

# The Rascally Romance

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

By Sehrguey Ogoltsoff

(Copyleft ;-) 2020 S. Ogoltsoff

Smashwords Edition

CONTENTS

Foreword, a sort of

epigraph

The Birchbark Sketches

The Genesis

The Childhood

The Adolescence

The Youth

My Universities: Part One

My Universities: Part Two

The Parade of Planets

The Married Life

Defying the Wash

The Solitary Barge Hauler

The Ivory Tower

The Eastern Corridor

The Postscripts

# Foreword, a sort of

Apologies & Excuses

Being both completely clean of fanciful fantasy flights and all thumbs at spinning yarn, I am left with one choice only — to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; in other words, to strictly keep within the straitjacket of my personal experience.

The above-mentioned, regrettable, limitations quash any hope to keep abreast with the hackney delivering heaps of whimsy lucubrations wrought in line with the bestselling practices at the fantasy, science, mystery, thriller, action, or any other twist of fiction in the field. Some sprightly jades indeed!

So—poor, yet proud—I hereby declare that not anything at all would readily fit under your skin, nor in a breeze you'll pull off any fickle fancy whatsoever, like, walking through the walls and over the waters or indulging in unhealthy recreational addiction to sucking strangers' blood in utterly unsanitary environs. (A sigh.)

Structure & Content

Starting with the lengthy title, the novel flows through this here foreword (ahem!) and the following epigraph—curt, but to the point—into the not exceptionally short narration, four books all in all some of which might cause certain doubts as to the sincerity of my solemn oath in the previous subsection.

Not every truth is readily welcome nor guaranteed from someone tossing their back up in sync with a spiteful outcry, "What a bullshit! No way of selling that to me!"

My meek, immediate, amicable, advise to deeply unbelieving skeptics is: put off The Rascally Romance until obtaining, hopefully, a clearer vision that truth at times does happen to comprise surprises not lesser than any quirky fiction. And if the truth of this observation is to stay dimmed for someone, then all there is to say, "I do envy you, O, truly lucky one!."

Though being a first-person story, The Rascally Romance it's not a self-admiring report about me, myself and the Number One, but a portrayal of the whole generation in the greatest and most fascinating era since the creation of the world.

Presently, with embittered understanding, I witness that glorious period cinched tightly with a couple of labels, criss-cross—

«stagnation" >< "restructuring»

—packed and sealed, all readied to be dumped into the bottomless bin of the past. Yet, neither smart labeling nor shifty package tricks would ever eliminate the fact that the entire history of mankind owns no period to match the one when so young we were.

Style & Language & Age Restrictions

It goes without saying that each and every generation inevitably enjoys or lives through their own youth, yet some of them miss out to erect an epistolary pillar marking the fact appropriately.

The style abided by the erection at hand can be baptized as rabid realism, which means, this here ball is ruled by Mrs. Naked Truth who hands soft soap out to neither written nor tacit laws.

Moving from the style to the language used in The Rascally Romance, it should be noted that the grim-mouthed pearl-clutching language purists might disapprove of presence in the body text certain taboo words.

I fully grasp their venerable point and would willingly pull along with the sentiment but for the fear to seem a cheater. In a true-to-life presentation, you just cannot hold back them those words because life, as it is, would differ from a family movie. For that reason, I expressly discourage any person under 18 years of age to read on any further.

I am serious, DROP IT RIGHT AWAY, before it's too late!.

Technical Notes & Self-Appraisal

Letters are not supposed to be divided into chapters or parts; they just flow on and on and on, to their end. However, to leave a reader without a map and compass in the midst of vast hundreds upon hundreds of pages in each of the directions, to deprive them of any guiding star or two, calls for blatant inhuman brutality.

A feeling of compassion for humanoid brethren and sistern stirred me up to adding The Table of Contents.

Ain't I a fucking philanthropist thereafter?.

Acknowledgments & Disclaimer

I thank you all, whose names are mentioned in the novel, as well as those who are not in there (you are indefinitely more in numbers and your merit in this here work having been written after all is no less).

And, most importantly, thank you for reading along at least up to this very line. Any book can only be produced by a collaborative team of two: the reader and the author. Thank you because, sincerely, your kind cooperation is a huge honor and real treat for me.

And now we've just reached the point when everyone has to decide for themselves whether to turn back to the pursuit of customary business and/or pleasures, to all those pet joys, and daily problems alongside with habitual rewards and outlets befitting people of sober good sort (and—between us two, as one buddy-teammate to the other—that might be the most reasonable course because you never can tell what insidious vortexes and currents might be lurking out there), or else keep on rowing ahead, past and beyond the buoy of this here foreword, a sort of...

Whoa! After such a rambling passage I do have to shut up and take a breather, meanwhile, feel free to use the stretch for making your informed decision...

However that may be, take your time when making up your mind and stay assured whatever the consequences there's no use to put the blame on me because of the disclaimer – regardless of what course you choose, you'll never be the same hereafter.

~ ~ ~

# epigraph:

Looks like that's it,

As of yet,

And even if not quite,

Still, sort of, may be,

Because of else,

" _Hey, you!."_

Bang and – a-ha!.

Vladimir Sherudillo

# ~ ~ ~ The Birchbark Sketches

...Varanda...

...a handful of random sounds...

...some sonorant nothing... as any other name...

And the river itself, at this distance, is nothing but a discordant hum of water in endless headlong run, tumbling among them those solid boulders littered to block the way, whaling away at their blunt pates or, maybe, temples, but only breaks in thrashes against their listless hugeness into the spits of futile frenzy mixed with the gobs of splashy froth, and rolls in the unceasing helter-skelter on and on, and on, yet never gets anywhere fixed by here and now within the unchanging impetuous rush from one nowhere to another, tapping, now and then, neither to time nor in key, the smooth ground gravel in its riverbed...

And since when been all this so? You may safely call it infinity and this one day.

Nations had risen and past away, to quote the glorious sage Abu-Lala's lecture to his string of camels, while this river kept running here and it still has to as in all those ages upon eons since before the beginning of time.

Mountain rivers tend to keep changeless, except for their names. A hot tip, the Stone Age hunters used other sounds referring to this here river because all flow and everything changes, even the names. And with all the roamers seen by the river upon its banks, it's hard to state who's runnier: the dateless flow of the Varanda or us. Now, here am I, a casual bum, one of us, neither the first nor the last on this omnipresent bank.

...extreme pleasure from your wordwork, bro...how about pinning down this "I" of mine, eh?...

A minor spill, well dehydrated and motionless for a moment, crucified on that good ol' hole through which all of the future tumbles away into the past; a relay-pipeline from a snotty noddy kid to an old, flea-bitten curmudgeon, the only common thing they share is this ubiquitous word of "I".

...me too, me too!...don't leave me out!...I'm also somewhere in between those two, on our non-stop journey from the one to the other, because even though sitting momentarily on the Varanda's bank I still go with the flow...

" _O, water! We be of one blood!_

...whoa, man! what are you up at? playing a freaking smartie?...who cares a flick about your fizzing quotations at this time of the day?...

The lazy time remains the most uncaring of all, it dozed off about my one-person tent. The twilight creeping along outside the shabby nylon wall still has a long way ahead to changing into the dark of night.

...right, then why not to whittle it away with something useful, eh?...

...like, say, composing a letter promised to your daughter...we've got the promises to keep, remember?

...especially when there's not a sliver of a chance to fall asleep so early...

...simply watch your mouth, pardner... easy with them those f-f..er..fumbling quotations...

Hello, Liliana

(...a hugely nicer name than "Varanda", eh?...

...shut up and mind your business!.)

It looks like, at last, I do start the letter promised at our meeting in Kiev.

What for? To marshal a bunch of self-excuses and belated explanations in an attempt at absolving my innocent self?

Anything can be explained; nothing can be redone. Yet the word was given and I have but keep it...

Real hard it was to stomach the exemplary correctness and overemphasized use of the officially plural "You" used by you to keep me off: "Sure, Sehrguey Nikolayevich..." "Exactly, Sehrguey Nikolayevich..."

I began to resent my own patronymic, yet faced the flogging without a flinch, as fits a manly man.

Saying "Daddy" to a stranger come upon in the Internet vistas is pretty difficult, moreover, if he looks nothing like the Mr. Pretty Guy sitting in your Mom's album.

Some obscure mujik with a hanging gray beard... Nothing like the Daddy of your dreams who you've missed since your early childhood. You've been missing that Daddy, and not this old man. No, thanks!

No wonder, our farewell hug at the railway station was just put up with (not a big deal for a woman nearing thirties) and that's it. The inveterate ice stayed as hard as a rock; not a cobweb-thin crevice cracked its cold surface; the gardens didn't splash in bloom, nor got they filled with chipper chirps of blackbirds, thrushes, tits, and starlings to merge their lively trill with the triumphant blare of The Happy End fanfares.

The stranger who failed to become anything but a stranger let you go and I gave the promise of a letter to you. Thus we parted, two strangers, at the Kiev Main Railway Station...

However, of the two of us, I am still luckier because in my life there have been so much more of you than of me in yours.

I can easily recollect your kick at my nose when you were turning over inside your mother's belly. Or that thick sterile cocoon which I carried from the maternity hospital, with you calmly sleeping within.

Up to this day, it warms my heart to watch you with my mind's eye, in the dance with your kindergarten chums about the Xmas tree. The most beautiful kid was you, with the fair smooth hair, in a silk quilted vest, red pantyhose, and tiny felt high boots of black.

I remember quiet Sundays at the empty playgrounds of another, closed, kindergarten in the neighborhood. We were coming there for you to take a ride on the swing pended with two iron rods. At its sways, the swing screeched piercing the drowsy silence about the playgrounds strewn with the fallen leaves. Those sounds, so alike to sorrowful shrieks of sobbing gulls, ripped my soul apart. Because I was nothing but a weekend Daddy.

On weekdays I was far away, working, like a dog, a mule, a slave, at Construction Train 615, aka SMP 615, on various building sites in the neighbor region to earn by selfless labor an apartment for our young family, and have a home, sweet home for us...

Then there arrived that weekend doomsnight when, in the narrow bedroom allotted by your grandparents in of their three-room apartment to our young family, lying next to my beloved wife on the hand-me-down double bed, I was crushed with the road roller of her story.

A couple of days before the weekend, a friend of hers gave my wife a pleasure ride on his Volga GAZ 24, driving miles beyond the city limit, to the Hare Pines Forest by the Moscow highway which he left and parked among the trees. From the glove compartment, he took a bottle of champagne and stripped its foiled cork in the soft demi-light from the dashboard, under a mellow tune on the radio in it.

She sipped a bit and sadly said, "Please, take me home." And he obediently started the motor...

The whispered briefing on my wife's unswerving chastity dried up, replaced with deafening silence.

Stretched on my back, I was spreadeagled by the avalanche of mutely toppling walls and only your calm breathing was somehow reaching me through their suffocating mass, from your cot in the corner. Some mighty grip severely squeezed my heart and turned it into a hard flintstone.

The only good news was that grimy, pitch-black, darkness compassionately hid the unexpected chilly teardrop which rolled out of the corner of my eye and crept, soundless and slow, down my temple to get lost among the hair roots.

The last tear in my life...Later on, its trail was followed by wrinkles digging across the temple but never again any other tear left my eye in any direction. Except for the tears wrung out by high winds but those do not count.

(...again a-whining, sissy wimp?...toppling pieces of crushed hopes squashed the poor namby-pamby against the anvil of petrified heart, eh?...

...be a man, buddy, and seek solace in simple truths, whose simplicity makes them so peerless, unrivaled and unavoidable...

...no busting your balls at construction sites, no sunburns or frostbites will remove or postpone the inevitable next time, when she won't say, "Let's don't," and start instead to catch the trick of having it in the environs of the GAZ 24 interior...

...and here you have another simple undisputed truth – recollecting the past delights can't bring the joy back, but when a speck of grievous remembrance just flick by, the pain, suppressed ages ago, will bite you anew...

...it's caught you up even here, on the Varanda's bank, thousands of kilometers away from the crumpled bedroom, after millions of instances of passing the ubiquitous relay baton of "I" from one I on to the next one...

...I tell you what, my dear I...heal yourself with the same dog's hair...got bitten by a simple truth, eh?...bust it with as simple a tool!...crack it with the wedge of a wider grammatical approach, move from "I" to "we"...

...who are we after all?...some shaved and powdered, or maybe greasy and shaggy (or whatever else is prescribed by the current fashion trend) cartload of trained primates...

...a member cannot but live by the group's rules and no tricks will ever get you off the hook...ignorance of a law is no excuse, nor a means to dodge its application, right?...

...now then, comfort yourself with this simple truth, wipe your mawkish snot and wait; maybe it'll dissolve that nasty clutch on your balls core...

...oh, shut up, man!...the like stuff is not for tender female ears...hmm...

...seems, like, I'd better give it a start over...)

Hello, sweetheart

Though our brief live meeting did not bring you to calling me "Dad", I still can't help being sentimental when addressing you...

The day before yesterday in the late afternoon, executing the plan imparted to you in my last email, I climbed up the heights in the neighborhood of the ghost village of Skhtorashen to visit the local celebrity – the two-thousand-year-old sycamore tree, the oldest denizen of the Mountainous Karabakh.

The walk along the scorched ruts in a desolate dirt road winding up the slope would be a pleasure but for the oppressive August heat, and my eyes kept instinctive scanning the steep ahead to discern the signs of the water-spring affirmed by all who had ever visited the place.

Most springs in the Mountainous Karabakh are added a water-managing structure, which traditionally consists of a retaining stone wall carved into the slope to protect a 5-6 meter long trough of roughly hewed stone slabs; the other, quite short, wall meets the first one on the right and is furnished with a stub of iron pipe sticking out of it over the trough butt.

The softly lapping stream of cool clear water runs from the pipe to fill the stone bowl embedded in the wall, for quenching people's thirst and falls from it into the knee-deep trough for cattle and other animals to drink. Brimming up the trough, the water flows over its left end to go meandering down the slope.

However, the water-spring by the giant tree turned out to be flipped, with the water running in reverse – from left to right. Another surprise by the backward spring was that I failed to slake my thirst, which prodded me with the alluring visions of gently bubbling flow, along all the climb started at the roadside diner by the highway turn to the town of Karmir-Bazaar. Because I ran into a _mahtagh_.

(...there are two – thrilling with their depth and beauty – expressions in Armenian:

1) _tsahvyd tahnym_ ; and

2) _mahtagh_ _ahnym_.

The first of them literally means, "I'd haul your pain". Just a couple of words, all in all, yet charged with so much of unfathomable profoundness!.

As for the second pair, it blares out a vow to do a sacrifice – _mahtagh_.

Normally, a _mahtagh_ is done to confirm a happy outcome. Like, when a dear relative was very sick but recovered or, say, survived a car jump into a gorge, then it's high time to do a _mahtagh_ for which end any variety of domestic animals can be slain and offered as a sacrifice, whose extent reflects the bypassed danger's dread, as well as the prosperity of the person in charge of _mahtagh_ -doing.

The meat of sacrifice must be shared among the relatives and neighbors to which they proclaim the traditional formula of felicitation, "Let the offer be accepted," otherwise that is not a _mahtagh_.

Still and all, the _mahtagh_ 's being edible is not the point; you may do it even with a second-hand outfit, donating a pair of worn-out but still sturdy jeans to some poverty-stricken wretch.

Giving is the essence of _mahtagh_ , some kind of offering to be registered by the unseen, unknown, forces who are in control of fate, aka chance, aka fortune...

It does not take exorbitant IQ to figure out, that sacrifice to so murky figures calls into question the omnipotence of Acting Gods from leading religions in this best of worlds.

However, the reverent religions have long since checked and learned from their bitter experience, that eradication of certain pigheaded customs from among the irresponsible segments in their respective congregations is hell of an uphill job, so they prefer to turn their blind eye to springing over the fires built on the shortest summer night, or round dances designed for seeing the winter off, or _mahtagh_ s and other suchlike activities. What can't be cured must be endured. Dammit!

Frequent use would dull anything and turn any, however profound, expression into a trite figure of speech, stripping away the feel of beauty from its meaning:

_"Tsahvyd tahnym_ (I'd haul your pain), how's about paying for the potatoes? Forgot?!."

" _Mahtagh_ _ahnym_ (a sacrificial offering on me), a minute before I gave you six one-hundred-drahm coins! Check your pocket."

_"Tsahvyd tahnym_ (I'd haul your pain), I stick here since morning, there are handfuls of those coins in my pockets."

" _Mahtagh_ _ahnym_ (a sacrificial offering on me), I'm not to pay twice for the same potatoes. Don't wet your whistle too often when a-trading."

In the bazaar of Stepanakert, the capital of Mountainous Karabakh, even when a hassling, folks keep to both correct and deeply poetic stance...)

As it was said, a long cool drink from the so-much-longed-for water-spring was not my lot that day, because in the shade of the giant patriarch of a tree there was a huge _mahtagh_ -doing in full swing around two rows of tables for a hundred of participants, and from the thick of the festivity there sounded a loud yell, "Mr. Ogoltsoff!"

And shortly after, my arm was in a gentle, yet irresistible, grip of a burly gray-haired mujik who led me up to a young stout woman sitting at the table among the others. "You were teaching us! Do you remember me? Could recollect my name?"

(...well, anyway, I did teach her the word "Mister", but what, on earth, could her name be?.)

"Are you 'Ahnoosh'?"

My random guess ignited general delight and tender joy, that their Ahnoosh was still remembered by her name among the teaching staff at the local State University.

And her father, the _mahtagh_ -doer, never loosening his welcome clutch, took me to a vacant place at the far end of males' table, where they immediately replaced a used plate and fork, brought a clean glass and a fresh bottle of tutovka, while the toastmaster was already rising upon his feet with another speech about parents, children, and university diplomas...

The Karabakh tutovka (moonshine from mulberry berries) by its killing force is on a par both with "ruff" (a fifty-to-fifty mixture of vodka and beer) and "northern lights" (medicine alcohol mixed with champagne to the same proportion).

I mean, such a product calls for some substantial snack rejecting the principles of veganism, whereas on the richly festive table only bread and water-melon could actually pass a strict vegetarian control; nonetheless, after each toast speech I bravely gulped tutovka down and my dinner companion on the right, named Nelson Stepanian (a double namesake of the hero pilot fighter at the Great Patriotic War), took pains to swiftly refill my glass, hiding a hooligan grin in his sky-blue squint.

And then I was not up to no sycamores...

I just picked up my haversack bundled with the tent and sleeping bag and walked away across the slope to find a quiet secluded place, and there, swaying, yet closely attending the process, I rigged up the one-person synthetic Made-in-China tent.

The final shreds of keeping myself in check were used for reeling to a nearby oak tree to take a leak behind its mighty trunk.

The turn about and the very first step towards the erected tent pushed me back and smashed against the bumpy oak bole; limp and unresisting, I slid along the crannied bark down to the tree roots and, completely spent, curdled there.

The consciousness twilight thickened sooner than the twilight of the nearing night. The dim modicum of closing horizon circle swerved in pitiless undulation, a surge of overwhelming sickness rolled up and squeezed me, I turned onto my side and, balancing on the unsteady elbow, honked over a thickly bulging root, then fell back into the sharp hard quirks of bark pressing against the back of my head.

Do fish get seasick?.

In the dead of night, its row chill woke me. Gaining back the ability of upright walking was not an easy task, but, eventually, I swagged to the tent, adding on the way my worn-out groans to the grisly howls, and satanic laughter of jackal packs gone loose over the nearby slopes.

That night, for the first time I got it in deadly earnest that I could very easily not survive until the next morning. Terrified by the ruthless piercing grip on my chest, I lay as low as I could and waited for the dawn as for salvation. It came at last but brought no relief, and though my piteous moans were of no help at all, I didn't have it in me to withhold them – everything was taken away by the excruciating sickness.

Yet, if I somehow lived through the night (it started to shakily shape in my mind), then this here Cosmos still needed me for some purpose. My first task was to regain myself; assemble me back.

The inventory revealed a shortage of the upper denture. I plodded along to the oak, sat on my haunches and dumbly poked with a twig the shallow puddle of stiff vomit between the roots. Not there.

The goodnight hurl was so forceful that the prosthesis leaped half-meter farther off from the puddle, and safely spent the night on the mossy ground; the jackals needed nothing of the kind with their teeth all there, and divers other gluttonous riff-raff of the woods were not attracted by the piece of plastic for twenty thousand drahms...

All that day saw me sprawled under the tree by the tent. I was only able to creep along with the slow progress of the tree's shade like a sloppy woodlouse in the gnomon's shadow on sundial disk.

"Don't drink yourself drunk" is a truly sage adage, but as ages ago I tried to explain it to someone, my brake system has its own perspective on this particular matter...

And that same day it became very clear to me that the proximity of the arboreal long-liver was leaving no room for the serene repose and dreamy leisure of untroubled mind.

The distant buzz of _mahtagh_ feasts replacing each other under the sycamore (although not each one was bringing a KAMAZ-truckload of tables for the activity), as well as cows wandering by to the water-spring and back, and their teenage shepherds all too eager for communication, and occasional passers-by either on foot or horseback gaping from the too-close trail at the alien looks of pale-lilac synthetic tent, on top of killing hangover forcibly emphasized the need to find a better spot for my annual taking flight to the hills...

That's why, only this morning, after filling my plastic bottle with the spring water for the trek ahead, I observed the tree closely for a report to you.

Indeed, one millennium is not enough to grow as big as that. The lower branches of the giant are the size of century-old trees. The bulky trunk, carrying that bunch of a grove, has a passage-like cleft in its base to admit the stream of water running from the spring (which, probably, explains the sycamore's longevity), and even a horseman can ride into if ducking low in the saddle...

I also entered the tree and found myself in a murky grove illuminated by the daylight reaching in from the shade outside, through the entrance and the opposite exit. It felt damp and uncomfortable in there. Several flat stones were strewn at random over the boggy ground of the floor to serve footholds. The huge barbecue box of roughly welded sheet-iron on the rusty legs of rebar-rods stuck deep in the quaggy soil inside the cavity was thickly covered with uneven layers of wax drippings from innumerate candles burned in the box. The dismal settings made you want to get out sooner, back into the clear morning.

So, out I went to collect my things and, with a farewell look at the glorious sycamore, I once again shook my head in a mute pooh-pooh at those ugly knife marks left by self-immortalizers always ready to add their memes, and esoteric symbols to any landmark the assholes can put their hands on.

The oldest of the mark-scars had crept, along with the bark, up to some six meters above the ground. Cut a couple of centuries ago, the upper marks got blurred and distended along with the inaudible flow of time into obscure, unreadable, contours over the uneven ripples in the gray bark that pulled the labor lost up, into inevitable oblivion...

I didn't retake the route which two days before brought me to the famous tree. Instead, my intention was to go along the ridge of the _toombs_ (so in Karabakh they call the rounded mountains stretching in wavy chains, covered with the woods and grass, to tell them from giant lehrs pricking the sky with their raw rocky peaks) by which stratagem I would bypass climbing all the way down to the valley of Karmir-Bazaar and trudging back up the highway to the pass in the vicinity of the Sarushen village.

That's why I followed a well-neigh indiscernible trail tilting up the steep to the right. I did not know whether my plan was feasible at all but if there's a trail it would eventually bring you someplace, right? And I walked on along it, inhaling sweet fragrance from the infinite varieties of mountain verdure, admiring the fixed waves of merrily green _toombs_ flooded with the sunshine, looking forward to the delight from the breathtaking view which would unfurl from atop the ridge...

And it turned out just so—a view surpassing the most dainty epithets by Bunin-and-Turgenev as well as the subtlest brush strokes in Ayvazovsky-and-Sarian's pictures—and against that terrific background, the trail flowed into a narrow road coming up from nowhere to the next _toomb_ from whose wood, there were descending, dwindled to specks by the distance, a couple of horses, two men, and a dog.

We met in ten minutes. The horses dragged three-to-four-meter-long trunks of young trees cinched with their thicker ends onto the backs of beasts of burden; the loose, peeled of bark, tops were scratching against the scorched road. Two boys and a dog escorted the firewood for keeping their homes warm next winter.

Entering the wood, I met another party of loggers; they were three horses, and three men, and no dog. We exchanged greetings and I asked if there was a way to reach Sarushen going along the chain of toombs.

The woodchopper in a sun-bleached red shirt and with the skin in his face tight as a drum to expose the detailed structure of his skull, replied that he had heard of such a trail but never went along it, and that after another three hundred meters I would meet a one-eyed old man cutting wood up there, who should certainly know.

I walked as far as I was told to, then another three or five hundred meters, but never heard an ax; the old man was, probably, enjoying a snack break with a good smoke and sound nap...

Before reaching the top of the toomb, the road split into multiple paths. I picked the one which looked wider but it soon gave out and disappeared completely. There remained just an untrodden mountain wood around, where instead of walking you have to climb grabbing at the tree trunks; a pretty tiring exercise, to be honest. Without climbing towards the summit, I kept moving around it, looking for a passage to the next _toomb_ in the ridge.

Suddenly, there came the feeling of some odd change. The sounds of the summer wood died away and the daylight got dimmed into a weird twilight erasing the sunlight spots between the bushes and on the tree trunks. A flash-mob of clouds in the sky?

Looking around, I got it – instead of lofty giants blended with diverse undergrowth I was surrounded by frequent trunks of peers whose crowns interlocked at four to five meters above the ground into a dense mass of foliage impenetrable for the sun, and it was their joint shadow that filled the air with the uncanny touch.

Something made me look back to the eye contact with the intent stare of a beast. A jackal? Dog?

...ah, none...look at this brush of a tail...a fox, to be sure...or maybe a vixen...sure, a young one, never met hunters yet...

"Hi, Fox. I'm not Prince. I am not young. Go your way."

I moved on, dodging the long web-threads, bypassing, and at times scrambling through the thorny scrub; the fox followed. Who started the lie that animals cannot withstand your fixed look and have to turn their eyes away? Bullshit!.

And so we went on. Occasionally, I addressed him with one or another conversational clue but he never picked gossip. At one point, I took off my haversack and opened it to fetch and throw him a piece of bread.

At first, he didn't seem to know how to approach it, but then ate, without taking his vigilant sight off me. Considering the donor as a potential prey? Don't hurry, schemer...

And only when between the trees ahead there stretched a sunlit clearing, he started casting skulking looks behind himself and soon blend into the woodwork. Fare thee well, Young Fox from the young forest...

I went out into the clearing to realize that I had made roughly a full circle about the summit without finding the passage to the next toomb. A couple of decayed roofs peeped from under the distant cliffs. Enough was enough and, fed up with the search for a supposed trail along the ridge, I switched over to looking for a possibility of climbing down to the ghost village of Skhtorashen.

The steep footpath soon showed up and brought me to a deserted mulberry orchard from where I proceeded to the village spring of delicious water, far more superb to that by the long-liver sycamore.

Then I walked a thirty-meter-long street of two or three houses lost under the vigorously grown blackberry bushes. The raggedly cobbled street changed abruptly for a barely discernible trail tilting down the slope which faced the Karmir-Bazaar valley.

(...the village of Skhtorashen was deserted before the Karabakh war, that's why the houses were not burned down and still had their rotten roofs in place.

The village, like many other ones, got killed by the dimwit decision of the Soviet leadership on the resettlement of population from high mountainous areas to lower places. The USSR, over its seventies at that time, was sinking into senile dotage because of political systems tend to follow the life circle of man, their creator.

Servile authorities of the then Mountainous Karabakh Autonomous Region, along with the like polities in other Caucasian regions obeyed loose-brain Big Brother's injunction and finished off more than one village.

I mean, with all due respect to septuagenarians I'd rather skip their venerable funny club...)

On the way down the slope, a couple of my additional tries at finding some shortcuts were blocked by deep gorges and sheer cliffs, so the highway met me exactly where I left it two days before, near "The Old Sycamore Diner".

(...gently is a good boy led by fate, but naughty ones are dragged along with a grip at their hair and get to the very same, unavoidable, destination...)

After several turns of the smooth serpentine, the highway took a beeline to the pass out from the spacey valley of Karmir-Bazaar.

I trudged along the roadside through both repulsive and fetching smell of asphalt thawed by the sun. Panting, sweating, plodding ahead, I more and more often changed the position of the haversack straps on my shoulders, but they dug into the flesh anyplace and hurt to the very bone.

The salty sweat ate into my eyes that ceased joyous frisking around the beautiful views and toiled uphill in a dull weary gaze at the rough asphalt under the shabby army boots stomping my shadow, which began to gradually grow longer.

Still and all, at times my eyes took the liberty of casting wistful glances up seeking a shady tree by the highway, though I knew perfectly well there was not a single one all the way up to the pass top.

Once or twice, I left the asphalt to slacken thirst with blackberries from the bushes down the road shoulder, but it seemed this year we are facing the blackberry crop failure or it was the stretch of barren bushes; and again me heavy boots were tramping uphill along with the relentless tilt...

To develop skills of foretelling, don't look for a better coach than mountains. And when the endless straight ascend of the highway reached the pass top to change from that point into horizontal bends and twists dictated by the relief of the _toombs_ outside the valley, I could predict, and pretty accurately too, that half an hour later the already indiscernible (if watched from this here position) speck of me would be taking the indiscernible turn over the most far off slope of that distant _toomb_ and, after ten-to-fifteen-minute walk, I would leave the highway before reaching the Sarushen village, and follow the dirt road tilting down to the bottom of the Varanda River valley. And there it would be really nice, with lots of shade under the trees, and the spring of cool water running from the rocky river bank...

All happened exactly as foretold, and when the dirt road got down to the shallow ford across the gravel-filled riverbed before the steep rise to the village of Sarkissashen, I parted with it and went along the river through the live tunnel in a hazel thicket that led to the wide-open space with a narrow and unusually level field stretching alongside the foot of the giant _toomb_ on the opposite bank.

Try to imagine a football field put sloping upright, and overgrown with broad-leaf wood up to the very top of that wheeling stadium. Because of the toomb's rampant steepness, the tree crowns do not screen each other but succeed, climbing higher and higher, and each of them shimmers with its own, a little bit different, shade of green. Can you imagine all that?

If so, then you can easily see me as well on this riverbank, stretched on my back under a huge walnut tree, on the thick mat of moldered foliage from the years past; brittle, soft, dried out.

Here am I to enjoy the orgy of the upward stream of green running over the _toomb_ across the river, and to relish the blue of the sky above, and admire the canopy of broad walnut leaves sun-bathing in the light breeze over my head.

Ho-ho! It's damn good to be alive, lying like that, thinking about this or that, or nothing. The only discordant note is the absence of anyone who I could share all this beauty with.

Whoops! Forget, cut this one out... I've got used already that the moments of such delight happen only with nobody around... Yet, it's never overmuch to make sure of keeping megalomania tightly in check, neither to take things for granted, like, the more space is forked out to one person, the higher is their position...

Once upon a time, I was flipping through a discarded relic of a glossy magazine in German. The feature article in it was all about a certain Hoheit Herzog, the owner of a giant chemical concern.

In short, he's one of those Highnesses whose stance is above the political rat races because they leave that petty sport to presidents, prime ministers, contesting parties and so forth, but whose turns of rudder from within their enterprises, even though for the slightest fraction of a degree, become decisive for the entire politics of Germany.

The article was full of eye-candies, the main of which presented his closeup against the backdrop of his personal backyard park, some stunningly vast area, with blond-lock cupids of his grandkids playing toy bows between the trees.

His forefathers, wandering Jew paddlers, hauled consumer goods from as far as China itself to trade with feudal dukes, and barons, and other kinds of the medieval bandits. Gentile barbarians paid the sidelocked Shylocks with all sorts of base abuse. And now he's the upper dog, the monarch of a wealthy kingdom. Yet, is he happy?

I doubted it strongly while considering the facial expression of Herr Herzog's midst that well-groomed park of his...

OK, but what about me? Am I happy here, lying on my side beneath the arboreal awning, enjoying whiffs of the soft breeze from the cool river, with all this hell of space for me and me alone?

Some huge domain, indeed, this field overgrown with the knee-deep grass, and bluish spherical thorns looking like spiked maces, and that grand, royal, _toomb_ over there, as tall as the residential towers bulking up along the highway between Kiev and the Borispol Airport. What else would you ask for to feel happy? Eh?

A pretty interesting question if you come to think of it. Alas, there's no looking-glass in my haversack to knock out a self-diagnosis from the expression of my mug...

I got aware of this place six years ago when the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, the newly independent and never recognized by the external world, arranged sort of a Pioneer tent camp here for school kids of Stepanakert.

Sahtic worked there through all the camp sessions, back-to-back. My humble suggestion to leave our dearest children to my fatherly care and custody was turned down with a scoff. That's why Ahshaut and Emma spent that summer by their mother's side, all the three sessions, back-to-back, in the camp platoons befitting their different age and gender.

The eldest child in our family, Ruzanna, having just passed her university exams for the second year of study, joined them there and picked up the job of self-styled unsalaried Pioneer Leader, because she always knew what she wanted and never could be stopped by anything short of the force major...

After a couple of weeks staying home alone, I got bored stiff by unusually mute evenings in our house, so one late afternoon I left the city taking the direction of the Sarushen village. On the way, I bought a pack of cookies and some candies from a petty shop in the town outskirts. (By that time in my life I grew already up to the realization that the joy of seeing Dad should be reinforced and sweetened.)

Hitchhiking, I reached the village and at dark got to the camp.

Just about the same spot where I am lying now, there stood the folding canvas stool of Camp Director, Shahvarsh, on which no one ever dared get seated except him, kinda local species of the frigging Coronation Boulder in Scotland.

And on the broad trunk of this walnut tree, even then lightning-split already, there hung a single but powerful lamp, fed by softly whirring power generator, which spilled its light into the thick darkness around.

Two long tables of sheet-iron outlined the field edge, both between a couple of even longer, narrow, benches of the same material.

The silhouettes of two squat pyramids of army tarpaulin tents bulked in the dark field: one for all the girls at the camp, the other for the boys and Gym Teacher. A little to the left there stood a six-person tent of Caretakers.

The formation was concluded by a two-person tent for Camp Director Shavarsh and his wife, who also embraced the positions of Cook and Paramedic.

Deeper in the field, some thirty meters to the right from the tents, a tame campfire was licking lazily with quiet tongues of flame the end of a sizable log, a whole tree-trunk with its boughs chopped off, propelled, as needed, into the gleaming embers of the burned down wood...

All of Camp Caretakers were, naturally, teachers from the city schools, who identified me in the lamplight and called Sahtic. Ruzanna came running after. They both were glad to see me, though with a trace of inward strain in Sahtic, prepared to knock off any funny stuff of mine was it out of tune with the local customs shaped by millennia of use.

However, I was not in the mood to fool about any fundamental matters and just behaved, sat down at the table with the camp dinner in progress, and appreciatively accepted a plate of oatmeal, a spoon, and a slice of bread. I even made attempts at biting a little bit off that bread, which turned out to be no match for plastic teeth, I had to inconspicuously put it aside and concentrate on the porridge.

(...How come that make-believe pioneer camp, a keepsake from the happy Soviet times, popped up in the country whose Minister of Education confessed, in a fit of openness, that his ministry cannot even buy a football for School 8?

Supposedly, the Diaspora provided a target grant and end summer the oversea philanthropists would be treated with a nice grateful report: "Thanks to the $40,000 of your generous donation, all the schoolchildren from the City of Stepanakert, the capital of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, were presented with the unique opportunity to...")

The commenced composition of the report to hypothetical donors from presumed grant-rippers was interrupted by the happy squeals of Emma snuggling to my side.

I fondly stroke her straight hair and the narrow back of a preschool child, asked some casual questions; she answered them and asked me back. "And where's Ahshaut? D'you know?"

She pointed at the far end of the next table where the light from the lamp dissolved in the night darkness. Ahshaut sat there, forgetful of the meal, admiringly a-gape at the high school teenagers who towered about him cackling in their nonstop rookery.

I took the package out from the pocket of my summer jacket and gave it to Emma asking to share the sweets with her brother. She quietly walked away...

Then there was a dinner for adults. Camp Caretakers, all of them females recruited from among the city school teachers, modestly drank wine. Gym Teacher, Camp Director, the precinct policeman from a nearby village, and I was sharing traditional tutovka.

For a snack, we had some small fry, banged in the river with an electric discharge from the power generator which was borrowed from the camp by the precinct policeman earlier in the day. The catch was fried by Cook, aka Paramedic, aka Camp Director's wife...

A group of teenagers approached the table with a petition to Shavarsh to allow some dancing and he graciously decreed a half-hour delay in the camp lights-out.

Meanwhile, I asked Ruzanna about Ahshaut. She answered that he was already sleeping in the tent and volunteered to go after him, but I said, "No, don't disturb."

The teenagers gathered by the campfire and danced to the music from the loudspeaker box hanging from the tree next to the walnut with the lamp.

At first, it seemed strange that all of them danced with their backs to the feast of seniors at the sheet-iron table, but then I cracked it: everyone danced with their personal shadow cast off by the lamplight into the night field.

Then Camp Director announced it was enough, switched the generator off, and retired to his royal double tent...

Some of the camping teenagers sneaked, in twos and threes, to the quietly glowing log to scare each other with spooky stories, as old as the hills, and to laugh at the timeless jokes up to one or two past midnight, under the sympathetic supervision by Caretakers, their school teachers, taking turns in the night shift.

I stayed there till one o'clock and then accepted the suggestion to go and sleep on a vacant camp-cot in the boys' tent, leaving Sahtic to do her turn by the fire, because I had to walk away at six in the morning so as to catch the bus to Stepanakert...

Years later, I asked Ahshaut why he did not come up to me that night. He answered that he was told about my visit only the following day when I had already left the camp. To my question about the biscuits and candies, he only responded with an uninformed shrug.

I don't blame Emma. At the age of six, to finish on the sly a pack of biscuits that turned up along with that camp rations is just a normal manifestation of healthy selfishness.

Yet poor Ahshaut! How does it feel to grow up knowing (even though that knowledge since long was buried away and securely forgotten, it still remains there) that your father did not want to come up to you? From all of the family, it's only you that your father did not want to come up to...

Well, let bygones be bygones or, quoting the regular adage from my latest mother-in-law, Emma Arshakovna: "So's life, see?."

Eeewwwww!. Who let them icky blues sneak into this luxuriously spacey place for me alone?. To hell all them nostalgic sentiments! Let's have a little knock-up with venville legitimate hooliganism...

Bypassing thickets on the steep slope, I explore the underwood along the field edge, pulling a broken bough here, a dead sapling there onto the desolate cow path. After advancing in that manner some two hundred meters, I turn around and go back picking up the firewood scattered over the path. With an ample armful of fuel, I come back to the former campsite, then re-track to fetch another bundle; and one more. That's that.

The next step is breaking brushwood for the fire and baking "pioneers' fav'rite food-ood-ood", as a cheerful Soviet song christened potatoes. And that is a piece of work to do barehanded because I'm not equipped with even a knife.

At times the fact of my hiking unarmed astounds people, and they start giving out boo-boo stories of hungry wolves or cruel robbers. However, in all my annual escapes to the wilderness, I've only seen deer and foxes, and a couple of times bear steps, but no robbers ever bothered to ambush me in the toombs.

Yet, once I got attacked indeed, when spending the night under a bush nearby the Mekdishen village, in my sleeping bag additionally wrapped over with a piece of blue synthetic burlap. (The shoddy crap drenches through in the rain before you say "knife", but that was before I got this Chinese tent.)

It was about midnight, when two wolfhounds, escorting a belated horseman, ran into me stretched on the ground. Damn! What a hell of barking broke loose over my head!

Their master arrived at the scene with his flashlight and was stunned with so strange a sight in his native quarters, but the blue sack yelled from under the bush that it was a tourist from Stepanakert and let him call back his bloody beasts.

The mujik started the all too familiar blah-blah about the wolves, for which I was not in the mood and cut him short that after his gumprs nothing would ever scare me anymore...

And at the sleepover upon the Dizzuppaht, which is the third highest mountain in Karabakh, half an hour after me there climbed up a party of guys from the Halo Trust. That is an international organization headquartered in Great Britain, who finance and teach techniques of mine clearance to the natives of hot spots at war all over the globe because conflicting sides have a nasty custom of setting up lots of minefields to kill as many people from the opposite side as possible.

Now, the local sappers (instructed by native Britons) climbed the Dizzuppaht on their off-duty time to do a _mahtagh_ , because atop that mountain, from time immemorial, there stood a stone chapel which you should walk around, thrice, for your request to be approved by the authorities of fate.

The Halo Trust guys, naturally, did not come empty-handed, they brought a rooster with them for the sacrificial offering. But because of the somewhat impromptu nature of their _mahtagh_ -doing, they missed to bring a knife and were expressly disappointed to learn that neither had I.

Yet, the inventive folks found a novel technique on-the-fly, and they chopped the bird's head off with the piece of a broken bottle collected in the heap of garbage left by all the previous _mahtagh_ -doers...

It's only that year when I climbed the second highest peak in the region, the Keers, I had an imitation of a Swiss army knife, a present from Nick Wagner. It had a whole bunch of things in its handle: a fork, a corkscrew, and even a nail file. I can't remember where I misplaced it afterward.

But, however long were I bragging and showing off, the region's peak number one remains absent from the peacock tail of my vagrant achievements. The front line of the unfinished war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis crosses that mountain. So, if not one side, then the other wouldn't let me pass up, or they'd just bang from both sides synchronously.

That is to say, that breaking dried branches manually is not too big a problem, and before long I readied up two sizable heaps of fuel for the fire.

With the first one burned up, in its hot ashes I will bury unpeeled (so is the recipe) potatoes, and restart the fire upon them with the other heap.

But not right now, first, I have to put the tent up; with the sun gone already behind this wheeling football field of a toomb, the dusk will soon start creeping slowly from over the river...

(...each human is a pyromaniac to some extent.

" and then the pyromaniacs partook of pies with Pirosmani..."

At first, the line looks like an unfinished jaw-breaker, but then it gives a slow rise to a disjunctive question: was Pirosmani at the table among the eaters or, after all, within the pies as a toothsome filling?.)

So as not to set the field and all ablaze, I systematically stopped the fugitive flames with the long club which I couldn't crack when crushing the firewood.

As the bonfire got bordered with the black ring of burnt grass, the club-armed sentry transformed into an idle onlooker considering the frisk dance of flame tongues over the wood pieces. The club itself became a staff to lean my locomotion apparatus against it...

And what do you see in the lively fire or in the scintillating glow of coals breaking up?

(...we were a seed, then a germ, then buds, then branches...)

Now, turning the staff into a poker, I rake their smoldering reminiscences, push them aside to open a hole for a dozen potatoes; dinner and breakfast — two in one.

The fire eats wood, I eat potatoes, mosquitoes eat me...

(...who do not eat, they do not live.

Even such a goody-goody as some unobtrusive crystal devours space when growing.

But no one can ever devour time because it does not exist at all.

Time is nothing but a red-herring to fool naive suckers. What they call "time" is just a series of different states of space.

Some place sunlit from the left is morning, the same place sunlit from the right is evening. As simple as that.

Day as a unit of time? Bullshit!

Day is just the difference between two states of space. An apple adds to an apple to make a pair of them and not a unit of time, damn!.

Oh, sorry!. There, there! Don't be afraid, sweetheart, no gray wolves around, no unrestrained emotions, all's under a strict control...

Okay, it's no use denying that I'm a bit spacey on the point of space and time, just a bit, not really noticeable when you don't look too closely.

However, just a brush in passing with that sweet couple and—ta-dah!—there is a short circuit and I start pouring forth some folly accomplished. Sort of reincarnation of that crackpot Vasily the Blessed, only cocked up by completely different stuff.

Still and all, I am not a violent case. Not in the least! I swear, and both Devil and God, (alphabetically) might safely attest to that.

The course of seizure brings no harm whatever to anyone about because the hooey I pour forth is more than enough to tangle myself in it and—voilà!—here am I, the same obediently complaisant yahoo ready to carry on whatever they see fit to burden me with...)

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Genesis

You're not familiar with your lineage on the paternal side, right? As for your Mom's family tree, I suppose, it was presented to you in detail by your grandmother and no less than two generations deep.

The reasonable doubt about your awareness of my pedigree arose after a letter from your mother notified me about my death.

Well, not so callously though, she was kind enough to soften the impact and just informed that you were told that your Dad was dead and I would better abstain from stressing the immaturely fragile psyche of the child by exposure to rendezvous with her late father's ghost.

And here lies the explanation why ever since if in a pub the fella next to me started to bend my ear by lamentations over the fact of his being nobody these days though there were the times that saw him the Chief Mate of a nuke submarine, then in response, with well-grounded right and clear conscience, I drove it back that once I was a famous pilot tragically killed at shakedown flights of the secret-type jet fighter of new generation.

For which unparalleled achievement I, by the by, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union together with the Gold Star medal. Posthumously, of course, and it's a sad pity the award didn't find the hero because they never tried hard enough...

That bullshit, to be true, was not of my invention because in that romantic epoch, when the growing kid of a single mother began asking questions about the incomplete composition of their family, Mom's excuse, traditionally, sounded as follows, "Your father was a pilot and died in a flight."

Sharing of the brute facts of life was reserved for her bosom lady-friends, "He was a junior bookkeeper, guys, and spread me on his office desk, O, my! As long as I live will I not forget that fucking abacus rollicking to-and-fro under my ass..."

However, don't expect of me a fine-grained presentation of your roots because my knowledge of the matter is way too shallow and fuzzy because at those times the study of eugenics was frowned at...

The name of your father's mother's mother was Katerina Poyonk and she was brought from Poland by your great-grandfather, Joseph Vakimov, a commissar in the 1-st Cavalry Army of Semyon Budyonny, as a trophy, or maybe a keepsake of that period in the Civil War when Budyonny's cavalry nearly captured Warsaw.

Their relationship was legalized by the then Civil Registry Office, aka ZAGS, and eight years later my mother, Galina, was born followed by her brother, Vadim, and then by their sister, Lyudmila. In recollections of those three, Joseph was very clever. He knew Jewish and German languages and was a Regional Trade Auditor in Ukraine. During that period Katerina had a separate pair of shoes for each of her frocks.

Seven years later, in the late thirties, Joseph was arrested. They did not put him before a firing squad to shot away like millions of other "people's enemies", apparently he found a clever way to buy his life back and was only deported instead to a very northern, however, European part of Russia. The family followed him and at the beginning of the forties, they all returned to Ukraine and lived in the city of Konotop, soon afterward captured by the German Wehrmacht.

After two years of the Nazi occupation, when German troops retreated westward under the blows of the Red Army, my grandfather disappeared from home one day before the liberation, together with his bicycle — a very valuable thing in those times.

The next morning, heavy bombardment made Katerina and her three children flee as far as the suburban village of Podlipnoye, where a shell fragment cut an apple branch above my mother's head (some telling detail, if not for those odd centimeters I wouldn't be composing this letter to you now). By noon, the advancing troops of the Red Army liberated both the village and the city. Katerina came back to Konotop where she brought up, as a single mother, her children — Galina, Vadim, and Lyudmila...

In the early fifties, her eldest daughter Galina met, through acquaintance by correspondence, Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a petty officer of the Order of Combat Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. "Acquaintance by correspondence" meant the postman bringing a letter which would start with, "Hello, unknown Galina...", and end with,"...Send me your photo, please!"

And on his furlough the following year, instead of usual visiting his native Ryazan Region in Russia, Nikolai arrived in the Ukrainian city of Konotop where the width of both his flaring Navy pants and his chest under the striped vest along with his sailor's cap bearing golden-lettered inscription "The Black Sea Fleet" above his forehead as well as two black ribbons at the back of his head, the shining anchor in his polished belt plate impressed the quiet streets of the outskirts which he walked looking for the place he addressed his letters in envelopes ornamented with hand-written line added by him on behind, "Fly with my greetings, come back with the promise of meetings!."

And three days later my parents, without even asking my grandmother, registered their marriage in the city ZAGS...

Was my missing grandpa Joseph a Jew?

Being a commissar in the years of the Civil War, proficiency with the language in question, and even his name could be considered circumstantial evidence to the assumption.

However, the high percentage of the chosen people's offsprings among the revolutionary leaders does not remove the possibility of exceptions. The language might have been learned while he was doing the job of shop assistant at a store of some Jew. As for the name, then even such a hardened anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin was his namesake.

Nevertheless, my mother, when introducing herself, preferred the patronymic "Osipovna".

Her dark mellow eyes she inherited from Katerina Ivanovna (or Katarzyna Janovna?) whose affinity with the tribes of Israel looked doubtful enough.

Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen there hung a dark lacquered board with some gloomy-bearded saint (I can't say of which religion or nationality, could be a Catholic as well). Besides, she fattened a pig in her shed, Masha was her name, for slaughter.

But, again, the icon might have taken root as a camouflaging part of the interior in the time of Nazi occupation, while the restrictions of kosher diet can be overruled with the common Ukrainian proverb – "Need teaches eating cakes with lard".

Of course, all these unanswerable questions will arise after the return of your ancestors from their marriage registration at Konotop ZAGS, but we are not to follow them along with all that way, we are taking a U-turn – to trace the line of your grandfather's father's origin.

That line is simple, straight, and down-to-earth. In a word, Mikhail Ogoltsoff was a peasant.

In the depths of the Ryazan land, there is the district center of Sapozhok and at nine or eleven kilometers from it (the distance depends on who was asked the question), you find the village of Kanino. My father liked to boast that in its fat days the village had about four hundred households.

The noiseless sluggish stream along with a shallow ravine it flows in divides the village into two halves. Back in the blessed days of yore, the stream banks served the grounds for the ancient folk amusement "Battling Walls", aka collective fist-fight. The folks from one half of the village were in earnest punching mugs of the villagers from the other half smashing the teeth out to celebrate some church holiday or just a bright Sunday day.

O, yeah, once upon a time people knew how to entertain themselves...

And so it went on for centuries before sinking into oblivion. Only vague memories remained of Alesha the Saddler – the legendary fighter and obedient son. But his Dad was real strict! "Where to?" he would shout at his son. "So filthy rich you are, eh? Sit tight and do the work!"

And the mighty three-and-thirty-year-old son would stoop his bulky shoulders over the unfinished horse-collar, poking it with his awl while all of him was there, by the stream, from where little boys were breathlessly running in with the updates, "Oh, Alesha! They are pressing indeed! Ours are giving in!"

Yet, the warning snort from his father would keep Alesha silent and concentrated on his toil until many "a-heck!" and "plunks!" of a dogged retreat became heard in the hut. At that point, Dad would no longer keep his temper down. Springing up to his feet, he would run to Alesha and deal him a huge box on the ear and yell, "Fuck it! Ours bite the dust but this dickhead still sits home!"

But Alesha didn't hear all of that, he would already be out of the door bypassing the battling "Walls" through village backyard kitchen gardens because the rules forbid attacking the opposite team from behind; a good game calls for fair play.

"Alesha's out!" And "ours" at once get a second breath while the opposite "Wall" shows streaks of wavering. Some weaklings start falling down in advance – the rules do not allow to beat a fighter lying on the ground. And Alesha, deeply concentrated, knocks the standing fighters out one after another; and, mark you, without a single f-f..er..foul word.

Yeap, the village was in the pink then...

The Rural Collectivization in the USSR finished off that innocent merry-making. The well-concerted Great Hunger, called to solidify the revolutionary changes in the Russian villagers life, knocked Alesha off, and his father, sure enough, also starved to death...

My father's mother, Martha, remembered the life under the Czar because at the break of the Great October Revolution she was a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Ten years later she was already married to Mikhail Ogoltsoff to bring forth three children: Kolya, Sehrguey, and Alexandra (respectively).

Mikhail survived the start of collectivization but the Great Hunger made him pass on and Martha remained a single mother. She cooked soup of saltbush and less edible herbs. Both she and her children were swelling up from starvation but survived.

Then there arrived the era of hard labor at the collective farm, aka kolkhoz, with its miserly paid workdays. Life was spinning around those "workdays" paid in kind with the same products the villagers produced slaving in the kolkhoz fields, and recreation at the kolkhoz club where twice a month they brought Soviet movies. To make movie-watching possible, the village lads had to rotate the crank of a portable dynamo machine generating electricity for the film projector.

In the summer of 1941, Joseph Stalin announced the treacherous invasion of fascist Germany into the Soviet Union, and the village mujiks were driven to the war.

The Germans never reached Kanino though the thunder of the front-line cannonade was rolling in from the horizon. Then in the village came detachments of the Red Army reserve, the mujiks from Siberia with their astounding custom to take a steam bath and then sit outside in the frosty winter night and have a thoughtful smoke, with just their undershirts on.

The Siberians left in the direction of the cannonade and soon afterward it was heard no more. In the village, besides the silence, stayed only women, girls and boys too young to be drafted. And—yes!—the collective farm chairman; a one-armed cripple.

And so it went on and on, not for days or weeks but for months, from year to year. Under the circumstances, there cropped up certain sexual deviancy among the womenfolk. They would gather in one or another hut for inspection of one or another vagina of theirs, exchanging comments and judgments about whose one looked more attractive...

Getting on the scent of this Sapphism Renaissance, the kolkhoz chairman tried to eradicate that lesbian innovation before the rumors of it reached the district authorities, and he called a general meeting of exclusively women and girls in the kolkhoz club.

The male youths participated too, on the quiet. They crawled to the projectionist booth in the club and, with their jaws hung, witnessed the chairman to holler our all kinds of curses at the congregation and, repeatedly knocking his only fist on the desk, he solemnly swore to cut out that rotten cunt-watching. (I mitigate, in part, the artless bucolic directness marking the figures of speech in the chairman's proclamation.)

My father never knew if the cripple kept his promise because he (my father) was drafted into the Red Army. Or rather, in his case, it was not the Army but Navy...

The WWII was burning out yet kept devouring the cannon fodder at no less rate. Kolya, a youth from a Ryazan village, together with lots of youths from other places, was outfitted with the black Navy pea-jacket and for a couple of months kept at a recruit depot to get drilled military basics and know "Attention!" from "Dismissed!" They also were taught to distinguish the bayonet of a rifle from its trigger and, finally, put on high-speed cutters for a landing operation somewhere up the Danube river in Austria.

But, for all the speed of the landing operation cutters, they didn't get there in time: Germany had already capitulated and there was no one to attack.

(...long ago I felt some regret at this point: eew! they left no time for my Dad to become a hero!

Now, on the contrary, I am glad that he never shot and killed anyone, not even accidentally...)

Then he was charged with guarding of the Serpent Island off the coast of Bulgaria, or maybe Romania, from where they transferred him to a minesweeper, a petty Naval trawler with a small crew.

My Dad's seafaring service began with the passage from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk over the ruff Black Sea; it was not really a storm but the sea was pretty choppy.

Riding a swing in the park is fun but if you try enjoying it for a couple of hours the stomach will throw up anything stuck in it from the day before yesterday's breakfast. That sea crossing continued much longer...

When the Red Navy man Ogoltsoff came ashore at the port of destination, even the land itself kept swaying under his feet. He tried to puke between the tall timber-stacks lined along the pier, but to no avail.

The young sailor sat down just where he stood and, watching the towering rows of timber that kept swaying up and down, thought that he would die in that naval service...

(...as you may figure it out that was a wrong assumption because he had not yet met your grandmother, nor persuaded her to go with him to ZAGS.

And your grandmother hadn't yet born three children without becoming later a single mother, which will constitute an unprecedented instance of such a development in this here story...)

So, seasickness did not kill my father. He learned to endure the pitching and tossing. He tattooed a blue anchor on the back of his hand, and on his right arm a swift outline of a swallow in the flight—from the elbow to the wrist—with a tiny letter envelope in his beak ("fly with greetings..."); and on his bitty minesweeper he furrowed the vastness of the Black Sea, clearing it from the minefields, which is what the Navy minesweepers are, actually, used for.

The main difference of naval mines from land mines is that the first must be tied down or else they would scatter away and destroy any ship they meet on the way without checking whether she was of "theirs" or "ours". That's why each of the sea mines is tied with a steel cable to an anchor.

With anchors grabbed at the seabed, the mines—the balls of iron filled with air and explosives—pop up, without reaching the surface though but only as far as the cables' length let them rise to correspond to sea depth on specific sea routes. And there the naval mines hover, some two or three meters deep, waiting for a passing ship to catch one of the spike-like detonators sticking out of the mine-shell in different directions as in a kiddish sketch of the sun.

Thanks to its shallow immersion, the Navy minesweeper passes over the minefield without touching the spikes of the detonators. The boat drags a long loop of thick steel cable in its wake cutting the mines anchorage at the seabed so that the freed mines float up to the surface for the following liquidation.

To perform the liquidation a manned rowboat leaves the minesweeper heading towards the mine. The sailors' task is to fix a dynamite cartridge with the Bickford fuse onto the huge iron ball of the mine. (And this is to be done not in a quiet park pond but among unsteady waves in the open sea with the mine-shell ball rising above the rowboat and then falling under it, striving to ram with the horn of a detonator.)

The operation is performed by the boatswain seated in the rear seat, with a lit cigarette between his lips, and it's not for showing off what a daredevil he is; the cigarette is a readied tool to ignite the fuse. Now it's set on fire and – Hup! Hup! Ho!

Everyone pulls with might and main, no shirkers in the boat. It's of vital importance to get as far away as possible while the fuse is still hissing behind because the powerful charge of a naval mine is designed to tear up the hulls of line battleships...

When decomposed into constitutive elements, romantic heroism just disappears and maritime mine clearance begins to look like a commonplace tractor bumbling in a kolkhoz field. The minesweeper gets to the assigned water area and furrows it all day long, back and forth, with the cable released behind the stern; and on the following day – to the next area. On the whole, the minesweeper crew's heroism consists in being a good team, and the fact that my father stayed alive resulted from their candid cooperation.

For example, at the end of a usual working day, Nikolai Ogoltsoff watched over the stern winch when he noticed a mine approaching the boat because the mine anchorage line got intertwined with the minesweeper's trailing cable reeled back to the windlass drum.

It was too late to switch off the winch which would spin on by inertia for a short, yet sufficient, time to drag and bang the mine against the boat.

Dad's shirt stood off away from his body like the hide of a beast at the moment of utmost danger, and he roared, "Full Ahead!", with such an animal force that Captain on the bridge lightning-haste duplicated his order on E. O. T. sending the bell to the engine room, the mechanic, Dad's shift-man, did his job quickly, the boat propeller churned up the wave whose pressure cut off the line of the nearing mine. So the team saved each other.

Five years later there remained no unswept areas in the sea routes and my father was transferred from the minesweeper to a coastguard ship, again in charge of the diesel engine. The following year saw the end of his second term in the Navy service and they offered my father a job in a "mailbox".

At those times the USSR had lots of secret institutions, secret factories, and even secret cities, none of which had an ordinary postal address to fool enemy spies by giving them no clue to whereabouts of all those secret objects. As a result, the addressee stopped living in any street or city, he lived in no region neither district and he was referred to in a much shorter way: "N. Ogoltsoff, Mail Box № ."

Since on his last furlough before the demobilization, the Red Navy man Ogoltsoff N. M. registered his marriage with the citizen Vakimova G. J. she also got to the "mailbox" in the Carpathian mountains.

There was no maternity hospital in the "box", and for giving birth to me my mother was taken to the town of Nadveerna, thirty kilometers from the regional center, the city of Stanislavl (later renamed into Ivano-Frankivsk). She was very afraid of going because the Bandera men were shooting at the vehicles on the roads.

(...more than half of my life I considered the Bandera men bloody bandits and Nazi accomplices. What else to think of them if a full-scale military division named "Galichina" was manned with Western Ukrainians to fight against the Red Army?

Then, gradually, it dawned on me that two years before the German invasion it was the Red Army who occupied Western Ukraine and assisted the Soviet secret police, aka NKVD, in executions and deportation of potential opponents to the Soviet system.

Besides, what is a division when compared to an army? Among the German Wehrmacht's comrades-in-arms, there also was the Russian Liberation Army (RLA) of almost one million servicemen fighting against the USSR.

And last but not least, the rank-and-file Red Army men, participants in the events of that period, were telling me that the Bandera men fought fiercely against both Soviet and German troops. They were Carpathian guerrillas defending their land against successive liberators, aka enslavers.

But for my parents, all their life long, the Bandera men remained bandits...)

And two years later, when my mother once again had to go to the maternity hospital, there still rumbled dogged machine-gun rounds on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, but she could not hear them anymore, because her husband was transferred from one "mailbox" to another, from the Transcarpathia to the Valdai Upland...

The change in the life circumstances of my parents resulted from a snitch-on letter sent to the Special Division of the previous "mailbox" from Konotop. It was composed by the people living in the same house with Galina Vakimova before her marriage.

The house (in Konotop parlance "khutta") of 12 by 12 meters was a divided property, half of which belonged to citizen Ignat Pilluta. The other half was equally divided between citizen Katerina Vakimova with her children and citizens Duzenko with their daughter, so each of the mentioned two families owned an entrance hall, a kitchen, and a room.

The daughter of citizens Duzenko married citizen Starikov who moved into her father's part of the khutta. One kitchen and one room turned not enough for accommodating both the young family and the in-laws.

In order to increase their living space, Duzenko and Starikov learned the number of the mailbox whereto the demobilized Mariner took their former neighbor and wrote to the Special Division of the "box" their snitch-on letter to inform the SD, whose foremost duty was catching spies, that the father of Galina Vakimova (presently Ogoltsova) was arrested by the NKVD before the war but five years later he somehow managed to return to Ukraine.

Besides, in the years of German occupation, his house served the headquarters of the German troops. (Which was true in part, a Wehrmacht company headquarters was stationed in the Pilluta's half of the _khatta_.) With the approach of the Soviet Army, Joseph Vakimov fled together with the retreating fascists.

The informers knew that Special divisions of "mailboxes" were especially vigilant and merciless, so the relatives of Joseph, who allowed himself to disappear in so anti-Soviet way, would certainly be arrested and, at least, deported.

The flaw in their, otherwise quite logical calculations, was their neglect of the time factor. Namely, by that moment Great Leader and Teacher of Peoples, Comrade Stalin, had passed to a better world. The nuts tightened under his rule to the utmost were starting to weaken gradually.

Of course, Nikolai Ogoltsoff was repeatedly interrogated in the Special Division of the "mailbox". There occurred an exchange of official correspondence between the "box's" Special Division and the Division of Interior Affairs of the city of Konotop.

However, my father was not repressed thanks to his completely peasant origin, as well as to the fact that diesel engines generating electricity in "mailboxes" obeyed him so willingly.

Still and all, the "signal" could not be left without reaction and, just in case, they transferred my father to another "mailbox", far away from the border with foreign countries...

The second lying-in of Galina Ogoltsova also occurred outside the "box" – in the nearest district center.

(...it seems that the maternity hospital, or rather, its absence was the Achilles' heel of the then "mailboxes"...)

At first, she was denied admittance to the hospital because they took her for a gypsy on account of her black hair and the red dressing gown with the imprinted pattern of gaudy flowers.

Her husband, who arrived with her, condemned such an erroneous assumption and his efforts brought about change in the attitude of the nurses, she was let in for the labors at hand.

An hour and a half later my father was told that his wife had born a girl, and five minutes later they informed him about another birth. This time it was a boy. And our father yelled in answer, "Put out the light in the room! They keep coming to the light!."

History, be it of a private person, or a developed nation, boils down to just two parts: the first one is the history immemorial, preserved in legends, myths, and traditions; the latter includes the history which has been registered and logged, and anchored to a certain calendar; this second part is preserved in public chronicles, or in the personal memory, in case of a separate individual...

All the children of my parents were fascinated when Mom and Dad began to share the family lore about the deeds and adventures of the eager listeners at the times that were beyond their infant memories.

For instance, that their first-born started his toddling at the railway station when they were departing from the Carpathians to Valdai and at all the subsequent train stops my father took me out onto the station platforms to consolidate my skills in feeble walking because the wobbly floor of the rolling car did not allow for such a possibility...

At the new place, the family was allocated a wooden house from which I was allowed to go for independent walks in the yard bounded with a fence of slender planks. My mother was greatly perplexed that coming back from the yard I was as dirty as a piglet. Where could I possibly find any dirt in so small and clean enclosure?

Changing my dress once again, she asked my father to trace back to the reason. So he watched as the kid let out in the yard took the beeline to the fence plank which hung fixed with just the upper nail, pushed it aside and – off he went! Into the street to the hillock of sand dumped nearby for the construction of another house.

The boy climbed onto it, lay on his belly and slid all the way down the slope of sand drenched by the recent rains. And laughing so very happily along his belly-ride! Could you manage washing for such a villain?.

While my mother was changing my dress over again, my father took a hammer, went out and nailed the dangling plank in place. Then he came back and together with my mother watched: now what?

The kid went out into the yard up to the accustomed place and pushed the plank. It didn't stir. Neither did the planks on both sides of it.

The boy went along the fence, twice, trying each of the planks then stopped and burst into tears....

My memory retained neither that house nor its yard, but at this point in the parents' narration, I had to suppress sympathetic tears welling up in my eyes. Poor boy!

And with another legend, the soft paw of horror bristled up my hair and pierced with its sharp talons the back of my neck; when my mother suddenly grew anxious that I had not been seen nor heard for a long time already, and she sent my father to look for me.

He went into the yard then into the street – not a sight of me anywhere, neither any of neighbors had seen me and it was already getting dark.

Dad walked the street again, from one end to the other, and then he heard the rumbling noise of the river. He hurried to the steep, almost vertical, slope under which the river, swollen after the rains, rolled angrily on.

And there, far down, he made out his son. Run, Daddy, run!

The torrent of muddy water had engulfed the narrow strip of the bank under the cliff-like drop-off. He had to race knee-deep in the water.

The boy clenched to the wall of clay holding on a tuft of withered grass in his pinch, with his feet in the rushing torrent. He did not even cry already and only whimpered, "uhu-uhu.."

Dad wrapped him in his jacket and hardly managed to find a spot he could climb out without helping himself with his both hands...

And how proudly fluttered the wings of my nose at the story that it was me to give names to my brother and sister!

Since I was named after my father's brother, the names of my mother's siblings were readied for the twins who came next. In the maternity hospital, they were addressed just so – Vadik and Lyudochka.

However, when the twins were brought home and the parents asked me what we would call them, I immediately replied: "Sassa - Tattassa." And no fast-talk could convince me to change my mind.

That's why my brother's name became "Alexander" and my sister was called "Natalia".

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Childhood

The first notch in my memory to draw the line at my legendary past and become the start for recording my life in personal recollections, was cut by the raw glare of morning sun which made me firmly squint and turn my face sideways standing atop a small grassy mound, upon which Mom pulled me to give way to a crowd of men in black marching across our route to the kindergarten.

From the mass of their advancing column, they yelled to me their cheerful 'hellos' and holding Mom's hand, I felt big and pleased that my name was so popular among the adult convict- _zeks_.

I never realized then that the amiable attention of the _zeks_ on their march was caused by the presence of a young and so good-looking mother...

Those _zeks_ were building two blocks of apartment houses upon the hill named the Gorka, and after the first block was accomplished, our large family moved into a two-room apartment on the upper, second, floor in an eight-apartment house.

All in all, our Block comprised six two-story houses alongside the perimeter of a vast rectangular courtyard. The entrances to all of the six houses were from the courtyard. The four cranked buildings bounded the corners and had three entrances each, while the two shorter houses, inserted in the long sides of the rectangular, had only one.

The road of hard concrete ran around Block separating it from its twin block under construction, which mirrored ours in every detail.

Let out to play in the courtyard, I often crossed the road and went to the construction site.

_Zeks_ working there never daunted me and at the midday breaks, they shared with me their balanda soup.

Thanks to the sharp growth of specific embellishment expressions in my otherwise babyish talk, my parents promptly figured out who was my current gossips and posthaste entered me to the kindergarten.

When the second block on the Gorka was completed, _zeks_ disappeared altogether and all the subsequent construction works at the Object (people around preferred this name to "Mailbox") were performed by the soldiers with black shoulder straps in their uniform – blackstrappers. Apart from them, there also were redstrapper soldiers at the Object, but as for their mission there I am not aware of up to now...

The hill of the Gorka, the highest part in the Object, shared its name with the two blocks built atop of it. Across the ring road bordering the Gorka blocks there grew the forest, on all the four, but no tree could ever make it over the concrete of the roadway...

The trail to the kindergarten started right behind our house. There was a straight long tilt towards the gate in the fence of Recruit Depot Barracks. Yet before you reached it, a wide path branched off into the pine forest on the right.

After bypassing the fenced barracks and a large black pond under big trees, the path went down through the thicket of young fir trees. The descent ended at the fence of planks midst the forest, and in a wide clearing there stood a two-story house among the mesh of narrow paths and playgrounds with sandboxes and small teremok-huts made of wood.

There even stood a real nosy bus. It had no wheels, to make it easy to step inside directly from the ground, but the steering wheel and the seats were all in place.

Coming to kindergarten, you had to take off your coat and shoes, leave them in your narrow, tall locker with the picture of two cherries on the door and, after changing into slippers, you might climb the stairs to the second floor with big rooms for separate groups and the even bigger, common, dining room.

My kindergarten life was a patchwork of various feelings and sensations.

The feel of victory on the day when the parents were already coming after their children and, following Mom's prompting, I discovered that I could tie my shoelaces myself, without anyone's help.

The bitterness of humiliating defeat from those same shoelaces on that morning when they happened pulled tight into wet intractable knots and my Mom had to untangle them, distressed that she would be late for her work...

In kindergarten, you never know what awaits you there before Mom, or Dad or some neighbor woman will come to take you home.

They can insert a glistening tube-end of a thin rubber hose deep into your nostril and blow in a nasty tasting powder, or else make you drink a whole tablespoon of pesky fish oil, "Come on! It's so good for health!"

The most horrible thing when they announce that it is the injection day today.

The children will line up towards the table with a loudly clinking steely box on it from where the nurse takes out the replaceable needles for her syringe.

The closer to the table the tighter you are squeezed with horror. You envy the lucky ones for whom the procedure is already over and they go away from the table pressing a piece of cotton wool to their forearm and boast happily it didn't hurt. No, not a bit!.

The children in the line around whisper how good it is that today's injection is not done under the shoulder blade. That's the most fearful one...

Saturdays are the best. In addition to the usual dinner of hateful bean soup, they give you half-glass of sour cream sprinkled with sugar.

And they do not send the children to the bed for the "quiet hour". Instead, they hang dark blankets over the dining room windows and show filmstrips on the wall.

The caretaker reads the white lines of inscription beneath each frame and asks if everyone has reviewed everything in the picture, before she drags the next frame in where Zhelezniak the Seaman will capture the armored train of the Whites or a rusty nail will become a brand new one after his visit to the steelmaking furnace, depending on which of the filmstrips the projector was loaded with.

Those Saturday happenings fascinated me: a voice sounding from the darkness sliced with the thin rays seeping out the slits in the projector's tin side, the pictures slowly changing each other on the wall brought about a touch of mysterious secrecy...

I seemed to rather like the kindergarten than otherwise, even with certain hidden reefs lying in wait there for me to run into.

One of such skulkers trapped me after Dad repaired an alarm clock at home and, handing it back to Mom, he said, "Here you are!. You owe me a bottle now." Which words, for some reason, delighted me so much that I boast of them in front of children in my kindergarten group which braggadocio was reported by the caretaker to my Mom when she came to take my home in the evening.

On our way home, Mom said I did a shameful thing because a boy should not share outside home everything that goes on among the family. Now, they might think that my Dad was an alcoholic. Was it what I wish? Eh? Was that so very nice?

How I hated myself at that moment!.

And it was in kindergarten that for the first time in my life, I fell in love. However, I did my level best to hold the feeling back. With bitterness and sadness, I understood how useless was that love because of the insurmountable—like a bottomless abyss—difference in age between me and the swarthy girl of dark eyes with a cherry-berry gleam in them. She was two years younger...

But how unreachable and adult looked the former kindergarten girls who came on a visit there after their first day at school. Clad in festive white aprons, putting on so reserved and mannerly airs, they scarcely deigned to answer the eager questions asked by our group's caretaker.

The caretakers and other workers at the kindergarten wore white robes, however, not always all of them. Anyway, not that one who once got seated next to me on a bench allaying my distress. It's hard to say what exactly it was – a fresh scratch on my knee or a new bump on my forehead, yet as for her name, it was positively Zeena.

Her gentle palm kept stroking my head, and I forgot to cry with my cheek and temple pressed her left breast. The other cheek and closed eyelids felt the warmth of the sun, I listened to the thuds of her heart beneath the green dress that smelt of summer until there came a shrill call from the building, "Zeena!."

And at home, we had Grandmother who came from Ryazan because Mom started going to work and there should be someone to look after Sasha and Natasha.

Grandma Martha wore a cotton blouse over a straight skirt almost to the floor and a white blue-dotted kerchief on her head whose large square she folded into a big triangle to cover her hair and tied its acute angles with a loose knot under her round chin...

Mom worked three shifts doing the job of a Watcher at the Pumping Station. And Dad had as many shifts at the Diesel Station.

I never learned where his workplace was located, but it for sure was somewhere in the forest because one day Dad brought a piece of bread wrapped in a newspaper given him by a bunny on his way home. "So, I come home after the shift and – lo! – there's a bunny under a tree, who says, "Here you are, take it to Sehryozha, and Sasha, and Natasha."

The bread from bunny was much more delicious than the bread which Mom sliced for the dinner...

At times the parents' shifts did not coincide so that one of them was home while the other at work. At one such time, Dad brought me to Mom's workplace – a squat brick building with a dark green door behind which, just opposite the entrance, there was a small room with a small window up above a big old desk and two chairs. But if bypassing that room, you turned to the left through a brown door, there would be a huge murky hall full of incessant rumble and with another desk at which Mom sat doing her job.

She didn't expect us and was so very much surprised.

Then she showed me the log under the lamp on her desk because it was her job to write down the time and figures from the round manometers' faces to which there led narrow bridges of iron-sheets all rigged up with handrails because under them everywhere was dark water for the pumps to pump. And those pumps made that terrible noise all the time so that for talking we had to shout loud but even then not all the words were heard, "What!? What!?"

So, we returned to the room by the entrance where Mom took from a drawer in the desk a pencil and some spare old log with missing pages for me to do some hither-thither drawings.

After I drew a big sun, she asked if I wanted to go and play in the yard. I did not want to go out, but then Dad said if I didn't listen to Mom he never-never would bring me there again anymore, and I went out.

The yard was just the piece of a grass-grown pebble road from the gate to the log shed a short way from the right corner of the Pumping Station. And behind the Station building, there rose a sheer steep overgrown with nettles.

I returned to the green door from which a short concrete path led to a small white hut without any window and a padlock on the black iron door. How could you play in such a place?

Two rounded knolls bulged high on either side of the hut twice taller than it. Grabbing at the tufts of long grass, I climbed the right one.

From that height, the roof of the hut and the roof of Pumping Station were seen in full, and in the opposite direction beyond the fence behind the knoll foot there stretched a strip of bush and ran a river sparkling brightly, but I would certainly get punished if I went out of the gate.

For any further playing at all, there remained only the other knoll with a thin tree on its top. I went down to the hut, bypassed it from behind and climbed the second knoll.

From up there, everything turned out to be the same as from the previous knoll, only that there you could touch the tree. Hot and sweaty after the climbing, I lay down under it.

What's that?!. Something stung me at the thigh and then at the other, and then over and over again.

I turned around and peeked over my shoulder behind my back. A swarm of red ants was busily bustling about my legs below the shorts of yellow corduroy. I smacked them away but the scorching merciless stings kept increasing in numbers...

Mom jumped out from behind the green door to my wailing, and Dad after her too. He ran up to me and carried me down on his hands. The ants were brushed off, but the swollen, reddened thighs still burned unbearably.

And that served me a lesson for the rest of my life – there is no better remedy for the bites of those red beasts than being seated into the sling of the cool green silk in the hem of Mom's dress stretched taut between her knees.

Grandma Martha lived in the same room with us, her three grandchildren, her narrow iron bed stood in the corner to the right from the door, opposite the cumbersome structure of a mighty sofa with upright leatherette back in the wooden frame and the cylinders of hinged armrests bordering the wide leatherette seat on which the twins were bedded for the night.

Along the top plank in the back's frame, there ran a narrow shelf alongside with the low mirror inserted behind it to reflect the small figurines of white elephants parade lined in a file on the shelf, from the tallest to the shortest.

The elephants had long since lost and the varnished shelf remained empty, except for when we were playing Train constructed of legs-up stools brought from the kitchen and chairs tumbled on their backs, and with the nightfall in the train car, I climbed onto the shelf although its narrowness allowed only for stretching on one your side.

The Train game became more interesting when Lyda and Yura Zimins, the children of our neighbors, crossed the landing to join us in our room.

Then Train became even longer and we, sitting in the upside-down stool-cars, swayed them with all might and main, so that they tap-tapped on the floor, giving start to the Grandma's grumbles about our raging like zealots.

When the games and supper were over, my aluminum folding bed was set up in the middle of the room. Mom brought and spread the mattress over it, and a blue oilcloth too, under the sheet, in case I peed in sleep, then a huge pillow, and the thick wool-filled blanket completing my bed.

Grandma Martha turned off the radio box hanging on the left wall by the door and clicked the light switcher. However, the darkness in the room was quite relative – the lights from the windows in the neighboring corner building and from the lampposts in the courtyard penetrated the mesh of tulle window curtains, and from under the door, there sneaked in a sliver of light from the corridor between the kitchen and the parents' bedroom.

I watched the dark silhouette of Grandma Martha as she stood by her bed and whispered something to the ceiling corner above it, which didn't bother me after Mom had explained that it was Grandma Martha's way of praying to God and that the parents could not allow her to hang an icon in the corner because our Dad was a Party member...

The hardest problem in the morning was finding my stockings. Believe it or not, but even boys in those days wore stockings. Over the underpants, there was donned a special garter belt to button on its front two short rubber bands ending with the fasteners. Each fastener was a rubber button in a tight-fitting wireframe. A pinch of the stocking top was pulled over the rubber button and then forced into the tight loophole of the wireframe. Ugh!.

All that harness, of course, was put on me by Mom, however, finding the stockings was my responsibility, and they somehow managed to always find a new place for hiding. Mom would keep urging from the kitchen to come for breakfast, "Be quicker, slow duck!" Because she, after all, had to be in time for her work, while those meanies were nowhere to trace.

At last – peekaboo! – I spotted the nose of one of them sticking from under the hinged armrest of the sofa with the still sleeping twins. Of course, it called for Mom's help to get them out and not to waken Sasha up...

Weary with regular morning upbraiding, I found an elegant solution to the problem of disappearing stockings and, with the light in the room switched off already but Grandma Martha still talking to her God in a whisper, I tied them to my ankles, separately.

My brother and sister with their pillows on the opposite armrests of the big sofa were, as always, kicking each other under their common blanket and could not notice my inventive manipulations in the dark. And I was in time to cover my legs when Mom entered our room to kiss her children goodnight.

And suddenly she did something she had never done before. Mom switched on the light, who lived under the ceiling in the bulb inside the orange shade of silk fringed with hanging bangs and threw the blanket off my legs discovering the stocking shackles on each of my ankles. "Something had just pulled me to do it", she later told Dad with a laugh.

I had to untie the stockings and leave them atop the bundle of my other clothes on the chair next to my folding bed without realization so a brilliant solution...

In all fairness, the most unpleasant part of my kindergarten life was going to bed after the midday meal for the "quiet hour". You had to take off your clothes and put them on a small white stool and, no matter how carefully you did it, at getting up after the "quiet hour" the clothes would be in quite a mess, and the stocking fastener in one or another garter would stubbornly refuse to do its job.

Besides, what's the use of idle lying for a whole hour staring at the white ceiling or the white window curtains, or along the long row of cots with a narrow passage after each pair of them?

The children would lie silently in that row ending at the far off white wall with the caretaker sitting by it reading her book, occasionally distracted by some child approaching her to ask in a whisper for permission to go out to the toilet. And after her whispered permission, she would in a low voice silence the rustle of whispering arising along the row of cots, "Well, everyone shut your eyes and sleep!"

Maybe, at times I did fall asleep at that "quiet hour", though more often it was just numb drowsiness with my eyes open but not seeing the white ceiling from the white sheet drawn over my head...

And suddenly the drowsiness was cast off with a gentle touch of cautious fingers crawling from my knee up over the thigh. I looked out from under the sheet. Irochka Likhachova was lying on the next cot with her eyes closed tightly, but in between the sheets over our cots, I could clearly make out a length of her outstretched arm.

The quiet fingers dived into my underpants to enclose my flesh in a soft warm palm. It was unspeakably pleasant. But then her touch moved away from my private parts – why? yet more!

Her hand found mine and pulled it under her sheet to put my palm on something soft and yielding which had no name, which it did not need at all because all I needed was that all that just went on and on.

However, when I, with my eyes tightly closed, once again brought her hand back under my sheet, she stayed there all too briefly before pulling mine over to hers.

At that moment the caretaker announced the end of "quiet hour" and called all to get up. The room filled with the hubbub of dressing children.

"And we don't forget to make our beds," the caretaker repeated instructively, walking to and fro along the cots' row, when all of a sudden Irochka Likhachova shouted, "And Ogoltsoff got into my panties!" The children lulled in expectation.

Sledgehammered with the disgraceful truth, I felt a hot wave of shame rolling up to splash tears out of my eyes.

"It's you got into! Fool!" roared I and ran out of the room to the second-floor landing tiled with alternating squares of yellow and brown. Stopping there, I decided to never ever any more return to that group and that kindergarten. No, never ever anymore. That was enough of enough.

But I didn't have time to think about how I would live on further because I was bewitched by the red fire extinguisher on the wall. In fact, it was not the whole fire extinguisher that my gaze got nailed to but the yellow square on its side with a picture where a man in a cap on his head held exactly the same fire extinguisher, only upside down already, with the expanding gush from it directed to a fat bush of flames.

The picture was intended, probably, to serve a kind of visual instruction on how to use this or any other fire extinguisher, for which reason the one in the man's hands was painted fully true to life. Even the yellow square with the instructive picture on its side was scrupulously reproduced, portraying a little man in a tiny cap who fought, standing upside down, the undersized fire with the gush from his miniature fire extinguisher.

Then and there it dawned on me that in the next, already blurred, picture on that miniature extinguisher the already indiscernible man was back again to his normal position – feet down. Yet, in the still next, further reduced, picture he would be on his head once more and—the most breathtaking discovery!—these diminishing men just could not end, they would only grow smaller, receding to unimaginably tiny specks and dwindle on without ever ending their dwarfish tumbles, serving each other a link and a spring-board to ever turning tinier simply because of that Fire Extinguisher who started them off from his nail in the wall on the second floor landing next to the white door to the senior group, opposite the door to the toilet.

The spell was shattered into pieces with the awakening calls to me to immediately come to the dining room where the kindergarten groups were seated already for the after-"quiet-hour" tea. Yet, ever since, passing below Fire Extinguisher–the bearer of innumerable worlds–I felt respectful understanding.

As for getting into someone else's panties, that was my only and unique experience. And enlightened by it, when during following "quiet hours" I had to go, with the undertone permission from the caretaker, out to pee then, passing by, I fully knew the meaning of sheets overlapping the gap between a pair of coupled cots, as well as why so earnestly were closed the eyes of Khromov in his cot next to Sontseva's...

We lived on the second floor and our door was followed by that of the Morozovs, pensioner spouses in a three-room apartment. Opposite to them across the landing, there also was an apartment of three rooms, yet only two of them were dwelt by the Zimins family, while the third one was populated with single women, now and then replacing one another, at times there happened couples of women, who declared themselves relatives.

The dead wall between the doors to the Morozovs' and to the Zimins' was divided with a vertical iron ladder reaching the open hatchway to the attic where the tenants hung their washing under the slate roof, and the father in the Savkins family—whose apartment was opposite to ours—was keeping pigeons after he came home and changed into his blue sportswear.

The wooden handrail supported by the iron uprights ran from the Savkins' door towards ours without crossing the whole landing though, because it turned down to follow the two flights of steps to the first-floor landing and from there four more steps down — to the staircase-entrance vestibule.

The wide entrance door kept closed by means of a big screechy iron spring, opened to the expanse of our block Courtyard, and the narrow door opposite it hid the steep steps into the impenetrable darkness of the underground basement.

Founding on my subsequent life experience, I may safely assume that we lived in Flat 5 though at that time I didn't know it yet. All I knew was that behind our door with a large homemade mailbox screwed up to it, there would open the hallway with the narrow door of the small storeroom to the left, and the glazed door to the parents' room to the right, which instead of a window had the wide balcony door, also glazed in its upper part, facing the breadth of the Courtyard.

Straight ahead from the hallway started the long corridor to the kitchen, past two blind doors to the right, that to the bathroom followed by the toilet door, while in the left wall immediately before the kitchen, there was just one, also blind, door to the children's room that had two windows, one of which looked into the Courtyard and the other presented the view of murky windows in the plastered butt wall of the next, corner, house of the Block.

The only window in the kitchen was looking at the same adjacent building, and to the right from the kitchen door, there was another window frame, up in the wall under the ceiling, the small matte glassed toilet window, also filled with murk unless the light inside was on.

Neither bathroom nor the storeroom squeezed behind its white door in the hallway had any windows at all, but in the ceiling of each of them, there hung an electric bulb – just click the black round switch jutting by the needed door, and walk into without angst...

Entering the toilet, first of anything else I spat on the wall to the left from the throne and only then sat down to go potty and watch the slow progress of spittle leaving a vertical wet trail on the green coat of paint. If the glob of the snailing saliva did not have sufficient reserves to reach the baseboard, I would assist it by an additional spit in the track – just above the stuck locomotive. At times the trip took from three to four spits and sometimes just one was quite enough.

The parents were perplexed with the spittle on the toilet wall until the day when Dad entered immediately after me, and at the strict interrogation that followed I admitted doing that, although I could not explain why.

Since then, fearful of punishment, I blotted the traces of the wrong-doing with the pieces of cut-up newspapers from the cloth bag on the opposite wall but the thrill was gone.

(...my son Ahshaut at the age of five sometimes peed past the john, on the toilet wall.

More than once I had to explain it to him that was not the right way of taking a leak, and those who missed the target should wipe up after themselves.

One day he balked and refused to wipe the paddle. Then I grabbed at his ear, and led him to the bathroom, and ordered to pick up the floor cloth, and led him back to the toilet where, in a rage-choked voice, ordered to collect all the urine from the floor with that cloth. He obeyed.

Of course, in more civilized states I might get easily deprived of the parental rights for the child abuse of so violent nature, still and all, I consider myself right at that particular development because no biological species is able to survive in their own waste. I would savvy was the kid just spitting on the wall, however, in the house that I built the toilet walls were simply whitewashed plaster and no spittle would crawl down such a wall.

Later, the money for ceramic wall tiles got scraped up too, yet by that time the children were already adults...)

You feel yourself kinda almighty when reconstructing the world of a half-century ago, adjusting the details to your liking with no one to rub your nose in it even if you muck up.

However, you can fool anyone but yourself, and I am ready to admit that now, from a distance in fifty years, not everything is falling in just nicely.

For instance, I am far from certain that the pigeon enclosure in the attic had anything to do with the officer Savkin. The mentioned structure could as easily belong to Stepan Zimin, the father of Lyda and Yura.

Or maybe there were two enclosures?

Frankly, at the moment I am not sure about the presence of pigeons in one or the other enclosure on the day when I ventured to climb up the iron ladder towards something unknown, indistinguishable in the murky square hole of the hatchway above my head. And it is pretty possible that I simply remembered the remark overheard in my parents' chat, that Stepan's pigeons also fell victim to his unrestrained booze binges.

On the whole, just one thing stands beyond the shadow of a doubt – the tremulous ecstasy of revelation when, leaving behind my sister's ominous predictions about the pending manslaughter of me by the fatherly hand, as well as silent stare of my brother who kept the close watch over each of my movements from the ladder foot on the landing diminished with the growing height, I climbed into the new world unfurling before me beneath the grayish underbelly of the slate roof.

A few days later Natasha came running into our room to proudly announce that Sasha had just climbed up to the attic too.

Taking all that in the account, it is quite probable that the pigeons were gone from the attic enclosure, but in the Courtyard, there were hosts of them...

The Courtyard's layout presented an exquisite masterpiece of systematized geometricity itself.

Inside the big rectangular outlined with six two-storied buildings, the ellipse of the road was inscribed and accentuated by knee-deep drenches along its both sides, crossed with albeit short, yet mighty bridges minutely opposite each of the fourteen entrances to the six houses constituting our block.

Two narrow concrete walks aligned at right angles to the ellipse's longitudinal axis cut it into three even chunks; the resultant rectangular in between the walks and the road ditches was further divided into three equal segments by the other couple of concrete paths parallel to the above-mentioned axis to connect the walks also mentioned already.

The intersection points formed four corners of the central segment, from which the rays of four more concrete paths traversed the Courtyard diagonally directed towards the central entrances in the block's corner buildings, the line between each pair of ray-starting points server the chord of a concrete path arc described about a round gazebo of wood, all in all, two of them, so that, on the whole, it presented the model of perfection reminiscent of the Versailles' design only of concrete.

(...it is impossible to come across a so purified Bau Stile in nature. No circular circles exist among natural ones, neither absolutely isosceles triangles, nor flawless squares – someplace, somehow, the accomplished evenness would be inevitably ruined by the stubborn awl spiking through the Mother Nature's haversack...)

Of course, there were no fancy waterworks in our Courtyard, neither trees nor bushes. Maybe later they planted something there, yet, in my memory, I can find not even a seedling, but only grass cut into geometric figures by the paths of concrete and loose pigeon flocks flying from one end of the vast Courtyard to the other when there sounded "...gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil-gooil!." call.

I liked these looking so alike, yet somehow different, birds flocking around you to bang the scattered bread crumbles away from the road on which you'd never see a vehicle except for a slow-go truck carrying, once in a blue moon, the furniture of tenants moving in or out, or a load of firewood for Titan boilers installed in the apartments' bathrooms.

But even more, I liked feeding pigeons on the tin ledge out the kitchen window. Although it took a long wait before some of the birds would get it where your "gooil-gooil" invitation was coming from and hover with the swish of air-cutting wings in the relentless flapping above the tin-clad ledge under the thick spill of breadcrumbs before landing on it with their raw legs to start the quick tap-tapping at the offer on the hollow-sounding tin.

The pigeons seemed to have an eye on each other or, probably, they had some kind of intercom system because the first bird was very soon followed by others flying in, in twos and threes, and whole flocks, maybe even from the other block.

The window ledge submerged into the multi-layer whirlpool of feathered backs and heads ducking to pick the crumbs, pushing each other, fluttering off the edge and squeezing in back again.

Then, taking advantage of that pandemonium, you could cautiously put your hand out through the square leaf up in the kitchen window and touch from above one of their moving backs, but tenderly, so that they wouldn't dash off with the loud flaps of the wings and fly away all at once...

Besides the pigeons, I also liked holidays, especially the New Year.

The Christmas tree was set up in the parents' room in front of the white tulle curtain screening the cold balcony door. The plywood boxes from postal parcels received long ago and presently full of fragile sparkling adoration came from the narrow storeroom: all kinds of fruits, dwarfs, bells, grandfathers frosts, baskets, drill-bit-like purple icicles, balls with inlaid snowflakes on their opposite sides and just balls, but also beautiful, stars framed within thin glass tubes, fluffy rain-garlands from golden foil.

In addition, we made paper garland-chains as taught by Mom. With different watercolors we painted the paper, it dried overnight and was cut into finger-wide colored strips which we glued with wheatpaste into lots of multicolored links in the growing catenas of our handmade garlands.

Lastly, after decorating the tree with toys and sweetmeat—because a candy with a thread through its bright wrapper served both nice and eatable decoration which you could cut and enjoy at Xmastide—a snowdrift of white cotton wool was put under the tree to hide the plywood footing of one-foot-tall Grandfather Frost in his red broadcloth coat with one mitten in firm clasp on his big staff and the other clutching the sack over his shoulder sewn with too-tight stitches for you to check what it held.

Oh! How could I forget the multicolored twinkling of tiny bulbs on their long thin wires?!. They came into the Christmas tree before anything else, and those wires were connected to the heavy electric transformer also hidden under the wool snowdrifts; Dad made it himself.

And the mask of Bear for the matinée in the kindergarten was also his production. Mom explained to him how to do it and Dad brought some special clay from his work and then on a sheet of plywood, he modeled the bear's face with its stuck-up nose. When the clay got stone-hard, Dad and Mom covered it with layers of gauze and water-soaked shreds of newspaper.

It took two days for the muzzle to dry and harden, then the clay was thrown away and—wow!—there was a mask made of papier-mache. The mask was colored with brown watercolor, and of brown satin, Mom sewed the one-piece costume and you could get into the trousers only through the jacket. That's why at the matinée I did not envy the woodcutters with the cardboard axes over their shoulders.

(...and until now the watercolors smell to me of the New Year, or maybe vice verse – it's hard to decide, I'm not too good at moot points...)

If the big bed in the parents' room was taken apart and brought to our room, it meant that later in the evening they would haul tables from the neighboring apartments and set them in the freed bedroom for guests to sit around. The neighbors' children would gather in our room to play.

When it got very late when all the children already went back to their apartments, I would venture to the parents' room filled with the thin smarting mist of tobacco smoke and the noise of loud voices. Everyone would try to speak louder than anyone else. Old Morozov would announce that being a young man he once oared no less than seventeen kilometers to a date, and some man would affirm that meant it was worth it and all the people would rejoice at the good news and laugh happily and they would grab each other and dance filling all of the room with their giant figures up to the ceiling and circle along with the disc on the gramophone brought by someone of the guests.

Then they again would speak without listening to each other, and Mom, sitting at the table, would start to sing about the lights on the streets of the Saratov City, and her eyelids would fall halfway onto her eyes. Mortified with shame at that view, I would get onto her lap and say, "Mom, don't sing, please, don't!" And she would laugh, and push the glass back, and say she did not drink anymore and go on singing all the same.

Then the guests would go to their apartments taking out the tables and still talking without listening. I would be sent to our room with Sasha already sleeping on the sofa but Natasha still awake. From the kitchen, there would come the tinkle of the dishes being washed up by Grandma and Mom, and then the light in our room would be turned on shortly for the parent bed parts to be taken away...

Besides her work, Mom also was taking part in the Artistic Amateur Activities at the House of Officers which was very far to go because at times the parents took me to the cinema there, to the great envy of the twins.

All the movies started with loud music and the big round clock on the Kremlin tower opening a newsreel "The News of the Day", but then one of that news frightened me to tears with jerky bulldozers in fascist concentration camps whose blades were pushing heaps of naked corpses to fill deep trenches. Mom told me to shut my eyes and not watch, and after that, they didn't take me to the cinema anymore.

However, when the Artistic Amateur Activities performed their concert at the House of Officers, Dad took me along. The Artistic Amateur Activities people sang from the scene with the accompaniment of the button accordion and the audience clapped so loudly. Then the whole scene was left for just one man who talked for a long time, yet I couldn't get it what about even though he made his voice louder and louder, and there again was clapping. And so it went on that way with singing and talking and claps in between, but I waited only to see my Mom on the scene.

At last, when a lot of women in the same long skirts came to dance with a lot of men in high boots, Dad said, "Aha! Here is your dear Mommy!" But I could not make her out because just the same long skirts made the women look all so alike. Dad had to point again who was my Mom and after that, I looked only at her so as not to lose.

If not for such intent attention, I would have, probably, missed the moment which stuck in me for many years like a splinter that you cannot pull out and it's just better not to press the spot where it sits...The women dancers on the scene were spinning ever quicker and their long skirts also swerved rising to their knees, but my Mom's skirt splashed suddenly to flash her legs up to the very panties.

Unbearable shame flooded me and for the rest of the concert, I kept my head down never looking up from at floor beneath my felt boots no matter how loudly they clapped, and all the long way home I did not want to talk with either of the parents and did not answer why I was so pouty.

(...in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet...)

But, hey! Really, what's the point in those concerts at all if there was a shiny brown radio box on the wall in our—children's—room?

It could both talk and sing, and play music, we knew it very well that when they broadcast Arkady Raikin you should turn the white knob of the volume control to make it louder, then run and call everyone in the house to haste to our room for laughing all together under the box on the wall.

And we learn to hush the radio or even turn it off when there was a concert for the cello and orchestra, or if someone was telling what good news was the news about the victory of revolution in Cuba which made him so happy that he turned out two daily tasks during one shift just for spite of the revenge-seekers and their leader Adenauer...

Yet, the May Day celebration was not a home holiday at all.

First, you had to walk a long way by the road descending away past the Block's corner building and there, at the foot of the Gorka hill, to go walking on and on.

And there were lots of people going the same way, both adults and children.

People greeted each other cheerfully, in their hands they carried bunches of balloons or pliant twigs with handmade leaves of green tissue paper fixed with tightly spun black threads, or long pieces of red cloth with big white letters in between a pair of poles, and also portraits of different men, both bold and not too much so, set upon stubby sticks.

Like almost all the children, I had a short square pennant in my hands, on a thin—like a pencil, only a bit longer—stick.

In the red pennant, the yellow circle crossed with yellow grid represented the globe, and a yellow dove soared above it, yet not as high as the string of yellow letters reading: "Peace to the World!"

Of course, I couldn't read at that time but those flags remained unchangeable for years and decades.

And as we all walked on, in the distance ahead of us, there emerged music. It sounded louder and louder, and then we passed by the line of soldier-musicians with shining trumpets, and past a tall red balcony with people on it in their forage caps, but that balcony, strangely, had no house behind it...

After one of the May Days, I felt like drawing a holiday so Grandma gave me a sheet of ruled paper and a pencil.

In the center of the sheet, I drew a large balloon on a string going down to the bottom edge of the paper. It looked good, so big and festive.

However, I wanted more than that, I wanted the holiday be all over the world and, to the right from the balloon, I drew a blind plank fence behind which there lived not ours but the Germans and other enemies from the newsreels in the House of Officers, but all of them invisible, of course, because of the fence.

Okay, Germans, let it be a holiday even for you!

And I drew another balloon on the string rising from behind the fence. Lastly, to make it clear who is who and who is where the enemies' balloon got marked with a thick cross.

The masterpiece accomplished, I shortly admired my art and then ran to share it, for a starter, with Grandma...

At first, she couldn't figure out what is what, and I had to explain to her the picture. But when I got to the point that let even Germans have a holiday – we are not meanies, right? – she stopped me abruptly with severe criticism.

I should have learned since long, said she, that because of my those cross-adorned balloons, the "black raven" vehicle would stop by our house and take my Dad away arrested, and she asked if that was what I wanted.

I felt sorry for Dad and terrified by the prospect to be left without him. I burst into tears and crushed the ill-fated drawing, then ran to the bathroom, and thrust the crumpled paper ball behind the pig-iron door of the water boiler Titan where they lighted fire when heating water for the bathing...

The hardest thing in the morning was getting out of bed. It seemed anything could be given away for another couple of minutes lying without their yells it was time to go to the kindergarten.

On one of such mornings, the pillow was so yielding under my head, and the mattress spread over the folding bed had developed such an exact mold of my body that a mere thought of tearing myself away from their pleasant warmth accumulated overnight under the blanket was simply unthinkable.

So I went on lying until there popped up the frightening knowledge – if I would not shed off that blissful boggy drowsiness right away, then never would I come to the kindergarten that morning, and never come to anywhere else because it would be a languor death in sleep.

Of course, so macabre words were then beyond my ken, I didn't need them though nor other like expressions because my thoughts were coming mostly in form of feeling, so I just felt freaked out, got up into the chilly room and started to dress.

On Sundays, it was possible to lie as long as you wanted but never again did the bed acquired such a pleasing shape...

One Sunday I woke up alone in the room and heard Sasha-and-Natasha's merry screams from somewhere outside. I donned and hurried out into the corridor.

They were not there nor in the kitchen, where only Grandma was clinking the pots' lids.

Aha! In the parents' room! I ran in there at the height of fun – my brother and sister, and Mom was laughing together at a white shapeless lump standing in the corner on their bare feet.

Of course, it's Dad! He had covered himself with the thick blanket from the parents' bed and now awkwardly loomed there next to the wardrobe.

But suddenly those legs started to jump together, fluttering the white folds of that horrible bare-legged lump. It blocked the way towards the corridor for Mom and all three of us, clutching at her dressing gown.

Oh, how we laughed! And clung to Mom more and more convulsively.

Then one of us began to cry and Mom said, "There-there, this is Dad, silly!" But Sasha did not stop (or maybe Natasha but not me though my laughter was more and more transforming into hysterics) and Mom said, "Well, enough, Kolya!"

And the blanket straightened up revealing laughing Dad in his underpants and tank top, and we all together began to console Sasha sitting high in Mom's arms and incredulously trying to laugh through tears.

(...laughter and fear go hand in hand and there is nothing more frightening than some unmakeoutable thing...)

And on Monday morning I went to the parents' room to admit that at night I again peed in the bed.

They were already dressed, and Dad said, "Gak! Such a big boy!"

And Mom ordered me to peel off my underpants and get into their bed. From a shelf in the wardrobe, she fetched dry underpants for me and followed Dad into the kitchen.

I lay down under the blanket still warm with their warmth. Even the sheet was so soft, caressing.

Full of pleasure I stretched out as much as I could, both legs and arms.

My right hand went under the pillow and pulled out an incomprehensible hardened rag. I could not determine its purpose in their bed but I felt that I touched something shameful and shouldn't ask anyone about it...

It's hard to say what was more delicious – Mom's pastry or Grandma's buns both baked for holidays in the blue electric oven "Kharkov".

Grandma Martha spent her days in the kitchen cooking and washing up, and in the children's room sitting on her bed not to be in the way of our playing.

In the evenings, she read us The Russian Epic Tales, a book about hero warriors who fought the countless hordes of invaders or the Dragon Gorynich, and then for a change, to have a rest from the battles, they visited Prince Vladimir the Red Sun in the city of Kiev.

That's when the iron bed had to bear the additional weight of the three of us seated around Grandma Martha to listen about the exploits of Alesha Popovich or Dobrinya Nikitich.

When the heroes had their moments of sadness, they remembered their mothers, each one his own, but to their different, absent, mothers they all addressed one and the same reproach: why those mothers weren't smart enough to wrap the future heroes into a piece of white cloth while they still were silly babies and drop them into the fast running River-Mommy.

Only Ilya of Murom and Warrior Svyatogor, who grew so mighty that even Mother the Earth could bear him no more and only mountain rocks still somehow withstood his movements, never raised that lamentation, not even having the bluest blues...

At times one or another of the hero warriors had a fight with one or another beauty disguised in armor. Those fights ended differently but the defeated would invariably say, "Do not kill me but treat instead to good food and drink and kiss on my mouth as sweet as sugar."

With all of those epic tales heard more than once, I knew by heart when such combats with gastronomic outcomes were near at hand and eagerly anticipated them in advance.

Grandma Martha named the bathroom "a bathhouse", and after her weekly bath, she was returning to our room steam-heated to red and half undressed, in only a tank top for menswear and one of her long skirts. Then she sat down on her iron bed to cool off while combing and braiding her gray hair into a pigtail.

On her left forearm, there was a large mole in the form of a female nipple, the so-called "bitch's udder".

In course of one of her after-bath proceedings when she seemed to notice nothing but the curved plastic comb running through the damp strands of her hair, I took advantage of my brother-and-sister being busy with their play on the big sofa and sneaked under the iron net of the Grandma's bed sagging under her weight.

There I cautiously turned over to my back and looked up – under the skirt between her straddled legs put wide and firmly on the floor.

Why? I did not know. Neither was there anything to make out in the dusk within the dark dome of the skirt. And I crawled away, as carefully as I could, filled in the aftermath with shame, regret, and a strong suspicion that she was aware of my hushed maneuvers...

Sasha was a reliable younger brother – credulous and taciturn. He was born after the brisk Natasha, and his complexion had a startlingly blueish tint because of the umbilical cord almost strangled him, yet he was born in a shirt, which was taken off him in the maternity hospital because as Mom explained they were producing some special medicine from newborns' shirts.

And Natasha turned out a really shrewd weasel.

She was the first to know all the news: that the next day Grandma would bake buns, that new tenants were to move into the flat on the first floor, that on Saturday the parents would go to a party at some people's place, and that you must not kill a frog or it would rain cats and dogs.

At the sides of the back of her head, there started two pigtails reaching her shoulders and from halfway down intertwined with inlaid ribbons to fix each of the braids ends with a lovely bow-knot.

Yet, neither of those bows could stay in place for long and fell apart into a tight knot with a pair of narrow ribbon tails. Probably, because of zealous spinning her head on all the quarters to find out: what-where-when?.

The two-year difference in age gave me a tangible degree of authority in the eyes of the younger.

However, when Sasha taciturnly repeated my climbing up to the attic, then by that feat he, like, overtook me for two years.

Of course, neither he, nor I, nor Natasha was capable at that time to put into words such a finicky deduction. We stayed at the level of emotional sensations expressed with interjections like, "Wow, boy!.." or, "Oh-oh, boy!.."

The unexpressed desire of reinforcing my faltered authority and self-esteem, or maybe some other inexpressible, or already forgotten, reasons resulted in my getting nasty.

One evening, with the light in the room already turned off, yet my brother-and-sister, laid to sleep with their heads on the opposite armrests in the huge leatherette sofa, still a-giggling and kicking each other under their common blanket because Grandma Martha couldn't upbraid them while standing by bed and whispering into the upper corner, I suddenly spoke up from my folding bed, "Tell you what, Grandma? God is a jerk!"

After a moment of complete silence, she erupted with a stream of threats about my licking a red-hot frying pan in the future, yet I only laughed and, encouraged by the reverent lull on the sofa, kept brazenly responding, "Whatever! Your God's a jerk all the same!"

The following morning Grandma Martha did not talk to me.

On my return from the kindergarten, Natasha shared that in the morning, as Dad came home after the night shift, Grandma told him everything and cried in the kitchen and that at the moment our parents were gone to a party at someone's but I'd be let have it, and that's that!

To my goody-goody attempts at starting a dialogue, Grandma Martha kept stubbornly silent and soon went over to the kitchen.

The front door slammed, the parents' voices sounded in the hallway. They moved to the kitchen where the talk became noisier and hotter. Through the door of our room, it was not possible to make out what's going on.

The voices sounded louder and louder until the door flew open with Dad's hand. "What? Scoffing at elders? I'll show you 'a jerk'!" His hands pulled the narrow black belt with a flashing rectangle of the buckle from the waist of his pants. His arm swayed and a never experienced pain scorched me.

Once more. And more.

Wailing and wriggling, I rolled under Grandma's bed to escape the belt.

Dad grabbed the back of the bed and with one mighty jerk pulled it to the middle of the room. The mattress with everything dropped down alongside the wall.

I followed the bed for sheltering under the shield of springy mesh.

Dad was pulling the bed back and forth whipping it on both sides, but I with inexplicable speed ran on all fours under the mesh jumping overhead, and mingled my howling and wailing, "Daddy! Dear! My! Don't beat me! I won't! Never again!" into his, "Snotty sod!"

Mom and Grandma came running from the kitchen. Mom screamed, "Kolya! Don't!" and stretched out her hand to catch the hissing impact of the belt. Grandma also kvetched loudly, and they took Dad out of the room.

Crestfallen, sobbing, I rubbed the sores looking away from the younger who, petrified and silent, huddled in the back of the big sofa...

In the Courtyard, we played Classlets.

First, you need a chalk to draw a big rectangular on the concrete path and divide it into five pairs of squares, like, a two-column table of 5 rows. The second need is the bitka – a used container of shoe polish, a kinda tiny tin disk filled with sand for weighty stability.

Standing at the bottom of the first column, you throw your bitka into a classlet-square and follow it hopping on one leg to pick it up and proceed through the rest of the table, also in hops, to the bottom classlet in the second column hop out of the table of classlets. A tour is done.

While traveling through the table, take care your sandal never lands near any of the chalked lines not to let the other players, watching closely your progress, raise a hell of jeering shouts insisting that you stomped on it.

Now, safely out of the Classlets table, you throw your bitka targeting the next square and repeat your hopping tour to carry it out.

After your bitka visited, in turn, all of the classlets, you mark one of them as your "house" and further on in the game you may feel in it at home – put your other foot down and relax.

Yet, if your bitka missed the right square or stopped over a line, or if you touched a line when hopping, another player starts their tries and you become a watcher...

There were ball games as well.

For example, hitting a ball non-stop against the ground, you had to accompany each strike with a separate word, "I! – know! – five! – girls'! – names!"

At each subsequent hit at the ball, you called out one of five random names, no repetitions allowed.

Then followed five boy's names, five flowers, five animals, etc., etc., until the ball bounced out of reach or the player got lost in their enumerations...

Another ball game was not as intellectual.

You just hit the ball against the pinkish faded plaster on the house wall (closer to the corner, safely away from the window on the first floor). Guessing the landing spot of the re-bounced ball, you jumped over it with your legs wide apart before it hit the ground.

The player behind you caught the ball to throw it back against the wall – this time for them to jump and you to catch. There could be more players in the game though, so you had to wait for your turn in the line of jumpers.

I was enchanted by the game's infinity. It was like those endless pictures on the red side of Fire Extinguisher...

We played outside the Courtyard as well, across the ever-empty road surrounding the twin blocks.

Atop the descend towards Recruit Depot Barracks, there was a tall plank-fence enclosure hoarding large garbage containers for all of our Block. Next to the fence there stretched a level area grown with green grass except for a lonely sagging pile of sand, probably, a leftover from the construction times and later used like any sand by any children in any sandbox.

There was a special sand game though, which had no name.

You just scooped a handful of sand and tossed it up, trying to catch the returning sand into your palm, as much of as you could. The catch was held in the outstretched hand and you pronounced the ritual formula, "So much – for Lenin!"

Then the sand in the palm was thrown up again and caught for the second time. Over the second catch, the words of the formula changed a bit, "So much – for Stalin!"

After the third toss, no one cared to catch the sand, on the contrary, they hid their hands behind their backs from the downing sand, and then even clapped to ensure not a grain of it got randomly stuck to the palm, "And so much – for Hitler! That's that!"

Somehow, I felt ill at ease about not fully fair play in the game – leaving the last in the trinity without a chance to get even the tiniest speck of sand. And one day playing at the pile alone, I broke the rules and caught a pinch of sand even for Hitler although I knew he was a very bad one...

Besides, we used the sandpile's sprawling outskirts for constructing of "secrets"—small holes scooped out no deeper than a teacup—whose bottoms were floored with the heads of the flowers picked in the grass. A shard of pane glass put upon the petals of the heads pressed them down and imparted a look of somewhat melancholic beauty.

Then the hole was filled up and leveled and we made arrangements over it "to check our secret" the following day, but either we forgot about it or it rained, and later we could not find "the secret" and just produced another one...

One day the rain caught me in one of the round gazebos in the Courtyard. As a matter of fact, it sooner was crossbred of the outright deluge with a thunderstorm.

Black clouds piled up over the entire Courtyard, and all of it sunk in the dark as if wrapped with a dashing night.

The adults and children who happened to be in the gazebo scattered racing along the paths towards their houses. Only I tarried over a forgotten book with the pictures of three hunters roaming through the mountain woods until the waterfall rushed down from the darkness above.

It was unthinkable to run home through that roaring flood, I had to only wait until it was over.

Thunder pearls erupted madly, the lightning tore the sky over Block criss-cross and hither-thither. The gazebo bounced from the deafening rumbling, and the wind-driven sheets of water lashed the inside circle of the cemented floor reaching far over its center.

I placed the book on the bench running along the lee side props but some crazy drops got even there. It was so scary and wet, and cold, and never-ending.

When, nonetheless, the storm let up, the clouds of darkness broke asunder revealing the blue of the sky as well as the fact that the day was far from being over yet, and my sister Natasha was running from our staircase-entrance with the already needless umbrella because Mom sent her to call me home.

"We knew that you were here", she said panting, "You could be seen at first..."

It's not that I have any special knack for nosing out conspiracies, yet the unfaltering confluence of chance circumstances would always bring me straight to the spot of brewing a secret scheme...

When in the kindergarten three boys of the senior group began to exchange clandestine hints, something like:

"Surely today, eh?"

"We'll definitely go, yes?"

"After kindergarten, right?"

I felt unbearable bitterness that some adventure was obviously underway while I stayed with the usual unchanging everyday.

So I approached the leader of the three and asked him directly, "Where are you going to?"

"To steal tomatoes in the Where-Where Mountains."

"May I go with you?"

"Okay."

I had already had a vague idea that stealing was bad but in my whole life I hadn't seen yet any mountains, only the low hillock of the Bugorok-Knoll near our Block, overgrown with fir trees and facing with its drop-off sandy side the grassy level grounds by the enclosure for garbage bins.

However, first of anything else, I desired the wonderful tomatoes from the Where-Where Mountains. In my mind's eye, I already could see their round sides gleaming with solid red.

So it was a whole day of waiting for the hour when adults start to come after their children, when I promptly declined going home with someone else's mother, "No, thank you, I go with the boys to reach Block sooner."

The four of us went out of the gate but we didn't take the short trail through the forest. Instead, we turned left to follow the wide dirt road on which there never appeared any vehicle.

The road went uphill and then began to descent, and I kept looking out around and asking the same question about when the Where-Where Mountains would stand out.

However, with the answers getting more and more curt and reluctant, I had to hold the eager question back, so as not to endanger my taking part in the tomato adventure.

We went out to the road of concrete slabs whose junctions were filled with the black pitch. I knew that road descended from the Gorka blocks towards the House of Officers. We did not follow it though and only crossed into the thicket of supple bushes cut with a narrow trail which brought us to a house of gray logs with a sign hanging above its door for those who could read.

The boys did not go any farther. They started aimlessly wander between the bushes and the washed-out gray of the logs in the house walls until an adult man came out of the door and angrily ordered us to go away.

Our leader told him that he was sent by his parents to pick up the newspapers and mail, but the man grew even more angry, and I went home well taught what they mean by mentioning the Where-Where Mountains...

Yet, I still believed that adventures and travels would certainly come my way and it's better to be ready for them. That's why, spotting a maverick box of matches upon the kitchen table, I grabbed it without a moment's hesitation or delay: you have to train yourself to get the knack of vital arts, right?

A couple of initial attempts proved that lighting a match against its box side was something easy indeed.

And there at once popped up the urge to proudly demonstrate to someone my newly acquired skills.

Who to? To Sasha and Natasha, sure thing, they would be much more impressed than Grandma. Besides, my authority by them called for repair and restoration after all the recent flops.

(...however, this list of motives is made by me in hindsight, from the immeasurably distant future—my current present over this here fire loaded with potatoes to bake.

But then, in that immeasurably distant past, without any philosophizing and logical justifications, I perfectly knew that...)

I should call the younger ones to some hide-out and show them my apt control of the fire.

The most suitable place was, of course, under the parents' bed in their room, where we crawled in the Indian file.

At the sight of matches in my hands Natasha oh-ohed in a whisper. Sasha kept silent and watched the process closely.

The first match caught fire but went out too soon.

The second developed a good flame, yet all of a sudden it tilted close to the mesh of tulle bed cover hanging down by the wall. The narrow tip of the fire bent forward, the upturned icicle of yellow flame burst through the tulle forming a black, ever-widening, gap.

For some time I looked at what was happening before I guessed the meaning and shouted to my brother and sister, "Fire! Run away! Fire!"

But those little fools stayed where they were and only boohooed in duet.

I got out from under the bed and ran across the landing to the Zimins' where my Mom and Grandma were sitting in the kitchen of Paulinna Zimin drinking tea with her.

On my skimble-skamble announcement of fire alarm, the three women rushed over the landing. I was the last to come to our apartment.

Under the ceiling of the hallway, leisurely revolved the wisps of yellowish smoke.

The bedroom door stood open to show the half-meter-tall flames of fire in a merry dance upon the parents' bed. The room was filled with a thin blue mist and somewhere within it, the twins were still howling.

Grandma pulled the mattress and all from the bed down to the floor and stamped the fire with her slippers, repeating loud calls to her God. Mom yelled to Sasha and Natasha to get out from under the bed mesh.

The fire jumped over onto the tulle curtain of the balcony door and Grandma pulled it down with her bare hands.

In the kitchen, Paulinna Zimin rattled the saucepans in the sink filling them with water from the tap.

Mom took the twins to the children's room, came running back, and told me to go over there too.

We sat on the big sofa silent, heeding the to-and-fro racing in the corridor, uninterrupted swish of water from the tap in the kitchen, the stray exclamations of the women. What now?

Then the noise little by little abated, the hallway door clicked behind departing auntie Paulinna. From the parents' bedroom there came the sound of mop taps as during washing the floor; from time to time the splash of water poured down into the bowl was heard from the toilet room.

And then there reigned silence—some complete, suspended, silence.

The door opened. Mom stood there with a wide seaman belt in her hand. "Come here!" she called without giving any name, but the three of us knew perfectly well who was summoned.

I stood up and went to catch hell.

We met in the middle of the room, under the silk shade from the ceiling. "Don't you ever dare, you, piece of a rascal!" she said and swayed the belt.

I cringed. The slap fell on the shoulder. It was just a slap, not a blow – no pain at all.

Mom turned around and left.

I was stunned by so light a punishment. It's nothing compared to what I would surely get when Dad be home from work and see the bandaged hands of Grandma after applying vegetable oil to them...

When the door clicked in the hallway and Dad's voice said, "What the... er... What happened here?", Mom hurried over there from the kitchen.

All that she said was not heard but I made out these words, "I've already punished him, Kolya."

Dad went into the parents' bedroom to estimate the damage and very soon entered our room. "Ew, you!" was all he told me.

For a few days, the apartment had a strong smell of smoke. The runner from the parents' bedroom was cut up into smaller pieces. The remnants of the tulle curtain and burned bed were taken out to the garbage enclosure across the road.

A couple of years later I could read already and whenever coming across a matchbox with the warning sticker: "Hide matches from children!", I knew that that was about me too...

I have no idea what made me so certain at that tender age that they inevitably would write books about me.

Yet, the conviction was not without a certain alloy of shame scorching my cheeks at the thought that future writers when touching my childhood years would have to admit that even being a big boy, already a first-grader, I sometimes peed in bed at night, although Dad just couldn't hold back his exasperation because at my age he no longer made puddles in his bed. Never!

Or take that terrible occurrence when on the way from school my tummy got squeezed by unbearable colic which made me run home to the toilet room, but there everything stopped halfway, in spite of all my straining, until Grandma, terrified with my heartrending howls, rushed from the kitchen to the toilet and, snatching a piece of newspaper from the bag on the wall, ripped the stubborn turd out.

Who would ever dare to write such things in a book?!..

(...already in another—my present—life my current wife Sahtic went to a fortune teller in the war-destroyed city of Shushi when our son Ahshaut fled the local army because of harassment by his company commander and regular beatings at the guardhouse.

In the year of Ahshaut's birth, the USSR was ripping apart at all seams, some new life was promising to start, instilling hope that before he grew of age there would be no army drafts but only contract enrollment of volunteers.

And why not? "You never know the Devils' next joke," as runs a Russian saying.

Well, in my dream's case, the son of a bitch was not in the mood for joking.

The commander of the company, handled Chana, picked on Ahshaut because of his own dissatisfaction with the unfair arrangement of life – after the Karabakh war his combat bros became generals with hanging stomachs and personal Jeeps equipped with drivers while he, Chana, was still rotting at the front line.

After Ahshaut was missing for eight days, Sahtic went to Shushi, to the popular fortune-teller who assured her that everything would be alright.

And so it happened.

Ahshaut came home, we took him back to the place of his service, to the commanders of higher rank than Chana, and he was transferred to another regiment, in a hotter spot, where he served the remaining year, though already without the sergeant stripes in his shoulder straps...

So then, in the course of seeing the future, the fortune teller shared additional information, like, kinda bonus for turning to her for help, that my Grandma, though in the other world already, was still disturbed about me and lighting a candle up here for her sake should pacify the worries.

My Grandma's name (so the fortune teller) was almost like that of Maria, only a little different.

I was simply flabbergasted with the accuracy of the extrasensory guess. Maria and Martha are indeed very similar names of the two sisters from the Gospel. Leo Taxil says that even Jesus Himself sometimes confused the chicks...

And when my Grandma was ninety-eight, she also started to forget her own name. On such days she saught her daughter's help, "Lyaksandra, I keep wondering lately – what but my name is?"

Well, Aunt Alexandra was also a good one, "Oy, Mom! But I don't remember it too! Maybe, Anyuta?"

"No... Somehow different it was..."

And three days later she would triumphantly announce to her daughter, "I remembered! Martha, I am. Martha!."

No wonder the fortune teller couldn't deliver her exact name...

However, by this flashforward, I jumped ahead too much because it's me who had to serve in the army first, but in this here letter to you, I'm still at the kindergarten senior group.

I think I'd better turn off the tap with profound thoughts on infantile megalomania, and return to the period when kindergarten was completing the formation of my personality...)

Now, back to the pivotal 1961...

What is remarkable about it (besides my graduating the senior group at the Object's kindergarten)?

Well, firstly, no matter how you turn this figure around it will still be "1961".

Additionally, in April from the radio on the wall of our room chimed the bell-like voice of Levitan announcing that in an hour there would be read an important government declaration. Grandma started sighing and stealthily crossing herself.

However, at the appointed time when all of the family gathered in the children's room, Levitan gleefully announced the first manned spaceflight by our countryman Yuri Gagarin who in 108 minutes flew about the globe and opened a new era in the history of mankind.

In Moscow and big large cities of the Soviet Union, people walked the streets in an unplanned demonstration, straight from their workplaces, in robes and overalls, with handmade placards in their hands: "We are the first! Hooray!"

And at the Object in our children's room filled with cheerful marches from the radio on the wall, Dad was impatiently driving it home to Mom and Grandma, "Well, and what's there not clear? They put him on a rocket and he flew around."

The special plane with Yuri Gagarin on board was nearing Moscow and, on the way, he got promoted from Lieutenant straight to Major. That's why at the airport, he descended the airplane stairs with big stars already in the shoulder straps of his light-gray officer's greatcoat and marched with a precise parade step along the carpet runner stretched from the plane to the government in raincoats and hats.

The laces of his polished shoes somehow untied on the way and whipped the carpet runner at each stomping step but he did not lose his demeanor and in the general jubilation no one even noticed them.

(...many years later watching the footage of the familiar newsreel, I suddenly saw them though before that as, probably, all other viewers, I could only stare at his face and the well-trained marching in.

Did he notice himself? I don't know.

But all the same, he came up so confidently and, holding his hand under the peak of his forage cap reported that the mission assigned by the Party and the Government had been successfully accomplished...)

Standing under the wall radio at the Object, I had a fairly faint idea about bestriding a rocket flight, but if Dad said so, then that was the way to open a new era...

A month or two later there came the monetary reform. Instead of being large and long pieces of paper, the rubles shrunk considerably, yet kopecks remained the same. The mentioned as well as less obvious details of the reform became the subject of frequent loud discussions of adults in the kitchen.

In an effort to join the world of grown-ups, at one of such meetings, I stood up in the middle of the kitchen and proclaimed that those new one-ruble bills were disgustingly yellow and Lenin in them did not look like Lenin at all but like some petty deuce.

Dad briefly glanced at a couple of neighbors present in our kitchen and told me not to meddle in conversations of elders and go away to the children's room.

I bore the offense silently and left. But if Grandma could say whatever she wanted, why wasn't I qualified too?.

At times I heard Mom praising me at her chit-chat with the neighbor women, "He happens to ask questions that even I have no answer to!"

From those words, I felt proud tingling up inside the nose as after a hearty gulp of lemonade or fizzy water.

(...what if my megalomania took roots right there?..)

However, the setback at the discussion of the new money served me a good lesson – no plagiarizing from your grandma, be kind to present the wits of your own, if only there are any...

And, by the by, about the nose.

When visiting the homes of other people, like, at the neighboring apartments or, say, in separate houses, like that of Dad's friend Zatseppin, there was always felt some kind of smell. Not necessarily unpleasant, yet always there, and it was different from place to place. Only at our home, there was no smack whatsoever...

In the summer of 1961, the adults of Gorka took great interest in volleyball. After her work and home chores, Mom put on her sportswear and went out to the volleyball grounds, at a stone's throw across the road, alongside the Bugorok-Knoll that looked like one of the hills in The Russian Epic Tales.

The games were played by the "knock-out system" with the teams replacing one another till the ink-dark night darkness condensed around the yellowish bulb atop the solitary log post nearby the volleyball grounds. The players chided each other for failures or hotly lambasted the opposite team's protestations, but no one dared to argue with the umpire because he sat so high and blew the whistle.

The on-lookers also rotated. They came and went, shouted along with the game, manned teams of their own, slapped themselves to kill a biting mosquito or paddled the buzzing scourges away with green broad-leaved branches.

And I was there and also fed the mosquitoes, yet they are just a dim recollection but I remember dearly the rare feel of communion and belonging – all around were us and we were our very own people. Such a pity that some of us had to leave and go, but–look!–there were others coming. Ours. We.

(...so long ago was all that.

Before the TV and the Internet split us up and shoved into separate cells...)

With the nearing autumn, Mom started to teach me reading the ABC book, which was full of pictures and the letters were strung with dashes to easier form the words.

Yet, the spitted letters stayed reluctant to fuse into something sensible. At times, I tried to skulk and, staring at the picture next to the word, read: "Arr-hay-eye-enn. Rain!"

But Mom answered, "Stop cheating! It's a " c-l-o-u-d".

I poohed, and eeewed, and started again converting the syllables into words, and in a few weeks, I could already sing through the texts at the end of the book where the harvester was mowing wheat in the collective farm field...

Grandma Martha's worldview was not in the least affected by the Yuri Gagarin's statement for the journalists that, while on his flight, he saw no God up there.

On the contrary, she started a covert agitation and anti-atheistic propaganda targeting her eldest grandkid. She insistingly advised me to mark well that God knew everything, could do anything and, most importantly, was able to fulfill your wishes. And in exchange for what? Simply for praying regularly! Such a trifle, ain't it? But then at school, I, with God's help, would have no problems. The grade of "five" is needed? Just say a prayer and – get it! Some good trade, eh?.

And I wavered. I succumbed to her agitation and even though never admitting it, I turned a clandestine believer on my own.

As long as no one ever taught me what a believer's supposed to do, I had to invent the rituals myself.

On the way down to play in the Courtyard, I for a second dropped behind the narrow door to the basement and there, in the darkness, pronounced – not even in a whisper but silently, in my mind – "Alright, God, you know all yourself. See? I'm crossing me." And I put a sign of the cross somewhere about my navel...

However, when before school there remained just a couple of days, something revolted inside of me and I became an apostate. I renounced Him.

And I did it out loud. Openly.

I went into the grassy grounds by the garbage-bins enclosure and shouted at the top of my lungs, "There's no god!"

And though there was no one around—not a single soul—I still took proper precautions, just in case if somebody would overhear accidentally, say, from behind the plank fence around the garbage bins. "Aha!" they would think, "Now that boy shouts there is no god – even a fool can see it that till lately he still believed there was some." And that was surely a shame for a boy who in a few days would become a schoolboy.

For that reason, instead of articulating the blasphemous renunciation clearly, I took care to howl it with indistinct vowels: "Ou ou ouu!"

Nothing happened.

Turning my face upward, I hollered it once again and then, in a way of putting the final period in my relations with God, I spat in the sky.

Neither thunder nor lightning followed, only I felt the drizzle of spittle landing on my cheeks. So it was not a period but the dots of ellipsis. Not too much of a difference. And I went home liberated...

(...the microscopic spittle fallout that sprinkled, in the aftermath of the God-defying spit in the sky, the upturned face of the seven-year-old I, proved up to the hilt my inability to draw conclusions from the personal experience: a handful of sand when thrown up invariably came back down.

It also showed my complete ignorance of Sir Isaac Newton's conclusions in his law of the respective matters.

In short, it was really time for the young atheist to plop into the inescapable flow of compulsory school education...)

The never-ending summer of the pivotal year pitied, at last, the little ignoramus and handed me over to September when, dressed in a bluish suit with shiny pewter buttons, with my forelock trimmed in the real hair salon for grown-up men, where Mom took me the day before, clutching with my right hand the stalks of the newspaper-wrapped dahlias bunch brought the previous night from the small front garden of Dad's friend Zatseppin who had a black motorcycle with a sidecar – I went for the first time to the first grade, escorted by Mom.

I cannot remember whether she was holding my hand or I succeeded at my claim of being big enough to carry both the flowers and the schoolbag of dark brown leatherette.

We walked down the same road from which since long had disappeared the black columns of _zeks_ though the sun shined as brightly as in their days.

On that sunny morning, the road was walked by other than me first-graders with their parents and brand-new leatherette schoolbags, as well as by elder, differently aged, schoolchildren, marching both separately and in groups. However, after the descent ended, we did not turn to the all too familiar trail to the kindergarten but went straight ahead to the wide-open gate of Recruit Depot Barracks. We crossed their yard and left it through the side gate, and walked uphill along another, yet unknown, trail between the tall grayish trunks of aspen.

From the pass, there started again a protracted tilt downward through the leafy forest with a swamp on the right, after which a short, yet steep, climb led up to the road entering the open gate of the school grounds encircled with the fence of planks.

Inside the spacey closure, the road ran up to the short flight of concrete steps ascending to a concrete path towards the entrance of the two-story school building with two rows of large frequent windows.

We did not enter the school but stopped outside it and stood for a long time, while bigger schoolchildren kept running roundabout and were yelled at by adults.

Then we, the first-graders, were lined to face the school. Our parents stayed behind us but still there, while we stood clutching our flower bunches and new schoolbags until told to form pairs and follow an elderly woman heading inside.

And we awkwardly moved forward. One girl in our column burst into tears; her mother ran up to silence her sobs and urged her to keep walking.

I looked back at my Mom. She waved and smiled, and said something which I could already hear. Black-haired, young, beautiful...

At home, Mom announced that everyone praised Seraphima Sergeevna Kasyanova as a very experienced teacher and it was so very good I got into her class.

For quite a few months, the experienced teacher instructed us in writing in the copybooks along the faded horizontal lines crossed with slanting ones, for which process we were allowed to use only pencils.

We scribbled endless lines of sticks and hooks which were supposed later to become parts of letters written with an elegant bent, parallel to the slant lines on the pages of ruled paper.

It took an eternity and one day before the teacher's announcement that we were to start using pens and should bring them to school the next day together with no-spill ink-pots and replaceable nibs.

Those dip pens—slender wooden sticks in lively monochrome color with cuffs of light tin at one end for the insertion of a nib—I kept bringing with me from the first school day under the long sliding lid in a wooden pencil-box.

As for the plastic no-spill ink-pots, they indeed prevented the spillage of ink holding it between their double walls if the ink-pot got accidentally knocked over or deliberately turned upside down.

The pen's nib was dipped into the ink-pot, but not too deep because if you picked up too much of ink with the nib tip, the ink would drop down into the page—oops!—a splotch again...

One dip was enough for a couple of words and then – dip the nib anew.

At school, each desk had a small round hollow to place one ink-pot for the pair of students sharing it to dip, in turn, their pen's nibs in.

The replaceable nib had a bifurcated tip, however, its halves, pressed tightly to each other, were leaving on the paper a hair-thin line (if you didn't forget to dip the pen's nib into the ink-pot beforehand). Slight pressure applied to the pen in writing made nib's halves part and draw a wider line. The alteration of thin and bold lines with gradual transitions from one into another presented in the illustrious samples of the penmanship textbook drove me to despair by their unattainable calligraphy refinement...

Much later, already as a third-grade student, I mastered one more application of dip pen's nibs.

Stab an apple with a nib and revolve it inside for one full rotation, then pulling the nib out you'll have a little cone of the fruit's flesh in it, while on the apple side there appeared a neat hole, into which you can insert the extracted cone, reversely. Got it? You've created an apple with a horn.

Then you may add more of such horns until the apple starts looking like a sea mine or a hedgehog – depending on the perseverance of the artisan.

Finally, you can eat your piece of art but I, personally, never liked the taste of the resultant apple mutant...

And after one more year at school, in the fourth grade, you learned the way of turning the dip pen's nib into a missile.

First, break off one of the halves in the sharp tip of the nib to make it even sharper, then split the opposite insertion butt-end and jam into the crack a tiny piece of paper folded into four-wing tail-stabilizer to obtain bee-line flying mode.

Now, throw your dart into some wooden thing – the door, the blackboard, a window frame would equally do – the prickly nib's half will pierce deep enough to keep the missile sticking out from the target...

The trail to school had become quite familiar, yet each time a little different.

The foliage fell, the droughts began roaming between the naked tree trunks and the school was peeping through them even before you reached the big aspen by the swamp, on whose smooth bark there stood the knife-cut inscription: "It's where the youtth is wasted".

(....until now the literary magazine _The Youth_ shocks me with a certainly crying deficiency in its name...)

Then the snowfalls began, yet but by the end of the day, the wide path through deep snowdrifts to the school got trodded anew. The sun sparkled blindingly on both sides of that road to knowledge transformed into a trench with orange marks of urine on its snow walls. Totally obliterated by the next snowfall, they would persistently pop up again at other spots in the restored and deepened trench-trail through the forest...

A few weeks before the New Year, our class finished studying the primer and Seraphima Sergeevna brought us to the school library, a narrow room with one window on the second floor. There she introduced us to the librarian as accomplished readers who had the right to visit her and borrow books for our personal reading at home.

That day, returning home with my first book, I stretched upon the big sofa and never left it but only turned from one side to the other, and from my tummy to my back, until finished the entire book which was a fairy-tale about the city with narrow streets walked by tall hammer-creatures who banged on the heads of shorter bell-creatures to make them ring. Just so a story by Aksakov about a music-playing snuff-box...

Winter evenings were so hasty rides, you had barely had your meal and scribbled away your calligraphy home assignment when – look! – it's already deep dusk outside the window.

Yet, even the dark could not cancel the social life and you hurriedly put your felt boots on, and pulled warm pants over them, and got into your winter coat followed by the fur hat and – off you ran to the Gorka!

How far away? Just around the corner! Because "the Gorka" indicated not only the two blocks as well as the whole hill but also that very tilt towards Recruit Depot Barracks which we walked down on our way to school.

With its well-trodden snow, the Gorka served ideally for riding sleds. The start was taken from the concrete road surrounding the blocks. The deep rut left in the snow by tires of random cars confirmed that the road was still there and so did the bulbs shedding the light from their post tops.

One of those posts marked the starting point in the Sleigh Gorka. The cone of yellow light from its bulb drew a blurred circle – the meeting place of the sledding fans crowd.

Most of the sleds were a store purchase – with aluminum runners and multi-colored cross-plank seats. Mine was made by Dad though. It was shorter and made of steel and much speedier than those store-bought things.

After a short run pushing the sled downhill with your hands on the backrest, you plonked with your tummy upon the seat and flew away to the foot of the hillock drowned in the dark of night pricked with the distant solitary light above the gate of Recruit Depot Barracks that bounced in time with the leaps and jerks of your fleeting sled. And the speed wind pressed tears out of your eyes.

When the sled came to a stop, you picked up the icy rope run through two holes in the sled's nose and stomped uphill. The sled tamely ran after you, now and then knocking its muzzle at the heels of your felt boots.

And with the approach of the roadside lamp, myriads of living sparks started to wink at you from the roadside snowdrifts varying their twinkle with each step.

Gee! Up there atop the Gorka, they already started to marshal a train of sleds, hitching them to each other and – hup-ho! – off the whole mass and wild screams and the frosty screech of the sled, runners went into the darkness...

At some point, probably, as thousands other boys both before me and after, I did something which should never be done, and we knew it all along that it was no-no, yet the sled's nose in the light of the bulb shimmered beautifully with the frost-sparks that we couldn't resist and licked it.

Sure thing, as we knew beforehand, the tongue got stuck to the frost-gripped metal and we had to rip it off back with pain, and shame, and hope that no one noticed the folly inappropriate for so big a boy.

Then you plodded home, dragging your sled along with stiff hands and dropped it by the basement's door in the staircase-entrance vestibule. You climbed upstairs to the second floor and knocked at your apartment door with your felt boots, and your Mom pulled off your mittens with a tiny bead of ice stuck to each filament of their wool, disclosing the white icicles of your hands.

She would run out into the yard to scoop up a basinful of snow and rub your senseless hands with it, and order to put them in the saucepan in the kitchen sink under the cold water running from the tap. And life would start to slowly come back to your hands.

You'd whine from the piercing needles of unbearable pain in your fingers, and Mom would yell at you, "Serves you right! You, rascal roamer! You, bitter woe of mine!."

And though still whimpering from the pain in your stiff fingers and in your tongue skinned by the savage frosty iron, you'd know for sure that everything will be fine because your Mom knew how to save you...

After the winter holidays, Seraphima Sergeevna came to the classroom with an issue of the newspaper _Pioneer Pravda_ and instead of the lesson she was reading aloud the news of Nikita Khrushchev's promise that twenty years later Communism would be built in our country.

At home, bubbling with delight, I declared that on that day in twenty years we were going to live in Communism when any item at the store would be given just for asking because at school they told us so. However, my parents only exchanged silent glances, yet abstained from partaking in my festive mood on account of so capital news.

I decided not to bother them any longer, but deep in my mind started arithmetic calculations to discover that seeing the onset of Communism at seven-and-twenty, I wouldn't be so badly old, still having some time to enjoy things free of charge.

By that time all the pupils of our class had already become Octoberists, for which occasion a group grown-up fifth-graders visited our classroom to pin Octoberist badges on our school uniforms.

The badge was a small scarlet star of five tips around the yellow frame in the center out of which, as if from a medallion, peeped the angelic face of Volodya Ulyanov with long golden locks in his early childhood when playing with his sister he ordered her, "March out from under the sofa!." And later he grew up, lost his hair and became Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and they wrote a great many books about him...

At home, there appeared a filmstrip projector – a clumsy device with a set of lenses in its nose tube, as well as a box of small plastic barrels to keep tight dark scrolls of filmstrips.

Among the filmstrips, there happened some old acquaintances – the one about the hero of the Civil War, Zheleznyak the Seaman, another about the little daughter of a revolutionary, who smartly hid the typesetting sorts, brought by her father for printing underground leaflets, into a jug of milk when the police raided their house late at night. They never had brains enough to check under the milk...

Of course, it was I who loaded the filmstrips and then rotated the black scroll-wheel to move the projected frames. And I also read the inscriptions under the pictures, which did not last long though, because my sister and brother learned them by heart and retold before the whole frame would creakily creep down into the lighted rectangular on the wallpaper.

The challenge to my seniority from Natasha did not hurt so bitterly as Sasha's disobedience.

Just so recently as we two pranced, panting, into the kitchen to still our thirst with water from the tap, he readily conceded the white tin mug, adorned with the revolutionary battleship Aurora's imprint on its side, to me as to the elder, bigger, brother.

And emptying half of it, I generously handed the mug back for him to finish off the water, after all, that was the way for strength transmitting.

How come that I became so strong? Because, without silly prissiness, I drank a couple of gulps from the bottle of water started by Sasha Nevelsky, the strongest boy in our class.

My younger brother naively listened to my naive claptrap and dutifully grabbed the outstretched mug...

He, like me, was over-credulous and once at midday meal, when Dad took out from his soup plate a cartilage without meat and announced: who'd gnaw it up was to get a prize – one kilo of gingerbread, Sasha volunteered and, after protracted munching, managed to swallow the cartilage but never got the promised sweetmeat, probably Dad forgot his promise...

A parcel arrived from the post-office, or rather Mom dropped in there to pick it on her way home after work, that box of grayish plywood secured with a string glued to its sides with brown blobs of stamped sealing wax, with two addresses in blue block letters on its top: to our numbered mailbox from the city of Konotop.

The parcel was set on a stool in the kitchen and all of the family gathered around. The lid with the addresses, nailed firmly and aplenty, had to be removed by application of a big kitchen knife used as a lever, and revealed a sizable lump of lard, and a hot-water bottle gurgling with moonshine in between its rubber sides. The rest of the space within the box was filled to the brims with black sunflower seeds.

When slightly scorched in a frying pan, the seeds became simply delicious. We crushed them with our teeth, piled hulls away into a saucer placed in the center of the kitchen table, and enjoyed those small but so tasty, sharp-nosed, hearts.

And then Mom said if you didn't eat them just so, one after another, but collected, say, half a glass of husked seeds and added a sprinkle of sugar, that would be a real treat.

Each of her three children was handed a tea glass to collect the hearts. Instead of a saucer, Mom equipped us with one deep plate for all, and a huge cornet, which she deftly rolled of a newspaper and filled with the fried seeds.

We left the adults to eat unsweetened seeds in the kitchen and went over to the children's room, where we lay upon the pieces of carpet runner frizzled in the fire of long-ago past.

Of course, the level of peeled hearts in Natasha's glass rose quicker than in ours, although she jabbered more than cracked. But when even my brother began to overtake me, I felt hurt.

My progress was slowed down by considering a cartoon on the side of the newspaper cornet, where a pot-bellied colonialist blasted off away from the continent of Africa with a black imprint of a boot kick in the seat of his white shorts.

So I dropped the distracted contemplation of his flight and tried to husk faster, and under stricter self-control so as not to accidentally chew some of the harvested hearts, however, all my struggle for catching up with the younger proved useless.

The door opened and Mom entered the room with a half-glass of sugar and sprinkled a teaspoon of it over our personal achievements, but I was already sick and tired of them those foolish seeds, no matter sugared or not, and in my following life I stayed indifferent forever to joys of sunflower seed orgies.

(...but still and all, consumption of seeds is more than a trifling pastime with sapid side-effect, it grew into real art.

To start with the Slavonic lavish way of eating them in the "piggy" style when the hollowed or simply chewed together with the hearts, black hulls are not vivaciously spat out into the nearby environment, but with sluggish pushes of the tongue are set instead on the move from out the corner of the mouth and keep sliding in a mutual, saliva-moisturized, mass down the chin to finally plop onto the eater's chest.

Or in contrast, again Slavonic though, the graceful "filigree" style when seeds are tossed by the snacker, one after another, into their mouth from a distance no less than twenty-five centimeters.

And so on, down to the chaste Transcaucasia manner, when a seed for crushing is fed into the same mouth from a fixed position between the thumb tip and the joint of the index finger, so as to screen the intake of it, after which the processed husk is not spat out randomly but carefully returned into the burka-like contrivance of finger-screen to be scattered somewhere, or collected into something.

On the whole, the last of the presented methods leaves an impression of the eater biting their own thumb on the sly. But at who?

" Did you bite your thumb at me, Sir?!."

Oh, yes, sunflower seeds are miles aloft of dull popcorn. However, that's more than enough about them.

Back to the green, cut-up, carpet runner...)

It was those runner pieces where my brother felled my authority of the eldest with one dire blow.

On that day coming home after a PE lesson, I thoughtlessly stated that performing one hundred squats at one go was beyond human power.

Sasha silently sniffled for a while and then said that he could do it.

Natasha and I were keeping the count, and after the twentieth squat, I yelled that it was all wrong and unfair because he didn't fully rise, but Sasha went on with squats as if I never said a word, and Natasha continued to keep the count.

I shut up and soon after joined my sister in counting, though after "eighty-one!" he could no longer rise even above his bent knees.

I felt sorry for my brother over-strained with those incomplete squats. He staggered, tears welled up in his eyes, but the count was brought to a hundred and he barely hobbled to the big sofa.

My authority collapsed like the colonialism in Africa; good news that before the fall I hadn't promised any gingerbread...

Where did the filmstrip projector come from? Most likely, our parents bought it from a shop. And in their room there appeared The Radiola – a combination of radio and records player. Two in one, as they call it now.

The lid on top as well as the sidewalls of The Radiola softly gleamed with brown varnish. The rear side had no gloss because it was hard cardboard with multiple rows of tiny portholes facing the wall. However, pulling The Radiola a little forward, you could peep through them and catch a patchy view of the murky interior landscape: the white of aluminum panel-houses, the dim glow in the pearly black turrets of radio-lamps of different height and thickness, and from one of those holes, the brown cable with the plug for a mains socket ran out.

The Radiola's face was clothed with a special sound-friendly fabric through which you could trace the big oval of the speaker beneath the round glass of a sleeping eye that vigilantly flashed up with green when you clicked on The Two-in-One.

The long low plate of glass inserted along the front side bottom bridged the control knobs: the power and volume adjustment (two in one) next to the range selection switch on the right, and only one knob on the left — for fine-tuning the wavelength.

The glass plate was glossy black except for four transparent stripes, from end to end, marked with irregular vertical hair-width snicks and the names of capital cities: Moscow, Bucharest, Warsaw. While twirling the knob of fine adjustment, you could follow, through those transparent stripes in the glass, the progress of the thin red slider crawling from city to city along the inner side of the plate.

The radio was not very interesting though, it hissed and cracked and swished along with the slider movements; sometimes there would float up an announcer's voice reading the news in some unknown Bucharestian language, a little farther along the stripe it would be replaced with a Russian voice repeating the news from the wall radio.

Yet, lifting the lid on top of The Radiola, you, like, opened a tiny theater with the round red-velveted stage with a shining pin in the center to slip on it the hole in a record disk when loading it on the pad. Next to it, the slightly crooked poker of the white plastic adapter sat on its stand.

With the pad switched on and spinning, the adapter had to be carefully picked up from its stand, brought over the whirling disk and lowered in between the wideset initial grooves running round and round and in a couple of turns there would start a song about Chico-Chico from Costa Rica, or about O, Mae Caro, or about a war soldier marching in a field along the steep river bank.

The cabinet under The Radiola held a stack of paper envelopes with gleaming black disks made at the record factory in the Aprelev City whose name was printed on the round label about the center hole, beneath the song's title, and the name of the singer, and the instruction that the rotation speed was 78 rpm.

Next to the adapter's perch, there was the gearshift lever with notches for 33, 45, and 78 rpm. Disks of 33 rpm were much narrower and spun slower than 78 rpm disks, but they—so small—had two songs on each side!

Natasha shared it with us that when you launched a 33 rpm disk at the speed of 45 rpm then even the Soviet Army Choir named after Aleksandrov began to sing with Lilliputian puppet voices...

Dad never was overly keen on reading. He read nothing but _The Radio_ magazine full of schematic blueprints of capacitor-resistor-diodes, which every month appeared in the mailbox on our apartment door. And, since Dad was a Party man, they also put there the daily _Pravda_ and the monthly The Blocknote of Agitator filled with the hopelessly dense text running for one or two endless paragraphs per page and not a single picture in any issue.

Because of his Party membership, twice a week Dad attended the Party Studies Evening School, provided it was his day-shift week. He went there after work to write the lessons in a thick copybook with leatherette covers because at the end of the academic year Dad had to pass a very difficult exam.

After one of the evening classes, Dad brought home a couple of Party textbooks, which they distributed among the Party members who attended the Party Studies Evening School. However, he never opened even those books, which, as it turned out, was his mistake. It became clear two years later when in one of those Party books he found the stash – a part of salary concealed from the wife for expenses at one's own discretion.

With bitter regret and belated self-accusations lamented Dad over the find, because the stash was in the money used before the monetary reform which turned it into funny papers...

Among the many names used for the Object where we lived, there also was that of "Zone" – a vestige from the times when _zeks_ were building the Object. (Everyone knows that _zeks_ live and work in "zones".)

After two years of attending the Party Studies Evening School, Dad and other learners were taken for their examination "out of Zone" – to the nearest district center.

Dad was noticeably worried and kept repeating that he knew not a damn thing, although his thick copybook was already written down to the almost very end. And who cared, dammit, repeated Dad, to be left for one more year at that Party Studies Evening School!

From "out of Zone" he returned in a very merry mood because at the examination he had got "three" and now all his evenings would be free.

Mom asked him how he managed to pass the exam without knowing a damn thing.

Then Dad opened his thick copybook and showed his magic good-luck charm: a pencil drawing of an ass with long ears and brush-like tail, which he made during the exam on the last page, and beneath the animal, he wrote: "pull-me-through!"

I did not know if Dad's story was really worth believing because he laughed while explaining. So I decided that I'd better not tell anyone about the ass who pulled my Dad from the Party Studies Evening School...

Mom was a regular book reader in our family. Going to her workplace, she took them along to read during her shifts at the Pumping Station.

Those books were borrowed from the Library of Detachment. (Yes, one more name because we lived not only in the Object-Zone-Mailbox but also in the Military Detachment number so and so.)

The library wasn't too far away, about one kilometer of walking. First, down the concrete road, until, at the Gorka's foot, it was crossed by an asphalt road and, after the intersection, the concrete road disappeared turning into a dirt-road street between two rows of wooden houses behind their low plank fences and narrow front gardens.

The street ended at the House of Officers, but about a hundred meters before it there was a turn to the right, towards the one-story brick building of the Detachment's Library.

Sometimes, Mom took me with her down there and while she was exchanging her books in the back of the building, I waited in the spacey front room where instead of any furniture there hung lots of posters all over the walls.

The central poster presented a cross-sectional drawing of the atomic bomb (because the full name of the Object we lived in was the Atomic Object).

Besides the posters with the bomb anatomy and atomic blast mushrooms, there were other pictures about the training of NATO's spies. In one of them, the spy who jumped from behind on a sentry's back was tearing the soldier's lips with his fingers. That picture made me creepy but I could not look away and only thought to myself, O, come on, Mom, please, change the borrowed books sooner.

At one of such visits, I pluck up the heart to ask Mom if I also could borrow books from the library.

She said that, actually, that was a library for adults but still led me to the room where a librarian woman was sitting at the desk on which the stacks of various thick books left only room for a lamp and the long plywood box beneath it, filled with the readers' cards, and my Mom told her that she did not know what to do about me because I had already read the entire library they had at school.

Since then I always went to the Detachment's Library alone, without Mom. Sometimes, I even exchanged her books and brought them home together with the two or three for me.

The books for my reading were scattered at ready over the big sofa because I read them in a scrambled way. On one of the sofa's armrests, I crawled across the front line together with the reconnaissance group Zvezda for the mission to capture a German officer and, rolling over to the opposite armrest, I continued to gallop with White Chief of Mayne Reid among the cacti of Mexican pampas. And only The Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece in blue bindings I, for some reason, read mostly in the bathroom sitting on a low stool with my back leaned against Titan the water-boiler.

For so a messy lifestyle Dad handled me "Oblomov", the lazybones whom he remembered from the lessons of Russian Literature at his village school...

That winter was endlessly long and full of heavy snowstorms as well as the frost-and-sun intervals, and some quieter snowfalls.

Starting for school, I left home at dusk as thick as the night dark. But one day it was thawing and on my way back from school when reaching the tilt between the Recruit Depot Barrack and Block, I marked a strange dark strip to the left from the road.

There I turned and plowing the snow with my felt boots went to see what's up. It was a strip of earth peeping out from under the snow, a patch of the thawed ground sticky with moisture.

The next day the opening extended, and some visitor had left in it several blackened fir cones. And although in a day the frost strengthened its grip again and fettered the snow with a thick rind of ice, and then the snowfalls set in anew and left no trace of the thaw on the hillside, I already knew for sure that the winter would pass all the same...

In mid-March, at the first lesson on Monday, Seraphima Sergeevna told us to put our dip pens aside and listen to what she had to say.

It turned out that two days before, she went to the bathhouse together with her daughter, and when back home she noticed that her wallet had disappeared with all of her teacher's salary. She was very upset together with her daughter, who told her it's impossible to built Communism with thieves around.

But the next day, a man came to their home, a worker from the bathhouse, who had stumbled there on the missing wallet and figured it out who could lose it the night before, and took it to her place.

And Seraphima Sergeevna said that Communism would surely be built, and there's no doubt about it. Then she also asked us to remember the name of that working man.

(...but I have already forgotten it because "the body's fluid, the memory's faulty" as it stands in the dictionary by Vladimir Dahl...)

The Saturday bathed in the sun as warm as the spring sun can be. After school and the midday meal at home, I hurried outdoors in the Courtyard where there was a general Subbotnik in progress.

People came out of the houses into the bright shining day and shoveled the snow from the concrete paths about the vast Courtyard. Bigger boys loaded the snow in huge cardboard boxes and sledded it aside on a pile where it would not be in the way.

In the ditches along the road, they dug deep channels, cutting the snow with shovels and hoisting out entire snow cubes darkly wet at the bottoms. And through those channels, dark water ran lapping.

So came the spring, and everything began changing every day...

And when at school they gave us the yellow sheets with records of our grades, the summer holidays started, bringing about the everyday games of hide-and-seek, classlets, and knifelets.

For the game of knifelets, you need to choose a level area and draw a wide circle on the ground.

The circle is divided into sectors according to the number of players who, standing upright, throw a knife, in turn, into the ground that belongs to some of their opponents.

If the hurled knife sticks in, the sector gets split up with the line drawn along with the stuck knife's blade. The owner of the divided sector decides which part of it he wants to keep while the other slice becomes a part of the knife-thrower's domain.

A player stays in the game until they retain a patch of ground big enough to accommodate for their standing upon at least one foot, with no space even for that, the game is over for them, the remaining players go on until there stays just one. You win!

(...quoting Alexander Pushkin: "tale is a lie, yet holds some hint as well as a lesson to learn..."

When playing knifelets, all I felt was an overwhelming yen to win. And presently, I can't help feeling amazed at how readily the whole world's history gets covered by a simplistic game for kids...)

And we also played matches, which is a game just for two.

Each player sticks their thumb off their fist, inserts a match, kinda spacer, between their thumb tip and the middle joint of the index finger, and holds it tight. The matches are slowly pressed against each other, the pressure grows and the player whose match withstands it without breaking up becomes the winner.

The same idea as in tapping Easter eggs against each other, only you don't have to wait a whole year for the game which wasted more than one matchbox nicked from the kitchen at home.

Or we just ran hither-thither playing War-Mommy, yelling, "Hurray!", or "Ta-ta-ta!", or "I've killed you!" But the killed did not want to fall and he shouted back, "Okay! I'm at death's doorstep yet!" And for a long time after, he still kept running to-and-fro and ta-ta-taing before to slam, at last, that door behind himself and picturesquely fall in the grass.

For taking part in War-Mommy you needed a machine-gun sawed from a plank piece. Yet, some boys played automatic weapons of tin, a black-painted store acquisition.

Such machine-guns had to be loaded with special ammunition – rolls of narrow paper strips with tiny sulfur globs planted in them. When the spring trigger struck such a glob it clapped loudly, and the paper strip got automatically pulled to the next one...

Mom bought me a tin pistol and a box of pistons – small paper circles with the same sulfur globs which had to be inserted manually for each separate shot. After the report, a tiny wisp of sore smelling smoke rose from under the trigger.

One day when I was playing the pistol in the sand pile by the garbage enclosure, a boy from the corner house asked me to present the weapon to him, and I readily gave it away. Being a son of an officer, he, of course, needed and had more rights to it than me.

Mom refused to believe that anyone would give his gun away to another boy just so casually. She demanded of me to confess the genuine truth about losing Mom's present, yet I so stubbornly kept to my truth, that she even had to lead me to the apartment of that boy in the corner house.

The officer started to rebuke his son, yet Mom said she was so sorry and asked to excuse her because she only wanted to make sure I did not lie...

That summer the boys from our Block began to play with yellowish cartridges of real firearms which they were hunting at the shooting range in the forest. I wanted so badly to see what shooting range might look like, yet bigger boys explained that you could visit it only on special days when there was no shooting and any other day they'd shoo you off.

It took a long wait for a special day, but after all, it came and we went through the forest.

The shooting range turned out to be a huge opening with a wide excavation where we got by a steep descent in the earth wall. The opposite wall of the pit was screened with a tall log barrier, all poked with bullets, with shreds of the outline of man's head-and-shoulders in riddled paper squares.

We looked for the cartridges in the sand underfoot. They were of two types – longish, neck-narrowed, cartridges from the AK assault-rifle; and small smooth cylinders from the TT pistol. The finds were loudly welcomed and busily exchanged between the boys. I had no luck at all and only envied them.

The shrieks of luckier seekers sounded dull and drowned in the eerie silence of the shooting range displeased with our trespassing the forbidden grounds...

At the other end of the glade, there was dug a front-line trench with shields of planks retaining the sand in its walls. A narrow track of iron rails ran across the field from end to end, and over the trench. It was the railway for a large plywood mock-up of tank mounted upon its trolley rumbling along the track hauled with the hand winch cable.

The boys started to play with all those things. I also sat in the trench once, while the plywood tank clanged overhead, and then I went to the call from the edge of the field where they needed my help.

We pulled the steel cable looped through the horizontal pulley to make it easier for the boys on the other end of the battlefield to turn the handle of the winch which set in motion the trolley with the tank.

At some point, I got inattentive and didn't snatch in time my hand off the cable and my little finger was dragged by the cable into the pulley.

The pain in the squashed finger squeezed out of me an agonizing scream mingled with the fountain of tears.

Hearing my "oy-oy-oy!" as well as the shouts of other boys around me, "Stop! Finger!", the winch operators managed to stop it when there remained a mere couple of centimeters for my little finger to get out from the other side of the pulley. They started to turn the winch handle in the opposite direction, dragging my little finger back to where it was originally swallowed by the steel cable.

The unnaturally flattened, dead pale finger smeared with the blood from the broken skin, emerged from the pulley jaws and puffed up instantly.

The boys wrapped it with my handkerchief and told me to run home. Quick!

And I ran through the forest feeling the painful beat of the pulse in the burning finger...

At home, Mom, without asking anything, told me to put the little finger in the gush of water from the kitchen tap. She bent and straightened it several times and told me not to bellow like a little cow.

Then she bandaged it into a tight white cocoon and said that by the wedding day it would be like new.

(...and at the same time, childhood is not the nursery of sadomasochism, like, "Whoops, my finger got pinched! Oh, I bumped my head!"

It's just that some jolts leave deeper notches in the memory.

Yet, what a pity that the same memory does not retain the admiring state of ongoing discoveries when a speck of sand stuck to the blade of the penknife holds countless galaxies and worlds, when every trifle, a scrap of trash, is the promise and pledge of future wanderings and unbelievable adventures.

We grow up gaining the protective armor necessary in the adult world – the doctor coat on me, the traffic cop uniform on you. Each of us becomes a necessary cog in the social machine. All needless things—like gaping at fire extinguishers or scanning the strange faces in the frost gripped windowpane—are chopped off...

Now there is a number of old scars on my fingers. This one from an awkwardly wielded knife, here it was cut with an ax; and only on my little fingers, I cannot find any trace from that pulley injury.

But, hey! I know some fresher sayings, like that recent one, and well-said too –

" summer is a miniature life"...)

When you are a child not only summer but each and every day is a miniature life.

The childhood time is slowed down – it does not fly, it does not flow, it does not even move until you push it. Poor children would long since got extinct while crossing that boundless desert of the static time, were they not rescued by games.

And in that summer, if I got bored with a game or no one was in the Courtyard to play with, I had already a haven, kinda "home" square when playing classlets.

The big sofa it was, where life ran high indeed, the life full of adventures shared with the heroes in books by Gaidar, Belyaev, Jules Verne...

However, even outside the big sofa, you could always find a place suitable for all kinds of adventures. Like the balcony by the parents' room, where I once spent a whole summer day reading a book about prehistoric people – Chung and Poma.

There was hair all over their bodies, like by animals, and they lived in the trees. But then a branch went accidentally broke off a tree and helped to defend themselves against a saber-tooth tiger, so they started to always carry a stick about them and walk instead of leaping in the trees around.

Then there happened a big jungle fire followed by the Ice Age. Their tribe wandered in search of food, learning how to build fire and talk to each other.

In the final chapter, the already old Poma could walk no farther and fell behind the tribe. Her faithful Chung stayed by her side to freeze together in the snow.

But their children could not wait and just went on because they were already grown up and not so hairy as their parents, and they protected themselves from the cold with the skins of other animals...

The book was not especially thick, yet I read it all day long, while the sun, arisen on the left, from behind the forest outside our Block, indiscernibly moved in the sky over the Courtyard, towards the sunset on the right, behind the second block.

At some point, in a way of respite from the uninterrupted reading, I slipped out between the iron uprights of the handrail that bounded the balcony and started to promenade outside, along the concrete cornice beyond the safety grating, and it was not scary at all because I tightly grasped the bars, just like Chung and Poma when they were still living in the trees.

But some unfamiliar unclie was passing down there who scolded me and told to get back onto the balcony. He even threatened to report to my parents. However, they were not home so he took his complaint to our neighbors on the first floor. In the evening they told on me to Mom, and I had to promise her to never-never do it again...

(...every road, when you pass it for the first time, seems endlessly long because you cannot measure yet the passed part of it against what is still ahead. When passing the same road, again and again, it obviously shortens.

That keeps true with the school academic year as well. But I'd never discover it had I left the race at the beginning of the second year at school...)

It was a clear autumn day and our class went on the excursion to collect fallen leaves. Instead of Seraphima Sergeevna, we were supervised by the School Pioneer Leader.

First, she led us through the forest, then down the street towards the Detachment Library which we didn't reach but turned into a short lane between the wooden houses, that ended atop a steep slope bridged with two wide flights of board stairs streaming straight down to a real football field bound by a wide cinder path.

Following the flights, we descended to the large plank landing in both directions from which, there ran half-dozen bleachers made of timber beams.

No bleachers were seen on the field's opposite side but only a lonely white hut and a tall stand with the huge picture of two footballers fixed in their jump high up in the air at the moment of heated scrambling for the ball with their feet.

I had a vague recollection of visiting the place in winter long ago, probably, at my kindergarten past or even earlier, when they flooded the field with water turning it into a skating rink.

A dark winter night dimly dwelt in my memory lit with seldom bulbs on the posts bordering the field as well as a bitter sting of distress because they gave me so too brief a ride in a high skating chair with roundly curved blades of thin iron rods...

The girls of our class stayed back collecting the leaves from between the bleachers, while the boys bypassed the football field along the cinder path and fled down the dip to the river running below.

When I reached the riverbank, three or four of the boys with their pants rolled up to the knees were already wading the hurried stream of the river that noisily rushed through the gap in the broken dam; most classmates stayed on the bank.

Without a moment's deliberation, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled the pants up. Entering the water was a little scary – what if it's too cold? But it turned out quite tolerable.

The angrily roaring stream yanked at my legs below the knees, yet the river bottom felt surprisingly smooth and even. One of the boys wading in the splashing ripples nearby shouted to me through the turbulent noise that it was a slab from the destroyed dam – wow! so classy!.

And so I waded hither-thither, caring not to drench the upturned pants when everything—the splashes of the running river, the eager yells of classmates, and the clear gentle day—abruptly disappeared. On all sides, there was a completely different, silent, world filled with nothing but oppressive yellow dusk and streams of whitish bubbles waltzing up before my eyes. Still not realizing what had happened, I waved my hands, or rather they did it on their own accord, and soon I broke free to the surface full of blinding sun glare, and the ramble of rushing water that kept slapping my nose and cheeks with choking splashes, and of distant yells: "he drowns!"

My hands flip-flapped at random in the stream until the fingers grabbed the end of someone's belt thrown from the edge of the slab so meanly cut-off under the water.

I was dragged out, helped to squeeze the water out of my clothes, and showed a wide trail bypassing the whole stadium so as not to ran into the School Pioneer Leader and peachy girls collecting fallen leaves for their autumn herbariums...

In a bird's-eye view, the school building, supposedly, looked like a wide angular "U" with the entrance in the center of the underbelly.

After the lobby tiled with brown ceramic, two corridors of slippery yellow-parquet flooring led to the opposite wings of the building, the "U" horns from a bird's point of view.

Along each of the corridors, there ran a row of wide windows looking into the area enclosed by the horns of the building and filled with a thicket of young, thin-skinned, pines. The wall opposite the windows had only doors set far from each other, marked with numbers and letters of the grades studying behind them.

The same layout continued after the turn into the left wing, but in the right one, there was the school gymnasium taking up the whole width and height of the two-story building. The spacey hall was equipped with a vault followed by the thick cable of spirally twined strands hanging from the hook in the ceiling and the parallel bars next to the pile of black mats by the distant blind wall. And near the entrance, there was a small stage hiding behind its blue curtain an upright piano and a stock of triple seats stacked up there until used to transform the gym into the assembly hall.

The upper floor was climbed up the stair-flights starting the left corridor where it turned up the horn, and the layout up there replicated that of the first floor, except for the lobby, of course, with its nickel-plated stand-hangers for school kids' hats and coats behind low barriers, each with its own wicket on both sides from the entrance door. That's why the second-floor corridors ran straight between the wide windows in one wall and the doors of classrooms in the other.

In winter, coming to school, not in shoes but in felt boots, you could take a short run and skid along the yellow parquet flooring, if only there were not black rubber galoshes on your boots neither a teacher in the corridor. My felt boots, at first, severely chafed my legs behind the knees, then Dad slashed them a little with his shoemaker's knife. He knew how to do anything.

In winter you came to school still in the dark. Sometimes I wandered around empty classrooms. In the seventh grade's room, I peeked inside the small white bust of Comrade Kirov on the windowsill. It looked much like the insides of the porcelain puppy statuette in the parents' room.

Another time, switching on the light in the eighth grade, I saw a wax apple left behind on the teacher's desk. Of course, I fully realized that it was not natural, yet the fruit looked so inviting, juicy, and as if glowing with some inner light and all that made me a bit the hard unyielding wax, leaving dents from my teeth on its tasteless side. Immediately, I felt ashamed of being hooked with a bright fake. Yet, who saw it? Quietly turned I the light off and sneaked out into the corridor.

(...twenty-five years later, in the school of the Karabakh village of Noragyuogh, I saw exactly the same wax imitation, with the imprint of a child's bite and smiled knowingly – I saw you, kid!..)

Kids of all nations and ages are much alike, take, for instance, their love for hide-and-seek...

That game we played not only in the Courtyard but at home as well, after all, we were three at once and sometimes more numerous with the participating neighbor children – the Zimins and the Savkins who lived at the same landing.

Our apartment did not provide plenty of hiding places. Well, first, under the parents' bed, or then... behind the cupboard corner... er... O, yes! – the cloth wardrobe in the hallway.

My Dad made it himself. A vertical two-meter-tall bar planted off the hallway corner, with two metal rods connecting its top to the walls, cut out a sizable parallelepiped of space. Now, it just remained to hang a cloth curtain on ringlets running along the horizontal rods and cover the whole contraption with a piece of plywood so that the dust did not collect inside. The do-it-yourself's ready!

On the paint-coated wall inside the cloth wardrobe, there was fixed a wide board with pegs for hanging coats and other things, the big brown wicker chest stood on the floor beneath the hanger-board, and there still remained a lot of room for the footwear...

Sure, the hiding places were pretty scanty, yet playing the game was interesting all the same. You holed up in one of the enumerated spots and, keeping your breath under the strenuous control, listened to the "it's" cautious steps before off you rushed to be first at the big sofa in the children's room from where the "it" started their search, and assert your win by tap-tapping on the big sofa's armrest and the loud yell, "knock-knock! that's for me!", so as not to be the "it" in the following game of hide-and-seek.

Yet, one day Sasha got hidden so that I couldn't find him, he simply disappeared! I even checked both the bathroom and the storeroom in the hallway, although we had a standing deal to never hide in there. And I felt through each of the coats on the hanger-board behind the cloth curtain in the hallway.

Then I opened the wardrobe in the parents' room with Mom's dresses and Dad's jackets hanging in the dark warm compartment behind its door bearing big outside mirror.

Just in case, I checked behind the wardrobe's right door even though there was no room for hiding in the compartment filled with the drawers for stacks of sheets and pillowcases, except for the one below where I once discovered the blue square of seaman's collar cut off a sailor's shirt. And under it, there was a dagger of a naval officer with spiral ribs in the yellow hilt and the long steel body tapering to the needle-sharp point hiding in the black taut scabbard. A couple of days later, I couldn't keep the temptation back and shared the great secret with the younger ones. However, Natasha casually shrugged the news away and answered that she knew about the dagger all along and even showed it to Sasha...

And now Natasha with happy giggles was following my vain search and to my frantic cry addressed to our absent brother that, okay, I agreed to be the "it" one more game let him only go out from wherever he was now, Natasha also yelled instructing him to sit tight and quiet, and not to give up.

I ran out of patience completely and refused to play anymore, but she suggested that I go out into the corridor for a couple of minutes. On coming back, I saw Sasha standing in the middle of the room pleased and silent, and blinking bemusedly at Natasha's report how he climbed the fourth drawer in the wardrobe where she piled socks over him...

At times there happened exclusively family games at home with no neighbors taking part.

Merry laughing of several voices was heard in the parents' room, I put the book aside got up from the big sofa and trotted over there.

"What are you doing here?" asked I trying to guess the reason for the mutual mirth.

"Checking the pots!"

"How's that?"

"Come on and have a check!"

I was told to sit on Dad's back and grab him by the neck while he was firmly holding my legs. So far, so good, I liked it. But then he turned my back towards Mom and I felt rooting my ass as deep as the pants let her finger go.

"This pot is leaky!" announced Mom.

Everyone laughed and me too, although I felt somehow ashamed...

Another time Dad asked me, "Wanna see Moscow?"

"Wow! Sure!"

He came from behind and put his hands tight over my ears, then, squeezing my head in his hands, he lifted me meter high from the floor.

"How now? D'you, see Moscow?"

"Yes! Yes!" screamed I.

He dropped me on the floor and I did my best not to show the tears from the smarting pain in the ears flattened against the skull.

"Aha! Got fooled! It's so easy to fool you!"

(...much later I figured out that he just was repeating the practical jokes played on him in his childhood...)

In the course of the hide-and-seek with Sasha's disappearance, when checking the cloth wardrobe in the hallway, I noticed a bottle of lemonade staying all by itself in the narrow cleft between the wall and the wicker chest.

Lemonade then was something I adored in earnest, that the carbonated nectar had only one reproachable quality, that of disappearing so too fast from my glass. As for the discovered bottle, it obviously was stored for some holiday and then just forgotten about.

I did not care to remind of it to anyone and the following day, or maybe the day after the following day, taking the opportunity of being home alone, I pulled the lemonade from behind the chest and hurried to the kitchen. Still in the corridor, my eager fingers felt some infirmity in the bottle cap, I tore it off and clapped the bottle up to my thirsty lips.

By the middle of the second gulp, I realized that it wasn't that the lemonade was somehow not quit it, but quit not it at all. Returning the bottle to the normal position, I saw that after the holiday it was filled with sunflower oil for storage.

It's good that no one saw my attempt at drinking sunflower oil, except for the small white box with a red cross on its door, the hoard of first-aid kits, unknown pills and dark glass phials, fixed up in the wall between the cloth wardrobe and the door to the storeroom, and also the black electric meter just above the entrance door. But they were not to tell anyone...

The next gastronomical misdeed of mine was filching of a newly baked bun, which Mom took out from the electric oven "Kharkov" together with a bunch of others and spread them on a towel over the kitchen table.

Their glossy brownish round backs looked too tempting that I violated Mom's order to let them cool off just a little bit till before the all-out tea party. Sneaking into the empty kitchen, I yanked one of them off, hid behind my back, and smuggled it into the lair on the wicker chest in the half-dark cloth wardrobe.

Probably, that bun was really too hot or else the sense of guilt culled taste sensations but, hastily chomping the forbidden fruit of culinary art, I didn't feel the customary pleasure and wanted only the unpalatable bun to be over the sooner the better. When from the kitchen Mom called all to come over and enjoy the tea with buns, I did not feel like that at all...

Yet in general, though a skill-less slow-goer, I was a fairly law-abiding child still diligent in earnest, and if something went wrong it was not on purpose but because it simply turned out that way.

Dad grouched that my Sloth-Mommy got born a moment before me and all I was good at was basking on the big sofa all day long gripping a book, like, a true Oblomov!.

Then Mom protested that reading was beneficial and because of it I might become a doctor and look so very elegant in the white smock.

I did not want to become a doctor, I never liked the smell in doctors' offices...

At school, Seraphima Sergeevna showed us a plywood frame 10 cm x 10 cm, like, a prototype of a loom with two rows of small nails on two opposite sides. A thick wool thread, stretched between the nails on different sides, served the warp. Motley other threads interwoven across the warp formed rainbow streaks in a miniature rug.

Our home assignment was to make a similar frame and bring it for the next lesson, the parents would certainly help us in manufacturing the tool, the teacher said.

However, Dad was not home, he worked the second shift that week, and Mom was busy in the kitchen. Yet, she helped with finding a piece of plywood from an old parcel-box and she allowed to take the saw from the storeroom in the hallway.

I worked in the bathroom pinning the workpiece with my foot to the stool. The saw got stuck so too often, and it kept tearing out small chips and scraps from the plywood, but after long tedious labor efforts a crooked, zigzag sided, square was sawed off.

Putting the tool aside, I got aware of the major problem – how could you ever cut out a smaller square inside the readied one so as to turn it into a frame?

I tried to hack the unnecessary span out with a kitchen knife and a hammer, but only split the piece cut off with so many 'a hem!' and concentrated efforts.

By the time when I had to go to bed, the plywood supply was spoiled in fruitless attempts, and I realized that I was not fit to be a master. The disappointment was so great that I raised a mournful howling in the kitchen before Mom.

Lying in the folding bed, I tried not to fall asleep but stay awake till Dad was home after work and ask for his help. However, I overslept his coming, yet at some point through overpowering drowsiness I heard Dad's voice in the kitchen, telling angrily to Mom, "What? Again "Kolya"? What "Kolya"?" And I fell back asleep.

In the morning at breakfast, Mom said, "Look what Dad has made for you to take to school."

It was a flood of happiness and admiration, when I saw the plywood loom-frame finished with neither a split nor a chip, nor a crack anywhere, and polished with sandpaper. The rows of small nails along two opposite sides were aligned straighter than a ruler...

Next year Dad brought home from his work a jigsaw for me, and I enrolled in the group "Skillful Hands" at school. It did not go well with my jigsawing though, because the thin blades kept breaking all too often. Still, I managed to produce a frame of plywood (with Dad's help and polishing) for Mom's photo.

Doing pyrography was much easier and I liked the smell of charring wood. Dad brought home a scorcher that he had constructed at his work, and I produced a couple of illustrations to Krylov's fables copying them from The Book for Future Craftsmen.

However, all that does not mean that my childhood was spent with only hand-made playthings around. No, I had a big, store-purchased, Modeling Designer Kit.

It was a cardboard box filled with sets of tin strips and panels perforated with rows of holes for fixing them with small bolts and nuts when assembling building blocks for the construction of different things, like, a car, a locomotive, a windmill, a you-call-it from the booklet of blue-prints that supplemented the Modeling Designer Kit. For instance, it took a couple of months to accomplish a tower crane, taller than a stool it was, and almost all the bolts and nuts in the Kit were used up for it. I would finish the project sooner if not for Sasha's unwelcome insistence on his partaking in the construction efforts...

The costume of Robot for the New Year matinée about the Christmas Tree in the school gym was made by Dad. Mom found the design in _The Working Woman_ magazine, which also was every month dropped in the mailbox on our entrance door.

When finished, the costume looked like a box of a thin but sturdy one-layer cardboard. Two holes in the box sides were used for keeping arms outside and the whole construction, when put over the shoulders, reached down to the crotch. The cardboard body of Robot was decorated with "+" and "–" on the chest left and right sides, exactly like the markings on flat batteries for a pocket flashlight.

Inside the box, there also was a battery but more powerful, the Czech "Crown", and a small switch. Clicking that secret switch turned on and off the light-bulb nose in the other, smaller, box which represented Robot's head and was put onto mine, like a helmet.

The two square eyes cut on each side from the nose-bulb in the Robot's face allowed for seeing from inside the box how and who with you were walking about the Christmas Tree...

Both coyly and hopefully, I asked at the Detachment's Library if they'd allow me to choose not from the books returned and stacked on the librarian's desk, but rather from those on the shelves. Yes, I could do that, they said, O, what a joy beyond description!.

To the right from the librarian's desk, loomed the wall of The Complete Collection of Works by V. I. Lenin, occupying shelves upon shelves up to the ceiling, dense rows of uniform volumes were different only by the hue of blue in their covers, which depended on the year of edition – the earlier, the darker.

The opposite wall was paneled with multi-volumed rows of works by Marx and Engels in brown bindings, and the wall by the door was screened by the tall ranks of Stalin's writings.

Rows of thick, never opened books with the gold embossing of letters and numbers on their spines, bearing convex relief portraits of the writers on their lid-like heavy front covers...

However, there was a narrow cleft in the blue wall—the passage to that part of the Detachment's Library where forming a maze of narrow passages stood shelves with the books of varying degrees of wear.

The books by Russian writers ranked alphabetically—Aseev, Belyaev, Bubentsoff...; the authors from abroad kept to the same order under inscriptions of their countries' names—American literature, Belgian literature...; or under the branch they belonged to—Economics, Geography, Politics...

In the maze's nooks, you also could come across multi-volume collections: Jack London, Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott (for all my efforts I never found among his works a novel about Robin Hood, but only about Rob Roy).

I loved wandering in the condensed silence of the passages between the shelves, taking, now and then, from as far above as allowed my height, one or another book to scrutinize the title and put it back. In the end, pressing the chosen couple to my chest, I returned to the librarian's desk. Sometimes she put aside one of the books I brought, saying it was too early for me to read...

Once, meandering through the treasured labyrinth, I suddenly farted. What an embarrassment!

Though the sound was not very loud, yet, in case it reached the librarian's desk behind the wall of Marxism-Leninism classic writers, I tried to iron the wrinkles out by successive pensive claps of lips simulating the shameful sound, like, some innocent fancy of a boy promenading in the narrow stack passages, for whom the reading of certain books was yet too early.

However, one of the camouflaging farts turned out so successful, natural and rolling, that utterly mortified me – if the first, unintentional, breaking of wind might have been missed, the falsified one sounded too convincing.

(....as your mother's mother would likely put it: "Kept fixing until mucked up." She liked to use Ukrainian proverbs in her speech...)

After the New Year holidays, the stack of subscriptions they put in the mailbox on our door got thicker with _The Pioneer_ Pravda. Sure enough, I still was only an Octoberist, but at school, they told us that we already had to subscribe to that newspaper and in any other way prepare ourselves to become pioneers in the future.

Handing over to me _The Pioneer_ Pravda, Mom said, "Wow! They started to deliver a newspaper for you like for an adult." I felt pleased with getting admitted to the world of grown-ups, at least from the postal point of view. And I kept reading the newspaper all day long. Each and every line printed in its four pages.

When the parents returned from work in the evening, I met them in the hallway to proudly report that I had read all, all, all of it!.

They said, "Good job!", then hung their coats behind the cloth curtain in the corner, and went over to the kitchen.

You can't help feeling disappointed when for your pains they pay with a fondly expressed indifference. Like, a hero after a life-and-death battle with Gorynich the Dragon to free a beautiful captive is nodded off with her fleeting "Good job!" instead of the regular kiss on the sugar-sweet mouth. Next time he would think twice if the scrap was worth the while, after all.

Thus, never again I did read _The Pioneer Pravda_ entirely – from its red title, with the statement of the printed organ affiliation, down to (and including too) the editorial office telephone numbers and street address in the city of Moscow...

The omission of desired and deserved reward calls for the restoration of justice. And the following morning I readily forgot Mom's instructions that three spoonfuls of sugar were absolutely enough for one cup of tea.

At that moment, I was alone in the kitchen and, while adding sugar to my tea, I got distracted by considering the frost patterns in the kitchen windowpane, which was the reason why the count of the added spoonfuls was started not from the first one. That mistake somehow coincided with an additional one and instead of a teaspoon, I measured sugar with a tablespoon.

The resulting cloy treacle was good only for pouring it into the sink. And that became another lesson to me – filched pleasures are not as sweet as might have been expected...

The fact of having read an issue of _The Pioneer Pravda_ so exhaustively inflated my self-confidence and at the next visit to the Detachment's Library, from the shelf of French literature, I grabbed a weighty volume with a bouquet of swords on its cover, The Three Musketeers by Dumas-peré. The librarian, after a moment's hesitation, registered the book in my reader-card and I proudly carried the bulky booty home.

The big sofa somehow didn't seem appropriate for reading such an adult book, so I took it to the kitchen and spread open on the oil-clothed tabletop.

The very first page, full of footnotes informing who was who in France of the XVII century, felt like pretty complicated stuff for reading. But it gradually got in the groove and by the scene of D'Artangan's saying goodbye to his parents, I already figured out by myself the meaning of the abbreviated words "Mr." and "Mrs.", which were absolutely absent from _The Pioneer_ Pravda...

Later that winter, Mom decided that I needed to get my squint corrected because it was not right to leave it as it was. Before she said so, I had never suspected I had anything of the sort.

She took me to the oculist at the Detachment's Hospital, and he peeked into my eyes through the narrow hole in the dazzling mirror circle that he wore tied to his white cap when not used. Then the nurse dropped some chilly drops into my eyes and told me to come alone next time because I was a big boy already and learned the way to their office.

Going home after the next visit, I suddenly lost the sharpness of vision: the light of lamps on posts along the empty winter road turned into blurred yellow splotches and at home, when I opened a book, all the lines on the page were just unreadable dimmed strings.

I got scared but Mom said it was okay only I had to wear glasses, so a couple of the following years I used some plastic-rimmed glasses.

(...my eyes were straightened and made keep parallel when looking, however, the eyesight in the left one stayed unfocused. At checks by oculists, I cannot see their pointer or finger directed at the check chart.

Yet, as it turned out, you can live your life with just one working eye.

The squint was got rid of, but ever since the expression in my eyes doesn't match, which is easy to notice in a photo when screening them in turn – the inquiring curiosity in the right eye gives way to a lifeless indifference of the left one.

At times I notice that same discrepancy in close-ups of some movie actors and I think to myself if they have also been treated for a squint, or possibly we all are being spied on by some unknown aliens through their sinister eye...)

And again came the summer but no volleyball was played anymore. In the volleyball grounds at the foot of the Bugorok-Knoll, they cemented two big squares for playing the game of gorodki. And they even organized a championship there. For two days the tin-clad wooden bats clapped and whipped against the concrete, sweeping the wooden pins of gorodki out the squares towards the barrier of the Bugorok-Knoll bluff side.

As it used, the news reached the big sofa with a snail delay, yet I still was in time for watching the final single combat of the two masters who could even from the remote position knock out the most complicated figure of the gorodki—"the letter"—with just three throws of their bats and didn't spend more than one bat at such figures as "the cannon" or "Anna-girl-at-the-window".

The tournament was over, leaving behind the concrete squares where we, children, continued the game with fragments of the tin-cuffed bats and chips of the split gorodki pins. And when even the leftover wore out of existence and the concrete squares got lost in the tall grass, the level grounds by the Bugorok-Knoll remained our favorite meeting place. If going out to the Courtyard you could see no one to play with, the next move was going over to the Bugork-Knoll to find your playmates there...

Besides playing games, we educated each other in the main things to know about the wide world around us. Like, after a nasty fall apply the underbelly of Cart Track to the bleeding scratch on your knee or elbow. And the stalks of Soldier-grass with tiny scale-like leaves were edible, as well as the sorrel but not the "horse sorrel", of course. Or, say, those long-leaved swamp weeds were also edible when you peeled the green leaves off and got to the white core. Here you are! Chew it and you'll see!

We learned how to see flint from other stones and which of the rest to use for striking with the flint to send forth a trickle of pale sparks. Yes, the hard and smooth flint and the murky yellowish one produce sparks leaving some strange – both foul and fetching – smell of seared chicken skin.

Thus, in games and chat, we learned the world and ourselves...

"Are you in for hide-and-seek?"

"No go. Two are too few for it."

"There are two more. Coming back from the swamp in a minute."

"Went to the swamp? What for?"

"Wanking."

Soon the promised two came from the swamp, chortling between themselves, each one clutching a whisker of grass in his grab.

I couldn't guess the purpose of the grass bunches, neither had I any clear idea what "wanking" was about. Though from the grunts with which boys usually accompanied the word, I understood that it was something bad and wrong.

(...all my life I have been a champion for righteousness. Everything should be as right as rain.

Seeing something which is not right just puts my back up. If, say, a grown-up piggy with brazen squeals sucks on a cow's udder, I'm tempted to disperse them.

And take a look at that cow too! So resigned and obedient! As if she doesn't know that milk is for calves and people only...)

That's why I stood akimbo and met the comers with the question: "So what? Enjoyed your wanking?"

And then I learned that the righteousness supporters would sometimes better keep quiet.

Besides, it's a crying shame that I could so easily be stretched on the ground at an unexpected brush...

Football was played in the grassy field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the garbage bins enclosure.

The basis for defining team captains was their supremacy in age, height as well as the loudness of their shrill cries in a debate.

Then the boys, in pairs, went aside and put heads together, "You're 'hammer' and I'm 'tiger', okay?"

"No! No! I'm 'rocket', you're 'tiger'."

Having agreed on the placeholder handles, they returned to the captains-to-be and asked the one whose turn it was to choose, "Which one for your team: 'Rocket' or 'Tiger'?"

With the human resources divided, the game began. How I wanted to be a captain! To be so popular that all the boys would hanker to play in my team!

But the dream remained only a dream...

I diligently ran in the grass: from one football goal to the other. I was desperate to win and didn't spare myself, ready to do anything for our victory. It's only that I never could get near the ball. At times it rolled towards me, yet before I got prepared to kick it properly, the swarm of "ours" and "theirs" came racing around and send it far afield.

And again I ran across the field, back and forth, and shrieked, "Pass! Me here!" but no one listened to me and everyone else screamed too and also was running, and the game rolled on without my actual participation...

In summer all our family, except for Grandma Martha, went to Konotop in the Sumy region of Ukraine, to the wedding of Mom's sister Lyudmila and the region champion of weightlifting in the third weight class, young, but rapidly balding, Anatoly Arkhipenko from the city of Sumy.

A truck with a canvas top took us through Checkpoint – the white gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the whole Zone, to the Valdai railway station where we boarded a local train to the Bologoye station to change trains there.

The car was empty with no one but us on the wooden yellow benches ranked between the green walls.

I liked the car swaying in time with the clatter of wheels on rail joints beneath the floor. And I liked to look out of the big window watching the dark log posts that flicked across the windowpane carrying the endless stream of wires on their crossbars. The unrolling stream sagged in between the posts then ran up to the crossbar on the following one which would immediately fall behind the window frame letting the wire stream to slide towards the sag and then go up, and again, and again.

At the stops, the local train patiently waited giving way to more important trains until they'd hurriedly whoosh by.

One especially long wait happened at the station of Dno whose name I read in the glazed sign on the green plank-wall of its shed. And only after a solitary steam engine puff-puffed past the shed, bit by bit piercing with its long black body the curly white clouds of its own steam, our train moved on.

(...I recollected that station and the black, moist gleaming of the engine that crawled through the milky mist of the steam when I read that at the station of Dno, Colonel of the Russian Army Nikolay Romanov signed his renunciation of the royal throne.

However, by that act, he didn't save himself, nor his wife, nor the children of their royal family whom at the execution they were finishing off with the rifle bayonets.

I knew nothing of all that sitting there in the local train by the shabby shed. Neither was I aware that it does not matter if I knew it or not.

One way or the other, all that is part of me. It's me...

Anyway, it's good that we don't know all in childhood...)

Most of the houses along Nezhin Street in the city of Konotop kept slightly off the road, standing behind their respective fences which reflected the owner's level of prosperity, as well as the main trends and stages in the evolution of the local fencing technologies.

However, the left-side line of sundry fencing stretches in the street was briefly interrupted with the wall of Number 19 whitewashed ages ago, having two windows in thoroughly bleached paint-coat and four wooden shutters to seal the windows off from the night street.

For entering the house, one had to pass through the wicket of tall weather-worn planks, side by side with the wider, yet constantly closed gate which separated the yard from the street. To be more precise, there were four entrances, all in all, equally distributed between two windowless verandas abutting the house in between the four windows looking in the yard.

The veranda next to the wicket, with both of its doors, as well as the half of the whole house, belonged then to Ignat Pilluta and his wife Pillutikha, so the pair of windows overlooking Nezhin Street was theirs. The plank walls of the second veranda wore a coat of rambling vine with wide green leaves and pale clusters of dinky, never ripening, berries; the blind partition, also of planks, divided the second veranda's inside into two lengthwise sections for the two remaining owners.

The home, aka khutta, of our grandmother, Katerina Ivanovna, comprised the half-dark veranda-hallway, the kitchen with its window looking onto the two stairs beneath the outside entrance door and the brick stove in the opposite corner next to which stood the leaf of the constantly open door to the only room in the khutta.

The only window in that room was filled with constant limbo-like twilight seeping in from the solid shade of the giant elm in the two-meter wide backyard, who also shadowed half of the neighbors' yard, of the Turkovs at Number 17.

When turning around the far corner in the second veranda, you reached the last, fourth, door to the khutta of the old man Duzenko and his wife.

They also had the same-sized sequence of hallway-kitchen-room, however, yet with two windows more than in Grandma Katya's khutta because of the symmetry in layout – the two windows looking to the street called for two windows looking into the common yard.

Close to each of the Duzenkos' additional windows, there grew a mighty American Maple with pointed tips in their open-palm leaves. The space between the maples was filled with a low stack of red bricks, brittle with their age, which old man Duzenko kept for a possible restructure of his khutta in the future.

About six meters away from the breastwork between the maples and parallel to it, there stretched a long shed of ancient grayish boards, whose blind wall had only doors with padlocks. Their respective owners kept there the fuel for the winter, and in an enclosure within Grandma Katya's fuel section lived a pig named Masha.

Opposite the veranda coated with barren vine, one more huge elm and a plank-fence separated the common yard from the neighbors at Number 21. Next to the elm, there stood a small shed plastered with the mixture of clay, cow dung, and chopped straw, that also was padlocked to secure the earth-cellar of the Pillutas inside.

The Duzenkos' earth-cellar shed of bare planks stood farther away from the street and as if continued the long common shed, being separated from it by the passage to the kitchen gardens.

Between those two earth-cellar sheds, there stood a small lean-to structure covering the lid over Grandma Katya's earth-cellar – a vertical shaft two-meter deep, with a wooden ladder going down, into the dark between the narrow walls of earth. At the bottom, the flashlight disclosed four cavelike niches cut to all four sides, and a bit deeper than the shaft bottom. That's where they stored potatoes and carrots for the winter, and beets too because the frost couldn't reach the stored vegetables at such depth.

In the corner formed by the Duzenko's and Grandma Katya's earth-cellar sheds, there stood a kennel with the black-and-white dog Zhoolka chained to his house. He tinkled the chain and whiplashed it against the ground, barking furiously at any stranger who entered the yard. But I made friends with him on the very first night when, on Mom's advice, I took out and dumped into his iron plate the leftovers after supper...

Grandma Katya's hair was quite gray and a little wavy. She had it cut to the middle of her neck and held in place with a curved plastic comb beneath the back of her head. Such color of the hair contrasted to the swarthy skin of her face with a thin nose and a bit too round, as if frightened, eyes.

And in the dusky room behind the kitchen, on one of the three blind walls, there hung a photographic portrait of a black-haired woman with an aristocratic hairdo and a necktie (as was the fashion upon the New Economic Policy times during the late twenties) – Grandma Katya in her young years.

Next to her, there was an equally large photo of a man with a heavy Jack London's chin, wearing a Russian collar shirt and black jacket; that's her husband Joseph when he was still working as the trade auditor before his arrest and exile to the North, and sudden disappearance that coincided with the retreat of Germans from Konotop...

On the whole, I liked the visit to Grandma Katya, although there were neither gorodki nor football playing, and only daily hide-and-seek with the children from the neighboring khuttas who would never find you if you hid in Zhoolka's kennel.

Late in the evening, on the log pillars along the street, there lit up rare yellow lamps, unable to disperse the night dark even beneath themselves. May beetles flew with a bomber buzz above the soft black dust of the road, yet so low that you could knock them down with your jacket or a leafy branch broken off a cherry tree hanging from behind someone's fence. The captives were incarcerated in empty matchboxes whose walls they scratched from inside with their long awkward legs. The following day, we opened their cells to admire the fan-like mustaches and the chestnut color of their glossy backs. We tried to feed them with shredded grass blades, but they did not seem hungry and we set them free from our palms the same way as you set a ladybug to fly.

The beetle ticklishly crawled to a raised fingertip, tossed up its rigid forewings to straighten out their long transparent wings packed under that protective case, and flew off with low buzzing. Okay, fly wherever you want – in the evening we'll catch more...

One day from the far end of the street, there came a jumble of jarring wails affirmed by rare long booms. The sounds of familiar cacophony made the people of Nezhin Street went out of their yards and, standing by their gates, inform each other whose funeral it was.

In front of the procession, three men were marching slowly with their lips pressed to the brass pipes of trumpets sobbing woefully. The fourth one carried a drum in front of him like a huge potbelly. After walking for as long as it was proper, he smote its side with a felted stick. The wide belt cinching the drum across the drummer's back left both his hands free to hold the felted stick in one and a wide copper plate in the other, which he from time to time crashed against the second such plate screwed upon the drum rim, to which event the trumpets responded with a new splash of disparate wailing.

After the musicians, they carried a large photo of a sullen man's face and several wreaths with white-lettered inscriptions over black ribbons. A medium platform truck followed the wreaths, purring its engine. On the platform with the unfastened sides, there stood an openwork monument of rebar rods coated with silver paint. Two men grabbed onto the rods from both sides to keep their balance over the open coffin at their feet with the laying deceased on display.

A small nondescript crowd closed the slow procession.

I did not dare to go out into the street, although Mom and Aunt Lyudmila were there standing at the gate as well as the neighbors with their children by the wickets of their khuttas.

Yet, driven by curiosity, I still climbed the gate from inside to peek over it. The lead-colored nose stuck from the pallid dead face looked so horrible that I fled back to the kennel of black-and-white Zhoolka, who also was ill at ease and whining together with the trumpets...

Grandma Katya knew the way of tying a common handkerchief into a mouse with ears and a tail, which she put on her palm to pet the white head with a finger of her other hand. All of a sudden the mouse would leap in a desperate attempt at fleeing, but Grandma Katya would catch it on the fly put back to lightly stroke on, under our eager laughter. Of course, I realized that it was she who pushed the mouse, but following the trick, as closely as possible, I could never crack how she did that.

Each evening she hauled out the pail of sourly smelling slop of peelings and scraps to her section in the mutual shed, where pig Masha was already grunting impatiently. There Grandma Katya would stand over slurping Masha and scold her, finding guilty of some or another act of blatant misbehavior.

She showed us which of the vegetable beds and trees in the garden were hers so that we did not play around with the neighbors' because there was no border fencing about the plots. But the apples were not ripe yet and I climbed the tree of white mulberry, though Grandma Katya warned that I was too heavy for such a young tree. And indeed, one day it split under me in two. I was scared by the pending punishment, but Dad did not beat me. He squeezed the halves of the split tree tightly together with some yellowish sheer cable. And Grandma Katya never uttered a single word of reproach, but only blinked her eyes sadly.

That evening she said that the pig refused to eat anything at all and knocked the pail over because the animal was too clever and felt that the next day they would slaughter her.

In the morning when the butcher came, Grandma Katya left her khutta, and already in her absence they were pulling frantically screaming Masha out of her enclosure, chasing about the yard and slaughtering with a long knife to pierce the pig's heart after which the screeching turned into prolonged wheezes. Throughout that time, Mom kept us, the children, in the khutta, and she allowed me to go out only when they were scorching it with a blowtorch.

At Aunt Lyudmila's wedding, plates with sliced lard and fried cutlets, and dishes with chilled-out pork jelly clattered on the table. One of the guests volunteered to teach the bride how to stuff a home-made sausage, but she refused and the merry guests laughed out loud...

In general, I liked Konotop although I felt sorry for Masha and ashamed for the split mulberry tree. For some reason, I even liked the taste of the bread made of cornflower. Everyone was cursing it but still buying – there was no other bread because Nikita Khrushchev declared the corn to be the queen of the fields...

Back to the Object we also were coming by train but the road seemed so much longer. I felt sick and dizzy until eventually there was found a window in the car where you could stick your head out into the wind. From that window I watched as the green string of cars in our train, keeping a constant bent about its middle, rolled around the green field. It was easy to figure out that our journey did not come to its end because the train was describing one huge circle in one and the same field with groves added here and there.

At one of the stops, Dad left the car and did not come back at the departure. I was scared that we would remain without our Dad, and started to whine pitifully. But a few minutes later, he appeared along the car aisle, carrying ice-cream because of which he lingered on the platform and jumped into another car of the departing train...

That year my younger sister and brother also went to school and at the end of August, Dad, angrily red-faced, was taking Grandma Martha to the station of Bologoye to help her change trains to Ryazan.

When saying "goodbye", she sobbed a little until Dad snarled: "Again? Started again!."

Then she kissed all of us, her grandkids, and was gone from my life...

Across the road opposite the corner buildings of our Block, there was a grocery store and, after Grandma Martha had left, Mom was sending me there for small purchases, like, bread, matches, salt or vegetable oil. More important products she bought herself: meat, potatoes, sore cream or chocolate butter. For holiday celebrations, large-beaded red or smaller-beaded black caviar was also bought because the Object was well catered for. And only ice-cream appeared at the store no sooner than once a month and was immediately sold out. As for the tasty cornbread, I never saw it on sale there.

To the right from the store, near the bend in the road around the blocks, the wall of the forest was slightly cleft by a narrow glade, where the car repair ramp constructed of sturdy logs provided another gathering place for children to play.

"To the ramp!" called a familiar boy running by. "They've caught a hedgehog there!"

All the hedgehogs seen by me up to that moment were only met in the pictures, so I also hurried to the scream-and-shouting group of boys. With the sticks in their hands, they checked the animal's attempts at fleeing to the forest, and when the hedgehog turned into a defensive ball of gray-brown needles, they rolled it pushing with the same sticks into a small brook.

In the water, the hedgehog unfolded, stuck his sharp muzzle with the black blob of the nose out from under the needles, and tried to escape through the grass on his short crooked legs. Yet, he was again spread on the ground and firmly pressed across his belly with a stick not to allow him to fold up again.

"Look!" shouted one of the boys. "He's constipated! Cannot shit!" To prove the statement, the boy poked a stalk of some rank grass into a dark bulge between the animal's hind legs.

"The turd is too hard. He needs help."

I recollected how Grandma Martha saved me.

Someone in the company had pliers in his pocket, the patient was crucified on the earth with a couple of additional sticks and the self-proclaimed vet pulled the jammed turd with the pliers. The turd, however, was not ending and turned out to be of a strange bluish-white color.

"Damn fool! You tore his guts out!" cried another boy.

The hedgehog was set free and once again made for the forest dragging behind the pulled out part of the intestine. All followed to see the outcome.

I didn't want any more of all that and, fortunately, my sister came to the rescue running from the Block to say that Mom was calling me. Without the slightest delay, I left the party of the boys and hurried with her to the Courtyard. There I talked to Mom, greeted neighbors, ran some errand and all the time was thinking one and the same thought formulated in an overly clear-cut, not childish way, "How to live on now, after what I've just seen? How to live on?"

(...but still and all, I survived. The blessing property of human memory, its forgetfulness recorded by Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary, saved me.

However, in the series of atrocities registered by me, when human beings tattered their likes with tortures into deformed pieces of meat, the mutilated hedgehog comes the first, dragging through the brittle grass the grayish length of the intestine with small pieces of dry earth stuck to it.

And I still lived to understand that low brutes need high-flying excuses for their barbarity:...to alleviate sufferings...as sacred revenge...to keep the race pristine...

However, to be entirely frank: is there any guarantee that I myself would never and under no circumstances do anything of the sort? I can't tell for sure...)

When you are a child, there is no time to look behind at all those series back in your memory. You have to go on — farther and beyond — to new discoveries. If only you've got the nerve to keep the course.

Once, slightly veering to the left from the accustomed "school – home" route, I went deeper into the broad-leaf part of the forest to come, on a gently rising hillock, across four trees that grew a couple of meters apart from each other, in the corners of an almost regular square. The smooth wide columns of their trunks without branches went upwards and at the height of six to seven meters were bridged with a platform you could reach climbing up the crossbeams cut of thick boughs and nailed to one of the trees, like a vertical ladder...

I never found out the purpose of the contraption, nor who it was made by. All I learned was that not a fraidy-cat would climb a platform in the forest even if discovered by himself...

Much easier went on the exploration of the basement world. I was going there together with Dad to fetch the firewood for Titan the Boiler who heated the water for bathing.

Because all the bulbs down there were missing, Dad brought along the flashlight with the spring lever protruding from its belly.

When you squeezed the flashlight in your hand, the lever reluctantly went inside; you loosened the grip and it popped out again. A couple of such pumping rounds awoke the small dynamo-machine buzzing inside the handle to produce the current for the lamp as long as you kept pushing-loosing the lever, and the faster you did it, the brighter was your flashlight.

A circle of light hopped along the walls and cemented floor in the left corridor of the basement with our section at the end of it. The walls in the narrow corridor were made of boards and so were the sections' doors with hanging weighty padlocks.

Behind our door, there was a square room with two concrete walls and the wooden partition from the neighboring section.

Dad unlocked the padlock and turned on the bulb inside whose crude light flooded the high stack of evenly sawed logs by the wall opposite the door, and all sorts of household things hanging from the walls or piled on shelves: the sled, the tools, the skies.

After a couple of plump logs were chopped with the ax, I collected the chips for kindling Titan the Boiler and a few thicker splinters, while Dad grabbed a whole armful.

Sometimes, he was tinkering at something or sawing logs in our basement section and I, bored by waiting, would go out in the corridor with a narrow grated ditch middle-lining the cemented floor. Through the open door, the bulb threw a clear rectangle of light on the opposite section wall while the far end of the corridor, from where we had come, was lost in the dark. But I was not afraid of anything because behind my back Dad was working in his old black sailor's pea jacket with two rows of copper buttons with neatly embossed anchors...
The firewood got to the basement in early autumn. A slow-go truck would enter the Courtyard and dump a heap of ruffly chopped logs nearby the tin-clad lid of the cemented pit right in the center of every sidewall of the Block's houses. Inside one-and-a-half meter deep pit, slightly up from its bottom, there started a hole through the foundation, 50 cm x 50 cm, which ended in the basement dark corridor at about a meter-and-half above its cemented floor. The logs were dropped into it, and then through the hole down into the basement to be hauled into the section whose owner the firewood was brought for.

As I was already a big boy, Dad instructed me to throw the wood pieces into the pit so that he could drag them through the hole down to the basement. Dropping them in, I could not see him, but heard his voice from down there when he shouted me to stop if the pile of logs in the pit threatened to block the hole. Then I waited until there came muffled thuds of the logs toppling onto the cemented floor in the basement corridor.

Everything went quite well before Natasha told Sasha that they had brought the firewood for us and I was helping Dad to move the logs down there. Sasha came running to the heap of firewood and started dragging logs and dropping them into the pit. To all my furious clarifications that he was violating the age limits for such a work, and that the very next log he dropped would surely block the hole, he answered with silent but obstinate snuffling and just went on.

(...any rhetoric is lost on those whose Stubbornness-Mommy was born a moment before them!. )

Yet, I not only made speeches but also kept throwing the logs, so that later, at midday meal in the kitchen, Sasha would not say that he did more than me. And suddenly he withdrew from the pit with his hand clutching his face with the blood-smeared fingers. Natasha rushed home to call Mom, who came running with a damp cloth to wipe the blood off Sasha's upturned face.

Dad also raced from the basement and no one was listening to my defense that all that happened accidentally, not on purpose, when the piece of wood thrown by me scratched the skin on my brother's nose. Mom yelled at Dad because he allowed all that to happen. Dad also grew angry and told everyone to go home, and he finished the work himself.

The scratch healed very soon, although Sasha stubbornly peeled the patch off his nose even before the midday meal.

(...I doubt if my brother would recollect all that, it's only me who remembers and feels guilty: yes, it was not deliberate, but instead of screaming orations I should have looked better where to toss the log...)

At school, I constantly enrolled in this or that Group, whenever its tutor entered our classroom to recruit volunteers. Group meetings were held in the late afternoon so that participants had time to go home, have their midday meal, and come back to school. After a one-hour session of learning and training at the Group, its members returned home in the complete night darkness...

One evening after the Group activities were over, a bunch of participants dropped into the school gym where there was an upright piano on the stage behind the closed curtain, and where one boy once showed me that if you hit only the black keys then it sounded like Chinese music. But that evening I forgot all about the music because, on the stage, there were several boys from senior grades who had a pair of real boxing gloves!

We dared to ask permission to touch the gloves' shiny leather and try them on. The senior graders kindly allowed us that, and then they had an idea of holding a match between the sprats, a fighter from the Gorka (that is someone from the blocks atop the hill) against someone of lowlanders who dwelt in the rows of wooden houses at the foot of the Gorka hill.

The choice fell on me—O! and I wanted it so dearly!—and red-haired fatty Vovka from among the lowlanders. As the stage was illuminated too poorly for the match, all the present went over to the gym hallway under the bright bulb reflected in the ink-black winter darkness behind the wide window-pane, and they commanded "box!" to me and Vovka.

At first, we both chuckled punching each other with the bulky balls of gloves, but soon we grew hot and angry. I wanted so dearly to hit him on the head and his eyes were also full of craving to knock me down. Before long my left shoulder, which kept receiving all his blows, got terribly sore, while my right hand, that kept hitting his shoulder, grew limp and floppy.

Probably, his state was no better, our giggles turned into puffing and gasping. It was bad and unbearably painful because his blows seemed penetrating to the very bone of the forearm, but I would rather die than surrender. At last, the big boys got bored with such a monotony, they told us "enough!" and took away their gloves.

The next morning a purple-black bruise decorated my left forearm and for several following days I was very touchy at that spot, crouching even at a friendly and producing the hiss of a self-defending gander...

If the Courtyard was covered with powder snow but not too deep, all of our family went out to clean the carpet and the runner. We spread them face down on the snow and stomped on their backs. Then the carpet was turned over, the snow from the snowdrifts around got swept with a broom onto all of the carpet's face and then swept away. Done. And we folded the carpet.

The long green runner remained face down after the stomping, and the four of us—Mom and the three children—gathered upon it, and Dad dragged the runner through the snowdrifts with all of us standing upon its back, leaving a crumpled, dust-smeared, furrow on the snow in our wake. Yes, our Dad was so strong and mighty!

And making use of a slushy snowfall, the boys began to roll the snow in the Courtyard to form huge balls and build a fortress. For a start, you made a regular snowball, put it down on a snowdrift, and began rolling it back and forth. The lump immediately swelled with layers of slush snow stuck all over it. The snowball turned bigger than a football, then grew above your knees, becoming denser, heavier and you had to call for help already and, in a team of two or three, roll it to the building site where the big boys hoisted it and fixed into the course of dense snow lumps making the circular wall taller than you...

We divided into two parties – the fortress defenders and the assaulting party. In a record short period, the snowball-ammo was hurriedly produced and – off to the storm they rushed!

Shrieks, yells, babel; snowballs swishing from all the sides and in every direction. I stuck my head out above the fortress wall choosing a boy to hit with my snowball but a crack of yellow lightning flashed in my eyes, like an exploding electric bulb. With my back sliding against the wall, down I crouched, my hands firmly pressed to the eye whipped with a snowball.

( _" oh, yes, besides, I got then killed..."_ so is described such a moment in a poem by Nikolai Gumilyov...)

Yet, the battle raged on, and no one cared about bodies of the fallen buddies. Everything fused and drown in one general uproar, "A-a-a-a-a-ah!" until the battle ceased, at last, the fortress never surrendered but turned into a hillock of snow trampled firm and hard as ice. But the roaring did not stop, with the same unquenchable yell we kept sliding down the hillock on our bellies, the heads turned kinda hollow and filled with a sort of dull deafness because of your and others' united, crazy, howl, "A-a-a-a-a-ah!"

My eye could see already. I slapped up a snowball and hit the head of a boy older than me. What a mistake!

Firstly, the battle was long since over and that boy had come already with his skates on.

How could I be so reckless? As always, as a result of trying to keep things in proper order, to make everything right.

Ages before, at the start of fortress construction, the eldest boys—seventh and eighth-graders—announced, "who does not build will not play", and I knew for sure that the boy in skates was not among the builders.

But who now cared about the righteous justice? Many of the founder boys had left already. The remainder had completely forgotten the declaration.

Yet, there was no time to present justifications for so cheeky a deed, and there was no one to listen or help, so – run for your life!

And I plunged headlong towards the staircase-entrance door of our house. Maybe he wouldn't catch up with his skates on in the trampled snow drifts?

Running, exhausted with many hours of wild playing, I was still running. The entrance door's already so close! "But if he'll catch up?" flashed in my head, and I got a skate kick in the ass for such an inappropriate fear. Slamming the door I flew through the vestibule where he dared not follow – it's someone else's house...

(...if you want everything to work out as it should, you mustn't doubt that so it would...)

In the spring that followed, my parents tried their hand at farming. That is, they decided to plant potatoes. When with a spade and a bagful of potatoes they started for the forest after work, I begged of them to take me too.

We came to the endless narrow clearing in the forest, the former border of the Zone before the expansion of the Object's area. Dad made holes in the soil that he turned the day before, and Mom dropped potatoes into them. Their faces bore a sad look and Dad wistfully shook his head and asserted that the soil was not of the right sort of soil, but merely loam on which nothing could possibly grow.

Soon, the quiet spring twilight thickened, and we started home.

(...a little anticipatory, I'll say that the attempted kitchen garden indeed yielded nothing. Because of the loam, or the doubt annulling any possibility of success?.

And, what is really inconceivable, why did they start it at all? To save costs for potatoes? But we were not so poor then.

In the parents' room there appeared a fold-out couch-bed, two armchairs with lacquered armrests of wood, and a three-legged coffee table, all of them making one furniture set.

Probably, they simply wanted to take a break from all that furniture and the farming enterprise served an excuse for fleeing to the forest...)

And again it was summer only it started much earlier than in the previous years. And together with that summer, the Rechka river rushed into my life. Or maybe, the limits of my living space had expanded enough to reach it.

To start the relations with the Rechka I needed a company of more advanced boys who led the way downhill along the road with the heat-softened pitch filling the joints of its concrete slabs, which leg I knew quite well though, because of my visits to the Detachment's Library. Then there was an unknown shortcut following a footpath through the thicket on a steep slope until there unfurled the sparkling sunlit flow of the Rechka lapping among innumerable boulders of all shapes and sizes.

You could cross the ten-meter-wide river without getting deeper than to the waist or you might stand instead knee-deep in its fast current and watch a school of translucent whitebait poking ticklishly at your ankles in the greenish twilight of the untiringly rolling mass of water...

When out of the river, we played key-or-lock, betting on the form of the splash made by a stone hurled into the water. If the splash raised up like a stick, that was counted "a key", while a wider, bush-like, splash went for "lock". At contestable cases, the last word remained with by the boy who played football better, or whose pebble did more leaps when "baking pancakes" over the water surface...

Soon I began to go to the Rechka alone or with just one partner, yet on the river bank, we parted because our main concern there was fishing.

All the tackle consisted of a fishing pole—a cut-down willow whip—with a length of line tied on its end. The line was threaded through the float and ended with the hook, accompanied by a tiny lead sinker. The float could be made of a brownish wine cork pierced with a match and fixed to the line, or be bought from the store—a plucked and pared goose feather painted red-and-white: both popped equally well on the rushing ripples of the rapid current, or turned thoughtfully still in a small backwater behind boulders...

Fishing is something personal. One guy pins his hopes on that quiet inlet, the other prefers to have his float hopping on the rapids. That's why companions get parted on the river bank.

Fishing is the rushing surge of alerted excitement at the slightest start of the float. Hush! Striking!

The line does not yield, it jibs, bends the pole, cuts the water in zigzags, then suddenly gives up and, jumping over your head, carries to you the sparkling flutter of the caught fish!

Then, of course, it turns to be not a fish but a small fry. Never mind! The next catch will be tha-a-at big!.

More often than anything else there was one of the "miserables" on the hook. I never learned their scientific name. Those fools got caught even with a bare hook, without any bait at all. And they could be hooked at any part of them – at the tail, or the belly, or an eye. Who would bother inventing a special name for such a moron minnow?

Back from the fishing, I usually brought half-dozen of small fry sleeping in a milk-can, and Paulinna Zimin's cat devoured them with purr and snap from a saucer put on the landing tiles...

That day I started fishing from the bridge between the Pumping Station and Checkpoint on the road out from the Zone.

As usual, I walked after the current, refreshing the bait, adjusting the depth of the hook immersion.

I was a steadfast fisherman and only once let myself get distracted from bobs and jerks of the float in the current. It happened on the sandy spit near the green bush, where I carried out some restoration work mending the sand sculpture of a woman stretched on her back.

The masterpiece was created a couple of days before by two soldiers. You could guess at a glance that they were soldiers because of their black underpants and black high boots. Who else would wear such boots in summer?.

I increased the sagging breasts and rounded the hips of the sculpture. They seemed to be wider than necessary but I did not correct it.

Why did I do it at all? Very clear, it's not right to let the work of art to disappear in the rest of the sand with all the soldiers' labor gone to ashes...

(...or was I hooked on the opportunity to spank a female bust and thighs even if just made of sand?

Eew! To hell with Freud and other miserables of psychoanalytic schools!

Let's go back fishing, it's much more interesting...)

...and I did not roll on top of her like one of the soldiers two days before, but just returned to fishing.

The current dragged the float to the broken dam below the stadium, where ages ago I stumbled off the insidious slab. And that meant that half of the Rechka had been already passed, after the other half it would run beyond the Zone, away from the barbed wire along two rows of poles bordering the strip of loosened ground in between for catching footprints of the NATO spies.

Half of the walk was over and the three-liter milk-can contained just a couple of "miserables". The neighbor's cat would be disappointed.

When down the river there loomed the second (and also last) bridge in the Zone, I decided not to go any farther but try my luck at the sharp bend of the river under the precipitous drop-off in the bank.

And right there happened that after what folks go fishing at all. The float did not twitch or flinch but slowly and deeply went under the surface. I pulled back and the vibrating pole in my hands responded with surprisingly hard resistance. No fish jumped from the water wiggling in the air. I had to pull the tight line all the way closer and closer and finally drag it onto the dry land...

The fish twisted and arched and beat the sand, scaring me with its might and size, never had I seen the like of that dark blue piece of thick hose.

I threw the "miserables" back to the river, filled the can with water, and lowered the pray into it but the fish had to stand there vertically – its length did not allow for tumbling in the can.

Two boys came from the bridge, they had already finished fishing and were on their way home. They asked me about the catch and I showed them the fish. "Burbot!" without a sec of hesitation identified one of them.

When they left, I realized that I couldn't catch anything better, that it was time to cut the line and go home...

I walked up the Gorka hill and the glory ran before me – a couple of boys met me some hundred meters before the Block. They wanted to have a look at the burbot. And when I was already nearing our house, an unfamiliar auntie from the corner building stopped me on the path to ask if that was true.

She peeped into the can at the round muzzle of the burbot turned asleep by that time, and asked me to give it to her.

I immediately handed the milk-can over and waited while she carried the fish to her home and brought the can back, because it's only right to do what you're told to by grow-ups...

In those years, the years were much longer than nowadays and they were filled with much bigger numbers of memorable events. For instance, in the same summer with the burbot my sister, and brother, and I went to the pioneer camp, though we were not young pioneers yet.

One sunny morning the children from our Block, and from the twin one, and the lowlander-children from the wooden houses by the foot of the Gorka hill collected at the House of Officers where two buses and two trucks with canvas tops were waiting for us. Parents gave their respective children suitcases with clothes, and bags full of sweets and other tasty things, and waved after the departing convoy.

We went over the bridge at the Pumping Station and passed the white gate of Checkpoint, leaving the Object behind the barbed wire that surrounded all of it together with the forest, hills, marshes and the piece of the Rechka.

After Checkpoint, we turned to the right, climbing a protracted slant of the highway which we followed for about half an hour before one more turn to the right to follow a forest dirt road among the great pine trees. In the forest, the convoy had to slow down and, after another half-hour, we drove up to another gate in another fence of barbed wire. However, that fence wasn't doubled, and there were no sentries at the gate because it was a pioneer camp.

Not far from the gate, there stood a one-story building of the canteen and the rooms for caretakers, and paramedic, and Camp Director, and other employees at the camp. Behind that building, there was a wide field with a tall iron mast of "giant leaps" with the iron wheel on its top, from which there hung half-dozen canvas loops on rusty chains because no one ever used the attraction. Beneath the row of tall birch trees along the left edge of the field, there ran a neat cinder path ending with a pit for broad jumps. Across the field, the forest began again, parted from the camp with the couple lines of barbed wire randomly nailed to the thicker trunks from among the trees.

To the left of the canteen building, a stretch of green bushes screened four square canvas tents with a board floor and four beds each, for the ninth-graders from the first platoon.

Then followed a level clearing with another iron mast, this time more slender and without chains but with a thin cable for the Red Flag of the camp.

In the morning and in the evening the platoons were lined-up along three sides of a big rectangular, facing inside. The iron mast, Camp Director, Senior Pioneer Leader, and the camp accordionist served the fourth—fairly rarefied—side to the formation.

The commanders of the platoons, starting with the youngest, approached, in turn, Senior Pioneer Leader to report that their platoon was lined-up. During their report, both the commanders and Senior Pioneer Leader held their right elbows up, hands straightened and kept diagonally across their respective faces.

With the reports received from the commanders of all lined-up platoons, Senior Pioneer Leader went several steps ahead towards the center of the square, yet before reaching it turned around and approached Camp Director to report that the camp was lined-up, and Camp Director responded with the order to hoist or to lower the Red Flag of the camp, depending on the time of day.

The accordionist stretched the bellows of his instrument and played the hymn of the Soviet Union. Two rank-and-file pioneers called out by Senior Pioneer Leader for their recent achievements and overall merits in the camp life approached the mast.

Standing on both sides from it, they pulled the cable running through two pulleys—one at the mast top, the other a meter above the ground—their hands taking turns at grabbing the cable, and the Red Flag of the camp crept in jerks along the mast, up in the morning and down in the evening, while the lined-up formation stood with their right elbows up, hands straightened and kept diagonally across their respective faces...

The clearing with the flag mast was followed by a short tilt, down which there stood a long squat barrack of planks with two large bedroom-wards separated with the blind central partition and filled with rows of spring-mesh beds abutting the windowed sidewalls. Each of the wards ended with the door to the common square room comprising the whole width of the barrack. There was a small stage with a screen for movie shows and rows of seats for the audience.

Entering the bedroom-wards on the day of arrival, the children were not in a hurry to go and get mattresses, sheets, and blankets from the canteen-etc. building, but instead, they dropped their bags and suitcases on the floor and went amok, leap-racing along the spring-mesh trail of the lined beds which tossed you up in long jumps through the air. For that particular sports affair, it's vitally important not to collide with a jumper rushing in the opposite direction...

Then everyone opened their suitcases and bags and started to enjoy the sweets, flashing them down with the gulps of treacly condensed milk from blue-and-white tin-cans.

It turned out that for condensed milk consuming, neither an opener nor a spoon was needed. Just find a nail sticking out on the wall and hit the can lid against it to punch a hole. Make sure the hole's location is near the lid edge and not in its center. Produce another hole in the lid opposite to the first and – here you are! – now the condensed milk can easily be sucked out through any of the holes without smearing your lips and cheeks, as when eating with a spoon from an open tin-can. And if you are not a notably trained puncher, or not tall enough to reach the nail up in the wall, then ask someone of the elder boys – they would punch it for you for just a couple of sucking droughts from your can...

In the middle of the square for the camp's lined-up formation, there were rectangular patches of loosened ground, one for each of the platoons. Every day children laid out the date in their platoon patch with green cones, or twigs, or chopped off flower heads competing for the Best Designed Platoon Calendar.

On Sundays, parents arrived at the camp by bus to treat their children with gingerbread, and sweets, and – lemonade!

Our Mom was taking us someplace in the green shade of trees and watched as we chewed and swallowed, and asked questions about the camp life, while Dad snapped his brand new FED-2 camera.

Consuming the treats, we were sharing that the camp life was quite like a camp life.

That not long before, all the platoons went out for a hike in the forest and on our return – surprise! There was a restaurant waiting for us on the floor-boarded platform of the pergola, outside the cinema room in the barrack.

As it turned out, the girls of the senior platoon did not participate in hiking and instead set up tables and chairs in the pergola, and cooked the dinner together with the canteen workers. Handwritten menu sheets were put on the tables, and everyone was calling the girls with the adult word "Waitress!" And they approached to receive an order for the "May Salad" or the "Onion Salad".

When the restaurant was over, I accidentally overheard two of the waitresses giggling between themselves that everyone asked for the "May Salad" while the "Onion Salad" was much more delicious and thus the waitresses' share became bigger thanks to the fools ready to be hooked by mere look of words on a piece of paper.

(...and I promised myself in future never get fooled with tinsel wrappers.)

It's a pity, that the daily schedule in the camp retained an obnoxious vestige from the kindergarten past under the new name of "stiff hour". After the midday meal, everyone should go to their wards and to their beds. Get asleep!

Sleeping in the middle of the day just did not work and the two-hour-long "stiff hour" progressed at a snail rate. All the spooky stories had been told and listened to for the millionth time, both about the woman in white who drank her own blood, and about the black flying hand that had no body to it but kept effectively strangling anyone on its way, and all the other gory horrors, yet there still remained the same thirty-eight minutes before the long-awaited-for shout "Get up!."

Once at the midday meal in the canteen, I got aware of obviously clandestine gestures of three boys at my table, their exchange of silent nods and winks was nothing but some double talk with secret code signs. Clear as daylight – there was some collusion. And me?

So I accosted one of them in earnest until he shared the secret scheme. They conspired to flee the "stiff hour" that day and go to the forest, where one of them knew a spot with such raspberries that had more berries than leaves in their bushes.

The midday meal over, the boys ran stealthily in the direction opposite to the barrack. I followed them, repulsed the leader's attempt at turning me back to the ward-bedroom, and crawled after the others under the barbed wire of the fence into the forest.

We armed ourselves with the rifles made of breakable tree branches and walked along a wide footpath among the pines and shrubs. Then the commander turned into some glade after which we again went into the forest, but already with no footpath there. We wandered for a long time without finding any raspberries but only the bushes of wolf-berries which you should skip eating because they're poisonous.

Finally, we got fed up with the useless search, and our commander confessed he could not find the promised raspberries, so he was reproached with multiple "eew! you!", and our wandering through the forest went on until we came across the barbed wire nailed to the trees to form a fence.

Following the prickly guidance of the camp fencing, we went out to the already familiar footpath and our perked-up commander ordered to fall in. It seemed we were going to start playing War-Mommy. The command was bravely executed and we lined-up along the footpath, pressing the dried boughs of our assault rifles to our stomachs.

But suddenly, two grown-up women—the camp caretakers—jumped from behind a thick bush with a loud yell, "Drop down your weapons!" We let our sticks fall and, in the already formed file, were convoyed to the camp gate. One of the captors walked ahead of us, the other closed the formation.

