the most final
concluding work

All those painful crises in the relationship called for general relaxation, and restoration of the dented self-esteem. These factors led to the emergence of Sveta, who also lived in the Hosty, and Maria, who did not live there but came on occasional visits, and more oftener I went to spend a night at her place…

Despite the fact, that Sveta studied at the Biological Department, she lived on the fifth floor in the Hosty. During one of her visits from up there to the third floor, she got vanquished by my noble continence, like, a knight-errant driven by merciless weather conditions to a roadside brothel…

I had just returned from seeing Eera to the vestibule in her staircase-entrance when they told me there was chicken soup on the table in Room 77. One of the advantages which the student canteen apportions you is that after visiting it you still can find enough room in your system for chicken soup, any time of day. I entered the room and turned on the light.

On one of the four beds, there lay a girl who did not make a secret of the fact that she had nothing on apart from the bedsheet wrapped about her. More importantly, there was a pot on the table and a couple of spoons. Taking the lid off the pot uncovered the presence of the soup, about two servings. I wiped off one spoon, sat on a vacant bed and started eating. The soup was cold, but unmistakably of chicken. The girl protested from inside her bedsheet that she couldn't sleep with the light on. Turning it off, I threw the door open, because eating soup in complete dark is uncomfortable, so I had to finish it off in the dim illumination from the distant corridor lamp. Some delicious soup, I liked it, even though cold. Then I left.

"The less we love a woman,

The more she is turned on…"

Thus, I began to heal the wounds from the torturing love with medicinal visits to the fifth floor in the hostel. Sveta was simply created for that. Not very tall, of a boyish haircut, she had a slender body and generous breasts. She was good at anything, but her special dish was giving a blow job. Besides, Nature-Mommy endowed her with a valueless blissful gift: a mere touch to her nipples did make her go off for fucking crazily, whining, and there went you, in her wake, to boot.

In addition to psychological impediments formed by the Soviet school system, at times I rammed into unbending ideological dissonance with Eera. Like on that occasion when the institute Rectorate ordered a volunteer clean-up in the Count's Park. The girls of my course were raking the fallen leaves in great heaps, and Igor Recoon and I set them on fire.

After translating The Jaws, I knew that burning leaves in the open was a crime against the planet's atmosphere; there was a short passage in the book on that particular point. But could you prove anything to anyone? "Sehrguey, don't put on airs! Everyone does it. We're not in America.”

When in Rome do as Romans do. The Count's Park got drowned in the thick white smoke and we dispersed… Bypassing the Old Building, I saw a girl in sportswear and liked her from afar. I didn't even know why she attracted me so much. Well, the wide white kerchief with big black spots around her neck, that's for one, but certainly not only because of that; and not for the sneakers. I came closer – what the f-f.. damn! – but that's Eera herself!. And, way too deeply moved by the pleasant surprise, I blurted at once about my falling in love with her again a moment before.

"You did not known it was me but fell in love?"

"Yes! Can you imagine?"

"How could you!"

"But it’s you who I loved!"

"You hadn't not known it was me!"

"Hey, think a bit! Since it turned out to be you, then I have no chance to fall in love with anyone else. It's only you that I can love."

"Just a minute ago you loved someone who wasn’t me, and you'll do it again!"

"Who else can I love? Can’t you see it's only you who turns me on?"

"You still can't get it!"

"Okay. So I shouldn't have fallen in love with you?"

"No!"

"Never?"

"No, never!"

A vicious circle – love me but never fall in love with me. But she looked real cool in her sports, and she moved so classy…

It was enough for Ilya Lipes to drop an unfamiliar word "she-oxen" and I followed him like a puppy on the lead. "Come on! Let's visit the she-oxen!" The casually used term triggered an imagination flight picturing a skulk of free of complexes hetaeras, but, in reality, they were the same girls as in the hostel. One she-ox was throwing her birthday party.

And now in that half-dark room in an old private house, we were, like, having fun, like, dancing all-out fast dance. Then I would lie with some of them on one of the beds in the next room, and she would in half-sec get topless while blocking any further movements, like any other oxen-vixen, with their usual obnoxious sermon, "Do not torture yourself, nor me!" As if she was strong-armed or blackmailed to go to bed with me. Why coming, if you’re so stalwart lesbian or in your everlasting times? To get free rape?!. And so I got blues and went out in the corridor to ring Eera for to disclose over again I loved her, an emo chump.

And she got it right away, "What music is there? Where are you?"

Usually, I called her from the booth in the Hosty’s lobby which was almost soundproof, that odd vestibule after the ever-locked door among those 2 entrances, separated from its operational twin by the glass-partition. We would talk for hours until her people at home needed the telephone or some students started to knock at the glass door from the lobby. The talks about absolutely nothing, I just loved to hear her voice. She would say a word over there and I got carried beyond myself wallowing in thrill, in here…

"Just somewhere, I'll explain later. Not a phone talk. I love you. Bye."

And later, I had to drive a fool about a bro drag dealer arriving in Nezhyn for a visit who asked me to show him the way to a safe house, where the music was played on the account of his arrival, but I did not stay there and left after calling her on the phone… Some stuff that would hardly fit even in both elephant's ears, to believe such a helpless bullshit one had to be very eager to believe. Although, she might have believed after those icons… Ah, yes, the icons…

They told me that Veerich wanted to see me, and I went to his place. On the winter holidays, he was skiing in the Carpathians and broke one of his legs and both skis. So he kept to bed, plastered. He and his student wife rented a flat in the city. When she went out to the kitchen, Veerich started his monologue about the too far-reaching dirty hand of Zionism groping for our cultural heritage and spiritual assets. That all was to the fact, that Ilya Lipes had 3 to 4 Orthodox icons in his briefcase, under his bed in the hostel. Somewhere they had bombed a village church and now Lipes wanted to push the catch off like antique rarities. How to bear a so cocky impropriety? If not for the plaster, Veerich would never allow trampling our holy shrines… In short, could I bomb the icons back and restore historical justice?

In the morning I waited until the students left the hostel for their respective classes. One kick from the drowsy silence of corridor at the unsuspecting door and the lock jumped out… Everything as described – the briefcase under the bed, the icons in the briefcase. Them those Serbs have a good nose for such things, even in the third generation. The icons looked like the one Grandma Katya had in her khutta, only on bigger boards.

I left the briefcase where it was, and took the icons to the washroom where my black "diplomat" case was already waiting for them under the sink in that singled-out compartment, the loot fitted in perfectly. And that’s when I felt all the truth of the popular saying about stealing chickens. "But your hands do tremble! Been stealing chickens, eh?"

My fingers quivered quite uncontrollably; but not the way they shook after the capsizing in the UAZ-66 truck. That tremor had been a kinda shallow one, while in the washroom, my fingers were, like, knocking against each other. That's what sacrilege brings about… I didn't care for the finger-prints. Ilya would not go to the criminal investigation, "Please, check for the traces on my briefcase where I kept the icons from a robbed temple." However, taking the catch directly to Veerich’s was not correct. So, I asked Eera to keep my briefcase at home for a couple of days, she was on a sick leave at the moment.

Then, like an exemplary student, I attended the classes and, already after the canteen, climbed up to the third floor in the Hosty where I was met by a noisy commotion in the corridor, the Lipes' digs had been broken in!

I approached his room and saw that, yes, the door was indeed in need of repair. Dirty bastards! And what's missing?

Ilya never responded and only kept tut-tutting in bitter frustration…

~ ~ ~