gray feather of an unknown bird, and I thrust it into her smooth hair where it stayed as if fixed.
(…Indians are no fools – such feathers make a person the part of the free wild world, establishing involvement, contact, and mutual tacit understanding…)
When we were coming back to the camp civilization, a gust of wind ran up from behind and softly took the feather out of her hair to drop it down onto the thick carpet of old Pine needles on the ground. She did not even notice it.
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Parade of Planets
On the Day D, aka my departure day, everything hung on a thread, more precisely, on a single cobweb fiber. I got it at once on entering the staircase-entrance vestibule to spark a joint because I never smoked in the apartment, not even vanilla cigarettes. The cobweb thread hung from the upper crossbar in the cracked entrance-door frame, stretched tautly downward by the weight of a burned match dangling from its end… How long could it last?.
It was I, who always stuffed burned matches up in the gap between the frame-top and the whitewashed plaster on the wall because there was no trash bin in the staircase-entrance vestibule. After Tonya's toddler son had exposed my connection to cannabis, I did not care what might be sniffed out by the passers-by in the smoke I left in the vestibule… Would the cobweb thread hold on until I get away?.
I looked from the sultry shade in the staircase-entrance out into the yard. A squadron of black ravens coasted lowly thru the heat-melted sky. Heading north-east, they did not move their wings—made all too reluctant even for the slightest effort—the feathers at their wing-tips stuck out kinda rigid spikes harrowing the hot breeze… Could I get thru?.
Eera was seeing me to the station. When we started for the bus stop, from a balcony in the neighboring five-story block Alla Pugacheva sobbed up after me in her latest hit:
"Please, come back for at least a day!.."
I did not have much luggage – a briefcase with a book of stories by W. S. Maugham in English (soft pink cover, Moscow publishing house "The Enlightenment"), the Hornby's Learners' Dictionary, a thin copy-book of 12 sheets with a stub at translation of "The Rain" story by Maugham (4 pages of a rough pencil draft made hard to read by manifold corrections), the employment history book (the first entry made on September 13, 1971, at Konotop Locomotive and Car Repair Plant), the passport, the military ID, and shaving accessories.
The briefcase was accompanied by the blue sports-bag with a shoulder strap, containing a change of underpants, two tank tops, a pair of shirts, jeans, and the geologist jacket, sewn by my mother of hard green tarp… Boarding the local train, I threw them onto the car-long rack of thin tubes running above the windows and went back to the platform.
Eera was nervous that the doors would slam shut and the train leave without me. I climbed up one step to the car vestibule and stood there, holding a grip on the nickel-plated vertical railing, "I’ve left something on the windowsill, let it be there till I'm back."
"What's that?"
"Look for yourself. I'll be back exactly in a month."
"Call at once as you've arrived!"
It was the last car on the train. An old woman ran up along the platform. She asked something but I neither listened nor wanted to, I was looking at Eera until the speakers in the car shouted, "Beware! The doors are shutting!" And they cut me off her.
The electric train pulled and, gaining the speed, rumbled along the rails in the direction of Kiev…
The night before, I went out shopping together with Eera. The department store was locked already, but the glazed stall by its side still worked. From the sitting inside middle-aged gypsy woman, I bought a new safety razor, a shaving brush, a stand-up mirror, and two handkerchiefs with a series of pin-thick blue wavy lines printed across their fields and leaving out only thin circular frames in the center. Both size and looks of the handkerchiefs were quite alike except for the pictures inside those frames – a small sailing boat in one, a neat blue anchor in the other. In my pocket, I was carrying away the handkerchief with the sailing boat, its counterpart with the anchor was left on the windowsill. Coming back, I would put their circles to each other, the boat to the anchor. It would be the ritual of return…
And pretty late at night, my mother-in-law suddenly freaked out and started anxiously persuade me there was no need to go anywhere, and it was still possible to return the train ticket Kiev-Odessa to the booking ticket-office at the station.
I thought I was going to lose it – what ticket return, eh? Eera and Tonya also joined the conversation, only the father-in-law was out, called to the situation at the Bakery Plant.
Staring at the oilcloth on the table, Gaina Mikhailovna was mumbling about a too complicated moment, so that even Ivan couldn't get thru… A week before, Tonya's husband Ivan left for the Transcarpathia, yet without ever reaching there, he returned from Kiev a day later—I couldn't get it why—and now he was all the time hiding away in the bedroom with the children of their family.
By that time, I had grasped already that the whole world was in the state of tumultuous fracas, amid some unceasing battle in progress – but who against who? That was some question! Because all of that went on under wraps, beneath the surface presenting only the conventional layer of casual life. Still, thru occasional rinds and gaps in the disguising cover, there at times glimpsed certain inconsistencies, secret signs, and I already started to understand that the true reality consisted of something surpassing the customary limits of commonplace views we were brought up to keep to, and those my guesses were affirmed by the instances when people let things