the most final
concluding work

The landlady fondly quoted her deceased spouse and every other day boozed with her veteran lady-friends, not in the kitchen though, because of the tenant, but behind the closed curtains in the doorway to her room.

Softly, I kept turning pages in the rented room and did not intervene with anything – no use forbidding 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 to the wardrobe designed for installation in my room. He produced a prop and two thin tubes according to my sketch; 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 advancement of technology moved far ahead and the top for my wardrobe served a Polystyrol plate, light and thick, of those used for thermal isolation finishing inside the walls of railway cars renovated at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

The room was seemingly too squalid to become a safe house, and conspirators shunned to show up. So I switched over to considering it a hermitage cell whose appearances were to my liking, especially the black-and-white bark of the birch behind the window pane allowing for no other view; 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 for a visit, escorted by my father. In the kitchen, my former and my current landladies measured each other with mute, irreconcilable, glances while exchanging official nods. Then my parents stood and sighed silently under the raw bulb hanging from the ceiling on its dust-blackened wire. To all their questions I responded in a polite, though monosyllabic, way 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 Nezhyn. She found our construction site in At-Seven-Winds, I changed in the trailer, and we went off to the city. I always liked that romantically loose 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 occasional quarrels 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 reconciled upon the folding coach-bed covered with a hard carpet in the Valentina and Lyalka's living-room.

In fact, you'd hardly call them "quarrels", it's only that at times Eera got in a huff and felt like yelling. Like, because I was so ugly to look at, which she discerned after we went out to watch some sort of a comedy with faggy innuendos produced at the MosFilm studious. Or else, that no one would ever be interested in those translations of mine…

But real wrangles between us just did not work. Despite my tongue-tiedness, I somehow managed to convince her that such yells were not our role, why to give out other people's clues? However stupid it might seem, 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 old 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 kept cursing bitterly my lack of restraint.

At my stay on the next weekend, Eera somewhat shyly shared that they do accept glued bills at the bank.

What I, personally, was surprised by at that occasion, 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 KahPehVehRrZeh Plant built next to Bazaar. They say the construction cost amounted to 6 million rubles. The Loony’s Director, Bohmstein, moved over there to embrace the same position. The Culture House had only two floors, less than in Loony, but on the upper one, there was a ballroom with a bar.

We came to my apartment the moment when Praskovya was driving her orgy of alcoholic widows out into 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 loose 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. Say, once, Sasha Chalov's daddy kissed me on the cheek, and now it was tipsy Praskovya. Who would care?

Yet, in my entire life I've never come across a more sweet, lasciviously tender and, at the same time, so eagerly tight-fitting cunt 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.

~ ~ ~