empty of guests. I took a seat somewhere in the middle of the hall and started to pour wine into a glass as I would do it from a bottle of beer – in a knitting-needle-thin trickle. So was my habit.
After the first glass, I was approached by some mujik of an ambiguous occupation who asked for a permission to get seated by. The whole hall of vacant tables, and he liked this particular one. Well, I did not mind.
Landing into the next chair, he shared that he was in transit from the city of Lvov. I answered that Lvov also was a good city, welcome in passing, and all that. And I started to fill the following glass. Embracing by his intent stare the filigree-thin trickle, he announced his recent release from Zone… The couple of guys at the next but one table cut their gossip. I congratulated him on being free at last and drank.
His face got suddenly distorted by the expression of indistinct malice, and he went over to loud threats of having intercourse with my rectum when 2 of us would land in the same prison cell.
(…all that, of course, in the most explicit straightforward terms…)
The wine was finished off, the neighbor at the table obviously did not like me, and I got up to leave. One of the guys that were sitting nearby, was already standing in between the tables. "Bang the bitch!" he said to me. "What are you waiting for? We're in!" An absolutely unfamiliar guy, probably, he had a fit of patriotism.
"You did not get it," answered I. "He's not local. The law of hospitality does not allow for crushing the bottle against his pate. When on a vacation I'll visit the city of Lvov and check what problem makes the travelers from there so impolite."
I do not know if the guy understood my lengthy speech. Anyway, he returned to his table, and I went out, leaving my neighbor in front of the empty bottle by the empty glass on the empty varnish of the tabletop. He had resorted to the ultimate invocation, yet the magic did not work and the bottle did not turn into a scatter of fragments by a wallop against his Ascabar trained pate. But still and all, I cannot forgive it Gorbachev… You may ask what had Gorbachev to do with fucking my asshole? Even in the era of deficit and severe shortages, the bottled beer did not disappear from Konotop. Never…
But he went loose beyond all bounds of decency and judgment and kept amending the Prohibition with new articles to toughen the struggle against alcoholism… In the evening of the day with the fresh, stricter, measures coming into force, I went as usual to the Central Park of Recreation. However, I reached neither the dance-floor nor even the ticket office.
In the central alley of the park, I was intercepted by a muscular stranger with a dark hair and horseshoe-shaped mustache in the style of VIA The Pesnyary. He told that I did not know him, but he knew me because he was from KhAZ, where he worked with my brother… I recollected as one time my brother Sasha admiringly mentioned some former border guard fond of demonstrating miracles of acrobatics at their workplace. Probably, that was him.
The stranger carefully held a white cellophane packet in his right hand, and he did not slap the nasty night mosquitoes but instead blew them by sharp puffs off his biceps bulging out the T-shirt sleeves. Just like me, another adept of non-resistance, or else that way he was trained for frontier patrols – make sure to avoid producing unnecessary sound waves betraying your location.
Giving a slight shake to the white cellophane—to which it responded with a luring clandestine tinkle—he informed it was wine in there because he wisely procured it before the curfew. Would I keep him company? The answer was in the affirmative.
It looked strange to me though, when he turned to the flocks of youngsters streaming to the dance-floor with the repetitive request for a knife to open a bottle. Everyone shook their heads and some even recoiled, scared by the incongruity of the question with the general spirit of concurrent times… But then, maybe, it was his personal form of protest against the Prohibition…
A knife was never found, yet he somehow contrived to tear the plastic cork off by application it against a beam in the bench by which we stood in the alley. He handed the bottle to me. I said it would be better for him to start it because of a certain flaw in my brake system.
"Never mind. I've got another in the bag," insisted he.
Well, I had warned anyway, ain't it? And I killed the 750 ml without a trace.
"Hmm, yes," observed the companion thoughtfully. "I did not get it properly." He uncorked the second bottle, yet refrained passing it to me, just held in his hands, and when we sank onto the bench, he put it between us.
We began to probe each other as to which of manifold philosophical subjects might flag off a friendly conversation. As a rule, after the second glass, you start to give out awesomely smart things, getting astonished yourself by their unexpected wisdom. In the end, of course, everything will slide into the eternal, slippy gash as predicted by the truck crane operator, Ivan Kot, but why not to glitter the sequin of your well-trained mind for a starter?
Alas, the envious malevolent stars forestalled any shining, or sparkling, or glittering… Along the alley, slowly and almost inaudibly, rolled up a van with inscription "militia" on the door. It stopped and 2 gentlemen in cockades jumped out of the cab.
My interlocutor, not waiting for the further development in the upcoming scene, without delay threw himself over the bench and started down the side alley towards the dark building of the city council. I didn’t even think to compete him in this track and field event and, with