the most final
concluding work

To Leningrad, we went thru Moscow. Besides me and Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna, School 13 was represented in the excursion group by 2 more girls from my class – Tanya and Larissa, as well as by 2 students from the parallel, 7 “A” grade – Vera Litvinova, and Tolik Sudak, the rest of the group were students from other city schools herded by a couple of their teachers.

The train arrived in Moscow in the morning, and we spent there one day which time was enough for me to make 3 major discoveries. The first one was the discovery of the existence of foreshadowing dreams. It was proved undeniably when we rode an excursion bus on our tour in the city—look to the left! look to the right!—until at some place, they asked us to leave the bus for a close look at something from anear.

Our group tagged along with the guide, I also followed straggling at some distance, when, all of a sudden, the surroundings looked so much familiar to me—both that bridge above no river, and the far-off tower of the Moscow State University, and even the locked stall on the pavement I walked by.

Someone from our group turned back and called me, “Don’t lag or we will leave without you!”, to which I answered, “When you turn back, I’ll be the first!” And exactly that moment I felt having seen already that view in all its details and pronounced those very words because all of that was in a dream dreamed by me a week before. I felt freaked out and even stopped, but not for long – the excursion group was indeed returning to the bus.

After the second revelation, we went to the All-Union Exhibition of the Achievements of National Economy, aka Veh-Deh-eN-Kha. There we were taken to the Astronautics Pavilion, with the gigantic white needle of “Vostok” spaceship put in front of its facade, one from the series by which Gagarin orbited the Earth. Inside the spacious pavilion, several excursions were wandering at once among the stands, and mock-ups and mannequins donned in red spacesuits and bulky helmets.

I did not know what the other guides were sharing to their groups, but ours ruminated things known by anyone from the times immemorial, so I kept lagging, or running ahead, and at some point sneaked off into a wide side door. Stone steps led upward following the arrowed inscription “The Optics Pavilion”. I reached the landing where the steps U-turned going up to the pavilion itself. But I didn’t follow them any farther immobilized and fascinated by the extravaganza of colorful airiness unfolded on the landing. A whopping cube of space was filled with a motionless, as if frozen, family of soap bubbles of all sizes radiating silently diverse hues of the rainbow colors. What a delight!.

My deviation from the programmed rout was noted by someone in the group and they called me from down there, “Come back! We're leaving!” After a parting look at the unreachable pavilion entrance on the upper landing, I joined the excursion.

The final, third, discovery of that day awaited me in the State Universal Shop, aka GUM, on the Red Square, where we arrived without any guide already. There, I learned that dreams do come true, you only need to be ready for their realization…

At the entrance to GUM, we were told to gather in the same spot after a half-hour and were dismissed to scatter in search for goods. From inside, GUM looked like sectioned wells of space within an ocean bulk-carrier enclosed by multi-story transitions up the hull sides.

In one of the compartments on the third floor, they were selling the billiards of my dream whose price was exactly ten rubles. O, how I did curse my gluttony! From the sum given by Mother, I had already paid for 2 ice-cream – one in the morning at the station, and the other at the V eh-Deh-eN-KHa. There remained nothing I could do but say goodbye to my dream so, to mitigate the grief, I ate one more ice-cream right in the GUM.

In the evening tired but wholly satisfied (if counting out the misfire about the billiards) we left Moscow for Leningrad…

In the city on the Neva river, we were billeted in a school on Vasilevsky Island, not far from the Zoo. At the school, we were allotted half of the gym, since the other half was occupied already by an excursion group from the Poltava city. We did not cause them any inconvenience—the gym was pretty spacious—and only moved several black sports mats they were not using into another corner. Additionally to the mats, we were given cloth blankets getting accommodated for sleep with much more comfort than the royal court of France, when fled from the rioting Paris in Twenty Years Later by Alexandre Dumas where poor aristocrats were provided for the purpose with just raw straw and no linen…

For 3 meals a day, we walked up a couple of blocks to a canteen next to a humpbacked bridge above the Moika river. A very quiet place it was, with hardly any traffic at all. There, our heads paid in advance with paper coupons and the girls from the excursion group laid the food on the square tables before inviting the rest of us to come in from the sidewalk. Sometimes we had to wait because apart from the Poltava’s and ours there were other groups as well – not from our gym though. In such a case we stood waiting on the nearby bridge over the narrow river with its indiscernible flow between the upright stone-lined banks.

“ On the Moika bank,
we ate garbage skank”

So ran the epigram composed by someone from our group.

We were a little late for the white nights but everything else was in place – both Nevsky Avenue, and the Palace Bridge, and trotting thru the halls of the Hermitage with the immense Pompeii demolition in the picture by Karl Bryullov, and luxurious, yet small-sized, oil paintings by Dutch masters…

In St. Isaac Cathedral they launched for us the Foucault’s Pendulum hanging all the way down from inside the main dome. It swung for some time swishing between the disgruntled, icon decorated, walls and then pegged down one of the sizable wooden pins lined on the polished floor.

“See?!” exclaimed the enthusiastic Cathedral guide.”The Earth is turning, after all. Foucault’s Pendulum has just proved this scientifically.”

The revolutionary battleship Aurora denied us admittance for some reason, but we listened to the Admiralty’s Cannon fired each day to mark the noon, and visited The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with green lawns over the mass graves of people starved in the years of fascist Blockade and the pool by the dark wall for the visitors to drop their coins in.

The day when we went to Peterhof was cloudy, and crossing the Finnish Gulf we could not see the sea but only fog above the circle of yellowish water with shallow waves around the boat, like on a lake with a sandy bottom. It was boring and dank, and when I got out of the passenger hall and climbed down the short ladder to the low stern with the churned up mass of foam behind it, the boat boy came up to tell that passengers were not allowed there. I climbed back, and he hung a chain across the ladder and started to wash the stern deck with a mop.

But the Peterhof fountains jetted pillars of surprisingly white water along the channel banks below the hillock with the palace on its top closed for restoration…