the most final
concluding work

In spring Father switched his workplace. He left his job of a locksmith at Car Repair Shop Floor of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant and moved over to Shop Floor 19 at the Konotop Electro-Mechanical Plant, aka KEMZ, aka the “Red Metallurgist” Plant, to embrace the same position there.

The salary of workers at KEMZ was a trifle higher. The trifle’s exact size though I didn’t know, such matters never interested me because it’s Father and Mother who were in charge of getting money, after all. I had cares of my own being up to my chin in CJR, and Club, and all sorts of Groups, not to mention the books non-stop exchanged at the library. Well, kerosene and water fetching were also my responsibility, but if they needed something from the Nezhyn Store, let them send Natasha or Sasha…

Besides his salary, Father earned some side money by repairing TV sets considered hopeless cases even by the specialists at the TV Repair Atelier. About once a month, coming from work, he would collect his pot-bellied satchel of green leatherette with his multimeter tester, soldering iron, some spare vacuum-tubes, and other necessary things before leaving till late at night. Then he’d come back, sozzled pleasantly, and hand Mother a crushed three rubles of earnings. To parry her loud rhetoric disparaging his shameful alcoholic propensity, he reiterated one and the same, unbeatable clue, “Was my drink on you?” Probably, Mother’s eagerness to upgrade his moral standards took roots in her suspicion of 2 more rubles stashed away by Father, I don't know, I've never been keen on monetary matters…

Sometimes, the procedure lasted for two evenings. If so, on the first one, Father came back home sober with neither money nor his satchel left at the client’s khutta until resolving the complicated case. The most critical ones were delivered to our khutta. Father put the dead box on the desk under the only window in the room, where he freed it of its case transferred then out of way onto the wardrobe, so that the desktop held now just the box’s entrails—the electronic tube within the skeleton of aluminum panels with the thick growth of divers radio vacuum-tubes. He would turn it over and over, checking from all sides, muttering, “Well, so what’s that that you want then? Eh, sweetheart?”

In the dead of night, I would be waked by sharp hissing—Father, in the niggardly light from the desk lamp, had brought bouncing white stripes to flick across the tube screen. “So, that’s why you couldn't shoot, girlie! Not loaded you were!”

Then, for a couple of days, we watched the repaired TV because its screen was wider than that of ours until the owner came to take back home the box he’d almost crossed out from his life. So, it’s not in vain that Father made the filings of those The Radio magazines…

Mother also wanted to change her job but couldn’t find any. It was Father who helped her to get a job at KEMZ. He repaired the TV of Personnel Manager there, and when asked about the charge, Father answered he did not want money, let his wife be given a job at the plant. Personnel Manager replied, “No problem, bring her.”

At first, Mother could not believe it, because six months before that same Personal Manager flatly turned her down saying there were no prospects of any jobs there.

When the parents came together, Personal Manager suggested Mother apply for a presser at Pressing Shop Floor. Though they worked in shifts there, the salary depended on the production output, and no one took home less than a hundred rubles. While Mother went to his secretary to fill the application form, Personal Manager laughed and told Father that he remembered her, but the previous time he thought she was pregnant. Women in a family way were not supposed to be given a job, after a month of working they'd get a year of paid maternity leave. Personal Manager wouldn’t be petted for admitting the pregnant but, as it turned out, so was her bodily structure.

That way Mother became a presser at KEMZ. Her job there was filling all kinds of molds with special powders for melting by the heating press to transform them into this or that spare part of plastic. She worked two shifts—a week from eight to five, the following one from five to half to twelve, because of the shortened break for meal.

In summer the press radiated infernal heat, and the molds were awfully heavy all year round, replacing them on the press was a strenuous job. Late at night, the Konotop streetcars ran all too rarely, it took long waits to get from KEMZ to the Under-Overpass after the evening shift. But worse of all was pressing things of the glass wool. The fine glass dust made its way thru the protective robe giving unbearable itch all over the body and even the after-shift shower did not really help.

Yet, as a silver lining to that cloud, both in our khutta and in the yard there appeared a whole bunch of different boxes and thingamabobs made of plastic of different colors because Mother brought home the defectively pressed spare parts or those dented at pulling out from their molds. So what if that one had a chink in the corner? Look, what a classy modern ashtray it makes!. Even Zhoolka got a nice ribbed basin for drinking water… All that because “The Red Metallurgist” production was supposed for all kinds of units and safety systems in the mining industry.

