Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
All you need is VF!
All you need is VF!
VF is all you need!
rrata-ta-ra-ra-ta-ta
(All together now!)
All you nee…
but wait-wait-wait! how about suggestive music backdrop? mirrors in the ceiling like in those Roman poets' bedrooms… I kicked poetry already… a-and the initializing blow job, or finalizing for that matter… ready to go without?.. well, it's a game for 2 after all, whatever baby wants, she should get…as a noble self-made gentleman, I can't withhold her pleasures, eh?…
Here's another car's wailing… they are just wrenching your soul out when passing by… Poor Tonya, how could they live here?.
Then thru the door to the living room, there came the voices wishing goodnight each other. Eera entered the bedroom. In the light of the streetlamp behind the window tulle curtain, she picked the needed vial up from the bevy by the dressing table mirror and went out again. The unyielding hardon made me tense and strained.
It took a long time before she returned and closed the door, then she bent over you on the bed-armchair to check if I was asleep. You slept like an innocent baby and never woke up at what followed.
Eera lay by my side under the blanket, felt with her hand my shoulder, abruptly recoiled, and cried out, "You?! Get out of here!"
"Come on, quiet…"
"Dad!"
SHE CALLED FOR HELP TO GET PROTECTED FROM ME
I did not touch her, I just lay on my side with my arm bent at the elbow to prop my jaw in the capped hand above the pillow and idly watched, like a beach-goer estimating with an imperturbable air how many bathers were there in the water. Oddly, I became a complete outsider, a listless on-looker because everything somehow turned all the same to me.
Evenly, with unconcerned calmness, I pronounced, "I'm fed up with you."
Said I that? No! Not true! Not fed up! It's not me!
And yet it was I who uttered the words, which were the part of the ritual. What ritual?!. It made no difference because I did not care anymore.
Still leaning my head against my hand, I held out the other one and weakly slapped its palm against the soft cheek.
I?! Cuffed her?! Of course, not. It was not a slap, it was a part of the ritual.
She turned speechless from astonishment, but it was too late. I dropped back upon the pillow and pulled the blanket up to my chin.
The switch clicked, in the raw light from the ceiling, her parents and sister crowded in the doorway. She jumped out of the bed and joined the flock. Vitta started to emit the traditional screams of a family squabble. Ivan Alexeyevich in his pajamas stood with his head bowed.
I saw how difficult it was for him to make the decision. Or take it. What if I was stark naked? Before his princedom harem? But there was nothing I could do to help him. My role was that of an on-looker. Finally, he made a decisive step, even 2, grabbed my hand sticking from under the blanket, and pulled me out. The catch plumped onto the frayed rug spread on the floor. The blanket remained atop the bed.
I stayed sprawled down there while my mother-in-law was reading Prayers at the Departure of the Soul to declare how hugely shameless I was to lay prostrate before the ladies in such an undressed state. Underpants and a tank-top may be decent sportswear for jogging in the morning, but not in the presence of your mother-in-law.
I silently got up and, quite unexpectedly even for myself, made a deep bow to shake off the non-existent dust from the hair below my knees. A ritual makes us follow its canon even if we have no idea what ritual it is.
"We shall renounce the old world of tyrants,
We shall shake off its ashes from out feet!.."
I dressed and went out into the hallway. The mother-in-law followed. To make sure I would not foray into the refrigerator? She was replaced by Eera, alerted, keeping mum. I gave her one ruble and asked to pass it to Vitta, who lent me the sum a week earlier. She nodded. I took a piece of paper out of my briefcase and wrote a note to Vitta with gratitude for the ruble. Even the grave fails to correct a graphomaniac…
The night was quiet and windless. I spent it standing at the nearest bus stop, the way I was standing in front of a ticket office in the Odessa airport locked for the midday break. Only now there were no roses in my hand.
"The Sun was never any match for you,
Brother Rain,
That is true from any point of view,
Brother Rain.
Twining in the dates too rare,
Stuck in love and black despair,
Shedding diamond tears in vain,
Tears of ecstasy and pain
Stop your crying, get away, Brother Rain…"
It was a quiet, indifferent, midwinter, night… In all that night 3 cars passed the bus stop, one of them a Volga. I did not care. Numbness of the senses.
