On entering the room, you got into its narrowest part squeezed between the 4 plywood lockers reaching the ceiling—2 of them on each side. After the lockers, the room became a bit wider to accommodate a bed, a cabinet-box, and another bed lined under the walls which pattern was mirrored by the same arrangement under the opposite side wall. The wide, three-winged, window was right ahead between the 2 and under its sill were 2 more cabinet-boxes pressed to the pig-iron radiator of the central heating system. The center of the room was occupied by the dark-brown varnish-scarred veteran of a table with 4 wooden chairs pushed under, so that you could bypass it when heading to the window.

The soiled spots in the wallpaper marked the places where the inmates or their visitors habitually leaned their heads taking a seat upon the bed covers, while the wallpaper cleaner stretches bore dense columns of inscribed card debt records and scores in Throw-in-Fool competitions.

The round tin box in the center of the whitewashed ceiling slab contained 2 naked light bulbs of low voltage. The room was also equipped with 2 wall sockets (the left one falling out from the partition with the following room but it was a double partition so the socket couldn’t be pushed in from outside while from inside you had to keep in mind the socket’s state and withhold too wide gesticulation in its vicinity that’s why the rented tape recorder was always plugged into the wall to the washroom) plus the switch by the door. However, from midnight till six in the morning the electricity in the Hosty rooms was turned off by the on-duty watchwoman, with the general switch near her post. G’night, sleep tight, Jesus Christ Super Star, in the flock of rented tape recorders on the window-sills of all 5 floors!.

For those eager to scratch and gnaw into the granite of science, there was a reading room in the corridor on the first floor next to the hall with a TV box. In both the electricity was in place thru all the night. However, the reading room got empty long before the midnight, as well as the hall with the TV, except for the nights of an international football match or a new 4-sequel musical with Andrey Mironov on…

All of my 3 roommates in the pencil-box room were fourth-year students… Fyodor Velichko came from a hinterland village in the vast Ukraine-Mommy. The straight thick hair, jutting above his wide forehead, was somehow reminiscent of the straw-thatched barn roof on a quiet farm.

Sasha Ostrolootsky was brought up and educated in an orphanage, which didn't prevent his mapping out plans to marry the daughter of Professor Sokolov from Moscow. No one besides him had ever met or heard about both Professor and his daughter… Like Fyodor, he was not very tall, but looked more sporty, besides, his fair hair was softer, his nose was longer and he had the reputation of Casanova. Sasha’s favorite pastime was visiting girls' rooms on the floor to drink tea with sweets to which outings he was often accompanied by another inhabitant of Room 72, Marc Novoselytsky from Kiev.

Marc had a broad face with icicles of black hair hanging to the rim of his glasses and indispensable smirk beneath his thin mustache, he looked the most well-fed of my roommates. Visiting the room of Sveta Havkina and 3 more freshman girls, Marc and Sasha paid for her tea and jam with most black ingratitude. Sprawling on the covered beds of the inmate girls, they started a sneer-fleer-jeer discussion full of unworthy innuendos in the address of those low-grade Jews.

Sveta, a pretty black-curled daughter from one of the 12 tribes of Israel from Chernigov, was changing in her face to each of their anti-Semitic remarks but suffered in silence. For the next 2 days she was utterly out of sorts until Ilya Lipes, a third-year student with sideburns like in Pushkin's self-portraits, did explain to her that those ungrateful pigs were, actually, Jews themselves…

The fourth-year student Yasha Demyanko from Poltava rented a room somewhere in the city but visited his course-mates almost every evening. The people of Room 72 spend their spare time (which was nearly the only type of time by them) in constant Throw-in Fool battles at which occupation Yasha’s skills were simply superb and he also was the tallest of us. He had a long Baltic face in the frame of long brown hair with a natural wave and, likewise Fyodor, he spoke only and exclusively the Ukrainian language. The rest of us communicated in Russian but we all perfectly understood each other…

The fourth-year student Sveta, a native of the Nezhyn city, kept visiting our room regularly. She was the official bride of Marc and even their respective parent pairs had already known each other. Sveta did not play cards, she kept sitting on the Marc's—and only his—bed and held him in an iron grip, "What's that, Marik? I did not get it!"

