the most final
concluding work

A month later the CJR team of School 13, quite unexpectedly, won their first game. In the initial contest of the game, exchange of greetings, Kuba and I came on stage in real tails and bicorns borrowed from auntie Tanya’s Costume Room at Club. Napoleon (acted by me) in his swell attitude—the right hand in his tails breast, the left one balled and pressed to the back above the buttocks—recited the famous line:

“…Moscow! This sound alone holds volumes for a Russian heart!”

Then, abruptly shedding off the poetic enchantment, I turned to Marshal Murat and ordered, “Burn Moscow down!”

Kuba sniffed up his nose and replied, “No problem, Sire! As you wish!”

The audience rocked with laughter and the rest of our team appeared on stage in casual clothes and bicorns made of Whatman paper under a merry air by the button-accordion from behind the scenes. We acted a couple of jokes more, won the contest and, eventually, the whole game.

In that same merry-go-happy, fine and dandy, way, we reached the final held in May, because everyone had learned already that we were a strong team, and if not to laugh at our jokes then at whose else? At every game in the contest of Captains, I acted some kind of Napoleonic postures adding a Mussolini-like pull to my chin, right to left and up, to provoke the willing guffaw from audience.

The only thing I did not like was that the script for our victorious start-up was copied from TV. We simply aped the performance of a CJR team who played on Central TV a few years before. Volodya Gourevitch met my scruples by loud laughter and proclamation about winners exempt from condemnation. Yet, all the same, it was like dubbing your name under the stuff by another guy.

So, the concluding seconds in the final game were running out and Jury Chairman, aptly pumping up suspension, read on his mike, “…And the season's winner… becomes the CJR team of School … 13!”

Still not believing in what has been just announced, I, together with the whole hall, shouted, “A-a-a!” and turned to our team to see that all of them were galloping towards me – both Kuba, and Skully, and Sasha Uniat from the ninth grade, and Sasha Rodionenko from ours, and everyone else roaring “A-a-a!” on the run.

And suddenly, instead of them, white light in between blue curtains flew at me. I did not immediately realize that they were the fluorescent lamps above the stage, a-swaying to me and back. Our team was tossing me in the air…

The following year the victory again was ours, yet no Captain tossing performed…

Already in the tenth grade, before the graduation, we reached the finals, yet lost to the prestigious School 11. At that concluding game, we once again re-played performance of a CJR team on Central Television from the current year. The game on TV still was too fresh in the memory of many, and we were accused of brazen plagiarism…

However, all of that was still in the lap of the future, when I was listening to the fiery speech about the change of school generations, and the throbbing pulsation moved from my nose to the back of my head. With amazement, I thought of fancy swerves in tides of fate that could uplift you, in just a single day span, from a trampled skier to Captain, dammit! So, there's no grounds for grumbling about monotony in the course of events I was destined to undergo. It’s only that from that day, my flawlessly Roman nose remained a bit turned to the right…

~ ~ ~

Destiny, aka fate, aka fortune, ain't in favor of a beeline course but prefer some wiggly sine curves, like a drunk alky, and, to make it funnier, swings up and down …crest—trough… peak—pothole.

One day ago, for example, Volodya Gourevitch, laughing his loud merry laugh, handed me a card posted on School 13 in my name. It was sent by the ninth-grader girl-like-adult who participated in the Regional Physics Olympiad and now sent her congrats on our victory at CJR concluding with a screwed-in quotation from Mayakovsky:

" Shine everywhere, always shine!..”

Something kept me from answering the card, either the heinously joyful School Pioneer Leader’s laughter or my being ashamed at her unawareness that more than once I had unbuttoned her green coat under my blanket on the folding couch-bed shared with my younger brother.

And just a couple of days later I went to Peace Square because my sister told that by that building where in summer they sold kvass from the two-wheeled yellow barrel-trailer, they put a booth to refill ballpoint pen ampoules for just 10 kopecks. Such ampoules, for both short and long ball pens, you could buy in bookshops but at the double price—for 20 and 22 kopecks apiece.

Riding a streetcar on my way back, I stood by the large poster fixed behind the glass wall in the driver’s cab, as big as a spread-out newspaper only the title much longer: “Rules For Streetcar Usage in the City of Konotop of Sumy Region”. As if other cities had different rules, eh? Or if anyone but me had ever read the articles in those Rules… The rules on how to correctly ride a streetcar… on paying 3 kopecks for a ticket… and who you’re supposed to cede your seat to… And the concluding article about the measures of administrative penalties up to the three-ruble fine if being caught without a ticket. A good quality paper in that poster, so glossy and obviously thicker than the common newsprint…

The conductors with their puffy bags on gunny straps had since long disappeared from the streetcars. And the tickets were replaced with paper coupons sold by drivers thru a small hole in the cabin door. The stupidly located hole made you bow way too low when buying coupons, yet for a driver seated in the cab, the height was comfortable enough.

