the most final
concluding work

New occupations spread among boys much faster than a wildfire. As soon as one of them put his hand on some new trick, you’d hardly find the time to wink your eye but everyone already is, like a busy beaver, all in manufacturing explosives.

A land mine of delayed action you can produce just hands down. Fill a glass bottle with water, three-quarter up, and thru the bottle’s neck stuff in a wisp of grass, then pour the bluish powder of crushed carbide on top. (Carbide is stored in an iron barrel at the construction site of a five-story building across the road around Block, blackstrapper-soldiers would blink at your ladling handfuls of it into your pants pocket.) Now, seal the bottle tight with a cork whittled from a wood chip, turn the bottle upside down and insert it into some pile of earth or sand. The land mine is ready.

A word of warning!! Be cautious not to cut your fingers when whittling the cork and, secondly, when sitting on the ground and driving the cork into the charged bottle, don’t keep the bottle’s neck between your thighs because it might crack and some stray shard would cut your skin just where the shorts end, as it was in my case…

It only remains to wait until the carbide, after getting in contact with the water in the bottle, has issued too much gas for the bottle walls to hold the pressure and it explodes with a loud pop, sending sand and glass splinters in all directions.

Being a book-addict, I often failed to follow the mainstream developments in ever-changing public life…

When tired of reading, I spread the book next to a big sofa’s armrest, covers up for the seat to keep it open at the right page and ready to be read on by my return from the Courtyard. Then down I went and stepped out of the entrance door—surprise! A caravan of differently aged boys were crossing the Courtyard hauling pieces of boards, planks, beams… I ran up to ask: what’s up? how? where?

They told me to run to the construction site of the five-story building, where another group of boys still collected useful timber that a blackstrapper soldier-guard allowed to lift off. And I arrived there just in time to grab the end of a long plank, chiseled from the guard by elder boys. The soldier only said to be quick, before any one saw us.

Like a string of diligent ants, we dragged the pillage across the Courtyard and down the Gorka, then into the forest at the foot of the steep slope made of the earth chuted down by the bulldozer when leveling the ground for the skating rink.

There, between the trees, sounded hand-saws and hammers clapped in eager heat of enthusiastic labor. The bigger boys were sawing boards and nailing them to the pillars piled into the ground.

With the trained eye of a Construction Modeling Designer, I at a glance saw that it was a shed without any windows and with one, already hinged up, door. Inside, there stood a wooden ladder leaned on the wall beneath the square hatch in the ceiling of long boards. Up I climbed and out onto the flat roof and, at the same time, ceiling of the structure.

A couple of bigger boys were there discussing whether the roof was strong enough and reassuring one another that the shed would serve the headquarters for boys from our Block and not from the twin one.

I asked for a chance to work with a handsaw or hammer, but neither of them gave me his, and they even ordered me to go down and not strain the yielding roof by my additional weight.

I climbed down the ladder. In the half-dark shed and around it, there stayed no one of my peers, and going home to the book waiting for me upon the big sofa, I felt happy that the boys of our Block would have Headquarters of their own, like Timur and his team from the book by Gaidar…

Later, when wandering in the forest, I never missed to check the shed, but nobody was there, and a big padlock hung on its door. The autumn came, a stack of hay appeared next to the shed, and a team of chicken migrated to it thru the square hen-way, sawed out in the bottom of the door. The Headquarters were obviously canceled…

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Dad had a hair cutting machine— a nickel-plated critter with two horns or, rather, they were two slender handles. Dad grabbed them both by one hand and put the machine in motion by squeezing and loosening his grip on the handles.

On the haircut day, my brother and I were seated, in turn, in the middle of the kitchen on a stool placed upon a chair, so that we would sit higher and Dad wouldn’t have to stoop down to us.

Mom tightly wound a white bedsheet around the neck of her son—whose turn it was—and fixed it with a clothespin. Then she held a large square mirror in front of the brothers, in turn, while sharing her advice to Dad, who waved her words off with only his nose because his right hand was grabbing the machine while his left hand held the customer’s head and steered it from side to side, from down to back. And even his jaw was busily moving from side to side repeating the movements of the machine’s cutting part.

At times the machine did not cut the hair but pulled at it and that hurt. When that happened, Dad gave out an angry snort and vigorously blew into the machine's underbelly before going on with his work.

Once, the blowing didn’t restrain the critter, it still pulled at the hair and Sasha started to cry. Since that day, we visited the hairdresser salon not only before school was starting after the vacations, but whenever Mom decided that we already got too shaggy….

Photography Dad learned himself from a thick book. His FED-2 camera was fixed inside its brown leather case with a narrow shoulder strap, also of leather. For shooting, you had to unbutton the case from behind, drop the case’s pug-nosed face to dangle under the camera, take pictures and buckle it back.

Unscrewing and taking the camera out of the case was done after its counter indicated 36 clicks which meant there remained no space for another frame and it’s time to replace the film cassette.

