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

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

"Five fatigues to private Ogoltsoff."

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

Well, yes, when we were approaching the nine-story building site, I loosened the belt over my tunic a bit, how could I know he would pop up from behind the trees in the windbreak?.

That day I tried my best to curry favor with the Sergeant who sent me to plane the ground with a spade for the subsequent installing of the curbstones. I did some fucking great job! Two hundred meters if not more, in the hope that the Sergeant, seeing my zeal, would blink at the fatigues.

"Two conbatists full of vigor
substitute a backhoe digger…"

2 passers-by on the nearby sidewalk were so impressed with my working style, that approached me with an invitation to partake in wine from the bottle they carried.

"No. Thank you! I cannot."

At the evening roll-call, the Sergeant beckoned me with his finger – "on the floors!"

"On the floors" meant – when all would get in their bunk beds, you sweep the aisle as well as the passages in the koobriks, bring water from the washstand trough by the sorteer and perform wet cleaning of the entire sixty-seven-meter-long barrack with its koobriks and the vestibule.

Do it in two steps. Step One: with a thoroughly drenched rag, rub each fucking inch in the linoleum flooring. Step Two: wash the rag, squeeze dry and repeat Step One. And the oftener you change the water for drenching, the better so that there remained no bleary spots in the linoleum and you won’t be commanded to do the whole toil anew.

Then go and report to the on-duty Sergeant the job waits for checking. And if he accepted it at once, you could go to bed and be happy about not being sent that evening "on the floors" to the Canteen. Now you might flake out on your bunk bed and the moment your head touched the pillow you'd hear, "Companyeeeeee! Get uuuup!"

~ ~ ~

"They took Vanya to the nuthouse."

"What Vanya?"

"Come on, you knows yoursel. The scar in his pate."

"What for?"

"Did not get up in the morning. Says mice crept into his high boot."

"Dodging, or gone fucking nuts?"

"Who fucking knows? They’ll check there."

The first day-off we had in August. Till then from half-past eight till dark they kept us slavering on construction sites.

And—all of a sudden—a whole Sunday in the detachment grounds. The youngs washed their dusted smelly uniforms. They placed the washing on the brick wall along the trafficless road and roamed outside the barracks in black underpants, white tank-tops, and kirza high boots, like those sporty Fritzes with Schmeisser guns in the movie "One Chance In a Thousand".

During the period till the first day-off, our team-squad dropped the habit of saluting the roadside Zona by scream-and-shout. And going to the sorteer in the mornings of clear weather, we didn't stop in our tracks anymore to stare at the faraway wonder – the snow-clad top of the Elbrus Mountain hovering in the sky over the pigsty. Private Alimonov, aka Alimosha, taught me to smoke a stub of cigarette "Prima", chiseled from buddies, until there remained three millimeters of the tobacco-wrapping paper tube…

And one time we even got the payment. The Master Sergeant of First Company, a gray-haired man under 50, well imbibed, called us, one by one, to his ware-room and meted out one-ruble-plus to each, adding a piece of white cloth for under-collars, a pair of shoe polish cans, and a spool of threads for sewing up the under-collars after washing them. But in the pay-roll, we signed for 3 rubles and 80 kopecks each because everyone knew, whoever you’d ask, that the monthly payment of a private in the Soviet Army was 3 rub. 80 kop., that was as indisputable an axiom as that about the Volga River and the Caspian Sea…

Midsummer, at one of the evening roll-calls, the company zampolit announced sending to my wife, at her request, the reference certifying I was in the army.

"You did not say you were married, Goly!"

"You didn't ask."

(…they had no time for marriage doing their stretch in the penitentiary colonies for juvenile offenders…)

Olga, Konotop, the Plant, the dances seemed something unreal, like dreams seen in another, far away, life. I was receiving letters from her, “…and in the evenings when I see how girls are walking with their guys and I am all alone and by myself it hurts so that I am crying…”

There were also letters by Mother, both brother and sister wrote a couple of times.

I did not know what to write in response. "Hello, I've received your letter, many thanks for it.."

And then? What else to write? "…in two winters, in two summers…"?

Nothing entered my head. And I already couldn't think a single simple thought without "fuck" and "fucking" within it. Such a fucking dickhead!

Just think of it, even to my closest kin people there remained nothing but the feeling of detachedness in me. Detachedness?

Well, something like what I felt when in the thickening twilight we were sitting already in the bed of a truck beneath the white wall in the unfinished nine-story building and waited for a grandpa-bricklayer changing into his uniform.

Another grandpa, in the truck bed already, started heckling Misha Khmelnytsky—just so, to idle the time—for his being a Ukrainian, aka Khokhol.

Misha, averting his eyes, muttered that, no, he was not a Ukrainian and it's only that kind of the last name. The rest of the youngs sat in silence. The grandpa started to scoff – what a lousy draft they brought from Ukraine with not a single Khokhol!

"Okay, I'm a Khokhol, so what of that?"

Only when those words somehow echoed back from the brick wall looming whitish thru the dark, I realized that it was me who said it. It's strange to hear yourself from outside so unexpectedly. Some weird self-detachedness. The grandpa shut up. And really – what of that? Or of anything else?.

Later, Misha Khmelnytsky revealed to me that he also was married, adding intimate details of how he always had the itch to take a leak into his wife's cunt after he cum, just for fun, but it never came out.

Making no comments, I rejoiced in my mind that the evolution process of the homo sapiens species anticipated an anatomical mechanism to prevent fucking jokes of such fucked in the head funny fuckers…

Of course, my comrades-in-arms did not use the terms like "evolution" or "sapiens" in everyday communication, however, it cost them no noticeable effort to recite by heart the unrhymed lines of one or another article from the Penal Code of the USSR.

"What was you locked up for?"

"Article six hundred seventeen, part two ‘by aggravating circumstances’."

"Brain-fucker, you! There's no such article!."

"Introduced recently, for chronic cannibalism."

It turned out that tattoo was not just an ornamental decoration but an esoteric message for the initiated, it reported of what exactly crime convicted, how high arisen in Zona Table of Ranks the wearer of the tattooed skin was. The inmates with life terms were distinguished by the tattoos on their foreheads running "Slave of the USSR".

But then again, not all were the same. One of my buddies returned from Zona with neat 3 words on his forearm in quite a modest typeface – 'in vino veritas'. With such a tattoo one easily may pass off for a Philosophy Doctor. Some fucking Latinist…

There were certain taboos too. An attempt at exaggeration of personal achievements by means of a tattoo faking his status in the criminal milieu by ornamentations which he was not entitled to, called for a severe, brutal—at times the capital—punishment.