At the evening all-out line-up, Camp Director announced that there happened an incident at the camp, and the parents of those involved would be informed, besides, there would be raised the question of expelling the fugitives from the camp.

After the line-up dispersed, my brother and sister came to me from their junior platoon, "Now, you'll sure get hell!"

"Ah!" dismissively waved I, trying to conceal the fear caused by the uncertainty of the punishment for getting raised the question of expelling. That uncertainty tormented me till the end of the week with the Parents' Day on Sunday...

Our parents came as usual, and Mom shared between us condensed milk and biscuits, but she never mentioned my involvement in the disruptive occurrence. A beam of hope flicked for me – perhaps the Camp Director forgot to inform my parents!

When they left, Natasha told me that Mom had already known about the incident and, in my absence, asked her who else was among the runaways.

On getting the complete report, she turned to Dad and said, "Well, you bet, such ones aren't going to be expelled."

At the end of that same summer, there occurred a drastic change in our Block's way of life. Now, every morning and evening, a slow-go garbage truck entered the Courtyard, honked loudly and waited for the tenants of the houses to bring their garbage buckets and empty them into its dump. Besides, they took away the rusty boxes from the garbage bins enclosure and nailed up its gate.

In September in the field between the Bugorok-Knoll and the defunct enclosure, there for several days roared and clattered a bulldozer moving mountains of earth. Then it left, leaving behind a wide field leveled two meters lower than the one we used to play football in, with not a single grass blade and filled instead with the footprints of bulldozer's caterpillar tracks in the raw ground...

A month later, they organized a Sunday of Collective Free Work for adults only, but my Dad allowed me to go with him too.

On the edge of the wood behind the next block, there stood a long building similar to the barrack in the pioneer camp, and the people who participated in the Sunday of Collective Free Work attacked it from all ends and started to demolish.

My Dad climbed to the very top. He tore away whole chunks of the roof and sent them down shouting his farewell, "Eh! Pulling down in not building up – no painstaking cares!"

I liked that Sunday of Collective Free Work very little because they would drive you away everywhere, "Don't come closer!" And simply listening to the screams of nails being torn from the beams and boards, becomes boring quite soon...

(...I cannot now recollect if it was it on the eve of that Sunday or immediately after it, that Nikita Khrushchev got deposed and Leonid Brezhnev became the ruler of the USSR in his place.

Ew! So untimely! When there remained no more than a mere eighteen years before Communism to be established in our country!...)

In his very practical book, Ernest Seton-Thompson insists that bows have to be made of ash-tree boughs. But could you find an ash-tree at the Object, please?

The forest and woods around the Block were populated with pines and fir trees, as well as deciduous birch and aspen, and all the rest might be considered just shrubs. That's why, following the advice of the neighbor at our landing, Stepan Zimin, my bows were made of the juniper.

It's important to make the right choice because the juniper for a bow should not be too old with lots of side branches, neither too thick which would be impossible to bend. A tree of about one-and-a-half meters tall would be the thing, both springy and strong. The arrow shot with the bow made of such a juniper would rise in the gray autumn sky about thirty meters or so, you'd barely see it before its precipitous down-fall to stick in the ground with the arrowhead of a nail fixed with electrical tape.

The best material for an arrow shaft is a thin plaster lath, all you have to do is just split it lengthwise, round and shave the shaft off with a knife, then polish with sandpaper. Only my arrows had no fletching, although Seton-Thompson explained how to do it. But where could I get the feathers from? No use to ask Dad, there's nothing but machinery at his work...

In the winter holidays, I learned that the boys from both blocks on the Gorka often visited the Regiment Club to watch movies there. The Regiment was where the soldiers carried on their army service after graduating from the Recruit Depot Barracks.

Going there for the first time was a bit scary because of the vague rumors among children about some soldier strangling some girl in the forest. No one could explain how and why, but that bad soldier must have been a "blackstrapper" while in the Regiment all the soldiers wore red shoulder straps.

The way to the Regiment was not short – two times as long as to school and after bypassing its grounds, the trail became wider and straighter, bound with the walls of tall fir trees until you went out onto the asphalt road which ended by the gate with sentries, however, they did not stop boys and you could go on to the building with the signboard Regiment Club.

Inside, you got into a wide long corridor with three double doors in its blind wall. The other wall had windows in it and between them, as well as between the double doors, there hung a row of same-sized pictures portraying different soldiers and officers with short descriptions of their selfless deeds and heroic deaths defending our Soviet Homeland.

The wide double doors opened to a huge hall without windows, filled with rows of plywood seats facing the wide stage behind velvet crimson curtains, partly drown both sides to open the wide white screen for movies. The passage from the stage to the back wall, that had a couple of square black holes for movie projection, divided the hall into two...

The soldiers came in, in groups, stomping their boots at the boards of the paint-coated floor, they gradually filled the seats with their uniformed mass and all of the hall with the indistinct thick hum of their talking to each other.

Time dragged on very slowly. There were no pictures on the whitewashed walls and I re-read, over and over again, the two inscriptions on the red-clothed frames that screened the speaker boxes on both sides of the stage.

A portrait of a bearded head with a thick turf of hair was mounted onto the left frame and followed by the lines: "In science, there is no wide highway, and only they who fear no fatigue but keep climbing its stony footpaths will reach its shiny peaks." The concluding line underneath explained whose head and words they were – "K. Marx."

And, next to the velvet folds of the curtain drawn to the right, a head without hair and with a small wedge-like beard made it clear even before reaching the bottom-most line that it was Lenin who curtly said, "The cinema is not only an agitator but also a remarkable organizer of the masses."

As the soldiers filled the entire hall, the schoolboys moved from the front rows over onto the stage and watched the movies from the backside of the taut screen. What's the difference if Amphibian Man made his dive not from the left to the right but on the contrary? And the rebel Kotovsky would all the same escape from the courtroom through the window. Although, some boys stayed in the hall perching on the armrests between the seats because the soldiers did not mind.

At times, in the darkness illuminated by the flicks of the running film, there sounded a yell from one of the three doors, "Lance-corporal Solopov!."

Or else, "The second squad!." But any yell ended the same way, "To the exit!"

If the movie suddenly broke off and the hall sank in complete darkness, there arose a deafening wall of whistles and rambling boot-stomp at the floor and yells "shoemaker!!." from all the sides...

After the movies at the Regiment Club, we walked home through the night forest retelling each other the episodes of what we had just watched together, "Now! I say! The way he punched him!" "Hey! Hey! I say! The guy never knew what hit him!"

Of course, the Regiment Club was not the only place for movie-going. There always was the House of Officers but there you had to buy a ticket and, therefore, come with your parents, but they never had time for movies.

True, on Sundays, they demonstrated there a free film for schoolchildren: black-and-white fairy tales or a color film about the young partisan pioneer Volodya Dubinin...

One winter Sunday morning, I told Mom that I was going out to play.

"Think before talking! Who would be playing outside in such weather?"

Behind the panes in the kitchen window, the murky dusk was scraped by the scudding shoots of the rime snow.

"See what mayhem?"

But I croaked and grumbled and never got off her back until Mom grew angry and told me to go wherever I wished.

I went out into the boundless Courtyard. No one at all; the desolate space around looked so too gloomy to stay in. With my face turned away from the snappy slaps from the wild snow torrents, I bypassed the house corner and crossed the road to the field next to the nailed up garbage enclosure.

There also was nobody except for me, but I couldn't see myself. All I could see was the complete turmoil full of the violent blizzard lashing the dull gray world with the long snake-like belts of prickly snow.

I felt lonely and wanted to be back home. But Mom would say, "So I told you!", and the younger ones would start giggling.

Then from the far edge of the field where long-long ago they played volleyball and gorodki in summer, there came a voice of the aluminum loudspeaker on top of a wooden pillar not seen in so hurly-burly weather, "Dear children! Today we'll learn the song about Merry Drummer. Listen to it first." And a well-trained quire of children's voices began to sing of a clear morning at the gate, and the maple drumsticks in the hands of Merry Drummer.

The song was over and the announcer commenced to dictate the lyrics so that the listeners by their radios would write it down word for word, "Get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, get up ear-ly, with the first light of the mor-ning by the gate..."

And I already was not alone in the grim world getting its lashing. I waded through the snowdrifts but the snow could not get me because of my thick pants pulled tightly over my felt boots.

The announcer finished dictating the first verse, and let me listen to it sung by the quire. Then he dictated the second, also with the subsequent singing through it, and the third.

"Now, listen to the whole song, please."

And there became quite a lot of us – both Merry Drummer, and the children with their merry voices, and even the blizzard turned into one of us and wandered with me across the field, hither and thither. Only that I kept falling through the crust into the sifted powder snow under it, and the blizzard danced above, scattering its prickly pellets.

When I got home Mom asked, "Well, seen anyone there?"

I said "no" but no one laughed.

The solitary walk in the big company, under the dictation about Merry Drummer, laid me up in bed with a temperature. It was strangely quiet all around with everyone gone to work and to school.

With the books from the Detachment's Library finished and no one around to go there and exchange them for me, I had to take one from our home library filling a shelf in the closet of the cupboard in the parents' room. After some hesitation, I chose the one that for a long time had been attracting me by its title, yet at the same time repelling with its thickness, the four volumed War and Peace by Tolstoy.

The opening chapter confirmed my fears by its text in French running page after page, however, it eased off when I noticed that there was a translation in the footnotes.

Because of that novel, I did not notice my illness but hastily swallowed the medicines and hurried back to Pierre, Andrey, Petya, Natasha; at times forgetting to take thermometer from out of my armpit.

I read all the volumes and the epilogue, yet the concluding part – the discourse on predestination, I couldn't overcome. Its endless sentences turned into a bluff of glass, climbing up for a tiny bit, I invariably slipped back to its foot. The insurmountable bluff stretched in both directions, and there was no way to figure out where I got to that point from. The last volume was closed without reading it up to the very end.

(...a couple of years ago I re-read the novel, from cover to cover, and said that if a person was capable of writing like Tolstoy in that concluding part of War and Peace then why bothering themselves with all that prelude fiction, including the epilogue?

Probably, I kinda showed off, in part, but only just in part...)

And while I was lying on my folding bed combined with the battlefield of Austerlitz, life was not standing still. My sister and brother were bringing news that the garbage enclosure had been pulled down and a shed was erected in its place. They turned the field between the shed and the Bugorok-Knoll into a skating rink! As big as all that field leveled by the solitary bulldozer back in autumn. Then there arrived a fire-engine, they dropped the hoses on the ground and leaked tons of water. It's a real skating-rink now! And they were lending out skates at the shed; anyone could come and borrow skates or, optionally, bring their own and go skating!

I did not want to lag behind life, and promptly recovered. However, I was late. They were no longer lending skates at the shed, and you had to bring yours with you. The benches in the shed were still in place, so you could sit down and put on the skates you had brought, leaving your felt boots under the bench or in a vacant locker if there remained any, and go skating.

As it turned out, there were two sheds, back to back, and two doors upon a high wooden porch. The right door led to the locker-room, and the other to the warm-up room with the electric skate grinder and a stove made of a wide iron barrel.

The hot fire crackled in the stove to warm your frozen hands or dry up your mittens. You had to look out though – were the mittens not removed in time, they started to smell with singed wool they were knitted of. Yak!

No words could ever describe my desire to become a skater. How deliciously crunched the ice! And you didn't run, but flew like a winged swift shooting ahead of the crispy slush of your steely blades!.

I started learning with double-bladed skates, which had strings for tying them to the boots, and I was laughed at for using such kindergarten playthings. "Snegoorki" came in their place, the round-nosed skates of one blade each, but also with the strings for tying. And nothing came out with them either, no flight, no joy, just some odd iron pieces on my felt boots. Finally, Mom brought from someplace real "half-Canadians", riveted to the shoes of their own.

With those real skates hung over my shoulder, I hurried to the locker room at the skating rink. I put them on and went out upon the ice. All I could get there was an awkward hobbling back and forth. The skates did not want to stand evenly, they kept falling in or out, twisting my feet so painfully. I had to return back to the locker-room walking the snowdrifts around the skating rink, where dense snow kept the skate blades upright so as not let them go on with breaking my hurt ankles out.

The last attempt occurred in the evening when Dad came home from work and had his supper. At my request, he tightly laced the "half-Canadians" making them one with my legs.

I went out and clattered down the stairs holding onto the railing. From where the railing ended to the entrance door I walked with my hand to the wall. The outer wall of the house supported me on my way around the building. Farther on, there were auxiliary snowdrifts, but the road I had to cross fluttering my hands like a tightrope walker.

At last, I got to the skating rink but there was no improvement and the skates again were breaking my feet in and out, despite so tight a cinch.

For some time I stood there, in pain and envy to the crowd of wing-footed lucky ones rushing around me, then started the endless agonizing way back.

(...and never more in my life tried I to skate.

" _Who's born to creep – he cannot fly."_...)

On one of the clear days-off our landing neighbor, Stepan Zimin, suggested I join the ski walk he and his son Yura were having in the forest, for which occasion Dad went down to our basement section and brought the skies.

Each of them had a leather loop in the middle to put the nose of your felt boot into and a length of the white rubber band, like that in underpants. That band, tied with its both ends to the leather loop served an elastic noose encircling the felt boot heel to prevent the ski sliding off.

Both Yura and I had a pair of ski poles each but Stepan went out with just skies on his feet but — whew! — he moved so nimbly without any poles! He glided down the Gorka and we followed, falling and getting up to glide farther on.

Then we turned into the forest to the left from Recruit Depot Barracks and walked through the almost impenetrable thicket of the half-dried pine trees. We came across a couple of square holes in the deep snow there. Stepan explained they were dugouts during the war for the soldiers to live in.

It was hard to believe because the war ended before my birth, that is ages and ages ago, and in the course of so long a time all the trenches, and dugouts, and bomb-holes should completely get leveled up and effaced from the earth...

Never again Stepan went out for a ski walk, but I liked skiing and started to glide down the hillocks and knolls nearest to the road surrounding the two blocks.

And, of course, I volunteered to participate in the ski competition held among the school children, for which occasion, on the eve of the cross-country race, I asked Dad to change the worn-out rubber bands on the leather loops of my skies. He casually dismissed the problem saying they're sturdy enough to hold on, and there's nothing to bother about.

The start was given from the glade where in autumn they pulled down the barrack on the Sunday of Collective Free Work. From the start point the ski track went into the forest and after zigzagging there for a couple of kilometers returned back; start and finish at the same point: two in one.

Our group of fourth-and-fifth-graders was flagged off all at once, with a senior schoolboy running ahead of us so that we wouldn't go astray among other ski tracks there.

I was getting overtaken, and I was overtaking others yelling at them eagerly, "The track! The track!", so that they would give way along the two narrow paths imprinted in the snow. And when they shouted "The track!" behind my back, I reluctantly stepped aside into the untrodden sticky snow, because that's the rule.

We ran, and we glided, and we ran again. Down one especially steep slope, we piled in over each other. I got from the pile one of the first and frantically rushed ahead, but some two hundred meters before the finish that meanie rubber band burst up and the ski ran away from my right felt boot.

Keeping back burning tears, I reached the finish line in only left ski, driving the right one with kicks along its part in the ski track. The refs liked it, they laughed, but I, on coming home, burst into tears, "I knew it! I warned! I asked!"

Mom went on at Dad, who wanted to talk back but couldn't find what to say. The next day he brought from his work and fixed to the ski leather loops some elastic band of ivory color, as thick as a little finger.

(...that fixture never failed, and even twenty-two years later the band served as it should.

Skies, on the whole, are doggedly long-liver creatures...)

With so reliable fasteners, on Sundays, I was taking to the woods all day long.

The endless well-trodden ski track stretched from beyond anything to another out of everything. At times, the ski track branched off and two tracks ran along, side by side.

I liked the clicks of skies clapping at the ski track behind my back. On the way, I sometimes met single soldier-skiers enjoying their Sundays with their greatcoats taken off, in loosened uniform shirts not girded with army belts.

The unswerving ski track led to my favorite gliding grounds – a deep combe where the speed gained by the onrush down one slope took you almost to one-third of the opposite one. I was delighted by it and proud that I could plunge like those solitary soldiers, although at times I was falling, especially at the jump ramp they built of snow for their jumps...

One day I noticed a secluded ski track diverging from the mainline track which—as I gradually figured it out—was running along with the former controlling clearing of Zone-Object-Detachment before its expansion.

The branching ski track led me to a magnificent ski-plunge slope in the depth of the thicket.

Though the slope was grown with perennial fir-giants dictating an abrupt turn at its foot, yet, if you did not fall at that point, the plunge took you unimaginably far away with the speed squeezing tears from your eyes and making repeat the plunge over and over again...

The next Sunday I almost did not fall at that tricky turn and rode the slope until very late, when the deep violet shadows began to trickle down from the dense branches of fir trees hanging heavily under the pressure of the thick layer of snow.

Then all of a sudden, there came a strange feeling that I was not alone, that someone else was watching me from behind the backs of the mighty firs. At first, it was scary but giving heed to the benevolent silence of the forest around, I realized that it was him, the forest, friendly spying on me because we were one – me and the forest.

The twilight deepened and I remembered that Block was more than two kilometers away.

(...of course, I got home in the dark and bore the brunt of Mom's displeasure, yet until now when remembering that winter purplish twilight and the good-willed quietude of the forest, I know that I lived not just so...

The same sense of dissolution and becoming a part of everything else around when you cannot say where your "I" ends and turns into "not-me", I lived through once more and much later, in Karabakh already.

Only that time it was I who watched, and it happened in summer instead of winter.

Even though telling this story somewhat violates the linear flow of the narrative and goes against the grain of the classical canons of the time-place-action unity, but, after all, it's my letter and it's my life, and why not to take turns to my liking?

So...)

In Stepanakert, I am not to be seen a day or two before my birthday and about as long after it, because for that period I enjoy the freedom of hiking.

(...see? It's very advantageous to be born in summer...)

My local relatives have already ceased to be surprised or get angry. They decided that it's an old, odd but firmly established, Ukrainian tradition – to go away for your birthday and walk at random wherever your eyes choose to cast a look.

And so it was in August (I don't remember the exact year) end nineties'. Yes, no later, because of this here tent was bought in the last year of the last millennium.

That August I went north through the woods over _toombs_ where there were no villages but the views of enthralling beauty. Just as Mom once warned me, "You'll be there alone."

After a day-long climbing up to ascend a toomb-ridge where the woods got replaced with the alpine meadows, I came across some soot-black pieces of slate and a bunch of charred poles. Apparently, before the war shepherds were coming there with their flocks, and they brought the construction materials to build a hovel.

And who burned it? Well, you never know...Might be got hit by the lightning as well...Anyway, nothing of my business.

So, I went on – higher, and in a saddle bridging two _toombs_ I discovered an ancient tomb.

How did I guess its antiquity? An easy question.

It was excavated, unearthed by scavengers greedy for a buried treasure leaving a hole in the ground and four to five roughly-hewn stone slabs, half-ton each. People weren't buried that way under socialism, nor in the capitalist epoch. The nearby ridges were not rocky so the slabs had to be transported from afar. But what for?

Well, one look around would remove the question – What a sweep of incredible beauty! The sky without any limit, the placid wavy chines of toomb-chains around, the distant of which covered with dark woods, and those nearby with Alpine meadows.

But bringing the slabs from as far as I could not suppose where would call for a plum sum of money, or real power, or both. Which made more than enough of clues for an unbeatable guess – it was one of the Karabakh melique-princes who one day rode out hunting, reached that place and fell in love with it, and didn't want to get parted from it even after his demise. The only nagging flaw in his calculations: the greed of ashes desecraters was not taken into account.

See? No historical enigma can elude its ultimate solution when we apply to it our tall tales in the absence of any opponent...

I passed over to the next _toomb_ and on its summit got under the rain, for which occasions, I've got a thoroughly worked-out and pretty practical technique.

So, as usual, I took off all of my clothes, packed them into a cellophane bag and started dancing in the altogether under the downpour. Those dances, actually, were never meant as some pagan ritual, they were intended to keep me warm; in the mountains up there without the sun and under the rain it's really chilly, let me assure you. Yet, probably, there still is a certain paganism admixture, otherwise how to account for accompanying the dances with wild shrill yells? Anyway, solitude does have certain advantages – you're not likely to be arrested for the violation of public order.

With the rain over, I rub-dry myself with the sweater and put on the dry clothes from the bag, ain't I a smart guy?

But that time after one rain there came another, and my second dancing was not so enthusiastic as the first one.

The additional rain also stopped after all, and I prepared to stay overnight in a shallow hollow so that the wind would not get to me unhindered.

About midnight the drops of one more rain tap-tapped on my sleeping bag and made me realize that I was kaput. A raging stream of rainwater ran down the hollow, I struggled out of the sleeping bag put it on my back and stood with my legs wide apart giving way to the running spate. That's when I guessed my sleepover spot was just a gulch, but I could not leave it either because of the squally wind joining to the fun. There was nothing to do but wait for the dawn in the posture of the letter Z, clutching my knees with my hands, under the sleeping bag on my back, drenched through and through, and the rivulet running between my feet. The uncontrollable inside shudder mingled with the lashing by outside chilly rains, which I lost count of that night...

The morning started through a thick mist, yet with no rain, except for drizzling, and the wind also began to abate.

Jerking like an epileptic, I squeezed the water out of my clothes and the sleeping bag, as much as my cold-stiffened hands could manage to.

I had not the slightest desire to go any farther; hearth and home were all I craved for. So, I went back, yet even walking did not warm me up, I was too busy being trembling all the time.

Normally, going downhill is easier than going uphill, but for me, that difference, for some reason, was gone and at times I was sort of floating, while to the hearths of civilization there still remained at least a day of normal walking. That's when I remembered the slate – it was much closer if only I could find it. It's somewhere along the edge of the wood. For which reason, down the toomb, I was descending in zigzags so as not miss the slate pieces in the tall grass.

And I did find the place.

Seized with the sticky shivering tremor on the one hand and overwhelming stiffness on the other, I started to restore the shed and the work warmed me better than walking.

The thing I accomplished looked like a crude tent of fire-smeared slate pieces. Inside, it was tall enough for sitting on the ground and more than enough for stretching at the whole body length.

Then I built the fire at the entrance with the wreckage of poles and deadwood which I dragged from the nearby wood. I warmed my sides by the fire and began to dry up the sleeping bag. When the color of its fabric turned lighter and stopped issuing any steam, I believed in the possibility of survival.

All the next day the sun was glaring blindingly, but I had a slanted roof of slates over my head supported with the charred poles walked by the soundless lizards as lazy as I was, because in all that day I went out just once – to collect an armful of grass and spread it under the sleeping bag on the ground...

And so it went on day after day, without any changes, if not for the growing company – cautious mice joined me and the lizards. They did not dare to step over the fire ashes, so I left a piece of baked potato outside, but the rest, together with bread and cheese, hung up in the haversack under the slate.

At nights, the full moon rose to fill the world with clear-cut shadows.

On one of those well-illuminated nights, I went out to take a leak, and on the way through the tall grass, there burst from under my feet a brood of quail with the loud flutter of wings and shrill outcry, "Damn sleepwalker! Watch your step! We're sleeping here!" As if they did not scare me stiff!

In the light of day, over the wide expanse of the valleys, the vultures glided without ever moving their wings. Watching them from the depths of valleys you turn your face up to see their circling so high above, but now, laying on my sleeping bag, I didn't even have to stick my head out of the slate tent.

When one of them trespassed the invisible borderline between their hunting grounds, the skylord soared higher and, folding his wings, fell down upon the arrogant intruder like a stone. I heard the whistling sound of the air cut by his dive next to the slate tent entrance. He missed, however, or maybe was not keen on hitting but only wanted to warn and shoo off the saucy sneaker. All of us are blood kin, after all.

And so it went on...

All my business was to roll over from one side to the other, from the belly to the back, having no desires, neither ambitions nor plans.

Sometimes, I was falling asleep ignoring the time of day, because it made no difference...

Well, and I also watched, of course. I watched how beautiful and perfect the world is.

Sometimes I think, maybe the purpose of man's existence is just seeing this beauty and perfection. Man is merely a mirror for the world to look into, otherwise, it would not know its own beauty...

Six days later, I had to go back to civilization, just for the sake of righteousness.

On my return, to all the questions I responded with monosyllabic answers because my vocal cords, after being idle for so long, became too lazy and I could only speak in a hoarse whisper.

(...all I want to say is that in both cases—in that winter forest and among the summer toombs—I had the same feeling that I was not alone and someone else was watching that ski-riding kid and the supine lazybones in the shade of burned slate pieces and, more strangely, I was a part of that someone and watched myself from the twilight of the winter forest and from the tall grass on the _toomb_ slope because we all are involved...

Well, on the whole, some weird stuff, a folly accomplished...)

With the spring at hand, we, the fourth-graders, started active preparation for the admittance into the ranks of young pioneers, for which purpose we copied and memorized the Solemn Oath of Young Leninists.

One day after the break, Seraphima Sergeevna entered the classroom with an unknown woman. She introduced her as the new School Pioneer Leader and said that we were going to have a Leninist Lesson and had to go out into the corridor and keep very quiet there because the other classes were at their regular lessons.

We went out into the long corridor of the second floor, where along its walls with the windows on the left and the rare doors to the classrooms on the right, there hung different pictures with differently-aged Lenin in all of them...

The new School Pioneer Leader commenced from the very beginning. Here, he's quite a young man, a youth, actually, after getting the news about the execution of his elder brother Alexander by the Czarist regime, he consoles his mother with the words "We'll go another way", which is the name of this famous picture, by the way.

And our class followed her quietly to the next poster with his photograph in the group of comrades from the underground committee...

The working silence reigned in school, we passed by the closed doors of the classrooms with the school children sitting behind them and only we, like secret conspirators, veered from the usual course of the school regime and seemed to have joined the life of underground, following the quiet voice directing us from a picture to a picture...

Then the spring came, and again the thawed patches appeared on the slope between Block and Recruit Depot Barracks but I wasn't checking them anymore...

One sunny day coming home from school, I took over an unfamiliar girl of my age. Maybe, from the parallel fourth grade. I get ahead of her and looked back at the face full of absolute lack of care about my walking along.

The brag just asked to be shown that I was a boy of consequence in the surrounding whereabouts. And besides, I had a gang of my own, like Robin Hood, the noble robber.

Still walking on, I half-turned to the left and told with eloquent gestures to the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the decaying skating rink, "Hey! Don't be so careless! Duck!! Don't let them spot you!"

So, if the snooty girl looked that way, no one would be seen there...

Another time, with the snow, completely gone, I was going the same route and squinting because if you squint without closing your eyes completely, but only to the point when the eyelashes from your upper and lower eyelids meet and touch each other, you'd see the world as if through the transparent wings of a dragonfly. That way I was not, actually, walking but flying in a tiny dragonfly-like helicopter and watching through its Plexiglas roof which I saw in The Funny Pictures because even though I was past the preschool age I still turned pages of that magazine for small kids if I come across it.

And then I remembered how rebellious Kotovsky, in the movie "Kotovsky" at the Regiment Club, answered the arrogant landlord, "I am Kotovsky!" After which he grabbed him and threw through the window panes of the landlord's house.

So I also grabbed the rich scoundrel by the breast of his jacket and threw him into the roadside ditch. And I proudly called myself with the glorious name, "I am Kotovsky!"

Yay! And I liked to be so strong. That's why I replayed the episode several times walking uphill to Block. And why not? Who was to see me along the empty road?

At home, Mom told how she and Paulinna Zimin had a hearty laugh watching through the neighbor's window my grabs and throws of nobody knew who.

But I never confessed that I was Kotovsky at the moment...

End April, we became young pioneers. The ceremony took place not at school but in front of the House of Officers because there stood the big gypsum head of Lenin upon the tall pedestal.

The night before, Mom ironed my trousers through gauze and also the white parade-shirt and the scarlet silk triangle of pioneer tie. All those things she hung over the back of a chair so that in the morning everything would be ready.

When there was no one in the room, I touched the soft caressing fabric of the pioneer tie. Mom said she had bought it from the store, but it's impossible for such things to be for sale.

The bright morning sun was shining. We, the fourth-graders, stood facing the lined-up ranks of the school children. Our scarlet ties hung on our right arms bent at the elbow, the collars of our shirts were turned up for the senior graders to easily tie our ties around.

Yet before that moment, we canted the memorized Solemn Oath in front of our comrades to love our Homeland hotly, to live and learn and struggle as admonished by great Lenin, as we were being taught by the Communist Party...

One week before the end of the academic year I fell ill.

Mom thought it was a cold and told me to stay in bed but could not bring the temperature down, and when it rose up to forty she called an ambulance from the Detachment's Hospital because with two more degrees the temperature would become lethal.

I was too lightheaded to be proud or frightened that a whole vehicle came after just me alone. At the hospital, they at once diagnosed pneumonia and began to knock the temperature down with penicillin injections every half-hour. I did not care.

A day later the injection frequency was reduced to one per hour, the following day – one in two hours...

The patients in the ward were all adults, soldiers from the Regiment.

In four days, I was quite okay and walking in the garden around the Hospital, when our class together with the teacher came to visit me and hand over the report card with my grades.

I felt uncomfortable and, for some reason, ashamed, so I ran away around the corner followed by the boys of our class. But then we returned, and the girls together with the teacher presented me with the award for successful studies and exemplary behavior. It was the book of The Russian Epic Tales which Grandma Martha read to me, and my sister-and-brother, but only quite a new one.

That way, little by little, things began somehow repeat themselves in my life...

In summer we were again taken to the pioneer camp to the same canteen, lining-ups, bedroom ward, "stiff hours", and Parental Days.

Though certain things had notably changed because as a full-fledged pioneer, I already belonged to the Third Platoon which, together with the First and Second ones, was eligible for swimming in the lake. But first, we had to wait a week in anxious hope that it shouldn't rain on the appointed day.

We waited eagerly, and on the swimming day the weather was not rainy, so two trucks with canvas tops took us to the Sominsky lake.

The road was stretching through the forest, along some endless clearing. And also the ride was very long because we had sung all the pioneer songs, both my favorite "ah, potato's so tasty-tasty-tasty-tasty..." and the one I liked less, but still for pioneers – "we marched to the ding of the cannonade...", and, well, all that we knew, anyway, but the road did not end and I felt sick with all those jolts on the bumps in the road.

Then those, who sat at the square window cut in the front canvas wall, shouted that something was seen ahead and the truck pulled up on a grassy shore of a big lake amid the forest.

They allowed us to enter the water not all at once but in turn, one platoon after another.

The water was very dark, and the bottom felt unpleasantly quaggy, and they too soon yelled from the shore, "Third platoon – out!"

At first, I only stood up to the chest in the water doing shallow hops. But then they gave me an air-filled life ring of rubber and showed me how to row with my hands and kick my legs for swimming.

Soon both the caretakers and the pioneer leaders grew bored to command the platoons in and out of the water, so everybody stayed there as long as they wanted. I let the air out of the life ring and made sure that I could still swim for a couple of meters.

At the end of the day, when they yelled everyone to get ashore because we were leaving, I tarried a bit for the final check that the skill remained with me and gratefully uttered in my mind, "Thank you, the Sominsky lake!"

The next time, they took us to the Lake of Glubotskoye. The elder platoons said it was even better because the lake had a beach and sandy bottom. The way over there was much longer but asphalted, and we were going by bus so I was not sick at all.

Yay! What a huge lake it was! They said channels were connecting it to other lakes visited by passenger boats with excursions to the Ant Island. The island was so big that long ago there was a monastery surrounded with the forest full of giant ant-heaps. Whenever any of the monks was not behaving, they tied him up and dropped onto an ant-heap. The ants thought they got under attack and hurried out to defend their city, so in just one day they gnawed the punished away, leaving only his polished skeleton.

But from the bathing place neither boats nor islands were seen, only the very distant opposite shore. Yet, the bottom turned out sandy indeed, firm and pleasant to step on, only you had to wade for a long time before reaching a place deep enough for swimming.

When wading back, I deeply cut my feet near the big toe. The cut was bleeding profusely and on the shore, they bandaged it at once. A dark spot showed through the bandage, but the blood stopped oozing.

They yelled to everyone about the beach to be cautious, and then one of the adults found a broken bottle in the sandy bottom and threw it farther away in the direction of the opposite shore, but it did not console me. And on the way back, I even began to whimper because it was so unfair that in the whole bus just only one foot got cut, that of mine.

One of the caretakers told me, "What a shame! Are you a guy or a dishrag?"

The question stopped my whining, and in my subsequent life, I adamantly pretended not to feel pain and, being ashamed to moan, I feigned being fine...

Twice per shift, we were taken to the bath-house in the nearby village of Pistovo.

The first time I missed – I went back to the platoon ward to pick the forgotten bar of soap, and when I came running back, the buses had already left. The camp became quiet and empty, there remained only the cooks at the canteen and me. You could do whatever you wanted and go wherever you wished, even to the tents of First Platoon with iron beds on the raw floor-boards, and the finely carved shadows of the nearby tree foliage, dancing upon the sun-warmed canvas walls. But I, for some reason, climbed upon the booth with an iron barrel on top of its plank walls.

It was the shower for the caretakers and pioneer leaders, who filled the barrel with pails of water for the sun to heat it.

The whole two-hour solitude, I spent atop that booth, wandering along the narrow beams supporting the barrel, until the camp returned from Pistovo...

And I did not miss the second visit to the bath-house, but it disappointed me – it was unbearably noisy and had no baths at all! You had to wash yourself splashing water from a tin basin with tin ears for grabbing when you carried it.

On the wall, there were two taps, side by side, one with boiling hot water, the other with cold. You put your basin on a low table beneath the taps but but it was hard to mix their waters to your liking because the line of boys behind you clutching by the ears their empty basins yelled at to be quick...

The shift at the camp traditionally ended with the Farewell Bonfire which was built at the far end of the field with the rusty mast of the never-used attraction, near the edge of the forest behind the barbed wire.

After the breakfast in the morning, the senior platoons marched to that forest through a temporarily made passage in the barbed wire fence and harvested dry firewood for the Farewell Bonfire. The harvesting went on after the midday meal as well, so by the evening, in the field accumulated a heap of dry branches taller than a grown-up man.

In the dusk of the nearing summer night, that heap was set on fire from all sides and burnt with high flames under our choral songs, and the marches from the accordionist.

Then Camp Director and the caretakers started some arguing with agitated voices. In the end, Camp Director agreed and gave the orders to his chauffeur. The man answered: "If you wish so," walked to the camp buildings, and drove back by the Camp Director's car.

From the trunk, the chauffeur took a metal canister while the pioneers were ordered to step back from the fire. He splashed onto it from the canister, and a huge ball of red-and-black flame buzzed and swirled up in the night, for at least three meters high, and then fell back again until the next splash.

In the morning, the buses were taking us home...

However, the end of the camp shift did not mean the end of summer. And again there was the Rechka river and playing War-Mommy, Cossacks-and-Robbers, American Ball, and Twelve Chips, as well as the new adventures, borrowed from the Detachment's Library. However, besides the travels to distant planets and mysterious islands started from the opposite armrests of the big sofa, I also wandered in the forest for quite different reasons.

For instance, our neighbor Yura Zimin suggested we go harvesting the Hare Cabbage, and I got curious about the unheard-of cabbage. Well, though sour it still was tasty but picking it turned a literal toil because its leaves were so too tiny.

Or else, my sister Natasha would bring the news that in the swamp behind the next block, there were myriads of blueberries, and one boy brought home a whole milk-can of them! Now, the spirit of competition drove me to the same swamp, I had to collect more blueberries than any "one boy"...

But usually, I wandered there alone and almost without any purpose; well, except for hunting a juniper to make another good bow, or collecting green pine cones for all sorts of hand-crafted toys.

Stick four matches into a green cone and here you have the body of a quadruped.

To the body standing on all the four, add a vertical match as the would-be neck, pierce a smaller cone and spit it with the 'neck' match – wow! – you've got a horse now! Just don't forget to attach a tail to it.

After green cones, you have to climb up young pine trees, whose light-brown bark peels off all too easily to smear your hands with sticky colorless resin, which a few minutes later turns into blackish spots all over your palms, while on your pants it stays as white stains, yet still as sticky as your blackened palms.

The young pines are swaying with the wind and under your weight – some classy swing! And their cones are so nice: green scales pressed densely to each other, all glossy as if lacquered, so different to the cones picked on the ground under old big pines, those also are old and black with their scales ruffled and sticking loosely all apart. However, in big pines, you can find green cones too, yet they hang from the very tips of such boughs where you cannot climb and which are too hard to pull or bend closer to the branch you're sitting on because they are so thick...

New occupations spread among boys much faster than a wildfire. Let one of them put his hand on some new trick and you'll hardly have time to wink your eye before they all are busy manufacturing explosives.

You can produce a land mine just hands down. Fill a glass bottle with water, three-quarter up, and through the bottle's neck stuff in a wisp of grass, then pour the bluish powder of crushed carbide on top. (Carbide is stored in an iron barrel at the construction site of a five-story building across the road around Block, blackstrapper-soldiers would blink at your ladling handfuls of it into your pants pocket.)

Now, seal tight the bottle with a cork carved from a wood chip, turn the bottle upside down and insert it into some pile of earth or sand. The land mine is ready.

It only remains to wait until the carbide, after getting in contact with the water in the bottle, has issued too much gas for the bottle walls to hold the pressure and it explodes with a loud pop, sending sand and glass splinters in all directions.

A word of warning. Be cautious not to cut your fingers when carving the wooden cork and, secondly, when sitting on the ground and driving the cork into the charged bottle, don't keep the bottle's neck between your thighs because it might crack and some stray shard would cut your skin just where the shorts end, as it was in my case...

Being a book-addict, I often failed to follow the mainstream developments in ever-changing public life...

When tired of reading, I left the book spread by a big sofa's armrest, covers up for the seat to keep it open and ready at my return from the Courtyard.

So, down I went and stepped out of the entrance door – surprise! A caravan of differently aged boys were crossing the Courtyard hauling pieces of boards, planks, beams. I ran up to ask: what's up? how? where?

They told me to run to the construction site of the five-story building, where another group of boys still collected construction materials that a blackstrapper soldier-guard allowed to lift off.

And I arrived there just in time to grab the end of a long plank, begged of the guard by elder boys. The soldier only said to be quick, before seen by someone.

Like a string of busy ants, we dragged the pillage across the Courtyard and down the Gorka, then into the forest at the foot of the steep slope made of the earth chuted down by the bulldozer when leveling the ground for the skating rink.

There, between the trees, sounded hand-saws, and hammers clapped in eager heat of enthusiastic labor. The bigger boys were sawing boards and nailing them to the pillars piled into the ground.

With the trained eye of a Construction Modeling Designer, I at a glance saw that it was a shed without any windows and with one, already hinged up, door. Inside, there stood a wooden ladder leaned at the wall beneath the square hatch in the ceiling of long planks. Up I climbed and out onto the flat roof and, at the same time, ceiling of the structure.

A couple of bigger boys were there discussing whether the roof was strong enough and assuring each other that the shed would be the headquarters of boys from our Block and not from the twin one.

I asked for a chance to work with a handsaw or hammer, but neither of them gave me his, and they even ordered me to go down and not strain the roof with my additional weight.

I climbed down the ladder. In the half-dark shed and around it, there stayed no one of my peers, and going home to the book waiting for me upon the big sofa, I felt happy that the boys of our Block would have the Headquarters of their own, like Timur and his team from the book by Gaidar...

Later, when wandering in the forest, I never missed to check the shed, but nobody was there, and a big padlock hung on its door.

In the autumn, a stack of hay appeared next to the shed, and a team of chicken migrated to it through the square hen-way, sawed out in the bottom of the door. The Headquarters were obviously canceled...

Dad had a hair cutting machine – a nickel-plated animal with two horns or, rather, they were two slender handles. Dad took them both in one hand and put the machine in motion by squeezing and loosening his grip on the handles.

On the haircut day, my brother and I were seated, in turn, in the middle of the kitchen on a stool placed upon a chair, so that we would sit higher and Dad wouldn't have to stoop down to us.

Mom tightly wound a white bedsheet around the neck of her son—whose turn it was—and fixed it with a clothespin. Then she held a large square mirror in front of the brothers, in turn, while sharing her advice to Dad, who waved her advice off with his nose because his right hand was grabbing the machine and with his left hand he held the customer's head, and steered it from side to side, from down to back. And even his jaw was busily moving from side to side in sync with the movements of the machine's cutting part.

Sometimes the machine did not cut the hair but pulled it and that hurt. At such moments, Dad gave out an angry snort and vigorously blew in the machine in his hand before going on on with his work.

Once, the blowing didn't bring the machine to rights, it still pulled the hair and Sasha started to cry.

Since that day, we visited the hairdresser salon not only before school was starting after the holidays, but whenever Mom decided that we already got too shaggy...

Photography Dad learned himself from a thick book. His FED-2 camera was fixed inside its brown leather case with a narrow shoulder strap, also of leather. For shooting, you had to unbutton the case from behind, drop the case's pug-nosed face to dangle under the camera, take pictures and buckle it down again.

Unscrewing and taking the camera out of the case was done after its counter indicated 36 clicks which meant there remained no space for another frame and it's time to replace the film cassette.

The film from its cassette should be rewound with proper precautions ensuring complete darkness, onto a loose spool in a small round cistern of black plastic with the tightly fitting lid, in which container the film was treated with the developer solution poured inside through the light-proof hole in the spool's knob which stuck out through the lid.

After rotating the spool with the film on it for five minutes, the solution was poured out of the cistern, the film washed with freshwater and then treated with rotation in the fixing solution followed by one more washing out. For drying, the film was pinned on a rope just like a usual laundry. But if before the final washing, the film got awkwardly exposed to the tiniest beam of light, it got spoiled and instead of frames, you'd have just a gleaming black ribbon of a film, a throwaway.

When there collected several developed films, Dad arranged a photo lab in the bathroom. He covered the bath with two deal shields made for the purpose. They served as the desktop upon which he put the photo-projector with its downward-looking lens. In the photo lab, Dad used a special red lamp, because of photo paper's exceeding sensitivity, and only the red light didn't damage it.

The projector was also equipped with a movable light filter of red glass, right beneath the lens, so that light-sensitive photo paper would not become a throwaway while you're adjusting the image sharpness with the lens.

All frames in the film were negative – black faces with white lips and eye sockets, and the hair whiter than snow.

After adjusting the sharpness, the red filter was turned aside so that the crude light from the projector would pour through the film frame onto the paper, while Dad counted down the seconds needed for exposure and then returned the filter back into its place.

Then the completely white sheet of photo paper was taken from under the projector and put into a small rectangular basin filled with the developer solution, that sat next to the red light lamp whose glowing couldn't disperse black darkness in the room and only turned it into a sorcerer's chamber.

The magic started in the plastic basin under the dim light of the red lantern and on a clean white sheet, there gradually appeared clothes, hair, facial features.

Yet, pictures should not stay in the developer for too long, or their paper would turn into black wet squares. The rightly developed pictures were taken out with the pincers, rinsed in freshwater, and placed in the next small basin with the fixer, otherwise, they would blacken all the same; then, after five to ten minutes, the ready pictures were transferred into a large enamel washing tub filled with water.

When the printing was over, Dad turned on the light in the bathroom; the charmer's chamber disappeared, giving way to a small workshop. Dad took the wet pictures from the basin, put them face down on Plexiglas sheets and ran rubber roller over their backs so that they stuck well.

Those glasses he leaned against the wall in the parents' room, and the following day the dried-up photos fell off the glass to strew the floor, like the leaves from the trees in autumn, but white, smooth and glossy.

...here am I with round eyes and the neck bandaged because of a sore throat...

...brother Sasha looking so credulously into the camera...

...Mom alone, or with her friends, or with the neighbors...

...and that is Natasha with her nose up in the air, and the eyes on something else happening to the right, and the ribbon tie in her pig-tail got undone as always...

Besides photography, Dad also was a radio fan, that's why he subscribed to _The Radio_ magazine full of all kinds of charts.

I liked the smell of melted rosin in the kitchen when he worked with his soldering iron, collecting this or that scheme from The Radio. Once, he assembled a radio receiver the size a bit more than the FED-2 camera case. At first, it was a thin brown board with radio parts soldered to it, then he made a small box of plywood, polished and lacquered it, and hid the board inside. There were just two knobs outside the box: one for adjusting the volume and the other for tuning to a radio station. Then he sewed the case for the receiver from thin leather, because he could work with the awl, and knew how to make stitching thread from a usual one by applying wax and pitch. Finally, he attached a narrow shoulder strap to the case so that you could carry it and still have your hands free.

Later on, Dad made a special machine fixed on a stool to do bookbinding, and bound his _The Radio_ magazines into volumes, one for each year. He had just golden hands.

And Mom, of course, had golden hands as well, because she cooked tasty meals, sewed with her Singer machine, and once a week did a general washing in the washing machine "Oka". At times, she trusted me with squeezing the water out of the washing by turning the crank of the wringer fixed on top of the machine. You stick a corner of a washed thing in between its rubber rollers and when you start turning the crank, the washing is pulled through the wringer, which squeezes brooks of water back into the machine basin. And the thing crawls out behind the rollers thinly pressed and wrung out.

But hanging the washing was a job for adults because there were no linen ropes in the Courtyard and everyone dried their washing in the attic of their house. Only Dad could lift the heavy basin with half-wet things up the vertical iron ladder and through the hatch above the landing.

However, with his strong, golden, hands, he once created a long-term problem for himself. It's when he made a "bug" within the electric meter, so that it would not rotate, even with all the lights on and the washing machine buzzing busily in the bathroom.

Dad said it reduced the bills for electricity, but he feared very much that the controllers would catch us "bugging" and punish with a big fine. Why inflict yourself so much distress because of saving on bills?

As for Mom, she never did unreasonable things, except for those yellow corduroy shorts with suspenders, that she sewed for me in the kindergarten. Oh, how I hated them! And, as it turned out, not for naught – in those hateful shorts I was when the red cannibal ants molested me so severely...

During one of my solo forest walks, I went out into a glade and felt there was something not right with it, yet what namely? Aha! That thin smoke did not belong to the usual picture. And then I saw flames, almost transparent in the sunlight, fluttering, charring the bark of trees and creeping along the thick carpet of dry pine needles on the ground. So, it's the forest fire!

At first, I tried to just trample the flames upon the needles out, but it did not work. Yet, a broken away trunk of a small juniper with multiple dense twigs coped with the underfoot flames quite efficiently and served well at killing fire on trees trunks.

After the laborious fight and deserved victory, I saw that the burned-out area was not so big: some ten to ten meters. My shirt and hands were smeared with black soot, yet I didn't mind because the battle dirt is not dirty. I even ran my sooty hand over my face to ensure it was smeared too so that everyone could see at once – here's the hero who saved the forest from the death in the fire.

Unfortunately, I met no one on the way home. Walking on, I dreamed of being written about in _The Pioneer_ Pravda, where they published an article about a pioneer who signaled with his red tie to the locomotive driver about the broken railway ahead.

Already entering the Courtyard, I, at last, met two passers-by. They looked at me alertly but none of them asked, "Where does this black soot in your face come from? It looks you were quenching a forest fire, were you?"

At home, Mom yelled at me for going around so dirty, and no washing machine would catch up with keeping my shirts clean. I felt wrongly hurt but suffered it silently...

In summer evenings, the children of Block and mothers of those kids, who as of yet were to be looked after, went out of the Courtyard onto the surrounding road of concrete. Everyone was waiting for the platoon from Recruit Depot Barracks to come up to the road for their drilling evening promenade.

On reaching the concrete surface of the road, the soldiers started to parade march. As in a magic transformation, they seemed to merge into one united creature—a closed squad—that had one mutual leg comprising the entire length of the marching flank, the leg fused of dozens of black boots that simultaneously broke away from the road and fell down one step farther, advancing the whole formation for that one step. It looked so fascinating a creature!

Then the sergeant-major walking along by its side abruptly commanded, "Sing off!" And from the midst of the compact mass, throbbing in time to the mutual "plonk!" of the boot soles against the concrete, a young vibrating tenor rose solo to be followed in a few steps farther by the thunder of the supporting chorus:

"... _we are the paratroopers,_

the wide sky is all for us...

The formation went on and on to the corner of the next block with its inhabitants waiting for it to march by them too, and some children from ours followed it as a running tail, while the young mothers looked in the wake of the marching soldiers.

Some calm and all-embracing serenity permeated the evening, because we were the strongest, and so reliably protected by our paratroopers from all the NATO spies in the anteroom of the Detachment's Library...

They brought long iron pipes into the courtyard. When you hit such a pipe with a stick, it rang loudly and longly...

Much longer, actually, than needed and for all my effort I could never repeat the drum roll with which the Whites marched to their "psychic" attack against Anka and her machine gun in the movie "Chapaev".

Day after day, coming from school, I tried, again and again, filling the whole Courtyard with ding and dong, yet in vain, it sounded nothing like that roll.

The pipes were buried all too soon and my musical self-education got interrupted, but the blocks on the Gorka got furnished with gas.

They installed the gas stove in the kitchen and hung the white box on the wall to light the gas on when heating water to wash up or take a bath. Titan the Boiler disappeared from the bathroom, and firewood was needed no more, our basement section with Dad's workshop became roomier...

One day in the early summer, when the parents were at work, I came down to our basement section and took away Dad's big ax, because I and some other boy wanted to build a fire in the forest.

We descended into the thicket behind the Bugorok-Knoll and started climbing up the next, lower, hill. On the steep slope, there stood a small fir tree no taller than a meter and a half. From the moment of entering the forest with the ax in my hands, I had had an itch to put it to use. And there it stood before me the one-and-a-half-meter tall opportunity. A couple of blows and the fir tree dropped on the slope...

I was standing next to it, unable to grasp – what for? You couldn't use it for making a bow, nor even for a fake Kalashnikov gun to play War-Mommy.

Why did I kill the fir so aimlessly?

I no longer wanted to make any fire nor have a walk. All I needed was to get rid of the ax, the accomplice in my stupid cruelty. I took it back to the basement section, and from that time walked the forest unarmed...

(...see? What a lovely prissy boy! Yet the core for this pathetic self-praise through self-chastening is true. However, don't run over yourself to list your Daddy with the good guys because I am too unstable for that. One day I might be as tenderhearted as you can wish, but the following one... well, I don't know...

When my bachnagh (this word in Karabakh Armenian means "husband of a sister-in-law") was preparing the wedding of his eldest daughter, the relatives were helping with anything they could. Not with money though, because he wouldn't accept it – the expenses for such an occasion are born by the happy father. That's the tradition.

The acceptable assistance comprises, mainly, cookery work. While the staple set of wedding treats at the city House of Celebrations is paid in cash, the standard snacks get diversified with additional courses cooked by aunts, grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters of the immediate and distant relatives. Kinship, aka clan relationships, is verily alive and kicking in Karabakh. The culinary help in wedding preparations is a sort of love labor performed with the products purchased by the celebration organizer.

However, certain products call for preliminary treatment, and you can't but agree that slaughtering a dozen chickens on the balcony in a five-story apartment-block is a way more toilful undertaking, than executing it at a private, albeit still under construction, house. That's why the chickens were brought to me.

They dumped them in the unfinished hallway and left, busy with innumerable other wedding-preparation chores. Jedem – seiner, quoting a German saying.

So, those fifteen living creatures are lying on the ground in dust, with their legs tied, and I am towering over them with a freshly whetted knife in my hand with all of us fully aware of what for.

Fifteen are not a single one and there is a definite deadline when distaff clan members will come to pluck the initially processed products clean of their feathers. But each of the would-be products, while alive, has its own coloring and age, its personal point of view on what is happening, its individual reserve of energy, which determines the loudness of protestations as well as the protraction of the flutter with the already chopped off head.

You can't do such a job without being methodical. So I turned into a robot methodically repeating a set of the same movements...fifteen times...

Sometimes, I looked through the window-opening with still no frame in it, at a white fluffy cloud high in the blue sky. So clean. Immaculate curls...

Just so a robot with a kinda sentimental wrinkle in its program.

Since that time, my attitude to executioners has somehow changed. Probably, I understood that nothing in their nature was outside me...

Well, in a nutshell, at that wedding I was a vegetarian.

Coming back to the assertion that, in the fir-tree killing case, the weight of guilt was on the ax, who pressed me into the slaughter of the innocent plant, then there's nothing new about it, "I was carrying out the orders..."

A low-grade zombie-simulation...)

In the fifth grade, instead of just one Mistress, we had separate teachers for different subjects because our elementary education was over.

The new Class Mistress name was Makarenko Lyubov... er... Alexeevna?...Antonovna?...I don't remember her patronymic. Between us, we called her just "Makar".

"Atas! Makar is coming!" (In the school lingo atas! meant "look out!")

But that was later, and for the first time, I met the would-be Class Mistress the day before school, when Mom came there with me to copy the curriculum and to get acquainted with my new Class Mistress.

Makarenko asked me to help her with the class wall newspaper on a big sheet of Whatman paper, which had to be adorned with a frame for which there already was the mark of a pencil line five-centimeter offset from the edges.

She gave me a brush and a box of watercolors and warned to use only the blue one, then went out together with my Mom to further accomplish their acquaintance.

Proud of being trusted with so important a job, I started immediately, dipped the brush in the glass of water, dampened the blue and began to paint the strip of the Whatman paper between its edge and the pencil mark, trying not to trespass it.

The job turned out an up-hill one – you paint, and paint, and paint but there still remains so much to paint yet. The main problem though was that each watercolor stroke differed from others with its shade of blue making it hard to keep the uniformly.

I persevered in earnest because not every day a boy get a chance of making frames on a sheet of Whatman. However, by the return of Mom and Mistress, I had only finished about a quarter of the frame.

The teacher said at once that was enough, even more than that because all she had wanted of me was just passing the brush along with the pencil line, but now it's too late.

Mom promised to bring a sheet of Whatman paper from her work, but the teacher said "no-no!" Then I came up with a proposal to mount strips of paper on glue over the superfluously painted areas, but the idea was also turned down, I didn't know why.

We left, and Mom did not rebuke me on our way home for it was not my fault if the new teacher had never in her life seen sturdy frames of plywood, but only those of thin lines as around the words of Marx and Lenin in the Regiment Club...

When school began there was a wall newspaper hanging in our classroom. Probably, I was the only schoolboy who studied so attentively the blue borderline framing in the paper...

Nevertheless, our new Mistress retained some confidence in me because a month later she entrusted me with a verbal message for Seraphima Sergeevna in our former classroom.

I knocked on the familiar door and recited the message to my first teacher, who was sitting at her desk facing the new growth of first-graders. She thanked me and then asked to close the window leaf, through which droughts got in whenever someone opened the door.

I readily climbed onto the windowsill then, standing on it, reached out and slammed shut the vicious window leaf. For coming back, rather than to kneel back on the sill and then lie on it with the stomach, I just jumped down on the floor.

The jump turned out classy deft, and full of pride I strutted out of the silent classroom past the delight and reverence in the eyes of the small ones at their desks.

How could I have thought those first-graders on a visit to my kindergarten group were so unreachably grown up? Arrogant swaggers!.

At home, we already had a TV set in which announcers read the news against the background of the Kremlin walls and towers, and hockey players rushed from one goal to the other at the European and World Championships.

There were eagerly awaited for programs of Kinopanorama, and the Club of Jolly and Inventive, and, of course, movies!

I would never have supposed that there could be a film longer than two sequels. The four sequels of "Bombard the area I'm in!" became an eye-opener.

Only I did not like Italian cinema, because when Marcello Mastroianni mentioned possible abortion, and I inquired what that word meant, our neighbor, auntie Paulinna, laughed out loud and Dad sent me to go to the children's room because that movie was not meant for children...

The arms race took place not only in TV news broadcasting but in our boyish life as well. We reached the phase of using sophisticated weaponry: crook pistols, crook rifles.

There's hardly any need to explain what a slingshot is, however, I'd like to point out that there are two types of slingshots: for shooting pebbles, and for shooting crooks.

(...pebble-shooters are a lethal weapon, in the hungry post-war years in Stepanakert, the boys were knocking sparrows from the trees for their meal...)

Crook-shooting slingshot is almost a toy made of aluminum wire and a round rubber band for aircraft-modeling (instead of rubber straps cut out from a gas mask for pebble shooters).

Non-lethal slingshots shoot with small pieces of aluminum wire bent into narrow arcs – crooks. Catching the rubber band within a crook's bend, pull the band and let the missile go. It doesn't kill but it is felt alright, bad news if the crook hits the eye.

Now, if instead of the slingshot the round rubber band is fixed upon the planed piece of plank for pulling the crook along its even surface, the accuracy of the hit grows exponentially because the crook takes off the planed guide. The rest is at your discretion – whether to cut out a submachine gun or a pistol from that piece of plank.

At the point on the plank to which the readied crook is pulled, you adjust the trigger from the same aluminum wire strung crosswise to keep the crook in place until you pull the trigger. The pressure for holding the cocked up crook originates from a rubberband like that in underpants, stretched taut from the trigger to the screw in the downside of the planed plank.

The boys armed with such weapons do not run and cry "ta-ta-ta!" as in War-Mommy. Leaving those naive games for kindergarten kids, they go down into the basements and start hunting each other in the dark.

Metallic "dzink!" of a crook against the cemented floor, or the wooden walls, suggests that the enemy is near and opened fire at you. But gaining the position in the pit above the floor at the end of the corridor, you are as safe as in an impregnable bunker. You have to just sit tight up there and send crooks to the sound of stealthy steps, and if you hear "ouch!" from the dark, then you have targeted him okay...

In autumn, they finished construction of the five-story apartment block across the road surrounding Block.

The tenants were moving into their flats while deep down, in the endless basement corridors of so big a building (the first of that height and size at the Object), there unfolded unprecedented combat actions with the employment of crook weapons of all types.

Initially, the huge underground basement was lit with rarely placed electric bulbs, that lived but shortly: long-range crook shots burst them up, one by one, into fine splinters.

Perhaps the only drawback of the crook weapons was their almost complete noiselessness. For real self-assertion, you need your arms to do some major bangs...

Life just cannot stand still, it has to flow. Where to? The direction conforms to the dearest dreams of those swimming in the flow, sort of...

More and more often, the evening quietude in the Courtyard got disrupted with sharp snaps alike to gun reports because the boys had armed themselves with peelikkalkas but I, as usual, straggled behind the advanced trends in the flow of social life, which made me beg for instructions to manufacture a peelikkalka.

Take 15 cm. length of a narrow section (0.5 cm.) copper tube and bend it in the shape of letter L. The foot of the resulting L is flattened with a hammer.

Through the remaining orifice, pore a small amount of molten lead into the tube to form a smooth leaden bottom at the bend point.

Find a thick long nail reaching the leaden bottom and still sticking out from the tube for at least 5 cm. and bend the nail at 4 cm. from its head (you've got another L now).

Insert the nail into the tube (the contraption resembles the left bracket "[", or right bracket "]", depending on your point of view) and as a result, you have a working piston-cylinder shebang.

Connect the bent nail head and the flattened tube foot using a rubber band like that in underpants, now the whole construction looks like a small bow and your peelikkalka is ready.

Pull the nail halfway out from the tube, the tension of the band forces the nail rest against the copper wall of the tube at the point to which you pulled the nail out.

Squeeze the peelikkalka in your palm, the band pressed to the tube makes the nail slide inside and sharply hit the leaden bottom. So much for a trial blank shot.

Now, it remains only to load the firearms, for which purpose the nail is fully taken out and the tube loaded with scrapings of sulfur from a couple of matches heads.

Insert the nail back, cock it up with the band and "Hello, world!" with a live shot from your weapon. Bang!...

In the evening dark, the splash of flame shooting out from the tube orifice looks quite impressive.

On the whole, it's the same principle as in toy pistols with paper pistons, yet distinctly enhanced in decibels...

On learning the theory, I wanted to manufacture a peelikkalka of my own, but Dad did not have a copper tube of the right size at his work.

Still and all, I had it, probably, one of the boys gave me an odd one of his.

It seems that in an extra-curricular way, a schoolboy gets better training for real life...

As for mainstream schooling, our class was moved to a one-story building in the lower part of the school grounds, about a hundred meters from the principal building. Apart from our classroom, there were a couple of workshop rooms for Handicraft lessons equipped with vices and even a lathe in one of them. Because the school curriculum had more important subjects, that room was rarely open, two or three days a week to accommodate the grades visiting our territory.

Learning on the outskirts of the school grounds had lots of advantages.

During the breaks, you could have crazy races in the corridor without the risk of stumbling into any of the teachers who were patrolling only the main building.

Besides, the teachers entered our class no sooner than our self-appointed sentinel or two, playing outside, would race in with the announcement which subject was heading to us from up there. And a look-out guard was simply the must for not to be caught at bullying a socket on the classroom wall into whose holes with 220 V we stuck the legs of radio-electronic resistances. In the resulting short circuit, the resistance would burst and spit around indignant sparks of blinding flame.

(...now I'm just bewildered why none of us had ever got electroshocked. It seems, the mains sockets in the room were too human...)

Life was changing in our house too.

The Zimins family left when Stepan was made redundant because Nikita Khrushchev, when on the post of the major ruler of the USSR, promised the Western countries drastic cuts in the contingent of the Soviet Army reducing it to the meager twenty millions of servicemen. Soon after that, he was made to retire, yet the new ruler kept the promise true and the reduction policies affected even our Object.

Besides the Zimins, the tenants from the apartment beneath us left also. Their grown-up daughter Julia presented us, three children from the upper floor, with her album of matchbox stickers collection.

At those times matchboxes were made not of cardboard with printed pictures on it, but of very thin, one-layer, plywood which was covered with blue tissue and the matchbox top was mounted with one or another sticker portraying the famous ballet dancer Ulanova or some sea animal, or a hero astronaut in it. People collected matchbox stickers just like the post-stamp hobbyists, only, first, you had to peel them off a box soaked in water and then, of course, to dry.

Julia's collection was subdivided into sections: sports, aviation, Hero Cities, and so on. Of course, all three of us were delighted with so generous a gift and continued the picturesque hobbyhorse...

In place of Yura Zimin, another Yura became my friend who had a different family name, yet, like the previous Yura, Yura Nikolaenko was also a neighbor, a more distant one though, living not on the same landing, yet in the same Block.

As the snow filled the forest, we ventured out there in search of foxholes or, at least, to catch an odd hare. We had pretty good chances of success because we were joined by a lowlander-boy who brought a dog living in the yard of their wooden house. Only he was too greedy to share the linen rope tied to the dog's collar and yanked it himself.

In the forest though, the dog began to drag him forward and backward over the snowdrifts with lots of hare footprints. Yura and I were running behind not to miss out on the moment of catching a hare.

Then we noticed that the dog was paying no attention to the hare footprints but constantly sniffing for something else. Finally, he started to excitedly dig into a tall snowdrift.

Anticipating that the dog would dig out a fox burrow whose scent he nosed through the snow, we armed ourselves with sticks to meet the beast.

However, from under the snow, the dog pulled out a big old bone, and we stopped hunting...

In the winter holidays, many children of my age were invited to a neighboring corner house in the Courtyard, where some newly arrived tenants celebrated the birthday of their daughter, my future classmate. She looked like Malvina from the Golden Key tale, only her hair was neither blue nor curly, but straight.

After the guests finished all of the lemonade on the big table, the beautiful girl shared her memories of the place she lived before, where she was, like, Queen of the Courtyard and the boys living there were her pages, sort of...

Probably, I caught cold by the holidays' end and started school later than my classmates because I could not understand what was happening that morning when I finally came to our classroom.

The lessons had not begun yet and the newcomer Malvina-like girl appeared in the doorway after me. Like all the schoolgirls at any grade in those times, she wore the compulsory uniform in Queen Victoria's style – a dark brown dress with a white lace collar and a black apron on copious straps over her shoulders.

Stepping on the threshold, she stopped expectantly. The next moment there sounded a multi-voiced hue and cry, "The Cow of the Courtyard!"

She dropped her school bag on the floor and, wrapping her arms around her head, ran along the aisle between the desks, while everyone else—both the boys and the girls—blocked her way, hooting and yelling something in her ears, and Yura Nikolaenko ran behind her and rubbed himself at her back, like dogs do, until she sat down at her desk and dropped her face into her hands.

The mayhem ceased only when a teacher entered the classroom with a question, "What's going on here?", she was perplexed no less than me.

The girl ran out of the classroom without even picking her schoolbag up from the floor.

The next day she never showed up and we had a class meeting attended, instead of her, by her father who was red in the face and shouting that we were a bunch of scoundrels and pinched his daughter by the chest. He demonstrated with his hands where exactly were applied the pinches.

Then our Mistress spoke to the meeting that it was a disgrace for pioneers to stain themselves with goading their classmates the way we did because the Malvina-like girl was also a pioneer like us.

And I felt ashamed even though I hadn't pinched nor goaded anyone.

The beautiful girl never more appeared in our class, probably, she was transferred to the parallel one.

_(..."the crowd is a merciless beast..."_ , as runs a line from Avetic Isahakian's poem about Abu-Lala, which I learned even before I read it...)

Individual cruelty is no better than the collective one.

In spring I got another deep scratch when witnessing an example of maternal pedagogy.

The empty afternoon Courtyard was entered, between our house and the corner building, by a woman heading to the buildings on the opposite side. Behind her, a six-year-old girl ran and sobbed holding her arm outstretched to the women, who kept repeating the same words with the voice hoarse from her non-stop wail and cry, "Mom, gimme your hand! Mom, gimme your hand!"

The rasping shrieks somehow reminded me of Masha's screeching, when they came to slaughter her at Grandma Katya's in Konotop.

The woman never slowed down only time and again looked back to lash with a thin rod the girl's outstretched hand. The kid would respond with a little louder shriek but neither take away her hand nor stop crying, "Mom, gimme your hand!"

They crossed the yard and went into their staircase-entrance leaving me beset with the unanswerable question – where could such fascist mothers be in our country from?.

Between the left wing of the school building and the tall openwork fence of planks that separated the school grounds from the surrounding forest, there were located beds of the school agronomy lot.

It's highly unlikely that the beds of loam mixed with withered pine needles, dropping from several pines left inside the school territory, could yield a crop of any sort. However, when they announced to our class that everyone should come to school on Sunday for turning dirt in the agronomy lot, I dutifully showed up at the appointed hour.

The morning was overcast, so Mom even tried to talk me into staying home. Indeed, everything turned out just as she had predicted – not a single soul around. But maybe they would come yet?

I hung about the locked school for a while, then bypassed the dismal agronomy lot and went down to the one-story building of our class plus the workshop in the lower part of the school grounds.

Opposite the building, there was a squat brick warehouse with two gates locked as anything else in the empty school grounds whose silent stillness could be simply felt. However, climbing up to the roof of the warehouse from the steep hillock behind it was not a big deal.

The slight slant of the lean-to roof was covered with black roofing felt. I walked around the roof square to each of its corners, then looked back at the mute school. Still nobody. Okay, five minutes more and I'd breeze off.

At that moment the sun peeped out through the clouds making the wait not so gloomy because I marked light, transparent, wisps of steam rising from the black roof here and there. "Aha, the sun heats it!" guessed I.

What's more, while drying up, the black felt began to develop streaks of dark-gray color, which widened, expanded, joined together and kept me enthralled with watching that gradual expansion of the solar possessions.

I knew perfectly well already that no one would show up and I could just go home, yet let that stretch of wet roofing felt would also turn dry-gray making the Isle of Dry expand to the corner edge of the roof.

I returned home by the midday mealtime and didn't tell Mom that the sun had recruited me to the ranks of his comrades-in-arms...

End spring, Dad was going fishing out of Zone and he agreed to take me along if I procure worms for bait. I knew some lavish spots for worm-digging and brought home a whole tangle of them in a rusty tin container from canned beef.

We left very early in the morning, and near Checkpoint, two more men joined us, with the same papers of permission to leave Zone till six in the evening. Beyond the white Checkpoint gate, we turned right and went through the forest.

We were walking, and walking, and walking and the forest never ended. At times the footpath got near the edge of the forest but then again took us back into the wilderness.

I walked patiently because Dad had warned me even before sending after the warms there was a walk of eight kilometers, and I hastily answered then that it was okay with me, yes, I could do that. So I just walked on, though my fishing pole and the tin can with bait grew very heavy.

Finally, we went out to a forest lake and the fishermen told it was the Sominsky which I couldn't recognize though it was the lake where I once learned to swim.

We walked along a grassy promontory at the end of which there was a real raft. One of the fishermen remained on the shore, and we three boarded the raft that was made of logs from deciduous trees with smooth green bark.

Dad and the other fisherman pushed the raft off, stepped onto it and kept jabbing slowly the lake bottom with long poles until we got some thirty meters away from the shore. There we stopped and began fishing.

The raft logs were not close to each other and through the gaps between them, there were seen the openwork traverse logs drowned in the pitch-black depth, so we had to move carefully.

Our three fishing poles overhung three different sides of the raft. The catch was not so as big as promised by the vigorous resistance to the pulled line, and you should be careful taking the fish off the hook because around their muzzles as well as on back fins there stuck out very prickly spikes.

Dad said it was the ruff, and the fisherman added that the fish soup of them was especially delicious.

Later, when we got ashore and cooked the soup in a pot hung over the fire I, of course, ate all of it but couldn't decide how delicious it was because the steaming soup was way too hot.

After the meal, the fishermen advised there was no hope of good catch anymore because at that time of day fish went sleeping. So, they went under the trees and slept too, the fishermen and my Dad. When everyone woke up, we slowly started back home.

Returning, we didn't take the shortcut footpath through the forest, choosing to walk along the low hills and valleys because of the papers permitted to stay away till the evening.

From the top of one of the hills, we saw a small lake in the distance, it was perfectly round, rimmed with the growth of reeds.

When we reached it, Dad wanted to take a swim at any rate, although the fishermen tried to talk him out of the idea. One of them told it was too often that in the round lake, called Witch's Eye, someone got drowned caught with its duckweed.

But Dad doffed his clothes, all the same, grabbed hold of the stern of a skiff by the shore and, kicking up foamy splashes, moved off to the reeds by the opposite shore. Halfway through, he remembered the watch on his wrist, took it off and hung on a nail in the stern.

When he came back in the same manner, the duckweed clung all over his shoulders in long thickly spliced garlands.

He was ashore already and putting on his clothes when we saw a woman in a long skirt of villager womenfolks, who ran across the slanted field with indistinct yells. She ran up to us but didn't say anything new and only repeated what we had heard from the fellow-fisherman.

Near Checkpoint, we were caught in a spell of bad weather and the rain thoroughly drenched us before we got home, but no one fell ill after...

With bicycles, I palled up since early childhood. I can't even remotely remember my first tricycle, but some photos confirm: here it is with the pedals on the front wheel and me, straggling it, a three-year-old fat little man in a closely fitting skull cap.

However, the next one I recollect pretty well – a red three-wheeler with the chain drive – because I often had to argue with my brother and sister whose turn it was to take a ride. Later, Dad reassembled it into a two-wheeler but, after my fifth grade, the bicycle became too small for me and was hand-me-downed to the younger for good.

And then Dad got somewhere a real bike for me. Yes, it was a second-hand one, but not a bike for ladies or some kind of "Eaglet" for grown-up kids.

One evening after his work, Dad even tried to teach me riding it in the Courtyard, but without his supporting hand on the saddle, I would fall on one side or the other.

Dad got tired of my clumsiness, he said, "Learn it yourself!" and went home.

In a couple of days, I could already ride the bike. However, I didn't get the nerve to throw my leg over the saddle and perch up properly, instead, I passed my leg through the frame and rode standing on the pedals, which caused the bike to run askew.

But I got ashamed when I saw a boy who, though younger than me, was not afraid to race along with his bike, step onto a pedal and flung the other leg over the saddle to the second pedal. His body length did not allow to use the saddle without losing touch with the pedals and turning them he rubbed his crotch against the frame which also served him for sitting upon with his left or right thigh, alternatively. On so brave shortie's background, riding the bike "under the frame" was quite a shame...

And at last, after so many tries and falls ending both with and without bruises or scratches, I did it!

Wow! How swiftly carried me the bike above the ground – no one would ever catch up be they even running! And – most important – riding a bicycle was such an easy thing!

I rode it non-stop driving along the concrete paths in the Courtyard, orbiting its two wooden gazebos until, a bit warily, I steered it out, to the road of concrete slabs surrounding the two Gorka blocks...

Later, becoming an experienced rider, I started mastering of bikerobatics – "riding without the handles", when you take your hands off the steer and pilot the bicycle with feeding your body weight to the side you want it to turn to. And the bike understood me!.

Another achievement of that summer became learning to keep eyes open in the water.

The dam where I once slipped off the slab was restored to bring about a wide bathing pool and numerous beach-goers.

Among us, boys, the favorite game in the water was "spotting" where the "it" should catch up with and touch one of the fleeing players. You can't walk through the water as quickly as a swimmer. Besides, a player can take a dive and underwater change the direction of his escape, and it's hard to guess where he would come back to the surface for a breather. Ever before, when plunging in the water, I firmly closed my eyes but that way you can't catch a glimpse of white heels kicking full ahead.

True enough, in the ever-present yellowish twilight underwater, you can't see very far, but sounds are heard way more clearly if you sit down there and knock, say, two gravels against each other.

However, you cannot sit underwater for a long time – the air in your lungs pulls you up to the surface and there's no other way to resist it but rowing with your hands so the gravels should be dropped...

My parents' leaves did not coincide that summer so they went for their vacations in turn.

First, Dad visited his native village of Kanino in the Ryazan region. He took me with him there, after a strict warning that on the way I should not ever tell anyone that we lived at the Atomic Object.

At the station of Bologoye, we had a long wait for the train to Moscow. Leaving me seated on our suitcase in the station waiting room, Dad went to punch the tickets. On a nearby bench, a girl was sitting with an open book in her lap. I got up and neared the girl to look in the book over her shoulder. It was The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

I read a couple of paragraphs of the familiar lines I liked so much. She kept reading and didn't pay any attention to me standing behind the bench back.

I wanted to speak up to her, but I did not know what to say. That that was a good book? That I had also read it?

While I was looking for the right words to say, her adults came and announced that their train was arriving. They grabbed their trunks and went out to the platform to board the train. She never looked back...

Then my Dad returned with the punched tickets. At my request, he bought me a book from a bookstall about a Hungarian boy who later became a youth and fought against the Austrian invaders of his homeland.

When the ping-ponging echo from the loudspeaker announced the arrival of our train, we went out to the platform. A ten-or-so-year-old boy passed by.

"See?" said Dad to me. "That's what poverty is!"

I looked after the boy who walked away, and noticed the rough patches in the back of his pants...

In Moscow, we arrived the next morning.

I wanted to see the capital of our country from its very beginning and kept asking when Moscow would, at last, start, until the conductor said that we were in the city already.

But behind the pane in the car's window, there were the same shabby log huts as at the stations of Valdai, only much more of them and closer to each other, and they did not want to end in any way. And only when our train pulled in under the high arc of the station roof, I believed that it was Moscow.

We went on foot to the other station which was very close. There Dad again punched the tickets but that time we had to wait until evening for the train, so he handed the suitcase over to the storage room and we boarded an excursion bus going to the Kremlin.

Inside the Kremlin walls, they warned that we shouldn't take any pictures whatsoever. Dad had to demonstrate there was no camera in the leather case hanging from his shoulder but his homemade radio, so they allowed only now I had to carry it on.

There were white-walled houses in the Kremlin and dark fir trees, but quite a few of them, although thick-trunked and tall.

The excursion was brought to the Czar Bell with its chopped out wall. It happened when the Czar Bell fell from the belfry and couldn't ring ever since, which was a pity.

And when we came to the Czar Cannon, I instantly climbed the pile of the large polished cannonballs under her nose and shoot my head into the muzzle. It looked like insides of a huge pipe with lots of dust on the circular wall.

"Whose kid is that?! Take him away!!" cried some man outside the cannon, running up from the nearest fir tree.

Dad admitted that I was his and, until we left the Kremlin, he had to hold me by the hand, though it was hot.

When the bus returned to the railway station, Dad said that he needed to buy a watch, although he did not have much money. So, we went to the store where there were lots of different watches under the glass of the countertop, and Dad asked me which one to buy.

Remembering his complaint that he was short of money, I pointed at the cheapest – for seven rubles, but Dad did not obey and bought an expensive wristwatch – for twenty-five...

In the village of Kanino, we lived in the log hut of Grandma Martha, made up of one large room with two windows and a high Russian stove.

Behind the hut, there was a log lean-to attached to it. It was empty, strewn with wisps of old hay, and smelled with dust.

In that lean-to, I found three books: a historical novel about the general Bagration in the war of 1812 against Napoleon invasion, a long story about establishing the Soviet rule among the Indians of the Chukchi Peninsula, and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Once, my Dad's brother and sister came to visit, they both lived in the same village but were too busy at the collective farm, kolkhoz. Grandma Martha cooked a round yellow omelet for the occasion; I don't remember the meals on other days...

The village of Kanino was divided into two parts by the hollow with a slowly rolling, broad and noiseless, creek. The banks of it were one wall of an uninterrupted willow thicket. And the stream was pretty shallow – a little bit above the knees, with a pleasant sandy bottom. I liked to wander in its slow current.

One day Dad took me to the Mostya river. It was a very long walk but in the end, there was enough of the river to swim from one grassy bank to the other. There were many people on both banks too, probably, from other villages.

On our way back we saw a combine harvesting wheat in the field. We stopped at the edge of the field to watch and when the harvester drove past to the other edge, Dad spat and angrily said, "Phui, hooey!"

As it turned out, the combine driver was mowing the shoots at their tops, so as to finish his job quicker, but when he saw a stranger in a white tank top together with a boy of urban appearance, he decided my Dad was some chief from the district administration on his vacation and, driving past us, he mowed the shoots close to the ground...

Near Grandma Martha's lean-to, there appeared a large haystack and when Dad together with his brother began some repair work inside her log hut, Grandma Martha moved to spend nights in the lean-to, and the bed for me and Dad was made atop the haystack.

Sleeping up there was convenient and pleasant because of the smell of withering grass, but a bit unusual and even scary for all the stars above watching you all the time. Besides, the roosters started crying before the dawn and then you had just to lay in the twilight before dropping off again...

One day I went up the creek, as far as another village, there was an earthen dam built by that village boys to make a pond for swimming. But after that, I fell ill and was taken to the same upstream village because only there was infirmary with three beds.

On one of those three beds, I was ill almost a whole week reading The Standard Bearers by Gonchar and eating the strawberry jam brought by Dad's sister, Aunt Sasha, or maybe it was his brother's wife, Aunt Anna, because they came together to see me.

So we spent Dad's vocation and returned to the Object...

Soon after our return, Mom took Sasha and Natasha with her and went on her vacation to Konotop.

Again, Dad and I kept the company of two. He cooked tasty pasta soup the Navy way and explained things about the seamen life.

For instance, on ships, many commands were given by the bugle calls and those signals were not just "du-du-du-du du-du-du-du" as made by a pioneer bugler, when marching together with a drummer after the Pioneer Company Banner on some ceremonial line-up. The ship bugle played a different melody for each call. At midday meal time the bugle sang, "Take your spoon, and your mess-tin, quickly run to the half-deck".

The mess-tin is a pot with a lid which they fill for a sailor with his grub to eat, and the half-deck is that place on the ship where the cook ladles meal out.

Dad taught me some sea words too. "Topmast" meant the highest point on a boat.

When they wanted to play a trick on a young sailor, they would give him a teapot and order to fetch tea from the topmast. The greenhorn unaware, of course, where it was, walked about the boat asking the way. The seasoned sailors directed him from one place to another or to the engine room, just for fun...

And Dad also told that some _zeks_ , who spent too many years in Zone, could no longer live in freedom. One recidivist, on serving his term, pleaded Zone Chief not to let him out and keep on in. But Zone Chief replied, "The law is the law! Get lost!"

In the evening, the recidivist was brought back to Zone because he killed a man in a nearby village. And the murderer cried, "I told you, Chief! Because of you, I took an innocent soul!"

At those words, Dad's eyes looked sideways and up, and even the sound of his voice changed strangely...

Some books I re-read more than once, not immediately, of course, but after some time.

That day I was re-reading the book of stories about revolutionary Babushkin, which I was awarded at school for good study and active participation in public life.

He was a common laborer and worked for rich plant owners before becoming a revolutionary...

When Dad called me for the midday meal, I went to the kitchen, got seated at the table and, eating the pasta soup, shared, "And did you know, that the workers at the Putilov factory once were forced to work for forty hours at a stretch?"

To which Dad replied, "Did you know that your Mom went to Konotop with another man?"

I raised my head from above the plate. Dad was sitting in front of untouched soup and looking at the kitchen window blinds.

I got scared, and started to cry, and shouted, "I will kill him!"

But Dad, still looking at the blinds, answered, "No, Seryozha, we don't need no killing."

His voice sounded a little nasal as that of the recidivist murderer who wanted to stay in Zone.

Then Dad got to the Detachment's Hospital and for two days the neighbor woman, who had moved in the rooms of the redundant Zimins, was coming to our kitchen to cook meals for me.

On the third day, Mom came back together with my sister and brother...

Mom went to see Dad at the Detachment's Hospital and took me with her. Dad came out to the yard in the pajamas to which they changed all the patients in the Detachment's Hospital.

The parents sat on a bench and told me to go and play somewhere. I walked away but not too far, and I heard as Mom was quickly telling something to Dad in a low voice.

He looked straight in front of himself and repeated the same words, "The kids will understand when they grow up."

(...when I grew up, I understood that some informer had sent a letter from Konotop, only that time directly to my Dad instead of the Special Department.

What for? By telling on my Mom, the rat gained no prospect of better housing conditions or other improvements in their day-to-day life.

Or maybe just out of habit? Or maybe that was not a neighbor at all?

Some people, when not happy with their lives, think it will help if someone else does badly. I do not think it works, but I know that there are such thinkers.

And I never asked my brother or sister about the man who went with them to Konotop that summer. Nonetheless, now I know that so it was.

Mom built her defense on Dad's frivolous behavior during his vacation the previous year, when he went alone to a Crimean sanatorium on the admission card from the trade-union. He got so light-minded there that never thought to get rid of his light-mindedness evidence, and Mom had to wash them that evidence out from his underpants in the washing machine "Oka"...)

Then Dad left the Hospital and we started to live on further...

At school, our sixth grade was moved back onto the second floor in the main building. With reading books and watching the television I had no time for home assignments but still remained a "good learner" just out of teachers' inertia.

In the school social life, I played the role of a horse in the performance staged by the pioneers of our school. The role I got because Dad made a big horse head from cardboard and on stage, I represented the horse's head and forelegs. My arms and shoulders were hidden under a large colorful shawl, which also covered one more boy who crouched behind me gripping my belt because he played the role of the hinder-parts.

The horse did not say anything on the stage and appeared there only as the nightmare to scare an idler in his sleep and make him start to study well. We performed in the school gym, and in the Regiment Club, and even went on a tour out of Zone – to the club of Pistovo village. Everywhere, the appearance of the horse sparked vivacity among the audience...

Besides the movies at the Regiment Club, I sometimes went to the House of Officers, asking for money for the ticket from my parents. It was there that I watched the French adaptation of The Three Musketeers for the first time.

Before the show, bad rumors circulated the thick crowd gathered in the vestibule hall, they murmured that the film had not been brought and they would show some other flicks instead, so that not to return money for the sold tickets.

On the wall of the vestibule there hung a huge portrait of Marshal Malinovsky with all his orders and medals on. The collection was too huge for his tunic leaving no vacant spot on it hidden under all kinds of medals and orders, like an over-all coat of mail, hung down even below the waist.

Looking at the chain-mailed marshal, I thought that I wouldn't watch anything else if even they did not give back the ticket money.

But the alarm turned out to be false and the happiness, spiced with the sound of ringing swords, lasted the whole two sequels, and in color too!.

The exploration of the Detachment's Library was marked with new achievements. Not only that I had long ceased to get frightened by the pictures in the wide hallway, but I also became a seasoned shelf-hanger.

As the shelving of books crowded quite close to each other, I got the hang of climbing to the very top for which purpose the shelves both sides of the narrow passages became, like, convenient ladder-rungs.

I wouldn't say that on the previously unreachable shelves there were some special books, not at all, however, the acquired skills of mountaineering increased my self-esteem like after that occasion when Natasha called me from my sofa-readings because there was an owl in the basement of the corner building.

Of course, I immediately ran after her. The basement corridor was illuminated by a single bulb that somehow managed to survive the harsh times of the crook wars. At the end of the corridor under the opening to the outside pit, there sat a large bird on the floor, much bigger than an owl; some real eagle owl it was who angrily shook his eared head with the crooked nose, no wonder that the kids did not dare to approach.

My response was prompt and deft, without a moment's hesitation, as if handling maverick eagle owls was my daily routine, I took my shirt off and threw it over the bird's head. Then, grabbing at the clawed legs, I lifted the bird from the floor, the owl didn't resist under the cover of my tartan shirt.

Where to now? Of course, I took it home, especially since I was not fully clad.

Mom didn't agree to keep such a big monster at home although our neighbors, the Savkins, had a hefty crow in their apartment. Mom answered that Grandmother Savkin's main job was wiping up the crow guano all over their apartment all day long, and who would do it in ours with all of us at work and school?

Reluctantly, I promised to take the eagle owl next morning to Living Nature Room at school where there lived a squirrel and a hedgehog in their cages. Till then, he was allowed to sit in the bathroom.

For the eagle owl's refreshment, I took to the bathroom a slice of bread and a saucer filled with milk. He sat in the corner on the tiled floor and did not even look at the food on the floor tiles. Going out, I turned the light off, in the hope that being a night predator, he'd find it even in the dark.

First thing in the morning, I checked and saw that the eagle owl hadn't pecked a crumble of his supper. He neither partook of it while I had breakfast although the light in the bathroom was left on for the purpose, so, I clutched his bare legs and carried him to school.

Probably, owls do not like hanging upside down because that eagle owl constantly tried to bend his head up as far as let by the neck. At times, I gave my schoolbag to my brother and carried the bird with both hands in the normal position.

When from the hillock top opened the distant view of the school, the owl's head dropped and I realized that he was dead. I felt even relieved that he wouldn't have to live in the captivity of the smelly Living Nature Room.

Veering from the path, I hid him in the bushes because once I saw a hawk hanged from a thick bough of the old tree on the Bugorok-Knoll. I didn't want them feathered or somehow mutilate my owl, even though dead as he was...

Later, Mom said that the bird died, probably, of old age that's why he sought refuge in the basement.

(...but I think all that happened so that we would meet each other. He was a messenger to me, only I haven't yet understood the message. Birds are not just birds and ancient augurs knew that well...

My house in Stepanakert is located on the slope of a deep ravine behind the Maternity Hospital. It's the last house in a dead-end, a very quiet place indeed.

Once, coming home I saw a small bird, the size of a sparrow, in the withered late-autumn grass by the footpath. It trailed through the brittle grass bunches with fumbling unsteady steps, as if severely wounded, dragging the wings in its wake.

Giving it a passing look, I went on, burdened with too many problems of my own.

The next day I learned that right about that moment a young man was butchered a little deeper in the ravine in a brawl of dope-fiend bros.

That small bird was the soul of the murdered and there's no chance of making me change this my belief...)

In the autumn after the separate summer vacations, the senior part of our family became fans of mushroom harvesting.

Of course, the mushrooms were at the Object everywhere, just take a couple of steps to any side away from the school path and there's russula growth for you, or solid portabella, long-legged enoki, let alone oily agarics; it's only that too busy passers-by had no time for mushrooms. But when they give you the permission paper to leave Zone for a whole Sunday and also provide a truck to take the mushroom-pickers to the out-of-Zone forests, the "noiseless hunting" takes on much more attractive looks. Probably, all those conveniences were always there for the Object dwellers, only my parents did not use them until they needed a firmer reconciliation after the split-up summer.

(...though I did not think about such things at that time and was just all too happy to go with my parents to the forest for mushroom harvesting...)

Specially for those Sundays, Dad made of cardboard three pails, lightweight and capacious.

In the forest, the mushroom-pickers parted and wanderer everyone by themselves at times exchanging distant echoes of "ahoy!" by which you couldn't guess who was it.

I liked alerted roaming in the silent autumn forest wet from the drizzle and fog. Of course, we didn't pick too brittle russulas, but portabella or agarics were a good find. Dad made a small knife for each of us, so as not to spoil the mycelium, besides, on the cut, it's seen at once whether the mushroom had worms.

The best sort of the mushrooms were "the whites", or porcini, but I never came across any of them. The unfamiliar ones I took to Dad, and he explained that those were shiitake, or morels or simply poisonous throwaways.

At home, the mushrooms were poured into a big washing basin and kept overnight in the water, then Mom cooked or marinated them. All that was delicious, no doubt, but hunting them in the woods gave more delights...

One Sunday when the parents went on a visit somewhere, the three of us started chasing each other all over the apartment, just for fun. The merrymaking was cut short by a knock on the door; on the landing, there stood the new neighbor from the first floor who said that our parents' absence was not a reason to kick up such a bedlam, and when back they'd be informed we couldn't behave if left alone.

Later in the evening, Natasha came running from the landing with the alert alarm: the parents were coming home already but stopped on the first floor by the neighbors from the apartment under ours. Oh-oh, we're going to get hell!

How come she was at the right time in the right place? Quite easy. The landing was, like, the apartment's extension wide for us to play balloon-volleyball, and Mom even started to use it as a gym, going out there in the evenings, when she was not at work, to jump a skipping rope. We followed her example, but I wasn't as good at it as Natasha who practiced much oftener, and so she did at the moment of our parents' intercepted return.

When they entered the hallway, Dad's face was very angry. Without taking off his coat, he headed to the kitchen and brought a stool to the parents' room, where he moved the rug aside and smashed the stool against the floor. "Keep quiet, eh?!" shouted he to the floorboards and squarely banged them once again with the stool's seat, "Is it okay now?"

I realized that we would not be punished, but something still was somehow not right...

When leaving for school, we took with us sandwiches which Mom wrapped in newspaper sheets so that during a break we would take them out of our schoolbags and eat. For Sasha and Natasha, she put two sandwiches in one package because they studied in the same class. And before leaving for school, we also had breakfast in the kitchen.

However, on that particular Saturday, I left without my schoolbag and alone because that day the senior classes were having a military game for which reason the junior school kids classes were canceled.

The game participants were subdivided into two groups: "the Blues" and "the Greens", and for the start, they were to march into the forest in different directions. The goal was to track down the opponent forces, surprise them, and capture their banner.

Each trooper had to come with paper shoulder straps whose color denoted the group they were from. A gamester with the shoulder straps torn off became "killed" while missing only one shoulder strap made them a prisoner of war...

That morning, I came to the kitchen late for breakfast because normally I got up being awakened by the rise of the younger ones, but they enjoyed their day-off at the moment. Secondly, the previous night I was till late sewing the shoulder straps onto my jacket with diligently short and frequent stitches so that they would sit tight and not be easily torn off, and went to bed about midnight...

Now, Mom was already leaving for her work and said there remained some pasta cooked for the previous day dinner or, if so be my wish, I could boil an egg for my breakfast.

I reminded her that I knew nothing about cooking eggs, but she answered it was as easy as pie: to have a soft-boiled egg you boil it for a minute and a half, and three-minute non-stop boiling makes it hard-boiled.

She even brought the alarm-clock from their room and put it on the windowsill next to the mushroom jar, and took a hurried leave...

Such three-liter jars were kept in almost every kitchen at the Object and they were filled with a mushroom that had nothing to do with the forest. It looked like some greenish slime upon the water in the jar, but in spite of ugly looks, it turned the water into a tasty drink reminiscent of effervescent kvass.

When the jar contents were at the end with the mushroom wisps scratching the bottom, the jar was simply refilled with water and put aside for a couple of days to get the drink again. Women were gladly sharing pieces of the mushroom among themselves because when grown too thick it left no room for refilling the jar...

So, marking the time by the alarm clock next to the mushroom jar, I poured water into the small pan indicated by Mom before leaving, loaded it with an egg, lit the blueish springy fire in the gas stove and put the pan on it...

Exactly a minute and a half later, the water around the egg did not look like being hot, so I decided, okay, let it be a hard-boiled egg.

After additional one-and-a-half minutes, some scanty vapors did start to rise from the pan, besides, the pan's walls beneath the water surface developed lots of small bubbles, and I turned the gas off because I had exact instructions on how to cook boiled eggs...

(...the saying that _" the first pancake is lumpy"_ can be safely expanded with "the first boiled egg is a messy liquid"...)

The military game participants were mostly in sportswear and noticeably reluctant to enter the school building. So, all crowded together in the yard, in separate small groups. In the one I was with, everybody appreciated the minuscule stitches that kept my shoulder straps in place.

I proudly patted the one on my left shoulder – no way to grab at it, right? Nothing like by those boys who fixed theirs with just a couple of stitches and now their shoulder straps stuck out like a bridge simply asking to be torn off with just your small finger.

At that moment some unfamiliar boy, maybe from the parallel class, started a scrap. He spread me on the ground and tore my shoulder straps in tatters.

(...I never knew how to fight, neither do I now.

Most likely, I just called him "fool!" and ran away into the forest – back home...)

In the forest, I took my jacket off. Instead of the shoulder straps, there only remained a dashed, frame-like, paper-strip, under the tight close stitches with a doubled black thread.

I plucked the paper scraps out and scattered over the fallen foliage.

Maybe I even cried full of resentment at being killed so unruly, prematurely, before the start of combat actions, though I eagerly dreamed of capturing the enemy headquarters...

For some period, my favorite pastime at classes became producing the blueprint drawings of my secret shelter located in a cave inside a mighty impenetrable cliff like that one lived by people in The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

Yet, unlike their case, you could get to my cave only by the underground passage which began far from the cliff, in the depths of the surrounding forest.

Well, and the cave itself had an additional passage upward, into a smaller cavity equipped with narrow crevices in the wall to peek out and see what's going on around...

A grim mask alike to those stone idols in the Easter Island decorated the butt-end of the pencil which I drew my designs with.

The skill of pencil carving was also obtained at school, it's as easy as pie, and all you needed was a razor blade.

In the pencil's butt-end, scrape two lengthwise grooves, about one centimeter each, to produce the ridge of the would-be nose. Connect the grooves with a deep cross cut to mark the nose tip.

Now, about a centimeter down the nose start a wider scrape towards the cross-cut, it makes the nose stick out and also becomes the lower part of the face.

The notch across that wider scrape represents the thin-lipped mouth, and two short slits in the long grooves on both sides of the nose are the idol's eyes.

Only you should be careful about handling the razor blade, it's awesomely sharp and would cut your fingers tips too easily...

The carving instrument was picked up from the tiny blue-paper pack of blades that Dad kept in the bathroom. The pack's top bore the neat drawing of a black sailboat above the inscription "Neva". And each blade in the pack was wrapped in a separate blue envelope embellished with the same sailboat and inscription...

With the start of winter, the skin on my hands began to peel off. At first, there formed some small spots of dry skin and, when rubbed and pulled at, it would go off in patches.

I didn't tell anyone about it and in a week took off all of the skin there, like a pair of tattered gloves, up to the wrists. Only the palms' skin remained in place. And beneath the peeled off patches, there was new skin again...

(...I have no idea if there is some scientific explanation for such a case, yet, in my humble opinion, the phenomenon was caused by the book which I met on the shelves of the Detachment's Library titled The Man Is Changing His Skin.

I never borrowed nor skimmed it but the title was remembered and, being an impressionable child, I checked the possibility of the announced change...)

Both naivety and impressionability were my innate Achilles' heels.

Impressed by a record on a 33 RPM disc, I felt a naive desire to write down the lyrics of the song, although it was in a foreign language.

My attempt at copying reached no further than the first line of which result I also had grave doubts. When played, the line distinctly sounded as "azza latsmaderi", yet at the following audition it somehow changed into "esso dazmaderi" and no matter how long I listened to the record those variants elusively changed each other preventing final decision. But it's not possible that a recorded disc would swap the words on the fly! Because of that consideration, the project was never accomplished.

(...many years later I heard the song again and recognized it when Louis Armstrong sang up: _" Yes, sir, that's my lady_...)

The skating rink across the road from the very start was meant for hockey playing. Over time, it got bounded with a compact fence of planks, and two hockey goals popped up at the field's opposite ends.

After snowfalls, the boys cleared the field with a pair of wide metal sheets resembling the bulldozer blade. Each shield had a long horizontal handle above it and no less than two or three boys were needed to push the contraption.

The snow was moved to the fence opposite the locker-room shed and shoved out of the field with large snow shovels of plywood. That's why behind that fence there accumulated a tall snow ridge all along with the rink.

Those artificial hills of snow were burrowed through by boys and became an ever-growing system of tunnels with ramifications, dead ends and stuff as if following the blueprint drawings of my secret shelter.

In the evenings, we played hide-and-seek in those tunnels filled with the ink-black darkness, because the posts with lit lamps were only along the fence on the locker room's side of the ice rink. But when you switched a flashlight inside a burrow there appeared white glacial walls containing numberless bright sparks in their murky depth...

The year was ending. In the tear-off calendar on the kitchen wall by the window, there remained but a few tiny-sized pages.

Such tear-off calendars were printed on as many pages as there were days in their year and initially the thick mass of hundreds of pages fixed with the glossy tin-strip of calender's back gave it a look of solid importance.

Each page bore its unique date in bold, as well as the time of sunrise and sunset on that particular day, in small print, followed by the symbols depicting the current phase of the moon, which all information was meant to be torn off and thrown away to keep apace with the time flow.

The data on the movements of celestial bodies were placed at the bottom of tiny pages yielding the center to the portrait of one or another Member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who was born on that day, and if the day lacked a Member's birthday, there was a portrait of this or that hero of the Civil War or of the Great Patriotic War. On the reverse side, you could read their biography, but briefly because of the petit page size.

Once in a month or two, you could come across a crossword in the calendar, besides, there were four dates printed in red because they were holidays: the New Year, May Day, the Great October Revolution Day, and the Constitution Day.

However, later Mom started to buy tear-off calendars for women, where instead of Members' portraits there were pictures of birch-trees upfront and the sewing patterns on the page back, or recipes for pies, and other useful tips.

From one of those tips, I learned how to wean your husband from his propensity for spirits:

"Pour a quantity of pulverized burnt cork into a glass of wine and treat your husband to it before the guests' arrival. When all got together, the burnt cork will show its effect, the drunkard will not be able to withstand the pressure of gases in his stomach and start to fart and feel ashamed before the guests which embarrassment will make him abandon the disgraceful habit."

I shared the method with Mom because at times she scolded Dad for his propensity. However, Mom was reluctant to use the advice.

(..I couldn't understand her then – why to complain if you don't want to eliminate the cause of discomfort?

Coming of age I understood my Mom, but now I cannot understand those who could print such idiocy.

You see, my understanding ability is like that crane from a fable wallowing in a marsh swamp – he pulls his neck out free, but a wing gets bogged down, the wing is out—oops!—a leg got stuck.

Or is it about my understanding only?..)

A week before the winter holidays Class Mistress announced that at the New Year Eve school party there would be held the contest for the best fancy dress so we should do our best to win it.

I was thrilled by the task at hand and right away conceived the idea of irresistible carnival dress – no bears or robots anymore, I'd dress up like a gypsy girl!

Mom laughed when I shared my plan, yet promised to help because she had connections at the Dancing Amateur Activities...

At my cautious inquiries in the class – what disguise they were planning for the contest, the boys invariably answered that no one cared about making any fancy dress and they would attend the party in their casual wear.

The dismal prospect distressed me because at a New Year party everything should be as in the movie "The Carnival Night" with streamers flying crisscross through the snowfall of confetti.

I tried to soothe myself with a thought that it was silly panicking just like before "The Three Musketeers" which show did take place, after all.

Well, and if the boys did not intend wearing fancy dresses, then there were other guys especially from the senior classes who you could rely on...

Mom made a mask for me as that of Mr. X in the movie "Mr. X", also of black velvet, like his, but added with black gauze down over the lips. Now, no one would recognize me because from the Dancing Amateur Activities Mom brought a real wig with a long black braid reaching to the waist, a red skirt, a fine blouse and a black shawl with big red flowers.

After I changed into all those things, Mom and her new woman-friend who moved into the Zimins' rooms laughed themselves to tears. Then they said, what if someone invited me to dance? I had to have some practice beforehand.

On their advice, I picked up a chair and slowly span with it under a waltz record. They laughed even more and said I needed female shoes, my boots did not suit the red skirt.

The shoes were also found but they had high heels because you couldn't wear sandals in winter. Walking on high heels was more than uncomfortable but Mom said, "Practice your patience, Cossack, and get trained while the time allows".

One hour before the New Year party, my carnival costume was packed in a large bag, and I ventured to school through the dark night forest.

At school, I sneaked up to the second floor, where even the light was not turned on, and in one of the dark classrooms, I changed into my fancy dress. Descending to the first floor, I held onto the railing because walking in high-heel shoes was no better than having skates on your feet.

Both the vestibule and the first-floor corridors were lighted rather scantily, yet there was enough illumination to see that everyone, including the guys from senior classes, wore, albeit not the school uniform, yet nothing like carnival costumes.

They all stood in small groups or ran back and forth and fell silent when I clap-clapped the shoe heels past them over the parquet flooring, then over the tiles of the vestibule and the following parquet in the next corridor. And where was the celebration then? Where were the streamers and confetti?.

A couple of senior boys talked to each other in a whisper and approached me, "Could you tell the future, gypsy girl?"

At that moment School Pioneer Leader appeared and took me with her to the gym.

The hall was crowded with rows of seats up to the New Year Tree and on both sides of it to accommodate the audience for the performance of a play on the stage. So, all my waltzing that chair at home was just useless, the school New Year party program foresaw no dancing whatsoever.

School Pioneer Leader seated me in the first row facing the still closed blue curtains. Then she left briefly and brought a masked girl in a Harlequin suit—another stupid fool like me. The girl was placed in the chair next to me, and we were the only mummers in the gym.

The curtain fell open and the ninth-graders presented their production of Cinderella. They had good costumes though, I especially liked the tartan cap of the Jester...

The performance ended, everyone started to clap and I realized that now even the Jester would change into a jacket and his pants.

I left the gym and went upstairs to the dark classroom, where I had left my clothes, and changed back. What a bliss it was to get rid of the hatefully painful high-heel shoes and get into my long-longed-for felt boots!

Exiting the school, I met my Mom and Natasha who came to admire my masquerade triumph. I briefly explained that there was no carnival, and we went home through the same night forest.

(...the main trick of being happy is simply to avoid looking back and let the memory do its job quickly – it will forget and erase your blunders, sorrows, and pains.

Just keep looking forward to pleasures, successes, and holidays...)

Though the New Year celebration party fell so flat, ahead still was the long winter holidays with seventeen TV sequels of "Captain Tankesh" where he'd ride his swift horse, and jingle his saber, and make fools of the Austrian occupants of his Hungarian Motherland.

In the parents' room, as always, the Christmas Tree was reaching the ceiling with the star on its top, and among the shiny decorations there also hung chocolate candies "Batons" and "Bear Cub in the Forest".

After the lead balloon carnival, life smiled again...

On the New Year Eve, Dad worked the night shift so that the garland lights would not fade in the Christmas trees at homes in the Object. And on the first morning of the New Year, Mom left for her work so that water would flow steadily from the kitchen taps...

That morning I woke late when Dad was already home from work. He asked who visited the previous night, and I answered that Mom's new woman-friend from the former Zimins' rooms came briefly.

Then I read, went to the rink, played hockey in felt boots and came back again to the books on the big sofa.

I was watching the concert of Maya Kristalinskaya on the TV—as usual, she wore a wide kerchief around her neck to hide the traces of the personal life drama—when Mom came from work. I ran from the parents' room to the hallway, and Dad was already there from the kitchen.

He stood in front of my Mom, who had not yet had time to take her coat off. Then, while they stood strangely still and silent, facing each other, there happened something bewildering to Dad's hand, which, as if the only moving part in their frozen confrontation, crushed the stillness with an awkward slap against Mom's cheeks.

Mom said, "Kolya! What's that?" and she burst into tears which I had never seen.

Dad started yelling and demonstrating a saucer with cigarette butts which he found behind the blind on the windowsill in the kitchen.

Mom tried to say something about her woman-friend neighbor, but Dad rebuffed in a loud voice that Belomor-Canal cigarettes were not a women's smoke.

He flung his sheepskin overcoat on and, before getting out, yelled, "And you have sworn to never ever even shit within a mile off him!"

The door slammed furiously, Mom went to the kitchen and then across the landing to her new woman-friend in the former Zimins' rooms. I put on my coat and felt boots, and went to the rink again. On my way there, I met my brother and sister coming back home, I did not say anything to them about what happened there.

At the rink, I was hanging around until full dark. I had no wish to play, neither wanted to go back home, so I just milled about aimlessly or sat by the stove in the shed.

Then Natasha came up to me on the ice empty of anyone already, she said that Mom and my brother were waiting for me on the road and that at home Dad dumped the Christmas tree on the floor and kicked Sasha, and now we were going to sleepover at some acquaintances'.

Under the desolate light of lamps above the empty road, the four of us walked to the five-story building, where Mom knocked on the door of an apartment on the first door.

There lived the family of some officer with two children, I knew the boy from the school, but not his sister, who was from a too senior grade.

Mom shared some sandwiches she brought with her, but I did not feel like eating. She went to sleep together with my brother and sister on the folding coach, and I was bedded on the carpet next to the bookcase. Through its glass doors, I saw The Captain Dare-Devil by Louis Bussenard and asked for permission to read it, while the light from the kitchen was reaching the carpet...

In the morning, we left and crossed the Courtyard to one of the corner buildings, I knew that it was the hostel for officers though I never had entered it.

In the long corridor on the second floor, Mom told us to wait because she needed to talk with the man whose name she had mentioned but I forgot it entirely.

For some time, the three of us waited silently on the landing, then Mom showed up in the corridor and led us home.

She opened the door with her key. From the hallway, through the open door to the parents' room, the Christmas tree was seen dropped on its side by the balcony door, splinters of smashed decorations scattered the carpet around it.

The wardrobe stood with its doors ajar, and in front of it there was a soft mound of Mom's clothes, each one ripped from top to bottom...

Dad was away from home for a whole week, but then Natasha said that he was coming back and so it happened the following day.

And we started to live on further again...

When the holidays ended, I found a newspaper package in my schoolbag, the uneaten sandwich stayed there from the last school day in the previous term. The rotten ham filled the schoolbag with a putrid smell. Mom washed it from within with soap and the stink got weaker but still stayed...

At school, they held the contest between the pioneer grades at collecting waste paper.

After classes, our class pioneers, in groups of threes or fours, visited the houses of Block and the five-story buildings, knocked on doors, and asked if they had some waste paper. At times, they presented us with huge piles of old newspapers and magazines, but I never went to the corner building with the hostel for officers. Instead, I proposed my group of pioneer collectors to visit the Detachment's Library, where they gave us a sizable score of books. Some of them were pretty worn and tattered but others quite new as, for instance, The last of Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper with nice engraving pictures which only missed a few pages at the end...

One evening, when we were playing hide-and-seek in the snow burrows along the outer side of the skating rink, some senior boy said that he could lift five people at once, and easily too, with just one hand. It seemed so improbable that I bet with him. He only warned that the five people should lie down in a compact group for him to grip conveniently.

So, he and I, as opponents, and a few more boys went towards the Bugorok-Knoll beyond the light of rink illuminating lamps and found a level spot.

I lay down on my back in the snow and, following his instructions, stretched out my arms and legs, for the four boys to lay upon them: one boy on each, all in all, five people.

Yet, he never tried to lift us. I felt alien fingers unbuttoning my pants and entering my underwear. Unable to break loose from under the four boys who pinned me to the ground, I only yelled and shouted them to get off and let me go.

Then suddenly I felt free because they all ran away. I buttoned my pants up and went home angry with myself that I could so easily be fooled. Scored one more visit to the topmast with a teapot.

(...and only quite recently it suddenly dawned on me that it was not a practical joke as with "showing Moscow". It was the check to verify suspicions caused by my fancy dress at the New Year party.

However ridiculous it seems, it took almost a whole life span until I guessed what's what.

And here lies the third, but, probably, cardinal of my Achilles' heels – retarded thinking...)

On the way from school, my friend Yura Nikolayenko broke the news of my Mom being drawn in a caricature pinned to the stand by the House of Officers. In that picture, she was tossing whether to go to her husband or her lover.

I did say a word to answer but for more than a month, I couldn't go anywhere near the House of Officers. Then, of course, I had to visit it because they showed "The Iron Mask" with Jean Marais in the role of D'Artagnan.

Before the show, with all of my inside squeezed hard by shame and fear, I sneaked to the stand, but the Whatman sheet pinned at it contained already a new caricature of a drunk truck driver in a green padded jacket, and his wife with children shedding blue tears at home.

(...it was unlimited relief at that moment, yet for some reason, until now I can see all too vividly the caricature of my Mom which I have never seen.

She's got a sharp nose in it, and long red fingernails while tossing – to which of the two?

No, Yura Nikolayenko did not describe the picture for me, he only retold the inscription...)

In early spring, Dad came home very upset after a meeting at his work. There was another wave of the redundancy purge and at that meeting, they said who else to cut off if not him?

So, we started to pack things up for loading them into a big iron railway container, as other redundant people before us. However, the actual loading was done by Dad alone because the four of us left two weeks earlier...

On the eve of our departure, I was sitting on a couch in the room of the Mom's new woman-friend across the landing.

The woman and Mom went to the kitchen, and I stayed back with a thick book which I picked up from the piles of waste paper at the Detachment's Library and later presented to Mom's woman-friend.

Turning pages with the biography of some ante-revolution writer, I idly looked through the seldom inset illustrations with photographic pictures of unknown people in strange clothes from another, alien, world. Then I opened the thick volume somewhere in the middle and for some reason inscribed on the page margin, "we are leaving."

At that moment, I remembered the principle of creating animated cartoons: if on several subsequent pages you spell some word—a letter per page—and then bend the pages and release them one by one so that they quickly flip one after another, then letters will form up the word you wrote.

And I inscribed separate letters in the corners of subsequent pages, "I-S-e-h-r-g-u-e-y-O-g-o-l-t-s-o-f-f-a-m-l-e-a-v-i-n-g."

Yet, the cartoon did not work out as supposed. In fact, it did not work at all, but I did not care. I just slammed the book, left it on the couch, and walked away...

Early in the morning, a bus left the Courtyard for the station of Valdai. Besides the four of us, there were a couple of families going on their vacations.

When the bus turned to the road of concrete slabs descending from Block, Mom suddenly asked me who we would better live with: my Dad, or the man whose name I absolutely do not remember.

"Mom! We do not need anyone! I will work, I'll be helping you," said I.

She did not answer.

And those were not just words, I believed in what I was saying, but Mom knew the labor legislation laws better than me...

When the descent was over, the bus stopped at the turn to the Pumping Station and Checkpoint. The man about who Mom had just asked me, climbed in. He approached her, took her hand, telling something in a low voice.

I turned away to look out of the window.

He went out, the bus slammed the door and drove on. It very soon pulled up at the white gate of Checkpoint.

The sentries checked us and the vacationers and opened the gate letting the bus out of Zone.

A black-haired soldier grabbed hold of a white-paint-coated rod in the gate's grate while floating by behind the glass in the bus window.

I realized with absolute clarity that never again would I ever see the familiar gate of Zone, neither that unknown soldier by it, however, one thing I didn't know yet, that it was my way of leaving childhood.

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Adolescence

(...and, probably, that's it. Enough is enough.

It is time to roll the potatoes out from among the glowing ashes before they turned firebrands too.

Though coals are crammed with kilocalories, I am not quite sure about the taste of those beasts. Besides, it's getting pretty dark and I'd rather not overeat at so late an hour. "And leave your dinner", said some sage dietitian, "to your enemy". Which is pretty useless wisdom in my case. Where would I get them those enemies from? They were formatting me for life in a society where each man is a friend, a comrade, and a brother to any other man...

Damn, but it's so tempting to share in ladlefuls the bullshit you once were fed with up to your ears. Yet, one day I gave out all homilies to your elder step-sister, Lenochka, like, being good and kind was the innate feature of mankind at large and their one and only distressing flaw was their ignorance of how immensely good they were deep down, a sad pity!

Alas! As my perversive stars deigned to have it, there was Shakespeare's "Richard III" on TV that same evening. What a treat! She was devouring the tube with her stare while those good and kind people, but uninformed of their hidden goodness, were strangling and shredding each other and cutting throats for a change. And sure enough, the next morning she watched the rerun too because Shakespeare isn't a knickknack you can give the shake, it's classic. Since then, my political line regarding the TV is that of armed neutrality.

Well, so much to emphasize the fact that, if I chance to come across an accidental enemy, I'd sooner give them my last shirt but not my dinner, moreover, the potatoes baked in the fire ashes.

The moment you break their charred crust and pour a pinch of salt into the steamy core, you see the light of Truth that no oysters, nor lobsters, nor any other fancy kulebyaki can hold a candle to them. Oh, no! Not a chance.

By their side, I would leave any freaky nourishment, readily and safely, to abstruse gourmets 'cause we, uncouth and simple-minded garlic eaters, have no use for neither calipash nor calipee – our modest aim is simple, ample, grub and plum dough, we're not after excessive luxuries.

And were I a younger man but not a Negro advanced in my years and pressed by all kinds of problems which the struggle for life trickles with, then to them, and them only, would I dedicate an ode of love and gratitude – to potatoes baked amidst the fire ashes.

No wonder, that in the most poignant episode in all the pulp fiction series by Julian Semenov, his main protagonist Stirlitz, aka Soviet secret service agent Isaev, turns up the sleeves of his spiffy Fascist uniform and bakes potatoes in the fireplace of his Berlin apartment to celebrate the Soviet Army and Navy Day.

However, with all due admiration at his culinary patriotism, no, sir – dat's ain't da thin'. To understand the taste of baked potatoes, you need to sit on the ground, under the open sky, with an evening like this one here around you...)

In Konotop, Grandma Katya kissed all of us, one by one, confusedly standing in her kitchen, and started crying.

Mother tried to console her and, noticing two kids' heads that peeked from behind the doors to the room, asked if they were her sister's children.

"Yes, here we have our Irochka and Valerik. So big kids already. The girl is three years old and he soon will be two."

When their father, Uncle Tolik, came home from his work, I for the first time saw, not in a movie but in real life, a man with a bald patch extending from the forehead to the back of his head, however, I tried not to ogle too obviously.

An hour later he and I went out to meet my Aunt Lyuda.

The store she worked at closed at seven and, coming home, she always carried bags from her work.

While walking with Uncle Tolik, I marked the way to the Underpass, which the Konotopers were still calling Overpass.

Among my vague recollections, there was a long wait in front of a lowered railway barrier blocking way to the overpass made of smeared wooden sleepers to bridge the gaps between the rail-heads, and how the barrier went up giving rise to agitated commotion in a crowd of people, which rushed from both sides to cross the railway, together with a couple of horses drawn telega-carts and an odd truck. That time we were going from Konotop to the Object...

In my absence, they built a spacey concrete tunnel under the multi-track railway, hence the official name – Underpass, but folks kept calling it the old way – Overpass...

On the other side of the Under-Overpass, long red streetcars were running from the City to the Station and back. Before Aunt Lyuda arrived by one of the streetcars coming from the City, Uncle Tolik talked me into approaching her under the rare lamps over the tilt into the Under-Overpass, while he'd keep out of sight, and, grabbing one of her bags, ask in a husky voice: "Not too heavy for you?" But she recognized me even though Uncle Tolik had drawn the peak of my cap low down over my eyes.

The three of us walked back to Nezhin Street, and Uncle Tolik carried the bags with food which Aunt Lyuda was taking from the store she worked at repaying from her wages.

On climbing up out of the Underpass, we crossed Bazaar along the wide aisle between the rows of empty at that hour counters, with the tall lean-to roofs over them, like, abandoned gazebos, and after walking for five more minutes, we turned into Nezhin Street; a couple of distant lights on far-off lampposts in its depth distinguished it among the rest, unlighted, streets...

In Konotop, we arrived at the start of the last quarter in the academic year and both I and my younger brother and sister became students at School 13 which very conveniently stood right opposite Nezhin Street, across fieldstone-cobbled Bogdan Khmelnytskyi Street.

Old folks called it "Cherevko's school" because under the Czar, some rich man from the nearby village of Podlipnoye, Cherevko was his name, built a two-story pub-house, but the then authorities didn't allow him to operate it because the would-be pub's location was too near to the only factory in the city, threatening to make drunks of all the working class, so Cherevko donated the building to the city for arranging a school of four classrooms in it.

In the Soviet era, "Cherevko's school" was expanded with a long one-story building in pronounced barrack-style made also of bricks. The addition stretched along a quiet side street slanting toward the Swamp, otherwise named the Grove, that separated the village of Podlipnoye from Konotop or vice versa.

Going to school for the first time, I couldn't get the meaning of canvas pouches dangling alongside the schoolbags or sizable leatherette folders by the students walking in the same direction.

I was surprised to learn that in the pouches they carried to school their ink-pots. It felt a little out-of-date because the schoolchildren at the Object long since started using fountain pens with an inside ink-tank whose capacity allowed for refilling it no oftener than once a week if you did not write too much. At first, it seemed, like, getting from the era of gasoline engines back to the epoch of post stages, yet the next morning the pouches did not look as something overly striking anymore.

Deafening protracted ding-and-dong of the huge electric bell filled the long corridor of the one-story building, as well as the whole yard with the "Cherevko's school" in it and three adjoining streets in the neighborhood. If it signaled a break, everyone went out into the wide schoolyard with an ancient tree in its center and the low building behind it, which comprised the Pioneer Room, the workshop for Handicraft lessons, the school library and, as I learned later, the ski storage room.

The gym, with its windows grated from inside to prevent smashing the panes with ball hits at PE classes, abutted the far end of the barrack-like building at the right angle. Opposite the blind end wall of the gym, there stood a detached brick-whitewashed hut of toilets.

All the break long, a crowd of students hung out on and around the narrow high porch at the entrance door. The bigger boys perched skilfully upon side railings that bounded the head of the three tall steps until a maverick teacher would shoo them off and they reluctantly comply only to light back up again the moment the teacher's back vanished in the entrance doorway.

A lively trickle of students kept flowing to and from the toilets in the yard corner, yet the majority of boys (and only boys!) veered before reaching the toilets hut and turned around the gym corner.

There, in the narrow passage between the gym and the tall fence of the neighboring garden, life ran high in a brisk cash game for ready money with the average stake in the game of bitok at the school Las Vegas grounds from two to five copper kopecks. If you had nickels, say, ten, fifteen, twenty or even fifty-kopeck in one coin, it'd be exchanged before you say "knife".

With the stakes stacked on the ground, atop each other with every coin heads up, the bitok came into play.

What's a bitok? It's hard to say – every player had his favorite piece of iron: a bolt, a railroad spike, a polished ball from a huge bearing – there were no limits, you could use whatever you wanted be it even a stone. And the absence of any equipment was no problem – anyone would readily lend you his bitok for hitting.

Hitting what? That stack of kopecks, of course!

All the coins turned over by your hit and showing their tails became yours. Collect them into your pocket and hit the remaining stubborn heads, one by one. With no coin turned over, the next player started his tries.

And who was to open the game? The one who put the highest stake into the stack...

At times, the warning cry of "shuba!" from the gym corner signaled the approach of some male teacher. The money vanished right away from upon the ground into the pockets, cigarettes hid in the hollowed palms.

However, the alarm was always false – the teachers turned to the toilet where there was a boarded cabin for Director and teaching staff.

In just three games, I lost fifteen kopecks, that Mother gave me for a cabbage pirozhki from the school canteen. This was no wonder though because the bitok virtuosos were training their hands at home with their favorite bitoks and I had to hit with a borrowed one. Maybe so was even for the better – leaving no time for me to get addicted...

On my first day at school the class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, planted me next to a skinny red-haired girl, Zoya Yemets. I didn't use Zoya's inkpot, yet Sasha Dryga, a grown-up double repeater with a greasy forelock down to his eyes, resented my presence at her desk. After the classes, he cared to inform me of the fact.

And on the way home I made friends with my classmate Vitya. His last name sounded a bit scary, yet it's a commonplace one among the native Ukrainian family names – Skull. Our on-the-fly friendship had sound foundation though because we both were walking along the same Nezhin Street, and he also lived on it, only farther, next to the Nezhin Store which was halfway from any of the street's ends.

The following day I asked Albina Grigoryevna for moving me to the last desk in the left row, to Vitya Skull, because we were neighbors and could help each other with home assignments. She respected so weighty reasons and I left Zoya's desk.

The desk in front of me and Vitya was seated singly by Vadya Kubarev, which situation gave rise to our immediate triple friendship.

The last names at school were, naturally, used by only teachers, while among the students Skull would surely turn Skully, Kubarev become Kuba and so forth.

What handle did I get? Goltz or Ogle? Neither. If your name happened to be "Sehrguey", they did not bother about the last name and everyone started calling you "Gray" by default...

Friendship is power. When the three of us were together, even Sasha Dryga refrained from bullying.

Friendship is knowledge. I shared the pieces of poetry never included in school curriculum but firmly memorized by all the boys at the Object, such as "To get insured from the cold...", and "The light was burning in the pub...", and "Vaniyka-Halooy went to the fair..." as well as other short but flowery instances of rhymed folklore.

And in the context of cultural and philological exchange, my friends explained to me the meaning of popular Konotopian expressions like "Have you fled from Romny?" or "It's time to pack you off to Romny."

As it turned out, the town of Romny, about seventy kilometers from Konotop, was the seat of Regional Psychiatric Hospital for nuts...

That morning the gambling bouts of bitok ran low behind the gym.

On that clear April morning, the lads stood arguing, waiting for confirmation of the rumors that the Central TV news program "Time" was mistaken last night. Because of some guy heard from guys from School 10 that last night some man landed with a parachute in the Sarnavsky forest nearby Konotop. And soon from the City center would arrive Sasha Rodionenko, whose family had recently moved over there, but he still attended our school, so let him come, he should know for sure, he would confirm...

I remembered the flight of Gagarin and soon after him Guerman Titov was orbiting all day long and in the evening said, "Bye, for now, I'm going to bed." And Dad chuckled with delight and answered to the radio on the wall, "That's a good one!"

Our cosmonauts were always the first and we, elementary school pupils, were arguing who of us was the first to hear the radio announcement about the flight of Popovich or Nikolayev, or the first female cosmonaut Tereshkova...

Sasha Rodionenko came but he didn't confirm anything. So the Central TV news program "Time" was not mistaken. And the sun faded in grief.

Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov...In the landing module...

Entering the dense layers of the earth's atmosphere...

Perished...

Then Father came and was followed a week later by the railway container with our things from the Object that arrived at the Freight station and moved from there on a platform truck to 19 Nezhin Street, both the wardrobe with the mirror on its door and the folding couch-bed, and both armchairs with wooden armrests, and the TV set and all the other nondescript things and utensils. Even the old-fashioned leatherette sofa arrived for which there was no room in the khutta.

(...now I cannot but feel horrified: how was it possible for ten people – two families and the mutual Grandma Katya – to fit in and live on in one room and a kitchen?

But at that time I didn't think of such things at all because since it was our home and we lived there the way we lived, then it couldn't be somehow different, everything was as it should be and I just lived on along and that's it..)

For the night, Sasha and I readied the folding couch-bed and shared it with Natasha, who lay across at out feet with a chair put next to the couch for her legs.

My brother and I had to keep our feet pulled up to the middle of our bed, otherwise, Natasha would start grumbling and complaining to the parents on their bed at the opposite wall, and tell on me and Sasha for kick-fighting.

Nice news! She could stretch her legs out as far as she wanted, and rebuffed my offers to swap our places...

The family of Arkhipenkos and Grandma Katya slept in the kitchen.

Parallel to Nezhin Street as far as about three hundred meters, there ran Professions Street one side of which was just one endless wall of tall concrete slabs fencing the Konotop Steam-Engine and Railroad-Car Repair Plant, which name was commonly eschewed and replaced with short and nice – KaPeVeRrZe.

Because of that plant, the part of Konotop outside the Under-Overpass was named the KaPeVeRrZe Settlement, or just the Settlement.

On the Plant's opposite side, the same slab-wall separated it from the multitude of railway tracks in the Konotop Passenger Station and the adjacent Freight Station, where long freight trains were waiting for their turn of starting off to different destinations because Konotop was a big railway junction.

At the marshaling yard of the Freight Station with freight car running all by themselves or in small groups from the hump into the sorting lines, there constantly sounded shrieking screech of wheel chocks, bangs of cars against each other, indistinct screams of loudspeakers with reports about that or another train on that or another sorting line.

However, in the daytime the marshaling yard symphony was not too overbearing, its racket whooped it up against the background of night quietude with the noises of daylife subsided...

Regardless of any time of day, whenever it breezed from the nearby village of Popovka with its distillery, the air got filled with nasty stink, which the Settlement folks were naming "Popovka's salutation". Not that the reek was totally lethal, yet you were better off if shunned to sniff at it attentively, anyway, to have a running nose on such days was kinda blessing...

Nezhin Street connected to Professions Street by lots of frequent lanes.

The first of those sidestreets (counting from School 13) was called Foundry Street because it led in the direction of the former foundry inside the Plant, which view was obliterated with the concrete wall.

Then there came Smithy Street, where the Plant's smithy could be told by the tall brick chimney towering behind that same wall.

The next (past our house at number 19) was Gogol Street, ignoring the fact that there was no Gogol, or any other writer for that matter, in front or behind the Plant wall.

The mentioned three streets were more or less straight but those following them before and after the Nezhin Store tangled into a maze of differently directed lanes which, in the end, also led to the Plant wall if you knew how to navigate them...

The Nezhin Store gained that name because it stood in Nezhin Street and it was the largest one of all the three stores in the Settlement.

The store premises occupied a separate one-story brick building and a backyard. It consisted of four departments each of which had its own entrance distinguished by the inscriptions in tin frames over their doors: "Bread", "Industrial Goods", "Grocery", and "Fish and Vegetables".

The "Bread" opened in the morning until all the "white" loaves and "brick" bread they had were sold out and they could safely lock the emptied department. In the afternoon, with the arrival of the food truck with another bunch of "bricks" and loaves from the Konotop Bread Factory, it opened again.

The next, and also the spaciest, department—"Industrial Goods"—had two shop windows adorned with dust-smeared miniaturized boxes of security signalization clung to their panes from inside, on both sides of its iron door. The showcase-counters with store-soiled goods were looked after by three bored saleswomen because they hardly saw a couple of customers a day. The Settlement population, when in need of such goods, preferred to travel to shops in the City center.

But the two saleswomen in the "Grocery" department had their hands full all day long. At times, there even formed a queue, especially on the days when the butter was brought to the department and they cut its huge yellow cube, put next to the scales, with their enormously big knife and wrapped your two or three hundred grams into the friable blue paper.

And when the "Grocery" was entered by a workman from the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, he was served without standing in the queue because in his palm there was a thoroughly counted and readied amount of kopecks for his vodka, which saved the trouble of counting the change. Besides, he was to come back to his workplace as soon as possible for which end he arrived without changing from his boiler suites, aka spetzovka.

The choice of vodkas in the department was fairly extensive, of different colors and names – "Zubrovka", "Erofeich", " Let's Have One More..." but people bought only "Moscow Vodka" with its green and white sticker.

The concluding "Fish and Vegetables" department was mostly locked not to disturb its empty dormant shelves and the dried-earth smell left by potatoes sold out last year...

And after the Nezhin Store, there were Locksmith Street, Wheels Street and in the unexplored as yet depths of the Settlement other streets and lanes and blind alleys...

The very first Sunday after our arrival, Aunt Lyuda led me and my brother and sister to Professions Street that was the only asphalted street in the Settlement. Following it in the direction of Bazaar, we reached the Plant Club for the three o'clock movie show for children.

The Plant Club was a mighty two-story building but as tall as a four-story one. The masonry of its walls and windows had lots of arches, ledges, and columns, like, a lace-work of smoky bricks. The concrete wall of the Plant enclosure surrounded also the backside of the Club. In the small square in front of it, there was the Plant Main Check-Entrance built in the same ornate ante-revolution style of masonry, opposed with a modernist structure of the two-story murky-glass cube of the Plant Canteen.

We entered the lofty lobby of the Plant Club full of diverse-aged, yet equally noisy children lining to the small window in the tin-clad door of the ticket office. One boy, a second-grader by his looks, started leaching Aunt Lyuda for ten kopecks to buy himself a ticket, but she yelled at him and he shut up. She seemed to enjoy visiting the Plant Club for an afternoon show for children...

So I learned the route to the Club where, among other things, there also was the Plant Library of two huge halls.

The desks in the first one were amply burdened with wide and thick newspapers' filings, through the glazed doors in the tall cabinets lined by the walls, there stood familiar rows of never-asked-for works by Lenin, and Marx, and Engels and other similarly popular multi-volume collections.

The next hall had the stacks with normal books for reading. Needless to say, I enrolled immediately because the choice of books on the two shelves in our school library was niggardly poor...

On May Day, our school marched out for the demonstration in the city. The school column was decorated with the portraits on sticks in hands of the students (one portrait for three or four students carrying it in turn) representing the current Members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Headed by the group of teachers, we walked along the uneven cobbles in Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street to Bazaar where Professions Street shared its asphalt to Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street for its dive through the Under-Overpass.

The ascend from the tunnel on its opposite end was followed by the wide Peace Avenue stretching away to the tall railway embankment in the distance, after which it ran through the housing area of five-story buildings, named Zelenchuk, followed by the City center – Peace Square.

Peace Avenue, tangentially passing Peace Square, separated it from the City Council standing in the greens opposite to the granite-rimmed, never working, fountain in the middle of Peace Square concluded with the building of Peace Movie Theater.

The middle of the three alleys in the greens that led directly to the City Council's entrance porch was blocked with the red platform past which the whole city marched in the holiday demonstrations, except for the tenants of the five-story buildings bounding the square who watched demonstrations from their balconies. I envied them at first, but not for long...

On our way to Peace Square, the School 13 column had time and again to stop for long waits, to let the schools of preceding numbers overtake us and go ahead. But the working organizations gave way to us, like those columns of the Locomotive Depot, or the Railway Distance Of the South-West Railroad, as it stood in white bulging letters cut of polystyrol and mounted on the crimson-velvet covering in the shields on wheels at their columns' heads. No streetcars nor vehicles were seen along all of Peace Avenue, only people, lots of people on foot both walking in the wide stream of columns and standing by, kinda live banks scanning the current, which made May Day so special and unlike other days.

On entering the vast Peace Square, we had to suddenly change our dignified marching step to a frivolous trotting and, like, run to attack, giggling and panting, with those portraits of Members atilt, to catch up with the previous column of which we, as usual, had fallen too far behind because of the bad timing.

And since School 13 was the last but one in the city school numbering, the moment we were passing the red platform, the loudspeakers shouted from up there, "The column of the Konotop Railway Technical School is entering Square! Hooray, comrades!", making us to hooray to others and not to ourselves.

After Peace Square and past the entrance to Central Park, the road turned to the right descending towards Lenin Street, but we didn't go down there. In the nearest lane, we piled the Political Bureau Members and red banners on a truck that took them back to our school to sit in the Household Manager's storeroom till the next demonstration.

And we also went back, on foot, bypassing Peace Square, because the passages between the building bounding it were blocked with empty buses, face to face, and the empty square behind them was strolled by solitary figures of leisurely pacing militiamen.

Yet, it still was a holiday, because before we started for the demonstration Mother was giving each of us fifty kopecks, of which there even remained some change afterward because a bar of Plombir ice-cream in thin paper wrapping cost 18 kopecks and that of a Creamy just only 13. The saleswomen in white robes sold ice-cream from their plywood double-walled boxes at every crossing along the traffic-less Peace Avenue...

When I returned home, the schoolchildren in festive white shirts and red pioneer ties were still walking along Nezhin Street on their way back to the Settlement after the demonstration.

And then I committed the first dastardly act in my life.

I went out from the wicket of our _khatta_ and wantonly shot with my crook pistol in the back of a passer-by boy. He chased me, but I ran back into the yard up to the kennel of Zhoolka who kept barking and yanking his chain violently, so the boy did not dare come up and only shouted his threats and abuses from the wicket...

In summer my parents bought a nanny-goat from Bazaar because when Father received his first payment at the Plant and brought home 74 rubles, Mother confusedly looked at the money and asked, "How? Is that all?"

The white nanny-goat was meant to make living easier, but in fact, it only complicated life because I had to walk it on a rope into Foundry Street or Smithy Street where she grazed the dust-covered grass along the weather-eaten fences.

I refused to drink any of the goat milk although Mother kept wheedling that it was so much useful for health.

After a while, the goat was slaughtered and tenderized into cutlets which I refused to even try...

Sometimes Grandma Katya's son, Uncle Vadya, came to our khutta in his boiler-oil smeared spetzovka during the midday break at the Plant to beg moonshine for his a-waiting colleagues, but his plea seldom succeeded.

Uncle Vadya had a smooth black hair and a toothbrush mustache, also black, his skin was of slick olive hue, like that of young Arthur in The Gadfly by Lilian Voynich, and he missed the middle finger on his right hand, which was lost at the beginning of his working career.

"I couldn't get it first. Well, okay, that's my finger dropped upon the machine tool, but what water is dripping on it? Where from? Aha! that's my tears!" so he recounted the accident.

Doctors sewed up the stump very nicely – smooth and no scars in it – so that when he made the fig it came out two at once. The double-barreled fig looked very funny and no chance for anyone to imitate the trick even remotely.

Uncle Vadya lived in the khutta of his mother-in-law near the Bus Station.

The Ukrainian language has a special term for a man living with his in-laws, it is primmak, aka Acceptee. Bitter is the share of an Acceptee! As reported by Uncle Vadya, the primmak has to keep quieter than water and lower than the grass. He must call his mother-in-law "Mommy" and show his respect even to the hens she kept in her yard and wash their legs when they go perching for the night...

We all loved Uncle Vadya for he was so funny and kind, and smiling constantly. And he had his special way of greeting, "So, how are you, golden kids?"

At the age of ten, when the German Company Headquarters were just behind the wall – in the Pilluta's part of the khutta, Vadya Vakimov climbed onto the khutta's fence in an attempt to cut the cable of the occupants' telephone connection. The Germans yelled at him but didn't shoot and kill right on the spot...

When I asked why he dared for that action, Uncle Vadya replied that he no longer remembered. However, it's hardly possible that he wished to become a hero partisan pioneer; most likely he was allured by the multi-colored wires running inside telephone cables of which you could pleat lots of different ornamental things, even a gaudy finger-ring...

On my way to the Nezhin Store, I was intercepted by a pair of guys riding one bike. First, they overtook me, then the one sitting on the bike rack jumped off to the ground and slapped me on the cheek.

Of course, it was a revolting dishonor, however, though he was half-head shorter than me, I didn't fight back in fear of his companion who also got off the bike – and that guy was indisputably stouter.

"I told you'll catch hell!" said the offender and they left. I realized whose back I had a shot at with a crook...

The movie shows at Club started at six and eight in the evening. With the tickets bought in the lobby, the film-goers had to climb the wide red-paint-coated thick-board steps to the second floor.

The tiled landing up there always had somewhat murky air, despite the two high windows and three doors.

The door to the right opened a small hall with a TV set in front of a dozen rows of seats and a flight of steep iron stairs to the projectionist booth.

On both sides of the TV set, two more big doors led to the spacey gym of the Ballet Studio which is not what you need with the cinema tickets in your pocket. So, back again to the tiled landing with two more still unexplored doors.

The first door on the left was always locked because it led to the balcony in the auditorium. And the next, invitingly open door was controlled by everlastingly grim auntie Shura, who stood by in her helmet-like head kerchief, like a gloomy sentry in charge of tearing off the check part in your ticket before letting you in.

The floor inside the vast auditorium had a slight slant towards the wide white screen behind which there was a big stage with two porches and doors by the side walls. For the concerts or the performances of the puppet theater, the cinema screen was drawn to the left wall disclosing the dark-blue plushy velvet of the stage curtains.

The open balconies adorned with alabaster swag ran along the sidewalls, yet not reaching the stage. By the rear wall, the balconies sloped steeply from both sides, so as not to block the loopholes of the projectionist booth from where the flicking widening beam was dispatched to the screen to deliver a movie.

In the lobby on the first floor, next to the windowed door of the ticket office, there hung the list of movies for the current month brush-written in the canvas stretched over a sizable wooden frame. Films changed every day except for Monday when there was no cinema at all. So you could make your choice in advance, and know when to ask from Mother twenty kopecks for the show...

Summertime annulled the cinema expenses totally because the Plant Park, hidden behind the long dilapidated two-story apartment block, that stood above the tilt to the Under-Overpass tunnel, was a great money-saver.

In the Park, apart from its three alleys, a locked dance-floor, and a large gazebo beer pavilion, there also was the open-air cinema behind a pretty tall plank fence with conveniently located gaps and holes in its rear part.

The show began after nine when twilight showed signs of getting denser and, more importantly, if the ticket office on the first floor of the projectionists' booth managed to sell at least four tickets because the new generation preferred watching films from outside the cinema.

However, standing on foot by a hole for an hour and a half, with your nose buried in planks roughed by merciless time and calamitous weather, was not exactly what you'd call a pleasurable recreation. That's why the film-going guys took advantageous places in the old apple trees grown behind the brick structure of the projectionist booth.

If your fork in the tree was too narrow or the bough too bumpy for comfortable sitting, next time you'd be smarter to come earlier and have a better choice of the free tree-seats...

The film went on, the warm summer darkness thickened around two or three dim lamps in the Plant Park alleys and the stars of the night sky peeped through the gaps in the apple tree foliage.

On the silver screen, the black-and-white "The Jolly Fellows" with Leonid Utesov kept slapping each other with drums and double basses and at less breathtaking moments you could stretch your hand out and grope among the apple-tree twigs to find, somewhere between the Cassiopeia and Andromeda constellations, a small inedible crab-apple for biting tiny bitter bits off its stone-hard side.

After a good film, like that one starring Rodion Nakhapetov where there were no fights, neither wars, but just scenes about life, about death, and beautiful motorcycle riding through shallow waters, the spectators walked out of the Park gate to the cobbled Budyonny Street without the usual bandit whistles or cat-yells.

The sparse crowd of people became somehow quietened and united as if related by the watched film, and kept peaceful walking through the darkness of a warm night, dwindling at the invisible crossroads, on their way to the lonely lamppost at the junction of Bogdan Khmelnitsky and Professions Streets next to Bazaar...

But the main thing, because of which the guys were waiting for the summer, was, of course, bathing. The start of the swimming season took place late May at the Kandeebynno and served the sign of summer coming into its own.

The Kandeebynno were several lakes used for breeding of the mirror carp, and they also were the springhead of the Yezooch river.

At times along the lakes-dividing dams, there rode a solitary bicycler-overseer, so that guys wouldn't poach too cheekily with their fishing poles.

Yet, in one of those lakes they didn't breed the carp, it was left for bathing of beach-goers...

However, to go for a swim at the Kandeebynno, you had to know how to get there. Mother said that although having been there she couldn't explain the way and it was better to ask Uncle Tolik, who both to work and back, and, in fact, everywhere went by his motorbike "Jawa", so he, no doubt, should know.

The Kandeebynno, according to his instruction, was all too easy to find. When going towards the city center along Peace Avenue, you pass under the bridge in the railway embankment, then take the first turn to the right which you cannot miss because it is where starts the road to Romny, and follow it to the intersection by which take another right turn and go on until you see the railway barrier; cross the railway, turn to the left and – here you are! – that's the Kandeebynno for you...

The younger ones, sure enough, pressed for going along with me. We took an old bed cover to have what to lay upon when sunbathing, put it into a mesh-bag, added a bottle of water and went to the Under-Overpass where Peace Avenue started. Up to the railway embankment, the road was familiar after the May Day demonstration.

We went under the bridge and saw it at once – the road to the right running along the base of the elevated railway. True enough, it didn't look a highway because of no asphalt in it, yet being as wide as any other road, it was the first one to the right after the bridge. So, we turned and followed the road along the base of the tall steep embankment.

However, the farther we went, the narrower the road became transforming into a wide path, then into a tread, and lastly just vanishing. We had no choice but to climb the steep grass-overgrown embankment, shake the sand out from our sandals and march on stepping on the concrete crossties or along the endless narrow railheads.

Natasha was the first to notice the trains catching up from behind, and we stepped down onto the uneven gravel in the ballast shoulder, giving way for the rumbling, wind-whipping cars to shoot past us.

When we reached the next bridge, there was no avenue or a street under it, just other railway tracks. Our embankment turned right and started to gradually go down towards the distant Railway Station. It became clear, that we were going in the opposite direction and not to the lakes of the Kandeebynno at all.

We did not have time to get disappointed though, because far below we noticed a small field at the base of another embankment, beneath the bridge in ours. Two groups of tiny, at that distance, guys in light summer clothes, and with the mesh-bags like ours, walked towards a grove of green trees, and they even had a ball too. Where else could they go if not to a beach?!.

We climbed down two steep embankments and went along the same path in the field as the previous guys who were gone out of sight long ago. Then we walked through the aspen grove along a lonely railway track with soft soil instead of crushed stone ballast between its wooden ties until we reached a highway, that crossed the track beneath two raised barriers.

We passed over the highway and followed a wide, at times boggy, path among the tall growth of bright green grass. The chest straightened out with cautiously expectant exaltation, "Aha, Kandeebynno! You won't flee now!"

Groups of people were walking the same path in both directions, but those going there were more in numbers than back-comers.

The path led to a wide canal of dark water between the shore and the opposite dam of the fish lakes and continued along the canal. We followed it on and on, among green trees, under white clouds in the azure-blue summer sky. The straight rows of fruit-trees in the no man's, neglected, orchard went up over the smooth slant to the right of the path.

Then the canal on the left widened into a lake with a white sand beach. The stretch of sand turned into the grass between the tall currant bushes of the garden.

We chose a free stretch of grass for our bed cover, hastily undressed, and ran over unbearably hot sand to the water flying from each direction into any other, splashed up and sent in strangling sprays to faces of dozens of folks eagerly screaming, yelling, and laughing in the water that seethed with their merry frolics.

Summer!. Ah, Summer!.

As it turned out later, Uncle Tolik didn't even know of that vanishing road along the embankment base, because when his motorbike shot at a roaring speed from under the bridge in Peace Avenue, in two seconds flat he was on the Romny highway, while going on foot you reached it after a good hundred of meters...

In the list of July movie shows at Club, there was "The Sons of Big Bear", so Skully and I decided it shouldn't be missed because we knew that Goiko Mitich starred in the film as one of her sons. Goiko Mitich was a Yugoslavian actor but mainly acted red-skins in GDR Westerns and, as long as he was in, you could safely expect it to be a decent movie.

Sure enough, the list did not report all those details or anything except the title. However, the films reached the Plant Club a month, or maybe two, after a week on show at the Peace Movie Theater and, immediately after, another week at the Vorontsov Movie Theater on Square of the Konotop Divisions that's why, with the little help of our friends, we always could make the right choice.

And we did not extremely hurry to watch a movie at the mentioned theaters because of trust in the unmistakable flair of our friends, no, their leads well sucked at times, so the reason was much simpler – a ticket at the Peace Movie Theater was fifty kopecks, watching the same film one week later at the Vorontsov set you back for thirty-five kopecks, while after practicing your patience for one month you paid for the show at the Club mere twenty kopecks...

On that Sunday the three of us—Kuba, Skully, and I—went to the Kandeebynno by bikes. We swam and dived, in turn, off the self-made launch-pad when two of us, chest-deep in the water, clasped our hands for the third to climb upon and take a dive from. And, of course, we played "spots", though you couldn't catch up Kuba underwater.

Then he and Skully got lost somewhere in the bathing crowd. In vain looked I for the friends amidst the splashes and squeals, they were nowhere around. Just in case, I even swam to the opposite shore which was the dam of the fish lakes. A couple of guys were fishing there, with their eye alert for an opportunity to angle in the mirror carp paradise over the dam. And I swam back so as not to scare off their fish, which was striking even in the lake for swimmers.

Then I once again scanned the crowd in the water – to no avail, and decided to go ashore.

Chilled through and through, I got to the scorching sand of the beach when the lost friends came running from among the bushes of currant with the hair on their heads almost dry already, "Where the hell were you?"

"We're getting in again. Let's go!"

"You wackos?! I'm just coming out!"

"So what? Let's go!"

"Ah, damn! Off we'll drive the city boys!."

And whipping up foamy splashes with the three pairs of racing feet, we rushed together to deeper places to dive, and yell, and hoo-ha.

Each summer was the summer then...

Kuba refused to go to the movie – he had already seen that western, and Skully also changed his mind. That fact didn't stop me, and I decided to take twenty kopecks from Mother and go to Club all the same.

At home, Grandma Katya told, that my parents left two hours ago together with my brother and sister; and she didn't know where they went.

My determination remained unswerving because there were three hours before the next show at Club – enough time for them to come back...

At the end of the third hour, I was overcome by irresistible anxiety: where could they be? So I asked it once again, yet Aunt Lyuda already.

With complete indifference and even surly, she answered, "I wouldn't even have seen you." She always became like that when Uncle Tolik was gone fishing.

Two more hours passed, I missed the show hopelessly but, flooded with the feeling of an unavoidable and already accomplished catastrophe, I didn't care for any cinema at all. The tide of despair dragged in some sketchy pictures of a truck jumping over to the sidewalk, vague wailing of ambulance sirens, and only one thing was clear – I no longer had any parents nor any brother and sister.

The darkness thickened. Uncle Tolik pulled up in the street on his return from fishing and rolled his "Jawa" motorbike across the yard to the shed section. He went to khutta and I, freaked out and crushed by my grief and loneliness, was sitting on the grass next to sleepy Zhoolka...

It was already quite late when the iron handle-hook of the wicket clinked. Sasha and Natasha ran into the yard followed by Mother's cheerful voice from the street. I rushed to meet them torn apart between joy and resentment, "So, where were you lost?"

"Visiting Uncle Vadya," said Mother. "And what's up with you?"

I burst into tears mixed with muddled mumbling about bear's sons and twenty kopecks because I couldn't explain that for half of that day I was mourning the loss of them all and having no idea how to live on without the family.

"You could ask the money from Aunt Lyuda."

"So? I did ask and she said she wouldn't like to see me too."

"What? Come on into the khutta!"

And at home, she squabbled with her sister, and Aunt Lyuda said it was all bullshit and she'd only said she wouldn't see me too if I hadn't come. But I obstinately repeated my bullshit.

Mother and Aunt Lyuda shouted at each other louder and louder. Grandma Katya tried to calm them down, "Stop it! What a shame, all the neighbors would hear, and the people in the street too."

Natasha, Sasha, Irochka, and Valerik crowded, with frightened eyes, in the doorway between the kitchen and the room where Father and Uncle Tolik were sitting with their silent sullen stares stuck into the TV set...

That's how I committed the second meanness in my life – slandered innocent Aunt with false accusations. And though her response to my questioning I got exactly the way as related to Mother, yet after the Aunt's interpretation, I could admit that, yes, she had answered with those words, however, I never admitted my base calumny.

That lying without words filled me with a compunction because the quarrel in the khutta was my fault. I felt guilty before both Aunt Lyuda and her kids, and before Mother, who I belied, and before everyone because I was such a sissy dishrag, "Woe is me! I'm left alone in the whole world!"

My contritions were never voiced though for we were not bred up to make apologies. True, at times they could be heard in movies, but for real life, when someone was inadvertently pushed or stuff, "Excuse me for not trying harder" was enough.

All that annoyance about nothing triggered off a slow, inconspicuous, process of my alienation and transformation into a "cut off slice" as Father used to say.

I began to live a separate life of my own although, of course, I did not realize or felt anything of the kind and just lived that way...

Mother and Aunt Lyuda made up rather soon, after Aunt Lyuda showed Mother how to correctly sing the popular at that time "Cheremshina blossoms everywhere", besides, she was bringing from her work food you couldn't buy anywhere, because at any store any goods beyond the pretty niggardly staples scope were sold exclusively under the counter to the circle of trusted people: their kindred and those who could potentially scratch your back in answer...

Square of the Konotop Divisions, was called so to commemorate the Soviet Army detachments that liberated the city in the Great Patriotic War, aka WWII, and were honored for the achievement with the city's name in their denominations.

For me, it seemed at first the end of the world because of its being the fourth streetcar stop counting from Peace Square, to which it took the same number of stops from the Station.

Square of the Konotop Divisions was as wide as three roads put side by side, and it had a slight slant along all of its considerable length.

Next to the square's upper right corner, there stood a metal tower like the famous one in Paris only more useful, because the Konotop tower held a huge water tank on its top dubbed with the uneven inscription – "I love you, Olya!" made in paint on its rusty side overlooking Square of the Konotop Divisions. Beneath the tower, behind the high wall with dense rows of barbered wire run atop of it, was the city prison.

In the square corner opposite the tower, the tall gate opened to the City Kolkhoz Market which, technically, was outside it, and in the square itself the gate started the raw of small stores going down the gradual slant – "Furniture", "Clothes", "Shoes"...

At its lower end the square was bounded by a high building with more windows than walls – the Konotop Sewing Factory, followed by a low building with more walls than windows – the City Sober-up Station, but that stood already in the outflowing street which led to the dangerous outskirt neighborhood of Zagrebelya.

Its hazardous nature was established by nasty scumbags that intercepted guys from other city neighborhoods, who had the nerve to see home the girls of Zagrebelya. The braves were made to imitate the rooster cry, or measure the Zagrebelya bridge with a match, or simply got a beating from the villains...

Square of the Konotop Divisions was crossed, bend-sinister, by the tram-track which entered it next to the long blind wall with three exit doors from the Vorontsov Movie Theater, whose entrance was from Lenin Street.

When a mobile menagerie arrived in the city, they would arrange their trailers and cages into a big square camp in the sector between the streetcar track and the Sewing Factory. The temporary enclosure looked like the Czech Taborites defense camp from from the Hussite wars in The Medieval History textbook. Only inside of their corral of wagons, they placed two additional rows of cages, back to back, for the thick crowd of Konotopers and folks from the nearby villages to walk around them as well as along the cages in the inner side of the mobile perimeter wall.

Square tablets on the cage gratings announced the name and age of the inmate, and the surf-like hum of the crowd of on-lookers hung over Square of the Konotop Divisions, interspersed with wild shrieks and wailing of the caged animals.

That happened once every three years...

And a couple of times the Wall of Death riders also visited Square of the Konotop Divisions. In front of the gate to Kolkhoz Market, they erected a high tarpaulin tent with a five-meter tall ring-wall of planks inside.

Two times a day, they let the on-lookers to climb in from outside under the tent roof and to crane over the wall top for watching how the riders circled arena on two motorcycles to gain the speed sufficient for getting over the ramp onto the wall, and bucket along it in a horizontal plane with the deafening rumble of their motors...

When you left Square of the Konotop Divisions up Lenin Street, moving past the Vorontsov Movie Theater towards the tiled three-story cube of the House of Householding with all kinds of repair workshops and ateliers, then midway between the two you bypassed a tall stand constructed of iron pipes crowned with the catching legend "DO NOT PASS BY!"

The contraption was used for hanging black-and-white photos of people taken to the Sober-up Station, paper slips at the bottom of their glazed frames reported their names and what organizations they worked at. Some ripper creepy pictures they were, the close-ups of faces as if got skinned, or something.

I felt a kinda pity for those alcoholics hanging in it. Probably, because of that another, far away stand at the Object which I abhorred so much. The two stands established sort of affinity between me and, well...at least, their kids...

Farther on along Lenin Street, past a crossing, the House of Culture of the Red Metallurgist Plant stood a little way back divided from the road by the tiny square of its own.

On both sides of that square, there also were planted stands, however, for merrier ends, presenting glue-mounted pages from satirical magazines – the Russian "Crocodile" on the left, and the Ukrainian "Pepper" on the right.

Between the road and each of the stands, there was a tin-and-glass stall looking at its symmetric twin across the square. The one by the "Crocodile" was selling ice-cream and lemonade, while all sorts of knick-knackery were the merchandise of that by the "Pepper".

There, among the motley keep-sake trifles, I spotted different sets of matchbox stickers and for my next trip to the city, I asked for extra kopecks and bought one, with the pictures of animals.

However, when I brought the purchase home to enhance the collection album brought from the Object, I realized it wouldn't be right. The older stickers, peeled off their matchboxes, bore the small-printed address of the match manufacturing factory, as well as "the price – 1 kopeck", while the set bought from the stall was just a pack of sticker-sized pictures.

Since then I had lost all interest in the collection, and passed it to my friend Skully...

Skully lived by the Nezhin Store with his mother, and grandmother, and the dog named Pirate, although the last dwelt outside the puny house of so small a kitchen and bedroom that both would fit into the only room of our khutta, however, theirs was a detached property.

Next to their khutta there stood an adobe-plastered shed, in which, apart from usual household tools and the coal stored for winter, there stood a handcart – an elongated wooden box resting on the axis of two iron wheels with a length of iron pipe sticking from under the box bottom and having a crossbar end to drag or push the handcart along.

Between the khutta and the wicket to the street, there stretched a long garden enclosed from both sides by the neighbors' fences which, all in all, was bigger than those two or three vegetable beds of ours.

In autumn and spring, I came to help Skully with turning the dirt in their garden. Jabbing the bayonet spades in the ground, we gave out the fashionable Settlement saying, "No Easter cake for you! Grab a bun and off with you, go dig the garden!"

And Pirate, set free, frisked wildly about the cherry trees bordering the narrow path to the rickety wicket...

Aunt Lyuda's tales about the midday-meal break at their deli were so funny!.

For the midday break, the saleswomen gathered in their locker room and started bragging with the delicatessens they brought that day from home in their half-liter glass jars. They were comparing, making judgments and statements, exchanging the recipes.

The store manager ate separately in her office and when the telephone on her desk rang, she answered the call and yelled through the open door the name of the saleswoman wanted by the caller.

The woman in question would hurriedly travel from the locker room to the manager's office and back, but—however short the phone talk was—by her return, her jar contents got heavily reduced by everyone so eager to see the taste. One lick is better than a hundred looks, right?.

But they had one shrewd smartie at the store. Whenever the manager called her to the phone, she'd calmly put her spoon aside, clear her throat with a "khirk!", and spit into her jar. Yak!

After the procedure, without any haste, she was leaving for her phone conversation and never looking back at the other saleswomen who had lost any interest in her jar already...

Mother also started working in the trade, she got a cashier job in the large Deli 6 near the Station. However, two months later she had a major shortage there, Mother was very worried and kept repeating she couldn't make such big a mistake. Someone from the deli workers should have knocked out a check for a large sum when Mother went to the toilet forgetful to lock the cash register. Selling of Father's coat of natural leather, which he bought while working at the Object, helped out of the pickle.

After that Mother worked in retail outlets manned with just one salesperson without any suspicious colleagues, at one or another stall in Central Park by Peace Square where they sold wine, biscuits, cigarettes and draft beer...

By the end of summer there again was a squabble in our khutta, though this time not a sisterly quarrel but a scrap between a husband and his wife.

The reason for discontent was provided by the newspaper-wrapped mushrooms which Uncle Tolik brought from a ride to the forest. Not a mighty harvest but enough for a pot of soup.

The pesky newspaper package was accurately tied around and put then into a mesh-bag which he hung on his motorbike steer not to scatter the mushrooms on the way. However, at home instead of grateful praise, he got a shrill tongue-lashing from Aunt Lyuda, who discovered that the package was tied up with a brassiere shoulder strap.

In vain Uncle Tolik repeatedly declared that he had just picked up "the damn scrap of a string" in the forest, Aunt Lyuda responded with louder and louder assertions that she was not born the day before and let them show her a forest where bras grew in bushes, and no use in trying to make a fool of her.

Grandma Katya no longer tried to appease the quarrelers and only looked around with saddened eyes.

And that became a lesson for two at once – Uncle Tolik learned to never bring home any mushrooms and I grasped the notion of "bra strap".

Then Aunt Lyuda ventured a probe of forbidding even the Uncle Tolik's fishing rides, at which point it was he to raise his voice until they agreed on a compromise – he was allowed to go fishing if I went with him.

So, the following two or three years from spring to autumn every weekend with a pair of fishing rods and a spinner hitched to the trunk rack of his "Jawa" we set off to fishing.

Mostly we rode to the river of Seim. At times we fished in the Desna river, but then we had to go off at dark because it was a seventy-kilometer ride there.

Roaring its engine, "Jawa" shot through the city wrapped in the night sleep with its streets empty of anything including the militia.

After the thirty-kilometers ride along the Baturin highway, we got to the Moscow highway where Uncle Tolik sometimes squeezed out of his motorbike a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour...

When we turned off onto the field roads, the dawn was already catching up with us.

I sat behind, crabbing his sides with my hands in the pockets of his motorcyclist jacket of artificial leather so that they wouldn't freeze away under the chilly headwind. The night around little by little transformed into twilight with the darker stretches of forest belts showing up about the fields, the sky grew lighter disclosing detached clouds that changed from white to pink, touched with the long rays of the sun which sent them high up before its rising above the horizon.

The breathtaking views gave no less thrill than wild high-speed riding...

Our usual bait were worms dug in the kitchen garden, yet once gurus from the fishermen brethren advised Uncle Tolik to try dragonfly larvae. Those critters lived underwater in clods of clay by the high river bank, and the fish just went crazy about them, like, snapping the larva-masked hook from each other.

We drove up to the riverbank in a murky twilight. The river lapped sleepily, wrapped in thin wisps of fog rising from the water. Uncle Tolik explained that it was me who had to fetch those lumps of clay onto the bank.

A mere thought of entering that dark water in the dusk of still lingering night threw a shiver up the spine, but a good ride deserved a good dive. I undressed and, on the advice of the elder, took a headlong dive into the river.

Wow! As it turned out, the water was much warmer than damp chill by the river!

I dragged slippery lumps to the bank, and Uncle Tolik broke them there and picked the larvae out from the tunnels they had drilled for living in clay. When he said it was enough I even didn't want to leave the streaming warmth of the current...

Still and all, it was an instance of merciless exploitation of adolescent labor and that same day I got square with the misuser.

Uncle Tolik preferred a spinner to a fishing rod, and with a sharp throw, he could send the lure to a splashdown almost in the middle of the wide river, then started to spin the reel on the tackle handle zig-zag pulling the flip-flap flash of the lure back. Predatory fish, like pine or bass, chased it and swallowed the triple hook in the tail of the lure, if the fisherman luck would have it.

So, by noon we moved to another place with a wooden bridge across the river and Uncle Tolik walked over to the opposite, steep, bank where he went along with it throwing the lure here and there.

I remained alone and watched the floats of the two fishing rods stuck in the sand by the current and then stretched out in the nearby grass...

When Uncle Tolik was walking back upon the opposite bank, I didn't raise my head and watched him struggling through the jungle of knotgrass and other weeds I lay in. They use that trick for special effects when filming a movie.

Up to the very bridge, he acted a Lilliputian for me...

Once Aunt Lyuda asked if I had ever seen her husband visiting any khutta during our fishing trips.

It gave me no qualms to give an absolutely honest answer that, no, I hadn't.

As for that one time in the Popovka village, when he suddenly remembered that we had set off without any bait and left me in an empty village street to wait while he'd ride to someplace—not too far off—to dig up worms and be straight back, all that I saw then was the soft deep sand in the road between the towering walls of nettles and the blackened straw roof of the barn I was left by but not a single _khatta_ in the view.

That's why I could safely say "no" to my Aunt's question...

There happened falls but just a couple of times.

The first time while riding through the field along the path on top of a meter high embankment with the tall grass flying by on both sides from the bike. I guessed it was an embankment because the tall grass was lower than our wheels, but what could that be for among the fields? That was the question.

At some point, the embankment broke off yet the tall grass hid the pit into which "Jawa" nosedived after a long jump through the air, and the hard landing threw us both far ahead.

The other time we had hardly started along Nezhin Street when the motorbike got tripped by a piece of iron pipe piled close by someone's khutta so that vehicles would not go too close by its foundation splashing dirt at it from the puddles in the road...

However, both times we got no injuries except for bumps because on our heads there were white plastic helmets.

It's only that after the fall in Nezhin Street, the trip had to be canceled because "Jawa"s' absorber began to leak oil and needed an urgent repair...

When we moved to Konotop, my first and foremost responsibility became fetching the water supply needed in our khutta.

The pair of water-filled enamel pails stood in the dark corner of the tiny veranda, on two back-to-back stools next to the kerosene stove. From a nail in the plank wall above the pails, there hung a dipper for drinking or filling a cooking pan.

Besides, water was needed to fill the tank of the washstand in the kitchen, which also held exactly two pails of it.

The tap, sticking from under the tank mounted above the tin sink, yielded water when pressed from underneath, as those spring taps in the toilets of passenger train cars.

The soapsuds trickled from the sink into the cabinet under it for the slop bucket which was to be kept under close control not to let it brim over and flood the kitchen floor but to take it out before too late and empty into the spill pit next to the outhouse in the garden.

The water was fetched from the pump on the corner of Nezhin and Gogol Streets – some forty meters from the gate. Hanging a pail on the pig-iron nose of the pump, you gave a good push-down to the iron handle behind it for the vigorous stream to bang into the pail, fill it and run over onto the road if not watched closely.

Two daily water-walks, four pails, all in all, were enough for our khutta, if, of course, there was no washing that day, however, the water for Aunt Lyuda's washing was brought by Uncle Tolik...

When the rains set in, the water-walks became a little longer – you had to navigate bypassing the wide puddles in the road.

In winter the pump stood in the middle of a small but ripping slippery skating rink because of spilled water and the resulting ice had to be walked in tiny careful steps.

The log lamppost by the pump was placed in the very right spot...

Besides, I was in charge of fetching fuel for the kerogas that looked like a small gas stove with two burners and had two cups on its backside to fill them with kerosene that soaked, through two thin tubes, two circular wicks of asbestos which were lighted when cooking dinner, or heating water for tea or the washing at hand on the smelly flames of yellow fringed with waving tips of black soot.

After kerosene, I went to Bazaar with a twenty-liter tin canister. Fairly aside from the Bazaar counters, there stood a big cubic tank of rusty sheet iron.

The day of kerosene sale was announced with the chalk note upon the tank side – "kerosene will be ..." and then followed the date when they were to bring it. However, so too many dates had changed each other—wiped and written over and over again—that no figures could be discerned there, inside the thick chalk spot, that's why they just dropped writing and the tank side bore the invariably optimistic inscription, "kerosene will be ...!"

A shallow trench under the tank side accommodated a short pipe from its bottom bearing a tap blocked with a padlock.

On the proclaimed day, a saleswoman in a blue satin robe descended into the trench and sat by the tap on a small stool ferried along. She also brought with her and put under the tap a multi-liter aluminum cauldron, took the padlock away and filled the vessel, up to three-quarters, with the foamy yellowish jet of kerosene.

The queue started moving to her with their bottles, canisters, and cans which she filled with a dipper through a tin funnel, collecting the pay into her blue pocket. When the dipper began to knock on the cauldron bottom, she turned the tap on and added the fluid.

In fact, they didn't need at all to bother with the sale date writing, because each morning Grandma Katya visited Bazaar and two days ahead brought the news about the "kerosene will be...!" exact date.

So, on the kerosene sale day after coming from school, I took the canister and went to spend a couple of hours in the line to the rusty tank.

Sometimes, they were also selling kerosene in the Nezhin Store backyard equipped with the same tank, but that happened not so often and the line was no shorter...

Soon after the summer holidays, I was elected Chairman of the Pioneer Platoon Council of our 7th "B" grade, because the former Chairman (the skinny red-haired Yemets) moved to some other city together with her parents.

At the Pioneer Platoon meeting, two of the nominees announced self-withdrawal without giving any particular reasons for their refusal, and the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school pushed forward my candidature.

Following the trend, I also started sluggish excuses, which he rebuffed with energetic clarification that all that was not for long because we all were soon to become members of the Leninist Young Communist League, aka Komsomol.

(...the structure of the pioneer organizations in the Soviet Union presented an awesome example of precise and well-thought-out principles of organizing any workable organization.

In every Soviet school, the students of each class on reaching the stipulated age became Young Pioneers and that event automatically turned their class into a Pioneer Platoon divided into Pioneer Rings.

The Ring Leaders and Platoon Chairman formed the Council of the Pioneer Platoon.

The Chairmen of the Pioneer Platoons made up the Council of the School Pioneer Company.

Then there came District or City Pioneer Organizations converging into Republican ones which, in their turn, composed the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

Such a crystal-wise-structured pyramid for convenient handling.

That is why the heroes of Komsomol resistance underground during the German occupation of Krasnodon city did not have to reinvent the wheel.

They used the all too familiar structure, only renamed "rings" into "cells".

If, of course, we take for granted the attestation found in The Young Guard, a novel written by A. Fadeyev.

He composed his work on the basis of information provided by the relatives of Oleg Koshevoy. As a result, in the mentioned novel Oleg became the underground leader while Victor Tretyakevich, who, actually, accepted Oleg to the resistance organization, was depicted as the traitor under the name of Stakhevich.

Fourteen years after the book publication, Tretyakevich was rehabilitated and awarded an order posthumously, because he did not die during interrogations at organs of the Soviet NKVD but was executed by the fascist invaders.

In the early sixties, a few other secondary traitors, whose names the writer did not bother to disguise, had served from ten to fifteen years in the NKVD camps and got rehabilitated as well.

By that moment, the writer himself had time enough to put a bullet through his head in May 1956, shortly after his participation in the meeting of Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the USSR, with the survived young guardsmen of Krasnodon.

At that meeting, Fadeyev grew inadequately excited and he yelled at Khrushchev in front of all the present, calling him names considered especially defamatory at that period, and two days later he committed suicide.

Or else, they committed his suicide, although, of course, such an expression—"they committed his suicide"—is unacceptable by the language norms.

Hence the moral – even the cleverest structure cannot guarantee from failure if your pyramid is not made of at least 16-ton stone blocks...)

Late September, Chairman of our School Pioneer Company fell ill, and in his stead, I was delegated to the City Pioneer Organization Account Meeting of the Chairmen of Councils of City School Pioneer Companies.

The Meeting was held in the Konotop House of Pioneers in a quiet nook behind the monument to the fallen heroes above Lenin Street.

According to the organization regulations, an Account Meeting had to have its Chairman and Secretary. The Meeting Chairman's job was to announce whose turn it was to account, and the Secretary would take notes of how much waste paper and scrap metal was collected by the pioneers of the reporting Chairman's school during the accounting period, which cultural events were organized, and what places were taken by their pioneers in the city-wide contests and competitions.

The Senior Pioneer Leader of our school had supplied me with a sheet of paper to be read at the Account Meeting, but in the House of Pioneers, they charged me with the additional responsibility of the appointed Chairman of the Meeting. I was assured that presiding an Account Meeting was as easy as pie. All you had to do was to announce, "And now the floor for the accounting report is given to the Chairman of the Pioneer Company Council from School number such-and-such!" after which the such-and-such Chairman would march to the rostrum on stage with their sheet of the report. When done with reading, the accounting Chairman would leave the paper to Secretary of the Meeting, because what's the point in sticking down all those figures on the fly if they had been already written, right?.

At first, everything went without a hitch. I and Secretary of Account Meeting, a girl in her festive white shirt and the scarlet pioneer necktie, as anyone else around, were sitting behind a square desk covered with a dark red cloth on a small stage in a small hall, where Chairmen of the City Pioneer Companies were seated in rows waiting for their turn to read their accounts. In the rear of the hall, Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee—responsible for the work with the pioneers—sat in her red pioneer necktie.

The Chairmen in a well-oiled manner followed each other, read from their sheets, left them by Secretary of Account Meeting, and returned to the audience. I also did my part as instructed but after the fourth announcement, something suddenly came over me or rather flooded over me.

My mouth got inundated with overflowing saliva, I barely had time to gulp it, and the salivary glands immediately gave out a new portion. I felt ashamed before the Secretary of Account Meeting, sitting next to me who surely was perplexed with the sounds of my non-stop hurried gulping. A spell of ease came when she went to account for School 10, yet with her return, the shameful torture went on. What's wrong with me, after all?!.

Then came my turn. Returning from the rostrum, I swallowed three times; it did not help. Okay, let School 14 finish and...Oh, no! Second Secretary too, with her concluding speech!.

(...in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who's now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere mingled with the never subsiding flow whoosh of the river currently named Varanda...)

In October, the seventh-graders began to prepare for joining the ranks of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, aka ALYCL, aka Komsomol.

Komsomol membership was not a cheap giveaway passed out indiscriminately to lined-up squads or companies. Not in the least! You had to prove that you deserved that high honor at the special admittance sitting of the City Komsomol Committee whose Members would ask you questions as in a real examination because on entering this youth organization you became an ally to the Party and a would-be communist.

During the preparatory training for acceptance, the Senior Pioneer Leader of our school, Volodya Gurevitch—a pretty young man with black hair and bluish-skinned cheek-and-jowls because of the thick but always close shaved bristle—distributed to us, the would-be members, small accordion-folding leaflets presenting in the smallest typeface the Charter of ALYCL.

He warned that at the Admittance Sitting the City Komsomol Committee Members were especially keen about the Charter Section on the rights and duties of Komsomol members.

Volodya Gurevitch graduated from the prestigious School 11, as well as the class of button-accordion at the Konotop the music. He lived far from the Settlement, in a block of five-story buildings between Peace Square and Square of the Konotop Divisions, which area the local folks called, for some reason, Palestine.

At school, he wore mixed paraphernalia consisting of a very clean and well-ironed pioneer necktie and the badge of Komsomol member on the chest of his jacket – a small red banner with the golden profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's bald head with his wedge-like beard.

In the close circle of pioneer activists, Volodya Gurevitch liked to repeat, emphasizing the coincidence in both name and patronymic, "Call me simply – Ilyich." And these words he concluded with a hearty laugh, loud and protracted, after which his lips did not immediately pull back to the neutral position.

However, Volodya Sherudillo, a sturdily built champion at bitok gambling with the red turf of hair and a thick scatter of freckles in his round face, who studied in my class, in the close circle of us, his classmates, called Volodya Gourevitch – "a khannorik from CEC!"

(...at the dawn of the Soviet regime, before enslaving villagers with the collective farms, the Communist leadership experimented organizing rural population into fellowships of Collective Earth Cultivation, acronymically "CEC"

However, the meaning of "khannorik" is not recorded even in the multi-volumed Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great-Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl, probably, because of the prominent linguist never visited the village of Podlipnoye.

Who remembers CEC's nowadays?

Yet, the collective memory of village folks still keeps them dearly and transfers from generation to generation.

" _Though the meaning is forgotten the same remains the feeling..."_...)

The Konotop City Komsomol Committee was located on the second floor in the right wing of the City Council building. The building itself, somehow resembling the Smolny Institute from numerous movies about the Great October Revolution, faced Peace Square divided from it by Peace Avenue. Three short, quiet, flag-stone paved, alleys beneath the umbrage of mighty chestnuts connected the building with the avenue.

None of the guys from our school had any problem whatsoever in the examination on the Komsomol Charter, like any other students of our age, we got smoothly admitted to the Leninist Young Communist League...

In autumn, they started the construction of tramway into the Plant Settlement underneath the giant poplars lined along the cobbled Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street. Gray concrete pillars for the support of the contact wire over the tramway rose at regular intervals between the trees.

By the October holidays, the track rails had passed both Bazaar and our school and even turned into May Day Street, which stretched to the city limit at the end of the Settlement.

Then three small streetcars started running from the terminal on the city-side of the Under-Overpass tunnel to the terminal at the end of May Day Street.

The streetcar conductor-women collected the fare selling three-kopeck tickets which they tore off the rolls fixed on the canvas strap of their plum uniform bags cinched under their breasts.

In the large streetcars that ran in the city, the driver had only one cab, in the head of the car, and on reaching a terminal stop the streetcar went around the turning loop to start its route in reverse.

The streetcar line in the Settlement had no such loops at its terminals because the small streetcars had two cabs, kinda a pushmi-pullyu, and at the loopless terminals, the driver simply swapped the cabs and started back assisted by the conductor, who stood on the step in the back door yanking at the sturdy tarp strap tied to the streetcar arc and pulling it over because the arc should be in backward position when sliding along the contact wire above the track.

And again, if the doors in the large streetcars were operated by the driver who slammed them automatically from her cab, then the small streetcars in the Settlement had hinged folding doors, so on reaching your stop, you pulled the middle handle of the door, pushed the folding leaves aside and got off; while in the reverse operation you pulled the handle on the edge leave and pushed the middle handle – the door, closed, off we go!.

But who cares for all that algorithmic trouble? That's why the streetcars in the Plant Settlement ran their routes with both doors wide open except for spells of devastating frost.

And so that the streetcar could give way to each other, two of the stops in the Settlement had doubled track; one such stop was by School 13 and the other in the middle of May Day Street...

The toilet in the Plant Club was on the first floor – at the far end of a very long corridor that started by the library door and went on and on between the blind walls on both sides, under the seldom bulbs in the ceiling.

In the dark green paint on the walls, there occasionally happened closed doors with signs: "Children Sector", "Variety Band", "Dresser Room" and, already near the toilet, "Gym". All the doors were constantly locked and kept silence, only from behind the gym door there sometimes came tap-tapping of the ping-pong ball or clangs of metal in barbell plates.

But one day I heard sounds of piano playing and knocked on the Children Sector door. From inside, there sounded a yell to come in, which I did and saw a small swarthy woman with a bob-cut black hair and wide nostrils, who sat at the piano by the wall of large mirror squares.

Opposite the door there were three windows high above the floor and, beneath them, ballet rails ran along with a ribbed heating pipe on the wall. In the left half of the room there stood a tall screen of the puppet theater behind an unusually long narrow table.

And then I said that I'd like to enroll Children Sector.

"Very well, let's get acquainted – I'm Raissa Grigoryevna, so who are you and where from?"

She told me that the former actors grew too adult or moved away to other cities, and for the Children Sector revival I needed to bring along my schoolmates.

I started a canvassing campaign in my class. Skully and Kuba felt doubtful about the idea of joining the Children Sector, yet they surrendered after the irresistible argument that the long table in that room could easily be used for ping-pong playing. And a couple of girls came too out of curiosity.

Raissa Grigoryevna received the newcomers with delighted welcome, and we began to rehearse a puppet show "Kolobok" based on the same-named fairy tale.

Our mentor taught us to control plain hand puppets so that they did not duck below the screen out of the onlookers' sight. We gathered at Children Sector twice a week, but sometimes Raissa missed the rehearsals or was late because of which occasions the key was kept on the windowsill in the room of the announcement painters.

We opened Children Sector and played ping-pong for hours, albeit with a tennis ball, across that long table. Neither had we bats, effectively replacing them with the covers of school textbooks and the net between the players' sectors was also made of the lined-up textbooks, and although the hits of tennis ball knocked them down but then restoring the order for the game didn't take long either...

Hard and demanding is a puppeteer's job: both mentally – you need to copy your character's clues and learn them by heart and physically – you shouldn't ever low down your up-stretched arm with the hand doll donned on your fingers.

During rehearsals, the acting arm turned numb with the strenuous exertion, and even propping it with the other hand didn't really work. And then there appeared the pesky nagging crick in the neck because the head was constantly tilted upward to check the actions of the doll.

But, on the other hand, at the end of the performance, you would step out from behind the screen and come in front of it, keeping your hand inside the doll upraised to your shoulder, and Raissa Grigoryevna would announce that it was you who acted Hare.

And after a theatrical nod of your head, Hare near your shoulder would bow too, and you'd hear the laughter and applause from the audience. O, thorns! O, the sweetness of glory!.

Later on, many of the participants dropped out but the core of Children Sector—Skully, Kuba, and I—kept on.

Raissa made of us actors for short performances about the heroic kids and adults from the period of the October Revolution or the Civil War.

For the performances, we made up, stuck real theatrical mustache, wore army tunics, rolled cigarettes of shag and newspaper slips the way she taught us, and let the smoke in and out of our mouths without inhaling it, so as not to cough.

With those performances, we then went to the shop floors in KaPeVeRrZe Plant—the bigger ones where there were Red Corner rooms for meetings—and during the midday break, we acted on tiny stages there before the workers while they were eating their midday meal out of newspaper packages. Most of all they enjoyed the moment with hand-rolled cigarettes...

Twice a year Club staged a major amateur concert where the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, recited heartfelt poems dedicated to the Communist Party. The pupils of Anatoly Kuzko, the button-accordion class teacher, played their achievements.

Yet, the crest of the concert program was dancing numbers by the Ballet Studio because of their trainer Nina Alexandrovna enjoyed a well-deserved reputation that attracted students from all over the city.

Besides, Club possessed a rich theatrical wardrobe so that for the Moldavan dance of Jock the dancers appeared in skin-tight pants and black vests embroidered with sequin, and for the Ukrainian Hopuck, they wore hugely wide trousers and soft ballet boots of red leather.

The accompaniment to all of them, including young girls in ballet tutus, provided virtuoso accordionist Ayeeda standing behind the scenes of the stage.

And there next to her stood also we, in army tunics and adult makeup, marveling how classy she played without any sheet music.

The handsome electrician Murashkovsky sang in duet with the bald tenor, a turner from the Mechanical Shop, "Two Colors of My Life" in Ukrainian, and recited comical rhymed humoreskas. On Murashkovsky's right hand there were missing three fingers – only the small one and the thumb remained in place, and, to hide the deficit, he clutched a spiffy handkerchief in them like with a crab claw.

Two elderly women sang romances, not in a duet but in turn, accompanied by the button-accordion of Anatoly Kuzko himself, whose eyes were sooner astray than crossed, with one of them looking straight into the ceiling when he eye-contacted you.

For the concluding peak of the concert, Aksyonov, the blonde Head of the Variety Band, and his musicians came to the stage through the dark of the auditorium. Their drums and double bass were waiting already there in the small makeup room behind the stage, but his saxophone Aksyonov was bringing himself.

Blonde Jeanne Parasyuk, also, by the way, a graduate from our school, performed a couple of popular hits accompanied by the Variety Band and the concert ended with the all-out applause and eager shouts "encore!"

The auditorium at those concerts was filled to the brim, like at a show of some popular two-sequel Indian film.

The stage was illuminated by lamps along its edge and from above, and even by the beams of searchlights from both balconies. In the dark passage along the wall beneath the balcony, the Ballet Studio dancers were trotting to the Dressing Room of auntie Tanya on the first floor, to change their stage clothes for the following numbers.

For acting our short performances, Raissa trained us how to appear on stage from behind the scenes and get out without turning your back to the auditorium, and how to look into the hall – not at someone in particular but just so, in general, somewhere between the fifth and sixth rows.

Although in the crude beams of the searchlight glare directed into your face from the darkness in the hall, you could hardly make out anyone after the fourth row, and even those in the first one looked fairly blurred...

So Club became a part of my life and if I didn't show up home for a long time after school, they didn't worry – I was hanging out at Club as usual...

In the dark of winter evenings, we got together for hanging out along the streetcar track because our favorite pastime was riding the streetcar "sausage", so was called the tubular grille hanging under the driver cab.

We ambushed a streetcar at the stop, neared from behind, and when it started rolling forward, we jumped onto the "sausage", grabbing at the small ledge under the windshield of the empty driver cabin.

The narrow ledge provided nothing to gain a hold, and you had to strain the fingers to the utmost clawing for some absent point of vantage in its even surface.

The streetcar rolled and rumbled, and bumped on the rail joints, the springy "sausage" jumped up and down under your feet – wow! Super!

The most speedy stretch in the track was between Bazaar and School 13. It's where the streetcars imagined they were racing cars and it was there that my fingers once grew too numb and began slipping off the smooth ledge, but Skully shouted, "Hold on!" and pressed them back with his palm, but in a minute Kuba cried, "Kapets!" because his fingers also slipped off, and he jumped from the "sausage" shooting along at full speed.

Fortunately, he didn't ram against the trunk of some huge poplar and he caught up with us jogging from the darkness, while the streetcar waited at the stop for its counterpart coming from the Settlement, so we went on riding without losses...

The attraction was not exclusively our hobby-horse though but in common ownership of the Settlement guys. At times there collected a whole bunch of "sausage"-riders so that the springy grille began to scrape the railheads.

At longer stops, the conductors got off the car attempting to drive us away. We fled into the frosty winter darkness, the streetcar started and we lighted back onto the grille before the streetcar gained full speed...

One day the classes for our 7th "B" were canceled and we walked for an excursion to the KaPeVeRrZe Plant.

First of all, we visited the Plant Fire Brigade which was not too far from the Main Check-Entrance. Then we proceeded to the shop floor for filling tall cylinder iron tanks with oxygen.

In the Smithy, no explanations were audible behind the deafening hum of giant fans and the roar of the fire in the brick furnaces from which black-robed workers were pulling with tremendous tongs huge glowing slugs and transporting them with winch cranes onto the anvils of hydraulic hammers.

Our class stood for a while and watched a worker turning with his steely tongs a big white-hot slug upon the anvil, this way and that way, under the mighty strikes of huge puffing hammer, shooting from above between its oily stands, to shape the needed form.

The floor vibrated with the tremor sent about by the hammer bangs. Flakes of metal fell off the workpiece getting darker and changing color to scarlet, then to dark cherry. But the most surprising was the sensitiveness of the hammer which could also strike very lightly, and even stop halfway in its sharply accelerated fall. It was operated by a woman in a kerchief on her head, who used just a pair of levers sticking from the juggernaut's side frame.

On our way out of the shop past another, silent, hydraulic hammer I saw a scattering of round metal tablets the size of a jubilee ruble, only thicker. I liked their pleasant lilac color, besides, such a tablet would do for a good bitok to turn kopecks over in the game for money. Besides, they surely were just a waste if thrown there on the floor.

I picked one up and dropped at once – it badly burned my fingers. A passing-by worker laughed and said, "What? Too heavy, eh?"

And in the Mechanical Shop Floor, I was impressed by a planing machine with a narrow low frame, scraping off, in no hurry, shavings from the clamped metal plate. The astounding feature about the machine tool was its bas-relief boilerplate – "Manufactured in Riga in 1904." From before the revolution! And still working!.

Farther along, there stood a large Soviet machine tool, also a planer; its cutter ran long runs and the worker sat next to it in a chair just watching idly. Some nice job, huh?

When at home I shared my impressions from the excursion, Mother said I might start taking shower at some of Plant's shop floors instead of going to the City Bathhouse behind Square of the Konotop Divisions.

Then she asked if I knew that Vadya Kubarev's mother worked at the Plant cooling tower and that would simplify access to the tower's shower room.

I discussed the idea with Skully who told me that he had been long since going to Plant on his bath days, and there were shop floors with better shower rooms than that at the cooling tower. The majority of the showers worked only to eight but those in the shop floors with three working shifts were open round the clock.

Of course, they might not allow us to Plant through the Main Check-Entrance but who cared about going that way? There remained free access to the territory through the Plant rear end, along the tracks where the cars were pulled in for repair and the repaired ones pulled out.

Yet, there was no need to go even that far, because of the high concrete wall along Professions Street was equipped with a number of convenient stiles for the workers to easily take home shabashkas after their working day.

(...and again I have to break out from the consequently flowing timeline, and take a jump from Konotop to the Varanda River, how otherwise would a metropolitan woman from the third millennium understand the everyday provincial lingo of the last century?

At times even the Dahl's Dictionary is of little help. Although he correctly stated that the word "shabash", aka Sabbath, served a signal for the end of work, but no further revelations beyond that point.

It took the Russian language another hundred years up to the era of developed socialism built in the country to derivate "shabashka" from the Sabbath.

Shabashka is something produced at work for use at home or, at least, a bundle of timber pieces acquired and chopped at the workplace for burning in the stove of the worker's khutta.

It is the period, sort of, marking the end of a working day.

How do you estimate my etymological efforts?.

Well, and since I'm here, perhaps it's time to crawl into this one-person Chinese pagoda of mine. What I like about it are its folding bamboo rods.

Some cleverly designed gizmo – a dozen half-meter tubes assemble into the pair of three-meter-long elastic poles to stretch the tent on them. And this mosquito net at the entrance works fine – zip it up, and no mosquito can fly in. Buzz outside, bloodsuckers! Fig at you!

Now I'll take off my shirt and pants, get into this sleeping bag "Made in Germany", get warm and all the king's men can't make you feel cozier.

It's good when so an ancient civilization of the East and the most technocratic nation of the West work for you.

Although, when you come to think about it, they are only manufacturers putting to use the ideas which are the global asset accumulated by all the humans. Any, even the most sophisticated, widget in this or that advanced nation is the mutual achievement of mankind as a whole, to which the Amazonia Indians contributed as well by the mere fact of their existence.

Look at that same zipper: who was it invented by? I do not know, but hardly they were the Liang Jin dynasty or Kaiser Wilhelm...)

The stage is a complex mechanism, in addition to its block system for operating the curtains and the electrical board with lots of fuses and switches to control its diverse illumination, high above the stage, there is a whole cobweb of metal beams for hanging backs, lamps and side wings.

During the concerts, we not only stood beside virtuoso accordionist Ayeeda, and not only chatted with Moldovan-Ukrainian dancers of the Ballet Studio, who were waiting for their turn to appear before the audience, but we also explored the mysterious world of the backstage.

There was a vertical iron ladder to a short catwalk, from which you could climb the beams under the roof and cross them to the other side of the stage, where was another catwalk but without any ladder, so retrace your Tarzan-walk through the flies you, short-sighted Chung!.

But what could be there – behind that plank partition which stretched above the stage from one wall to the other? Aha! The attic above the auditorium!.

And thus was conceived and matured the plan how to get free access to movie shows at Club – through the attic to the catwalk, down the ladder to the stage, wait for the lights to go out, dive under the screen and you were in the auditorium!

On the first floor of Club, next to the painters' room there was a door eternally ajar to the Plant territory, where the Club building was equipped with a solid iron stairway running up to the very roof with a dormer which allowed for easy access to the attic. So, it remained only to prepare a hole through the plank partition for getting from the attic to the stage.

Kuba, for some reason, refused to participate in solving the final problem on the way to free cinema, leaving the realization of the brilliant plan to me and Skully.

Soon, one dark and windy winter night, taking the ax from the Skully's shed, we penetrated the Plant territory over one of the so many stiles in the concrete wall. Without delay or any obstruct, we approached the Club building, climbed to the attic and looked around...

It was an extensive space with an incomprehensible metal disk in the middle about two meters in diameter and more-than-a-meter tall covered, like, with a casserole lid of sheet iron.

Moving the lid little bit aside, we discovered that the round bottom was much deeper than you supposed looking at the disk from outside. It had narrow slits from the center towards the side of the circle cut at regular intervals. The positioning of the disk and the look of the slits prompted it was from where the huge chandelier adorned with dangling pieces of milky glass hung into the auditorium.

Through the slits, there burst dogged rounds of assault-rifles mixed with booms of exploding grenades – a war movie down there became an accomplice to our not strictly legitimate intentions.

The jumping circle of light from a flashlight disclosed the layer of cinder used for thermal isolation under our feet on their cautious sneaking ahead to where the attic ended with the plank partition.

Deducting the approximate location of the catwalk on the other side of the sturdy planks, we applied the ax to split and break them to produce a sizable hole. The wood proved to be hard, besides, we had to stop the work at lulls between the combat actions underneath.

It's only after cutting one of the planks in two, we realized the additional problem we had run into – the supposed partition turned out to be a double wall of planks with a sheet-iron layer sandwiched between the wooden ones. You can't cut iron with an ax, that's why we failed to make a manhole to the magnificent world of the art of motion pictures. The builders of yore knew their job all right, I warrant...

As it turned out, and pretty soon too, the whole manhole plan was no need at all, because Raissa taught us taking pass-checks from the Club Director.

About six in the evening, Pavel Mitrofanovich was, as a rule, already jolly screwed, and when someone from the Children Sectorians appeared in his office with a humble petition, he tore a page-wide slip off a sheet of paper on his desk and, snuffling his nose so as to keep in check the booze on his breath, wrote an illegible line yielding "let in 6 (six) people" when deciphered, or any other number of those who wanted to watch the show on that day. Then he added his ornate signature running much longer than the previous line.

When the show began, we went up to the second floor and handed the precious scrap of paper to auntie Shura, who unlocked the treasured door to the balconies, suspiciously comparing our quantity to the hieroglyphics in the pass-check...

The Club Director was short and thickset without having a pot-belly though. His slightly swollen, and oftentimes ruddy, face was accompanied by the combed back grayish hair with a natural wave.

When the Club stuff together with the amateurs from the Plant staged a full-length performance of the Ostrovsky's At the Advantageous Place, the Club Director just parted his hair in the middle of his head, smeared it with Vaseline and turned out a better than natural Czar-times Merchant for the play.

Electrician Murashkovsky acted Landowner and appeared on stage in a white Circassian coat, constantly clutching a riding-whip, instead of a handkerchief, in his claw of the disfigured hand.

Even the Head of Children Sector, Eleonora Nikolayevna, partook in the full-length production of that classic play.

Her position at Club was unmistakably higher than that of Raissa, who was the Artistic Director of Children Sector, and Eleonora appeared in Children Sector much seldomer. On those visits, as elsewhere, she invariably arrived in dangling earrings studded with tiny bright sparklers, as well as in an immaculate white blouse with a lace collar, which riggings were emphasized with mannerly retarded movements of her hands, in contrast to the energetic gesticulation of Raissa.

The only occasion when I saw Eleonora without those tiny shining strips hanging from her ears was in the one-act play, where she was acting the underground communist caught by the White Guards.

The Whites locked her in the same prison cell with a criminal, acted by Raissa, and Eleonora converted her into a Communist supporter before Stepan, Club House Manager, together with Head of Variety Band, Aksyonov, both in white Circassian coats and ballet high boots, took her away to face the firing squad...

If the Club Director was absent from his office, I had to buy a ticket like everyone else from the ticket office next to his locked door.

On one of such occasions, I entered the common auditorium and chose a seat right in front of two girls, my classmates, Tanya and Larissa because even though in the sold tickets they marked the row and the place no one paid much attention to those marks.

Sometime before, I secretly liked Tanya, but she seemed overly unattainable, so I pulled wisely up and switched over to courting Larissa. After the classes at school, I tried to catch up with her in Nezhin Street because she also went home that way. However, she invariably walked together with Tanya, her close girl-friend as well as a neighbor.

When Larissa was a participant in Children Sector I once happened to see her along Professions Street to the Gogol Street corner because she did not allow to go with her any farther.

At that period Tanya also participated in Children Sector activities and there, actually, were three of us going along Professions Street. Tanya kept urging Larissa to go faster, but then she just got angry and walked ahead alone.

The two of us parted at the aforesaid corner, and I went along Gogol Street enthusiastically recollecting Larissa's sweet laugh in response to my silly yakety-yak.

On reaching the ice-coated water pump under the lamppost at the Nezhin Street corner, I parted with all of my enthusiasm evaporating because of the two black figures, contrasting sharply against the white snow, who called me to come up.

I recognized both – one was a guy from the parallel class, and the other – Kolesnikov, a tenth-grader from our school; they both lived somewhere in Maruta Street.

In a privately threatening tone, Kolesnikov began to make me understand that if I ever would come up to Larissa again and if he heard or be told that I dared then, well, in general, if I understood what he would do to me. So he kept rehearsing those general concepts in a circle, with slight variations in their order of priority, when I suddenly felt something snatching at my calf. I thought that was a street dog and looked back, but there was only a snowdrift and nothing else. That's where and when the meaning of the idiom "hamstring shaking with fear" came to me completely.

He asked again if I understood, and I muttered that I understood.

Then he asked if I understood everything that he meant. I mumbled that, yes, everything. But I didn't look at their faces and thought how good it would be if Uncle Tolik, the former regional welterweight champion in weightlifting, came to the pump for water.

No, he never popped up. On the morning of that day, I had brought enough water to our khutta...

And now, before the pretty crowded auditorium, I took the seat in front of the two girls, my classmates, even though being fully aware of all the imprudence of such an act, yet for some reason, unable to behave differently.

I turned to them and tried to start a talk in the general hubbub of the audience present. However, Larissa kept silent and looking aside, and only Tanya was responding in rather a monosyllabic way before Larissa addressed me herself, "Stop following me, I'm laughed at by the guys because of you!"

Unable to find a word to answer her and dumb-stricken, rose I to my feet and walked off along the blind wall to the exit, carrying within my chest the fragments of my broken heart.

When I was nearing the last rows in the auditorium, my black sadness got drowned in the downright darkness because the lights went out to start the movie.

To let my eyes get accustomed to the dark and prevent stumbling, I for a second took an empty seat in the row's end and forgot to go on with grief and suffering because it was "Winnitoo the Chief of Apaches"!.

At 19 Nezhin Street, the old man Duzenko was no more and that part of the khutta was dwelt already by two old women: Duzenko's widow and her sister who moved from her village.

And in the half belonging to Ignat Pilluta there remained only his widow, Pillutikha. She never stuck her nose outside her khutta, and the window shutters looking into Nezhin Street at times were closed for weeks on end. Sure enough, she had to visit Bazaar or the Nezhin Store but my treads never crisscrossed with hers...

In February Grandma Katya was suddenly taken to the hospital.

Probably, it's only for me, with my life divided between school, Club, books, and the TV it happened suddenly. When trying to get everywhere, you've got no time to see things around.

Coming from school, I clinked the wicket latch-hook and ran up our porch past Pillutikha's window, in which there was seen her profile cloaked with a loosely hung black kerchief, and her hand raised menacingly towards the wall between her and our kitchens.

At home, I threw the folder with school notebooks into the crevice between the folding couch-bed and the cabinet under the TV and went back to the kitchen to have a midday meal with my brother and sister, if they hadn't had it yet.

Mother and Aunt Lyuda cooked separately for their families, and Grandma Katya ate the meals by her youngest daughter, together with her younger grandkids, Irochka and Valerik, at the common kitchen table by the wall between our and Duzenko's parts of the khutta.

In the daytime, there was nothing on television but the frozen circle and squares for image adjusting with small knobs at the back of the TV box; if the circle was uneven then the announcers' faces would be flattened or overly long. That's why until the All-Union Television started to broadcast at five o'clock the TV was turned off and the midday meal was eaten under the muffled drum-roll-like chant from behind the wall to the Pillutikha's, whose blather at times peaked up into indistinct shrieks.

Then I went to Club and, coming back, again saw Pillutikha, backlit by a distant bulb in the room; she never turned on the light in the kitchen where she stood up against the hateful wall. After all the four parents of our khutta returned from work, Pillutikha would add the volume to which the usual comment of Father was, "Ew! Again that Goebbels at her hurdy-gurdy!"

Once Uncle Tolik put a large teacup to the wall to hear what she was croaking about. I also pressed my ear to the cup bottom – the gabble got nearer and sounded already not from behind the wall but in the white teacup, yet remained as thick as before.

Mother advised not to pay attention to the half-witted old woman, and Aunt Lyuda explained that Pillutikha was putting curses on all of us through the wall. She turned to that same wall and pronounced with perfect poise, "Be all of that back to your bosom!"

I don't know whether Pillutikha was crazy indeed. She managed to live alone, after all.

By the end of the war, her daughter left Konotop for the safety's sake – not to have troubles for her cheerful behavior with the officers of the German Company Headquarters lodging in her parents' khutta.

Pillutikha's son Grisha was doing his ten-year stretch in prison for some murder. Her husband died; no TV in the khutta. Maybe, she kept cursing so as not to go nuts, who knows...

Grandma Katya never commented or said anything about Pillutikha, she only smiled a guilty smile. On some days she moaned occasionally but not louder than the muffled Goebbels' speeches from behind the wall...

And suddenly an ambulance arrived and she was taken to the hospital.

Three days later they brought Grandma Katya back and put on the leatherette-covered mattress-couch, constructed of the remains of the big sofa from the Object, placed under the window in the kitchen, opposite to the brick stove.

She did not recognize nor spoke to anyone, and only moaned loudly.

In the evening our two families gathered in front of the TV and closed the door to the kitchen to cut off her moans and heavy smell. The Arkhipenkos moved their beds to the room and it became a bedroom for nine.

The next day the ambulance was called again, but they did not take her away and only made an injection. Grandma Katya quieted for a short time but then again began to swerve from side to side on her couch, repeating the same screams, "Oh, God! Ah, probby!"

A few years later I guessed that "probby" was a shortened Ukrainian "forgive me, God".

Grandma Katya was dying for three days.

Our families stayed at neighbors' khuttas; the Arkhipenkos at Number 15, and we at 21, in the half of Ivan Kreepak.

Adult neighbors were giving our parents indistinct advice about breaking out the threshold to our khutta, or some of the floorboards inside it.

The most common-sense proposal made Ivan Kreepak's wife, auntie Tamara. She said that the couch with Grandma Katya stood under the window with a half-open leaf above her head, and the fresh air protracted the sufferings of the poor thing.

The same evening, Mother and Aunt Lyuda dropped into our khutta to grab more blankets, then they put out the light and got out onto the porch.

There Aunt Lyuda neared the kitchen window and closed the leaf tightly. Then she stealthily stepped down to Mother and me—I was holding the blankets—with a smile of a naughty girl on her face, or so it seemed in the dark moonless night.

In the morning Mother woke us, sleeping on the floor in the living-room of Kreepak's khutta, with the news that Grandma Katya died.

The funeral was the next day. I did not want to go, but Mother said I should.

I was burning with shame. It seemed to me that everyone knew that Grandma Katya was suffocated by her daughters. That's why I let loose the ear-flaps of my rabbit-fur hat and pulled it over my eyes. And so I went all the way from our khutta to the cemetery, keeping my guilty head low, and looking at the feet of those who walked ahead of me.

It's possible though that no one ever guessed that I did so out of shame and not because of the strong wind slapping my face with icy pellets.

At the cemetery, under shrill cries of a trumpet over the mound of snow mixed with black earth lumps, all Grandma Katya's children were sobbing both Mother, and Aunt Lyuda, and even Uncle Vadya.

(...living on, we harden more and more, someday I'll grow less sentimental than those iron crackers in the worn-out scrip of the wanderer in search for her beloved Finist the Falcon Radiant...)

The news of the Yuri Gagarin's death shattered us, though not so tragically as the death of Vladimir Komarov eleven months before him – getting harder we had learned already that astronauts were also mortal.

The TV announcer, keeping his eyes down to the sheet of text on his desk, read that in a training jet plane flight, Gagarin together with his partner-pilot Seryogin crashed when approaching the airfield. Then he looked up through his black-rimmed thick glasses and declared the All-Union mourning.

When a person reads from a sheet of paper it does not mean that they hide their eyes because of shame, they just do their job, how else would we know the news?

Shortly before Gagarin's death, I heard in the adults' gossip that after all, he didn't live up to what you'd call an impeccable hero, because he became too vain and proud, and he cheated his wife. Consider, for instance, that wide scar on his eyebrow which appeared after his jump from a lover's apartment on the second floor.

(...but who's interested today in all those rumors, be they true or false?

For my son Ahshaut, and so for all of his generation, Gagarin is just a name from a history textbook, as for me was, say, Marshal Tukhachevsky.

Orbited the Earth? Well, good job.

Got executed with a firing squad? Well, bad luck.

However, Gagarin for me is not a textbook but a part of my own life and, as long as I'm alive, I am interested to find out what happened, how and why.

And, when digging for certain facts, it's hard to avoid falling in love with Internet search engines...

Vladimir Komarov knew that he would not return alive from his space flight because his backup, Yuri Gagarin, when inspecting the spaceship Voskhod, found two hundred technical flaws which he listed in a written report of ten pages.

He passed the report through his higher commanders to Leonid Brezhnev, the then leader of the USSR. The commanders held the report by them, they knew that Brezhnev would never agree to postpone the launch date, not to let the Americans overtake the Soviet Union in the space flight race.

Komarov could refuse to go to his obvious death, but then the doomed spaceship would be manned with his backup and personal friend, Yuri Gagarin.

On the appointed morning, Gagarin appeared at the launch pad wearing an astronaut spacesuit and demanded that he be sent instead of Komarov, but he was not listened to...

After the burial of Komarov's ashes in the Kremlin wall, next to the ashes of Marshal Malinovsky, Gagarin's behavior towards his superiors became extremely defiant and uncontrolled.

By unconfirmed rumors, at one of the government banquets, Yuri Gagarin splashed his glass of vodka into Brezhnev's face.

Americans rule out the plausibility of such an incident not because they are stupid but simply because they have different grammar.

In the Russian language "mother" and "death" are of the same grammatical gender so that for a Russian mujik, consciously or unconsciously, there is something in common between the two.

Well, how to plausibly translate "Death-Mommy" for Americans if all they have got is just "Mr. Death"? Not anything fits into a person's head until they get it under the skin...

As an indirect result, they shove an anti-tank mine under their belt and with the cry, "Try to bear me back, Mom!" throw themselves under the trucks of advancing tank...

Then go and rack your brains over the mystery of the Russian soul. The solution lies in the language...

Unruly Gagarin was not expelled from the Cosmonauts' Detachment – he already belonged to the entire Planet. He continued to attend the classes, flew jets in training flights.

Did he realize that the countdown for his extermination had been set to ticking?

I think, yes, he did. Cosmonauts were selected not only for physical but mental fitness as well.

He did not only know where and when...

On March 27, 1968, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a plane crash near the village of Novosyolovo, Kirzhach District, Vladimir Region.

Through the foggy morning, the MIG jet was coming in from the training flight, there remained a couple of minutes of flight at the altitude of five hundred meters to the airfield, when from the low clouds the SU jet dropped down, though according to the flights plan for that morning she was supposed to fly at the altitude of fourteen kilometers in a completely different direction.

Controlled by an experienced test pilot, the huge, in comparison to the training aircraft, SU jet flashed by close to the MIG preparing for landing. The MIG, captured by turbulence, twirled like a sliver in the breaker, entered a tailspin and collapsed into the forest. The sound of the explosion reached the airfield.

Let him who has ears hear. Fadeyev – Khrushchev; Gagarin – Brezhnev.

Let him who understands realize...

But I again got carried away and in the account about myself, there popped up some complete strangers never met in my life, and it's only now that I'm starting to see – they are also a part of me.

Okay, it's time to drop showing off what a wise guy I am and get back to the twentieth century, year sixty-eight, when I am in my fourteenth year and...)

...And it was simply outrageous that them those Czechs, succumbing to the CIA subversive propaganda, started a counterrevolution in the fraternal camp of the socialist countries.

How could they so inhumanely block the road with baby carriages in front of our tank? The driver had to take an abrupt turn, in case there were babies inside, and he died when the tank fell off the bridge. So reported the Central TV news program "Time".

Then, of course, the Czech Communist Party restored the order in their country with the help of a military contingent from the fraternal states, and we again began to live on together...

By the by, the then Konotop outstripped many of the larger cities in the field of television because we had got two channels on TV.

The first was the Central Television with the news program "Time", and the main New Year entertainment program "The Friendly Blue Light", and the contest of teams at the Club of Jolly and Inventive, aka CJI, and the live hockey games.

The other channel was the Konotop TV studio which broadcast only in the evening when people were back home from work, yet it demonstrated movies much oftener than on Central Television.

The TV-sets of that period were all black-and-white, except for those you could see in color films from abroad, so Father had to draw a sheet of transparent isinglass over the TV screen. Such a sheet had certain color shades in some of its parts – the upper part blue for the sky, the lower one green for the grass. They even said that through that isinglass the announcers' faces looked of more natural color than without it.

I could not discern any of the mentioned subtleties though never considered myself colorblind.

Such mica became a fashion throughout Konotop, and Uncle Tolik brought the sheet for our TV from the Repair Base, aka the RepBase, where he worked on a milling machine tool.

The RepBase specialized in renovating choppers so there they had to have a better notion in the advanced matters like isinglass and stuff...

For switching TV channels you clicked the biggest knob under the screen. However, in the afternoon both the Central Television and Konotop TV Studio showed the same mute tuning circle, so switching the knob outside those two channels filled the tube with the unbearable sizzling noise and coarse-grained "snow" in jumping streaks of white.

And (coming back to the available two channels) every day at three p.m., the technicians at Konotop TV Studio switched on some music for about thirty minutes or so: "The Nocturne" by Tariverdiyev, the hits of Valery Obodzinsky or Larissa Mondrus – against the background of the irreplaceable fine-tuning circle.

We—Sasha, Natasha, and I—always switched the TV on at that time for the sake of music though the tapes were changed rarely if ever, and we knew beforehand which record would follow that or another song...

Besides, Konotop was flooded with a wealth of underground indie radio stations that went on air in the mid-wave range. There was both "The King of the Cemetery" and "Caravel", and whichever name an independent guy would choose to call his station.

They all had a common weak point though, which was their irregularity. You had no idea when to switch the receiver on so that to hear, "Hello to all, "The Stickman" radio station is on air. Who hears me, confirm..."

And he would put on the hoarsely roaring Vysotsky's songs about the Archer who disgraced the Czar, or how we shoot through space in a spaceship, or about a dolphin's belly ripped open by the boat propeller...

At some point, the radio station "Charming Nina" would cut into the broadcast and start to point out to "The Stickman" that he had sat on another guy's wave band, and that "Charming Nina" had been airing in that particular range for no less than a week.

Little by little, they began to quarrel: "Don't swell too much! Look out, if I catch you at Peace Square you'll have two blobs instead of your ears!"

"Hey, you! Mini-willie! Who do you roll a barrel on? Haven't had wet pants for a whole week?"

"The more you rant the more you'll weep!"

"Close it up!"

But they never switched over to four-letter words.

Father claimed that even our radio set could be readily converted into such a station, smooth and easy if only there was a microphone.

However, my and Skully's wheedling such a conversion out of him and we'd sure get a mike somewhere later, he declined outright because it was radio hooliganism, and special vehicles were stalking the city to track those hooligans down, and fine them, and confiscate all the radio equipment from their khutta, down to the TV box. We didn't want to stay without our TV, didn't we?

At times, the radio-hooligans instead of wished-for Vysotsky songs entered in endless negotiations about who had which capacitor and which diodes he'd trade it for. Finally, they agreed to meet at Peace Square.

"How'd I know you?"

"Don't worry. I know you. I'll come up."

And so we fell back to the TV tuning circle, listening to the hundreds of times heard, yet more reliable, Obodzinsky...

Peace Square in front of the same-named movie theater was bounded with long five-story parallelepipeds of apartment blocks.

The large fountain in its center, enclosed by the granite ring of a low parapet, was turned on no sooner than once in a couple of years to shoot up a high jet of water for an hour or two.

The asphalt walks, lined with beautiful chestnut trees, led from the wide stone porch steps of the movie theater to the opposite square corners alongside the crosswise road of Peace Avenue.

The lawns under the chestnuts had a couple of well-trodden short-cuts not provided by the original layout, and along the asphalted alleys, as well as by the fountain, there occasionally stood lengthy timber benches in dark green coat of paint.

In the warm evenings, the square turned into the "whore-parade" grounds with dense waves of loungers walking leisurely the alleys without exiting the square and just repeating their promenade circles, again and again, scanning the faces and clothes worn by the public in the counter-directed circulation, as well as on those seated on the benches.

In their flowing ahead, they shuffled through the soft dark layer, which got denser in front of the benches, because of both the walkers and the sitters were engaged in ceaselessly persistent chewing of black seeds and spitting the inedible husk out...

Sometimes after a movie show, I also went along with the lazy stream when making for the streetcar stop around the corner. It happened not too often though because from one sequel of "Fantômas" to another you had to wait for at least six months.

In the daytime, the benches were mostly empty, though Kuba and I once happened to be called from a bench by a pair of young grown-up idlers who demanded kopecks.

Kuba fired up trustworthy oaths that we had no money whatsoever, but I suggested to them, "Catch all that falls out!"

With those words, I pulled the left pocket bag in my pants inside-out and dusted it with my palm. I did not bother with the right pocket though, because it held ten kopecks for a streetcar fee.

The slob in sunglasses looked around and threatened with a beating, yet he didn't leave the bench. We took it for being dismissed and went on, while Kuba kept bitterly upbraiding me for such a stupid impudence which could quite easily end in a good scrub for my silly mug, and justly too.

Probably, he was right, and I had missed to figure out such an outcome, carried away with the idea of making a fine gesture – to pull an empty pocket out.

What saved me? The rogue might have decided that I was under the protection of some guy with a pull among the thieves, how, otherwise, to explain my reckless arrogance?.

"Enters Sehrguey Ogoltsoff from Konotop!" announced Raissa, when I and Skully appeared in the Children Sector room. Marking that I couldn't catch up with that particular humor, she handed me _The Pioneer_ magazine opened at a story, under which at the page bottom it stood in a black bold typeface: "Sehrguey Ogoltsoff, the city of Konotop".

I had completely forgotten about those couple sheets from a school notebook describing my talk with a dwarf, sent half a year before to the contest of fantasy stories announced by the magazine.

The talkative dwarf chattered of this and that making half-drowsing me even more sleepy. And now, all of a sudden – wake up!

What sweet whiffs of the fresh typography print issued the magazine pages setting my head off in a slow swerve! And my legs kinda weakened, for I felt a soft blow at the back of my head, only somehow from inside.

I lighted upon one of the auditorium seats complected in threes which stood along the ballet rail under the windows and read the publication where there hardly remained a paragraph from what I had sent to the contest.

Yes, the dwarf still was there but talked nineteen to the dozen about a certain filmmaker Ptushko I had never heard of in my life.

However, neither in Children Sector nor at home had I ever shared with anyone that the story contented hardly anything written by me except for the general settings because not every day they print, after all, your story in a thick monthly magazine...

At the beginning of summer, Mother grew fat and Father, with a somewhat guilty chuckle, began to ask us—their children—what about having one more brother? The babe might be given a good name, like, Alyoshka, huh?

Natasha wrinkled her nose, Sasha kept silent as well, and I said with a shrug, "What for?"

The suggested increase in the family seemed unnecessary not by threatening with a deterioration of our living conditions, but because of the awkwardly crying difference in age between the would-be parents and the prospective baby.

So Father silenced his giggle, dropped the subject and never picked it up again.

A couple of weeks later, I accidentally heard how Mother gossiped with Aunt Lyuda, "I used the pill and the same day draft beer casks were brought to the stall, I rolled them in and – that's it."

So no quantity change took place in our generation of Konotop Ogotsoffs, yet Mother kept looking fat forever...

Her stall, a round hut under a tin roof, was advantageously located in the main alley of the Central Park opposite Peace Square. The heavy padlock hung on the back door of sheet-metal, which she took off when a-trading through the front window with a square ledge-counter facing the asphalted walk shaded by the mighty poplars.

Besides the draft beer running from the faucet by the window, which she connected through a removable hose with one or another of the dark wooden casks, the goods at the stall included packaged cookies, cheap candies of two or three sorts, cigarettes, lemonade and bottled wine – the Ukrainian fruit-and-berry "White Strong", the dark red Georgian "Rkatsiteli", and some wine of uncertain origin named "Riesling" which was so awfully hard to sell out.

"White Strong" was going out like hotcakes because of its price – one ruble and two kopecks a half-liter bottle. Cigarettes also did not linger for long, yet the main engine for trade-pulling was draft beer.

When there was a delivery delay and they did not bring beer casks from the trade base of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, Mother started to sigh and complain that the current month's trade plan for her stall seemed hardly doable and they again would cut her salary...

My life rollicked on along its tracks which somehow bypassed the Central Park, although my sister and brother occasionally boasted of dropping to Mother's workplace for free lemonade.

However, there happened one day which I spent at the stall from its beginning to end because of the secret service agent Alexander Belov, disguised as Johann Weiss...

In those abysmally old times, it was next to impossible to subscribe to The Novel-Gazette.

The monthly justified its name, as it was printed on inexpensive newsprint and in two columns per page, while the thickness of an issue was on a par with _The Pioneer_ or _The Youth_ magazines.

Albeit absent from the subscription lists at the post-offices, _The Novel-Gazette_ could still be found at libraries or borrowed from one or another luckier person who had asked it from the previous lucky beggar.

If some novel happened to be too long for one issue, it was continued in the following month.

True, at times, deviating from the magazine name, they printed collections of stories or (quite rarely) poems, but no more than by a couple of authors per issue.

So, getting the word of mouth that in _The Novel-Gazette_ they had recently published _The Shield and Sword_ by Vadim Kozhevnikov, I rushed to the Club Library and was told that all the three consequential issues were already lent out, and they had to put together the queue-list of those wishing to borrow the masterpiece.

No wonder, when Mother told that one of her colleagues gave her _The Shield and Sword_ for a few days, the rails of my customary life tracks in one 'tah-dah!' made swing around and stretched to her stall, where I arrived the next day soon after the opening hour...

The initial issue I read in the stall, sitting on a wire box with empty bottles, before I got smart enough to move over onto a nearby bench, returning only to exchange the issues or sit in Mother's place while she went to the park toilet when I even sold something.

By the end of the day, I lived through the career of the Soviet intelligence officer Belov, aka Johann Weiss, from a private in the German Wehrmacht to an officer at the intelligence service of Abwehr.

The trade during that day was rather sluggish, because the stall had run out of draft beer, and the empty casks piled up outside the stall back door.

However, with the onset of twilight, when I moved back to the booth to finish off the final issue under a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, at the very end of the Second World War, the flow of consumers began to increase.

That's it!. And, with the collapse of the Third Reich, I stacked all the three The Novel-Gazettes on a box by the door and saw that the trickle of customers turned into a line thickly crowding before the outside counter-ledger.

There cropped thick growth of hands, held up over it, with crumpled rubles and handfuls of kopecks.

Mother turned to me and said, "Wait for a little, I'm closing in half-hour, we'll go home together."

I sat leaning my back against the door, so as not to be in the way for her taking goods from here and there, in the narrow stall insides.

The said half-hour later, the flurry by the stall in the park alley did not subside.

"Maman! A pair of Strong Blondes and a small one of cookies!"

"Auntie! Auntie! A pack of "Prima" cigarretes!"

"Sister! A bottle of white!"

"White is over."

"And over there? In that box?"

"It's Rkatsiteli for one ruble and thirty-seven."

"Alright, come on! Let it be it, we're not racists!"

Finally, the Georgian was over too, the crowd dissolved. Mother dropped the window shutter but had to open again for a latecomer trotting up along the dark alley. Grieved by the fact that everything was sold out, he bought a bottle of the uncertain expensive Riesling for a ruble seventy-eight, though it was already thirty minutes past the stipulated hours for alcohol selling.

When Mother locked the stall and we walked to the streetcar stop at Peace Square, I asked if such mayhem was there every evening.

"No, Seryozha. It's because it's Sunday today."

And again the summertime Kandeebynno lake awaited us, but now, apart from swimming trunks and a sandwich with a slice of melted cheese, bringing along a deck of cards became the must.

"Whose move?"

"Yours."

"Really?"

"Take your eyes out of your shoes! It's Skully who's been dealing!"

"Good for him 'cause labor made Ape into Man... Here, two Knaves to lazy Kuba."

"Then labor made Man into Cart-Horse... Queen and Ace of the suit."

On each beach blanket spread between the currant bushes, heated battles of Throw-in Fool went on to the music from portable radios.

The most enviable receiver was, of course, Spidola produced at the Riga's Radio Plant, with the face dimensions of a copybook and no thicker than a brick. The whole body of the telescopic antenna was hidden in the receiver's plastic case leaving outside only the button of its tip. Pulling that button, you obtained the shiny nickel-plated rod for fishing in the short waves, the waves in both the long and medium-range were received without extending the antenna.

Searching for radio stations in short waves was a hopeless occupation though. Half of the range was drowning in a sizzling, hissing, and crackling because of ours's interference to drown out all those "voices" in the service of the CIA – "The Voice of America", "Liberty", "Russian Service of BBC" and their likes.

So on the beach, all the receivers were tuned to "Mayak" – the All-Union Radio Station, which broadcast signals of the exact time and short news account every half-hour, filling the rest of the air with concerts at the requests of radio listeners...

But it's better not to go to the Kandeebynno alone, and not only because you'd stay without partners for card-playing but merely for security reasons.

Once, not paying attention to the warnings from Kuba and Skully, I swam across the Kandeebynno to the low dam of the fish lakes. A group of guys of my age was there on the bank. One of them asked me in Ukrainian, "Have you seen Peka?"

"Who's Peka?" asked I in reply, and got a sucker punch into the chin, kinda explanation.

They all dived from the bank and swam away.

It did not hurt much but left a bitter resentment at such meanness on no provocation.

Probably, the blades from Zagrebelya...and how, if one was allowed to ask, had I ever hurt them?

(....in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who's now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere mingled with the never subsiding flow whoosh of the river currently named Varanda...)

The Kandeebynno was not the only place in Konotop for beach-going.

There, for instance, was a sizable water-filled gully in the middle of the field beyond the Settlement. Sometimes its grassy banks got overcrowded with the guys from all over the city coming in a flash mob for unknown reasons.

And a couple of times our friendship-knit trinity traveled by bikes to the river of Yezooch in the Konotop outskirts diagonally opposite Settlement.

The dormant flow of the stream slumbering in the shade of thick willows along the grassy banks was almost imperceptible. And it was deep indeed, so in one place there even stood a tower for high diving. The contraption made of iron pipes had three height levels: one, three and five meters.

We climbed the ladder to the three-meter level but it took some time to pluck the heart, and even then it was not a headlong dive but just a jump heel-first.

Then we proceeded onto the plank deck at five meters, yet having looked at the water so too far down there, silently retracted to a lower level, even Kuba.

When leaving already, we watched an adult in a nice "swallow-like" dive from the highest level.

The only drawback of the Yezooch was its lack of beach-goers; there was no one at all except for us and that lone diver.

And, of course, the most popular place for summer recreation of Konotopers was considered the sandy Bay beach on the Seim river easily reached by a local train after two stops from the Station.

But that summer I wasn't going there. Not because of the ticket cost of twenty kopecks, like other guys you could go there as a hidden traveler, aka "hare"; the crowd of Seim-goers was too thick for the conductors to squeeze through all the cars in just ten minutes. So expenses were not the point, neither the grim harvest of a few drownings reaped by the Seim each summer – teenager guys they mostly were, with their funerals normally attended by a huge crowd, no, I was not afraid of that because nothing of the kind could ever happen to me.

The reason was that everyone went to the Seim on weekends – the days when Uncle Tolik and I were gone fishing. Although a couple of times we dropped over to the Bay Beach—just so along the way, with the fishing rods hitched to the "Jawa" rack...

Once we even had an overnight stay not far from the Bay Beach.

It happened when Uncle Tolik's brother, Vitya, came from the regional center, the city of Sumy, to propose to Natasha from Number 15 in Nezhin Street where the Arkhipenkos stayed while Grandma Katya was dying.

Vitya was not balding like his elder brother, Uncle Tolik, no, Vitya's hair was all in place – light brown, combed straight back in the style sported by young blades of the late fifties'.

He was already over thirty, but then auntie Natasha from Number 15 was not a young girl either. On the other hand, the whole khutta and the garden at 15, Nezhin Street belonged to her and her two parents.

That Saturday, Uncle Tolik and I came for overnight staying with the inseparable bunch of fishing rods to go the next morning off fishing along the Seim bank. Yet, at the specified meeting place, we didn't find the Moscvitch of auntie Natasha's father who had to bring the rest of the away-night partakers in his car.

To pass the time, Uncle Tolik and I visited the pioneer camp in the pine forest at about half-kilometer from the Seim. And while Uncle Tolik rode away somewhere else – "there, not too far off", I watched a movie in the camp open-air cinema.

"A Million Years B.C." was a classy film about Tumak banished by his black-haired tribe, and a tribe of blonds accepted him because he had piled a dinosaur to save a small blonde kid.

When the movie ended Uncle Tolik came back from his "not too far off" and warned me to tell if asked, that we were watching the movie together.

We returned to the appointed spot, where auntie Natasha's father had already brought her, and Aunt Lyuda with Irochka, and auntie Natasha's groom Vitya with his and Uncle Tolik's third brother. They even had set up a tent already, behind which there loomed the Moscvich in the dark, and built a small fire in front of the tent.

I went down to the sand spit under the steep riverbank and touched the calm flowing water; it was so warm that I couldn't resist and entered the river. I did not dive nor swam though and only wandered, hither and thither, along the smooth sandy bottom nearby the bank.

Soon Vitya and his bride came down too. He decided to take a swim, despite all her tries to sway him off the intention, and I returned to the fire to dry up; it was full night already.

Then I crawled to the edge of the high bank over the river and looked down. Against the background of the stars glinting in the river flow, two silhouettes kissed each other – so romantic...

Perhaps my head was also seen from below, against the starry sky, because Vitya cried out "bitch!" and flung his arm.

The pebble, invisible in the dark, hit me on the forehead; I shouted "Missed!" and rolled away from the edge. Of course, I lied for had it missed, it would not hurt that much.

When the romantic couple came back to the fire, Vitya asked me, "Do you know what 'fingertips' are?"

I said I did not and he told me to stand up and, when I did, he put his fist under my chin and chucked me flat to the ground. "That's what the 'fingertips' are", said he.

Lying prostrate next to the fire, I said, "Vitya, my friend Kuba is in the habit of saying 'Don't take offense when dealing with nuts'". But I felt hurt all the same.

The women and the small Irochka slept in the car and all the rest inside the tent.

In the morning, Uncle Tolik and I went to another place to fish but the catch was quite useless – not enough to feed a cat.

I didn't see Vitya anymore because his and auntie Natasha's wedding took place in the city of Sumy, and they stayed there to live...

In the middle of summer, in the middle of a week, and even in the middle of a working day, Uncle Tolik came suddenly home. "Fetch the fishing rods, quick!" shouted he entering the _khatta_.

Hastily hitching the tackle to the "Jawa" rack, he announced that there happened a breakage in the dam of the Kandeebynno fishery lakes and all the fish fled to the Yezooch river.
We rode across all of the city, shot over the bridge to Zagrebelya and only then Uncle Tolik slowed down, driving along the Yezooch riverbank in search of a vacant spot. And that was not an easy task.

Along both river banks, the mixed crowd of boys, and youths, and grownup men were standing in almost uninterrupted line waving their fishing rods or poles towards and from the invigorated stream, jerking out empty hooks or flashing quiver of the catch.

It was a spontaneous all-out day off. It was the inarguable, manifest, demonstration of angling forces of the Konotop city.

(...up till now, I am not quite certain if the breakout from the fishery lakes was in some weird way connected to the Mad Summer '68 in France or, after all, the revolutionary situation there was triggered off by the Kandeebynno events...

And lastly but also possibly, both developments had some third-party cause, not yet discovered, but undeniably common...)

A few days later, Skully and I visited the Kandeebynno on foot.

The fish lakes stretched like a vast field covered with the dingy crust of half-dry mud. Occasional spots of green algae were still seen here and there. In one of such spots, there was a shallow, yet lengthy pit full of live fish.

