Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
("It.. helped?" asks I thru tears.)
Well, something cracked, but—I swear by my Mom!—it did straighten out. We put the coffin back upon the table and shoved the body straight in. All in a socko proper way. It’s only that…
("??" I no longer have any strength for asking.)
Well, the sleeper grew ten centimeters taller now and the feet stuck out from the too-short coffin. Fuck!
In the tall tale of the lahbooh about the hunchback "sleeper" reality mingled with fiction… Sprawled over a plywood seat in the cinema hall, I was expiring with laughter, having no idea that in the Stavropol city there was the Regional Committee of the CPSU headed by its Secretary, a certain Gorbachov, the future mortician of the USSR handled Hunchy, yet among the Stavropol "workshoppers" of that period they referred to him as Envelope.
(…"workshoppers" were the people aspiring to do business under the realities of developed socialism, and they had to pay for their dreams to come true.
Gorbachov trained the Stavropol workshoppers to bring their payment to him exclusively in envelopes, good and proper, as it was practiced in all the civilized world…)
~ ~ ~
I don't want you to form a rash notion as if the construction battalion was a dreary desperate hard labor and nothing else. Sometimes even there came the spring, and we switched over to the summer outfit.
We handed our long-sleeved undershirts and pea-jackets to the company Master Sergeant, because the winter uniform had, for some reason, become way too heavy. We changed warm gray hats of artificial fur for dandyish piss-cutters.
It's real nice to stand in the light-dressed ranks at the Morning Dispensing under a freshly blue sky with great sailings of thin transparent feather clouds in the fathomless height, and in the luster of the morning sun ride in the open bed of a truck into the city with so many bright skirts and frocks walking its sidewalks… In spring, the population of girls grew drastically, and they began to spill over and out of the sidewalks.
In any case, at the end of a working day, two girls appeared even in the territory of the would-be Medical Center… I was nearing the place where the truck usually picked us up, and those two girls walked in the same direction some 30 meters ahead of me. Probably, they were taking a shortcut somewhere and leisurely paced ahead, talking to each other.
Suddenly, their chatter broke off. Bypassing the truck arrival point, they accelerated to quick strides and disappeared from the view… And at the spot, there was already sitting Sasha Khvorostyuk – the first to pop up.
Seated on a half-meter stump, he kept his knees wide apart resting his hands on them, like, in the KGC—King of Gay Cocks—posture and, happy with himself, kept turning royally his beak from side to side. From his unbuttoned fly, his cock was drooping languidly… That's why the girls trotted away, and hardly would they shortcut here anymore. Because of that fucked in the head platypus!.
And sometimes in the construction battalion, you might quite unexpectedly get into another world – away from all those trenches, shovels, pallets, humiliations… That Sunday morning everything went on as always, yet on entering the city our truck changed tack.
Probably, our Lance-Corporal Alik Aliyev knew where we were going, but his vocabulary limitations did not allow him to talk of anything beyond the usual commands and responses, so he kept enigmatic and puffed up mien. The truck pulled up by the city circus building. We jumped off after Alik and were met by a man in the civilian who explained what we had to do. There was a change in the circus – one troupe was leaving and replaced with the touring circus of Lilliputians.
(..what is the role of the construction battalion in the interval between two circuses?
Exactly! To load one and unload the other…)
But still it was a holiday, and we festively dragged large boxes into long trailers with canvas tops, and festively pulled boxes looking quite the same out from looking the same, but already other, long freight trailers. And then we ate ice-cream, drank kvass from the wheeled barrel in the circus square, entered the building and got seated wherever one chose, on the velvet crimson seats in the empty amphitheater around the arena.
The artists from the newly arrived Lilliputians troupe walked admired circles around the shortest serviceman in our special-mission loader-group.
Were he wise enough to grow two centimeters shorter, they would not press him in the army, not even to a construction battalion, but now: Taller than a meter and fifty-six? Wow! A ready-made non-combatant!
One of the Lilliputians even spoke to him in an undertone—the soldier never confessed what about. Most likely, it was an invitation to enter the number of power acrobats, when the whole pyramid of light-weight Lilliputians was built upon the propping shoulders of the midget strongman…
One of the Lilliputian women invited me to follow her. We left the building thru a side passage and she led me to a row of house trailers.
