Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
Outside the front door, a rectangular grating of parallel rebar-rods bridged a shallow cemented pit for the dirt falling off the high boots when scraped against the grating.
Close to the vestibule there stood an equally sized openwork gazebo with a bench of three beams running along the three plank sides. Its four-sided roof was propped by the posts in the gazebo corners. In the center of the cemented floor there was another pit, this one of rounded walls and without any lid or grating – for the servicemen to throw their cigarette stubs in, which eventually would be cleaned up by the on-duty soldier.
Next to the gazebo, there stretched a three-meter-long footrest allowing several men to simultaneously put one or the other of their feet upon it when polishing their high boots.
Anything omitted? Oh, yes! And the grass on both sides of the asphalt path around the barrack. When the Sergeants got over hot with drilling us in the sun-swept drill grounds, bounded by the gate, the Canteen, and the sorteer, or fed up with driving it home to us the meaning of lines in the booklet of the Statute of Internal Military Service, they cut us loose with the order to eradicate ragweed, aka ambrosia.
Previously, I knew for sure that ambrosia was a cheerful drink at the feasts of the eternally young and immortal gods of Olympus, and never suspected it had a nickname – the terribly vicious grass. We were shown sheets with a black-and-white picture of the wanted culprit coupled with short lines calling to find and liquidated the offender spreading dangerous hay fever.
That was the one and only unreservedly welcome command because the Sergeants disappeared for an hour or so, and, lying in the grass, we could talk and get acquainted in no hurry… From Konotop there was no one but me and others were from different cities – Buryn, Krolevets, Shostka, in the same Sumy region.
In general, the entire spring draft to VSO-11 was from Ukraine with the Dnepropetrovsk fellas brought before us. They had already undergone the training and got distributed to the companies of the battalion. Taking advantage of the Sergeants' absence, a couple of them sneaked into the gazebo to collect the cigarette stubs from the rounded hole, dropped there by us at the command to fall in.
Nobody really knew why the poor Ambrosia was hunted down so severely, and nothing in the grass around resembled it even remotely, but the idle talks helped to at least shortly forget about the gruesome eternity piled on us for the following two years…
~ ~ ~
The newly acquired outfit harbored certain predicament at training the commands of "get up!" and "light out!", the buttons could hardly be squeezed in and out of the tight buttonholes. On the advice of a wise newbie Vitya Strelyany, I widened them with an aluminum spoon handle in the Canteen, and they began to fly in and out nice and swiftly…
The immediate goal of the drill training was to sell ourselves on the Oath Day. All in all, there were three platoons in the "training" barrack with one and the same song for them all, which was often aired by the All-Union "Mayak" Radio Station.
"In two winters,
Merely in two winters,
In two summers,
Merely in two summers
I'll do my honest service in the army
And come back to you…"
After the first platoon finished their ceremonial-step circling round and round the drill grounds and singing the song in a false course chorus concluded by the finalizing, "Stop! One-two!" the second platoon marched into the same ground singing the same song, which turned unbearably long. And when at last they also stopped, we, the third platoon, stomped in, blaring about the third pair of winters and summers, which was a crying redundancy.
The recruits snickered, the Sergeants of the first and second platoons laughed outright, and our Sergeant got icky nervous… When I told him I could prepare another song for us to sing, if only I had a pen and paper, he did not immediately get it what I was talking about, but then I was set free from the drill grounds to do creative work for the benefit of the platoon.
The Sergeant instructed me to get the needed stationery from the on-duty soldier guarding the cabinet-box… The first thing you saw on entering any barrack was a soldier standing next to the cabinet-box. The soldier was an on-duty serviceman, and the cabinet-box was his sentry post. Standing there, he had to issue the command "Company! At attention!" when the barrack was entered by an officer.
There were 2 on-duty privates daily who replaced each other by the cabinet-box every four hours, and at the mealtime, the one free from the watch went to the Canteen under command of the on-duty Sergeant to lay the tables with the havvage for the company servicemen to have it.
Those 3 (the on-duty Sergeant and the pair of private men) were called "on-duty detail" and stayed it for 24 hours. The current on-duty Sergeant was surprised by my request, yet he gave me a pen and a sheet of paper.
