Making for a Yonder

And what's his assignment? No assignment, other than to stay with his relatives, whom he's longed for since moving to Moscow at the age of four.

And here he is, swallowing the foreign cigarettes smoke, looking me in the eye, and asking amidst the general hubbub: 'Why?'

Two days after Artur's murder, he came to say goodbye; he got the signal it was time to come back to Moscow. And so he leaves, carrying a puzzled look in his eyes: 'Why?'

~ ~ ~

For my strictly personal use, I gave him the working nickname 'Weather Probe.' There are these balloons equipped with a bunch of sensors for launching into the upper atmosphere to record current meteorological conditions in said layers.

When he returns to Moscow, he'll be given another free ride to a polite interview in a spacious office. A meaningless conversation about this and that, because a weather balloon has no need to know the data delivered by its recording device.

Or maybe the conversation will be very brief, a pure formality, you know. What's the point of delving into a completed mission? Good job, that dark-haired guy from the Armenian KGB! O, rocks! Again?… What was that? Aha! The NSS for the National Security Service of the independent Republic of Armenia…

~ ~ ~

A secret meeting of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh is underway.

Karabakh is under tight blockade. Azerbaijani forces, using GRAD rocket launchers are extensively shelling Stepanakert. Villages are changing hands in fierce fighting. They need fuel, they need ammunition…

Particularly alarming news: Azerbaijan is trying to negotiate the supply of surface-to-air missiles, the very same ones that kicked the USSR out of Afghanistan. Helicopter deliveries of fuel and ammunition are under threat.

(As it later turned out, the buyer was Chechnya in their first war with Russia, but two Chechen emissaries were killed in London by an Armenian NSS agent. British police managed to arrest the agent, but he poisoned himself in prison by potassium cyanide, received in a bread delivery from a visitor. 'I don't want my family to suffer; the KGB's reach is too long,' were his last words before successfully swallowing the dose.)

A 'road of life' is needed; a 'corridor' linking Karabakh with Mother Armenia is urgently needed, and for that, the city of Lachin must be captured; it controls the 50-kilometer stretch of highway to Armenia.

And then Artur laughed. Who needs Lachin? We have Iran right next door. Opening a corridor in that direction won't require human losses. That way, we'll establish communication with the outside world, with the Armenian Diaspora…

-.-

Two weeks later, Artur was gone. He wanted too much—to decide for himself how to fight for independence, rather than execute decrees from spacious offices that would inevitably lead thousands of young men to the slaughter.

But Version 3 is Version 3 in Karabakh, too.

~ ~ ~

That's why the next acting Chairman turned to the KGB, whose structures weren't buried in the debris of the collapsed USSR, but had become supranational (despite renaming its brunches in the former Soviet republics). A single and indivisible Center and the incorruptible KGB archives remained.

So, the aforementioned acting head most likely got a slap on the wrist from Big Brother for such a careless approach to selecting analytical personnel for the Supreme Council of the completely independent Republic of Mountainous Karabakh. Or, to avoid presenting myself as effing Omniscience, the decision was made at the local level, based on good old xenophobia.

Especially since, as a foreigner, I should have shown more restraint.

Back then, everyone was really into creating state paraphernalia: ministries, legislative assemblies, anthems, flags, and all that crap. So, a high-ranking official approached me for advice from a professional analyst: 'Does the RNK have a chance of becoming internationally recognized?'

But I, naively, answered wholeheartedly, wanting the best.

Yes—easy! You, as a legislator, create such wise laws that all of Azerbaijan will spit on its rulers and come rushing, racing to ask you for Karabakh citizenship. And then the rest will follow, from Moscow to the very outskirts on the sixth part of the globe.

He was probably offended, but I wasn't joking. I believed what I was saying; I didn't imagine that independence would result in 35 ministries for 50,000 draft horses of working-age folks…

It’s a shame he’d taken offense.

