deeper in debt…"
We worked two shifts – the second and the third, leaving the first one to the gas cutters for cutting axes to pieces.
On the payday I could hardly believe my eyes – I had earned 120 rubles a month!.
"…transfer to a lower-paid position…"
" Ha-ha, Mr. Lebedev!Ha-ha! Mr. Heath!'Cause I'm a workman!Yea! Yea! Yea!.."
And to the smiths, the cashier was forking out two-three unopened packs of money in bank wrapping plus stray notes. Over 300 rubles!
Yes, Borya, you'd better cut out boozing at your workplace.
" Hither-thither…To and fro…Ooh!… How good it feels!.."
(…I have always been, am, and will be cursing that night when I let out that cry of a stupid seminarian.
Yet, what's said can't be unsaid…)
And Olga again wanted something else… Once, when I was throwing the slugs into her furnace, she started pressing, "Tell it… what!.. you're doing… now…"
"I'm…making!.. love…to you!.."
"No!.. tell it…the other!.. way…"
"Which…wa..way?!.."
"You..ou.. know!.. which…"
And I started to moan it out, "I'm…fuc…king…you!.."
"Ah!"
"You'm…fu… cki…ng…I…"
"Oh, my!.."
The dark kitchen. The baby's asleep. And what could it understand anyway…
Another night she called me from the darkness, "Hit me!"
"You crazy?"
"No, I'm not! Hit me!"
Well, at last, she made me lightly slap her cheek.
"Not just so! Hit hard!"
Knowing she'd not get off my back in any way, I meted out a more sonorous slap. She stretched on her back sobbing.
"O, babe! Did it hurt?"
No answer, just quiet sobs. And I had to comfort her in the most effective, as far as I know, way. And it was good…
Then I was lying on my back thinking. Why would she? And so persistently… A slap in the face as the punishment for misconduct?. Some whoever…before me?..without me?..instead of?.
(…it’s better not to think some thoughts, just leave them alone and, if heedlessly started, they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their inevitable conclusions…)
End May the term of my penal exile to the Smithy Shop Floor was over, and that same day I got the draft notice order to report for induction on May 27…
And again there was a feast in our khutta yard because in the Settlement traditions seeing-off to the army was almost as great a regale as a wedding.
They all drank and sang, only without The Orpheuses' accompaniment, and Mother was carrying around the table Lenochka in her arms, wrapped in a swaddle over her loose baby shirt. Clasping her Grandma's gown collar with her tiny fingers, she looked around with her pink lips open in surprise…
The next morning they saw me to the two-story House of the Deaf by the bridge in the railway embankment over Peace Avenue. There were lots of draftees in the caps on their bare-of-hair heads in the thick crowd of seers-off.
Tolik Arkhipenko kept assuring everyone that I would be just fine but nobody listened, my brother smoked in wistful consideration of the skin-headed draftees, Father concentrated on frowning deeply, Mother comforting Olga who sobbed burying her face in my chest…
The draftees were commanded to board two big buses which started to move but, after turning into Peace Avenue, stopped – someone was missing. We went out to the roadside. The crowd of seers-off rushed across Peace Avenue. Olga ran up ahead of all.
She was kissing me with her soft wet lips and pressing to my chest her small soft breasts without a bra under the light summer blouse wet from her tears.
The belated draftee was brought in a car, and we were told to board again. The motor started up. The door slammed and the bus finally, uncompromisingly, and irretrievably moved away carrying us to where the army would make of me a real man and defender of our Soviet Homeland.
~ ~~~ ~
~ ~ ~ My Universities: Part One
"And the drill grounds will start shining,Will get polished with our boots,Will get crushed to fractions tinyBy the marching brave recruits…"to the air of "C’mon, fellas, uncinch the horses…"
At the Draft Collection and Distribution Point in the regional center, I made a desperate attempt at getting exempted from the army service. During the final medical check, I reported to the oculist that I couldn't see with my left eye any deeper than the second line in his check chart on the wall, although, in fact, I saw three. For that, slightly exaggerated deficiency, I was recognized fit for non-combat service in the construction troops.
After three days of kicking back upon bare-timber decking at other Collection and Distribution Points and equally hard shelves in the railway cars for draftees, in the scant pre-dawn light I stood in the line of draftees on a platform at the Stavropol railway station thoroughly drenched by the last night’s rain in just one shoe. Differently from the Perseus' case, my shoeless foot still had a cotton black sock on.
And what other choice remained there? Early in the morning when they commanded all to leave the car, I searched not only the section I slept in but 2 more under the mad yells of the Sergeant by the exit from the already empty car. My right shoe was nowhere and, while chilly dampness from the puddles in the asphalt around edged in thru the sock fabric, I felt an incipient suspicion gradually building up at the back of my mind that even in absence of direct evidence the disappearance of my footwear item had occurred by dint of the vindictive hand of Valik Nazarenko from the Krolevets city.
Of all the guys in our car section, only he had a thick pack of postcards, and at each stop, he begged the people passing along the platform outside the car to drop a bunch of filled out postcards to a mailbox. Who would deny a young boy being taken away even though not in a prison, yet also in a securely locked railway car?
And after our train left the station, Valik would put on an acute countenance and ask himself his invariable question, "Who else to write to?" And then he answered to himself, "Ah! I know!" and began filling another postcard