the most final
concluding work

A parcel arrived from the post-office, or rather Mom dropped in there to pick it on her way home after work, that box of faded plywood secured by a string glued to its sides with brown blobs of stamped sealing wax, with two addresses in block blue letters on its top: to our numbered mailbox from the city of Konotop.

The parcel was set on a stool in the kitchen and all of the family gathered around. The lid with the addresses, nailed firmly and aplenty, had to be removed by application of a big kitchen knife used as a lever, and revealed a sizable lump of lard, and a red hot-water bottle of hooch gurgling in between its rubber sides. The rest of the space within the box was filled to the brims with black sunflower seeds.

When slightly scorched in a frying pan, the seeds became simply delicious. We crushed them with our teeth, piled hulls away into a saucer placed in the center of the kitchen table, and enjoyed those small but so tasty, sharp-nosed, hearts.

And then Mom said if not eating them just so, one after another, but you amass, say, half a glass of husked seeds then add a sprinkle of sugar, that would be a treat indeed. Each of her 3 children was handed a tea glass to collect the hearts into. Instead of a saucer, Mom equipped us with 1 deep plate for all, and deftly rolled a huge cornet of a newspaper which she filled with the fried seeds.

We left the adults to eat unsweetened seeds in the kitchen and went over to the children’s room, where we lay upon the pieces of the carpet runner frizzled in the fire of long-ago past. As it should be expected, the level of peeled hearts in Natasha’s glass rose quicker than in ours, although she jabbered more than cracked. But when even my brother began to overtake me, I felt hurt.

The slowness of my progress resulted from considering a cartoon on the side of the newspaper cornet, a pot-bellied colonialist blasted off away from the continent of Africa, the black imprint of a boot kick in the seat of his white shorts. So I dropped the distracting contemplation of his flight and tried to husk faster, exercising a stricter self-control too, so as not to accidentally chew some of the harvested hearts, however, all my struggle for catching up with the younger proved useless.

The door opened and Mom entered the room with a half-glass of sugar and sprinkled a teaspoon of it over our personal achievements, but I was already sick and tired of them those foolish seeds, no matter sugared or not, and in my following life I stayed indifferent forever to the delights of sunflower seed orgies.

It was on those runner pieces where my brother felled my authority of the eldest by 1 dire blow… That day coming home after a PE lesson, I thoughtlessly stated that performing one hundred squats at one go was beyond human power. Sasha silently sniffled for a while and then said that he could do it.

Natasha and I were keeping the count, and after the fifteenth squat, I yelled that it was all wrong and unfair because he didn’t fully rise, but Sasha went on with squats as if I never said a word, and Natasha continued to keep the count. I shut up and soon after joined my sister in counting, though after “eighty-one!” he could no longer rise even above his bent knees. I felt pity for my brother over-strained by those incomplete squats. He staggered, tears welled up in his eyes, but the count was brought to a hundred and he barely hobbled to the big sofa. My authority collapsed like the colonialism in Africa; good news that before the fall I hadn’t promised any gingerbread…

~ ~ ~

Where did the filmstrip projector come from? Most likely, our parents bought it from a store. And in their room there appeared Radiola—combination of the radio and record player. 2 in 1, as they call it now.

The lid on top and both sidewalls of Radiola shed gentle gleam of brown varnish. The rear side had no gloss because it was hard cardboard with multiple rows of tiny portholes facing the wall. However, pulling Radiola a little forward, you could peep thru them and catch a patchy view of the murky interior landscape: the white of aluminum panel-houses, the dim glow in the pearly black turrets of vacuum-lamps of different height and thickness, and from one of those holes, a brown cable ran out ending by the plug for a mains socket.

