the most final
concluding work

Eera was visiting Konotop without you as well. So was it for the occasion of Vladya's wedding, when the winter was setting in.

He married Alla, who already had a child and worked at a large canteen. The wedding party was held at that very canteen on the outskirts of the city, nearby the stop of the diesel train to Dubovyazovka. The "live music" included already heavily bald Skully and still curly-haired Chuba. At times, at the guests' warm requests, the groom also approached the mike to sing along with the ex-Orpheuses. Everything was delicious, loud, and fun.

But all that was on the second day of Eera's stay, and in the late evening of the first day, I made two discoveries. The first was about the hidden resources in the human body…

At the starting night, Eera and I passed thru the veranda to the attached room. In winter it was not heated and turned into a sort of storeroom for odd household things. That’s why when leaving the kitchen, Eera threw over her shoulders some of the jackets from the hooks by the door; she always liked to try things on. In the room among the other things, there stood a pair of old armchairs, the relics from the Object times, whose wooden armrests still retained their yellow varnish and enough of stability to let us have deeply satisfying sex among other stored items. At such moments I did not think of any agonies…

We seemed to cum together but Eera, with her eyes half-closed, started to moan "More! More!." Until that moment, I knew it for dead sure that after orgasm you needed to catch a breath for at least half an hour.

"Mo-ore!."

And up I got to penetrate and go on above the glitter of the freshly spilled trickle that aspersed the floorboards a minute ago. However impossible, at times it, nonetheless, can happen…

The second discovery, concerning the white spots in the human's conscience, occurred when Eera and I returned to the living-room.

My father had already gone to the bedroom, and my mother, who felt completely out of sorts on that evening, sat on the folding coach-bed with her hands dropped widely off onto the seat, she was looking in front of her and not at the TV on its stand between the two windows. Only Lenochka was watching it from her, not yet slid-out, chair-bed. The subdued murmur of the TV merged with the feeble light from a couple of bulbs in the luster.

After groaning for a while, my mother asked me and Eera to help her to the bedroom because she had no strength in her at all. We took her by the arms from both sides and helped to get up. Giving out weak grunts and shuffling her slippers over the floor, she moved, with our support, towards the curtains in the doorway to the dark kitchen.

In that manner, the 3 of us reached the middle of the room beneath the chandelier of 5 white shades only 2 of which painted the circles of yellowish electric light in the whitewashed ceiling. When there remained a final couple of meters to the doorway, the light around me suddenly dimmed going away and I found myself confined in the darkness, not complete though because I could discern that I was having a sex with my mother from behind. Wild horror lashed me, kinda electric shock, and threw back into the lighted living-room. To the kitchen doorway, there still remained a distance of about a meter.

In fright, I gave Eera a sidelong glance over the white kerchief swaddling my mother's head. Eera, with her eyebrows knit together, took care to keep her eyes on the lowered profile of my mother as if she had not noticed anything. So, that was just a vision, yet more prolonged than that second of running thru the Greek night…

Asking Eera to hold alone for a sec, I hurried into the kitchen to turn the light on there. We took my mother to the bedroom and helped her to sink onto the bed, where my father muttered something in his sleep. Then we returned to the living-room.

Befuddled and kinda reeled, I slid the folding bed-armchair for Lenochka and slid out the folding coach-bed for us. Soon all of the khutta turned into a mutual sleeping kingdom. Only the clock on the wall above the TV was ticking from its plastic box against my temples. It also had no answer to what all that was at all and why that all had to be happening to me…

>~ ~ ~

As always before, accepting the notebooks with my translations, Zhomnir jerked his bushy eyebrow up and started to read, inserting his pencil marks in between the widely spaced lines, though he agreed that his options were also not ideal.

"Your trouble, Sehrguey, is that Ukrainian is not your native tongue, you hadn't absorbed it with your mother's milk."

I refrained from stating that the first months in my life I was nourished with the milk of Carpathian cows.

He went over to his archival chamber and returned with a thin book in his hands. "These are Gutsalo's stories. That's how one should write!"

And Zhomnir began to read out excerpt lines from the book, clicking his tongue at the end of especially cool ones, then he handed the book to me for mastering the craft.

Yet Zhomnir should know better and, so as to compensate for the faulty nurture in my early days and mitigate the backwash of skipping the Ukrainian literature lessons at School 13, I took a thin copybook, titled it "Ukr. Lit." and then read all of the books in Ukrainian from the 2 long shelves in the Plant Club library.

There were both Lesya Ukrainka and her mother Olena Bdgilka, and Panas Myrny with his oxen, and the splendidly great Kobzar, and Marko Vovchok, and Ivan Franko, and Jankowski (idolized by Zhomnir) and many others in alphabetical order. About some of them, even Zhomnir knew only from the skimpy notes taken at the overview lectures attended by him in his student years.

So, after work, I had what to busy myself with. And even a local train could be easily turned into a passable study. That's why on Fridays, I came to At-Seven-Winds with the briefcase and, after work, in the train car, I took out of it a thin copybook, a pen, and a volume of stories by Maugham, in English.

Stooping over the compact print in a book page, I plunged into the tender humid night of the exotic southern seas, where the fragrance of the jungle in bloom spreads for miles beyond the islands.

Emerging back from there with a pair of rough lines for the copybook, I stacked the pinch into the ruled-paper cells, and dived away to roam forth along the sandy beach by the water's edge with white-crested, even in the dark, waves of the rolling surf, and, with a start, looked thru the pane in the car window… Pryosterny?.

Delicious rides they were…

Writing into a copybook placed atop of the briefcase was not comfortable, yet the desk problem found its elegant solution. On Fridays after work, I extracted from my locker the plywood piece intended for the shelf to keep a headgear because if you're holding a piece of plywood 50cm × 60cm pressed in your armpit, it doesn't look too outrageous and, actually, it is not in the way when boarding a bus or a train car.

Upon arrival in Nezhyn, the desk of plywood perfectly fitted into an automatic storage cell, while the briefcase traveled to Red Partisans and there under the table covered with the tulle tablecloth, on which the old pier mirror stood leaning against the wall. The expenses for storage of that single item in a cell amounted to reasonable 30 kopecks: 15 kopecks to set the code inside the door and slam it, 15 kopecks more to open it, after collecting the code from outside.

Once, on the way back to Konotop, the cell door jammed. In such cases, it's opened by an on-duty station attendant with a special key, and in the presence of a militiaman. Before opening the frivolous cell, the militiaman asked me about the things put inside.

I did not want to expose the fella to an unnecessary strain and never mentioned any desk nor shelf, but the ungrateful bonehead utterly refused to believe even in a piece of plywood.

When the attendant opened the cell door, I pulled out those 50cm × 60cm and walked away, yet the militiaman for a considerable stretch kept at the cell agape, peeping into the void of its dusty innards. He, to use the favorite byword of our team foreman, Mykola Khizhnyak, was inspecting it like a magpie the piece of busted bone. A trivial magic trick, dumbo…