-.-

Be that as it may, I got kicked out. As a too extravagant an excess for peacetime conditions.

A week later, an analytical department of 35 female employees was created in my place, headed by a well-known local philatelist. Male. But a very smart one.

And, of course, the staff didn't stop at that, to keep up with the times, as not all relatives had yet returned from exile in Moscow and Yerevan…

Perhaps in England, a civil servant serves the public, but here, he's a bloodsucking nit on the people's body. And no way to pick off the biting bitches—they've been trained for that for ages…

~ ~ ~

All the glass in every window of the State University was, of course, shattered, after all those bombings. However, three windows in the Rector's office were restored, and all the rest covered with vinyl film.

The wind—quite predictably and easily—torn through all these translucent patches, and as soon as it picked up, the vinyl shreds enthusiastically applauded their hero from every window frame.

Tin wood-burner boxes were installed in the classrooms, with tin pipes led outside. Each morning, the University's Quarters Manager would hand out two pieces of cleaved wood to the group leaders from the shed in the yard. It was winter, after all.

By the middle of the second period, the boxes were ice-cold, idle, rusty tin chests of dead ashes, and the female students would start complaining they were frozen too. The male students, however, didn't complain, due to their absence. They were freezing in the trenches on the front lines, so what if the war was over?

And then I would give the girls the order: 'Form up! Walking in a circle… Forward, MARCH!' And they would march around the wood burner, chanting one or another exercise from a brochure, yellowed with decrepitude, published for Soviet universities in 1957. And when they started whining that they were getting dizzy from walking in circles, I commanded: 'Turn around! MARCH!' In the opposite direction.

They giggled, but obeyed and continued chanting… A kinda Sergeant Major Ogoltsoff's Peripatetic Methodology, but it helped them hold out until the hoarse from a cold ringing in the wind-swept corridors.

-.-

Damn! Where have I come to all this from?!

Aha, I remember—children are the flowers of life…

~ ~ ~

But enough of this, let's get back to Lenochka's attempt to correct my blatant inviolability and her lack of a normal father…

She entered the room and sat on my lap, wedged between the table (with an open dictionary, notebook, and copy of Morning Star spread out on its top) and me.

Turning her face upward, she raised her hand and placed her small palm on my each-morning-shaved cheek. She probably wanted to teach her ascetic father the way it's done.

(… what put me off? Fear of slipping into incest? Impossible, with my built-in robotic self-control.

Most likely, the pitiful smile on her face, which said 'Oh, you poor thing!', raised my fur…)

'Well, that's enough, Lenochka, I have to work.'

The smile gave way to an expression of sullen anger, and she began to jump up and down vengefully, still sitting on my lap.

'What?! Dreams of sweet pies? Isn't it too early?' And I rose to my feet, a soulless robot, destroying the launch pad and the possibility of further jumps.

-.-

A couple of days later, when I returned from work, I noticed a change on my shelves. A black hole had appeared.

The high cheekbone in Eerah's face (10 cm x 15 cm, an amateur photo in the middle of a stream) had been pierced right through. The instrument of this vandalism, or maybe even Voodooism, was a sharp pencil or perhaps a ballpoint pen. The question 'who?' didn't occur to me. What difference did it make?

‘Lenochka, come here!’

‘What?’

‘As a father, I'm obligated to ensure your education, so you know what's what. Look at the photo on the shelf.’

‘What?’

‘That's called 'meanness'.’

‘It wasn't me.’

‘I'm not saying you did it. Just remember what 'meanness' is. And who did it make no difference.’

-.-

I had to take the photograph to the photo studio on Club Street across from Lunatiс. The photographer, Arthur, a young Armenian who specialized in transferring wedding portraits to ceramics, said it was fixable. I asked him to enlarge the restoration to the size of a wall portrait, leaving everything as is, including the stream…

For the restored and enlarged photograph, I bought a cardboard frame and put it back on the shelf.

