Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Collecting the typewritten pages of the last story, I gave Valya the powder box and asked to look under the lid. She picked up from it a long thin string of white metal.
"Melchior?" inquired the typist from the next desk. I did not explain anything to anyone: whoever wanted would find a way to check what was of what… That month, the alimony to Nezhyn and Konotop again nosedived to 15 rubles each…
A couple of days before May Day, I again felt like giving in to rituals. From 13 Decemberists, I brought a piece of scarlet cloth, 40 cm × 40 cm, to the site in the locomotive depot. I nailed it to a two-meter beam from the pile of remnants of former trestles, and it turned a cheerful bunting. So that it was not in the way with the work of our team, I fixed it upon the finished corner of the third-floor walls, and there it splashed happily in the spring wind, above the sun-gleaming river of railway tracks that streamed towards the station.
Peter Kyrpa asked me if I was again for it, and I drove him a fool about the day of the international solidarity of working-class people. He promised they would soon come to nab me again, but our team tacitly dismissed his prophecies. Laying the courses of bricks in the wall, we sometimes looked back at the ripples in the flaunting red above our stooped working-class backs…
On the morning of May Day, in my jeans and a T-shirt, I went out to the veranda to put my shoes on. My parents also were there though for many years already they considered themselves not liable to partaking in them those demonstrations. I sat down on a small stool made by golden hands of my father, to tie the strings on my black leather shoes.
"You're not going anywhere," my mother said, and she moved to block the way to the glazed veranda door.
"You'll stay home," confirmed my father, and bolted the same door with the steel latch produced by him at the RepBase. The happening looked like a home arrest without trial and investigation. Still sitting, I bowed my head and, in a low voice, began a plaintive air:
"Oh, Dnipro, Dnipro,
you're a mighty stream,
With the clouds afloat above you…"
I did not know the following lyrics from that song, so I got up and took a step towards the door. My father seized my neck with the grip of his working-class arms of a hammerer, diesel engine tamer, and skillful locksmith. I always admired the bass-relief bumps of his biceps. My mother hung on my opposite shoulder.
Schlepping their total weight, I continued slow progress towards the door. There, I pulled the latch aside, wriggled out from the suffocating grip of the 2 opponents, and jumped off the porch onto the brick-paved path to the wicket.
"Buster!" shouted my father.
"Scoundrel!" backed him up my mother.
With a victorious sneer, I exclaimed, "Ca-up, Mom!"
(…in our family tradition, at the age of 2 I pronounced "catch up!" that way…)
Since then I stopped speaking to my parents, and I also dropped participating in the May and November demonstrations. Instead, on reaching Professions Street, I turned left and walked to the very outskirts, where the khuttas were replaced with meadows bordered by trees in the windbreak belt along the railroad embankment. From there, the deserted dirt road led me to the station of Kukolka.
I did not go to the station though, but after a couple of kilometers followed the solitary track branching off the main railway. It was never used by trains because of being a reserve track in case of war. Such a case would make Konotop a target for bombardment, as a strategically important junction, and the reserve track detoured the would-be-destroyed city… Following that track thru the empty fields, I reached the forest by the Seim river.
To the Seim itself, I went out not far from the local train stop "Priseimovye", and walked to the place on its bank where once, still unmarried, I spent a day with Eera. In that spot, I read an issue of Morning Star, almost completely, bypassing the last sports page, which I always ignored anyway. The newspaper was left in the grass on the bank, in case it might come handy for someone.
The return journey was made along the main two-track embankment. I entered Konotop together with it and for a long time continued walking along the adjacent gardens, right up to the second bridge, where the embankment turned to the railway station. There we parted, and I went on, by the outskirts alongside the Swamp. Already in the late evening darkness, I crossed Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street behind the old cemetery and, going up Sosnowska street, I reached the terminal of streetcar 3, from where to 13 Decemberists there remained hop, skip and a jump.
On the whole, it was like whirling in a wide vicious circle, with a return to the starting point after walking all day. The music from the demonstrations loudspeakers was substituted with self-made marching chants, like:
"So what about
are we laughing
while our shoes
this trail is roughing?"
But all that was in the future, while for the very first time, I did not have Morning Star, instead of which there was a pinprick feeling in my chest on the left. And it did not want to disappear, no matter how often I scratched the T-shirt in that area.
