Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
"Comrade Major, the overhaul is done."
"And you call this an overhaul?"
"Comrade Major, you have promised…"
“I promised nothing!"
That's how Major Avetissian had fucked Tom Sawyer… SLIP-SLOP!!
At the end of the day, Gray came to the stoker-house, "Got the fuck?"
"Yea."
In the construction battalion, everyone knows everything about anyone else.
"Fuck him. Now we'll have a flight to Paris."
From the inner pocket of his jacket, he takes out a folded newspaper page, opens it at the place marked by a brownish thin plate, breaks a pinch of it off then folds and hides the paper back. The pinch gets crumbled into a tiny pile in his palm over which he presses and rolls a "Belomor-Canal" cigarette in between his fingers until two-thirds of the tobacco pours into his palm. A sharp blow into the Belomor’s thick-paper mouthpiece scatters the rest of the tobacco away. He bites the edge of the paper tube and pulls the cigarette tissue halfway off the mouthpiece. The stuff and tobacco in the palm mixed with care, the lengthened cigarette tube starts to consume the mixture in gentle tiny jerks.
Though watching the process for the first time ever, I still knew he was stuffing a joint.
"Spark it," and he brought up a burning match. "Keep the smoke in you.”
We smoked the joint passing it to each other, I diligently copied his way of inhaling and keeping the smoke in the lungs.
"Well, so what?"
"What what?"
"You asking? Wasn't you fucking touched? Well, you're some moose!"
"I'm sorry."
Disappointed, he left for the evening roll-call…
~ ~ ~
One week later, on my day shift, 2 soldiers of a Central Asian appearance modestly entered the stoker-house filled with the duet wailing by the furnace and the pump. Probably, from Separate Company, or else ours from the Crimean draft.
"We a-need sieve it," one of them said timidly.
"What?"
"Da ganja. You knows yoursel."
I did not really understand what all that was about, yet it's not proper to look ignorant before the youngs. "Okay."
They came out and returned 4 already, carrying a couple of some gunnysack bags. I led them to the workshop room and returned to watch the howlers.
A couple of times, I checked into the workshop with the grass bunches spread out on the workbench. They greeted me with their mute united smiles of gratitude and I went back – why to interfere with busy people knowing their job? In two hours, when it was already quiet in the stoker-house, their caravan moved to the exit. "We there a-left," said the last in their file with a joyful smile.
In a shallow plywood box that had since long been kicking back around on the workbench, there was a handful of brownish sticky dust. I put it away into the iron box next to the never used hammer-and-chisel and just forgot about it…
Of course, I remembered the dust in the box when on the payday instead of the usual "Prima" I bought a pack of "Belomor-Canal". Repeating the procedure demonstrated by Gray, I stuffed a blunt and sparked.
Vo-ohoo! What the tha-a-at?
And I swam up to the mirror peeping from the wall and looked into to make sure there really was no one behind because there was a clear feeling as if my head was like a balloon that was not filled too tight so you could jab it from opposite sides but not as deep as to burst up but just to spin your fingers inside where they do not reach each other as I was now feeling jabbed thru my temples and they twirled inside the brain convolutions but in the mirror there was just only me alone without anyone behind me the balloon floating gentle and slow because I was kinda zeppelin but then yes it was only very necessary to fly over and check the manometer glass or else we all will fly away and very high… you are the moose yoursel, Gray…
(…that was how I became a nashavan, aka grass doper, one of the enlightened initiates who get kef from cannabis, aka marijuana, aka grass, aka anasha, aka ganja, aka kif…etc…)
The first one to register my acquisition of the new dimension was Gueerok, a descendant of German colonists, one of the Ensigns at Fourth Company. He saw me stunned still, in a stoned reading from the scraps of The Red Star, the army daily glued, a decade before, on the tin stand in the grass drying up by the drill grounds.
The sun kept pouring its scorching heat on my piss-cutter. So what? Like to the political studies, like, I'm preparing… Hmm… Americans once again defeated in Vietnam, from our correspondent in Saigon… He approached me from the right but seeing that the "Belomor-Canal" cigarette in my fingers was smoked up to its paper mouthpiece and there was no hope even for the “heel”-stub, he smiled a weary smile, licked his dry lips, and weakly melted away in the heat…
The veil of ignorance slipped off from my enlightened eyes and there came the revelation that everyone in The Orion was on the drag, though each one in his own way… Karpesha and Pickle in a businesslike manner. Jafarov – very softly. Roodko was following the homeopathic shebang of moderate buoys at regular intervals. Robert – when they treated him, yet not always… It looked like I almost got late for a departing train.
