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

"O, babe! Did it hurt?"

No answer, just quiet sobs. And I had to comfort her in the most effective, as far as I know, way. And it was good…

Then I was lying on my back thinking. Why would she? And so persistently… A slap in the face as the punishment for misconduct?. Some whoever…before me?..without me?..instead of?.

(…it’s better not to think some thoughts, just leave them alone and, if heedlessly started, they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their inevitable conclusions…)

End May the term of my penal exile to the Smithy Shop Floor was over, and that same day I got the draft notice order to report for induction on May 27…

And again there was a feast in our khutta yard because in the Settlement traditions seeing-off to the army was almost as great a regale as a wedding.

They all drank and sang, only without The Orpheuses' accompaniment, and Mother was carrying around the table Lenochka in her arms, wrapped in a swaddle over her loose baby shirt. Clasping her Grandma's gown collar with her tiny fingers, she looked around with her pink lips open in surprise…

The next morning they saw me to the two-story House of the Deaf by the bridge in the railway embankment over Peace Avenue. There were lots of draftees in the caps on their bare-of-hair heads in the thick crowd of seers-off.

Tolik Arkhipenko kept assuring everyone that I would be just fine but nobody listened, my brother smoked in wistful consideration of the skin-headed draftees, Father concentrated on frowning deeply, Mother comforting Olga who sobbed burying her face in my chest…

The draftees were commanded to board two big buses which started to move but, after turning into Peace Avenue, stopped – someone was missing. We went out to the roadside. The crowd of seers-off rushed across Peace Avenue. Olga ran up ahead of all.

She was kissing me with her soft wet lips and pressing to my chest her small soft breasts without a bra under the light summer blouse wet from her tears.

The belated draftee was brought in a car, and we were told to board again. The motor started up. The door slammed and the bus finally, uncompromisingly, and irretrievably moved away carrying us to where the army would make of me a real man and defender of our Soviet Homeland.

~

~

My Universities: Part One

"And the drill grounds will start shining,
Will get polished with our boots,
Will get crushed to fractions tiny
By the marching brave recruits…"

    to the air of "C’mon, fellas, uncinch the horses…"
At the Draft Collection and Distribution Point in the regional center, I made a desperate attempt at getting exempted from the army service. During the final medical check, I reported to the oculist that I couldn't see with my left eye any deeper than the second line in his check chart on the wall, although, in fact, I saw three. For that, slightly exaggerated deficiency, I was recognized fit for non-combat service in the construction troops.

After three days of kicking back upon bare-timber decking at other Collection and Distribution Points and equally hard shelves in the railway cars for draftees, in the scant pre-dawn light I stood in the line of draftees on a platform at the Stavropol railway station thoroughly drenched by the last night’s rain in just one shoe. Differently from the Perseus' case, my shoeless foot still had a cotton black sock on.

And what other choice remained there? Early in the morning when they commanded all to leave the car, I searched not only the section I slept in but 2 more under the mad yells of the Sergeant by the exit from the already empty car. My right shoe was nowhere and, while chilly dampness from the puddles in the asphalt around edged in thru the sock fabric, I felt an incipient suspicion gradually building up at the back of my mind that even in absence of direct evidence the disappearance of my footwear item had occurred by dint of the vindictive hand of Valik Nazarenko from the Krolevets city.

Of all the guys in our car section, only he had a thick pack of postcards, and at each stop, he begged the people passing along the platform outside the car to drop a bunch of filled out postcards to a mailbox. Who would deny a young boy being taken away even though not in a prison, yet also in a securely locked railway car?

And after our train left the station, Valik would put on an acute countenance and ask himself his invariable question, "Who else to write to?" And then he answered to himself, "Ah! I know!" and began filling another postcard or two that he goes to serve in the army and has already passed the city of Rostov. In the end, he would read his literary production out loud for all the present in our car section.

All of his writings were alike and concluded by the inevitable, "My best wishes, Valik". On the second day, I suggested him to vary the word order—at least in some postcards, for a change—to make it, "My Valik wishes best". All laughed then, but he laughs best who laughs last and, standing on the platform in a soaked sock, I did not feel like laughing at all. The kickback to my innocent pun left me without a shoe which, most likely, never arrived in the city of Stavropol but stayed way back, mateless, strange and foreign to the rank grass in the embankment wet after the rain in darkness… To a whimsy play on words, the redhead bastard responded by the rude practical joke. However, who's not caught at action is not the joker…

We were told to get into the beds of waiting trucks, that took us thru an unknown, not yet awaken, city and left it by an outgoing highway which also was left for a worn-out asphalt road and, after three more kilometers along an unsubstantial forest edge on the left, there popped up a long white-brick wall by the right roadside, a meter-and-half tall or so.

The trucks drove into the openwork high gate of iron pipes (cross-section 2”) by the whitewashed guardhouse. The glazed red-&-yellow tablet by it outer door announced it was Military-Construction Detail 11, Military Detachment 41769, while the empty road outside the gate went on to the nearby horizon…

We were lead to the bathhouse, before which they asked us whether anyone was going to send his clothes back home. Quire predictably, no one planned anything of the sort, keeping the time honored tradition, draftees were leaving for the army service in their junk clothes which were eventually dropped on the grass about the bathhouse porch.

