the most final
concluding work

So, what else did we do in the Club besides solfeggio, rehearsals and surly contemplation of certain transcendental enigmas from all their respective angles?

Fooling around with chiffeer mentioned en passant? Its bitterness was a rare delicacy. And vodka happened hardly oftener…

We used a special code-knock at the door of the musicians' for a smooth admittance. To the right rhythm in your tap-tapping, the door would open, otherwise, go where you had come from, or shout thru the closed door what was your fucking message.

One time, after the right code and the click of the lock opening in response, the doorway was filled with the stubby figure of Zampolit, bodyguarded by the Ensign from Fourth Company who had tap-tapped the code, to be sure, the fucking excursion guide.

Our cook-vocalist Volodya Rassolov, handled Pickle, was fast and up to the situation: while the two officers gaped around what's what, he glibly slipped the bottle into the top of a kirza boot from the pair standing by his side. Of course, Zampolit labeled us a gang of drunkards and parasites all the same, but there was no direct evidence already…

But most of all we talked: who was what in his civilian life, what would he do coming back to it (we innocently believed then it was possible to come back anywhere at all in the stream of the flowing, ever changing space) and that Third Company went to kick the shit out of Separate Company, but the black-ass fuckers fought the assault back with their belt-plates, and the pigsty soldier-oversee seemed really be fucking his swine harem…

The champion of talking was, sure enough, Karpesha. In a hushed, brotherly confidential tone of voice, for hours would he spin a yarn about his ten-day furlough when he six times broke up and reconciled with the girl he dated, his former classmate…

Got bored with listening to the same minutiae for the seventh time? Go out into the empty Club hall, get seated next to Robert in the last row of seats, and welcome to the fluctuations of Parisian life. In Paris, everyone knew everything about anyone else. That, for example, Jean Marais was gay. And that's a pity, of course. Although I did not like him starring in "Fantômas", but as D'Artagnan in "The Iron Mask", he was the masculinity itself. That's what that fucking Paris was doing to even manly men…

Gray would share how he used to rough those in love, inadvertently passing along his street. Then he would go out of the wicket, and conversationally ask the guy, “So, what, Romeo? Wanna talk of love?” and cock up the trigger of his dad's shotgun. To which motion the asked, neglecting the chanced discussion, would sprint away, but in fucking zigzags, sort of, while yelling over his shoulder the farewell instructions, "Run! Sveta, run!"

Or, for a change, how he battered his wife for the first time and the following morning she had Chink eyes…

And Jafarov, caressing thoughtfully the soft glitter of his horn, would narrate of when being still just a kid and "playing trash" at some party, he watched thru the key-hole a whore giving some officer a blow job, and then she returned to the hall and danced with someone else suck-kissing him, another officer of a higher rank than the previous one.

"But such a beautiful woman! Upon my word of honor! Fuck it!"

And when he served at the military orchestra, their leader usually walked the city with a tube, which is the biggest trumpet in brass bands. Just donned it and went out hunting for "trash", such a shifty schemer was he, I swear.

He was walking and looking out where they carried funeral wreaths for him to follow. "Would you like a military band at the funeral? Let's talk terms." I swear by my Mom, some foxy wheeler-dealer, but "playing trash" not with the whole orchestra, sure thing. Such kind of "trash" was called "to play a sleeper". Yes.

Now, one time, as usual, we went "to play a sleeper". On the second floor, the door to the landing wide open, all’s socko, good and proper, we marched in.

In the first room, the relatives sitting by the walls, a-crying all, good and proper, as befit the occasion. Only that they were somehow way too much at it, and paying zero attention that the musicians had arrived. So, the leader came up to the one he had made the deal with, "What's the fuss?"

"Oh, we're so distressed! It's a disaster. We may have to cancel the funeral." And she showed us to the next room, also packed with relatives a-crying, but even louder than in the first room.

Now, in the room center, there stood a table with a coffin on it, all’s socko, good and proper. And in the coffin, the dead man a-sitting. Well, upon my word, real sitting, bolt upright.

See, when alive, he was a hunchback and because of so big a hump, they couldn't make him lie down as required. Whoops, that’s how our "playing a sleeper" got fucked…

But the leader was a fucking tough character, he came nearer and pressed at the sleeper's forehead; it went over its hump and lay down in a proper way. Only after the correction its legs stuck up in the air, no way to shut the coffin lid.

"We've already tried that way!" sez she who the deal was made with, and wails loudest in the room.

And ain’t I tell you the leader was a real sport, eh? I swear, some socko, good and proper fucker. "Okay," says he. "I wanna all but the musicians out of the room."

Well, in general, we pulled the sleeper out of the coffin, placed it on the floor, face down, hoisted the coffin over it and – bang! Who would fucking like to lose a "trash", eh?

("It.. helped?" asks I thru tears.)