Passing to the end of the barrack, I entered the room which the company political commander, aka zampolit, called "Leninist Room" because its walls were paneled by yellow chipboard and next to the mirror there hung the brown-yellow icon of Leader's profile in a piece of Beaverboard, but in the soldiers' lingo it was "live-mains room" because of the wall sockets for an iron or electric razors and the mirror wide enough to be used by 2 or 3 of shaving men at once…
The song air was no problem – everyone knew the perennial hit:
"Maroosya, a black-haired girl,
Picked berries
Of gelder rose…"
But not everyone knew that originally the song was sung as "C’mon, fellas, uncinch the horses…" which meant that it got used to transformations of its lyrics:
"Our parade march is the best,
And our song's the loudest,
That's the tune
Of our platoon!.."
Sitting over a sheet of paper I twirled the pen in my fingers picking up words in my mind, fitting them this or that way. And gradually the Leninist live-mains around me, and the acrid smell of fresh cotton from my uniform, and the smarting itch in my right foot rubbed to bleeding, all that faded into the woodwork. I was in AWOL from the army…
Yes, we did learn and sing it quite bravely…
~ ~ ~
At the end of the day, the rookies stood at ease about the entrance to the "training" barrack when the Master Sergeant of Fourth Company, a man of about 40 with a round good-natured face and a paunch of the potbelly, was passing by.
He stopped to ask where we were drafted from. Probably, he just wanted to while away the half-hour before the Ensigns and officers, as well as a couple or two of women from the accountancy by the Detachment Staff were to be taken to the Stavropol-City. For the overnight staying in the battalion, there remained only the on-duty officer.
One of us, Vanya by his name, seeing the human disposition of the senior in rank, asked with a sucking-up smile, "Comrade Master Sergeant, could they exempt me because of this?"
Lowering his head, he rested his index finger in a wide scar on his pate, that peeped thru the bristles of the close-cut.
"Fucking smartie, fixin' to fuck the army?" said the Master Sergeant. "No fucking way!" And he slapped Vanya's shoulder blades with his broad fatty hand.
From the sonorous spank, Vanya bent in the opposite direction and pouted to show that it hurt, "Ouch!"
The soldiers readily laughed at the witty remark of the Master Sergeant…
As for the tactical drills, I even liked them. All the three platoons of rookies were formed into one column and marched out of the battalion grounds to the field by the pigsty. The Sergeants explained that "flash" meant a nuclear bomb explosion, and it was necessary to drop flat on the ground with your head in the flash direction.
Then the command "run march!" followed, and when the whole column moved in a disorderly trot, one of the Sergeants yelled, "Flash on right!" With animated yells and screams, we clumsily fell in the grass. The drill was repeated several times.
(…an eternity later, when we also became "grandpas" and the buddies from my draft recollected those "flash on left!" and "flash on right!" as one of the inhuman trials for the startup youngs, I could not understand them.
I still do not understand. Running in the summer field, tumbling in the green grass when you have the strength and wish – it's just fun!
"How young we were at that time!
How young we were at that time!."…)
After the concentrated, hard, fatigue-denying, training in the course of the unforgettable four days, we took the Military Oath and became servicemen at the Armed Forces of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. No, we were not holding any automatic or another kind of weapons which customarily adorned that ceremonial ritual in the Soviet Army. We just took turns stepping out of the ranks to approach the desk in the asphalt path, pick up the sheet with the text of the Military Oath, read it, put it back onto the desk, sign another sheet (the lieutenant indicated the place for the signature), step back to the ranks, turn about and face the barrack wall made of white silicate brick laid in shiner position.
Behind the desk, facing our ranks, there stood two officers. If somebody, while taking the Military Oath, was not quite dexterous about the reading of the printed text, they did not really pick on him – just finish it off quick and scribble your scratch on the sheet.
In the end, the lieutenant asked if anyone had a medical education. After a moment of refrained confusion in the ranks, a young soldier stepped out and reported his having been a help for the paramedic at the first-aid post in his village. He was singled out to continue his service at Fourth Company, as well as four professional drivers from our draft.
(…how many times in the 2 years that followed, I cursed myself with every taboo word under the sun for missing to step forward and report my 3 years of reading up for admittance exams at the neurosurgery department of a medical institute!.)
Then they announced where each of us belonged. I got to First Company, that of masons. Plasterers served at Second and Third Companies. Fourth Company was for drivers and everything else.