But the coolest weed was by Sasha Lopatko, the Club painter. In his room, I had half-weightlessness fits, moving gracefully as some underwater vegetation or, when in full, like on a visit to the orbital space station Salyut, only not often, because of his meanness. Roodko also agreed that he had never seen such a greedy egoist in his life. And strange it seemed indeed when taking into account such a good father – a minister of the cult, who should infuse his son with love towards your neighbor…
(…when on high, your drift can be sort of different to another time of being under. In kef, generally, you’re getting filled with all-forgiving calm, you feel mellow and nappy, and you want any other mother’s son feel good too and you get so discreet and unobtrusive, you don't want to disturb anyone's fluff.
Or you could suddenly notice some funny wrinkle in the surrounding reality and – you're done, you just cannot stop, you'll laugh until completely exhausted, then you'll catch your breath and start laughing again. That kind of drift is called "to catch the arrival". That’s the most dangerous drift if you’re a TV announcer.
Still another time, you could get concentrated on doing something and went on doing it, and doing it, and doing in the mode of utter circumspection and methodicality with the utmost, ofttimes unnecessary, finesse and over-perseverance, and though it’s so fucking long ago that you should’ve drop it, you'll still keep doing it and doing… Like that team of zeks who felled an Oak coppice equipped with only a couple of jigsaws.
Or, let’s take, the so-called "piggy" drift; this is when you got started eating something and all of a sudden there unfolds such a gamma of taste sensations that you, without ever noticing it, could put away a whole pot of cold macaroni from the day before yesterday and scrape the bottom.
And, on the whole, you became ever so prudent, awesomely perspicuous, and when some buddy’s coming up to you, like, "Hi, how's your nothing?" you knew already at which point of his nonprofit socializing he’d start chiseling for a pinch for a joint.
Or there may get started to form all kinds of deep thoughts by you—fucking Isaac Newton!—only that they did not linger for long so as to shape them clearly and got lost because of one thing or another distracted you over to something else equally profound. All in all, a play of shadows on the swirling whiffs of fog.
Listening to music when you ride the wave is the utmost drift…)
In the musicians’ we had a record player on the bookshelf together with the one and only LP disc, "Burn" by The Deep Purple… Getting seated on the floor next to a speaker, I would hold the disc cover in my hands and consider it unswervingly till all of the side played to the end – there were their busts, like, in bronze, with a tongue of flame from each one's head, like, a lighter, sort of, the dudes were clearly understanding what's what in blasting…
A real bummer popped up when anasha suddenly ran out and, no matter whomever you rolled up, no one had it; such a period was named "the empty suction". Everyone became dog snappy, some buddies even got crashed because of the fucking khoomar was so too pressing. No kidding, they became just fragments a-jitter; some simply eyesore sight…
Once Gray heated me with pills that he brought from the city.
"Would ye?"
"What's that?"
"Nyshtyak."
"Okay".
He was passing them, one by one, for me to swallow. With half of the pack over, I said, "And what's the dose?"
"All's nyshtyak."
So I consumed the whole pack. Then a roar flooded the ears, as from a waterfall, and the night got dense and dark around.
Oh… the stoker-house… Vanya's shift… I entered.
He talked to me but I couldn't get it at all. Then I began to walk around the furnace, what for?. He told me later that at one point I stopped in the dark passage behind the boiler, and stood there for half-hour as a monument, like, in bronze. And, most importantly, I was afraid of going to bed: what if getting somehow asleep I wouldn't wake up? But eventually, I came to myself.
And Gray was just a bitchy scumbag not knowing the dose himself, kinda experimenting on people whether I'd survive or not.
"But you're some fucking moose!."
Vanya's wife came on a visit from their Crimea village… The construction battalion started to seem some club of married dolts because of whose premature marriages I again was pulling at the stoker-house one shift after another.
When she left, Vanya changed from the parade-crap into his fatigues and came to the stoker-house as gloomy as the sadness itself. I didn't want to barge in the buddy's meditations and the darkness outside the windows was as delicate as me…
And then Roodko, the Club Director, arrived in the stoker-house. He had the regular cold in his snoot and, in the medical unit, they forked him out some powder for inhalation. So, grabbing on the way a tin cup from the Dishwashers', he navigated to the stoker-house in another of his futile attempts at curbing his adenoidal condition.
