a little chuckle.
"What are you laughing at, Sehrguey?" asked Skully with an unheard of correctness. That's some news! For the first time since we’ve met he called me by my name, skipping both my school and lahbooh handles. Yes, and with that pompous circumspection, kinda lord-speaker addressing a peer from the opposition faction.
“Ah!. Just remembered Vladya's verse. Remember, Vladya? We were writing poems during classes. Once I composed a piece with Vladya in it; he was blowing the horn and clanging his sword in a battle with another knight. So he turned out an answer:
“Don't ever tryTo put on meThe wreaths of military glory.As for the bugle, I wasn't that horny…But low and cozy in the ditch…”
"Well, now, do you remember, Vladya?"
He vaguely shrugged his shoulders and gave a so apologetic look to the passengers seated and standing around that it was clear right away, he did not keep any recollections of the sort. Not to strain my old bosom friends any longer, I got off by School 13…
On foot went I along Nezhyn Street, turned into Eugenia Bosh Street, and then into Kotovsky Street. My feet knew those streets by heart, I could fully trust them and, at leisure, think about this or that…
…the translator from Vsesvit was good at rendering that Czech's verses… now, how would it look in Russian, I wonder?…probably, something like…
"I walk and smile just to myselfAnd then the thought'What would the people think of me?'Turns quiet smiling in too loud a laughter…"
…no, in Vsesvit it's still better good job by the translator yet the Czech is a hugely better fellow and the Czechs in general are good fellows… if we for instance take Jan from the Bolshevik…
…stop! no poking the Bolshevik's ashes or else we'll have another turn of plaintive weeping to irrigate with bitter tears the dry and petrified sponge which for a year already kicks back dropped in the nook unreachable behind the fridge…
…but this Czech is good indeed… showed them all what the last will of a poet should look like… before him they turned out only primitive two-liners: ah, bury me so that in spring the nightingale's song will sound o'er my grave… but me, please, where the Dnieper's flow is heard from afar… base and selfish consumerism… go and learn from the laughing Czech… everything's instructive and to the point… starting with the tree kind whose roots will suck the juice from the buried body and pump it up right to the flowering twigs so that the bees collect the honey for young beauties to grease their buns when having tea for breakfast in their beds… that's a suave gallant for you! in his unblemished shining armors! who cares that I am dead? says he… it’s not a reason to deprive, he says, the customer ladies of our specialty delicacies!.. yet you can’t blame Czechoslovakia alone for his fanciful kinks because schizophrenia is supranational indestructible and indivisible… although time and again there pops up some or another defector like Freud who cinch their specific vision of the world into the cart of servicing their wallets and open Viennese schools… to keep the pot boiling… for scurvy metal he lost his chance to be a normal schizophrenic as free as the rest of us… the weakling got caught with the lime for dickhead suckers mind well sonny “the longer the line of zeroes in your bank account the cooler you are”… some complete hooey you get from them those zeroes, bro… yet the Cave-Mommy as ever feels so mighty comfortable for the blind… and with the final fall of curtain after the life spent among all kind of neurasthenic ladies with their hysterics and in a company of naphthalenized spiders of scientistical PhDs did you not ask your mug’s reflection in the looking-glass well what now Ziggy have your Poles helped you out?. give back my schizophrenia please set me free… yet what is freedom and how to see its fore from its behind?. as Peter Lysoon cares to put it… freedom from what?. and here you get fixed up with the straitjacket of national traditions… for the Brit Shakespeare it's freedom from time… the connection of times is broken describes he a petty clinical case… while in Ukrainian the very term denotes either separation from God Almighty or else can be interpreted as some incognito "free divine"… doesn't matter though since the existence of both freedom and God is beyond provability… and seeing that tether keeps back no longer whizzing ahead in frenzied rapture… still watch your step buddy the wild is good but smarting chill and wet… and here lies the whole dirty trick impossibility to both give the slip to the commandments getting away from all kind of safety regulations to keep the herd consolidated by and at the same time enjoy the goodies of the in-herd lifestyle with a warm female next to your side and cool vodka from the freezer, see?. more quirky task than cracking the circle quadrature you know…
…what's that? Decemberists Street? so soon? some gag… Mercutio was in the luck to have a friend like Romeo who would snap him back to earth in time… "peace, f-f..er..friend of mine, thou talk'st of nothing! watch around or you'll get over to Tsiolkovsky Street in no time!.""
…strange…why is Lenochka strolling in front of the gate?.
"Dad, you've got a visitor."
"What visitor?"
"I don't know, he says he's your friend."
With the chink of the handle-latch in the wicket, I entered the yard.
On the bench by the porch way, looking up at the lower branches in the Apple tree whose trunk served also the natural backrest, my visitor sat, aka my friend, blowing cigarette smoke up into the leaves.
"Hello, Twoic."
"Hi, Hooey-Pricker."
~ ~ ~
He arrived from the nearby Bakhmuch town in the neighboring Chernigov region by 17.15 local train and had to go back by the last one going in the Kiev direction. Before the departure, there remained not too much time, yet not too little either, and we