the most final
concluding work

I washed my hands and face with the water from a tap in the toilet, then I climbed to the upper floor to become the only guest in the huge dining room. The lone waitress appeared from somewhere and I ordered soup. When she left, I noticed a wrinkle in the tablecloth resulted from hasty ironing; I passed my palm over the crease and it disappeared.

…well, no wonder, after ironing those heaps of swaddles it's easy to smooth any crease out with just laying hands upon…

The waitress came and went leaving me alone in the whole wide hall. I began eating soup cooked by the recipes of the port city. On a low deck nearby there stood silent loudspeakers and amplifiers of the restaurant group.

…so, what to listen to?. something light… okay, let it be The Smokie… I flicked my fingers.

No sound.

…what?!. am I not omnipotent?!. or is the music here switched on some other way?.

And then, as if rammed by an unexpected blow, I got crushed by the feel of a gross mistake. Somewhere, there was a fatal flaw in my suppositions; I was terribly wrong somewhere. The soup became utterly stodgy, not eatable any more. The rice in it turned into fine shell-flakes that settled on the plate bottom, kinda layer of tiny splinters of mother-of-pearl.

…somewhere something was drastically amiss; I made a terrible mistake, miscalculated something…but what?!.

I started to pace between the tables, to and fro. The waitress approached, and I explained that I couldn't eat, I forgot something.

"What?"

"My jacket in the toilet," said I the first thing that came to my mind.

At that very moment, the door of the hall opened, and a neat pensioner announced that my jacket was in the cloakroom downstairs.

I went down to the cloakroom barrier where a woman with the juicy Odessa accent gave me my jacket, which the old man brought to her from the toilet.

"And the pockets had been filled to the utmost," she said with the bitter reproach clear to both of us. She meant that Sunny City who saw my arrival after such a long wait had bestowed the gifts which I stupidly lost by the mistake and still stayed in the dark as to what namely blunder it was. I despondently climbed upstairs to pay for the soup cooked of mother-of-pearl…

It's like in that game where you rise higher and higher along the winding path of figures and then fall in a precipitated nose-dive thru the pipe drawn to the very bottom line… I rolled out into the street from the restaurant “Bratislava”, where I had intentionally left my jacket in the toilet because there were documents and money in its pocket at the moment when I was admitted and entered the new shining world that needed neither money nor documents.

On the way to the bus station, I noticed a long slit in my pants. The seam had burst on the right thigh, starting from the pocket. And I went on covering it with my jacket whose pockets held no gifts from the new world spilled and scattered into nowhere because of my fault… The unlocked cell at the bus station was also empty of things I'd left there.

For the last ruble, I bought a ticket to Yuzhny and shoved it with the kopecks of change into the hip pocket. The bus was crammed with passengers jamming the aisle. My neighbor on the seat kept sighing and silently rubbed the damned un-outable spot in her skirt hem; I knew she had got spattered because of my lapse. And that my flaw caused the stuffed bus to stop at each and every traffic lights, all red with rage. Then the bus stood for a long time on a trenched street, giving way to an endless file of disgruntled pioneers covered with the dust from the heaps of earth on the pavement. It was I who spoiled the celebration…

By and by, the bus got outside the city, the passengers were leaving at the stops. I also got out at the last but one stop, because it was wrong to come to Yuzhny with a hole as big as the wound in the Spartacus's thigh pierced with a spear.

On the outskirts of the settlement, I respectfully greeted a boy of about twelve and asked for a needle and thread. He got it at once what I needed, and led me behind the high hedge of big stone blocks joined by thick seams of mortar, to a secluded place in the weed thicket. Then he ran away and returned with his friend who had a needle on a long black thread.

The boys got seated on the fence with their backs to me; I doffed my pants and started sewing up the burst seam. From the other side of the stone wall came the sounds of the tires screeching sharply, of the clashes and roar of lorry motors along the difficult roads, forth and back, in the endless universal battle… The boys sat there as mere on-lookers as if having no idea that behind their backs a member of RMC was a-darning a wound in his thigh.

With gratitude, I returned them the needle and the still long enough stretch of the thread… When alone, I got seated under an Apple-tree, took out a Belomor cigarette, lit it and stuck the match into the earth driving it full-length in to put out the flame. Ouch! How she cried!. I startled at the wild heartrending holler of that black-and-white cow at the nearby tree, who desperately bellowed with her muzzle turned up to the heaven. How could I know that everything was so intricately entangled and mingled with each other!.