The powder from the folded sheet of paper was poured into the cup, then he added boiling water from the boiler tap and covered the cup with a stray piece of cardboard, sort of a lid to keep the mixture hot and not let it cool down right away.
That way he and I sat by the round table talking our talks. And, while talking, Roodko would move that cardboard lid, sniff at the cup a time or two, cover it back and we would go on with our gossip.
Now, by that particular moment in the course of his army service, Vanya had already seen different sights in the stoker-house and, standing in the dark of the adjacent hall of it, he followed all those collateral manipulations and came to certain aberrant conclusions. In determined strides, neared he the round table and, "Roodko! Gimme too!"
"What to give?"
"Well, this!" And Vanya pointed at the Roodko's contraption.
Roodko was as naive as any other intellectual and he thought if he had a running nose then whosoever could have it also. "Welcome."
Vanya pulled the cardboard off, took a couple of sniffs, deep indeed, filling himself to the heels, and I saw how his eyes rolled under his forehead getting more and more, however strange it may sound, crosswise on the way.
So what? I, personally, would believe it. Self-hypnosis is a great power because faith moves the mountains. If Vanya believed that Roodko was consuming the fucking "blue fairy" by bucketfuls there, then any other moment he could fall into hallucinatory strawberry fields and fucking easily too, I swear. Someone had to save the buddy.
"Vanya," says I, "the other day in the Canteen I talked to a Tatar from your draft."
"And what?"
"Well, nothing special…just that I says there, 'hey buddy, what's your name?', and he says, ‘Me a-Russian no understand'…to which, 'Okay,' says I, 'a fully clear matter, but how much do you have to serve yet?'…and here he at once clutches his head from both sides, 'Vooy! Fucking too much!' says he… So, Vanya, could he was a friend of yours?"
In short, I did have pumped the partner back from his hallucinations because that's the law of soldiery friendship – help your comrade out even by the cost of your own life…
~ ~ ~
(…in my opinion, The Orion provided their musical services free of charge, that is for nothing. In any case, I do not remember any talks about any money for "playing trash".
For us, musicians in The Orion, just breaking out from the bounds of the Military Detachment 41769, playing dances for people dressed in civilian clothes was an invaluable payment in itself. So, if you like, we were paid by minutes of freedom, time is money sometimes.
Was there any dough sticking to a palm at the commanding level? Say, to that of Zampolit of our battalion? I have no idea and don’t feel like lying…)
With the draft from Simferopol, there arrived one more musician to join The Orion. Yura Nikolayev knew his worth because his price-list he studied well before the army, playing the rhythm guitar in a restaurant band.
And he also sang (without particular voice range and particular crap) within the framework of usual orders from restaurant revelers, heated with a couple of decanters of vodka.
"Here's water, it is good and cool!
Adding it to vodka is the gentlemanly rule!"
After the third decanter, it was time for hard rock:
"…by softly murmuring waters of the Nile,
Free of care, of pains, of nasty neighbors,
There lived a small but happy crocodile!.."
And when the client grew fully ripe, the surrealistic splashes gushed forth:
The firewood bloomed and horses were a-twitting,
A camel came from Africa on skates…
Chorus:
No, no no need to giddy-up me, sweetie,
I’m daft enough as is–
Aye! Aye! Aye!. "
So my presence in The Orion was justified by merely a couple of old numbers but the Ensign, appointed to supervise us at playing out of the battalion, could not inform Zampolit that I was going with the ensemble for no good reason. And not only I was getting something for nothing – 2 or 3 chmomen usually went along under the pretext of being sound engineers.
However, playing dances was a seasonal affair. The New Year parties were the main vent for The Orion getting outside the VSO-11. It’s only once that we were engaged in summer, or rather at the beginning of autumn. That was playing dances at a bakery plant. Whether it was the same one where my team-squad had been collecting alms from the production line conveyors, I couldn’t tell. Arriving in for that party, I saw only the asphalted courtyard enclosed by the row of locked truck boxes and the three-story building of the Plant Management with the party buzzing on its second floor.
