Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
The operator switched on the wail-and-rumble of his crane, raised and turned away the beam, carrying the figure standing on the hooks far down, where a lonely light-bulb outlined the mortar mound. (Safety regulations? The royal troops lived by the concepts of their own.)
From down there, the crane brought a pallet of bricks with the filled kettle atop. The pallet was put by the wall between the working bricklayers, then they commanded the operator to take the cables away.
One of the spider's hooks caught the young bricklayer, stooping over the wall with a trowel in his hand, by his belt cinched over the pea-jacket, and lifted him into the air.
The rise was not extremely high – about a meter or so, because of the whistles and cries from all the sides calling to put him back down.
The operator executed the command and the incident was over, but what did the buddy live thru while hanging up in the air and kicking his long legs and shouting "enough! enough!"?
(…probably, it happened just by chance, because the grandpas in the line were also shouting "down!" to the operator…)
Then the bricklayers' Sergeant-foreman went to the far corner of the erected section, stood on the wall edge and took a leak down onto the distant remnants of the windbreak belt, in an arc-shaped glinting squirt of dashes reflecting the bulb-garland lights.
"There’s no nicer sight
Than when you piss from the hight.."
He jumped off the corner and joined the bricklayers' line to go on with laying the wall…
Not always though everyone got off nice and cozy with anything at all…
In the broad daylight, two soldiers grabbed each other in a mock-wrestling over the elevator shaft. Or rather, the bigger guy grabbed the smaller one; hefty yokels are more prone to that kind of horse-playing.
They both fell into the shaft and the safety boarding one story lower did not withstand the impact. Due to the law of acceleration for bodies in free fall, the bigger buddy was the first to reach the bottom of the shaft and got flattened against the piles of construction debris down there.
The smaller guy came to a second later landing on the jellied body of the late joker and got off with heavy fractures. After the rehabilitation, he was not exempted though and served until his demobilization as a watchman at various construction sites of VSO-11…
Every other month at the Morning Dispensing, they were reading up the circulation orders about servicemen killed as a result of the malicious violation of safety regulations in the military construction units of the Baku Air Defense District, which our construction battalion reported to…
~ ~ ~
All the youngs starting their service got "burdened", but our squad was the "youngest" of all the youngs, which situation resulted from a chain of unfavorable circumstances.
Firstly, the Ensign, who was our platoon commander, caught the Sergeant, who was our squad commander, with 2 bottles of wine bought from a nearby deli.
What is Ensign? That's a grandpa who liked thief-swaggering (wow! the youngs got cold feet before him!) and got brains enough to realize that in civilian life, after the demobilization, he'd be a sheer nothing.
(…the civilian life has other kinds of hierarchies…)
That's why such a grandpa stays in the army for long-term service. After 4 months of training at a school of Ensigns, he comes back to the same detachment with a small star in his shoulder-straps. He wears the parade-crap all the time, he roughs the soldiers and is paid for his favorite pastime one hundred twenty rubles a month. How not to sympathize with a person who has found his place in life?
So, our squad was called and collected from different spots at the nine-story building construction site, some of us were laying partition walls, others digging a trench, still others loading bricks on pallets before we were ordered to fall in by the entrance to the second section.
Our Sergeant was facing the line without his belt on—the obvious mark of a serviceman under arrest—2 bottles of wine (0.5 liters, wide red sticker) next to his feet on the ground. The fair-haired Ensign in a short-sleeved parade-crap shirt (the summer had just started) took the position at the flank of our dust-covered-mud-crusted formation.
In short, that whelp, who was not even a grandpa already, decided to perform a didactic oratorio. Like, this traitor of our great Homeland treacherously left his comrades-in-arms at their labor post and deserted to the grocery store, yet the vigilant Ensign caught him red-handed… He finished his piece of bullshit, snuffed and didn't know what to do next. However, he seemed to have watched some TV sequel from the life of military cadets, where someone got a parcel mailed from home and ate it on the sly, without sharing with his buddies. Then he got caught, and the cadet school zampolit forced him to eat a bar of chocolate in front of the rank of his comrades. The miser with his head bowed, burning with shame, implored to forgive him. To be continued…
Well, now, that Pestalozzi with a scrawny star in his shoulder-straps, started to peacock himself for the TV zampolit before us, "And you let your comrades down for wine! Well, well…So drink it!” He did not consider that in real life flicks might go the way bypassing the staple TV ruts…
Instead of bowing his head, the Sergeant threw it back, clapped the bottle’s neck to his lips and executed the received order. The Ensign froze in his place, the lined-up audience sympathetically swallowed along with the Sergeant's gulps and the bottle was slugged down at one go. He did not have time for the second one though – the Ensign recovered his senses, sprinted to the bottle and smashed it against a heap of gravel.
