an early hour in the Settlement, you hardly met any passers-by, still less along the railway tracks to the station. Approaching the concrete wall around the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, I remembered money for the local train ticket, which I had left behind. The absent-mindedness made me go back leaving the briefcase alone to wait by the service passage for my return.
On the way back to 13 Decemberists along the Settlement streets, I met only Tolik who walked in the opposite direction. He also graduated from School 13 but 2 years after me… Grabbing the forgotten money, I came back to the path by the railway tracks. The briefcase was nowhere to see. Only Tolik and I had walked that path. Or was there some unknown third?
The answer was received a week later on streetcar 3. Tolik did not say "hello" to me, he only was making faces from his seat, in the style of Slavic Aksyanov at the "Dophinovka" mine. But—most importantly—his right hand was plastered. Who would need a straighter indication that it was he to pick up the lonely briefcase in a desolate spot? Not me.
(…at times in my life, I'm able to not only see but also read the signs…)
On the whole, the work that followed was not a re-translation, poor Giulia made to betray her lover was sitting vividly enough in my mind and, a month later, I took my last translation to Zhomnir, but already without the briefcase. So, albeit with a month's delay, my decision to part with Maugham got executed. However, it was only a part in a broader plan of action.
Like any other of my plans, it was lacking clear concrete details. My plans, as it were, could hardly be called plans at all, being, like, feelings that it was necessary to do this or that. Details to the plans came only afterward – in the course of execution. The mentioned broad plan arose because I, finally, realized that Zhomnir would do "match-making" for none of my translations. Both never, and nowhere. And it did not matter why, the main thing was that it was for sure. So what now? Very simple, the issue of publication should be solved in a do-it-yourself way.
To go that way, I had to take from Zhomnir all my translations in thin copybooks for school, of differently colored covers, piled somewhere among manifold heaps of paper on his archive chamber shelves… I arrived in Nezhyn and announced to him my intention to take back my still-not-alpha versions of Maugham in Ukrainian. Zhomnir did not object and did not ask any questions.
He arranged a feast because during these years I became sort of a distant relative in his house. A dinky needy relative of no consequence, but handy at times when, say, pasting the living-room in his apartment with the wallpaper… We sat at the square table, pushed from the wall to the center of the living room, and ate everything being brought by Maria Antonovna from the kitchen. We drank a strong village hooch. Zhomnir was enthusiastically discussing the gold pectoral of great artistic value, recently excavated from an ancient mound in the steppe. Changing the subject, he asked how my current relations with Nezhyn were, meaning Eera.
I proudly stated those relations to be fruitful, meaning you. Then I cautiously asked how Eera was.
"How what?" answered Zhomnir. "Whoring about the city."
Of course, my logic was deductive enough to know the answer to such an elementary “how”. I even could visualize it easily if not for untimely distractions popping up, like, “look! What a strange bird over there!”, or else, “Where did I misplace that thing the other day… What was it a Thursday? I definitely could not find something on Thursday but what was that?” and so on… And now, having my nose paternally rubbed into it was fully deserved. Well, yes, maybe below the nose, I felt sledge-hammered into my plexus, although his reply rammed me not as hard as the words of Eera that she had a certain Sasha, about who she cared to inform my sister Natasha, who withheld the news until my divorce with Eera, to make a booby prize of it, I suppose. Yet, most of all I was bewildered, stunned, in fact, by Zhomnir’s literal reprisal of the response got from the slob to my inquiry about Olga, back at the Konotop Brick Factory…word for word, not a hair-breadth variance…
(…for all the difference in educational and cultural level, when we need to knock our neighbor's brains out, we use the same good old stone ax…)
When it was time to set off for the local train, Zhomnir put all the copybooks with my translations in a cellophane bag that turned tight and heavy, and went out to escort me to the station. That hooch was damn well strong stuff, but I remember how the local train pulled up and hissed to slam the doors open. Refusing Zhomnir's assistance, I headed into the round tunnel of the car vestibule thru the curved gleam of nickel-plated handrails in its unsteady sides. Catching the left one, I climbed inside, went over to the opposite, closed, door and hung the bag on the top-knob of the handrail there. The last thing I heard was the sound of the door slamming shut behind me…
Slowly coming to my senses in the gradually emerging car vestibule, I still had the top-knob of the handrail clutched in my left hand next to the closed door. The train stood as motionless as I, at the fourth platform of the Konotop railway station. It was empty of passengers because according to the timetable its departure to Khutor Mikhaylovsky was in 2 hours after its arrival in Konotop.
The sight of the empty handrail beneath my clutch turned my abdominal muscles stone hard and stopped still my breathing. On the remaining 3 top-knobs in the car vestibule, there was no cellophane bag either. Slamming the sliding door, I went into the empty car and glanced