the most final
concluding work

When Gaina Mikhailovna, keeping her eyes aside, cautiously asked what attitude was entertained towards me among our team members, I got it easily what wind she was trimming her sails to. That was meant to ask: how do they tolerate my drenched reputation?

Yes, it should be admitted that not every collective would readily swallow presence in its ranks of someone with higher education at a position not corresponding to their diploma. Here lies the explanation to that scream from the bottom of the heart of Vasya, a roof-fastener at the "Dophinovka" mine, "Your diploma’s a sore disgrace for our enterprise!" which stood for, "You turn the mine into some worthless rabble!"…

My reputation at SMP-615 was spoiled by the cashier Komos who knew that I had studied in Nezhyn and got the diploma. Her daughter Alla once had a long, serious, relationship with my brother Sasha. At that period, I even visited the Komoses one time in their apartment. But later, Alla cut her marvelous long hair way too short, and my brother became the Adoptee to Lyouda and her mother…

The cashier Komos was meting out wages to the employees at SMP-615. For that event, once a month our Seagull bus was taking the workers from the construction sites to the SMP-615 base grounds, and in the lobby on the first floor of the administrative building, we lined to the small square loophole in the wall.

You got your payment after standing in the anticipatory excited line of workmen, then drooping forward to thrust your head into the opening of the loophole-window, low in the wall, and signing the pay-sheet… I just did not like that final juxtaposition. With your head somewhere there, not quite clear where, your behind stayed outside to the mercy and at the discretion of the line in a state of heated agitation…

When I reached the window, I did not stoop but simply pulled the sheet closer—on the window ledge—and signed it. Moreover, Komos saw that it was I who popped up. Then she cried out from behind the glass, "Sehryozha! And where is the head?"

"I was guillotined."

"What? Don't show off! Having a diploma does not make you above anything else! You once visited us with your Olga. Forgot that? We have been drinking hooch together!."

Never was I in favor of frivolous smugness nor of brusque familiarity. And, naturally, my response to Komos, the cashier, was direct enough to put her in a proper shape of attitude: "Missed by a mile!” said I, “There was no hooch whatsoever! That time at your place, we drank plain medical alcohol and flushed it down with birch sap."

So, in general, I let her know where she belonged. But she still gave me my payment, and there was enough to return Tonya those 25 rubles that she lent me for flowers, when you were some ten-minute old at the maternal hospital. Till then, it somehow did not work out at all to square up with her…

Thus, because of the talkative cheek of a cashier, I never managed to hide from our team the fact of my diploma. However, they did not apply any specific discrimination on the grounds of my having it, and after about 4 years I even screwed up on my spetzovka jacket the "float-badge", of those that they handed out along with the diploma. I just thought: why should it kick back in the hutch drawer? That’s how it got screwed up, in the summertime, naturally. And my spetzovka jacket acquired pretty spiffy look with that rhomboid enamel badge of tender blue and a golden book spread open inside it against the backdrop of the sun-bleached black cotton of my protective clothing.

For more than a month I walked around the site wearing it. And then one morning I opened the locker where my spetzovka hung in its place but the badge was whipped, only the hole pricked for its screw remained in the jacket breast. But it couldn’t be someone from our team, who unscrewed the insignia, no, at that moment the project neared its commissioning and the site swarmed with workforce driven in even from outside SMP-615 because of the solidarity of managerial suckers…

So, on my next visit to Nezhyn, I gave my mother-in-law a quite predictable answer, "Gaina Mikhailovna, 10 people from our team have a good attitude to me, and 1 person entertains a positive one."

"How do you know?"

"I conducted an oral survey. Separately, of course."

"Does it mean that you asked, 'What's your attitude to me?'"

Yes, life turned upside down: once I used to go from Nezhyn to Konotop on weekends, but now from Konotop to Nezhyn. On Fridays by 17.40 local train to Nezhyn; on Mondays back from there by 6.00 local train. 3 times I overslept that 6.00 local and began returning by 19.30 on Sundays because I got into a flap to deteriorate my positioning in the line for getting an apartment.

