the most final
concluding work

In the late evening before the bridal, Gaina Mikhailovna offered her services for ironing the trousers of my wedding suit, which task, in her opinion, she could do virtuously because in the years of the German occupation she, a young girl Gaina, was taken from a hinterland Ukrainian village and moved to Germany to work for more than two years as a "guest-worker" in a well-to-do German family by whom she became a past master in the above-mentioned art… Strange are the shuffle-and-deal ways of the knowledge deck, but it was how I learned that

Pants Are To Be Ironed On All Four Sides.

I clearly understood the rule and firmly kept to it all my life, but at that particular moment the unconquered spirit of a young pioneer partisan awoke in me, and I rejected the offer of my the-next-day-to-be mother-in-law. Like, it was not the first time for me to iron trousers thru a piece of moistened gauze… With the ironing accomplished, I hung the trousers over the back of a chair pushed under the table and went to bed.

In the morning I was awakened by Eera's sobs in the adjacent living room. Going out there, I traced back the grim silent glare of Gaina Mikhailovna to see an undeniably hot iron print on one of the trouser-legs hanging accurately from the back of the chair. Poor Eera!

The burnt spot, albeit blurred and lacking the clear-cut outline, discernibly changed the smoky shade of dark gray in the trousers’ fabric to something greenish. I could swear that nothing of the kind was there the night before, but the spot sat on one of the two sides I had applied the iron to. It cost me helluva efforts to persuade Eera not to cancel going to the ZAGS office – we had pulled thru too much of everything to make a U-turn at the last moment. I swore with the most solemn oath to hide the damaged part of my outfit into the folds of her long wedding dress.

Do brides have always to cry on the threshold to their wedding? Poor Eera!

Then there was a very long wait at the registry office, because the witness on the groom side, Slavic, that bitch of my best man, appeared only after my brother Sasha scribbled Slavic's name instead of him. Good news that they did not check witness' passports in ZAGS.

Yes, my brother and sister came from Konotop for the wedding and departed on the same day by the 17.15 local train.

So, at last, in all its glory arrived the dazzle of the breath-taking moment in the nuptials – the happy couple were suggested to exchange the wedding rings in a token of spousal love and loyalty. Softly glided the ring on the Eera's incomparable finger – the yellow of the gold over the alabaster white skin… And now, already not as a bride, but the accomplished wife, picked she my wedding ring from the white saucer to don it on my finger. On slid the ring, in moved my finger…my finger moved in…my f-f…finger moved…

Why that bitch of the ring from Natasha got stuck on my finger joint, I have no idea because at the preliminary tests it, like, was getting over. Under my breath, I promised my young wife that, okay, I'll stick it in later, and balled my hand into a fist to hide the under-donned ring.

"The wedding ring is not a frill… Oh, no!.

Not an empty decoration…"

Poor Eera!.

But what else could she do? The incipient maternal instinct balked at having to bear you without a daddy… The recollections of my meetings with the KGBist in that very ZAGS room as well as the awareness of the iron print on my pants’ leg made me keep my eyes shyly down, however, my brother Sasha on the pictures taken at the registry office looked very well, like a young Sicilian mafioso…

According to the long-established Nezhyn tradition, the newlyweds together with their witnesses (Slavic had already replaced Sasha) took a ride in a taxi. The taxi drove to the station to honk in the square in front of it (the traffic bridge over the railway tracks had been already completed) and proceeded to the city limit by the highway to Pryluky, where a bottle of champagne was burst open, after which we returned to 26, Red Partisans Street, Apartment 11.

The wedding party was a modest one – for the closest family inhabiting the apartment, plus the two best persons. The TV was temporarily exiled into the corner, the table spread out and cluttered with feasting treats and snacks, mostly of salad Olivier which Gaina Mikhailovna had chopped so finely and profusely, filling, in the preparation, half of an enamel washing basin.

And the drinks were fabulous too. Like those from the traditional refrain in the final lines of every other Russian fairy tale, "And I was at that wedding and drank the mead and beer…" subtracting "the mead", of course. Gaina Mikhailovna, like any other properly erudite woman, had since long gained the upper hand over her husband, bent him to her will and twisted around her little finger, using for the purpose the panicky males’ fear of a possible cuckoldry.

Hence that beer and only beer on the wedding table… Tonya and Ivan took turns looking after their baby daughter in the bedroom, while their three-year-old son Igor was irremovably present at the table.

Then the baby was also brought to the living room, and the newlyweds together with their best persons replaced her in the vacated bedroom which, narrow as it was, still let the 4 of them dance under a cassette tape-recorder borrowed from the hostel…

When Eera and I retired to our bedroom for the nuptial first night, I turned on the transistor radio on the table under the pier mirror. The nocturnal sconce on the whitewashed wall at the foot of the bed created a flickering red twilight, like a feeble torch in the wall of medieval castle… The blanket was too thick and hot, and we threw it back, twining in the already legalized conjugal embraces. We were going on real groovy when the door to the bedroom flung open and my father-in-law stepped in to turn the radio off.

Surprised, I did not hide my nakedness, and only ceased the action. Eera also froze sitting… In the mute twinkling of the torch from the niche formed by the chiffonier in the corner, Ivan Alexeyevich, with his eyes cast down, left the bedroom. The prince of the three-room castle. How could I know it was too loud? He could just call out from their folding coach-bed. Okay, babe, let's have another take…

3 following days all the meals were of salad Olivier, but half of it went stale all the same. And who would doubt? No way to finish off such a heap without drinking.

That's how, in outline, people get united in misalliance marriages…

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