the most final
concluding work

On the whole, I liked my father-in-law, and I forgave him the absence of a minimal kit of normal tools on the shelves in the boxroom niche, as well as his distrust in my ability to repair the electric iron, relic from the Stalinist epoch. Besides, when the three-year-old world-explorer Igor pulled a handful of cannabis seeds from the hip pocket in my jeans left in the bedroom, and scattered the find on a stool in the kitchen, my father-in-law did not aggravate the exposure with unnecessary questions though, in his position at the Nezhyn Bakery Plant, he understood the varieties of grain…

The son of a Bryansk mujik, he, as an 18-year-old recruit Ivan, got caught into the "Kharkov Meat Grinder", where the German Wehrmacht, waking up after the defeat near Moscow, proved that they knew their business by crushing several Soviet armies… Stunned by the power and shocked with the spectacle of the artillery mass execution, Ivan, in the endless crowds of tens of thousands of other survivors, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

At that time there was a tacit, unspoken of, agreement between the warring parties to reimburse each other thru banks in neutral countries for the cost of keeping prisoners of war. And only the Soviet Land remained aloof from that arrangement since every captured Red Army soldier was unquestionably considered a traitor to the Soviet Homeland. Hence the difference in the havvage for POWs of different nations.

To feed the prisoners from the Red Army at least somehow, occasional freight trains brought to the camps agricultural products looted from the occupied Soviet territories. Among other food brought to Ivan's camp by such an echelon, there were several burlap sacks of sunflower seeds. The German guards could not guess at the purpose of the arrived product not described in any of cookbooks. When the prisoners demonstrated how to use those seeds, rational Germans were still unable to understand that the final result (chewing of a scanty grain) was not as important as the process itself – gnawing and secreting the anticipatory saliva.

So those sacks just lay around, irrationally cluttering the storage room, until one of the guards figured out how to use the seeds. He organized a sports event: a 100-meter race for a packet of seeds as the award to the winner. Under the scream-and-shout of the guard-fans, the young and tall, although as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, Ivan ran first and received his prize. In the second race, he again was out of reach, but the guard said that he had enough already, and gave the seeds to the second to come. My father-in-law took offense and ceased to take part in the subsequent competitions, but he told me that those seeds were the most delicious in his life…

Sometimes the prisoners of war ran for 100 meters, sometimes they ran away from the camp. Then they were invariably caught, brought back and executed in front of all the other prisoners, which did not prevent the following escape attempts. Which is quite natural because sometimes there comes the feel that you don't care anymore and fuck it all. When such a moment rolled up to Ivan, he, taking into consideration the experience of previous fugitives, did not go east but turned west and, therefore, got to France.

For about 1 year a French farmer family hid him in a barn from German patrols, and when the coast was clear, he helped with the work at the farm. Once the three-year-old son of the farmer, not speaking yet any language, warned him with his gestures about the unexpected arrival of a patrol…

Then the Americans started up the Western front and liberated him. And they moved farther and farther until they brought freedom to the Ukrainian girl Gaina from her unpaid work for a well-to-do German family… When Stalin demanded from his allies to return all the Soviet citizens freed from German captivity, Americans did not argue.

Ivan and Gaina, among many other sons and daughters of the Soviet land, were brought to a French port city, where, by the way, they met each other, and were taken to Leningrad by a steamboat. The fate favored them because the overwhelming majority of the Soviet war prisoners were taken to the East by trains. On the border with the USSR, where the railway track gauge gets different, they were walked to the awaiting echelons of freight cars and brought, over the vast expanses of our Homeland, to the camps of Gulag in Siberia and the Far North.

What for? Just in case. So that their memories of what they had seen in German captivity would not spoil the picture carefully engineered in the brainwashed minds and collective memory of the Soviet people.

"Nothing is forgotten, nor anyone…"

Provided that the unforgotten matter had undergone retouching corrections by the censorship… Even I, a chump brought up on vivid examples from Soviet literature and cinema masterpieces, lost plenty of stereotypes when I got accidentally exposed to my mother-in-law’s talking on the phone to her friend, who also passed the inferno of the German captivity.

"…and do you remember how on February 23 we bought champagne and went to congratulate our pilots?.."

Ta-dah! It turns out that on the Day of Soviet Army and Navy not only secret agent Stirlitz was using alcohol in the fascist Germany, but the captured Soviet aces as well…

In Leningrad, Ivan and Gaina arranged for their marriage and directly enlisted to work in one of the Soviet Central Asian republics. That was a wise move. The subsequent purges and combing for former prisoners of war, and other citizens who had seen a non-Soviet way of life, did not reach them out there. In the Soviet camps, they would not have to eat sunflower seeds. Our camp system, aka Zona, is the most human in the world and it does not protract your sufferings with humiliating prizes for sports achievements…

After the central press announced the elimination of the consequences of the cult of Stalin's personality, they moved to Ukraine and settled in the countryside, just in case, and from there they rose to Nezhyn.

Before stuffing a joint in front of the pier-mirror loaded upon the table in the bedroom, I, first of all, switched off the radio. The rare seeds dropping on the table top from the dried-up cannabis heads were shoved into the hip-pocket of my jeans. The Ryazan-peasantry layer in my genes balked at riddance of them right away which proved to be an unnecessary atavism because sowed at springtime in the Count's Park they didn't grow up…

In the fourth year of study I became an almost exemplary student, my classes attendance increased enormously. I couldn't bear staying in the apartment when Eera went to the institute… At the lectures, I submerged into the endless story of Joseph and his Brothers. It became deeper and more palpable, sort of a bass-relief of tranquil streamflow, in the wake of a joint smoked in the restroom during the break.

Under the unbearably long ding-donging final bell, I went down to the side hall on the first floor filled with the students' coats on pegs along its walls and helped Eera into hers. Then among the strident hullabaloo of donning students, I looked for a tiny piece of white fuzz on my coat, and took it off; only after that inspection, I put my coat on and we started home.

That white thread of arachnid yarn appeared on the gray fabric of my coat each time after I had a joint at the educational institution. Yes, in place of the sheepskin coat I wore a demi-saison camel coat bought from Alyosha Ocheret when he was in his final year. I did not share my discovery of the fluff phenomenon with anyone, but for myself dubbed it "God's marking a rascal"… Sometimes, to check it experimentally, I refrained from a joint at the break, and then the fluffy piece did not appear. That’s why, before putting my coat on, I checked it searching for the white mark. It never skipped its duty…

My love for Eera grew ever deeper. Sometimes she asked me not to gaze at her so steadily, especially in public, but I still hoped to stop the fluid moment.

"He gazed at her the way a dog regards a crystal vase,

the stare was answered by a look of crystal vase considering a dog…"

Occasionally, we visited the hostel for a pool at Preferans. Because of Eera’s being in the family way, we did not smoke while playing; only Twoic at times, with an air of a schooled hussar cadet, asked her for kind permission and smoked to the envy of me and Slavic… And Eera, sitting with absent air on a bed by the window, would finely jag with scissors a Belomor-Canal cigarette taken from me…