the most final
concluding work

Everything in Leningrad turned out to be as beautiful as one would expect of the Cradle of Revolution. The weather got nice again, and on the first floor in the Naval Museum there stood the boat of Peter the Great, almost the size of a brigantine, and all the walls on the second floor were decorated with the paintings depicting glorious sea battles of the Russian fleet, starting with the battle in the Sinop Bay.

On the first floor of the Zoological Museum, a skeleton of whale bones towered high, while the central attraction on the second floor was the composition of life in Antarctica, behind the glazed partition. The white snowfield was painted in the back, and behind the glass there stood a few adult penguins with their beaks up in the air. They were surrounded by a kindergarten of penguin chicks of different ages to show how they change when growing.

At first, I liked them dearly – those lovely fluffy cutie pies, but soon the nagging thought that all of them were stuffed animals abated my delight. 3 dozen living birds were killed for the exposition. I did not want to look further and climbed down to the gnawed whale skeleton and out of the Museum.

In a glazed stall by the Zoological Museum, I bought a ballpoint pen—they did not sell such in Konotop yet—and two spare ampoules to it, folks said just one of them would do for a month of scribbling…

That day I was the first to finish the midday meal at the canteen and went out to the bridge over the Moika to wait for the rest of our group. Between the high walls of the river banks, a small white cutter cautiously made its way, splitting the black water into two long bumpy waves.

Then an elderly man came up to me over the bridge and warned that my pants were stained on behind. I knew about it, two days earlier I had sat down on a bench somewhere and it left a whitish splotch in the seat of my pants as if of Pine resin. It was unpleasant to be marked on behind in that way but the stain proved ungetriddable by simply rubbing-scratching so I tried just not to think of it.

He asked where I was from.

“We’ve come on an excursion. From Ukraine.”

The friendliness in his face faded. “Ukraine,” he said. “In the war years, they burned my side with the blowtorch there.”

I recollected Masha’s screech on the day they were slaughtering her, the buzz of a blue flame bursting from the nozzle of the blowtorch and the cracks in blackened skin of carcass. He grew silent and so was I, feeling somehow guilty for coming from the place where he had been tortured. It was a relief when our group, at last, came out of the canteen.

The Poltava excursion group left two days earlier than ours. On the last evening in Leningrad, we went to the circus tent. Our seats were at the very top, under the quaking canvas roof.

It was a united performance of circus actors from the fraternal socialist countries. A pair of Mongolian acrobats synchronously jumped onto the end of a see-saw to toss up the third one, standing on the other end. The tossed man somersaulted in the air and landed on the shoulders of the strongman in the arena. The pushers launched another one and one more – three people were placed upon the man below, like after the Battle at the Kalka River.

The gymnasts from the GDR worked on four high bars put to form a square for them to fly from one bar to another. Then the Czech trainers brought out a group of monkeys who started to spin and circle on the bars left after the Germans, only much funnier.

The next day we left without visiting the canteen, probably, because of having run out of the coupons. There was a very convenient train, with no train changes, on the route thru Orsha and Konotop. Only it started off in the evening and after all the ice-cream eaten during the excursion, and paying for the ticket to the circus tent, plus the purchase of a ball pen, there remained just 20 kopecks of all the 10 rubles given by Mother.

I had a pair of piroshki for the midday meal, but at about five o’clock, when we were already sitting in the waiting room at the station, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna noticed my despondency and asked about the reason. I confessed that I was hungry and had no money, she lent me one ruble. In a deli near the station, I bought bread and a big fish in oily brown skin and thin strings tied all around it. Clutching the paper-wrapped prey, I returned to the station with our train at the platform already.

On boarding the car, I immediately sat down at the table under the window and began to eat. Very tasty fish it was, easily crumbling but slightly drier than expected considering its oily skin. I ate one half, wrapped the rest back and put it on the third level bunk, which was not for sleeping anyway but to put your luggage there.

Some single fellow-traveler, a couple of years older than me, got seated at the opposite side of the table, took out a deck of cards and offered to play Throw-in Fool with him. I won a couple of times and, when he was once again shuffling the cards, I flashed a commonplace Kandeebynno wit for the like cases, “A dinghead’s hands have no rest.”

