental product from scratch… It's interesting.
We scrutinized the intangible speculative thought turned into the visual lines of blue-prints specked with countless figures to indicate dimension. Observing those figures, we asked the gas cutter to cut the necessary pieces out from 20 mm-thick sheet iron, asked the marker to delineate the contours, asked the planer to scratch odd metal off to the markings, asked the welder to weld this one to that, and that to another…
Why so many requests? Well, because everyone's busy, sort of… Sometimes from the request to its execution, it took weeks of waiting, or go and ask once again…
And—lo!—the skeleton of the product-in-progress on the deck-rack outta the Repair Shop Floor grew with the added assemblage parts, began to gradually acquire engaging looks. Overseer ceased to call us "hairy yobbos" at every turn, and the Experimental Unit locksmiths drop the stale joke about the launch date of our "Lunokhod-2", aka Lunar Rover.
At that point Manager of the Experimental Unit ordered to deliver the already thoroughly-smeared cardboard folder with the multitude of blue-prints to Yasha and Mykola-the-old letting the more skilled workforce finalize the disembodied technical idea in weighty tangibility… It hurts.
The following product was simply ruined by us… Using lots of material, we assembled the massive stand “Glory to Labor!” on the deck-rack and called Borya Sakoon to assess the accomplished work before erecting it on the square in front of the Main Check-Entrance. The overseer looked thru the blueprints and said something was wrong though he couldn’t put the finger on it.
Engineer-Technologist climbed down from the Shop Floor Management Office above the locker room and joined Borya’s negative appraisal – yes, something was certainly amiss, not quite the thing. However, neither separately nor together, they could tell exactly what’s not right, even after checking the dimensions of the manufactured monument with a tape measure.
The author of the ill-starred project was called from the Design Bureau by the Plant Management. And it took a while even for him to discover the reason. We faithfully preserved all the subtleties of his idea and executed it in metal without any deviations except for producing the mirrored reflection of the blueprints. The product was cut to pieces and the square remained without the prospective architectural beautification…
After the New Year, a special team was sent from the Experimental Unit to the construction site of a feed mill in the village of Semyanovka. The team comprised three locksmiths: Mykola-the-young, Vasya, and me, under command of Borya Sakoon, our Overseer.
On the first morning, as 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 the lowered fallboard of the upright piano, I strummed the chords of the rhythm-guitar part. Behind the piano, Olga stood with her arms folded over its top board and bored she was. "Kiss me," demanded she from behind the piano.
I turned my head to the left and, over my shoulder and the black upright thing between us, merged into a long kiss with her warm soft lips. My fingers knew without me when to go to the next chord…
With the public kiss over, I modestly turned my face down to my guitar to regain the normal breathing and heard the shocked exclamation from Olga, "Oy! Mother!"
Her stifled cry signaled that the end of Heorot was at the gate… Midst the gooey hugs and swoony swaying of the dancers, like a rigid rock stood and watched her her mother who had unexpectedly arrived from the Crimea to take Olga back to Theodosia down there…
And from another end of our boundless, vast Homeland, from another port city in another sea, The Spitzbergen band arrived in Konotop from the Murmansk city to start playing dances at Loony, as arranged with Loony’s Director, Bohmstein.
We were undone by The Spitzes in a fortnight. Two weeks later, the Mirror Hall at Club was empty because the dancing crowd spurted to the dances in Loony, to the concert hall on the second floor, which used to be the listing for CJR competitive battles, and now, freed of all the audience seats, was turned into a parquet ballroom.
However, not the parquet became the decisive point. The restaurant band from Murmansk, made up of 4 musicians of 20-to-25 years old, came with the Western instruments and rock-group equipment available in port cities, including the organ of the "Roland" brand, and (most importantly) they sang. Moreover, they sang into professional microphones producing the echo effect. "One!.. un!.. un! Two!.. oo!.. oo!"
The Orpheuses with their homemade stuff went kaput. Yes, there still remained concerts in Club, "playing trash" but the dances just faded out…
Olga's both mother and unregistered stepfather left Konotop taking along her most solemn oath of coming back to Theodosia in two weeks, yet The Spitzes got firmly anchored in the city…
End February, I saw Olga off in a train leaving from Platform 4. She boarded the last car, the conductor locked the thick iron door and went inside. When the starting jerk pulled the car, Olga waved to me thru the door glass.
