the most final
concluding work

The neighbor wardroom was filled up though. One of the patients there was from our construction battalion, also a grandpa like Rezo only a Russian, named Sanya. Besides, his hair was fair and his right brow missing, licked off with a flat scar. He was a driver too and went AWOL by his tractor and collided somewhere with something, or maybe capsized. They had to amputate both his legs above the knees.

He did not visit the dining room. They buddies from his room were bringing the havvage directly onto his closet-box, although he had crutches and a pair of high leg prostheses next to his bed. On the front cover of The Rural Life magazine, he liked the picture of a shock worker of Communist Labor from Stavropol against the background of her combine harvester and wheat ears, and started writing letters to her. "Hello, unknown Valentina…"

Sometimes his fellow-drivers from our conbat came to visit him. After their closed-door meetings, he screamed songs and quarreled with the on-duty medical personnel. But he got off with it because they would exempt him from the army anyway…

On the second floor, there was a library, sort of, because its two shelves were filled with only translations from Chinese novelists about how socialism was being built in the villages of China. The books were printed in the fifties' before the exposure of the personality cult at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. To wit, before Mao Tse-Tung took offense for disparaging his bosom friend Generalissimo Stalin, and in both great powers they stopped singing:

"Moscow – Beijing,

Eternal friendship…"

And what would you do when left with no choice? You’d go and read social realism masterpieces in the best tradition of the newspaper Renmin Ribao…

A commotion broke up in the next wardroom, splashing out into the corridor – the combine driver Valentina answered Sanya's letters by her live visit. She got seated in the yard, on a bench under a tree. A swarthy-faced woman of Moldovian type, beautiful as movie stars from the first Soviet color flicks about collective farms in the Cossack villages. The most handsome buddy-patient from the neighbor wardroom alighted by her side with explanations that Sanya would presently come from a medical procedure.

And Sanya, in hysterical jitters, was sitting on his bed in the ward, fastening his prostheses. They helped to pull his pajama pants over them, and, sticking two crutches in his armpits, he clumsily dragged his body to the exit door. But Valentina—well done!—for whole 3 minutes she sat next to him on the bench that he finally reached. Then the same handsome buddy led her along the shortcut path to the unofficial exit thru a hole in the fence…

Two days later along the same path…I watched and I couldn't get it… It just couldn't be! But who else was that if not Olga?!. Yes, it's she!.

The same evening, I went with her to the park in her trousers and some sort of a turtleneck while she, sure thing, had her mini skirt on.

On the dance-floor, a pack of local yobbos started to close in, probably, attracted by the pattern of huge yellow flowers all over my borrowed pants. A couple of dippers on AWOL from our conbat had identified me and approached. One of them rigged out with a civilian citizenka and the second was in a "Pe-Sha" outfit, I didn't even know their names. The locals got it that the construction battalion was having a pleasure-walk and dissolved…

Olga had a whole heap of news in her life. She had again moved to Theodosia, but in the day nursery there were no places for babies. So she took Lenochka and went to the city executive committee on the chairman's reception day.

He parroted the same thing – there were no places and that's it. Then she just put Lenochka on his desk and walked out, he ran after her to the stairs, "Citizen! Take your baby!" In short, they found a place.

Her mother was looking after Lenochka, while she went to Stavropol, only on the train they stole all her money. And my wedding ring was also gone. But it happened still back in Konotop. She was wearing it on her finger though it was too wide and when washing she did not notice that it slipped off into the basin, and she splashed it away with the soapy water into the drain pit…

The next day she borrowed money for her back travel from the cook, who came to visit Rezo, and walked away down the same shortcut path…

They took the plaster off my hand and discharged me. By free of charge trolleys I traveled to the south-eastern outskirts of Stavropol and from the ring road there walked on under the tall roadside trees bordering the highway to Elista, towards the Demino fork.

Bright yellow leaves scattered the ground here and there, the sun was shining, yet it felt like it was autumn already. But when was the summer?

One of the conbat trucks pulled up on the highway. The driver shouted to me, "Home?"

I said, yes, home, and jumped into the truck bed. Because neither from work, nor from AWOL's we never returned "to the detachment", or "to the barracks". We were coming back “home”…

~ ~ ~

At home, it wasn't without news too. During my absence, our squad lived thru a rampage of torturing humiliation at the hands of grandpas who drove them after the lights-out out the barrack to the drill grounds and they had to walk "goose step" in a circle before getting beaten.

Karlookha from Second Company was particularly atrocious – he liked to jab a young with the knife, not so as to stab but aggravate by pricking. And he himself was just a dwarf, half-head lower than normal human height. Then in the basement of the 50-apartment block, he rushed with his knife on Sehrguey Chernenko, handled Gray, from Dnepropetrovsk. But Gray had his Zona skills for such incidents and knocked him out. Karlookha thief-swaggered only on the grounds of being a grandpa, but those grandpas from his draft, who had done their time before the army, hadn't supported him against Gray. So everything, like, subsided but the tension held on.

On the wave of that suspended tension, some pheasant clung to me, "Are you from thieves?"

Answering such a question in affirmative, you had to make it clear which stretch the prosecutor demanded for you and what was the final verdict, but for me the articles of the Penal Code were as closed a book as formulas from Organic Chemistry. Saying "yes' without having done some time, you became an impostor from the view-point of Zona code, liable to hard consequences.

So I said "no" and he took me to the Leninist Room and began to shear my hair in a "zero-like" style with a hand-held machine – the length of my hair was a crying impudence for a young. I did not mind though, it had 2 years ahead to grow back. However, the machine was blunt and a couple of times it pulled very painfully.

There was a plasterer from Third Company in the Leninist Room, who came to see his Armenian buddies-countrymen. So, he suggested the home-made barber letting him finish my haircut. The pheasant himself was not already happy that he started that job, and yielded the machine to him.

In short, Robert Zakarian did my haircut, and when the machine jammed he said, "I am sorry". I had completely forgotten there were such words in existence…