the most final
concluding work

The supply of foraged potatoes could see me thru the whole week, however, potatoes alone somehow did not satiate, even if sprinkled with the salt found in the common kitchen… The artist noticed when in the Red Corner room I lifted a dried bread roll, forgotten by someone on a windowsill, and ate it, hiding in my fist. He reported the incident to the head of the personnel department.

The grumpy geezer, in the unvarying mask of disdain on the face, came to Red Corner, already empty of the business trippers of whom I was the last one, and demanded explanations for so strange an action.

The money was lost from my bag.

Stolen? Who?

I knew nothing. There had been 10 rubles which were there no more.

The mask twitched in disgust and he walked out. Soon, I was summoned to his office where he informed me that my business trip papers would be stamped for the entire stretch (there still remained 3 more days) but I had to perform an urgent work: a KAMAZ truck had dumped its load of sand at a wrong place in the yard, so the sand had to be moved, yet not by a bulldozer whose caterpillars would mangle the fresh asphalt.

It took me 2 or 3 hours to shovel the sand behind the kinda screen of too small pots with the doomed Fir-tree babies. I was paid 10 rubles for the job, which money I immediately received from the cashier in the accountancy office. The local train ticket to Konotop was 4 rubles plus. So I went to a grocery store, bought a bottle of vodka, transparent as a tear of separation, something there for a snack, and returned to the Red Corner room. Together with the artist, we drank that vodka for the success of the poetry collection whose pages had to be turned backward…

~ ~ ~

The overhaul at the Konotop recycle factory was headed by Yura, one of the 3 workmen at the unit. He loved to laugh and did it ably, exposing the fixture of white metal on his fang. In the white-and-black films they usually portrayed Komsomol leaders looking like him and only the fix did not fit the image.

The second overhauler was Arsen, cross-eyed, but not too much so. He put on the airs of a dignified aqsaqal, despite his young age. The reason for his tremendous pride was having the son who reached the age of 2 years already.

I hit it off with Arsen, but Yura with his stalking horse of laughter kept trying hard to crush me, most likely, because of his aversion to my higher education. I did not tell anyone about the fact, but those 4 years were recorded in my workbook now kept in the personnel department of the factory, and Yura spent lots of time in the administration barrack, readily laughing along with everyone there. The main impediment to establishing friendly relations between us 2 were my quotations as well as sharing news from Morning Star. Arsen, for his part, tried his best to pacify our feud.

Once talking to Arsen, I cited certain lines from the work of Karl Marx On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

I did not draw Arsen's attention to all those details, keeping down to a short quotation from the work itself. Yura, who happened about, suddenly snapped in demanding that I never ever dare start provocative talks like this in his presence because he was a communist and knew where to give a phone call on statements of that sort.

For the first time in our clashes, the last word remained by him. He dumbfounded me with his threat to halloo the KGB at the founders of Marxism-Leninism. And that's no fun, they would easily run them down, for all I know…

Another time, I was depicting to Arsen the Wagner's ballet about Scottish witches which I attended during the business trip to Kiev. Dancing a solo dance, one of the hexes stumbled and with a wooden knock fell flat onto the stage floor.

"Ha-ha-ha!" cheerfully reacted Yura on his visit to the overhaul room from the administration barrack.

"And imagine, Arsen, in the whole hall there was not a single jerk to laugh at her. She got up and danced on, showed her high mettle, you know."

And Yura also showed that it was not in vain that he spent so much time by the administration. As a result, I was transferred to the factory’s production section, to embrace the position of a presser…

What, actually, was Rags? It served a place where freight cars were bringing rubbish sorted at garbage dumps. Discarded dreck clothing for the most part, as well as waste paper.

Women from the nearby village of Popovka dissected the tatters with the howling disks of their machine tools and sorted the rugs again into soft mounds on the cemented floor in the aisle between their workplaces – cotton tatters, knitted rags, artificial fur collars from winter coats, etc.

Day after day they stood in front of their machine tools in dusty spetzovka wear with dangling clusters of safety pins on their chest, which they detected and pulled out from fabrics so that the steely trifles did not damage the disk. Such grapes of pins made them evil-eye-proof forever…

Time and again, 2 loaders approached those rag mounds with a deep box on long poles, like a sedan chair. Their faces were wrapped with bandannas, in the style of bank robbers, so as not to inhale the dense clouds of dust hanging around the machine tools. They piled rags high into their box and carried to the neighboring pressing section, pacing in a precipitated half-trot. That jogging gait was dictated by the weight of the load.