The Sergeant was taken to the detachment and locked up in the clink at the checkpoint guardhouse. The next morning, he was busted to a private and sent to the team he had been working with before they brought our draft to VSO-11. And might it possibly be otherwise? Who would allow him to kick back in the clink for 10 days and chew bread for nothing? March to work! We've got so all-embracing five-year plan designed by the Party and Government. After all, both with and without the instructive tattoo on our foreheads, all of us were slaves of the USSR…
Our squad got a new commander, just a dipper, by the name of Prostomolotov. "Call me simply – Molotov."
An intellectual wearing glasses, he knew about Molotov, but he was nothing more than a dipper and though they soon gave him the rank of Lance-Corporal, the grandpas were pushing him around, and he was in cold sweat before them, and never suggested to "burden", at least occasionally, some other squad of youngs, for a change. Because of such a situation, after a day's work instead of going to bed, we were assigned to the kitchen detail and peeled potatoes for the next day feeding of the entire servicemen personnel plus that of Separate Company because the peeling machine broke… Peeled all night long. Until 5 in the morning.
True, the last sack of potatoes we smuggled in portions out to the garbage bins, covering the out-going pailfuls with the peels from processed potatoes so that the on-duty cook did not get it. And at 6 – "get up!", then the Morning Dispensing and – march to work!.
Or else, they brought us in the evening from work to have the havvage—quick!—and then took back to the nine-story building, because KAMAZ trucks were moving alabaster there from the railway station, and if it rained the whole carload of the valuable building material would be lost. And we, standing knee-deep in loose alabaster, drove it with shovels into the basement of the nine-story building thru the opening in the blocks of the foundation under the butt wall. As soon as we finished one hillock of it, another KAMAZ truck would come and dump its 13-tonne load, and then another and then another, a practical way to learn that a railway freight car capacity is 68 tonnes… And inside the basement, the alabaster had to also be driven into the next compartment, otherwise, all of it just wouldn't fit in.
(…no horror film can hold a candle to the lividly lurid complexion of Vasya, drafted from Buryn, when he dozed off on an alabaster dune smack under the feeble light bulb…)
In short, Simply-Molotov, the popular conbat saying was right: "It's better to have a prostitute daughter than a Lance-Corporal son."
Daddy of Grisha Dorfman arrived and had a talk with someone in the Staff barrack and when he left Grisha was transferred to Fourth Company and given the position of the tailor. Soon, Grisha already flaunted in "Pe-Sha" and didn't even spend nights in the barracks because he had a sewing workshop in the bathhouse building.
"Pe-Sha" meant an outfit of half-woolen cloth, which was thicker than cotton fabric, aka "Khe-Be", and had the color of dark swampy slime – one of the khaki shades. "Pe-Sha" was the dress-code of aristocrats among the rank-and-file servicemen: the driver of the Battalion Commander's "goat"-Willys, or the projectionist at the Club, who was also the postman. It's a great thing to have a daddy who knows how to negotiate…
And Vanya, scared by the mice in his high boots, got exempted from the army. The Sergeant, who escorted him home from the nuthouse, told that at the Stavropol railway station Vanya dropped the mesh-bag with his belongings wrapped in a newspaper to the floor and screamed, "Run! Get off! It's a bomb! It's ticking!" Sure enough, folks shied away. And on the arrival in Vanya's home, he said his escort for a goodbye, "Learn, Sergeant, the way smart guys serve in the army."
That's, in general, why on that first day-off in August, trying to eschew the lazy crowd of beach-lizards in kirza high boots, I turned round the corner of the Club and from the rebar-grated window, next to the steps under the closed door of the projectionist's, I heard an acoustic guitar. Guitar…
I stood still and listened, though there was nothing to listen to – someone clumsily tried to play the chords of "Shyzgara", yet did not go well with the rhythm because of using balalaika beat. Unable to stand it, I returned to the Club entrance door. It was open.
