the most final
concluding work

It was his second visit to the village where he was now walking from. The first time though he did not come himself but was brought by his Dad. The days in that summer lasted forever, unhurried, like the slow stream splitting the village into ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. The knee-deep water in the quiet creek was rolling soundlessly along the sandy bottom. A little bit upstream you got into the green-shaded tunnel in between the walls of dense Willow thicket. Whitebait brushed ticklishly against the shanks. It feels creepy, especially when you are 12 and they told you some scary stories about leeches and "horsehair".

And beyond the village, quite at a distance, maybe at an hour's walk, there was the river Mostya not too wide but enough for a swim. And he was swimming to the opposite bright grassy bank and pushing the red-and-blue ball ahead over the water, watching the blurred spot of his face reflected in the wet, spinning, sides of the ball. Or was that ball and the green bank by some other river of his childhood? Yet, the fact remained that he entered the Mostya river as well. 20 years before…

Twenty years later, on his second visit, he did not enter it. It was too cold for swimming. Late autumn. Emptiness reigned in the wide sway of the fields. Empty was the village with small hillocks of crushed bricks – ruins of houses overgrown with rank grass. “Khan Mamai's horde was here”. The remaining huts were silent, squatting lowly as if pressed down by the ocean of faded sky. At the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

"Looking for whom?"

"Sehrguey Mikhailovich Ogoltsoff."

"And who are you?"

"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."

"So, the nephew?" guessed she quickly.

"Exactly," he agreed, holding a smile back.

She invited to go over into the room and was sorry that the uncle had just left for work after the midday break, and she didn’t forget to praise the scrawny cat thoroughly washing his face all the morning to predict arrival of guests. Then she returned to the kitchen and the four-meter-long thread-chain doubled in-and-out the small teremok-hut time-piece on the opposite wall by the ceiling, gravity-driven to produce slow ticks slicing hollow silence in the empty room except for the table between 2 windows, below the clock, under the worn-out oil-cloth hanging over the plywood doors in its box and the crowd in the black-and-white cluster of close and distant relatives, and their special friends of sundry sizes, persistent stares from the silent iconic faces similarly mute and petrified for the ceremonial shot, in the corner left free by the Russian oven comprising half of the space.

He sat leaning against the backrest of the couch, beneath a narrow arched window to the front garden, checking the interior in the single room with a brick stove opposite his feet, from which a smooth gray pipe of asbestos-concrete rose up and, by the ceiling, veered to the kitchen wall.

Next to the stove, stood a broad bed with paint-coated legs and siderails, carrying a pyramidal tower of cushions next to the plush carpet pinned up by small nails over the wall, in which, on some of the thousand-and-one nights, the young man abducted a bashful beauty on his plush stallion, and his accomplice followed them, with a parting glance over his shoulder at the minarets in the sleeping city. The plywood hide-out of brown wardrobe idled connivingly in the corner for their arrival.

On this side, next to the couch, stood a table beneath the second of the arched windows, with chairs pushed under it and, by the blank wall to the neighbors', a television set on a high shelf.

From under the TV to the kitchen door a rug-mat stretched, following the directions of the planks in the ceiling overhead, naked and blue… She tinkled plates washing up in the kitchen, occasionally coming to the door of the room to ask if his parents were healthy, and where he worked, and what's his job. By the cautiousness of the questions, he got it that she knew. As if it could be otherwise. His father, since retired, was visiting his native village almost every summer, bringing along his granddaughter too. He surely shared his troubles with his brother.

The kitchen’s entrance door banged, "Grandma! Two fives!"

"You’re back?" responded she with tender strictness. "Take off your jacket. And do not shuffle that way. Go say 'hello' to the uncle, (to the whispered question) your mom's cousin."

From behind the door handle, the boy's face with a strand of hair sticking up in a cow-lick above the right corner of the steep forehead slowly peeped in, with the childishly serious look.

After a prolonged "hello-oo" he disappeared to go on with the inaudible questioning of his grandmother.

"Lenochka's dad," answered she laying the table. "Remember her staying at grandma Sasha's last summer?"

She invited the guest to the table. Supping the meal, the schoolboy looked at the window with a dejected stare. Could you remember what they see with such wide-open gaze those seven-year-old aliens until another question about school brings them back to their senses?

Well, at least the unknown uncle from nowhere was eating silently. The boiled potatoes with fried onions the boy rejected, as well as the tea.

The grandmother sent him to the village smithy to tell his grandfather about the guest, who with a polite ‘thank-you’ returned to the couch… Full of lean satiety, he sat in the congested sleepy silence wrapping the house.

Outside the 2 windows behind his back, the gray wind cooed and wooed with impetuous gusts the Apple tree in the front garden, who angrily waved away the inconstant any lady's man… It's time to insert the inner frames for winter… In front of him, thru the velvety-lilac night, the kidnappers were still galloping mutely with their capture. Although she might be happy to be stolen and not stay by the old vizier with his fat eunuchs…

~ ~ ~

It's weird, the extent of how fully everything around was befitting me. And so it would be on all the following days of the vacation… In the evenings I'd be visiting my aunt Alexandra to overeat her pancakes, and once even a chicken. Some rich villager was my aunt.

In the mornings after breakfast, when my uncle, the blacksmith, went by bicycle to his smithy, I ventured to roam over the fields, and after the midday meal, I was cutting logs from the hillock of firewood dumped next to the house, for the winter.

A beautiful Russian woman Valentina, by her husband's last name – Zhelezina, my cousin and the mother of Maxim, the outstanding student living in the house of his grandparents, would encourage me to visit her house, where she kept the younger ones – the hooligan Volodka and post-toddler Tanyooshka, who still did not want to part with her pacifier.

She would retell me the village gossips, and her life in Moscow, where she was courted by a Frenchman, and in Kustanai, where she was married to a German from the local colonists.

Her current husband would take me to the village store, and I would drink bottled beer and listen to mujiks' talk of nothing but with so native intonations that it takes your breath away with the sentimental sympathy.

And by that time my aunt would have already bestowed a black padded jacket, which was the obligatory outfit for anyone there, except for kids and teenagers, so that I did not stick out like a sore thumb in my checkered jacket…

Some ante-biblical simplicity of life, and at the same time with so many admixtures… An old woman came to the store to exchange potatoes from her garden for kolkhoz kopecks, her utter poverty showed thru but the mujiks around were next to bowing, caps in hand, before her. She’s a relic of their past – the embodiment of the old-regime landowners, yet they needed that relic and would create it from a poor retired teacher if only her facial features were delicate enough…

Returning from one of the supper evenings at my aunt's, I, for some reason, stopped in my tracks at nothing around, and for a long stretch was staring in the dry tall grass. What for?. The next evening my aunt affirmed that, yes, my grandmother Martha's hut had been exactly in that spot.

On the last night before leaving, I came with the farewell visit to Valentina's house. My checkered jacket turned out exactly her husband's size, they were obviously impressed with such generosity and were calling the jacket "a suit". To Valentina, I presented my suspiciously feminine bag. I did manage to get rid of it after all…

We went out into the darkness of the street without houses. Everyone understood that we would never see each other again. Valentina embraced me and wept. I stroke the shoulder of her padded jacket and said, "Boodya, sister." Then I shook hands with her husband Zhelezin and went away.

It's so strange, in my whole life, I never heard or used that soothing word of "boodya", it came out all by itself, spontaneously… I come from here, it's where I belong, sad pity I’ll be of no use for my own…

~ ~ ~