The film from the used cassette should be rewound with proper precautions ensuring complete darkness, onto a loose spool in a small round cistern of black plastic with the tightly fitting lid, in which container the film was treated with the developer solution poured inside thru the light-proof hole in the spool’s knob which stuck out thru the lid.

After rotating the spool with the loosely wound film on it for five minutes, the solution was poured out of the cistern, the film washed with freshwater and then treated with rotation in the fixing solution followed by one more washing out. For drying, the film was pinned on a rope just like a usual laundry. But if before the final washing, the film got awkwardly exposed to the tiniest beam of light, it got spoiled and instead of frames, you’d have just a glittering black ribbon of a film, a throwaway.

When there collected several developed films, Dad arranged a photo lab in the bathroom. He covered the bath with two deal shields made for the purpose. They served as the desktop upon which he put the photo-projector with its downward-looking lens. In the photo lab, Dad used a special red lamp, because of photo paper’s exceeding sensitivity, and only the red light didn’t damage it.

The projector was also equipped with a movable light filter of red glass, right beneath the lens, so that light-sensitive photo paper would not become a throwaway while you’re adjusting the image sharpness with the lens.

All frames in the film were negative—black faces with white lips and eye sockets, and the hair whiter than snow. After adjusting the sharpness, the red filter was turned aside so that the crude light from the projector would pour thru the film frame onto the paper, while Dad counted down the seconds needed for exposure and then returned the filter back into its place.

Then the completely white sheet of photo paper was taken from under the projector and put into a small rectangular basin filled with the developer solution, which sat next to the red light lamp whose glowing couldn’t disperse black darkness in the room and only turned it into a sorcerer’s chamber. Under the dim light of the red lantern, commenced the magic in the plastic basin and, on a clean white sheet, there gradually appeared clothes, hair, facial features.

Yet, pictures should not stay in the developer for too long, or their paper would turn into black wet squares. The rightly developed pictures were taken out with the pincers, rinsed in freshwater, and placed in the next small basin with the fixer, otherwise, they would blacken all the same; then, after five to ten minutes, the ready pictures were transferred into a large enamel washing tub filled with water.

When the printing was over, Dad turned on the light in the bathroom, the charmer’s chamber disappeared, giving way to a small workshop. Dad took the wet pictures from the basin, put them face down on Plexiglas sheets and ran rubber roller over their backs so that they stuck well.

Those glasses he leaned against the wall in the parents’ room, and the following day the dried-up photos fell off the glass to strew the floor, like the leaves from the trees in autumn only white-backed, smooth, and glossy.

…here am I with round eyes and the neck bandaged because of a sore throat …

…brother Sasha looking so credulously into the camera …

…Mom alone, or with her friends, or with the neighbors …

…and that is Natasha with her nose up in the air, and the eyes on something else happening to the right, and the ribbon tie in her pig-tail got undone as always…

Besides photography, Dad also was a radio fan, that’s why he subscribed to The Radio magazine full of all kinds of charts.

I liked the smell of melted rosin in the kitchen when he worked with his soldering iron, collecting this or that scheme from The Radio. Once, he assembled a radio receiver a sliver larger than the FED-2 camera case. At first, it was a thin brown board with radio parts soldered to it, then he made a small box of plywood, polished it and varnished, and hid the board inside. There were just two knobs outside the box: one for adjusting the volume and the other for tuning to a radio station. Then he sewed the case for the receiver from thin leather, because he could work with the awl and knew how to alter a common thread into stitching one by twining it and applying wax and pitch. Finally, he attached a narrow shoulder strap to the case so that you could carry it and still have your hands free.

Later on, Dad made a special machine fixed on a stool to do bookbinding, and bound his The Radio magazines into volumes, one for each year. He had just golden hands.

And Mom, of course, had golden hands too because she cooked tasty meals, sewed with her Singer machine, and once a week did general washing in the washing machine “Oka”. At times, she trusted me with squeezing water out of the washing by turning the crank of the wringer fixed on top of the machine. You stick a corner of a washed thing in between its rubber rollers and when you start turning the crank, the washing is pulled thru the wringer, which squeezes brooks of water back into the machine basin. And the thing crawls out behind the rollers thinly pressed and wrung out.

But hanging the washing was a job for adults because there were no linen ropes in the Courtyard and everyone dried their washing in the attic of their house. Only Dad could lift the heavy basin with half-wet things up the vertical iron ladder and thru the hatch above the landing.

However, with his strong, golden, hands, he once created a long-term problem for himself. It’s when he made a “bug” inside the electric meter, so that it would not rotate, even with all the lights on and the washing machine buzzing busily in the bathroom.

Dad said it reduced the bills for electricity, but he feared very much that the controllers would catch us “bugging” and punish with a big fine. Why create so much worries for yourself because of saving on bills?

As for Mom, she never did unreasonable things, except for those yellow corduroy shorts with suspenders, that she sewed for me in the kindergarten. Oh, how I hated them! And, as it turned out, not for naught – in those hateful shorts I was when the red cannibal ants molested me so severely…

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