the most final
concluding work

The landlady fondly quoted her deceased spouse and every other day boozed with her veteran lady-friends, not in the kitchen though, because of the tenant, but behind the closed curtains in the doorway to her room.

Softly, I kept turning pages in the rented room and did not intervene with anything – no use forbidding folks to live their lives in style.

My connection with 13 Decemberists was not cut off entirely. I had to ask my father to manufacture at the RepBase some spare parts to the wardrobe designed for installation in my room. He produced a prop and two thin tubes according to my sketch; my mother sewed the needed piece of burlap and it turned out a fabric-walled wardrobe in the corner, as it once was in the hallway of our apartment at the Object. However, since then the advancement of technology moved far ahead and the top for my wardrobe served a Polystyrol plate, light and thick, of those used for thermal isolation finishing inside the walls of railway cars renovated at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

The room was seemingly too squalid to become a safe house, and conspirators shunned to show up. So I switched over to considering it a hermitage cell whose appearances were to my liking, especially the black-and-white bark of the birch behind the window pane allowing for no other view; sometimes, when tired of translations, I just sat and looked at the black marks in the huge tree trunk.

When I settled down, my mother came for a visit, escorted by my father. In the kitchen, my former and my current landladies measured each other with mute, irreconcilable, glances while exchanging official nods. Then my parents stood and sighed silently under the raw bulb hanging from the ceiling on its dust-blackened wire. To all their questions I responded in a polite, though monosyllabic, way and they soon left because the one and only chair in the room was not stimulating much longer stay.

Mid-September, in the middle of a working week, Eera came from Nezhyn. She found our construction site in At-Seven-Winds, I changed in the trailer, and we went off to the city. I always liked that romantically loose cloak reaching below her knees.

We went to visit Lyalka. His wife, Valentina, was relieved to learn that everything was fine by us. A couple of times, after occasional quarrels between me and Eera, she used to later come to Konotop asking Valentina to call me from the Settlement which was a long way from Peace Square. And so, with Valentina's mediation, Eera and I reconciled upon the folding coach-bed covered with a hard carpet in the Valentina and Lyalka's living-room.

In fact, you'd hardly call them "quarrels", it's only that at times Eera got in a huff and felt like yelling. Like, because I was so ugly to look at, which she discerned after we went out to watch some sort of a comedy with faggy innuendos produced at the MosFilm studious. Or else, that no one would ever be interested in those translations of mine…

But real wrangles between us just did not work. Despite my tongue-tiedness, I somehow managed to convince her that such yells were not our role, why to give out other people's clues? However stupid it might seem, but I myself understood what I meant although could not express it properly…

And it happened just once that I misbehaved. That time I brought my payment from SMP-615 and put it on the table under the old pier-mirror. Eera asked how much was there and then started yelling that was not money. She did not need such alms!

Then I grabbed that skinny stack and tore it in two before throwing out of the window… While Eera was away out in the yard, I did not know what to do and kept cursing bitterly my lack of restraint.

At my stay on the next weekend, Eera somewhat shyly shared that they do accept glued bills at the bank.

What I, personally, was surprised by at that occasion, it's the poor quality of paper used for printing money. Say, if you cut some funny money of newspaper—the same number of bills—it would be harder to tear it up that my payment. It literally went in two of its own will, in my hands….

Then we visited the new Culture House of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant built next to Bazaar. They say the construction cost amounted to 6 million rubles. The Loony’s Director, Bohmstein, moved over there to embrace the same position. The Culture House had only two floors, less than in Loony, but on the upper one, there was a ballroom with a bar.

We came to my apartment the moment when Praskovya was driving her orgy of alcoholic widows out into the neighborhood. I introduced her and Eera to each other in the kitchen. The landlady carefully examined her and, in my opinion, she also liked Eera's loose raincoat. She even kissed her suddenly and me as well, on the spur of the moment, and then went to sleep behind her curtains.

Eera made a small grimace of misunderstanding, however, she did not dare resist, and as for me, I did not care at all. One time Eera and I were going by a local train, and some gay guy from the opposite seat started to make overtures to me. Eera simply flew in a temper; she even started bickering with him, and that was ridiculous because I always was indifferent to them. Say, once, Sasha Chalov's daddy kissed me on the cheek, and now it was tipsy Praskovya. Who would care?

Yet, in my entire life I've never come across a more sweet, lasciviously tender and, at the same time, so eagerly tight-fitting cunt than on that night; even by Eera herself it was both the first and last time that I happened to feel it that way. As for where the carnal treat of a lifetime had sprung from – the austere interior of a monk’s cell or the kinda blessing double kiss by the boozed landlady – I remain in the dark till now, and pretty firmly too.

