the most final
concluding work

Peace Square in front of the same-named movie theater was bounded by long five-story parallelepipeds of apartment blocks. The shallow round pit in its enclosure of gray granite ring located centrally contained the large fountain which was turned on no sooner than once in a couple of years to shoot up a high white jet of water for an hour or two. The asphalt walks, lined with beautiful chestnut trees, rayed off from the wide stone steps of the movie theater porch to the opposite square corners alongside the crosswise road of Peace Avenue. The lawns beneath the chestnuts were improved by a couple of well-trodden short-cuts not provided by the original layout. Each of the tree-shaded ray-alleys was equipped with a couple of lengthy timber benches in the dark green coat of paint and two more of their breed stood openly on the asphalt nearby the fountain.

In the warm evenings, the square turned into the so-called “whore-parade” grounds for dense waves of loungers walking leisurely the alleys, they didn't leave the square and just repeated their promenade circles, again and again, scanning the faces and clothes worn by the public in the counter-directed circulation, as well as by those seated on the benches. In their evenly flowing motion, they all shuffled thru the soft dark layer, which got denser in front of the benches because both the walkers and the sitters were engaged in ceaseless persistently purposeful chewing of sunflower seeds and spitting the black inedible husk out…

Sometimes after a movie show, I also went along with the lazy stream when making for the streetcar stop around the corner. It happened not too often though because from one sequel of “Fantômas” to another you had to wait for at least six months.

In the daytime, the benches were mostly empty, though Kuba and I once happened to be called from a bench seated by a pair of young grown-up idlers who demanded kopecks. Kuba fired up trustworthy oaths that we had no money whatsoever, but I suggested to the louts, “Catch all that falls out!” With those words, I snatched the left pocket bag of my pants inside-out and expressively dusted it with my palm. I did not bother with the right pocket though, because it held ten kopecks for a streetcar fee.

The slob in sunglasses looked around and threatened with a beating, yet he didn’t leave the bench. We took it for being dismissed and went on, while Kuba kept bitterly upbraiding me for such a stupid impudence which could quite easily end in a good scrub for my silly mug, and justly too. Probably, he was right, and I had missed to figure out such an outcome, carried away with the idea of making a fine gesture – to pull an empty pocket out.

What saved me? The rogue might have decided that I was under the protection of some guy with a pull among the thieves, how, otherwise, to explain such reckless arrogance?.

“Enters Sehrguey Ogoltsoff from Konotop!” announced Raissa, when I and Skully appeared in the Children Sector room. Marking that I couldn’t catch up with that particular piece of humor, she handed me The Pioneer magazine opened at a story, under which at the page bottom it stood in black on white: “Sehrguey Ogoltsoff, the city of Konotop”.

I had completely forgotten about those couple sheets from a school notebook reporting on my chat with the dwarf a-straddle a pen on my desk, sent half a year before to the contest of fantasy stories announced by the magazine. The talkative dwarf chattered then of this and that making me more and more sleepy. And now, all of a sudden – wake up!

The sweet whiff of fresh typography print from the magazine pages set my head off in a slow swerve. My legs kinda weakened, and I felt a soft blow at the back of my head, only somehow from inside. Carefully, I lighted upon a seat in the 3-in-1 auditorium set put under the ballet rail beneath the windows and read the publication where there hardly remained a paragraph from what I had sent to the contest. Yes, the dwarf still was there but talked nineteen to the dozen about a certain filmmaker Ptushko I had never heard of in my life. However, neither in Children Sector nor at home had I ever shared to anyone that the story comprised practically nothing by me except for the opening settings because not every day, after all, they print your story in a thick monthly magazine…

In summertime Mother grew fat and Father, with a somewhat uneasy chortle, asked us—their children—what about having one more brother? The babe might be given a good name, like, Alyoshka, huh?

Natasha wrinkled her nose, Sasha kept silent as well, and I responded with a shrug, “What for?”

The suggested increase in the family seemed unnecessary not as a threat of deterioration our living conditions, but because of the awkward crying difference in age between the would-be parents and the suggested baby. So Father effaced his ingratiating smirk, dropped the subject and never picked it up again. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally heard Mother’s casual gossip with Aunt Lyouda, “I used the pill and the same day draft beer casks were brought to the stall, I rolled them in and – that’s it.” That way the proposed quantity changes in our generation of the Konotop Ogoltsoffs were canceled, yet Mother stayed looking fat forever…

Her stall, a round sheet-iron hut under a tin roof, was advantageously located in the main alley of the Central Park of Recreation opposite Peace Square. The heavy padlock from the back door was taken off and brought inside to start trading thru the front window whose square ledge served the counter jutting over the asphalted walk in the shade of mighty poplars.

