When the room got silent and the light turned off, I went to the waiting room. What if the voice sounds different at childbirth?. They told me it was not the time yet…

I never stuffed another joint; the one at the vigil start remained the only that night. When screams started anew, I recognized the dear voice – it was Eera!

After it was over and the light in the delivery room out, I came to the waiting room and they told me it was not the time yet and then sent me to the window of the prenatal ward on the other side of the building. Eera raised herself to the windowsill and from under her half-dropped eyelids, she incredulously looked to see that I was still there. She told me to leave because the childbirth would be at nine.

Of course, she did not know that I was protecting her from this world with its KAMAZ-dragons and merciless paramedics. "Kerdun on the shift?"

"No."

I returned to the gazebo… There I sat squeezing in the cupped hands the quiver in my shoulders to ward off the chill of night…

In the murky predawn twilight, the circle of the gazebo floor was suddenly crossed by a strange dark ball pushing a white cylinder before itself. Only when it disappeared into the grass, I guessed that it was a hedgehog whose muzzle got stuck in an ice-cream paper cone.

The rays of invisible sun touched the white clouds high above; soon it wouldn't be so awfully cold. From the center in the gazebo roof, a fine thread of web plumbed down precipitated by the weight of a big spider on its end. No sooner he touched the floor than the air space of the gazebo was cut thru by a sparrow flying in the direction marked by the muzzle-covered hedgehog. The spider followed them.

(…I can see signs, but—what a pity!—I cannot read them.

Spider, bird, hedgehog… The three Magi?..)

In the delivery room, someone started screaming again. When the screams died down, two women called me from behind the sheer veil of the mosquito net to come up. One of them held the baby in her uplifted hands; something was dangling between the tiny legs.

"Son!" I had time to think.

"Congratulations to your daughter!"

"Navel cord," corrected I myself…

The mother-in-law met me with a smile and congratulations, she had already called the maternity hospital on the phone.

Borrowing money from Tonya, I ran to the Bazaar. It was a serious banknote of 25 rubles, she hadn't smaller ones by her at the moment. I flounced about the Bazaar, buying up bouquets of roses; roses, I wanted only roses, nothing but roses. Until the blank click in the run out clip of 25 rubles.

Then I hurried back to the hospital embracing that bale of bouquets. The one-legged cripple, on his crutches by the five-story block of the mother-in-law, smiled at me happily – he knew where I was hurrying to.

The nurse at the maternity hospital had to call two more of her colleagues to help her to take the flowers from the waiting room to the inner corridor. Later, Eera told me that she was still lying then in that corridor on the gurney and they heaped the roses over the bedsheet covering her but not for too long because they had to take her to the wardroom where flowers were not allowed… Then nurses and midwives shared those bouquets to take them home; one bouquet went to the paramedic Kerdun who came on her shift in the morning. Who cares? The most important thing that you were born.

"…a million, a million, a million of scarlet roses…"

~ ~ ~

(…Egyptologists are still arguing why the beautiful female faces of sphinxes are endowed with those hanging beards…)

The explanation was demonstrated by Eera. Though, at first, she demonstrated you, from behind the windowpane. The white fabric tightly wrapped all around you except for the circle of the face with your eyes in an obstinate squint. The same fabric covered Eera's hair, and half of her face was hidden with a bandanna-wide mask, like by the bank robbers, only white. She took you away somewhere, and then returned to the window and said thru the glass, that your eyes were the bluest blue but that you were already asleep after feeding.

To say this, she untied the upper strings of the mask, leaving the lower ones in place and the released cloth hung under her chin.

(…a beautiful face and an odd beard under it! The sphinxes have just fed their cubs!

