the most final
concluding work

On arrival, it turned out just outskirts with a construction site in the remnants of a windbreak belt, the project of a nine-story residential building of two sections whose walls of white silicate brick reached already about half of their height.

The commander of our team-squad brought us to a tall hillock of bricks piled up by the dump trucks and ordered to stack bricks on pallets. Each pallet was just four thick planks, one-meter-and-twenty in length, nailed to a pair of crosswise beams, 90 cm x 6 cm x 6cm, which became the pallet's footing so that the steel cable slings of the tower crane would easily pass beneath the pallet’s underbelly. Twelve courses of bricks upon the pallet (some 300 bricks, all in all) made for about one cubic meter of masonry, but the bricks had to be stacked into courses retaining the bond pattern, so that the pallet load wouldn't pour down when hoisted by the crane to transport bricks to the bricklayers up the walls.

In fact, the job was not overly exhaustive, but doing it, we learned that silicate dust gnaws into your palm skin and it smarts, but they gave us no protective mitts… Grisha Dorfman examines plaintively looked his bare hands…

Besides, the white silicate dust clings fast to your outfit and is really hard to shake off, but they never bothered to give us any overalls…

The same truck took us back to the detachment for the midday meal. The passers-by on the sidewalks did not care to watch a squad of conbatists in the bed of a vehicle rolling by.

After the fork off the highway outside the city, the truck bypassed a clump of industrial buildings on the right roadside at which sight the buddies from our team-squad kicked up crazy yell-and-whistle waving in that direction, like a pack of football fans whizzed in the truck-bed past their team entering the field.

Vitya Strelyany reluctantly explained that was a Zona there, which made it crystal-clear—the ex-cons’ solidarity…

From work, we were brought at dusk already. The evening roll-call following the supper was run by First Company Commander, Captain Pissak.

The servicemen fell into two ranks with the youngs (so was the law) in the front one. Facing the company personnel, Captain Pissak called the roll never looking up from the list, he just listened to the calls in answer:

"Here!"

"Here!"

"Here!"

He needed no visual clues and was able to determine the current state of a serviceman merely by the timbre of the voice yelling his "Here!" in response.

When the roll-call list reached the youngs, Pissak was approaching and standing still against each of the new "Here!" to shortly and silently examine your face with the unblinking gaze from under the black visor in his forage cap. Then he called out the next one.

That was enough – you got fixed in his photographic memory for two years ahead and one month later, instead of, "What's your name, private?" he would say, "Private Ogoltsoff!"

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

"Are you thief-swaggering?"

"No, Comrade Captain!"

"Then why is your belt-buckle dangling by your balls? Sergeant Batochkin!"

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

"Five fatigues to private Ogoltsoff."

"Yes, Comrade Captain!"

Well, yes, when we were approaching the nine-story building site, I loosened the belt over my tunic a bit, how could I know he would pop up from behind the trees in the windbreak?.

That day I tried my best to curry favor with the Sergeant who sent me to plane the ground with a spade for the subsequent installing of the curbstones. I did some fucking great job! Two hundred meters if not more, in the hope that the Sergeant, seeing my zeal, would blink at the fatigues.

"Two conbatists full of vigor

substitute a backhoe digger…"

2 passers-by on the nearby sidewalk were so impressed with my working style, that approached me with an invitation to partake in wine from the bottle they carried.

"No. Thank you! I cannot."

At the evening roll-call, the Sergeant beckoned me with his finger – "on the floors!"

"On the floors" meant – when all would get in their bunk beds, you sweep the aisle as well as the passages in the koobriks, bring water from the washstand trough by the sorteer and perform wet cleaning of the entire sixty-seven-meter-long barrack with its koobriks and the vestibule.

Do it in two steps. Step One: with a thoroughly drenched rag, rub each fucking inch in the linoleum flooring. Step Two: wash the rag, squeeze dry and repeat Step One. And the oftener you change the water for drenching, the better so that there remained no bleary spots in the linoleum and you won’t be commanded to do the whole toil anew.

Then go and report to the on-duty Sergeant the job waits for checking. And if he accepted it at once, you could go to bed and be happy about not being sent that evening "on the floors" to the Canteen. Now you might flake out on your bunk bed and the moment your head touched the pillow you'd hear, "Companyeeeeee! Get uuuup!"

~ ~ ~

"They took Vanya to the nuthouse."

"What Vanya?"

"Come on, you knows yoursel. The scar in his pate."

"What for?"

"Did not get up in the morning. Says mice crept into his high boot."

"Dodging, or gone fucking nuts?"

"Who fucking knows? They’ll check there."

The first day-off we had in August. Till then from half-past eight till dark they kept us slavering on construction sites.

And—all of a sudden—a whole Sunday in the detachment grounds. The youngs washed their dusted smelly uniforms. They placed the washing on the brick wall along the trafficless road and roamed outside the barracks in black underpants, white tank-tops, and kirza high boots, like those sporty Fritzes with Schmeisser guns in the movie "One Chance In a Thousand".

During the period till the first day-off, our team-squad dropped the habit of saluting the roadside Zona by scream-and-shout. And going to the sorteer in the mornings of clear weather, we didn't stop in our tracks anymore to stare at the faraway wonder – the snow-clad top of the Elbrus Mountain hovering in the sky over the pigsty. Private Alimonov, aka Alimosha, taught me to smoke a stub of cigarette "Prima", chiseled from buddies, until there remained three millimeters of the tobacco-wrapping paper tube…

And one time we even got the payment. The Master Sergeant of First Company, a gray-haired man under 50, well imbibed, called us, one by one, to his ware-room and meted out one-ruble-plus to each, adding a piece of white cloth for under-collars, a pair of shoe polish cans, and a spool of threads for sewing up the under-collars after washing them. But in the pay-roll, we signed for 3 rubles and 80 kopecks each because everyone knew, whoever you’d ask, that the monthly payment of a private in the Soviet Army was 3 rub. 80 kop., that was as indisputable an axiom as that about the Volga River and the Caspian Sea…

Midsummer, at one of the evening roll-calls, the company zampolit announced sending to my wife, at her request, the reference certifying I was in the army.

"You did not say you were married, Goly!"

"You didn't ask."