Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
And all of us facing him from the stools brought in from the barrack aisle, a-gape and ready for some sage advice. The Spanish artist Goya produced a whole bunch of the like pictures, series of them…
"Are you fucking going on strike? Eh? Stupid dicks! No fucking Italy for you here! The motherfuckers over there enjoy spaghetti! One macaroni can be long, another – short, because it fucking broke in halves!"
Here he made a pause in his cryptic monologue, perched proudly above our heads, turning from side to side his thick-rimmed glasses. Some swollen-headed fur-legged owl, not having the slightest idea what fucking folly he had thrown up right now.
And we all sat before him with dull stares full of faith and willingness which we should demonstrate to seniors in rank…
Yet, behind the statutory look that I was supposed to present each and every commander, there reeled on Pickle’s tale about the hermaphrodite Sofochka from the Orel draft. Pickle couldn’t say how much her parents had to shell out for the medical commission to turn a blind eye at certain peculiarities in the physiological structure of their child because of craving for a time break, at least in those two years.
That way Sofochka was classified as fit for non-combatant service and sent to the construction battalion where they make a real man out of anyone… Shortly before the Orel draft demobilization, in the barrack of Fourth Company, there developed an explosive love triangle, the dembel cutie involved. She was indiscriminately giving her favor to a couple of her fellow-servicemen, though in turn. The buddies couldn't find a peaceful solution to the question: whose bunk bed she should visit after the lights-out.
Then in the same Political Classes Room, there was also ordered a meeting of the Fourth Company personnel. So I might chance to be sitting on that same stool which was seated by Pickle when Battalion Commander put the question squarely, "Sofochka, fuck the whore of your mother, is there dick or cunt by you there, eh?"
The private so addressed rose from his stool and, approaching the senior in rank, dealt a slap in the face, "Old goat!" Then, rolling her hips proudly, she returned to the stool with her back to the happy squeaks of a laughing owl.
Fathers-Commanders. Some fucking army!. Take it or leave it, yet I couldn’t shrug the Pickle's story off as some sheer bunk, the details were falling in all too readily with the surrounding shit…
I woke up back into the current meeting just in time for the concluding address delivered by Lieutenant-Colonel from his perch: "Fuck it! You’re given the highest matter! The brain! The fucking gray stuff!."
Hmm, looks like he’s got bored already into some other gyrus of his gray matter…you're in the fucking army now…aw, fuck it all!.
~ ~ ~
At the Morning Dispensing, Chief of Staff announced that the day before he saw a soldier from our battalion floundering on an AWOL in the city. He had even chased the motherfucker but couldn't take over, however, the just retribution could never be avoided and now he would pass along the ranks and find that fucking stain defiling the glorious name of our battalion.
And so he paced along, scanning carefully the rows of petrified faces in First Company, Second Company, Third Company, and Fourth Company.
…fuck yourself, Major!..there remains only the gate and the road outside it…
Keeping silent, he slowly retraced alongside the ranks.
…what a dolt!..if you were chasing someone yesterday, there's no fucking chance he’d attend the Morning Dispensing…go and wipe up your drivel…the buddy's now kicking back around in a drier room…or substituting the on-duty serviceman… it might have also been one from those squads who never come to barracks slaving at the city plants for months…
The Major started his third attempt, the fucking optimist.
First Company, Second Company, Third Company, and Fourth Company.
..so happy now?..the stupid head gives no respite the legs…that's some fucking ar…
"Here he is!"
The index finger from the boxer-like fist of Major pointed at me.
"What?! If it were I my ass’d be kicked before the Dispensing!"
"To the clink!"
The on-duty officer and two dippers with red armbands approached me demanding to hand in my belt and escorted me to the checkpoint guardhouse. On the move, I went on to debate that the bitch of Major knew it as well as I did that it was not me, but they locked me in the clink all the same…
About an hour later the on-duty officer unlocked the door to give me back my belt because I was assigned to the penalty work – sprinkling sand over the ice covering the road to the city. The truck with its bed-load of sand was at the gate already…
Squinting my eyes at the whistling wind, I was dutifully throwing shovelfuls of sand over the iron tailgate of the moving truck. Yet, when it entered the city and went after another load of sand, our ways parted at the nearest traffic lights.
