concluding place in the file, without ever unclipping his eternal zek-styled hand-clasp…
~ ~ ~
Apart from orbiting the corridor and visiting the ball in Club, I also was reading. I asked the blonde one from Messrs. Pretty-Guys to lend me the book from his armpit, which he at times used as a drum, and he willingly concurred. It turned out to be a book of stories by Tamaz Chiladze translated from Georgian. I liked them though in original they, probably, were better.
On the third day, I was sitting by the window next to the locked door to the yard, where the first snow was descending in slow quiet flakes. I watched it while reading The Judge and Executioner by Durrenmatt, which I had read years before. Behind me, all the modern world was romping and fussing and rumbling and mumbling and stumbling as reflected in the cross-section by the fifth unit at the fourth kilometer. I was already fed up with it.
Yet, I did not have time to finish reading Durrenmatt read years ago because of the knock on the window pane from outside. On the fluffy thin cover of snow, there stood Eera smiling at me. Silent soft snowflakes swirled slowly about her face. So beautiful…
The nurse brought my clothes and I entered the wardroom to change. Then I returned to the corridor-hall, whose society's particles that retained any close connection with now and here were astounded by my leaving them so soon. Someone, hiding his identity behind the Brownian movement, shouted angrily that it's not right to let me loose, but it certainly was not Baranov because he's a cheerful bozo.
Excited by the freedom at hand, I took a step forward, raised my hand with the fist balled oratorically and shouted out that I was grateful to everyone for everything and promised to remember. In response, a spontaneous rally broke out, but I already stepped out in the medical staff passage. On the way to Tamara's office, in one of the rooms, I caught a glimpse of a lonely old lady in a dressing gown and a head kerchief. Crawling on all fours over the floor, she was lining large blocks, the size of a brick, in two sketchy rows.
Tamara told Eera that my treatment had not started yet but since she was insisting so much then let her take me and not be too worried, the deviations of the sort I had demonstrated so far were a commonplace anomaly among the folks with a PhD degree. That was her way of consoling Eera.
(…that snare did not work on me though, by that time I had already found an effective trick for keeping any conceit vagaries in check with an iron grip on my supremacy’s throat, but Eera seemed to have believed the specialist. In any case, two years later she gave me for the birthday present a book by Plekhanov, that very SOB who brought Marxism to Russia.
On the back of its hardcover, she wished me to become as clever as him because she was waiting for that. So, she waited, at least, two years more, though Freud was talking of just one and a half, at most…)
Addressing me, Tamara prescribed a special means of turning back to myself for which end I had every night to watch the news program "Time".
In the following several years, I dutifully followed her prescription and could already with an accuracy of 3 days predict a plane crash or the arrival of the delegation of the Communist Party of Paraguay in Moscow on a brief working visit. But then I got tired of it and dropped watching TV, justifying myself by the proverb that the humpback would be straightened with only his grave, at which point I also, at last, become like everyone else – clean of my leopard spots.
(…O, how pleasantly beautiful this world is if you consider it without digging deeper thru its glossy surface!
“…the symposium was held under the aegis of UNESCO…”
What magic, lovely, charming ring resounds in each word of this splendid line!.
But when you get to coarse plain roots where “aegis” means nothing but a goatskin, and "symposium" corresponds to a collective drinking bout, then you cannot but feel bored with the world where nothing ever changes and once again, as always, there is a jag debauchery under the goatskins of prostitute Unesca…)
"See how perfect this world is,Have a look!Ah, how pe-e-e-rfect this world i-i-is!.."
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Married Life
SMP-615, aka Construction and Installation Train of the same number, was located about where I once chewed blades of grass, half-starved in the bicycle trip to the river of Seim, only on the other side of the road.
At the time of my grazing experience, Konotop had not reached that place yet, but the city grew and the location became a part of the outskirt neighborhood named "At-Seven-Winds". Konotopers hardly ever lacked propensity to a poetic vision of the world they live in.
On the 7th of December 1979, after a brief stay at the 4th kilometer in the outskirts of Chernigov, I came to SMP-615, because none of the streetcar or bus routes were reaching there, that was as far as hell itself, on the frontier of At-Seven-Winds.
I couldn’t even distantly imagine why in the course of my job interview the head of the personnel department kept giving such warps to his face that would put to shame the amateurish attempts by Slavic Aksyanov. At some point, he even grabbed from his desktop a wide wooden ruler to cover his left eye with it. So as not to jinx me off? Taking a hangover for the distortions' cause would be a weak conjecture, as I came there in the late afternoon. Just one of those things that you'd better dismiss with a shrug, and forget.
Anyway, he provided me with a job at the organization, which as he explained, levied 10 percent of the apartments built by them for subsequent distribution among the workers of SMP-615, whose turn it