In the one-story building opposite, the light went on and, soon after, off, twice during the night; should be an elderly person going to the toilet and back. In the dark gray twilight, the first bus appeared from the Airfield-Area and took me to the station…
~ ~ ~
At half-past seven, I got off the local train in Konotop. I do not know where I spent the following hour because when I came to the 50-apartment block the black Saturday was in full swing. The growling bulldozer in the shroud of the blueish mist of smoke from its exhaust pipe, was burying itself in the hill of earth it moved in the middle of the would-be yard. Grynya and Lydda had already changed into their spetzovkas and padded jackets. "You did not go to Nezhyn?" Lydda asked.
"No."
I took a sheet of paper from my briefcase with the report to the trade-union committee about spending 3 rubles to visit a patient in hospital.
(…my current public position was visiting SMP-615 employees when they got to hospital, and comfort them with a delivery and for each such occasion the trade-union committee granted exactly 3 rubles.
Though visiting ill colleagues solo, I had later to present reports on spending the amount of 3 rubles signed by no less than 3 persons because the sum was serious…)
I put the paper on the side of a concrete pipe, 1.5 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters long, and they signed it without reading. "And now?" asked Grynya, "Are you changing or what?"
My stance to black Saturdays was always firmly negative but what else had I to do? I changed into the work clothes, took my shovel and went to scrape the upshot truck-dump with the mortar stuck to its insides, replacing Vera Sharapova. She was sharp and since long noticed that so was my way to drive off my jealousy fits…
At night, back to 13 Decemberists, I was lying prostrate in the unfolded bed-armchair amid the pitch-black darkness in the living room.
Lying all the time on your back is tiring. I wanted to change position and turn over, but I did not allow myself to stir because I needed to become inconspicuous, yet movements might betray your location. When motionless, I kinda became a part to the bottom of a boundless ocean, nothing but that oceanic immensity remained in all empty world. To become a part to such absolute void, you should keep smooth and streamlined and make no rips, so that nothing would cling to you and just go on floating its way. But what enormous emptiness!
(…there is a no direr curse than the old folk curse "emptied be it for to you!"
The purpose of any loss is to make you feel emptied, deprived, drained, devoid of…
Love comes to us as a protecting reaction to the endless void rotations of the life's mill-wheel, its returns to the starting point as empty as it left it.
Love comes as defense from despair, when you're empty of an idea what to do about the useless flukey gift—your life—when you find no means to kill off the eternity measured out to you. When you feel at loose ends, when you have nothing to live for except the aimless living on.
Love comes to free from empty search, brings meaning into your life – to serve! points the direction – to serve!
Love is selfless, self-denying slavery and zealous service to the object of love – a two-legged mammal, or a collection of stamps, or… doesn't matter… it depends on how lucky you were…
And suddenly, a kinda bolt from the blue, the fetters shattered, you're told, "Off with you! Enjoy your freedom!" And you find yourself in the void where there is no purpose, no sense, where you have to just live, like a crystal, like a blade of grass, like a rain-worm.
We are not slaves, slaves are not we!
No! I want back! To where love was… it would fence from the horror of facing the emptiness, would give meaning to the senseless repetitive fuss.
Love will be the one to make decisions. I will obediently execute the orders!.
Love is the sand where to bury your freaked out ostrich head…
Damn you, love! How empty it feels without you!..)
Surviving in vacated vapid void is not a trivial problem. Of course, there is always a choice. Why survive if you can stop the torment at any moment? However, never in my life had I even played with the thought of suicide, not formatted that way. Well, and since there was no choice, I had to solve the problem.
There is just one and only solution – systematicy. Nothing else can serve to overcome emptiness. Whether you're systematically jamming vodka, or systematically jogging in the park does not matter much as long as you keep maintaining a certain cycle…
Luckily, I already had some investments that provided certain means for spanning the void. The five-day workweek, that's for one. My participation in SMP-615 public life – two. And also, visits to Nezhyn for intellectual communication with Zhomnir, once in 2 or 3 months. Who would ask for more?
Any system, so that to work, would need some sort of a carrot to tip for spinning the wheel, to reward for successful conclusion its vicious circle, to stimulate diving into the next, exactly same, rotation.
On Thursdays, I visited the bathhouse with 2 tours into the steam room. Bars of soap and sauna whisker, aka a bunch of dried birch twigs for self-whipping midst the burning hot steam, were on sale at the bathhouse ticket office on the first floor. Leaving the bathhouse, I left those instruments of pleasure on the gray marble tops of low tables in the common washing hall on the second floor, taking home only the changed underwear for the subsequent laundry.
