the most final
concluding work

Although I am not sure if any system would save me without adding our team to it. This isn't meant to say that the team members surrounded each other with caring attention, tenderness and moral support. Like hell, they would! In our team, as anywhere else, they were all too glad to have a good laugh at your expense. And everyone had a family and kids of their own, as an outlet for their tender care. Except for ruddy, pug-nosed, Peter Kyrpa, handled Kyrpanos, but eventually, he also got lassoed, and corralled, and broken in as a family man by Raya, from the team of plasterers. And yet, from 8 am to 5 pm our team, even with each one distracted by their personal problems and concerns, became one family. For all the hole-picking jokes in each other's qualities, you wouldn't become a victim of a detrimental practical joke like piercing your brains by stench of smoldering wool, or any other injury-prone idiocy.

Did bricklayers use taboo words in ladies' presence? Both yes and no. I have never heard a four-letter word addressed to any woman on our team. Never. But when the crane operator puts a pallet of bricks on your foot, you report it to the whole world—and very loudly too—without paying much attention if there were ladies around.

Were women on a bricklayer team using taboo words? Both no and yes. At the moment charged with trauma threat or loss of life, they’d rather shout "Oy! Mamma!" or issue shrill incoherent shrieks. Whereas at the intervals between shoveling mortar into the boxes for bricklayers, or rigging the brick pallets with the prickly steel cables, Katerina could casually share the folklore song:

"Fuck yourself, you fucking dumbos,

you're more stupid than they said,

No way to marry your daughter?

Go fuck her in my stead!.."

I have to admit, that mute replaying this particular obstreperous folklore piece in the brain convolutions of my inner self sometimes worked as a painkilling palliative.

But, after all, is the foul language the only thing to frown at in the world? The bricklayer Lyoubov Andreyevna once complained to the head engineer, who accidentally dropped in at the construction site, about the insulting words of our foreman Mykola Khizhnyak, by which he identified all women indiscriminately: "Inside-out insoles!" Up to now, I haven't got the slightest idea what it could possibly mean, but she somehow got hurt. Probably, because she was the most beautiful woman on our team, only sad at times.

It is sad for a woman to know she's beautiful and, at the same time, not to know what to do with her beauty and just watch how it flows away in vain.

She had a husband five years younger than her. Before their marriage, he was walking around with a knife hidden in the top of his high boot, and she made of him an exemplary family man and a safe member of society. But she still remained sad, especially in winter frosts, when the mortar in the boxes would develop a centimeter thick ice crust while climbing thru the air to the seizure line. "Oy, Mamma! How my poor little hands did get numb with the cold!"

And that parasite Sehryoga would readily respond from the other end of the line, "Serves you good! Your mummy-daddy kept telling 'study well, sweetheart, so as to become an accountant!' And what was your answer? 'No! The shovel is my one and only love forever!' So shut up now and love it until you get dark blue!"

"Parasite!"

Anna Andreyevna was not as beautiful as Lyoubov Andreyevna, but she was kind, especially after the break for the midday meal. She, as most of the team, lived in At-Seven-Winds and went home for the midday break. There, she would accompany her meal with a couple of shots and return to the workplace softened and kindhearted. Her only drawback that she was hunting my brick hammer. The moment my vigilance got slacken, she'd snatch my brick hammer and bury it in the wall covering with mortar. Most bricklayers cut bricks with their trowels but I, for righteousness sake, did it with the hammer…

Lydda's and Vitta's husbands were SMP-615 employees as well. They were locksmiths at the production building in the base grounds, under the supervision of the chief mechanic. As any locksmiths, they, naturally, were drinking. And the following morning in the bricklayers' trailer you had for one half-hour to listen to curses to those busters who even were not anywhere around.

Although the curses from Lydda were a treat to hear, she sang them out like a song, with Vitta's backing in the background.

Vitta herself was not eloquent. When we were finishing off the uppermost part of the walls on the 110-apartment block, for the final bridging with roof slabs, she was next to me in the line of the bricklayers, and, when I jumped out over the wall, all she could say after disappearing me was: "Sehrguey! Where to?"

