the most final
concluding work

_{~ ~ ~} The Parade of Planets

On the Day D, aka my departure day, everything hung on a thread, more precisely, on a single cobweb fiber. I got it at once on entering the staircase-entrance vestibule to spark a joint because I never smoked in the apartment, not even vanilla cigarettes. The cobweb thread hung from the upper crossbar in the cracked entrance-door frame, stretched tautly downward by the weight of a burned match dangling from its end… How long could it last?.

It was I, who always stuffed burned matches up in the gap between the frame-top and the whitewashed plaster on the wall because there was no trash bin in the staircase-entrance vestibule. After Tonya's toddler son had exposed my connection to cannabis, I did not care what might be sniffed out by the passers-by in the smoke I left in the vestibule… Would the cobweb thread hold on until I get away?.

I looked from the sultry shade in the staircase-entrance out into the yard. A squadron of black ravens coasted lowly thru the heat-melted sky. Heading north-east, they did not move their wings—made all too reluctant even for the slightest effort—the feathers at their wing-tips stuck out kinda rigid spikes harrowing the hot breeze… Could I get thru?.

Eera was seeing me to the station. When we started for the bus stop, from a balcony in the neighboring five-story block Alla Pugacheva sobbed up after me in her latest hit:

"Please, come back for at least a day!.."

I did not have much luggage – a briefcase with a book of stories by W. S. Maugham in English (soft pink cover, Moscow publishing house "The Enlightenment"), the Hornby's Learners' Dictionary, a thin copy-book of 12 sheets with a stub at translation of "The Rain" story by Maugham (4 pages of a rough pencil draft made hard to read by manifold corrections), the employment history book (the first entry made on September 13, 1971, at Konotop Locomotive and Car Repair Plant), the passport, the military ID, and shaving accessories.

The briefcase was accompanied by the blue sports-bag with a shoulder strap, containing a change of underpants, two tank tops, a pair of shirts, jeans, and the geologist jacket, sewn by my mother of hard green tarp… Boarding the local train, I threw them onto the car-long rack of thin tubes running above the windows and went back to the platform.

Eera was nervous that the doors would slam shut and the train leave without me. I climbed up one step to the car vestibule and stood there, holding a grip on the nickel-plated vertical railing, "I’ve left something on the windowsill, let it be there till I'm back."

"What's that?"

"Look for yourself. I'll be back exactly in a month."

"Call at once as you've arrived!"

It was the last car on the train. An old woman ran up along the platform. She asked something but I neither listened nor wanted to, I was looking at Eera until the speakers in the car shouted, "Beware! The doors are shutting!" And they cut me off her.

The electric train pulled and, gaining the speed, rumbled along the rails in the direction of Kiev…

The night before, I went out shopping together with Eera. The department store was locked already, but the glazed stall by its side still worked. From the sitting inside middle-aged gypsy woman, I bought a new safety razor, a shaving brush, a stand-up mirror, and two handkerchiefs with a series of pin-thick blue wavy lines printed across their fields and leaving out only thin circular frames in the center. Both size and looks of the handkerchiefs were quite alike except for the pictures inside those frames – a small sailing boat in one, a neat blue anchor in the other. In my pocket, I was carrying away the handkerchief with the sailing boat, its counterpart with the anchor was left on the windowsill. Coming back, I would put their circles to each other, the boat to the anchor. It would be the ritual of return…

And pretty late at night, my mother-in-law suddenly freaked out and started anxiously persuade me there was no need to go anywhere, and it was still possible to return the train ticket Kiev-Odessa to the booking ticket-office at the station.

I thought I was going to lose it – what ticket return, eh? Eera and Tonya also joined the conversation, only the father-in-law was out, called to the situation at the Bakery Plant.

Staring at the oilcloth on the table, Gaina Mikhailovna was mumbling about a too complicated moment, so that even Ivan couldn't get thru… A week before, Tonya's husband Ivan left for the Transcarpathia, yet without ever reaching there, he returned from Kiev a day later—I couldn't get it why—and now he was all the time hiding away in the bedroom with the children of their family.

By that time, I had grasped already that the whole world was in the state of tumultuous fracas, amid some unceasing battle in progress – but who against who? That was some question! Because all of that went on under wraps, beneath the surface presenting only the conventional layer of casual life. Still, thru occasional rinds and gaps in the disguising cover, there at times glimpsed certain inconsistencies, secret signs, and I already started to understand that the true reality consisted of something surpassing the customary limits of commonplace views we were brought up to keep to, and those my guesses were affirmed by the instances when people let things out, and pretty frequent too.

Was I sure they were exactly people? Well, I did not have another name for them… Letting out? What namely? What about?. About things that did not belong to the life which we were taught to see and no deeper.

