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

And because of my fundamentally delayed mental processing, the logical evaluation of the bullshit they fed to me takes place the following day if not later.

However, at that period I did not care for no logic – be it rapans or other fish. It's only now I feel curious at times – what kind of crap could be them those rapans? But then I'm too lazy to go Googling after them…)

Yet, the most captivating feature about her was her legs.

(..the sexual revolution was raging then all over the world reaching its apogee, and the laws of revolutionary times have no mercy, moreover, the laws of revolutionary fashion.

In modern, democratic times, you can wear whatever you want – be it maxi or midi or unisex. You can even choose to spend all of your life in sportswear and have no problem about it if only the pants legs bear those nice stripes from Adidas.

The sexual revolution established the dictatorship of mini all over the world so that if you considered yourself a woman, you had to bare your knees. The law was simple and short – either your skirt is for at least two inches above your knees or go and join the pack of pensioner lady-oldies idling on the common bench in the yard.

Dura lex, sed lex…)

Olga's mini was 10 inches above her knees. Therefore, when getting seated she chastely dropped her hand between her sportingly ripe thighs so as not to flash her panties. And on that bright and shining sunny day, when I stood next to the Under-Overpass tunnel and stared at her skipping in a nimble athletic style down the stairs from the Plant Park, flashing her yellow sports haircut and the ruby-red mini of hers, it became so clear to me that I was born in the epoch really worth to be born into.

A flick of the breeze tossed up the loincloth of her mini and she, on the run, sat it back with the everlasting gesture of Marilyn Monroe from some other, pre-revolutionary era.

(…at the like moments all the rapans in the world and hungry bros chewing the scraps of dry bread sprinkled with fine riverside sand can go to hell for all I care!

"…two legs…though sad, and cold, and weary
I still remember them…"

Or, as another, surely more pragmatic, chosen of Muse, cared to put it:

" Olga, for them those legs of yours, I'd give anything
except the payday and day off!"…)

He was her co-worker at Rags where she got a job because she hadn't gone to her mother in Theodosia but stayed in Konotop by her aunt.

"Rags" was how they named Recycling Factory on the very outskirts of Konotop, by the first stop of the local train going towards the Seim and farther.

Why not pick a job somewhere closer? Because at Rags they didn’t care too much for the labor legislation, and Olga then was barely just 15…

~ ~ ~

On the first of September, I walked to the Konotop Railway Transportation College together with my brother and sister who were also admitted to the institution after graduating their eighth grade that summer.

The students were split to groups and lined-up in the courtyard and the College Director started to push his annual speech. I felt like a zek who served his ten-year time and somehow ran into additional 3 years for no misdoing at all. After the line-up finished, I went to the Personnel Department of the College, took my papers back and went to enter the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant. There I was given a job at the same shop floor where Vladya was already a locksmith apprentice – in the Experimental Unit for Metal Constructions by the Repair Shop Floor…

Like most other shops at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, the Mechanical Shop Floor was built of refractory-like brick. Its walls bore no flamboyant ante-revolution extravagances of lace-like brickwork, simplistic evenness stretched plainly from corner to corner in the massive masonry of the building whose spacious inner dimensions comprised 130 meter in length and 8 in height while being thirty-eight-meter wide.

High overhead, under the roof, there rambled a bridge crane rigged with the cab for her operator driving the crane along the rails fixed close to the walls up there. The huge pulley-hook hung on the thick steel cable pulled by the mighty winch running almost all of the bridge length for except the cubicle of cab at the left end where the crane operator got climbing up the iron rungs planted in the brick wall.

The Mechanical Shop Floor building had three wings of lesser height attached to it. The first wing to the right from the entrance gate was the separate Tools Shop Floor, and the remaining two were parts to the Mechanical Shop Floor, only not so tall and without any bridge crane.