"Well, Svetik, well, I just…" with cowardly lowered eyes behind his glasses, Marc began to meekly defense himself until the other players would express their indignation with the procrastination caused by his tarried move in the game.

Then he escorted her home, came back and, after they turned off the electricity in the rooms, he brought in his course-mate Katranikha. For a couple of minutes, they silently creaked his bed and parted. And that was correct because of the strenuous study-work awaiting us all in the morning…

~ ~ ~

Katranikha had a warmly affable disposition, widely open, unreserved and very hospitable. One burglar, after having broken into the Republican Fashion House in Kiev, decided it was time to lie low. He got off a local train in Nezhyn and spent a whole week in her room because they met each other on that train. And every night he took her and her roommates to one or the other of Nezhyn restaurants.

A week later two operative officers of the criminal investigation ascended the third floor in the Hosty, tracing the indications of loot from the Republican Fashion House, which the burglar tried to dispose of at the Nezhyn Bazaar. One of them took a black pistol from inside his coat and knocked on the door of Katranikha's room which the burglar had already cleared out of. He was arrested only a month later in the city of Mariupol. Anyway, that was what the operative with the black pistol told his wife, also a fourth-year student at the English Department…

Soon after, Katranikha invited me to the Leninist Komsomol Cinema, about two hundred meters from the canteen, across the road from the lake in the Count's Park. We watched "Zorro" starring Alain Delon. Well, I don’t know, but in my humble opinion, the final fencing scene in the movie was way too long and boring.

On the whole, the time she spent on me was lost in vain, I couldn't consider her for practical purposes because she was a girl of my cohabitant in the pencil-box room. To tell the truth, I always stayed somewhat old-fashioned…

Starting my student life, I never fancied any breach of my marital fidelity, it was unthinkable, for about a week or so. But then on our floor in the Hosty, there occurred a vacant room and the key incidentally got to my hands, with a chance addition of my course-mate Irina from Bakhmuch. We spent all night in that room and she proved to be an ardent adherent of strictly tactile pleasures with the firmly negative stance towards trespassing the rubber band in her panties.

Again?! What for?!. Her boobs were undeniably magnificent, with some strange nipples though, I had never come across so tiny ones, the size of a pinhead. However, keeping oneself all night long busy with only the bust is a hell of monotonous occupation.

Two days later she resolutely blocked my way in the half-dark corridor of the Hosty. "You did not say you were married!"

"You didn't ask."

(…and here, in my opinion, lies the main flaw in civilization. Take me, for instance, I have nothing but the purest and most natural inclination for a no-cheating trade after the pattern "you give me, I give you". For a fully fair trade of pleasures based on the mentioned principle, I am prepared to provide all the pleasures available from my male body—restricted in no way—in exchange for delights obtainable from her female one. But instead of a young Bacchante rocking with fiery mad ecstasy in my embrace I—for the damnteenth time!—run into the disgusting attempt at using her cunt as a trap.

Bitter are the fruits of yours, O, civilization! Toy with the boobs and piss off! Marry first, and then have it in slathers, ladle or spread it as you like, but no sooner… And no one cares a fig about your shattered self-respect. Couldn't bring to a passionate response?. Hmm…and you call yourself a man after that, eh?.

And—the most perplexing puzzle—a mere outline of the word "rape" gives me a boner, but I’ve never tried to put the term into effect in a real-life situation, not even with the recusant who lay with me of her own free will. She sez, "No, stop it…" and I begin to tame my horny ambition, whatever the cost. Probably, because I love fair deals.

Besides, I was born too late – after the origination of the family, private property, and state…)

Presently, the buses in the Nezhyn city stop next to the railway station, but in those times the highway bridge over the railway tracks was not yet in place and the bus stops were reached by the high footbridge overpass… Then you had to wait for a bus, scramble to get on board, and stand squeezed in the crowd for all the long ride to the main square. From the square there remained a short walk down to the bridge over the Oster river on whose right bank stood the Hosty, the New and the Old Buildings, as well as the other campus structures together with the Count's Park behind them holding the sky aloft upon its columns of dark ancient Elms within the bounds of a long lake of horseshoe outline…

It took me one of those prolonged bus rides from the station to the main square, to persuade Yasha Demyanko to sell me a shirt. A white shirt with the grid pattern of blue-and-yellow, thin, widely set, stripes. Coming back to Nezhyn after the weekend at his home city of Poltava, Yasha brought that shirt for selling at a negotiated price, and in the crowded bus, he opened his grip to flash the goods before me.