We were picking them out with bare hands; not very large fish though, some twenty centimeters or so. Skully did not miss bringing a mesh-bag with him, but I had to take off my tank top and tie its tail into a knot to make a sack for the catch.

At home, they fried the fish which was enough for both families and even Zhoolka had his share. Aunt Lyuda teased Uncle Tolik that he had never brought such a catch from his fishing tours...

Summer's the rightest time for repair and reconstruction works.

Father cut a hole in the dead wall of the kerogas section on the veranda and inserted a small frame with a glazed leaf on hinges. The daylight came to the section and made it more comfortable canceling the need to switch the bulb on each time when you drop in to have some water.

Then came the kitchen's turn. One Sunday, everything was taken out of it into the yard except for the too heavy refrigerator by the door. On the same day, Mother and Aunt Lyuda whitewashed all the walls, ceiling and the brick stove.

They worked until finished and it was too late for bringing things in, they just washed the floor in the kitchen and everyone had to spent the night in our room.

Natasha gave up her folding bed to Irocnka and Valerik, returning to her old place across the end of the folding couch-bed shared by us, her brothers.

The spring mattress from the bed of the Arkhipenkos parents was put in the center of the room and there practically remained no place – you had to watch where to squeeze your step.

Sasha and I had also to go to bed, bending the legs up to make room for our sister, because Aunt Lyuda decided to take a dip in the kitchen while everyone else was watching TV.

From the things left out in the yard, she brought the mirror in the old wooden frame and hung it in its permanent place on the wall above the fridge. Then she poured hot water into a big tin basin for washing and pulled together the striped curtains hanging in the doorway between the kitchen and the room.

The light in the room was switched off so as to better see the TV screen, and the volume decreased but I still grumbled that I could not sleep with the sound on. The response, as always, was disinterested and practical, "You don't have to be listening. Pull the blanket over your head and sleep."

Aunt Lyuda was splashing in the kitchen, then she called Uncle Tolik to rub her back. When he returned and sat back on the folding-bed filled with his children, I noticed a narrow gap left between the curtains with a glimpse of the mirror above the refrigerator containing a distanced reflection of the floorboards, half of the tin basin, and the back of Aunt Lyuda in it.

And then I did what I had been told to, and pulled the blanket over my head, yet the good advice was followed no further. Instead of sleeping, I placed the blanket on the wooden armrest of the folding couch-bed and wrinkled it up into a standing ripple so as to watch from under it the view in the faraway mirror on the opposite wall of the kitchen.

Actually, there was not much to watch – wet floorboards with splotches of suds and a little bit moving shoulder with the lock of black wet hair stuck over. Then there remained only the floor and the empty half-basin because Aunt Lyuda got out of it.

Yet, she soon appeared again in the mirror frame—much closer and clear—because she came up to it with a towel around her waist under the naked breasts.

She smiled a little cunning smile, licked her lips and looked straight into my eyes all the way through my blanket periscope.

I shut my eyes firmly and didn't open them anymore, while she was wiping the floor in the kitchen and coming over to the room...

Then everyone got to their beds, the light and TV were turned off. Only that moment I, at last, removed the hot blanket from over my head. The room was pitch dark.

A little later, various snuffling from all the sides mixed with the darkness, and then from the spot where the Arkhipenkos' spring mattress was placed on the floor, there came some cautiously low sound as if a bale of straw was getting squeezed and loosed again in slow rhythmic repetition.

I did not turn my head. Firstly, what the use in such darkness? And then, after the tons of books read as yet, I could tell even not seeing that they were making love down there...

Six months later, on a dark winter evening when I and Skully went to take a shower in the Plant, he called me to watch through the windows of the Plant Bath female section shedding a warm yellow light on the snowdrifts in bluish darkness.

I did not approach it.

Was I shy to do it in his presence? I don't know. But even when going alone for a shower, I never watched through those windows...

And that same summer Raissa asked us to recollect our old good days and tour the city kindergartens with a puppet show.

In less than a week we gave ten performances.

In the morning, we came to a kindergarten indicated by her the day before, installed in their dining room the screen brought by a Plant truck, hung the backdrop, set up tripods with the hut and a forest tree, performed the show before the much-respected toddler public, and moved to the next kindergarten – the scenery on the same truck, and the actors by streetcar.

Kuba grumbled that we were slaving at a conveyor belt for a mere "thank you" because no one knew how much Raissa ripped off the directors in eye-to-eye talk in their offices at kindergartens, but I did not care.

First, every day Raissa treated us with ice-cream of the most expensive Plombir flavor, and one time she took everyone to a movie show in the Vorontsov Movie Theater, and it was not her fault that "The Western Corridor" turned out such an eerie splatter film.

Besides, and most importantly, the money we had earned that week wouldn't amount to the price of watching films in Club with the check-passes from Director, that we enjoyed for years after her lead...

The Club alone was not enough to satisfy my natural proclivities. Even though attending the temple of Melpomene at Children Sector whose worshippers were rewarded with watching films for free was a pretty nice pastime, yet I had always been attracted by architecture and the only available grounds to practice it was our khutta's yard.

The parents allowed erecting an experimental structure there propped by the fence of the Turkovs from Number 17, if only it would in no way block access to the shed sections in the yard, preventing complaints from other dwellers from our khutta.

Together with my brother and Skully, I went after construction materials to the Grove and from among the quagmire bogs of the Swamp, we cut a couple of bundles of two-meter-long whips and adding to the booty a huge bunch of green twigs cinched everything onto two bikes and transported home.

Some of the procured whips turned into the lattice roof fixed with pieces of wire and all sorts of strings. One edge of the roof rested on the fence and the other one was propped by the lattice wall produced of the remaining whips. Our skills at tying knots and diligent stickability to the task in hand resulted in a crisscross styled contraption, like, a sturdy cage finally accomplished and covered with a layer of leafy branches over its roof and two walls because the fence served the third one and the concluding, fourth, wall served, for simplicity's sake, one wide entrance. Wow!

Inside, the structure smelt pleasant of drying up leaves and from outside it caressed your sight by its presence in the corner of the yard.

A week later, the foliage wilted but the delight and ecstasy with the creative efforts sagged even earlier because there arose the pesky eternal question which makes all and any creator scratch the back of their head: What now?

You would not organize a clandestine pioneer group like that in The Timur's Team just because there was a suitable structure for the headquarters of an organization in your yard, would you? Especially if you were past the age for such games...

So, Skully and I switched over to our usual pastime – vain hurling of a kitchen knife into the trunk of the old maple tree which supported the ancient stack of crumbling bricks, because that year the first Soviet Western "The Uncatchable Avengers" reached, at long last, the Konotop cinemas and the Gypsy's knife swished across the silver screen to deeply stuck in the slender trunk of a white birch tree.

In real life though, the home-made knife just bounced from the hard bark even when hitting it with the tip of its blade, and that's the meaning of being born into a wrong era after all the romantic revolutions and splendid wars dried up and left you no chance of riding a horse in the pursuit of fleeing enemies or shooting a fiery machine-gun to beat off their assault...

The leaves of the structure withered, blackened and fell off but the cage-like skeleton withstood another couple of years...

Still and all, my itch for architecture did not subside, but the following, inimitable, creation I built all by myself.

The freestanding sheds over the Duzenko's and our earth-pit cellars were separated with a gap of about half-meter between them which was boarded up from the yard, yet squeezing behind the sheds, along with the neighbor's fence, you reached the narrow opening to that board-walled cleft. That is where I built my private study room.

A piece of plywood fixed in the horizontal position to the planks nailed from the yard served a desk. A length of board inserted between the walls of the blind passage became a stool.

The absence of any other items of furniture made the interior truly Spartan, but then the study lured no intruders, neither my brother and sister nor the little Arkhipenkos. Okay, let's imagine someone sneaked in when I was not home and...what then?

Natasha made sure to check it all the same and to wrinkle her nose scoffing at my level best creation, that fairly snug and cozy nook in the inter-shed cleavage space.

With the accomplishment of the study-room construction, there again arose the mentioned doggone question: what now, then?

Well, now I could enjoy a place for unobserved secluded speculations where no one could see me, maybe except for Zhoolka who resented my popping up so close, even if kept off by the clumsy boarding of the gap. And he never cared to conceal his indignant attitude, retiring to his kennel with the iron chain dragged noisily over the threshold to, sort of, slam the door each time when I squeezed into my Spartan study through the cleft.

Yet, what for can a person use the nook of solitude they managed to carve out?

That's when I had to succumb to my other itch, that for graphomania.

I have no idea of how they denominate precisely my particular case in their scientific cant—expressed or manifest graphomania—yet I always felt a craving for new notebooks, albums, block-notes, and the like stationery items.

It gave me a real thrill to spread them wide open and start to cover their innocent, untouched, purity with the jerks and strokes of my crinkly scribbling.

So there remained only a minor drag, that of finding content for those ripping lines, which was not a predicament for the expressed (or manifest?) graphomaniac.

I just took a book about a group of circus actors and their adventures in the turbulent years of the Civil War, and I picked a thick notebook, not finished off during the academic year at school, and dragged them to my study, so to say, room...

(...here I should mention a queer, yet scientific, fact – the home assignments to be done in a written form made my graphomania dissolve untraceably...)

There, I placed the book and the notebook on the desk of unvarnished plywood, and started to copy the content from the first into the ruled, but otherwise untouched, pages of the latter. And I did not bother to ask myself about the purpose of such an occupation. Would it make any difference? I just enjoyed the process of it.

After a week or so, the process reached the middle of the second chapter, when a spell of bad weather made my study room too damp and chilly, and the adventure story remained un-hand-copied...

In good weather, I had also a private reading room, not of my creation though.

The gardens, unfolding behind the sectioned shed and those of the earth-pit cellars, were divided by a net of narrow treads between the beds of turned soil for kitchen crops. The beds did not merge into integral plots belonging to respective owners because various historical processes led to land swapping, as well as using it as a means of paying for services or goods between the neighbors.

As a result, the land possessions turned into the strip of a complicated patchwork. For instance, our tomato bed was located right behind the common shed and followed by Duzenko's stretch, which separated it from our cucumber-and-sunflower bed and from the booth of our outhouse and the drain pit.

And the potatoes we planted at the very end of the garden, past Pilluta's stretch, beneath the old sprawling apple tree.

After our potatoes bed, there began, or rather ended, the plot belonging to the khutta in Kotsubinsky Street, which ran parallel to Nezhin Street.

Thus, the vegetable and fruit gardens, embraced by the khuttas of three adjacent streets and one lane, composed a vast area with vegetable beds and fruit trees of different sorts.

The apple tree, on whose wide sprawling branches I lounged in hot summer days reading a book under the blue dome of the sky with massive mops of white clouds hanging still, was called Antonovka apple. Some of its branches were long enough to allow yourself laying upon them and to sway slightly until a gentle breeze would reach you from the hot expanses of the summer.

When my sides started to ache from so too hard a hammock, I'd climb down and go on a stealthy visit to the raspberry plot somewhere between Number 15 and 13.

In the gardens, you might occasionally come across a short span of a fence fragment that served a dividing landmark between the possessions, but not a barrier to a quiet raid...

From among those environs I was carried away with The Interstellar Diaries of Jona Calm and The Return From a Space Mission by Stanislaw Lem, Khoja Nasreddin by Vladimir Solovyov, The Odyssey of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, among other pulp fictions for unsystematic reading by the younger generations.

But then, for no obvious reason, I suddenly decided to meet the requirements of the school curriculum and started to learn by heart the poem Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, although at school they wouldn't tell you to memorize more than one stanza from it.

To be honest, so dutiful respect to the school curriculum was nothing but a temporary ad hoc excuse because after solidifying the first stanza, I went on to the following ones and murmured, day after day, to the Antonovka apple tree about the constantly alert Breguet watch, and the merchandise from scrupulous London, and the pitiful lack of a couple or two of slender female legs in the whole wide Russia...

When the number of memorized stanzas grew over twenty, I began to lose my way in the countless threads of lines at reciting them all, but then Mother helped me out.

Returning from a Sunday visit to Bazaar, she told me of meeting there Lyudmila Konstantinovna, a teacher of the Russian Language and Literature from our school, who asked if I would like to go to Leningrad with an excursion of schoolchildren at an inexpensive price.

You bet I would! But where could I get the money from?

Mother paid the price and gave me an incredible sum of ten rubles for the journey. Departing, I made a firm decision to buy with that money a small-sized billiards, like the one we were playing at Children Section.

(...yet now, not as a consistent narrator, but as a layman archaeologist wrapped up in my sleeping bag in this tent surrounded by the eerie symphony of the wild forest nightlife – would I be able to unearth the root reason for the strenuous memorization of the Pushkin's poem?

It seems, that only now and just from here, I would.

To begin with, the scheme "I decided and started to..." does not apply to me.

Developing a use case is quite okay, especially if an accurate and reasonable one, but my way of doing things is right the opposite.

I act first, and only then start looking for a suitable reason to justify my action and present it with a resemblance of logicality. That is, I'm not motivated with well-defined decisions and do things on the spur of the moment.

But what or who is prodding me to act then?! Which are the secret springs and goads?

The answer is simple: It's because of my credulous and all-too-ready submissiveness to the impact of the printed word. Yes, the stuff read by me determines my subsequent actions.

When the Soviet secret agent, Alexander Belov, forced the fascist intelligence officer Dietrich to flip through a folder with top-confidential documentation before his eyes, so as later, in a safe house, to dictate to his helper-asset hundreds of addresses, names, and figures from his memory, that became the hidden underlying reason for my memorizing the rhymed lines by Alexander Pushkin.

No, I did not want to compete nor check my abilities, the root stimulus was served by the plain fact of my reading _The Novel-Gazette_ filled with the work by Kozhevnikov which, frankly speaking, does not deserve the name of a novel.

Or take another case, when, impressed by the book _The Baron in the Tree_ , about an aristocrat who refused to walk upon the ground anymore, and moved to live in the trees, I mounted the heap of bricks stacked under the too thick American Maple tree, and from that elevation climbed the less impregnable part of the trunk. And from there I went on getting higher and higher, to the very clouds that floated quite low on that day, almost brushing the crown.

Viewed from the upper branches, distant khuttas far down under the tree decreased to the size of matchboxes.

Taming fear and dizziness, I observed the bird-eye view of Bazaar, and the Plant, no more hidden behind the tall wall along Professions Street, and of the Station on the other side of the Plant.

The magic power of the printed word by Italo Calvino made me compliant like melted wax, turned into a docile slave, and landed on top of the American Maple tree...

Of course, the secret springs slip at times – how on earth could I possibly compete with D'Artagnan and ride twenty leagues in one day running down three horses which I did not have?

Keep your legs to the length of the blanket, they say.

That's why I like this sleeping bag so much – it fits any leg size...)

To Leningrad, we went through Moscow. In the excursion group besides me and Lyudmila Konstantinovna, School 13 was represented by two more girls from my class – Tanya and Larissa, as well as by two students from the parallel, 7 "A" grade – Vera Litvinova, and Tolik Sudak, the rest of the group were students from other city schools with two teachers of theirs.

The train arrived in Moscow in the morning, and we spent there one day during which time I came across three discoveries.

The first of them became the discovery of the undeniable existence of foreshadowing dreams. It happened during our tour on an excursion bus around the city—look to the left! look to the right!—when in some place, we were asked to leave the bus and look at something from a near.

Our group followed the guide closely but I straggled at some distance, when, all of a sudden, the surroundings looked so much familiar to me – both that bridge above no river, and the far-off tall building of the Moscow State University, and even the locked stall on the pavement.

Someone from our group turned back to call to me, "Don't lag or we will leave without you!", to which I answered, "When you turn back, I'll be the first!"

And exactly that moment I felt having already seen that view in all its details and pronounced those very words because all of that was in a dream dreamed by me a week before.

I felt freaked out and even stopped, but not for long – the excursion group was indeed returning to the bus.

(...in my later life, from time to time I had the like instances of falling into once-seen dreams.

Some of such recollections could for a split-second precede the actual development of the events so that I knew who and what would say a second later, and with what gesture they would accentuate the words because the current happening was just an echo of the scene already seen by me in some dream.

Duration of such presaging dreams is not too long, and at times they may be many years apart from their echoing in wake hours.

I did not share my discovery with anyone and much later, with a mixture of relief and disappointment, I learned that such things happen not only to me, and that in Scotland they even have a special term for the phenomenon – "second sight"...)

For the second revelation, we went to the All-Union Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, aka Veh-Deh-eN-Kha.

There we were taken to the Astronautics Pavilion, with the white needle of a "Vostok" type spaceship, on which Gagarin orbited the Earth, towering in front of it.

In the spacious pavilion, several excursions were wandering at once among the stands, and mock-ups and mannequins donned in red spacesuits and bulky helmets.

I did not know what the other guides were telling, but ours ruminated things known by anyone from the times immemorial, so I kept lagging, or running ahead, and at some point sneaked into a wide side door.

Stone steps led upward following the arrowed inscription "The Optics Pavilion".

I ascended to the landing from which the steps took a turn to the pavilion itself. But I didn't proceed any farther fascinated by the extravaganza of color and airiness unfolding on the landing.

A cubic meter of space was filled with a motionless, as if frozen, family of soap bubbles radiating all hues of the rainbow colors. What a delight!.

Someone from our group saw my entering the door out of the excursion program and I was called from down there, "Come on we are leaving!"

With a parting look to the unreached pavilion entrance on the upper landing, I returned to ours.

(...what was behind that door I do not know and the discovery itself is as follows: sometimes a single step away from the trodden rut opens new shining worlds, but, as runs a folk adage in the country that was the first to commence building a Socialist society, "A step aside is an escape attempt, they'll shoot to kill without warning"...)

The final, third, discovery of that day was lurking in the State Universal Shop, aka GUM, on the Red Square, where we arrived without any guide.

There, I learned that dreams do come true, you only need to be ready for their realization...

At the entrance to GUM, we were told to gather in the same place in half-hour and were dismissed for a random search of goods.

From inside, GUM looked like a giant ocean liner with huge wells of space surrounded by multi-story transitions up the hull sides.

In one of the compartments on the third floor, they were selling the billiards of my dream whose price was exactly ten rubles. How I did curse my gluttony!

From the sum given by Mother, I had already paid for two ice-cream – one in the morning at the station, and the other at the Veh-Deh-eN-KHa. There remained nothing I could do but say goodbye to my dream so, to mitigate the grief, I ate one more ice-cream right in the GUM.

In the evening tired but satisfied (if not to recollect the misfire with the billiards) we left Moscow for Leningrad...

In the city on the Neva river, we were billeted in a school on Vasilevsky Island, not far from the Zoo.

At the school, we were allotted half of the gym, since its other half was occupied already by an excursion group from the Poltava city.

We did not constrain them in the least—the gym was pretty spacious—and only moved several black sports mats they were not using into another corner.

In addition to the mats, we were given cloth blankets and could sleep with more comfort than the royal court of France, when they flew from the rioting Paris in Twenty Years Later by Alexandre Dumas...

For three meals a day, we walked up a couple of blocks to a canteen over a humpbacked bridge above the Moika river. A very quiet place it was, with hardly any traffic at all.

There, our elders paid in advance with paper coupons, the girls from the excursion group laid the food on the square tables and then invited the rest of us to come in from the sidewalk. Sometimes we had to wait because apart from the Poltava's and ours there were other groups as well – not from our gym though.

In such a case we stood waiting on the bridge over the narrow river with its unobservable flow between the stone-walled banks.

" _On the Moika bank,_

we ate garbage skank"

So ran the epigram composed by someone from our group.

(...the rhyme, of course, is flawless, but I personally had no complaints about the food there – everything was as it always was in any canteen I dropped in along my life path...)

We were a little late for the white nights but everything else was in place – both the Nevsky Avenue, and the Palace Bridge, and trotting through the halls of the Hermitage with the immense Pompei demolition by Karl Bryullov, and luxurious oil paintings by Dutch masters...

In the St. Isaac Cathedral they launched for us the Foucault's Pendulum hanging from the main dome.

It swung for some time swishing between the high, icon decorated, walls and then pegged down one of the sizable wooden pins lined on the polished floor.

"See?!" exclaimed the Cathedral guide."The Earth is turning, after all. Foucault's Pendulum has just proved this scientifically."

The revolutionary cruiser Aurora did not accept us for some reason, but we listened to the Admiralty's Cannon fired each day to mark the noon, and visited The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with green lawns over mass graves and the pool by the dark wall for the visitors to throw coins in.

The day when we went to Peterhof was cloudy, and crossing the Finnish Gulf we could not see the sea but only the fog and a circle of yellowish water with low waves around the boat, like on a lake with a sandy bottom.

It was boring and dank, and when I got out of the passenger hall and climbed down the short ladder to the low stern with yellow, churned up, water behind it, the boat boy came up to tell that passengers were not allowed there.

I climbed back, and he hung a chain on the ladder and started to wash the deck of the stern with a mop.

But the Peterhof fountains jetted pillars of surprisingly white water...

Everything in Leningrad turned out to be as beautiful as one would expect of the Cradle of Revolution.

The weather got nice again, and on the first floor in the Naval Museum there stood the boat of Peter the Great, almost the size of a brigantine, and all the walls on the second floor were decorated with the paintings depicting sea battles of the Russian fleet, starting with the battle in the Sinop Bay.

On the first floor of the Zoological Museum, a skeleton of whale bones towered high, while the central attraction on the second floor was the composition of life in Antarctica, behind the glazed partition.

The white snowfield was painted in the back, and behind the glass there stood a few adult penguins with their beaks up in the air. They were surrounded by a kindergarten of penguin chicks of different ages to show how they change when growing.

At first, I liked them dearly – those lovely fluffy cutie pies, but soon the nagging thought that all of them were stuffed animals abated my delight. Three dozen living birds were killed for the exposition.

I did not want to look further and climbed down to the gnawed whale skeleton and out of the Museum.

In a glazed stall by the Zoological Museum, I bought a ballpoint pen—they did not sell such in Konotop yet—and two spare ampoules to it, folks said just one of them would do for a month of scribbling...

That day I was the first to finish the midday meal at the canteen and went out to the bridge over the Moika to wait for the rest of our group.

Between the high walls of the river banks, a small white cutter cautiously made its way, dividing the black water into two long bumpy waves.

Then an elderly man came up to me over the bridge and warned that my pants were stained on behind. I knew about it; two days earlier I had sat down on a bench somewhere and it left a whitish stain on the seat of my pants as if of pine resin. It was unpleasant to be marked so on behind but I could not get rid of it with any rubbing or scratching.

He asked where I was from.

"We've come on an excursion. From Ukraine."

The friendliness on his face sagged. "Ukraine," he said. "In the war years, they burned my side with the blowtorch there."

I recollected the buzz of a blue flame bursting from the nozzle of the blowtorch and the cracks in blackened skin of Masha's carcass.

He grew silent and so was I, feeling somehow guilty for coming from the places where he had been tortured. It was a relief when our group, at last, came out of the canteen.

The Poltava excursion group left two days earlier than ours. On the last evening in Leningrad, we went to the circus tent. Our seats were at the very top, under the canvas roof.

It was a united performance of circus actors from the fraternal socialist countries.

A pair of Mongolian acrobats synchronously jumped onto the end of a see-saw to toss up the third one, standing on the other end.

The tossed man somersaulted in the air and landed on the shoulders of the strongman in the arena.

The pushers launched another one and one more – three people were placed upon the man below, like after the Battle of the Kalka River.

The gymnasts from the DDR worked on four high bars put to form a square for them to fly from one bar to another.

Then the Czech trainers brought out a group of monkeys who started to spin and circle on the bars left after the Germans, only much funnier.

The next day we left without visiting the canteen, probably, because of having run out of the coupons.

There was a very convenient train, with no train changes, on the route through Orsha and Konotop. Only it started off in the evening and after all the ice-cream eaten during the excursion, and paying for the ticket to the circus tent, plus the purchase of a ball pen, there remained just twenty kopecks of all the ten rubles given by Mother.

I had a pair of pirozhki for the midday meal, but at about five o'clock, when we were already sitting in the waiting room at the station, Lyudmila Konstantinovna noticed my despondency and asked about the reason. I confessed that I was hungry and had no money; she lent me one ruble.

In a deli near the station, I bought bread and a big fish in oily brown skin and thin strings tied all around it. With the prey wrapped in a paper, I returned to the station with our train at the platform already.

After boarding the car, I immediately sat down at the table under the window and began to eat. Very tasty fish it was, easily crumbling but slightly dry in the end.

I ate one half, wrapped the rest back and put it on the third level bunk, which was not for sleeping anyway but to put your luggage on.

Some single fellow-traveler, a couple of years older than me, got seated at the opposite side of the table, took out a deck of cards and offered to play Throw-in Fool with him. I won a couple of times and, when he was once again shuffling the cards, I flashed a usual Kandeebynno wit for such a case, "A dinghead's hands have no rest."

With a sidelong glance in the direction of a couple of girls from our excursion, sitting under the window across the aisle, he promptly retorted, "The less one yaks, the longer lives."

I marked the look of genuine rage in his eyes and, after winning another game, refused to play on; he seemed glad to stop it too...

We arrived in Konotop in the morning after unusually heavy rain.

During that night on the train, something happened to my shoes and they became too small size. I hardly forced them on, yet not completely, and my heels were partly hanging outside.

Hobbling painfully, I got off the car onto the platform and waited for our excursion to disappear into the underground passage leading to the Station. Then I took my shoes off and, in the socks only, went along the wet Platform 4 to the familiar breach in the fence at the very end of it.

Across the road from the breach, there stood the Railway Transportation School, I passed it by and very soon entered Bazaar.

No one was surprised with my walking in socks and carrying a disfigured shoe in each hand because there were neither passers-by nor traffic around but huge puddles everywhere.

After Bazaar the ground disappeared altogether under the water surface. I splashed along the streetcar track stepping on the railhead that a bit stuck out above the water, and on reaching Nezhin Street I just waded ahead indiscriminately – the khutta was not far off...

Later, Mother laughed, sharing with the neighbors that from both capitals I brought only a pair of shoes one centimeter too short for my feet.

I hadn't ever heard or read anywhere that it's possible to grow your feet one centimeter in just one night...

On the first of September, Mother gave me one ruble to repay the debt. However, at the ceremony line-up in the schoolyard, Lyudmila Konstantinovna was nowhere to be seen, and in the teachers' room they told me she was sick and explained how to find her apartment in the two-story block by Bazaar, so I took the money to her place.

There, she started to say that it was no need for such haste, she even somehow seemed to be not very happy that I had returned that debt at all.

Then her father entered the room and I was surprised to see it was Konstantin Borisovich, the projectionist at the Plant Club. The world was a small place indeed.

(...if I were now asked about my most vivid impression of those from the cultural capital of Russia, I'd answer without a moment's hesitation – it is the evening twilight in the street whose sidewalk is bound by a stone parapet with the opening to a few stone steps down to the immensely wide flow of the Neva River by the Palace Bridge and a random wave splash against the lower step sends up high spatter mixed with the sharp shrieks of the girls from our excursion group who stand on the steps over the water...)

Still and all, Lenin was right remarking that the mightiest force is that of a habit. Take, for example, the albums of young ladies from beau monde, where Eugene Onegin, with a reckless stroke of the quill, sketched out his author's whiskered profile on the page following the autograph of a certain Lieutenant Rzhevsky.

Such an album was the must for any decent young lady to outpour her personal feelings and amass creative scribblings of her visitors and guests.

Of course, no album of that kind had ever come to my hands, yet after a whole lot of wars, three revolutions, and radical changes in the way of life, the albums for the sentimental exercises of sensitive girlish souls were still around because those albums were too much of a hard-die habit to simply disappear.

The struggle for life taught them to properly disguise—no silk bow-ties on the cover, neither creamy pages anymore—a general-purpose ruled-paper notebook in brown leatherette covers for thirty-eight kopecks – such was the common aspect of a girl's album in our class.

In place of long-nosed self-portraits of aristocratic rascallions there came cutouts from the color pictures in Ogonyok magazine, securely mounted on the glue.

The poems though managed to survive:

Why? O, I don't know why

A streetcar needs rails to go far or nigh

Why? O, I don't know why

Why do parrots scream and cry?

I do not know why...

And the fancifully adorned inscriptions relating all sorts of profound maxims and winged expressions were still there:

" _The one who loves will forgive anything"_

" _Cheating kills love"_

When such an album, accidentally forgotten on a desk, fell in a guy's hands, he, having turned over a page or two, would slap it back on the desk – some "girlish nonsense".

Yet to me, for some reason, those albums were interesting and I dutifully scrutinized them. As a result, I got an offensive handle of "lady-bug" among the schoolmates.

Nobody ever called me that to my face, even though when our class lined-up at a PE lesson I was only the fourth in the line, and the shortest guy, Vitya Malenko, could beat me up in a wrestling match under the scornful giggling of the girls.

No, I have never heard that handle, but if your sister and brother attend the same school, there is no secret for you about you that you don't know...

The school principal Pyotr Ivanovich Bykovsky, unlike his nickname, the cosmonaut Bykovsky, had a Herculean physique.

When all the classes were lined-up in the long—from the teachers' room up to gymnasium—corridor, the floorboards, paint-coated in red, creaked pitifully under his measured steps alongside the ranks of students.

The mighty dome of his head, with the trailing locks across it, towered half-head above the tallest, graduating, class.

When the look of his big eyes, from under the heavy hanging eyelids, was bypassing your face, your inside involuntary contracted, even though you knew perfectly well that the paper sent from the Children Room of Militia had nothing to do with you, and the principal would call another guy to get out of the ranks and face the lined-up schoolmates.

So, no surprise that when our Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, told me to stay after classes and go to the Principal's Office, my heart sank.

At that sustained state—with my heart sunk and my spleen contracted—I meekly knocked on the high door of his office, followed by puzzled as well as farewell glances from Kuba and Skully.

In the long and narrow office room with one window at its far end, Pyotr Ivanovich sat at his desk put in profile to the door and hardly reaching up to his waist.

He told me to sit down on one of the chairs lined-up alongside the wall opposite his desk.

Uneasily, I got seated and he picked up a thin copybook from his desk, opened it and froze staring in a suspenseful silence at the pages, occasionally giving an angry twitch to his thick, clear-cut, lips.

"It is your essay on Russian literature," he announced at last, "And you're writing here that in summertime the sky is not as blue, as in the fall."

He looked into the copybook and read up, "In summer it looks as if sprinkled with the dust at the edges... Where could you have ever seen such a sky?"

I recognized the incomplete quotation from the opening sentence in my essay on the free theme I am sitting by the window and thinking... which was our home-assignment the week before.

"In Nezhin Street," answered I.

He began to drive it home to me, that it absolutely didn't matter – be it Nezhin Street, or Professions Street, or Depot Street, but the sky always remained the same, both in the center and along its edges. And the blue was always blue, it stayed as blue in summer as it did in fall because blue was always blue.

At my timorous attempt to maintain a slightly different view on the sky blueness, he once again rolled out his weighty arguments and I surrendered.

"Yes, the same," said I.

"That's good. Now, we agreed that this here sentence of yours is wrong."

And in the same unalterable manner, we proceeded to agree about the wrongness of my views. With weighty importunity, he shattered to pieces each and every sentence in my essay, one by one, and, after a short, forlorn, resistance, I gave in and surrendered them, one after another.

From the left bottom corner of the window, thin iron bars beamed up in a divergent pattern, the walls squeezed the high ceiling of the corridor-like office to narrow its span, the heavy desk towered above the lined-up chairs, the bulging sphere of Principal's skull hovered over the desk with his crosswise hair wisps unable to hide the bald and only clung to it like the cobweb to a still globe in the locked storeroom of School House Manager...

And I renounced line by line, from the very beginning to the very end. I renounced each and every sentence in my essay.

Yes, Pyotr Ivanovich, you're right, I was completely wrong...

I was wrong refusing to use the template suggested by the teacher for the smooth essay writing: "Walking down the street, I heard schoolchildren arguing about Tatyana Larina from the immortal poem by Pushkin and, when home already, I got seated by the window and started to think once again about Tatyana, analyzing her social background and her love to the Russian nature..."

Yes, it's a completely wrong statement that schoolchildren would rather discuss motorcycles, karate, and fishing but not Tatyana Larina's characteristic features. That's absolutely thoughtless and erroneous...

When I agreed with him on all the points, he handed me the copybook and said that I could go, yet I should think it over again.

I went out to the empty school. From the entrance door came sounds of tin pails rumbling against the iron sinks and the swish of water from the taps filling those pails – the janitors had already started washing the floors.

I numbly went by those five taps without looking at my reflection passing through five mirrors above the sinks.

From the tall brick porch, I descended with a dizzy feeling that I was not myself, and not sure of now what, and how, and whereto.

Probably, Galileo had the same strange feeling after betraying his discovery.

At the gate, I stopped and opened my copybook. Underneath the essay there was put a fractional mark, the denominator (content evaluation) was blank, and the divisor (grammar evaluation) – 4.

And after the mark, in the same red ink, Zoya Ilyinichna wrote, in that diligently pretty handwriting of hers, four pages of her own essay that I was wrong and belied the Soviet youth.

I should have recollected the winged words from the novel How the Steel was Tempered, as well as the heroes of Krasnodon underground, and the heroes of the Red Army...

(...from that time on, I wrote following the templates; the "berserk" blogger of XIX centuary Belinsky didn't become out of me, nipped in the bud.

How to explain so tight attention of School 13 teaching stuff to my incipient quill check?

Well, their generation grew up under the puttering of "black raven" vehicles' engines awaiting in the dark for another bunch of arrested "the people's enemies" so they chose to preventively react, just in case...)

Not every Konotop school could boast of a classroom so properly equipped for the classes in Physics as that at School 13.

The blue blinds hung from the iron rings running along the string-cables fixed over the windows. They were pulled together before demonstrating educational films on this or that of school subjects. But there was no screen – the films were projected onto a large square of a frosted glass frame in the wall above the blackboard, like, a 2 m x 2 m TV for you.

The film projector itself was located in the back room behind the wall with that frame.

In addition to the projector and tin round cans with the films, the room was furnished with lots of shelves to keep all kinds of lenses, tripods, rheostats, weighs and other untold treasures in boxes, caskets, cases to be used for staging various experiments from the textbooks on Physics and Chemistry. And on a separate stool, there also stood the gray trunk-like tape recorder "Saturn" loaded with the tape on two white reels.

The film projectionist and keeper of all those hoards was Teacher of Physics, Emil Grigoryevich Binkin, a calm handsome man of about thirty, with his eyebrows slightly twitched up his straight forehead to meet the curly short wisps of black hair, well matching the swarthy skin of his face.

During the breaks, he stacked and reshuffled the things amassed in the treasury, while softly whistling all kinds of melodies, so clearly and subtly, without the slightest clam.

I had a wary attitude towards him.

First, for the abolishing of my reading at his Physics lessons...

Normally, I brought to school a book from the Club library and at the lessons, I opened the hinged part in the desktop and put the book on the inside shelf-receptacle for a schoolbag and – full ahead, Captain Blood! Let's board the bastards!

Teachers were also happy having so quiet a boy in the class, no trouble at all.

However, some of them occasionally made attempts at breaking the equilibrium of the serene co-existence because I obviously was busy with anything but their lesson.

"Ogoltsoff! What have I just said?"

But even when engulfed in happenings of a different, Antarctic-Tropical-Martian, world, I did not cut completely all ties with the school reality around. Some tiny buoys on the edge of consciousness received, like a muffled background, the current sounds in the classroom.

"Ogoltsoff!"

Aha, it's time to come up to the surface...The memory rewinds the recording of background for some half-minute back.

"You, Alla Iosifovna, have just said that 'read' is an irregular verb."

"Get seated!!"

And then at the Class Parents Meeting, she would complain to Mother, "I see it clearly that he's busy with something miles away from the lesson it's only that I can't run him down."

Binkin had no problems with running me down. He did not demand to repeat anything, he asked questions instead, "So, what conclusion do we come here to? Ogoltsoff?"

And that's where no mechanical rewind of the previously registered background could come to the rescue. How to present conclusions from you didn't know what, especially when in sight of the dark ironic eyes over the thin rim of glasses?

He was killing with his rock-solid calmness and seemed to know exactly what page the book for bootleg reading was open at.

So I had to sometimes open the Physics textbook at home and stray-reading at school was rescheduled to fill Chemistry and Algebra classes. No, I couldn't brush Binkin off.

Only once I did come to grapples with him on the thermodynamics grounds when he asked whether the temperature of the boiled potato and the soup around it was the same.

I answered – no, it's different.

"Alas, but the laws of Physics confirm it's the same in both."

"Well, yesterday, I ate soup for the midday meal and it was fine, but then I bit through a potato in the soup and burned my tongue. I wish the Physics be more strict to outlaw potatoes."

The laughter of the classmates mingled with bell ringing for the break...

That is why I was astounded when our Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna, announced that on Sunday, at eleven o'clock I should be at School 11 for the City Olympiad of Physics...

It was a sunny Sunday morning when I went out of Nezhin Street to the tramway stop by our school to wait for a streetcar because the prestigious School 11 was on the other side of the Under-Overpass, halfway between it and the Railway Station.

The Settlement red streetcar with its round—like a clown's nose—lamp under the driver cab came up to the stop. Under the nose-lamp, there was the inventory number of the car – 33.

Though fully understanding that all that was a pure nonsense and stupid superstition, I, nonetheless, did not feel like letting such an opportunity pass by, to wit, when you happened to notice a doubled digit, like, 22 or 77 and so forth, in a car license plate, or in the number printed on your movie ticket, or on the ticket handed to you by a streetcar conductor, you were in luck, dead sure.

Only you had to ball your fist and pronounce the inaudible incantation, "The luck is mine. Full-stop!"

Which I did.

At the Olympiad, in the group of fourteen-year-old students from the fourteen city schools, I solved some of the problems about acceleration, and specific weight, and density, but not all.

To the concluding question: "Why do we first see the lightning and only then hear the thunder?", I even draw a pencil sketch explaining the time interval between the flash and the bang.

Next week, Binkin, with an unconcealed surprise, announced that I took the first place among the eighth-graders at the city Olympiad of Physics.

I did not know whether the number under the streetcar's nose really brought luck, or the solution checkers were impressed with the clumsy lightning, but it's nice to realize that you had beaten both a representative of the prestigious School 11 and even a guy from School 12 with its mathematical specialization.

Now, get it, blockheads, from the Plant Settlement guys!.

"The Dead Season" was on the show at the Club.

The three of us bought tickets to ensure the show because, at times when no tickets were sold, the projectionists refused to show the film for only the check-passers.

However, the audience turned out big enough; not as many as at the Indian "Zita and Guita" but no less than a quarter of the auditorium got filled.

The movie was about our secret agent in the United States starring Donatas Banionis from "No One Wanted to Die" where he was shot at the end and fell on the desk without finishing the note he was writing.

And in America, they followed him for a long time, then caught and jailed for twenty years, but then exchanged for a CIA agent caught in the Soviet Union.

A black and white film, but of the wide-screen format and Banionis was wearing a luxurious white shirt. You could see at once that it was not nylon, but he wore that shirt even when cooking in the kitchen, only turned its sleeves up.

A cool movie, in general.

When it was over, we slowly moved towards the exit, envious that some folks managed to live interesting lives.

And then Kuba clapped his muskrat-fur hat against his fist and said, "Okay! First thing in the morning – to have a talk with Solovey to enroll a school of secret agents!"

Skully and I laughed and laughed and laughed because Solovey was Precinct Militiamen at the Settlement.

Actually, no one ever referred to him as "Precinct Militiaman", they just said "Solovey" and everyone got it at once.

When he entered Bazar, a muffled "Sol!..- Sol!..- Sol!.." swished over the counters and crowding caboodle. The old peasant women from Podlipnoye or Popovka buried deeper in their bags the glass jars and rubber hot water bottles with moonshine, to make them out of sight. Then they turned to the legitimate part of their trade standing behind the counter with a cup of black seeds, or a braid of onions – law-abiding goods.

But no kidding with Solovey's sniff flair! And more than once, under loud curses from the trader, he poured onto the ground the bootlegged "samohrie" confiscated from her gunny sack.

Once some drunk could not stand the temptation, fell on his four bones and lapped the moonshine from the puddle. Solovey swooped at him, and a couple of times drove his boot into the alky's side, but the guy was in the Lap of Happiness already. Then the vehicle arrived and he was taken to Sobering-up Station.

Occasionally, Solovey got his share too, and more than once they would trap him someplace in the dark and warm up with a blizzard of beating. One time they poured kerosene over him and set on fire, in another sorting out his arms were broken with a crowbar.

Well, the guys would get their prison terms, he'd recover and again – to Bazaar, in his red militiaman cap, and there again, "Sol!..- Sol!..- Sol!.."

So, Kuba made a good one about enrolling in a secret service school through Solovey...

During the winter holidays, the winners in the Olympiad of Physics were taken to the city of Sumy, for the Regional Olympiad.

In the Konotop group, there were four boys and a girl, a ninth-grader, though she looked quite an adult girl.

In Sumy, we were accommodated for a night stay in a hotel. The number of boys coincided with the number of beds in the room. Our mentor, who was a teacher from School 12 with its Math and Physics specialization, stayed somewhere farther along the corridor, and the girl-like-an-adult in some female number.

Soon everyone gathered in our room around a two-volumed paperback Collection of Tasks and Exercises in Physics for Matriculants brought in by the head of the group.

Jee! I had never seen such books and, until that moment, earnestly believed that school textbooks were all there was in Physics. It was a misconception.

The rest of the future Einsteins from Konotop met both Collections as their good acquaintances and even bosom friends. They began to actively discuss in which sections there were complex tasks and in which not so much so.

The teacher offered to work out some of the tasks, just for a knock-up. Everyone immediately fell to scribbling formulas and explaining them to each other.

I was "the sixth odd" in the company. Those exercises advanced far beyond the problems which Binkin solved with us on the class blackboard.

Then we went out to the city to have a meal at a canteen. On the way back, I lagged to furtively admire the gait of the girl-like-an-adult.

The green coat fitted tight her wide figure and every step produced oblique folds in the coat's fabric on her back. Flick to the right, flick to the left. Hither-thither. Flick-flick.

In fact, besides the long coat, high boots, and a knitted hat, there was nothing to look at but those rhythmic folds on her back, yet, falling back to the Onegin's epoch cant, they drove me crazy.

Though seemingly a fiddle-faddle, those folds were not a trifle for the connoisseur and collector of the like things. Some books were reread for more than once just because I knew there were a couple of lines "about it". A couple of miserly lines, but they contained a specific detail, which I would put into my secret casket for later use.

For instance, in a sci-fi story by Harry Harrison about the time machine, a film-shooting crew jumped over into the year of one thousand, to make an action movie. Their male star had an accident there, and they had to replace him with an available local Viking.

So the film director started instructing that newly picked Schwarzenegger what to act in the next scene: "You rush into a bedroom in the castle you've just seized. You see a half-awake beauty and throw away your weapon.

Sit down on the bed next to her and slowly move her brassiere strap to fall from her shoulder.

That's all. The scene is done. Everything else is left to the imagination of film-goers, which you can safely bet your bottom dollar on."

Aha! That's the long-awaited-for detail! The brassiere strap sliding smoothly from the soft round shoulder...

No messing around with a vague "kiss on the sugar-sweet lips" for you.

And the same evening, with the blanket pulled over my head and the eyes closed tightly, I burst into a half-asleep beauty's bedroom. But, of course, without any stupid cameras and highlights; I am not a movie Viking but a real-life one, and it's the real Middle Ages we are having around here.

I throw away my shield and sword and flick her brassier strap off.

At first, she resists but after taking a more attentive look at the handsome features of my face, she willingly spreads on the bed. I roll on top of her body...A hot wave floods the lower part of my belly...My dick twitches in a boner...My eyes are shut...

And I...

What?!!.

I do not know what comes next.

So, it's time to take a rest before another dive into the coveted casket for some other secret detail to start building up a new situation about it which would eventually lead to a painfully sweet state of cursed ignorance.

(...Leo Tolstoy fervently advocated against male masturbation.

Any real saint starts their career in a form of unscrupulous sinner, otherwise, they would miss the stage of self-denying in their spiritual growth which is just null and void without the pains of personal elevation above the brute creation level.

I cannot conclude precisely whether my erection orgies might be classified as trivial masturbation.

On the one hand, there was no dick chafing applied through the noose-like grip of palm contraption, and I had never cum.

But on the other hand, what if that was only introductory warming, kinda mental knock up?

What if not for my brother, sleeping peacefully next to me on the same folding couch-bed, I'd go astray, swap reaching the boner by handless erotic speculations for traditionally tactile tangible toil and join the ranks of 95 percent of all the males with Leo Tolstoy and choryphaei of Italian cinematography in the head of the procession?.)

Once in the schoolyard, Kuba asked keenly, "Did you know, that wanking causes hair-growth on your palms?"

Skully and I simultaneously looked in our hands, to the Kuba's happy guffaw.

I knew that my palms were sinless, but I looked all the same; out of pure instinct.

And, as it turns out, those folds, flicking this way and that way in front of me, were not a negligible trifle. Maybe at some future session of my contactless masturbation, the green coat would open and a tender voice softly call, "Are you also cold? Come closer. Let's warm each other..."

And I...

What?!.

In the evening the mentor brought the same volumes again and persistingly suggested to pay attention to exercises of such and such numbers.

The winners gave them short shrift, and I only looked silently over their shoulders keeping the countenance of a weathered problem cracker...

The Regional Olympiad took place in some institutes for higher education. In the auditorium with eighth-graders, every competitor was given a thin copybook stamped on each of its double sheets.

On the first page, you had to write your name and where you were from. The following one or two were for rewriting the problems from the blackboard, all in all, six.

Jee! Three of them turned the ones that our mentor was solving the previous night with the wise guys in the hotel room.

Yet, the morning had not made me any wiser, the problems seemed as unapproachable as they were the night before.

It was boring to sit idly there, yet to get up at once and leave, breaking the tense silence of concentrated work of brains that reigned around, seemed not too polite.

So I opened the last page in the copybook and started a pencil sketch of a pirate. His face I could imagine quite vividly, both the broad mustache and the plum-like eyes staring from under the turban on his head turned back over his shoulder.

But on the paper, everything went wrong. Even the blunderbuss pistol, like by those robbers in "The Snow Queen", did not better the picture.

Hmm...I did not live up to become a new Sir Isaac Newton and was too lousy a painter for a Repin.

I recollected Father's ass that pulled him out of the Party Studies School; in my case, it was walking out on foot, I took the copybook to the inspectors' desk and left...

Of course, the fiasco in so important areas as Physics and Painting dealt me a moral shock. To deaden the stingy feeling of defeat or, in a nutshell, from grief, I bought a pack of cigarettes with filters. "Orbit" it was, for thirty kopecks.

However, the orbital test was delayed until my return to Konotop, where I waited two more days until there was a suitable moment to retire with the tantalizing pack to the outhouse in the garden.

One drag...Another...A fit of coughing.

Transparently greenish bagels floated before the eyes. Nausea. All the symptoms described by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer's case.

O, yes, respect and trust to the classic would spare throwing a barely started pack of "Orbit" into the dark hole in the outhouse floor...

Opposite Railway Station Square, across the tramway and the asphalt road, there was the park named after Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Minister of Education, a wide area with alleys of tall trees interspersed with curtains of trimmed bushes.

Upon entering the park, the first thing you met was a white monument to Lenin who stood on its tall gray pedestal considering the railway station.

With his left hand clutching the jacket lapel, he lowered his right one at full arm's length, and withdrew it back a little in a politically poetic attitude, like a harvester driver caressingly brushing with his palm through the ears of wheat: are you ready for mowing?.

Through the trees lined-up behind the monument, there peeped the massive cube of the three-storied Culture Palace also named after Lunacharsky, but in the Konotop parlance shortened to just 'Loony' (not Minister of Education, of course, but the Culture Palace) and because of the name duplication you had at times to ask for clarification: Loony Park or Loony Palace?.

The building bore no architectural excesses – flat walls, square windows, rectangular entrance.

Contrary to the outside appearance, Loony had four floors, the hidden one, comprising the auditorium for film shows, was deep in the basement.

However, since the same films were run at Club just one week later and for free, thanks to check-passes from the Club Director, Loony remained out the scope of our interests.

The excitement about the Loony Culture Palace was breaking out in the second half of the academic year, when there started the season of games at Club of Jolly and Inventive, aka CJI, between the competing city school teams.

Everyone then wanted to get on the second floor of Loony, into the auditorium floored with the smooth parquet and filled with blue-velvet-covered seats lined in too close rows.

They didn't sell tickets to CJI games and to get there I had to beg a ticket from our School Pioneer Leader, and Volodya Gourevitch would answer that the tickets distribution was controlled by the City Komsomol Committee, and the quota they allotted for School 13 was way too small, which got further diminished by his senior colleagues in the Teachers' Room ripping off their lion's share and that was not his fault, right?

Those tickets were always blank, marking neither seats nor rows, so it was only wise to come early and occupy a seat in advance so as not to keep standing all the game in the narrow side passages or perching on the marble window sill at the back of the hall, leaning to the darkness behind the chilly panes, for that was winter, after all...

In winter the PE classes were held outside.

The teacher, Lyubov Ivanovna, unlocked the dark "cell" next to the door of consecutive Pioneer Room and School Libray. Each student grabbed a pair of skis and poles leaned against the blind walls of the bulbless "cell", and went to Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street to run under the poplars along the streetcar line.

Lyubov Ivanovna checked her big round stopwatch and announced the results. Next to her stood a pair of girls who on that particular day could not, for some reason, run and kept the class register for Lyubov Ivanovna to evaluate the guys sporting achievements.

Some interesting equality of sexes, eh? The girls could run or not run at their wish, but if you're a male-student Lyubov Ivanovna would never ask how you feel about running and simply commanded: get ready! start! Run, boy, run!

The fastener-straps on the lousy school skis were much too hard, they didn't hold a candle to the fixtures made by Father from thick rubber bands in the old days at Object. But I never brought my skis to school for PE lessons saving them for extra-curriculum use...

That day after the midday meal we, the inseparable trinity of boy-friends, skied to the hill behind the Grove in the vicinity of Podlipnoye.

The hill was quite steep, but we had glided no more than a couple of times before two grown-up geezers came from the village with the demand for our skis.

One of them even tried to punch Kuba, but he ducked and glided down out of reach. Skully and I followed, but not in the steepest place like Kuba.

Those two pursued running on foot and, at the edge of the Grove, the faster runner stepped on the end of my ski. I fell.

When I got up, I saw that Skully had already removed his skis, bunched them onto his shoulder and ran dodging between the dark trunks of the winter Grove.

The picture got screened by a head in a black-fur hat with loosened flaps. The fur of the visor covered his eyes and only the thick-lipped smirk was visible.

The portrait sharply splotched away as I took it on the nose and collapsed by a tree.

"Got it? Take off the skis, bitch!"

His buddy ran up in a moment. Being either less drunk or more sensible – the snow around was spattered with sizable drops of blood trickling from my nose – he just told me to get lost, and led his buddy back towards the village.

With sullen slowness, I skied through the Grove plugging my nose with lumps of snow, which got red one after another.

On the side street by the school, Kuba was waiting for me. He looked into my face and told to better wash it under a tap, he also said that Volodya Gourevitch invited us to the tenth-grade classroom for some urgent talk.

In the schoolyard, I took off my skis and climbed up the porch to the empty school building, by five o'clock the janitors usually left it having done their job. The school remained empty with only the watchman in, and sometimes a group of pioneers preparing a collective recital accompanied with the button-accordion of the School Pioneer Leader.

The mirror above a sink showed that the blood was oozing no more and that it was some stranger's face with the nose two times thicker than mine with the tooth-brush mustache under it painted with brown makeup. The chin was also stained with gore.

I washed until Kuba said it wouldn't get better, then I wiped my face with a handkerchief. The pulse dully throbbed within the puffed nose.

In the appointed classroom, there was Volodya Gourevitch all alone.

Delicately keeping his glances off my face, so as not to touch my huge nose, he made a speech about the crying shame that our school each year was kicked out from CJI in the initial pool of the game. And the disgrace was caused by over-reliance on the graduation classes.

We had to break that vicious practice. We had to find new forces. New blood was what we needed.

I looked back at Kuba. He shrugged his shoulders, and Volodya Gourevitch declared that I would be Captain of the School 13 CJI team.

The throb of pulsation became more distinct and moved from inside the nose into the nape, where I felt it after that publication of an anonym's story signed with my name in _The Pioneer_ magazine...

A month later the CJI team of School 13, quite unexpectedly, won their first game.

At the game-opening contest of greetings, Kuba and I came on stage in real tails and bicorns borrowed from auntie Tanya's Costume Room at Club.

Napoleon (acted by me) was in his swell attitude – the right hand on his chest, the left one, balled into the fist and pressed to the back above the buttocks.

With heartfelt lyricism I thoughtfully recited the famous line:

" _Moscow! The sound of your name holds volumes for a Russian heart!"_

Then, shedding the poetic enchantment off, there sounded the abrupt order to Marshal Murat, "Burn Moscow down!"

Kuba sniffed up his nose and replied, "No problem, Sire! As you wish!"

The audience rocked with laughter and the rest of our team appeared on stage in casual clothes and bicorns made of Whatman paper to the merry sounds of the button-accordion from behind the scenes.

With a few more jokes, we won the contest and, eventually, the whole game.

In that merry-go-happy, fine and dandy, way, we reached the final game in May, because everyone had learned already that we were a strong team, and if not to laugh at our jokes then to whose else?

In each game at the contest of Captains, I just placed the hands into the Napoleon posture, while moving, Mussolini-like, my chin to the right and up and it was enough for the audience to readily guffaw.

The only thing I did not like was that the script of our initial victorious start-up was copied from TV. We just repeated the performance of a CJI team playing on Central TV a few years before.

Volodya Gourevitch though laughed loudly at my scruples and kept repeating about winners exempt from condemnation.

All the same, it was like dubbing your name over another guy's stuff.

So, the final game's concluding seconds were running out and Jury Chairman, with nicely timed suspension, read on his mike, "...And the winner becomes the CJI team of School... 13!"

Still not believing in what has been just announced, I, together with the whole hall, shouted, "A-a-a!" and turned to our team to see that all of them were galloping towards me – both Kuba, and Skully, and Sasha Uniat from the ninth grade, and Sasha Rodionenko from ours, and everyone else also shouting "A-a-a!" on the run.

And suddenly, instead of them, white light in between blue curtains flew at me. I did not immediately realize that they were the fluorescent lamps above the stage, a-swaying to me and back.

Our team was tossing me in the air...

The following year we gained the victory again, but there was no Captain tossing already...

On the eve of graduating, already in the tenth grade, we reached the finals, yet lost to the prestigious School 11.

At that final game, we again parroted a CJI team performance on Central Television and this time from the current year. The game on TV was still too fresh in the memory of many, and we were accused of brazen plagiarism.

However, all of that was still in the lap of the future, while I was listening to the fiery speech about the change of school generations, and the throbbing pulsation moved from my nose to the back of my head.

With amazement, I thought of fancy swerves in tides of fate that can rise you, in just a single day, from a trampled skier to Captain, dammit!

So, I had no grounds to take offense at my destiny.

It's only that from that day, my flawlessly Roman nose remained a bit turned to the left...

Destiny, aka fortune, aka fate, does not keep to a beeline course but goes along a sketchy sine curve, like a drunk alky and, at the same time, undulates up and down...crest—trough...peak—pothole.

One day ago, for example, Volodya Gourevitch, laughing his loud merry laugh, handed me a card posted on School 13 in my name. It was sent by the ninth-grader girl-like-adult who participated in the Regional Olympiad of Physics and now sent her congrats on our victory at CJI concluding with a screwed-in quotation from Mayakovsky:

" _Shine everywhere and always shine!.."_

Something prevented my answering the card, either the heinously joyful School Pioneer Leader's laughter or my being ashamed with her unawareness that I had more than once unbuttoned her green coat under my blanket on the folding couch-bed shared with my younger brother.

And just a couple days later I went to Peace Square because my sister told that by the building where in summer they sold kvass from the two-wheeled yellow barrel-trailer, they put a booth to refill ballpoint pen ampoules for just ten kopecks.

Such ampoules, for both short and long ball pens, you could buy in bookshops but at the double price – for twenty and twenty-two kopecks apiece.

Riding a streetcar on the way back, I stood by the large poster behind the glass wall of the driver's cab, as big as a spread-out newspaper titled "Rules For Streetcar Usage in the City of Konotop of Sumy Region".

As if other cities had different rules, eh? Or if anyone but me had ever read the articles in those Rules...

The rules on how to correctly ride a streetcar...on paying 3 kopecks for a ticket...and who you're supposed to cede your seat to...And the concluding article about the measures of administrative penalties up to the three-ruble fine if being caught without a ticket.

A good quality paper in that poster, so glossy and obviously thicker than the common newsprint...

The conductors with their puffy bags on gunny straps had since long disappeared from the streetcars. And the tickets were replaced with paper coupons sold by drivers through a small hole in the cabin door.

The stupidly located hole made you bow way too low when buying coupons, yet for a driver seated in the cab, the height was comfortable enough.

And in the streetcar walls, between the windows, they fixed small boxes with lever-handles. On inserting your coupon in the slot of a box, you pulled the lever to punch the paper with a series of holes which, if scrutinized attentively, made up certain digits. Occasionally, a couple of inspectors boarded the streetcar at the stops asking the passengers to deliver their coupons for checking those digits. Because in Tramway Depot, they periodically changed the digits in the levered boxes: ain't it smart?

Yet, any smartness could be outsmarted and some bilkers kept a handful of used coupons in their pocket and traveled for free, and when addressed by the inspector they would present a whole bunch of paper trash from their pocket, "How could I know which one is from this streetcar? Look yourself for the right one..."

At times some too stubborn ass of an inspector could start kicking the dust up because after a month of riding in the pocket many a coupon got travel-fretted. However, they would sooner give up and move along to the next passenger...

So, under those Rules, I stood, although there were vacant seats, it's only that in winter standing seemed warmer than sitting.

Some familiar guy boarded at the stop in Zelenchuk Area. Although I didn't know him by his name, he was from the graduating class at our school, and a couple of times I saw him in Club too.

Well, so he moved near. Hey. Hey. How's all? So-so. And we went on standing silently.

Then I saw the jerk started clamping me as if I was a girl. On the right, there was the window with the handrail across it and the driver cab behind me, with those darn Rules above another handrail. So, the clown grabbed those handrails and pressed me into the corner.

"Piss off! Stop horsing!" said I, to which he only giggled and squinted his stupid eyes, yet didn't let me go.

I looked at the passengers. They were not many, like, about a dozen and everyone, as if mimicking each other, was looking out of the windows intently so, like, on an excursion to a famous city, like, something could be seen through the ice-coated panes.

To put it short, I barely managed to wriggle out of his grip and stood on the steps by the cab door. There, I had to put my clothes in order because of both the jacket and the sweater, well everything up to the naked skin, got jerked up.

Some stupid asshole, if so was your bent, go and enroll the Greko-Roman wrestling group at the Club Gym and rub against your partners on the mats.

But what a humiliation for the famous CJI Captain to get into such sinusoidal flop!.

And the next breathtaking crest rolled up in late April at the All-Union military-patriotic game Zarnitsa, aka "Heat-Lightning".

Nominally, the game was for pioneer organizations but still involved all the senior classes. And I was appointed Commander of the United Formation at School 13!

No paper shoulder straps, no division into "blues" and "greens", and everyone should have by themselves a knapsack with the field ammunition: a bowl and spoon, a needle and thread.

After the line-up in the schoolyard where a PE teacher, Ivan Ivanovich, checked a pair of knapsacks for the presence of the ordered items, we went along Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, past Bazaar and turned into Budyonny Street. There we passed the Plant Park and went down to Swamp, aka Grove. Thick fog was hiding all movements of the column on the march.

We stopped at the Grove and the PE teachers – Ivan Ivanovich and Lyubov Ivanovna – opened a sealed envelope with the directions for our further route and mission.

The column proceeded to the bridge in the high railway embankment. Besides the main tracks, there was a sideway, branching from under the bridge to the Meat-Packing Plant, we followed the lone track and outflanked the Grove from the left.

The fog was thinning and through its rising wisps, there peeped fragments of a bumpy field. Ivan Ivanovich roared "To attack!" and we ran across the field shouting "Hurray!"

I ran amid the disordered crowd and didn't feel my body, which, like, dissolved in the general stampede and of all my senses there remained only the sight relaying patchy pictures of the fog over tussocky bumps jumping before and past me...

Then we stopped not far from Podlipnoye in the field with occasional mighty-trunk elms. The fog cleared up completely, and the day became glad and sunny.

A real army field-kitchen arrived from the village and we were fed with hot soup.

Then after a short-cut march through the Grove, we returned to our schoolyard and lined up again.

As the commander, I stood to face the ranks, ranging from the sixth to the tenth-graders, and some unknown cameraman shot us, buzzing his hand camera.

The following Monday Volodya Sherudillo mockingly (but very funny) acted me facing the ranks of my schoolmates, a weakling with a stoop and slouched shoulders until the camera turned in my direction making me to bravely thrust the chest out and stretch at attention almost to tiptoes.

(...At times I wonder if not for the daily fetching water from the pump to our khutta – might I have still become for at least an inch taller than the fourth in the line of boys when our class fell in at PE lessons?..)

That spring I had a dream of a long journey and by no other means if not a raft. Most likely, I was impressed by the Tour Heyerdahl's The Kon-Tiki Expedition.

The dream was shared with Kuba and Skully, and they approved it, yeah, that would be great, they said. We even began to discuss the details of its realization.

If, say, the raft was built on the Seim river then, with its flow, we would reach the river of Desna and farther downstream to the mighty Dnieper, that flowed to the Black Sea.

And the journey should be completed before August when Kuba had to leave for entrance examinations to the Odessa Sea School and Skully to some Mining Technical College in Donetsk.

The dream lasted for two weeks, and then it began to wither. Problems of growing magnitude cropped up in the way of bringing it to life.

Well, suppose we'd made a deal with the watchman in the pine forest on the Seim river. Then how to move a heavy log from the forest to the river? Dragging it for half-kilometer? But when constructing a raft, you needed more than a log or two.

Eventually, I ran into a thought which shattered the dream irreparably, into fine fragments of no use. Because I remembered that on the Dnieper, following Lenin's plan of GOERLO, they had built several hydro-electric power stations whose dams across the river put raft navigation out of question.

Dismantle the raft and drag it, log by log, to the other side of each dam? Damn!.

I did not tell my friends about the incompatibility of the advanced electrification with our beautiful dream and simply stopped discussing it with them...

Volodya Gourevitch made another fiery speech and declared the necessity to annul the hegemony of School 11 at the city Ballroom Dancing Competitions.

At the first training of the group of ballroom dances, there were formed five pairs of willing dancers from both eighth grades.

Volodya Gourevitch demonstrated us waltzing in the ballroom style, after which he played his button-accordion for us to dance.

Skully dropped out at once without any explanations except for he just did not want to. Kuba and I lasted longer, but very soon the group of prospective hegemon-busters disintegrated.

And really what's the point in going on, if my partner, Natasha Grigorenko, after finishing the eighth grade was moving to School 12 with its Math and Physics specialization, which boosted chances of the students for entering some Institute after graduating?.

End May, Kuba and I had a bike ride to the Seim river Bay Beach to open the swimming season. It turned out that twelve kilometers of bike-riding, along an even path under the railway embankment, was not an overly exhausting exercise...

On the beach, there was not a single soul except for us and our bikes dropped on the sand. And the water was still too chilly, but we took a swim all the same.

Then from the bushes flew mosquito swarms, who buzzed and droned stinging from all the sides and very badly too. Probably, we had just fallen out of the habit during the winter.

To get rid of the blood-suckers, we tried burying ourselves in the sand, but the sand was also too cold and didn't protect from the cannibal mosquitoes.

Our mad cries echoed in the empty beach, and then we had another swim and rode back to Konotop.

We didn't know yet that life, actually, is a series of losses, but felt that from that beach our ways parted...

Yes, that year School 13 was hegemonic in everything except for the ballroom dancing. We even won the city inter-school competition in the concluding stage of the All-Union Game Zarnitsa.

On a Sunday, the teams from city schools, six people each, under the supervision of their PE teachers, went on a one day hike to the forest near the Seim.

There were all sorts of competitions: for the quickest transporting of an "injured", for putting up a two-man tent, for bandaging skills...

My part in the competitions was measuring distances by eye.

The umpire asked how many meters were to the tree over there, and then silently recorded the participants' estimations.

I was following changes in his facial expression.

Someone said the distance was twenty meters. The umpire lifted his right eyebrow, the guess seemed an overshoot.

To the estimation in fourteen meters, the umpire's mouth dropped its left corner – not enough.

So I called out the average – seventeen meters.

With everyone through their attempts, the umpire checked his records and announced that the most accurate was my guess – I didn't need a tape-meter...

However, everything was to be decided in the concluding contest of boiling water on the fire in a ten-liter tin bucket. No favoritism would help out, neither reading of facial expressions.

The start given, the matches stroke matchboxes by the brushwood mounds readied for bonfires.

Dense white smoke gave way to crackling flames – it's time to hang the bucket over the fire and add the firewood to it; the drier, the better.

The red tongues of fire fluttered unsteadily under the bucket, licking its tin, painting it black with soot.

The bastard of a wind! So much of flames kept away from under the bucket.

The team of School 12, trying to control the situation, held a blanket in their hands, sort of a screen to block the wind, not let it playing with their fire.

And we? Our PE teacher Ivan Ivanovich, a wartime soldier, and an experienced fisherman, scornfully waved aside their smartness. That's all bullshit!

Get more brushwood, the drier and smaller, the better. Put it on that side!

No textbook presented me with a clearer and more memorable idea of water-boiling stages.

Heating; light steam over the water; formation of tiny bubbles on the vessel walls; the bubbles float up forming an agitated foam and, at last, the water in the bucket started to bump up, jump and splash, and gush the white steam up.

The umpire clicks his stopwatch. Hooray! We are the first!.

And School 12 were still standing around their bucket watching the bubbles on the tin walls...

With the competition over, the teams boarded the buses. Except for those who wanted to spend the night in two large tents, and in the morning the bus would come to take them back to Konotop...

At twilight, I left the glade with the tents and went deeper into the forest. In general, it was the same as at the Object, only more deciduous than coniferous.

Looking around, I took a leak. Suddenly, a certain part of the forest next to me came into motion separating from the picture of stillness in the late evening woods.

What's happening?

The eye, perplexed with unaccustomed sight reported nothing to the stunned mind until the thing little by little assumed a certain form and consistency...

Wow! That's a moose! What a whopper! And it had been standing so nigh...

Looking after the giant disappearing among the trees, I thought it was not in vain that I did stay for the night.

At night I regretted my staying there. Because of inexperience and unbridled individualism, I had lain down next to the canvas wall of the tent, becoming the last in the line of guys preparing for the night.

The night chillness woke me up an hour later and forced to press my back against the last but one guy in our sleeping group to feel at least a drop of warmth.

In the small hours, chilled to the point of freezing, I got out of the tent when the night darkness hardly started to turn gray.

The ashes of the fire next to the tents were dead, but a couple of youths still sat nearby – a girl and a boy. Probably, being foolish like me, they had tried sleeping at the edges, not in the middle, of the group in their tent...

No bus came after us. Instead, a "goat"-Willys with a canvas top drove into the glade, and we were told there happened some pickle.

The collapsed tents and four girls filled all the room there was in the vehicle, and the rest had to go to the city on foot, carrying the two tent pillars that had to be transported to House of Pioneers, yet did not fit into the "goat".

It turned out that twelve kilometers on foot were a damn long distance, especially when dragging along a wooden tent pillar even though not too heavy.

The guys from School 12 soon disappeared from view together with their pillar, and we lagged diminishing in numbers because some people went ahead and we never caught up with them, neither saw them that day.

When we reached the streetcar stop in the city outskirts there remained only three of us: I, my classmate Sasha Skosar, and the smooth pillar of pinewood coated with green paint.

(...I remember that we were stunned with fatigue and too weary even to keep up a chat when reaching the streetcar stop by the Tram Depot, yet that memory doesn't evoke any emotion. Perhaps the emotions got dulled by multiple repetitions of that same state in my following life, however, the picture of a moose dissolving in the twilight among the trees, which even now I can see so vividly, calls a little smile to my lips – hey, Mr. Whopper, pass my best to Bambi!..)

In spring Father changed his workplace. He moved from his job of a locksmith at Car Repair Shop Floor of the KaPeVeRrZe to Shop Floor 19 at the Konotop Electro-Mechanical Plant, aka KEMZ, aka the "Red Metallurgist" Plant, to embrace the same job of a locksmith.

The salary of workers at KEMZ was a trifle higher. I did not know for how much though because I never was interested in such matters; after all, bringing money home was the care of Father and Mother. I had cares of my own being up to my chin in CJI, and Club, and all sorts of Groups, and in the books interminably borrowed from the library.

Well, kerosene and water fetching were also on me, but if they needed something from the Nezhin Store, let them send Natasha or Sasha...

Besides his salary, Father earned some side money by repairing TV sets considered hopeless cases even by the specialists at the TV Repair Atelier.

About once a month, coming from work, he would collect his pot-bellied satchel of green leatherette with a multimeter tester, the soldering iron, some radio spare parts, and other equipment, and leave until late at night.

Then he'd come back, pretty sozzled, and hand to Mother a crumpled three rubles of earnings. In reply to all her scolding for the disgraceful alcoholic propensity, he kept repeating the unbeatable clue, "Was my drink on you?"

Probably, Mother's staunch upholding high moral principles was fueled with the suspicion of two more rubles stashed away by Father...

Sometimes, the procedure lasted for two evenings. Then on the first one, Father came back home sober with neither money nor his satchel left at the client's khutta until the end of the repair.

Especially complicated cases were delivered to our khutta.

Father put the dead TV on the table under the only window in the room, took off its case, which would go atop of the wardrobe, leaving on the tabletop just the entrails: the electronic tube within the skeleton of aluminum panels with radio lamps. He would turn it over and over, checking from all sides, muttering, "Well, so what's that that you want then? Eh, sweetheart?"

In the dead of night, I would be waked by sharp hissing – Father, in the niggardly light from the desk lamp, had brought bouncing white stripes running across the tube screen. "So, that's why you refused to shoot, girlie! Was not loaded!"

Then, for a couple of days, we watched the repaired TV because its screen was wider than that of ours until the owner came to take back home the box he'd almost crossed out from his life.

So, it's not in vain that Father made the filings of those _The Radio_ magazines...

Mother also wanted to change her job but couldn't find any other.

It was Father who helped her to get a job at KEMZ. He repaired the TV of Personnel Manager there, and when asked about the charge, Father answered he did not want money, let his wife be given a job at the plant.

Personnel Manager replied, "No problem, bring her."

At first, Mother could not believe it, because six months before that same Personal Manager flatly turned her away saying there were no jobs soon.

When the parents came together, Personal Manager suggested Mother apply for a presser at Pressing Shop Floor. Though they worked in shifts there, the salary depended on the production output, and no one took home less than a hundred rubles.

While Mother went to his secretary to fill the application form, Personal Manager laughed and told Father that he remembered her, but the previous time he thought she was pregnant.

Pregnant women were not a good idea to give them a job; they would work for one month and then get a year of paid maternity leave. He wouldn't be petted for giving jobs to the pregnant, but as it turned out so was her bodily structure.

That way Mother became a presser at KEMZ.

Her job there was filling all kinds of molds with special powders to be melted with the heating press to produce this or that plastic spare part.

She worked two shifts – a week from eight to five, another week from five to half to twelve, with the shortened break for the meal.

In summer the press radiated literally infernal heat, and the molds were awfully heavy all year round, replacing them on the press was a strenuous job.

After midnight, the Konotop streetcars ran all too rarely, it took long waits to get from KEMZ to the Under-Overpass.

But worse of all was pressing things of the glass wool. The fine glass dust made its way through the working robe and brought itching all over the body and even the after-shift shower did not really help.

Yet, as a silver lining to that cloud, both in our khutta and in the yard there appeared a whole bunch of different boxes and thingamabobs made of plastic of different colors because Mother brought home the defectively pressed spare parts or those dented at pulling out from their molds.

So what if that one had a chink in the corner? It would make a classy modern ashtray. Even Zhoolka got a nice ribbed basin for drinking water.

All that because of "The Red Metallurgist" production was supposed for all kinds of units and safety systems in the mining industry.

"Mom," asked I, seemingly under the impression from one of the nihilist-authors, "What's the meaning in your life? Why do you live at all?"

"Why?" answered Mother, "To see how you grow up and become happy."

And I shut up because at times I had brains enough not to be too clever...

The changes were taking place not only in our part of the khutta.

One of the grannies-sisters from the Duzenko's part returned to her village, and the other moved to her daughter's, somewhere in the five-story blocks of the Zelenchuk neighborhood, so that to rent her khutta.

A single mother, Anna Sayenko, together with her daughter Valentina moved in as the lodgers.

Valentina was a year older than me but didn't look so because of being short, red-haired, and skinny. Her nose was pretty long though.

In the evenings, she came out to play cards with the three of us, the younger and me, on the wide bench under the window overlooking their porch. A very comfortable bench it was – you could safely lean your back on the clay-plastered wall of the khutta coated with ancient whitewash, which left no traces.

During the game, taking advantage of the gathering twilight, I touched Valentina's shoulder with mine. So soft it was...And everything began to swim...

She usually withdrew, but sometimes not immediately which made my pulse throb quicker, louder, and hotter.

But then she stopped coming out for the game. Probably, because of my pressurizing of her shoulder grew too tight...

From the Duzenko's son-in-law, Father bought the smaller of their two sections in the common shed, concluding it in the yard corner. Once upon a time, they kept a pig in that lean-to section and, to make it warmer, plastered with cob the outside walls.

Father replaced the Ruberoid roofing felt with a tin roof, though not of new tin, of course.

Watching how dexterously he knocked his mallet interlocking the panels of tin, I was amazed at how many skills he had, as well as the tools for each particular job.

Take those tin-cutting scissors, for example, nothing of the kind was sold at stores.

No wonder that Skully, whenever in need of a tool, popped up in our khutta, "Uncle Kolya, gimme the hand-drill."

"Uncle Kolya, may I take a needle file for a while?"

In the acquired section's wall opposite the entrance, Father inserted a hinged glazed frame like that in the veranda. The electric wiring was run from our part in the shed, which was the section next to it.

Uncle Tolik applied at his workplace for waste crates, in which chopper spare parts were arriving at the RepBase. The crates were remodeled into the flooring shields.

Thus, the lean-to became Father's workshop equipped with a vice and everything needed. And the space by the wall, where the sloped roof did not allow you to stand up at your full height, became stable for Uncle Tolik's "Jawa".

As a result, our old section in the shed became roomier, even after the remaining crate planks were stacked under its low gable-roof.

As usual in summer, the leaves of the door between the kitchen and the room were taken out of the khutta because shutting the door in the hot season left no air for breathing, so those leaves were stacked upon the planks beneath the shed roof.

When giving it a proper thought, you'll find a good use for anything, and with a mattress placed upon the door leaves the shed section became my summer dacha.

The bed-upon-the-door was about at the same level as the upper sleeping bunk in a train car compartment, yet wider.

On the nearby wall, Father fixed a sliding lamp with a tin shade, and I could read at night as long as I chose.

Besides, I equipped my dacha with a small radio receiver "Meridian", which was given to Father by a customer delighted with the resurrection of his TV.

The gift, of course, was not working at all, but in a couple of weeks, Father found the necessary spare parts and my place became the second to none. You could read whenever you wanted, or listen to the radio.

And, most importantly, no one would beef, "When will you turn off this light already?!" or, "Enough of that hurdy-gurdy!"

There was I lying alone, by the cone of the light shed over the pages in an open book till midnight and past it.

Only dogs were barking in the yards of khuttas on the nearby streets. One of them would start for another to snap up, and then still another continued the chain reaction of barking that floated far and wide over the Settlement.

Only our Zhoolka hardly ever took part in their concerts, having grown too old and lazy.

And, just a thought, what if you put together all the dog barking, adding even that beyond your hearing, eh?

I mean, now the Settlement dogs had calmed down for a stretch, yet the dogs in Podlipnoye kicked up a fit of barking rising and flowing on the night air and so on and on, over into the next regions and countries.

Then, as a whole, the dog barking would, probably, never subside on the Earth. And that's what they call the Planet of Humans, right?.

The best time for turning the receiver on was past midnight.

Firstly, it's when they broadcast "The Concert After Midnight" in which there was not only Georg Ots but Din Reed too.

The concert was followed by another one – "For Those in the Sea", from one till two o'clock, meant for the sailors of merchant ships and fishing trawlers.

That's when they put real rock'n'roll on air. This was understandable though because Lyudmila Zykina and Josef Kobson singing all round the clock were not enough to make happy the sailors who saw the life overseas.

And from about four till almost six, there was jazz. Just two-three musicians: a piano, a double bass, and a drummer, but what music they made!

"And now listen to the number called 'The Spring Mood', please...", and there followed such a number – wow! Best of the best...

Well, and six o'clock was marked with the anthem of the Soviet Union after which the everyday "Mayak The All-Union Radio Station" poured out its everyday hurdy-gurdy till next midnight...

Once I did not sleep all night through, because at dawn I had to raid the outskirts by Swamp foraging for our two rabbits and bring as much hay as my bike could carry from those stacks along the edge of Grove.

The rabbits were given by Skully, who kept a lot of them in four or five cages, and Father told me to procure food for the presented pair.

And then I thought that the day had already begun, and why not to find out for how long I could go without sleep and somewhere around noon, when I was playing chess with Seryoga Chun on the porch of their khutta, next to the water pump, I felt that the sounds of talking came to me as if from afar or, like through some woolen wall, and that I couldn't make out what exactly they were telling me.

However, I still managed somehow to find my dacha...compartment up...sleeping bunk in...compartment the...

And when I got up it was daylight around – already or still?

I went to the kitchen in our khutta. The cuckoo clock on the wall wagged the pendulum and showed half-past five and in the tear-off calendar was the new day date.

So, my sleep was longer than 24-hours?!. Everyone laughed and said, "Phew! That's a champion sleeper!"

Then it turned out that it was Uncle Tolik's prank to tear off an extra page in the calendar, while I was sleeping.

I mean, them those rabbits also did not stay with us for long...

That Sunday, I once again went to the Seim by bike, but already alone.

The familiar road shot past much faster under the spokes carrying nothing but my weight because of Sasha and Natasha were also coming to the Bay Beach by 2:10 local train, bringing a snack for me.

How could I know that after cycling and swimming the appetite breaks fiercely loose?

By noon my stomach fell in and I looked away from family groups sitting on their blankets around the delicacies they brought along.

How long was it to wait yet? And I pricked up my ears when from different parts of the beach different receivers tuned to one and only "Mayak The All-Union Radio Station" announced what exact time it would be after the sixth sound of "peee!"

At last, 2:10 to Khutor Mikhaylovsky rumbled along the bridge over the Seim. Some ten minutes later, the first groups of the arrived folks appeared from the distant pine grove across the field.

However, neither in the first wave of newly arrived nor in the following, my brother and sister never popped up.

What the heck?!. Hadn't we arranged that I would wait for them on the beach?

Oh, I'd wolf a bull down, yes, I would, right away.

Then Sasha Plaksin, who lived in Gogol Street opposite the water pump, came up to me to say that Natasha told him to tell me that they would not come because we were going to the Uncle Vadya's to celebrate his birthday and I had to come straight there.

"Was that all? Nothing else?"

"No."

Well, that's also right – why stuffing up your stomach before a birthday party?

And I started back to Konotop with my stomach stuck to my backbone...

The familiar road no longer seemed to be short. The pedals grew heavy and I did not sprint anymore but wearily turned them under the cheerless song of robbers in the "Morozko" movie, circling creakily in my mind:

" _Oh! How hungry we are!._

Oh! How awfully cold!."

The forest was over, the path along the railway embankment also ended, and there still remained about half of the way ahead. Never before had I really realized the meaning of "I wanna eat!".

When the big billboard "Welcome to Konotop!" appeared at the road bend, I felt that I could go no farther and turned into a grassy ditch stretching towards the forest belt.

And along the whole ditch, there was not a single blade of any edible grass, which ages ago we showed each other at the Object...nothing but sparysh and equally inedible dandelions...and those who-knows-whats, with uselessly dry shoots...

I chewed the softer part pulled from inside the shoot. No, that's not food...okay, just a little bit of rest in the ditch before the final leg to Uncle Vadya's...

I was the very first guest there.

Before that summer day, I always wrinkled my nose at lard, and Mother would usually say, "Maybe, you'd like marzipan on a silver platter, then?!"

And ever since, I knew there's nothing tastier than a slice of lard on a piece of rye bread.

(...not kosher for someone? Good news! The bigger my share...)

In July, the three of us, my brother and sister, and I went to the military-patriotic camp in the town of Shchors. The cards of admission were offered at our school, almost for free. So I had to put a pioneer necktie on again.

Shchors stood aside from the major railway lines and it took about four hours to get there by a diesel train.

There we fell into the rut of usual pioneer camp routine with its "stiff hour" after the midday meal, occasional walks through the small town for bathing in the narrow river under the railway bridge. Well, at least there was a library there...

Once, there happened an unusual day though. After getting up in the morning, only guys came to the camp canteen, where Senior Pioneer Leader announced that our girls had been kidnapped and, after breakfast, we would go to the rescue.

Wow! The old good game for kids, Cossack-Robbers, revised and bettered pursue following the arrows drawn on the sandy forest paths.

When the forest was over and replaced with the even rows of a pine plantation, we came up to a crossroads and divided into small search parties, that scattered in different directions.

In the company of two guys, I went to the right.

The road returned to the forest edge and eventually led to a lonely hut bounded with a knee-high palisade. Probably, the Forester's dwelling.

Not a single creature alive was in the empty yard, not even a dog. Overpowering silence surrounded a readied coffin put on the ground with its lid leaning at the tree by the low plank-fence.

Now, you don't seem to have much of a choice after Grandma Martha's regular reading of The Russian Epic Tales to you, right?

Of course, I lay in the coffin and asked the guys to cover me with the lid, just as hero Svyatogor asked his younger partner, hero Ilya of Murom, and they concurred.

I lay in the narrow darkness not scary at all but filled with the pleasant smell of fresh shavings.

Then I wanted to move the lid off, but it did not yield to my pushes, supposedly, fixed with the weight of the guys who sat upon it restraining their happy giggles.

I did not scream nor knocked against the lid. Familiar with the proceedings, I knew that any scream or shriek would only ring the coffin with an additional iron hoop, just like the Ilya's smiting sword was adding them around the box that trapped Svyatogor.

Silently, I waited in the darkness and then without any effort moved the lid aside into the desolate quietude of the deserted yard. No wonder the brace of those nincompoops felt spooky straddling the ominously silent coffin and fled...

When I returned to the crossroads, everyone was already there and the kidnapped girls too, because it was time to go back to the camp for the midday meal...

I did not stay there until the end of a camp shift though because Senior Pioneer Leader got a telephone call from the Konotop City Komsomol Committee informing her that I had to go to the camp of the Komsomol Activists Training in the regional center, the city of Sumy.

On the last evening before my departure, some local Shchorsian guys came to the camp to beat me. They even showed up in the bedroom ward windows to clarify with their gestures that I was a dead man already.

Probably, I had flashed with an arrogant retort to one of them when bathing in the river under the bridge, or else some of the local girls, who also enjoyed the camp shift, had complained to them of my being too snobbish.

The guys did not climb in though because of Senior Pioneer Leader's presence.

Later, she escorted me to the barrack of the platoon with my sister and brother to say goodbye before leaving early the next morning...

At the training camp for Komsomol activists in Sumy, we, four guys from Konotop, lived in a tent with four iron beds on the sand floor, and two of our compatriot-girls shared one of the bedrooms in the long one-story building nearby.

Besides that building, there was also a separate canteen and a stage in front of rows of benches bordered by half-dry cob-webbed pine trees.

Each morning we sat on those benches, taking notes of the lectures read to us – I am damned if I remember what about. And in the afternoon we idly lay upon the cloth blankets over our beds in the tent, which was just a tent with no shows of the magic shadow theater on any of its walls.

(...we do loose worlds when growing up...)

I was the youngest in the Konotop group and just listened when the elder guys gave out their chin music why the latest make of Volga was better than out-modish Pobeda, and which was the right way of breaking a motorcycle in, as well as about a guy in their neighborhood who got married at the age of eighteen. Imagine that moron! Married, when he still should be playing football with the guys in the yard...

Stretched on my bed, I had nothing to add to their confident discussions and just watched the Baturin highway rushing by where I would take my "Jawa" for the maiden ride or saw the grassy field by the garbage enclosure at the Object and us, ball-chasing kids, with our vain shrieks, "Here! Pass to me!" And I inwardly scoffed, recollecting ludicrous childish tales we told, in turn, each other about a hero footballer and the red band on his right knee because he was forbidden to kick the ball with it and umpires followed him closely otherwise goal posts were broken with his cannonball hits and goalkeepers taken away on the stretchers.

No, sharing such prattle wouldn't be welcome in the dampish cave of the tent with Komsomol activists dropped around on their beds.

One guy from our tent could play the guitar which he borrowed from somewhere in the long low building.

All in all, his repertoire contained just two songs: one about a city the way to which you'd hardly ever find, and people there were so straightforward and bringing up whatever they had on their minds, and they preferred their lovers' hugs to the comfort of apartments, and the other one about skeletons walking in a file after having some good weed.

However, even with so limited number of songs, he always had an audience; the guitar strumming attracted guys from the nearby tents and the girls from their bedrooms in the long building.

I asked him to teach me guitar playing and he showed me the two chords he knew and how to beat out the rhythm of "eight".

Deep furrows from the guitar strings disfigured my left-hand fingertips. It hurt, but I wanted to learn it so much.

In the CJI game against the team from the Sumy group we lost, but not in the contest of greetings for which I didn't plagiarize a single line from anywhere. We performed as aliens who had lost their way.

" _It was Mars we were going to!_

Yeah-yeah!

It is you we've come to!

Yeah-yeah!.."

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Youth

After that summer many of my classmates were not around anymore, they moved or went to different technical and vocational schools.

Kuba entered the Odessa Sea School, Volodya Sherudillo became a student at the Konotop Vocational School 4, aka GPTU-4, which institution enjoyed among Konotopers the unofficial name of "Seminary" turning its disciples into "the seminarists".

Skully endeavored to enter some Mining School in Donetsk but eventually landed in the Konotop Railway Transportation College.

The class parallel to ours at School 13 also lost about half of its students, and the remnants of 8 "A" and 8 "B" were put together into the single ninth grade...

On the first school day, after the ceremonial line-up concluded with the traditionally endless bell signaling the start of the first lesson in the academic year, our classroom was entered by Valera Parasyouk, handled Quak.

He was a blonde tenth-grader running after some girl from the former parallel and for that reason popped up, like, just to hello the guys.

The Ukranian Language teacher, Fedosya Yakovlevna, handled Feska, with the straight parting in her colorless hair braided into a pitiful crown, almost immediately followed Quak. Indicating the door, she ordered him to leave the classroom and Quak complied, yet choosing another, his own, way; he climbed onto the windowsill and jumped off into the schoolyard flashing, like, for a goodbye his black well-polished shoes.

Not for nothing the Chemistry teacher, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, was in a habit of bringing those his shoes to our attention, "If guy's shoes shine, that means he's looking after himself. Follow the example of Parasyouk whose shoes are always polished!"

So, Fedosya Yakovlevna, aka Feska, closed the window left open by Valera Parasyouk, aka Quak, and called the class to pay no attention to his antics because he, all the same, had been transferred already to School 14 (which was the other of two schools in the Settlement) as long as he dwelt next to the mentioned school location and from now on he'd become the resident headache of teachers over there...

The best way to know the worth of the people around and get rubbed along with each other is by doing some mutual job.

After a week of classes, the senior grades of our school were instructed to report present at the schoolyard on Saturday morning equipped with buckets because we were going to help the kolkhoz in Podlipnoye village with harvesting their crop.

The day was glorious – a warm September day with a bright sun in the blue sky. The clamorous column of students reached the edge of a cornfield and we were tutored on the technique of harvesting at hand.

Pull the ear off the stem, tear off the long leaves of its sheathing and drop it in your bucket. When the bucket's filled up, take it to the common cob of ears and pour your share in.

The entire process was traditionally named "patronage assistance to a collective farm". Each patronizer was put before a row of corn stalks to go along and harvest the ears on their way to the other end of the field.

And off we went in one united push, giving rise to the mingled clink of tin buckets and cheerful juvenile yells, and the wise admonitions of caring teachers punctuated with loud bangs of thunderflashes thrown high in the cloudless sky...

It did not take long for me to notice that I lagged behind the general progress. So, hauling another filled bucket to the cob, I paid attention that not all the cornrows were clear of all the corn ears in them. It seemed the instructors did not emphasize strongly enough that we were not supposed to collect all to the very last ear, but selectively choose the best of the best, the most gorgeous cream of ears, so to say.

Correcting my working practices accordingly, in no time I caught up with the main body of the patronizers, then got ahead, and overtook the avant-garde party which with such addition grew to four advanced shock-workers.

Being ahead of the common mass of laborers had many advantages. You didn't need to go back to the common cobs of the harvested corn ears. As soon as your bucket got filled, you just poured the ears on the ground, becoming the founder of a new cob for those coming later to contribute.

A couple of guys in the avant-garde party chose the path of least resistance, throwing the ears from their rows in all directions, so as not to bother with husking them. I did not follow their best practices though because the field edge was seen ahead already.

We went out to a fallow field, and for another half-an-hour lay in the grass, before the general mass approached and joined us, the super-productive harvesters...

In September, the Arkhipenkos moved to Ryaboshapka Street near the RepBase who allotted to a turner of theirs, Uncle Tolik, together with his family an apartment in a five-story block. The mode of life became more convenient because our parents went over to sleep in the kitchen...

Soon after, in the khutta yard appeared a new tenant – Grigory Pilluta who had served his ten years for murder, and returned to his home sweet home.

With the dark turf of hair hiding his forehead and his eyes constantly looking down or aside, passed he, silent and sullen, from the wicket to his khutta porch.

His return from jail did not put end to the Pillutikha's concerts through the wall. Although one day, passing under their kitchen window, I heard his rude attempt at shutting up her stream of execrations pored against the whitewashed wall...

In the dead of night, I was wakened by Father in the scarce light of the desk lamp. Mother stood next to him, and Sasha and Natasha looked out sleepily from under their blankets.

Father told me that Pilluta was breaking into our door with a knife, and I had to climb down out of the room window and bring two axes from the workshop in the lean-to. There was no time for dressing up – through the dark-filled kitchen there came sounds of heavy blows at the door on the porch, and thick drunken cries addressing Mother, "Open it, bitch! I'll get your guts out!"

I quickly brought the required tools and together with Father went to guard the door quaking under the blows mixed with the animal bawls of Grigory Pilluta. How long would the rim lock last?

We stood ready in our underpants and tank-shirts with axes in our hands. "Seryozha," said Father in a keyed-up voice, "when he breaks in do not hit with the blade, use the butt!" I felt scared, yet at the same time wanted Pilluta to break in sooner at last.

He never did it. In the dark yard sounded Pillutikha's wails and assuaging male voice. It was Yura Plaksin, Grigory Pilluta's childhood buddy from the khutta in Gogol Street, opposite the water pump. He took the drunk away with him.

We left the axes on the veranda and went to sleep on.

In the morning, I saw the deep scratches left by knife stabs in the gray paint coating of the front door. The good news it did not happen in winter, with the additional window frames inserted for warmth, those had no hinges and just sealed the whole of the window from inside, so how would I get out to the lean-to?

Then Yura Plaksin came on a visit pleading not to inform the precinct militiaman about the incident...

One of the axes stayed in the veranda for a long time, until Grigory Pilluta moved somewhere in the city from his mother's khutta to keep away from the harm. Stupid indeed of his mother to wind him up, and then run for Yura Plaksin's assistance, so as to save her obedient son from getting locked up again.

Maybe, Grigory's leaving had other reasons as well, how could I know? Another guy's life is a dark abyss for those outside.

Later, I sometimes met him in the city but never more in the yard of our khutta...

With the Pillutikha's death, the population of the whole khutta increased sharply because Grigory sold his parental home to some newcomers from Siberia.

That fact did not mean at all that they were Siberians themselves. You could go there from any Republic, just get recruited for work and – full ahead.

The so-called "chasing the long ruble" was mainly steered in that direction because salaries in those uninhabited Taiga places were much higher. Folks were coming back with their suitcases packed with money to the gills, they said. If they could manage it, of course, I mean to return at all. As ran a popular saying ran: "the longer the ruble, the shorter the life".

One guy from the Settlement recruited to a mine beyond the Urals and in six months they sent him back.

There, in that mine, he was in charge of the machinery and equipment repair. Something stopped working, they switched the faulty contraption off and he crawled in to see what's up.

At that moment the switch was turned on (they had forgotten he was inside or something) so that the mechanism chopped him so finely that he arrived at his parents khutta inside a zinc coffin in the form of minced meat.

In the Ballet Studio of Nina Aleksandrovna, he was a leading dancer: such a tall brunette. When performing the Moldovan Jock he jumped higher than others with his legs wide apart in the air to slap the ballet boots with his hands. And the Moldovan waistcoat of black silk embroidered with flashy spangles suited his long hair so well...

The newcomers who bought Pilluta's half-khutta had been recruited to Siberia neither from Konotop nor even from Ukraine. They spoke Russian and did not understand many local words.

There were four of them – two childless couples, who divided the half-khutta among themselves. The somewhat older pair lived in the khutta next to ours, and the younger ones got the part with two additional windows looking into the street. Maybe, that's why they were a little more cheerful than the older pair. Although, in contrast to demised Pillutikha, the elders looked quite friendly too.

Our immediate neighbor, the husband in the senior couple, started the renovation of the brick stove in their kitchen and found a treasure hidden in the chimney.

To Sasha and Natasha, as well as to the children from the neighboring khutta of the Turkovs, he distributed the bills of banknotes from his find.

They amazed me with their unseen face value, before that the 25-ruble note, with the gypsum bust of Lenin, was, in my opinion, the biggest piece of money imaginable, but no! The Turkovs kids played with one-hundred and even five-hundred-ruble banknotes, the size of a handkerchief each, with antique sculptures and royal portraits in oval frames, and with a vignette-like signature of Finance Minister of the Russian Empire.

The money of the Ukranian Central Rada from the Civil War times was also played, not as picturesque though, but the curls in the signature of Lebid-Yurchik were not inferior to those by the Czarist minister.

By the way, there was a guy in my class whose last name was also Yurchik, named Sehrguey, like me, only he was taller and when our class lined-up for a PE lesson he stood the second. Hardly that he was Minister Yurchik's relative though, because he lived in Podlipnoye; most likely they were just namesakes...

When Father came from work, the neighbor called him over to demonstrate the box which he found the treasure in, as well as the hollow place inside the chimney where it was hidden.

Then Father returned home and standing in the middle of the kitchen pronounced with a thoughtful poise, "Seems, it was not only funny money there." He once again observed the stack of banknotes on the table and started recollections about his village relative on the maternal side.

The geezer lived under the Czarist regime and mastered the skill of printing paper money for which purpose he had a special machine-tool.

Life smiled on him until his business failed because of thoughtless impatience.

It happened when entertaining his brother on a visit from the city, he bought vodka from their village store. The salesman noticed that the five-ruble note he got for the commodity was leaving blue marks on his fingers – the eager hurry to celebrate the brotherly meeting did not allow the money paint to dry up properly.

In short, the printer man was exiled to Siberia with the confiscation of all his property. And his wife followed him, like those wives of revolutionary Decemberists doing their terms there.

"That's what love is", said Mother in an attempt of adding a pinch of sentimental spice to the all too earthy story.

"Bullshit!" burst Father. "The smart bitch got it that by the side of so qualified a diddler she would be better off even in Siberia than home."

He gave out a content chuckle, and I also felt pleased that someplace in my family tree there was sitting a cunning counterfeiter.

Even the fact that it was long ago was not too telling on the satisfaction although, for me, anything from before the Revolution seemed as distant as the harsh old times of epic heroes. Yet, take my word that in the days of Gorynych the Dragon they did not print paper money.

A week later, Father's assumption got substantiated by an indirect confirmation when the husband from the younger couple (not so cheerful as before) shared the news that his friend disappeared in an unknown direction.

Both he and his wife quietly quitted their jobs and did not even say goodbye to their neighbor-friends. Friendship is a great thing, but hands off my tobacco, buddy!

Soon the younger, noticeably depressed, couple left too. The Pilluta's part of the khutta emptied again and for long...

As a result of getting trained at the regional camp of Komsomol activists, I was elected Head of Komsomol Committee, aka Komsorg, of School 13 and the following week, I for several days was free from classes. In a commission of five other Komsorgs, I attended the reporting sessions of Komsomol Committees in the city schools, under the supervision of Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee. Besides me, among the commission members, there were two more trainees from the Sumy camp: the guitar player and one of the girls.

The reporting sessions were killing with their boredom because at every school the very same things were said the very same way in the very same words. And then Second Secretary invariably demanded from us, the commission members, to take the floor with our critical remarks.

The guitar player was good at those stodgy pieces because of being used to strum the only two chords he knew...

Ever keeping aloft and honored their bright pioneer traditions, the Komsomol members of School 13 did their best at contributing in the All-School Yearly Collecting of Scrap Metal...

Every autumn, half of the long rectangular schoolyard was divided into the sectors starting from the two-story "Cherevko's school" at the gate up to the workshop building. The sectors were assigned to different classes so that they knew where to dump the scrap metal collected by them.

The classes competed, the piles of rusty stuff grew with their augmentations checked, weighed and registered until one day the schoolyard was entered by a dump truck to take the collection away in a couple of goes.

The winner class was awarded an Honor Certificate handed to them at the nearest ceremonial school line-up.

Of course, we hardly cared for them those certificates. Yet, it was fascinating to get together with your whole class and...well, not all of your class, actually, but those who could or were willing to turn up...and—

And with a pair of handcarts rattling their iron wheels over the raggy cobblestones of Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, or creaking tiredly along the rest – dust'n'dirt-paved streets, we ventured into the Settlement in search of scrap metal.

Where exactly were we looking for it? It depended.

Sometimes a classmate reported a neighbor willing to get rid of a heap of perennial metal layers in the corner of their yard. "God bless you, kids! Drive your handcart in, take all of it away!"

Yet, rusty basins, folding coach-bed springs, and bent nails were a too lightweight addition to the respectability of your grade's scrap heap. Besides, champions for environmental purity were not a common species in the neighborhood. "So, what wrong with that trash behind the shed? Right, it's rusty through and through. Yet, who knows? One of these days it might come handy. A length of wire would nicely fix a fence plank so rotten that nails crash it to pieces. Get along, kids. Go!"

That's why the newly amalgamated collective of our ninth grade moved for a free search dollying their handcarts along the Plant wall in Professions Street; like vultures from the westerns seeking prey.

At the far end of Plant, where the tracks of the marshaling yard multiplied innumerably, we wheeled around an obviously no one's wheel pair from a railway car. Yet, you couldn't load the multi-ton wheels on a pair of handcarts, otherwise, we'd win in the scrap metal collecting competition in just one go.

On we soared searching along the railway tracks to no avail though.

But then, peeking into a wide concrete tube section in the tall grass nearby the railway, the guys discovered a watermelon and a box of grapes.

Clear as daylight, the station loaders lifted the fruits from some car in a freight train and stashed away for a while, supposed Volodya Sakoon from the former parallel.

We looked around more attentively, rows of freight trains stood silently on all the sides stilled in the torpor of waiting...

Some dude from our party took out a knife to cut the watermelon from the find. Yet, it did not open even when gashed all the way around, because of being too big for the knife length. Only when hit against the wall of the concrete tube, the watermelon broke up in two, but its core, the so-called "soul", remained in one of the halves. The moist, and red, and sugary, stitched with dark brown seeds, soul.

I would never expect such a swiftness from myself, but it was I who dealt the "falcon strike" with both hands, snatching the soul from the watermelon.

Puzzled with that completely out of the blue deftness of mine, I generously refused from partaking in the remaining parts.

The guys cut them into slices, while I enjoyed the rindless juice-dripping ball of watermelon pulp from out of my capped palms.

Even the girls couldn't say "no" to the grapes, yet almost half of the box, we left for the absent loaders who stole them so that they did not feel offended...

An hour later, following the lead from an acquaintance, we stroke it rich on a scrap metal deposit, although in an entirely different place.

In the fence of iron pipes separating Bazaar from Seminary, aka Vocational School 4, there was a hole through which we dragged out lots of iron pipe offcuts, rather long and numerous to make a good load for both handcarts.

The next day the House Manager of Seminary came to our school, identified their pipes in scrap metal heap collected by our grade, and took them away. He asserted they served as the material for training seminarists from the class of turners.

However, our Principal, Pyotr Ivanovich, did not even scold us.

But then what for? How could you guess the purpose of material dumped into the thicket of nettle?

Nonetheless, when giving it careful thought, you can discover a good reason for anything. And only my lightning-fast seizure of the watermelon's soul remained as something inexplicable for me.

(....in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys, ups, and downs, all my silly mistakes, and breathtaking insights sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who's now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere mingled with the never subsiding flow whoosh of the river currently named Varanda...)

Unpredictable is the inception of friendship. You go home after school, and there Vitya Cherevko, your new classmate from the former parallel, also walks along Nezhin Street.

"Oh! How's that you're here?"

"Just goin' to Vladya's. He lives in Forge Street."

"Hmm. I'm with you."

Since that day I had two classmate-friends: Chuba, aka Vitya Cherevko, and Vladya, aka Volodya Sakoon...

Vladya's forehead was hidden under the long forelock of brown greasy hair, which took start from a long parting above his right ear. Two or three half-ripe pimples on his cheeks were absolved by the beauty of his large expressive eyes that would have given heartburn to any pretty girl.

Chuba's black and slightly curly hair had no parting, and his eyes were pale blue. He had a healthy blush on his cheeks and a little spray of freckles over his neat nose.

For hanging out, we gathered on the porch of Vladya's khutta where he lived with his mother, Galina Petrovna.

In fact, it was half of a khutta comprising a room and a kitchen. A box-table, an iron bed, and the brick stove filled the kitchen up to the brim – nothing else could ever be squeezed in, except for the hooks on the wall by the door to hang coats.

In the equally narrow room there stood a wardrobe, a bit wider bed, a table with three chairs pushed under it (otherwise you couldn't pass by) and an up-stand shelf topped with a TV. The kitchen and the room had a window each in ages long need of paint. The blind wall opposite the windows separated their home from the neighbors' half-khutta.

Galina Petrovna had the job of a nurse at the Plant Kindergarten concealed in the bush between the Plant Park and the road diving into the tunnel of Under-Overpass.

At times, her cousin came to visit her. She called him Pencil or Pencilletto, depending on her mood at the moment which in its turn depended on whether or not he had popped up with a bottle of wine on him. The honorific 'Pencil' was saved for officially dry visitations. I wouldn't hurriedly rule out his being a relative because of Vladya's and his eyes had something common in their look.

Vladya's two elder brothers, who looked different from each other, and from Vladya as well, were separately traveling around the Soviet Union in their chase after the long ruble...

Among the guys from both Forge and Smithy Streets Vladya enjoyed well-deserved popularity. And it was not merely for the fact that his two elder brothers had managed to gain proper respect and unquestionable recognition in the eyes of whole Settlement before they launched on their 'chase', and even though certain gleam of their reputation touched Vladya, yet, apart from all that, he had merits of his own.

He could drive a fool like no other guy in the neighborhood.

In the Settlement parlance "fool driver" was someone who deceived you with an invented story for their private purposes, or just for entertainment and subjects for such recreational fool-driving could vary widely.

Here, for instance, he drove a fool about blocks in Scotland throwing logs in competition, which he told on behalf one of those kilted sportsmen:

"Well, that guy did not get it that I had already made my throw and he caught it square on the pate. That's when he kicked the bucket. What else would you do under such a predicament, right?" And Vladya closed one eye while drowsily rolling the other one up under the still half-open eyelid.

Or he shared local news how Kolyan Pevriy, thoroughly well-oiled, took a lamppost for a passer-by. He bullied it for a starter, then went over to extorting a cigarette, but since the held-up lamppost neither talked nor showed proper respect, Kolyan began to kick the shit outta him in earnest...couldn't fell, though...

And one evening, our company on the porch was joined by a guitar borrowed from Vasya Markov, and Vladya sang the song about Count and his daughter Valentina, who fell in love with the page playing the violin so well.

That's when and where I got into servile bondage and begged Vladya to teach me too. He replied that he also was learning from Quak to who I'd better turn directly, yet what the use when I did not have a guitar, and he couldn't give me the one he played because it was Vasya's who did not allow to farm it out or let be strummed by anyone except for Vladya...

If you dearly want something, the dream would come true in seconds, plus or minus a day or two. There appeared a guitar!

Vadik Glushchenko, handled Glushcha, from that same Forge Street, sold me his. And with no ripping off at the transaction; down the soundhole, you could read on the sticker inside: "7 rubles 50 kopecks. The Leningrad Factory of Musical Instruments."

The needed sum was almost immediately procured by Mother. True enough, the plastic handle on the third-string peghead was missing, but later Father took off the tuning machine, smuggled it to his work and welded a neat iron rivet in place of the lost one.

Quak gave me a crumpled sheet from a copybook with the invaluable, exhaustive, list and tablature of all the guitar chords in existence: "the small starlet", "the big starlet", "the poker", and "the barre".

Just a little more and I would start singing about the Count's beloved daughter!.

But no, I was not allowed that tiny stretch of time. Vladya's brother, Yura, on his way from Syktywkar to Zabaykalsk (or maybe vice versa), brought him a brand new six-string guitar, and I again remained hopelessly behind because on the six-stringed, aka Spanish, guitar there were neither "pokers" nor "starlets".

I had to do cuts in the nut of my guitar for the six-stringed layout instead of the seven-stringed, aka Russian, one.

In October, the weather was still warm and Galina Petrovna arranged Vladya's birthday party in their khutta's yard for him to invite and entertain his classmates in the open air.

The table from the room was taken out into the front garden strip and, with the protective oilcloth stripped off, it turned to be a varnished sliding table To span between the khutta and the wooden shed with latticed veranda panes, which in summer served both a kitchen and a bedroom.

It was at that celebration table where for the first time I drank wine. What a stunner feeling!

The world around got enveloped with the thinnest curtain of translucent, like dragonfly wings, flower petals passed through with sheer tiny veins.

Beautiful friends sat around me—the best of the best in the worlds—we were engaged in the wittiest conversation and Vladya's mother's laugher ringed so melodiously while the soft shadow beneath the bush of red currant grew blurrier and deeper...

With the onset of winter, another of my classmates, Lyuba Serduke, also had a birthday, and those who handed in two rubles to our Class Monitor, Tanya Krasnozhon, came to the khutta of the birthday girl.

Until then, all kinds of bigger parties were arranged exclusively at school, under the supervision of Class Mistress, Albina Grigoryevna. We gathered there in the evening, drank lemonade brought to the classroom by a couple of mothers, then they left and all the desks were moved into one corner to make room for playing The Brook, and the guys from higher grades opened the door and peeped in, but Albina would drive them away with her yells.

(...it's a nice feel to hold a girl's hand in yours and pull her along The Brook through the tunnel of paired arms arched above the two of you, unless, of course, the hand you tow behind you is not moist with sweat so after you two become the concluding part to the tunnel you'd have to wait until Vera Litviniva free and pull you in her wake.

Vera's flat nose is far from being lovely, still, her palms are always dry. She's a nice girl, in general, but Sasha Uniat from the tenth grade is after her in earnest.

He's a calm good guy, yet you can never say because anyone at times might turn jealous.

On the whole, it's better not to look for troubles, especially since Vera's lips are way too thin...)

In the large living-room of Lyuba's khutta on the floor in fresh paint-coat of red, there stood a long table under a spiffy white tablecloth laid with all kinds of salads, pork jelly, sweetmeat, and lemonade.

When all the celebration participants gathered, and Tanya the Monitor handed the birthday girl the present bought for the collected rubles, Lyuba's parents put on their coats and went to some neighbors to let us have fun unrestrainedly.

The dudes began iterating to the wide veranda with the glazed lattice and sipping on sly the moonshine smuggled in by someone of them.

In a small bedroom next to the living room, there started up a cozy disco.

The dimly lighted panel of the record player with an LP disk of instrumental numbers by The Singing Guitars, served the only illumination in the room, except for the sliver of light that made its way from the corridor through the gap between the curtains pulled closely together in the doorway.

From time to time, Lyuba's brother, a blockhead seventh-grader thrust from the corridor his arm to click the switch on the wall behind a curtain and the bulb under the bedroom ceiling flashed up with dazzlingly crude light. The dancers would coil back from each other, with their eyes in a tight squint, and yell at the darn moron, who'd laugh his stupid horse laughter and race back to the veranda. And then the dude from the pair closest to the curtains would put the light out again...

I did not go to the veranda but tarried at the table stowing away my favorite Olivier Salad. When I switched over to the lemonade, already not so favorite but still tasty, scarcely anyone else remained at the table.

Only Tanya Krutas from the former parallel grade sat at the opposite side though not eating or drinking anything because her arms were crossed on the chest beneath the mien of displeasure in her countenance.

I plucked up my courage, went around the table and stood next to her with the words, "Would you dance, please?"

She did not even look at me but, putting on even more rejecting air, pursed her lips, rose and with a pliant gait made for the disco bedroom.

They did not swap the partners there, and in the hissing intervals between the records, the pairs did not split and only waited for the sounds of the next number, so as again to wrap their arms around their partner, and press themselves to the hugged torso.

The slight swaying of Tanya's thin waist in between my palms laid upon her hips made me feel drunk without any wine. My ears were filled with some pulsating rumble which did not tell though on the utmost alertness of my every muscle ready to immediately respond to the least movement of her hands raised upon my shoulders.

And I was not angry with the moron clicking the switch but, recoiling under the bright bulb, I peered at her profile with pale clean skin and sternly lowered eyes, and mutely adored the bob of her hair stringed below the back of her head.

Her breasts were sooner circles than hemispheres, but even that what was there plunged me into the ecstatic trance of Corybants.

(...although, at that time I did not know so weird terms and it is where Father would scoff again:

"Piled up a mess of arty-farty words like to a fleasome by a scrawny cur. You, the top hopper!"...)

Yes, I was on top of bliss, it was incurable, inevitable, love forever...

After school, I waited for her going home just to walk by her side to the gate of our khutta because of most of the School 13 students scattered over the Settlement through Nezhin Street. And I even went to School 5 to support our girls when they lost in the Volleyball Championship of the city schools. She also was on the team.

Their loss almost did not disappoint me, I was too busy falling deeper and deeper in love with her high cheekbones. And I forgave her her slight bowleggedness which, after all, was a characteristic feature of Amazons, the fearless and beautiful she-warrior riders. But how devastatingly nice she looked in her sportswear white shirt!.

However, with all my constant and admired being there I never managed to dissolve the incomprehensible displeasure always present by her. At the breaks between classes, as soon as I bobbed up by her side, she beckoned to one or another of her girlfriends.

She even changed her route of returning home from school and bypassed Nezhin Street through May Day Street.

So all I could do was to wither off...The traces of turned down love got lost in snowdrifts piled high by winter storms upon the frozen ashes of killed fire...

In no way less heavy snowfalls were meeting in the Hero-City of Moscow, Capital of our Homeland, the participants of the winter stage in the All-Union military-patriotic game Zarnitsa.

Six of those participants went there from Konotop, together with their skis and a middle-aged supervisor...

I was sure of the rubber bands fixed by Father years ago, and confidently threw my skis onto the third level bunk, undressed, and climbed into the bed on the second level in the compartment of the first-class car. The lights in the car were already turned off but behind the window, there stretched Platform 4 flooded with the radiance of arc lamps above the crust of firmly trodden snow.

At last, from the locomotive in the head of the train, there rolled the approaching clangs of cars starting to pull each other. The domino-effect reached our car, it also jerked and gaining smooth acceleration glided forward.

To Moscow! To Moscow!.

On the evening of the following day, we left our skis in the vestibule of a huge school scarcely lighted and empty except for a small group of tenants from the surrounding neighborhood who came to take us to their different apartments as bed-and-breakfast guests at their hospitable families.

The next day, my hosts treated me with the morning tea, and their son led to the same school closed for the holidays. On the way, he warned me to mark the route well, so that in the evening I could find their apartment where I was billeted to stay.

We had three meals a day in the huge canteen, not far away from the huge school, both surrounded by the neighborhood of huge multi-storied apartment blocks. Visiting the canteen was skipped just once when we, together with our skis, went to the Taman Guard Division stationed near Moscow.

There we ran to the attack through the deep snowdrifts between young fir-trees escorted by a soldier in a greatcoat who also ran on skis bursting unsparing ammunition rounds from his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

On that day, together with two hundred other guys, who arrived for the winter-stage Zarnitsa in Moscow, we were fed with the midday meal in a soldiers' canteen of the Taman Guard Division.

The following day after an endless excursion around the city, our Konotop group arrived at the Red Square to visit the Lenin Mausoleum. We joined the dense line of people moving to it across the Red Square and for a long time kept approaching the Mausoleum while the dusk grew thicker over the smooth black cobbles in the snow-strewn pavement. The icy chill emitted by the flagstones pierced even through the thick soles of winter shoes, and my feet got too cold.

With just about fifty meters separating our group from the entrance to Mausoleum, we learned that the working day there was over and they locked it for the mummy to have a night's rest.

Our supervisor led us back across the Red Square to get warm in the brightly lit emporium of GUM, aka State Universal Store, which worked to later hours. I doubted that the half-hour he allotted was enough to warm so cold feet up, but as it turned out, such a stretch could do the trick.

In the subway car coming back to the hospitable neighborhood, the supervisor announced that Zarnitsa was over, yet we had another day of staying in Moscow and the following morning we, by all means, would pass through the Mausoleum and then cut loose for a shopping spree.

However, the next morning after leaving my hosts' apartment, I tarried in the huge canteen and on coming to the huge school learned that our group had already left to observe Lenin in his casket. The watchman was also leaving until five in the afternoon, so he locked me inside (the weather was frosty) and all of that day I spent in the huge empty school.

Almost all the doors in the building were locked. In the watchman's room, there was a phone and, having never used the device, I started learning. Not a too knotty task to stick your finger into one of ten holes along the edge of phone dial-disc and wind it collecting random digits until there sounded beeps in the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Hello! Is that zoo over there?"

"No."

"Then why the call is answered by an ass?"

(...yuck! you wanna puke even recalling...)

Soon after the watchman unlocked me, our group arrived and I was expressly told that we were going home the next morning.

In the apartment of my hosts, I saw Twenty Years Later by Dumas inside their glazed bookcase and asked where they sold such books. The hosts began to explain how many crossings were along the way to the bookshop, though it should be closed already. But I went out all the same...

It was dark and very quiet with rare fluffy snowflakes coming down from above, one after another. I stood by the glass walls of the locked bookshop with the feeble glow of distant light inside. All around me was some vast emptiness immersed in hollow immense silence...

Then a belated passer-by walked leaving shallow footprints in the soft snow along the pavement, and I went back to the home of strangers. There was "The Vertical" on TV, starring Vladimir Vysotsky,...

We knew exactly what we wanted, we should become a vocal-instrumental ensemble because in the then USSR there were no rock groups. Rock groups were an attribute of the decaying capitalist West, but in our Soviet state, free from the exploitation of a man by man, rock groups were named vocal-instrumental ensembles, aka VIA's.

The songs about the prosecutor, who raised his blood-smeared hand against the happiness and peaceful life of an honest pickpocket, were just a spring-board in our glorious career. Those upstart crows, the popular VIA's of The Singing Guitars, and The Jolly Guys, actually, stole our songs. It was we, who should have performed the hit about fetching the ring of Saturn to ask the one we loved to marry us, and no other but we and only we should have turned out that thrilling electric guitar vibrato ending "The Gypsy Girl" in the LP Disc of instrumental numbers.

It's just that while we were busy training ourselves with the fact that, visiting Bazaar, he did not sell pigeons there but hunted the passers'-by pockets, they jumped out before us. But we did not give up...

During the breaks in the two-story building of the "Cherevko's school", where the ninth grade was again transferred to, we gathered at the window on the staircase landing for making music. The triangle-ruler of light metal normally used for drawing figures in school copybooks was thrown on the windowsill to serve music instrument on which Sasha Rodionenko, handled Radya, was knocking out rhythmic backup to the songs.

Chuba at once crossed out any chance for me to be a singer. The problem was not with my vocal cords but with my ears, I just could not hear my own sharps from flats when singing. There was no way to argue with Chuba, who finished Music School in the class of button-accordion and, as an expert, should hear better.

As for Vladya's musical ear, Chuba admitted its presence and the fact that Vladya even had some kind of a voice, only it was hard to tell in which part of his anatomy it was sitting.

Thus, there remained only two vocalists – Chuba himself, and Radya.

It's more than likely though that with all our zeal we would never progress any further than the mentioned windowsill, if after the winter holidays there did not appear a new teacher of Music at our school, named Valentina. She looked like a tenth-grader girl but styled her hair in the ladies' way of making a round cushion of hair on top of their heads.

At the lessons, she widely spread the billows of her accordion out and squeezed them vigorously back, and with the strident jarring bell announcing the break, she collected her instrument and hurried to the streetcar stop because she also taught Music at School 12.

Valentina promised we could go to the Regional Review of Young Talents, only we had to work hard because the Review was taking place next month. The girls she worked with at School 12 were to perform there and we might accompaniment their singing, the whole combination would pass for a VIA from the Plant Club because the Regional Review shut out the participation of school students.

Anything can be solved exceedingly simple if you know how to go about it...

The rehearsals were held in the evenings, behind the blue blinds on the windows of the Physics classroom. Our string group was enhanced with one more guitarist from School 12.

He looked more mature than a tenth-grader and did not conceal his special relation with Valentina, wrapping her neck with a scarf after the rehearsals in an unmistakably owner's manner, and then she trustingly leaned her head on his shoulder, walking along the dark school corridor to the exit.

The girls from School 12 appeared at the rehearsals just a couple of times, and not in full, but Valentina promised us that the singers knew their part quite well.

At the final stage preview in Club, the day before starting off to the regional center of Sumy, there popped up one more singer, a corpulent dude of no school affiliation, who sang solo:

"Hello there, the field of Russia,

I'm a thin shoot of yours..."

The chorus of eight girls from School 12 performed a patriotic number emphasizing the fact that Komsomol members, first and foremost, take care of their Homeland and only after that they cater for themselves.

Then Sasha Rodionenko, aka Radya, was giving out a song by Vysotsky about the mass graves.

Supposedly, we cut a nice picture – the line of eight white-shirted girls in front of two microphones, Valentina with her shining accordion, Skully standing behind a single drum on its rack, three guitarists with their acoustic guitars hanged on package strings over their shoulders, and Volodya Elman handling the double bass.

Where did Elman come from and why without any handle?

He was a tenth-grader from our school and lived at the end of Smithy Street, in the khutta next to a century-old birch tree. In spring, they milked it, gathering about a dozen of three-liter glass jars of the birch sap. But the sap, of course, was not all for Elman alone, because it was a long brick khutta-block of four apartments.

The absence of a handle was easily explained by the fact that his last name, by itself, sounded like a criminal handle – "L-man".

As for the double bass, it was handed out to him by Aksyonov, Head of the Variety Ensemble at Club. Head couldn't say "no" to the drummer of his Variety Ensemble.

It's hard to suppose though that Elman had much knowledge, or any skills at playing the double bass, more likely his eagerness to get integrated into the glorious world of the music industry was as great as mine.

He joined us without a single rehearsal, at the stage preview in Club. Valentina asked him to play the double bass as low as possible and not too often. However, Elman could not keep his zeal in check and, by the end of the stage preview, two fingers on his right hand were bleeding, with the skin rubbed off against the sturdy strings. To somehow pull them at the Regional Review in Sumy, he bandaged his torn fingers with electrical tape.

Eleonora Nikolayevna, the nominal Head of Children Sector went along with us, as the official head of our Youth Ensemble, in one of her blouses of starched immaculateness and a cameo brooch under the collar. The long earring, no doubt, dangled in place...

We went to Sumy by the morning diesel train.

While waiting for it, I was strangely struck by the sight of our three guitars leaning onto each other, like a stack of rifles on the snow-clad platform One. Some piercing nudity...

The Regional Palace of Culture buzzed like a beehive, crammed with young talents who arrived to show themselves in the Review.

We were auditioned in a separate room by a couple of people with block-notes and they tick-marked us for participation in the gala concert at five in the afternoon.

The neighboring rooms were also full of auditions and rehearsals at full swing. In one of them for the first time in my life, I heard and was stopped in my tracks by the mesmerizing caterwauling of a live electric guitar.

Wow! It filled the room through and through with the sounds of swaying vibrato...

We went out for a midday meal to a nearby canteen, where I fell under the spell of Sveta Vasilenko from the group of chorus girls from School 12.

Returning to the Regional Palace of Culture, I walked by her vacant side like a dog on the lead because her other side was escorted by her lanky girlfriend holding her by the arm. My schoolmates, following closely behind, kicked up a hailstorm of stupid giggling addressed to no one in particular, which did not sober me in the least.

During the final rehearsal, Sveta won me over to the hilt. From the compact line of the chorus-girls, she kept casting at me flip glances of her black glittering eyes just to drop them modestly down, or direct at the ceiling above.

In more than one book, I happened to read that beauties knew the way of shooting with their glances, but never could I imagine that those shots may fell you on the spot.

After the rehearsal was over, there remained two hours of waiting before the gala concert, so I approached her and invited to the cinema. She was not sure about it and hesitated, even though her girlfriend, who turned out not so lanky, after all, but quite a nice individual, backed up my proposal persuading Sveta to go along with me, and why not?

Our united efforts failed to overcome Sveta's uncertainty, however, I still managed to get her flat refusal and left carrying away my shot-through heart.

I was at death's doorstep on all the way to the movie theater where I plunged into the magical world of the seventeenth century France, with Gerard Filip and Gina Lollobrigida in the "Fanfan the Tulip". They reanimated me.

How was our performance at the gala concert?

With my defective musical ear, I'm not the right guy for making judgments.

However, with three guitars strumming the same chords in unison, there's not a fat chance of guessing whose one is out of tune.

The electrical tape on maimed Elman's fingers remarkably softened down the dubbing of the double bass.

Skully's drum was not too acute because instead of sticks he used jazz drumming brushes.

Valentina's accordion, rolling over her energetic body, kept covering all er-harmonic inaccuracies as well as getting out of key.

I believe that, on the whole, all that sounded fresh, and torrid, and full of youthful zeal, and (most importantly!) patriotic.

After the concert, a bus from the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, waiting for us by the Regional Palace of Culture, fully justified Eleonora Nikolayevna's presence with us at the Review.

On the bus ride home, everyone was giving meaningful looks at both me and Sveta though we did not sit next to each other. The chorus girls kept singing all kinds of songs about the eyes that drive us mad, and "Sveta's shining, Sveta's dazzling..." substituting her name for "the moon" in that folk song. Sveta was snapping back at them, but to me all that gave no trouble, I just did not care.

The next day at school, Volodya Gourevitch kept stupidly cuckooing about our competitors at the CJI having turned me into School 12 agent, each time the jest was concluded with his protracted laughter.

At a break between the classes, Tolik Sudak from our grade, for no reason whatsoever, started sharing in a group of guys that Sveta Vasilenko was a daughter to Head of Militia Station and that she once came to her school in a jizz stained skirt.

If anyone allows themselves such offensive allusions about your beloved, you have to demand satisfaction at a duel. However, at PE classes Tolik stood the first in the line. He was a strong guy from Podlipnoye and always knew everything, probably, because his mother taught Maths at our school. That's why I just stood by as if all that had nothing to do with me, and silently hated the blond curls and drowsy stare of Tolik Sudak's pale-blue eyes.

Soon after, the combined Youth Ensemble participated in a Club concert but when it was over I did not try to see Sveta home.

What killed my love? The monotonous joke and loud laughter of Volodya Gourevitch? Or, maybe, Tolik Sudak's disparagement of the stained skirt?

Frankly, the heaviest blow was dealt with by the fact of her residence in Depot Street which was another unfavorable neighborhood for those in love.

Vadik Glushchenko once escorted a girl to her khutta in Depot Street and was stopped by a gang of ten who knocked him down and kicked from all the sides.

"The main thing is to hide your head in your arms, then you got woozy and the kicks grew dull," so he later shared his enlightening experience...

The end of winter was postponed with so huge a snowfall that Nezhin Street had to be cleared with a bulldozer pushing mounds of snow off the road.

On my way back from school, instead of walking along the cleared way I chose to leap along the ridge of snow heaps moved aside towards the fences. The fun was cut off by a sharp pain in my groin, so the remaining way to our khutta I followed the prints of the bulldozer tracks.

In the evening, Mother, worried with my moans, demanded to demonstrate what the matter there. I refused. Then Father said, "Show to me, then, I'm also a man."

The scrotum, swollen up to the size of a teacup, felt hard to the touch. Father frowned and when Mother asked from the kitchen, "So, what's there?" He said I had to see a doctor.

It was an eerie night – the agony of panic and despair...

In the morning, walking with painfully shortened steps, I came with Mother to the Railway Polyclinic near the Station.

In the reception, they gave me a slip of paper with my number in the queue to the doctor. We got seated on the chairs next to the specialist's office in the hollow echoing corridor.

When it was my turn to enter the white door, I, keeping my eyes aside, told Mother that if needed I agree to be operated on, let only everything be normal.

The doctor was a woman, but either her white robe gave her the status of man, or the fear to lose something beyond my current ken, erased my shyness.

The doctor said it was a sprain and all I needed were spirits compresses.

Two days later, the scrotum returned to its usual shape and I forgot my agonizing fears...

On the seventh of March, Vladya brought to school a miniature bottle of cognac. We shared the booze between three of us, sipping from the tiny bottle's neck.

Some warm glowing filled my mouth, and we laughed louder and oftener than usual, but there was nothing like the bliss from the wine at Vladya's birthday.

We were dismissed early because it was the eve of Women Day, and when I got home the influence completely disappeared except for the heaviness in my head.

I climbed onto the khutta's roof, because already for a week Father chewed my ear to dump the snow from up there.

Four short brick chimneys, barely protruding from the snow, helped to outline our part of the roof. It was rather steep, and in the final stretch my felt boots slipped and I fell into the narrow back garden.

The landing was successful – on both legs and into a deep snowdrift, however, when I saw the pointed planks of the low palisade between the back garden and the yard of the Turkovs, menacingly stuck up from the snow about an inch off my thigh, I grew cold with horror.

(....in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys, my ups and downs sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who's now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere mingled with the never subsiding flow whoosh of the river currently named Varanda...)

End March a team of doctors came to our class to have the physical examination of the dudes to register us among future conscripts.

While the girls were taken to another room for some special lecture, and the physicians told us to undress and demonstrate them our backs and sit on a chair for them to knock a rubber hammer beneath our knees, besides the height-measuring and dick inspection.

In my draftee card, the line for "sexual development" was marked with 'N'. When the commission left, Tolik Sudak explained that "N" stood for "normal" and all the dudes got that mark except for Sasha Shwedov, and the girls, who returned after we got dressed, somehow found it out and that's why now they were whispering to each other and exchanging giggles...

The summer started with the examination session for the ninth grade.

Of all the exams, Chemistry was the most feared one – a normal guy from the Settlement could not really bottom all them those benzyl rings and their atomicity.

Following the majority of my classmates, I memorized the answers to just one of the twenty-four question sets, aka "tickets", from the Tickets List.

At the exam, the ticket numbers, written on slips of paper, were strewn face down on the desk of examiners for us to choose.

My chances were one to twenty-three and I lost. However, the teacher of Chemistry, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, for some unknown reason, began to pull me out and, eventually, evaluated my ignorance with "four".

(....in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my, etc., etc...)

Physicist Binkin was Assistant Examiner at that exam and had hearty fun by showing to Vladya the location of the ticket numbers. With an encouraging bob of his head, Binkin raised the slips from the exterminators' desk, one by one, kept the numbers aloft, faced towards Vladya, and put them back down to the very place they had been picked up from. As fair a play as one could wish.

Unfortunately, Vladya was occupying the desk at the end of the classroom, so as to copy from the cribs prepared by diligent girls, who had already passed the exam and handed him their cheat sheets. But what could you possibly have understood seeing for the first time in your life some formulas scribbled on an inch-wide accordion-folded paper-strip in a handwriting three times smaller than normal?

Of course, Vladya would like to ask for another try and swap the ticket for the one which answers he had learned by rote.

The Binkin's funny fair play though was no help at all because of a too great distance, marking the place of the picked up and put back slips, Vladya couldn't make out the numbers, however hard he squinted. So, he swapped two more tickets, exhausting the permitted tries and raising his chances at three to twenty-two, but missed again.

Nonetheless, he got "three" and the comment from Binkin, "You got this mark solely on behalf of your unalloyed proletarian origin..."

I never quibbled about my clothes, putting on and wearing just what had been given, and Mother looked after the things were not dirty or torn. So my new clothing item—a jacket made of leatherette to the patterns from _The Working Woman_ magazine—appeared on Mother's initiative and it was her to sew it.

The money to buy leatherette was found because Father moved to work at the RepBase at a locksmith job and his salary grew by ten rubles.

It turned out a good jacket of a nice brown color with cuffs and a belt of darker cloth. If you looked from afar it even glinted in the sun. Two weeks later the leatherette at the elbow folds got fretted to its gunny base, but my award I received when the jacket still had good looks.

Yes, the trade-union Committee of the KaPeVeRrZe Plant rewarded me for outstanding participation in amateur activities. At the All-Plant trade-union conference in Club, the Chairman of the Plant trade-union Committee personally handed me not a useless Certificate of Honor, but a sizable paper packet which contained dark rubber fins and a mask, but no snorkel.

Nonetheless, I took the equipment to the Seim once, but swimming in the fins turned out much harder than you might think when watching "The Amphibian Man" flicks. Besides, water found the way to penetrate inside the mask and get into my nose, but then, perhaps, it couldn't be otherwise...

However, I was not too keen on studying the bottom life of large water bodies because my main concern that summer was finding a job; I needed money, lots of it, because of my "horselessness".

Vladya had a motor scooter "Riga-4", Chuba drove "Desna-3".

Skully reconstructed his bike into a moped, and when a flock of the Settlement scooter-riders buzzing with their motors scudded along Peace Avenue, he did not fell too far behind.

Yet, "Riga-4" was the coolest.

Vladya, of course, allowed me to drive it a couple of times — the buzz of the engine, wind in the face, speed operating, delight!

But there was no use of begging scooter for a ride from Chuba. Firmly saddled in its seat, with his feet on the ground, he only chuckled in answer.

"Let me, eh? Don't be greedy."

"I ain't greedy, I am gritty!"

"Slobs aren't gritty. One ride to Professions Street and back, I swear!"

Another giggle at nothing funny.

"A stinting asshole!"

But Chuba again only chuckled.

Skully's moped I did not want myself; but where to get money to buy a scooter? That was the question...

Mother said that a guy after the ninth grade might get a job at the Vegetable Storage Base, he only needed to apply at Head Office of the Workers Supplying Department, aka ORS, near the Under-Overpass.

It sounded a great idea, there should be truckloads of strawberries and also the watermelons should be passing through the Vegetable Base before getting on sale at stores.

But would they give me a job if I wasn't sixteen yet?

In the long half-dark corridor of the ORS Head Office, I was more uptight than through all the summer exams at school.

I got the job! So began my labor career...

The Vegetable Base was located at the end of Depot Street and I was getting there by bike.

Besides me, the enterprise employed some ten more summer-workers; mostly from School 14. I recognized one of them – a short guy sporting long hair, handled Luke, it was he who once slapped me in the face for shooting in his back. He tacitly let the bygones be bygones, and so did I, of course.

An opening couple of days on the job we were sorting boxes, empty boxes with no strawberries whatsoever. The whole ones were stacked in the shed, those in need of repair piled next to the shed, and shattered throwaways had to be dragged to the stoves under the open sky in the middle of the Base yard...

On arriving at the Base, a truck with a load of vegetables drives onto a weighbridge to get weighed. After dumping the cargo they weigh the vehicle once again; the difference between the loaded and empty truck shows the weight of the brought vegetables if only the weighbridge works correctly.

That's where arises the need for a calibration specialist who knows how to tune the weighbridge.

To do the calibration, you also need a trial one-ton load of 20 kg pig iron weighs, as well as the presence of a certain workforce to move that ton from one corner of the weighbridge to another, to another, to another, to the middle...

The job of calibration helpers showed who among us was who.

At first, it was like a sporting event, we carried the weighs racing each other, by the third corner we started to notice which of us shirked and who was going to the end...

Then for two or three days, we cleaned the potato storage block of its stock gone rotten. I never imagined there could be so a sickening stench in the world. We dragged that horrid muck out, in two-handled wicker baskets, to dump in the thicket of tall grass at the Vegetable Base outskirts.

The number of working school guys diminished to five...

The main workforce of the Base were women in black robes and color-printed kerchiefs on their hair. They sorted the carrots or beetroots in the respective blocks, and we moved and stocked the boxes filled by them.

Sitting in a circle around a dusty knoll of vegetables, they never stopped yakking, not for half a minute, faith. They were telling each other endless sagas of "he" and "she".

How that "she" of theirs grew fat, then skinny, then got to the hospital, then told her mother she couldn't live without him, then died, then cheated him and fled with someone else...

And "he" was tall, then short, then pot-bellied, then bald, then black-haired, then a drunk; "he" asked to marry him eventually and did not pay alimony, they treated him for alcoholism and "he" ripped off the linoleum from the kitchen floor to take it to his lover widowed two times...

And so they would pour out the score of their chin music yarn until the blonde guy from School 14, Long by his handle, addressed the peppiest one in the circle of squaws seated on upset empty boxes, "Well, d'you give or what?"

"At once!" was the reply. "And I'll squeeze and tear your little willie clean off you, kiss it goodbye, lover!"

And her squaw-friends would begin to silence her with oops and pffts and "watch your mouth! It's a kid you talkest to!"

For the midday meal, I rode the bike home – twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back, ten minutes for soup and tea or, maybe, compote.

Thus, four times a day I gained the first space velocity pedaling all the way down the concrete dive into the Under-Overpass tunnel. Who, of the Vegetable Base workers, does not crave for crazy speed?

Whee-hoo!.

In the morning Head of the Vegetable Base allocated jobs for the present workforce.

A couple of times I got a coopers' helper job.

The area in front of their stocky workshop was crowded with hogsheads in need of repair. I rolled or dragged the vessels in, depending on their conditions.

Two mujiks in caps and aprons knocked the iron hoops off, and the barrel disintegrated into a heap of slightly bent staves which they called klepkas. The coopers sorted the klepkas, threw the hopeless off, filled up for the shortage from the stock of odd ones. They planed and fitted them to each other, collected the bottoms from straight lags, inserted the bottoms on both ends and drove the hoops back.

Of course, I knew that by saying "he's missing a klepka in the head" folks meant the same as when they said "not all at home" or just "crazy", but it was in that workshop that I got it where that meaning came from – you cannot fill a barrel with a missing klepka, it's as impossible as filling a cup whose walls are crazed.

The refuse I hauled to the same idle stoves in the yard with the iron cauldrons embedded in them.

The coopers worked unhurriedly, fixing two or three barrels a day, and the time by their side passed so very slowly, but in their workshop, there was a pleasant smell of timber shavings...

By the masons, it smelled of damp earth.

They worked in a long basement bunker, replacing a log wall with a brick one. And they also wore caps and aprons; the caps were the same as on the coopers, but the aprons of a sturdier tarp.

I was so eager to try my hand at laying a wall, at least a little.

The older mason allowed me to lay one course. He was standing by and smiling at something, although his grim partner grumbled along that I was doing it not properly at all.

My helper-partner from School 14 also grumbled all the time, however, not on the point of masonry. His standing subject of dissatisfaction was Head of the Base.

Being unhappy with having such a bitch of a boss, he shirked the work which Head was allocating for two of us. I did not mind doing more than my partner, only it seemed not right so I was glad when he decided to quit at all...

And then the cucumber season began.

They were coming in by cars pushed with a small diesel locomotive along the sideway tracks entering the Base grounds. The cars were filled with boxes of cucumbers that had to be moved to the stoves in the yard, in whose cauldrons the brine with smelly dill was boiling, and crowds of pickle barrels stood around, with their lids removed, prepared to get their load of cucumbers for pickling.

The already familiar squaw-team worked there, but they did not have time anymore for chin-wagging about "her" and "him". They cooked the pickling oozuar in the stove-embedded cauldrons with iron lids and poured it into the barrels loaded with cucumbers.

I did not aspire to be an oozuar-cook, I was satisfied with the job of stoker feeding the stoves with the wood-waste of broken boxes and cracked klepkas, some of which had to be shortened with an ax.

In general, it was not a conveyor job – they would call and tell when to add the fuel, and then again go and get seated someplace, and wait for the next call.

And I sat in the sun which filled the shadeless yard, way off from the stoves by which it was even hotter. To while the time, I practiced taking chords of a six-stringed guitar: from D-minor to A-minor, to E-major, on a narrow cask stave grabbed from the pile of fuel.

The women laughed from about the cauldrons, "Found your missing klepka at last?"

But I did not pay attention to them taking B-7th and thinking about Natalie...

When walking along the sidewalk, you meet a girl with a kerchief around her neck which she had tied not like the pioneer necktie but with the knot on her shoulder, you can get it at once that she knows what's what in the chic style. And you at once feel an urge to come up and ask her name, and start a talk.

But how to speak up? What to say? Who cares to get "piss off!" in answer and then feel yourself a squashed tomato?.

But it's quite another kettle of fish when you know that the stylish girl's name is Natasha Grigorenko, and you have even tried to learn ballroom waltzing with her as your partner, under the button-accordion of Volodya Ilyich Gourevitch.

"Hello, Natasha! How you doing?"

"Oh, Seryozha! Is that you? Actually, at School 12 everyone calls me 'Natalie'."

We happened to be walking the same direction and I saw her to the corner of the street she lived in, Suvorov Street, opposite the middle driveway into Bazaar.

(...or was it she to greet me first on that sidewalk? After all, for tying the kerchief that dashy way one needs not only knowing the fashion but having a resolute nature as well...)

Whoever of us it was, but the next step was made by me. Maybe not too soon. In a week or so. Or was it even a month?

Anyway, I made that decisive step, or rather a very resolute jump.

Radya and I were riding the back steps of the Settlement streetcar, getting fanned by the strong counter wind. And when the streetcar rumbled along Bazaar, I suddenly turned my head and glanced across the road into Suvorov Street.

Not far from the corner, two girls were playing badminton. Sure thing, I immediately recognized Natalie's long straight hair.

"Bye, Radya!" And I jumped off without answering his, "Where to?"

Yes, no mistake – it was she. And her partner turned out also to be my former classmate, Natasha Podragoon, who, together with Natalie went over to School 12 because of its Maths and Physics specialization.

Of course, I immediately gushed some yackety-yack about giving free masterclasses to share the proper skills of training their shuttlecock.

And then—who could imagine!—another chance passer-by turned over the corner. Radya obviously jumped off before the stop at our school, although he had been going to visit his Grandpa.

Natasha Podragoon went home soon, because of both Radya and I talked to her so too little, if at all, on account of her being fat. Natalie invited us into her khutta yard, there, on a table dug into the ground, lay a stack of Czech Film a Divadlo magazines. I got carried away with perusing the pictures, and Radya snapped up the conversational initiative.

But then from the neighbor garden, two missiles of dry earth lumps came, though missing under. Natalie yelled at the boy she would complain to his parents, but for Radya that seemed not enough, and he ran to the garden fence to whip the fool up with an elder guy's lecture. Or maybe, he wanted to show off his sporting bearing, because he, after all, had been attending the volleyball section of the Youth Sports School for two years.

Either Natalie somehow sympathized with the ten-year-old Othello of her neighbor, or Radya, despite all his training, crashed some of the potato bushes on his run, but while the jock was bullying the boy behind the fence, Natalie told me to come on Thursday – she had more of those magazines.

So we started dating; me and Natalie.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she was dating me because I did not know the way of doing dating. I just came to 8, Suvorov Street, on the appointed day, greeted her mother, sat on the couch and turned the pages of another Film a Divadlo magazine.

Some people know how to live! And where only could them folks manage to get such magazines from?

Then her father came home from work on his motorcycle with a sidecar. He had the same round chin as Natalie, and he gave her his permission to go out for a walk till ten, but no later than half to eleven.

And we went out.

She talked a lot, yet not for just flap her chops like many others.

Natalie became my enlightener. Despite the long years of reading addiction, there was so much I did not know yet.

That the coolest candies were "Grilyazh", only they were not on sale in Konotop. You had to go after those sweets to Moscow or Leningrad, and even there it's not a snap to find the treat.

That the most delicious sandwich was bread and butter with layers of sliced tomato and boiled egg. And it should be rye bread, of course. And that Louis Armstrong had the hoarsest voice of all the singers in the world.

Following her lead, I borrowed a book of poems by Voznesensky from the Club library. I always saw it on the shelves but bypassed it because it was poetry. So that's what the real poetry meant!.

But much more than for filling my educational gaps, I needed her for the moments when I swam in the thrill.

For example, we were going to the Peace Movie Theater and she allowed to hold her arm-in-arm. Gee! That's impossible to describe!

I felt the delicate skin of her forearm because she had a summer frock on and I was grabbing her around the biceps. Although girls have no biceps to talk of.

And because of all that I was on a full flight, I swam in thrill starting from under the bridge over Peace Avenue, past Zelenchuk Area, and almost to Peace Square. Before we reached it, she explained that it would be more correct when the girl herself holds you by the arm, and we continued to go on the way she shared.

Also nice, though not quite the thing before that...And then I received a ball-lightning strike when walking on, absorbed in the conversation, she half-turned to me and—O!—her right breast pressed lavishly to my forearm...the bliss that stops your pulse...

So, I had what to think about by the stoves in the Vegetable Base yard, while practicing chords on the missed but eventually found klepka of mine...

It's hard for those enlightened to abstain from sharing the light of truth they saw.

I attempted to bring the revelation over to my sister. We were walking along Forge Street towards Club when she said, "Come one, I'll take my brother under the pretzel!" and she took my arm.

"Listen, Kiddy," said I because we, my brother with me, and our friends, and all ours rarely called her by name but only "Kiddy", or "Red-Haired".

"I can teach you a trick that any guy would be yours in no time."

"O, really?" my sister said in answer, "Is that what you're talking about?" And she half-turned to me on the move touching her breast to my forearm.

Such an arrogant naivety! How could I imagine—even for a split second—there was something I would ever be able to learn before my younger sister?

I had to apologize, and all the remaining way to Club we laughed like mad at what a self-confident patsy I was.

But no happiness goes on forever...

At one of the evening going-outs with Natalie, some guy came up to us between the Under-Overpass and Bazaar and we stopped for a talk. Or rather they talked because of being from one school, and I just stood there like an odd lamppost.

He had a cool shirt on, I had not seen anything like that before – red and green stripes as wide as on pajamas. And I also had never had pajamas, but they were sometimes shown in movies.

He rhapsodized which of the Moscow universities he would enter because his uncle was a diplomat and knew everyone there. And he, the uncle, invited him to go to the Black Sea after the entrance exams by his, uncle's, Volga so that the attractive nephew would serve a bait to lime the girls.

Then they see-youed each other and we parted, but the chat had obviously put Natalie out of humor.

By her khutta gate, she told me that she had already been dating a guy and one evening they were going on an empty bus and he looked back at the conductor in her seat by the door, and said, "Conductor is not a human," and kissed Natalie.

And then I also felt down in the dumps, because it was clear that they were kissing without conductors as well. I thought that it was, probably, that same red-green yakker but I didn't ask questions.

That evening all the way from Suvorov to Nezhin Street I walked forever crushed by grief...

In those times the estimation of a Konotoper's prosperity was simple – you just inquired if they had a hut at the Seim river.

Upstream from the Bay Beach, about half-kilometers closer to the railway bridge, the willow thicket on the bank was gashed by a long gully. At the end of that inlet, amid abundant growth of pliant willows, there stood some four to six dozen huts of the Partnership "Priseimovye".

True, it called for a certain stretch of liberality to use the name of "huts" for those thrown together booths with deal-walls under the roofs of tin.

They were small in size – for a couple or three iron beds on the floor of sand. No window was needed; on their arrival to relax in nature's lap, the hut owner kept its door open all day long.

But if they were a fisherman, they would lock the door and go down to the gully, where a row of long narrow flat-bottom skiffs stood afloat, chained and padlocked to the pales in the sandy bank.

Putting the tackle on the bottom of their boat, they would unlock the weighty padlock, get seated in the narrow stern and paddle with a single oar to come out of the gully to the expanse of the Seim river, and then proceed to their favorite fishing place, the spot where they kept chumming fish with caked chaff.

Having a hut was of great convenience – you could go swimming to the Bay Beach (directly two hundred meters through the willow thicket), come back and cook your meal on the Primus stove, blazing its blue flame on the table dug into the sand next to your hut.

Many people went to their huts by the local train on Friday evening and returned by the last one on Sunday. While having no hut on the Seim, you could go there only Saturdays and Sundays; in the morning – there, and by 17.24 or 19.07 – back to Konotop.

When Kuba arrived in the summer after his first year at the Odessa Sea School, we, sure thing, decided to rush to the Seim. Only we had to wait for the weekend because I had a job at the Vegetable Base, besides, it was on weekends only that the ORS booth trucks came to the Bay Beach to sell ice-cream.

"Skully says, Grigorenchikha's become your squeeze, right?"

"Tell Skully her name is 'Natalie'."

"Okay, whatever. Then invite her too."

Natalie agreed quite easily and we went all together: Kuba, Skully, I and Natalie.

When we got off the train and were discussing where to—the Bay Beach or the Lake at the pine grove?—Natalie suggested crossing the Seim, there's not as much of a madhouse there as on the Bay Beach.

On the other riverbank, there also were huts whose owners, if arrived on Friday, the next morning were meeting theirs from the Saturday train to take them over. They could ferry us just for asking.

And it happened the way she predicted, probably, because it was her to ask the skiff guy for a ride.

It was an excellent day.

We found a sandy glade in the willow thicket quite close to the river and some hundred meters from the huts. On the soft white sand, we spread the only bed cover we had, because no one except Natalie was clever enough to bring it along.

When she changed into her two-piece swimsuit, she overshadowed the entire Film a Divadlo because along with her lush breasts and plum bottom there also was such a slender waist.

For bathing, we went to the small beach by the huts with the skiffs tied to the bank. Natalie preferred sitting in one of them but Kuba, Skully and I got as furious as in old good days on the Kandeebynno.

Then we ate sandwiches, drank lemonade and switched over to sunbathing.

The bedspread on the sand had room only for two: for Natalie, as it was she who brought it, and for me, because it was I, who she was going out with.

She was lying on her back wearing black sunglasses; I stretched by her side on my stomach, being embarrassed with my trunks sticking out because of the boner.

My sidekicks lay prostrate on the hot sand (also on their stomachs) fitting their imprudent heads onto the corners of the bedspread at our feet...And – sultry silence...

Of course, the next weekend only two of us went to that place.

And again we lay alongside each other on the bedspread amid the silent heat. Mute and motionless hung the long leaves of the pliant young willows around the oval glade, and also silent were we two and the soundless sand, and the still sun crouching over us from the sky.

My eyes were closed because I did not have sunglasses, but the sun, all the same, seeped in through the blood-red fog of my dropped eyelids to get turned into a black headache.

"A headache," heard I my voice, barely audible.

The red mist darkened, and I felt inexpressible delight – she put her palm over my eyelids. Without opening my eyes, I found her wrist and silently pulled her palm sliding over to my lips.

I was so grateful to that tender soft palm that had driven away my pain and brought the inexpressible bliss. There was nothing better in the whole world.

But when she leaned on her elbow and hovered her face over mine and merged her lips with my lips, I found out that there was still something better, only that it had no name.

'Kiss'?

When you melt and dissolve in the font of the meeting lips, and you drown in their immensity and, at the same time, you soar...all that and a whole ocean of completely indescribable feelings...Just one syllable of four letters to express all that vast expanse without limits? Well, well...

Anyway, the syllable was fairly employed by us that summer day.

And when we were already going to the huts for a skiff ride to be in time for the local train, I stopped her amid the willow trees to kiss once again. The parting kiss, we couldn't go on kissing any further.

She answered the kiss with her tired lips and then, looking aside, said with a strange sadness, "Silly one, you'll get cloyed with it."

I did not believe her...

(...a certain German smartie, by the name of Bismarck, once flashed with another of his witticisms, "Only fools learn from their personal experience, I prefer to use the experience of others for the purpose."

"I did not believe her..."

But even from my personal experience, I should have learned that my sister Natasha, being younger than me for two years, surpassed my knowledge and repeatedly proved that.

Yes, I'm anything but Bismarck with my distrust of others.

A pinch of consolation though is supplied by the fact that I am not a fool as defined in his maxim since I never get wiser even from my own experience.

What category then should I attribute myself to?

Okay, let's not get distracted, the question is off the current topic...)

The cucumbers cloyed for good. Just out of habit and because of having nothing better to do, I would take one from the boxes, bite it reluctantly a couple of times, and hurl into the nearest thicket of tall grass in the grounds of the Vegetable Base.

To put it short, I also left the race and went to the ORS Office to quit and get the money I earned in that month and a half. For the first time in life, I held the sum of fifty rubles in my hands.

Was that enough for a scooter? Who should know?

A talk with Mother turned those questions unnecessary:

"Seryozha, school is starting. You need clothes. Shoes are needed both for you and for your brother and sister. You know yourself how we're scratching along."

"Yes! I have clothes! And I told you why I was going to the Base."

"Those pants that I have painted two times? Is that your clothes? At your age, it's a shame to go about like that."

Mustang of my Dreams! Farewell! We won't rush along Peace Avenue, you and me, overtaking all those "Rigas" and "Desnas"...

No ready-made pants were bought for me. Instead, following Mother's instructions, I went to the sewing workshop near the Bus Station.

The seamstress with a long pointed nose measured me and sewed trousers of dark gray broadcloth, synthetic Lavsan.

A wide belt of two buttons. Flares. Fifteen rubles.

Very soon the trousers came in handy.

Vladya brought the news that in Central Park there would be held the Youth Song Contest. The prospective participants had to apply at the City Komsomol Committee. Arthur would also participate.

Arthur was an Armenian who served in the construction battalion next to the RepBase, and Vladya was his fan.

Being a right-handed guitarist, Arthur played it like a god in Vladya's estimation. He did not replace the strings, but just turned a common guitar the opposite way, with the bass strings below and the thin ones up, and played it!

In addition to that miraculous trick, Arthur also sang, no wonder Vladya idolized him and had no doubt that Arthur would win the contest. But we decided to participate, all the same. Together...Vladya and me.

As the Head of the Komsomol organization at School 13 familiar with the location of offices in the City Komsomol Committee, I had to go there to apply for the contest and inquire about the exact time and location it was to be held.

It turned out there remained just two days before the contest taking place at the Central Park dance-floor. We had no time to lose and started rehearsals...

Club Movie Projectionist, Boris Konstantinovich, switched on the light in the auditorium as well as two microphones on the stage. One of them we inserted into Vladya's guitar through the soundhole and from the powerful loudspeakers installed on both sides of the stage, there roared such a cool sound that Boris Konstantinovich could not stand it and left.

In his place, filled with bubbling excitement, Glushcha scuttled in from Professions Street, where bypassing Club he had been stopped in his tracks by the bewitching hubbub of that strident mayhem.

We decided to perform two numbers. First, the bass guitar part to "Chocolate Cream" from the LP disc of Polish rock-group The Chervony Guitary, to be followed then with the song in the film "The Uncatchable Avengers".

At the rehearsals everything went pretty smoothly – the guitar with the mike in its body was turning out a classy rock'n'roll piece, after which the instrument was transformed into a common acoustic one to accompany Vladya's singing the song that though there were so many a path in the field, the truth remained one and only. And I stood by Vladya's side strumming my guitar...

Surprises cropped up at the Contest itself. In the concha of the dance-floor stage, there was only one microphone installed. So much for a starter.

Besides, our duo needed to be named somehow...Another "oops".

The Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee offered a choice: The Sun, or The Troubadours. Of the two evils, was chosen the shorter one.

Inserting a microphone into an acoustic guitar through its soundhole is not an easy undertaking. You have to loosen a couple of thin strings to the utmost and shove the mike into the hole under them and then, naturally, tune the strings up.

Now, with the rock'n'roll started, how could I possibly shout into the Vladya's guitar hole that we were The Sun duo?

For the second number, the same crap, only in the opposite direction, with getting the mike out.

The full logistics of the situation dawned on us, when we were on the stage already, in front of the dense crowd bordered with the light of lamps around the dance-floor.

Vlady panicked, "To hell both them and their contest!" And I began to convince him that there was no way to turn back since we popped up there with our guitars. Or was it, like, we were just walking them around, sort of?

So he started the bass part trying to raise his guitar closer to the microphone in which I announced that we were the vocal-instrumental duo The Sun.

Then I lowered the microphone to his guitar for the crowd to hear clearly that it was rock'n'roll indeed. Quite understandably, that holding the microphone I could no longer support his bass part with my rhythm guitar.

With the second number, everything seemed to be in the groove. We both strummed our guitars, Vladya sang, I was looking above the heads of the crowd the way Raissa had taught us in Children Sector.

Yet, after singing the verse and the chorus, Vladya turned to me with rounded eyes and moaned, "I forgot the lyrics!"

The further, the merrier!

May Chuba forgive me and may forgive me the listeners of the contest who filled that evening the dance-floor and the nearby park ally, but I took a step forward and yelled into the microphone that:

"Over the wide empty steppe

Raven soars in vain,

We'll be living for ages,

We are not raven's prey..."

By the next verse, Vladya snapped back and we finished the song off together, in a duo, just as promised...

Natalie and I did not go to the Seim anymore. We fell out, I did not get it though why she told me not to show up again.

Of course, I suffered painfully, and, of course, I was happy when in half-month my sister, aka Red-Haired, said:

"I saw Grigirenchikha today, and she asks me, 'Did Ogoltsoff go somewhere or what?' I say, 'No', and she says, 'Then why does he not come?' Have you quarreled or what?"

"We did not quarrel... Kiddy! you're the sun!"

The swimming season was already over, and we started to go out to the Plant Park where she showed me a secluded bench behind the untrimmed bushes along the alley. I had passed that alley more than once but never knew about that bench, which stood as if embedded in a grotto of foliage.

There we were coming in the dusk when the rare yellowish lamps switched on in the alleys. The most distant bulb marked the window of the ticket office in the summer cinema projection booth.

The projectionist Grisha Zaychenko, Konstantin Borisovich's partner, turned on the tape recorder and filled the dark park with the sound of cinema loudspeakers:

"The twilight shadowed the light of day.

Or is it the night? I can't say..."

Then the ticket office bulb went out and the séance began.

The bench in its cave of leaves got wrapped in the darkness. At that moment our talk was running out. She threw her head back leaning on my arm stretched out along the upper beam of the bench and the world ceased to exist. Especially so, if she was without a brassier and in the green dress with a meter-long zipper on its front...

But there are limits for anything and when immersed into another dimension, my palm slid down her belly beneath the navel and touched the elastic band of her panties, her head on my shoulder moved discontentedly, and she issued a sound as if she was about to awaken and I unquestioningly moved over to the upper treasures.

Then the séance ended. The bulb over the ticket office flashed on again.

We waited while the handful of film-goers would pass along the alley before we rose from the bench.

Some hollow inebriety...She must go...Dad has told...No later than...

But all too soon the world waddled into the quagmire of fall. It became cold, damp, wasted. The leaves fell down and the wet black branches could not hide the bench any longer. And who would care for sitting in the wet?

By inertia, we still went to the Plant Park, but it also became hostile. Once, in broad daylight, a mujik in his mid-thirties started to bully me. I had no chance against him.

It's good that some guys from our school called him to have a drink behind the dance-floor, and in the meanwhile, we walked away.

Then the first snow fell; it melted, the slush got fixed with the frost; the snow had fallen again and the winter started.

On one of the dating evenings when I unbuttoned her coat to make my way to the beloved breasts, she recoiled and said she could not allow everything to a man who, in fact, was no one to her.

Was it me that she considered no one?! After all that had been between us?!.

Sorting out the toppled relations, like, who's righter and who's wronger of the two, is just a farewell cannonball fired with the stern cannon after the ship sailing away...

We broke up. Fare thee well, sweetest Natalie.

"Ah, tender buds killed by the cruel frost..."

End of February, a year after I told Mother that I agreed to be operated on, I had to lie under the knife. A real man should keep his word, ain't it?

Starting in the evening and all night long, my stomach ached sharply and the ambulance, called in the morning, diagnosed the appendix that had to be removed before too late.

I walked to the vehicle myself but there I had to lie down in the low canvas stretcher placed on the floor. Mother also wanted to go, but along Nezhin Street, there was walking an acquaintance of hers, who was late for her work, and Mother forwent her place to the woman who she always praised as a very good legal consultant deserving all the possible respect.

In the City Hospital, despite the urgency of my diagnosis, they were too lazy to carry me on the stretcher, and I had to walk up to the second floor myself. There I changed into the hospital blue gown and went on foot to the operation room.

They helped me to lie onto the long tall table and fixed to it all my extremities with wide belts. A white sheet was thrown over a tall frame above my face so that I could not see what they were doing down there. A nurse, whom I also could not see, stood behind my head and asked all sorts of distracting questions. The interview was intended to substitute the general anesthesia because they only syringed some local anesthetic in my stomach.

The injection took effect, I felt and recognized that they were cutting me down there but all that was perceived in a somewhat distanced way as if they were doing it to my pants, although at the moment I had nothing but a hospital shirt on me.

Only at the end, a sharp pain pierced me several times and I even groaned through my clenched teeth. The nurse behind my head started to praise my manly endurance, assuring she had never seen a patient of such mettle. So, I had to shut up and let them finish their business without deflecting sounds.

However, to a cot in the long corridor, I was taken on a gurney, after all.

Two days later they brought me a note from Vladya. He wrote that he was down in the reception hall but they did not let him pass through, and our class would come to see me when I was allowed to get up, and I should recover as soon as possible because Chuba had got violently untamed and kept jumping at Vladya like a Mazandaran tiger.

After the surgery, they warned me to hold back coughing and avoid any straining so that the stitches keep the cut. But could you really avoid it if having such friends?

"Chuba Maza.." And crumpling the paper slip in my fist, I pushed my face into the pillow to keep back the rolling up laughter.

"Mandara.. tiger."

Haha! Haha!

"Ouch! It hurts!"

And even after I managed, with a many of restraining stops, to finish reading, there was no way to ward off the jerky lines popping time and again up in my mind.

"Tiger Chuba Mazanda..."

Haha! Haha!

And tears seeped through my tight squinted eyelids.

Vladya! You're worse than a tiger, O, son of a bitch!.

Ten days later I was discharged, and in one more week came to the hospital to have the stitches thread pulled from my stomach, and collect the reference releasing me from PE classes for one month...

By the by, Vladya's handwriting was more cryptic than a team of famous detectives could possibly decipher with all their methods of elementary deduction.

Half of the written essays he handed in were not even read by the Literature teacher who returned them unchecked but fiercely gashed, criss-cross, with red ink.

On some occasions, he even himself failed to make out heads or tails in own graffiti and turned to me for assistance.

I was the expert arbitrator in his cryptographic disputes with Zoya Ilyinichna, "No, there is nothing wrong with the spelling, he always writes "e" that way, and this one stands for "a" by him."

"What "e"? What "a"? They're just ticks!"

"Yes, for sure, but that tick's tail is, like, a bit longer. See?"

I had a rough talk with Father when he said I should have my hair cut, for it already was as long as it's damn hard to say what. And because of my looks, he was summoned to the Political Officer, aka Zampolit, of the RepBase.

The enterprise repaired not just helicopters, but military machines and instead of Directors or Managers they had high-rank officers and Zampolit's post was that of Deputy Commander of the RepBase.

Now, that Commander just ordered Father to stop his son from being a frightful sight in the city.

True, I had a yearning for as long hair like that by The Beatles though theirs were beyond the reach, yet my hair had grown already to touch the top of the shoulder blades when I threw my head back as far as I could to marvel my reflection in the wardrobe's door mirror.

At a recent CJI match, I performed the Dean Reed's hit "Jerico" hopping on the stage with a muted mike and whipping my face with my hair.

One good whipping deserved another. How would the RepBase Zampolit know that I was the son of their worker?

As if few other Beatles fans were hanging out around the city. I had been told on, and no doubt about it.

However, I couldn't have words with Father for long because I was sitting on his neck, and Zampolit threatened to fire him if I kept my hair...

In spring our school was victimized by an infection. The most acute cases were registered in our grade because it definitely became the main locale of glaring epidemic forms and the seat of the infection spiller...

Vladya and I sat there on stools at the last desk. The regular stools whose painted-black seats had oblong holes in the middle for inserting your hand to move it with convenience to another place, when needed.

When we got bored with wood carving and the black seats of our stools got covered with deep white scars crying out, 'THE BEATLES! THE ROLLING STONES!", we looked around – what else could supply us a pastime?

Some unlimited naivety indeed – what could you really do in a graduating class? Actually, nothing...

Still and all, we gave the boredom a slip – we started writing poetry.

It was a prolific poetic eruption that turned out in various forms and genres. At the break, we showed our creations to our classmates. We laughed and they were laughing too, unaware that the virus of poeticizing had already started the inexorable destruction of their immune system.

Many of them began trying their hand at the production of rhymed lines. Even Chuba turned out some trifle of an epigram. But the indisputable crest-riders of that wave were sitting, sure enough, at the last desk.

Fortunately, the epidemic had died down without fatalities.

(...if those scattered pieces of ruled paper torn off various notebooks were put together, it could become a collection of aspirant poets. And, stashed away in bookstores stacks, it would accumulate the dust mixed with its drowsy dreams of eager readers' hands and rising to the fame...

It is highly improbable that any of my classmates would recollect that overweening epidemic. No one would recognize even their own lines, you bet. But, after all, who cares? The final goal is nothing. The main buzz is in doing.

Although, I'm still not ashamed of the lengthy elegy crafted at a lesson in Organic Chemistry:

"The day will come for me to join the robbers

To earn my honest daily bread

I'll sleep all day and chew on dried grasshoppers

At night, stray walkers will I intercept..."

Then, of course, I got killed because elegy is a sad genre and, lying in the roadside tall grass:

" _I won't grasp it with my head by nearing Death already chilled_

If so urgent was indeed for you to have me killed?

Of wood was made my pistol, it wouldn't harm a lamb,

With gentle "Hello!" I fleeced the clients

Yet left them kopecks for a tram,

"Take 't easy, folks! So's my job."

Then soft "Adieu!" and – parting bob..."

A lot of water has flowed in the river of Varanda since then and, quoting the classic poet from the banks of the Neva river, handled Monkey:

" Some aren't there anymore, and I am far away..."

Okay. That's enough for flashing up my speckles of erudition...

It's time to confess that I wasn't a stranger to swindling too.

There are things you'd prefer not to remember before starting to recount them...

However, showing oneself off entirely good and irreproachable is foolish and dishonest. It's not a righteous thing, I mean.

Anyway, I am not a good guy, I'm way too unsteady for that...)

So, as it was said already, that year we lost the CJI final to the prestigious School 11.

In the Contest of Greetings, we dragged out on stage a dummy ship of cardboard, exactly the same as two months before us, they dragged out at the Central Television CJI. And they also joked our jokes there, two months before. Both the ship and jokes were still fresh in the memory of the jury members and we were accused of blatant plagiarism in the end.

The team of School 11 came out in top hats made of blackened Whatman paper and finishing their Greeting presented the hats to our team. I did not get my share, because their Captain left his one on the jury desk to help them come to the right decision.

After the defeat, going home without shields but with top hats, our team members were doffing the paper head-gears at the Settlement crossroads for "goodbye" to each other and I felt hurt that only I didn't have the thing.

By reaching the streetcar stop near our school, there remained just two of all the team – Valya Pisanko and me.

And then I insidiously asked Valya for her top hat, like, willing to try it on. She credulously gave it and, clapping the paper hat onto my head, I ran away along Nezhin Street.

I knew she wouldn't follow, she lived in Podlipnoye and had to go in the opposite direction. Indeed, she didn't chase and only screamed behind, "Sehguey! Give it back! It's not fair!" I knew it was not fair, but I did not return and did not give it back. Why should I?

The next morning in the lean-to which served as my bedroom already, I was nauseated by just looking at that piece of Whatman paper blackened with gouache; some disgusting loot.

(...so, I'm composed of different parts and meanness has its share in the composition...)

And now, the ten years were over. But it was not for me to decide whether that term was long or short, because ten years later I became a different I to that one who ten years before was passed to the educational system which started to format me into a usable member of society.

It's only fair to admit that the didactic cultivators, in general, achieved the set goal. I grew up from a snotty Octoberist to the Head of School Komsomol Committee. I realized that spitting into the sky, with universal gravitation in place, is meaningless.

Even though I did not have enough of Komsomol ardor to sing at All-School Komsomol Meetings "The Internationale" together with the backup gramophone record by the Bolshoi Academic Choir, I still had no doubt that the USSR was the bulwark of peace throughout the world. (When in doubt, it's enough to recollect those small-sized red flags with the yellow impression of a dove which Soviet people used to wave at celebration demonstrations.)

Generally, we were the best in everything, and the only sphere in which we lagged was music. In any song by The Beatles, there were more interesting chord sequences than in the entire Soviet song production. The reason for such a dishonorable state of affairs was that all songs by us started from A-minor.

If only The Beatles would not meddle with the politics, by what right did John Lennon announced that the Soviet Union was a fascist regime? It was our country who lost twenty million people killed in the war against fascism, so why couldn't The Beatles mind just music?

However, Furtseva, Soviet Minister of Culture, was really a nasty bitch not letting them have a tour of the Union. She personally did not miss enjoying their performance behind the closed doors before announcing, "Sorry, guys, but our listener will not understand your music."

Yeah, some real bitch of a Minister, because they were getting ready and had already written their hit "Back to the USSR".

As for the school curriculum, I did not comprehend chemistry at all, as well as algebra with trigonometry, and several other subjects for which I did not have time enough. Yet, I was trained to distinguish landlord Famusov from its creator, writer Griboyedov.

Wasn't that a sufficient base of knowledge for entering the broad road to a bright life?

Anyway, it was too late to supplement. The time was up. The final exams were close at hand and then Graduation Party traditionally followed by the night of collective roaming of graduates who were not classmates anymore but still had to meet the dawn of their new life together.

However, all of that was just a background overshadowed by a more important matter. We were preparing for the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee to find out the best vocal-instrumental ensemble, aka VIA.

Wanna a VIA? You'll get it!

All the previous winter, long before and even never suspecting they would announce the competition of VIAs, we were busy making electric guitars as presented by the instructions and blueprints in _The Radio_ and The Young Technician magazines.

At first, we experimented with the mounting of piezo elements on a common acoustic guitar. As a result, the sound could be amplified as with a mike shoved in through the soundhole, yet it sounded nothing like an electric guitar. Besides, the guitars for seven rubles and fifty kopecks did not look like those on black and white pictures of different rock-groups with their hair reaching below the shoulders.

Wanna have a guitar with stylish horns? Cut its body out of three-centimeter-thick plywood. Be ready for a long hassle with the neck. The guitars which we manufactured after the drawings in the magazines for advanced technicians could not keep to the key.

What is "keeping to the key"? Well, if you pluck a string at the twelfth fret and then pluck the same string released, you get the same note, only over one octave. And with the necks we produced, there sounded different notes, the guitars did not keep to key; that's what it meant.

The upshot was we had to fall back on using the necks of common guitars which kept to key alright. Yet, the headstock of a common guitar with its slots for strings looked ridiculous on an electric guitar, like a saddle atop a cow.

To replace the headstock in the neck, you have to saw it out and substitute with a homemade one having no slots and with all six or four tuning pegs in one row.

Father soldered the electrical rigging of guitars following the schemes printed in the magazines. Besides, he procured shielded cable enclosed by braided metal strands for the connection of a guitar and amplifier. Without such a cable, electric guitars send forward a terrible noise miles away from any music.

All the testing was carried out in our khutta, with the product in progress connected to the ancient radio receiver because Father said if it worked that way then with a normal amplifier there would be no problem at all.

The pickups became a major headache.

A pickup is a tiny box installed under the strings with an individual coil for each of them. One coil consisted of six hundred spirals of hair-breadth copper wire wound by hand, now it remains only to multiply them by the number of strings to equip the guitar with a pickup...

Eventually, everything got assembled. The radio receiver, almost bursting with steely thundering cords and popular guitar breaks, drowns Mother's yells of protestation from the kitchen. Wow!

We're delighted. The bomb! Father looks glad too...

Now you can disassemble everything, level the plywood of guitar body with sandpaper, putty it and tenaciously polish again, this time with finer sandpaper before spraying the body with paint (I bet you'll choose red), then re-assemble your shiny new electric guitar. Enjoy!.

Thus we got all the right, as well as equipment, to apply for participation in the contest organized by the efforts of the City Komsomol Committee.

All in all, there were two competitors vying for recognition as the best:

1) VIA "The Kristall" by the House of Culture named after Lunacharsky (aka Loony);

2) VIA "The Orpheuses" by the Club of the Konotop Engine and Car Repairing Plant (aka the KaPeVeRrZe Club).

The Loony guys were in the business for years. They had an electric organ played by Sasha Basha, who had graduated from the Music School in the piano class. He was not only the leader of The Kristall but also the Captain of the CJI team from the prestigious School 11.

Besides participation in the concerts at Loony, they were also _doing trash_ , that is playing music at weddings, birthdays and all sorts of parties with their one organ, two guitars, and the drum set.

On the other side, there were four of us too, who didn't know a damn thing about the music theory, except for Chuba who had attended the Music School for four years at the class of button-accordion, but we were backed by Club, the unalienable part of the Settlement.

While our khutta served the base for technical empowering of The Orpheuses, Club provided means for our musical education. (Once again bypassing Chuba with his button-accordion which let him easily master the bass guitar parts, because they, generally, coincide with those played by the musician with his left hand in the bass section of the accordion.)

That's why, the concert of Classical Guitar in Club, advertised with a modest poster about the classical guitar performer Zverev from the Kiev Philharmonic, was attended by only two Orpheuses – Vladya and me because Skully did not feel like attending as long as he was the drummer at out VIA, not a guitar-player...

The lobby of Club was unusually crowded, and so was the landing at the auditorium entrance; young guys for the most part. Who would have thought that the Settlement youth were so much fond of the guitar classics!

So, we stood up there in the crowd when from below, along the wide steps of the stair and from the dudes around us, there rose the rustle of the low-voiced announcement to each other, like a gust of wind rushing in front of the thunderstorm: "Wafflisters! Wafflisters are coming!"

From the first floor, two girls were ascending the wide stairs. When they reached the stairhead, there reigned a tense silence with all the glances riveted to them. I was bewildered with the purity of milk-white skin on their faces. Encapsulated with the wall of goggling silence, they turned to the right – towards the mirrored gym of the Ballet Studio.

That evening the seminarists from GPTU-4 had a party there...

And we, Vladya and I, separated from the crowd on the landing and turned to the left, to join a handful of those who attended the concert of the Guitarist Laureate in a classic black suit and thick black-rimmed glasses.

Two or three of front rows were more than enough for the listeners to get seated giving a wide berth to each other.

He sat above us in a chair on the edge of the scarcely illuminated stage, announced the music pieces and then played them on his acoustic guitar. But that was more than what we considered guitar playing! Something unimaginable! Unattainable...

After the concert, Vladya and I knocked on the door of the room on the first floor, where he was putting his classic black suit into the black hard case of his guitar.

We introduced ourselves as willing to learn the guitar playing. What to do? How to begin?

And he gave us a free consultation. He took out his instrument from under the suit in his case and showed some tricky picks. Then he folded everything back and went to the Station to go elsewhere through the dark of night.

Yet before leaving the room, he advised us to get some Polish music magazines where they were printing a lot of music with tablature above the lyrics. However, at the newsstands of Konotop, they never heard of such magazines...

After applying for the VIA contest, we came to the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich. We made it clear that for holding aloft the honor of Club while representing it at the City Contest we asked but for a trifle – just that couple of black speakers from the portable movie projector, together with their amplifier, because we did not even have a place for rehearsals, nor a single item of drum set.

Flaring his redly hot face under the crisp coils of natural merchant curls, Pavel Mitrofanovich proclaimed that for the guys from the Settlement, Club would do all and everything and then everything and all over again.

That is the meaning of scheduling a talk at the right time.

Director ordered Club House Manager, Stepan, to pass to us the room of the Variety Ensemble until after the contest.

The Ensemble musicians supervised by their Head, Aksyonov, moved their instruments from there, including the double bass and saxophone, to the unknown destination. For an indefinite interval, Aksyonov stopped appearing in Club at all.

In the room, there remained only a giant desk, a piano and "the kitchen" – a drum set made up of a kicker, a snare, a hat, and two tom-toms.

Skully was practicing the beat for hours with all his hands and feet over the kitchen.

The technique of beat-drumming was shown to him by Anatoly Melai, a Settlement dude recently demobilized from the army who, before the service, played the horn at the Variety Ensemble.

Besides, he showed us the chords to " TheYellow River" by the rock-group Christie. That song topped most of the European music charts then. We knew about the fact from the station "The Radio-Sweden" who were broadcasting in Russian one hour a week, on Sundays, and the ours did not drown it with the usual radio noise because they talked exclusively about rock music omitting any anti-Soviet propaganda.

Anatoly even knew the Russian adaptation of the lyrics in "The Yellow River":

"We roamed at the Yellow River

The flowers blossomed all 'round us

By the river of my dream –

Alloverida!"

And then followed the chorus which remained unrendered into Russian:

"Alloverida! Alloverida!

Yuza mom-ma! Yuza mom-ma!"

We started to rehearse it as the number for the contest. At some point, it dawned on me that if the song was called "The Yellow River" then the chorus also should sound "Yellow River!" and nothing like some fuzzy "Alloverida". So, it was not in vain that Alla Iosifovna was driving home to me that "London is the capital of Great Britain".

Anatoly wrinkled his nose peevishly but had no trumps to ward off my stock of knowledge.

To reward my linguistic feat, Chuba allowed me to sing a backup in the chorus:

"Yellow River! Yellow River!

is in my mind and in my eyes."

That immensely inspired me, because in our VIA I had the very necessary but so inconspicuous role of the rhythm guitarist.

For the second number, we chose "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones. We knew the chords to the song and even its true title, but we did not know the lyrics and just were using dummy "doo-wop" like some seasoned scat singers:

"Doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop

Doo-wop doo-wop pá-ba-baá

But, knowing the name, you could guess what the song was about and if you know the meter of the lines then – full ahead!

"Black clouds towered in the sky over the city

The drops of falling rain are black as coal tar

No stars reflections in black puddles: nor big, nor bitty

They're stolen by black fog and hidden way too far..."

(.. in the flicks _The Devil's Advocate_ with Al Pacino starring as the Prince of Dark this song sounds at the closing credits; the original, of course.

But at that time it was too early for Hollywood to shoot that movie.

And, by the by, with the mentioned production of "The Yellow River" in Russian our garage VIA had outstripped The Jolly Guys of Alexander Booynov who performed the song a couple of years later, singing about Carlson on the roof:

"Here we hear,

Here we hear,

The motor buzz,

The cheerful buzz.

High in the air

Straight from the roof

Our dear friend

Is flying to us..."

Thus a love song was mutated into the RepBase anthem...)

Before the VIA competition, we rehearsed for days on end leaving Club only for having a midday meal at the pavilion "Meeting" by the Station square where we ate dumplings flushing them down with gulps of beer from a bottle of Zhigulyovsky shared between the four of us and considered ourselves cool dudes who could play rock.

Precisely one day before the contest, our rivals—VIA "The Kristall" from Loony—dealt a preemptive strike to us. They came to our school to play the trash at the graduation party of our class.

Before that, we offered the school management our free of charge music service for the pram dance, yet the proposal was turned down and they hired The Kristall instead.

In our native school, we were not considered musicians! No prophet in his native land, indeed...

Of course, The Kristall had a well-established reputation. Sasha Basha, educated at the piano class of Music School, played his organ very competently – both "seven-forty", and waltz, and rock'n'roll, but it, still, hurt.

The revenge took place at the contest because we had hidden reserves.

Firstly, Pavel Mitrofanovich allowed us to grab for the occasion the 50-watt amplifier. And secondly, we carried the day even before making any music, our looks when appearing on the stage showed at once who were predestined winners.

Okay, let's say you've got an electric organ and music education plus a team of musicians trained at "playing trash", but who would care a damn about all that crap the moment when:

"...And now in this cozy Central Park Summer Cinema, we invite on the stage the vocal-instrumental ensemble The Orpheuses!!."

At which moment on stage, there came four dudes with three (!) horned (!!) guitars!!!

And, on top of everything else, each of them, all the four were...

...IN WHITE PANTS!!!..

Oh, my! There is no way to explain the meaning of white pants in Konotop of 1971 because of all that had been taking place years before the rise of denim civilization.

Where did the white pants come from?

In Department Store opposite Main Post, they were selling the so-called "canvas for household needs", one ruble twenty kopecks a meter. After the very first wash, the fabric turned into gray saggy burlap, however, we came to the concert when our while pants were still in the pristine unwashed state.

Mother made them—all the four—with her sewing machine, two days before the performance.

The then pants fashion of the day rejected the wide waist belt in favor of no belt at all, so the pants were starting from the middle of the hips. One meter and ten centimeters of "canvas" were more than enough for a pair of trousers.

The only bad news was that I screwed up my part in the "Yellow River" vocals.

During the rehearsals, Chuba kept frowning at my third in the chorus backup, and in the knock-up chant before going on to the stage of the Central Park Summer Cinema he grabbed his head in desperation. So at the moment when we had to yell together into a single microphone, "Yellow River! Yellow River!" I just opened my mouth but did not produce any sound at all.

It was the same trick as singing "The Internationale" at the All-School Komsomol meetings or in the make-believe performing of "Jericho" at the CJI.

Chuba made round eyes on the other side of the mike because I had left him without the third, but that did not help.

The Orpheuses won a convincing victory but on my vocal career, there was put the final cross.

Still and yet, we did it!.

You strain yourself in exhausting efforts to reach some goal and after achieving it triumphantly all there remains to do is just to live on...Probably, that's the hardest part.

"Where to sail?" was poetically asking Pushkin, and Chernishevsky paraphrased the question into prose, "What to do?"

"That is all,

Say "bye!" to dreams

Live your life the way it seems

Right to you.

Find your answers,

Find your ways,

Find your tread to happiness.

Do it, do!"

(music by V. Sakoon, lyrics by S. Ogoltsoff)

I ventured to look for happiness at the Kiev State University named after T. Shevchenko, taking my school certificate to the Department of English Language there. Unlimited arrogance it was, considering the extent of my knowledge which encompassed a couple of grammar tables memorized from the English textbook for the 8th grade.

However, audacity calls for reward and all the ride from Konotop to Kiev (four hours by a local train) I spent on a seat next to Irina Kondratenko, the most good-looking girl among my ex-classmates. The gorgeous black eyes and long black hair made her so beautiful that I would never dare approach the girl – what's the use to be unreasonable? And suddenly—lo!—four hours of riding side by side filled with an eager conversation.

Irina also was going to Kiev to become a student somewhere while living at some relatives of hers and, being already acquainted with the city, she advised me by which streetcar to go from the station square to the University.

The ceilings at the University were unusually high to drive it home to the folks it was the right place for getting higher education.

At the dean's office, I swapped my certificate of secondary education and the reference about my excellent state of health for the address of a student hostel in about one hour's ride by a trolleybus.

The hostel manager, or maybe she was just the dormitory attendant in charge of forking out the bed linen in exchange for my passport turned out an unmistakable racist and didn't care about hiding her ugly inclinations. I deducted it when two young Vietnamese entered her office (or a stockroom), immediately following me and asked her for an oilcloth to cover the table in their room. And she retorted sharply, "No oidcloth for you! You're an oidcloth yourself! Get out of here!"

They timidly left, sad and puny against the background of that robust Ukranian racist. I wondered silently if she was able to pronounce "oilcloth" in Vietnamese.

However, jumping to conclusions when unaware of all the concurrent circumstances might result in faulty evaluation. The whole situation could very easily have nothing to do with racism. There was not the 100 percent guarantee that them those bitchy Vietnamese were not asking for the fifth oilcloth on the same day, or else that it wasn't the fifth pair of Vietnamese demanding an oilcloth from the overworked Ukrainian woman tired with their looking so much alike...

One of my roommates also was an applicant for the English Department, only he had already served in the army. The next day, we went to the University together to attend a pre-examination lecture where he chattered with the lecturer so fluently that I felt myself like at that regional Olympiad for Physics, where all of them understood each other and only I was cutting an odd dolt around.

After the lecture, I went to the dean's office and took back my matriculation papers. I do not remember what lie I told them because it was not easy to confess, that I got scared and surrendered without even trying.

On the way to the hostel to collect my passport, there poured such a rain that the trolleybus at times had to swim from one stop to another. There always come the rains to wash away the slightest traces...The four-hour trip by the local train to Konotop was spent in desolate silence...No beautiful chat-companions for scurvy cowards...

In Konotop, any complicated questions resolved on the fly.

Whereto? Well, there where all the others were. Follow and join the crowd.

Skully was already a third-year student at the Railway Transportation College, above the Under-Overpass tunnel. Vladya and Chuba had submitted their papers for admittance to the same institution. So the question "whereto?" was solved before me, I could only matriculate to the Konotop Railway Transportation College.

Even Anatoly Melai was there embracing some indefinite job of a laboratory assistant, but with the academic year not started yet he was just walking the corridors in blue overalls engaged in wiring, when not busy singing.

As it turned out, Anatoly was an avid fan of The Pesnyary VIA who had recently performed "The Dark Night" in the Kremlin Hall. Imagine that? All the top guys of the Central Committee Political Bureau in the first row – Brezhnev, Suslov...er...who else?...Podgorny...And the dudes spread it out in full with the unleashed guitar reverberation!... Plus their vocals, of course! All of their numbers in no less than four-voice intervals:

"The dark night's between

Me and you, my beloved one..."

And Anatoly, throwing up his face in glistening marks from the gone acne, filled the empty corridor with echoes of one or another from those four parties.

And why not sing? It's summer and no classes around, even the admittance exams hadn't started yet and, on top of all else, he's in his overalls.

"When I go to date you

My bast-shoes keep creaking!."

He promised to put in a word for The Orpheuses applicants, however, only one-third of us was admitted – Chuba and Vladya fell through and went to work at the KaPeVeRrZe Plant...

Mid-August we made a proposal to the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, which he could not refuse – we would play dances in the Plant Park. For free.

Each of the three parks in the city of Konotop—the Central, the Loony, and the Plant Park—was furnished with a dance-floor.

Those dance-floors were complete replicas of each other: the spheric concha over the band stage abutted the wide circle of concrete bounded with the two-meter high grating of iron pipes which enclosure had the narrow entrance gate (diametrically opposite the stage) made of the same pipes. Even the paint coat of the gratings was the same gray silver. The only difference was that the paint on the pipes in the Central Park had not peeled off so dismally.

Mother remembered that as a young girl, she went to the Plant Park dance-floor because in summer there played a brass band.

Later, everything ground to halt, and in the warm season, the young Konotopers began to walk (instead of waltzing) in circles along the alleys of Peace Square shuffling over the layers of spat out black seeds husk. Circle after circle...

But then there came that fateful August Sunday to wake the Plant Park's dance-floor up from the benumbed dormancy.

With a clang, collapsed the fetters of the rusty heavy iron padlock, and on we hauled across the concrete circle the rubber-wheeled handcart towards the concha-shaded stage.

Normally, that handcart was used by the projectionists for transportation of the cylindrical tin boxes with film reels from Club to the open-air cinema in the Plant Park. However, on that historic Sunday, it was piled up with the cuboid boxes of loudspeakers and amplifiers, like, angular haystack secured with upholding hands.

We started to install and assemble the equipment, switching on, plugging in, checking the guitars with a bang of a chord or two, picking popular break over the strings.

A raw echo bounced back from the squalid two-story apartment block right outside the low park fence. Along with the echo, there came racing a brood of local small kids and, not daring enter the open gate bunched up in the alley beyond the palisade of iron pipes.

Now Skully, pompous and self-important, put his drum-set "kitchen" up, thumped the kick drum with the pedal beater, chinked the hat, clanged the crash.

The ultimate check of the microphone, "One... One-two... One..."

With the dry clicking of sticks against each other, Skully sat the tempo.

One, two. One-two-three-four!

Off we go!!

That's how the change of epochs was coming to pass in a singled-out Konotop park...

Seeing the narrow gate unguarded, the kids cautiously penetrated the dance-floor circle, though keeping close to the grating except for a couple of neglected toddlers frisking happily hither-thither.

Three girls walked in to sit in a short row on a backless bench by the fence...A young pair entered slowly being late, as it seemed, to occupy the special bench in the grotto of bushes...Another hesitant couple...Welcome, there are lots of benches inside...

There was no dancing on the groundbreaking evening; we, like, played to please ourselves. Then we shipped the equipment and instruments to the cinema ticket office on the first floor in the projectionist's booth.

Everything repeated itself on Wednesday. Yes! On Wednesday!

We played dances three times a week: Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday.

On Saturday, a half-hour before the start of dancing, some unusual stir in the air was felt in the Plant Park alleys suddenly filled with people sauntering along, to and fro. We decided to wait no longer and climbed on the stage when Vitya Batrak, handled Slave, entered the wide circle of the dance-floor followed by his retinue of Peace Square guys.

The abundant curls of chestnut hair poured over the shoulders of his long-sleeved silk shirt the color of the pirate flag. The collar, following the suit of the unbuttoned hanging cuffs, was open down to the solar plexus.

Reaching the center of the dance-floor, Slave kicked up a picturesque dispute with his followers about his wristwatch. The wide strap of artificial leather got unfastened, the watch tossed high up in the air and landed clattering over the concrete in the dance-floor. The dudes flocked around to check if it was smashed or still ticking.

Meanwhile, a stream of young people of both sexes began to flow in bypassing the pack of clockwork experts.

That's it! The city believed that in the Plant Park they were playing dances indeed!

On Sunday everyone danced. In circles, of course.

A circle of ten to fifteen dancers sprang up around two or three satchels laid on the concrete floor, and each of the circles danced in the endemic style of their own.

The band stage served a good viewing point.

In the circle on the left, they were busily twisting while in the one closer to the concha, the dancers were portraying speed skating contest by gradually shuffling their feet over the cemented floor with their hands clasped on their backs. And over there, near the gate, the guys were still happy with the ol' good "seb'n-forty".

At times, from one or another dancing circle there sounded a probing, on-the-sly scream...

The following Saturday auntie Shura, the Controller in her eternal helmet-kerchief, popped up at the entrance to the dance-floor sending all the people who approached to buy tickets, fifty kopecks apiece.

Vladya and I came up to auntie Shura, we were rightfully outraged. What the heck! The dances for free!

Auntie Shura remained indifferently calm because of having the Director's order.

Vladya, glowing in the twilight with his white short-sleeved turtleneck, yelled to the nearing folks not to listen to her and come in because the dances were for free!

They did not listen to him and sheepishly plodded on towards the cinema ticket office.

Be like everyone else...

If for a whole decade you keep folks without even a brass band around, they would readily put down 50 kopecks for a slip of blank movie-ticket with the printed price "35 kop."

After the dances when we brought the equipment back to the narrow ticket office, the cashier told us about selling five hundred tickets that evening.

The next day Pavel Mitrofanovich ordered to remove all the benches from the dance-floor to cram more people within the enclosure. There was more of a merchant in him than I had figured it out.

What did we play?

Basically, instrumental pieces like in that LP disc by The Singing Guitars plus the songs we had prepared for the contest, however, without my third already.

At times, at the insistent request of the public, Quak would come up to the microphone to break all hell loose with "Shyzgara". He looked great with that long blonde hair of his and small mustache of albino color. It's only that he made people wheedle him for so long, but then:

"Shyzgara!"

And the burst of eager response – the wild wail from several hundred throats:

"Vaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!"

(...you should have heard this song. Yes, you had, and more than once for sure, only without the lyrics.

The TV folks like to use it as background soundtrack when advertising all kinds of female lingerie and stuff.

And at that time a rock-group from Holland, The Shocking Blue, toured the whole world with practically just that one song of theirs – "Venus" that had made them "the group of the year", surprising all the music critics as well as themselves.

Of course, their singer performing the hit sang:

" She's a goddess!"

But Quak's "oidclothy" pronunciation did not prevent anybody from being carried away and screech at the top of their lungs:

"Vaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!"

I mean to say that true sublime work of art finds its way to the masses and ignites their hearty response in spite of any accent.

Shyzgara!!!..)

And the masses grew more and more thick.

When in the middle of the dances we announced a short break, it took a while to push through the crowd and get out to a side alley towards the long booth of whitewashed planks, marked with "M" and "F" at its ends.

There was no time to waste because of back on the stage Chuba was already starting to pick random breaks at his bass guitar, sending jitter over the front of the huge loudspeaker borrowed from the summer cinema. Skully's fresh girlfriends with the girlfriends of theirs used the nook behind that loudspeaker for stacking their shoulder bags.

Yes, it was Skully who had the most frantic success among the girls in the Orpheuses bohemian milieu.

What do girls find in all those drummers, eh?

I, for example, had just one time seen home a certain blonde Irina. It's hard to say who of us cooled down quicker – she, having to wait after the dances while The Orpheuses were hauling all the equipment to the summer cinema ticket office, or I because of the alarming fact that she lived in the dangerous neighborhood of Zagrebelya.

Later on, she was picked up by Anatoly Melai who was smart enough to escort her by a taxi. Getting out of a car pulled up to her gate, Anatoly would ask the driver, "Chief, when the meter ticks up to one ruble, gimme a honk, bro, will you?"

Because Zagrebelya was a rough neighborhood for those in love...

In another development, I was approached by Kolya Pevriy.

When at school, he kept bullyragging me so that I even started to figure out for how long I still had to suffer before he'd leave after the eighth grade and enter Seminary.

And now he came up with full respect and asked to go out from the dance-floor to his classmate Valya, who also was a year older than me.
She was going somewhere to be operated from an inborn heart defect and wanted to talk to me.

I went out at the half-time break, stopped by her side in the dark alley. We both were silent, she kept sighing, and then the break was over. Some romantic date...

(..how did we play?

That question I can answer with just one word:

LOUD!!!

Oh, poor tenants of the two-story apartment block right over the Plant Park fence!.

(At the beginning of the third millennium, the King of Spain asked Jews to forgive that five hundred years ago the great-grandpas of their great-grandpas of their great-grandpas were deported from the land of Spain. Better late than never...)

Forgive us, O, sufferer-tenants, for making you deaf three times a week!

Never again we'll be so barbarous!.)

However, the life of Club didn't get fixed to the dance-floor alone. Head of Variety Ensemble, fair-haired saxophonist Aksyonov, popped up again and integrated us into his band to accompany their vocalist Zhanna Parasyouk at concerts performed by the Plant Amateur Activities.

One of the rehearsals was held on the stage in the Park summer cinema with the white screen pulled aside because of the open-air cinema season was at its end, we worked before the empty benches in the fence-bounded auditorium performing another song in inescapable A-minor:

"Icy ceiling, creaky door –

In the Winter-Mommy's hut..."

Dusk was setting in the auditorium when from the tunnel entrance through under the projectionists' booth, there walked in a couple of girls escorted by a guy, too young though to be a boyfriend.

I thought they'd leave at once on seeing the fully empty benches all around, but, no, they went on and got seated somewhere in the fifth row. Well, the audience of three was also an audience.

One of the girls had long dark hair, but she was fat.

The other was what you'd need for a girlfriend in her mini-skirt and checkered waistcoat. Her hair, even though short, was wavy and yellow, so you could see at once it was dyed.

And then, quite so composedly, without a slightest attempt to conceal it, she took a cigarette pack from out her waistcoat and lit one up. Skully's girlfriends, before smoking, looked back and around trying to keep their cigarettes out of view.

Anyway, they were sitting down there with us starting another take, when the girl with the cigarette turned to her fat girlfriend and spoke up. Of course, I couldn't hear that it was me she pointed out to her chum, "This one will be mine. Wanna bet?"

With the rehearsal over, the youngster came up to me on the stage, "That girl over there wanna have a word with you."

In a minute I was by their side in the fifth row. Olga, Sveta – oh, how mighty nice!

And in a half-hour, I was escorting both girls home. Not far at all, some two hundred meters from the Plant Park, the third back-alley in Budyonny Street when going towards Swamp.

In fact, I wasn't the only escort because Skully and Quak also plodded along, which was not quite fitting the picture – she got only one girlfriend about her and those two were superfluous in number. Who's escorting whom?

After the turn into the back-alley, Sveta giggled parting "bye!" and slipped into her khutta's yard. Olga and I proceeded to the wicket of the next one, where she said she lived.

But Skully and Quak stuck fast and marched along, inserting their silly cues in our conversation. And only when I and Olga started kissing, they realized there was no making-hay for them at all.

So, they crossed to the opposite fence in the alley, urinated on it under the lamppost (some bohemian milieu, dammit!) and left with a flea in their ear. As if they couldn't keep in check their nature call until back on Budyonny Street.

How come Quak was at the rehearsal? Very simple, the vocalist Zhanna Parasyouk was his one and only sister...

The Amateur Activity concerts were staged not in Club only. Sometimes, they were taken to different villages of the Konotop District traveling there by a small bus of PAZ make. It was for one of such concerts that we rehearsed that icy ceiling with the creaking door in A-minor.

Since the PAZ bus was not of rubber, you couldn't carry amplifying equipment with you, neither was there any room for the young snowflakes in their tutus bread by the Ballet Studio. Just one Ukrainian Hopack and one Moldovan Jock danced to the button-accordion of Aidda were good to go with such a touring concert.

Then she handed the instrument over to Chuba to play his part in the Variety Ensemble band.

My role in the Ensemble was that of a rhythm guitarist with a common acoustic guitar. Vladya remained outside Variety Ensemble because Aksyonov, with his saxophone, felt no need for assimilating a solo-guitar. As for Skully, he was irreplaceable, only his "kitchen" got minimized to the skeleton composition of the snare-and-hat to pat his sticks upon.

The universally recognized cream of the concert program was, certainly, Murashkovsky singing songs and telling "humoreskas".

Those rhymed stories about "me and my koom", were his specialty. About how "I", together with the koom, aka a sister-in-law's husband, smashed the football goal clean away with koom's head or, riding a motorcycle, collided with a kolkhoz bull who threw us over an oak-tree just for free...

Simple rhyme, solid wit. The audience liked it – they laughed and clapped.

And then on the stage again appeared Zhanna the Singer and we – her band. Skully sat the tempo, we started and I suddenly felt that the guitar strings under my fingers were loosened to the utmost. Aksyonov had tempered with them, no doubt, during a humoreska or maybe Hopack to have a hearty laugh. Some stupid thick-cheeked joker.

Well, so Chuba and Skully were making up for chords and rhythm and I, like scenery alive, was striking chords careful no to let them sound – as if I was playing an odd klepka...

At the end of the concert, Muraskovsky traditionally burst out his main "bomb" – the humoreska about Acceptee and his Mother-in-Law.

(...in those days the word "mother-in-law", aka "teshcha", was the most magical incantation among stand-up comedians.

It was enough for a man on the stage to pronounce "teshcha!" and the audience laughed and laughed.

Nowadays the population grew much more sophisticated, spoiled with the cultivated humor; so that an actor in the comic genre must inhale deeply and screech at the top of their lungs into the microphone – "shit!!!" for the audience to get it that it's time to laugh...

Okay, we'd better get back to the concert at a village club in the early seventies of the XX-th century...)

With eager screams, Murashkovsky rushed from the back door through the entire small hall making for the stage. The case of button-accordion in his hands served a make-believe suitcase with personal belongings.

On climbing the stage, he started the first-person humoreska on bitter miseries in the life of Acceptee.

His wife together with her Mom, his teshcha, had turned him in for the militia to prevent his going on a binge. In the fifteen days spent in the custody, he worked out a careful plan for revenge and, returning from behind the bars to the place of residence, he casually broke the news about the barrel with pickled cucumbers in the earth cellar-pit going to pieces...

(The audience enlivened and started to giggle.)

The worried wife and teshcha raced down the ladder into the earth-cellar and Acceptee from above the ladder top recited the biblical principle of "eye for an eye" and announced his verdict for their wrong-doings—fifteen days of incarceration—and slammed the cellar-pit lid.

(The hall drowned in the jubilant glee.)

Every other day Acceptee dropped to the captives packages on a string, like humanitarian relief with certain food items, as a dietary addition to the vegetables stored down there.

(Decibels of the thundering guffaw reached the neighboring villages. The spectators with a particularly vivid imagination could not laugh anymore – they simply jerked their heads with their mouths convulsively open, their eyes squinted and dripping tears which they had nothing to wipe with, because their hands, balled into fists, were knocking against the back of the seat in the row in front of them.)

Four days later, the militia, called by some of the neighbor-villagers, came to set the captives free, and Acceptee got another stretch of fifteen days in confinement.

("Boo-ha-ha" in the audience began to look like a collective fit.)

Murashkovsky threw at them the final lines, like a bullfighter dealing the final stab to the animal.

"Okay, I'm leaving.

You'll never find another one like me.

I won't even burn your khutta down, which I could do!"

Normally, to these words, the audience reacted with a farewell burst of laughter capable of blowing the doors and windows out together with their frames.

Murashkovsky prepared for a parting bow to the general ovation and —

Dead silence. Not a sound.

All froze like exhibits at the Madam Tussauds Theater of Wax Figures. Only from somewhere in the seventeenth row there came a tiny plop of a tear giggled out just a moment before...

Then the seatbacks began to creak uneasily. The village council chairman cautiously stepped up onto the stage with a crumpled word of gratitude for the concert. The audience dispersed in mute despondency.

Behind the scenes Aksyonov and Skully pinion Murashkovsky gone to pieces in a heavy fit of hysterics; no one knowing how to appease him...

In record time, the instruments and costumes were stuffed into the bus.

All got seated in the Club Manager office for the traditional treat of gratitude to the touring actors: bread, lard, cucumbers, moonshine.

After the first glass, the village council chairman brought an awkward apology to Murashkovsky, "Well, here... er...in our village three khuttas were burnt down...in just a month...they still can't find who..."

Plant the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, blushing more and more in his plump face, kept vigilant control over the bus driver and when he gulped his third glass – "to smooth the road", we were good to start into the night.

At that stage in my life the taste of moonshine was still making me wince, so a couple of gulps, snacked with bread and lard, got worn away quickly. I watched the impenetrable night rushing by behind the window glass.

The driver applied his whole soul to pushing the gas pedal right into the floor. We flew; we shot along the soft dirt roads of the district.

The headlights snatched from the dense darkness the trunks and branches of the roadside trees. At times khuttas of a small village scudded by...A guy and a girl standing by a khutta fence...seeing her home...

They looked back at the passing bus. Perhaps they thought, "The folks manage to enjoy their lives, they live in the city". They envied me.

Strange as it was, but I envied them...seeing her home...

I also wanted that.

...in the warmly dark Ukrainian night...

But I had Olga, and in the back-alley where she lived, it was the same night, yet I still envied that guy.

...strange...

Olga was extremely good at kissing and liked it too, not for nothing she had so sensual lips.

The bitter taste of burnt tobacco on her breath did not distract me overly much. Besides, standing by her khutta's gate, the next time I saw her home, she shared a cigarette with me. I tried with cautious apprehension, but all went off without aggravating side effects and I started to smoke.

The khutta, which I escorted her to belonged to Olga's aunt, who she came to stay with for that summer coming from Theodosia in the Crimea, where also lived her mother and elder sister. As for her father, he died in an accident with a tractor when she was twelve years old.

She loved him so much that sometimes she went to the cemetery at the dead of night to cry by the low monument welded of rebars rods with the fixed tablet "Abram Kosmenko". Some name, ain't it? But he wasn't a Jew, just so was his name.

Her mother found a stepfather for her and her sister, without registering at the ZAGS though, who was a musician, knocking on drums.

Once Olga lay on the couch with the temperature watching TV. He got seated at her feet and covered his lap with a corner of her blanket. Her mother saw it and raise the hell of shrieking...

Then she went in for athletics, sprinting one hundred. The coach said she had a good physique for that sport. Once their group was even taken for competitions in Simferopol City. Before the dash, the coach made everyone eat a whole lemon; without the slightest pinch of sugar sprinkling it. He said, "Gets straight into the blood!"

So, between the kisses, we were getting to know each other more intimately...

After that touring concert, Skully, Vladya and I went to the Seim for an overnight stay.

Skully and I got there by the evening local train, bringing with us a large vinyl bag which Father had fetched from the RepBase. Such bags were coming there as wrapping for some helicopter spare parts. A big translucent bag could easily do for a three-man tent.

We also brought a guitar with us, and then Vladya arrived on his scooter "Riga-4" loaded with the dinner.

On a sandy spit overgrown with the willow thicket nearby the railway bridge, ee put the bag-tent up. It was getting dark and we built a fire to have a bottle of wine by it and slathers of grub brought by Vladya, too much, in fact, for a snack, so it was lavishly scattered around, yet no one cared, because of in the morning Vladya had to ride to Konotop after more eatables...

He began to give out the guitar breaks from different hits. Above the placid water, the guitar sounds wafted mighty great, so clear, so full and...nyshtyak, in a word, it sounded there...

One fisherman in his boat anchored in the middle of the river liked it and asked to cut more. But when we roared "Shyzgara!" another night catcher from afar – near the other bank – began to curse us for scaring off his fish.

Skully advised not to mess around with him, the man could go and call more mujiks from the huts.

The fire burnt out and we crawled under the vinyl roof...

At dawn, I woke up from water dripping into my face.

Vinyl is absolutely water- and air-proof. Our breathing settled from inside upon the vinyl chilled with the August night, and turned into water droplets – the condensate; they did not teach us at school about such things.

So we met the morning cold and hungry. I hardly managed to wheedle Vladya to give me his "Riga-4" for the ride to Konotop after some food instead of him...

Yes, motors are the real thing...you don't have to pedal or pull anything, the only effort is twisting the throttle handle and steering...

I drove into the city mapping the routes in my mind: first – home, then to the Skully's khutta, after that to the Vladya's and back to the Seim river.

"Plans on paper looked just fine

Yet, they'd missed out the ravine..."

Entering the left turn between the Station and Loony Park I heard my name called out loud. Over the Station square, Olga was dashing in her red mini-skirt. The coach was right – that's some physique!. I throttled down and let the scooter come to a stop...

She ran up with no panting to speak of and let me have it – it's three days since I'd disappeared no one knew where and if I did not want going out with her I didn't have to she didn't care because yesterday she got a telegram from her mother inviting to a telephone talk with Theodosia and she said that's enough for staying with her aunt she had to go back in two days but I didn't care I rushed to the Seim with my fucking friends who were more dear to me than her and she was just a fool to think she had found someone she could trust and if I needed her the slightest bit I had to stay with her right now.

After the cold condensate shower so heated a raging, and her soon departure mixed with the incipient hope – hey, she might let have it off for a farewell, why not? – had their job done. I only begged for a couple of hours – to take the scooter to Vladya's khutta and go to change before our meeting at the Park...

Sure enough, my friends returned from the Seim by the 17.20 local train, after they combed the entire sand spit in search of scraps that they had so thoughtlessly scattered hither-and-thither at the orgy the night before.

Who but I could understand them better? Once I also almost fainted from hunger on the Seim.

They stopped talking to me and boycotted for a stretch of three days.

And who but I could understand them better? You couldn't boycott a dude for longer than three days if you played dances with him and your only means of communication was through disgruntled Chuba.

(...you can imagine nothing meaner than the betrayal of your chums...

Yet, from all the mean deeds in my life that particular one, for some reason, I regret the least. Although, of course, I am sorry.

"A skirt chaser, a dishrag, he betrayed his homeboys for a piece of the smelly hole, betrayed for a ho!" would say 95 percent of real bro guys.

Well, okay, it was overdone – 93 percent is the exact number.

And I would understand them. Moreover, I'd fully agree with them.

But most of all I would pity the poor fools. Too bad luck, they had not come across a woman for whose sake it's worth betraying...)

Now, Olga.

Her breasts certainly lacked the yummy splendor of the melon-like treasures of Natalie. And the nipples were not jutting rigidly as prescribed by the literary tradition to the mentioned parts in the anatomy of virgins.

Yet, on unbuttoning both her blouse and my shirt to press her topless chest against mine for the first time (she did not have a bra on that occasion after dropping for a sec in the dark khutta yard) I was stunned with the immensity of the sensation caused by the raw female flesh.

The fact of her breasts being small and the nipples not very stiff she explained by diving from a cliff after rapans in the sea which happened to be too deep there and that's why at the hospital they had to pierce her breasts.

(..some whopper for of a gaping sucker's ears? I have no idea.

As a champion dupe, I believe anything they tell me.

Faith, I mean it, while listening, I believe anything at all from whoever be they.

And because of my fundamentally delayed mental processing, the logical evaluation of the bullshit they fed to me takes place the following day if not later.

However, at that period I did not care for no logic – be it rapans or other fish. It's only now I feel curious at times – what kind of crap could be them those rapans? But then I'm too lazy to go Googling after them...)

Yet, the most captivating feature about her was her legs.

(..the sexual revolution was raging then all over the world at its apogee, and the laws of revolutionary times have no mercy, moreover, the laws of revolutionary fashion.

In modern, democratic times, you can wear whatever you want – be it maxi or midi or unisex. You can even choose to spend all of your life in sportswear if only, of course, there are Adidas stripes on it.

The sexual revolution established the dictatorship of mini all over the world so that if you considered yourself a woman, you had to bare your knees.

The law was simple and short – either your skirt is for at least two inches above your knees or go and join the pack of pensioner oldies idling on the common bench in the yard.

_Dura lex, sed lex._..)

Olga's mini was twenty centimeters above her knees. Therefore, when getting seated she chastely dropped her hand between her sportingly ripe thighs so as not to flash her panties.

And on that bright and shining sunny day, when I stood next to the Under-Overpass tunnel and stared at her skipping in a nimble athletic style down the stairs from the Plant Park, flashing her yellow sports haircut and the ruby-red mini of hers, it became so clear to me that I was born in the epoch really worth to be born into.

A flick of the breeze tossed up the loincloth of her mini and she, on the run, sat it back with the everlasting gesture of Marilyn Monroe from some other, faraway era.

(...at the like moments all the rapans in the world and hungry bros chewing dry bread scraps sprinkled with fine riverside sand can go to hell for all I care!

".two legs...though sad, and cold, and weary

I still remember them..."

Or, as another, surely more pragmatic, chosen of Muse, cared to put it:

" Olga, for them those legs of yours, I'd give anything except the payday and day off!"...)

He was her co-worker at Rags where she got a job because she hadn't gone to her mother in Theodosia but stayed in Konotop by her aunt.

"Rags" was how they named Recycling Factory in the very outskirts of Konotop, by the first stop of the local train going towards the Seim.

Why not pick a job somewhere closer? Because at Rags they didn't care too much for the labor legislation, and Olga then was barely even fifteen...

On the first of September, I walked to the Konotop Railway Transportation College together with my brother and sister, that summer they were admitted to the institution after graduating their eighth grade.

The students were grouped and lined-up in the courtyard and College Director started to push his speech. I felt like a zek who after serving his ten-year stretch ran into three years more for no crime at all.

After the line-up finished, I went to the Personnel Department of the College, took my papers back and went to enter the KaPeVeRrZe Plant. There I was given a job at the same shop floor where Vladya was already a locksmith apprentice – at the Experimental Unit of Metal Constructions of Repair Shop Floor...

Like most other shops in the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, Mechanical Shop Floor was built of refractory-like brick. Its walls bore no flamboyant ante-revolution extravagances of lace-like brickwork, simplistic evenness stretched plainly from corner to corner in the massive masonry of the building whose spacious inner dimensions comprised one hundred-thirty meter in length and eight in height while being thirty-eight-meter wide.

High above, under the roof, there rambled a cross-beam with the crane-operator cab, over the rails fixed along with the walls up there.

The huge hook on the thick steel cable hung from the mighty winch running along the beam with the stationary cab on the left where the crane operator got by climbing up the iron rungs rooted in the brick wall.

The Mechanical Shop Floor building had three wings of lesser height attached to it. The first wing to the right from the entrance gate was the separate Tools Shop Floor, and the remaining two belonged to Mechanical Shop Floor, only they were lower and had no cross-beams.

The central aisle in Mechanical Shop Floor was wide enough for two dolly-cars to go side by side. A dolly-car was a self-propelled cart on small but sturdy wheels with no tires. It had a small pad in front for a driver to stand upon. Between the driver and the cargo platform, there was an upright narrow metal box with two levers stuck out from its sides, so that the driver could hold onto them. But it only seemed so, in fact, the driver steered the dolly-car with those levers taking left or right turns.

Dolly-car was, actually, a kind of a pullmi-pushyu. It needed no space for U-turns after getting loaded or unloaded in some cramped place, instead, the driver themselves turned on their pad and drove back; some clever invention.

The floor in Mechanical Shop Floor was concrete but with all engine oil splashes and dolly-car wheel prints, it ages before turned asphalt-black.

Some thirty meters from the end wall the aisle was crossed by the road from one of the abutting wings to another, with the fence of upright iron pipes bounding the opposite roadside. Those pipes marked the border between the grounds of Mechanical and Repair Shop Floors.

The border, of course, was transparent and provided with three duty-free entries in the fence – one straight from the central aisle and two more alongside the opposite walls...

Past the left-hand border-crossing, beneath the flight of iron stairway, there was a wooden door in the wall opening to the workmen locker room.

Next to the door, a wooden desk with a couple of thick, pretty smeared, cardboard folders atop was abutting the wall, two single-plank benches put closely by the longer sides of the desk completed the arrangement of the Overseers' Nest which was immediately followed by the line of eight huge vises screwed onto the edge of a spacious workbench running along the row of tall windows in the wall.

The first in the line was Yasha's vise, then – Mykola-the-old's, farther on – Peter's, still farther – Mykola-the-young's and so on to the gate by the end of the workbench where the sideway track entered Repair Shop Floor parallel to the butt wall of the building.

The sheet-iron-lined front of the workbench had sheet-iron doors in it, under each of the vises, with neat padlocks on each door opening to the toolbox. The first was Yasha's box, then Mykola-the-old's and, well, so on...

On the second floor, over the locker room, there was the Management office of Repair Shop Floor. That was where led that iron stairway of two flights furnished with iron handrails which also bordered the landing in front of the office door. And from that same landing, the narrow fixed-in-the-wall ladder went up to the cross-beam cab for the crane operator to get there in the morning, or after her midday break, and rumble away to the space above Mechanical Shop Floor.

The sideway track entering Repair Shop Floor was a dead end. Bulky contraptions in need of repair came in there heaped on slowly crawling railway platforms, while those of smaller size were brought to Repair Floor by dolly-cars.

Behind and parallel to the track, there stretched the butt wall which also had hugely tall windows latticed with iron bindings to hold the panes of dusty glass. In the middle of the wall above the windows, under the very roof, there hung a large electrical round clock like those at the railway stations. From time to time, the peaceful slumber of the clock got interrupted with a sudden "tick!" which made the half-meter long hand jump for two-three minutes at once and there fall asleep again until the next "tick!".

The third wall had the same tall windows. Next to the right-hand border-crossing from Mechanical Shop Floor, there stood a drilling machine for anyone who needed it. Then came the huge table of the marker and, in the corner behind the tracks of the dead-end, the lathe with its turner.

Along the central axis of Repair Shop Floor, there stood another long workbench or rather two of them abutting each other face-to-face, with an iron-mesh partition in between. Common-sense-based safety rules, if you think of it: had a hammer slipped out of grip, the mesh would prevent knocking out a workman at the opposite workbench.

Walking Repair Shop Floor, you had to watch your step carefully to safely navigate between giant worm gears, oil-smeared casings, and other whatnots strewn indiscriminately upon the floor.

Those things, brought by dolly-cars and dropped at vacant spots a couple of months before, were waiting patiently for the due attention because there always popped up something else, more pressing for urgent repair.

But that was not our concern. We were the Experimental Unit by Repair Shop Floor, sited at the workbench next to the Overseers' Nest.

No, we did not meddle with repair, our task was implementing of the projects experimentally drawn at Design Bureau by the Plant Management, giving them the real-life forms in metal. The handcart of four wheels, for example, or the stand "Glory to Labor!" placed in front of Main Check-Entrance to the Plant. Or all kinds of bearing constructions made of channels: brackets, pillars, roof trusses.

However, for so bulky products there was no room at Repair Shop Floor and we assembled them outside, on the rack-deck between the welder's booth by the sideway gate and the window of the locker room.

By the by, the parts for the city TV tower were also constructed on that rack-deck, and then the team of workers from our Experimental Unit assembled the tower at its site. But that was before me...

For the initial three months, I was a locksmith apprentice couched by Peter Khomenko. For him, it was good news because a locksmith got a certain increase in his payment when in charge of training a newbie.

On the other hand, he was not sure what else to do with me, after he handed me a spare key from his toolbox in the workbench under his vise, so that I could keep there my hammer, chisel, and file they handed me at the Tool Shop Floor. Okay, he showed how to produce a scratcher out a throwaway length of thin steel wire to draw marks on a sheet of iron but what then?

Along all our line of vises by the Overseers' Nest, a workman at work was a rare sight indeed. Unless at the end of the working day when someone was tinkering up some kind of shabashka for household needs at his khutta.

Nevertheless, the entire workforce was always busy. A couple of locksmiths pottering with the welder at the mainstay props. Some went to dismantle the roller table in the Foundry Shop Floor. Another group was led by Senior Oversee to Boiler Shop Floor to install anchor bolts for a stationary crane to be constructed there.

In general, the work was running high. Somewhere...

The managers of Repair Shop Floor were doing their work in the office upstairs even though the CEO of Repair Shop Floor, Lebedev, visited the premises no oftener than two times a day. Where he worked before and after those visits I had no idea.

He wore the uniform black greatcoat of railwaymen. In summer, of course, it was swapped for the jacket of that same uniform with silver-colored buttons.

At walking, the CEO's back was held so plumb upright that it didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the man's being in a well-befogged state already.

However, even though his front side could betray the fact of Lebedev's being drunk as a fiddler, he never stumbled the slightest bit. No, never.

The workers respected him, probably, for his never staying in the office longer than for five-ten minutes.

In the table of ranks, the CEO was followed by Managers of the Units by Repair Shop Floor.

The Repair Unit was headed by Manager Mozgovoy, whose thin falsetto somehow did not fit his portly frame, still, he also was respected for his being harmless.

Once at Repair Unit, they were restoring the concavity profile of some bulky incomprehensible thing. Whoever you asked what the crap was that thing, the answer was invariably uniform, "Who the fuck knows what hooey it is." And even that "hooey" was pronounced identically, almost in a howl, like, "...hooooey it is."

So for half of a month, they kept scraping that concavity in turns. Whoever got tired of doing nothing took the hand scraper and commenced to scrape.

Eventually, it got polished to a mirror shine and another hooey (the convex thing) began to freely enter and rotate, back and forth, inside the scraped one.

Mozgovoy, sure thing, was delighted by such a labor achievement at his Section...

Well, now, the locksmith Lekha from the Podlipnoye village, freshly after his army service, in the end of a working day put a chisel at the shiny surface of the polished hooey and asked, with the hammer raised to his shoulder, "Look here, Mozgovoy, d'you wanna me fuck the fucker?"

And Mozgovoy responded in a tired falsetto, "If you have no brains, go – fuck it."

Lekha, certainly, was just horsing around, yet Mozgovoy did not tell on him although he could...

Then followed Manager of the Experimental Unit, Lyonya...

(...hmm, it's embarrassing, I can recollect the mole on Lyonya's upper lip but his last name gives me the slip...)

About him, it was not clear yet: to respect or not to respect?

He was still wet behind his ears and until recently was sitting in the Overseers' Nest by the locker room door. Then he graduated some diploma in absentia and got raised, up the iron stairway, to the Management Office where were already sitting Engineer-Technologist (at the desk with his back to the window, but I don't even remember his name) and Senior Overseer, Melai, Anatoly Melai's father. He had a wide horizontal gash of a mouth and he was always silent, unlike his yodeling son...

Twice a month the stairway to the Management Office was climbed up by the cashier with her tarpaulin bag from which she portioned out the advance or monthly payment to the workers depending on which of her two visits it was.

The very first time, she gave me the advance of only twenty rubles.

When I brought my first earnings home, then, before Mother's return from her work, I scattered those twenty notes all over the couch in the kitchen, one by one, so that it would seem more.

I said, "Mom, that's for you to dispose of." And right away I asked two rubles for cigarettes, without going into detail because she did not know that I had started smoking...

The working day began at eight in the morning.

We passed through the still silent aisle of Mechanical Shop Floor to our locker room with tall plywood boxes along three blind walls and two additional rows of lockers put back to back to divide the room into the oblong halves.

Each locker-box had two vertical sections: one for the clean clothes and the other for the working dress, aka spetzovka, given to a workman once a year. From above, the sections were bridged with a plywood shelf for the hat and the package with the midday meal.

However, at the midday meal breaks, both Vladya and I went home over a stile in the concrete wall and then it took just five minutes to reach our _khattas_.

While we changed and had a smoke in the locker room, the Mechanical Shop Floor machine-tools started to turn on, one after another. The howling, rapping, and rumbling of their engines merged with the piercing squeal of steel peeled off the workpieces.

The cacophony of a working day was muffled to some extent by the locker room door but very soon it swung open and Overseer Borya Sakoon drove us out to our workplaces – to the line of vises or to the rack-deck in the yard where we seemed being busy with doing something...

The rest of the day, Borya Sakoon spent sitting by the locker room door on a bench at the Overseers' Nest desk. He leaned on it with his elbow, then with the other one and was busily smoking cigarettes "Prima", one after another.

Short, with thin fair hair and dun faded face, he had the same last name as Vladya but wasn't a relative because both denied any kinship.

Frequent coughing fits made him pull his cap down and press it to his face to choke the discharge. When his therapeutics did not work, he slammed the cap atop the desk and went on coughing with his face dropped into it. Then he snapped out of his pocket another cigarette, lit it up and the cough eventually died away until the next attack.

At times, he stood up from the desk to stretch his whole body – a scraggy shrimp with his arms aloft against the tide of mad rambling of the machine-tools in Mechanical Shop Floor – then he lit another cigarette, turned back and sat down again.

Once Overseer beckoned me with a finger inviting to get seated on the opposite bench at the desk and, yelling over the roaring howl of the machine-tools, began to tell how soon after the war he went to dances in the club of Podlipnoye, where the village yobos started bullying him so he cut and ran but they were chasing and he had to lie down in a ditch and shoot his Walther pistol from there, and that he also witnessed how the law enforcing bodies did away with the All-Union thief-in-law, handled Kushch, who came to Konotop but they were following him and in Budyonny street just neared from behind and banged into the back of his head, one second later a "black raven" drove up and he, a young guy Borya at that time, was told to grab Kushch by the legs and help to heave the corpse into the vehicle.

"Up to these days it's nowhere you can buy the fabric like to that in the Kushch's suit pants," he shouted out and his fingers picked off his lips a stuck thread of tobacco fiber from a cigarette "Prima".

However, not always Borya Sakoon looked such a totally rotten wretch.

One day, Vladya called me to drop into Loony and watch our Overseer training the Ballet Group in the hall on the second floor, where a dozen girls held onto the handrail along the mirror wall, while our geezer strolled along their line like a karra cock sporting a short, diamond-shaped, necktie.

Then demonstrating some of the moves he shot his leg almost above his head. That's some Borya Sakoon...

The hardest period of the whole working day was the concluding half-hour. In that half-hour there was no time at all: it just stopped and it was better not to even look at that electric round clock above the huge windows in the end wall. Some endless stretch of vexing disappointment which brought about a strange itch to push the frozen clock hand with a straw.

(...I have no idea why with a straw, but that's what I hankered for at those periods when there was no time, although I clearly understood that the straw would only break instead of moving that iron piece of crap...)

The Mechanical Shop Floor machine tools would slow down and fell silent, one after another. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit gathered from elsewhere to line the workbench with their backs leaned onto their respective vises.

The two-meter-tall Mykola-the-old emptied his horse-long nose into the crumpled lump of a rag the color of earth-and-ash. Who could imagine he had so gentlemanly habits!

Mykola-the-young stilled at pensive picking fresh acne on his cheeks.

Tick! Twenty-seven to five.

Swarthy-faced Yasha began to tell me how the Red Army took him along after liberating Konotop from the Germans. A solitary shabashka-tinker at the grinding wheel in the corner did not interfere with the calm flow of Yasha's story.

They ran to attack and the ours supported them from behind shooting the "forty-fivers" when one of the supporting shells shot off the balls of an attacker.

Yasha's palm showed the trajectory of a flying 45-mm shell.

Then he ran another half-kilometer before he died...

Recollecting how I also felt nothing and only saw the ground of the bumpy field jumping before my eyes, as we ran to attack through the shaggy mist in the military game of Zarnitsa, I believed Yasha.

He shifted his cap far back revealing the sharp, like an arrowhead, angle from which his black hair ran up under his cap. Not a speckle of gray. He looked twice as young as Borya Sakoon.

Overseer told that at the installation of the TV tower something went wrong with the uppermost section. It was in winter with severe frost and Yasha took off his sheepskin coat, climbed up by the cable and put it to rights.

Mykola-the-old was two heads taller than Yasha. They were sort of chums and after work went home by the same diesel train, only to different stops.

Tick! Seven to five. Okay, that's that; time to go to change...

Skully also dropped out of the Railway Transportation College and entered our Experimental Unit which was a smart move. They didn't pay him any scholarship there but after getting the diploma he'd be sent to slave at the end of one or another nowhere. Did he need it at all?

So three of The Orpheuses got together. As for Chuba, he worked at Car Repair Shop Floor; we scarcely ever ran into each other in Plant.

And we continued to play dances even when Vladya smashed his finger with a hammer.

Club paid each of us thirty-six rubles a month. It seemed too little, but what could we do?

At our attempt at talking business with the Club Director, he said that after buying the electric guitar for one hundred and fifty rubles there remained no funds for increasing our payment.

