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

Sehryoga Ogoltsoff – a bricklayer.

In the city of Konotop, it's easy to see an apartment block built by our team from the houses built by other organizations because ours were striped. Starting the walls of a floor, we laid the perimeter belt of red brick (6cm x 12cm x 25cm) courses. The mark "KK" on the brick stretcher stood for "Konotop Brick", instead of "Factory" there followed "I", or "II", or "III" indicating the shift when it was produced.

After the belt courses reached the level of window ledges, we switched to laying the pillars between the windows of white silicate bricks (9cm x 12cm x 25cm) of unmarked origin.

The pillars were bridged with concrete cross-pieces delivered up by the tower crane. The completing courses over the cross-pieces were also of red bricks.

Now, looking from aside, another floor was ready (red-white-red), yet not everything goes as swiftly as it happens in a fairy tale… Now, it's time to start the "filling", that is growing up the inner walls – the load-bearing axial one, aka "the capital wall", and the transverse ones partitioning the blocks of adjacent staircase-entrances, as well as one apartment from another within the same block. The partitions between the rooms and corridors in an apartment were laid of gypsum slab-plates (8cm x 40cm x 80cm) laid “on rib”, in shiner position. The toilet-bathroom compartments were also of red bricks (and only red!– because silicate bricks, as well as gypsum, do not withhold moisture) laid on stretch, in the same position.

Only then the floor was ready to be bridged over with the concrete slabs conveyed, one by one, by the tower crane on 4—taut strained by the held weight—steel cables which the riggers, Katerina and Vera Sharapova, hooked them with from the stacks on the ground. Each of slab ends had a pair of iron loops for the hooks, the length of each slab was 5.6 meters, but the width might vary from 1 to 1.2 meters.

The difference in slab width was dictated by the need to fit them accurately between the staircase-entrances because a slab should not overlap and block the kitchen and toilet ventilation ducts laid out inside the staircase-entrance walls. And if the slabs brought to the site all happened to be of the same widths?

(…the era of planned economy and deficits taught not to be too picky and grab just what turns up, while at least that was available…)

What if there was nothing to choose from in the slab stacks crowding about the site, eh?

Not a problem whatsoever! There was a breaker, a sledgehammer, two Peters, two Gregories, one Sehryoga and foreman Mykola – passing the tools to each other, they would bring the slab to the needed gauge dimensions.

Bridging the floor is a crucial moment, my first year on the team I was not honored with that responsibility.

The crane carefully downs the brought slab onto two load-bearing walls: the outer and the axial (capital) ones, to span the two of them. The foreman together with a trusted bricklayer lie down with their stomachs across the bridging slab and hang their heads below its underbelly, checking how well it fits in the series of the previously installed ones because the slabs' concrete underbellies become the ceiling in the would-be apartment. If needed, the crane would take the slab up and aside, for the mortar to be added onto a wall, or maybe scraped off. After all, we built for people who would come to live there!

Finally, the exacting peeps of 2 hanging heads feel satisfied by how it flushes with the entire evenness in the previously installed bridging, and the foreman cries out the long-awaited for words: "They'll lap it up!" Which means the future tenants would be happy with the quality of the construction works in their respective homes.

The crane loosens the taut cables, the hooks get released from the loop-holes at both ends of the installed slab and dropped clang-whang onto its concrete upper rim. The crane jib goes up and turns aside, the 4 steel slings with weighty hooks at their ends—the so-called "spider"—swim thru the air in the ascension movement. Jerking, thru the rumble and din, the iron carcass of its open-work tower, the crane rolls off along the track of rails run to the slab stack on top of which Katerina and Vera Sharapova are waiting ready to stick the "spider's" hooks thru the loops in the next slab's end-holes. The technology proved and founded on decades upon decades of implementation…

~ ~ ~

In the morning at half-past seven, the workforce of SMP-615 gathered at the station square, waiting for their colleagues, arriving by the first local train thru Bakhmuch, Khalimonovo, Khutor Khalimonovo and Kukolka stations, to come up in the waves of other passengers bypassing the corner of the mighty two-story structure of the Konotop railway station. And then, all together, we started to wait for our bus.

