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

First Company, Second Company, Third Company, and Fourth Company.

..so happy now?..the stupid head gives no respite the legs…that's some fucking ar…

"Here he is!"

The index finger from the boxer-like fist of Major pointed at me.

"What?! If it were I my ass’d be kicked before the Dispensing!"

"To the clink!"

The on-duty officer and two dippers with red armbands approached me demanding to hand in my belt and escorted me to the checkpoint guardhouse. On the move, I went on to debate that the bitch of Major knew it as well as I did that it was not me, but they locked me in the clink all the same…

About an hour later the on-duty officer unlocked the door to give me back my belt because I was assigned to the penalty work – sprinkling sand over the ice covering the road to the city. The truck with its bed-load of sand was at the gate already…

Squinting my eyes at the whistling wind, I was dutifully throwing shovelfuls of sand over the iron tailgate of the moving truck. Yet, when it entered the city and went after another load of sand, our ways parted at the nearest traffic lights.

Then I jackalled for a bottle or 2 and woke up at dark already seated on a bench at the foot of the Komsomol Gorka Hill.

It turned out that the blizzard meanwhile got fully subsided and only slow big snowflakes were descending from the dense dark above and melting on my face and my chest in the wide-open pea-jacket. The passers-by flow was adding which signaled the end of the working day for non-manual employees. They hurried home, they had nothing to do with a lonely soldier peacefully taking his rest on the bench.

"Hey!" Someone still shook my knee.

"Fuck you fucking fucker!"

"How dare you? I'm a KGB worker!"

"Fuck your fucking KGB!"

"Just you wait! I'll call the patrol!"

Then I boarded a bus crammed up to its utmost. I was shaking after the long exposure to frost on that bench and suddenly in the dense mass of passengers there opened a cleft straight to a vacant seat. Yes, our people always loved and respected the defenders of Homeland…

We played at the New Year party at the Culinary College. To be more precise, they played it and I was simply an astral body inertially following The Orion.

The autumn draft from Pyatigorsk brought to our battalion a certain Volodya, handled Long. He was not only long but also skinny, with dark circles under his haggard sunken eyes as fit for a perma-fried junkie. But he played guitar like the guitarist from Led Zeppelin in the album "Stairway to Heaven". Alexander Roodko worshiped him, and I also admired his technique but as a person, he was just a piece of crap. "Why are you the way you are, Long?"

"I always push all my shit up so that all of you piss off and leave me alone."

He had a pleasant laugh but laughed too rarely. All in all, he was just a kid who turned a god when having a guitar in his hands… It goes without saying, the construction battalion ensemble did not perform the numbers from "Stairway to Heaven" but Long at times inserted in The Orion repertoire so mighty guitar riffs which Jimmy Page himself wouldn't be ashamed of.

Some Long's buddy from Pyatigorsk brought him his own guitar from home and for that New Year season, he also became The Orion’s drummer because he and Long were in the same rock group which disintegrated after they drafted the guitarist. And when the New Year season was over, he took Long's guitar back to Pyatigorsk, you couldn't keep such things at the battalion's Club…

Yura Nikolayev, the star of Crimean taverns, and Alexander Roodko, a virtuoso from the Dnepropetrovsk Philharmonics, were the vocalists at the New Year parties. They sang, each one in his intrinsic and inimitable style, accompanied by the improvised riffs in the spirit of Jimmy Page and at times of Hendrix, for a change, who also was Jimmy, by the by. However, for a normal music lover from the hinterland expanses nourished on the undying examples of the Soviet variety pop, such variations sounded unacceptably cacophonous, since they were not Kobzon-like in any way. So one of the future cooks had all the right to approach Yura Nikolayev and ask, "Sogwe, can you play Gussian folk music?" That's how she was screwing the words up with her burr.

And Yura knew that Roodko had got completely fallen under the influence of Long whose word became the last and decisive as to what to play and how to play it. Therefore, he directed the girl straight to Long so that she wouldn't lose time in vain.

As for Long, sprawling on a chair with his legs so far away and wide apart, his parade-crap jacket hung on the chair back, but the khaki tie in its obligatory place, only thrown over his shoulder, he at that moment was absolutely lost in Dryland inside his mouth. And there he sat staring fixedly at some or another thing among the distant hazy dunes, licking his scorched lips with his raspy, dry, tongue.

"I am sogwe, do you have Gussian songs in yohg gwepetwahg?"

With a superhuman effort, the warrior on the chair collected all his will and might, concentrated, and focused his optic organs in the direction of the remote sounds to discern that there was a girl speaking to him.

"Gussian? Gwepetwahg? Go stgaight to Comgade Goodko!" and he pointed his index finger at Alexander, who stood by the loudspeaker box pensively twirling the volume knob of his bass guitar amp.

The girl was baffled, naturally, being so ping-ponged from one musician to another, but she was a sturdy backcountry strain and went all the way to The Orion nominal leader.

"I am vegwe sogwe," replied Roodko, and presented her that misty blue gaze of his, "but we genegally don't play Gussian songs." And he sorrowfully sniffed up his everlasting rhinitis.