(…it's somehow strange to follow a woman not taller than your waist, feels kinda being an elephant in a small Indian village…)
She climbed onto the high porch way, shot her arm up, high above her head, and pulled at the unyielding door handle. Plaintively asked she for assistance. I lowered my hand on the handle which readily turned down, and pulled the door.
"Thank you!" said the voice of the highest-pitched flute.
"You're welcome."
It's so inconvenient to live in a world not made to match you…
I returned to the circus where Alik Aliyev trotted enraptured circles in the arena chasing the white pony who openly resented flirtations from any stray Lance-Corporals in kirza high boots.
In the pit above the curtained arena entrance, the brass band hurriedly rehearsed bravura marches with the slight streak of impudent outa-keyness innate in circus orchestras.
A group of Lilliputians gathered by the heavy folds of the arena entrance curtains, following as one of them, the size of a kindergarten kid, was giving hell to her husband whom she had caught pants down in a trailer with another Lilliputian woman. When fired out in sparrow squeaks, foul language loses its specific weightiness, but the intensity of the infuriated wife's emotions was on a par with the deepest Shakespearean passions…
Olga arrived in the middle of the day. We were brought to the midday meal and they told me, "Your wife waits in the checkpoint guardhouse."
I raced there, then to the Staff barrack, they gave me the Leave Ticket only until next morning. Battalion Commander was not there, said they, the Ticket would be prolonged the following day after the Morning Dispensing, they said. Then I barely found some parade-crap, the Master Sergeant was not there together with the wareroom key. But in a canvas outfit, the military patrols in the city would rake you in at once, be there even dozens Leave Tickets on you.
So we got to the city only in the evening, but she had already had a room in the hotel: a one-person suite with a washbasin on the wall.
Then some red-haired guy knocked at the door. Olga introduced him, meet please, we arrived by the same train together. The fellow-traveler invited us to his room, where he had a party with his friends. We went over and on the way, Olga asked me to pretend that she was my sister – when on the train she jazzed him that she was visiting her brother.
(…well, okay, then…
Sarah and Abraham had also been there…)
He had a long table in his room all filled with wine bottles, sort of a hussar banquet. Sometime earlier, he was a cadet at the Stavropol Military Aviation School but got expelled and now came there to see his friends, and all those already were third-year cadets…
I knew their Aviation School, out squad-team once were laying partitions in the basement of some building there. When the bell sounded and the cadets rushed to the classes from the yard, we combed trash pits in the gazebos hunting cigarette stubs… Now they were sharing common memories with each other, toasting this and that from their mutual past.
We also drank. And then I saw how that kicked-out cadet dropped his palm on Olga's knee. What to do? To surprise him with a bottle crushed against his pate? Not quite traditional treatment of your prospective brother-in-law though.
Of course, she took his hand off and I, like, didn't see anything. Soon we left and back in our room she said, “Well, and so what of it?”
Indeed, on Peace Square in Konotop when our whole passe alighted on a bench by the constantly dry fountain for a smoke, they also stroked her knees and she as casually brushed their stray hands off. Yet, we weren't married then…
In the morning, when I ran to the UAZ van taking Ensigns to the detachment, Jafarov rocked with laughter in its open bed.
"You ran as if in a slow-motion film stretch. Clearly doing your best, but still no progress. I swear by Mommy. Good luck there was no counter wind."
They gave me the Leave Ticket only till the evening roll-call, dirty fuckers. When I returned, Olga was still sleeping, in her blouse inside out.
Then it was the time to check out, the room was for one day only. I told her I should be back at the Battalion for the evening roll-call, and she said her train was also in the evening.
We went to the cinema, some kind of a fairy tale about a Persian Hercules named Rostam… Then we were sitting on a bench at the foot of the Komsomol Gorka Hill.
She said that she had to go to the station, but no need to see her off, and she started to cry. The rare passers-by scoffed on the sly – a classical picture by Repin: the girl got pregnant but the soldier doesn't care a fuck.
When she left, I sat on a little more and then went home…
The next day in the Canteen, I knock-toppled a bowl of soup from the table. It spilled in my lap, scolding even thru the canvas pants. I could not get it at all how it happened. Everyone at the table looked up at me, oddly silent, and no one laughed.
Spilled the soup in the lap…What sign could it be? The blouse inside-out. Why?.
