Honest Moose From the Tribe Of Hooey-Prickers

I stood next to him and quietly asked in his ear, 'Gray, is that you?' He didn't react, didn't even move, though he must have heard me; cadets are undergoing medical examinations, after all… Maybe he plans to lie low among the midshipmen.

. .. .

And another time, it was my father, while I stopped by a newspapers-magazines kiosk. He looked nothing like my father; I only recognized him by his voice. It was the same voice he used retelling about a murderer made kill an innocent soul by the law-abiding Zone Chief.

When he spoke to me, I acted to be too absorbed in looking at the portrait of the psychiatrist Burdenko on the cover of OGONYOK magazine. It was hanging behind the kiosk glass wall. So the clerk answered my father's questions for me.

(… the like encounters would force anyone to ask: what's going on anyway? However, without a monad, one cannot figure this out.

A monad is a German-made gadget for helping philosophers, which everyone understands in their own way. For one, it may be a singularity from a collective multiplicity, and for some other, a multiplicity from collective singularities.

For example, when a dude asks a girl: 'Am I one in the crowd for you, or in the crowd one?' Well, here, precisely, the second 'one' in his question is that very monad, although, perhaps, the opposite is true…

In one Indian Bible, there is a colorful picture of a child crawling through the grass, and a boy runs one step ahead of him, a man pacing in front of the runner is about to catch up with the bent old man, beyond whom, there is only green grass again. The picture is called 'The Circle of Life.' In other words, from nothing to back to nothing.

And those drawn in it—all together—constitute a single monad, since they are all the same person.

Now all that remains is to assume that monads can be composed based on other characteristics, say, such as voice timbre, and everything falls into place. It depends on which of the monad’s ends is facing you: here is your father, there is a bum who addresses you by the kiosk where the clerk has hanged Burdenko.

Of course, this is a little more complicated than learn by rote: 'When you trip on your left foot, everything will go swimmingly, but if you trip on your right, don't even try, immediately turn the shafts back.' Yet the monad, which even the average German knows nothing about, explains a lot…)

~ ~ ~

One preference player from Odessa was part of the criminal underworld in his youth. Then he reformed and began collaborating with the Odessa television studio as a commentator on the hot crime news. He even wrote a book about the experiences he gained during his gangster past. In it, he claims that the year of your birth, and especially its summer season, was marked by a critically turbulent crime situation in Odessa.

This is a rare case where a printed text failed to convince me, because of my being there in person that summer and marking nothing of the sort. Which fact supports the theory of parallel worlds.

The Reforged Commentator and I each lived in their own of the parallel worlds, and the situation experienced in one world was at odds with that in the other. The only thing we had in common was the number of a current year.

However, it's not worth dismissing the possibility that these two separate worlds could (despite their parallelism) occasionally intersect, which explains the presence of a couple of episodes with criminal overtones in the otherwise completely calm summer of '79.

. .. .

Yes, I must admit that during my wanderings around Odessa, I did witness two instances of contact and interpenetration between our parallel worlds.

The first occurred on the morning bus 'Gvardeyskoye - Odessa', when a young slob in the second seat from the left scolded the driver for a minor route deviation on the city outskirts.

Upon arrival at the Bus Station 3 near the New Bazaar, the driver ran from his cabin into the bus with apologies and technical (somewhat overly obsequious) explanations. He was forgiven thanks to the intercession of a young female passenger in the same seat, who softened her easily excitable companion…

The second instance of interpenetration took place at the train station, where I approached a random cop with a question about the population number of Odessa. For an answer, the law enforcement officer sent me to the police station on the first floor of the station.

The on-duty lieutenant, on hearing the same question, told me to wait.

In observance of his instruction, I leaned against the counter separating us and watched as his red lips lasciviously squeezed, wiggled, and caressed the filter of his unlit cigarette, accompanied by sharp cries and heavy blows behind my back.

My quick glance in the direction of the noise noted the wide-open door to the next room, where a woman in a gauze headscarf and a janitor black robe was skillfully using the heavy wooden handle of her mop kicking shit out a drunk draped in nothing but his red underwear.

I was wearing the exact same red dressing item, with a pattern of blue tennis rackets, under my pants, though perhaps less faded, having been purchased only a couple of months earlier. So I wasn't inclined to watch his inevitable defeat in the current match.

