two meters, with the window looking out onto the wide trunk of the birch in the neglected front garden. One-third of the room was occupied by an iron bed produced before WWII and the room itself was entered thru the doorway from the kitchen screened off with hanging curtains. To the right from the same kitchen, behind the same curtains in the doorway, there was the owner's room.
For me, it was essential to leave 13, Decemberists on that very day, and we agreed on 20 rubles a month.
(…Later, Lydda from our team told me that I could find an apartment in At-Seven-Winds for just 18 rubles, but I kept to where I was…)
Coming to Decemberists Street, I borrowed a handcart from a neighbor, put it at the wicket to number 13, and only then entered the yard.
Seated in the folding bed-armchair, Galya was watching TV. I said polite "hello" and that I was not hungry, and then went over to my room to collect the books and disassemble the bookshelves.
The self-made windows in the room did not have leaves to open, that's why I had to take the things out iterating thru the living room and the kitchen. So as not to change the shoes with slippers at each go, I paved the floor with pages from Morning Star. The young woman in surprised silence watched my manipulations from her armchair.
I took the books and bookshelves' parts to the handcart waiting in the street. All fitted in, only I had to drive slowly because the varnished shelves, stacked on top, were sliding over each other.
In the khutta by the Nezhyn Store, my landlady had a visitor. The 2 old women grew silent and watched the underground functionary shipping stacks of illegal literature to his new safe house…
Back in Decemberists Street, I returned the handcart to its owner and gathered some of my clothes—the briefcase from Odessa stood at the ready—then I said polite "goodbye" to Galya, and left her to enjoy the TV because I knew how to win with dignity.
(…of course, it was not her fault to get into the thick of a family sorting out, yet later she managed to marry a guy from the Settlement, not for too long though, but that's already her personal story…)
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ Defying the Wash
The landlady fondly quoted her deceased spouse and every other day boozed with her veteran lady-friends, not in the kitchen though, because of the tenant, but behind the closed curtains in the doorway to her room.
Softly, I kept turning pages in the rented room and did not intervene with anything – no use forbidding folks to live their lives in style.
My connection with 13 Decemberists was not cut off entirely. I had to ask my father to manufacture at the RepBase some spare parts to the wardrobe designed for installation in my room. He produced a prop and two thin tubes according to my sketch; my mother sewed the needed piece of burlap and it turned out a fabric-walled wardrobe in the corner, as it once was in the hallway of our apartment at the Object. However, since then the advancement of technology moved far ahead and the top for my wardrobe served a Polystyrol plate, light and thick, of those used for thermal isolation finishing inside the walls of railway cars renovated at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.
The room was seemingly too squalid to become a safe house, and conspirators shunned to show up. So I switched over to considering it a hermitage cell whose appearances were to my liking, especially the black-and-white bark of the birch behind the window pane allowing for no other view; sometimes, when tired of translations, I just sat and looked at the black marks in the huge tree trunk.
When I settled down, my mother came for a visit, escorted by my father. In the kitchen, my former and my current landladies measured each other with mute, irreconcilable, glances while exchanging official nods. Then my parents stood and sighed silently under the raw bulb hanging from the ceiling on its dust-blackened wire. To all their questions I responded in a polite, though monosyllabic, way and they soon left because the one and only chair in the room was not stimulating much longer stay.
Mid-September, in the middle of a working week, Eera came from Nezhyn. She found our construction site in At-Seven-Winds, I changed in the trailer, and we went off to the city. I always liked that romantically loose cloak reaching below her knees.
We went to visit Lyalka. His wife, Valentina, was relieved to learn that everything was fine by us. A couple of times, after occasional quarrels between me and Eera, she used to later come to Konotop asking Valentina to call me from the Settlement which was a long way from Peace Square. And so, with Valentina's mediation, Eera and I reconciled upon the folding coach-bed covered with a hard carpet in the Valentina and Lyalka's living-room.
In fact, you'd hardly call them "quarrels", it's only that at times Eera got in a huff and felt like yelling. Like, because I was so ugly to look at, which she discerned after we went out to watch some sort of a comedy with faggy innuendos produced at the MosFilm studious. Or else, that no one would ever be interested in those translations of mine…
But real wrangles between us just did not work. Despite my tongue-tiedness, I somehow managed to convince her that such yells were not our role, why to give out other people's clues? However stupid it might seem, but I myself understood what I meant although could not express it properly…
And it happened just once that I misbehaved. That time I brought my payment from SMP-615 and put it on the table under the old pier-mirror. Eera asked how much was there and then started yelling that was not money. She did not need such alms!
Then I grabbed that skinny stack and tore it in two before throwing out of the