the most final
concluding work

One compromise because of weakness invites another to slip in and before long your adamant determination tumbles in a crumbled heap. I mean, you start to fix one unbearable sore and there crop up a pack of others crying for amelioration… The button in the pajama pants belt kept slipping out of its too wide loop. I grew tired of living with my hand in a constant clutch at the pants top to prevent their falling down. And again, I had to bring the nurse out of her non-involvement lethargy, with the request for a needle and thread.

No sooner had the repair been over than another nurse appeared from the medical staff passage, and called the roll of those starting to Club. My name was there too…

For a considerable stretch, our caravan of 12 in pajamas followed the nurse in white, yet the concluding inmate in our single file wore also a black padded jacket of a workman. On climbing a stair flight, we entered the long indoor gallery bridging to another building. Outside the windows, there unfolded a withered fields with distant black-and-yellow arrow-shields indicating the direction towards the out-of-sight airfield. Each windowsill in the gallery was packed with multiple pots of cacti accompanied by the handwritten instruction for those meek of heart and ignorant of agriculture, "Do not water!"

Inside, Club presented the replica of a regular club with the stage in front of the plywood rows of seats, and the visual-agitation posters on the walls:

Bread is the head of anything else!

The economy should be economical!

If there is bread, there will be a song!

interspersed by the sheets of wordier pieces in a smaller typeset.

The workman from the end of our file pulled up at the sheet nearest to the entrance to unswervingly study it, at times scratching the cap on his head, for which purpose he had to unlock his hands from being clasped in zek attitude on his back.

I sat down in the last row of seats. The lamps above the stage lit up, and a man in a doctor’s smock came out upon it bearing a displeased countenance along with an accordion.

Two more nurses brought in another caravan – a dozen of women in gray gowns over the sturdy linen of hospital underwear. 2 or 3 of them proceeded to seats in the middle of the hall and were immediately joined by Messrs. Pretty-Guys.

The accordionist started to play for the dancers in the passage between the stage and the front row of seats… A woman of about 40 swiftly paced along the central aisle carrying her sweet smile to the last row and invited me for the white dance.

"Sorry, I'm no good at the waltz."

She went away with her face dropped down. A loss. A loss…

Despite the purpose of the Strauss' "The Danube Waves" no one was waltzing but just hugging each other in pairs, a couple of which climbed onto the stage. In one of those elevated pairs, there was the young man with asynchronous eyes. But now both of them were fixed on the tall soft fluff of gray mohair in the knitted hat of his partner – a nurse in a white smock. Who of them invited who?.

The ladies were first to be taken away before our caravan started off. The workman broke away from the same citation poster on the wall and took his concluding place in the file, without ever unclipping his eternal zek-styled hand-clasp…

>~ ~ ~

Apart from orbiting the corridor and visiting the ball in Club, I also was reading. I asked the blonde one from Messrs. Pretty-Guys to lend me the book from his armpit, which he at times used as a drum, and he willingly concurred. It turned out to be a book of stories by Tamaz Chiladze translated from Georgian. I liked them though in original they, probably, were better.

On the third day, I was sitting by the window next to the locked door to the yard, where the first snow was descending in slow quiet flakes. I watched it while reading The Judge and Executioner by Durrenmatt, which I had read years before. Behind me, all the modern world was romping and fussing and rumbling and mumbling and stumbling as reflected in the cross-section by the fifth unit at the fourth kilometer. I was already fed up with it.

Yet, I did not have time to finish reading Durrenmatt read years ago because of the knock on the window pane from outside. On the fluffy thin cover of snow, there stood Eera smiling at me. Silent soft snowflakes swirled slowly about her face. So beautiful…

The nurse brought my clothes and I entered the wardroom to change. Then I returned to the corridor-hall, whose society's particles that retained any close connection with now and here were astounded by my leaving them so soon. Someone, hiding his identity behind the Brownian movement, shouted angrily that it's not right to let me loose, but it certainly was not Baranov because he's a cheerful bozo.

Excited by the freedom at hand, I took a step forward, raised my hand with the fist balled oratorically and shouted out that I was grateful to everyone for everything and promised to remember. In response, a spontaneous rally broke out, but I already stepped out in the medical staff passage. On the way to Tamara's office, in one of the rooms, I caught a glimpse of a lonely old lady in a dressing gown and a head kerchief. Crawling on all fours over the floor, she was lining large blocks, the size of a brick, in two sketchy rows.

Tamara told Eera that my treatment had not started yet but since she was insisting so much then let her take me and not be too worried, the deviations of the sort I had demonstrated so far were a commonplace anomaly among the folks with a PhD degree. That was her way of consoling Eera.

Addressing me, Tamara prescribed a special means of turning back to myself for which end I had every night to watch the news program "Time".

In the following several years, I dutifully followed her prescription and could already with an accuracy of 3 days predict a plane crash or the arrival of the delegation of the Communist Party of Paraguay in Moscow on a brief working visit. But then I got tired of it and dropped watching TV, justifying myself by the proverb that the humpback would be straightened with only his grave, at which point I also, at last, become like everyone else – clean of my leopard spots.

"See how perfect this world is,

Have a look!

Ah, how pe-e-e-rfect this world i-i-is!.."

^~~^~~^~