certificate received just a month before, while that someone had served already in the army. But now the ex-superior was slavering at a construction site, and you had an office in the City Party Committee, albeit having to share the office room with another functionary…
We never met again, yet I was in time to catch a glimpse thru the window in his career-spring-board office and to see the strip of the cracked asphalt in the blind area under the wall, the sun-killed lawn, and the facade plaster "coat" on the blank opposite wall in the opaque gray whitewashing and… nothing else. To whichever heights he was to rise in his future career of a cadre, he’d never see that group of tall Birches among the construction sites of At-Seven-Winds that looked like slender trees in the summer haze of African Savannah. Even if you were pointing at them, he would not see…
~ ~ ~
Still, I was persistently harassed by a sticky hope because when Eera talked to me on the phone her voice seemed so joyful. What if?. And it was none of her fault that my mother-in-law decided to expose me before you as a brutal door-kicker. She certainly had not even consulted Eera, whose voice sounded like my Eera's voice…
To assert those hopes, I went to the Intercity Telephone Station, next to the main post-office. The glass door and walls cut off and left behind me the clang of the streetcars and the everyday fuss in front of the Department Store on the square's opposite side.
The woman behind the glass partition over the counter wrote down the city and the number I was calling. She passed the receipt to me, and I paid for a three-minute talk. Taking off the receiver from the phone on her desk, she told someone to give Nezhyn, 4-59-83.
I slipped the receipt into a hip pocket of my jeans and became one of the few waiting. When somewhere in another city someone was picking the receiver up, they were told that it was Konotop online, and the black loudspeaker in the station hall shouted in a female voice which booth to enter for a talk with that city. Behind the glass inserted in the door of the indicated booth, a light bulb lit up revealing a narrow compartment squeezed in between yellow chipboard plates. The expectant walked into the said booth with the phone on a small plywood shelf in the corner, next to the high stool with the crimson-plush covered seat. I did not know whether the stool was soft or hard, I had never sat down…
"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"
"Repeat!" From the loudspeaker floated up a distant echoing of long telephone rings in the faraway Alma-Ata.
"Petrozavodsk! Cabin 12!"
What they were talking about was not heard in the station hall, unless they started to shout because of a faulty connection.
"Alma-Ata! The number does not answer! What will you do?"
"Take off!" The person of unfeasible expectations returned the receipt and got their money back.
"Nezhyn's online!”
I entered the booth and left the station hall behind my back and behind the glass in the upper half of the closed door. It's very difficult to talk with your heart throbbing pit-a-pat up inside your throat.
"Call Eera, please."
"Who's talking?"
"Sehrguey Ogoltsoff."
"Now…"
"Yes."
And the throb broke off at once, killed by the permafrost chill in her voice. I said hello, was saying something else, but I heard that I could never get thru that dead, adamant, ice.
"Look, I'm not asking for anything, but the girl needs a father."
"Do not worry, she’s got a father already."
"Yes?. It's…good." The conversation was over.
I went directly to the exit but when in the glazed cage of its vestibule, I looked back at the booth where the light had already gone out. And I said to myself: "Look well, it's number 7. See? That number means your getting crucified…"
~ ~ ~
There are miles upon miles upon miles and three time zones between the UK and Konotop, but—lo and behold!—because of that faraway kingdom, or rather because of that kingdom's communists and, reaching the very core, because of their Morning Star newspaper, I missed the wedding of my sister Natasha that summer. After all, if you consider things carefully, it's because of Morning Star that I landed into the madhouse once again.
(…because of the daily reading the news that half-month before was the latest news in the United Kingdom, you begin to sympathize with the Labor movement, and the names of Michael Foote and Tony Benn become not so empty sounds as the names of Suslov, or Podgorny, or whoever else was among the members of that Political Bureau of their Central Committee of the CPSU.
The head of the British government, Margaret Thatcher ceases to be "Dear Mrs. Margaret Thatcher!" as announced by Leonid Brezhnev scrutinizing the lines in the sheet of his welcome speech and playing for time with triple senile smooches on every other word written for him to read out. She becomes that bitchy iron twat who starved to death 29 Irish lads because of their wish to wear sweaters in their prison cells.
That is, there is a shift towards an inadequate perception of the surrounding realities. You start to behave like a miner from Kent County or a public utility worker in the city of Manchester.
Of course, I could defend myself bringing in my lack of awareness because, after all, I lived in the era of stagnation and did not ever suspect it. However, this is a weak excuse, because equally ignorant of the fact was the KGB officer, who answered the phone call from SMP-615…)
At the height of summer, when the annual battle for the harvest was unfolding in the boundless fields of our great Motherland, when the miners of Kuzbass region promised to give out the millionth ton of black gold in the current year, when he, the aforesaid KGB officer, still could not make up his mind whether to go on Saturday to his