the most final
concluding work

The Regional Olympiad took place at some institute for higher education. In the auditorium for eighth-graders, each competitor was given a thin copybook stamped on every other page. In the first one, you had to write your name and where you were from. The following two were for rewriting the problems from the blackboard, six of them, all in all. Gee! Three of the problems turned the very same which our mentor was solving the previous night in the hotel room with the wise guys. Yet, the morning had not made me any wiser, the problems seemed as unapproachable as they were the night before.

It was boring to sit idly there, yet to get up and leave at once, disrupting the tense silence of concentrated brain work that reigned around, seemed not too polite. So I opened the last page in the copybook and started a pencil sketch of a pirate. His face I could imagine vividly enough, both the broad mustache and the plum-like eyes staring from under the turban on his head in a half-turn over his shoulder. Yet, on the paper, everything went wrong. Even the blunderbuss pistol, like by those robbers in “The Snow Queen”, did not better the picture.

Hmm… Not only I did not live up to be a new Sir Isaac Newton, but also turned out a too lousy painter for a Repin… I recollected Father’s ass that pulled him out of the Party Studies School, in my case, it was walking out on foot. I took the copybook to the inspectors’ desk and left…

Of course, the fiasco in such essential fields as Physics and Painting dealt me a moral shock. To deaden the stingy feeling of defeat or, in a nutshell, to mitigate the grief, I bought a pack of cigarettes with filters. “Orbit” it was, for thirty kopecks. However, the orbital test was delayed until my return to Konotop, where I waited two more days before a suitable moment to retire with the tantalizing pack to the outhouse in the snow-clad garden.

One drag… Another… A fit of coughing… Transparent, greenish bagels floated before the eyes. Nausea. All the symptoms described by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer’s case. O, yes, respect and trust to the classic would spare throwing a barely started pack of “Orbit” thru the dark hole in the outhouse floor…

~ ~ ~

Opposite Railway Station Square, across the streetcar track and the asphalt road, there was the park named after Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Minister of Education, a wide area with alleys of tall trees connected by low curtains of trimmed bushes.

On entering the park, you were met by a white monument to Lenin who stood on its tall gray pedestal in a pensive deliberation of the Railway Station. Clutching the jacket lapel with his left hand, he lowered his right one at full arm’s length, and slightly withdrew it back in a both political and poetic attitude, like a harvester driver petting with his palm the ears of wheat: got ready to be cut down?.

Thru the trees lined-up behind the monument, there peeped the massive cube of the three-storied Culture Palace also named after Lunacharsky, but in the Konotop parlance shortened to just ‘Loony’ (not Minister of Education, of course, but the Culture Palace) and because of the name duplication you had at times to ask for clarification: Loony Park or Loony Palace?.

The building bore no architectural excesses—even walls, square windows, rectangular entrance. Contrary to the outside appearance, Loony had four floors, the hidden one, comprising the auditorium for film shows, sat deep in the basement. However, since the same films were run at Club just one week later and for free, thanks to check-passes from the Club Director, Loony remained out the scope of our interests.

The excitement about the Loony Culture Palace was breaking out in the second half of the academic year, when there started the season of games at Club of Jolly and Resourceful, aka CJR, in the competition between city school teams. That's when everyone wanted to get on the second floor of Loony, into the auditorium filled with blue-velvet-covered seats lined in too close rows over the smooth parquet floor.

They didn’t sell tickets to CJR games and to get there I had to beg it from our School Pioneer Leader, and Volodya Gourevitch would answer that the ticket distribution was controlled by the City Komsomol Committee, and the quota they allotted for School 13 was way too wee, which got further decimated by his senior colleagues in the Teachers’ Room ripping off their lion’s share and that was not his fault, right? Those tickets were always blank, marking neither seats nor rows, so it was only wise to come upfront and occupy a seat so as not to stand all the game in the narrow side passages or perch on the marble window sill at the back of the hall, leaning to the darkness behind the chilly panes, for that was winter, after all…

In winter the PE classes were held outside. The teacher, Lyubov Ivanovna, unlocked the dark “cell” next to the door of the consecutive Pioneer Room and School Library. Each student grabbed a pair of skis and poles leaned against the blind walls in the bulbless “cell”, and went to Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street to run under the poplars along the streetcar track. Lyubov Ivanovna checked her big round stopwatch and announced the results. Next to her stood a pair of girls who on that particular day could not, for some reason, run and kept the class register for Lyubov Ivanovna to enter her evaluation of the class sporting achievements… Some interesting equality of sexes, eh? The girls could run or not run at their wish, but if you’re a male-student Lyubov Ivanovna would never ask how you feel about running and simply commanded: get ready! start! Run, boy, run!

The fastener-straps on the lousy school skis were much too hard, they didn’t hold a candle to the fixtures made by Father from thick rubber bands in the old days back at Object. But I never brought my skis to school for PE lessons saving them for extra-curriculum use…

That day after the midday meal we, the inseparable trinity of boy-friends, skied to the hill behind the Grove in the vicinity of Podlipnoye. The hill was quite steep, but we had glided no more than a couple of times before two slobs came from the village with the demand for our skis. One of them even tried to punch Kuba, but he ducked and glided down out of reach. Skully and I followed, but not in the steepest place like our friend.

Those two blockheads pursued running on foot and, at the edge of the Grove, the faster runner stepped on the end of my ski. I fell. When I got up, I saw that Skully had already removed his skis, bunched them onto the shoulder of his workman padded jacket and ran dodging between the dark trunks in the winter Grove. The picture got screened by a head in a black-fur hat with loosened flaps. The fur of the visor covered his eyes and only the thick-lipped smirk was visible. The portrait sharply splotched away as I took it on the nose and collapsed by a tree.

“Got it? Take off the skis, bitch!”

His partner ran up in a moment. Being either less drunk or more sensitive—the snow around was spattered with sizable drops of blood trickling from my nose—he just told me to get lost, and led his buddy away back to the village.

Full of sullen apathy, I skied thru the Grove plugging my nose with lumps of snow replacing those as they got red one after another. On the side street by the school, Kuba was waiting for me. He looked into my face and told to better wash it under a tap, he also said that Volodya Gourevitch wanted to see us in the tenth-grade classroom for some urgent talk.

In the schoolyard, I took off my skis and climbed up the porch to the empty school building, by five o’clock the janitors usually left it having done their job. The school remained empty with only the watchman in, and sometimes a group of pioneers preparing a collective recital by accompaniment of the button-accordion of the School Pioneer Leader.

The mirror above a sink showed that the blood was oozing no more and that it was not mine but some stranger’s face with the nose two times thicker than normal and the tooth-brush mustache painted under it with brown makeup. The gore-stained chin was no cleaner. I washed until Kuba said it wouldn’t get any better, then I wiped my face with a handkerchief. The pulse throbbed dully within the puffed nose.

In the appointed classroom, there was Volodya Gourevitch all alone. Delicately keeping his glances off my face, so as not to accidentally graze my huge nose, he made a speech about the crying shame that our school each year got kicked out from CJR in the initial pool of the game. And the disgrace was caused by our over-reliance on the graduation classes. We had to break that vicious practice. We had to find new forces. New blood was what we needed.

Alarmed, I looked back at Kuba. He shrugged his shoulders, and Volodya Gourevitch declared that I was the ready Captain for the School 13 CJR team. The throb of pulsation became more distinct and moved from inside the nose into the nape, where I felt it after that publication of the anonymous story signed by my name in The Pioneer magazine…