the most final
concluding work

Olga, Konotop, the Plant, the dances seemed something unreal, like dreams seen in another, far away, life. I was receiving letters from her, “…and in the evenings when I see how girls are walking with their guys and I am all alone and by myself it hurts so that I am crying…”

There were also letters by Mother, both brother and sister wrote a couple of times.

I did not know what to write in response. "Hello, I've received your letter, many thanks for it.."

And then? What else to write? "…in two winters, in two summers…"?

Nothing entered my head. And I already couldn't think a single simple thought without "fuck" and "fucking" within it. Such a fucking dickhead!

Just think of it, even to my closest kin people there remained nothing but the feeling of detachedness in me. Detachedness?

Well, something like what I felt when in the thickening twilight we were sitting already in the bed of a truck beneath the white wall in the unfinished nine-story building and waited for a grandpa-bricklayer changing into his uniform.

Another grandpa, in the truck bed already, started heckling Misha Khmelnytsky—just so, to idle the time—for his being a Ukrainian, aka Khokhol.

Misha, averting his eyes, muttered that, no, he was not a Ukrainian and it's only that kind of the last name. The rest of the youngs sat in silence. The grandpa started to scoff – what a lousy draft they brought from Ukraine with not a single Khokhol!

"Okay, I'm a Khokhol, so what of that?"

Only when those words somehow echoed back from the brick wall looming whitish thru the dark, I realized that it was me who said it. It's strange to hear yourself from outside so unexpectedly. Some weird self-detachedness. The grandpa shut up. And really – what of that? Or of anything else?.

Later, Misha Khmelnytsky revealed to me that he also was married, adding intimate details of how he always had the itch to take a leak into his wife's cunt after he cum, just for fun, but it never came out.

Making no comments, I rejoiced in my mind that the evolution process of the homo sapiens species anticipated an anatomical mechanism to prevent fucking jokes of such fucked in the head funny fuckers…

Of course, my comrades-in-arms did not use the terms like "evolution" or "sapiens" in everyday communication, however, it cost them no noticeable effort to recite by heart the unrhymed lines of one or another article from the Penal Code of the USSR.

"What was you locked up for?"

"Article six hundred seventeen, part two ‘by aggravating circumstances’."

"Brain-fucker, you! There's no such article!."

"Introduced recently, for chronic cannibalism."

It turned out that tattoo was not just an ornamental decoration but an esoteric message for the initiated, it reported of what exactly crime convicted, how high arisen in Zona Table of Ranks the wearer of the tattooed skin was. The inmates with life terms were distinguished by the tattoos on their foreheads running "Slave of the USSR".

But then again, not all were the same. One of my buddies returned from Zona with neat 3 words on his forearm in quite a modest typeface – 'in vino veritas'. With such a tattoo one easily may pass off for a Philosophy Doctor. Some fucking Latinist…

There were certain taboos too. An attempt at exaggeration of personal achievements by means of a tattoo faking his status in the criminal milieu by ornamentations which he was not entitled to, called for a severe, brutal—at times the capital—punishment.

And one should also be careful about using the word "waffles". After we got that half-ripped-off payment, Alimosha visited the hut of Military Store by the gate and, pointing his finger at a pack of waffles, asked the saleswoman, "Gimme of those grid biscuits." Yet, the trick did not save him.

"Hey, Alimosha! Got missing waffles, eh?"

"Go and fuck yourself!" snapped Alimosha back.

The innocent word of "waffles” in Zona cant became "sperm swallowed at doing head", thence the pun.

Besides play on words, there happened practical jokes as well… After the midday meal, we were standing by the gate waiting for the truck. Sasha Khvorostyuk and Vitya Strelyany had razor-shaved their heads the night before and stood out among us with white-skinned pates above their densely tanned mugs.

"I say, would I look a dick if there was a scratch across my pate now?" asked me Vitya.

"No worry, buddy, you look it just as is with no scratch at all."

