The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

For a considerable stretch, our caravan of 12 in pajamas followed the nurse in white, yet the concluding inmate in our single file wore also a black padded jacket of a workman. On climbing a stair flight, we entered the long indoor gallery bridging to another building. Outside the windows, there unfolded a withered fields with distant black-and-yellow arrow-shields indicating the direction towards the out-of-sight airfield. Each windowsill in the gallery was packed with multiple pots of cacti accompanied by the handwritten instruction for those meek of heart and ignorant of agriculture, "Do not water!"

Inside, Club presented the replica of a regular club with the stage in front of the plywood rows of seats, and the visual-agitation posters on the walls:

Bread is the head of anything else!
The economy should be economical!
If there is bread, there will be a song!

interspersed by the sheets of wordier pieces in a smaller typeset.

The workman from the end of our file pulled up at the sheet nearest to the entrance to unswervingly study it, at times scratching the cap on his head, for which purpose he had to unlock his hands from being clasped in zek attitude on his back.

I sat down in the last row of seats. The lamps above the stage lit up, and a man in a doctor’s smock came out upon it bearing a displeased countenance along with an accordion.

Two more nurses brought in another caravan – a dozen of women in gray gowns over the sturdy linen of hospital underwear. 2 or 3 of them proceeded to seats in the middle of the hall and were immediately joined by Messrs. Pretty-Guys.

The accordionist started to play for the dancers in the passage between the stage and the front row of seats… A woman of about 40 swiftly paced along the central aisle carrying her sweet smile to the last row and invited me for the white dance.

"Sorry, I'm no good at the waltz."

She went away with her face dropped down. A loss. A loss…

Despite the purpose of the Strauss' "The Danube Waves" no one was waltzing but just hugging each other in pairs, a couple of which climbed onto the stage. In one of those elevated pairs, there was the young man with asynchronous eyes. But now both of them were fixed on the tall soft fluff of gray mohair in the knitted hat of his partner – a nurse in a white smock. Who of them invited who?.

The ladies were first to be taken away before our caravan started off. The workman broke away from the same citation poster on the wall and took his concluding place in the file, without ever unclipping his eternal zek-styled hand-clasp…

~ ~ ~

Apart from orbiting the corridor and visiting the ball in Club, I also was reading. I asked the blonde one from Messrs. Pretty-Guys to lend me the book from his armpit, which he at times used as a drum, and he willingly concurred. It turned out to be a book of stories by Tamaz Chiladze translated from Georgian. I liked them though in original they, probably, were better.

On the third day, I was sitting by the window next to the locked door to the yard, where the first snow was descending in slow quiet flakes. I watched it while reading The Judge and Executioner by Durrenmatt, which I had read years before. Behind me, all the modern world was romping and fussing and rumbling and mumbling and stumbling as reflected in the cross-section by the fifth unit at the fourth kilometer. I was already fed up with it.

Yet, I did not have time to finish reading Durrenmatt read years ago because of the knock on the window pane from outside. On the fluffy thin cover of snow, there stood Eera smiling at me. Silent soft snowflakes swirled slowly about her face. So beautiful…

The nurse brought my clothes and I entered the wardroom to change. Then I returned to the corridor-hall, whose society's particles that retained any close connection with now and here were astounded by my leaving them so soon. Someone, hiding his identity behind the Brownian movement, shouted angrily that it's not right to let me loose, but it certainly was not Baranov because he's a cheerful bozo.

Excited by the freedom at hand, I took a step forward, raised my hand with the fist balled oratorically and shouted out that I was grateful to everyone for everything and promised to remember. In response, a spontaneous rally broke out, but I already stepped out in the medical staff passage. On the way to Tamara's office, in one of the rooms, I caught a glimpse of a lonely old lady in a dressing gown and a head kerchief. Crawling on all fours over the floor, she was lining large blocks, the size of a brick, in two sketchy rows.

Tamara told Eera that my treatment had not started yet but since she was insisting so much then let her take me and not be too worried, the deviations of the sort I had demonstrated so far were a commonplace anomaly among the folks with a PhD degree. That was her way of consoling Eera.

(…that snare did not work on me though, by that time I had already found an effective trick for keeping any conceit vagaries in check with an iron grip on my supremacy’s throat, but Eera seemed to have believed the specialist. In any case, two years later she gave me for the birthday present a book by Plekhanov, that very SOB who brought Marxism to Russia.

On the back of its hardcover, she wished me to become as clever as him because she was waiting for that. So, she waited, at least, two years more, though Freud was talking of just one and a half, at most…)

Addressing me, Tamara prescribed a special means of turning back to myself for which end I had every night to watch the news program "Time".

In the following several years, I dutifully followed her prescription and could already with an accuracy of 3 days predict a plane crash or the arrival of the delegation of the Communist Party of Paraguay in Moscow on a brief working visit. But then I got tired of it and dropped watching TV, justifying myself by the proverb that the humpback would be straightened with only his grave, at which point I also, at last, become like everyone else – clean of my leopard spots.