Then I walked thru a dense Willow thicket, and in the sky above there hung a huge bird, like a stork, almost motionless, with an escort of smaller birds stuck to the air around him…

…so, that's it – the highest Head… Devil, or God or What else you could be is more than I possibly can comprehend… the messy mingle-mangle of a whipped up world is entangled too confusedly… and here I am with nothing but the documents, a pocket notebook, a pen and the handkerchief with a small sailing boat… let's sign the contract then as becomes your trade, eh?.

I took out the pen and the bus ticket. I did not know how to draw such a document, so I simply put my signature below the lines of figures knocked out by the cash register at the bus station. I put the pen back in my pocket and placed the ticket upon the long leaves in a pliant Willow fork. Then I turned my back to the contract – it's a fair play, no peeping.

A sharp gust of breeze swirled the bushes, but when I turned around the ticket was still in the same fork, only turned over with its blank side up… so that's your signature?. smart move, no one will ever be able to forge…

I went out of the Willow thicket to a tall brick building, like the central warehouse at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, and started to ask where the personnel department was. They told me that everything had got closed already, but after the second shift, the bus was going to the city for which I had to wait.

I waited for a long time, then there was a long ride thru the night by a small PAZ bus. The fellow-travelers were leaving the bus, in twos and threes, on dimly lit streets in the city, until the driver told me I had to get off too, on the corner of a large empty square.

Getting off the empty bus, I saw the yellowish gleam of lamp lights in a narrow street nearby and went along its fences, then turned to the left and at the next crossing I chose the left turn once again. Dry snaps of claws against the asphalt behind my back were following me; judging by the sound, it was some hugely big beast of a dog, yet I was not afraid at all, and I did not look back, and just kept walking on slowly.

Ahead, the same square opened and I stopped about 20 meters from it because it was dead sure that I reached my sentry point. The lamp on a pillar poured down yellow light, but I stood outside the circle drawn by its cone on the asphalt so that it could not reach my feet.

From the black silhouette of the five-story block on the left, a cat trotted stealthily across the road to the yard of a dark khutta and was met there with a joyous jingling of dog's chain, the date of antipodes. Even slaves have it off at times…

The night went on and I stood motionless, pretending that I had nothing to do with that crushing din and ramble beyond the horizon, where the cogwheels of the universe clockwork with frenzied screech were coming to a clash halt because of my fatal mistake at who knows what…

When the dump truck pulled up behind me, I turned but did not give way, and only threw up my right hand, because that was my post. Those sitting in the cabin had no heads, impenetrable pitch-black darkness cut them off to the shoulders dimly visible in the feeble beam of the lamplight from the pillar.

The driver, who came down from the cab, had a head though; he led me, with care, aside. I did not resist. The dump truck left, taking away the one on the passenger seat, with the viper asp blackness upon his shoulders.

Black traces of tires stayed on the road. They should not be left there – the darkness would follow reading the black marks. I began effacing the traces with the soles of my shoes. Would they last long?

The wind was rising, a spread open newspaper sheet raced frisking from the square to rub against my shank. I made out the headline "The Prince's Tomb"; it took it a really long time to find me. The paper rustled its goodbye and slipped farther on along the asphalt…

The sky became gray… The dog-tired, yet satisfied, cat cautiously retracted her way across the road to the five-story block to pick up her upper-society day life at the lordly loft estate. Woeful laments of suppressed despair and supplicating clank of chain sounded after her.

The new day dawned, but I stood there until a woman in white crossed the square in the distance heading to the left edge of it, unseen from my post. An old woman in black appeared in her wake, pushing a carriage. But I knew there was no baby at all. It was eggs she was pushing along, white and round like billiards balls; dense grapes of eggs.

And I realized that I might leave my post and go on to the square… I walked along empty streets until I turned into the door of a factory check-entrance.

In a narrow room, I asked for water from an old man in black spetzovka, wearing glasses and a workman cap. He gave me a glass of water and we both watched closely if I would swallow the black speck floating on the water surface.

I drank all of it. The speck remained stuck to the glass wall. The man in black told me how to find the nearest employment office…

~ ~ ~