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

At that very point, the second pair of the peripatetic interlocutors arrived at the epicenter of discontent. Carried away by their discussion, they hadn't been looking around. And all of a sudden—ta-dah!—an abrupt change of the scenery: 2 soldiers armed with plates of their belts against 2 militiamen with a gun.

From the overabundance of feelings and associations, Vitalik's legs bent limply, his mouth went a-gape and only at the last moment, he managed to lean his back against the fence…

Glory, glory be sung to you, the blessed land of Moldovia! You had conceived and brought forth Vasya Shooshoo the Valiant! The true warrior, filled with the spirit of soldierly brotherhood and conbatist solidarity, in his mighty embrace, seized he the nearest to him militiaman—the one without a gun it was—and cried, "Run!" There was no need he repeated it twice to me.

“ Oh, Gods! How frightened was I! How I fled!

Around and below me some fences, trees, alleys, hills, gullies, ramparts, and mountain ridges flashed… I came to myself only in some shed with wide lengthwise gaps between the horizontally nailed boards structuring its walls, and it took me a considerable stretch to bring my breath into a normal shape.

In the evening only Lyolik showed up in the barrack. He needed to wash his pea-jacket of the blood from the broken eyebrow. I led him to the stoker-house.

There they also had their news. The lining of one of the furnaces was all cracked, most likely caused by the overheating of the boiler. So that’s why last month they took us to the city bathhouse. Apparently, at the time of the accident, the smoke was pouring out from multiple crevices, carrying black soot which settled on the walls and ceiling in both halls of the stoker-house. My cosmetic overhaul was lost under uniformly even, greasy, black.

(…did I wallow in rancor? There hardly was much of gloating though – by that time I didn't care a fuck about anything…)

Loose materials are normally transported in special freight cars without a roof, and the floor in such cars is a series of iron hatches. When unloading, you just approach the car and knock aside the huge hook that fixes the hinged hatch-lid which now falls down allowing the loose material to spill out thru the opening.

I do not know for which organization those five cars came to the station of Stavropol, but I can vividly visualize how they clang-flapped the hatches to dangle open and nothing flowed out, so they took a look from underneath into the car hatches and saw a smooth, fine-grained, monolith. The sand had been sent wet or got drenched by rains while traveling from some much warmer corner in our boundless Mother-Homeland and the frosts, met further on along the endless way, turned it into five huge parallelepipeds of carload frozen within the mold of the cars' iron sides.

There was no time to wait for the reverse transformation, for if you did not return the car within 3 days after its arrival to the station, or to your organization sideway, then it was classified as "rolling stock delay" and penalized with a huge fine which grew still huger with each additional day of delay. The addressee organization of the permafrosted sand lost their head – the problem seemed absolutely unsolvable.

And who, by us, is there for cracking any problems, however unsolvable they were? Who puts to rights the shit fucked up by the managing yet stupid elite waltzing from womb to tomb with their heads never examined but their tongues, and lips, and stuff ever at ready? Well, yes, sorry, you know the answer to this trivial one about USSR slaves… Yet, just in case, which factor have you to throw in for solving a problem of any magnitude, eh? You’re kidding! I know that you know that I know that you know… So, that’s why 4 truck-loads of us were brought to the Stavropol freight station. And for that occasion, they even gave us smooth-bodied steel breakers.

To solve the problem thru the hatches opened at the car bottom was out of the question because the monolith reacted to the hits from below by sending the breaker back at you with the tantamount force as foreseen by the respective law of Physics. We had to fuck it from the top and bore down along the car sides. The rumors had it they even were going to bring some perforators for the job but until then – to attack with what's in hands!

For a while, I was at it but soon kicked because of being much too fed up with the fucking monotony of the process reiterated in all the years of my service. However, idle kicking back around in that cold weather was no good for my tender feet which had lived thru too many freezing ups and thawing offs…

Misha Khmelnytsky handed me some money to fetch "warming stuff". He himself couldn't do it, he was a Sergeant in charge of the Uzbeks…

And where only do them buddies manage to get money from?

