the most final
concluding work

The best time for turning the receiver on was past midnight. Firstly, it’s when they broadcast “The Concert After Midnight” in which there was not only aria's by Georg Ots but Din Reed's hits too. The concert was followed by another one – “For Those in the Sea”—from 1 till 2 o’clock—meant for the sailors of merchant ships and fishing trawlers. That’s when they put real rock’n’roll on air. This was understandable though because round the clock transmission of Russian songs sung by Lyoudmilla Zykina and Josef Kobson were not enough to make happy the sailors who had seen the life overseas. And from about 4 till almost 6, there was jazz. Just two-three musicians: a piano, a double bass, and a drummer, but what music they made! “And now listen to the number called ‘The Spring Mood’, please…”, and there followed such a number – wow! Best of the best… Well, and 6 o’clock was signaled by the anthem of the Soviet Union after which the everyday “Mayak The All-Union Radio Station” poured out its everyday hurdy-gurdy till next midnight…

Once I did not sleep all night long, because at dawn I had to raid the outskirts by the Swamp foraging for our 2 rabbits and bring as much hay as my bike could carry from those stacks along the Grove edge. The rabbits were given by Skully, who kept a lot of them in 4 or 5 cages, and Father told me to procure food for the presented pair.

And, after the raid, I thought that the day had already begun, and why not to find out for how long I could go without sleep and somewhere around noon, when I was playing chess with Sehryoga Chun on the porch of their khutta, next to the water pump, I felt that the sounds of talking came to me as if from afar or, like thru some woolen wall, and that I couldn’t follow what exactly they were telling me. However, I still managed to somehow find my dacha…compartment up…sleeping bunk in…section the…

When I got up it was daylight around—already or still? I went to the kitchen in our khutta. The cuckoo clock on the wall wagged the pendulum and showed half-past five and in the tear-off calendar was the new day date. So, my sleep lasted longer than 24-hours?!.

Everyone laughed and said, “Phew! That’s a champion sleeper!” Then it turned out that it was Uncle Tolik’s prank to tear off an extra page in the calendar, while I was sleeping… I mean, them those rabbits also did not stay with us for long…

~ ~ ~

On that Sunday, I once again went to the Seim by bike, but already alone. The familiar road shot past much faster under the spokes carrying nothing but my weight because Sasha and Natasha were also coming to the Bay Beach by 2:10 local train, bringing a snack for me.

How could I know that after cycling and swimming the appetite breaks fiercely loose? By noon my stomach fell in, I ground my teeth and looked away from family groups sitting on their blankets around the delicacies they brought along. How long was it to wait yet? And I pricked up my ears when from different parts of the beach different receivers tuned to the one and only “Mayak The All-Union Radio Station” announced what exact time it would be after the sixth sounding of “peee!”

At last, 2:10 to Khutor Mikhaylovsky rumbled over the bridge across the Seim. Some 10 minutes later, the first groups of the arrived folks appeared from the distant Pine grove across the field. However, neither in the first wave of newly arrived nor in the following, my sister-'n'-brother never popped up. What the heck?!. Hadn’t we arranged that I would wait for them on the beach? Oh, I’d wolf a bull down, yes, I would, right away.

Then Sasha Plaksin, who lived in Gogol Street opposite the water pump, came up to me to say that Natasha told him to tell me that they would not come because we were going to the Uncle Vadya’s to celebrate his birthday and I had to come straight there.

“Was that all? Nothing else?”

“No.”

Well, that’s also right – why stuffing up your stomach before a birthday party? And I started back to Konotop with my stomach stuck to my backbone… The familiar road no longer seemed to be short. The pedals grew heavy and I did not sprint anymore but wearily turned them under the cheerless song of robbers in the “Morozko” movie, circling creakily in my mind:

" Oh! How hungry we are!.

The forest was over, the path along the railway embankment also ended, and there still remained about half of the way ahead. Never before had I really realized the meaning of “I wanna eat!”.

When the big billboard “Welcome to Konotop!” appeared at the road bend, I felt that I could go no farther and turned into a grassy ditch stretching towards the nearby windbreak belt. And along the whole ditch, there was not a single blade of any edible grass, which ages ago we showed each other at the Object…nothing but sparysh and equally inedible dandelions…and those who-knows-whats, with uselessly dry shoots… I chewed the softer part pulled from inside the shoot. No, that’s not food…okay, just a little bit of rest in the ditch before the final leg to Uncle Vadya’s… I was the very first guest there.

Before that summer day, I always wrinkled my nose at lard, and Mother would usually say, “Maybe, you’d like marzipan on a silver platter, sir?!” And ever after, I knew there’s nothing tastier than a slice of lard on a piece of rye bread.

In July, the 3 of us, my sister-'n'-brother and I, went to the military-patriotic camp in the town of Shchors. The cards of admission were offered at our school, almost for free. So I had to put a pioneer necktie on again.

Shchors stood aside from the major railway lines and it took about four hours to get there by a diesel train. There we fell into the rut of usual pioneer camp routine with its “stiff hour” after the midday meal, occasional walks thru the small town for bathing in the narrow river under the railway bridge. Well, at least there was a library there…

Once, there happened an unusual day though. After getting up in the morning, only guys came to the camp canteen, where Senior Pioneer Leader announced that our girls had been kidnapped and, after breakfast, we would go to the rescue.