Seeing the portrait in the same place, but significantly more prominent (20 cm x 25 cm), my mother gave out a mocking cackle, which was her only comment.

I didn't rise any follow-up pedagogical discussions, and the photograph sat there, completely undisturbed, in the quiet process of gradually accumulating dust…

~ ~ ~ Beware of your dreams’ realization

Shortly before her firstborn Andrey's birthday, my sister Natasha complained about not being able to find a toy train set. If I remember that big circle of tracks with a tiny train running around it back at the Object…

Of course, I remembered the wonderful toy and took the complaint as an excuse to escape the daily grind of Konotop life. After all, I'm quite a doting uncle! It's only a bit awkward to ask Natasha: will Andrey be two or three?

_._

For a starter, I checked Kyiv. The saleswoman at the specialized department store 'Kids’ World' sat sullenly behind the counter, her arms crossed under a black padded jacket worn by laborers over her blue uniform of a shop assistant. She was mildly amused when I reported that my wish was a chuff-chuff. With a chuckle, she answered in a villagers' parlance, so that the churl of me would get it easier, 'Ain't a-having no chuff-chuffs here.'

Which didn't surprise me in the least—whatever Natasha says should be accepted as a solid fact of reality, without looking for loopholes or wasting time on fruitless doubts…

The next detail to pop up in the plan was the capital of our mutual Motherland—Moscow…

To Moscow! To Moscow!—led the caravan routes, trodden by brain-fogged consumers weary of in of chronic shortages in the semidesert on the bare shelves of retail stores…

At the All-Union capital's 'Kids’ World' store, were found pinky-sized locomotives with carriages and rails, switches, and bridges for miniature trains powered by tiny batteries.

I took my loot to an automated locker at the Kyiv Station, and returned to the center to of culture, accessible only to visitors and residents of the capital.

At the Bolshoi Theater ticket office, they explained to me that you should hustle for a ticket to their grand establishment a couple of weeks before the performance. All cultured people do it that way.

Not alone, but accompanied by poignant disappointment, I left the hallway of the celebrated hearth of culture, saddened they provide no warmth for us, spontaneously loving uncles.

On the sidewalk next to the inaccessible cultural heritage site, I came across a glass cube. Its walls lined tightly from the inside with a crust of diverse advertisements of all sorts of shows on different days in overlapping posters, most likely paper ones.

This hut-on-chicken-legs had a window selling tickets to Moscow theaters and concert halls. For the upcoming evening, I was offered a choice: a pop star concert at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, or a jazz band concert at the Central House of the Soviet Army.

Yeah, it's only one of the other, ‘cause I can't split myself in two. Therefore, one of the suggested possibilities would be lost, and any loss however small is certainly a tragedy. Now, I had to decide which one would be bigger, bitterer?

Should I give up the one suggesting the rarest opportunity to visit the Kremlin and enjoy all that staple shit that gurgles from the Central Television sewers year after year, or… well, hell, what tragedy in that?

‘Gimme Jazz, please!’

_._

(… they say the Chernigov train station was built under the Germans, during the years of occupation. And I believe such hearsays. Why? Just because the sayers don't get paid for their talk, unlike the day laborers engaged in non-stop re-editing Soviet history textbooks.

And then there's the rumor that from a bird's eye view, the Chernigov train station looks like a Teutonic cross.

I haven't actually chanced to inspect the building from above, but I can testify—of all the train stations I've visited, only here can you get boiling water from an impressive copper faucet at any time of day…)

It's quite a clever ploy (Ain’t it, buddy?) to share with the uninitiated that the building of the Central House of the Soviet Army resembles a five-pointed star for fleeting birds. As if our feathered friends have nothing else to do but following the fall of their droppings at what happened to turn up far below their busy wing.

Inside, it's a solid building, with a large auditorium on the first floor, and spacious galleries on the second floor, lined with exhibits on stands.

