the most final
concluding work

That spring I had a dream of a long journey and by no other means if not a raft. Most likely, I was impressed by the Tour Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition. The dream was shared with Kuba and Skully, and they approved it, yeah, that would be cool, they said. And we even began to discuss the details of its realization. If, say, the raft was built on the Seim river then, carried by its flow, we would reach the river of Desna and farther downstream to the mighty Dnieper, that flowed to the Black Sea. And the journey should be completed before August when Kuba had to leave for entrance examinations to the Odessa Sea School and Skully to some Mining Technical College in Donetsk.

The dream lasted for two weeks, and then it began to wither. Problems of growing magnitude cropped up in the way of bringing it to life. Well, suppose we’d made a deal with the watchman in the Pine forest on the Seim river. Then how to move a heavy log from the forest to the river? Dragging it for half-kilometer? But when constructing a raft, you needed more than a log or two. Eventually, I ran into a thought which shattered the dream irreparably, into fine useless shreds. Because I remembered that on the Dnieper, following the Lenin’s GOERLO plan, they had built several hydro-electric power stations whose dams across the river put raft navigation out of question. Dismantle the raft and drag it, log by log, to bypass each dam? Damn!. I did not tell my friends about the incompatibility of the advanced electrification with our beautiful dream and simply stopped discussing it with them…

Volodya Gourevitch made another fiery speech and declared it was time to annul the hegemony of School 11 at the city Ballroom Dancing Competitions. At the first training of the group of ballroom dances, there were formed five pairs of willing dancers from both eighth grades. Volodya Gourevitch demonstrated us waltzing in the ballroom style, after which he played his button-accordion for us to dance.

Skully dropped out at once without any explanation except for he just did not want to. Kuba and I lasted longer, but very soon the group of prospective hegemony-busters disintegrated. And really what’s the point in going on, if my partner, Natasha Grigorenko, after finishing the eighth grade was moving to School 12 whose Math and Physics specialization boosted the chances of its students for entering some Institute on graduating?.

End May, Kuba and I had a bike ride to the Bay Beach on the Seim river to open the swimming season. It turned out that twelve kilometers of riding a bike by the even path alongside the railway embankment, was not an overly exhausting exercise…

On the beach, there was not a single soul except for us and our bikes dropped on the sand. And the water was still too chilly, but we took a swim all the same. Then from the nearby bushes there droned the buzzing swarms of mosquitoes who hungrily stung us from all the sides and very badly too. Probably, we had just fallen out of the habit during the winter. To get rid of the blood-suckers, we tried burying ourselves in the sand, but the sand was also too cold and didn’t protect from the bites of those flying cannibals. Our crazy cries echoed in the empty beach, and then we had another swim and rode back to Konotop. We didn’t know yet that life, actually, is a series of losses, but felt that from that beach our ways parted…

~ ~ ~

Yes, that year School 13 was hegemonic in everything except for the ballroom dancing. We even won the city competition at the concluding stage of the All-Union Game 'Zarnitsa'.

On a Sunday, the teams from city schools, six people each, under the supervision of their PE teachers, went on a one day hike to the forest near the Seim. There were all sorts of competitions: for the transportation of an “injured” without a stretcher, for putting up a two-man tent, for skillful bandaging…

My part in the competitions was measuring distances by eye. The umpire asked how many meters were to the tree over there, and then silently recorded the participants’ estimations. I was following changes in his facial expression.

Someone said the distance was 20 meters. The umpire lifted his right eyebrow, the guess seemed an overshoot. To the estimation in 14 meters, the umpire’s mouth dropped its left corner—not enough. So I called out the average—17 meters. After everyone got thru their attempts, the umpire checked his records and announced that the most accurate was my guess – I didn’t need a tape-meter…

However, everything was to be decided in the concluding contest of boiling water on the fire in a ten-liter tin bucket. No favoritism would help out, neither reading of facial expressions.

The start given, the matches stroke matchboxes by the brushwood mounds readied for bonfires. Dense white smoke gave way to crackling flames—it’s time to hang the bucket over the fire and feed the firewood to it; the drier, the better.

The red tongues of fire fluttered unsteadily under the bucket, licking its tin, painting it black with soot. The bastard of a wind! So much of flames driven away from under the bucket… The team of School 12, trying to control the situation, held a blanket in their hands, sort of a screen to block the wind, prevent its playing with the fire. But we? Our PE teacher Ivan Ivanovich, a wartime soldier and an experienced fisherman, scornfully waved aside their smartness. That’s all bullshit! Get more brushwood, the drier and smaller, the better. Put it over that side!

No textbook presented me with a clearer and more memorable idea of water-boiling stages. Heating; light steam over the water; formation of tiny bubbles on the vessel walls; the bubbles float up forming agitated foam and, at last, the water in the bucket starts to roll, jump and splash, it gushes the white steam up.

The umpire clicks his stopwatch. Hooray! We are the first!. And School 12 still about their bucket ogling the bubbles on the tin walls…

The competition over, the teams boarded the buses. Except for those who wished to spend the night in two large tents, and in the morning the bus would come to take them back to Konotop…

At twilight, I left the glade with the tents and went deeper into the forest. In general, it was the same as at the Object, only more deciduous than coniferous. Casting an appraising look around, I took a leak. Suddenly, some part of the forest next to me came into motion separating from the picture of stillness in the late evening woods. What’s happening?

The eye, perplexed at the unaccustomed sight reported nothing to the stunned mind until the thing little by little assumed a certain form and consistency… Wow! That’s a moose! What a whopper! And it had been standing so nigh… Looking after the giant disappearing among the trees, I thought it was not in vain that I did stay for the night.

At night I regretted my staying there. Because of inexperience and unbridled individualism, I had lain down by the canvas wall of the tent, becoming the last in the line of guys preparing for the night. The night chillness woke me up an hour later and forced to press my back against the last but one guy in our sleeping group to feel at least a drop of warmth.

In the small hours, chilled down to the point of freezing, I got out of the tent when the night darkness hardly started to turn gray. The ashes of the fire next to the tents were dead, but a couple of youths still sat near it—a girl and a boy. Probably, being foolish like me, they had tried sleeping at the edges and not in the midst of the group in their tent…

No bus came after us. Instead, a “goat”-Willys with a canvas top drove into the glade, and we were told there had happened some pickle. The collapsed tents and four girls filled all the room there was in the vehicle, and the rest had to go to the city on foot, carrying the 2 tent stocks that also needed transportation to the House of Pioneers, yet did not fit into the “goat”.

It turned out that twelve kilometers on foot were a damn long distance, especially when dragging along a wooden tent stock even if not too heavy.

The guys from School 12 soon disappeared from view together with their stock, and we lagged diminishing in numbers because some people went ahead and we never caught up with them, neither saw them that day.

When we reached a streetcar stop in the city outskirts there remained only three of us: I, my classmate Sasha Skosar, and the smooth stock of pinewood coated with green paint.

~ ~ ~