…Ivan unable to get thru…(repealed on his emissary mission)…and whose side are you on?. (the fire at the Bakery Plant just an episode in the universal battle)…

I had to find the ways and means for collecting the strewn puzzle pieces of concomitant reality, turn them into some-wieldy-thing, without getting lost on the way midst all chance hints of recondite raw truth. Who's for who? Who's against who?.

A thunderstorm broke behind the black window in the living room. The ramble of falling water outside got overpowered again and again by thunderclaps fighting blindly in the flicker of mighty flashes. A pillar of enormously white light struck the transformer box in the yard. And the pitch-black darkness engulfed all around.

Tonya groped her way to their bedroom to calm down the children and Ivan. When she came back with a burning candle, I saw in its feeble light that I was talking to Mothers. Those very Mothers mentioned, in all too cautious, cut-and-run, manner by Goethe… Three Mothers were they: the old yet powerful, the middle, and the beginner – Eera. She was not my ally, she was one of them. I needed to persuade them, otherwise, nothing would come out.

With the storm raging outside, behind the blinking candle reflection in the panes of black glass, I still managed to get their go-ahead… In conclusion, their eldest, the leader said, "If something goes completely awry…in a hopeless, extreme, situation…turn to the very Head…"

At night I had a prophecy dream… I lay on a gurney, trying to become inconspicuous in the cold and dim fluorescent light flooding from everywhere thru the pale gray, semi-translucent, ceiling and walls, so as to exclude the slightest possibility for even a sliver of a shadow. A group of someones in white robes stood all about me. The one standing out of view, behind my head, asserted, "If not for the fat, it still might come out…" Even without seeing, I knew that the one in the white who pronounced that was also I. With a furtive glance from under my half-closed eyelids at the stomach of me lying raw upon the gurney, I saw thru the sheer skin a thin yellowish layer, probably, the fat I was talking about…

I went out into the train car vestibule and sparked. Thru the sky of dusty glass in the automatic doors, a small harem of seahorses floated with their tails curled forward under their bellies. Lined from the taller mare to the smallest colt, they were also fond of a system, like the lost figurines of white elephants. The train hurriedly raced ahead, yet couldn't leave their formation behind…

A man entered the vestibule with a dangling row of medals on his civilian jacket breast. A war veteran; here's the one who once knew who's for who, who's against who. We shot the breeze for a while without advancing any particular line of thought until at one of the stops, a man with a bundle of long thin planks in his hands stepped in from the platform. He carried his load between us 2 and went on into the car. The veteran freaked out, his staring eyes stuck to something in the upper corner behind me. I knew that there was nothing there, but since he saw it, then there it was. I left them to sort it out between themselves and followed the fascia-bearer into the car, to the window under the rack carrying my things, because Kiev was running towards our train…

>~ ~ ~

At the station, I took my luggage to the cool huge underground checkroom hall. Then I came back up to the hot surface of the station square in whose right corner I slipped thru the inconspicuous passage leading to the steep and long stair flights that descended to the canteen once shown to me and Olga by Lekha Kuzko.

At the bottom of stairs, I sparked and went on, but had to stop smoking, when a platoon of militiamen poured out of the canteen and marched towards me along the sidewalk so that I had to pad thru their ranks with a smoldering joint between my fingers…

From the canteen, I returned to the station and took a walk-round. There were not so many glass-eyed as on the night watch at the Nezhyn station, probably, because of the different time of day. Still, there were some and at my approach, they hurriedly pretended that they were there just so, kinda ornery passengers.

I went up to the third floor where there was the mother-and-child room and explained to the watchwoman that in a month I would be passing their station together with my wife and baby daughter, and now I dropped in to check the conditions. Well, in general, rather a clean corridor, thank you.

Near the toilet rooms on the first floor, a young militiaman with a black eye of deep purple hue took pains to avoid the least eye contact with me, although both of us perfectly knew that his black eye resulted from my walking thru their formation and that he, who had suffered in the universal battle, would not forgive me that.

Then, for quite a stretch, I stood in the waiting hall on the second floor, in front of the huge news stall counter keeping heaps of diverse newspapers, magazines, postal envelopes. But all that time I looked at just one postcard with the bluest blue sky in its picture.

It was a long wait until there at last sounded footsteps behind me, barely audible in the joint buzz of the crowd filling the hall… My eyes stayed fixed at the picture. The footsteps stopped. A copper coin the size of an eye iris fell from behind my back onto the blue in the postcard. Only then I turned and went away without ever looking back – from that moment on no casual genes would ever be able to change the color of your eyes. And only then it was, that the station loudspeakers' call broke thru to me:

"The train Kiev-Odessa departs from the third platform. We ask escorting citizens to leave the cars."