Once, responsive to a mighty hammer strike, liquid dung jetted thru a gap in between the uneven board pieces, right into my face, and the cow from the nearby stall turned her left eye at me and grinned with so deep satisfaction that I learned for certain – those cattle are not as stupid as they pretend to be. In fact, my main occupation on the farm was playing Throw-in Fool with 3 local mujiks. My photographic deck of cards (quite modest girlie nudes in black-and-white) plunged them into a catatonic stupor, their scrutiny of the dealt hands went on for a real hell of time and they were markedly reluctant to throw in any of the cards and part with the girlie.

(…now the era has changed and the same card packs, only in color, are sold in the stalls at any railway station…)

One of the students who worked at the dryer, redheaded Grisha from the Bio-Fac, also played Throw-in Fool with me after his work. He was tremendously keen on winning. The hot-tempered guy even found a deck of ordinary cards to replace my black-and-white gallery, but the school of Yasha Demyanko was bringing its fruits, and by the end of the month he had lost to me a twenty-five-bottle box of vodka. However, mindful of Sasha Ostrolootsky's orphanage wisdom, that a bird in the hand is better than a pie tomorrow studded with rubies from the sky, I, on the last working day, told the fiery-cheerful Grisha that one bottle immediately would write off all his debt, and he happily ran to the village store, otherwise I wouldn't get even as much…

I wouldn't say that vodka or hooch were really giving me a kick, no, it’s neither here nor there, but my social position and the opinion of the surrounding society were simply pushing me to booze.

(…the folks around keep us incarcerated in the unbreak-outable prison of their opinion and no matter what we do it only adds to our ill repute or mutual admiration for our character.

More often than not, we just begin to conform, so if told that some unlucky wretch had to become a boozer because of noblesse oblige, I am prepared to believe it…)

For example, a male student from the Phil-Fac with a couple of girls from his course wandered to the farm. They lingered by the stall of the bull hitched with an iron chain. The wise guy threw to the beast a scrap of hay he grabbed from the cow in a nearby stall. On taking the cow's scent in the delivered hay, the bull got horny and kicked up mad bellowing and yanking at his chain.

Quite accidentally, I passed by and that was enough to spice the evening oral news bulletin at the canteen tables with enthusiastic slurping the latest news of Ogoltsoff who guided Phil-Fac chicks on the excursion around the bull's hardon. An utterly pervert misconstruing and belying of my character! Yet, the imprint of your personal image in the collective mind is a horrendous force, and you could never prove to anyone that with my noble delicacy of feelings and trepid adoring attitude to girls I didn’t even wink at them, because of my damn innate gentility…

Having familiarized myself with the Bolshevik work and living conditions, I went to Konotop. First of all, to change the sodden sneakers, and besides, there also I was awaited by the pressing harvesting labors… Back in August, Lyalka and I had a couple of regional tours around the corners in the city backstreets away from its noisy main thoroughfares. In the slumberous quietude of the forlorn lanes, we paid good heed to the small but magnificent plantations of cannabis gently waving to us from behind khutta-fencing with their bushy branches bearing the load of fuzzily outlined, ripening, heads. Lyalka was the guide, and I was an enthusiastic tourist admiring the diligence of Konotopers at their heartfelt, loving, cultivation of their plots. It was time to help the home-towners in harvesting. And though not everyone waited for my humanitarian patronage assistance, however, there still stayed unharvested sites.

I was a noble robber, well-versed in the concepts of justice, and never snatched more than a couple of bushes from one plantation, and even those 2 were one hell of a load to haul. Whereto? To the nearest nook, for a too shallow and, I would sadly admit, predatory processing. That is, the final product comprised skimpy 10 percent of what could be obtained from the same amount of the raw material when approached with a balanced and well-thought-out technology. And the regretfully meager turnout was, if I were asked, the consequence of deplorable incompetence in such a fundamental field. Elementary ignorance and nothing else…

After laborious night vigils in Konotop, I was already well furnished to plunge into the everyday working efforts in Bolshevik… When on the first night back, I was thoughtfully tuning the guitar—…you leave it without control and anyone would spin the tuning machine, good news the strings are still in place…—two local guys came into the clink-like dormitory who declared of their desire to play billiards.

