the most final
concluding work

SMP-615 was based in Konotop, but it had several branches operating at other places: a pair of jacks in Kiev, a construction team plus a truck crane in Bakhmuch, a team with a BELARUS tractor in Vorozhba… The third case was that of the overseer at the Bakhmuch branch. They finished somewhat building there and were leveling the adjacent area with a bulldozer borrowed from a local organization. The overseer noticed that a pile of the moved earth was about to bury a defective bridging slab left over after the project completion. So he took the slab into the yard of his friend or, maybe, relative to cover the earth-cellar pit. The building was safely delivered, and then some rat reported a plunder of the socialist property.

At that court session, I had only one question for the criminal, "What would happen to the cracked slab had it not be taken to cover the earth-cellar?"

He gave a discontented shrug and replied, "Would get buried in the ground. What else?"

I demanded to declare public gratitude to the overseer for his contribution to raising the general welfare of the Soviet people. It did not matter who was whose relative, but all of us were one united family.

Due to the general monotony of life, that proposal was also neglected… At the next year's report-election trade-union meeting, no one mentioned my name for election to the Comradely Court. As if I had never had that f-f..er..I mean, fully worked off diploma in my life…

>~ ~ ~

After you turned one year old you came on a visit to Konotop, briefly though, for a week or 2. That summer there were frequent thunderstorms. After one of them, I drove you for a spin in your carriage. My mother and Eera were against it, but I did not want to sit in the house and wait for the next teeming rainfall. Finally, Eera conceded for our going out, and they went back to sleep, people grow sleepy in the rain.

There were lots of huge puddles all over the road, but you and I still managed to make a roundabout over almost all of the drenched empty Settlement – from the streetcar terminal to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, and back along Professions Street. You were adequately dressed and sleeping under the buckled apron and the raised top of the carriage. Only at the end of Professions Street, when the rubber tire fell off the right front wheel, you woke and sat up, and grabbed the tire which I had placed over the buckled apron.

You grabbed it with your both hands as if it was a steering wheel, but I took away that wet and muddy piece of rubber. You whimpered a little, then hushed but never went to sleep again. Decemberists Street was not far away already, and we reached there on just the hind wheel pair in the carriage…

Then the weather cleared up and in a couple of days I took you out to the field near the streetcar terminal. There I got you out of the carriage and put on the green grass. You were not too firm on your legs yet and just stood with your hand leaning against the carriage side.

I lay down in the grass nearby. The green field slanted upward into the blue sky, and larks were singing from up there. So loud, joyful. You stood there until your red pantyhose showed a dark patch of moisture. I had to take you back home because pampers had not been invented yet…

Another time I took a spare pantyhose along with us and drove you to the pond by the Approvals village, which Kuba and I had been visiting on our bicycles. It's not too far, 5 kilometers or so. You slept all the way.

The pond by Shapovalovka was rather big. I placed the carriage on a low sandy beach to watch your reaction to an unfamiliar world because you had not seen any ponds yet, it was like the first walk-out from a spaceship to an unknown planet.

You woke and sat up, left on your own with something you've never seen in your lifetime. I stood behind the raised top, so as not to interfere with the first impressions.

You turned to the left—only the wide water surface was seen from your viewpoint—then to the right, there was just the same incomprehensible substance, and you burst into tears. Of course! Waking up in the middle of who knows what and all alone. I had to show up and soothe you before we rolled back….

The clothesline under the load of already dry washing stretched from the wicket at 13 Decemberists to the front porch. On the way, it passed above you sitting in your carriage. My mother stood next to it with the basin in her hands to collect the dried things. Suddenly, you gripped on something hanging alongside, rose and stood up in the carriage at all your height.

My mother told me to remove the baby and you, like, responding, threw both your hands up, as if in a dance, as if to say, “See how big I am! I can do what I want!”

And then thru my mother's eyes, there flicked something so dark and eerie that I instinctively pulled you back. Rather, I pulled the handle of the carriage and, by that move, I yanked its bottom from under your feet. You tumbled over the carriage side onto the ground. The spot was, luckily, soft soil and you, fortunately, landed on your back.