With a sidelong glance at a couple of girls from our excursion, who sat by the window across the aisle, he dryly retorted, “The less one yaks, the longer lives.” I marked the look of genuine rage in his eyes and, after winning another game, refused to play on, he seemed glad to stop it too…

We arrived in Konotop in the morning after unusually heavy rain… During that night on the train, something happened to my shoes and they became too small size. I hardly forced them on, yet not completely, and my heels were partly hanging outside.

Hobbling painfully, I got off the car onto the platform and waited for our excursion to disappear into the underground passage to the Station. Then I took my shoes off and, in the socks only, went along the wet Platform 4 to the familiar breach in the fence at the very end of it.

Across the road from the breach, there stood the Railway Transportation School, I passed it by and very soon entered Bazaar. No one was ogling at me walking in the drenched socks, a disfigured shoe in each of my hands, because there were neither passers-by nor traffic around but boundless puddles everywhere.

After Bazaar the ground disappeared altogether under the even water surface. I splashed on following the streetcar track, kinda a tightrope walker along the railhead which stuck a tad bit from out the water, and on reaching Nezhyn Street I just waded ahead indiscriminately – the khutta was not far off already…

Later, Mother laughed, sharing with the neighbors that from both capitals I brought only a pair of shoes one centimeter too short for my feet. I hadn’t ever heard or read anywhere that it’s possible to grow your feet one centimeter in just one night…

On the first of September, Mother gave me one ruble to repay the debt. However, at the ceremonial line-up in the schoolyard, Lyoudmilla Konstantinovna was nowhere to be seen, and in the Teachers’ Room they told me she was ill and explained how to find her apartment in the two-story block by Bazaar, so I went there.

In the apartment, she kept repeating there's no need for such haste, it even somehow seemed to me she was not very happy that I returned that debt at all. And then her father entered the room and I was surprised to see it was Konstantin Borisovich, the projectionist at Club. The world was really a small place.

~ ~ ~

Still and all, Lenin was quite right marking the force of habit as a tremendously mighty force. Take, for example, the albums of young ladies from beau monde, where Eugene Onegin, with a reckless stroke of the quill, sketched out his author’s whiskered profile on the page following the autograph by a certain Lieutenant Rzhevsky. Such an album was the must for any young lady of quality to outpour her personal feelings and amass creative scribblings of her guests and visitors.

Of course, no album of that kind had ever come near my hands, yet after a whole lot of wars, three revolutions, and radical changes in the way of life, the albums for the sentimental exercises of sensitive girlish souls were still there because those albums had too much of a hard-die habit to simply disappear.

The struggle for life taught them to cunningly disguise—no silk bow-ties on the cover, neither creamy pages anymore—a general-purpose ruled-paper notebook in brown leatherette covers for thirty-eight kopecks, such was the common aspect of a girl’s album in our class. In place of long-nosed self-portraits of aristocratic rascallions there came cutouts from the color illustrations in Ogonyok magazine, securely mounted on glue… However, poems managed to survive:

Why? O, I don’t know why

A streetcar needs rails to go far or nigh

Why? O, I don’t know why

Why do parrots scream and cry?

I do not know why…

A-and fancifully adorned inscriptions to relate profound maxims and winged expressions of all sorts also proved immortal:

" The one who loves will forgive anything”

" Cheating kills love”

When such an album, accidentally forgotten on a desk, fell in a guy’s hands, he, having turned a couple of pages, would slap it back on the desk—some “girlish nonsense”.

Yet to me, for some odd reason, those albums were interesting and I dutifully scrutinized them. As a result, I got an offensive handle of “lady-bug” among the schoolmates. Nobody ever called me that to my face, even though when our class lined-up at a PE lesson I was only the fourth in the line, and the shortest guy, Vitya Malenko, could beat me up in a wrestling match under the scornful giggling of the girls. No, I have never heard that handle, but if your sister and brother attend the same school, there is no secret for you about you that you don’t know…