the most final
concluding work

Next day I went to 25, Gogol Street and left by Sasha Plaksin my black dembel "diplomat" case loaded with dictionaries and a couple of books. We arranged he would send it to me when I settle down somewhere and let him know my address… Konotop saw me off with angry cold and wind, but the coat from Natasha kept me warm, and I went to Nezhyn to return the book of stories by Salinger borrowed from Zhomnir. I locked the sports-bag with clothes and other things into an automatic storage cell at the station and with just my briefcase went to Shevchenko Street.

When the bell rang, the door did not open, probably, Zhomnir and Maria Antonovna walked out somewhere to visit. I went to the city center, to the new "Kosmos" cinema opposite the department store. There was some garbage produced by "Uzbek-film" about Sindbad the Seaman, but I just needed to kill the time.

I sat down and planted the briefcase under the seat. The place on the left was taken by a woman of my age. In the tilted passage on the right, a girl about four was running up and down. Her mother, sitting in the front rows, called for her to come back, but the kid did not listen. She kept capering there, and at each of male spectators entering the hall she yelled, "Daddy!" But he was not among them… A couple of rows higher, to seven o'clock, there were seated 2 military pilots in officer jackets. One of then began to greet my neighbor on the left, but somehow with the owner's air and in a certain double bottom way.

The movie started, and Sindbad switched from the sea to a cave, to fencing a saber next to the ruins of the ancient walls of Samarkand against the background of a high-voltage power line… Finally, that all was over, I lifted my cap from my knees and clapped it on my head. The neighbor on the left dropped her thin gloves into the lap of my coat.

"Take it," she said softly. "Escort me." I angled my briefcase from under the seat and began to squeeze after her thru the crowd.

In a rather dense stream of moviegoers, we descended the high exit stairs outside. The officers-pilots were waiting down in their forage caps. As we were passing by, they did not even dare to peep. Did not get the nerve to. Meaningful dress code works like a charm in the aware milieu. First, the karakul collar, to which they would hardly grow, in the Soviet army such collars were prerogative of Colonels and higher ranked Commanders. Secondly, my gray, brand new, cap in the style favored by zeks after their second term in Zone. Not to mention the equally new briefcase…

She invited me to tea. It was not far, in the five-story block on the slope from the main square. I walked and the location was getting more and more familiar to me. Really? It cannot be…Exactly! She opened with her key the apartment where once the black-haired KGBist arranged a meeting for me and his boss in the stylish gray hair haircut above his tanned face. But now the apartment was furnished and lived in.

We took our coats in the hallway and went over to the living room. On the coffee table in front of the folding coach-bed, instead of tea, she served a bottle of wine, sliced sausage, and chocolate sweets. I drank wine, snacked chocolate and remembered the crane operator Vitalya.

We did not ask each other's names. For what we were there "you" was enough. True, she couldn't resist boasting about having a position at the prosecutor's office. Without specifying my profession, I assured her they wouldn't run me down in her beat.

Then she went into the bedroom and came back in a long unbuttoned dressing gown. She sat next to me on the folding coach-bed again. I hugged her, ran my hand under the gown collar around her neck until reached and unfastened the bra on her blades. Her face flashed up with joy. We went over to the bedroom…

What followed might be compared to the demonstration performances of champions in figure skating, the simile to match her graceful physique. Like well-trained partners, we accurately and precisely entered all those supports, triple two-loops, and other program elements. Of all the program, that two-loops element was especially advantageous for outlining the shapely curves in her slender body. We moved from figure to figure with fancy changes of tempo and on-the-fly improvisation in combinations, and continued to conquer the hearts of absent spectators with the outstanding degree of perfection in our inimitable performance.

The world around, under, and above got wrapped with the misty veil of the delightfully sweet bliss and stuff of ashes being hauled… It’s only that concurrent with the ripples in the stream of sensuality, but absolutely discordant to the thrills of our carnal delights and skillfully adroit ecstatic raptures, there time and again splashed up both sketchy and irrelevant glimpses of a f-f..er..frisking puppy, Tuzik… full of sportive ardor, he was happily gnawing a rubber hot-water bottle in an unidentifiable nook. Which Tuzik?! What rubber bottle on Earth had anything to do with the triumphs of our vigorously deft calisthenics? All the proceedings were, in fact, a streamlined execution of the program I was fed in thru a novel by Carpentier from a recent issue of Vsesvit. There too, the protagonist, before going to Spain to fight in the ranks of the International Brigades against General Franco, was having sex with his girlfriend 3 times in their farewell night…

In the morning she, at last, made tea, and I called Zhomnir to tell that I brought his book and was on my way to his place. However, I did not go to Zhomnir at once. I returned to the Gogol Greens and entered a hairdresser's in the adjoining cobweb of old streets.

They did not expect to have so an early customer, yet one of the hairdressers agreed to shave me. That young make-believe hairdresser of a gypsy girl nicked my throat for more than once. At each scratching, she said "oh!" and rubbed the cut with pliable alum. And she even had the nerve to grab the fee after!.

I again passed the Gogol Greens and entered School 7. There were classes going on and silence reigned in the deserted corridors. In the Teachers' Room, I said to the few women present there that I wanted to see Liliana Ogoltsova from a second grade, whose dad I was.

One of the women came out into the empty corridor with me and led to the classroom in question. She went in and returned with a girl I did not know, her ashy hair in the pair of tight plaits, wearing a gray knitted blouse with thin transverse stripes in its front, who obstinately kept her eyes away.

"This is the girl," said the teacher, "but she says she does not have a dad."

"That's right," I answered fighting back the anger at I did not know what, which rolled up from nowhere. "Would you call ‘father’ the one who shows up once in 5 years just to say ‘goodbye’?" The teacher tactfully walked off to the nearby windowsill.

I opened my briefcase and went down on one knee next to you so that we were even. You did not look at me. "Liliana," I called, took out from my briefcase the folded Morning Star, and handed it to you. "Pass it to your mother, please."

You accepted the newspaper and stood on silently, staring at the floor.

"All right, Lee," said I, "Go back to your class."

You turned with relief and walked to the door of your classroom. I got up from my knee and watched as the door swallowed both you and the newspaper, where between the printed pages there was an enlarged portrait of Eera standing in the summer stream, and the sparse bunch of all the postcards I received, as well as the telegrams, about how you 2 loved me and congratulated on my birthday or on the Day of the Soviet Army…

~ ~ ~