the most final
concluding work

Persistent snowfalls met the participants in the winter stage of the All-Union military-patriotic game 'Zarnitsa' arriving in Moscow, the capital of our Homeland. 6 among those participants were from Konotop, together with their skis and a middle-aged supervisor…

Confident of the rubber bands fixed by Father years ago, I threw my skis onto the uppermost, third, level bunk, undressed, and climbed into the bed on the second level in the compartment of the first-class car. The lights in the car had been turned off already, yet behind the window, there stretched Platform 4 whose crust of firmly trodden snow reflected the glare of arc lamps above it.

At last, from the locomotive in the head of the train, there rolled nearing clangs of cars that yanked each other in turn. The domino effect hit our car too, it jolted and gaining smooth acceleration glided forward. To Moscow! To Moscow!.

On the evening of the following day, we left our skis in the vestibule of a huge school scarcely lit and empty except for a small group of tenants from the surrounding neighborhood who came to take us to their different apartments as bed-and-breakfast guests at their hospitable families.

Next morning, my hosts treated me to tea and hurriedly left for their work telling their teenage son to see me to the same huge school closed for the vacations. On the way, he insistently warned me to mark the route well, so that in the evening I could find their apartment where I was billeted to stay.

We had three meals a day in a huge canteen, not too far from the huge school, both surrounded by the neighborhood of huge multi-storied tower-blocks. And we skipped only one visit to the canteen, which happened on the day when we, together with our skis, were taken to the Taman Guard Division stationed outside Moscow.

There we ran to the attack thru the deep snowdrifts between young Fir-trees, and a soldier in his greatcoat also ran on skis among us smiling and bursting profuse blank rounds from his Kalashnikov assault rifle spilling the spray of spent cartridges into the deep snow. Later in the day, together with two hundred other guys, who arrived for the winter-stage 'Zarnitsa' in Moscow, we were fed with the midday meal in a soldiers' canteen at the Taman Guard Division.

The following day after an endless excursion around the city, our Konotop group arrived in the Red Square to visit the Lenin Mausoleum. We joined the dense line of people moving to it across the Red Square and for a long time kept nearing the Mausoleum while the twilight grew ever thicker above the slick black flagstones showing in patches thru the snow. The icy chill from the pavement pierced the feet even thru the thick soles of winter shoes, and I got pretty cold.

When there remained about fifty meters before the Mausoleum entrance, we learned that the working day was over and they locked it for the mummy to have a night’s rest. The supervisor led our group back across the Red Square to get warm in the brightly lit emporium of GUM, aka the State Universal Store, which worked to later hours. I doubted that the half-hour he allotted for getting warm would be enough to save my feet, however, the stretch did the trick.

In the subway car carrying us back to the hospitable neighborhood, the supervisor announced that 'Zarnitsa' was over, yet we had one more day in Moscow so the first thing in the morning we'd pass thru the Mausoleum and then go loose for a shopping spree.

However, the next morning after leaving my hosts' apartment, I tarried in the huge canteen and, on coming to the huge school, was told that our group had left already to visit Lenin in his casket. The watchman also was leaving until five in the afternoon, so he locked me inside (the weather outdoors was frosty) and all of that day I spent imprisoned in the huge empty school.

Almost all the doors in the building were locked. In the watchman's room, there was a phone and, having never used the device, I started learning. Not a too knotty task to stick your finger into one of 10 holes along the edge of phone dial-disc and wind it collecting random digits until there sounded beeps in the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Hello! Is that zoo over there?"

"No…"

"Then why the call is answered by an ass?"

Soon after the watchman unlocked me, our group arrived and I was expressly reminded that we were going home the next morning.

In the apartment of my hosts, I saw Twenty Years Later by Dumas inside their glazed bookcase and asked where they sold such books. The hosts began to explain how many crossings were along the way to the bookshop, though it should be closed already. But I went out all the same…

It was dark and very quiet with rare fluffy snowflakes coming down from above, one after another. I stood by the glass walls of the locked bookshop with the feeble glow of distant light inside. Some supernatural emptiness wrapped all around in a profound immense silence… Then a belated passer-by walked soundlessly along leaving shallow steps in the soft virgin dusting over the pavement, and I went back to the home of strangers. There was "The Vertical" on TV, starring Vladimir Vysotsky…

~ ~ ~

We knew exactly what we wanted, we aimed at becoming a vocal-instrumental ensemble because in the then USSR there were no rock groups. Rock groups were an attribute of the decaying capitalist West, but in our Soviet state, free from the exploitation of a man by man, rock groups were named vocal-instrumental ensembles, aka VIA's.

