the most final
concluding work

Of course, that night we allowed ourselves too much and got way too far for any fail-safe. Hugs and kisses by the khutta wicket or on Sveta's porch were not enough anymore, and wouldn't do.

But where? And when? On November 7, said Olga, after young Olya would have passed in the holiday demonstration column of her school and be taken by Uncle Kolya and Aunt Nina on a visit to his village.

And that time no tricks would help Olga to wriggle away, the cuckoo's cries would mean nothing with the whole night being our own…

On the morning of the Great October Revolution Day, I came after Olga because we also were going out in the festive city. She was retouching with a pencil her trimmed, thread-thin, brows, and marking the corners of her eyes, spiffing up, in short.

There was no one but us, yet to my hug, she didn't respond with her body and said, "Why hurry? The khutta is ours today. It’s only…You know, there's something…"

(I froze in mortification, could it be she's going to announce she had her time of the month?)

Well, in general, if I wanted it… well, I knew what… to come to pass, then I had to agree to one condition…

"What?! Speak out!"

Now, before going out to the city she would make up my eyes.

What the fuck?!. Though, if you come to think about it, that was better than her being on the rag… Hercules would understand me. After the victorious fights against the Nemean Lion, the Lernean Hydra, the Cretan Bull, and other monsters, he was made (by a chick named Omphal) wear a female dress and spin the yarn in a gynoecium, with her high heel crushing his male’s dignity's throat. At least in some way, I'd equal that inhumanly hunky demigod… And I agreed…

Blueish eye shadows tinted my eyelids, black eyeliner accentuated the lashes… And out we went to the city…

Borya Sakoon, who came out of his five-story block in Zelenchuk Area greeted me cheerfully but, after a more focused look, suddenly changed in his face. Genuine fright distorted the worn-out facial features of Overseer, the unfinished "hairy yob…" stuck in his throat and he fled back to the block of his residence.

"You are nuts on the run from their having your head checked," concluded my younger sister Natasha flatly, when she met us on the sidewalk of Peace Avenue.

" …but I don't care

'cause of this hardon…"

In the Central Park of Recreation, Olga took out her cosmetic bag and washed out my War Paint, so much for faking a Hercules. Then Skully's girlfriend Nina with her girlfriend Ira came up to us, and the 3 girls walked off looking for a place to have a smoke.

A pack of Settlement bros approached me, they were celebrating it in full swing already. They felt elated, they wanted that an Orpheus from the Settlement was also nyshtyak. They tore off the lid from an intact bottle and handed it to me… Everything in this life is to be paid for, even your popularity. I raised the bottle up, threw back my head, cast the parting look at the sun, and started drinking from the bottle’s neck.

Then the bottle went from hands to hands around the circle warm and emotional.

Then we went to a deli for more wine.

Then I felt sick and reeled off home…

I woke up in the lean-to on the iron bed which inherited the space from the "Jawa" bike when the Arkhipenkos moved to their apartment. My "dacha" season had already been over, but the bed still tarried in the lean-to and, as it happened, that was the rightest place for it.

I woke up with my raincoat and shoes on, but the bare spring mesh of the bed didn't mind. The main thing was that I hadn't overslept the farewell dances that we were playing in Park that night. Only I still had to trudge all the way there being so stiff and with that oily smack in my dried up mouth and—ouch!—with that pain in the nape…

I finally came there when everyone was already schlepping the equipment to the dance-floor stage. Lyokha fussed that I was shirking, and Olga too began to lay into, "Where did you get lost?"

I hardly could explain that I was very so very much sick, and Lyokha said all that I needed was a hearty swig to get back to life. I shuddered at the very thought of it, but Lyokha and Olga started to laugh at me.

Yurko, the young guy whom Olga used as her errand-boy, ran to a nearby deli and brought wine. I forced myself to take a few gulps and—lo!—the remedy brought me back to life…

After the dances were over and the equipment dragged back to the ticket office, Olga and I left the Plant Park and in 2 minutes of suspensive walking reached her back-alley.

The first khutta, then the Sveta's one, the third was for us. I assuredly walked Olga to the wicket, opened it and… all of a sudden, she recoiled!.

By age, I was two years older than Olga, yet always felt, like, it was another way around. She knew more than I learned from all the stuff in all the books I read.

Besides, she enjoyed respect and authority. Whenever any of the girlfriend in our bohemian milieu had problems with outsiders, she turned to Olga for help. Olga walked out with the brazen and put the stupid cow in her proper place…

It was a rare evening when the dances went off without a fight… A multi-voiced discordant squeal broke suddenly from the dance-floor, yet not at all in time with the number played at the moment. In the dense mass of the youth gathered for collective recreation, a circle of vacant space formed in no time, filled with the blur of rapid gusts of fists milling the air. The vortex swept, tornado-like, across the dance-floor, thru piercing shrieks of girls giving way.

Abruptly yet asynchronously, we cut playing and encouraged dear friends to keep order, please. The defeated side, alone or in a ring of his bros, was pushing thru the crowd to the exit. To remove the low depressing hum, Skully set the tempo with dry snaps of sticks against each other and we started the next number…

Girls though did not make a show of their dissent and for their cat-fights invited each other to go out. Olga went out just a couple of times and gained respect and authority because in Theodosia she started attending dance-floors at the age of thirteen and, without wasting time on verbal preliminaries, decked them bang off. As a result, if some frostbitten bitch hurt feelings of a girl from the bohemian circle, then mentioning Olga’s name was quite enough to make her realize the blunder and shut up.

Another reason why Olga seemed maturer than me was the attentive attitude towards her from mujiks.

Once after the dances, when we were collecting cables and stuff from upon the stage, a frightened dude raced into the dance-floor, crossed it and jumped over the fence into the darkness of the Plant Park. At the last moment his chaser, a hairy-ass mujik over thirty, managed to deal a glancing strike and the fugitive sprawled into the bushes, but bounced up at once and ran away.

"I'll catch you, bitch!" cried the triumphant and, turning to Olga who stood by the stage, added, "Ain't it, Red-Haired?"

"You yoursel is the word," Olga answered diplomatically, and the latter swagger out the dance-floor.

That's why I felt to be younger than her. But the moment she flinched at the wicket to the dark khutta that feeling dissolved, and everything fell into place. Next to her fear, I felt older and stronger than her, I felt pity for her and compassion. After all, the younger ones should be cared for and protected. Even from ourselves.

I comforted the frightened girl and left without entering the yard. On my way to Nezhyn Street, I knew that I had done the righteous thing and was pleased with myself, yet all the same, I couldn't but agree with the diagnosis by my sister Natasha – "nuts on the run from their having my head checked "…

~ ~ ~