they dumped a truckload of hot asphalt between the old and the new hostels to make flooring in the rooms. Aksyanov together with his assistant at the stone-cutting machine were moving the asphalt with a wheelbarrow to the Aksyanovs' rooms, while I hauled it with a pair of pails to ours. They managed to cover with the asphalt both of his rooms, and I only half of just one, yet making the flooring of higher quality, before the heap outside was finished off. That's why, while the plane was gaining altitude, I did not want any asphalt were brought without me around.
Then I started looking out of the porthole. The moon was absent from the cloudless sky, but the stars were shining, thousands of them. And the lights of cities and towns far below were shimmering too, no bigger than the distant stars. And I thought I'd rather for the pilot not to lose his way among all those stars from everywhere. But then, deep in the darkness under the plane wing, I made out separate lights, maybe in some village, whose configuration was the exact replica of 1 from the only 2 constellations I could ever single out in the night sky. The village lights repeated positioning of the stars in the Little Bear, and I relaxed because it's impossible to get off the right course with the North Star in view…
~ ~ ~
At six in the morning, I got off the Kiev-Moscow train at the station of Nezhyn and by the first bus of the day came to Red Partisans. The door was opened by Ivan Alexeyevich who hardly recognized me because I had become so lean. I took the blue plastic mesh with the apricots to the kitchen and carried the dark red roses to the bedroom past the folding coach-bed in the living room, where the mother-in-law was already starting to stir.
Both of you were asleep. I inserted the roses stems into the small violet vase by the pier mirror on the table and looked behind the window curtain. The handkerchief with the anchor was gone from the windowsill. Okay, I could find out later… I undressed, went to bed, and hugged Eera in her long white nightie.
"Oh! You?"
"Yes."
"So scraggy?!"
"Hush, don’t wake up the baby."
Then Eera told me that her sister Vitta was on a visit in Odessa, and wanted to see me at the mine. She reached the village of New Dophinovka, but a villager named Natalia Kurilo advised against going any farther, because of a too difficult road.
"Yes, that Natalia sits at the mine office in the pit up there."
"She complained that you didn't listen to anyone but the foreman."
"How could she know? She sits up there."
"She must know if she's saying… And how is all over there?"
"There all is so… classy… the sea is… well, in general… ships above the field…"
"But you got so too skinny… Have you had sex with someone over there?"
"You crazy?!"
"Quiet! Don't wake the baby! Well… you were doing something right now… you've never been doing that before."
"Ah… I got it from the stone-cutting machine… her disks move that way."
"What's your position there?"
"Some long-named one – the assistant of the stone-cutting machine operator; but, to myself, I call me shorter – a phallic associator."
"What's that?"
"From old Greek. It's a long story."
"And what are the housing conditions there?"
"We'll have two rooms. So big. Tolik from Machine 2 says they are well located. Looking away from the winter winds. And the sea inlet under the window."
"But look at yourself! Thin as a rake!"
"Hush! The baby!."
But all the same you got awake…
"Look, where's the handkerchief that I've left on the windowsill?"
"What handkerchief? I've never seen any."
In general, that's correct. To see a thing you have to know what you're looking for. I, for example, could not recognize the sea at once.
(…so the sailing boat had not found its anchorage and, later on, it disappeared too. For all I know, it might be still sailing expanses of the universe somewhere…)
It was not what you’d call inspiring news to learn from Eera, that in the maternity hospital she was informed that her hymen had not been completely busted, and you had to finish it off from inside.
Though embarrassed, I still did not feel much difference, if any, after my wife lost her virginity in such an unconventional way. Yes, there was a certain feeling of guilt for that overly stealthy night in Bolshevik, yet since then I always was shooting the bolt my level best, unreservedly. Besides, she was not the first virgin to give birth…
(…leaving aside the Holy Family, our particular case was the result of textual programming thru the novel by a French writer, Herve Bazin, which I read back in my adolescence.
Although there was no childbirth in that work, I still should not be allowed to read just anything at all…)
I went to Konotop to collect warm clothes, the sheepskin coat, rubber high boots. My father gave me his navy black pea-jacket with copper buttons in 2 upright rows. I even took my guitar with me, because I was moving in earnest to stay there.
And in Konotop, they also kept grumbling that there had remained only half of me, but I never was in finer fettle indeed… My mother wrapped the things in a white cloth and sewed it up; it turned out a bulky and thick bale.
Yet, I had to do one more thing. To do and – cut and run. To do, and lie low at the bottom, in the mine "Dophinovka"…
(…throughout all those five years plus, I was perfectly aware that everything should be paid for. Nothing is given for nothing. And I don't mean money for pot, which goes without saying. I mean the main payment for getting stoned, high, and on the flights. And the closer to the final full-stop in the trough of the common urinal at the Kiev intercity bus station, the deeper I realized that I even knew who exactly was paying the