the most final
concluding work

On the weekends in Nezhyn, the 3 of us took walks to the kindergarten in the narrow streets of the neighborhood. It did not work on Saturdays and the entire playgrounds—all those stalls and slides—were at your disposal. The swing on iron bars when set into motion gave out brief screams, shrill, heartbreaking.

Eera stood in the distance. And then you began running over the yellow leaves strewn on the ground, from me to her and back, but even that was not bringing us closer. As we returned along the same empty streets without sidewalks, I held your hand and did not take my eyes off the smooth play of round hips under the light dress of Eera walking ahead of us. It was so too clear to me that it’s our last autumn together, no one told me that, but all the same, I knew it…

Tonya got an apartment for her family somewhere on Shevchenko Street. Gaina Mikhailovna was planning to rent the freed bedroom to one of the military pilots from the Airfield-Area, who were howling in the sky with their training flights each Tuesday and Friday. I was not present in any plans, and even could not be there because of Lenochka who I refused to leave in Konotop without a dad either. The impetuous spats between Eera and me abated in their fury, yet grew more frequent, which changes told me of imminent end closing in, creepily, to bring about the final moment and make me a chunk cut off clearly, completely.

When Eera voiced the words, they, strangely, brought not only pain but a speck of relief too – there remained nothing to be afraid of anymore. It is finished.

~ ~ ~

I went to Konotop and began to live a half-life. I worked with our team, read, wrote, talked, but half of me disappeared somewhere, together with the aim for which I was doing all that before I got cut off…

The dullness of half-life was somewhat alleviated by a business trip to Kiev. There, I was alone from SMP-615, and I did not know where the rest of the workers came from to the reconstruction of a dairy factory. We lived in a passenger car driven into a dead-end track in the factory grounds. They gave us bed linen yellow with age and fairly fretted, but gently soft because of that. I occupied the upper bunk in the compartment to skip folding up the mattress in the morning. Everywhere in Kiev there sounded one and the same song:

"The leaves of yellow are in a flurry o'er the city…"

And I remembered the leaves in the playgrounds of the desolate kindergarten…

On weekends, I visited the library of Kiev University, in the building on the left from the bulky monument to Taras Shevchenko. People were allowed there without any diploma, leaving their passports to the registry in the entrance lobby. In the huge and pretty quiet reading room with long tables but separate chairs for readers and separate lamps as well, under the green shaded one of them, I read John Stuart Mill's treatise "On Freedom" in the original. That's what real philosophy is! He instructed me that there are just two kinds of people:

1) law-abiding loyal subjects;

2) experimentalists.

As for all the race, class, confession and other differences, they only serve a means to split and set people against each other…

Then I found the House of Organ Music, which surely used to be a Catholic temple before. It’s in Red Army Street now, beneath the Republican Stadium. I was a little late for the concert and they had already locked the entrance, so I began to knock from outside.

The door opened and I cried as on the bus to Romny, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!"

"Very well. But could you be quieter? The concert is on."

The hall there began right next to the entrance, without any vestibule.

"Excuse me."

But the grudger went on to murmur in resentment.

"Wanna me apologize anew?"

And he shut up because I had the time to doff my brown raincoat of the meek-geek-in-a-deep-shit cut and disclose the brazenly proletarian corduroy bob-coat from the shocking blue slice of the specter. Any not too deeply touched porter would see it was not his chance for molesting spineless intelligentsia here. Moreover, with my secret agent hat off, a strand of hair sprang like a spring stuck up from amid my pate. There was no way to suppress it, even after the shower the stubborn strand, when it got dry, cocked up again.

So he shut up. Quite reasonably.

In the concert's first part, they played some modern atonal symphony – a tormenting screech of shredded notes from abrupt tunes smashed into sharp shards and swept up into jugged heaps… But in the second, the organ sounded the fugues of Bach…

The miracle come to pass in January… I arrived in Nezhyn to visit Zhomnir and, on a bus starting from the station, I saw Ivan Alexeyevich. He asked me how came that I had not been seen for so long.

Keeping back a sob in my throat, I replied that Eera forbade me to show up.

"Forget it! Come on, let's go!"

I still got off the bus on Shevchenko Street and later phoned from the Zhomnirs. Eera also said, yes, come. The remaining 7 bus stops to Red Partisans I rode outwardly calm but breasting the storm-churned waves of the tempest inside…

Lots of changes occurred in the months of my absence. Eera, together with you, moved to the former bedroom of Tonya's family. Her parents went over into the narrower bedroom.

The living-room was left as it was: "The Unknown Beauty" with the same contemptuous air looked from the hutch, and the rich merchant's daughter crookedly trotted from the major pinching his mustache. But in your bedroom there stood a new dressing table with a crowd of un-figure-outable but so necessary cosmetic tubes and vials. A wide yellow ring of gold lay close-by the mirror.

To my cautious inquiries, Eera said that the pier was bought by her father, and her mother presented her with the ring. And we began to live on further…

The construction site… Nezhyn… The construction site… Nezhyn…

Eera worked as a caretaker in the kindergarten 200 meters down Red Partisans Street. Her duties included registering the state of health among the kids in her group. The copybook with records in her handwriting slanted to the left, about how the kids were each day of the week, was dropped atop the dressing table.

I only once opened that copybook, and ever after I tried to not even look at it, so as not to die of jealousy. It became absolutely clear that there was no need to tread along the path of righteousness any farther, and no use escaping the inevitable because it had already happened.

Shame didn't let me ask Eera of how she lived those months, or what she was doing in between my weekend visits, but when I saw in that copybook that on Thursday only half of Eera's group came to attend and even that half ill with a cold I knew that on Wednesday she had a date.

I was dying of jealousy but kept silent. Life became a kinda racing thru a maze full of stenciled warnings – don't take that turn, don't look that side, don't think that thought so as to dodge the claws and fangs of anguish…

Then Eera introduced the new order of putting you to sleep next to her on the double bed, and I was bedded on the folding bed-armchair. Sometimes she came to me in the dark, sometimes not, and then I did not sleep for long after the midnight, in the bitter pangs of jealousy…

Only once I was happy about not having a sex with her. It happened after a ride on an overcrowded bus with ice-glazed windows from the station to Red Partisans. Somewhere halfway up I suddenly felt an anus penetration. I never experienced the enema, nor probe insertion in my life, so the feeling was unfamiliar and inexplicable amid the crowd of passengers in their coats and sheepskins. After the main square, the crowd drastically thinned but I still felt as if ass-raped midst a bus-load of strap-hangers.

Exactly for that reason, I did not insist on having sex that night, because I was afraid that Eera would later have it with the fucker who had fucked me on the bus. Of course, such positioning of the cause and effect might, after all, be contrary to the actual flow of events, however, I dreaded to consider such a probability and kicked away all of the anal-sadistic speculations on that point…

~ ~ ~