I fell for it immediately, but he was obstinately refusing to sell it because he had another such shirt on and both of us were from the same Department. In his opinion, it was not the right thing for 2 persons to be dressed alike when in one place… In the most solemn terms, had I to swear to never ever put it on without his expressed permission, or when his one was washed or left behind in Poltava.

(…we lived in the deficiency era, of which fact we were well aware. So, I wasn't stunned at all when a girl sitting next to me at a general lecture, flashed wide runs in her pantyhose aptly fixed with a blue electric tape high up her thigh.

So what? In upright posture her skirt hid both the tape and runs leaving just legs in the pantyhose of enviable Conte brand… yes, it was the post-mini epoch already…)

~ ~ ~

Fyodor, Yasha and I became bosom friends on the common basis of dry wine. After classes, we started to the deli located round the corner of the department store opposite the church where Bogdan Khmelnytsky centuries ago married another of his wives, to buy 4 to 5 bottles holding 0.75 liters of white dry wine each. Yasha was a firm supporter of moderation and his dose constituted just one bottle in the haul, while Fyodor and I entertained more liberal perspective.

From the deli, we proceeded past the Bazaar and the restaurant "Polissya" to the second bridge over the Oster River, from which long Red Partisans Street started and went off to finally turn right, towards the highway beyond the city. But our route was much shorter and, from the bridge, we climbed down into the tall grass on the left riverbank nearby the Catholic Chapel used as the Youth Sports School grounds, snug and cozy place to stretch out for a libation.

A finger-thick layer of sediment covered each bottle bottom, but we knew how to drink from the neck without stirring it up. The emptied bottles were thrown into the nearly motionless waters of the Oster because somewhere downstream the floodgates of the dam were shut. After a short-lived reproachful popping, the bottles froze on the water, kinda fishing rod floats with their necks in osculatory appeal to the sky.

(…environmental pollution fighters would not approve of such behavior, but young carefree students are not turned on by so minor issues.

Besides, when compared to the exploits in the student life of Mikhail Lomonosov at German universities, we were a tender flock of fluffy lambs. Reading about his feats, you grow to understand: it was not for nothing that the man had walked on foot from Arkhangelsk itself to Moscow… Passion for knowledge knows where to direct you…)

And, lying in the tall grass, we carried on enlightened exchange on this and that, and other such things, interspersed by prolonged gulps before to change the subject. The chat was our snack, like chomping the well-known fact that when the Oster had still been navigable, a merchant boat full of treasures sank someplace there. And recently the Japanese came up with a proposal that they would clean up the entire riverbed of the Oster, provided that they get the treasure, but the ours responded: "Piss off, Japs! Don't be too cunning!"

Or, for a change, we were discussing Latinist Litvinov, that ruthless beast of an exact executioner.

"Read sentence 7 from Exercise 5." But how could you possibly read it when seeing for the first time in your life?

"Sentence 7 comes after Sentence 6."

"…"

"Sentence 7 comes before Sentence 8."

"…"

"Get seated, please. Your mark is two."

Wholly serene, as cool as a cucumber, with his head like a light bulb, maybe, a bit more hair on it, he turns to the next victim… Thus, the poor students did not have a choice but to dub him with the handle of "Lupus".

His beautiful wife was a fourth-year student already, and in her first year, at the winter examination session, she managed to pass the credit in Latin only at her sixth try. He entered the record into her Grade Book, and articulated coolly, "Be smart, and marry me." Figuring out that in the summer session it would be not a credit but the examination in Latin, she realized that the resistance was of no use…

After elaborate discussion of the cadre policy at the NGPI, we glided into a trifling gossip about our roommate Ostrolootsky who’s cool only at staggering but still believes—can you believe it?!—into the final victory of Communism… Innocence itself…Though you never can tell…Who knows?. After all, they still keep Lenin’s mummy in the Mausoleum… Imagine the unthinkable technologies they so possibly will have in that frigging future, eh? After so dreadfully advanced in medical science they’ll reassemble the guy from just his boot strings, you know… but what then? To storm the Winter Palace anew? It’s a museum now. And no Royal Romanov to revenge for his hanged brother…

Then and there we stipulated that after Fyodor and Yasha got their diplomas, at their farewell party I would ramble into the Oster waters with a glass of champagne aloft in my hand. Like in the movie "The Land of Sannikov" the Czarist army lieutenant enters the rolling surf after the schooner sailing away to discoveries.

