the most final
concluding work

In the barbershop on the same street, there was no queue and, when I returned to the station, it remained half-hour before the appointment. The shoe shiner in a satin blue smock polished my shoes, flicking the ponderous anchors tattooed on the backs of his hands.

Instead of eyeing up the ladies that scurried past his booth to the women's toilet and back, I steadily looked at the gray of his head bowed to my knees. The mujik got fed up with that crying anomaly. "What are you gazing at?" he asked, putting off his brush and taking a plush cloth instead.

"I seem to like you."

"Bullshit!" he grumbled grimly. "Even I myself don't like me."

"We have different tastes then." And all the same, there still remained fifteen minutes…

I passed thru the immense lobby of the station, climbed up the white stone stairs to the second floor and, up there, rested my elbows on the wide white parapet over the grandiose hall dissolving high overhead into the twilight-filled void. Idly watched I the rough confusion of human particles in the Brownian movement swarming at the tiled bottom far below. About 5 minutes later, this tiny bit of me would mix with them, but now I was just looking down at the bustling fuss.

Their hasty streams thinned about the center of the lobby and, after bypassing it, they again became denser. The reason for the phenomenon was the athletic figure in a scarlet jacket walking there in unhurried circles. Waiting for someone. Whom? Not me. Nobody waits for me except for Twoic who, probably, right now is by the metro entrance checking the waves of the passengers from the neighboring Suburban Trains Station.

Ain’t it funny? Here, in the main station, this burly block goes round and round, waiting for someone, while a bit shorter slob, Twoic, is circling now by the nearby, smaller, Suburban Trains Station, also in a state of expectation. If you extend this line, then somewhere still farther, say, at a streetcar terminal, there is a teenager waiting for somebody. And so on, just like that endless little man in a fire extinguisher on the staircase landing of the second floor in my kindergarten, the man in his cap from the somersaulting pictures who instilled the notion of infinity in me. That kindergarten "I" hadn't even heard the word "infinity", and only infinitely gazed at the fire extinguisher trying to understand: where did those men in caps go? That zany kid is me, who replaced him, and I will be replaced by other "I" because we all are finite unlike the little man in his cap…

Near the metro station, I rested my chin in the chest to hide my face under the tilted brim of the hat. My friend Twoic walked along the line of payphones in the wall, to and fro. He wore a freshly re-established mustache, a prestigious leather coat, the thinning hair and a somewhat surly pensive look in his countenance. There he turned and started back.

After catching up with him, I silently followed from behind. At the end of the row of phones, he turned again right to my grin: "Hi, Twoic. And where are the guys?"

"Hooey-Pricker!" He turned his broad face up and issued the characteristic Twoic's giggle, followed by that same taut sharp squint to snapshoot the situation: what and how?

After a blithe hug, he let me go and started up confused speculations on reasons that aborted coming of Petyunya and Slavic.

Waves of the freshly arrived crowd gurgled from the Suburban Trains Station inundating all of the sidewalk, making us to retreat to the wall.

Twoic gave up developing sketchy hypotheses about possible excuses for the absence of our dear friends, asked me for a 2-kopeck piece and began to spin the disk on a payphone, holding an open pocket notebook in his clutch. It’s safer to have a blunt pencil than a sharp memory, as ran a KGB adage once shared to me by their brunette gallant…

Rucks of sundries floated by in the waves carrying mesh bags, suitcases, rolls of wallpaper, packages, boxes, buckets, bundles of pipes, briefcases, backpacks, seedlings, cornices, bird-cages and all other kinds of imaginable and exotic items, they flowed to the metro and to the stops of public transport of all types on the square, dashing fleeting looks at the pair of metropolitan tough guys.

The one with the broad leather back, spinning the phone disk, should be the boss, and the other, with a sticky gaze from under the lowered brim of his hat, a bodyguard. And although not everyone in the crowd knew such words as "boss" or "bodyguard", yet at the back of their collective mind, they shared common respect to those 2, at least for having their spines free of burden, and having where to call on the phone in the metropolitan city of Kiev.

How could they guess, that ever-flowing crowd, that Twoic was an upstart in the city, and I was a nothing-at-all called in by his telegram?. And, by the by, where's he calling? I had no idea, and it did not matter for I was just an instrument. There's always someone to decide for us, and my part always was to execute the orders…

~ ~ ~

A year before, Twoic became a graduate student and now paced along the straight path to PhD. His scholarship was higher than that of undergraduate students, yet not enough to meet expenses for divers temptations pervading the big city life. Okay, there were no problems with clothing, because his mom controlled a district trading base. Food also was not a pressing issue, coming back from weekend visits to his native village, Twoic fetched torbas tearing the hands off by their weight. Yet, for all that manna from heaven he had to pay in kind by the exposure to the parental chewing his ear off with their twits for a diffused lifestyle, and working thru all the weekend: digging, manuring, hauling, pulling in the garden and about the khutta.

Twoic had enough health and strength to make the sport of farmer's chores. And he especially liked hauling something weighty and bulky – armfuls, bundles, sacks with a harvest from the garden to the shed. Raking up the muck in the pig stall, or from under the bull calf, was not as pleasant, but also a job he was used to. Quoting the old priest from their village, "Where there's muck, there's lard". However, the mom's moans and lamentations about the Kiev whores, who rob and eat off the goof of her sonny, were more than enough to make even a saint see red. That's why Twoic needed ready money, but where to get it, was a tricky question.

Unloading freight cars at the station as in the student years seemed below a graduate student level. Besides, he was a skilled workforce at playing Preferans. The game was pure Arithmetic, and in his curriculum vitae, Twoic had 2 years at a mathematical special school, plus the feel of whether a player was bluffing or having a good hand indeed. And there also, last but not least at Preferans, was Twoic's appearance of a natural hick, putting opponents off track.

However, the hostel was too shallow waters. You ripped your neighbors for a fiver once or twice, and they started shying you. Everyone grew so awfully busy, no time for a pool at all, yet between themselves, they went on playing. Yes, behind the locked door in someone's room, a kopeck per trick, so mean misers. Still and all, somewhere, someplace there had to be the upper crust, the elite. It was the capital, after all. Playing by candlelight, on the green cloth, with a freshly unsealed deck, and the trick no less than fifty kopecks, that was his dream. But how could you reach the upper crust without money?

All that brought Twoic to designing sundry romantic plans for getting a jackpot… The initial plan to become a drug trafficking baron in the cannabis market somehow withered by itself. It was followed by a plan to make friends with some of the foreigners scudding thru the capital, to establish a stable barter trade for clothes smuggled from outside the Iron Curtain… That's when he called me to use as a productive tool at the operational end. And since then I entered into the service to Twoic on quite acceptable terms if you don't care a f-f..er.. a frigging flick anymore about anything at all…