We were taken to the respective barracks and presented to the commanders of our squads who indicated free bunk beds in the koobriks of the silent empty barrack because at that time of day the company personnel was working at construction sites in the city…
In all the living nature there hardly could be found more disgusting sounds than the thrice-cursed command "Company! Get up!"
(…anticipatorily, I should confess that when being an on-duty private and having waited for the hands in the large square clock above the sentinel cabinet-box to fall exactly to six o'clock in the morning, I also took a deep breath and yelled in the meanest voice I was capable of:
"Companyeeeeeeee! Get uuuuuup!"
An eye for an eye. And an ear for the tormented ear…)
After the first night in the barracks of First Company, of all my personal belongings in the cabinet-box of the koobrik I slept in, there remained only a half-pack of razors "Neva" priced 25 kopecks when full. The loss of the toothbrush and paste-tube together with the safety razor was not so depressing as the disappearance of 30 kopecks from the pocket in my cotton pants. That would buy me two packs of cigarettes "Prima". I recollected the fellas from Dnepropetrovsk picking up cigarette stubs from the trash pit in the "training" barrack’s gazebo.
Having meticulously covered my bed with the blanket (otherwise, the on-duty serviceman would rip it off and demand to do it better), I collared my neck with the army waffle towel, as everyone else around, and went to the sorteer in the general flow of khaki color.
Over each of the ten hole-ochcos, someone was squatting attended by a waiting line of 2 or 3, and even the wall-width-long urinal runnel was not accessible at once. The place was filled with a babel of tinkling, farting and exchanging news of the past day.
"He was rat-arsed then?"
"You knows yoursel."
"Got caught?"
"I am fucked if I know. They were looking for him."
"They'll get him."
"You knows yoursel."
At the washstand trough, they milled the same piece of news only in more detail.
By eight o'clock the on-duty Sergeants had driven the youngs and dippers of their respective companies to the drill grounds and carried out the complex of exercises. Then the companies had their breakfast and got loosely lined, 4 rows deep, on the drill grounds except for those grandpas who fucking fucked all those fall-ins already.
At a little to eight, the "goat"-Willys of Battalion Commander and a small bus with the officers and accountancy ladies pulled up at the gate.
Battalion Commander, Political Second-in-Command, aka Zampolit, and Chief of Staff went to the middle of the drill grounds, the officers joined the ranks of their respective companies, the accountants bypassed the barrack of Third Company heading to the barrack of Fourth Company – half of that building accommodated the Staff of VSO-11.
The Morning Dispensing started with the report of the on-duty officer to the trinity of Commanders that during the last day there were neither incidents nor violations in the Construction Detail 11. Then Chief of Staff ordered two soldiers from Third Company to step out and face the ranks. The day before they violated military discipline at the construction sites in the city. He announced the penalty – 10 days of arrest.
The gray-haired Battalion Commander, turning from side to side his horn-rimmed glasses, commenced the prosecution harangue. Those oratories of his were outright beyond comprehension because his chronic brain leakage allowed him to reach no further than the middle of a current sentence, and then he leaped to another one of which though no more than a half saw its completion and left you puzzled whether that was the starting or concluding part in it.
Behind the Battalion Commander's back, Separate Company was approaching along the asphalt path on their way to the Canteen for their breakfast havvage. They fucking fucked all that Dispensing, they were Separate Company not belonging to VSO-11.
Finally, Zampolit told Battalion Commander that was enough for the rhetoric. Battalion Commander fired off a pair of concluding "fucks" and shut up.
The on-duty officer passed his responsibilities to another officer whose turn it was to stand on duty for the following twenty-four hours.
The discipline violators surrendered their belts to the new on-duty Sergeant and plodded to the checkpoint guardhouse to get locked up in the clink there, the darkroom with the tin-veneered door and no windows at all, yet provided with the decking of planks to lie upon.
Chief of Staff ordered the rest of the servicemen to turn right and march to our workplaces. We walked to the gate with the trucks already waiting for us outside. Battalion Commander started up – a shred of a sentence that had slipped off when he was at it, landed back into the Colonel Lieutenant's brain.
Fuck yourself, fucker! The Dispensing's over! We're already boarding the trucks – a foot on the tire-tred, hands grabbed atop the plank-side, swing over it and rush further so as the following buddy wouldn't land on your back. Off we go!
The gate stayed behind; the wall of white brick panels between the white brick pillars ran by on the left. We're going to the city!.