"There is a point between the past and the future,
And that split second is what we call life…"

And then we, happily mushy, got up and made for the Hosty overtaking the lazy bottles still sticking from the middle of the river.

(…we lived in the era of stagnation only we did not know yet about it…)

In the blue-tiled shower on the Hosty’s first floor, I made a discovery that I had a rather resonant voice. So I brought my guitar from Konotop and sang from the window of my room on the third floor to serenade no one in particular.

Of course, Irina from Bakhmuch notified the whole pack of Artemises at the English Department that I was not a kosher game. As a result, the uniform sweet sadness in the eyes of girls gave way to the expression of alert vigilance, and my entering their rooms did not triggered an automatic invitation to have a tea-party any more. But all the same, I sang.

Sometimes students of the Music-Pedagogical Department descended from their fifth floor to knock on Room 72 door, requesting the guitar at least for one evening. Probably, they wanted to get some rest…

Moreover, end September, when our course students attended the wedding of a student mate in her native town of Borzna, I was strumming and singing there all night the numbers from the repertoire of The Orpheuses, The Orion, and Duke Ellington. And the folks danced to my music!. The slender bride in a long white dress, pressing herself to the massive figure of her groom, did not miss bestowing her grateful looks on the wedding singer. Her brother stood on guard by the record player to shoo off those who wanted to start a disk. Not every wedding could boast of having live music…

~ ~ ~

At the beginning of October, I was summoned to the personnel department of the State Pedagogical Institute. The head of the personnel department, without looking into my face, urged me to pass on into the additional room behind his office desk, but he himself remained where he was.

In the adjacent room, there also was a desk with a lanky man at it who had a shaven face of about 40 years old and pale-dark hair of indistinct length. After my entering and getting seated, he clasped the fingers of his long hands on top of the desk and introduced himself as a Captain of the Committee of State Security, aka the KGB, and went over to briefing me that to prevent the espionage activities of the CIA agents coming to our land under the disguise of news correspondents the KGB needed young people who spoke English. Such people were to get the appropriate special training and be subsequently sent to foreign countries to ensure the security of our state.

Wow! Wild dreams did come true without ever turning to the precinct militiaman Solovey! Captain of KGB was in person making me an offer that I wouldn’t even try to refuse. Not for nothing in my adolescent dreams, I was trying on the shirt of Banionis from "The Dead Season"! It only remained to discuss the details… When after the classes on my way to the hostel I see him with a newspaper in his hands, then an hour later I need to call this here number to get further instructions. And at that, we parted…

A week later, when I called him with the payphone fixed in the glass-walled cage by the second, permanently locked, entrance door to the hostel lobby, he instructed me to come to the railway station, and there proceed to the wooden house of the station militia, next to the public toilet, and enter the first door to the right in their corridor… Behind that door, under his dictation, I wrote the application to enlist me in the secret contingent of the KGB, to which end I chose the conspirative by-name "Pavel" as my operational pseudonym…

At our third meeting, Captain said that the response from the commanding staff at the military detachment of my army service indicated they were of extremely poor opinion about me. Like, I was a hopelessly lost and utterly spoiled fraction of the society dregs.

(…it seems like at the KGB everything was turned upside down – first, they recruited me as a secret agent and then waked up to collecting information if I was worth the while.

Though on the second thought, there could also be my fault, to some extent, by presenting myself so awesome good guy in the forged testimonial.

To quote the great sage Gavkalov, in charge of a truck crane at SMP-615 (of whom later on), “what is all too good is not good at all”…)

So, I asked if Zampolit reported of me as an accomplice in a bank robbery, to which Captain grinned but all the same wished to know why the commanding officer was so negative in his estimation.

Well, I didn’t attempt at jejune justifications or puerile lies, nothing of the sort. I told him the whole truth about how it all happened. It’s only that I substituted myself for the projectionist at the construction battalion club and part-time postman collecting daily mail for the battalion personnel from the city main post office, whom Zampolit trusted with running errands and passing presents to his (Zampolit's) young passions.