Only in the canteen at the Rostov Collection and Distribution Point, I saw a draftee in his suit and necktie. He fell out of the picture by his age too – about ten years older than the surrounding skinhead yobbos, however, he was not twenty-seven yet, otherwise, they wouldn't draft him. And his hair wasn't cut. He ate nothing, just sat without a motion staring in front of himself, or rather looking inward.

(…because it's only from outside that we all look the same, while inside there is a hell of a lot to consider, the epics unfolding in there are way cooler than the Illyad added by the Odyssey…)

There he sat in a tie loosened on his thick neck, paying no notice to empathetic nor to sarcastic ogles, not knowing what was ahead where they were taking him…

The Military-Construction Detail 11, shortened to VSO-11, had basic minimum engineered for keeping lots of humans in one place.

A close group of five long barracks, paneled from inside with painted plywood sheets and overlaid without with white bricks in shiner position, squatted behind the white brick fence run along the roadside. The barracks were interconnected by the common system of steam-heating pipes running up in the air on tall iron props. For heat insulation, the pipes were wrapped in glass wool, fixed with white glass cloth, and covered with the finishing layer of black roofing felt kept in place by twists of thin baling wire.

Three of the barracks to the right from the gate were lined along the brick wall separating the military territory from the road outside, each of them surrounded by an internal asphalt path. Across the path behind the leftmost barrack, there stood a wider, but also one-story, building comprising the Canteen with its kitchen, and the Club of the detachment.

In the third row, counting from the road, there was the stoker-house, the bathhouse, the shoe-making and sewing shops under one common roof for all.

The drill grounds covered by the layer of rough concrete, started from the gate and stretched on to the Canteen. Opposite the Canteen, across the drill grounds, there stood the last two barracks of the five, parallel to each other and the wall along the outside road. Behind them, next to the far left corner of the drill grounds, there stood a brick toilet, aka sorteer, accomplished with 10 holes, aka ochcos, in the concrete slab alongside the left wall and the cemented urinal runnel along all of the opposite one.

To the left from the sorteer, there stretched a ten-meter tin trough of a washbasin raised by meter-tall rebar props above the ground. The water pipe with a dozen taps ran along over the trough.

Farther on, behind the drill grounds, there stood three tall truck boxes in a raw, each one without the face wall and—to their left—2 rows of sturdy sheds of ware and food storehouses. Behind them, a bit on the outskirts of the detachment’s rectangular grounds, stood the squat structure of the pigsty.

Ah, yes! The last but not least – the narrow brick hut of the military store by the gate, opposite the checkpoint guardhouse…

The narrow white wall of bricks stood only along the asphalt road, and the rest of the perimeter was guarded by the fence of barbed wire, so familiar from the early childhood. Behind the truck boxes and the barbed wire fence, a wide field rose hiding in the invisible hollow a deserted sandpit and the village of Tatarka, which was visited by the soldiers of VSO-11 on their AWOL's, aka absences without leave.

As for the road by which we were brought to the detachment, it entered, after another six kilometers, the village of Demino, where the soldiers also went on AWOL's, as well as to the city of Stavropol, sure thing.

But all that I hadn't known yet leaving the bathhouse in the cotton khaki outfit and high kirza boots on top of badly wound footcloths – two strips of light coarse calico or flannel fabric (30 cm x 60 cm), which are much more practical than common socks. In summertime, when baring your feet you'll notice the dirty stains left by the dust that sieved in thru the socks' fabric, while the footcloths, however dirty they become themselves, still keep your feet clean. Only they should be wound properly around the feet—tight and smooth, without wrinkles—otherwise, you'd rub your feet to bleeding. And in winter, footcloths without socks feel warmer than footcloths over socks, though both methods do not save toes from getting frozen inside the high boots…

Two soldiers from the previous drafts were poking thru the civilian clothes dropped on the grass in front of the bathhouse, checking whether there were any citizenka items suitable for AWOL's…

We were led to the detachment Club fitted out with a stage bare of any curtains, and rows of plywood seats lined across the hall over its tilted floor of not paint-coated timber. Our army service started there by dragging the audience seats out of the Club, washing the wide floorboards, bringing and installing 2-tier iron bunk beds for the Fourth Company personnel to sleep upon, since we, the recruits, were to be kept in their barrack.

With the first non-combat mission accomplished, they collected us by the entrance to the Fourth Company barrack and split into three platoons, each under the command of a separate Sergeant. The Sergeants compiled lists of their commandos, checked them with the general list by the lieutenant and started training the newbies. In all the three platoons were drilled the same commands.

"Platoooon! Fall in!"

"Platoooon! Fall out!"

"Platoooon! Fall in!"

"Platoooon! Fall out!"

"Platoooon! Fall in!"

"Platoooon! Fall out!"