the most final
concluding work

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 in 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 boxes on one wall, like those in automatic storage cells, only made of veneered chipwood instead of iron… On the window sill, we were peeling potatoes, lots of potatoes.

Sasha had nice sporty looks in his jacket whose zipper was always swayed up to the utmost with the slider tastefully dangling from 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 thru 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.

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 some other reasons which 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 crisp, 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 nebulous and 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 really short story (some two-and-a-half pages) named The Man with a Scar, and its size tempted me to try my hand at translating the story 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 with neatly glue-mounted rows of 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 on 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, get a soul kiss, and be stabbed to death. Because they loved each other so much. Alma de mi corazon!

The current dictator, present at the execution, was impressed by such a poignant passion, ordered to single his rival out and after the firing squad did their job on the rest of the gang, they deported the man to a nearby Latin American State where his following career was that of a drunkard jackalling at bars under the pretext of selling lottery tickets… Once a bottle of beer burst in his hands and a glass splinter nicked 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.. er.. the foggy Albion.

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.

Outwardly, he sooner had looks of a Ukrainian nationalist than of 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. The shoulders were somewhat arched 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 thru the spokes when leaving his means of transportation leaned against a Birch tree.

When in the wide corridor by the Language Laboratory, I handed Zhomnir a thin copybook with my translation of the Maugham's story, he flipped thru 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 pieces…

Right, in my school certificate the Ukrainian Language and Literature were marked with "n/c" – "not certified", thanks to arriving to Konotop past half of my school-time which legally allowed ditching Ukrainian Language classes while the younger came too early to also evade it. Nonetheless, in a fortnight 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. Nonetheless, to simply ditch the whole venture was out of the question, not only because of wounded pride but also of getting 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…

~ ~ ~