Out of sheer curiosity—how could anyone play it with the balls screwed up to the utmost?—I rolled my mattress up and put it on a chair by the wall. Well, yes, exactly as supposed, no one could. Not only that the maimed balls jerk-hopped along their wiggling way, but it was them to chose when to jerk and change the tack. The absolutely chaotic unpredictability excluded any aesthetic pleasure distinguishing that strictly harmonized game… On realizing that, the fellas introduced themselves as 2 brothers from a neighbor village.

The information did not arise any discernible excitement among the students sitting in line along the edge of the mattresses-topped decking, and the brothers left…

The following day one of them, named Stepan, called me out from the canteen at midday mealtime. In token of gratitude for my understanding during their previous night visit, he proposed a ride to his village, where we went by his "Jawa"… Stepan pulled up in front of a well-built house and asked to act before his parents that I had been one of his buddies during the hitch in the Limited Contingent of Soviet Troops stationed in Germany, and now we accidentally met each other in Bolshevik.

His parents were most delighted with our chance meeting and laid the table for the comrades-in-arms… After the second glass, getting in the mood, I asked Stepan if he remembered Elsa, the German blonde waitress from the Gashtet round the corner. Stepan was taken aback, and started to look at me more closely – what if I indeed slept on a bank in the corner koobrik?.

A day later, Stepan and I were paying visits to different rooms in both hostels dwelt by girl-students, after they returned from supper in the canteen. He pulled up in a room with my course-mates, but I (fully aware of the absolute barrenness of such a hunting grounds for me personally) went on alone until reached, already on the second floor in the next hostel, the last room to the left.

It was occupied by girls from the Philological Department: Anna, Eera, Olya, and Vera all of whom I was so very pleased to get acquainted with. And they had no other alternative but to be also pleased, without any dance-floors, cinemas and even a TV set around.

Olya, a short amiable girl with the wavy yellow bob-cut hair, asked where my business card was, implying the guitar. Without much delay, I fetched it from the club dormitory, sang some sentimentally romantic trash, and passed the guitar to Olya, who suddenly fancied learning to play it. Meanwhile, I got seated onto the bed of reserved and silent Eera to pick up a trifling conversation in which it doesn’t matter what about because it's meant to follow the voice modulations and trace the fleeing shifts in the expression of the eyes and face in general…

It’s hard to say whether on that particular or the following night she and I went outside and stood under the yellow light shed by the bulb from the lamppost between the two shabby hostels when I happened to have what the North American Indians call "vision".

I saw the boundless Ukrainian night wrapping us from everywhere and in the blacker dark along its edges, there was raising the buzz of chilly autumn winds already. The only bright spot, besides the bulb overhead, was that face opposite me, smiling and not unfriendly anymore, radiating tiny beams of light which happen when you squint, without fully closing your eyelids. Yet, I was not squinting, not a bit, and maybe even opened my eyes wider, struck with the beauty of that new face. And all that—even myself—I beheld as if from aside, from some point in the immense wrapper who, like me, focused on the vision center, on her face of incredible beauty, kinda warm circle of light in the surrounding darkness, like a lifebuoy to withstand the onslaught of icy cold rattling at the far-off, rimed, horizons.

(…of course, at that moment I was not thinking any of this lofty trash, and, in fact, I was not capable of thinking at all because at the moment all I could do was looking at her face and falling in love irretrievably…)

The next day Eera did not come to the canteen for midday meal, Vera said that she was on duty – cleaning their room. The moment I came up to the hostel, she went out on the porch with a mop in her hands, in a short gown.

(…the most wide-spread methodology for estimation of female attractiveness is gouging her volumes. The self-proclaimed experts and qualified connoisseurs base their evaluation on the volume of the breasts and buttocks, while gourmets, subtractively, measure the waist… Absolute dilettantism. But what else to expect from all those differently aged junior jerks?

The most convincing detail in a woman, with which she will hook you at once and forever, is her knees. If the glimpse of them warms your heart, makes your shoulders straighten up and your breath go deeper, then stay assured – that’s it, nothing more beautiful will ever be met.

If that does not happen, go away and keep looking out, maybe you’ll be lucky someday…)

Spotting her knees, I immediately realized that I was right in raising my paws and flashing dumb wit about the size of the high boots, because on the wet trail thru the corn jungle under her blue jeans were those very knees.

