(I didn't buy Morning Star for my colleagues, even though the quality of the photos there was far superior to the flickering rotoprints of the Soviet press.)

From the train station, with a full clip of comfort and consolation, I walked to the railway hospital.

-.-

Tensions arose later, at submitting the report for my three-ruble reimbursement. Union 'boss' Slaushevsky was downright hostile to a bottle of beer be mentioned in the document.

(Unions and beer are things incompatible… well, I suppose… or what?)

Finally, as a compromise, I offered him to write the report himself, and I would sign anything…

And now this system, perfectly calibrated to the last micron, was to exist only till the CAT-615 union's reporting and election meeting at the end of November.

Nevertheless, I did manage to feed Panchenko some waffles…

-.-

After listening to the receptionist's phone report about a certain Panchenko from CAT-615, I realized I couldn't wait—why the hell would I risk a sudden discharge?

I hung up and went to grocery store No. 6 for some waffles. First things first. Then more waffles, from the kiosk. And more waffles—worth a whole sweet ruble, in different wrappers, from different outlets…

~ ~ ~

Glancing briefly over my shoulder at the blurry reflection of the two of us in the pitch-black winter gloom beyond the unbarred window, I complimented the decor of the hospital lobby. The plastic bag in my hand made an invitingly seductive 'zing' as I handed it to the patient. He couldn't resist—like everyone else at CAT-615, he knew without looking that there was beer in there too…

Why was I laughing like crazy, scurrying through the snow of the dark backstreets, cutting from store to store as I collected waffles of various shades?

I can't explain it, but it was a laughter for survival, until my pulse was broken, until tears stung my eyes, until I was searching blindly for some solid support to keep from collapsing, convulsing…

-.-

A couple of days later, Lida, a bricklayer from our team, asked me face to face: 'D’you visit Panchenko?'

‘Yep. Sure.’

‘Cakes too?’

‘Nope. For the man only waffles—no variations.’

She knew I never lied, on principle. I fell silent and tensed, because once again I had to suppress a surge of inexplicably unprovoked laughter.

A minute later, Panchenko came into our trailer to get something. Carefully, weighing every word, Lida asked him if I'd visited him.

‘Yes.’

‘With a package?’

'Well, some newspapers, or something. I didn't even read them.'

Not another word was said. She poured out the rest at home, to her husband, Mykola. That he was already a family man and should stop hanging on lips of that waffle-gobbler Panchenko…

~ ~ ~

Somehow, it took me a while to get it why the divorce proceedings left a vague impression of incompleteness. Something felt strangely amiss.

(… my kind of slow-wittedness is remarkable in that I eventually manage to figure out things I wouldn't have thought of at first…)

Well, of course! That darn forgetful divorce applying judge didn't say a word about alimony! As if I were childless… The task of correcting this judicial error fell on my shoulders…

-.-

Since December, I began sending 30 rubles a month to the Red Partisans. For this purpose, on payday, I used the post office across from the bus station.

But since you weren't my only child, I also sent the exact same amount to Decemberists 13. '30 to Nezhyn, 30 to Konotop' became my financial lifestyle and the most recurring line in my pocket notepad for several years.

Why this exact amount? I don't know. Taken together, the transfers made up half my income. From the other half, in addition to my expenses for the bathhouse, laundry soap, and toiletries, I sometimes bought books and ate lunch in the canteens every day.

At first, my mother tried to convince me that the Konotop '30' could be brought to Decemberists 13 and given in person, even though she had no use for the money.

I dismissed her insistence with arguments, saying so was more convenient for me. Of course, our team didn't miss the fact that I was a spawn fund payer—given my principle of answering direct questions without evasion, they only had to ask why I kept popping to the post office near the bus station every payday. And some female bricklayers also asked the same question: 'Why exactly 30 rubles?'

Fighting a wave of anger that suddenly surged at neither known at who nor from where, I replied that more wasn’t needed, and were even my salary 3,000 rubles, the '3 tenners' to Nezhyn or Konotop would still remain '3 tenners'.

There were times when I couldn't send out spawn fund payments, and the line '30 to Nezhyn, 30 to Konotop' had to wait until the required amount was scraped together and the line in the mailing list be closed with the clumsy little bird.

Sometimes I only sent 15 rubles in each direction. One such period occurred when I accidentally overheard my mother and my sister Natasha talking. They were tearing Eerah apart in absentia for selling my sheepskin coat and keeping the money for herself.

Of course, I noticed the coat was missing, but I had no idea where it had gone, how, or why.

Now, to restore the reputation as Caesar's wife, I was forced to lower the alimony payment to 15 rubles, until the required sum of 90 rubles was collected…

-.-

I took the money to Nezhyn, and at the post office on Red Partisans Street, I asked a random customer to fill out the address on a money order form, as I dictated it. In the space reserved for personal messages, I wrote—with a clumsy leftward slant—'sheepskin coat'.

