the most final
concluding work

The part of wall in the process of being laid by the team was called "the seizure". A string, aka the shnoorka, was tightly stretched from end to end of the seizure. Usually, shnoorka was a thick fishing line smeared with stuck, dried up, mortar, the knots in its length marked places where a strike of an incautious trowel had cut it up, giving rise to reproving exclamations from along the seizure, "Again? What son of a bitch was it?!." The shnoorka served for maintaining the right direction and horizontal leveling of the brick courses so everyone paid it close attention…

To the right of a bricklayer, the crane left a box, aka banka, full of mortar. The boxful of mortar was not exceedingly large – just about a quarter of one ton. When the banka-box got emptied, the crane took it off to the riggers for refilling from the remaining or newly brought heap of mortar. The boxed mortar gradually lost its elasticity but then you had to simply add water fetched in a crumpled pail from the multi-ton container standing nearby, behind the seizure, and temper the “dirt” applying your shovel. That's why a shovel handle stuck out from each box. However, the main purpose of the shovel was to put the mortar from the box onto your part in the seizure. Then the shovel returned to its stuck up posture in the box, and the mortar dumped onto the wall was spread by the bricklayer using their trowel, a tool approximately the size of a large kitchen knife with a triangular spade substituting for the blade.

To the left from a bricklayer, there stood a pallet of bricks, 3 to 4 hundred pieces stacked in dense rows on top of each other. Snatching a brick from the upper row, the bricklayer laid it upon the spread mortar and tap-tapped with the tin-clad end of the trowel handle, so as to level the brick to the line dictated by the stretched shnoorka.

When the course bond called for a brick of special size—a half, a three-quarter, or (the smallest) a one-fourth piece—the bricklayer's hammer was used to gauge the brick by cutting off the excess. After the bricks on the pallet were finished off, the crane operator delivered another one, hooked by Katerina and Vera Sharapova from among the pallets stacked on the ground.

The rhythmic change of interlinked movements—stooping, stretching, turning, bending—transformed the labor process, taking into account its outdoor nature, into a real aerobics sprinkled with a weeny admixture of weightlifting. Looped, consistently ordered, motion, which you might even call spiraling. Do you follow?

And now spit in the eye of that pathetic bullshit and forget it, because the construction site is not a circus with evenly smoothed sand in its arena. Construction site is a danger zone, where spiky ends of rebar-rods lurk in dark nooks, a seemingly firm board snaps off under your foot, a pail of boiling tar falls from the roof, and you’re a lucky devil if the warning yell "run!" makes you jump aside without needless gaping skyward: what's up? Flump!!

It is the place, where a cast-iron heating radiator hits the ground by the wall, hurled from a window on the fourth floor by a criminal having recently returned from his another stretch in Zona. He was not targeting anyone personally and threw it just so, without ever looking out to check who might have their pate cracked open by God’s will.

On the whole, a construction site could be compared to life itself, and there, just as in life, one must not only live but also survive. (Excuse my recidivistic falling back into the rut of pathos.)

Still, it's worth mentioning that bricklayers are not robots but mere humans. And humans, when being cornered properly enough, would take your dear life to save the life of theirs… That is…er…what was it I was about?. Ah, yes!. Construction site.

At a construction site, there's no time for a bricklayer to glide thru whimsical interpretations of esoteric messages from the initiated to the chosen, neither for the deciphering of signs drawn in the sky by ever-changing clouds. Wait for a smoke break, and then play with your irrelevant or over-insightful thoughts, shuffle the puzzle-pieces of signs and symbols of varying significance to your heart's content, read and learn the crypt-glyph messages written with white on blue. Until Mykola the foreman had risen the shnoorka for the next course and yelled along the seizure line: "Off we drive!" To which call Peter Lysoon would respond despondently: "What? Again to attack? And which way lies your "forward"? And that is the signal to grab your shovel, splat dirt atop the wall in progress, and start to live on further…

>~ ~ ~

Eera did not believe in labor therapy in the open, she had more trust in folkloric remedies. That winter she took me to the sorcerer in the district center of Ichnya, in the Chernigov region. We arrived there late in the evening amid the early thickening winter twilight. There was about half-hour before the bus departure back, and the local kids, with some kind of pride, directed us to the sorcerer's khutta.

The door was opened by a regular rural woman of middle age and the rest of the interior was as ordinary, strapped of any hexerei. In the kitchen, there was a pair of visitors, but not from our bus, I would have remembered them. Probably, from somewhere in the neighborhood. A young couple they were, seemingly newlywed, both seated at the table with the man busy shoving away a bowlful of borsch, and she, like, overseeing. Not quite the right time for borsch though, but I did not intervene – might be the sorcerer prescribed it in the way of medication…

The woman led Eera to the next room, and two minutes later they came back together with the sorcerer, a black-haired man about 50 in a khaki shirt from the army parade-crap. We looked at each other, unblinkingly, and he returned to his room with Eera. I stayed with the borsch-eater and the 2 women.

Soon Eera came back, all excitedly wound up, and we left for the bus. On our way to Nezhyn, Eera shared that I was the way I was because they had fed a "giving" to me, and there occurred an overdose, but it was useless to treat me on that particular day since it was a wrong "quarter", that is the moon was not in the right phase. (Or could they run out of the borsch?.)

The sorcerer also said that I did not need to come on a visit anymore, and should be replaced with someone from my blood relatives. Later, instead of me, my sister Natasha a couple of times went with Eera to the district center of Ichnya.

I have no trust in any charms, neither in spells, nor in any other hooey of the kind, but when you chink your trowel against brick or turn the mortar with the shovel, your head remains, basically, free and lots of things may slowly twirl in there.

~ ~ ~