On arrival, it turned out just outskirts with a construction site in the remnants of a windbreak belt, the project of a nine-story residential building of two sections whose walls of white silicate brick reached already about half of their height.
The commander of our team-squad brought us to a tall hillock of bricks piled up by the dump trucks and ordered to stack bricks on pallets. Each pallet was just four thick planks, one-meter-and-twenty in length, nailed to a pair of crosswise beams, 90 cm x 6 cm x 6cm, which became the pallet's footing so that the steel cable slings of the tower crane would easily pass beneath the pallet’s underbelly. Twelve courses of bricks upon the pallet (some 300 bricks, all in all) made for about one cubic meter of masonry, but the bricks had to be stacked into courses retaining the bond pattern, so that the pallet load wouldn't pour down when hoisted by the crane to transport bricks to the bricklayers up the walls.
In fact, the job was not overly exhaustive, but doing it, we learned that silicate dust gnaws into your palm skin and it smarts, but they gave us no protective mitts… Grisha Dorfman examines plaintively looked his bare hands…
Besides, the white silicate dust clings fast to your outfit and is really hard to shake off, but they never bothered to give us any overalls…
The same truck took us back to the detachment for the midday meal. The passers-by on the sidewalks did not care to watch a squad of conbatists in the bed of a vehicle rolling by.
After the fork off the highway outside the city, the truck bypassed a clump of industrial buildings on the right roadside at which sight the buddies from our team-squad kicked up crazy yell-and-whistle waving in that direction, like a pack of football fans whizzed in the truck-bed past their team entering the field.
Vitya Strelyany reluctantly explained that was a Zona there, which made it crystal-clear—the ex-cons’ solidarity…
(…30 percent of the servicemen in the construction battalions comprised citizens who had served their time in prison for not excessively grave crimes.
The majority of the remaining 70 percent were considered fit for non-combatant military service because of their lousy education level, poor health conditions or, as in my case, for left-handed tricks to dodge out of the army service.
At occasional bubbles of clarity midst his chronic brain-leakage, our Battalion Commander happened to give forth pieces of indisputable truth, "You're the fucking rabble of cripples and jail-birds, fuck the whore of your mother!"…)
From work, we were brought at dusk already. The evening roll-call following the supper was run by First Company Commander, Captain Pissak.
The servicemen fell into two ranks with the youngs (so was the law) in the front one. Facing the company personnel, Captain Pissak called the roll never looking up from the list, he just listened to the calls in answer:
"Here!"
"Here!"
"Here!"
He needed no visual clues and was able to determine the current state of a serviceman merely by the timbre of the voice yelling his "Here!" in response.
When the roll-call list reached the youngs, Pissak was approaching and standing still against each of the new "Here!" to shortly and silently examine your face with the unblinking gaze from under the black visor in his forage cap. Then he called out the next one.
That was enough – you got fixed in his photographic memory for two years ahead and one month later, instead of, "What's your name, private?" he would say, "Private Ogoltsoff!"
"Yes, Comrade Captain!"
"Are you thief-swaggering?"
"No, Comrade Captain!"
"Then why is your belt-buckle dangling by your balls? Sergeant Batochkin!"
"Yes, Comrade Captain!"
"Five fatigues to private Ogoltsoff."
"Yes, Comrade Captain!"
Well, yes, when we were approaching the nine-story building site, I loosened the belt over my tunic a bit, how could I know he would pop up from behind the trees in the windbreak?.
That day I tried my best to curry favor with the Sergeant who sent me to plane the ground with a spade for the subsequent installing of the curbstones. I did some fucking great job! Two hundred meters if not more, in the hope that the Sergeant, seeing my zeal, would blink at the fatigues.
"Two conbatists full of vigor
substitute a backhoe digger…"
2 passers-by on the nearby sidewalk were so impressed with my working style, that approached me with an invitation to partake in wine from the bottle they carried.
"No. Thank you! I cannot."
At the evening roll-call, the Sergeant beckoned me with his finger – "on the floors!"
"On the floors" meant – when all would get in their bunk beds, you sweep the aisle as well as the passages in the koobriks, bring water from the washstand trough by the sorteer and perform wet cleaning of the entire sixty-seven-meter-long barrack with its koobriks and the vestibule.
