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

And one should also be careful about using the word "waffles". After we got that half-ripped-off payment, Alimosha visited the hut of Military Store by the gate and, pointing his finger at a pack of waffles, asked the saleswoman, "Gimme of those grid biscuits." Yet, the trick did not save him.

"Hey, Alimosha! Got missing waffles, eh?"

"Go and fuck yourself!" snapped Alimosha back.

The innocent word of "waffles” in Zona cant became "sperm swallowed at doing head", thence the pun.

(…and how not to come to admiration, not to arose emotionally, from the unpretentiously artless, but so poetically provocative, mocking couplet-duels of the Zona folklore?

" I have fucked you at the gate,
And can present the certificate!.."

"I have fucked you in the grass dew,
Here's the reference for you!.."

"I have fucked you in the raspberries
With all of your references!..”

Then, stomping the final, victorious, period:

" No trumps? No ace?
Grab my dick and wipe your face!.."…)

Besides play on words, there happened practical jokes as well… After the midday meal, we were standing by the gate waiting for the truck. Sasha Khvorostyuk and Vitya Strelyany had razor-shaved their heads the night before and stood out among us with white-skinned pates above their densely tanned mugs.

"I say, would I look a dick if there was a scratch across my pate now?" asked me Vitya.

"No worry, buddy, you look it just as is with no scratch at all."

"Do me a favor, grab my ears and jerk it. Please, O, please!"

Who would refuse so earnest appeal of a buddy? Naturally, I did as asked.

"Ptui-ptui-ptui-ptui…"

I did not get it immediately – the white saliva of tiny spits dribbled on my tunic chest.

"I cum…" explains Vitya…

A truck pulls up by the checkpoint with a team-squad of plasterers of our draft, but from Dnepropetrovsk. They walk thru the open gate. Five dippers shoot from the checkpoint door besetting a mighty young, like a pack of wolves hunting a bull.

But no, he turns out a too hard prey for them, and the pack retreats uttering threats. The bull picks up his cap knocked off in the skirmish.

We kept the policy of non-interference to the internal affairs of Third Company. The driver of the arrived truck honked us to climb into the back…

~ ~ ~

The walls of the nine-story building were laid even at night in the light from a garland of electric bulbs suspended above the wall-portion-in-progress. Two soldiers from our draft were transferred to the night shift – a lanky buddy who worked as a bricklayer before the army, and me.

He was immediately integrated into the line of the servicemen laying the brick-course, and I got a shovel to bring the mortar, aka "dirt", from a nearby iron box and splash it onto the growing wall.

Outside the other wall in the dark of night, there loomed the motionless tower crane with the dim spot of the soldier operator's face in his cab below the crane-beam.

The bricklayers, in turn, entreated the operator to hoist a kettle of drinking water for them, but he was too lazy to climb all the way down the ladder inside the crane's tower and back up again because there was no one down there to fill the kettle with water from the water pipe by the mound of mortar on the ground.

Finally, one of the bricklayers climbed on a pallet with bricks, grabbed the steel cables of the "spider" (the bundle of four steel cables donned on the crane's main hook) and stepped up onto two smaller spider hooks hanging by idly.

The operator switched on the wail-and-rumble of his crane, raised and turned away the beam, carrying the figure standing on the hooks far down, where a lonely light-bulb outlined the mortar mound. (Safety regulations? The royal troops lived by the concepts of their own.)

From down there, the crane brought a pallet of bricks with the filled kettle atop. The pallet was put by the wall between the working bricklayers, then they commanded the operator to take the cables away.

One of the spider's hooks caught the young bricklayer, stooping over the wall with a trowel in his hand, by his belt cinched over the pea-jacket, and lifted him into the air.

The rise was not extremely high – about a meter or so, because of the whistles and cries from all the sides calling to put him back down.

The operator executed the command and the incident was over, but what did the buddy live thru while hanging up in the air and kicking his long legs and shouting "enough! enough!"?

(…probably, it happened just by chance, because the grandpas in the line were also shouting "down!" to the operator…)

Then the bricklayers' Sergeant-foreman went to the far corner of the erected section, stood on the wall edge and took a leak down onto the distant remnants of the windbreak belt, in an arc-shaped glinting squirt of dashes reflecting the bulb-garland lights.

"There’s no nicer sight
Than when you piss from the hight.."

He jumped off the corner and joined the bricklayers' line to go on with laying the wall…

Not always though everyone got off nice and cozy with anything at all…

In the broad daylight, two soldiers grabbed each other in a mock-wrestling over the elevator shaft. Or rather, the bigger guy grabbed the smaller one; hefty yokels are more prone to that kind of horse-playing.

They both fell into the shaft and the safety boarding one story lower did not withstand the impact. Due to the law of acceleration for bodies in free fall, the bigger buddy was the first to reach the bottom of the shaft and got flattened against the piles of construction debris down there.

The smaller guy came to a second later landing on the jellied body of the late joker and got off with heavy fractures. After the rehabilitation, he was not exempted though and served until his demobilization as a watchman at various construction sites of VSO-11…

Every other month at the Morning Dispensing, they were reading up the circulation orders about servicemen killed as a result of the malicious violation of safety regulations in the military construction units of the Baku Air Defense District, which our construction battalion reported to…

~ ~ ~

All the youngs starting their service got "burdened", but our squad was the "youngest" of all the youngs, which situation resulted from a chain of unfavorable circumstances.

Firstly, the Ensign, who was our platoon commander, caught the Sergeant, who was our squad commander, with 2 bottles of wine bought from a nearby deli.

What is Ensign? That's a grandpa who liked thief-swaggering (wow! the youngs got cold feet before him!) and got brains enough to realize that in civilian life, after the demobilization, he'd be a sheer nothing.

(…the civilian life has other kinds of hierarchies…)

That's why such a grandpa stays in the army for long-term service. After 4 months of training at a school of Ensigns, he comes back to the same detachment with a small star in his shoulder-straps. He wears the parade-crap all the time, he roughs the soldiers and is paid for his favorite pastime one hundred twenty rubles a month. How not to sympathize with a person who has found his place in life?

So, our squad was called and collected from different spots at the nine-story building construction site, some of us were laying partition walls, others digging a trench, still others loading bricks on pallets before we were ordered to fall in by the entrance to the second section.