Turning away, I meekly lowered my gaze to contemplate the surface of the high counter separating me from the lieutenant…

When the officer had received his due (appropriate for his service and rank) quota of pleasure, he finally lit the cigarette, announcing that the city didn't have a million yet, but maybe 600,000…

So, on my next visit to the city, having missed the last bus to New Dofinovka, I chose to spend the night in a small park inside the ring road, in front of the train station.

~ ~ ~

It turned out to be completely deserted due to the lack of lighting in the underpass beneath the ring road. Having chosen the bench furthest from the lamppost, I lay down. It was so hard that I remembered Edgar Allan Poe, stabbed to death on a bench in Baltimore, Maryland, for the $40 literary royalties he had just received.

So I partially pulled the advance I'd been paid that day at Polar Explorers' Square out of my shirt pocket, like a coquettish boutonniere of three-ruble notes—an exercise in personal courage, for self-improvement purposes.

Traffic on the ring road had almost died out, and the bench had become even harder. But I kept my eyes closed on principle, because night is for sleep.

So I was wide awake when I heard the soft sounds of cautious footfalls on the asphalt. He came up and for about a minute stood over me, stretched out on the bench, wearing an Edgar Allan Poe mustache, a blue short-sleeved shirt, and the skinny stack of Soviet banknotes partially stuck out from the breast pocket. Then he left, as quietly as on his arrival. For principle and the sake of training, I didn't open my eyes to see who it was.

In the morning, I woke up in the same position, quite chilled and extremely stiff, but, unlike the great American Romantic, alive.

I stood up and tucked the money deeper. A flock of ravens, croaking and flapping their wings, flew across the dawn sky. Apparently, the same squadron that had soared over Nezhyn the day I left for Odessa. Their flight here clearly was not mapped in a straight line.

A feather fell from the wing of one of them, heading in grotesque twists and turns toward the greens. Tilting my face back to better follow the feather's zigzags, I moved to intercept it, ignoring the poorly dug beds of stunted marigolds… I caught it in the capped palm of my hand, returned to the sidewalk, and gently dropped it into the trash can, saying, 'Not in my presence, please!'

(… a not widely known German poet of the first half of the 20th century once lamented his mediocrity; otherwise, he would not have allowed the suicidal global self-slaughter of human race.

Few venerable poets rise to such a profound understanding of the poet's responsibility for the fate of the world. They inertly cling to the generally accepted concepts and rituals of their time, but if you think about it closely…)

However, thinking alone is not enough; one has to also invent something, as Valentin Batrak, aka Lyalka, put it. Somewhere…

Глава

~ ~ ~ The Beautiful Defeat

When the agreed-upon deadline arrived and it was time to pick up you and Eerah, there was practically nowhere to take y’all. Yet, the word given, I had no choice but to show up and at least explain the reasons for the delay.

I was critically short of mone, as was everyone I'd tried to borrow from for travel expenses. The desperate nature of the situation prompted the idea of exchanging my wedding ring for banknotes at a pawnshop.

. ..

By the time I found one in the city, the pawnshop was already open, and the line began on the sidewalk in front of the entrance…

Inside, the establishment consisted of one long room with partitions along three walls. The sheet metal partitions had small windows, and one, at the very end of the room, even had a grating. That was where all of the line was crowding to because behind the other two partitions and windows, a dark-haired but rather dejected young man was carrying out cosmetic repairs with a foul-smelling nitro paint.

Before closing for lunch, when everyone was asked to leave, I had reached to about four meters from the finish window.

In the breast pocket of my short-sleeved shirt lay the ring I'd torn off my finger the previous evening. Even soap and water from the washstand (on a tree next to the 'dorm' ) had done little to help. As I tormented my poor finger, I recalled the projectionists’ booth at KeLCeaRP Park and once again felt sorry for Olga.

. .. .

The pawnshop reopened, and after standing in the line for an extra hour, my blood circulatory system anxiously throbbing, I handed the ring through the grates. The earrings brought in by the woman in front of me couldn’t prove being valuable enough, and she'd left empty-handed. My pawn had passed muster; I'd received 30 rubles plus the receipt slip…

~ ~ ~

The next morning, I arrived at the New Bazaar and bought a plastic blue shopping basket, along with four kilos of apricots to fill it, though those weren't quite ripe yet. Then I went up to the flower booth and said I needed three red roses.

On the flower girl my request worked like a watchword. From a hidden spot behind her, she produced small-size roses of dark-red, three all in all with a half-meter, sturdy stem each. Then she sounded the conspiratorial countersign, ' Meant these ones?'