the most final
concluding work

When Brezhnev for the first and final time was passing Konotop by the train made of just a couple of cars, they put up his portrait, 2 months in advance, in a tin shield taller than the station itself. The giant close-up 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 on 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 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 concomitant circumstances—a person without a uniform trying to prove something to a uniform-rigged guy 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, the prophecy was slap accurate. All I managed to 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, for a snack, on the futility of arguing 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.

In the "Seagull" restaurant, located farther off from Red Partisans, I bought a fluky bottle of champagne and also a parsley salad… 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 consider the matter too closely, the assumption inspired some puny hope… As long as peeing in the sidewalk was wrong, I headed for the toilet in the Bazaar whose gate 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 in chalk. Meanwhile, the champagne reached the peak in its fight for freedom, so I had to pour my indignation at the dictatorship of the communicating vessels out on that same door. Without impairing the inscription though.

Well, and who else could met me climbing out down the gate but 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 in the dark around, 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 pressed close to each other.

Then the doc asked how much and which stuff namely 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.

Thus, despite the die-hard opposition by 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…

~ ~ ~