the most final
concluding work

People started making wry faces at me as early as the bus station near the Izmaylovo Park, where the Ryazan-Moscow bus arrived. At Zhulyany airport in Kiev, where I disembarked the midnight flight from Moscow, the hostile attitude to me from the folks around increased exponentially to confirm the correctness of the old saying – people judge you by your zek outfit.

The public opinion on my account was voiced in the morning by a passenger on the platform in the underground metro station, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"

I differed from them by my being a black man. The black padded jacket, black pants, black army boots. Only the "cock" hat on my head fell out of the ensemble with its brown and blue stripes. It would seem more or less excusable were I loaded with some kind of luggage, but a black man with his hands in his pockets is outrageous, it's a challenge to the social order, it's a cheeky bomzh… We bypass them with an unseeing glance, so that to avoid any eye contact—save, God!—or we bark, "Where the fuck do you barge thru among the people?"

True, in those days we did not know the word bomzh yet, and for such sort of people, they used the term bych. "Where do you barge, you bych?.. Get out of here, fucking bych!"

The word was brought by the seamen who had sailed abroad. There, in the port cities, the drifters spending nights on the beach, collecting the scraps and offal left by vacationers were called "beach-combers". Our people did not care for the whole word and borrowed only the first half of it. So the folks without a certain place of residence and of obscure occupation got labeled byches. A short, biting term. However, it died out.

Firstly, those who did not speak English and never went to the sea began to slip into synonyms, substituting knoot (which in Russian means "whip") for bych that in Russian also means "whip". And, secondly, abbreviations are always stronger, especially when supported by the state.

When the law enforcement organs abbreviated the "without a certain place of residence" that turned in Russian into BOMZh, other terms had no chance for survival.

In the great and mighty Russian language, you cannot find a synonym to bomzh. The nearest to it "tramp" or "bum" smack of mothballs and infantile lisp of the Indian cinema…

Once upon a time in Russia there lived peddlers, aka offenny. In order to survive, they invented a language of their own. Dark for uninitiated, the Offenny language went into oblivion together with its carriers – no one bothered to compose its dictionary.

The current fenya of the criminal world is also for initiated but has nothing to do with the defunct Offenny except for echoing the latter's name. Considering fenya the language of Russian mafia is not correct because from Russian it borrowed only grammatical structures, and the vocabulary is fairly international. Kicked out of secondary school, half-educated students when continuing their careers as jail-birds poured in fenya the bits and scraps of words they heard at foreign language classes. That way fenya feathered its hat with atas! (from the French "l’attention!"), haza (from the German "Hause"), havvat (from the English "have a"), as well as manifold borrowings from the languages in the family of friendly and free brother nations fused into the common, unsplittable, USSR.

The champion for the public fundamental morals, who offended me in the metro, had no notion that under the appearance of a black man there lived in me a vulnerable tender soul as well as the digestive tract of a delicate constitution. I did not suspect it myself until I felt how, after the mentioned insult, I gradually became "mournful in the belly" because the intestines began revolting after the traumatic discovery that in public eye they were a constituent part of a bum.

About the Maidan, which then was named Square of October Revolution, it became clear that I could not hold back the pressure of the tides that stormed the ampoule (which follows the large intestine) and that there remained no hope for reaching the greens by the University, with the only public toilet known to me in the downtown part of Kiev. Fortunately, I remembered the Ministry of Education with their ministerial toilet on the second floor, and not too far from the square, it’s only that the intemperately intensive rioting within my system called for additional suppressive efforts…

I flung the tall entrance door open and rushed, in a concentrated jog, up the marble stairs.

"Hey! Where?" shouted the attendant from the chair to the left from the entrance.

"Plumbing system check," reported I over my shoulder, without slowing down the businesslike strides…

When all the sorrows subsided, I left the restroom, polished like a malachite jewelry case, and descended the wide white stairs, with the demeanor of archangel Gabriel in dignified idle stroll and, maybe, even gleaming blissfully.