Come on, it’s a breeze. MCU turned out mortar of different kinds in the quantities scribbled in the forms of application orders presented by the truck drivers. And if there happened no form with a signed order the driver handed over another piece of paper. To whom? To the Commander of the squad-team working at the MCU…

So off I started in the city… Because of being unfamiliar with the current neighborhood, it wasn’t at once that I found the right store. There I shoved the bottles under my pea-jacket cinched over by the belt, which load made me look so stout. Who’d ever said they poorly fed the construction battalion?

I went back with my head kept down not from shame just because of the snow lashing against my face.

"Why don't you salute? Haven't they taught you?"

By the Statute of the Internal Military Service, you must salute every senior in rank, be it even just a Lance Corporal. Yet, the hard snow pelting prevented zeroing in time the officer who stopped me, and then how could I throw my hand up in salute which surely would set the bottles inside my pea-jacket a-playing jingle bells?

"My fault, Comrade…" I scanned his shoulder-strap and could not make it out – no stripes, like by an Ensign, and only one star, yet much bigger than that by a Major, and only then I saw leaves in his collar patches. "…Comrade Major-General, I was lost in thoughts."

"He lost in thoughts! Dismissed!"

And that was right – a general and a private in black shoulder-straps had, practically, no common gossip even if it was the only officer who addressed me with the honorific "You" in all the 2 years…

~ ~ ~

In place of Captain Chernykh, a Siberian, another Captain arrived to take command over Fourth Company, transferred from the Mongolian steppes.

He was the pleasantness itself with an exceptionally long hook of a nose reaching his upper lip constantly stretched in a gracious smile. When on duty, he did not keep to the Commander office but walked the barrack aisle sharing his friendly boasts about the money certificates he had brought from Mongolia, and occasionally started small wrestling matches with soldiers. And those matches made him so happy and agitated; his eyes began to shine, red blush crept into his cheeks and the hanging nose began to scrape already both of his lips.

I couldn't get it at once although something pretty familiar flickered in his grimaces, intonations, yet what exactly I could not…Damn! I got it! The boy from Nalchik!. But then, well, that's an officer…Besides, there was his wife…

In short, I dubbed him after the name of the Mongolian currency and the reasonable handle immediately took root among the soldiers of the company. So, at another of evening roll-calls, Tughrik once again got into how rich he was with all those certificates for tughriks, and that the first thing next day he was going with his wife to buy a new refrigerator, and a new wristwatch as well, because the one he had was just a shame and had to be thrown away, regardless of its name: "Commander's".

I could not stand it any longer and spoke up, "If you don't want to throw it away then give it to some soldier."

To which, he immediately called out, "Who said that?! 2 steps out of the ranks!"

I stepped out. He approached me and in a demonstrative way unfastened the wristwatch strap. "Here you are!"

I took the watch and put it into my pocket, although he certainly expected a different outcome and had to suffer that friendly small surprise.

However, the next day it was me to be surprised with the hell of trouble brought about by that fucking watch. Half-day and no less I walked the streets attempting to sell it and no one agreed to buy. They knew if a conbatist offers you a watch it should have been pinched or at least cut off from a cold body. And a good watch it was, I swear, once my father paid 25 rubles in Moscow for the exact same thing, but I asked just meager 7.

For the first time, I was not jackalling and stuff but offering a square deal… Nah, commerce is a dead thing if there is no demand. In the end, I took it to a watchmaker's, and when the mujik there suggested 3 rubles I just had no choice.

