Making for a Yonder

He'd sit down at a table propped against the wall and loaded with a stack of old newspapers. To enhance his comfort, he’d pull his cheap but elegant black rabbit fur hat down to touch his ears, and begin leafing through the piles of press news accumulated since our previous shift.

Then, one by one, we'd arrive, take our seats, and begin our manly, dignified conversations on any subject at hand.

Here, Kot, his eyes glued to the ‘newspapers from days gone by and forgotten’, would predict, from beneath the black fur of an innocently slain animal on his head, that even if we began our sophisticated conversation from the heights of the Salyut orbital station, it wouldn’t cancel our landing on the cunt of Alla Pugacheva or some more accessible local slut, inevitably.

As a rule, the prophecy was accurate. And all because of the latecomers who missed his brazen, but on the whole right, forecast.

About ten minutes past eight, a cop—ranging from lieutenant to captain—appeared to contribute to our male ефдл ырщз and hand out red armbands from a drawer in his desk, bearing the word 'Vigilante' in bold black lettering.

In threes, we left the stronghold, maintaining public order in the evening sidewalks with our patrols: to the train station, to Depot Street, to Lunatic, and along Peace Avenue, but no further than the bridged gap in the railway embankment.

After a forty-five-minute stroll, we returned to the starting point (some trinities in a soft, emotionally sentimental mood) and, after a more lively piece of a parliamentary session, set out on our final rounds, before heading home by ten o'clock until the next shift…

~ ~ ~

A couple of times, KGB officers showed up at our evening matinées with their own briefings.

The first sighting occurred on the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution, and we were warned to be especially vigilant and to suppress any provocative anti-Soviet behavior.

As soon as the KGB officer had left, a late cop showed up to mock his predecessor (who had already vanished without a trace), asking if we'd gotten it right that the spy who'd caught our eye needed to be immediately caught by the collar and dragged back to this here stronghold.

For the second and final time, a KGB agent (now younger) shared confidential information aimed at speeding up the capture of a former KGB agent who had disappeared AWOL and gone into hiding.

She may have changed her hairstyle and hair color, the KGB agent explained, showing us a black-and-white portrait of her, but she has a distinctive feature that makes identification easier: a contraceptive ring in her vagina. A Dutch-made production.

The men didn't immediately grasp what he was even there for, and when they finally did, they bombarded him with such leading questions that the KGB agent darted out from under the 'Stronghold' sign at the first cosmic velocity. After all, he was merely following orders, for the stupidity of which he bore no responsibility…

~ ~ ~

During one of my patrols, the men in my threesome gave me a hard time. Walking in a group of three vigilantes isn't exactly a bounty, but it's tolerable. However, when you look around and, in the light of the windows of Grocery Store No. 6, you see that among the passersby scurrying along the packed snow of the sidewalk, only your sleeve is tied with a red rag, you begin to feel a bit outlandish.

Maintaining a brazen, 'I don't care' pan, I walked to the station square. However, carpenter Mykola and driver Ivan were absent from the hurried silhouettes. Passersby of draft age glanced back at the strange phenomenon—the brazen vigilante loner.

It didn't take much intelligence to deduce with 100% certainty that my fellow patrolmen, having torn off their armbands, had grabbed a bottle of 'rotgut,' from one or another grocery store and that very moment, located in some quiet nook, were gurgling it down, in turn, to feel both warm and toned up, generally. Where? That was the question.

Most likely, in the quiet chaos of short lanes and dead ends between grocery store No. 6 and the high platform 1, in that jumble of warehouses, skin and venereal disease dispensary, a couple of private houses without gardens, and other wooden structures. That's where I turned, not because I had the slightest chance or desire to partake from the bottle.

Nope. I had a nobler objective of making the pair of sly asses feel ashamed and amazed at what deductive reasoning could do. Makes you able to so easily spot them in a forlorn alley under a streetlamp. Which only would do good the surprised bastards…

-.-

However, instead of a driver and a carpenter, in the cone of yellow light from a lamppost, I stumbled upon a genre scene.

The girl was walking with a young man when their mutual acquaintance, another young man—a huge brute—caught them in the act and kicked up a fight.

