the most final
concluding work

I assumed the stance of a foreman’s sympathizer. I took a liking to him just so, no proof demanded, like, bread’n’fish multiplication and stuff. In fact, his trick about juvenilization of my worn-out passport was more than enough for me.

By the way, the chief under Chief also presented his credentials. One day during the midday break, he came to hold a trade-union meeting. (Ahem!)

We settled under the trees by the hostel. He got seated on a chair and took off his shoes, and socks too. Like, don’t you think all talks of my clove foot are a stupid gossip now? Stuff and nonsense! But I am not the one to be hooked on by illusory chaff.

The devils of Makhno bandits lay down around in the shaded grass under the trees in their black spetzovkas. Only I was in the nylon shirt which I wore in the mine under the spetzovka jacket and every evening washed in the shower.

In the way of a polite, albeit arch, response, I also took off my helmet. Like, you wanna make me believe you've got no hooves? Come on, admire my hornlessness then!. All the other workers had their helmets on, especially Slavic Aksyanov.

And so it went on for some 10 minutes when suddenly the rooster crowed. Surprise! The chief, who's not Chief, shoved his socks into his pockets, and raced to the nearby country road, thrusting his feet into the shoes on the run. And there, as if from under the ground, popped up a biker in black and in a black-leather ribbed helmet, like those the miners wore in the days of the first five-year plans. And they whizzed off in the direction of New Dophinovka. Not clear enough? Who shoots away at the rooster crowing?

Not that I confronted with… well… the chief engineer, but there happened certain frictions. Like it was when a truck dumped a heap of coal for the winter, and I shoved all that anthracite into the stokehold. At the end of that day, he came from Vapnyarka and asked me, haughtily so, "Well, how much is you want? 3 rubles enough?"

I went amok: half-day in the sun, and he, like as if offering a pittance to a dirty wretch. Okay, you're the prince of darkness, but I am also a chosen, even if not initiated, one.

"No!" said I, "let I'll be paid the worth of my labor."

"You won't get such an amount then."

I did not believe him and the next day applied for a day-off and went to the Mining Management in Pole Explorers Square. I was shown the door of the chief accountant office, Weitzman was his name. No sooner had I stepped into his office than the phone on the desk rang. He took off the receiver, "You are listened to."

I depicted the essence of the matter in hand, he got it at once and took out a thick book in a gray paperback The Unified Norms and Tariffs, and he found in it where it was about loading and unloading of loose coal and gave me to read. There it stood in black on white, that even if I were shoveling that coal in an area north of the Arctic Circle—to be paid with the highest northern coefficients applied—and with each shovelful of coal I were circling 3 times around the hostel, before heaving it into the stokehold window, so as to gain the bigger distance of moving the load—then, by the rates from that normative bible, I was entitled to the payment of 1 ruble and 20 kopecks.

His diggings were near the Hunchback Bridge in Odessa. There he lived in a house of his own, together with his wife and their son, fifth-grader. He treated me to a glass of home-made tomato juice. (Ahem…) Everything as expected – some red, thick, brackish liquid. But could I say "no"? Margarita also drank it, at the annual ball of Satan, in Moscow. Yet until now, I brew the black tea after the recipe he shared… That evening he also shared his recollections about working in the Arctic, where, after work, he put a pair of bricks on an electric stove and seated his wife atop of them to bring into the working conditions for the night…

One time the impure attempted at a putsch, they wanted to change the layout of world stratification. The day before it, the mining engineer Pugachov popped up at the hostel and opened one of the locked doors in the corridor. Like, distributing to the miners some food products to be paid for later, on their payday.

I walked along the corridor and Slavic Aksyanov shouted to me from that room, "Come on, get it too!"

There were five Makhno devils inside the empty room and a box of "Prima" packs upon the desk without a chair; Pugachov was meting out from 5 to 10 packs each.

Food products, eh? Ammunition supplies! "No, thank you, "Belomor" is my smoke."

Going out, I still heard Slavic motivating the devils, "No fear! Youth will write off everything!"