The central aisle in the Mechanical Shop Floor was wide enough for two dolly-cars to drive side by side. A dolly-car was a self-propelled cart on small but sturdy wheels with no tires. It had a small pad in its front for a driver to stand upon. Between the driver and the cargo platform, there was a narrow upright metal box with two levers stuck out from its sides, so that the driver could hold onto them. But it only seemed so, in fact, the driver steered the dolly-car with those levers taking left or right turns.

Dolly-car was, actually, a kind of a pullmi-pushyu. It needed no space for U-turns and, after getting loaded or unloaded in some cramped place, instead of the vehicle, the driver themselves turned round about on their pad and drove back, some clever invention.

The floor in the Mechanical Shop Floor was concrete but, with all those engine oil splotches and smudges from dolly-car tredless wheels, it ages before turned asphalt-black.

Some 30 meters before the end wall, the aisle was crossed by the road from one of the abutting wings to the other, with the fence of upright iron pipes bounding the opposite roadside. Those pipes marked the border between the grounds of the Mechanical and Repair Shop Floors. The border, of course, was transparent and the fence provided three duty-free entries – 1 straight from the central aisle and 2 more alongside the walls…

Past the left-hand border-crossing, beneath the flight of iron stairway, there was a wooden door in the wall opening to the workmen locker room. Next to the door, a small wooden table with a couple of thick, pretty smeared, cardboard folders dropped on its top was abutting the wall, 2 single-plank benches put close by the longer sides of the table completed the arrangement of the Overseers’ Nest which was immediately followed by the line of 8 huge vises screwed, with big intervals, onto the edge of one common workbench running alongside the row of tall windows in the wall.

The first in the line was Yasha's vise, then – Mykola-the-old's, farther on – Peter's, still farther – Mykola-the-young's and so on to the gate at the end of the workbench where the sideway track entered the Repair Shop Floor parallel to the inside part in the butt wall of the building.

The sheet-iron-lined front of the workbench had sheet-iron doors in it, under each of the vises, with a neat well-oiled padlock on each door opening to the toolbox. The first was Yasha's box, then Mykola-the-old's and, well… so on…

On the second floor, over the locker room, there was the Management Office of the Repair Shop Floor. That was where led that iron stairway of two flights furnished with iron handrails which also bordered the landing in front of the office door. And from that same landing, the narrow fixed-in-the-wall ladder went up to the cab in the bridge crane for the operator to get there in the morning, or after her midday break, and rumble away to the space above the Mechanical Shop Floor.

The sideway track entering the Repair Shop Floor was a dead end. Bulky contraptions in need of repair came in there heaped on slowly crawling railway platforms, while those of smaller size were brought to the Repair Shop Floor by dolly-cars.

Behind and parallel to the track, there stretched the butt wall which also had hugely tall windows latticed with iron bindings to hold the panes of dusty glass. In the center of the wall above the windows, under the very roof, there hung a large electrical round clock like those at the railway stations. From time to time, the peaceful slumber of the timepiece got perturbed with a sudden "tick!" which made the half-meter long hand jump for two-three minutes at once and there fall asleep again until the next "tick!".

The third wall had the same five-meter-tall windows. Next to the right-hand border-crossing from the Mechanical Shop Floor, there stood a drilling machine for anyone who felt like using it. Then came the steel-topped acres of the marker's table and, in the corner behind the tracks of the dead-end, the lathe with its turner.

Along the central axis in the Repair Shop Floor, there stood another long workbench or rather two of them abutting each other face-to-face, with an iron-mesh partition in between. Common-sense-based safety rules, if you think of it: had a hammer slipped out of grip, the mesh would prevent knocking out a workman at the opposite workbench.

Walking the Repair Shop Floor, you had to watch your step carefully to safely navigate between giant worm gears, oil-smeared casings, and other whatnots strewn indiscriminately upon the floor. Those things, brought by dolly-cars and dropped at vacant spots a couple of months before, were waiting patiently for the due attention because there always popped up something else, more pressing for urgent repair. But that was not our concern. We were the Experimental Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, sited at the workbench next to the Overseers’ Nest.

