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

Gray would share how he used to rough those in love, inadvertently passing along his street. Then he would go out of the wicket, and conversationally ask the guy, “So, what, Romeo? Wanna talk of love?” and cock up the trigger of his dad's shotgun. To which motion the asked, neglecting the chanced discussion, would sprint away, but in fucking zigzags, sort of, while yelling over his shoulder the farewell instructions, "Run! Sveta, run!"

Or, for a change, how he battered his wife for the first time and the following morning she had Chink eyes…

And Jafarov, caressing thoughtfully the soft glitter of his horn, would narrate of when being still just a kid and "playing trash" at some party, he watched thru the key-hole a whore giving some officer a blow job, and then she returned to the hall and danced with someone else suck-kissing him, another officer of a higher rank than the previous one.

"But such a beautiful woman! Upon my word of honor! Fuck it!"

And when he served at the military orchestra, their leader usually walked the city with a tube, which is the biggest trumpet in brass bands. Just donned it and went out hunting for "trash", such a shifty schemer was he, I swear.

He was walking and looking out where they carried funeral wreaths for him to follow. "Would you like a military band at the funeral? Let's talk terms." I swear by my Mom, some foxy wheeler-dealer, but "playing trash" not with the whole orchestra, sure thing. Such kind of "trash" was called "to play a sleeper". Yes.

Now, one time, as usual, we went "to play a sleeper". On the second floor, the door to the landing wide open, all’s socko, good and proper, we marched in.

In the first room, the relatives sitting by the walls, a-crying all, good and proper, as befit the occasion. Only that they were somehow way too much at it, and paying zero attention that the musicians had arrived. So, the leader came up to the one he had made the deal with, "What's the fuss?"

"Oh, we're so distressed! It's a disaster. We may have to cancel the funeral." And she showed us to the next room, also packed with relatives a-crying, but even louder than in the first room.

Now, in the room center, there stood a table with a coffin on it, all’s socko, good and proper. And in the coffin, the dead man a-sitting. Well, upon my word, real sitting, bolt upright.

See, when alive, he was a hunchback and because of so big a hump, they couldn't make him lie down as required. Whoops, that’s how our "playing a sleeper" got fucked…

But the leader was a fucking tough character, he came nearer and pressed at the sleeper's forehead; it went over its hump and lay down in a proper way. Only after the correction its legs stuck up in the air, no way to shut the coffin lid.

"We've already tried that way!" sez she who the deal was made with, and wails loudest in the room.

And ain’t I tell you the leader was a real sport, eh? I swear, some socko, good and proper fucker. "Okay," says he. "I wanna all but the musicians out of the room."

Well, in general, we pulled the sleeper out of the coffin, placed it on the floor, face down, hoisted the coffin over it and – bang! Who would fucking like to lose a "trash", eh?

("It.. helped?" asks I thru tears.)

Well, something cracked, but—I swear by my Mom!—it did straighten out. We put the coffin back upon the table and shoved the body straight in. All in a socko proper way. It’s only that…

("??" I no longer have any strength for asking.)

Well, the sleeper grew ten centimeters taller now and the feet stuck out from the too-short coffin. Fuck!

In the tall tale of the lahbooh about the hunchback "sleeper" reality mingled with fiction… Sprawled over a plywood seat in the cinema hall, I was expiring with laughter, having no idea that in the Stavropol city there was the Regional Committee of the CPSU headed by its Secretary, a certain Gorbachov, the future mortician of the USSR handled Hunchy, yet among the Stavropol "workshoppers" of that period they referred to him as Envelope.

(…"workshoppers" were the people aspiring to do business under the realities of developed socialism, and they had to pay for their dreams to come true.

Gorbachov trained the Stavropol workshoppers to bring their payment to him exclusively in envelopes, good and proper, as it was practiced in all the civilized world…)

~ ~ ~

I don't want you to form a rash notion as if the construction battalion was a dreary desperate hard labor and nothing else. Sometimes even there came the spring, and we switched over to the summer outfit.

We handed our long-sleeved undershirts and pea-jackets to the company Master Sergeant, because the winter uniform had, for some reason, become way too heavy. We changed warm gray hats of artificial fur for dandyish piss-cutters.

It's real nice to stand in the light-dressed ranks at the Morning Dispensing under a freshly blue sky with great sailings of thin transparent feather clouds in the fathomless height, and in the luster of the morning sun ride in the open bed of a truck into the city with so many bright skirts and frocks walking its sidewalks… In spring, the population of girls grew drastically, and they began to spill over and out of the sidewalks.

