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

Our Sergeant was facing the line without his belt on—the obvious mark of a serviceman under arrest—2 bottles of wine (0.5 liters, wide red sticker) next to his feet on the ground. The fair-haired Ensign in a short-sleeved parade-crap shirt (the summer had just started) took the position at the flank of our dust-covered-mud-crusted formation.

In short, that whelp, who was not even a grandpa already, decided to perform a didactic oratorio. Like, this traitor of our great Homeland treacherously left his comrades-in-arms at their labor post and deserted to the grocery store, yet the vigilant Ensign caught him red-handed… He finished his piece of bullshit, snuffed and didn't know what to do next. However, he seemed to have watched some TV sequel from the life of military cadets, where someone got a parcel mailed from home and ate it on the sly, without sharing with his buddies. Then he got caught, and the cadet school zampolit forced him to eat a bar of chocolate in front of the rank of his comrades. The miser with his head bowed, burning with shame, implored to forgive him. To be continued…

Well, now, that Pestalozzi with a scrawny star in his shoulder-straps, started to peacock himself for the TV zampolit before us, "And you let your comrades down for wine! Well, well…So drink it!” He did not consider that in real life flicks might go the way bypassing the staple TV ruts…

Instead of bowing his head, the Sergeant threw it back, clapped the bottle’s neck to his lips and executed the received order. The Ensign froze in his place, the lined-up audience sympathetically swallowed along with the Sergeant's gulps and the bottle was slugged down at one go. He did not have time for the second one though – the Ensign recovered his senses, sprinted to the bottle and smashed it against a heap of gravel.

The Sergeant was taken to the detachment and locked up in the clink at the checkpoint guardhouse. The next morning, he was busted to a private and sent to the team he had been working with before they brought our draft to VSO-11. And might it possibly be otherwise? Who would allow him to kick back in the clink for 10 days and chew bread for nothing? March to work! We've got so all-embracing five-year plan designed by the Party and Government. After all, both with and without the instructive tattoo on our foreheads, all of us were slaves of the USSR…

Our squad got a new commander, just a dipper, by the name of Prostomolotov. "Call me simply – Molotov."

An intellectual wearing glasses, he knew about Molotov, but he was nothing more than a dipper and though they soon gave him the rank of Lance-Corporal, the grandpas were pushing him around, and he was in cold sweat before them, and never suggested to "burden", at least occasionally, some other squad of youngs, for a change. Because of such a situation, after a day's work instead of going to bed, we were assigned to the kitchen detail and peeled potatoes for the next day feeding of the entire servicemen personnel plus that of Separate Company because the peeling machine broke… Peeled all night long. Until 5 in the morning.

True, the last sack of potatoes we smuggled in portions out to the garbage bins, covering the out-going pailfuls with the peels from processed potatoes so that the on-duty cook did not get it. And at 6 – "get up!", then the Morning Dispensing and – march to work!.

Or else, they brought us in the evening from work to have the havvage—quick!—and then took back to the nine-story building, because KAMAZ trucks were moving alabaster there from the railway station, and if it rained the whole carload of the valuable building material would be lost. And we, standing knee-deep in loose alabaster, drove it with shovels into the basement of the nine-story building thru the opening in the blocks of the foundation under the butt wall. As soon as we finished one hillock of it, another KAMAZ truck would come and dump its 13-tonne load, and then another and then another, a practical way to learn that a railway freight car capacity is 68 tonnes… And inside the basement, the alabaster had to also be driven into the next compartment, otherwise, all of it just wouldn't fit in.

(…no horror film can hold a candle to the lividly lurid complexion of Vasya, drafted from Buryn, when he dozed off on an alabaster dune smack under the feeble light bulb…)

In short, Simply-Molotov, the popular conbat saying was right: "It's better to have a prostitute daughter than a Lance-Corporal son."

Daddy of Grisha Dorfman arrived and had a talk with someone in the Staff barrack and when he left Grisha was transferred to Fourth Company and given the position of the tailor. Soon, Grisha already flaunted in "Pe-Sha" and didn't even spend nights in the barracks because he had a sewing workshop in the bathhouse building.

"Pe-Sha" meant an outfit of half-woolen cloth, which was thicker than cotton fabric, aka "Khe-Be", and had the color of dark swampy slime – one of the khaki shades. "Pe-Sha" was the dress-code of aristocrats among the rank-and-file servicemen: the driver of the Battalion Commander's "goat"-Willys, or the projectionist at the Club, who was also the postman. It's a great thing to have a daddy who knows how to negotiate…

And Vanya, scared by the mice in his high boots, got exempted from the army. The Sergeant, who escorted him home from the nuthouse, told that at the Stavropol railway station Vanya dropped the mesh-bag with his belongings wrapped in a newspaper to the floor and screamed, "Run! Get off! It's a bomb! It's ticking!" Sure enough, folks shied away. And on the arrival in Vanya's home, he said his escort for a goodbye, "Learn, Sergeant, the way smart guys serve in the army."

That's, in general, why on that first day-off in August, trying to eschew the lazy crowd of beach-lizards in kirza high boots, I turned round the corner of the Club and from the rebar-grated window, next to the steps under the closed door of the projectionist's, I heard an acoustic guitar. Guitar…

I stood still and listened, though there was nothing to listen to – someone clumsily tried to play the chords of "Shyzgara", yet did not go well with the rhythm because of using balalaika beat. Unable to stand it, I returned to the Club entrance door. It was open.

At the end of the hall, on both sides of portholes from the projectionist's, there were two doors. The left one stood wide open and it was where the guitar sounded from. The grated window in a narrow room was abutted by a wooden hospital couch seated by a soldier with beastly bristles, in a faded piss-cutter, black overalls, and slippers who kept the guitar in his paws.