Instantly, I picked you wailing at the top of your lungs, but Eera was already darting from the garden in panther leaps to pound her fists against my head and the shoulders because my hands were busy holding you…

The local train taking you back to Nezhyn was overcrowded with the passengers standing in the aisle as one thick mass as well as in the space separating the bench-seats that abut the car walls between the windows. When I had to take your plastic potty to the toilet in the car vestibule, I kept it over my head like a waiter his tray in a crowded tavern…

>~ ~ ~

After coming back from Odessa, I lived in a never-ceasing fit of panic, in agonizing fear of what, sooner or later, had to happen or, maybe, had already come to pass. The fear was fueled by jealousy and resentment at not some specific one, but at his taking my Eera from me. The excruciating dread was kept deep hidden as some shameful want, but no camouflage eased the choking grip of misery that never let me go.

Occasional reprieve happened only when Eera was nearby or when I was slaving at a construction site, or worked at the translation of another story. But even then, the crushing anxiety did not disappear entirely, but only receded into the background. Physical pain is more merciful – the part of the brain receiving the pain signals gets inured and eventually turned off, so the pain no longer reaches you.

I did not attempt to alleviate my situation. Firstly, because I never learned to analyze and make up plans for actions, I just lived on, silent about where it pains, enduring the unbearable. Secondly, the alternative to that agony was no less horrible than the torture itself…

Our team was sent to the local train stop "Priseimovye" by the bridge over the river of Seim to build a 2-apartment cottage for the track-men and their families. We worked there about a fortnight.

At one of the midday breaks, I spread my spetzovka on the grass and lay down next to the sun-scorched footpath with the traffic lines of ants bustling over the cracks in the ground. To pass the time at one-hour midday breaks, I had Vsesvit, a thick monthly received on subscription, where they printed Ukrainian translations from the world literature of all times and peoples. Soon, I got tired of reading and put my head on a page in the open magazine.

It was a sunny day around, filled to the brim with the busy summertime life. The ants were dragging their flotsam and jetsam along the cracked footpath, the tall grass, swaying under the rare gusts of breeze, carried the shaky shadows of leaves in the foliage of trees and bushes above it. The unending buzz of horseflies, bees, wasps, and common flies filled the sultry air.

From time to time, the breeze idly picked up the page next to the one under my head, and then everything around got screened off with whiteness and blurry spots of letters brought overmuch close to the pupil. The standing page effaced the piers of the bridge across the river, and the long spit of a narrow sand island washed up by the unruly current, as well as the fisherman standing on that island with his long fishing rod, everything got lost behind the whitish blurriness.

Then the page would fall back to disclose that same fisherman, yet standing in the current already up to the ankles of his high rubber boots. The fishing rod got bent by the taut line, he whipped it up snatching from the restless stream the flicking splendor of a catch. The geezer took it off the hook and threw behind his back onto the spit, where the fish went on pulsating in the sand. He threw the freshly baited hook back into the river and, watching the float, did not notice the river gull that crabbed up along the sand to the beating of the fish. Grabbing its prey, the bird flew off.

The fisherman did not see that, neither how another river gull dived from above the bridge, attacking the first one. They collided in the air fight, and the fish fell from a five-meter height back into the river. The geezer did not see anything of that, he stubbornly followed the float.

It was only I, who saw the whole episode, but nothing of it touched me. I did not even hold the page so as to watch uninterruptedly. The river and the white blur took turns before my eyes, and I saw that all of that was Nothing. All that life full of events and struggles and changes was just a series of pictures on top of Nothing. I watched, and I could also not watch and nothing would change anything. Everything was drowned in absolute Nothing. Even the constantly present pain receded getting flooded with Nothing, from which I did not need anything.

I lay stretched out like that long spit of sand around which the stream of life hasted on, gurgling and splashing, but both of us knew that all that was just one and the same, bleak, void, Nothing. That was some terrifying knowledge. How could you live with it? How to live on without wanting anything and rid of waiting for something? So, the choice I had was not overly extensive: either Eera and the hang-fire agony, or Nothing…