Relived, I stepped out of the workshop with the dough earned so honestly just to be confronted by an alky, "Hey, soldier! Buy a watch from me! I'll give it for just 3 rubles!" That's a coincidence for you! But those sots got outrageously brazen, they did not even stop at messing around with conbatists…

A week later, Vanya told me how a young cook was sleeping recently in the workshop of the stoker-house. Being the on-duty officer that day, Tughrik stuck his long nose even to the stoker-house and saw the young on the mattress spread over the workbench. He clutched the soldier’s dick and stuck like shit to a shovel, "Gimme! Gimme it! " And now, concluded Vanya his story, that Tughrik was already sucking two young cooks, while one of them was, in the intervals, fucking his wife…

Once in the barracks, the wafflister made a try to push me around, "Seems, like you think you are so great a grandpa, eh?"

I did not say a single word to it, but only protruded my lips to issue three tiny sounds, "Tchmo-tchmo-tchmo!"

He mutely turned around and walked away with his back stiffened at unforgiving attention. Since then, he dropped to notice me at all because I was such a scoundrel. “A naasty scoundreel!”

A newcomer dipper appeared in the company barrack who was transferred from another construction battalion somewhere in Dagestan where he went to an AWOL and caught his wife a-cheating on him with another man. He tried to raise dust for that reason but got tied up and locked in the clink which he flooded with so convincing promises to bump off everyone involved as well as himself for a dessert, that they transferred him to us – the remotest point in the same Military District… The soldier was of some Caucasian origin, I can't be more specific, in Dagestan alone there were about 48 different nationalities.

He did not talk to anyone and no one talked to him. Because of fear maybe, kinda when seeing a new beast in your native cage.

One evening, he sat on a stool in the aisle of the company barracks with a newspaper in his hands. I was passing by and some headline attracted my attention. I mean that all I wanted was just to have a look and give it back. But he replied, "Fuck off!"

"What?! Thief-swaggering, salaga?"

He jumped up to his feet. And I never had a chance to reach him, a whole pack flew in to kick up a blizzard. The private broke away and ran out of the barrack. And—which is characteristic—no grandpa was in that pack, just only dippers. Later I figured out that they were so pissed because of his making them fear him for several days; they were scared of his being not like them. No ethnic grounds though, just because of his family tragedy he harbored the danger of bumping you off and fuck the quadrangle of the circle problem. Any pack is cemented by fear…

Yet, the buddy ran away no farther than the Stuff barrack, he did not have the nerve to make for his native Dagestan… The on-duty officer came to our barrack and led me to the clink already occupied, in part, by a Dnepropetrovsk buddy kicking back around. The serviceman had some really nice weed on him and on high we went.

Then we lay upon the plank decking covered with some make-belief mattresses of padded jackets, and he started continuous lapping on about the whole of our great power since long being under the control of secret network of a certain shadow organization with well-developed structure of branched interaction because we all were moving toward one great goal, regardless of whether we realized that or not… In general, he performed much better than a company zampolit at the Sunday political classes, that kinda Knight Templar from Dnepropetrovsk delivering his profound briefing to the surrounding darkness in the clink.

But if you were such a fucking Frank Mason how could they fucking rake you up to a construction battalion, eh? However, I did not interfere with his structural analysis because he was the decision-making body in charge of that quite decent weed distribution.

Then the door opened and shed in some light from the bulb in the corridor while letting a droll Gingerbread Man of Tatar origin roll inside. Wow! Who's that with so round happy mug? Alimosha! What's brought you here, bro?.

On the arrival of his truck to the gate, the on-duty Left-tent suspected him of being in a state of intoxication to some degree, the stars even intended to search Alimosha and detect a possible attempt at smuggling alcohol into detachment barracks. At that point Alimosha began to knock himself on the chest, then he unbuttoned his pea-jacket, and flung it open to demonstrate what an honest serviceman he was, and as for the smell on his breath it was not his slip at all but resulted from Zhigulyovsky beer drunk accidentally in absolute belief it was lemonade or some other potable shit in the bottle which he came across in the dark basement, which bitch could it possibly leave there? The Lefty ordered to lock him up but Alimosha still could not shut up all the way to the clink. That was why he joined our conference in so immodestly unbuttoned state.