the most final
concluding work

Since then, when at my shifts, I had something to busy myself with. The pump engine wailing, the boiler hissing, and, with my elbows planted into the round table, and my chin leaned against my balled hands, I was thinking about just one thing. Thinking for hours was I – in what way to bump Gray off?

Bumping off was not much of a problem, given the presence of that same breaker, but what then? It was necessary to whack him and cop out, but how? I didn’t even have a thing to simply dig a hole in the field, just that hammer-and-chisel in the workshop. To ask Ter-Terian for a shovel? Fucking stupid…

Or, say, take it to the pump-station room, in that deep pit always filled up with water, hitch a load and drop there. But what if the water catches stench with the decomposition of the body? The surest way was to shove it into the boiler furnace, the two-meter long flame shooting from the nozzle would incinerate it without a trace. It's only that Vanya would come for his shift and the whole stoker-house filled with the smell of barbecue – how’s about that?.

The problem had no solution and I simply kept moving, week after week, in a vicious circle until the on-duty cook would come and say it was time to turn the boiler off.

You never can tell, I might have coped after all with that quadrangle of the circle problem, but then the Tula draft was demobilized and they drove in new youngs from Uzbekistan and Stavropol Region, and Major Avetissian kicked me out of the stoker-house replacing with some young from the Pyatigorsk city.

Fare thee well, Vanya! And you, Round Table, the confidant silent of my fruitless designs…

Yes, I became a grandpa and I got it in full when, entering the sorteer, I saw there Vasya from Buryn with whom, as youngs, we had been slaving in the squad-team under Prostomolotov. Vasya was squatting over an ochco holding a newspaper open wide before his nose.

I’m fucked if it’s not the lost picture by the great Russian artist Repin – “A squatter in the reading-room”! Behold how all so grandly, with his belt hanging from around his neck, kinda stylish muffler, giving himself Great Gatsby's airs he checks the news of the day, sort of. And at that point, the cuntfucker had finished me off completely. He raised himself from his full squat to a deep-curtsy level, like, a dance teacher demonstrating the technique of a reverence to the hole underneath and announced, "Good evening!" I was fucking fucked to pieces; that's some Vasya! Where did he fucking find such fucking words?.

~ ~ ~

My grandpa period of service unfolded rather chaotically. I no longer belonged to the gang of chmomen but the commanding officers were too lazy to transfer me from Fourth Company somewhere else for only 6 months. So, I had to work here and there, most of all at MCU.

That MCU had nothing to do with Missile Controlling Units, it was a mortar-concrete unit. Although, a grandpa wouldn't die of overwork even at so strenuous a workplace. I could shove the sand with a shovel as well as not shove the sand with the shovel, it depended.

The squad-team there was commanded by Misha Khmelnytsky from our draft who had turned so portly, with those Sergeant stripes across his shoulder-straps. And he roughed the youngs as we had been roughed so long before…

Then for a period, I was sent to a brick factory and there were neither squad-teams nor youngs. My job there was stacking clamp, raw bricks, in the ring kiln for burning. The ring kiln from inside is a low arched tunnel and it works continuously. At one spot in the tunnel, the mobile conveyor belt brings raw bricks thru the opening in the wall—be quick or they’ll pour in a pile, grab them in time and stack in loose rows up to the ceiling!—while on the opposite side in the ring kiln diameter, the fire rages from the nozzles in the arched walls to burn the bricks. The heat, of course, was felt all over the kiln and you had to work in an undershirt, still sweltering. The job grew much hotter when loading the freshly fried bricks on that same conveyor belt but moving in reverse. The heat scorched your hands even thru the canvas mitts and was radiating from the walls around so you had to undress and work with only high boots and pants on. Take care not to touch the scorching wall with your bare shoulder. And the next shift would be stacking raw bricks in this very spot, and so over and over again without an end to the loop cycle of ring kiln…

When at home, I started to spend more time in the Company barrack. In case of off-the-wall situations, the servicemen from younger drafts approached me to get advised. For example, outside the brick-fencing, a taxi pulled up with a Sergeant from our Company – blind, deaf and dead – on the back seat. They called me, I went out to check and it was real easy because the grunting body stretched over the back seat was naked to the waist – yea, him ours. The taxi driver wanted no fee, thank you, says he, just take the shit away.

And as the Sergeant was a real boar, it took three youngs to plop him over the wall into a snowdrift from where he was dragged into the dryer room next to the cabinet-box guarded by the on-duty, where the jackets were dried after the working day, and there he dried off too till the morning.

Once some Uzbeks treated me to a dried melon plated in a braid, from a parcel they received from their home, sweet it was, I even remembered the parcel from my parents when I was a young – four cans of condensed milk shared in the musicians’.