Of course, you’ve guessed already, that it was your mother…

~ ~ ~

Thus, there still remained three full years before your birth, which stretch, supposedly, would suffice for no less than a couple of loves to die away, if we accept naive calculations promoted by the reverend Sigmund Freud.

(…what a blasphemous mockery of the sacred beliefs, eh? Which chesty assault though can easily be parried by the traditional fencing trick of "terz" – to wit, that there are 'no rules without exceptions.' The good ol’ move…Yet, it depends on the rules, you know.

If a certain scientist Galileo, when dropping his balls from the Tower of Pisa would have noticed that one of them, marked, for the scientific accuracy, with something like "E + S", all of a sudden started to soar and put out aerobatics tricks, then there would be no law of universal gravitation.

And on that account, our beloved Ziggy can't be registered as a trustworthy die-hard scientist. He should be moved to some other league. Place him among such illustrious coryphaei as Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and so forth, up to the nameless creators of The Thousand and One Nights. There he would fit perfectly with his Tom Thumb, aka "ego", Evil Giant, aka "super-ego", the royal castle of "consciousness", and impenetrable wilds of tropical swampy jungles of "subconsciousness", on the canvas of which he weaves the lacy patterns of his theory.

How dare I?!. So many generations have been conceived and, in their turn, conceived further generations with the blessing of his psychoanalysis!.

Nature does not tolerate emptiness, man necessarily has to fill with something their gray matter, aka brain, aka (using the apt expression of the brain-tapped Battalion Commander of VSO-11) the "highest fucking stuff". And that's the indisputable truth. Nothing but intolerance to emptiness caused the production of all those Bibles-Korans-Vedas-Iliads, as well as belief in the existence of boogies and brownies.

And, obedient to the naive wisdom of nature, we stop marketing the useless bullshit—it's not worth it from a pedagogically correct standpoint—and start bringing into the picture the three years until you’ll condescend to be born…)

In the girls' room everything was figured out already, that is everyone got it clear who I was after. Olya's eagerness to learn the guitar playing cooled off but, all the same, I tarried with taking it back to the club dormitory. Just in case, so that I would have an excuse to pop up again, like, oh, I forgot here something… No safety measure would be too proactive if they fall over themselves to blast away to your sweetheart, "Gee, he's married!." I was not denying that dent in my biography, since long sunk in the abyss of the past though. And she never asked to show her my passport!.

(…the booklet in red covers asserting your USSR citizenship was more than just ID card. It registered your movements about our boundless Soviet Homeland, witnessed changes in your matrimonial state, reflected variations in the expression of your facial features every ten years, and more… Folks developed and cherished strong belief in the pleonasmic omniscience of Organon, aka passport. They could on the fly invent and endow it with magic powers.

In a separate development, a militiaman checked my passport and on one of its blank pages (reserved for the stamps in future) detected letter “Z” disguised as a casual smear. The sign told him I was an ex-con, aka zek. He couldn’t read the duration of my stretch though and escorted me to a senior in his chain of command who fatherly advised him not to take anyone in a raincoat of unfamiliar cut for a threat to the public and state order.

Even under socialism, wise people were still there. Thank you, unknown Captain!.)

That evening a young teacher from the Philological Department came to the girls' room. Probably, to make sure that she didn't skip her duty and checked what was going on there at all. Because apart from me, one more lover started his visits to the room – Czech Jan.

A natural Czech, middle-aged geezer, who arrived within the framework of socialist integration of the fraternal states to drive it home to Bolshevik (which was not just the village but also the name of the state farm for hops-production) the subtle art of drying hops so as to get the right beer. (Czechs and beer for centuries were and remain twin brothers.)

Jan's wife stayed to keep their children in the Czech-Slovakia Socialist Republic. He missed her and, to relieve the longing, fell in love with Olya. That was the reason for his late evening visits and long talks with her about something, I was not sure what namely, because he talked in Czech. And if it were not for the language barrier, I would not miss interviewing him about the year of '68…

Once the girls arranged a party in the room, so he came even in a necktie, that's a civilized man for you. For the occasion, he brought a bottle of Champagne and canned food, but not from the village store because the canned food turned out more delicious than even the cod liver, after which you had to go to Moscow or Leningrad. And he flatly refused to drink any vodka. Showing at the filled glass he wrinkled his face and patted himself on the heart to emphasize his fear of that swill charged with health problems…

But when the teacher came on her control visit, Jan was not present in the room. She could see for herself that though Eera and I were sitting on the same bed, yet in a quite appropriate attitude – each one at the opposite side rails. All moral prescriptions respected, so, get seated, please, let's have a cup of tea.