We formed a wide circle, not for a dance but to idle the time sharing the news, fresh jokes or looking around to make comments on the not too exuberant life in the station square. There was practically no traffic on it and only other circles from other organizations, yet ours was the widest and jolliest.

(…in a circle, there is something of a family feel, incipient rudiments of a community. In a circle you see more human faces than when standing in the lined-up ranks…)

Finally, from Club Street there appeared our bus, our Seagull, handled so after the cars of Seagull make transporting delegations of foreign governments from the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow to the Kremlin. It cautiously crossed the streetcar tracks and passed the one-story building of the railway militia station by the corner of the square, then under the cabstand sign on the lamp pillar, though, for some reason, no taxi ever appeared under it. At the end of its slow triumphal circling the square, the bus stopped next to our merry circle to slam its automatic doors open.

From the square, it took us past Loony, past School 12, past the streetcar Depot, to At-Seven-Winds, where our team got off near the 110-apartment block site, and the bus went farther, for another half-kilometer or so, taking the rest of its passengers to the vast grounds of SMP-615 behind the narrow wall of white brick. However, not all of our team workers came by the Seagull, most of them lived in the 50-apartment block or in the hostel barracks, also in At-Seven-Winds, and they arrived on foot.

We changed clothes in the wheelless timber trailer painted brown. About half of its tiny vestibule was crammed with dead-mortar crusted shovels leaned against the wall, over the bunch of well-dented tin pails out of which stuck the handles of our trowels and brick hammers out and hung the coiling fishing-line tails of our plumb bobs. The inner door of the vestibule opened to a low room with one window over the long well-scarred table and a bench to it and two sets of narrow lockers in its both ends. Most of the room was filled with the huge box of asbestos-cement plates covering electric innards of the heater below the frame welded of rebar-rods to throw our padded jackets over it for drying after rain. Yet, the box could also be used for sitting and even stretching over it.

The women of the team doffed and donned in the oversees' trailer. Unlike ours, it had big wheels which called for the steep porch way under the door in the middle of its side wall. The oversees' trailer was tin-coated and had two windows because there were two compartments in it – one for the current oversee and heaps of the blueprint drawings of the project in progress, and the other for our team women.

At night, two pensioner-watchmen slept, alternately, night in, night out, in the oversees' compartment. One of them, by the brave name of Rogov, wore a Pe-Sha tunic with order-and-medal straps, an officer's belt, riding breeches and high boots of chrome leather, and on his head a khaki cloth cap in the fashion of the 1930's, like that worn by Marshal Zhukov when he was still a brigade commander. From under the long cloth visor, there looked the face of a veteran Roman legionary, worn out in campaigns against various barbarian tribes and full of resentment at the head of Konotop pension fund. That sentiment took roots because of the comment, accidentally overheard by Rogov on a visit to the fund office, by which the aforesaid public servant consoled his deputy, exasperated at the stalwart bearing of the veteran. "Patience, colleague, they're already not so too many around."

The second watchman preferred civilian clothes, but earlier in his career, he wore the uniform of a militiaman and subjected tipsy mujiks to self-invented sadistic check: those still capable of articulating "Jawaharlal Nehru" were let go, while the phonetically hopeless ones transported to the sobering-up station.

(…Konotop is Konotop, where even a mere rank-and-file militiaman knew and popularized the name of the first president of India…)

When on his turn, the former militiaman sealed the window in the oversees' compartment from within with a self-made cardboard trencher. Otherwise, he could not sleep at all because of his service, as a young man, in the troops fighting Bandera resistance, and the windows in their barracks were closed for the night with lumber shields so that the repose of servicemen would not be disturbed by the guerrillas' grenades hurled thru the window panes…

After donning their spetzovka robes, the entire team collected in the men bricklayers' trailer to exchange the news about At-Seven-Winds, the hostel barracks, and SMP-615 itself. Yes, sometimes Gregory Gregoryevich would start bulldozing Grynya that at 8.00 he should stand at the line, chink his trowel and lay a brick upon another. To which Grynya would produce a grunting chortle and readily agree, "Very truly!" Because until the mortar was brought to the site and crane-hauled to the line, the bricklayers had nothing to do up there.