(…it’s better not to think some thoughts, just leave them alone and if heedlessly started they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their inevitable conclusions…)
~ ~ ~
Zampolit ordered the Club Director, Alexander Roodko, there should be a brass band by the Victory Day, on May 9, or he'd get the boot and busted to a construction site as a plasterer's hand, and his Company Master Sergeant would rot him "on the floors" until his demobilization day.
Of course, we pulled for The Orion leader and did not let him down, in mere three weeks a brass band was thrown together. Jafarov and Commissar, clear enough, were two horn players, Pickle played the baritone, and Zameshkevich blew the tuba. As it turned out, in their schooldays, they participated in a brass music course. Karpesha was the drummer, Roodko played the clarinet, the Club painter dubbed the big drum and mine was the main instrument in any brass band – two copper plates. Bzdents!!.
Sasha Lopatko began his service in the same squad-team with me, but then his Dad came and held negotiations in the Staff barrack and Sasha was appointed the Club painter… His Dad was, by the by, a priest and, probably, for that reason Sasha got to the construction battalion. You can’t trust whosoever handling advanced weaponry, right?.
We rehearsed 2 numbers: “On the Hills of Manchuria” and “Farewell of the Slav Woman”, not because we got way too scared by Zampolit's threat but simply a lahbooh would do whatever is humanly possible to help out another lahbooh.
On May 9, we changed into parade-craps and were taken by the UAZ van to different construction sites escorted by the "goat"-Willys carrying Zampolit. Holidays were invented for idlers and the construction battalion warriors are always on duty. The squad-teams at the sites visited by those 2 vehicles got ordered to briefly leave their front of work and fall in by their projects. Zampolit pushed over a very short speech (the Battalion Commander with his leaky brain would start an oration for a half-hour without knowing what he was about at all), we played "The Slav" and "The Hills" and the sun shimmered playfully from our brass and copper… To have a holiday you do need a brass band…
Next step in The Orion's career became the one-night dances in the village club of Demino, in 6 kilometers from our detachment along the same asphalt road. In response to the kind invitation, the musicians not only played but, replacing each other at the instruments, climbed, in turn, down from the small stage to the small hall to dance midst the local youth. Of all The Orions the pleasure was withheld only for Alexander Roodko, the irreplaceable bassist.
Under the long-long song sung by Robert Zakarian, I was embracing the ample-bodied villager Irina. Life was smiling on me…
Before his demobilization, Yura Zameshkevich reported to Major Avetissian, the Battalion Supply and Maintenance Commander, that no one but I was qualified to replace him at the position of the Battalion Stoker. Zameshkevich's statement was actively backed by a Battalion Cook Vladimir Rassolov, aka Pickle, who had still another half-year to serve. In course of petitioning, the chef congratulated the Supply and Maintenance Commander on obtaining the long-awaited-for rank of Major. As a result, Major Avetissian granted my enrollment to the glorious ranks of chmo.
The collective name of chmo embraced all the servicemen engaged in the battalion internal services: the pigman, dishwashers, stokers, cooks, the locksmith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the projectionist, the drivers of the vehicles for the commanding officers, as well as the assistant paramedic at the first aid unit – anyone, in short, who was not fortunate enough to work at construction sites was referred to as a part of chmo reporting to Major Avetissian.
(…initially, CHMO was the acronym of "person messing around with the society" but soon because of its so impressive sound form the term forced to forget the original meaning and nowadays everyone thinks that chmo is a synonym to "wafler" only more degrading…)
Before his return to civilian life, Yura Zameshkevich showed me the location of the water well with the main water supply valve-wheels to keep the proper water level in the tank above the stoker-house. He taught me to light the nozzle in the steam boiler furnace with a handmade torch, to read the steam-gauge, water-reserve tube and pressure manometer. I was transferred to Fourth Company where all the chmo was listed, and Yura got demobilized.
The young draft was from the Crimea and Major Avetissian chose me a partner from them named Vanya who sported a thin mustache and thick eyebrows. It's highly doubtful that Major Avetissian's choice of Vanya was prompted by the eyebrows' thickness of the latter. Most likely, Vanya's father, who came to see his offspring on the third day of sonny’s service, forwarded convincing arguments in his negotiations with Major. I shared Yura Zameshkevich's lectures to Vanya and we split 7/24 into day-in, day-out.