Even at night the annoyance persistently stayed by me, so in the morning I decided to have a session of labor therapy. I went to the locomotive depot, penetrated its grounds deserted and submerged in quietude, because of the second holiday day, and went to the construction site of the administrative building.
At the hillock of white silicate bricks dumpage, I planted an empty pallet and started stacking bricks on it. At times, it was necessary to press my chest with the left elbow, because the pin in there got replaced with a thick knitting needle. When the standard 12 courses of bricks were stacked up on the pallet, I told myself that my case was not terminal, and climbed to the incomplete third floor. There I took the Jolly Roger down from the corner wall, tore it from its mast, and slipped into a loop-hole in the slabs, and buried with dried mortar lumps and other debris…
Kyrpa's threats remained just empty words, I was never taken to Romny that summer. Might it be I had grown wiser? Very questionable indeed. It's just because I had not run into a sore spot of some high-ranking bitch of a cadre… By the middle of May, the needle, or pin, or whatever it was to pierce my chest, gradually dissolved, and many years later I realized that it was the first of heart attacks suffered by me…
~ ~ ~
In my rough plan there cropped up another, but already pleasant, detail, that of assembling the typewritten pages into one complete volume of stories. For that purpose, I bought a folder from the Department Store, with a hard plastic cover and nickel-plated rings inside. They usually use such folders for annual accounting reports lined up on the shelves in the accountancy office; sturdy, respect inspiring rows. To punch the holes for the folder rings in the pages of text, I borrowed the puncher from the secretary of Manager of SMP-615 in the administrative building. The new boss’s complexion grew green when saw me in his poultry farm, however, his sore spots did not qualify yet to be considered high-ranking enough…
The folder with the collection of translated short stories was holstered into a festive-looking cellophane bag and I took it—bugle your trumpets, fanfarade! Roll, timpani, roll!—in the capital city of Kiev, to the book publishing house Dnipro.
In the first room, where I proudly announced the arrival of a collection of translations [Here! Here!] of short stories by William Somerset Maugham, the jovial young man informed that he was not the person in charge of Maugham, and the expert I needed was to be found 2 offices farther down the corridor. If would I like him to have me seen over there? With dignified gratitude, I declined.
In the indicated office, there sat a fat, but still young, man staring in disgust at a skinny pile of typewritten pages inside an open looseleaf folder of purple cardboard, with short white strings in its covers spread wantonly atop his desk… He reluctantly opened the heavy hard-plastic-armored file that I handed him over his desk, and glanced at the title of the first story in the collection.
The Rain
He shut the file abruptly and asked who I was sent by.
In confused bewilderment, my mind revved to its limits: …forbidden to come here on your own accord?…too high circles… I should have been sent by some or another duke***, so that the courtier-receptionist could guess whose vassal I was… to compare the duke's weight with that of his suzerain—marquis***—and know how to handle me… and then one phone call to verify—just in case—for him to decide to which drawer he might safely stick it in… and don’t you cherish no hope, under so polished a shebang, to find a hole for the f-f..er..I mean, freelancer-outsider.
Meanwhile he, just in case, opened the volume once again, someplace in the middle, and immediately slammed it shut.
"I'm just an errand-boy," clarified I, "They asked me to take it to your publishing house, so I brought it here."
"Who?"
I opened the file to show the sticker on inside of its back cover with my Konotop address. "This friend of mine," said I.
It was below his position to talk to a messenger who was not sent by even somewhat petty baron but came from.. what was it? Konotop, or something he never needed no slush from… I coldly replied to his official goodbye and left the room.
The next evening, in Konotop, coming from work, I saw on my shelves a weighty postal package wrapped in their usual mustard-brown hard-duty paper. I had no reason to open the parcel. What for? By its size and familiar weight, I knew what was inside. The annual report for the past 6 years of my life, comprising 472 typewritten pages of 35 short stories by W. S. Maugham, translated into Ukrainian.
Strangely, the posted parcel hadn't reached Konotop before I came back from Kiev. And it was also odd that the unopened package with unread stories left me so frostbitten indifferent.
(…as it turned out, those 6 years did not fit into the feudally regulated grid of book publishing system.
"Who sent you to our reality laid out in so nice rectangular way?"
"Sorry, I've knocked on a wrong door…"
Quoting the habitual byword from my Uncle Vadya: “Farewell, dear peers and peerixes, sirs and sirixes!”
