the most final
concluding work

The development of my marital relationship with Eera moved onward thru gradual and quite predictable stages. At first, when after a working week I came to Nezhyn and excitedly pressed the coveted nipple in the doorbell, Eera in a flash opened the door for me. I hugged her in the hallway, and we kissed.

She even smeared my wrists with glycerin to treat the skin cracks from the frost at the construction site. "Oh, what a silly fool you are!" said Eera and I felt happy, although the cracks smarted.

At the following stage, the kissing got cut out. Still later, instead of embraces, we exchanged the casual cues, "How d'you?" "Fine." And that is correct because something had to be said anyway.

The relationship did not stop at that, and the door started to be opened by my parents-in-law, mostly by Ivan Alexeyevich. Sometimes, I had to push the doorbell button twice already…

In the winters when my hands' skin condition became of no interest, I stopped freezing it. Probably, I grew more experienced, or else the skin realized it had no chances of being treated with glycerin anymore.

At our final kiss in the hallway, I instantly realized that something was wrong. Instead of her lips, Eera somehow guiltily set up her neck, and there wafted a whiff of fox. It's not that I had ever sniffed a fox, yet directly got it – the vixen funk. Later on that visit, she told me that she had been home alone, the doorbell rang and it turned out to be one of her classmates from school. He knelt before her in the kitchen, embraced and kissed her knees, but she told him to leave and nothing happened.

And there, of course, happened another fit of covert agony, but even choking in the steely grip of jealousy I still managed to keep my heartbeat bursting absolutely out of time and, when it numbed and breathing gradually normalized, I somehow began to live on further…

From the hallway, I proceeded to the bathroom to wash my hands, and then entered the living-room to say "good evening" to everyone absorbed in TV watching, and to sit down at the table abutting the windowsill.

The table center was allotted to the TV but, beside it, there remained enough of the oilclothed room for the plate, fork, and bread laid by Eera so that I could have a supper. I did not block the screen and did not bother anyone, if only aesthetically – by my chewing profile on the left from the TV… Then I took the plates to the kitchen and washed up, as well as all that crockery-cutlery stacked in the sink after the meals on that day. I was not ashamed to wash up even when Tonya's husband, Ivan, was entering the kitchen. On the contrary, I was proud that Gaina Mikhailovna trusted me with the task and that after a couple of strict proficiency tests I was approved for the job of a weekend pearl diver.

First of all, I boiled a kettle of water on the gas stove, because it took too long to heat it in the boiler, for which it was necessary to bring firewood from the basement. The process of washing up took place in a large enamel bowl put in the sink. Civilization had not yet come up with detergents and other useful things for washing dishes then and, for a start, with a bar of laundry soap I rubbed a large piece of gauze to give it rich foam. And in the end, of course, I rinsed them all under the tap, in strict keeping with the requirements of technology shared by Gaina Mikhailovna. Washing up helped me to pass the time. I even liked it, especially in that part of operation, when the turned on gas was hissing and burning its blueish flame under the kettle bottom.

Besides, I was trusted with dusting the carpet taken off the floor in the living room out to the yard. It was a shabby thread-bare rug, so one could feel free to beat it thoroughly when dusting. Sometimes, when I was working it over, Eera would go out in the yard and say that it was enough already because the neighbors in the apartment block were human beings too and deserved compassion. And Gaina Mikhailovna once remarked that the method of my dusting showed the temper of a born translator. I cannot imagine where she could have seen translators busy with that job…

At times, I offered some services on my own accord. Like, when Gaina Mikhailovna was very worried about her son Igor being ill and hospitalized in Kiev, because she could not go there and find out how he was, and I suggested that I would go.

Igor was very surprised and could not believe that I had come to Kiev without any other agenda but visiting him. 4 hours on a local train to see my brother-in-law, with whom I did not know what to talk about. If I disclosed having a certain interest of my own, and that in those 4 hours I had finally read The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Radishchev, would it feel better for him?

Then I had time and again to report to my mother-in-law what her son looked like. Well, he looked quite normal, except for an unmistakably monkish air, like all the other patients there. It was an officers-only hospital where they were given long blue gowns, yet allowed to keep their military forage caps. The combination resulted in an awesomely wondrous costume, especially when you watched the ostensibly strolling shut-ins in peripatetic gossip pairs along the allies in the tiny outside garden – the cape-like Merlin-style blue garbs beneath the khakied halos with the scrambled-eggs of cockades. Some special order of monks: Forage-Cappians…

And I was also entrusted to coat the apartment floor with the glossy red paint. Not at one go, naturally, because people had to live in the apartment undergoing the process of renovation; so it took two weekend-visits. But the kitchen, the hallway, and the corridor connecting them, Ivan Alexeyevich painted in my absence.