True, the guitar of Iolanta brand was a classy thing – so neatly streamlined and it sounded miles better than made-it-yourself ones after _The Radio_ magazine guide, Iolanta's smooth scarlet gleaming eclipsed and turned them into pieces of spray-painted plywood.

Soon after, I was sent together with Projectionist Konstantin Borisovich to the city of Chernigov after new instruments from the local music factory there – bass, and rhythm electric guitars. Pavel Mitrofanovich talked to Plant Management and I was exempted from work for two days, because of the long way to Chernigov and back.

There we stayed overnight in a hotel as business travelers, and at nine in the morning arrived at the factory. Konstantin Borisovich went to talk with their management and I had to wait in the corridor for a couple of endless hours.

At last, they called me in for checking the guitars which had no cases, and were much heavier than Iolanta, and covered with the glossy but black lacquer. It was clear at once that the factory hadn't mastered yet the electric guitar production or Konstantin Borisovich did not have enough funds on him to purchase some better ones. Although, when we brought the caseless instruments to Konotop, Chuba admitted that the bass guitar would do.

The following Monday in the Repair Shop Floor locker room, Vladya stirred up the fuss canvassing for the Orpheuses to get exempted from work for health reasons. He suggested going to the Plant Medical Center with complaints about the sausage we ate the day before when playing trash at a wedding which snack was certainly stale. Only we had to go all together and say the same thing.

So we found Chuba in Car Repair Shop Floor and the four of us arrived at the Medical Center facilities with complaints about the spoiled sausage.

There, they seated us on chairs along the wall and the nurse brought four bath-basins and lined them on the floor in front of us – one tin basin for each of the ailing Orpheuses. The morbid preparations were continued with bringing in a bucket of luke-warm water which she made purple with a handful of potassium permanganate.

The doctor came in and demanded of us to drink the concoction in liters and then poke two fingers into the mouth, as deep as the root of the tongue, which procedure would remedy the food poisoning.

The grimly waiting basins on the floor and the instructions charged with sadistic pleasure worked like a charm on both Chuba and Skully, their poisoning crises was over in no time to speak of and, leaving no traces, they hurried to their respective workplaces.

Yet, Vladya's and my cases were of more complicated nature and we staunchly endured the whole hog of procedure throwing up into the basins everything that we had for breakfast that morning. The doctor, impressed by our obstinacy, gave us exemption for the current working day.

We changed and left through the Check-Entrance in the crowd of workers going to the canteen at the midday break. Thus, for all our pains and labors we got bare four hours of freedom, all in all, and the next morning – welcome back to the mill, O, boy!.

The Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, informed us that Club was buying an electric organ Yonika, which would be played by Lyokha Kuzko as the fifth Orpheus.

Lyokha had reddish thinning hair and sported a horseshoe-shaped mustache a-la The Pesnyary to somehow distract attention from the severe bend in his nose, the legacy of some old-times fight. Because of that disfigured nose, his handle was Rhinoceros.

He was seven years older than us but still, he was a cool dude who had The White Album by The Beatles on his tape-recorder which he played to Vladya and me inviting to his place.

His father, Anatoly Efimovich Kuzko, the button-accordion teacher at Club, had built a two-story red-brick house for Rhinoceros in the yard of his fatherly khutta. The first floor was the garage with a sheet-iron gate, and on the second floor, there were two rooms and a kitchen. Some folks could live conveniently, anyway.

Yet, the garage remained empty of a car because Kuzko Senior did not buy it for Lyokha who was drinking like a fish for which reason his wife Tatyana left him taking their baby daughter away.

Along with The White Album Lyokha also shared The Forensic Medicine Textbook to look through.

The yellowish aged pages were full of black-and-white photographs with explanatory notes beneath them.

Knowing the illustrations by heart, he shared his favorite spot in the textbook, where there were rows of small-sized pictures (3 by 2 cm, like for a passport), lots of them, to demonstrate the difference between intact and damaged hymens.

(...I have a strong suspicion that because of that textbook, all kinds of pornographic publications give me the shiver.

No kidding, they make me panicky – what if, turning a page in The Playboy I get smack to a murder with the household scissors sticking from the open chest of the body up into my face, or else a guy strangled against an upturned stool, you never can tell...)

Climbing up and down the Plant concrete wall at midday-meal breaks was a real shortcut that spared a half-kilometer walk if compared to going through Main Check-Entrance.

At home, I warmed the soup or vermicelli up on the kerogas in the veranda and took the meal into the kitchen where I doffed my spetzovka pants and jacket leaving only my tank top and underpants on. It caused no inconvenience to anyone because with the parents at work and the younger ones at their College I was home alone.

The reason for taking off my working clothes was those ten minutes before going back to Plant. While eating, you could use a stool even with your dirty spetzovka on, yet smearing the couch or an armchair with it was not right.

To fill those odd ten minutes, I strummed the guitar and screamed different songs to develop my vocal skills which I have never had. But I sang all the same – may Beata Tyszkiievich, a professional Polish beauty torn from a color magazine and pinned above the folding bed-couch, forgive me as well as The Who in the black-and-white photo next to her.

Once my wild wails ended up in a boner and, grabbing from the desk under the window a ruler left behind by the younger gone to their college, I measured my dick.

Locksmithing surely instills a respectful attitude towards knowledge of specific details...

One day, coming back after the midday break, Vladya and I, saw Skully on a bench of Overseers' Nest in the company of Borya Sakoon and some stranger in clean clothes.

"Here they're coming," said Overseer, and the man suggested to us, including Skully as well, to go along with him.

Clad in our faded T-shirts without spetzovka jackets on because of a hot and sunny October day, we followed his athletic figure in a tartan shirt while the three of us wore.

From the flitting farewell grimace on Borya Sakoon's mug, we could guess the invitation was from a specimen of law-enforcing bodies, without having any idea why.

We walked contrary to the flow of latecomers who leisurely sauntered from the canteen in the square outside the Main Check-Entrance gate. Everything went as usual, and only we were pulled out and estranged from the routine life of the KaPeVeRrZe Plant.

"Where to, smarties?" asked Peter Khomenko flashing a broad smile from the counter-directed stream of workmen, but at the abrupt turnabout of our escort, his mirth dried up at once and he paced away towards Mechanical Shop Floor not caring to get a reply.

"Who's that?" alertly asked the guard-and-guide. I answered that was my tutor, and we left Plant through Main Check-Entrance.

He told us to get into the Volga through whose windshield shimmering in the sunshine peeped Chuba's face wearing a nervous smile, and they took us to City Militia Department, which was next to Passport Bureau.

Behind the gate of City Militia Department, there was a wide yard-coral bounded with barrack-type one-story buildings. We were separated and led to different rooms in the different buildings where they began to ask us questions and write down our responses.

Of course, not everything in the proceedings got recorded. For instance, the interrogation of Skully started as follows, "Do you know that fucking moron?"

"Which moron?"

"The one who brought you here."

"No, I dunno."

"That was Head of the Criminal Investigation Department."

"No, I dunno."

At that moment I was interrogated by the mentioned f-f...er...well, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department.

Seated at the large desk, muscular, with his hair sticking closely to the skull, he asked who was the day before present at the rehearsal in the Variety Ensemble room in Club.

And who was the last to leave? Who was approaching the closet where so much expensive German accordion of four registers had been kept?

He took notes all the time and when the phone on his desk rang, the receiver was pressed the to his ear with his shoulder raised to the tilted head, the way Marlon Brando did in the movie where he was the sheriff, and the moron went writing on...

After interrogating all of us, they told us we were free and might go back to work.

We sauntered up along the street to Department Store and turned left towards Peace Square. Four Orpheuses in smeared spetzovka pants and old T-shirts. Along Peace Avenue, we also strolled in no hurry – the working day was ending at five.

At Zelenchuk Area, we had a bit of fun, jumping at each other like Mazandaran tigers and tearing down the worn T-shirts on our bodies. We did not stop it until all the four T-shirts were torn wide open from their collars to the waist.

And why not? The day was sunny and pretty warm, so we simply tied the tatters with knots upon our navels and went on, like happy hippies.

It was Skully to start the whole horseplay; probably, because he had such a hairy chest...

Next week, coming back to Plant after the midday break I, as always, dropped into Vladya's khutta so that to go on together.

Vladya shared the news about one of his neighbor's hens who died in the yard that morning and concluded with the suggestion of taking the body over with us to hang it in our locker room; just for fun.

The plan did not inspire me too much but I still lent Vladya a helping hand to smuggle the demised to Plant because climbing the wall along Professions Street called for use of your both hands and dragging along a newspaper package with a dead hen, you had nothing to grab hold of those holes in the concrete slabs with...

From the locker room ceiling there hung a length of wire for a light bulb, which was missing as well as the cartridge.

Vladya took someone's unfinished shabashka from under the window, rested it on a locker in the middle row, climbed upon the work in progress and wrapped the unemployed wire around the hen's neck.

She froze up there with her dirty white wings loosely spread above the raw skinny legs.

The midday break was over and the Mechanical Shop Floor machine-tools started their scraping wails when the black-haired plump locksmith from the Repair Unit entered the room. Seeing the bird, he did not laugh but left immediately. In a split-second, our Overseer, Borya Sakoon, flew in.

With his eyebrows shot up and the moth in the form of the small letter "o", motionlessly stood he for one entire moment staring at the listless animal above his uplifted face. Then he turned over to us, "Hairy-yobbos! You did it, bitches!"

For some unadvertised reason, Borya was in the habit of calling The Orpheuses working at the Experimental Unit "the hairy-yobbos"...

We, certainly, denied the allegation but Vladya took the dead bird off, wrapped it back into the same newspaper and dropped somewhere outside Repair Shop Floor.

In the final analysis, Borya was right – with merely two eyewitnesses, by the end of that working day the entire Repair Shop Floor knew that the hairy-yobbos (the workingmen masses slavishly aped the Overseer's example in calling us that name) fixed a chick in the locker room. And if the thing remained there for at least half-hour it would inevitably give the kickoff of grim rumors circulating Konotop about someone got hanged at the KaPeVeRrZe Plant...

Olga and I ceased dating at the gate of her aunt's khutta because of founding a more suitable place, or rather she showed it to me.

A little farther along Budyonny Street, there was a short dead-end to the left, leading up to the closed iron gate of the oil storage base. Near that gate, along with the roadside fence, there stood a park bench.

Who and when had dragged it so far from the Park I couldn't say, but it was positioned in a strategically right spot wrapped in the shadow out of reach of the light from the lamp above the gate.

On that bench, I got acquainted in absentia with Olga's Konotop relatives...

Her mother's sister, Nina, immediately after the war served as a telephone operator at the headquarters of a Soviet Army division stationed in Poland.

On her demobilization, Nina didn't return to the Soviet Union because she had married a Pole and they had got a child already, so Nina stayed to live in her husband's land.

Four years later, she arrived in Konotop to attend the funeral of one of her parents and that was a mistake. They never let her go back despite the fact that her young daughter remained in Poland, and the country itself was a member of the Socialist Camp Community. She never found out what happened to her daughter or her husband nor did she know anything about their present situation, because none of her letters was answered.

Fifteen years later, Aunt Nina registered her marriage with Uncle Kolya who did not drink and had a good job in the forestry, only he often needed to go somewhere by his motorcycle with a sidecar. Yet, he had built a really good khutta of three rooms and a kitchen. They had no children and adopted a baby girl, named her Olya and were very fond of her. Not long ago they bought a piano for Olya although it's, probably, too late to start playing it at eleven.

Aunt Nina worked at Meat-Packing Plant in three shifts. To reach her workplace she had to walk two kilometers along the railway tracks in the city outskirts.

On the other hand, her family did not have to buy meat at Bazaar because even though the bags of workers after their shift were looked through at the check-entrance, they never frisked the panties of exiting women.

And on that same bench, we talked about Art.

For example, there we discussed the "Romeo and Juliet" after watching the flicks together in the basement cinema at Loony.

"They talked and talked but I could not make out what their talks were about, yet tears were dripping from my eyes all the same as if by some fool..."

(...which was a very well-defined assessment, by the by, because the rhymed and metered speech makes words you know seem unknown obscuring even so simple a fact that more than one of noble ladies in Verona, way younger than you, had babies at your age...)

It was there also (I'm still about the bench) that Olga harpooned me up, both deep and tightly. She uttered just one phrase but if you're the born patsy of a graphomaniac you're trapped securely.

"Yesterday I entered in my diary: '...when he kissed me goodbye I was devastatingly happy.'"

Dammit! You're done for! And there is no way out!

Firstly, in many tons of the read and re-read literature, I had never come across such an expression " devastatingly happy". Secondly, she kept a diary! Thirdly, but not lastly, I was there in that journal!.

After the dances, we sometimes saw her girlfriend Sveta to the porch of Sveta's khutta.

At so late a time the Konotopers who dwelt in khuttas did not venture into their yards, more so Sveta's Granny and Grandpa.

After giggling by our side for the stretch of a smoke, Sveta went in to bed, and the porch with the narrow plank bench was left at our disposal.

On one of such evenings, Olga told me to wait on that porch while she'd be gone to her khutta because Aunt Nina was on the third shift that day and Uncle Kolya went by his motorcycle somewhere in the district.

It took a long wait until the tinkle of the wicket handle-latch in the neighboring yard, behind departing Aunt Nina. A few minutes later, Olga appeared at the porch and mutely beckoned me to follow. We went out into the back-alley and noiselessly entered the yard of her khutta.

The door from the veranda led to a large kitchen followed by an even larger living-room to the right, and a bedroom to the left, both separated from the kitchen with cloth curtains in the doorways. After the living-room, there was another bedroom for Olga and small Olya. We did not go there but turned into the owners' bedroom to the left.

Olga switched on the feeble night-light lamp and went out to the bedroom behind the living room. I was left alone facing the large double bed of a ceremonial aspect gleaming with its nickel-plated backs, and a smaller, more casual, bed next to the curtains in the doorway to the kitchen. The tight grip of some benumbing tension overwhelmed me.

She returned in a dressing robe keeping its unbuttoned sides in place by her folded arms. Not uttering a word, we both looked at the smaller bed and Olga put out the light.

Under the robe, she had only panties on. I hastened to follow the suit reserving just my underpants. Then, in the bed, there followed a long wordless wrestling match for each of her dressing gown sleeves. Finally, I threw the whole item on a chair by the wall, the score of the clothes we had on became even – 1:1.

When I turned to her again, she lay on her back under the cover pulled up to her chest, shielding it with her arms pressed tightly over. I felt it was chilly in the room and got under the cover too.

The scramble about her small panties was no less than that with the large dressing gown. At last, there we were stark naked both of us because it got really hot under those covers. And then...

Then she writhed and dodged furiously from under me, pushing my hands away. I managed only to rub my dick between her thighs and against the tiny turf of hair without knowing what was what but feeling just a little more and...Now, almost...about there...Damn, she turned off again!.

(...I would do the deed, I swear I would, if not for the lack of time...

That night the cuckoo in the kitchen clock went crazy and jumped out with her shrill "coo! coo!" every other couple of minutes and now it was already croaking six and soon Olya would be getting up for her school so I had to put things on, quick, and go away before Aunt Nina were back from her work...)

Of course, that night we had allowed ourselves too much reaching way too far for any fail-safe. Hugs and kisses by the khutta wicket or on Sveta's porch were not enough anymore, and wouldn't do.

But where? And when?

On November 7, said Olga, after young Olya would pass in the holiday demonstration in the column of her school and be taken by Uncle Kolya and Aunt Nina on a visit to his village.

And that time no tricks would avail Olga to wriggle away, the cuckoo's cries would mean nothing with the whole night being our own...

On the morning of the Great October Revolution Day, I came after Olga because we also were going out in the festive city.

She was retouching with a pencil her trimmed, thread-thin, brows, and marking the corners of her eyes; spiffing up, in short.

There was no one but us, yet to my embrace, she didn't respond with her body and said, "Why? The khutta is ours today. It's only...You know, there's something..."

I froze in mortification; could it be she's going announce she had her time of the month?

Well, in general, if I wanted it...well, I knew what...happen, then I had to agree to one condition...

"What?! Speak out!"

Now, before going out to the city she would make up my eyes.

What the fuck?!. Though, if you come to think about it, that was better than the menstruation...

Hercules would understand me. After the victorious fights with the Nemean Lion, the Lernean Hydra, the Cretan Bull, and other monsters, he was made (by a chick named Omphal) wear a female dress and spin the yarn in a gynoecium, with her high heel crumpling his male dignity's throat.

At least in some way, I'd be equal to that inhumanly powerful demigod. And I agreed...blueish eye shadows tinted my eyelids, the black eyeliner ran along the lashes...And out we went to the city.

(...at present, in the aftermath of all those "blue" and "pink" revolutions, after Elton John was knighted, after the charming cutie pirate named Jack Sparrow, etc., etc., people became more intelligently aware.

In those days folks needed more than a glance to get it what the heck there was with my visage.

Then someone shrugged, others giggled...)

Borya Sakoon, who came out of his five-story block in Zelenchuk Area greeted me cheerfully but, after a more close look, suddenly changed in his face.

Genuine fright distorted the worn-out facial features of Overseer, the unfinished "hairy yob..." stuck in his throat and he fled back to the block of his residence.

(...and that was the man who survived the rampant banditry and all kinds of "black cat" gangs in the post-war Konotop!

Or maybe because of that?

After the old Walther gun in the down-most drawer of his chiffonier?..)

"You are nuts and fleeing treatment," concluded my younger sister Natasha flatly, when she met us on the sidewalk of Peace Avenue.

" ...but I don't care

'cause of my boner..."

In the Central Park Olga took out her cosmetic bag and washed out my War Paint; enough for pretending a Hercules.

Then Skully's girlfriend Nina with her girlfriend Ira came up to us, and the three girls walked away looking for a place to have a smoke.

A pack of Settlement dudes approached me; they were celebrating it in full swing already. They felt elated; they wanted that an Orpheus from the Settlement was also nyshtyak. They tore off the lid from an intact bottle and handed it to me.

Everything in this life is to be paid for, even your popularity.

I raised the bottle up, threw back my head, cast the parting look at the sun, and started drinking from the bottle's neck.

Then the bottle went from hands to hands around the circle warm and emotional.

Then we went to a deli for more wine.

Then I felt sick and went home...

I woke up in the lean-to on the iron bed which substituted for "Jawa" after the Arkhipenkos moved to their apartment. My "dacha" season had already been over, but the bed still stayed in the lean-to and, as it happened, that was the rightest place for it.

I woke up with my raincoat and shoes on, but the raw spring mesh of the bed didn't mind. The main thing was that I hadn't overslept the farewell dances that we were playing in Park that evening. Only I still had to trudge all the way there being so stiff and with that oily smack in my dried up mouth and—ouch!—with that pain in the nape...

I finally came there when everyone was already dragging the equipment to the dance-floor stage. Lyokha started to carp that I was shirking, and Olga too went to attack, "Where did you get lost?"

I hardly could explain that I was very so much sick, and Lyokha said all that I needed was a good drink to get alive and kicking. I shuddered at the very thought of it, but Lyokha and Olga began to laugh.

Yurko – the young guy whom Olga used as her errand-boy, ran to a nearby deli and brought wine. I forced myself to take a few gulps and—lo!—it worked like a charm and I got to myself...

After the dances were over and the equipment dragged back to the ticket office, Olga and I left the Plant Park and in two minutes of suspensive walking reached her back-alley.

The first khutta, then the Sveta's one, the third was for us.

I assuredly walked Olga to the wicket, opened it and...all of a sudden, she recoiled!.

By age, I was two years older than Olga, yet always felt, like, it was another way around.

She knew more than I learned from all the stuff in all the books I read.

Besides, she enjoyed respect and authority. Whenever any of the girlfriend in our bohemian milieu had problems with outsiders, she turned to Olga for help. Olga walked out with the brazen and put the stupid cow in her proper place...

It was a rare evening when the dances went off without fighting.

A multi-voiced discordant squeal rose suddenly from the dance-floor, yet not at all in time with the number played at the moment. In the dense mass of the youth gathered for collective recreation, a circle of vacant space formed in no time, filled with the blur of rapid gusts of fists milling the air. The vortex swept, tornado-like, across the dance-floor, through piercing shrieks of girls giving way to it.

Abruptly yet asynchronously, we cut playing and encouraged dear friends to keep order. The defeated side, alone or in a ring of his bros, was pushing through the crowd to the exit. To remove the low depressing hum, Skully set the tempo with dry snaps of sticks against each other and we started the next number...

Girls though did not make a show of their dissent and for their cat-fights invited each other to go out.

Olga went out just a couple of times and gained respect and authority because in Theodosia she had started attending dance-floors at the age of thirteen and, without wasting time on preliminary talks, switched them off in a business-like manner.

As a result, if some frostbitten bitch hurt feelings of a girl from the bohemian circle, then mentioning Olga's name alone was enough to make her realize the blunder and shut up.

Another reason why Olga seemed maturer than me was the attentive attitude towards her from mujiks.

Once after the dances, when we were collecting cables and stuff from upon the stage, a frightened geezer ran into the dance-floor, crossed it and jumped over the fence into the Plant Park. At the last moment his chaser, a hairy-ass mujik over thirty, managed to deal a glancing strike and the fugitive fell awkwardly into the bushes, but bounced up at once and ran away.

"I'll catch you, bitch!" cried the triumphant and, turning to Olga who stood by the stage, added, "Ain't it, Ruddy?"

"You yourself is the word," Olga answered diplomatically, and the latter left the dance-floor with a swagger.

That's why I felt to be younger than her. But the moment she flinched at the wicket of the dark khutta that feeling disappeared, and everything fell into place.

Next to her fear, I felt older and stronger than her; I felt pity for her and compassion. After all, the younger ones should be cared for and protected. Even from ourselves.

I comforted the frightened girl and left without entering the yard.

On my way to Nezhin Street, I knew that I had done the righteous thing and was pleased with myself, yet all the same, I couldn't but agree with the diagnosis from my sister Natasha – "nuts and fleeing treatment"...

On November 7, the unusually long Indian summer ended and we moved to Club to play dances there.

The Ballet Studio Gym opposite the cinema auditorium on the second floor stretched for some forty meters from the door to the small stage at the far end wall. The stage was intended not for concerts but for Evenings of Recreation and, therefore, could be climbed in two steps over a couple of stairs running all its width. That way a recreating participant could ascend it when called by the mass-entertainer to take part in some funny competition or another event of the Evening.

The stage took the central one-third of Ballet Gym's width and on both sides was bounded with vertical gratings of smooth black-paint-coated rebar rods. The light cloth curtains hanging behind the gratings formed, like, some backstage.

In the center of Ballet Gym, high above, midst the roof bearing structures painted with the black Kuzbass-Lacquer, there was fixed a large white ball with the scale-like rind of mirror shards. Besides, up there was also set up the searchlight directed at the ball and one click switched synchronously on both the rotation of the ball brought about by an electric motor and the bright beam reflected in the scale-shards which sent dim polygonal spots of light to float slowly along the walls and floorboards of the Ballet Gym.

The long-side walls consisted of high frequent windows, below which the handrail for the ballet art students was running from end to end of the spacey room.

The butt wall opposite the stage was paneled, according to the ballet school tradition, with large tight fitted squares of mirrors from which the room derived its second name – the Mirror Hall...

The Mirror Hall served an ideal place for any gathering – from the New Year matinees for the Settlement kids to School Graduating Parties, Evenings of Recreation for the Plant youth and, last but not least, for dances. And those very dances were to disclose the weak spot in the ideal – its floor.

Under the shuffling soles of a couple of hundred dancers, the red paint coat of the floorboards peeled off and turned into fine dust in less than a month. However, Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, said it did not matter.

On both sides of the stage behind the curtains, there were installed the huge loudspeakers transported from the summer cinema in the Plant Park, and they produced some bomb sound, awesome nyshtyak!

Our distant figures with guitars reflected in the far-off wall of the Mirror Hall, stuck above the rhythmically swaying tide of dancers' heads in the huge murky void whose only illumination was the beam fractured into the floating swarm of specks – round and round, and round – and everything went on nyshtyak through and through.

And only Chuba puffed and complained that the sound of his bass guitar from two black portable loudspeakers on the stage was lost completely behind the mighty boxes with the meter-wide speakers. Lyokha habitually replied that he knew a guy who had low-frequency speakers for bass, and we only had to procure material for a box to install those. And it was also he to suggest the appropriate place for getting the material in question – the KaPeVeRrZe Plant. After all, all we needed was a sheet of thick plywood, three by two meters.

We, the Plant affiliated Orpheuses, started to mull over a plan.

In Repair Shop Floor, there was no plywood whatsoever, everything we dealt with there was iron and steel. The proper place to look for plywood was Car Repairing Shop Floor, where Chuba worked. And he admitted that the plywood could be extracted from the cars brought for repair, but how to get it outta Plant?

He firmly declined the proposal to cut the plywood into pieces the size of the bass box parts and drop them over the wall in Professions Street because his overseer would fire off uncomfortable questions about the source for so immodest quantities of such an expensive material.

Thus, we were left with one and the only option – to get the whole sheet out of Plant through Club building, with its never closed side door to the Plant grounds, next to the bill painters' room.

However, the planned mission had a certain slippery point – Car Repair Shop Floor and Club were located at the opposite ends of Plant. Dragging the whole sheet through all of the Plant territory?

Chuba refused to take such a risk, neither Skully showed any whiff of enthusiasm. As usual, the hardest part in undertaking rested entirely on my and Vladya's shoulders...

Still and all, Chuba in part collaborated and ripped off the plywood sheet in a car waiting for repair on a sideway outta his shop floor and went away forgetful to lock the car's door as required by the rules.

Through that door, I and Vladya penetrated the car to find, in the indicated place, the coveted treasure – a standard sheet of thirty-millimeter-thick plywood which had a couple of stains but, on the whole, they did not matter.

We dragged the plywood out of the car and, grabbing from the edges, carried it along the gravel of the track ballast shoulder, then along the asphalt paths between the Plant shop floors. On the way, we kept persuading each other that the sheet was not too mighty heavy and that there was nothing special if two workmen carried it along the shop floors within Plant. Although we, personally, had never observed such a picture because of dollies were a usual means of transportation for the like operations.

When to Club there remained the smaller leg of passing by Smithy Shop Floor, All-Plant Bathhouse, the Fire Brigade building, Oxygen Tank Filling Station and Medical Center, Skully ran up from Mechanical Shop Floor to inform that Borya Sakoon sent after us and if we didn't show up we would get fired.

That was some news, our Overseer at the Experimental Unit never came up with so fiery threats. Could it be Head of the Criminal Investigation Department came on another visit?

So we rested the sheet against the smoky wall of Smithy Shop Floor under the marble tablet screwed to the bricks announcing that in 1967, on the fifties anniversary of the Soviet Power, there was embedded a message to the KaPeVeRrZe Plant workers who would work there in the year of the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution.

Making sure that our sheet did not interfere with the traffic, we went to the Repair Shop Floor.

Borya was raging far more furiously than Fantômas himself – where the heck we two been paddling when the whole Experimental Unit was sent to harvesting?.

Yes, harvesting was not a thing to shrug away. It was like parading the entire workforce of the Experimental Unit. That was the moment when everyone was engaged to the utmost.

All the locksmiths from the Experimental Unit, in full collection, with a paper slip listing the required materials and quantities, made for Central Warehouse.

There, behind the All-Plant Bathhouse, heaps of rebar rods of different diameters, by heaps of metal fittings of powerful profiles, by heaps of pipes with a cross-section of no less than ten centimeters were piled criss-cross by the railway track.

Soon after, the workmen got joined by a dolly-car, and then along the tracks about Central Warehouse, a stocky railway crane would roll to their group and hover the dangling steel cables of its beam over the tangled heaps and hills of all those piles of metal.

Two of the most experienced workers, equipped with steely breakers, would noose the pipes, rebars or channels named in the paper.

The rest of the congregation would share their sage advice from a reasonably safe distance.

The crane would pull the cinched bunch of metal and, with scraping screech, tear it out from the heap of iron jumbled with all the previous harvestings, then lower the catch onto the waiting dolly-car.

The Ware House employee would compare the approximate amount of the cargo with the figures in the order and give his "go ahead".

Returning from a safe distance, the dolly-car driver would drive it to Repair Shop Floor, scraping, on the way, the asphalt of the paths with dangling ends of rebars, or pipes or whatever else was there in the requested order.

The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit would return to Repair Shop Floor in one cheerful, monolithic mass, proud of the fulfilled duty...

And now the coming back harvesters appeared from the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, yet we were not among them. We failed to attend the holy rite of harvesting.

Fortunately, our Overseer had a kinda soft sport for Vladya because of having the mutual last name, even though without being relatives, and we again slipped from the Experimental Unit directly to our sheet under the memorial tablet.

The Manager of the Repair Unit by Repair Shop Floor, Mozgovoy, stood next to it eying the plywood avidly and swallowing his managerial saliva. Of course, such material would whet anyone's appetite.

We clawed our prey like two winning vultures.

"Where to?" asked Mozgovoy in his plaintive falsetto.

"To Plant Management," replied Vladya casually and we dragged the sheet in the direction of Main Check-Entrance next to the backside of the Club building that substituted–for the stretch of its length–the wall around Plant.

The back door, sure thing, was not locked. We dragged the sheet in, and leaned it against the bunch of billboards opposite the painters' room...

When after work we came to Club to move the plywood to our room, the crisp-curled House Manager, Stepan, was already wheeling round and about our sheet.

The deficit material would entice anyone into improper planning even a do-nothing, who in all of his life did not hold anything heavier than the bunch of keys in his hands. It's not about Stepan though, who once was a good carpenter they said; it's about Director of Club, who stood by and tinkled his personal bunch of keys, hallooing Stepan to our trophy.

Don't rub the soap to your cheeks, Pavel Mitrofanovich, no shaving for you today, as ran a winged Settlement saying popular at those days...

The winter broke out somehow straightaway, the snowdrifts piled high up as if they always were there...

Before the dances, I went to pick up Olga. She introduced me to everyone in the khutta and I was insistingly invited to take my coat off, get seated and have a drink, but, no, thank you, I had to work that evening it was time for us to leave. So Olga got dressed and we left.

However, it was a bit early for Club because we weren't moving the equipment from the stage but only locked the Mirror Hall after the dances. With so much spare time, we paid a visit to the bench near the oil storage Base. Olga had a bottle of wine in her bag and we drank it; not too much though just as general tone up for the warmth's sake. And from there we went to Club over the crunchy snow crust tightened along the streets by traffic tires and tramping passers'-by footwear...

Already at night, dark and moonless but with the sky pricked by myriads bright star-specks, we came back to the unfinished bottle of red wine stashed away among the snowdrifts.

The wine felt much too cold to make you warm, and tasteless like the ice. We scarcely drank half of what was there in the bottle and lit our cigarettes.

I unbuttoned my coat, she unbuttoned hers and got seated in my lap. We had already used to treat each other as personal property. I might run my hand into her pantyhose up to that convex concavity which I missed on the too-short night. She, in her turn, could casually unfasten my belt and unbutton the fly to comfortably grip my boner.

Everything went on, as usual, blended with long, like a protracted dive into another dimension, kisses.

And then all of a sudden there happened something of which I couldn't understand what or how but only that it was somewhere else...where I got into...out of myself...and mingling with....the fusion grew firmer with each push...no I remained anymore just we...we...we...and nothing else...unmakeoutable...doesn't matter...and all's swimming...in blur of blindfolding mist...what's that?. What?!. Oh, no!. More!.

The connection was lost. The night slowly emerged back from nowhere...the snow...the bench was there again...A couple of jerks after the elusive new world showed there was nothing to sustain, to return, to keep on with.

We broke apart becoming her and me again.

I stood up, deafened.

That same lamp from up its post. The sparks winking from the snowdrifts around. The black sky...the pin-pricks of stars...

When no one would think of thinking...

Where's my hat? Dammit, wherever be it can wait...

November 17... 17-year-old locksmith apprentice...lost his virginity...

And she?

(...I do not know until now.

It does not matter.

Who cares?.)

Saying goodbye to her, so quaintly quiet, by the khutta of her aunt, I realized that now it was my duty to be stronger than she and I did not have to give much thought to anything else, from now and forever and ever.

(...Here! Here! Wow!

I can present ideas in a pretty form, can I?

Subsequently though...Decades later...)

The following evening I ventured to the Evening School of Working Youth where Olga from time to time attended classes because Aunt Nina pressed her to get the paper about finishing eighth grade.

After the bell for a break, she went out into the corridor and left with me skipping the rest of the classes. I saw Olga to her aunt's khutta listening on the way to what record-making bleeding she had the previous night.

(...as if it means anything.

What's the point in all the maidenheads, circumcisions, adulteries and faithfulness forever and a day?

" _What was – is no more for good._

What is – flows away through clenched fingers.

What is to come – can't be avoided...)

It was not possible, of course, for our love affair to melt the snow and ice around, but all the ice and snow of winter could not suppress our flaming ardor. Moreover, we fanned the flame at the least opportunity.

The snow-covered bench by the oil storage Base was soon rejected because of its unwanted backrest.

The sheet-iron trailer by the tiny ice rink in the Plant Park was more convenient, but it took an unbearably long time waiting until the bros would finish their wine, then go through their atomic reports to each other about what kind and which dosage of alcohol they consumed earlier on that day and which circumstances led to having it in their current composition, concluding the brag session with argumentative punches at each other's mug (without drawing a knife though), before they, at last, dispersed.

Drawing the knife out when Kolyan was around, a bro could just as well kiss it goodbye before the inexorably pending confiscation.

Kolyan O' Settlement was a specimen of the increasingly scanty breed of heroes. Not too large an exemplar though, he was only one meter and eighty, and utterly laconic.

On the other hand, he didn't really need to flash eloquence because a single glance at those fists about twenty kilos each was enough for any wish of odd discussions to die out by itself. Even for a dumbo clapped with a sack on his head from around the corner, it was clear at once that Kolyan would make a toast of him in less than six seconds flat.

Among the bros, of course, he could say a thing or two, only you had to patiently wait till his words were out, after all.

Admittance to the trailer was granted us because he miscalculated me for a champion-bro in a specific line which irrevocable mistake he entertained since my "engagement" with Olga back in summer when we had just started going out together.

One evening starting off to the Plant Park, I spruced my little finger up with a ring cajoled out of my sister. A casual tawdry fake it was with a splinter of glass or something. Rather reluctantly, Natasha farmed it out after I swore it was just for that one time.

In the Plant Park, Olga and I climbed up to the projectionist booth in the summer cinema whose key was obtained from the younger projectionist, Grisha Zaychenko.

The moment she saw the ring on my little finger, Olga clung tighter than a leaf from the sauna whisker in the steam-room: who gave me that?

Borrowed from Kiddy, said I, my younger sister.

With outright disbelief, Olga demanded the thing for a closer inspection.

Hardly had I passed the ring when she clapped it on her finger, some other than the little one though.

Okay, said I, that was enough for showing off and let her give it back for I had promised Natasha to return, it was, like, from her boyfriend.

At that point, Olga took heed and tried to take the ring off but – no go! She twirled, and pulled, and spat at the darn thing to no avail, the ring held a tight grip on her finger.

The date turned into a dungeon torture session until she somehow managed to force it over her finger joint.

When, at last, I shoved the cursed ring into my hip-pocket, we were not fit for kisses and stuff with Olga's finger hurt and swollen and me feeling sorry for her. So I locked the booth and we left...

Now, Kolyan at that time was picking up steam in the ticket office together with the Plant Park watchman, and he observed who it was coming down from above.

And what possibly could he have thought, if from the booth portholes, for some half-hour the female moans had been floating over the entire summer cinema?

"Oh, my! Mmmm! Ouu! Ay!"

That's why, he kinda thought: where, in such a small...well.. thing...could it...sort of...be sitting?

In a word, he respected me as a bro hero, only from another branch.

And for all those reasons, coming on a visit to the sheet-iron trailer and having sat in heated expectation through the ongoing stupid debates of the present booby jerks on that it was high time to kick the ass of the Peace Square hippies who lately had become way too hippy, and when at last they'd free the premises of their presence happy with their being such cool goons, we still had to wait until Kolyan would finish his endless explanations as to where...well...to...kinda put...the key...well...of...sort of...the trailer...

The warmest feelings were left by the long sheepskin coat of Aunt Nina in which Olga once ventured from the khutta wicket.

We descended into the snow-filled Grove with the patches of smooth hard ice of the frozen Swamp and it was good, but, as always, not enough...

At Plant, the term of our apprentice training expired and we began to get the payment of seventy rubles a month – almost as much as other locksmiths.

Now, cutting the iron with a chisel, we no longer bruised our fingers with the hammer and we (the hairy yobbos) were even trusted with the manufacture of an experimental product from scratch.

It's interesting.

We scrutinized the intangible speculative thought turned into visual lines of blue-prints specked with countless figures to indicate dimension.

Observing those figures, we asked the gas welder to cut the necessary pieces out from 20mm-thick sheet iron, asked the marker to delineate the contours, asked the planer to scratch odd metal off to the markings, asked the welder to weld this one to that, and that to another...

Why so many requests? Well, because everyone's busy, sort of...

Sometimes from the request to its execution, it took weeks of waiting, or go and ask once again...

And – lo! – the skeleton of the product-in-progress on the deck-rack outta Repair Shop Floor grew with the added assemblage parts began to acquire engaging looks. Overseer ceased to call us "hairy yobbos" at every turn, and the Experimental Unit locksmiths drop the stale joke about the launch date of our "Lunokhod-2", aka Lunar Rover.

At that point Manager of the Experimental Unit ordered to deliver the already thoroughly-smeared cardboard folder with the multitude of blue-prints to Yasha and Mykola-the-old letting the more skilled workforce finalize the disembodied technical idea in weighty tangibility.

It hurts.

The following product was simply ruined by us.

Using lots of material, we assembled the massive stand "Glory to Labor!" on the deck-rack and called Borya Sakoon to assess the accomplished work before erecting it on the square in front of the Main Check-Entrance. The overseer looked through the blueprints and said something was wrong though he couldn't put the finger on it.

Engineer-Technologist climbed down from the Shop Floor Management Office above the locker room and joined Borya's negative appraisal – yes, something was certainly amiss, not quite the thing.

However, neither separately nor together, they could tell exactly what's not right, even after checking the dimensions of the manufactured monument with a tape measure.

The author of the ill-starred project was called from Design Bureau by Plant Management. And it took a while even for him to guess the reason. We faithfully preserved all the subtleties of his idea and executed it in metal without any deviations, except for producing the mirrored reflection of the blueprints. The product was cut to pieces and the square remained without architectural beautification...

After the New Year, a special team was sent from the Experimental Unit to the construction site of a feed mill in the village of Semyanovka. The team comprised three locksmiths: Mykola-the young, Vasya, and me, under command of Borya Sakoon, the Overseer.

On the first morning, as we started off to Semyanovka in a truck back with the tarp top, there was terrible ice on the roads. The truck driver drove very slowly not to slide and follow the suite of those vehicles whose drivers had lost the control on the ice, and they loomed now, here and there, with their wheels up in the dense fog wrapping the roadside. And so we puttered on through eerie stillness and flowing fog waves that muffled the sound of the truck engine.

Some panorama of the concluding stage in the Stalingrad Battle for you...

The feed mill was a gray building of three sections, half-kilometer off the village, surrounded from all the sides by a silent chilly field of weather-beaten snow.

The boiler room did not work, we had to bore the wall yet, with breakers, to lay pipes through. Frosty iron sides of numb bunkers and mute conveyor-belts filled space in the other half-dark section.

For two weeks we went there to knock steel against steel while walloping the walls or rigging the conveyor belts, and to doze over the red-hot electrical spiral in the chilly boiler room.

At one of such soft snoozes, a sharp awl's prick pierced my brain. Starting up from pain to the jubilant guffaw from Vasya's happy snout, I noticed a piece of smoldering cotton dropped on the floor, whose bitter smoke had penetrated through my nostrils to give the unbearable sensation.

Overseer and Mykola also laughed, but not as gleefully as Vasya, that stupid dickhead or, to put it limpidly, a fucking 30-year-old miscarriage. No wonder, my Uncle Vadya never tired to recite his favorite chant, "Heroes are what Homeland needs, but Cunt keeps turning out morons..."

One day Mykola brought raw potatoes from a solitary clamp in the field and we undertook baking them just to have some pastime.

Borya sent me to collect the pieces of crashed boards remaining on the site after they finished construction works. Mykola and Vasya fetched a couple armfuls of some straw to the unfinished weigh-bridge section for kindling the bonfire with the firewood fetched by me.

The gate to the section, with one of its wings removed from the hinges, could not ward off the wind which kept breaking in and swerved the smoke whatever way it fancied.

We stood around the fire in the chilly gusts that tore from the white field under the gray sky, when the Overseer remarked, "In four years I will retire but this here latata would not get ready yet." He threw a "Prima" stub into the fire and went in the section corner to blind the walls with a welding electrode set a-crackling.

What a beautiful word "latata", I have never heard anyone calling potatoes that way...

Now, Borya started playing with the electric welding, Vasya went over to hold the pipe pieces for him to weld up and by the dismal fire there remained only Mykola and I with our shoulders rolled up, noses wrinkled, eyes at a squint from the smart smoke. Some boring party...

Then I grabbed the piece of chalk brought with us to mark the lengths of pipe when cutting it up and started a drawing on the gate wing leaned against its shut counterpart. I did it slowly and tried to do my level best, there was plenty of time before the truck would arrive to take us home.

Perhaps, that was the most successful drawing in my entire life, almost of natural dimensions, with thorough attention to the details. Nu, of course.

Hips, breasts, long hair falling behind the back, the captivating triangle and tempting call in the look of her eyes from under partly lowered eyelids.

Wow! Nothing to add to nor remove from.

However, the piece of chalk had not been finished off yet. So, I used it for block letters next to the nude beauty.

"BORYA, I AM WAITING FOR YOU!."

Then I went to the fire because the wind had thoroughly chilled the feet of the artist absorbed in his creative efforts.

Mykola stood there too and giggled gazing at the gate wing.

At that moment, Borya Sakoon took his face out of the black box of his welder mask and traced Mykola's stare back to the gate wing.

No Stanislavsky system would ever reproduce the facial expression acquired by Borya's mug a moment later. "Who?!."

Mykola and I stood by the fire pretending naive ignorance of reasons for the emotional outburst shattering the Overseer's soul.

As for Vasya, squatting next to Overseer to hold the workpiece pipe with both hands, he dropped his look to the floor quite impartially, but at the same time, his piggy snout turned into a stubby index finger and pointed at me like the compass needle who knows where North is.

"Bitch!."

The innate instinct for self-preservation did its job, and I sprinted to the conveyors' section ahead of the pipe-length tinkling along the cemented floor in my wake.

Why, of so too many foul words in Borya's lexicon, did he use "bitch!"? To support the tradition of thieves-in-law? Good luck he'd never been trained at gorodki game...

I came back ten minutes later.

The word "BORYA" was servilely effaced from the gate wing with Vasya's work glove.

The rest was left as it had been.

The hand of vandals dared not destroy the masterpiece...

We played in the Mirror Hall, aka Ballet Studio Gym. Lekha sat at the Yonika, Skully – behind his "kitchen", Chuba, with a dormant stare into the dimly lit Hall, sluggishly picked the strings of his bass guitar.

It was a slow-tempo number, the "white dance" for girls to pick their partners. Vladya's girlfriend Raya had invited and led him off into the mass of dancers to have hugs in the slow floating waves of light specks from the mirror splinters in the ball spinning overheads.

In the right corner of the small stage, leaning my behind against the lowered fallboard of the upright piano, I strummed the chords of the rhythm-guitar part. Behind the piano, Olga stood with her arms folded over its top board and bored she was. "Kiss me," sounded her demand.

I turned my head to the left and, over my shoulder and the piano between us, merged into a long kiss with her warm soft lips. My fingers knew without me when to go to the next chord.

With the public kiss over, I modestly turned my face down to my guitar to regain the normal breathing and heard how Olga exclaimed behind me, "Oy! Mother!"

That was the beginning of the end. Among the dancing pairs, there stood still her mother who had arrived unexpectedly from the Crimea to take Olga back to Theodosia down there...

And from another end of our boundless, vast Homeland, from another port city in another sea, The Spitzbergen band arrived in Konotop from the Murmansk city to start playing dances at Loony, as agreed with its Director, Bohmstein.

We were undone by The Spitzes in a fortnight. Two weeks later, the Mirror Hall at Club was empty because the dancing crowd spurted to the dances in Loony, to the concert hall on the second floor, which used to be the listing for CJI competitive battles, and now, freed of all the audience seats, was turned into a parquet ballroom.

However, not the parquet became the decisive point.

The restaurant band from Murmansk, made up of four musicians from twenty to twenty-five-year-old, brought Western instruments and rock-group equipment available in port cities, including the organ of the "Roland" brand, and (most importantly) they sang. Moreover, they sang into professional microphones producing the echo effect.

"One!.. un!.. un! Two!.. oo!.. oo!"

The Orpheuses with their homemade stuff went kaput. Yes, there still remained concerts in Club, "playing trash" but the dances just faded out...

Olga's both mother and unregistered stepfather left Konotop, taking along her most solemn oath of coming back to Theodosia in two weeks, yet The Spitzes got firmly anchored in the city...

At the end of February, I saw Olga off. She boarded the last car in a train leaving from Platform 4 and when it moved with the starting jerk, Olga waved to me through the glass in the car door.

Grabbing the handrails by the sides of the locked door I jumped onto the steps under it.

The train was quickly gaining speed, she got scared and frantically cried behind the glass I could not hear what, as if I did not know what I was doing. I jumped off at the very end of the platform, because further on you could indeed break a leg or two against the rails, and the crossties half-buried with the gravel...

In March I sent her a letter.

It was very romantic stuff, that above the locksmith vise at my workplace I was seeing the heavenly features of her dear face.

No, I didn't copy the lines from Pushkin, but the essence and spirit were the same, and only the lexicon was upgraded for a century-and-a-half.

In the opinion of the locksmiths at the Experimental Unit of Repair Shop Floor, such a letter could have been written by only a complete cuntsucker.

They had not read it though, neither had she because the letter did not find her in Theodosia.

Olga returned to Konotop to inform me that she was pregnant...

At those rational days of planned economy and growing concern for the needs of the population, condoms in the Soviet Union could be purchased even at news stalls, three kopecks apiece. Yet, for me, a condom was just a word from the dirty jokes folklore, and I had no idea what "protective care" meant.

Then she took the pill and everything got off easy...

Spring came early, amicable and warm.

In mid-April, I started the "dacha" season of sleeping in the lean-to. I swept it and moved the mattress and blanket to the iron bed that spent the winter over there.

The same evening in the Plant Park, I invited Olga to "my place". She easily agreed.

All the way from the Plant Park to Nezhin Street I was walking on clouds. We strolled in the dark, tightly catching each other at the waist. Through the yard of the Turkovs' khutta and the back garden under the sole window of ours, we sneaked into the lean-to, and I latched the door.

In the breaks between having sexes, I, obedient to Valle-Inclan's commandment, was restoring the equality between my "hands that already knew everything and the eyes that still hadn't seen anything...", for which purpose, I lit up matches, one by one, and did not allow her to shyly pull the blanket over her body emerging in the flickering light.

We woke up at dawn and walked through the deafening silence and strangeness of empty streets to her girlfriend Sveta's khutta so that Olga would have an alibi for her Aunt Nina.

On my way back I met the morning first pedestrian. It was past Bazaar, The man was walking in the counter direction along the other side of Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street...

I was fine with her, yet I wanted to get rid of our affair.

Firstly, not always it was really good. The time when we went to the Seim and I spread her in the willow thicket, everything turned out somehow flat and not exactly the thing.

We, certainly, rehabilitated ourselves later, when she invited me to the shower at her workplace.

Yes, she had already got a job in the city and was delivering telegrams from Main Post-Office.

(...it is hard to believe, but even way back in the 1970s, in absence of as yet undreamed of mobile phones, people managed to somehow survive.

Telegrams helped to do the trick. They were delivered on the post-office blanks with the glue-mounted paper ribbons from a telegraph machine which had printed the words, "come Friday ten Moscow-Kiev car seven".

The telegram messages conveyed only the core essence of information because you had to pay for each word in it and for each punctuation mark, including the address of the person to whom it was sent.

Alms are the insurmountable teacher of the laconic style.

But if you had money to burn then, of course, you could write in full – "I AM ARRIVING ON FRIDAY BY THE TRAIN MOSCOW-KIEV AT 10 AM IN THE CAR NUMBER SEVEN", and then even add in the end – "I LOVE YOU FOREVER COMA MY DEAR PERIOD"

And the workers from Main Post-Office would bring the telegram in their tiny black on-duty handbag, "Sign here on the receipt, please."...)

She ended her work at five, and we met by the five-story hotel "The Seagull" paneled with large yellowish tiles. On the wide porch beside the entrance to the hotel, there were two more glass doors: Inter-City Telephone Communication Station, and Main Post-Office.

Olga led me to the post's service entrance on the back of the building. Entering the long corridor, she went ahead by herself and at its far end turned around and beaconed me. Some doors stood open and there were women sitting with their backs to me, in front of their windows in the glass partitions dividing them from the customers.

We descended into a wide basement hall with long low windows overhead and the row of shower stalls along the wall.

Entering one of them, we undressed and Olga turned the hot water on.

(...in the early 90's the scene in the shower, starring Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in some action movie, was declared the hottest Hollywood erotic of the year.

But they plagiarized it from our visit to Main Post-Office!

Twenty years later.

And now they tell me there was no sex in the USSR. Yes, there was!

Only the term for it sounded differently...)

At the end of our hot f-f...er...well...scene...there was a certain moment that Hollywood never dare to shoot. That is when along Olga's white taut thigh, in between droplets and paths of the running hot water, there crawled two-three whitish-roiled spits...

I had certainly seen that frame before but could not recollect where exactly...

Yes, I had started to be "protective careful".

(...an incomplete bookish education at times ends up in misconceptions.

For a long time, I entertained an erroneous opinion that 'masturbation' stood for handwork exclusively – rubbing your dick until you cum.

But, no!. It turned out, that even in the Old Testament there was a man named Onan, who was in the habit of watering the earth floor of his tent with his seed at the end of, otherwise normal, sexual intercourse. The final chord, so to speak.

The chord, to be frank, just a stinky clam, absolutely out of tune, but served a means of protective care to prevent unwanted conception...)

And, secondly, I was freaked out by Olga's first pregnancy and feared a repetition – who would care?

I did not want to get tied up in wedlock, and one dark evening on the porch of Sveta's khutta, I even gave it a try at ridding of the delightful cause of the unwanted effect.

I told her that it was time for us to part. She started crying, "Why?."

I lit a cigarette, "We must do it. I have met another."

"Who?! Tell me her name!"

"You still do not know."

"But tell me!"

"Well...in short...some...well...Sveta."

"Where does she live?"

"Nearby the gypsies' block."

"You're lying!"

"No, I am not."

And I lit the second cigarette from the stub of the first, as in Italian black-and-white movies, though I did not want to smoke at all, the second one tasted too bitter and even disgusting.

I smoked half of it, felt nauseated and gave up. It was the surrender to both of them: I could not finish off the cigarette, neither could I manage to break up with Olga.

The following week, she announced that she was pregnant again and no longer had the pill...

I called my parents to come to the lean-to because we had to talk.

They came in, cautious and silent, unaccustomed to such invitations.

I sat on the chair under the glassed frame by the head of the bed. Mother remained standing at the other end of the empty bed, only leaned against its back. Father stood next to her with his hand resting on the long box-workbench alongside the blind wall.

Then and there, I announced that I would marry Olga.

"How that you will get married?" asked Mother.

"As a man of honor, I have to marry her," replied I.

My parents exchanged wordless glances, Father shook his head, Mother sighed in silence.

Then they sat down on the bed, side by side, and started a detailed discussion on how we were going to celebrate the noble man's wedding...

When I and Olga submitted to the city ZAGS the application stating our wish to get married, they gave out a paper for the Bridal Salon so that we could buy wedding things at a discount.

In Konotop, there was such a salon behind Central Park, yet there they had nothing but two dust-coated mannequins of bride and groom looking out of the dust-stained shop window. We had to go to Kiev.

Lekha Kuzko went with us as an expert, because he had already gone through all of that when marrying Tatyana, and learned places.

In Kiev, we bought rings, the one for Olga was a little yellower, but that of mine – wider. We also bought new shoes for me, and a white silk mini dress for Olga, as well as the wedding veil.

A month later our marriage was registered in Loony. The Hall of Celebrations was on the same floor with the ballroom only in the opposite wing.

For the ceremony, we arrived in a hired taxi. When entering the Hall of Celebrations, we were met with loud electric music by the guys "playing trash". I knew the guitarist with a long deep scar on his cheek playing a red Iolanta, he watched me with round eyes and shrugged.

Ah! To hell! Makes no difference, I never was good at football...

A woman in a dark dress, with glasses and permanent curls in her bob-cut hair, read to Olga and me the rights and responsibilities of a young family, which was a cell in our Soviet society.

We signed the form; Lekha and Sveta seconded.

"That is all, the end to your dreams..."

The trash playing band broke out with Mendelssohn's march, and the photographer from the photo studio across the road shot us with his camera on the tripod.

In the picture ready a week later, there was a hairy yobbo with a not too happy smile and the guiltily scrunched collar of the jacket from the last year's graduation suit. But Olga turned out nicely, only with some sadness in her face. Probably, she did not want to get tied down at just sixteen...

The music at the wedding party was played by The Orpheuses, for free, sure thing, it was not a playing trash occasion.

A couple of boards sealed Zhoolka up in his kennel and in the circle of ground cleared of grass with the chain he dragged after him throughout all his dog's life, they put the instruments and the equipment.

Between the stack of crumbled bricks and the sectioned shed, there was set up a long table, parallel to both, in the shade of the two age-old American maples.

Olga and I sat with our backs to the fence of the Turkovs' yard. Two kitchen chairs under us were coupled into one seat by spreading over them the turned inside-out Father's sheepskin coat with long wisps of fleece, not overly golden but black and maroon anyway.

Around the table there sat the Arkhipenkos, Uncle Vadya with his wife whose Acceptee he was, Olga's mother, Maria, who arrived from the Crimea with her eldest daughter, Vita, Aunt Nina and Uncle Kolya, some nondescript relatives of Solodovnikovs, the immediate and more distant neighbors from Nezhin Street, the Kreepaks, the Plaksins, the Kozhevnikovs, Vladya's mother Galina Petrovna, and all sorts of close friends either to the newly-weds or to the musicians, as well as flying parties of Settlement bros, always ready to drink for free...

The wedding party rambled on till late at night, under the light of a couple of bulbs fixed up in the maples.

They chanted "Bitter! Bitter!" for me and Olga to stand up and kiss each other while they would count loudly how long we kept the kiss.

Father, together with Olga's mother, was put into a handcart and shoot in it along the street (Maria was not quite happy with that ancient beautiful folk custom).

Quak bared himself to the waist and danced holding aloft the large ax which he grabbed from the lean-to, but Uncle Kolya started to clap in time as if he also was a rocker and, seizing a moment, took the ax from the merry Viking.

The Settlement bros dragged Quak to his khutta because he was all mops and brooms already, while Skully kept copulating with Glushcha's sister in the most primeval posture, under the gloomy elm in the back garden.

In short, quite a normal wedding it was, in style to the classic canons and traditions of Settlement...

Already after the midnight, Olga and I retired to our lean-to conjugal bedchamber.

To commence the nuptials, I first had to tidy the place scraping Quak's vomit by the door with a shovel and sweeping out the cigarette butts left by Olga's girlfriends smocking in privacy.

If I imagined beforehand that friendly openness might run into so a callous inconsideration I'd better hang a padlock on the door.

Even the tape in the tape-recorder was obviously played, wound and rewound from the particular place with the erotic French song, which I was going to switch on as the background for Consummation of marriage.

Hopeless to find it in a snap, I just switched the tape on from the very beginning—the song eventually would get played anyway—but as we finished the mentioned consummation it turned out that the tape reel was over too. I somehow missed enjoying those erotic moans by Brigitte Bardot.

Then at the tin roof of the lean-to, a heavy shower clattered poring down on it and on the long leaves of corn crowding in its lot up to the glazed frame wide open into the night garden outside, and we just lay clasped in a tight embrace and it was good...

Our honeymoon coincided with my vacation from Plant.

The first squabble happened on the third day of our married life.

I was sitting in the yard deciphering sheet-music of some Spanish guitar piece. Olga walked past from the khutta to the lean-to and called me along.

I still picked strings for a minute or two, no more, before coming.

She was on the bed shedding tears because I did not need her nor paid any attention: was that the right way to treat wives?

So I had to iron out my wrong-doing in the most effective, as far as I know, way, though I still couldn't get it what was my guilt.

(...and only by now I have figured it out that so works the female instinct for self-preservation, "If you have already got me, then who do you keep practicing that fucking guitar for?"

However, quite possibly, that even now I don't understand them right...)

Lekha Kuzko brought blissful news – we were to play dances at the KEMZ Plant Palace of Culture, he had arranged it.

I was delighted because there's no life without playing dances. Besides, when Olga and I were coming to dances at Loony and they kicked up a fight on the dance-floor there, I feared of accidental harm to her belly, although it was not noticeable yet.

The dances at KEMZ were attended by a crowd from neighborhoods too distant from Loony. Although The Spitzes played better music than we, yet long waiting for a streetcar after their dances would cure any melomania.

And even some bros from the Settlement began to show up at the KEMZ Palace of Culture. People like to join familiar crowds...

Vladya and Chuba were drafted into the army.

Sur, a neighbor of Chuba's, who was still a tenth-grader, stepped into his shoes as the bass guitarist.

A guy from Zagrebelya, handled Fofik, started to sing with us. His crowning number was the song by Makarevitch.

"I drink to those who're at the sea now..."

And another one, about an American pilot, shot down in the sky over Vietnam.

"My F-4 as fast as a bullet..."

(...only recently I found out that was a Russian adaptation of the "Secret Service Man" of Mel Tormé which he sang back in the '50s.

In music, they always were ahead of us...)

One night Olga got with her kisses to my dick, and I yawped, "No need for a wafflister wife!"

She shrunk back, and I immediately regretted my idiocy. Moron! Why? It was so good!

Just joined the crowd of the stupid seminarists...

When it became too cold in the lean-to, we moved into the khutta on the couch in the kitchen.

Each night, I tightly closed the double-leaf door between the kitchen and the room where slept my parents, and my brother and sister. Not because we were having sex every night, but so that they did not guess on what night we were at it...

At the dances in KEMZ Olga seldom danced, the belly became too big but the rock'n'rollers jumped around without ever heeding where to.

And her light brown mini coat became too small for fastening any lower than by the two upper buttons.

Once she began to cry at night that I completely fell out of love with her. But that was not true, I felt sorry for her and wanted to protect from everything.

Olga cried and cried until she made me make love to her.

And it was good, only I tried to be very careful so as not to hurt the belly in any way.

Four days later Olga gave birth to my first daughter, Lenochka...

Children are the flowers of life until they wake up.

"All the day you cried and cried

With your mouth open wide,

No more crying by my side

Or I'll throw you outside!"

Olga's small breasts turned out to be full of milk. After the feeding, there was even the need to milk off the excess. And, of course, she didn't get off my back until I agreed to try the product.

Well, tastes differ and stuff, there's no use to argue, but what the heck do them those silly babies find in it? Pasteurized milk is much better...

Aunt Nina said that the child must be baptized and we took Lenochka to a khutta nearby School 12, at the address given by Olga's aunt.

There were many people crowding in the yard. On the whole, it was a church though without the cross on its roof, sort of an underground temple. But inside it was a usual khutta only without a single piece of furniture.

The baby was taken out of the envelope, hastily moistened so it let loose a protesting weep, and presented with a small cross on a string.

I forgot even to think about the holy event, yet at the end of January Lyonya, Manager of the Experimental Unit and also Komsomol Head of Repair Shop Floor called all the younger locksmiths to the Management Office after work for a Komsomol meeting.

There he announced that he was told by the City Komsomol Committee that I had been to church and baptized my child for which breach of Komsomol ethics the present meeting should pronounce a reprimand to me, as a renegade member.

Everyone voted "pro" at once to cut the meeting short and go home but, leaving hurriedly, expressed their condolence to me for not getting expelled from the organization completely, which would cancel another ten years of their keeping Komsomol contributions from my wages.

As I learned later, the priest baptizer each month was to report of visitors to his crossless church-khutta. That's some underground clergyman for you...

And in February I ran into a huger penalty.

Lekha Kuzko was going then to the city of Korosten to bring electric guitars for the KEMZ Palace of Culture, and I wanted to go with him. That morning I came up to the Management Office and asked to let me go, but they told me to wait for the CEO of Repair Shop Floor.

When Lebedev's black greatcoat showed up in the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, I went out to meet him. However, his back was not straightened up properly at so an early hour, or maybe he kept it too much upright the day before but all he was able to mumble at the moment was "no".

Then I saw red and just left, because I hadn't changed yet into my spetzovka. Yet as it turned out, Lekha was already gone to Korosten.

In short, I got "absence from work" for that day and the CEO of Repair Shop Floor issued the order about transferring me to a lower-paid position as a workman at Smithy Shop Floor for the extent of three months.

"You'd better fell the wood to make you coffins –

The penal battalions are going to attack..."

In Smithy Shop Floor, instead of the remorseless wail of machine-tools, there thundered hydraulic hammers sending a tremor through the asphalt floor and violently roared the everlasting fire bursting in the furnaces where black iron slugs were heated to the scarlet whiteness. The howling of hefty fans in their round grated boxes was also in the score.

Such a fan had a meter wide sweep of their blades and if it caught someone's hand then...That was the reason for those muzzle-gratings.

In a word, you couldn't find a better place for improving your vocal skills. Shout at the top of your lungs and no one would hear you. Even I couldn't hear myself but still kept yelling:

"Oh, Mommy,

Oh, Mommy-Mommy blues,

Oh, Mommy blues..."

But my yelling exercises went on only while my partner Borya was learning how much we were to load that day.

Borya was a penal workman, like me, for violation of labor discipline, yet he was native there, a smith from the Smithy Floor.

A blonde over thirty years old, he was not very tall or bulky, you'd hardly think he was a smith. And in his case, the discipline was violated by being in a state of intoxication at his workplace.

Our job was plain and invariable – loading of steel slugs into the furnaces.

Those slugs waited for us in the left wing of the Smithy Shop Floor building. They were sizable pieces of axes from the railway car and locomotive wheel pairs cut up by the gas cutters during the day shift.

The ex-axis pieces were, sure enough, too heavy to be hoisted by a couple of workmen, penalized or not, that's why there was a crane beam in the wing.

I grabbed hold of a piece with the grip fixed on the winch hook, and Borya operated the buttons of the hand console hanging from the winch in the crane beam and forwarded the slug to the trolley where I directed the lowering grip and held in place until it opened and let the piece go.

That way we loaded several layers of the slugs, depending on the length of the cut pieces (the longer, the heavier) because the following part of our job was to push the trolley along the narrow gauge track of rails.

We pushed it into the main building, onto the turn-disc there which looked like a sewer hatch but only was swerving in its place. Applying our bodies to an end of the loaded trolley we turned it 90 degrees to the left and rolled on further, to the furnace.

The most demanding point in the process of slugs transportation was giving the start to a still-standing trolley. That's where you had to pull your sinews in earnest, and when the trolley began to slowly roll on then it was ours!.

Each furnace vent had a wide iron shelf outside.

Turning his face away from the fiery heat pouring out the vent, Borya set a half-meter-wide tube-roller on the shelf. Then we put onto the roller the oblong spade with raised edges, which prevented the slugs from rolling off the spade.

That spade had an enormous handle of five meters long and was made of steel—not iron—having a cross-section of six by four centimeters. The handle ended with a crossbeam for two workmen to grab its halves from each side of the handle.

But first, I held the end alone so that Borya could use the nearby stationary crane to hoist a slug from the trolley into the spade, shielding his face from the fire in the furnace with his shoulder hunched up. Then he turned the crane over back to the trolley, came up to me, and each of us grabbed his half of the crossbeam.

"Hup!"

And we, rubbing shoulders, went three-four wide strides, accelerating to jogging, towards the flaming hell in the furnace. The run ended with a synchronous jump up and sharp push of the crossbeam down with the aggregated weight of our bodies so that the springy handle would transmit the impact to the spade and toss the slug up and out.

On landing after the jump, your face would turn, on its own accord, away from the scorching heat of fire raging in the furnace. That's why Borya worked in the smith's protective tarp apron, and I was finishing off my once-beloved red sweater.

With our necks defensively pulled in, we strode back pulling the shovel after us, and Borya went to hoist the next slug on it.

"Hither-thither...To and fro...

Oh!. How good it feels!.."

Then we drove the emptied trolley back to fetch a new batch of slugs.

Inside the furnace, they also had to be stacked in layers and rows starting from the deepest, otherwise, they just wouldn't fit in.

The more of them loaded inside, the shorter the runs with the shovel...

I didn't immediately mastered the synchronous jumping, and Borya cursed me with inaudible, behind the rumble and roar, taboo words because the slug wrongly dropped across a layer would fucking fuck your ass when loading the following ones.

Borya was overly terse. I had more communication with the fan (singing in a duo) than with him.

But once Borya shouted into my ear, "We've done forty tons today!" The red flames from the furnace reflected in the teeth bared in a pleased smile and the whites of his eyes. Some labor victory!.

Empty worthless bullshit. It's just because we did it.

"You load sixteen tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt..."

We worked two shifts – the second and the third, leaving the first one to the gas cutters for cutting axes to pieces.

On the payday I could hardly believe my eyes – I had earned a hundred and twenty rubles a month!.

"...transferred to a lower-paid position..."

" Ha-ha, Mr. Lebedev!

Ha-ha! Mr. Heath!

'Cause I'm a workman!

Yea! Yea! Yea!.."

And to the smiths, the cashier was forking out two-three unopened packs of money in bank wrapping plus stray notes. Over three hundred rubles!

Yes, Borya, you'd better cut out boozing at your workplace.

" Hither-thither...To and fro...

Oh!... How good it feels!.."

(...I have always been, am, and will be cursing that night when I let out that cry of a dirty stupid "seminarist".

Yet what's said can't be unsaid...)

And Olga again wanted something else...

Once, when I was throwing the slugs into her furnace, she started demanding, "Tell it.... what!.. you're doing.... now..."

"I'm...making!.. love...to you!.."

"No!.. tell it...the other!.. way..."

"Which...way?.."

"You.. know!.. which..."

And I started to moan it out, "I'm...fuc...king...you!.."

"Ah!"

"You'm...fu... cki...ng...I..."

"Oh, my!.."

The dark kitchen. The baby's asleep. And what could it understand then...

Another night she addressed me from the darkness, "Hit me!"

"You crazy?"

"No, I'm not! Hit me!"

Well, at last, she made me to lightly slap her cheek.

"Not just so! Hit hard!"

Knowing she'd not get off my back in any way, I meted out a more sonorous slap. She stretched on her back sobbing.

"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 whoeer...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 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 by 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 freshly skin-headed heads in the thick crowd of seers-off.

Tolik Arkhipenko kept assuring everyone that I would be just fine. Olga sobbed loudly.

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 seers-off crowd rushed across Peace Avenue.

Olga ran up the first.

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 soaked with her tears.

The belated draftee was brought in a car, and we were told to get on buses again.

The motor started.

The door slammed shut and the bus finally, uncompromisingly, and irretrievably carried us away 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 turn shiny

Will be polished with our boots

Will be milled to dust fine and tiny

By the brave marching recruits..."

(to the air of "Take the harness, guys, off your horses...")

At the Draft Collection and Distribution Point in the regional center, I made the desperate last attempt to get exempted from the army service.

At the final medical check, I told the oculist that with my left eye I could see no deeper than two lines in his check chart on the wall, although, in fact, I saw three. For the exaggerated deficiency, I was classified as fit for non-combat service in the construction troops.

After two days of kicking back on bare-plunk decking at the Collection and Distribution Point and equally hard shelves in the railway cars for draftees, I stood on the platform of Stavropol Railway Station in one shoe. Unlike the Perseus' case, my right foot was not bare but with a black, cotton, sock on.

And what else could I do?

Early in the morning when they commanded all to leave the car, I searched not only the section where I slept but the neighboring ones as well. My right shoe was not found and in the rank of draftees on the station platform, a fuzzy suspicion in my mind began to gradually acquire more and more precise delineation that my footwear item's disappearance came to pass by dint of the vindictive hand of Valik Nazarenko from the Krolevets city.

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

And when our train left the station, Valik would assume a clever countenance and ask himself his invariable question, "Who else to write to?" Then followed his answer to himself, "Ah! I know!" And he began to fill another postcard or two that he was going to serve in the army and had already passed the city of Rostov. And finally, he read his literary production out loud for all the present in our car section.

All of his writings were alike and ended with an inevitable, "My best wishes, Valik".

At some point, 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 wet after the night rain in a soaked sock, I did not feel like laughing at all.

The kickback to my pun left me in one shoe at our arrival in the city of Stavropol. The redhead bastard paid with a practical joke for a whimsical play on words. However, who's not caught at action is not the joker.

We were told to get into the backs of waiting trucks, that drove us through an unknown, not yet awaken, city, then left it as well as the highway out of it and turned to the left along a worn-out asphalt road that after three more kilometers reached a long white-brick wall the height of a medium man.

The trucks turned into the gate welded of 2-inch thick iron pipes by the checkpoint guardhouse with the glazed red tablet disclosing it was Military-Construction Unit 11, Military Detachment 41769, while the road left behind 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 entertained any such plans because, according to the old tradition, draftees were leaving for the service in their junk clothes which were eventually dropped on the grass around 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 with 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 looking in front of him, or rather looking inward.

(...because it's only from outside that we all look the same, while inside there are lots upon lots to consider; the epics unfolding inside are far more cooler than the Illyad together with the Odyssey...)

There he sat in a tie loosened on his thick neck, paying no notice to neither sympathetic nor sarcastic ogles, not knowing what was ahead where they were taking him...

In Military-Construction Unit 11, aka VSO-11, there was a necessary minimum for keeping lots of people in one place.

A close group of five long barracks, paneled with painted plywood sheets inside and overlaid without with white bricks laid in shiner position, squatted behind the white brick fence along the roadside.

The barracks were connected with the common system of steam-heating pipes running 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 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 middle 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 line, 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 with a rough layer of concrete, stretched from the gate 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. At the far left corner of the drill grounds, there stood a brick toilet, aka sorteer, accomplished with ten holes, aka ochcos, alongside one wall and the cemented urinal runnel along the opposite other.

To the left of 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 – two rows of sturdy sheds of ware and food warehouses.

Behind the warehouses, a bit on the outskirts of the detachment 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 bordered the grounds 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 at 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 for AWOL's, as well as to the city of Stavropol, sure thing.

But all that I did not yet know when 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 summer, when baring your feet you'll notice the dirty stains left by the dust that got through the fabric of the socks, 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 boots...

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

We were brought to the detachment Club fitted out with a bare stage without any curtains, and rows of plywood seats filling the whole slanted hall. There our service started with dragging the audience seats out of the Club, washing the wide floorboards, bringing and installing iron bunk beds for the Fourth Company personnel to sleep on, since we, the recruits, were to be kept in their barrack.

Then at the entrance to that barrack, we were divided 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!"

We executed the commands keeping the hunger in check by the wishful thinking because a small group of recruits had been already sent to the Canteen for laying tables with the midday meal.

And finally, "Fall in for the meal!"

"Slow.. march!"

In contrast to the Club, where you had to step up three stairs of a porch before the door, in the Canteen, on entering the door, you went three steps down into the spacious hall filled with two quads of tables separated by the central aisle.

On both sides of each table stood brown benches of solid boards allowing for ten men to sit in a row.

The smoothly polished concrete floor endowed the hall with a bouncing hum, like in the waiting rooms of passenger stations at their rush hour.

Along the whole left wall, two steps ran beneath the three windows to the rooms outside the hall. A single wide shelf-ledge of painted tin stretched under all the three windows.

The first (and also the smallest) of the windows was the seat of Bread-Cutter already closed from within with its tin-clad shutter.

The next one—wide and having no shutters—presented the view of the kitchen with the steam rising off the wide cylinders of nickel-plated cooking boilers, and a pair of soldier-cooks among them, in khaki trousers, slippers on bare feet, and in white jackets smeared with greasy smudges. One of the cooks had a white-cloth beret on his head.

The last, also wide and shutterless, window connected to the Dishwashers' room filled with steam and noise of hot water bursting from several taps at once in the long tin trough with heaps of used enamel cups and bowls, and aluminum spoons.

The far blind wall, opposite the entrance, separated the Canteen from the Club. In the right wall high up above the floor, the row of wooden frames kept panes of unhinged windows...

The white enamel bowls, arranged in two long rows along the table, marked the seating places on the benches put close by.

Twenty aluminum spoons, studded with water drops, were piled in the center of the table for each eater to grab one. Next to the spoons, lay a heavy dipper accompanied with twenty enamel cups with combat scars from the pell-mell pileups in the Dishwashers' trough.

Two and a half, multiply cross-sectioned, loaves of "brick"-shaped brown bread on the crumpled aluminum tray provided also twenty slices...

The cooks began throwing five-liter enameled pots on the ledger-shelf of the dispenser window, issuing shrill indistinct yells. The first meal in the army began.

The borshch was red and scorching hot. It was brought in a pot from the dispenser window and shared into the bowls with the dipper.

Since the bowls were not to be changed, the borshch should be eaten to get the second course, or you had to refuse the first course at once and wait until the on-duty soldier would bring the next pot with pearl barley, more commonly handled kirzookha.

(...if you carefully consider the fine pattern in the tops of army boots of the artificial kirza leather, you begin to understand the accuracy of the term kirzookha for the army porridge...)

The porridge was liquid and as hot as the borshch.

Compote poured into the cups from aluminum kettles, was not so hot, and also liquid.

The stunning din of bustle in a railway station served the background to munching and gulping.

On finishing the meal, the tools of personal saturation had to be carried to the Dishwashers' window and put in the appropriate piles or stacks on the shelf-ledge. As those accumulate, Dishwashers themselves would topple the bowls, or spoons, or cups in the respective sections in the trough under the streams of steaming water from the taps.

Now we could leave the Canteen and return to the "training" barrack so as not to miss the next command to fall in...

The following army experience proved that borshch was never to happen for breakfast or supper, those started immediately with kirzookha, and in the morning next to the bread on the tables they put trays with 20 cubes (1" x 1" x 0.5") of yellow butter brought from the Bread-Cutter's window, which you spread on the bread with the same aluminum spoon handle.

If the butter was brought in one piece it was portioned by the most authoritative serviceman of those present at the table, with his spoon handle.

The piece of butter could also be reduced by a passer-by serviceman who started his army service a year and a half earlier, and now approached your table to reward himself for his combat merits. The lump sugar, brought for tea, would also do for one or another honored veteran...

On the whole, the ration was unpretentious, yet enough for the survival.

In autumn it became even simpler – cabbage and water for the first course, cabbage and no water for the second, water and no cabbage for the third.

On a seldom lucky day, you could detect a sliver of lard a-float in your portion of the kirzookha porridge (the detachment had its pigsty, after all) but nothing beyond the lard.

And on the Soviet holidays, they would have added white buns for the morning tea...

At first, I couldn't eat soldiers' food. Not that I was over-squeamish, but simply because no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't manage to stuff that ration into myself. It simply stuck in the throat.

At one of the meals, a soldier from the previous draft, seeing my diligent agony, laughed and explained, "No fear! You'll get used and start to havvat anything."

He was right. The matter was that in the construction battalion they did not eat, but "havvat".

"The company went to havvat – catch on!"

"And what havvage is it today?"

As soon as I stopped eating and started havvating, everything fell into place. At times, I even havvatted an additional portion.

But that came later because if a soldier in his first half-year in the service (handled in that period _youngs_ , or _salaga_ , or "salabon") dared approach the dispenser window with the bowl in his hands, the cook, most likely, would feel lazy to splash in it a scoop of havvage and simply shriek instead, "Fuck you, salabon!"

Not because of being a genetic misanthropist, but just aping the attitude he had suffered from when being a _youngs_ himself.

However, he also might not start shrieking – exceptions happen anywhere.

(...in his two years at the army service, a Soviet soldier ascended the hierarchical ladder of servicemanship.

In the first six months, he was a _salaga_ , aka _young_ , aka "salabon".

For the next six months—after the following draft had brought in a new wave of _youngs_ —he became a _dipper_.

One year of service and two younger drafts behind made him a _pheasant_.

For the concluding six months, with no old-timers above him, he was a _grandpa_.

And, at last, Minister of Defense of the USSR has signed the order on demobilization of the servicemen drafted two years ago, turning by this act a _grandpa_ into a _dembel_ to be dismissed with the arrival of the new draftees.

The hierarchy terminology is not overly hieroglyphic.

_Young_ meant the youngest in the service.

"Dippers" were entrusted with dealing the havvage out – for the _youngs_ too early, for the senior servicemen below their status.

"Pheasants" took in the width of their cotton pants to have them tight like sausage skin and began to stagger like a bunch of dandies.

_Grandpa_ was antipodal to _young_ , and _dembel_ presented a nice abbreviation for "demobilization".

To go through that ladder you had to live two years.

At the age of eighteen or twenty that quantity of time seems an eternity.

Besides, the quality of time in the army is unpredictable when some days fly by hardly having been started, and vice versa – you feel that no less than a week had passed already – but no! – it's still today.

In the army, the amount of time of the latter type prevails over that of the one mentioned first.

The most miserable lot was that of " _dembel_ s" who had pulled, and pushed, and dragged the un-embraceable lump of two years to the finish.

For them each hour became an eternity filled with soul trepidation, anxiety beyond any good riddance, disbelief that that was possible at all.

Soldiers from the lower rungs of the ladder tried to spur time employing for the purpose card calendars where all the twelve months of the year were printed on one side, while the backside called to keep money in the saving banks or fly by the Aeroflot airplanes.

They ruthlessly pricked each day lived through with a needle, one by one.

The card calendars lost their glossy appeal, but when raised against the sky, they showed quads of pin-thick holes – one for a month lived through.

Such calendar-pricking calls for a disciplined unswerving mind and remarkable willpower.

Not by a single pheasant ever I happened to see such a calendar. Eternity humbles anyone and crushes their pride...)

The first day in the service ended about midnight – we were trained to fit into forty-five seconds when going to sleep or getting up after it.

In the time specified, you had to remove all your outfit, carefully stack the items on a stool in the central aisle lit with the long daylight lamps, to dive into your bunk in the koobrik, and cover yourself with a sheet and blanket.

Koobrik was four two-tier bunk beds set closely, side by side, in two rows separated from the neighboring koobriks by narrow passages where you collided with those who slept in the next koobrik's beds.

The collisions were just inevitable because the width of the inter-koobrik passage was dictated by the forty-centimeter-wide cabinet-box crammed in between the bunk beds bounding the passage with eight newbies rushing to their bunks.

Oops!. Ouch!.

Under the top of the seventy-centimeter-tall cabinet-box, there was a drawer.

The door beneath the drawer provided access to the inside shelves. Those two shelves and the drawer were allotted to eight people whose bunk beds towered above the half-meter-wide four-meter-long passage.

If one of the beds in the passage was occupied by a _grandpa_ , then all of the cabinet-box, the drawer as well as both shelves under it, was his sovereign stowage whose indivisible immunity was not a matter for the feeblest discussion.

If it were a _pheasant_ in place of a _grandpa_ , he could share the lower shelf, still, not every _pheasant_ would.

Construction battalion trained you to live lightly, and not to burden yourself with things you could do without.

As for the "Neva" blades and the machine of a safety razor, they could find a place on the shelf of the buddies from your draft who had neither oldies nor birds in the passage of their koobrik...

Raising questions before commanding officers had undesirable backwash on the state of health.

The "pheasant-grandpa" system was the pledge of military discipline in the army, and an officer with disregard to it was sawing off a bough he sat upon. Therefore, in case of addressing him with some complaint, he complained about you to the "grandpas".

In the evening, the officer would go home after his day at the service, and at night the "grandpas" were damaging your state of health.

Yet, all that was to be discovered later, and now the sergeants were walking along the central aisle of the training barrack, looking for a footcloth wound not accurately enough around its boot top, or a belt dropped in a hurry over the stool in a careless manner, or the absence of any part of outfit – the son of a bitch had dived under the blanket half-dressed!.

Finding where to find fault, they commanded a general "get up!" and the training began anew.

No chance that we had started doing the job any better, most likely, the sergeants themselves wanted to sleep. After another "lights-out!" they did not command "get up!" and the long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling over the central aisle were switched off, except for the one over the cabinet-box at the entrance to the barrack.

Its remote light was not a hindrance, you could close your eyes and...

"Get up!!"

What? What for?! O, shit, it's morning! And where's the night?

(...I have told already that time in the army is a dirty bitch, ain't I?.)

A couple of "get up!" were conducted without much of nit-picking though, just to remind you're in the army now, bastards. Which leniency was caused by the breakfast ahead, and if we were late for it, the cook- _grandpa_ would hail the sergeants with his "J'ai presque dû attendre" from the dispenser window.

(...the kings of France had a special courtier whose job was to clap his pole against the floor to bring attention to King's entry to this or that hall in one or another of the royal palaces.

The clap was coupled with the strident yell, "His Majesty the King!"

So, one day at the Louvre, Louis of Certain Number, approaching the door to the general hall, noticed that the announcer was not in place.

Maybe, dropped around a corner to correct some kind of mess in his outfit...

Yet, in the very last moment, directly from nowhere, the courtier with the pole ducked in the doorway and—as required by the statute—boomed his bang into the floor, "His Majesty the King!"

In fact, the King hadn't even had to march on the spot, and passing by the servant, without much fuss, he reproached him in a royally dignified way:

"J'ai presque dû attendre."

When translated from French, it means "I almost had to wait"...)

But the _grandpa_ in the window would translate it another way:

"You, fucker! Got too fucking cocky, eh? They threw that sergeant stripe-snot across your shoulder-strap and you lost your scent? I fucking fuck your fucking rank and you too! You once again be late and I'll have you dispensing the fucking pots. You fucking cock!"

And the sergeant would have nothing to parry such a translation with, because if though not a "cock", yet for the current period, he still was just a _pheasant_.

(...What on earth could any king have to do with our construction battalion?

The most intimate connection.

The commonly used, albeit unofficial, denomination of the Soviet Army military construction battalions—aka conbats—was "the royal troops".

Got that under your belt?

On we go.

The outfit of the military conbat soldier, aka conbatist, consisted of a khaki fore-and-aft cap with a small red-cherry star screwed in its bow with the still smaller yellow sickle-and-hammer inside.

The star was a very important detail called to make easy seeing the front from the rear of the headgear.

On the strength of its shape, the fore-and-aft cap was of no use for protecting the soldier's ears.

When caught in the strong wind or rain, you could turn off the cap's flaps and pull it on your skull, yet the trick bestowed on the serviceman the looks of a mugger in a condom-hat.

Under certain circumstances, the conbatist could even put his fore-and-aft cap crosswise, that is, with the star transferred into position above one or another of his ears.

The cap applied in that manner was supposed to present a motif "a-la Tricorn of Bonaparte", however, on the whole, that looked like a dull moron with the star on the side of his fucking gibbosity.

Alternately, the head of the conbat soldier might be covered with a forage cap, but, according to the statute, the forage cap should be accompanied with the jacket and trousers over the blunt-nosed high shoes of black leather.

Such a set was briefly referred to as "parade-crap" (ceremonial uniform) with black shoulder-straps on the shoulders of the jacket.

(...black is always in vogue...)

The black insignia fields up the lapels of the ceremonial outfit were decorated with miniature emblems of military construction troops, made of a light yellow alloy.

The same emblem was repeated in a larger size on the forearm part of the jacket's left sleeve, but already without any metal impurities.

The Brief Heraldic Explication of the Conbat Emblem

" _Battalion Commander pours forth Thunder-and-Lightning;_

Ensign trots like a squirrel in the Wheel;

I dropped the Anchor and don't care a fuck,

They won't urge me onward

Not even with the fucking Bulldozer."

~ ~ ~

Between the parade-crap jacket lapels, peeped a khaki shirt and a tie of a darker khaki with the elastic string—like that in underpants—hidden under the collar and secretly holding the tie in place.

But let's return to the casual (everyday) uniform the upper part of which (the cap) already was discussed, in general.

The innermost layer of the outfit was underpants and a tank-shirt (in winter long-sleeve undershirt and long johns).

Then came the cotton khaki jacket without any shoulder loops (in case you got some rank distinguished by a number of yellow stripes across the shoulder loop, then you were in charge of procuring the needed insignia).

The jacket was fastened in front with five buttons made of light plastic with the bas-relief of the star with sickle and hammer crossed in its center.

The skirts of the jacket reached the middle of the thighs.On both sides—just below the waist—were found the straight pockets with flaps above them, so that the earth and sand did not get in while digging holes.

The buttons in the wide sleeve cuffs were of the same green plastic, and of the same design, but smaller in size.

Under the left breast of the jacket, there was the inner sack-like pocket of a khaki canvas.

The casual form trousers presented the peak of pragmatism – two cotton pipes of legs, narrowing downwards, overlaid with large patches on knees for hardening and prolonging the service life of the whole item; two upright pockets on the hips; one fly fastening with small buttons which bore no emblems.

(At leg edges there also were inch-wide strips sewn across the openings but those were cut off at once so that they wouldn't fuck your brains and rub your soles.)

In winter the cap was replaced by a hat with ear-flaps made of artificial gray fur.

The fastening strings at the flap tips allowed for wearing such a hat in four distinct manners:

1. "ears up"-type (King Solomon Crown);

2. "ears under the back of the head"-type (Cautious Rabbit);

3. "ears loosened"-type (Hawk Coasting Proudly);

4. "ears tied under the chin"-type (Sparring Partner).

A padded jacket constituted the outmost layer worn in winter.

Upright stitches, keeping the wool lining in place, gave the padded jacket a hybrid-like looks of epic heroes combat outfit and concentration camp uniform, only in an unvarying khaki color.

Instead of a padded jacket, a soldier could wear a pea-jacket with a smooth outside surface.

The latter surpassed the padded jacket in many ways.

Firstly, there was twice as much wool in its lining and hence it was warmer.

Secondly, it reached the middle of the thighs, covering the groin and buttocks from the nasty extremes of winter weather.

And one final glimpse of the parade-crap.

A double-breasted greatcoat of cloth-felt was added to it in winter.

The greatcoat ended a bit below the knees and had two vertical rows of yellow buttons on the breast (one of them decorative).

Behind—across the sacrum—there was sewn a short decorative length of a belt with two decorative buttons on its ends under which, just below the rectum, started the vertical gash dividing the skirts – in case of the need to quicken the pace or for any other needs.

And last but not least, the wide belt of sturdy tarpaulin with the weighty metal plate-buckle which could be used for a host of purposes, starting from digging a hole up to becoming a lethal weapon in a fight, when used as a mace on a string, sort of.

Here, in short, how the construction battalion soldier, aka conbatist, was dressed.

Though we, the spring draft of 1973, at first were honored and trusted to finish off the Russian and Red Armies' tunics, of the classic Russian shirt collar model, which had been inherited and kicking back around in the warehouses of the Soviet Army.

Later, when we had worn them off to tatters and they became a real rarity, the "pheasants" were steaming with the itch to get such a one, unlike anybody's else.

The comparative analysis of the component items in the outfit of the conbatist serviceman shows that the most idiotic piece of it was the forage cap, being uncomfortable to put under your head when sleeping, because of its hard visor, and resisting attempts to pull it over your ears in the rain...)

Entry to each of the barracks was in the middle of its long side through the outside cell of a narrow vestibule (3 m. x 3 m.) with the tiled floor of dark-ash color underneath the low ceiling resting on large lattice windows in its walls.

Outside the front door, a rectangular grating of parallel rebar-rods bridged a shallow cemented pit for the dirt falling off the boots when scraped against the grating.

Close to the vestibule there stood an equally sized open gazebo with a bench of three beams running along its plank sides. Its four-sided roof was propped by the posts in the gazebo corners. In the center of the cemented floor there was another pit, yet with rounded walls and no cover – for the servicemen to throw their cigarette butts in, which eventually would be cleaned by the on-duty soldier.

Next to the gazebo, there stretched a two-meter-long footrest for several people to use it simultaneously putting one or another of their feet on when polishing their boots.

Anything omitted? Oh, yes! And the grass on both sides of the asphalt path.

When the sergeants got bored with drilling us in the drill grounds, bounded by the gate, the Canteen, and the sorteer, or fed up with driving it home to us the meaning of lines in the Statute of the Internal Military Service booklet, they ordered to commence eradication of ragweed, aka ambrosia.

Previously, I knew for sure that ambrosia was a cheerful drink at the feasts of the eternally young and immortal gods of Olympus, and never suspected it had a nickname – the terribly vicious grass.

We were shown sheets with a black-and-white picture of the wanted culprit coupled with short lines calling to find and liquidated the offender spreading hay fever.

That was the one and only desired command because the sergeants disappeared for an hour or so, and, lying in the grass, we could talk and get acquainted in no hurry...

From Konotop there was no one but me and others were from different cities – Buryn, Krolevets, Shostka, in the same Sumy region.

In general, the entire spring draft to VSO-11 was from Ukraine with the Dnepropetrovsk guys brought before us. They had already undergone the training and got distributed to the companies of the battalion.

Taking advantage of the sergeants' absence, a couple of them sneaked into the gazebo to collect the cigarette butts from the rounded hole, dropped there by us at the command to fall in.

Nobody really knew why the poor Ambrosia was hunted down so severely, and nothing in the grass around resembled it even remotely, but the idle talks helped to at least shortly forget about the gruesome eternity piled on us for the following two years...

The newly acquired outfit presented a certain predicament at training for "get up!" command, the buttons could be hardly squeezed in and out of the tight buttonholes. On the advice of a wise newbie Vitya Strelyany, I widened them with an aluminum spoon handle in the Canteen, and they began to fly in and out nice and swiftly...

The immediate goal of the drill training was to sell ourselves on Oath Day.

All in all, there were three platoons in the "training" barrack with one and the same song for them all, which was often aired by the All-Union "Mayak" Radio Station.

"In two winters,

Merely in two winters,

In two summers,

Merely in two summers

I'll do my service in the army

And come back to you..."

After the first platoon finished circling in parade march round and round the drill grounds and singing it in a course chorus concluded with the final "Stop! One-two!", the second platoon marched into the same ground singing the same song, which became unbearably long. And when at last they also stopped, we, the third platoon, stomped in, blaring about the third pair of winters and summers, which was a crying redundancy.

Even among the recruits there sounded restrained chuckles, while the sergeants of the first and second platoons laughed outright, and our sergeant became nervous.

When I told him I could prepare another song for us to sing, only I needed a pen and paper, he did not immediately get it what I was talking about, but then I was set free from the drill grounds to do creative work for the benefit of the platoon.

The sergeant instructed me to get the stationary from the on-duty soldier guarding the cabinet-box...

The first thing you saw on entering any barrack was a soldier standing next to the cabinet-box. The soldier was an on-duty serviceman, and the cabinet-box was his sentry post. Standing there, he had to issue the command "Company! At attention!" when the barrack was entered by an officer.

There were two on-duty privates daily who replaced each other by the cabinet-box every four hours, and at the mealtime, the one free from the watch went to the Canteen under command of the on-duty sergeant to lay the tables with the havvage for the company servicemen to have it.

Those three (the on-duty sergeant and the pair of private men) were called "duty unit" and remained it for twenty-four hours.

The current on-duty sergeant was surprised by my request, yet he gave me the needed pen and paper.

Passing to the end of the barrack, I entered the room which the company political commander, aka zampolit, called "Leninist Room" because of its walls were paneled with yellow chipboard and next to the mirror there was the Leader's profile painted with two colors, but in the soldiers' lingo it was "live-mains room" because of the wall sockets for an iron or electric razors and the mirror wide enough to be used by two or three of shaving men at once.

The song air was no problem – everyone knew the perennial hit:

"Maroosya, a black-haired girl,

Picked berries

Of gelder rose...."

But not everyone knew that originally it was the song "Take the harness, guys, off your horses..." which meant that it got used to transformations of its lyrics:

"Our parade march is the best,

And our song's the loudest,

That's the tune

Of our platoon!.."

Siting over a sheet of paper I twirled the pen in my fingers picking up words in my mind, fitting them this or that way. And gradually the Leninist live-mains around me, and the acrid smell of fresh cotton from my uniform, and the smarting itch in my right foot rubbed to bleeding, all that faded into the background. I was in AWOL from the army...

Yes, we had learned and sung it quite bravely...

At the end of the day, the rookies stood at ease about the entrance to the "training" barrack when the master sergeant of Fourth Company – a man of about forty with a round good-natured face and a paunch of the potbelly – passed by.

He stopped to ask where we were drafted from. Probably, he just wanted to while away the half-hour before the ensigns and officers, as well as a couple or two of women from the accountancy at the Detachment Staff were to be taken to the Stavropol-City. For the night in the battalion, there stayed only the on-duty officer.

One of us, Vanya by his name, seeing the human disposition of the senior in rank, asked with a sucking-up smile, "Comrade master sergeant, could they exempt me because of this?"

Lowering his head, he rested his index finger in a wide scar on his pate, that peeped through the bristles of the close-cut.

"Fucking smartie, gonna fuck the army?" said the master sergeant. "No fucking way!" And he slapped Vanya's shoulder blades with his broad fatty hand.

From the sonorous spank, Vanya bent in the opposite direction and painfully pursed his lips, "Ouch!"

The soldiers readily laughed at the witty remark of the master sergeant...

As for the tactical drills, I even liked them.

All the three platoons of rookies were formed into one column and marched out of the battalion grounds to the field next to the pigsty.

The sergeants explained that "flash" meant a nuclear bomb explosion, and it was necessary to drop flat on the ground with your head in the flash direction.

Then the command "run march!" followed, and when the whole column moved in a disorderly trot, one of the sergeants yelled, "Flash on right!"

With animated yells and screams, we clumsily fell in the grass.

The drill was repeated several times.

(...an eternity later, when we also became "grandpas" and the buddies from my draft recollected those "flash on left!" and "flash on right!" as one of the inhuman trials for the startup _youngs_ , I could not understand them.

I still do not understand.

Running in the summer field, tumbling in the green grass when you have the strength and wish – it's just fun!

"How young we were at that time!

How young we were at that time!."...)

After the concentrated, hard, fatigue-denying, training during the unforgettable four days, we took Military Oath and became serviceman at the Armed Forces of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.

No, we were not holding any automatic or another kind of weapons, that customarily adorned that ceremonial ritual in the Soviet Army. We just took turns stepping out of the ranks to approach the desk on the asphalt path, pick up the sheet with the text of Military Oath, read it, put it back onto the desk, sign another sheet (the lieutenant indicated the place for the signature) and step back to the ranks to turn about and face the barrack wall made of white silicate brick laid in shiner position.

Behind the desk, facing our ranks, there stood two officers. If somebody, while taking Military Oath, was not quite apt with the reading of the printed text, they did not really pick on him – just finish it off quick and scribble your scratch on the sheet.

In the end, the lieutenant asked if anyone had a medical education. After a moment of refrained confusion in the ranks, a young soldier stepped out and reported his having been a help for the paramedic at the first-aid post in his village. He was singled out to continue his service at Fourth Company, as well as four professional drivers from our draft.

(...how many times in the two years that followed, I cursed myself with every taboo word under the sun for missing to step forward and report my three years of reading up for admittance exams at the neurosurgery department of a medical institute!.)

Then they announced to us who belonged to which company.

I got to First Company, that of masons. Plasterers served at Second and Third Companies. Fourth Company was for drivers and everything else.

We were taken to the respective barracks and presented to the commanders of our squads who indicated free bunk beds in the koobriks of the empty barrack because at that time of day the company personnel was working at construction sites in the city...

In all the living nature there hardly could be found more disgusting sounds than the thrice-cursed command "Company! Get up!"

(...anticipatorily, I should confess that when being an on-duty private and having waited for the hands in the large square clock above the sentinel cabinet-box to fall exactly to six o'clock in the morning, I also took a deep breath and yelled in the meanest voice I was capable of:

"Companyeeeeeeee! Get uuuuuup!"

An eye for an eye. And an ear for the tortured ear...)

After the first night in the barracks of First Company, of all my personal belongings in the cabinet-box of the koobrik I slept in, there remained only a half-pack of razor blades "Neva" priced 25 kopecks when full.

The loss of the toothbrush and cream together with the razor shaving machine was not so depressing as the disappearance of 30 kopecks from the pocket in my cotton pants. That would buy me two packs of cigarettes "Prima". I recollected the guys from Dnepropetrovsk picking up cigarette butts from the trash pit in the "training" barrack's gazebo.

Having meticulously covered my bed with the blanket (otherwise, the on-duty serviceman would rip it off and demand to do it better) I threw the army waffle towel around my neck, as everyone else around, and went to the sorteer in the general flow of khaki color.

Over each of the ten hole-ochcos, someone was squatting attended by a waiting line of two or three, and even the wall-width-long urinal runnel was not accessible at once. The place was filled with a babel of tinkling, farting and exchanging news of the past day.

"He was rat-arsed then?"

"You knows yoursel."

"Got caught?"

"I am fucked if I know. They were looking for him."

"They'll get him."

"You knows yoursel."

At the washstand trough, they milled the same piece of news only in detail.

By eight o'clock the on-duty sergeants had driven the _youngs_ and "dippers" of their companies to the drill grounds and carried out the complex of exercises. Then the companies had their breakfast and got loosely lined, four rows deep, on the drill grounds except for those "grandpas" who fucking fucked all fall-ins already.

At a little to eight, the "goat"-Willys of the Battalion Commander and a small bus with the officers and accountants pulled up at the gate.

Battalion Commander, Political Second-in-Command, aka Zampolit, and Chief of Staff went to the middle of the drill grounds, the officers joined the lines of their respective companies, the accountants bypassed the barrack of Third Company heading to the barrack of Fourth Company – half of that building contained the Staff of VSO-11.

The Morning Dispensing started with the report of the on-duty officer to the trinity of Commanders that during the last day there were no incidents or violations in the Construction Unit 11.

Then Chief of Staff ordered two soldiers from Third Company to step out and face the ranks. The day before they violated military discipline at the construction sites in the city. He announced the penalty – ten days of arrest.

The gray-haired Battalion Commander, turning from side to side his horn-rimmed glasses, commenced his prosecution harangue.

His oratories were beyond the comprehension because his chronic brain leaks allowed him to reach no further than to the middle of a current sentence, and then he leaped to another one of which though no more than a half saw its completion and left you puzzled whether that was the starting or concluding part in it.

Behind the Battalion Commander's back, Separate Company was approaching along the asphalt path on their way to the Canteen for their breakfast havvage. They fucking fucked all that Dispensing, they were Separate Company not belonging to VSO-11.

Finally, Zampolit told Battalion Commander that was enough for the rhetoric. Batallion Commander fired off a pair of concluding "fucks" and shut up.

The on-duty officer passed his responsibilities to another officer whose turn it was to stand on duty for the following twenty-four hours.

The discipline violators surrendered their belts to the new on-duty sergeant and plodded to the checkpoint guardhouse to get locked up in the clink there, the darkroom with the tin veneered door and no windows at all, yet provided with the decking of planks to lie upon.

Chief of Staff ordered the rest of the servicemen to march to our workplaces.

We walked to the gate with the trucks already waiting for us behind it.

Battalion Commander started up – a shred of a sentence that had slipped off when he was at it, landed back into the Colonel Lieutenant's brain.

Fuck yourself, fucker! The Dispensing's over! We're already boarding the trucks – a foot on the wheel, hands grabbing atop the plank-side, swing over it and rush further to avoid landing of the following buddy on your back.

Off we go!

The gate stayed behind; the wall of white brick panels between the white brick pillars ran by on the left. We're going to the city!.

In the end, it turned out an outskirt with a construction site in the remnants of a forest belt; the project of a nine-story residential building of two sections whose walls of white silicate brick reached already about half of their height.

The commander of our team-squad led us to a high hillock of bricks piled up by the dump trucks and ordered to stack bricks on pallets. Each pallet was just four thick planks, one-meter-and-twenty in length, nailed to a pair of crosswise beams, 90 cm. x 6 cm. x 6cm., which became the pallet's footing so that the steel cable slings of the tower crane would easily pass beneath the pallet's underbelly.

Twelve courses of bricks upon the pallet (some 300 bricks, all in all) made for about one cubic meter of masonry, but the bricks had to be stacked into courses retaining the bond pattern, so that the pallet load wouldn't pour down when being hoisted by the crane for transporting the bricks to the bricklayers up the walls.

In fact, the job was not too hard, but it turned out that silicate dust gnawed into palm skin and made it smart, but they gave us no protective mitts.

Grisha Dorfman plaintively observed his hands.

Besides, the white dust clung to our boots and tunics and was hard to shake off, but they never bothered to give us any overalls...

The same truck took us back to the detachment for the midday meal. The passers-by on the sidewalks did not care to watch a squad of conbatists in a vehicle rolling along.

Turning off the highway outside the city, the truck bypassed a clump of industrial buildings on the right roadside at which sight the buddies from our team-squad kicked up crazy yell-and-whistle waving in that direction, like a pack of football fans whizzed in the truck-back past their team entering the field.

Vitya Strelyany reluctantly explained that was a zone there, which made it clear – the ex-cons' solidarity...

(...30 percent of the servicemen in the construction battalions were the citizens who had served their time in prison for a felony of not overly grave criminal nature.

The majority of the remaining 70 percent were considered fit for non-combatant military service because of their lousy education level, poor health conditions or, as in my case, for left-handed tricks to dodge out of the army service.

At the rare bubbles of clarity amidst his chronic brain-leaking, our Battalion Commander, occasionally, gave out rather clear-cut definitions, "You, the fucking rabble of cripples and jail-birds, fuck the whore of your mother!"...)

From work, we were brought at dusk already.

The evening roll-call following the supper was run by First Company Commander, Captain Pissak.

The servicemen fell into two ranks divided into two formations by the cabinet-box at the central entrance to the barrack. The _youngs_ (so was the law) filled the front rank.

Facing the company personnel, Captain Pissak called the roll without looking up from the list, just listening to the answering calls.

"Here!"

"Here!"

"Here!"

He needed no visual clues and was able to determine the current state of a serviceman by merely the timbre of a voice yelling the "Here!" of response.

When the roll-call list reached the _youngs_ , Pissak was approaching and standing still against each of the new "Here!" to shortly and silently examine your face with the unblinking gaze from under the black visor of his forage cap. Then he called out the next one.

That was enough – his photographic memory had remembered you for two years ahead and a month later, instead of, "What's your name, private?", he would say, "Private Ogoltsoff!"

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

"Are you thief-swaggering?"

"No, Comrade Captain!"

"Then why your belt-plate is dropped to your balls? Sergeant Batochkin!"

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

"Five fatigues to private Ogoltsoff."

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

Well, yes, when we were approaching the nine-story building site, I loosened the belt over my tunic a bit; how could I know he would pop up from the forest belt?.

That day I tried my best to curry favor with the sergeant who sent me to plane the ground with a spade for the subsequent installing of the curbstones.

I did some fucking great job! Two hundred meters if not more, in the hope that the sergeant, seeing my zeal, would blink at the fatigues.

"Two conbatists full of vigor

substitute a backhoe digger..."

Two passers-by on the nearby sidewalk were so impressed with my working style, that approached me with an invitation to partake in wine from the bottle they carried.

"No. Thank you! I cannot."

At the evening roll-call, the sergeant beckoned to me with his finger – "on the floors!"

"On the floors" meant – when all would get in their bunk beds, you sweep the aisle as well as the passages in the koobriks, bring water from the washstand by the sorteer and do the wet cleaning of the entire sixty-seven-meter-long barrack with its koobriks and the vestibule.

Do it in two steps – Step One: with a thoroughly drenched rag, rub each fucking inch in the linoleum flooring; Step Two: wash the rag, squeeze dry and repeat Step One.

And the oftener you change the water for drenching, the better so that there remained no bleary spots in the linoleum and you won't be commanded to do the whole toil anew.

Then go and report to the on-duty sergeant the job waits for checking. And if he accepted it at once, you could go to bed and be happy about not being sent that evening "on the floors" to the Canteen.

Now you might flake out on your bunk bed and the moment your head touched the pillow you'd hear, "Companyeeeeee! Get uuuup!"

"They took Vanya to the nuthouse."

"What Vanya?"

"Come on, you knows yoursel. The scar on his pate."

"What for?"

"Did not get up in the morning. Says mice crept into his boots."

"Dodging, or gone fucking nuts?"

"Who fucking knows? They'll check there."

The first day-off we had in August. Till then from half-past eight till twilight they kept us slavering on construction sites.

And all of a sudden – a whole Sunday in the detachment grounds.

The _youngs_ washed their dusted uniforms.

They placed the washing on the brick wall along the road outside and roamed about the barracks in black underpants, white tank-tops, and kirza boots, like those sporty Fritzes with Schmeisser guns in the movie "One Chance In a Thousand".

During the period till the first day-off, our team-squad dropped the habit of saluting the roadside zone with screams and whistles.

And going to the sorteer in the mornings of clear weather, we didn't stop in our tracks anymore to stare at the faraway wonder – the snow-clad top of the Elbrus Mountain hovering in the sky over the pigsty.

Private Alimonov, aka Alimosha, taught me to smoke a butt of cigarette "Prima", shared by buddies until there remained three millimeters of the tobacco-wrapping paper...

And one time we even got the payment.

The master sergeant of First Company, a gray-haired man under fifty, well imbibed, called us, one by one, to his ware-room and meted out one-ruble-plus to each, adding a piece of white cloth for under-collars, a pair of shoe polish tins, and a spool of threads for sewing up the under-collars after washing.

But in the pay-roll, we signed for three rubles and eighty kopecks because everyone knew, whoever you'd ask, that the Soviet Army serviceman monthly payment was 3 rub. 80 kop.; that was as indisputable an axiom as that of the Volga River and the Caspian Sea...

Midsummer, at one of the evening roll-calls, the company zampolit announced they sent to my wife, at her request, the reference certifying I was in the army.

"You did not say you were married, Goly!"

"You didn't ask."

(...they had no time for marriage doing their stretch in the penitentiary colonies for juvenile offenders...)

Olga, Konotop, Plant, the dances seemed something unreal, like dreams seen in another, far away, life.

I was receiving letters from her, "...and in the evenings when I see how girls are walking with their guys and I am all alone and by myself it hurts so that I am crying..."

Mother also sent letters to me, and brother and sister wrote a couple of times as well.

I did not know what to write in response.

"Hello, I've received your letter, many thanks for it.."

And then? What else to write?

"...in two winters, in two summers..."?

Nothing entered my head.

And I already couldn't think out a single thought without "fuck" and "fucking" within it.

Such a fucking dickhead!

Just think of it, even to my closest kin people there remained nothing but the feeling of detachedness in me.

Detachedness?

Well, something alike to what I felt when at the end of the day we were already sitting in the back of a truck under the white wall of the unfinished nine-story building, and waited for a _grandpa_ -bricklayer changing into his uniform.

Another _grandpa_ , already in the back, started heckling Misha Khmelnitsky—just so, to idle the time—for his being a Ukrainian, aka Khokhol.

Misha, averting his eyes, muttered that he was not a Ukrainian and only had that kind of the last name. The rest of the _youngs_ sat in silence.

The _grandpa_ began to scoff – what a lousy draft they brought from Ukraine with not a single Khokhol!

"Okay, I'm a Khokhol, so what of that?"

Only when those words somehow echoed back from the brick wall looming whitish in the twilight, I realized that it was me who said it.

It's strange to hear yourself from outside if you did not expect that. Some kind of self-detachedness.

The _grandpa_ shut up.

And really – what of that? Or of anything else?.

Later, Misha Khmelnitsky revealed to me that he also was married, adding some intimate details about how he always had the itch to take a leak into his wife's cunt after he cum, just for fun, but it never came out.

Making no comments, I rejoiced in my mind that the evolution process of the homo sapiens species anticipated an anatomical mechanism to prevent fucking jokes of such fucked in the head funny fuckers...

Of course, my comrades-in-arms did not have such terms as "evolution" or "sapiens" at their fingertips, however, without any noticeable effort they could recite this or that article from the Criminal Code of the USSR.

"And what did they lock you up for?"

"Article six hundred seventeen, part two 'with aggravating circumstances'."

"Brain-fucker, you! There's no such article!."

"Was recently introduced – for cannibalism."

It turned out that tattoo was not just an ornamental decoration, but an esoteric message for the initiated reporting of what crime convicted, how high advanced in Zone Table of Ranks the wearer of the tattooed skin was.

The inmates with life terms were distinguished by the tattoos on their foreheads running "Slave of the USSR".

But then again, not all were the same.

One of my buddies returned from Zone with neat three words on his forearm in quite a modest typeface – 'in vino veritas'. With such a tattoo one easily may pass off for a Philosophy Doctor. Some fucking Latinist...

There were certain taboos too.

An attempt at exaggeration of personal achievements by means of a tattoo adding to his status in the criminal milieu with ornamentations which he was not entitled to, called for a severe, brutal—at times the capital—punishment.

And one should also be careful about using the word "waffles".

After we got that half-cut 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 Zone 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, putting 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 without any 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..." explained Vitya...

A truck pulled up by the checkpoint with a team-squad of plasterers of our draft, but from Dnepropetrovsk. They walked through the open gate.

Five "dippers" shot from the checkpoint door besetting a mighty _young_ , like a pack of wolves hunting a bull.

But no, he turned out too hard prey for them, and the pack retreated uttering threats. The bull picked 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 drop it onto the growing wall.

Outside the other wall in the dark of night, there loomed motionless the tower crane with the dim spot of the soldier operator's face in his cab beneath 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 hooks in the "spider" hanging by idly.

The operator switched on the wailing 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 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 the belt strapped over his pea-jacket, and lifted him into the air.

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

The operator executed the command and the incident was over, but what did the buddy live through 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 forest belt, in an arc-shaped squirt of gleaming dashes reflecting the bulb-garland lights.

"Nothing gives a nicer sight

Than pissing down 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 easily with anything at all...

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 of 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_ at the beginning of 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 two 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 four months of training at a school of ensigns, he comes back to the same detachment with a small star in his shoulder loops.

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.

Our sergeant was facing the line without his belt on—the sign of a serviceman being arrested—two bottles of wine (0.5 liters, wide red sticker) next to his feet on the ground.

The fair-haired ensign in a short-sleeved parade-crap shirt (the summer had just started) took the position at the flank of our dust-covered-dirt-smeared formation.

In short, that whelp, who was not even a _grandpa_ already, decided to perform a didactic oratorio. Like, this traitor of our great Homeland treacherously left his comrades-in-arms at their labor post and deserted to the grocery store, yet the vigilant ensign caught him red-handed.

He finished his righteous bullshit, snuffed and didn't know what to do next. However, he seemed to have watched some TV sequel from the life of military cadets, where someone got a parcel mailed from home and ate it on the sly, without sharing with his buddies. Then he got caught, and the cadet school zampolit forced him to eat a bar of chocolate in front of the rank of his comrades.

The miser with his head bowed, burning with shame, implored to forgive him. To be continued...

Well, now, that Pestalozzi with a scrawny star in his shoulder loops, started to peacock himself for the TV zampolit before us, "And you let your comrades down for wine! Well, well...So drink it!"

He did not consider that in real life flicks might go the way bypassing the screenplay...

Instead of bowing his head, the sergeant threw it back, clapped the bottle's neck to his lips and executed the received order.

The ensign froze in his place, our rank sympathetically swallowed along with the sergeant's gulps and the bottle was slugged down at one go.

He did not have time for the second one though – the ensign sprinted to it and smashed against a heap of gravel.

The sergeant was taken to the detachment and locked up in the clink at the checkpoint guardhouse. The next morning, he was busted to a private and sent to the team he had been working with before they brought our draft to VSO-11.

And might it possibly be otherwise? Who would allow him to kick back in the clink for ten days and chew bread for nothing? March to work!

After all, both with and without the instructive tattoo on your forehead, all of us were slaves of the USSR...

Our squad got a new commander, just a _dipper_ , by the name of Prostomolotov.

"Call me simply – Molotov."

An intellectual wearing glasses, he knew about Molotov, but he was nothing more than a _dipper_ and though they gave him the rank of lance-corporal, the "grandpas" were pushing him around, and he was in cold sweat before them, and never hinted to "burden", at least occasionally, some other squad of _youngs_.

For that reason, after a day's work, instead of going to bed, we went to the kitchen and peeled potatoes for the next day feeding of the entire servicemen personnel plus that of Separate Company because the peeling machine stopped working.

All night long. Until five in the morning.

True, the last sack of potatoes we smuggled out to the garbage bins, covering the out-going pails with potato peels so that the on-duty cook did not get it.

And at six "get up!", then the Morning Dispensing and – march to work!.

Or else, they brought us in the evening from work to eat the havvage – quick! – and then took back to the nine-story building, because KAMAZ trucks were moving alabaster there from the railway station, and if it rained the whole carload of the valuable building material would be lost.

And we, standing knee-deep in loose alabaster, drove it with shovels into the basement of the nine-story building, through the opening in the blocks of the foundation under the butt wall.

As soon as we finished one hillock of it, another KAMAZ truck would come and dump its 13-tonne load, and then another and then another, a good way to learn that a railway freight car capacity is 68 tonnes...

And inside the basement, the alabaster had also be driven into the next compartment, otherwise, all of it just wouldn't fit in.

(...no horror film can hold a candle to the lividly lurid complexion of Vasya, drafted from Buryn, when he dozed off on an alabaster dune smack under the feeble light bulb...)

In short, Simply-Molotov, the popular conbat saying was right: "It's better to have a prostitute daughter than a lance-corporal son."

Daddy of Grisha Dorfman arrived and had a talk with someone in the Staff barrack and when he left Grisha was transferred to Fourth Company and given the position of the tailor.

Soon, Grisha already flaunted in "Pe-Sha" and didn't even spend nights in the barracks because he had a sewing workshop in the bathhouse building.

"Pe-Sha" meant an outfit of half-woolen cloth, which was thicker than cotton fabric, aka "Khe-Be", and had the color of dark swampy slime – one of the khaki shades. "Pe-Sha" marked the aristocrat-servicemen: the driver of Battalion Commander's "goat"-Willys, or the projectionist at the Club, who was also the postman.

It's a great thing to have a daddy who knows how to negotiate...

And Vanya, who feared the mice in his boots, got exempted from the army.

The sergeant, who escorted him home from the nuthouse, told that at the Stavropol station Vanya dropped the mesh-bag with his belongings wrapped in a newspaper to the floor and screamed, "Run! Get off! It's a bomb! It's ticking!"

Sure enough, folks shied away.

And on the arrival at Vanya's home, he said his escort for a goodbye, "Learn, sergeant, the way smart guys serve in the army."

That's, in general, why on that first day-off in August, trying to leave the lazy crowd of beach-lizards in kirza boots, I turned around the corner of the Club and from the rebar-grated window, next to the steps under the closed door of the projectionist's, I heard an acoustic guitar.

Guitar...

I stood still and listened, though there was nothing to listen to – someone clumsily tried to play the chords of "Shyz-Gara", yet did not go well with the rhythm because of using balalaika beat.

Unable to stand it, I returned to the Club entrance door. It was open.

At the end of the hall, on both sides of portholes from the projectionist's, there were two doors. The left one stood wide open and it was where the guitar sounded from.

The grated window in a narrow room was abutted with a wooden hospital couch seated by a soldier with beastly bristles in a worn fore-and-aft cap, black overalls, and slippers who kept the guitar in his paws.

Another soldier, also in slippers, sat opposite him on a chair with its backrest against the wall.

"What the fuck you need here?"

"It's from "Shocking blue" that you wanna play, I can show how."

They exchanged glances. "Okey, show."

(... "beauty will save the world..."

Well, no one can say for sure.

The thing is way too vague, that elusively meaningful 'beauty'.

Music is much more tangible.

It can do wonders and work miracles as well as create bridges canceling all that's vain and unimportant.

Instead of a _pheasant_ (Zameshkevich), a _dipper_ (Rassolov), and a _salaga_ (Ogoltsoff) there remained just three young guys passing the guitar from hands to hands...)

A couple of days later, a _young_ from Dnepropetrovsk knocked in the tin-veneered door with his fingers eaten by plastering lime "dirt". The Musician Alexander Roodko, who in his civilian life, worked as a bass guitarist at the regional Philharmonic.

That is how the creation of the VIA Orion started in our construction battalion, based on the equipment and instruments left after the servicemen of the previous drafts.

The guys went to the Stuff barrack, they talked to Zampolit of the VSO-11. Alexander was appointed Director of the Club. But he never got himself a "Pe-Sha" outfit, and he spent nights in the barrack of Second Company and stood at the evening roll-calls there...

He knew the musical notation; he played on anything that would turn up. He taught us the warm-up chant of "mi-me-ma-mo-mu" and he blinked, painfully and mutely, with his dull blue gaze at my crap in singing.

He had a big nose constantly swollen with rhinitis, and he burred.

But he was the Musician...

And I started to lead a double life. After the working day and havvage at the Canteen, I was taking the left turn, to the Club...

"May I join the ranks, Comrade Master Sergeant?"

"Why late for the evening roll-call, Ogoltsoff?"

"I was at the Club."

"And what do you, Club-goers, exercise there?"

In the ranks, there sounded some chuckles supportive of the hint.

"We exercise solfeggio there, Comrade Master Sergeant."

The commander's face stupidly stiffened; he'd never heard such words throughout all his life. The giggling in the ranks increased, but already in the opposite direction.

"The Battalion Zampolit is aware of it, Comrade Master Sergeant."

"Get to the ranks, suffle... sulge... Son of a bitch!"

But during the working day, I was like anyone else...

We were transferred to the five-story building construction site in its concluding pre-delivery phase.

Vitya Novikov and Valik Nazarenko called me to an empty apartment. They had a bottle of wine to share. We finished it drinking, in turn, from the neck. A forgotten buzz.

Everything was gone before the evening roll-call because what was there for three of us?

At the evening roll-call, Captain Pissak sent the on-duty soldier to the Dishwashers' to fetch a washed-up cup for breath alcohol testing.

As he moved along the rank, Pissak handed the cup to a soldier he cared to check, ordering to exhale into it.

Two servicemen had already been ordered out of the ranks and face about.

When he handed the cup to me, I realized that I was fucked up beyond salvation even before the test by the uncontrollable waves of chill and heat rolling, in turn, over me, telling on me. For the loosened belt on my outfit, he had ordered me five fatigues, and now I was fucked up totally.

Pissak sniffed from the cup and, with a sadistically averted look, announced, "Well, I say, if a soldier hasn't drunk you can see it at once."

After the evening roll-call, Vitya Strelyany told me with a smile, "You were whiter than the fucking wall."

As if I did not know that myself!

Pissak, bastard! What the fucking cat and mouse?.

It was hard to believe, but there came another day-off. In the evening they showed a movie, some Polish film "The Anatomy of Love" it was, with certain hints at eroticism.

Maybe in Poland, there were more than just hints, but until it got to us it had been shortened by repeated cut-outs. There was a whole pack with scissors, starting from the censorship down to acned projectionists, snatching out whole pieces of film wherever there flashed bare tits in a frame. For special friends and personal use. Fucking morons.

The next morning in the line of leak-takers over the sorteer runnel, on giving my dick the reflexive shake to shed off the final drops, I silently addressed it in my mind, while buttoning the fly up amidst the general hubbub, "That's it, buddy, you're just to be a drain cock for the whole two years."

At work, we were removing construction debris and excess earth out of the basement with the stretchers, which operation was termed "to do the planning". All of us were somewhat sullen, pensive and silent, probably, after that Polish film.

In a smoke break I, having nothing better to do, began to get at Alimosha. He did not talk back and replied just with the brief "fuck off!" but then suddenly jumped to his feet and pounced at me with his fists.

I had to brush off as best as I could, yet to put it frankly, I had never been proficient at the activity.

Then Prostomolotov dropped into the basement and shouted to stop, so we again took up the stretchers.

When doing my turns, I noticed that the pain in my right hand was not going to cease. Something happened to my thumb hit against the Tatar-Mongolian mug of Alimosha...

The next morning my entire hand was swollen, and after the Morning Dispensing the Assistant Paramedic from the Detachment Medical Unit (that same villager from our draft, but already in "Pe-Sha" outfit) took me to the Stavropol Military Hospital.

We reached the city on some team-squad truck and there got on a bus because for soldiers the city public transport was for free.

When we arrived at the hospital, he told me to wait and entered some of the buildings. The grounds looked quite attractive with a thick garden of yellow plum trees. Yet, I did not have the appetite for them because of the aching hand and getting seated on a bench between the buildings I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes some round muzzle with long cat-like mustaches was right against my nose. I started, but the bench back safely kept me from falling.

Another glance disclosed Captain's shoulder loops on the cat. Everything became clear – seeing a soldier dozing on the bench, the officer stooped for the alcohol breath test.

Then my escort came out and led me to another building for the hand check.

They twirled my thumb, and I hissed like a gander and slapped my other hand, like a broken wing, against my side, from which indications they diagnosed a bone fracture, bandaged the hand, plastered it with gypsum and left me in hospital. Thank you, Alimosha!.

Yet, washing the face with one hand was fairly inconvenient...

What could be better than a fracture? No jabs at all, just kick back and wait until the bone tissue grows over.

In the dining room, there were square tables for just four persons and chairs instead of benches. The havvage also was much better than in our Canteen. Quite understandable though, because the hospital treated officers as well.

Of course, all patients wore pajamas with no insignia, only the wards for officers were on the second floor and those for soldiers in the basement.

Who cares if there's a bed to sleep at any time of day? Besides, the dining room was nearer to us – at the end of the corridor.

The hospital was a quiet place and anything but overcrowded. In my wardroom, apart from me and a Georgian named Rezo, there were four vacant beds.

The Rezo's black hair was long enough to be combed back, an obvious mark of a _grandpa_.

He kept his left arm tightly pressed against his chest which attitude resulted from his work as a driver at wheat harvesting. In the field camp, he started fooling around with the cook, and her husband stabbed him in the back with a large kitchen knife, and now the cook kept visiting the sufferer at the hospital.

They usually went down the thick garden, and coming back from there Rezo was offering me yellow plums from the pocket of his pajamas jacket, but I had no appetite...

The neighbor wardroom was filled up though.

One of the patients there was from our construction battalion, also a _grandpa_ like Rezo only a Russian, named Sanya.

He had fair hair and his right brow was missing, licked off with a flat scar.

He was a driver too and went AWOL by his tractor and collided somewhere with something, or maybe capsized. They had to amputate both his legs above the knees.

He did not visit the dining room. They guys from his room were bringing the havvage directly to him, although he had crutches and a pair of high leg prostheses next to his bed.

On the front cover of The Rural Life magazine, he saw the picture of a shock worker of Communist Labor from Stavropol against the background of her combine harvester and wheatears, and started writing letters to her.

"Hello, unknown Valentina..."

Sometimes his fellow-drivers from our conbat came to visit him. After their closed-door meetings, he screamed songs and quarreled with the on-duty medical personnel. But he got off with it because he was to be exempted from the army anyway...

On the second floor, there was a library, sort of, because its two shelves were filled with only translations from Chinese novelists about how socialism was being built in the villages of China.

The books were printed in the fifties' before the exposure of the personality cult at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. That is before Mao Tse-Tung took offense for disparaging his bosom friend Marshal Stalin, and in both great powers they stopped singing:

"Moscow – Beijing,

Eternal friendship..."

And what would you do when left with no choice? You'd go and read social realism masterpieces in the best tradition of the newspaper Renmin Ribao...

A commotion broke up in the next wardroom, splashing out into the corridor – the combine driver Valentina answered Sanya's letters with her live visit.

She got seated in the yard, on a bench under a tree. A swarthy-faced woman of Moldavian type, beautiful as movie stars from the first Soviet color flicks about collective farms in the Cossack villages.

The most handsome buddy-patient from the neighbor wardroom alighted by her side, with explanations that Sanya would presently come from a medical procedure.

And Sanya, in hysterical jitters, was sitting on his bed in the ward and fastening his prostheses. They helped to pull his pajama pants over them, and, sticking two crutches in his armpits, he clumsily dragged his body to the exit door.

But Valentina—well done!—for whole three minutes she sat next to him on the bench he finally reached.

Then the same handsome buddy led her along the shortcut path to the unofficial exit through a hole in the fence...

Two days later along the same path...I watched and I couldn't get it...It just couldn't be!

But who else was that if not Olga?!. Yes, it's her!.

The same evening, I went with her to the park in her trousers and some kind of a turtleneck while she, sure thing, had her mini skirt on.

At the dance-floor, a pack of local yobbos started to close in, probably, attracted by the pattern of huge yellow flowers over my borrowed pants.

A couple of "dippers" on AWOL from our conbat had identified me and approached. One wore the civilian and the second was in a "Pe-Sha" outfit; I didn't even know their names.

The locals got it that the construction battalion was having a pleasure-walk and dissolved...

Olga had a heap of news in her life.

She again had moved to Theodosia, but in the day nursery, there were no places for babies. So she took Lenochka and went to the city executive committee on the chairman's reception day.

He repeated the same thing – there were no places and that's it.

Then she just put Lenochka on his desk and walked out; he ran after her to the stairs, "Citizen! Take your baby!" In short, they found a place.

Her mother was looking after Lenochka, while she went to Stavropol, only on the train they stole all her money.

And my wedding ring was also gone. But it had happened still back in Konotop.

She was wearing it on her finger though it was too wide and doing washing she did not notice that it slipped off into the basin, and she splashed it away with the soapy water into the drain pit...

The next day she borrowed money for her back travel from the cook, who was just visiting Rezo, and walked away down the same shortcut path...

They took the plaster off my hand and discharged me. By free of charge trolleys I traveled to the south-eastern outskirts of Stavropol and from the ring road there walked on under the tall roadside trees bordering the highway to Elista, towards the Demino fork.

Brightly yellow leaves scattered the ground here and there, the sun was shining, yet it felt like it was autumn already. But when was the summer?

One of the conbat trucks pulled up on the highway. The driver shouted to me, "Home?"

I said yes, home, and jumped into the truck back. Because neither from work, nor from AWOL's we never returned "to the detachment", or "to the barracks".

We were coming back "home"...

At home, it wasn't without news too.

During my absence, our squad survived the rampage of torturing humiliation in the hands of "grandpas" who drove them after the lights-out out the barrack to the drill grounds and made walk "goose step" in a circle before getting beaten.

Karlookha from Second Company was particularly atrocious – he liked to jab a _young_ with a knife not so as to stab but aggravate by pricking. And he himself was just a dwarf, half-head lower than normal human height.

Then in the basement of the 50-apartment block, he rushed with his knife on Sehrguey Chernenko, handled Gray, from Dnepropetrovsk. But Gray had his Zone skills for such incidents and knocked him out.

Karlookha thief-swaggered only on the grounds of being a _grandpa_ , but those "grandpas" from his draft, who had done their time before the army, hadn't supported him against Gray.

So everything, sort of, subsided but the tension held on.

On the wave of that suspended tension, some _pheasant_ clung to me, "Are you from thieves?"

Answering such a question in affirmative, you had to make it clear which stretch the prosecutor demanded to punish you with and what was the final verdict, but for me, the articles of the Criminal Code were as closed a book as the formulas from Organic Chemistry.

Saying "yes' without having done some time, you became an imposter from the view-point of zone code, liable to hard consequences.

So I said "no" and he took me to the Leninist Room and began to shear my hair in a "zero-like" style with a hand-held machine – the length of my hair was a crying impudence for a _young_. I did not mind though, it had two years ahead to grow back.

However, the machine was blunt and a couple of times it pulled very painfully.

There was a plasterer from Third Company in the Leninist Room, who came to see his Armenian fellow-countrymen. So, he suggested the _pheasant_ let him finish my haircut.

The _pheasant_ himself was not already happy that he started that job, and yielded the machine to him.

In short, Robert Zakarian did my haircut, and when the machine jammed he said, "I am sorry".

I had completely forgotten there were such words in existence...

Later, he started visiting the Club and became a vocalist in The Orion.

He had the purest Russian pronunciation because he grew up in the Far North where his father served his time in a camp convicted of dissidence or something of the sort. When the old man was paroled to "chemistry" in the same region, Robert's mother moved there too, taking Robert and his younger brother north.

With his stretch completed, Robert's father applied for the emigration of his family from the Soviet Union. Two years passed, and he passed away before they gave permission.

There remained some time before the fixed date of their departure, and Robert went to have a rest in the seaside city of Sochi. There he met a girl Valya from the Tula city and fell in love. They exchanged their addresses and returning to the north, Robert bleared out that he was not going to leave the Soviet Union.

Yet, the papers had been already drawn up for the whole family and if he refused, his mother and brother would not be let out.

The brother tried to make him understand the situation by fighting him, yet Robert daringly maintained his intentions concerning his dear beloved.

Then the mother began crying on a daily basis, and eventually, he went with them to Paris to their relatives because of whose invitation they were let out.

In Paris, he found a job at a construction site. He did not know the language, he had no friends, and all his dreams were only of Valya from Tula...

A year later, with a tourist group from France, Robert Zakarian came to Moscow, and on the very first evening, he slipped out the hotel which his group was accommodated at and scurried to the Tula city.

For ten days he lived there in the house of Valya's parents before her mother persuaded him to give himself up to the authorities.

When he turned up in the Tula KGB, the officers there were simply delighted because their bosses in Moscow were on the horn about the disappearance of a tourist from Paris. He was immediately taken to the airport and deported to France.

In Paris, he requested the Soviet Embassy to let him back to the USSR, to his beloved. And then he kept visiting them every week, and the embassy clerk, with a tattoo "Tolik" on his hand, was shaking his head and announcing there was no answer to the application.

It took Tolik about a year to answer, at last, they received a positive response.

Robert came to Tula, married Valya, they had a baby daughter, and he was drafted to our construction battalion.

He liked to show a black-and-white photograph of his family: he himself on the left, black-haired, with a serious look of wide-set eyes under the broad black eyebrows of a definitely family man; his wife Valya, on the right, in a white blouse and with a round face framed by fair hair; the baby-daughter, in between the two, in a fancy cap of fine lace.

So, the contingent of our construction battalion comprised not only cripples and jail-birds, we even had a double migrant in our ranks...

On the Seventh of November, The Orion gave their first concert on the VSO-11 Club stage.

The drums were knocked and kicked at by Vladimir Karpeshin, handled Karpesha.

Vladimir Rassolov and Robert Zakarian provided lead vocals.

Alexander Roodko sang along with them and played the bass guitar; I kept silent and played the rhythm guitar.

In our vocal-instrumental ensemble, there also was a horn player, Kolya Komissarenko, handled Commissar, a short, dark-haired guy from Dnepropetrovsk of a cheerfully Jewish appearance.

He played very diligently, yet did no better than I in my singing. Every crap note from the horn was an obvious torment for Roodko who still and all kept putting up with it.

Probably, the presence of a horn player on stage tickled his nostalgia for his Philharmonic past. To hear less clam, he time and again cut the horn part shorter and shorter...

For the concert, we changed into parade-crap (three of us into that from strangers because a conbatist was entitled to the parade-crap only after one year of service).

The first number in the concert was "The Wide, Wide Field" song (sort of a patriotic one).

Roodko dreamed of making it with a vocal layout like that of The Pesnyary, but because of the limited range of the vocalists' sound and the crappy clams from the Commissar's horn (at which he goggled his beady eyes out in outright astonishment but still blew on) this philharmonic piece of shit was almost booed at.

However, Robert Zakarian got a warm applaud for his number (sort of a lyrical one).

He performed the adaptation of the French song, the air of which was year after year used by the Central Television News Program "Time" when announcing the weather forecast.

"Yes, I can forgive you all

And let to the sky like a bird free of thrall..."

The servicemen of Caucasian nationalities (mostly from Separate Company) enthusiastically met the song "Eminnah" performed by Vladimir Rassolov (sort of an Eastern-comical one).

"Under the burka of your girlfriend

There's no girlfriend but your Grandpa.

Uh, Eminnah!.."

And the song "Rain" from the repertoire of Fofik (The Orpheuses at DK KEMZ, Konotop) was awarded a unanimous ovation (sort of the hit of the season).

However, in the oral review by Zampolit, aka the Political Deputy Commander of VSO-11, delivered after the concert in the close circle of the musicians, the final song received the lowest rating.

"Roodko, those fucking "Rains" of yours have already drenched everyone fucking through and through." He made a sugary-nasal voice meaning everyday pop stars, "Rains again.... but you wait for me.... no, I won't wait.... fuck off, you stupid fucker..."

We couldn't help laughing. That particular song had been heard by Zampolit for the first time in his life but he accurately grasped the essence of lyrics in the musical mass production of the kind.

"I'll pass through any rains

Because I'm loving you! Uh-uh!.."

And again our team-squad saw the replacement of the commander.

Prostomolotov got transferred back to his previous squad without demotion from the lance-corporal rank though because he wasn't caught at anything.

His clash of personalities with the ensign, the platoon commander, became the reason for the shuffle. Most likely, at some point, he incautiously did not care to keep back his intellectual superiority over the ensign. "Thief-swaggering" was the conbat term to denote a behavior of the sort.

Alik Aliyev, an Azerbaijanian in the slinky pants of pheasantly upgraded outfit, came in his place.

He was a slim tall guy with a beautiful round face in which a thin clean skin tightly fitted his high cheekbones and the well-developed jaw.

A week later he was assigned the rank of lance-corporal.

For that ceremonial occasion, Alik Aliev ordered our squad-team to fall in, clapped his hands and announced, full of bubbling delight, "I would-a fuckan!"

But he somewhat hurry-scurried in his predictions and joyful anticipations.

There were no less tall but more emotionally reserved privates in our squad, who quietly shared with the lance-corporal their concepts (which he understood and accepted) that if people who got to the construction battalion after doing their times in Zone still did not thief-swagger, then for him, who was honored to become a conbatist because of insufficient fluency in Russian, moderation and modesty were the ticket to survival.

As to me personally, he never meant to be mean.

While still a private man, he accidentally became a witness of the case when in the Leninist Room of our Company two senior servicemen from The Orion interpreted to Prostomolotov, the then commander of my squad-team, the postulate of the musicians being above the vanilla army relations as those were determined in the Statute of the Internal Military Service...

So we just did our job at work—digging, dragging, laying, hoisting—and after it, we got rest within the built-in limits of construction battalion life.

Of course, we were not qualified to lie down on our beds in the koobriks before the lights-out (that was the privilege of "grandpas") but then there were stools along the aisle, as well as in the Leninist Room, on which one could sit down and have a rest, because it was already too cold for sitting in the gazebo by the entrance vestibule...

Then the winter began. We were given warm hats and scarcely padded khaki jackets.

They pulled canvas tops over the truck backs by which we were taken to work, and also installed plank benches—from side to side—to ride seated...

In the blue darkness of the starting night, our squad-team gathered after work at the foot of the nine-story building, but our truck was late. We even walked a little to meet it on the other side of the forest belt remnants, and then some hundred meters more, to the sidewalk towards the distant blocks of five-story buildings, with no passers-by at such an hour.

There we formed a wide circle standing on the trampled snow. Jokes, laughter, friendly jabs and claps on the shoulders – usual vivacity at the end of a usual working day before leaving for the usual havvage at the conbat Canteen.

I felt bored with listening to the jokes heard before more than once and walked to the light of a distant electric bulb on the butt wall of the nine-story building.

(...one of the ways to overcome the drag of time is absorbing of space...)

So, I plodded back, knowing that they would not leave without me, as well as without a couple of _grandpa_ -bricklayers who were still changing into their uniforms in the nine-story building.

Boos, yells, and laughter of comrades died down behind.

I walked in a measured step thinking of nothing.

(...such reflections are also named "wistful soul yearnings", that is when you don't finalize your thoughts about anything specific, but still, for some reason, feel sort of sad...)

On entering the remnants of the forest belt, I, like, heard a muffled call coming from some very distant place. Something called me.

I switched over to here-and-now, and reluctantly looked back just to see the rear side of the truck rushing at me. No time was left to jump aside, though I instinctively bent my legs to hit the road.

And I was saved by that initial tilting in the direction of the intended jump – the impact of the truck rear side completed the started move and threw me away under the tree, instead of onto the road, under the huge wheels of the vehicle...

"We've been shouting to you so much," said Vitya Strelyany, as we rode home.

Well, I didn't know. As it was, I happened to hear just one call and from very far away.

My right shoulder hurt for a couple of days...

At the end of December, our squad-team was transferred to the construction site of a multi-apartment building. Or rather to the initialization of that site.

There was just a deep pit still empty of any foundation blocks with a short length of tower crane tracks alongside the excavation and the crane itself standing idly over the wide rectangular crater.

Ah, yes, there also was a tin-roofed trailer made of planks with a door and two windows, taken off its wheels and put on the ground by the pit.

We got a clear-cut task – to dig the trench for the sidewall foundation blocks because the wall, as it turned out, should pass two meters closer to the trailer making the hollow even wider. The reason was that when digging out the foundation pit, they did not take into account that the building would be sitting square on the pipe providing running water for a whole city neighborhood.

At that point, they woke up and decided to slightly change the project location before it was started.

However, while they were figuring out this and that, winter came, frost struck and no backhoes could widen the foundation pit – the frozen ground was too hard for the excavator buckets, and therefore they brought us, the rescuers at unresolvable situations...

Half of the trailer was packed with brand-new shovels and bayonet spades, we even were given the unheard-of luxury – protective canvas mitts.

Of course, the ground was too hard for any kind of spades, breakers were the must there. And they were brought, a whole truckload of breakers, and dumped with clang-and-din next to the trailer.

Heavy, iron, a meter-and-half long, breakers, and their only weak point was being self-made. At one of the local productions, they took thick rebar rods, cut them into the pieces of proper length, hammered the rod ends in a smithy to make them pointed, and dumped by the pit.

However, the breaker should be smooth because that's a hand instrument. Yet, rebar, which is mostly intended for making reinforced concrete, bears frequent oblique scars for firmer merging with the cement solution.

Those scars, though rounded, would tear any mitts after a dozen strikes with the rebar-rod breaker against the ground, and then the so-called handtool would start rubbing off the palm skin, no matter how calloused and hardened it was.

But if not we, then who else would defend beloved Homeland from the planning and design-making ass-holes?

Conbat would cover anything and deal with any situation...

The wind, like a dog who broke off the chain, tumbled in helter-skelter around, snapped at the loosened ear-flaps of our hats, and lashed their strings against the faces.

However, the wind's main job was that of dragging along its current the black and gray clouds tumbling and scudding as low as the cabin top of the tower crane.

Because of those clouds, all around from morning to night was drowning in gloomy twilight.

To get warm we had the trailer, heated with our breathing.

The mitts had long since got worn to tatters; we grabbed the frosty rebar-rods with the rags found in the trailer.

A strike of the rebar breaker against the frozen ground cleaved off hardly more than a sliver the size of a walnut; then another splinter, and one more.

With his back to the wind, your partner waited for you to break away a shovelful of chips for him to scrape them off and throw away. Then you changed each other

As Vitya Strelyany cared to put it:

"We were brought to Stavropol

To dig and shovel the ground,

But it is so fucking hard,

Harder can't be found."

(...however, I entertain an unshared suspicion that it was an adaptation of a Zone couplet from the first five-year plans period, turned out in the mines of Donbas...)

Yet there's always a nook to feel happy in – oh, how sweet it is to doze seated on the floor of the trailer leaning your back against the backs of your comrades!

After half-day of breaking-scraping, we discovered that at the depth of half-meter-plus the permafrost transformed into the ground of almost equal hardness, yet yielding to the bayonet spade. Three days later we developed the trench digging technique.

First, you dig a hole meter-by-meter and two meters deep, then with an interval of one meter, you dig another such hole for these two to be connected with a burrow down at their bottoms under the bridging layer of frozen ground.

The bridge is noosed with the crane slings and you will hollow out two grooves across the edges of the permafrost bridge until the moment when the crane power is enough to tear off and hoist the whole block of frozen ground. Aha! Fuck you, bitch!.

Yes, the construction battalion did it!

And although there remained many days of breaking and scraping to the very end of the trench, we won the day. We broke the backbone of the polar night twilight that had descended as far as the city of Stavropol...

Besides the trailer, you also could shelter from the frost in the staircase-entrances of the multi-apartment block on the other bank of the pit. Out of the piercing wind, a cigarette could also warm you up if, of course, a passer-by in a staircase shared one to you...

While I was basking in the staircase-entrances, Alimosha and Novikov explored the surrounding territories and discovered a dairy factory there and a bakery plant as well. Just a question of climbing a pair of fencing walls.

They returned swollen like balloons with cardboard half-liter pyramids of milk, and loaves of hot bread tucked under their padded jackets.

Since that day we were sending foragers there. The workers of both enterprises allowed you to lift your loot directly from the production lines...

At times, we went out on the streets to beg money from the passers-by.

"Bro, 27 kopecks short of a bottle, can you help out?"

"Sister, 11 kopecks for a pack of "Belomor", eh? Two days without a smoke.."

Alimosha explained the nuances to me. Never address the pensioner oldies – no go, and they might even start to yell. Asking for a round sum was also a mistake; instead of 27 he would give you at least 30, and instead of 11 you'd get 15 kopecks.

What the money for?

Well, instead of 9-kopeck shag, or "Pamir" for 11 kopecks, you could buy Cuban "Portugas", aka "the thermonuclear", or that same "Prima" again; but not Indian "Red and White" – a sour crap in golden-foil wrappers.

And sometimes we drink wine too; to drive away fatigue and flush down the snack from the bakery plant.

Oh, how low I fell! Begging on the streets! Where were my decency and self-esteem? How could I possibly not die of shame?

(...well, firstly, in our cant there was a more precise term for that activity: we were not begging, but "jackalling".

Then, my decency and self-esteem are always by me only they do not have rigidly constant value as that never-ending Pi we were taught at school for I don't know what purpose.

And, regarding shame, I'm probably a pervert. I am more ashamed of robbing that Whatman paper tophat from credulous Valya Pisanko, than of receiving soiled coppers in my capped palm from the passers-by.

And though I might, at certain points, be a noble man, yet, on the whole, I'm anything but a Spanish grandee – that's for sure...)

In February, the bread-and-butter carnival was over; we were transferred to the construction of the Medical Center.

There the basement was already bridged over with concrete flooring slabs, but not completely. Underneath those slabs, we were hiding from the winter wind and building fire of any lumber or raw-timber we came across and split with breakers because there was no trailer to shelter in.

The grounds of the future Medical Center were vast indeed, but being on the city outskirts it provided no hunting grounds for jackalling...

The trucks for our transportation to work and back were provided by a local motor depot with their civilian drivers.

Ours was a hairy asshole. He flew into the grounds of the would-be Medical Center on his UAZ, hit the breaks and the truck glided over the icy ground, turned around and stopped still – get in, off we go!

During the trick, the tattered, not fully fixed canvas top quacked and bubbled like a parachute in arms of a landed saboteur. The driver grinned his bad-teeth smile from under his thin mustache – he was in high spirits from that sort of gypsy romanticism.

The exhaust pipe of his truck could give out loud bangs but he withheld the fun for the passage along the city sidewalks – to rough the passers-by.

Bang!!

"Oy, Mommy!"

The buddies tried to explain to me about those bangs and the carburetor, but such things always were above my head.

On one of the first days in the new place, I went to the wooden toilet on the frontier of the site territory.

When urged to take a leak we loosened bowls at any near nook, so I wouldn't go that far for such a trifle. It's only that because of the frost, using the sorteer at the detachment had certain risks to it. The whole floor there became one solid yellow skating rink too slippery for walking and even in the squatted attitude over an ochco your boots tried to slide apart on the smooth ice ...

While emptying the intestines at that faraway toilet, I felt like having some strange auditory sensations. I kind of heard...well, not quite voices...rather, echoes of voices. A distant, cohesive buzz of voices, some low even hum with no splashes nor distinct words.

Then I took a letter from the inside pocket of my outfit jacket, which I never re-read but kept on me.

Without looking who the letter was from, I used it as toilet paper, stood up, buttoned my pants and suddenly saw the source of that noise.

The plank walls and partitions of the toilet were thickly covered with inscriptions. Names, dates, settlement names were written and scratched, with pencils and ball pens. Some climbed on top of others because there was no spare space enough.

The territory around had previously been the Stavropol Collection and Distribution Point of Draftees, to be sure, and they, already immersed into the two-year-long eternity, already smitten and swept away by it, were leaving on the planks their hurried parting marks:

"Sakha, from the village..."

"Athos, from the settlement..."

"Drun, from the city..."

They were already there—were engulfed—because their voices were not heard, but turned into some mutual wordless hum, yet the hands were still finishing their farewell to themselves:

"Andron, from..."

(...in the construction battalion, the universal urge to leave a meme of oneself does not disappear, but becomes anonymous.

You would not see there the classical "Vasya was here", they used one, common, mark for all at once:

"Orel, DMB-73".

Read as "Drafted from the Orel-City (or region) demobilized in 1973".

With graphite, chalk, paint on walls, on pipes, on the tin, on anything.

In every construction site or building erected by the Stavropol Construction Battalion about a year or two before 1973, there was such a mark.

Then there came "Tula, DMB-74".

The time would come for "Sumy, DMB-75", and "Dnepr, DMB-75" but it still was so far away...)

The Orion took part in the city musical contest.

We performed two numbers there without winning any place; in general, the whole affair seemed to be started for the sake of a local singer. A young guy could sing without a microphone filling the whole audience with his voice.

That's some singer!

(...I have never heard him later neither on TV nor over the radio, they had no vacancies there; muslim magomaevs and iosif kobsons kept their positions for decades...)

The second of our numbers at the contest was "The Indian's Song" from the repertoire of Tom Jones.

No one knew what about he sang in it, but in the Soviet adaptation the song bemoaned the bitter fate of American Redskins:

"From reservation, mark it well,

We go one way, that's straight to hell..."

At the contest, the Orion's "brass" group comprised already two horn players.

Ensign Jafar Jafarov had been transferred to our battalion I can't say where from or what for, because I didn't care.

He came to the Club and announced that he was playing a horn...

Jafarov's eastern appearance imparted a pleasant impression of softness. A rounded face with the soft swarthy skin, the soft glinting of his black, olive-like, eyes, his soft smile when he uttered his, "I swear to you by my Mom!"

And he really played the horn which he was bringing to the Club for the rehearsals and carrying away in a strangely hard case.

Kolya Commissar started to blow his horn much better with Jafar around...

Gray, the tamer of Karlookha, became a frequent visitor to the Club too, not as a musician though, just because it was a secluded spot in the everyday conbat life.

At work, he fucked it all from the very beginning of his service and was just doing another two-year time at the construction battalion. As if it was much fucking different from a penitentiary colony...just that conditions were a bit easier and the spetzovka in khaki color instead of indigo.

Arriving in the morning at a construction site, he ventured to the city and returned only for the evening truck home.

At times, he was locked up in the clink, but even Battalion Commander, notwithstanding his chronic brain leakage, clearly realized the futility of such educational measures towards the fully-developed stiff-lipped jail-bird, with the bald patch of a scar over his eyebrow in the sharp face on the head, drooping forward from his broad shoulders.

In his life, Gray was treading along the guilelessly straight, unpretentious, path of a hereditary thief.

In the Club, he shared stories of his recent adventures in the city, or roughed Commissar.

That was not right, because both Commissar and he were from the same draft, but for Gray, the Zone Code overweighted that of the construction battalion.

On the eve of becoming a _pheasant_ , Commissar decorated the entire rear of his right hand with a gaudy tattoo depicting a raggy ridge of fuzzy mountains and the sun rising from behind them in a spiky halo of sharp rays, and all that freshly shining world had a firm foundation of instructive inscription underneath, "The Northern Caucasus".

When on the stage, Commissar assumed such a stance that his tattoo would face the audience and, blowing his horn aloft, he squinted proudly at the sprawling masterpiece of an unknown author.

Probably, it went against Gray's grains that Commissar was swaggering with a more ostentatious tattoo than his blueish spider-cross (a Zona sign for the initiated) hardly bigger than a ping-pong ball, and so Gray picked at the cheerful hornblower.

(...however, when I use the word "probably" you don't have to take all that follows for its face value because there certainly might be other assumptions besides it.

There can be a whole lot of variants and interpretations, but that "probably" sweeps them all aside and leaves just one, maybe not the truest to life.

Word requires a cautious approach.

At times you blurt something out, like, say, " _laboohs_ (aka musicians) – are one family! We support each other like a wall!" and then you run into nagging qualms: oops! I did it again...

Because all those general statements are good for slogans only, like:

"Workers of all the countries – unite!"

Or else:

"Bipeds! All you need is love!"

Such spiffy words work only until the common interests coincide with the interests of the given, individually taken, mammal but whenever the interests diverge then at once – you get along and let me alone...)

Let's take, for instance, that same Yura Zameshkevich.

After locking up the stoker-house he came to the Club. The place where he would safely keep away from the eyes of Fathers Commanders, where he could strum a guitar, serenely drink a mug of chiffeer concocted in the Canteen kitchen (a 250 gr. pack of tea for 250 ml of water, and bring to boiling) where he's one of us – a person of a subtle soul constitution, an exquisite connoisseur of real music, a loyal friend, a reliable comrade, and simply a brother – a _labooh_ , in a word.

But then his wife arrived to visit him and waited at the checkpoint guardhouse, while he raced around looking for a parade-crap and a greatcoat to go with her to the city.

He shaved hastily, and got the Leave Ticket at the Staff barrack, and dropped in for some reason to the Club where I was sitting on a back-row seat.

He briskly jumped in and out of the musicians' and, leaving the Club, grabbed my completely unaware dick and all, in his bearish grip and raised me in the air for a goodbye.

Of course, I screamed!

Then the pain gradually dissolved but there still remained inescapable bewilderment. What for?

(...I haven't found the answer in writings of the naive primitivist Freud and his bro-scholars, neither in all the Upanishads and Bhagavatas, nor in the two of Covenants, nor in Quran.

Only in The History of Russia from Ancient Times, a brief passage mentioned the case of Dmitry the Pretender hiding at the back of the palace where a Cossack found him and, grabbing at his "secret knot", dragged the usurper out to the raging mob.

But there at least might be traced a certain purpose for the deed, in contrast to Yura's...

What was it to him?.

Some questions are beyond the power of human comprehension; we only can point at them for the edification of the inquisitive, and, with a sad shrug, spread our hands wide apart – alackaday! 'tis beyond the human plumbing.

They have even invented a special scientific term for such cases.

When, say, you are so high and mighty that taking a leak the squirt you issue bores through a three-meter-thick layer of glacial ice, yes, in a breeze, before there suddenly pops up some crap that even you don't fucking know what the fuck it could possibly be at all.

Know then that you've come across that very opaque doodad called by scientifically bent fobs _transcendentalism_...)

So, what else did we do in the Club beside solfeggio, rehearsals and wistful contemplation of certain transcendental questions viewed at all their respective aspects?

Fooling around with chiffeer mentioned en passant? Its bitterness was a rare delicacy.

And vodka hardly happened oftener...

We used a code-knock at the door of the musicians' to be admitted into the room.

With the right knock, the door would open, otherwise, go where you had come from, or shout through the closed door what was your fucking message.

One time, after the right code and the click of the lock opening in response, the doorway was filled with the stubby figure of Zampolit, bodyguarded by the ensign from Fourth Company who had tap-tapped the code, to be sure, the fucking excursion guide.

Our cook-vocalist Volodya Rassolov, handled Pickle, was fast and up to the situation: while the two officers gaped around what's what, he glibly slipped the bottle into a boot top in the pair of high kirza boots standing by his side.

Of course, Zampolit labeled us a gang of drunkards and parasites all the same, but there was no direct evidence already...

But most of all we talked: who was what in his civilian life, what would he do coming back to it (we naively believed it was possible to return anywhere at all) and that Third Company went to kick the shit out of Separate Company, but the black-ass fuckers fought the assault back with their belt-plates, and the pigsty soldier-oversee seemed really be fucking his swine harem...

The champion of talking was, sure enough, Karpesha.

In a hushed, brotherly confidential tone of voice, for hours would he spin a yarn about his ten-day furlough when he six times broke up and reconciled with a girl he dated, his former classmate...

Got bored with listening to the same minutiae for the seventh time? Go out into the empty Club hall, get seated next to Robert in the last row of seats, and he would tell you about Parisian life.

In Paris, everyone knew everything about anyone else. That, for example, Jean Marais was gay.

And that's a pity, of course. Although I did not like him starring in "Fantômas", but as D'Artagnan in "The Iron Mask", he was the masculinity itself.

That's what that fucking Paris was doing to even manly men...

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 else how he battered his wife for the first time and the following morning she had Chink eyes...

And Jafarov, thoughtfully stroking the soft gleam of his horn, would narrate of when being still just a kid and "playing trash" at some party, he watched through 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.

That was his way of was 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 not "playing trash" with the whole of the 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!" said she who the deal was made with, and wailed 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?", asked I through 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 had 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 _labooh_ 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 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 get the impression 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 fore-and-aft caps.

It's so 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 back 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 the 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 thirty 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 Aliev knew where we were going, but his lexicon 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 trailer vans with canvas tops, and festively pulled boxes looking quite the same out from looking the same, but already other, long trailer vans.

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.

Was 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 a 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 through 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, it kinda feels like being an elephant in a small Indian village...)

She climbed onto the high porch, 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 Aliev was racing around the arena, circling after a white pony who openly resented flirtations from any stray lance-corporals in kirza boots.

In the pit above the curtained arena entrance, the brass band hurriedly rehearsed bravura marches with a light 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 performed in a chicken 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 at the checkpoint guardhouse."

I raced there, then to the Staff barrack, they gave me a Leave Ticket only until the next morning. Battalion Commander was not there, said they, the Ticket would be prolonged the next day after the Morning Dispensing, they said.

Then I barely found some parade-crap, the master sergeant was not there together with the storeroom 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 room 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.

(...well, okay, then...

Sarah and Abraham had also been there...)

He had a long table in his room all filled with wine bottles, sort of a hussar banquet. Sometime earlier, he had been a cadet at the Stavropol Military Aviation School but got expelled and now came there to see his friends; and those were already third-year cadets...

I knew their Aviation School, out squad-team once had been laying partitions in the basement of some building there. When the bell sounded and the cadets rushed to the classes from the yard, we combed trash pits in the gazebos hunting cigarette butts...

Now they were sharing common memories with each other, toasting this and that from their mutual past.

We also drank. And then I saw how that kicked-out cadet dropped his palm on Olga's knee.

What to do? To surprise him with a bottle smashed at his pate? Not quite traditional treatment of your prospective brother-in-law though.

Of course, she took his hand off and I, like, hadn't seen anything. Soon we left and back in our room she said, "Well, and so what of it?"

Indeed, on Peace Square in Konotop when our whole passe got seated on a bench by the constantly dry fountain to have a smoke, they also stroked her knees and she as casually brushed their hands off.

Yet, we hadn't been married then...

In the morning, when I ran to the UAZ taking ensigns to the detachment, Jafarov rocked with laughter in its open back.

"You ran as if in a slow-motion film stretch. Clearly doing your best, but still no progress. I swear by Mommy. Good luck there was no counter wind."

I was given a Leave Ticket until the evening roll-call; dirty fuckers.

When I returned, Olga was still sleeping, in her blouse inside out.

Then it was the time to check out, the room was for one day only.

I told her I should be back at the Battalion for the evening roll-call, and she said her train was also in the evening.

We went to the cinema; some kind of a fairy tale about a Persian Hercules named Rostam.

Then we were sitting on a bench at the foot of the Komsomol Gorka Hill.

She said that she had to go to the station, but no need to see her off, and she started to cry.

The rare passers-by scoffed on the sly – a classical picture by Repin: the girl got pregnant but the soldier doesn't care a fuck.

When she left, I sat on a little more and then went home...

The next day in the Canteen, I knock-toppled a bowl of soup from the table. It spilled in my lap, scolding even through the canvas pants. I could not get it at all how it happened.

Everyone at the table looked up at me, strangely silent, and no one laughed.

Spilled the soup in the lap...What sign could it be?

The blouse inside-out. Why?.

(...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...)

Zampolit ordered the Club Director, Alexander Roodko, to have a brass band for the Victory Day, on May 9, or he'd get the boot and busted to a construction site as a plasterer's hand, and his Company master sergeant would rot him "on the floors" until his demobilization day.

Of course, we pulled for The Orion leader and so as not to let him down in mere three weeks a brass band was thrown together.

Jafarov and Commissar, clear enough, were two horn players, Pickle played the baritone, Zameshkevich blew the tuba. As it turned out, in their schooldays, they participated in a brass music course.

Karpesha was the drummer, Roodko played the clarinet, the Club painter beat the big drum and mine was the main instrument in any brass band – two copper plates. Bzdents!!.

Sasha Lopatko began his service in the same squad-team with me, but then his Dad came and held negotiations in the Staff barrack and Sasha was appointed the Club painter...

His Dad was, by the by, a priest and, probably, for that reason Sasha got to the construction battalion. Not anyone, after all, could be trusted with the handling of modern military weapons.

We prepared two numbers: "On the Hills of Manchuria" and "Farewell of the Slav Woman", not because we got way too scared by Zampolit's threat but simply a _labooh_ would do what he could for to help out another _labooh_.

On May 9, we changed into parade-craps and were taken by the UAZ van to different construction sites escorted by the "goat"-Willys with Zampolit.

Holidays were for idlers and the construction battalion warriors had always been on duty.

The squad-teams working at the sites were ordered to briefly leave their front of work and fall in nearby their construction sites. Zampolit pushed over a very short speech (the Battalion Commander with his leaky brain would start an oration for a half-hour without knowing what he was about at all), we played "The Slav" and "The Hills" and the sun shimmered playfully over the brass and copper.

To have a holiday you do need a brass band...

The following step in The Orion's career became the invitation to play one-night dances in the village club of Demino, located six kilometers farther from our detachment along the same asphalt road.

The musicians not only played but, replacing each other at the instruments, climbed, in turn, down from the small stage to the small hall to dance amidst the local youth. Of all The Orions the pleasure was withheld only for Alexander Roodko, the irreplaceable bass guitarist.

Under the long-long song sung by Robert Zakarian, I was embracing the ample-bodied villager Irina. Life was smiling at me...

Before his demobilization, Yura Zameshkevich informed Major Avetissian, the Battalion Supply and Maintenance Commander, that no one but I was qualified to replace him at the position of the Battalion Stoker.

Zameshkevich's statement was actively backed by a Battalion Cook Vladimir Rassolov, aka Pickle, who had still another half-year to serve. In the course of the petition, the chef congratulated the Supply and Maintenance Commander on obtaining the long-awaited-for rank of Major.

As a result, Major Avetissian granted my enrollment to the glorious ranks of chmo.

The collective name of chmo was used to specify all the servicemen engaged in the internal battalion services: the pigman, dishwashers, stokers, cooks, the locksmith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the projectionist, the drivers of the vehicles for the commanding officers, as well as the assistant paramedic at the first aid unit – anyone, in short, who was not fortunate enough to work at construction sites was a part of the chmo reporting to Major Avetissian.

(...initially, CHMO was the acronym of "man messing around with the society" but soon because of so impressive sound form the term forced to forget its original meaning and nowadays everyone thinks that chmo is a synonym of "wafler" only more degrading...)

Before his return to civilian life, Yura Zameshkevich showed me the location of the water well with the water supply valves for filling the water tank above the stoker-house. He taught me to light the nozzle in the steam boiler furnace with a torch, to read the water measuring tube and the pressure gauge.

I was transferred to Fourth Company where all the chmo was listed, and Yura got demobilized.

The _young_ draft was from the Crimea and Major Avetissian chose me a partner from them named Vanya who sported a thin mustache and thick eyebrows.

It's highly doubtful that Major Avetissian's choice of Vanya was prompted by the eyebrows' thickness of the latter. Most likely, Vanya's father, who came to see his offspring on the third day of sonny's service, found convincing arguments when negotiating with the Major.

I shared Yura Zameshkevich's lectures with Vanya and we began to work in two 24-hour shifts.

The stoker-house of the Military Detachment 41769, aka VSO-11, consisted of two high halls in a red-brick one-story building.

Each of the halls contained two massive boilers sharing their common refractive brick lining, and a host of all kinds of pipes with valves and cocks – for hot water, for cold water, for steam, for fuel supply...

On the concrete floor before each boiler, there was planted an air pump motor forcing the fuel to spray from the nozzle inside the respective furnace. However, only one boiler was in permanent operation, the farthermost from the entrance, all the remaining ones were reserved for the heating season in winter.

The stokers' task in summer was to provide steam for cooking boilers in the kitchen of the Canteen plus hot water for the Dishwashers'. And, once a month, we heated water for the bath of all the servicemen at VSO-11 and Separate Company.

Anyway, each day you had to sit at a round table beneath the high window opposite the deafening rumble of the air pump and the wailing buzz of the nozzle flame in the boiler furnace for about four hours until the on-duty cook knocked on the locked door of the stoker-house to say the havvage was ready. Then you could turn it off. The runs for breakfast and supper were shorter though.

Silence is an invaluable grace...

To the right from the entrance door, there was a narrow room of the pumping section to drive hot water through the heating system in winter. But if going straight ahead, in the corner behind the twinned boilers of the first hall, you found the door to a small workshop.

There was a window, a wooden workbench without a vice placed by the butt wall across the room, an iron box in the corner between the door and the window, containing a hammer and a blunt chisel, plus a narrow piece of a mirror embedded in the plaster next to the switch of the electric bulb in the ceiling.

The arrival of summer was celebrated by the chmo of VSO-11 with collective booze.

The battalion's truck delivering havvage to the watchmen at the construction sites and those kept there even at night by urgent works came back with a box of vodka smuggled utilizing a thermos-flask emptied of havvage. The on-duty officer at the checkpoint cast a fleeting glance into the back of the returning truck, and it passed the gate.

The orgy, to which I also was invited because a stoker is a necessary accessory in the soldiery life, started after the lights-out near the remote car-boxes.

In the bright illumination from the full moon, some fifteen chmomen sat on the ground in a wide circle, as if an aboriginal tribe of that field. Everyone faced the center of the circle where the glass of vodka bottles, and the sides of two pots full of meat fried by cooks in large baking trays at the Canteen kitchen, glistened in the moonlight. On the spread burlap of two empty sacks there piled several loaves of bread chopped in the Bread-Cutter's.

Never before I had vodka from the bottle's neck. The initial gulps were somewhat disgusting but the following kept pouring in smoothly.

The snack, regrettably, got finished off all too soon.

I never finished the bottle in my hand. Having risen on unsteady legs, with the best wishes to the honest company, I informed of the immediate departure of me to the village of Demino.

"All's nyshtyak, buddy-bros. What fucki' on-dut' what fucki' office..rr... It's me on-dut'.... fuck!.."

Nevertheless, so as not to run into, I crossed the perimeter fence near the pigsty, away from the barracks. And there I made for the round face of the full moon that shone from above the distant village of Demino and was swaying back and forth like on a swing.

I muttered reproaches to its treacherous inconstancy, and to the field as well for arranging a sea-rolling in my way. Then I fell down and tried to hoist me on my elbows but the earth gravity proved too powerful and the field was so irresistibly soft...

I woke up in the dusk of dawn, only a hundred meters from the pigsty, dying from thirst, and went back to drink water from the tap in the stoker-house before crashing onto the workbench in the workshop room.

It seemed like I gave too free rein to my wishful thinking, imagining that till my service ended I would live my life between the Club and the stoker-house.

On the morning after one of the night shifts, Major Avetissian found me asleep in the workshop and ordered to retreat to the Company barrack.

And that at the time when so many of the chmomen were free to skip even the evening roll-calls!

Thus, the soldier-clerk from the Stuff barracks slept at the Medical Unit as well as the paramedic assistant. The Club painter Lopatko had a room of his own at the Club.

But an ill-fated stoker, after sitting all day in that howling hell of the stoker-house, had to go for the evening roll-call where instead of absent chmomen a voice from the ranks would shout out "on duty!" and there were no questions at all...

To somehow pass the time while they were cooking havvage, I took a book from the library in the Staff barrack, with the assistance of the Staff clerk. The book was chosen because of its thickness so that it lasted longer. The Idiot by Dostoevsky.

Wow! That's the stuff! A culmination upon culmination. After those of his works prescribed by the school curriculum, I wouldn't ever think he was writing so cool.

And there wasn't anything else to take from the Staff library with its just one shelf of books, because reading the masterpieces of B. Polevoy or N. Ostrovsky was not worth the while after the Dostoevsky's book.

At the Club, Roodko passed me a booklet The Beatles in America about their tour there. Some of the _youngs_ brought it along with him.

I undertook to translate it because that booklet had more pictures than the text. However, without a dictionary at hand, my school stock of vocabulary allowed me to understand it only here and there. I filled the gaps with my wild guesses, but Roodko was happy all the same.

And so it went in a circle – the hiss of steam, the rumble of the air pump, the Club, the evening roll-call, and back to the Club. And in the morning all over again...

Here, Jafarov rushed a-galloping into the stoker-house with his eyes rounded and the face as pale as the white marks on his khaki shirt back which he had fucking rubbed against some whitewashed wall.

"Where to hide? Chief of Staff is after me!"

I looked out the door and who was there but him – making for the stoker-house from the Canteen's kitchen in his boxer swagger. Jafarov barely had time to jump out through the window in the workshop into the tall grass on the other side of the stoker-house.

"No, Comrade Major, no one was coming."

But the Major's scent would surpass that of a hunting dog, and in a moment, from around the corner, "Ensign Jafarov! To me!"

Fucking caput to you, ensign.

Why should Chief of Staff chase Jafar as with a fucking dick in his arse? But then, who fucking cares...

And in the evening there's another hunt in the field.

The swarthy cowboys from Separate Company ran down a rat and drove it into a plugged pipe then splashed gasoline inside and set on fire. The rat whizzed out and jumped around the field like a ball of flames and they followed running – some cultural and sports event...

When it was my night shift, I saw a brood of rats in the passage around the twinned boilers, so I hollered and rushed to trample them, but they fled.

And then I wondered what caused that sudden rat-hate to crop up in me?

The instinct of self-preservation it was. Rats would not forgive the humans, including me as well, the death in flames of that rat martyr, so to prevent their avenge I attacked first. Fucking moron...

One night I was sleeping on the workbench when some strange thing sat on my chest. Some dark one like a clot of black fog, sort of, and it pressed to strangle me.

I wanted to brush it off but had no strength even to stir or at least scream it away as if my might got all wrung out or paralyzed. It took a desperate effort to wake up.

Later Vanya, putting on a look of an expert, began to lecture me it was a bogey.

They're just fucking stupid in that Crimea of theirs. Bogeys live at folks homes, the stoker-house is anything but a home. Where could a bogey pop up here from?.

What I omitted to tell Vanya was that the creature sat right in that place on my chest that I had shaved with the razor-machine in front of the mirror piece embedded in the wall plaster.

Well, to get a macho look, of course, because I had there no more hair than Vanya on his upper lip. But it fucking did not work and the chest remained unchanged, the way it had been before...

After the evening roll-call, I went to Demino and there I found the house of Irina whom I met when we played dances at their club.

There was also her elder sister in the house. Irina left the kitchen for a while and her sister started a solo Sing-a-song about how Irina was only nineteen-year-old and had never come across a low-grade buster in her life as of yet and would I mind her taking a look at my military ID, by the way.

That was her way to hint, sort of, about her sister's being a virgin.

"No worry, I'm not a buster."

The soldier's military ID, as stipulated in the Statute of the Internal Military Service, each serviceman had always to have by him, and so was mine in my jacket inner pocket. There was a slight problem though presented by just one line down its first page: 'wife – Olga Abramovna Ogoltsova"

Because of that record, I had to drive a fool to that smart-Alec of a guardian-sister about conbatists' IDs being locked up in a big safe at the Battalion Staff and given out to us together with a Leave Ticket which papers we must hand in on coming back from the city and, going on AWAL to their village, I skipped disturbing Battalion Commander with a request for my military ID.

Then there popped up the husband of the elder of the two sisters, named Senya who at first, like, started to be jealous, sort of, but then all of us drank tea in peace and I left...

A week later, a soldier from Separate Company appeared in the stoker-house. There's a girl, he said, at the corner of the wall fence, who asked for me.

I went there, it was Irina. Demino folks sometimes went from Stavropol to their village along the asphalt road on foot, in twos or threes, but she was alone.

Hello. Hey. Kisses.

We agreed that after the evening roll-call I come to the village. "Will you walk with me a little?"

That meant along the whole wall, past the Staff barrack, past the checkpoint. "No, I'll wait for you near that corner."

I walked along the paths inside the battalion, parallel to the asphalt road outside. And from that far off corner, I even walked with her a bit.

(...now I am sorry for missing that opportunity.

After all, how beautifully we might have passed together along the whole construction battalion. Leisurely, absorbed in each other, seeing nothing of the drab world around.

And if the on-duty ensign suddenly stopped me at the checkpoint I might just tell him...

Although, who cares what exactly might have been told if I missed it and cowardly walked inside like a worthless boob...)

At night she took her clothes off down to the panties, which she refused to remove and actively defended. The item of discord was rather capacious and stretching willingly, maybe after all those who, like me, aspired yet failed to become the buster.

In the morning, after the night spent in monotonous useless efforts at peeling those panties off her, I left the girl in her staunch irremovables and went back, without any tea at that time.

Six kilometers along an asphalt road with the nature awakening around for a new day – it's a rare treat. The light was flowing higher and higher, but the sun hadn't yet hove into sight.

On a roadside hillock, I saw a horse among the greens of broad-leaved grass and, without a moment's hesitation, turned towards him.

Pure idiocy. I had never ridden a horse in my life, but I suddenly felt like it.

The horse started to retreat, and I ran after him but did not catch up, and only drenched my canvas pants with the big drops of dew from all over the grass.

I returned to the road and walked on yelling all sorts of songs – nobody was near to hear my crap.

"Sleep! The night of June is just six-hour loooooooooong!"

In a week I received her letter sent from Stavropol, "...my soul aches – for whom? – for you!..."

So beautiful words were wasted because I had already been harpooned and trophied by the one who "...was devastatingly happy..."

(...I never answered the letter but I sincerely hope that Irina had eventually found a proper buster and they started living a happy, wealthy, and blissful life thereafter...)

Having served for one year in the armed forces of the USSR, a serviceman was eligible for a 10-day furlough to visit his home, the place where he was drafted from.

When I mentioned the idea to Major Avetissian, he did not even want to listen. How could Vanya possibly withstand ten days working round the clock alone?

Vanya said that, yes, he was up to the task, and Major Avetissian promised to give me a 10-day leave if I do a cosmetic renovation of the stoker-house, that is, I had to whitewash it from inside.

The VSO-11 locksmith, private Ter-Terian, showed me the place in the tall grass where they buried the lime not utilized at the previous stoker-house renovations.

I loaded it in portions in a bath basin with handle-ears, added water to the proportion, hauled it up on the furnaces to reach the ceiling of the stoker-house and with a broad brush – ...slip-slop... slop-slup... – whitewashed where I could reach.

Then I took a long iron ladder from the locksmith Ter-Terian and leaned it against the walls, at some places against the pipes run under the ceiling, and – ....slip-slop.... slop-slup.... – went on because of it's just a circus and nothing else – ....slip-slop.... slop-slup.... – but after all, does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?

However, no Tom Sawyer would stand a week of circus-like renovation – two hugely tall and spacey halls plus two enormous furnaces with a pair of twinned boilers in each.

Heated anticipation – that's what helped me to hold out that week.

After all, Olga and I – ...slip-slop...– missed trying so many things yet – ...slip-slip-slop!..– we'd do it that way and even so and then all over again in full juxtaposition–...slop!...slop!..slop-slup!..– ten nights that would fucking shatter the fucking world –...slip-slip-slop!...SLOOOP-slup!.

And now the renovation was over. The concrete floor in both halls bore variously shaped white splotches, even after I had swept it. The pipes under the ceiling got hastily wiped up. The whitewashing if not too uniform but then universal – without left-out spots. All in all, two huge halls and two gigantic furnaces.

"Comrade Major, the renovation is done."

"And you call this a renovation?"

"Comrade Major, you have promised..."

"I hadn't promised anything!"

That's how Major Avetissian had fucked Tom Sawyer.

SLIP-SLOP!!

At the end of the day, Gray came to the stoker-house, "Got the fuck?"

"Yea."

In the construction battalion, everyone knew everything about anyone else.

"Fuck him. Now we'll have a flight to Paris."

From the inner pocket of his jacket, he took out a folded newspaper page, opened it at the place marked with a brownish thin plate, broke a pinch of it off, and folded the newspaper as it was.

Then he pressed and rolled a "Belomor-Canal" cigarette until all the tobacco poured into his palm. He sprinkled it with the stuff from crumbled pinch and mixed all up. The tube of the emptied cigarette went off consuming the mixture up in tiny jerks.

Although watching the process for the first time ever, I still knew that he was stuffing a blunt.

"Spark it," and he brought up a burning match. "Keep the smoke in you."

We smoked the blunt passing it to each other; I diligently copied his way of inhaling and keeping the smoke in the lungs.

"Well, so what?"

"What what?"

"You asking? Wasn't you fucking touched? Well, you're some moose!"

"I'm sorry."

Disappointed, he left for the evening roll-call...

One week later, on my day shift, two soldiers of a Central Asian appearance modestly entered the stoker-house filled with the duet wailing of the furnace and the pump. Probably, from Separate Company, or else from the Crimean draft.

"We a-need sieve it," one of them said timidly.

"What?"

"Da ganja. You knows yoursel."

I did not really understand what all that was about, yet it's inconvenient to look ignorant before the _youngs_.

"Okay."

They came out and returned four already, carrying some gunnysack bags. I took them to the workshop room and returned to watch the howlers.

A couple of times, I checked into the workshop with the grass spread out on the workbench. They greeted me with their mute united smiles of gratitude and I went back – why to interfere with busy people knowing their job?

In two hours, when it was already quiet in the stoker-house, they went away. "We there a-left," said the last in their file with a joyful smile.

In a shallow plywood box that had long been kicking back around on the workbench, there was a handful of brownish sticky dust.

I put it away into the iron box next to the never used hammer-with-chisel and just forgot about it...

Of course, I remembered the dust in the box when on the payday instead of the usual "Prima" I bought a pack of "Belomor-Canal".

Repeating the procedure demonstrated by Gray, I stuffed a blunt and sparked.

Vo-ohoo! What the tha-a-at?

And I swam up to the mirror peeping from the wall and looked into to make sure there really was no one behind because there was a clear feeling as if my head was like a balloon that was not filled too tight so you could jab it from opposite sides but not as deep as to burst up but just to twist your fingers inside where they do not reach each other as I was now feeling jabbed through my temples and they twisted inside the brain convolutions but in the mirror there was just only me alone without anyone behind but then yes it was only very necessary to go and check the manometer glass or else we all will fly away and very high... you are the moose yourself, Gray...

(...that was how I became a nashavan, one of the enlightened initiates who get the drag from cannabis, aka marijuana, aka grass, aka anasha, aka ganja, aka...etc...)

The first one to know about my transition to a new quality was Gueerok, a descendant of German colonists, the warrant officer at Fourth Company.

He saw me engulfed in a stoned reading from the scraps of Red Star daily glued, years before, on the tin stand in the grass bordering the drill grounds.

The sun was pouring its scorching heat on my fore-and-aft cap. So what? Like to the political studies, like, I'm preparing...Americans once again defeated in Vietnam, from our correspondent in Saigon...

He approached me from the right but seeing that the "Belomor-Canal" cigarette in my fingers was smoked up to its paper mouthpiece and there was no hope even for the heel, he smiled a weary smile, licked his dry lips, and weakly melted away in the heat...

The veil of ignorance slipped off from my enlightened eyes and there came the revelation that everyone in The Orion was on the drag, though each one in his own way.

Karpesha and Pickle in a businesslike manner.

Jafarov – very softly.

Roodko was following the homeopathic shebang of moderate buoys at regular intervals.

Robert – when they treated him, yet not always...

It looked like I almost got late for a departing train.

But the coolest weed was by Sasha Lopatko, the Club painter.

In his room, I was getting in the state of weightlessness as if on a visit to the orbital space station Salyut; only not often, because of his meanness.

Roodko also agreed that he had never seen such a greedy egoist in his life. And strange it seemed indeed when having such a good father – a minister of the cult, who should have had infused his son with the love towards your neighbor...

(...when under the influence, the drag can be sort of different to another instance of being under.

In general, you're getting filled with an all-forgiving calm, you feel good, fluffy, and you want everyone else to feel good too, and you don't want to disturb anyone's fluff.

Or you could suddenly notice some funny side in the surrounding reality and – you're done, you just cannot stop, you'll laugh until completely exhausted, then you'll catch your breath and start laughing again.

That kind of drag was called "to catch the arrival". That's the most dangerous drag if you're a TV announcer.

Still another time, you could get concentrated on doing something and went on doing it, and doing it, and doing – it had already long before been not necessary but you still went on doing it. Like that team of _zeks_ who felled a grove of oak trees with a couple of jigsaws.

Or, let's take, the so-called "piggy" drag; this is when you got started eating something and all of a sudden there unfolds such a gamma of taste sensation that you, without ever noticing it, could put away a whole pot of cold macaroni and scrape the bottom.

And, on the whole, you became ever so clever, awesomely judicious and when some buddy's coming up to you "hello, how's your nothing?", you knew already at which point of his nonprofit socializing he'd beg of you a pinch for joint.

Or there may start to appear so deep thoughts by you – fucking Isaac Newton! – only that they did not linger to allow for formulating them clearly but got lost because of one thing or another distracted you over to something else. All in all, a play of shadows on the swirling whiffs of fog.

Listening to music when you ride the wave is the utmost drag...)

In the musicians' we had a record player on the bookshelf together with the LP disc "Burn" by The Deep Purple.

Getting seated on the floor next to a speaker, I would hold the disc cover in my hands and consider it unswervingly till one side played to the end – there were their busts, like, in bronze, with a tongue of flame from each one's head, like, a lighter, sort of, the dudes were clearly understanding what's what in blasting...

A real bummer was when anasha suddenly ran out and, no matter whomever you rolled up, no one had it; such a period was called "the empty suction".

Everyone became angered as dogs, some buddies even went to pieces because of the fucking khoomar was so too pressing. No kidding, they got smashed breaking; some simply pitiful sight...

Once Gray heated me with pills that he brought from the city.

"Would ye?"

"What's that?"

"Nyshtyak."

"Okay".

He was passing them, one by one, for me to swallow. With half of the pack over, I said, "And what's the dose?"

"All's nyshtyak."

So I consumed the whole pack.

Then a roar flooded the ears, as from a waterfall, and the night got dense and dark around.

Oh, the stoker-house. Vanya's shift...

I entered.

He talked to me but I couldn't get it at all. Then I began to walk around the furnace, what for?

He told me later that at one point I stopped in the dark passage behind the boiler, and stood there for half-hour as a monument, like, in bronze.

And, most importantly, I was afraid of going to bed: what if getting somehow asleep I wouldn't wake up? But eventually, I came to myself.

And Gray was just a bitchy scumbag not knowing the dose himself; kinda experimenting on people whether I'd survive or not.

"But you're some fucking moose!."

Vanya's wife came on a visit from their Crimea village.

The construction battalion just started to seem some Club of married dolts because of who I again was pulling at the stoker-house one shift after another.

When she left, Vanya changed from the parade-crap into his fatigues and came to the stoker-house as gloomy as the sadness itself.

It was dark outside the windows.

And then Roodko, the Club Director, came in. He had his regular cold, and in the medical unit, they gave him some powder for doing inhalation.

That's why, grabbing a tin cup at the Dishwashers', he navigated to the stoker-house.

The powder was poured into the cup, then he added boiling water from the boiler tap and covered the cup with a stray piece of cardboard, sort of a lid to keep the mixture hot and not let it cool down right away.

That way he and I sat by the round table talking our talks. And, while talking, Roodko would move that cardboard lid, sniff at the cup a time or two, cover it back and we would go on with our gossip.

Now, by that particular moment in the course of his army service, Vanya had already seen different sights in the stoker-house and, standing in the dark of the adjacent hall of it, he followed all those collateral manipulations and came to certain aberrant conclusions.

Striding determinately, he neared the round table and, "Roodko! Gimme it too!"

"What to give?"

"Well, this!" And Vanya pointed at the Roodko's contraption.

Roodko was as naive as any other intellectual and he thought if he had a cold then whosoever could have it also. "Welcome."

Vanya pulled the cardboard off, took a couple of sniffs, deep indeed filling himself to the heels, and I saw how his eyes rolled under his forehead and, however strange it may sound – crosswise.

So what? I, personally, would believe it. Self-hypnosis is a great power because of faith moves the mountains.

If Vanya believed that Roodko was consuming the fucking "blue fairy" by bucketfuls there, then any other moment he could fall into hallucinatory strawberry fields and so fucking easily, I swear. Someone had to save the buddy.

"Vanya," said I, "the other day in the Canteen I talked with a Tatar from your draft."

"And what?"

"Well, nothing special...just that I says there, 'hey buddy, what's your name?', and he says, 'Me a-Russian no understand'...to which 'Okay,' says I, 'a fully clear matter, but how much do you have to serve yet?'...and here he at once clutches his head from both sides, 'Vooy! Fucking too much!' says he... So, Vanya, could he was a friend of yours?"

In short, I did have pumped the partner back from his hallucinations because that's the law of soldiery friendship – help your comrade out even by the cost of your own life...

(...in my opinion, The Orion provided its musical services free of charge, that is for nothing.

In any case, I do not remember any talks about any money for "playing trash".

For us, musicians of The Orion, just breaking out of the bounds of the Military Detachment 41769, playing dances for people dressed in civilian clothes was an invaluable payment in itself.

So, if you like, we were paid with minutes of freedom; time is money sometimes.

Was there any dough sticking to a palm at the commanding level?

Say, to that of Zampolit of our battalion?

I have no idea and don't feel like lying...)

With the draft from Simferopol, there arrived one more musician to join The Orion.

Yura Nikolaev knew his worth because of his price-list he studied well before the army, playing the rhythm guitar in a restaurant band.

And he also sang (without particular voice range and particular crap) within the framework of usual orders from restaurant revelers, heated with a couple of decanters of vodka.

"Here's water, it is good and cool!

Adding it to vodka is the gentlemanly rule!"

After the third decanter, it was time for hard rock:

"....by softly murmuring waters of the Nile,

Free of care, of pains, of nasty neighbors,

There lived small but happy crocodile!.."

And when the client grew fully ripe, the surrealistic splashes flowed forth:

"The firewood bloomed and horses were a-twitting,

A camel came from Africa on skates..."

So my presence in The Orion was justified by merely a couple of old numbers but the ensign, appointed to supervise us at playing out of the battalion, could not inform Zampolit that I was going with the ensemble for no good reason.

And not only I was getting something for nothing – two or three chmomen usually went along under the pretext of being sound engineers.

However, playing dances was a seasonal affair. The New Year parties were the main vent for the Orion to get outside the VSO-11. It's only once that we were engaged in summer, or rather at the beginning of autumn. That was playing dances at a bakery plant.

Whether it was the same one where my team-squad had been collecting alms from the production line conveyors, I couldn't tell. On arrival for that party, I saw only the asphalted courtyard enclosed with the row of locked truck boxes and the three-story building of the Plant Management with the party buzzing on its second floor.

Of course, I danced there quite a lot, and one of my partners got so charmed that she didn't hesitate to go out of the hall, at my suggestion.

We climbed the dark staircase to the third floor but the landing there with the locked door to a corridor was occupied by them those chmo sound engineers drinking wine.

On the first floor, the picture almost repeated itself, only there it was her female co-employees smoking cigarettes.

I made for the exit with her following yieldingly in tow.

AW, FUCK!!

The bare asphalt area was flooded with arc light glare leaving no shaded nook. The only bit of shadow was the anthracite-black meager strip of it cast by the pillar which held that dazzling arc lamp in the middle of the yard.

I was like that puppy named Tuzik who had snitched off a rubber hot water bottle, yet couldn't find a place to tear it up.

Reluctantly, I beat retreat...

Probably, the girl was disappointed with my unsoldierly lack of determination and too easy surrender to the plain minimalism of the conditions in the bakery plant yard. Anyway, the following evening she did not show up for the date in the park as settled.

I circled along the dark alleys, stood for a while close by the brightly lit dance-floor inside which coral the youth of Stavropol were enjoying their rest, although it was dangerous – a soldier in a casual wear outfit could be an easy mark for a military patrol.

She was nowhere and the chances for her to pop up grew real slim.

"Got matches, soldier?" A dainty long-haired dude with a shoulder bag on a wide strap was addressing me.

I took the matchbox from my pants pocket. He picked it and unzipped his bag where, on top anything else, lay a cigarette pack next to a box of matches.

"Oh! I'm so forgetful. Will you?" He stretched out the pack and opened its lid over the filters; I pulled one out.

"Ah, it's so noisy here, giving me a headache. Will we walk a little?"

With his right hand, he shook up the wide curls of his dark bob-cut hair.

...hell, what's up?. is he gluing me or what?. a short neat guy, long hair, a bag under his elbow...

"Why not?"

We walked away, followed by the glances of those standing by the dance-floor, that part of the public who's always keeping outside.

Strolling slowly, we headed nowhere in particular. He talked and talked with velvety feminine intonations. Then he told me a joke about gay life.

Some queen was arrested in Moscow and while they were beating him up at a militia station he squeaked, "Oh, Captain, I only wanted it in my mouth, not in the teeth!"

A play on words, though not very funny, yet clear enough, as clear as what he was, it's only that I just wondered what's next.

"Would you like some wine?

"Why not?"

We went to a nearby deli; there was almost no line there.

Bubbling with joy, he asked for my advice on a wine over there: would that do? As if I knew the first time ever seeing that "Mountain Flower".

The shop was flooded with crude light and leering goggles of scanty buyers.

He happily punched a check by the cashier exchanged the slip for the bottle and inserted it into his dangling bag.

We returned to the park, to its upper part, where there were no benches and no lights reach it from the nearby street. Standing in the darkness by the line of trimmed bushes, we drank some wine, not finishing it off, then he dropped right in front of me on his knees and unbuttoned the fly in my pants...

Well, at first, it was arousing, yet soon there remained just the feel of moist warmth.

His head, barely visible in the dark, kept pumping back-and-forth. I slipped the plate of my loosened belt behind, over my back, so that he did not hit his forehead against it.

He changed the rhythm, changed the tempo, took a short rest then started again.

...somehow it's...monotonous...and for how long should I stand like this?.

Chmo-ook.

...what?..another time-out?.

"You scoundrel! You've been with a slut! So you cannot come! A nasty scoundrel!"

"No, I haven"t."

I buttoned up under his plaintive complaints that I had such a matching dick—exactly thirteen!—but to no avail.

The discrepancy between his expert estimation and the measurements, once taken at a midday break at the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, did not hurt me, taking into account his disappointment – lots of labor lost in vain, besides, it was he to pay for the wine.

"There's still left some – will you?"

"Ah, no."

I finished the sorrowful mountain flower under his story that he was passing from the Nalchik city, where some very important director of some very important enterprise made him such as he was when he still was just a boy.

Then he gave me a farewell hug, but no kiss for such a nasty scoundrel who had been with a slut and had to face the music now, and he left making with his sentimentally luring gait for the street lamps by the park end.

That tear-jerking joke by the sad boy from Nalchik made it easy to see that gay life was not a bed of roses – keep low and hide out until they catch you in the end.

So what? Time to march home, ain't it?.

The postman handed me a letter from Olga about the letter she got from a fellow-serviceman of mine, who anonymously informed her of my amorous unauthorized marches in different directions from the location of the Military Detachment 41769, aka VSO-11...

The insolence of filthy insinuations made me feel just furious, the more so that neither in the village, no at the bakery plant there was no booty whatsoever! And the gay guy could safely be counted out because I hadn't even cum.

Therefore, in the letter of reply, I rightfully emphasized that there had been nothing to speak of, and she should send me that anonymous piece of crap for carrying out graphological scrutiny and taking appropriate measures against that dirty lying bitch of my fellow-serviceman.

In her respective reply, she stated that the lies about my allegedly unstable behavior made her see red at which point she tore the letter into irrecoverable shreds.

(...and here again, I stumble on that same transcendence.

What for?

What's the use of it for the anonymous fellow-serviceman?

And if Olga just tried to check me, then all the same – why?

These questions are another clear proof that the possibilities of a human mind are limited indeed.

In any case, those of mine...)

Vanya left for the evening roll-call because it was my shift at the stoker-house.

Gray came bringing along a _young_ driver from the Simferopol draft. They both were tight; the _young_ obviously had money, no wonder Gray'd palled up with him.

And then Gray kicked up some shitty dust crap, like, the buddies had some gripes about me. I couldn't understand. Which buddies? What beefs?

Now you'd see, says he, and latched the front door. The three of us went over to the workshop room, and Gray at once sneaked out of there. I did not get it.

And then the _young_ , keeping his eyes away, asked, "Why finking on guys?" And he shot a fist into my face. I parried with my shoulder and jumped past him out of the door, the yokel followed.

In the nook behind the furnace, there was a breaker; I grabbed it and shouted, "Gray! Who the fuck did I fink on?"

Gray stood nearby in the dark passage. Seeing me armed, he pelted body blows and I dropped the breaker. After all, it was grabbed out of pure instinct, kinda warning.

At that point, the iron-sheet shutter under the window in the hall moved, and Sasha Khvorostyuk from our draft crawled in on all fours, in only boots and underpants, and with a towel hanging from his neck. Clear enough, he was going to take a shower in the pump-station room but the entrance door was latched from inside.

Seeing him enter, Gray barked out, "Get the fuck out of here!"

So, Sasha Khvorostyuk revved back without ever taking a U-turn, and Gray again turned to me.

And now he saw my chest was bleeding because of my jacket was unbuttoned all the while, and one of his blows had torn the birthmark off.

Gray saw there was fucking lots of blood and he didn't know what was there in the room between me and the _young_ , and he wasn't gone too blind not to see the chance of getting fucked up into the penal battalion.

So he just croaked a couple of times, "Look out!. The buddies!.." And they left.

Yet, I couldn't get it what the fuck all that was about.

Later, I saw him and asked; he did not say anything clearly, just repeated the same bullshit, "Look out! If there something.."

In short, he, like, started selling himself for a zone master-thief...

Since then, when at my shifts, I had something to busy myself with.

The pump engine was wailing, the boiler hissing, and, with my elbows planted into the round table, and my chin leaned against my balled hands, I was thinking about the same thing.

Thinking for hours was I: in what way to bump Gray off?

Bumping off was not much of a problem, given the presence of that same breaker but what then? It was necessary to whack him and cop out, but how?

I didn't even have a thing to simply dig a hole in the field, just that hammer-and-chisel in the workshop.

To ask someone for a shovel? Fucking stupid...

Or, say, take it to the pump-station room, in that deep pit always filled up with water, hitch a load and drop there. But what if the water catches stench with the decomposition of the body?

The surest way was to shove it into the boiler furnace, the two-meter long flame shooting from the nozzle would incinerate it without a trace. That's only that Vanya would come for his shift and the whole stoker-house filled with the smell of barbecue – how's that?.

The problem had no solution and I simply kept moving, week after week, in a vicious circle until the on-duty cook would come and say it was time to turn the boiler off.

You never can tell, I might have coped after all with that quadrangle of the circle problem, but then the Tula draft was demobilized and they drove in new _youngs_ from Uzbekistan and Stavropol Region, and Major Avetissian kicked me out of the stoker-house replacing with some _youngs_ from the Pyatigorsk city.

Fare thee well, Vanya!

And you, Round Table, the confidant silent of my fruitless designs...

Yes, I became a _grandpa_ and I got it in full when entering the sorteer I saw there Vasya from Buryn with whom, as _youngs_ , we had been slaving in the squad-team under Prostomolotov.

Vasya was squatting over an ochco holding a newspaper open wide before his nose.

I'm fucked if it's not the lost picture by the great Russian artist Repin – "A squatter in the reading-room"! Behold how all so grandly, with his belt hanging from around his neck, kinda stylish muffler, giving himself Great Gatsby's airs he checks the news of the day, sort of.

And at that point, the cuntfucker had finished me off completely. He raised himself from full squat to a deep-curtsy level, like, a dance teacher demonstrating the technique of a reverence to the hole underneath and announced, "Good evening!"

I was fucking fucked to pieces; that's some Vasya! Where did he fucking find such fucking words?.

My _grandpa_ period of service was passing pretty chaotically.

I no longer belonged to the gang of chmomen but the commanding officers were too lazy to transfer me from Fourth Company somewhere else for only six months. So, I had to work here and there; most of all at MCU.

That MCU had nothing to do with Missile Controlling Units, it was a mortar-concrete unit.

Although, a _grandpa_ wouldn't die of overwork even at so strenuous a workplace. I could shove the sand with a shovel as well as not shove the sand with the shovel, it depended.

The squad-team there was commanded by Misha Khmelnitsky from our draft who had turned so portly, with those sergeant stripes across his shoulder loops. And he roughed the _youngs_ as we had been roughed so long before...

Then for a period, I was sent to a brick factory and there were neither squad-teams nor _youngs_. My job there was stacking clamp, raw bricks, in the ring kiln for burning.

The ring kiln from inside is a low arched tunnel and it works continuously. At one spot in the tunnel, the mobile conveyor belt brings raw bricks through the opening in the wall—be quick or they'll pour in a pile, grab them in time and stack in loose rows up to the ceiling!—while on the opposite side of the ring kiln diameter, the fire rages from the nozzles in the arched walls to burn the bricks.

The heat, of course, was felt all over the kiln and you had to work in an undershirt.

The job grew much hotter when loading the freshly fired bricks on that same conveyor belt but moving in reverse. The heat scorched your hands even through the canvas mitts and was radiating from the walls around so you had to undress and work with only boots and pants on.

And the next shift would be stacking raw bricks at this spot, and so over and over again without an end to the loop cycle of ring kiln...

When at home, I started to spend more time in the Company barrack. In the case of off-the-wall situations, the servicemen from younger drafts approached me to get advised.

For example, outside the wall-fence, a taxi pulled up with a sergeant from our Company – blind, deaf and dead – on the back seat.

They called me, I went out to check and it was real easy because the grunting body stretched over the back seat was naked to the waist – yea, him ours.

The taxi driver wanted no fee, thank you, says he, just take the crap away.

And as the sergeant was a real boar, it took three _youngs_ to plop him over the wall into a snowdrift from where he was dragged into the dryer room next to the cabinet-box guarded by the on-duty, where the jackets were dried after the working day, and there he dried off too till the morning.

Once some Uzbeks treated me to a dried melon plated in a braid, from a parcel they received from their home, sweet it was, I even remembered the parcel from my parents – four cans of condensed milk shared in the musicians'.

And the Uzbeks had come up to and treated me of their own accord, I wouldn't even know they had any parcel.

Probably, because of, though a _grandpa_ , I never hewed from their rations of butter and sugar in the Canteen...

The commander of Fourth Company, Captain Chernykh, was transferred somewhere from the construction battalion, or maybe his penalty stretch at VSO-11 was over and for that occasion, the lieutenant, Deputy Commander of Fourth Company, stepped into his shoes.

However, the lieutenant's fists were nothing like the sledgehammers of the departed Captain and buddies kinda stirred up some fuss about TV set, like, why in Separate or in Third Companies they could watch TV, football and stuff while our box was dead for more than a year, ain't we humans? Stuff it!

At that point, the Battalion Commander ordered to collect the Company personnel into the Political Classes Room.

He entered it together with the lieutenant and sat atop the desk, like, Prince Charming, where his trousers jerked up to the knees for demonstrating the gray fur above his shoes and socks.

And all of us facing him from the stools brought in from the barrack aisle, a-gape and ready for some sage advice. The Spanish artist Goya produced a whole bunch of the like pictures, series of them...

"Are you fucking going on strike? Eh? Stupid dicks! No fucking Italy for you here! The motherfuckers over there enjoy spaghetti! One macaroni can be long, another – short, because it fucking broke in halves!"

Here he made a pause in his cryptic monologue, perched proudly above our heads, turning from side to side his thick-rimmed glasses. Some swollen-headed fur-legged owl, not having the slightest idea what fucking folly he had threw up right now.

And we sat before him with dull stares full of faith and willingness which we should demonstrate to seniors in rank...

Yet, behind the statutory look that I was supposed to present each and every commander, there flowed on Pickle's tale about the hermaphrodite Sofochka from the Orel draft.

Pickle couldn't say how much her parents had to shell out for the medical commission to turn a blind eye at certain peculiarities in the physiological structure of their child, because of craving for a time break, at least in those two years.

That way Sofochka was classified as fit for non-combatant service and sent to the construction battalion where they make a real man out of anyone...

Shortly before the Orel draft demobilization, in the barrack of Fourth Company, there developed an explosive love triangle including the pretty _dembel_.

She was indiscriminately giving her favor to a couple of her fellow-servicemen, though in turn. The buddies couldn't find a peaceful solution to the question: whose bunk bed she should visit after the lights-out.

Then in the same Political Classes Room, there was also ordered a meeting of the Fourth Company personnel.

So I might chance to be sitting on that same stool which was seated by Pickle when Battalion Commander put the question squarely, "Sofochka, fuck the whore of your mother, is there dick or cunt by you there, eh?"

The private so addressed rose from his stool and, having approached the senior in rank, dealt a slap in the face, "The old goat!" Then, rolling her hips proudly, she returned to the stool with her back to the happy squeaks of a laughing owl.

Fathers-Commanders. Some fucking army!.

Take it or leave it, yet I couldn't be leery about the Pickle's story whose details were falling in all too readily with the surrounding shit...

I woke up back into the current meeting just in time for the concluding address delivered by Lieutenant-Colonel from his perch:

"Fuck it! You're given the highest matter! The brain! The fucking gray stuff!."

Hmm, looks like he's got bored already into some other gyrus of his grey matter...you're in the fucking army now...aw, fuck it all!.

At the Morning Dispensing, Chief of Staff announced that the day before he saw a soldier from our battalion floundering on an AWOL in the city. He had even chased the fucker but couldn't take over, however, the just retribution could never be avoided and now he would pass along the ranks and find that fucking stain who defiled the glorious name of our battalion.

And so he paced along, scanning carefully the rows of petrified faces in First Company, Second Company, Third Company, Fourth Company.

...fuck yourself, Major!..there remained only the gate and the road outside it...

He slowly retraced alongside the ranks.

...what a dolt!..if you were chasing someone yesterday, there's no fucking chance he'd attend the Morning Dispensing...go and wipe up your drivel...the buddy's now kicking back around in a drier room...or substituting the on-duty serviceman... it might have also been one from those squads who never come to barracks slaving at the city plants for months...

The Major started his third attempt, the fucking optimist.

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 penalty work – sprinkling sand over the ice covering the road to the city. The truck with its back-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 back side of the moving truck. 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 two and woke up at dark already seated on a bench at the foot of the Komsomol Gorka Hill.

It turned out that the blizzard had 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 meant 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 a 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 The 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 they 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 nor perform the numbers from "Stairway to Heaven" but Long at times inserted in The Orion repertoire so mighty guitar breaks 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 before they drafted the guitarist to the army.

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 Philharmonic, were the vocalists at the New Year parties. They sang, each one in his intrinsic and inimitable style, accompanied by the improvised breaks 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, with his parade-crap jacket hung on the chair back, but with the khaki tie in its obligatory place, only thrown over the shoulder, he at that moment was absolutely lost in the 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 with that misty blue gaze of his, "but we genegally don't play Gussian songs." And he sorrowfully sniffed with 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 that!.

Now, go and talk about congenial complexes but everything—EVERY THING!—is acquired through 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 twenty-seven from sixty-seven!.

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; that 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 grass?.

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 deadly empty and cold 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 ten 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 transporting 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 with 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 fine 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.

At that moment some geezer in a sailor's striped vest trotted down the porch of 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, so we had to 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 Făt-Frumos.

Thus, in peaceful conversations, we slowly strolled on when all of a sudden, on the right, a Volga braked and two 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 the 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.

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 not looking around.

And all of a sudden—ta-dah!—an abrupt change of the scenery: two soldiers armed with plates of their belts against two militiamen with a gun.

From the overabundance of feelings and associations, Vitalik's legs bent limply, 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 sodality, with 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 renovation 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 fixing the hinged hatch-lid which now falls down and lets the loose material flow out through 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 flapped the hatches to dangle open and nothing spilled 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 with rains while traveling from some much warmer corner of 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 three 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 was there for cracking any problems, however unsolvable they were?

True again! The construction battalion...

So they brought three trucks of us to the station.

And for that occasion, they even gave us smooth-bodied steel breakers.

To solve the problem through the hatches opened beneath the car was out of the question because the monolith reacted to the hits from below by sending the breakers back at you with the tantamount force so as to remind the corresponding 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 gave up 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 through too many freezing ups and thawing offs...

Misha Khmelnitsky 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 did 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 in case there was 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 neighborhood, it wasn't at once that I found the right store.

There I shoved the bottles under my pea-jacket girded tightly with 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.

But the hard snow pelting prevented noticing in time the officer who stopped me but 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 loop 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 loops had, practically, no common gossip even if it was the only officer who addressed me with the honorific "You" in all the two years...

In place of Captain Cherhykh, 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 instead around the barrack 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, a red blush crept over his cheeks and the 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 took root at once 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 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?! Two 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 three 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 three 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 Vanya concluded his story that Tughrik was already sucking two _youngs_ cooks, one of whom started fucking his wife...

Once in the barracks, the wafflist 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 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 exact, 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, sort of 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 – what's 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 a danger of bumping you off and fuck the quadrangle of the circle problem. Any pack is cemented by fear...

Yet, the buddy had run away only as far as 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 grass and we went on high.

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 long since 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? However, I did not interfere with his structural analysis because he was the decision-making body in that grass distribution.

Then the door opened shedding some light from the bulb in the corridor while letting a droll Gingerbread Man of Tatar origin roll in.

Wow! Who's that so queerly round? Alimosha! What's brought you here, bro?.

On the arrival of his truck to the gate, the on-duty officer suspected him of being in a state of some intoxication; the stars even intended to search Alimosha to detect an attempt at smuggling alcohol into detachment's 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 Zhigulovsky beer drunk accidentally, in absolute belief it was lemonade in the bottle because of it was dark where Alimosha chanced to discovered it!

That was why he was brought to join our clink conference in so immodestly unbuttoned state.

About five minutes later, Alimosha knocked on the door and asked an on-duty _dipper_ if the stars was still around.

Gone to the Stuff barrack.

Then Alimosha took a bottle of wine from the sleeve of his pea-jacket and ordered to take it to Vitya Novikov in First Company because the buddies there were already waiting for it.

The on-duty _dipper_ locked us again to run the errand.

Then Alimosha took the second bottle from the second sleeve losing so hard and shapely biceps, after which, falling into the classic groove:

"The warriors remembered the days of their youth,

The battles they fought in by each other's side..."

In the morning all three of us were, of course, released so that not to reduce the workforce called to fulfill the current five-years plan drawn by the Communist Party and the Government of the Soviet Union.

And the Caucasian with his threats of killing himself after a spree of murders in his native Dagestan was transferred to Separate Company...

I had already seen that Uzbek in the Canteen and remembered, for it was because of him that I got the idea that you might get stoned even without any weed by simply hitching your wagon to the wake wave of some other buddy's drag.

That time we went to the Canteen after the lights-out where the _youngs_ doing their fatigues "on the floors" were already washing the hall.

We chose the table in the corner and landed there to be out of the way, they still had wide swaths to clear before reaching that area.

The blunt was circulating our chosen company in a mutually attentive manner and the drag took a ho-ho bent – we looked at each other's mugs and were wetting our pants with laughter.

And that Uzbek was dragging his soaked rag to-and-fro in about five-seven meters off us when he suddenly joined the crowd with his snicker.

In short, witnessing our good-humored recreation, he got recharged and dragged the same way – in our wake, without any weed.

We called him to approach and offered the heel which he rejected.

Well, it's clear too, the roughed _young_ feared that the on-duty piece of shit from his company would drop in to see what's how around there...

And then I saw the same Uzbek again, among the MCU squad-team of _youngs_ he was riding the same truck-back with me.

And at times, when on the road, he sang songs in the mother tongue attuned to their Central Asian modal-tonal harmony. Not much of like the Italian opera stuff but, on the whole, listenable, sort of Jimmy Hendrix when without his guitar.

The other Uzbeks got perked up and the road ended more quickly.

Good fellow "akyn", or maybe "ashoogh"? Well, in short – _labooh_...

Sergeant Misha Khmelnitsky couldn't pronounce his name in any way, and, in the end, he said, "Okay! You will be Vasya!"

So, one time as we were riding home, Khmel commanded: "Vasya! Sing up!"

I marked that the Uzbek was in no mood, sad and reluctant, but Khmel did not shut up, "What? Can't get it, salabon? The command was 'sing up!'"

Well, the _labooh_ started a song.

The rest of the Uzbeks looked at him like angry dogs and scolded in their dark language, telling, "You bitch, are you a canary for this motherfucker?"

Of course, I did not know their language, but certain utterances need no translation.

Now, the _labooh_ gave out one verse and went to the coda, but Khmel demanded more, "Sing, Vasya, sing!"

So the soldier started again on high notes. And I saw how cleared up the Uzbeks' faces, they even laughed at one point.

Well, also quite understandable, the singer on the fly adopted his number to the situation:

"Vai, sergeant, vai, I have fucked your Mom!."

But Khmel didn't get it at all, "That's it! Well done! More!"

And he got what he was asking for:

"Vai, sergeant, vai, I have fucked your fucking mouth!."

The Uzbeks were rocking with laughter and the sergeant liked it too, "Very well, Vasya!"

At that moment the truck pulled up at the traffic lights and I, without a superfluous goodbye to the nice company of music lovers, slipped over the backside and down the short ladder...

That time I slipped away to see Quiet Mouse.

Actually, her name was Tanya and she did not know that, to myself, I was calling her "Quiet Mouse" because when I first approached her in a trolleybus she was answering so quietly.

And could I possibly not approach? Several times I saw her on the trolleybus when going from the ring road to the MCU.

She told me later, "I noticed you still in February; at the very frosts, your pea-jacket collar was wide open with the whole your neck sticking out."

"... we always choose those very women,

who have already chosen us ..."

In the morning, when she agreed to a date after the working day by that same ring road, I was not alone going to the MCU by a trolley. From our stop, we had to march yet along a lane, and there I said to that Moldovan, "Rahroo! Would you bet I doff now?"

In general, there was snow all around, although it was March already, and I stripped to the waist strolling along in just boots and the canvas pants with Rahroo carrying all other items of my outfit behind. Because I had got filled with so irresistible delight; but that was before her telling me about my bare neck...

Most likely, my topless walking resulted also from the meeting that god's fool.

Back in February, I was for about a week hanging out at the 50-apartment block – that same that we had started with rebar-rod breakers, it was already close to its delivery.

Now, buddies from a squad-team there told me about some old man walking barefoot in one of the nearby lanes. So I went there twice, on purpose, before I met him.

It was an old bearded man, his beard was white and slightly yellowish, and apart from it, the man had also a hat and an overcoat on. His pants were rolled up leaving his legs bare down the knees; he swept a path in the snowdrifts with a besom. Though long and skinny, he hardly was a junkie because he had a drag of his own.

The snow was falling in big rare flakes, and he walked barefoot and swept an empty path in the empty street.

I stood by for a while watching him, and he gave me a sidelong glance or two while busy with his business. We both kept silent, and then I left.

(...everyone believes that they are right and that their way of believing is the rightest one.

In Stavropol mujiks, the faith, for some reason, establishes a firm connection with their feet.

Already in the third millennium, on TV they showed a man who had crawled on his knees from Stavropol to Moscow.

To withstand the trying deed, he fixed pieces of automobile tires onto his knees and crawled on, replacing the tires as needed.

For the revival of faith in the Christ-loving people of Russia and to bring God's blessing to them...

Well, I, personally, don't mind.

My present confession is that of Tolerant Non-Believing.

I entertain a strong conviction that true tolerance could happen exclusively among the unbelievers.

All the rest are only pretending it while, in fact, they want to convert everyone else into a follower of their faith.

Even the atheists are a confession like others, all too happy to bring you to their flock of believers in the absence of any god.

An unbeliever is the one who has nothing to believe with, because of the absence of the corresponding organ, responsible for believing functions.

"... the doctor said, 'we'll just remove the odd appendix'..."

yet being over-blind, he chopped off the thing producing fluids of crucial importance for believing...

So now, crawl as far as you please, sit in the lotus until you bloom, knead the floor with your forehead—whatever!—if not in my kitchen garden, of course.

Don't put to try my tolerance, please...)

But at the construction battalion that spring I did not care a damn about any theology when awaiting Trolleybus 5 by the Ring Road stop.

Several of that number passed by before she arrived.

We quietly walked along the sidewalk by the host of five-story blocks laid of white silicate brick in the Lipetsk masonry fashion.

Then we entered one of the staircase-entrances in one of the five-story blocks.

We embraced warmly and quietly, standing by the heating battery on the first floor, at the bottom of the staircase.

Still standing, we quietly copulated.

Then we went out again to the endless sidewalk and I saw her to another entrance in another five-story block...

And for a long time after, it was not possible to repeat the warmly quiet pleasure; the staircase-entrances, for some reason, became too crowded.

A couple of times we went to the movies for daytime shows but there were too many kids around.

One time Captain Pissak spotted me leaving a cinema with her. He called me aside and demanded to immediately end all sorts of relations with her, although he could not present any sound foundations for his insistence.

And that was most annoying – okay, suppose, you're Captain Pissak, then go and command in your First Company, why meddling if I had Tughrik to report to?.

But then I finally visit her at home.

As it turned out, her staircase-entrance was different from where I escorted her on our first date, and the building itself was half-block farther along the sidewalk.

When I took my boots off in the hallway and stuck the footcloths into them as deep as I could, so that they wouldn't propagate their smell too freely, it turned out that I was barefoot and even slippers did not hide that fact – like a god's fool only without a besom.

At home, she happened to have her mother and a daughter of three years old.

Then her mother took her daughter for a walk to a store and we got seated on the carpet where she brought and opened her album with photos.

Both in the album photos and on the carpet, she looked real cute that quiet mouse blonde Tanya.

I had only to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder inside her gown to have a sex on the carpet next to the album, but there was something in the way.

I did not know what exactly stopped me from going on in the most natural way.

(....in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys and stuff sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who's now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere mingled with the never subsiding flow whoosh of the river currently named Varanda...)

Then her mother returned from the store bringing back Tanya's daughter as well as a mesh-bag of bright oranges...

Our following meetings took place outside her apartment, and she started to show interest in checking my military ID.

The sham about my ID locked up in the safe at the Commander's office did not work – she was two years older than me.

Then there cropped up some nagging predicaments and confusions in the otherwise peaceful flow of my service, I got in a scrape or two, and we lost sight of each other.

Already before the demobilization, I went to visit her again, but her mother said she was not home.

I waited for her at the staircase-entrance; we went out to a wide night courtyard between the five-story apartment-blocks and she succumbed both readily and quietly on a table in the playgrounds.

However, I cum too soon, much faster than in that staircase-entrance which outcome I did not like at all and broke off our relationship, in conformance with the demand of Captain Pissak, Commander of First Company. Because, as it stands in the Statute of the Internal Military Service, "an order of the commander is the law for a lower-ranked serviceman"...

The closer the demobilization, the shorter is your sleep.

Where had you retired, the blissful times when I, as a _salaga_ , fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow? But now?

The evening roll-call over, the long aimless visit to the Club paid, again I plodded back to the barrack without any hope of getting asleep.

So, we got together, the nighthawks of the same feather, and stretched upon bunk beds in one or another koobrik, we gossiped of this, we gossiped of that, or just drove a fool.

(....many years later I learned from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago that it was an old customary pastime among _zeks_ , inherited from the Czarist times when someone in the cell retold some novel by some Dickens with adaptations and retouch of the details to bring them closer to the contemporary everyday life.

Only instead of "driving a fool" _zeks_ called it "stamping a novel"...)

When it was my turn, I stamped a novel of revenge about two young lovers and a cruel baron from the castle on a nearby hill.

The vicious brute of a baron imprisoned the young man in the dark dungeon cell and was methodically using his beloved as a sex slave right in front of the poor guy.

A month later, the prisoner broke the peg fixing his chain to the wall and paid the bills for lodging and warm hospitality.

(...the plot had nothing to do with Dickens or any particular literary work though, because when driving a fool I, with my closed eyes, saw the peekaboo blouse of Michelle Mercier presenting her tits in the first sequel of "Angelica".

However, here arises the question: if I was farming out my Michelle to the baron to use her (for a whole month!) pleasing his senile fantasies, in turn with his wolfhound and various objects of medieval utensils and implements, then, even though jerking at the peg in the attempts to pull it from the wall, but still collaboratively keeping time with the concurrent porno scene, may it be I'm a pervert?

Of course, the question would be forwarded not by the listeners but by myself, and much later too, but still and all...)

During the epilogue centered on the dismantling of the baron conducted in the savagely graphical manner, Khmel suddenly screamed, "Hey, on-duty!"

From the cabinet-box by the faraway barrack entrance, the on-duty came and Khmel told him, "He had fucking fucked already with his snoring, dome the fucker, let him RIP."

"Who?"

"In the koobrik over two passages."

The on-duty bent over the peace disturber and listened to the sleepy breathing, "No, not this one."

Lyolik joined in the conversation, "Who the fuck cares? Dome the fucker all the same!"

(...the depth of philosophical wisdom of the utterance still brings the tears of tender delight to my eyes.

"Who the fuck cares? Dome the fucker all the same!."

Here! Here it is – the quintessence of statuary and other service relations, the pledge of having a well-trained army, marked with combat zeal and readiness...

I'd be happy to say of "the Soviet army", the one that's gone into oblivion...but who nowadays believes in Father Christmas?..)

A soldier- _dembel_ pines away under constant tension. A state of incomprehensible, groundless anxiety deprives him of sleep, appetite, the ability to assess and conform his actions with the requirements of elementary logic and common sense.

Every morning, the buddies from your draft were lined up in groups facing the ranks of the Morning Dispensing and, after a brief farewell from Zampolit, or Chief of Staff, they marched to the gate by the checkpoint, they went home.

And when was my turn to come?!.

After idling around to three o'clock at the location of VSO-11, I got in the cabin of UAZ truck used for fetching bread from Stavropol.

Under the canvas top of the truck back climbed Lyolik and some of his buddies, also going to AWOL.

The truck left through the gate and sped to the city along the asphalt road wet after the recent thunderstorm. The asphalt closer to the roadsides was all ruts and holes so the white car that jumped out of the road turn was darting along the middle.

The UAZ driver dodged, leaping with the right wheels of the truck onto the muddy roadside. The turn was rushing at him – he both swerved left and hit the brakes. The truck jumped back onto the road and skidded along in a free-style gliding.

The driver next to me was frantically spinning the wheel hither-thither and back again. The truck kept speedily crabbing along, changing the sides at her will, paying no attention to what the driver did to the wheel. In the end, we were turned in the opposite direction and, after traveling backward for some time, the truck capsized.

The embankment was not too high—about two meters—so we rotated just a couple of times.

Tumbling under the slope inside the cab of a truck, you live through a strange sensation as if you were a fish in a bowl. Probably, that is weightlessness. The driver, the wheel, the cab door, and once again the hovering driver are slowly floating past you...

I landed on him when the motion stopped leaving the truck on her side. Yet, the driver was the first to climb out through the window overhead; I followed him.

The buddies from the truck back were already standing by the driver. Lucky guys.

On the road, the Battalion Commander's "goat"-Willys squeaked its brakes.

Without waiting for the outcome, I merged with the green foliage of the forest edge.

"Who else was that?"

"I dunno, some soldier from Separate Company asked to take him along..."

After two kilometers, the forest was over, and so was the tense tremor in my hands, when I entered the city.

I went to a cinema to take off the adrenaline rush. It was "How to Steal a Million" with Peter O'Toole. Or was it "The Remarriage" with Belmondo?

Nah! After Belmondo, I met Nadya, a student of something there.

We walked for a long time, hugging here and there, but when I went over to kisses, she bit my tongue. "I know what you're hinting at!"

Stuff it! What hints were there?

It hurt so, I could hardly speak when seeing her to the one-story house where she rented an apartment.

She dropped in and brought out a can of condensed milk; kinda emolument to the wrongly wounded warrior. I hugged her for goodbye but shunt kissing.

When she left, I looked at the can in my hand then at the wall of the house with no maverick nail sticking out, so I placed the can on the railing and went away bypassing the pleasure for my bitten tongue...

Just only four _dembel_ s were still remaining in the construction battalion – I, Gray, Red from Dnepropetrovsk, and Alexander Roodko.

I had already got myself a parade-crap, borrowing it from a _pheasant_. Because of transference after one year of service to Fourth Company as a stoker, I missed getting a parade-crap both at First and Fourth Companies...

Before the Morning Dispensing, there started up a round-dance by the sorteer.

The eager on-lookers hasting to the entertainment informed, that the night before Gray made a _young_ truck crane driver take him from a site to the battalion and, reaching Separate Company, got to the wheel himself and crashed into a pole.

Nothing terrible happened, the truck crane was not even in need of repair. However, Chief of Staff, getting the report on his arrival, went amok and wanted to kick Gray's ass personally.

YOU FUCKER!

What a mighty hook! The major put every kilo of his stout body weight into the ramming wallop and!. Whoops!. Gray dodged. Hmm...boo, Major!..and I had always thought you were a boxer...

The soldiers helped Chief of Staff to get back on his feet. The on-duties convoyed beltless Gray to the clink...

At the Morning Dispensing that followed, Zampolit announced that Red was going to the demobilization, and the next day Roodko and I as well.

"Comrade Zampolit, I need a testimonial."

"What testimonial?"

"For admission to the institute."

"You are an absolute son of a bitch, Ogoltsoff!", thundered Zampolit, " Are you fucking sane? An alcoholic, junky, gangsta! I'll give you such a fucking testimonial that no zone will accept you other than the jug for lifers! Fuck! It's our oversight that you get out of here at all. But you wait! The society will deal with you, they'll crush you yet and grind down to the finest powder!"

Then three of us were paid money at the Staff barracks.

Wow! So I even had some earnings! One hundred and twenty rubles for two years of honest work...

Roodko and I went to see Red off and to equip ourselves at the same go.

When in the city, Roodko bought a sports-bag for his journey home, and I chose a "diplomat" briefcase, they were just getting in vogue then.

Its black plastic inside got filled with the _dembel_ stuff: cellophane-wrapped pantyhose for Olga, a bottle of vodka for me and my father, and a crimson silk tablecloth with a fringe, for 7 rubles 50 kopecks, which Red had bought for his mother and asked me to keep in the "diplomat", while we were sprinkling down the dust on his way home.

Besides, I put in there the kicks I bought – light and practical footwear with black corduroy tops for just six-fifty, because in the battalion I couldn't find high shoes for the borrowed parade-crap, and was shopping in a pair lent me by the Third Company on-duty sergeant for just a day.

After the Red's way was sprinkled properly and our clamorous goodbyes were nearing the bus stop for Red to go to the station, I was not drunk and clearly remembered about that crimson silk tablecloth inside my "diplomat".

I did not remind Red of the gift he had bought for his mother. I stole it.

At some point, giving me one last chance, he turned a sober look at me to check if I would tell him. But I kept silent. He dropped his head drunkenly and walked on to get on the bus.

I watched the distance growing between us along the sunlit sidewalk – ten meters, twenty...But I never called out, "Hey, Red! You forgot it, buddy!"

(....and no prissy bitch on the Varanda river banks could ever bring about redemption for my dirty misdeed...)

At the next Morning Dispensing, Roodko and I stood facing the ranks of VSO-11 and Chief of Staff announced that we were going to the demobilization.

We both made a turn "to left!" – I, with my black "diplomat", and Roodko, with his blue sports bag.

After a couple of our steps, Battalion Commander spotted the corduroy kicks on me heading to the gate behind which the society lurked in ambush making ready to grind me down to powder at the nearest convenient moment.

Battalion Commander made the last, desperate, attempt at saving the doomed, "What the fuck?! See the fucking shit on the son of a bitch!"

However, Chief of Staff cut short his solicitously protective impulse, "Let the fucker get the fuck out!" said he, "The motherfucker has fully motherfucked all and every fucking one here!"

Good-bye and you, Fathers-Commanders...

But even 24 hours later I was still in Stavropol, at the city airport of plainly rustic looks.

Just having served "two winters and two summers" was not enough, you still had to reach home.

I had a flight ticket to Kiev bought from the city Aeroflot office, but when I arrived at the kolkhoz field of an airport, the flight was delayed for an hour, then for another hour and only by noon the piston-plane AN-24 ran along the takeoff strip, and beneath the wing of the aircraft, under the hum of motors, floated rarefied clouds over topographic landscapes.

The construction battalion remained in the past, but it still stayed with me and I was thinking about First Company master sergeant who stuck to me on a city bus last week.

And it was so stupid, did he really need it when clad in his civilian outfit? Because he was drunk, he wanted to show off what an important piece of shit he was, that's why.

"What are you doing here? Back to barracks! I'll report to Battalion Commander at the Morning Dispensing!"

"And I'll say you were drunk as a swine."

No one said anything to anyone...

And that major also was in his civilian, so how could I know?

"I'm a Major!" kept he shrieking, "How dare you?"

Who'd guess you were a Major when you have civilian rags on?

Look at me – all's in full view; the black shoulder loop clear of any yellow crap means clear conscience – a rank-and-file construction battalion!

It's because of that barmaid in the café that we came to grips.

She was a juice sort and, at first, it was me who she addressed the purposeful swing of her ample breasts to, before he flashed his rank trump, or was he bluffing?

Nah, you can't deceive such a woman...

I still belong to the Construction Battalion; forever.

Some part of it has stuck in me, until the end.

But I did not think of anything like that then, I was just a _dembel_ flying home. Not home meaning "barracks", but home meaning "home".

Although my mother wrote in her letter that they had sold their quarter-khutta in Nezhin Street, and bought half-khutta someplace deeper in the Settlement.

No fear, I got the address, I would find it.

But I couldn't think about Konotop for long, I got accustomed to thinking about other things and so I thought my usual thoughts...

As we took the drummer from Pyatigorsk to the military flight school to show that he was really good.

There went three of us – Long, the drummer and I. We wanted the cadets from the vocal-instrumental ensemble at the flight school saw for themselves that the drummer was a pro so that they would put a word to their zampolit to find him some position in their school chmo because he had to be drafted to the army. Such was the idea.