And he was a great connoisseur of vassal dependencies from The History of Middle Ages school textbook …)
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Ivory Tower
Instead of a volume of short stories by W. S. Maugham in Ukrainian (a single copy from 150 000 published) a weighty parcel rested, dead as a doornail, on my shelves. All that depended on me for accomplishment of the undertaken project was done in full, which stripped my further living on of any goal whatsoever. Life still rolled along the rutted trail, even if aimless and unplanned already. However, when you drop asking the useless question "what for?", then a Thursday visit to the bathhouse with the steam room, concluded by 2 bottles of beer, would suffice to motivate living for another week. Marvel at monks in the Tibet, who rough it up there though deprived of even the mentioned stimulants.
In my, not quite Tibetan, yet well-structured way of life there felt an undeniable lack of carnal pleasures. I caught myself thinking this thought on the evening when, coming after work to 13 Decemberists, I cast the customary glance at the mingle-mangle crowd of shoes and slippers about the shoe shelf on the veranda. The in-depth self-interrogation, which followed the hot trail of the glance, made clear that my eyes attempted at zeroing in on the high-wedge Austrian high boots absent there. Of course, it was not the eyes' fault that made in Austria footwear was so durable and unwilling to wear out from my recollections. Yet, what high boots might possibly come to the veranda in summertime, eh? And for what reason would she ever come to Konotop, let alone 13 Decemberists?. Such rhetorical questions helped to make me a laughing stock before myself, but could not prevent nightly ejaculations…
In the dead of night, my sleep was interrupted because I threw my head up and dropped it sharply onto the wooden armrest above my pillow in the folding coach-bed. However, the pain and blood from the broken eyebrow did not obscure the fact of soaked underpants. I peeled them off, used to wipe my loins, and threw behind the other armrest by the wallpapered wall, they could sit there till the morning. Then I got up, made a couple of steps thru the darkness to switch the lamp on the tabletop.
Bypassing the mirror on the way back, I averted my face – no good in adding this grim nudist to other blobs stored in its db—a toddler amazed by a too silent playmate behind the glass surface, a dude giving crick to his neck in a sidelong glance from his upturned face at his hair not yet reaching his shoulder blades, a young couple seated on the sunlit davenport fucking happily in the company of their reflections, soundless yet frisky. Out of the mirror’s sight, I stooped and yanked the blanket aside. Hell! A damp dark spot blotted the wrinkled landscape in the crimson tablecloth, which since long had lost its fringe and become the folding coach-bed’s cover.
"That's right," said I to myself. "That's exactly what you stole it for." Then I pulled, folded, and tucked the soaked spot so as to prevent body’s contact to the jism, and lay back down to sleep the night thru.
"They are simply white spots
Those cryptic black holes…
…lure the quest to lose way in tornado-like whirlings…
…with the black semen splotches in the white of bedsheet…"
And also using public means of transportation in rush hours became a real trial at times. I did not mind being squeezed from all sides by passengers packed tightly in the streetcar to give you the shape of the concave quarry pip in the Ace of Diamonds, as long as they don’t shove you against the rondure of a young female ass, which is grossly unfair. Damn! The situation fires up a breaker-like boner on your part, which fact can’t be concealed by the raincoats on both of you. Yet, with no room to step back in the crowd of passengers pressed in like two barrels of herring into one, all there remains to do is just swaying together with the streetcar in its swift run and keeping a despondent stare stuck to the window, like, I have nothing to do with that swelled thing. But if not yours, then whose?
"Blessed be the curves and bends
And other twists of tramway tracks,
The accomplices of the sweetest touches,
Quite decent, almost accidental…"
It's hard to list all sorts of things exposing sexual starvation, shortened by the scientifically bent folks to the term "libido". And they highly recommend the application of that damned Libido medicine for those engaged in creative professions, like, to give a sharp rise to the engaging drive in your manufactures. But what the f-f..er..I mean, frolic was I supposed to do with that f-f..er..funky Libido, being neither Vincent van Gogh nor Walt Whitman?!. And that f-f..er..well, feverish libido could seize me suddenly not only in the means of public transportation, or in erotic nightmares, but even at the workplace. Only that at work, the creative orgasm was reachable without the physical erection.
