the most final
concluding work

The newcomers who bought Pilluta's half-khutta had been recruited to Siberia neither from Konotop nor even from Ukraine. They spoke Russian and did not understand many local words. There were 4 of them, 2 childless couples, who split the half-khutta in further even halves. The somewhat older pair dwelt in the khutta next to ours, and the younger ones got the part with 2 additional windows looking into the street. Maybe, that's why they were a little more cheerful than the older pair. Although, in contrast to demised Pillutikha, the elders looked quite friendly too.

Our immediate neighbor, the husband in the senior couple, began to overhaul the brick stove in their kitchen and found a treasure hidden in the chimney. To Sasha and Natasha, as well as to the children from the neighboring khutta of the Turkovs, he distributed the bills of banknotes from his find. Those amazed me by their unheard-of face value. Earlier, the 25-ruble note, with the gypsum bust of Lenin turned in profile, was, in my opinion, the biggest piece of money imaginable, but no! The Turkovs kids played with one-hundred and even five-hundred-ruble banknotes, the size of a handkerchief each, illustrated with antique sculptures and royal portraits in oval frames plus the vignette-like signature of the Finance Minister of the Russian Empire. The currency issued by the Ukrainian Central Rada in the Civil War times was also played, not as picturesque though, but the curls in the signature of Lebid-Yurchik were not inferior to those by the Czarist minister.

By the way, there was a guy in my class whose last name was also Yurchik and by his first one – Sehrguey, like me, only he was taller and when our class lined-up for a PE lesson he stood the second in the rank. Yet, he hardly could be Minister Yurchik’s relative because he lived in Podlipnoye, most likely they were just namesakes…

When Father came from work, the neighbor called him over to demonstrate the box which he found the treasure in, as well as the hollow place inside the chimney where it was hidden. Then Father returned home and standing in the middle of the kitchen mused, "Seems, it was not only funny money there." He once again observed the stack of banknotes on the table and started recollections about his village relative on the maternal side.

Living under the Czarist regime, that fella mastered the skill of printing paper money for which purpose he had a special machine-tool. Life smiled on him until his business failed because of thoughtless impatience. It happened when entertaining his brother on a visit from the city, he bought vodka from their village store. The salesman noticed that the five-ruble note he got for the commodity was leaving blue marks on his fingers – the brothers were so eagerly impatient to celebrate their meeting that the money paint was not allowed to dry up properly.

In short, the printer man got exiled to Siberia and all his property confiscated. And his wife followed him, like those wives to revolutionary Decemberists doing their terms over there.

"That's what love is" said Mother in an attempt at sprinkling a pinch of sentimental spice into the all too earthy story.

"Bullshit!" burst Father. "The smart bitch got it that by the side of so qualified a diddler she even in Siberia would be much better off than home."

He gave out a content chuckle, and I also felt pleased that in my family tree there someplace was sitting a cunning counterfeiter. The fact of all that taking place long ago did not really tell on the satisfaction even though anything from before the Revolution seemed as distant as the harsh old times of epic heroes. But, of course, in the days of Gorynich the Dragon they did not print paper money.

A week later, Father's assumption got confirmed in a roundabout way by the husband in the younger couple (not as cheerful already as before). He shared the news that his friend disappeared in an unknown direction. After quietly quitting the job (his spouse followed the pattern), the older pair left without a goodbye to their neighbor-friends. Friendship is a smashing good thing, but hands off my tobacco, partner!

Soon the younger, noticeably depressed, couple left too. The Pilluta's part of the khutta emptied again and for long…

~ ~ ~

Because of getting trained at the regional camp for Komsomol activists, I was elected Head of Komsomol Committee, aka Komsorg, of School 13 and for several days next week I was free from classes. In the commission of 5 other Komsorgs, I had to attend the reporting sessions of Komsomol Committees in the city schools, under the supervision of the Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee. Besides me, among the commission members, there were 2 more trainees from the Sumy camp: the guitar player and one of the girls.