Do it in two steps. Step One: with a thoroughly drenched rag, rub each fucking inch in the linoleum flooring. Step Two: wash the rag, squeeze dry and repeat Step One. And the oftener you change the water for drenching, the better so that there remained no bleary spots in the linoleum and you won’t be commanded to do the whole toil anew.
Then go and report to the on-duty Sergeant the job waits for checking. And if he accepted it at once, you could go to bed and be happy about not being sent that evening "on the floors" to the Canteen. Now you might flake out on your bunk bed and the moment your head touched the pillow you'd hear, "Companyeeeeee! Get uuuup!"
~ ~ ~
"They took Vanya to the nuthouse."
"What Vanya?"
"Come on, you knows yoursel. The scar in his pate."
"What for?"
"Did not get up in the morning. Says mice crept into his high boot."
"Dodging, or gone fucking nuts?"
"Who fucking knows? They’ll check there."
The first day-off we had in August. Till then from half-past eight till dark they kept us slavering on construction sites.
And—all of a sudden—a whole Sunday in the detachment grounds. The youngs washed their dusted smelly uniforms. They placed the washing on the brick wall along the trafficless road and roamed outside the barracks in black underpants, white tank-tops, and kirza high boots, like those sporty Fritzes with Schmeisser guns in the movie "One Chance In a Thousand".
During the period till the first day-off, our team-squad dropped the habit of saluting the roadside Zona by scream-and-shout. And going to the sorteer in the mornings of clear weather, we didn't stop in our tracks anymore to stare at the faraway wonder – the snow-clad top of the Elbrus Mountain hovering in the sky over the pigsty. Private Alimonov, aka Alimosha, taught me to smoke a stub of cigarette "Prima", chiseled from buddies, until there remained three millimeters of the tobacco-wrapping paper tube…
And one time we even got the payment. The Master Sergeant of First Company, a gray-haired man under 50, well imbibed, called us, one by one, to his ware-room and meted out one-ruble-plus to each, adding a piece of white cloth for under-collars, a pair of shoe polish cans, and a spool of threads for sewing up the under-collars after washing them. But in the pay-roll, we signed for 3 rubles and 80 kopecks each because everyone knew, whoever you’d ask, that the monthly payment of a private in the Soviet Army was 3 rub. 80 kop., that was as indisputable an axiom as that about the Volga River and the Caspian Sea…
Midsummer, at one of the evening roll-calls, the company zampolit announced sending to my wife, at her request, the reference certifying I was in the army.
"You did not say you were married, Goly!"
"You didn't ask."
(…they had no time for marriage doing their stretch in the penitentiary colonies for juvenile offenders…)
Olga, Konotop, the Plant, the dances seemed something unreal, like dreams seen in another, far away, life. I was receiving letters from her, “…and in the evenings when I see how girls are walking with their guys and I am all alone and by myself it hurts so that I am crying…”
There were also letters by Mother, both brother and sister wrote a couple of times.
I did not know what to write in response. "Hello, I've received your letter, many thanks for it.."
And then? What else to write? "…in two winters, in two summers…"?
Nothing entered my head. And I already couldn't think a single simple thought without "fuck" and "fucking" within it. Such a fucking dickhead!
Just think of it, even to my closest kin people there remained nothing but the feeling of detachedness in me. Detachedness?
Well, something like what I felt when in the thickening twilight we were sitting already in the bed of a truck beneath the white wall in the unfinished nine-story building and waited for a grandpa-bricklayer changing into his uniform.
Another grandpa, in the truck bed already, started heckling Misha Khmelnytsky—just so, to idle the time—for his being a Ukrainian, aka Khokhol.
Misha, averting his eyes, muttered that, no, he was not a Ukrainian and it's only that kind of the last name. The rest of the youngs sat in silence. The grandpa started to scoff – what a lousy draft they brought from Ukraine with not a single Khokhol!
"Okay, I'm a Khokhol, so what of that?"
Only when those words somehow echoed back from the brick wall looming whitish thru the dark, I realized that it was me who said it. It's strange to hear yourself from outside so unexpectedly. Some weird self-detachedness. The grandpa shut up. And really – what of that? Or of anything else?.
Later, Misha Khmelnytsky revealed to me that he also was married, adding intimate details of how he always had the itch to take a leak into his wife's cunt after he cum, just for fun, but it never came out.
