the most final
concluding work

To mark the most obvious things is the hardest of tricks. I had been raiding weed plantations as far as the Kandeebynno itself, while in the neighbor's garden, right over the fence splitting our plots, there grew a dense coppice of cannabis. That's what a limited outlook means. I was looking into the distance and couldn't see under my very nose. The situation called for the restoration of historical justice which I did at night and, to cover the tracks, heaved the weed looted from the neighbor's garden over his fence to the next lane, and from there back, round the corner, to our wicket and up to the attic in the shed… The quality of tested samples was simply excellent. I shared some part of the booty with Lyalka for him to get on high, and feel that not for nothing he was warming me up in those two years…

You strike a lode and there comes another. In Nezhyn, in the plot by an inconspicuous khutta in the Count's Park, right across the road from the Leninist Komsomol cinema, there stood 5 ample bushes of weed without any fencing whatsoever. No saint would pass by and withstand the temptation…

But then there arose a serious problem: how to store the abundant harvest? To keep it under the bed in the Hosty?. Very funny, indeed.

I walked around all of the hostel looking for a suitable nook but in vain. And then in the washroom on the fourth floor, I saw a desk with a drawer. I did not know how came it was there, or for how long it would tarry in the washroom, but being desperately pressed for finding any storage place (I couldn't just leave the weed in the park with the rains setting in, couldn't I?) I just dumped it in the drawer. As a precaution measure, I turned the desk and pushed it with its drawer close to the wall, so that no one would horse around. Then, as necessary, I was visiting the washroom to pinch off a few heads for the current consumption…

From the patronized collective farm, my course-mates returned in a state of complete shock, dumbfounded, all lost in the deep contemplation about life's purpose, meaning, and requirements. That is, was or was not their former understanding of and approach to those concepts correct? As it turned out, during their patronage assistance 2 of local guys there had a knife fight. Because of whom? Because of Tanya who was studying at my group.

A year before, those ruthless bitches of my course-mates asked me to pretend I fell in love with her. Just for fun, because she was most inarticulate and unattractive. And I—the stupid moose—was quick to execute what asked. "Tanya! I love you with all of the depth! And what is your shared feeling?" For 2 days I pestered her at the breaks until she asked to leave her alone. It looked like she was going to cry, I got ashamed and shut up.

Well, now, how do you like it, ladies? Who was chosen by the guys as the prize for their berserk passion? That's why the girls were now following her with furtive looks of envy and respect. And she walked the corridors with pensive pride as if she got it something about herself which she had never expected. And her glances at me became not as negating as they used to be. What if I had not been just sporting last year? Thank you, dagger guys, for the alibi…

But I still was worried about the cannabis stored in so inappropriate manner. A desk drawer in the washroom was anything but the right place for it. Any block with elementary literacy level on the subject would inevitably get attracted by its poignantly alluring fragrance and deduct the source of the whiff because the desk somehow did not belong among the tiled bare walls and sinks of the washroom. Besides, the Phys-Math students might start to ask themselves unnecessary questions as to why I started to frequent the washroom on their floor.

So with the first snow in November, I took weed out for relocation to another place of storage. My plan was to hide it in the dormer on the Old Building roof because I noted a mighty welded ladder leading up there from behind the building…

Late in the evening, Slavic, Twoic, and Eera accompanied me to the Old Building backyard, like, the state commission at the launch of a manned spaceship from the Baikonur site.

I passed my overcoat and hat to Eera, thrust the package with weed under my shirt and started off… At the initial after-launch stages all went on in a standard mode. The ladder vibrations stayed within the safety gauge, it’s only that the iron rungs were icy cold making the lift endless. In the times of Gogol, they built the floors two-three times taller than presently.

At the point of entering the roof, there cropped up unforeseen problems. The ladder did not reach the roof itself, ending under the eaves. It was necessary to catch hold of the tinplate above the ladder and go over its jutting edge onto the roof. Of that moment I recollect the uncompromisingly dark night, in the surrounding void, there were just 3 of us – the tinplate, the darkness and I…

The roof itself was rather slippery, although not overly steep; I had to plant my steps onto the low ridges of seams between the sheet blocks. Getting to the dormer, I found its window sealed tightly with thick planks nailed from within. Thank you for your visit!.

On the way back, I suddenly slipped, when nearing the place where I had to get over the tinplate at the roof edge, yet I did not fall, but straightened up, gnashed my teeth and, addressing myself, spoke up to the darkness, "Tickling the public’s expectation, eh? You bitch!" Then I went down on all fours, dangled my legs over the roof edge and groped with my feet for the uppermost rung in the ladder.