Grabbing the handrails by the sides of the locked door I jumped onto the steps under it. The train was quickly gaining speed, she freaked out and frantically cried behind the glass I could not hear what, as if I did not know what I was doing. I jumped off at the very end of the platform, because farther on you could indeed break a leg or two against the rails, and the crossties half-buried in the gravel…
In March I sent her a letter. It was very romantic stuff of how above the locksmith vise at my workplace I was seeing the heavenly features of her dear face.
No, I didn't copy the lines from Pushkin, but the essence and spirit were the same, and only the lexicon was upgraded for a century-and-a-half. In the opinion of the locksmiths at the Experimental Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, such a letter could be written by only a total cuntsucker. They had not read it though, neither had she because the letter did not find her in Theodosia. Olga returned to Konotop to inform me that she was pregnant…
At those rational days of planned economy and growing concern of the Soviet Government and the Leadership of the CPSU about the needs of population, condoms could be purchased even at news stalls, three kopecks apiece. Yet, for me a condom was just a word from the dirty jokes folklore, and I had no idea what "protective care" was about. Then she took the pill and everything got off easy…
Spring came early, amicable and warm… In mid-April, I started the "dacha" season of sleeping in the lean-to. I swept it and moved the mattress and blanket to the iron bed that spent the winter over there.
The same evening in the Plant Park, I invited Olga to "my place". She easily agreed. All the way from the Plant Park to Nezhyn Street I was walking on clouds. We strolled in the dark, tightly holding each other at the waist. Thru the yard of the Turkovs' khutta and the back garden, under the sole window in the ours, we sneaked into the lean-to, and I latched the door.
In the breaks between the rounds, I, obedient to Valle-Inclan's commandment, was restoring the equality between my "hands that knew already everything and the eyes that hadn't had a single glimpse yet…" for which purpose, I lit up matches, one by one, and stopped her shy tries to screen the glimmer of her body emerging from the darkness in the flicker of a tiny torch…
We woke up at dawn and walked thru the deafening silence and strangeness of empty streets to the khutta of her girlfriend Sveta so that Olga would have an alibi for her Aunt Nina. On my way back I met the first pedestrian of the breaking day. It was past Bazaar, the man was walking in the counter direction along the other side of Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street…
I was fine with her, yet I wanted to get rid of our affair. Firstly, not always it was really good. The time when we went to the Seim and I spread her in the Willow thicket, everything turned out somehow flat and not exactly the thing.
We, certainly, rehabilitated ourselves later, when she invited me to the shower at her workplace. Yes, she had already got a job in the city and was delivering telegrams from the Main Post-Office.
(…it is hard to believe, but even way back in the 1970s, in absence of as yet undreamed of mobile phones, people still managed to survive.
Telegrams helped to do the trick. They were delivered on the post-office blanks with the glue-mounted paper ribbons from a telegraph machine which had printed the words, "come Friday ten Moscow-Kiev car seven".
The telegram messages conveyed the raw core of information because you had to pay for each word in it and for each punctuation mark, including the address of the person to whom it was sent… Alms are the insurmountable coach at the laconic style.
But if you had money to burn then, of course, you could write in full – "I AM ARRIVING ON FRIDAY BY THE TRAIN MOSCOW-KIEV AT 10 AM IN THE CAR NUMBER SEVEN PERIOD", and then even add in the end – "I LOVE YOU FOREVER COMMA MY DEAR PERIOD"
And the workers from the Main Post-Office would bring the telegram in their tiny black on-duty handbag, "Sign here on the receipt, please."…)
She ended her work at five, and we met by the five-story hotel "The Seagull" paneled with yellowish stone tiles. On the wide porch beside the entrance to the hotel, there were two more glass doors: The Inter-City Telephone Communication Station, and The Main Post-Office.
We left the porch and Olga led me to the The Main Post's service entrance on the back of the building. She entered first and went ahead alone to the far end in the long corridor, where she turned around and beaconed me. Some doors stood open and there were women sitting with their backs to me, in front of their windows in the glass partitions that separated them from the lined customers.
