The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

"Yes! Can you imagine?"

"How could you!"

"But it’s you who I loved!"

"You hadn't not known it was me!"

"Hey, think a bit! Since it turned out to be you, then I have no chance to fall in love with anyone else. It's only you that I can love."

"Just a minute ago you loved someone who wasn’t me, and you'll do it again!"

"Who else can I love? Can’t you see it's only you who turns me on?"

"You still can't get it!"

"Okay. So I shouldn't have fallen in love with you?"

"No!"

"Never?"

"No, never!"

A vicious circle – love me but never fall in love with me. But she looked real cool in her sports, and she moved so classy…

(…with all my mug's game to show off as the crossbred of Casanova and a refined aristocrat of spirit, I am a classical example of a natural chump.

Why? Too gullible and too ready to fall for a new bauble…)

It was enough for Ilya Lipes to drop an unfamiliar word "she-oxen" and I followed him like a puppy on the lead. "Come on! Let's visit the she-oxen!" The casually used term triggered an imagination flight picturing a skulk of free of complexes hetaeras, but, in reality, they were the same girls as in the hostel. One she-ox was throwing her birthday party.

And now in that half-dark room in an old private house, we were, like, having fun, like, dancing all-out fast dance. Then I would lie with some of them on one of the beds in the next room, and she would in half-sec get topless while blocking any further movements, like any other oxen-vixen, with their usual obnoxious sermon, "Do not torture yourself, nor me!" As if she was strong-armed or blackmailed to go to bed with me. Why coming, if you’re so stalwart lesbian or in your everlasting times? To get free rape?!. And so I got blues and went out in the corridor to ring Eera for to disclose over again I loved her, an emo chump.

And she got it right away, "What music is there? Where are you?"

Usually, I called her from the booth in the Hosty’s lobby which was almost soundproof, that odd vestibule after the ever-locked door among those 2 entrances, separated from its operational twin by the glass-partition. We would talk for hours until her people at home needed the telephone or some students started to knock at the glass door from the lobby. The talks about absolutely nothing, I just loved to hear her voice. She would say a word over there and I got carried beyond myself wallowing in thrill, in here…

"Just somewhere, I'll explain later. Not a phone talk. I love you. Bye."

(…everyone knew then that the phones were tapped by the organs so the phrase "not a phone talk" precluded any further questions…)

And later, I had to drive a fool about a bro drag dealer arriving in Nezhyn for a visit who asked me to show him the way to a safe house, where the music was played on the account of his arrival, but I did not stay there and left after calling her on the phone… Some stuff that would hardly fit even in both elephant's ears, to believe such a helpless bullshit one had to be very eager to believe. Although, she might have believed after those icons… Ah, yes, the icons…

They told me that Veerich wanted to see me, and I went to his place. On the winter holidays, he was skiing in the Carpathians and broke one of his legs and both skis. So he kept to bed, plastered. He and his student wife rented a flat in the city. When she went out to the kitchen, Veerich started his monologue about the too far-reaching dirty hand of Zionism groping for our cultural heritage and spiritual assets. That all was to the fact, that Ilya Lipes had 3 to 4 Orthodox icons in his briefcase, under his bed in the hostel. Somewhere they had bombed a village church and now Lipes wanted to push the catch off like antique rarities. How to bear a so cocky impropriety? If not for the plaster, Veerich would never allow trampling our holy shrines… In short, could I bomb the icons back and restore historical justice?

(…for me, the inter-confessional contradictions were null and void, so on that point Veerich was just another odd voice in the wilderness. I could still believe in Zeus or, say, Poseidon, but all the gods in vogue at present times do not stir any sympathy in me, and in the same breath (which is characteristic) I don't believe in atheism either.

But the request to bomb was properly addressed. No problems! I'm doing what I'm told to do and thinking after it is done…)

In the morning I waited until the students left the hostel for their respective classes. One kick from the drowsy silence of corridor at the unsuspecting door and the lock jumped out… Everything as described – the briefcase under the bed, the icons in the briefcase. Them those Serbs have a good nose for such things, even in the third generation. The icons looked like the one Grandma Katya had in her khutta, only on bigger boards.

