the most final
concluding work

In February, the bread-and-butter carnival was over; we were transferred to the construction of the Medical Center whose basement was already bridged over with concrete flooring slabs, but not completely. Underneath those slabs, we were hiding from the winter wind around a fire built of any lumber or raw-timber we came across and split with the breakers because there was no trailer to shelter in.

The territory of the future Medical Center were vast indeed, but being on the city outskirts it provided no hunting grounds for jackalling…

The trucks for our transportation to work and back all were from a local motor depot manned by the civvy drivers… Ours was a hairy asshole. He flew into the grounds of the would-be Medical Center on his UAZ-66, hit the brakes and the truck glided over the icy ground, turned around and stopped still – get in, off we go!

During the trick, the badly fixed, tattered, canvas top quacked and bubbled like a parachute in arms of a landed saboteur. The driver grinned his bad-teeth smile from under his thin mustache – he was in high spirits from that sort of gypsy romanticism.

The exhaust pipe of his truck was trained to give out loud bangs but he withheld the fun for riding along the city sidewalks, to rough the passers-by. Bang!!

"Oy, Mommy!"

The buddies tried to explain me about those engine backfire bangs and the carburetor, but such things always were above my head…

On one of the first days in the new place, I went to the wooden toilet on the frontier of the site territory. When urged to take a leak we loosened bowls at any nearby nook, so I wouldn't go that far for such a trifle. Yet, because of the frost using the detachment sorteer harbored not a little risk. The whole floor there became one solid yellow skating rink too slippery for walking and even when a-squatting over an ochco your high boots’ treds slid slowly apart on the smooth ice…

While defecating at that faraway ruin of a toilet, I felt like having some odd auditory sensations. I kinda heard…well, not quite voices…rather, echoes of voices. A distant, cohesive buzz of voices, some low even hum with no splashes nor distinct words.

Then I took a letter from the inside pocket of my outfit jacket, which I never re-read but kept on me. Without looking who the letter was from, I used it as toilet paper, stood up, buttoned my pants and suddenly saw the source of that noise.

The shabby walls and stall partitions were scratched in toto with inscriptions. Names, dates, settlement names were written and snicked, with pencils and ball pens. Some climbed on top of others because there was left no spare space around… The territory had obviously been used as the Stavropol Collection and Distribution Point of Draftees, betcha, and they, already fallen thru into the two-year-long eternity, smitten, swept, engulfed by it, were hurriedly leaving on the deals in rotten whitewash their parting scratches:

"Sakha, from the village…"

"Athos, from the settlement…"

"Drun, from the city…"

They were already there—swallowed up—because their voices were not heard, but turned into some mutual wordless hum, yet the hands were still finishing their farewell to themselves:

"Andron, from…"

~ ~ ~

The Orion took part in the city musical contest. We performed 2 numbers there without securing any place. As it seemed, the whole affair was started for the sake of a local singer. A young guy could sing without a microphone filling the whole auditorium with his voice. That's some singer!

The second of our numbers at the contest was "The Indian's Song" from the repertoire of Tom Jones. No one knew what about he sang in it, but in the Soviet adaptation the song bemoaned the bitter fate of American Redskins (as it turned out later, Tom had nothing to do with the song sung by Raiders):

"They took the whole Cherokee nation,

Put us on this reservation…"

At the contest, the Orion’s "brass" group comprised already two horn players. Ensign Jafar Jafarov had been transferred to our battalion I can't say where from or what for, because I didn't care. He came to the Club and announced that he was playing a horn…

Jafarov’s eastern appearance imparted a pleasant impression of softness. A rounded face with the soft swarthy skin, the soft glint in his black, olive-like, eyes, his soft smile when he uttered his, "I swear to you by my Mom!" And he really played the horn which he was bringing to the Club for the rehearsals and carrying away in an unexpectedly hard case… Kolya Commissar started to blow his horn much better with Jafar around…

Gray, the tamer of Karlookha, became a frequent visitor to the Club too, not as a musician though, just because it was a secluded spot in the everyday conbat life. At work, he fucked it all from the very beginning of his service and was just doing another two-year time at the construction battalion. As if it was much fucking different from a penitentiary colony… just that conditions were a bit easier and the spetzovka in khaki color instead of indigo.

Brought in the morning to a construction site, he ventured to the city and returned only for the evening truck home. At times, he was locked up in the clink, but even Battalion Commander, notwithstanding his chronic brain leakage, clearly realized that suchlike correctional efforts would be lost on that well-developed, stiff-lipped jail-bird. The bald patch of a scar in his left eyebrow somehow humanized the crisp face thrust in wolfy way forward from his broad shoulders… In his life, Gray was treading along the guilelessly straight, unpretentious, path of a hereditary thief.

At the Club, he shared stories of his recent adventures in the city, or roughed Commissar. That was not right, because both Commissar and he were from the same draft, but for Gray, the Zona Code overweighed that of the construction battalion.

On the eve of becoming a pheasant, Commissar decorated all of the rear of his right hand with a gaudy tattoo depicting a craggy ridge of fuzzy mountains and the sun rising from behind them in a spiky halo of sharp rays, and all that freshly shining world had a firm foundation of instructive inscription running below, "The Northern Caucasus". When on the stage, Commissar assumed such a stance that his tattoo would face the audience and, blowing his horn aloft, he squinted proudly at the sprawling masterpiece of an unknown author.

Probably, it went against Gray's grains that Commissar was swaggering with a more ostentatious splotch than his blueish spider-cross (a Zona sign for the initiated) hardly bigger than a ping-pong ball, which cheeky inequality, even in absence of any Zona regulations as regards geographical tattoos, provoked Gray's picking at the cheerful Hornblower.

Let's take, for instance, that same Yura Zameshkevich. After locking up the stoker-house he came to the Club. The place where he would safely keep away from the eyes of Fathers Commanders, where he could strum a guitar, serenely drink a mug of chiffeer concocted in the Canteen kitchen (mix a 250 gr. pack of tea and 250 ml of water, bring to boiling) where he's one of us – a person of a subtle soul constitution, an exquisite connoisseur of the music which is something, a loyal friend, a reliable comrade, and simply a brother – a lahbooh, in a word.

But now his wife has arrived to visit him and waits in the checkpoint guardhouse, while he races around looking for a parade-crap and a greatcoat to go with her to the city. He gives his bristles a hasty shave, and gets the Leave Ticket at the Staff barrack, then for some reason drops to the Club with me sitting peacefully in the back row of the empty hall. He briskly jumps in and out of the musicians' and, leaving the Club, grabs my completely unaware cock and all in his bearish grip and raises me up in the air for a goodbye. Of course, I scream!

Then the pain gradually dissolves leaving behind inescapable puzzlement. What for?