The appearance of a fourth wheel with a red rag on his sleeve (a matador?) slowed the plot, but only for a minute. Realizing that no more law enforcement officers were to pop up, the big man began to beat up his smaller, but more successful, rival.

The bantam fighter dropped to one knee, threw his fish-skin-lined jacket off his shoulders into the same snowdrift where his hat had rolled a second earlier, and rushed to a counterattack.

I remained an indifferent sideline referee with a rag. The girl gathered the jacket and hat to hold them, just as Eerah had once kept in hands my rabbit-fur hat in the main square of Nezhyn.

The odds were too unequal. When the lightweight collapsed again in the snow, the girl, without counting to 10, folded his belongings under a lamppost, took the victor's arm, and disappeared with him into the labyrinth of indecipherable alleys.

-.-

The fallen guy rose to his feet and, seeing that I was still there, launched into a passionate, rambling speech, extolling the power of the spirit, compared to which physical strength is nothing, because all strength lies in the spirit… In Konotop, every second person is a born Lord Speaker. Or have I already mentioned this?

To console the crushed Demosthenes, I shared my observation that while he fought his lost battle, the girl was holding his belongings, not his opponent's fur hat, which had also been tossed into the snow during the clash.

Hearing my words of encouragement, he shut up and hastily searched the pockets of his jacket to make sure everything was still there, because, despite their innate love of oratory, the main distinguishing feature of Konotopers is common sense.

~ ~ ~

And just like that, no one could stop me from giving the women of our team calla lilies every year on March 8th. One flower per bricklayer, because I'm not a millionaire, and the men in our team didn't always think to ask how much I paid and chip in a ruble each.

However, I wasn't too worried about reimbursement – I'd discovered that I enjoyed giving gifts much more than getting them myself.

First, however, I had to find the city greenhouse, which is practically in the middle of nowhere. You have to get off tram #2 one stop before its final stop. Then turn left and trudge half a kilometer through streets dating back to the Civil War. Like Youdenich Street or Denikin Lane. Of course, in reality, all the names remained faithfully Soviet, but the look was nostalgically White Guardian…

-.-

When I first visited the greenhouse, the manager led me into a long, squat building with a gable roof made of squares of cloudy glass, from which heavy, sparse drops of condensation fell.

She wanted me to see for myself the absence of flowers. And the plantings in those beds were calla lilies that hadn't yet ripened, they were 'unbloomed' (not flared up). That is, the white flowers hadn't yet blossomed into wide, flaring high boot tops.

Then and there all my tongue-tiedness vanished, and I delivered a sample of a Konotoper eloquence. On the topic of how, for her, who strolled every day among the greenery of the greenhouse beds, the calla lilies seemed unblown. But for the women of our bricklayers team, who saw nothing but crushed bricks, mortar, and icy hummocks of dirty snow, these calla lilies, even if 'unbloomed', were the most beautiful flowers in the world.

-.-

From that day on, and for as long as I worked on our team, I was never told 'no' at the city greenhouse on the eve of March 8th. And I proudly stood by the tram seat that carried a bundle of green and white calla lilies, which you wouldn’t find at the 'Flowers' shop on the corner of Peace Square for at least two weeks more.

~ ~ ~ A flash-forward into a not-so-bright future

My decision was final and irrevocable—it’s time to draw a line. The story I was translating now would be the last for the book. I'd had enough of Maugham. Even the fact that I had to translate the final story twice couldn't shake my resolve.

-.-

Tolik Polos forced me to echo the translation by lifting my briefcase. It had contained nothing but the notebook with the final story, which I was carrying to the railway station early that morning to leave in an automatic storage locker, to take to Zhomnir in Nezhyn after work.

There were no passersby in the Settlement at such a time, at least not along the tracks heading toward the railway station. At the very spot where the concrete wall of the KeLCeaR Plant begins, I remembered I'd forgotten to grab along money for the commuter train. I had to walk back, my briefcase left waiting for me by the side of the service passage path.

On my way to Decemberists 13, I met Tolik Polos, who had also graduated from School No. 13, two years after me, and was now trudging toward me, in the opposite direction. And being not actually from these outskirts, he was obviously returning from a romantic night. Too spent to say ‘hi’…

Pocketing the forgotten rubles, I retraced to the starting point of the plant wall. The briefcase wasn't on the path side, or anywhere else. Only Tolik and I had passed by that particular spot. Or was there someone else?

