the most final
concluding work

And the half-hour breaks, were for gossip and playing dominoes, the ubiquitous "goat". Besides the mujiks, the breaks were also attended by bale weigher Valya, and a couple of younger women from Popovka, and sometimes technologist Valya came in as well. She was an able-bodied woman, sufficient to fill impulsive poetic dreams, but I had already kicked off those things.

There were 4 loaders in the locker room of whom only old Misha kept silent all the time and never chip in, and even "goat" he played very rarely. Loader Volodya Kaverin with a narrow reddish horseshoe mustache trickling down to his chin, on the contrary, was loud and passionate, but loader Sasha sporting a dark toothbrush mustache soberly pacified his partner's fervor. He was tall, calm, reliable and—what a small place the world is!—married to that very Valya from the typist pool who had typed the collection of short stories by Maugham in Ukrainian.

The fourth loader, Vanya, was chubby and he shaved all of his round face. He sometimes threatened to smash my fucking mug for some of my remarks, but I doubted it – you could see from his face that he was a kind block. Besides, he was a real, big-time woman-hater and, holding the dominoes bones in his palm he used to ofttimes declare all of them were bitches.

"I'm on top of her, pumping, digging, doing my level best and she just lays with her eyes into the ceiling, 'Oy, Vanya! there's such cobweb in the corner!', well, ain't they bitches after that?!"

Even a saint wouldn't hold back a passing remark, "Poor boy!" says I, "Such a humiliation leaves no choice but become gay indeed."

And the loader begins fiddling his customary score about breaking my fucking mug. However, odds are very poor he'd ever keep his threat because behind the firmly knitted brows of a hard-core misogynist, it was hard not to see in Vanya's round face his heart of gold and tender nature.

~ ~ ~

End winter, the factory workers traditionally went on a three-day excursion to Moscow. Not all, of course, only those who wanted to. Technologist Valya asked me if I wanted. I had to admit that I hardly had enough money to live until the payday.

"Don't talk nonsense," she said, "the trade-union pay for food and accommodation. You can go there with just 3 rubles."

That was a challenge to Experimentalist. I signed up for the tour and prepared a three-ruble bill…

We arrived in Moscow filled with the winter dark. The small column of the tourists was headed by Yura who led thru the immense railway station to the square, it was not his first year in those tours. I was the file closer keeping my hands in the empty pockets of the demi-saison camel’s hair coat. A bus was already waiting for us before the station to take to the Red Square.

Arriving there, the bus stopped, and all the tourists went out to pass by the mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum. There only remained the bus driver, the guide Olya and I.

"Are not you going?" asked Olya.

"I disgust the dead."

The driver slightly creaked his seat turning back from the steering wheel…

Obviously, to the Red Square arrived more buses with the excursionists from different other places in our vast Motherland, because the driver opened the door and 3 more guide girls climbed up inside. They knew each other and in a brisk shoptalk were discussing the internal affairs of their tour operating organization and anything else…

Their sacred tribute paid, the Konotop excursionists came back from the frosty snow-clad Red Square. Elatedly rubbing and slapping the shoulders of their coats and pea-jackets, they filled the bus with animated whoops and the stomps of treds in their footwear against the entrance steps… We were taken to the Veh-Deh-eN-Kha area, to a hotel built in the late fifties for the participants in the World-Festival of Youth and Students. The guide Olya specified details of further cooperation: on the morning of the third day the bus would take us to the railway station because we were more interested in combing thru all kinds of stores than in "look-to-the-right, look-to-the-left", wasn't it so? Everyone joined in the joyous chorus chant that, yes, it was so…

Our havvage was served at the canteen in a separate building and paid for with the stamped paper slips of the coupons distributed among the excursionists… One of the canteen employees recommended me not to leave my camel coat on the hanger by the entrance door to the hall.

"But eating with the coat off is more convenient."

"Look, Vera!" she yelled back to another worker in the canteen kitchen. "There's one more guest from Communism!"

Since I was not interested in shopping of any kind, I mostly walked about the area, had a ride on a trolley bus to its terminal, and even found a newsstand with Morning Star on sale. In Konotop, because of the explosive situation in Poland, that newspaper was often missing even from the news stall at the station. Probably, the editors in England were covering Polish events incorrectly.

3 rubles was not a sum to live in a grand style, but I still watched a historical action movie starring Karachentsev.

To the hotel Polar I went by the grandiose Moscow subway, aka metro. Since it was the daytime, the restaurant guests were some kind of excursionists because they all were sitting side by side in a row along the table assembled from smaller ones, and ate their havvage with their fur coats and overcoats on.

I asked a man in the waiter’s uniform garb to call waiter Nikolay but he only shrugged his shoulders. Then I demanded the head waiter, a tall woman came out in the same stripe-sleeved jacket.