We descended into a wide basement hall with long low windows overhead and beneath them a row of shower stalls alongside the wall. Entering one of the stalls, we undressed and Olga turned the hot water on.
(…in the mid-90's the scene in the shower, starring Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in some action movie, was declared the hottest Hollywood erotic of the year.
But they plagiarized it from our visit to the Main Post-Office! Twenty years later.
And now they tell me there was no sex in the USSR. Yes, there was!
Only the term for it sounded differently…)
At the end of our hot f-f…er…well, I mean… scene… there was a certain moment that Hollywood never dare to shoot. That is when along Olga's white taut thigh, in between droplets and paths of the running hot water, there crept two-three whitish-roiled spits… I had certainly seen that frame before but could not put my finger on where exactly… Yes, I became "protective careful" already.
(…a superficial pulp-fiction-founded self-education may often give rise to grave misconceptions.
For a long time, I entertained an erroneous opinion that 'masturbation' stood exclusively for sedulous handwork—chafing your cock until you cum. But, no!. As it turned out, even in the Old Testament there was a geezer named Onan, who regularly watered the earth floor in his tent with his seed at the concluding stage of, otherwise normal, sexual intercourse. The final chord, so to speak.
That chord was (using the term by lahboohs, aka musicians) just "a stinky clam", absolutely out of tune, yet served a means of protective care to prevent unwanted conception…)
And, secondly, I was freaked out by Olga's first pregnancy and feared a repetition – who would care? I did not want to get tied up in wedlock, and one dark night on the porch of Sveta's khutta, I even gave it a try at ridding of the delightful cause of the unwanted effect.
I told her that it was time for us to part. She started crying, "Why?."
I lit a cigarette, "We must do it. I have met another."
"Who?! Tell me her name!"
"You wouldn’t know her."
"But tell me!"
"Well…in short…some…well…Sveta."
"Where does she live?"
"Nigh the gypsies' block."
"You lie!"
"No, I don't."
And I lit the second cigarette from the stub of the first, as in Italian black-and-white movies, though I did not want to smoke at all, the second one tasted too bitter and even disgusting. I smoked half of it, felt nauseated and gave up. It was the surrender to both of them: I could not finish off the cigarette, neither could I manage to break up with Olga. The following week, she announced that she was pregnant again and no longer had the pill…
I called my parents to come to the lean-to because we had to talk. They came in, wary and silent, unaccustomed to such invitations.
I sat on the chair under the glassed frame by the head of the bed. Mother remained standing at the opposite siderails of the empty bed, only leaned against them. Father stood next to her with his hand resting on the long box-workbench alongside the blind wall. Then and there, I announced that I had to marry Olga.
"How that to marry?" asked Mother.
"As a noble man of quality, I am obliged to marry her," clarified I, uneasy that the delicate bare-bone “have to” proved not as graspable as expected.
My parents exchanged wordless glances, Father shook his head, Mother responded his clue with a silent sigh. Then they sat down on the bed, side by side, and started a detailed discussion on how we were going to organize the noble man’s wedding…
~ ~ ~
When I and Olga submitted to the city ZAGS the application stating our wish to get married, they gave us the paper for Bridal Salons so that we could buy nuptial tackle at a discount. In Konotop, there was such a salon behind the Central Park of Recreation, however, all they had there was nothing but two dust-coated mannequins of bride and groom with separate blank gazes from out their narrow cage of a shop window. We had to go to Kiev… Lekha Kuzko went with us as an expert, because he had already gone thru all of that when marrying Tatyana, and learned places. In Kiev, we bought rings, the one for Olga was a little yellower, but that of mine – wider. We also bought new shoes for me, and a white silk mini dress for Olga, as well as the wedding veil.
A month later our marriage was registered in Loony. The Hall of Celebrations was on the same floor with the ballroom only in the opposite wing. For the ceremony, we arrived in a hired taxi. At the entrance to the Hall of Celebrations, we were met with loud electric music by the guys "playing trash". I knew the guitarist with a long deep scar in his cheek playing a red Iolanta. He watched me with rounded, not understanding, eyes and shrugged… Ah! To hell! Makes no difference… I never was good at football anyway…
