the most final
concluding work

All of my 3 roommates in the pencil-box room were fourth-year students… Fyodor Velichko came from a hinterland village in the vast Ukraine-Mommy. The straight thick hair, jutting above his wide forehead, was somehow reminiscent of the straw-thatched barn roof on a quiet farm.

Sasha Ostrolootsky was brought up and educated in an orphanage, which didn't prevent his mapping out plans to marry the daughter of Professor Sokolov from Moscow. No one besides him had ever met or heard about both Professor and his daughter… Like Fyodor, he was not very tall, but looked more sporty, besides, his fair hair was softer, his nose was longer and he had the reputation of Casanova. Sasha’s favorite pastime was visiting girls' rooms on the floor to drink tea with sweets to which outings he was often accompanied by another inhabitant of Room 72, Marc Novoselytsky from Kiev.

Marc had a broad face with icicles of black hair hanging to the rim of his glasses and indispensable smirk beneath his thin mustache, he looked the most well-fed of my roommates. Visiting the room of Sveta Havkina and 3 more freshman girls, Marc and Sasha paid for her tea and jam with most black ingratitude. Sprawling on the covered beds of the inmate girls, they started a sneer-fleer-jeer discussion full of unworthy innuendos in the address of those low-grade Jews.

Sveta, a pretty black-curled daughter from one of the 12 tribes of Israel from Chernigov, was changing in her face to each of their anti-Semitic remarks but suffered in silence. For the next 2 days she was utterly out of sorts until Ilya Lipes, a third-year student with sideburns like in Pushkin's self-portraits, did explain to her that those ungrateful pigs were, actually, Jews themselves…

The fourth-year student Yasha Demyanko from Poltava rented a room somewhere in the city but visited his course-mates almost every evening. The people of Room 72 spend their spare time (which was nearly the only type of time by them) in constant Throw-in Fool battles at which occupation Yasha’s skills were simply superb and he also was the tallest of us. He had a long Baltic face in the frame of long brown hair with a natural wave and, likewise Fyodor, he spoke only and exclusively the Ukrainian language. The rest of us communicated in Russian but we all perfectly understood each other…

The fourth-year student Sveta, a native of the Nezhyn city, kept visiting our room regularly. She was the official bride of Marc and even their respective parent pairs had already known each other. Sveta did not play cards, she kept sitting on the Marc's—and only his—bed and held him in an iron grip, "What's that, Marik? I did not get it!"

"Well, Svetik, well, I just…" with cowardly lowered eyes behind his glasses, Marc began to meekly defense himself until the other players would express their indignation with the procrastination caused by his tarried move in the game.

Then he escorted her home, came back and, after they turned off the electricity in the rooms, he brought in his course-mate Katranikha. For a couple of minutes, they silently creaked his bed and parted. And that was correct because of the strenuous study-work awaiting us all in the morning…

~ ~ ~

Katranikha had a warmly affable disposition, widely open, unreserved and very hospitable. One burglar, after having broken into the Republican Fashion House in Kiev, decided it was time to lie low. He got off a local train in Nezhyn and spent a whole week in her room because they met each other on that train. And every night he took her and her roommates to one or the other of Nezhyn restaurants.

A week later two operative officers of the criminal investigation ascended the third floor in the Hosty, tracing the indications of loot from the Republican Fashion House, which the burglar tried to dispose of at the Nezhyn Bazaar. One of them took a black pistol from inside his coat and knocked on the door of Katranikha's room which the burglar had already cleared out of. He was arrested only a month later in the city of Mariupol. Anyway, that was what the operative with the black pistol told his wife, also a fourth-year student at the English Department…

Soon after, Katranikha invited me to the Leninist Komsomol Cinema, about two hundred meters from the canteen, across the road from the lake in the Count's Park. We watched "Zorro" starring Alain Delon. Well, I don’t know, but in my humble opinion, the final fencing scene in the movie was way too long and boring.

On the whole, the time she spent on me was lost in vain, I couldn't consider her for practical purposes because she was a girl of my cohabitant in the pencil-box room. To tell the truth, I always stayed somewhat old-fashioned…

Starting my student life, I never fancied any breach of my marital fidelity, it was unthinkable, for about a week or so. But then on our floor in the Hosty, there occurred a vacant room and the key incidentally got to my hands, with a chance addition of my course-mate Irina from Bakhmuch. We spent all night in that room and she proved to be an ardent adherent of strictly tactile pleasures with the firmly negative stance towards trespassing the rubber band in her panties.

Again?! What for?!. Her boobs were undeniably magnificent, with some strange nipples though, I had never come across so tiny ones, the size of a pinhead. However, keeping oneself all night long busy with only the bust is a hell of monotonous occupation.

Two days later she resolutely blocked my way in the half-dark corridor of the Hosty. "You did not say you were married!"

"You didn't ask."

Presently, the buses in the Nezhyn city stop next to the railway station, but in those times the highway bridge over the railway tracks was not yet in place and the bus stops were reached by the high footbridge overpass… Then you had to wait for a bus, scramble to get on board, and stand squeezed in the crowd for all the long ride to the main square. From the square there remained a short walk down to the bridge over the Oster river on whose right bank stood the Hosty, the New and the Old Buildings, as well as the other campus structures together with the Count's Park behind them holding the sky aloft upon its columns of dark ancient Elms within the bounds of a long lake of horseshoe outline…

It took me one of those prolonged bus rides from the station to the main square, to persuade Yasha Demyanko to sell me a shirt. A white shirt with the grid pattern of blue-and-yellow, thin, widely set, stripes. Coming back to Nezhyn after the weekend at his home city of Poltava, Yasha brought that shirt for selling at a negotiated price, and in the crowded bus, he opened his grip to flash the goods before me.

I fell for it immediately, but he was obstinately refusing to sell it because he had another such shirt on and both of us were from the same Department. In his opinion, it was not the right thing for 2 persons to be dressed alike when in one place… In the most solemn terms, had I to swear to never ever put it on without his expressed permission, or when his one was washed or left behind in Poltava.

~ ~ ~