Of course, I danced there quite a lot, and one of my partners got so charmed that she didn’t hesitate to go out of the hall, at my suggestion. We climbed the dark staircase to the third floor but the landing there with the locked door to a corridor was occupied by them those chmo sound engineers drinking wine.
On the first floor, the picture almost repeated itself, only there it was her female co-employees smoking cigarettes. I made for the exit with her docilely following in tow.
AW, FUCK!!
The bare asphalt area was flooded with arc light glare leaving no shaded nook. The only bit of shadow was the anthracite-black meager strip of it cast by the pillar which held that dazzling arc lamp in the middle of the yard… I was like that puppy named Tuzik who had snitched off a rubber hot-water bottle, yet couldn't find a place to tear it up… Reluctantly, I beat retreat…
Probably, the girl was disappointed by my not-soldierly lack of determination and too easy surrender to the plain minimalism of the conditions in the bakery plant yard. Anyway, the following evening she did not show up for the date in the park as we'd arranged.
I went a couple of circles along the dark alleys, stood for a while close to the brightly lit dance-floor inside which coral the youth of Stavropol were enjoying their recreation, although it was dangerous – a soldier in a casual wear outfit could be an easy mark for the military patrol. She was nowhere and the chances for her to pop up grew real slim.
"Got matches, soldier?" A dainty long-haired dude with a shoulder bag on a wide strap was addressing me.
I took the matchbox from my pants pocket. He picked it and unzipped his bag where, on top anything else, lay a cigarette pack next to a box of matches.
"Oh! I'm so forgetful. Will you?" He seized the pack and opened its lid over the densely lined filters. I pulled one out.
"Ah, it's so noisy here, gives me a headache. Will we walk a little?" With his right hand, he shook up the wide curls in his dark bob-cut hair.
…hell, what's up?. is he gluing me or what?. a short neat guy, long hair, a bag under his elbow… "Why not?"
We walked away, followed by the glances of those standing by the dance-floor, that part of the public who always keep outside. Strolling slowly, we headed nowhere in particular. He talked and talked with velvety feminine intonations. Then he told me a joke about gay life.
Some queen was arrested in Moscow and while they were beating him up at a militia station he squeaked, "Oh, Captain, I only wanted it in my mouth, not in the teeth!" A play on words, though not very funny, yet clear enough, as clear as what he was, it’s only that I just wondered what's next.
"Would you like some wine?
"Why not?"
We went to a nearby deli, there was almost no line there. Bubbling with joy, he asked for my advice on a wine over there, on the shelf behind the counter: would that do? As if I knew seeing the first time ever that "Mountain Flower". The shop was full of crude light and leering goggles of scanty buyers. He happily punched the check by the cashier, took it to the shop-assistant, exchanged the slip for the bottle and inserted it into his dangling bag.
We returned to the park, to its upper, dark, part, where there were no benches under the trees screening the rare lights from a nearby street. Standing in the darkness by the line of trimmed bushes, we drank some wine, not finishing it off, then he dropped right in front of me on his knees and unbuttoned the fly in my pants…
Well, at first, it was arousing, yet soon there remained just the feel of humid moistness down there. His head, barely visible in the dark, kept pumping back-and-forth. I slid the plate of my loosened gird-belt behind, to the back of my jacket, so that he did not hit his forehead against it accidentally. He changed the rhythm, diversified the tempo, took a breath for a moment then started again.
…somehow it's…monotonous…and for how long should I stick around like this?.
Chmo-ook.
…what?..another time-out?.
"You scoundrel! You've been with a slut! So you cannot come! A nasty scoundrel!"
"No, I haven’t." I buttoned up under his plaintive complaints that I had such a matching member—exactly thirteen!—but to no avail. The discrepancy between his expert estimation and the measurements, once taken at a midday break at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, did not hurt me, taking into account his disappointment – lots of labor lost in vain, besides, it was he to pay for the wine.
"There’s still left some – will you?"
"Ah, no."
I finished the sorrowful mountain flower off under his story that he was on transit from the Nalchik city, where some very important director of some very important enterprise made him such as he was when he still had been just a boy.
Then he gave me a farewell hug, but no kiss for such a nasty scoundrel who had been with a slut so let him now face the music… And he left making by his sentimentally luring gait for the street lamps beyond the park.
From that tear-jerking joke by the sad boy from Nalchik you couldn't but see that gay life's not a bed of roses – keep low and hide out until they catch you in the end. Poor critters… So what? Time to march home, ain't it?.