The reporting sessions were killing by their boredom because at every school the very same things were said the very same way in the very same words. After which the Second Secretary invariably demanded from us, the commission members, to take the floor with our critical remarks… The guitar player was good at those stodgy pieces, being used to strum the only two chords he knew…

"Ever keeping aloft and honored their glorious pioneer traditions, the School 13 Komsomol members did their best to contribute their weighty share in the Annual All-School Collecting of Scrap Metal…"

Each autumn, half of the long rectangular schoolyard was divided into the sectors starting from the two-story "Cherevko's school" at the gate up to the workshop building. The sectors were assigned to different classes so that they knew where to dump the scrap metal collected by them.

The classes competed, the piles of rusty stuff grew, the augmentations checked, weighed and registered until one day the schoolyard was entered by a dump truck to move the collection away, usually in a couple of goes. The class winner was awarded the Honor Certificate handed to them at the nearest ceremonial school line-up.

Of course, we hardly ever cared for those certificates. What attracted us was getting together with all of your class and… well, not exactly all of your class, yet at least those who could or were willing to turn up and… A-and with a pair of handcarts rattling their iron wheels against the ragged cobblestones in Bogdan Khmelnytsky Street, or creaking wearily along the rest—dust'n'dirt-paved—streets, we ventured into the Settlement in search of scrap metal. Where exactly were we looking for it? It depended. Sometimes a classmate reported a neighbor willing to get rid of a heap of perennial metal layers in the corner of their yard. “God bless you, kids! Drive your handcart in, take all of that away!”

Yet, rusty basins, folding coach-bed springs, and bent nails were a too lightweight stuff to add much of respectability to your grade's scrap heap. Besides, champions for environmental purity were not an ofttimes species in the neighborhood. “So, what's wrong about that trash behind the shed? Rusty thru and thru? But you never know. One of these days it might come handy. A length of wire would nicely fix a fence plank so rotten that nails crash it to pieces. Get along, kids. Go! Go!”

That’s why the newly amalgamated collective of our ninth grade moved for a free search dollying their handcarts along the Plant wall in Professions Street… Like vultures circling in the westerns to locate a prey… At the far end of Plant, where the tracks of the marshaling yard multiplied innumerably, we wheeled around an obviously no man's wheel pair from a railway car. Yet, you couldn't load the multi-ton wheels on a pair of handcarts, otherwise, we'd win at the scrap metal competition in just one go.

On we soared seeking along the railway tracks, to no avail though. But then the guys peeked into a concrete tube section lost in the tall grass alongside the railway to discover a watermelon and a box of grapes.

"Clear as daylight, the station loaders lifted the fruits from some car in a freight train and stashed away for a while." supposed Volodya Sakoon from the former parallel.

We looked around more attentively at the rows of freight trains stilled silently in their tracks, immersed in the torpor of waiting…

Some dude from our party took out a knife to cut the watermelon from the find. Yet, it did not open even when gashed all the way about its equator because of being too big for the knife length. Only when hit against the concrete tube, the watermelon broke up in two, but its core, the so-called "soul", remained in one of the halves. Moistly red, and sugary, stitched with dark brown seeds… Soul… With swiftness never expected from myself, I dealt the sweeping "falcon strike" and by both hands claw-snatched the watermelon's soul. Stunned by my so completely out of the blue deftness, I magnanimously refrained from partaking in the remaining halves. The guys sliced them into handy pieces, while I enjoyed the rindless juice-dripping ball of watermelon flesh from out of my capped palms.

Even the girls couldn’t say “no” to grapes, yet about half of the box we left for the absent loaders who stole them so that they did not feel offended…

An hour later, following the lead from a stray acquaintance, we stroke it real rich on a scrap metal deposit, although at an entirely different spot… In the fence of iron pipes separating Bazaar from the Seminary, aka Vocational School 4, there was a hole thru which we dragged out lots of iron pipe offcuts, long and numerous enough to make a good load for both handcarts.

Next day the House Manager of the Seminary came to our school, identified their pipes in the scrap metal heap collected by our grade, and took them away by a dump truck. He asserted they served as the material for training seminarians in the turners group. However, our Principal, Pyotr Ivanovich, did not even scold us. But then what for? How could you guess the purpose of material dumped into the thicket of nettle? Nonetheless, when giving it a careful thought, you'd always find a good underlying reason for anything. And only my violently swift seizure of the watermelon's soul remained completely inexplicable for me… but it was groovy.

~ ~ ~