With meticulous attention, I indulged in the exhibition of postal envelopes and matchbox stickers produced during the Great Patriotic War. Because of arriving at the Central House of Soviet Army two hours before the concert. What else was there to do in unfamiliar Moscow surrendered to the winter?

The images on the envelopes and stickers, despite their naive primitivism, struck a deep chord with a warm, nostalgic note in me, as I grew up on the black-and-white humus of films of that era.

_._

Then I went down to the hall, and soon the jazz musicians arrived to set up and test their instruments on stage—drums, vibraphone, speakers…

Having finished their preparations, the musicians unanimously attacked the bald Jew for being too smart and late again. Taking up a defensive perimeter, he drove a counter-hooey about the hardships of Moscow life, and went into massive offensive threatening to give up on this music altogether, because: well, really, who needs it, huh?

They moved bandying their counterarguments backstage, and the hall began to slowly fill. For the audience of a hundred of jazz lovers, the rows of purple plush seats were more than enough.

And then the concert began… A tall, plump girl in black hosted it, and she also sang occasionally. I absorbed number after number and wanted only one thing—for them to never end. What Dixieland the vibraphone produced! What riffs on the bass guitar!

In one of the numbers, the bassist with his long-necked instrument, and the tall girl were left completely alone, the three of them on stage, not counting the microphone. And they created blues of such frank sexuality that after that all mass porn became a puddle of slush at the gate to a kolknoz cattle farm…

The Jew showed up only once; he was playing the bongos. Played?! The entire African continent will not produce the like delight on all their djembes and dunduns.

I forgave him for his bald head and stupid talk before the concert, because he became a completely different person. He forgot that he 'didn’t need it anymore' and created rhythms getting you high to uncontrollable joy:

'Bravo! Bravo!'

~ ~ ~

Apparently, some kind of parallel event was being held in one of the star limbs of the CHSA pentacle structure, because many officers in full dress uniform, not present at the concert, were crowding by the locker room counter.

The cloakroom girl brought coats for two at once and lowered them on the counter top: a general’s greatcoat – tight curls in Karakul fleece of the astrakhan collar, scarlet silk lining – and (so then this dried honey agaric on my left is a general?) and the deme-season overcoat bought in the previous decade for 30 rubles from Alyosha Ocheret, a student of NSPI.

She left the pair on the sheen of polished wood and tarried over their exquisite contrast, letting out a barely noticeable sad sigh. Eternal sadness sounded in her quiet exhale.

(… yes, dear one, choice making was, is, and always will be tragic. The usual insoluble dilemma — either a hussar in the pink, but without a penny in his pocket, or a scruffy general, of a secure income.

Both have ways and levers to console a lady in her sighing mood, yet those means and levers take roots and spring from not the same beds; hence, the choice, and the tragedy inherent to it…)

_._

Muscovite taxi drivers are way more professional than their Kyiv colleagues. In any case, the one who picked me up after the concert, appreciating my camel-haired appearance and lack of luggage, took me at the first try to a hotel, where they don’t start the boring bullshit about pre-booking…

The Polar Hotel started from the sidewalk and was lost somewhere up there in the darkness of the night sky… The receptionist sent me by elevator to unimaginable heights between the twelfth and sixteenth floors.

The room turned out to be similar to the repose rooms at Ukrainian train stations, where people are always accepted just for asking, whenever they have on them the passport and a ruble for a bed. Only in the Polar shelter there were more beds – about twenty of them, on which the guests were already lying, having changed into their blue sweatpants.

I had only what I had on, and all there remained to do under the circumstances was to undress and – good-night…

However, my stomach started its mournful protests complaining of my forgetfulness, which left it empty after partaking in the feast of cultural life at CHSA. Egoistic egotism!

Besides, it grumbled about the earlier offenses in the course of the same day. Flared with the heat of hunt for toy railroad I never thought of taking a bite to give the poor wretch, my stomach, some, at least provisional, fill.