(…O, how pleasantly beautiful this world is if you consider it without digging deeper thru its glossy surface!

“…the symposium was held under the aegis of UNESCO…”

What magic, lovely, charming ring resounds in each word of this splendid line!.

But when you get to coarse plain roots where “aegis” means nothing but a goatskin, and "symposium" corresponds to a collective drinking bout, then you cannot but feel bored with the world where nothing ever changes and once again, as always, there is a jag debauchery under the goatskins of prostitute Unesca…)

"See how perfect this world is,
Have a look!
Ah, how pe-e-e-rfect this world i-i-is!.."

~

~

The Married Life

SMP-615, aka Construction and Installation Train of the same number, was located about where I once chewed blades of grass, half-starved in the bicycle trip to the river of Seim, only on the other side of the road.

At the time of my grazing experience, Konotop had not reached that place yet, but the city grew and the location became a part of the outskirt neighborhood named "At-Seven-Winds". Konotopers hardly ever lacked propensity to a poetic vision of the world they live in.

On the 7th of December 1979, after a brief stay at the 4th kilometer in the outskirts of Chernigov, I came to SMP-615, because none of the streetcar or bus routes were reaching there, that was as far as hell itself, on the frontier of At-Seven-Winds.

I couldn’t even distantly imagine why in the course of my job interview the head of the personnel department kept giving such warps to his face that would put to shame the amateurish attempts by Slavic Aksyanov. At some point, he even grabbed from his desktop a wide wooden ruler to cover his left eye with it. So as not to jinx me off? Taking a hangover for the distortions' cause would be a weak conjecture, as I came there in the late afternoon. Just one of those things that you'd better dismiss with a shrug, and forget.

Anyway, he provided me with a job at the organization, which as he explained, levied 10 percent of the apartments built by them for subsequent distribution among the workers of SMP-615, whose turn it was the established queue of employees waiting for the improvement of their housing conditions. Currently, the construction of 110-apartment block was underway, with 23 people in the aforesaid queue. Of course, I handed in the application and became the 24th. Even the fact, that after the delivery of the 110-apartment block, I automatically turned the 13th aspirer did not scare me off. Because in the following couple of projects, I would definitely get an apartment for my family. I did not know then that not everything was as straightforward. And the head of the personnel department did not have time to explain to me the details and nuances, because he changed his place of work.

The position was embraced by a retired army officer. With the new head of personnel department, everything was clear and subordinate, since retired Major Petukhov kept his countenance under the army-trained control. However, the facial expressions of the personnel department heads were not of much importance, because the main people in my life for the coming 6 years became the team of bricklayers.

In SMP-615 there was only one team of bricklayers, all the rest – plasterers, welders, carpenters, plumbers came to the erected objects after us. The workforce at the mortar-concrete unit, as well as crane operators, forwarders, and loaders were an auxiliary layer; even the engineers and accountants stayed secondary when compared to us.

It was we, who came to the deep foundation pits to fill them inserting multi-tonnage concrete blocks with the assistance of the truck crane operator Vladimir Gavkalov. And then began the epic of upgrowing the walls and "fillings", aided by the tower crane operators Mykola, Kolya, and Vitalya, in turn. The crane operators replaced each other, welders changed, but we stayed and withstood, for who else, if not we, would transfigure the space?

In place of an air-filled void for the roaming flocks of crows, stair flights marched up, for the tenants to climb to their homes located at the previously unattainable altitudes. The idle crows had to reconsider their flight routes. Of course, multi-apartment houses ensued from the work of all the above listed, as well as of not mentioned SMP-615’s structures and units, but we, the bricklayers, were the arrowhead in the advancement towards the realization of the everlasting dream of mankind about normal living conditions.

Being the arrowhead is not an easy job. Neither office walls, nor the cabins' glass, nor the boards of the hulls shelter you from the whims of calamitous weather. All your protection is your spetzovka, helmet, and boots, in the winter a pea-jacket, mitts, and a hat will be added, any part of you not protected by them becomes a prey to the scorching sun, whipping rains, ruthless whirlwinds, and merciless frosts. Not everyone will endure, not everyone will stand up to being a bricklayer day after day.

I have worked with lots of different people both in SMP-615 and beyond it, but for me, these 12 will forever remain "our team":

Mykola Khizhnyak – the foreman;

two Peters—Lysoon and Kyrpa—bricklayers;

two Gregories—Gregory Gregoryevich, and his nickname Grynya, handled Melekhov (after the serial of the "Quiet Flows the Don" on the central television)—bricklayers;

two Andreyevnas (not relatives though)– Lyubov Andreyevna and Anna Andreyevna—bricklayers;

Lydda and Vitta – bricklayers;

Vera Sharapova and Katerina – riggers;