The next day not a single traffic lights worked in Odessa. It was a day of complete bedlam; people were shouting at each other, and the trolleybuses were jostling and jumping like mad. There was no shooting, of course, because the putsch took place on a different level. However, by my estimations, it failed, as long as I was in time to buy The World Atlas, a thin booklet in a soft green paperback…

In Odessa of those days, the most stable and widely used expression of approval was "you can’t but love!"

"What’s your thought about Sonya's latest groom?"

"You can’t but love!"

And, instead of "no" they were saying "dick to mama!" Yet, with Odessa-Mommy around, it sounded even patriotic.

"So, The Black-Sea Footballer won yesterday, or what?"

"Dick to mama!"

In the small park on Deribassov Street, there grew some unseen trees looking as if they had cast off their own bark. In the evening, the brass band played there, almost like in the times of Johann Strauss, but seldomer. And in some other park, in the daytime, I dived into the pool from the five-meter-tall tower, the air whistled in the ears during the dive. A little later two guys jumped off as well, holding hands, but it was a heels-first cannonball dive and one of them had black socks on. That way those jumpers were effacing my footprints to put off track any possible followers…

At the intercity phone calls station on Pushkin Street, they played a good joke on me. That time I made the order and waited, then went out thru the porchless door wide-open onto the sidewalk. The moment I lit a cigarette, the loudspeaker inside shouted, "Nezhyn! Is anyone waiting for Nezhyn?!" I threw the cigarette into the trash bin by the door and ran back. "It's me! I am waiting!"

To which the telephone operator said on her microphone, "So, wait then!" The crowd in the hall split their sides. That again, they were saving me from something.

Some cat was waiting there too. They announced his number connected, "Chelyabinsk on line! Enter Booth 5!" And before going to where was told, he uttered with a bitter disappointment, "Eew!"

That's an enlightened one! By the booth number alone, he knew beforehand the pending talk’s outcome!.

I got to know Odessa very well. On foot, for the most part. I found the Public Library Nr. 2; and Privvoz Bazaar, where the porters in blue smocks pushed station trolleys in front of them, shouting "Feet! Feet!" so that the crowd would give way to them warned by their shortened "Watch your feet!". There, in Privvoz, an old gypsy cast a curse on me with their witchcraft art; I did not get it what for, but she should know better or maybe I just popped up at the wrong split-second…

Factory of Gastric Juice; who would ever imagine there were such enterprises?!. When I was passing thru the yards of five-story blocks, mujiks at their "goat" game would bang the bones louder against the tables to shoo off the cats, so they would not run across the sidewalk in front of me. Also auxiliary allies…

To Odessa I was going by bus, only a couple of times on foot; it's only 20 kilometers or so all in all. And one time I walked from Vapnyarka to New Dophinovka along the seashore, over the cliff. In one place there stood some military installation behind the fence of barbed wire. The sentry yelled from there it was forbidden to pass by their site, approached and demanded to present my papers. I showed thru the wire my handkerchief with the sailing boat in the circle. He realized at once that the level was different, "Okay, get along…"

From up the cliff, the view was very beautiful. The sea was quiet, almost smooth, yet sparkled and glittered under the sun. Sometimes the wind rushed along to ripple the water and draw various types of galaxies. Spiral, for the most part. The wind was copying them from the clouds that hovered above the sea…

In Streetcar 5 going to the Arcadia beach, I saw Gray from our Stavropol construction battalion. It surprised me a little – four years had passed and he remained looking so young and, for some reason, in the black uniform of a sea cadet, in their cap with the ribbons hanging over the back.

I stood up and quietly asked into his ear, "Gray, is it you?" He did not respond, neither moved the tiniest bit although he heard me, dead sure…

And another time it was my father by a newsagent booth. He did not look like my father at all, I only recognized him by his voice. It was in that exactly voice he told me of the murderer, whom the camp director brought to a new murder.

When he spoke to me, I pretended that I was all too busy examining the portrait of psychiatrist Burdenko in the Ogonyok magazine cover, which hung behind the glass of the booth, so it was the seller who responded to him.