And in the streetcar walls, between the windows, they fixed small boxes with lever-handles. You insert your coupon in the slot of a box, pull the lever—click!—your slip's marred by punched holes which, if closely scrutinized, made up the pattern of digits. Occasionally, a couple of inspectors boarded the streetcar at the stops asking the passengers to deliver their coupons and checked those digits. Because in Tramway Depot, they periodically changed the pattern in the levered boxes: ain’t it smart?

Yet, any smartness could be outsmarted and some bilkers kept by them a handful of used coupons to travel for free, and when addressed by the inspector they would present a whole bunch of paper trash angled from their pocket, “How could I know which one is from this streetcar? Look yourself for the right one…” At times some too stubborn ass of an inspector might start to kick the dust up because after a month of riding in the pocket many a coupon got travel-fretted. However, they would sooner give up and move along to the next passenger…

So, under those Rules, I stood, although there were vacant seats, it’s only that in winter standing seemed warmer than sitting.

Some familiar guy boarded at the stop in Zelenchuk Area. Although I didn’t know him by his name, he was from the graduating class at our school, and a couple of times I saw him in Club too. Well, so he moved near. Hey. Hey. How’s all? So-so. And we went on standing silently.

Then I saw the jerk started clamping me as if I was a girl. On the right, there's the window with the handrail across it and the driver cab behind me, with those darn Rules above another handrail. Now, the clown grabbed those 2 handrails and pressed me into the corner.

“Piss off! Stop horsing!” says I, but he only giggled and squinted his stupid eyes, yet didn’t let me go. Such a shame. I looked at the passengers. They were not many, like, about a dozen and everybody, as if mimicking each other, was looking out of the windows intently so, like, on an excursion to a famous city, like, something could be seen thru the ice-coated panes.

To put it short, I barely managed to wriggle out of his grip and stood on the steps by the cab door. There, I had to put my clothes in order because of both the jacket and the sweater, well, everything up to the naked skin, got jerked up. Some stupid asshole, if so was your bent, go and enroll the Greek-Roman wrestling group at the Club Gym and rub against your partners on the mats. But what a humiliation for the big-time CJR Captain getting into a such sinusoidal flop!.

And the next breathtaking crest rolled up end April at the All-Union military-patriotic game Zarnitsa, aka “Heat-Lightning”. Nominally, the game was for pioneer organizations but still involved all the senior classes. And I was appointed Commander of the United Formation at School 13!

No paper shoulder straps, no division into “blues” and “greens”, and everyone should have by themselves a knapsack with the field ammunition: a bowl and spoon, a needle and thread. After the line-up in the schoolyard where a PE teacher, Ivan Ivanovich, checked a pair of knapsacks for the presence of the told items, we went along Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, past Bazaar and turned into Budyonny Street. There we passed the Plant Park and went down to the Swamp, aka Grove. Thick fog was hiding progress of the column on march.

We stopped at the Grove and the PE teachers—Ivan Ivanovich and Lyubov Ivanovna—opened a sealed envelope with the directions for our further route and mission. The column proceeded to the bridge in the high railway embankment. Besides the main tracks, there was a sideway forking-off from under the bridge to the Meat-Packing Plant, we followed that lone track and outflanked the Grove from the left.

The fog was thinning and thru its rising wisps, there peeped fragments of a bumpy field. Ivan Ivanovich roared “To attack!” and we ran across the field shouting “Hurray!” I ran amid the disordered crowd and didn’t feel my body, which, like, dissolved in the general stampede and of all my senses there remained only the sight relaying sketchy pictures of torn fog locks over bumps and tussocks jumping before and past me…

Then we stopped not far from Podlipnoye in the field with occasional mighty-trunk Elms. The fog cleared up completely, and the day became glad and sunny. A real army field-kitchen arrived from the village and we were fed with hot soup. Then after a short-cut march thru the Grove, we returned to our schoolyard and lined up again. As the commander, I stood to face the ranks, ranging from the sixth to the tenth-graders, and some unknown cameraman shot us, buzzing his hand camera.

The following Monday Volodya Sherudillo mockingly (but very funny) acted me facing the ranks of my schoolmates, a slouch-shouldered weakling with a stoop but, whenever the camera turns my way, I'm bravely thrusting my chest out and stretching at attention almost to tiptoes.