The cadets were, so too conveniently, rehearsing on the stage in the hall like a summer cinema, without the roof. They handed Long their guitar, the drummer sat behind the drums...

Wow! They two made a duet da bomb, a potpourri of Jimmy and Jimmy, they let their souls have a free flight...

Poor fools! They sort of run a bulldozer over those rosy cadets in their blue shoulder loops who needed a drummer of the kind that follows the pioneer banner next to the bugler with the red pennant on his horn:

du-du-du-dú! du-du-du-dú!

No chance they'd ever mention to their zampolit about such Drummer.

So well-groomed boys, them those cadets; well-fed too...

Was it all over? No more evening roll-calls? Neither Zampolit, nor Chief of Staff, nor pieces...

I was flying home; at home, everything would be nyshtyak! Not for nothing, I had been dreaming of it all those two years, or rather did not allow myself to ever think about home...

That was my first flight in an airplane; better than crawling for the whole two days by train.

My wrist still hurt a bit; that fool of a bitch in the hotel the night before.

She would give, only there was nowhere; let's go to your room, said she.

I asked the mujiks in the room, and they left.

So, while she was demonstrating her unbreakable virginity and maiming my wrist with her fingernails, they started to come back, one by one. The séance is over.

But I didn't strongarm her, she just grabbed my hand and started her claw-work.

That Stavropol was just some breeding ground for sadist chicks, I swear.

Hopefully, Olga would not notice...but if she would, then what? You could get any kind of scars when on your combat duty...

The AN-24 landed in Rostov.

I went to the toilet by the takeoff field and, on the way back, a military patrol stopped me.

Right! Corduroy shoes were an utter breach of the Statute of the Internal Military Service, but I was a _dembel_ flying home, and the plane's already buzzing its propellers!

They let me go.

Refueling in Kharkov and, at last, the destination landing in the Boryspol airport brim-filled with the summer sunlight...

On that first flight, I thought it was already Kiev and, entering the sunny bright square full of all kinds of vehicles and scurrying pedestrians, I went straight to the big shield bearing huge "T" and two rows of chessboard squares, to get a taxi.

The taxi driver was a long-haired geezer about thirty wearing brown leather shoes with thick strings. I told him to take me to the railway station and he asked me to wait in the car while he would look for additional fellow-travelers; there still remained forty-eight kilometers to Kiev.

He left and I remained to wait in the front passenger seat. It was hot and I took off my parade-crap jacket and to both pass the time and keep the inside building-up tension in check, I stuffed and smoked a blunt.

The driver came back with two more passengers to fill the backseat: a Major and a Lieutenant-Colonel, but younger than our Battalion Commander, and we started.

Maybe that driver in brown shoes scented the weed in his car and was carried away by some personal memories, but he drove like mad, and after crossing the Dnieper over the Paton Bridge, he dropped heeding the traffic lights completely.

Or maybe the traffic lights had a day-off and it was a sunlit holiday of free driving for anyone to overtake whoever they wanted however they could...

Paying for the ride at the station, the Lieutenant-Colonel said, "Well, chief, you're flying indeed!"

So, most likely, the driver got a drag on the wake...

In 1975, "diplomat" briefcases were a fairly seldom sight and, therefore, attracted attention by their foreign voguish appearance which would be forgivable for senior officers but I, a private man, was stopped by a military patrol the moment I stepped into the central hall of the Kiev Railway Station.

And the patrol, by the by, were cadets again, yet this time with red shoulder loops. They checked my military ID and the demobilization papers; there was nothing to find fault with.

And then I made a mistake of looking at my shoes. The patrol commander followed my glance and traced back a flagrant violation of the statutory uniform.

I was taken to the station military commandant office, under the magnificent stairs which led to the giant marble statue of Lenin's head, on the landing half-way to the second floor.

The on-duty officer at the commandant office told me to open the "diplomat" and at a glance realized that I was nothing but a _dembel_ : pantyhose, a bottle of vodka, and the stolen crimson tablecloth.

"Go," said he. "Come back in uniform shoes and then you'll get your case."

I rushed to the huge ticket-offices hall on the left. There was a long line at the ticket office for the direction in Moscow's destination.

In the line, some thirty meters off the ticket office, I made out a soldier in the parade-crap. He was a big man, which meant his feet were not small, and he looked sad so (that's elementary) he was returning after his furlough to serve another year.

"Where are you going?"

"To Moscow."

"Come on."

I led him straight to the window of the ticket office and explained to the line, that suddenly grew so clamorous, that we had urgent orders to protect their peace and safety on the remote borders of our Homeland.

He bought a ticket to Moscow and I to Konotop.

When we moved away, I described to him the situation with the case. A pheasant cannot say "no" to a _dembel_.

We sat on one of the many benches in the huge waiting hall and exchanged the footwear...

"Where could you manage so fast?" asked the on-duty officer at the commandant office.

"Bought from a gypsy on the platform."

With the case set free, I hurried to where the sad after-furlough buddy was hiding his feet in the statute violating kicks deeper under the bench.

I landed down next to him, but we did not have time to change – the loudspeakers announced that the train to Moscow was going to start off the sixth platform, and we ran there so as not to be late.

The strings on the borrowed shoes got loose and started lashing the floor on the run, but we boarded in time...

The train knocked hastily along the rails, it was carrying me to Konotop, yet my uptightness did not slack up, I urged the train to go faster and could in no way calm down...

Only late at night getting off the train on Platform 4 of the Konotop Station, I believed that that's it.

"With his service done,

Came the soldier home..."

And I again rode the familiar Streetcar 3, but this time to the very terminal. The darkness outside the window made the pane-glass reflect vaguely the khaki jacket and the forage cap of the serviceman parade-crap.

At the terminal, I asked where Decemberists Street was, and they told me to go right...

Long fences; dark khuttas behind their wickets, rare lampposts made some unfamiliar outskirts.

Having asked someone else along the way, I went out onto Decemberists Street and walked along it until I reached the wicket with scarcely discernible in the dark plate marked 13.

I entered the yard and knocked on the first door of the khutta; it opened...

Was that my father so gray-haired? When?.

In the light falling from the open door, he looked incredulously at my parade-crap, "Sehrguey?" Then he turned to the inner house, "Galya! Sehrguey has come!"

My mother came out onto the porch and buried her head in the breast of the parade-crap jacket, crying loudly.

In confusion, I awkwardly patted her shoulder, "Well, Mom, calm down, I'm back after all."

I really did not know what there was to cry about.

(...it's only now I realize that she was crying about herself, about her life flashed by in a flick.

Just so recently she's been scampering to the ballet school with her girlfriends and—here you are!—a man in the parade-crap in front of her, like, the son from the army came back.

When?..)

My mother looked back at the small frightened girl standing by the kitchen table and, finishing the last sob, she said, "What do you fear, silly? It's your dad who's come."

Then she turned back to me, "How that you did not meet Olga? She went to the third shift; working at the brick factory."

" _...service done..._

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ My Universities: Part Two

That was exactly what I dreamed about, or rather did not allow myself to dream of in all those two years, that in the morning I would wake up not from the bellow of the on-duty jerk but from a female embrace, that of Olga. She came home from work, lay atop of me, hugged through the blanket, and I woke up and answered her kiss.

Our talk somehow did not come out well, if an exchange of one-word clues could be called a talk at all.

And we looked at each other in such a manner that my mother, who was on her vacation, promptly took our daughter Lenochka and went to Bazaar...

Everything in life is surely repeating itself. What was, will be there again. The difference is only in the details of concurrent circumstances.

For instance, that my mother returned from Bazaar (and not from a store) without oranges, and that nothing restrained me this time.

As for hieroglyphics left on my wrist by the claws of that hotel sadist, Olga, sure enough, marked them well, studied attentively and read their message, but not out loud. Actually, I did not insist on her sharing the obtained information.

(...nothing has a more elastic structure than time.

The current year lasts without showing any sign of termination, while a year lived through turns into a mere point of time.

A point has no length whatsoever, it ends at its start. And there is no reason to consider any stretch shorter than a year as having even a point's worth.

Then, what can you say about the last month? That it had several Fridays and one of the dates was thirteenth.

And about the last hour? Oh, yes! It had sixty minutes.

Empty term-juggling and shuffling of numbers.

A decade is a no bigger point.

After that point spent at school, a person begins to grow bristles. Another such point spent in the zone results in the aching of joints (especially in the right shoulder), yet it still is just a point...)

A week after the demobilization, the two-year eternity at the construction battalion became mere scraps of memories pinned onto a point in the past.

The flow of the ever-moving life carries all those points away, to hell or maybe another destination, and it does not matter where exactly, because you don't have time to ponder on such matters but have a more urgent problem – to get along the flow of life-stream...

When bathing, there are two ways of entering the water. With the first, you go into it step by step, with your shoulders pulled up, rising on the tiptoes as the bottom grows deeper.

The other way is entering the water until it's knee-deep and with a shout (or without it) plunge headlong forward...

It was time for me to plunge into civilian life.

Overseer Borya Sakoon died and never kept his promise to retire in four years.

The Arkhipenkos moved to the Kamchatka Peninsular, which, reportedly, was Fishermen's Paradise with fish jumping into your skiff of their free will.

My brother and sister graduated from the Railway Transportation School and were sent to repay for their diplomas with work at the exploration and construction of railways somewhere in the Urals between Ufa and Orenburg.

Vladya and Chuba returned from the army half-year before me and had time enough to get streamlined with the concurrent life-flow.

Skully had developed a solid bold patch over his head and was looking forward to becoming twenty-seven – which age ended draft liability of a USSR citizen. He was exempted from the army as the only breadwinner for his single mother, God save her until his coming of the right age!

I was not much amused with my re-appearance at the Konotop polite society.

We gathered at the Vlady's, I stuffed a blunt, yet my friends did but a couple of drags each, out of plain politeness.

From Vlady's khutta we ventured to the Loony park where The Spitzes were playing dances. When passing Deli 6, Vladya farted at a lighted match held by Skully close to his behind. The emitted ammonia flared up in a blue bunch of flame. It did not delight me though; in the construction battalion, I had seen all sorts of the like tricks and did not care for wanton reminders.

In general, my way of getting on high wasn't fine with them, and theirs didn't turn me on. We remained friends but in the course of our following lives, we streamed, basically, in separate parts of the flow...

I borrowed The Adventures of Captain Blood from the Club library but couldn't read even a half of the rubbish which once upon a time was my regular thrill...

"What do you keep in the newspaper on top of the wardrobe?" asked Olga.

"A spike condom. Wanna try?"

"No!"

Though I, in fact, suspected she had checked it before asking; or was I overestimating her?.

She introduced me to an unknown squirt in the common stream – her co-worker from the brick factory who we met near Deli 1.

A mujik over thirty said his name, I answered with mine, and we immediately forgot what had just heard. I did not like his smile baring the over-worn gums receding to the teeth roots. Besides, some uneasiness about him made it clear that the meeting and new acquaintance was no good news to him; I regretted we had come up to him at all...

And on the other side of the Under-Overpass, near Deli 5, it was already we to be approached by a half-acquaintance Halimonenko, handled Halimon, who demanded of Olga a private talk.

She asked me to wait and walked with him four meters aside on the same two-step porch in front of Deli 5.

Some scraps of words in their conference: "militia", "get not a little" were reaching me.

It was unpleasant to stand pushed aside that way, but so I'd been asked.

(...another of my pesky traits is doing what they've asked me without giving it a thought and starting to think when it's too late...)

Their conversation ended and she returned to me followed by his owner-like "I told you!".

Olga explained that someone attempted to steal Halimon's motorcycle from the shed and he mistakenly concluded she had anything to do with all that.

(...myths are different.

There are useful ones, like the myths of ancient Greece, and useless as, for instance, that the army turns young men into manly men.

Bullshit! Were it so, I'd say to Halimon, "This is my woman, talk to me!"

It's not that I was afraid of him, it simply never occurred to me to say so.

The army hadn't made a man of me...)

Olga suggested going to the Plant Park on Saturday, where the dances were played by The Pesnedary, a group from Bakhmach. Their native town was the fourth stop of a local train going from Konotop to Kiev, so it took just a half-hour ride to get there. What kind of group could be from such a backwater?

Yet, Olga said they still played well, besides, at the dances, she'd introduce me to Valentin Batrak, handled Lyalka, the brother of Vitya Batrak, handled Slave.

The _laboohs_ from Bakhmuch sounded very good thanks to their keyboard player – a long guy sporting the hairstyle of Angela Devis. They quite decently performed "Smoke on the Water" of The Deep Purple, as well as "Mexico" of The Chicago band.

Then we were approached by Lyalka and Olga introduced us to each other.

Tall and skinny, with the long fair hair, slightly cocked up atop of the head, he had a same-colored nail-beard à la Cardinal Richelieu. A single look at each other's enlightened eyes said to us that we needed a more secluded place than the dance-floor.

Such a place was found and there we exchanged the credentials and reached consensus in the estimation of the sampled weed's quality, which contributed to establishing relations of friendship and cooperation for the years to come...

My father disclosed his strategic plans for implementing the skills supposedly acquired by me in the army.

His project called for the addition one more room as well as a veranda to the bought half-khutta, and also paneling its walls from outside with brick and, at the same breath, construction of a brick shed in the yard of two spacious sections – one to keep firewood and coal for winter, and the other residential, like, a summer room.

I felt reluctant to clarify that the training received at the military service made of me a qualified trencher well versed in the application of shovel and breaker, without further building skills. Not that I was ashamed of the fact, but because he was so happy to start the realization of his designs, I couldn't tell him that "bricklayer" in my military ID was complete bullshit. So I said, yes, of course, no problems...

A truckload of bricks was brought from the brick factory, a truckload of sand, a half-ton of cement and – off went the construction works of the century!

The water source was farther away from the khutta than that in Nezhin Street, besides, the running water system hadn't reached the outskirts of the Settlement and you had to turn round and round the crank above a hell-deep well winding the multi-meter iron chain around the windlass barrel to extract and bring up to the daylight a pailful of water.

That summer was really hot, both in weather and zest of the labor efforts; my father's plans became the tangible reality.

As for the quality...Well, the seams in the masonry were thicker than ideal, but the plumb-line test of jambs and corners won't make me blush till now...

On his arrival home, a _dembel_ had to report to the Military Commissariat and get registered there, spiffed in his parade-crap.

After those proceedings, I sent the parcel with the uniform to its owner at the military detachment 41769, thrusting a three-ruble banknote in the jacket's inner pocket.

Had the money reached the buddy? My mother told me she also had been putting a three-ruble bill along with each of her letters to me.

Stuff it! Why did she never mentioned it at least a single time?! I would have written not to do so because I was receiving just the vanilla letters. Well, they also were my relief, of course...

Soon after, I received a letter from Stavropol sent by the soldier-clerk at the Staff barracks of the VSO-11. He did not write a single line, but, as it was arranged between us, put in the envelope a blank sheet of paper stamped with the Construction Battalion seal. It only remained to fill the page with the testimonial for admission to an institute.

I threw together a text depicting myself very positively, as an excellent soldier both at military and political training, and an active participant in the amateur art activities of the battalion, a reliable comrade, an experienced warrior of the Soviet armed forces in general and the military construction troops in particular. Not only zampolits could do the job, after all.

Then I asked my father to re-write the text on the sheet with the stamp since his handwriting looked more like that of an inveterate army officer.

He copied the list of my virtues, but somewhat hesitated to sign the testimonial, "What if they catch you?"

I had to assure him that our Battalion Commander had no chances to disown his signature that he had to re-invent for every instance of signing a paper because of his chronic memory leakage.

Grateful for my valiant labor that summer, my father scribbled a signature (any colonel would be proud of such a one) next to the seal stamp of the military detachment 41769...

I did not go to Kiev, but, on the advice of my mother, I took my papers to the Nezhin State Pedagogical Institute which also had the English Language Department.

It took only a two-hour ride by a local train to get to Nezhin, twice shorter than to Kiev, and I did not care for the institution's pedagogical quirk, most importantly, I would be able to read in English...

For the period of the entrance examinations I, as an applicant, was allocated a bed in the hostel in the main square of Nezhin city, opposite the Lenin statue and the massive building of City Party Committee and District Party Committee (two in one) behind his white back.

It took a bus ride for just one stop to get from the square to the institute, yet on foot you got there much sooner.

The English Department was located on the third floor of the Old Building, erected in the times of Decemberists by Count Razumovsky, and in those times of yore, it served already as the educational institution for nondescript students along with Gogol, the great Russian writer. For that fact, the institution had nailed down to its denomination the name of N. V. Gogol.

I liked the short alley of giant birch-trees in front of the high porch of the Old Building, as well as the wide white columns carrying its pediment, the echoing corridors paved with parquet, and the high-ceilinged auditorium rooms.

And I liked Dean of the English Department, named Antonyuk. The sympathy was based on his not picking holes in my lame knowledge of English. I do not think he would be as lenient if knowing that my grandfather's name was Joseph, and my father-in-law was Abram.

Dean Antonyuk belonged to the militant anti-Semite type. In the gloomy late evenings, Antonyuk sneakily crossed with his wrathful pencil the names of Jewish teachers in the time-table of the English Department, and in the same manner, purged he the faculty wall-newspaper hanging by. Like a youth from an underground resistance cell struggling gegen Befehle by the occupant authorities of the Third Reich.

However, Alexander Bliznuke, one of the Jewish instructors, as alert as Gestapo, tracked Antonyuk down and caught him red-handed for which the latter lost his position. However, that happened later...

At the written examination on Russian, I turned out a composition graded 4, which, in fact, was an untraceable plagiarism – an adaptation of the memorable message-statement that Zoya Ilynichna, the teacher of Russian language and literature at the Konotop School 13, rolled out in red ink under my subversive composition about meditations by the window.

And at the oral examination, I luckily pulled the ticket asking to describe the character of Prince Andrey from the War and Peace by Tolstoi.

However, the examiner still tried to set me back with an additional question, "Could you recite some poem of a Soviet poet, anyone of your choice?"

That was, as you call it, a question below the belt, but I recollected that Yesenin for some time also lived under the Soviet regime, and began to pour out with a restaurant drawl to it:

"Oh, my leafless maple,

Ice-coated maple..."

Before my getting into the second verse, the examiner surrendered and yielded a passing score...

In the interval between the exams, I bought a couple of balloons for Lenochka.

Such goods items were seldom to run across in the trade network of Konotop, and I did not like that her staple plaything was the old suitcase which she preferred to a couple of worn-out dolls.

She used to drag the suitcase out of the bedroom in the middle of the kitchen to announce, "Cry, Grandma! Grandpa, cry! Lenochka is leaving for the BAM!"

It was about a year already that the Central TV news program "Time" was night after night presenting reports of labor achievements at the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway track, aka BAM.

"Come to me at the BAM

I am not a stuck-up Ma'm

On the rails, we'll have a sex...

I did not like that the child was growing so over-politicized, and remembered how at the Object we loved to play balloons.

And so, one evening stretched out on the hostel bed, I lighted a cigarette and watched how its smoke swam up to the ceiling which view prompted an idle idea of staging an experiment in Physics because there was nothing else to busy myself with.

By its behavior, that smoke very clearly demonstrated that it was lighter than the air. Now, if we had a balloon filled with then that balloon had to soar up! It remained only to solve the technical problem of getting the smoke inside the balloon.

The solution was prompted by my life experience.

More than once I watched a couple of stoners assisting brotherly each other to get a swift lift, high as a kite, with the trick code-named "locomotive".

One of the bros would put a sparked blunt into his mouth reversely, the burning end first, observing, sure thing, precautions to avoid inside burns, and then the benefactor blew.

As a result, a squirt of thick smoke was pouring from the tube-mouthpiece of the Belomor-Canal cigarette to be immediately consumed by the donation receiver.

However, for a vanilla balloon, a straight cigarette would also do, right? So, I lit it, inserted the mouthpiece into the balloon's neck, and blew from the opposite end a lungful of air.

However, it should be kept in mind that the "locomotive" smoke was swallowed by the consumer, whereas the air when forced into a balloon, tries to escape the rubber body through its neck.

In short, the amount of the smoke-mixed air, that I had blown in, burst back through the mouthpiece and knocked the smoldering tobacco out, straight into my throat.

(..."When a dog has nothing to do, he licks his balls", my father used to say.

Sometimes it's better to lick than tamper with aeronautics...)

Sure enough, I coughed the tobacco out after its smoldering fibers scorched my larynx somewhere behind the glands.

That's what happens when a philologist meddles with Physics matters. Firstly, it hurts, and then go to pharmacies in search of furacilin for treating burns.

(...but what hurts even more, hurts to tears, that no lessons may prevent my future follies.

Certain morons are not able to learn from their own experience because it is not possible to foresee which other locomotives with balls, or vice verse, will inspire my inquisitive mind tomorrow...)

I was matriculated at the English Department, but the triumphant departure to Konotop was somewhat clouded by having words with the commandant of the hostel who found a shortage of one pane in the window of my room. The glass had been missing when I moved in there, but the jackass did not except any explanations, demanding retribution in ready money, or finding a workman who would insert the pane.

I did not have the amount indicated, and I resented the injustice of the ripping-off. When left alone in the room, I went up to the upper floor and pulled the glass from the window in the toilet. The pane size fitted perfectly; how I love standardization!

The commandant, however, croaked that the glass had obviously been in use. So I have to assert that it was bought at a chance seller in Bazaar, at which transaction I missed to notice those paint smudges along the edges.

Our old good world is very repetitive, at any rate, my tricks in disputes with commandants are all alike...

Olga resented the whole idea of my striving for higher education, moreover in the field of pedagogy. As for English, she did not consider it as a specialty at all because everyone should know the language nowadays, so she was told by a baby doctor visiting to treat Lenochka's cold.

I responded by calling the doctor smart dumb-ass and promised her to come to Konotop on every Saturday.

Yet, Olga stopped pecking at me only after I agreed that she would dye my hair with hydrogen peroxide. That's why in the all-out picture of the 1975 first-year students at the English Department of the Nezhin State Pedagogical Institute, aka the NGPI, I had looks of the furbished protagonist in The Hero of Our Times– a blond with the dark mustache...

Our course was divided into four groups of twelve students each, with only one male per group. The exactly same male-female ratio was maintained at all the other courses of the English Department.

Because of my obviously dyed hair, some local young fairy started trailing and coveting me with signs of care and close attention along with insistent proposals to make friends that were full of quavering intonations of the boy from Nalchik.

After a shocking sample of construction battalion parlance, he bleated that his life was ruined for he had missed a chance of going to Moscow because of me, and pissed off.

Olga immediately informed me that in Nezhin I was hanging out with fags.

On my demand to indicate the source of the falsehood, she mentioned a certain Shoorik whose sister studied at the Physics and Mathematics Department of the NGPI.

At my request, Lyalka called Shoorik out of the Loony dance-floor into a dark alley to have a talk with me.

I hit the summoned Shoorik on the jaw and he did a runner; I didn't pursue though and only shouted after him in the manner of construction battalion, "Come here, fucker!"

Rather a strange way to lure back a runaway, if you come to think of it...

The classes in the Old Building lasted from nine to almost three and then I went along the wide asphalt path towards the sandstone-tiled New Building in front of which, there stretched a row of thick sprawling willows hiding under their canopies long benches without backrest.

In thirty meters from the New Building corner, there loomed the red-brick five-story block of the student hostel, aka the Hosty, and alongside the hostel there stood the canteen, a tall two-story Mausoleum-like structure of a cubes-and-glass style.

The large hall on the second floor was filled with a crowd of square, four-person, tables, along with the babel of students' voices, of water wooshing in the dishwasher's, of kitchen utensils clatter, of the knock of plates with chosen havvage landing on the plastic trays, which were dragged over narrow railing along the kitchen counter towards the woman in the stiff tube of white cloth upon her head behind the cash register in the end of the rail-path.

With a fleeting glance at the tray contents, the nun of the order of Starched Cashiers proclaimed the verdict—from 60 kop. to 1 ruble—accepted the payment, gave the change, and her box spat out anther paper slip onto the heap of the neglected checks.

At times some students, with a quirk for research, took the same set of food while in different places of the moving line – just so, from purely scientific curiosity.

The payment for those control sets varied. The cashier created the price on the fly, by inspiration, taking into account the client's looks, the outside weather conditions, and the level of noise in the hall...

After finishing their meal, guests went to the first floor, past the shortest embodiment of human wisdom E = mc2, inscribed on the wall of the staircase landing.

As runs a Russian proverb, the empty stomach rejects all learning, and after the meal, the theory of relativity might seem more attractive, you never can tell.

(....by the by, it's a moot point who's wiser – Einstein or the guy who found such a fitting place for the application of the genius' formula...)

On the first floor, there was the constantly locked hall of celebrations that hosted a couple of weddings a year.

Going out onto the high porch you could still turn into a glass door of a small confectionery with two saleswomen in nun whites, and the usual assortment of sand cakes for 22 kop., two-day-old donuts, and tobacco products.

Cigarettes were not too good, rather on a dampish side, except for "Belomor-Canal" of the most excellent quality – stuffed with dry and finely chopped tobacco, which is very important.

Once, being on high, I demanded from the saleswomen "The Ledger of Complaints and Proposals" which presence was the must in any store, and scribbled thanks for this fact, concluding it "be blessed, dearest dears!"

A graphomaniac would always find an occasion to give vent for his hidden passion...

Now you could return to the five-storied Hosty.

On the two-step porch at the entrance, three columns of wide-section iron pipes supported the flat concrete canopy.

The columns, when knocked at, issued sounds of a different pitch. You could play on them "do-re-mi-do-re-do!", so precise were the intervals sounded by the iron pipes.

Although at the institute, there was the Department of Music Teachers, yet the honor of that particular music discovery belonged to a student of the English Department who graduated before my enrollment.

As for the mentioned music phrase, it was an old-time curse among the _laboohs_.

Wherever you played it, any _labooh_ that happened around would get it at once, that old good jive running, "Go and fuck yourself, jerk!" One syllable for each note, exactly...

Behind the glazed entrance door, there was a small glass-walled vestibule with another door opening into the lobby in the right corner of which there stood the desk with the on-duty watchwoman behind it guarding the square shield of plywood fixed on the wall, with rows of nails for hanging the keys to the rooms in the Hosty.

If the nail beneath the ink-written '72' was empty then one of my roommates had already grabbed the key and passed to the room.

In the long corridor behind the lobby you could take either the right or the left turn and reach the staircases to the upper floors, yet the left one was the shorter route to room 72.

The floors were divided between the departments, aka faculties.

The second floor was inhabited by the students of the Biology Department, aka Bio-Fac.

The English Department, aka Anglo-Fac, owned the third floor.

Mathematicians from the Phys-Mat lived on the fourth, and the uppermost—fifth floor—belonged to the Music-Pedagogical Department, aka Mus-Ped...

On any floor leaving the staircase landing, you entered a long, half-dark, corridor to which the light was getting from its opposite ends, through two high windows spanned between the floor and the ceiling. The rest of the scenery was made of walls with rows of closed doors above the smoothly ground dark-gray concrete of the floor.

Room 72 was next to the washroom of six sinks, the first one from the corridor window; the door to the men's toilet was on the other side of the same window. On the opposite end of the long corridor, everything was exactly the same, only the toilet there was for ladies.

On entering the room, you got into its narrowest part squeezed between the four plywood lockers reaching the ceiling—two of them on each side.

After the lockers, the room became a bit wider, with a bed, a cabinet-box, and another bed under each of the side walls. The wide, three-winged, window was right ahead with two more cabinet-boxes under its sill.

The center of the room was occupied by the dark-brown scratched veteran of a table with four wooden chairs pushed under, so as you could bypass it when heading to the window.

The soiled spots in the wallpaper marked the places where the inmates or visitors habitually leaned their heads taking a seat upon the beds covered with army blankets, while the cleaner wallpaper stretches bore dense columns of recorded card debts and scores in Throw-in-Fool competitions.

The round tin box in the center of the whitewashed ceiling slab contained two light bulbs. The room was also equipped with two wall sockets and the switch by the door.

However, from midnight till six in the morning the electricity in the Hosty rooms was turned off by the on-duty watchwoman, with the general switch near her post. G'night, rented tape-recorders!

For those eager to gnaw the granite of the science, there was a reading room in the corridor on the first floor next to the hall with a TV box.

In both the electricity was in place all night through.

However, the reading room got empty long before the midnight, as well as the hall with the TV, except for the nights with an international football match or a new 4-sequel musical with Andrey Mironov on...

All of my three roommates in the pencil-box room were four-year students.

Fyodor Velichko came from a hinterland village in the vast Ukraine-Mommy. The straight thick hair, jutting above his wide forehead, was somehow reminiscent of the straw-thatched barn roof on a quiet farm.

Sasha Ostrolootsky was brought up and educated in an orphanage, yet he had plans to marry the daughter of Professor Sokolov from Moscow; no one except him ever met or heard about both Professor and his daughter. Like Fyodor, he was not very tall, but looked more sporty, besides, his fair hair was softer, his nose was longer and he had the reputation of Casanova.

Sasha's favorite pastime was visiting girls' rooms on the floor to drink tea with sweets to which outings he was often accompanied by another inhabitant of Room 72, Marc Novoselitsky from Kiev.

Marc had a broad face with icicles of black hair hanging to the rim of his glasses and indispensable smirk under his thin mustache; he looked the most well-fed of my roommates.

Visiting the room of Sveta Havkina and three more freshman girls, Marc and Sasha paid for her tea and jam with most black ingratitude. Sprawling on the covered beds of the inmate girls, they started a sneer-and-jeer discussion of those most unworthy people – the Jews.

Sveta, a pretty black-haired daughter of one of the tribes of Israel from Chernigov, was changing in the face to each of their anti-Semitic remarks but suffered in silence. For the next two days she was utterly out of sorts until Ilya Lipes, a third-year student with sideburns like in Pushkin's self-portraits, did explain to her that those ungrateful pigs were, actually, Jews themselves...

The four-year student Yasha Demyanko from Poltava rented a room somewhere in the city but visited his course-mates almost every evening.

The people of Room 72 spend their spare time (which was almost the only type of time by them) in constant Throw-in Fool battles at which occupation Yasha's skills were simply superb and he also was the tallest of us.

He had a long Baltic face framed with long curls and, likewise Fyodor, he spoke only and exclusively the Ukrainian language.

The rest of us communicated in Russian but we all perfectly understood each other...

The fourth-year student Sveta, a native of Nezhin city, kept visiting our room regularly. She was the official bride of Marc and even their respective parents had already got acquainted.

Sveta did not play cards, she kept sitting on the Marc's—and only his—bed and held him in an iron grip, "What's that, Marik? I did not get it!"

"Well, Svetik, well, I just..." with cowardly lowered eyes behind his glasses, Marc began to meekly defense himself until the other players would show their indignation with the procrastination of his move in the game.

Then he escorted her home, returned and after they turned off the electricity in the rooms, he brought in his course-mate Katranikha. For a couple of minutes, they silently creaked his bed and parted.

And that was correct because of the strenuous study-work awaiting us all in the morning...

Katranikha had a friendly disposition, and she was very hospitable. One burglar, after having broken into the Republican Fashion House in Kiev, decided it was time to lie low. He got off a local train in Nezhin and spent a whole week in her room because they met each other on that train. And every night he took her and her roommates to one or the other of Nezhin restaurants.

A week later two operative officers of the criminal investigation ascended the third floor in the Hosty, tracing the indications of loot from the Republican Fashion House, which the burglar tried to dispose of at the Nezhin bazaar.

One of them took a black pistol from inside his coat and knocked on the door of Katranikha's room which the burglar had already cleared out of.

He was arrested only a month later in the city of Mariupol. Anyway, that was what the operative with the black pistol told his wife, also a four-year student of the English Department...

Soon after, Katranikha invited me to the Leninist Komsomol Cinema, about two hundred meters from the canteen, opposite to the lake in the Count's Park.

We watched "Zorro" starring Alain Delon. Well, I don't know, but in my humble opinion, the final fencing scene in the movie was way too long and boring.

On the whole, the time she spent on me was lost in vain, I couldn't consider her for practical purposes because she was a girl of my cohabitant in the pencil-box room.

To tell the truth, I always remained rather old-fashioned...

Starting my student life, I never fancied any breach of my marital fidelity, it was unthinkable, for about a week or so.

But then on our floor in the Hosty, there occurred a vacant room and the key incidentally got to my hands, with a chance addition of my course-mate Irina from Bakhmach. We spent all night in that room and she proved to be an ardent adherent of strictly tactile pleasures with the firmly negative stance towards trespassing the rubber band in her panties.

Again?! What for?!. Her boobs were undeniably magnificent, with some strange nipples though; I had never come across so tiny ones: the size of a pinhead. However, keeping oneself all night long busy with only the bust is a hell of monotonous occupation.

Two days later she resolutely blocked my way in the half-dark corridor of the Hosty. "You did not say you were married!"

"You didn't ask."

(...and here, in my opinion, lies the main flaw in civilization.

Take me, for instance, I have nothing but the purest and most natural inclination for a no-cheating trade after the pattern "you give me, I give you", that is, for the fair exchange of pleasures.

I am prepared to provide all the pleasures available from my male body in exchange for delights obtainable from her female one.

But instead of a young Bacchante rocking with mad ecstasy in my embracing arms I—for the damnteenth time!—run into the disgusting attempt at using her vagina as a trap.

Bitter are the fruits of yours, O, civilization!

Toy with the boobs and piss off! Marry first, and then have it in slathers, ladle or spread it as you like, but no sooner...

And no one cares a fig about your shattered self-respect.

Couldn't arise a fiery response? Hmm...and you call yourself a man after that, eh?.

And—the most perplexing puzzle—a mere outline of the word "rape" gives me a boner, but I've never tried to put the term into effect in a real-life situation, not even with the recusant who lay with me of her own free will.

When she said "no", I began to tame my horny ambition, whatever the cost.

Probably, because I love fair deals.

Besides, I was born too late – after the origination of the family, private property, and state...)

Presently, the buses in the Nezhin city stop next to the railway station, but in those times the highway bridge over the railway tracks was not yet in place and the bus stops were reached by the high footbridge overpass.

Then you had to wait for a bus, scramble to get on board, and stand squeezed in the crowd for all the long ride to the main square.

From the square there remained a short walk down to the bridge over the Oster river on whose right bank stood the Hosty, the New and the Old Buildings, as well as the other campus structures together with the Count's Park behind them holding the sky aloft upon its columns of dark ancient elms within the bounds of a long horseshoe-like lake...

It took me one of those prolonged bus rides from the station to the main square, to persuade Yasha Demyanko to sell me a shirt. A white shirt with the grid pattern of blue-and-yellow widely set stripes.

Coming back to Nezhin after the weekend at his home city of Poltava, Yasha brought that shirt for selling at a negotiated price, and in the crowded bus, he opened his grip to show me the goods.

I fell for it immediately, but he was obstinately refusing to sell it because he had another such shirt on and both of us were from the same Department. In his opinion, it was not the right thing for two persons to be dressed alike when in one place.

In the most solemn way, had I to swear to never ever put it on without his expressed permission, or when his one was washed or left behind in Poltava.

(...we lived in the deficiency era, and we were well aware of the fact.

I wasn't stunned at all when a girl sitting next to me at a general lecture, flashed wide runs in her pantyhose aptly fixed with a blue electric tape high up her thigh.

So what?

In upright posture her skirt hid both the tape and runs leaving just legs in the pantyhose of enviable _Conte_ brand...)

Fyodor, Yasha and I became bosom friends on the common basis of dry wine.

After classes, we started to the deli around the corner of the department store opposite the church where Bogdan Khmelnitsky married another of his wives, to buy four to five bottles holding 0.75 liters of white dry wine each. Yasha was a firm supporter of moderation and his dose constituted just one bottle in the haul, while Fyodor and I entertained more liberal views.

From the deli, we proceeded past the bazaar, and the restaurant "Polissya" to the second bridge over the Oster River, from which the long Red Partisans Street went away to finally turn right, toward the highway beyond the city. But our route was much shorter, and from the bridge, we climbed down into the tall grass on the riverbank nearby the Catholic Chapel used as Youth Sports School grounds, snug and cozy place to stretch out for a libation.

A finger-thick layer of sediment covered each bottle bottom, but we knew how to drink from the neck without stirring it up. The emptied bottles we threw into the almost motionless waters of the Oster because somewhere downstream the floodgates of the dam were shut.

After a short-lived reproachful popping, the bottles froze on the water, kinda fishing rod floats with their necks pointed at the sky.

(...environmental pollution fighters would not approve of such a behavior, but young carefree students are not turned on by so minor issues.

Besides, when compared to the exploits in the student life of Mikhail Lomonosov at German universities, we were a flock of fluffy tender lambs.

Reading about his feats, you grow to understand: it was not for nothing that the man had walked on foot from Arkhangelsk itself to Moscow.

Passion for knowledge knows where to direct you...)

And lying in the tall grass we carried on enlightened conversations about this and that, and other such things, interspersed with prolonged gulps before to change the subject.

The chat was our snack, something like discussing the well-known fact that when the Oster had still been navigable, a merchant boat full of treasures sank there. And recently the Japanese came up with a proposal that they would clean up the entire riverbed of the Oster, provided that they get the treasure, but ours replied: "Piss off, Japs! Don't be too cunning!"

Or, for a change, we were discussing Latinist Litvinov, that ruthless beast of a drubber.

"Read sentence seven from exercise five."

But how could you possibly read it when seeing for the first time in your life?

"Sentence seven comes after sentence six."

"..."

"Sentence seven comes before sentence eight."

"..."

"Get seated, please. Your mark is two."

Wholly serene, as cool as a cucumber, with his head like a light bulb, just with a bit more hair on it, he turns to the next victim...

So the poor students did not have a choice but to dub him with the handle of "Lupus".

His beautiful wife was a fourth-year student already, and in her first year, at the winter examination session, she managed to pass the credit in Latin only at the sixth try.

He entered the record into her Grade Book, and articulated coolly, "Be smart, and marry me."

Figuring out that in the summer session it would be not a credit but the examination in Latin, she realized that the resistance was of no use...

Then we stipulated that after Fyodor and Yasha got their diplomas, at their farewell party I would ramble into the Oster waters with a glass of champagne aloft in my hand. Like in the flicks "The Land of Sannikov" the Czarist army lieutenant enters the rolling surf after the schooner sailing away to discoveries.

"There is a point between the past and the future,

And that split second is what we call life..."

And then we, happily mushy, got up and went to the Hosty overtaking the lazy bottles still sticking from the middle of the river.

(...we lived in the era of stagnation only we did not yet know about it...)

In the blue-tiled shower on the Hosty's first floor, I made a discovery that I had a rather resonant voice. So I brought my guitar from Konotop and sang from the window of my room on the third floor to serenade no one in particular.

Of course, Irina from Bakhmach notified the whole pack of Artemises at the English Department that I was not a kosher game. As a result, the sweet sadness in the eyes of girls had given way to an expression of alert vigilance, and my entering their rooms no more triggered an immediate invitation to have a tea-party. But all the same, I sang.

Sometimes students of the Music-Pedagogical Department descended from their fifth floor to knock on Room 72 door requesting the guitar at least for one evening. Probably, they wanted to have some rest...

Moreover, end September, when our course students attended the wedding of a girl-student in her native town of Borzna, I was strumming and singing there all night the numbers from the repertoire of The Orpheuses, The Orion, and Duke Ellington. And the folks danced to my music!

The slender bride in a long white dress, pressing herself to the massive figure of her groom, did not miss bestowing her grateful looks on the wedding singer.

Her brother stood on guard by the record player to shoo off those who wanted to start a disk. Not every wedding could boast of having live music...

At the start of October, I was summoned to the personnel department of the State Pedagogical Institute.

The head of the personnel department, without looking into my face, urged me to pass on into the additional room behind his office desk, but he remained where he was.

In the adjacent room, there also was a desk with a lanky man at it with the shaven face of about forty years of age and pale-dark hair of indistinct length.

After my entering and getting seated, he clasped the fingers of his long hands on top of the desk and introduced himself as a captain of the Committee of State Security, aka the KGB, and went over to briefing me that to prevent the espionage activities of the CIA agents coming to our land under the disguise of news correspondents the KGB needed young people who spoke English. Such people were to get the appropriate special training and be subsequently sent to foreign countries to ensure the security of our state.

Wow! Wild dreams did come true without ever turning to the precinct militiaman Solovey! The captain of KGB was on his own making me an offer that I wouldn't even try to refuse. Not for nothing in my adolescent dreams, I was trying on the shirt of Banionis from "The Dead Season"!

It only remained to discuss the details. When on my way to the hostel after classes I would see him with a newspaper in his hands, then one hour later I needed to call the number given by him for further instructions.

And at that, we parted...

A week later, when I called him with the payphone fixed in the glass-walled vestibule of the second, permanently locked, entrance door to the hostel lobby, he instructed me to come to the railway station, and there to the wooden house of the station militia, next to the public toilet, and enter the first door to the right in the corridor.

Behind that door, under his dictation, I wrote the application to enlist me in the secret contingent of the KGB, and that for the conspiracy purposes I chose the nickname "Pavel" to be my working pseudonym...

At our third meeting, the captain said that the response from the commanding staff at the military detachment of my army service indicated they had a way too poor opinion about me. Like, I was the hopelessly lost and utterly spoiled fraction of the society dregs.

(...it seems like at the KGB everything was turned upside down – first, they recruited me as a secret agent and only then they started collecting information if that was worth the while.

Though on the second thought, I might also be to blame, in part, because of presenting myself so too beautifully in the forged testimonial.

To quote the great sage Gavkalov, in charge of a truck crane at SMP-615 (of whom later on), what is all too good is not good at all...)

I asked if Zampolit reported also of my taking part in a bank robbery, to which the captain grinned but all the same wished to know why the Commander was so negative in his estimation.

I didn't attempt at jejune justifications or puerile lies, nothing of the sort. I just substituted myself for the projectionist at the construction battalion club whom Zampolit trusted with running errands and passing presents to his (Zampolit's) young passions.

By the adjusted version, it was I who accidentally laid up one of the girls who was silly enough to blab it before Zampolit and in his jealous rage he was now besmearing me with the stamp of a drug-using rowdy...

After that talk, the halo of my dream to become a spy in the USA grew dim. It dawned on me that I might have been needed for local use only, just as a snitch, "a Gestapo's ear inserted into Everyman's pocket".

The future confirmed my gloomy boding...

There were no more talks about intelligence service school (which bullshit served to hook the fool) instead, twice a month, I came to the room in the station militia corridor to report that I hadn't heard any political discussions among the students of the NGPI.

On the one hand, I felt guilty for letting down the captain and the hopes he pinned on me, but on the other – what could I report?

Was the KGB really interested that Igor Recoon, my course-mate who entered the institute straight after school, fell in love with Olga Zhidova from Chernigov?.

All his evenings Igor spent in her room where her roommates exploited the feelings of the young enamored, sending him with a kettle to fetch water from a tap in the washroom.

Once he was checked on the way by my roommate, the four-year student Marc Novoselitsky. "Made an errand-boy of you, eh?" asked Marc with his usual mocking grin.

"So what?" the yesterday's schoolboy did not give in, but defiantly threw up his sharp nose with the tea-colored glasses on it and kept chewing, in the attitude of indie guy, his bubble gum.

"In love with Olga Zhidova, eh?"

"So what?"

"Wanna marry her, eh?"

"So what?"

"How can you marry her? She was my lay!"

"So what?"

The youth withstood even that deadly blow, yet the treacherous kettle slightly lowered its spout in his slackened hand, letting thread-thin trickle onto the gray concrete floor. Poor boy...

My roommate did not lie, of course, and he explained his action as the desire to save young Igor from a fatal blunder. Yet all the same, that Novoselitsky was an ornery bastard, notwithstanding his being a Jew...

In short, I had nothing to curry favor with the KGB and mend my reputation ruined by the finking Zampolit.

(...still and all, if only they had connived at what he rolled on me, and the fact of baptizing my daughter too, as well as being rude with the unknown KGB worker at the foot of Komsomol Gorka Hill in the Stavropol city then—you never can tell—I might have easily risen to the presidency in present Russia, even without the spy school.

My mother always said that I was mighty clever.

As it is, I poisoned my student years with my own hands.

Two meetings a month with the captain were excruciating me like an incurable toothache. I tried to kill the thoughts of nearing meeting and think of something...anything else, but they returned to me, as to the patient with a deadly illness return the thoughts about the inescapable end.

During the most young-Lomonosov-like feasts, I would suddenly remember that in three days I was to go to a hateful interview and then switched over to pondering on the word "seccol", aka secsot, which was just an abbreviation of "secret collaborator" but sounded much more disgusting than chmo.

And there was no escape – they had my application and reports telling on no one in particular but signed "Pavel".

So even if I, say, got to Zona, another "zampolit" would approach with the demand to keep on knocking on the current inmates if I had no wish of a certain part from the KGB archives to be leaked to the master-thief of the zona, aka pakhan.

My life became cramped up like that of Sindbad the Seaman when in some of his travels a nasty old man nestled around his neck strangling and kicking with his legs for any disobedience.

But why the KGB captain remained nameless? He called me his name-and-patronymic but even under the threat of being executed, I cannot recollect it.

Not that I'm afraid of the KGB, or whatever is its new, post-Soviet, name – no; it's just a permanent brain cramp at that point.

However hard strained, my memory wouldn't yield his name.

Though not that I want it too much...)

In those times, there were two restaurants in Nezhin – "Polissya" in the square in front of the bazaar, and "The Seagull" in the hotel of the same name to the right from the City-and-District Party Committee behind the Lenin's back on the main square. The third one was on the first floor of the railway station but in the afternoon it worked as a canteen, so I count it out.

The epic provincial backwaters inspiring tender sympathy by a mere thought of it...of the monument bust commemorating the home-geezer who's sail-boat at the dawn of XIX-th century hove at sight nearby the Antarctic shores, yet the innocent silly penguins couldn't discern the entire taxidermic impact from the appearance of that strange wooden ice floe over the dark polar waters carrying a herd of strange penguins gaggling in non-Penguin lingo...of the cathedral closed for renovation works ever since end 50's...of the firstborn of the Soviet combat-tank industry, the model of 1929, at the Shevchenko Park entrance without any podium, right on the asphalt sidewalk: fill in the diesel fuel and – full ahead!.

Even the bazaar square was, actually, just a wide street tilting from the bridge up to the department store...

The restaurants we visited seldom indeed, and not all of us because Yasha and Fyodor shunned the facilities. On such occasions, they were substituted for with Sveta, the official bride of Marc.

The white tablecloths on the tables, and the wide green runner from the entrance up to the screen in the corner, hiding the window to the kitchen, proved at once that it was a restaurant for you and not a shabby bar.

And, as it's appropriate for a restaurant, we had to wait through a long wait before the waitress would bring the ordered goulash with potatoes.

To whittle the span down, Sasha Ostrolootsky would start rubbing his set of spoon-fork-knife lined in a close formation next to a napkin on the tablecloth. Like, he was so well-bred and cleanly. Good news, he didn't set his little finger prudishly aside at the procedure; some Marquis de Orphanage...

Sveta kept nagging Marc with her "What's that, Marik? I didn't get it!" but in a lower kind of voice.

Finally, from behind the screen, the waitress appeared with a tray in her hands...Whoops, taken to another table...

But here, at last, and for us. She moved the plates from the tray onto the table. Sasha in a well-trained manner poured shots of vodka out from the small and round, like the flask in chemical experiments, decanter.

Shoot off!

And after the second shot, you were already a participant in a witty conversation of the affable table-mates. Your fingers toyed so smartly with the fork. The music from the loudspeakers behind the screen was no longer sounding too crude.

You gave an unobtrusively gaze to those present in the room. Which one to invite to slow dance on the green runner?

Marc knew them all, which Department, say, those two girls were from, and in what year of their study. If that was someone not from the Institute, then Sveta, as a local guide, presented all their intimate details.

Weren't we the cream of the libertine crop then, eh?.

In the end, Marc would pay for all from his soft brown purse; at the hostel, we reimbursed for our shares...

Marc would almost pass for a good dude, but for his love to teach you.

Coming back from the shower on the first floor, he made sure to peep into the lobby to thank the watchwoman auntie Dinna for the hot water. And then he started to drive it home to me that although she had nothing to do with the water, yet now she was prepared to do him favors.

It's like promising something to someone. Nobody might be positive if you were going to keep your word so that they would get indeed what promised, however, the person you bestowed a hope on starts looking into your hands and, because of the anticipation, they would pull for you.

(...it seems to me, he was just reiterating adages with which his father had been screwing his head on since his early childhood.

Jewish wisdom transferred from generation to generation, see?.

That's from whom the KGB learned to hook fools with promises of the spy school...)

As a fee for his free lectures, I presented him The Otranto Castle which book he saw on my cabinet-box and got impressed.

It was borrowed from the library at the KaPeVeRrZe Club. So, I had to return the book first and a week later I stole it from the shelves.

Nothing could be easier; in the privacy of a passage between the stacks of shelves, you stuck a book under the belt in your pants, put your sheepskin coat aright, grab another book on the way to the desk of the librarian, and leave with two books of which only one is registered...

The home-made feasts whooped up in Room 72 cost us much less...

While Yasha and Fyodor were dispatched after Calvados in flask-like bottles of foreign looks, Ostrolootsky and I went to the kitchen.

On each floor of the Hosty, there were two kitchens, located by the entrance to the corridor from each of the staircase landings. Each kitchen was furnished with two gas stoves, one water tap combined with the sink, and three rows of box doors, like in automatic storage cells, only made of veneered chipwood instead of iron.

There we were peeling potatoes on the window sill, lots of potatoes.

Sasha had a sporty look with the zipper of his jacket always swayed up to the utmost where the slider dangled under his chin. "Well, that'll do. Let's chop them...Okay...Come up to the door, just lean against it. Yes, that's the way...Now, let's check what we have here..."

Ostrolootsky opened a box door and unloaded a piece of butter onto the huge frying pan, "Oh, and here some nice onions too, excellent!."

He frisked through the boxes with such elegant ease that I did not immediately realize that we were robbing the provision, aka "torbas", of the girls from our Department. All went so deftly and smoothly, the tongue wouldn't turn to call it looting.

(...well, while Sasha might be justified by his half-starved childhood in an orphanage, what about meI? How would I look into Robin Hood's eyes after that wicked depredation?

And yet (with all the remorse in its place) I haven't eaten anything more delicious than that pillaged fried potatoes...

However, Calvados turned out to be a lousy swill.

And even quenching of the hangover with it was disgusting...)

Zhora Ilchenko came back from India after working at the Soviet embassy there for a year or so. One should be a hard-working student to grasp enough of English for the job in just one academic year at the English Department of NGPI, or there cropped up other reasons that I did not care to consider. Anyway, Zhora Ilchenko came back to finish the studies and get his diploma together with the rest of the students who he had started his learning with.

I did not know Zhora and only saw him from afar in the Old Building corridors. He had a curly, rapidly thinning black hair and a mustache emphasizing the red of his lips.

Needless to say, that I envied him – one whole year in India! From his detour, he brought some books in English and those commenced circulating among the students at our Department and when my course-mate Igor Recoon made friends with Zhora, I borrowed from Igor a book which he borrowed from Zhora.

It was a volume of short stories by William Somersault Maugham published at the Penguin Publishing House.

The book was difficult to read because of lots of too tricky words. I had to borrow The Large English-Russian Dictionary from Natasha Zhaba, my group-mate.

Reading the book borrowed from Igor, borrowed from Zhora, I came across a quite short story (some two-and-a-half pages) named The Man with a Scar, and its size tempted me to try my hand at translation it into Russian. Moreover, there was a place for publishing – on the third floor of the Old Building next to the Language Laboratory, there hung the wall newspaper "Translator", a sheet of Whatman paper with rows of glue-mounted typewritten pages of translations made by the students of the English Department, alongside with the Classes Time-Table for all the four courses...

Besides being so conveniently short, the story highlighted the very essence of all those Latin American revolutionaries. The to-do list for such a revolutionary was not too complicated – to adorn oneself with the rank of colonel or general, rally a gang, and start a war for liberation under the slogan "Liberty or Death!" until he became the dictator.

However, the would-be dictator from the story ran out of ammunition and got captured before he reached his goal. At the dawn of his execution day, he for a moment stepped aside from his gang lined up against the wall for the pending procedure and hugged his beloved who came running up to him to say goodbye, to be kissed and stabbed to death. Because they loved each other so much.

The current dictator, being present at the execution, was impressed with such a poignant passion, ordered to single his rival out and after the firing squad did their job, they deported the man to a nearby Latin American State where his following career was that of a drunkard selling lottery tickets at bars.

Once a bottle of beer burst in his hands and a glass shard marked his face, that's how he became the man with a scar.

Just so simple a story without superfluous frills. However, Maugham knows the way to present concise but tangible details in his stories. He is some real writer that son of the foggy Albion!

(...the words in English are short, except for those borrowed from other languages, and a sentence made of them looks like a handful of scattered rice, yet sometimes it might contain a whale of meanings, enough to fill a whole sack.

In Russian, on the contrary, the words, because of their suffixes and prefixes, are long like spaghetti, or cobweb threads of which you have to weave what, actually, you were about...)

The wall newspaper "Translator" was supervised and edited by the teacher of theoretical grammar or something like that, studied at the senior courses of the English Department.

Alexander Vasilyevich Zhomnir. A capital man.

(...nowadays such an individual would be referred to as a regular screwball, but then it meant a dissident they hadn't run down yet...)

Outwardly, he sooner had looks of a Ukranian nationalist than a dissident, but also too cunning to be caught, otherwise, they'd never allow him to teach at an institute.

His long gray hair he combed back for it to immediately return to bangs over his broad forehead and touch his gray bushy brows. His shoulders were somewhat rounded and jerked up as if prepared to receive a weighty sack upon them, and in his movements there was the touch of clumsiness which takes decades of cultivation. Just a villager beekeeper for you or, say, a miller who had bored all the way up into professorate of linguistic neurosurgery.

To the institute, he was coming by his bicycle, like a mujik, yet intellectually buckled it down with a padlock threaded through the spokes when leaving his means of transportation leaned against a birch tree.

When in the spacey corridor by the Language Laboratory, I handed Zhomnir a thin copybook with my translation of the Maugham story, he flipped through it and with overly exact articulation of Russian words, stated that he did not work with texts in Russian, for which reason "Translator" presented students' works in only Ukrainian except for the translations of poetic works...

Right, in my school certificate the Ukranian language and literature were marked with "n/c" – "not certified", yet after moving to Konotop I was reading books in Ukrainian as well, so in two weeks I surprised Zhomnir with a Ukrainian version of that same man with a scar.

He bucked up and, with a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, smashed and crushed my labors to the finest dust.

I hated being flogged like that, yet I couldn't but see that he was right. Besides, I couldn't simply dump the whole venture, not only because of wounded pride but being hooked by wrestling obstinate Slavonic words and making them express what I was able to grasp from among the rolling beads of Maugham's language.

The struggle was so exciting that I took the guitar back to Konotop...

The rumors I became aware of one year later, that arriving at Konotop on Saturdays I dropped my black plastic "diplomat" in the hallway to be off to whores, and never cared a fig that when I was away my wife got laid promiscuously, readily and regularly, was a gross exaggeration.

My relations with Olga remained steady, passionate and invariably brought a feeling of deep satisfaction. Except for that occasion when I did timing...

My roommate Marc Novoselitsky, for no obvious reason, asked me about the duration of my having a sex with my wife.

Caught unawares, I made a wild guess at modest ten to fifteen minutes, no longer.

He mocked so tall a tale exceeding any limits of the humanly possible and we bet...

Olga did not get it when I put onto the bedroom windowsill the alarm clock normally stationed in the kitchen, and I did care to clarify the news.

With the clock's clacking on my brain, the shown results were a total debacle...

On Sunday night arriving at the Hosty, I honestly admitted it had taken a niggardly five minutes, which report changed Marc's usual smirk into a happy smile.

But all of the other times it was all right and time did lose all meaning whatsoever...

Before it, we were visiting Loony and danced slow dances there with a sincere feeling, and we gave free rein to our vigor in the fast ones. She was good at it, in any style.

In the meantime, we watched a couple of fights on the floor, which Lyalka dubbed 'gladiatorial bull-battles' or took a respite out of the hall, in the unlit corridor of the library wing.

There, leaning our backs against the windowsill beneath the silent dark-black panes, Lyalka and I shared a blunt immersing into more and more deep comprehension of the aquarium essence of the interior, while Olga was smoking her orange-filtered cigarettes.

Everything turned nyshtyak and the thoughts about my being a KGB rat in Nezhin sank to the very bottom of the aquarium...

My matrimonial duties I did to the best of my abilities, so when Olga said she was pregnant and the abortion regulations called for the husband to donor one glass of his blood in the hospital, I went there without much ado, though I had, like, always tried to keep protective at having it.

In the room for blood transfusions, I was shod in white shoe covers and laid on the table covered with a cold oilcloth.

There were two nurses in the room, and I was amazed at the expression about their eyes, or rather struck by the absence of any. Their eyes seemed blanked with filmy blinds, like to the stilled gaze of dead fish.

With a needle on the end of a thin elastic tubing, they approached me and tried to stick it into the vein inside my arm to make the blood flow through the hose. Yet, at all of their three attempts at piercing the vein, it stubbornly rolled away from the needle stubbed deep under the skin.

The bewilderment of the dead-eyed nurses turned them merciful and they signed the paper about my donation of blood in exchange for an abortion free of charge...

The surrender was unthinkable and simply impossible.

So, I had to learn one more writing—similar to Arabic lettering only with a wider sweep—the hand of Zhomnir with which he scribbled his notes over and between the lines of the manuscripts I kept handing to him. At last, he raised a bushy brow and said that it seemed somewhat like that already, and my translation would go for the next issue of "Translator".

Then there came the day when Yasha and Fyodor, standing in front of the typewritten pages pasted in the Whatman sheet on the wall, congratulated Zhomnir with the fresh discover of an upstart talent in the field of Ukrainian translations with such an unmistakably Ukrainian ending in his family name – Ogolts-OFF.

Zhomnir responded more directly – he was not to blame that so truly-truly Ukrainians as Demyan-KO and Velich-KO had never scratched their ass in all four years of their studying at the English Department...

Spring came hand in hand with the most cloudless and unalloyed love of my life.

Everyone both addressed or referred to her as Shvycha, but I called her by her name – Nadya. It was her to bring about the resurrection of the belief that the true female principle was still and all alive in this civilization-scummed world.

We loved each other; love was filling us to the brim and trickled over it. Love for love's sake is a lovable love, it's the purest form of love if you love it.

Why am I stating for both of us? What's the reason for so unrestrained allegations? The answer is very simple – Nadya was a virgin and inexperienced, so far, at feigning.

Then, maybe I once again forgot to say I was married? The fact needed no advertising, she was finishing her fourth year at the English Department and lived on the Anglo-Fac floor in the Hosty.

Some unique combination: virginity and the fourth course at the Anglo-Fac, eh?

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy..."

The four-year male students held a banquet in their pencil-box room opposite ours, to which I also was called.

Nadya happened to be sitting next to me on the same bed, and when someone turned off the light in the room I reflexively unzipped her sports jacket.

She flicked it back right away and when they turned the light on, everything was the innocence itself and no need to call the police morale. However, Marc had read the zipper sounds in the dark, and he began to chaff; Nadya got hurt and left, and all was over.

The following day she met me in the long corridor on our floor in the same sportswear, spoke up to me, and smiled.

Oh, the smile of Nadya was a real thing! Those dimples on the cheeks, those impish sparks in her eyes!

She fitted all the canons of a Ukrainian beauty – glossy stream of black hair down to the middle of her back; round face with velvety black rainbows of eyebrows over the shiny dark-brown eyes; voluminous breasts; rounded shoulders smoothly flowing into the arms and hands set akimbo on her abundant hips above the gorgeous thighs of a trained swimmer. Because she was going in for that sport.

And, with all that, what did she need me for? And a simple answer again – that summer she was going to get married.

Not to me, you bet; there was some lieutenant graduating some military school who would marry and take her to the garrison of his appointment.

There was not much time left, and we did not want to profligately lose it. We loved to love each other and we wanted more and more of it.

But that came later for, at first, we had to tackle busting her cherry...

The initial couple of dates we spent in the compartment with one window and one sink, partitioned, for some reason, from the rest of sinks and taps in the washroom. The truly spartan style of the compartment interior did not matter much at the introductory stages of acquainting ourselves with each other, especially since the latch-lacking door of it opened inside and was easy to block.

And then the guys from Room 71 left for a day or two, leaving their key to Zhora Ilchenko who, actually, rented some place in the city but would you reject the key from a vacant room in the Hosty?

They did not pass the key to him from hand to hand though, just hung it on its nail in the plywood shield behind the watchwomen's desk in the lobby. It's hard to trace back in what way that information reached me, but I did not wait for another invitation to such a gift of fate and snatched the key before Zhora.

In the evening, Nadya and I retired to Room 71 and locked the door. When the knocking on the door ceased, and the echoes of Zhora's cries, "Anyone seen Ogoltsoff?!", died away in the corridor outside, Nadya started to gradually take off items of her sportswear, accompanying the striptease of the stagnation era with a chant from the pre-war black-and-white movie "The Circus",

"Tiki-tiki-do, ay!

I'm leaving from the cannon to the sky!."

Although she was noticeably ill at ease.

We lay down on the bed by the window. On the other side of the double partition made of gypsum slabs was my room, 72. By the window, there stood Fyodor's bed under the wall socket which was not properly fixed in its place and kept falling out.

Nadya's scream from the socket attracted Fyodor's attention. He took it out altogether and till late at night was listening to the moans that followed. We were not aware of being tapped, though even knowing it wouldn't tell on our enthusiasm.

The next day the guys from Room 71 returned and wanted the key back...

At the Monday date in the washroom, Nadya was gloomily silent, yet I managed to elicit the reason. Marc Novoselitsky was spilling dirty gossip among the four-year students that Ogoltsoff had had Shvycha in the washroom from the back...

I always sensed he was not indifferent to her; otherwise, why should he be so attentive to zipper zips at that birthday? O, you'd catch it, Jewish bastard!.

On Tuesday, he returned from the shower with his hair wet and the towel hung over his shoulder, to find only me in Room 72. I locked the door and announced, "Take off your glasses, Marc. I'll beat you up."

He did not remove the glasses though but instead began to run around the brown table with chairs placed under it. I had to push the table to the window exterminating space for him to go on with orbiting that piece of furniture.

In the nook between the windowsill, the bed, and the table he stood with his head bowed like Andriy, the son of Taras Bulba – a lamb resigned himself to being sacrificed.

I hit him on the chin so as not to damage the glasses, and in a pitched-up tone of voice promised that if he, fucking motherfucker, would ever squeal a single word about Shvycha...

When I finished my Sermon on the Mount, he set his glasses aright and said with a toady smile, "You so fucking well kicked up my fucking ass, right?"

(...the wisdom of ages imbibed with the mother's milk.

And—what is characteristic—he but on the fly picked up the terms from my sermon.

Affinity with languages resides in their blood...)

On Thursday, at the end of our date in the compartment, she pensively observed, "Yet, he was right after all..."

It stunned me that I was like fulfilling the plans laid down by Marc Novoselytsky. Some fucking Nathan the Prophet...But where was the way out?.

The manna from heaven came in the form of a first-year student at the Muz-Ped.

In his angel-like curls, with the golden gloss of his glasses' rim, he descended from above—the firmament of the fifth floor—to our sinful third floor and handed me the key to a vacant room in the corridor of theirs. Hallelujah!

But why? After all, I did not ask him or anyone else, and I did not even suspect the existence of that room.

How could he possibly know?!. Yes, a couple of times I gave him the guitar in the autumn, but since then we had not even met...

(....in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my...

COULD YOU FUCKING SHUT UP IN YOUR FUCKING SLEEPING BAG?!.)

And that was it.

Possession of the key switched me and Nadya to the nocturnal way of life, we were ascending to the fifth floor when student life subsided in the Hosty's corridors and coming down back in the mum gray of the pre-dawn dusk.

She once again became a freshman student, sort of. When our course was on the training excursion to Kiev, where we rode a bus for foreign tourists, she also joined in.

The young guide on that bus spoke only English, "Look to your left!. Look to your right!." Concluding the tour, he asked if we had any questions.

By that time, I got so involved in being a foreign tourist that also asked in English, "Are you a Communist, Mr. Guide?"

Taken aback with such an unexpected question by a student from Nezhin, he still managed to answer, "I am a Candidate for the Communist Party Membership."

"Okay, I see, Comrade Guide."

Then Nadya and I were sitting on a bench in a green patch of one of those steep lanes descending to Khreshchatyk Street. The sun was shining from the sky with fluffy clouds floating around it without screening the sunshine. Nadya and I were kissing long kisses.

Next to me there sat Igor Recoon and gravely scattered bits of cookies to the pigeon flock of a different feather, noisily crowding on the asphalt about our feet.

Hopefully, Kiev felt on that day that it was another—albeit small—Paris...

(...why was it so irksome to be a secsot?

I did not tell on anybody, making the KGB man shake his head at my reports empty of useful information.

Still, the feeling of being hooked and squeezed with the ratchet from which there was no way out, and the constant fear that my finking would get exposed, remained the source of ever-present internal torment – an unwilling rat was still a rat.

On the other hand, I was like feeling guilty before the captain.

Especially, after I turned down his request in winter...)

The captain asked then to sell him my sheepskin coat so that he would go hunting in it.

The short coat of shaggy black sheepskin, my father's coat still from easy times at Object. The sheepskin which Olga and I were sitting on at our wedding party. It was a part of my image, as well as the plastic black "diplomat" briefcase and my almost-tabooed response to any life problem, "Stuff it! We'll prick the hooey!"

To sell that sheepskin coat was like selling a part of oneself. I did not tell the captain all of that, I only answered that I couldn't.

He didn't insist though; that might have been a test, sort of, if I was willing to sell myself.

But in May I pleased him in full. It's when he got his reward for all my empty reports written under his dictation that nothing worthy of attention had happened or heard about.

Yes, twice a month he was dictating for me to write them so that the sheets of paper with my hand, signed "Pavel", accumulated in his safe, to get me ever deeper run through with their hook...

So, end May, returning from the weekend, Marc entered the room bubbling with delight about a new game he learned in Kiev. "The Game of Parties" was its name and all of us should have a try to see how interesting it was.

Fyodor and I took a break in Throw-in Fool played on Fyodor's bed. Ostrolootsky sat down on his and leaned the back of his head against the soiled spot in the wallpaper, and all of us listened to the rules.

The objective was to make changes in the events of the history process at our will. Starting from the summer of 1917, before consolidating the one-party political system, when there still were all sorts of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries, Anarchists and so on, each player had to choose a party to their liking and try to attract the other players over to his side. Try and see for yourselves what great fun it is!.

In the Hosty, Room 72 enjoyed no less popularity than a public urinal next to a cheap beer bar and everyone, who happened to drop in that night, was met with Marc's gleeful giggling and the offer to partake in so breath-taking role-playing game.

For a start, he together with Ilya Lipes and Ostrolootsky united into the Bund, on the basis of their shared nationality, but then they split and joined the Mensheviks and the Social Democrats.

Sasha Nesteryouk, on a flying visit through the room, waved his black scarf playfully and proclaimed anarchy to be the mother of order.

Fyodor and I declared ourselves fighters from the Peasant Army of Nestor Makhno and threatened to fuck up anyone distracting us from playing Throw-in-Fool.

Yasha, as a resident of Poltava, became a representative of the Ukrainian Central Rada.

The horseplay was not too long but as loud as usual...

The next morning no one recollected the noisy pastime and would forget altogether were I not so stupid as to mention the jolly game at the meeting with the KGB man.

The captain got wired, sat upright and, instead of usual two lines, squeezed out of me a whole page with the names of who was in the room, which party was his choice.

He did not like the conclusion in my report that the game died out because we got bored with it; I had to re-write all after he edited the page and crossed the statement out...

And the hell of a rumpus broke loose.

The KGB started calling the guys from the English Department for interrogations, even those who never popped up in Room 72 that cursed night. They wrote down their testimonies – who entered second? who sat where? why declared himself a Kadet? Some students were summoned more than once.

Dudes were coming back to the hostel with drawn faces, retelling the interrogation, anxiously discussing the possible outcome. Under the one-party political system, you could very easily be denied a diploma even after four years of study...

Three weeks later there was a general meeting of the English Department because the Organs detected certain unhealthy tendencies among our students. The KGB captain was introduced to the meeting and read out the list of the participants in the subversive Game of Parties.

It eased me up a little when I heard my name mentioned – they wouldn't guess that it was I who finked on guys. Then they began to selectively call the players to the large blackboard in the auditorium.

Lipes said that he dropped in absolutely by chance, seeking a teapot, stayed for just a minute and did not have time enough to get it what game it was at all.

Sehrguey Nesterenko from Kiev went off with a dramatic declamation of the lines memorized from a Shakespear play:

"Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your ears!.."

He was called to stop the balagan and get back to his place.

As for Yasha Demyanko, he was even happy to lean on the lectern with his elbows and build up logical syllogisms in the most flowery Ukrainian language about the unprecedented precedent at hand.

At last, Marc Novoselitsky faced the meeting, as the instigator, and said how sorry he was for not getting it at once how bad that game was, and promised solemnly to never ever play it again.

The meeting decided to announce a reprimand to everyone in the list of the captain and called to always guard and uphold the honor of the Soviet youth...

Returning to the hostel from the meeting, everyone seemed to give me sidelong glances and whisper behind my back.

Sasha Ostrolootsky, to relieve the stress from the interrogations in the KGB, drank a bottle of vodka without any snack and had to throw up, however, he managed to run out to the toilet.

Everyone finished the studies and received their diplomas.

The KGB captain failed to bloat the Game of Parties up to the level of the "doctors-poisoners" case about their attempt at the assassination of the Leader of All Nations, Comrade Stalin, with their medical treatment.

However, he certainly proved to his seniors that not for nothing his salary was paid to him...

(...and I am still thinking that it was not for nothing that Gray came to the battalion stoker-house to beat me up for ratting.

It's only that he anticipated the events and came ahead of time...)

The first time when that thought came to me was at the meeting with the captain for the last time in the current academic year. On handing over twenty rubles, he told me to sign the receipt of getting the money for secret collaboration.

Damn! It was not silver coins and the sum didn't coincide with that got by Juda, yet the rubles burnt my hands urging to get to Konotop as soon as possible and right away exchange all them for ganja.

It failed to bring about peace of mind to me.

I rode on the footstep of Streetcar 3, looking at my reflection in the glass of folded door (I always liked the way it reflected me) but now I hated that face.

Why did I ruin my own life?.

Between the New Building and the Hosty, there was a rather wide ditch for draining of excess water from the Count's Park lake into the Oster.

We walked together—Nadya, I and Igor Recoon—bypassing for some reason the New Building from behind, when I noticed an iron pipe connecting the banks of the ditch. It sagged about a meter above the surface of still water overgrown with duckweed.

"I dare me to go over!" said I.

Nadya screamed, "No! Don't dare!"

And Igor immediately said, "I bet you won't!"

The pipe was not wide (the cross-section of 10 cm.) and half-way over the ditch, it teetered under my feet. With Nadya's "ah!" and "oh!" behind my back, I regained a feeble balance and, fluttering my arms, advanced for another couple of meters and spurted the final segment.

"Aha!" shouted I and looked back.

Igor waved me from the other bank, "I dare you to return!"

Some viper of a homie, eh? I'm the Ogoltsoff but not just limitlessly so...

And why did I start all that at all? Because of the darn masculine pride.

The day before, our course had a picnic by the Oster, almost outside the city. There Nadya challenged me to compete in swimming; one hundred meters down the river.

She went ahead at once and after another twenty meters, I realized that my Kandeebynno-made freestyle swimming was but a garbage in comparison to her powerful butterfly. What could I do?

I climbed onto the bank and was the first to reach the finish line. I met the winner with a bunch of flowers grabbed in the grass along the way, "You're the champion, Nadya!"

When the three of us (Fyodor, Yasha and I) came with a load of bottles under the canopy of giant elms in the Count's Park and lay down in the grass to have a drink accompanied with the rustle of green foliage overhead, Yasha asked if I really had chosen the career of a circus pipe walker.

I was surprised because he had not been there, but Fyodor said that the whole English Department knew already about my crossing the ditch.

We drank and Fyodor began to complain of the pro-rector Budowski who had viciously, on purpose, spoiled Fyodor's entire Grade Book that registered results of credits and examination past in all four years of his study. The grades in there were uniform "threes" but that bitch Budowski put him "four" without heeding Fyodor's plead not to do so.

In this regard, Yasha put his index finger upright and draw a philosophical conclusion, that Fyodor "had swum hell of a way before he drowned nearby the shore".

We drank again and, inspired by the bright warm day, I said that pipe-walking was a baby toy because I could climb even that elm whose wide trunk was clean of branches to grip at and forked about eight meters above the ground.

Yasha once again set his philosophical finger up and instructively declared the undertaking beyond the humanly possible, yet he was prepared to buy two bottles of wine if I waved my hand from the foliage in the tree's crown.

There was certain swindle on my part when betting because behind the elm there grew a thinner tree you could shin up and then move over into the crotch of the giant. That way, I climbed to the stipulated altitude and safely returned to the native terra firma.

Yet, Yasha began to cavil and announced my exploit a measly wangling, but Fyodor, who he appealed to for an arbitration, gave out a peremptory command to shut up with petty quibbling – the point stipulated had been reached and two bottles from Yasha were due on the barrelhead...

Returning to the Hosty after recreation, I showed them the pipe over the ditch – the training kit for aspirant pipe-walkers.

Yasha grew passionate and proclaimed such crossing but a trifle, and he would easily prove it for merely two bottles of wine if I would hold his pants. I could not refuse a senior student from my department, my coach at playing Preferans and Protracted Throw-in-Fool...

And he stepped on the pipe and walked ahead, in his elegant white shirt of crossed yellow and blue stripes, from under which lasted his long legs in socks and black shoes. He did not suspect how insidious the pipe was over the middle of the ditch.

However, as it turned out, the ditch was not too deep there.

When Yasha got back to us, the colors of the shirt clinging to his torso, bore additions of slimy green. He had nothing to lose anymore and went for the second time, with a tantamount success though.

My loud laughter motivated Fyodor and to maintain the honor of the graduating course, he gave me his pants too and went over the shaky piece of iron. After plumping down he was smart enough to get out at the opposite bank of the ditch.

Damn it! I was splitting my sides with their pants in my hands. They might have done it, by the by, had they not surrendered beforehand by taking their pants off.

Well, at least, the Hosty was not too far off and four-year students without their pants were not too seldom sight there...

It seemed my laughter was too much loud and the hoot turned out ominous. On the arrival at Konotop, I learned that my wife was missing; she went to work a day before and hadn't been seen ever since. My mother had to visit Olga's aunt who neither knew a thing.

At the insistent advice of my mother, I dined before going to aunt Nina in the hope of some recent news.

She shook her head sadly, nothing whatsoever. Then I went to the brick factory.

It was already dark and the electric bulbs shed their yellow light inside of the main workshop floor building. As it turned out, the Konotop brick factory didn't use a circle kiln, being equipped instead with trolley-trains going in and out the kiln gate over narrow-gauge rail tracks.

It seemed to be a break, and on the whole workshop floor, I saw just one man and inquired about Olga.

"Where should she be?" retorted he resentfully. "Whoring out in the city."

That moment I recognized him, it was the one she had acquainted me with by Deli 1 when I came back from the army.

Had he remembered me? I didn't know...

I went out of the workshop floor into the night...whoring out...

But, maybe she'd come to the third shift? I had nowhere to go anyway.

Climbing upon the unfinished wall in the nearby building under construction, I sat there like that owl who flew to me in my childhood at Object, the messenger from the unknown...

That's how I sat there, in the middle of the night, thinking thoughts which were better be left alone and not thought at all, the thoughts that should be dropped before their final completion down the road for it would do no good and there would come the moment of their critical mass going beyond the fail-safe point and—willy-nilly—you had to act already, regardless of how carefully the thoughts had been thought through or else...but what to act?

A rectangle of yellow light flung open in the darkness, a man came out of the workshop door and slammed the light back in the dark.

Soon, he opened it again, went in, and all again was a dark night. Been out to take a leak.

Nothing to do here. I go home...

The next day brought news.

My sister said that Sasha Plaksin, handled Esa, who lived in Gogol Street, had seen Olga by the fishermen huts at the Seim river. He did not speak to her, yet saw there, for two days in a row.

With the exam in Latin on the following morning, I couldn't wait for further developments; the main thing she was alive and kicking, so I left for Nezhin.

My proficiency in Latin was evaluated by Lupus with "four" after my action by the door to the auditorium where he held examination of our course, sending echoes through the whole corridor, I roared at the top of my lungs:

"Gaudeamus igitur!.."

The disappearance of my wife, followed by her popping up, in absentia, at the place I wouldn't like to think of further, was surely putting me off, but having started you couldn't but go on:

"Juvenes dum sumus!.."

Lupus jumped out of the door to make sure it was I who loved his Latin so loudly, and later, when I got seated in front of him at the examination desk, he acted like a skilled worker at a conveyor belt – opened my grade book, entered "four", closed it, handed to me.

Fare the well, O, Latin...

Right after the examination, I hurried to Konotop and my mother told me that Olga came home in the morning.

Unaware of her mother-in-law's presence in the bedroom, she, first of all, rushed into the living-room towards the mirror in the wardrobe door. Standing in front of it, she unbuttoned her shirt to examine the hickeys on her chest.

...the owner's brand...everyone bears their kind of it...for someone, it's hieroglyphs nail-scarred on their wrist; another one gets adorned with a necklace of monkey bites on their breasts...

"I yelled at her and told to go back from where she came. She gathered her clothes and left. What now?"

I shrugged, "What can there be?"

"No way for her to get Lenochka," my mother said decidedly.

All that was so weighing down...

Olga came the next morning wearing a turtleneck. She said she was staying at aunt Nina's because my mother kicked her out. Then she poured forth a pack of lies about going to the Seim with Sveta and spending time in the hut of uncle Kolya's friends.

I advised her not to spend too much breath because of the pending divorce.

"And Lenochka?"

"She'll stay here."

Olga went over to threats that she would take her daughter to her mother in Theodosia. Then she said it was I who had made her do it because of all my whores in Nezhin of whom she was being told everything but just kept silent. And, yes, she went to the Seim out of spite, but there was nothing there, and we could still put everything aright.

(...in life, there is always a choice.

You may dig a hole or you may not dig it.

By filing for divorce, you affirm that you're a cuckold who takes retaliatory measures within the frame of the current moral code.

Neglecting the move, you still remain a cuckold but only if you look at yourself through the eyes of society or—but not everyone is up to that "or"—you become a hooey-pricker who does not care a fuck and lives for their own pleasure.

The small nuance is that the true hooey-pricker does not see any insoluble dilemma about all that stuff – they just live for their pleasure all the time.

I always had it good with Olga but a whole lot of centuries-old morals and codes of "honor" heaped on me and I was faced with the choice: to become a cuckold or go over to the other league?

Making a choice is always a tragedy – choosing one thing you lose the alternative...)

I never liked to choose, I preferred leaving tragedies to others – to fate, or chance, and at that point, Olga served a tossup coin for the purpose. I told her that all would be scratched out and forgotten if she fetched weed for just one blunt by the end of the day.

She left and returned already in the evening, fairly weary. She said she had walked the whole city but no one had no weed.

That was the cruel finger of fate, some chance empty suction.

Alea jacta est!.

(...were Olga lucky in providing the blunt, then I, as a man of honor, would only have to keep my word.

We would have started living on and now someone else would be composing this letter to you.

And maybe no letter would be needed, with you having Dad and Mom, and staff.

After all, replacing just one, even the tiniest, detail harbors a host of other outcomes...

If, say, you flick by the time machine to Mesozoic, where you accidentally slap-kill one single mosquito then, returning back, you find yourself in an irreversibly changed future – yes, the same year when you had left, but you yourself do not conform with the contemporary standards.

And there's no one to blame, you should have watched out better in what you were stepping in that Mesozoic past...

Just a single blunt would give me back the family idyll with an ideal woman.

She was not trading herself for money or some other assets, she cheated on me just for her personal pleasure.

Following the pattern of most natural exchange of joys – you to me, and I to you.

The fact that she was exchanging with someone else did not tell on my having it good with her.

Why did I so stupidly gave up what I wanted and was getting in full?

The moral foundations of the society left me no other choice but to join the crowd of dumb-ass "seminarists"...)

She gave me a great blow job for goodbye and asked to come the next day to Aunt Nina's for something important.

So, it was how, because of cruel chance, I became a cuckold...

(...for a long time I couldn't understand my dislike of Lermontov, but now I know – that's because of his lies.

Lermontov lied from the very start, from his poem to Pushkin's death:

"...with the lead of a bullet in his chest, he drooped his head..."

Well, let's say this lie was caused by the ignorance of anatomy. A hussar is not a doctor, after all, and for him, the loins, where, actually, the bullet hit, and the chest might be the same. Half-meter higher, half-meter lower, who cares?!.

But there is no way to excuse the following lie:

"...he rebelled against the society's morals..."

Pah! Stop kidding, Lermontov-boy.

He did not rebel but, on the contrary, he most exactly followed the precepts of the society for such a case. With the utmost rigor and slavish loyalty, Pushkin kept to the rules.

And since he himself did not dare disobey the moral code of the society then what can we, mere mortals, do in case of violation of marital fidelity but to file for divorce?.

However, one always looks for some justification for their beloved.

What if Pushkin was not at all obeying the dictates of moral customs? What if he intentionally used them for his personal gains? What if the aging, weary, poet worn out with the excesses of poetical lifestyle, threw down the gantlet to the greenhorn French youth on a visit to Russia for a too close attention to his wife, just to simulate a Shakespearean Othello with the hidden agenda of getting killed at the ensuing duel and passing away in style?

But the development of this hypothesis requires three doctoral degrees: that in gerontology as well as in psychology, and philology.

With a much more important matter on my hands – the letter to my daughter, I'd rather flashback, from the Varanda river to Konotop...)

The next day at the aunt Nina's khutta, she and her aunt performed in duo what I had already heard from Olga solo, about a fresh start from a clean leaf. Then the aunt went to her work.

Olga and I drank a glass of moonshine each and for about an hour were killing each other all over the kitchen and the adjacent living room.

When we got dressed Olga asked – what now? I replied that the question had been answered and, alas, not by me.

She started to cry and said that she knew what to do next, some pills appeared in her palm which she began to swallow. I managed to wring the most of them, yet some still were consumed.

I rushed out of the khutta, ran along Budyonny Street and past the Plant Park to Bazaar where a payphone hung at the intersection. Luckily, the receiver was nor cut off yet, and it worked.

I called the ambulance.

Probably, it's not every day they were called for a suicide attempt but their vehicle overtook me on my way back.

When I came back to aunt Nina's, Olga sat limply on a stool in the middle of the kitchen giving reluctant answers to the doctor and nurse in white coats. She had a large mug in her hands and on the floor by her feet stood a basin used at the stomach lavage.

The crisis was obviously over and I left without going into details. It was unlikely that she would take another try, and from my own experience, I knew that gastric lavage brings about reassessment of values and a fresher perspective on the situation...

Two days later I was told that they had seen Olga boarding a train of Moscow direction with some kind of a black-haired guy. Most likely, that was the one she'd been cheating on with my active participation two days before...

In a week I went to Nezhin to the fourth-course graduation party keeping my promise to Nadya.

The party was arranged in the hall of celebrations on the first floor of the canteen.

Nadya was the most beautiful there, in a long dress made of light chiffons, like a bride at her wedding, only pink.

In the end, everyone went to the Oster bank behind the hostel to build a fire from the thick copybooks with lecture notes scribbled through all their four years of study.

Fyodor and Yasha did not add their share to the fire, because I had never seen anything like a copybook near them, another reason was their absence from the party.

The full moon was shining, the bonfire kept devouring with its nationalistically yellow-and-blue flames the pages of once-upon-a-time so necessary notes.

The former students stood gazing at the fire—each for themselves from now on—and in the dark tall grass around, the teacher of theoretical grammar wandered in circles. He was a dwarf, no taller than up to your waist, but they said he was very clever.

One of the graduates, the ugliest of all and, as gossip had it, dull and rude, agreed to marry him so as not to go to a village to work off for her diploma. She was also a villager herself so she knew exactly what she was losing by such her choice...

For our farewell wedding night with Nadya, we went up to her room where there even were blinds on the window.

We had goodbyes, and slept a little, and woke up for new goodbyes in breaststroke, and dog paddle, and backstroke, and front crawl and freestyle...

When the pale morning light began sipping through the white blinds and she reached for giving the first blow job in her life, I wearily pulled back.

Let at least something remain for her tomorrow's husband to be first at.

All of us—the cuckoldry brethren—have to be generous to each other...

When a mujik has nothing to do, he finds hard labor for himself.

The khutta at 13 Decemberists Street amply provided an inexhaustible source of what to fill your leisure time with, and my father harnessed me into the infrastructure reconstruction...

Brick-paneling the earth-pit cellar under the kitchen, replacing the fence and the wicket, constructing a summer shower next to the shed, insulating the outhouse in the garden, laying the brick paths so as not to wade in mud after each heavy rain.

Mujik's summertime brims up with tasks and cares...

For breaks, I visited Lyalka.

He lived by Peace Square on the second floor in a red brick five-story block between the Peace movie theater and the Department Store; right above the ice-cream pavilion "Snowflake".

His father, in his youth, was a criminal and, when reaching the venerable age, became an ideological inspirer of the following generations of thieves. Returning from Zone, they shared warm recollections about Lyalka's dad coming to the court in a jacket over a tank top instructing them to keep their tail up when in the zone, bandying words with the judge and having to forcibly leave the room.

I was too late to meet him.

But his mother-in-law, Lyalka's grandma, was still living like a hermit in the bedroom with a view of the pitch-mounted roofing felt of the "Snowflake" roof. She shared the room with the decrepit but malicious lap-dog Bayba and Lyalka's mom.

Lyalka replaced his dad in the line of moral support to guys departing to the zone.

He did not attend the court hearings but he knew when the guys were sent to the place of serving their time and came to the station for a goodbye through the bars of a special car, aka stolypin...

The balcony in Lyalka's flat went from the living-room into a wide quiet courtyard between the five-story buildings, with occasional shady apple trees and a desolate khutta locked up with criss-cross nailed boards – the incubator for growing criminals.

In the dovecot above the khutta, Lyalka's younger brother, double-handled both Slave and Rabentus, held pigeons when not in the zone.

Their mother, Maria Antonovna, a dressmaker from the atelier behind the main post-office, once dreamed of a violinist career for Lyalka and she even bought him a violin for the purpose, which he stacked away in the nailed up khutta when, like, going to a lesson.

So, for all her pains, she had only managed to leave him with the inbred love for good clothes; Lyalka's shirts, and jeans, and shoes were always tiptops.

But he also loved music, unlike Rabentus whose interests were confined in his pigeons and havvage, that's why he was twice as thick as slender Lyalka.

On that balcony, we listened to the records of Czeslav Neman, Slade, The AC/DC...

With the doorbell starting its buzz, Lyalka would go to the hallway and lead the visitor to the kitchen to sell them some jeans or a shirt with foreign stickers.

If it turned out not a client but some of his brother's bros, or simply a guy from the city rowdies, like Count-Junior, or Horse, who just was short-cutting over the yard and got attracted by the sound of the loudspeakers (Lyalka's khutta enjoyed a dynastic respect) and fancied dropping in to share his notions that everything should be fair and founded on justice.

For such a case, Lyalka played some hard-hard rock – The Arrow Smith or The Black Sabbath.

Those home-made natural philosophers and champions for keeping the world in line with concepts of true justice could not withstand more than one number, and they left the sofa under a hard carpet cover, with a sudden recollection of some urgent business awaiting them in the city.

Lyalka closed the door after them and, rolling his eyes under the forehead, shook his head with a sigh – oh, those boars! – but the traditions oblige.

Then he stroke his fair nail-beard and put on the LP of Engelbert Humperdink...

And he had also craving for knowledge and was not shy to show it.

One day he did not hesitate to ask me about the meaning of "excess" after hearing the word from me. In short, he needed me like an oasis among all those justice-lovers.

No doubt, the main fusing factor in our connection was the weed, substituted in bleak periods between the creamy seasons with all kind of pills – noxiron, seduxen, kadein – to give their succor in times of need, only you had to know what should be mixed with what and to which proportion...

He was going out with his girlfriend Valentina to the dance-floor in Loony. Valentina had beautiful Spanish eyes, as one of the boars put it in the form of a compliment, "I'd pick such eyes up on the wall."

One evening I danced with her girlfriend, Vera Yatsenko, though I knew that Quak pined after her for years, but Vera was going out with him for a week or so before cutting him dead for months.

After that dances, Quak stopped me and Vera in the park alley; he asked her for an apology and permission to talk with me. She went on in a leisurely crowd flowing to the exit from the night Loony park.

Quak and I stepped aside to the trimmed bushes not to be in the way of the current. I could see that Quak was pretty loose, not quite blind but well plastered.

He leaned his forehead against my shoulder and, looking at the ground, said, "Sehrguey, I've been with Olga."

Of course, that frank confession scraped me deep, but I avoided explaining the fallacy of such a perspective – that it was not he who was with her, but rather she who was with him, and that he was not the only one she took use of.

First of all, such subtleties were beyond his scope of comprehension even when sober, to leave alone his current state, and secondly, I needed to catch up with Vera Yatsenko...

I saw her to one of the two-story blocks along Peace Avenue and, when we were standing in the quiet dark courtyard, Quak popped up in the gate and revved forward shedding hail of exclamations incongruent with the peaceful night.

I had to take a couple of expedient steps to shut him up with a restraining punch. He fell on his back, but still went on yelling, "So, that's how you meet?! Got prepared?!"

Probably, the drunk really have their guardian angels, but with that preventive blow at the blockhead's scull my thumb got dislocated and I couldn't box anymore, so when Quak rose to his feet the fight transformed into a wrestling single combat.

We reeled over the ground and after the high-pitched admonitions by Vera threatening to call her brother and father to the scene of discontent, we left the yard.

Walking in the same direction, we gradually restored being on speaking terms and briefly discussed details of our recent confrontation, touched, in passing, undeniably succulent attractions of Vera Yatsenko.

We never returned to the subject of Olga.

Near the Under-Overpass he boarded Streetcar 3 departing to the Settlement and I went on, bypassed the Station and proceeded along the railway tracks to Decemberists Street because my shoulder was slightly bleeding, torn by the coal slag cover of the walkway in the two-story block courtyard.

Coal slag is good to keep in check the mud after a rain or autumn drizzle, but as tatami, it falls short of the cinder path.

The next morning I had to tell my parents about my fall off a bicycle – the traditional excuse which causes an understanding smirk in the inquirer's countenance.

(...probably, the guardian angels are also retiring from their job.

Many years later, Quak died the traditional Ukrainian mujik's death – fell asleep in a snowdrift and froze a few meters from his khutta.

Sometimes it seems to me that the only place where he still exists is my memories of him...)

Soon I was summoned to the militia station near Deli 5 to explain my role in Olga's suicide attempt of which they were informed by the ambulance workers. After my assurance that I was neither an instigator nor an accomplice, they let me go.

My mother collected Olga's clothes and shoes that remained in the khutta, both light and warm – for all seasons. It turned out a hefty bale, which she lined with a white cloth for sending by the railway post cars.

I asked Vladya for help and we dragged that bale along the tracks to the station luggage office. For convenience, we tied it with a rope to a nickel-plated pipe from a window curtain shaft. That way the prehistoric hunters or Aborigine savages carry killed game home; only that we dragged it in the opposite direction – away, for it was not prey, but a loss.

In the office, I wrote the Theodosia address on the cloth and got the receipt indicating the weight.

When we got out of there, Vladya obviously wanted to tell me something, but he restrained himself, I always knew that he was more tactful than Quak.

...certain thoughts are better not to be started...

The curtain shaft developed a bend under the load carried all that long way, and I threw it into the bushes behind the high first platform of the station before going to Lyalka...

On September 1, at the line-up around the big pensive bust of Gogol between the Old and New Buildings, Rector of the Institute, as always, announced that the classes were starting for all except the second and third-year students, who would go for a month to villages with their patronage assistance. The second and third-year students of all the Departments, as always, shouted "Hurray!"

The next morning the convoy of two big buses carried their load of sophomores along the Moscow highway to the district center of Borzna, from where they took the bumpy road to the Bolshevik village, yet failed to reach it because of too deep mud at a final couple of kilometers.

The students and half-dozen of overseeing teachers get out of the buses onto the roadside, and walked along a narrow path trodden through the green thicket of the rain-drenched corn stalks towards the village, where they were to patronize hops harvesting.

Many of them dragged "torbas", gunny cloth bags filled with provision taken along from their homes.

My burden was much lighter – the guitar put with its neck across my shoulder, and cigarettes in my pocket, so the walk would be a breeze but for my leaking sneakers.

In front of me a red sweater, blue jeans, and black rubber boots, with a white kerchief-visor on top of all, were dragging their "torba".

(...I am often amazed at my own self – when meeting an object with their hair longer than mine, the hips wider and rounder, I get taken in completely.

I am routed, conquered, delighted and, sticking my paws up, ready to surrender and plead for the victress' mercy...)

"Hi, beauty, your boots are size 45?"

A haughty look over her shoulder, "46."

Like the "hello" so is the response; a poor try at hooking, but, at least, I was not ignored completely.

Overtaking the girl, I looked back to smile at the chill in her face and went on, because of winking at chicks never was a habit with me though, reportedly, they like it...

The village of Bolshevik was one wide empty street of half-dozen khuttas, and some larger buildings hidden deeper in the fog and dank dampness behind the trees, that still dropped rare heavy drops from their foliage.

Everyone went into the one-story canteen filled with grave gloom because of the bad weather outside the low windows. Long tables under the worn-out oilcloth and the plywood shutter of the locked dispensing window witnessed the purpose of the room.

After protracted negotiations between the overseer-teachers and local authorities, the students began to be accommodated for their stay in the village.

A pair of wooden two-story buildings partitioned into four-person rooms were allocated to student girls, while the guys were stationed in the large hall on the second floor of the club, also made of wood.

Each student got a mattress with a pillow, an army blanket and a pair of sheets.

I took the bundle to the club and was deeply impressed by the simplicity in the design of the ad hoc dormitory. The low decking of board shields made an all too familiar view, like, spending a month in an overcrowded clink at the guardhouse. Some thirty mattresses were spread on top of the decking, side by side, so for stretching out a patronizer had to crawl along onto his mattress on all fours.

Fortunately, near the door, there remained a high billiard table covered with a worn green cloth in random snick-and-gashes.

Choosing it for my bed, I did not pretend a thief-master but simply noticed that each of the billiard balls in the rack on the wall was dented brutally and thus remodeling the whole set into a collection of half-eaten apples. No sane stretch of imagination would suppose any possibility of playing the game, which turned the table in just an item of the scenery.

Those were the grounds for my sleeping four meters away from the common bed decking, half-meter higher than I was used to, yet without neighbors snoring into my ears.

The table's width allowed for a piece of a broken lacquered cue to be placed next to the mattress, because of the bleak rumors circulating among the student guys about the ill-will disposition expressly harbored by the local youth towards us...

We were fed at the canteen three times a day. The students "eeked" and "ughed" but I could not sympathize with them, it was as havvable havvage as anywhere else.

The next morning after breakfast, we went to harvest the hops which grew in rows of three-meter stems reaching the wires stretched over the field for the purpose.

The dense wreaths of entwined stems, like, live columns of dark-green leaves, were to be pulled down to the ground for picking off them the clusters of pale-green soft cones. When the collected cones filled up the shallow scuttle with two handles, it was dumped into a box on the scales. The overseer-teacher registered in their notebook the kilos you've brought, for later calculation of your payment after deductions for the food and bed.

But the price per kilo of harvested crops was so insignificant, that simple arithmetic count promptly knocked any labor enthusiasm out...

Of course, there still remained strong incentives of the sonorous yells and calls of fervent young voices over the field, and so diverse but equally attractive (each in its own way) forms of female students. Yet, my fingers, accustomed to grabbing a breaker and strumming the strings, balked at doing that Chinese-peasant-like assiduous labor.

My first day of work on the plantation of hops was also the last. After that I did various jobs: I went to the district town of Borzna a couple of times to load provision for the canteen, and I mended flooring on a cow farm using sundry scraps of planks, and I sawed wood for a local woman in exchange for the strong murky moonshine, and I...and...well, perhaps that's all...but, in general, not a little, after all.

The hop-harvesters had earned some forty rubles in that month. A couple of students working at the dryer got about a hundred, and I, for all my patronizing efforts, was paid twelve rubles and some kopecks at the institute cash desk. Most likely, the money was earned in those three days on the farm where I sawed and nailed boards bridging the dung with them.

Once, in response to a strong hammer hit, liquid dung jetted through a gap in between the uneven planks, right into my face and the cow from the nearby stall turned her left eye at me and grinned with so deep satisfaction that I learned for certain – those cattle are not as stupid as they pretend to be.

In fact, my main occupation on the farm was playing Throw-in-Fool with three local mujiks. My photographic deck of cards (quite modest girlie nudes in black-and-white) plunged them into a catatonic stupor, their scrutiny of the dealt hands took an unbearably long time and they were markedly reluctant to throw in any of the cards and part with the girlie.

(...now the era has changed and the same card packs, only in color, are sold at stalls in the railway stations...)

One of the students who worked at the dryer, redheaded Grisha from the Bio-Fac, also played Throw-in-Fool with me after his work.

He really was keen on winning. The hot-tempered guy even found a deck of ordinary cards to replace my black-and-white gallery, but the school of Yasha Demyanko was bringing its fruits, and by the end of the month he had lost to me a twenty-five-bottle box of vodka.

However, mindful of Sasha Ostrolootsky's orphanage wisdom, that a bird in the hand is better than a pie tomorrow studded with rubies from the sky, I, on the last working day, told the fiery-cheerful Grisha that one bottle immediately would write off all his debt, and he happily ran to the village store, otherwise I wouldn't get even as much...

Not that vodka or moonshine were really giving me a kick, no, it's neither here nor there, I simply was pushed to booze by my social position and the opinion of the society about me.

(...the folks around keep us incarcerated in the unbreak-outable prison of their opinion and no matter what we do it only adds to our ill repute or mutual admiration with our character.

More often than not, we just begin to conform, so if told that some unlucky wretch had to become a drunkard because of noblesse oblige, I am prepared to believe it...)

For example, a male student from the Phil-Fac with a couple of girls from his course wandered to the farm. They lingered by the stall of the bull hitched with an iron chain. The guy threw to the beast a scrap of hay taken from the cow in a nearby stall. On taking the cow's scent in the delivered hay, the bull got horny and kicked up mad bellowing and pulling at his chain.

I accidentally passed by, and that was enough for the evening oral news bulletin at the canteen to relish the news about Ogoltsoff taking Phil-Fac girls on the excursion to marvel at the bull's pizzle.

So a pervert misconstruction based on the crying misrepresentation of my character! Yet, personal image is a terrible force, and you could never prove to anyone that with my noble delicacy of feelings and trepid adoration towards girls I didn't even wink at them, because of my damn natural gentility...

Having familiarized myself with the Bolshevik work and living conditions, I went to Konotop. First of all, to change the sodden sneakers, and then, in Konotop I was also awaited by the pressing harvesting labors...

Back in August, Lyalka and I made a couple of regional tours around the corners of the city backstreets away from its noisy main thoroughfares.

In the slumberous quietude of the forlorn lanes, we gave good heed to the small but magnificent plantations of cannabis gently waving to us from behind the fences, with their bushy branches burdened with a load of ripening softly outlined heads.

Lyalka was the guide, and I was an enthusiastic tourist admiring the diligence of Konotopers cultivating, with love and care, their plots. It was time to help the home-towners in harvesting. And though not everyone waited for my humanitarian patronage assistance, however, there still remained unharvested sites.

I was a noble robber, well-versed in the concepts of justice, and never snatched more than a couple of bushes from one plantation, and even those two were one hell of a load to haul.

Whereto? To the nearest nook, for a too shallow and, I would sadly say, predatory processing.

That is, the final product comprised skimpy 10 percent of what could be obtained from the same amount of the raw material when approached with a balanced and well-thought-out technology. And the regretfully meager turnout was, if I were asked, the consequence of deplorable incompetence in such a fundamental field. Elementary ignorance and nothing else...

After laborious night vigils in Konotop, I was already well furnished to plunge into the everyday working efforts in Bolshevik.

On the first evening back, when I was thoughtfully tuning the guitar—...you leave it without control and anyone would spin the tuning machine, good news the strings are still in place...—two local guys came into the clink-like dormitory who declared of their desire to play billiards.

Out of curiosity – how could anyone play it with the balls screwed to the utmost? – I rolled my mattress up and put it on a chair by the wall.

Well, yes, exactly as supposed, no one could. Not only that the maimed balls jerk-hopped along their wiggling way, but it was them to chose when to jerk and change the tack. The absolutely chaotic unpredictability excluded any aesthetic pleasure inherent in that strictly harmonized game.

On realizing that, the guys introduced themselves as two brothers from a neighbor village.

The information did not arise a special excitement among the students sitting in line along the edge of the mattress-covered decking, and the brothers left...

The next day one of them, named Stepan, called me out from the canteen at midday mealtime. As a token of gratitude for the understanding shown by me the previous night, he proposed a ride to his village, where we went by his "Jawa".

Stepan pulled up in front of a well-built house and asked to pretend before his parents that I had been one of his buddies back in the army, serving in the Soviet troops stationed in Germany, and now we accidentally met each other in Bolshevik.

His parents were most delighted with our chance meeting and laid the table for the comrades-in-arms.

After the second glass, getting in the mood, I asked Stepan if he remembered Elsa, the German blonde waitress from the Gashtet around the corner.

Stepan was taken aback, and started to look at me more closely – what if I indeed slept on a bank in the neighboring koobrik?.

On the following day evening, Stepan and I were paying visits to different rooms in both hostels for girl-students, after they returned from supper in the canteen.

He pulled up in a room with my course-mates, but I (fully aware of the absolute barrenness of such a hunting grounds for me personally) went on alone until reached, already on the second floor in the next hostel, the last room to the left.

It was occupied by girls from the Philological Department: Anna, Eera, Olya, and Vera with all of whom I was so very pleased to get acquainted with. And they had no other alternative but to be pleased too, without any dance-floors, cinemas and even a TV set around.

Olya, a short amiable girl with the wavy yellow bob-cut hair, asked where my business card was, implying the guitar. Without much delay, I fetched it from the club dormitory, sang some sentimentally romantic trash, and passed the guitar to Olya, who suddenly fancied learning to play it.

Meanwhile, I got seated onto the bed of reservedly silent Eera and picked up a trifling conversation in which it didn't matter what about because its real meaning was to follow the voice modulations and trace the fleeing shifts in the expression of the eyes and face in general...

It's hard to say whether on that particular or the following night she and I went outside and stood under the yellow light shed by the bulb on the lamppost between the two shabby hostels when I happened to have what the North American Indians call "vision".

I saw an immense Ukrainian night bounding us from all the quarters and in the dark along its edges, there was raising the buzz of chilly autumn winds already. The only bright spot, besides the bulb overhead, was that face opposite me, smiling and not unfriendly anymore, radiating tiny beams of light which happen when you squint, without fully closing your eyelids.

Yet, I was not squinting, not a bit, and maybe even opened my eyes wider, struck with the beauty of that new face.

And all that—even myself—I beheld as if from aside, and everything was focused on the vision center: her face of incredible beauty, like a circle of light in the darkness around us, like the lifebuoy, which would help to withstand the onslaught of rumbling icy cold from the far-off horizons.

(...of course, at that moment I was not thinking any of this lofty trash, and, in fact, I was not capable of thinking at all because at the moment all I could do was looking at her face and falling in love irretrievably...)

The next day Eera did not come to the canteen for midday meal; Vera said that she was on duty – cleaning their room.

The moment I came up to the hostel, she went out on the porch with a mop in her hands, in a short gown.

(...the most wide-spread method to estimate female attractiveness is gouging of volumes.

The self-proclaimed experts and connoisseurs base their evaluation on the volume of the breasts and buttocks, while gourmets subtractively measure the waist...

Absolute dilettantism.

But what else to expect from all those differently aged junior jerks?

The most convincing detail in a woman, with which she will hook you at once and forever, is her knees.

If the glimpse of them warms your heart, makes your shoulders straighten up and your breath go deeper, then stay assured – that's it, nothing more beautiful will ever be met.

If that does not happen, go away and keep looking out, maybe you'll be lucky someday...)

Spotting her knees, I immediately realized that I was right in raising my paws and flashing dumb wit about the size of the boots, because on the wet trail through the corn jungle under her blue jeans were those very knees.

Of course, you've guessed already, that it was your mother...

Thus, there remained three full years before your birth.

Such a stretch supposedly would suffice for no less than a couple of loves to die away, if we accept naive calculations promoted by the reverend Sigmund Freud.

(...what a profanation of the sacred dogma, eh?

This chesty attack is easy to parry though with the trick of "terz" – to wit, that there are no rules without exceptions.

It depends on the rules, though.

If a certain scientist Galileo, when dropping his balls from the Tower of Pisa would have noticed that one of them, marked, for the exception's sake, with "E + S" all of a sudden started to soar and deliver aerobatics tricks, then there would be no law of universal gravitation.

And on that account, our old good Ziggy cannot be considered a trustworthy die-hard scientist.He should be transferred to another league.

Put him in the rank of such illustrious coryphaei as Charles Perrault, Hans Cristian Andersen and so on, up to the nameless creators of _The Thousand and One Nights_.

There he would fit perfectly with his Tom Thumb, aka "ego", Evil Giant, aka "super-ego", the royal castle of "consciousness", and impenetrable wilds of tropical marshes and jungles of "subconsciousness", on the canvas of which he weaves lacy patterns of his theory.

How dare I?!.

So many generations have been conceived and, in their turn, conceived further generations with the blessing of his psychoanalysis!

Nature does not tolerate emptiness, man necessarily has to fill with something their grey matter, aka brain, aka (using the apt expression of the brain tapped Battalion Commander of VSO-11) the "highest fucking matter".

And that's the indisputable truth.

Nothing but intolerance to emptiness caused the production of all those Bibles-Korans-Vedas-Iliads, as well as belief in the existence of brownies.

And, obedient to the naive wisdom of nature, we stop marketing the useless bullshit—it's not a pedagogically correct standpoint—and start bringing into the picture the three years until you'll condescend to be born...)

In the girls' room everything was figured out already, that is everyone got it clear who I was after.

Olya cooled off her eagerness to learn the guitar playing, but all the same, I tarried with taking it back to the club dormitory. Just in case; so that I would have an excuse to come again, like, oh, I forgot here something. No safety measure would be too proactive if they fall over themselves to blast away to your sweetheart, "Gee, he's married!."

I did not deny that dent in my biography, since long sunk in the abyss of the past though. And she never asked to show her my passport!.

That evening a young teacher from the Philological Department came to the girls' room. Probably, to make it sure that her duty was done and she did check what was going on there at all. Because apart from me, one more lover started his visits to the room – Czech Jan.

A natural Czech, middle-aged geezer, who arrived within the framework of socialist integration of the fraternal states to drive it home to Bolshevik (that was not just the village but also the name of hops-production state farm) the subtle art of drying the hops to get the right beer. Czechs and beer were always twin brothers.

Jan's wife stayed to keep their children in the Czech-Slovacia Socialist Republic. He missed her and, to relieve the longing, fell in love with Olya. That was the reason for his late evening visits and long talks with her about something; I was not sure what namely, because he talked in Czech.

And if it were not for the language barrier, I would not miss interviewing him about the year of '68...

Once the girls arranged a party in the room, so he came even in a necktie, that's a civilized man for you. For the occasion, he brought a bottle of Champagne and canned food, but not from the village store because the canned food turned out more delicious than even the cod liver, after which you had to go to Moscow or Leningrad.

And he flatly refused to drink any vodka. Showing at the filled glass he wrinkled his face and patted himself on the heart to emphasize the fear of the swill charged with health problems...

But when the teacher came on her control visit, Jan was not present in the room.

She could see for herself that though Eera and I were sitting on the same bed, yet in a quite appropriate attitude – each one at the opposite back of it. All moral prescriptions respected; so, get seated, please, let's have a cup of tea.

At that point, there surged a hell of an uproar in the corridor: You!. Who!. Mother-blother!.

The door of the room burst open. And in the dark corridor, five to six guys were looming in two ranks.

The teacher turned around from the table, "What's happening?"

"And who are you here at all?"

She decided to crush them with her authority, "Girls! Tell them who I am!"

And all the four girls, in unison, as if in the collective recital which they had been preparing from their kindergarten times, "She-Is-a-Teacher!!."

And, in the way of an antiphon, "Then fuck her!"

(...well, yes; not all in our young generation are brought up in the proper way, which, regretfully, applies not only to the rural areas...)

During that matinee dialogue, I, of course, realized that they had come after my soul.

The evening before, a girl from the next hostel came running to the club dormitory and raised the alarm about local guys misbehaving in her room.

You bet, I ran there and saw a scene of confusion on the first floor. Some girl was crying, three local guys were confronted with three student counterparts stuck in a futile discussion on the subject of "and who are you?" In short, a stalemate position.

To solve the etude, I chose the bigger guy among the locals and asked the crying girl, "This one offended you?"

"Yes!"

I punched the guy. The locals vanished without a trace and the common agitation subsided.

Later that guy and two more with him waited for me at the entrance to the club. "It was not me," he said.

"I'm sorry," said I. "I had no choice."

How could I explain to him that I was trained by Chief of Staff – a fact of violation should be followed but the fact of punishment? Only Chief of Staff—which is characteristic—did not ask me for forgiveness...

It seemed that my apology was not excepted, and the uninvited guests to the tea-party arrived to demonstrate a Bolshevik-styled vendetta.

From under the bed, I fished the empty champagne bottle and stood in front of the doorway.

They kept barking outside but abstained from stepping in – the bottle looked rather heavy. How could they know that my martial art level was less than a fig with minus?

Some footsteps sounded in the corridor, and behind the guys, I made out Stepan. He grasped at once what was what, and attacked from the rear.

I also jumped out into the corridor with the battle cry, "Come fucking here!" It worked no worse than on Shoorik – the guys flinched and fled.

Stepan and I were adding stimulation to their stampede, but I already hadn't the bottle in my hands; I didn't remember where it got lost. The memory kept registered only their unanimous clattering down the stairs with Stepan racing in their wake.

I was left alone with the one who in the commotion failed to pass the bottleneck of the stair-flight and stuck upstairs, but his spirit was shattered, and he drooped limply sagging like a wet mat over the railing. He was resisting no longer, just hung on, considering from above the steps down there on which he was to plop.

And I grabbed him – noblesse oblige! – but then I heard a cry; very distant, hardly audible, like the one that called me on the snowy road near the nine-story building in Stavropol.

I observed the submissive jelly of a guy. What for?

So I turned around and went down the corridor back to the room.

(...I agree all that is more than strange, but at times strange things do happen.

Some people hear voices, but I heard calls...)

And once again she did not come to midday meal; I went to their room.

Eera was sitting alone and did not want to talk; I sat on the bed by her side, took her hand.

I liked that hand and those fingers, long and tapering. I only did not like the whitish narrow scars on the wrist, like, from a teenager's suicidal games, but I never asked about them. And at that moment I only asked what's wrong.

She sobbed and said that in the morning on the plantation, the senior overseer was putting her to shame. He told it was unworthy of a teacher's daughter to have anything in common with such a renegade and married man as I was. And that he would call her mother, and tell her everything the moment we arrived back at Nezhin.

But what was there to tell about!?. And of which teacher mother?.

"Of Ger..maaaaan.." and she burst into tears.

"Damn them all, then! Come with me!"

"Where?"

As if I knew where, but she agreed, and we went out there.

At first, it was a field of corn, not the one over which we had been walking at our arrival, but with the much shorter and scantier stalks. Then the field slanted and we came up to a long secluded stack of straw.

The day was warm and clear. We stretched on the straw that broke out of the stack side and lay there, talking, kissing. I wanted to open to her my whole soul up and even to admit that I was a space cadet.

And I wanted her so badly, only the sun was in the way. But with the approach of the evening, the solitude dissolved. Next to the stack, there appeared an unnecessary dirt road, some trucks and motorcycles started to pass by, gaping at her red sweater...

We returned in the dark and were met by Anna, who waited for us by the hostel to warn about the ambush up there. She also told the senior overseer teacher screamed and shouted in their room, that both Eera and I had shunned work but were seen strolling around, and the dean offices of our respective Departments, as well as the Institute Rectorate, would be informed about the brazen breach of discipline.

During the briefing, Olya, Vera, and Jan emerged from the darkness for the joint brain-storming of the problem: what to do?

Jan kept shaking his head and repeating in Czech, which had already grown a bit more intelligible, that "it is-a not-a good-a".

Olya ordered him to shut up, and better go to the canteen to fetch some food for us; because only he could do it without evoking unwanted suspicions. Jan and Olya were understanding each other without translation; so he soon returned with a newspaper parcel for the hunted-after "milovitsy".

I did not know that I was that hungry.

Meanwhile, the girls were quick at drawing a plan for the campaign of persecuted students against oppressor-teachers.

Eera and I would go to Borzna, the native town of Vera, and stay for the night at the khutta of Vera's parents. In the morning, Eera would go to Nezhin as if she had gone there two days before because of being unwell, and I would come back to Bolshevik as if coming from Konotop, unaware what's the fuss.

Czech Jan saw the two of us to the road out of the village, still preaching about "lovely pretty milovitsy" and we left into the night...

The night was dark and windy and the road all potholes, and longer than ten kilometers from the approximate estimation by Vera. Eera got very tired, and in the end, I even humped her on top of me, like Gogol's Homa Brutus the witch bestriding him, between two posts in the roadside electricity line.

Having already been on a visit to Vera's khutta, Eera found it even in the dead of night. Vera's mother bedded us on the floor in the living room and promised to wake Eera up for the seven o'clock bus to Nezhin.

We lay down and to my embrace, Eera said that she was too tired and that she had to get up early. She got asleep right away; but I still lay full awake for a long time, gloating and grinning in the dark that we had rubbed the senior overseer's nose in it.

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

When I awoke in the morning, Eera was gone and Vera's brother gave me a lift to Bolshevik by his "Jawa" bike.

Students and teachers were just coming out of the canteen and he, cracking his motor, carried me alongside the crowd in the slow triumphant ride. A certain stupid asshole stood still with his jaw dropped.

Yet, Vera's brother was disappointed by my report to his inquiry that I and Eera hadn't had sex on the floor of their living room...

She stayed in Nezhin for a long time, and I again got under the influence of my image.

Three workmen from Borzna came to conduct a stretch of running water; a pipe with the half-inch cross-section in a knee-deep trench. I was passing by and helped them a little because of nothing better to do.

The mujiks got emotional and bought some vodka, yet without a snack. A throwaway kitchen oilcloth was spread under a cherry tree, we sat on it with our feet lowered into the trench for comfort, and killed the bottle.

And then the senior overseer came up to witness the disgraceful recidivism when, instead of work, I was at boozing drastically, so he again began his threats about what awaited me, when back in Nezhin.

While the youngest of the workmen went to the store after a catch-on addition, I dropped in at the plantation. My course-mate girls started to speak up that I did not notice my own and keep the company exclusively with the girls from the Philological Department.

I told them I was a Slavophil since my early childhood, so the Anglo-Fac's beef to heels did not excite me, in short: Phil-Fac forever!

Then the mujiks called me from the trench. We finished the extra bottle too, with a pair of doughnuts for a snack, and I passed away on that same tablecloth. Like, enjoy our specialty dessert...

Later, the senior overseer in his accusatory speech focused on the fact, that the students on their way from the plantation had to pass by me in such a served-up form.

Although the distance between the road and the trench was about five meters, I was still ashamed to hear about it. But that was later...

Three days after, Vera went to Borzna, and I accompanied her to make a telephone call to Eera in Nezhin.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"How d'you?"

"Nothing."

"You...well...come back...eh? I wrote a song here for you."

And what more could be expected from a dude like me?. In fact, I did not write a song but made a Russian adaptation of then-popular hit "It's raining, it's pouring (you might be sorry)..."

"The weary whisper of an endless rain

Drowned hopes of seeing you again,

Dripping drops with their low drone

make me feel forlorn and lone

and drive me mad with their stance:

"You can be happy only once!"

What's the use of all your weeping, rain?

Keep it back, don't spend on me in vain

Let the wind dry up your tears

With a swarm of fallen leaves

I don't need any preaching rains

They can't bring back my happy days..."

Zampolit wouldn't approve that it again was about the recidivistic rain, but so was the theme in the original, and the song itself had so cool a harmony...

Coming back with Vera, we didn't go along the road but took a shortcut over the vast fields which she was familiar with. There happened some secluded square hole nearby the path, like a former dugout, all overgrown with inviting carpet-like grass, where we entered for a midway repose.

Vera was a beautiful black-haired girl of a dark complexion and commanding air. When she got fed up with my incessant babbling about Eera this, Eera that, we hit the road again.

Getting out of the hole, I noticed candy wrappers in the grass. It seemed to be a local dating house, where I failed to live up to my image...

Many years later, Eera told me how on one of the endless evenings in Bolshevik, before my getting to their room, they arranged shaman dances behind the closed door.

Vera hung a piece of sausage and a pair of onions from her sports trousers and went off to roll and jump in that disguise: uh! Uh!

(...those swarthy Slav females would out-sex anyone when left on their own, and here lies the clue to the music of Igor Stravinsky...)

Eera arrived back at the village, and I spent the night in their room.

It happened all by itself. We lay dressed on her bed and kept hugging and pressing more and more tighter and closer to each other, and then there remained nowhere any closer.

Only I did not want to creak the bed, like Marc and Katranikha, and it for slowing down the action...

(...Anna did not sleep then and she later told Eera that at some point she couldn't control herself and kissed her own forearm...)

...but I still liked it.

The next day Eera admitted, "Seems, I've overcome the psychological barrier."

"I kinda thought the physical too..."

After Olya refused to marry Jan, he instantly grew Russian. The sufferings inflicted by his neglected love peeled all the varnish of civilization off the Czech European.

He never learned the language though, but he dropped shaving and walked around in bristles wearing a black padded jacket, from under which he took a bottle of vodka—at uneven intervals—and swallowed from its neck, like Validol or some other medication. Sort of homeopathy in the Bolshevik style...

On the last night before our departure from the village, Vera, with a lot of care, prepared a bed for me and Eera in the next room, which had already been vacated.

I did not turn the light off, and later Eera told me how much she was confounded at the sight of what I was getting on top of her with.

In the morning, before the arrival of the buses, she kept mum, hardly talking to me except for "yes", "no", "nothing".

I did not manage then to bring out, that her mood resulted from Olya's forewarning that all we had had there was merely a "collective-farm affair" and back in Nezhin, I would not give Eera another look.

When the buses came, I boarded neither of them, but put the guitar over my shoulder and walked towards the forest belt along the Moscow highway on the distant horizon, to go hiking to Baturin and from there to Konotop...

"They say, you've got an affair with a teacher's daughter?"

"They say, you've got married?"

Yes, she had and was in Nezhin on a flying visit to get aright some papers, and dropped into Room 72 in the Hosty, before leaving for Mongolia where her husband was sent to serve after graduating his military school.

By the by, he realized she was not a virgin. After the first wedding night he asked, well, they say, that women, usually, as if would, like, compare...

"Yes, that's true," she answered and didn't add a word to it.

(...that's how she fucking crushed the poor fool.

Just stepped on and smeared away.

Why not spread it thick and comfort him affectionately, like, there's no man quite like you, babe, you're the best man I've ever had, no one's fit to hold a candle to you, my hero lover?.

Women are the most cruel creatures if you ask me.

And should we really be so much surprised at having Tughriks among us?...)

However, sometimes you'd better make love, not talking.

And we lay on the former Fyodor's and presently my bed because it was by the window. The first and only time in my life, I was with a married woman; and that's only for the old sakes' sake.

When we got dressed and hugged goodbye to each other, she exclaimed, twice, "I'm a whore!"

Yes, and sounding so all too happy, like, Archimedes in his famous jogging after a bath.

"Eureka! I found myself and know what I gonna do in Mongolia!"

Farewell, Nadya.

Whatever and regardless, you're the most cloudless love of my life...

The senior overseer kept true his threats to me. And there was a general meeting of the English Department with just one issue on the agenda: petitioning the Institute Rectorate to send me down.

The day before it, on Veerich's advice, I called the meeting of my course-mates – well, of those living in the Hosty – who gathered in Room 72, to rally the ranks, so to say.

Veerich was a current four-year student, who also entered the Institute after the army service.

They crowded in, got seated on each other laps – all girls, except for Igor and Volodya. I wouldn't have supposed that such a swarm could fit into our pencil-box room. I had to perch on the window sill.

It was some rally of supporters! Damn! They came together united with one purpose – to admire me crushed, wrung out of my image, crucified on that windowsill. The saliva was dripping even from their eyes, like by those public execution goers.

They came to lynch me beforehand, impatient to wait for the general meeting, because in Bolshevik I turned my nose up at our Department girls. They craved to quarter me, impale, to put me at the stake for that unpardonable slogan – "Phil-Fac forever!"

One of the girls even accused me of uttering to her something eye-to-eye, which she wouldn't forget until her last day and never forgive me for the statement. She even had to quench a sob, when telling her sad story.

Everyone rushed to inquire – what words were they? – but she only blew her nose and repeated her oath to carry them with her to the grave.

Even I got intrigued – what kind of so stirring words might I have known? Moreover, until that moment it never occurred to me she was from my course; I could swear to see her for the first time!

Then I got tired of that Lynch trial session. "Okay," said I, "many thanks for your most kind support, but I still have to prepare my homework for tomorrow's classes."

Irina from Bakhmach almost choked with chortling...

At the meeting, after the overseer's declamation, a couple of my course-mates took the floor to confirm, that, yes, I went to work only when I wanted to, and shamelessly slept on the oilcloth.

Then Veerich attempted breaking the monotonous mood.

He leaned on the lectern and, facing the audience, began to broadcast what kind of a reliable comrade and friend I was, and recently I did my best to rescue a couple of freshman girls, who had been subjected to hooligan harassment in the Count's Park. I bravely rushed at the villains, although one of them had a neck from a broken bottle in his hands.

Veerich stepped out from behind the lectern to demonstrate the audience the proper way of gripping the neck in your hand and commented that such a weapon was more dangerous than a common knife.

The audience froze in awed attention to the disclosed details...

On the whole, he did not deviate too much.

That day Slavik and Twoic ran up to Room 72 from the hostel lobby. There was a first-year student, they said, in a fit of hysterics; some guys had stopped her girlfriend in the park and were keeping her there.

The three of us raced to the indicated place and shooed off three local guys. And the saved mantrap started to scream her guts out, that we were busters who ruined her personal life. It seemed one of the would-be rapists had become her target.

Damn! Don't call me anymore to rescue a twat gone a-hunting!.

However, the detail with the bottle's neck was a free-style fantasy flight brooded by Veerich's imagination.

In the end, I was given the floor.

"Everyone is forging his own destiny. Here is mine, white-hot, right from the forge and now it depends on you how it will turn out..."

Then I gave out a repentance à la Marc Novoselitsky at the meeting dedicated to the Game of Parties and with a minimal margin – who's for? against? abstained? – I received a severe reprimand with the final note of warning...

(...although the outcome of the meeting was clear before it even started – were I kicked out then where would you come up from?

Certain shell-fragments cannot but miss...)

Every good news has some crappy lining. Hardly I rejoiced that sending down whizzed harmlessly by, as it was time to stick my neck again into the hateful noose. The KGB captain beaconed with his newspaper: come to report and get instructions.

At the secret meeting, it turned out that I became a hand-me-down item at their enterprise. The captain for his heroism and vigilance displayed during the Game of Parties was rewarded by the rise from the provincial backwoods to the capital city of Kiev. He did not hide his joy passing me as a stock-in-trade to his successor.

The successor was a black-haired young man who had just graduated from some institute in Chernigov, at the Historical Department of which they were forging Party Cadres.

After that Department you weren't sent to a village to work off your diploma, you got a job no lower than at some District Party Committee and then – grow up in your career to become a Member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, if your health conditions and readiness to assume the right position would allow for it.

But not everyone was up to graduating in that Department.

Two students from the Philological Department at the NGPI got transferred there, and a month later they blew off all the career prospects and came back.

The discipline at that Historical Department was like that in a cadet school. With the lecturer entering the classroom you had to stand at attention, otherwise the group headman, also a student, would get at you like a construction battalion _pheasant_ at a newly drafted _salaga_.

And in the hostel, everyone kept strict to the rules and peeking after anyone else to catch pants down and knock on them. After all, there were district committees and District Committees, one might be in a muddy district center, while another in the capital city.

A trite example of the struggle for survival – the more competitors you outlive, the harder it is to outlive you...

That young black-haired KGB man had a long sheepskin coat and did not inquire about the price of mine. And he was much more mobile than the promoted captain, or maybe the upstart hadn't yet grown lazy. Anyway, the secret meetings with me, he arranged at various city institutions.

For instance, in ZAGS closed after a working day, or in the Tourism Bureau. One time it was in an empty apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story building, not far from the main square.

To that meeting, he brought along his new boss. Once upon a time, a male with the looks of that boss was stamped as "an interesting man" – gray hair in a clean cut above a youthful, well-tanned, face; a European gloss was felt at once.

I don't know what for he was transferred from Hungary to the provincial backwoods of Nezhin, where he got interested in a rat whose finking helped his predecessor in the promotion to Kiev. However, I couldn't serve a springboard for him either. Enough was enough; I had got thoroughly fed up with that shit.

My invariable reports to the black-haired KGB young man, that the current student youth was an amorphous mass, indifferent to anything except for the present stock of lard in their "torbas", were almost bringing him to tears. The playful times of gamey gossip were over, I unilaterally stopped narking on my co-students.

But he had so irrepressible desire to dig something out, that even send his secret collaborator to Room 72, in case I was a double agent, and kept an underground printing house under my bed.

Of course, that secsot did not introduce himself as a rat with the pseudonym "Vova", yet I still figured it out.

Would a normal student from the Physics and Mathematics Department ask me for help with his English? With all the "pro" and "cons" secured by my image? Hooey!

The shammer drove a fool about living in the same hostel as me.

Okay, dude! No problem!

So, here he comes.

I hospitably encourage him to take a seat on a freshman's bed and call the exercise number from the textbook he's brought along, and he starts doing the exercise.

So I can return to the table with the players in the already started "pool" of Preferans around it.

And what will he sneak into his notebook for his report to the KGB man: "seven in spades", "trick", "pass", "miser"?

At those carefree times, the Ministry of Health had not yet started to print its warning on cigarette packs and the malignant deadly tobacco smoke kept filling Room 72 with its tumbling, slowly whirling layers.

The non-smoker martyr of a rat learned it from his severe exposure, that stool-pigeoning was hazardous for health. It took him just two visits to make sure that, yes, the student body was hopelessly amorphous and miserably supine – beggarly two kopecks for a trick.

But once the young KGBist dictated me a telling on Zhomnir.

There was nothing compromising in the text though, just that on such and such a day, at such and such an hour Zhomnir was coming out from the Language Laboratory.

Well, the Language Laboratory was not a safe house and contained just the laboratory assistant at her desk, and a swarm of freshmen behind the glass doors in the booths, parroting the tape-recorded texts "Meet the Parkers" from the headphones on their heads. Some absolutely inappropriate place for disseminating of the Ukrainian nationalism.

I guess, the dictation was done just in case, after the KGB man found out that I was visiting Zhomnir at home to discuss my translations for "Translator", which I never cut ties with.

Such a piece of paper could always come handy: "Do you recognize the hand, Alexander Vasilyevich?"

My final mission was making friends with an American.

There was a ten-day USA Agricultural Exhibition in Kiev, and I was instructed to visit it and get acquainted with at least someone from their staff.

I took Slavik with me and we whizzed by a local train to Kiev, and there to the grounds of the Republican Veh-Deh-eN-Kha with the exhibition held in a huge hangar.

A live American was then a rare phenomenon, so at the exhibition, you could hardly squeeze and tolter through the crowd denser than that to the Lenin Mausoleum in the Red Square in Moscow, or at the traveling menagerie in Konotop on a Sunday afternoon.

On entering the hangar you saw the huge portrait of the US President Jimmy Carter with best wishes to the Soviet people, and the crowd carried you farther alongside the shiny barriers with compartments on both sides – farm tractors, machines, pictures of happy rural life.

In one small section there stood a dummy pig, some nice creature, with large flowers painted all over it, in the style of The Beatles'cartoon "Yellow Submarine".

And next to the ornamented piggy there stood a girl, but alive. Not my style though, if not aware that it's an American you wouldn't waste another glance at her.

So, she stood by and kept squeaking like a clockwork, "This is a piglet! This is a piglet!"

But her staring eyes, long since stunned, dim, and glassy, turned kinda swoony slugs and swam over all that rumbling crowd that flowed past her for hours, like some f-f..er..flooding Niagara Falls without the tiniest splash of response to her words from the thrumming waves of strange faces.

I pitied her and slowed down by her stall, "Hey, girl," said I, "Call it porosyonok."

"This is a piglet! This is a piglet!"

(...at that time the two great nations were not prepared for a dialogue yet...)

I and Slavik went out of the hangar and sparked in the dank spring wind of the Republican Veh-Deh-eN-Kha. When back in Nezhin, I reported to the black-haired that those Americans were too introvert.

He realized that both "introvert" and "amorphous' stuff was not the right stuff for building his career upon and grew sad...

That mission turned the last one because soon after I dug a hole for myself to fall into.

The black-haired KGBist really fretted me already with his importunate demands to write a report and not to just play with the word order. And there popped up something to make him happy without harming innocent civilians...

In the institute reading hall, on the second floor of the New Building, I was leafing through a biography of Bogdan Khmelnitsky when on one of the pages I saw a mark in pencil: "Bogdan Khmelnitsky is a traitor to the Ukrainian people". I mentioned it in my next report to the KGB.

The guy was delighted – calling the initiator of the Ukraine and Russia reunion a traitor was visibly steaming with the Ukrainian nationalism. "On which page?"

"Well, somewhere in the middle."

So, they arrested the book, found the subversive page and, at the following meeting, "But it was you who wrote that."

"What?!."

"The hand is yours, that's what. No use of denying. You better admit." And he started to intimidate me with full-scale expertise.

Two weeks later, he explained that the letter "a" in the pencil inscription was very like to mine but a little different; so the graphologist told him. Yet—which is characteristic—he did not even apologize.

In general, I, like, got offended and stopped to turn up for the loathsome dates, no matter how diligently he flashed his semaphore newspaper. And at chance meetings in the city transport, I was cutting him dead with a disinterested indifference of a stranger.

He seemed to understand that such a secret collaborator is as beneficial as two aces in the kitty when playing a miser at Preferans, and pissed off.

So the KGB archives ceased to accumulate the reports with my handwriting signed "Pavel".

(...yes, but now I have to rewind – who were they – Slavik and Twoic?..)

They were a couple of first-year students, who entered my life at the Hosty to substitute for Fyodor and Yasha.

Slavik was from Chernigov, he matriculated the English Department and even lived in the same room with me. And he had also served in a construction battalion, but being a member of the well-to-do society stratum granted him the position in charge of a warehouse. I mean, he came from a family wealthy enough for keeping successful negotiations with the Commanders of his military unit.

(...lots of things in my life flowed by unquestioned because I was never good at analyzing but taking everything for granted and then just lived on with it.

Now I know why in our great Soviet Homeland of working people by working people for working people with equal rights for all and everybody, certain people happened to have equaller rights than the average.

It's only there's no way to pass my present wisdom to that hairy yobbo of myself, happy with his/my blissful ignorance.

There's no way to reach over there, I cannot re-run my life, I can only re-tell it.

But, hey! Who cares? Probably, those hyper-equalized guys had just found a maverick treasure in their stove chimney...)

To the construction battalion, he also got because of some sight problems hidden behind the half-dark lenses in his glasses.

The long forelock of straight chestnut hair slid across his forehead – from edge to edge alongside the glasses rim and he did not shave his upper lip, saving soft female tendrils trimmed with scissors...

The guy, who passed the school of construction battalion, knows the meaning and origin of the all-forgiving mellowness and omni-comprehension in the optics of his roommate returning after a short absence to the nearby Count's Park.

A former conbatist will find in himself enough determination to ask a direct question and, after a direct answer, to ask for a blunt. In the enlightened circles, it is termed as "clinging to the tail".

Weed cemented us and made, practically, inseparable. I recollect the case of a winter empty suction, when right in the middle of the week I decided to go to Konotop, by 3:15 local train – there and by 19:05 back to Nezhin. So, Slavik kept me company because of being such a sterling loyal friend.

In Konotop, we went to Lyalka's who asked me if I remembered that bustard on a visit from St. Petersburg.

How not to remember? I liked his shoes then: so heavy, one could see at once that was some sturdy footwear. Lyalka then was at conquering the visitor with the sweep of lifestyle in our provincial backwater.

The Petersburger was taken to the host's section in the basement, where weed was reaching the condition; we sparked there – not bad it was, some real stuff for high flights.

"So two days ago," said Lyalka, "that bitch bombed my basement. Broke the door and took it out. Seryoga the King saw him at the station getting on the Leningrad train with a backpack."

Yea, that's what you call a clean work because St. Pete had always been the cultural capital of our country...

In short, Lyalka forked out a couple of heads but with the warning that their quality hadn't been tested yet. Then I, just in case, dropped on 13 Decemberists and found one or two twigs in the attic of the brick shed.

On the back train, it became completely unbearable, and I stuffed a blunt of Lyalka's donation in the car vestibule, while Slavik acted a make-believe screen around me with his fur headgear on top.

We sparked it right there, smoked, entered the car and got seated on the benches, opposite each other. He looked at me, I looked at him, in the hope, so to speak, maybe it's just that I didn't have time enough to get it?

But it's all bullshit. If you start to cultivate wishful expectations of that sort, then the stuff has no more dose than clippings from a kitchen broom.

We arrived at Nezhin, glum and dismal. By the time we reached the Hosty, it was completely dark.

But, just in case, we walked to the Old Building. Night. Desolation. Winter.

I stuffed one from the grabbed at the attic. Sparked it.

Slavik was standing by, but manly restrained himself.

I took another drag and said, "Slavik..."

(...and from the marble plaque on the corner of the Old Building with the inscription "N. V. Gogol studied here..." my own words echoed back to me...)

"...it's not in vain, that we have ridden three horses to death today."

So said I, and passed the blunt into his craving claw...

As for Twoic, he was a guy from Bakhmach named Sasha whom I renamed into "Eternal-Two-Getter" because "two" was the poorest mark for school kids, but then the handle was shortened to Twoic.

He retaliated with handling me the "Hooey-Pricker" derived from my half-tabooed warcry with which I answered any kickbacks in life, "We'll prick through any hooey!"

In fact, he was not from Bakhmach itself but from a village adjacent to it. On account of that, he liked to pass for a naive child of nature and acted a simple-minded peasant yokel.

Each weekend when he started back to Nezhin his parents collected him a generous "torba" with ample grub. On the whole, it was a bulky farm boy.

Man's nature is best expressed in their laughter. By Twoic it was a sharp yank of his broad face up to chortle two-three squeaks out, with his eyes shut, then followed a slow lowering of the face back and, on the way, the pin-sharp pupils would frisk through the porthole of his squint, checking the current situation: what and how? Just so a recklessly cautious character...

He studied at the Biology Department and, therefore, lived on the second (the Bio-Fac's) floor of the Hosty. Twoic was another "tail-clinger", but not as keen as Slavik.

The main factor that made us into a trinity was Preferans which is a great game if you take a closer look at it.

Poker, Snore, King or its reduced version – Eralush, are just a contest of actor skills, while Preferans is an intellectual game of mind. Only I had constant bad luck at it...

I tried to break that tendency and tame the fortune, and, because of that, I kept taking desperate risks. "Bluish" misers were the trademark of Hooey-Pricker.

It was clear as day that because of the crimson tablecloth stolen from the redheaded _dembel_ , I had fallen out of grace by Luck, so I tried to overcome that status quo, whatever the costs, and gain back a grip at the fortune's forelock.

As a result, getting two or three "throw-ins" or even a "train" of them at playing a regular "bluish" miser, I sat in an indifferent and languid prostration until the end of the "pool of 40" in progress...

I was paid a student scholarship of 45 rubles a month. Almost every weekend, my mother gave me 10 rubles before I left for Nezhin. All the money went on my card debts, well, plus the havvage at the canteen.

The tall bottles with dry wine forsook me; I switched over to the healthy way of a sober life. Although constant being down-and-out was f-f...er...flatly bending me out of shape.

Besides, Twoic and Slavik played "on one paw", that is as a team, having conspired, which means forget the hope that your seconded King, or Queen backed by two lower cards, will ever bring you a trick.

United efforts of two players "on one paw" would strip the single-handed opponent of a trick, or a chip at 50 percent of the games in the pool.

Such is the law – severe, but just: there are no bros at cards; shut up your driveling gape when among pals.

(...of course, you do not need to understand all this Preferans-terminology, but, to get the feel, imagine a couple of muggers working in a minibus: one holds the victim's hands while the other frisks the pockets and pulls the money out.

The difference though is that you won't take the same minibus seeing them on it, while in Preferans' case you will come up to them the next day and say, "Well, will we "draw a pool", or will we?"

On their conspiracy, I was directly told years after graduating from the NGPI...)

Of course, I noticed their "one-paw pedal system" of scratching their eyebrows and pulling themselves behind the earlobe, under the guise of reflexive body movements, but I did not care a damn. It was not them but my fate I vied to vanquish in the single combat gambling, even if it chose to wile using the pair of tricky pawns.

Knowing that "they play" in Room 72, Preferans lovers from other Departments also came to us. With those, I was breaking even, I would have stayed in the win, but for the adamant propensity for unreliable—"bluish"—misers...

In addition to being always ready to play cards, Twoic served a source of useful acquaintances. With his mediation, a pair of cute, educated local fags paid a couple of visits to our room.

One of them told "pinkish" jokes, "Then get, you naasty fascist, a grenade from a Soviet homoseexual!" With much gusto and very accurately, he emulated the fey droll of fairies.

And Dr. Grisha shared how visiting the beach of Golden Sands in Bulgaria, he screened his partner, who was ripping off a golden watch from the clothes on the sand left by an Englishman taking a swim in the sea. We laughed again.

No, Twoic was not a homo. And I hadn't met a single one at the institute. What's the point? To matriculate and land among a group of girls?

So the gay guys just flashed by like a funny episode. However, Dr. Grisha was useful indeed. Once he arranged a twelve-day sick leave for me, writing some bronchitis in the diagnosis.

Such a cute little man; he had very beautiful hair, though the word "hair" wouldn't suit it, I'd rather say – a wavy chevelure.

And he was handsome of face, only that a little short. But his brown soft briefcase was large, as well as his hips which he rolled in his gait.

I was on friendly terms with him, despite the difference in orientation; nothing like it was in the case with Tughrik. By the way, Dr. Grisha was also married and had two children; boys both of them...

But a three-day leave for acute respiratory disease, aka ARD, I could easily procure without Dr. Grisha's help.

Behind the Old Building, there stood the one-storied institute's medical center.

You came here in the morning before classes, and they gave you a thermometer and, if there was the temperature, you got a stamped slip of paper for ARD which meant three days of freedom. Only you needed to warn the headman-girl of your group not to smear the log with "absent" marks, in three days she'd have the reference.

Twoic, as a biology specialist, shared that the temperature significantly rises in the area of strained muscles; but the armpit is a bunch of muscles.

Placing a thermometer in there, I would start to rapidly strain and relax that area muscles under the clothes, until the doctor, handled Pill, would say, "Enough!" And the result was never less than 37.3 degrees centigrade.

My falling ill so often perplexed Pill, where was my immune system?

Later on, her bewilderment transformed into angry suspicion, and she used to check me with two thermometers at once, one for each armpit. So the difference was only one-tenth: 37.3 and 37.2 – all the same ARD.

And then Pill went amok, "Enough! Here's a referral for you – go to the hospital!"

But I did not retreat, and went there, and lay in the hospital for a week and a half, for no reason, actually, just for the principle's sake...

With all that in mind, don't forget about my main occupation – studying.

I was sitting in the practical classes of my group, and at times attended lectures for the students of the whole course, I passed credits and examinations. Besides, I never dropped self-education.

In the second year, I was fortunate enough to meet The Cavalry Army and The Odessa Stories by Ivan Babel. He convinced me that even after the Great October Revolution there still remained writers in Russia and not just sholokhovs-proskurins-markovs.

On the third course, in the institute reading hall, I discovered magazines with The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. It was a thunderbolt.

In the final year, the endless, like the flow of the Nile, Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers were attending the institute to keep me company through the long lecture hours.

I don't account for commonplace pulp fictions not related to my education, that was read for a pastime. Like, when there was a stir in the Hosty, "Ah, Efremov! Thais of Athens! The peak and limit of wildest dreams!"

Ilya Lipes gave that hetaera to me for only two days. So after the midnight lights-out, I even had to go in the corridor and read it under the lamp above the doors to the washroom and the men's toilet.

I was sitting in a chair, dragged along, with my sheepskin coat thrown over the shoulders but not covering my bare legs because I was too lazy to dress after reading in bed before the curfew. So what? Let them imagine I was on the beach...

But with all due respect to Lipes, that's not literature but just another illustration from the textbook The History of the Ancient World for the fifth grade of secondary school.

When a schoolboy, I liked those gaudy pictures of the Egypt slaves dragging stone blocks to the pyramids, of the Roman legions on their march and the such like masterpieces. Some seductive means of education, no denying, yet comics strips and literature are not the same things...

However, you cannot know beforehand where a find might be awaiting you, and where a loss.

Sitting there, by the dark frozen window, with my eyes running over the lines with a description of an ancient festival, where stark naked participants were having a ritual run through the darkness of night, I had a vision again.

Just for a fraction of a second I got into a dark Greek night and ran, stark naked, in the shade of black trees under the big moist stars in the sky...

But then – flick! – and I was back again in the sheepskin coat, on a chair in the cold light of a lone fluorescent lamp in the ceiling over the gray concrete floor stretched away into the darkness of the corridor in the fast asleep hostel, and my body still tense from that pair of hasty step-jumps in my run through that split-second, and my skin still feeling the chill of night from that distant past...

(...now, what to do with all that?

Just do as everyone else – brush it aside with a dismissive shrug, forget, and get back to living on.

But the book itself was, nonetheless, lame garbage...)

No better garbage was all those theoretic Grammars, Theorophonics, Scientific Communism, Communist Aesthetics, and oodles of likewise farragoes devoid of any rhyme or reason obligatory taught at the institute...

Although, I can understand, in part, the lecturers who poured them out; once upon a time they had to learn all that shit themselves, and now, based on the past sufferings, they tormented us, students, because of their dissatisfaction with so crappy life design.

"Welcome to my glossed perineum,

The seat of fanciful zygotes..."

However, I happened even to like one of the theoretical lectures on.... grammar?.. phonetics?.

Well, in short, Scnar it was who delivered that Lecture of lectures. It's only that his last name sounded kinda disparaging handle, but he himself was an acceptable geezer.

When I ventured to be locked up in the city hospital because of the medical staff at the institute hadn't antiviral means to bridle my temperature galloping with so immodest frequency, he lent me The Quiet American by Graham Green, in English.

I'd hardly survive that week there without that quiet companion because the ward-mate patient from the next bed kept window curtains bubbling with his mighty snore...

Now, before that incredible lecture, when on a weekend in Konotop, I visited Lyalka. He wasn't home and his brother Rabentus warmed me up.

I had never come across such grass yet; like, some thin dry skeletons of tiny twigs. And never had I been in the like jag.

After a blunt for two, I watched Rabentus as if through a lens – his top and chin got narrow and distant while the middle of his mug stretched in disproportionate zoom in.

He noticed that I was dragged beyond the limits, and advised to rinse my smiler with water from the tap. No use.

But I remembered that I still had to go to Nezhin. On the way to the station, I dropped to Igor Recoon on Peace Avenue.

His mother was cordiality itself, "O, how so nice to meet you! Please, get seated and have a snack before the journey."

As if I could keep sitting! I was dragged back and forth – from the living room to the balcony, from the balcony to the living room.

On the way hither-thither, I asked Igor to find some piece of paper for jotting down the things I would say. Something like:

"The stooping sky beheaded the jumble of the world..."

and then sort of:

"...the shaggy clouds cut through the frail and feeble helmet of the skull and welter rubbing at the brain..."

In short, complete bullshit with surrealistic stink, or else I would be dragged into them those surreal quicksands and drowned tracelessly for good.

So, it's only on the train that I came back, in between the Plisky and Kruty stations.

As for those psychedelic scraps, Zhomnir later placed them in the faculty wall newspaper next to "Translator", he liked them way too much.

But all this not about that, but about the lecture turned out by Scnar, it's only that the memories of that grass keep distracting me, kinda like, red herring, sort of.

That time Rabentus provided me with a pinch for a couple of blunts and, fully aware of what kind of thermonuclear dope it was, I did not abuse it anymore but showed moderation.

Well, now, in such a state—from moderate to quite quiet—I slowly floated to the lecture, kinda zeppelin, because making for the hostel seemed awfully long and winding way at the moment.

And we then sat down, so as to make room for Scnar to read it from behind the lecturn. And I grew more and more admired what a classy thing it was!

The plywood all so yellow and well polished, and gleaming pleasantly because of that, you just couldn't take your eyes off that varnished thing.

But then I suddenly couldn't get it – the peaceful flow clicked out of the groove and very obviously too, replaced with some affronting discrepancy. Scnar switched over to Latin!

I concentrated but – yes! – exactly Latin... And he was jetting it out even more fluentlier, in a way, than Lupus the Latinist, only that he sounded somehow hollow, and kept his eyes directly upward, like, to you I call de Profundis!

I cocked up – was that Scnar, or not Scnar after all?

That's why I started to watch more closely and noticed that above behind the lecturn of all the Scnar there remained nothing but a bust. I mean it, on the yellow box there stood the bust of Scnar even without his arms – just only shoulders.

Yet the head continued to speak on all the same.

And on his upper lip there notched a tiny cleavage, which began to grow deeper and darker, so as to turn into the toothbrush mustache of Adolf Hitler. Well, go and fuck yourself!

In a Soviet institute, Hitler's bust reads a lecture and, on top of all – in Latin!

Good fellow Scnar! Not every lecturer would have the nerve to pull such a trick. Without him, I would still think that if there's a lecture it's necessarily bullshit. Them those stereotypes, they are really die-hard customers, you bet...

And with Zhomnir I studied at his home.

On finishing another of translations, I brought it to his place, we sat at the table pushed to the wall in his living room and he was shredding it in a dragon-like style – here's flat, there's bland...

Yes, I felt it before his picking the holes out, that those were bosh places, but why? And what was the workaround?

"That's your problem. Find it."

"Maybe, then put it just so and so?"

"No! That'd be out of all scotch and notch!"

To please him was simply impossible, he would always find what to find fault with. And because of that, the work with Zhomnir was a good school not to give up...

To relax from the clutches of the Ukrainian language, aka mova, I asked Zhora Ilchenko for one of the books he brought from India and started translating it into Russian.

Not a too thick book, some two hundred pages, authored by Peter Benchley, a writer in the third generation, that is both his grandpa and his daddy were earned their living in the same trade. It was titled _The Jaws_ , about a shark-cannibal. On the whole, a professionally mixed vinaigrette – a little scrap of everything: bitten-off limbs, a love triangle, the mafia looming in the background.

True, the final scene of the shark's death unscrupulously ripped off from Moby Dick, but who nowadays reads Melville?

While rendering all that in Russian, I finished off a pack of thick copybooks.

The translation was completed in Konotop, in winter. So, it was the night from Saturday to Sunday, or else during the winter holidays.

The clock on the kitchen wall was showing some of the small hours. Putting the final period, I draw it as big as half-page – I wanted to finish off the ink in the ball-pen but it never ended.

Then I turned off the light and lay on the folding coach-bed in the living room behind whose two windows, there stood a whitish night dimly fluoresced with the snow. And it seemed that the night was leaning heavily against the window panes, just about to break in.

I tried to get asleep as soon as I could, for I never liked horror movies.

My sister Natasha read those notebooks, and then lend someone else to read and they dissolved, without a trace, in nowhere...

Well, all that's fine; but when about the most important?

Eera...

My relationship with her at the reunion stage can be defined with just one word – "torment". At an endeavor to flesh the definition out, there might be added one more word – "devastating torment".

To begin with, resuming the relationship with her in Nezhin ran into a number of stumbling blocks.

Why resume? But I was in love, damn it! It was love at first sight on that tread through the wet stalks of corn. And it should be kept in mind that, by my nature, whenever I fell in love it was forever.

I mean, falling in love, then falling out just to fall in again, and out...no, such bouncing is not for me. Yes, my father was duly applying to me his winged expression about my Laziness-Mommy being born a moment before me.

Besides, the return to Nezhin confirmed the accuracy of my choice – with all the multifacedness, multinosedness, multileggedness, multibreastedness of the assortment, Eera was the second to none.

Starting with the clothes: in the era of totalitarian shortages, she managed to look in a European way, as in the movies of Italo-Franco-German production.

Turning to the undergarments: I had never seen such delicately feminine lingerie in my life.

Passing to the most important, the body: such bodies as hers, I saw only in the bathroom at Object, sitting next to the fire burning in Titan and considering the Goddesses, the Dryads, and the Nymphs of Hellas on the black-and-white illustrations in The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece.

However, her gait was quite modern – the German-style sweeping steps, combined with a decisive swing of hands.

She had a round face with high cheekbones and a nose with a tiny hump; wide, but not turned out lips. The light brown hair of the ideal length, in my favorite hairstyle.

I liked to watch her, approaching in her resolute step along the street leading up to the Old Building, and to follow how in the distant circle of her face the fuzzy, as in the full moon, lines began to merge into my Eera.

But all that came about not immediately...

At first, Eera believed the sinister prognosis by Olya. And even Vera, who had so sympathetically been preparing the bed in Bolshevik for two of us to bathe in the fiery stream of the lascivious carnal pleasures, gave a dubious shrug of hesitation – O, my, they tell so heinous things about him!

So our first meetings in Nezhin were far from encouraging, and I even started to suspect, that all that happened between us in Bolshevik was nothing more but a "collective-farm affair" of a teacher's daughter using me. And I pissed off.

After some time, a group-mate of Eera, Anna, came to the Hosty with the errand from Eera who waited for me in the room of their Department hostel, in the main square.

I followed the messenger cursing on the way my shameful lack of the most elementary male pride...

Eera was lying on one of the beds, for some reason without a sweatshirt, but wearing beautiful, as always, lady's undergarment. The girls whose room it was tactfully left us alone.

I sat down on the bed next to her, doing my best not to show how captivated I was by the beauty of her torso and the strangely pale face.

She said that she had had a pregnancy, and a young surgeon-gynecologist made the abortion at his home, under anesthesia.

Is abortion done under anesthesia? At home? Young?

(...certain thoughts are better never be thought at all...)

Feelings of guilt and compassion only added to my love. I couldn't help it, I put my arms around her shoulders and, lifting her from the pillow, pressed to my chest.

"I love you, Eera. You always know that I love you."

(...and again I run into my being born at the wrong time.

I behave like an ancient Greek from the times when the birth control was females' responsibility.

And in the modern enlightened age, the weaker sex has already saddled us and mounted, while still pretending to be weak...)

The initial misunderstandings (thanks to the kind care of her girlfriends), were further aggravated by unwanted predicaments at establishing normal sexual relations at the first stage of our love affair.

Not because of being short of favorable conditions for having sex, on the contrary, when Eera visited Room 72, my freshman-cohabitants, on their own accord, went to the first floor of the hostel to click the TV channels in the hall with the box, or sit over a bottle of lemonade in the refreshment room.

The problem had deeper roots...

Not right away, but I noticed that after our having a sex Eera got in a plaintive mood, and on the way from the Hosty to her home she spoke of sad things.

How sadly was the wind dragging the autumn leaves across the stadium, visited to say goodbye to track athletics, because of a ligament injury after two years of training...

How sad it feels, when at a festive table your parents got so absorbed in an agitated discussion of who was more right or wrong, that they do not notice you taking already the third plate from the table, and detachedly letting it fall to the floor over the scattered fragments of the first two – snap! – before mom and daddy wake up and finally turn to you...

The further, the sadder. The mood changes got substituted with undisguised sabotage!

How else to classify it, if at the end of having a sex your partner wriggles out from under you?

It took me some hell of efforts to elicit the reason for such an unconventional behavior.

Well, because she felt something like an urge for uncontrollable urination.

(...long live to our Soviet education system – the best system in the world!

It couldn't maim the village schoolkids to such a degree though. They were saved by direct observation of the natural facts of life. A village girl would figure out at a glance what namely you were mounting upon her with.

But the poor city dwellers?

In one of the color illustrations concluding the school textbook of Anatomy, there was a partial image of the penis modestly hidden in between the intestines, out-poured from the belly on the general scheme of internal organs.

Those appended pictures were studied by the pupils on their own because during the academic year the class managed to reach only the middle of the textbook.

How could a poor daughter of a teacher know the difference between orgasm and urination?..)

I cannot maintain that the problem had been solved exclusively because of my persistent requests to trust her own body, which was wiser than her. In any case, she gave up wriggling out...

All those painful crises in the relationship called for general relaxation, and restoration of the dented self-esteem. These factors led to the emergence of Sveta, who also lived in the Hosty, and Maria, who did not live there but came on occasional visits, and more oftener I went to spend a night at her place...

Despite the fact, that Sveta studied at the Biological Department, she lived on the fifth floor in the Hosty. During one of her visits from up there to the third floor, she got vanquished with by my noble continence, like, a knight-errant driven by merciless weather conditions to a roadside brothel.

I had just returned from seeing Eera to the vestibule in her staircase-entrance when they told me there was chicken soup on the table in Room 77.

One of the advantages of a student canteen is that after visiting it you still can find enough room in your system for chicken soup, at any time of day. I entered the room and turned on the light.

On one of the beds, there lay a girl who did not make a secret of the fact that she had nothing on apart from a bedsheet. There also was a pot on the table and a couple of spoons.

Taking the lid off the pot uncovered the presence of the soup, about two servings. I wiped off one spoon, sat on a vacant bed and started eating. The soup was cold, but unmistakably of chicken.

The girl wrapped in the bedsheet protested that the light was preventing her from falling asleep.

Turning the light off, I threw the door open, because eating soup in the dark is uncomfortable, and finished it off in the dim illumination from the corridor lamp. Some delicious soup, I liked it, notwithstanding its being cold. Then I left.

"The less we love a woman,

The more she is turned on..."

So the wounds, inflicted by the painful love, I began to heal with medicinal visits to the fifth floor in the hostel.

Sveta was simply created for that. Not very tall, with a boyish haircut, she had a slender body and generous breasts.

She was good at anything, but her special dish was giving a blow job. Besides, she simply lost her head from mere touches to her nipples; a happy gift of nature for both her and you...

In addition to psychological impediments formed by the Soviet school system, at times I rammed into unbending ideological dissonance with Eera.

Like on that occasion when the institute Rectorate ordered a volunteer clean-up in the Count's Park.

The girls of my course were raking the fallen leaves in great heaps, and Igor Recoon and I set them on fire.

After translating _The Jaws_ , I knew that burning leaves in the open was a crime against the planet's atmosphere; there was a short passage in the book on that particular issue. But could you prove anything to anyone?

"Sehrguey, don't put on airs! Everyone does it. We're not in America."

When in Rome do as Romans do. The Count's Park got drowned in white smoke and we dispersed.

Bypassing the Old Building, I saw a girl in sportswear and liked her from afar.

I didn't even know why she attracted me so much. Well, the wide white kerchief with big black spots around her neck, that's for one, but certainly not only because of that; and not for the sneakers.

I came closer – what the f-f.. damn! – but that's Eera herself!

And way too deeply moved by the pleasant surprise, I blurted at once about my falling in love with her again a moment before.

"You had not known it was me but fell in love?"

"Yes! Can you imagine?"

"How could you!"

"But it's you who I loved!"

"You had not known it was me!"

"Hey, think a bit! Since it turned out to be you, then I have no chance to fall in love with anyone else. It's only you that I can love."

"Just a minute ago you loved someone who wasn't me, and you'll do it again!"

"Who else can I love? Can't you see it's only you who turns me on?"

"You still can't get it!"

"Okay. So I shouldn't have fallen in love with you?"

"No!"

"Never?"

"No, never!"

A vicious circle – love me but never fall in love with me. But she looked real cool in her sports, and she moved so classy...

(...with all my mug's game to show off as a crossbred of Casanova and a refined aristocrat of the spirit, I am a classical example of a natural patsy.

Why?

Too gullible and too ready to fall for a new bauble...)

It was enough for Ilya Lipes to drop an unfamiliar word "she-oxen" and I followed him like a puppy on the lead.

"Come on! Let's visit the she-oxen!"

The casually used term triggered an imagination flight picturing a flock of free of complexes hetaeras, but, in reality, they were the same girls as in the hostel. One she-ox was throwing her birthday party.

And now in that half-dark room in an old private house, we were, like, having fun, like, dancing all-out fast dance.

Then I would lay with some of them on one of the beds in the next room, and she would eagerly get topless while blocking any further movements, like any other oxen-vixen, with their usual obnoxious sermon, "Do not torture yourself, nor me!" As if she was strong-armed or blackmailed to go to bed with me. Why coming, if you're so stalwart lesbian or in your everlasting times? To get free rape?!.

And so I got blues and went out in the corridor to rang Eera for over again to announce about my love, a sentimental patsy.

And she got it right away, "What music is there? Where are you?"

Usually, I called her from the booth in the Hosty's lobby which was almost soundproof in that vestibule with the locked entrance door, glass-partitioned from its twin vestibule by the open one.

We would talk for hours if not for her people at home needed the telephone, or some students started to knock at the glass door from the lobby.

Those talks were about absolutely nothing, I just loved to hear her voice. She would say a word over there and I got carried beyond myself in here...

"Just in one place, I'll explain later. Not a phone talk. I love you. Bye."

(...everyone knew then, that the phones were tapped so the phrase "not a phone talk" excluded further questions...)

And later, I had to drive a fool about a bro drag dealer arriving at Nezhin for a visit who asked me to see him to a safe house, where the music was played on the account of his arrival, but I did not stay there and left after calling her on phone.

Some stuff that would hardly fit even in both elephant ears; to believe such a helpless bullshit one had to be very eager to believe.

Although, she might have believed after those icons. Ah, yes, the icons...

They told me that Veerich wanted to see me, and I went to his place.

In the winter holidays, he was skiing in the Carpathians and broke one of his legs and both skis. So he kept to bed, plastered.

He and his student wife rented a flat in the city. When she went out to the kitchen, Veerich started his monologue about the too far-reaching dirty hand of Zionism groping for our cultural heritage and spiritual assets.

That all was to the fact, that Ilya Lipes had three to four Orthodox icons in his briefcase, under his bed in the hostel. Somewhere they had bombed a village church and now Lipes wanted to push the catch off like antique rarities.

How to bear a so cocky impropriety? If not for the plaster, Veerich would never allow trampling our holy shrines...In short, could I bomb the icons back and restore historical justice?

(...as for the frictions between different religious confessions, Veerich was just an odd voice in the wilderness.

I could still believe in Zeus or, say, Poseidon, but all the gods in vogue at present times do not stir any sympathy in me, and in the same breath (which is characteristic) I don't believe in atheism either.

But the request to bomb was properly addressed.

No problems! I'm doing what I'm told to do and thinking after it is done...)

In the morning I waited for the students to leave the hostel for their respective classes.

One kick at the unsuspecting door from the drowsy silence of corridor and the lock jumped out.

Everything as reported – the briefcase under the bed, the icons in the briefcase. Them those Serbs have a good nose for such things, even in the third generation. The icons looked like the one Grandma Katya had in her khutta, only on bigger boards.

I left the briefcase where it was, and took the icons to the washroom where my black "diplomat" case was already waiting for them under the sink in the singled-out compartment; the loot fitted in perfectly.

That's when I felt all the truth of the popular saying about stealing chickens. "But y

our hands do tremble! Been stealing chickens, eh?"

My fingers quivered quite uncontrollably; but not the way they shook after the capsizing in the UAZ truck. That tremor had been a kinda shallow one, while in the washroom, my fingers were, like, knocking against each other. That's what sacrilege brings about.

I didn't care for the finger-prints. Ilya would not go to the criminal investigation, "Please, check for the traces on my briefcase where I kept the icons from a robbed temple."

However, taking the catch directly to Veerich's was not correct. So, I asked Eera to keep my briefcase at home for a couple of days, she was on sick leave at the moment.

Then, like an exemplary student, I attended the classes and, already after the canteen, climbed up to the third floor in the Hosty.

There I witnessed a noisy commotion in the corridor; the room of Lipes had been broken in!

I approached and saw that the door was indeed kicked open. Dirty bastards! And what's missing?

Ilya kept silent to my question and only tutted in bitter frustration...

And then I decided to finally break up with Eera because I was fed up with all that heartbreaking harrowing.

Moreover, because she absolutely didn't trust me and that's for sure.

The watchwoman in the Hosty's lobby passed me a letter:

"Sehrguey,

I have been fascinated by you for so long, but I did not dare to say it.

Today I'll be waiting for you at 19.00 near the Old Building.

Lyuba"

That evening, as usual, I escorted Eera to the staircase-entrance vestibule in her apartment block, and there she unexpectedly caught some loving fire, "Do not go, hang on a little more, please!"

I looked at the watch it was ten to seven, "Well, the guys are waiting at the Hosty. We agreed to draw a pool at Pref."

"They can wait. Don't go!"

I hardly managed to leave.

When I neared the Old Building it was exactly seven because I had checked the time under a street lamp on the way.
And on the square in front of the Old Building, there was no one. But I did not tarry there smoking, waiting, looking around; not at all.

I crossed the empty square without ever stopping; maybe in a little bit slower tempo than my usual.

But then, after all, I had all the right to admire the nature of the winter night, had I?

That pine tree by the corner looked like a cedar; could it really be one? Its thicket of branches is some owl's home, there, amidst them, it's always dark and quiet even in the afternoon. Look at the snowdrift under the pine-cedar, scattered with offals of his feasts, shreds of small rodents; one of the sanitary care-takers of nature...

And, as it happened, I didn't lie. The moment I entered Room 72, Slavik and Twoic followed me, "Well, will we draw a pool, or will we?"

The letter, as it soon turned out, was written by Eera's girlfriend whose name was not "Lyuba", by the by, Eera invented it while dictating to the girl.

Everyone may get attracted by the novelty, but it takes a silly patsy to be caught out...

Well, and besides, there appeared Maria, a brunette of the age so ardently canvassed for by once the popular French writer Balzac.

When she smiled at me on the sidewalk, I did not immediately snap in. As it turned out, she happened to drop for a minute to that she-ox's birthday, only I did not notice when.

In general, she explained in what apartment-block she lived and said the apartment number; 42.

Although I had a busy day with a concert in the assembly hall of the Old Building, I found time and money for a bottle of vodka which I carried using Alimosha's trick – in the sleeve; it made for such a hard bicep.

So I came to the address, the fourth floor, the door to the left. She opened.

We had a little snack and landed on the sofa. I do not like to cum when I just started, but at times it happens.

"I'm sorry," said I, " I'm in a hurry. There's a concert at five."

Which concert? Where?.

She sat in the second row, when from the stage, and already playing the bass guitar, and already as the leading vocalist, I was screaming,

"Do you remember those two sta-a-rs?!

That disappeared from the sky?!.."

A third-year student, Vitya Kononevich, played the rhythm guitar and sang along, backing with a third; and on the drums some, well, Lyosha, it seems, also from that course, a local guy he was.

After the concert, Maria and I had a walk. She led me to a friend of hers.

The woman brought a mug of medical alcohol out to the staircase landing, and a piece of fish for a snack.

It was 96 percent spirits because my tongue at once stuck to the palate. But since then our go-rounds with Maria in their duration were not inferior to the acts in Shakespeare's plays...

She had a son, sixth-grader, who I never met in her one-room apartment.

Apart from the sofa, there was a double bed and a radio receiver on the nightstand next to it.

All the night long it was playing softly to itself in the middle waves ranges, glowing with its small yellow eyelet.

And she cum in really superb style, "More! More! A! I wanna.. Mo-o-ore! A!."

Maybe it was her worked out coda, but still a cool one. She didn't condone the semen smell and asked me to go to the bathroom right away. I did not mind, she was worth it.

For my willingness, she rewarded me with a massage, so was her profession.

I couldn't get it why they were so crazy about it. Oh, massage!. But I did not contradict even on that point...

Sometimes, even way too late at night, the doorbell rang.

She rose from the bed, threw on her long gown and went out to the landing to have a word with the untimely visitor.

I was not quibbling, I understood that a nurse, even a masseuse, had somehow to survive in this world.

She had a beautiful body, as in black-and-white pics of Soviet amateur pornography, and she herself was good-looking too, in that Transcarpathian style.

But she seldom took off her nightgown in bed, if at all, she said there was a breast problem, mastitis, or something.

And after ramming into so too many "eager-top-unsurrenderable-downs" that felt even refreshing for a change. More so because she knew how to use her lower parts.

"And may I do it that way?" And she would get unleashed in such a "way" which I never imagined possible, and did not even imagine at all.

Yes, you may and welcome all the way!

When dropping to Room 72, she skillfully used its plain furniture set there.

In between having a sex we were on genuinely friendly terms. She shared her plans for buying me a pair of slippers, and promised to cure would I catch a venereal disease.

She told me...

Well, it doesn't matter though, or else I will never finish, sort of, like after a mug of medical alcohol.

In a word, I wanna say, Balzac was not a fool, albeit a Frenchman...

At the May Day demonstration, willing or not, you had to carry a portrait of a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the privilege based on your being one of the only four boys on the course.

After passing over the main square in the institute's columns, that member still had to be taken to the Old Building and handed over to the House Manager.

When I was leaving the House Manager storeroom, Slavik warned me that he saw Eera in front of the Old Building, and she asked him where I was.

Slavik knew that I had broken up with her for over a month already, that's why he warned.

The separation was painful for me. The evenings stretched endlessly long without her voice over the telephone. And I was missing her German gait from afar.

Seeing her occasionally in the institute corridors, I got it over and over again that there was no one as beautiful as her, and my heart tightened bitterly.

But still and all I had to be firm and put the final period, after all...

So, to avoid an unbearably painful encounter, I decided to sit tight in the Old Building until she left.

Moreover, the day before while on a country outing, Maria and I agreed to spend May Day at her place...

For the outing, we went to the station, and, in the bright rays of the sunset, walked along the path by the tracks to the forest on the outskirts.

On the way, we met a couple of workmen. One of them started to yap, but I just ignored the bumpkin – anyone would envy when you walk so a juicy beauty to the wood, while the nightingales around tear themselves apart in so vigorous trills that stand upright like one firm wall of sound...

We found a clearing among the trees, and in the gathering darkness, I built a fire. It was very warm, she even took off her cloak. We did not have glasses for the wine brought along...

"More! A! More!.."

The bonfire was already burnt out, and screening for a sec the iridescent glow from its coals, some dark shadow rushed across the clearing. A homeless dog. How he scared her!

There is nothing more appealing than women's fears, when you, a kinda epic knight, protectively embrace her shoulders. I even wanted it again.

"More! Mo-ore!."

We were returning already in the middle of the night and had to wait for long at the stop for the last bus, carrying workers of the defense plant Progress after the second shift. Or rather, female workers, there were only women on the bus giving Maria way too hostile looks. Like, we were slaving like damned, while that slut horsed around with her fucker. In spring even females grow intolerant and bitchy...

That is to say, that I did not need that meeting with Eera and I waited for another twenty minutes before I left the Old Building.

"Sehryozha!" She still waited between the massive columns on the high porch.

Well, what could I do if she was so beautiful? If I had to keep in check my breath and tame my heart?

We went around the corner with the plaque "Here N. V. Gogol studied..." and stopped beneath one of the tall ancient windows overhead.

I was appalled by the wanness of her face, not sickly pallid though but like the pure white of exquisite, almost transparent, porcelain.

And I couldn't tell what clamped my heart in so mighty grip – her beauty, or my pity for her.

What a witless brute I'd been, torturing both her and myself for so long, and so savagely!

At last, I was embracing her again. She both laughed and cried upon my chest.

O, how I loved her!.

That cursed month she was coming home and just lay down prostrate feeling the pain which was straight physical, and nothing mattered, absolutely nothing. Mommy did not know what to do, "What's wrong with you, Eera?"

"Nothing."

Damn stupid beast! Bastard! How pale she was! How desperately beautiful.

"Come on to the Hosty. The room is vacant."

She happily hurried home to change and tell her mother that she was celebrating and spending the night at a girlfriend's.

(...most of all in the Soviet holidays I liked the calm which was condensing after the demonstrations.

The streets got void of traffic and pedestrians; people retired to their homes to start the celebrating...)

The hostel was also empty. Except for Room 72 on the third floor.

That was our room, our hostel, our celebration; the Feast of Reconciliation...

Sveta might nigh spoiled the feast.

Taking advantage of the solitude in the quieted corridor of locked doors, I ventured to the toilet in my underpants and coming back I dropped into the washroom.

It was there that Sveta screwed me over, "What's that!"

And she began to talk my ear off that she'd never put up with an expansion of the staff without preliminary coordination. She was forgiving me Eera, forgiving Maria, but who that new whore in my room was?

"Are you crazy? That's Eera!"

Well, she had just peeped in and there was someone standing by the window. Where could Eera possibly have such a cute negligee from?

As if I knew; I saw it for the first time too...

On the second day, I left the Hosty in the morning. In the big deli on the main square, they were selling a rare deficit: white-and-blue cans of condensed milk.

Proud of my hunting skills, I returned to Room 72 and Eera said from the bed by the window, "Wow! You brought condensed milk?"

I was f-f.. well, I mean, flabbergasted. "You...what the...er...that is, how?"

"You had such a swagging nose, it was seen at once."

And while possessing such skills to write counterfeit letters? There was something, not that there...

So I surrendered, and we started to live on together as one common united family.

In learned books, they call such life-style polygamy in which I was sort of the join link.

(...the join link should master and keep to one golden rule – no names.

"Darling" is the very thing, it sounds pleasant and causes no misunderstandings.

Maybe someone would pull for "pussy" or "bunny", which is a matter of taste, but, in my humble opinion, why to start up an extra menagerie?

"Yes, darling..."

"Come on, darling...")

Sveta did not kick up excessive dust anymore. She clearly knew her exact place – after Eera, before Maria.

Officially, the girls were not introduced but knew about the existence of the others.

Eera and Sveta, for sure, and Maria, most likely, as well.

Talking to the darlings, I was not especially keen on that topic – who knows what about who, but Nezhin was a provincial town where everyone knew everything about everyone else.

When in the third year, I had a pedagogical practice at School 2 and one of the teachers there started giving out some disparaging information about Maria.

She took unusual care not to look at me when speaking and addressed my course-mate who also practiced at the school.

That tootsy of my course-mate was a very studious student, and she took lots of pains when preparing for her first practice lesson.

At home, she collected all her dolls and puppets and arranged them in a row seated upon the piano lid, so as to get properly prepared, "Good morning, children!.."

(...infantilism is a lethal weapon for me, far more terrible than a machine gun.

I mean, it makes me wanna puke...)

But the newlywed couple on our floor in the Hosty were well matured.

After their marriage, they got a whole room for themselves. The students living there were moved to other rooms, only the furniture remained.

At times, to relax after intense mental work in their educational process, they arranged "races" on Saturdays. A couple of other students from the floor were invited then for the overnight stay, and after the dinner, they started the "race" heats with the change of partners.

I do not know the details though, I did not participate in those races, Vitya Kononevich was the principal jockey there...

(...honestly, if you ask me, having a sex is something just for two.

It is of so intimate a nature that even a condom doesn't fit well in between the lovers.

No arguing, I'm fairly old-fashioned on this point but there's nothing doing about it, that is my innate quality...)

In summer, I was passing my pioneer practice at the camp "The Young Construction Worker" near the town of Sednev.

At the times of Chernigov Princedom there stood a mighty fortress for defense from Tatars, Lithuanians, or Novgorodians – whoever would come to plunder. And now of all the fortress there remained just one tower.

From the tower, a steep winding descent led down to the bridge connecting the sandy banks of the Snov river. In the small pinewood after the bridge, there were two pioneer camps, side by side: "The Young Construction Worker" and "The Young Chemist", followed by the boundless vistas of wheat fields...

My trainee position at the camp was that of a substitute caretaker.

That meant that when the caretaker of some platoon went to Chernigov, I was to oversee the on-duties kids from her platoon laying tables in the canteen for breakfast, midday meal, tea, and supper, and if on that day the camp was taken out to the river, I had to watch that the platoon's pioneers did not splash outside the iron grid but only in the fenced part of the calm flow.

Going to Chernigov was not so easy because of transportation problems, and caretakers seldom went there. So, my remaining job was to switch on the music in the radio-unit room for the camp loudspeakers to broadcast it, and also to announce at the microphone the "dead-hour" and "lights-out".

I don't know why, but I was doing it with the feline drawl of a fag, "Attayntion! Leets-ouwt for thee camp!."

The radio-unit was installed in the room of the senior pioneer leader, partitioned from a small gymnasium equipped only with one bed on which I slept.

The door in the far wall of the gym opened onto the stage of a small open-air auditorium bounded by pine trees.

I was kicking back, and reading what would turn up in the camp library, and growing my beard because after the camp I was going to work with the student construction platoon of the NGPI.

In short, I was wallowing in the life of reprobate unshaven renegade...

The position of senior pioneer leader was filled with my course-mate, Irina from Bakhmach.

I somehow did not immediately realize that she was courting me, until her invitation to the ancient tower of Sednev with its small built-in romantic restaurant.

Through the loopholes in the thick (of about a meter and a half) walls, on the plain far below, fleeing shadows from summer clouds raced by like a raiding horde of robbers...

She treated me to the blackberry liqueur, yet I did not like that over-sweetened cloying swill.

After two years of studying at the NGPI, Irina obviously re-evaluated her standpoints and priorities, compared to the night which we spend together when being the first-year students. However, I couldn't respond to her advances in a natural way. Not because of being a vengeful jackass, "aha! you didn't give it then, so go without now!" No, it's not like me.

The reason was my dutiful submissiveness to the received instructions. When said "no", I retreat obediently, but in order for me to get at it again, there should be an explicit invitation "come on, let's do it".

She pinned her hopes on the liqueur alone which was not enough...

And I also couldn't concentrate on the other trainee, one more Irina, but already from Nezhin, the daughter of Pro-Rector Budowski.

Firstly, I disliked both his bald head and his moral character in general, and secondly, she was an unmistakable virgin.

Consequently, the champion laurels in the contest, quite predictably and inevitably, went to the blonde sports trainer, again Irina, from the neighboring "The Young Chemist" camp.

At first, we had dates on the riverbank in the company of her "Spidola" receiver, but in my gym, it was much warmer...

Once I entertained a group of visitors comprising Slavik, Twoic, and Petyunya for playing Preferans, and Sveta for everything else.

After the game, the boys started racing around the gym after the hedgehog brought to me by pioneer kids earlier on that day. I asked them to stop molesting the poor creature, and they switched over to voyeuristic eavesdropping to the erotic arias sounding from the partition to the radio-unit room, where Irina from Bakhmach entertained a guest who visited her on the same day, also a Bakhmach guy.

Then I gave the boys a bundle of camp cloth blankets to soften their sleep on the bare floorboards and turned off the light.

Sveta, who had the legitimate right to a part of my bed, performed from that elevation before the three, frozen in awe and admiration, music lovers on the floor, a concert for a flute without an orchestra...

Another time I went to Nezhin, sort of a day off, but there I behaved like a disgusting swine.

I swallowed too many pills, and dining in the canteen room at the station I almost dozed off over the bowl of borshch, like, it was a kinda pillow. Naturally, Eera got outraged and left.

Slavik, who was also going to Chernigov, had to drag me, like a vegetable, into the diesel train. Because the branch line to Chernigov was not electrified.

Traveling by the diesel train, I slept off but still remained bored utterly because everything was so dull...

I felt like that for the most time of that practice.

So dull and unnecessary was my lie to a mujik in the field, who asked which camp I was from. Why did I say I was from "The Chemist"?

And it was dull when a pack of youngsters from Chernigov came to the pine forest by the daddy's Volga of some of them.

They kicked up thief-swaggering and one of them pulled out a big handsome dagger, I looked around for a stick, although he obviously wanted to get relieved of the weapon. A split-second of delay, the moment was lost and the trophy went to the chauffeur of the camp. Well done, mujik!

And because of being bored and off-hand, when diving in the river from the bluff I, like, dislocated something in my back and a couple of days was turning to the sides with my whole body.

Taking a swim at night was dull as well, even after some car drove on the bank flashing the headlights at the girls, who had already changed their mind to enter the river, and I had to get out of the water in the altogether, just as I had come to this world, armed only with a distorted expression of the unshaven face.

It's hard to say what aboriginal mask my face looked like at that moment, but they switched off the headlights.

The next day Irina from Bakhmach was making sport of my dick size not living up to her expectations. It did not hurt my feelings though because everything was so dull and boring...

"A vain present, a chance present,

Why are you given to me, Life?."

Yet, when on the Poseidon Day the pioneers of both camps united in catching and dragging me along to drop into a pond by the river, it was not boring, it was right.

At first, I felt offended and wet, but then like laughing. Well done, kids! Serves good the bastard!.

The last night at the camp, Irina the trainer and I once again sat on the river bank. There were so many stars that you could hardly see the sky behind them, and I had blues that everything was somehow flowing away and getting lost.

She, for some reason, did not want to have a sex, and we just sat leaning our backs against each other.

The stars were shining both from below—reflected in the silent flow of the Snov—and also from above. They were everywhere and would always be and still it was impossible to keep them. Everything flows away...

Probably, I had blues because of the "Spidola" was babbling a sermon in English.

I did not understand at all what all that was about, because it was not the English Department Language Laboratory texts about the family of Parkers, but you could guess that it was a sermon.

Then I escorted Irina to "The Young Chemist".

She went in and locked the gate, but I called her again. We climbed the grating of the gate from both sides and had the final kiss, a camp kiss atop of the grates.

Forgive me and goodbye, my loss...

I knew the city of Pryluky for a long time, yet in absentia.

The cigarette packs of Prima acquainted me with the city's name printed on their back, "cigarette factory m. Pryluky."

During the years of German occupation, the city of Pryluky was drastically rebuilt, so the streets in it became strictly parallel and methodically perpendicular to each other. Except for the outskirts where the bus station was built later...

Commander of the student construction platoon was Vladimir Maiba, from the Physics and Mathematics Department.

The platoon's Commissar was Igor, a Ukrainian nationalist, who suspected Maiba of being a secret collaborator with the KGB and, therefore, was constantly jeering at him and discrediting his authority in every possible way.

And I was Leading Specialist, sort of, because in my military ID I was advertised as a "bricklayer".

Besides the mentioned commanding staff, there were two girls and fifteen guys in the platoon. In the city we stayed in a hostel of "chemists" but only for one night and the next morning, we had to leave for Auto-Depot 4, which was on the highway stretch between the Ivkovtsy village and the town of Ladan.

"Chemists" was the term for prisoners who, because of their supposedly good behavior, were paroled from Zone to finish off their time "at chemistry".

Any plant or a factory with production lines hazardous to health, or a mine, or a construction site usually served "a chemistry" for paroled prisoners.

The regulations for "chemists" were pretty strict. They should be present in the hostel no later than the hour specified, never get drunk, nor bring whores and submit many other restrictions. However, they were not locked and controlled by the turnkeys and did not sleep in the common dormitory. They even got some payment, though decimated by their curator militiaman, on whom it depended whether they remained on parole or got remanded back to Zone.

After the shower, I and Igor, who, regardless of his being a Ukranian nationalist, spoke a very good Russian and dreamed of moving to St. Petersburg, the cultural capital, went out to check the geometrical correctness of Pryluky.

"Katranikha! I am damned! Is that you?"

"Don't shout! Some of my students can be around. I'm a teacher here."

Well, of course, sorry, how could I forget myself. For one year already she was disseminating there the seeds of the wisdom, of kindness, and values eternal...

Auto-Depot 4 was all by itself, neither in a village nor in a town, just behind the forest belt along the highway roadside.

First, there stood an old two-story building. On the first floor, it had some locked warehouses, and on the second floor, there was a spacious hall with beds for students of the construction platoon and a small room for its two girls.

Then there followed a one-story stoker-house and, still farther, the vast grounds of Auto-Depot 4 behind the tall red-brick wall surrounding a dozen of garages, a canteen, and many other buildings, some of which hadn't been yet completed, and in the middle of the grounds, there stretched a wide and deep foundation pit.

Lots of steel wires crisscrossed the air over the pit. Plumb under the intersections of the spanned wires, our platoon had to assemble formworks and fill them with concrete to produce the "cups" for the insertion of support columns. But all that was to be done later and for the start, there were shovels to exercise "dig-dump". Everything was so nostalgic familiar, and only the uniform was different.

After a working day, the stoker-"chemists", Yura and Tomato, opened the cock inside their stoker-house and from an outside pipe, sticking out high up on the wall, there gushed a broad horizontal jet of water. You could stand where the jet water was falling to the ground and get a shower which was pretty chilly, sure thing, but who cared in the summertime...

A week later Commander of the platoon called a general meeting.

The agenda of one issue – feeding the platoon contingent, because the food in the canteen was just a...

(...well, I don't know, that same havvage as anywhere else...)

The meeting approved – to cook food of our own resources procured for money borrowed by Commander from the Auto-Depot foreman in advance, on account of our future labor victories.

From now on the girls' position was not only that of paramedics but cooks as well...

Each evening, as it got dark, in twos or threes, we went on a raid to the potato field of the nearby collective farm.

And, on the way, sweeping anything else looking ripe enough.

"A furious construction platoon

Is like to a fire in the steppe!."

The students paid compliments to the cooking skills of the Phys-Math girls. Well, I don't know, yes, on the whole, it was hotter than in the canteen, but otherwise the same havvage as anywhere else...

A couple of times we went to dances in the village of Ivkovtsy by the water-tanker truck, manned by a young driver. The girls were traveling in the cab, the rest of us wherever they could grab hold at the iron cistern of the truck.

We danced to the hits of Leshchenko:

"From the fields, the sadness flees away,

The anxiety also hits the road,

And the vistas wide unfold ahead..."

After the dances, we whizzed through the breeze and the darkness, everyone hugging closely their piece of the steely cistern...

Once for the midday break and meal, we visited the nearby city of Ladan.

When translated into English, "ladan" becomes "incense" with all connotations to it. But I also presented a meaningful view with that curly beard and hair hanging to the shoulders from under the twisted bandage of earthy color which prevented its falling into the eyes.

You couldn't make it out at a glance whether it was an excommunicated priest or Rambo from black-and-white photos. However, when Rambo in the central noshery of Ladan demanded a bottle of white to be served in a half-liter beer glass in one go, everything fell in place – a drunk from Auto-Depot 4!

I come back from Ladan with a pretty slackened thirst only to find Sasha Chalov, a third-year student from the English Department, in our dorm, who arrived from Pryluky, his native city, together with a friend of his and a briefcase bulging with ammo.

"The Sun in the Tumbler"

Gee!. They did learn, after all, turning out poetic stickers for ornery swill!

Adding that Sun on top of the prosaic berry&fruit from Ladan necessitated catching a breath. I was preparing for a peaceful repose among the bushes of the forest belt, but would those so-called bros allow you to breathe?

Sasha and his chum tore me away from our mutual Earth-Mommy, dragged to the second floor and dropped onto the bed there.

Some fucking lot of comradely solicitude it was! I had to puke out from the second-floor window like that jet from the wall in the stoker-house...

In fact, they came in need of a bass guitarist for "playing trash" at weddings in the city of Pryluky. So we serviced two nuptials at weekends, yet both for free because the happy newlyweds were relatives of that Sasha's chum, it turned out a job paid with grub.

Getting wiser, for the second wedding I brought three students from the Physics and Mathematics Department along with me, like, indispensable sound engineers...

The handle of "Tomato" suited the stoker-"chemist" perfectly because his face had red skin and his hair was of natural orange color.

He was the most joyful "chemist" in the world. Having his skills at sharping cards, I'd also walk my life with a smile. On shuffling the deck, he dealt hands with eight tricks in hearts for himself. Though fully aware that he was stacking the deck, you could not follow how...

In the excavated foundation pit we worked incompetently but with enthusiasm, until at the end of the month, the foreman presented the work orders for our labor. By his calculations, after deduction of the paid advance, our payment per worker equaled to the student monthly scholarship of 45 rubles.

At that moment Auto-Depot 4 ran out of nails, and we had nothing to assemble the formworks with. The enthusiasm dried up completely because of the grim prospect of sitting idly for ten days more without any job, during which period our food expenses would eat away the pittance we had earned.

The student construction platoon sent a negotiating team for talks with Director of Auto-Depot 4. The delegation consisted of me and one of the two paramedic-cook girls, the blonde one it was who did not understand a fig either in construction works or nails for carpentering, but she was a blonde, which quality imparts the right impulse to the process of any negotiations.

The chief engineer we met at the management office disclosed that Director was not around but harvesting crops in the fields of the patronized collective farm. The good news was that a truck with spare parts was leaving soon for the harvesting field camp, which could also take us along.

If there were no blondes in the delegation, he hardly would mention the truck which he himself was driving with the blonde seated in the cab, between him and me...

I was surprised by his knack at recognizing the Auto-Depot 4 vehicles on the highway long before their number plates became discernible.

The chief engineer explained that he saw them by their horns, and asked if I knew Tshombe.

Of course, I knew Tshombe who machine-gunned Patrice Lumumba when I was still a pioneer. However, I could not figure out any connection between the trucks rushing in the opposite direction along the sunlit highway, and the dictator from I could not recollect which African country, because I was still a pioneer then. So, I denied any acquaintance and said, no, I did not know him.

The chief engineer explained that Tshombe was Auto-Depot 4 Director to whom we were traveling now. This Tshombe of a director ordered the radiators of all the vehicles in Auto-Depot 4 to be marked with white paint in the form of a large Roman digit V. The marks were visible from afar and, in the opinion of the drivers, resembled horns.

The drivers cursed Tshombe's meanness because such marks added complexity to going on their contingent runs. However, the Director was Tshombe even before the Depot vehicles acquired the horns...

Director was not in the field camp made up of four big trailers; they said he was reaping another field.

The chief engineer with the brought spare parts and the blonde remained by the trailers, and I went to Tshombe. The brand new water tanker of the UAZ make was driven by a ten-year boy, the Director's son.

Drowning in the thick cloud of dust, a brown harvester with the white inscription "Niva" on its side was encircling a yellow sun-smitten field.

I went to meet it but the harvester rumbled by, and I had to run after, and jump onto the short ladder that led to the inclined cab of the machine.

The harvester roared and pounded on in its ride through the dust. For the first time in my life I had climbed aboard such a juggernaut, but everything went on intuitively – here's the ladder, that's the door...

In the narrow cabin, a man in a workman cap sat with his back to me and watched through the glass of the tilted windshield how his combine fell and drew in jagged portions of the cut-down wheat shoots.

I slammed the door, cutting off the knock in the bunker behind my back, and also stared at the rows of crawling-up ears, while I reported to the top of his cap that our platoon was sitting around, the nails had run out and we wouldn't earn a penny.

Under the rumble of the engine, the shoots twitched, collapsed onto the wide rotating shaft and flowed, in shredded bunches, up the conveyor belt.

Director never turned around and answered that he would see what could be done, and let the chief engineer come to see him.

I got out of the cab into the cloud of dust about the bunker, climbed down the ladder and jumped off.

Having seen neither the face nor the skin color of the man I had talked to, I still felt that some dictators were worthy of respect...

Back at the field camp, they called us into the trailer with a long table for the midday meal. Such a dinner could not fall under the name of havvage, it was some cheerful chow.

The cook in his camouflaged with layers of grease, but otherwise white, jacket put half-dipper of sore cream in a huge enamel bowl and filled it with red steaming borshch. A big piece of boiled meat was put on top.

After emptying my bowl, I got filled to the brim.

Then the cook served golden balls of young potatoes fried with dill and added meat sauce.

Absolutely delicious, but lacking any room for the second course, I had to finish it off just out of principle.

The compote seemed a glut excess, but, gradually, I poured it in too.

With thanks for the treat, I rose and very carefully went down the steps of the front porch. When on the ground, I unbuckled my belt and with the gait of dividers proceeded to the garden adjoining the field.

There I neatly laid me down on an armful of dry hay under an apple tree, in the hope that maybe I somehow would not burst.

And so it happened! By the time the blonde came into the garden, I felt normal.

She sat under the same apple tree, leaned her back on the trunk and smiled at me her sweet inviting smile.

I was amazed by the exact coincidence of circumstances – a garden around her and me beneath the apple tree, and only the serpent was skipping the picture.

And with tender emotion, I started to think of Eera and prided myself for staying true to her. Because I abstained from falling in the usual groove with the blonde and did not go with the flow despite all so ingratiating conditions created for the purpose – the bed of hay in the apple-tree shade in the Garden of Eden...

The next morning saw me, and the chief engineer, and a long tape measure marking out the projected walls of two inspection holes in the boxes under construction. Tshombe had really found what to keep us busy with.

A couple of days before the completion of the term at the construction platoon, Sasha Chalov popped up at the Auto-Depot 4 on no particular purpose, just to drink the sun in the tumbler.

Giving a tender jerk to his briefcase he, as was his custom, recited his favorite quatrain:

" One won't sound at all

And two won't jingle this way

When people of such quality

Live in the Soviet land!"

From the standpoint of poetry canons, the piece sucked more than absolutely, yet in the same breath, conveyed an optimistic message inspiring and bright.

The stoker-"chemists" helped to sort out with the contents of the portfolio, which made one bottle for a snout and soon after the consumption, Sasha Chalov left.

It was already late, so Tomato and Yura also steered to their stoker-house but, on the way, they knocked on the door of the girls' room. It happened to be locked.

They knocked again and then, carried away with recollections of their happy school days and themselves – adolescent hooligans – they started cutting capers around the locked door.

Some paper slips were lit to burn and shoved in the gap under the door. The girls defended themselves from inside with the water from their kettle.

In the background was I, stretched on my bed, producing a soundtrack of hue and cry. A sudden rage against the whole female tribe broke out in me, like, because of them all was so awry and so boring that I myself did not know what I needed. So, I lay there yelling the most disgusting things.

Were the door open from the very beginning, the "chemists" would simply come in and go out, but now they were burning with hunting ardor. Staying under the sword of Damocles of being sent back to the zone, they, you bet, had no intention of aggravating the situation, they were just having fun.

However, the poor girls in the besieged room were not up to all these logical operations or seeing any fun at all, when a pair of convicts were attacking their door, under my instigating, idiotic, yells from the common bedroom, "Bitches! Wolf whores!"

Finally, one of the guys from their Phys-Math course approached my bed and said that was not right. I shouted to the stokers that that was enough, and Tomato with Yura disappeared right away; the "chemists" had no problems with the logic.

The next morning I knocked on the door of the girls' room. It was not locked.

I entered and apologized for the previous night. "Afraid of expulsion from the institute?" asked the one with the brown hair.

Hardly would she believe that I was just ashamed. Even less, could I bring it over to her that I did not know whether I was afraid or wanted to be sent down?

(...looking back brings not too much fun, because of frequent temptation to spit in your own face.

However, the truth remains true only when it's unvarnished, and all that shit is also me...)

Since I earned some kopecks at the student construction platoon, I bought a doll for Lenochka. Of course, I wouldn't be smart enough to do it, but the radio station "Mayak" for at least thrice a day aired the most popular hit of the season:

"Daddy, present me,

Daddy, present me,

Daddy, present me

With a doll!."

And during a day that hit would get you someplace or another, and it started to spin on and on in the brain even without the radio around until – click! – hey, that's an idea!

So I went to the Department Store after a doll, but there were no dolls.

It wouldn't be right to always blame the era of shortages. It's not the era to blame for ideas belatedly reaching certain the mind of a certain dolt.

So I had no other choice but to buy a dog of the biggest size with the price answering the proportions. The brute was no less than a meter tall, rigged out with trousers and a shirt. The same, practically, doll, only with a canine head...

Lenochka grew a healthy child, and she attended the big kindergarten "Sunny" not too far from home, in the apple orchard of May Day Street.

All September, I was taking her to "Sunny" and coming after her at the end of the day, because those who worked at the student construction platoon were exempt from the patronage assistance to collective farms.

My beard was shaved but I kept the hair long.

Once I and my brother went to dances together. Sasha Basha had already replaced The Spitzes at the Loony dance-floor.

My brother had served his two years in the army at the Baikonur cosmodrome, and because of that, he lost any chance of going out of the country for twenty years.

Even visiting the resorts of socialist Bulgaria was out of the question to make sure he wouldn't blurb out to a CIA spy sunbathing on a beach that at the Baikonur, besides the astronauts, all kinds of test ballistic missiles were launched every week.

Starting off to the Loony, I put my "mona-Lisa" sunglasses on.

You'd hardly need to wear sunglasses in the evening, but the "mona-Lisa" in the thin golden rim was commonly viewed as the swanky symbol of a dandy dude of fashion as well as the jeans losing with wear their blue dye.

Such jeans were pushed over for 120-150 rubles, which was more than an average workman salary. All kinds of jeans were trafficked to Konotop by dark-skinned Algerians who studied at the Engineering Technical School on Peace Avenue.

By the by, those Algerians were so naive. "He said-a come-a go out and talk-a. I come-a out, he kick-a me a kick. Why-a?"

But for all their naivety, they never deflated the jeans' price.

And my jeans were for merely 30 rubles and that what they looked; some Brazilian crap never fading with washing, nothing like Lyalka's "Levi's".

Therefore, although it's hard to see through sunglasses in the evening, they justified themselves on the dance floor, screening the misery in jeans...

To the dance-floor, my brother and I arrived after the break when the crowd crammed the place to the utmost.

Sasha went around looking for his girlfriend, and I pulled up nearby the stage and remained there listening; Basha's guitarist, Marik, was good at solo breaks.

Then some salabon buster came up and gazed at me. Well, quite understandable too, he got impressed with such a hippy-long hair, the "mona-Lisa", and the metropolitan air in general.

So he stared for a while and got lost in the crowd.

I stood where I was and in a couple of minutes–good evening to your khutta!–the same buster popped up but already with his buddy.

They approached me and, synchronously so, swayed back and–lo!–two fists were flying at me.

I parried them with my shoulder but the collective impact of the double blow slammed me off and I, like, flew into some parallel space.

I mean it – it was a completely different dimension, as if under the sea.

The sound of the dances instantly turned off and I was gliding or, rather, spinning along the concrete floor. From all the sides in that mute space around, lots of legs rushed towards me, each one all too eager to kick. And those legs were somehow not complete but sort of cutouts, from feet and up to knees, no higher.

So they whizzed by from here and there, only soundlessly, yet missed kicking.

I yanked me up and jumped onto the bench by the circular grating and pressed my back to its pipes. That's when the sound came back, the shrieks of girls and Basha's preaching on the microphone, "Friends, please, observe..."

And round the bench, a pack of guys stood facing me, and one of them, such a hefty slob, yelled, "Who're you? Who're you? Take off your glasses!."

I pulled the "mona-Lisa" off and someone shouted, "From The Orpheuses!"

They obviously were Settlement guys although I did not even know them.

So, they yanked me off the bench into their tight circle and escorted out of the dance-floor, then went back at once to the general sorting out.

On that day the blades from Depot Street attempted at staking off the Loony as their sovereign turf.

At the park exit, I met my brother, one of his brows was broken. We had to go to the Station for him to wash the blood off under the tap in the men's room...

To mark the most obvious things is the hardest of tricks. I had been raiding weed plantations as far as the Kandeebynno itself, while in the neighbor's garden, right over the fence, there grew a dense coppice of the cannabis.

That's what a limited outlook means. I was looking into the distance and couldn't see under my very nose. The situation called for the restoration of historical justice which I did at night and, to cover the tracks, heaved the weed looted from the neighbor's garden over his fence to the next lane, and from there back, around the corner, to our wicket and up to the attic in the shed.

The tests of quality showed the samples were simply excellent. I shared some part of the booty with Lyalka for him to get on high, and feel that not for nothing he was warming me up in those two years...

You strike a lode and there comes another.

In Nezhin, in the plot by an inconspicuous khutta in the Count's Park across the road from Leninist Komsomol cinema, there stood five ample bushes of weed without any fencing whatsoever. No saint would pass by and withstand the temptation...

But then a serious problem arose: how to store the abundant harvest? To keep it under the bed in the Hosty?. Very funny, indeed.

I walked around all of the hostel looking for a suitable nook but in vain. And then in the washroom on the fourth floor, I saw a desk with a drawer.

I did not know how it came to be there, or for how long it would stay in the washroom, but being desperately pressed for finding any storage place (I couldn't just leave the weed in the park with the rains setting in, couldn't I?) I just dumped it in the drawer.

As a precaution measure, I turned the desk and pushed it with its drawer close to the wall, so that no one would horse around.

Then, as necessary, I was visiting the washroom to pinch off a few heads for consumption in a couple of days...

From the patronized collective farm, my course-mates returned in a state of complete shock, dumbfounded, in deep thoughts about life's purpose, meaning, and requirements. That is, was or was not their former understanding of and approach to those concepts correct?

As it turned out, during their patronage assistance two of local guys there had a knife fight.

Because of whom? Because of Tanya who was studying in my group.

A year before, those ruthless bitches of my course-mates asked me to pretend I fell in love with her. Just for fun, because she was most inarticulate and unattractive.

And I—the stupid moose—was quick to execute what asked. "Tanya! I love you with all of the depth! And what is your mutual feeling?"

For two days I pestered her at the breaks until she asked to leave her alone. It looked like she was going to cry; I got ashamed and shut up.

Well, now, how do you like it, ladies? Who was chosen by the guys as the prize for their berserk passion?

That's why the girls were now following her with furtive looks of envy and respect. And she walked the corridors with pensive pride as if she got it something about herself which she had never expected.

And her glances at me became not as negating as they used to be. What if I had not been just sporting last year?

Thank you, dagger guys, for the alibi...

But I still was worried about the cannabis stored in so inappropriate manner. A desk drawer in the washroom was anything but the right place for it. Any block with elementary literacy level on the subject would inevitably get attracted by its poignantly alluring fragrance and deduct the source of the whiff because the desk somehow did not belong among the naked walls and sinks of the washroom.

Besides, the Phys-Math students might start to ask themselves unnecessary questions as to why I was frequenting the washroom on their floor.

So with the first snow in November, I took weed out for relocation to another place of storage. My plan was to hide it in the dormer on the Old Building roof because I noted a mighty welded ladder leading up there from behind the building...

Late in the evening, Slavik, Twoic, and Eera accompanied me to the Old Building backyard, like, the state commission at the launch of a manned spaceship from the Baikonur site.

I passed my overcoat and hat to Eera, thrust the package with weed under my shirt and started off.

At the initial after-launch stages all went on in a regular mode. The ladder vibrations were keeping within the safety gauge, it's only that the iron rungs were icy cold making the lift endless. In the times of Gogol, they built the floors two-three times taller than presently.

At the point of entering the roof, there cropped up unforeseen problems. The ladder did not reach the roof itself, ending under the eaves. It was necessary to catch hold of the tinplate above the ladder and go over its edge onto the roof.

Of that moment I recollect the uncompromisingly dark night around; there were three of us – the tinplate, the darkness and I...

The roof itself was rather slippery, although not overly steep; I had to walk stepping onto the standing seams between the sheet blocks.

Getting to the dormer, I found its window sealed tightly with thick planks nailed from within. Thank you for your visit!.

On the way back, I suddenly slipped, when nearing the place where I had to get over the tinplate at the roof edge, yet I did not fall, but straightened up, gnashed my teeth and, addressing myself, spoke up to the darkness, "Tickling the publics expectation, eh? You bitch!"

Then I went down on all fours, dangled my legs over the roof edge and groped with my feet for the uppermost rung in the ladder.

Halfway down, I was reached with the belated mortifying thought that the evaded dive from the roof wouldn't be as bad as crash-landing on someone in the commission.

(...certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all...)

And again I kicked in a door; remarkably, it was the same one; only Ilya Lipes did not live in that room anymore.

It was inhabited by the current four-year students and among them Vitya Kononevich, who imprudently borrowed from Zhora Ilchenko _The Godfather_ , together with A Learner's Dictionary of Current English by Hornby, both imported from India.

How insignificant and trivial, at first glance, might seem the things eventually leading to a real jolt in the flow of life! Say, you ask Zhora to lend you _The Godfather_ for a month or so, and then you come to the hostel and see the door of your room kicked brutally in...

By the way, this time no shaky fingers were observed; the skills of vital importance get formed surprisingly quickly. Probably, the fact that I was working not for Veerich but for myself had also its telling effect.

_The Godfather_. a novel by Mario Puzo was stolen not out of idle curiosity (would or wouldn't the action set my fingers a-shaking?), neither for upgrading my door-kicking skills, but just to translate it in Russian.

The novel, as well as its author, happened to be rather thick, about four hundred pages. With regard to the way of its acquisition, Konotop was a more suitable place for plunging into the translation work.

It took several months of intent labor efforts to render the book turned out at the Penguin Publishing House into a weighty pile of numbered thick notebooks filled with my handwriting, in ink of various hues of the blue.

The whole bunch comprising _The Godfather_ I passed to Lyalka and his wife Valentina for reading, of the subsequent movements and general fate thereof I am aware no more than of where swam and how fared the cannibal shark from _The Jaws_ also rendered in Russian.

In the course of the second translation, about halfway through towards the completion, my father cooperated by sharing his critical remarks.

In the original, there was a passage describing a party in the Hollywood club designed and equipped for the recreation activities of Hollywood movie stars.

There I experienced problems with the rendering of the American English term "blow job" into Russian. The descriptive variants seemed over-lengthy, while the shorter options looked outrageously obscene.

When in labor pains, I tore another unsuccessful attempt at translation out from the notebook and shoved it into the kitchen stove to be used for kindling.

On coming from work, my father opened the cast-iron door to fill the stove firebox with wood, picked the crumpled sheet of paper, smoothed it out and studied the lines before asking, "What fucking hooey is this?"

I did not object to his estimation for two reasons. Firstly, I knew that passages perceived in the form of the printed text as eroticism did look vulgar porn when presented in handwriting.

It suffices to recall the thin notebook with a handwritten story, circulating among the senior students at School 13, which contained a passage running as follows "...she threw her legs in fishnet lace up over his shoulders..."

It's hard to say why, but those fishnet legs were immediately and undetachably associated by me with the Parisian Eiffel Tower. Some pretty uphill job it would be to have a sex, as well as to defend erotica, with the Eiffel Tower bestriding you.

On the other hand, who knows how those same legs would sway me if met in the orderly line of the typographic set. Appearances influence our judgments.

Secondly, I always respected the subtle literary instinct of my father. Thus, from the newspaper Trood, he read only the TV program and, with a brief glance at the rest of the headlines, announced his exhaustive conclusion, "Neither rhyme nor reason – kiss a flea in the brick." And he never mistook; crisp and to the point.

Besides, he possessed some amazing linguistic ingenuity. Perhaps, because of his Ryazan roots; the land of Ryazan always lay at the crossroads of language contacts.

Well, for example: seated at the kitchen table, with his gray brows taunted strenuously above the plastic rim of his glasses, he's busy a-tinkering to insert some hooey into another one.

I cracked along, between the table and the stove, from the door to the window only to take an abrupt turn back to the door. Without taking his eyes from the hooeys in his hands, the father inquires, "Why trorting?"

No dictionary would present an entry for the word, yet what a juicy verb it is brimmed with immensely elastic plasticity! Its sound form alone will let you grasp with utmost precision the action's quintessence, as well as the disorderly inner state of the actor.

And – most importantly – the word got born spontaneously, right now, while this fickle hooey doesn't want to enter into the other fucker.

"But could one keep back trorting when the treppa has pibzed already?!."

Both workpieces drop from his hands onto the table, the father gives me a hard look over the black plastic rim of the glasses slid halfway down his nose, then he says, "Pfui!"

And here lies, by the way, an exhaustive explanation of the "fathers-and-children" issue – they reproduce their likes only to pooh-pooh or pfui-pfui afterward.

(...coming back to _The Godfather_...

Unfortunately, there remained no writers in the American literature – Salinger, Carver, Pearson and the list is at its end.

The rest are scribbling with their both eyes on Hollywood buying their production; compilers of cartoon stories and soap opera dialogues.

No! I do not intend to blame them in the least. Basically, we all are like each other and differ only in only how deep is hid our craving to sell us individually.

And though being nothing of a Cristian, I cannot but admire Mr. J. Christ's instruction, "Let him who never sinned trigger off the slaughter of the slut," with which he wholesomely absolved the motley team of the human race for infinite millenniums to come.

Is there any alternative?

Absolutely, yes, and it's all contained in the approbation to reward the writer's efforts with the self-appraisal, "Damn nice artifact! It amused me and helped to kill twelve years of my stretch!" which is not going to keep your pot boiling though.

That's why I'd better head back from so high a curve and pick up literature anew.

Look at the Briton Maugham, the very first paragraph in a story by him is a chord, a fugue tuning up.

In his first paragraph, among the surface details, he scatters nodules, which will develop into the further narrative and the denouement with a flutter of echoes from the first paragraph.

That's real craftsmanship. Exactly what the Hollywood jacklegs are lacking. My father would say, "Pfui!"

Puzo is the role model from the same and for the same Hollywood writers.

He was the first to get a six-figure sum of dollars for his creation, the accountancy pathfinder, yet his _The Godfather_ suffers from the infirmity common to all the action bestsellers: while the protagonists fight for their survival in the unfavorable environment of hostile mafia clans, you can still read it, but with the start of the elephant distribution, that is methodical extermination of bad guys whose only slip was leaving a chance for the equally bad guys to outsmart them because of the author's biased sympathies, the interest dwindles rapidly and disappears.

The same trouble as with the 19th song in The Odyssey, when the hero returns home from his wanderings and whacks the suitors of his wife, one by one, with aesthetic relishing of the details in what manner the assholes' brains were smashed or guts were ripped out.

I couldn't finish reading the song even in a good Ukrainian translation, not because of being too squeamish but simply getting bored...)

I marked him a split-second sooner than he saw me.

With our stares fused intently, we were nearing each other on the sidewalk by the Railroad Distance Trade-Union building.

Both of us knew that only one would survive. Or no one.

With my lateral sight, I detected the rare figures of scared passers-by, careful to make room for the unvisible line between him and me.

Steadily, inexorably we kept making that line shorter. Step by step.

The dwindling distance rendered the forthcoming duel inescapably lethal.

His hand darted to his right hip, but no sooner his palm touched the handle of his Smith & Wesson than my Colt erupted in a series of shots blended in a thundering staccato.

If you are going to survive in Konotop, you have to be the first to draw.

His hands flapped up to clutch his bullet-riddled chest. In unsteady sway, he careened over the spiky line of the ruthlessly short-shorn bushes bordering the lawn upon which he would collapse the very next moment.

I thrust my Colt back into the holster, he straightened up, and we embraced.

"Kuba!"

"Gray!"

The passers-by kept bypassing us along the sidewalk...

Yes, that's him – Kuba. Grinning with the gold, that had replaced his teeth lost at the bar brawls in faraway ports of the oversea wanderings, but this was him – Kuba.

"How d'you?"

It's strange that everyone changes—they grow fat, they grow bald—but for your old friends.

Fleeting eye contact works a miracle, you no longer see scars, or false teeth or any other distracting trifles. You see your friend Kuba with whom you have had bike rides to the Kandeebynno or the Seim, attended Children Sector, rode the "sausage" of a streetcar.

It's just that now Kuba has what to tell about the life of seamen plowing the World Ocean...

We are sitting at Kuba's.

His old folks are at work, but on the table, we have three eggs in the frying pan next to a three-liter jar with transparent, lethally powerful, moonshine, in which the lemon peels float not yet below the half-jar.

We drink, snack, and listen to the stories of Kuba the Seafarer.

...that time he was late after the vacation, or rather his boat had sailed away sooner than scheduled. So they assigned him to a self-propelled barge for about a month until some other suitable boat would turn up.

The crew consisted of him alone, but he strictly kept the maritime regulations on the barge moored at the far wharf by the mouth of the river.

Standing on the bridge he shouted loudly, "Cast off!"

And he ran from the bridge to the wharf and removed the lines from the bitts.

Then he jumped back to command "Slow Astern!" and execute it...

"Good fellow, Kuba! Let them know the ours! Down the hatch!"

...and in foreign ports, there are special houses for seamen recreation. Equipped like a luxury hotel, with a restaurant, rooms, a swimming pool.

Now, whenever Soviet seamen dive into the pool, the water around their bodies gets spotted with crimson.

Abroad, they've become way too advanced and add some chemicals to the water which turns crimson by an admixture of urine.

Well, and you know how it goes by us, the first thing after you plunged is to take a leak in the water...

So, they have to drain the pool and fill it again, and the Germans have to sit for another hour over their beer on the tables and wait:"Rusishe Schweinen!"

"They themselves are pigs. Half-whacked fascists! Down the hatch-y!"

...in Hong Kong, it was, or maybe Thailand.

Ours got moored, visited the city, and were coming back to the pier.

There was a team of dockers, so skinny them all because they live on just rice and seafood.

Our boatswain was a hero, two meters tall, he grabbed one of the dockers by his collar and lifted up in the air, like a kitten.

"Yea, bro. Slaving all your life, eh? Bad luck." He put him back and went on.

So that yellow did not understand the brotherly solidarity, and he did not appreciate the Slavonic breadth of soul.

He runs ahead, jumps up—ya!—and kicks the boatswain into the nose.

Then ours had a whole hour to water the giant on the pier to bring him back to life.

"And dat's rightee! Here's to Bruce Lee! Down the!"

...Nah! Kuba ain't gonna get married at all. They all are but fucking sluts.

A boat in the roadstead ready for sailing off. The captain's wife comes up by a towboat to kiss him goodbye. Happy voyage, dear!

Coming back to the harbor, she's fucking the helmsman and two mechanics, in turn, in the wheelhouse.

"For freedom! For whores! D'n th'tch!"

...and it's real difficult to smuggle goods from abroad. Any boat zampolit has at least two rats among the crew.

"You mean, there are zampolits on boats?!"

"That's the rule."

"I'd better stay a land rat then!"

"T's rightee! For rats! D'nnnnn!"

But I still remembered clearly enough that I was going to the drugstore because my mother asked to fetch her some medication before I went to Nezhin.

Therefore, I most warmly said goodbye to Kuba the Sea Dog, although the lemon peels were not yet scraping along the bottom of the three-liter jar, and in the frying pan there still were glittering, here and there, spots of sunflower oil not wiped out dry with bread.

"No! No! I know! All's gonna be nyshtyak."

After the Under-Overpass, I boarded a streetcar to the center. I nicely got off it at the Department Store and went around its corner to the drugstore where, by my mother's lead, they sold the needed medicine.

Entering the glass door, I reached the glass partition and, to the question of the woman in white, breathed the air in, preparing to answer but suddenly realized that even if I could recollect the medication's name then pronouncing it, or anything else for that matter, was simply unfeasible. Regretfully, I turned around, exhaled and staggered out. Nonetheless, I somehow managed to cross Peace Square before getting aware that I was done in beyond all bounds and switching over to the guidance of my guardian angel.

He steered me into the yard of a five-story apartment block, chose the proper staircase-entrance and took care that I did not spill down the dark stairs in an unfamiliar basement. Then he led me along an endless cemented corridor to the place, where the scattered light from the opening to the outside pit outlined a mesh bed frame, leaned against the wall. It remained only to lower it to the floor and crash down upon it. The sheepskin coat and the hat served as a sleeping bag.

I woke up in a thoroughly stiff state, but still managed to be in time for the last local train to Nezhin.

The next weekend, I again volunteered to go to the drugstore after the medicine if my mother reminded me of its name, but she said, no, it was not necessary any longer...

There was a New Year dancing party held in the foyer of the New Building.

Eera and I were dancing there, and some teacher from the Biology Department could not keep back her delight and she announced to us that we were created for each other. It's nice to be complimented that way, moreover, by a specialist versed in species.

But soon after, my jeans' zipper blasted, and my sweater's length was not enough to hide the hole. So I tried to fasten the sweater hem to the jean's fly with the safety pin lent me by Slavik. However, it did not solve the issue, because the pinched down sweater resembled a leotard for girls, besides, I did not care to be pricked into one or another of my private parts if the pin burst too.

There remained no other option but go to the Hosty and change my jeans.

Normally, I didn't keep spare clothes in my room but changed in Konotop at weekends. Yet, that was a special occasion and I had brought my dapper jeans for dancing at the party. The incident made me change back into shabbier, but sturdier ones.

Upon returning to the foyer, I found Eera in eager conversation with some young buster. I did not like him right away, despite the fact that he turned some of her old acquaintances.

Probably, I couldn't hide my dislike towards him and the feeling became reciprocal. The confrontation did not go over to active hostilities, but the voice timbers acquired menacing pitch.

At some point, I got distracted from the jackass and caught a glimpse of Eera which deeply amazed me. She blossomed, she was happy! Never before I had ever seen so much joy in her eyes...

On the way to her home, she kept picking holes in my reaction to an absolutely normal situation, and I half-heartedly defended myself, busy with storing in my head the new discovery.

(...the highest bliss and most eagerly craved for moment in a female life arrives when two stag-males are going to clash their horns for her, the prize bitch.

That's it.

You vigorously toil like f-f..er..flustered Pygmalion absorbed so deeply in turning your piece of art into living flesh, panting, drowning in the perspiration of relentless efforts and to what end all that, eh?!.

O, fool! You're slavering for an idle jerk popping up down the road to lap up the goodies of creation that cost you so many pains!

No, it's anything but a fair play.

Where's the f-f..er..fundamental justice, eh?..)

The New Year Eera met at the Hosty.

Before her arrival, I served a romantic table for two, and then suddenly decided to prepare a surprise for her, or rather a New Year present...

Since my getting interested in the topic, it was insistingly driven in to me that the longer, the better. To wit, the duration of having it indicates the quality of action.

The human race invented quite a few tricks for gaining upswing in quality. The simplest one is to kill a glass or two, I mean the standard Russian glass of 250 ml.

However, stepping on that path you need the right snack. Prosper Merimé, for example, was advocating for soup of cock combs for this particular purpose. I did not even have lard though.

The circumstances called for seeking other means or workarounds.

My personal experience in the brute facts of life prompted that of two go-rounds the second having a sex was always longer. Thus, I had no other choice but having a proactive sex.

Very conveniently, Spotty was frisking about the hostel corridor, hither and thither, as if so too busy with her New Year Eve cares.

I skipped discussing the nature of my unexpected interest in her or clarifying that I needed her solely for technical assistance. Not that such frankness would hurt her in any way. The floozy had seen much more than I could imagine in the wildest dreams before she had to transfer to the Nezhin State Pedagogical Institute to avoid being sent down from the University of Kiev for grossly unleashed fucking and sucking.

Possibly, there were other reasons too, because she casually mentioned that her husband did not wear anything under his jeans at all. Well, I dunno, but for me, a common, timorous, unspoiled, lad from the Settlement, the like extravagances seemed way too deep...

The technical assistance was applied in a neutral, of course, room in an orogenital way, regrettably, to no avail. Maybe, because of her warning not to crumple her breasts, she did not have erogenous zones there at all.

And even considering the ringlets of her hair the color of raven's wing, and the glasses which she never took off, was of no help.

Still and all, what a subtle plan it was! What willingness for genuine self-sacrifice! Really, if you find a second to consider it attentively enough. Catering a blow job to Spotty, who had no idea of whereabouts of those f-f...er...fickle erogenous zones of hers. The knight-qualifying readiness for anything just to please your beloved! If it was not an irrefutable evidence of selfless love and tender care, I know of nothing else that could be...

Nevertheless, I did not disclose to Eera what namely I had to undergo endeavoring to make her feel good. Just because I never was in favor of flashing my positive aspects or ostentatious advertising my noble deeds...

Later on, that New Year night, when Eera and I sat up at the table again, wrapped in bedsheets like Romans in their togas, Spotty walked by the door opened to the corridor.

Out there, with gleeful vehemence, those who met the New Year in the hostel congratulated each other.

Spotty politely knocked on the door jamb, was invited to the table, treated to wine and allowed to ask Eera about her life circumstances.

Eera started to drive a fool to her, like, she was a married woman but her husband being a geologist seldom came home.

Having just recently moved from Kiev to Nezhin, Spotty believed anything driven to her which made us laugh immoderately.

The haughty, naive Romans in those loose togas, we were making fun of gullible Spotty without realizing that any jest was the truth which just needed some time to mature...

After the winter examination session, Eera and I went to Borzna for the wedding of her course-mate Vera to her solid groom in the rank of Major.

Unlike the wedding of my course-mate two years before in the same Borzna town, the celebration was not a khutta affair but took place in the large café-canteen on the main square of that district center, and lasted for two days.

After the first day, Eera and I spent the night in a small khutta among the snow-filled vegetable gardens on the outskirts.

The khutta owner, a distant relative of Vera, was told that Eera and I were a married couple, newlywed, and she, after having her fill at the wedding table, went to stay for the night at some other relative's, because her place was a single room with a whitewashed oven, a table, a chair, and a bed.

The bed stood by the wide windowsill with the sharply outlined black shadow of the lattice, lightened from outside by the full moon, whose beams set a-gleaming the glass walls in the empty three-liter jar, left on the same shadow-crossed sill.

I liked everything there, and the crusty earth floor made of firm, washed-down, clay, and the bed with boards in place of the mesh, and the hay-stuffed mattress...

It's highly unlikely that the mistress believed in our being a husband and wife because during the wedding feast I a couple of times caught her gaze, both encouraging and gruffly sneering, from behind the table where she sat among the elderly women in their Sunday best black padded jackets, or in black plush coats with thick plaid kerchiefs spread loosely over their shoulders...

We threw our clothes off on the chair and ascended to the matrimonial bed as it was a century and centuries before in those same khuttas lost among those same snowdrifts.

The moon reluctantly rose up above the window frame and could no longer follow the merrymaking couple of newlyweds, pressing hay at the alternate ends of the bed rooted in the earth floor of the unchanging khutta...

On the second day, Eera grew silly jealous when I was called out from the wedding hall by a local beauty. I did not really get it what's what as in the din of celebration Vera's brother, Mozart by his handle, shouted into my ear the unintelligible message.

Leaving the café-canteen, I went to the half-dark backyard where a beautiful, in general, girl was staging a pathetic hysteria on the trampled snow, pinioned by two girlfriends, all the trinity in light festive dresses.

A group of young spectators, who came out to air themselves, crowded by with exhortations to her and adviсes to the girls gripping her arms.

Without the slightest participation in the amateur show, I turned to leave and met the unforgiving stare of Eera. Back at the table, I had a hard time convincing her that I had nothing to do with the vagaries of tipsy mantrap.

I was supported by Valentina, a female of the most remarkable physique, who sat next to Eera. Farther on, there was seated an insignificant, on the background of her mighty forms, Armenian.

His Armenian identity was revealed when he was giving the three of us a ride through the early night.

On the street leading to the Moscow highway, the big Valentina told him to slow down, and left the Zhiguli to yell at Tolik, her fifth-grader son. The boy was replying to his mother in pure Ukrainian, and I felt somehow knocked out of a rut by the winter snow all around so sharply discordant to the boy's Negro face.

Later, Eera told me that Valentina had born Tolik after working as a waitress in Kiev, or maybe she found that job after the delivery, I'm not quite sure on that point.

Valentina's current life partner of an Armenian was not messing around with the instance of upbringing.

We rode along the highway, and after a couple of kilometers stopped on the roadside snow.

The driver turned on the tape-recorder and took out a bottle of foil-necked champagne.

(...the beauty of Armenian music does not open to listeners right away.

At that time it was still incomprehensible to me but I kept patient – he, who gives a ride, orders the music...)

A patrol car stopped on the road, and two militiamen in greatcoats and, despite the winter, forage caps approached the Zhiguli. The Armenian stepped out to negotiate and make it clear that everything was safely controlled.

In the meantime, Valentina started to resent that I and Eera were staying in a so shabby khutta, and undertook to bring her indignation to the bride's parents, who were some kind of her relatives.

As a result, the second night we spent in a large, well-equipped khutta in the well-to-do part of Borzna.

The moon could not peep into our room there, only a dim reflection of the moonlight made its way to us through the glazed door of the adjacent veranda.

The bed frame was way too creaky, so the mattress had to be thrown on the painted floorboards.

Not too bad, in general, but I liked it better in the shabby khutta...

We were taken to Nezhin by the Armenian. Along the way, I was, for some reason, thinking about Tolik, the Negro boy.

Catching sight of him, old women in Borzna were dropping their jaws and crossing themselves behind his back.

How does it feel being not like anyone else?

(...the grandfather of Pushkin was an unalloyed Ethiopian, but at least in his childhood, he saw normal people...)

When by the hostel we got out of the Zhiguli, the Armenian asked me to tarry a second, and after Eera went along, he inquired if I knew the address of the beauty with theatrical traits, he kinda heard she was at some college in Nezhin. I neither knew nor wanted to know it.

Eera and I went up to a vacant room on the third floor and after half-hour swaying and waving the more trained bed frame, she said she felt something she never had experienced before.

Well, and thank you! So it was not in vain, exerting myself all that year and a half.

Or was it that she just pitied me?.

As mentioned already, in February I went to the hospital for more than a week because of my devotion to principles.

After a week of treatment, my sister Natasha found me there. On the whole of Decemberists Street in Konotop, there was just one phone in the khutta at number 26. I did not know their number and even knowing it I would hardly call. One and a half weeks were not two years...

I left the wardroom and at the end of the corridor, we went one flight down the stairs leading to the basement. Natasha took out her filter cigarettes, I stuffed a blunt with a Belomor-Canal, and we mixed our smokes.

"Well, and how are you?" asked my sister after I reported about Pill going crazy.

"Well, and I also have Eera," said I, and started to convince my sister that Eera was not like everyone else, not at all.

"Well, well," replied Natasha indefinitely...

When I was discharged, I suddenly felt that the struggle for just cause strained me real hard. On the way to the hostel, I even had to untie the ear-flaps of my rabbit fur hat and let them loose.