That's what the ancient Egyptians wanted to bring over…)

When back at the apartment on Red Partisans, I was struck by the horrific look of the door to our narrow bedroom. How could I not see earlier all that dirt and mud splashes, and that long single hair hanging from a mud clump stuck to the door at a half-meter up from the floor? I heated some water and washed the door on both sides and then the window frame too, from inside. When Tonya gave me the carriage of her children, so that you would have where to sleep, I washed it as well taking into the yard under the bedroom window. And there I realized that it was the right thing to do when from out the folds in the collapsible top I picked out a piece of dried baby’s cack. No, I did not say anything to anyone, no one had anything to do with it, that was a part of sorting it out between me and the world in our single combat…

At the institute, Eera still had one more final examination. If it were missed, she would have to wait one whole year so as to take it together with the following graduating course. However, you were born very conveniently – right after the previous exam and there followed a week set aside for reading up between the examinations plus three more days, because there were four groups at a course, and they were not examined on the same day but one after another which amounted to 10 days allowed for your stay in the hospital.

On the sixth day of your life, Eera came to the waiting room and said that you were already all right, and the danger of jaundice, because of the different Rh factor in your parents, was over, and you were ready to be taken home any moment they say so. I kicked up tempestuous activity running to the Head of the maternity hospital with demands to discharge you both immediately on behalf of the state examination to be taken by the mother. The Head began to hesitate only she said they needed a go-ahead from another maternity boss, sitting in one of the lanes branching off Shevchenko Street.

From an unfamiliar nurse who happened to come to work by her bicycle which was slumbering now leaned in a shady spot against the wall until the end of her shift, I borrowed it and drove over there. In the unattainable height of the bottomless sky hung a few clouds shaped like spiraling galaxies over the bus stops, where already started to accumulate the end-of-day lines of passengers. The bike swept past, like the besom of Margarita riding to the ball of Satan… When I jumped off it by the small maternity office lurking in a lane, the witch's son of a bitch kicked me in the groin with its back wheel and neighed in vicious cheer, mutely but spitefully.

I ran into the office to surprise two women peacefully idling last minutes of their working day. Taming my breath, I started the same negotiations. They made a telephone call somewhere and flatly announced – no discharge without BCG, the next day they'd vaccinate you and then set us free.

On the way back, I drove much slower, dejectedly fixing the bike's chain that fell off awfully often. When the bicycle was returned to the owner, I went to the waiting room to find Tonya there. I started to convince her that we could easily kidnap both Eera and the baby, only I had to go and fetch Eera's clothes.

Tonya sprinkled me with the knitted belt of her jacket, the way exorcist priests do when busy with their job. The belt was dry, of course, but all the same I stopped freaking Tonya out, though I knew perfectly well that if I did not get Eera out of there that day, I would lose her.

Eera came to the room and, in turn with Tonya, explained it to me that just one day did not mean anything. It was evening already. I saw Tonya to my parents-in-law's, but I couldn't stay in the bedroom even with its thoroughly rinsed door…

I returned back to the maternity hospital but did not enter the gazebo; I wouldn’t stand another night of listening to the animal howling of women in childbirth. So I went to the night watch, like the last in the field from the squad of guarding knights of Uncle Chernomor.

I walked in a slow, dilatory, pace because ahead there still was a whole night which turned out so dark, that bypassing the five-story block of Zhomnir, I stepped into a deep pot-hole puddle on the sidewalk, with my right foot. Pfui! Though deft in dodging the dragon, next to the lair of Laban I screwed it up so ingloriously.

I did not stop till reaching the water pump across the road from the locked gate of Nezhyn Vegetable Cannery, where I had the foot ablution and also washed the soaked sock. A cavalcade of buses, brightly lit from inside, rumbled from round the turn to the Progress Plant; they jostled past void of any passengers. I firmly squeezed the water out of my sock and put it back on.

In that manner, one sock dry and the other wet, yet both hidden beneath my pants, I reached the station. A knight vigilant should never stop in his watch round.

I walked a couple of circles in the half-dark and fully empty ticket-office hall with its floor-tiles wrapped in nighttime sending back tiny hollow echoes to my delayed steps. Another circle was performed in the waiting room filled with silent motionless figures of people seated on the benches.

