the most final
concluding work

By his skinny, short, stature, Grynya somehow made me think of German general Guderian, whom I never saw in my life. Yet, was there in his appearance something vaguely suggestive of the General Stuff and, perceptibly, that of the Wehrmacht. On weekends, he took rest from blitzkriegs and went on fishing trips with Grigory Grigoryevich, everywhere in the reach of local and diesel trains. They were fishing with fishing rods of different lengths, longer ones in the summertime, shorties for ice fishing…

I was bribed by his faith in my healing talent. That time he stopped me on the flight of stairs leading straight into the open heaven because of absence any roof yet.

"Sehryoga, help!" And, lifting his upper lip, he showed a whitish pimple on the gum. Then he unfastened the safety pin from the inside pocket of his workman padded jacket, where he kept his wristwatch during working hours, and handed it to me, "Pierce the bitch, it smarts too much."

I started excuses that it was not possible there amid the dust, dirt, and stuff, without antiseptics because such kind of operation called for disinfection.

"What disinfection do you want of me here?"

Well, in action movies, they usually disinfect things on open fire… He held the pin tip over a lit match. The result did not comfort me though, the tip got covered with black soot.

Grynya critically examined the pin, wiped the soot off against the incrustations of brick dust and other sediments over the sleeve of his padded jacket, and held it out to me, "Take! Do it!" And I shut up because the man did his best to provide disinfection…

Mykola Khizhnyak arrived in Konotop as those dark-haired, curly, heroes of French novels, who come to Paris with a couple of sous in their pocket and ambitious plans to conquer the capital.

True, he had a three-ruble bill and, instead of a slouch hat with a feather, there was a forage cap on his head, incapable to protect in the thirty-degree frost on the night of his arrival.

He had not become Captain of musketeers, but he is the only bricklayer of the sixth category known to me. In that capacity, he had an apartment, a motorcycle URAL without the sidecar, and his wife Katerina whom, whenever having problems at falling asleep at once, he could grab by her ears and pull under… And it was Mykola Khizhnyak making up for the knowledge I omitted at the institute.

When studying at the English Department of the NGPI, I could not force myself to read a single work by Thomas Hardy, although he was in the examination questions. I don’t even know why, maybe some unhealthy allusions called forth by his innocent Saxon name, but I somehow had an incompatibility with the guy’s works, I dunno. I knew, that it was necessary, but I couldn't…

Once on the stack of slabs that 2 of us were checking with a measuring tape, Mykola began to tell me a long and winding story. At first, I thought it was some TV series and only at the very end, when the pursuit overtook her, but she was asleep from fatigue, and he told them let her sleep a bit while she did not know she was caught, I realized that it was Tess of the D'Urbervilles, notwithstanding that Khizhnyak had woven some flight ticket into the plot…

But officially, the most beautiful woman on our team was the rigger Katerina. Vera Sharapova never hesitated to say it to her directly, even though she knew it herself, especially since she was the foreman's wife, though not registered, so what? But they already had a seventh-grader son from her first marriage.

On her short yellow curls, Katerina wore a scarf of red gossamer, and on her neck a necklace of massive red beads, to suit the color of the lipstick on her lips. Somewhere in the stacks of bridging slabs, nearby the heap of dumped mortar, she kept a triangular fragment of a thick mirror to look into, in her spare time.

She considered herself as beautiful as Anfisa from the TV series "The Ugryum River" after she became the vision because of whom Gromov flung himself off the cliff. In any case, it was with that spook gesture that she beckoned to me from the brick debris, scattered on the ground, when I was laying the corner of the fourth floor, the morning after that particular sequel: "Come on, Proshka! Come to me!"

Or, maybe, she just wanted to check if I was crazy enough for the dive. After all, it was clear that the one was not all there and even turned away from live porn…

That time two couples desired to have sex in the bosom of nature, and they left the city for a distance of 2 hundred meters from the city limit by At-Seven-Winds. They used the strip of the bush as a screen from the highway. Pissing with passion, they did not take into account the close-by construction site, and our team put their hand tools aside and exchanged expert comments during the combined action, like the Romans in the stands of Coliseum, when it did not yet require major repairs.

But how offensively relative is everything in this world! You come first and Anna Andreyevna, seated upon her shovel handle, thrown across the iron box with mortar, would disdainfully utter: "Phui! And that's your best?"

And only the one that's not all there turned away, sat low by the brick pallet, and stared in the opposite direction at the distant group of Birches in the middle of "no man's but builders' land", as tall as the trees in the African Savannah. A normal one wouldn't behave like that…

Before his marriage, Peter Kyrpa lived with his mother, and in the winter season kept bragging regularly how on the morning of that day, he went out into their khutta's corridor-hallway, broke the ice in the bucket with a tin mug, and drank the water so cold that it was entering the teeth.

I liked him less than anyone else on our team, but it became him who helped me to prove to everyone and, moreover, to myself that I was a true bricklayer. It happened much later, when the fresh blood in the form of 2 girls, who graduated a vocational school someplace in Western Ukraine, and the former paratrooper Vovka joined our team. At that time, we were finishing the second floor of the machine shop floor building, opposite the round-the-clock canteen for the teams of locomotive drivers.

When the brick wall is laid 1.2 meters tall, it is continued from trestles put close by it. Between Kyrpa and me there were 2 such trestles, which accounts for a distance of about 15 meters.

He wanted to show off before the pair of young girls in freshly black padded jackets, who often used in their talk the funny-sounding "yoy!" So he yelled, "Here, Sehryoga!"

And he hurled a brick hammer in my direction over the pallets and boxes in between us 2. The tool flew like a tomahawk spinning around its hilt. I did not have time for calculations and I did not calculate anything. I just stepped forward and raised my right hand and the moment as the hammer handle smacked my palm, all there remained to do was to squeeze my fingers in a grab. Everything turned out all by itself.

When seeing that I did not duck behind the brick pallet to dodge his throw, but stood instead holding the hammer in my hand proudly aloft, that turncoat Kyrpa flip-flopped at once and declared to the girls who suddenly turned mum, "See? So are the bricklayers on our team!"

That’s why I do have what to be proud of in my life…

~ ~ ~