Never before, even the most severe frost could make me do so, I only rubbed my ears against the turned-up collar of the sheepskin coat, and demanded from the saleswoman at the stand on the station platform to sell me a bottle of frostbitten beer and, despite her exhortations, drank it in small sips through the ring of ice growing more and more thick inside the bottle's neck.

And now?

You could hardly put your finger on anything more hazardous to your health than hospitals...

In spring at full swing, I was approached by Vitya from the Music-Pedagogical Department. That same student with the ancient Roman's curls of short blonde hair on his head, to whom in the first year of study I was lending my guitar, and who later gave me the key to the vacant room on the fifth floor. Now he came up with a request on behalf of his friend Volodya.

But why did Volodya not talk for himself? After all, we were together in the United Mus-Ped and Anlo-Fac CJI team and took the honorable third place out of the three available.

Well, he, like, was shy. In general, his wife got pregnant and now he had to give blood for the abortion, but he himself was still in the middle of the treatment; tripper, see?

Yeah, clear. Of course, I'd do it for him, no problem. It's they who gave the key to the love affair with Nadya.

A glass of blood is such a trifle in spring. And Nadya was worthy of much more than that...

Men's toilet on the third floor of the hostel, besides serving its direct purpose, was also forcing the student body to wake up from their amorphous hibernation. A mass interested in leaflets is not supine any longer.

However, the most ardent KGBists, with all their rats could not gain promotion on the ground of headlines cut out from the central press and mounted on glue in the toilet for all to see.

In Hosty's toilets, like in any, for that matter, other public toilets, cleanly folks never got seated on the seats but got perched instead, sitting on their haunches above the seats too dirty after all the previous squatters. In that, bird-like, attitude the visitor was inevitably facing their stall door from inside and that's where those cut-outs were placed without any conceivable order or insidious comments. Just so a haphazard collage, sort of. However, subjected to the close perusal of the stall-caged creature, those headings gradually acquired some bizarre connotations and warped innuendos giving rise to uncatchable hidden meaning that forced to consider them in a different light, not envisaged by the editorial staff of the party publishing organ.

While squatting over the bowl, you started to perceive another perspective in all those quite trite boring:

"Care of Party Has to Be Answered

Chain is Strong by its Links

Same 45 Minutes Over Again

Quality is the Priority

By Accelerated Schedule

No Amnesty to Bunglers

In the Name of Peace and Prosperity"

The force of, so to say, circumstances awoke your alertness.

And that toilet humor spilled from the stalls outreaching the tiled wall with two urinals in it...

As usual, I sped past the first of them proclaiming:

"Waters of North to Flow South"

and pulled up by the second adorned with two headings from different newspapers:

"Biathlon Sport for Courageous

Communism Our Aim"

I finished taking the leak and suddenly felt a strange burning sensation. Looking down, I watched as a strange murky drop crawled lazily out of the urethra slot.

I froze; what!?. No! It cannot be!

But no mute pleading could cancel the fact that three days before, because of the stupid confluence of circumstances, the moment they switched off the light in the hostel rooms, there was no one in mine, except for a four-year student whom I laid on the nearest bed.

It happened so quite mechanically; out of pure reflex. She had never turned me on, and—as said already—all that was just some stupid coincidence.

With her, I felt no more than the Lucy Mancini's partners from _The Godfather_ before she was operated on by Dr. Kennedy's surgeon friend. Like in a church bell...

Itching and burning did not cease; all the polygamy had to be canceled for an unspecified period.

Twoic advised me to consult with Dr. Grisha who ponderously shook his head, and admitted that several cases of gonorrhea infection had already been recorded in the hostel.

What f-f..er..flicking gonorrhea?

Yes. The symptoms were very similar, but to know for sure there was needed a laboratory analysis of the semen.

What the f-f.. freak! But I did not know how to do it, I had never masturbated in my life.

Dr. Grisha volunteered to help.

We locked ourselves in one of the rooms – he, I and Sveta, well, she was just in case, like, sort of auxiliary contingent.

From his large soft briefcase, Grisha angled a cork-sealed glass tube and handed it to me for collecting the material for analysis.

I dropped my jeans and underpants knee-deep and sat on a chair for the procedure at hand.

Grisha got seated on the bed opposite, Sveta took place next to him.

He began to drive my foreskin back and forth.

The three of us tensely stared at the stuck dick with Grisha's hand on it, blurred in rapid flicking up and down.

After a couple of minutes of the procedure, Grisha began to often swallow saliva and agitatedly announced that the penis was too dry and in need of moisture application.

I did appreciate Sveta's presence, a kinda restraint to his eager willingness to help. And I said that it's okay, never mind, now I knew the way and would try it myself, only I had to take the test tube with me, right?

I zipped up my jeans and, for a goodbye, Grisha gave me a patent medication, some Rifadin in capsules...

Mindful of Maria's promise to cure me in the case of S.T.D., I called her and she told me to come that evening.

When I explained to her that I had gonorrhea and needed to extract the semen for analysis, she opened the bed and started to undress.

I had to once again explain that I had gonorrhea, but she said it did not matter.

Then I also started to undress but warned that I would collect the semen into the test tube.

She agreed; probably, that her contraceptive coil protected not only from pregnancy but from gonorrhea as well.

So I put the test tube on the nightstand by the radio, and we started off...

Thais of Athens treated Alexander the Great with some medicine so that they could have sex all night long.

I cannot state that all that night with Maria I had an incessant erection.

After another and another of her regular "More! Mo-re!" we caught a breath before to proceed anew because I couldn't cum until the grayish dawn twilight stood behind the window curtains.

(Was such a delay effectuated by the presence of the waitingly uncorked test tube on the nightstand? I don't know, I am not an expert.)

In the broad morning light, I joined her usual "More! I want it! A!" with the grunts of my own, and jerked out.

"No! No!" screamed she. "Into me!"

But it was too late, the long-awaited-for moment of final convulsions the dickhead gifted to the rigid orifice of the test tube. With the sense of done duty, I cum into it and slammed shut.

Maria obviously did not like it, but so was the arrangement...

Perfectly happy with the success, I hurried to Dr. Grisha to proudly present the moisture jailed (with so much a-do) within the glass walls.

He took off his doctor's white smock, grabbed his large soft briefcase, and we left his office.

That briefcase could be observed in different places of Nezhin on that day, accompanied by the passionate roll of Dr. Grisha's buttocks on one side, and my gait of disturbed moose on the other. The test tube made the constant fourth to the company, keeping the still unchecked semen out of sight in the hip pocket of my jeans.

It seemed that Grisha wanted to help in earnest. Only the day turned out to be such that venereal dispensary did not work, in some laboratory someone left for somewhere else, in another they had run out of something and so on.

About two in the afternoon, our harmonious four (Grisha, briefcase, I and the tube) appeared for some reason at the station where we decided that it was enough because the symptoms matched all the same, without any further checking.

I dropped the test tube into the gray tubular garbage urn located by the large white bust of Lenin nearby the payphone booth in its thick red-and-yellow paint coat, halfway between the station and the high platform for local trains of Kiev destination.

Dumping the tube away was kinda pity, like, we were not complete strangers anymore after going together through all we had to since our first meeting, however, there was no good reason to carry it on any further...

I went to the Hosty and then returned to the station because the week was over and I needed to show up in Konotop so that my parents would not worry.

There were still ten minutes before the local train to Konotop and, all of a sudden, I was just pulled to pay a visit to the bust of Lenin.

What I saw there literally dumbfounded me. From the circular orifice of the gray urn, a thick bunch of green pliant shoots raised up with uncontrollable vigor.

I did not immediately get it that while I was away, they trimmed the bushes around the pedestal upholding the bust.

The local train arrived and, crossing over the platform to the car, I gave the urn one last and proud glance – bushes or no bushes but that f-f..er..frivolous semen was full of real pep, by Jove! Of course, if abstracting of certain minor details...

Except for imparting a very vivid color to my urine, the Rifadin from Grisha had no other straight or side effects. Thanks to the capsules, I pissed with gleeful scarlet and, overcoming itching and burning, cursed my stupid incontinence with Lucy Mancini.

Maria treacherously washed her hands of me, like, being offended that I preferred some glass tube to her natural vase...

I got cured by Eera. She simply led me to an elderly woman in the barracks-like children hospital.

The woman in white took me behind a screen in the corridor to hide from the looks of the queue.

I downed my pants a little, bent a bit forward, got the bite of a shot in my buttock, and...And that's all! Nothing more was required.

That's how the summer came...

How did I spend the summer? Like any other decent, diligent, hardworking guy.

First of all, I became a plant breeder.

Among the beds dug up at the end of the garden at 13 Decemberists, there started to grow and strengthen the vigorous shoots of cannabis the seeds for which were provided by the bushes looted from the neighbor.

Although applying the term "bushes" to the plants did not seem right. They looked more like sprouting seedlings of young trees. And those trees were growing like one united family, rushing upwards, turning into a dense thicket, which, of course, called for thinning out in the course of selection culling.

From the street, that coppice was not visible, screened by the fruit trees, but nothing could evade the attentive neighbors. The neighbor on the right asked my mother about the purpose of the cultivated crop.

My mother replied, that hemp produced a lot of seeds (such small, round, oily looking, beads) and at Bazaar the canary keepers were simply scrambling for that perfect food for their feathered singers...

Oh, the ingenuity of maternal love! I hardly could be as inventive to driving a fool of that kind!

Most likely, I'd give out some stuff about compresses and foot baths from varicose veins aggravated by salts deposition. And that would be a dangerous mistake because canary keeping was a rare sport in the Settlement when compared to the plenty of labor veterans with deteriorated health.

Is it too hard to imagine an honored vet with a loving teenager relative, who's ready to sacrifice half of his night repose and bring home a remedy to his Grandpa's ailing from a not too faraway plantation?.

Okay, let's drop spooking ourselves with nightmares...Anyway, excessive advertising sometimes might damage the growth of business.

And, by the by, the question was asked by the wife of the robbed neighbor who, in addition to his pension, had also the job of a watchman in the nearby Track Machine Station, aka PMS.

(...and it's not my unseemliness that the organization's name in Russian, when abbreviated, coincides with that of Premenstrual Syndrome...)

I did not have many scruples about expropriating his cannabis because after the raid there was left enough of it to keep him up till the following season.

(...it's only now, in retrospect, I think of a possibility that he might have had his clients with canaries...)

By that time, it was several years since my mother left the KEMZ Plant and got a job in the RepBase pre-assembly unit. I gather it, they were checking the availability of helicopter spare parts there.

Physically, her job was not exhausting and returning home after a day's work, she often shared news about what was going on in the collective comprising only females, except for the unit chief and his deputy.

At her workplace, her main task was to serve a kinda conflict-extinguisher, while at the lull periods she played compliments. That is, after telling someone another of her pleasantries she scored herself a point.

(...it calls for a good self-schooling and close self-control not to get stuck in the repetition of what had been already used to please...)

Sometimes the chief of their unit would shake his head and say, "That's a cunning she-Jew for you! Found again how to lick!"

And my mother joyously laughed in response, and she laughed at home retelling the compliment which brought her one more point...

My brother Sasha worked at the PMS in a team of repairers. They were in charge of replacing the ties in the railway tracks and ram the gravel beneath them with a massive dildo-type hand-vibrator.

He was the only worker there who had technical education in the field of railways...

Our sister Natasha, while there was no work for her, was taking my daughter Lenochka to the kindergarten and back...

At the request of my father at the personnel department of the RepBase, they gave me a temporary job, until the summer end at the construction shop floor there.

With three permanent workmen, I was demolishing and building some walls within the RepBase grounds. The most straining part at the job was long waits before they brought mortar for us to start our work.

There I earned a fig plus another fig and one more fig, but then the work was just to sit and sit, or stand up and stand on. Anyway, the RepBase was quite satisfied with my masonry.

Having nothing better to do, I again grew a beard and the RepBase workforce handled me "Fidel Castro".

My father liked it, maybe because he and Fidel were born in the same year.

When I ran out of the smoke, I went to beg from my father. He was a locksmith at the shop floor with strict regulations about smoking, which only was allowed in specially designated places, like an open gazebo in the yard...

My father was respected on the shop floor for his golden hands and readiness to share the know-how.

When coming across a bungler wasting both himself and the stuff to turn out a pitiful throwaway, you can quietly scoff to yourself and go away minding your business. Not so was my father's way, because of his intolerance to illiteracy.

With a painful wince in his face, he would stand by, like, observing some disgustful act of dicking around, then he'd come up, take the instrument from the dilettante's hands and show how to go about that particular task, "See? It's just a lead-pipe cinch, easier than boiling turnips!"

That's why he was respected, and they did not take offense at his grumpy muttering, "Really have to do it askew? So they taught you, eh?"

Many workers of the RepBase came there from the nearby village of Popovka, who never got trained in the "seminary".

Popovka had integrated with the RepBase so closely that in the village you could see fences made of helicopter blades; discarded, of course. But the blade wound up to the stake with a piece of wire looks ugly, and fixing it with a neat binding as suggested by uncle Kolya was completely another kettle of fish...

In the unpaneled half-khutta at 13 Decemberists, resided auntie Zina, a lonely pensioner.

She plaited her half-gray hair into stringy maiden braids and tied them together. On the porch at her door, for the most of the year, there also hung a yellow circular of dried onions plaited into a braid.

Auntie Zina did not interfere with the life of the yard and smiled at everyone.

Each spring, following the directive of our father, my brother and I turned the dirt in her part of the garden.

Once, she was very friendly with Olga, and secretly resented my role in our divorce, but she still kept smiling even at me...

There was enough living space in our brick-paneled half-khutta of three rooms and a kitchen plus veranda, apart from the summer room in the yard under one roof with the shed.

Among the inhabitants of all that area, only five-year-old Lenochka was not smoking.

The rest of us smoked Belomor-Canal for 22 kopecks, except for Natasha with her filtered Metropolitan for 40 kopecks.

She once counted up that the family total expenditure for cigarettes was 25 to 30 rubles monthly...

The summer was over and before my first departure for the fourth course at the English Department, my mother asked if I could bring and introduce to her my Eera from Nezhin.

She knew about Eera from Natasha's report and subsequent questioning of me. And she had even seen Eera on the all-out photograph taken at the Borzna wedding.

The picture was staged in the photo studio of the district center, where the guests and relatives of the newlyweds were standing in three rows on the long benches of descending height, behind the happy bride and groom on their chairs.

My mother asked me to show who from the multitude was Eera, and I answered, "Find for yourself."

In the picture, I stood in the upper row on the right, surrounded by three girls, and Eera was in the diagonally opposite corner.

My mother's finger touched her face, "That's her?"

I felt that she, for some reason, would rather be mistaken, but I couldn't lie to my mother. "How d'you guess?"

"I don't know."

(...the first prosaic work in Ukrainian was _The Witch of Konotop_ written by Kvitka-Osnovyanenko in 1833.

Ask whoever you choose "why?" and they will answer,

"I don't know."...)

Therefore, in September following the serene summer of 1977, the meeting of your mother and grandmother took place at 13, Decemberists Street...

Of course, I had been bringing Eera to Konotop even before that and introduced her to the high life of the polite circle in local society.

We visited the Loony, where because of demonstration gladiatorial performance staged on the parquet in honor of her visit, I even had, just in case, to block her off with myself nearby the stage.

Then Lyalka led us to his sidekick's who, in his treasure box made of a human skull, kept the high-quality Gimp's weed, named so after its meritorious producer.

The sidekick lived on the fourth floor with his cat, who he used to grab from time to time and hurl against anything at all. Not everyone tames their pet by kindhearted tenderness.

But at night, he sometimes woke up from the gentle touch of her fangs to his Adam's apple. She did not bite the skin through though, it served a kinda soft reminder who was the midnight commander in the place they shared...

When we were about to leave, Eera discovered the loss of her gloves. The sidekick swore he had not seen any.

Burning with shame, I began to speculate about the gloves being forgotten at Loony, but Lyalka insisted on continuing the search until they were found eventually, behind the floor mirror in the hallway. Them those cats are sometimes worse than the gang of forty thieves...

In the staircase, there was, naturally, no light, and I walked first, groping for the steps with my feet, and did not even hold onto the railing; like the brave tin soldier or the one-eyed leader in the gang of the blind from the "Eulenspiegel" movie, because in the pitch dark I had Eera's hand on my shoulder, and Lyalka was holding on hers. So we descended...

At that Eera's visit, we spent the night at Skully's, who had already become an Acceptee and lived in a fairly spacey khutta where two "Jawa" bikes stood in the garage – one for him and the other for his wife's younger brother.

Eera and I were left in a separate bedroom and, going out, Skully and his wife significantly hung a terry towel on the back of the bed.

When we lay down and from the "Spidola" receiver there sounded the introduction to my favorite "Since I'm loving you" by The Led Zeppelin, I realized that nothing better could be provided even by Las Vegas...

On another occasion, we even visited 13 Decemberists, in the daytime, naturally, when there was no one there.

After champagne and a doobie, we got in a deeply playful mood so that auntie Zina in her part of the khutta panicked, ran to our front door, and kicked up alarmed drumming at it.

Probably, the echoes of our frolics passed through the partition wall making her think of bloody murder in the canonical traditions of the post-war bandit period in the history of the city because it's highly unlikely that old innocent lady had any notion of hardcore scenes and stuff...

So, Eera met my brother and sister at the Loony dances, and she knew Lenochka unilaterally from the pictures shot at the photo session around Rabentus' dovecot, which I had pasted on the wallpaper over my bed in the Hosty...

Apart from Eera coming to Konotop to meet my parents, Slavik also was taken along.

He and my sister measured each other with guarded looks but skipped sniffing. And that was correct because I brought Slavik for another purpose – I needed him to be put on the alert.

(..."the most powerful force is the force of habit" or something like that was said by V. I. Lenin in one of his works in the 58-volume collection, and, quoting the colonel of counter-revolutionary Whites from the movie "Chapaev":

"Yes, here the Bolshevik leader is right."...)

Consider me, for instance.

I had got an ample plantation of cannabis to keep me lavishly up to the following season, even with generous largesses to those two tail-clinging bros – Slavik and Twoic.

On the other hand, I was in the habit of plundering other folks' plantations.

Who'll bite the dust – sound reason or deep-rooted habit? Make your bets, gentlemen!

(...it's sometimes hard to refute the truth in Leninist theses...)

And what else, apart from the habit, smashes up all of the chop-logic reasoning? What drives us on and further on? What pushes to the new, the unknown?

Hope – what if the luck would have it?.

Faith – but there should be, there is somewhere!.

And Love, of course, the love of knowledge and change...

All the summer going by streetcars along May Day Street, I watchfully kept track of the growth stages of cannabis in Buttuke's khutta yard, and I hoped, believed and dreamed – what if it was of the same nonpareil quality as the one which Rabentus shared with me for the deeper comprehension of the unforgettable lecture by Scnar?.

Once upon a time, Buttuke was the legend and role model for the youth not only in the Settlement but all over the city.

Everyone knew Buttuke who did not care a damn for the traffic-officers from State Auto Inspection, aka GAI, and all the militia in the bargain. They just couldn't catch up with him to fine for riding his bike without a helmet, wearing only his long windblown hair.

What? Drunken driving? You have to catch up and prove it, first!

Two patrols ambushed him in Zelenchuk Area but he made his "Jawa" leap between the poplars and shoot away along the headrail in the streetcar tracks. The word "biker" plodded to Konotop much later – we had Buttuke...

And suddenly thundered the news that shook the guys like the Tower of Babel – Buttuke died!

"Bullshit! Alive, but in the reanimation ward."

And the speed was a mere 60 kph, well, plus that of the counter-moving bus whose radiator Buttuke rammed with his head that chanced to have a helmet at the moment.

"Got it, guys? The helmet is a good idea, so they do not need to scratch your brains off the asphalt, the crap remains in the helmet neat and tidy."

Buttuke survived, only his mug remained checkered after the restoration.

They took the motorcycle from him together with the license, and never gave back. In indignant protest, he became bald and got some loader job. In short, Buttuke was no legend anymore.

However, he bought a scooter. He made eye candy of it – the windshield, rear-view mirrors, as well as all kinds of pendants dangling all around.

The saddle was covered with fleece, long and white. And (what was characteristic) he never rode his scooter without a helmet on his head. A regular biker helmet, and also white to match the fleece under his ass...

And now let's reflect on a natural situation – I go to bomb his grass and he suddenly pops out: how could I possibly guess what was still lingering under that white helmet of his?

So I brought Slavik too since there was enough of living space...

When it got dark the two of us went out.

"Once we went to do our job, me and Rabinovich..."

The moment we were leaving, Eera got very nervous and asked to lock her up in the summer room.

"What's the problem? Lock the door from inside."

"No! You do it."

Well, I locked the door from outside and gave the key back through the window because I did not know when we were going to return.

(...there's still a lot of things that I will never understand...)

When we returned, Eera checked the loot.

No! She did not even smoke cigarettes but could determine weed quality by simply sniffing at it. With the accuracy of up to 80 percent...

In general, the spoils from Buttuke were from the remaining 20 percent, I wouldn't grow such crap on my plantation...

Later in Nezhin, Slavik sniffed out one more cannabis growing spot next to the bridge across the Oster, near the bazaar square.

He brought me to the location and showed the lush beauties as if decorated with ostrich feathers of green. However, the property was surrounded by a tall fence.

I also do not like monotony, yet once again we went out in the dark because a habit is the most irresistible force...

So, I climbed over the fence and with the ghostly gait of a sneaking redskin approached the one-summer-old trees. The khutta stood aside and was not in the way with the light in only one window. Well, let the man watch his TV program, I did not mind.

No sooner I gently rustled the magnificent beauties than the ground started jumping in pulsating seismic tremors accompanied with a thunder-like clatter from the khutta direction, and the light from the window was eclipsed by the black silhouette of that galloping Dog of Baskervilles.

It took a wink for all that happened then and, actually, without my participation. The instinct, laid in our spinal cord by countless generations of gnawed to death and shredded ancestors, did the trick. I could only watch how the fence jumped to meet me, and my right pedal extremity kicked its top rail.

Somewhere unbelievably far below, by the narrow vein of the Oster river, shimmering in the darkness of the night, the already indistinguishable fence quaked with the ramming push of the wolfhound.

I left the upper layers of the stratosphere but, halfway to the moon, I realized that there was not enough air in my lungs for the return to my native planet. That's how I forsook becoming "Apollo 14"...

Slavik was saved only by the desperate spurt from the spot of my landing. Because among the ancestors, that formed our spinal cord, a lot of guys got squashed flat too...

The fourth course was not sent to a collective farm with patronage assistance, we had a month of school practice but this time in village schools.

Another difference to the school practice at the third course—finalized with a written comment from a respective city school teacher bubbling of what incredibly wonderful teachers we, the students she had been in charge of, were going to become in future—was that each group of trainees had an overseer from the English Department to assess our professional skills from the practice results.

An eye for an eye, so to speak, because we also evaluated them in the years of our study...

When we, the first-year students, were divided into study groups, Lidya Panova became the curator of mine.

She was a spinster and in unrequited love with Deputy Dean of the English Department, Alexander Bliznuke, who, in his turn, was in unrequited love with his beautiful young wife.

Taking advantage of his official position, Bliznuke employed his wife as a teacher at the English Department as soon as she graduated the Nezhin institute, but the ungrateful one soon jilted him and fled to someone else in Kiev.

Lydia Panova, with her hormonal mustache, thick glasses and equally thick makeup mask on her face, had no chances to lasso Bliznuke, although the girls of my group were pulling for her.

She lived in the five-story block for the institute teachers by the sports grounds in the Count's Park and whenever Bliznuke had an imprudence of walking under her balcony, she started talking to him in English, and the following day she was teaching us more enthusiastically.

The second group's curator was Nona Panchenko (not a relative to the famous boxer), she also was unmarried and wore glasses, but no cosmetic plaster, and looked much younger than Panova.

Once at some kind of voluntary Saturday work, Veerich wanted to treat her to a glass of wine. I played the errand-boy and approached her with it, like, would you have a sip of lemonade to quench the labor thirst?

She smiled at me with a pleasant smile and refused. Nona smiled pleasantly at everyone but wasn't lassoing anybody.

The curator of the third group wore glasses (again!) was a blonde and a perfect fool too (yes, monotony).

She mastered English within the limits of the textbook by Galperin for the first-year students and unconsciously loved Sasha Bryunchugin, the boy in the third group.

To that conclusion, I was led by her habit to take the floor at every general meeting of the English Department with a harangue in his address; like that Roman senator with his constant call to destroy Carthage.

A local boy from a well-to-do family, polite and ever-smiling, he two times a month attended classes. Who would ask for more?

She literally f-f..er..frustrated everyone with her crying in the wilderness.

As we already were on the fourth course at a meeting in the big Auditorium 4, she again took the floor to chew the same rag, "Admire, please! Bryunchugin's skipping even the general meeting!"

And then even the wind outside couldn't stand it anymore and slammed the tall windows, open on the occasion of spring and good weather. The panes got almost smashed out.

She ducked and forgot what there was further to be said of Carthage...

And at last, the curator without glasses, the curator of the not feminine gender, the curator of the fourth group was Roma Gurevitch.

He was also a Jew, as any other of all the Gurevitches I've ever met, or as that same Bliznuke, only older and balder. And he was always busy with something or talking to someone, completely involved and steaming with enthusiasm...

Once I had to retake a test on the subject he taught. The affair was to be settled in the Old Building, of course.

Making sure that he got out of the New Building in the right direction, I went to the Old Building and waited for his approach. Ten minutes later I grew worried and combed through the two hundred meters of the asphalt path between the Old and the New Buildings.

He had just reached the corner of the New Building, stopping every counter moving teacher for an animated discussion.

I returned to the position by the Old Building but this time got seated on a bench under the birches.

Twenty minutes later, he could be spotted by the big sad bust of Gogol. Good fellow, Roma! The half of the distance over! Do you have much of a choice when the teacher is late for the appointed retaking of the test you failed at the first go?

It took Roma sixty-two minutes to get over that f-f..er..flimsy two hundred meters, but I'm sure that was not the limit of his knack for loitering.

For that, I bestowed him with the handle "ebullient slacker". His official appellation contrôlée was "Roma-Phonetist" though because he was distinguished against all the other teachers at the English Department by the purest pronunciation of the sound "th".

It was he who read the texts about the Parkers family on the tape-recorder for the students to parrot them in the booths of the Language Laboratory. No wonder he was referred to as "Phonetist"...

Besides the Phonetics, we were taught lots of other subjects, different and necessary.

Take, for example, the Comparative Lexicosemantosurdographosemasiology – your tongue would go to pieces before you manage to pass the exam.

That Comparative Lexi...well, whatever...ology was learned under a hereditary teacher.

The dynasty broke off at her because she was a retired virgin and chastely buttoned her teacher's raincoat with a huge safety pin up to her very throat.

She was an irreplaceable pensioner because it was her, who wrote the textbook on the subject. A skinny paperback pamphlet from the institute printing house with the smeared typeface authored by...well, it's embarrassing...the name was such...with some whistling sound in it...or maybe hissing?. Anyway, her name was shorter than that of the subject.

Yes, I remembered! Shakhrai she was! (And it's not a handle, faith! Some Ukrainian last names do make you think before you jump.)

If during her lectures she allowed herself too much, sort of, walking along the aisle between long desk rows, say, how do they stick down my comparatively smeared pearls into their notebooks? – there was nothing easier than putting her in her proper place.

Undo your shirt on the chest, two or three buttons, and stroke wistfully and gently your hair on the solar plexus. That's all.

The hissing wanderings got safely blocked and till the break bell, she would be sitting at the teacher desk like a nice little girl, staring at her plan of the lecture which she knew by heart. I do adore virgins.

Zhomnir once said that after even the briefest talk with her, he got an itching desire to take a bath. Well, tastes differ.

I do not remember if I took a shower after the exam on that most Comparative – well, how-d'you-call-it – at which I also had to scratch my chest...

And all those were our specialization subjects, apart from general ones lectured by teachers from other faculties and departments. And each lecturer fancied themselves a Don Corleone extorting due respect, like, he or she made me an offer I couldn't refuse and returning to the student hostel I would immediately plunge into the study of their subject. Yeah, as soon as I'm back to the Hosty!

The only one who evoked sympathy in me was Samorodnitsky, for some of the philosophies because he lit a cigarette at his exam. Openly so, imposingly, and, with all that, in a good manner – he took from his briefcase an ashtray with a lid and shook the cigarette ash off into it.

To that examination, I came from the Hosty and started driving some kind of a fool improvising from a lamppost, possibly from some different philosophy. But he suddenly got interested, sat upright, and put me four.

He said that I needed to change the Department, and he would see to it, but soon after he emigrated to Israel...

So, I was practicing at the school of the sugar factory at the station of Nosovka (twenty minutes by a local train from Nezhin in the Kiev direction) and Zhomnir was in charge of our group of trainees.

Early in the morning, we went there from the high platform of the Nezhin station – a team of ten students from different groups and Zhomnir in his teacher's raincoat and dark blue beret, gripping his briefcase with cave-in sides.

(...everyone dresses according to their role model.

Beret, raincoat, briefcase – read "teacher".

Can you imagine a plumber in such an outfit?

That's what I mean...)

Before the practice, my mother sewed me a jacket. It looked like a geologist anti-encephalitis jacket but from a thick tarpaulin of green color. I liked it, especially the color of so a Robin-Hoodish hue...

The most vivid impression from the practice was left by the football match between the sugar factory team and that from the locomotive depot of the Fastov station. The game in the championship for the Cup of the Trade-Union Committee of the South-Western Railway took place on the school football field.

I went out of the school building for a break between the classes and got stuck.

It was a warm and sunny September day. On the green grass of the field, some twenty men were chasing a single ball, and a separate mujik chased after them all and whistled with shrill trills. The crowds of fans were represented by, firstly, a frowning man in black overalls and, secondly, me.

I started the count with him because he was the first to stand by the field edge, and he was a more intent watcher – it took me a while to go under the trees behind one of the goals for to stuff a blunt. On coming back, I left a respectful distance between me and the other fan not to tease his sense of smell with vain hopes or odd reminiscences. I just stood and enjoyed the championship match.

A sharp sting in the neck threw me from high. I recoiled, slapped the wasp and, jerking around, I saw Igor Recoon sneaking up from behind with a guileful grin.

I hid neither the blunt nor the smoke, "Igor, when you have any questions come up openly and speak easy."

He effaced the smile and said, no, he was just so, and then hurried to the school where sounded the long bell for classes.

A young errand-boy arrived on his bicycle with a bag-load of doping for the local geezers in the field. They jogged, and gulped, and passed the bottles to each other to furiously rush to attack.

The right halfback of the visiting team passed the ball to the central forward, who went to the corner of the penalty and with a slight but accurate blow rolled the ball into the bottom left corner of the goal. "Goal!" shouted the striker together with the rest of his team.

"No!" roared the local geezers.

Jogging back to his half of the field, the striker came across a wall of three locals. "No goal!" they howled at him.

"As if I argue," answered he bypassing their line, though unable to suppress his contented smile.

There was no way to prove anything because the goal had not any mesh and the referee at the goal moment was looking up in the sky together with the bottom of the bottle handed to him by a local footballer.

I approached the first half of the match-watchers, and put a direct question, "So was it a goal or what?"

The mujik in overalls surly nodded. I rejoiced that the truth, even though mutely, was still present in this world, at least among the working class.

The match for the Cup of Trade-Union of the South-Western Railway ended in a draw, 0:0...

Zhomnir warned that as Head of the Practice, he couldn't put me more than "three" for the chronic absence of the written lesson plans by me.

And I couldn't even force myself to at least copy those f-f..er..fanciful plans from Igor, I was physically unable lining dolls in a row on the piano lid.

I asked Zhomnir not to worry and put whatever mark he could. I really did not give a f-f..er.. I found it meaningless, I mean.

When on the third floor of the Old Building the four-year students' practice results were fixed next to the Time-Table, I was the one and only having "three".

Zhomnir alarmed and started to convince Deaness of the English Department that it was wrong, and he could not have imagined I was so unique. She impregnably advised looking before jumping.

The current Deaness always tried to look like Alice Freindlich from "The Office Affair" movie, only that no Myagkov turned up for her, and she became a flinty bureaucrat.

Yet, in her cupboard, she kept a skeleton of the divorce on the grounds of sexual incompatibility, because the girls from the English Department did not leak unverified information.

Okay, enough is enough, that'll do for the strangers of all kinds...and now enters...you!.

Your personal conception took place on the fourth floor in the Hosty.

That particular date Eera arranged herself since it was a room of Phys-Math girls and among the students of the Physics and Math Department I knew only that pair of cooks from the student construction platoon after the second course, but they lived in the city.

Shortly before the event, I once again fell in love with Eera, but, at first, I did put the end to my polygamy.

And could it be otherwise? To Eera alone I owed that salvage shot from gonorrhea.

So, on arrival in Nezhin for the final academic year, I became straight and reasonable. And I dryly informed Sveta of my reformation when she attempted at the former familiarity. We became just a nodding acquaintance and vague recollections to each other.

And I also returned Maria the book borrowed from her several months ago. Though, I chose a late hour for nullifying that bifurcation.

She opened her door to the staircase landing, in the unbuttoned robe over her nightgown.

If we assume the possibility of time shifts, then at that moment it easily could be I in her bed awaiting when she'd sent away that dork outside.

I did not develop this theory but simply handed the book in, thanked, and left...

And since then my love belonged only to Eera; absolutely undivided, especially after the mentioned falling in love with her once again.

At a chance meeting on the third floor of the Old Building in the wing occupied by the Philological Department, I persuaded Eera to skip a class and, after the bell shut up, we sneaked along the wide empty corridor to the side staircase.

There, we did not go down the stairs but followed the ascending flights, although the building had no fourth floor, and the last flight was blocked by a partition with the locked door to the attic.

We stopped in the middle of that flight and kissed.

(...her classic breasts under the river algae shade of green in the knitted sweater to match her mermaid-style haircut, the silk skirt on the strong hips swelling the sketchy outlines of white abstract bunches on the black background, tailored by Maria Antonovna, Lyalka's mother, high wedge Austrian boots, her eyes slant all too slightly, the slender white Lorraine cross of the tall window frame behind her back, with the azure blue of the sky in its panes, the foamy white splash of dove's wings on the other side of that cross – all that and everything else merged into the picture that I will see and remember all my life...)

But having memories alone was not enough for me, I wanted to keep all that to me or to stay myself within that desperately inexpressible beauty.

The kisses were to no avail, they couldn't stop the moment. So all that there remained for me to do was to fall in love...

In the evening, on the stairs in the Hosty, Eera passed me the key to the room of the Phys-Math students, so that I went first to open it and she would come a minute later to keep the rules of secrecy.

We did not turn on the light. The bed stood by the window overlooking the Oster banks invisible in the darkness.

With Eera, the burden of protection lay on me, that is, getting out in time to avoid abortion was my responsibility.

But on that particular evening...a bit more!..I'm in control!..more!..just a sec...y-u!..out of the blue!..too late...the train's left...

You were on that train, in the crowd of all-alike fellow-travelers, only you turned out to be a little bit nimbler...

Well, and then – a smooth transition to already worked out technology: as a man of noble spirit, I had to marry.

More so, that I would not survive another Eera's report on abortion under general anesthesia...

When Eera was still a schoolgirl, she found a ring on the bridge over the Oster; a casual ring of those that they sell at stalls of fake jewelry. Eera brought it home and her mother, Gaina Mikhailovna, got sad and distressed but she said nothing to her daughter...

Was Eera's marriage with the divorced me a misalliance? Undoubtedly and undeniably. Even a brief matching of the would-be newlyweds' parental pairs against each other would prove it to the hilt:

a spare parts checker at the RepBase vs. a teacher of German language at the Nezhin State Pedagogical Institute of Order of the Labour Red Banner named after Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol;.

a locksmith at the RapBase vs. the Deputy Director of the Nezhin Bakery Plant.

However, the factor of your presence, even though not born yet mitigated the caste prejudices, which, by the way, had long since been abolished by the Soviet system.

Still and all, even in the era of the developed socialism in our country, throughout our pre-wedding trip to Kiev, I had my anus impaled on the stake, like, admonishment for a cheeky pariah.

Kiev was needed to exchange the coupons from Nezhin ZAGS for goods in the metropolitan bridal salons. Although the stamp on divorce in my passport nullified any discounts for a wedding ring for me, yet my sister Natasha promised to lend me the neat gold ring that she wore, for some reason, on her thumb.

As for the stake, it was not seen from outside, but caused staggering painful pangs inside, turning my gait into dragging shuffles of a semi-paralytic old man, or that of a young Cossack raider, who was removed from the said impalement stake after a slightly belated amnesty. "Mercy, Cossack-brothers! Finish me off!"

Poor Eera! Would any girl in her dearest girlish dreams ever dream of such a companion to a bridal salon?

Never! By no means! No and no, over again!

To me, the hellish torture suffered on that trip served the palpable reminder of the truth from Heraclitus: never enter the same river, for your ass' safety sake! Alas! The wisdom of the previous generations does not make us wiser until (quoting the famous letter of Ukrainian Cossacks to the Sultan of Turkey) we get seated on a hedgehog with our stark naked ass.

Nevertheless, in Kiev, the bride got rigged for the impending happy occasion, and I bought brown shoes made by the Dutch company "Topman".

The footwear was a bit too loose, but the realities of the era of deficits taught us grabbing any chance bird at hand, and a month later the shoes become a fitting hand-me-down to my father-in-law. That's for whose sake I was dragging that stake!.

Soon, I felt better and we started looking for a suit to dress the groom.

We combed through the department stores of major railway stations between Nezhin and Kiev: Nosovka, Kobyzhchi, Bobrovitsa – to no avail. The suit was hunted down only in Chernigov, far from the electrified railroads, and it imparted quite a decent look to me.

A week before the wedding, I left the hostel and moved to the three-room apartment of Eera's parents...

The eldest of their four children, Igor, was a Major of some sophisticated troops stationed in the city of Kiev.

Victoria, their next child, lived in Chernigov and worked in the city museum there.

Then came Tonya, who graduated the NGPI and was sent to teach the Russian language and literature to kiddies in a Transcarpathian village, until a local boy, Ivan, whose courting in a simple and unpretentious style of a Bandera-man kindled reciprocative feelings in her.

Unable to overcome the language barrier, one day he knocked on the door of the young teacher, and when it opened his shotgun was mutely pointed at her chest. Like, be mine or nobody's else.

Ivan's brothers were in time to disarm him, but the depth of feelings in the romantic lover impressed Tonya, which attitude gave her a chance to survive among the superb views of the Transcarpathian nature.

She married him, gave birth to a pair of lovely children, returned to Nezhin, and together with her entire young family lived in one of the narrow bedrooms in the three-room apartment of her parents.

For their night rest, the parents enjoyed the folding coach-bed by the wall in the living room serving a passage to both bedrooms. It was a blind wall opposite the wide window behind a tulle curtain separating the windowsill with a couple of flowerpots from the abutting table with the TV box on its top.

The curtain also hid the backs of the chairs squeezed in between the table and the windowsill so that the chairs pushed under the tabletop would not take up space until needed.

The chairs were from one set with the table which, if you removed off its top the electric iron, a messy pile of central newspapers, the TV, and the oilcloth, it could be folded out for a celebration feast.

When there was no festivity, those chairs from the set that found no place under the folded-back table were put in the corners of the living room, draped with the clothes for household wear and keeping heaps of those same newspapers, and all sorts of whatnots dumped upon their seats to keep them out of the way for a minute or two and forgotten there for a couple of months.

In the living room, there also stood a wardrobe with a big mirror in its door, and a varnished hutch with the front of sliding glass-sheets protecting from the dust two shelves of dishes.

Upon the hutch, there stood, leaning its frame against the wallpaper, a repro of "The Unknown Beauty" by Kramskoy observing scornfully from under her ostrich feather the rubbish collection around her, including the "The Major's Matchmaking" repro fixed on the opposite wall.

There was no balcony in the apartment, thanks to its being situated on the first floor, but there was a boxroom niche in the tiny passage between the living room and the bedroom filled up with Tonya's family.

Eera and I were placed in the second, narrower, bedroom with a large plywood chiffonier from the times of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and a veteran pier glass on a small table between the door and the windowsill.

Along the wall with the carpet of almost the same pattern as in my parents', there stood the hand-me-down conjugal double bed for the soon-to-be newlyweds.

It remained only to get married...

In the evening before the bridal, Gaina Mikhailovna offered her services for ironing the trousers of my wedding suit, which task, in her opinion, she could do virtuously because in the years of the German occupation she, a young girl Gaina, was taken from a hinterland Ukrainian village and moved to Germany to work for more than two years as a "guest-worker" in a well-to-do German family, which resulted in her mastering of the above-mentioned art...

Strange are the shuffle-and-deal ways of the knowledge deck, but it was how I learned that

Pants Are To Be Ironed On All Four Sides.

I clearly understood the rule and firmly kept to it all my life, but at that particular moment the unconquered spirit of a young pioneer partisan awoke in me, and I rejected the offer of my the-next-day-to-be mother-in-law. Like, it was not the first time for me to iron trousers through a piece of moistened gauze.

With the ironing accomplished, I hung the trousers over the back of a chair in the living room and went to bed.

In the morning I was awakened by Eera's sobs. Going out to the living room, I traced back the silent sullen glare of Gaina Mikhailovna to see an undeniably hot iron print on one of the trouser-legs hanging accurately from the back of the chair.

Poor Eera!

The burnt spot, albeit blurred and lacking the clear-cut outline, discernibly changed the smoky shade of dark gray in the trousers' fabric to something greenish. I could swear that nothing of the kind was there the night before, but the spot sat on one of the two sides I had applied the iron to.

It cost me heaps of efforts to persuade Eera not to cancel going to the ZAGS office – we had pulled through too much of everything to make a U-turn at the last moment. I swore with the most solemn oath to hide the damaged part of my outfit into the folds of her long wedding dress.

Do brides have always to cry before the wedding? Poor Eera!

Then there was a very long wait at the registry office, because of the witness on the groom side, Slavik, that bitch of my best man, appeared only after my brother Sasha scribbled Slavik's name instead of him. The good news that they did not check witness' passports in ZAGS.

Yes, my brother and sister came from Konotop for the wedding and departed on the same day by the 17.15 local train.

And, at last, in all of its glory arrived the dazzle of the breath-taking moment in the nuptials – the happy couple were suggested to exchange the wedding rings in a token of spousal love and loyalty.

Softly glided the ring on the Eera's incomparable finger – the yellow of the gold over the alabaster white skin.

And now, already not as a bride, but the accomplished wife, picked she my wedding ring from the white saucer to don it on my finger. On slid the ring, in moved my finger...my finger moved in...my f-f...finger moved...

Why that bitch of the ring from Natasha got stuck on my finger joint, I had no idea because at the preliminary tests it, like, was getting over.

Under my breath, I promised my young wife that, okay, I'll stick it in later, and balled my hand into a fist to hide the under-donned ring.

"The wedding ring is not a frill... Oh, no!.

Not an empty decoration..."

Poor Eera!

But what else could she do? The incipient maternal instinct balked at having to bear you without a daddy...

The recollections of my meetings with the KGBist in the ZAGS room as well as the awareness of the iron print on my pants' leg made me keep my eyes ashamedly down, however, my brother Sasha on the pictures taken at the registry office looked very well, as a young Sicilian mafioso...

According to the long-established Nezhin tradition, the newlyweds together with their witnesses (Slavik had already replaced Sasha) took a ride in a taxi.

The taxi drove to the station to honk in the square in front of it (the traffic bridge over the railway tracks had been already completed) and proceeded to the city boundary along the highway to Pryluki, where a bottle of champagne was burst open, after which we returned to 26, Red Partisans Street, Apartment 11.

The wedding party was a modest one – for the closest family inhabiting the apartment, plus the two best persons.

The TV was temporarily exiled into the corner, the table spread out and covered with feasting treats and snacks, mostly of salad Olivier which Gaina Mikhailovna had chopped so finely and profusely, filling, in the preparation, half of an enamel washing basin.

And the drinks were fabulous too. Like those in the traditional refrain of the final lines by the Russian fairy tales, "And I was at that wedding and drank the mead and beer...", subtracting "the mead", of course.

Gaina Mikhailovna, like any other properly erudite woman, had long ago gained the upper hand over her husband, bent him to her will and twisted around her little finger, using for the purpose the panicky fear of males at the prospect of cuckoldry.

(...fall in with what your dear wife tells you, and be happy with two glasses of beer on a celebration day if you wanna miss yet that proud decoration of stags...)

Hence that beer on the wedding table.

Tonya and Ivan took turns looking after their baby daughter in the bedroom, and their three-year-old Igor was also sitting at the table.

Then the baby was brought to the living room, and the newlyweds together with their best persons replaced her in the bedroom which, although narrow as it was, let the four of them dance under a tape recorder borrowed from the hostel...

When Eera and I retired to our bedroom for the nuptial first night, I turned on the transistor radio on the table under the pier mirror.

The nocturnal sconce on the whitewashed wall at the foot of the bed created a flickering red twilight, like a feeble torch in a medieval castle.

The blanket was too thick and hot, and we threw it back, twining in the already legalized conjugal embraces. We were going on real groovy when the door to the bedroom flung open, and my father-in-law stepped in to turn the radio off.

Surprised, I did not hide my nakedness, and only ceased the action. Eera also froze sitting.

In the mute twinkling of the torch from the niche formed by the chiffonier in the corner, Ivan Alexeyevich, without ever looking up, left the bedroom.

The prince of the three-room castle.

How could I know it was too loud? He could just call out from their folding coach-bed.

Okay, let's have another take...

Three following days all the meals were of salad Olivier, but half of it went stale all the same.

And who would doubt? No way to finish off such a heap without drinking.

That's how, in outline, people get united in misalliance marriages...

On the whole, I liked my father-in-law, and I forgave him the absence of a minimal kit of normal tools on the shelves in the boxroom niche, as well as his distrust in my ability to repair the electric iron relic of the Stalinist epoch.

Besides, when the three-year-old world-explorer Igor pulled a handful of cannabis seeds from the hip pocket of my jeans left in the bedroom and scattered the find on a stool in the kitchen, my father-in-law did not aggravate the exposure with unnecessary questions though, in his position at the Nezhin Bakery Plant, he understood the varieties of grain...

The son of a Bryansk mujik, he, as an 18-year-old recruit Ivan, got caught into the "Kharkov Meat Grinder", where the German Wehrmacht, waking up after the defeat near Moscow, proved that they knew their business by crushing several Soviet armies.

Stunned by the power and shocked with the spectacle of the artillery mass execution, Ivan, in the endless crowds of tens of thousands of other survivors, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

At that time there was a tacit, unspoken of, agreement between the warring parties to reimburse each other through banks in neutral countries for the cost of keeping prisoners of war.

And only the country of the Soviets remained aloof from that arrangement since every captured Red Army soldier was unquestionably considered a traitor to the Soviet Homeland.

Hence the difference in the havvage for POWs of different nations.

To feed the prisoners from the Red Army at least somehow, occasional freight trains brought to the camps agricultural products looted from the occupied Soviet territories.

Among other food brought to Ivan's camp by such an echelon, there were several sacks of sunflower seeds.

The Germans guards could not guess the purpose of the arrived product not described in any cookbook. When the prisoners demonstrated how to use those seeds, rational Germans were still unable to understand that the final result (chewing of a scanty grain) was not as important as the process itself – gnawing and secreting the anticipatory saliva.

So those sacks just lay around, irrationally cluttering the storage room, until one of the guards figured out how to use the seeds. He organized a sports event: a 100-meter race for a packet of seeds as the award to the winner.

Under the scream-and-shout of the guard-fans, the young and tall, although as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, Ivan ran first and received his prize. In the second race, he again was out of reach, but the guard said that he had enough already, and gave the seeds to the second to come.

My father-in-law took offense and ceased to take part in the subsequent competitions, but he told me that those seeds were the most delicious in his life...

Sometimes the prisoners of war ran for 100 meters, sometimes they ran away from the camp. Then they were invariably caught, brought back and executed in front of all the other prisoners, which did not prevent the following attempts at escape.

And that is quite natural because sometimes you feel that you don't care anymore and fuck it all.

When such a moment rolled up to Ivan, he, taking into consideration the experience of previous fugitives, did not go east but turned west and, therefore, got to France.

For about one year a French farmer family hid him in a barn from German patrols, and when the coast was clear, he helped with the work at the farm.

Once the three-year-old son of the farmer, not speaking yet any language, warned him with his gestures about the unexpected arrival of a patrol...

Then the Americans started up the Western front and liberated him. And they moved farther and farther until they brought freedom to the Ukrainian girl Gaina from her unpaid work for a well-to-do German family...

When Stalin demanded from his allies to return all the Soviet citizens freed from German captivity, the Americans did not argue.

Ivan and Gaina, among many other sons and daughters of the Soviet land, were brought to a French port city, where, by the way, they met each other, and were taken to Leningrad by a steamboat.

The fate favored them because the overwhelming majority of the Soviet war prisoners were taken to the East by trains. On the border with the USSR, where the railway track gauge gets different, they were walked to the awaiting echelons of freight cars and brought, over the vast expanses of our Homeland, to the camps of Gulag in Siberia and the Far North.

What for? Just in case. So that their memories of what they had seen in German captivity would not spoil the picture carefully engineered in the brainwashed minds and collective memory of the Soviet people.

"Nothing is forgotten, nor anyone..."

Provided that the unforgotten matter had undergone retouching corrections by the censorship.

Even I, a chump brought up on vivid examples from Soviet literature and cinema masterpieces, lost plenty of stereotypes when I got accidentally exposed to my mother-in-law's talking on the phone to her friend, who also passed the inferno of the German captivity.

"...and do you remember how on February 23 we bought champagne and went to congratulate our pilots?.."

Ta-dah! It turned out that on the Day of Soviet Army and Navy not only secret agent Stirlitz was drinking alcohol in fascist Germany, but the captured Soviet aces as well...

In Leningrad, Ivan and Gaina arranged for their marriage and directly enlisted to work in one of the Soviet Central Asian republics.

That was a wise move. The subsequent purges and combing for former prisoners of war, and other citizens who had seen a non-Soviet way of life, did not reach them out there.

In the Soviet camps, they would not have to eat sunflower seeds. Our camp system, aka Zona, is the most human in the world and it does not protract your sufferings with humiliating prizes for sports achievements...

After the central press announced the elimination of the consequences of the cult of Stalin's personality, they moved to Ukraine and settled in the countryside, just in case, and from there they rose to Nezhin.

(...once my father tried to explain to me that the progress of life is going on in a spiral.

I did not understand him, even though his index finger drew circles in the air to assist the grasping...

The fate of Ivan Alexeyevich can serve as an argument in favor of that theory.

In our life, we walk in a circle of the same events, but they, because of the spiral-like proceeding of life, acquire new aspects and details, so we don't recognize them when they are repeating themselves, we just move by and on, and farther.

I do not know whether my father-in-law had ever been drawing any parallels between the seeds he won in the 100-meter dash and his position at the Nezhin Bakery Plant. In both cases, it's grain disposal.

But then, what would he need such a geometry for?.)

In the fourth year of study I became an almost exemplary student, my classes attendance increased enormously. I couldn't stay in the apartment when Eera went to the institute.

At the lectures, I submerged into the endless story of Joseph and his brothers; it became deeper and more palpable, sort of a bass-relief of tranquil streamflow, in the wake of a blunt smoked in the restroom during the break.

Under the prolonged sounding of the final bell, I went down to the side hall on the first floor filled with the students' coats on pegs along its walls and helped Eera into hers.

Then among the strident hullabaloo of donning students, I looked for a tiny piece of white fuzz on my coat, and took it off; only after that inspection, I put my coat on and we went home.

That white thread of arachnid yarn appeared on the gray fabric of my coat each time after I had a blunt at the educational institution. Yes, in place of the sheepskin coat I wore a demi-saison camel coat, bought from Alyosha Ocheret when he was in his final year.

I did not share my discovery of the fluff phenomenon with anyone, but for myself dubbed it "God's marking a rascal".

Sometimes, to check it experimentally, I refrained from a blunt at the break, and then the fluffy piece did not appear. That's why, before putting my coat on, I checked it searching for the white mark. It never skipped its duty...

My love for Eera grew ever deeper. Sometimes she asked me not to gaze at her so steadily, especially in public, but I still hoped to stop the fluid moment.

"He gazed at her like a dog at a crystal vase..."

Occasionally, we visited the hostel for a pool at Preferans. Because of Eera being in the family way, we did not smoke while playing; only Twoic at times, with an air of a schooled hussar cadet, asked her for kind permission and smoked to the envy of me and Slavik.

And Eera, sitting with absent air on a bed by the window, would finely cut with scissors a Belomor-Canal cigarette taken from me.

She did not make a secret of her pregnancy, and still in the second month ordered from Lyalka's mother an elegant spacious sarafan made of brown broadcloth.

Once, already in the spring, she left the hostel first, while I was tarrying in the lobby with Twoic.

When I went out on the porch, Eera stood near the corner of the building in a quarrel with a student of the Biology Department drooping from a window on the second floor.

Unfit to grasp the meaning of the sarafan, the dunce of a sophomore tried to pick up an unknown beauty. I demanded of him an apology to the lady but received an insolent refusal.

While I was climbing up the staircase, Twoic joined me but there were three more guys in the room.

There followed a muddled battle with varying success and steady reinforcements to the inmates arriving from the neighboring rooms.

I recollect a moment in the scrimmage with me standing on someone's bed while one of the opponents kept his stupid mug in front of my shoe toes begging for a kick, but I restrained myself because he wanted it too much.

Pretty soon, I was overpowered and leveled with the floor, immobilized with the weight of three adversaries, yet hearing that somewhere in the corner, Twoic was still fending off the outnumbering enemy forces.

And then the door flew open – Eera stood on the threshold with a wooden ruler in her hands and issued a shrill cry, "I'll stab them all!"

I was so impressed by the absurdity of the situation—Eera's pirate warcry, combined with that unknown ruler in her hands, and you in her belly—that I laughed.

All the present followed my example.

It is not possible to fight in earnest with whom you've laughed along right now. I was helped to get up and we left...

Being unfit to immobilize the flowing moment, I had to change priorities. My task became to protect her; protect from the babel turmoil in the crowd of students putting their coats on; from the insidious viper bites of her begrudging bosom girlfriends with their snaky forked tongues, "Hi! You do look ugly today!"

To guard against her fears of the things to come – they said, the paramedic Kerdun in the maternity hospital was so cruel, every woman in labor was complaining of her afterward.

And protect from so incomprehensible but negative Rh factor in Eera herself...

Protecting from all the world, ready to attack at any moment from where you do not expect, calls for being alert; so, I kept low and was on a constant look-out. That position led to my alienation from the hostel, from the course-mates, from the institute.

Only with Zhomnir I still kept in touch. He was the scientific supervisor to my term work The Means of Irony in 'The Judgement Seat' Story by W. S. Maugham.

Besides, I needed him as a means to fence off some place for me with Eera in this hostile world. He promised to take my translations for a "matchmaking" at one of the publishing houses in Kiev, where he had connections. But it had to be a collection of 20 to 25 stories in Ukrainian.

I kept visiting his place, and he was saying in jest that his wife, Maria Antonovna, fell in love with me.

The two of them lived in a three-room apartment on the fifth floor, in one of the apartment blocks along Shevchenko Street, because their children had already come of age and separated.

The sons moved to Russia, and the daughter lived in Nezhin at her husband's.

The Zhomnirs used only two rooms for living, the third one Alexander Vasilyevich turned into an archival study furnished with a desk, a chair, and stacks of mighty shelves made of long thick boards up to the ceiling, filled with a welter of cardboard folders, books, magazines, and paper sheets, and all that splashed out and piled in heaps even on the sill of the curtain-less window, the only one in the room.

I liked it. And I also liked Eera's story about the inhumanity of Zhomnir.

His family lived then in the same five-story block with Eera's parents, and at renovating their apartment he divided the floor area by the number of his family members, painted his share, placed the brush in a jar with water, wished the labor successes to the rest of the family, and washed his hands...

His wife, Maria Antonovna, a noiseless woman with the hair gray to radiant whiteness, presented me with a book of poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva and made me fall in love with her poems.

Before that, I believed that poetesses were only good at lace weaving, which is adding frills to rhymed lines. Marina was not like that, she knew how to rape words, when necessary.

I remembered her poetry in the local train vestibule, coming from Konotop because I remained an iterant passenger although not every week as earlier.

I felt it my duty to Lenochka; she always was a good child and I even loved her in my own way. It's only that I was never good at playing and lisping with kids and got bored in less than ten minutes...

In the vestibule, I had a smoke and then, all of a sudden started to feel the lapel of my camel coat. I didn't know why.

As it turned out, a long tailor's needle was hidden in the lapel corner, stuck entirely between the layers of fabric.

Getting the needle out was a mighty hard job. Everything repeated itself with the second lapel.

(...a stabbed-in needle exactly as in that early poem by Tsvetaeva...)

I threw the needles out through the slots above the glass panes in the doors of the electric train rumbling along to Nezhin.

Where did they come from? Stuck by the jealous mother like in that poem? Or bought together with the coat from Alyosha?

And (most perplexing) what made me find them?

(...there's still a lot of questions that I will never find answers to.

Never...)

My visits to the Zhomnirs disturbed my mother-in-law.

Her main concern and worry were if they ever treated me to cooked sausage there. Apparently, she was afraid that such sausage could manipulate a person, making a zombie of them like in the "The Matrix" movie, produced by Hollywood some thirty years later.

She didn't know that I was from a new generation of robots being zombied and formatted through printed text.

And how would you like, Gaina Mikhailovna, that Zhomnir fed me a book by Hesse, in whose prose one paragraph can flow for a page and a half?

(...the possibility to affect the world around, with the leverage of text-zombied me was more than once proved by personally experienced events.

For example, in the toilet of in-laws' apartment, I find At the Steer Wheel magazine cut up for convenient hygienic use.

Sitting on the potty, I read scraps of an article about big Soviet trucks.

Then I leave for the institute, turn around the corner of the block and get appalled!

There is no way to cross Red Partisans Street because of the roaring stream of KAMAZ's and BELAZ's. They are flowing in hosts!

Of course, later they tried to put me off the track by irrelevant fibs of repair works on the Moscow highway and detouring of the traffic through Nezhin.

So, they waited with their repair until I found the time to read a cutting from At the Steer Wheel?.)

My relations with Gaina Mikhailovna developed according to the traditional "son-in-law vs. mother-in-law" scheme, refracted by the intellectual level of the participants.

At first, we were getting along in just a bright and sunny manner, but after a week or so, she suddenly began to fasten up the collar of her dressing gown with a big safety pin. The robe was for home wear with a deep cut, but I did not even notice it until that pin popped up.

The outfit transformation robbed me of the blissful unawareness, because between that pin and the first button under the cut there had formed a gap, and any gaping would, naturally, catch your eye.

I did not ask her previous son-in-law (Tonya's husband, Ivan, from the other bedroom) if he had observed the like symptoms before my coming to our parents-in-law's, and with what frequency. I just had to put under control the direction of my glances.

Although, what was there to see? The woman had gone seedy long before...

Once, we happened to be alone in the whole apartment, just she and I.

It was getting dark outside the window. She was standing with her hands behind her back leaned against the big mirror on the wardrobe door, and telling me, seated on the folding coach-bed folded up because of the daytime, how she was being carried away to Germany in a freight-train car crammed with lots of young girls.

Clattering its iron wheels at the rail joints, the car was jostling its live load in abrupt sways. Everyone was frightened by the uncertainty of what would happen next, and they felt very thirsty. Some of the girls were crying...

The train stopped in the field. The guards threw open the doors of the cars and shouted something, but she did not know German then.

In a nearby hollow there ran a stream; the guards told with their gestures they were allowed to approach the water.

They happily rushed to the stream, drank and washed their faces.

Suddenly there were shouts and sharp reports of a machine gun round – one of the girls had attempted to run away and was killed.

Back to the cars they were all passed by the dead. The killed girl lay on her back with her eyes open and looked so beautiful...

Dusk thickened in the room, Gaina Mikhailovna stood with her palms pressed to the surface of the mirror faded away behind her, her head drooping over the killed beauty. Now she was there and felt herself that young mournful Gaina.

I was sorry for her, and I was sorry for the killed; I wanted to say or to do something only I did not know what I could say or do. So I got up from the folding coach-bed and silently clicked the switch.

The light of the three electric bulbs under the ceiling smashed everything into spiky shards. Instead of a frightened girl of Gaina, an elderly woman stood by the wardrobe with an absurd hole beneath her collar, and unforgiving glare from under a strand of her dyed hair.

Who had asked me to break the spell? So, I proved to be the standardly unacceptable bustard of a son-in-law...

In fact, I never felt a particular antagonism to the mother-in-law, yet I cannot help but note that your grandmother, at times, allowed her feelings to have the upper hand over her intellect.

She was irreconcilably anti-Semitic. Probably, the years spent in the well-to-do German family were telling on her attitude to them those Jews. Folks tend to imitate the sentiments of people around them.

The former Dean of the English Department, Antonyuk (who lost the position because of his guerrilla pencil-raids against the names of Bliznuke and Gourevitch in the wall newspapers) remained a hero in her eyes.

She was indignant that there were Jews all around wherever you cast a look and resented her husband's indifference to her choler caused by the escalation of Zionism.

Sitting with a newspaper in front of his massive nose and, when it's completely forgotten what exactly had been told to him, he would wake up to give you a reply, "A? Well...yes, sure."

And then again his nose would drowsily get buried in the paper. That's a supporter in life for you!

In her ardent struggle against Zionism, she even went to see a newly appointed Rector – to open his eyes to the crying shame of each and every institute Department being seized by the proliferating tribes of Israel.

(...it's ridiculous to approach Rector of the NGPI, named Arvat, a Jew from Odessa, with complaints of Jewish domination at the Nezhin institute.

" _Eine lächerlich Wasserkunst!."_

Or how was it turned out by Rilke?..)

But life did not stand still, Eera's belly was growing with the waves from your knees and heels rolling over it. Rather firm heels you had at that time, my nose remembers that.

And one day Eera in a scared tone of voice told me to call her mother. Gaina Mikhalovna came to the bedroom.

"What is it, Mummy?"

On the statuette-like smooth and immaculate skin beneath the already very large belly, there stretched shallow groovy marks.

"Tightening."

"Does it pass after the childbirth?"

Her mother lowered her head with a frown, but nothing was said...

The final examination session started, instead of questions, they told Eera to give her Grade Book right away and entered their evaluation mark.

On the evening of June 14, Eera's water broke and we walked to the maternity hospital.

They were surprised there that your mother came for childbirth on foot and took her to the prenatal ward, and then they brought her clothes out and gave them to me. I took the clothes home and went back to where I left Eera, where I could no longer protect her...

About two hundred meters before the maternity hospital, a bulky KAMAZ truck with switched off headlights loomed by the sidewalk. Only the triple ember-red beams on top of its cab shimmered like scales in a dragon's crest.

When I got nearer, KAMAZ suddenly sprang at me, splash-sending from within a long puddle in the road a dirty mesh of foam. I jumped up in time to make it miss.

The foam-mesh croaked and died in hissing disappointment; I landed on the wet sidewalk.

Get lost, filthy dragon! Back to your lairs! There's no time for trifling with you, a more potent mission awaits me tonight.

The KAMAZ submissively roared away, towards Red Partisans Street...

In the waiting room, they told me the childbirth would take place in the morning and I walked out.

The maternity hospital was in a long one-story building, with the entrance from the butt wall. Near the middle of the sidewall, there stood a rounded gazebo constructed of iron pipes, it was wider than that at the construction battalion and without the pit in the center to receive cigarette butts.

I entered under its tin canopy, sat on the beams of the bench inscribed along the circumference of the cemented floor, and started to wait. I had nothing to do without Eera in the empty narrow bedroom of her parents' apartment.

A belated couple walked from the gate to the entrance of the maternity hospital; soon after the man went back to the gate alone. So, not only we were arriving on foot; probably, because such a day it was.

The full moon shone in all of its glory high above the hospital roof.

I smoked a blunt, and the moon turned into a distant exit from a long tunnel with pulsating walls.

The wide-open window of the delivery room looked at the gazebo. I figured out its purpose from the fine mosquito net which dimmed the light when they turned it on inside, and screams of a woman in labor broke out into the night.

It was not Eera shouting, not her voice. Probably, the one from the couple who came after us.

When the room became silent and the light was turned off, I went to the waiting room.

What if the voice sounds different at childbirth? They told me it was not the time yet...

I never stuffed another blunt; the one at the vigil start remained the only that night.

When screams started anew, I recognized the dear voice – it was Eera!

After it was over and the light in the delivery room out, I came to the waiting room and they told me it was not the time yet and then sent me to the window of the prenatal ward on the other side of the building.

Eera raised herself to the windowsill and from under her half-dropped eyelids, she incredulously looked to see that I was still there. She told me to leave because of the childbirth would be at nine.

Of course, she did not know that I was protecting her from this world with its KAMAZ-dragons and merciless paramedics. "Kerdun on the shift?"

"No."

I returned to the gazebo.

There I sat squeezing my shoulders with the hands to ward off the chill of night.

In the murky predawn twilight, the circle of the gazebo floor was suddenly crossed by a strange dark ball with a white cylinder in its front.

Only when it disappeared into the grass, I guessed that it was a hedgehog whose muzzle got stuck in an ice-cream cone.

The rays of invisible sun touched the white clouds high above; soon it wouldn't be so awfully cold.

From the center of the gazebo roof, a fine thread of a web bolted down with a heavy spider on its end.

No sooner he touched the floor than the space of the gazebo was cut through with a sparrow flight in the direction that had been shown by the muzzle-covered hedgehog.

The spider followed them.

(...I can see signs, but—what a pity!—I cannot read them.

Spider, bird, hedgehog.

The three Magi?..)

In the delivery room, someone started screaming again. When the screams died down, two women called me from behind the net to come up.

One of them held the baby in her uplifted hands; something was dangling between the tiny legs.

"Son!" I had time to think.

"Congratulations to your daughter!"

"Navel cord," corrected I myself...

The mother-in-law met me with a smile and congratulations, she had already called the maternity hospital by phone.

I borrowed money from Tonya and ran to the bazaar. It was a serious banknote of 25 rubles, she hadn't smaller ones by her at the moment.

I flounced about the bazaar, buying up bouquets of roses; roses, I wanted only roses, nothing but roses. Until the clip of 25 rubles had run out.

Then I hurried back to the hospital embracing that bale of bouquets.

The one-legged cripple, on his crutches by the five-story block of the mother-in-law, smiled at me happily – he knew where I was hurrying to.

The nurse at the maternity hospital had to call two more of her colleagues to help to take the flowers from the waiting room to the inner corridor.

Later, Eera told me that she was lying then on the gurney in that corridor and they heaped the roses over the sheet covering her, but not for too long because they had to take her to the wardroom, where flowers were not allowed.

Then nurses and midwives shared those bouquets to take them home; one bouquet went to the paramedic Kerdun who came on her shift in the morning.

Who cares? The most important thing that you were born.

"...a million, a million, a million of scarlet roses..."

(...Egyptologists are still arguing why the beautiful female faces of sphinxes are endowed with those hanging beards...)

The explanation was demonstrated by Eera. Though, at first, she demonstrated you, from behind the windowpane.

The white fabric tightly wrapped all around you except for the circle of the face with your eyes in an obstinate squint. The same fabric covered Eera's hair, and half of her face was hidden with a wide bandage, like by the bank robbers, only white.

She took you away somewhere, and then returned to the window and said through the glass, that your eyes were the bluest blue but that you were already asleep after feeding.

To say this, she untied the upper strings of the bandage, leaving the lower ones in place and the bandage hung under her chin.

(...a beautiful face and an odd beard under it!

The sphinxes have just fed their cubs!

That's what the ancient Egyptians wanted to bring over...)

Coming back to the apartment on Red Partisans, I was appalled by the look of the door to our narrow bedroom. How could I not see earlier all that dirt and mud splashes, and that one long hair hanging from a mud clump stuck to the door?

I heated some water and washed the door on both sides and then the window frame too, from inside.

When Tonya gave me the carriage of her children, so that you would have where to sleep, I washed it as well taking into the yard under the bedroom window.

And there I realized that it was the right thing to do when from under the folds of the hood I picked out a piece of dried baby's cack.

No, I did not say anything to anyone, no one had anything to do with it, that was a part of sorting it out between me and the world in our single combat...

At the institute, Eera still had one more final examination.

If it were missed, she would have to wait one whole year so as to take it together with the following graduating course.

However, you were born very conveniently – right after the previous exam and there followed a week set aside for reading up between the examinations plus three more days, because there were four groups on a course, and they were not examined on the same day but one after another which amounted to 10 days allowed for your stay in the hospital.

On the sixth day of your life, Eera came to the waiting room and said that you were already all right, and the danger of jaundice, because of the different Rh factor in your parents, was over, and you were ready to be taken home any moment they say so.

I kicked up tempestuous activity running to the Head of the maternity hospital with demands to immediate discharge you both, on behalf of the state examination to be taken by the mother.

The Head began to hesitate only she said they needed a go-ahead from another maternity boss, sitting in one of the lanes branching off Shevchenko Street.

From an unfamiliar nurse whose bicycle leaned against the outer wall and was waiting for the end of her shift, I borrowed it and drove over there.

In the unreachable height of the bottomless sky with the galactic-shaped spiraling clouds over the bus stops, there already began accumulating the end-of-day lines of passengers. The bike swept past, like the besom of Margarita riding to the ball of Satan.

When I jumped off it by the small maternity office lurking in a lane, the witch's son of a bitch kicked me in the groin with its back wheel and neighed, mutely but spitefully.

I ran into the office to surprise two women peacefully awaiting the end of their working day. Taming my breath, I started the same negotiations.

They made a telephone call somewhere and said flatly – no discharge without BCG, the next day they'd vaccinate you and then set us free.

I drove back much slower, dejectedly fixing the bike's chain that fell off so too often. When the bicycle was returned to the owner, I went to the waiting room to find Tonya there.

I started to convince her that we could easily kidnap both Eera and the baby, only I had to go and fetch Eera's clothes.

Tonya sprinkled me with the knitted belt of her jacket, the way exorcist priests do when busy with their job. The belt was dry, of course, but I stopped freaking Tonya out, though I knew perfectly well that if I did not get Eera out of there that day, I would lose her.

Eera came to the room and, in turn with Tonya, explained it to me that just one day did not mean anything.

It was evening already. I saw Tonya to my parents-in-law's, but I couldn't stay in the bedroom even with its thoroughly rinsed door...

I returned back to the maternity hospital but did not enter the gazebo; I wouldn't stand another night of listening to the animal howling of women in childbirth.

So I went to the night watch; like the last in the field from the squad of guarding knights of Uncle Chernomor.

I walked in a slow, dilatory, pace because ahead there still was a whole night which turned out so dark, that bypassing the five-story block of Zhonmir, I stepped into a deep pot-hole puddle on the sidewalk, with my right foot.

Phui! Though deft in dodging the dragon, next to the lair of Laban I screwed it up so ingloriously.

I did not stop until the water pump across the road from the locked gates of Nezhin Vegetable Cannery, where I had the foot ablution and also washed the soaked sock.

A cavalcade of buses, brightly lit from inside, came around the turn to the Progress Plant; they rumbled past void of any passengers.

I firmly squeezed the water out of my sock and put it back on.

In that manner, one sock dry and the other wet, yet both hidden beneath my pants, I reached the station.

A knight vigilant should never stop in his watch round.

I made a circle in the half-dark and empty ticket-office hall with its gloom-hidden floor-tiles sending back tiny hollow echoes to my delayed steps.

Another circle was performed in the waiting room filled with silent motionless people seated on the benches.

Past the locked canteen-restaurant, I went to the second floor to coast through the waiting rooms up there.

Never before had I noticed how strangely change at night the look of people's eyes. Not by everyone though, yet some of them gazed through the eyes glazed with a perceptibly uncanny gleam.

The ones of those weird looks got startled by my appearance; they tried to hide the unearthly glare of their eyes, but I could easily discern them in the sitting rows of unsuspecting passengers, half-asleep in the night silence of the station.

Behave yourselves, glassy-eyed! The guard is on the watch!.

The rain caught up with me beneath the lights on pillars over the empty traffic bridge. A quiet summer rain it was.

I did not intend to go to Pryluki, so reaching the city line I turned back and walked to Red Partisans.

The rain was not increasing and not ceasing either. We strolled on together at the same laggard pace...

The door was opened by Ivan Alexeyevich; Gaina Mikhailovna was peeping from the dark of the unlighted living room. "Where are you roving? It's raining outside."

"The rain is warm."

"Maybe, I'll beat you?"

"Not worth it."

In the bedroom, I dropped all wet clothes and lay down naked.

As in all the previous nights without Eera, I spread her nightdress full length and hugged around it, so that I could protect her even without her by my side.

Much later, I learned that the in-laws concluded I was whoring on that night...

The next day in the afternoon I carried you from the hospital, wrapped in a quilted silk blanket and some frilled tulle. Eera walked alongside, with a bouquet, which Tonya had bought in advance. But the flowers were not roses...

Her final examination, Eera passed with another group from her course.

I waited for her by the columns on the high porch and, embracing by the waist, helped her down the steep steps. She wore a yellow knitted jacket with three-quarter sleeves.

The head of my group, Lyda, who happened about, was watching us from aside with an empathic smile on her face...

That yellow jacket I liked and got it by chance. Eera told me then that they brought goods to the department store in the main square, and sent me to see what was on sale.

As usual on such occasions, the store was densely crammed with a heated crowd. The jacket was the last one and exactly Eera's size, yet while I was being happy with the good luck, it was grabbed by some girl and her mother. Sneaky villagers!

The girl tried the jacket on and looked inquiringly at her mother, who was holding the daughter's raincoat.

On the department store visit, Slavik kept me a company. So, we stepped aside and started to exchange comments, "Not bad, but the sleeves are way too short."

"Yeah, let's look for something else."

The mother shook her head, and the girl reluctantly took off the jacket. I snatched it at once and sent Slavik to knock out the check.

Eera even liked that it was a three-quarter jacket. All that was before you...

And for your birth, following the elegant, time-honored, Slavonic tradition, I had to treat my friends to magarich.

In the restaurant Seagull by the same-named hotel in the main square, Slavik, Twoic and I shared a couple of decanters with vodka. The waitress had a skirt of white and black stripes on, and Twoic liked it when I defined her outfit as a stringy piece of cloth. He demanded a toast.

"It's not just birth," announced I, "but a start of new life, and since life is nothing but a transition from one form to another let's drink to that from now on along both the newborn and our lives we fill up only beautiful forms."

Twoic started to croak that idea of form transitions I had ripped off Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he also happened to read, which was my fault, I had put him on the trail to the book at the institute library.

My next toast was to a girl with beautiful blue eyes, I meant you.

Yet, Twoic pulled a clever look on his peasant mug and started a lecture about some causal genes—a smartass from the Biology Department—and that the color would change in a month to brown, possibly dark-brown. Some Bio-Fac bastard with his causal genes!.

Before getting their diplomas and workplace appointments, all the institute graduates were summoned to the assembly hall in the New Building.

We had to sit through a usual blah-blah about keeping high the NGPI honor wherever we get by our appointments.

Than a black-haired stranger took the floor and said that each of us, on entering the hall, was given a sheet of paper and a pencil, right?

Now, it should be admitted that not everything was straight and good at our schools. So, let us write about what we, the graduates, did not like at the time of our school practices, or even earlier, or even when we had still been studying at school.

Just any occasion when some teacher behaved incorrectly, in our opinion, or allowed themselves incorrect statements. To make it easier to start, let's use the phrase "And I still remember how...", after which it would go on by itself, okay?

He finished his briefing, and I sat stunned with awe and realization of how deeply backward I had fallen. The KGB had obviously upgraded to the conveyor system in the production of secret collaborators.

Hundreds of rats in just one sitting! And no need for the bait of a spy school.

(...in each of us, there lurks a small frightened animal hidden deep inside and thinking logically: "If I don't write they can cancel my diploma or give the appointment to the worst of the holes.

It's better to write – one time does not count."

But that time of no account is, actually, just the start.

Later, in the hole you were appointed to, they will come up and show you your essay, and dictate the next...)

Okay, bitches, I'll write to you!

In the back of each seat in the assembly hall, there was installed a hinged rectangular piece of plastic, a kinda mini-desktop.

I brought down the one in the back of the seat before me, placed the crisp sheet of paper on the even plastic surface, and wrote:

"And I still remember how in the fourth grade my Class Mistress, Seraphima Sergeevna, stated:

'Well done, Sehrguey! You collected most of the waste paper.'

And I was filled with pride and joy."

I signed my final report to the KGB with my real name and I am proud of it till now...

(... _The great discovery of Karl Marx about the emergence of surplus-value, remained, as it, unfortunately, is, not pushed to all of its potential limits._

He quite correctly noted, that some part of his working time a laborer toils for himself, and another part for the factory owner. Good fellow, Karl, hit the bulls-eye!

However, that's not all there is there to it.

The main (yet unnoticed) trick lurks in the fact, that it is impossible to determine who exactly the laborer toils for at this or that part of a split second.

And this, not yet perceived (still indisputable), truth is applicable not only to the methods of production but to any other sphere of human activities as well.

(Hopefully, I'm not advancing too fast, and you have time to stick done your notes?

Okay, reach to the full-stop, while I'm opening the second bottle.)

Hence, we can safely state, that there are no bad guys in the world, but there are no good guys either.

An elusive, uncatchable, fraction of a second separates good from evil.

Well, so you think that guy is a good man? I love your naivety!

Stay assured, you're still alive only because of you turned up in the right part of the second. Some tiny pinch of time earlier or later, and that vampire would have drop aside your lifeless corpse with your blood system sucked-up dry, and lymph nodes gnawed to tatters!

Or let's take those same witches queuing to be burned at the stake and illuminate the darkness of the Middle Ages.

The gloomy blockheads of executioners could not understand that they were burning not the right ones, and at the wrong moment.

My point is, no matter how – at the stake, on the pile, in the guillotine, on the electric chair, in the gallows, against a wall facing the firing squad...well, whatever!.. they always execute the innocent.

These are not those ones, those were not these. No!. Too late...The pattern iterates in the same endless vicious loop...

But even those, at the moment of wrong-doing, were simply order-executing tools.

Whose orders? Who were they toiling for?

Well, if I had the answer to that question, would I be living here, eh?

One thing is clear, though.

Between the tool engaged at the operation end and the don of mafia there lies a chain of several links making the "who" practically untraceable.

Because, if we paraphrase the favorite expression of my Uncle Vadik, which he picked at the history classes in School 13:

"a zombie of my zombie is not my zombie"...)

Hearing your heartbreaking cry from the bedroom, I rushed there and was just in time. You were wriggling in the carriage under the open leaf in the window, and your grandmother, drooping over you, went on with her incantation, "Little angel! Little angel!" While you were getting torn apart in screams.

"Gaina Mikhailovna! She's not an angel but a girl!"

In her responding glance, there glinted the malice from the one who had sent her, but lacking arguments to refute my statement, she silently left.

I knew for sure that prevailing upon a baby with its infirm psyche, and as of yet too feebly orienting in the world, was wrong, especially persuading her that she was an angel. And more so under the open window! Like, fly to where it's nice, where angels like you frisk and flutter around happily!

I started to convince you that you were a girl named Lill and nothing of an angel at all.

You still kept crying but not so desperate as before when the soul was being wrenched in efforts to escape the mortal body.

Yet, what was the matter? I put you on the bed and unwrapped the swaddle; you cried on arching your infant's torso. The reason was found on the soles of the tiny feet covered with whitish arachnoid fiber like those rascal-marking fluffs on my camel coat. I rinsed it off.

Blinking your blue eyes in surprise, you calmed down. I swaddled you back again and took over to the carriage where you peacefully fell asleep...

Ironing your swaddles was my responsibility so that I would keep everything under control and watched closely. And after washing it also was me to hang them out over the common linen ropes in the apartment-block yard.

The ropes ran from the central pillar like spokes from a wheel hub. It's where I learned that I had allies in this world because alone I would hardly solve the problem of hanging swaddles the right way.

I mean it, really, which way to put them on the rope – face down or back down?

I put the first one this way, the second upside-down. And that very moment, a white dove came from above, lit on the central pillar and cooed in protest.

Aha! Thank you, friend! I'll keep to the instruction!

Since then I was hanging a whole load of swaddles homogeneously...

Zhomnir suddenly lost interest in my translations from Maugham. He stopped his cheerful threats to take them one of these days to "matchmaking" in Kiev. In their stead, there came languid explanations that it was necessary to take into account the ongoing changes in conjuncture. That the following year there would be the centenary of another English writer. Translations from that one would be much easier to shove through. And Maugham, actually, was a gay person...

Well, let's say, rendering the story about a young suicide pianist, I was able to figure out his orientation by myself. However, in what gutter would this here best of the worlds be today without the gay composer Tchaikovsky? Either Maugham or nothing!

Alexander Vasilyevich shrugged his shoulders...

In the living room at Red Partisans in the presence of Gaina Mikhailovna, I complained to Eera about Zhomnir's double-dealing. They both knew about my ambiguous ambitions of becoming a literary translator.

Eera started pathetic exclamations while my mother-in-law, without any comments, went out to Tonya's bedroom and returned with a powder box.

She opened it, powdered her face in front of the mirror in the wardrobe door, and took it back in the same tacit manner. That's all.

In the evening, Zhomnir rang the doorbell and invited me to go out with him into the yard. His bicycle leaned against the house wall by the staircase-entrance.

Under the dark foliage of the thick cherry crowns behind the common linen ropes, twilight was already gathering and creeping towards the hung laundries. From the neighboring apartment block sounded The Eagles' Hotel California:

"Warm smell of colitas rising up in the air..."

I did not know at that time what a tragically creepy end the song had, and simply was getting on high from the final guitar part...

Zhomnir obviously envied the atmosphere around, but then he started to talk business. My translations were no longer just scribbling but still remained only a beta version. He did not insist on changing the author, but let them be upgraded to the alpha...

He left, and I respectfully admired the skills of the old school.

With all their ignorance about the textual formatting of the world, and with the naive belief in bewitching through the cooked sausage, yet just a single powdering was enough to overpower Zhomnir and seize him by the gills! Well done, mother-in-law!.

Apart from the baby's security considerations, the swaddle ironing was needed to pass the time.

Eera, like a mother with a newborn, was exempt from working off for her diploma.

I got an appointment somewhere in Transcarpathia. The exacter location was not of much concern to me, because I did not plan to work at school in any place at any time.

So, Gaina Mikhailovna (since I was so brave) came up with an idea to follow the example of Komsomol members from the earlier generations who recklessly went to erect new cities that were not yet on the map. And, by the way, there was an article in the newspaper that nearby Odessa they started to build a new city-port of Yuzhny...

It was decided that I would go there as soon as you became one month old because it was still not easy for Eera to keep you single-handed.

Thus, I was whiling away the pre-launch month with the swaddles and walking the carriage, with you sleeping in it. Only I had to follow the strict instructions to never move the tulle cover fixed on the hood to screen the baby inside. And at the end of the month already, after your medical examination, the tulle could be removed and substituted with a traditional safety pin for keeping safe from the evil eye...

My brother Sasha came on a visit from Konotop, and you had your first trip to the Count's Park. Eera and Slavik joined us also. By the park lake, Slavik and I sparked a blunt but my brother never blew jive.

We returned through the narrow gate by the building of the Musical Pedagogical Department. The gate's jambs were connected with an iron strip welded some ten inches above the ground, like, a stile impeding the passage of the carriage.

I languishingly asked Slavik for help to move the carriage over, but no sooner had he reached out to grab its handle than Sasha barked brutally at him, "Get off with you!"

Slavik cowedly obeyed, and you were carried over the stile by me and Sasha. I felt pleased and proud to have such a brother, and also glad that you had such sort of an uncle who wouldn't abandon his niece to Slavik...

Your next visit to the Park took place on the arrival of Eera's brother from Kiev. Igor came together with his wife who kept chewing his ear all the time while he, in a soft good-natured manner, smoothed away the spiky wrinkles she turned out of nothing.

I thought then it might be because of her PMS but later I learned that she had got that PMS for life, without a break.

During the walk, she kept opening her umbrella every other minute, and then the rain started to drizzle. When she did it for the dozenth time, Eera also got it about the cause and effect and asked her sister-in-law not to open the umbrella anymore.

Igor's wife was happy to be noticed and appreciated, she left the umbrella alone and on our way back there was no rain...

In his family, Ivan Alexeyevich enjoyed the handle of Prince, and he was pleased with it. A natural reaction for a peasant son to getting such a title.

And he looked princely too, especially when, well-nourished and imposing, he sat in a white tank top and blue sportswear pants over a newspaper, wide open in his hands. So the handle was, like, a compliment to tickle his pride, and he certainly deserved it because he was a getter.

In the era of deficit not only wedding suits were hard to be acquired, but different other types of products too. So my father-in-law was getting them.

Once he even fetched and dropped in the kitchen a whole sack of buckwheat, by the battery of the central heating, beneath the windowsill.

In the corner to the left from the window, there was installed the gas stove, the titan for water boiling loomed in the right, so that sack of buckwheat filled the center completing the composition to advantage.

And that was a righteous lump of pride too, because other folks had to go for a special trip to Moscow to buy that product, and suddenly in a kitchen of provincial Nezhin a whole sack of buckwheat!

(...same sort of pride that some people get from a hunting trophy, like a pair of tusks, a sword sawed off a fish, or such thick branching...well, ahem...which, in general, can also be fixed in the wall...)

Okay, getter, if so is your disposition, then tickle your pride for a week, let's say two, or even a month bypassing that f-f..er..fabulous sack in the kitchen, but it stuck there already so long that even the mother-in-law started to grumble just to receive his usual "A? Well, yes..." in return, before he buried himself back in the newspaper...

But then in the uneven pile of newspapers next to the TV on the table, a certain headline caught my eye. I did not read the article itself but the headline prompted that was on some archaeological subject. It's just that I liked the headline for some reason; so short and sweet and to the point. It somehow reminded me of the toilet room cut-outs' exhibition in the Hosty.

I picked the paper up and folded it in a certain way so that only the headline would be seen. Late in the evening, I took it to the kitchen and with a caressing gesture—there even was some fag-imitating tint to it—I put the newspaper on the sack of buckwheat.

On the way out of the kitchen, I put the light off and went to bed, leaving in the dark the sack headlined

The Prince's Tomb

I mean, as a son-in-law I was a regular SOB, yet the next morning the sack faded in the woodwork before my getting up...

The day before I was leaving to participate in erecting a new city, I went to Konotop to see Lenochka who was in the pioneer camp by the Seim.

After she confirmed that I was her father, the caretaker of her platoon allowed us to go out of the campgrounds.

In the pine forest, Lenochka picked up a long gray feather of an unknown bird, and I thrust it into her smooth hair, and there it stayed as if fixed.

(...Indians are no fools – such feathers make a person the part of the free wild world, establishing involvement, contact, and mutual tacit understanding...)

When we were coming back to the camp civilization, a gust of wind ran up from behind and softly took the feather out of her hair to drop it down on the pine needles.

She did not even notice it.

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Parade of Planets

On the day D, aka my departure day, everything hung on a thread, more precisely, on a single cobweb fiber. I got it at once on entering the staircase-entrance vestibule to spark a blunt because I never smoked in the apartment, not even vanilla cigarettes. The cobweb thread hung from the upper crossbar of the cracked entrance-door frame, taut plumb by the weight of a burned match dangling from its end.

How long could it last?.

It was I, who always stuffed burned matches in the gap between the frame-top and the whitewashed plaster on the wall because there was no trash bin in the staircase-entrance vestibule.

After Tonya's toddler son exposed my connection with cannabis, I did not care what might be sniffed out by the passers-by in the smoke exhaled by me in the vestibule.

Would the cobweb thread hold on until I was away?.

I looked out from the shade in the staircase-entrance into the yard. A squadron formation of black ravens coasted lowly through the heat-melted sky. Heading north-east, they did not move their wings—the heat made all of them too reluctant for even the slightest effort—the feathers at their wing-tips stuck kinda stilled spikes harrowing the hot breeze.

Could I get through?.

Eera saw me to the station.

When we were getting on a bus, from a balcony in the neighboring five-story block Alla Pugacheva sobbed up after me her latest hit:

"Please, come back for at least a day!.."

I did not have much luggage – a briefcase with a book of stories by W. S. Maugham in English (soft pink cover, Moscow publishing house "The Enlightenment"), the Hornby's Learners' Dictionary, a thin 12-leaf copy-book with a stub at translation of "The Rain" story by Maugham (4 pages of a rough pencil draft with multiple corrections), the employment history book (the first entry made on September 13, 1971, at Konotop Locomotive and Car Repair Plant), the passport, the military ID, and shaving accessories.

The briefcase was accompanied by a blue sports-bag with a shoulder strap, containing a change of underpants, two tank tops, a pair of shirts, jeans, and the geologist jacket, sewn by my mother of green tarpaulin.

On the local train, I threw them onto the car-long rack of thin tubes running above the windows and went back to the platform.

Eera was nervous that the doors would slam shut and the train leave without me. I climbed up one step to the car vestibule and stood there, holding a grip on the nickel-plated vertical railing, "I've left something on the windowsill, let it be there till I'm back."

"What's that?"

"Look for yourself. I'll be back exactly in a month."

"Call at once as you arrived!"

It was the last car on the train.

An old woman ran up along the platform. She asked something but I neither listened nor wanted to, I was looking at Eera until the speakers in the car shouted, "Beware! The doors are shutting!" And they cut me off her.

The electric train pulled and, gaining the speed, rumbled along the rails in the direction of Kiev...

The night before, I went out shopping together with Eera.

The department store was locked already, but a glassed stall by its side still worked.

From the middle-aged gypsy woman inside it, I bought a new manual razor machine, a shaving brush, a standup mirror, and two handkerchiefs with a series of wavy thin blue lines printed across the field leaving out only a circular pin-thin frame in the center.

The two of them were quite alike except for the pictures inside those frames – a small sailing boat in one, a neat blue anchor in the other.

In my pocket, I was carrying away the handkerchief with the sailing boat, the one with the anchor was left on the windowsill. Coming back, I would put their circles to each other, the boat to the anchor. It would be the ritual of return...

And pretty late at night my mother-in-law suddenly freaked out and started anxiously persuade there was no need to go anywhere, and it was still possible to return the train ticket Kiev-Odessa to the booking ticket-office.

I thought I was going to lose it – what ticket return, on earth?

Eera and Tonya also joined the conversation, only the father-in-law was out, attending the emergency at the Bakery Plant.

Staring at the table's oilcloth, the Gaina Mikhailovna was mumbling about a somewhat too complicated situation, so that even Ivan couldn't get through...

A week before, Tonya's husband Ivan left for Transcarpathia, yet without ever reaching there, he returned from Kiev a day later—I couldn't get it why—and was all the time sitting away in the bedroom with the children of their family.

By that time, I had already got it, that the whole world was in the state of the constant fracas, of some unceasing battle in progress – but who against who? That was some question! Because all that went on under wraps, concealed with the conventional surface layer of everyday life.

However, I had already been given to understand the true reality had much more rinds and gaps through which I at times caught glimpses of certain inconsistencies, secret signs, and came across frequent instances when people let out things surpassing the customary limits of commonplace life.

Was I sure they were exactly people? Well, I did not have another name for them.

Letting out? What namely? What about? About things that did not belong to the life which we were accustomed to.

...Ivan was repealed on his emissary mission...unable to get through...and whose side are you on?...the fire at the Bakery Plant was just an episode in the universal battle...

I had to find the way of collecting the strewn puzzle pieces of innumerable concomitant saliences into some wieldy thing without getting lost among the wild hints of recondite raw truth.

Who's for who? Who's against who?.

A thunderstorm broke behind the black window in the living room. The ramble of falling water outside was time and again cut through with the thunderclaps slashed by the flicker of lightning flashes. A pillar of blinding light struck the transformer box in the yard. The pitch-black darkness engulfed all around.

Tonya went to her bedroom to calm down the children and Ivan. She came back with a burning candle; in its feeble light, I saw that I was talking to Mothers. Those very Mothers mentioned, in all too cautious cut-and-run manner, by Goethe.

Three Mothers they were: the old, but powerful, the middle, and the beginner – Eera. She was not my ally, she was one of them. I needed to persuade them, otherwise, nothing would come out.

With the storm raging outside behind the blinking candle reflection in the black glass panes, I still managed to get their go-ahead.

In conclusion, their eldest said, "If something goes completely awry...in a hopeless, extreme, situation...turn to the very Head..."

At night I had a prophecy dream.

In the room of the pale gray, half-translucent, walls, I lay on a gurney, trying to become unnoticeable in the cold fluorescent light flooding from everywhere. A group of someones in white robes stood around me. The one standing behind my head said, "If not for the fat, it still might come out..." Even without seeing, I knew that the one in the white who pronounced that was also me.

With a furtive glance from under my half-closed eyelids at the stomach of me lying raw upon the gurney, I saw through the sheer skin a thin yellowish layer, probably, the fat he was talking about...

I went out into the train car vestibule and sparked. In the sky behind the dusty glass of the automatic doors, a flock of seahorses floated with their tails curled up under the bellies. Lined by their height, from the bigger to the smaller, they were also fond of a system, like the lost figurines of white elephants. The train hurriedly ran ahead but couldn't escape their formation...

A man entered the vestibule with a row of medals on his civilian jacket. A war veteran; here's the one who once knew who's for who, who's against who.

We shot the breeze for a while without advancing any particular line of thought until at one of the stops, a man with a bundle of long thin planks stepped in from the platform. He carried his load between us two and went on into the car.

The veteran's eyes filled with fright staring into the upper corner behind me. I knew that there was nothing there, but since he saw it, then there it was.

And I also went into the car, to the window under the rack carrying my things, because Kiev was running towards our train...

At the station, I took my luggage to the cool and spacey underground checkroom hall. Then I came back up to the surface of the square in front of the station and in its right corner I found the inconspicuous passage leading to the steep and long stair flights that descended to the canteen once shown to me and Olga by Lekha Kuzko.

At the bottom of the stairs, I sparked and went on, but had to stop smoking, when a platoon of militiamen poured out of the canteen and marched towards me along the sidewalk. So I had to march through their formation, with a smoldering blunt between my fingers...

From the canteen, I returned to the station and took a walk-round. There were not so many glass-eyed as on the night watch at the Nezhin station, probably, because of the different time of day. Still, there were some and at my approach, they hurriedly pretended that they were there just so, kinda ordinary passengers.

I went up to the third floor where there was the mother-and-child room and explained to the watchwoman that in a month I would be passing their station together with my wife and baby daughter, and now I dropped in to check the conditions. Well, in general, rather a clean corridor, thank you.

Near the toilet rooms on the first floor, a young militiaman with a black eye of deep purple hue took pains to avoid the least eye contact with me, although both of us perfectly knew that his black eye came from my walking through their formation and that he, who had suffered in the universal battle, would not forgive me that.

Then, for quite a stretch, I stood in the waiting hall on the second floor, in front of the huge news stall counter keeping heaps of diverse newspapers, magazines, postal envelopes. But all that time I looked at just one postcard with the bluest blue sky in its picture.

It was a long wait until there at last sounded footsteps behind me, hardly audible in the joint buzz of the crowd filling the hall.

My eyes stayed fixed at the picture. The footsteps stopped. A copper coin the size of an eye iris fell from behind my back onto the blue in the postcard. Only then I turned and went away without ever looking back – from that moment on no casual genes would be able to change the color of your eyes.

And only then it was, that the station loudspeakers' call broke through to me:

"The train Kiev-Odessa departs from the third platform. We ask escorting citizens to leave the cars."

Needless to make a special point that at those, communicationally underdeveloped, old simple days, even the bravest minds could never imagine in the most sprightly fantasy flights, nor even dream about the installation of surveillance cameras in public places.

Then, given the conditions of the aforesaid period, what else could cause the ungraspable scene that took place the same evening in the queue of passengers waiting at the bus stop in front of the Kiev intercity bus station?

There might be solely one reasonable explanation – the vigilance of the taxi driver.

(...here the derivative of "reason" is used in connotation to the established core meaning, that of presentation details of surrounding reality in a linear, orthodoxly perceived and conventionally assessed, cause-effect correlation.

However, at that particular period I was too deeply absorbed in tracing up the intricate complexities in the sketchy, haphazardly twined, chain of transcendental symbols and signs of varying significance, confronting me in random flicks of revelation, which goaded to strive and grope with might and main for a new, elusive, but incisive and tantalizingly close nearby, level in apprehensive comprehension of the recondite world wrapped in the disguising sham of make-believe reality, and to find, through those acumen insights, a sure footing for establishing my function in it...)

Now, back to the taxi driver in the cabstand by the steps to the underground checkroom hall at the Kiev railway station for the long-distance destination trains.

At 17.06 a young man of about twenty-five-to-seven years old, height one-meter seventy-eight centimeters, with straight brown hair, and a trimmed mustache, emerged from the underground passage. He wore a gray jacket and gray pants, not matching though the shade of gray in the jacket.

Noticeably upset about something, the man got into the taxi and suggested the driver go down to the underground hall instead of him, and bring a briefcase and a bag from the indicated automatic storage cell, the code to which he would provide. The driver, naturally, refused.

The dark-haired individual fell into a reverie, twisting a burnt match in his right-hand fingers, then sighed, broke the match in his hand, asked to wait a bit and disappeared down the passage steps.

Five minutes later, he appeared again and asked to take him to the intercity bus station. Upon arrival at the specified place, he paid, hung the sports-bag over his left shoulder, gripped the briefcase handle with the same hand, and slammed the door.

Then he, like, accidentally wiped nickel-plated door handle with the right hem of his jacket destroying, by all the canons of criminal films, his fingerprints. After those manipulations, the man disappeared into the entrance to the intercity bus station.

What else was the driver, normally, to do? Of course, his perfectly natural move was to call the operative he was secretly collaborating with, under the working pseudonym of "Tractor".

What was witnessed by the queue of passengers at the bus stop to which I joined coming back from the bus station building, after a visit to the men's toilet and a five-minute stop in the lobby to consider the multi-meter billboard "Fly with the Aeroflot!" depicting a happily smiling stewardess in the uniform jacket?

Nearby the stop, a freshly washed red Zhiguli car pulled up abruptly. A man wearing dark sunglasses got out of it, came up to me and, holding out the ignition key in the bunch with divers other ones, instructed, "Get in the car, we'll go right now."

Keeping mum, I turned away; the man proceeded to the bus station building.

Soon after, two young men emerged from behind the right corner of the building—one of them in the militia uniform, the other wearing plainclothes—both of whom took a position on the right off the queue.

Round the left corner, the same man in sunglasses came together with a short companion in a thick fabric cap; they stopped on the other side of the queue.

The man in the cap (an obvious scumbag and tipsy as well) mixed with the line of passengers and approached me. He started rubbing against me from behind. The nearby passengers watched in bewilderment.

The disgusting scene was interrupted by the appearance of a bus with the inscription "Polyot" on its side...

On the way to Borispol, I did not respond to the puzzled looks of the fellow-travelers, returning with my mental gaze to what had not been recorded with the then-non-existent (and, therefore, absent) surveillance camera in the men's toilet room of the Kiev intercity bus station.

I went up to the sloping trough of the common urinal and poured into it the mustard-brown powder of all the dope I had by me. Then I crumpled its packing sheet of paper and threw it to the trash-bin. The way I was taught by the French criminal movies starring Belmondo.

(...which is the evidence that I can be programmed not only by means of a text but with the application of films as well.

In all my life that followed, up to the present night in a forest by the river of Varanda, I stayed straight and strictly abstinent...)

At the airport in Borispol, I didn't use an automatic cell to keep my bag and briefcase but left them in a baggage room for them to have a shakedown of luggage and see there was no point in rubbing their scumbag provocateurs against my ass.

A ticket to Odessa for a plane flying from Moscow cost 17 rubles.

It did not exceed the amount of 20 rubles I had by me, stashed for covering survival needs until the first advance payment at construction sites of the new port city...

On arrival at the Odessa airport, I couldn't see it in the dark, and from there, on a city bus, I reached the intercity bus station where all the ticket offices were already locked, yet the baggage room still operated and in the waiting rooms there were benches for overnight sitting.

I, to be sure, felt myself the winner because did I manage, despite everything, to break through Kiev. The gleeful delight with the success was assuring me of my exceptional invulnerability.

Returning to the actual state of things was not very pleasant when a scattered line of passengers slogged in the early morning through the back door for the first bus.

In the incipient daylight, I was sitting half-asleep with my head thrown back, in the disdainful attitude of a winner, over the bench backrest, leaving my whole throat completely undefended.

The pain from the needle sting to the right from my Adam's apple made me pinch the skin in the carotid artery area. Of course, there was no needle there but the feeling of a deeply stuck, or rather hurriedly pulled out, needle persisted. The following half-hour I winced, rubbing, time and again, the skin covering my throat about that spot.

The ticket office opened and they said to me there were no runs to Yuzhny, and to get there I needed a local communication bus from Station 3 located by New Bazaar.

Having reached there and examined the bus schedules fixed on the walls of Station 3 where the line "Yuzhy" repeated itself at different hours, I decided that I should take a walk before departure because—damn you, OMG!—it was but Odessa-Mommy!.

I was in Odessa! Yay!.

At the end of the small station-hall, there stood just a couple of sections of automatic storage cells. All their doors were locked except for one in the upper row of a section.

I put my things inside, combined a code, dropped 15 kopecks into the slot, and slammed the door. The out-of-order lock did not click, that's why the cell remained unused.

I took the documents from my briefcase and put them in the inside pocket of my jacket. Then I quietly closed the door, so that it would look as if locked.

On the crest of the hill-tall wave of euphoria, I left the bus station and entered Odessa...

Not everyone has chanced to experience the state of complete happiness in their life.

I am from among luckier ones. More than that, I can indicate the time and place of the absolute happiness experienced by me. These are the few hours of my first walk in Odessa...

The gleeful sunshine was filling the streets which I walked. I was a part of everything around and everything was a part of me in that unfamiliar city, where everyone tacitly recognized me because they had so long been waiting for my coming.

I felt what was being thought by people and mentally responded to their thoughts.

Here walked a woman rejoicing in her own beauty.

...wow!..that's a really good one!.

And she bloomed up victoriously.

...but I have Eera...

To which the woman saddened and, with her lowered head, passed by.

For a middle-aged Caucasian, gaping around with a ho-hum stare, I threw in the thought – "Eew, Javad, I still remember your dagger blow!"

With all of his boredom shed off right away, he woefully sagged the shoulders and pulled at his mustache, stunned by a sudden memory of a treacherous attack from Javad of whom up to the present moment he had not had the slightest idea.

...okay, let's not think sad things!.

A fast-moving flock of pioneers in scarlet neckties and white shirts shot past hurrying to the celebration of my arrival to the city.

I entered a big bookstore to make my choice for the future; I communicated with the shop-assistants and buyers there without ever opening my mouth.

I walked up the steps of the famous stair, bypassing the monument to Richelieu who never was a cardinal.

In the nearby green grove there again were pioneers, but another ring, too much, to my mind, carried away with watching the freight cars slowly rolling into the port grounds.

"Pioneers!" shouted I to them. "Boats are nicer than cars!"

They looked around and smiled, they recognized me.

The taxi driver took me to the "Bratislava" restaurant sharing on the way that it was a canteen on weekdays. But the current day was the holiday to celebrate my arrival, and he also knew that it was the so-eagerly-and-long-awaited-for I...

On washing hands and refreshing my face with water from the tap in the toilet, I climbed to the upper floor and was the only guest in the huge dining room. The lone waitress appeared from somewhere and I ordered soup.

When she left, I noticed a crease in the tablecloth, a result of hasty ironing; I passed my palm over the crease and it disappeared.

...well, no wonder, after ironing those heaps of swaddles it's easy to smooth creases out with simply laying hands upon...

The waitress came and went leaving me alone in the whole hall. I began eating soup cooked by the recipes of the port city.

On a low deck nearby there stood silent loudspeakers and amplifiers of the restaurant group.

...so, what to listen to?.okay, let it be The Smokie...

I flicked my fingers.

No sound.

...what?!.am I not omnipotent?!.or is the music here switched on some other way?.

And then, as from an unexpected blow, I got overwhelmed with the sense of a gross mistake. Somewhere, there was a fatal flaw in suppositions; I was terribly wrong somewhere.

The soup became utterly bland, not eatable any more. The rice in it turned into finely crushed shells that settled on the plate bottom as a layer of tiny mother-of-pearl fragments.

...somewhere I was wrong; I had missed, forgot something...but what?!.

I started to pace between the tables, to and fro.

The waitress approached, and I explained that I couldn't eat, I forgot something.

"What?"

"My jacket in the toilet," said I the first thing that came to my mind.

At that very moment, the door of the hall opened, and a neat pensioner announced that my jacket was in the cloakroom downstairs.

I went down to the cloakroom barrier where a woman with the juicy Odessa accent gave me my jacket, which the old man brought to her from the toilet.

"And the pockets had been filled to the utmost," she said with the bitter reproach clear to both of us. She meant that Sunny City who saw my arrival after so long a wait had bestowed the gifts which I stupidly lost by mistake and still stayed in the dark as to what kind of blunder was it.

I climbed upstairs to pay for the soup cooked of mother-of-pearl...

It's like in the table game when you rise higher and higher along the winding path of figures and then plummet in a swift nose-dive down the pipe drawn to the very bottom line.

I rolled out into the street from the restaurant "Bratislava", where I had intentionally left my jacket in the toilet because there were documents and money in its pocket at the moment when I entered and was accepted into a new shining world, where money and documents were not needed.

On the way to the bus station, I noticed a long slit in my pants. The seam had burst on the right thigh, starting from the pocket. And I went on covering it with my jacket whose pockets held no gifts from the new world already spilled and scattered because of my fault.

The unlocked cell at the bus station was also empty of things I left there.

For the last ruble, I bought a ticket to Youzhny and shoved it with the kopecks of change into the hip pocket.

The bus was crammed with passengers jamming the aisle. My neighbor on the seat kept sighing and silently rubbed the damned un-outable spot in her skirt hem; I knew she had got spattered because of my lapse.

And my flaw caused the stuffed bus to stop at each and every traffic lights, all red with rage.

Then the bus stood for a long time on a trenched street, giving way to an endless file of disgruntled pioneers covered with the dust from the heaps of earth on the pavement.

It was I who spoiled the celebration...

By and by, the bus got outside the city, the passengers were leaving at the stops.

I also got out at the last but one stop, because it was wrong to come to Yuzhny with a hole as big as the wound in the Spartacus's thigh pierced with a spear.

On the outskirts of the settlement, I respectfully greeted a boy of about twelve and asked for a needle and thread.

He got it at once what I needed, and led me behind the high hedge of large stone cubes joined with thick seams of mortar to a secluded place in a weed thicket. Then he went away and returned with his friend who had a needle on a long black thread.

The boys got seated on the fence with their backs to me; I took off my pants and started sewing up the burst seam.

From the other side of the stone wall came the sounds of the tires screeching sharply, of the clashes and roar of engines along the difficult roads in the endless universal battle.

The boys sat there as mere on-lookers as if having no idea that behind their backs a member of RMS was a-darning a wound in his thigh.

With gratitude, I returned them the needle and the still long enough stretch of the thread...

When alone, I took out a Belomor cigarette, lit it and stuck the match into the earth driving it in the full length to put out the flame. Ouch! How she cried!.

I startled at the wild heartrending holler of that black-and-white cow at the nearby tree, who desperately bellowed with her muzzle turned up to the heaven. How could I know that everything was so knottily entangled and mingled with each other!.

Then I walked through a dense willow thicket, and in the sky above there hung a huge bird, like a stork, almost motionless, with an escort of smaller birds stuck around him...

...so, that's it – the highest Head.

Devil, or God or What else you could be is more than I possibly can comprehend.

The messy mingle-mangle of a whipped up world is entangled too confusedly.

And here I am with nothing but the documents, a pocket notebook, a pen and the handkerchief with a small sailing boat.

Let's sign the contract then as becomes your trade, eh?.

I took out the pen and the bus ticket. I did not know how to draw such a document, so I simply put my signature below the lines of figures knocked out by the cash register at the bus station.

I put the pen in my pocket and placed the ticket upon the long leaves in a pliant willow fork.

Then I turned my back to the contract – it's a fair play, no peeping.

A sharp gust of breeze swirled the bushes, but when I turned around the ticket was still in the same fork, only turned over with its blank side up.

So that's your signature?

Smart move, no one will find a way to forge...

I went out of the willow thicket to a tall brick building, like the central warehouse of the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, and started to ask where the personnel department was.

They told me that everything had been closed already, but after the second shift, the bus was going to the city for which I had to wait.

I waited a long time, then there was a long ride through the night by a small PAZ bus.

The fellow-travelers were leaving the bus, in twos and threes, on dimly lit streets in the city, until the driver told me I had to get off too, on the corner of a large empty square.

Getting off, I saw the yellowish gleam of lamp lights in a narrow street nearby and went along its fences, then turned to the left and at the next crossing, I chose the left turn once again.

Dry snaps of claws against the asphalt behind my back were following me; judging by the sound, it was a giant of a dog, yet I was not afraid at all, and I did not look back, and just kept walking on slowly.

Ahead, the same square opened and I stopped about twenty meters from it because it was dead sure that I reached my sentry point.

The lamp on a pillar poured down yellow light, but I stood outside the circle drawn by its cone on the asphalt so that it could not reach my feet.

From the black silhouette of the five-story block on the left, a cat trotted stealthily across the road to the yard of a khutta and was met there with a joyous jingling of dog's chain, a date of antipodes. Even slaves have it at times...

The night went on and I stood motionless, pretending that I had nothing to do with that crushing din and ramble beyond the horizon, where the cogwheels of the universe clockwork with frenzied screech were coming to a clash halt because of my fatal mistake at who knows what...

When a dump truck pulled up behind me, I did not give way, but only threw up my right hand, because that was my post.

Those sitting in the cabin had no heads, impenetrable pitch-black darkness cut them off to the shoulders dimly visible in the feeble beam of the lamplight from the pillar.

The driver, who came down from the cab, had a head though; he led me, with care, aside. I did not resist.

The dump truck left, taking away the one on the passenger seat, with the viper asp blackness upon his shoulders.

Black traces of tires stayed on the road.

They should not be left there – the darkness would follow reading the black marks.

I began effacing the traces with the soles of my shoes. Would they last long?

The wind was rising, an unfolded-in-full-width sheet of a newspaper came frisking from the square and rubbed against my shank. I made out the headline "The Prince's Tomb"; it took it a really long time to find me.

The newspaper rustled its goodbye and slipped farther on along the asphalt...

The sky became gray.

The dog-tired, yet satisfied, cat cautiously retracted her way across the road to the five-story block to pick up her upper-society day life at the lordly loft estate.

Woeful laments of suppressed despair and supplicating clank of chain sounded after her.

The new day dawned, but I stood there until a woman in white crossed the square in the distance heading to the left edge of it, unseen from my post.

An old woman in black appeared in her wake, pushing a carriage. But I knew there was no baby at all. It was eggs she was pushing along, white and round like billiards balls; dense grapes of eggs.

And I realized that I might leave my post and go on to the square...

I walked along empty streets until I turned into the door of a factory check-entrance.

In a narrow room, I asked for water from an old man in black spetzovka, wearing glasses and a workman cap.

He gave me a glass of water and we both watched closely if I would swallow the black speck floating on the water surface.

I drank all of it. The speck remained stuck to the glass wall.

The man in black told me how to find the nearest employment office...

The office was locked, but then a woman with the key came and opened it.

I said to her I was looking for a job, and she told me to wait for one more office employee, who should presently come.

Not far from the office there was an open diary café. The kopecks I still had were enough to buy a large bottle of milk, but I drank only half of it.

Over a tall tumbler of thin glass, I uttered the parting words of Romeo, "Here's to my love!" And then I drank it...

When I returned to the employment office, the second employee was already in place.

I knew at once that she was Death, and the one who came first was Love.

Death looked through my documents and surly announced that I had been divorced already, but Love smiled and said that, well, so what?

Then she went out to the other room to make a phone call and I stayed with the irritated Death, that looked a little like Olga. Maybe because of her dyed hair, only longer.

On her return, Love said that there was a job for me at the Odessa Mining Management, I had to go to Pole Explorers Square and find the chief engineer there, and also remind him about a car she was waiting for but forgot mentioning it. A car for Maria, he should know.

The chief engineer said there was no position for me at the management and only the job of a roof-fastener at a mine which was incompatible with my higher education.

I hurriedly assured him that my education would not be in the way at all, and he commanded me to get into the back of a truck standing by the porch of the management, which took me out of the city into the countryside.

Apart from me, there was a tall and white but shabby refrigerator in the truck-back, and a pair of black chains, like from a chainsaw only much longer.

They looked like a couple of mating snakes and, with the jostling of the truck-back over the road, they kept sneaking up along its floorboards, gradually closing in on me.

In the village of Vapnyarka, the truck entered the grounds of somewhat manufacture.

The engineer told me to drop the chains from the back and I dropped the damned stalkers into a deep puddle, although there was a dry place too.

"Got crazy?" shouted the chief engineer, but I saw that he liked my exploit.

The truck driver dragged the drowned serpents into the open door of the warehouse...

We drove to another place in the village and hauled the refrigerator into a summer cottage in the group of the like cabins, surrounded by a common meter-tall palisade.

The chief engineer stuck the cord into a socket for a check, and the fridge hummed in satisfaction.

"I've almost forgotten," said I, "Maria wanted you to send her somewhat car."

In fact, I remembered those signal words all the time and only waited for the right moment...

The chief engineer explained how to get to a water tap in the street.

I went there, took off my jacket, washed my hands and arms up to the short sleeves, and also my face and neck.

Two militiamen with officer stars in the shoulder loops stood on one side from me, and two army officers in their fatigue uniform on the other.

They all waited patiently while I was splashing because I was with the chief, and after that water, no needle would ever be able to pierce the skin in my neck.

Then I walked away wiping myself with the tiny handkerchief that at once soaked through.

The truck left the village and rode on along the highway and very soon the road dived into a steep tilt to the right of which there unfurled a boundlessly vast field.

I could not understand what it was until a moment later it woke up and stirred in movement, and long low waves with white crests ran to the shore. So that's the sea!.

I took out the pocket notebook and, consulting the watch on my wrist, made the entry on inside of its back cover:

"July 20, 1979

13: 30: 15

Eera

Sehrguey

Lilianna"

The highway went up again. At the top of the ascent, the truck turned left onto a country road, and through the outskirts of a village went to the field where the road ran along a forest belt.

Two kilometers farther, after a long gentle slant there appeared and were passed two or three barrack-like structures and, after another hundred meters, the road ended in a wide pit with the dark hole of a cave-tunnel in the opposite wall, where a narrow-gauge track ran past the office-cottage of the "Mine Dophinovka"...

Three worn-out armchairs with wooden armrests stood in the shaded room.

In the one with its back to the window curtains sat the mustached mine foreman, about forty-five, of a placid countenance, with the hair thinning away on his pate.

From the chair opposite, the chief engineer with jovial laughter reported how I heaved the chain-snakes into the water.

The foreman did not partake in his mirth, and the chief engineer subsided guiltily.

His guarded respect to the foreman made it clear who was in charge there.

I was sitting to the right from the foreman and, to his request, handed my passport over, a little ashamed of its being so tarnished.

He opened it and, without touching, passed his right palm over the pages.

And I beheld how the paper in them brightened getting filled with life as if it had just come from the printing house, and there even appeared some slight transparent glow from its texture.

Both the chief engineer and I watched fascinated, doing miracles was beyond our power.

Seemed, like, I, after all, managed to reach the most supreme...

He had long since left the clouds and acquired the form of a foreman at a shabby mine.

His name? It shall not be taken in vain. I can only disclose that he had fancied the patronymic of "Yakovlevich"...

Then I said that all my things were lost at a bus station in Odessa, and there was no money by me, but I had to call my wife because she would be worried.

The chief engineer at once outstretched a dark-blue five-ruble note to me, and he made it known that I would live in the hostel above the pit.

I needed no explanation that the hostel, as well as the mine itself, were a deceptive illusion for gullible dupes in the world where one should constantly be on their look-out.

So I pinched the brownish fuzz-mark off the bill and, to get rid of it, gently placed on the wooden armrest...

Besides doing my jobs – at first, a mine roof-fastener, and later an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator, not to mention some short-term labors, I was in the constant state of the ceaseless alerted search for an answer: what was hidden behind the seeming facade all around?

My quest for clarity continued also in Odessa, where I often went for making long-distance telephone calls to Nezhin from the intercity telephone station on Pushkin Street.

Where was the money from? I borrowed it in the hostel from Slavik Aksyanov, or his wife Lyuda.

In the, let's assume, hostel, seemingly, adapted from a, supposedly, cow-farm-house there were four rooms on both sides of a long corridor from end to end of the barrack-like building.

In one of the rooms lived the young childless family of Aksyanovs.

Their neighbors were a Bessarabian family with a one-year-old baby.

An elderly single electrician occupied the room next to them.

I was given a room across the corridor from which, reportedly, they moved the radio set away but left the grates in the window.

First of all, I pulled the iron frame with bars out and put it outside in the tall grass reaching the window ledge.

Then I whitewashed the walls, and for one entire evening was thrashing them with a tube of a rolled-up newspaper in the battle with a myriad of vampire mosquitoes.

The following morning Slavik Aksyanov, looking fairly battered, asked what I was doing there all the evening after the repair.

"Safari," curtly said I without going into detail for he obviously got his share in the battle.

The rest of the doors in the corridor were locked, except for the first to the right from the entrance where there was a shower.

The mineworkers were coming in the morning by a truck from Vapnyarka and New Dophinovka villages. They arrived whistling and screaming in the truck-back like devils, but they called themselves Makhno bandits.

Every two days, a pair of them were filling the large tank of the shower with water from a small hut in a hollow, some thirty meters from the hostel. There was a deep well with a bucket tied with a chain to the iron windlass.

Electric heaters heated the water in the tank long before the end of the working shift.

Aside from the barrack-hostel, on the slope overgrown with tall grass, stood a tin-walled outhouse.

There was no door in it, and the facility had to be approached with some kind of a warning noise, so as not to catch a user in the posture of an eagle on the roost.

From the doorless toilet there opened a magnificent view of the long sea inlet and its steep opposite shore.

(...there is a concept of "the stream of consciousness" which presumes that a person is capable of making mental comments on anything happening around them, or to think about something extraneous, having nothing, at first glance, to do with those happenings.

By the widely entertained assumption, the Irishman James Joyce is considered the creator of "the stream of consciousness", although he tried to bring into play a certain French author from whom he, allegedly, picked up the idea.

However, much earlier that same stream, even though not on an overly prominent scale, occurred in the meditations of the failed-to-become mother-in-law of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky.

Thus, "the stream of consciousness" seems to be one of those discoveries which have to take place repeatedly and in different places, just in case, to ensure they would not be missed.

The "stream", when boiled down, announces to the human race that a person really can exchange thoughts with themselves.

What happened to me in Odessa in that crazy summer of '79 which turned out to be the most beautiful summer of my life, could hardly be called a "stream of conscience".

A stream? I pray, desist!

No! It was a waterfall and a refreshing one too, for my constantly and tensely strained senses on their alerted lookout...

I exchanged thoughts not just with myself but also with any-every-one-thing I came across.

Starting from a small pebble on a dusty roadside up to the night stars with their dew-like glinting in the sky.

"Seen that?"

And the stars were answering with high-and-mighty indifference, "And more than that, and more than once..."

And they went blinking on the way they did the millions upon millions of years before our era.

And it did not bother me at all, that constant and tireless wide-spray fire pump gushing of thoughts.

After all, the human brain is engaged for some scanty 10 percent of its full capacity.

Let it have a knock-up, sweep away the cobweb and dust accumulated in the remaining percent!

Of course, during working hours the intensity of my brainstorm somewhat decreased – the workplace environment seemed more static and settled when compared to split-second changes of circumstances on the city streets.

However, I can proudly state that even as deep as 38 meters under the earth's surface, the intensity of my mental labor was much higher than the notorious ten-percent standard...)

The mine "Dophinovka" produced cubics – three-dimensional freestone blocks of 20 cm. x 20 cm. x 40 cm. cut out from the underground limestone strata.

For which purpose, there was a drift tunnel dipping from the wide pit and going under 38 meters of other stratification layers.

Down the tunnel, here and there the shafts were branching out on one or another of its sides—also tunnels, but lower and narrower—just like boughs from a tree trunk.

At the end of those shaft-galleries, there were placed the stone-cutting machines which cut cubics from the wall in front of their noses.

Such was the general, birds-eye-view picture...

As for the details, my instructor in the roof-fastener job bore a sonorous name of ancient Russ princes – Rostislav.

However, he did not respond to this name because it sounded foreign even to him, for everyone knew and addressed him as Charlic.

First of all, he led me to the shaft of Machine 3 because of his humble trepidation before its operator, whom Charlic called exclusively with the patronymic "Kapitonovich".

Being a petty demon, Charlic constantly made up to Kapitonovich, a stout devil of esteem, who had once served a stretch of ten years.

Both Charlic and I walked holding a flashlight in hand.

Going down to the mine, everyone received his flashlight from Lyuda Aksyanova, the lamp-recharger, in her cave by the entrance to the main tunnel.

Without the light, down there you got into the wholesome pitch-black darkness and could easily stumble at a rail of the narrow-gauge track, or at one of the rarely put ties under it, and have a nasty fall.

That's why everyone in the mine wore a plastic helmet and each morning, before going down, they scribbled their signatures in a ledger to testify that they got instructed on safety rules and now knew their risks, and were up to them.

The temperature in the mine was always above zero, even in winter. A constant calm and underwater silence reigned in the shafts if no one talked to someone else and no mechanism was working nearby.

We walked and walked along a narrow low gallery, one wall of which bore serifs from a stone-cutting saw and the other was screened off with a hedge of cubic debris.

The hedge was rather tall but did not reach the gallery ceiling.

In mining, the ceiling is called roof, but more on that later...

Ahead of us appeared dim yellow light of a pair of bulbs with a scaly incrustation of thick dust fixed to a long white wire on the wall.

The stone-cutting machine stood to face the end wall, and Kapitonovich sat in its open seat waiting for us.

He worked without an assistant because his dream was someday to be paid 300 rubles a month.

The stone of the end wall in front of the machine — 2,5 m. x 4,5 m. — was already crisscrossed with deep furrows of "the sketch".

The deep parallel cuts ran horizontally between sidewalls and were intersected with vertical ones cut that same way from the ceiling to the floor, forming the butt ends of the future cubics.

Now, you just needed to drive a breaker in one of the slots in the "sketch" center until a cubic was broken out.

Then a couple of cubics next to it, until there formed a niche roomy enough to allow breaking the rest of them off with a sledgehammer.

Kapitonovich was waiting for us because in the past two days his stone-cutting machine moved forward, away from the end of the narrow-gauge track.

Charlic and I extend the railroad with two pairs of three-meter rails, so that the mine cars, aka wagonettes, could be pushed closer to the end wall to stack the broken out cubics on them...

If a wagonette capsized off the rails, they called it a "bored-in wagonette" and two or three workers heaved it back in the track, the method being named "fart-steamer".

Then a tiny mining locomotive would come down from the open pit, and pull back the wagonettes loaded with the cubics, collecting on its way up the loaded wagonettes waiting in the entrances to other cutting-machines' shafts.

Not all of the cubics were breaking evenly off the wall, so before the next "sketching" the most sticking out pieces of the limestone had to be knocked off with that same sledgehammer.

Those fragments together with the spoilage—cubics broken off too short, or split because of the cracks in the stone strata—served the material to continue laying of the hedge-screen along the shaft wall.

Without that masonry, there would be no room to shove the sand off.

Where did the sand come from?

When the cutting-machine, with howling din and clang of its chain, was cutting a furrow in the wall, a long jet of sand, or rather sawdust gushed into the shaft.

The shield of metal-framed glass protected the operator from whipping sand, although not from the clouds of dust.

The sand rose like a dune around the cutting-machine, and if not shoved off with a shovel into the "pocket", between the hedge and the wall, there would be no room for the narrow-gauged track.

With the track-promotion accomplished, Charlic took the helmet off his head, put it down and sat upon as on a potty – that's much more comfortable than sitting on the floor, or on a heap of sand or rubble.

He lit a Prima begged from Kapitonovich and reverently inquired about the meaning of the large stain of red in the stonewall on the right.

Kapitonovich with portent gravity forwarded his explanation that once there was the sea around with a steamboat on fire, which, eventually, sank, leaving the red of the flames in the stone.

Charlic gave out a flattering giggle, while I was trying to suppress the unnecessary contemplations that ten years was the standard stretch provided for murder because I liked Kapitonovich.

Before leaving for other cutting-machines, we fixed the roof in the shaft.

For that purpose, Kapitonovich started the machine and cut a series of short horizontal slots under the very ceiling of the gallery.

When the stone plates between the slots were crashed away with the breaker, a deep niche of 20 cm. x 20 cm. was formed up there. The same operation was done on the opposite wall.

Then Charlic and I fetched a not too thick log of those named ploshchuk in the mine lingo and thrust its end into one of the niches, as deep as it could go. The other end we raised to the opposite niche and shoved inside, not too deep though, so as not to pull the log out from the first one.

We propped it up by the sidewalls with a pair of stoyak logs.

Now the shaft roof was fixed.

Where did the three logs come from? Very simple, retreating our way back about some thirty meters into the darkness of the shaft, we pulled out one of the previous fastenings. Where else could they be from?.

In the period of my work at the "Dophinovka" mine, there had arrived exactly three new logs.

It was I to rip the bark off them and Slavik Aksyanov drove the wagonette with the deficit materials down the main tunnel.

So, the roof in the shafts was secured with the economically saved materials...

Sometimes the roof started to "drip" or "get rainy". Then it began crackling, splitting and dropping down pieces of rock; something in a way of collapse though not total.

Charlic got under such "raining" in front of my eyes when pulling out one more of "economically saved" logs.

He was lucky though to be laying on the sand heap between the hedge and the wall, close to the ceiling. The dropping cob of stone, that separated from the roof, did not have room enough to gain speed and just lay on his chest, gently. Not a too big flake though, half-meter by half-meter and about ten centimeters thick.

He immediately recollected Alic the Armenian.

When the roof started to rain, Alic had to retreat for sixteen meters, backward. Racing, of course, as quick as he could because there was not even time to turn around with the roof crackling and falling and catching up.

And so he ran, backward, yelling on the way, "Fuck the mine! Fuck the money!" But how? That was the question.

So the roof in mining is not the same as an ordinary roof...

Besides the operating shafts, there also were abandoned ones in the mine. The layer of proper stone dwindled out there, and they were left off.

Entrances to such shafts were sealed with a wall of cubic rubble joined with mortar, so that prevent drafts.

However, not all of the left off shafts were sealed. One time the foreman showed me the emergency exit from the mine. Through one such unsealed shafts, we reached the old trunk tunnel where once the wagonettes were pulled by horses. That drift also led to the same open pit, only on a higher level than the present one.

And that old tunnel also had its shafts. When Charlic had a vacation and I remained the only roof-fastener in the mine, I was pulling the logs from there.

On one occasion, I returned to the newer part of the mine, to Machine 4 shaft, so pleased and proud of myself that I was hauling a whole log alone.

With some stupid jest too, like, "Here's for Machine 4 by special order, all the way from Rio de Janeiro!" Then I dropped the log off my shoulder; and the bastardy piece of wood—crackle!—fell apart into two, because of being way too ancient material.

But those gossips, as if I was roaming the abandoned shafts without a flashlight, were blatant lies.

They started because when someone else's flashlight was on, I turned mine off. I did not even know why.

To save energy? It made no difference because after the shift all of the flashlights were delivered to Lyuda for recharging.

A meter-long length of wire connected the flashlight to the accumulator in the small canvas shoulder bag. The flashlight with number 16 painted clumsily on its accumulator side was mine.

In the abandoned galleries, I always turned the flashlight on, and one time its beam caught a flash of some unseen, unearthly beauty.

I couldn't make it out from afar what were those sparks in the overpowering tremendous silence of the dark gallery.

It's hard to describe – some spiky pure-white alien structure, or maybe like some creature from the ocean depths where even bathyscaphes could not reach, and there it was shimmering with tiny diamonds in the circle of light.

Awesomely beautiful.

And I had an ax in my hand for checking if the logs out there were still usable. So the ax swooshed through the darkness above the light and the white thing fell to the floor.

And instead of the inexplicable beauty, I saw just a huge slimy spittle, only then I guessed that it was a garland of mold.

Later I was coming across the like garlands, but smaller in size and only brown, as if being punished for the murder of that pure beauty...

Then Charlic returned from his vacation and a new worker, Vasya, was given the job of a roof-fastener, and I became an assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator.

Well, it's not as romantic as walking the no man's shafts and it's deafening, and the nose and mouth must be covered with a cloth because of the dust, but—wow!—familiar all faces! Messrs. Breaker, Shovel, and Sledgehammer...

However, that all was so only at the first, uninitiated, glance.

What actually produced the "Dophinovka" mine under the unadvertised supervision of the most supreme chief, that is Yakovlevich?

Well, it depended. Jedem das Seine.

The mining engineer Pugachov, who showed his pyramidally straight nose down there once a month, was interested in gold only, or rather in the golden sand. He would suck at the gold fix on a fang in his mouth, and quietly ask the operator, "Enough sand today?"

After I had (unintentionally) heard him say that I started to dust out my spetzovka pockets at the end of each shift. Like, you're not gonna buy me with your vile metal! Moreover, I did not know the way of turning that sand into gold. Tolik, the operator of Machine 2, got stunned when he saw what I was getting rid of.

But they, no doubt, knew how to turn it into gold indeed and then, under the guise of aluminum castings, stacked it in the tall grass nearby the hostel; those looked exactly like ingots of bank gold reserves, only of aluminum color, of course, so as to camouflage.

The foreman himself said to me about it and almost straightly too, "Such a worth and no one has brains to collect them, so they kick back here, littered."

And where a mine for cubic production would get aluminum ingots from? Or for what purpose?.

As for the cubics themselves, they, naturally, were souls.

Machine 5, for example, whose operator was Hitler, or else Adolf (well, anyway, everyone called him so: either Adolf or Hitler) was producing human souls.

Ivan, from Machine 1, felt hurt indeed that when his wagonettes were pulled to the pit up there, lots of his cubics were rejected, while anything from Adolf—however uneven and defected—went through. But, if you think about it, so it is – many human a soul happen with flaws.

And what is paradoxical, his namesake—Hitler—annihilated so many souls, and this one, down here, turns them out slapdash and keep sneering at Ivan.

Whose souls were sawed out by other machines, I could only guess. For archangels? Demons? Titans?.

That's what really depressed me most – my ignorance.

Yes, I felt, of course, that I was a chosen one, but I remained a so sorely ignorant chosen, like, a pawn in the game whose rules all are aware of but you.

Advancement to getting it went in trial and error method, checking each hunch I had on the way.

Sometimes there happened real insights as it was when I went to New Dophinovka after the shift to buy food for the next couple of days.

Among the workers in the truck-back, there was some old woman in a headscarf. We were driving past the hostel where the Bessarabian stood in the doorway with the baby in her arms.

"Such a nice baby-girl!" pronouncing these words, the old lady released her headscarf and tied it up again, but somehow differently...

I returned home walking through the fields along the forest belt. But I could not get rest in my room – the one-year-old girl of the Bessarabian family was choking with shrieks and cries, and her mother, not knowing how to ease the baby, kept carrying it along the corridor—from end to end—swaying in her arms, chanting "ah-ah!", but nothing helped.

I never could bear children crying, but the hostel was not a local train where you might move to another car.

And suddenly I remembered how the woman in the truck-back had tied her headscarf differently while praising this, so calm at that time, child.

I went out into the corridor and silently, but steadily looking at the baby's mother, took out my handkerchief from the pocket, stretched it open and folded back again, yet on the other side, after which I went out to the well-hut to fetch some water.

When I returned the woman gave me a happy grateful look; the girl in her arms was perfectly calm, a kerchief had appeared on her head tied in a knot on the forehead.

Bingo!.

However, there happened misfires too. The rooster, walking around the hostel entrance, did not understand my fair intentions and contemptuously turned away, when I offered him a grain of laundry blue from the pinch scattered on the wide bench, next to the entrance.

The proposed supplement to the ration of the bird was based on good motives and freshly gained experience.

That day it was revealed to me, that the combination of blue and black symbolize strength: the cock with his black plumage would turn a super-cock had he picked that laundry blue speck...

And the fact that I was both chosen and protected one became obvious when one of the glassy-eyed was sneaking to me with obviously inimical intentions...

There are three varieties of glassy-eyed.

Those in whom eye glassiness is combined with pronounced purity of whites in their eyes are harmless. They, beyond doubt, are possessed, but remain just tools for the transmission of information, like, what's up and on and how it goes? – kind of a spyglass, and nothing more.

Where does the information flow to? Who's the recipient? The former dwellers of Olympus in their current forms, of course.

The second variety, with blurry luster filming their eyeballs, are self-employed freelancers looking for a chance refreshment with "red-and-hot", or striving to somehow otherwise get recharged on your account.

"There's an underground passage for people, but we may use it as well," one of them told me, apparently taking for one of her likes when in an unfamiliar and poorly lit area of night Odessa, I asked her how to get to the bus station – their favorite feeding trough.

Those it was, waiting for me to get out of the "Bratislava" restaurant with my torn thigh, and urging impatiently the woman in the cloakroom not to talk so too much and set the game (me) out, for them to hunt...

When having a medical check for employment (two weeks after getting the job), I visited some medical facilities in Vapnyarka village for the blood sample analysis.

On entering the office, I saw, besides the nurse, a lady, marked with that particular murkiness in the eyes, sitting on the couch, and from a corner of her mouth, there was hanging a long flexible tube.

The nurse explained that the tube was just a probe, and the lady would not be in the way.

As if I could not figure out from her looks what kind of lady it was and why she was there...

Then the nurse customarily pierced the ball of my finger and squeezed it and, instead of the usual bead of blood, it gave out a tiny jet of it, no thicker than a needle, like milk sprinkling from a squeezed nipple of a breastfeeding woman. I had never seen such a thing in my life!

And not only I was surprised – the lady's jaw dropped and that, let's say, probe wanted to pop out too. Just like an alky who had outstretched a cup for a fill but they splashed a whole three-liter jar of moonshine over it. What a loss of precious stuff!.

As for reaching the blood with their fangs, that's just grandma's tales for sillies.

To fill their tanks they use some subtle, inconspicuous, and even though unknown to me, but efficient technology...

The glassy-eyed of blurry type, who attempted at utilizing me, was a Volga driver that brought his boss to the hostel.

In the corridor, there also was a rarely opened office of the mining engineer, visited by those coming to arrange for cubics to be taken from the pit.

That day, as always, I came from the mine to hostel for the midday meal and was washing my hands by the washstand on the stake, not far from the entrance.

The glassy-eyed did not know me because of being an outsider, and he kept sneakily closing in, holding in his hands the weapon – an artifact that looked like a length of aluminum wire twisted in a special way, about twenty centimeters long.

Noting that blurry filmed glassiness in his eyes and the cautious way of his slinking nearer, I realized that I was done.

The distance shortened, yet the moment when he already could reach me with his thing, a gray kitten jumped out from the tall grass and rubbed his scruff against my black spetzovka pants. And at once the glassy-eyed stalker lost any interest in me, lowered his weapon and returned to the car.

The unknown rescuer-kitten who I never—before or later—saw around, disappeared into the grass...

But more often I had to rely only on my own prudent circumspection. As on that narrow beach under the cliff of Chabanka.

I wanted to take a swim in the sea and had already entered the peaceful slow waves but stopped – two fishermen in swimming trunks with fishing rods in their hands stood ahead.

Between them, there was enough space to swim forwards, but I realized that the rods were the barrier blocking the way to the sea. And only seizing the moment when they simultaneously pulled their fishing rods up, I plunged in and swam away from the beach.

I swam for a long time, sometimes laying on the water for rest and wondering why my father told me that seawater supports a swimmer because of the salt dissolved in it. It made no difference to lying on the freshwater.

Then I swam on, mostly on my back, facing the warm bright sky, until I felt a touch on my shoulder.

I looked back and saw a jellyfish in the water, semi-transparent and as wide as a basin. I gave it way, but then I began to come across more and more jelly-fish – you bypassed one of them to just run into another.

Popping up a bit out from the water, I looked forward and saw a whole crowd of them which had turned the calm sun-driven waves into some jellyfish soup filled with their translucent bodies.

I didn't get the nerve to breast that soup, I turned around and swam back to the already distant shore...

The shingle beach of Chabanka had some sandy stretches in it.

On one of those spits, near the water's edge, I wanted to write "Eera", but the waves did not allow. They ran up and leveled the wet sand before I had time to write out all the letters, and I only scratched my finger to bleeding with the tiny shell fragments mixed with sand, before I gave up...

But my first meeting with the sea was on the beach of New Dophinovka where I went after work, along the shore of the sea inlet that reached the hostel.

The water in it was shallow and very transparent.

I walked until saw some worn-out tires in the water, dropped there from the shore by some morons. So I took off my pants, went into the shallow water, and dragged the tires onshore, but after one more bend of the inlet, I saw there was an entire trash dump in it – life would not be enough to drag all that out, and it was evening already.

Then there was a thicket of reeds stretching to the highway and along its opposite roadside there unfolded the wide vista of the sea and sea alone...

But when going to New Dophinovka by the country road, there sometimes were huge ships hovering above the sea.

The ships, of course, stood in the sea merging with the sky at the horizon, that's why you saw a field with a ship above it and, still higher or next to its bow, the immense red ball of the setting sun.

Those ships were so large that they, probably, do not fit in the port and had to stay right there among the sea with the sky...

With Slavik Aksyanov, at first, I had normal relations, even though I saw that in his past life he served as a Nazi officer in a death camp and that at present he was too keen on attracting the public attention by empty talks.

And I even helped him to saw boards for the family couch...

The distance from Chabanka to the mine was about two kilometers, approximately the same as from New Dophinovka, but with no forest belt along the country road.

And in the fields, some arrogant flies always started to follow me, a whole swarm of them keeping buzzing around and never lagging behind.

But I did not want to bring a "tail of a follower" behind me and give out the location of the mine, so I found a nice way of putting them off the track.

Nearby the hostel there stood a long structure of a former cattle farm, which I used as the disinfection lock of a spaceship on unexplored planets. I entered the building from one end, with all the buzzing flies swarming around me, and marched to the exit at the other end.

The whiff of the manure from once upon a time allured them, confusedly, they rushed in all directions in active search for fresher dung, while I walked out into the air, with the food bought in Chabanka and without a single buzzing follower behind my back...

Now, Slavik asked the foreman for permission to use some floorboards from the old farm and make a couch for himself and his wife because he was expecting the arrival of his mother-in-law.

Then we went and pulled out the boards for the project; a rather decent material they were, only nailed way too deep, but we had got a breaker.

With the material procured, we started to discuss the measurements of the planned furniture item.

By that time, I had already had a certain, fully developed, numerological system in which the meaning of some individual figures was brought to a complete clarity, thus, for instance, 22 corresponded to "death", 24 to "wife", 10 to "sex", and so on, and all that remained there was just to combine their meaning the way called for by the situation.

With the purpose of the product in mind, I offered him the best solution for its length – 2 meters 10 centimeters. Which read that 10 for 2 is the very thing for a young family.

But he balked!

"I wanna have 2 meters and 30!"

Okay, you know better what you want...

He dragged a "goat"-trestle from somewhere, the kind used for sawing firewood, and we started. A board on the "goat", two marks with the tape measure and – off we go!

When we stopped to catch a breath, his wife, Lyuda, was passing by to the hostel entrance. She pointed at the "goat" and declared to Slavik, "Don't you hope, that I ever lie upon this thing!"

Full of indignation, she went away and I got finally convinced that she was a part of a different world. What normal woman had never seen a "goat"?

Apart from that, she could read thoughts.

I once entered their room, where Slavik was eating soup and watching television. I said I was not hungry, and sat by the door to wait for him to finish off his havvage.

And in the corner behind his back there stood a refrigerator, with a mirror put on top of it face down. The mirror frame had a pair of plastic legs to keep it upright, when not in the supine position.

From the chair I was sitting in, the puzzle collected into a coherent picture: Slavik, eating the TV with his stare, ladles the soup into himself, with two green legs sticking out of his hair in the form of lyre-shaped horns, only without strings, of course.

Then I thought to myself, that is, inside my mind, "So, you're not only a Nazi but a cuckold too!"

Lyuda read that thought, and went directly to the refrigerator, she put the legs down and gave me an eloquent look. Like, we need none of your comments on the skeletons in our family cupboard!.

Well, in general, when Slavik fired up the test flights on that aerodrome of a couch in their room, there cropped up somewhat inconsistencies in the game.

Three days later, he dragged it out of the hostel in the tall grass and shortened with a hacksaw. That's what the trial and error method is about...

And when his mother-in-law came, he started to have fits of frenzy. He visited my room and made faces. The purpose of those grimaces was clear to me without any explanations – he wanted to drive me mad...

Once Ivan, the driver of Machine 1, called me to share a midday meal with him and his assistant in their shaft.

His wife worked in the canteen of the military school in Odessa, where they also trained Negroes from the countries of awakened Africa. So those Afro-Africans were not too hungry, judging by the amount of provision she brought home from there. When Ivan removed the lid from that aluminum pot, it was brimming with meat on ribs, without any garnish at all.

The three of us—Ivan, his assistant and I—hardly managed to finish off that hecatomb, leaving a pile of bared bones on the sand by the pot.

And then Slavik came to borrow some spare part for his stone-cutting machine; on seeing that cannibal still-life, he distorted his mug in earnest, bitten by the recollection of everyday oats from his mother-in-law, most likely.

Maybe, that's why several hours later, when the hostel residents were enjoying the coolness of late evening, he wanted to fight me.

He even snatched one ingot from the gold stock in the tall grass, raised it with both hands over his head and hurled at me.

The action resulted in a really beautiful sight – the full moon pouring its tender light onto the scintillating tracery of dashes in the arc-shaped trajectory chosen by the lobbed ingot for its flight, gleaming lazily with white, apparently aluminum, color against the velvety darkness of the balmy night.

(Or was I wrong, after all, and the mine was mining platinum?)

Now it was my turn to ran backward in the manner of Alic the Armenian. Slavik's wife, Lyuda, took him home from the arena of demonstration performances.

During my next visit to Odessa, I dropped to legal consultation. I did not plan it at all, just their office sign caught my eye.

Without leaking any names or geographical locations, I asked for a recommendation if pestered by a neighbor in the hostel.

"Turn to Komsomol Committee of your enterprise."

Well, and those also were not of this world. They are already anywhere, see?!.

But if Supreme Head was Yakovlevich, then who, the heck, could the chief engineer be?

It's not difficult to guess – who's the Creator's antipode? Prince of Darkness and master of the impure, in all his glory.

That could be easily deducted even from their attitude toward each other – respectful, but armed, neutrality. I recollect them standing in the tunnel and talking eye to eye – correctness itself!

The foreman in his black spetzovka and the chief engineer in a summer shirt with a white handkerchief bent over its collar to keep the dust off. If there were a safari helmet on his head instead of the plastic one, it would be a ready picture "I'm the master here!"

Although, of course, the depths under the ground are his domain.

(...you might protest: how could be possible contact between such antagonistic opposites?

Do not forget – it was the twentieth century around, in its second half, when everything got so intertwined, confused and tangled that a simplistic geometry could no longer help out...)

I assumed the stance of a foreman's sympathizer.

I liked him just so, even without miracles, moreover, that, in fact, the one with my passport was more than enough for me.

By the way, the chief under Chief also presented his credentials.

One day during the midday break, he came to hold a trade-union meeting. (Ahem!)

We settled under the trees by the hostel.

He got seated on a chair and took off his shoes, and socks too. Like, don't you think all talks of my clove foot are a stupid gossip now? Stuff and nonsense!

But I was not to be caught with illusory chaff.

The devils of Makhno bandits lay down around in the shaded grass under the trees in their black spetzovkas.

Only I was in the nylon shirt which I wore in the mine under the spetzovka jacket and every evening washed in the shower.

(...nylon is ideal for washing: you rub it for six seconds flat and it's clean, and it gets dry even faster...)

In the way of a polite, albeit arch, response, I also took off my helmet. Like, you wanna make me believe you've got no hooves? Come on, admire my hornlessness then!.

All the other workers had their helmets on, especially Slavik Aksyanov.

And so it went on for some ten minutes when suddenly the rooster crowed. Surprise!

The chief, who's not Chief, shoved his socks into his pockets, and raced to the nearby country road, thrusting his feet into the shoes on the run.

And there, as if from under the ground, popped up a biker in black and in a black-leather ribbed helmet, like those the miners wore in the days of the first five-year plans. And they whizzed off in the direction of New Dophinovka.

Not clear enough? Who shoots away at a rooster crowing?

Not that I confronted with...well, the chief engineer, but there happened certain frictions. Like it was when a truck dumped a heap of coal for the winter, and I shoved all that anthracite into the stokehold.

At the end of that day, he came from Vapnyarka and asked me, haughtily so, "Well, how much is you want? Three rubles enough?"

I grew amok: half-day in the sun, and he, like as if offering a pittance to a dirty wretch. Okay, you're the prince of darkness, but I am also a chosen, even if not initiated.

"No!" said I, "let I'll be paid the worth of my labor."

"You won't get such an amount then."

I did not believe him and the next day applied for a day-off and went to the Mining Management in Pole Explorers Square.

I was shown the door of the chief accountant office, Weitzman was his name.

No sooner had I stepped into his office than the phone on the desk rang. He took off the receiver, "You are listened to."

(...just like that, word for word: "You're listened to."

Clear, smooth, distanced.

Without sticking his neck out for a fraction of a millimeter.

That's some Weitzman for you!.)

I depicted the essence of the matter in hand, he got it at once and took out a thick book in a gray paperback The Unified Norms and Tariffs, and he found in it where it was about loading and unloading of loose coal and gave me to read.

There it stood in black on white, that even if I were shoveling that coal in an area north of the Arctic Circle—to be paid with the highest northern coefficients applied—and with each shovelful of coal I were circling three times around the hostel, before heaving it into the stokehold window, so as to gain the bigger distance of moving the load—then, by the rates from that normative bible, I was entitled to the payment of 1 ruble and 20 kopecks.

(...and it was revealed unto me, who did not know the truth hitherto, that to foremen, supervisors, engineers, etc., etc., should the workmen bow low for the lies added to work orders.

Without the addition of false figures, the working class would die out long ago, together with their families.

Pray for your benefactors and bread givers, workmen!

But what bastard composed all those rates and tariffs?

I'd like to share my shovel with them in a brotherly way...)

His diggings were near Hunchback Bridge in Odessa. There he lived in a house of his own, together with his wife and their son, fifth-grader.

He treated me to a glass of home-made tomato juice. (Ahem...)

Everything as expected – some red, thick, brackish liquid. But could I say "no"? Margarita also drank it, at the annual ball of Satan, in Moscow.

Yet until now, I brew the black tea after the recipe he shared.

That evening he also shared his memories about working in the Arctic, where, after work, he put a pair of bricks on an electric stove and seated his wife on top of them to bring into the working conditions for the night...

One time the impure attempted at a putsch, they wanted to change the layout of world stratification.

The day before it, the mining engineer Pugachov arrived at the hostel and opened one of the locked doors in the corridor. Like, distributing to the miners some food products to be paid for later, at the payday.

I walked along the corridor and Slavik Aksyanov shouted to me from that room, "Come on, get it too!"

There were five Makhno devils inside the empty room and a box of "Prima" packs upon the desk without a chair; Pugachov was meting out from 5 to 10 packs each.

Food products, eh? Ammunition supplies! "No, thank you, "Belomor" is my smoke."

Going out I still heard Slavik motivating the devils, "No fear! Youth will write off everything!"

The next day not a single traffic lights worked in Odessa. It was a day of complete bedlam; people were shouting at each other, and the trolleybuses were jostling and jumping like mad.

There was no shooting, of course, because the putsch took place on a different level. However, by my estimations, it failed because I was in time to buy The World Atlas, a thin booklet in a soft green paperback...

In Odessa of those days, the most stable and widely used expression of approval was "you can't but love!"

"What's your thought about Sonya's latest groom?"

"You can't but love!"

And, instead of "no", they were saying "dick to mama!" But, with Odessa-Mommy around, it sounded even patriotic.

"So, The Black-Sea Footballer won yesterday, or what?"

"Dick to mama!"

In the small park on Deribassov Street, there grew some unseen trees looking as if they had cast off their own bark.

In the evening, the brass band played there, almost like in the times of Johann Strauss, but seldomer.

And in some other park, in the daytime, I dived into the pool from the five-meter-tall tower, the air whistled in the ears during the dive.

A little later two guys jumped off as well, holding hands, but it was a heels-first cannonball dive and one of them had black socks on. That way those jumpers were effacing my footprints to put off track any possible followers.

At the intercity phone calls station in Puskin Street, they played a good joke on me.

I made the order and waited, then went through the porchless wide-open door out onto the sidewalk. The moment I lit a cigarette, the loudspeaker inside shouted, "Nezhin! Is anyone waiting for Nezhin?!"

I threw the cigarette into a trash bin by the door and ran back. "It's me! I am waiting!"

To which the telephone operator said on her microphone, "So, wait then!"

The crowd in the hall split their sides. That again, they were saving me from something.

Some geezer was waiting there too. They announced his number connected, "Chelyabinsk on line! Enter Booth 5!"

And before going to where was told, he uttered with a bitter disappointment, "Eew!"

That's an enlightened one! By the booth number alone, he knew beforehand the pending talk's outcome!.

I got to know Odessa very well. On foot, for the most part.

I found the Public Library Nr. 2; and Privvoz bazaar, where the porters in blue robes pushed station trolleys in front of them shouting "Feet! Feet!", so that the crowd would give way to them with their abbreviated "Watch your feet!".

There, in Privvoz, an old gypsy cast a curse on me with their witchcraft art; I did not get it what for, but she should know better.

Factory of Gastric Juice; who would ever imagine there were such enterprises?!.

When I was passing through the yards of five-story blocks, mujiks at their game of "goat" would bang the bones louder against the tables to shoo off the cats, so they would not run across the sidewalk in front of me. Also allies...

To Odessa I was going by bus, only a couple of times on foot; there were just twenty kilometers or so all in all.

And one time I walked from Vapnyarka to New Dophinovka along the seashore, over the cliff. In one place there stood some military installation behind the fence of barbed wire. The sentry shouted from there it was forbidden to pass by their site and demanded to show my documents.

I showed him through the wire my handkerchief with the sailing boat in the circle. He realized at once that the level was different, "Okay, get along..."

From up the cliff, the view was very beautiful. The sea was quiet, almost smooth, and sparkled under the sun. Sometimes the wind rushed along to ripple the water and draw various types of galaxies. Spiral, for the most part. The wind was copying them from the clouds that hovered above the sea...

In a streetcar to the beach of Arcadia, I saw Gray from our construction battalion.

It surprised me a little – four years had passed and he remained looking so young and for some reason in the sea cadet black uniform, in the cap with ribbons behind.

I stood up and quietly asked into his ear, "Gray, is it you?"

He did not respond, neither moved the tiniest bit although he heard me, dead sure...

And another time it was my father by a newsagent booth. He did not look like my father at all, I only recognized him by his voice. It was with that voice he described the murderer, whom the camp director brought to a new murder.

When he spoke to me, I pretended that I was overly busied with examining a portrait of the psychiatrist Burdenko on the Ogonyok magazine cover, which hung behind the glass of the booth, so it was the seller who responded to him.

(...confronted with the meetings of such a kind, anyone will start asking themselves: what's going on?

But you can't get an answer to it without a perception of the conception of the monad.

Monad is a made in Germany gadget for philosophizing, which everyone understands to their liking.

For someone, it might mean a singularity from a set, while for someone else – a whole set of singularities.

For example, when a guy asks his girl, "Tell me! Am I just another one of many for you, or the only one from all their many?"

Here, the second "one" in his question is that very monad, or maybe, vice versa...

In some Indian Bible, there is a bright picture of a baby that crawls over the grass, a step ahead of him a kid is running, before whom there walks a man, just about to overtake a withered old man, and then again only the green of the grass.

The picture is called "The Circle of Life".

That is, from nothing to nothing.

Now, together, they all comprise one monad because it's the same person.

So, it only remains to assume, that monads can be formed in a different way; for example, by the timbre of a voice; and everything falls into place.

It depends on the standpoint from which you are viewing the monad: here – it's your father, while on its other end – a homeless drifter addresses you by the stall with Burdenko.

Of course, all that is a bit more complicated than memorizing the chant: "if you stumble with your left leg – everything would be okay, when with your right – not even try, turn back and go home", but abstruse and hardly comprehensible as it is, monad still explains a lot...)

One of the Odessa Preferans players as a young man was a part of the illegal underground. But later he reformed and began to collaborate with the television studio of Odessa as a commentator of the latest criminal news. He even wrote a book sharing impressions from his bandit past, in which he claims that the year of your birth, and especially the summer period, was marked by an unseen, critically baneful, surge of violent crime in Odessa.

It's a very rare case when a printed text failed to convince me because that summer I was there in person and never noticed anything of the kind. Which speaks in favor of the theory about the existence of parallel worlds. The reformed commentator and I lived in separate parallel worlds, therefore each of us was receiving different impressions from different worlds both of which had in common only the ordinal number of the current year.

In all of my reiterations to and detours within Odessa, I observed only two occasions of contact and reciprocal penetration of our parallel worlds.

The first one happened in the morning on the bus Gvardeyskoye-Odessa when a young geezer on the second seat on the left rebuked the driver for a minor change in the route on reaching the city.

Upon arrival at the bus station by New Bazaar, the driver hurried from his cabin into the bus with apologies and technical (to some extent too-too obsequious) explanations.

He was forgiven when the other passenger from the same seat spoke for him to her easily irritable companion...

The second interpenetration occurred in the building of the railway station, where I inquired a militiaman about the number of population in the city of Odessa. For an answer, he directed me to the police station on the first floor.

The on-duty lieutenant, to whom I repeated the question, told me to wait for a while.

Obedient to his instruction, I leaned against the barrier separating us and watched as the red worms of his lips lustfully closed on, and squeezed, and twirled the filter of his unlit cigarette, under the accompaniment of heavy thuds and loud yells behind my back.

With a fleeting glance in that direction, I registered a door opened to the next room, where a woman in a kerchief and the black robe of a janitor aptly wielded the hefty handle of her mop to knock the crap out of a wretch draped in only his red underpants.

I never turned back again until the execution was finished, because of never being attracted by scenes of violence, moreover, under my trousers there was an exact clone of those red underpants though not in such a geriatric state.

After getting the pleasure due to his rank and position, the lieutenant lit the cigarette, and said that a million was not reached yet; maybe somewhere about six hundred thousand people...

That's why, when on my next visit to the city and being late for the last bus to New Dophinovka, I preferred to spend the night in the greens inside the circular intersection in front of the railway station.

It turned out to be completely deserted because the underground passage to it was unlit.

Having chosen the most distant from the lamppost bench, I lay down. The bench beams felt so hard that I recollected Edgar Poe killed on a bench in Baltimore, state of Maryland, for $40—a literary fee he had just collected—and partly pulled out the advance I received that day in Pole Explorers Square, like a coquettish handkerchief made of three-ruble notes, for the purpose of self-training and development of my personal courage.

The traffic along the circular intersection had almost ceased, but the bench became even harder. However, I kept my eyes shut for the principle's sake because the night is for sleeping.

So I was not asleep when there came the tiny sounds of cautious steps along the rounded path.

He walked up and for about a minute stood over me lying on the bench, with the Edgar Poe mustache, in a blue T-shirt with the Soviet three-ruble banknotes sticking out from the breast pocket on it.

Then he left keeping as quiet as he was when approaching. For the sake of principle and training, I did not open my eyes to see who it was.

In the morning, I woke up on the same bench rather chilled and stiff as a board but, unlike the great American romantic, alive.

A flock of ravens flew croaking in the dawn sky, flapping their wings. Seemingly, the same ones that coasted above Nezhin heading north-east on the day D. It did take them a long time to get over to Odessa.

A feather dropped from the wing of one in their squadron and, somersaulting in zigzags, kept falling down.

The face upturned, I followed the jerky trajectory and walked to intercept it, not heeding the dug up beds with sickly flowers.

At the meeting point, I outstretched my palm towards the black dodger, caught it, and went back to the asphalted path.

There I dropped the catch tenderly into a trash bin saying, "Not while I'm around, please."

(...a lesser-known German poet from the first half of the 20th century once cared to bemoan his own unworthiness, otherwise, he would not allow for the world's self-massacre.

Few of the venerable laureates rise to so a deep comprehension of a poet's responsibility for the fate of the world.

Inertly cling they to the trivial standpoints and rituals of their time, yet if you think about it closely...)

However, just to think is not enough, it's also necessary to think out, as Valentin Batrak, aka Lyalka, cared to say somewhere...

On reaching the deadline for my return to take you and Eera over to Odessa with me, there, in fact, was no place to bring you to. However, with the word given, I had no choice but come back, and at least explain the reasons for the postponement of the move.

I had no money for the travel, neither anyone who I addressed for a loan. The urgent need brought about the idea to exchange the wedding ring for money at the pawnshop.

While I found it in the city, it was already open with the line starting out the front door.

The pawnshop was one long room with barriers along its three walls.

In the sheet glass partitions atop the barriers, there were small rounded windows one of which even had iron grating. It was to that very window, the farthest one, for all that crowd to queue. At the time when the pawnshop closed for the midday break, I was at some four meters from that window.

In the breast pocket of my T-shirt, there was the ring that I hardly managed to rip off the finger the night before. Even the soap and water from the washstand nearby the hostel were of little help. At those self-inflicted tortures, I remembered the projectionist booth in the Plant Park and felt sorry for Olga.

The pawnshop opened again and, after waiting in the line for one more hour, I apprehensively handed the ring in, because a person before me failed – her earrings did not pass the check for genuine gold.

My ring proved acceptable, and I received 30 rubles along with the pawnshop ticket...

The following morning, I came to New Bazaar and bought a blue plastic mesh-bag, and four kilos of apricots to fill it with, they were not fully ripe though.

Then I went to the booth with flowers and said that I needed three red roses.

For the flower girl, it sounded like a clandestine password, and from some special place behind the counter she took out small, dark red, roses, exactly three, on sturdy long stalks. "You meant these?"

"Sure."

From New Bazaar, I went to the airport—not much better than the one in Stavropol—and stood in the line till the midday break.

When the ticket office window was closed, I remained standing nearby, like a statue with the three red roses in my hand, and only put the apricots on the floor under the window. Keeping four kilos for an hour seemed too much of a strain for my hand.

After I bought the ticket, there remained four hours before the departure and I was already tired of life with my hands busy holding something.

I took the flowers and the fruits to the automatic storage cells, but I could not leave them inside because I felt sorry for them; they would surely welk in there with the air and light cut off.

Looking around a small corridor, I found the janitors' room and asked for permission to leave the roses and apricots there. They accepted both of them, and I went out into the city hands-free, but I did not venture too far off.

At six I came after the roses.

The janitors were washing the floor in the corridor, and one of them told me I'd better wait. I insisted on getting them right away to be in time for the plane departing in half-hour.

She grinned and, without further arguing, let me take the roses sticking out of one of their tin pails filled with water. The janitor only warned that they had treated themselves on the apricots a little bit.

I went to a long shed on the edge of the take-off field and, together with other passengers having tickets for that flight, waited till midnight because each half-hour the loudspeakers announced a delay of the flight to Kiev. My delayed fellow-travelers also tried the apricots and approved.

After midnight, in the crude glare of the arc lamps along the runway, two stewardesses were counting us on the stairs to have no more than 27 passengers because for the flight they had to substitute a smaller aircraft, AN-24.

When onboard, it took some time to become warm after the chilly night breeze from the sea during that long wait.

I'd better have agreed to the janitor...

At the takeoff, I was fighting down the thoughts that they might have brought the asphalt while I was away.

At the mentioned meeting of the trade-union, the chief engineer informed that the builders had come across sharps in their scores. For those unfamiliar with the music notation, he put two fingers of his left hand over two on the right one, crosswise, representing prison grates.

Therefore, the construction works would be continued by those wishing to live in the intended hostel. The Aksyanovs and I enlisted for moving over there, and the Bessarabian family abstained.

The new hostel was located about twenty meters from the old one, and it also was a former cattle-farm building.

Each apartment in the hostel under reconstruction was of two spacious rooms and a single standard window. I chose the one with the view of the sea inlet.

However, the walls in our would-be home still needed plastering, and the window waited for insertion of glass panes, but I liked our place all the same, even though it had neither doors nor any floor yet.

Once, they dumped a truckload of hot asphalt between the old and the new hostel to make flooring in the rooms.

Aksyanov and his assistant at the stone-cutting machine were moving the asphalt with a wheelbarrow to the Aksyanovs' rooms, while I hauled it with a pair of pails to ours.

They managed to cover with the asphalt both of his rooms, and I only half of just one, yet making the flooring of higher quality, before the heap outside was finished off.

That's why, while the plane was gaining altitude, I did not want any asphalt were brought without me around.

Then I started looking out of the porthole. The moon was absent from the cloudless sky, but the stars were shining, thousands of them. And the lights of cities and towns far below were shimmering too, no bigger than the distant stars.

And I thought I'd rather for the pilot not to lose his way among all those stars from everywhere.

Then, deep in the darkness under the plane wing, I made out separate lights, maybe in some village, whose configuration was the exact replica of one from the only two constellations I could ever single out in the night sky.

The village lights repeated positioning of the stars in the Little Bear, and I relaxed because it's impossible to get off the right course with the North Star in view...

At six in the morning, I got off the Kiev-Moscow train at the station of Nezhin, and by the first bus of the day came to Red Partisans.

The door was opened by Ivan Alexeyevich who hardly recognized me because I had become so lean.

I took the blue plastic mesh with the apricots to the kitchen and carried the red roses to the bedroom past the folding coach-bed in the living room, where the mother-in-law was already starting to stir.

Both of you were asleep.

I inserted the roses stems into the small violet vase by the pier mirror on the table and looked behind the window curtain. The handkerchief with the anchor was gone from the windowsill. Okay, I could find out later.

I undressed, went to bed, and hugged Eera in her white long nightgown.

"Oh! You?"

"Yes."

"So scraggy?!"

"Hush, don't wake up the baby."

Then Eera told me that her sister Vitta was on a visit in Odessa, and wanted to see me at the mine. She reached the village of New Dophinovka, but a villager named Natalia Kurilo advised against going any farther, because of a too difficult road.

"Yes, that Natalia sits at the mine office in the pit up there."

"She complained that you didn't listen to anyone but the foreman."

"How could she know? She sits up there."

"She must know if she's saying... And how is all over there?"

"There all is so...classy...the sea is...well, in general...ships above the field..."

"But you got so too skinny.... Have you had sex with someone there?"

"You crazy?!"

"Quiet! Don't wake the baby! Well...you were doing something right now...you've never been doing that before."

"Ah...I got it from the stone-cutting machine...the disks move that way."

"What's your position there?"

"Some long-named one – the assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator; but, to myself, I call me shorter – a phallic associator."

"What's that?"

"From old Greek. It's a long story."

"And what are the housing conditions there?"

"We'll have two rooms. So big. Tolik from Machine 2 says they are well located. Looking away from the winter winds. And the sea inlet under the window."

"But look at yourself! Thin as a rake!"

"Hush! The baby!."

But all the same you got awake...

"Look, where's the handkerchief that I've left on the windowsill?"

"What handkerchief? I've never seen any."

In general, that's correct. To see a thing you have to know what you're looking for.

I, for example, could not recognize the sea at once.

(...so the sailing boat had not found its anchorage, and later on, it disappeared too.

For all I know, it might be still sailing expanses of the universe somewhere...)

It was not what you'd call inspiring news, when I embarrassedly learned from Eera, that in the maternity hospital she was informed that her hymen had not been completely burst, and you had to finish it off from inside.

For my part, I did not feel any change after my wife lost her virginity in such an unconventional way.

Yes, there was a certain feeling of guilt for that overly stealthy night in Bolshevik, yet since then I always was shooting the bolt my level best, unreservedly.

Besides, she was not the first virgin to give birth...

(...leaving aside the Holy Family, our particular case was the result of textual programming through the novel by a French writer, Herve Bazin, which I read back in my adolescence.

Although there was no childbirth in that work, I still should not be allowed to read just anything at all...)

I went to Konotop to collect warm clothes, the sheepskin coat, rubber boots. My father gave me his black navy pea-jacket with copper buttons in two upright rows.

I even took my guitar with me, because I was moving in earnest to stay there.

And in Konotop, they also were grumbling that there had remained only half of me, but I never was in finer fettle indeed...

My mother wrapped the things in a white cloth and sewed it up; it turned out a bulky and thick bale.

Yet, I had to do one more thing.

To do and – cut and run. To do, and lie low at the bottom, in the mine of "Dophinovka".

(...throughout all those five years plus, I was perfectly aware that everything should be paid for.

Nothing is given for nothing.

And I don't mean money for pot, which goes without saying.

I mean the main payment for getting stoned, high, and on the flights.

And the closer to the final full-stop in the trough of the common urinal at the Kiev intercity bus station, the deeper I realized that I even knew who exactly was paying the unreasonably high—more expensive than any money—price for my buzz.

I had neither desire nor opportunity to share that knowledge with anyone, because of its being complete crazy nonsense.

That's why I silenced it and kept it hidden and buried away, even from myself, but it came back to me over and over again and at my not-stoned moments as well, that I was irredeemably indebted to the long-suffering people of Cambodia swimming in sweat in the sub-equatorial hothouse climate of South-Eastern Asia.

And there was no forgiveness for me...

Nothing comes from nowhere, and it is the immutable truth.

The tactile sensations at my maiden getting high, in the stoker-house of the construction battalion, established an inextricable link between blowing jive and getting smashed in the brains.

Subsequently, the rigor of the correlative interdependency was smoothed out, but the buzz continued to flow in.

Which gives rise to a question: if not me, then who gets the smash in the brains?

By the end of the five-year-plus period there came the answer.

The Khmer Rouge troops, when seizing another village, killed its inhabitants, the same Cambodians as themselves.

To save the ammo, they were killing them with striking bamboo sticks against their skulls. Then they turned the bodies on their backs and photographed dead faces, like for a passport. In those pictures, the right eye is half-closed and the left one bulging out.

I saw them.

Multiple rows of those pictures—dead people with feline faces—were regularly placed in the central newspapers.

They looked like some different non-human race, them those people with their, as if skinned, faces.

I had what to feel guilty about.

Of course, after the events accompanying my first flight to Odessa, the peasants' brains were not any longer being smashed out for me, which did not stop the show so that someone else would get a kick.

In Odessa, I found myself amid a universal battle of who knows who against whoever else.

In the course of inconceivable vicissitudes, I became a some who's ally, making enemies with whoever else, still remaining in the complete dark as to who is who?

One thing was totally clear though, that those, with whom, as willed by fate, I happened to be on the different sides of the barricades, would not fail to track me down and square the accounts.

It's no coincidence, that while I was getting off the Kiev-Moscow train in Nezhin, a window in one of its cars opened and a glassy-eyed (apparently from the monad of the chief engineer) spit out a long stream of saliva on the platform.

He undoubtedly was leaving a signal mark for other militants from their dark legion where to pick up the trace of my further perambulations and follow my subsequent movements up to Konotop.

And there, they would easily and inevitably discover the cannabis plantation, at the end of the garden of my parents' khutta in the Settlement. With incalculable and unimaginable consequences of the most horrible nature.

My duty before the unknown allies, and before the still remaining peasants, at their squalid villages in humid depths of jungles of South-Eastern Asia prompted the only right decision...)

In the shed at 13 Decemberists, I took the bayonet-type spade and went to the plantation on the remotest bed.

They stood proud of their almost three-meter height; issuing the piercing rich aroma.

...forgive me, I know you wanted to live, forgive that I was late for that train to Odessa, but now I have to do what I have to, forgive me...

And they were falling—one after another, one next to another, one on top of another—from the bayonet strikes piercing deep, separating the roots, cutting the life off...

I stacked them in a high pile, went back to the shed and returned with a canister of gasoline. The crackling fire rose up, the thick white smoke floated.

Alerted by auntie Zina, my mother hurried to the garden, "Seryozha!. What are you...Why?. How is it?.."

"It must be done."

She left, and my brother Sasha came instead, "Seryoga, what are you doing?"

"It must be done."

My brother always believed that I knew what I was doing, even when I did not know it myself. He stopped asking me and just stood there, and we both looked at the fire turning the dense green of the dumped on a pile trunks and branches into black charred sticks and fine ash, brittle, white...

I arrived at the Odessa airport in the dark and managed on the 6.00 bus from the New Bazaar bus station.

Outside the city, irresistible drowsiness overcame me and I missed the stop, and only woke up after three hundred meters past it. At my request, the driver stopped the bus at the top of the ascend, and I crossed the forest belt.

In the garden of the outermost cottage amid the thinning dusk of the retreating night, an elderly mujik in his underwear and a woman in a white nightgown swept, for some reason, the beds with brooms.

They moved in a strange, robot-like, way. The mujik's eyes were filmed with the glassiness. I did not see the woman's eyes though, she was careful to keep them turned away.

Rather strange agricultural practices for so early an hour, but I could hardly be surprised at anything already.

In my four-day absence, they did not bring any asphalt.

The worn-out pinkwashed plaster of the hostel building was for some reason spattered with blue splashes and dispersed lines as if to camouflage the barrack. But why blue?.

I got in the everyday groove at the mine.

The weather changed because one day coming back from Odessa, I found that in my pocket remained just a single three-kopeck coin of age-blackened copper.

"That's not money," thought I to myself, and threw the coin back over my shoulder, among the trees of the forest belt.

For exactly three days thereafter, the cold wind blew from the sea, refuting my dismissive opinion of the three kopecks, and making me get the gist of expression "to throw money to the wind".

The electrician, my neighbor opposite the corridor, died on the road from Chabanka before reaching the hostel. They found him three days later.

I always knew that was a dangerous stretch of the road. In summer, there were constantly flying fluffy spherical balls, like to sea mines, but white and smaller, of course. Probably, one of them scraped the defunct, when he was not quick at dodging.

They buried him in the village cemetery, on the cliff between the highway and the sea.

Kapitonovich was carrying a wooden cross ahead of the coffin, like a banner, but he himself had a sash of a long narrow towel tied in a loop from one of his shoulders, the way best men of grooms adorn themselves at village weddings; instead of pinning a handkerchief up the sleeve as was the custom at funerals in Konotop.

What else might you expect of them? They've heard the song but got the wrong sow by the ear.

In the father's pea-jacket with yellow buttons, I presented a colorful figure, like, a seaman from the black-and-white flicks "We are from Krondstadt", but I also helped to fill up the grave.

Then we were taken back to the hostel by bus.

The women from the mine office in the pit prepared the wake feast from their home supplies.

I wolfed a disgracefully enormous amount of every scoff like on the visit to the Tshombe's field camp in my student years...

The repaired radio set was brought back to the hostel, and I had to move into the room of the diseased electrician. Soon Vasya, the new roof-fastener, joined me there.

At first, I doubted his sex, when accidentally noticed red-brown stains on his bedsheets, as if from menstruation.

He hurried to explain, that they were from a tomato that rolled under his blanket and he kicked it to squash in sleep, although I hadn't been asking about anything at all.

That hostel's just another Bellamy Isle with everyone around reading your thoughts before you had the time to think them off.

However, what simple explanations might sometimes be found for incomprehensible, at first glance, facts...

Autumn came into its own.

I inserted glass into the window frame of the respective room in our would-be apartment, however, they still were not bringing any asphalt...

And so it went on in its everyday way until the moment when the chief engineer came from Vapnyarka and said, I was announced wanted at the all-Union hunt, and the mining management received a letter from the NGPI with accusations of sheltering a runaway who shirked working off at the place of his appointment.

"Now, write the application."

"What application?"

"Asking to be fired at your own volition."

"I have not such a wish."

"We cannot retain you here after such a letter."

As I persistently negated any wish to leave, a compromise was found, on the basis of one of many articles in the code of labor legislation: "dismissal by agreement of the parties".

Thus, instead of the chosen, I became just a party...

In the end, I had a parting walk around Odessa in the sheepskin coat open wide, like a soldier from the Peasant Army of Makhno, and in rubber boots bravely splashing across the puddles from the recent heavy rains.

When back in the hostel, I packed them in a bale with the rest of my clothes and the tools that I had already started to acquire, one by one: a hammer, an ax, a saw, an iron, an electric water heater, and a white enamel kettle.

When I bought the kettle from Odessa, I had to sing songs all the way from New Dophinovka to the hostel so that it would not get too spooked.

It was very late, and the night was too dark, as in the abandoned shafts without the flashlight. I had to fit from memory into the bends of the country road, groping for it with my feet. It's hard to say whether I was singing to sooth the kettle or to perk up myself.

Probably, it was more for the kettle's sake, because of fearing the dark would be a disgrace for a chosen. Anyway, we overcame that pitch-black night together...

The bale was taken to the station and sent by a luggage car.

Then I returned to the hostel where a recently bought briefcase and sports-bag Aerobica were sitting together with the guitar, before going to the airport the next morning.

Slavik Aksyanov dropped into our room. We finished off a whole pan of fried potatoes under "The Bolero" by Ravel from Vasya's receiver.

I told Slavik to fix the door to the toilet booth above the sea inlet. It was kicking back in the tall grass, I had seen it there.

He swore to execute my last wish.

However, just in case, I threatened that if he did not, I would haunt him like the ghost of Hamlet's father. A genuine funk flashed in his eyes. Who would have ever imagined that even they were afraid of spooks!.

Eera told that they had sent a letter from Transcarpathia to the institute, reporting my absence from the appointed school.

Gaina Mikhailovna was summoned to Rector, who demanded of her to disclose my current location. After Rector declared that in summer he had himself met me in Odessa, she was forced to give away my affiliation with the mine. Now she was going to have troubles at work, and my diploma would be taken away unless the Republican Ministry of Education annulled my appointment.

I had to urgently go to Kiev, as far as metro station named after Karl Marx, and up the street starting from The October Revolution Square to a gray-stone building in a row of similar to it, yet different to them by its sign of Ministry of Education, and up the white steps of polished marble to a tall leather-lined door on the second floor...

Head of the department in charge of shirkers, surnamed Baranov, looked five years older than me and superbly refined with the adequate chiseling, grinding, and polishing as required by his position.

The only chink in his armor was the lone hair on the shoulder of his jacket, worn over a thin woolen waistcoat, with a glimpse of the striped necktie in finely crisscrossed shirt – impierceable coat of mail.

He glibly trotted it out that our state for four years bore expenses to give me the higher education free of charge, and it was time to compensate by honest work in Transcarpathia or say goodbye to my diploma.

My defense was built on my passionate desire to work in the field of enlightenment of the younger generations, and nowhere else but on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, yet how about my family?

He encouraged me to take you and Eera over there.

And what about the second, or rather first of my daughters?

The presence of Lenochka was a surprise for him. By the force of inertia, he suggested deporting her together with the rest.

I had to show my passport that she was a product of my previous marriage and to bitterly confess to the lack of information as to her mother's whereabouts.

That was the checkmate. Grandmaster Baranov had not been trained to parry such moves and, having got to Zugzwang, admitted that I had a really swirly plot.

I would get a free diploma, that is the cancellation of my obligations to return my debt to the state by honest work at the place I was appointed to if I presented the reference from Head of Street Committee, that Lenochka did live at 13, Decemberists Street in the city of Konotop.

Meanwhile, the bale sent from Odessa arrived at Nezhin. The tools did not impress my father-in-law, but he got delighted with a teapot strainer. It was his long-term dream to have such a one, only you could not find it in stores even for ready money...

Eera and I started discussing at which of the construction enterprises of Nezhin I should apply for a job to get an apartment as soon as possible when she suddenly said that I needed to be checked, as advised by her mother.

I was a little surprised because of a medical check being the must when you applied for a job, even without her mother's advice.

As it turned out, I had to understand that there was a need for special examination, to check if I was normal at all. Some traits in my behavior were giving rise to certain fears and threatened to disrepute in the public eye the otherwise totally respectable, if not for me, family of Eera's parents.

For instance, quite recently I walked the streets in torn shoes, and I also collected every mote of dust around the baby carriage, and any question, even of the most basic nature, made me think for too long before answering, and when she was in maternity hospital, I came home in the middle of the night and declared that the rain was warm.

Besides, Eera was shocked by the news from Konotop about my fanatical auto-da-fe of the cannabis plantation, which, though not included in the list of deviations, spoke volumes...

I had no counter-arguments, she was right on all the points.

Shortly before that talk, on a clear peaceful autumn day, I went out for a walk wearing my shoes. They were not torn, of course, but fairly worn-out along the sidewalks of Odessa and country roads in the adjacent Komintern district.

The walk inspired an elegiac mood. I recollected the distant galaxies on the smooth sea under the steep cliffs near Vapnyarka, the endlessly long street of Kotovsky's Road, and the ridiculously short one of Sholem Aleichem, that were walked along in those brown leather shoes with lengthwise incut pieces in their toe caps' tops. They were sort of a spaceship on the return from an expedition across the universe – still alive, but hopelessly out of vogue...

When I was kicking them off in the hallway, Gaina Mikhailovna remarked that it was time to use some warmer footwear. I felt really pleased with such caring attentiveness from my mother-in-law...

And I could not deny the delayed nature of my reaction to any questioning.

Each inquiry I was addressed with fired up a rumbling computer in my mind (although I did not even know then the word "computer") to assess the combinatorial variations of all the possible responses and choose the one which value would not lose its validity even in the most unforeseeable future.

(...an idiot!

All that, in fact, was needed:

"A? Yes..."...)

As for the entrenched defense line around your carriage, I have already mentioned it.

Nonetheless, even fully aware of my innocence, I never thought of debating or proving anything—especially since I had no excuse for neither the warm rain nor the annihilation of cannabis in merciless conflagration—so I just went where Eera led me...

It was a corridor on the second floor of an unfamiliar building with wide floorboards painted red.

The place was rather crowded.

On the whitewashed wall, there hanged a sheet of Whatman paper with a picture executed with crayons in the technique of The Merry Pictures magazine where a kettle addressed the washcloth with the question, "Why did you tell the saucer I was a colander?"; most likely, a gift from some art lover patronizing the institution.

A young man in the army officer pea-jacket without any insignia was happily contemplating the picture. His forage cap was tilted a sliver of a notch on a screwballish side.

Eera entered one of the offices to state complaints.

Then they called me in, but no conversation followed. The doctor, addressing exclusively Eera, announced he was not competent for the like cases and I should be examined in Chernigov.

(...exactly as my father used to say:

"They are sitting there, getting their salary but when you turn to them – 'I am not Copenhagen!' is all they can ever give out!"...)

The Chernigov psychiatric hospital was located four kilometers from the city, in full correspondence to the nearby bus stop named "The 4th kilometer".

The gate in the tall concrete wall of the institution was conveniently nearby the bus stop. Behind the wall, there was a large complex of buildings in the modern huge-block architectural style which could readily beautify the city center, were it no so far off.

We bypassed a row of red-tiled buildings of various height; some of them were bridged with indoor galleries or connected with lower structures.

Eera was obviously oppressed by that severe Bau Stile void of fanciful conceits, quite understandably though, not everyone appreciates that particular variety of architecture and I, personally, would sooner pull for works by Corbusier too.

I escorted silent Eera, looking glum and sullen at the moment, to the required building where we were accepted in a small one-window office by a dark-haired woman in a white robe named Tamara...er...Tamara...well, I am sorry, her patronymic escaped my mind.

At the desk by the window, there sat a man of a well-trained carcass, also in white.

When I was asked by Tamara about my preferences in music, he started prompting, "Variety, of course!" which convinced me that he was there not for just to ensure Tamara's security, if I were a violently deviated case.

So I had to honestly admit having more than one preference: Ella Fitzgerald and Johann Sebastian Bach, because I do not drive a fool about the things that really matter.

Tamara told Eera that deviations of my kind were not of dangerous nature, however, if so was Eera's wish and if I did not mind, they could keep me for more close observation.

I did not mind, only warned that on Saturday it was my brother's wedding to which Eera and I had been invited and, if Tamara considered it permissible, I would come back to the 4th kilometer on Monday. Upon my word of honor.

Tamara concurred kindly and saw us out into the corridor. From behind the glass door in its end, there came a muffled noise of a multitudinous assemblage...

By that time my brother Sasha had already moved from PMS to KhAZ and was working on some sophisticated milling-grinding machine.

The KhAZ was not the KhAZ itself, but only a branch of the Kharkov Aviation Plant. They did not assemble any planes at the branch, but produced spare parts of most different configurations, packed them in boxes, and sent to KhAZ or to its other branches in some other cities.

In Konotop, the KhAZ branch was named, for shortness, just KhAZ and everyone was eager to get a job there because of high wages. Sasha earned 200 rubles a month!

The rest of the workers got a lower payment because there was just one machine tool of so superb high-precision.

Another advantage of KhAZ was its location in the Settlement, you could come home for the midday break and have your havvage.

Unfortunately, there was a drawback too, KhAZ made you work longer than just eight hours a day.

No, there were no labor legislation violations. Sasha was leaving his workplace at five sharp, but his work overtook him already at home.

He complained to me that even watching football on TV, he contemplated his working plans for the following day: which spare parts to work on in the morning, and which after the midday break.

I felt sorry for my brother, but there was nothing I could help him with...

In the Settlement, earning 200 rubles a month, you could start up a family of your own without hesitation.

Sasha's chosen one, Lyuda, worked at "The Optics" store in Zelenchuk Area and she also was from the Settlement.

Besides, she was a really enviable bride having two khuttas, or rather each of her estranged, though not divorced, parents had a separate one, which guaranteed a young family immediate solution to the problem of housing, one way or the other.

Who would decline to live in clover? Thus, my brother became an Acceptee.

Eera was going to buy bed linen as the wedding present, but all the traces of such goods had long disappeared from the stores.

The explanation of the fact provided by the planned economy we lived under, deducted that particular shortage from the World Olympics which Moscow was to host the following year, and the mentioned commodity would be needed for doing beds in the Olympic Village.

(...in a forward flashing, I can tell that two years later bedding remained a sharp deficit.

I cannot imagine what those guest sportspersons were doing with it in the Olympic Village...)

So, as the wedding present Eera bought a nice jug of red transparent glass, wisely reasoning, that the bedsheets would wear out very quickly but the jug—if not broken—could stand in the cupboard until the golden anniversary.

Since the wedding happened to coincide with our mother's birthday, I wanted to present her with flowers.

Gaina Mikhailovna insisted that no flowers could be bought on November 24, but I went to the bazaar all the same.

On the bridge over the Oster, I saw a man holding a bouquet in his hands, in a company of two ladies. They were just standing there, looking anything but traders. However, I felt their presence on the bridge was no accident, came up, and asked if he would sell me the flowers...

My mother-in-law's bewilderment had no limits, but I knew that somewhere around Odessa or in the worlds parallel to it, I had done something right, which was not forgotten by the unknown yet grateful allies...

We went to Konotop by 15.15 local train.

The wedding party took place in a three-room khutta on Sosnowska Street in the Settlement.

The flowers caused surprise even there. The surprise grew, even more, when I presented them not to the bride. Then Sasha remembered what day it was, and assured the guests it was okay.

The following was a traditional Settlement wedding of an Acceptee.

The only difference that at the party I gave up smoking. It happened when my neighbor at the table started to convince me of the impossibility of kicking off the habit, especially at a party of any kind.

I put out the lit cigarette and that was all there to it.

(...I am a non-smoker even now...)

The next morning at 13 Decemberists, Eera announced my intended trip to the 4th kilometer by Chernigov.

There followed a stormy exchange of views with my parents. They opposed the very idea of the trip and demanded cancellation of it.

No matter how hard I tried, they could not understand that I had promised to be there on Monday. How to survive in a world where you could not rely even on your own word?

Eventually, Eera took sides with my parents, and they continued trying to prevail upon me in concerted efforts. Only Lenochka was sitting silent aside in the corner of the folding coach-bed.

"So what? Has given him education for your own misery?" my father reproached my mother.

Then he turned to me, "We've done all that we could for you. Now it's your turn. Do as we ask you. Or we're not the stuff? What are our wrongs? Tell it!"

"Okay, I'll tell!" responded I, and slammed my fist at the top of the table, "Why did you stop writing poetry?"

There was a sharp change in my father's attitude. In obvious embarrassment, he was turning his eyes away from both his wife and daughter-in-law. Even in the deep wrinkles on his forehead, there appeared never observed marks of shyness, "Well...I was young...it was the war then... "

(...here's life, huh?

You start to drive a fool and unexpectedly run into a frank confession...

By now he gave up the poetry for good and switched over to oratory.

In long winter evenings, he puts his felt boots on and goes out to the meeting of neighbors of his age, under the lamp on the post nearby the Kolesnikov's khutta.

And there they stand on the trampled snow, discussing the news from yesterday's news program "Time", hotly debating whether Muammar Gaddafi's a manly man or the same clown as Yasser Arafat...)

In the way of a compromise, they decided that before leaving for Chernigov, I would go with my mother to a local psychiatrist Tarasenko from whom (here my father narrowed his eyes threateningly) no one had a chance of getting off-hook.

Then I escorted Eera to the station, and all the way there she tried to persuade me not to go to the 4th kilometer. However, my word to Tamara had been spoken and past recalling...

In the large light building of Konotop Medical Center, not far from the Avangard stadium, people were crowding next to each and every door, and only the door to the office of the psychiatrist Tarasenko stood out by its forlorn solitude.

When my mother and I entered his office, Tarasenko explained the phenomenon by the low awareness of the population, while there, overseas, every fourth citizen kept visiting a psychiatrist.

Tarasenko's office was equipped with his assistant nurse and the standard medical office furniture.

However, the furniture was arranged very strangely. The oddity was created by the positioning of the desk. Besides being put in the center of the room, it was also turned the wrong way, with its drawers to the door.

I was asked to get seated at the desk. My mother sat on a chair by the wall, and the medical team of two stood on either side of the desk.

I did not like this disposition intended to inflate my megalomania—you sit there like Chairman Mao, and those in white are standing around as an errand-boy with an errand-girl. So, I pushed the chair a bit back from the desk, turned it 90 degrees and, stretching my legs out, put one foot on the other in the attitude of a kicking back cowboy.

And now Tarasenko and his partner rushed to pull and slam back the desk drawers, with bang and crash.

Getting amidst so violent a company, I, naturally, pulled my legs back but kept sitting, yet with my ears pricked up: what the heck?

On making sure that I hadn't jumped out of the door, neither tried to flee climbing up the window blinds, Tarasenko stopped the test and announced that I was as healthy as a bull.

"Tell it to him!" exclaimed my mother, sobbing, "He wants to go to the psychiatric hospital in Chernigov!"

"What for?"

"His wife has sent him there!"

"Is she a doctor?"

"No!"

"Why then? People can send you anywhere. Is he her slave, or what?"

"Yes! Yes! He's a slave!"

(...look here, Joseph Yakovlevich, aka the Beautiful, you were sold into slavery by your brothers and that hurt, right?

How would you feel being sold by your own mother?..)

Tarasenko once again forbade me, already as to a slave, to go anywhere, and I together with my mother left his office.

On the way to the streetcar stop, my mother asked, "Now, you see? Got convinced?"

"It does not change anything."

"If they do something to you, I'll kill her!" said my mother with a sob.

"Mom," said I, "what kind of a book have you read recently?"

Of course, I knew perfectly well that my mother dropped reading books a long time ago, but you are supposed to give one or another response, anyway, to maintain a conversation...

Because of the check with submitting me into slavery, and inconsistencies in the train traffic timetables, I reached the 4th kilometer by Chernigov late at night.

However, the stipulated Monday was not over yet and I started to knock at the iron gate, giving rise to discontent yells from the securities in the check-entrance house. They switched on the light and asked what it was I was at, the name of Tamara became the password.

Two more orderlies in blue flannel gowns came up and took me to the waiting room.

There I gave up my clothes and received pajamas in exchange, and a pair of army kirza boots. The left boot was my size, but the right one squeezed the foot inhumanely. Probably, that was retaliation for disturbing them at so late an hour.

Then through the cold darkness, I was taken to the fifth unit and handed over to the paramedic on duty.

He led me into a wide empty corridor-hall lit dimly, because of the late hour, with a pair of shaded lamps in the wall, reflected by the dark glass of a distant window in the opposite end of the corridor. Glazed doors to the wardrooms were lined along the hall's left wall.

The paramedic escorted me into one of the wardrooms, pointed at a free bed, and went out...

In the obscure light through the glass of the door, I could make out half-dozen beds laid with wrapped up figures, and ghostly whitish nightstands in between.

I undressed and lay down, suppressing involuntary fear.

Apparently, so late addition made the population of the ward to hide away under their blankets, but gradually they thawed out. Someone invisible asked me from out of the corner if it was me. They hush-hashed at him and he fell silent.

I refrained from giving an answer.

Through the glass door, there came a faraway cry from down the corridor and cut off too.

I lay—a wrapped up figure as everyone else—rejoicing that I still managed to do it on Monday, and felt the upsurging alertness because I understood who I was among.

"So what, Kostya, would you like some home-made sausage now?" asked one of the invisible figures of his invisible gossip.

I was tickled with irresistible laughter; how quickly they managed to figure me out!.

When Eera and I were leaving Chernigov after our joint visit to the 4th kilometer, Eera bought a coil of home-made sausage at the station. It was really delicious.

Now, the brainstorming team in the darkness entered an expert discussion of that very sausage, and I, amused by their getting on track so casually, tried to choke the laughter and snuffle it away through the nostrils, biting the corner of my pillowcase, so that they would not take me for a psycho.

At some point, I could not keep it more anymore, and they broke off in a frightened silence...

The morning started with the scuffing of mules in the corridor-hall.

In a yoke of a waffle tower around my neck, I went out in kirza boots and, following the mainstream of the traffic, found the washroom and toilet.

Then there was a usual havvage for breakfast.

When doctors arrived from the city, Tamara looked into the huge corridor and called me, by my last name.

I approached her with the apologies for being late on Monday; she generously pardoned me and retired back to her parts.

The corridor-hall society was populous, diversified and in a state of noisy Brownian movement.

Absolutely unsystematic.

Apart from me, only one individual with his hair closely cropped in zek style wore boots. He, for the most part, lay on the floor tiles around the white radiators of central heating under the windowsill in the far end of the corridor.

Time and again, he was pressing himself against the other patient's backside, who also was lying there and responded to this silent address with tepidly languid pushing the wooer away.

The mobile part of the crowd roamed around in their mules, immersed in their individual inner worlds from which they occasionally emerged to issue some incomprehensible exclamations.

A cripple on a low trolley navigated the stream of their wandering legs, propelling himself with hand pushes against the floor tiles. He obviously supervised some part of the society capable of understanding instructions and orders and served a hub for their hangout in the style of a black market...

A pair of Mssrs. Pretty-Guys kept together.

The dark-haired one showed himself off as the master-thief in their milieu of two.

A young man of Central Asian appearance invited me to play checkers at a table in the far corner.

Every eye in his face moved independently from the other, as happens when the brain hemispheres do not interfere in the sovereign internal affairs of their neighbor and each one controls their own eye.

The guy obviously could not play checkers, and when there remained just one piece of his on the board, I announced the draw and did not play anymore.

And I did not play cards with the Mssrs. Pretty-Guys.

On the other end of the corridor by the window, between the locked door to the courtyard and the glazed door to the passage with medical offices, a white figure of a nurse sat in a chair.

She never intervened with anything.

She rose from her throne only after the midday havvage to stately walk along with the gurney, arriving from the medical staff passage to the center of the corridor-hall.

"Medications!" sounded joyful cries from different parts of the crowd. They rushed to scramble around the movable table, grabbing up their favorites from the pills of different color and size, scattered over the oil-clothed top.

Soon after, some glassy-eyed appeared in the crowd. The exchange transactions at the black market grew more animated...

To pass the time, I followed the example of Lenin and Dean Reed, measuring their cells with steps from end to end.

Luckily, I had much more space and orbited the huge corridor in a sweeping ellipse, from the window in one end to the window by the locked door in the other. Being not the only moving body in that space, I carefully avoided collisions, especially since I paced at a rapid rate.

Some in the crowd paid attention. The blonde one from Mssrs. Pretty-Guys started up the Indian drums beat against the cover of a thick book, that he constantly kept in his armpit, accentuating the footfalls of my boots.

"Why are you driving a fool? You need it?" shouted the dark-haired one in my wake.

"Try it yourself, you'll get high!" yelled I back, scudding to the other end of the ellipse.

Then one activist in the Brownian movement by the walls suddenly got it. He issued a happy scream and also started running regular ellipses of an orbit, though not along, but across the hall-corridor.

"Ogoltsoff infected Baranov!" squeaked some rat from the crowd to the queen in her chair. But she did not intervene in anything.

Walking was painful, because the right boot, invented for the torture kit of the Inquisition under the name of "Spanish boot", was two sizes smaller than mine.

I managed to withstand just one day, and on the following afternoon, I decided that was enough for playing Andersen's Mermaid and turned to the nurse with the complaint.

She gave me a pair of regular mules, like on the rest of the patients, only much more rundown, so my orbiting became painless, yet markedly slowed down...

One compromise because of weakness invites another to slip in and before long your adamant determination tumbles in a tacky heap. You start to fix one unbearable sore and there crop up a pack of others crying for amelioration.

The button on the pajama pants belt kept slipping out of its too wide loop. I grew tired of living with my hand clutching pants top to prevent their falling down.

And again, I had to bring the nurse out of her non-involvement lethargy, with the request for a needle and thread.

No sooner had the repair been over than another nurse appeared from the medical staff passage, and called the roll of those starting to Club.

My name was there too...

For a considerable stretch of time, our caravan of the twelve in pajamas followed the nurse in white, yet the concluding patient in our single file was in a black padded jacket of a workman.

On climbing a stair flight, we entered the long indoor gallery bridging to another building. Outside the windows, there stretched withered fields with distant black-and-yellow arrow-shields indicating the direction towards the out-of-sight airfield.

Each windowsill in the gallery was packed with multiple pots of cacti accompanied by the handwritten instruction for those meek of heart and ignorant of agriculture, "Do not water!"

It turned out to be a classically standard club with the stage in front of the hall filled with the rows of seats, and the visual-agitation posters on the walls:

Bread is the head of anything else!

The economy should be economical!

If there is bread, there will be a song!

interspersed with the sheets of more wordy citations printed in a smaller typeset.

The workman from the end of our file pulled up at the sheet nearest to the entrance, and unswervingly studied it, at times scratching the cap on his head, for which purpose he had to unlock his hands from their being clasped in zek attitude on his back.

I sat down in the last row of seats. The lamps above the stage lit up, and a man in a doctor's smock came on it bearing a displeased countenance along with an accordion.

Two more nurses brought in another caravan – a dozen of women in gray gowns over the sturdy linen of the hospital underwear. Two or three of them proceeded to seats in the middle of the hall and were immediately joined by Mssrs. Pretty-Guys.

The accordionist started to play for the dancers in the passage between the stage and the front row of seats.

A woman of about forty swiftly paced along the central aisle carrying her sweet smile to the last row and invited me for the white dance.

"Sorry, I'm no good at the waltz."

She went away with her face dropped down.

A loss. A loss...

Despite the purpose of the Strauss' "The Danube Waves" no one was waltzing but just hugging each other in pairs a couple of which climbed onto the stage.

In one of those elevated pairs, there was the young man with asynchronous eyes. But now both of them were fixed on the tall soft fluff of gray mohair in the knitted hat of his partner – a nurse in a white smock.

Who of them invited who?.

The ladies were first to be taken away before our caravan started off.

The workman broke away from the citation poster on the wall and took his concluding place in the file, without unclipping his eternal zek-like hand-clasp...

Apart from orbiting the corridor and visiting the ball in the club, I also was reading.

I asked the blonde one from Mssrs. Pretty-Guys to lend me the book from his armpit, which he at times used as a drum, and he willingly concurred. It turned out to be a book of stories by Tamaz Chiladze translated from Georgian. I liked them though in original they, probably, were better.

On the third day, I was sitting by the window next to the locked door to the yard, where the first snow was descending in slow quiet flakes. I watched it while reading The Judge and Executioner by Durrenmatt, which I had read years before.

Behind me, all the modern world was romping and fussing and rumbling and mumbling and stumbling reflected in the cross-section at the fifth unit of the fourth kilometer. I was already fed up with it.

Yet, I did not have time to finish reading Durrenmatt read years ago because there was a knock on the window glass from outside. On the thin fluffy cover of soft snow, there stood Eera smiling at me. Silent snowflakes swirled slowly around her face.

So beautiful...

The nurse brought my clothes and I entered the wardroom to change.

When I returned to the corridor, that particles of society who retained a more close connection with now and here were astounded by my leaving them so soon.

Someone, hiding his identity behind the Brownian movement, shouted angrily that it's not right to let me out, but it certainly was not Baranov, because of his being a cheerful geezer.

Excited by the freedom at hand, I took a step forward and shouted out that I was grateful to everyone for everything and promised to remember. In response, a spontaneous rally broke out, but I already stepped out in the medical staff passage.

On the way to Tamara's office, in one of the rooms, I caught a glimpse of a lonely old woman in a dressing gown and a head kerchief. Crawling on all fours over the floor, she was lining large blocks, the size of a brick, in two sketchy rows.

Tamara told Eera that my treatment had not started yet but since she was insisting so much then let her take me and not be too worried, the deviations of the sort I had demonstrated so far were a commonplace thing among the folks with a Ph.D. degree.

That was her way of consoling Eera.

(...that snare did not work on me though, by that time I had already found an effective trick for keeping any conceit vagaries in check with an iron grip on my supremacy's throat, but Eera seemed to have believed the specialist.

In any case, two years later she gave me for the birthday present a book by Plekhanov, that very guy who brought Marxism to Russia.

On the back of its hardcover, she wished me to become as clever as him because she was waiting for that.

So, she waited, at least, two years more, though Freud was talking of just one and a half...)

Addressing me, Tamara prescribed a means of turning back to myself for which end I should every evening watch the news program "Time".

In the following several years, I dutifully followed her prescription and could already with an accuracy of three days predict a plane crash, or the arrival of the delegation of the Communist Party of Paraguay in Moscow on a brief working visit.

But then I got tired of it and dropped watching TV, justifying myself with the proverb that the humpback would be straightened with his grave, and then I, at last, be like everyone else – clean of my leopard spots.

(...O, how pleasantly beautiful this world is if you consider it without digging deeper through its glossy surface!

" _...the symposium was held under the aegis of UNESCO..."_

What magic, lovely, charming ring fills these splendid words!.

But when you get to coarse plain roots where "aegis" means nothing but a goatskin, and "symposium" corresponds to a collective drinking bout, then you cannot but feel bored with the world where nothing ever changes and once again, as always, there is a jag debauchery under the goatskins of prostitute Unesca...)

"See how perfect this world is,

Have a look!

Ah, how pe-e-e-rfect this world i-i-is!.."

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Married Life

SMP-615, aka Construction and Installation Train of the same number, was located about where I once chewed blades of grass, half-starved in the bicycle trip to the river of Seim, only on the other side of the road.

At the time of my grazing experience, Konotop had not reached that place yet, but the city grew and the location became a part of the city district named "At-Seven-Winds". Konotopers hardly ever needed to pirate a propensity to a poetic vision of the world.

On the 7th of December 1979, after a brief stay at the 4th kilometer in the outskirts of Chernigov, I came to SMP-615, because none of the streetcar or bus routes were reaching there, that was as far as hell itself, on the frontier of At-Seven-Winds.

I couldn't even distantly imagine why in the course of the job interview the head of the personnel department kept giving such warps to his face that would put to shame the amateurish attempts by Slavik Aksyanov.

At some point, he even grabbed from his desk a wide wooden ruler to cover his left eye with it. So as not to jinx me off?

Taking a hangover for the distortions' cause would be a weak conjecture, as I came there in the late afternoon. Just one of those things that you'd better dismiss with a shrug, and forget.

Anyway, he provided me with a job at the organization, which as he explained, levied 10 percent of the apartments built by them for subsequent distribution among the workers of SMP-615, according to the established line of employees waiting for the improvement of their housing conditions.

At the moment, the construction of 110 apartment block was underway, with 23 people in the mentioned line; I handed in the application and became the 24th. Even the fact, that after the delivery of the 110-department block, I automatically turned the 13th in the line did not scare me off. Because in the following couple of blocks, I would definitely get an apartment for my family.

I did not know then that not everything was as straightforward. And the head of the personnel department did not have time to explain to me the details and nuances, because he changed his place of work.

The position was embraced by a retired army officer. With the new head of personnel department, everything was clear and subordinate, since retired Major Petukhov kept his countenance under the army-trained control.

However, the facial expressions of the personnel department heads were not of much importance, because the main people in my life for the next six years became the team of bricklayers.

In SMP-615 there was only one team of bricklayers, all the rest – plasterers, welders, carpenters, plumbers came to the erected objects after us.

The workforce at the mortar-concrete unit, as well as crane operators, loaders were an auxiliary layer; even the engineers and accountants stayed secondary when compared to us.

It was we, who came to the deep foundation pits to fill them, inserting multi-tonnage concrete blocks with the assistance of the truck crane operator Gavkalov.

Then started the epic of growth of the walls and "fillings", aided by the tower crane operators Mykola, Kolya, and Vitalya, in turn.

The crane operators replaced each other, welders changed, but we stayed and withstood, for who else, if not we, would transfigure space?

In place of an air-filled void for the roaming flocks of crows, stair flights marched up, for the tenants to climb to their homes, located at the previously unattainable altitudes. The idle crows had to reconsider their flight routes.

Of course, multi-apartment houses ensued from the work of all the above listed, as well as of not mentioned SMP-615's structures and units, but we, the bricklayers, were the arrowhead in the advancement towards the realization of the everlasting dream of mankind about normal living conditions.

Being the arrowhead is not an easy job. Neither the walls of the offices, nor the glass of the cabins, nor the boards of the hulls shelter you from the whims of calamitous weather.

All your protection is your spetzovka, a helmet, and boots, in the winter a pea-jacket and a hat will be added, any part of you not protected by them becomes a prey to the scorching sun, whipping rains, ruthless whirlwinds, and merciless frosts.

Not everyone will endure, not everyone will stand up to being a bricklayer day after day.

I have worked with lots of different people both in SMP-615 and beyond it, but for me, these twelve will forever remain "our team":

Mykola Khizhnyak – the foreman;

two Peters—Lysoon and Kyrpa—bricklayers;

two Gregories—Gregory Gregoryevich, and his nickname Grynya, handled Melekhov (after the serial of the "Quiet Flows the Don" on the central television)—bricklayers;

two Andreyevnas (not relatives though)—Lyubov Andreevna and Anna Andreevna—bricklayers;

Lyda and Vitta — bricklayers;

Vera Sharapova and Katerina — riggers;

Sehrguey Ogoltsoff — a bricklayer.

In the city Konotop, it's easy to see an apartment block built by our team from the houses built by other organizations because ours were striped.

Starting the walls of a floor, we laid the perimeter belt of red brick (6cm. x 12cm. x 25cm.) courses. The mark "KK" on the brick stretcher stood for "Konotop Brick", instead of "Factory" there followed "I", or "II" or "III" indicating the shift when it was produced.

After the belt courses reached the level of window ledges, we switched to laying the pillars between the windows of white silicate bricks (9cm. x 12cm. x 25cm.) of unmarked origin.

The pillars were bridged with concrete cross-pieces delivered up by the tower crane.

The completing courses over the cross-pieces were also of red bricks.

Now, looking from aside, another floor was ready (red-white-red), yet not everything goes as swiftly as told in a fairy tale...

It's time to start the "filling", to raise the inner walls – the load-bearing axial one, aka "the capital wall", and the transverse ones partitioning the blocks of adjacent staircase-entrances, as well as one apartment from another within the same block.

The partitions between the rooms and corridors in an apartment were laid of gypsum plates (8cm. x 40cm. x 80cm.).

The toilet-bathroom compartments were also of red bricks (and only red!— because silicate bricks, as well as gypsum, do not withhold moisture) laid shiner-way.

Only then the floor was ready to be bridged over with the concrete slabs delivered by the tower crane on four, taut strained, steel cables with which the riggers, Katerina and Vera Sharapova, hooked them from the stacks on the ground.

Each slab had four iron loops for the hooks, the length of each slab was 5.6 meters, but the width might vary from 1 to 1.2 meters.

The difference in slab width was dictated by the need to fit them accurately between the staircase-entrances because a slab should not overlap and block the kitchen and toilet ventilation ducts laid out inside the staircase-entrance walls.

And if the slabs brought to the site all happened to be of the same widths?

(...the era of planned economy and deficits taught not to be too picky and grab just what turns up, while at least that was available...)

What if there was nothing to choose from in the slab stacks about the site, eh?

It's also no problem! There was a breaker, a sledgehammer, two Peters, two Gregories, one Seryoga and the foreman Mykola – passing each other the tool, they would gauge the slab to the needed dimensions.

Bridging the floor was a crucial moment, my first year in the team I was not honored with that responsibility.

The crane put the slab onto two load-bearing walls: the outer and the axial (capital) ones, bridging the two of them.

The foreman together with a trusted bricklayer lay down with their stomachs across the slab, and hung their heads below its underbelly, checking how well it fitted in the series of the previously installed ones, because the slabs' concrete bellies were the ceiling in the would-be apartment.

If needed, the crane would take the slab up and aside, for the mortar to be added onto a wall, or maybe scraped off.

After all, we built for people who would come to live there!

Finally, the exacting peeps of two hanging heads felt satisfied with the slab's fitting the evenness of the entire bridging, and the foreman cried out the long-awaited for words: "They'll lap it up!" Which meant the future tenants would be happy with the quality of the construction works in their respective homes.

The crane loosened the taut cables, the hooks got released from the loop-holes at both ends of the installed slab.

The crane jib went up and turned aside, carrying away its huge block with the massive hook from which hung the four slings with four smaller hooks on their ends – the so-called "spider".

With the rumble and din of its open-work iron tower, the crane rolled along the rails of its track to the slab stack on top of which Katerina and Vera Sharapova were waiting ready to pull the "spider's" hooks through the loops in the next slab end-holes.

Some technology proved and verified by long decades of application...

In the morning at half-past seven, the workforce of SMP-615 gathered at the station square, waiting for their colleagues arriving by the first local train through Bachmach, Khalimonovo, Khutor Khalimonovo and Kukolka stations, to come up in the waves of other passengers bypassing the corner of the two-story mighty structure of the Konotop railway station.

And then, all together, we started to wait for our bus.

We formed a wide circle, not for a dance but to idle the time exchanging the news, jokes or looking around to make comments on the not overly eventful life of the station square.

There was practically no traffic on it and only other circles from other organizations, yet ours was the widest and jolliest.

(...in a circle, there is something of a family feel, incipient rudiments of a community.

Standing in a circle you see more human faces than when lined-up in the ranks...)

Finally, from Club Street there appeared our bus, our Seagull, handled so after the cars of Seagull make used for bringing delegations of foreign governments from the Sheremetyevo airport to the Kremlin.

It slowly crossed the streetcar tracks and passed the one-story building of the railway militia station by the corner of the square, then under the cabstand sign on the lamp pillar, though, for some reason, no taxi ever appeared under it.

At the end of its triumphal circling the square, the bus stopped next to our merry circle to slam its automatic doors open.

From the square, it took us past Loony, past School 12, past the streetcar depot, to At-Seven-Winds, where our team got off near the 110-apartment block site, and the bus went farther, for another half-kilometer or so, taking the rest of its passengers to the vast grounds of SMP-615 bordered with the white brick wall.

However, not all of our team workers came by the Seagull, most of them lived in the 50-apartment block or in the hostel barracks, also in At-Seven-Winds, and they arrived on foot.

We changed clothes in the wheelless trailer made of long planks, painted brown.

About half of its tiny vestibule was crammed with dead-mortar crusted shovels leaned against the wall, over the bunch of well-dented tin pails with the handles of our trowels and brick hammers sticking and the coiled fishing-line tails of our plumb bobs hanging out of them.

The inner door of the vestibule opened to a low room with one window over the long table and a bench to it and two sets of narrow lockers in its both ends. Most of the room was filled with the huge box of asbestos-cement plates covering electric entrails of the heater.

The women of the team doffed and donned in the oversees' trailer. Unlike ours, it had big wheels which called for the high front porch under its door.

The oversees' trailer had tin siding and two windows because there were two compartments in it – one for the current oversee and heaps of the blueprint drawings of the object in progress, and the other for our team women.

At night, two pensioner-watchmen, alternately, slept in the oversees' compartment.

One of them, by the brave name of Rogov, wore a Pe-Sha tunic with order-and-medal straps, an officer's belt, riding breeches and boots of chrome leather, and on his head a khaki cloth cap in the fashion of the 1930's, like that of Marshal Zhukov when he was still a brigade commander.

From under the long cloth visor, there looked the face of a veteran Roman legionary, worn out in campaigns against various tribes of barbarians and full of resentment at the head of Konotop pension fund.

That sentiment took roots because of the comment, accidentally overheard by Rogov on a visit to the fund office, with which the mentioned public servant consoled his deputy, exasperated with the stalwartness of the veteran.

"Patience, colleague, they're already not so too many around."

The second watchman preferred civilian clothes, but earlier in his career, he wore the uniform of a militiaman and subjected tipsy mujiks to self-invented sadistic check: those still capable of articulating "Jawaharlal Nehru" were let go, while the phonetically hopeless ones transported to the sobering-up station.

(...Konotop is Konotop, where even a mere rank-and-file militiaman knew and popularized the name of the first president of India...)

When on his turn, the former militiaman sealed the window in the oversees' compartment from within with a self-made cardboard trencher. Otherwise, he could not fall asleep.

In his youth, he served in the troops fighting Bandera men, and the windows in their barracks were closed for the night with shields of thick planks so that the repose of servicemen would not be disturbed with the grenades hurled by guerrillas through the window panes...

After donning the spetzovka robes, the entire team collected in the men bricklayers trailer to exchange the news about At-Seven-Winds, the hostel barracks, and SMP-615 itself.

Yes, sometimes Gregory Gregorovich would start bulldozing Grinya that at 8.00 he should stand at the line, chink his trowel and lay a brick upon another.

Then Grinya grunted with a chuckle, and readily agreed, "Very truly!" Because until the mortar was brought to the site and hauled by the crane to the line, the bricklayers had nothing to do up there.

The mortar was brought to the site by a dump truck. It would reverse over the rows of empty sheet-iron boxes, and raise its dump for the mortar to crawl down the steep slope, but it would not drop into the boxes completely. And it's good news if at least half of it slid out of the dump.

Firstly, on the way from the mortar-concrete unit, the mortar had grown dense, squeezing water out from the solution, and it was, actually, that water to fall down into the boxes on the ground.

And secondly, the dump floor and sides were not smooth anymore but covered with the growing crust of frozen upon frozen upon frozen mortar from the previous deliveries in winter, or of the dried up, upon dried up, upon dried up, crust in summer.

That's why it's necessary to climb the tailgate hanging off. It would swing in its hinges under your feet so one of them should be propped on the dump's side for the stability.

Now you're in the position to cut the dense mortar with your shovel and send swaths of it down onto the heap growing over the boxes. When the cut-off layer of mortar pours in the boxes, the truck dump will give a vigorous jerk-and-quake when relieved of the load, at this point, keeping your balance on the tailgate is of vital importance.

The dump truck would go, leaving behind a hillock of mortar over 4 to 5 boxes. But that's wrong because each bricklayer was supposed to have a separate box. Katerina and Vera Sharapova restored the just distribution with their shovels.

Although each box had four hook-loops in its structure, the riggers hooked the boxes by only two, diagonally, so that the crane would haul the mortar for two bricklayers in one go...

The part of the wall in progress of being laid by the team was called "the seizure". A string, aka the shnoorka, was tightly stretched from end to end of the seizure.

Shnoorka was a thick fishing line smeared with dry stuck mortar, tied up in knots at places where a strike of an incautious trowel had cut it, giving rise to reproving exclamations from along the seizure, "Again? What son of a bitch was it?!."

The shnoorka served for maintaining the right direction and horizontal leveling of the brick courses...

To the right of the bricklayer, the crane left a box, aka banka, with a load of mortar. The boxful of mortar was not exceedingly large – just a quarter of a ton.

When the banka-box was emptied, the crane took it to the riggers for refilling from the remaining or newly brought heap of mortar.

The boxed mortar gradually lost its elasticity, and you had to simply add water fetched in a crumpled pail from the multi-ton container standing nearby, behind the seizure, and temper the "dirt" applying your shovel. That's why a shovel handle stuck out from each box.

However, the main purpose of the shovel was to put the mortar from the box onto your part of the seizure. After that, the shovel returned to its sticking position in the box, and the bricklayer spread the mortar dumped onto the wall with their trowel, approximately the size of a large kitchen knife, only with a triangular spade substituting for the blade.

To the left of the bricklayer, stood a pallet of bricks, 3 to 4 hundred pieces, stacked in dense rows on top of each other.

Snatching a brick from the upper row, the bricklayer laid it upon the spread mortar and tap-tapped with the tin-clad end of the trowel handle, to level the brick with the line of the stretched shnoorka.

When the course bond called for a brick of special size—a half, a three-quarter, or, the smallest, a one-fourth piece—the bricklayer's hammer was used to gauge the brick by cutting off the excess.

After the bricks on the pallet were finished off, the crane operator delivered another one, hooked by Katerina and Vera Sharapova from among the pallets stacked on the ground.

The rhythmic change of interlinked movements – bending, stretching, tilting, knocking – turned the labor process, taking into account its outdoor nature, into a real aerobics sprinkled with a pinch of weightlifting.

Looped motion, consistently ordered, you might even call it spiraling.

Do you follow?

And now spit in the eye of that pathetic bullshit and forget it, because the construction site is not a circus with evenly smoothed sand in its arena.

Construction site is a danger zone, where spiky ends of rebar-rods lurk in dark nooks, a seemingly firm board snaps off under your foot, a pail of boiling tar falls from the roof, and you're a lucky devil if the warning yell "run!" makes you jump aside without gaping up: what's the matter? Flump!!

It is the place, where a cast-iron heating radiator hits the ground by the wall, hurled from a window on the fourth floor by a criminal having recently served his another stretch at Zone. He was not targeting anyone personally, and threw it just so, without ever looking out, to check who might have their pate cracked open by God's will.

On the whole, a construction site could be compared to life itself, and there, as in life, one must not only live but also survive. (Excuse my recidivistic falling back into the rut of pathos.)

Still, it's worth mentioning that bricklayers are not robots but mere humans. And humans, when being cornered properly enough, would take your dear life to save the life of their...

That is...er...what was it I was about?. Ah, yes!. Construction site.

At a construction site, there's no time for a bricklayer to glide through whimsical interpretations of esoteric messages from the initiated to the chosen, neither for the deciphering of signs drawn in the sky by ever-changing clouds.

Wait for a smoke break, and then play with your irrelevant or otherwise thoughts and idle re-shuffling of signs and symbols of varying significance to your heart's content.

Up to the moment when Mykola the foreman had risen the shnoorka for the following course and yelled along the seizure line: "Off we drive!"

To which call Peter Lysoon would respond despondently: "What? Again to attack? And which way lies your "forward"?

And that is the signal to grab your shovel and start living on.

(...a couple of centuries before, on the border with England, or maybe conversely, with Scotland, there lived a farmer earning plenty of dough without any charlatanism whatsoever.

His specialty was restoring all kinds of mentally crazed. On the condition, that their loving relatives were not around in the course of treatment.

So, they brought to him such a, let's say, challenged, whose special perception of the world had already f-f..er..fretted brains of all of his household members unfit in earnest consider him a teapot.

"Oh, look out! I'm of porcelain! Don't break me up!"

And the following morning the farmer would take the teapot out into a field, together with odd items from other services – crystal wine glasses, or saltcellars with their lids lost, as well as costume jewelry, which also turned up at times – and carefully harnessed the whole company into the plow. And then, of course, plowed the field.

By the evening of the day, 88 percent of the glass containers recollected their origin, starting comments on his erroneous attitude towards human beings.

On the second day, the most stubborn pressure cookers began to pretend to be human too, and the farmer returned to the family and society their fully restored members.

For the stipulated fee, sure thing, plus bonus of the field cultivated by unpaid workforce...)

Eera did not believe in labor therapy in the open, she had more confidence in folk remedies. That winter she took me to to the sorcerer in the district center of Ichnya, in the Chernigov region.

We arrived there late in the evening amid the early thickening winter twilight. There was about half-hour before the bus departure back, and the local kids, with some kind of pride, directed us to the sorcerer's khutta.

The door was opened by a regular rural woman of middle age and the rest of the interior was as ordinary, with not a hint at hexerei.

In the kitchen, there was a pair of visitors, but not from our bus, I would have remembered them; probably, from somewhere in the neighborhood.

A young couple they were, seemingly newlywed; both were seated at the table with the man busy shoving away a bowlful of borsch, and she, like, overseeing.

Not quite the right time for borsch though, but I did not intervene – might be the sorcerer prescribed it in the way of medication...

The woman led Eera to the next room, and two minutes later they came back together with the sorcerer, a black-haired man about fifty in a khaki shirt from the army parade-crap.

We looked at each other, unblinkingly, and he returned to his room with Eera. I stayed with the borsch-eater and the two women.

Soon Eera came back, all excitedly wound up, and we left for the bus.

On our way to Nezhin, Eera shared that I was the way I was because they had fed a "giving" to me, and there occurred an overdose, but it was useless to treat me on that particular day since it was a wrong "quarter", that is the moon was not in the right phase. (Or could they run out of the borsch?.)

The sorcerer said I did not need to come on a visit anymore, and should be represented by a blood relative on my behalf. So, instead of me, my sister Natasha a couple of times went with Eera to the district center of Ichnya.

(...it's a commonplace knowledge that a "giving" is a love potion used by a female to make you fall in love with her.

The target of the charm is treated to something edible after spicing it, for the purpose, with a portion of her menstrual humours.

Anyway, it was the fair sex to start experiments on human beings...)

I have no trust in any charms, neither in spells, nor in all the other hooey of the kind, but when you chink your trowel against brick or turn the mortar with the shovel, your head remains, basically, free and lots of things may slowly twirl in there.

(...if, purely hypothetically, suppose that the "giving" has, after all, taken place, then – who, where, when?

I am not sure in which from the years of my work at SMP-615, two assumptions turned up in my head:

1) the kefir, which Maria brought for me when I was treated in Nezhin city hospital for the principle's sake;

2) the boiled sausage I was treated to by my course-mate Valya with black eyebrows meeting on her nose bridge, during our joint school practice at the station of Nosovka, although I was not really hungry.

However, since I had not fallen in love with either of them, the hypothesis fails miserably, the Ichnya sorcerer gets zero points and remains on the bench of charlatans...)

When Gaina Mikhailovna, keeping her eyes aside, cautiously asked what attitude was entertained towards me among our team members, I got it easily what wind she was trimming her sails to. That was meant to ask: how do they tolerate my drenched reputation?

Yes, it should be admitted that not every collective would readily accept to its ranks someone with higher education for a position not corresponding to their diploma. Here lies the explanation to the yell from the bottom of the heart of Vasya, a roof-fastener at the "Dophinovka" mine: "Your diploma's a sore disgrace for our enterprise!" Which stood for – "you turn the mine into some worthless rabble"...

My reputation at SMP-615 was spoiled by the cashier Komos who knew that I had studied in Nezhin and got the diploma.

Her daughter Alla once had a long, serious, relationship with my brother Sasha, I even visited the Komoses in their apartment during that period. But later, Alla cut her marvelous long hair too short, and my brother became the Acceptee to Lyuda with her mother...

The cashier Komos was giving the payment to the employees of SMP-615.

For that event, our Seagull bus was taking the workers from the construction sites to SMP-615 base grounds, and in the lobby on the first floor of the administrative building, we lined to the small square loophole in the wall.

You were given the payment after standing in the anticipatory excited line of workmen, then drooping forward to thrust your head into the opening of the loophole-window, low in the wall, and signing the pay-sheet. I just did not like that final juxtaposition. With your head somewhere there, not quite clear where, your behind stayed outside to the mercy and at the discretion of the line in a state of heated agitation...

When I reached the window, I did not bent, but simply pulled the sheet closer—on the window ledge—and signed it. Moreover, Komos saw that it was I who popped up.

Then she cried out from behind the glass, "Seryozha! And where is the head?"

"I was guillotined."

"What? Don't show off! Having a diploma does not make you above anything else! You once visited us with your Olga. Forgot that? We have been drinking moonshine together!."

Never was I in favor of frivolous smugness nor of brusque familiarity. And, naturally, my response to Komos, the cashier, was direct enough to put her in a proper shape of attitude:

"Missed by a mile!" said I, "There was no moonshine whatsoever! That time we drank plain medical alcohol at your place, and flushed it down with birch sap." In general, let her know where she belonged.

But she still gave me my payment, and there was enough to return Tonya the 25 rubles that she lent me for flowers, when you were at the maternal hospital. Till then, it somehow did not work out at all to collect the sum...

Thus, because of the talkative cheek of a cashier, I never managed to hide from our team the fact of my diploma.

However, they did not apply any specific discrimination on the grounds of my having it, and after about four years I even screwed up on my spetzovka jacket the "float-badge", of those that they handed out along with the diploma.

I just thought: why should it kick back in the sideboard drawer? That's why it got screwed up, in the summertime, naturally. And my spetzovka jacket acquired some pretty look – a rhomboid enamel badge of tender blue with a golden book in it against the backdrop of the sun-bleached black cotton.

For more than a month I walked around the site wearing it. And then one morning I opened the locker and the spetzovka hung in its place but the badge was whipped, only the hole pricked for its screw remained in the jacket breast. But it couldn't be someone from our team, who unscrewed it, no, at that moment the project neared its commissioning and the site swarmed with workforce driven in even from outside SMP-615 because of the solidarity of managerial suckers...

So, on my next visit to Nezhin, I gave my mother-in-law a quite predictable answer: "Gaina Mikhailovna, ten people from our team have a good attitude to me, and one person entertains a positive one."

"How do you know?"

"I conducted an oral survey. Separately, of course."

"Does it mean you asked: 'What's your attitude to me?'"

(...an interesting question, eh?

Where else could I get those data from?

By the way, one of the respondents also asked in their turn:

"And what's your attitude to me?"...)

Yes, life turned upside down: once I used to go from Nezhin to Konotop on weekends, but now from Konotop to Nezhin.