On my way from the bathhouse to the place of residence, I consumed 2 bottles of Zhigulevskoye beer and bought an issue of Morning Star from the news stall in Peace Square, for reading with a dictionary until next Thursday.
On Mondays, I did washing in a tin basin on the bench in the yard, in winter the washing was done in the summer-room section of the shed.
The ironing day depended on the weather conditions around the clothesline, which was stretched from the porch to the shed and not to the wicket anymore; better late, than never.
Weekends were harder to fill, but once a month in Peace Movie Theater they showed another of action movies starring Belmondo, or a comedy with Pierre Richard.
Summer Sundays were no problem at all, I spent them on the Seim beach lying on the pink, with red circles, cover for wrapping babies. That very one which on weekdays was spread over the tabletop when ironing the dry laundry. That cover stayed at 13 Decemberists after one of your earlier visits there. It was rather short and my legs, in part, stayed outstretched over the bare sand, but who cares?
3 times a Sunday, I had a swim for the buoys, where there were no screaming bathers. I lay on my back over the water, with my arms and legs wide apart, and pronounced the self-made ritual formula,
"Oh, water! Ran into each corner of mine!
We be of one blood – thou and me.”
(…to assemble such a phrase I had to involve Fitzgerald and Kipling in collaboration, but they did not mind my plagiarism…)
Then I swam back to the screams and splashes, got out the water to the coverlet to lie down and turn from side to side in the scorching hot sun, at times reading Morning Star. On the beach, I read it without a dictionary, underlining the words which later had to be written out in a copybook.
At the midday-meal time, I left the beach and went to the store in the nearby village of Khutor Taransky. It was a casual khutta under a thatched roof, but with a thick iron strap fixed across the door with a weighty padlock.
Store Manager, an elderly burly squaw, who prided herself on having seen even Sakhalin Island, unlocked the door for just one hour. When she dropped the iron strap on the porch, the door opened into a room with 2 dust-covered windows in the same wall with the door and wide, two-tier, shelves running along the remaining three walls, above the 3 wooden counters.
I systematically bought one item of canned food, a pack of cookies and a bottle of lemonade. After opening the victuals with the opener borrowed from Store Manager, I took the meal out to the empty street of 4 silent khuttas and deep sand in the road, sizzling from the heat. There, next to an old crooked Elm, I sat on the wide bench of a cracked but mighty board turned gray by the years of exposure to the whims of weather going its unchanging season circles around the tree over the bench by the thatched khutta of the store.
The assortment of things on the store shelves never changed. Buying a can of "Tourist's Breakfast", I saw that next Sunday I would have "Sprats in Tomato Sauce" for the meal, and a week later "Zucchini Squash". The can with the sticker "Adjika" instilled obscure apprehension because I kinda heard somewhere that it was bitterer than even wasabi, yet it was still a month away. Maybe, I'd combine it with the small jar of cherry jam from the following shelf, eh? Will make a complex dinner.
In the end, I wiped the aluminum spoon with the wrapper from the finished off cookies, and hid the spoon at the back of the khutta, in the thatched straw over the blind wall, the way Anti-Soviet kulak bandits were hiding their barrel-sawed shotguns… Even Marcello Mastroianni hardly could have dreams of so sweet "Dolce Vita"…
And right in that khutta, I bought a doll for your birthday present. There were only 2 dolls on the shelves – a girl and a monkey, both of rubber. Each one had a tiny squeaker in its back to make a sound when squeezed. The pair of motorcyclists, who somehow managed to overcome the deep scorching sand in the road on that day, advised me to but the monkey, but I preferred the girl, as I had been planning all previous Sundays, in a bright dress—also of rubber—to her knees.
I could buy a present from Department Store in the city, of course, but all the toys there were made of plastic. Besides, I wanted it to be a gift from that enchanted khutta with its cool shade, kinda sanctuary amid the summer heat…
~ ~ ~
Although I am not sure if any system would save me without adding our team to it. This isn't meant to say that the team members surrounded each other with caring attention, tenderness and moral support. Like hell, they would! In our team, as anywhere else, they were all too glad to have a good laugh at your expense. And everyone had a family and kids of their own, as an outlet for their tender care. Except for ruddy, pug-nosed, Peter Kyrpa, handled Kyrpanos, but eventually, he also got lassoed, and corralled, and broken in as a family man by Raya, from the team of plasterers. And yet, from 8 am to 5 pm our team, even with each one distracted by their personal problems and concerns, became one family. For all the hole-picking jokes in each other's qualities, you wouldn't become a victim of a detrimental practical joke like piercing your brains by stench of smoldering wool, or any other injury-prone idiocy.
