the most final
concluding work

All the youngs starting their service got "burdened", but our squad was the "youngest" of all the youngs, which situation resulted from a chain of unfavorable circumstances.

Firstly, the Ensign, who was our platoon commander, caught the Sergeant, who was our squad commander, with 2 bottles of wine bought from a nearby deli.

What is Ensign? That's a grandpa who liked thief-swaggering (wow! the youngs got cold feet before him!) and got brains enough to realize that in civilian life, after the demobilization, he'd be a sheer nothing.

That's why such a grandpa stays in the army for long-term service. After 4 months of training at a school of Ensigns, he comes back to the same detachment with a small star in his shoulder-straps. He wears the parade-crap all the time, he roughs the soldiers and is paid for his favorite pastime one hundred twenty rubles a month. How not to sympathize with a person who has found his place in life?

So, our squad was called and collected from different spots at the nine-story building construction site, some of us were laying partition walls, others digging a trench, still others loading bricks on pallets before we were ordered to fall in by the entrance to the second section.

Our Sergeant was facing the line without his belt on—the obvious mark of a serviceman under arrest—2 bottles of wine (0.5 liters, wide red sticker) next to his feet on the ground. The fair-haired Ensign in a short-sleeved parade-crap shirt (the summer had just started) took the position at the flank of our dust-covered-mud-crusted formation.

In short, that whelp, who was not even a grandpa already, decided to perform a didactic oratorio. Like, this traitor of our great Homeland treacherously left his comrades-in-arms at their labor post and deserted to the grocery store, yet the vigilant Ensign caught him red-handed… He finished his piece of bullshit, snuffed and didn't know what to do next. However, he seemed to have watched some TV sequel from the life of military cadets, where someone got a parcel mailed from home and ate it on the sly, without sharing with his buddies. Then he got caught, and the cadet school zampolit forced him to eat a bar of chocolate in front of the rank of his comrades. The miser with his head bowed, burning with shame, implored to forgive him. To be continued…

Well, now, that Pestalozzi with a scrawny star in his shoulder-straps, started to peacock himself for the TV zampolit before us, "And you let your comrades down for wine! Well, well…So drink it!” He did not consider that in real life flicks might go the way bypassing the staple TV ruts…

Instead of bowing his head, the Sergeant threw it back, clapped the bottle’s neck to his lips and executed the received order. The Ensign froze in his place, the lined-up audience sympathetically swallowed along with the Sergeant's gulps and the bottle was slugged down at one go. He did not have time for the second one though – the Ensign recovered his senses, sprinted to the bottle and smashed it against a heap of gravel.

The Sergeant was taken to the detachment and locked up in the clink at the checkpoint guardhouse. The next morning, he was busted to a private and sent to the team he had been working with before they brought our draft to VSO-11. And might it possibly be otherwise? Who would allow him to kick back in the clink for 10 days and chew bread for nothing? March to work! We've got so all-embracing five-year plan designed by the Party and Government. After all, both with and without the instructive tattoo on our foreheads, all of us were slaves of the USSR…

Our squad got a new commander, just a dipper, by the name of Prostomolotov. "Call me simply – Molotov."

An intellectual wearing glasses, he knew about Molotov, but he was nothing more than a dipper and though they soon gave him the rank of Lance-Corporal, the grandpas were pushing him around, and he was in cold sweat before them, and never suggested to "burden", at least occasionally, some other squad of youngs, for a change. Because of such a situation, after a day's work instead of going to bed, we were assigned to the kitchen detail and peeled potatoes for the next day feeding of the entire servicemen personnel plus that of Separate Company because the peeling machine broke… Peeled all night long. Until 5 in the morning.

True, the last sack of potatoes we smuggled in portions out to the garbage bins, covering the out-going pailfuls with the peels from processed potatoes so that the on-duty cook did not get it. And at 6 – "get up!", then the Morning Dispensing and – march to work!.

Or else, they brought us in the evening from work to have the havvage—quick!—and then took back to the nine-story building, because KAMAZ trucks were moving alabaster there from the railway station, and if it rained the whole carload of the valuable building material would be lost. And we, standing knee-deep in loose alabaster, drove it with shovels into the basement of the nine-story building thru the opening in the blocks of the foundation under the butt wall. As soon as we finished one hillock of it, another KAMAZ truck would come and dump its 13-tonne load, and then another and then another, a practical way to learn that a railway freight car capacity is 68 tonnes… And inside the basement, the alabaster had to also be driven into the next compartment, otherwise, all of it just wouldn't fit in.

In short, Simply-Molotov, the popular conbat saying was right: "It's better to have a prostitute daughter than a Lance-Corporal son."

Daddy of Grisha Dorfman arrived and had a talk with someone in the Staff barrack and when he left Grisha was transferred to Fourth Company and given the position of the tailor. Soon, Grisha already flaunted in "Pe-Sha" and didn't even spend nights in the barracks because he had a sewing workshop in the bathhouse building.

"Pe-Sha" meant an outfit of half-woolen cloth, which was thicker than cotton fabric, aka "Khe-Be", and had the color of dark swampy slime – one of the khaki shades. "Pe-Sha" was the dress-code of aristocrats among the rank-and-file servicemen: the driver of the Battalion Commander's "goat"-Willys, or the projectionist at the Club, who was also the postman. It's a great thing to have a daddy who knows how to negotiate…

And Vanya, scared by the mice in his high boots, got exempted from the army. The Sergeant, who escorted him home from the nuthouse, told that at the Stavropol railway station Vanya dropped the mesh-bag with his belongings wrapped in a newspaper to the floor and screamed, "Run! Get off! It's a bomb! It's ticking!" Sure enough, folks shied away. And on the arrival in Vanya's home, he said his escort for a goodbye, "Learn, Sergeant, the way smart guys serve in the army."

That's, in general, why on that first day-off in August, trying to eschew the lazy crowd of beach-lizards in kirza high boots, I turned round the corner of the Club and from the rebar-grated window, next to the steps under the closed door of the projectionist's, I heard an acoustic guitar. Guitar…

I stood still and listened, though there was nothing to listen to – someone clumsily tried to play the chords of "Shyzgara", yet did not go well with the rhythm because of using balalaika beat. Unable to stand it, I returned to the Club entrance door. It was open.

At the end of the hall, on both sides of portholes from the projectionist's, there were two doors. The left one stood wide open and it was where the guitar sounded from. The grated window in a narrow room was abutted by a wooden hospital couch seated by a soldier with beastly bristles, in a faded piss-cutter, black overalls, and slippers who kept the guitar in his paws.

Another soldier, also in slippers, sat opposite him on a chair with its backrest against the wall.

"What's your fucking need here?"

"It's by "Shocking blue" that you wanna play, I can show how."

They exchanged glances. "Okay, show."