the most final
concluding work

The mail brought for me to 13 Decemberists was placed on the handmade shelves, next to the photograph of Eera during her pioneer practice near the town of Kozelsk, in the north of Chernigov region, where she stood midst the summer stream in black sports pants rolled up above her knees, and smiled from under the plastic visor in the cap-kerchief… My mail was invariably the thick monthly Vsesvit in Ukrainian. I opened it and, with my eyes closed, sniffed somewhere from the middle – I always liked the smell of fresh print ink…

However, this time there was nothing to smell, it was an envelope which I disliked at first sight. It looked like having been ripped open with a kitchen knife and then, in a fit of funk, they daubed the rent with glue spread, just in case, in thrice more quantities than needed. Here, at once and all too clearly, the hand of layman was felt, the maiden flight of younger generation.

I opened the envelope from its side, but I still had to tear off a strand of paper stuck with glue, sacrificing pieces of typewritten text.

"What is it, Sehryozha?" my mother asked anxiously.

"Did Lenochka not tell you?"

"No."

"She will then."

It was a summons to the local People's Court over the lawsuit by a resident of Nezhyn, Citizen Eera, to dissolve the marriage since the family, in fact, never existed, and I was regularly taken to psychiatric hospitals diagnosed with schizophrenia…

In the queue for the soon-to-be divorcees on the second floor of the People's Court, I was the second, after a couple of ample-bodied local people disappointed in the institution of marriage. They looked like a pair of fluffed-up dove-pigeons, absolutely not talking to each other, and taking pains to gaze the opposite ways.

A girl, a little over the age of 20, invited them to enter for the procedure.

For several minutes from behind the door, there was heard a dialogue of varying loudness but of the same illegibility.

Then the couple went out of the door, still not looking at each other, blushed in their complexion, as if leaving the steam room in a bathhouse. One after another—the man first—they left…

In the room looking like a corridor, two tables formed the letter "T". The judge was sitting in the center of the crossbar table equipped with 2 lay judges, one for his either side. They were a thirty-year-old fair-haired man of military uprightness and a woman well over her forties who had already let all of it go at all. The girl-clerk got seated at the second table where it adjoined the upper one.

I liked the judge at once – a handsome man about 35 who looked like judges in Western movies. His jacket was off and he even opened his waistcoat for a couple of top buttons to represent a true embodiment of the Western democracy.

I decided to play along with him and, sitting on a chair a meter off the “T's” base, assumed the attitude of a kicking back cowboy – the left leg stretched out with its heel planted into the floor, and the right heel resting over the left foot.

"Don’t sprawl! Get seated as you should! Forgotten where you are?!" barked the fair-haired.

"If you demonstrate how to sit at attention, I'd be happy to ape you, Comrade Lance-Corpo.."

"Well, okay!" intervened the judge like a ref in the ring calls “break!” before the boxers turn the noble art of crushing each other’s visage into an unruly fang-and-kick street fight. "Let him sit as he likes."

Then he read up the lawsuit of Citizen Eera about the absence of a family and my diagnosis. He finished off and addressed me, "What can you say in this respect?"

"My wife is always right. Each and every her word is the holy, purest, truth," averred I solemnly.

The girl-clerk registered in the papers that not only the Caesar’s wife could be beyond any suspicion.

Then the judge used his home-made trump with which he had started, pumped, and heated up the previous pair of divorcees, "But wasn't there at least anything good in your marriage?"

"Why not? We were the sexiest lovers at the institute."

With a sidelong glance at the flash of innocent flush in the girl clerk's countenance, the judge announced that was enough and the court didn't need any more evidence.

Thus was dissolved my wedlock with Eera.

^~~^~~^~