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'.
