analyze and make up plans for actions, I just lived on, silent about where it pains, enduring the unbearable. Secondly, the alternative to that agony was no less horrible than the torture itself…
Our team was sent to the local train stop "Priseimovye" by the bridge over the river of Seim to build a 2-apartment cottage for the track-men and their families. We worked there about a fortnight.
At one of the midday breaks, I spread my spetzovka on the grass and lay down next to the sun-scorched footpath with the traffic lines of ants bustling over the cracks in the ground. To pass the time at one-hour midday breaks, I had Vsesvit, a thick monthly received on subscription, where they printed Ukrainian translations from the world literature of all times and peoples. Soon, I got tired of reading and put my head on a page in the open magazine.
It was a sunny day around, filled to the brim with the busy summertime life. The ants were dragging their flotsam and jetsam along the cracked footpath, the tall grass, swaying under the rare gusts of breeze, carried the shaky shadows of leaves in the foliage of trees and bushes above it. The unending buzz of horseflies, bees, wasps, and common flies filled the sultry air.
From time to time, the breeze idly picked up the page next to the one under my head, and then everything around got screened off with whiteness and blurry spots of letters brought overmuch close to the pupil. The standing page effaced the piers of the bridge across the river, and the long spit of a narrow sand island washed up by the unruly current, as well as the fisherman standing on that island with his long fishing rod, everything got lost behind the whitish blurriness.
Then the page would fall back to disclose that same fisherman, yet standing in the current already up to the ankles of his high rubber boots. The fishing rod got bent by the taut line, he whipped it up snatching from the restless stream the flicking splendor of a catch. The geezer took it off the hook and threw behind his back onto the spit, where the fish went on pulsating in the sand. He threw the freshly baited hook back into the river and, watching the float, did not notice the river gull that crabbed up along the sand to the beating of the fish. Grabbing its prey, the bird flew off.
The fisherman did not see that, neither how another river gull dived from above the bridge, attacking the first one. They collided in the air fight, and the fish fell from a five-meter height back into the river. The geezer did not see anything of that, he stubbornly followed the float.
It was only I, who saw the whole episode, but nothing of it touched me. I did not even hold the page so as to watch uninterruptedly. The river and the white blur took turns before my eyes, and I saw that all of that was Nothing. All that life full of events and struggles and changes was just a series of pictures on top of Nothing. I watched, and I could also not watch and nothing would change anything. Everything was drowned in absolute Nothing. Even the constantly present pain receded getting flooded with Nothing, from which I did not need anything.
I lay stretched out like that long spit of sand around which the stream of life hasted on, gurgling and splashing, but both of us knew that all that was just one and the same, bleak, void, Nothing. That was some terrifying knowledge. How could you live with it? How to live on without wanting anything and rid of waiting for something? So, the choice I had was not overly extensive: either Eera and the hang-fire agony, or Nothing…
Eera was visiting Konotop without you as well. So was it for the occasion of Vladya's wedding, when the winter was setting in.
He married Alla, who already had a child and worked at a large canteen. The wedding party was held at that very canteen on the outskirts of the city, nearby the stop of the diesel train to Dubovyazovka. The "live music" included already heavily bald Skully and still curly-haired Chuba. At times, at the guests' warm requests, the groom also approached the mike to sing along with the ex-Orpheuses. Everything was delicious, loud, and fun.
But all that was on the second day of Eera's stay, and in the late evening of the first day, I made two discoveries. The first was about the hidden resources in the human body…
At the starting night, Eera and I passed thru the veranda to the attached room. In winter it was not heated and turned into a sort of storeroom for odd household things. That’s why when leaving the kitchen, Eera threw over her shoulders some of the jackets from the hooks by the door; she always liked to try things on. In the room among the other things, there stood a pair of old armchairs, the relics from the Object times, whose wooden armrests still retained their yellow varnish and enough of stability to let us have deeply satisfying sex among other stored items. At such moments I did not think of any agonies…
We seemed to cum together but Eera, with her eyes half-closed, started to moan "More! More!." Until that moment, I knew it for dead sure that after orgasm you needed to catch a breath for at least half an hour.
"Mo-ore!."
And up I got to penetrate and go on above the glitter of the freshly spilled trickle that aspersed the floorboards a minute ago. However impossible, at times it, nonetheless, can happen…
The second discovery, concerning the white spots in the human's conscience, occurred when Eera and I returned to the living-room.
My father had already gone to the bedroom, and my mother, who felt completely out of sorts on that evening, sat on the folding coach-bed with her hands dropped widely