Did bricklayers use taboo words in ladies' presence? Both yes and no. I have never heard a four-letter word addressed to any woman on our team. Never. But when the crane operator puts a pallet of bricks on your foot, you report it to the whole world—and very loudly too—without paying much attention if there were ladies around.
Were women on a bricklayer team using taboo words? Both no and yes. At the moment charged with trauma threat or loss of life, they’d rather shout "Oy! Mamma!" or issue shrill incoherent shrieks. Whereas at the intervals between shoveling mortar into the boxes for bricklayers, or rigging the brick pallets with the prickly steel cables, Katerina could casually share the folklore song:
"Fuck yourself, you fucking dumbos,
you're more stupid than they said,
No way to marry your daughter?
Go fuck her in my stead!.."
I have to admit, that mute replaying this particular obstreperous folklore piece in the brain convolutions of my inner self sometimes worked as a painkilling palliative.
But, after all, is the foul language the only thing to frown at in the world? The bricklayer Lyoubov Andreyevna once complained to the head engineer, who accidentally dropped in at the construction site, about the insulting words of our foreman Mykola Khizhnyak, by which he identified all women indiscriminately: "Inside-out insoles!" Up to now, I haven't got the slightest idea what it could possibly mean, but she somehow got hurt. Probably, because she was the most beautiful woman on our team, only sad at times.
It is sad for a woman to know she's beautiful and, at the same time, not to know what to do with her beauty and just watch how it flows away in vain.
She had a husband five years younger than her. Before their marriage, he was walking around with a knife hidden in the top of his high boot, and she made of him an exemplary family man and a safe member of society. But she still remained sad, especially in winter frosts, when the mortar in the boxes would develop a centimeter thick ice crust while climbing thru the air to the seizure line. "Oy, Mamma! How my poor little hands did get numb with the cold!"
And that parasite Sehryoga would readily respond from the other end of the line, "Serves you good! Your mummy-daddy kept telling 'study well, sweetheart, so as to become an accountant!' And what was your answer? 'No! The shovel is my one and only love forever!' So shut up now and love it until you get dark blue!"
"Parasite!"
Anna Andreyevna was not as beautiful as Lyoubov Andreyevna, but she was kind, especially after the break for the midday meal. She, as most of the team, lived in At-Seven-Winds and went home for the midday break. There, she would accompany her meal with a couple of shots and return to the workplace softened and kindhearted. Her only drawback that she was hunting my brick hammer. The moment my vigilance got slacken, she'd snatch my brick hammer and bury it in the wall covering with mortar. Most bricklayers cut bricks with their trowels but I, for righteousness sake, did it with the hammer…
Lydda's and Vitta's husbands were SMP-615 employees as well. They were locksmiths at the production building in the base grounds, under the supervision of the chief mechanic. As any locksmiths, they, naturally, were drinking. And the following morning in the bricklayers' trailer you had for one half-hour to listen to curses to those busters who even were not anywhere around.
Although the curses from Lydda were a treat to hear, she sang them out like a song, with Vitta's backing in the background.
Vitta herself was not eloquent. When we were finishing off the uppermost part of the walls on the 110-apartment block, for the final bridging with roof slabs, she was next to me in the line of the bricklayers, and, when I jumped out over the wall, all she could say after disappearing me was: "Sehrguey! Where to?"
The brick courses in my part of the seizure needed jointing so I jumped outside onto the concrete awning over a balcony on the fifth floor. But she had no idea about that awning! Now, a man dives from the roof of a five-story building and all she's up to saying is: "Sehrguey! Where to?" Here's, in a nutshell, the female logic, and knowledge of physics – down, of course, I've jumped! Where else?.
Our team was young. The oldest bricklayer on our team, forty-year-old Grigory Grigoryevich, put it directly, "We're still young!"
