the most final
concluding work

My brother Sasha worked at the PMS in a team of repairers. They were in charge of replacing the ties in the railway tracks and ramming the gravel under them with a massive dildo-type hand-vibrator.

Our sister Natasha, while out of work, was taking my daughter Lenochka to the kindergarten and back…

To the request of my father, the personnel department at the RepBase let me have a temporary job, till end summer, at the construction shop floor there. With three permanent workmen, I was demolishing and building some walls within the RepBase grounds. The most straining part in the job was long waits before they brought mortar for us to start our work. There I earned a fig plus another fig and one more fig, but then the work was just to get seated and sit tight, or stand up and stand patiently. Anyway, the RepBase was fully satisfied with my masonry skills.

Having nothing better to do, I again grew a beard and the RepBase workforce handled me "Fidel Castro". My father liked it, maybe because he and Fidel were born in the same year. When run out of the smoke, I went to beg from my father. He was a locksmith at the shop floor with strict regulations about smoking, which only was allowed in specially designated places, like an open gazebo in the yard…

My father was respected on the shop floor for his golden hands and readiness to share the know-how… When coming across a bungler wasting both himself and the stuff to turn out a pitiful throwaway, you can quietly scoff to yourself and go away minding your business. Not so was my father’s ways, because of his intolerance to illiteracy.

With a painful wince in his face, he would stand by, as if made to watch some vulgar act of dicking around, then he'd come up, take the instrument from the dilettante’s hands and show how to go about that particular task, "See? It’s just a lead-pipe cinch, easier than boiling turnips!" That's why he was respected, and they did not take offense at his grumpy mutter, "Really have to do it askew? So they taught you, eh?"

The majority of the RepBase workers came there from the nearby village of Popovka, and too few of then trained in the "seminary". Popovka had integrated with the RepBase so closely that in the village you could come across fencing made of helicopter blades, discarded, of course. But the blade cinched up to the stake with a piece of wire looks ugly, and fixing it by a neat binding as suggested uncle Kolya was completely another kettle of fish…

In the unpaneled half-khutta at Decemberists 13, resided auntie Zeena, a lonely pensioner. She plaited her half-gray hair into stringy maiden braids and tied them together at the back of her head. On the porch at her door, for the most of the year, there also hung a yellow braid of dried onions forming a plaited circle. Auntie Zina did not interfere with the life of the yard and smiled at everyone. Each spring, following the directive of our father, my brother and I turned the dirt in her part of the garden… Once, she was very friendly with Olga, and secretly resented my role in our divorce, but she still kept smiling even at me…

There was enough living space in our brick-paneled half-khutta of three rooms and a kitchen plus veranda, apart from the summer room in the yard under one roof with the shed. Among the inhabitants of all that area, only five-year-old Lenochka was not smoking. The rest of us smoked Belomor-Canal for 22 kopecks, except for Natasha with her filtered Metropolitan for 40 kopecks. She once counted up that the total expenditure for cigarettes by the family was 25 to 30 rubles monthly…

The summer was over and before my first departure for the fourth course at the English Department, my mother asked if I would bring and introduce to her my Eera from Nezhyn. She knew about Eera from Natasha's report and subsequent questioning of me. And she had even seen Eera on the all-out photograph taken at the Borzna wedding. The picture was staged in the photo studio of the district center, where the guests and relatives of the newlyweds were standing in three rows on the long benches of descending height, behind the happy bride and groom in their chairs.

My mother asked me to show who from the multitude was Eera, and I answered, "Find for yourself." In the picture, I stood in the upper row on the right, surrounded by 3 girls, and Eera was in the diagonally opposite corner.

My mother's finger touched her face, "That's her?"

I felt that she, for some reason, would rather be mistaken, but I couldn't lie to my mother. "How d'you guess?"

"I don't know."

Therefore, in September following the serene summer of 1977, the meeting of your mother and grandmother took place at 13, Decemberists Street…

Of course, I had been bringing Eera to Konotop even before that and introduced her to the high life of the polite circle in local society. We visited Loony, where the demonstration gladiatorial performance was staged on the parquet in honor of her visit, I even had, just in case, to block her off with myself nearby the stage. Then Lyalka led us to his sidekick's who, in his treasure box made of a human skull, kept the high-quality Gimp’s weed, named so after its meritorious producer.

The sidekick lived on the fourth floor with his cat, whom he grabbed regularly to hurl against the wall or anything at all. Not everyone brings up their pets by unsystematic fondling. He shared that sometimes at night he got waked up by a gentle touch of her fangs at his Adam's apple. She did not spoil the throat skin though, just held it in a kinda soft reminder who was the midnight commander in the place they shared…

When we were about to leave, Eera discovered the loss of her gloves. The sidekick swore he had not seen any. Burning with shame, I began to speculate about the gloves being forgotten at Loony, yet Lyalka insisted on the search to go on until they were eventually spotted, behind the floor mirror in the hallway. Some cats are more cunning at theft than even such attested pilferers as magpies…

In the staircase, there was, naturally, no light, and I walked first, groping for the steps with my feet, and did not even hold onto the railing, like the brave tin soldier or the one-eyed leader in the gang of the blind from the "Eulenspiegel" movie, because in the pitch dark I had Eera's hand on my shoulder, and Lyalka was holding on hers. So we descended…

At that Eera's visit, we spent the night at Skully's, who had already become an Adoptee and lived in a fairly big khutta where two "Jawa" bikes stood in the garage – one for him and the other for his wife's younger brother.

Eera and I were left in a separate bedroom and, going out, Skully and his wife significantly hung a terry towel on the back of the bed… When we lay down and from the "Spidola" receiver there sounded the introduction to my favorite "Since I'm loving you" by Led Zeppelin, I realized that nothing better could be provided even by Las Vegas…

On another occasion, we even visited Decemberists 13, in the daytime, naturally, when there was no one there. After champagne and a joint, we got in a deeply playful mood so that auntie Zina in her part of the khutta panicked, ran to our front door, and kicked up alarmed drumming at it. Probably, the echoes of our frolics passed thru the partition wall making her think of bloody murder in the canonical traditions of the post-war bandit period in the history of the city because it’s highly unlikely that the old innocent lady had any notion of hardcore scenes and stuff…

So, Eera met my brother and sister at the Loony dances, and she knew Lenochka unilaterally from the pictures shot at the photo session around Rabentus' dovecot, which I later pasted on the wallpaper over my bed in the Hosty…

Apart from Eera coming to Konotop to meet my parents, Slavic also was taken along. He and my sister measured each other with guarded looks but skipped sniffing. And that was correct because I brought Slavic for another purpose – I needed him to be put on the alert.

Consider me, for instance. I have an ample plantation of cannabis to keep me lavishly up to the following season, even with generous largesses to those two tail-clinging bros – Slavic and Twoic. On the other hand, I am in the habit of plundering other folks' plantations. Who'll bite the dust – sound reason or deep-rooted habit? Make your bets, gentlemen!

And what else, apart from the habit, smashes up all of the chop-logic reasoning? What drives us on and further on? What pushes to the new, the unknown?

Hope – what if the luck would have it?.

Faith – but there should be, there is somewhere!.

And Love, of course, the love to knowledge and change…