The brick courses in my part of the seizure needed jointing so I jumped outside onto the concrete awning over a balcony on the fifth floor. But she had no idea about that awning! Now, a man dives from the roof of a five-story building and all she's up to saying is: "Sehrguey! Where to?" Here's, in a nutshell, the female logic, and knowledge of physics – down, of course, I've jumped! Where else?.

Our team was young. The oldest bricklayer on our team, forty-year-old Grigory Grigoryevich, put it directly, "We're still young!"

He possessed exceptional pedagogic skills and, noticing that his son, a ninth-grader, somewhere on a streetcar, or the sidewalk, was gaping at a woman worthy of looking at, he never missed the chance of seizing the opportunity: "Wanna get you some of that sort? Study well, buster!"

His face was round in unmistakably Napoleonic way because of the thin hair strand stuck to his forehead. And he was a solid, burly man. More than once, I tried to overtake him in laying a brick course – no go. He would finish when I still had to lay about ten bricks or so.

And he was very judicious. Only once his common-sense gave in. That time he brought to the construction site his double-barreled hunting rifle, after the midday break.

The site was in "no man's but builders' land" at the frontier of At-Seven-Winds. And then a young construction superintendent Sereda stopped by coming from SMP-615 base grounds.

Grigory Grigoryevich allowed him also to hold the weapon. He even started an argument that Sereda would not ever hit his hat thrown up into the air. We went round the end wall of the unfinished building. It was the white silence all around, and only the trees in a distant windbreak belt contrasted the snow with their black trunks.

And he threw his hat up—high, so high!—and Sereda waited for a second and pulled the trigger. The hat twitched in its flight and fell like a hit bird. Grigory Grigoryevich raised it and there was a hole in the hat top, 2 fingers easily ran thru. The buckshot turned out to be too large, meant for boars. But it had been a good hat, you know, of nutria fur. It's only he did not consider logically that Sereda was from Transcarpathia and although there remained no Bandera men already, yet the firearms survived, hence the skills…

And the rigger Vera Sharapova was never sad. She was singing all the time, laughing and ready to keep up a talk with anyone at a moment’s notice. And she also was the most beautiful, but only at work, while dressed in her workman padded jacket and spetzovka pants. But when she changed to go by the local train to her Kukolka station, the beauty disappeared somewhere.

I do not know why it made me sad when she was telling about her wedding party and everyone around laughed along with her.

"The kids a-crying, Peter a-playing!"

Peter was that humpback mujik who took her even with 2 children of her own. He also was an itinerant from Kukolka to Konotop and knew how to play the accordion. Some noisy wedding it turned out.

Vera Sharapova was keen and nimble, and she noticed that when someone complained of having a headache, I would take out a handkerchief from my spetzovka pants pocket and turn it inside out. At times, she would nudge Katerina, say—watch the miracles of my training!—then press her hand to her forehead and make a pain-ridden face, "Oh, what a headache I have!"

Naturally, I saw thru all that comedy, yet, nonetheless, executed my role in the procedure. However, when Katerina also started to rub her temples, I would say that the reception is over – the facility serves 1 patient per day. Harry Potter had not been conceived as of yet…

Peter Lysoon not always was a bricklayer. Earlier in his career, he had the job of a security in railway gold transportation. There was a special squad of armed securities to accompany safes in luggage cars.

They had long trips, sometimes for weeks. The floor of the car swayed to the clang of wheel pairs on the rail joints, and thoughts of all sorts were spinning on and on. Say, what way, for example, that gold could be taken?

One day they were spinning, another day – sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But no spinning could bring an answer to that insoluble problem. He would take a look at the faces of his fellow-securities: they were also thoughtful. And what about?

And then fear started to creep in – what if some of them had thought out a working solution? Readied a plan, found accomplices and, at some point in the endless way, he would trash all the squad with one clip and leave with the gold? Peter got tired of waiting and became a bricklayer…