the most final
concluding work

The summer started with the examination session for the ninth grade. Of all the exams, Chemistry was the most feared one – a normal guy from the Settlement could not really bottom all those benzyl rings and their atomicity.

Following the majority of my classmates, I memorized the answers to just one of the twenty-five question sets, aka "tickets", from the Tickets List. At the exam, hand-made cards with ticket numbers were strewn face down on the desk of examiners for us to choose. My chances were one to twenty-four and I lost. However, the teacher of Chemistry, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, began, for some unknown reason, pulling me out and, eventually, evaluated my ignorance by "four".

Physicist Binkin, who, strangely, had no handle among the students, at that examination was Assistant Examiner and used his position for demonstrating the cards to Vladya. Picking a slip from the exterminators’ desk, Binkin would keep it up, face to Vladya, and bob his head encouragingly before he put it back and get over to the next one. As fair a play as one could wish.

Unfortunately, Vladya was seated in the end of the classroom, loaded with handfuls of the cribs prepared by diligent girls, who had already passed the exam and dumped to him their cheat sheets. But who can get it seeing for the first time in your life all those formulas scribbled on an inch-wide accordion-folded paper-strip in a handwriting three times smaller than normal? Of course, Vladya would jump to the opportunity of swapping the ticket in hand for that one whose answers he had learned by rote.

For Binkin his fair play was an innocently sadistic fun because at such a distance Vladya couldn't make out the numbers, however hard he squinted. So, he had 2 more wild attempts by which dint he exhausted the ticket swap quota and, though raising his chances to 3 to 25, missed again. Still and all, he didn’t flunk and got his "three" as well as the comment from Binkin, "Your unalloyed proletarian origin secured this mark for you…"

I never quibbled about my clothes, put on and wore just what was given, and Mother made sure the things were neither torn nor dirty. So the new addition to my wardrobe—a jacket made of leatherette to the patterns from The Working Woman magazine—appeared on Mother's initiative and it was her to sew it.

The money to buy leatherette was found because Father moved to work at the RepBase as a locksmith again and his earnings grew by 10 rubles a month. The jacket looked classy, of a nice brown color but cuffs and the belt of a darker cloth. If watched from afar, it even glistened in the sun… In two weeks the leatherette at the elbows fretted to its gunny base, but at the moment when I received my award, the jacket still had good looks.

Yes, the Trade-Union Committee of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant rewarded me for outstanding participation in amateur activities. At the All-Plant trade-union conference in Club, the Chairman of the Plant Trade-Union Committee personally handed me not a useless Certificate of Honor, but a sizable paper packet which contained dark rubber fins and a mask, yet, sadly, no snorkel.

Nonetheless, I took the equipment to the Seim once, but swimming in the fins turned out much harder than you might think when watching flicks alike to "The Amphibian Man". Besides, water found the way to penetrate inside the mask and get into my nose, but then, perhaps, it couldn't be otherwise… However, I was not too keen on studying the bottom life of large water bodies because my main concern that summer was finding a job. I desperately needed money, lots of it, because of my "horselessness".

Vladya had a motor scooter "Riga-4", Chuba drove "Desna-3", Skully reconstructed his bike into a moped, and when a flock of the Settlement scooter-riders buzzing their motors scudded along Peace Avenue, he did not fell too far behind… Yet, "Riga-4" was the coolest. Vladya, of course, allowed me to drive it a couple of times – the buzz of the engine, wind in the face, speed operating, delight! But begging Chuba's scooter for a ride was of no use. Straddling his "Desna-3", the feet firmly on the ground, he'd only scoff in answer.

"Let me, eh? Don't be greedy."

"I ain't greedy, I am gritty!"

"Churls aren’t gritty. One ride to Professions Street and back, I swear!"

Another chuckle at nothing funny.

"A scrimpy asshole!"

But Chuba only scoffed again.

Skully's moped I did not want myself; but where to get money to buy a scooter? That was the question…

Mother said that a guy after the ninth grade might get a job at the Vegetable Storage Base, if he applied at the Head Office of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, near the Under-Overpass.

It sounded a great idea, there should be truckloads of strawberries and watermelons too were surely passing the Vegetable Base before they got on sale at stores. But would they give me a job if I wasn't sixteen yet? In the long narrow corridor of the barrack-like ORS Head Office, I felt more uptight than thru all the session of summer examinations at school. And I got the job! So began my labor career…

The Vegetable Base was located at the end of Depot Street and I was getting there by bike. Besides me, the enterprise employed about 10 other summer hands, mostly from School 14. I recognized one of them – a short guy sporting long hair, handled Luke, he it was who slapped me in the face for shooting in his back. The guy tacitly let the bygones be bygones, and so did I, of course.

The initial couple of days on the job we were sorting boxes, just empty boxes with no strawberries whatsoever. The whole ones were stacked in the shed, those in need of repair piled next to the shed, while split and shattered throwaways had to be schlepped to the stoves under the open sky in the middle of the Base yard…

Arriving in the Base, a truck with a load of vegetables goes onto a weighbridge to get weighed. After dumping the cargo they weigh the vehicle once again; the difference between the loaded and empty truck shows the weight of the brought vegetables if only the weighbridge works correctly. That's where arises the need for a trained calibrator who knows how to tune the weighbridge. To do the calibration, you also need a trial one-ton load of 20 kg pig iron weighs, as well as some workforce to move that ton from one corner of the weighbridge to another, to another, to another, to the middle…

The job of hands at calibration disclosed who of us was who. At first, it was like a sporting event, we carried the weighs racing ahead each other, by the third corner we started to notice which of us shirked and who was going to the end…

Then for two or three days, we cleaned the potato storage block of its stock gone rotten in winter. I never imagined there could be so sickening a stench in the world. Wrapping our mugs in our tank tops, we dragged that horrid muck out, in two-handle wicker baskets, to dump in the thicket of tall grass on the Vegetable Base outskirts. The number of working school guys diminished to 5…

The main workforce at the Base were women in black robes and pattern-printed kerchiefs on their hair. They sorted the carrots or beetroots in the respective blocks, and we moved and stacked the boxes filled by them. Sitting in a circle around a dusty knoll of vegetables, they never stopped yakking, not for half a minute, faith. They were telling each other endless sagas of "he" and "she". About how that "she" of theirs grew fat, then skinny, then got to the hospital, then told her mother she couldn't live without him, then died, then cheated on him and fled with someone else… And "he" was tall, then short, then pot-bellied, then bald, then black-haired, then a drunk; "he" refused to pay alimony and asked to marry him, they treated him for alcoholism before “he” ripped off the linoleum from the kitchen floor to take it to his lover widowed two times…

And so they would pour out their chin music until the blonde guy from School 14, Long by his handle, addresses the peppiest one in the circle of squaws seated on the upset empty boxes, "Well, you give or what?"

"At once!" says she. "But when in I'll squeeze and tear your little willie clean off you, kiss it goodbye, lover!"

And the lady-squaws would start to silence her by oops and pfffs and "watch your mouth! It's a kid you talkest to!"

For the midday meal, I rode home – 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back, 10 minutes for soup and tea or, maybe, compote.

Thus, 4 times a day I gained the first space velocity pedaling all the way down the concrete dive into the Under-Overpass tunnel. Who, of the Vegetable Base hands, does not crave for crazy speed? Whee-hoo!.