Then I jackalled for a bottle or 2 and woke up at dark already seated on a bench at the foot of the Komsomol Gorka Hill.
It turned out that the blizzard meanwhile got fully subsided and only slow big snowflakes were descending from the dense dark above and melting on my face and my chest in the wide-open pea-jacket. The passers-by flow was adding which signaled the end of the working day for non-manual employees. They hurried home, they had nothing to do with a lonely soldier peacefully taking his rest on the bench.
"Hey!" Someone still shook my knee.
"Fuck you fucking fucker!"
"How dare you? I'm a KGB worker!"
"Fuck your fucking KGB!"
"Just you wait! I'll call the patrol!"
Then I boarded a bus crammed up to its utmost. I was shaking after the long exposure to frost on that bench and suddenly in the dense mass of passengers there opened a cleft straight to a vacant seat. Yes, our people always loved and respected the defenders of Homeland…
We played at the New Year party at the Culinary College. To be more precise, they played it and I was simply an astral body inertially following The Orion.
The autumn draft from Pyatigorsk brought to our battalion a certain Volodya, handled Long. He was not only long but also skinny, with dark circles under his haggard sunken eyes as fit for a perma-fried junkie. But he played guitar like the guitarist from Led Zeppelin in the album "Stairway to Heaven". Alexander Roodko worshiped him, and I also admired his technique but as a person, he was just a piece of crap. "Why are you the way you are, Long?"
"I always push all my shit up so that all of you piss off and leave me alone."
He had a pleasant laugh but laughed too rarely. All in all, he was just a kid who turned a god when having a guitar in his hands… It goes without saying, the construction battalion ensemble did not perform the numbers from "Stairway to Heaven" but Long at times inserted in The Orion repertoire so mighty guitar riffs which Jimmy Page himself wouldn't be ashamed of.
Some Long's buddy from Pyatigorsk brought him his own guitar from home and for that New Year season, he also became The Orion’s drummer because he and Long were in the same rock group which disintegrated after they drafted the guitarist. And when the New Year season was over, he took Long's guitar back to Pyatigorsk, you couldn't keep such things at the battalion's Club…
Yura Nikolayev, the star of Crimean taverns, and Alexander Roodko, a virtuoso from the Dnepropetrovsk Philharmonics, were the vocalists at the New Year parties. They sang, each one in his intrinsic and inimitable style, accompanied by the improvised riffs in the spirit of Jimmy Page and at times of Hendrix, for a change, who also was Jimmy, by the by. However, for a normal music lover from the hinterland expanses nourished on the undying examples of the Soviet variety pop, such variations sounded unacceptably cacophonous, since they were not Kobzon-like in any way. So one of the future cooks had all the right to approach Yura Nikolayev and ask, "Sogwe, can you play Gussian folk music?" That's how she was screwing the words up with her burr.
And Yura knew that Roodko had got completely fallen under the influence of Long whose word became the last and decisive as to what to play and how to play it. Therefore, he directed the girl straight to Long so that she wouldn't lose time in vain.
As for Long, sprawling on a chair with his legs so far away and wide apart, his parade-crap jacket hung on the chair back, but the khaki tie in its obligatory place, only thrown over his shoulder, he at that moment was absolutely lost in Dryland inside his mouth. And there he sat staring fixedly at some or another thing among the distant hazy dunes, licking his scorched lips with his raspy, dry, tongue.
"I am sogwe, do you have Gussian songs in yohg gwepetwahg?"
With a superhuman effort, the warrior on the chair collected all his will and might, concentrated, and focused his optic organs in the direction of the remote sounds to discern that there was a girl speaking to him.
"Gussian? Gwepetwahg? Go stgaight to Comgade Goodko!" and he pointed his index finger at Alexander, who stood by the loudspeaker box pensively twirling the volume knob of his bass guitar amp.
The girl was baffled, naturally, being so ping-ponged from one musician to another, but she was a sturdy backcountry strain and went all the way to The Orion nominal leader.
"I am vegwe sogwe," replied Roodko, and presented her that misty blue gaze of his, "but we genegally don't play Gussian songs." And he sorrowfully sniffed up his everlasting rhinitis.