The answer came a week later, on tram No. 3. Tolik didn't say 'hello', but instead, lounging on the seat, made faces at me in the cheeky manner of Slavik Aksyanov from the Dofinovka Mine dorm. But—most importantly!—his right hand was in a cast.

Do you need more direct evidence that it was Polos who disturbed the solitude of the briefcase peacefully waiting in the quietude of early hour for my return? Maybe for some folks – yes, but for me, definitely, no.

(… sometimes, along the life’s flow, I not only see signs, but also easily read their explicit meaning…)

~ ~ ~

In fact, restoring of the translation, kidnapped together with the briefcase, was not a from-the-scratch job. The story of poor Julia, forced to betray her lover to the British intelligence service, was still vivid in my memory, and a month later I delivered my final milestone translation to Zhomnir, but no longer in the briefcase. So, albeit with a month's delay, the idea of quitting Maugham's translations became the tangible reality in a cellophane bag. But this reality was only a point in a larger plan of action.

-.-

Like all of my plans, it had no list of sequential steps or clear details.

Actually, my plans are not even plans at all, but rather feelings that it would be nice if it were this way, or, say, somehow different. The details are tacked on to the plan later, in the course of execution.

The aforementioned broad plan got felt distinctly because it finally dawned on me that Zhomnir would never 'match make' any of my translations. Nowhere, ever. And doesn't matter for which reason, the main thing is that it's so. Surely. So what does that mean?

It couldn't be simpler—I need to take the publication issue into my own hands.

That's why it would be a good idea to collect all my translations in thin school notebooks, 12 pages each, stacked somewhere among the other piles of paper on Zhomnir's shelves in his archive room…

~ ~ ~

I arrived in Nezhyn and announced to Alexander Vasilyevich my intention to take my alpha-beta versions. Zhomnir didn't object, nor asked any questions.

He threw a feast because these years have made me a relative in his house. A rather distant, poor relative, who is sometimes useful if, say, you're changing the wallpaper in the living room…

We sat at a square table pulled off the wall into the center of the room and ate whatever Maria Antonovna brought from the kitchen. We drank strong village moonshine. Zhomnir enthusiastically shared the news about a gold pectoral of great artistic value that had recently been excavated in one of the steppe burial mounds.

When the topic of excavations was exhausted, he asked about my relationship with Nezhyn, meaning Eerah.

I proudly characterized our relationship as fruitful, meaning you. Then I cautiously asked how Eerah was doing.

'What ‘how’ could there be?' Zhomnir replied. 'Slutting around the town.'

Of course, I was familiar enough with deductive logic to independently answer such elementary a 'how'. And it was quite within my grasp to rather vividly imagine details of the 'how', weren’t I constantly distracted by some tangential thoughts like, 'Oh! Look at that strange little bird!', or 'Where did I misplace it? Damn my crappy memory… on Thursday, I think? I clearly remember I couldn't find something on Thursday, but what exactly?', or something else in that line…

In short, I avoided thinking logically in that direction. And now, for my naivety, I got a kick in the balls, from the paternally admonishing mentor.

Well, maybe not exactly in the balls, but half a meter higher.

The blow, in fact, hit me in the plexus, however, it didn't knock the breath out of me to the extent of Eerah's demolishing phrase, 'And I have Sasha now.'

She shared this with my sister, but Natasha held back the information until after my divorce proceedings. Probably saving it as a booby prize for me.

But more than that I got groggy by Zhomnir’s answer’s being a replica of the reply I got from the slob to my question about Olga at the Konotop brick plant… He literally copied it, word for word…

Even knocked out, I still tried to hide the simoom raging inside my indignant chest: They're all the same!

'And what am I to do now? Wander around the same desert my whole life? Am I a goddamn Moses here?'

'Comrade Sukhov, please don't yell. Gulechatay has just fallen asleep.'

'Sorry, Petrukha…'

(… despite all the differences in educational and intellectual levels, when we need to blow our neighbor's brains out, we grab a good old stone axe…)

As the time came to head out for the commuter train, Zhomnir packed my translation copybooks into a single plastic bag—it turned out a pretty thick, weighty load—and came out to see me off at the station. The moonshine was ahhh… damn strong, but I remember the commuter train clunking to a stop and hissing open the doors onto the platform.

