the most final
concluding work

We walked round the corner bypassing the marble plaque "Here N. V. Gogol studied in…", and stopped beneath one of the tall XIX-century windows overhead. I was appalled by the wanness of her face, not sickly pallid though but like the pure white of exquisite, almost transparent, porcelain. And I couldn’t tell what clamped my heart in a mightier grip – her beauty or my pity for her.

What a witless brute I’ve been, torturing both her and myself for so long, and so savagely! At last, I am embracing her again. She both laughs and cries in my chest. O, how I love her!.

That cursed month she was coming home and just lay down prostrate overwhelmed by the pain felt verbatim physically, and nothing mattered, absolutely nothing. Mommy did not know what to do, "What's wrong with you, Eera?"

"Nothing."

Stupid beast! Bastard! How pale she is! How desperately beautiful. "Come on to the Hosty. The room is vacant."

She happily hurried home to change and tell her mother that she was celebrating and staying overnight at a girlfriend's.

The hostel was also empty. Except for Room 72 on the third floor. That was our room, our hostel, our celebration. The Feast of Reconciliation…

Sveta might nigh spoil the feast… Taking advantage of the vacuum in the silent corridor of locked doors, I ventured to the toilet in my underpants and on the way back I dropped into the washroom. It was there that Sveta screwed me over, "What's that!"

And she began to talk my ear off that she'd never put up with any personnel extension without preliminary coordination. She was forgiving me Eera, forgiving Maria, but who was that new slut in my room?

"Are you crazy? That's Eera!"

Well, she had just peeped in and there was someone standing by the window. Where could Eera possibly get such a cute nightie from?

As if I knew; I saw it for the first time too…

On the second day, I left the Hosty in the morning. The big deli in the main square was stormed by the crowd after a rare deficit: white-and-blue cans of condensed milk.

Proud of my hunting skills, I returned to Room 72 and Eera greeted me from the bed by the window, "Wow! You brought condensed milk?" I was f-f.. well, I mean, flabbergasted. "You… what the… er… that is, how?"

"You had such a swagging nose, anyone could read it."

And possessing such skills to write counterfeit letters? There was something, not that there… In short, I surrendered, and we started to live on together as one tightly united family. In learned books, they call such life-style polygamy in which I was the joining link, sort of.

Sveta did not kick up unneeded dust anymore. She clearly knew her exact place – after Eera, before Maria. Officially, the girls were not introduced but knew about the existence of the rest. Eera and Sveta, for sure, and Maria, most likely, as well.

Talking to the darlings, I was not especially keen on that topic – who knows what about who, but Nezhyn was a provincial town where everyone knew everything about everyone else… When in the third year, I had a pedagogical practice at School 2 and once at the break a teacher of theirs started divulging a kinda disparaging information about Maria. When at it, she carefully kept her eyes off me addressing exclusively my course-mate who also practiced at that school.

That tootsy of my course-mate was a very studious student, and she took lots of pains when preparing for her first lesson at that practice. At home, she collected all her dolls and puppets and arranged them in a row seated upon the piano lid, so as to get properly prepared, "Good morning, children! Who is on duty today?."

But the newlywed couple on our floor in the Hosty were well matured. After their marriage, they got a whole room for themselves. The students living there before were moved to other rooms, only the furniture remained.

At times, to relax after intense mental work in their educational process, they arranged "races" on Saturdays. A couple of other students from the floor were invited then for the overnight stay, and after the dinner they started the "race" heats with the change of partners. I do not know the details though, I did not participate in those races, Vitya Kononevich was the principal jockey there…

~ ~ ~

In summer, I was passing my pioneer practice at the camp "The Young Construction Worker" near the town of Sednev. At the times of Chernigov Princedom there stood a mighty fortress for defense from Tatars, Lithuanians, or Novgorodians – whoever would come to plunder. And now of all the fortress there remained just one tower. From the tower, a steep winding descent led down to the bridge connecting the sandy banks of the Snov river. After the bridge, you got into a small pinewood with two pioneer camps, side by side: "The Young Construction Worker" and "The Young Chemist", and then followed the boundless vistas of wheat fields…

My trainee position at the camp was that of a substitute caretaker. That meant that when the caretaker of some platoon went to Chernigov, I was to oversee the on-duty kids from her platoon laying tables in the canteen for breakfast, midday meal, tea, and supper, and if on that day the camp was taken out to the river, I had to watch that the platoon's pioneers did not splash outside the iron grating but only within the fenced part of the calm flow.

Going to Chernigov was not so easy because of transportation problems, and caretakers seldom went there. So, my remaining job was to switch on the music in the radio-unit room broadcasting thru the camp loudspeakers, and also to announce on the microphone the "dead-hour" and "lights-out". I don't know why, but those announcements I gave out with the feline drawl of a fag, "Attayntion! Leets-ouwt for thee camp!."

The radio-unit was installed in the room of the senior pioneer leader, partitioned from a small gymnasium whose only equipment was one bed on which I slept. The door in the far wall of the gym opened onto the stage of a small open-air auditorium bounded by Pine trees.

I was kicking back, and reading what would turn up in the camp library, and growing my beard because after the camp I was going to work with the student construction platoon of the NGPI. In short, I was wallowing in the life of reprobate unshaven renegade…