For instance, during the finishing works at the 100-apartment block, an unfamiliar young plasterer seemed very attractive to me. A passing glance was quite enough to see the rural beauty’s immunity to any intellectual pursuits, but the purity of the blush, the tempting outlines of her breasts and thighs (discernible even thru the deforming spetzovka) disarmed and captivated me so that I decided to gush up Song of Songs of my own, using the plasterer for a model…
Normally, the plastering works are started at a construction site after covering the floor slabs with the layer of expanded clay. Expanded clay is a good thermal insulation material, but it crunches underfoot until it is covered with the screed at the subsequent stages of finishing works.
Turning a couple of times to my cautious steps over the expanded clay—I neared the doorway to make the details of the supposed masterpiece more precise—the model asked Trepetilikha, who was plastering a jamb in the same room, "Could that bozo stole my trowel?"
"Not a chance," replied Trepetilikha. "This one if even stumbles on your trowel would never pilfer it."
Given the dimensions of my libido at that period, the new Song of Songs would have easily surpassed the Solomon's creation, and only the cynic suspicion of my involvement in the theft saved the world literature from the upcoming reassessment of all its values.
"From the highest cliff
Over the sea, blue and boundless,
Off I dumped my libido
To get rid of it
Yet… O, my!.
All of the vast blue sea
Drowned in my bluesy libido.
Oops!."
Hell!. Two divorces and three stretches in the Romny madhouse leave you with a damn slim prospect of developing a stable relationship, or any at all for that matter.
But you cannot lace up a blizzard… Good news, it's not whipping my face, but pushing from behind towards the station in the early morning twilight. Thick streams of snow pressed into dense mass by the squally wind drive the twilight back towards the darkness.
Knee-deep in snowdrifts I flounder on by the supposed service path alongside the railway track. The concrete pillars holding the contact wire above the rails serve the milestones not to get lost in the desert of floating snow. It's better not to look back – the stream of blinding snow instantly sticks like a chilly mask all over the face. Besides, there's nothing behind to look for – whatever has been there is just gone.
But why do I see her naked body as white as the churning white foam of this frenzied blizzard? And she's not alone – having a sex with someone. Not me…
I turn my face back to the snowy slaps, to wake up, not see. In my brain, I switch on the splashes of the organ from the House of Organ Music, they are tattered, crisp and not precise, yet distract…
… I must be a pervert indeed…no normal one would have a hardon watching his wife fucking somebody else midst this snowstorm…
…what wife? You don't have no wife!.
…okay, not wife then – the love of the lifetime…
…shut up, asshole!.
I shook my head in desperation and, with a groan, wandered on. A hard glancing blow from behind grazed at my left shoulder calling to order. The local train from Nezhyn making thru the blizzard for the station.
…the trains are always right, they don't have deviations…
…look, the blurred lights ahead, above the fourth platform…
…from there in the common throng makes thru the blizzard to the station square, to our Seagull…
…everything is okay, I'm just like everyone else…
~ ~ ~
In a late spring evening on the station square, someone had a breakdown. Maybe, the heart needed a time break or something, but the man collapsed onto the asphalt. However, the ambulance was quick and pulled up by when the females' "ah! oh!" were still floating over the small crowd around the vacationer.
Going to the railway station thru the Loony park, I missed the beginning and only watched the final act – the ambulance departure followed by dispersing of a group of people. However, the pedestal of the Lenin monument in the park was still sending back tiny echoes of "ah!" so reconstructing what had just been there was as easy as summing up 2 zeroes.
Along the alley opening to the square, one of the incident witnesses was nearing me, pensively pacing in the counter direction. When we get close to each other, she suddenly repeated "ah!" rehearsed shortly before, uplifted her arms, a kinda dancer in The Swan Lake ballet, and fell on me.
What else could I do? Naturally, I caught the fainter in her fall, by the armpits. Then I gentlemanly dragged the swoony swan onto the bench of green beams in the low wall of trimmed bushes.
She sat silently, her head bowed, and I gallantly kept shut up, in the same deep shadow under the tree blocking the light from the lamp up the alley. Seated next to her, I fed an inaudible sermon to myself on pointlessness of the slightest advances by a guy of my pitch-black past, especially in the city where everyone knew anyone else. Who’d need a goner’s courting?. Who’d care for a mentally compromised freak let loose till next pinch up for a yearly session to get his head tweaked at the Romny madhouse?