The songs about the prosecutor, who raised his blood-smeared hand against the happiness and peaceful life of an honest pickpocket, were just a spring-board in our glorious career. Those upstart crows, so popular VIA's as The Singing Guitars, and The Jolly Guys, actually, stole our songs. It was us, who should have performed the hit about fetching the ring of Saturn to ask the one we loved to marry us, and no other but we and only we should have turned out that thrilling electric guitar vibrato ending to "The Gypsy Girl" in the LP Disc of instrumental numbers. But while we were busy training ourselves and sang that, when visiting Bazaar, instead of trade in pigeons there he hunted the passers'-by pockets, they leaped forward ahead of us. Still and all, we did not give up…

During the breaks in the two-story building of the "Cherevko's school", where the ninth grade was again transferred to, we gathered at the window on the staircase landing to make music. The triangle-ruler of light metal normally used for drawing figures in school copybooks was thrown on the windowsill to serve a musical instrument on which Sasha Rodionenko, handled Radya, was knocking out rhythmic backup to the songs.

Chuba at once crossed out any chance for me to be a singer though. The problem was not about my vocal cords but my ears, I just could not hear my own sharps from flats when singing. There was no way to argue with Chuba because he finished Music School in the class of button-accordion and, as an expert, should hear better. As for Vladya's musical ear, Chuba admitted its presence and the fact that Vladya even had some kind of a voice, only it was hard to tell in which part of his anatomy it was sitting. Thus, there remained only two vocalists – Chuba himself, and Radya.

It's more than likely though that with all our zeal we would never progress any further than the mentioned windowsill, if after the winter holidays there did not appear a new teacher of Music at our school, named Valentina. She looked like a tenth-grader girl but styled her hair in the ladies' way of making a round cushion of hair atop of their heads.

At the lessons, she widely spread the billows of her accordion out and squeezed them vigorously back, and before the endless strident bell announcing the break shut up, she collected her instrument and hurried to the streetcar stop because she also taught Music at School 12.

Valentina promised we could go to the Regional Review of Young Talents, only we had to work hard because the Review was taking place next month. The girls she worked with at School 12 were to perform there and we might accompaniment their singing, the whole combination would pass for a VIA from the Plant Club because the Regional Review ruled out the participation of school students… Anything can be solved exceedingly simple if you know how to go about it…

The rehearsals were held late in the evenings, behind the blue blinds on the windows in the Physics classroom. Our string group was enhanced with one more guitarist from School 12. He looked more mature than a tenth-grader and did not conceal his special relation with Valentina, wrapping her neck with a scarf after the rehearsals in an unmistakably owner's manner, and then she trustingly leaned her head on his shoulder, walking along the dark school corridor to the exit.

The girls from School 12 appeared at the rehearsals just a couple of times, and not in full, but Valentina promised us that the singers knew their part quite well. At the final stage preview in Club, the day before starting off to the regional center of Sumy, there popped up one more singer, a corpulent dude of no school affiliation, who sang solo:

"Hello there, the field of Russia, br I'm a thin shoot of yours…"

The chorus of eight girls from School 12 performed a patriotic number emphasizing the fact that Komsomol members, first and foremost, take care of their Homeland and only after that they cater for themselves. Then Sasha Rodionenko, aka Radya, was giving out a song by Vysotsky about the mass graves.

Supposedly, we cut a nice picture – the line of eight white-shirted girls in front of two microphones, Valentina with her shining accordion, Skully standing behind a single drum on its rack, three guitarists with their acoustic guitars hanged on package strings over their shoulders, and Volodya Elman handling the double bass.

Where did Elman come from and why without any handle? He was a tenth-grader from our school and lived in the end of Smithy Street, in the khutta next to a century-old Birch tree. In spring, they milked it, gathering about a dozen of three-liter glass jars of the Birch sap. But the sap, of course, was not all for Elman alone, because it was a long brick khutta-block of four apartments. And the absence of a handle was easily explained by the fact that his last name, by itself, sounded like a criminal handle— "L-man".

As for the double bass, it was handed out to him by Aksyonov, Head of the Variety Ensemble at Club. Head couldn't say "no" to the drummer at his Variety Ensemble. It’s hard to suppose though that Elman had much knowledge or any skills at playing the double bass, more likely his eagerness to get integrated into the glorious world of the music industry was as great as mine. He joined us without a single rehearsal, at the stage preview in Club. Valentina asked him to play the double bass as low as possible and not too often. However, Elman could not keep his zeal in check and, by the end of the stage preview, two fingers on his right hand were bleeding because their skin got rubbed off against the sturdy strings. To somehow pull them at the Regional Review in Sumy, he bandaged his torn fingers with electrical tape...