On Fridays by 17.40 local train to Nezhin; on Mondays back from there by 6.00 local train.

Three times I overslept that 6.00 local and began returning by 19.30 on Sundays because I got into a flap to deteriorate my positioning in the line for an apartment.

(...when there was Negro slavery in America, some of the Afro-American families were separated.

Say, the husband was slavering on the plantation of one master and his wife was several miles away on the plantation of another one.

On holidays, her husband was visiting her.

Such a woman was called his "broad wife".

When I learned that, I regretted that I knew English at all, so deeply had it scratched me, I don't know why, but I got really upset...)

Because there were no streetcars in Nezhin, the city buses became too much stuck-up. The tin plates on special posts at every bus stop were telling, with black on yellow, at what exactly time bus number this or that should pull up by, but reading those plates would only aggravate frustration. According to the tin-table, no less than three Bus 5 should have already passed the stop, while you were still waiting for at least a single one.

At last! It appeared in the distance instilling a timid hope that...No, it revved by, ignoring the stop because of being jam-packed to the utmost...

However, that night Eera and I were lucky. The moment we reached the bus stop, it was approached by a bus.

It was a Saturday night and we walked out because Twoic invited me to play Preferans at his place.

He was already a last-year student and did not live in the hostel but rented a flat somewhere, so we arranged to meet at the main square.

From Red Partisans Street to the main square there were just two bus stops, and we would go on foot but for that bus turned up. Eera would hold on to my arm, so as not to slip in her high wedge boots on the firmly trampled snow, with rigid circles of white on it, drawn by the cones of light beneath the lamp pillars...

When we were dressing in the bedroom, Eera asked me to pass her the belt from her frock – a long strap of fabric.

Because the bedroom was so narrow and to skip squeezing between the bed and your carriage, I just threw the belt to her. However, one of its ends I kept pinched with my fingers, in case she did not catch it.

Eera, not following my actions after her request, bent down to zip up her boots, and the other end of the belt swept over her drooping back.

I was stunned by the striking resemblance of the situation to that scene in "The Gypsy" movie, where Budulie lashed his wife with a whip for goodbye because he was going away to the war, like, gypsies had that sort of tradition.

However, Eera had not noticed anything, and I consoled myself with the thought that I was not a gypsy and there was no war anyway...

When the bus pulled up on the square stop, there had already been accumulated such a crowd that even two buses would not be enough.

I got off first and stretched out my hand to Eera, helping her go down. No sooner had she been on the stop than the crowd rushed to storm the bus doors. However, I managed to fence Eera behind my back.

And then some girl shrieked loudly because she got almost run over in the stampede. Fortunately, she managed to grab onto the bus side and was not trampled by the crowd pouring up the steps.

As a man not only noble but also gallant, I thought it was absolutely wrong, especially in the presence of my wife, and I shouted to the girl, over the mass streaming between us, apologizing for all that bedlam, "I am sorry!"

Someone in the crowd did not want to be inferior in gallantry to me and, deducting it was I who pushed her, hit me on the cheekbone. Or maybe he was schooled that a fact of violation must be followed by the fact of punishment.

And then I declared out loud to him and to the crowd which for a moment forgot about the bus and tarried waiting for my response, and even the full moon seemed to bend her face closer to hear the words: "With all my nonresistance this is too much to bear!" And the blow was responded with my blow.

Probably, he was not alone there, or else the guys, united by the frustration from a long wait in the embittered crowd, immediately turned into a close-knit pack, but there poured blows at me from all the sides – they found a scapegoat to splash out their wrath because of inconveniences in life design.

All I could do was to cover my face and head with my arms bent at elbows, but, in my humble opinion, the self-protection attitude was executed by my body on its own accord, without waiting for my decisions. I, personally, could only hear some unintelligible yells.

Who to whom? What about?

When there sounded the growl of the started engine, I somehow was already on the square behind the bus, in the cross-light of the street lamps surrounding it, but still keeping on my feet, although bareheaded.

Probably, the enraged were too many, and they hindered each other to knock me down on the flatly trodden snow in the square. The pack ran off to catch the door from slamming on the other side of the bus. It left and I returned to the stop, where, among a dozen passengers who had not managed to squeeze in, Eera stood with my rabbit fur hat in her hands.

Farther aside, in the shadow of the dark news stall there loomed Twoic who had come to meet us...

He led us to his flat which he rented together with Petyunya Rafalofsky, and I played one pool with them. Then they went out to see off Eera and me.

The narrow sidewalk allowed for only two persons to go side by side, and Eera was in the first couple walking along with Twoic. He wore a long sheepskin coat and a furry malakhai headgear, giving him a look of a bear beside Eera in her coat of straight cut and a closely fitting woolen hat.

I was walking behind with Petyunya and felt unbearable bitterness because she was not with me.

Yet, what could I do? To kick up a scene of jealousy? To pull her away from Twoic's side?

Then who was I? Hooey-pricker in the demi-saison coat from Alesha Ocheret, freshly from under the kicking herd in the square. No one would want to walk with such a one by her side, even if she were your own wife.

In the skirmish little while ago, I was not hurt too bad but how painful it was to walk along with Petyunya now!

He and Twoic saw us to the square, and then still farther, down the street to the bridge by the hostel, where we finally managed to part.

For goodbye, Twoic, averting his look away from me and taking often drugs at his cigarette, expounded on his having a sex recently with one of his Bio-Fac sluts, how she embraced his waist with her legs, while he was dragging her around the room lifted by his grip at her tits.

That gross self-advertising of a male winner utterly shocked me. I'd never share shit of that kind in presence of even those sluts of his. Some f-f..er..filthy mudak.

When we walked on towards Red Partisans, Eera never put her hand on to my arm, and she kept silent. I just had to shut up as well.

There was no reward for apologizing to unfamiliar girls...

The management of SMP-615 found a way to, at least partially, smooth out the fact of keeping around a bricklayer with a diploma.

I was appointed one of the assessors at the Comradely Court. Such courts considered offenses not included in the articles of the criminal code or if envisaged there, not breached to the excess; some petty vandalism, or theft of trifles. Comradely Court was rather a means of moral upbraiding than a punishment dealt with all the legislative rigor.

The position of a Comradely court assessor provided no payment and was electable by vote. However, it's not always possible to draw a clear borderline between election and appointment. The words "Who's for?" during the voting at trade-union meetings was not a question addressed to those present, but rather the command, like sounding the bugle to signal it was time to raise their hands. That unanimous show of hands served an illustrious demonstration of a secondary reflex, no less indicative, but not as repulsive as the use of a Pavlovian dog.

The very same responsive reflexology ruled at Komsomol meetings. Actually, in the whole period of my work at SMP-615, there occurred just one such meeting caused by an unexpected visit of an inspector from the City Komsomol Committee.

It's highly unlikely that he came to the assembly hall on the second floor of SMP-615 administrative building on his own accord, he sooner was charged to check how high the life was running among enthusiastic youth under the age of 28 engaged in the sphere of construction.

The pitiful absence of any interest even in the most pressing issues of our time demonstrated by those collected to sit through the meeting that rolled, with catastrophic swiftness, to its end teemed the cadre with bitter indignation which made him forget the rut of protocol and ask another question, both stinging and exotic, "How could you be so passive?"

At so unfamiliar sounds the folks simply did not know what to do with their hands, that's why I had to get up and respond rhetorically, "And who, I wonder with your kind permission, would the active lead if there were no passive ones?"

Still and all, that f-f..er..forlorn diploma keeps you obliged to follow a certain line of conduct.

The inspecting functionary was unprepared, in his turn, for such a counter-question, and the meeting got safely closed...

So, SMP-615 management decided they would show a proper respect to the system of higher education in our state by making me, a carrier of a diploma for such an education, an assessor of the Comradely court which required one chairman and two assessors for the period of one year, until the next report-and-election meeting of the trade-union.

At the assessor position, I discovered a latent tyrant lurking in me, who used to come up with suggestions of the most draconian punishments.

For example, a month of solitary (sic!) correctional labor for the plasterer Trepetilikha, in the far northern parts of SMP-615 grounds. Whereas, for her, a day was lost, if on the bus ride from the station to At-Seven-Winds she would not yackety-yack a couple of colleagues to a coma!

Of course, from SMP-615 production building (the place of the supposed correctional labor) to the check-entrance house by the gate, there was a distance of merely 200 meters, and the check-entrance house was the seat of Svaitsikha the watchwoman, whose tongue was also in no need of oiling.

However, the court did not heed my proposal and sentenced Trepetilikha to be removed for three months from the position of the forewoman of the plasterer's team, which meant the cut in payment to the amount of ten rubles for each penalty month.

Anyway, she got off lightly because her offense could easily have a political resonance.

The trial revealed the following chain of events:

Trepetilikha peeked out of a window in 110-apartment block and saw that the accountant of SMP-615 was going home.

Well, and why not go? She lived in the At-Seven-Winds area, and it took her about ten minutes of a leisurely stroll to get home from SMP-615 administrative building. And the time was already twenty to five.

Her gross mistake was in answering the question of Trepetilikha who drooped out of the window, "Well, well, and what's there to be carried?" The plasterer meant the cellophane packet in the hands of the passer-by.

"Fish," responded the dimwit of an accountant.

The word "fish" served the detonator for what followed. Trepetilikha went to pieces, collected the women of her plasterers' team and, with prolonged intonations, informed them on the unfair distribution of life's good things, despite the era of developed socialism:

"They're sitting there in the offices! Have made themselves warm and cozy! An electric heater under each bitch's asshole! And we a getting stiff with the cold! And when it's fish, it's for them?! Enough, girlfriends! Collect your spats and hawks! Yes, and even so brazenly she mouthed: 'It's fish I've got.' But do we have no families?!"

The fact is that our Seagull bus at times brought food from the ORS. Once, when we were on the 110-apartment block, they brought fresh buns, and on the 100-apartment block, it was mineral water in glass bottles of 0.5 liters.

When and what was meted out in the administrative building of SMP-615, I had no idea, but the following day the women of Trepetilikha's team did not start working and that, from whatever viewpoint, was a strike.

I never knew whether they had brought them fish or some other equivalent, but the finishing work was, after all, continued and Trepetilikha stood before the court. That is, our comradely court.

SMP-615 management could not turn a blind eye to the fact of idle time with a political lining to it, especially when the deputy chief technologist wore a tie with the imprinted sickle and hammer. Which said a lot.

Yes, my cloth scarf bore a pattern of a Kremlin tower on top of the five Olympic Rings and the inscription "Moscow-80", but I had nothing to choose from, while the neckties at Department Store were fairly diversified with crisscrossed, striped, and even dotted pattern...

After mature contemplation, it can't but be admitted that rejecting my proposal to transfer Trepetilikha to SMP-615 base, the comradely court made a wise decision. Keeping her there would tantamount to playing with fire on top of a powder keg. Had they brought there something of which she did not get a share, she'd blow up the whole base.

"There are certain women in settlements of Russia..."

Without false modesty, I have to note that in the villages of the Konotop district one might come across even more cool females, whose potential could only be measured in megatons or even by the Richter scale.

"Phui! What brazen folks I have to get along with! The whole of the village was out to hassle me! I've barely managed to bark them off!"

And the welder Volodya Shevtsov would even get exiled, had the court played along with my suggestion.

He was a very professional welder having worked for twenty years at the KEMZ Plant, and there was some kind of hereditary intelligence about him. Maybe that's why he was drinking like a fish.

When looking at his crisp curly hair, I somehow had associations with the City on the Neva. There was some intelligentsia flair in Volodya...elusive feel of the white nights of Pete-Town...subtle allusion to the Peterhof fountains...

But he got tanked up like any other boozer, especially on a payday.

At the court session, its chairman described the case as follows, "We get off at the station square after work, and by reaching the next from there traffic-lights, Volodya manages to get plastered in full."

Well, it was he who slept: from the station to the traffic-lights by the Under-Overpass there were two delis plus the Rendezvous bar by the station square.

At that point, I suggested deporting Volodya to some countryside where there were no traffic-lights tempting simple souls with their satanic wink, which would take away the reason for Volodya to booze until he's steaming.

The court rejected such inhumanity, and Volodya himself took offense at me, though without exhibiting it.

And that's a pity, I missed his classy refinement: "If you would like to go and fuck yourself, please?"

And at this suggestion of his, you got the feel of the breeze from the seafront of our cultural capital...

SMP-615 was based in Konotop, but it had several branches operating at other places: a pair of jacks in Kiev, a construction team and a truck crane in Bakhmach, a team with a "Belarus" tractor in Vorozhba...

The third case was that of the overseer from the Bakhmach team.

They finished somewhat building and were leveling the adjacent area with a bulldozer borrowed from a local organization there.

The overseer noticed that a pile of the earth when moved was about to bury a defective bridging slab, left after the project completion. So he took the slab into the yard of his friend, or relative to cover the earth-cellar pit.

The building was safely delivered, and then some rat reported the plunder of the socialist property.

At that court session, I had only one question to the criminal: "What would happen to the cracked slab were it not taken to cover the earth-cellar?"

He shrugged discontentedly, and replied, "Would be buried in the ground. What else?"

I demanded to declare public gratitude to the overseer for his contribution to raising the general welfare of the Soviet people. It did not matter who was whose relative, but all of us were one united family.

Due to the general monotony of life, that proposal was also neglected.

At the next year's report-election trade-union meeting, no one mentioned my name for election to the Comradely court. As if I had never had that f-f..er..fully worked off diploma in my life...

After you turned one year old you came on a visit to Konotop, briefly though, for a week or two.

That summer there were frequent thunderstorms. After one of them, I drove you for a spin in your carriage.

My mother and Eera were against it, but I did not want to sit in the house and wait for the next teeming rainfall. Finally, Eera conceded for our going out, and they went back to sleep; people grow sleepy in the rain.

There were lots of large puddles all over the road, but you and I still managed to make a roundabout over almost all of the Settlement – from the streetcar terminal to Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, and back along Professions Street.

You were adequately dressed and sleeping under the buckled apron and the raised hood of the carriage. Only at the end of Professions Street, when the rubber tire fell off the right front wheel of the carriage, you woke and sat up, and grabbed the tire which I had placed over the buckled apron.

You grabbed it with your both hands as if it was a steering wheel, but I took away that wet and muddy piece of rubber. You whimpered a little, then hushed but never went to sleep again.

Decemberists Street was not far away already, and we reached there on just hind wheel pair of the carriage...

Then the weather cleared and in a couple of days I took you out to the field near the streetcar terminal. There I got you out of the carriage and put on the green grass.

You were not too firm on your legs then and just stood with your hand leaning against the carriage side.

I lay down in the grass next to you.

The greenfield slanted upward into the blue sky, and larks were singing from up there. So loud, joyful.

You stood there until your red pantyhose showed a dark patch of moisture. I had to take you back home because pampers had not been invented yet...

Another time I took a spare pantyhose along with us and drove you to the pond of Shapovalovka village, which Kuba and I had been visiting on our bicycles. It's not too far, five kilometers or so. You slept all the way.

The pond of Shapovalovka was rather big. I placed the carriage on a low sandy beach to watch your reaction to an unfamiliar world because you had not seen any ponds yet; it was like the first walk-out from a spaceship to an unknown planet.

You woke and sat up, left on your own with something you've never seen in your lifetime.

I stood behind the raised hood, so as not to interfere with the first impressions.

You turned to the left – only the wide water surface was seen from your viewpoint – then to the right, there was only the same incomprehensible substance, and you burst into tears.

Of course! Waking up in the middle of who knows what and all alone. I had to show up. and we rolled back...

The clothesline under a load of already dry washing stretched from the wicket at 13 Decemberists to the front porch. On the way, it passed above you sitting in your carriage. My mother stood next to it with the basin in her hands to collect the dried things.

Suddenly, you gripped on something hanging alongside, rose and stood in the carriage at all your height.

My mother told me to remove the baby and you, like, responding, threw both your hands up, as if in a dance, as if to say, "See how big I am! I can do what I want!"

And then through my mother's eyes, there flicked something so dark and eerie that I instinctively pulled you back. Rather, I pulled the handle of the carriage and, by that move, I yanked its bottom from under your feet. You tumbled over the edge of carriage onto the ground. The spot was, luckily, soft soil and you, fortunately, landed on your back.

I instantly picked you wailing at the top of your lungs, but Eera was already darting from the garden in panther leaps to pound her fists against my head and the shoulders because my hands were busy holding you...

The local train taking you back to Nezhin was overcrowded with the passengers standing in the aisle as one thick mass as well as in the space between the bench-seats abutting the car walls between the windows.

When I had to take your plastic potty to the toilet in the car vestibule, I kept it over my head like a waiter his tray in a crowded tavern...

(...in my memory, I keep two sets of images which can be easily retrieved and considered in detail.

The first set is a collection of apocalyptic impressions, full of howling darkness, crowds in panicky stampede, cold horror.

The second one contains nice, heart-warming, pics, but they arouse poignant longing for something unreachable, or unachieved.

Like that view through the open door of the bus pulled up near Vapnyarka, next to a lean concrete post with a blue tin square at its top numbered 379, and behind it there opens a narrow gap of a country road between the walls of ripening wheat stopped in their motion, and a boy of ten on the road holds his hand aloft over his wheat-color-haired head to wave goodbye to the departing bus...

I mean, all those mental slides where I can see you are from the second set...)

After coming back from Odessa, I lived in a never-ceasing fit of panic, in agonizing fear of what, sooner or later, had to happen or maybe had already come to pass. The fear was fueled with resentment and jealousy at some not specific one, but at his taking my Eera from me.

The excruciating dread was kept deep hidden as somewhat shameful want, but no camouflage eased the choking grip of misery that never let me go.

Occasional reprieve happened only when Eera was nearby, or when I was slaving at a construction site, or worked at the translation of another story. But even then, the crushing anxiety did not disappear entirely, but only receded into the background.

Physical pain is more merciful – the part of the brain receiving the pain signals gets inured and eventually turned off, so the pain no longer reaches you.

I did not attempt to alleviate my situation. Firstly, because I never learned to analyze and make up plans for actions, I just lived on, silent about where it pained, enduring the unbearable. Secondly, the alternative to that agony was no less horrible than the torture itself...

Our team was sent to the local train stop "Pryseymovye" by the bridge over the river of Seim to build a 2-apartment cottage for the track-men and their families. We worked there about a fortnight.

At one of the midday breaks, I spread my spetzovka on the grass and lay down next to the sun-scorched footpath with the trafficking lines of ants bustling over the cracks in the ground.

To pass the time at one-hour midday breaks, I had Vsesvit, a thick monthly received on subscription, where they printed Ukrainian translations from the world literature of all times and peoples.

Soon, I got tired of reading and put my head on a page in the open magazine.

It was a sunny day around, filled to the brim with the busy summertime life. The ants were dragging their flotsam and jetsam along the cracked footpath, the tall grass, swaying under the rare gusts of breeze, carried the quaky shadows of leaves in the foliage of trees and bushes above it. The unending buzz of horseflies, bees, wasps, and common flies filled the sultry air.

From time to time, the breeze lazily picked up the page next to the one under my head, and then everything around got screened off with whiteness and blurry spots of letters brought overmuch close to the pupil.

The standing page effaced the piers of the bridge across the river, and the long spit of a narrow sand island washed up by the unruly current. And also the fisherman standing on the islands with his long fishing rod got lost behind the whitish blurriness.

Then the page would fall back to show the fisherman again, but standing in the current already up to the ankles of his rubber boots. The fishing rod got bent by the taut line, he whipped it up snatching from the restless stream the flicking splendor of a caught fish.

The fisherman took it off the hook and threw behind his back on the spit, where the fish went on pulsating in the sand. He threw the freshly baited hook back into the river and, watching the float, did not notice the river gull sneaking up along the sand to the beating of the fish. Grabbing its prey, the bird flew up.

The fisherman did not see that, neither how another river gull dived from above the bridge, attacking the first one. They collided in the air fight, and the fish fell from a five-meter height back into the river.

The fisherman did not see anything of that, he stubbornly followed the float.

It was only I, who saw the whole episode, but nothing of it touched me. I did not even hold the page so as to watch uninterruptedly.

The river and the white blur took turns before my eyes, and I saw that all of that was Nothing. All that life full of events and struggles and changes was just a series of pictures on top of Nothing.

I watched, and I could also not watch and nothing would change anything. Everything was drowned in absolute Nothing. Even the constantly present pain receded getting flooded with Nothing, from which I did not need anything.

I lay stretched like that long spit of sand around which the stream of life hasted murmuring and splashing, but both of us knew that all that was just one and the same bleak void Nothing.

That was some terrifying knowledge. How could you live with it? How to live on without wanting anything and rid of waiting for something?

So, the choice I had was not overly extensive: either Eera and the suspended agony, or Nothing...

Eera was visiting Konotop without you as well. So was it for the occasion of Vladya's wedding, when the winter was setting in.

He married Alla, who already had a child and worked at a large canteen. The wedding party was held at that same canteen on the outskirts of the city, nearby the stop of the diesel train to Dubovyazovka.

The "live music" included the heavily bald Skully and the still curly-haired Chuba. At times, at the requests of the guests, the groom was also singing with the ex-Orpheuses. Everything was delicious, loud, and fun.

But all that was on the second day of Eera's stay, and in the late evening of the first day, I made two discoveries. The first was about the hidden resources of the human body...

At the starting night, Eera and I went over the veranda to the attached room. In winter it was not heated and turned into a sort of storeroom for odd household things. That's why when leaving the kitchen, Eera threw over her shoulders some of the jackets from the hooks by the door; she always liked to try something on.

In the room among the other things, there stood a pair of old armchairs, the relics from the Object times, with wooden armrests under the yellow varnish, and we had a sex. At such moments I did not think of any agonies...

We seemed to cum together but Eera, with her eyes half-closed, started to moan "More! More!."

Until that moment, I knew it for dead sure that after orgasm you needed to catch a breath for at least half an hour.

"Mo-ore!."

And I got up again, and we went on above the freshly aspersed floorboards. That's impossible but, as it turned out, at times it could happen...

The second discovery, concerning the white spots in the conscience of a human mind, occurred when Eera and I returned to the living-room.

My father had been already gone to the bedroom, and my mother, who felt completely out of sorts that evening, was sitting on the folding coach-bed with her hands dropped widely onto the seat, looking in front of her and not at the TV on its stand between the two windows. Only Lenochka was watching it from her, not yet folded-out, chair-bed. The subdued murmur of the TV merged with the light from a couple of feeble bulbs in the luster.

After groaning for a while, my mother asked me and Eera to help her to the bedroom, because she had no strength in her at all. We took her by the arms from both sides and helped to get up.

Weakly groaning, shuffling her slippers over the floor, she moved, with our support, towards the curtains in the doorway to the dark kitchen.

In that manner, the three of us reached the middle of the room beneath the chandelier of five white shades only two of which painted the circles of yellowish electric light in the whitewashed ceiling. When there remained a final couple of meters to the doorway, the light around me suddenly dimmed and I found myself confined in the darkness, not complete though because I could discern that I was having a sex with my mother from behind.

Wild horror lashed me like an electric shock that threw me back into the living-room. To the kitchen doorway, there still remained a distance of about a meter.

I gave Eera a frightened sidelong glance over the white kerchief swaddling my mother's head. Eera, with her eyebrows knit together, took care to keep her eyes on the lowered profile of my mother as if she had not noticed anything. So, that was just a vision, yet more prolonged than that second of running through the Greek night...

I asked Eera to hold alone for a sec, hurried into the kitchen to turn the light on there.

We took my mother to the bedroom and helped to sink on the bed, where my father muttered something in his sleep. Then we returned to the living-room.

I prepared the folding bed-armchair for Lenochka and slid open the folding coach-bed for us.

Soon the khutta turned into a mutual sleeping kingdom. Only the clock on the wall above the TV was ticking against my temples. It also had no answer to what all that was at all and why that all had to happen to me...

As always before, accepting the notebooks with my translations, Zhomnir, jerked up his bushy eyebrow and started reading it and inserting his pencil marks in between the widely spaced lines, though he agreed that his options were also not ideal.

"Your trouble, Sehrguey, is that Ukrainian is not your native tongue, you hadn't absorbed it with your mother's milk."

I refrained from stating that the first months of my life I was being fed with the milk of Carpathian cows.

He went into his archival chamber and returned with a thin book in his hands. "Gutsalo's stories. That's how one should write!"

And Zhomnir started to read out excerpt lines from the book, clicking his tongue at the end of especially cool ones, then he handed the book to me for mastering the craft.

(...I had read that collection as well as any other works by E. Gutsalo ever coming my way.

What am I to do if singing praises of devotion to the morning dew on cucumber seedlings do not turn me up?

(For that same reason, by the way, I do not like Yesyenin even though he's from Ryazan region.)

Besides, after _The Enchanted Desna_ by Dovzhenko, who had so beautifully exhausted the theme, attempts at picking it up anew are doomed to miserable copying of the flavors and mood.

And when Gutsalo tried his hand at writing on city life, he dropped off to the level of cartoons in the magazine _Perets_.

I am ready to agree that in one of his stories of that period, he managed to mention the reddish brick dust on the black padded jackets of bricklayers, but the detail had nothing to do with the plot nor with the characters in the story. So, the odd detail just remained dangling about, like a limp dick in an immense vagina...

The constituent parts of a work should add, converge, and develop the whole structure, the way it's done by pulling the constellation of the Southern Cross and the lamplight flickering in the red hair of the doctor on the empty ship deck into the opening lines of The Rain by Somerset Maugham, to suggestively send the reader down the road towards the clash of priesthood and prostitution...)

Yet Zhomnir should know better, so I started to compensate for the deficient nutrition in my early days and tried to mitigate the backwash of skipping the Ukrainian literature lessons at School 13.

On the cover of a thin copybook, I wrote "Ukr. Lit." and then read all of the books in Ukranian from the two long shelves in the Plant Club library.

There were both Lesya Ukrainka and her mother Olena Bdgilka, and Panas Myrny with his oxen, and the splendidly great Kobzar, and Marko Vovchok, and Ivan Franko, and Jankowski (the idol of Zhomnir) and many others in alphabetical order.

About some of them, even Zhomnir knew only from the notes of the overview lectures he had attended in his student years.

(...sifting all of that through the sieve of careful reading, I can safely state that in terms of artistic value most of the authors did not manage to create anything above the level of petty amateurs.

Quoting a Ukrainian proverb, "Where there is no nightingale, you're left with a sparrow chirrup",

The sparrow-writers remained just re-tellers of the latest European fashion in the belles-lettres.

That's great! Glory be to them! The Ukrainian language began to be seen through the press. However, that's politics and I am talking about the literature.

Of the Ukrainian literature, only three authors would pass with their colors flying in front of the world literary standards:

a) poet Kandyba, aka Olyes, who had for years been wallowing knee-deep in blood at the Kiev slaughterhouse, writing the tenderest poems imaginable;

b) writer Vasil Stephanic;

c) writer Les Martović.

The real master knows what he wants to say, because he has what to say, and he also knows how to say it even without much of learning, just as humans find out the way of how to breathe to live on.

The rest of the literature aficionados are left with jingling their cowbells in an attempt to portray the newest of the fashionable waltzes by Herr Strauss, which he creates to the delight and admiration of the decent European public.

But all the same, we will catch up, and overtake his orchestra because we've got inimitable balalaikas!.)

So, after work, I had what to busy myself with.

And even a local train could be easily turned into a passable study. That's why on Fridays, I came to At-Seven-Winds with the briefcase, and after work, in the train car, I took out of it a thin copybook, a pen, and a volume of stories by Maugham, in English.

Stooping over the compact print in a book page, I plunged into the tender humid night of the exotic southern seas, where the fragrance of the jungle in bloom spread for miles off the islands.

Emerging back from there with a pair of clumsy lines for the copybook, I stacked the prey into the ruled paper cells, and dived away again to roam along the sandy beach by the water's edge with white-crested, even in the dark, waves of the rolling surf, and, with a start, looked through the pane in the car window... Pryosterny?. So soon?... The next is Nezhin...

It was a delicious time...

Writing into a copybook placed atop of the briefcase was not comfortable, yet the desk problem found its elegant solution.

On Fridays after work, I extracted from my locker the plywood piece intended for the shelf to keep a headgear. If you hold a piece of plywood 50cm.×60cm. under your armpit, it doesn't look outrageous, and it is not in the way when getting on a bus or a train car.

Upon arrival in Nezhin, the desk of plywood perfectly fitted into an automatic storage cell, while the briefcase traveled to Red Partisans and there under the table covered with the tulle tablecloth, on which the old pier mirror stood.

The expenses for storage of the single item in a cell amounted to reasonable 30 kopecks: 15 kopecks to set the code inside the door and slam it; 15 kopecks more to open it, after collecting the code from outside.

Once, on the way back to Konotop, the cell door jammed. In such cases, it's opened by an on-duty station attendant with a special key, and in the presence of a militiaman.

Before opening the frivolous cell, the militiaman asked me about the things put inside.

I did not want to expose the man to an unnecessary strain and never mentioned any desk or shelf, but the ungrateful bonehead wholly refused to believe even in a piece of plywood.

When the attendant opened the cell door, I pulled out those 50cm.×60cm. and walked away, but the militiaman for a considerable while still stood before the cell, peeping into its dusty insides.

He, to use a fixed expression of our team foreman, Mykola Khizhnyak, was inspecting it like a magpie a piece of busted bone...

And at times the briefcase was filled with things for laundry because Eera instructed me to bring the washing.

I readily obeyed because it felt like we were, sort of, becoming a family, even though in her mother's washing machine.

However, the first family celebration was no success.

You had turned exactly one year old, and I invited Eera to go to a restaurant. She refused because Gaina Mikhailovna was not in favor of our going to restaurants.

Well, at first, Eera a little hesitated: to go or not to go? But I did not manage to persuade her, because of my tongue-tied manner of speaking.

Most often the fits of tongue-tiedness befell me in some common, everyday, situations; I just did not know how to explain obvious things.

"Tell you what, well, let's go, eh?"

While the mother-in-law, leaning against the jamb of the door to the bedroom, trotted out reasonable arguments that it should take a woman at least two days to get ready for going to a restaurant.

"Well, what? Come on, let's go, eh?"

And a suchlike pitiful crap instead of saying, that it's our daughter's first birthday which would never repeat itself and that sometimes an impromptu might happen to be better than planned events.

Tongue-tiedness is a real curse. It called for some abstract topic, that I would flash with a repartee...

When Brezhnev for the first and final time was passing Konotop by train with just a couple of cars in it, they put his portrait next to the station on a tin shield taller than the building itself.

The giant portrait of dear Leonid Ilyich—Mind, Honor and Conscience of our Time—with all his Gold Star medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union on his jacket breast. In case, he would glance from the bypassing car and see how totally we loved him around here.

Only they forgot to warn me it was the day of his traveling by, and I walked from the Settlement along the tracks until a militia sergeant stopped me, and told I could not go to the station.

Okay, said I, I was going to the Under-Overpass and not the station which I could easily bypass by taking that service path around so that to keep my jeans clear of the fuel-oil-smeared rails.

The guy in the militia uniform loved and respected Brezhnev no more than I did. However, taking into account the attendant circumstances—a person without a uniform trying to prove something to a guy in a uniform who, moreover, had an order—he asked me an absolutely well-grounded question, "Are you sick?"

To which, without a moment's delay, I gave it out proudly, "I am incurably infected with life."

Yay! I liked the sound of it myself.

The sergeant, from awe and admiration, could not find what else to say but did not let me pass all the same...

That is why I had to celebrate the family holiday alone, although Eera and Gaina Mikhailovna predicted in a duo that nothing good would come of it.

Yes, it was an accurate prophecy. All I could get in the "Polissya" restaurant was a shot of vodka – the last in stock, so they told me. I was encouraged to buy a bottle of cognac instead, but I'm not a drunk to put away a half-liter cognac single-handed.

So I concentrated on that lonely shot and meditations that it was no good to argue with Mothers and that under the conditions of all-pervading matriarchy there certainly had to be a system of communicating vessels between my mother-in-law and the unfriendly waitress.

The "Seagull" restaurant was located farther away from Red Partisans, and there I managed to buy a bottle of champagne and a parsley salad for a snack.

On my way back from the celebration, the champagne, naturally, hit my bladder.

In those days I tried to do everything right (in the hope to avoid the inevitable). That was, like sort of insurance – the righteous guy's wife couldn't cheat on him...or what? There, of course, was no guarantee but, if not to think about the matter too deeply, it inspired some timid hope...

Peeing on the sidewalk was wrong, so I went to the toilet in the bazaar.

The bazaar gates turned out to be locked for a long time before my coming, and I had to climb over. That also was not entirely correct, but not too noticeable in the dark.

By the time when in the corner of the empty and dark bazaar I approached the iron-sheet door to the toilet, it already bore a block-letter inscription "On Repair", drawn with chalk.

As the champagne was on the peak of its fight for freedom, I had to pour my indignation about the dictatorship of the communicating vessels out on that same door. Without impairing the inscription though.

Well, and who else could I meet climbing down the gates if not a militia patrol? Welcome to your native planet!

Of course, they did not buy it that someone would go over the closed gate when there was so much of sidewalk around in the dark and I was taken to the sobering-up station.

The doctor there, to check my stage of intoxication, offered to perform several forward bends.

"Heels together, toes apart?" inquired I conversationally.

But that capillary vessel complicated the task, and I had to do the bends with my feet put close to each other.

The doctor asked how much and what stuff had been consumed, received clear information and, with a shrug, handed me over to the lieutenant.

The lieutenant wanted to know my place of work and, learning I was not local, asked for my mother-in-law's number and called Gaina Mikhailovna to identify my voice over the phone.

Then they just pointed at the door, refusing to give me a little lift, and threatening to lock me up if I attempt to do any more nuisance of myself.

So, despite the stubborn opposition of conspiring females and their henchmen, your first birthday became a truly unique event – the one and only time when I got into a sobering-up station...

The development of my and Eera's relationship was going through gradual and quite predictable stages.

At first, when after a working week I came to Nezhin and excitedly pressed the doorbell button, Eera immediately opened the door for me. I hugged her in the hallway, and we kissed.

She even smeared my wrists with glycerin to treat the skin cracks from the frost at the construction site. "Oh, what a silly fool you are!" said Eera and I felt happy, although the cracks smarted.

At the following stage, the kissing was cut out.

Still later, instead of embraces, we exchanged the casual cues, "How d'you?" "Fine." And that is correct because something had to be said anyway.

The relationship did not stop at that, and the door started to be opened by my parents-in-law, for the most part, it was Ivan Alexseyevich.

Sometimes, I already had to push the doorbell button twice...

In the winters when my hands' skin condition became of no interest, I stopped freezing it. Probably, I became more experienced, or else the skin realized it had no chances to be treated with glycerin anymore.

At our last of the kisses in the hallway, I immediately realized that something was wrong.

Instead of her lips, Eera somehow guiltily put up her neck, and there was a whiff of the fox smell. It's not that I had ever sniffed a fox, yet instantly determined – it's a vixen funk.

Later on that visit, she told me that she had been home alone, the doorbell rang and it turned out to be one of her classmates from school. He knelt before her in the kitchen, embraced and kissed her knees, but she told him to leave and nothing happened.

And there, of course, happened another fit of covert agony, but even choked with the steely grip of jealousy I still managed to keep my heartbeat, bursting absolutely out of time, and when it numbed and breathing gradually normalized I somehow began to live on further...

From the hallway, I proceeded to the bathroom to wash my hands, and then entered the living-room to say "good evening" to everyone absorbed in TV watching, and to sit down at the table abutting the windowsill.

The center of the table was occupied by the TV, yet there remained enough place on the oilcloth for the plate, fork, and bread laid by Eera so that I could have supper.

I did not block the screen and did not bother anyone, if only aesthetically – by my chewing profile on the left from the TV.

Then I took the plates to the kitchen and washed up, as well as those stacked in the sink after all the meals on that day. I was not ashamed to wash up even when Tonya's husband, Ivan, was entering the kitchen. On the contrary, I was proud that Gaina Mikhailovna trusted me with the task, after a couple of picky quality checks in the beginning.

First of all, I boiled a kettle of water on the gas stove, because it took too long to heat it in the boiler, for which it was necessary to bring firewood from the basement.

I was washing up in a large bowl put in the sink. Civilization had not yet come up with detergents and other useful things for washing dishes then, so I used a large piece of gauze rubbed with a bar of laundry soap. And then, of course, I rinsed them all under the tap. Everything by the technology which Gaina Mikhailovna shared with me once.

Washing up helped me to pass the time. I even liked it, especially in that part of the process, when the hissing gas burned with the blue springy flame under the kettle bottom.

Besides, I was trusted with dusting the carpet taken off the floor in the living room out to the yard. It was a thread-bare shabby rug, so one could feel free to beat it thoroughly when dusting.

Sometimes, when I was working it over, Eera would go out in the yard and say that it was enough already because the neighbors in the apartment block were human beings too and deserved compassion.

And Gaina Mikhailovna once remarked that the method of my dusting showed a born translator. I cannot imagine where she could have seen translators busy with that job...

At times, I offered some services on my own accord. Like, when Gaina Mikhailovna was very worried about her son Igor being ill and hospitalized in Kiev, because she could not go there and find out how he was, and I suggested that I would go.

Igor was very surprised and could not believe that I had come to Kiev with no other agenda apart from visiting him. Four hours on a local train to see my brother-in-law, with whom I did not know what to talk about.

If I had told of having an interest of my own, and that in those four hours I finally read The Journey from St.Petersburg to Moscow by Radishchev, would it feel better for him?

Then I had to report to my mother-in-law what her son looked like. Well, he looked quite normal, except for a certain monkish air, like all the other patients there.

At the officers' hospital, they were given long blue gowns and kept their military forage caps. That resulted in a wondrous combination of clothing, especially when you watch a couple of shut-ins walking outside – the Merlin-style blue robes under the khaki halos with the scrambled-eggs of cockades. Some special order of monks: Forage-Cappians...

And I was also entrusted to coat the apartment floor with the glossy red paint. Not at one go, naturally, because people had to live in the apartment being renovated; so it took two weekend-visits.

But the kitchen, the hallway, and the corridor connecting them, Ivan Alexeyevich painted in my absence.

He helped me a lot when I decided to make bookshelves in the form of a bookcase without doors and walls.

The shelves were, naturally, designed for our future family library. Ten volumes of The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language were already collected.

I was too late to subscribe to the Dictionary, but many of its subscribers soon stopped to waste their money, and the volumes were put on free sale at bookstores.

Apart from the incomplete collection of the Dictionary volumes, there were full Kvitka-Osnovyanenko's works in four volumes, a dozen books in English and a hotchpotch company angled from different bookstores...

At SMP-615, I could not find satisfactory material for the project and asked my father-in-law to have the planks planed and cut in the carpenter workshop at the Nezhin Bakery Plant. I supplied him with the list of measurements of what I needed.

He brought the bundle of readied planks and dumped it in the hallway of his apartment, then started to convince me it was impossible to make anything worthy out of them. He even called Eera to the hallway to be an arbitrary, "Look, what shelves could be made of these slats?"

And they indeed looked very slim, but before ordering I had thought out thoroughly how to make shelves that would be both light and sturdy.

The project was accomplished at 13 Decemberists because in Nezhin there were neither conditions nor tools for such an undertaking.

And when I sawed out the bridle joints in the planks and bonded them with casein glue, polished with sandpaper, and covered with varnish, then even my father approved the shelves.

Eera, on one of her visits to Konotop, was not too much impressed though, at furniture stores you could see more baroque items; yes, they're shelves, and so what?

And Ivan Alexeyevich's false forecasts could easily be understood – a worker at the Nezhin Bakery Plant workshop told him the planks were unsuitable for the project, and he just repeated the opinion of a specialist...

But then my route in Eera's parents' apartment grew even shorter.

One time on my arrival at Red Partisans, it took my father-in-law really long to open the door and, eventually entering the hallway, I heard the cries of a squabble; it happens, a commonplace family stank.

I heard angry yells of Ivan, Tonya's husband, in high-pitched tones, then she herself flicked over to the kitchen and back, more voices confusedly wrangled in the living-room.

Eera peeped into the hallway, "The bread is on the table, you lay the rest." And she disappeared again to bicker on with Ivan.

On account of my arrival, the theater of hostilities moved over to the bedroom of Tonya's family. From the living room, it was only heard that Ivan took a circular defense in the corner, and his parents-in-law and sister-in-law, individually and then in chorus, cried out to him what particularly they were not happy with.

The words remained indistinct, like, Pillutikha's curses, but I could tell that Ivan was responding with dour short bursts, like, a Bandera-guerrilla used to use the ammo sparingly.

At times, some of the attackers retreated to the living room to recollect what else they had omitted to tell and then again rush back into the clashes. Except for Tonya, who did not leave the bedroom, but kept monotonously banging her dismal clue.

I did not even look in there, but everything was clear enough, family squabbles do not shine with the diversity of dispositions.

And all that was boiling against the background of wild screams from the rebellious farmers in Central Asia, because the TV was feeding series of The Man is Changing His Skin and they kept rushing there from one edge of the screen to the other. Hence the voices. The rioters were taking advantage of the watchers being busy with personal sorting out in the bedroom.

Then the dehkans grew so impudent that even jumped out of the TV, and continued their rat-racing around the oilcloth on the table.

And I knew that you could expect anything from that TV...

One Sunday, my mother-in-law cooked soup from a raw bone and put the plate for me next to the TV where some mafia clan members were forcing a judge to commit suicide.

So he put a bullet through his temple, and the brains splashed over right into my plate – oops!

And my mother-in-law stood vigilant behind my back to control if I would show the proper respect to her cooking. What was there to do? I had to lap it hot...

But no one would escape the just retribution, and now, that the TV and I remained eye to eye, I clicked it onto another channel. It turned out a mellowed violin quartet of chamber music.

But then the father-in-law jogged from the bedroom for recharging. And he felt that something was amiss, not as stimulating as expected.

He did not immediately realize that it was because of the cello. What could a cello have to do in a Central Asian bedlam?

And when he got it what was what, he clicked the channels back. And the dehkans from there raised to him their solid chorus of gratitude, "Ala-la-ah!" He inhaled it, like a sip of energizer and, with replenished ammunition, rushed back to the interminable battle...

Since that night, on arrival, after the hallway and the bathroom, I proceeded straight to the kitchen. There I laid the kitchen table to have some havvage. And I never looked in the fridge not to give Gaina Mikhailovna the pretext for mumbling later her reprimands to Eera.

While I was eating, you would come running to the kitchen with agitated chatter in your own, as yet not very understandable, language...

However, I again have run ahead of the events...

To keep Eera, my Eera, to ensure that she would be mine and mine only, I went down the path of a righteous life.

(...they do not sell the code of righteousness at the news stalls because no one needs them. Without checking it by code, anyone knows whether they did the right thing or not.

Even if your wrong-doing can be bolstered with tons of excuses and justifications, or even called for by written law, and even if everyone else around shows their support "well done! good fellow!" you still know, deep in your heart, that you'd better not have done that and, at that point, you'll be right, because you cannot deceive yourself and you know all along what's right and what isn't.

They finish their empty praise and disperse, leaving you to live on and wade through disgust to yourself and try to quench the memories of your wrong-doings, or maybe to drown them in more and more atrocious wiles...

Honestly, my quest for righteousness sprung from a personal interest: if I kept doing everything right then nothing wrong would happen to me, otherwise, it would be so unfair, which guesswork became the main prop to pin my hopes on.

I never checked the real shape of my loose construction and only tried—and real hard too—to do everything right...)

That's why it took bricklayer Peter Lysoon 2-3 hours less than me to finish the walls of a bathroom-toilet unit.

No wooden insertions? Who cares? Spit a spat, and go on laying the walls. When the carpenters come to install the doors, they would think of something to do about fixing the problem.

The partition laid up with a "belly"? So what? Say: "they'll lap it up!" and leave it as it is. The plasterers would come and solve the issue with an additional mortar layer.

But that's not right.

Therefore, my specialization in the team was gypsum partitions, and that of Peter – bathrooms. However, nothing was dogma and there always happened moments for a harum-scarum "off we drive!" and forced castlings.

Yes, doing everything right is a time-consuming trick, but that's not the whole story, because choosing the path of stringent righteousness you cannot bind yourself within the limits of current life, you strive to fix wrong-doings committed in the life past, which can't be achieved without unconcealed repentance...

When I came to the institute hostel, a former freshman Sehrguey from Yablunivka was finishing his fourth year of study, and still lived in Room 72. I returned to him the thick English-Russian Dictionary by Mueller.

"Ho-ho! Where's it from?"

"I stole it from you."

After a moment's confusion, everyone in the room burst into loud laughter, which I involuntarily joined.

(...what's funny there?

In his story _Jane_ , Maugham explains that there's nothing funnier than the truth...)

Nobody laughed though at the library of the Plant Club when I returned a couple of books stolen there and confessed that one more was missing and that I was really sorry and ready to reimburse.

They forgave me without compensation and did not even cancel my reader form...

Two weeks later, my father started to upbraid me for behaving as if I was not all there. He stuck the forefinger out of his fist and fiercely drilled the air nearby his right temple.

I translated his gesture into the parlance of the Holy Script, "Go and take him for he's out of his mind."

"And again some frostbitten hooey! Gone nuts in Nezhin? Is that what you've been sent to the institute for?"

Then I lowered the bar, and switched over to the Ukrainian folklore, "And when the father's khutta gets burnt down, whose attic the sparrows will spend nights in?"

My father did not understand the humor, he did not know that parable, and in the following week or two, the matches box from the gas stove in the veranda was missing. But then everything settled down and returned to normal.

"I'm ashamed before people! You enter the streetcar and get frozen like a statue with your look nailed to the window."

"I have to knock step dance along the car, eh?"

"No!! Just be like everyone else: 'hello! how are you? fine!' Do not be a renegade!"

And then the Central Television news program "Time" showed an employee at the Moscow Central Library named after Lenin, who confessed that for several years he had been purloining valuable publications from the archival department, under his gray uniform coat.

I realized that I was not alone redeeming wrong-doings of the past. But what was it to make him follow the path to righteousness?

"The fur-coat form of schizophrenia."

Unexpectedly entering the kitchen, I overheard my father announcing to my mother the diagnosis turned out by Tamara of the 4th kilometer in Chernigov, which, most likely, reached him with Eera's mediation...

But later on, the sorcerer of Ichnya, after a couple of visits by my sister Natasha there, said he had done his job and I was put aright.

Eera became happy with the news, but not I. Life became boring.

The overwhelming powerful stream of consciousness, in which I had to choose the fairway like those rafters driving their log rafts down the foam-boiling rapids of the Carpathian rivers, turned into placid shoals.

I could still see breakthroughs of the impossible into the world of everyday life—where everyone is like everyone else—but between those insights and me, there already rose that dreary grating from the Bulgakov's novel, with the dry dust over the grates canceling all pirate brigantines in the unknown seas.

The heat and full-blooded throb of the belonging vanished.

(...it's one thing when you are actually riding a log-raft jostling and bumping under your feet, and quite another kettle of fish if you can any moment just hit Pause Button, and leave everything frozen until you've poured yourself a cup of tea...)

"Give me my schizophrenia back," with genuine bitterness said I to Natasha, but it was too late...

In Nezhin, on the platform near that station's building corner, where the round clock hung on the bar protruding from the wall, Eera and I were waiting for the local train to Konotop.

She had the three-quarter yellow jacket on, and the day around was also sunny, a good summer day it was. Eera smiled at me and said, "When I'll be bad, remember me as I am now when I love you."

"Don't talk nonsense. You can't become bad."

"Do not argue, I know."

"How can you know?"

"I know. I am a witch."

Her eyes turned sad, and a slight imperceptible cross-eyedness crawled into them. It was as slight as my disappointment, for I had once thought she was a devil in love like that one in the book which I stole for Novoselitsky.

"No worry," said I, "I'm a hexer too."

Although what hexer could be of me? Some sleepy warlock at best...

This thought was prompted by the black hardback covers of The Phenomenology of the Spirit by Hegel which I bought in Odessa and was reading in the trailer of our team during the midday breaks.

Well, okay, to call it "reading" would be a rank bragging. I could not wallow through more than one page in a break, because of inevitably falling asleep.

I wonder if the translator understood himself what he was turning out, or just rendered on with "a perplexed mind"?.

In that Odessa bookstore, they did not want to sell this book to me. The two saleswomen were playing for time, exchanging accusatory glances.

At that time, the cause of their embarrassment was more than clear for me: they had been expecting a real warlock to pick up the book in black bounds, but now I just do not know what to think.

What's the difference who buys what in the world where each one is like anyone else? Be happy to complete the sales plan...

I kept Hegel in my locker.

The lockers in our team trailer had no locks, but nothing disappeared from there. Except for the diploma badge and a book by some Moscow literary man.

I was reading that stuff borrowed from my mother-in-law's hutch simply out of the sense of duty, and I felt relieved when it got lost half-way through. Then I brought The Phenomenology of the Spirit, in the way of experiment, to check if they would lift it as well, but no go, I had to read it to the very end.

And then it turned out, that it was not Hegel who wrote it at all, but somewhat Rozenkrantz noting down his lectures. Then he published those notes for them to translate the thing into Russian so that I would slumber peacefully in our team trailer.

And thank you ever so much.

(...sometimes I ask myself: did the original lecturer understand what he was giving out?

Or was it just his way to make a living with a tricky juggling of a "thing-unto-itself", a "thin-in-itself" and other things in whimsical juxtapositions?...)

But one passage I understood completely, where there was reasoning that a German bricklayer had to consume a half-pound of bacon and a pound of bread to fulfill his daily norm, while a French one managed to do it with just a bunch of grapes under his belt...

That summer saw the reconstruction at 13 Decemberists.

As projected by my father, the door from the veranda to the attached room was sealed and the latter got connected instead to the living room. The changes allowed for the heat from the kitchen stove to reach in winter the attached room making it livable all year round.

The rest of the khutta was renovated too.

After the reconstruction, I moved to the attached-joined room and a friend of Natasha came on a visit from the city of Shostka. She had been a group-mate of my sister in the Konotop Railway Technical School.

Later, Natasha's girlfriend got married, divorced but had no regrets because she could sew jeans like "Levi's" and though the fabric in her jeans was notably not genuine the business thrived and brought a good income.

She was not too tall, but well-tanned, and had dyed hair plus appetizing figure. But I, of course, kept my glances in check and never asked Natasha for how long her friend was going to stay.

Coming back from work, I sat at the desk in my room and read a book in English keeping a dictionary at hand, or else _Morning Star_ , the newspaper of British communists. Probably, they were not exactly communists but nonetheless, their paper was sold at newsstands in the land of victorious socialism for 13 kopecks an issue.

After dinner, I worked on translations and had no time for special communication with the guest.

I did not know how Eera learned about the visitor at 13 Decemberists, but she suddenly started questioning about Natasha's girlfriend and then announced that she herself wanted to move to Konotop, so I had to talk about it with my parents.

I returned to Konotop on outspread wings, and at once called my father and mother into the yard.

They got seated, side by side, on the bench under the tree by the porch, and I remained standing on its steps.

Bubbling with hidden joy, I informed them on Eera's wish to move to 13 Decemberists. And I was completely unprepared for what happened next.

My mother crossed her arms over her chest and said that she would not accept Eera because it was impossible for two of them to get along together in one place.

I heard her words but could not get it – how so? My mother who always pulled for me was now sitting on the bench, with her arms crossed, saying she wouldn't have Eera around here.

I turned to the father for help. He shrugged, "What can I do? All documents on the khutta are issued in her name, she is the landlady."

It was already dark in the yard, but in the light of the lamp lit in the veranda, I saw my mother's rigidly unyielding stance.

Desperately, I searched my mind for worthwhile arguments, appeals, for anything at all, but it was blank and void and dead sure that nothing whatsoever would persuade her.

My father went into the house, and I sat down on a porch step vainly scrambling with the hollow emptiness in my head.

The wicket latch-handle chinked, and the visiting girlfriend of Natasha's entered the yard. She was alone, without my sister.

"And why are you like that?" asked she, and sat down next to my mother.

My mother immediately revived and started to explain that the next day the four of them—my parents, Natasha and Lenochka—would go to the RepBase camp for recreation by the Seim. However, the refrigerator was full and those who remained in khutta could cater for themselves.

The girlfriend approved and turned so that the light from the veranda would boldly delineate her large breasts under a taut turtleneck.

Even dumbfounded by the result of the negotiations with my parents, I realized that I was doomed, and when left eye-to-eye with such breasts, without anyone else in the whole khutta, no bridle would safely hitch me.

I knew myself and got it that all my righteousness would not stand for a week, and even the fact that she was my mother's nickname would not save me. And whatever the fridge was full of, yet the innocent lamb prepared for the sacrifice was I...

The next day after work, I did not go, as usual, along the tracks and the wall surrounding the KaPeVeRrZe Plant to Decemberists Street, but got on the streetcar going to the Settlement and drove to School 13.

From there, I moved along Nezhin Street, entering the yards of khuttas with one invariable question, "Where can I rent an apartment?"

At number thirty-something, I was told that in the khutta under the big birch opposite the Nezhin Store, they seemed to be renting.

The birch was found in the indicated place, and it was so old and tall that the red brick khutta under it looked very small. However, it had two rooms and a kitchen, apart from the dark hallway-veranda.

The landlady, a single pensioner Praskovya Khvost, suspiciously looked me over, but showed a room of three by two meters, with the window looking out on the wide trunk of the birch in the neglected front garden.

One-third of the room was occupied by an iron bed produced before WWII.

The entrance was from the kitchen with curtains instead of a door.

To the right from the same kitchen, behind the same curtains in the doorway, there was the owner's room.

For me, it was essential to leave 13 Decemberists on that very day, and we agreed on 20 rubles a month.

(...Later, Lyda from our team told me that I could find an apartment in At-Seven-Winds for just 18 rubles, but I kept to where I was...)

Coming to Decemberists Street, I borrowed a handcart from a neighbor, put it at the wicket to number 13, and only then entered the yard.

Galya was sitting in the folding bed-armchair watching TV. I said polite "hello" and that I was not hungry, and went to my room to collect the books and disassemble the bookshelves.

The room windows did not have leaves to open, and I had to take the things out through the living room and the kitchen. So as not to change the shoes with slippers at each go, I paved the floor with pages from _Morning Star_ .

The young woman with astonishment watched my manipulations from her armchair.

I took the books and bookshelves' parts to the handcart waiting in the street. All fitted in, only I had to drive slowly because the varnished shelves, stacked on top, were slipping over each other.

In the khutta by the Nezhin Store, my landlady had a visitor, the two old women grew silent and watched the underground functionary shipping stacks of illegal literature to his new safe house...

Back in Decemberists Street, I returned the handcart to its owner and gathered of my clothes—the briefcase from Odessa stood at the ready—then I said polite "goodbye" to Galya, and left her to enjoy the T, because I knew how to win with dignity.

(...of course, it was not her fault to get into the thick of a family sorting out, yet later she managed to marry a guy from the Settlement, not for too long though, but that's already her personal story...)

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ Defying the Wash

The landlady liked to quote her deceased spouse and regularly boozed with her veteran lady-friends, not in the kitchen, because of the tenant, but behind the closed curtains in her room doorway.

I was sitting in the rented room and did not intervene with anything – you're not to forbid folks to live their lives in style.

My connection with 13 Decemberists was not cut off entirely. I had to ask my father to manufacture at the RepBase some spare parts for a wardrobe designed for installation in my room.

He produced a prop and two thin tubes as shown in my blueprint; my mother sewed the needed piece of burlap and it turned out a fabric-walled wardrobe in the corner, as it once was in the hallway of our apartment at the Object.

However, since then the advanced technologies paced far ahead, so for the wardrobe's top I used a light thick foam plate of those used for heat isolation finishing in the railway cars renovated at the KaPeVeRrZe Plant.

The room was seemingly too squalid for a safe house, and no conspirators deigned to show up. So I started to consider it a monk-hermitage cell and its appearances were to my liking, especially the black-and-white bark of the birch obscuring any other view out the window; sometimes, when tired of translations, I just sat and looked at the black marks in the huge tree trunk.

When I settled down, my mother came to a visit, escorted by my father. In the kitchen, my former and my current landladies measured each other with mute irreconcilable glances and exchanged official nods.

Then my parents stood sighing under the raw bulb hanging from the ceiling on the pair of dust-blackened wires. To all their questions I was giving polite, though monosyllabic, answers and they soon left because the one and only chair in the room was not stimulating much longer stay.

Mid-September, in the middle of a working week, Eera came from Nezhin.

She found our construction site in At-Seven-Winds, I changed in the trailer, and we went off to the city. I always liked her romantically wide cloak reaching below her knees.

We went to visit Lyalka. His wife, Valentina, was relieved to learn that everything was fine by us.

A couple of times, after an occasional falling-out between me and Eera she used to later come to Konotop asking Valentina to call me from the Settlement which was a long way from Peace Square. And so, with Valentina's mediation, Eera and I were getting reconciled on the folding coach-bed covered with a hard carpet in the living-room of Valentina and Lyalka's place.

In fact, you'd hardly call them "quarrels", it's only that at times Eera got in a huff and felt like yelling.

Because I was so ugly to look at, which she discerned after we went out to watch some sort of a comedy with faggotish innuendoes produced at the Mosfilm studious.

Or that no one would ever be interested in those translations of mine...

But real altercation between us just did not work. Despite my tongue-tiedness, I somehow managed to convince her that such yells were not a role for us, why to repeat other people's clues?

However stupid it might sound, but I myself understood what I meant although could not express it properly...

And it happened just once that I misbehaved.

That time I brought my payment from SMP-615 and put it on the table under the pier-mirror.

Eera asked how much was there and then started yelling that was not money. She did not need such alms!

Then I grabbed that skinny stack and tore it in two before throwing out of the window.

While Eera was away out in the yard, I did not know what to do and only was cursing my lack of restraint.

During my stay on the next weekend, Eera somewhat shyly, explained that at the bank they were accepting glued bills.

(...and that's correct because banks also need money, and 70 rubles are not scattered in your path, except when you are going under a window on the first floor, but even then in a torn-up condition...)

What I, personally, was surprised at during that particular development, it's the poor quality of paper used for printing money.

Say, if you cut some funny money of newspaper—the same number of bills—it would be harder to tear it up that my payment. It literally went in two of its own will, in my hands...

Then we visited the new Culture House of the KaPeVeRrZe Plant built next to Bazaar. They say the construction cost amounted to six million rubles. The Loony director, Bohmstein, moved over there to embrace the same position. The Culture House had two floors less than Loony but on the second one, there was a ballroom even with a bar.

When we came to my apartment, Praskovya was just driving out her orgy of alcoholic widows in the neighborhood. I introduced her and Eera to each other in the kitchen.

The landlady carefully examined her and, in my opinion, she also liked Eera's raincoat. She even kissed her suddenly and me as well, on the spur of the moment, and then went to sleep behind her curtains.

Eera made a small grimace of misunderstanding, however, she did not dare resist, and as for me, I did not care at all.

One time Eera and I were going by a local train, and some gay guy from the opposite seat started to make overtures to me.

Eera simply flew in a temper; she even started bickering with him, and that was ridiculous because I always was indifferent to them; once, Sasha Chalov's daddy kissed me on the cheek, and now it was tipsy Praskovya. Who cared?

But in my entire life I never came across a more sweet, lasciviously tender and, at the same time, so eagerly tight-fitting vagina than on that night; even by Eera herself it was both the first and last time that I happened to feel it that way.

As for where the carnal treat of a lifetime had sprung from – the austere interior of a monk's cell or the kinda blessing double kiss by the boozed landlady – I remain in the dark till now, and pretty firmly too.

(...there is still a whole lot of questions that I won't find answers to.

Never...)

Later in the autumn, I was sent to the station of Vorozhba at the construction of the three-story Communication House where the walls and the roof were already in place, and my responsibility was laying the partitions. When working there, I got another proof that the body of a human being is much smarter than he himself...

At both ends of the building, there were inside staircases with only one of them completed.

Newly arrived at the site and not fully acquainted with the details of the current situation, I used the right one until noticed that the steps between the second and third floors had yet not been inserted and just the pair of channels for their eventual montage were tilted up to the landing in between the two floors.

Feeling lazy to traverse all of the building to the other staircase, I decided to climb up the channel alongside the wall, whose width of 10 cm. seemed enough. So, I turned sideways and, facing the wall, made a couple of careful steps upward.

Then I discovered my mistake – the channel was placed too close to the wall and my center of gravity coincided with its face, deflecting from that vertical would, according to the laws of physics, send my body into a dive with the free-fall acceleration, onto the debris with insertions of crookedly sticking rebar-rods, deep in the basement. The undertaking did not seem worth it already.

However, after the start I could not make the same two steps back in the reverse direction, there was not room enough to even turn my face back, because of the too high location of my gravity's center

I clung to the red brick wall as if to something most dear to me and watched an unforgettable view: my hands turned into tiny independent octopuses, each finger lived its separate life bending in all directions, searching for clefts in between the bricks. When they got rooted in the wall, I pulled myself upward and then cautiously shuffled my feet up the sloping channel. After many a repetition of that trick, we got out.

But I remained dead sure that were the seams in the brick courses filled properly with the mortar, but not in the hasty style of "off we drive!" no unknown reserves in the human body would ever rescue me.

From the ensuing surge of adrenaline simmering through my system, I realized why cliffhangers love mountains so much, yet I, personally, would not risk it every other day...

In winter, they excavated all of Professions Street.

The rumors had it as if that was done for sewer construction, but it looked like a foundation pit about a kilometer long, and four to five meters deep.

At some places, the chasm was crossed with a thick underground telephone cable hanging in the air across the pit, from one wall to the other, at random spots.

And deep down there, a bulldozer was moving earth and leveling the gravel heaps dumped by KAMAZ trucks.

Only along the concrete wall of the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, there remained a meter-wide ledge with a path over the heaps and hillocks of the spoil...

With a cellophane packet in my hand, I was walking along that trail oscillating up and down when ahead of me I marked a schoolgirl who walked in the same direction. The yellow-and-gray tartan of her coat, made me realize that I should not go any further; that was not my way.

Fortunately, the telephone cable was sagging nearby towards the opposite wall in the pit. I stepped on it and walked without slowing down; I did not even mind the bag in my hands.

Yet, after a couple of meters, the usual story happened again – I started to doubt if I really was a tightrope walker to stride telephone cables.

(...because of the like hesitation, Simon, handled Stone, aka Peter, instead of a leisurely walk over the water started to go down into it...)

The cable fluttered and began to sway increasing the amplitude of the swing. I shot up my arms and fell.

It's good news that in the dive, my hands grabbed onto the cable. I caught breathe for a couple of seconds, then let it go and, like a parachutist, jumped to the bottom of the pit.

There, I leaned over the face of a prostrate prostitute in a broad-brimmed hat with red lining who stared upward past me.

How come the prostitute in the snow? Why was I there?

It's a pot shot about the prostitute, she dropped out of the bag in the fall.

And it was right for me to be there – my way was finished on that cable, another one was starting from that depth...

So I went along the bottom of the pit to its end in the distance with the ramp for KAMAZ trucks to drive down, and from there to the station square to be in time for our bus and go to work, and after the working day get off our Seagull by the bus station, and buy a ticket, and run, waving it, into the already starting bus, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!"

Because Eera told me about her country trip to the Hare Pines forest so as to train her conjugal fidelity, despite the champagne in the glove box.

Because of what else did I have to do?

That's why I went to Romny...

It was completely dark and cold in Romny, but I found a hotel.

The receptionist did not know where to accommodate a guest with a cellophane packet in his hands, so she allotted a room with four beds for me alone. Although she could combine me with that pair of business travelers that came from the same bus in my wake.

The room was a usual pencil-box for four, empty and freshly painted over the paint coats from the previous twenty renovations.

Four thick terry towels hung from the backs of the four beds, and the radio on the wall was singing in thick bass a romance about the cold morning, gray morning.

I had nothing to do; I turned off the radio and the light too. Then I lay down and looked into the darkness until I fell asleep...

The morning, in contrary to the forecast from the radio romances, was bright and sunny, and pretty soon I found the psychiatric hospital.

I left the cellophane packet in the snowdrift on the lawn under a big tree and, without any luggage, entered the open gates keeping my hands visible.

When the guards got it that I was not visiting anyone but wanted to stay there myself, I was taken to a small office.

A young man, who looked like a militia lieutenant, except for a white doctor's smock, asked about the reason for my coming.

"I want a certificate that I am not crazy." I knew perfectly well that by those words I had burned down all the ships and blown up all the bridges behind me, and now they would lock me up for sure.

"And who says you were crazy?"

"Well, in a streetcar, for instance."

His animation grew exponentially. He started inquiring what kind of a seal I wanted on the certificate – round, or triangle?

"It does not matter as long as it's signed."

So, he called a young doctor and an elderly nurse to take me to the shower, and then to the fifth unit.

Before the shower, the nurse cut off the hair in my groin with a hairdresser's hand-machine.

I felt embarrassed, but I did not resist – a strange monastery is not a place to declare your rules, as the saying goes.

After the shower, the doctor took me to an interview.

In order to consolidate the success, I drove a couple of fools, she only moaned lustfully while scribbling post-haste in a thick notebook.

When we went out into the yard, I said that I had left a cellophane packet outside the gate.

The nurse refused to believe it, but then she went off and with amazement brought it.

(...and what was there to be surprised at?

Who'd get the nerve to lift a packet left, like a bait, in front of the wide-open gate to the regional psychiatric hospital?..)

The doctor frisked the cellophane and allowed me to keep it as well as a copybook, a pen, and a book in English with a close-up of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat on the front cover...

The fifth unit of the Romny psychiatric hospital was located on the third floor of the building constructed by the blueprints of the Stalinist times when the stair flights were forming a wide stairwell. Halfway up, there was an iron mesh across the well to surprise a would-be suicide with the failure of his shifty schemes.

The stairs ended on the wide landing in front of the locked door between two long wooden benches alongside the walls.

Behind the door, as you would normally anticipate, there started a corridor stretching to the right from the window with vertical grates by the door marked "Head Doctor", to its other, blind, end—at some considerable distance—with a tap and sink in the wall.

In both sidewalls of the long corridor, there gaped rectangular doorways to the wardrooms, that at the first, unaccustomed, sight seemed cave entrances because of lacking any door.

The light from the outside world reached the corridor after creeping transversely through the wardrooms whose grated windows thoroughly decimated it. That's why, in cloudy weather, the bulbs in the corridor were turned on all day long. The murky illumination served rather to emphasize than disperse the twilight.

Halfway to the far-off end wall, one wardroom on the left was missing, substituted with a small hall of two barred windows.

In the hall corner next to the right window, a tall pier-mirror stood atop its empty cabinet, and the partition returning to the corridor from that corner had a white door with the tablet "manipulation room" on it.

The hall's left window was blocked with a tall box, like, pedestal for a turned-off TV, that pyramid was abutted by a hospital couch alongside the partition wall with the other white door in the hall, tableted "senior nurse", exactly opposite the manipulation room.

The floor in the corridor was paved with middle-sized ceramic tiles of a brownish dark hue conforming to the general gamma of the all-pervading twilight.

The floor-tiles gleamed moistly since the privileged shut-ins washed it twice a day with wet cloths on wooden mops...

For a starter, to check how dangerous I was, they placed me to the observation wardroom, opposite the hall with the pier mirror.

At the jamb of the door-less doorway to the wardroom, there stood an armchair whose carcass of nickel-plated pipes upholstered with a piece of brown leatherette, leaned its back against the corridor wall.

The slender pipes of legs supported an elderly but sturdy mujik in the seat—a paramedic—rigged out in a white coat and a small white capulet.

With one ear turned to the observation wardroom, he faced the distant parts of the corridor where another paramedic sat at another wardroom in the exactly same chair, yakking idly with a young man in pajamas and army boots, who squatted, hanging his arms over his knees, in front of the sitter.

The paramedic took me into the wardroom, chinking on the way his bunch of keys against the back of the bed nearest to the doorway, on which a young blonde in bright red pajamas lay with his unswerving stare stuck in the ceiling while hastily beating off under his sheet.

The clang was upheld by a burst of sardonic laughter out of the opposite corner, but it did not last for long.

The paramedic pointed at the third bed from the window, and I humbly lay down.

The bed between me and the window was occupied by a supine young man clutching the collar of his blue hospital gown wrapped tightly around his stuck out neck with closely cropped head on it whose eyes were intensely peering upward.

Soon, he turned to me an inquisitive stare from the bluish circles around his eyes and asked whether my brother's name was Sasha and if I had a sister as well.

Then he squeezed his head between his hands to report that he had been studying with them at the technical school before one evening his father sent him to collect cows when the hoary fog was drifting through Podlypnoye which instilled a cold into his hatless, unprotected, head and ever since the poor nob aches regularly.

A couple of times he was distracted from his story yelling at a nuts who approached the back of my bed with poorly articulated questions. Then he said that his name was also Sasha, turned away and fell asleep.

A pair of patients without speech problems exacted from the blond in red a song, and he whined out the latest hit from the "Mayak" radio station:

"Save, please, save, please, save, please, save my broken heart,

Find, please, find, please, find, please, find her for me..."

Two hours later, I was decided to be not a violent case, the senior nurse called me out from the corridor and led to Wardroom 9, closer to the office with the tablet "Head Doctor".

The 9th looked more comfortable with its just ten beds. Only the white table in the corner partly jutted across the entrance, but since there was no door it felt like a minor inconvenience.

Wildlife shrieks from neighboring wardrooms gradually grew more habitual and ceased to stir upsurges of funk by their jungle power.

In the evening, along the corridor there sounded a cry "to the kitchen!" and a group of privileged shut-ins, led by a nurse, walked to the exit.

A half-hour later they returned and in a hurried pace, precipitated by the weight of two boiler-thermoses, marched in the counter direction.

A few minutes later, from the remote end of the corridor, they called, "Workmen to dinner!" Workmen were always called first to the dining room.

Instead of pajamas, the workmen wore black spetzovkas and after breakfast and midday meal, they were convoyed away somewhere.

When the workmen left the dining room, in the corridor sounded the next call, "The second party, to dinner!"

And, after a corresponding period of time, the concluding call was shouted out, "The third party, to dinner!"

The left wall in the far end of the corridor had three locked doors: to the shower, to the dispenser, and to the dining room. Neither of them had a tablet, but everyone knew where was what.

In the shower room, they kept tin pails and wooden mops for washing the floor. Its door was opened by a nurse or a paramedic for the privileged to take their pastime instruments and locked again at once. However, despite so close control one of the fifth unit patients managed to hang himself in the shower room; though not at the first go.

Before feeding the fifth unit, they unlocked both the dispenser room, to place the brought boiler-thermoses, and the dining room, to have where to call the eating parties to.

The dispenser room was narrowed by the large shelving along the wall opposite the dispenser window. The robust shelves bore cellophane packets with food delivered to the shut-ins by their visitors on the visiting day.

Twice a week, they shouted in the corridor, "Delivery! Who has a delivery? To the dining room!"

Those who knew that in the dispenser room there were things they did not manage to stove away completely when the visitors were feeding them, treaded to the dining room to finish eating.

If someone could not keep in mind or did not want to remember the existence of a cellophane packet on the shelves, then more attentive wardroom-mates would remind him and solicitously escort to the dining room to help in eating the delivery.

I did not belong to the workmen and ate with the second party.

We lined up in a noisy, diversely dressed but equally hungry, queue along the wall by the door blocked with a paramedic's body, while they were sweeping off the tables inside after the previous eaters.

The paramedic also controlled that someone would not get in the line after having his share in the freshly fed party. At last, he commanded, "Come on!"

And we noisily poured through the unusually narrow door into the dining room with three windows and long tables, like in a medieval refectory, if not for being covered with oilcloth.

The tables stood in three rows abutting two opposites walls, and the narrow cross-sectional passage in the middle cut them into six separate tables.

We sat at them, overstepping the benches nailed to the floor.

Amid the animated noise spiced with uninhibited gesticulations, we waited for the constant on-duty blond masturbator to bring the wide plywood tray loaded with aluminum bowls, spoons and bread.

The tray was unloaded and those who got the havvage in front of them started eating, while the rest watched the process and waited for the chmo dispenser, also from the shut-ins, to fill the next tray-load behind his window.

We finished everything off and began to wait for a tray with tin cups of sour-sweet kissel, whose skin I hated so much when at kindergarten.

Once I overslept the feeding and had to eat with the third party. Some grievous sight.

There, people treated their faces as plasticine, kneading out of it the most grotesque masks for no obvious purpose.

But then and there I found out who produced baboon shrieks, which I heard from my wardroom, and who was answering him with the roar of a wounded elephant.

There were none of, even desultory, conversations at the third party feeding.

And yet at times, someone from the second party would mix into the third one. Not because of pure love for living nature, but simply since they had time to eat the neighbor's ration while he was making faces to the window grates.

Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, was favoring the third party and often ate with them to curb funny in the head, yet crafty, freeloaders.

Those three meals were the noisiest time of day in the fifth unit.

If someone started to make too much noise at an unreasonable hour, a pair of paramedics ran to his wardroom and, following a rectifying hit or two with their bunch of keys on his head, fixed the troublemaker.

That is, they crucified him in the supine position, with his wrists and ankles tied to the iron corners along his bed spring mesh by means of yellowish cloth straps, obviously former bed-sheets worn-out to shreds...

After feeding, everyone dispersed to their wardrooms or strolled aimlessly over the brown tiles on the corridor floor.

I would not say that we were starving there – same havvage as anywhere else.

Once, we even were given for a dinner a pair of pancakes each; though being cold, they had been smeared with a drop of some sticking jam.

And quite separately stands the incomprehensible late-night feast, when two laundry basins appeared in the hall filled with a sausage of two types: liver-squash and blood-mixture; and everyone might grab as much as he wanted. Except for a pair of the third party members, who suddenly grew sane enough, but the fat patient in charge of the basins drove them away. Discrimination happens anywhere...

But the main delight in the life of the fifth unit appeared with the stately, flax-haired, nurse; she brought it in a pillowcase bulging with angular pieces of refined sugar.

That pillowcase she took into the "senior nurse" office and every day those, who had the brains to come and ask for, received a few pieces of not just pressed, but a real, refined, sugar, which did not melt on your tongue in two seconds.

I, for one, had brains to ask twice a day. And I tried to consume that sugar unnoticed because of those not having brains to turn to the original source still were smart enough to beg it from me.

To show that it was over, I patted at the emptied pocket, but then, recollecting that lying was not the right thing to do, I shared the sugar from the other pocket in my pajamas.

Once in twenty days a black-haired woman with a sharp nose and in the, naturally, white smock, came to the hall in the middle of the corridor.

You could see at once that she was from the glassy-eyed, but I had already kicked that off and, therefore, agreed to the version of the fifth unit old-timers stating that she was a former circus acrobat.

The acrobat cut the stubble off our faces with a hairdresser machine, and for the haircut, she used scissors, if you did not ask to crop it also with the machine in "zero" style...

The cultural life was ensured with the TV set.

One hour before, and one hour after the news program "Time", during which it was a break for the procedures.

Some ten watchers gathered around it dragging stools and chairs from their wardrooms. The paramedic by the observation wardroom also moved nearer...

At night, the wardrooms were lighted with the electric bulbs until the daylight. Probably, so that no one did something to himself or his neighbor.

Sleeping with the light on is inconvenient because even if in your dream you were walking in the wild, the inescapable presence of the bulbs was felt there all the same. Yet, the corridor was not lighted so brightly for the on-duty paramedics to get a normal rest in their chairs.

In the small hours, Wardroom 9 was usually visited by a young guy eager to show how dexterously he juggled a pair of boiled eggs from a delivery.

Sometimes he demonstrated a small, yet proficiently executed picture, where a stark naked male was moodily chasing a girl with only her boots on and a high Russian fillet on the head. Her long taut braid flapped on the run, and she looked back in fright at the meter-long dick of the determined pursuer. Apparently, a copy of some original from the first half of the XIX century.

Then a frail man with elusive eyes came to take the young guy away.

According to his repeatedly shared story, he got to the psychiatric hospital after accidentally breaking the window panes in the khutta of Village Council with a stick, not omitting a single glass.

He kissed the youngster in his pate under the stubble hair, called him "mnemormysh" and led him back to his wardroom. He kissed all the young people in the pate and called "mnemormysh" all of them.

I had never heard such a word before, but it sounded very tenderly, like, "pinniped pup".

The time for getting up was announced by paramedics jingling their key bunches against the bed backs so that by the arrival of the head doctor and the nurses the fifth unit life would flow in its orderly channel.

First of all, all flocked to the toilet.

2 / 80 = F(0)!

Two toilet bowls for 80 shut-ins are too FUCKING few(!), and queuing to them started in the corridor; the line continued inside, along the walls of two rooms – in the hallway, and then in the actual toilet.

In the first of the rooms, I once fainted for the first time in my life; absolutely for no reason whatsoever. Darkness entered my eyes, and rubbing my back against the wall, I slid down to the floor and sat in nowhere. However, I did not lose my being completely and, though submerged into darkness, heard the echo of distant voices explaining to each other that I just passed out.

Then the blackout turned murky gray, penetrated with light coming back gradually, I opened my eyes and returned into the line.

For those who couldn't keep in check their excretory system any longer, a tin basin with handles was put on the floor tiles in the center of the actual toilet room.

When it got filled up full, some of the nuts would ladle the excrement with his hands into a separate pail and empty it into one of the two bowls, the remaining urine was poured out in a drainpipe in the corner.

There was some tacit time quota for squatting on the bowl so, when it ran out, the nearest queue started to grumble, and a minute later some of the deaf-mute nuts, from those lining in the hallway, would pull you off the toilet bowl without explanations why...

After breakfast, the toilet was locked until the end of the midday meal, when they opened it briefly for washing the floor.

The last chance to use the toilet was the half-hour following the dinner, because of the final floor washing of the day.

My rather lax attitude to urination matters before entering the madhouse left my bladder lacking the proper discipline to fit into that quite simplistic schedule.

When feeling the urge, I lapsed into a panicking confusion – how to withstand it until the next half-hour of the open toilet?

Appealing to paramedics in whose possession was the coveted key did not make sense, because of their unchanging answer "Piss off! You can't use the toilet, the floor is washed there."

So to avoid a warming up, explanatory, hit over the head with the whole key bunch, you had to conform and piss off.

One day, driven to despair, I tried to take a leak into the sink in the end wall of the corridor, and got boxed on the ribs by the patient who often smoked there on the sly, admiring the sink, like, it was a park fountain on a repair.

During another crisis, overcoming shame, I turned to an elderly nurse with keys on her belt, trying to delicately explain my need and plight.

For a considerable time, she couldn't understand my muttering about what I felt within my bladder, but then she opened the door to the shower and pointing to the trap ordered, "Puddle here!"

No wonder they were named "sisters of mercy" in the Czarist army...

One time, the shut-ins were driven, in groups, to the bathhouse in another building.

There, it was necessary to stand under the lukewarm shower in a slippery cast-iron bath stained with rusty-brown streaks on its walls.

While you soaped the washcloth left by the previous shower taker, the next already naked one stood by the bath, not wet as yet, twitching his cheek, and jerking his neck, and staring in nowhere under the low ceiling.

The small waffle towel got soaked before you finished to wipe all of yourself, and the residual moisture got absorbed with the underwear on the way back to the unit...

In the afternoon, it was better not to come too near to the windows in the hall. A pair of tower cranes were seen through the glass, turning slowly their beams at distant construction sites, and from the bus station, there came muffled sounds of the loudspeaker announcing the bus departures of indiscernible destinations and wishes of the good voyage.

The sun was shining, the snow melting; life was going on out there, but you were on this side of the vertical bars...

Saturday at the fifth unit was assigned for the reception of visitors and they were not allowed on any other day of the week.

The harsh ringing of the doorbell in the corridor called the on-duty nurse to checked who was out there, and then they shouted along the corridor the name of a shut-in to go outside the door and see his visitors.

My parents came on the very first Saturday.

I was greatly surprised because I did not tell anything to anyone when leaving for Romny. As it turned out, the following day my landlady informed them of my absence, they called SMP-615 and were told where I got off the bus the day before. At the bus station, someone also recollected seeing me, and the tangle got unraveled...

We met on the landing in front of the door to the fifth unit, one of the long benches was vacant so we sat along that, in one row.

My mother, pushing her fluffy kerchief back from the head onto her shoulders, said, "How's that, sonny?" and she began to cry,

My father, so as to calm her down and somehow console, announced, "Again! Started again!"

He did not take off his fur hat, and did not cry, but kept his eyes directed at the bench opposite, where another pair of parents fed all the goodies from their cellophane packet to their shut-in – a crazy guy who did not talk at all because he had been bitten by an encephalitic tick.

I also was eating all sorts of homemade cakes and buns brought by my mother, and Eclair cakes with custard filling from the cooking shop by the Under-Overpass, because she knew what I loved.

There was also lard in the cellophane packet to take it with me, but I flatly refused. So at the end of the meeting, my mother handed the bag to the nurse for storing it in the dispenser room.

But I did not go to the dining room when in the corridor they yelled announcement to come and eat deliveries. For the principle's sake...

On the following Saturday, my brother and sister came instead of our parents.

My brother had no hat on his head, but he frowned just like our father and said, "Why, Sehryoga? It's no good you do it."

As for Natasha, she did not cry but kept upbraiding me, "Tell me just one thing – you really need it? Well done, good fellow!"

She said that Eera did not come, although she called her so that she knew.

Eera never came to Romny, but I understood that she had to look after the baby...

On March 8, they brought a gurney to the corridor with a pile of free postcards for the holiday.

I filled one out to Nezhin with congratulations and love for Eera.

While writing, I was horrified how ugly and trembling were the lines in the postcard, and the handwriting was anything but mine.

Probably, because of injections...

The head doctor of the fifth unit had no inclination to discuss my music preferences, she was busy with curing me.

I was injected with iminazine intramuscularly, three times a day.

An initial couple of days, it still could be tolerated, but later there remained no intact spot in the buttocks.

One shot got upon another, nodules sprang up over my ass which turned into a terrain of tightly swollen knolls, and it became difficult to even walk along the corridor, leaving aside any orbiting.

Besides, the skin down there, denied any time for regeneration, started bleeding, not too profusely but constantly, the hospital underpants were stained through from inside.

The most unbearable was the third, concluding, injection of a day.

It was shot at about nine pm., and at the tinkling of the metal boxes with syringes on the gurney pulled along the corridor, my teeth clenched like in a spasm.

The gurney gradually reached our wardroom, and the on-duty nurse appeared in the doorway with a syringe in her hand.

Having done an injection, she returned to the corridor after another syringe for the next shut-in.

Once a nurse missed me, and I pretended to be asleep, so as not to remind her, and when I heard the gurney tinkling along to Wardroom 8, I could not believe my own luck.

An hour later, the nurse called me by name from the doorway, she held a syringe in her hand and smiled victoriously, "Hoped to skip it, Ogoltsoff?"

In the manipulation room, before they go around, those syringes were charged according to the list, and when on the gurney remained an unused syringe, she realized that someone had been missed.

You remembered – well done, but why to smile? At that moment, she reminded me of Sveta from my polygamous past; probably, by her hairstyle...

And I was also injected with insulin intravenously, but at first, the head doctor warned my parents that they should agree to it.

Beltyukov, a young but experienced neighbor in the wardroom, told that they extracted insulin from bull's liver, there was nowhere else to get it from.

The purpose of those injections was to bring a shut-in into a coma. Many were cured that way, subtracting the percentage on whom the drug worked incorrectly. Still, the number of survivors remained higher. The main trick was to pull the shut-in out of the coma in time.

Shots of insulin were done to me and Beltyukov in the morning, one insertion in the vein inside arm elbow.

Then the nurse called the nearest paramedic, and he came together with volunteers from the shut-ins to fix us with rags to the iron beds we were stretched on.

They fixed only our arms, but firmly so that we could not wring them away when led back out of the current coma.

After about twenty minutes, the nurse would return to the wardroom to fill out somewhat ledger, sitting at the white desk in the corner. That's why it was placed in that improper place – she was watching us like milk on fire not to let it drip over when seething.

Beltyukov and I lay on our beds, side by side, and talked, looking into the ceiling. He was a sociable guy and looked like Vitalik from the construction battalion, or maybe not very much so.

Then our conversation turned into incoherent exclamations: Beltyukov shouted about the dominance of fucking matriarchy, and I declared that all people were brothers and how could you possibly not see it!?

At the same time, my head was tilting back to see my backbone, only the pillow was always in the way.

It served the signal for the nurse to put aside her ledger, and give us a shot of glucose intravenously to ward off the upcoming dive into the fatal coma.

Then they untied us and gave a glass of water with a thick sugar solution because the mouth was burning awful hot.

That does not mean that Beltyukov and I always shouted the same thing, it was just the core theme of our uncontrolled slogan chanting when under insulin.

On Sundays, we were not injected with that shit...

The hardest to recover from was a shot of sulfur.

Normally, they injected it to drunks in the form of punishment, yet the head doctor might have been having some special experimental considerations or somewhat hopes. She wanted to do her best, probably.

It's also a shot in the buttock, with the effect spreading over deep into the bone tissue.

Two days following the injection, the treated had to drag his leg because of feeling a sharp pain as if your join was finely smashed.

The shot of sulfur broke my will.

Dragging my leg, I came to the dining room to eat the lard from the delivery, but when the chmo dispenser patient handed me the cellophane packet, the smell inside it was like that in my school briefcase in the sixth grade, when I forgot to eat the ham sandwich, and it spent there all winter vacations. I had to throw the rotten lard away...

My relations with the fellow patients were even and correct, as anywhere else, I still remained an unproclaimed renegade.

Naturally, those derailed completely, submerged out of reach into the vagaries of their worlds, did not notice me, while shut-ins capable of thinking, as far as possible, showed certain respect caused by the sympathy and pity for my suffering the insulin injections.

Only one young guy, Podrez, for some time was fawning over me without any reason, but then in the queue to the dining room, he hit me in the stomach, I couldn't guess why.

Two minutes later, Beltyukov, in the same queue, found some fault with Podrez, pinioned him and kept immobilized.

He did not say me anything, not even with his eyes, but there was no need for hinting that he had fixed Podrez for me to jab the guy into any spot at my discretion.

But I did not hit, I felt sorry for the mentally ill, notwithstanding my hurt stomach.

A far more terrible blow for me was the loss of the book in English.

On the white desk in our wardroom, there remained only the copybook with the already finished translation and the pen stuck in between its pages.

I was upset unbearably because the book was borrowed from Zhomnir, who had borrowed it from another teacher at the Department of English – the ever-smiling Nona.

But when I, in that terrified state, turned to the head doctor, she, with the indefinite indifference, responded that the book would not go anywhere.

And she was right.

Three days later it was returned to me by a patient who collected it from a half-nuts kidnapper from Wardroom 7, he failed to keep it concealed any longer.

(...I understand the thief's sentiment.

At those times they did not know in the Soviet Union how to produce such glossy paperbacks for books, and all of a sudden—wow!—a bright close-up of a female face against the background of the fifth unit.

Who would resist?..)

He did not spoil it in any way, and only the backside of the cover bore light touches of a pencil he tenderly poured out his adoration with, slightly reminiscent of a sketch of the cerebral cortex, or whimsy curls of whirling smoke.

It even might have been some formulas of the unknown scientific language from beyond the future; only I had already given up moving down that road...

The shut-ins were all so very different.

At first sight of some of them, you could immediately see they had a yo-yo stream of consciousness if any at all, but with some other, you'd hardly say he's nuts.

In general, there were all kinds of sorts, among them quite neighborly types, like that brunette fat man.

However, one day, lying on the couch in the hall, he confessed to me his murder of someone else and, usually so very cheerful, he grew at once all gloomy.

Maybe it was a lie because the murderers were kept at the second unit whose paramedics were some complete brute beasts...

Yes, there happened incurable liars around.

One of them, with a fat tattoo of "Kolya" on his hand, without any invitation started convincing me that his name was Peter, and after that, he took an obvious offense at me although I had not expressed any doubts.

As for Tsyba, he amazed me with his erudition because he enumerated the unsuccessful suicide attempts of Hemingway until he found out a pistol was the most steadfast means for the purpose. And before that, I listed him among the half-nuts...

There was an elderly, seemingly normal, man, whose queerness you could guess only from his sentimentality, he got devastatingly hurt hearing that we all lived in a madhouse.

Always. For life. The madhouse through and through, both indoors and outside, no difference.

"Do not say so, at least here it's a mental hospital."

Such a delicate soul...

Or, say, that mujik whom I for a long period considered dumb.

On the contrary, he was very inquisitive, it's just that he prepared his questions all too carefully.

It took him a month before he approached me and, eye to eye, asked about the sorest spot, "And your wife, was she a chaste virgin?"

Firstly, no dumb have such words in their lexicon, and secondly, I hadn't checked her ears, quoting Rabentus.

And the dumb, on hearing that, began to cry. He fell silent again, and the tears were dripping.

A rather gloomy madhouse on the whole...

However crazy, the shut-ins knew everything, and four days beforehand they warned me, that on Friday I would be called to the commission, where they decide to set me free or go on with treatment.

The commission consisted of the head physician of the psychiatric hospital, the head doctor of the fifth unit and the on-duty nurse.

Afraid of saying something wrong, I was amenably falling over myself to agree with anyone of them in anything they said, "Yes, yes, of course, yes!"

The head doctor said they had prepared me for discharge, but I would only be released if some of my relatives come to pick me off.

How afraid I was that no one would come on Saturday! After all, there had been such a Saturday when I waited in vain.

The whole evening after the commission I had to restrain myself so as not to burst into tears. Sobs literally clenched my throat – I would not stand another week of injections...

My parents came together, and from the landing by the door, we were summoned to the office of the head doctor who said that my treatment should be continued with iminazine pills.

My mother thanked her very much, and my father took out the money from his jacket pocket and handed it to my mother. She came up to the head doctor and put the money into the pocket of her white doctor's smock, but the head doctor did not even notice it.

(...it turned out later, the amount was forty rubles – the combined daily earnings of a team of six bricklayers.

That day there were three discharges, so the head doctor earned my monthly payment in one morning.

As they say in Konotop, it depends on what you've been trained for...)

On the bus from Romny to Konotop, my mother cautiously informed me that my things had been moved from the apartment rented under the great birch tree, back to 13 Decemberists.

Though saddened by that news, I had not strength to resist...

At first, our team met me guardedly as a person returning from Romny.

However, at the construction site, such attitude wears out quickly enough, if by the end of a working day you neither surprised anyone with your shovel over their head nor took a dive from the fifth floor then you're like everyone else.

True, Lyda noticed that I leaned against the pallet with bricks and dozed off in the sun, while the crane was fetching the mortar up, which previously never happened to me.

And Gregory commented to Grinya that I was not the same, and pointed at the spanner I laid over the niche for the electric meters on the landing: one edge five centimeters higher than the other.

Grinya answered that they would lap it up all the same because the niche was to be screened behind the frame around the box for the meters.

So I had to put the spanner to rights during the midday break, but before Romny I wouldn't have allowed me to do so a sloppy job.

And, in general, I became more compliant. The only thing that the treatment couldn't straighten out, was my ill will at falling on all four when laying from the bridging slabs the load-wall on which they rested.

Everyone did it on their all four, it's more convenient that way, and safer too. Yet, I still just squatted when laying the brick course at levels lower my feet, in disregard of protests by the weight center.

Vitta also at times refrained from kneeling.

(...sometimes, it's an up-hill job to get rid of the young pioneer inside you.

"Better to dive from the fourth-floor height than lay the wall standing on your knees!"..)

When I went to Nezhin for a weekend, I took pains to keep my eyes a little squinted, otherwise, people felt creepy at my sight because my lower eyelids drooped as if I'd been forced to watch a documentary series about the death camps, gas chambers, and grim crematoria.

I recollected the long article about Clockwork Orange in the monthly Moscow read in the stoker-house of the construction battalion, about how they applied the same technique to him...

Noticing a double chin that started to form beneath my jaw, I threw the glass container with iminazine pills (the gift from the fifth unit head doctor) into the drain pit in the garden of 13 Decemberists.

The next day my mother spotted it there and threatened that she would report to psychiatrist Tarasenko my violation of directions from Romny.

"Mom, how can't you see it? Their pills are just a means to make me crazy."

I did not want to lose my leanness, which I always pride myself in, notwithstanding its slight stoop...

Everything became as it was before, or nearly so.

Construction site in Konotop; weekend in Nezhin.

The eyelids returned to their normal place, and there remained no need for straining the eye muscles.

The translations. The poems...

Those poems started to pop up after the start of my career as a construction worker at SMP-615.

They were not poems at first, but pieces of jumbled phrases. Some seemed attractive with the alternating play of sounds within them, others because of inherent ambiguity, or rather being double-barreled so that they could be interpreted in different ways.

While busy with the production process, I, invisibly for my fellow-bricklayers, turned and twirled those pieces in my mind, slit-split them then re-assembled anew, then threw them out of my head to dogs, to devils, to scrap fucks, but the most persistent ones came back after the bum's rush, or French walk, or flying a kite, and set impertinently in as if they never ever were away.

Then there remained the last remedy – to stick them with a pen down to a piece of paper and forget.

(...in six years there gathered about 30 pieces of those unsolicited stubborn rascals in two languages, because each one was coming the way it fancied.

Among them, there happened graphical sketches like that one copied from the landscape around a construction site: "the apple of sky skewered with the blade of sunbeam..."; or those marked by their onomatopoeic stickiness: "Carkalomna barcarole..."; or philosophical pieces like that about God devoured the day before; and simply rhythmic chants for marching: "what do we laugh at?."...)

One of the first pieces I showed Eera, and she cocked up at once – who was that Madonna in a padded workman jacket?

As if I could know, just one of those queuing in the working canteen at the midday break.

As for "To the Tune of V. Kosma" she did not ask anything, it was about her, undoubtedly and clear. Later, she said that they told her it was a good poem, and I stopped showing her any of them.

Probably, I was jealous of the unidentified someone, to whom she gave it for evaluation.

When I read to my brother Sasha "The Scythian Interview", his reaction was instantaneous, "You have to be ratted on!"

(...if your poetry piece turns folk's train of thoughts in the KGB direction, it contains a worthy idea...)

Ivan, a carpenter from SMP-615, somehow liked the line about a cabbage leaf on the knife blade's edge. After six months, he asked to recite to him about that cabbage once again; I couldn't imagine what he found about it at all.

At times, when at the end of a midday break there were still five minutes before to leave the trailer and go on with laying the walls, the women of our team asked to read something new, and the recital would be concluded with Grinya's yell: "Sehryoga! They do not shoe horses with fire, there are horseshoes for that! What a gelding ungroomed you are!"

He was brought up and educated in the village of Krasnoye on the Baturin highway and should know such things better.

When the number of poems exceeded a score, my attitude to them changed qualitatively. Why should they lay around? Ain't it a pity?

And I started to send them to the editorial offices of diverse monthlies and publishing houses, just like Martin Eden from the same-named novel by Jack London.

And they kept returning back to me, exactly as his ones to him, with typewritten responses, which looked like one and the same carbon-copied answer.

They informed that the material received from me was inconsistent with the thematic direction of their publication, besides, their editorial portfolio was filled for three years ahead; but not a single word about the verses themselves.

Thus, Grinya's review remained unsurpassed: "Gelding ungroomed!"

However, the literary collaborator at one of the journals shared, that a similar style was the vogue in the 1930s.

Probably, he aimed to point out the deprecated nature of the stuff, but it rather made me happy – they recognized poems as having somewhat style!

(...and what a style it was!

In the 1930s the Union of Writers had not been gelded yet with political purges and spy-hunting repressions.

In those days people still wrote poetry and not conjuncture-prone materials for the upcoming Party Congresses...)

It gradually began to dawn on me that the eggheads, whose trough was a literary collaboration, had no more interest in all those poetic "beam blades in the sky" than in prosaic skewers in their personal ass.

The final eye-opener became the response from the monthly Moscow to "Tired Alla".

A fleeting glance made it evident that the literary collaborator approached the poem he perused in the most serious and thoughtful way. The meaning of a certain word in one of the lines was not quite clear to him, so he took pains to check the term with a dictionary.

He forgot to erase the working notes of his assiduous pencil in my verse. The word "craving" remained underlined and its interpretation—"lust"—was added nearby.

I did not know which dictionary he used to found it out, but the result offended me.

The ultimate blow served the name of the reviewer who signed the response – Pushkin!

A mental picture of Pushkin looking up "craving" in a dictionary made me draw the line under my fucking the editors' brains with my f..er..formidable simplicity.

I realized at last, that I was not a Martin Eden and it was anything but America around...

The realization of my non-American origin and whereabouts cut postal expenses for envelopes and registered letters.

Though sending such a letter was about fifty kopecks, the equivalent of two "Belomor-Canal" cigarette packs, because of the cost of living in the Soviet Union was quite reasonable, and treatment of useless illusions, practically, free of charge.

In summer, you came to Konotop again, yet, naturally, without any carriage.

Our team was working at the 50-apartment block near the Under-Overpass, and one of the riggers, Katerina it was, shouted from the ground that I had visitors.

I went downstairs and to the sidewalk outside the gate.

You stood next to Eera who was wearing a red sarafan with white Mongolian patterns. I don't remember what you had on, but I do remember how lovely you were smiling.

I gently lowered my plastic helmet onto your straight fair hair, and its visor glided down right to your nose but could not put out your happy smile.

I remember that smile from under my helmet.

In a couple of minutes, you both went on down the sidewalk and I watched, and the riggers, Katerina and Vera Sharapova, they also watched from behind the gate, suddenly so silent and pensive, because such beauty was going away – a woman in red, hand in hand with a child of fair straight hair.

You had just turned three years old, and I decided that the best gift for you would be a familiar face among the strangers at 13 Decemberists.

I went to Nezhin and, despite my tongue-tied speaking manner, did manage to convince Tonya to let her son go with me to your birthday in Konotop, provided that my father-in-law would arrive the following day and take him back.

Tonya was a really brave woman, she was not afraid of my reputation, drenched beyond any hope for restoration after Romny.

The local train was overcrowded and for about an hour we had to stand in the aisle till the station of Bakhmach.

But how happy you and Igor were when I brought him to 13 Decemberists! A fountain of joyful squeals!.

The following week my vacation began and four of us—you, Eera, I and Lenochka—went to the Seim with a permit to the recreation camp of the RepBase that my parents took there for us.

It was a wide grounds whose low plank fence enclosed a few large pines and several wooden cabins with four beds in each and windows on all the sides, like a veranda.

When we first went to the river beach, everyone there got just stupefied, they never saw a Greek goddess go, moreover with such snow-white skin as Eera's.

Another day the four of us went hunting mushrooms in the forest plantation nearby the village of Khutor Taransky.

Halfway there, we met a pair of horses, but I worried only about Eera, she always was afraid of those animals.

The forest planting was of young pines standing in parallel rows. Long spider webs stretching across the passages between the rows of trees made the plantation almost impassable, but there were suillus under the pine needles covering the ground.

We were combing through the corridors walled with the pine trunks, forth and back.

You grew thirsty and I asked Lenochka to take you to the camp—the path was wide and it was no more than just three hundred meters—because I wanted Eera all too madly.

For a long time you did not want to go with your sister, yet finally went along, but a moment later your crying rang out at the end of the pine corridor, and Lenochka explained that you did not listen to her at all, although there were no horses anymore.

In the evening, there was heavy rain and thunderstorm, but you were not afraid and only laughed because I was laying on my bed and you were stomping on my stomach.

Someone's joy might hurt someone else – at your three years you were a weighty kid, but Eera cried out to be patient with my own child.

I endured a little more and then I hardly managed to persuade you that it was enough already.

It was a good summer...

On the day of your departure, you once again had a clash with the clothesline stretched from the wicket to the porch, and it certainly was not the right place for it. You took a mop and started to knock it on the half-dried laundry hanging from the rope.

My mother yelled at you and darkened in her face, but you already were too big to lose your footing, and only the mop was taken from your hands.

We had to walk to the streetcar terminal, but Lenochka volunteered to take you there on the trunk of her bicycle. Eera agreed though I was against the idea.

My misgivings increased when I noticed the glances exchanged between my mother and Lenochka.

The most frightening about it was that they did not look at each other, but into the ground at each other's feet. And there followed a mute dialogue between their averted eyes:

"Sure?"

"Yes, do it!"

I do not invent, neither distort reality with fantasies, and it was proved by what followed after the unspoken dialogue that did take place and was heard by me with I don't know what.

You left, sitting on the trunk behind Lenochka.

My mother and Eera for a whole minute were ping-ponging empty clues, before Eera and I went out into the street. With the bags in my hands, I hurried along leaving Eera behind.

When there remained some two hundred meters to the street corner, I knew that I was right in being rash because I heard your pitched screaming.

You stood by the fence and screamed. Lenochka, holding her bicycle, tried to persuade you not to cry, but you did not listen to her and screamed on and on.

The rusty iron pipe stuck up from under the ground between you two. The only iron pipe alongside all the fences in the half-kilometer stretch between 13 Decemberists and Streetcar 3 terminal.

Everything fell into place, I got it all. Very gently, so as not to show that I was aware, I asked Lenochka to go home; no need to see us off any farther.

Then Eera came up too and started to comfort you, but you cried while going on to the terminal because of such a big bump on your forehead.

We drove on in the streetcar in silence, Eera was blankly looking out the window.

You sullenly sat in her lap, and I in the opposite seat, feeling crushed.

How to live in a world where a grandmother blesses her granddaughter to kill another granddaughter of hers – this beautiful kid with 5-kopeck coin pressed by her mother to her forehead for the bump to dissolve?

Eera was silent on the train too, and I never tried to share what shouldn't be shared...

(...now Lenochka has two children, beautiful daughters.

You and she are strangers to each other, and no one of you remembers anything of all that, especially that pipe.

People are blessed with the gift of forgetting bad things.

My mother, eventually, became a witness of Jehovah and had collected piles of glossy eye-candy booklets for the saved or those who want to be saved.

And it's only I am to blame for all that happened, but, upon my word of honor, in that recreation camp I wouldn't stand Lenochka on my stomach – she was already nine years old...)

When I returned to our team after the vacation, the pavement before the 50-apartment block was cut with a transverse trench for the tie-in to the main communications under the road on Peace Avenue.

However, carpenters of SMP-615 assembled a boarding bridge over the trench, with beam railings for the convenience of the pedestrians.

I was at the trench bottom working with the shovel when I saw Beltyukov on that bridge. He strolled there dressed in a dapper colonial style.

I did not want to attract his attention, but he recognized me from up there, despite my spetzovka and helmet, stopped on the bridge to greet me and introduced to his mother, a lady in an aggressive neckline.

Then they went on.

He was nervous and she guarded him so closely that I understood the roots of his bitter resentment against matriarchy when under the influence of insulin.

I also thought that our meeting in Romny was not his final stay in a mental hospital, and they wouldn't let him run around loose for long, because he was wandering up there, defenseless, and that mommy of his would surely bring forth another relapse.

Learn from me, sonny, down here in the trench, in my helmet, no paramedic busters would ever reach me.

As for my stay in the madhouse, I went there as a volunteer and got fed up to the ears, while being made wiser through my busted ass...

Accepting another of my translations, Zhomnir, in return, warmed me up with a thick book in hardbacks. It was a monograph about schizophrenia which he bought when his daughter had problems with it before she got married.

Monograph means a collection of articles by different authors concerning one and the same subject.

I thoroughly studied the friendly shared volume; after all, that was not boiled sausage with added charms to win my love.

(...in their works, the authors consider different aspects of the mutual theme from diverse standpoints, according to their respective specializations.

One writer presents the comparison of the biochemical blood composition in some notorious schizophrenics at the peak of their spiritual activity to the periods of relative calm in the same persons.

Unfortunately, there was not detected any exacerbation in the level of amino acids in leukocytes.

Another contributor scrupulously measures anything which turns up to their measuring devices, with the equally disappointing, indefinite, results.

The third one just takes a seat next to the bed with a fixed up patient and, while the aberrating fictionalist drives him a fool, he writes down some tremendously fabulous stuff.

Like, as he was going by trolleybus 47 being careful not to touch anyone and all the same there suddenly was a desert all around him and just a worn-out rag on his loins, and he was in a pack of similarly skinny, naked, sunburned guys like him when a band of horsemen galloped from behind a sandy hillock and started to massacre the unarmed fugitives sticking them with spears...

Yet, on the whole, it is a useful monograph because the authors, despite the fact of their being representatives of the decaying West, had the courage of real scientists to honestly put their hands up and acknowledge, "Alas! I do not fucking know what the fuck is this fucking schizophrenia about!"

"Make sure to approach her tenderly,

Look deeply into her eyes,

You'll find the treasure you have never seen!.."

Presently, notwithstanding the progress in the research methodology, all that the science is in possession of comprises only that scientific term of "schizophrenia", everything else is wrapped in the dense mist of uncertainty.

The main trump ace, touchstone, and litmus test, provided by the science, are "the voices" which you meet in any textbook on the psychiatry.

If you hear some voices and there is not a living soul around, then you are a schizophrenic.

But if them those voices say, "Save France!" then you're the hero Saint – Joan of Arc.

The only weak point in the monograph was the absence of a theology expert.

Suffice it to recall St. Inez, whose body in a jiffy got covered with long fur, so that the rapists were stripped of any chance of breaking her hirsute chastity...

They are enjoying cakes and ale in their picnic in the bed of roses, the specialists in the trade whose luminaries can't see the misty core of what they are, actually, about.

To concoct a diagnosis is easier than making a fig.

Pour half a glass raw schizophrenia, spice it with a pinch of double-barreled adjectives, shake the ingredients...Enjoy! "Fur-coat form of schizophrenia", the favorite drink of St. Inez!

Tamara at the fourth kilometer in the Chernigov outskirts was not in the know of all of my exploits.

For the burned down plantation of cannabis, I could be easily stamped with "autodafic form of schizophrenia aggravated with Torquemada complex" to commemorate that absolutely normal inquisitor who sent packs of heretics to the stake.

For the term itself, they use (as for the most part of terms in the scientific nomenclature) the words from old Greek which, when putting ancient roots together, mean "cracked mind".

"The mind cracked in the form of a fur coat."

So, who of us is schizophrenic after all?!.

Do they think that if they don the white smocks, and trumpet a trump from the terminology they don't know a damn thing in, I will trust them more than I trusted the Ichnya sorcerer in his khaki shirt and mumbo jumbo about the moon "quarters"?

Oh, my dear aesculapius-kindergarten kids!

Mind you, I am from Konotop.

My classmate Volodya Sherudillo could casually give out:

"I cannot ignore the data of pseudo-quasi-illusions to avoid the ultimate diffusion of my transcommunicability skills."

After the eighth grade, he went to "the seminary", aka GPTU-4, to become a turner, otherwise, by now he would be Head of the Academy of Sciences, and you would be sitting in the ante-room of his office, waiting in nervous jitter if he would listen to you, the petty CEC khannoriks.

In short, while no one knows where schizophrenia comes from and where goes to, and how much is her fee for a visit, you could just as well go and f-f..er..fumble yourself against something else.

That is to say, get along, sweethearts, keep going...)

On the weekends in Nezhin, the three of us took walks to the kindergarten in the narrow streets of the neighborhood.

It did not work on Saturdays and the entire playgrounds—all those stalls and slides—were at your disposal.

The swing on iron bars when set into motion gave out brief screams, shrill and heartbreaking.

Eera stood in the distance.

And then you began running over the yellow leaves upon the ground from me to her and back, but even that was not bringing us closer.

Then we returned along the same empty streets without sidewalks.

I held your hand and did not take my eyes off the smooth play of round hips under the light dress of Eera walking ahead of us.

It was so too clear to me that it's our last autumn together, no one told me that, but all the same, I knew it...

Tonya got an apartment for her family somewhere on Shevchenko Street.

Gaina Mikhailovna was planning to rent the freed bedroom to one of the military pilots from the Airfield-Area, who were howling in the sky with their training flights each Tuesday and Friday.

I was not present in any plans, and even could not be there because of Lenochka who I refused to leave in Konotop without a dad either.

The impetuous spats between Eera and me abated in their fury, yet grew more frequent, which changes told me of imminent end closing in, creepily, bringing the final moment of my becoming a chunk cut off completely, clearly.

(...probably, Dostoyevsky had the like feeling when they drove him to the scaffold on a cart and, by the familiar streets, he was calculating how much time remained to execution.

The difference was only that I did not know how many words remained to hear from Eera before she'd say:

"Get lost to that Konotop of yours! And never show up in Nezhin!"

Yet I knew that I would hear them...)

When Eera finally pronounced the words, they, along with the pain, strangely, brought a flick of relief – there remained nothing to be afraid of anymore. It was finished.

I went to Konotop and began to live a half-life.

I worked with our team, read, wrote, talked, but half of me disappeared somewhere, together with the aim for which I was doing all that before I got cut off.

The dullness of half-life was somewhat alleviated by a business trip to Kiev.

There, I was alone from SMP-615, and I did not know where the rest of the workers came from to the reconstruction of a dairy factory.

We lived in a passenger car driven into a dead-end on the factory grounds. They gave us bed linen yellow with age and fairly fretted, but gently soft because of that. I occupied the upper bunk in the compartment to skip folding up the mattress in the morning.

Everywhere in Kiev there sounded one and the same song:

"The leaves of yellow are in a flurry o'er the city..."

And I remembered the leaves on the playgrounds in the desolate kindergarten...

On weekends, I visited the library of Kiev University, in the building on the left side from the monument to Taras Shevchenko.

People were allowed there without any diploma, leaving their passports in the entrance lobby.

In the huge and pretty quiet reading room with long tables but separate chairs for readers and separate lamps as well. Under the green shade of one of them, I read John Stuart Mill's treatise "On Freedom" in the original. That's what real philosophy is!

He instructed me that there are just two kinds of people:

1) law-abiding loyal subjects;

2) experimentalists.

As for all the race, class, confession and other differences, they only serve a means of setting people against each other...

Then I found the House of Organ Music, it surely used to be a Catholic church before, on Red Army Street, beneath the Republican Stadium.

I was a little late for the concert and they had already locked the entrance, so I began to knock from outside.

The door opened and I cried as on the bus to Romny, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!"

"Very well. But could you be quieter? The concert is on."

The hall there began right next to the entrance, without any vestibule.

"Excuse me."

But he continued to murmur on in discontent.

"Wanna me apologize once more?"

And he shut up, because under the intelligentsia style cloak that I doffed, there was a blue corduroy jacket of workmen and peasants and, when I took off my secret agent hat, a strand of hair sprang like a spring stuck up from my head.

There was no way to suppress it, even after the shower the stubborn strand, when it got dry, cocked up again.

(...about thirty years later, such explosion of hair became an everyday fashion.

That's how deeply I was shocked by the separation from Eera...)

In the first part, they played some modern atonal symphony – a tormenting screech of shredded notes and shards of tunes.

But in the second, the organ sounded the fugues of Bach...

The miracle happened in January.

I arrived in Nezhin to visit Zhomnir, and on a bus starting from the station I saw Ivan Alexeyevich. He asked me how came that I had not been seen for so long.

Keeping back a sob in my throat, I replied that Eera forbade me to show up.

"Forget it! Come on, let's go!"

I still got off the bus on Shevchenko Street, and later phoned from the Zhomnirs.

Eera also said, yes, come.

The remaining seven bus stops to Red Partisans I drove outwardly calm but breasting the storm-churned waves of the inside tempest...

Lots of changes occurred in the months of my absence.

Eera, together with you, moved to the former bedroom of Tonya's family. Her parents went over into the narrower bedroom.

The living-room was left as it was: "The Unknown Beauty" with the same contempt looked from the hutch, and the rich merchant's daughter crookedly trotted from the major pinching his mustache.

But in your bedroom there stood a new dressing table with a crowd of un-figure-outable but so necessary cosmetic tubes and vials.

A wide yellow ring of gold lay close by the mirror.

To my cautious inquiries, Eera said that the pier was bought by her father, and her mother presented her with the ring.

And we began to live on further...

The construction site.

Nezhin.

The construction site.

Nezhin.

Eera worked as a caretaker in the kindergarten two hundred meters down Red Partisans Street.

Her duties included keeping records of the health state of the kids in her group. Atop the dressing table, there lay a copybook with notes in her handwriting slanted to the left, about how the kids were each day of the week.

I only once opened that copybook, and ever after I tried to not even look at it, so as not to die of jealousy.

It became clear to me that it was no use anymore to tread along the path of righteousness, and no need to try escaping the inevitable because it had already happened.

(...certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all, just leave them alone and, if heedlessly started, they'd better be dropped and not thought down the road to their inevitable conclusions...)

I felt ashamed of asking Eera how she lived these months, and what she was doing in between my weekend visits, but when I saw in that copybook that on Thursday only half of Eera's group came to attend though having a cold I knew that on Wednesday she had a date.

I was dying of jealousy but kept silent. Life became kinda racing through a maze full of warnings – don't take that turn, don't look that side, don't think that thought not to wake the anguish up...

Then Eera introduced the new order of putting you to sleep next to her on the double bed, and I was moved out to the folding bed-armchair.

Sometimes she came to me in the dark, sometimes not, and then I did not sleep for long over the midnight, seized with the pangs of bitter jealousy...

Only once I was happy about not having sex with her. It happened after a ride on an overcrowded bus with ice-glazed windows from the station to Red Partisans.

Somewhere halfway up I suddenly felt anus penetration. I never experienced an enema, nor probe insertion in my life, so the feeling was unfamiliar and inexplicable amid the crowd of passengers in their coats and sheepskins. After the main square, the crowd drastically thinned but I still felt as if ass-raped amidst a bus-load of straphangers.

It is for that reason that I did not insist on having sex that night, because I was afraid that Eera would later have it with the fucker who had fucked me on the bus.

Although such positioning of the cause and effect might, after all, be quite contrary to the actual flow of events, I dreaded to think of such a probability and kicked away the slightest contemplations on the point...

End February, there was a working day on Saturday, aka "black Saturday". Each year had six Saturdays of that color and not only in SMP-615.

However, I firmly refused to participate and after work on Friday went to Nezhin.

I had a solitary dinner in the kitchen because Eera told you not to disturb your daddy when he's eating, and took you away to the living room.

Then I went over to the bedroom, so as not to disturb everyone watching TV in the living room. Besides, there was no place to sit down, because your aunt Vitta had come from Chernigov to stay with the parents for her vacation.

You also came to the bedroom and we turned a bit noisy, and Eera came in to make out the beds for you and me.

She turned off the light, so that you would fall asleep sooner, and returned to the TV box because there was a replay of the New Year issue of "Kinopanorama".

I stayed sitting in the dark in front of the new dressing table...

I did not make any plans and everything went somehow by itself...

After the sound of your breathing prompted that you were fast asleep, I waited another five minutes, and then took you over to the folding bed-armchair. Then I undressed and lay down on the matrimonial double.

I lay for a long time with my hands under my head. The traffic along Red Partisans Street almost died out, but the noise of the rare cars became even more unbearable and so the glare of their headlights creeping over the window curtains.

Poor Tonya. How could they possibly live here?.

Then I began to think about Eera and me: how could we come to live like this?

Ladies first, yet for the simplicity's sake it's much easier to start with me thanks to my straightforward accountability as there left nothing in me but a mixture of unsatiable hanker and jealousy, bitter and sharp. All other feelings got successfully quenched to avoid distressful pangs, but these two turned out stronger than me.

Now, what about her?

At the institute, she was lucky to pull such a winning trump from the pack. All the girlfriends pined with envy. Then the girlfriends went away to work off their diplomas where appointed, and the trump's reputation got drenched.

Here enters mummy with the gold ring: you're so young, a good man still will come around the corner, better if he were a military pilot, whose salaries far above the miserable 120 rubles.

So, what in the end?

We just have what we have...that Soviet Pushkin, the sycophant of a literary collaborator, had called it lust...stupid nerd...lust comes when there is no more craving...

And again there rose a howling of a car engine coming from afar, nearer and nearer, from the Airfield-Area.

The creeping light crawls up over the curtains, arching its back forward, yes, we've found the way of smoothing the pesky wrinkle in the final phase of natural flow and slide around the sharp interruption of the ebullient passionate raptures for the sake of birth control just like Arthur Clark's astronauts jumping from one spaceship's lock to another's without any spacesuits through the open space with a side bonus of using the seed for lotions of more beneficial effect for the skin than that of mummia, ginseng, and even fabulous ojb grass because the inquisitive digressions of those loving to love their beloved lovingly will beat any Kama Sutra, I always knew that without reading a single line from it but is it worthwhile?.

Here's another...they are just wrenching your soul out when passing by...

Poor Tonya, how could they live here?.

Then through the door to the living room, there came the voices wishing goodnight each other.

Eera entered the bedroom. In the light of the streetlamp behind the window tulle curtain, she picked the needed vial up from the bevy by the dressing table mirror and went out again.

Tension filled me up.

It took a long time before she returned and closed the door, then she bent over you on the bed-armchair to check if I was asleep.

You slept like an innocent baby and did not wake up.

Eera lay by my side under the blanket, felt with her hand my shoulder, abruptly recoiled, and cried out, "You?! Get out of here!"

"Come on, quiet..."

"Dad!"

SHE CALLED FOR HELP TO GET PROTECTED FROM ME

I never touch her, just lay idly resting my jaw in my hand, like a beach-goer estimating how many bathers were there in the water.

Oddly, I became a complete outsider, a listless, idle, on-looker because everything somehow turned all the same to me.

With a detached calmness, I pronounced, "I'm fed up with you."

Said I that? No! Not true! Not fed up! It's not me!

And yet it was I who uttered the words, which were the part of the ritual.

What ritual?! It made no difference because I did not care anymore.

With my head still leaning against my hand, I held out the other and slapped it on the soft cheek.

I?! Cuffed her?!

Of course, not. It was not a slap, it was a part of the ritual.

She became speechless from astonishment, but it was too late. I dropped back upon the pillow and pulled the blanket to my chin.

The switch clicked, in the raw light from the ceiling, her parents and sister crowded in the doorway.

She jumped out of the bed and joined the flock.

Vitta started to emit the traditional screams of a family squabble.

Ivan Alexeyevich in his pajamas stood with his head down.

I saw how difficult it was for him to make the decision. What if I was stark naked? Before his princedom harem? But there was nothing I could do to help him. My role was that of an on-looker.

Finally, he made a decisive step, even two, grabbed my hand sticking from under the blanket, and pulled me out, onto the rug on the floor. The blanket remained on the bed.

I stayed stretched out down there while my mother-in-law was reading Prayers at the Departure of the Soul to declare how hugely shameless I was to lay prostrate before the ladies in such an undressed state.

Underpants and a tank-top may be decent sportswear for jogging in the morning, but not in the presence of your mother-in-law.

I silently got up and, quite unexpectedly even for myself, made a deep bow to shake off the non-existent dust from the hair below my knees. A ritual makes us observe its canon even if we have no idea what ritual it is.

"We shall renounce the old world of tyrants,

We shall shake off its ashes from out feet!.."

I dressed and went out into the hallway. The mother-in-law followed. To make sure I would not foray into the refrigerator?

She was replaced by Eera, alerted, keeping mum. I gave her one ruble and asked to pass it to Vitta, who lent me the sum a week earlier.

She nodded.

I took a piece of paper out of my briefcase and wrote a note to Vitta with gratitude for the ruble.

Even the grave fails to correct a graphomaniac...

The night was quiet and windless.

I spent it standing at the nearest bus stop, the way I was standing in front of a ticket office at the Odessa airport locked for the midday break. Only now there were no roses in my hand.

"The Sun was never any match for you,

Brother Rain,

That is true from any point of view,

Brother Rain.

Twining in the dates too rare,

Stuck in love and black despair,

Shedding diamond tears in vain,

Tears of ecstasy and pain

Go your way and get away, Brother Rain..."

It was a quiet, indifferent, midwinter, night.

In all that night three cars passed the bus stop, one of them a Volga.

I did not care. Numbness of the senses.

In the one-story building opposite, the light went on and, soon after, off, twice; should be an elderly person going to the toilet and back.

In the gray dark twilight, the first bus appeared from the Airfield-Area and drove me to the station...

At half-past seven, I got off the local train in Konotop.

I do not know where I spent the following hour because when I came to the 50-apartment block the black Saturday was in full swing.

The bulldozer roared and, wrapped in the blue mist of smoke from its exhaust pipe, was burying itself in the hill of earth it moved in the middle of the would-be yard.

Grinya and Lyda had already changed into their spetzovkas and padded jackets.

"You did not go to Nezhin?" Lyda asked.

"No."

I took a sheet of paper from my briefcase with the report to the trade-union committee about spending the 3 rubles for a visit to a patient in the hospital.

(...my next public position was visiting SMP-615 employees when they got to the hospital, and comfort them with a delivery from the trade-union committee which allocated 3 rubles for the purpose.

The visits to the ill colleagues I did solo, but the report on spending the amount of 3 rubles should have had three signatures, because of so huge a sum of money...)

I put the paper on the side of a concrete pipe, 1.5 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters long, and they signed it without reading.

"Now?" asked Grinya, "Are you changing or what?"

I was always opposing black Saturdays but what else had I to do?

I changed into the work clothes and went with my shovel to clean the upshot truck-dump with the mortar stuck to its insides, replacing Vera Sharapova.

She had since long noticed that it was the way I drove off my jealousy fits...

At night, back to 13 Decemberists, I was lying prostrate in the unfolded bed-armchair amidst the darkness in the living room.

Laying all the time on your back is tiring. I wanted to change position and turn over, but I did not allow myself to stir because I needed to become inconspicuous, but movements might betray your location.

When motionless, I became part of the bottom of a boundless ocean in the immensely empty world.

To remain part of the bottom you should be smoothly streamlined and make no rips, so that nothing would cling to you but just keep floating by and off, along its way.

But what a vast emptiness it was!

(...there is a no direr curse than the old folk curse "be it empty to you!"

The purpose of any loss is to make you feel empty, deprived of something, to make you feel as if drained of something.

Love comes as a defensive reaction to the endless void turns of the life's mill-wheel coming back to where it starts rotating as empty as it returns.

Love comes to ward off despair, when you're empty of any idea what's the use of the vain accidental gift – your life – when you find no means to kill the eternity measured out to you. When you feel at loose ends, having nothing to live for but for aimless living on.

Love comes to cancel empty questions, to present your life with some meaning – to serve! – to give it the point – to serve!

Love is self-denying slavery and zealous service for the object of love – a two-legged mammal, or a collection of stamps, or...doesn't matter...it depends on how lucky you were...

But then, like a bolt from the blue, the shackles fall off, you are said: get out! Enjoy your freedom!

And you find yourself in the void where there is no purpose, no sense, where you have just to live – like a crystal, like a blade of grass, like a rain-worm.

We are not slaves, slaves are not we!

No! I want back! To where love was...it would save from the horror of facing the emptiness, it would give meaning to the senseless repetitive fuss.

Love will be the one to make decisions. I will obediently execute the orders!.

Love is the sand where to bury the frightened ostrich head...

Damn you, love!

How empty it feels without you!..)

Surviving in the vapid void is not an easy problem.

Of course, there is always a choice. Why survive if you can stop the torment at any moment? However, never in my life had I even played with the thought of suicide, I was not programmed that way.

Well, and since there was no choice, I had to solve the problem.

The solution is one and only – systematicy. Nothing else can serve to overcome emptiness.

Whether you're systematically jamming vodka, or systematically jogging in the park does not matter much as long as you keep adhering to a certain cycle...

Luckily, I already had some investments that provided certain means for spanning the void.

The five-day workweek, that's for one.

My participation in SMP-615 public life – two.

And also, visits to Nezhin for intellectual communication with Zhomnir, once in two or three months.

Who would ask for more?

Any system, so that it worked, would need some sort of a carrot as a reward for spinning the wheel, for successfully concluding its vicious circle and stimulation for going into the next, exactly same, rotation.

On Thursdays, I visited the bathhouse with two tours into the steam room.

Bars of soap and sauna whisker, aka a bunches of dried birch twigs for self-whipping amidst the burning hot steam, were sold in the bathhouse ticket office on the first floor.

Leaving the bathhouse, I left those instruments of pleasure on the low tables with gray marble tops in the common washing hall on the second floor, taking home only the changed underwear for the subsequent laundry.

On my way from the bathhouse to the place of residence, I consumed two bottles of Zhigulevskoye beer and bought an issue of _Morning Star_ from the news stall on Peace Square, for reading with a dictionary until next Thursday.

On Mondays, I did washing in a tin basin on the bench in the yard, in winter the washing was done in the summer-room section of the shed.

The ironing day depended on the weather conditions around the clothesline, which was stretched from the porch to the shed and not to the wicket anymore; better late, than never.

Weekends were harder to fill, but once a month in "The Peace" cinema they showed another of action movies starring Belmondo, or a comedy with Jean Richard.

Summer Sundays were no problem at all, I spent them on the Seim beach lying on the pink, with red circles, cover for wrapping babies. That same one which on weekdays was used as the table cover when ironing the dry laundry. The cover stayed at 13 Decemberists after one of your earlier visits there. It was rather short, and my legs, in part, remained stretched out over the sand, but who cares?

Three times a Sunday, I had a swim for the buoys, where there were no screaming bathers, lay on my back on the water, with my arms outstretched sideways, and pronounced the self-made ritual formula:

"Oh, water! Ran into each corner of mine! We be of one blood – thou and me."

(...to assemble such a phrase I had to involve Fitzgerald and Kipling in collaboration, but they did not mind my plagiarism...)

Then I swam back to the screams and splashes, got out the water to the coverlet and turned on it from side to side frying myself in the sun, between the periods of reading _Morning Star_ .

On the beach, I read it without a dictionary, underlining the words which later had to be written out in a copybook.

At the midday-meal time, I left the beach and went to the store in the nearby village of Khutor Taransky.

It was a casual khutta under a thatched roof, but with a thick iron strap across its door, fixed with a weighty padlock.

Store Manager, the elderly burly woman, who was proud of her having seen even Sakhalin Island, unlocked the door for just one hour.

When she dropped the iron strap on the porch, the door opened into a room with two dust-covered windows in the same wall with the door and the plank counters running along the remaining three walls, with wide two-tier shelves above them.

I systematically bought one item of canned food, a pack of cookies and a bottle of lemonade.

After opening the victuals with the opener borrowed from Store Manager, I took the meal out to the empty street of four khuttas and deep sand in the road, sizzling with the heat.

There I sat on the wide bench of a cracked but mighty board, turned gray by the years of exposure to the whims of weather, going its unchanging season circles around the tree over the bench by the thatched khutta of the store.

The assortment of things on the store shelves never changed. Buying a can of "Tourist's Breakfast", I saw that next Sunday I would have "Sprats in Tomato Sauce" for the meal, and a week later "Zucchini Squash".

The can with the sticker "Adjika" instilled obscure fears, because I had heard somewhere that it was bitterer than even wasabi, but it was still a month away. Maybe, I'd combine it with the small jar of cherry jam from the following shelf? It would be a complex dinner.

In the end, I wiped the aluminum spoon with the wrapper from the finished off cookies, and hid the spoon at the back of the khutta, in the thatched straw over the blind wall, the way Anti-Soviet kulak bandits had been hiding their barrel-sawed shotguns.

Even Marcello Mastroianni could hardly be dreaming of a sweeter "Dolce Vita"...

And right in that khutta, I bought a doll for your birthday present.

There were only two dolls on the shelves – a girl and a monkey, both of rubber. Each one had a tiny squeaker in its back to make a sound when squeezed.

The pair of motorcyclists, who somehow managed to overcome the deep sand in the road that day, advised me to but the monkey, but I preferred the girl, as I had been planning all previous Sundays, in a bright dress—also of rubber—to her knees.

I could buy a present from Department Store in the city, of course, but all the toys there were made of plastic.

Besides, I wanted it to be a gift from that enchanted khutta with its cool shade in the middle of the summer heat...

Although I am not sure if any system would save me without the application of our team to it.

This isn't meant to say that the team members surrounded each other with caring attention, tenderness and moral support.

Like hell, they would!

In our team, as anywhere else, they were all too glad to have a good laugh at your expense.

And everyone had a family and kids of their own, as an outlet for their tender care. Except for ruddy, pug-nosed, Peter Kyrpa, handled Kyrpanos, but eventually, he also got lassoed and corralled and broken in as a family man by Raya, from the team of plasterers.

And yet, from 8 am to 5 pm our team, even with each one distracted by their personal problems and concerns, became one family.

For all the hole-picking jokes in each other's qualities, you wouldn't become a victim of a detrimental practical joke with smoldering wool, or any other injury-prone idiocy.

Did bricklayers use taboo words in ladies' presence? Both yes and no.

I had never heard a four-letter word addressed to any woman in our team. Never.

But when the crane operator puts a pallet of bricks on your foot, you report it to the whole world—and very loudly too—without paying much attention if there were ladies around.

Were women on a bricklayer team using taboo words? Both no and yes.

At the moments threatening with trauma or loss of life, they'd rather shout "Oy! Mamma!", or just scream.

Whereas in the intervals between shoveling mortar into the boxes for bricklayers, or rigging the brick pallets with the prickly steel cables, Katerina could casually share the folklore song:

"Fuck yourself, you fucking dumbos, you're more stupid than they said,

No way to marry your daughter? So fuck her in my stead!.."

I admit, that mute replaying this particular obstreperous folklore piece in the brain convolutions of my inner self sometimes worked as a painkilling palliative.

But, after all, is the foul language the only thing to frown at in the world?

The bricklayer Lyubov Andreyevna once complained to the head engineer, who accidentally dropped in at the construction site, about the insulting words of our foreman Mykola Khizhnyak, by which he identified all women indiscriminately: "Inside-out insoles!"

Up to now, I haven't the slightest idea what it could possibly mean, but she somehow got hurt.

Probably, because she was the most beautiful woman in our team, only sad at times.

It is sad for a woman to know she's beautiful and, at the same time, not knowing what to do with her beauty and left with only watching how it flows away in vain.

She had a husband five years younger than her. Before their marriage, he was walking around with a knife hidden in his high boot, and she made of him an exemplary family man and a safe member of society.

But she still remained sad, especially in winter frosts, when the mortar in the boxes would develop a centimeter thick ice crust while climbing through the air to the seizure line.

"Oy, Mamma! How my poor little hands did get numb with the cold!"

And that parasite of Sehryoga would readily respond from the other end of the line:

"Serves you good! Your mummy-daddy kept telling 'study well, sweetheart, so as to become an accountant!' And what was your answer? 'No! The shovel is my one and only love forever!' So shut up now and love it until you get blue!"

"Parasite!"

Anna Andreyevna was not as beautiful as Lyubov Andreyevna, but she was kind, especially after the break for the midday meal.

She, as most of the team, lived in At-Seven-Winds and went home for the midday break. There, she would accompany her meal with a couple of shots and return to the workplace softened and kind-hearted.

Her only drawback, that she was hunting my brick hammer. The moment my vigilance got slacken, she'd snatch my brick hammer and bury it in the wall covering with mortar.

Most bricklayers cut bricks with their trowels but I, for righteousness sake, did it with the hammer...

Lyda's and Vitta's husbands were SMP-615 employees as well.

They were locksmiths at the production building in the base grounds, under the supervision of the chief mechanic.

As any locksmiths, they, naturally, were drinking. And the following morning in the bricklayers' trailer you had for one whole hour to listen to curses to those busters who even were not anywhere around.

Although the curses from Lyda were a treat to hear, she sang them out like a song, with Vitta's backing in the background.

Vitta herself was not eloquent. When we were finishing off the uppermost part of the walls on the 110-apartment block, for the final bridging with roof slabs, she was next to me in the line of the bricklayers, and when I jumped out over the wall, then all she could say after disappearing me was: "Sehrguey! Where to?"

The brick courses in my part of the seizure needed jointing so I jumped outside onto the concrete awning over a balcony on the fifth floor.

But she had no idea about that awning! Now, a man dived from the roof of a five-story building and all she managed to say was: "Sehrguey! Where to?"

Here's, in a nutshell, the female logic, and knowledge of physics – down, of course, I had jumped! Where else?.

Our team was young. The oldest bricklayer of our team, forty-year-old Grigory Grigoryevich said it directly, "We're still young!"

He had exceptional pedagogic skills and when noticing that his son, a ninth-grader, somewhere on a streetcar, or the sidewalk, was gaping at a woman worthy of looking at, he never missed the chance of seizing the opportunity: "Wanna get you some of that sort? Study well, buster!"

He had a round Napoleonic face because of the thin hair strand on his forehead. And he was a solid, burly man.

More than once, I tried to overtake him in laying a brick course – no go. He would finish when I still had to lay about ten bricks or so.

And he was very judicious. Only once his common-sense gave in.

That time he brought to the construction site his double-barreled hunting rifle, after the midday break.

The site was in "no man's but builders' land" at the frontier of At-Seven-Winds.

And then a young construction superintendent Sereda, stopped by coming from SMP-615 base grounds.

Grigory Grigoryevich allowed him also to hold the weapon. He even started an argument, that Sereda would not ever hit his hat thrown up into the air.

We went around the end wall of the unfinished building. It was the white silence all around, and only the tree trunks of a distant forest belt were contrasting the snow with their dark.

And he threw his hat up—high, so high!—and Sereda waited for a second and pulled the trigger. The hat twitched in its flight and fell like a hit bird.

Grigory Grigoryevich raised it and there was a hole in the hat top, two fingers easily ran through. The buckshot turned out to be too large, meant for boars. But it had been a good hat of nutria fur.

It's only he did not consider logically that Sereda was from Transcarpathia and although there remained no Bandera men already the firearms survived, hence the skills...

And the rigger Vera Sharapova was never sad. She was singing all the time, laughing and ready to keep up a talk with anyone at a moment's notice.

And she also was the most beautiful, but only at work, while dressed in her workman padded jacket and spetzovka pants. But when she changed to go by the local train to her Kukolka station, the beauty disappeared somewhere.

I do not know why it made me sad when she was telling about her wedding party and everyone around laughed along with her.

"The kids a-crying, Peter a-playing!"

Peter was that humpback mujik who took her even with two children of hers.

He also was an itinerant from Kukolka to Konotop and knew how to play the accordion. Some noisy wedding it turned out.

Vera Sharapova was keen and cute, and she noticed that when someone complained of having a headache, I would take out a handkerchief from my spetzovka pants pocket and turn it inside out.

At times, she would nudge Katerina, say, watch the miracles of my training, then press her hand to her forehead and make a pain-ridden face, "Oh, what a headache I have!"

Naturally, I saw through all that comedy, but nonetheless, I executed my role in the procedure.

However, when Katerina also started to rub her temples, I would say that the reception was over – the facility served one patient per day.

Harry Potter had not been conceived as of yet...

Peter Lysoon was not always a bricklayer. Earlier in his career, he had a job of security in railway gold transportation. There was a special squad of armed securities to accompany safes in luggage cars.

They had long trips, sometimes for weeks. The floor of the car swayed to the clang of wheel pairs on the rail joints, and thoughts of all sorts were spinning on and on.

Say, what way, for example, that gold could be taken?

One day they were spinning, another day – sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But no spinning could bring an answer to that insoluble problem.

He would take a look at the faces of his fellow-securities: they were also thoughtful. And what about?

And then fear started to creep in – what if some of them had thought out a working solution? Readied a plan, found accomplices and, at some point in an endless way, he would trash all the squad with one clip and leave with the gold?

Peter got tired of waiting and became a bricklayer...

With his skinny, short, stature, Grinya reminded me somehow of German general Guderian, whom I never saw in my life. There was in his appearance something vaguely suggestive of the General Stuff, more exactly that of the Wehrmacht.

On weekends, he took rest from blitzkriegs and went on a fishing trip with Grigory Grigoryevich, everywhere in the reach of local and diesel trains.

They were fishing with fishing rods of different lengths, longer ones for the summer, shorties for ice fishing...

I was bribed by his faith in my healing talent.

That time he stopped me on the flight of stairs leading just to heaven, because of absence any roof yet.

"Sehryoga, help!"

And, lifting his upper lip, he showed a whitish pimple on the gum.

Then he unfastened the safety pin from the inside pocket of his workman padded jacket, where he kept his wristwatch during working hours, and handed it to me, "Pierce the bitch, it smarts too much."

I started excuses that it was not possible there amid the dust and mud, without antiseptics, while such an operation called for disinfection.

"What disinfection do you want of me here?"

Well, in action movies, they usually disinfect things with open fire.

He held the pin tip over a lit match. The result did not comfort me though, the tip got covered with black soot.

Grinya critically examined the pin, wiped the soot against the sleeve of his padded jacket with layers of brick dust and other sediments, and held it out to me, "Take! Do it!"

And I shut up because the man spent so many efforts on disinfection...

Mykola Khizhnyak appeared in Konotop as those dark-haired and curly heroes of French novels, that come to Paris with a couple of sous in their pocket and ambitious plans to conquer the capital.

True, he had a three-ruble bill and, instead of a slouch hat with a feather, there was a forage cap on his head, incapable to protect in the thirty-degree frost on the night of his arrival.

He had not become the Captain of musketeers, but he is the only bricklayer of the sixth category known to me.

As such, he had an apartment, and a Ural motorcycle without a sidecar, and his wife Katerina whom, in case of problems with getting asleep at night, he could grab by her ears and pull under.

And it was Mykola Khizhnyak making up for the knowledge I omitted at the institute.

When studying at the English Department of the NGPI, I could not force myself to read a single work by Thomas Hardy, although he was in the examination questions.

Somehow, I had an incompatibility with him, probably, because of his name, I dunno. I knew, that it was necessary, but I couldn't...

Once on the slabs, Mykola began to tell me a long and winding story.

At first, I thought it was some TV series and only at the very end, when the pursuit overtook her, but she was asleep from fatigue, and he said to let her sleep a bit while she did not know she had got caught, I realized that it was Tess of the D'Urbervilles, notwithstanding that Khizhnyak had woven some flight ticket into the plot...

But officially, the most beautiful woman in our team was the rigger Katerina.

Vera Sharapova never hesitated to say it to her directly, even though she knew it herself, especially since she was the foreman's wife, though not registered, yet they had already had a seventh-grader son from her first marriage.

On her yellow curls, Katerina wore a scarf made of sheer fabric, and on her neck a necklace of large red beads; to suit the color of the lipstick on her lips.

Somewhere in the stacks of bridging slabs, by the heap of dumped mortar, she kept a triangular fragment of a thick mirror to look into, in her spare time.

She considered herself as beautiful as Anfisa from the TV series "The Ugryum River" after she became the vision because of whom Gromov flung himself off the cliff.

In any case, it was with that spook gesture that she beckoned to me from the brick debris, scattered on the ground, when I was laying the corner of the fourth floor, the morning after that particular sequel: "Come on, Proshka! Come to me!"

Or maybe she just wanted to check if I was crazy enough for the dive.

After all, it was clear that the one was not all there and even turned away from live porn...

That time two couples desired to have sex in the bosom of nature, and they left the city for a distance of two hundred meters from the city line by At-Seven-Winds. They used the strip of the bush as a screen from the highway.

Pissing with passion, they did not take into account the nearby construction site, and our team put their hand tools aside and exchanged expert comments during the combined action, like the Romans in the stands of Coliseum, when it did not yet require major repairs.

(...in the stagnation era in our land the totalizator was not known yet, so there were no betting on which of the mating pairs will cum first...)

But how relative is everything in this world!

You come first and Anna Andreyevna, sitting over the shovel handle, thrown across the iron box with mortar, would say: "Phui! And that's your best?"

And only the one that not all there, turned away, sat low by the brick pallet, and watched in the opposite direction with a distant group of birches in the middle of "no man's but builders' land", as tall as the trees in the African Savannah.

A normal one wouldn't behave like that...

Before his marriage, Peter Kyrpa lived with his mother, and in the winter season kept bragging regularly how on the morning of that day, he went out into their khutta's corridor-hallway, broke the ice in the bucket with a tin mug, and drank the water so cold that it was entering the teeth.

I liked him less than anyone else in our team, but it became him who helped me to prove to everyone and, moreover, to myself that I was a true bricklayer.

It happened much later, when the fresh blood in the form of two girls, who graduated from a vocational school someplace in Western Ukraine, and the former paratrooper Vovka joined our team.

At that time, we were finishing the second floor of the machine shop floor building, opposite the canteen for the teams of locomotive drivers.

When the brick wall is laid 1.2 meters tall, it is continued from trestles put close by it. Between Kyrpa and me there were two such trestles, which accounts for a distance of about 15 meters.

He wanted to show off before the pair of young girls in fresh padded jackets, who often used in their talk the funny-sounding "yoy!"

So he shouted, "Here, Sehryoga!"

And he hurled a brick hammer in my direction over the pallets and boxes in between us two.

The tool flew like a tomahawk spinning around its hilt.

I did not have time for calculations and I did not calculate anything. I just stepped forward and raised my right hand.

The moment as the hammer handle touched my palm, all there remained to do was to squeeze my fingers in a grab.

Everything turned out all by itself.

When seeing that I did not duck behind the brick pallet to dodge his throw, but stood instead with the hammer held in my hand proudly aloft, that turncoat of Kyrpa flip-flopped at once and said to the girls who instantly turned mum, "See? So are bricklayers in our team!"

That's why I do have what to be proud of in my life...

In addition to the rubber doll from the village store, I collected a whole set of gifts for your birthday.

There were those glossy plastic what-you'd-call-thems, which electricians insert into the junction boxes.

They looked like little ninja turtles, although before the production of that cartoon there remained more than twenty years, for which reason you couldn't determine that they were ninjas, yet the similarity of those bits of plastic to turtles was evident at once.

Besides, there were white ceramic checkers as well.

Every item in the set had a double, except for the doll.

(...this, like, a soldier in the front line collecting a present from shot cartridges.

However, our team was indeed at the forefront of the world mastered by humans.

Some gifts from the edge of the ecumene...)

It was important for me to get to Nezhin at a fitting time when no one would intercept and spoil the celebration day.

The local train from Konotop, moreover on your birthday, was too easy to ambush with the "it" in a black-and-white tartan and then a slight swishing touch against my jeans would be enough to derail everything.

It was wiser to approach from the rear, where I could not be expected from.

The bus Kharkov-Chernigov suited the purpose ideally, but it passed Konotop at five-thirty in the morning that's why I did not go to bed that night, so as not to oversleep.

I was just walking around Konotop in different directions.

When I walked along the concrete wall of Meat-Packing Plant, there was a crowd of cattle driven through the roofed gallery up there, to the slaughter work floor.

With what human voices they were screaming! Worse than in "The Western Corridor".

And, they absolutely got it – where they were being driven and why...

About midnight, I was at the Kandeebynno lakes and decided to take a swim.

I stripped down and entered the water in the altogether.

And who would see? The dark currant bushes on the shore, or the stars with the moon? They had seen more than that.

So I plunged ahead. And the darkness around was trembling with the grunts of mating frogs...

One plasterer, an elderly female, though sporting long taut braids, told me that when she was going to commit suicide in her village, the same night it was, and the air was filled with the buzz of insisting whisper, "Come on! Here it is, the pond! Go into!"

But I did not have any voices, only the frogs.

And then I swam towards the moon. It had just risen over the fish lakes and didn't have time to grow small in the sky. The huge full moon a sliver up from the horizon.

I swam with sidestroke, soundlessly, but still pushed waves before me. Smooth evenly rounded waves, like those lines printed in the handkerchief with the sailboat. Only there they were blue on the white background, and here it was thin silver lines against the black darkness.

Besides, these lines were moving, like the waves of ether, until pondweed began to cling to my feet. It felt scary, all slimy mermaids came on thought, and I returned, swimming on my back so that to watch the moon all the time.

My hair was wet after the swim, and I slowly strolled to the station so that it would dry on the way.

At the station, there were huge clocks on the front and back walls of the building, and two more inside, in the halls. That's why I went to the station.

I did not have a watch, when I tried to wear one or another on my wrist it would stop in a couple of days, or they started to show the wrong time and should be taken to repair, or replaced with a new one...

Along the way, I remembered that unfortunate guy from the Arab Nights fairy tales, who cried all the time and kept tearing the clothes on his chest.

He loved a beautiful sorceress, and she loved him but warned that a certain door in her palace should never be opened.

And he opened it—out of pure curiosity—and got into another dimension with only sand and stones around, and no way back.

So, all that remained to him was to cry and beat himself in the chest...

About two years before that, I went with Eera to the Desna River.

Just two of us, she and I. Gaina Mikhailovna was keeping you that day.

We went there by the morning bus of the Chernigov destination.

But how would we come back?

Come on, something would turn up...

When I saw the Desna through the bus window, I asked the driver to pull up and we got off to the roadside.

Then we were going over a field.

In another field nearby, women in white kerchiefs were raking hay into mounds, from afar you could not make out what century you were in.

Then I carried Eera on my back over a channel to a long spit of sand, overgrown with wide green leaves past which the enchanted Desna flowed calmly.

We spread a blanket over the leaves and spent all day there.

When I had to take a leak, I swam to the other bank, the river was not too wide there.

Eera strictly warned me not to drench my head.

I remembered that, and all the same, I could not help plunging headlong from the bluffy opposite bank.

And now all that was left to me was to cry and tear that T-shirt of blue acetate silk on my chest...

The rest of that night I spent sitting in the square between the station and the first platform.

The benches there were not very comfortable, lacking the backrests. Seated on one of them, I met rare night trains together with the trolleys of the on-duty workers from the luggage office, into which the workers of postal cars threw out boxes and bales of parcels.

And from that same bench, I was seeing off the groups of passengers yawning from the night chill. Have a good trip!.

When the black box in the front wall of the station lit up 05:00, I walked to the waiting hall to collect the cardboard box with the gifts from the automatic storage cell and went from there to the bus station.

It's close by, almost immediately behind the Loony park...

The Kharkov-Chernigov bus did not pass through Nezhin, but from the turn of the highway, nearby the round building of the traffic police post, there again turned up something, so that about nine in the morning I was already in Nezhin. At that hour, the local train from Konotop was only approaching Bakhmach. But I did not want to be a bolt from the blue; that's why I called Eera at her workplace from a payphone booth.

What a beautiful voice she had! So mellow, so dear.

I said that I wanted to see you and give a birthday present, and she answered that, yes, of course, and that you were at home with her mother.

I went to Red Partisans with a joyous tide in my chest, because Eera on the phone sounded quite friendly, and even somehow pleased.

The door did not open, only the peephole darkened momentarily, then brightened up again.

I pushed the doorbell button once more, but this time shorter, and I heard footsteps cautiously departing from the hallway.

I also heard your voice complaining about something from the doorway to the living room, and how your grandmother was shushing you in a whisper.

If a person has voices from a psychiatry textbook, they tell him something.

I couldn't make out any words but through the door I could see – and very clearly – you, a four-year-old kid, anxiously looking up at your grandma – who's there? Gray Wolf? Bad Unclie?

And I also saw Eera's mother in the six-month perm-wave, with her finger pressed to her lips, "Shush!"

I am not of those who break into a locked door, and I did not want to scare you any further.

I rang to the opposite door on the landing and it opened.

There lived a pair of teachers at the NGPI. Groza-husband, he taught scientific Communism, and Groza-wife, who was teaching me German in my second year of study there.

I left the birthday box with the Grozas and asked to hand it to you personally.

As for coming back to Konotop, I could already use a local train.

What's the difference?

Just 1 ruble 10 kopecks...

(...an attempt to live a righteous life causes a bad habit in a person.

Not a detrimental one, but, at any rate, meaningless – you fall in the rut of that business and keep on, even knowing that makes no difference...)

After the final and even ritually confirmed break-up with Eera, giving back _The Godfather_ —the last of the books I had stolen—made no sense, but it was too late because I kinda got addicted.

The reason why the book tarried by my side was that I did not know where Vitya Kononevich went to work off his diploma, but then I got a word that actual owner of the book was Sasha Nesterook from whom Vitya borrowed it.

I had to go to Nezhin again but at the address given to me by Vasya Kropin, Sasha Nesterook was no more and the place was already rented by a married young couple.

The young man wore a white tank-shirt, his wife a dressing gown, and the apartment richly smelled with grease smoked herring.

What else would you need for happiness, but a separate apartment and a young woman at any time of day?

When they proposed the address of their landlady who, possibly, knew where Sasha Nesterook moved, I turned it down and dropped any further search because I remembered that in the last year at the institute, Igor Recoon, my course-mate from Konotop, became bosom friends with Nesterook.

So it would be easier to give the book to Igor and let him pass it instead of me. Anyway, I felt fed up with the path of righteousness.

On the train, I for the first time was visited by the thought – maybe just so it was necessary?

A woman of your own, of course, is a good thing, whichever way you turn it, but why then I did not envy the young lodger?

And what was the reason for the odd ticklish laughter seizing me at a recollection of the bliss accentuated by the herring and a white tank-top?.

Igor's mother said that he was not home and that he worked on the first floor in the building of the City Party Committee.

The building itself was by Peace Square, behind the gray monument of Lenin where once stood the tower of the city television studio before it was dismantled.

At the entrance to the City Party Committee, I answered the militiaman which room and to whom I was going, and he let me pass.

The room was empty, but the moment I came up to the window, Igor got in, obviously unwilling to let me see what I saw out there.

He had not changed at all. The same glasses of tea color in a golden frame, and the same smirk under the sharp nose.

Only in his demeanor there appeared the air of condescending; clear enough though in a man who got in tracks of a wide road to a brighter future.

_The Godfather_ hardly surprised Igor, and he promised to pass the book to Sasha Nesterook.

Probably, it's nice to feel superior to someone who you were looking up to when being a young entrant to the NGPI with your school certificate received just a month before, while that someone had served in the army.

But now the ex-superior was slavering on a construction site, and you had an office in the City Party Committee, albeit having to share the office room with another functionary...

We never met again, yet I was in time to catch a glimpse through the window in his career-spring-board office and to see the strip of the cracked asphalt of the blind area under the wall, the sun-killed lawn, and the facade plaster "coat" on the blank opposite wall, under opaque gray whitewashing and – nothing else.

To whichever heights he was to rise in his future career of a cadre, he'd never see that group of tall birches among the construction sites of At-Seven-Winds that looked like slender trees in the summer haze of African Savannah.

Even if you were pointing at them, he would not see...

Still, I was persistently harassed by a sticky hope because when Eera talked to me on the phone her voice seemed so joyful. What if?.

And it was none of her guilt that my mother-in-law decided to expose me before you as a brutal door-kicker. She certainly had not even consulted Eera, whose voice sounded like my Eera's voice...

To assert those hopes, I went to the Intercity Telephone Station, next to the main post-office.

The glass door and walls separated me from the clang of the streetcars and the everyday fuss in front of the Department Store.

The woman behind the glass partition over the counter wrote down the city and the number I was calling. She passed the receipt to me, and I paid for a three-minute talk.

Taking off the receiver from the phone on her desk, she told someone to give Nezhin, 4-59-83.

I slipped the receipt into a hip pocket of my jeans and became one of the few waiting.

When somewhere in another city someone was picking the receiver off the ringing phone, they were told that it was Konotop online, and the black loudspeaker in the station hall shouted with a female voice which booth to go in for a talk with that city.

Behind the glass inserted in the door of the indicated booth, a light bulb lit up revealing a narrow compartment squeezed by yellow chipboard plates.

The expectant entered the said booth with the phone on a small plywood shelf in the corner, next to the high stool with the crimson-plush covered seat.

I did not know whether the stool was soft or hard, I had never sat down...

"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"

"Repeat!"

From the loudspeaker floated up a distant echoing of long telephone rings in the faraway Alma-Ata.

"Petrozavodsk! Cabin Twelve!"

What they were talking about was not heard in the station hall, unless they started to yell because of a faulty connection.

"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"

"Take off!"

The person of unfeasible expectations returned the receipt and got their money back.

"Nezhin's online!"

I entered the booth and left the station hall behind my back and the glass in the upper half of the closed door.

It's very difficult to talk with your heart going pit-a-pat up inside your throat.

"Call Eera, please."

"Who's talking?"

"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."

"Now..."

"Yes."

And the beating halted at once, killed by the permafrost chill of her voice.

I said hello, was saying something else, but I heard that I could never get through that dead tightened ice.

"Look, I'm not asking for anything, but the girl needs a father."

"Do not worry, she's got a father already."

"Yes?. It's...good."

The conversation was over.

I went directly to the exit but in the glass cage of its vestibule, I looked back at the booth where the light had already gone out.

And I said to myself: "Look well, number seven. That's the number for you to get crucified under..."

There miles upon miles upon miles and three time zones between the UK and Konotop, but – lo and behold! – because of that faraway kingdom, or rather because of that kingdom's communists, and, keeping to the very point, because of their _Morning Star_ newspaper, I missed the wedding of my sister Natasha that summer.

After all, if you consider things carefully, it's because of _Morning Star_ that I landed into the madhouse once again.

(...because of the daily reading the news that half-month before was the latest news in the United Kingdom, you begin to sympathize with the Labor movement, and the names of Michael Foote and Tony Benn become not so empty sounds as the names of Suslov, or Podgorny, or whoever else was among the members of that Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

The head of the British government, Margaret Thatcher ceases to be "Dear Mrs. Margaret Thatcher!" as read by Brezhnev out from the sheet of his welcome speech.

She becomes that iron bitch who starved to death twenty-nine Irish guys because of their wish to wear sweaters in their prison cells.

That is, there is a shift towards an inadequate perception of the surrounding realities.

You start to behave like a miner from Kent County or a public utility worker in the city of Manchester.

Of course, I could refer to the lack of awareness – after all, I lived in the era of stagnation and did not suspect it.

However, this is a weak excuse, because equally ignorant of the fact was the KGB officer, who answered the phone call from SMP-615...)

At the height of summer, when the annual battle for the harvest was unfolding on the fields of our Motherland, when the miners of Kuzbass region promised to give out the millionth ton of black gold in the current year, when he, the above-mentioned KGB officer, still could not make up his mind whether to go on Saturday to his dacha in the Zholdaky village or rather drive to the Desna river, from where for the second week at a stretch mujiks were coming back with a good catch...

Shattering the summer softness of those contemplations, the telephone on his desk buzzed to give out the message less welcome than a spare prick at a wedding.

Emergency Accident. Strike and sit-in at SMP-615.

How many strikers?

One.

Where exactly?

On the porch of the administrative building.

"Do nothing before the arrival of our staff."

Yes, I was sitting on the wide concrete two-step porch of the two-story administrative building.

Yes, it was a strike, because at ten in the morning, instead of chinking my trowel against the bricks, I changed clothes in our team trailer in At-Seven-Winds and showed up at the base of SMP-615.

Yes, it was a sit-in strike and, so as to be seated with more comfort, I took a wooden chair from the check-entrance house at the gate and dragged it onto the porch of the administrative building.

It was a classic summer day, in the blue sky a huge puffy mass of a solitary, brightly white, cloud hung anchored over the production building, sending no shade to the vast sun-smitten yard.

The gray fence of concrete panels couldn't hide the tall railway embankment, along which express trains flew with hasty knock-knocking past the mortar unit, giving way to solidly pounding cars of endless freight trains getting on in both directions.

It was a casual busy day, and only I did nothing but sweating in that blue shirt of acetate silk which is the same crap as nylon, just a little softer.

I was sitting on the side of the entrance, so as not to accidentally obstruct the way to passing employees of SMP-615.

Two locksmiths, the husbands of Lyda and Vitta from our team, stopped by to ask why I was here and not at work.

Without explanations, I pointed with my thumb at the labor performance board of brown linoleum, placed on the same porch, but on the other side of the entrance.

And the chief mechanic guessed himself to read it...

Normally, that board was hung for life in the lobby on the first floor, next to the shut up window out of which once a month we received our payment. And year after year, the board chastely kept the virginity of its linoleum, although a piece of chalk was put on its frame.

That day the board's star hour stroke and out it went and stood there covered with the pompous handwriting from which, without any graphology, anyone could right away see a graphomaniac:

Our trade-union boss is a liar!

Down with Slaushevsky!

I knew, if that had happened somewhere in England, young representatives from both factions of the Labor Party would have already been photographed next to the board, and the reporters of that same _Morning Star_ would have already interviewed me – where was such a militant intolerance towards the trade-union leader from?

Until that morning, I also had just sympathy for him.

The foreman of carpenters, Anatoly Slaushevsky, had a pleasant appearance with his milky gray hair. In Hollywood, he would easily have made a career in the line of a noble sheriff in various Westerns. But we also kept noble looks in high esteem, and Slaushevsky was year after year elected the chairman of the trade-union committee of SMP-615.

It was a no-charge position, so he also lived on just his monthly payment. Like everyone else.

And he thought that I would understand him, like everyone else, when he told me on the site that morning, "No go."

"How's that 'no go'?"

"Just so that no go."

Never, in the most horrible nightmares, he could dream of being accosted with the defamatory name of "boss"—white on brown—and aggravating demand to put him in an unusual position.

Sympathy is a short-living thing.

A month before I would readily give him a hug when he told me there was a permit to the Artek pioneer camp.

Yes, I wanted it, sure thing! All my pioneer childhood I dreamed of visiting the sunny Artek on the Crimean coast.

Now, I, naturally, did not fit there with my age anymore, but Lenochka would be happy to see the Black Sea...

In fact, Lenochka got a little scared and began to ask her grandmother, who responded that Artek was very good.

And Lenochka had already passed all the doctors from the children polyclinic with their medical checks. She even made her choice which suitcase she would take with her for keeping her things in Artek.

"No go."

A month before Slaushevsky did not yet know that someone else would guess that Artek was good. That's why he offered to me the free permit paid for by the trade-union.

And it did not matter that the smart late-comer, to whom some manager from SMP-615 boasted about having such a permit, was from another organization. Anyway, his position in his organization was higher than that of a bricklayer.

"No go."

If you live on just your monthly payment, you must think rationally. As everyone else.

Grunt, scratch in the back of your neck, say "fuck!", and go back to your workplace.

What's the use of showing your horns to Slaushevsky? He's also like everyone else...

I knew exactly how all that would evolve in England, but I had no idea what would happen next here in my native country.

So, my role was that of an on-looker in acetate silks, only I had to unfasten a couple of buttons, the day was too darn hot.

Round the white-brick corner of the administrative building slowly came a white Volga.

It made a wide turnabout on the fine dust of the road surface and pulled up in front of the porch with its nose to where it had come from.

The driver got out, leaving two passengers in the back seat, climbed the porch, read the two lines on the linoleum of the monthly labor performance board and, without looking at me, entered the building.

He soon returned, got back into the car and his two burly passengers came out of it and approached me.

"Let's go."

"Where?"

"You'll see."

It's inconvenient to talk turning your face up in two directions.

I got up and put my hand on the back of the chair, "Okay, I'll just take the chair back."

"They'll take it without you."

And the two of them instantly gripped my biceps – each one from his side with both hands.

Gently and slowly they led me towards the Volga.

At a distance, the monitor group of two locksmiths and one welder stood watching from the shade in the doorway to the production building; a lost and found preparatory sketch by Repin for his famous "The Arrest of a Propagandist".

The archangel on the left, responding to my meek compliance, loosened his grip a little. He already, like, just strolled along comradely embracing my arm with his palms.

I shouted to the driver, "The one on my left is shirking!" The grips from both sides immediately hardened and soon the three of us were sitting in the back seat, with me in the center. Like, a f-f..er..festive king on the coronation day.

While Svaytsikha was opening the gate – the first and last time I saw it locked – I shouted to her to take back from the porch the chair I had borrowed from her workplace.

And the Volga drove to Konotop.

After some other gate, they told me to get over into a small UAZ van with no windows in the back. One of the burly guys got in with me, the vehicle revved ahead but soon we stopped again.

Through the opening to the driver cab and the following windshield, there were seen the poplars nearby the City Medical Center.

After a prolonged wait, the back door swung open. On the sidewalk stood the psychiatrist Tarasenko.

"Yes, it's him."

After those his words, the door slammed shut again and I was taken to Romny. Without any voluntariness on my part...

Your looks depend on how favorable is the disposition of the mirror you are looking in.

I noticed it more than once. In some mirror – wow! – I'm really gorgeous! While in another – is that ghoul I?

The most in-love-with-me mirror I had ever met, was the pier-glass in the hall of the fifth unit of the regional psychiatric hospital in the city of Romny.

It showed me what a terrific handsome man I was after all. And without any cinematic sweetness – just a comely man and that's it.

In those three months in Odessa, I looked like Konkin, or he was made up to look like me when starring in "No way to change the meeting point".

And it did not matter much, who's like who, the main thing that there, from the pier-glass, at me was looking a man of unusual, for the stereotyped standards, handsomeness by the Titian's brush.

The red pajamas with thin yellow stripes, brown soft hair slightly lightened with their sunburn, but the main advantage was the color of the eyes. Some singular, inimitable, color – that of melting honey.

And let Captain Pissak, composing my verbal portrait in front of the ranks of the first company, say, "Look at his eyes! They are lynx eyes!"

But no, Captain, the pier-glass would not lie – they were good!

The only pity was that no one saw it except me. The hall was empty, and the corridor was quiet.

A dozen patients stayed in the observation wardroom and all the rest of the fifth unit for the entire daylight hours were kept – with the break for a midday meal – on the Area.

It's summer, after all!.

When, at the Experimental Unit of the Repair Work Shop of the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, we, the Unit's locksmiths, at the end of working day were awaiting the final, most slow-go, concluding, half-hour to expire and, leaning our backs against the vices, were yakking of this and that though, in general, of nothing, some younger locksmiths agreed that it would be nice to get back to the army again, but only now, already knowing what's what, and, surely, not for the full stretch of two years, but, like, for a week, or two, or maybe for a month...

To me, a soon-to-be draftee, such conversation seemed unconvincing, yet now I'm ready to agree, that the same phenomena might have more than one and different appearances.

At first sight, through the roundly perplexed eyes, things look one way, but when you watch them from the height of the accumulated experience, they acquire quite a different aspect.

And one month is just a trifle. The madhouse does not lock you up for less than forty-five days.

Forty-five days is half of a season: half the summer, or half the spring, or whenever they made you a shut-in.

As a regular of the fifth unit, I knew that already as well as some other nuances, however, I had not been there in summer.

For me, as an unmitigated recidivist, they no longer cared to spend expensive insulin. That time I was not treated there, but getting punished with iminazine.

Three executions per day multiplied by forty-five; I knew what mess they would turn my ass into through the subsequent half-season.

And, as a cheaper patient, I was placed in a larger wardroom, number eight.

The more the number of sick people spending the night around, the higher the chance of listening to their screams from nightmares, or witnessing a showdown under the light of inexorable electric bulbs.

(...every summer has its drawbacks and, first of all, the influx.

Any resident of any resort would agree – on the arrival of those crowds, the standard of living takes a nosedive...)

In summer, the fifth unit served, on average, 40 patients more than in other seasons.

To provide everyone with a place to sleep, in wardroom eight, for example, two side-by-side beds served to accommodate from three to four men a night, depending on how lucky you were.

In that half-season, I was lucky both ways.

But there was a huge "but!" – summertime removed the problem of the washed and, therefore, locked toilet because we spent all day in the Area.

The Area was a square 40 by 40 meters.

The three sides of its perimeter, including the one with the wicket in it, presented a robust fence of gray unpainted boards 2.2 meters tall, nailed vertically side by side.

The fourth side was a sturdy 2-meter-tall iron mesh fixed by the concrete stakes.

Along with the fence in the base of the square, there stretched a thirty-meter canopy with its low gable roof of rusty tin propped with few and far between pillars of red brick.

Scores of broken iron beds randomly piled on each other formed one high heap rusting in the canopy's shade. Two, still usable, ones stood alongside the heap's slope, both covered with a cloth blanket over the spring mesh. When the syringes with midday injections were brought down to the Area, the shut-ins, called by their names, were coming to the blanketed beds to pull their pants down, lie with their backs up, and get their dosage into, one by one.

A pair of armchairs on rusting legs, with their leatherette cover in tatters, were leaned, to prevent collapsing, against the brick pillars – they were the seats of paramedics.

At the far end of the canopy, nearby the mesh fence, there stood a couple of short plywood benches with unyieldingly upright backs like those of school desks.

Along the fence opposite the square base, three long, separate, boards were nailed to short stumps sticking from the ground to form three consecutive backrestless benches.

Three benches of the same design stretched along the third board fence with the entrance wicket in it.

The iron-mesh side in the square, opposite the entrance, had nothing for sitting nearby, but close to it—in the right upper corner of the Area—there stood toilet of the sorteer type: a box of three rust-grazed tin walls under the equally rusty tin roof.

The box's door was missing for paramedics to make sure that the shut-in inside was not attempting suicide, or otherwise abusing the facility.

The ground surface in the Area was bare and firm, with an admixture of fine clay dust trampled out of it.

And that's all?

No!

There were as many as two "but!" more – the strip of green, not trampled, grass along the other side of the mesh fence, and the summer sky with white clouds above anything and everything else.

The sun was rising from behind the fifth unit's building and the shadow, thrown back by the roof, started its imperceptible advancement from the iron mesh to the opposite board fence with the entrance wicket in it.

While we were taken to the midday meal, the shadow passed over the fence and we did not find it anymore after the break, and the sun in the sky was still steadily moving on – to the construction site of a one-story building, about six meters from the iron mesh fence, and even farther over the site until it disappeared altogether, and the clearly delineated evening shadow started creeping up the wall of the fifth unit, right up to its roof, where it would dissolve in the dusk, which meant that now they would take us up to the unit for the end-day meal, injections, and overnight.

But before that, all of us had our feet washed, of course, in the vestibule on the first floor.

All 120 people, in turn, would step, one after another, into one and the same tin basin filled with one and the same water.

Two nuts, kneeling on the floor behind the basin, would wipe all their feet, in turn, with one and the same pair of wafer towels wet through and through.

Those proceedings had an unmistakable biblical air about them, like, the New Testament feet ablution for the queuing apostles, sort of. Probably, on account of the measly illumination by the bulb somewhere up in the staircase well...

I met about ten familiar faces.

Tsyba, on the very first evening, hastily approached me in the corridor, gave a brief glance and turned away, "Eew! Not the same!" And he never wanted to communicate with me anymore.

Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, remained sporting close-cropped hair, but he was asleep all the time.

In the morning, after our joyful piling in through the wicket into the Area, he stretched on the bed for injections and only by the middle of the day, without waking up, he conceded a part of it for laying, in turn, with their backs up, of those whose execution syringes were brought down from the manipulation room...

The first one-and-a-half hour in the Area, I usually spent laying on one of the board-benches along the upper side of the square.

Behind the fence, there was the area of the fourth unit, where howling and squealing were no less powerful than by us.

Sometimes, I had someone from the slightly inflated standing above me, and muttering to himself it was unfair I had taken up so much space for me alone.

Then I had to lower my stumps on the ground and sit up because I could not send him to the three board-benches alongside the fence with the entrance wicket in it – that was the grounds of the fully emancipated gymnosophists.

Those communicated with screams, while being cooked in their own juice of free life, inattentive that the skin of their bare bodies, fried in the sun day after day, became cracked and oozing blood, which, eventually, got baked though.

Now, the leader of the community where no one cared about anyone else, bored with the monotony of his swinging back and forth in a sitting position, issued a Tarzan howl and plunged for a couple of meters deep into the Area, only for to come back to the board-bench and go on with his swinging.

Along the way, he just kicked a philosopher of the same ceramic-burned hue, who squatted to get closer to the ground and draw with his finger on the dust underneath his dangling balls.

"Noli turbare circulos meos!"

Next time, the leader with a single blow would knock another naked neighbor away from the bench, who'd never notice that, engulfed in spinning in his fingers a sixteen-centimeter piece of a broken twig and keeping on his own counsel as unobtrusively as before the passing thunderclap.

The paramedics never intervened into the internal affairs on the benches of deeply introverted as long as the howl-squeal-screaming in their free territories did not bypass the notch of a permissible level. When it was transgressed, the paramedics, assisted by the volunteers from halfnuts or fully nuts, would pull the stark naked nuts raging at the board-benches and fix him on the second usable bed under the canopy.

When the heat drove me away from the Area, I got seated on one of the plywood benches ignored by the crazy public because of their merciless backrests.

To spend the whole day on a firm horizontal plane was not an easy task, in the evening you did not know which of your buttocks to use for sitting.

The Area itself was in the state of seething motion: back and forth, to and fro, circles, jerky tags...

Where to? Where from? In pursuit of what?

Along the board fence behind the board-benches on which I lay in the morning, there lined a row of backs of replacing each other geezers stuck to the gaps between the nailed boards.

Someone giggled into the gap, another one beckoned a fellow-patient, someone else jerked off in his pants, because the fourth unit kept shut-ins of the opposite sex entertaining similar sorts of mental inclinations, up to the state of stark naked gymnosophists.

These are just my assumptions though because I never approached the gaps in the fence and had seen only one of our neighborixes.

Black-haired and skinny, about thirty years old, she emerged topless over the fence, and with a gentle sway of her arm threw a large flower into the dust under our feet.

The nuts kicked up a skirmish over her flower, and she was sharply pulled away from the other side of the fence, but all the same, the breasts were beautifully shaped...

Three times a day, so as to stretch the buttocks puffy from the shots, I left the shade of the canopy and walked around the Area in wide circles.

While promenading, I memorized by rote the lines of The Cartoon Novel, conceived by me yet in the wild, but having taken its final shape already in the funny farm.

The content did not exceed one page of text, and it was important for me not to lose a single coma, and prevent substitution of words with their synonyms, because I was arrested without a pencil and paper on me.

One time, too deeply immersed in the punctuation of unwritten lines, I inadvertently crossed the invisible line along the board-benches of the absolutely free, and two or three punches on the body and into my head brought me back to the surrounding reality...

I could not allow that reality to break my system of survival in the void and for that reason, on Sundays, I went to the beach.

I dragged two plywood benches out from under the canopy to the mesh fence—away from those cooped-up yet still too free—and all day long I was sunbathing there, with breaks for the midday meal and when they called me to share the bed with sleeping Sasha, and get my syringe into the ass.

Uncompromisingly, I lay there all Sunday, with my eyes closed under the hot sun, and the surrounding soundtrack noise accurately reproduced the shrieks and squeals of a crowded summer beach...

On admission to the fifth unit, instead of underpants, they gave me long johns with strips for tying them to the ankles. However hard I tried, I couldn't roll the rigging up above my knees.

I had to surrender in the end, and on the plywood-bench beach, I pulled them off and wrapped my loins with the tank top.

One Sunday, the head doctor was on duty herself and got utterly shocked by the frivolity of my costume.

"And this is a person with higher education!" indignantly exclaimed she from the shade beneath the canopy.

How could she at that distance figure out there was nothing under the tank top but for me in the altogether?

Deductively, the rhyme-riddle for kids about "A and B" and the rule of thumb helped her out: If the pajamas put under the head, and the blood-smeared long johns draped the back of the bench – which letter got hidden in the tank top?.

The day after she drenched the reputation of my past, I was approached by Tarattoon, from the new wave of shut-ins.

He invited me to collaborate in the creation of a nuclear bomb, for which purpose they had already collected a good working group.

And I said, thank you, yet, said I, such a task called for the nuclei splitting, and I had been fed up with even an idea of breaking, breakers and so on down that road.

He never repeated the invitation...

Among the paramedics there also popped up new faces.

The man of short stature with a beautiful head of crisp red hair and the broken right leg, for example. Or maybe, it just was shorter, but he was heavily falling on that side.

The other one was a slender black-haired youth in an immaculately white doctor's smock.

He was the only one to call me with the plural "You", and planning to enter a medical institute in Leningrad.

In the meantime, he gave me injections above my pulled down pants and long johns and—so as to comfort me—he kept complaining sympathetically that there simply no place was left to stab into, that's why it's bleeding so.

One evening, when we, hurraying and banzaiing, came back after the day in the Area, that naked sunburned bodybuilder pressed all of his front (dirty with the dust stuck to his sweat) against the "manipulation room" door in the hall by the observation wardroom.

The youth paramedic, so as prevent stains on his snow-white smock, drove him away with high kicks of his black shiny shoes.

"Just think of it! Now the door has to be washed!"

That moment I seemed to understand the naked introvert – to press your sun-smitten body to such a clean, coolness emanating, door...even if locked...

Once upon a time, H. G. Wells wrote a novel The Sleeper Awakes.

The skinhead sleeper of Sasha woke up on the bed under the canopy and, without opening his eyes, pronounced, "What a ridiculous name he has – Tarattoon!"

A second later the paramedic's yells mingled with he customary noise in the Area.

I turned my head.

Snapping the iron mesh, Tarattoon overcame its two-meter height and disappeared behind the nearby construction site.

The paramedic, falling on his right leg, ran up to the mesh, yet he had brains enough to figure out that even trying was of no use.

He doffed his white smock, passed it to his partner paramedic and left.

Soon, another paramedic came to fill his place in the tattered armchair.

The Area was in the excited state until the evening, they even stopped masturbating.

Before the rite of feet washing, the redhead cripple entered the Area, pleased as an elephant about his catching that bastard!

We went up to the unit floor and some of us visited the sixth wardroom, where Tarattoon was already lying on his bed, fixed and pacified with the shot of sulfur.

Dragging on the cigarette butt which one of the halfnuts kept in front of his lips, he spoke softly.

He fled to the outskirts of the city and hid in the bushes of a deep ravine, no one saw him there, there were no khuttas around.

How could that red-haired bastard have found him at all?

(...and I felt melancholic sadness about white spots in psychology books as of yet.

While they got stuck and making a muck out of schizophrenia with their monographs and insulin, what fascinating horizons of incomprehensible human capabilities are unfolding around!

How did the sleeping Sasha learn about Tarattoon's flying the coop a few seconds before its actualization?

What led the redhead to the right ravine and to that very bush behind which the fugitive got frozen sitting on his haunches?

There's a hell of a lot of questions that I won't find answers to.

Never.

And others don't care about them at all...)

That tall, emaciated, black-haired young man stood out among the representatives of the new wave by the expression of normality in his thoughtful face, yet he got easily aroused from mere words.

Once, he started talking about some fascists all too ready to walk over dead bodies so that to reach their fascist ends.

I responded with a conversational shrug, "The end justifies the means."

It was an unwise observation because he interpreted my casual remark as an attempt at justifying those unspecified fascists and flared up immensely. Still, I was not hit for that clumsy clue.

Incidentally, he also was a construction worker and brought to the fifth unit at eight o'clock in the evening, directly from the construction site.

"Your team works two shifts?"

"No, we finish at five, I went there just to plan work for the next day."

Oh, sweetie! You did come to the workplace after five, eh?

They're right – your place's in the coop!.

Ah! Yes! There was also music in the Area!

It was being made by a shut-in with a button accordion.

The repertoire comprised two or three songs: "Walking the Don river...", "You're a cop, I'm a thief...", and...and that's all, I think.

The performance of those pieces began in the morning with an interval of an hour.

The interval grew shorter and shorter and in the twilight, the numbers were already running one after another, and again, and again.

That way he achieved perfect virtuosity of performance, to which in the evening was also added singing without too rude deviations out of key.

With those two songs, the accordionist was bringing the Area to an ecstatically orgiastic state, transforming by the evening all of us into a single organism, where each organ did what it was supposed to do.

Some sang along in chorus, others started up dancing, even the absolutely free under their ceramic sun-cracked tan began to squeak somehow in time.

I saw an elderly female paramedic, succumbing to the general ecstasy, she also danced and shouted in the circle of halfnuts under the yellow light from a bulb in the summer twilight.

That's not to say that such euphoria rolled up each evening, but it happened...

Then the accordion player was discharged because his forty-five-day stretch was over.

For two days something was missing for us.

But suddenly after a break for the midday meal, wit a smile of embarrassment on his face, he popped up in the wicket.

That morning he put on his necktie and ventured to the city executive committee to point out to them their mistakes in managing affairs in the city of Romny...

Ivan Corol, which means "king" in English, would have remained quite normal but the name brought him to megalomania, and here he landed among us, one of us, but with royally conceited manners.

He was not patronizing the gaps in the fence to the fourth unit, he was a gourmet. Louis le Roi Soleil.

He lay in ambush for the female plasterers from the nearby construction site to go out on the porch in their mortar splattered spetzovkas.

Then he entered the three-wall box of the tin toilet and, staring through the holes in the tin pierced with erratic nails, he commenced to hastily sweep his palm along his dick—back and forth—standing in profile to the rest of the courtiers in the Area.

Some refined example for the sovereign subjects, eh?

On having it away, he left the Versailles with the royal ceremonial, albeit exhausted, gait.

One of the plasterers took a brush for whitewashing, put it on the porch and started to cut its end with an ax, like, to make it even, or maybe just so, in retaliation.

A male voice cut through the jungle cacophony in the Area: "Put a plank under! Making the ax blunt against concrete, you fool!"

She dropped her jaw, never expecting instructions from that side; she thought there were only ceramic ones.

It's just that I don't like when they spoil instruments. Probably, that's a hereditary trait...

(...as of yet, I have only outlined the external contours of the Area, the shell of it. But what is its essence?

What is the point, if any, in all that chaotically turbulent movement, or the frozen motionlessness, not giving a fuck for anything?

Does it exist? Certainly, yes.

The boiling bouillon chaos of the soup, from messy lightheaded ingredients and motionless vegetables on the bottom, is nothing else but a cross-section of the component parts and the current state of the human race.

The question "how tasty is it?" does not belong here.

So, without much ado, yet strictly to the point, inside the Area, you easily will assort the following five categories of nuts:

a) personnel, aka paramedics, aka bitches in white, etc., etc.;

b) not all there, aka phase-shifted, aka cunt-thinkers, etc., etc.;

c) crazy, aka schizics, aka halfnuts, etc., etc.;

d) nuts, loony, mad, etc., etc.;

e) stark raving mad, aka bananas, aka departed, aka irrevocably free, etc., etc.

To begin with, you need clearly understand and keep it in mind that the boundaries between the above categories are oscillating and overlapping – some medical workers, for instance, are distinguished from certain other forms among the following categories only by the color of their uniform.

Secondly (and this is of prior importance!), the touchstone that allows for differentiation, is the possibility of using the individual in the interests of the current social formation, which creates those Areas. Such a formation must necessarily be current.

Now in order of appearance.

Those suffering from a "phase shift" are distinguished from the normal ones by their inability always and under any conditions remain the same as everyone else.

Therefore, for all those who are constantly like everyone else, they are not all there.

Don Quixote, for example, who was not all there, would have been perfectly fitting into the ranks of the normal in the previous formation, where he would be like everyone else.

Schizics, those incomprehensible geniuses, invent theories of relativity, probability, etc., or write the novel Finnigan's Wake in the aftermath of which the normal are necessitated to pretend they have understood the slightest bit of crap in all that theories or literary works.

Yet, if you try to push forward your crazy ideas without having the appropriate diploma – welcome to the fifth unit! The hospitable Area is waiting for you!

Nuts have difficulties when asked to intelligibly expound the logic of their actions, however, having a musculoskeletal apparatus sufficient to move weights, and being capable of reproduction, they are the backbone of any formation. It's only that from time to time them those sancho panzas must have their ass kicked so they'd wipe the drivel off their gaping muzzles and keep off crossing the street to red.

The Tarzan-like roaring departed, who has achieved absolute freedom from the conventions of morality and behavior patterns of human species, would easily become their own in the family of brown bears, or in the lost, and never found by Darvin, link between the ape and human herds, but the present normal have no application for his qualities.

Yes, but why shall we need each other? What could the normal have to do with the absolutely free?

Let's don't forget the mobility and overlapping of the categories, before reaching the absolute, the departed had been start-ups within the lower leagues.

Besides, some of the normal (or else exceptionally gifted pretenders) could still harbor hope for a return of the departed ones out of the rough.

"Shine! Shine on!

You, crazy diamond!"

Don't get scared, partner! They can't catch up!

They cannot climb up to the shining peaks of your absolute freedom...

What category am I personally from?

By the method of excluding the superfluous, I irrefutably find myself a not all there.

After all, no normal one would allow themselves the luxury of a hearty laugh when all alone, and there is no "Comedy Club" on the TV.

Besides, I hear voices in my dreams, I will not hide.

I'm sleeping, and they read to me—in a detachedly impersonal and distanced tone of voice—pieces of prose.

I must confess, rather enviable passages of neatly composed and glibly flowing prose they are, somehow resembling a movie screenplay.

From time to time the reading voice gets substituted with visual action illustrations, yet when there's a change in the storyline, it pops up back and starts to mumble again.

I'd rather turn them those voices off, not because of being envious, it's just that they interfere with my sleep, but I don't know where's their switch control.

Belonging to the departed is excluded because of my aversion to impurities; both physical and mental.

Well, and I do not have the IQ to place myself among the geniuses.

I have not been tested but I know for sure it won't be enough for the category.

In the course of life, you naturally have to zip in any of the categories because each of us is just a drop in the streams of the current formation.

Sometimes, the current gives me over to a stream to drag along the rapids, at other times I happen to be kicking back in the languid backwaters.

That's what my letter, actually, is about, which I am now due to proceed with...)

Everything returns to normal, and in forty-five days I returned to our team.

A couple or so of months later, the buttocks also returned to their normal shape. The body is fluid.

It's only that walking along the Settlement streets, where, in the dusty potholes of the future puddle-pools, provisionally filled with the scattered piles of apples fetched out from under the trees in gardens and dumped in the road, I felt saddened that everything rolled on somehow without me.

"So the summer has passed,

As if it's never happened..."

At 13 Decemberists appeared Guena, the husband of my sister Natasha.

He was a representative of a well-to-do layer in the population.

His mother, Natalya Savelyevna, with her face and blue eyes was like a movie star from the Mosfilm, but she worked in the station restaurant and every evening returned from there burdened with food loaded bags.

Her husband, Anatoly Phillipovich, had already retired, kept shouting at everyone and swallowing his medications – an unmistakable specimen of the managing stratum.

The newlyweds still did not get along with the husband's parents, but there's a time for everything...

Yes, I missed the wedding, but every cloud has a silver lining and Lenochka had gone all the way to "Artek". It turned out feasible, despite the pessimistic forecast of "boss" Slaushevsky. Besides, all came off so cheap, I did not pay a kopeck for her seaside summer, the expenditures for recreational facilities in our land were traditionally met by trade-unions.

Did Lenochka meet her mother Olga? After all, Theodosia was also in the Crimea.

I do not know. I never learned to ask the most elementary, simple, questions...

The newlyweds returned to live with the Guena's parents and, as the wedding present, I built in their khutta yard the walls for garage and summer kitchen combined into one shed. The roof and plastering were not of my concern though.

Well, there were still partitions in the bathroom inside the khutta. Just so trifles...

The mail brought for me to 13 Decemberists was placed on the handmade shelves, next to the photograph of Eera during her pioneer practice near the town of Kozelsk, in the north of Chernigov region, where she stood amidst the summer stream in black sports pants rolled up above her knees, and smiled from under the plastic visor of a light kerchief...

My mail was invariably the thick monthly Vsesvit in Ukrainian. I opened it and, with my eyes closed, sniffed somewhere from the middle – I always liked the smell of fresh print ink.

However, this time there was nothing to smell, it was an envelope which I disliked at first sight.

It looked like having been ripped open with a kitchen knife and then, in a fit of funk, they daubed the rent with glue spread, just in case, in thrice more quantities than needed.

Here, at once and all too clearly, the hand of layman was felt, a maiden flight of the younger generation.

I opened the envelope from the side, but I still had to tear off a piece of paper stuck with glue, sacrificing pieces of typewritten text.

"What is it, Seryozha?" my mother asked anxiously.

"Did Lenochka not tell you?"

"No."

"She will then."

It was a summons to the local people's court over the lawsuit of a resident of Nezhin, Citizen Eera, to dissolve the marriage since the family, in fact, never existed, and I was regularly taken to psychiatric hospitals diagnosed with schizophrenia...

In the queue for the soon-to-be divorcees on the second floor of the people's court, I was the second, after a couple of ample-bodied local people disappointed in the institution of marriage. They looked like a pair of fluffed-up dove-pigeons, absolutely not talking to each other, and taking pains to gaze the other way.

A girl, a little over the age of twenty, invited them to enter for the procedure.

For several minutes from behind the door, there was heard a dialogue of varying loudness but of the same illegibility.

Then the couple went out of the door, still not looking at each other, and blushy in their complexion, as if leaving the steam room in a bathhouse.

One after another—the man first—they left...

In the room looking like a corridor, two tables formed the letter "T".

The judge was sitting in the center of the crossbar table equipped with two lay judges, one for either his side.

They were a thirty-year-old fair-haired man of military uprightness and a woman over her forties who had let all of it go at all.

The girl-clerk got seated at the second table where it adjoined the upper one.

I liked the judge at once – a handsome man about thirty-five who looked like judges from Western movies. His jacket was off and he even opened a pair of top buttons on his waistcoat to represent a true embodiment of the Western democracy.

I decided to play along with him and, sitting on a chair a meter off the "T's" base, assumed the attitude of a kicking back cowboy – the left leg stretched out with its heel stuck into the floor, and the right heel resting over the left foot.

"Get seated as you should! Don't get it where you are?" barked the fair-haired.

"If you demonstrate how to sit at attention, I'll be happy to ape you, Comrade Lance-Corpo.."

"Well, okay!" intervened the judge. "Let him sit as he likes."

Then he read up the lawsuit of Citizen Eera about the absence of a family and my diagnosis. He finished off and addressed me, "What can you say in this respect?"

"My wife is always right. Each word of hers is the holy, purest, truth," averred I solemnly.

The girl-clerk wrote down that not only the Ceaser's wife could be beyond any suspicion.

The judge used his home-made trump with which he had started, pumped and heated up the previous pair of divorcees, "But wasn't there at least anything good in your marriage?"

"Why not? We were the sexiest lovers of the institute."

With a sidelong glance at the innocent blush in the girl clerks countenance, the judge announced that was enough and the court needn't any more evidence.

Thus was dissolved my wedlock with Eera.

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Solitary Barge Hauler

My cheeky snubs to the judge at the people's court straightened out my chest, but not for long.

All slipped back along the same eternal rut: "O! Woe to me! What for? I loved so much! I was doing my best! Why me?"

The unanswerable questions took turns with the sticky meek dream that one of these days Eera would come and everything would be fine again...

The fact, that through the divorce Eera had, with straightforward logic, cleared her way to further life without me around, did not diminish the longing for the unreachable, neither shooed off the hope that everything, somehow, will become fine all the same...

However, uninterrupted suffering is a pretty tiresome occupation and, gradually, I formed a firm opinion that the divorce had to somehow be celebrated.

But in what way? I knew no rituals on the subject and could only improvise.

One thing was clear though, I needed a day not like all other days. And it was for such a day that I went to Kiev.

The Indian summer that year transgressed all common-sense limits and, even though it was the first week of November, I ventured there in my jacket. Taking into account the fall's depth reached in the calendar, the dark gray waistcoat went along with the jacket. It did not belong to any three-piece suit but was sewn back in my school years, by that same sharp-nosed tailor in her shop next to the bus station.

Such was my rig (plus a shirt and pants) when I emerged from the metro station on Khreschatyk Street and moved slowly along its sidewalks grown with gorgeous chestnuts.

I went down to Red Army Street cobbled with polished flagstones, and walked farther down its slope to the "Foreign Book" store, to make myself the event-marking present, which caught my eye way back during the business trip to the dairy reconstruction. On the way, I had to keep in check a slight worry: what if they had already sold it?

Yet, I was almost sure and didn't get much surprised making out the bright red jacket of Chamber's 20th Century Dictionary on the same very shelf.

The salesman, observing my festive outfit—from under the waistcoat, there also peeped the open collar of my faded red shirt—asked politely if I indeed would want that particular book.

(...I was not surprised by his doubt – in that year of the then-current 20th century, not every folk could afford a book for 31 rubles 60 kopecks.

Except, of course, for the bricklayers celebrating their divorce...)

I left the store with the thick volume tightly wrapped in their special lavender-colored packing paper. It had to be left in an automatic storage cell at the station.

Yet, how to get there? On the subway again? No, it was another kind of day. And I approached the curb with flocks of taxis shooting by...

From the station, I also went to "The Hunter" store, at the address given me by Grinya, who wanted some folding fishing rod from there.

After the shopping spree with subsequent storing of the goods, there started the cultural part of the program.

That evening The House of Organ Music was filled with the sun shimmer over the sea waves in the pieces by Debussy. Bright sparkling notes of the happy ripples and splashes...

As I was a child, my father told me that when listening to such music people were supposed to draw some mental pictures to fit it. I never could follow his advice, the sounds overpowered all clever intentions leaving no space for anything else...

In the post-concert twilight outside The House, the mid-autumn chill stir-up to my hunger. The taxi took me to the restaurant of "The Golden Wheat" hotel.

First, I tried to rent a room there for a sleepover, but the receptionist assessed my rig, incongruent with the season, as well as the absence of any luggage, and cut me off with the usual question below the belt: if I had booked a room. They very well knew how to cope with vagrant freelancers.

In the restaurant, to orient myself, I ordered a bottle of wine for a starter, and an elderly man with a beret on his head immediately got seated on the chair opposite me.

(...when there is a beret, but no briefcase about the man, then you are dealing with an electrician...)

We did not have time to drink even a glass when a young blonde geezer landed at the third side of the table. For some unspecified reason, he began putting his fingers in the composition "I'll take your eyes out!" The electrician grew quiet under his beret.

My holiday program did not foresee any gladiatorial amusements, so I got up on my feet: "All right, young man. I leave this feast to you. Enjoy!"

I went to the waiters, paid for the wine and left.

The blonde rushed after me to the lobby, but of the three glazed entrance vestibules, only one was opened to the porch, seeing me through lots of glass doors he, in his heated zeal, did not manage to choose the right one.

I waved my hand for goodbye and went away...

Sleeping in a waiting hall of the station would hardly add festiveness for the day. Another taxi took me to the hotel "Old Prague" that was the driver's choice.

The young receptionist there had also picked up the subject of beforehand reservation, but suddenly turned merciful and found a room for me.

She warned though it was more expensive, which was understandable though because, besides the room, there was a hallway with a sideboard in it.

Getting there, I decided it was enough for putting fate to test with my attire, and ordered dinner in the room – fish with potatoes and wine, let it be white, please...

Waking up late in the morning, I checked out and went for a walk around the city.

On the sidewalk near the Golden Gate, a blond young man ran panting by, apparently a part to the monad of the yesterday's boob, who got stuck in the labyrinth of glass vestibules at the Golden Wheat.

It looked like their whole monad would have a tough job of getting from the mess they got into with the feast I had generously thrown to them. But the fool ran into it himself...

On the descent to Bessarabian Market, I decided it was time to dine, and turned into the restaurant "Leningrad".

In front of me, a group of Negroes entered the same place, however, I was anything but a racist and followed them. Still, I did not like the over-fat scruff of their file closer; a piece of obese Africa.

In the afternoon gloom of the restaurant, I could not see in what woodwork they managed to blend leaving me the only guest in the room.

I ordered something "in the pot", so it was named on the menu. They brought potatoes mixed with meat and brown souse, but all that in a ceramic pot, as promised.

Eating from the pot was very uncomfortable and also too hot. But I guessed to pour a part of the steaming stuff into a plate on the table, and then was gradually adding to it from the pot.

Before going out, I entered the restaurant's empty quiet toilet and left it a completely different person, not like the one who had come to "Leningrad".

The lines by Ivan Franko were slowly swirling in the head:

"One by one get severed the hobbles,

We've been tied with to the life of the past..."

And not only that.

The main difference between me entering and me leaving the restaurant was the absence of the jacket, which I intentionally left hanging in the toilet.

It was the wedding jacket in which I was registered as Eera's husband in the ZAGS of Nezhin.

Besides, it was the same one that survived my premature attempt at leaving it in the toilet of the restaurant "Bratislava" in Odessa. Perhaps, the time then was not ripe yet.

Was it an act on the celebration program list? No, it sooner was an impromptu inspiration, but I liked it.

Eased and relieved, I lightly walked up Khreschatyk which was being prepared for the demonstration on the 7th of November.

The troops of the Kiev garrison were training their parade step, and a brass band was playing loudly.

Along the sidewalk, they had put endless board stands for spectators, just three steps, but very wide indeed, so that they would watch the demonstration and wave their hands in a show of approbation and joy.

Before the demonstration, there remained two more days and the steps were still empty. I walked along the middle one, clapping my heels against its thick planks, a man in his prime, in a red shirt under a gray waistcoat, and the sun rays vibrated through the branches of mighty chestnuts.

I walked to the metro station and was ready again to face trenches, walls, and partitions.

People do need holidays to live on further...

When Panchenko – without even peeping out to check if it might crush someone's unaware scull – hurled a pig iron four-section heating radiator from a window on the fourth floor, as if just having nothing better for a pastime, his quirk, in fact, had a quite sound underlying reason.

With that bolt out of the blue, he signaled to all who might be concerned, that the veteran jailbird's balls were still unshaven, and under his eight-wedge cap (the vogue sported by toughs in the fifties) he still was quite a crazy machine.

The signal was addressed, first of all, to his superintendent in charge of drawing work orders that determined Panchenko's monthly payment, and to the chief mechanic in whose division he turned a fresh leaf to start a new, honest, life. And it was high time already for a mujik in his mid-fifties.

Of course, it did not concern him in any way, that after the second time in Romny I had no chance of keeping the position of the trade-union's visitor at SMP-615.

That, at first somewhat chaotic, position I did manage to bring to the impeccable state-of-the-art perfection.

Forgotten were the times when someone from the jacks or carpenters returning to work after a couple of days in the railway hospital grumbled disparaging complains about being neglected and not visited by me in the infirmary, whereas no bricklayer on my team was ever ignored.

But how could I know? Their foremen did not report to me!

The problem was solved radically – at the end of every working day, I started calling the hospital registry office to ask if they had taken for treatment any employee of SMP-615.

Then there arose the question of right usage for the three rubles, which the trade-union allocated for visiting a hospitalized co-worker.

How to spend the sum, so that each sufferer received the equal amount of consolation, regardless of their age, gender, and other inclinations?

Not at once, but that issue also found its own and—without indulging in false modesty—a superbly clear-cut solution.

One ruble was spent on drinks – the invariable three bottles: one of beer, one of lemonade, one of kefir.

Cakes, marshmallows and/or other sweets were bought for the second ruble.

For spending the final, third one, I went to the railway station to chose from the wide counter of the news stall, nearby the restaurant entrance, the always popular cartoon magazine Perets, the Konotop city newspaper The Soviet Banner—which my father affectionately called "our liar cur"—and a couple of the central periodicals for the kopecks of change.

From the station, with the fully readied visiting package, I walked to the hospital...

Frictions arose later when I was handing in the report for the three rubles spent by me to be reimbursed by the trade-union.

"Boss" Slaushevsky rigorously protested mentioning the bottle of beer in the report. (The trade-union and beer are two things completely incompatible; mutually exclusive, so to say.)

Then, as a compromise, I suggested he write the reports himself and I would sign anything.

And now that, brought to the perfect equilibrium, shebang had to live no longer than until the November report-election trade-union meeting of SMP-615.

Still and all, I did manage to feed Panchenko waffles...

Hearing on the telephone from the registry, that they had a certain Panchenko from SMP-615, I realized there was no time to lose, I did not want to risk a sudden discharge.

First of all, I bought waffles for him. Then again waffles. And once more – waffles, for the entire ruble, all in different wrappers and from different shops...

With a sidelong glance to the already dark evening outside the windows without grates, I praised the interior of the hospital hall. The cellophane packet in my hand issued a soft tempting tinkle when I handed it over to the patient.

He could not refuse, like any other worker of SMP-615, he knew perfectly that there was beer as well...

Why was I so uncontrollably laughing wandering from shop to shop in search of waffles of different colors? It's hard to explain, but I laughed until tears streamed down my cheeks...

A couple of days later, Lyda, a bricklayer from our team, asked me confidentially in the trailer, "Visited Panchenko?"

"Sure."

"With cakes?"

"No. To him – only waffles."

She knew that I never lied, for the principle's sake.

I fell silent and tense because once again I had to restrain a surge of inappropriate laughter.

In a moment, Panchenko entered the trailer for some reason.

Carefully, weighing each of her words, Lyda asked if I had visited him.

"Yes."

"With the package?"

"Well, there were some newspapers. I did not even read them."

No more words were said.

The rest she poured out at home to her husband Mykola. That he was already a family man for whom it was the shame to look up to that wafflister Panchenko...

I did not immediately understand why the divorce proceedings left me with a feeling of some incompleteness. Something was amiss.

(...the trademark of my retardedness is that in the end, I get it, of which, at first, did not even guess to think about...)

It turned out, that the people's judge had completely forgotten to mention alimony! As if I was childless.

The task of correcting the judicial error lay on my shoulders.

Since December, I started sending monthly 30 rubles to Red Partisans for which transaction, on the payday, I visited the post-office opposite the bus station.

And, as you were not my only child, I sent the same amount to 13 Decemberists as well.

For several years "30 to Nezhin, 30 to Konotop" had become my financial way of life, and the most recursive line in the pocket notebook.

Why just that sum? I did not know.

In total that made up half of my earnings.

For the second half, apart from my hygiene-bath-laundry expenses, I sometimes bought books, and every day had a midday havvage at canteens.

At first, my mother tried to convince me that the Konotop's "30" could be brought home and past from hand to hand, although she did not even need that money; my argument was that my way of doing it was more convenient.

My status of an alimony-payer was not a secret for our team, with my principle of answering direct questions directly, it was enough for them to ask why each payday I ran to the post-office from our Seagull.

And some women bricklayers also asked that question: why 30 rubles exactly?

Fighting back a wave of anger welling up in me from I didn't know where, I answered no more was necessary and were I even paid 3,000 rubles a month, the monthly "30" to Nezhin and Konotop would remain just "30".

There were times when I was not able to send out the alimony, and then the line "30 to Nezhin, 30 to Konotop" had to wait until the required sum was scratched up, and after sending it a tick popped up next to the line...

At certain periods, I sent only 15 rubles each way.

One such period followed after I accidentally overheard a talk between my mother and my sister Natasha. They were discussing Eera's having sold my sheepskin coat, and keeping all the money to herself.

I did note the disappearance of the sheepskin coat, but I had no idea where it was gone or why.

Now, to restore the reputation of Caesar's wife, I had to lower the alimony rate to 15 rubles, until the sum of 90 rubles was collected.

I took the money to Nezhin and, in the post-office on Red Partisans Street, I asked an occasional visitor to fill out the money order address as I dictated.

In the space reserved for a personal note, I wrote in clumsy handwriting, slanting left, "for the sheepskin coat."

Why 90 rubles? The market price of a new sheepskin coat with longer skirts amounted to 120 rubles. Mine was short and way back from the Object – the rest was pure arithmetic.

On receiving so large money remittance, my mother wanted to ask me about something, but at that time I was not on speaking terms with my parents, so there was no point in asking the deaf and dumb fool of me about "for the sheepskin coat."

(...here, it is interesting to note, that the wisdom of outsiders cannot make us smarter.

In one of his stories, telling about a young man who stopped communicating with his parents, Maugham remarks that in this harsh and hostile world people will always find a way to make their situation even worse.

I agreed with the wisdom of the maxim, but I did not use it.

It took ten years of separation—four of which were spent in a full-scale war—so that when arrived on a visit to Konotop, I started again to talk with my parents.

And it was pleasant to pronounce the words "Mom", Dad".

But only it just felt as if I was not addressing my parents, or it was not exactly I talking to them.

Probably, the habit was lost, or maybe because that all of us, by that time, had already changed so much...)

As expected, trade-union positions were closed to me, but no one could hope to deprive me of the right to fulfill my public duty.

I mean the monthly watches of the volunteer public order squad.

By seven o'clock in the evening, SMP-615 male employees gathered in a long room of the "stronghold of the public order squad" with its entrance from the butt wall of the endless five-story block by the Under-Overpass. That same building where there was the workers' canteen number three, at the opposite end.

Mykola Kot, a truck crane driver, came one of the first and, without removing his hat of black rabbit fur, got seated at a side desk to flip through the pile of newspapers, accumulated there since our turn of duty one month before.

The men gradually collected into the room and, sitting down on chairs alongside the walls, gossiped of nothing in particular.

Kot, still getting acquainted with the press from the days of the past, predicted casually that were we even to start our yacking from as high as about space orbital stations, the conversation would inevitably slip over down to the female twat. And, as a rule, he was right.

At about ten past seven, there came a militia officer—ranking from lieutenant to captain—contributed to the mujiks' gossip before taking from a drawer in his desk and handing out the red armbands with the black inscription "public order squad".

Then, in threes, we left the stronghold to patrol the late evening sidewalks in vigil beats – to the station, to Depot Street, to the Loony and along Peace Avenue, but no farther than the bridge in the railway embankment.

The round took about forty-five minutes after which stretch we returned to the base—some of the threes tired and emotional—and after a more enliven yackety session, set off for the final watch, so that by ten o'clock we would go home until the next duty turn a month later...

A couple of times, KGB officers appeared at our evenings with their instructions.

The first time it happened on the occasion of the upcoming Holiday of the Great October Revolution, and we were instructed to be especially vigilant not to allow provocative pranks.

When the KGBist left, a belated militia officer appeared with the question if we had learned it well, that seeing a spy we should immediately grab him by the collar.

The second and last time, another KGB officer shared secret information to facilitate the capture, ASAP, of a former KGB worker who disappeared in an unknown direction.

She could have changed her hairstyle and color of her hair, explained the KGB officer showing us her black-and-white portrait, yet she got a special sign to simplify identification – a contraceptive coil of Dutch production inserted in her vagina.

Our mujiks did not immediately understand what all that was about, but in a moment poured so suggestive questions that the KGBist thought it best to leave.

After all, he only executed his orders and was not responsible for the stupidity thereof...

In one of the vigil rounds, the guys from my "trinity" gave me a slip.

Walking in a group of three ornamented with red armbands, looked more or less sane, but seeing that among the passers-by along the sidewalk of trampled snow under the windows of Deli 6, you were the only one with a red rag on your arm, made you feel as if you were not all there.

With a brazen mug, to show that I did not care a fig, I went on to the station square. However, carpenter Mykola and driver Ivan was not to be made out from among the hasty silhouettes of passers-by. Some of the younger people looked back at a strange phenomenon – a saucy solo public order trooper.

It did not take to be a genius for figuring out that my co-volunteers had pulled off the armbands, bought a bottle of "the mutterer" in some grocery store, and now, in a secluded place, were gurgling in turn from the neck to tone up and get warmer.

Where? That was the question.

Most likely, in the quiet mess of short lanes and dead ends between Deli 6 and the high first platform of the station. In that jumble of warehouses, venereal dispensary, a couple of private khuttas without kitchen gardens, and other timber structures.

There I turned not because of being eager to share from their "the mutterer", but to make them ashamed and perplexed by the power of the deductive method, detecting them in a quiet nook under a lamppost...

However, instead of the carpenter with the driver, in the dim cone of light from the lamp, I ran into a genre scene.

A romantic couple—a girl walking with a youth—were intercepted by their mutual acquaintance, a burly young geezer, who started sorting it out.

The appearance of the fourth superfluous with a red armband slowed down the action but only for a moment. Realizing that no more vigilantes were to be expected, the tough started to kick the ass of his smaller, but luckier in love, opponent.

The bantam fell on one knee and, having thrown aside on the snow his jacket of "fish-fur" fabric, next to his hat already knocked off there, rushed into a retaliatory attack.

I stayed a non-interfering on-looker with a red rag on my arm.

The girl picked up the jacket with the hat and held them, as Eera had once been holding my rabbit fur hat in the main square of Nezhin.

With the odds being too long, the lightweight got stretched in the snow, the girl folded his clothes under the lamp, and took the conquerer by the arm, and walked with him away, into the labyrinth of the tangled snow-clad alleys.

The defeated rose and, seeing I was still there, burst out with a confusedly ardent oration to praise the strength of spirit, before which physical strength was nothing because only the spirit had power.

In Konotop, every other passer-by was a born lord-speaker.

To morally support Demosthenes, I reported that during the fight the girl held exactly his things, and not the fur "potty" hat of his opponent, which also had been knocked off in the snow.

Hearing the words of consolation, he shut up and hastily checked the pockets in his jacket because, with all innate love for oratorical art, the common-sense is a more prominent feature when distinguishing a Konotoper...

And no one could ever forbid me to cater that women of our team each year received flowers on March 8—callas—one flower for each female bricklayer, because I was not a millionaire, and not every year mujiks in our team guessed to ask how much I had paid and collect a ruble per man.

However, the reimbursement of the expenses did not bother me much. I made the discovery, that I liked giving presents much more than getting them myself.

But first, I had to find the city greenhouse which was as far as hell itself. You had to get off streetcar 2 one stop before reaching the route terminal. Then take the left turn, and stomp for half-kilometer along the streets from the Civil War. Like, Yudenich Street, or, say, Denikin Street.

The names though were quite Soviet, but the look and feel unmistakably White-Guardian...

When I came to the greenhouse for the first time, the manager took me into a long squat structure with its gable roof made of squares of muddy glass dripping large rare drops of water.

She wanted me to make it sure for myself that there were no flowers. As for all those plantings, the callas there had not yet matured, not "flared up", they were just white flowers not turned into the wide-lapel muzzles.

And then, without the slightest vestige of my tongue-tied speech problems, I gave out to her a sample piece of Konotop oratory.

That was to her, who every day was walking among the greenery of the greenhouse beds, those callas seemed not ripe. But for women of our bricklayer team, who day after day saw nothing but crushed bricks, mortar and icy hillocks of dirty snow, those callas, even in so-called not "flared-up" form, were the most beautiful flowers...

Since then, while I was working in our team, I never was said "no" in the city greenhouse on the eve of March 8.

And I proudly drove in a streetcar a bunch of green-and-white callas that would appear in "The Flowers" store by Peace Square no sooner than in a half-month...

My decision was final and irrevocable – it's time to sum it up. The story I was translating should close the books. That's enough of Maugham for me.

Even the fact that the concluding story had to be translated twice could not shake my resolution.

I was forced to translate it for the second time because Tolik Polos path-lifted my briefcase, which, as it was, contained nothing but the copybook with the last translation, when in the morning I took it with me to go after work to Zhomnir in Nezhin.

In the Settlement, there were no passers-by at such an early hour, at least along the railway tracks to the station. On reaching the concrete wall surrounding the KaPeVeRrZe Plant, I remembered about money for the local train ticket, which I had left behind.

So, I had to go back and that I did, leaving the briefcase to stand alone by the path of the service passage.

Returning to the Settlement streets, I met only Tolik who walked in the opposite direction. He also graduated from School 13 but two years after me.

After grabbing the forgotten money, I retracted back to the path by the railway tracks. The briefcase was nowhere to see.

Only Tolik and I had walked that path. Or had there been someone else?

The answer was received a week later on streetcar 3.

Tolik did not say "hello" to me, he only was making faces from his seat, in the style of Slavik Aksyanov at the "Dophinovka" mine. But—most importantly—his right hand was plastered.

Was there a need for more direct evidence that it was he who picked up a lonely briefcase in a desolate place?

Not for me.

(....sometimes in my life, I am able to not only see but even read the signs...)

On the whole, the work that followed was not a re-translation, the story was still vividly contained in my mind and one month later, I took my last translation to Zhomnir, but already without the briefcase.

So, albeit with a month's delay, my decision to part with Maugham was executed.

However, it was only a part of a broader plan of action.

Like any other of my plans, it was lacking clear concrete details. My plans, as it were, could hardly be called plans at all, being, like, the feelings of it was necessary to do this or that. Details to the plans came only afterward – in the course of execution.

The afore-mentioned broad plan arose because I, finally, realized that Zhomnir would do "match-making" for none of my translations. Both never, and nowhere. And it did not matter why, the main thing was that it was for sure.

So what now? Very simple, the issue of publication should be solved in a make-it-yourself way.

To go that way, I had to take from Zhomnir all my translations, all the thin school copybooks, in covers of different colors, piled somewhere among papers stacks on the shelves in his archive chamber...

I arrived in Nezhin and announced to him about my intention to take back my still-not-alpha versions of Maugham in Ukrainian. Zhomnir did not object and did not ask any questions.

He arranged a feast because during these years I became sort of a distant relative in his house. A poor one of no consequence, but at times handy when, say, pasting the living-room of his apartment with wallpaper...

We sat at the square table, pushed from the wall to the center of the living room, and ate everything being brought by Maria Antonovna from the kitchen. We drank a strong village moonshine.

Zhomnir was enthusiastically discussing the gold pectoral of great artistic value, recently excavated from an ancient mound in the steppe.

Changing the subject, he asked how my current relations with Nezhin were, meaning Eera.

I proudly stated those relations to be fruitful, meaning you.

Then I cautiously asked how Eera was.

"How what?" answered Zhomnir. "Whoring around the city."

It rammed me in the solar plexus, although not as hard as the words of Eera that she had a certain Sasha, about who she cared to share with my sister Natasha, who withheld the news until my divorce with Eera, to make a booby prize of it, I suppose.

Most of all, I was struck by the complete coincidence of Zhomnir's response with the words of the mujik at the Konotop brick factory replying to my question about Olga.

(...for all the difference in educational and cultural level, when we need to knock our neighbor's brains out, we use the same old good stone ax...)

When it was time to set off for the local train, Zhomnir put all the copybooks with my translations in a cellophane bag that become tight and heavy, and went out to escort me to the station.

That moonshine was damn well strong stuff, but I remember how the local train pulled up and with a hiss slam the doors open.

Refusing Zhomnir's help, I went towards the round tunnel of the car vestibule with gleams of nickel-plated handrails on both sides.

Catching the left one, I climbed inside, went over to the opposite, closed, door and hung the bag on the top-knob of the handrail there.

The last thing I heard was the sound of the door slamming shut behind me...

When I slowly came to my senses, I still stood there, clutching in my left hand the top-knob of the handrail by the closed door.

The train also stood motionless at the fourth platform of the Konotop railway station.

It was empty of passengers because according to the timetable it departed to Khutor Mikhailovsky in two hours after its arrival in Konotop.

The sight of the empty handrail by the door turned my abdominal muscles stone hard and stopped still my breathing.

On all the three remaining top-knobs in the car vestibule, there was no cellophane bag as well.

Slamming the sliding door, I went into the empty car and glanced along the empty rack rails above the windows, then I returned to the vestibule and exhaled: hooooey!

I did not feel like sitting in the leatherette-covered seats of the empty local train, and I went through the underground passage and over the station square to the Loony park, to a hard wooden bench.

There I sat for a long time without any thoughts, only now and then imagining myself in the form of a stupidly frozen statue by the handrail, while they were removing the cellophane bag.

Who?!. What's the difference?

Whoever was the pillager, they hardly got any happier with such a useless spoil, except for kindling firewood in their stove, it would do for quite a few winters.

After the stupefied sitting for about an hour, I remembered that it was SMP-615 on-duty day in the public order squad and I dragged myself to the stronghold room to sit on further – indifferent, detached, and silent.

Only with the arrival of the militia officer, I knew what to do next.

"Comrade Captain, lend me tree rubles till our next turn on duty."

"I do not lend in rubles. Only in days of arrest. Fifteen enough?"

His dull wit only confirmed the correctness of my plan...

The next day, three rubles were borrowed from our team and after work, I went to Nezhin.

There, in the five-story block for the institute teachers in the Count's Park, I found the apartment of ever-smiling Nona and said her that after several years of work, I lost all of my translations from Maugham.

Now, for their restoration, I needed the originals of the stories, all of which were collected in the four-volume edition by the Penguin Publishing House that was in her possession. Could she, please?.

With her usual sweet smile, Nona brought the books, placed them into a cellophane bag, and handed over to me. With what a joy my heart was pounding – thank you!.

"How do you like it, Maria Antonovna. This scoundrel of Ogoltsoff lost all of his translations in the local train!"

"Because you shouldn't have made the poor boy drink so much!"

Maria Antonovna also did not know that all my misfortunes or joys, ups, and downs, all my pleasures, and deprivations were determined by that rascal on the Varanda River bank in an unimaginably faraway future...

"The habit is given to us from above,

As a fit substitution for happiness..."

This immortal line of the great classic implies unequivocally, that for the third time in Romny they raked me up exclusively out of the established habit.

And that time almost everyone in SMP-615 knew that any other day they would nab me.

Two years later, at an accidental meeting on the narrow trail along the railway embankment, behind the sports grounds on the outskirts of the engineering college, that knowledge was disclosed also to me by the retired Major Petukhov, the then head of the personnel department of SMP-615.

Without any pressure or leading questions from my part, Petukhov told me how the superintendent Ivan kept coming every other day from the construction site to the personnel department head's office to call psychiatrist Tarasenko about my latest deviations.

"He sang this morning. Maybe it's time?"

"Let him sing."

"He wrote an explanatory note in verse."

"What note?"

"He lost his helmet and I demanded to write an explanatory. Will you come after him?"

"Not yet."

"He shoved his shirt into a hole in the bridging slab and buried it with mortar."

"That's it! Take care he doesn't get away."

Singing at the workplace I allowed myself not every day, but rather often.

Sometimes, especially when a construction site in At-Seven-Winds drowned in a dense cold fog, one or another bricklayer from our team would ask, "Sing, Sehryoga!"

"I had a wife,

She loved me so much,

And just one time she cheated,

And then she made her mind:

" _Eh! One time, yes, and once again,_

And many, many, many, many more times again..."

However, to the Vysotsky's trade-mark Gypsy Girl our team, almost unanimously, preferred his The Ballad of Gypsum:

" I lay prostrate, all plastered over,

My every member's well pre-packaged!.."

As for the helmet, it was not lost, it's just that I had flashed off with my gentlemanly urbane nature.

I was walking among the construction sites of At-Seven-Winds and by the nine-story block, there were female plasterers from PMK-7.

They picked some flowers in the fresh grass, most likely, dandelions because yellow they were.

When asked for a cellophane packet, I, with a wide, hussar, gesture, threw them my helmet to use as a basket for collected flowers. Then I even pointed out the brown trailer of our team for them to return the headgear to. Since then I had seen neither them nor my helmet...

Of all our team, it was only I who wore a helmet, that's why the superintendent Ivan made a fuss with his explanatory note. But calling "verses" the note written by me on his demand was staring flattery, it might be considered vers libre, at most...

Well, about the shirt, yes. With that shirt, I ran into it flatly.

That time I imprudently indulged in my inclination to self-invented rituals, because it was the first day of summer. So, was it possible not to observe the event?

In summer, even wearing nothing but a tank top under your spetzovka, you still swim in your sweat; a shirt in summer is a redundant element.

That green shirt of some kind of finely creased synthetics I had been wearing for six years. Yet, that bitch of a shirt did not want to wear off, and I had to sweat in it like in any other synthetic fabric, despite its being finely creased.

And so, on June 1, when I got out of the trailer, the green shirt was, like, an artistic wrap on top of my black spetzovka put, in its turn, on my stark naked torso.

I went up to the workplace and buried the shirt in one of many loop-holes in the floor slabs among the unfinished walls.

There were no garbage bins at the site and just to throw the shirt into the latrine's ochco did not seem right – we had been so close, sweat mingling buddies for so many years...

Then I went to the third floor of the next section and laid the traverse wall with ventilation ducts working alone until Peter Lysoon appeared to call me to the trailer.

Along the way, he somehow kept his eyes off me and spoke on esoteric botanical topics.

All those strange symptoms flew out of my head when in front of our trailer I saw a UAZ-van with a burly militiaman next to it in his red-band forage cap and psychiatrist Tarasenko.

Our team, together with overseer Karenin and superintendent Ivan, formed an uneven semicircle about the visitors.

Tarasenko announced to the audience that my behavior had always been abnormal, and today I stepped over the line with burying my shirt into the hole in a concrete slab.

Then he democratically asked the crowd if they had noted additional anomalies about me.

The people responded with silence.

One of our women endeavored to clarify that the shirt was completely worn out, and Tarasenko, so that to avoid meandering discussion of the topic, ordered me to go into the trailer and change my clothes.

I obeyed unquestioningly, and then I climbed into the van with somewhat drunkard in its hold, and we were driven away...

During the stop near the Medical Center, the drunk started convincing me to jerk the claws in different directions – the militiaman couldn't chase two at once.

I kept quiet, realizing that it was better forty-five days under syringes than the rest of my life on the run.

Then a young plain-clothes guard joined us, bringing one more drunk and, along the trodden familiar road, I was taken back to Romny.

On the way, we made a stop in some roadside village to load into the hold a couple of old women in black, and a troubled man who swore to all the present, in turn, that he did not remember anything of what was yesterday.

Upon arrival at the psychiatric hospital, we were taken in different directions and, for some reason, I was X-rayed in a supine position. Probably, they were just testing a newly installed equipment.

I did not see any of the drunks anymore, in the madhouse such cases were taken care of by unit 3, while for me the fifth unit was waiting...

And again the Area became an arena for the daily brainwashing applied to my ass, followed with the overcrowded wardroom for the night repose.

Of the acquaintances among all the categories higher than that of the absolutely free, I saw only Sasha, who knew my brother Sasha, but he slept without ever waking up.

As a veteran and for the sake of philanthropy, I turned to the head doctor with a plea to exchange my iminazine injections with iminazine pills.

She promised to think it over and, ten days before the end of the stretch, she canceled the concluding stab from the three injections in my daily quota.

And right now, her name popped up in my grateful mind – Nina it was.

Nothing more remarkable happened, except that I learned the way to provide first aid in case of epilepsy fit.

It is necessary to grab the epileptic by the legs and drag away from the Area into the shade under the canopy.

There he would go on with beating his back against the ground, yet with gradual reduction of the tempo until his excitement finally dies out.

Some halfwits consider it useful to drive flies with their dirty paws from his face, but that does not have a telling effect on the course of the seizure...

On that narrow trail under the railway embankment, Petukhov did not tell me just one thing – why I was so closely followed and kept under the unremitting control.

But there was no need for it because I knew the reason as well as he did.

My arrest took roots in the reconstruction of the maternity hospital, a long two-story building by the crossroads of Lenin Street and the descent from the Department Store.

Each construction enterprise of Konotop was doing its part in the works. SMP-615 was responsible for several partitions and bathrooms in the right-wing of the first floor.

Four plasterers and I were sent to accomplish the task. We managed it in just one week.

When the women were already plastering the partitions laid by me, in the corridor appeared a man wearing a clean suit and a necktie.

Beholding the four yummy females, the visitor began to spread out his peacock tail against the backdrop of the wretch of a hand, for which he took me.

I politely asked him to keep his ardor in check and not cough in all directions.

"Hey, you! Know who against you're ramming? I am the First Secretary of the City Party Committee."

"And I am a bricklayer of the fourth category."

"Okay! You'll have it!"

He left and a half-hour later our chief engineer flew into the corridor, out of his breath, because he was SMP-615 party committee chairman too.

"How d'you dare use foul language at the First Secretary of the City Party Committee?"

The plasterers unanimously testified that there was not a single taboo word on my part which information did not console the chief engineer though, but he left.

That's all. Nothing could be simpler – a male with levers of power at his command versus a male in a mortar splattered spetzovka.

The only thing that really hurt me was the accusation of using the derivatives of "fuck", because in all the years at SMP-615, I righteously refrained from using such words even deep in my mind...

At the beginning of autumn, when soaping myself in the bathhouse, I suddenly discovered my stomach was bulging like the rigid fore wings of a May beetle, and similarly unyielding.

Soon, my mother noticed that I was turning double-chinned. After one of the evening dinners at 13 Decemberists, she put her hand on my shoulder with her victorious announcement: "You're getting fat, Brother Rabbit! Relax, so it should be, you're from our breed."

I did not answer to the smile on her round face under which—I knew that without looking—a much rounder figure was expanding, so I just kept silent.

I did not want to be of such a round breed and turn a blubber guts. I would not succumb to their iminazine!

Some radical measures were the must.

If we consider those same dinners at 13 Decemberists for a start, my mother was skillful at piling no less than two servings of rice or potatoes on a plate. At the same time, everything was so delicious, that you imperceptibly ate all of it.

The repeal of bread became the first step. Okay, I eat as much as you care to load, but I'm not obliged to eat bread along with it, and I will not. And I cut it out from my diet even at canteens.

As for the "will not" that was a sham, because I always liked the bread, especially rye bread, moreover when it's warm.

I was able to finish off a loaf of such bread at one sitting, without any additional stuff, apart from the words I learned from my father: "Soft bread and mouth wide make the heart rejoice at every bite."

A month later, seeing that the breadless diet was of no help, I just stopped going to canteens at the midday break and that brought equilibrium to the previously impaired balance.

Breakfast in the canteen plus two servings at the dinner in the evening made for obtaining three meals.

And what about the midday havvage? I devoured, in the words of our team, Vsesvit, every month brought by me to the trailer for reading.

As a result, by the New Year Eve, in the same city bathhouse behind Square of Konotop Divisions, I proudly observed my sunken, like on a healthy wolf, stomach.

I always preferred that form. Some concave-bellied Narcissus...

(...there are lots of words you seemingly know because they have been heard, read, and even pronounced more than once.

Sure, I know the word!.. until asked about its meaning.

But such inquisitive bastards are rarely met, and you continue to interpret seemingly known words the way you vaguely feel they should mean, sort of.

The word "asceticism" is one of the brightest examples of how people do not understand themselves what they are saying.

90 percent of the population, to whom the word, like, is clear, would imagine a man with his eyes a-glitter from his tattered unkempt beard, worn-out by his self-inflicted tortures.

This is just as wrong as using the word "athlete" to designate exclusively sumo fighters.

In fact, the root meaning of "asceticism" is conveyed by the word "training".

If you are eager to win a beer tournament and keep putting away three liters of beer daily to train yourself and keep the form up, you are an ascetic.

As well, as the neighbor's girl that every day rushes violin scales behind your apartment wall. Damn her asceticism with all that f-f..er..flats and sharps!

This proves an ascetical ascetic, preparing themselves for future life in heaven, to be nothing but a special case among the other sorts of asceticism that may appear in different forms, short as well as long, depending on the purpose of training...)

And what—if I may ask—were the goals that made me so rigorously guard my being thin as a rake, and every weekday write out unfamiliar words from the newspaper _Morning Star_ ?

As I have tried already to explain, there was always present some ungetriddable vagueness in the details of my general plans. I just felt that was what's necessary and, therefore, I did so...

The extracts from the _Morning Star_ required keen attention and self-checking.

When meeting in the newspaper an incomprehensible word about which I definitely knew that it had been already come across, it was only too tempting to omit it, because the word remained exactly the same after all!

Yet, what was the meaning, eh?

It's too tedious to rummage through the pile of written copybooks, much easier to look it up again in Chamber's Dictionary, and once again to write it out.

As a result, at times I was looking up a word whose entry page number I could say by heart, but not its meaning. Some colander of a memory.

That's what asceticism does to a person, making you repeat a certain series of actions hardly knowing why you have to...

For me, the incident of that evening was not a temptation, I only was amazed.

And she, for her part, was not seducing me but rather tried to claim fulfillment of parental duty because I was grossly indebted to Lenochka.