He would be happy to say it some other way but he couldn't because of his own burr. But she did not know about it!. Now, go and talk about congenial complexes but everything—EVERY THING!—is acquired thru the exposure…
At that party, I had a kissing session with Valya Papayani, a Stavropol Greek woman. Nothing more than kisses. She told me she was a teacher at that Culinary College, and that she was twenty-seven years old. So the next morning Battalion Commander announced at the Morning Dispensing, "Yesterday, one of our fucking musicians spread out a sixty-seven-old slut at the bottom of a staircase!" That slushy brained fucker couldn't even see 27 from 67!. Of course, it was that piece of shit, the Ensign-supervisor who ratted out…
Two days later there was another New Year party somewhere else, but I did not dance there at all. Because of so superior grass quality, the kif was the weed of weed. We blasted on the stairs and then went into the hall, the guys took their instruments, all so tenderly and gently, and they started to play. And the music was strangely distant as if from over a horizon and—which was characteristic—somehow deadened. When leaning your head to the loudspeaker you could see how its front was quaking with the sound, but all the same, it kept muffled.
Then I went to wander around the hall, for a change. And the people there, all of them, were, like, some plywood cut-outs, that is two-dimensional, each and every one. All the time, I wanted to take a look at what was on the backside of their plywood, but it did not work out because someone next was flowing up into the picture who also was a two-dimensional one. And, from far far away, so low and slow, came the sounds of muffled music…
Occasionally, above all the plywood heads, there floated a pair of eyeballs on their pair of stems—like periscopes—it was those pseudo sound engineers stoned to death but still roaming the space. So funny bastards!. And they laughed too. Where did they get such weed?.
We were brought home by midnight. There was a creaking Arctic frost… Under the light of the spiky stars in the sky, we dragged the equipment onto the scene of the dead empty and frozen cinema hall. No one spoke a word. No strength; no desire to. Because of All was emptiness.
The emptiness of emptinesses and nothing but emptiness…
~ ~ ~
Ah, yes! With the same autumn draft they had also driven in youngs from Moldova and Moscow, but quite a few – about 10 men.
Moldovans had so funny last names like Rahroo, Shooshoo, though their first names were quite normal… Vasya Shooshoo received a postal notification about a parcel from home awaiting him at the city main post-office. When going to get it, he invited Lyolik from Moscow, Vitalik from Simferopol, and me. We collected the parcel and found some canteen in the city, on the second floor. There Vasya opened the box and there was,
"Wine of Moldavia, my boy,
Is to give us a blissful joy!."
Vasya, as the generous host, fetched some macaroni with something on top and was filling our cups under the table which we held out of sight as well as the bottles to cut out unnecessary discussions with the canteen staff. That way we finished off I can’t say how many liters.
Well, what now? Saddle up! We went down to the first floor, and Lyolik took a leak there into the trash urn, while Vitalik, sort of, screened him off to observe decency in public eye.
That Lyolik was generally frostbitten. Once I went to the construction materials factory, and there was such a long conveyor-belt, mostly in the open, going high up under the roof upon a hill to carry clay or something. Lyolik's job there was to go up and down that hill with a breaker and prod what clay had got jammed on the conveyor belt. I can't remember exactly what I went there for, but the moment Lyolik saw me, the breaker in his hands simply fluttered from eager agitation, and it was in his eyes how really much he wanted to bump me off. Not for anything personal, just so, because I had turned up there when he conveniently had the breaker in his hands. However, he also hadn't the quadrangle of the circle problem solved yet. Bashing brains in with a breaker's not a big deal, but what then with the body? In short, he kept himself in hand at that time…
We left the canteen and strolled along in a friendly conversation; bright sun, white snow, life's beautiful.
Then Lyolik and Vasya started to sort it out whose homeland was better: Moscow or Moldova? Thus, word by word, they went over to gripping each other pea-jackets' breasts. But Vitalik—that's a capital fellow!—why, says he, on the street? Let's go in some yard.
In we steered into the yard of some two-story apartment block. Vitalik started reading instructions to them, like, sort of, a referee from London; no fighting with the belt plates, no kicking at the felled. They threw off their belts and hats, and pea-jackets, and – off they started the fun of heroes. Both of them over a meter and eighty with the fists like sledgehammers, and each scored hit was sending echoes about the hollow yard. A-hey! Let's sprinkle the snow with the red!.
Vasya broke Lyolik's brow. Lyolik, bleeding, fell on one knee. Vasya moved back to the linen ropes with some washing on it because the real heroes observe the rules.
