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

Oh, Mommy-Mommy blues,
Oh, Mommy blues…"

But my yelling exercises went on only while my partner Borya was learning how much we were to load on that day.

Borya was a penal workman, like me, for violation of labor discipline, yet he was native there, a smith from the Smithy Floor. A blonde over thirty years old, he was not very tall or bulky, you'd hardly think he was a smith. And, in his case, the discipline was violated by being in a state of intoxication at his workplace.

Our job was plain and invariable – loading of steel slugs into the furnaces.

Those slugs waited for us in the left wing of the Smithy Shop Floor building. They were sizable pieces of axes from railway car or locomotive wheel pairs cut up by the gas cutters during the day shift.

The ex-axis pieces were, sure enough, too heavy to be hoisted by a couple of workmen, penalized or not, that’s why there was a ground-operated bridge crane in the wing. I grabbed hold of a piece with the grip donned on the winch hook, and Borya hit the buttons in the hand console hanging from the winch in the bridge crane and forwarded the slug to the trolley where I directed and held in place the descending grip until it opened and let the piece go.

That way we stacked several layers of the slugs, depending on the length of the cut pieces (the longer, the heavier) because the following part of our job was to push the trolley along the narrow gauge track of rails.

We pushed it into the main building, onto the turntable there which looked like a sewer hatch but swerving in its place. Applying our bodies to an end of the loaded trolley, we turned it 90 degrees to the left and rolled on further, towards the furnace.

The most demanding point in the process of slugs transportation was to start a still-standing trolley. That's where you had to exert your sinews in earnest, and when the trolley began to slowly roll on then, Ha! bitch, you're, ours!.

The vent of each furnace was furnished with a wide iron shelf outside. Turning his face away from the fiery heat pouring out the vent, Borya tossed a half-meter-wide tube-roller on the shelf. Then we put onto the roller the oblong spade with raised side edges, which prevented the slugs from rolling off the spade.

That spade had an enormous, five-meter-long, handle made not of iron but of steel with the cross-section of six by four centimeters. The handle ended with the crossbeam for two workmen to grab its halves from each side of the handle.

But first, I held the end alone so that Borya could use the nearby jib crane to hoist a slug from the trolley into the spade, shielding his face from the fire in the furnace with his hunched-up shoulder. Then he turned the crane over back to the trolley, came up to me, and each of us grabbed his half of the crossbeam.

"Hup!"

And we, rubbing shoulders, went three-four wide strides, accelerating to jogging, towards the flaming hell in the furnace. The run ended with a synchronous jump up and sharp push of the crossbeam down with the aggregated weight of our bodies so that the springy handle would transmit the impact to the spade and toss the slug up and out.

On landing after the jump, your face would turn, on its own accord, away from the scorching heat of fire raging in the furnace. That's why Borya worked in the smith's protective tarp apron, and I was finishing off my once-beloved red sweater.

With our necks defensively pulled in, we strode back pulling the shovel after us, and Borya went to hoist the next slug onto it.

"Hither-thither…To and fro…
Ooh!. How good it feels!.."

Then we drove the emptied trolley back to fetch a new batch of slugs… Inside the furnace, they also had to be stacked in layers and rows starting from the deepest, otherwise, they just wouldn't fit in. The more of them loaded inside, the shorter the runs with the shovel…

I didn’t immediately mastered the synchronous jumping, and Borya cursed me with inaudible, behind the rumble and roar, taboo words because the slug wrongly dropped across a layer would fucking fuck your ass when stacking in the following ones from the bunch.

Borya was overly terse. I had more communication with the fan (singing in a duo) than with him. Yet, one time Borya shouted into my ear, "We've done forty tons today!" The red flames from the furnace reflected in the teeth bared in his pleased smile and the whites of his eyes. Some labor victory!.

Empty worthless bullshit. It's just because we did it.

"You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt…"

We worked two shifts – the second and the third, leaving the first one to the gas cutters for cutting axes to pieces.

On the payday I could hardly believe my eyes – I had earned 120 rubles a month!.

"…transfer to a lower-paid position…"

" Ha-ha, Mr. Lebedev!
Ha-ha! Mr. Heath!
'Cause I'm a workman!
Yea! Yea! Yea!.."

And to the smiths, the cashier was forking out two-three unopened packs of money in bank wrapping plus stray notes. Over 300 rubles!

Yes, Borya, you'd better cut out boozing at your workplace.

" Hither-thither…To and fro…
Ooh!… How good it feels!.."

(…I have always been, am, and will be cursing that night when I let out that cry of a stupid seminarian.

Yet, what's said can't be unsaid…)

And Olga again wanted something else… Once, when I was throwing the slugs into her furnace, she started pressing, "Tell it… what!.. you're doing… now…"

"I'm…making!.. love…to you!.."

"No!.. tell it…the other!.. way…"

"Which…wa..way?!.."

"You..ou.. know!.. which…"

And I started to moan it out, "I'm…fuc…king…you!.."

"Ah!"

"You'm…fu… cki…ng…I…"

"Oh, my!.."

The dark kitchen. The baby's asleep. And what could it understand anyway…

Another night she called me from the darkness, "Hit me!"

"You crazy?"

"No, I'm not! Hit me!"

Well, at last, she made me lightly slap her cheek.

"Not just so! Hit hard!"

Knowing she'd not get off my back in any way, I meted out a more sonorous slap. She stretched on her back sobbing.