Well, something cracked, but—I swear by my Mom!—it did straighten out. We put the coffin back upon the table and shoved the body straight in. All in a socko proper way. It’s only that…

("??" I no longer have any strength for asking.)

Well, the sleeper grew ten centimeters taller now and the feet stuck out from the too-short coffin. Fuck!

In the tall tale of the lahbooh about the hunchback "sleeper" reality mingled with fiction… Sprawled over a plywood seat in the cinema hall, I was expiring with laughter, having no idea that in the Stavropol city there was the Regional Committee of the CPSU headed by its Secretary, a certain Gorbachov, the future mortician of the USSR handled Hunchy, yet among the Stavropol "workshoppers" of that period they referred to him as Envelope.

~ ~ ~

I don't want you to form a rash notion as if the construction battalion was a dreary desperate hard labor and nothing else. Sometimes even there came the spring, and we switched over to the summer outfit.

We handed our long-sleeved undershirts and pea-jackets to the company Master Sergeant, because the winter uniform had, for some reason, become way too heavy. We changed warm gray hats of artificial fur for dandyish piss-cutters.

It's real nice to stand in the light-dressed ranks at the Morning Dispensing under a freshly blue sky with great sailings of thin transparent feather clouds in the fathomless height, and in the luster of the morning sun ride in the open bed of a truck into the city with so many bright skirts and frocks walking its sidewalks… In spring, the population of girls grew drastically, and they began to spill over and out of the sidewalks.

In any case, at the end of a working day, two girls appeared even in the territory of the would-be Medical Center… I was nearing the place where the truck usually picked us up, and those two girls walked in the same direction some 30 meters ahead of me. Probably, they were taking a shortcut somewhere and leisurely paced ahead, talking to each other.

Suddenly, their chatter broke off. Bypassing the truck arrival point, they accelerated to quick strides and disappeared from the view… And at the spot, there was already sitting Sasha Khvorostyuk – the first to pop up.

Seated on a half-meter stump, he kept his knees wide apart resting his hands on them, like, in the KGC—King of Gay Cocks—posture and, happy with himself, kept turning royally his beak from side to side. From his unbuttoned fly, his cock was drooping languidly… That's why the girls trotted away, and hardly would they shortcut here anymore. Because of that fucked in the head platypus!.

And sometimes in the construction battalion, you might quite unexpectedly get into another world – away from all those trenches, shovels, pallets, humiliations… That Sunday morning everything went on as always, yet on entering the city our truck changed tack.

Probably, our Lance-Corporal Alik Aliyev knew where we were going, but his vocabulary limitations did not allow him to talk of anything beyond the usual commands and responses, so he kept enigmatic and puffed up mien. The truck pulled up by the city circus building. We jumped off after Alik and were met by a man in the civilian who explained what we had to do. There was a change in the circus – one troupe was leaving and replaced with the touring circus of Lilliputians.

(..what is the role of the construction battalion in the interval between two circuses?

Exactly! To load one and unload the other…)

But still it was a holiday, and we festively dragged large boxes into long trailers with canvas tops, and festively pulled boxes looking quite the same out from looking the same, but already other, long freight trailers. And then we ate ice-cream, drank kvass from the wheeled barrel in the circus square, entered the building and got seated wherever one chose, on the velvet crimson seats in the empty amphitheater around the arena.

The artists from the newly arrived Lilliputians troupe walked admired circles around the shortest serviceman in our special-mission loader-group.

Were he wise enough to grow two centimeters shorter, they would not press him in the army, not even to a construction battalion, but now: Taller than a meter and fifty-six? Wow! A ready-made non-combatant!

One of the Lilliputians even spoke to him in an undertone—the soldier never confessed what about. Most likely, it was an invitation to enter the number of power acrobats, when the whole pyramid of light-weight Lilliputians was built upon the propping shoulders of the midget strongman…

One of the Lilliputian women invited me to follow her. We left the building thru a side passage and she led me to a row of house trailers.

She climbed onto the high porch way, shot her arm up, high above her head, and pulled at the unyielding door handle. Plaintively asked she for assistance. I lowered my hand on the handle which readily turned down, and pulled the door.

"Thank you!" said the voice of the highest-pitched flute.

"You're welcome."

It's so inconvenient to live in a world not made to match you…

I returned to the circus where Alik Aliyev trotted enraptured circles in the arena chasing the white pony who openly resented flirtations from any stray Lance-Corporals in kirza high boots.

In the pit above the curtained arena entrance, the brass band hurriedly rehearsed bravura marches with the slight streak of impudent outa-keyness innate in circus orchestras.

A group of Lilliputians gathered by the heavy folds of the arena entrance curtains, following as one of them, the size of a kindergarten kid, was giving hell to her husband whom she had caught pants down in a trailer with another Lilliputian woman. When fired out in sparrow squeaks, foul language loses its specific weightiness, but the intensity of the infuriated wife's emotions was on a par with the deepest Shakespearean passions…