I left the briefcase where it was, and took the icons to the washroom where my black "diplomat" case was already waiting for them under the sink in that singled-out compartment, the loot fitted in perfectly. And that’s when I felt all the truth of the popular saying about stealing chickens. "But your hands do tremble! Been stealing chickens, eh?"

My fingers quivered quite uncontrollably; but not the way they shook after the capsizing in the UAZ-66 truck. That tremor had been a kinda shallow one, while in the washroom, my fingers were, like, knocking against each other. That's what sacrilege brings about… I didn't care for the finger-prints. Ilya would not go to the criminal investigation, "Please, check for the traces on my briefcase where I kept the icons from a robbed temple." However, taking the catch directly to Veerich’s was not correct. So, I asked Eera to keep my briefcase at home for a couple of days, she was on a sick leave at the moment.

Then, like an exemplary student, I attended the classes and, already after the canteen, climbed up to the third floor in the Hosty where I was met by a noisy commotion in the corridor, the Lipes' digs had been broken in!

I approached his room and saw that, yes, the door was indeed in need of repair. Dirty bastards! And what's missing?

Ilya never responded and only kept tut-tutting in bitter frustration…

~ ~ ~

But then I decided to finally break up with Eera because I was fed up with all that heartbreaking harrowing… Moreover, because she absolutely didn't trust me and that’s for sure.

The watchwoman in the Hosty’s lobby passed me a letter:

"Sehrguey,

I have been fascinated by you for so long, but I dared not say it.

Today I'll be waiting for you at 19.00 near the Old Building.

Lyouba"

That evening, as usual, I escorted Eera to the staircase-entrance vestibule in her apartment block, and there she unexpectedly caught some fire of unrestrained passion, “Do not go, hang on a little more, please!" I looked at the watch it was ten to seven, "Well, the guys are waiting at the Hosty. We're fixin' to draw a pool at Pref."

"They can wait. Don't go!"

I hardly managed to leave… When I neared the Old Building it was exactly seven because I had checked the time under a street lamp on the way. And on the square in front of the Old Building, there was no one. But I did not tarry there smoking, waiting, looking around; not at all.

I crossed the empty square without ever stopping; maybe in a bit slower tempo than my usual. But then, after all, I had all the right to admire the nature of the winter night, had I? That Pine tree by the corner looks like a Cedar; could it really be it? In the thicket of close-set branches lives an owl, there, midst them, it's always dark and quiet even at day-time. Look at the snowdrift under the Pine-Cedar, at scattered offals from his feasts, shreds of small rodents; one of the nature sanitizing care-takers…

And, by the by, I didn't lie at all. The moment I entered Room 72, Slavic and Twoic followed me, "Well, will we draw a pool, or will we?"

The letter, as it soon turned out, was written by Eera's girlfriend whose name was not "Lyouba", Eera invented it while dictating to the girl. Everyone may get attracted by the novelty, but it takes a driveling chump to be caught out…

Well, and besides, there appeared Maria, a brunette of the age so ardently canvassed for by the once popular French writer Balzac.

When she smiled at me on the sidewalk, I did not immediately snap in. As it turned out, she happened to drop for a minute to that she-ox's birthday, only I did not notice when. So, in general, she told me what apartment-block she lived in and her apartment number – 42.

Although having a rather busy next day I still slotted a visit to the new acquaintance and also found money for a bottle of vodka which I carried using Alimosha’s trick – in the sleeve; it made for such a hard bicep. So I came to the said address, the fourth floor, the door to the left. She opened.

We had a little snack and landed on the sofa… I do hate coming on entering or almost so which happens at times, the scorch-hot trickle's bored thru, the floodgate burst, your standard pleasure quota past salvage. Fuck!

"Sorry," says I, " In a dreadful hurry. There's a concert at five."

Which concert? Where?. In short, she also came to the Old Building Assembly Hall and was sitting in the second row, when from the stage, and already playing the bass guitar, and already as the leading vocalist, I was screaming,