By the adjusted version, it was I who accidentally laid up one of the girls who was silly enough to blab it before Zampolit and now, in his jealous fury, he besmeared me with the stamp of a drug-using rowdy…

After that talk, the halo of my dream of becoming a spy on the USA soil grew dim. It dawned on me that I might have been needed for only local use, in the capacity of a snitch, another "Gestapo's ear inserted into Everyman's pocket".

The future confirmed my gloomy boding… There were no more talks about intelligence service school (which bullshit served to hook the fool) instead, twice a month, I came to the room in the station militia corridor to report that I hadn't heard any political discussions among the students of the NGPI.

On the one hand, I felt guilty for letting Captain down and the hopes he pinned on me, but on the other – what could I report? Was the KGB really interested that Igor Recoon, both a Konotoper and my course-mate who entered the institute straight from school, fell in love with the fourth-year student Olga Zhidova from Chernigov?.

All his evenings Igor spent in her room while her roommates exploited the feelings of the young enamored, sending him with a kettle after water from a tap in the washroom.

Once he was checked on the way by my roommate, the fourth-year student Marc Novoselytsky. "Made an errand-boy of you, eh?" asked Marc with his usual mocking grin.

"So what?" the yesterday's schoolboy did not give in, but defiantly threw up his sharp schnozzle with the tea-colored glasses on it and kept chewing, in the attitude of a big-time indie dude, his bubble gum.

"In love with Olga Zhidova, eh?"

"So what?"

"Wanna marry her, eh?"

"So what?"

"How can you marry her? She was my lay!"

"So what?"

The youth withstood even that deadly blow, yet the treacherous kettle slightly lowered its spout in his slackened hand, letting thread-thin trickle onto the gray concrete floor. Poor boy…

My roommate did not lie, of course, and he explained his action as a good-will wish to save young Igor from a fatal blunder. Yet all the same, that Novoselytsky was an ornery bastard, notwithstanding his being a Jew…

In short, I had nothing to curry favor with the KGB and mend my reputation ruined by the finking Zampolit.

(…still and all, if only they ignored what he had rolled on me, and if they winked at the baptizing of my daughter, as well as being so rude to the unknown KGB officer at the foot of Komsomol Gorka Hill in the Stavropol city, then—you never can tell—I might have easily risen to the presidency in present Russia, even without a spy school… My mother always said that I was mighty clever.

As it is, I poisoned my student years with my own hands. Seeing Captain twice a month excruciated me like an incurable toothache. However hard tried I to suppress the thoughts of a pending meeting and think of something…anything else…they returned to beset me like the thoughts of the inescapable end keep coming back to the terminally ill.

Midst the heated revelries in the young-Lomonosov style, there'd pop up a sudden thought that in three days I was to go to a hateful interview which broke me out from the current merriment and made me switch over to morose ruminations that "seccol", aka secsot, which was just an abbreviation of "secret collaborator", sounded much more disgusting than chmo.

And there was no escape – they had my application and reports telling on no one in particular but signed "Pavel". So even if I, say, got to Zona, another "zampolit" would approach me and order to keep on knocking on the inmates if I had no wish of a certain part from the KGB archives to be leaked to the resident master-thief, aka Zona's pakhan.

My life got screwed and cramped up like that of Sindbad the Seaman when in some of his travels a nasty old man nestled around his neck strangling and kicking with his legs for the slightest disobedience.

But why the KGB Captain remained nameless? He told me his name-and-patronymic but I am hanged if I can recollect it.

Not that I'm afraid of the KGB, or whatever is its new, post-Soviet, name – no; it's just a case of permanent brain cramp at that point. When I try to recollect, his name eludes me… Not that I strive in earnest though…)

~ ~ ~

In those times, there were two restaurants in Nezhyn – "Polissya" in the square in front of the Bazaar, and "The Seagull" in the hotel of the same name to the right from the City-and-District Party Committee behind the Lenin's back on the main square. The third one was on the first floor of the railway station but in the afternoon it worked as a canteen, so I count it out.