"Do me a favor, grab my ears and jerk it. Please, O, please!"

Who would refuse so earnest appeal of a buddy? Naturally, I did as asked.

"Ptui-ptui-ptui-ptui..."

I did not get it immediately – the white saliva of tiny spits dribbled on my tunic chest.

"I cum…" explains Vitya…

A truck pulls up by the checkpoint with a team-squad of plasterers of our draft, but from Dnepropetrovsk. They walk thru the open gate. Five dippers shoot from the checkpoint door besetting a mighty young, like a pack of wolves hunting a bull.

But no, he turns out a too hard prey for them, and the pack retreats uttering threats. The bull picks up his cap knocked off in the skirmish.

We kept the policy of non-interference to the internal affairs of Third Company. The driver of the arrived truck honked us to climb into the back…

~ ~ ~

The walls of the nine-story building were laid even at night in the light from a garland of electric bulbs suspended above the wall-portion-in-progress. Two soldiers from our draft were transferred to the night shift – a lanky buddy who worked as a bricklayer before the army, and me.

He was immediately integrated into the line of the servicemen laying the brick-course, and I got a shovel to bring the mortar, aka "dirt", from a nearby iron box and splash it onto the growing wall.

Outside the other wall in the dark of night, there loomed the motionless tower crane with the dim spot of the soldier operator's face in his cab below the crane-beam.

The bricklayers, in turn, entreated the operator to hoist a kettle of drinking water for them, but he was too lazy to climb all the way down the ladder inside the crane's tower and back up again because there was no one down there to fill the kettle with water from the water pipe by the mound of mortar on the ground.

Finally, one of the bricklayers climbed on a pallet with bricks, grabbed the steel cables of the "spider" (the bundle of four steel cables donned on the crane's main hook) and stepped up onto two smaller spider hooks hanging by idly.

The operator switched on the wail-and-rumble of his crane, raised and turned away the beam, carrying the figure standing on the hooks far down, where a lonely light-bulb outlined the mortar mound. (Safety regulations? The royal troops lived by the concepts of their own.)

From down there, the crane brought a pallet of bricks with the filled kettle atop. The pallet was put by the wall between the working bricklayers, then they commanded the operator to take the cables away.

One of the spider's hooks caught the young bricklayer, stooping over the wall with a trowel in his hand, by his belt cinched over the pea-jacket, and lifted him into the air.

The rise was not extremely high – about a meter or so, because of the whistles and cries from all the sides calling to put him back down.

The operator executed the command and the incident was over, but what did the buddy live thru while hanging up in the air and kicking his long legs and shouting "enough! enough!"?

Then the bricklayers' Sergeant-foreman went to the far corner of the erected section, stood on the wall edge and took a leak down onto the distant remnants of the windbreak belt, in an arc-shaped glinting squirt of dashes reflecting the bulb-garland lights.

"There’s no nicer sight

Than when you piss from the hight.."

He jumped off the corner and joined the bricklayers' line to go on with laying the wall…

Not always though everyone got off nice and cozy with anything at all…

In the broad daylight, two soldiers grabbed each other in a mock-wrestling over the elevator shaft. Or rather, the bigger guy grabbed the smaller one; hefty yokels are more prone to that kind of horse-playing.

They both fell into the shaft and the safety boarding one story lower did not withstand the impact. Due to the law of acceleration for bodies in free fall, the bigger buddy was the first to reach the bottom of the shaft and got flattened against the piles of construction debris down there.

The smaller guy came to a second later landing on the jellied body of the late joker and got off with heavy fractures. After the rehabilitation, he was not exempted though and served until his demobilization as a watchman at various construction sites of VSO-11…

Every other month at the Morning Dispensing, they were reading up the circulation orders about servicemen killed as a result of the malicious violation of safety regulations in the military construction units of the Baku Air Defense District, which our construction battalion reported to…

~ ~ ~