the most final
concluding work

Bridging the floor is a crucial moment, my first year on the team I was not honored with that responsibility.

The crane carefully downs the brought slab onto two load-bearing walls: the outer and the axial (capital) ones, to span the two of them. The foreman together with a trusted bricklayer lie down with their stomachs across the bridging slab and hang their heads below its underbelly, checking how well it fits in the series of the previously installed ones because the slabs' concrete underbellies become the ceiling in the would-be apartment. If needed, the crane would take the slab up and aside, for the mortar to be added onto a wall, or maybe scraped off. After all, we built for people who would come to live there!

Finally, the exacting peeps of 2 hanging heads feel satisfied by how it flushes with the entire evenness in the previously installed bridging, and the foreman cries out the long-awaited for words: "They'll lap it up!" Which means the future tenants would be happy with the quality of the construction works in their respective homes.

The crane loosens the taut cables, the hooks get released from the loop-holes at both ends of the installed slab and dropped clang-whang onto its concrete upper rim. The crane jib goes up and turns aside, the 4 steel slings with weighty hooks at their ends—the so-called "spider"—swim thru the air in the ascension movement. Jerking, thru the rumble and din, the iron carcass of its open-work tower, the crane rolls off along the track of rails run to the slab stack on top of which Katerina and Vera Sharapova are waiting ready to stick the "spider's" hooks thru the loops in the next slab's end-holes. The technology proved and founded on decades upon decades of implementation…

>~ ~ ~

In the morning at half-past seven, the workforce of SMP-615 gathered at the station square, waiting for their colleagues, arriving by the first local train thru Bakhmuch, Khalimonovo, Khutor Khalimonovo and Kukolka stations, to come up in the waves of other passengers bypassing the corner of the mighty two-story structure of the Konotop railway station. And then, all together, we started to wait for our bus.

We formed a wide circle, not for a dance but to idle the time sharing the news, fresh jokes or looking around to make comments on the not too exuberant life in the station square. There was practically no traffic on it and only other circles from other organizations, yet ours was the widest and jolliest.

Finally, from Club Street there appeared our bus, our Seagull, handled so after the cars of Seagull make transporting delegations of foreign governments from the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow to the Kremlin. It cautiously crossed the streetcar tracks and passed the one-story building of the railway militia station by the corner of the square, then under the cabstand sign on the lamp pillar, though, for some reason, no taxi ever appeared under it. At the end of its slow triumphal circling the square, the bus stopped next to our merry circle to slam its automatic doors open.

From the square, it took us past Loony, past School 12, past the streetcar Depot, to At-Seven-Winds, where our team got off near the 110-apartment block site, and the bus went farther, for another half-kilometer or so, taking the rest of its passengers to the vast grounds of SMP-615 behind the narrow wall of white brick. However, not all of our team workers came by the Seagull, most of them lived in the 50-apartment block or in the hostel barracks, also in At-Seven-Winds, and they arrived on foot.

We changed clothes in the wheelless timber trailer painted brown. About half of its tiny vestibule was crammed with dead-mortar crusted shovels leaned against the wall, over the bunch of well-dented tin pails out of which stuck the handles of our trowels and brick hammers out and hung the coiling fishing-line tails of our plumb bobs. The inner door of the vestibule opened to a low room with one window over the long well-scarred table and a bench to it and two sets of narrow lockers in its both ends. Most of the room was filled with the huge box of asbestos-cement plates covering electric innards of the heater below the frame welded of rebar-rods to throw our padded jackets over it for drying after rain. Yet, the box could also be used for sitting and even stretching over it.

The women of the team doffed and donned in the oversees' trailer. Unlike ours, it had big wheels which called for the steep porch way under the door in the middle of its side wall. The oversees' trailer was tin-coated and had two windows because there were two compartments in it – one for the current oversee and heaps of the blueprint drawings of the project in progress, and the other for our team women.

At night, two pensioner-watchmen slept, alternately, night in, night out, in the oversees' compartment. One of them, by the brave name of Rogov, wore a Pe-Sha tunic with order-and-medal straps, an officer's belt, riding breeches and high boots of chrome leather, and on his head a khaki cloth cap in the fashion of the 1930's, like that worn by Marshal Zhukov when he was still a brigade commander. From under the long cloth visor, there looked the face of a veteran Roman legionary, worn out in campaigns against various barbarian tribes and full of resentment at the head of Konotop pension fund. That sentiment took roots because of the comment, accidentally overheard by Rogov on a visit to the fund office, by which the aforesaid public servant consoled his deputy, exasperated at the stalwart bearing of the veteran. "Patience, colleague, they're already not so too many around."

The second watchman preferred civilian clothes, but earlier in his career, he wore the uniform of a militiaman and subjected tipsy mujiks to self-invented sadistic check: those still capable of articulating "Jawaharlal Nehru" were let go, while the phonetically hopeless ones transported to the sobering-up station.

When on his turn, the former militiaman sealed the window in the oversees' compartment from within with a self-made cardboard trencher. Otherwise, he could not sleep at all because of his service, as a young man, in the troops fighting Bandera resistance, and the windows in their barracks were closed for the night with lumber shields so that the repose of servicemen would not be disturbed by the guerrillas' grenades hurled thru the window panes…

After donning their spetzovka robes, the entire team collected in the men bricklayers' trailer to exchange the news about At-Seven-Winds, the hostel barracks, and SMP-615 itself. Yes, sometimes Gregory Gregoryevich would start bulldozing Grynya that at 8.00 he should stand at the line, chink his trowel and lay a brick upon another. To which Grynya would produce a grunting chortle and readily agree, "Very truly!" Because until the mortar was brought to the site and crane-hauled to the line, the bricklayers had nothing to do up there.

The mortar was brought to the site by a dump truck. It would reverse over the rows of empty sheet-iron boxes, and raise its dump for the mortar to crawl down the steep slope, but it would not drop into the boxes completely. And it's good news if at least half of it had slid out off the dump. Firstly, on the way from the mortar-concrete unit, the mortar had grown dense, squeezing water out from the slush, and it was, for the most part, that very water to fall down into the boxes on the ground. And secondly, the dump floor and sides were not smooth anymore but covered with the ever-growing crust of frozen, upon frozen, upon frozen, mortar from the previous deliveries in winter, or of the dried up, upon dried up, upon dried up, rind in summer. That's why it's necessary to climb the tailgate hanging off behind the dump. It would swing in its hinges under your feet so one of them should be propped against the up-tilted dump's side for stability.

Now, you’re in the position to cut the impacted mortar with your shovel and send swaths of it down onto the heap growing over the boxes. When a cut-off layer of mortar pours in the boxes, the truck dump will give a vigorous jerk-and-quake, getting relieved of the load, at this point, keeping your balance on the tailgate is of vital importance.

The dump truck would go, leaving behind a hillock of mortar over 4 to 5 boxes. But that's wrong because each bricklayer is supposed to have a separate box. Katerina and Vera Sharapova would restore the just distribution with their shovels.

Although each box had 4 hook-loops atop its sides, the riggers hooked the boxes by only 2, diagonally, so that the crane would haul the mortar for 2 bricklayers in 1 go…