When our reciprocal silence became too monotonous, she put her hand on my shoulder to say in a wearily meek tone of voice, "Thank you" and left the bench.
I dismally looked after the blurred spot of her long light cloak moving away up the alley, and I thought to myself: "Moron! Couldn't you prop the girl by your arm around her waist? And let her decide whether to put her head on your shoulder or say "don't!" and leave? No? You're too smart for that, you made the decision for both! Okay! Now stay with your fucking stream of consciousness, with your libido, and the endlessly long nights, like by that princess on a pea!"
"Had an encounter with Katya in the park, brother?"
"What's the buzz, Natasha?"
"Come on! Katya's from our accounts department. She told me herself how she nearly fainted in Loony and fell on you."
"She took me for someone else, or him for me."
"Stop fibbing to me!"
"I wish I were as lucky as that jackass with Katya-girlies dropping on him in parks!."
~ ~ ~
On the payday, I got off our Seagull at the bus station and turned into the post-office to send 30 & 30 alimony. Then I crossed Club Street back and proceeded alongside the Loony park towards the railway station.
"Hey! You're from The Orpheuses, right? Ogoltsoff?
…a young man of my age, heading to the station with a woman by his side, his wife, probably… "Yes, it's me."
"Do I know you! You studied in Nezhyn and I knew your wife Olga!"
…no, never met him, and he was not alone to know Olga after she became my wife…
He looked around as if seeking some piece of hard and weighty rock to swat against my skull with. Then he pointed his finger at his companion who unswervingly stared aside.
"See? Got her teeth into and having me in all the holes!"
…yea, I see it alright, man, having it in all the holes… some relic from the antediluvian life… you wander around beset with snotty sorrows for the flute of Eera and they still pop up with their news bulletins on Olga…
"Yea, I see. Say 'hello' to my wife Olga."
"Damn! You're some f-f.. fool driver!"
Leaving them to each other, I turned off Club Street into the park along the walk coming up to the Loony Palace of Culture, but I bypassed it on the right and walked on behind the white back of Lenin to the side exit from the park, then past School 11 to the terminal of Streetcar 3 by the Under-Overpass. At Bazaar stop, Skully and Vladya boarded the streetcar.
"Hi!" said I. "How are you?"
Skully nodded warily and they both also said, "Hi!"
The rumbling streetcar was carrying us towards School 13. I gave a little chuckle.
"What are you laughing at, Sehrguey?" asked Skully with an unheard of correctness. That's some news! For the first time since we’ve met he called me by my name, skipping both my school and lahbooh handles. Yes, and with that pompous circumspection, kinda lord-speaker addressing a peer from the opposition faction.
“Ah!. Just remembered Vladya's verse. Remember, Vladya? We were writing poems during classes. Once I composed a piece with Vladya in it; he was blowing the horn and clanging his sword in a battle with another knight. So he turned out an answer:
“Don't ever try
To put on me
The wreaths of military glory.
As for the bugle, I wasn't that horny…
But low and cozy in the ditch…”
"Well, now, do you remember, Vladya?"
He vaguely shrugged his shoulders and gave a so apologetic look to the passengers seated and standing around that it was clear right away, he did not keep any recollections of the sort. Not to strain my old bosom friends any longer, I got off by School 13…
On foot went I along Nezhyn Street, turned into Eugenia Bosh Street, and then into Kotovsky Street. My feet knew those streets by heart, I could fully trust them and, at leisure, think about this or that…
…the translator from Vsesvit was good at rendering that Czech's verses… now, how would it look in Russian, I wonder?…probably, something like…
"I walk and smile just to myself
And then the thought
'What would the people think of me?'