Past the locked canteen-restaurant, I went to the second floor to coast thru the waiting rooms up there. Never before had I noticed how strangely change at night the look of people's eyes. Not by everyone though, yet some of them gazed thru the eyes glazed by some uncanny gloss. The ones of those weird looks got startled by my appearance; they tried to hide the unearthly glare in their eyes, but I could easily make them out within the sitting rows of unsuspecting passengers half-asleep in the massive night silence of the station… Behave yourselves, glassy-eyed! The guard is on the watch!.

The rain caught up with me beneath the lights on pillars over the empty traffic bridge. A quiet summer rain it was. I did not intend to go to Pryluky, so reaching the city limit I turned back and walked to Red Partisans. The rain was not increasing and not ceasing either. We strolled on together at the same laggard pace…

The door was opened by Ivan Alexeyevich; Gaina Mikhailovna was peeping from the dark of the unlighted living room. "Where are you roving? It’s raining outside."

"The rain is warm."

"Maybe, I'll beat you?"

"Not worth it."

In the bedroom, I dropped all wet clothes off and lay down naked. As in all the previous nights without Eera, I spread her nightie full length and enclosed in my hug so that I could protect her even absent from by my side… Much later, I learned that the in-laws concluded I was whoring on that night…

Next day in the afternoon, I carried you from the hospital, wrapped in a quilted silk blanket and some frilled tulle. Eera walked alongside, with a bouquet which Tonya had bought in advance. But the flowers in it were not roses…

~ ~ ~

Her final examination, Eera passed with another group from her course. I waited for her by the columns on the high porch and, embracing by the waist, helped her down the steep steps. She wore a yellow knitted jacket with three-quarter sleeves. The head of my group, Lyda, who happened about, was watching us from aside with an empathetic smile in her face…

That yellow jacket I liked and got it by chance. Eera told me then that they brought goods to the department store in the main square, and sent me to see what was on sale. As usual on such occasions, the store was densely crammed with a heated crowd. The jacket was the last one and exactly Eera's size, yet while I was being happy about so good luck, it was grabbed by some girl and her mother. Sneaky villagers!

The girl tried the jacket on and looked inquiringly at her mother, who was holding the daughter’s raincoat. On that department store visit, Slavic kept me company. So, we stepped aside and started to exchange comments, "Not bad, but the sleeves are way too short."

"Yeah, let's look for something else."

The mother shook her head, and the girl reluctantly took off the jacket. I snatched it at once and sent Slavic to knock out the check.

Eera even liked that it was a three-quarter jacket… All that was before you…

And for your birth, following the elegant, time-honored, Slavonic tradition, I had to treat my friends to magarich. In the restaurant Seagull by the same-named hotel in the main square, Slavic, Twoic and I shared a couple of decanters with vodka. The waitress had a skirt of white and black stripes on, and Twoic liked it when I defined her outfit as a stringy piece of cloth. He demanded a toast.

"It's not just birth," announced I, "but the start of new life, and since life is nothing but a transition from one form to another let's drink to that the newborn, as well as we, will fill our lives up with beautiful forms."

Twoic started to croak that the idea of form transitions was ripped by me off Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he also happened to read, which was my fault, I had put him on the trail to the book at the institute library.

My next toast was to a girl with beautiful blue eyes, I meant you.

Yet, Twoic pulled a clever look on his rustic mug and started a lecture about some causal genes—a smart ass from the Biology Department—and that the color would change in a month to brown, possibly dark-brown. Some Bio-Fac bastard with his causal genes!.

Before getting their diplomas and workplace appointments, all the institute graduates were summoned to the assembly hall in the New Building. We had to sit thru a usual blah-blah about keeping high the NGPI honor wherever we get distributed by our appointments.

Than a black-haired stranger took the floor and said that each of us was given, on entering the hall, a sheet of paper and a pencil, right? Now, it should be admitted that not everything's straight as it should be in our schools. So, let us write about what we, the graduates, did not like in the schools we had practices at, or even earlier, or even when we ourselves were still school students. Just any occasion when some teacher behaved incorrectly, in our opinion, or allowed themselves incorrect statements. To make it easier to start, let's use the phrase, "And I still remember how…" after which it would go on by itself, okay?