At the end of the hall, on both sides of portholes from the projectionist's, there were two doors. The left one stood wide open and it was where the guitar sounded from. The grated window in a narrow room was abutted by a wooden hospital couch seated by a soldier with beastly bristles, in a faded piss-cutter, black overalls, and slippers who kept the guitar in his paws.
Another soldier, also in slippers, sat opposite him on a chair with its backrest against the wall.
"What's your fucking need here?"
"It's by "Shocking blue" that you wanna play, I can show how."
They exchanged glances. "Okay, show."
(… "beauty will save the world…" Well, no one can say for sure. The thing is way too vague, that elusively meaningful 'beauty'.
Music is much more tangible. It can do wonders and work miracles as well as create bridges canceling all that’s vain and unimportant.
Instead of a pheasant (Y. Zameshkevich), a dipper (V. Rassolov), and a salaga (S. Ogoltsoff) there remained just three young fellas passing the guitar from hands to hands…)
A couple of days later, a young from Dnepropetrovsk knocked in the tin-veneered door with his fingers eaten by plastering lime "dirt". The musician Alexander Roodko, who in his civilian life worked as a bass guitarist at the regional Philharmonics. That is how started up the creation of the VIA Orion in our construction battalion, based on the equipment and instruments left after the servicemen from previous years.
The guys went to the Stuff barrack, they talked to Zampolit of the VSO-11. Alexander was appointed Director of the Club. But he never got himself a "Pe-Sha" outfit, and he spent nights in the barrack of Second Company and stood at the evening roll-calls there…
He knew the musical notation; he played on anything that would turn up. He taught us the warm-up chant of "mi-me-ma-mo-mu" and he blinked, painfully and mutely, thru his cloudy blue gaze at my crap in singing.
He had a big nose constantly swollen with rhinitis, and he burred. But he was the Musician…
And I started to lead a double life. After the working day and havvage at the Canteen, I was taking the left turn, to the Club…
"May I join the ranks, Comrade Master Sergeant?"
"Why late for the evening roll-call, Ogoltsoff?"
"I was at the Club."
"And what do you, Club-goers, exercise there?"
In the ranks, sounds snickering supportive of the hint.
"We exercise solfeggio there, Comrade Master Sergeant."
The commander's face stiffens stupidly, he's never heard such words in all his life. Chuckles in the ranks increase in volume, yet now in the opposite direction.
"Battalion Zampolit is aware of it, Comrade Master Sergeant."
"Get to the ranks, suffle… sulge… Son of a bitch!"
But during the working day, I was like anyone else… We were transferred to the five-story building construction site in its concluding pre-delivery phase. Vitya Novikov and Valik Nazarenko called me to an empty apartment. They had a bottle of wine to share. We finished it drinking, in turn, from the neck. A forgotten buzz. Everything was gone before the evening roll-call because what was there for three of us?
At the evening roll-call, Captain Pissak sent the on-duty private to the Dishwashers' to fetch a washed-up cup for breath alcohol testing. Moving along the rank, Pissak selectively handed the cup those soldiers he cared to check, commanded them to exhale into it and sniffed the content. Soon, a couple of servicemen were ordered out of the ranks and face about.
When he handed the cup to me, I realized that I was fucked up beyond salvation even before the test. The uncontrollable waves of chill and heat were rolling, in turn, over, telling on me. For the loosened belt on my outfit, he had ordered me five fatigues, and now I was fucked up totally. Pissak sniffed out from the cup, sadistically downed his gaze and announced, "Well, I say, if a soldier hasn't drunk you can see it at once."
After the evening roll-call, Vitya Strelyany told me with a smile, "You were whiter than the fucking wall." As if I did not know that myself! Pissak, bastard! What the fucking games at cat-and-mouse?.
~ ~ ~
It was hard to believe, but there came another day-off. In the evening they showed a movie, some Polish one called "The Anatomy of Love" with certain hints at eroticism. Maybe in Poland, there were more than just hints, but before reaching us it had been shortened by repeated cut-outs. There was a whole pack with scissors, starting from the censorship down to acned projectionists, snatching out whole pieces of film wherever there flashed bare tits in a frame. For special friends and personal use. Fucking morons.