He possessed exceptional pedagogic skills and, noticing that his son, a ninth-grader, somewhere on a streetcar, or the sidewalk, was gaping at a woman worthy of looking at, he never missed the chance of seizing the opportunity: "Wanna get you some of that sort? Study well, buster!"
His face was round in unmistakably Napoleonic way because of the thin hair strand stuck to his forehead. And he was a solid, burly man. More than once, I tried to overtake him in laying a brick course – no go. He would finish when I still had to lay about ten bricks or so.
And he was very judicious. Only once his common-sense gave in. That time he brought to the construction site his double-barreled hunting rifle, after the midday break.
The site was in "no man's but builders' land" at the frontier of At-Seven-Winds. And then a young construction superintendent Sereda stopped by coming from SMP-615 base grounds.
Grigory Grigoryevich allowed him also to hold the weapon. He even started an argument that Sereda would not ever hit his hat thrown up into the air. We went round the end wall of the unfinished building. It was the white silence all around, and only the trees in a distant windbreak belt contrasted the snow with their black trunks.
And he threw his hat up—high, so high!—and Sereda waited for a second and pulled the trigger. The hat twitched in its flight and fell like a hit bird. Grigory Grigoryevich raised it and there was a hole in the hat top, 2 fingers easily ran thru. The buckshot turned out to be too large, meant for boars. But it had been a good hat, you know, of nutria fur. It's only he did not consider logically that Sereda was from Transcarpathia and although there remained no Bandera men already, yet the firearms survived, hence the skills…
And the rigger Vera Sharapova was never sad. She was singing all the time, laughing and ready to keep up a talk with anyone at a moment’s notice. And she also was the most beautiful, but only at work, while dressed in her workman padded jacket and spetzovka pants. But when she changed to go by the local train to her Kukolka station, the beauty disappeared somewhere.
I do not know why it made me sad when she was telling about her wedding party and everyone around laughed along with her.
"The kids a-crying, Peter a-playing!"
Peter was that humpback mujik who took her even with 2 children of her own. He also was an itinerant from Kukolka to Konotop and knew how to play the accordion. Some noisy wedding it turned out.
Vera Sharapova was keen and nimble, and she noticed that when someone complained of having a headache, I would take out a handkerchief from my spetzovka pants pocket and turn it inside out. At times, she would nudge Katerina, say—watch the miracles of my training!—then press her hand to her forehead and make a pain-ridden face, "Oh, what a headache I have!"
Naturally, I saw thru all that comedy, yet, nonetheless, executed my role in the procedure. However, when Katerina also started to rub her temples, I would say that the reception is over – the facility serves 1 patient per day. Harry Potter had not been conceived as of yet…
Peter Lysoon not always was a bricklayer. Earlier in his career, he had the job of a security in railway gold transportation. There was a special squad of armed securities to accompany safes in luggage cars.
They had long trips, sometimes for weeks. The floor of the car swayed to the clang of wheel pairs on the rail joints, and thoughts of all sorts were spinning on and on. Say, what way, for example, that gold could be taken?
One day they were spinning, another day – sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But no spinning could bring an answer to that insoluble problem. He would take a look at the faces of his fellow-securities: they were also thoughtful. And what about?
And then fear started to creep in – what if some of them had thought out a working solution? Readied a plan, found accomplices and, at some point in the endless way, he would trash all the squad with one clip and leave with the gold? Peter got tired of waiting and became a bricklayer…
By his skinny, short, stature, Grynya somehow made me think of German general Guderian, whom I never saw in my life. Yet, was there in his appearance something vaguely suggestive of the General Stuff and, perceptibly, that of the Wehrmacht. On weekends, he took rest from blitzkriegs and went on fishing trips with Grigory Grigoryevich, everywhere in the reach of local and diesel trains. They were fishing with fishing rods of different lengths, longer ones in the summertime, shorties for ice fishing…
I was bribed by his faith in my healing talent. That time he stopped me on the flight of stairs leading straight into the open heaven because of absence any roof yet.
"Sehryoga, help!" And, lifting his upper lip, he showed a whitish pimple on the gum. Then he unfastened the safety pin from the inside pocket of his workman padded jacket, where he kept his wristwatch during working hours, and handed it to me, "Pierce the bitch, it smarts too much."
I started excuses that it was not possible there amid the dust, dirt, and stuff, without antiseptics because such kind of operation called for disinfection.