His educative speech left me stunned with awe and realization of how deeply backward I stayed. The KGB had obviously upgraded to the conveyor-system technologies in the production of secret collaborators. Hundreds of rats hatched in just one sitting! And no need to use the bait of spy school individually.

(…in each of us, there lurks a small frightened animal hidden deep inside and thinking logically: "If I don't write they can cancel my diploma or fork out the appointment to the worst of stinking holes. It's better to write – one time does not count."

But that time of no account is, actually, just the start. Later, in the hole you were appointed to, they will come up and show you your essay, and dictate the next…)

Okay, bitches, you'll get it written!. In the back of each seat in the assembly hall, there was installed a rectangular hinged piece of plastic, a kinda mini-desktop. I brought down the one in the back of the seat before me, placed the crisp sheet of paper on the smooth plastic surface, and wrote:

"And I still remember how in the fourth grade my Class Mistress, Seraphima Sergeevna, stated:

'Well done, Sehrguey! You collected most of the waste paper.'

And I was filled with pride and joy."

I signed my final report to the KGB with my real name and I am proud of it till now…

~ ~ ~

(…The great discovery of Karl Marx about the emergence of surplus-value, remained, as it, unfortunately, is, not pushed to all of its potential limits. He quite correctly noted that some part of his working time a laborer toils for himself, and the remaining part for the factory owner. Good fellow, Karl, hit the bulls-eye!. However, that's not all there is there to it.

The main (yet unnoticed) trick lurks in the fact, that it is impossible to determine who exactly the laborer toils for at this or that part of a split second. And this, not yet perceived (although indisputable) truth is applicable not only to the methods of production but to any other sphere of human activities as well.

(Hopefully, I'm not advancing too fast, and you are in time to stick down your notes? Okay, proceed to the full-stop, while I'm opening the second bottle…)

Hence, we can safely state, that there are no bad guys in the world, but there are no good guys either. An elusive, uncatchable, fraction of a second separates good from evil.

Well, so you think that guy is a good man? I love your innocence! Stay assured, you're still alive only because of meeting him in the right part of the second. Some tiny pinch of time earlier or later, and that vampire would have dropped aside your lifeless corpse already, with your blood system sucked-up dry and lymph nodes gnawed to tatters!.

Or let's take those same witches queuing to be burned at the stake and illuminate the darkness of the Middle Ages. The gloomy blockheads of executioners could not understand that they were burning not the right ones, and at the wrong moment.

My point is, no matter how – at the stake, on the pale, in the guillotine, on the electric chair, in the gallows, against a wall facing the firing squad… well, whatever!.. they always execute the guiltless. These are not those ones, those were not these. No!. Wait!. Oops… Too late… The pattern iterates in the same endless vicious loop…

But even those, at the moment of wrong-doing, were simply order-executing tools. Whose orders? Who were they toiling for? Well, if I had the answer to that question, would I be still living here, eh?

One thing is clear, though. Between the tool engaged at the operation end and the don of mafia there lies a chain of several links making the "who" practically untraceable. Because, if we paraphrase the favorite expression of my Uncle Vadik, which he picked at the history classes in School 13:

"a zombie of my zombie is not my zombie"…)

Hearing your heartrending cry from the bedroom, I rushed there and was just in time. You were wriggling in the carriage under the open leaf in the window, and your grandmother, drooping over you, went on with her incantation, "Little angel! Little angel!" While you were getting torn apart in screams.

"Gaina Mikhailovna! She's not an angel but a girl!"

In her responding glance, there glinted the malice from the one who had sent her, but lacking arguments to refute my statement, she silently left.

I knew for sure that prevailing upon a baby whose infirm psyche hasn't got adequate training, who, as of yet, too feebly orients herself in the world, was wrong, especially persuading her that she was an angel. And more so under the window open widely! Like, inviting – fly to where it's nice, where angels like you frisk and flutter around happily!

I started to convince you that you were a girl named Lille and nothing of an angel at all. You still kept crying but not so desperate as before when the soul was being wrenched in efforts to escape the mortal body.

