the most final
concluding work

Between the New Building and the Hosty, there was a rather wide ditch for draining of excess water from the Count's Park lake into the Oster. We walked together—Nadya, I and Igor Recoon—bypassing, for some reason, the New Building from behind, when I noticed an iron pipe connecting the banks of the ditch. It sagged about a meter above the surface of still water overgrown with duckweed.

"I dare me to go over!" said I.

Nadya screamed, "No! Don't dare!"

And Igor immediately said, “I bet you won't!"

The pipe was not wide (cross-section 10 cm) and, half-way over the ditch, it teetered under my feet. With Nadya's "ah!" and "oh!" behind my back, I regained a feeble balance and, fluttering my arms, advanced for another couple of meters and spurted the final segment.

"Aha!" shouted I and looked back.

Igor waved me from the other bank, "I dare you to return!"

Some viper of a homie, eh? I'm the Ogoltsoff but not just limitless so…

And why did I start all that at all? Because of the darn masculine pride. The day before, our course had a picnic by the Oster, almost outside the city. There Nadya challenged me to compete in swimming, one hundred meters down the river.

She went ahead at once and after another twenty meters, I realized that my Kandeebynno-made freestyle swimming was but a garbage in comparison to her powerful butterfly. What could I do? I climbed onto the bank and was the first to reach the finish line where I met the winner with a bunch of flowers grabbed in the grass along the way, "You're the champion, Nadya!"

When the 3 of us (Fyodor, Yasha and I) came with a load of bottles under the canopy of giant Elms in the Count's Park and lay down in the grass to have a drink accompanied by the rustle in the green sway of foliage overhead, Yasha asked if I really had chosen the career of a circus pipe walker. I was surprised because he had not been there, but Fyodor said that the whole English Department knew already about my crossing the ditch.

We drank and Fyodor began to complain of Pro-Rector Budowski who viciously, on purpose, spoiled Fyodor's entire Grade Book that registered results of credits and examination past in all four years of his study. The grades in there were uniform "threes" but that bitch Budowski put him "four" in spite of Fyodor's earnest plea not to do so.

In this regard, Yasha put his index finger upright to draw a philosophical conclusion, that Fyodor "had swum hell of a way before he drowned nearby the shore".

We drank again and, inspired by the bright warm day, I said that pipe-walking was a baby toy because I could climb even that Elm whose wide trunk was clean of branches to grip at and forked about eight meters above the ground.

Yasha once again set his philosophical finger up and instructively declared the undertaking beyond the humanly possible, yet he was prepared to buy two bottles of wine if he see me waving my hand from the tree crown.

I somewhat cheated at the bet because behind the Elm there grew a thinner tree you could shin up and then move over into the crotch of the giant. That way, I climbed to the mentioned altitude and safely returned to the native terra firma. Yet, Yasha began to cavil and announced my exploit a measly wangling, but Fyodor, who he appealed to for an arbitration, gave out a peremptory command to shut up with petty quibbling – the point stipulated had been reached and two bottles from Yasha were due on the barrel head…

Returning to the Hosty after our recreation, I showed them the pipe over the ditch – the training kit for aspirant pipe-walkers. Yasha grew passionate and proclaimed such crossing but a trifle, and he would easily prove it for merely two bottles of wine if I would hold his pants. I could not refuse a senior student from my department, my coach at playing Preferans and Protracted Throw-in Fool…

And he stepped on the pipe and walked ahead, in his elegant white shirt with the grid of thin yellow and blue stripes, from under which lasted his long legs in socks and black shoes. He did not suspect how insidious the pipe was over the middle of the ditch… However, as it turned out, the depth there allowed for standing on the bottom.

When Yasha got back to us, the colors of the shirt clinging to his torso bore generous additions of slimy green. He had nothing to lose anymore and went for the second time, with a tantamount success though. My loud laughter motivated Fyodor and, to maintain the honor of the graduating course, he gave me his pants too and went over the shaky piece of iron. After plumping down he was smart enough to get out at the opposite bank of the ditch.

Damn it! I was splitting my sides with their pants in my hands. They might have done it, by the by, had they not surrendered beforehand by taking their pants off. Well, at least, the Hosty was not too far off and fourth-year students without their pants was not a too seldom sight there….

My laughter seemed to turn an ominous hoot. On the arrival in Konotop, I learned that my wife was missing; she went to work a day before and hadn't been seen ever since. My mother visited Olga's aunt who neither knew a thing… At the insistent advice of my mother, I dined before going to aunt Nina in the hope of some recent news.

She shook her head sadly, nothing whatsoever. Then I went to the brick factory. It was already dark and the electric bulbs shed their hazy yellowish light inside of the main workshop floor building. As it turned out, the Konotop brick factory didn't use a circle kiln, being equipped instead with trolley-trains going in and out the kiln gate over narrow-gauge rail tracks… It seemed to be a break, and on the entire workshop floor, I saw just one man and inquired him about Olga.

"Where should she be?" retorted he resentfully. "Whoring about the city." That moment I recognized him, it was the one she introduced me to by Deli 1 when I came back from the army. Had he remembered me? Hard to say…

I went out of the workshop floor into the night…whoring about… But, maybe she'd come to the third shift? I had nowhere to go anyway.

Climbing upon the unfinished wall in the nearby building under construction, I sat there like that owl who flew to me in my childhood at the Object, the messenger from the unknown… That's how I sat there, in the middle of night, thinking thoughts which were better be left alone and not thought at all, the thoughts that should be dropped down the road before their final completion for it did no good and there would come the moment of their critical mass going beyond the fail-safe point and—willy-nilly—you had to act already, regardless of how carefully the thoughts had been thought thru or else… but what to act?

A rectangle of yellow light sprang up in the darkness, a man came out of the workshop door and banged the light back into the dark. Soon, he opened it again, went in, and all again turned the dark night. Been out to take a leak. Nothing to do here. I go home…

The following day brought news. My sister said that Sasha Plaksin, handled Esa, who lived in Gogol Street, had seen Olga by the fishermen huts at the Seim river. He did not speak to her, yet saw there, for two days in a row.

With the exam in Latin on the following morning, I couldn’t wait for further developments, the main thing she was alive and kicking, so I left for Nezhyn.

My proficiency in Latin Lupus evaluated with "four" after my preparatory action by the door to the auditorium where he examined our course. Sending mighty echoes along the whole corridor, I roared at the top of my lungs:

"Gaudeamus igitur!.."

The disappearance of my wife, followed by her popping up, in absentia, at the place I wouldn't like to think of further, was surely putting me off, but having started you couldn’t but go on:

"Juvenes dum sumus!.."

Lupus jumped out of the door to make sure it was I who loved his Latin so loudly, and later, when I got seated in front of him at the examination desk, he acted like a skilled worker at a conveyor belt – opened my grade book, entered "four", closed it, handed back to me. Fare the well, O, Lingua Latina….