The moment she sat at the table, there surged a hell of an uproar in the corridor: You!. Who!. Mother-blother!. The door of the room burst open. And in the dark corridor, five to six guys were looming in two-rank formation.

The teacher turned around from her cup, "What's happening?"

"And who are you here at all?"

She decided to crush them by her authority, "Girls! Tell them who I am!"

And all the 4 girls, in unison, as if in the collective recital which they had been preparing from their kindergarten times, "She-Is-a-Teacher!!."

To which, kinda antiphon, "Then fuck her!"

(…well, yes, not all in our younger generations are brought up in the proper way, and non-rural areas, regretfully, are not exceptions to the rule…)

During that matinee dialogue, I, of course, realized that they had come after my soul. The night before, a girl from the next hostel came running to the club dormitory and raised the alarm about local guys misbehaving in her room. You bet, I ran there and saw a scene of confusion on the first floor. Some girl was crying, 3 local guys were confronted by 3 student counterparts stuck in a futile discussion on the subject of "and who are you?" In short, a stalemate position.

To solve the etude, I chose the bigger guy among the locals and asked the crying girl, "This one offended you?" "Yes!"

I punched the guy. The locals vanished without a trace and the common agitation subsided. Later that guy and 2 more with him waited for me at the entrance to the club. "It was not me," he said.

"I'm sorry," said I. "I had no choice." How could I explain to him that so I was trained by Chief of Staff: a fact of violation should be followed but the fact of punishment? Only Chief of Staff—which is characteristic—did not ask me for forgiveness…

It seemed that my apology was not accepted, and the uninvited guests to the tea-party arrived to demonstrate a Bolshevik-styled vendetta. From under the bed, I fished out the empty champagne bottle and stood up close to the doorway. They kept barking outside but abstained from stepping in – the bottle had rather weighty looks. How could they know that my martial art level was less than a fig and minus?

Some footsteps sounded in the corridor and, behind the guys, I made out Stepan. He grasped at once what’s what, and attacked from the rear. I also jumped out into the corridor with the warcry, "Come fucking here!" It worked no worse than on Shoorik – the guys flinched and fled. Stepan and I were adding stimulation to their stampede, but I already hadn't the bottle in my hands, I didn't remember where it got lost. The memory retained only their unanimous clattering down the stairs with Stepan racing in their wake.

I was left one to one with the guy who in the mutual commotion failed to pass the bottleneck of the stair-flight and stuck upstairs. His spirit though blasted without a fight. Giving in to his fate, he limply drooped onto the railing and was sagging there like a wet mat, considering from above the steps down there on which he was to plop.

And I grabbed him—noblesse oblige!—but then I heard a cry; very distant, hardly audible, like the one that called me on the snowy road nearby the nine-story building in Stavropol. I observed the submissive jelly of a guy. What for?. So, I turned around and went down the corridor back to the room.

(…I agree all that sounds more than oddly, but at times strange things do happen. Some people hear voices, but I heard cries, distant, from afar…)

And once again she did not come to midday meal. I went to their room. Eera was sitting alone and did not want to talk. I sat on the bed by her side, took her hand… I liked that hand and those fingers, long and tapering. I only did not like the whitish narrow scars on the inside of the left wrist, as from a teenager’s toying with the suicide, but I never asked about them. And at that moment I only asked what's wrong.

She sobbed and said that in the morning on the plantation, the senior overseer was putting her to shame. He told it was unworthy of a teacher's daughter to have anything in common with such a renegade and married man as I was. And that he would call her mother, and tell her everything the first thing on our arrival back in Nezhyn.

But what was there to tell about!?. And of which teacher mother?.

"Of Ger..maaaaan.." and the tears quashed her speaking.

"Damn them all, then! Come with me!"

"Where?"

As if I knew where, but she agreed, and we went out there… At first, it was a field of corn, not the one over which we walked at our arrival, here the stalks were shorter and scantier. Then the field tilted down and we came up to a long secluded stack of straw.