The stoker-house of the Military Detachment 41769, aka VSO-11, consisted of two high halls in a red-brick one-story building. Each of the halls contained 2 massive boilers encased in their common lining of refractive brick, and a slew of pipes with valves and cocks – for hot water, for cold water, for steam, for fuel supply… On the concrete floor before each boiler, there was planted an air pump forcing the fuel to spray thru the nozzle inside the respective furnace. However, in operation was only one boiler, the farthermost from the entrance, the rest were reserved for the heating season in winter.
The stokers' task in summertime was providing steam for boilers in the kitchen of the Canteen plus hot water for the Dishwashers'. And, once a month, we heated water for the bath day of all the personnel at VSO-11 and Separate Company. Anyway, each day you had to sit at a round table by the high window opposite the deafening rumble of the air blower and the howling buzz of the nozzled flame inside the boiler’s furnace for about 4 hours until the on-duty cook knocked on the locked door of the stoker-house to say the havvage got ready. Then you could turn it off. The runs for breakfast and supper were shorter though. Silence is an invaluable grace… Until the next, one of the remaining 2, shorter, 2-hour stretch.
To the right from the entrance door, there was a narrow room of the pumping section to drive hot water thru the heating system in winter. But if going straight ahead, in the corner behind the twinned boilers of the first hall, you found the door to a small workshop. It had a window, a wooden workbench without a vice put by the butt wall across the room, an iron box in the corner between the door and the window, a hammer and a blunt chisel in that unlocked safe-like box, and a narrow mirror shard embedded in the plaster above the box, next to the switch for the bulb in the ceiling.
~ ~ ~
The arrival of summer was celebrated by the chmo of VSO-11 by a collective booze. The battalion's truck delivering havvage to the watchmen at the construction sites and those kept there even at night by urgent works came back with a box of vodka smuggled utilizing a huge thermos pot emptied of havvage. The on-duty officer at the checkpoint cast a fleeting glance into the bed of the returning truck, and it passed the gate.
The orgy, to which I also was invited because a stoker is a necessary accessory in the soldiery life, started after the lights-out near the remote car-boxes. In the bright illumination from the full moon, some fifteen chmomen sat on the ground in a wide circle, kinda aboriginal tribe of that field. Everyone faced the center of the circle where the glass of vodka bottles, and the sides of two pots full of meat fried by cooks in large baking trays at the Canteen kitchen, glistened in the moonlight. On the spread burlap of two empty sacks there piled several loaves of bread chopped in the Bread-Cutter's. Never before I had vodka from the bottle’s neck. The initial gulps were somewhat disgusting but the following kept pouring in smoothly.
The snack, regrettably, disappeared all too soon… I never finished the bottle in my hand. Having risen on unsteady legs, with the most best wishes to the honest company, I informed of the immediate departure of me to the village of Demino.
"All's nyshtyak, buddy-bros. What fucki' on-dut' what fucki' office..rr… It's me on-dut'… fuck!.."
Nevertheless, so as not to run into, I crossed the perimeter fence near the pigsty, away from the barracks. And there I made for the round face of the full moon that shone from above the distant village of Demino and was swaying back and forth like on a swing. I muttered reproaches to its treacherous inconstancy, and to the field as well for arranging a sea-rolling in my way. Then I fell down and tried to hoist me on my elbows but the earth gravity occurred too powerful and the field was so irresistibly soft…
I woke up in the dusk of dawn, only a hundred meters from the pigsty, dying from thirst, and went back to drink water from the tap in the stoker-house before crashing onto the workbench in the workshop room…
Looked like I’d given too free rein to my wishful thinking, imagining that till the end of service I would live my life between the Club and the stoker-house. On some morning after a night shift, Major Avetissian found me asleep in the workshop and ordered to retreat to the Company barrack. And that at the time when the majority of chmomen skipped even mustering the roll-calls before lights-out! Thus, the soldier-clerk from the Stuff half-barrack slept at the Medical Unit hosted by the paramedic assistant sharing a bed from the couple of normal ones waiting for ill personnel whom he escorted to the city military hospital the moment they popped up with health complains. The Club painter Lopatko had a room of his own at the Club. But the ill-fated stoker, after sitting all day in that howling hell of the stoker-house, had to go for the evening roll-call where instead of absent chmomen a voice from the ranks would shout out "on duty!" and there were no questions at all…
To somehow pass the time while they were cooking havvage, I took a book from the library in the Staff barrack, with the assistance of the Staff clerk. The book was chosen because of its thickness so that it lasted longer. The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Wow! That's the stuff! A culmination upon culmination… After those of his works prescribed by the school curriculum, I wouldn't ever think he was writing so cool… And there wasn't anything else to take from the Staff library with its just one shelf of books, because reading the masterpieces of B. Polevoy or N. Ostrovsky was not worth the while after the Dostoevsky's novel.