The press was also a box but it had a door and no poles because it stood on the floor, anchored to its place. With the door open, you needed, first of all, to put over the box bottom 2 thin and narrow metal strips, aka shinka, leaving their ends out of the box. Then you had to line the box from inside with a couple of throwaway burlap sacks and lock the door with a hook outside. After stuffing the box with the trash brought by the loaders, you hit one of the 3 buttons on the press side. The electric motor, fixed atop the press shield over the box, started to creak and howl, and crept down the shaft, pushing the shield also down. It pressed the trash towards the bottom as deep as it could. When the pitch of the motor howling rose to whine, it meant the motor had done all it could and didn't have power to squeeze any firmer. At that point, you hit the "stop" button and then the button "up". The shield with the motor started the reverse creeping, up the shaft. Those ups and downs, the press executed really slowly.

Then you filled the hollow, produced in the box by the shield's cyclic travel, stuffing in additional armfuls of trash because the readied bale should weigh about 60 kg. After the third going down, the shield was stopped to keep all that in place while you tied tightly the ends of shinka about the produced, roughly cubic, bale. There remained only to send the shield up and roll the readied bale out of the box. The farther away you rolled it over the floor the better, it wouldn’t now be in the way of the upcoming bales.

About the press, there gradually accumulated a flock of bales and then Misha the loader came with a two-wheel barrow. He shoved the bottom shelf of the barrow under the bale and yanked the handles toward himself. The bale lay upon the handles, propped by the shelf from behind, and Misha dragged the barrow to the exit from the pressing section.

Near the exit gate, there stood the booth of Valya the weigher, with a large luggage scales next to it. Misha toppled the bale onto the scales and, having dipped a short stick into a tin can with red paint, wrote on the burlap wrapping of the bale figures of its weight, which Valya yelled to him thru the glass of her booth because Misha was old and half deaf. Then he dumped the bale from the scales, heaved it onto his two-wheel barrow again, and rolled it out of the pressing section into the open air, and there along the path of crippled concrete into the Quonset Hut for the processed product…

When an empty railway freight car came to the dead-end track by the Hut, the team of loaders stacked the bales into the car and it was driven away, no matter where, probably, to some factories for further processing of recyclables…

In the pressing section, there was only 1 window crusted with the dust accumulated there from the period of the First Five-Year Plan. The illumination was served by dim yellowish bulbs, one over each of the 4 presses. True, one of them did not work after donation some of it parts to the remaining 3 manned by 2 operators in the pressing section.

The production norm for a presser was 32 bales per shift. I hardly turned them out during the working day, while the other presser, another Misha, who lived with Valya the bale weigher, would have finished the norm ahead of time and left, whistling haphazard airs. He was more experienced presser and did not put excessive quantities of rags into the press box, while my bales showed abnormal overweight. Misha the loader would shake his deaf head disapprovingly, scribbling with the dipped stick "78" or "83" on the bales of my production. Then he, with a grunt, heaved the bale onto the barrow and dragged it out, because he was a strong old man. He was silent by nature and never reprove me. But I felt guilty all the same because I could not catch the hang of guessing the weight of the rags stuffed into the press box…

Apart from the midday break, there were 2 more half-hour breaks, just for having rest. We spent them in the common large room with lockers alongside 2 of its walls. In the wall opposite the door, there were 2 windows large enough to make the room light because the dust stuck to them was not quite opaque. 4 square tables with white plastic-cover tops were put in a close row under the windows, forming one common table for the midday meal, with long plank benches along its sides. That was the locker room of pressers and loaders who changed their clothes there. However, in the midday break, the Popovka women also came in because at theirs there was not a table to have a meal at.

I did not havvat there. For the midday meal, I traveled to the canteen of the "Motordetail" plant… After crossing the railway track, I went over the field and turned away from the city limit into the windbreak belt to follow the trail between the trees and bushes there to the terminal of Streetcar 1, opposite the plant check-entrance. The whole journey took 15 to 20 minutes.

It was a very modern plant, and thru the glass walls of the canteen on the second floor, there opened the view on the field from where I was coming. And there were no problems at the check-entrance, anyone in a spetzovka was considered a workman at the plant. The havvage portions at the canteen were small but cheap, and for a couple of hours after you did not feel hungry.

Sometimes, the bale weigher Valya ordered to bring her a custard cake from the canteen. On the way back, when crossing the railway track in front of pulled up locomotives in the head of their freight trains waiting for "the green" to pass thru the Konotop junction, I made attempts at bribing the locomotives with the cake wrapped in a piece of paper. They had such good-natured faces with beards in red paint coat, like the image in the sail on the Kon-Tiki raft. But they remained incorruptible.

“Well, as you please, then!" and I was taking the cake to the bale weigher Valya…