Turns quiet smiling in too loud a laughter…"
…no, in Vsesvit it's still better good job by the translator yet the Czech is a hugely better fellow and the Czechs in general are good fellows… if we for instance take Jan from the Bolshevik…
…stop! no poking the Bolshevik's ashes or else we'll have another turn of plaintive weeping to irrigate with bitter tears the dry and petrified sponge which for a year already kicks back dropped in the nook unreachable behind the fridge…
…but this Czech is good indeed… showed them all what the last will of a poet should look like… before him they turned out only primitive two-liners: ah, bury me so that in spring the nightingale's song will sound o'er my grave… but me, please, where the Dnieper's flow is heard from afar… base and selfish consumerism… go and learn from the laughing Czech… everything's instructive and to the point… starting with the tree kind whose roots will suck the juice from the buried body and pump it up right to the flowering twigs so that the bees collect the honey for young beauties to grease their buns when having tea for breakfast in their beds… that's a suave gallant for you! in his unblemished shining armors! who cares that I am dead? says he… it’s not a reason to deprive, he says, the customer ladies of our specialty delicacies!.. yet you can’t blame Czechoslovakia alone for his fanciful kinks because schizophrenia is supranational indestructible and indivisible… although time and again there pops up some or another defector like Freud who cinch their specific vision of the world into the cart of servicing their wallets and open Viennese schools… to keep the pot boiling… for scurvy metal he lost his chance to be a normal schizophrenic as free as the rest of us… the weakling got caught with the lime for dickhead suckers mind well sonny “the longer the line of zeroes in your bank account the cooler you are”… some complete hooey you get from them those zeroes, bro… yet the Cave-Mommy as ever feels so mighty comfortable for the blind… and with the final fall of curtain after the life spent among all kind of neurasthenic ladies with their hysterics and in a company of naphthalenized spiders of scientistical PhDs did you not ask your mug’s reflection in the looking-glass well what now Ziggy have your Poles helped you out?. give back my schizophrenia please set me free… yet what is freedom and how to see its fore from its behind?. as Peter Lysoon cares to put it… freedom from what?. and here you get fixed up with the straitjacket of national traditions… for the Brit Shakespeare it's freedom from time… the connection of times is broken describes he a petty clinical case… while in Ukrainian the very term denotes either separation from God Almighty or else can be interpreted as some incognito "free divine"… doesn't matter though since the existence of both freedom and God is beyond provability… and seeing that tether keeps back no longer whizzing ahead in frenzied rapture… still watch your step buddy the wild is good but smarting chill and wet… and here lies the whole dirty trick impossibility to both give the slip to the commandments getting away from all kind of safety regulations to keep the herd consolidated by and at the same time enjoy the goodies of the in-herd lifestyle with a warm female next to your side and cool vodka from the freezer, see?. more quirky task than cracking the circle quadrature you know…
…what's that? Decemberists Street? so soon? some gag… Mercutio was in the luck to have a friend like Romeo who would snap him back to earth in time… "peace, f-f..er..friend of mine, thou talk'st of nothing! watch around or you'll get over to Tsiolkovsky Street in no time!.""
…strange…why is Lenochka strolling in front of the gate?.
"Dad, you've got a visitor."
"What visitor?"
"I don't know, he says he's your friend."
With the chink of the handle-latch in the wicket, I entered the yard.
On the bench by the porch way, looking up at the lower branches in the Apple tree whose trunk served also the natural backrest, my visitor sat, aka my friend, blowing cigarette smoke up into the leaves.
"Hello, Twoic."
"Hi, Hooey-Pricker."
~ ~ ~
He arrived from the nearby Bakhmuch town in the neighboring Chernigov region by 17.15 local train and had to go back by the last one going in the Kiev direction. Before the departure, there remained not too much time, yet not too little either, and we strolled to the station in no hurry. On the way, we remembered the old golden times, and our mutual friends: Petyunya and Slavic. Twoic outlined, in general terms, their cases for the past period. With a sigh of consolation, he admitted knowing that all had gone wrong for me. Well, meanwhile, he graduated and, in agreement with his appointment, became the teacher of Chemistry in the Varvarovka village, 6 kilometers from his home.
Such fortunate appointment of my friend did not surprise me because in the era of deficits the Goods Manager at a district trading base (so his mother's position) had more influential leverage than that by the Secretary of District Party Committee.
At his workplace in the neighboring village of Varvarovka, everything was drowned in the hooch and only a remarkable specimen with genetic stamina in regard to homemade alcohol (thanks to Cossack ancestors) would have survived the constant submersion. The periods between educating the school kids were spent in friendly bouts with the local toughs of the district capital, the Bakhmuch town, and trips to Nezhyn to have sex with one or another of eager sluts at the student hostel.
Village teachers were exempt from the army draft, as well as persons over the twenty-seven-year-old limit. On reaching the specified age, Twoic realized that it was time for him to grow. A professor at the Nezhyn institute, fed tame with deficit goods from Twoic's mother's trading base, made protection at some research institute in Kiev.
