the most final
concluding work

However, there happened misfires too. The rooster, swaggering around the hostel entrance, did not understand my fair intentions and contemptuously turned away, when I offered him a grain of laundry blue from the pinch scattered over the wide bench next to the entrance. The proposed supplement to the ration of the bird was based on good motives and freshly gained experience. That day it was revealed to me, that the combination of blue and black symbolize strength: the cock with his black plumage would turn a super-cock had he picked up that laundry blue speck…

And the fact that I was both chosen and protected one became obvious when a certain glassy-eyed was sneaking to me with obviously inimical intentions…

There are three distinct varieties of glassy-eyed. Those in whom eye glassiness is combined with pronounced purity of whites in their eyes are harmless. They, beyond doubt, are possessed, but remain just tools for the transmission of information, like, what's up and on and how it goes? – kind of a spyglass, and nothing more. Where does the information flow to? Who's the recipient? The former dwellers of Olympus in their current forms, of course.

The second variety, with blurry luster filming their eyeballs, are self-employed freelancers looking for a chance refreshment with "red-and-hot", or striving to somehow otherwise get recharged on your account.

"There's an underground passage for people, but we may use it as well," one such one told me, apparently taking for one of her likes when, in an unfamiliar and poorly lit area of night Odessa, I asked her how to get to the bus station – their favorite feeding trough. Those it was, waiting for me to get out of the "Bratislava" restaurant with my torn thigh, and they impatiently urged the usher-woman to cut the needless chit-chat (which was not that but a talk loaded with meaning understood by both of us even though not to the same degree of clarity) and set “the rabbit” (me) out for their hunt…

For the pre-employment medical check (two weeks after getting the job), I visited a corresponding unit facilities in the Vapnyarka village to pass the blood sample analysis. On entering the office, I saw, besides the nurse, a lady marked with that particular eye murkiness, who sat on the couch and, from a corner of her mouth, there was hanging a long flexible tube. The nurse explained that the tube was just a probe, and the lady would not be in the way. As if I could not figure out from her looks what kind of lady it was and why she was there…

Then the nurse customarily pierced the pad of my finger and squeezed it and, instead of the usual bead of blood, it gave out a tiny jet of it, no thicker than a needle, like milk sprinkling from the squeezed nipple of a breastfeeding woman. I had never seen such a thing in my life!

And not only I was surprised – the lady's jaw dropped and that, let's say, probe wanted to pop out too. Just like an alky who had outstretched a cup for a fill but they splashed a whole three-liter jar of hooch over it. What a loss of precious stuff!.

As for reaching to the blood with their fangs, that's just a grandma's fair-tale for sillies. To fill their tanks they use some subtle, inconspicuous and, even though not fully understood by me, yet quite efficient, technology…

The glassy-eyed of the blurry type, who attempted at utilizing me, was a Volga driver that brought his boss to the hostel. In the corridor, there also was a rarely opened office of the mining engineer, visited by those coming to arrange the transaction of taking cubics from the pit.

That day, as always, I came from the mine to hostel for the midday meal and was washing my hands at the washstand on stake, not far from the entrance.

The glassy-eyed did not know me because of being an outsider, and he kept sneakily closing in, holding in his hands the weapon – an artifact that looked like a length of aluminum wire twisted in a special way, about 20 centimeters long.

Noting that blurry glassiness in his filmed eyes and the cautious way of his slinking nearer, I realized that I was done. The distance shortened, yet the moment when he already could reach me with his thing, a gray kitten jumped out from the tall grass and rubbed his scruff against my black spetzovka pants. And at once the glassy-eyed stalker lost any interest in me, lowered his weapon and returned to the car. The unknown rescuer-kitten who I never—before or later—saw around, disappeared into the grass…

But more often I had to rely only on my own prudent circumspection. As on that narrow beach under the cliff of Chabanka.

I wanted to take a swim in the sea and had already entered the peaceful slow waves but stopped – two fishermen in swimming trunks with fishing rods in their hands stood ahead. Between them, there was enough space to swim forwards, but I realized that the rods were the barrier blocking the way to the sea. And only seizing the moment when they simultaneously pulled their fishing rods up, I plunged in and swam away from the beach.

I swam for a long time, sometimes laying on the water for rest and wondering why my father told me that seawater supports a swimmer because of the salt dissolved in it. It made no difference to lying on the freshwater… Then I swam on, mostly on my back, facing the warm bright sky, until I felt a dab at my shoulder.

I looked back and saw a jellyfish in the water, semi-transparent and as wide as a basin. I gave it way and went on ahead, but then I began to come across more and more jelly-fish – you bypassed one of them to just run into another. Popping up a bit out from the water, I looked forward and saw a whole shoal of them which had turned the calm sun-driven waves into some jellyfish soup crowded with their translucent bodies. I didn't get the nerve to breast that soup, I turned around and swam back to the already distant shore…

The shingle beach of Chabanka had some sandy stretches in it. On one of those spits, near the water's edge, I wanted to write "Eera" but the waves did not allow. They ran up and leveled the wet sand before I had time to write out all the letters, and I only scratched my finger to bleeding with the tiny shell fragments mixed with the sand, before I gave up…

But my first meeting with the sea was on the beach of New Dophinovka where I went after work, along the shore of the sea inlet that reached the hostel. The water in it was shallow and very transparent. I walked until saw some worn-out tires in the water, dropped there from the shore by some morons. So I took off my pants, went into the shallow water, and dragged the tires onshore, but after one more bend of the inlet, I saw there was an entire trash dump in it – life would not be enough to drag all that debris out, and it was evening already. Then there started a thicket of reeds stretching to the highway and along its opposite roadside there unfolded the wide vista of the sea and sea alone…

But if going to New Dophinovka by the country road, there sometimes were huge ships hovering in the sky. The ships, of course, stood in the sea which merged with the sky at the horizon, that’s why you saw a field with a ship above it and, still higher or next to its bow, the immense red ball of the setting sun. Those ships were so large that they, probably, do not fit in the harbor and had to stay right there in the sea-sky…

~ ~ ~