the most final
concluding work

The arrival of summer was celebrated by the chmo of VSO-11 by a collective booze. The battalion's truck delivering havvage to the watchmen at the construction sites and those kept there even at night by urgent works came back with a box of vodka smuggled utilizing a huge thermos pot emptied of havvage. The on-duty officer at the checkpoint cast a fleeting glance into the bed of the returning truck, and it passed the gate.

The orgy, to which I also was invited because a stoker is a necessary accessory in the soldiery life, started after the lights-out near the remote car-boxes. In the bright illumination from the full moon, some fifteen chmomen sat on the ground in a wide circle, kinda aboriginal tribe of that field. Everyone faced the center of the circle where the glass of vodka bottles, and the sides of two pots full of meat fried by cooks in large baking trays at the Canteen kitchen, glistened in the moonlight. On the spread burlap of two empty sacks there piled several loaves of bread chopped in the Bread-Cutter's. Never before I had vodka from the bottle’s neck. The initial gulps were somewhat disgusting but the following kept pouring in smoothly.

The snack, regrettably, disappeared all too soon… I never finished the bottle in my hand. Having risen on unsteady legs, with the most best wishes to the honest company, I informed of the immediate departure of me to the village of Demino.

"All's nyshtyak, buddy-bros. What fucki' on-dut' what fucki' office..rr… It's me on-dut'... fuck!.."

Nevertheless, so as not to run into, I crossed the perimeter fence near the pigsty, away from the barracks. And there I made for the round face of the full moon that shone from above the distant village of Demino and was swaying back and forth like on a swing. I muttered reproaches to its treacherous inconstancy, and to the field as well for arranging a sea-rolling in my way. Then I fell down and tried to hoist me on my elbows but the earth gravity occurred too powerful and the field was so irresistibly soft…

I woke up in the dusk of dawn, only a hundred meters from the pigsty, dying from thirst, and went back to drink water from the tap in the stoker-house before crashing onto the workbench in the workshop room…

Looked like I’d given too free rein to my wishful thinking, imagining that till the end of service I would live my life between the Club and the stoker-house. On some morning after a night shift, Major Avetissian found me asleep in the workshop and ordered to retreat to the Company barrack. And that at the time when the majority of chmomen skipped even mustering the roll-calls before lights-out! Thus, the soldier-clerk from the Stuff half-barrack slept at the Medical Unit hosted by the paramedic assistant sharing a bed from the couple of normal ones waiting for ill personnel whom he escorted to the city military hospital the moment they popped up with health complains. The Club painter Lopatko had a room of his own at the Club. But the ill-fated stoker, after sitting all day in that howling hell of the stoker-house, had to go for the evening roll-call where instead of absent chmomen a voice from the ranks would shout out "on duty!" and there were no questions at all…

To somehow pass the time while they were cooking havvage, I took a book from the library in the Staff barrack, with the assistance of the Staff clerk. The book was chosen because of its thickness so that it lasted longer. The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Wow! That's the stuff! A culmination upon culmination… After those of his works prescribed by the school curriculum, I wouldn't ever think he was writing so cool… And there wasn't anything else to take from the Staff library with its just one shelf of books, because reading the masterpieces of B. Polevoy or N. Ostrovsky was not worth the while after the Dostoevsky's novel.

At the Club, Roodko passed me a booklet The Beatles in America about their tour there. Some of the youngs brought it along. I undertook to translate it because that booklet had more pictures than the text. However, without a dictionary at hand, my school stock of vocabulary allowed me to understand it only here, there, yet not everywhere. I filled the gaps with my wild guesses, but Roodko was happy all the same…

And so it went in a circle – the hiss of steam, the rumble of the air pump, the Club, the evening roll-call, and back to the Club. And in the morning all over again…

Here, Jafarov rushes a-galloping into the stoker-house with his eyes round and bulging, the face as pale as the white marks on his khaki shirt back which he had fucking rubbed against some whitewashed wall.

"Where to hide? Chief of Staff’s after me!"

I watched out the door and who was there but him – making for the stoker-house from the Canteen's kitchen in his boxer swagger. Jafarov barely had time to jump out thru the window in the workshop into the tall grass on the other side of the stoker-house. "No, Comrade Major, no one was coming this way."

But the Major’s scent would surpass that of a hunting dog, and in a moment, from behind the corner, "Ensign Jafarov! To me!"

Fucking caput to you, Ensign, I swear by your Mommy… Why should Chief of Staff chase Jafar as with a fucking prick in his arse? But then, who fucking cares…

And in the evening there's another hunt in the field. The swarthy cowboys from Separate Company ran down a rat and drove it into a stub of plugged pipe there, splashed gasoline inside and set on fire. The rat whizzed out and jumped around the field like a ball of flames and they followed running – some cultural and sports event…

When it was my night shift, I came across a brood of rats in the passage around the twinned boilers. I hollered and rushed to trample them, but they fled. And then I wondered where that sudden rat-hate had cropped up in me from?. The pure instinct of self-preservation that’s what it was. Rats would not forgive the humans, including me as well, the death in flames of that rat martyr, so to forestall their avenge I attacked first. Fucking moron…

One night I was sleeping on the workbench when some strange thing lit on my chest. Something dark like a clot of black fog, sort of, and it pressed to strangle me. I wanted to brush it off but had no strength even to stir or at least scream it away as if all of my strength had dried up leaving me pitifully paralyzed. It took a desperate effort to wake up.

Later Vanya, putting on a look of an expert, began to lecture me it was a bogey. They're just fucking stupid in that Crimea of theirs. Bogeys live at folks' homes, right? The stoker-house is anything but a home. Where could a bogey pop up here from, eh?.

What I omitted to tell Vanya was that the creature sat exactly in that place on my chest which I had shaved by the safety razor in front of the mirror piece embedded in the wall plaster. Well, to get a macho look, of course, because what I had there was like that down on Vanya's upper lip. But it fucking did not work and the chest remained unchanged, smooth and bare…