the most final
concluding work

With Slavic Aksyanov, at first, I had normal relations, even though I saw that in his past life he served as a Nazi officer in a death camp while at present he was too keen on producing baloney sensations by hoopla talks. And I even helped him to saw boards for the family couch…

The distance from Chabanka to the mine was about two kilometers, approximately same as from New Dophinovka, but with no windbreak belt alongside the country road. And in the open fields, some arrogant flies always started to follow me, a whole swarm of them keeping buzzing around and never lagging behind. But I did not want to bring a "tail of a follower" after me and give out the location of the mine, so I found a nice way of putting them off the track.

Nearby the hostel there stood a long structure of a former cattle farm, which I began to use as the disinfection lock in a spaceship visiting unexplored planets. I entered the building from one end, with all the buzzing flies swarming around me, and marched to the exit at the other end. The whiff of the manure from once upon a time allured them; confusedly, they rushed in all directions in active search for fresher dung, while I walked out into the air, with the food bought in Chabanka and without a single buzzing follower behind my back…

Now, Slavic asked the foreman for permission to use some floorboards from the old farm and make a couch for himself and his wife because he was expecting the arrival of his mother-in-law. Then we went and pulled out the boards for the project; a rather decent material they were, only nailed way too deep, but there was a breaker by us.

With the material procured, we started to discuss the measurements of the planned furniture item. By that time, I had already had a certain, fully developed, numerological system in which the meaning of some individual figures was brought to a complete clarity, thus, for instance, 22 corresponded to "death", 24 to "wife", 10 to "sex", and so on, and all that remained there was just to combine their meaning the way called for by the situation. Minding the purpose of the product, I offered him the best solution for its length – 2 meters and 10 centimeters. Which read that 10 for 2 is the very thing for a young family. But he balked!

"I wanna have 2 meters and 30!"

Okay, you know better what you want… He schlepped a "goat"-trestle from somewhere, the kind used for sawing firewood, and we started. A board on the "goat", two marks with the tape measure and – off we go!

When we stopped to catch a breath, his wife, Lyouda, was passing by to the hostel entrance. Pointing at the "goat", she with unhidden disgust announced to Slavic, "Don't you hope, that I ever lie upon this thing!" Full of indignation, she went away and I got finally convinced that she was not a native to this world. What normal woman has never seen a "goat"?

Apart from that, she could read thoughts… I once entered their room, where Slavic was eating soup and watching television. I said I was not hungry, and sat by the door to wait for him to finish off his havvage. And in the corner behind his back there stood a refrigerator, with a stand-up mirror put atop of it face down. The mirror frame had a pair of plastic legs to keep it upright, when not in the supine position.

From the chair by the door which I was seated on, the puzzle collected into a coherent picture: Slavic, eating the TV with his stare, ladles the soup into himself, the two green legs sticking out of his hair in the form of curved horns, kinda lyre only without strings, of course. Then I thought to myself, that is, inside my mind, "So, you're not only a Nazi but a cuckold too!"

Lyouda read that thought, and went directly to the refrigerator, she turned the legs down and gave me an eloquent look. Like, we need none of your comments on the skeletons in our family cupboard!.

Well, in general, when Slavic fired up the shakedown flights on that aerodrome of a couch in their room, there cropped up some inconsistencies in the game. Three days later, he dragged it out of the hostel in the tall grass and shortened with a hacksaw. That’s what the trial and error method is about…

"What's he bungling at?" asked a Makhno bandit another when they were passing by.

"As if it's not clear. A machine-tool for fucking, what else?"

"A-aha!"

Well, what else is there to expect from mujiks? They just can't bring it over in a subtler way, blurt out as is, without numerological refinement…

And when his mother-in-law arrived, he started to have fits of frenzy. He visited my room and made faces. The purpose of that fleering was clear to me without any explanations – he wanted to drive me mad…

Once Ivan, the driver of Machine 1, called me to share a midday meal with him and his assistant in their shaft. His wife worked in the canteen of some military school in Odessa, where they also trained Negroes from the countries of awakened Africa. So those Afro-Africans were not too hungry after their sleep, judging by the amount of provision she brought home from there. When Ivan removed the lid from that aluminum pot, it was brimming with meat on ribs, without any garnish though. The 3 of us—Ivan, his assistant and I—hardly managed to finish off that hecatomb, leaving a pile of bared bones on the sand by the 5-liter pot. And then Slavic came up to borrow some spare part for his stone-cutting machine; on seeing that cannibal still-life, he distorted his mug in earnest, bitten by the recollection of everyday oats from his mother-in-law, most likely.

Maybe, that’s why several hours later, when the hostel residents were enjoying the coolness of late evening, he wanted to fight me. He even snatched one ingot from the gold stock in the tall grass, raised it with both hands over his head and hurled at me. The action resulted in a really beautiful sight – the full moon pouring its tender light onto the scintillating tracery of dashes in the arc-shaped trajectory chosen by the lobbed ingot for its flight, gleaming lazily with white, apparently aluminum, color against the velvety darkness of balmy night. (Or was I wrong, and the mine was mining platinum, after all?)

Now it was my turn to ran backward in the manner of Alik the Armenian. Slavic's wife, Lyouda, took him home from the arena of demonstration performances…

During my next visit to Odessa, I dropped to a legal consultation. I did not plan it at all, just their office sign caught my eye. Without leaking any names or geographical locations, I asked for a recommendation if pestered by a neighbor in the hostel.

"Turn to the Komsomol Committee of your enterprise."

Well, and those also were not of this world. They are already anywhere, see?!.

But if Supreme Head was Yakovlevich, then who, the heck, could the chief engineer be? It's not difficult to guess – who's Creator's antipode? Prince of Darkness and master of the impure, in all his glory.

That could be easily deducted even from their attitude toward each other – respectful, but armed, neutrality. I recollect them standing in the trunk tunnel and talking eye to eye – correctness itself! The foreman in his black spetzovka and the chief engineer in a summer shirt with a white handkerchief bent over its collar to keep the dust off. If there were a safari helmet on his head instead of the regular plastic one, it would be a ready picture "I'm the master here!" Although, of course, the depths under the ground are his domain.