I wanted to share the Good News and, turning my face to the attendant, informed benevolently, "Hey, look! The check says it's okay around here. Yea!." And I went out into the blatantly atheistic Karl Marx Street, between two dense walls of the like, severely administrative, buildings.

~ ~ ~

My visit to Kanino kicked off the rise of national self-awareness within me. For a descendant of Novgorodian ushkuynik robbers and Tatar raiders, who for centuries were raping Ryazan womenfolk, taking turns with less stable, accidental, bands of fuckers, it was not appropriate, and even disreputable, to earn my living by giving hugs, on a daily basis, to the stinking undisinfectioned shit of rags when shoving them into the press box.

So, for the first time in my working career, I applied for firing me on the strength of my own free will. Now, in my workbook, the disparaging Article 40 got obscured by the perfectly acceptable standard record "dismissed on the application"—who would look any deeper?—and I went to hire on in the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.

Everything went without a hitch, I had smoothly past the medical checks but at the final stage, already at the personnel department, I suddenly heard "no go". Why not?

As it turned out, there remained no quota for me. The head of the personnel department exposed it in detail, that there were tacit but strict regulations forbidding to hire a person with higher education to become a workman among the workforce of fewer than 1000 undiplomized employees. In the plant collective of 5000, there remained no extra thousand to allow for my case, some sons of a bitch with diplomas arrived before me and exhausted the quota.

So I went to the city outskirts opposite the Settlement, to the "Motordetail" plant where I was hired on as a bricklayer in the Construction Shop Floor. The bastards with diplomas had not infiltrated yet the large modern enterprise.

If we subtract the havvage in its canteen, the plant "Motordetail" stood out as a crystal-like embodiment of dream model for an industrial enterprise and a casual walk over its Construction Shop Floor was enough to confirm the statement. The spacious locker rooms attractively paneled with tiling in brown colors of the spectrum were combined with as spacious (and also tiled, not just cemented) shower rooms. The recollection of the said conveniences, waiting for you at the end of the day, would warm your heart during the working hours.

I knew my job and was used as a bricklayer-loner for non-standard tasks in separate spots of application. They would equip me with a pair of helpers to fetch bricks and mortar and—off we drive!—the drum brickwork of wall in an underground water well, or erecting chimneys over the roofs in two-apartment cottages…

I liked the frequent change of tasks: each one required a special approach and circumspection which kept your mind from slipping into sloth and your spine from growing stiff. And for the periods of relative calm between the missions, I was sent to the team of bricklayers at the construction of the 130-apartment block for the plant employees in the neighborhood adjacent to the plant. The team there were no aces, but it was they to live in what they built…

Neither in the locker room nor with the team was I a dream gossip. When asked of something, I would reply and then again keep silent while indetectably talking to myself in my mind… Besides, my helpers were replaced way too often. Their rotation was seen to by Narcological Department 2, shortened to Narco-2.

Narco-2 constituted the crucial part in the conveyor production of slaves.

Slaves in the epoch of Developed Socialism? Well, let’s not forget the spiral-like advancing of the historical progress. The system worked as follows: a militia van rushed into a village and grabbed a pair of mujiks indicated by the village council chairman as prone to alcohol consumption. (And who is not?)

The catch was brought to Narco-2 for the treatment of alcoholism. Anyone entertaining an indecently high opinion of his human rights got a shot of sulfur and, until the end of the treatment, he carefully avoided risks of picking up the subject any more…

The treatment term spanned from 2 to 3 months. The patients lived in the hostel, ate their havvage in the canteen, worked wherever they would send them.

NO PAYMENT FOR THEIR WORK

All of their payment was withheld as reimbursement for their accommodation, havvage, and medical care. The mentioned medical care was the pills dispensed to the patients after the working day, which they immediately flushed down the toilet.

If keeping a low profile, they were allowed to visit their villages on weekends…

In cities, Step 1 in the procedure was simplified. The precinct militia officer announced to the drunks on his beat whose turn it was to go for the treatment and they knew they'd be better off if falling in line.