No, we did not meddle with repair, our task was to implement the projects experimentally drawn at the Design Bureau in the Plant Management building, to endow them with the real-life forms of metal constructions. The handcart of four wheels, for example, or the stand "Glory to Labor!" to be placed in front of Main Check-Entrance to the Plant. Or all kinds of bearing constructions made of solid rolled-steel channels and joists, like, brackets, pillars, roof trusses.

However, for so bulky products there was no room at the Repair Shop Floor and we assembled them under the open sky outside, on the rack-deck between the welder's booth by the sideway gate and the window of the locker room. By the by, the parts for the city TV tower were also constructed on that rack-deck, and then the team of workers from our Experimental Unit assembled the tower at its site. But that was before me…

For the initial three months, I was a locksmith apprentice couched by Peter Khomenko. For him, it was a good news because a locksmith's wages somewhat increased when he was in charge of training a newbie. On the other hand, Peter was not sure what else to do about his apprentice, after he handed me a spare key from his toolbox in the workbench under his vise, so that I could keep there my hammer, chisel, and file they handed me at the Tool Shop Floor. Okay, he showed how to produce a scratcher out a throwaway length of thin steel wire to draw marks on a sheet of iron but now what?

Along all our line of vises by the Overseers’ Nest, a workman at work was a completely rare sight. Unless at the end of the working day when someone was tinkering up some kind of shabashka for household needs at his khutta.

Nevertheless, the entire workforce was principally always busy. A couple of locksmiths pottering with the welder at the mainstay props outside the locker room window. Some went to dismantle the roller table in the Foundry Shop Floor. Another group was led by Senior Oversee to the Boiler Shop Floor to install four anchor bolts for a jib crane under the construction there. In general and on the whole, the work was running high. Somewhere… If not at one, then at the other place… Maybe.

The managers of the Repair Shop Floor were doing their work in the office upstairs even though the CEO of the Repair Shop Floor, Lebedev, visited the premises no oftener than two times a day. Where he worked before and after those visits I had no idea.

He wore a black greatcoat of the railwaymen uniform. In summer, of course, it was swapped for a jacket of that same uniform with silver-colored buttons. At walking, the CEO’s back was held so plumb upright that it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the man’s being in a well-befogged state already. However, even though his front side could betray the fact of Lebedev's being drunk as a fiddler, he never stumbled the slightest bit. No, never. The workers respected him, probably, for his never staying in the office longer than for five-ten minutes.

In the table of ranks, the CEO was followed by Managers of the Units by the Repair Shop Floor. The Repair Unit was headed by Manager Mozgovoy, whose thin falsetto somehow did not fit his portly frame, still, he also was respected for his being harmless.

Once at the Repair Unit, they were restoring the concavity profile of some bulky incomprehensible thing. Whoever you asked what the crap was that thing, the answer was invariably uniform, "Who the fuck knows what hooey it is." And even that "hooey" was pronounced identically, almost in a howl, like, "…hooooey it is."

So for half of a month, they kept scraping that concavity in turns. Whoever got tired of doing nothing took the hand scraper and commenced to scrape. Eventually, it got polished to a mirror shine and another hooey (the convex thing) began to freely enter and rotate, back and forth, inside the scraped one. Mozgovoy, sure thing, was delighted by such a labor achievement at his Section…

Well, now, locksmith Lekha from the Podlipnoye village, freshly after his army service, in the end of a working day puts a chisel at the shiny surface of the polished hooey and asks, with the hammer raised to his shoulder, "Look here, Mozgovoy, wanna me fuck the fucker?"

In a wistful, tired falsetto, Mozgovoy responded, "If you have no brains, go – fuck it."

Lyokha, certainly, was just horsing around, yet Mozgovoy did not tell on him although he could…

Then followed Manager of the Experimental Unit, Lyonya…