Why 90 rubles? Well, the market price of a new sheepskin coat with long skirts was 120 rubles. Mine was short, and older than me—dating back to the Object—the rest was pure arithmetic.

Having received such a large order, my mother was eager to ask me something, but by that point I was no longer on speaking terms with my parents, so asking dumbly silent me about 'sheepskin coat' was pointless.

(… it's worth noting here that the wisdom of strangers doesn't make us smarter. In one of his stories, about a young man who stopped communicating with his parents, Maugham notes that in our harsh and hostile world, people inevitably find ways to make their situation even worse.

I accepted the wisdom of the saying, but didn't take advantage of it. It took ten years of separation (four of which in a full-scale war) before, upon returning to Konotop on leave, I began talking to my parents again.

And I enjoyed saying 'mama' and 'papa'. Only this pleasantness seemed to be enveloped in a layer of felt, preventing me from feeling it, as if I wasn't addressing my parents; or maybe it wasn't really me speaking to them. Probably, because of falling out of habit, or else because we had all changed too much by then…)

~ ~ ~

Trade union and social activities, accurately fulfilling my expectations, got blocked for me completely, however, the right of carrying out my public duty remained with me. The right of any citizen to dutifully maintain and selflessly protect the order the safety within their communities can suffer no infringement.

(For those who haven't quite gotten it, don't worry; I wouldn't realize what’s what seeing the above paragraph the first time, either, it’s all about the monthly shifts in a voluntary public order squad.)

By seven o'clock, the male workers of CAT-615 would gather in a room marked 'People's Militia Detachment Stronghold.' The tablet on the only door in all the end wall in the mile-long five-story building that had long since replaced the squalid Department of Workers Catering barracks office near the Under-Overpass. That very building where you find, at the other end, Workers' Canteen No. 3.

The first person to arrive for the squad shift was usually the crane driver, Mykola Kot (no, not a nickname, and not some code name, but a perfectly innocent Ukrainian surname).

He'd sit down at a table propped against the wall and loaded with a stack of old newspapers. To enhance his comfort, he’d pull his cheap but elegant black rabbit fur hat down to touch his ears, and begin leafing through the piles of press news accumulated since our previous shift.

Then, one by one, we'd arrive, take our seats, and begin our manly, dignified conversations on any subject at hand.

Here, Kot, his eyes glued to the ‘newspapers from days gone by and forgotten’, would predict, from beneath the black fur of an innocently slain animal on his head, that even if we began our sophisticated conversation from the heights of the Salyut orbital station, it wouldn’t cancel our landing on the cunt of Alla Pugacheva or some more accessible local slut, inevitably.

As a rule, the prophecy was accurate. And all because of the latecomers who missed his brazen, but on the whole right, forecast.

About ten minutes past eight, a cop—ranging from lieutenant to captain—appeared to contribute to our male ефдл ырщз and hand out red armbands from a drawer in his desk, bearing the word 'Vigilante' in bold black lettering.

In threes, we left the stronghold, maintaining public order in the evening sidewalks with our patrols: to the train station, to Depot Street, to Lunatic, and along Peace Avenue, but no further than the bridged gap in the railway embankment.

After a forty-five-minute stroll, we returned to the starting point (some trinities in a soft, emotionally sentimental mood) and, after a more lively piece of a parliamentary session, set out on our final rounds, before heading home by ten o'clock until the next shift…

~ ~ ~

A couple of times, KGB officers showed up at our evening matinées with their own briefings.

The first sighting occurred on the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution, and we were warned to be especially vigilant and to suppress any provocative anti-Soviet behavior.

As soon as the KGB officer had left, a late cop showed up to mock his predecessor (who had already vanished without a trace), asking if we'd gotten it right that the spy who'd caught our eye needed to be immediately caught by the collar and dragged back to this here stronghold.

For the second and final time, a KGB agent (now younger) shared confidential information aimed at speeding up the capture of a former KGB agent who had disappeared AWOL and gone into hiding.

She may have changed her hairstyle and hair color, the KGB agent explained, showing us a black-and-white portrait of her, but she has a distinctive feature that makes identification easier: a contraceptive ring in her vagina. A Dutch-made production.

The men didn't immediately grasp what he was even there for, and when they finally did, they bombarded him with such leading questions that the KGB agent darted out from under the 'Stronghold' sign at the first cosmic velocity. After all, he was merely following orders, for the stupidity of which he bore no responsibility…

~ ~ ~

During one of my patrols, the men in my threesome gave me a hard time. Walking in a group of three vigilantes isn't exactly a bounty, but it's tolerable. However, when you look around and, in the light of the windows of Grocery Store No. 6, you see that among the passersby scurrying along the packed snow of the sidewalk, only your sleeve is tied with a red rag, you begin to feel a bit outlandish.

