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

Then they announced where each of us belonged. I got to First Company, that of masons. Plasterers served at Second and Third Companies. Fourth Company was for drivers and everything else.

We were taken to the respective barracks and presented to the commanders of our squads who indicated free bunk beds in the koobriks of the silent empty barrack because at that time of day the company personnel was working at construction sites in the city…

In all the living nature there hardly could be found more disgusting sounds than the thrice-cursed command "Company! Get up!"

(…anticipatorily, I should confess that when being an on-duty private and having waited for the hands in the large square clock above the sentinel cabinet-box to fall exactly to six o'clock in the morning, I also took a deep breath and yelled in the meanest voice I was capable of:

"Companyeeeeeeee! Get uuuuuup!"

An eye for an eye. And an ear for the tormented ear…)

After the first night in the barracks of First Company, of all my personal belongings in the cabinet-box of the koobrik I slept in, there remained only a half-pack of razors "Neva" priced 25 kopecks when full. The loss of the toothbrush and paste-tube together with the safety razor was not so depressing as the disappearance of 30 kopecks from the pocket in my cotton pants. That would buy me two packs of cigarettes "Prima". I recollected the fellas from Dnepropetrovsk picking up cigarette stubs from the trash pit in the "training" barrack’s gazebo.

Having meticulously covered my bed with the blanket (otherwise, the on-duty serviceman would rip it off and demand to do it better), I collared my neck with the army waffle towel, as everyone else around, and went to the sorteer in the general flow of khaki color.

Over each of the ten hole-ochcos, someone was squatting attended by a waiting line of 2 or 3, and even the wall-width-long urinal runnel was not accessible at once. The place was filled with a babel of tinkling, farting and exchanging news of the past day.

"He was rat-arsed then?"

"You knows yoursel."

"Got caught?"

"I am fucked if I know. They were looking for him."

"They'll get him."

"You knows yoursel."

At the washstand trough, they milled the same piece of news only in more detail.

By eight o'clock the on-duty Sergeants had driven the youngs and dippers of their respective companies to the drill grounds and carried out the complex of exercises. Then the companies had their breakfast and got loosely lined, 4 rows deep, on the drill grounds except for those grandpas who fucking fucked all those fall-ins already.

At a little to eight, the "goat"-Willys of Battalion Commander and a small bus with the officers and accountancy ladies pulled up at the gate.

Battalion Commander, Political Second-in-Command, aka Zampolit, and Chief of Staff went to the middle of the drill grounds, the officers joined the ranks of their respective companies, the accountants bypassed the barrack of Third Company heading to the barrack of Fourth Company – half of that building accommodated the Staff of VSO-11.

The Morning Dispensing started with the report of the on-duty officer to the trinity of Commanders that during the last day there were neither incidents nor violations in the Construction Detail 11. Then Chief of Staff ordered two soldiers from Third Company to step out and face the ranks. The day before they violated military discipline at the construction sites in the city. He announced the penalty – 10 days of arrest.

The gray-haired Battalion Commander, turning from side to side his horn-rimmed glasses, commenced the prosecution harangue. Those oratories of his were outright beyond comprehension because his chronic brain leakage allowed him to reach no further than the middle of a current sentence, and then he leaped to another one of which though no more than a half saw its completion and left you puzzled whether that was the starting or concluding part in it.

Behind the Battalion Commander's back, Separate Company was approaching along the asphalt path on their way to the Canteen for their breakfast havvage. They fucking fucked all that Dispensing, they were Separate Company not belonging to VSO-11.

Finally, Zampolit told Battalion Commander that was enough for the rhetoric. Battalion Commander fired off a pair of concluding "fucks" and shut up.

The on-duty officer passed his responsibilities to another officer whose turn it was to stand on duty for the following twenty-four hours.

The discipline violators surrendered their belts to the new on-duty Sergeant and plodded to the checkpoint guardhouse to get locked up in the clink there, the darkroom with the tin-veneered door and no windows at all, yet provided with the decking of planks to lie upon.

Chief of Staff ordered the rest of the servicemen to turn right and march to our workplaces. We walked to the gate with the trucks already waiting for us outside. Battalion Commander started up – a shred of a sentence that had slipped off when he was at it, landed back into the Colonel Lieutenant's brain.

Fuck yourself, fucker! The Dispensing's over! We're already boarding the trucks – a foot on the tire-tred, hands grabbed atop the plank-side, swing over it and rush further so as the following buddy wouldn't land on your back. Off we go!

The gate stayed behind; the wall of white brick panels between the white brick pillars ran by on the left. We're going to the city!.

On arrival, it turned out just outskirts with a construction site in the remnants of a windbreak belt, the project of a nine-story residential building of two sections whose walls of white silicate brick reached already about half of their height.

The commander of our team-squad brought us to a tall hillock of bricks piled up by the dump trucks and ordered to stack bricks on pallets. Each pallet was just four thick planks, one-meter-and-twenty in length, nailed to a pair of crosswise beams, 90 cm x 6 cm x 6cm, which became the pallet's footing so that the steel cable slings of the tower crane would easily pass beneath the pallet’s underbelly. Twelve courses of bricks upon the pallet (some 300 bricks, all in all) made for about one cubic meter of masonry, but the bricks had to be stacked into courses retaining the bond pattern, so that the pallet load wouldn't pour down when hoisted by the crane to transport bricks to the bricklayers up the walls.

In fact, the job was not overly exhaustive, but doing it, we learned that silicate dust gnaws into your palm skin and it smarts, but they gave us no protective mitts… Grisha Dorfman examines plaintively looked his bare hands…

Besides, the white silicate dust clings fast to your outfit and is really hard to shake off, but they never bothered to give us any overalls…

The same truck took us back to the detachment for the midday meal. The passers-by on the sidewalks did not care to watch a squad of conbatists in the bed of a vehicle rolling by.

After the fork off the highway outside the city, the truck bypassed a clump of industrial buildings on the right roadside at which sight the buddies from our team-squad kicked up crazy yell-and-whistle waving in that direction, like a pack of football fans whizzed in the truck-bed past their team entering the field.

Vitya Strelyany reluctantly explained that was a Zona there, which made it crystal-clear—the ex-cons’ solidarity…

(…30 percent of the servicemen in the construction battalions comprised citizens who had served their time in prison for not excessively grave crimes.

The majority of the remaining 70 percent were considered fit for non-combatant military service because of their lousy education level, poor health conditions or, as in my case, for left-handed tricks to dodge out of the army service.

At occasional bubbles of clarity midst his chronic brain-leakage, our Battalion Commander happened to give forth pieces of indisputable truth, "You're the fucking rabble of cripples and jail-birds, fuck the whore of your mother!"…)

From work, we were brought at dusk already. The evening roll-call following the supper was run by First Company Commander, Captain Pissak.

The servicemen fell into two ranks with the youngs (so was the law) in the front one. Facing the company personnel, Captain Pissak called the roll never looking up from the list, he just listened to the calls in answer:

"Here!"

"Here!"

"Here!"

He needed no visual clues and was able to determine the current state of a serviceman merely by the timbre of the voice yelling his "Here!" in response.

When the roll-call list reached the youngs, Pissak was approaching and standing still against each of the new "Here!" to shortly and silently examine your face with the unblinking gaze from under the black visor in his forage cap. Then he called out the next one.

That was enough – you got fixed in his photographic memory for two years ahead and one month later, instead of, "What's your name, private?" he would say, "Private Ogoltsoff!"

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

"Are you thief-swaggering?"

"No, Comrade Captain!"

"Then why is your belt-buckle dangling by your balls? Sergeant Batochkin!"