Yet, what was the matter? I put you onto the bed and unwrapped the swaddle; you cried on, arching your infant torso… The reason was found in the soles of the tiny feet both wearing the stretches of whitish arachnoid fiber like those rascal-marking fluffs on my camel's-hair coat. I rinsed them off. Blinking your blue eyes in surprise, you calmed down. I swaddled you back again and took over to the carriage where you peacefully fell asleep…

Ironing your swaddles was my responsibility so that I would keep everything under control, watched closely. And it was also me to hang them, after washing, out over the common linen ropes in the apartment-block yard.

The ropes ran from the central pillar like spokes from a wheel hub. It’s where I learned that I had allies in this world because alone I would hardly solve the problem of hanging swaddles the right way. I mean it, really, which way to put them on the rope – face down or back down? I put the first one this way, the second upside-down. And that very moment, a white dove came from above, lit on the central pillar and cooed in protest.

Aha! Thank you, friend! I'll keep to the instruction!

Since then I was hanging a whole load of swaddles homogeneously…

Zhomnir suddenly lost all of his interest in my translations from Maugham. He cut off his usual cheerful threats to take them one of these days to "matchmaking" in Kiev. Instead of encouragements, there came languid explanations that it was necessary to take into account the ongoing changes in conjuncture. That the following year there would be the centenary of another English writer. Translations from that one would be much easier to shove thru. And Maugham, actually, was a gay person…

Well, let's say, rendering the story about a young suicide pianist, I was able to figure out his orientation by myself. However, in what gutter would this here best of the worlds be today without the gay composer Tchaikovsky? Either Maugham or nothing!

Alexander Vasilyevich shrugged his shoulders…

In the living room at Red Partisans in the presence of Gaina Mikhailovna, I complained to Eera about Zhomnir's double-dealing. They both knew about my ambiguous ambitions to become a literary translator. Eera started pathetic exclamations while my mother-in-law, without any comment, went out to Tonya's bedroom and returned with a powder box. She opened it, powdered her face in front of the mirror in the wardrobe door, and took it back in the same tacit manner. That's all.

In the evening, Zhomnir rang the doorbell and invited me to go out with him into the yard. His bicycle leaned against the house wall by the staircase-entrance. Under the dark foliage of the thick Cherry crowns behind the common linen ropes, twilight was already gathering and creeping towards the hung laundries. From the neighboring apartment block sounded The Eagles' Hotel California:

"Warm smell of colitas rising up in the air…"

I did not know at that time what a tragically creepy end the song had, and simply was getting on high from the concluding guitar break…

Zhomnir obviously envied the atmosphere around, but then he started to talk business. As it stood, my translations had ceased to be mere scribbling, yet still remained in a ballpark, kinda a beta version. He did not insist on changing the author, but let them be upgraded to the alpha…

He left, and I respectfully admired the skills of the old school. With all their ignorance about the textual formatting of the world, and with the naive belief in bewitching thru the cooked sausage, yet just a single powdering was enough to overpower Zhomnir and seize him by the gills! Well done, mother-in-law!.

Apart from the baby’s security considerations, the swaddle ironing was needed to pass the time… Eera, as a mother with a newborn, was exempt from working off for her diploma. I got an appointment somewhere in the Transcarpathia. The exacter location was not of much concern to me because I did not plan to work at school in any place at any time. So, Gaina Mikhailovna (since I was so brave) came up with an idea to follow the example of Komsomol members from the earlier generations who recklessly went to erect new cities that were not yet on the map. And, by the way, there was an article in the newspaper that nearby Odessa they started to build a new city-port of Yuzhny…

It was decided that I would go there as soon as you became one month old because it was still not easy for Eera to keep you single-handed. Thus, I was whiling away the pre-launch month with the swaddles and walking the carriage, where you were sleeping in. Only I had to keep to the strict instructions and never-never move the tulle cover fixed on the raised top to screen the baby inside. And after the month expired, and you passed your medical examination, the tulle could be removed and substituted with a traditional safety pin for keeping safe from evil eye…

My brother Sasha came on a visit from Konotop, and you had your debut visit to the Count's Park. Eera and Slavic joined us also. By the park lake, Slavic and I sparked a joint but my brother never blew jive.