The day was warm and clear. We stretched out on the straw broken off of the stack side and were lying there, talking, kissing. I wanted to open up to her my whole soul, up to admitting that I was a space cadet. And I wanted her so badly, only the sun was in the way. But with the approach of the evening, the solitude dissolved. Next to the stack, there appeared an unnecessary dirt road, some trucks and motorcycles started to pass by, gaping at her red sweater…

We returned in the dark and were met by Anna, who waited for us between the hostels to warn about the ambush up there. She also told that when the senior overseer teacher came to their room, he screamed and shouted that both Eera and I had shunned work but were seen strolling around, and the dean offices of our respective Departments, as well as the Institute Rectorate, would be informed about such brazen breach of discipline.

During the briefing, Olya, Vera, and Jan emerged from the darkness for the joint brain-storming of the problem: what to do? Jan kept shaking his head and repeating in Czech, which had already grown a bit more intelligible, that "it is-a not-a good-a". Olya ordered him to shut up, and better go to the canteen to fetch some food for us; because only he could do it without evoking unwanted suspicions… Jan and Olya were understanding each other without translation; so he soon returned with a newspaper parcel for the hunted-after "milovitsy". I did not know that I was that hungry.

Meanwhile, the girls were quick at drawing a plan for the campaign of persecuted students against oppressor-teachers. Eera and I would go to Borzna, the native town of Vera, and stay for the night at the khutta of Vera's parents. In the morning, Eera would go to Nezhyn as if she had gone there 2 days before because of being unwell, and I would come back to Bolshevik as if coming from Konotop, unaware what's the fuss.

Czech Jan saw the 2 of us to the road out of the village, still preaching about "lovely pretty milovitsy" and we left into the night…

The night was dark and windy and the road all potholes, and longer than 10 kilometers from the approximate estimation by Vera. Eera got very tired, and in the end, I even piggybacked her like Gogol's Homa Brutus the witch bestriding him, for the distance between 2 posts in the roadside electricity line.

Having already been on a visit to Vera's khutta, Eera found it even in the dead of night. Vera’s mother bedded us on the floor in the living room and promised to wake Eera up for the seven o'clock bus to Nezhyn. We lay down and, to my embrace, Eera said that she was too tired and that she had to get up early. In a moment she was fast asleep, but I still lay for a long time full awake, gloating and grinning in the dark that we had rubbed the senior overseer's nose in it… No trumps? No ace? Grab my cock and wipe your face!.

When I awoke in the morning, Eera was gone and Vera's brother gave me a lift to Bolshevik by his "Jawa" bike. Students and teachers were just coming out of the canteen and he, cracking his motor, carried me alongside the crowd in the slow triumphant ride. A certain stupid asshole stood still with his jaw dropped. Yet, Vera's brother was disappointed when to his inquiry I answered that Eera and I had no sex on the floor in their living room…

~ ~ ~

She stayed in Nezhyn for a long time, and I again gave in to the image enforced on me by the society… 3 workmen from Borzna came to conduct a stretch of running water; the pipe of half-inch cross-section in a knee-deep trench. I was passing by and helped them a little because of nothing better to do. The mujiks got emotional and bought some vodka, yet without a snack. A throwaway kitchen oilcloth was found and spread under a cherry tree, we sat on it with our feet lowered into the trench for comfort, and killed the bottle.

And then the senior overseer came up to witness the disgraceful recidivism when, instead of work, I was at boozing drastically, so he again began to croak what was awaiting me, when back in Nezhyn… While the youngest of the workmen went to the store after a catch-on addition, I dropped in at the plantation. My course-mate girls started to speak up that I did not notice my own and keep the company exclusively with the girls from the Philological Department. I told them I was a Slavophil since my early childhood, so the Anglo-Fac's beef to heels did not turn me on, in short: Phil-Fac forever!

Then the mujiks called me from the trench. We finished the extra bottle too, sharing a doughnut for a snack, and I passed away on that same tablecloth. Like, enjoy our specialty dessert… Later, the senior overseer in his accusatory speech focused on the fact that the students, returning from the plantation, had to pass by me served-up in that spread flat form. Although the distance between the road and the trench was about 5 meters, I was still ashamed to hear about it. But that was later…

3 days after, Vera went to Borzna, and I accompanied her to make a telephone call to Eera in Nezhyn.

