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

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.

When the brick wall is laid 1.2 meters tall, it is continued from trestles put close by it. Between Kyrpa and me there were 2 such trestles, which accounts for a distance of about 15 meters.

He wanted to show off before the pair of young girls in freshly black padded jackets, who often used in their talk the funny-sounding "yoy!" So he yelled, "Here, Sehryoga!"

And he hurled a brick hammer in my direction over the pallets and boxes in between us 2. The tool flew like a tomahawk spinning around its hilt. I did not have time for calculations and I did not calculate anything. I just stepped forward and raised my right hand and the moment as the hammer handle smacked my palm, all there remained to do was to squeeze my fingers in a grab. Everything turned out all by itself.

When seeing that I did not duck behind the brick pallet to dodge his throw, but stood instead holding the hammer in my hand proudly aloft, that turncoat Kyrpa flip-flopped at once and declared to the girls who suddenly turned mum, "See? So are the bricklayers on our team!"

That’s why I do have what to be proud of in my life…

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