He would be happy to say it some other way but he couldn't because of his own burr. But she did not know about it!. Now, go and talk about congenial complexes but everything—EVERY THING!—is acquired thru the exposure…

At that party, I had a kissing session with Valya Papayani, a Stavropol Greek woman. Nothing more than kisses. She told me she was a teacher at that Culinary College, and that she was twenty-seven years old. So the next morning Battalion Commander announced at the Morning Dispensing, "Yesterday, one of our fucking musicians spread out a sixty-seven-old slut at the bottom of a staircase!" That slushy brained fucker couldn't even see 27 from 67!. Of course, it was that piece of shit, the Ensign-supervisor who ratted out…

Two days later there was another New Year party somewhere else, but I did not dance there at all. Because of so superior grass quality, the kif was the weed of weed. We blasted on the stairs and then went into the hall, the guys took their instruments, all so tenderly and gently, and they started to play. And the music was strangely distant as if from over a horizon and—which was characteristic—somehow deadened. When leaning your head to the loudspeaker you could see how its front was quaking with the sound, but all the same, it kept muffled.

Then I went to wander around the hall, for a change. And the people there, all of them, were, like, some plywood cut-outs, that is two-dimensional, each and every one. All the time, I wanted to take a look at what was on the backside of their plywood, but it did not work out because someone next was flowing up into the picture who also was a two-dimensional one. And, from far far away, so low and slow, came the sounds of muffled music…

Occasionally, above all the plywood heads, there floated a pair of eyeballs on their pair of stems—like periscopes—it was those pseudo sound engineers stoned to death but still roaming the space. So funny bastards!. And they laughed too. Where did they get such weed?.

We were brought home by midnight. There was a creaking Arctic frost… Under the light of the spiky stars in the sky, we dragged the equipment onto the scene of the dead empty and frozen cinema hall. No one spoke a word. No strength; no desire to. Because of All was emptiness.

The emptiness of emptinesses and nothing but emptiness…

~ ~ ~

Ah, yes! With the same autumn draft they had also driven in youngs from Moldova and Moscow, but quite a few – about 10 men.

Moldovans had so funny last names like Rahroo, Shooshoo, though their first names were quite normal… Vasya Shooshoo received a postal notification about a parcel from home awaiting him at the city main post-office. When going to get it, he invited Lyolik from Moscow, Vitalik from Simferopol, and me. We collected the parcel and found some canteen in the city, on the second floor. There Vasya opened the box and there was,

"Wine of Moldavia, my boy,
Is to give us a blissful joy!."

Vasya, as the generous host, fetched some macaroni with something on top and was filling our cups under the table which we held out of sight as well as the bottles to cut out unnecessary discussions with the canteen staff. That way we finished off I can’t say how many liters.

Well, what now? Saddle up! We went down to the first floor, and Lyolik took a leak there into the trash urn, while Vitalik, sort of, screened him off to observe decency in public eye.

That Lyolik was generally frostbitten. Once I went to the construction materials factory, and there was such a long conveyor-belt, mostly in the open, going high up under the roof upon a hill to carry clay or something. Lyolik's job there was to go up and down that hill with a breaker and prod what clay had got jammed on the conveyor belt. I can't remember exactly what I went there for, but the moment Lyolik saw me, the breaker in his hands simply fluttered from eager agitation, and it was in his eyes how really much he wanted to bump me off. Not for anything personal, just so, because I had turned up there when he conveniently had the breaker in his hands. However, he also hadn't the quadrangle of the circle problem solved yet. Bashing brains in with a breaker's not a big deal, but what then with the body? In short, he kept himself in hand at that time…

We left the canteen and strolled along in a friendly conversation; bright sun, white snow, life's beautiful.

Then Lyolik and Vasya started to sort it out whose homeland was better: Moscow or Moldova? Thus, word by word, they went over to gripping each other pea-jackets' breasts. But Vitalik—that's a capital fellow!—why, says he, on the street? Let's go in some yard.

In we steered into the yard of some two-story apartment block. Vitalik started reading instructions to them, like, sort of, a referee from London; no fighting with the belt plates, no kicking at the felled. They threw off their belts and hats, and pea-jackets, and – off they started the fun of heroes. Both of them over a meter and eighty with the fists like sledgehammers, and each scored hit was sending echoes about the hollow yard. A-hey! Let's sprinkle the snow with the red!.

Vasya broke Lyolik's brow. Lyolik, bleeding, fell on one knee. Vasya moved back to the linen ropes with some washing on it because the real heroes observe the rules.

That moment some geezer in a sailor's striped vest trotted down the porch way from the two-story apartment block. Someone from the rats of his neighbors, he reported, had called the militia. In short, the match had to be postponed. Lyolik washed his mug with the snow, the opponents put their outfits on and we left the stadium.

But the fighters' agitation did not show any abatement. It might’ve got bad enough so Vasya and Lyolik were disengaged and held apart. Then we split into pairs, I led Lyolik ahead, convincing him that Moscow was the capital of our Homeland, the best city on the Earth. About ten meters behind Vitalik and Vasya followed, discussing epic values of valorous Fat-Frumos from Moldovian myths. Thus, in peaceful conversations, we slowly strolled on when all of a sudden, on the right, a Volga braked and 2 militiamen in greatcoats jumped out of it on the sidewalk. Lyolik and I unfastened our belts and noosed them round the right wrists, leaving some length with the plate on its end for self-defense. The militiaman on the left flicked his gun up. A ridiculously small black hole in the bright ring of reflected sunshine looked square into my face.