Maintaining a brazen, 'I don't care' pan, I walked to the station square. However, carpenter Mykola and driver Ivan were absent from the hurried silhouettes. Passersby of draft age glanced back at the strange phenomenon—the brazen vigilante loner.

It didn't take much intelligence to deduce with 100% certainty that my fellow patrolmen, having torn off their armbands, had grabbed a bottle of 'rotgut,' from one or another grocery store and that very moment, located in some quiet nook, were gurgling it down, in turn, to feel both warm and toned up, generally. Where? That was the question.

Most likely, in the quiet chaos of short lanes and dead ends between grocery store No. 6 and the high platform 1, in that jumble of warehouses, skin and venereal disease dispensary, a couple of private houses without gardens, and other wooden structures. That's where I turned, not because I had the slightest chance or desire to partake from the bottle.

Nope. I had a nobler objective of making the pair of sly asses feel ashamed and amazed at what deductive reasoning could do. Makes you able to so easily spot them in a forlorn alley under a streetlamp. Which only would do good the surprised bastards…

-.-

However, instead of a driver and a carpenter, in the cone of yellow light from a lamppost, I stumbled upon a genre scene.

The girl was walking with a young man when their mutual acquaintance, another young man—a huge brute—caught them in the act and kicked up a fight.

The appearance of a fourth wheel with a red rag on his sleeve (a matador?) slowed the plot, but only for a minute. Realizing that no more law enforcement officers were to pop up, the big man began to beat up his smaller, but more successful, rival.

The bantam fighter dropped to one knee, threw his fish-skin-lined jacket off his shoulders into the same snowdrift where his hat had rolled a second earlier, and rushed to a counterattack.

I remained an indifferent sideline referee with a rag. The girl gathered the jacket and hat to hold them, just as Eerah had once kept in hands my rabbit-fur hat in the main square of Nezhyn.

The odds were too unequal. When the lightweight collapsed again in the snow, the girl, without counting to 10, folded his belongings under a lamppost, took the victor's arm, and disappeared with him into the labyrinth of indecipherable alleys.

-.-

The fallen guy rose to his feet and, seeing that I was still there, launched into a passionate, rambling speech, extolling the power of the spirit, compared to which physical strength is nothing, because all strength lies in the spirit… In Konotop, every second person is a born Lord Speaker. Or have I already mentioned this?

To console the crushed Demosthenes, I shared my observation that while he fought his lost battle, the girl was holding his belongings, not his opponent's fur hat, which had also been tossed into the snow during the clash.

Hearing my words of encouragement, he shut up and hastily searched the pockets of his jacket to make sure everything was still there, because, despite their innate love of oratory, the main distinguishing feature of Konotopers is common sense.

~ ~ ~

And just like that, no one could stop me from giving the women of our team calla lilies every year on March 8th. One flower per bricklayer, because I'm not a millionaire, and the men in our team didn't always think to ask how much I paid and chip in a ruble each.

However, I wasn't too worried about reimbursement – I'd discovered that I enjoyed giving gifts much more than getting them myself.

First, however, I had to find the city greenhouse, which is practically in the middle of nowhere. You have to get off tram #2 one stop before its final stop. Then turn left and trudge half a kilometer through streets dating back to the Civil War. Like Youdenich Street or Denikin Lane. Of course, in reality, all the names remained faithfully Soviet, but the look was nostalgically White Guardian…

-.-

When I first visited the greenhouse, the manager led me into a long, squat building with a gable roof made of squares of cloudy glass, from which heavy, sparse drops of condensation fell.

She wanted me to see for myself the absence of flowers. And the plantings in those beds were calla lilies that hadn't yet ripened, they were 'unbloomed' (not flared up). That is, the white flowers hadn't yet blossomed into wide, flaring high boot tops.

Then and there all my tongue-tiedness vanished, and I delivered a sample of a Konotoper eloquence. On the topic of how, for her, who strolled every day among the greenery of the greenhouse beds, the calla lilies seemed unblown. But for the women of our bricklayers team, who saw nothing but crushed bricks, mortar, and icy hummocks of dirty snow, these calla lilies, even if 'unbloomed', were the most beautiful flowers in the world.

-.-

From that day on, and for as long as I worked on our team, I was never told 'no' at the city greenhouse on the eve of March 8th. And I proudly stood by the tram seat that carried a bundle of green and white calla lilies, which you wouldn’t find at the 'Flowers' shop on the corner of Peace Square for at least two weeks more.