"Hi."

"How d'you?"

"Nothing."

"You… well… come back… eh? I wrote a song here for you." And what more sensible could be expected of a balmy fop like me?. In fact, I did not write a song but made a Russian adaptation of the then-popular hit "It's raining, it's pouring (you might be sorry)…"

"The weary whisper of this endless rain
Drowned hopes of seeing you again,
Dripping drops with their low drone
Make me feel forlorn and lone
And drive me mad with their stance:
"You can be happy only once!"
What's the use of all your weeping, rain?
Keep it back, don't spend on me in vain,
Let the wind dry up your tears
With a swarm of fallen leaves
I don't need any preaching rains
They can't bring back my happy days…"

Zampolit wouldn't approve that again it was about the recidivistic rain, but so was the lyrics in the original, and the chord sequence was really cool…

Coming back with Vera, we didn't go along the road but took a shortcut over the vast fields which she was familiar with. There happened some secluded square hole nearby the path, like a former dugout, all overgrown with inviting carpet-like grass, where we entered for a midway repose. Vera was a beautiful black-haired girl of dark complexion and commanding air. When she got fed up with my incessant babbling about Eera this, Eera that, we hit the road again.

Getting out of the hole, I noticed candy wrappers in the grass. It seemed to be a local dating house, where I failed to live up to my image… Many years later, Eera told me how on one of the endless evenings in Bolshevik, before my drifting to their room, they arranged shaman dances behind the closed door. Vera hung a piece of sausage and a pair of onions from her sports pants and went off to roll and jump in that disguise: uh! Uh!

(…those swarthy Slav females would out-sex anyone when left on their own, and here lies the clue to the music by Igor Stravinsky…)

Eera came back to the village, and I spent the night in their room. It happened all by itself. We lay dressed on her bed and kept hugging and pressing more and more tighter and closer to each other, and then there remained nowhere any closer. Only I did not want to creak the bed, like Marc and Katranikha, which called for slowing down the action…

(…Anna did not sleep then and she later told Eera that at some point she couldn't control herself and kissed her own forearm…)

…but I still liked it.

The next day Eera admitted, "Seems, I'm thru the psychological barrier."

"Gosh! I kinda thought the physical got done with too…"

~ ~ ~

After Olya refused to marry Jan, he instantly grew Russian. The sufferings inflicted by his turned down love peeled all the varnish of civilization off the Czech European. He never learned the language though, but he dropped shaving and walked around in bristles wearing a black padded jacket, from under which he took a bottle of vodka—at uneven intervals—and swallowed from its neck, like Validol or some other medication. Sort of homeopathy in the Bolshevik style…

On the last night before our departure from the village, Vera, with a lot of care, prepared a bed for me and Eera in the next room, which had already got vacated. I did not turn the light off, and later Eera told me how much she was confounded at the sight of what I was getting on top of her with.

In the morning, before the arrival of the buses, she kept mum, hardly talking to me except for "yes", "no", "nothing". I did not manage then to bring out, that her mood resulted from Olya's forewarning that all we had had there was merely a "collective-farm affair" and back in Nezhyn, I would not give Eera another look.

When the buses came, I boarded neither of them, but put the guitar over my shoulder and walked towards the windbreak belt along the Moscow highway at the distant horizon, to go hiking to Baturin and from there to Konotop…

"Rumors have it, you've got an affair with a teacher's daughter?"

"They say, you've got married?"

Yes, she had and was in Nezhyn on a flying visit to get aright some papers, and dropped into Room 72 in the Hosty, before leaving for Mongolia where her husband was sent to serve after graduating his military school. By the by, he realized she was not a virgin. After the first wedding night he asked, well, they say, that women, usually, as if would, like, compare… "Yes, that's true," she answered and didn't add a word to it.

(…that's how she fucking crushed the poor fool. Just stepped on and smeared away.

Why not spread it thick and comfort him affectionately, like, there’s no one quite like you, babe, you’re the best man I’ve ever had, nobody's fit to hold a candle to you, my hero lover?.

Women are the most cruel creatures if you ask me. And should we really be so much surprised at having Tughriks among us?…)

However, sometimes you'd better make love, not talk. And we lay on the former Fyodor's and currently my bed because it was by the window. The first and only time in my life, I was with a married woman, and that's only for the old sake's' sake.