the most final
concluding work

(…leaving aside the Holy Family, our particular case was the result of textual programming thru the novel by a French writer, Herve Bazin, which I read back in my adolescence.

Although there was no childbirth in that work, I still should not be allowed to read just anything at all…)

(…throughout all those five years plus, I was perfectly aware that everything should be paid for. Nothing is given for nothing. And I don't mean money for pot, which goes without saying. I mean the main payment for getting stoned, high, and on the flights. And the closer to the final full-stop in the trough of the common urinal at the Kiev intercity bus station, the deeper I realized that I even knew who exactly was paying the unreasonably high—more expensive than any money—price for my buzz.

I had neither desire nor occasion to share that knowledge to anyone, because it was so complete crazy nonsense. Nutty hooey. That's why I silenced it and kept it hidden and buried away, even from myself, but it came back to me over and over again, even at my not-stoned moments, that I was irredeemably indebted to the long-suffering people of Cambodia sweating in the swelter of the sub-equatorial hothouse climate of South-Eastern Asia. And there was no forgiveness for me…

Nothing comes from nowhere, and it is the immutable truth. The tactile sensations at my maiden getting high, in the stoker-house of the construction battalion, established an inextricable link between blowing jive and getting smashed in the brains.

Subsequently, the rigor of the correlative interdependency dissolved, but the buzz continued to flow in. Which gives rise to a question: if not me, then who is smashed in the brains?

By the end of the five-year-plus period there came the answer. The Khmer Rouge troops, when seizing another village, killed its inhabitants, the same Cambodians as themselves. To save the ammo, they were butchering them by bamboo club blows against their skulls. Then they turned the bodies on their backs and photographed dead faces, like for a passport. In those pictures, the right eye is half-closed and the left one bulging out.

I saw them. Multiple rows of those pictures—dead people with feline faces—were regularly placed in the central newspapers. They looked like some different non-human race, them those people with their, as if skinned, faces. I had what to feel guilty about.

Of course, after the events accompanying my first flight to Odessa, the peasants' brains were not any longer being smashed out for me, which did not stop the show so that someone else would get a kick.

In Odessa, I found myself amid a universal battle of who knows who against whoever else. In the course of inconceivable vicissitudes, I became a some who's ally, making enemies with whoever else, still remaining in the complete dark as to who is who?

One thing was totally clear though, that those, with whom, as willed by fate, I happened to be on the different sides of the barricades, would not fail to track me down and square the accounts. It's no coincidence that, the moment I got off the Kiev-Moscow train in Nezhyn, a window in one of its cars opened and a glassy-eyed (apparently from the monad of the chief engineer) spit out a long streak of saliva on the platform. He undoubtedly was leaving a signal mark for other militants from their dark legion where to pick up the trace of my further perambulations and follow my subsequent movements up to Konotop. And there, they would easily and inevitably discover the cannabis plantation at the end of the garden of my parents' khutta in the Settlement. With incalculable and unimaginable consequences of the most horrid nature.

My duty before the unknown allies, and before the remains of still not finished off peasants at their squalid villages in the humid depths of jungles in South-Eastern Asia prompted the only right decision…)