Besides the draft beer running from the faucet which she connected by a removable hose to the dark wooden casks, in turn, the goods on sale included briquettes of packed cookies, loose candies of a couple of cheap sorts, cigarettes, lemonade and bottled wine – the Ukrainian fruit-and-berry “White Strong”, the dark-red Georgian “Rkatsiteli”, and some wine of uncertain origin named “Riesling” never asked for by anyone. “White Strong” was going out like hotcakes because of its price – one ruble and two kopecks for a half-liter bottle. Cigarettes also did not stick around for long, yet the main trade-pulling engine was draft beer. When there happened a delivery delay and they did not bring beer casks from the trade base of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, Mother began to sigh and complain beforehand that the trade plan for her stall in the current month seemed hardly doable and they again would cut her salary…

My life rollicked on along its tracks which somehow bypassed the Central Park of Recreation, although my sister and brother occasionally boasted of dropping to Mother’s workplace for free lemonade. However, there occurred one day which I spent at the stall from its beginning to end because of the secret service agent Alexander Belov, under the guise of Johann Weiss…

In those abysmally past times, to get subscribed to The Novel-Gazette was next to impossible. The monthly justified its name being turned out on inexpensive newsprint and in two columns per page, yet the thickness of an issue was on a par with The Pioneer or The Youth magazines. Albeit absent from the subscription lists at the post-offices, The Novel-Gazette could still be found at libraries or borrowed from one or another luckier person who had asked it from the previous lucky beggar who, in their turn... If some novel happened to be too long for one issue, it was continued in the following month. At times, deviating from the magazine name, they printed collections of stories or (quite rarely) poems, but no more than by a couple of authors per issue.

Now, getting the word of mouth that in The Novel-Gazette they had recently published The Shield and Sword by Vadim Kozhevnikov, I rushed to the Club Library and was told that all the three consequential issues were already lent out, and they had to put together the queue-list of those wishing to borrow the masterpiece. No wonder, after Mother casually mentioned some colleague lending her all the issues of the epic spy saga for 3 days, my accustomed routes got torn from where they were embedded and with the inaudible tectonic bang swayed over, re-cast, to reach their new terminal by the standard snack-stall between the hefty trunks of drowsy poplars in the center of the City Park of Recreation shadowing the main, asphalted, walk where I arrived the very next morning soon after the opening hour…

The initial issue I read in the stall, sitting on a wire box of empty bottles, before I got smart enough to move over onto a nearby bench outside, returning only to exchange the issues or act the Sale-Assistant in Mother’s absence while she went to the park toilet when I even sold something.

By the end of that day, I had lived thru the career of the Soviet intelligence officer Belov, aka Johann Weiss, starting as a private in the German Wehrmacht up to an officer for special missions in the intelligence service of Abwehr.

The trade during that day was rather sluggish, because 2 days earlier the stall ran out of draft beer, and the empty casks piled up outside the back door. However, by the onset of twilight, when I moved back to the booth to finish off the final issue under a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, at the very end of the Second World War, the flow of consumers began to increase.

That’s it!. And, with the collapse of the Third Reich, I stacked all the 3 The Novel-Gazettes on a box by the door and saw that the trickle of customers had turned already into a tight swarm across the outside counter-ledger. There cropped thick growth of hands held up, kinda in the Nazi salutation, only balled about crushed ruble notes and handfuls of kopecks.

Mother turned to me and said, “Wait a little, I’m closing in half-hour, we’ll go home together.”

I sat leaning my back against the door, so as not to be in the way when she reached for goods from here and there in the stall’s narrow innards.

The said half-hour later, the flurry by the stall in the park alley did not subside.

“Maman! A pair of Strong Blondes and a smaller one of cookies!”

“Auntie! Auntie! A pack of “Prima” cigarettes!”

“Sister! A bottle of white!”

“White is over.”

“And over there? In that box?”

“It’s Rkatsiteli for one ruble and 37.”

“Alright, come on! Let it be it, we’re not racists!”

Finally, the Georgian was over too, the crowd dissolved. Mother dropped the window shutter but had to open again for a latecomer that tattooed in a trot under the yellow lamplight from the posts over the asphalt up to the shut stall. Grieved by the fact that everything was sold out, he bought a bottle of the uncertain expensive Riesling for 1 ruble 78 kopecks, though it was already 30 minutes past the allowed by regulations hours for selling alcohol.

When Mother locked the stall and we walked to the streetcar stop by Peace Square, I asked if such mayhem was there every evening.

“No, Sehryozha. It’s because it’s Sunday today.”

~ ~ ~