the most final
concluding work

However, the Club life didn’t get fixed to the dance-floor alone. The Head of Variety Ensemble, fair-haired saxophonist Aksyonov, popped up again and integrated us into his band to accompany their vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk at concerts by the Plant Amateur Activities.

One of the rehearsals was held on the stage of open-air cinema in the Park with the white screen pulled aside because the season of summertime cinema was at its end. We worked before the empty benches in the auditorium enclosure performing another number in the inescapable A-minor:

"Icy ceiling, creaky door –
In the Winter-Mommy's hut…"

The dusk was thickening outside and in the auditorium, when thru the tunnel of entrance under the projectionists' booth there appeared a couple of girls escorted by a guy, too young though to be a boyfriend.

I thought that, seeing empty benches all around, they’d turn about and leave at once but, no, they slowly proceeded and got seated somewhere in the fifth row. Well, the audience of 3 is also an audience. One of the girls had long dark hair, but she was fat. The other was what you’d need for a girlfriend in her mini-skirt and checkered waistcoat. Her hair, even though short, was wavy and yellow, so you at a glance could see it's dyed.

And then, quite so composedly, without a slightest attempt at concealing, she took a cigarette pack from out her waistcoat and lit one up. Skully's girlfriends, before smoking, always looked back and all around to check that no one would sight them smoking.

Anyway, they were sitting down there and we starting another take, when the girl with the cigarette turned to her fat girlfriend and spoke up. Of course, I couldn't hear that it was me she pointed out to her chum, "This one will be mine. Wanna bet?"

With the rehearsal over, the youngster approached me on the stage, "That girl over there wanna have a word with you."

In a minute I was by their side in the fifth row. Olga, Sveta – oh, how mighty nice! And in a half-hour, I was escorting both girls home. Not far at all, some two hundred meters from the Plant Park, the third back-alley in Budyonny Street when going towards the Swamp.

In fact, I wasn’t the only escort because Skully and Quak also plodded along, which was not quite fitting into the picture – she got only one girlfriend about her which those 2 obviously outnumbered. Who's escorting whom?

After the turn into the back-alley, Sveta giggled her parting "bye!" and slipped away into her khutta's yard. Olga and I went on to the wicket of the next one, where she said she lived. But Skully and Quak stuck fast and tagged on along, inserting their silly cues in our conversation. And only when I and Olga started kissing, they realized there was no making-hay for them at all. So, they crossed to the opposite fence in the alley, urinated on it under the lamppost (some bohemian milieu, dammit!) and left with a flea in their ear. As if they couldn't keep in check their nature call until back on Budyonny Street. How come Quak was at the rehearsal? Very simple, the vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk was his one and only sister…

The Amateur Activity concerts were staged not only in Club. Sometimes, they were taken to different villages in the Konotop District traveling there by a small bus of PAZ make. It was for one of such concerts that we rehearsed that icy ceiling with the creaking door in A-minor.

Since the PAZ bus was not of rubber, you couldn't take along any amplifying equipment, neither was there any room for the young snowflakes in their tutus bred by the Ballet Studio. Just one Ukrainian Hopuck and one Moldovan Jock danced to the button-accordion of Ayeeda were quite enough for such a touring concert. Then she handed the instrument over to Chuba for playing his part in the Variety Ensemble band.

My role in the Ensemble was that of a rhythm guitarist with a common acoustic guitar. Vladya remained outside Variety Ensemble because Aksyonov, with his saxophone, felt no need for assimilating a solo-guitar. As for Skully, he was irreplaceable, only his "kitchen" got minimized to the skeleton composition of the snare-and-hat to pat his sticks upon.

The universally recognized cream of the concert program was, certainly, Murashkovsky singing songs and telling humoreskas. Those rhymed stories about "me and my koom", were his specialty. About how “I”, together with the koom, aka a sister-in-law's husband, smashed the football goal clean away with koom's head or, riding a motorcycle, collided with a kolkhoz bull who threw us over an Oak-tree just for free… Simple rhyme, solid wit. The audience liked it – they laughed and clapped.

And then on the stage again appeared Zhanna the Singer and we – her band. Skully sat the tempo, we started and I suddenly felt that the guitar strings under my fingers were loosened to the utmost. Aksyonov had tempered with them, no doubt, during a humoreska or, maybe, while they danced Hopuck, to have a hearty laugh. Some stupid thick-cheeked joker.