That moment some geezer in a sailor's striped vest trotted down the porch way from the two-story apartment block. Someone from the rats of his neighbors, he reported, had called the militia. In short, the match had to be postponed. Lyolik washed his mug with the snow, the opponents put their outfits on and we left the stadium.
But the fighters' agitation did not show any abatement. It might’ve got bad enough so Vasya and Lyolik were disengaged and held apart. Then we split into pairs, I led Lyolik ahead, convincing him that Moscow was the capital of our Homeland, the best city on the Earth. About ten meters behind Vitalik and Vasya followed, discussing epic values of valorous Făt-Frumos from Moldovian myths. Thus, in peaceful conversations, we slowly strolled on when all of a sudden, on the right, a Volga braked and 2 militiamen in greatcoats jumped out of it on the sidewalk. Lyolik and I unfastened our belts and noosed them round the right wrists, leaving some length with the plate on its end for self-defense. The militiaman on the left flicked his gun up. A ridiculously small black hole in the bright ring of reflected sunshine looked square into my face.
At that very point, the second pair of the peripatetic interlocutors arrived at the epicenter of discontent. Carried away by their discussion, they hadn't been looking around. And all of a sudden—ta-dah!—an abrupt change of the scenery: 2 soldiers armed with plates of their belts against 2 militiamen with a gun.
From the overabundance of feelings and associations, Vitalik's legs bent limply, his mouth went a-gape and only at the last moment, he managed to lean his back against the fence…
Glory, glory be sung to you, the blessed land of Moldovia! You had conceived and brought forth Vasya Shooshoo the Valiant! The true warrior, filled with the spirit of soldierly brotherhood and conbatist solidarity, in his mighty embrace, seized he the nearest to him militiaman—the one without a gun it was—and cried, "Run!" There was no need he repeated it twice to me.
“ Oh, Gods! How frightened was I! How I fled!
Around and below me some fences, trees, alleys, hills, gullies, ramparts, and mountain ridges flashed… I came to myself only in some shed with wide lengthwise gaps between the horizontally nailed boards structuring its walls, and it took me a considerable stretch to bring my breath into a normal shape.
In the evening only Lyolik showed up in the barrack. He needed to wash his pea-jacket of the blood from the broken eyebrow. I led him to the stoker-house.
There they also had their news. The lining of one of the furnaces was all cracked, most likely caused by the overheating of the boiler. So that’s why last month they took us to the city bathhouse. Apparently, at the time of the accident, the smoke was pouring out from multiple crevices, carrying black soot which settled on the walls and ceiling in both halls of the stoker-house. My cosmetic overhaul was lost under uniformly even, greasy, black.
(…did I wallow in rancor? There hardly was much of gloating though – by that time I didn't care a fuck about anything…)
Loose materials are normally transported in special freight cars without a roof, and the floor in such cars is a series of iron hatches. When unloading, you just approach the car and knock aside the huge hook that fixes the hinged hatch-lid which now falls down allowing the loose material to spill out thru the opening.
I do not know for which organization those five cars came to the station of Stavropol, but I can vividly visualize how they clang-flapped the hatches to dangle open and nothing flowed out, so they took a look from underneath into the car hatches and saw a smooth, fine-grained, monolith. The sand had been sent wet or got drenched by rains while traveling from some much warmer corner in our boundless Mother-Homeland and the frosts, met further on along the endless way, turned it into five huge parallelepipeds of carload frozen within the mold of the cars' iron sides.
There was no time to wait for the reverse transformation, for if you did not return the car within 3 days after its arrival to the station, or to your organization sideway, then it was classified as "rolling stock delay" and penalized with a huge fine which grew still huger with each additional day of delay. The addressee organization of the permafrosted sand lost their head – the problem seemed absolutely unsolvable.
And who, by us, is there for cracking any problems, however unsolvable they were? Who puts to rights the shit fucked up by the managing yet stupid elite waltzing from womb to tomb with their heads never examined but their tongues, and lips, and stuff ever at ready? Well, yes, sorry, you know the answer to this trivial one about USSR slaves… Yet, just in case, which factor have you to throw in for solving a problem of any magnitude, eh? You’re kidding! I know that you know that I know that you know… So, that’s why 4 truck-loads of us were brought to the Stavropol freight station. And for that occasion, they even gave us smooth-bodied steel breakers.