Making no comments, I rejoiced in my mind that the evolution process of the homo sapiens species anticipated an anatomical mechanism to prevent fucking jokes of such fucked in the head funny fuckers…
Of course, my comrades-in-arms did not use the terms like "evolution" or "sapiens" in everyday communication, however, it cost them no noticeable effort to recite by heart the unrhymed lines of one or another article from the Penal Code of the USSR.
"What was you locked up for?"
"Article six hundred seventeen, part two ‘by aggravating circumstances’."
"Brain-fucker, you! There's no such article!."
"Introduced recently, for chronic cannibalism."
It turned out that tattoo was not just an ornamental decoration but an esoteric message for the initiated, it reported of what exactly crime convicted, how high arisen in Zona Table of Ranks the wearer of the tattooed skin was. The inmates with life terms were distinguished by the tattoos on their foreheads running "Slave of the USSR".
But then again, not all were the same. One of my buddies returned from Zona with neat 3 words on his forearm in quite a modest typeface – 'in vino veritas'. With such a tattoo one easily may pass off for a Philosophy Doctor. Some fucking Latinist…
There were certain taboos too. An attempt at exaggeration of personal achievements by means of a tattoo faking his status in the criminal milieu by ornamentations which he was not entitled to, called for a severe, brutal—at times the capital—punishment.
And one should also be careful about using the word "waffles". After we got that half-ripped-off payment, Alimosha visited the hut of Military Store by the gate and, pointing his finger at a pack of waffles, asked the saleswoman, "Gimme of those grid biscuits." Yet, the trick did not save him.
"Hey, Alimosha! Got missing waffles, eh?"
"Go and fuck yourself!" snapped Alimosha back.
The innocent word of "waffles” in Zona cant became "sperm swallowed at doing head", thence the pun.
(…and how not to come to admiration, not to arose emotionally, from the unpretentiously artless, but so poetically provocative, mocking couplet-duels of the Zona folklore?
" I have fucked you at the gate,
And can present the certificate!.."
"I have fucked you in the grass dew,
Here's the reference for you!.."
"I have fucked you in the raspberries
With all of your references!..”
Then, stomping the final, victorious, period:
" No trumps? No ace?
Grab my dick and wipe your face!.."…)
Besides play on words, there happened practical jokes as well… After the midday meal, we were standing by the gate waiting for the truck. Sasha Khvorostyuk and Vitya Strelyany had razor-shaved their heads the night before and stood out among us with white-skinned pates above their densely tanned mugs.
"I say, would I look a dick if there was a scratch across my pate now?" asked me Vitya.
"No worry, buddy, you look it just as is with no scratch at all."
"Do me a favor, grab my ears and jerk it. Please, O, please!"
Who would refuse so earnest appeal of a buddy? Naturally, I did as asked.
"Ptui-ptui-ptui-ptui…"
I did not get it immediately – the white saliva of tiny spits dribbled on my tunic chest.
"I cum…" explains Vitya…
A truck pulls up by the checkpoint with a team-squad of plasterers of our draft, but from Dnepropetrovsk. They walk thru the open gate. Five dippers shoot from the checkpoint door besetting a mighty young, like a pack of wolves hunting a bull.
But no, he turns out a too hard prey for them, and the pack retreats uttering threats. The bull picks up his cap knocked off in the skirmish.
We kept the policy of non-interference to the internal affairs of Third Company. The driver of the arrived truck honked us to climb into the back…
~ ~ ~
The walls of the nine-story building were laid even at night in the light from a garland of electric bulbs suspended above the wall-portion-in-progress. Two soldiers from our draft were transferred to the night shift – a lanky buddy who worked as a bricklayer before the army, and me.
He was immediately integrated into the line of the servicemen laying the brick-course, and I got a shovel to bring the mortar, aka "dirt", from a nearby iron box and splash it onto the growing wall.
Outside the other wall in the dark of night, there loomed the motionless tower crane with the dim spot of the soldier operator's face in his cab below the crane-beam.
The bricklayers, in turn, entreated the operator to hoist a kettle of drinking water for them, but he was too lazy to climb all the way down the ladder inside the crane's tower and back up again because there was no one down there to fill the kettle with water from the water pipe by the mound of mortar on the ground.
Finally, one of the bricklayers climbed on a pallet with bricks, grabbed the steel cables of the "spider" (the bundle of four steel cables donned on the crane's main hook) and stepped up onto two smaller spider hooks hanging by idly.