The next morning in the line of leak-takers alongside the sorteer runnel, I gave my cock the thoughtful shake to shed off final drops and silently addressed it in my mind, inaudibly in the general hubbub, "That's it, buddy, for the two-year stretch you're just a drain cock." And I buttoned the fly up.
At work, we were removing construction debris and excess earth out of the basement with the stretchers, it's called "doing the planning". All of the buddies looked somehow sullen, kept silently introvert, the after-effect, so to say, of that Polish film.
At a smoke break I, having nothing better to do, began to get at Alimosha. He did not talk back replying with brief fuck-offs but then suddenly jumped to his feet and pounced at me with his fists. I had to brush off as best as I could, yet, as always, not too proficiently.
Then Prostomolotov dropped into the basement and shouted to stop, so we again took up the stretchers. When doing my turns, I noticed that the pain in my right hand was not going to cease. Something happened to my thumb hit against the Tatar-Mongolian mug of Alimosha…
The next morning my entire hand was swollen, and after the Morning Dispensing the Assistant Paramedic from the Detachment Medical Unit (that same villager from our draft, but already in "Pe-Sha" outfit) took me to the Stavropol Military Hospital. We reached the city on some team-squad truck and there got on a bus because the city public transport served soldiers for free.
When we arrived in the hospital, he told me to wait and entered some of the buildings. The grounds looked quite attractive with a lavish garden of yellow Plum trees. Yet, I did not have the appetite for them because my hand hurt, so I just got seated on a bench in the green alley between the buildings and fell asleep. Opening my eyes, I got a smack bang close-up of some round muzzle with long cat-like mustache, right next to my nose. I startled, but the bench back safely kept me from falling. Another glance disclosed Captain's shoulder-straps on the cat. Everything got radiant clear – seeing a soldier dozing on the bench, the officer stooped for the alcohol breath test.
Then my escort came out and led me to another building for the hand check. They twirled my thumb, and I hissed like a gander and slapped my other hand against my left side, like a broken wing. From those indications they diagnosed a bone fracture, bandaged the hand, plastered it with gypsum and left me in hospital. Thank you, Alimosha!. Yet, washing the face with one hand was fairly inconvenient…
What could be better than a fracture? No jabs at all, just kick back and wait until the bone tissue grows over. In the dining room, there were square tables for just four persons and chairs instead of benches. The havvage also was much better than in our Canteen. Quite understandable though, because the hospital treated officers as well. Of course, all patients wore pajamas with no insignia, only the wards for officers were on the second floor and those for soldiers in the basement. Who cares if there’s a bed to sleep at any time of day? Besides, the dining room was nearer to us – in the end of the corridor.
The hospital was a quiet place and anything but overcrowded. In my wardroom, apart from me and a Georgian named Rezo, there were four vacant beds. The Rezo's black hair was long enough to be combed back, an obvious mark of a grandpa. He kept his left arm tightly pressed against his chest which attitude resulted from his patronizing help as a driver at wheat harvesting in some steppe kolkhoz. In the field camp, he started fooling around with the cook, and her husband stabbed him in the back with a large kitchen knife, and now the cook kept visiting the sufferer at the hospital. They usually went down the abundant garden, and coming back from there Rezo was offering me yellow plums from the pocket of his pajamas jacket, but I had no appetite although my hand didn't hurt already…
The neighbor wardroom was filled up though. One of the patients there was from our construction battalion, also a grandpa like Rezo only a Russian, named Sanya. Besides, his hair was fair and his right brow missing, licked off with a flat scar. He was a driver too and went AWOL by his tractor and collided somewhere with something, or maybe capsized. They had to amputate both his legs above the knees.
He did not visit the dining room. They buddies from his room were bringing the havvage directly onto his closet-box, although he had crutches and a pair of high leg prostheses next to his bed. On the front cover of The Rural Life magazine, he liked the picture of a shock worker of Communist Labor from Stavropol against the background of her combine harvester and wheat ears, and started writing letters to her. "Hello, unknown Valentina…"
Sometimes his fellow-drivers from our conbat came to visit him. After their closed-door meetings, he screamed songs and quarreled with the on-duty medical personnel. But he got off with it because they would exempt him from the army anyway…
On the second floor, there was a library, sort of, because its two shelves were filled with only translations from Chinese novelists about how socialism was being built in the villages of China. The books were printed in the fifties' before the exposure of the personality cult at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. To wit, before Mao Tse-Tung took offense for disparaging his bosom friend Generalissimo Stalin, and in both great powers they stopped singing:
"Moscow – Beijing,
Eternal friendship…"
And what would you do when left with no choice? You’d go and read social realism masterpieces in the best tradition of the newspaper Renmin Ribao…
A commotion broke up in the next wardroom, splashing out into the corridor – the combine driver Valentina answered Sanya's letters by her live visit. She got seated in the yard, on a bench under a tree. A swarthy-faced woman of Moldovian type, beautiful as movie stars from the first Soviet color flicks about collective farms in the Cossack villages. The most handsome buddy-patient from the neighbor wardroom alighted by her side with explanations that Sanya would presently come from a medical procedure.
