the most final
concluding work

The surrender was unthinkable and simply impossible. So, I had to learn one more writing—similar to Arabic lettering only with a wider sweep—the hand of Zhomnir with which he scribbled his notes over and between the lines of the manuscripts I kept handing to him. At last, he raised a bushy brow and said that it seemed somewhat like that already, and my translation would go for the next issue of Translator.

Then there came the day when Yasha and Fyodor, standing in front of the typewritten pages pasted in the Whatman sheet on the wall, congratulated Zhomnir with the fresh discover of an upstart talent in the field of Ukrainian translations with such an unmistakably Ukrainian ending in his family name – Ogolts-OFF. Zhomnir responded more directly – he was not to blame that so truly-truly Ukrainians as Demyan-KO and Velich-KO had never scratched their ass in all four years of their studying at the English Department….

Spring came hand in hand with the most cloudless and unalloyed love of my life. Everyone both addressed and referred to her as Shvydcha, but I called her by her name – Nadya. It was her to bring about the resurrection of my belief that true female principle was still and all alive in this civilization-jizzed world… We loved each other, love was filling us to brims and trickling over. Love for love’s sake is a lovable love, it’s the purest form of love, if you love it.

Why am I stating for both of us? By what right do I use so unrestrained allegations? The answer is very simple – Nadya was a virgin, innocent and inexperienced, as yet, in faking.

Then, maybe, I once again forgot to warn that I was married? The fact needed no advertising, she was finishing her fourth year at the English Department and lived on the Anglo-Fac floor in the Hosty. Some unique combination: virginity and the fourth course at the Anglo-Fac, eh?

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy…"

The fourth-year male students held a banquet in their pencil-box room opposite ours, to which I also was called. Nadya happened to be sitting next to me on the same bed and, when someone turned off the light in the room, I reflexively unzipped her sports jacket. She flicked it back right away and when they turned the light on, everything was the innocence itself and no need to call the police morale. However, Marc had read the zipper sounds in the dark, and he began to chaff. Nadya got hurt and left, and all was over.

The following day she met me in the long murky corridor on our floor, dressed in the same sportswear, spoke up to me, and smiled. Oh, the smile of Nadya was a real thing! Those dimples in the cheeks, those impish sparks in her eyes!

She fitted all the canons of a Ukrainian beauty – glossy stream of black hair down to the middle of her back, round face with velvety black rainbows of eyebrows over the shiny dark-brown eyes, voluminous breasts, rounded shoulders smoothly flowing into the arms and hands set akimbo on her abundant hips above the gorgeous thighs of a trained swimmer. Because she was going in for that sport.

And, with all that, what did she need me for? Well, here a simple answer again – that summer she was going to get married. Not to me, betcha, there was some lieutenant graduating some military school who would marry and take her to the garrison of his appointment.

There was not much time left, and we did not want to squander it away. We loved to love each other and we wanted more and more of it. But that came later because, at first, we had to tackle busting her cherry…

The initial couple of dates we spent in the narrow compartment with one window and one sink, partitioned, for some reason, from the rest of sinks and taps in the washroom. The truly spartan style of the tight interior did not matter much at the introductory stages of acquainting ourselves with each other, especially since the latch-lacking door of it was easy to block.

And then the guys from Room 71 left for a day or two, leaving their key to Zhora Ilchenko. He, actually, rented some place in the city but who would reject the key from a vacant room in the Hosty? They did not pass the key to him from hand to hand though, just hung it on its nail in the plywood shield behind the watchwomen's desk in the lobby. It's hard to trace back in what way that information reached me, but I did not wait for another invitation to such a gift of fate and snatched the key before Zhora.

In the evening, Nadya and I retired to Room 71 and locked the door… When the knocking on the door ceased, and the echoes of Zhora's cries, "Anyone seen Ogoltsoff?!" died away in the long corridor outside, Nadya started to gradually take off the items of her sportswear, accompanying the striptease of the stagnation era with a chant from the pre-war black-and-white movie "The Circus",

"Tiki-tiki-do, ay!
I'm leaving from the cannon to the sky!."

Although she was noticeably ill at ease… We lay down on the bed by the window. On the other side of the double partition made of gypsum slabs was my Room 72. By the window, there stood Fyodor's bed under the wall socket which was not properly fixed in its place and kept falling out when disturbed by the plug of a cassette tape-recorder.

Nadya's scream from the socket attracted Fyodor's attention. He took it out altogether and till late at night was listening to the moans that followed. We were not aware of being tapped, though even knowing it wouldn’t tell on our enthusiasm…

The following day, the guys from Room 71 returned and wanted the key back… On Monday, at the date in the washroom, Nadya was gloomy, silent, yet I managed to bring the reason out: Marc Novoselytsky was spilling dirty gossip among the fourth-year students that Ogoltsoff had had Shvydcha in the washroom from the back… I always sensed he was not indifferent to her, otherwise, why should he be so attentive to the zipper zips at that birthday? O, you'll catch it, Jewish bastard!.

On Tuesday, he returned from the shower, his hair freshly moist, the towel hanging over his shoulder, to find only me in Room 72. I locked the door, let the key slide into my hip-pocket, and announced, "Take off your glasses, Marc. I'll beat you up." He did not remove the glasses though but instead began to run around the brown table with the chairs placed deeply under it. I had to push the table to the window exterminating space for him to go on orbiting that weary piece of furniture.

In the nook between the windowsill, the bed, and the table, he stood with his head bowed like Andriy, the son of Taras Bulba – a lamb resigned himself to being sacrificed. I hit him on the chin so as not to damage the glasses, and in a pitched-up tone of voice promised that if he, fucking motherfucker, would ever squeal a single word about Shvydcha… When I finished my Sermon on the Mount, he set his glasses aright and said with a toady smile, "You so fucking well kicked up my fucking ass, right?"

On Thursday, at the end of our date in the compartment, she pensively observed, "Yet, he was right after all…" It stunned me that I was like fulfilling the plans laid down by Marc Novoselytsky. Some fucking Nathan the Prophet… But where was the way out?.