At the Club, Roodko passed me a booklet The Beatles in America about their tour there. Some of the youngs brought it along. I undertook to translate it because that booklet had more pictures than the text. However, without a dictionary at hand, my school stock of vocabulary allowed me to understand it only here, there, yet not everywhere. I filled the gaps with my wild guesses, but Roodko was happy all the same…
And so it went in a circle – the hiss of steam, the rumble of the air pump, the Club, the evening roll-call, and back to the Club. And in the morning all over again…
Here, Jafarov rushes a-galloping into the stoker-house with his eyes round and bulging, the face as pale as the white marks on his khaki shirt back which he had fucking rubbed against some whitewashed wall.
"Where to hide? Chief of Staff’s after me!"
I watched out the door and who was there but him – making for the stoker-house from the Canteen's kitchen in his boxer swagger. Jafarov barely had time to jump out thru the window in the workshop into the tall grass on the other side of the stoker-house. "No, Comrade Major, no one was coming this way."
But the Major’s scent would surpass that of a hunting dog, and in a moment, from behind the corner, "Ensign Jafarov! To me!"
Fucking caput to you, Ensign, I swear by your Mommy… Why should Chief of Staff chase Jafar as with a fucking prick in his arse? But then, who fucking cares…
And in the evening there's another hunt in the field. The swarthy cowboys from Separate Company ran down a rat and drove it into a stub of plugged pipe there, splashed gasoline inside and set on fire. The rat whizzed out and jumped around the field like a ball of flames and they followed running – some cultural and sports event…
When it was my night shift, I came across a brood of rats in the passage around the twinned boilers. I hollered and rushed to trample them, but they fled. And then I wondered where that sudden rat-hate had cropped up in me from?. The pure instinct of self-preservation that’s what it was. Rats would not forgive the humans, including me as well, the death in flames of that rat martyr, so to forestall their avenge I attacked first. Fucking moron…
One night I was sleeping on the workbench when some strange thing lit on my chest. Something dark like a clot of black fog, sort of, and it pressed to strangle me. I wanted to brush it off but had no strength even to stir or at least scream it away as if all of my strength had dried up leaving me pitifully paralyzed. It took a desperate effort to wake up.
Later Vanya, putting on a look of an expert, began to lecture me it was a bogey. They're just fucking stupid in that Crimea of theirs. Bogeys live at folks' homes, right? The stoker-house is anything but a home. Where could a bogey pop up here from, eh?.
What I omitted to tell Vanya was that the creature sat exactly in that place on my chest which I had shaved by the safety razor in front of the mirror piece embedded in the wall plaster. Well, to get a macho look, of course, because what I had there was like that down on Vanya's upper lip. But it fucking did not work and the chest remained unchanged, smooth and bare…
After the evening roll-call, I went to Demino and there I found the house of Irina whom I met when we played dances at their club. There was also her elder sister in the house. Irina left the kitchen for a while and her sister started a solo Sing-a-song about how Irina was only nineteen-year-old and had never come across a low-grade buster in her life as of yet and would I mind her taking a look at my military ID, by the way. That was her way to hint, sort of, about her sister's being a virgin.
"No worry, I'm not a buster."
The soldier’s military ID, as stipulated in the Statute of the Internal Military Service, each serviceman had always to have by him, and so was mine in my jacket inner pocket. There was a slight problem though boiling down to just one line at the bottom of its first page: 'wife – Olga Abramovna Ogoltsova". Because of that record, I had to drive a fool to that smart-Alec of a guardian-sister about conbatists' IDs being locked up in a big iron safe at the Battalion Staff and given out to us together with the Leave Ticket which papers we had to hand in on coming back from the city and, going on AWOL to their village, I skipped disturbing Battalion Commander with a request for my military ID.