Well, so Chuba and Skully were making up for chords and rhythm and I, like scenery alive, was striking chords careful not to let them sound – as if I was playing an odd klepka…

In the end of the concert, Murashkovsky traditionally burst out his main "bomb" – the humoreska about Adoptee and his Mother-in-Law.

Issuing torrid screams, Murashkovsky dashed from the entrance thru the entire small hall towards the stage. The case of button-accordion in his hands served a make-believe suitcase with personal belongings. After climbing the stage, he started the first-person humoreska on bitter miseries in the life of Adoptee.

His wife together with her Mom, his teshcha, had turned him in for the militia to prevent his going on a binge. While locked up, he dedicated all of the standard 15-day stretch in the custody to working out a careful plan for revenge and now, on his return from behind the bars to the place of residence, he casually broke the news about the barrel with pickled cucumbers in the earth cellar-pit going to pieces…

(The audience enliven and start to giggle.)

The worried wife and teshcha race down the ladder into the earth-cellar and Adoptee from above the ladder top recites the biblical principle of "eye for an eye", announces his verdict for their wrong-doings—fifteen days of incarceration—and slams the cellar-pit lid shut.

(The hall drowns in the jubilant glee.)

Every other day Adoptee drops to the captives packages on a string, like humanitarian relief with certain food items, as a dietary addition to the vegetables stored down there.

(Decibels of the thundering guffaw reach the neighboring villages. The spectators with a particularly vivid imagination can't laugh anymore – they simply jerk their heads with their mouths convulsively open, their squinted eyes drip tears which they have nothing to wipe with because their hands, balled into fists, keep knocking against the back of the seat in the row in front of them.)

Four days later, the militia, called by some of the neighbor-villagers, come to set the captives free, and Adoptee gets another stretch of 15 days in confinement.

("Boo-ha-ha" in the audience acquire resemblance to a collective fit.)

Murashkovsky throws at them the concluding lines, like a bullfighter dealing the final stab to the animal.

"Okay, I'm leaving.

You'll never find another one like me.

I won't even burn your khutta down, which I could do!"

Normally, to these words, the audience reacted with a farewell burst of laughter capable of blowing the doors and windows out together with their frames. Murashkovsky prepared for a parting bow to the general ovation and – Dead silence. Not a sound.

All froze like exhibits in the Madam Tussaud's Theater of Wax Figures. Only from somewhere in the seventeenth row there comes a tiny plop of a tear giggled out just a moment before… Then the seat backs begin to creak uneasily. The village council chairman cautiously steps up onto the stage with a crumpled word of gratitude for the concert. The audience disperse in mute despondency. Behind the scenes Aksyonov and Skully pinion Murashkovsky gone to pieces in a heavy fit of hysterics, no one knows how to appease him…

In record time, the instruments and costumes are shoved into the bus. All got seated in the Club Manager office for the traditional treat of gratitude to the touring actors: bread, lard, cucumbers, hooch. After the first glass, the village council chairman brings an awkward apology to Murashkovsky, "Well, here… er…in our village three khuttas were burnt down…in just a month…they still can’t find who…"

The Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, blushing more and more in his plump face, keeps vigilant control over the bus driver and after the man gulps his third glass—“to smooth the road”—we are good to start into the night.

At that stage in my life the taste of hooch was still making me wince, so a couple of gulps, snacked with bread and lard, got worn away quickly. I watched the impenetrable night rushing by behind the window glass.

The driver applied his whole soul to press the gas pedal right into the floor. We flew; we shot along the soft dirt roads of the district. The headlights snatched from the dense darkness occasional trunks and branches of the roadside trees. At times a small village khuttas scudded by… A guy and a girl standing by a khutta fence… seeing her home…

They looked back at the flying bus. Perhaps they thought, "The folks manage to enjoy their lives, they live in the city". They envied me.

Strange as it was, but I envy them… seeing her home… I also want that… in the warmly dark Ukrainian night…

But I have Olga, and in the back-alley where she lives, it’s the same night, yet I still envy that guy… dreadfully odd…

~ ~ ~