~ ~ ~

Later that autumn, I was sent to the railway station of Vorozhba to work at the construction of the three-story Communication House where the walls and the roof were already in place and my responsibility was laying the partitions. While there, I got another proof that the body of a human being is much smarter than he himself…

At both ends of the building, there were inside staircases with only one of them completed. Newly arrived at the site and not fully acquainted with the details of the current situation, I started up the right one until noticed that the steps between the second and third floors had not been yet inserted and just the pair of channels for the eventual montage of stairs were tilted up to the landing in between the two floors. Feeling lazy to traverse all of the rather long building to the other staircase, I decided to climb up the channel by the wall, whose width of 10 cm seemed enough. So, I turned sideways and, facing the wall, made a couple of careful steps upward.

Then I discovered my mistake – the channel ran too close along the wall whose surface kept my center of gravity dangerously off, too far over the void below, an offset for another inch would send my body into a dive precipitated, according to the laws of physics, by the free-fall acceleration, onto the debris interspersed by crooked spikes of rebar-rods, deep in the basement.

The undertaking did not seem worth it already. However, having moved up the channel I could not back those two steps already in the reverse direction, there was not room enough to even turn my face without losing balance, because of the shifted off location of my gravity’s center. So, I clung to the red brick wall as if to something most dear to me and viewed an unforgettable transformation: my hands turned into separate tiny asynchronous octopuses, each finger lived its individual life bending in all directions, searching for holes in between the bricks. As they got rooted in the wall, I pulled myself upward and then cautiously shuffled my feet up the sloping channel. After many a repetition of that trick, we got out.

But I remain dead sure that were the mortar slushed to fill joints in the brick courses with the proper righteousness and not in the hasty style of "off we drive!" no unknown reserves in the human body would get me off the hook.

From the ensuing surge of adrenaline simmering thru my system, I realized why cliffhangers love mountains so much, yet I, personally, would not risk it every other day….

In winter, they excavated all of Professions Street. The rumors had it as if that was done for sewer construction, but it looked like a foundation pit about a kilometer long, and four to five meters deep. The chasm was randomly crossed by a thick underground telephone cable suddenly got in the open and hanging in the air across the pit, from one wall to the other. And deep down there, a bulldozer was moving earth and leveling the gravel heaps dumped by KAMAZ trucks. Only along the concrete wall of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, there remained a meter-wide ledge with a path over the heaps and hillocks of the spoil…

With a cellophane packet in my hand, I was walking along that trail oscillating up and down when ahead of me I marked a schoolgirl who walked in the same direction. The yellow-and-gray tartan in her coat fabric, made me realize that I should not go any further; that was not my way. Fortunately, a telephone cable was sagging nearby towards the opposite wall in the pit. I stepped on it and walked without slowing down; I did not even mind the bag in my hands. Yet, after a couple of meters, the usual story happened again – I started to doubt if I really was a tightrope walker to stride telephone cables.

The cable went a-jitter, shallow swings turned into the sway of growing amplitude. I shot up my arms and fell. Luckily, when in the dive, my hands grabbed onto the cable. I caught breathe for a couple of seconds, then let it go and, like a parachutist, landed on the pit bottom.

There, I leaned over the face of a prostrate prostitute in a broad-brimmed hat with red lining who stared upward past me. How come the prostitute in the snow? Why was I there? It's an easy one about the hooker, she simply slipped from the bag in the fall. And it was right I got there – my way was finished on that cable, another one was starting from that depths…

So I went along the graveled bottom of the pit to its end in the distance with the ramp for KAMAZ trucks to drive down but not at this early hour. When back on the surface, I proceeded to the station square to be in time for our bus and go to work and, after the working day, I got off our Seagull by the bus station to buy a ticket, and to run, waving it, into the already starting bus, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!" Because Eera told me about her country trip to the Hare Pines forest so as to train her conjugal fidelity despite the champagne in the glove box. Because what else did I have to do? That's why I went to Romny…

It was completely dark and cold in Romny, but I found a hotel. The receptionist did not know where to accommodate a guest with a cellophane packet in his hands, so she allotted a room with 4 beds for me alone. Although she could combine me with that pair of business travelers that came from the same bus in my wake.

The room was a usual pencil-box for 4, empty and freshly painted over the paint coats from the previous 20 renovations. 4 thick terry towels hung from the backs of the 4 beds, and the radio on the wall was singing in thick bass a romance about the cold morning, gray morning.

I had nothing to do. I turned off the radio and the light too. Then I lay down and stared at the darkness until I fell asleep…

~ ~ ~