Then there popped up the husband of the elder of the two sisters, named Senya who at first, like, started to be jealous, sort of, but then all of us drank tea in peace and I left…
A week later, a soldier from Separate Company appeared in the stoker-house. There's a girl, he said, at the corner of the wall fence, who asked for me. I went there, it was Irina… Demino folks sometimes went from Stavropol to their village along the asphalt road on foot, in twos or threes, but she was alone… Hello. Hey. Kisses… We agreed that after the evening roll-call I come to the village.
"Will you walk with me a little?"
That meant along the whole wall, past the Staff barrack, past the checkpoint. "No, I'll wait for you near that corner."
I walked along the paths inside the battalion, parallel to the asphalt road outside. And from that far off corner, I even walked with her a bit.
(…now I am sorry for missing that opportunity. After all, how beautifully we might have passed together along the whole construction battalion. Leisurely, absorbed in each other, seeing nothing of the drab world around. And if the on-duty Ensign suddenly stopped me at the checkpoint I might just tell him to…
Although, who cares what exactly might have been told if I missed it and cowardly walked inside like a worthless boob…)
At night she took her clothes off down to the panties, which she abstained to remove and actively defended. The item of discord was rather capacious and stretching willingly, maybe after all those who, like me, aspired yet failed to become the buster.
In the morning, after the night spent in monotonous useless efforts at peeling those panties off her, I left the girl in her staunch irremovables and went back, without any tea at that time.
6 kilometers along an asphalt road with the nature awakening around for a new day – it's a rare treat. The light was flowing all over the sky, but the sun hadn't yet hove into sight. On a roadside hillock, I saw a horse among the greens of broad-leaved grass and, without giving it a moment's thought, turned towards him… Pure idiocy. I had never ridden a horse in my life, but I suddenly felt like it.
The horse started to retreat, and I ran after him but did not catch up, and only drenched my canvas pants with the thick dew covering the grass.
I returned to the road and walked on yelling all sorts of songs – nobody was near to hear my crap.
"Sleep! The night of June is just six-hour loooooooooong!"
In a week I received her letter sent from Stavropol, "…my soul aches – for whom? – for you!…" So beautiful words were wasted because I had already been harpooned and trophied by the one who "…was devastatingly happy…"
(…I never answered the letter but I do hope that Irina had eventually found a proper buster and they started living a happy, wealthy, and blissful life thereafter…)
~ ~ ~
After one year of service in the armed forces of the USSR, a soldier was eligible for a 10-day furlough to visit his home, the place where he was drafted from. When I spoke of my right to Major Avetissian, he did not even want to listen. How could Vanya possibly withstand ten days working round the clock alone?
Vanya said that, yes, he was up to the task, and Major Avetissian promised to give me a 10-day leave if I do a cosmetic overhaul in the stoker-house, to wit, whitewashing its interior.
The VSO-11 locksmith, private Ter-Terian, showed me the spot in the tall grass where they buried the lime not utilized at the previous cosmetology efforts. I loaded it in portions in a bath basin with handle-ears, added water to the proportion, hoisted it upon the furnaces to reach the ceiling in the stoker-house and with a broad brush – …slip-slop… slop-slup… – whitewashed where I could reach.
Then I took a long iron ladder from the locksmith Ter-Terian and leaned it against the walls, at some places against the pipes run under the ceiling, and – …slip-slop… slop-slup… – went on because it's just a circus and nothing else – …slip-slop… slop-slup… – but on the other hand, does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?
However, no Tom Sawyer would stand a whole week of circus-like whitewashing – two hugely tall and wide halls plus two enormous furnaces with a pair of twinned boilers within each.
Heated anticipation – that's what helped me to hold out that week… After all, Olga and I – …slip-slop…– missed trying so many things yet – …slip-slip-slop!..– we'll do it that way and even so and then all over again in full juxtaposition–…slop!…slop!..slop-slup!..– ten furlough nights that would fucking shatter the fucking world –…slip-slip-slop!…SLOOOP-slup!.
And now the renovation's over. The concrete floor in both halls bears variously shaped white splotches, even though I've swept it. The pipes under the ceiling got hastily wiped up. The whitewashing if not too uniform but then universal – without left-out spots. All in all, two huge halls and two gigantic furnaces.