Another soldier, also in slippers, sat opposite him on a chair with its backrest against the wall.

"What's your fucking need here?"

"It's by "Shocking blue" that you wanna play, I can show how."

They exchanged glances. "Okay, show."

(… "beauty will save the world…" Well, no one can say for sure. The thing is way too vague, that elusively meaningful 'beauty'.

Music is much more tangible. It can do wonders and work miracles as well as create bridges canceling all that’s vain and unimportant.

Instead of a pheasant (Y. Zameshkevich), a dipper (V. Rassolov), and a salaga (S. Ogoltsoff) there remained just three young fellas passing the guitar from hands to hands…)

A couple of days later, a young from Dnepropetrovsk knocked in the tin-veneered door with his fingers eaten by plastering lime "dirt". The musician Alexander Roodko, who in his civilian life worked as a bass guitarist at the regional Philharmonics. That is how started up the creation of the VIA Orion in our construction battalion, based on the equipment and instruments left after the servicemen from previous years.

The guys went to the Stuff barrack, they talked to Zampolit of the VSO-11. Alexander was appointed Director of the Club. But he never got himself a "Pe-Sha" outfit, and he spent nights in the barrack of Second Company and stood at the evening roll-calls there…

He knew the musical notation; he played on anything that would turn up. He taught us the warm-up chant of "mi-me-ma-mo-mu" and he blinked, painfully and mutely, thru his cloudy blue gaze at my crap in singing.

He had a big nose constantly swollen with rhinitis, and he burred. But he was the Musician…

And I started to lead a double life. After the working day and havvage at the Canteen, I was taking the left turn, to the Club…

"May I join the ranks, Comrade Master Sergeant?"

"Why late for the evening roll-call, Ogoltsoff?"

"I was at the Club."

"And what do you, Club-goers, exercise there?"

In the ranks, sounds snickering supportive of the hint.

"We exercise solfeggio there, Comrade Master Sergeant."

The commander's face stiffens stupidly, he's never heard such words in all his life. Chuckles in the ranks increase in volume, yet now in the opposite direction.

"Battalion Zampolit is aware of it, Comrade Master Sergeant."

"Get to the ranks, suffle… sulge… Son of a bitch!"

But during the working day, I was like anyone else… We were transferred to the five-story building construction site in its concluding pre-delivery phase. Vitya Novikov and Valik Nazarenko called me to an empty apartment. They had a bottle of wine to share. We finished it drinking, in turn, from the neck. A forgotten buzz. Everything was gone before the evening roll-call because what was there for three of us?

At the evening roll-call, Captain Pissak sent the on-duty private to the Dishwashers' to fetch a washed-up cup for breath alcohol testing. Moving along the rank, Pissak selectively handed the cup those soldiers he cared to check, commanded them to exhale into it and sniffed the content. Soon, a couple of servicemen were ordered out of the ranks and face about.

When he handed the cup to me, I realized that I was fucked up beyond salvation even before the test. The uncontrollable waves of chill and heat were rolling, in turn, over, telling on me. For the loosened belt on my outfit, he had ordered me five fatigues, and now I was fucked up totally. Pissak sniffed out from the cup, sadistically downed his gaze and announced, "Well, I say, if a soldier hasn't drunk you can see it at once."

After the evening roll-call, Vitya Strelyany told me with a smile, "You were whiter than the fucking wall." As if I did not know that myself! Pissak, bastard! What the fucking games at cat-and-mouse?.

~ ~ ~

It was hard to believe, but there came another day-off. In the evening they showed a movie, some Polish one called "The Anatomy of Love" with certain hints at eroticism. Maybe in Poland, there were more than just hints, but before reaching us it had been shortened by repeated cut-outs. There was a whole pack with scissors, starting from the censorship down to acned projectionists, snatching out whole pieces of film wherever there flashed bare tits in a frame. For special friends and personal use. Fucking morons.

The next morning in the line of leak-takers alongside the sorteer runnel, I gave my cock the thoughtful shake to shed off final drops and silently addressed it in my mind, inaudibly in the general hubbub, "That's it, buddy, for the two-year stretch you're just a drain cock." And I buttoned the fly up.

At work, we were removing construction debris and excess earth out of the basement with the stretchers, it's called "doing the planning". All of the buddies looked somehow sullen, kept silently introvert, the after-effect, so to say, of that Polish film.

At a smoke break I, having nothing better to do, began to get at Alimosha. He did not talk back replying with brief fuck-offs but then suddenly jumped to his feet and pounced at me with his fists. I had to brush off as best as I could, yet, as always, not too proficiently.

Then Prostomolotov dropped into the basement and shouted to stop, so we again took up the stretchers. When doing my turns, I noticed that the pain in my right hand was not going to cease. Something happened to my thumb hit against the Tatar-Mongolian mug of Alimosha…

The next morning my entire hand was swollen, and after the Morning Dispensing the Assistant Paramedic from the Detachment Medical Unit (that same villager from our draft, but already in "Pe-Sha" outfit) took me to the Stavropol Military Hospital. We reached the city on some team-squad truck and there got on a bus because the city public transport served soldiers for free.

When we arrived in the hospital, he told me to wait and entered some of the buildings. The grounds looked quite attractive with a lavish garden of yellow Plum trees. Yet, I did not have the appetite for them because my hand hurt, so I just got seated on a bench in the green alley between the buildings and fell asleep. Opening my eyes, I got a smack bang close-up of some round muzzle with long cat-like mustache, right next to my nose. I startled, but the bench back safely kept me from falling. Another glance disclosed Captain's shoulder-straps on the cat. Everything got radiant clear – seeing a soldier dozing on the bench, the officer stooped for the alcohol breath test.