the most final
concluding work

Ah, yes! With the same autumn draft they had also driven in youngs from Moldova and Moscow, but quite a few – about 10 men.

Moldovans had so funny last names like Rahroo, Shooshoo, though their first names were quite normal… Vasya Shooshoo received a postal notification about a parcel from home awaiting him at the city main post-office. When going to get it, he invited Lyolik from Moscow, Vitalik from Simferopol, and me. We collected the parcel and found some canteen in the city, on the second floor. There Vasya opened the box and there was,

"Wine of Moldavia, my boy,

Is to give us a blissful joy!."

Vasya, as the generous host, fetched some macaroni with something on top and was filling our cups under the table which we held out of sight as well as the bottles to cut out unnecessary discussions with the canteen staff. That way we finished off I can’t say how many liters.

Well, what now? Saddle up! We went down to the first floor, and Lyolik took a leak there into the trash urn, while Vitalik, sort of, screened him off to observe decency in public eye.

That Lyolik was generally frostbitten in his head. Once I went to the construction materials factory, and there was such a long conveyor-belt, mostly in the open, going high up under the roof upon a hill to carry clay or something. Lyolik's job there was to go up and down that hill with a breaker and prod what clay had got jammed on the conveyor belt. I can't remember exactly what I went there for, but the moment Lyolik saw me, the breaker in his hands simply fluttered from eager agitation, and it was in his eyes how really much he wanted to bump me off. Not for anything personal, just so, because I had turned up there when he conveniently had the breaker in his hands. However, he also hadn't the quadrangle of the circle problem solved yet. Bashing brains in with a breaker's not a big deal, but what then with the body? In short, he kept himself in hand at that time…

We left the canteen and strolled along in a friendly conversation; bright sun, white snow, life's beautiful.

Then Lyolik and Vasya started to sort it out whose homeland was better: Moscow or Moldova? Thus, word by word, they went over to gripping each other pea-jackets' breasts. But Vitalik—that's a capital fellow!—why, says he, on the street? Let's go in some yard.

In we steered into the yard of some two-story apartment block. Vitalik started reading instructions to them, like, sort of, a referee from London; no fighting with the belt plates, no kicking at the felled. They threw off their belts and hats, and pea-jackets, and – off they started the fun of heroes. Both of them over a meter and eighty with the fists like sledgehammers, and each scored hit was sending echoes about the hollow yard. A-hey! Let's sprinkle the snow with the red!.

Vasya broke Lyolik's brow. Lyolik, bleeding, fell on one knee. Vasya moved back to the linen ropes with some washing on it because the real heroes observe the rules.

That moment some geezer in a sailor's striped vest trotted down the porch way from the two-story apartment block. Someone from the rats of his neighbors, he reported, had called the militia. In short, the match had to be postponed. Lyolik washed his mug with the snow, the opponents put their outfits on and we left the stadium.

But the fighters' agitation did not show any abatement. It might’ve got bad enough so Vasya and Lyolik were disengaged and held apart. Then we split into pairs, I led Lyolik ahead, convincing him that Moscow was the capital of our Homeland, the best city on the Earth. About ten meters behind Vitalik and Vasya followed, discussing epic values of valorous Făt-Frumos from Moldovian myths. Thus, in peaceful conversations, we slowly strolled on when all of a sudden, on the right, a Volga braked and 2 militiamen in greatcoats jumped out of it on the sidewalk. Lyolik and I unfastened our belts and noosed them round the right wrists, leaving some length with the plate on its end for self-defense. The militiaman on the left flicked his gun up. A ridiculously small black hole in the bright ring of reflected sunshine looked square into my face.

At that very point, the second pair of the peripatetic interlocutors arrived at the epicenter of discontent. Carried away by their discussion, they hadn't been looking around. And all of a sudden—ta-dah!—an abrupt change of the scenery: 2 soldiers armed with plates of their belts against 2 militiamen with a gun.

From the overabundance of feelings and associations, Vitalik's legs bent limply, his mouth went a-gape and only at the last moment, he managed to lean his back against the fence…

Glory, glory be sung to you, the blessed land of Moldovia! You had conceived and brought forth Vasya Shooshoo the Valiant! The true warrior, filled with the spirit of soldierly brotherhood and conbatist solidarity, in his mighty embrace, seized he the nearest to him militiaman—the one without a gun it was—and cried, "Run!" There was no need he repeated it twice to me.

“ Oh, Gods! How frightened was I! How I fled!