"A year ago dining at your restaurant, I was 1 ruble short and promised the waiter to make up later. His name was Nikolay, he had a clever round face. Pass it to him, please." And I outstretched a ruble banknote, she silently accepted it…

Besides, I found another place to pass the time for free – the Central Library named after V. I. Lenin. You obtained a ticket there without any money if your passport was on you… That's a really grand place that Central Library after Lenin, yes, indeed, some crossbred of a theater and a metro station, the temple for book-worshipers, in short. Even the door was as tall as a church gate, and bore the inscription on its handle: "pull". And so I did. And behind the door, there was a big vestibule with a porthole in the blind wall, where they gave a free ticket if you had the passport, and then another door to the hall so very awesomely huge.

It turned out to be the cloakroom, yet adorned with white columns and the view to the distant stairs of milky white marble in the far end of the hall. And all around there swarmed the friendship of peoples from the whole of planet in full swing – all kinds of Burmese and Senegalese, yet the Whites also flashed thru. But it seemed to me as if the cloakroom was somehow, like, out of balance with the cloakroom attendants on the right side keeping a-trot between the hangers and the marble barrier, uploading bundles of coats, hither-thither, back and forth, yet the line to them never shortened, while the attendants on the left stood idle and beastly dying of ennui. I felt sorry for them as well as for the trotters, so I turned left and dumped my demi-saison coat upon the white marble barrier of the slackers.

The snooty footmen hardly paid any attention whatsoever, but then one of them looked down his nose at me and in a lordly manner deigned to explain – their half in the cloakroom was for academicians only. Some f-f..er..frightful mix of segregation and discrimination, as if my camel would graze fur off their coats! In short, I thanked the snob for the tip and walked over to the other side which was for mere mortals…

Before the stairs of milky white leading up into the height, there was a narrow gate that I hadn't made out from afar. They checked your ticket at that gate and gave more slips of paper, and only then let go up between a pair of militiamen, standing by so as to instill respect for order.

Up there, high above the cloakroom, stretched the galleries of endless ranks of catalogs in boxes which looked like automatic storage cells, only of wooden color, not metallic. I shuffled thru the cards wired in narrow drawers and found Freud, his lectures published in 1913 on the occasion of some of his jubilees, to commemorate it with the conjuncture publication of just 60 pages. I wrote out all the indexes and other marks of that booklet and went to the reading room to enjoy an hour of pleasure. Greetings!

The attendant scanned thru her glasses my application slip and squeaked up, like, she was calling for the militia when jumped by muggers: Freud?!!

Exactly, says I, I wanna see what the guy was about, be so kind, please.

That's when she rubbed my silly nose in. To have access to the mentioned book, says she, I had to be a PhD of relevant sciences, apart from being also a permanent resident in the Moscow city (the free ticket testified that I wasn't), and the last but not least, I had to produce a document asserting that gods of the Soviet scientific Olympus allowed me to open the book in question.

My jubilation ceased with a fizzle and in a state of a dejected calm, I climbed down the pasteurized stairs to collect my camel and go… I went out into the street, feeling, like, engulfed with the most profound calmness, as thick as bullet-proof glass; no desire to go anywhere, no wish to want any single thing.

Reaching as far as the underpass to the metro, I leaned my behind against the parapet and once again eyed the pompous building of the Central Library after Lenin. My mind was perfectly empty and somewhere in the background there echoed the lines from Shevchenko:

"… learn what is foreign, keep what is yours…"

Damn, folks! Where am I? The huge temple, the giant letters: Central Library Lenin. What was his ultimate goal? So that workers could read books! His famous bequeath had been drummed into our heads, dinned in the ears, rammed down the throat:

"Learn, learn, and learn!”

And, now what? 4 years before the Great October Revolution, in 1913, any worker could drop into a bookstore and buy those 60 pages of lectures, if so was his wish. After the victory of the mentioned revolution, in the Central Library after Lenin, they told me: "Fuck yourself! there's no book for you because you are a worker!"

Yet even screwed anew, I did not feel myself a looser, I never was it either, it’s only that being possessed by trust to people I got fooled most of the time thanks to my readiness to believe, which they vaccinated me with ages ago but I’m still lazy to ditch the bullshit…

So there I stood, getting rooted into the parapet, with some calm, crystal-like, silent torpor closing in on me… But then a scraping din began to gradually reach from the outside world, I woke up and saw a dozen of workers removing the snow with their shovels along the sidewalk. The sun shone brightly, and its comrades-in-arms scrubbed the asphalt and looked at me as if waiting for something.

And what could I share? I had just got the fuck myself. Or maybe they wanted to scrub along the parapet too? Okay, thank you, mujiks, right you are – clinging to this shell-shock transfixion for any longer would make a gooey show.

So, I tore my roots off the arid granite in tiling blocks and joined the flow down the steps to the underpass, to hide myself from those shining peaks…

On the previously agreed upon morning, the bus came and the senior recycler signed the papers brought by the guide to confirm that they had been driving us for three days all about the capital, presenting its historical sites and peerless pearls of Moscow architecture. And everyone was satisfied and happy:

guide Olya, who enjoyed 3 days of paid leisure;

the shoppers with their loads of hunted down deficits;

the bus driver with the three-day ration of gasoline which could be put into circulation;

and, most of all, I, with a spare coin in my pocket worth 15 kopecks.

Technologist Valya did not exaggerate – you could have Moscow for 3 days for 3 rubles sharp…

~ ~ ~