I declined Zhomnir's offer of help, and headed toward the round tunnel of the train car vestibule, framed by the nickel-plated gleam of the strangely arched handrails by its swaying sides. Grabbing the one on my left, I climbed inside, walked to the opposite, locked door, and hung the bag on the handrail head there. The last thing I remembered was the sound of a door slamming somewhere behind me.

~ ~ ~

Slowly, I was returning to my senses, until surfaced into the confined space in between the iron walls of the car vestibule to realize I was still clutching the handrail head with my left hand, beside the closed door.

The train stood, silent and motionless, like me, at platform 4 of the Konotop Station. There were no passengers, as train 6456 was scheduled to depart for Khutor Mikhailovsky two and a half hours after arriving in Konotop.

The sight of the empty handrail beneath my clenched palm caused my abdominal muscles to stiffen, which cut my breathing off. The three other vestibule handrails in this cage were also presenting their emptiness.

Slamming aside the slide door, I stepped into the car. My gaze shot off toward the car’s other end—racing along the empty luggage racks above the windows. It found nothing to stumble at across the entire distance: silent smooth emptiness… It returned to help me out into the vestibule, where I exhaled: 'Hooooh!'

I didn't want to sink onto the leatherette seats of the empty train. Through the underpass and the station square, I walked to Lunatic Park, to a hard wooden bench.

There I sat for a long time, clear of any thought at all, only occasionally contemplating myself as a statue, dumbly frozen over the handrail while they peeled off the bag.

Who?!

What difference could it make, it doesn't matter… To them, whoever was it, the spoils brought no joy—utterly useless mess. The only use perhaps to light the kindling in the stove; enough to tide one over for several winters…

After sitting there for about an hour, shell-shocked, I remembered that it was CAT-615's duty day to maintain public order, and I wandered to the squad's stronghold to sit there—in silent, indifferent detachedness.

Only when the cop arrived did I understand what to do next: 'Comrade Captain, lend me three rubles until the next shift.'

'I don't lend rubles, only days of arrest. Will fifteen be enough?'

The asinine witticism of the asshole once again confirmed the wisdom of my plan…

~ ~ ~

The next day, our team lent me three rubles, and after work I went to Nezhyn. There, in the five-story building of the NSPI faculty, on the edge of the Count’s Park, I found the apartment of the always sweetly smiling Nonna and told her I'd lost the Maugham translations I'd been working on for several years. Now, to restore them, I need the originals, all of which are collected in a four-volume set she has. Could she please?

With her usual sweet smile, Nonna brought the books out from another room, placed them in a plastic bag, and handed them to me. My heart forgot to beat from the overwhelming joy—thank you!

-.-

‘How do you like that, Maria Antonovna? That rascal Ogoltsoff lost all his translations on the commuter train!’

‘You shouldn't have gotten the poor fellow so drunk!’

Maria Antonovna also didn't know that all my sorrows, joys, and everything else have sprung from that unreachable bastard, in the unimaginably distant future, who’s sprawled now on my back, stretched out in the Chinese tent for one, composing this letter to you, in the middle of a dark forest where the river named Varanda rushes on, through, and beyond…

~ ~ ~

'Habit's a heavenly gift

To substitute our happiness…'

These immortal lines from the great classic are a blunt hint in 2-meter-tall lettering that they nabbed me on my third trip purely out of habit. The bastards got completely hooked…

And this time, almost everyone in CAT-615 knew I'd be locked up any day now.

Two years later, during a chance encounter on a narrow, deserted path along the railroad embankment, behind the sports grounds of the engineering technical school, retired Major Petukhov, the then head of the HR department of CAT-615, shared this knowledge with me.

Without the slightest prodding or leading questions from me, Petukhov recounted how Deputy Engineer Vanya kept showing up at the HR department almost every other day to call psychiatrist Tarasenko on the office phone about my freshest deviations.

'He was singing this morning. Maybe it's time?'

'Let him sing.'

'He wrote an explanatory note in verse.'

'What note?'

'He lost his helmet, and I demanded he write an explanation. Will you take it back?'