I never took her in my arms, nor kept her in my lap, nor raffled caressingly her hair, nor fondled her cheek, not to mention other "nors" of what I owed her.

We just lived in the same khutta, where she had once been told that I was her dad but, in fact, what kind of father was I? Just some dry abstract formula, a contactless, symbolic, dad.

Of course, I never gave her the cold shoulder, and at times I could even get carried away by talking to her, but for a child that, probably, is not enough.

And for me, as a father, that surely is not enough but just so turned out my relationships with each and every one of my five children...

When Lenochka was born, I simply was not ripe yet for the role of father.

Dad at eighteen? With all due respect to Swan of Avon, but that's just ridiculous.

Then followed the years at the construction battalion and the institute...

When you were born, I was already fit to be a father, and I loved you selflessly, but not for long enough – my reputation separated us.

I met Ruzanna in her six years.

She called me "daddy" all along, and I loved her as my daughter, but for the first time, I hugged her when she was departing to Greece, to her husband Apostolos.

The consequences of that same chronic cursed contactlessness...

Cuddling of both Ahshaut and Emma, born after him, was out of the question, because Ruzanna, their elder sister, was about and she hadn't seen from me anything of the kind, so caressing them in front of her would be not right, would be a glaring iniquity.

That's how the father of five children remained just a formal dad. Poor kids!

But it's not just to take pity on them only, how about me, who lived a life devoid of children's warmth and fondness?

Except for that occurrence, when four-year-old Emma busted her head in the courtyard of our unfinished house when trying to repeat the number of Chinese circus actors seen on the TV.

The oozing blood soaked her hair and stained my shirt sleeve when I was carrying her in my arms to the former regional, and now republican, hospital.

A weightless, frightened birdie clinging to my chest in anticipation of something terrible, unknown, she didn't cry at all, believing everything would be fine since Dad was by her side.

(...children at that age look up to their father as to God, and then they grow up and become atheists, because the Almighty, as it turns out, is just a stubborn wrinkled curmudgeon who does not understand a thing...)

The nurse at the traumatic unit treated the wound, the on-duty doctor prescribed antibiotics and two days later when I brought Emma for a second inspection, he yelled at me for being a penny pincher saving on medicine for my own child!

Stupidity is incurable, even a diploma is of no help here...

At the end of the month at the end of the 90s, one week and a half before the salary, I was borrowing bread from the nearest shop and the seller, Razmik was his name, did not even write me into his ledger of misery debtors. In the pharmacies though, the drugs were released only for ready money...

On the payday, from the line to the university cashier window, I, first of all, went to pay for that bread, and the rest of my salary handed to Sahtic. It just did not work to make a private "stash", anyway, if at the end of the month you had to beg for bread from Razmik...

For the record, there is nothing easier than creating a university. You take Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute and call it State University – enjoy!.

I got a job there when they kicked me out of the Supreme Council. And rightly so, with the officially ended war, the management had all the reasons to find out: who it was that analyst of theirs wearing such a brazen mug.

But that was just an outward appearance, because inside I was afraid, like everyone else, only that I restrained myself and didn't race down to the basement, which was the bomb shelter, but kept to the corner of my office room, away from the window, and at 18:00 sharp I was leaving the building of the former regional party committee and walked along the empty streets amidst the crushing roar of the cannonade.

First, what's the difference? And secondly, it's quite impossible to predict where the next shell, missile, or bomb would burst up...

Arthur Mkrtchyan, the first Chairman of the NKR Supreme Council, gave me the job of an analyst before they killed him under the guise of suicide so that no one would ever dare disobey Big Brother.

Well, yes, like, I put a bullet through my head, and then I removed the cartridge case and cleaned the gun.

However, a more authoritative investigator flew in from Yerevan, explained how it was possible, and Arthur's wife withdrew her testimony about the dark-haired guest in their apartment a minute before the tragedy because she had to raise their son as a single mother...

That is why the next, incumbent, Chairman turned to the KGB, whose structures remained alive and kicking on the ruins of the Soviet Union and turned supranational (despite its renaming in the former Soviet Republics), retaining its single and indivisible Center and the incorruptible KGB archives.

So, the mentioned incumbent officeholder could very possibly get his ass kicked by Big Brother for so foozling selection of personnel for the Supreme Council of the newly independent Republic of the Mountainous Karabakh.

In any case, I was fired as a commodity extravagant for peace time.

A month later, instead of me, the analytical department of 30 employees was created and approved, as well as the head for the department, a renown amateur philatelist, but very clever.

Maybe somewhere in England, an official is a servant of society, but we have only these bloodsucking lice on the body of the rest of the people. And there is no salvation because it depends on what they've been trained for...

All the window glass panes in the State University were, naturally, smashed in course of all the bombardments, but in the Rector's office, they were restored, while the other windows were patched with vinyl.

The wind, naturally, frazzled easily all those patches, and the tatters applauded snappily when it began to blow.

In the classrooms, they installed tin wood burners, for which in winter mornings the University House Manager forked out two logs to each group monitor, from his shed in the yard.

By the middle of the second class, the wood burners became as cold as ice together with their dead ashes, and the student girls started to protest that they were freezing too. The student guys did not complain though, because there was none of them: they were freezing in the trenches on the front line, well, so what if the war was over?

And then I commanded to the girls: fall in! march in a circle!

And they marched around the frozen Woodburner, chanting one or another exercise from a paperback collection, yellow with age, printed for the USSR universities in 1958. And to their complaints that their heads were dizzy from that circling, I commanded to turn around and march in the opposite direction. They giggled but obeyed and chanted on.

Kinda Peripatetic Methodology of Feldwebel Ogoltsoff, however, it helped to hold on until the bell sounded in the cold and windy corridor...

O, my!. Where have I drifted off again?!. Aha, I remembered: children are the flowers of life...

But enough of this, let's return to how Lenochka tried to fix such a glaringly wrong situation.

She entered the room and sat on my lap, cutting me off the desk with the opened dictionary, a copybook, and a _Morning Star_ issue on it.

Turning her face up to me, she raised her hand and patted my cheek with her small palm. Probably, she tried to show her austere father how to do it.

(...what pushed me off?

Fear of falling to incest?

Not a chance, with my built-in robotic self-control.

Most likely, the smile on her face saying "Oh, you poor thing!" put my back up...)

"Well, enough, Lenochka, I have to work."

The smile gave way to a sullen look, and she started to bound vengefully, still sitting on my lap.

"What? Dreams of sweetmeats? Ain't it too early?"

And I rose to my feet, like a soulless robot, leaving her without the pad for bouncing.

Several days later, coming back from work, I noticed a change on the bookshelves. There appeared a black hole.

The high cheekbone of Eera's face, on the amateur photo in the middle of the stream, was punched through. The tool of that vandalism, and maybe even Voodooism, served a sharp pencil, or, possibly, a ballpoint pen.

I did not dwell on the question: who? – it didn't matter.

"Lenochka, come here!"

"What?"

"As a father, I have to take care of your education, so that you understand what is what. Now, look at the photo on the shelf."

"What?"

"This is called baseness."

"It's not me."

"I am not saying it's you. Just remember what "baseness' is. And it makes no difference who does it."

The photo had to be taken to the studio opposite Loony. Their employee Arthur, a young Armenian specializing in the transfer of photo portraits to ceramics, said the hole was fixable.

Only I asked to enlarge the picture to the size of a wall portrait, leaving everything as it was, and the stream too.

For the restored and enlarged photo, I also bought a cardboard frame and put it back on the shelf.

Seeing the result, my mother gave a derisive jeer, and that was the only comment.

I did not start any pedagogical conversations on the topic, and the photo remained completely immune to malicious attempts and stood there, gradually collecting dust...

On the eve of the second anniversary of her son Andrey, my sister Natasha complained it was impossible to find a railway model even for the ready money.

Did I remember the huge circle of tiny rails with a miniature train running along, back at the Object?

I had vague childhood memories of the beautiful toy and picked her complaint as an excuse to break out of everyday Konotop life. I was a loving uncle after all!.

For a start, I went to Kiev.

The saleswoman of the specialized department store "Kids' World" sat glumly behind the counter in a black padded jacket of workmen over her blue coat of the specialized store uniform.

She grew a bit more good-humored when I told her I was looking for a choo-choo.

She chuckled and answered in a villagers parlance, so that the yokel of me would understand, "Ain't a-having any choo-choos."

It did not surprise me though, because what Natasha said would always be so.

The next detail to pull into the plan was the capital of our Motherland – Moscow. There led the caravan trails, trodden by those exasperated with empty store shelves in the semi-deserts of chronic deficit...

In the metropolitan "Kids' World," there were choo-choos with cars, and rails, and bridges so that the train could run along, powered by a tiny battery.

I took the prey to the railway station, stored it in an automatic storage cell, and returned downtown to snatch my share of the cultural life.

At the ticket office of the Bolshoi Theater, I was told that their tickets had to be reserved two weeks beforehand.

A little disappointed, I left the glorious hotbed of culture discriminating against flotsam loving uncles.

On the sidewalk outside, there was a glass cubic booth entirely curtained from inside with all sorts of show bills, in which they sold tickets to the theaters and concert halls of the Moscow City.

For the coming night, they offered to choose: either the concert of leading pop stars in the Kremlin Hall or a jazz band concert at the Central Theater of the Soviet Army.

So I could visit the Kremlin for the stale garbage they poured for years on TV, or...

"Jazz, of course!"

(...they say that the railway station of Chernigov was built under the Germans, during the occupation.

And I trust those sayers.

Why? Well, at least for the fact, that they are not paid for the gossip, unlike many compilers of countless Soviet history books.

And they say also, the bird-eye view of the Chernigov station presents a Teutonic cross.

I had never considered the building in question from above, yet, I can testify that from all the stations visited by me, only there any time of the day you could have ready boiling water from a big copper tap...)

And all that reminds me, that the building of the Central Theater of the Soviet Army looked like a five-pointed star if you flew over it and cast a look down; so the hearsay had it.

Inside, it had a massive interior with a large hall on the first floor, and the exhibition stands in the wide galleries on the second.

I scrupulously examined the exhibition of envelopes and matchbox stickers issued during the Great Patriotic War, because I arrived there two hours before the concert. And what else could I do in the unfamiliar winter Moscow?

The pictures on the envelopes and stickers, with all their naive primitiveness, turned out to be nostalgically appealing because I grew up on black-and-white movies of that period.

Then I went down to the hall, where the jazzmen soon began to install and check their instruments on stage – the drummer kit, the vibraphone, the speakers.

Having finished these preparations, the musicians attacked the bold Jewish man for coming so too late.

He drove a fool to them about hardships of Moscow life, and then went on a counterattack threatening one of those days to give up all that music altogether, and let anyone give him a good reason why he needed all that at all.

They left the stage, and the hall began to slowly fill up. For the audience of about two hundred, the rows of plush soft chairs in the hall were more than enough.

And the concert started...

The announcer was a tall fat girl who also sang at times.

I took in one number after another and wanted only one thing – let them not end.

What Dixieland the vibraphone sounded! And what a bass guitar!

Once the guitarist was left alone with the girl and his bass guitar and they, just three of them, performed such a blues on the empty stage!.

The Jew came out only once, he played a tom-tom.

Played?!. The whole of Africa would not be able to give out such a number on drums.

I forgave him for his bald head and dumb talk before the concert because he turned into a completely different person. He forgot that he did not need it and created rhythms filling you with thrill.

"Bravo!"

Apparently, in the Central Theater of the Soviet Army, aka TTSA, they held another event, parallel to the concert, because to the barrier in the cloakroom there also crowed officers in uniform, who had not been present at the performance.

The cloakroom attendant girl brought two clothes at once, and put them on the counter: a Generals' overcoat with the red silk lining and the karakul collar (so this withered mushroom on my right is a General?) and the camel demi-saison from Alyosha Ocheret.

She laid them down and gave a wee sigh over them.

(...and what are we to do?

The everyday insoluble conundrum – either a hussar in his prime, but without a kopeck in his pocket, or a tattered ruin of a General with a secured income.

Everyone has levers to please the ladies in sighing mood, it's only that those levers are located in different spheres...)

Moscow taxi drivers were more professional than their Kiev counterparts. Anyway, the one who picked me up after the concert, having estimated my look and lack of hand luggage, guessed to take me to a hotel where they did not start the fiddle-fart talk of reservations.

The hotel "Polar" was starting from the sidewalk and getting lost somewhere up there in the darkness. The receptionist sent me by elevator to unimaginable heights between the twelfth and sixteenth floors.

The suite was similar to the doss rooms at Ukrainian stations, where you could spend the night having the passport and one ruble for a bed. It's only that in the room at "Polar" the beds were more, about twenty pieces already laid with the guests in their sportswear on.

At that moment, my stomach reminded me that I omitted to dine after the cultural life, as well as having a snack in pursue of the train model.

So I asked where a dining room or buffet was, and the relaxing sportsmen, with some kind of gloating, explained that anything of the sort was closed at seven.

I felt more and more hungry as well as the growing urge to punish my neighbors happy to break the unwelcome news, so I take off my camel coat and whipped back down by the elevator.

On the wide slab of a porch outside, alongside the hotel entrance, there also was a tall door to the restaurant which, naturally, was locked but inside you could mark lights and discern some kind of motion.

I started to pound onto the brown frame of the door glass panes. A man in a cap and yellow straps on his jacket appeared behind them.

At the sight of me in a jacket open on the white shirt, against the black-ink background of the night pricked with the tiny sparkles of downing flakes, he had no other options but to deduce my being a guest, who had got out from the restaurant to powder my nose and stuff in the open air.

He unlocked the door and I rushed past him into the hall.

The restaurant occupied a considerable area, it was housing the festivities of two weddings at once, and there still remained vacant tables.

I had to wait for a long time, but at last a waiter approached me to whom I explained my wish to have a plain meal without excesses.

To pass the time before he fetched my Spartan order, I watched the dance of the newlyweds from the nearby wedding. At the end of their dance, the burly bride got bugged and dealt a mean elbow punch into the chest of the skinny groom.

Clutching his tie, he cringed his face in a pain-hiding smile, where a few teeth were missing. The foundation of marital relations was being laid as early as the wedding party.

Oh, boy! You've really stepped into...Sorry, that was the wrong card...

Aha! Here it is!

"May the love and happiness you feel today shine through the years..."

Paying for the meal I was one ruble short. Well, to be honest, I had a ruble, but I wanted to keep it for the next day's expenses. I asked the waiter's name to make up the shortfall later.

He gave his name and did not insist on getting the ruble immediately.

Contentedly filled, I got back to the room up there, and to the questions of the curious roommates casually informed that the restaurant below was still working...

24 hours later, I arrived in Konotop and proudly brought the gift for my nephew to At-Seven-Winds. Natasha's family already lived there in the nine-story block constructed by PMK-7.

The trip by the elevator to the fourth floor seemed provincially short, but their door was not opened to me.

Guena sometimes left for sessions at his technical institute by correspondence in the Donbas, and Natasha was, probably, visiting some of her block neighbors. I did not know a single one of them, although at times I visited the block because, in the way of helping the young family, I wrote all the test works on philosophy and history for Guena.

From the black sheep of a lousy brother-in-law, you still could sometimes get a fluff of wool...

On my way to 13 Decemberists, I turned in one of the dead-ends on Pirogov Street, where Guena's parents' khutta was located. His father was asleep already, and Natalya Savelyevna sat in the living-room with Andrey – her grandson, aka my nephew.

I wanted to leave the box and go, but she asked me to assemble the toy railway, Andrey was still awake anyway.

When the train model started, with a low buzz, circling over the floor in the living room, I was not an uncle anymore, Andrey and I became equal in age...

The restoration of the translations lost on a local train in the frenzy of drunken akinesia, took about a year. Because they still were fresh in my memory I couldn't postpone finishing and stretch the pleasure any longer.

With the final period in the last of the translations, I took the four-volume edition of stories by Maugham to Nezhin, to return them to Nona.

Nearing the teachers' block in the Count's Park, I caught up with Nona and Lidya Panova, who was my group's curator in the years of my study at the English Department of the NGPI.

They were heading to the staircase-entrance in their section, but noticed me and stopped to wait.

I greeted both of them and informed Nona how impossible it was to convey with mere words all the gratitude I felt for the four-volume originals, borrowed from her and now brought back, here you are.

She smiled from under her glasses and reached out for the cellophane bag.

I intercepted her hand, like, for a democratic handshake in the style of characters by Jack London. But instead, unexpectedly even for myself, I bent over and kisses the back of her hand. Only after that, the packet was passed.

Straightening up, I gave Panova a stiff nod and left.

Well, at least I hadn't clicked the shoe heels like hussar Lieutenant Rzhevsky, the f-f..er..flamboyant hero of the f-f..er..folklore jokes.

My euphoria got off the local train at the first stop and grim misgivings became my fellow-travelers.

What a blessing, after all, is the inability to make up detailed plans!

Them those plans should be kept as short as possible: Prepare a collection of translated short stories to be printed in 150 000 copies. Period.

When thinking the plan out in all the minor details, you expose your whole undertaking to a deadly risk.

There inevitably will pop up some insurmountable detail to send your plan to rest, the way like the Titanic was by its iceberg.

Look out! What the f...!!!!!

Bang!

And then there come muffled, mind-pacifying, sounds of bubbling...what's the use of anything...why to start doing the impossible...ible...ble...

Now, what normal publishing house will ever look through the scribbles of my handwriting?.

But, is there a way to transform them into typewritten text? Maybe learning to type by myself?

A yummy plan! D'you know a place where they sell typewriters?

(...and another iceberg penetrates the hold....)

The secretary of Manager of SMP-615 had a juggernaut of "Yatran" typewriter on her desk. Sort of a shop floor machine tool with a black cord to feed it with 220 voltage.

You simply touched a key and it responded with series of uncontrollable bursts, in the style of a Kalashnikov assault rifle, nothing like the lasciviously seductive cluck-cluck-cluck of typewriters in the movies.

Besides, the secretary did not know Ukrainian, and even Russian texts she typed with one finger.

...well, suppose, after work, I would come to the office and little by little...

Yes, this one also went straight to the sea bottom, because of SMP-615 new boss's being so jealous.

He viewed SMP-615 administrative building kinda personal warren or, say, chicken coop, and would not tolerate any bricklayer horsing around even after work.

The icebergs of unforeseen details threatened the plan from all directions and brought the navigation to a halt...

We worked in the locomotive depot at the construction of the three-story administrative building, when my sister Natasha, at a chance meeting on a streetcar, shared that Eera, by the by, was going to get married in Nezhin.

Doubting any information from my sister was just useless, it simply had to be taken for granted...

The news in passing somehow crushed me for more than a day.

Yet I recovered, thanks to our foreman Mykola Khizhnyak's suggestion that I dismantle the trestles alongside the finished partition on the second floor.

When the laid partition gets as tall as 1.2 meters, you have to install the cradles by it, bridge them with timber and continue laying bricks from that trestle, up to the ceiling.

The cradles brought from SMP-615 base were too few for all the team, and we were substituting _ratsookha_ for them (that is how our team streamlined the word "rationalization).

_Ratsookha_ was a series of pallets stitched with nails in twos with each pair working instead of cradles.

Because the pallets were shorter than needed, on top of the first decking we added further _ratsookha_ to be bridged with boards forming a taller deck. The whole contraption looked like a house of cards, was more flimsy and shaky than the legitimate trestles, but it worked.

The trickiest moment came with dismantling _ratsookha_ trestles. Some of the boards in decking were nailed to the pallets, others not, and they all were high above your head so, when you started to knock them off and down to the floor, the scattered fragments of crushed bricks and layers of mortar spilled and dried on the planks up there were pouring down as well.

Few people on our team liked dismantling trestles. And for me, it was, sort of, a chess nut to crack. Only the falling fragments should be dodged in time...

However, for that particular dismantling, I sent all chess to hell.

Furious, like a berserk Viking running to battle in just a cloth shirt, with a long iron breaker I pulled the boards away from the nails screeching and squealing in protest.

When the top deck collapsed on the floor I, swaying and raging over the mess of boards under my feet, continued slashing and slitting the cradles of the stitched pallets with sweeping blows of the breaker, while roaring like a wounded beast: "A wedding?! Here's a wedding for you!."

My nostrils rounded, and sprawled in frenzy, and pumped, in and out, the dust from the cloud whipped up by crushed toppling trestles.

It feels good to, at least sometimes, let yourself go.

Not everyone though is vouchsafed the pleasure. Me neither; because even while raging and carried away with the pleasure of having cut all the restricting tethers, I still was fully aware that all that was a mere aping of Odysseus' action in a recent movie adaptation of his wanderings.

He similarly pulled his lips over the clenched teeth, when on his return home he started to knock off, one by one, the suitors of his wife Penelope. As for the wedding which "here's for you!", that also was a quotation from the same flicks.

Anyway, just in a few minutes in place of the trestle, there was a heap of boards interspersed with torn up pallets.

The room was filled with the cloud of thick dust, and in the corridor, the foreman's wife, rigger Katerina, hiding by the doorway, listened intently – what wedding was I about?.

My sister Natasha never reported about Eera's new marriage.

Seems like the flash-team of Odysseus and me did a shamefully good job at derailing quite a natural course of events in the life of an innocent unfamiliar female, whose only error was being same-named and living at the place once dwelt by my Eera.

Just another folly of mine...

(...as it turned out, I was neither a wolf nor a hooey-pricker, but an ordinary dog in the manger.

Like those kings that sent their divorced wives under the home arrest in a monastery.

Yet, if the monastery has a proper gardener with a good lever, as depicted by Boccaccio...

Oops, I am again at it, this time being carried away with making rational plans for royals as if I don't have problems of my own...)

But it was also Natasha who showed me a solution to the titanically insurmountable problem of turning the manuscripts into typewritten text.

She said there was a typing pool on the street connecting Square of Konotop Divisions and Sennoy Market, and maybe someone there would agree to type those translations of mine...

The two-story house of the typing pool looked like the "Cherevko's school". From the entrance, a straight flight of wooden stairs led to the second floor where, in two adjacent rooms, a dozen of typists were with the amazing speed chirping their typewriters.

One of them, named Valya, with a bob-cut blond hair, agreed to type the shortest from the short stories, which I brought along in a thin copybook for a probe. She appointed a day for me to come after the finished text.

Taming my heartbeat, I said I had more translations. She replied I could bring them too, by one or two at a time.

I asked her about the payment, but she waved the question away...

For a couple of months, I was visiting the typing pool on the days said by Valya.

I approached the house from the opposite sidewalk, in the best traditions of underground conspirators and secret agents. Diving in the wide-open door of the entrance, I cautiously sneaked to the second floor – just only not to shoo off the crazy luck...

Passing to Valya the copybook with the last of the stories, I again tried to find out about the payment, and she again dismissively shook her head.

Labor must be rewarded, so I decided to pay anyway, if not with money, then in kind.

Near the streetcar stop by Peace Square, on the first floor of the five-story block, there stretched a row of shops, overhanging the sidewalk with their somewhat droopy shop windows.

The last in their row was "The Flowers" on the right, and the first, close to the square corner, "The Jewelry".

There, after several circles around the glass box-cabinets with exorbitantly expensive necklaces, bracelets, and gold rings, I bought a silver string for 25 rubles.

To fix it with a fitting case, I purchased a round lacquered powder box with an ornament for 5 rubles plus, however, that was from "The Souvenirs" section at the Department Store.

Collecting the typewritten pages of the last story, I gave Valya the powder box and asked to look under the lid. She picked up from it a long thin string of white metal.

"Melchior?" inquired the typist from the next desk.

I did not explain anything to anyone: whoever wanted would find a way to check what was of what.

That month, the alimony to Nezhin and Konotop again nosedived to 15 rubles each...

A couple of days before May Day, I again felt like giving in to rituals.

From 13 Decemberists, I brought a piece of scarlet cloth, 40cm.×40 cm., to the site in the locomotive depot. I nailed it to a two-meter beam from the pile of remnants of former trestles, and it turned a cheerful bunting.

So that it was not in the way with the work of our team, I fixed it upon the finished corner of the third-floor walls, and there it splashed happily in the spring wind, above the sun-gleaming river of railway tracks that streamed towards the station.

Peter Kyrpa asked me if I was again for it, and I drove him a fool about the day of the international solidarity of working-class people.

He promised they would soon come to nab me again, but our team tacitly dismissed his prophecies.

Laying the courses of bricks in the wall, we sometimes looked back at the ripples in the flaunting red above our stooped working-class backs...

On the morning of May Day, in my jeans and a T-shirt, I went out to the veranda to put my shoes on.

My parents also were there though for many years already they considered themselves not liable to partaking in them those demonstrations.

I sat down on a small stool made by golden hands of my father, to tie the strings on my black leather shoes.

"You're not going anywhere," my mother said, and she moved to block the way to the glazed veranda door.

"You'll stay home," confirmed my father, and bolted the same door with the steel latch produced by him at the RepBase.

The happening looked like a home arrest without trial and investigation.

Still sitting, I ducked my head and in a low voice started a plaintive song:

"Oh, Dnipro, Dnipro,

you're a mighty stream,

With the clouds afloat above you..."

I did not know the following lyrics from that song, so I got up and took a step towards the door.

My father seized my neck with the grip of his working-class arms of a hammerer, diesel engine tamer, and skillful locksmith. I always admired the bass-relief bumps of his biceps.

My mother hung on my opposite shoulder.

Dragging their total weight, I continued slow progress towards the door.

There, I pulled the latch aside, wriggled out from the suffocating grip of the two opponents, and jumped off the porch onto the brick-paved path to the wicket.

"Buster!" shouted my father.

"Scoundrel!" backed him my mother up.

With a victorious sneer, I exclaimed, "Ca-up, Mom!"

(...in our family tradition, at the age of two I pronounced "catch up!" that way...)

Since then I stopped speaking to my parents, and I also dropped participating in the May and November demonstrations.

Instead, on reaching Professions Street, I turned left and walked to the very outskirts, where the khuttas were replaced with meadows bordered by trees of the forest belt along the railroad embankment.

From there, the deserted dirt road led me to the station of Kukolka.

I did not go to the station though, but after a couple of kilometers followed the solitary track branching from the main railway.

It was never used by trains because of being a reserve track in case of war. Such a case would make Konotop a target for bombardment, as a strategically important junction, and the reserve track detoured the would-be-destroyed city...

Following that track over empty fields, I reached the forest by the Seim river.

To the Seim itself, I went out not far from the local train stop "Pryseymovye", and walked to the place on its bank where once, still unmarried, I spent a day with Eera.

In that spot, I read an issue of _Morning Star_ , almost completely, bypassing the last sports page, which I always ignored anyway. The newspaper was left in the grass on the bank, in case it might come handy for someone.

The return journey was made along the main two-track embankment.

I entered Konotop together with it and for a long time continued walking along the adjacent gardens, right up to the second bridge, where the embankment turned to the railway station.

There we parted, and I went on, by the outskirts, along with the Swamp.

Already in the late evening darkness, I crossed Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street behind the old cemetery and going up Sosnowska street, I reached the terminal of streetcar 3, from where to 13 Decemberists there remained hop, skip and a jump.

On the whole, it was like whirling in a wide vicious circle, with a return to the starting point after walking all day.

The music from the demonstrations loudspeakers was substituted with self-made marching chants, like:

"So what about

are we laughing

while our shoes

this trail is roughing?"

But all that was in the future, and for the very first time, I did not have _Morning Star_ , instead of which there was a pinprick feeling in my chest on the left. And it did not want to disappear, no matter how often I scratched the T-shirt in that area.

Even at night the annoyance persistently stayed by me, so in the morning I decided to have a session of labor therapy.

I went to the locomotive depot, penetrated its grounds deserted and submerged in quietude, because of the second holiday day, and went to the construction site of the administrative building.

At the hillock of white silicate bricks dumpage, I planted an empty pallet and started stacking bricks on it. At times, it was necessary to press my chest with the left elbow, because the pin in there got replaced with a thick knitting needle.

When the standard twelve courses of bricks were stacked up on the pallet, I told myself that my case was not terminal, and climbed to the incomplete third floor.

There I took the Jolly Roger down from the corner wall, tore it from its mast, and slipped into a loop-hole in the slabs, and buried with a dried mortar and other debris...

Kyrpa's threats remained just empty words, I was never taken to Romny that summer.

Might it be I had grown wiser? Very questionable indeed.

It's just because I had not run into a sore spot of some high-ranking bitch of a cadre.

By the middle of May, the needle, or pin, or whatever it was to pierce my chest, gradually dissolved, and many years later I realized that it was the first of heart attacks suffered by me...

In my rough plan there cropped up another, but already pleasant detail, that of assembling the typewritten pages into one complete volume of stories.

For that purpose, I bought a folder from the Department Store, with a hard plastic cover and nickel-plated rings inside. They usually use such folders for annual accounting reports lined up on the shelves in the accountancy office; sturdy, respect inspiring rows.

To punch the holes for the folder rings in the pages of text, I borrowed the puncher from the secretary of Manager of SMP-615 in the administrative building.

The new boss's complexion grew green when saw me in his poultry farm, however, his sore spots did not qualify yet to be considered high-ranking enough...

The folder with the collection of translated short stories was holstered into a festive looking cellophane bag and I took it—bugle your trumpets, fanfarade! Roll, timpani, roll!—in the capital city of Kiev, to the book publishing house "Dnipro".

In the first room, where I proudly announced the arrival of a collection of translations [Here! Here!] of short stories by William Somerset Maugham, the jovial young man informed that he was not the person in charge of Maugham, and the expert I needed was to be found two offices farther down the corridor. If would I like him to have me seen over there?

With dignified gratitude, I declined.

In the indicated office, there sat a fat, but still young, man staring with disgust at a skinny pile of typewritten pages inside an open looseleaf folder of purple cardboard, with short white strings spread wantonly upon his desktop.

He reluctantly opened the heavy hard-plastic-armored file that I handed him over his desk, and glanced at the title of the first story in the collection.

The Rain

He shut the file abruptly and asked who I was sent by.

In confused bewilderment, my mind revved to its limits:

...forbidden to come here on your own accord?.

...too high circles...I should have been sent by some or another duke***, so that the courtier-receptionist could guess whose vassal I was...to compare the duke's weight to that of his suzerain—marquis***—and know how to handle me...and then one phone call to verify—just in case—for him to decide to which drawer he might safely stick it in...and don't you cherish no hope, under so polished a shebang, to find a hole for the f-f..er..freelancer-outsider.

Meanwhile he, just in case, opened the volume once again, someplace in the middle, and immediately slammed it shut.

"I'm just an errand-boy," answered I, "They asked me to take it to your publishing house, so I brought it here."

"Who?"

I opened the file to show the sticker on inside of its back cover with my Konotop address.

"This friend of mine," said I.

It was below his position to talk to a messenger who was not sent by even somewhat petty baron but came from a nondescript Konotop or something of the sort...

I coldly replied to his official goodbye and left the room.

The next evening, in Konotop, coming from work, I saw on my shelves a weighty postal package wrapped in their usual mustard-brown paper.

I had no reason to open the parcel. What for? By its size and familiar weight, I knew what was inside.

The annual report for the past six years of my life, comprising 472 typewritten pages of 35 short stories by W. S. Maugham, translated into Ukrainian.

Strangely, the posted parcel hadn't reached Konotop before I came back from Kiev.

And it was also strange that the unopened package with unread stories left me so frostbitten indifferent.

(...as it turned out, those six years did not fit into the feudally regulated grid of book publishing system.

"Who sent you to our rectangularly arranged reality?"

"Sorry, I've knocked on a wrong door..."

Quoting the habitual saying of my Uncle Vadya: "Farewell, dear peers and peerixes, sirs and sirixes!"

And he was a great connoisseur of vassal dependencies from the school textbook of the Middle Ages History...)

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Ivory Tower

Instead of a volume of short stories by W. M. Maugham in Ukrainian (a single copy from 150 000 published) a weighty parcel firmly sat down on my shelves, dead as a doornail.

My part in the planned project was executed on all the points, which stripped my further living on of any goal whatsoever.

Life still rolled along the rutted track, yet aimlessly already and unplanned.

However, if you don't ask the useless question "what for?", then a Thursday with the bathhouse, and the steam room, and subsequent two bottles of beer would suffice to motivate living for another week. Admire monks of the Tibet, who rough it up there even though deprived of the mentioned stimulants.

In my, not quite Tibetan, but rightly structured way of life there undeniably felt a lack of carnal pleasures.

I caught myself thinking this thought the evening when coming to 13 Decemberists after work, I cast the usual glance at the mingle-mangle crowd of shoes and slippers about the shoe shelf on the veranda.

The in-depth self-investigation, that followed the hot trail of the glance, made it clear that my eyes were trying to make out the high-wedge Austrian boots there.

Of course, it was not their fault that made in Austria footwear was so durable and unwilling to wear out from my memory. Yet, what boots might possibly come to the veranda in summer? And for what reason would she ever come to Konotop, let alone 13 Decemberists?

Such rhetorical questions helped to make me a laughing stock before myself, but could not prevent nightly ejaculations...

In the dead of night, my sleep was interrupted, because I threw my head back and dropped it sharply onto the wooden armrest above my pillow in the folding coach-bed.

However, the pain and blood from the cut eyebrow did not obscure the fact of soaked underpants. I took them off, and used to wipe my loins, and threw behind the other armrest by the wallpapered wall, they could sit there till the morning.

I turned on the lamp on the table, returned to the folding coach-bed and yanked the blanket off. Hell!

A dark damp patch blotted the landscape of the crimson tablecloth, which had long since lost its fringe and become the folding coach-bed's cover.

"That's right," said I to myself. "That's exactly what you stole it for."

Then I folded the cover so that the wet of the stain would not be felt, and lay back down to sleep the night through.

"They are simply white spots

Those cryptic black holes...

...lure the quest to lose way in tornado-like whirlings...

...with the black semen splotches on the white of the sheet..."

And using public transport means in rush hours at times became a real trial.

I did not mind being squeezed from all sides by passengers packed like sardines in the streetcar, but when they press you against a gorgeous thigh of a young woman, that's grossly unfair.

Damn! The situation fires up a breaker-like boner on your part, which fact can't be concealed by the raincoats on both of you.

Yet, with no room to step back in the crowd of passengers crammed and pressed as two barrels of herring squashed into one, all there remains for you is just standing on, and looking absently out the window of the running streetcar, like, I have nothing to do with that thing. But if not yours, then whose?

"Blessed be the curves and bends

And other twists of tramway tracks,

The accomplices of the sweetest touches,

Quite decent, almost accidental..."

It's hard to list all sorts of things leading to sexual starvation, which the scientifically trained folks shortened to the term "libido".

And they highly recommend the application of that damned Libido medicine for those engaged in creative professions, like, to give a sharp rise to the engaging drive in your manufactures.

But what the f-f..er..frolic was I supposed to do with that f-f..er..funky Libido, being neither Van Gogh nor Walt Whitman?!.

That f-f..er..feverish libido was seizing me not only in public transport, or in erotic nightmares but even at the workplace. Only at work, the creative orgasm could be reached bypassing the stage of physiological erection.

For instance, during the finishing works at the 100-apartment block, an unfamiliar young plasterer seemed very attractive to me.

A passing glance was quite enough to see the rural beauty's immunity to any intellectual pursuits, but the purity of the blush, the tempting outlines of her breasts and thighs (discernible even through the deforming spetzovka) disarmed and captivated me so that I decided to gush up Song of Songs of my own, using the plasterer as a model...

Normally, the plastering works were started at a construction site after covering the floor slabs with a layer of expanded clay. Expanded clay is a good thermal insulation material, but it crunches underfoot until it is covered with a screed at the subsequent stages of finishing works.

Turning a couple of times to my cautious steps over the expanded clay—I neared the doorway to make the details of the supposed masterpiece more precise—the model asked Trepetilikha, who was plastering a jamb in the same room, "Could that geezer stole my trowel?"

"Not a chance," replied Trepetilikha. "This one if even treads on your trowel would never pilfer it."

Given the dimensions of my libido at that period, the new Song of Songs would have easily surpassed Solomon's creation, and only the cynic suspicion of my involvement in the theft saved the world-literature from the upcoming reassessment of all its values.

"From the highest cliff

Over the sea, blue and boundless,

Off I dumped my libido,

O, my!.

All of the wast blue sea

Drowned in my bluesy libido.

Oops!."

Hell!

Two divorces and three stretches in the Romny madhouse leave you with a way too slim prospect for developing a stable relationship, or any at all for that matter.

Would you kindly keep yourself inside your straitjacket, please?.

But you cannot lace up a blizzard...

Good news, it was not whipping my face, but pushing from behind towards the station in the early morning twilight.

Dense streams of snow in the squalls of the wind were driving the twilight back into the dark.

Knee-deep in snowdrifts I was floundering along the supposed path by the railway track.

The concrete pillars holding the contact wire above the rails served the milestones not to deviate too much in the snowy desert.

Yet, better not to look back – the blinding snow would instantly stick a chilly mask over the face. Besides, there's nothing behind to look for – it had been and gone.

Just why did I see her naked body in the white churning foam of the frenzy blizzard?

And she's not alone – having a sex with someone. Not me...

I turned my face back to be slapped with the snow, to wake up and not see.

In my brain, I switched on the splashes of the organ from the House of Organ Music, they were piercing and not precise, but distracting...

... I must be a pervert indeed...my wife's having a sex with no one knows who, and I get horny midst this snowstorm...

...what wife? You don't have no wife!.

...okay, not wife then – the love of the lifetime...

...shut up, asshole!.

I shook my head in desperation and, with a groan, wandered on. A hard glancing strike from behind on my left shoulder called to order.

The local train from Nezhin was making its way through the snowstorm to the station.

...the trains are always right, they don't have deviations...

...look, the blurred lights ahead, above the fourth platform...

...from there in the common throng to the station square to our Seagull...

...everything is okay, I'm just like everyone else...

In the late spring evening on the station square, someone had a breakdown. Maybe the heart wanted to take a break or something, but the man collapsed onto the asphalt.

However, the ambulance was quick and pulled up by when the female "ah! oh!" were still floating above the small crowd around the vacationer.

Going to the railway station through the Loony park, I missed the beginning and only watched the final act – the departing ambulance and dispersing group of people.

However, the pedestal of the Lenin monument was still sending back tiny echoes of "ah!" so reconstructing what had just been there was as easy as the addition of zeros.

Along the alley opening to the square, one of the incident witnesses was nearing me, pensively pacing in the counter direction.

When we get close to each other, she suddenly repeated "ah!" rehearsed shortly before, threw up her hands, like in The Swan Lake ballet, and fell on me.

What else could I do? Naturally, I caught the fainter in her fall; by the open armpits.

Then I gentlemanly dragged the swoony swan onto the bench of green beams in the low wall of the trimmed bushes.

She sat silently with her head hung down, and I gallantly remained shut up, in the same thick shadow under the tree blocking the light from the lamp in the alley.

I sat next to her and inaudibly, in my mind, kept convincing myself on the uselessness of any advances with my pitch-black past, especially in the city where everyone knew anyone else. Who'd care for a goner's courting?.

When our interactional silence became too monotonous, she put her hand on my shoulder, said in a weak voice "thank you", and left the bench.

I looked sadly after the light spot of her long cloak moving away along the alley, and I thought to myself:

"Moron! Couldn't you hug the girl around her waist and let her decide whether to put her head on your shoulder or say "don't!" and leave? No? You're too smart for that, you made the decision for both! Okay! Now stay with your fucking stream of consciousness, with your libido, and the endlessly long nights, like the princess on a pea!"

"Had an encounter with Katya in the park, brother?"

"What's the buzz, Natasha?"

"Come on! Katya's from our accounts department. She told me herself how she nearly fainted in the Loony and fell on you."

"She took me for someone else, or him for me."

"Stop fibbing to me!"

"Some lucky jackass indeed with Katya-girlies dropping on him in parks!."

On a payday, I got off our Seagull at the bus station and turned into the post-office to send 30&30 alimony. Then I crossed Club Street back again and proceeded alongside the Loony park towards the railway station.

"Hey! You're from The Orpheuses, right? Ogoltsoff?

...a young man of my age, together with a woman, his wife, probably, making for the station too...

"Yes."

"Do I know you! You studied in Nezhin and I knew your wife Olga!"

...no, never met him, and he was not alone to know my wife...

He looked around as if seeking for some other weighty piece to swat against my skull with. Then he pointed his finger at his companion who kept stubbornly looking away.

"See? Have got teeth into and having me in all the holes!"

...yea, I see it alright, having it in all the holes...some relic from the antediluvian life...you keep wandering around beset with snotty sorrows for the flute of Eera, and they still pop up with their news on Olga...

"Okay. Say 'hello' to my wife Olga."

"Damn! You're some f-f.. fool driver!"

Leaving them to each other, I turned off Club Street into the park along the path leading to the Loony Palace of Culture, yet, bypassing it on the right, I walked on behind the white monument of Lenin to the side exit from the park, then past School 11 to the Streetcar 3 terminal by the Under-Overpass.

At Bazaar stop, Skully and Vladya boarded the streetcar.

"Hi!" said I. "How are you?"

Skully nodded warily and they also said, "Hi!"

The rumbling streetcar was driving us to School 13.

I gave a little chuckle.

"What are you laughing at, Sehrguey?" asked Skully with an unheard of correctness.

That's some news! For the first time in my life, he called me by my name, escaping both my school and _labooh_ handles. Yes, and even with that pompous seriousness, like a lord-speaker addressing a peer from the opposition faction.

"Ah!. Just remembered Vladya's verse. Remember, Vladya? We were writing poems during classes. Once I composed a piece with Vladya in it; he was blowing the horn and clanging his sword in a battle with another knight. So he turned out an answer:

"Save your tries

To put on me

The wreaths of military glory.

As for the bugle, I wasn't so horny...

But low and cozy in the ditch..."

"Well, do you remember, Vladya?"

He vaguely shrugged his shoulders and looked back and round at the rows of the seated passengers in such an apologetic way, that it was clear right away, he did not keep any memories of the sort.

Not to strain my old bosom friends any longer, I got off by School 13...

On foot went I along Nezhin Street, turned into Eugenia Bosh Street, and then into Kotovsky Street.

My feet knew those streets by heart, I could fully trust them and, at leisure, think about this or that...

...the translator from Vsesvit did a good job of rendering the verses of that Czech...how could it be put in Russian, I wonder?...probably, like...

"I walk along, I'm smiling to myself

Until the thought

'What would the folks think of me?'

Makes me burst laughing outright..."

...no, in Vsesvit it's still better good fellow the translator yet the Czech is a hugely better fellow and the Czechs, in general, are good fellows...

...if we, for instance, take Jan from the Bolshevik...

...stop! no poking the Bolshevik's ashes or else we'll have another turn of plaintive weeping to irrigate with bitter tears the dry and petrified sponge which for a year already kicks back dropped behind the kitchen table...

...but this Chezh is good indeed at demonstrating all of them what should the last of a poet' look like...

...before him they produced just two-liners: ah, bury me so that in spring the nightingale's song will sound o'er my grave...and me, please, where there the Dnieper's flow is heard from afar...absolute selfishness and consumerism...go and learn from the laughing Czech...everything's instructive and to the point...starting with the tree whose roots will suck the juice from my buried body and pump it up right to the flowering twigs letting the bees collect the honey for young beauties to grease their buns when they begin enjoying their tea...that's the chivalry for you! even postmortem he still keeps them on a special diet...I will feed them! says he, with delicacies!..yet you can't blame Czecho-Slovakia alone for his fanciful kinks...because schizophrenia is supranational indestructible and indivisible...although there always pop up defectors like Freud...they cinch their specific vision of the world into the cart of servicing their wallets and open Viennese schools...to keep the pot boiling...and with the fall of the curtain after the life spent among neurasthenic ladies with their hysterics as well as with naphthalized spiders of scientistical doctors...did you not ask your mug's reflection in the looking-glass: well, what now, Ziggy, have your Poles helped you out?..but you could stay a normal schizo...maintain your free will...yet what is freedom and how to see its fore from its behind?..as Peter Lysoon cares to put it...freedom from what?..and here you get fixed up with the straitjacket of national traditions...for the Brit Shakespeare it's freedom from time...the connection of times is broken describes he a petty clinical case...while in Ukrainian the very term denotes either separation from God Almighty or else can be interpreted as some incognito "free divine"...doesn't matter though since the existence of both freedom and God is beyond provability...

...and when feeling that tether keeps back no longer – ahead! with frenzied rapture...still watch your step, the wild is good but smarting chill and wet...and here lies the whole dirty trick: how to flee the dictates which are the must for keeping the herd safe and at the same time enjoy the goodies of the in-herd lifestyle with a warm female next to your side and cool vodka from the freezer?..much more complex that the quadrature of the circle...

...what's that? Decemberists Street? so soon? some gag...Mercutio was in the luck to have a friend like Romeo who would snap him back to earth in time..."peace, f-f..er..friend of mine, thou talk'st of nothing!" look around or you'll get up to Tsiolkovsky Street in no time!.

...strange...why is Lenochka strolling in front of the gate?.

"Dad, you've got a visitor."

"What visitor?"

"I don't know, he says he's your friend."

With the chink of handle-latch in the wicket, I entered the yard.

On the bench by the porch, looking up at the lower branches from the apple tree whose trunk served the natural backrest, my visitor sat, aka my friend, blowing cigarette smoke up into the leaves.

"Hello, Twoic."

"Hi, Hooey-Pricker."

He arrived from the nearby Bakhmach town in the neighboring Chernigov region by 17.15 local train and had to go back by the last one starting in the Kiev direction.

Before the departure, there remained not too much time, yet not too little either, and we strolled to the station in no hurry.

Along the way, we remembered the old golden time, and our mutual friends: Petyunya and Slavik. Twoic outlined, in general terms, their cases for the past period. With a sigh of consolation, he admitted knowing that all had gone wrong for me.

Well, and he meanwhile graduated and, due to his appointment, became a Chemistry Teacher in the village of Varvarovka, six kilometers from his home.

So an advantageous appointment of my friend did not come as a surprise for me – in the era of deficit Goods Manager at a district trading base (that's his mother's position) had levers more powerful than those of even Secretary of the District Party Committee.

At his workplace in the neighboring village of Varvarovka, everything was drowned in the moonshine and only a remarkable specimen with genetic stamina at homemade alcohol, thanks to Cossack ancestors, would have survived the constant submersion.

The periods between educating the school kids were filled by friendly bouts with the local toughs of the district capital, the Bakhmach town, and trips to Nezhin to have sex with some or another of the eager whores in the student hostel.

Village teachers were exempt from the army draft, as well as persons over the twenty-seven-year-old limit. On reaching the specified age, Twoic realized that it was time for him to grow.

A professor at the Nezhin institute, who was kept fed with the deficit goods from Twoic's mother trading base, made protection in some research institute of Kiev.

"Ph.D. student "– each letter had its individual halo.

To get into the graduate school by the research institute, Twoic was prepared to pray all the gods whatsoever.

The Nezhin professor brought his mother to the right person from the research institute, and she held the necessary negotiations, but Twoic still went to the Vladimir Cathedral where he offered a prayer and did not stint for a twenty kilos candle, but now, just in case, he showed up to me.

After all, I was Hooey-Pricker, the Hosty elite, the rising star of the English Department, the bearer of a blessing, like Jacob, like Joseph...

(...the devil only knows what blessedness is, but since Thomas Mann said it is around then, after all, it is...)

It looked like Hooey-Pricker had a nasty nosedive and spilled his blessedness off, yet what if a drop or two had not still splashed away? Let him sprinkle the remnants on him, Twoic.

(...about the drops, he did not say a word to me, and everything else, following the point of the giant candle, is grown in the hotbed of my feverish fantasy...)

In the end, Twoic went over to his projects at hand, and without excessive hesitation laid out the business plan, according to which I did not have anything more to lose while he had a scientific career ahead of him; it only remained to get through the graduate school.

But, if lucky, there shined a decent jackpot ahead.

In short, one, like, a business guy from Kiev wanted to buy a sack or two of cannabis. Twoic was reluctant to invite to his village a guy who might turn out an undercover operative, you never could say. It's better I would sell it, at any other place convenient for the transaction.

The friendly offer made me feel somewhat melancholic, sort of.

For political transgressions they gave forty-five stay in Romny, but how much would they dump for dope? And they could make you sleepy forever too...

Yet, Twoic's general assessment of the current situation was to the point, I did not have anything to lose after the accomplishment of my Maugham plan. And I agreed.

On the second platform we exchanged a farewell handshake: let help you, my whilom friend Twoic, aspersion with my drops, if any accidentally stayed there. Do your graduate school, the whole nine yards...

A telegram from Kiev awaited me on the table: "Saturday 12.30, metro by Railway Station, guys too."

It was not signed, which meant it was my friend calling me; my reunited friend Twoic.

Any mail for me went to the shelves, but a telegram was received for the first time, and the text looked somewhat conspiratorial. That's why they put it under the desk lamp on the table, for me to see when I was back from work.

Since I kept silent like a fish to all questions from my parents, Lenochka was entrusted with the clarification.

As usual, I kept to the evasively elusive style of Delphi's Oracle in my responses, fully aware of the aggravated tension thickening in the silence of the kitchen and adjoining room.

"You have a telegram."

"Very interesting."

"Read it already?"

"What else do they do with telegrams?"

"From Kiev? Yes?"

"So it's written here."

"And from whom?"

"It's not written here."

"Are you going?"

"Going is not the must if you have a hang glider."

Why was I showing off and making so much mist atop the fog? Because I didn't know another way to instill a taste for philosophical dialogues and play on words.

How else could I reveal to her, a motherless girl, the eternal feminine secret: so that they wouldn't stop courting you, give, yet without giving?

Usually, those meandering conversations were cut short by the explosive blast of indignation from the kitchen: "Not tired of the nonsense? Get away from him!."

She was growing up a clever girl. And she knew how to maneuver, albeit in still childish, naive, way.

No wonder though, with the good training she underwent, especially from three to five when her mother disappeared suddenly, and her father was popping up only on weekends to say "hi!" before going away to his friends.

On the weekday evenings, drunk grandpa was snoring behind the wall and grandma, pissed off that he still managed to give her a slip, although at the end of working day they got to the RepBase Check-entrance together, and she had to go alone in crammed streetcars, and trudge the bags all by herself along the darkness and snowdrifts in the outskirt streets, would scream at the small girl wild threats to give her away, the disgusting wretch, into an orphanage.

And it seemed to the frightened kid, it was not her granny, but Baba-Yaga, the crooked witch and mistress of the black blizzard, which scratched into the dark, ice-clad, windows, and all of them were against her, defenseless, five-year-old, wretch.

Complains? To whom? Hopes for help? Where from?

So Lenochka learned to get along with her grandmother. She knew when to hug and how to kiss on the wrinkled cheek.

And granny brought her cakes with custard filling from the "Cooking" store by the Under-Overpass. Yes, and she sewed for her everything with the Singer sewing machine.

And what good things did she see from her dad?

Coming from work, he knew only to rustle with the book pages and even bought a desk lamp.

Well, there were also those thirty rubles a month, yet they were just thirty rubles to the granny, while Granny insured her with the insurance and when she is eighteen – here you are, Lenochka, get two thousand rubles!

And whatever you asked, Granny could cook.

She also knew all the gossip about her classmates, and they always had something to talk about.

However, when you asked what's happiness, or, say, beauty, then daddy explained more interesting. And he knew how to praise a new haircut so that it felt ticklish all over with joy.

But all the same, Granny's better...

My friend Twoic did correct calculations when appointing to meet at 12.30. By that time the first local train from Konotop rolled in Kiev.

He did not consider one thing though, which was my disgust to be put in frames worked out not by me. So I arrived in Mother of Russian Cities two hours earlier, by an express train...

Leaving the railway station, I crossed its square full of clang, and rumble, and rings of streetcars and leisurely strolled along the inclined plane of the wide empty sidewalk, towards a busy intersection in the distance.

Half a dozen gypsy women followed me into the first canteen after the crossing. Removing my raincoat and hat on the hanger in the corner, I almost regretted the coincidence, because of which I had to wait for them to select the havvage and pull their trays to the checkout, echoing to each other in their dark language.

...calm down, there's still a whale of a time...

However, the gypsies took a wait-and-see attitude and, glancing at me, clearly refrained from going first. And that's a wise move too – to check which items on the menu were edible that day.

"You're missing bread," grumbled the cashier with a glance at my tray.

"No need."

With a shrug, she threw back a couple of beads on her abacus and accepted the worn-out ruble.

Getting seated, I modestly kept my eyes down, at the cabbage salad in combination with a snack of custard cake and diligently tried not to follow the news announcer in his coat and cap, broadcasting from a nearby table, to feed his chewing companion the latest news of his world, where the day before someone swallowed way too much of noxiron and kicked the bucket. Indeed, the first-rate dinner gossip.

Yet, the most surprising thing that this metropolitan newsmonger repeated, word for word, the piece which already was no news in the provincial wild.

The tower crane operator Vitalya shared it a week ago. Coincidence, or plagiarism?.

Intercepting my pensive glance, the announcer swelled in vanity – the owner of a stunning sensation...

In the barbershop on the same street, there was no queue and, when I returned to the station, it remained half-hour before the appointment.

The shoe shiner in a satin blue coat polished my shoes, flicking the anchors tattooed on the backs of his hands.

Instead of staring at the ladies that scurried past his booth to the women's toilet and back, I kept my look on the gray of his head bowed to my knees.

The mujik got fed up with such an anomaly. "What are you gazing at?" he asked, putting off his brush and taking a plush cloth instead.

"I seem to like you."

"Bullshit," he grumbled grimly. "Even I don't like myself."

"We have different tastes then."

And all the same, there still remained fifteen minutes...

I passed through the immense lobby of the station, climbed up the white stone stairs to the second floor and, up there, rested my elbows on the wide white parapet over the grandiose hall dissolving high overhead into the twilight-filled void.

Idly watched I the rough confusion of human particles in the Brownian movement swarming at the tiled bottom far down there. About five minutes later, this tiny bit of me would mix with them, but now I was just looking down at the bustling fuss.

Their hasty streams thinned about the center of the lobby and on bypassing it, they again became denser. The reason for the phenomenon was the athletic figure in a scarlet jacket walking there in unhurried circles. Waiting for someone.

Whom? Not me.

Nobody waits for me except for Twoic who, probably, right now is by the metro entrance checking the waves of the passengers from the neighboring suburban station.

Ain't it funny? Here, in the main station, this burly block goes round and round, waiting for someone, while a bit shorter geezer, Twoic, is circling now by the nearby, smaller, suburban station, also in a state of expectation.

If you extend this line, then somewhere still farther, say, on a streetcar terminal, there is a teenager waiting for somebody.

And so on, just like that endless little man in a fire extinguisher on the staircase landing of the second floor in my kindergarten, the man in his cap from the somersaulting pictures who instilled the notion of infinity in me.

That kindergarten "I" hadn't even heard the word "infinity", and only gazed infinitely at the fire extinguisher trying to understand: where did those men in caps go?

That zany kid is me, who replaced him, and I will be replaced by other "I" because of all we are finite unlike the little man in his cap...

Near the metro station, I rested my chin in the chest to hide my face under the tilted brim of the hat.

My friend Twoic walked along the line of telephones in the wall, to and fro. He wore a freshly re-established mustache, a prestigious leather coat, the thinning hair and a somewhat surly thoughtfulness in his countenance.

There he turned and started back.

After catching up with him, I silently followed from behind. At the end of the row of phones, he turned again right to my grin: "Hi, Twoic. And where are the guys?"

"Hooey-Pricker!"

He turned his broad face up and issued the characteristic Twoic's giggle, followed by that same taut sharp squint to snap the situation: what and how?

After a blithe hug, he let me go and started up confused speculations on reasons that kept Slavik and Petyunya from coming.

From the local trains station, a new wave of the freshly arrived poured along the sidewalk, and we retreated to the wall.

Twoic gave up developing sketchy hypotheses about possible excuses for the absence of our dear friends, asked me for a 2-kopeck piece and started to spin the disk of a phone, keeping an open pocket notebook in his clutch.

It's better to have a blunt pencil than a sharp memory, as ran a KGB adage once shared to me by their brunette gallant...

The crowd streamed by with their mesh bags, suitcases, packages, boxes, buckets, bundles of pipes, briefcases, backpacks, seedlings, cornices, bird-cages and all the other imaginable and unthinkable loads; they hurried to the metro and to the stops of public transport of all types on the square, dashing sidelong glances at the pair of metropolitan tough guys.

The one with the broad leather back, spinning the phone disk, should be the boss, and the other, with a sticky gaze from under the lowered brim of his hat, a bodyguard.

And although not everyone in the crowd knew such words as "boss" or "bodyguard", yet at the back of their collective mind, they shared common respect to those two, at least for the fact of their backs being free of burden, and for having where to call on the phone in the metropolitan city of Kiev.

How could they guess, that ever-flowing crowd, that Twoic was an upstart in the city, and I was a nothing-at-all called in by his telegram?.

And, by the by, where's he calling? I had no idea; and it did not matter, for I was just an instrument.

There's always someone to decide for us, and my part always was to execute the orders...

A year before, Twoic became a graduate student and now paced along the straight path to Ph. D.

His scholarship was higher than that of undergraduate students, yet not enough to meet the expenses for divers temptations pervading a big city life.

Okay, there were no problems with clothing, because his mom controlled a district trading base. Food also was not a pressing issue, coming back from weekend visits to his native village, Twoic fetched torbas tearing off the hands with their weight.

Yet, for all that manna from heaven he had to pay in kind – to tolerate the parental chewing his ear off with their twits for a diffused lifestyle, and work through all the weekend: digging, manuring, hauling, pulling in the garden and about the khutta.

Twoic had enough health and strength to make the sport of the household works. And he especially liked hauling something weighty and bulky – armfuls, bundles, sacks with a harvest from the garden to the shed.

Raking up the muck in the pig stall, or from under the bull calf, was not as pleasant, but also a job he was used to. Quoting the old priest from their village: "where there's muck, there's lard".

However, the mom's moans and lamentations about the Kiev whores, who rob and eat off the goof of her sunny, were more than enough to make a saint see red.

That's why Twoic needed ready money, but where to get it, was a tricky question.

Unloading freight cars at the station as in the student years seemed below a graduate student level.

Besides, he was a skilled workforce at playing Preferans. The game was pure arithmetic, and in his curriculum vitae, Twoic had two years at a mathematical special school, plus the feel of whether a player was bluffing or having a good hand indeed. And, last but not least for Preferans, was Twoic's appearance of a natural hick, putting opponents off track.

However, the hostel was too shallow waters. You ripped your neighbors for a fiver once or twice, and they started shying you. Everyone grew so awfully busy, no time for a pool at all; yet between themselves, they went on playing. Yes, behind the locked door of someone's room, for a kopeck per a trick; so mean misers.

However, somewhere, someplace there had to be the upper crust, the elite. It was the capital, after all.

Playing by candlelight, on the green cloth, with a freshly opened deck, and so that the trick was no less than fifty kopecks, that was his dream.

But how could you reach the upper crust without money?

All that brought Twoic to designing sundry romantic plans of getting a jackpot...

The initial plan of becoming a drug traffic baron in the cannabis market somehow withered by itself.

It was followed by a plan to make friends with some of the foreigners scudding through the capital, to establish a stable barter trade for clothes smuggled from outside the iron curtain.

That's when he called me to apply as a tool at the operational end.

And since then I entered into the service to Twoic on quite acceptable terms if you don't care a f-f..er..flick anymore about anything at all...

Prospective business with foreigners did not prosper either.

On the day of the attempt at acquiring a suitable acquaintance, there sounded only Roman languages on the sidewalks of Khreschatyk.

It was no use to approach such passers-by with my English of Nezhin make.

Two times Twoic hallooed me at different twos of Negroes in slouch hats.

However, the targets in response to my cheerful "hi! let's have a talk!" shied, for some reason, and kept mum. Probably, they had already experienced invitations "to go out for a talk" at some or another of dance-floors.

I had to explain to Boss that they were Negroes from some of the former French colonies, so English did not click with them.

The futile hunt seemed to wear Twoic out, or maybe he decided to think over some new plan, but my master got tightly seated on a bench in the University greens and allocated me two hours for the uncontrolled free search.

The task did not seem too attractive, but I had to work off the grub, both consumed that morning (buns and Pepsi) and upcoming.

So, leaving him thoughtful on the bench, I did not shirk my duty in any way and kept the ears pricked up for anyone uttering something in Shakespearean parlance from any side.

On Shevchenko Boulevard a group of neat men, passing the Vladimir Cathedral, referred to it as "cathedral". Might it be?.

"No," one of them explained in Russian, "we are speaking in Latvian."

I felt fed up.

Okay, one more last try at "The Intourist" hotel and that's it...

On the wide porch in front of the glazed entrance, a burly block with a saxophone string on his neck asked politely what I needed.

They kept some naive bulldog at the establishment. How could I—a foreign tourist—possibly knew all those local dialects?

On an indulgent survey of the two-meter tall aboriginal, I, without a word of comment, went inside and turned to the left where the bar was.

The inscription in English asked to pay in local currency only and notified that the current day of the week was a day off.

Yes, it's time to have a rest.

The massive-looking chairs by polished tables turned out very responsive and tremendously comfortable. My loyalty got rewarded, had I been shirking I wouldn't enjoy such a soft seat; much better than the hard bench planks for accommodating Twoic.

At the far end of the bar, which was enjoying its day off, there loosely sat twelve she-apostles and their black-bearded Teacher with his fervent sermon of the truest truth.

What's their language, by the by? They should know better. Okay, in the report to Twoic there'd be mentioned coming across a non-governmental delegation of poultry farmers from Romania.

At the next but one table from me, two, Germanly colorless, girls exchange brief clues over their table, while doing their level best at keeping their looks off me.

Damn that f-f..er..fundamental language barrier. The chicks were bored. It would be manna for them to hear: "You're cute and I'm cool, besides, I have a friend named Twoic. How about to dump the boredom in a party of four?."

But they wouldn't hear that because of the obnoxious language prison; they're locked up in their cell, and I in mine. We don't even look at each other, like sage foxes ignoring unattainable grapes.

But they at least could prattle between themselves, while I stayed just deaf and dumb.

"An o'fooly nais plais," informed I the girls urbanely. "Ain't it? Baat (with a slight sigh of disappointment) nahbady to have a tauk wid!"

And I gave a gallant nod to their amazed gazes, "Bye-bye!."

For the period elapsed since that time, no jackpot had ever turned up, yet Twoic liked to deal with me, because I was not only a relic of his student life but also a handy tool all ready, like a young pioneer, for anything.

So, after the first telegram, there followed similarly curt ones with just the village's name and the date for me to show up on a weekend.

It took a half-hour ride to get from Konotop to Bakhmach by a local train, and then ten more minutes by bus.

"What's the news about you each weekend getting on a train with flowers? Visiting your wife or what? But you're, like, divorced."

"Visiting a friend in the country. The flowers are for his mom and grandmother."

"And are there no flowers in the village?"

Yes, they were there, yet much more than flowers there was work in the village.

For my arrival, repair of a roof was there waiting, or the barn, or turning dirt in the garden.

After the work, of course, – moonshine, as much as you like, gobble up to your heart's content.

However, without the flowers, I'd be like a farmhand there, and bringing them along with me I, like, turned a guest, sort of...

The house of Twoic's parents stood on the village outskirts in a narrow lane named Shore.

The lane narrowness was not resulting from its layout but the density of fruit trees overhanging the fences from both sides.

The house, of course, was called khutta, but in terms of quality, it was still a house.

Between the gate and the khutta, behind a low palisade to the left, there was a well with water at just a two-meter depth, with a tin roof above the pail chained to the windlass crank.

On the right, there stretched the whitewashed brick wall of the structure comprising anything – a summer kitchen, whose porch almost closed with the steps of the high porch to khutta's veranda, a garage for a car that still had to be bought, a tool store, a shed.

However, the entrance to the barn was not from the yard, but from the back of that building.

Passing between the two porches, you found yourself in the backyard with one more, made of boards, shed for goats, chickens, pigs, and anything else.

Under the windows of the khutta, there grew raspberry followed by half-dozen of apple trees, and still farther the huge vegetable garden beyond which there opened an even field to the distant forest belt hiding the railway.

The collective farm did not use that field because of abnormally high subsoil moisture.

The folks on Shore lived in a big style indeed...

The house's head was Raisa Alexandrovna, Twoic's mother, because her husband, Sehrguey, was, for the most part, engaged in the housework, and he was not up to yakking.

Of course, when something really put his back up, he could address his wife with a loud appeal to shut up her bunghole.

Then Raisa Alexandrovna would pause, bite her lower lip and act a dull and dumb rural woman, but all that was a pure theatricality – in five minutes the phone on the veranda would ring up, and they ask for Raisa, and not Sehrguey.

Apart from the domestic affairs, she ran the local politics, accepting several visitors a day, both on an appointment and without it.

Her favorite scenic image was that of a fretted villager woman beset with all kinds of troubles and worries, in a worn-out jacket and her kerchief on the black hair, and only the irony in the look of her black eyes could hardly fit the disguise.

She knew how to artfully tie her kerchief, re-arranging its appearance several times a day.

The knot changed its position from the forehead to under the back of her head, or else above the ear—the gypsy style—depending on whom Raisa Alexandrovna was accepting.

For the current visitor (in his jeans, long hair and the beard like that of a hippie from Los Angeles) she unexpectedly got it tied under her chin.

Then Twoic told me it was the young priest of their village.

The hippie priest left and in half-hour, a Zhigulie car pulled up by the gate and a young, but very loud, woman in awful need of "a gown, eh?!." entered the yard.

Raisa Alexandrovna took her to the veranda and was humbly making her brains for at least forty minutes before sending away with a promise of "a gown, eh?".

She did not sell things at home, to accomplish the transaction the visitor had to visit the trade base if the negotiations had a happy end.

Raisa winked at Twoic and me after the retiring priest's wife, blissful Mother, and crossed her face with a thumb. Holy, holy, holy!

But then she decided that we had spent way too much time playing cards on the porch step, and ordered us back to the garden to turn the dirt, or spread the muck, hauling it there in the handcart with its wheels getting stuck in the black soil, or to collect the corn ears...

However, when I and Twoic were erecting another barn of logs, we were out of her jurisdiction – Sehrguey had announced a smoke break that's why we were playing.

The food after work was not a havvage but a hefty rural grub on lavish fat, with dill aroma, and light steaming above the plates, and a bunch of crispy green onion on a dish, studded with fresh water drops.

The chef cook in the khutta was Grandma Ulya who cooked delicious things even with her one hand, the other, long paralyzed, she kept in the pocket on the stomach of her apron.

She also was responsible for the moonshine distilling, because she liked watching the product's drops dripping into the vessel set under...

I liked that kind of life more than stretching out on the Seim beach.

I liked the energetic one-legged neighbor Vityuk, the master of the Throw-in Fool game.

And even more, I liked Ganya, the sister of Raisa Alexandrovna.

There was no acting or irony about Ganya, she was calm and attentive, and she understood everything.

I was sorry that she had cancer.

Doctors recently removed "the pea" out her belly, and on her coming back home the loving hubby did not give her no peace until she let him see the fresh gash from the surgical knife.

I knew that she would not survive because when renovating the stove in her khutta, all of the old firebricks turned out to be quite rotten.

I was told to use the bricks again all the same – there were no others, but I could see that it was not for long...

They buried her in my absence, with heart-rending lamentations at the funeral.

When they were taking Raisa from the cemetery, the rural old women yelled at her and other mourners: "So what? Cried out Ganya back? Returned?"

Twoic was very indignant telling me about such cruel brutality, but in my opinion, that was ancient psychotherapy and one of the rituals in the continuous comedy of life...

In my next visit, the husband of the deceased was also sitting under the black mulberry tree in the khutta's yard.

At first, I did not guess where the sounds were coming from. I thought a puppy entered the yard, but it turned out the widower burst into tears.

Such a burly man, a bus driver; the tears flowed and he did not even try to hide them.

If all of them together could not call her back, what's the chance of you doing it single-handed?.

Ganya's son, a guy about fourteen, was at war with Twoic because he fell in love with Twoic's wife, but Twoic later divorced her; offended the beloved of the youth, sort of.

For me, it was complete news that he got married and divorced, but Twoic said, yes, a Jewish girl from the Biology Department.

He also told that his father-in-law, when visiting people, the first thing to follow vodka grabbed lard for a snack, sort of to demonstrate that he was not from kosher upholders.

Now the ex-father-in-law would raise Twoic's son as he pleased, up to the making of him an Orthodox Jew under the most Ukrainian of all last names.

And Twoic sighed at this point in the best traditions of the Moscow Artistic Academic Theater.

Raisa Alexandrovna did not allow time for Twoic to grieve though, and shouted from the phone in the veranda that he had to change into clean clothes because they were bringing an aspirant bride for the "evaluating look".

The loving mother did her best to find him a good party from among local girls, and for that reason, they periodically were brought to Shore; otherwise, those Kiev whores would certainly bamboozle the dull zany of Twoic.

He said inaudible "fuck!" and went to change.

Soon behind the gates, a car was heard and a pair of parents led into the khutta their elegantly donned girl.

I stayed alone on the porch of the summer kitchen, but then a visitor joined me. Some old man bent literally into an arc. When standing, he couldn't see the face of a man before him, only up to the waist.

We started a desultory talk, and the old man confessed to me that he was once a young and well-proportioned rural clerk, sporting a military tunic and high boots.

The collectivization began and with the clerk's assistance, they were making lists of those to be deported to the Siberia.

Now he was not able to look into the eyes of people around him.

And, after all, all was to no purpose. The grandsons of the misers, who at that time obtained the keys and seals of the village council, were now penniless drunks, and the descendants of the robbed and exiled had returned from the Siberia and got prosperous again. Because on such a soil only a lazy fool lives poorly.

He never waited till Raisa showed up and left, leaning on two short sticks, gazing at the sand in the road.

(...as it turns out, the theft of a crimson tablecloth is not the worst thing that can happen to you, there are things for which you punish yourself much more severely...)

Then Sehrguey came up with a major project of paneling the khutta's base with bricks, which he had prepared for several years already.

It took me three-weekend visits because the khutta was not a small size.

Twoic worked as a bricklayer's mate preparing the mortar and fetching the bricks up.

We finished on a Saturday.

On Sunday morning, I got up first and went out on the veranda porch.

My shoes stood on the second step with their noses directed towards the gate, although in the evening I left them exactly the opposite.

(...some signs I can read easily –

" the Moor had done his job..."...)

I put my shoes on, walked out of the gate and, on reaching the end of the lane, turned to the forest belt because in its clearings a very slow freight train was clanging along.

I strode fastly, and then ran, and managed to jump on the brake platform of the rear car.

(...everything turns out as it should when you have read it right...)

The freight train picked up speed and passed Bakhmach without stopping.

People at the railway station looked in surprise after it.

On the brake platform, I was standing happy and pleased with myself, and the wind was ruffling my hair, sort of a tramp by Jack London...

In the winter the works in the village came to a standstill and Twoic sent me a telegram only in April.

We were turning dirt in the garden when his father brought the news about the Chernobyl explosion.

The day was cold and windy, the gray clouds flew low.

Twoic started to talk about radiation but I did not care a fuck. What's the difference?

However, the wind blew from the East and did not let the radiation to reach the village. The clouds absorbed it and took over as far as Scotland, to the laundry hung there on clotheslines. Of course, the Scots then threw away that washing, so _Morning Star_...

But all that would happen later, and presently Twoic, leaning against the wall by the phone, dialed the number, and I scanned the endlessly hurrying crowd, which had no idea about the subtlety of relations between mafia bosses and their bodyguards.

And I tried to figure out who of us was more interested in this friendship. Was it the would-be Ph.D. Twoic, or I, his genie from a bottle?

It's a dumb thing to do psychoanalysis having no idea how it is to be done...

In the pedagogical institute, they, of course, explained that it was some mean presumptuous invention of the decaying West, degrading and belying the capitalized name of Man that sounded proudly.

A sad pity, the lecturers did not share the essence and methods of that indecency.

That way they left us with no other option but to invent the content under the heading of "Psychoanalysis" and make out the methods by ourselves.

Swing your arm, push your shoulder against it – we'll start this bitch of a collider manually!.

(...let's assume, the essence of such an analysis is to answer the dirtiest of all questions – that of "why?"...)

So, why am I stuck with Twoic? For which reason?

The healthy village food performed by his grandmother? Absolutely, yes.

Carrying the flowers on a train, I do look forward to enjoying the meals.

Besides, there is one more bait that I try to reach, with no chance of getting it though, like the ass of Till Eulenspiegel.

For any kind of an ass, you can find a kind of grass he will run after like a good little boy.

So which one am I after?

The wild descriptions of sex feasts, generously shared by Twoic, keep glowing the embers of hope that I, his loyal servant, will get some crumbs off the master's bed.

Say, some slut girlfriend of another whore of his.

The yearning's not fulfilled yet, but who said the ass should ever reach the grass?

It's a smart ass, and he doesn't give even a sidelong glance at the bunch of grass dangling in front of his nose.

He pretends not seeing it even point-blank, and he trots after it just so, for the sake of warm-up, because he adores physical exercises and other agricultural works.

However, to see what an ass is up to, you don't need to be as wise as Solomon...

Just for the record, there was an attempt at "with a girlfriend's girlfriend"...

They came from Nezhin to Bakhmach, the ex-lover of Twoic and her girlfriend.

Twoic and I met them and took to the village by bus. Two mattresses were spread in advance over the dry hay layer in the loft over the summer kitchen.

Out of delicacy, Twoic took his ex-lover to the nearby grove, leaving the whole loft for me to use it in undivided mode.

The chick was appetizing – slender and busty but she undressed only down to her pantyhose. No doubt, the modish item made her legs to look even prettier, but what the fuck I needed that mesh for? The same old acquaintance of a dirty trick – welcome on top, but no horsing with the chastity belt.

I did not try at tearing the pantyhose to shreds, and all attempts at stirring up a reciprocal flame of passion in the taunter fell flat. The state of stalemate was sustained until Twoic brought back his ex-lover from the romantic walk to the grove...

The next morning, I got up first and went for a swim in the kopanka – a pond of about twenty by twenty meters, dug in the field by a back-hoe.

When I returned, Raisa Alexandrovna was sitting on the veranda porch.

"So how was the water?" she asked with the hint in her ironic black eyes.

"Cold," answered I in all the senses.

After breakfast, already without Raisa around, Twoic asked directly, "Well, how?"

"No hows. We're incompatible."

"How that?"

"She wanted being raped, I wanted to get a shared pleasure. The two things just did not click."

So, all that keeps me on Twoic's leash boils down to the needs of my stomach, and that of the reproductive organ and...and?.

We need something else here, thinking in just two dimensions is not quite right for a Hegelian...

Where is the third?! Speak out!. Aha! Here it is – the brain!

The brain with its lofty needs; it does require to pour out the knowledge crammed into, to ease the tension in the storage cells and not to burst in every thinkable direction.

Ain't it a torture – to have pearls and no one to spill them in front of?

(...who would decline the role of a Mentor?

Passing the pearls of wisdom to a naively gaping youth...)

Twoic presented me with such an opportunity as well, by his questions.

How to choose the right trail in the jungle of a research institute laboratory squabbles, where each spider was for himself in the common jar?

Who's more useful for your scientific career – a talented but alcoholic micro-chief, aka the manager of the laboratory, or as dull as a felt boot macro-chief in charge of the institute department? Who of the two to serve to?

Answering these and similar questions, I was amazed at the huge stockpile of reprobate Machiavellianism in myself. I wouldn't ever dream of having so vast resources, communication with Twoic brought out the hidden arsenal.

However, the essence of my maxims was so plain that Twoic sensed all that himself and instinctively conformed to before my broadcastings.

It's only he couldn't put it to words, that we were coming to this world where everything was occupied already – "the house's sold out!" – which situation called for snatching a place under the sun for our dearest selves, and the end justified the means...

And Twoic was all too happy to agree.

But what about me? Do I live by this sermon? Do I follow it, do I eat it out?

(...following your own theories is not the must though.

Nietzsche, the inventor of the superman in the form of a "blond beast", was himself a physically miserable nuisance.

"Snap a place under the sun for yourself," proclaimed I, that's true.

However, as for me, I'd sooner depart in search of more human sun than partake in their scrimmage...)

Well, now, are you happy with your self-psychoanalyzing? Got all the nooks turned inside out? Don't be shy, we are alone – Twoic's too busy with dialing and checking his pocket notebook.

So, is that it? The orgies for your stomach plus hopes to get a second-hand whore, and tickling of your vanity by spilling intellectual pearls? Am I with him because of these reasons?

Well, that's why, definitely, yes...

And also because of the feeling of freedom, when I break free from the routine of my ordered, polished, trampled, way of life with a bath on Thursdays, washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, with the beach or reading room on weekends and the ever-present feeling of emptiness and destitution, and constant being on alert...

Wow! I see, now you flashed with your love for freedom too, well done! And, hopefully, now that's all?

Of course, yes, is not all that enough for a friendship?

Don't try to cheat the dialectics. You omitted the opposite force – hatred.

And why should I hate him? He feeds me, provides drinking, presents an outlet to escape...

It seems, you shyly keep absent from your list the opportunity to practice masochism, eh? What is a pleasure if not some sweet pain?

...had he slept with her or not?.. everything in me contracts into a tight tangle then painfully-sweetly dissolves in whining: no, it cannot be.. but if?. and the pangs return to be followed by a spill of warmth through the insides: no, no...

In one of my first visits to the Twoic's village, on a late windy night, we were sitting at a bus stop on the empty wide square. The whitewashed walls of the stop, as well as the planks of the benches, were stamped with inscriptions and cuts of all kinds of Deep Purples, Dynamos, Svetas, Blitzes, Vovas, and lots of dates.

All of a sudden, Twoic spoke of Eera, "She said she had never had better sex than with you."

That compliment, sort of, scalped me. They do not come up with such confessions at the table in a café. For such a topic, you should lie together in one bed after having a sex.

Did she count on Twoic someday would deliver these words to me and I recreate the whole picture? Or was it out of feline inclination of females to scratch the fucker? That's why he reached then out for a cigarette of Belomor-Canal...

...don't succumb to complexes, Twoic, I've never been a sexual giant...and now I know why he found me in Konotop...and I am sorry for the helpless babble about blessing's drops...he came with much more earthly intentions – to urinate on the ashes of Hooey-Pricker of whom he felt envious even post-mortem...

He somehow felt that he had blurted out a bit too much and, to efface it, started swearing that he had never in his life had anything with Eera...

As if I asked him whether it was so.

(...if you pretend to be a stupid ass for too long then, at times, you become it...)

"Have you ever beat her?" he asked a little later.

Oops, so she shared about that slap too.

"I hit just once, at the final date," reported I, "but it was a light spank, solely for compliance with the protocol."

Twoic laughed with his trademark laughter...

The next morning, we went for a swim in kopanka.

I did not feel like entering the water, so I just walked around the pond and lay on the beach.

Twoic swam it from end to end.

His blue eyes radiated a melting glow of satisfaction when he came ashore nearby me with water trickles dripping from his trunks.

"This look was in his eyes when getting off her," thought I.

The thought brought pain and even though not as acute as I expected, yet more replete than I would like...

She approached me on the beach and started a talk about _Morning Star_ dropped on the sand, next to the pink coverlet on which I was sitting: did I really read it or was it just a trick to lure girls? What, say, was that big article about?

So, I had to tell the examiner about a 19-year-old guy, a member of the family of smugglers. They regularly flew from Pakistan to England, after swallowing a heap of small tight packages with drugs. Stomach served an ideal repository, the specially trained dogs at airports couldn't sniff anything out.

Upon arrival at a safe house in London, the whole family underwent the stomach lavage and—rah-rah-rah!—another batch was delivered.

The fizzle happened during the flight when one of the small packages burst in the stomach of the young man. They used to tamp too much into one package, and on the arrival, the guy was taken from the airport straight to the hospital with a severe overdose.

They washed the drugs out of his stomach and saved his life. And that was the end of the family business.

Some sad, in general, story...

She sympathized and shared that she was also a nurse.

Basically, a good profession for a girl about thirty, who did not look a movie star, yet everything else was in place. My trunks could witness for the fact because when finishing the story I had to pull my knees up to my chin, to look like a civilized gentleman and not a heated gorilla in the zoo.

And then everything went on like in a fairy tale, she told me her address in At-Seven-Winds, and we agreed on my coming to her place on Tuesday with a visit of friendship and shared understanding.

She strolled away along the sandy beach, and I had to stretch out on my stomach, so as not to attract the public attention with my swimming trunks bulged out on account of the promising Tuesday.

The day came at last, and after work, I rode from the station square to the city center.

In "The Flowers" shop there happened nothing to my liking and I had to buy a kinda crossbred of daisies and sunflower.

There still remained lots of time before the appointed hour, so I took a walk back to the station and then along Club Street to At-Seven-Winds.

In Zelenchuk Area, Vladimir Gavkalov, the truck crane operator from SMP-615, who looked like Eera's brother Igor, crossed my path.

"Sehryoga!" yelled he on the run, "You've lost your way! The bathhouse's in the counter direction!"

I did not like that whisker of a bouquet myself but still continued to carry it along.

And all the same, up to At-Seven-Winds I got half-hour ahead of time and decided to fulfill my long-standing promise to myself, that one of those days I'd come on a visit to that family of tall birch trees in the vast area of construction sites.

Following the trail trod in the tall grass, I approached the group of the white-trunk beauties.

Stupid bitches! The tenants from the nearest street had arranged a garbage dump under the trees.

The sun, squeezed by the clouds, went down without a sunset.

Frustrated by the unwelcome discovery, I carried my stupid bouquet to the address.

"Oh!" she said. "Even with flowers!"

And I got it at once it should have been vodka...

Then we chattered about nothing in the kitchen of her one-room flat.

After tea there happened an incident – the big jar of strawberry jam slipped from her hands and thwacked the floor. It took her a considerable time to collect the large sticky puddle and wash the floor in the kitchen.

At about eleven she started sending me home. I had to drive a fool that everything there was locked and latched already, and the wolfhounds set free to run around.

She, like, took pity and granted me half of her double bed, on the condition that I would behave.

When she put the light out and also lay down, I endeavored to continue the relationship in the most natural way, which was met with stubborn resistance.

I would never learn nothing! Did she call me to wallow in a demonstration of how chaste she was?

I dropped trying and felt I didn't really care, just like with that sealed post package on my bookshelves.

...probably, because the loss of jam became a too great shock; a three-liter jar would have seen her for at least through half of the winter...it might also be an ominous sign for the superstitious...

...and I do not care that they've arranged that dump there....when from one or another construction site, I was watching how they waved at me, it became somewhat better...like a promise of something beautiful...

...when they eventually will cut them down and replace with a five-story block, the trees will, all the same, be waving their lithe tops to me through the heat haze...and that will stay with me, but the garbage heap will remain to those smarties...

At the dead of night, I was awakened by cautious fingers feeling my dick through the underpants. The nurse, who failed to get raped, was checking why so. She'd better ask the sand on the Seim beach.

But those frisking fingers of a stranger checking my flesh...it had already been somewhere...

Only I couldn't recollect where and when, and I fell asleep again.

In the morning I left, omitting the proposed tea with sugar.

What was her name? She should have one anyway...it was an easy name, yes it was...see? I even snap my fingers...so...well...er...perhaps...somehow, like, maybe...mmm...yes...

The dance-floor in the City Central Park was all that still remained there for me. And I visited it not as a belated shooter in search of the game but simply to get blues. A session of nostalgia at the price of 50 kopecks.

I was one of the first to enter the round enclosure of the dance-floor and sat down on the beams of the bench running along the tall pipe-grates in the peeling-off coat of paint.

The large black boxes of the loudspeakers on the stage raged sending forth trendy records because "live" music had already sunk into the past.

Between the numbers somewhat, like, DJ switched the mike on and announced what had just been played and what was coming next. At times, he attempted at making a clumsy cockamamie joke; fortunately, not too often.

I sat quietly, resting the back of my head against the iron pipe of the fencing. The evening twilight got denser around, but high in the sky the flocks of swallows still fluttered under the clouds touched with the parting sun rays. Just like on the day when you turned one month old, and we brought you for a checkup in the children's polyclinic, in the hand-me-down carriage covered with tulle to throw the evil eye off.

Only those swallows kept chirping shrilly when circling above the roof of the department store, but the swallows under the fading clouds were not heard because of being so far and high.

Then the sky became dark, the night came, and I still sat on the bench and never danced, because I knew my place which was among the other thirty-and-over-year olds outside, under the lamp in a dark alley.

You might stop there for a couple of minutes to watch the jumping joy of the next generation before going back to your still life with a sofa in front of the TV...

I sat quietly as becomes a foreign particle, listened to the music and watched, point-blank, the young stock mass getting gradually denser in front of the bench.

...that girl's has neck is longer than that of Nephertiti...very nice, like a stem of dandelion...

And I admired it without getting aroused.

Then she did not show up for a couple of weekends before coming back with her neck guiltily drooped and shortened obviously, and I knew that she got cut off at the entrance examinations to an institute...

At eleven, in the general throng, I left the park for the streetcar stop by Peace Square.

Those who lived closer diverged from the common flow in pairs and companies. People from far-off city neighborhoods discussed: to wait or not to wait? Streetcars at that time of day were an avis rara.

Once we neared the stop occupied by a glass-eyed mujik of about forty.

He eyed the approaching youngsters with a scornful stare, resting his palms on his buttocks, in the attitude of a Nazi officer by the death camp gate bearing the inscription "Forget all hope you who come in here".

The scared pairs and small companies got silent and bypassed him to timidly cram on the other half in the long stop. Triumphantly, trampled he the living space in the other half-stop.

I stopped in front of the victor, barely two meters away.

...so, Sturmbahnfuhrer, dueling of attitudes, eh?.

Mine came all of itself, from the newsreels of the Victory Parade in Moscow, 1945. Besides the dumping fascist banners to the Lenin Mausoleum, there were footages that filmed civilians; girls for the most part with their faces so sad.

Almost all of those girls from the past assumed the same posture – with their left arms hanging along the body, they bent their right ones across the stomach to grip the inside of the left elbow.

I reproduced the stance standing against the glass-eyed. Only my right hand was clutching higher than by those sad girls: around my left biceps and, as the result, my hanging down left arm resembled, like, a trunk already, sort of.

The opponent was not fit to withstand even one minute. He dropped his head in desperation, clasped the hands behind in the traditional zek attitude, and started to walk in shortened steps across the width of the stop, as far as the walls of the invisible cell let him go.

The young folks were amazed at the ease of my victory over the cockroach, and they began to fill the whole stop, taking note, for the future, that know-how is power.

But to be honest, my deed was pure improvisation, a gift from my generation to theirs...

Over and over again, with the clatter of wheels underneath the car floor in shallow sway, the local train carried me away from Konotop...

But where, by the way, was I going?

With all that black-ink darkness outside the window, it's a late local train and my trip is no farther than to Nezhin, which means I'm paying another visit to Zhomnir...

My reflection, blurred in the double-glazed window, dimly nods in time with the rhythm of the tapping at the rail joints: yea-to-him-and-no-where-else...

Why do I go there? Well, probably, there is some reason... Say, typing with his typewriter another story, or maybe a couple of verses...

(...how can I now recollect from such a distance?..)

But all that's nothing but a downright smoke screen, and there's no use to tell lies to oneself.

In fact, I am going to, again and again, feel the aching longing for the lost irreversibly. I am going to torture myself on the bank of the invisible river, the same very river which an eternity before splashed a gush where I loved and was loved in response...

That's why the train rumbles along, through the night, and in one of its cars I am sitting on the edge of the three-person seat, with my briefcase basking impudently in the middle of it.

It's a rare occasion when the car is empty; well, almost so. About twenty meters from my place, in a seat on the same side from the aisle, a girl is sitting.

Because of riding backward, she's facing me with her head leaned against the black window glass.

At such a distance I cannot make out the features of her face, it's just a girl, alone in an empty car of a night train, with a bob haircut of blond hair.

She does not care about my presence, but looks quietly through the window, where the picture of nocturnal darkness is sweeping past behind the dim reflection of the lamps in the ceiling of the empty car.

Of course, it is empty. I am of no account, I sit quietly in the distance and do not stare at her at all.

My absent gaze is directed along the aisle into the empty car vestibule behind the glass of the sliding door, trembling and quaking in time with the thuds of train wheels. Though such attitude doesn't, of course, prevent a sentimental corner of my eye from catching the outline of her blond head, and the part of her shoulders visible above the series of the seat-backs separating us.

Just two in an empty car rushing through the night...

But—lo!—she wakes up from her sad stupor. The right hand touches the hair of her blond haircut. She turns a bit deeper to the window, demonstrating her profile, and then looks straight ahead with her face turned to me.

From my place, I can't see where exactly her eyes are directed, yet I don't need to any longer show interest in the empty vestibule. Now I look at her and admire, with platonic frankness, the face turned to my side and her shoulders covered with the cloth of her cloak.

That's all I can do; I will not let her down with too daring jokes or suggestions, like, "You're cute, I'm cool, be my third wife..."

But – ah! – she's so nice! Even at this distanced semi-discernibility...

The clatter of the wheels fades into the background, replaced with the beautiful melody by Tariverdiev from the soundtrack to the sequels of "17 Moments of Spring".

It's when the secret agent Isaev, aka Stirlitz, has a meeting with his wife, arranged by the Center at a small café in Germany.

She got seated three tables away from him so that he could admire her after a decade of separation.

How's she getting on in the already unknown to him USSR? For ten dangerous years, he was away from his country, away from her...

But sweeping away all the thoughts not needed at that moment, he only looked observing stealthily the new features of the half-unfamiliar woman.

More! Please, more!.

But no, the time is up. Another Soviet secret agent, her escort sitting by her side, looks at his watch. The undercover meeting is over. And he takes her away so that the bloodhounds of the Gestapo won't be able to run them down...

But here, in the local train car, Tariverdiev's melody does not abate, we are out of their control, alone in the whole secluded...

BRENNGG! ZPRTYCH !!

From among the leatherette backrests between us, like from a slightly sloped deck of cards, a red joker jumps out.

We were not alone!. That drunk has been sleeping between us all along!

Swollen with the hangover, his red mug semaphores: "The remote flirtation is over!"

Oh, gods! How I indeed was rolling in the aisles seized with a horse-laughter! With all the stops pulled out.

Through his cloudy ignorance, watched the drunk my convulsions, then he looked back at the girl, slap-wiped his mouth with his paw and stiffly shoved off to the vestibule, and then to the next car. His delicate nature revolted against traveling in the same car with screaming quadrupeds.

And you are so right, drunk! To each his own.

And it's high time for me to wipe the slobber from ruminating the same mawkish bubble gum...

The burial of Brezhnev they performed in an outrageously ugly way.

Two mujiks in black mourning armbands simply dumped the box into the hole by the Kremlin wall. Those, who watched the ceremony in the live broadcast, without cuts for the news program "Time", were just shocked.

The death of Lyonya smack-smacking each word when he read speeches written for him, wallowing in tawdry orders and medals of the Soviet state awarded to him every year (except for Honored Mother Medal which decorated only women who bore 10 kids), bestowing triple, loud, wet smooches on any leader of fraternal parties or progressive movements in the wide world that he could put his hands on, became a trial for the Soviet population.

For almost twenty years, people got used to life if poor and full of shortages, but without Stalin's mass repressions, and without the shooting of hunger riots by military units as under Khrushchev...

Coming out of the bathhouse late Thursday evening, I witnessed how confused were people, collecting in dense flocks and looking around for a shepherd. I recollected the documentaries, where big men in officers' shoulder straps burst to pieces in weeping fits about the death of Stalin.

And at 13 Decemberists, sort of for fun but with underlying fear, they constructed a Paper Great Wall to ward off the upcoming unknown. The material used in fortification was all kinds of scrolls of honor awarded to the family members throughout its existence.

They were picked up in a row, side by side without gaps, along the wood slat that kept in place the oilcloth substituting for tile paneling up the kitchen wall.

I would never imagine there was such plenty of those certificates.

Starting from the sideboard next to the window, they formed dense rank up to the washstand by the door to the veranda. The scrolls of honor received for excellent studying in the third grade, for the second place in the pioneer camp checkers tournament, for taking part in amateur performances were serving now a breastwork against the future.

I only shrugged. What's the difference?.

After Brezhnev, there followed the leapfrog of mummies, which came to power for three or four months, and then the population had again to switch off their TV's for three days, because there was nothing on except for stiff quartets of chamber music, and the news program "Time" reading out telegrams of condolence from all kinds of fraternal parties and international leaders. Because that's what mourning is for.

But now, after another funeral, a certain Gorbachev got to the rudder, quite a middle-aged man, to cut the spree of classical music on TV, although with a suspicious stain over his bald head.

He began to make speeches about acceleration and reconstruction, pronouncing the sound "gh" in the Ukrainian way.

Well, let him talk if so is his pleasure, who cares?

However, one year before the moment we are now at in this my letter to you, he issued a decree with a long title, and, in short, introduced the Prohibition, handled "the dry law" for the sake of clearance.

That act showed immediately that the talkative leader had never in his life read works by John Mill, where it stands in black on white, that only those governments resort to the like measures who consider their own people to be juvenile sillies. That's like pushing the latch on the veranda door and announce, "You're not going anywhere today."

It was more than I would tolerate, and on the day of the Prohibition coming into force, I got off our Seagull bus by the big grocery store in At-Seven-Winds.

There I bought a bottle of wine and drank it from the bottle's neck, without caring to get out to the street. That's how I expressed my indignation with the "dry law".

Some of the saleswomen began to squeak that I should be grabbed and the militia called, but in the queue present in the store there happened no supporters for the law-abiding project. I took the emptied bottle out and gently dropped it into the trash bin on the sidewalk.

With streetcar changes, I reached the terminal in the Settlement, although it was not an easy task. After Vsesvit at the midday break and no snack in the grocery store, the wine did not behave well in the stomach. I hardly managed to keep it under control on the way to 13 Decemberists, where I threw it up and dumped into the spill pail in the veranda.

My mother, appearing from the kitchen, screamed in fright, "Kolya! He's throwing up with blood!"

My father also went out to the veranda, but getting the whiff of a familiar scent, waved her fears off: "What blood? Can't you see? Zonked like the last scumbag."

I covered the pail with its lid, changed from my shoes into the slippers, and silently passed by to crash onto the folding coach-bed without ever speaking back to point out that in a series of scumbags there is not much difference, if any, between the last and previous ones...

Before the Prohibition, I was a very moderate drinker. My weekly dose of alcohol was the two bottles of beer after the visit to the bathhouse, but Gorbachev with his "dry law" literally brought me to that excess.

Sure enough, the weeks were not absolute replicas of one another. There happened more liberal weeks when the bricklayers of our team shared with me wine brought to the trailer. But they did not bring it each week, and sharing also was not the dogma.

And all that because of the principle, with which I returned from the business trip to Kiev, where I had a discussion with one young superintendent.

We considered the case of a workman lying, purely theoretically, on the ground next to an unfinished, say, trench.

The young theoretician claimed that the jack was just bombed, excluding any other possible hypothesis.

My counter-argument was based on the fact that the man had his spetzovka on and, hence, he had just fainted because people do not drink at their workplace, as indicated by his work robe.

Of course, I knew perfectly well that they drink anywhere and with anything on, so kicking against the obvious was a lousy weak standpoint, however, on that particular occasion, I felt like embracing an idealistic stance, for some reason...

On my return to Konotop after the business trip, when I was offered a drink in the trailer, I continued the role of a fighter for ideal and declared that I did not drink at work, although I wanted it.

There followed a reasonable argument, that the trailer was not the workplace. I had to make corrections to the principle's formulation, and it ended up as "I do not drink when in my work robe".

So, they offered, in the form of a compromise, to change into clean clothes, have a swig and then change back.

With time, the procedure was reduced. I simply got undressed and, in my underpants and tank-top, fuddled, just to be polite, and put my spetzovka back on.

In our team, the principles were treated with respect, and I was tolerated in even such a negligee. Only the crane operator Vitalya used to explore and lose his temper, "Why share with him? He'll sell us!"

"No, he's not a snitch."

"When the superintendent drops in and sees his underwear, can't he get it what we are up to?"

But a crane operator was not a member of our team, and Vitalya wasn't even a Konotoper. He came to work from Bakhmach, and just had that sort of a frantic temperament.

Once at the midday break, he started to make fun, "Got stuck again in that Vsesvit of yours? Come on, have a drink! But don't undress, I also have my principles." He giggled, gaily flashed his eyes, grabbing the bottle with his hand missing a finger, and poured only for himself and Kyrpa...

One good turn deserves another. For the next midday break, I bought a bottle of "Golden Autumn" and a bar of chocolate from the grocery store.

Vitalya and Kyrpa were playing cards in the trailer.

I slowly stripped myself to the underwear and started sharing to the colleagues an exalted example of the sybaritic attitude to life, by taking desultory sips from the bottle for 1 ruble 28 kopecks and nibbling at the bar of expensive chocolate.

(...it was not revenging at all, but an act of pure pedagogy...)

Vitalya kept himself in check for quite a long but, eventually, his temperament took over, "Fuck! Snacking the mutter-mumbler swill with "Alenka"! What a pervert!"

But that, of course, was out of envy – in all his life he never tried it that way. And I calmly drank the whole bottle and did not share it even with Kyrpa, who was backing Vitalya's giggles the day before.

(...however, at times, some doubts still creep in, if that was unalloyed pedagogy indeed or, after all, a sort of vengeful exhibitionism?..)

On a Thursday, I stayed in the steam room a little longer and left the bathhouse at somewhat past seven.

Before the rule of Gorbachev, I would not even notice it – the blissful do not follow the time flow – however, the Prohibition placed the sale of alcohol in the rigid temporal frame.

But my after-bath quota?!.

In the beer bar on the opposite side of Square of Konotop Divisions, instead of the usual bright radiance of its fluorescent lamps, a misery yellow spot of a single bulb was seen inside.

In sad distress, I was passing by when the door of the bar opened and two men climbed down the high porch of the facility.

Well, well, well!. The situation called for closer inspection...

The unlocked door subdued willingly to the light pressure. And indeed, just one 100-watt bulb was lit inside above the beer tap. Yet the beer was still flowing from the tap into glasses! Men were grabbing them and retreating to stand about the tall round tables. If not for the scanty illumination, all was like in the old good dry-lawless times!

Not everything, however. The noise and din of warm friendly conversations were missing. The barman in a white coat kept warning, over and over again, from behind the counter "Keep quiet, mujiks! And be quick, we're being breaching it."

There's no buzz in the booze under the whip-clicks of a stopwatch...

Here, in the murky half-dark dungeon room, where you couldn't make out the face of a man standing at the table opposite, we were like the last handful of Knights Templar after their order was defeated and announced anathema.

We hid there from the alcohol-free spies and informers. Any low-grade trader could point at you and yell, "Lay hands on him! Hold fast! Call the militia!"

We were outlaws...

Honestly, I do not really like beer bars.

You stand in the line and watch how tipsy scumbags approach the mujiks queuing ahead of you, "Bro, and a couple for me, eh?" And instead of one line, you have to stand, in fact, two or three.

Even more disgusting, when already quite close to the tap, you get a jab in your ribs and a guy who you, like, have seen someplace, giggles and winks at you, "Don't forget? I asked three mugs."

No, next time I'd rather go to a café where they sell only bottled, more expensive, beer, but without those impudent tail-clingers.

And on the following bath-day Thursday, I haughtily passed by the beer bar and stomped to the café.

"We've got no beer."

Damn! Okay, I can go to Peace Square...

But in the café next to the cinema there also was no beer.

The railway station restaurant remained my last chance.

Same story.

But it's Thursday!

That way I was made buy a bottle of white wine.

The tables in the restaurant were big, for about ten persons each, surrounded by heavy chairs in leather upholstery, but with almost no guests.

I took a seat somewhere in the middle of the hall and started to pour wine into a glass as I would do it from a bottle of beer – in a knitting-needle-thin trickle. So it was my habit.

After the first glass, I was approached by some mujik of an indeterminable occupation who asked for permission to get seated by.

The whole hall of vacant tables, and he liked this particular one. Well, I did not object.

Landing into the next chair, he began to state that he was in transit from the city of Lvov.

I answered that Lvov also was a good city, welcome in passing, and all that. And I started to fill the following glass.

With intent stare at the thin trickle, he announced that he had just been released from Zone.

A couple of guys at the next but one table stopped their gossip.

I congratulated him on being free at last and drank.

His face was suddenly distorted with an expression of unfigureoutable malice, and he went over to loud threats to have intercourse with my rectum when two of us would be in the same prison cell.

(...all that, of course, in the most explicit straightforward terms...)

The wine was finished off, the neighbor at the table obviously did not like me, and I got up to leave.

One of the guys that were sitting nearby, was already standing in between the tables. "Bang the bitch!" he said to me. "What are you waiting for? We're in!"

An absolutely unfamiliar guy; probably, he had a fit of patriotism.

"You did not get it," answered I. "He's not local. The law of hospitality does not allow for crushing the bottle on his head. When on a vacation I'll go to the city of Lvov and check what problem makes the travelers from there so impolite."

I do not know if the guy understood my lengthy speech. Anyway, he returned to his table, and I went out, leaving my neighbor in front of the empty bottle by the empty glass on the empty varnish of the table.

He had resorted to the ultimate invocation, yet the magic did not work and the bottle did not turn into a scatter of fragments with a wallop against his Ascabar trained head.

But still, I cannot forgive Gorbachev.

You might ask what had Gorbachev to do with fucking my asshole?

Even in the era of severe deficit and shortages, the bottled beer did not disappear from Konotop. Never.

But he got loose beyond all bounds of decency and judgment and kept amending the Prohibition with new articles to toughen the struggle with alcoholism...

In the evening of the day with the fresh, the toughest, measures coming into force, I went as usual to the Central Park.

However, I reached neither the dance-floor nor even the ticket office.

In the central alley of the park, I was intercepted by a muscular stranger with a dark hair and horseshoe-shaped mustache in the style of VIA The Pesnyary.

He told that I did not know him, but he knew me because he was from KhAZ, where he worked with my brother...

I recollected as one time my brother Sasha admiringly mentioned some former border guard fond of demonstrating miracles of acrobatics at their workplace. Probably, that was him.

The stranger carefully held a white cellophane packet in his right hand, and he did not slap the nasty night mosquitoes, but instead, he blew them off from his biceps, with sharp puffs.

Just like me, an adept of non-resistance, or else that way he was trained for frontier patrols: make sure to avoid producing unnecessary sound waves betraying your location.

Giving a slight shake to the white cellophane—to which it responded with a luring clandestine tinkle—he informed it was wine in there because he wisely procured it before the curfew. Would I keep him company?

The answer was in the affirmative.

It seemed strange to me though, when he began to address the trickles of youngsters flocking to the dance-floor with the same question – if they had a knife to open a bottle.

Everyone shook their heads and some even flinched, scared with the incongruity of the question with the general spirit of the concurrent times.

Maybe that was his personal form of protest against the Prohibition...

The knife was never found, but he somehow contrived to tear the plastic cork off, by application of a beam in the bench by which we stood in the alley.

He handed the bottle to me. I said it would be better for him to start it because of a certain flaw in my brake system.

"Never mind. I've got another in the bag," insisted he.

Well, I had warned anyway, ain't it? And I killed the 750 ml without a trace.

"Hmm, yes," said the companion thoughtfully. "I did not get it properly."

He uncorked the second bottle, but he did not give it to me though, just held in his hands, and when we sank onto the bench, he put it between us.

We began to probe each other on which of the philosophical themes to start a friendly conversation.

As a rule, after the second glass, you start to give out very smart things, getting astonished yourself by their unexpected wisdom.

In the end, of course, everything will converge into the eternal gash predicted by the truck crane driver, Ivan Kot, but why not to glitter your well-trained mind for a starter?

Alas, the envious bad stars forestalled any shining, or sparkling, or glittering...

Along the alley slowly and almost noiselessly rolled a van with inscription "militia" on the door. The car pulled up and two gentlemen in cockades jumped out of the cab.

My interlocutor, not waiting for any further development in the upcoming events, without delay threw himself over the bench and started down the side alley towards the dark building of the city council.

I didn't even think to compete him in this track and field event and, with a bottleful freshly tanked into the hold, I could only admire how quickly he was leaving.

Moreover, those two bulls were already standing over me.

None of them followed him either, only the older one clattered his shoe heels against the asphalt, although staying in the same spot. His pretty fast step dancing he accompanied with a strange, possibly also Irish, air "oolyou-lyou!".

The border guard accelerated sharply and disappeared into the darkness.

The militiaman dancer picked up the open, but still not started, bottle from the bench. He turned it upside down in his outstretched hand and held so with a sadistic and sad air, as the wine gurgled out to the ground.

"Come on," the second man said to me, nodding at the already open side door of the van...

I stuck my head inside. In the dim light of a tiny bulb in the ceiling, those caught before me sat along the blind sidewalls.

An elderly militia petty officer sat leaning his back against the partition from the cab, facing the public.

Admiring the impeccable finesse of my own movements, I ascended the interior. The door slammed shut behind me.

"Good evening!" amiably and indiscriminately greeted I all the present, and at once got a kick in my ass.

"The prick even 'good-evening' knows!" yelled the petty officer who hit me.

Falling on someone from the previous catch, I automatically exclaimed, "I beg your pardon!" And I looked back fearful of another kick.

But I saw that I was not going to get it for the "pardon", the officer was too lazy to get up.

They drove us not too far. It was the same courtyard where they once recorded the testimony of The Orpheuses on the disappearance of the accordion made in DDR, but now I was taken to another building.

At the desk in the corridor there sat a Captain of the militia. After a couple of questions to my fellow-travelers, he sent them to the cell.

Then he turned to me. Seeing that I answered his questions adequately and did not try to push for my rights or refute the report of the officers who delivered me, he asked where I worked.

Then he called somewhere to verify and after a very short talk as well as checking my proficiency at bending exercises, he finally ordered me to go home. "Straight home! Got it? Nowhere else!"

I went out of the gate. Why do they all order me?

Fuck them!

And I obstinately returned to the park and bought a ticket to the dance-floor.

To celebrate another stage in the anti-alcoholic campaign, the gate was guarded by a militia sergeant and two public order enforcers adorned with red armbands.

"Did you drink today?" demanded one of them.

"Never," said I, and proceeded to my bench under the fence to sit there until the end of dancing.

Which happened after a couple of numbers...

The notification of my detention reached SMP-615 a month or two later.

I already forgot about it when the new boss called me from the construction site and demanded to write an explanatory.

He obviously decided to use the situation to full advantage, and in a week appointed a meeting of the trade-union committee to consider my personal case.

With the autumn cold setting in, I attended the meeting with my raincoat and hat on.

The new boss, in his jacket and tie, began to expound my transgressions.

The freshest of them, attested by the paper from the militia, was my violating directives of the party and government on a park bench. That's how I disgraced SMP-615 in the eyes of the public and authorities! How long to tolerate?!

However, I chose the position of an observer and to all rhetorical questions answered with a shrug of my left shoulder under the raincoat...

And my contemptible attitude to the management?! Look here – an explanatory written in verse!

From the stack of papers on the desk in front of him, the new boss picked one up and shook it in the air.

...wow! I did not know such a dossier had been accumulated on me...

And here's another sample! The reminder written by me to the trade-union committee: "Three months ago I applied for upgrading my bricklayer category.

However, till now the qualification commission of SMP-615 neither raise their eyebrow nor turn their horn."

The trade-union committee burst in laughter, the new boss, obedient to the herd instinct, also grunted though not understanding what was funny about it...

And it's simply dangerous to be next to me because I was putting an arm under the slab!.

And that's a fact.

On that day there were four of us: the overseer Karenin, the carpenter Ivan, the crane operator Vitalya and I.

The sun was glaring upon the March snow of the construction site where we were starting a new apartment building.

The foundation blocks had been laid in the pit since autumn, and then, throughout the winter, Ivan was coming to the site to guard it from 8 to 5.

He came, turned on the heater in the trailer, and watched the white snowdrifts outside the window, or kept considering the pics of cute beauties from girlie magazines, glued by him on all the walls...

On that March day, he became my hand.

The task was simple – to lay four courses of bricks in the short wall of the future staircase-entrance and install a stump of a slab over the future doorway to the basement.

Standing on the trestle between the foundation blocks, I raised two short corners and started laying courses under the shoorka to finish the stump's prop of a wall.

It was a half-hour task, no more, while to the working day end there remained an hour plus.

However, Vitalya, the crane operator, was impatient to climb down from his perch in the cab of his tower crane and play cards with Ivan till five. So he shouted from above to the carpenter to hook the concrete slab stump intended for the installation.

The stump's one side would rest onto the blocks of the traverse wall, the other side would be supported by the readied corners of the unfinished wall. They'll lap it up! And the remaining gape between the corners would be filled sometime after, in the process of construction.

I tried to explain to Ivan, that now it was the most convenient moment for finishing the started wall. Later, to fill the gap left under the stump, the bricklayers would not have the trestle under their feet. Let him better bring the mortar and I'd finish it in fifteen minutes, working under such favorable conditions.

Yet, Vitalya for Ivan was closer than logic, so he went and hooked the stump as told.

The crane operator raised the load, turned the beam and rolled the tower crane along the rails, carrying the stump to me for insertion as he planned.

He yelled from his cab to quickly spread mortar on the corners of the unfinished wall otherwise he would drop it just as it was, on dry bricks – they'll lap it up!

Instead of mortar, I put my arm on a brick corner so that he did not fulfill his intention.

Vitalya poured hectic curses from his birdhouse in the height, rang the crane bell without interruption, and kept closing in on the arm, with the load.

In general, it was a frontal attack of two fighter planes against each other: he who yields was nothing but a snotty chicken.

When the concrete stump neared the arm to about a meter, overseer Karenin awoke from watching the breath-taking battle of two aces and yelled to Vitalya to take the load aside.

And there it hung while I finished the wall the way it was right.

Overseer Karenin stood on the blocks above my head and asked, "Why did you do it, Sehrguey? He's crazy enough to crush your arm. You'd be a cripple."

"Karenin, all my life is crushed. All that remained is just my work. I don't want them making a snot of it."

"Where?" asked Ivan standing on the other wall of blocks behind my head. "What's the talk about crushin'?"

"He means it was his written fate from birth," overseer Karenin explained to him.

I was finishing the last course of bricks, like, busy, but I could not let the erudite conversation go without me, "May his hand wither, to that writer!"

Karenin and Ivan got silent at once; the overseer somehow shrank and turned his eyes aside.

And it was that very moment, squinting my eyes in the rays of the sun descending to the horizon, and spreading mortar for insertion of the slab stump onto the finished wall, that I thought for the first time that the particulars of our lives were defined and occurring the way as we recount them in our later life.

And it doesn't matter to whom and whether in gossip or writing...

(...it's scary!

It turns out that with that spontaneous curse I wished my own hand to wither away?!.

Why? It is so unfair!

..shut up!. Who are you to make complaints of unjust treatment?

How else could I show that cheeky puppeteer in his made in Germany sleeping bag that I'm not a servile marionette neither a tool to accomplish his drowsily scintillating blabber meant for reconstructing the past beyond his reach?

I'm not sure if you can get it though, the good news that at least I can follow myself.

However, I'd better shut up now for not to overstrain our brain.

Moreover, if not for this sleeping bag my story might very easily and more than once have ended in the nameless river at the Object...)

Ivan and I inserted the stump. Vitalya got down from the tower crane and still had time for playing cards with Ivan before we went to the road to meet and board on our Seagull.

I soon forgot the whole incident, however, the new boss did not omit to add it to the dossier...

"And you all know as well as I do, how often they nab him to the psychiatric hospital... Besides, he is a chronic violator of labor discipline. Three occurrences of absenteeism in only one year! That's why I propose to fire him for systematic absenteeism."

That's right – two days to Moscow after the modal train for Andrey, and one day to the publishing house "Dnipro" in Kiev...

At the time of each of my violations, I fully realized that it was an act of absenteeism.

However, it was normal for a worker at SMP-615 to have a week of absenteeism, and a couple of champions had accrued up to twenty days, which fact I considered a guarantee of permissibility to skip three days, the grosser violators would serve a cover for my ass.

No go! The integrity of the labor discipline couldn't be bribed with a smartie's calculations!

And now, after five consequential records in my workbook marking the gratitude and appreciation of my labor achievements, on October 18, 1985, the head of personnel department of SMP-615, A. Petukhov, with that same handwriting wrote that I had been fired on the strength of Article 40, for absenteeism without satisfactory excuse.

The participants in the meeting of the trade-union committee unanimously raised their hands in favor of the measure proposed by the new boss.

Afterward, some of them commented that such a result was exclusively my blunder, I should have stood up, and, with the hat in my hand, humbly ask for mercy and then they would forgive me...

Why did I keep to the role of a monitor to the end and did not make a speech in self-defense, pointing out the absenteeism of others, quite a few, and did not express my bitter regret for my wrong-doings?

I simply was fed up. The time had come to look for other grounds for the application of my experimentalism.

Not because of so was my plan, though. As always, I remained just a tool, an operation-end man executing his orders. The time and Experimentalism were the decision-making bodies...

Besides, another 100-apartment block was finished in summer. A bricklayer from our team, named Nina, a fat woman with a hairy birthmark on her cheek, got an apartment in it.

She entered SMP-615 a couple of months before the commissioning of the apartment block and, having received an apartment, quit the organization.

I went to the personnel department and asked Petukhov about my progress in the queue for improving my housing conditions.

He answered I was number 35 in it.

That's ridiculous! Six years before, I was 24th in the line!

He replied with calligraphic roundness: since those times three bosses replaced each other, and he was not around when I got a job at SMP-615, so now my place in the list was thirty-fifth and no other data to refer to...

Fare thee well, my beloved construction train! Farewell, our team!

I won't set on fire our trailer, even though my guitar, brought for celebrating Grinya's birthday, the next morning was not there...

When the last entry in the workbook ran "on strength of Article", you became a sort of blacklisted – no organization had a job for you.

However, in Konotop there was an enterprise not so much afraid of the outcasts, "Rags" was the name of the brave company, aka recycling factory.

On the strength of my basic specialty, they gave me the job of a workman at the overhauling unit.

The overhaul consisted of three workmen, but we did not do any major repair, neither any repair at all for that matter.

We sat in the room, idling the time and occasionally went out into the yard of the factory with stacks of modern recycling equipment brought there a year, maybe two, before and protected from the weather vagaries with a giant cover of black roofing felt, because the building for the equipment had not been finished yet.

The factory itself huddled in a pair of barrack-like structures – the offspring from the era of the first five-year plans – plus a couple of tall arched hangars from corrugated white tin, and several various huts and sheds leaning against the wall around the factory grounds.

But at the very beginning of my overhaul career, I was not bored with all that bleakness, because they sent me on a business trip to the city of Kiev...

The then Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, Comrade Scherbitsky, was going to visit the Kiev Recycling Factory to share his valuable instructions on the development of so important a branch in the national economy.

As a result, the recycling factories from all over the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine started sending their workmen to Kiev to spit and polish the metropolitan recycling factory in preparations for the high-ranking visit.

When I arrived to make my contribution, the metal structures in the shop floors of the factory had been paint-coated for the fourth time, and the factory yard covered with the third layer of asphalt...

They were the farewell days of golden autumn, the sun smiled affectionately from the calm sky, but the sight of the small fir trees in stone pots, like, to decorate the courtyard called for the blues to set in. The insufficient capacity of the pots would not allow for the trees to grow, and they were condemned to inevitably perish after the pompous visit...

Before leaving for the business trip, I went to the Konotop Department Store to buy a sports-bag for keeping personal necessities.

As it turned out, there was a fit of shortage for such bags and I had to buy a smaller, though practical, one instead, however, if you looked closely, it was, after all, a female goods item. Might have I been a pervert after all?.

For the stay in Kiev, I was billeted at a boarding house near the "Pipe", on the very bank of the Dnieper river.

Before the war, there was a plan to cross the Dnieper at that place by a metro line. They even managed to build a stop from the reinforced concrete, which looked like a giant pipe indeed, with the diameter as tall as a two-story house.

Later, the circumstances and plans were changed and the "Pipe" got covered with all sorts of "here were Osya and Kisa" and the like historical stamps.

The boarding house was a long one-story wooden structure with pencil-box rooms, like in the hostels, only the windows were wider.

In the mornings I went out on the sandy bank of the mighty stream to do exercises among the willow bushes.

To watch the Dnieper from so a-near was not like taking looks from a local train flying over along the bridge. The oceanic mass of the water rolling by was simply stunning.

...and so for millennia without a stop...

...three, four, bend left, bend right...

In the room, besides me, lived a blond from Southern Ukraine with a graphical story of how he was stabbed on the beach.

The homie bros from the same neighborhood jabbed a knife in his stomach and he fell on his back.

And then the precinct approached.

The guys pretended playing cards, and they threw an open newspaper over the knife handle sticking up from his stomach.

The militiaman started asking about something, and the blond lay and looked, and couldn't say a word, and flies were landing and racing upon the newspaper.

The guys, naturally, "Nah, we know nothing."

When the precinct left they called an ambulance because he had not knocked on them...

There was almost no renovation work left to be done at the factory, and the business trippers were just sitting in the Red Corner room, where the young and bearded artist, a local geezer, wrote out the letters of one and the same slogan, day after day, on one and the same long strip of red fabric spread over along a very long table, or gossiping with his friends, also Kievers, who knew ways of getting in for a visit through the guarded check-entrance.

We changed clothes right there, into spetzovkas given out by the factory, and hung our rigs onto the chair backs. The shower was working round the clock, around the corner down the corridor – some halcyon days in full swing.

My fellow-business-trippers were amazed at my talent of sitting in the same position and never strolling around Red Corner, nor partaking in the mutual idle gossip but only listening and watching in a modest, still, and silent way...

After another of working days, I returned to the boarding house and got it that the blond was through his business trip and went home because only my bed remained in the room, and my perverted bag was unzipped and wide open, with my last ten rubles missing from it.

And there still remained one week to survive on my business trip.

The next morning, it was Saturday, I went out in search of food.

I did not make any definite plans, but simply walked towards the distant bridge across the Dnieper. Then I walked along that bridge supported with a multitude of steel cables from pylons and almost free of traffic.

On the opposite riverbank, in the field to the right, towered several apartment blocks – the embryo of Troyeschina neighborhood, but I passed by and on, towards the faraway forest.

The road went through the village of Poghrebby and entered the forest where I started looking for mushrooms.

I came across of just two species, both unfamiliar. Their gills looked alike, but those with pointed caps turned out too bitter, so I had to eat the other sort, with concave caps. The hunger slackened and I went back.

In the field between the village and the distant tower blocks, I hit the mother lode. There was a scattering of potatoes on the roadside.

Probably, the truck was loaded with potatoes piling above the sides, and on the way, the surplus poured over when the truck dodged an oncoming vehicle.

I stuffed my pockets with potatoes, and on Sunday came to the same spot with the obviously female bag.

In the boarding house, at the very end of the corridor, there was a kitchen with a gas stove and a large common pan. Without peeling the potatoes I boiled a quantity for a few days of consumption.

But before it, while I was coming back to Kiev over the bridge hanging on its steel cables, I understood what namely prevented me from living a normal life, it was because of my poetry. Everyone else was living like all the other people, because they did not write poetry, and if I gave it up, then everything would, probably, get to rights...

It's easy to say "it's time to give up", but how? To burn the pocket notebook which the blond generously left in my bag? An overly trivial tack.

So I decided to make a collection of poems and put an end to all that. Such was the plan.

On Monday, I visited the ante-room of the personnel department and asked the secretary-typist for 32 blank sheets of paper. Exactly the volume of "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by Karl Marx, but just as many pages were needed for all the poems plus the preface.

Apart from that, she gave me two uncut sheets, which she couldn't use because of that defect. Yet, the defective double sheet turned a perfect folder for the rest.

Returning to the Red Corner room, I asked the artist to make a cover from that folder for the collection of poems titled "Just so?"

In the evening at the boarding house, I copied the preface and the poems to the sheets of paper with almost typeset handwriting.

The following morning at the factory, the artist showed the cover he created – the name of the author and the title against a background of abstract-style beige waves. Then he scratched the back of his head and confessed, that starting the creation he was somewhat tired and emotional, for which reason the author's name, as well as the collection title, were drawn on the back, instead of the front, cover.

Abnormal double sheets were not an everyday find, so I had no other option but to paginate the collection in Arabic style – from the back cover to the front...

It's very convenient to live in the same city with a publishing house, with your work finished at five, you have plenty of time to visit them without any absenteeism...

The office where some time ago a young man directed me to the specialist on Maugham was already shared by a couple of workers – another young man and a young woman.

I asked where they were handing poetry in.

They were delighted to send me to the first office room around the left corner in the corridor.

In that office, on gently breaking the news of delivery a collection of poetry, I heard the familiar question, "Who sent you?"

"Ah! Yes, sure! I was sent from the neighboring office, just around the corner. D'you know them?"

That served a sufficient recommendation for the collection to change hands.

I left the publishing house both grieving and laughing.

Grieving?

I rejected my own offsprings, made them a bunch of doorbell babies, pledging to keep sterile infertility from that moment on and forever.

Laughing?

I was free!

(...starting a poem you are doomed to bondage.

You strain yourself and plow like a slave until the moment you can step aside and say "well, yes, it's, like, rather-more-or-less, sort of, enough, I can't do better anyway..." ...)

Even louder I laughed at the poetry receiver because there was no return address with the collection, only the fictitious name of the author: "Klim Solokha".

Stuff your pipe with it and smoke, _salaga_!

"...service done!."

"What was their reaction?" asked the artist-designer.

"A standing ovation."

The supply of foraged potatoes could see me till the end of the week, however, just potatoes somehow did not satiate, even if sprinkled with salt found in the common kitchen.

The artist noticed when in the Red Corner room I lifted a dried bread roll, forgotten by someone on a windowsill, and ate it, hiding in my fist.

He reported the happening to the head of the personnel department.

The grumpy head, wearing the mask of eternal disdain on his face, came to Red Corner, already empty of the business trippers of whom I was the last, and demanded my reasons for so strange an action.

The money was lost from my bag.

Stolen? Who?

I knew nothing. There had been ten rubles which were there no more.

He gave a displeased itch to his face and went out.

Soon, they called me to his office and he said that he would stamp my business trip papers as completed (there remained still three more days) but I had to perform an urgent work: a KAMAZ truck dumped a heap of sand in a wrong place in the yard, the sand had to be moved but a bulldozer would hack the fresh asphalt with its caterpillars.

It took me two or three hours to shovel the sand to hide it behind the too small pots with the doomed fir tree babies.

I was paid ten rubles for the job, which I immediately received from the cashier in the accountancy office.

The local train ticket to Konotop was four rubles plus. So I went to a grocery store, bought a bottle of vodka, transparent as a tear of separation, something there for a snack, and returned to the Red Corner room.

Together with the artist, we drank that vodka for the success of the collection of poetry which pages had to be turned backward...

The overhaul at the Konotop recycle factory was headed by Yura, one of the three workmen at the unit.

He loved to laugh and did it ably, exposing the fixture of white metal on his fang. In the white-and-black films they usually portrayed Komsomol leaders looking like him, and only the fix did not fit into the image.

The second overhauler was Arsen, cross-eyed, but not too much so. He put on the airs of a dignified aqsaqal, despite his young age. The reason for his pride with himself was that his son had reached the age of two years already.

Arsen and I quite hit it off, but Yura kept trying hard to crush me, most likely, because of his disgust at my higher education.

I did not tell anyone about the fact, but those four years were recorded in my workbook now kept in the personnel department of the factory, and Yura spent lots of time in the administration barracks, readily laughing along with everyone there.

The main impediment to establishing friendly relations between us two were my quotations and sharing news from _Morning Star_ .

Arsen, for his part, tried to pacify our skirmishes.

Once in a conversation with Arsen, I cited certain lines from the work of Karl Marx On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

(...generally speaking, Frederick Engels is considered to be the author of that work, however, Fritz printed it after Karl had already passed away, giving his bosom friend the opportunity to rummage through his archives and unpublished works in progress.

Probably, Engels, like the blond from Southern Ukraine considered himself entitled to expropriate belongings of the absent.

After all, he had supported Karl and his wife all their lives with the money of his father, also Fritz...)

I did not expose all those details to Arsen, confining to a short quotation from the work itself.

Yura was around and suddenly snapped in with the demand that I would never dare start provocative talks like this in his presence because he was a communist and knew where to give a phone call on statements of that kind.

For the first time in our clashes, the last word remained by him. He dumbfounded me with his threat to halloo the KGB at the founders of Marxism-Leninism. And that's no fun, they would gladly run them down, for all I know...

Another time, I was depicting to Arsen the Wagner's ballet about Scottish witches which I attended during the business trip to Kiev.

Dancing a solo dance, one of the witches stumbled and with a wooden knock fell flat onto the stage floor.

"Ha-ha-ha!" cheerfully reacted Yura, who again happened in the overhaul room.

"And imagine, Arsen, in the whole hall there was not a single jerk to laugh at her. She got up and danced on, showed her high mettle, in short."

And Yura also showed that it was not in vain that he kept visiting the administration. I was transferred to the factory's production section, to the post of a presser...

What, actually, was Rags? It served a place where railway cars were bringing scrap sorted at rubbish dumps. Worn and discarded clothing for the most part, as well as waste paper.

Women from the nearby village of Popovka dissected the tatters with the howling disks of their machine tools and sorted the rugs again into soft mounds on the floor of the passage – cotton tatters, knitted rags, artificial fur collars from winter coats, etc.

Day after day they stood in front of their machine tools in dusty spetzovka coats with dangling clusters of safety pins on their chest, which they detected and pulled out from fabrics so that the steely trifles did not damage the disc. Such grapes of pins made them evil-eye-proof indeed...

Two loaders approached those rag mounds with a deep box on long poles, like a sedan chair. Their faces were wrapped with bandannas, in bank robbers style, so as not to inhale the dense clouds of dust hanging around the machine tools.

They piled rags into their box and carried to the neighboring pressing section, pacing in a precipitated half-trot. That jogging gait was dictated by the weight of the load.

(...once or twice I replaced someone of the missing loaders but was not able to do more than a couple of goes.

"Sehryoga! You must be relaxed when carrying. Relax!"

Yet even with those instructions, I could not reach relaxation tensely gripping at the long pole-handles that with each step slipped more and more out of my strained hands...)

The press was also a box but it had a door and no poles because it stood on the floor anchored in its place.

With the door open, first of all, you needed to put over the box bottom two thin and narrow metal strips, aka shinka, leaving their ends out of the box.

Then you had to drape the box from inside with a couple of throwaway burlap sacks and lock the door with a hook outside.

After stuffing the box with the trash brought by the loaders, you hit one of the three buttons on the press side. The electric motor on the press frame started to creak and howl, and crept down the shaft, pushing the press shield, on which it was fixed, also down.

The shield pressed the trash towards the bottom as deep as it could. When the pitch of the motor howling rose to whine, it meant the motor had done all it could and had no power to squeeze any firmer.

At that point, you hit the "stop" button and then the button "up". The shield with the motor started the reverse creeping, up the shaft.

Those ups and downs, the press executed really slowly.

Now you filled the space produced in the box by the shield's traveling, with additional armfuls of trash because the readied bale should weigh about 60 kg.

After the third going down, the shield was stopped to keep all that in place while you tied tightly the ends of shinka over the produced, roughly cubic, bale. There remained only to send the shield up and roll the readied bale out of the box. The farther away you rolled it over the floor the better so that it wouldn't be in the way of the bales to follow.

When about the press, there accumulated a flock of bales, Misha the loader came with a two-wheel barrow.

He shoved the bottom shelf of the barrow under the bale and yanked the handles toward himself. The bale lay upon the handles, supported with the shelf from behind, and Misha dragged the barrow to the exit from the pressing section.

Near the exit gate, there stood the booth of Valya the weigher, with a large luggage scales next to it.

Misha toppled the bale onto the scales and, having dipped a short stick into a tin can with paint, wrote on the burlap wrapping of the bale figures of its weight, which Valya yelled to him through the glass of her booth because Misha was old and half deaf.

Then he dumped the bale from the scales, heaved it onto his two-wheel barrow again, and rolled it out of the pressing section into the open air, and there along the path of crippled concrete into the hangar for the finished product...

When an empty railway freight car came to the dead-end track by the hangar, the team of hangar loaders stacked the bales into the car and it was driven away, no matter where, probably, to some factories for further processing of recyclables.

In the pressing section, there was only one window crusted with the dust accumulated there from the period of the First Five-Year Plan.

The illumination was served by yellowish dim bulbs, one over each of the four presses.

True, one of them did not work, but for the two workers in the section, the remaining three were enough.

The production norm for a presser was thirty-two bales per shift.

I hardly turned them out during the working day, while the other presser, another Misha, who lived with Valya the bale weigher, would have finished the norm ahead of time and left, whistling haphazard airs.

He was more experienced presser and did not put excessive quantities of rags into the press box, while my bales showed abnormal overweight.

Loader Misha would shake his deaf head disapprovingly, scribbling with the dipped stick "78" or "83" on the bales of my production.

Then he, with a grunt, heaved the bale on the barrow and dragged it out, because he was a strong old man.

He was silent by nature and did not reprove me.

I felt guilty, but all the same, I could not catch the hang of guessing the weight of the rags stuffed into the press box...

Apart from the midday break, there were two more half-hour breaks, just for having rest. We spent them in the common large room with lockers along with two of its walls.

In the wall opposite the door, there were two windows large enough to make the room light because the dust covering them was not overly ancient.

Four square tables with white-plastic-covered tops were put in a row under the windows, forming one common table for the midday meal, with long plank benches along its sides.

That was the locker room of pressers and loaders who changed their clothes there. However, in the midday break, the Popovka women also came there because in theirs there was not a table to have a meal at.

I did not have havvage there. For the midday meal, I traveled to the canteen of the "Motordetail" plant.

Crossing the railway track, I went over the field and took the turn into the forest belt to follow the trail there to the terminal of streetcar 1, opposite the plant check-entrance. The whole journey took fifteen minutes.

It was a very modern plant, and through the glass walls of the canteen on the second floor, there opened the view on the field from where I was coming. And there were no problems at the check-entrance, anyone in a spetzovka was considered a workman at the plant.

The havvage portions at the canteen were small but cheap, and for a couple of hours after you did not feel hungry.

Sometimes, the bale weigher Valya ordered to bring her a custard cake from the canteen.

On the way back, crossing the railway track in front of freight trains locomotives that were waiting for "the green" to enter Konotop station, I tried to bribe the locomotives with the cake wrapped in a piece of paper.

They had such good-natured faces with beards in red paint coat, like the image on the sail of the Kon-Tiki raft. But they remained incorruptible.

"Well, as you please, then!" and I was taking the cake to the bale weigher Valya...

And the half-hour breaks, were for gossip and playing "goat" with dominoes.

Besides the mujiks, the breaks were also attended by the bale weigher Valya, and a couple of younger women from Popovka, and sometimes the technologist Valya came as well.

She was an able-bodied woman, sufficient to fill impulsive poetic dreams, but I had already kicked off those things.

There were four loaders in the locker room of whom only old Misha kept silent all the time and never chip in, and even "goat" he played very rarely.

Loader Volodya Kaverin with a narrow reddish mustache trickling down to his chin, was, on the contrary, loud and passionate, but loader Sasha with a dark toothbrush mustache restrained his partner's impulses.

He was tall, calm, reliable and—what a small place the world is!—the husband of that very Valya from the typist pool who had typed the collection of short stories by Maugham in Ukrainian.

The fourth loader, Vanya, was chubby and he shaved all of his round face.

He sometimes threatened to smash my fucking mug for some of my remarks, but I doubted it – you could see from his face that he was a kind man.

Besides, he was a real, first-class woman-hater and, holding the dominoes bones in his palm used to declare all of them to be bitches.

"I'm on top of her, pumping, digging, doing my level best and she just lays with her eyes into the ceiling, 'Oy, Vanya! there's so much cobweb in the corner!', well, ain't they bitches after that?!"

Even a saint wouldn't hold himself back from adding a word: "Poor boy!" says I, "such a humiliation leaves no choice but become gay indeed."

And the misogynist as always began fiddling his score about breaking my fucking mug.

However, chances to see his threat fulfilled were too slim, the knitted brows in Vanya's round face couldn't hide away his heart of gold...

At the end of winter, the factory workers traditionally went on a three-day excursion to Moscow. Not all, of course, only those who wanted to.

Technologist Valya asked me if I wanted. I had to admit that I hardly had enough money to live until the payday.

"Don't talk nonsense," she said, "the trade-union pay for food and accommodation. You can go there with just three rubles."

That was a challenge to the Experimentalist. I signed up for the tour and prepared a three rubles bill...

We arrived in Moscow in the evening.

The small column of the tourists was headed by Yura who led through the immense railway station to the square, it was not his first year in those tours. I was the file closer keeping my hands in the empty pockets of the demi-saison camel coat.

A bus was already waiting for us before the station to take to the Red Square.

Arriving there, the bus stopped, and all the tourists went out to pass by the mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum. There only remained the bus driver, the guide Olya and I.

"Are not you going?" asked Olya.

"I disgust the dead."

The driver slightly turned from the steering wheel to look back.

Obviously, to the Red Square arrived more buses with the excursionists from different other places of our vast Motherland, because the driver opened the door and three more guide girls climbed up inside.

They knew each other and in brisk shoptalk were discussing the internal affairs of their tour operating organization and anything else...

Their sacred tribute paid, the excursionist came back from the frosty snow-clad Red Square, filling the bus with animated whoops and stomps of their footwear soles against the entrance steps, elatedly rubbing and slapping the shoulders of their coats and pea-jackets...

We were taken to the Veh-Deh-eN-Kha area, to a hotel built in the late fifties for the participants of the World-Festival of Youth and Students.

The guide Olya specified details of further cooperation: on the morning of the third day the bus would take us to the railway station because we were more interested in combing through all kinds of stores than in "look-to-the-right, look-to-the-left", wasn't it so?

Everyone joined in the chorus chanting that, yes, it was so...

Our havvage was served by a canteen located in a separate building and paid for with stamped paper slips of the coupons distributed among the excursionists.

One of the canteen employees recommended me not to leave my camel coat on the hanger by the entrance door to the hall.

"But eating with the coat off is more convenient."

"Look, Vera!" she yelled to another worker in the canteen kitchen. "There's one more guest from Communism!"

Since I was not interested in shopping of any kind, I mostly walked around the area, had a ride on a trolley bus to its terminal, and even found a newsstand with _Morning Star_ on sale.

In Konotop, because of the explosive situation in Poland, that newspaper was often missing even from the news stall at the station. Probably, the editors in England were covering Polish events incorrectly.

Three rubles was not a sum to live in a grand style, but I still watched a historical action movie starring Karachentsev.

(...the ours, in general, can make fifteen minutes of a movie quite watchable, but the rest may have been safely skipped...)

To the hotel "Polyarny" I went by the grandiose Moscow subway, aka metro.

Since it was the daytime, the restaurant guests were some kind of excursionists, because they all were sitting side by side in a row along the table assembled from smaller ones, and ate their havvage with their fur coats and overcoats on.

I asked a man in the waiter's uniform jacket to call Nikolay the waiter, but he only shrugged his shoulders.

Then I demanded the head waiter; a tall woman came out in the same uniform jacket.

"A year ago dining at your restaurant, I was one ruble short and promised the waiter to make up later. His name was Nikolay, he had a clever round face. Pass it to him, please."

And I handed her a ruble banknote; she silently accepted it...

Besides, I found another place to pass the time for free – the Central Library after the name of V. I. Lenin.

They gave a ticket there without any money if you had your passport on you...

That's a really grand place that Central Library after Lenin, yes, indeed, some crossbred of a theater and a metro station; in short, the temple for book-worshipers.

Even the door was as tall as a church gate, and bore the inscription on its handle: "pull". And so I did.

And behind the door, there was the vestibule with a porthole in the blind wall, where they gave a free ticket if you had the passport, and then another door to the hall so very awesomely spacey.

It turned out to be the cloakroom, yet adorned with white columns, and at the far end of the hall, there were the stairs of milky white marble.

And all around the hall swarmed the friendship of peoples from the whole planet in full swing – all kinds of Burmese and Senegalese, yet the Whites also flashed through.

But it looked to me as the cloakroom was somehow, like, out of balance with the cloakroom attendants on the right side keeping a-trot between the hangers and the marble barrier fetching bundles of coats, hither-thither, back and forth, yet the line to them never shortened, while the attendants on the left stood idle and beastly dying of ennui.

I felt sorry for them as well as for the trotters, so I turned left and dumped my camel upon the white marble barrier of the slackers.

They hardly paid any attention whatsoever, but then one of them looked down his nose at me and in a lordly manner deigned to explain – their half-cloakroom was for academicians only.

Some f-f..er..frightful mix of segregation with discrimination, as if my camel would graze fur off their coats!

In short, I thanked the snob for the tip and walked over to the other side which was for mere mortals...

Before the stairs of milky white leading up into the height, there was a narrow gate that I hadn't make out from afar. They checked your ticket at that gate and gave more slips of paper, and only then let go up between a pair of militiamen, standing by so as to instill respect for order.

Up there, high above the cloakroom, stretched the galleries of endless ranks of catalogs in boxes, which looked like automatic storage cells, only of wooden color, not metallic.

I rummaged through the cards wired in narrow drawers and found Freud, his lectures published in 1913 on the occasion of somewhat of his jubilees, to commemorate it with a conjuncture publication of just 60 pages.

I wrote out all the indexes and other marks of that booklet and went to the reading room to enjoy an hour of pleasure.

Greetings!

On looking into my application slip, the attendant squeaked up, like, she was calling for the militia when surprised by muggers: Freud?!!

Exactly, says I, I wanna see what the guy was about, be so kind, please.

That's when she rubbed my silly nose in.

To have access to the mentioned book, says she, I had to be a Ph.D. of relevant sciences, apart from being also a permanent resident of the Moscow city (the free ticket testified that I wasn't), and the last but not least, I had to produce a document asserting that gods of the Soviet scientific Olympus allowed me to open the book in question.

My jubilation ceased with a fizzle and in a state of a dulled calm, I climbed down the pasteurized stairs to collect my camel and go...

I went out into the street, feeling, like, engulfed with the most profound calmness, as thick as bullet-proof glass; no desire to go anywhere, no wish to want anything at all.

Reaching as far as the underpass to the metro, I leaned my back against the parapet and once again eyed the pompous building of the Central Library after Lenin. My mind was perfectly empty and somewhere in the background there echoed the lines from Shevchenko:

"... learn what is foreign, keep what is yours..."

Damn, folks! Where am I?

The huge temple, the giant letters: Central Library Lenin.

What was his ultimate goal? So that workers could read books!

His famous bequeath had been drummed into our heads, dinned in the ears, rammed down the throat:

"Learn, learn, and learn!"

And, now what?

Four years before the Great October Revolution, in 1913, any worker could drop into a bookstore and buy those 60 pages of lectures, if so was his wish.

After the victory of the mentioned revolution, in the Central Library after Lenin, they told me: "Fuck yourself! there's no book for you because you are a worker!"

Yet even screwed anew, I did not feel myself a looser, I never was it either, it's only that I was kept fooled all the time because of my readiness to believe the stuff that people tell me...

So there I stood, getting rooted into the parapet, with some calm, crystal-like, silent torpor closing in on me...

But then a scraping din began to gradually reach from the outside world, I woke up and saw a dozen of workers removing the snow with their shovels along the sidewalk.

The sun shone brightly, and its comrades-in-arms scrubbed the asphalt and looked at me as if waiting for something.

And what could I share? I had just got the fuck myself. Or maybe they wanted to scrub along the parapet too?

Okay, thank you, mujiks, right you are – clinging to this shell-shock transfixion any longer would be a gooey show.

So, I tore my roots off the arid granite of tiling blocks and joined the flow down the steps of the underpass, to hide myself from those shining peaks...

On the previously agreed upon morning, the bus came and the senior recycler signed the papers brought by the guide, that they had been driving us for three days all around the capital, telling about its historical and architectural sites.

And everyone was satisfied and happy:

– the guide Olya, who enjoyed three days of paid leisure;

– the shoppers loaded with the snapped deficits;

– the driver with the three-day ration of gasoline which could be put into circulation;

– and, most of all, I, with a spare coin in my pocket worth fifteen kopecks.

Technologist Valya did not exaggerate – you could have Moscow for three days with just three rubles on you...

The only backwash of the excursion was that I owed the factory those three days, I mean three daily norms of thirty-two bales each. Technologist Valya said not to worry though and just produce two or three surplus bales every day until I made up.

I never liked to be a debtor, so on the third day after return from Moscow, I came to work with a newspaper-wrapped snack, aka "brake", to keep me during my fit of Stakhanovite shock works.

When the factory bus took everyone to the city, and Popovka women went home on foot, I faced the slow-go creaky howler of a press, and the hillocks of rags grown up all around it during my Moscow recreation, and they weren't noticeably reduced in the working day-shift ended just now...

Like an enthusiastic champion for the victory of Socialism in a singled-out country, I worked the second shift, then the third, and even managed to sleep in the locker room for about twenty minutes before they came back by bus for the new working day...

In the summer, another presser started to work by us and very timely too because Misha the presser went on his annual vacation.

The newcomer had some kind of a long oriental name because he was a Tajik, but I could not pronounce it in any way. So I dropped the attempts at unfamiliar phonetics and started to call him simply Ahmed.

Ahmed was short and swarthy, and never parted with his happy smile until he tried to enjoy a midday meal in the canteen of "Motordetail" plant.

Coming from there, he lay on a bench in the locker room, and the women from Popovka were regretfully shaking their heads above him and sharing all kinds of health-care advises.

After the payday, he began to come to work with "brakes" wrapped in newspaper and his digestion got adjusted...

On his first working day, it was I who passed to him the wisdom and niceties of the presser profession.

After exhausting explanations on the purposes of the three press buttons, and live demonstration how a skillful presser was expected to lock the box's door with the hook outside it, I started to share with Ahmed my delights caused by a statement of a certain German poet that all seagulls, when in flight, look like the capital "E".

And why? The name of his beloved was Emma! That's a good fellow, ain't he? Eh? What a smart eye!

Seized with a lecturer's fervor, in the dim light from a bulb, I grabbed from the floor a scrap piece of wire to scratch a flock of capital E's on the gray plaster coat of the nearby wall.

(...and now ask me: what for did I harassed the innocent guy, dumping on him the needless facts, disregarding his poor command of Russian?

The answer is: so is human nature. The desire to teach is embedded in our genes.

To visualize this trite truth, look out of the window into the yard and watch the everyday picture – a mujik raised the hood in his car and right away a whole swarm of advisers surrounds him to flash their personal crumbs of ken.

That desire is uncontrollable as proved by the case of the barber who spied the ass ears of King Midas: "I know something! Listen to me!"...)

Among the wastes brought to Rags, there sometimes were found usable things.

So, loader Sasha stored in his locker about half-dozen sweaters with and without the rain deers across the chest; and each day he was sporting another one from his collection...

Volodya Kaverin did not care for small fish.

He hunted fur cuffs and collars from discarded coats so that when having hoarded enough of them he would order to sew a fur jacket for him, or maybe a fur coat. Three collars had been collected so far, and twice a week he used to take them out of his locker, like, to air and give them a shake, in turn, while asking you, "It should work out a nishtyak jacket, right?"

Vanya, in his locker, was keeping a parade tunic of the lieutenant-colonel of the Soviet Army with golden shoulder straps and all that stuff...

When I was sent on the errand to buy vodka from the liquors store on Semashko Street, they at once equipped me with a kind of jeans I could have been only dreaming about when I still cared for all that. It's only that the maple leaf or some kind of a flower embroidered on the right leg was, in my opinion, some excessive addition to the design...

The line to the store began long before it, and it was a tangled line looping with incomprehensible twists along the sidewalk, for which fact such lines were handled "Gorbachev's loops". But it was not advisable to share the handle too out loud because, as the rumors had it, the KGB sec-cols were present among the thirsty part of the population to pick up fresh jokes and take note of the most dissatisfied citizens.

Because of those rumors, I demanded a camouflage outfit from the recycling colleagues, and everyone agreed that, yes, it was necessary, though they did not manage to find me normal jeans without that effeminating flower on the thigh.

Despite the costly disguise, I still was identified by the pair of errand-boys from SMP-615, however, they chose to keep aloft.

(...to enter such a line after the end of the working day, and reach the store before it was closed was unthinkable.

That's why the enterprises and organizations were necessitated to develop an interlayer of 'errand-boys' among their employees.

The co-workers covered their absence doing the job "for the guy not there"...)

With its progress, the line often got shaken with panic rumors that vodka at the store was running out. And indeed, the movement stalled.

But soon a truck arrived at the store back and volunteers with enthusiasm dragged inside the wire boxes of 25 bottles each...

I returned to the recycle factory with vodka, at half-past four.

Two loaders, in turn, had been pressing the bales to fulfill my daily norm. Because of inexperience, they produced the bales with underweight.

The bale weigher, Valya, was expressing her dissatisfaction with loud yells from her booth, while half-deaf Misha kept blithe silence and quickly dragged away his barrow with lightweight bales to the hangar outside. With secret joy gaining acceleration, a-pace with the rest of our boundless Homeland of Great October, he was entering the crucial phase of reconstruction, aka Perestroika...

And with all the deficit of terry towels, in the washing room, where everyone washed the dust off their dirty hands before the meal, there hung no less than a dozen of those towels, angled from among the rags, covering the running-water pipe over the tin trough with taps above it.

However, my personal towel was brought from 13 Decemberists, and I kept it in the locker room, hung separately on the heating pipe in the corner under the window. I was afraid that if left in the washing room, it would be used by folks like any other piece of garbage hanging there.

How come I had such a deficit?

At some of my visits to the village, Raisa Alexandrovna, appreciating my labor achievements about their khutta, decided to pay in kind. She presented me with a towel and a brand new briefcase.

And a very nice towel it was, white and fluffy, not for the whole body though, just for the face and hands, judging by its size. And it had a blue squirrel imprinted in profile with a bushy tail, also very pretty.

Yet one day, coming back from the midday voyage to the remote canteen at the "Motordetail" plant, I noticed that someone's dirty hands had horsed around the tender squirrel in the corner.

Naturally, I kicked up some dust – what the f-f..er..frivolities with my personal belongings?!. My towel was not picked up from the rags in the dirty garbage, I brought it from home!

Everyone pointed at Ahmed.

Once again, in detail, I explained, specifically to him, where the towel had been brought from and urged him to understand and never ever again, under no circumstances, use it. There were flocks of them hanging in the washing room, were those towels not enough for him?

He apologized and said he did not a-know...

So I had to take the towel back to 13 Decemberists and wash it on Monday.

On Wednesday, freshly washed and ironed, the blue squirrel was hanging as a banner of cleanly way of life in the corner of the locker room.

In a half-hour break, I was playing "goat" with the loaders, when the locker room door slammed after belated Ahmed.

Murmuring some Tajik folklore tune, he bypassed the table covered with the sketchy line from dominoes.

Vanya jabbed me into the side and pointed with his chin into the corner, meaning "look at the prankster!"

Ahmed meticulously, like the surgeon before operating on Lucy Mancini, was wiping his wet paws on the bushy tail of my squirrel. But, by the sidelong glance from under the squint of his olive eyelids, I figured it out that he knew it as well as I did that he was no fucking doctor.

"Ahmed," said I, and general attentive silence suspended any motion in the locker room. "I see you liked the creature, eh? I gift it to you together with the towel."

"Oy, I forgotta!"

"Presents are not to be discussed. Take it, it's yours."

And I slammed two doubles at both ends of the bones line on the tabletop.

(...he paid me back in full for that German poet with his letter-like seagulls after all, or maybe he just did not forgive me "Ahmed"...)

A couple of presses were located outside the pressing section.

When I got the task of pressing waste paper with one of them, it was like going out of the dungeon because the press was installed next to a big freshly installed window. And under the window, there were the baggage scales as well, on which Misha the loader checked the weight of the waste paper bales and said it to me.

Then he dragged them straight to the hangar because it was two times closer than from the pressing section. That's why Valya the bale weigher gave me a pencil, and instructed to keep the record of the produced paper bales' kilos, and at the end of the working day hand her the list so that she would enter it into her ledger.

And that very pencil made of me an irreparable graphomaniac case.

At first, I used it to write the columns of figures into the hardly started, yet discarded, copybook of the fourth-grade student Lyuba Dolya, picked up from the hillock of waste paper.

But then, under creaks and groans of the slowly creeping press shield, the pencil suddenly, and completely of its own accord, wrote The Landscape, a short verbal picture with a puzzling final line.

I read that page from the schoolgirl's copybook and saw that it was perfect. I did like it – not a word to be added or taken away.

The Landscape was followed with The Still Life against a winter background, and The Portrait from a summertime.

Together with The Pastoral, they composed The Vernissage of four paintings.

But all that came later, because The Landscape was just the pencil's testing the water, after which it started to write the initial dialogue of the short story Sehryoga Drenches Horses or the summer piece.

Later, there came the winter, spring, and autumn pieces comprising the collection The Four Seasons of a certain writer Bidlook.

Of course, not all of those works were finished with the same pencil, yet it served the spring-board to all that followed.

The pencil put a spell on me, transformed me into a hypnotized zombie to use my fingers as a holder while it went on writing, line after line, in other scraps of paper, because Lyuba Dolya's school copybook was soon over.

(...at times it takes so little for the magic to happen.

Just think of it – an offal teeny stub of a pencil...)

When The Four Seasons pieces were finished, I wanted to see them in a typewritten form, yet felt strongly against going to the typist pool again, I didn't even know why.

In the one-room public library on the first floor of an apartment block in Zelenchuk Area, I discovered a typewriter with Ukrainian letters.

There worked two librarians: a woman of retirement age, and a fat girl in glasses, like, a granddaughter of the senior lady, which she called "granny" anyway.

My attempt at borrowing the typewriter met a cold reception. They did not know what I was going to type while knowing that the KGB had stored a sample text written with their typewriter.

The senior lady shared also that, by a tacit rule, the KGB had a collection of samples by typewriters from all the city organizations.

Everything was extremely simple and logical, were I to type some anti-Soviet proclamations the organs in charge would immediately find out whom to catch by the gills.

(...it's nice to realize that you are protected by so shrewd organs...)

Then I asked for permission to type one story directly in their room, at the desk behind the bookshelves and I would leave the carbon copy by them.

The lady shook her head in doubt, but the granddaughter persuaded her to allow.

Oh, my! What an up-hill job was typing!

It took me two days off to tap through one page and a half.

Poor librarians! The knocking out one letter after another with my clumsy index finger had fretted their brains away for sure.

The end product was still full of typos but the librarian girl liked it, although she had never in her life heard the colloquialism "to drench horses" and, reportedly, had to ask from her friends for elucidation...

That's why I had to restore my relations with Zhomnir because once upon a time he proudly showed me a portable typewriter stored in his archive chamber.

He could not lend it to me but, as a representative of the intellectual elite, was obliged to allow me solving my creative problems within his archive chamber. And Maria Antonovna had been loving me all along.

And so I started visiting Nezhin again, on weekends.

Zhomnir demonstrated the way of using all the fingers for typing with the typewriter. Maria Antonovna was making a bed for me on the folding coach-bed in their living room.

I typed at nights and in the morning walked to the railway station for a cup of hot coffee.

In the daytime, I went on typing on their tiny balcony.

From the height of the fifth floor, I had a nice view of the green trees far below, and the red brick chimney of the stoker-house rising from among them. I watched the pigeon flock tumbling in the sky and tucked another sheet of paper into the typewriter.

I like that way of life, although at times I remembered that it was Nezhin and then the nostalgia welled up. Rather, I did not forget where I was, not even for a single moment, and the nostalgia retreated only before the clatter of the typewriter...

The final in the winter piece of The Four Seasons genially outraged Zhomnir, "Look! It's ridiculous! How could a man be such a fool!"

But I was happy because he did not find faults with the language in my story, yet was indignant and argued with the character of the narrative!

As payment for farming out his typewriter, Zhomnir, for old time's sake, was passing English poems to me for translation. Kipling, Shelly, Frost...

I was translating and bringing them back on weekends, but that does not count, I still kept writing poems of my own kicked off...

By the Soviet labor legislation, every worker in the USSR enjoyed an annual vacation.

In autumn I got it after eleven months of slaving at the recycling factory.

I did not make plans on where to spend my vacation because I knew perfectly well where exactly I was going.

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Eastern Corridor

In the dense dark of expiring night, little by little, there began to show through the even darker, solid, blackness of the forest belt along the roadside.

...for any vehicle, the road of this kind is capital punishment with no chance of appealing to Philip Sober yet my shank's pony doesn't mind...

...a walker makes five kilometers per hour, they taught us in school...by Uncle's estimation, the district center is in fifteen kilometers, no more...I started at a little past five, the bus to Moscow departs at nine...

...jingling gods! life's a delicious havvage!.

...especially with the favorable wind...

" _The wind blows right from behind_

what's on your mind?

The sailing will be plain

to fetch a bottle of Portwein..."

...slow down, little one, don't rush when cutting corners...the dry law is vigilantly lurking, mind the Prohibition... Dura lex, sed lex... wanna a translation?.

...don't you worry, buddy, Latin is a bro from the home neighborhood...

...yet the vulgarity! the baseness of the subject: "portwein", "a bottle", flat as a pancake...

...then what?..show respect to the art of hammerers...a folklore item...next to iambic...

...no iambi-zombie talk, private...or we'll have you rotten with fatigues at dactyl...

...ha!.. who're you?..a self-taught good for nothing...screw up your loose screw first...a gourmand with fluffy chopsticks... "ah, iambus is not yummy! may I have some choree with a sprinkle of trochee, please?"...how about grayling under sherry then?...

...hmm, yes...the chorees are dying out...fucked, in fact, by the hostile ecology...arid vistas are closing in – 'warmly approving the saved reserves we will hold aloof the initiative of the plan in excess replete with the deepest satisfaction ahead of time by centners of running meters from a hectare of rolled metal'...feel free to start up the red book for all the elegant belles-lettres...doomed darlings...not a chance for survival...the golden days of muses gulped down by the abyss of past...

"The wrath sing, goddess, of the Peleus' son, Achilles..."

...this single line of hexameter calls for two square meters of footnotes so that the folks suckled and brought up with the editorials of Central press would get it what exactly that fucker Achilles wants of the Brazilian football star's kid...but think of the paper deficit!..we need it for printing about the growth of wealth and well-being!.

...you know the truth: if you want to live but there is no one to live with, you have to live with anyone you come across...that's why folks adore folklore...the perfection itself, mind you, can be found among those handcrafted items...here, for your consideration:

"Who of you, bastards, dared label God a rasp?!."

In the dark, already slightly graying, over the deserted road sounded a snort of a restrained chuckle. The black clot of a tree floated up along the roadside and fell back.

...yeah, they did school you to toe the line...who's around here to look back at your causeless laugh?...

"I walk, and I keep smiling to myself

and at the thought 'what would they think of me?'

I into laughter burst..."

...another piece crafted in the neighborhood?...

...no, it's by some Czech with tilted towards poetry...

...you mean, Czechs are not homies?..I'll have your throat cut!...

...have mercy, oh, Abraham!..check in the bush maybe we'll square up with Yahweh and keep your son unscratched...

...and if I am Taras Bulba?...

...oh, yes!..in the dried form, pressed for the herbariums...Robinson Crusoe's goat is more of a Cossack than you...drop your bragging before it killed the nanny-goat with laughter...

...not a chance...they say that laughter is the sovereign property of Khoma Sapiensoff...

...well, from the standpoint of physiology all is radiant clear – spasms and coughs tremendously benign to health, but how to grasp it from the significance's point of view?...

...I love challenger kids, yes I do!..let's have a look...where are the decent people laughing?..right, in the specific places set forth for the purpose...that's where you have to look for answer...like, in a circus or, say...

...hurray!..to the movies, we are going!..that's some comedy!... Fantozzi, a good fellow!..wow!..knows his trade!...

Bang! Ding! Plop! Chink! Pisssssss...

Glee and guffaw, giggling, laughter beyond all the limits and past all the bounds.

Boo-ooh-ha! Ha-ho-ho! Gu-gu-hu! Wu-hu-hu!

And only my neighbor to the left, a lady of immense proportions, sits listless, silent.

Why? Dozed off or what? No, dutifully gazes at the silver screen, without yielding a reaction though.

The man in there does his best to turn her up and takes a run to hit his head against the lamppost.

The hall reported with a happy volley.

And she? Good news she's not yawning.

But what's that? Unbelievable! On a minor episode, where Fantozzi, after another fall, plop, splash, whizz, changes in a suit five times bigger his size and the public almost do not react, exhausted in the previous convulsions, that's when from the exorbitant volumes of my neighbor rolls out the laughter of the same dimensions.

Well done, comedian! But how do you start her?

...and now, when asked: why do people laugh?..my answer is – because of fear...

...fear?!..

...exactly!..you can't put your finger on anything more dreadful for a woman than uglifying clothes...

But when the comedian's bicycle lost its saddle on the run, and the guy landed with his asshole onto the pipe that stayed sticking up there, the hall was shaking with the males' guffaw. A lady, naturally, can weather by such a trifle.

...laughter from fear!..nonsense!..they do not laugh but flee when scared...besides, your arguments are based on laughter of the basest sort...and people laugh because of not only that someone stumbled-slipped-sprawled-fell-into-drains, they laugh at witticisms as well...then, there are still epigrams...there are lots of ways to have a hearty laugh...

...verily, verily, I say unto you!..laughter comes from fear and is both request and prayer begging Unknown to avert the thing they laugh at, to keep it off the prayer sayer, I mean, off them who's splitting their sides...and same exactly foundation underlies the laughter caused by the finest witticisms...where "ha-ha-ha" means: "let me never be a target of such a joke!"...while laughing at oneself is just a prayer: "let I never again step into it!"...they are inseparable Siamese – fear and laughter...tell me what you laugh at and I'll tell what you are afraid of!...

...so, Fool, you mean to say that someone who never laughs, is not afraid of anything?.

...Your Majesty!..we are not considering abnormal anomalies, the subject at hand is a representative of the class of vertebrates, the subclass of mammals, the species of primates, the subspecies of anthropoid with the Latin name "homo sapiens."..so don't f-f..er..fret our brains, please...

...but look, then it means that by means of a joke you can find out...

...aha!..beginning to get it?..excellent!..on we go!..and here, by the way, a kilometer post...

What does it tell? No, I can't make out, it's still dark.

Well, to hell! Let it be. It's not the first neither the last. Stop molesting orphan ones! Do you need it? Yomp your way.

Oh, I'm sorry. No crooked tricks or dirty intent, I swear. Once again, please, forgive. Have a nice stay!

...hmm...so, what were we about?..ah, well, of course!..considering the immortal question of the classic: "What are you laughing at?"...the answer is: at something that we fear to learn firsthand...what is the forerunner of laughter?..that's right – a smile...and what is the smile?..right once again – the show of teeth...let's say, we meet each other at the lowest rungs of the evolutionary ladder, where I can't see what kind of stegosaurus you are, and you suspect me of being lungfishy...at that uneducated period, we roamed without passports...now, we meet and – first and foremost – what?..that's right!..we bare our teeth, like, look what I have, in case of you allow yourself excessive liberties...see, where all these laugh-hiccups and giggle-spasms spring from?...

...boiled down to its elementary basis, laughter is a means of self-defense with a Hegelian dual function – to scare away and to pray...it is used, however, not in case of real danger (it's not the right time for giggling) but when the threat is an imaginary one...

...they don't use it in absence of threat, or imagination, or when there is nothing to protect...

...using its monopoly on the gizmo under the consideration, the man climbed up to the top of the mentioned ladder up to the level where they issue passports and enroll you, if so is your wish, to gyms to learn kickboxing...Amen...

...wow!..it's time to shout "eureka!" and jog off to the patent office...

...why, silly sweetheart?..it's been a long time since all the wheels were reinvented...any supernova idea was brewing more than once in brains of a Chaldean priest, or a Greek sophist, a medieval alchemist, an Aztec knot-tier, a prophetic Brahman, or a Tibetan sage...all discoveries and uber-super ideas are nothing more but expressing by means of other words or symbols, the same truths old as the hills...invariable, as the change of seasons, or phases of the moon, of day and night rotation...every day is new and unique, every day is a repetition of myriad of lots of exactly same days...

...you know how to wrap it nicely, smart Alec...yet, there's a question from the audience: did you fix it firm enough, citizen?...

...sit tight, marijuanisto!..no chance you tear it off unless you've got some hugely "bitter but" up your sleeve, or have you?...

...uh-oh, alas, but, yes, Your I-ness...where–in the scintillating shebang of yours–would you place the smile of a two-month-old baby?..what is it afraid of, when smiling to its mother, or nenka, or mutter, or whatever?..that toothless smile seems to flush all you mental feasts straight down the drain...ain't it, Mr. Brilliant Kid?.

It's dawning. Murky-gray ceiling of dissolving darkness overhead got propped by the endless walls of hazy trunks alongside both roadsides, veiled with a mesh of hunger-black branches and chance twigs still bearing haphazard spots of withered leaves.

Along the shredded asphalt, the comets of tiny specks of snow are scuttling, swaying, drifting off their orbits, whirling their thinned streams of dry powder snow.

The wind is favorable. From behind. So blow, buddy, blow! Not a chance you ever pierce the padded jacket presented by my aunt. The head is tightly covered with the "cock"-type knitted hat, the feet in thick socks within the sturdy likes of army shoes.

The road under the whipped-up snow streams stretches to the horizon to merge with infinity...

Blow, the curly one! The ancient Greeks found out it's easier to march under the flute playing.

Sturdy rig, firm trail, what else would you want for to be happy?

A cleft in the forest belt let a country road fork off. Through the gap peeped a surprised field: who's so happy here?

And because of that field, and of that road ahead, and of so grim morning, and because of the pale-transparent streams of white snow scudding on with the wind, a sudden jubilant delight and silly joy rushed to well up the throat and splash out a cry into the confused desert around: "I! Am! Happy!"

The snow streams whisked up along the asphalt kept mocking silently, like a mirror reflection, the whirlwind spirals of the clouds galloping so low above.

"Am! Happy!" This time, for some reason, with a threat and as if inquiringly.

"Happy!" That one sounded already sad.

...yes...the music played but shortly...where are you, happiness?..only in the past or in the future...some elusive illusion...

...and when coming across its tiny speck I'm always alone...why so?..it even hurts somehow...now, if she were by...though she needs no hiking marches...or if she watched on a screen, in a dream, anywhere – this very morning, and this crippled road, a solitary traveler along...

...dumb moron!..will you ever get it?..stupid wretch!..there is no "she" at all but only your driveling indistinct dreams unclear even to the dreaming fool...dreams of an impossible conjunction of heavenly beauty and the passion for pleasures of thorough earthly nature, a combination of cold-sharp mind with both tender and fervent vagina craving for you only...shut your lusty gape, kiddo...you've built a bridge atop a mountain and keep a-waiting for a river to run under...

...and besides, to get some anything you need to give some kind of something...and what, with your kind permission, do you have to offer?..this dapper dandy padded jacket?..wow!..yes, some heavy-duty rig...and being worn for just a week, no longer...

...what?..you even have got the money?..fifty rubles?!..but that's a jackpot!.

...now, subtract a tenner for the bus ticket, then twenty-five for a flight to Kiev, and a fiver for the local train...and keep in mind the havvage expenses...now, for what reason are you to be loved with crazy passion?...

...castes are divided by the abyss unbridgeable...who do you pull for?...where d'you belong?... what are you: a master or a slave?...

...I am what I am what I am on the fifth bottom after the ninth gate... your 'master' trap is a too shallow approach for each man has at least three masters – Stomach, Genitals, and Brain...which one to serve?...

...and what about eunuchs?...

...shut up with your red herring!...any raccoon at the Central Committee axiomatically slaves for his stomach...to be a slave's slave?...count me out! I do not care for his stomach...neither for fucking dialectics with all due respect to imbibed Socrates...

...but then what else to busy me with? I cannot do a better job than my legs...

...enough! no more quibbling!...say it in plain words – are you a master or a slave?...

...damn! you are a nail-hard customer...okay, I am the master of my dick if it will make you happy...

...great!...that makes 33 % plus... not little, bro!...now, would you devour your neighbor at the demand of your empty stomach?...

...I don't think so...

...yes or no, sweetie?...

...no!...fuck you!...

...good boy!...you're at level 66 % plus...so, to disentangle the remainder of the Gordian lacework...

...but I don't remember what we were about...

...stop your zigzagging!...it's master or slave choice...who rules who, you know...

...oh!...I'm more tired than my legs already...well, as long as my system is kept in check by means of...

...enough!...no more words!..."means of" is nothing but an instrument...congrats, Mr. Master-unto-Yoursel...two words of warning though...don't stick your neck out nor try to change the world because a revolutionary without a supporting party is as ridiculous as a stateless citizen...and if I were you I wouldn't kick up much sing and dance about God's being dead 'cause all we need is Master giving us commands...but let's peep out into the wide wild world...what exactly are you out there?...

...I have no slaves!...nor need any...

...easy, corner-cutter...a slave owner is someone else's slave in 99 % plus...and you know as well as I do that having none does not exempt you...so, whose one are you?... Maugham's?... John Mill's?...

...yes, yes, yes!...as well as of that topless nuts who popped up above the fence in the Area...I am a slave to all and everything, yet temporarily, until my expiration date or simply getting bored...

...seems like we've run into another vicious circle with no chance to be resolved at the round table in m/u 41769's stoker house, sorry for interrupting your trudge...wipe your snots and just keep walking...some business you're a specialist in...

And he walked, stepping on the tails of the transparent bands of scampering grains of snow.

Each step was no different from the previous one, none of the steps changed a jot of the road; neither the low leaden sky nor the walls of forest belts on both sides got changed.

...all and the same...that same all...everything moves to stays the same...

Occasionally, a concrete kilometer post with figures on blue tin approached gradually to fall behind.

A few hours of such uninterrupted walking, even without any load, and aching, light but nagging, would seep into the shoulder bones. He knew that.

But not on that day. The district center was at most fifteen kilometers from the village, as said by his uncle. And from there started the transport services of a developed civilization...

Something loomed at a distance on the roadside; some huge object.

Fixing his gaze on that motionless strangeness midst the general chaotic stir, he was nearing it, trying to guess from afar: what could it be?

...some machinery...

...aha...what kind of it?...

...who knows, they tinkle out lots of them for agriculture...let's get closer and then...

A slight burning sensation broke up in his bladder.

...would you but wait a bit with your urges?..yes, machinery, yet from another sphere...

He stopped by a tangerine-yellow road roller.

...how could you possibly get to it, poor thing?..feels chilly, eh?..no doubt...way too accustomed to asphalt tropics...bituminous heat and stuff...what are your plans for to survive the wither?..no escape to warmer countries, too heavy on the rise, besides, it's too late...and no tool to dig you a furrow with because of the different purpose...anabiosis is your only chance, buddy ...freeze into the surrounding environment like them those cold-blood earth-water animals...though not a bed of roses too...

He poured his empathy out onto the scattering of small-sized gravel, then zipped the fly up and stepped over the uneven dark spot on the road, which a couple of hours before was tea prepared by Uncle's wife for a meal.

...everything flows, everything changes...one and the same tea can't be poured out twice...

It was his second visit to the village where he was now walking from.

The first time though he did not come himself but was brought by his Dad.

The days of that summer lasted forever, unhurried, like the slow stream dividing the village into 'ours' and 'theirs'.

The knee-deep water in the quiet creek was rolling soundlessly along the sandy bottom. A little bit upstream you got into the green-shaded tunnel in between the walls of a dense willow thicket. Whitebait brushed ticklishly against the shanks. It feels creepy, especially when you are twelve and they told you some scary stories about leeches and "horsehair".

And beyond the village, quite at a distance, maybe at an hour's walk, there was the river Mostya not too wide but enough for a swim. And he was swimming to the opposite bright grassy bank and pushing the red-and-blue ball ahead over the water, watching the light spot of his face reflected in the wet, spinning, sides of the ball.

Or was that ball and the green bank by some other river of his childhood?

Yet, the fact remained that he entered the Mostya river as well. Twenty years before...

Twenty years later, on his second visit, he did not enter it. It was too cold for swimming. Late autumn. Emptiness reigned in the widely spread waves of the fields. Empty was the village with small hillocks of broken bricks – ruins of houses overgrown with rank grass. "Khan Mamai's horde was here".

The remaining huts were silent, squatting lowly as if pressed down by the ocean of the faded sky. The Marianas Trench.

"Looking for whom?"

"Sehrguey Mikhailovich Ogoltsoff."

"And who are you?"

"Sehguey Ogoltsoff."

"So, the nephew?" guessed she quickly.

"Exactly," he agreed, holding back a smile.

She invited to go over into the room and was sorry that the uncle had just left for work after the break, and she didn't forget to praise the scrawny cat thoroughly washing its face all the morning to predict arrival of guests, then she returned to the kitchen with the large Russian oven and slow ticking of the weight-driven clock in the wall, and the table covered with worn-out oil-cloth above the plywood doors of its box, and the persistent stares from the silent crowd of differently sized photos in the corner between two windows.

He sat leaning against the backrest of the couch, beneath a narrow arched window to the front garden, checking the interior of a single room with a brick stove opposite his feet, from which a smooth gray pipe of asbestos-concrete rose up and by the ceiling veered to the kitchen wall.

Next to the stove, stood a broad bed with paint-coated legs and backs, carrying a pyramidal tower of cushions next to the plush carpet stretched over the wall with small nails, where, in some of the thousand-and-one nights, the young man abducted a beauty on his plush horse, and the accomplice followed him, with a parting glance over his shoulder at the minarets in the sleeping city. In the corner of the room, a brown wardrobe was waiting for their arrival.

On this side, next to the couch, stood a table beneath the second of the arched windows, with chairs pushed under it and, by the blank wall to the neighbors, a television set on a high shelf.

From under the TV to the kitchen door a rug-mat stretched, following the directions of the planks in the ceiling overhead, naked and blue...

She tinkled plates washing up in the kitchen, occasionally coming to the door of the room to ask if his parents were healthy, and where he worked, and what's his job.

By the cautiousness of the questions, he got it, that she knew.

As if it could be otherwise. His father, since retired, was visiting his native village almost every summer, bringing along his granddaughter too. He surely shared his troubles with his brother.

The kitchen's entrance door banged, "Grandma! Two fives!"

"You're back?" responded she with tender strictness. "Take off your jacket. And do not shuffle that way. Go say 'hello' to the uncle, (to the whispered question) your mom's cousin."

From behind the door handle, the boy's face with a strand of hair sticking up in a cow-lick above the right corner of the steep forehead slowly peeped in, with the childishly serious look.

After a prolonged "hello-oo" he disappeared to go on with the inaudible questioning of his grandmother.

"Lenochka's dad," answered she laying the table. "Remember her staying at grandma Sasha's last summer?"

She invited the guest to the table.

Supping the meal, the schoolboy looked at the window with a detached stare.

Could you remember what they see with such wide-open gaze those seven-year-old aliens until another question about school brings them back to their senses?

Well, at least the unknown uncle from nowhere was eating silently.

The boiled potatoes with fried onions the boy rejected, as well as the tea.

The grandmother sent him to the village smithy to tell his grandfather about the guest, who with polite 'thank-you' returned to the couch...

Full of lean satiety, he sat in dense sleepy silence wrapping the house.

Outside the two windows behind his back, the gray wind cooed and wooed with impetuous gusts the apple tree in the front garden, who angrily waved away the inconstant any lady's man.

It's time to insert the inner frames for winter.

On the opposite side, through the lilac-velvet night, the kidnappers were still galloping silently with their capture.

Although she might be happy to be stolen and not stay by the old vizier with his fat eunuchs...

It's weird, the extent of how fully everything around was befitting me.

And so it would be on all the following days of the vacation.

In the evenings I'd be visiting my aunt Alexandra to overeat her pancakes, and once even a chicken. Some rich villager was my aunt.

In the mornings after breakfast, when my uncle, the blacksmith, would go by bicycle to his smithy, I ventured to roam over the fields, and after the midday meal, I was cutting logs from the hillock of firewood dumped next to the house, for the winter.

A beautiful Russian woman Valentina, by her husband's last name – Zhelezina, my cousin and the mother of Maxim, the outstanding student living in the house of his grandparents, would encourage me to visiting her house, where she kept the younger ones – the hooligan Volodka and post-toddler Tanyushka, who still did not want to part with her pacifier.

She would tell me the village gossips, and about her life in Moscow, where she was courted by a Frenchman, and in Kustanai, where she was married to a German from the local colonists.

Her current husband would take me to the village store, and I would drink bottled beer and listen to mujiks' talk of nothing but with so native intonations that it takes your breath away with the sentimental sympathy.

And by that time my aunt would have already given me her present of a black padded jacket, which was the must outfit for anyone there, except for kids and teenagers, so that I did not stick out like a sore thumb in my checkered jacket...

Some ante-biblical simplicity of life, and at the same time with so many admixtures.

An old woman came to the store to exchange potatoes from her garden for kolkhoz kopecks, her utter poverty showed through but the mujiks around were next to bowing, caps in hand, before her.

She's a relic of their past – the embodiment of the old-regime landowners, yet they needed that relic and would create it from a poor retired teacher if only her facial features were delicate enough.

Returning from one of the supper evenings at my aunt's, I, for some reason, stopped in my tracks at nothing around, and for a long time was staring in the dry tall grass. What for?.

The next evening my aunt answered me that, yes, my grandmother Martha's hut had been exactly in that spot.

On the last night before leaving, I came with the farewell visit to Valentina's house.

My checkered jacket turned out exactly her husband's size, they were obviously impressed with such generosity and were calling the jacket "a suit".

To Valentina, I presented my suspiciously feminine bag. I did manage to get rid of it after all...

We went out into the darkness of the street without houses. Everyone understood that we would never see each other again.

Valentina embraced me and wept. I stroke the shoulder of her padded jacket and said, "Boodya, sister." Then I shook hands with her husband Zhelezin and went away.

So strange, in my whole life, I never heard or used that soothing word of "boodya"; it came all of itself.

I come from here, it's where I belong; sad pity I'll be of no use for my own...

People started making wry faces at me as early as the bus station near the Izmaylovo Park, where the Ryazan-Moscow bus arrived.

At Zhulyany airport in Kiev, where I disembarked the midnight flight from Moscow, the hostile attitude to me from the folks around increased exponentially to confirm the correctness of the old saying – people judge you by your zek outfit.

Public opinion on my account was voiced in the morning by a passenger on the platform in the underground metro station, "Where the fuck do you barge through among the people?"

My difference from them was in my being a black man. The black padded jacket, black pants, black army shoes. Only the "cock" hat on my head fell out of the ensemble with its brown and blue stripes.

It would seem more or less excusable were I loaded with some kind of luggage, but a black man with his hands in his pockets is outrageous, it's a challenge to the social order, it's a cheeky bomzh...

We bypass them with an unseeing glance, so that to avoid any eye contact—save, God!—or we bark, "Where the fuck do you barge through among the people?"

True, in those days we did not know the word bomzh yet, and for that sort of people, they used the term bich.

"Where do you barge, you bich?.. Get out of here, fucking bich!"

The word was brought by the seamen who had sailed abroad.

There, in the port cities, the drifters spending nights on the beach, and picking up the scraps and offal left by vacationers were called "beach-combers". Our people did not care for the whole term and borrowed only the first half of that word.

So the people without a certain place of residence and with obscure occupation got labeled biches. A short, biting term. However, it died out.

Firstly, those who did not speak English and never went to the sea began to slip into synonyms, substituting knoot (which in Russian means "whip") for bich that in Russian also means "whip".

And secondly, the abbreviation is always stronger, especially with the support of the state.

(...we are all from the USSR, got it?

Whoever does not understand will receive clarification in the CheKa, aka the KGB...)

When the law enforcement organs abbreviated the "without a certain place of residence" that in Russian becomes BOMZh, other terms had no chance of survival.

In the great and mighty Russian language, you cannot find a synonym for bomzh.

The nearest to it "tramp" or "bum" smack of mothballs and infantile lisp of the Indian cinema...

Once upon a time in Russia lived peddlers, aka offenny. In order to survive, they invented a language of their own.

Dark for uninitiated, the Offenny language went into oblivion together with its carriers – no one had bothered to compose its dictionary.

The current fenya of the criminal world is also for initiated but has nothing to do with the defunct Offenny except for echoing the latter's name.

Considering fenya the language of Russian mafia is not correct because from Russian it borrowed only grammatical structures, and the vocabulary is fairly international.

Kicked out of secondary school, half-educated students when continuing their careers as jail-birds poured in fenya the bits and scraps of words they heard at foreign language classes.

That way fenya feathered its hat with atas! (from the French "atasion!"), haza (from the German "Hause"), havat (from the English "have a"), and borrowings from the languages in the family of friendly and free brother nations fused into the common inseparable USSR.

(...however, back to my malyava, aka letter (fenya's term from the German "mahlen")...)

The champion for the public fundamental morals, who offended me in the metro, had no notion that under the appearance of a black man there lurked in me a tender vulnerable soul as well as the digestive tract of a delicate constitution.

I did not suspect it myself until I felt how, after the mentioned insult, I gradually became "mournful with the belly" because of intestines revolting against the trauma of discovering that in public eye they were a constituent part of a bum.

About the Maidan, which then was named Square of October Revolution, it became clear that I could not hold back the pressure of the tides that stormed the ampoule (which follows the large intestine) and left no hope of reaching the greens by the University, with the only public toilet known to me in the central part of Kiev.

Fortunately, I remembered the Ministry of Education with their ministerial toilet on the second floor, and not too far from the square, it's only that the intemperately intensive rioting within my intestines called for additional suppression efforts...

I flung the tall entrance door open and rushed, in a concentrated jog, up the marble stairs.

"Hey! Where?" shouted the attendant from the chair to the left of the entrance.

"Plumbing equipment check," answered I over the shoulder, without slowing down the businesslike strides...

When all the sorrows subsided, I left the restroom, polished like a malachite jewelry case, and descended the wide white stairs, with the demeanor of archangel Gabriel marked by dignified slowness and blissful gleam.

I wanted to share the Good News and, turning my face to the attendant, informed benevolently, "Look! The check says it's okay about here. Yeah."

And I went out into the blatantly atheistic Karl Marx Street, between two dense walls of the like, severely administrative, buildings.

(...Karl certainly knew it's only thanks to the collective that Man managed to become Crown of Nature.

Because of single-handed you can neither kill a mammoth not fly to the moon.

But how fragile the state of unity is!.

With what willing readiness we do divide ourselves, humans, by the color of skin and hair, by caste, faith, party affiliation: they are not us, we are not them, we are one ruble more expensive...

Some unsolvable mystery – how a herd of the ape-shaped boobs keeps able for collective efforts, given their chronic proneness to self-castration?..)

The visit to Kanino gave impulse to the start and growth of national self-awareness inside me.

For a descendant of Novgorodian ushkuynik robbers and Tatar raiders, who for centuries were raping Ryazan womenfolk in turn with less stable, accidental, bands of fuckers, it was not appropriate, and even disreputable, day after day to give hugs those stinking rags for stuffing them into the press box.

So, for the first time in my working career, I applied for firing me on the strength of my own free will.

Now, in my workbook, the disparaging Article 40 was obscured by the completely acceptable standard record "dismissed on the application" – who would look any deeper? – and I went to hire on in the KaPeVeRrZe Plant.

Everything went without a hitch, I had smoothly past the medical checks but at the final stage already at the personnel department I suddenly heard "no go". Why not?

As it turned out, there had remained no quota for me.

The head of the personnel department exposed it in detail, that there were tacit but strict regulations forbidding to hire a person with higher education to work among the workforce of fewer than 1000 undiplomed employees.

In the plant collective of 5000, there remained no extra thousand to allow for my case, some sons of a bitch with diplomas arrived before me exhausting the quota.

(...the disappointment did not kill me, I somehow used to cope with falling through, nevertheless, it was a significant shock to realize the existence of the "shadow" legislation, ignorance of which did not exempt from its applying to you...)

So I went to the city outskirts opposite Settlement, to the "Motordetail" plant where I was hired on as a bricklayer in the Construction Shop Floor.

The bastards with diplomas had not yet infiltrated the large modern enterprise.

If we subtract the havvage in its canteen, the plant "Motordetail" stood out as a crystal-like embodiment of dream model for an industrial enterprise, a casual look at its construction shop floor was enough to confirm the statement.

The spacious locker rooms attractively paneled with tiling in brown colors of the spectrum were combined with as spacious, also tiled, shower rooms. The recollection of the said conveniences, waiting for you at the end of the day, would warm your heart during the working hours.

I knew my job and was used as a bricklayer-loner for non-standard tasks in separate spots of application.

They were equipping me with a pair of helpers to bring bricks and mortar and – off we drive! – the drum brickwork of wall in an underground water well, or erecting chimneys above the roofs of two-apartment cottages...

I liked the frequent change of tasks: each one required a special approach and circumspection which kept your mind from slipping into sloth as well as your backbone from growing stiff.

And for the periods of calm between the missions, I was sent to the team of bricklayers at the construction of the 130-apartment block for the plant employees in the neighborhood adjacent to the plant.

The team there were no aces, but it was they to live in what they built...

Neither in the locker room nor with the team was I a dream gossip. When asked of something, I would reply and then again keep silent while undetectably talking to myself in my mind...

Besides, my helpers were replaced way too often. Their rotation was seen to by Narcological Department 2, shortened to Narco-2.

Narco-2 constituted a crucial part in the conveyor production of slaves.

Slaves in the epoch of Developed Socialism? Well, let's not forget the spiral-like advancing of the historical progress.

The system worked as follows: a militia van rushed into a village and grabbed a pair of mujiks indicated by the village council chairman as prone to alcohol consumption. (And who is not?)

The catch was brought to Narco-2 for the treatment of alcoholism.

Anyone entertaining a too high opinion of his human rights got a shot of sulfur and, until the end of the treatment, he no longer took risks of picking up the subject.

The treatment term continued from two to three months. The patients lived in the hostel, ate their havvage in the canteen, worked wherever they would send them.

NO PAYMENT FOR THEIR WORK

All of their payment was withheld as reimbursement for their accommodation, havvage, and medical care. The mentioned medical care was the pills dispensed to the patients after the working day, which they immediately flushed down the toilet.

If keeping a low profile, they were allowed to visit their villages on weekends.

In the city, the start of the procedure was simplified. The precinct militia officer announced to the drunks on his beat whose turn it was to go for the treatment and they knew they'd be better off by falling in line.

(...the first Marxist group in Russia bore the telling name of "Liberation of Labor" and – lo! – with the inexorable historic logicality one hundred years later the Land of Victorious Socialism effectively liberated labor from payment for it, and, in the same breath, Narco-2 with the host of same institutions became the brilliant realization of the cherished dream of the founders of scientific communism about erasing differences between City and Village.

Donnerwetter! Who'd ask for better proof that Ewige Weibliche means business and does not skip pedantically doing its ironic job?.

Both the Russian Empire and the United States of America abolished slavery in the early '60s of the XIX-th century, well done! Three cheers for each!.

It's only that Russian mujiks were enslaved many centuries before the first Afro-American slave was ever born.

I mean, old habits are die-hard customers indeed...)

Each person certainly has their own story and if you keep quiet and don't interrupt with attempts at narrating that of your own, they will eventually tell theirs to you.

Not necessarily about themselves, maybe about a relative or a neighbor.

For example, about a German from a squad occupying a village khutta.

Each morning he yelled something to which his comrades responded with laughter.

One of them had a little Russian and explained to the landlady the content of his yells, "Gimme those two bitches – Hitler and Stalin, I'll give them short shrift with my Schmeisser!"

The story was told me by an old woman preparing to retire from the construction shop floor, who, as a small girl, saw Germans living in her mom's khutta.

(...the question is for how long they would tolerate such an entertainer in the Red Army?..)

Or about a mujik who made friends with a stranger at a beer bar.

They went out together and strolled along the street until the new acquaintance had an urge to loosen his bowels. He dropped in a nearby yard with a promise to be back in a moment. Having urinated, he tried to nick a carpet from the linen rope and was arrested.

As for the mujik waiting for his gossip on the sidewalk, he got four years of prison as the accomplice.

Yes, there still occurred some happenstance mistakes even in the most human judicial system of the world...

And the executioner was even proud to tell his story because he considered himself a hero, not an executioner.

He served at the front Smersh battalion mopping up the areas taken control of, and whenever they happened to capture an RLA soldier, he personally and heroically took the traitor to a nearby wood. Although at the headquarters there was a special platoon with sub-machine guns for the purpose.

Now, they two would walk there arm in arm, only the hands of one in the pair were tied on his back. And on the way, the hero began a casual talk about the family and kids, so that some of the captives even started to hope for something.

And then he said, "Why do you, bitch, betrayed our Motherland?"

And he shot his TT pistol, not to kill though, but make a hole in the liver with his bullet so that the bastard wriggled for ten minutes before dying of the lethal wound.

After the war, he wanted to become a diplomat, but they explained to him that a Soviet diplomat, being an embodiment of our Homeland abroad, should be flawless.

Unfortunately, his body was missing three fingers cut off by a bomb fragment when already in Germany. How would he waltz another country ambassador's wife at a diplomatic rout with such a claw?

He saw the point and entered an institute for economics to get the diploma of a middle-rank manager...

I slightly knew his son who was always ready with slogans like "we'll not allow the bitches to trample our native land!"

He flawlessly inherited his dad's ideology...

In Konotop, the ideology was hardly ever viewed with much of reverence. When in the heat of an argument, folks did not choose some high-flown words.

Thus, for example, to upbraid a female, they would say, "You are a Nyusya Kamenetskaya!"

Nyusya was a city idiot. She silently walked the sidewalks, no one addressed her and she addressed no one because she was a quiet case.

But you could see with one look at her hat, that she was nuts, sort of a red bonnet with a bouquet of artificial flowers. By that bonnet, she was recognized from afar, and small kids in the street would run after her and shout, "Nyusya Kamenetskaya!"

But she did not reply and walked silently on. A casual city idiot.

The executioner's son murdered her. Late at night, in the Loony park. He did not want his Homeland to be trampled by quiet idiots.

Lyalka had to see the purist off in the grated stolypin car from the railway station.

And to make sure that the likes of Nyusya would never dare anymore infest the sacred sidewalks of Homeland, that son of the Smersh hero...

(...SHUT UP!.

Certain things shouldn't ever be told even to grown-up children!..)

I don't know why, but some of the stories are darker than all the thousand and one night put together...

Yet, even in the tragic layouts, you could always find nooks for optimism!

In that winter the frost was reaching absolutes and if walking streets you turned your head too sharply left or right a tiny rattling sounded inside – that were your thoughts turned to ice and tinkling against the frozen convolution walls within the brain.

And smack in the middle of that pole of cold, you came across a broadsheet on the wall in the plant check-entrance: "Those who wish to partake in a ski trip to the Seim, please, apply at the Tourism Group."

Haven't I told it was a very modern and advanced plant? In the basement of one of the five-story apartment blocks in Plant Neighborhood, I was once making a screed for rubber covering of a stadium for mini football...

I found the tourism group's room. They told me: on Saturday, at the check-entrance, with own skis. I brought my skis, the ones I was running in the forest at the Object.

There was a bus at the check-entrance for those who did not feel like skiing that morning.

Nonetheless, there were three volunteers to ski all the 12 kilometers; some girl with a guy courting her, and I.

The ski-track in the deep snow was being made in turn.

But what a beauty! Especially when we entered the forest. Because of the frost, the snow became as fine as flour and the sun was setting ablaze each and every of those tiny crystals.

The other two skiers knew the location of the plant recreation camp, but I saw it for the first time.

The houses made of wood had steep gable roofs, like in the Swiss Alps. The whole forest around drowned in the snow and only the roofs stuck out because of their steepness. Classy view!

My room was just under the roof and from inside I could again admire how steep it was.

The roommate turned out one of the veteran tourists, not a novice like me.

I understood that their group was sort of a closed shop at the plant, and the advertisement was just to show to the management that they were active in attracting the working masses. They did not ever expect there would turn up a curious yokel of me.

On the other hand, the geezer got a fresh listener for his stories about their hiking in the Urals where all week long they walked in the rain. From morning till night.

Yet afterward, at every outing that he was taking part in, there was not even a drizzle. That's why in the tourism group they nicknamed him "dry talisman". Whenever they ventured without him, they got drenched with the rain and quite the opposite with his participation.

Then he left and returned with a bottle of the medicine alcohol of which he poured me a full cup before measuring out twenty drops for himself. We drank and had a snack sharing the sandwich he brought.

Then he went away and from the first floor there came the sounds of music.

Being aware that free medicine alcohol was a means to switch me off so that I did not mess around with the group's cultural program, I lay down on the bed.

However, I noticed that the steep roof was in the state of too active waving, and for that reason, I got up and went downstairs.

They were having a quick dance in the hall with the lights turned off and only colored lamps were blinking rhythmically. I also hopped for a while in their wide circle.

Then I moved to the next room. It was lit brightly and along the walls there sat ladies of non-skiing age, probably, the tourists' mothers from the bus.

In the center, there stood a six-pocket billiards table. Dry talisman was fooling around with rolling the smooth balls before the mothers. He was surprised to see me up but submitted the cue to me when I asked.

Believe it or not, but with just three biting strikes, I send three different balls into the pockets. Even I myself was stunned because I never really played billiards.

I stopped at that, returned the cue and went out into the yard.

The darkness around was as dark as in the middle of the forest mingled with the light from the windows and high fire in the barbecue box to make coals for the meat processing.

Not a single alive soul was around.

I went up to the fire, looked at the flames and felt blues – everyone was like everyone else and only I was such a slice, forlorn and clearly cut-off.

And those blues drove my intoxication away, I went up into the room and fell asleep because of grief...

And in the summer I discovered the existence of Game, with the capital letter.

There was a football match between the plant team and a visiting one in the Central Park's "Avangard" stadium. The event attracted an audience of some twenty cut-off slices, like me, who hadn't a f-f..er..frolic to do, and a couple of random drunks.

So, the teams got out to the center, the referee, the coin toss and stuff, all as usual. Then they started the game, sort of.

But what could you expect? Factory teams, their trade-union committees bought them trunks and leggings, but no outfit would hide the fact that mujiks were far over their thirties.

Maybe some fifteen years before, a couple of them attended the Youth Sports School volleyball section, that's all their training.

And the field was big indeed – the standard field for playing soccer. While a poor buster jogged from one end of it to the other, he turned a sore sight with his tongue hanging out and over the shoulder. You couldn't but feel pity for the geezer.

Yet, since I came to the match I sat there, what's the difference when you don't have a.. anything else to do. No use of carping.

And suddenly the tall poplars in the dense row behind the empty opposite stands stirred and rustled... Like, the breath of some invisible giant puffed at them.

However, all that became at once unimportant because in the field there quite of a sudden was unfolding such a game for which you were all leaning forward, clutching the planks of the bench under you, and turning your head from side to side to follow the ball rocketing around the field, dissecting the air in its flight like a white cannonball which was not allowed to ever touch the ground.

Midfielder soared up a half-meter above his own height to pass the ball to the right striker who, one-touch, sent it to the center.

The center striker cleverly caught the pass, kicked the ball over the defender, easily bypassed him and – what a mighty strike!

No way to guess from where and how he popped up, but the left midfielder intercepted the ball and sent it back far away to the center of the field where at once they kick up a skirmish to get it...

We watched spell-bound closely following the ricochets of the ball from one team to another, getting accelerated with each hit of a leg, or a head, or a chest...

It was not them who played the game, it was the game who played them. It was Game.

Finally, even the drunks realized that something unprecedented was happening on the field. They roared and whistled like a hundred-thousand crowd went mad in the stands...

Probably, that shooed off the invisible.

The players, one by one, began to shirk and soon they just jogged around in their soaked through T-shirts...

I am not too much of a football fan, yet now I am convinced that there is real Game in existence.

(...five minutes of Game, is it not enough?

Fans of renown clubs might have seen more, but in bits, not at a stretch, poor homeopaths.

Yes, that Game was gone, dissolved, raced away like a gust of wind, like a burst of happiness, but it was there and it still fascinates me...)

The reason for my tacitness was that I kept my tongue sealed up.

At first, I let it enjoy all the freedom of speech it wanted, but a month after my getting a job there was a general meeting of the construction shop floor workmen attended by a representative of the "Motordetail" management.

There was an unmistakable air of a leader about that block of a representative. You just couldn't imagine such an individual as a child with a balloon, or a youth frustrated about his pimples. Oh, no! He came from his mother's womb ready-made, just like that – half-bold, wearing glasses, with hanging stomach and the well-bred stateliness.

In his speech at the meeting, he outlined the tasks facing us in the crucial current period of the acceleration. It was the time for everyone to work harder at their workplaces, both we, the workmen at different construction sites and they, the management, at their posts, steering our engagement and activities to achieve the set goals.

He finished and the meeting chairman asked if there were any questions.

I raised my hand.

(...it was a breach of the tacit rules, by which the question about questions was closing any meeting.

However, I raised my hand because he really put my back up that nightingale from the plant management...)

I asked to explain the difference between the "engagement" and "activities" I was really curious. Thank you.

The management representative whispered something to the meeting chairman and the latter announced the meeting closed.

The participants, with relief, hurried to their homes.

A couple of days later a guy from the village of Bochky, who was coming to work by motorcycle, entered the locker room with his round biker helmet under his armpit, like an astronaut on the launch pad, and announced his intention to change the lock in his locker because of schizophrenics walking around the room.

He did not address nor pointed at anyone specifically, but most of the present mujiks turned their heads in my direction.

That's why I started keeping my tongue on a short leash.

(...you can't kick against so mighty levers of power with their arsenal of tacit regulations, elusive omnipresence, and superb pedagogical skills – they even managed to teach the "schizophrenic" word to a moron from Bochky...)

"You been to Romny?"

Here, in the showers room of the Konotop bathhouse filled with clouds of steam, the noise of water rushing from taps, the clank of tin basins against marble tops of low tables, each of us looked like an "irrevocably free" from the Area of the fifth unit in the regional psychiatric hospital.

"I have been there, yet cannot recollect you."

Even I myself admired the impeccability of the poetic rhythm of my answer.

The neighbors stopped rubbing the soap in their sponges and, pricking up their ears, moved closer – the Konotopers had an innate propensity for poetry.

I continued to stare at the inquirer. The accordion groans over the evening Area... it's getting dark... soon to go up for the night... these eyes... those same eyes only without the oily blueness over the irises...

"Volodya!"

The neighbors pulled back, some of them grabbing the tin basins moved over to other tables.

I love the Konotopers' polite understanding, they never want to be in the way of intimate developments...

How could I not recognize him right away?

He was my partner, one from the three of us sharing two beds; he smiled bashfully.

The absence of that quirk in his eye put me off track at first...

(...it's not the glassy-eyedness, it's just like a translucent film emerging over the iris, and later exactly the same steely-bluish veil I saw about the eyes of people in the Azeri village of Krkchyan who arrested me on a tumb slope, taking for an Armenian spy, though, in fact, I was just picking blackberry there, aka mosh, aka ozhina, because it was a Sunday...)

By the official version, the Karabakh war lasted for three years, 1992 – 1994, but, in fact, it was started much earlier and hasn't ended yet.

On the third (in the unofficial estimation) year of the war, when I stopped to like the expression in Sahtic's eyes, I attempted at evacuating her from the theater of war. By a strange coincidence she, together with Ahshaut and Ruzanna, got to 13 Decemberists, Konotop.

Can you imagine my surprise three months later when she appalled me with her coming back together with the kids?

Anyway, you surely can't imagine the facial expression of the RMK Supreme Council's cashier when she was handing me my two months salary in advance as ordered. Six hundred of Soviet rubles, the devaluated currency of non-existent state which was enough yet for me to cut and run from the war zone. That's why her countenance reflected both disdain and envy, it's hard to say of which there was more.

I had to fly to Yerevan to meet the repatriates at Zvartnots airport for the subsequent airlift from the airport of Erebuni which had a heliport, also by a chopper fetching a barrel of diesel fuel and another group of fighters to Stepanakert.

(...on their arrival day the city had not yet recovered from the shock caused by the death of 25 people killed by a single "Grad" volley...)

Unfamiliar people in Yerevan, learning where we were going to, suggested to at least leave the children, Ahshaut and Ruzanna (in alphabetical order), by them...

When we got to the apartment in Stepanakert which our friends were renting to us for free, I asked about the reason for so quick a return.

"I realized that living just for the sake of living was not worth the while."

Here is a good example of the unavoidable force of environmental effects. Take an Armenian woman, brought up in all the strictness of patriarchal-matriarchal way of life, let her live for three months in Konotop and she will come back without even asking for permission and philosophizing already, giving out darn wise maxims.

Hello! Please, receive and sign here...

But couldn't that Konotop-acquired wisdom get it that fearing for just yourself is easier to endure than that same amount of fear plus for those who you love?

Especially when the air alarm sirens start their wailing, or from the tumb of Camel Back thunder the naval guns brought there from the Caspian flotilla?

Not mentioning "Grad" missiles that make no noise at all when on the fly to their final din-bang-crush, and half the block is wiped off.

After all, we live in the age of high technology.

(...and again I got washed off somewhere else...

I was talking about Romny, right?

But a madhouse and war are two big differences.

Or are they?..)

All this is to elucidate the fact that I somehow had not much spare time to update Sahtic as to certain facts of my previous biography, and only waited for a suitable moment.

Though her unawareness was not completely my omission, and if asked directly, "Have you ever been locked up in a madhouse?", I, as a man of principle, would give an unequivocal answer.

So, I was in part curious as to what information could she scoop up there; during that evacuation period?

None, as a matter of fact. The Konotopers did not rat on their own.

The only puncture happened in a conversation with a fellow employee. (Sahtic even got a job at the KEMZ plant when in the evacuation.)

Her gossip, having learned that Sahtic's husband was named Ogoltsoff, said only, "Hmm..."

And that comment, I reckon, exhausts the denigration of my personality leaked to the Transcaucasia from Konotop sources...

Yes, life kept rolling along the same rails – and there was the bath, and the beach, and the calls from Twoic.

And everywhere I played my rolled-in role, but somehow I got already separated from everything, both from the systematically adjusted life and from my part in it. I kinda became that mujik who, leaning on the fence around the playing grounds, like, watches the kids messing around in the sandbox.

Everyone was busily busy with their business in that sand, and Twoic, and bosses, and helpers, and I myself with my streamlined lifestyle, yet I did not really care about all that fuss...

In the spring, Twoic proposed to visit Nezhin for, like, to kick up a party in the old days' style at the Hosty.

I remember clearly that it was Thursday, a bath day, and, apparently, the eve of some holiday, he would not call me in the middle of the week.

So I took a towel and underwear for change and went to Nezhin, because even though there was no steam room in the hostel, yet the shower still remained...

In the hostel lobby, auntie Dina was sitting on duty, she had not changed a single bit and, of course, she didn't let me pass in.

I asked a passer-by student to visit the room where, as arranged, Twoic already had to be waiting for my arrival, and tell him about the predicament. He went upstairs and I had a discovery.

A young student entered the lobby from the hostel corridor, wearing a crumpled dressing-gown and a sleepy indifferent face. She did not give me the slightest look, ignoring another of casual visitors who turned up in the hostel lobby, and just came up to the window nearby.

I waited for Twoic or a message from him about through which of the back side windows on the first floor I could climb in.

And I was not at all prepared that my body, without any order from me, or any permission, would unexpectedly freak out, and throw my right hand up and behind my head, raising my elbow in the air. Such a cheeky kink!

Was it triggered by the nearness of the common-looking girl with her face of not so well-kneaded dough? Or was that her crumpled dressing gown to turn me up and out of control?

In any case, it was outrageous, moreover without any definite need! That body of mine really went too far; I, personally, did not intend any gestures.

And the cause of the mutiny aboard, a couple of meters off me, was staring at the absolutely deserted landscape of the two-story canteen behind the gray glass in the window.

Some shocking discovery...

The messenger returned and said the door of the indicated room was locked. Apparently, Twoic had already begun an old-style shake-up of some complaisant chick...

I went out of the hostel. To be back in Konotop before the bath closing hour was just unthinkable. But it was a Thursday!

Okay, there remained the lake in the Count's Park, I headed there the shortest way.

A group of student lads in their sportswear were coming up along the same shortcut from the park. They reached the pipe from which Fedor and Yakov once flopped into the water, yet now there was no water anymore, and the moat turned into a wide sod grown ditch. One of them crossed it walking along the shaky pipe.

Wow! It seemed to become a student tradition here!

So what? Drumming myself in the chest and shouting "It's me! I'm the legend! It's been started by me!"?

In the sad, elegiac mood I entered the alley of elms and strolled to the narrower end of the lake by the thicket in the deserted parts of the park. There I undressed and in the altogether went into the water.

Having rubbed the soap all over myself, I threw it ashore and scrubbed the hand-reachable parts of the body. Then, to wash the foam off, I churned along a little, turning around in a screw-wise twirl before diving towards the shore.

White spits of foam scattered the black ripples. The birth of Aphrodite.

The f-f..er..frivolous Little Mermaid, thought I rubbing myself with the towel.

No, I'm not a pervert. It simply gets so, somehow all by itself, and then just rolls on in a progressive spiral-wise rotation...

Lenochka entered the sewing college in Sumy city and went to study there.

I did not have any reason to go on living at 13 Decemberists, and found a place on the opposite outskirts of Konotop, closer to the "Motordetail" plant.

It was a summer kitchenette of 2×3 meters with a pretty low ceiling, in the yard of a khutta whose owner worked at the wastewater treatment plant, where I once laid individual walls.

The kitchenette's brick stove left room only for a bed and a desk by the window, yet it was enough for me to shack up with a couple of books in German and The German-Russian Dictionary of Medical Terms because no other kind of a dictionary happened on shelves in the bookstore on Lenin Street.

The rent was only 15 rubles but, nevertheless, I finally stopped sending out the already irregular alimony transfers in two directions...

The extended interest in German was brought about by the need of training for the final showdown with that old good Freud.

As an attested schizophrenic with a considerable store of experience in the field studies, I did not see any reason for his fixation on the symbolism of genitals.

Well, yes, a cigar may seem to look like a dick and the ashtray may call up strong associations with a vagina and so on and so forth. But what of that?

They got fixed to these interpretations and had no more progress than a stick in the mud.

(...I finally realized that Freud, in fact, is a storyteller, like, say, Hans Christian Andersen, both differ only in the choice of words they used.

Freud divides the Kingdom of consciousness into four parts (a good fellow Sigmund, that was a step forward from the Hegel's triads):

the Duchy Consciousness;

the March Subconscious;

the Baronetcy Ego; and

the County Super-Ego.

Ah! How nice and pretty! There is so much of charming finesse, so much of poetry in them those fairy tales!

Anyone has the right to a personal scientific theory, however, theories are checked by their practical results.

Based on the theory of his concoction, Freud cured 12 percent of his patients. They might have recovered on their own accord though or else were healed by the cruelest, yet most efficient therapist of all – Mr. Time, but we will give them to Freud as the reward for his merits – he offered at least some gaudy oasis when the topic was as bare and empty as the arid desert, which endeavor put him on the map.

Besides, he still inspires bundles of artists dabbing vinaigrette from phalluses and cunts...)

And in that same kitchenette, I felt a need for some sort of a plan to say my gentle "good-bye" to Konotop.

~ ~ ~

# ~ ~ ~ The Postscripts

The decision to part with Konotop became irreversible when I saw that everything was repeating itself.

Again I walked along a tunnel cut in the stratum of night darkness with batteries of floodlights on the pylons in the classification yard with dim gleam over the wet rows of tired rails.

The tunnel was higher and wider than those in the mine "Dophinovka", and instead of scanty pair of narrow gauge rails, the mighty tracks were bifurcating, multiplying, flowing alongside each other crammed with freight cars, cisterns, platforms with all sorts piled up, covered and uncovered, overall and small, cinched and loosely poured, stuff.

Clanging at the railway points, the rolling cars rolled down the hump in strings, in pairs, single, to find their way in the bowl and, with the pitched screeches of wheel chocks, come to a halt at their destinations.

The classification yard had no weekend breaks. On and on sounded the round-the-clock rumbling, clanging, screeching, shouting of the loudspeakers about the tracks with marshaled trains.

Yet, all that went on in a tunnel, in one huge tunnel. Would its roof withstand the weight of the night?

On that autumn night, as on many others, I crossed the railways following the well-learned network of service paths, bypassing the maze of the still trains and dodging the cars rolling down the hump, to reach the ever open wide breach in the wall around PMS-119.

Anticipatingly, I cringed in disgust of the mud and puddles waiting for me in the hole that was already at a stone throw because now I walked alongside the meter-tall letters in the inscription on the concrete wall. Made with ever-black tar over the light gray concrete of fencing by the assured strokes of a master, it advised the passengers of trains that passed by in the daylight: "Konotop – the city of nondrinkers!"

The floodlights from behind mixed my moving shadow with the calligraphic graffiti. The closer to the hole, the smaller the size of the silhouette with swaying hat brims until all of it got swallowed by the pitch-black darkness in the breach.

The time machine is a nice invention, yet if you can't afford it try traveling the time on foot. Now, following my disappeared shadow, I'll get in such medieval swamps and darkness that...

"Sophocles! Aeschylus!"

Hell! I seemed to take a too wide stride and glided by down to the antiquity, ain't I?

"Aeschylus!"

A black shadow about twenty meters from the breach roared hoarsely in the muddy darkness of the PMS backyards. Mine? No, this one shorter and plumper. And in a leather cap, the coat's also of leather.

"Why pulled up? Who called you? As if you may have the slightest notion of Sophocles."

"Right you are. I never went deeper than Aristophanes."

He hiccuped and, slightly rolling but resolutely, stepped in my way.

"Who are you?" demanded he with the moonshine on his breath.

"A passer-by. And what brought you here?"

He seemed to miss my question.

"Sophocles... Aeschylus.." he kept echoing softly. "Yes, yes... Aeschylus... Aristophanes! And who else?!"

"Well, there also is some Euripides."

"Right! Euripides!" cried he out with a tear in his voice and then again devotedly groaned out, "Sopho-ocles!"

We stood to face each other like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote meeting after the separation. Sancho gave out a despondent sob and dropped his head. The peak of the leather cap pecked me in the bridge of the nose.

Damn it, Sancho! Look out! My visor's up...

"I'm an artist," imparted he plaintively, raising his head up. "They gave me two months here..." Another nod with the pesky peak...

I see, two months from Narco-2 to eradicate alcoholic inclinations. And now I also knew whose masterpiece in tar was out there.

Eh, Sancho, Sancho!. Anyone would turn a drunk if there's no one to talk to of Sophocles!. A whole armful of pearls and no one to scatter them before...

No, no, no! I do have to leave...

...to go there, beyond the horizon, to the faraway—as childhood—seashore by the azure waters, and a mighty sacred oak tree with its hollow for whispering it the quotations hardly needed by anyone along with the names of sages forgotten ages ago...

The plan was perfect.

But what about the details? For instance, where to?

Well, firstly, it should be some warm place, enough of frostbites for me, and secondly, it has to be provided with the sea and mountains.

The Crimea, whose mountains are not that tall, does not fit, besides, it's occupied by Olga...

The finger slides on along to the next sea on the map... Yeah?

Okay, to Baku then. What's the difference?.

Getting the vacation from the construction workshop floor of the "Motordetail" plant, I also applied for dismissal.

Yet, before moving away I still had one unfinished business on my hands. It was my promise to the three strangers at the station restaurant to visit the city of Lvov...

The closer to Lvov the slower the train traveled along the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains with dark tall fir trees, yet in the evening it still arrived at the destination.

In the automatic storage cell, I left my briefcase, in which besides the hygienic necessities, there also lurked a gray cap of thick woolen fabric, so that to travel through the city lightly and in my inseparable secret agent's hat.

Lvov always was a beautiful city with lots of monuments and landmarks of ancient architecture in streets with cobblestone pavement. No wonder, that the 4-sequel Soviet adaptation of "The Three Musketeers" was shot in that city. They only needed to keep the camera away from the streetcar rails in the road.

I did not use any kind of transportation in Lvov but went on foot.

Where? To the Opera House, of course.

My promise was fulfilled, I had come to Lvov, but I had no intention to run around its streets with the demanding question, "Were you, by any chance, passing through Konotop two years ago, after you served your time in Zone?"

No, I was from a different category, and I strolled in a well-bred manner to have a good time because the train to Kiev was leaving exactly at midnight...

The Opera House in Lvov was a magnificent sight, simply a palace; well done the Poles who built it.

However, about having a good time my guess was premature.

There was an opera on, a creation of a local classical composer about the peasant unrest in the 16th century. A piece of trash in the style of "they'll lap it up!"

Anyway, if a job is once begun, never leave it till it's done, and I sat tight through all of it to the final bell which set me free...

By midnight, I was back to the station, unlocked the automatic storage cell and opened my briefcase. I doffed my hat and put it inside the cell, then clapped the gray cap from the briefcase onto my head.

Then I gently closed the door and even chortled softly imagining the goggled eyes of the next user of the same cell. You open the door and see a solitary hat sitting there without a head inside. Go and think of what to think...

On return to Konotop, I started the farewell visits.

To my brother Sasha on Sosnowska Street.

To my sister Natasha in the 9-story block in At-Seven-Winds.

I did not go to 13 Decemberists thought, I was a stupid jackass.

Natasha gave me a rich present of a winter coat of gray cloth with karakul fur collar. Apparently, the size did not fit her husband Guena, I was the coat size.

And I also went to ZAGS to get the stamp in my passport on divorce with Eera. Yet, they sent me to Nezhin ZAGS, the place of marriage registration.

However, at Nezhin ZAGS they demanded a reference from Konotop people's court that our marriage was terminated.

"Look," said I, "you made the record of our divorce when she was getting her stamp, give me my stamp on that ground and that's all."

"There is no such record. She never came to us."

That how they stroke me dumb. I had to go to Konotop, to get the reference in the court and take it back to Nezhin.

Shuttling in local trains forth and back, I thought whether the mileage I had ridden on trains would equal the Equator.

And I also thought: why did Eera, in so many years, not get her passport stamped to certify our divorce?

Probably, to sprinkle a pinch of spice to her lays, sort of adding fresh twigs to the antler of her absent husband, the cuckold of a geologist.

And then I realized why I always liked the scene of D'Artagnan farewell to Rochefort in the Dumas novel Twenty Years Later.

"Go your way, old devil," D'Artagnan said with a sad smile, looking after the departed Rochefort. "Go. Anyway, there is no more Constance..."

I realized, that Constance was Eera and me, only not separately, but together. Constance was us in those silly times when we were still torturing each other with our love...

Then I went to the city of Sumy.

There I took Lenochka to the cinema. The "Fanfan the Tulip" flicks it was, yet already with Alain Delon starring in it.

After the cinema we fed the swans in the park, dropping from the arched bridge crumbs of cabbage piroshki, and then we went to a restaurant. Everything there was a wonder for her...

She saw me off at the station and burst into tears for a farewell.

She looked beautiful, like her mother, and only the hair she took after me.

The next day I went to 25, Gogol Street and left by Sasha Plaksin my black _dembel_ "diplomat" case loaded with dictionaries and a couple of books. We arranged he would send it to me when I settle down somewhere and let him know my address.

Konotop saw me off with angry cold and wind, but the coat from Natasha kept me warm, and I went to Nezhin to return the book of stories by Salinger borrowed from Zhomnir.

I locked the sports-bag with clothes and other things into an automatic storage cell at the station and with just my briefcase went to Shevchenko Street.

When the bell rang, the door did not open, probably, Zhomnir and Maria Antonovna walked out somewhere to visit.

I went to the city center, to the new "Kosmos" cinema opposite the department store.

There was some garbage produced by "Uzbek-film" about Sindbad the Seaman, but I just needed to kill the time.

I sat down and planted the briefcase under the seat. The place on the left was taken by a woman of my age.

In the tilted passage on the right, a girl about four was running up and down. Her mother, sitting in the front rows, called for her to come back, but the kid did not listen. She kept capering there, and at each of male spectators entering the hall she yelled, "Daddy!"

But he was not among them.

A couple of rows higher, five meters to the left, there were two military pilots in officer jackets. One of then began to greet my neighbor on the left, but somehow with the owner's air and double bottom significance.

The flicks began, and Sindbad switched from the sea to a cave, to fencing a saber next to the ruins of the ancient walls of Samarkand against the background of a high-voltage power line. Finally, the movie ended, I lifted my cap from my knees and put it on my head.

The neighbor on the left dropped her thin gloves into the lap of my coat.

"Take it," she said softly. "Escort me."

I angled my briefcase from under the seat and began to squeeze after her through the crowd.

In a rather dense stream of moviegoers, we descended the high exit stairs outside.

The officers-pilots were waiting down in their forage caps. As we were passing by, they did not even dare to peep. Did not get the nerve to.

First, the karakul collar, to which they would hardly grow, in the Soviet army such collars were prerogative of the colonels and higher ranked Commanders.

Secondly, my gray, brand new, cap in the favorite style of _zeks_ after their second term in Zone. Not to mention the equally new briefcase...

She invited me to tea. It was not far, in the five-story block on the slope from the main square.

I walked and the location was getting more and more familiar to me.

Really? It cannot be...Exactly!

She opened with her key the apartment where once the black-haired KGBist arranged a meeting for me and his boss in the gray hair stylish haircut above his tanned face. But now the apartment was furnished and lived in.

We took our coats in the hallway and went over to the living room.

On the coffee table in front of the folding coach-bed, instead of tea, she served a bottle of wine, sliced sausage, and chocolate sweets.

I drank wine, snacked chocolate and remembered the crane operator Vitalya.

We did not ask each other's names. For what we were there "you" was enough.

True, she couldn't resist boasting about having a position at the prosecutor's office.

Without specifying my profession, I assured her they wouldn't run me down in her beat.

Then she went into the bedroom and came back in a long unbuttoned dressing gown.

She sat next to me on the folding coach-bed again.

I hugged her, ran my hand under the gown collar around her neck until reached and unfastened the bra on her blades.

Her face flashed up with joy.

We went over to the bedroom...

What followed might be compared to the demonstration performances of champions in figure skating, the simile to match her graceful physique.

Like well-trained partners, we accurately and precisely entered all those supports, triple two-loops, and other program elements.

Of all the program, that two-loops element was especially advantageous for outlining the shapely curves of her slender body.

We moved from figure to figure with fancy changes of tempo and on the fly improvisation in combinations, and continued to conquer the hearts of absent spectators with the outstanding degree of perfection in our inimitable performance.

The world around, under, and above got wrapped with the misty veil of the delightfully sweet bliss and stuff of ashes being hauled...

It's only that concurrent with the ripples in the stream of sensuality there, absolutely discordant to the ineffable thrills of our carnal delights and skilfully adroit ecstatic raptures, time and again, there splashed up both sketchy and irrelevant glimpses of a f-f..er..frisking puppy, Tuzik, full of sportive ardor, he was happily gnawing a rubber hot-water bottle in an unidentifiable nook.

Which Tuzik?! What rubber bottle on Earth had anything to do with the triumphs of our vigorously deft calisthenics?

All the proceedings were, in fact, a streamlined execution of the program I was fed in with a novel by Carpentier from a recent issue of Vsesvit.

There too, the protagonist, before going to Spain to fight in the ranks of the International Brigades against General Franco, was having sex with his girlfriend three times in their farewell night...

In the morning she, at last, made tea, and I called Zhomnir to tell that I brought his book and was on my way to his place.

However, I did not go to Zhomnir at once. I returned to the Gogol Greens and entered a hairdresser's in the cobweb of adjoining old streets.

They did not expect to have so an early customer, yet one of the hairdressers agreed to shave me.

That young make-believe hairdresser of a gypsy girl nicked my throat for more than once. At each scratching, she said "oh!" and rubbed the cut with pliable alum. And she even had the nerve to grab the fee after!.

I again passed the Gogol Greens and entered School 7.

There were classes going on and silence reigned in the deserted corridors.

In the teachers' room, I said to the few women present there than I wanted to see Liliana Ogoltsova from a second grade, whose dad I was.

One of the women came out into the empty corridor with me and led to the classroom in question.

She went in and returned with a girl I did not know, with her ashy hair in the pair of tight plaits, wearing a gray knitted blouse with thin transverse stripes in its front, who obstinately kept her eyes away.

"This is the girl," said the teacher, "but she says she does not have a dad."

"That's right," I answered fighting back the anger at I did not know what, which rolled up from nowhere. "Would you call 'father' the one who shows up once in five years just to say 'goodbye'?"

The teacher tactfully walked off to the nearby windowsill.

I opened my briefcase and went down on one knee next to you so that we were even. You did not look at me.

"Liliana," I called, and took out from my briefcase the _Morning Star_ newspaper, and handed it to you.

"Pass it to your mother, please."

You accepted the folded newspaper and stood silently, staring at the floor.

"All right, Lee," said I, "Go back to your class."

You turned with relief and walked to the door of your classroom.

I got up from my knee and watched as the door swallowed both you and the newspaper, where between the printed pages there was an enlarged portrait of Eera standing in the summer stream, and the sparse bunch of all the postcards I received, as well as the telegrams, about how you two loved me and congratulated on my birthday or the Day of the Soviet Army...

I handed Salinger to Zhomnir and in return, I asked for James Joyce's Ulysses, 705 pages of dense text without pictures, without divisions into parts or chapters.

Zhomnir himself once wanted to translate it, but Joyce turned out way too unsuitable for any conjuncture.

I gave my word to return the volume in ten years.

After a split-second hesitation, he brought the book out of his archive chamber and handed it to me. Now I had with what to fill the eternity ahead of me.

"Where are you going?" asked Maria Antonovna.

"To Baku."

With the usual jerk, the train pulled out of the Nezhin railway station.

Everything was behind, ahead was everything.

Thirty and three years.

"It's time for you to work miracles," once said I to a saxophonist I knew, when he became thirty-three.

"I have already done miracles," he replied, "And served my time for them as well."

And how only do them folks manage to find time for everything?

I thought that I was going to Baku to pick up a job of a bricklayer of the fourth category, and gradually translate Ulysses after the work.

As it turned out, I was starting to the Mountainous Karabakh with its war for independence and all the issuing details common for such cases, which I'd rather not dwell on.

However, behind the windows of the local train car, there still were running familiar landscapes of 1987, the last year of peace.

Before the collapse of the indestructible Union of the Free Republics, there still remained two years.

Today, they tell me that in 1987 the smack of the new era was in the air already. Alas, I did not scent the brew.

(...what was the underlying reason for the collapse of the USSR?

The Union was finished off by "The Guys on the Roadside".

So was named the English TV movie of four sequels about the life of British unemployed.

The censors at the central television in Moscow did not get it that at the end of that week an electrician at the "Motordetail" plant would say: "I have been working all my life, and so has my wife. Our son returned from the army and he also works now. We have a two-room apartment, and their unemployed live in two-story cottages! Fuck!"

The magic power of art touched the living strings in the heart of a Konotop mujik, triggering the chain reaction that changed the face of the world.

Has it changed its essence, or was it just a case of plastic surgery?..)

Let some other "I", not a part to my personal monad, strain their brains about this question, because the predawn twilight, seeping through the synthetic canvass of my Chinese tent, signals the end to this sleepless night and also to this endless letter.

You will ask, how did my following life flow, behind the watershed of the Caucasian ridge?

You may not even ask it, I will tell you all the same.

First, do not ask about my life in the past tense, it still keeps flowing on.

I rolled its way as best as I could. Because of the spiral nature of the current, we can only go through multiple repetitions of what has been and will be.

"What has been will be again," says the new translation of the Old Testament, and Vladimir Dahl in his dictionary recorded the same saying in normal, human, language – "radish is no sweeter than a horseradish".

But, if I may ask, do all those wisdom pieces helped a single anyone?

And when there comes the moment to feel that I don't care a f-f..er..fleck, I let it rip and go with the flow to the ultimate end.

Life is predetermined like a winding mountain road with the drop-off on the right and the cliff-wall on the left, here you go repeating step by step the path passed before you, by you who was also "I".

Of course, when I recognize a repetition of familiar situations, I try to avoid ugly deeds for which I'll be painfully ashamed.

And up till now I, like, have managed to dodge. Or?.

Yes, like, haven't stepped...If only that bitter son of a bitch in my Chinese tent wouldn't unearth something else...

So, here we are – I and the Varanda.

It goes to meet the Araks river and I am passing by and on, to the last limit beyond which there's the boundless blue sea and, probably, the once lost sailing boat in it...

Something again carries me off to all sorts of epochs with philologies.

But this is, after all, a private letter of a father to his daughter, and f-f..er..fairly didactic too, well...sort of...at certain passages...

Seems like it's the high time to wind up already.

...and then the morning of the following day came, and Scheherazade was suffered to live that day also...

And about myself, dear daughter, I may report that the maxim "I know that I know nothing" is not applicable to me, though there were times when I also scattered this particular pearl.

Today, however, I have serious doubts about having even so tiny scraps of knowledge. I doubt that I know anything at all, be it even nothing.

"We understand life only by looking back at the past," announced a lover of aphorisms.

Asshole! You will not understand it even when pulled out of the grave and poked into it with your noseless skull!.

And no one will ever understand...

There's just one thing beyond any doubt – life is shorter than even the dash between the dates of birth and death.

And I do not care that no one cares about my non-existent wisdom, because I know better than anyone else that after all that was there, after my stupidities and mistakes, after stepping in all sorts of shit, I am not a hair-breadth wiser, I am still the same naive sucker ready to get underway to the unseen Where-Where Mountains.

And let the hull is old like hell, the mast all cracks, and this whole nutshell will not survive the nearest storm – ahead, at full tilt!

And let another calypso or penelope (what's the difference?) tearing the blouse on her charms, cries out and rushes along the foamy water edge – full ahead!.

I know that the bigger part of the dash is over so, come what may, the final leg would be passed as well, perk up – we'll prick through for sure! Like hell will anything stop a hooey-pricker!.

Good-bye, sweetie.

My fatherly hug to you.

And, since you are fond of "You" in the plural –

With love,

your daddies: Sehrguey and Nikolayevich.

(...and whichever rumors reach you, you know firmly – we lived happily ever after and died on the same day...)

P. S.:

in case you will give birth to a baby-son – look out! And if you notice an excessive interest for paper, or if instead of games in the computer he starts playing with text typing, then wrap him in a white cloth and throw into the fast-running river and he'll only say "thank you!" afterward.

P. P. S.:

I almost forgot to warn that any coincidence with the names of real persons is purely accidental and the described events – fictitious because there is no one responsible for the unpredictably weird dreams of a life-long graphomaniac—

during the night of 20 to 21 August 2007,

on the left bank of the Varanda River...

~ ~ ~
