the most final
concluding work

No ready-made pants were bought for me. Instead, following Mother's instructions, I went to the sewing workshop near the Bus Station. The seamstress with a long pointed nose measured me and sewed trousers of dark gray broadcloth, synthetic Lavsan. A wide belt of two buttons. Wide-bottomed. Fifteen rubles.

Very soon the trousers came in handy, after Vladya brought the news that in the Central Park of Recreation they're fixin' to hold the Youth Song Contest. Those wishing to participate had to apply at the City Komsomol Committee. Yet, no one had the slightest chance because Arthur would take part in the Contest.

Arthur was a soldier Armenian from the construction battalion next to the RepBase, and Vladya was his fan. Being a right-handed guitarist, Arthur played it like a god in Vladya's estimation. He did not replace the strings, but just turned a common guitar the opposite way, with the bass strings going below and the thin ones up, and played it! In addition to that miraculous trick, Arthur also sang, no wonder Vladya idolized him and had no doubt that Arthur would win the contest. But we decided to participate, all the same. Together…Vladya and me.

As the Head of the Komsomol organization at School 13 and therefore familiar with the doors of offices in the City Komsomol Committee, I had to go there and apply for the contest as well as to know the exact time and location of the planned event. It turned out there remained just two days before the contest taking place at the Central Park dance-floor. We had no time to lose and started rehearsals…

Club Movie Projectionist, Boris Konstantinovich, switched on the light in the auditorium as well as two microphones on the stage. One of them we inserted into Vladya's guitar thru the soundhole and from the powerful loudspeakers installed on both sides of the stage, there roared such a cool sound that Boris Konstantinovich could not stand it and left. In his place, full of bubbling excitement, Glushcha scuttled in from Professions Street, where bypassing Club he got stopped in his tracks by the bewitching hubbub of that strident mayhem.

We decided to perform two numbers. First, the bass guitar part to "Chocolate Cream" from the LP disc of Polish rock-group The Chervony Guitary, to be followed then with the song from the soundtrack to "The Untraceable Avengers".

At the rehearsals everything went on in a pretty smooth way – the guitar with the mike in its body was turning out a classy rock'n'roll riff, after which the instrument was transformed into a common acoustic one to accompany Vladya's singing the song about so many a path in the field, yet the truth remained one and only. And I stood next to Vladya strumming my guitar…

Surprises cropped up at the Contest itself. In the concha of the dance-floor stage, there was just one microphone installed. One mike! Only one! So much for a starter. Besides, our duo needed to be named somehow… Another "oops". The Second Secretary of the City Komsomol Committee offered a choice: The Sun, or The Troubadours. Of the two evils, was chosen the shorter one.

Inserting a microphone into an acoustic guitar thru its soundhole is not an easy undertaking. You have to loosen a couple of thin strings to the utmost and shove the mike into the hole pulling them aside and then, naturally, tune the strings up. Now, with the rock'n'roll riff started, how could I possibly shout into the Vladya's guitar hole that we were The Sun duo? A nice x-rated pic, eh?

For the second number, the same crap, only in the opposite direction, to get the mike out. The full logistics of the situation dawned on us, when we were on the stage already, in front of the dense crowd bordered by the light of lamps around the dance-floor.

Vladya panicked, "To hell both them and their contest!" And I began to convince him that there was no way to turn back since we popped up there with our guitars. Or was it, like, we were just walking them around, sort of?

So he started the bass riff trying to jerk his guitar up closer to the microphone in which I announced that we were the vocal-instrumental duo The Sun. Then I lowered the microphone to his guitar for the crowd to hear clearly that it was rock’n’roll after all. Quite understandable that, holding the microphone, I could no longer support his bass part with my rhythm guitar.

With the second number, everything seemed to get in the groove. We both strummed our guitars, Vladya sang, I was looking above the heads of the crowd the way Raissa had taught us in the Children Sector. Yet, after singing one verse and the chorus, Vladya turned to me with rounded eyes and moaned, "I forgot the lyrics!"

The further, the merrier! May Chuba forgive me and may forgive me those present at the contest who filled that evening the dance-floor and the nearby park ally, but I took a step forward and yelled into the microphone that:

"Over the wide empty steppe

Raven soars in vain,

We'll be living for ages,

We are not raven's prey…"

By the next verse, Vladya snapped back and we finished the song off together, in a duo, just as promised…

Natalie and I did not go to the Seim anymore. We fell out, I did not get it though why she told me not to show up again.

Of course, I suffered painfully, and, of course, I was happy when in half-month my sister, aka Red-Haired, said, "I saw Grigirenchikha today, so she asks, 'Did Ogoltsoff go somewhere or what?' I says, 'No', and 'Why then does he not come?' says she. Have you quarreled or what?"

"We did not quarrel… Kiddy! you're the sun!"

The swimming season was already over, and we started to go out to the Plant Park where she showed me a secluded bench behind the clump of untrimmed bushes alongside the alley. I had walked that alley more than once but never knew about that bench, which stood as if embedded in the grotto of foliage.

There we were coming in the dusk when the rare yellowish lamps switched on in the alleys. The brightest, distant, bulb marked the window of the ticket office in the summer cinema projection booth. The projectionist Grisha Zaychenko, Konstantin Borisovich's partner, turned on the tape recorder and filled the dark park with the sound of cinema loudspeakers:

"The twilight shadowed the light of day.

Has the night come? I can't say…"

Then the ticket office bulb went out and the séance began. The bench in its cave of leaves got wrapped in the darkness. At that moment our talk was running out. She threw her head back leaning on my arm stretched out along the upper beam of the bench and the world ceased to exist. Especially so, if she had no brassier and was in the green dress with a meter-long zipper on its front…

But there are limits for anything and when, immersed into another dimension, my palm slid down her belly beneath the navel to touch the elastic band in her panties, her head on my shoulder moved discontentedly, and she issued a hmm as if she was about to wake, so I unquestioningly moved along to the upper treasures.

Then the séance ended. The bulb over the ticket office flashed on again. We waited while the handful of film-goers would pass behind the wall of bushes before we rose from the bench. Some dizzy inebriety… She must go… Dad told… No later than…

But all too soon the world waddled into the quagmire of the fall. It became cold, damp, wasted. The leaves fell down and the wet black branches could not hide the bench any longer. And who would care for sitting in the wet?

By inertia, we still went to the Plant Park, but it also became hostile. Once, in broad daylight, a mujik in his mid-thirties started to bully me. I had no chance against him. Fortunately, some guys from our school called him to have a drink behind the dance-floor, and in the meanwhile, we walked away.

The first snow fell and melted, the slush got fixed by the frost. The snow had fallen again and the winter started.

On one of the dating evenings when I unbuttoned her coat to make my way to the beloved breasts, she recoiled and said she could not allow everything to a man who, in fact, was no one to her.

Was it me that she considered no one?! After all that had been between us?!.

"Ah, tender rosebuds killed by the cruel frost…"

~ ~ ~