the most final
concluding work

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 fault 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 cut off and left behind me the clang of the streetcars and the everyday fuss in front of the Department Store on the square's opposite side.

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 Nezhyn, 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 up, they were told that it was Konotop online, and the black loudspeaker in the station hall shouted in a female voice which booth to enter 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 in between yellow chipboard plates. The expectant walked into 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 12!"

What they were talking about was not heard in the station hall, unless they started to shout 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.

"Nezhyn's online!”

I entered the booth and left the station hall behind my back and behind the glass in the upper half of the closed door. It's very difficult to talk with your heart throbbing pit-a-pat up inside your throat.

"Call Eera, please."

"Who's talking?"

"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."

"Now…"

"Yes."

And the throb broke off at once, killed by the permafrost chill in her voice. I said hello, was saying something else, but I heard that I could never get thru that dead, adamant, 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 when in the glazed cage of its vestibule, I looked back at the booth where the light had already gone out. And I said to myself: "Look well, it's number 7. See? That number means your getting crucified…"

~ ~ ~