the most final
concluding work

Each morning Head of the Vegetable Base was allocating jobs for the present workforce. A couple of times I got a coopers' helper job. The area in front of their stocky workshop was crowded with hogsheads in need of repair. I rolled or dragged the vessels in, depending on their current condition. Two mujiks in caps and aprons knocked the iron hoops off, and the barrel fell apart turning into a heap of slightly bent staves which they called klepkas. The coopers sorted them, threw the hopeless off, and filled up for the shortage from the stock of odd klepkas. They planed and fitted them to each other, collected flat round bottoms from straight lags to insert them on both ends of the resurrected barrel and drive the hoops back.

Of course, I knew that when saying "a klepka’s missing in his head" folks meant the same as when they said "not all at home" or just "crazy", but it was in that workshop that I got it where that meaning came from – you cannot fill a barrel with a missing klepka, it's as impossible as filling a cup whose walls are crazed.

The refuse I hauled to the same idle stoves in the yard with the iron cauldrons embedded in them. The coopers worked unhurriedly, fixing two or three barrels a day, and the time by their side passed so very slowly, but in their workshop, there was a pleasant smell of timber shavings…

By the masons, it smelled of damp earth. They worked in a long basement bunker, replacing a log wall with a brick one. And they also wore caps and aprons; the caps were the same as on the coopers, but the aprons of a sturdier tarp.

I was so eager to try my hand at laying a wall, at least a little. The older mason allowed me to lay one course. He was standing by and smiling at something, although his grim partner grumbled along that what I did was not proper.

My helper-partner from School 14 also grumbled all the time, however, not on the subject of masonry. His standing point of dissatisfaction was Head of the Base. Being unhappy about having such a bitch of a boss, he shirked the work which Head was allocating for 2 of us. I did not mind doing more than my partner, only it seemed not right so I was glad when he decided to quit at all…

And then the cucumber season began. They were coming in by cars pushed by a small diesel locomotive along the sideway tracks entering the Base grounds. The cars were filled with boxes of cucumbers that had to be moved to the stoves in the yard, in whose cauldrons the brine with smelly dill was boiling, and crowds of pickle barrels stood around, with their lids removed, prepared to get their load of cucumbers for pickling.

The already familiar squaw-team worked there, but they did not have time anymore for chin-wagging about "her" and "him". They cooked the pickling oozuar in the stove-embedded cauldrons under iron lids and poured it into the barrels loaded with cucumbers.

I did not aspire to become an oozuar-cook, I was satisfied with the job of a stoker feeding the stoves with the wood-waste from broken boxes and split klepkas, some of which had to be shortened by an ax. In general, it was not a conveyor job – they would call and tell when to add the fuel, and then again go and get seated someplace, and wait for the next call.

And I sat in the shadeless yard under the scorching sun way off from the stoves by which it was hellishly hotter. To while the time between calls, I practiced taking chords of a six-stringed guitar: from D-minor to A-minor, to E-major. A narrow cask stave grabbed from the pile of fuel served the guitar neck. The lady-squaws laughed from about the boiling cauldrons, "Found your missing klepka at last?"

Without paying them any attention, I took B-7th and thought of Natalie…

~ ~ ~

If you walk along the sidewalk and meet a girl with a kerchief around her neck tied not like the pioneer necktie though but with the knot moved onto her shoulder, you get it immediately that she knows what's what in the chic style. And at once you feel like coming up to ask her name, and start a talk.

But how to speak up? What to say? Who cares to get "piss off!" in answer and then feel yourself a squashed tomato?. However, it's quite another kettle of fish when you know that the stylish girl's name is Natasha Grigorenko, and you have even tried to learn ballroom waltz as her partner, under the button-accordion of Volodya Gourevitch, aka Ilyich.

"Hello, Natasha! How you doing?"

"Oh, Sehryozha! Is that you? Actually, at School 12 everyone calls me 'Natalie'."

We happened to be walking the same direction and I saw her to the corner of the street she lived in, Suvorov Street, opposite the middle driveway into Bazaar.

Whoever started it, but the next step was made by me. Maybe not too soon. In a week or so. Or was it even a month?. Anyway, I made that decisive step, or rather a very resolute jump.

Radya and I were riding the back steps in the Settlement streetcar, getting fanned by the strong counter wind. And when the streetcar rumbled along Bazaar, I suddenly turned my head and glanced across the road into Suvorov Street. Not that I had any reason for that, yet not far from the corner, two girls were playing badminton. Sure thing, I immediately recognized Natalie's long straight hair.

"Bye, Radya!" And I jumped off without answering his, "Where to?"

Yes, no mistake – it was she. Her partner also turned out to be my former classmate, Natasha Podragoon, who, as well as Natalie, went over to School 12 because of the Math and Physics specialization there.

Of course, I immediately fired up some yakety-yak about providing free masterclasses to share proper skills for taming their shuttlecock. And then—could you imagine!—one more chance passer-by turned over the corner. Radya obviously jumped off before the stop at our school, although he had been going to visit his Grandpa.

Natasha Podragoon went home soon, because both Radya and I talked to her so too little, if at all, on account of her being fat. Natalie invited us into her khutta's yard, where, on a table dug into the ground, lay a stack of Czech Film a Divadlo magazines. I got carried away with perusing the pictures, and Radya snapped up the conversational initiative.

But then from the neighbor garden, two missiles of dry earth lumps whooshed, though missing under. Natalie yelled at the boy she would complain to his parents, but for Radya that seemed not enough, and he ran to the garden fence to whip the snotty fool up with an elder guy's lecture. Or maybe, he wanted to show off his sporting bearing, because he, after all, had been attending the volleyball section at the Youth Sports School for two years.

Either Natalie somehow sympathized with the ten-year-old Othello of her neighbor, or Radya, despite all his training, crushed some of the potato bushes on his run, but while the jock was bullying the boy behind the fence, Natalie told me to come on Thursday because she had more of those magazines. So we started dating, me and Natalie.

Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that she was dating me because I did not know the way of doing dating. I just came to 8, Suvorov Street, on the appointed day, greeted her mother, sat on the couch and turned the pages of another Film a Divadlo magazine. Some people know how to live! And where only could them folks manage to get such magazines from?

Then her father came home from work on his motorcycle with a sidecar. He had the same round chin as Natalie, and he gave her his permission to go out for a walk till ten, but no later than half to eleven. And we went out.

She talked a lot, yet not for just to flap her chops like many others. Natalie became my enlightener. Despite the long years of reading addiction, there was so much I did not know yet… That the coolest candies were "Grilyazh", only they were not on sale in Konotop. You had to go after those sweets to Moscow or Leningrad, and even there it's not a snap to find the treat… That the most delicious sandwich was bread and butter with layers of sliced tomato and boiled egg. And it should be rye bread, of course… And that Louis Armstrong had the hoarsest voice of all the singers in the world.

Following her lead, I borrowed a book of poems by Voznesensky from the Club library. I knew where it stood on the shelves but always bypassed because it was poetry. So that's what the real poetry meant!.