"What disinfection do you want of me here?"
Well, in action movies, they usually disinfect things on open fire… He held the pin tip over a lit match. The result did not comfort me though, the tip got covered with black soot.
Grynya critically examined the pin, wiped the soot off against the incrustations of brick dust and other sediments over the sleeve of his padded jacket, and held it out to me, "Take! Do it!" And I shut up because the man did his best to provide disinfection…
Mykola Khizhnyak arrived in Konotop as those dark-haired, curly, heroes of French novels, who come to Paris with a couple of sous in their pocket and ambitious plans to conquer the capital.
True, he had a three-ruble bill and, instead of a slouch hat with a feather, there was a forage cap on his head, incapable to protect in the thirty-degree frost on the night of his arrival.
He had not become Captain of musketeers, but he is the only bricklayer of the sixth category known to me. In that capacity, he had an apartment, a motorcycle URAL without the sidecar, and his wife Katerina whom, whenever having problems at falling asleep at once, he could grab by her ears and pull under… And it was Mykola Khizhnyak making up for the knowledge I omitted at the institute.
When studying at the English Department of the NGPI, I could not force myself to read a single work by Thomas Hardy, although he was in the examination questions. I don’t even know why, maybe some unhealthy allusions called forth by his innocent Saxon name, but I somehow had an incompatibility with the guy’s works, I dunno. I knew, that it was necessary, but I couldn't…
Once on the stack of slabs that 2 of us were checking with a measuring tape, Mykola began to tell me a long and winding story. At first, I thought it was some TV series and only at the very end, when the pursuit overtook her, but she was asleep from fatigue, and he told them let her sleep a bit while she did not know she was caught, I realized that it was Tess of the D'Urbervilles, notwithstanding that Khizhnyak had woven some flight ticket into the plot…
But officially, the most beautiful woman on our team was the rigger Katerina. Vera Sharapova never hesitated to say it to her directly, even though she knew it herself, especially since she was the foreman's wife, though not registered, so what? But they already had a seventh-grader son from her first marriage.
On her short yellow curls, Katerina wore a scarf of red gossamer, and on her neck a necklace of massive red beads, to suit the color of the lipstick on her lips. Somewhere in the stacks of bridging slabs, nearby the heap of dumped mortar, she kept a triangular fragment of a thick mirror to look into, in her spare time.
She considered herself as beautiful as Anfisa from the TV series "The Ugryum River" after she became the vision because of whom Gromov flung himself off the cliff. In any case, it was with that spook gesture that she beckoned to me from the brick debris, scattered on the ground, when I was laying the corner of the fourth floor, the morning after that particular sequel: "Come on, Proshka! Come to me!"
Or, maybe, she just wanted to check if I was crazy enough for the dive. After all, it was clear that the one was not all there and even turned away from live porn…
That time two couples desired to have sex in the bosom of nature, and they left the city for a distance of 2 hundred meters from the city limit by At-Seven-Winds. They used the strip of the bush as a screen from the highway. Pissing with passion, they did not take into account the close-by construction site, and our team put their hand tools aside and exchanged expert comments during the combined action, like the Romans in the stands of Coliseum, when it did not yet require major repairs.
(…in the stagnation era in our land the totalizator was not known yet, so there were no betting on which of the mating pairs will cum first…)
But how offensively relative is everything in this world! You come first and Anna Andreyevna, seated upon her shovel handle, thrown across the iron box with mortar, would disdainfully utter: "Phui! And that's your best?"
And only the one that's not all there turned away, sat low by the brick pallet, and stared in the opposite direction at the distant group of Birches in the middle of "no man's but builders' land", as tall as the trees in the African Savannah. A normal one wouldn't behave like that…
Before his marriage, Peter Kyrpa lived with his mother, and in the winter season kept bragging regularly how on the morning of that day, he went out into their khutta's corridor-hallway, broke the ice in the bucket with a tin mug, and drank the water so cold that it was entering the teeth.
I liked him less than anyone else on our team, but it became him who helped me to prove to everyone and, moreover, to myself that I was a true bricklayer. It happened much later, when the fresh blood in the form of 2 girls, who graduated a vocational school someplace in Western Ukraine, and the former paratrooper Vovka joined our team. At that time, we were finishing the second floor of the machine shop floor building, opposite the round-the-clock canteen for the teams of locomotive drivers.