Halfway down, I was caught up by the mortifying belated thought that the evaded dive from the roof wouldn't be as bad as crash-landing on someone from the commission in the launch-pad.

And again I kicked in a door. Remarkably, it was the same one though Ilya Lipes did not live in that room anymore. It was inhabited by the current fourth-year students and among them Vitya Kononevich, who imprudently borrowed from Zhora Ilchenko The Godfather, together with A Learner's Dictionary of Current English by Hornby, both imported from India.

How insignificant and trivial, at first glance, might seem the things eventually leading to a real jolt in the flow of life! Say, you ask Zhora to lend you The Godfather for a couple of weeks, and then you come to the hostel and see the door of your room kicked brutally in… By the way, this time no shaky fingers were observed, the skills of vital importance get formed surprisingly quickly. Probably, the fact that I was working not for Veerich but for myself had also its telling effect.

The Godfather, a novel by Mario Puzo was stolen not out of idle curiosity (would or wouldn't the action set my fingers a-shaking?), neither for upgrading my door-kicking skills, but just to translate it into Russian. The novel, as well as its author, happened to be rather thick, about 400 pages. With regard to the way of its acquisition, Konotop was a more suitable place for plunging into the translation work.

It took several months of intent labor efforts to render the book turned out at the Penguin Publishing House into a weighty pile of numbered thick notebooks filled with my handwriting, in ink of various hues of the blue. The whole bunch comprising The Godfather I passed to Lyalka and his wife Valentina for reading, of the subsequent movements and general fate thereof I am aware no more than of where swam and how fared the cannibal shark from The Jaws, also in my Russian handwriting.

In the course of the second translation, about halfway thru towards the completion, my father cooperated by sharing his critical remarks… It happened when working about the passage that described a party in the Hollywood club designed and equipped for the recreational activities of Hollywood movie stars, I experienced certain problems with the rendering of the American English collocation "blow job" into Russian. The descriptive variants seemed over-lengthy, while the shorter options looked outrageously obscene. When in labor pains, I tore another unsuccessful attempt at translation out from the notebook and shoved it into the kitchen stove to be used for kindling.

On coming from work, my father opened the cast-iron door to fill the stove firebox with wood, picked the crushed sheet of paper, smoothed it out and studied the lines before asking, "What fucking hooey is this?"

I did not object to his instant estimation for 2 reasons. Firstly, I knew that passages perceived in the form of printed text as eroticism did look vulgar porn when presented in handwriting. It suffices to recall the thin notebook with a handwritten story, circulating among the senior students at School 13, which contained a passage running as follows "…she threw her legs in fishnet lace up over his collar-bones…" It’s hard to say why, but those fishnet legs were immediately and inseparably associated by me with the Parisian Eiffel Tower. Some pretty uphill job it would be to have a sex (as well as to defend erotica) with the Eiffel Tower bestriding you. On the other hand, who knows how those same legs would sway me if met in the orderly line of typographic set. Appearances influence our judgments.

Secondly, I always respected the subtle literary instinct of my father. Thus, from the newspaper Trood, he read only the TV program and, with a fleeting glance at the rest of the headlines, announced his exhaustive conclusion, "Neither rhyme nor reason – kiss a flea in the brick." And he never mistook, crisp and to the point. Besides, he possessed some amazing linguistic ingenuity. Perhaps, because of his Ryazan roots; the land of Ryazan always lay at the crossroads of language contacts.

Well, for example: seated at the kitchen table, with his gray brows taunted strenuously above the plastic rim of his glasses, he's busy a-tinkering to insert some hooey into another one. I cracked along, between the table and the stove, from the door to the window only to take an abrupt turn back to the door. Without taking his eyes from the hooeys in his hands, the father inquires, "Why tyrtyrting?"

No dictionary would present an entry for the word, yet what a juicy verb it is! Brimming with immensely elastic plasticity! Its sound form alone will let you grasp with utmost precision the action's quintessence, as well as the tense inner state of the poor asshole all in a dither. And—most importantly—the word got born spontaneously, right now, while this fickle hooey doesn't want to enter into the other fucker.

"But could one keep back tyrtyrting when the treppa has pibzed already?!."

Both workpieces drop from his hands onto the table, the father gives me a hard look from over the black plastic rim of the glasses slid halfway down his nose, then he says, "pfui!"

And here lies, by the way, the exhaustive key to the muchly discussed "fathers-and-children" controversy – they reproduce their likes only to pooh-pooh or pfui-pfui when it's too late.