the most final
concluding work

Vanya's wife came on a visit from their Crimea village… The construction battalion started to seem some club of married dolts because of whose premature marriages I again was pulling at the stoker-house one shift after another.

When she left, Vanya changed from the parade-crap into his fatigues and came to the stoker-house as gloomy as the sadness itself. I didn't want to barge in the buddy's meditations and the darkness outside the windows was as delicate as me…

And then Roodko, the Club Director, arrived in the stoker-house. He had the regular cold in his snoot and, in the medical unit, they forked him out some powder for inhalation. So, grabbing on the way a tin cup from the Dishwashers', he navigated to the stoker-house in another of his futile attempts at curbing his adenoidal condition.

The powder from the folded sheet of paper was poured into the cup, then he added boiling water from the boiler tap and covered the cup with a stray piece of cardboard, sort of a lid to keep the mixture hot and not let it cool down right away.

That way he and I sat by the round table talking our talks. And, while talking, Roodko would move that cardboard lid, sniff at the cup a time or two, cover it back and we would go on with our gossip.

Now, by that particular moment in the course of his army service, Vanya had already seen different sights in the stoker-house and, standing in the dark of the adjacent hall of it, he followed all those collateral manipulations and came to certain aberrant conclusions. In determined strides, neared he the round table and, "Roodko! Gimme too!"

"What to give?"

"Well, this!" And Vanya pointed at the Roodko's contraption.

Roodko was as naive as any other intellectual and he thought if he had a running nose then whosoever could have it also. "Welcome."

Vanya pulled the cardboard off, took a couple of sniffs, deep indeed, filling himself to the heels, and I saw how his eyes rolled under his forehead getting more and more, however strange it may sound, crosswise on the way.

So what? I, personally, would believe it. Self-hypnosis is a great power because faith moves the mountains. If Vanya believed that Roodko was consuming the fucking "blue fairy" by bucketfuls there, then any other moment he could fall into hallucinatory strawberry fields and fucking easily too, I swear. Someone had to save the buddy.

"Vanya," says I, "the other day in the Canteen I talked to a Tatar from your draft."

"And what?"

"Well, nothing special…just that I says there, 'hey buddy, what's your name?', and he says, ‘Me a-Russian no understand'…to which, 'Okay,' says I, 'a fully clear matter, but how much do you have to serve yet?'…and here he at once clutches his head from both sides, 'Vooy! Fucking too much!' says he… So, Vanya, could he was a friend of yours?"

In short, I did have pumped the partner back from his hallucinations because that's the law of soldiery friendship – help your comrade out even by the cost of your own life…

~ ~ ~

With the draft from Simferopol, there arrived one more musician to join The Orion. Yura Nikolayev knew his worth because his price-list he studied well before the army, playing the rhythm guitar in a restaurant band.

And he also sang (without particular voice range and particular crap) within the framework of usual orders from restaurant revelers, heated with a couple of decanters of vodka.

"Here's water, it is good and cool!

Adding it to vodka is the gentlemanly rule!"

After the third decanter, it was time for hard rock:

"...by softly murmuring waters of the Nile,

Free of care, of pains, of nasty neighbors,

There lived a small but happy crocodile!.."

And when the client grew fully ripe, the surrealistic splashes gushed forth:

The firewood bloomed and horses were a-twitting,

A camel came from Africa on skates…

Chorus:

No, no no need to giddy-up me, sweetie,

I’m daft enough as is–

Aye! Aye! Aye!. "

So my presence in The Orion was justified by merely a couple of old numbers but the Ensign, appointed to supervise us at playing out of the battalion, could not inform Zampolit that I was going with the ensemble for no good reason. And not only I was getting something for nothing – 2 or 3 chmomen usually went along under the pretext of being sound engineers.

However, playing dances was a seasonal affair. The New Year parties were the main vent for The Orion getting outside the VSO-11. It’s only once that we were engaged in summer, or rather at the beginning of autumn. That was playing dances at a bakery plant. Whether it was the same one where my team-squad had been collecting alms from the production line conveyors, I couldn’t tell. Arriving in for that party, I saw only the asphalted courtyard enclosed by the row of locked truck boxes and the three-story building of the Plant Management with the party buzzing on its second floor.

Of course, I danced there quite a lot, and one of my partners got so charmed that she didn’t hesitate to go out of the hall, at my suggestion. We climbed the dark staircase to the third floor but the landing there with the locked door to a corridor was occupied by them those chmo sound engineers drinking wine.

On the first floor, the picture almost repeated itself, only there it was her female co-employees smoking cigarettes. I made for the exit with her docilely following in tow.

AW, FUCK!!

The bare asphalt area was flooded with arc light glare leaving no shaded nook. The only bit of shadow was the anthracite-black meager strip of it cast by the pillar which held that dazzling arc lamp in the middle of the yard… I was like that puppy named Tuzik who had snitched off a rubber hot-water bottle, yet couldn't find a place to tear it up… Reluctantly, I beat retreat…