Because there were no streetcars in Nezhyn, the city buses grew too aloof. The tin plates on special posts at every bus stop were telling, with black on yellow, at what exactly time bus number this or that should pull up by, but reading those plates would only aggravate frustration. According to the tin-table, no less than 3 of Bus 5 should have already passed the stop, while you were still waiting for at least a single one… At last! It appeared in the distance instilling a timid hope that… No, it revved by, ignoring the stop because of being jam-packed to the utmost…

However, that night Eera and I were lucky. The moment we reached the bus stop, it was approached by a bus. It was a Saturday night and we walked out because Twoic invited me to play Preferans at his place. He was already a last-year student and did not live in the hostel but rented a flat somewhere, so we arranged to meet in the main square. From Red Partisans Street to the main square there were just 2 bus stops, and we would go on foot but for that bus turned up. Eera would hold on to my arm, so as not to slip in her high-wedge high boots on the firmly trampled snow with rigid circles of white on it drawn by the cones of light beneath the lamp pillars…

When we were dressing in the bedroom, Eera asked me to pass her the belt from her frock – a long strap of fabric. Because the bedroom was so narrow and to skip squeezing between the bed and your carriage, I just threw the belt to her. However, one of its ends I kept pinched with my fingers, in case she did not catch it. Eera, not following my actions after her request, bent forward to zip up her high boots, and the other end of the belt swept over her drooping back.

I was stunned by the striking resemblance of the situation to that scene in "The Gypsy" movie, where Budulie lashed his wife with a whip for goodbye because he was going away to the war, like, gypsies had that sort of tradition. However, Eera had not noticed anything, and I consoled myself with the thought that I was not a gypsy and there was no war anyway…

When the bus pulled up at the stop in the square, there had already accumulated such a crowd that even 2 buses would not be enough. I got off first and stretched out my hand to Eera, helping her to descend. No sooner had she been on the stop than the crowd rushed to storm the bus doors. However, I managed to fence Eera behind my back. And then some girl shrieked loudly because she got almost run over in the stampede. Fortunately, she managed to grab onto the bus side and was not trampled by the crowd pouring up the steps.

As a man not only noble but also gallant, I thought it was absolutely wrong, especially in the presence of my wife, and I shouted to the girl, over the mass streaming between us, apologizing for all that bedlam, "I am sorry!"

Someone in the crowd did not want to be inferior in gallantry to me and, deducting it was I who pushed her, hit me on the cheekbone. Or, maybe, he'd been schooled that a fact of violation must be followed by the fact of punishment.

And then I declared out loud to him and to the crowd which for a moment forgot about the bus and tarried waiting for my response, and even the full moon seemed to turn her face closer to hear the words: "With all my nonresistance this is too much to bear!" And the blow was answered with my blow.

Probably, he was not alone there, or else the guys, united by the frustration from a long wait in the embittered crowd, immediately turned into a close-knit pack but there poured blows at me from all the sides – they found a scapegoat to splash out their rage kindled by inconveniences in life design. All I could do was to cover my face and head with my arms bent at elbows but, in my humble opinion, the self-protection attitude was executed by my body on its own accord, without waiting for my decisions. I, personally, could only hear some unintelligible yells. Who to whom? What about?

When there sounded the growl of the started engine, I somehow was already in the square, off the stop, in the cross-light of the street lamps bounding the place, but still keeping on my feet, although bareheaded. Probably, the wrath-spillers were too many, and they hindered each other to knock me down flat on the trodden snow crust. The pack ran off to catch the door from slamming on the other side of the bus. It left and I returned to the stop where, among a dozen passengers who had not managed to squeeze in, Eera stood with my rabbit fur hat in her hands. Farther aside, in the shadow of the dark news stall there loomed Twoic who had come to meet us…