In any case, at the end of a working day, two girls appeared even in the territory of the would-be Medical Center… I was nearing the place where the truck usually picked us up, and those two girls walked in the same direction some 30 meters ahead of me. Probably, they were taking a shortcut somewhere and leisurely paced ahead, talking to each other.

Suddenly, their chatter broke off. Bypassing the truck arrival point, they accelerated to quick strides and disappeared from the view… And at the spot, there was already sitting Sasha Khvorostyuk – the first to pop up.

Seated on a half-meter stump, he kept his knees wide apart resting his hands on them, like, in the KGC—King of Gay Cocks—posture and, happy with himself, kept turning royally his beak from side to side. From his unbuttoned fly, his cock was drooping languidly… That's why the girls trotted away, and hardly would they shortcut here anymore. Because of that fucked in the head platypus!.

And sometimes in the construction battalion, you might quite unexpectedly get into another world – away from all those trenches, shovels, pallets, humiliations… That Sunday morning everything went on as always, yet on entering the city our truck changed tack.

Probably, our Lance-Corporal Alik Aliyev knew where we were going, but his vocabulary limitations did not allow him to talk of anything beyond the usual commands and responses, so he kept enigmatic and puffed up mien. The truck pulled up by the city circus building. We jumped off after Alik and were met by a man in the civilian who explained what we had to do. There was a change in the circus – one troupe was leaving and replaced with the touring circus of Lilliputians.

(..what is the role of the construction battalion in the interval between two circuses?

Exactly! To load one and unload the other…)

But still it was a holiday, and we festively dragged large boxes into long trailers with canvas tops, and festively pulled boxes looking quite the same out from looking the same, but already other, long freight trailers. And then we ate ice-cream, drank kvass from the wheeled barrel in the circus square, entered the building and got seated wherever one chose, on the velvet crimson seats in the empty amphitheater around the arena.

The artists from the newly arrived Lilliputians troupe walked admired circles around the shortest serviceman in our special-mission loader-group.

Were he wise enough to grow two centimeters shorter, they would not press him in the army, not even to a construction battalion, but now: Taller than a meter and fifty-six? Wow! A ready-made non-combatant!

One of the Lilliputians even spoke to him in an undertone—the soldier never confessed what about. Most likely, it was an invitation to enter the number of power acrobats, when the whole pyramid of light-weight Lilliputians was built upon the propping shoulders of the midget strongman…

One of the Lilliputian women invited me to follow her. We left the building thru a side passage and she led me to a row of house trailers.

(…it's somehow strange to follow a woman not taller than your waist, feels kinda being an elephant in a small Indian village…)

She climbed onto the high porch way, shot her arm up, high above her head, and pulled at the unyielding door handle. Plaintively asked she for assistance. I lowered my hand on the handle which readily turned down, and pulled the door.

"Thank you!" said the voice of the highest-pitched flute.

"You're welcome."

It's so inconvenient to live in a world not made to match you…

I returned to the circus where Alik Aliyev trotted enraptured circles in the arena chasing the white pony who openly resented flirtations from any stray Lance-Corporals in kirza high boots.

In the pit above the curtained arena entrance, the brass band hurriedly rehearsed bravura marches with the slight streak of impudent outa-keyness innate in circus orchestras.

A group of Lilliputians gathered by the heavy folds of the arena entrance curtains, following as one of them, the size of a kindergarten kid, was giving hell to her husband whom she had caught pants down in a trailer with another Lilliputian woman. When fired out in sparrow squeaks, foul language loses its specific weightiness, but the intensity of the infuriated wife's emotions was on a par with the deepest Shakespearean passions…

Olga arrived in the middle of the day. We were brought to the midday meal and they told me, "Your wife waits in the checkpoint guardhouse."

I raced there, then to the Staff barrack, they gave me the Leave Ticket only until next morning. Battalion Commander was not there, said they, the Ticket would be prolonged the following day after the Morning Dispensing, they said. Then I barely found some parade-crap, the Master Sergeant was not there together with the wareroom key. But in a canvas outfit, the military patrols in the city would rake you in at once, be there even dozens Leave Tickets on you.

So we got to the city only in the evening, but she had already had a room in the hotel: a one-person suite with a washbasin on the wall.

Then some red-haired guy knocked at the door. Olga introduced him, meet please, we arrived by the same train together. The fellow-traveler invited us to his room, where he had a party with his friends. We went over and on the way, Olga asked me to pretend that she was my sister – when on the train she jazzed him that she was visiting her brother.