The epic provincial backwaters inspiring tender sympathy by a mere thought of it… of the monument bust commemorating the home-geezer whose sail-boat at the dawn of XIX-nth century hove at sight nearby the Antarctic shores, yet the silly innocent penguins couldn’t discern the entire taxidermic impact of the appearance of that strange wooden ice-floe over the dark polar waters carrying a herd of strange penguins gaggling in non-Penguin lingo… of the cathedral closed for renovation works ever since end 50’s… of the firstborn of the Soviet combat-tank industry, the model of 1929, at the Shevchenko Park entrance without any podium, right on the asphalt sidewalk: fill in the diesel fuel and – full ahead!. Even the square before the Bazaar was, actually, just a wide street tilting from the bridge up to the department store…

The restaurants we visited quite seldom, and not all of us because Yasha and Fyodor shunned the facilities. On such occasions, they were substituted by Sveta, the official bride of Marc. The white tablecloths on the tables, and the wide green runner from the entrance up to the screen in the corner, concealing the window to the kitchen, showed at once that it was a restaurant for you and not a shabby bar. And, as it's appropriate for a restaurant, we had to wait thru a long wait before the waitress would bring the ordered goulash and potatoes.

To whittle the span down, Sasha Ostrolootsky would start rubbing his set of spoon-fork-knife lined in a close formation next to the up-turned cone of a napkin upon the tablecloth. Like, he was so well-bred and cleanly. Good news, he didn't stick his pinky finger out at the procedure, some prudish Marquis de Orphanage…

Sveta kept nagging Marc with her "What's that, Marik? I didn't get it!" but in a lower kind of voice… Finally, from behind the screen, the waitress appeared with a tray in her hands… Whoops, taken to another table…

But here, at last, and for us too. She moved the plates from the tray onto the table. Sasha in a well-trained manner poured shots of vodka out from the small and round, like a flask for Chemistry experiments, decanter. Shoot off!

And after the second shot, you were already a participant in a witty conversation of the amicable table-mates. Your fingers toyed so smartly with the fork. The music from the loudspeakers behind the screen was no longer sounding too crude. Your unobtrusively gaze swept over those present in the room. Which one to invite for a slow dance on the green runner?

Marc knew them all, which Department, say, those two girls were from, and in what year of their study. If that was someone not from the Institute, then Sveta, as a local guide, presented all their intimate details. Weren’t we the cream of the libertine crop then, eh?.

In the end, Marc would pay for all from his soft brown purse. Back at the hostel, we reimbursed for our shares…

But for his love to teach you, Marc would pass for quite a decent dude. Coming back from the shower on the first floor, he made sure to peep into the lobby to thank the watchwoman, auntie Dinna, for the hot water. And then he started to drive it home to me that although she had nothing to do with the water, yet now she was prepared to do him favors. Because it's like promising something to someone. Nobody might be positive if you were going to keep your word so that they would get indeed what was promised, however, the person you bestowed a hope on starts looking into your hands and, because of the anticipation, they would pull for you.

(…it seems to me, he was just echoing adages by which his father kept screwing his head on since Marc's early childhood. Jewish wisdom transferred from generation to generation, eh?.

That's from whom the KGB learned hooking fools by promises of a spy school…)

Paying for his free lectures in kind, I presented him The Otranto Castle which book he saw on my cabinet-box and got impressed.

It was borrowed from the library at the KahPehVehRrZeh Club. So, I had to return the book first and a week later I stole it from the shelves. Nothing could be easier, in the privacy of a passage between the stacks of shelves, you stuck a book under the belt in your pants, put your sheepskin coat aright, grab another book on the way to the desk of the librarian, and leave with two books of which only one is registered….

The home-made feasts whooped up in Room 72 cost us much less… While Yasha and Fyodor were dispatched after Calvados in flask-like bottles of foreign looks, Ostrolootsky and I went to the kitchen.

On each floor in the Hosty, there were two kitchens, located by the entrance to the corridor from each of the staircase landings. Each kitchen was furnished with two gas stoves, one water tap combined with the sink, and three rows of boxes on one wall, like those in automatic storage cells, only made of veneered chipwood instead of iron… On the window sill, we were peeling potatoes, lots of potatoes.

Sasha had nice sporty looks in his jacket whose zipper was always swayed up to the utmost with the slider tastefully dangling from under his chin. "Well, that'll do. Let’s chop them…Okay…Come up to the door, just lean against it. Yes, that’s the way…Now, let’s check what we have here…"