the most final
concluding work

In the list of movies for July, there stood “The Sons of Big Bear”, so Skully and I agreed not to miss it because Goiko Mitich starred in the film as one of her sons. That Yugoslavian actor was mostly engaged as a hero red-skin in this or that of GDR Westerns and, as long as he was in, you could safely expect it'd be a decent movie. Sure enough, the list did not report all those details or anything at all except for the movie's title and the date of show. However, the films arrived to the Plant Club no sooner than a couple of months after their run for a week at the Peace Movie Theater and one more week at the Vorontsov Movie Theater on Square of the Konotop Divisions that’s why, with the little help of our friends, we could always make an informed decision. And we weren't especially keen on watching movies at the mentioned theaters not because of trust in the unmistakable flair of our friends, no, their leads well sucked at times, but for the much simpler motivation – a ticket at the Peace Movie Theater was 50 kopecks, watching the same film a week later at the Vorontsov set you back for five-and-thirty, whereas, after practicing your patience for a month plus, you enjoyed it at Club paying reasonable 20 kopecks…

On that Sunday the 3 of us—Kuba, Skully, and I—went to the Kandeebynno by bikes. We swam and dived, in turn, off the self-made launch-pad when 2 of us, chest-deep in the water, clasped our hands for the third to climb upon and take a dive from. And, of course, we played “spots”, though you couldn’t catch up Kuba underwater.

Then he and Skully got lost somewhere in the bathing crowd. In vain looked I for the friends midst the splashes and squeals, they were nowhere around. Just in case, I even swam to the opposite shore which was the dam of the fish lakes. A couple of guys were fishing there, with their eye alert for an opportunity to angle in the mirror carp paradise over the dam. And I swam back so as not to scare off their fish, which was striking even in the lake for swimmers. Then I once again scanned the crowd in the water, to no avail, and decided it was enough.

Chilled thru and thru, I stepped out onto the scorching sand of the beach when the lost friends came running from among the bushes of Currant with the hair on their heads almost dry already, “W-where the h-hell were you?”

“We’re getting in again. Let’s go!”

“You w-wackos?! I’m-m just c-coming out!”

“So what? Let’s go!”

“Ah, damn! Off we’ll d-drive the c-city boys!.”

And whipping up foamy splashes with the three pairs of racing feet, we rushed together to deeper places to dive, and yell, and hoo-ha. Each summer was the summer then…

Kuba refused to join our going to the movie, he'd already seen that western, and Skully also changed his mind. That fact didn’t stop me, and I decided to take twenty kopecks from Mother and watch it all the same. At home, Grandma Katya told me, that my parents left two hours ago together with the twins and she didn’t know where they went. So what? There remained three more hours before the next show, enough time for them to come back…

At the end of the third hour, I was squashed by an overwhelming anxiety: where could they be? So I asked it once again, yet of Aunt Lyouda already. With complete indifference and even somewhat grouchy, she replied, “I wouldn’t even have seen you.” She always became like that when Uncle Tolik was gone fishing.

Two more hours passed, the show was missed hopelessly but, flooded by the feeling of an unavoidable and already accomplished catastrophe, I didn’t care for any cinema at all. The tide of despair dragged in some sketchy pictures of a truck jumping over to the sidewalk, vague wailing of ambulance sirens, and only one thing was clear – I no longer had any parents nor any sister-'n'-brother.

The darkness thickened. Uncle Tolik pulled up in the street on his return from fishing and rolled his “Jawa” motorbike across the yard to the shed section. He went to khutta and I, freaked out and crushed by my grief and loneliness, was sitting on the grass next to sleepy Zhoolka…

It was already quite late when the iron handle-hook in the wicket clinked. Sasha and Natasha ran into the yard followed by Mother’s cheerful voice from the street. I rushed to meet them torn apart between joy and resentment, “So, where were you lost?”

“Visiting Uncle Vadya,” said Mother. “And what’s up with you?”

I burst into tears mixed with muddled mumbling about bear’s sons and twenty kopecks because I couldn’t explain that for half of that day I was mourning the loss of them all, fighting back the prospect of life without the family.

“You could ask the money from Aunt Lyouda.”

“So? I did ask and she said she wouldn’t like to see me too.”

“What? Come on into the khutta!”

And at home, she squabbled with her sister, and Aunt Lyouda retorted it was all bullshit and she’d only said she wouldn’t see me too if I hadn’t come. But I obstinately repeated my bullshit. Mother and Aunt Lyouda screamed at each other louder and louder. Grandma Katya tried to calm them down, “Stop it! What a shame, all the neighbors would hear, and the people in the street too.”

