the most final
concluding work

With all that in mind, don't forget about my main occupation – studying. I was sitting thru the practical classes in my group, and at times attended lectures for the students of the whole course, I passed credits and examinations. Besides, I never dropped self-education.

In the second year, I was fortunate enough to meet The Cavalry Army and The Odessa Stories by Ivan Babel. He convinced me that even after the Great October Revolution there still remained writers in Russia and not just sholokhovs-proskurins-markovs. At the third course, in the institute reading hall, I discovered magazines with The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. It was a thunderbolt… In my final year, the endless, like the flow of the Nile, Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers were attending the institute to keep me company thru the long lecture hours.

I don't account for commonplace pulp fictions not related to my education, that was read for a pastime. Like, when there was a stir in the Hosty, "Ah, Efremov! Thais of Athens! The peak and limit of wildest dreams!" Ilya Lipes gave that hetaera to me for only 2 days. So after the midnight lights-out, I even had to go in the corridor and read it under the lamp above the doors to the washroom and the men's toilet.

I was sitting in a chair, dragged along, with my sheepskin coat thrown over the shoulders but not covering my bare legs because I was too lazy to dress after reading in bed before the curfew. So what? Let them imagine I'm on the beach…

But with all due respect to Lipes, that's not literature but just another illustration from the textbook The History of the Ancient World for the fifth grade of secondary school. When a schoolboy, I liked those gaudy pictures of the Egypt slaves dragging stone blocks to the pyramids, of the Roman legions on their march and other suchlike masterpieces. Some seductive means of education, no denying, yet comics strips and literature are not the same things… However, you cannot know beforehand where a find might be awaiting you, and where a loss.

Sitting out there, by the dark frozen window, with my eyes scuttling along the lines that described an ancient festival, where stark naked participants were having a ritual run thru the darkness of night, I had a vision again. Just for a fraction of a second I got into a dark Greek night and ran, stark naked, thru the black shadows of dark trees under the big moist stars in the sky… But then – flip! – and I am back again in the sheepskin coat, on a chair in the cold light from the lonely fluorescent lamp in the ceiling above the gray concrete floor getting lost in the pushed-off darkness of a corridor in the fast asleep hostel, and my body still tense from that pair of plunging step-jumps in my run thru that split-second, and my skin still feeling the chill of night from that distant past…

No better garbage was all those theoretic Grammars, Theorophonics, Scientific Communism, Communist Aesthetics, and oodles of likewise farragoes devoid of any rhyme or reason obligatory taught at the institute… Although, I do understand, in part, the lecturers who poured them out; once upon a time they had to learn all that shit themselves, and now, gaining leverage at the past sufferings, they tormented us, students, because of their dissatisfaction with so crappy life design.

"All work and no play in perineum makes Jack a dull zygote…"

Still, those lectures have certain value when approached properly prepared, I happened to even like one of the theoretical lectures on... grammar?.. phonetics?. Well, in short, Scnar it was who delivered that Lecture of lectures. It’s only that his last name sounded kinda disparaging handle, but he himself was an acceptable geezer. When I ventured to be locked up in the city hospital because of the medical staff at the institute hadn’t antiviral means to bridle my temperature galloping with so immodest frequency, he lent me The Quiet American by Graham Green, in English. I'd hardly survive that week there without that quiet companion because the ward-mate patient from the next bed kept window curtains bubbling with his mighty snore…

Now, before that incredible lecture, when on a weekend in Konotop, I visited Lyalka. He wasn't home and his brother Rabentus warmed me up. I had never come across such grass yet, like some dry emaciated skeletons of tiny twigs. And never had I been in the like jag. After a joint for 2, I watched Rabentus as if thru a lens – his top and chin got narrow and distant while the middle of his mug stretched in a disproportionate zoom-in. He noticed that I had drifted beyond the limits, and advised to rinse my smiler with water from the tap. No use.

But I remembered that I still had to go to Nezhyn. On the way to the station, I dropped to Igor Recoon on Peace Avenue. His mother was cordiality itself, "O, how so nice to meet you! Please, get seated and have a snack before the journey."

As if I could keep sitting! I was dragged back and forth – from the living room to the balcony, from the balcony to the living room. On the way hither-thither, I asked Igor to find some piece of paper for jotting down the things I would say. Something like:

"The stooping sky beheaded dull jumble of the world…"

and then sort of:

…the shaggy clouds cut thru the Helmet-Skull unable to fend off welter-onset at the brain beseiged…"

In short, complete bullshit with surrealistic stink, or else I would be dragged into them those surreal quicksands and drowned tracelessly for good. So, it's only on the train that I came back, in between the Plisky and Kruty stations.

As for those psychedelic scraps, Zhomnir later placed them in the faculty wall newspaper next to Translator, he liked them way too much.

But all this not about that but about the lecture turned out by Scnar, it’s only that the memories of that grass keep distracting me, kinda like red herring, sort of. That time Rabentus provided me with a pinch for a couple of joints and, fully aware of what kind of thermonuclear dope it was, I did not abuse it anymore but showed moderation…

Well, now, in such a state—from moderate to quite quiet—I slowly floated to the lecture, kinda zeppelin, because making for the hostel seemed awfully long and winding way at the moment. And we then sat down, so as to make room for Scnar to read it from behind the lectern. And I grew more and more admired what a classy thing it was! The plywood all so yellow and well polished, and gleaming pleasantly because of that, you just couldn’t take your eyes off that varnished thing.

But then I suddenly couldn't get it – the peaceful flow clicked out of the groove and very obviously too, replaced with some affronting discrepancy. Scnar switched over to Latin!. I concentrated but – yes! – exactly Latin… And he was jetting it out even more fluentlier, in a way, than Lupus the Latinist, only that he sounded somehow hollow, and kept his eyes directly upward, like, to you I call de Profundis! I cocked up – was that Scnar, or not Scnar after all?

That’s why I started to watch more closely and noticed that above behind the lectern of all the Scnar there remained nothing but a bust. I mean it, atop the yellow box there stood the bust of Scnar even without his arms – just only shoulders. Yet the head continued to speak on all the same. And on his upper lip there notched a tiny cleavage, which began to grow deeper and darker, so as to turn into the toothbrush mustache of Adolf Hitler. Well, go and fuck yourself! In a Soviet institute, Hitler's bust reads a lecture and, on top of all – in Latin! Good fellow Scnar! Not every lecturer would have the nerve to pull such a trick. Without him, I would still think that if there's a lecture it's necessarily bullshit. Them those stereotypes, they are really die-hard customers, you know…

And with Zhomnir I studied at his home… On finishing another of translations, I brought it to his place, we sat at the table pushed to the wall in his living room and he was shredding it in a dragon-like style – here's flat, there's bland…

Yes, I felt it before his picking the holes out, that those were bosh places, but why? And what was the workaround?

"That's your problem. Find it."

"Maybe, then put it just so and so?"

"No! That’d be out of all scotch and notch!"

To please him was simply impossible, he would always find what to find fault with. And because of that, the work with Zhomnir was a good school not to give up…