the most final
concluding work

And again the summertime Kandeebynno lake awaited us but now, apart from the swimming trunks and a sandwich with a slice of melted cheese, bringing along a deck of cards became the must.

“Whose move?”

“Yours.”

"No fake?”

“Take the shoes off your eyes! It’s Skully who’s been dealing!”

“That’s a good boy! He knows it was work to shape Man out of Ape… Here, two Knaves to lazy Kuba.”

"…and ultimately will shape Man into Drab Horse… Queen and Ace of same suits.”

On each and every 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. All the body of its telescopic antenna was hidden in the receiver’s plastic case leaving outside only the tip button. Pulling that button, you obtained the shiny nickel-plated rod for fishing in SW, the LW and medium-wave were caught without extending the antenna.

Browsing for radio stations in short waves was a hopeless lick though. Half of the range drowned in a sizzling, hissing, and crackling because the ours choked all those “voices” in service of the CIA—“The Voice of America”, “Liberty”, “Russian Service of BBC” and their likes—by a godawful static. 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 by concerts at the requests of radio listeners…

But it’s better not to visit the Kandeebynno alone, and not only because you’d stay without partners for card-playing but merely for security reasons.

Once, not heeding the advice of 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 surprise and got an explanatory sucker punch on the chin, a kinda dab bonus for curious dumbos.

They all dived off 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?

The Kandeebynno was not the only place in Konotop for beach-going. There, for instance, was a sizable water-filled gully in the field beyond the Settlement. Sometimes its grassy banks got overcrowded by the guys from all over the city swarming 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 the Settlement. The dormant flow of the stream slumbering in the shade of thick Willows over 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: 1, 3 and 5 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 guy in a nice “swift-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 reached after a short, two-stop, ride from the Station by any of the local trains.

Yet, that summer I wasn’t going there. Not because of the ticket price of twenty kopecks, like lots of 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 thru 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 everybody who's somebody 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, the fishing rods cinched 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 Nezhyn 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 at 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, Nezhyn Street belonged to her and her two parents.

That Saturday, Uncle Tolik and I came for overnight staying with the inseparable bunch of fishing tackle to go off the next morning to fish along the Seim bank. However, 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 – “one place, 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 from his black-haired tribe, and another tribe, that of blonds, adopted 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 Lyouda 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 Moscvitch in the dark, lit by a small fire built 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 parallel to the bank bend.

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 a 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 for good….