the most final
concluding work

Eera came back to the village, and I spent the night in their room. It happened all by itself. We lay dressed on her bed and kept hugging and pressing more and more tighter and closer to each other, and then there remained nowhere any closer. Only I did not want to creak the bed, like Marc and Katranikha, which called for slowing down the action…

…but I still liked it.

The next day Eera admitted, "Seems, I'm thru the psychological barrier."

"Gosh! I kinda thought the physical got done with too…"

~ ~ ~

After Olya refused to marry Jan, he instantly grew Russian. The sufferings inflicted by his turned down love peeled all the varnish of civilization off the Czech European. He never learned the language though, but he dropped shaving and walked around in bristles wearing a black padded jacket, from under which he took a bottle of vodka—at uneven intervals—and swallowed from its neck, like Validol or some other medication. Sort of homeopathy in the Bolshevik style…

On the last night before our departure from the village, Vera, with a lot of care, prepared a bed for me and Eera in the next room, which had already got vacated. I did not turn the light off, and later Eera told me how much she was confounded at the sight of what I was getting on top of her with.

In the morning, before the arrival of the buses, she kept mum, hardly talking to me except for "yes", "no", "nothing". I did not manage then to bring out, that her mood resulted from Olya's forewarning that all we had had there was merely a "collective-farm affair" and back in Nezhyn, I would not give Eera another look.

When the buses came, I boarded neither of them, but put the guitar over my shoulder and walked towards the windbreak belt along the Moscow highway at the distant horizon, to go hiking to Baturin and from there to Konotop…

"Rumors have it, you've got an affair with a teacher's daughter?"

"They say, you've got married?"

Yes, she had and was in Nezhyn on a flying visit to get aright some papers, and dropped into Room 72 in the Hosty, before leaving for Mongolia where her husband was sent to serve after graduating his military school. By the by, he realized she was not a virgin. After the first wedding night he asked, well, they say, that women, usually, as if would, like, compare… "Yes, that's true," she answered and didn't add a word to it.

However, sometimes you'd better make love, not talk. And we lay on the former Fyodor's and currently my bed because it was by the window. The first and only time in my life, I was with a married woman, and that's only for the old sake's' sake.

When we got dressed and hugged goodbye each other, she exclaimed, twice, "I'm a whore!"

Yes, and sounding way too happy, like, Archimedes in his famous jogging after a bath. "Eureka! I found myself and I know what I gonna do in Mongolia!"

Farewell, Nadya. Whatever and regardless, you're the most cloudless love in my life…

The senior overseer kept true his threats to me. And there was a general meeting of the English Department with just one issue on the agenda: petitioning the Institute Rectorate to send me down.

The day before it, on Veerich's advice, I called the meeting of my course-mates—well, of those living in the Hosty—who gathered in Room 72, to rally the ranks, so to say… Veerich was a current fourth-year student, who also entered the Institute after his hitch.

They crowded in, got seated on each other's laps – all girls, except for Igor and Volodya. I'd never have believed that such a swarm could fit into our pencil-box room. So, I had to perch on the window sill. It was some rally of supporters! Damn! They came together united by one wish – to admire me crushed, wrung out of my image, crucified on that windowsill. The saliva was dripping even from their eyes, like by those public execution goers. They came to lynch me beforehand, impatient to wait for the general meeting, because in Bolshevik I turned my nose up at our Department girls. They craved to quarter me, impale, to put me at the stake for that unpardonable slogan – "Phil-Fac forever!"

One of the girls even accused me of uttering to her something eye-to-eye, which she wouldn't forget until her last day and never forgive me for saying that. She even had to quench a sob, when telling her sad story. Everyone rushed to ask eagerly—what words were they?—but she only blew her nose and repeated her oath to carry them with her to the grave. Even I got intrigued – what kind of so stirring words might I have known? Moreover, until that moment it never occurred to me she was from my course, I could swear to see her for the first time!

Then I got tired of that Lynch trial session. "Okay," said I, "many thanks for your most kind support, but I still have to prepare my homework for tomorrow's classes." Irina from Bakhmuch nearly choked with chortling…

At the meeting, after the overseer's declamation, a couple of my course-mates took the floor to confirm, that, yes, I went to work only when I wanted to, and shamelessly slept on the oilcloth.

Then Veerich attempted at breaking the monotonous mood. He leaned on the lectern and, facing the audience, began to broadcast what kind of a reliable comrade and friend I was, and recently I did my best to rescue a couple of freshman girls subjected to hooligan harassment in the Count's Park. I bravely rushed at the villains, although one of them had a neck from a broken bottle in his hands… Here, Veerich stepped out from behind the lectern to demonstrate for the audience the proper way of gripping a spalled off neck in your hand, and commented that such a weapon was more dangerous than a common knife. The audience froze in awed attention to the disclosed details…

On the whole, he did not deviate too much. That day Slavic and Twoic ran up to Room 72 from the hostel lobby. There was a first-year student, they said, in a fit of hysterics 'cause some guys had stopped her girlfriend in the park and were keeping her there. The 3 of us raced to the indicated place and shooed off 3 local guys. And the saved mantrap started to scream her guts out, that we were busters who ruined her personal life. It seemed one of the would-be rapists had become her target. Damn! Don't call me anymore to rescue a twat gone a-hunting!. However, the detail with the bottle's neck was a free-style fantasy flight brooded by Veerich’s imagination.

In the end, I was given the floor. "Everyone is forging his own destiny. Here is mine, white-hot, right from the forge and now it depends on you how it will turn out…" Then I gave out a repentance à la Marc Novoselytsky at the meeting dedicated to the Game of Parties and with a minimal margin—who's for? against? abstained?—I received a severe reprimand with the final note of warning…

~ ~ ~