mentioned f-f…er…well, I mean, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department.
Seated at the large desk, pretty hunky, with his hair sticking closely to the skull, he asked who the day before was present at the rehearsal in the Variety Ensemble room in Club… And who was the last to leave?. Who was approaching the closet where so much expensive German accordion of four registers had been kept?.
He took notes all the time and when the phone on his desk rang, the receiver got picked and pressed to his ear with his shoulder raised to the tilted head, the way Marlon Brando did in the movie where he was the sheriff, while the moron kept writing on…
After interrogating all of us, they told us we were free to go and might be getting back to work… We sauntered up along the street to the Department Store and turned left towards Peace Square. 4 Orpheuses in smeared spetzovka pants and old T-shirts… Along Peace Avenue, we also strolled in no hurry – the working day was ending at five.
In Zelenchuk Area, we had a bit of fun, jumping at each other like Mazandaran tigers and tearing down the worn T-shirts on our bodies. We did not stop the revelry until all the four T-shirts were torn wide open from their collars to the waist. And why not? The day was sunny and pretty warm, so we simply tied the tatters with knots upon our navels and went on, like happy hippies. It was Skully to start the whole horseplay, probably, because he had such a hairy chest…
Next week, coming back to the Plant after the midday break I, as always, dropped into Vladya's khutta to flock and go on together. Vladya shared the news about one of his neighbor's hens who died in the yard that morning and concluded with the suggestion of taking the body over with us to hang it in our locker room, just for fun.
The plan did not inspire me too much but I still lent Vladya a helping hand in smuggling the demised into the Plant because you needed both your hands to climb the wall along Professions Street but if dragging along a newspaper package with a dead hen, you had nothing to grab hold of those holes in the concrete slabs with…
From the locker room ceiling there hung a length of wire for a light bulb, which was missing together with its socket. Vladya took someone's unfinished shabashka from under the window, rested it on a locker in the middle row, climbed upon the work in progress and wrapped the unemployed wire around the hen's neck. She froze up there with her dirty white wings spread loosely above the naked skinny legs.
The midday break was over and the Mechanical Shop Floor machine-tools started their scraping wails when a plump black-haired locksmith from the Repair Unit entered the room. Catching a glimpse of the bird, he did not laugh but left immediately. In a split-second our Overseer, Borya Sakoon, flew in.
With his eyebrows shot up and the lips pouched to farm the small letter "o", motionlessly stood he for one entire moment staring at the listless animal above his uplifted face. Then he turned over to us, "Hairy-yobbos! You did it, bitches!"
For some unadvertised reason, Borya was in the habit of calling The Orpheuses working at the Experimental Unit "the hairy-yobbos"…
We, certainly, denied the allegation but Vladya took the dead bird off, wrapped it back into the same newspaper and dropped somewhere outside the Repair Shop Floor. In the final analysis, Borya was right – with merely two eyewitnesses, by the end of that working day the entire Repair Shop Floor knew that the hairy-yobbos (the workingmen masses slavishly aped the Overseer’s example in calling us that name) fixed a chick in the locker room. And if the thing remained there for at least half-hour it would inevitably kick off grim rumors circulating Konotop about someone got hanged at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant…
~ ~ ~
Olga and I ceased dating at the gate of her aunt's khutta because we found a more suitable place, or rather she showed it to me.
A little farther along Budyonny Street, there was a short dead-end to the left, leading up to the closed iron gate of the oil storage base. Near that gate, by the garden fence on the roadside, there stood a park bench. Who and when schlepped it so far from the Park I couldn't say but, strategically, it was positioned in an impeccably correct spot wrapped in the shadow out of reach of the feeble light from the bulb above the closed base gate. On that bench, I got acquainted in absentia with Olga's Konotop relatives…
Her mother's sister, Nina, immediately after the war served as a telephone net switcher at the headquarters of a Soviet Army division stationed in Poland. On her demobilization, Nina didn't return to the Soviet Union because she had married a Pole and they had a child already, so Nina stayed to live in her husband’s land.
4 years later, she arrived in Konotop to attend the funeral of one of her parents and that was a mistake. They never let her go back despite the fact that her young daughter remained in Poland, and the country itself was a member of the Socialist Camp Community. She never found out what happened to her daughter or her husband nor did she know anything about their current situation, because none of her letters was answered.
After 15 more years, Aunt Nina registered her marriage to Uncle Kolya who did not drink and had a good job in the forestry, only he often needed to go somewhere by his motorcycle with a sidecar. Yet, he had built a really good khutta of three rooms and a kitchen. They had no children and adopted a baby girl, named her Olya and were very fond of her. Not long ago they bought a piano for Olya although it's, probably, too late to start