Over the Radiola’s face was pulled a special sound-friendly cloth thru which you easily could trace the big oval speaker beneath the round sleeping eye whose glass flashed up with green when you clicked on the Two-in-One on. The long low plate of glass inserted along the front side bottom bridged the control knobs: the power and volume adjustment (2 in 1) above the range selection switch on the right, and only one knob on the left—for fine-tuning to the wavelength. The glass plate was glossy black except for four horizontal transparent stripes, from end to end, marked with irregular hair-width vertical snicks and the names of capital cities, like, Moscow, Bucharest, Warsaw. While twirling the knob of fine adjustment, you could follow, thru those transparent stripes in the glass, the progress of the thin red slider crawling from city to city along the inner side of the plate.

The radio was not very interesting though, it hissed and cracked and swished along with the slider movements, sometimes there would float up an announcer’s voice reading the news in some unknown Bucharestian language, a little farther along the stripe it would be replaced with a Russian voice repeating the news from the wall radio. Yet, lifting the lid on top of Radiola, you kinda opened a tiny theater with the round stage of red velvet having a shining pin in the center to slip on it the hole in a record disk when loading it on the pad. Next to it, the slightly crooked poker of the white plastic adapter sat on its stand.

With the turntable switched on and spinning the disk, the adapter had to be carefully picked up from its stand, brought over the whirling disk's surface and lowered in between the wide-set initial grooves running round and round and after a couple of hissing turns there would start a song about Chico-Chico from Costa Rica, or about O, Mae Caro, or about a war soldier marching in a field along the steep river bank.

The cabinet under Radiola held a stack of paper envelopes with gleaming black disks made at the record factory in the Aprelev City whose name was printed on the round labels about the center hole, beneath the song’s title, and the name of the singer, and the instruction that the rotation speed was 78 rpm.

Next to the adapter’s perch, there was the gearshift lever with notches for 33, 45, and 78 rpm. Disks of 33 rpm were much narrower and spun slower than 78 rpm disks, but they—so small—had two songs on each side!

Natasha shared it with us that when you launched a 33 rpm disk at the speed of 45 rpm then even the Soviet Army Choir named after Aleksandrov began to sing with Lilliputian puppet voices…

~ ~ ~

Dad never was too keen on reading. He read nothing but The Radio magazine full of schematic blueprints of capacitor-resistor-diodes, which every month appeared in the mailbox on our apartment door. And, since Dad was a Party man, they also put there the daily Pravda and the monthly The Blocknote of Agitator filled with the hopelessly dense text running for one or two endless paragraphs per page and not a single picture in the whole issue except for Lenin's profile on the cover.

Because of his Party membership, twice a week Dad attended the Party Studies Evening School, if it was his “dog watch” week. He went there after work to write down the lessons in a thick copybook of leatherette covers because after two years of studying Dad had to pass a very difficult exam.

From one of the evening classes, Dad brought home a couple of Party textbooks, which they distributed among the Party members who attended the Party Studies Evening School. However, he never opened even those books, which, as it turned out, was his mistake. The bitter fruit of his neglect came out 2 years later when in one of those Party books he found his stash—a part of salary concealed from the wife for expenses at one’s own discretion. Full of heartfelt regret and belated self-reproach lamented Dad over the find, because the stash was in the money used before the monetary reform which turned it into funny papers…

Among the many names used for the Object where we lived, there also was that of “Zona”, the vestige from those times when zeks were building the Object. (Zeks live and toil in “Zonas” as know all and everyone.) At the end of the second academic year at the Party Studies Evening School, Dad and other learners were taken for their examination “out of Zona” – to the nearest district center. Dad was noticeably worried and kept repeating that he knew not a damn thing, although his thick copybook was already written down to the almost very end. And who cared, dammit, argued Dad, for another year at that Party Studies Evening School!

From Out-of-Zona he returned in a very merry mood because at the examination he had got a feeble “3” and now all his evenings would be free. Mom asked how come he passed the exam without knowing a damn thing. Then Dad opened his copybook for Party Studies and showed his good-luck charm—a pencil drawing of an ass with long ears and brush-like tail, which he made during the exam on the last page and, beneath the animal, inscribed his magic formula: “pull-me-thru!”

I did not know if Dad’s story was really worth believing because he laughed so much while telling it. So I decided that I’d better not say anyone about the ass who pulled my Dad from the Party Studies Evening School…