the most final
concluding work

Since then I stopped speaking to my parents, and I also dropped participating in the May and November demonstrations. Instead, on reaching Professions Street, I turned left and walked to the very outskirts, where the khuttas were replaced with meadows bordered by trees in the windbreak belt along the railroad embankment. From there, the deserted dirt road led me to the station of Kukolka.

I did not go to the station though, but after a couple of kilometers followed the solitary track branching off the main railway. It was never used by trains because of being a reserve track in case of war. Such a case would make Konotop a target for bombardment, as a strategically important junction, and the reserve track detoured the would-be-destroyed city… Following that track thru the empty fields, I reached the forest by the Seim river.

To the Seim itself, I went out not far from the local train stop "Priseimovye", and walked to the place on its bank where once, still unmarried, I spent a day with Eera. In that spot, I read an issue of Morning Star, almost completely, bypassing the last sports page, which I always ignored anyway. The newspaper was left in the grass on the bank, in case it might come handy for someone.

The return journey was made along the main two-track embankment. I entered Konotop together with it and for a long time continued walking along the adjacent gardens, right up to the second bridge, where the embankment turned to the railway station. There we parted, and I went on, by the outskirts alongside the Swamp. Already in the late evening darkness, I crossed Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street behind the old cemetery and, going up Sosnowska street, I reached the terminal of streetcar 3, from where to 13 Decemberists there remained hop, skip and a jump.

On the whole, it was like whirling in a wide vicious circle, with a return to the starting point after walking all day. The music from the demonstrations loudspeakers was substituted with self-made marching chants, like:

"So what about

are we laughing

while our shoes

this trail is roughing?"

But all that was in the future, while for the very first time, I did not have Morning Star, instead of which there was a pinprick feeling in my chest on the left. And it did not want to disappear, no matter how often I scratched the T-shirt in that area.

Even at night the annoyance persistently stayed by me, so in the morning I decided to have a session of labor therapy. I went to the locomotive depot, penetrated its grounds deserted and submerged in quietude, because of the second holiday day, and went to the construction site of the administrative building.

At the hillock of white silicate bricks dumpage, I planted an empty pallet and started stacking bricks on it. At times, it was necessary to press my chest with the left elbow, because the pin in there got replaced with a thick knitting needle. When the standard 12 courses of bricks were stacked up on the pallet, I told myself that my case was not terminal, and climbed to the incomplete third floor. There I took the Jolly Roger down from the corner wall, tore it from its mast, and slipped into a loop-hole in the slabs, and buried with dried mortar lumps and other debris…

Kyrpa's threats remained just empty words, I was never taken to Romny that summer. Might it be I had grown wiser? Very questionable indeed. It's just because I had not run into a sore spot of some high-ranking bitch of a cadre… By the middle of May, the needle, or pin, or whatever it was to pierce my chest, gradually dissolved, and many years later I realized that it was the first of heart attacks suffered by me…

~ ~ ~

In my rough plan there cropped up another, but already pleasant, detail, that of assembling the typewritten pages into one complete volume of stories. For that purpose, I bought a folder from the Department Store, with a hard plastic cover and nickel-plated rings inside. They usually use such folders for annual accounting reports lined up on the shelves in the accountancy office; sturdy, respect inspiring rows. To punch the holes for the folder rings in the pages of text, I borrowed the puncher from the secretary of Manager of SMP-615 in the administrative building. The new boss’s complexion grew green when saw me in his poultry farm, however, his sore spots did not qualify yet to be considered high-ranking enough…

The folder with the collection of translated short stories was holstered into a festive-looking cellophane bag and I took it—bugle your trumpets, fanfarade! Roll, timpani, roll!—in the capital city of Kiev, to the book publishing house Dnipro.

In the first room, where I proudly announced the arrival of a collection of translations [Here! Here!] of short stories by William Somerset Maugham, the jovial young man informed that he was not the person in charge of Maugham, and the expert I needed was to be found 2 offices farther down the corridor. If would I like him to have me seen over there? With dignified gratitude, I declined.

In the indicated office, there sat a fat, but still young, man staring in disgust at a skinny pile of typewritten pages inside an open looseleaf folder of purple cardboard, with short white strings in its covers spread wantonly atop his desk… He reluctantly opened the heavy hard-plastic-armored file that I handed him over his desk, and glanced at the title of the first story in the collection.

The Rain

He shut the file abruptly and asked who I was sent by.

In confused bewilderment, my mind revved to its limits: …forbidden to come here on your own accord?...too high circles… I should have been sent by some or another duke***, so that the courtier-receptionist could guess whose vassal I was… to compare the duke's weight with that of his suzerain—marquis***—and know how to handle me… and then one phone call to verify—just in case—for him to decide to which drawer he might safely stick it in… and don’t you cherish no hope, under so polished a shebang, to find a hole for the f-f..er..I mean, freelancer-outsider.

Meanwhile he, just in case, opened the volume once again, someplace in the middle, and immediately slammed it shut.

"I'm just an errand-boy," clarified I, "They asked me to take it to your publishing house, so I brought it here."

"Who?"

I opened the file to show the sticker on inside of its back cover with my Konotop address. "This friend of mine," said I.

It was below his position to talk to a messenger who was not sent by even somewhat petty baron but came from.. what was it? Konotop, or something he never needed no slush from… I coldly replied to his official goodbye and left the room.

The next evening, in Konotop, coming from work, I saw on my shelves a weighty postal package wrapped in their usual mustard-brown hard-duty paper. I had no reason to open the parcel. What for? By its size and familiar weight, I knew what was inside. The annual report for the past 6 years of my life, comprising 472 typewritten pages of 35 short stories by W. S. Maugham, translated into Ukrainian.

Strangely, the posted parcel hadn't reached Konotop before I came back from Kiev. And it was also odd that the unopened package with unread stories left me so frostbitten indifferent.

Quoting the habitual byword from my Uncle Vadya: “Farewell, dear peers and peerixes, sirs and sirixes!”

And he was a great connoisseur of vassal dependencies from The History of Middle Ages school textbook …)

^~~^~~^~