We returned thru the narrow gate by the building of the Musical Pedagogical Department. The gate’s jambs were connected with an iron strip welded some 10 inches above the ground, like a stile impeding the passage of the carriage. I, in spacey sluggish manner, asked Slavic for help to move the carriage over, but no sooner had he reached out for its handle than Sasha barked brutally at him, "Get off with you!"

Slavic coweredly obeyed, and you were carried over the stile by me and Sasha. I felt pleased and proud to have such a brother, and also glad that you had such sort of an uncle who wouldn’t leave his niece to Slavic…

Your next appearance to the Park took place on the arrival of Eera's brother from Kiev. Igor came together with his wife who kept chewing his ear all the time while he, in a soft good-natured manner, smoothed away the spiky wrinkles she turned out of nothing. I thought then it might be because of her PMS but later I learned that she had that PMS for life, without a break.

During the walk, she kept flinging her umbrella open every other minute, and then the rain started to drizzle. When she did it for the dozenth time, Eera also got it about the cause and effect and asked her sister-in-law not to open the umbrella anymore. Igor's wife was happy to be noticed and appreciated, she left the umbrella alone and on our way back there was no rain…

In his family, Ivan Alexeyevich enjoyed the handle of Prince, and he was pleased with it. A natural reaction of a peasant son to getting such a title. And he looked princely too, especially when, well-nourished and imposing, he sat in a white tank top and blue sportswear pants next to a newspaper, wide open in his hands. So the handle was, like, a compliment to tickle his pride, and he certainly deserved it because he was a getter.

In the era of deficits not only wedding suits were hard to be acquired but different other types of products too. So getters was getting them… Once my father-in-law even fetched and dropped in the kitchen a whole sack of buckwheat, by the central heating battery beneath the windowsill.

In the corner to the left from the window, there was installed the gas stove, the titan for water boiling occupied the right corner, so that sack of buckwheat filled the center completing the composition to advantage. And that was a righteous lump of pride too, because other folks had to go for a special trip to Moscow to buy that product, and suddenly in a kitchen of provincial Nezhyn a whole sack of buckwheat!

(…same sort of pride that some people get from a hunting trophy, like a pair of tusks, a sword sawed off a fish, or such thick branching…well, ahem…which, in general, can also be fixed in the wall…)

Okay, getter, if so is your disposition, then tickle your pride for a week, let's say two, or even a month bypassing that f-f..er..I mean, fabulous sack in the kitchen, but it had stuck there already for so long that even the mother-in-law started to grumble just to receive his usual response, "A? Well, yes…" before he buried himself back in the newspaper…

But then in the messy pile of newspapers alongside the TV on the table, a certain headline caught my eye. I did not read the article itself but the headline suggested that there was some archaeological subject. The main thing, I liked the headline for some reason, so short and sweet and to the point. It somehow reminded me of the toilet room cut-outs' exhibition in the Hosty.

I picked the paper up and folded it in a certain way so that only the headline would stay in view. It was bedtime already but I still dropped to the kitchen for a second and with a caressing gesture—there even was some faggish tint to it—I put the newspaper on the sack of buckwheat. On the way out, I put the light off leaving behind in the darkness the sack headlined

The Prince's Tomb

I mean, as a son-in-law I was a regular SOB, yet the next morning the sack faded in the woodwork before my getting up…

The day before I was leaving to participate in erecting a new city, I went to Konotop to see Lenochka who was in the pioneer camp by the Seim. After she confirmed that I was her father, the caretaker of her platoon allowed us to go out of the campgrounds.

In the Pine forest, Lenochka picked up a long gray feather of an unknown bird, and I thrust it into her smooth hair where it stayed as if fixed.

(…Indians are no fools – such feathers make a person the part of the free wild world, establishing involvement, contact, and mutual tacit understanding…)

When we were coming back to the camp civilization, a gust of wind ran up from behind and softly took the feather out of her hair to drop it down onto the thick carpet of old Pine needles on the ground. She did not even notice it.

^~~^~~^~