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