the box into the hole by the Kremlin wall. Those, who watched the ceremony in the live broadcast, before they cut it for the news program "Time", were simply shocked.
The death of Lyonya, smack-smacking each word when he read speeches written for him, wallowing in tawdry orders and medals of the Soviet state awarded to him every year (except for Honored Mother Medal which decorated only women who bore 10 kids), bestowing triple, loud, wet, smooches on whoever leader of fraternal parties or progressive movements in the wide world he only could put his hands on, became a trial for the Soviet population. For almost 20 years, people got used to life if poor and full of shortages, but without non-stop mass repressions of Stalin's times, without running the hunger riots over by tanks and shooting troopers as under Khrushchev…
Leaving the bathhouse on a late Thursday evening, I witnessed how confused got people, amassing into freaked out flocks and looking around for a shepherd. It was the key to documentaries, where big men in officers' shoulder straps burst to pieces in weeping fits about the death of Stalin… Meanwhile, at 13 Decemberists, as if for fun yet evidently lined with fear, they constructed the Great Paper Wall so as to ward off the upcoming unknown. The material used in fortification was all kinds of scrolls of honor awarded to the family members throughout its existence. They became pin-up blocks, side by side, in the gapless row along the wood slat which kept in place the oilcloth substituting for tile paneling in the kitchen wall… I would never imagine there was such a hell of a lot of those certificates. Starting from the sideboard at the window, their close rank stretched up to the washstand by the door to the veranda. The scrolls of honor received for excellent studying in the third grade, for the second place in the pioneer camp checkers tournament, for taking part in amateur performances were serving now a breastwork against the future. I only shrugged. What's the difference?.
After Brezhnev, there followed the leapfrog of mummies, who came to power for 3 or 4 months, and then the population had again to switch off their TV's for 3 days because there was nothing on except for stiff quartets of chamber music and the news program "Time" reading out telegrams of condolence from all kinds of fraternal parties and international leaders. Because that's what mourning is for.
And at last, after another funeral, a certain Gorbachev got to the rudder, quite a middle-aged man, to cut the spree of classical music on TV, although having a suspicious port-wine stain over his bald head. He began to make speeches about acceleration and reconstruction, pronouncing the sound 'g' in the Ukrainian 'gh' way. Well, let him talk if so is his pleasure, who cares? However, one year before the moment we are now at in this my letter to you, he issued a decree with a long title which, in short, introduced the Prohibition, handled "the dry law" for the clarity's sake. That act showed immediately that the talkative leader had never in his life read works by John Mill, where it stands in black on white, that only those governments resort to the like measures who consider their own people as a band of juvenile sillies. Kinda pushing the latch to lock the veranda door and announce, "You're not going anywhere today."
It was more than I could tolerate and, on the day of the Prohibition coming into force, I got off our Seagull bus by the big grocery store in At-Seven-Winds. There I bought a bottle of wine and drank it from the bottle’s neck, without caring to get out to the street. That's how I expressed my indignation with "the dry law". Some of the saleswomen began to squeak that I should be grabbed and the militia called, but in the queue filling the store there happened no supporters for that law-abiding project. I took the emptied bottle out and gently dropped it into the trash bin on the sidewalk.
With streetcar changes, I reached the terminal in the Settlement, although it was not an easy task. After Vsesvit at the midday break and no snack in the grocery store, the wine did not behave well in the stomach. I hardly managed to keep it under control on the way to 13 Decemberists, where it was finally thrown up into the spill pail in the veranda.
My mother, appearing from the kitchen, screamed in fright, "Kolya! He's throwing up with blood!"
My father also went out to the veranda, but getting the whiff of a familiar scent, waved her fears off, "What blood? Don't you see? Zonked like the last scumbag."
I covered the pail with its lid, changed from my shoes into the slippers, and silently passed by to crash onto the folding coach-bed without ever speaking back to point out that in a series of scumbags there is not much difference, if any, between the last and previous ones…
Before the Prohibition, I was a very moderate drinker. My weekly dose of alcohol was the 2 bottles of beer after the visit to the bathhouse, but Gorbachev with his "dry law" literally brought me to that excess. Sure enough, the weeks were not absolute replicas of one another. There happened more liberal weeks when the bricklayers of our team shared to me wine brought to the trailer. But they did not bring it each week, and sharing also was not the dogma. And all that because of the principle, with which I returned from the business trip to Kiev, where I had a discussion with one young superintendent.
We considered the case of a workman lying, purely theoretically, on the ground next to an unfinished, say, trench. The young theoretician claimed that the jack was just bombed, excluding any other possible hypothesis. My counter-argument was based on the fact that the man had his spetzovka on and, consequently, he had just fainted because