Around and below me some fences, trees, alleys, hills, gullies, ramparts, and mountain ridges flashed… I came to myself only in some shed with wide lengthwise gaps between the horizontally nailed boards structuring its walls, and it took me a considerable stretch to bring my breath into a normal shape.

In the evening only Lyolik showed up in the barrack. He needed to wash his pea-jacket of the blood from the broken eyebrow. I led him to the stoker-house.

There they also had their news. The lining of one of the furnaces was all cracked, most likely caused by the overheating of the boiler. So that’s why last month they took us to the city bathhouse. Apparently, at the time of the accident, the smoke was pouring out from multiple crevices, carrying black soot which settled on the walls and ceiling in both halls of the stoker-house. My cosmetic overhaul was lost under uniformly even, greasy, black.

Loose materials are normally transported in special freight cars without a roof, and the floor in such cars is a series of iron hatches. When unloading, you just approach the car and knock aside the huge hook that fixes the hinged hatch-lid which now falls down allowing the loose material to spill out thru the opening.

I do not know for which organization those five cars came to the station of Stavropol, but I can vividly visualize how they clang-flapped the hatches to dangle open and nothing flowed out, so they took a look from underneath into the car hatches and saw a smooth, fine-grained, monolith. The sand had been sent wet or got drenched by rains while traveling from some much warmer corner in our boundless Mother-Homeland and the frosts, met further on along the endless way, turned it into five huge parallelepipeds of carload frozen within the mold of the cars' iron sides.

There was no time to wait for the reverse transformation, for if you did not return the car within 3 days after its arrival to the station, or to your organization sideway, then it was classified as "rolling stock delay" and penalized with a huge fine which grew still huger with each additional day of delay. The addressee organization of the permafrosted sand lost their head – the problem seemed absolutely unsolvable.

And who, by us, is there for cracking any problems, however unsolvable they were? Who puts to rights the shit fucked up by the managing yet stupid elite waltzing from womb to tomb with their heads never examined but their tongues, and lips, and stuff ever at ready? Well, yes, sorry, you know the answer to this trivial one about USSR slaves… Yet, just in case, which factor have you to throw in for solving a problem of any magnitude, eh? You’re kidding! I know that you know that I know that you know… So, that’s why 4 truck-loads of us were brought to the Stavropol freight station. And for that occasion, they even gave us smooth-bodied steel breakers.

To solve the problem thru the hatches opened at the car bottom was out of the question because the monolith reacted to the hits from below by sending the breaker back at you with the tantamount force as foreseen by the respective law of Physics. We had to fuck it from the top and bore down along the car sides. The rumors had it they even were going to bring some perforators for the job but until then – to attack with what's in hands!

For a while, I was at it but soon kicked because of being much too fed up with the fucking monotony of the process reiterated in all the years of my service. However, idle kicking back around in that cold weather was no good for my tender feet which had lived thru too many freezing ups and thawing offs…

Misha Khmelnytsky handed me some money to fetch "warming stuff". He himself couldn't do it, he was a Sergeant in charge of the Uzbeks…

And where only do them buddies manage to get money from?

Come on, it’s a breeze. MCU turned out mortar of different kinds in the quantities scribbled in the forms of application orders presented by the truck drivers. And if there happened no form with a signed order the driver handed over another piece of paper. To whom? To the Commander of the squad-team working at the MCU…

So off I started in the city… Because of being unfamiliar with the current neighborhood, it wasn’t at once that I found the right store. There I shoved the bottles under my pea-jacket cinched over by the belt, which load made me look so stout. Who’d ever said they poorly fed the construction battalion?

I went back with my head kept down not from shame just because of the snow lashing against my face.

"Why don't you salute? Haven't they taught you?"

By the Statute of the Internal Military Service, you must salute every senior in rank, be it even just a Lance Corporal. Yet, the hard snow pelting prevented zeroing in time the officer who stopped me, and then how could I throw my hand up in salute which surely would set the bottles inside my pea-jacket a-playing jingle bells?

"My fault, Comrade…" I scanned his shoulder-strap and could not make it out – no stripes, like by an Ensign, and only one star, yet much bigger than that by a Major, and only then I saw leaves in his collar patches. "...Comrade Major-General, I was lost in thoughts."

"He lost in thoughts! Dismissed!"

And that was right – a general and a private in black shoulder-straps had, practically, no common gossip even if it was the only officer who addressed me with the honorific "You" in all the 2 years…

~ ~ ~