To solve the problem thru the hatches opened at the car bottom was out of the question because the monolith reacted to the hits from below by sending the breaker back at you with the tantamount force as foreseen by the respective law of Physics. We had to fuck it from the top and bore down along the car sides. The rumors had it they even were going to bring some perforators for the job but until then – to attack with what's in hands!
For a while, I was at it but soon kicked because of being much too fed up with the fucking monotony of the process reiterated in all the years of my service. However, idle kicking back around in that cold weather was no good for my tender feet which had lived thru too many freezing ups and thawing offs…
Misha Khmelnytsky handed me some money to fetch "warming stuff". He himself couldn't do it, he was a Sergeant in charge of the Uzbeks…
And where only do them buddies manage to get money from?
Come on, it’s a breeze. MCU turned out mortar of different kinds in the quantities scribbled in the forms of application orders presented by the truck drivers. And if there happened no form with a signed order the driver handed over another piece of paper. To whom? To the Commander of the squad-team working at the MCU…
So off I started in the city… Because of being unfamiliar with the current neighborhood, it wasn’t at once that I found the right store. There I shoved the bottles under my pea-jacket cinched over by the belt, which load made me look so stout. Who’d ever said they poorly fed the construction battalion?
I went back with my head kept down not from shame just because of the snow lashing against my face.
"Why don't you salute? Haven't they taught you?"
By the Statute of the Internal Military Service, you must salute every senior in rank, be it even just a Lance Corporal. Yet, the hard snow pelting prevented zeroing in time the officer who stopped me, and then how could I throw my hand up in salute which surely would set the bottles inside my pea-jacket a-playing jingle bells?
"My fault, Comrade…" I scanned his shoulder-strap and could not make it out – no stripes, like by an Ensign, and only one star, yet much bigger than that by a Major, and only then I saw leaves in his collar patches. "…Comrade Major-General, I was lost in thoughts."
"He lost in thoughts! Dismissed!"
And that was right – a general and a private in black shoulder-straps had, practically, no common gossip even if it was the only officer who addressed me with the honorific "You" in all the 2 years…
~ ~ ~
In place of Captain Chernykh, a Siberian, another Captain arrived to take command over Fourth Company, transferred from the Mongolian steppes.
He was the pleasantness itself with an exceptionally long hook of a nose reaching his upper lip constantly stretched in a gracious smile. When on duty, he did not keep to the Commander office but walked the barrack aisle sharing his friendly boasts about the money certificates he had brought from Mongolia, and occasionally started small wrestling matches with soldiers. And those matches made him so happy and agitated; his eyes began to shine, red blush crept into his cheeks and the hanging nose began to scrape already both of his lips.
I couldn't get it at once although something pretty familiar flickered in his grimaces, intonations, yet what exactly I could not…Damn! I got it! The boy from Nalchik!. But then, well, that's an officer…Besides, there was his wife…
In short, I dubbed him after the name of the Mongolian currency and the reasonable handle immediately took root among the soldiers of the company. So, at another of evening roll-calls, Tughrik once again got into how rich he was with all those certificates for tughriks, and that the first thing next day he was going with his wife to buy a new refrigerator, and a new wristwatch as well, because the one he had was just a shame and had to be thrown away, regardless of its name: "Commander's".
I could not stand it any longer and spoke up, "If you don't want to throw it away then give it to some soldier."
To which, he immediately called out, "Who said that?! 2 steps out of the ranks!"
I stepped out. He approached me and in a demonstrative way unfastened the wristwatch strap. "Here you are!"
I took the watch and put it into my pocket, although he certainly expected a different outcome and had to suffer that friendly small surprise.
However, the next day it was me to be surprised with the hell of trouble brought about by that fucking watch. Half-day and no less I walked the streets attempting to sell it and no one agreed to buy. They knew if a conbatist offers you a watch it should have been pinched or at least cut off from a cold body. And a good watch it was, I swear, once my father paid 25 rubles in Moscow for the exact same thing, but I asked just meager 7.
For the first time, I was not jackalling and stuff but offering a square deal… Nah, commerce is a dead thing if there is no demand. In the end, I took it to a watchmaker's, and when the mujik there suggested 3 rubles I just had no choice.