He helped me a lot when I decided to make bookshelves in the form of a bookcase without doors and walls. The shelves were, sure enough, designed for our future family library. 10 volumes of The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language were already collected. I was too late to subscribe to the Dictionary, but many of its subscribers soon stopped to waste their money, and the rejected volumes were put on free sale at bookstores. Apart from the incomplete collection of the Dictionary, there were full Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s works in 4 volumes, a dozen books in English and a hotchpotch company angled at different bookstores…

At SMP-615, I could not find the material required for the project and asked my father-in-law to have the planks planed and cut in the carpenter workshop at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant. So, I supplied him with the list of measurements of what I needed… He brought the bundle of readied plank pieces and dumped it in the hallway of his apartment, then started to convince me it was impossible to make anything worthy out of them. He even called Eera to the hallway to be an arbitrary, "Look, what shelves could be made of these slats?" And those indeed looked very slim but, before asking him, I had thought out thoroughly how to make shelves that would be both light and sturdy.

The project was accomplished at 13, Decemberists because in Nezhyn there were neither conditions nor tools for such an undertaking. And when I sawed out the bridle joints in the planks and spread casein glue over the tenons to stick them into mortices and, when they dried, polished with sandpaper, and covered with light yellow varnish, then even my father approved the shelves.

Eera, on one of her solo visits to Konotop, was not too much impressed though, at furniture stores you could see more baroque items; yes, they're shelves, and so what?. As for Ivan Alexeyevich's false forecasts, it could easily be understood – the workman at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant workshop told him the planks were unsuitable for the project, and he just repeated the opinion of a specialist…

>~ ~ ~

But then my initial perambulations about Eera's parents' apartment grew even shorter because I canceled eating in the living room… The decision was made when after my arrival at Red Partisans, it took my father-in-law way too long to open the door and, eventually entering the hallway, I heard the cries of a squabble. It happens, you know, a casual family stank.

I heard angry yells of Ivan, Tonya's husband, in high-pitched tones, then she herself flashed thru the corridor to the kitchen and back to the living-room, where more voices wrangled in a confused manner. Eera peeped into the hallway, "The bread is on the table, you bring the rest of snack along from the kitchen." And she disappeared again to bicker on with Ivan.

On account of my arrival, the theater of hostilities moved over to the bedroom of Tonya's family. From the living room, it was only heard that Ivan took a circular defense in the corner, and his parents-in-law and sister-in-law, individually and then in chorus, cried out to him what particularly they were not happy with. The words remained indistinct, like, Pillutikha’s curses, but I could tell that Ivan was responding with dour short bursts, like a Bandera-guerrilla used to use the ammo sparingly. At times, some of the attackers retreated to the living room to recollect what else they could've omitted to divulge and then again rush back to join the clashes. Except for Tonya, who did not leave the bedroom, but kept monotonously banging off her dismal clue. I did not even look in there, but everything was clear enough, family squabbles do not shine with the diversity of dispositions.

And all that turmoil raged against the background of wild screams from the rebellious farmers in the Central Asia, because the TV was feeding series of The Man is Changing His Skin and they kept rushing discontentedly from one edge of the screen to the other. Hence the voices. The rioters were taking the full advantage of watchers being busy with personal sorting out in the bedroom. Then the dehkans grew so impudent that even jumped out of the TV, and continued their scrambles all over the oilcloth on the table.

And I knew that you could expect anything from that TV… One Sunday, my mother-in-law cooked soup from a raw bone and put the plate for me next to the TV where some mafia clan members were forcing a judge to commit suicide. And, when he put a bullet thru his temple, the brains splashed out smack into my plate – oops! What was there to do with my mother-in-law standing vigilant behind my back to control if I would show the proper respect to her cooking? I had to lap it hot…

Yet, no one would escape the just retribution, and now, when the TV and I remained eye to eye, I clicked it onto another channel. It turned out a neatly mellow violin quartet of chamber music. What a relief!.

But then the father-in-law jogged from the bedroom for recharging. And he felt that something was amiss, not as stimulating as expected. He did not immediately realize that it was because of the cello. What could a cello possibly do in a Central Asian bedlam? Unfortunately, he got it what was what, and clicked the channels back, directly into the wild grateful wails of dehkans, "Ala-la-ah!" He swallowed it, like a sip of energizer and, with replenished ammunition, rushed back to the interminable battle…

Since that night, on my arrival, after the hallway and the bathroom, I made straight for the kitchen. There I laid the kitchen table to have some havvage. And I never opened the fridge, so as not to give Gaina Mikhailovna the pretext for her undertone mumbling reprimands to Eera.

While I was eating, you would come running to the kitchen with agitated chatter in your own, as yet not very understandable, language… However, I again have run ahead of the events…

~ ~ ~