Natasha, Sasha, Irochka, and Valerik, their eyes rounded by fright, crowded in the doorway between the kitchen and the room where Father and Uncle Tolik were sitting with their silent sullen stares stuck to the TV box…

That’s how I committed the second meanness in my life – slandered innocent Aunt by my false accusations. And though her response to my questioning I got exactly the way as related to Mother, yet after the Aunt’s interpretation, I could agree that, yes, so was her answer, however, I never admitted my base calumny.

That lying without words filled me with compunction because the quarrel in the khutta was my fault. I felt guilty before both Aunt Lyouda and her kids, and before Mother, who I belied, and before everyone because I was such a sissy dishrag, “Woe is me! I’m left alone in the whole world!” My contrition was never voiced though because we were not bred up to make apologies. True, at times they could be heard in movies, but for real life, when inadvertently you had someone pushed, run into or stuff, “Excuse me for not trying harder!” was enough.

All that annoyance about nothing triggered off a slow, inconspicuous, process of my alienation and transformation into a “cut off slice” as Father used to say. I began to live a separate life of my own although, of course, I did not realize or felt anything of the kind and just lived that way…

~ ~ ~

Mother and Aunt Lyouda made up rather soon, after Aunt Lyouda showed Mother how to correctly sing the popular at that time “Cheremshina blossoms everywhere”, besides, she was bringing from her work the chow you couldn’t buy anywhere because at any store any goods beyond the pretty niggardly scope of staples were sold exclusively under the counter to the circle of trusted people: the kindred of salespersons and those who could potentially scratch your back in answer…

Aunt Lyouda’s tales about the midday-meal break at their deli were so funny!. After they latched the shop entrance for the midday break, the saleswomen gathered in their locker room and started their show of delicatessens brought that day from home in their half-liter glass jars. They were comparing, exchanging comments and judgments, evaluating the appeal, sharing their recipes.

The store manager ate separately in her office and when the telephone on her desk rang, she answered the call and hollered thru the open door who was wanted. The woman in question would hurriedly travel from the locker room to the manager’s office and back but—however short and hurried the phone talk—her jar content, by her return, was heavily reduced by cluster degustation. Everyone too eager to see the taste. One lick is better than a hundred looks, right?.

Yet, there is one foxy bitch at the store. Whenever called by the manager to the phone, she calmly sets her spoon aside, deliberately clears her throat with a “khirk!”, and spits into her jar. Yahk! After the procedure, in no haste of any kind, she leaves the locker room for the pending conversation and never looks back at the rest of the saleswomen with their interest in her jar lost irreparably…

Mother also started working in the trade, she got a cashier job in the large Deli 6 near the Station. However, two months later she had a major shortage there. Mother was very worried and kept repeating she couldn’t make so vast a mistake. Someone from the deli workers should have knocked out a check for a large sum when Mother went to the toilet forgetful to lock the cash register. Selling of Father’s coat of natural leather, which he bought when working at the Object, helped out of the pickle. After that Mother worked in retail outlets manned by a single salesperson, herself, without any suspicious colleagues, at one or another stall in the Central Park of Recreation by Peace Square where they sold wine, biscuits, cigarettes and draft beer….

End summer there again was a squabble in our khutta, though this time not a sisterly quarrel but a scrap between a husband and his wife. The source for discontent became the newspaper-wrapped mushrooms which Uncle Tolik brought from a ride to the forest. Not a remarkably big harvest, they still would do for a pot of soup.

The insidious newspaper package was accurately cinched and put by unsuspecting Uncle Tolik into the mesh-bag which he hung on his motorbike steer not to scatter the mushrooms on the way. However, at home instead of grateful praise, he got a shrill tongue-lashing from Aunt Lyouda, who discovered that the string used for cinching was a brassiere shoulder strap. In vain Uncle Tolik repeatedly declared that he had just picked up “the damn scrap of a string” in the forest, Aunt Lyouda responded with louder and louder assertions that she was not born the day before and let them show her a forest where bras grew in bushes, and there's no use of trying to make a fool of her… Grandma Katya no longer tried to appease the quarrelers and only looked around with saddened eyes.

(And that became a lesson for 2 at once – Uncle Tolik learned to never bring home any mushrooms and I grasped the meaning of “bra strap”.)

But Aunt Lyouda, on the spur of the moment, let herself a try at forbidding even the Uncle Tolik’s fishing rides, at which point it was he who raise his voice until they reached a compromise: he was allowed to go fishing under the condition of my going along. So, the following 2 or 3 years from spring to autumn every weekend with a pair of fishing rods and a spinner hitched to the trunk rack of his “Jawa” we set off to fishing.