The postman handed me a letter from Olga about the letter she'd got from a fellow-serviceman of mine, who anonymously informed her of my amorous unauthorized marches in different directions from the location of Military Detachment 41769, aka VSO-11…
The insolence of filthy insinuations just made me furious, the more so that neither in the village, no at the bakery plant there was no booty whatsoever! And the gay guy could safely be counted out because I hadn't even cum. Therefore, in the letter of reply, I rightfully emphasized that there was nothing to speak of, and she should send me that anonymous piece of crap for carrying out graphological scrutiny and taking appropriate measures against that lying dirty bitch of my fellow-serviceman.
In her respective reply, she stated that the lies about my allegedly unstable behavior made her see red in which affected state she tore the letter into irrecoverable shreds.
(…and here again, I stumble on that same transcendence matters. What for? What's the use of it for the anonymous fellow-serviceman? And if Olga just tried to check me, then all the same – why?
These questions are another clear proof that the possibilities of a human mind are limited indeed. In any case, those of mine…)
~ ~ ~
Vanya left for the evening roll-call because it was my shift at the stoker-house. Gray came bringing along a young, a driver from the Simferopol draft. They both were tight, the young obviously had money, no wonder Gray’d palled up with him.
And then Gray kicked up some shitty dust crap, like, the buddies had some gripes about me. I couldn't understand. Which buddies? What beefs?
Now you'd see, says he, and latched the front door. The 3 of us went over to the workshop room, and Gray at once sneaked out of there. I did not get it.
And then the young, keeping his eyes away, asked, "Why finking on guys?" And he shot a fist into my face. I parried with my shoulder and jumped past him out of the door, the yokel followed. In the nook behind the furnace, there was a breaker, I grabbed it and shouted, "Gray! Who the fuck did I fink on?"
Gray stood nearby in the dark passage. Seeing me armed, he pelted body blows and I dropped the breaker. After all, it was grabbed out of pure instinct, kinda warning.
At that point, the iron-sheet shutter under the window in the hall with the reserved boilers moved, and Sasha Khvorostyuk from our draft crawled in on all fours, in only high boots and underpants, and with a towel hanging from his neck. Clear enough, he was going to take a shower in the pump-station room but the entrance door was latched from inside.
Seeing him enter, Gray barked out, "Get the fuck out of here!"
So, Sasha Khvorostyuk revved back, legs-first, without ever taking a U-turn, and Gray again turned to me. And now he saw my chest was bleeding because of my jacket was unbuttoned all the while, and one of his blows had torn the birthmark off.
Gray saw there was fucking lots of blood and he didn't know what was there in the room between me and the young, and he wasn’t gone too blind not to see the chance of getting fucked up into the penal battalion. So he just croaked a couple of times, "Look out!. The buddies!.." And they left.
Yet, I couldn’t get it what the fuck all that was about. Later, I saw him and asked, he did not say anything clearly, just repeated the same bullshit, "Look out! If there something.." In short, he’d been just selling himself for a fucking master-thief before the well-off young…
Since then, when at my shifts, I had something to busy myself with. The pump engine wailing, the boiler hissing, and, with my elbows planted into the round table, and my chin leaned against my balled hands, I was thinking about just one thing. Thinking for hours was I – in what way to bump Gray off?
Bumping off was not much of a problem, given the presence of that same breaker, but what then? It was necessary to whack him and cop out, but how? I didn’t even have a thing to simply dig a hole in the field, just that hammer-and-chisel in the workshop. To ask Ter-Terian for a shovel? Fucking stupid…
Or, say, take it to the pump-station room, in that deep pit always filled up with water, hitch a load and drop there. But what if the water catches stench with the decomposition of the body? The surest way was to shove it into the boiler furnace, the two-meter long flame shooting from the nozzle would incinerate it without a trace. It's only that Vanya would come for his shift and the whole stoker-house filled with the smell of barbecue – how’s about that?.
The problem had no solution and I simply kept moving, week after week, in a vicious circle until the on-duty cook would come and say it was time to turn the boiler off.
You never can tell, I might have coped after all with that quadrangle of the circle problem, but then the Tula draft was demobilized and they drove in new youngs from Uzbekistan and Stavropol Region, and Major Avetissian kicked me out of the stoker-house replacing with some young from the Pyatigorsk city.
