son of Taras Bulba – a lamb resigned himself to being sacrificed. I hit him on the chin so as not to damage the glasses, and in a pitched-up tone of voice promised that if he, fucking motherfucker, would ever squeal a single word about Shvydcha… When I finished my Sermon on the Mount, he set his glasses aright and said with a toady smile, "You so fucking well kicked up my fucking ass, right?"
(…the wisdom of ages imbibed with the mother's milk.
And—what is characteristic—he on the fly picked up my sermon phraseology. Affinity with languages resides in their blood…)
On Thursday, at the end of our date in the compartment, she pensively observed, "Yet, he was right after all…" It stunned me that I was like fulfilling the plans laid down by Marc Novoselytsky. Some fucking Nathan the Prophet… But where was the way out?.
The manna from heaven came in the form of a first-year student at the Mus-Ped. In his angel-like curls, golden gloss in his glasses' rim, he descended from above—the firmament of the fifth floor—to our sinful third floor and handed me the key to a vacant room in the corridor up there. Hallelujah!
But why? After all, I did not ask him nor anyone else, and I did not even suspect that room existed. How could he possibly know?!. Yes, a couple of times I gave him my guitar last autumn, but since then we had not even met…
(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my…
– COULD YOU FUCKING SHUT UP IN THAT YOUR FUCKING SLEEPING BAG?!.)
And that was it. The key in hand switched me and Nadya to the nocturnal way of life, we were ascending to the fifth floor when the student life gradually subsided in the Hosty’s benighted corridors and we were coming down back in the mum gray of the pre-dawn dusk.
She once again became a freshman student, sort of. When our course was on the training excursion to Kiev, where we rode a bus for foreign tourists, she also joined in. The young guide on that bus spoke only English, "Look to your left!. Look to your right!." Concluding the tour, he asked if we had any questions.
By that time, I got so used to being a foreign tourist that also asked in English, "Are you a Communist, Mr. Guide?"
Taken aback by so out-of-the-blue question from a local student, he still managed to answer, "I am a Candidate for the Communist Party Membership."
"Okay, I see, Comrade Guide."
Then Nadya and I were sitting on a bench in a green patch of one of those steep lanes descending to Khreshchatyk Street. The sun was shining from the sky with fluffy clouds floating around it without screening the tender warmth. Nadya and I were kissing long kisses. Next to me there sat Igor Recoon and gravely scattered bits of cookies to the pigeon flock of a different feather, noisily crowding on the asphalt about our feet. Hopefully, Kiev felt on that day that it was another—albeit small—Paris…
~ ~ ~
(…why was it so irksome to be a secsot? I did not tell on anybody, making the KGB man shake his head at my reports empty of useful information. Still, the feeling of being hooked and squeezed with the ratchet from which there was no way out, and the constant fear that my finking would get exposed, remained the source of ever-present internal torment – an unwilling rat is still a rat.
On the other hand, I, sort of, felt guilty before Captain. Especially, after my turning down his request in winter…)
Captain asked me then to sell my sheepskin coat for him to wear when a-hunting. The short coat of shaggy black sheepskin, my father's coat still from the easy times at the Object. The sheepskin which Olga and I were sitting on at our wedding party. It was a part of my image, converging with the plastic black "diplomat" briefcase and my nigh-tabooed warcry whenever having a situation, "Stuff it! We'll prick the hooey!"
To sell that sheepskin coat was kinda selling a part of me. I did not tell Captain all that, I only answered that I couldn't. He didn't insist though; that might have also been a test, sort of, if I was ready to sell myself.
But in May I pleased him in full. At last, he got a fat reward for all my empty reports written under his dictation that nothing worthy of attention had happened or heard about. Yes, twice a month he was dictating for me to write them so that the sheets of paper by my hand, signed "Pavel", accumulated in his safe, to get me ever deeper run thru with their hook…
So, end May, returning from the weekend, Marc entered the room bubbling with delight about a new game he'd just learned in Kiev. "The Game of Parties" was its name and all of us should have a try to see how interesting it was.
Fyodor and I took a break in Throw-in Fool played on Fyodor's bed. Ostrolootsky sat down on his and leaned the back of his head against the soiled spot in the wallpaper, and all of us listened to the rules.
The objective was to re-model the events of history process at our will. Starting from the summer of 1917, the period before the single-party political system got consolidated, when there still were all sorts of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries, Anarchists and so on, each player had to choose a party to their liking and win the other players, move them joining their side. Try and see for yourselves what great fun it is!.
In the Hosty, Room 72 enjoyed no less popularity than a public urinal next to a cheap beer bar and everyone, who happened to drop in on that night, was met with Marc's gleeful giggling and the offer to partake in so breath-taking role-playing game. For the start, he together with Ilya Lipes and Ostrolootsky united into the Bund, on the