“Mom,” asked I, seemingly under the impression from some of the nihilist-authors, “What’s the meaning in your life? Why do you live at all?”

“Why?” answered Mother, “To see how you grow up and become happy.”

And I shut up because at times I had brains enough not to be too clever…

~ ~ ~

The changes were taking place not only in our part of the khutta. One of the grannies-sisters from the Duzenko’s part returned to her village, and the other moved to her daughter’s, somewhere in the five-story blocks of the Zelenchuk neighborhood, so that they could rent her khutta. A single mother, Anna Sayenko, together with her daughter Valentina moved in as the lodgers.

Valentina was a year older than me but didn’t look that because of being short, red-haired, and skinny. Her nose was pretty long though. In the evenings, she came out to play cards with the 3 of us, the younger and me, on the wide bench under the window overlooking the 2 stairs of their porch way. A very comfortable bench it was, you could safely lean your back against the adobe-plastered wall of the khutta coated with ancient whitewash which left no traces.

During the game, taking advantage of the gathering twilight, I touched Valentina’s shoulder with mine. So soft it was… And everything began to swim… She mostly withdrew, but sometimes not immediately which made my pulse throb quicker, louder, and hotter. But then she stopped coming out for the game. Probably, because of my pressurizing her shoulder too tight…

From the Duzenko’s son-in-law, Father bought the smaller of the 2 sections left by the geezer in the common shed. It was the lean-to on the left, next to the Turkov's fence. Once upon a time, they kept a pig there and, to make it warmer, plastered its outside walls with cob.

Father replaced the Ruberoid roofing felt with a tin roof, though not of new tin, of course. Watching how dexterously he knocked his mallet interlocking the panels of tin, I was amazed at how many skills he had, and also tools for each particular job. Take those tin-cutting scissors, for example, nothing of the kind you could find at stores. No wonder that Skully, whenever in need of a tool, popped up in our khutta, “Uncle Kolya, gimme the hand-drill.” “Uncle Kolya, may I borrow a needle file for a while?”

In the wall opposite the entrance to the acquired section, Father inserted a hinged glazed frame like that in the veranda. The electric wiring was run from our part in the shed, which was the section next to it.

Uncle Tolik applied at his workplace for waste crates, in which chopper spare parts were brought to the RepBase. Those crates were remodeled into the flooring shields. Thus, the lean-to became Father’s workshop equipped with a workbench and vice and everything needed. And the space by the wall, where the sloped roof did not allow standing at your full height, became the stable for Uncle Tolik’s “Jawa”.

With the motorbike moved from our old section in the shed, it grew roomier, even though the remaining crate planks were stacked under its gable-roof.

As usual in summertime, the leaves of the door between the kitchen and the room were taken out of the khutta because shutting the door in hot season left there no air for breathing, and those leaves were placed upon the planks beneath the shed roof.

A heap of insignificant, unnecessary details, eh? Yet, all those moves had a tremendous effect because when giving it a proper thought, you’ll find a way for cardinal improvements… And now, with a mattress placed upon the door leaves, the shed section became my summer dacha.

The bed-upon-the-door was about at the same level as the upper sleeping bunk in a train car compartment, yet wider. On the nearby wall, Father fixed a sliding lamp with a tin shade, and I could read at night as long as I chose. Besides, I equipped my dacha with a small radio receiver “Meridian” presented to Father by a customer delighted by the resurrection of his TV. The generous gift, of course, was not working, yet in a couple of weeks, Father found the necessary spare parts and my place became the second to none. You could read whenever you wanted and, for a change, listen to the radio. And, most importantly, no one around to start carping, “When will you turn off this light already?!” or, “Enough of that hurdy-gurdy!”

So, in that elevated position, all alone, was lying I next to the cone of the light shed over the pages in an open book till midnight and past it in the serenity of summer night. The dog barking in the yards of khuttas on the nearby streets did not count because it was just part of it.

One of them would start for another to snap up, and then still another continued the chain reaction of barking that floated far and wide over the Settlement. Only our Zhoolka hardly ever took part in their concerts, having grown too old and lazy. And—just a thought—what if you put together all the dog barking, adding even that beyond your hearing, eh? I mean, now the Settlement dogs had calmed down for a stretch, yet the dogs in Podlipnoye kicked up a fit of barking rising and flowing on the night air and so on and on, over into the next regions, countries, and continents. It turns out then that, as a whole, dog barking would, probably, never subside on the Earth, right?. And that’s what they call the Planet of Humans!.