Fare thee well, Vanya! And you, Round Table, the confidant silent of my fruitless designs…
Yes, I became a grandpa and I got it in full when, entering the sorteer, I saw there Vasya from Buryn with whom, as youngs, we had been slaving in the squad-team under Prostomolotov. Vasya was squatting over an ochco holding a newspaper open wide before his nose.
I’m fucked if it’s not the lost picture by the great Russian artist Repin – “A squatter in the reading-room”! Behold how all so grandly, with his belt hanging from around his neck, kinda stylish muffler, giving himself Great Gatsby's airs he checks the news of the day, sort of. And at that point, the cuntfucker had finished me off completely. He raised himself from his full squat to a deep-curtsy level, like, a dance teacher demonstrating the technique of a reverence to the hole underneath and announced, "Good evening!" I was fucking fucked to pieces; that's some Vasya! Where did he fucking find such fucking words?.
~ ~ ~
My grandpa period of service unfolded rather chaotically. I no longer belonged to the gang of chmomen but the commanding officers were too lazy to transfer me from Fourth Company somewhere else for only 6 months. So, I had to work here and there, most of all at MCU.
That MCU had nothing to do with Missile Controlling Units, it was a mortar-concrete unit. Although, a grandpa wouldn't die of overwork even at so strenuous a workplace. I could shove the sand with a shovel as well as not shove the sand with the shovel, it depended.
The squad-team there was commanded by Misha Khmelnytsky from our draft who had turned so portly, with those Sergeant stripes across his shoulder-straps. And he roughed the youngs as we had been roughed so long before…
Then for a period, I was sent to a brick factory and there were neither squad-teams nor youngs. My job there was stacking clamp, raw bricks, in the ring kiln for burning. The ring kiln from inside is a low arched tunnel and it works continuously. At one spot in the tunnel, the mobile conveyor belt brings raw bricks thru the opening in the wall—be quick or they’ll pour in a pile, grab them in time and stack in loose rows up to the ceiling!—while on the opposite side in the ring kiln diameter, the fire rages from the nozzles in the arched walls to burn the bricks. The heat, of course, was felt all over the kiln and you had to work in an undershirt, still sweltering. The job grew much hotter when loading the freshly fried bricks on that same conveyor belt but moving in reverse. The heat scorched your hands even thru the canvas mitts and was radiating from the walls around so you had to undress and work with only high boots and pants on. Take care not to touch the scorching wall with your bare shoulder. And the next shift would be stacking raw bricks in this very spot, and so over and over again without an end to the loop cycle of ring kiln…
When at home, I started to spend more time in the Company barrack. In case of off-the-wall situations, the servicemen from younger drafts approached me to get advised. For example, outside the brick-fencing, a taxi pulled up with a Sergeant from our Company – blind, deaf and dead – on the back seat. They called me, I went out to check and it was real easy because the grunting body stretched over the back seat was naked to the waist – yea, him ours. The taxi driver wanted no fee, thank you, says he, just take the shit away.
And as the Sergeant was a real boar, it took three youngs to plop him over the wall into a snowdrift from where he was dragged into the dryer room next to the cabinet-box guarded by the on-duty, where the jackets were dried after the working day, and there he dried off too till the morning.
Once some Uzbeks treated me to a dried melon plated in a braid, from a parcel they received from their home, sweet it was, I even remembered the parcel from my parents when I was a young – four cans of condensed milk shared in the musicians’.
And the Uzbeks came up to and treated me on their own accord, I wouldn’t even know they had any parcel. Probably, because of, though a grandpa, I never hewed from their rations of butter and sugar in the Canteen…
The commander of Fourth Company, Captain Chernykh, was transferred somewhere from the construction battalion, or maybe his penalty stretch at VSO-11 was over and for that occasion, the lieutenant, Deputy Commander of Fourth Company, stepped into his shoes. However, the lieutenant’s fists were nothing like the sledgehammers of the departed Captain and buddies kinda stirred up some fuss about TV set, like, why in Separate or in Third Companies they could watch TV, football and stuff while our box was dead for more than a year, ain't we humans? Stuff it!
At that point, the Battalion Commander ordered to collect the Company personnel into the Political Classes Room. He entered it together with the lieutenant and sat atop the desk, like, Prince Charming, where his trousers jerked up to the knees for demonstrating the gray fur above his shoes and socks.