Relived, I stepped out of the workshop with the dough earned so honestly just to be confronted by an alky, "Hey, soldier! Buy a watch from me! I'll give it for just 3 rubles!" That's a coincidence for you! But those sots got outrageously brazen, they did not even stop at messing around with conbatists…
A week later, Vanya told me how a young cook was sleeping recently in the workshop of the stoker-house. Being the on-duty officer that day, Tughrik stuck his long nose even to the stoker-house and saw the young on the mattress spread over the workbench. He clutched the soldier’s dick and stuck like shit to a shovel, "Gimme! Gimme it! " And now, concluded Vanya his story, that Tughrik was already sucking two young cooks, while one of them was, in the intervals, fucking his wife…
Once in the barracks, the wafflister made a try to push me around, "Seems, like you think you are so great a grandpa, eh?"
I did not say a single word to it, but only protruded my lips to issue three tiny sounds, "Tchmo-tchmo-tchmo!"
He mutely turned around and walked away with his back stiffened at unforgiving attention. Since then, he dropped to notice me at all because I was such a scoundrel. “A naasty scoundreel!”
A newcomer dipper appeared in the company barrack who was transferred from another construction battalion somewhere in Dagestan where he went to an AWOL and caught his wife a-cheating on him with another man. He tried to raise dust for that reason but got tied up and locked in the clink which he flooded with so convincing promises to bump off everyone involved as well as himself for a dessert, that they transferred him to us – the remotest point in the same Military District… The soldier was of some Caucasian origin, I can't be more specific, in Dagestan alone there were about 48 different nationalities.
He did not talk to anyone and no one talked to him. Because of fear maybe, kinda when seeing a new beast in your native cage.
One evening, he sat on a stool in the aisle of the company barracks with a newspaper in his hands. I was passing by and some headline attracted my attention. I mean that all I wanted was just to have a look and give it back. But he replied, "Fuck off!"
"What?! Thief-swaggering, salaga?"
He jumped up to his feet. And I never had a chance to reach him, a whole pack flew in to kick up a blizzard. The private broke away and ran out of the barrack. And—which is characteristic—no grandpa was in that pack, just only dippers. Later I figured out that they were so pissed because of his making them fear him for several days; they were scared of his being not like them. No ethnic grounds though, just because of his family tragedy he harbored the danger of bumping you off and fuck the quadrangle of the circle problem. Any pack is cemented by fear…
Yet, the buddy ran away no farther than the Stuff barrack, he did not have the nerve to make for his native Dagestan… The on-duty officer came to our barrack and led me to the clink already occupied, in part, by a Dnepropetrovsk buddy kicking back around. The serviceman had some really nice weed on him and on high we went.
Then we lay upon the plank decking covered with some make-belief mattresses of padded jackets, and he started continuous lapping on about the whole of our great power since long being under the control of secret network of a certain shadow organization with well-developed structure of branched interaction because we all were moving toward one great goal, regardless of whether we realized that or not… In general, he performed much better than a company zampolit at the Sunday political classes, that kinda Knight Templar from Dnepropetrovsk delivering his profound briefing to the surrounding darkness in the clink.
But if you were such a fucking Frank Mason how could they fucking rake you up to a construction battalion, eh? However, I did not interfere with his structural analysis because he was the decision-making body in charge of that quite decent weed distribution.
Then the door opened and shed in some light from the bulb in the corridor while letting a droll Gingerbread Man of Tatar origin roll inside. Wow! Who's that with so round happy mug? Alimosha! What's brought you here, bro?.
On the arrival of his truck to the gate, the on-duty Left-tent suspected him of being in a state of intoxication to some degree, the stars even intended to search Alimosha and detect a possible attempt at smuggling alcohol into detachment barracks. At that point Alimosha began to knock himself on the chest, then he unbuttoned his pea-jacket, and flung it open to demonstrate what an honest serviceman he was, and as for the smell on his breath it was not his slip at all but resulted from Zhigulyovsky beer drunk accidentally in absolute belief it was lemonade or some other potable shit in the bottle which he came across in the dark basement, which bitch could it possibly leave there? The Lefty ordered to lock him up but Alimosha still could not shut up all the way to the clink. That was why he joined our conference in so immodestly unbuttoned state.