Wow! The old good game for kids, Cossack-Robbers, revised and bettered pursue following the arrows drawn on the sandy forest paths.

When the forest was over and replaced by the lined-up rows of a Pine plantation, we came up to a crossroads and split into small search parties, that scattered in different directions.

In the company of 2 guys, I went to the right. The road returned to the forest edge and eventually led to a lonely hut enclosed within a knee-tall palisade. Probably, the Forester’s dwelling.

Not a single breathing creature in the whole yard, not even a dog. Overpowering silence surrounded a readied coffin put on the ground with its lid leaning against the tree by the low plank-fence.

Now, you don’t seem to have much of a choice after Grandma Martha’s regular reading of The Russian Epic Tales to you, right? Of course, I stretched inside the coffin and asked the guys to cover me with the lid, just as hero Svyatogor asked his younger partner, hero Ilya of Murom, and they concurred.

I lay for a while in the narrow darkness not scary at all, filled with the pleasant smell of fresh shavings. Then I wanted to move the lid off, but it did not yield to my pushes, supposedly, fixed by the weight of the guys who sat upon it restraining their happy giggles.

I did not scream nor knocked against the lid. Familiar with the proceedings, I knew that any scream or shriek would only ring the coffin with an additional iron hoop, just like the Ilya’s smiting sword was adding them around the box which trapped Svyatogor. Silently, I waited in the darkness and then without any effort moved the lid aside into the desolate quietude of the deserted yard. No wonder the brace of those nincompoops felt spooky straddling the ominously silent coffin and fled…

When I returned to the crossroads, everyone was already there and the kidnapped girls too, because it was time to go back to the camp for the midday meal…

I did not stay there until the end of camp shift though because Senior Pioneer Leader got a telephone call from the Konotop City Komsomol Committee informing her that I had to go to the Camp for the Komsomol Activists Training in the regional center, the city of Sumy.

On the last night before my departure, some local Shchorsian guys came to the camp to give me a beating. They even showed up in the bedroom ward windows to clarify with their gestures that I was a dead man already. Probably, I had flashed with an arrogant retort to one of them when bathing in the river under the bridge, or else some of the local girls, who also enjoyed the camp shift, had complained to them of my being too snobbish. The guys did not climb in though because of Senior Pioneer Leader’s presence. Later, she escorted me to the barrack of the platoon with my sister and brother to say goodbye before leaving early the next morning…

~ ~ ~

At the training camp for Komsomol activists in Sumy, we, 4 guys from Konotop, lived in a tent with 4 iron beds on the sand floor, and 2 of our compatriot-girls shared one of the bedrooms in the long barrack-like building nearby.

Besides that building, there was also a separate canteen and an open stage in front of rows of benches bounded by immature but already half-dead, cob-webbed Pine trees.

Each morning we sat on those benches, taking notes of the lectures read to us – I am damned if I remember what about. And in the afternoon we idly lay upon the cloth blankets over our beds in the tent, which was just a tent with no shows of the magic shadow theater on any of its walls.

I was the youngest in the Konotop group and just listened when the elder guys gave out their chin music about in what way the latest make of Volga was better than the out-modish Pobeda, and how to rightly break a motorcycle in, as well as about a guy in their neighborhood who got married at the age of 18. Imagine that moron! Married, when he still should be playing football with the guys in the yard…

Stretched on my bed, I had nothing to add to their confident discussions and just watched the Baturin highway dashing under by my “Jawa” taken there for the maiden ride or saw the grassy field by the garbage enclosure at the Object and us, ball-chasing kids, with our vain shrieks, “Here! Pass to me!” And I inwardly scoffed, recollecting ludicrous childish tales we told, in turn, each other about a hero footballer and the red band on his right knee because he was forbidden to kick the ball with it and umpires followed him closely otherwise goal posts were smashed to splinters by his cannonball hits and goalkeepers taken away on the stretcher.

Nah, sharing such prattle wouldn’t be welcome in the dampish cave of the tent with Komsomol activists dropped around over their beds…

One guy from our tent could play the guitar which he borrowed from somewhere in the long low barrack building. All in all, his repertoire comprised just 2 songs: a ballad about a city the road to which you’d hardly ever find, and people there were straightforward bringing up whatever they had on their minds, and they preferred their lovers’ hugs to the comfort of apartments, followed by a lively rock about skeletons walking in a file after enjoying some good stuff.

However, even with so limited number of songs, he always had an audience; the guitar strumming attracted guys from the nearby tents and the girls from their bedrooms in the long building.

I asked him to teach me guitar playing and he showed me the 2 chords he knew and how to beat out the rhythm of „eight“. Deep furrows from the guitar strings disfigured my left-hand finger pads. It hurt, but I still wanted to learn it so much…

In the CJR game against the team from the Sumy group we lost, but not in the contest of greetings for which I didn’t plagiarize a single line from anywhere. We acted aliens who had lost their way.

“It was Mars we were going to!

It is you we’ve come to!

Yeah-yeah!..”

^~~^~~^~