the most final
concluding work

On September 1, at the ceremonial line-up around the big pensive bust of Gogol between the Old and New Buildings, Rector of the Institute, as always, announced that the classes were starting for all except the second and third-year students, who would go for a month to villages with their patronage assistance. The second and third-year students of all the Departments, as always, shouted "Hurray!"

Next morning, the convoy of two big buses carried their load of sophomores along the Moscow highway to the district center of Borzna, from where they took the bumpy dirt road to the Bolshevik village, yet failed to reach it because of the too deep mud in the final couples of kilometers. The students and half-dozen of overseeing teachers get out of the buses onto the roadside and walked along a narrow path trodden thru the green thicket of the rain-drenched corn stalks towards the village where they were to patronize hops harvesting. Almost each one dragged a "torba", the gunny cloth bag filled with the provision taken along from their respective homes.

My burden was much lighter – the guitar put with its neck across my shoulder, and cigarettes in my pocket, so the walk would be a breeze but for my leaking sneakers. In front of me a red sweater, blue jeans, and black rubber high boots, with a white kerchief-visor on top of all, were schlepping their "torba".

"Hi, beauty, your high boots are size 45?" A haughty look down her nose, "46." Like the "hello" so is the response, a poor try at hooking, but, at least, I was not ignored completely. Overtaking the girl, I looked back to smile at the condensed chill in her face and went on, because winking at chicks never was a habit about me even though, reportedly, they like it…

The village of Bolshevik was one wide empty street of half-dozen khuttas, and some larger buildings hidden deeper in the fog and dank dampness behind the seldom big trees that still dropped rare heavy drops from their foliage. Everyone went into the one-story canteen filled with grave gloom because of the bad weather outside the low windows. Long tables under the tattered oilcloth and the piece of plywood to stop dispensing window indicated the purpose of the room.

After protracted negotiations between the overseer-teachers and local authorities, the students began to settle for their stay in the village… A pair of log-walled two-story buildings split inside into four-person rooms were allocated to student girls, while all the guys were stationed in one large hall on the second floor of the club, also made of logs. Each student got a mattress with a pillow, an army blanket, a pillowcase, and a pair of sheets.

I took the bundle to the club and was deeply impressed by the simplicity in the design of the ad hoc dormitory. The low decking of plank shields created an all too familiar view, like, spending a month in an overcrowded clink at the guardhouse. Some thirty mattresses were spread atop the decking, side by side, so for stretching out, a patronizer had to scramble in his mattress on all fours. Fortunately, near the door, there remained a tall billiard table in its pretty worn cloth of faded green spruced up by random snick-and-gashes. Choosing it for my bed, I did not sell myself for a Zona thief-master but simply noticed that each of the billiard balls in the rack on the wall was dented so brutally that the whole set became a collection of crunched up apples. No sane stretch of imagination would suppose any possibility of playing the game, which turned the table into an odd item in the scenery.

Those were the grounds for my sleeping four meters away from the common bed decking, half-meter higher than I was used to, yet without neighbors snoring into my ears. The table's width allowed for a piece of a broken lacquered cue to be placed next to the mattress, because of the bleak rumors circulating among the student guys about the ill-will disposition expressly harbored by the local youth in regard to the snooty new-comers…

We were fed at the canteen three times a day. The students "eeked" and "yakked" but I could not empathize with them, it was as havvable havvage as anywhere else. The next morning after breakfast, we walked to harvest the hops whose rows of three-meter stem-bunches coiled up to reach the wires stretched over the field for the purpose.

The dense wreaths of entwined stems, like, live columns of dark-green leaves, had to be pulled down to the ground for picking off them the clusters of pale-green soft cones. When the collected cones filled up the shallow scuttle of two handles, it was dumped into a cardboard box on the scales. The overseer-teacher registered in their notebook the kilos you've brought, for later calculation of your payment after deductions for food and bed. But the price per kilo of harvested crops was so insignificant, that the elementary Arithmetic instantly knocked all the labor enthusiasm out…

Of course, there still remained strong incentives of the sonorous yells and calls of fervent young voices over the field, and so diverse but equally attractive (each in its own way) forms of female students. Yet, my fingers, accustomed to metal of breakers and guitar strings, balked at doing that Chinese-peasant-like assiduous labor. My first day of work at the plantation of hops became the last as well, 2 in 1, you know. After that I did various jobs: I went to the district town of Borzna a couple of times to load the truck with provision for the canteen, and I mended flooring on a cow farm using sundry scraps of boards and planks, and I sawed wood for a local woman in exchange for the strong murky hooch, and I… and… well, perhaps that's all… but, in general, not too little, after all.

The hop-harvesters had earned about forty rubles in that month. A couple of students working at the dryer got a hundred plus, and I, for all my patronizing efforts, was paid 12 rubles and some small change at the institute cash desk on our return to Nezhyn. Most likely, the money was earned in those three days on the farm where I sawed and nailed boards bridging the dung in the earth-floor.

Once, responsive to a mighty hammer strike, liquid dung jetted thru a gap in between the uneven board pieces, right into my face, and the cow from the nearby stall turned her left eye at me and grinned with so deep satisfaction that I learned for certain – those cattle are not as stupid as they pretend to be. In fact, my main occupation on the farm was playing Throw-in Fool with 3 local mujiks. My photographic deck of cards (quite modest girlie nudes in black-and-white) plunged them into a catatonic stupor, their scrutiny of the dealt hands went on for a real hell of time and they were markedly reluctant to throw in any of the cards and part with the girlie.

One of the students who worked at the dryer, redheaded Grisha from the Bio-Fac, also played Throw-in Fool with me after his work. He was tremendously keen on winning. The hot-tempered guy even found a deck of ordinary cards to replace my black-and-white gallery, but the school of Yasha Demyanko was bringing its fruits, and by the end of the month he had lost to me a twenty-five-bottle box of vodka. However, mindful of Sasha Ostrolootsky's orphanage wisdom, that a bird in the hand is better than a pie tomorrow studded with rubies from the sky, I, on the last working day, told the fiery-cheerful Grisha that one bottle immediately would write off all his debt, and he happily ran to the village store, otherwise I wouldn't get even as much…