The mortar was brought to the site by a dump truck. It would reverse over the rows of empty sheet-iron boxes, and raise its dump for the mortar to crawl down the steep slope, but it would not drop into the boxes completely. And it's good news if at least half of it had slid out off the dump. Firstly, on the way from the mortar-concrete unit, the mortar had grown dense, squeezing water out from the slush, and it was, for the most part, that very water to fall down into the boxes on the ground. And secondly, the dump floor and sides were not smooth anymore but covered with the ever-growing crust of frozen, upon frozen, upon frozen, mortar from the previous deliveries in winter, or of the dried up, upon dried up, upon dried up, rind in summer. That's why it's necessary to climb the tailgate hanging off behind the dump. It would swing in its hinges under your feet so one of them should be propped against the up-tilted dump's side for stability.

Now, you’re in the position to cut the impacted mortar with your shovel and send swaths of it down onto the heap growing over the boxes. When a cut-off layer of mortar pours in the boxes, the truck dump will give a vigorous jerk-and-quake, getting relieved of the load, at this point, keeping your balance on the tailgate is of vital importance.

The dump truck would go, leaving behind a hillock of mortar over 4 to 5 boxes. But that's wrong because each bricklayer is supposed to have a separate box. Katerina and Vera Sharapova would restore the just distribution with their shovels.

Although each box had 4 hook-loops atop its sides, the riggers hooked the boxes by only 2, diagonally, so that the crane would haul the mortar for 2 bricklayers in 1 go…

The part of wall in the process of being laid by the team was called "the seizure". A string, aka the shnoorka, was tightly stretched from end to end of the seizure. Usually, shnoorka was a thick fishing line smeared with stuck, dried up, mortar, the knots in its length marked places where a strike of an incautious trowel had cut it up, giving rise to reproving exclamations from along the seizure, "Again? What son of a bitch was it?!." The shnoorka served for maintaining the right direction and horizontal leveling of the brick courses so everyone paid it close attention…

To the right of a bricklayer, the crane left a box, aka banka, full of mortar. The boxful of mortar was not exceedingly large – just about a quarter of one ton. When the banka-box got emptied, the crane took it off to the riggers for refilling from the remaining or newly brought heap of mortar. The boxed mortar gradually lost its elasticity but then you had to simply add water fetched in a crumpled pail from the multi-ton container standing nearby, behind the seizure, and temper the “dirt” applying your shovel. That's why a shovel handle stuck out from each box. However, the main purpose of the shovel was to put the mortar from the box onto your part in the seizure. Then the shovel returned to its stuck up posture in the box, and the mortar dumped onto the wall was spread by the bricklayer using their trowel, a tool approximately the size of a large kitchen knife with a triangular spade substituting for the blade.

To the left from a bricklayer, there stood a pallet of bricks, 3 to 4 hundred pieces stacked in dense rows on top of each other. Snatching a brick from the upper row, the bricklayer laid it upon the spread mortar and tap-tapped with the tin-clad end of the trowel handle, so as to level the brick to the line dictated by the stretched shnoorka.

When the course bond called for a brick of special size—a half, a three-quarter, or (the smallest) a one-fourth piece—the bricklayer's hammer was used to gauge the brick by cutting off the excess. After the bricks on the pallet were finished off, the crane operator delivered another one, hooked by Katerina and Vera Sharapova from among the pallets stacked on the ground.

The rhythmic change of interlinked movements—stooping, stretching, turning, bending—transformed the labor process, taking into account its outdoor nature, into a real aerobics sprinkled with a weeny admixture of weightlifting. Looped, consistently ordered, motion, which you might even call spiraling. Do you follow?