And the Uzbeks came up to and treated me on their own accord, I wouldn’t even know they had any parcel. Probably, because of, though a grandpa, I never hewed from their rations of butter and sugar in the Canteen…

The commander of Fourth Company, Captain Chernykh, was transferred somewhere from the construction battalion, or maybe his penalty stretch at VSO-11 was over and for that occasion, the lieutenant, Deputy Commander of Fourth Company, stepped into his shoes. However, the lieutenant’s fists were nothing like the sledgehammers of the departed Captain and buddies kinda stirred up some fuss about TV set, like, why in Separate or in Third Companies they could watch TV, football and stuff while our box was dead for more than a year, ain't we humans? Stuff it!

At that point, the Battalion Commander ordered to collect the Company personnel into the Political Classes Room. He entered it together with the lieutenant and sat atop the desk, like, Prince Charming, where his trousers jerked up to the knees for demonstrating the gray fur above his shoes and socks.

And all of us facing him from the stools brought in from the barrack aisle, a-gape and ready for some sage advice. The Spanish artist Goya produced a whole bunch of the like pictures, series of them…

"Are you fucking going on strike? Eh? Stupid dicks! No fucking Italy for you here! The motherfuckers over there enjoy spaghetti! One macaroni can be long, another – short, because it fucking broke in halves!"

Here he made a pause in his cryptic monologue, perched proudly above our heads, turning from side to side his thick-rimmed glasses. Some swollen-headed fur-legged owl, not having the slightest idea what fucking folly he had thrown up right now.

And we all sat before him with dull stares full of faith and willingness which we should demonstrate to seniors in rank…

Yet, behind the statutory look that I was supposed to present each and every commander, there reeled on Pickle’s tale about the hermaphrodite Sofochka from the Orel draft. Pickle couldn’t say how much her parents had to shell out for the medical commission to turn a blind eye at certain peculiarities in the physiological structure of their child because of craving for a time break, at least in those two years.

That way Sofochka was classified as fit for non-combatant service and sent to the construction battalion where they make a real man out of anyone… Shortly before the Orel draft demobilization, in the barrack of Fourth Company, there developed an explosive love triangle, the dembel cutie involved. She was indiscriminately giving her favor to a couple of her fellow-servicemen, though in turn. The buddies couldn't find a peaceful solution to the question: whose bunk bed she should visit after the lights-out.

Then in the same Political Classes Room, there was also ordered a meeting of the Fourth Company personnel. So I might chance to be sitting on that same stool which was seated by Pickle when Battalion Commander put the question squarely, "Sofochka, fuck the whore of your mother, is there dick or cunt by you there, eh?"

The private so addressed rose from his stool and, approaching the senior in rank, dealt a slap in the face, "Old goat!" Then, rolling her hips proudly, she returned to the stool with her back to the happy squeaks of a laughing owl.

Fathers-Commanders. Some fucking army!. Take it or leave it, yet I couldn’t shrug the Pickle's story off as some sheer bunk, the details were falling in all too readily with the surrounding shit…

I woke up back into the current meeting just in time for the concluding address delivered by Lieutenant-Colonel from his perch: "Fuck it! You’re given the highest matter! The brain! The fucking gray stuff!."

Hmm, looks like he’s got bored already into some other gyrus of his gray matter…you're in the fucking army now…aw, fuck it all!.

~ ~ ~

At the Morning Dispensing, Chief of Staff announced that the day before he saw a soldier from our battalion floundering on an AWOL in the city. He had even chased the motherfucker but couldn't take over, however, the just retribution could never be avoided and now he would pass along the ranks and find that fucking stain defiling the glorious name of our battalion.

And so he paced along, scanning carefully the rows of petrified faces in First Company, Second Company, Third Company, and Fourth Company.

…fuck yourself, Major!..there remains only the gate and the road outside it…

Keeping silent, he slowly retraced alongside the ranks.

…what a dolt!..if you were chasing someone yesterday, there's no fucking chance he’d attend the Morning Dispensing…go and wipe up your drivel…the buddy's now kicking back around in a drier room…or substituting the on-duty serviceman… it might have also been one from those squads who never come to barracks slaving at the city plants for months…

The Major started his third attempt, the fucking optimist.

First Company, Second Company, Third Company, and Fourth Company.

..so happy now?..the stupid head gives no respite the legs…that's some fucking ar…

"Here he is!"

The index finger from the boxer-like fist of Major pointed at me.

"What?! If it were I my ass’d be kicked before the Dispensing!"

"To the clink!"

The on-duty officer and two dippers with red armbands approached me demanding to hand in my belt and escorted me to the checkpoint guardhouse. On the move, I went on to debate that the bitch of Major knew it as well as I did that it was not me, but they locked me in the clink all the same…

About an hour later the on-duty officer unlocked the door to give me back my belt because I was assigned to the penalty work – sprinkling sand over the ice covering the road to the city. The truck with its bed-load of sand was at the gate already…

Squinting my eyes at the whistling wind, I was dutifully throwing shovelfuls of sand over the iron tailgate of the moving truck. Yet, when it entered the city and went after another load of sand, our ways parted at the nearest traffic lights.