And Sanya, in hysterical jitters, was sitting on his bed in the ward, fastening his prostheses. They helped to pull his pajama pants over them, and, sticking two crutches in his armpits, he clumsily dragged his body to the exit door. But Valentina—well done!—for whole 3 minutes she sat next to him on the bench that he finally reached. Then the same handsome buddy led her along the shortcut path to the unofficial exit thru a hole in the fence…
Two days later along the same path…I watched and I couldn't get it… It just couldn't be! But who else was that if not Olga?!. Yes, it's she!.
The same evening, I went with her to the park in her trousers and some sort of a turtleneck while she, sure thing, had her mini skirt on.
On the dance-floor, a pack of local yobbos started to close in, probably, attracted by the pattern of huge yellow flowers all over my borrowed pants. A couple of dippers on AWOL from our conbat had identified me and approached. One of them rigged out with a civilian citizenka and the second was in a "Pe-Sha" outfit, I didn't even know their names. The locals got it that the construction battalion was having a pleasure-walk and dissolved…
Olga had a whole heap of news in her life. She had again moved to Theodosia, but in the day nursery there were no places for babies. So she took Lenochka and went to the city executive committee on the chairman's reception day.
He parroted the same thing – there were no places and that's it. Then she just put Lenochka on his desk and walked out, he ran after her to the stairs, "Citizen! Take your baby!" In short, they found a place.
Her mother was looking after Lenochka, while she went to Stavropol, only on the train they stole all her money. And my wedding ring was also gone. But it happened still back in Konotop. She was wearing it on her finger though it was too wide and when washing she did not notice that it slipped off into the basin, and she splashed it away with the soapy water into the drain pit…
The next day she borrowed money for her back travel from the cook, who came to visit Rezo, and walked away down the same shortcut path…
They took the plaster off my hand and discharged me. By free of charge trolleys I traveled to the south-eastern outskirts of Stavropol and from the ring road there walked on under the tall roadside trees bordering the highway to Elista, towards the Demino fork.
Bright yellow leaves scattered the ground here and there, the sun was shining, yet it felt like it was autumn already. But when was the summer?
One of the conbat trucks pulled up on the highway. The driver shouted to me, "Home?"
I said, yes, home, and jumped into the truck bed. Because neither from work, nor from AWOL's we never returned "to the detachment", or "to the barracks". We were coming back “home”…
~ ~ ~
At home, it wasn't without news too. During my absence, our squad lived thru a rampage of torturing humiliation at the hands of grandpas who drove them after the lights-out out the barrack to the drill grounds and they had to walk "goose step" in a circle before getting beaten.
Karlookha from Second Company was particularly atrocious – he liked to jab a young with the knife, not so as to stab but aggravate by pricking. And he himself was just a dwarf, half-head lower than normal human height. Then in the basement of the 50-apartment block, he rushed with his knife on Sehrguey Chernenko, handled Gray, from Dnepropetrovsk. But Gray had his Zona skills for such incidents and knocked him out. Karlookha thief-swaggered only on the grounds of being a grandpa, but those grandpas from his draft, who had done their time before the army, hadn't supported him against Gray. So everything, like, subsided but the tension held on.
On the wave of that suspended tension, some pheasant clung to me, "Are you from thieves?"
Answering such a question in affirmative, you had to make it clear which stretch the prosecutor demanded for you and what was the final verdict, but for me the articles of the Penal Code were as closed a book as formulas from Organic Chemistry. Saying "yes' without having done some time, you became an impostor from the view-point of Zona code, liable to hard consequences.