And now spit in the eye of that pathetic bullshit and forget it, because the construction site is not a circus with evenly smoothed sand in its arena. Construction site is a danger zone, where spiky ends of rebar-rods lurk in dark nooks, a seemingly firm board snaps off under your foot, a pail of boiling tar falls from the roof, and you’re a lucky devil if the warning yell "run!" makes you jump aside without needless gaping skyward: what's up? Flump!!

It is the place, where a cast-iron heating radiator hits the ground by the wall, hurled from a window on the fourth floor by a criminal having recently returned from his another stretch in Zona. He was not targeting anyone personally and threw it just so, without ever looking out to check who might have their pate cracked open by God’s will.

On the whole, a construction site could be compared to life itself, and there, just as in life, one must not only live but also survive. (Excuse my recidivistic falling back into the rut of pathos.)

Still, it's worth mentioning that bricklayers are not robots but mere humans. And humans, when being cornered properly enough, would take your dear life to save the life of theirs… That is…er…what was it I was about?. Ah, yes!. Construction site.

At a construction site, there's no time for a bricklayer to glide thru whimsical interpretations of esoteric messages from the initiated to the chosen, neither for the deciphering of signs drawn in the sky by ever-changing clouds. Wait for a smoke break, and then play with your irrelevant or over-insightful thoughts, shuffle the puzzle-pieces of signs and symbols of varying significance to your heart's content, read and learn the crypt-glyph messages written with white on blue. Until Mykola the foreman had risen the shnoorka for the next course and yelled along the seizure line: "Off we drive!" To which call Peter Lysoon would respond despondently: "What? Again to attack? And which way lies your "forward"? And that is the signal to grab your shovel, splat dirt atop the wall in progress, and start to live on further…

~ ~ ~

(…a couple of centuries before, on the border with England, or maybe conversely, with Scotland, there lived a farmer earning plenty of dough without any charlatanism whatsoever. His specialty was restoring all kinds of mentally touched, crazed, shifted and otherwise impaired. On the condition, that their loving relatives were not around in the course treatment.

So, they brought to him such a, let’s say, challenged, whose specific perception of the world around had already f-f..er..I mean, fretted brains of all of his household members unfit in earnest consider him a teapot. "Oh, look out! I'm of porcelain! Don't break me up!"

And the following morning the farmer would take the teapot out into the field, together with odd items from other services—crystal highballs, or saltcellars with their lids lost, as well as costume jewelry, which also turned up at times—and carefully harnessed the whole jingling company into the plow. And then, naturally, plowed the field.

By the evening of the day, 88 percent of the glass containers recollected their origin, starting to voice comments and protestations to his erroneous attitude towards human beings. On the second day, the most obstinate pressure cookers also began to pretend being human as everybody else, and the farmer returned to the family and society their fully restored members. For the stipulated fee, of course, plus bonus of the field cultivated by unpaid workforce…)

Eera did not believe in labor therapy in the open, she had more trust in folkloric remedies. That winter she took me to the sorcerer in the district center of Ichnya, in the Chernigov region. We arrived there late in the evening amid the early thickening winter twilight. There was about half-hour before the bus departure back, and the local kids, with some kind of pride, directed us to the sorcerer's khutta.

The door was opened by a regular rural woman of middle age and the rest of the interior was as ordinary, strapped of any hexerei. In the kitchen, there was a pair of visitors, but not from our bus, I would have remembered them. Probably, from somewhere in the neighborhood. A young couple they were, seemingly newlywed, both seated at the table with the man busy shoving away a bowlful of borsch, and she, like, overseeing. Not quite the right time for borsch though, but I did not intervene – might be the sorcerer prescribed it in the way of medication…

The woman led Eera to the next room, and two minutes later they came back together with the sorcerer, a black-haired man about 50 in a khaki shirt from the army parade-crap. We looked at each other, unblinkingly, and he returned to his room with Eera. I stayed with the borsch-eater and the 2 women.

Soon Eera came back, all excitedly wound up, and we left for the bus. On our way to Nezhyn, Eera shared that I was the way I was because they had fed a "giving" to me, and there occurred an overdose, but it was useless to treat me on that particular day since it was a wrong "quarter", that is the moon was not in the right phase. (Or could they run out of the borsch?.)