'Too early.'

‘He shoved his shirt into a hole in the floor bridging panel and filled it with mortar.’

'That's it! Make sure he doesn't leave.'

~ ~ ~

Though not every day, yet I did allow myself to sing at workplace, maybe, rather often.

Sometimes, especially when At-Seven-Winds construction lands was drowning in a cold, thick fog, and we sailed through it like a Viking longship in unfamiliar, winding fjords, someone from our team-crew would ask:

'Sing, Seryoga!'

'I had a wife,

She loved me so much,

And just one time she cheated,

And then she made her mind:

Eh! Just one time, then once again,

Then many, many, many, many more again…'

However, our team (almost unanimously) to 'Gypsy Girl' by Vysotsky preferred 'The Ballad of Gypsum Cast' also of his creation:

'I lay prostrate, all plastered over,

My every member's well pre-packaged!…'

However, my helmet hadn’t been lost; it fell victim to my showing off the gentlemanly manners.

I was walking among the construction sites of the 'construction lands' and, near a large-block nine-story building, I saw a couple of plasterers from PMK-7. They were picking some kind of flowers in the fresh green grass. Most likely dandelions, judging by the yellow terry.

The plasterers asked me for a plastic bag, which I didn’t have, and with a sweeping hussar gesture, I tossed my helmet into the grass at the ladies’ feet, for them to collect, so to speak. Like in a basket. Then I had expressly pointed for them at our team’s trailer of brown planks, so they'd know where to return the headgear. I saw them for the first time, which coincided with the last seeing of my hard hat…

Out of our entire team, I was the only one wearing a brimless plastic derby, so Vanya latched on to me with his demand of explanatory note about loss of the protective item. But calling the note I scribbled for him 'a poem' is brazen flattery; it was, at best, free verse…

As for the shirt, well, that's where I stepped into deep trouble. Incautiously, I let me indulging my penchant for DIY rituals because it was the first day of summer. How could you possibly not respond to the occasion? In the summer, even if you're wearing only a T-shirt under your overalls, you’re still swimming in sweat. In the summer, a shirt is a redundant element…

I wore that green shirt made of some crinkly synthetic material for six years, and the bitch never wore out. But you sweat. Because it felt like any other synthetic crap, despite its crinkly nature.

~ ~ ~

And so, on June 1st, I emerged from the trailer, like a freelance artist from Montmartre, in his green cape, its sleeves picturesquely hugging my black overalls, which, in turn, were donned upon my bare torso.

I climbed up to the floor of the current grab in the rising wall and buried the cape in one of the still-unsealed holes in one of the floor panels, among the still unfinished walls…

There had never been trash cans on a construction site, and I couldn't bring myself to simply throw it into the hole of the wooden outhouse—we'd sweated together for so many years…

Then I went to the third floor in the next section, where I was laying the staircase wall, alone, with the ventilation ducts, until Pyotr Lysoon showed up to call me to the trailer. On the way, for some reason, he averted his eyes and talked on abstract botanical topics.

All these strange symptoms vanished from my mind when I saw a UAZ van in front of the trailer, along with a burly cop in his red-band cap, under the command of psychiatrist Tarasenko in a formal business suit…

Our team, along with Engineer Karenin and Deputy engineer Vanya, formed an uneven semicircle facing the visitors.

-.-

Tarasenko announced to those present that my behavior had always been abnormal, and today I had overstepped all conceivable limits with the unauthorized burial of my shirt in a hole in a concrete slab. Then he democratically asked the working masses what other anomalies had they observed in me.

The crowd kept silence… One of the women though tried to explain that the shirt was completely rotten, and Tarasenko, cutting short any pathetic digressions into abstract dirge, ordered me to enter the trailer and change.

As silent as my colleagues, I complied, and then climbed into the windowless van’s back keeping in its hold some additional drunk. And we left the site…

-.-

During a brief stop nearby the Medical Center, the drunk began a passionate campaign for dashing in different directions—the cop wouldn't be able to chase two at once. I kept quiet, realizing that 45 days under the syringes was better than all of my lifespan on the run.

Then a young guard in plainclothes joined us, together with another drunk, and we were taken along the well-trodden way to the city of Romny.