I had to ask the mate shelters where there was a dining room or some kind of buffet. To this, the imposing athletes, with something like gloating, explained that everything like that here is closed at seven.

The feeling of hunger and the growing desire to the neighbors to their proper place (and even so joyfully: 'but everything is already closed!') forced me to leave my camel coat at the stables in the common wardrobe of the room and wheeze down by the elevator.

_._

In the night outside, on the meter-wide one-step porch covered with a centimeter-thick layer of fluffy snow, next to the hotel entrance there was also a high door to the restaurant. Locked, as predicted.

However, in the depths behind hits glass wing, light and some distant motion could be discerned…

I began pounding on the brown frame of the door panes. A man in a black visored cap, sporting wide yellow stripes athwart his jacket sleeves appeared on the other side of the transparent barrier.

At the sight of me, standing against the backdrop of the inky dark and downing flakes; no hat, a wide-open blue corduroy jacket over a white shirt…

Here, without starting your deduction engine, it was obvious that I had gone out to have my nose powder, or somehow otherwise enjoy the fresh snow in the open air, and now I wanted to go back.

He unlocked the door and I rushed into the hall.

~ ~ ~

The restaurant impressed with its vast dimensions. It was enough to host a couple of weddings, synchronously-parallel, but at the same time there remained a group of unengaged tables. About half a dozen.

I had to wait quite a long time until the waiter came up, to det informed about my desire to eat. Something simpler, no frills.

To pass the time until he returned with my Spartan order, I watched the dance of the just married pair from the wedding party closest to my table. At the end of their, so to say, tango, the plump bride in white freaked out for some reason, and surprised the frail groom with a mean elbow into plexus and returned to the banquet table.

The skinny man grabbed his tie so as not to collapse while his breath was restoring. His face contorted into a fake smile, revealing the absence of the upper incisor and canine together. (Lost at the registry office?) The foundation of a marriage relationship was laid right at the wedding.

Oh, boy! You've really stepped into some fu… Sorry, that was a wrong card… Aha! Here it is!. 'May the love and happiness you feel today shine through the years…'

_._

I was one ruble short on my dinner bill. Or rather, I still had a ruble left, but I saved it for the next day’s expenses. Without going into details, I told the waiter about the shortage, promised that I would definitely return it and asked his name. He identified himself and showed no persistence regarding the ruble.

I went up to my room full of both grab and benevolence, and to the room-mates’ questions, I explained with a distracted yawn that the restaurant downstairs was still open.

~ ~ ~

24 hours later, I arrived in Konotop and proudly carried my birthday present to At-Seven-Winds. Natasha's family already lived there, in a large nine-story building built by PMK-7.

I knew the location of their apartment—to help the young family, I'd been writing philosophy and history test papers for Gena, which he'd been assigned by his correspondence institute in Poltava. A brother-in-law of drenched repute can sometimes be of use…

The elevator ride to the fourth floor seemed provincially brief, but no one opened the door for me. Gena might have gone for exams in Poltava, and Natasha visiting her gossip among the neighbors for whom I hadn't written papers.

_._

On my way to Decemberists 13, I turned into one of the dead ends of Pirogov Street, where Gena's parents' house stood. His father was already asleep, but Natalya Savelyevna sitting yet with Andrey, her grandson and my nephew, in the living room.

I wanted to leave the box and go, but she asked me to assemble the toy; the boy’s still awake anyway.

When the train, began to whir its loops on the living room floor, there were no uncles or nephews left; Andrey and I became enchanted souls of the same age…

~ ~ ~

It took about a year to restore the translations lost tracelessly at my inebrious catatonic stupor in the commuter train vestibule. I couldn't prolong the pleasure any longer—the vanished texts were still too fresh in my memory.

After the final period in the last of anew translated stories, I took Maugham's four-volume set to Nezhyn to return it to Nonna.