So I said "no" and he took me to the Leninist Room and began to shear my hair in a "zero-like" style with a hand-held machine – the length of my hair was a crying impudence for a young. I did not mind though, it had 2 years ahead to grow back. However, the machine was blunt and a couple of times it pulled very painfully.
There was a plasterer from Third Company in the Leninist Room, who came to see his Armenian buddies-countrymen. So, he suggested the home-made barber letting him finish my haircut. The pheasant himself was not already happy that he started that job, and yielded the machine to him.
In short, Robert Zakarian did my haircut, and when the machine jammed he said, "I am sorry". I had completely forgotten there were such words in existence…
Later, Robert started visiting the Club and became a vocalist at The Orion. He had the purest Russian pronunciation because he grew up in the Far North where his father served his time in a camp, convicted of dissidence or something of the sort. When the old man was paroled to "chemistry" in the same region, Robert's mother moved there too, taking Robert and his younger brother north, far away from Armenia.
With his stretch completed, Robert's father applied for emigration of his family from the Soviet Union. Two years passed, and he passed away before they gave permission.
There remained some time before the fixed date of their departure, and Robert went to spend it by his Armenian relatives in the seaside city of Sochi. There he met a Russian girl Valya from the Tula city and fell in love. They exchanged their addresses and, on his return to the north, Robert bleared out that he refused to leave the Soviet Union.
Yet, the papers were drawn up already for the whole family and, without him, his mother and brother would not be let out. The brother tried to make him understand the situation by fighting him, yet Robert daringly maintained his intentions to keep true his promises to his dear beloved. Then the mother began crying on a daily basis and, eventually, he landed with them in Paris by their Armenian relatives because of whose invitation they were let out.
In Paris, he found a job at a construction site. He did not know the language, he had no friends, and all his dreams were only of Valya from Tula…
A year later, with a tourist group from France, Robert Zakarian came to Moscow, and the very first night, he slipped out the hotel which his group was accommodated at and scurried to the Tula city. For 10 days he lived there in the house of Valya's parents before her mother persuaded him to give himself up to the authorities.
When he turned up in the Tula KGB, the officers there were simply delighted because their bosses in Moscow were all horns and rattles about the disappearance of a tourist from Paris. He was immediately taken to the airport and deported to France.
In Paris, he requested the Soviet Embassy to let him back to the USSR, to his beloved. And then he kept visiting them every week, and the embassy clerk, with a tattoo "Tolik" on his hand, was shaking his head and saying there was no answer to his appeal… It took Tolik about a year to nod, at last, instead of shaking because there had come a positive response.
Robert arrived in Tula, married Valya, they had a baby daughter, and he was drafted to our construction battalion. He liked to show a black-and-white photograph of his family: he himself on the left, black-haired, with a serious look in the wide-set eyes below the broad black eyebrows of an unquestionably family man; his wife Valya, on the right, in a white blouse and fair curls about her round face; the baby-daughter, in between the two, in a fancy cap of fine lace. So, the contingent of our construction battalion comprised not only cripples and jail-birds, we even had a double migrant in our ranks…
On the Seventh of November, The Orion gave their first concert on the VSO-11 Club stage. The drums were knocked and kicked at by Vladimir Karpeshin, handled Karpesha. Vladimir Rassolov and Robert Zakarian provided lead vocals. Alexander Roodko sang along with them and played the bass guitar; I kept silent and played the rhythm guitar.
In our vocal-instrumental ensemble, there also was a horn player, Kolya Komissarenko, handled Commissar, a short, dark-haired guy from Dnepropetrovsk of a cheerfully Jewish appearance. He played very diligently, yet did no better than I in my singing. Every crap note by the horn obviously tormented Roodko who still and all kept putting up with it. Probably, the presence of a horn player on stage tickled his nostalgia for his Philharmonic past. To hear less clam, he time and again cut the horn part shorter and shorter…
For the concert, we changed into parade-crap (three of us into that from strangers because a conbatist got his parade-crap only after 1 year of service). The first number in the concert was "The Wide, Wide Field" song (sort of a patriotic one). Roodko dreamed of making it with a four-part vocal harmony like that by The Pesnyary, but because of the limited range of the vocalists' sound and the crappy clams from the Commissar's horn (at which he goggled his beady eyes out in outright amazement but still blew on) this philharmonic piece of shit was almost booed at.
