the most final
concluding work

Auto-Depot 4 was all by itself, neither in a village nor in a town, just behind the trees in windbreak belt along the highway roadside. First, there stood an old two-story building. On the first floor it had some locked warehouses, and on the second floor, there was a spacious hall with beds for students of the construction platoon plus a small room for the 2 girls by it. Then there followed a one-story stoker-house and, still farther, the vast grounds of Auto-Depot 4 behind the tall red-brick wall surrounding a dozen of garages, a canteen, and many other buildings, some of which still under construction, and in the middle of the grounds, there stretched the wide and deep foundation pit. Lots of steel wires crisscrossed the air above the pit. Plumb under the intersections of the spanned wires, our platoon had to assemble formworks and fill them with concrete to produce the "cups" for the insertion of support columns. But all that was to be done later and for the start, there were shovels to exercise "dig-dump”. Everything was so nostalgic familiar, and only the uniform was different.

After a working day, the stoker-"chemists", Yura and Tomato, opened the respective valve inside their stoker-house and from an outside pipe, sticking out high up on the wall, there gushed a broad horizontal jet of water falling to the ground about 20 meters off the wall. You could stand there and take a shower, pretty chilly, sure thing, but it was summertime around, right?.

A week later Commander of the platoon called a general meeting. The agenda of one issue – feeding the platoon contingent, because the food in the canteen was just a…

The meeting approved – to cook food of our own resources procured for money borrowed by Commander from the Auto-Depot foreman in advance, on account of our future labor achievements. From now on the girls' position was not only that of paramedics but cooks as well…

Each evening, as it got dark, in twos or threes, we went on a raid to the potato field of the nearby collective farm. Sweeping along the way whatever looking good enough.

"A fiery construction platoon

Hot as the steppe fire!."

The students paid compliments to the cooking skills of the Phys-Math girls. Well, I don't know, yes, on the whole, it was hotter than in the canteen, but otherwise the same havvage as anywhere else…

A couple of times we went to dances in the village of Ivkovtsy by the water-tanker truck, manned by a young driver. The girls were traveling in the cab, the rest of us wherever they could grab hold at the iron cistern of the truck… We danced to the hits of Leshchenko:

"From the fields, the sadness flees away,

The anxiety also hits the road,

And the vistas wide unfold ahead…"

After the dances, we whizzed back thru the breeze and the darkness, everyone hugging closely his piece of the steely cistern…

Once for the midday break and meal, we visited the nearby city of Ladan. When translated into English, "ladan" becomes "incense" with all connotations to it. But I also presented the view of manifold meaning with that curly beard and hair hanging to the shoulders from under the twisted gauze bandage the color of earth to keep it from falling into the eyes. You couldn’t make it out at a glance who was that – an excommunicated priest or Rambo from black-and-white photos. However, when Rambo in the central nosh-bar of Ladan demanded a bottle of white to be served in a half-liter beer glass in one go, everything fell in place – a drunk from Auto-Depot 4!

I come back from Ladan with a pleasantly slackened thirst only to find Sasha Chalov, a third-year student from the English Department, in our dorm, who arrived from Pryluky, his native city, together with a friend of his and a briefcase bulging with ammo.

The Sun in the Tumbler

Gee!. The ours did learn, after all, turning out poetic stickers for ornery swill!. Adding that Sun on top of the prosaic berry&fruit from Ladan necessitated catching a breath. I was preparing for a peaceful repose among the bushes of the windbreak belt, but would those so-called bros allow you to breathe? Sasha and his chum tore me away from our mutual Earth-Mommy, dragged to the second floor and dropped onto the bed there. Some fucking lot of comradely solicitude it was! I had to throw up and out from the second-floor window like that jet from the wall in the stoker-house…

In fact, they came in need of a bass guitarist for "playing trash" at weddings in the city of Pryluky. So, the following two weekends we serviced two nuptials, yet both for free because the newlyweds were lucky enough to be relatives of that Sasha's chum, so it turned just toiling for grub.

Getting wiser, for the second wedding I brought 3 students from the Physics and Mathematics Department along with me, like, indispensable sound engineers…

~ ~ ~

The handle "Tomato" suited the stoker-"chemist" perfectly because his face had red skin and his hair was of natural orange color. He was the most joyful "chemist" in the world. Having his skills at sharping cards, I'd also walk my life shedding benevolent blessing smile on all four. After shuffling the deck, he dealt hands with eight tricks in hearts for himself. Though fully aware that he was stacking the deck, you could not follow how…

In the excavated foundation pit we worked incompetently but with enthusiasm until, at the end of the month, the foreman presented the work orders for our labor. By his calculations, after deduction of the paid advance, our payment per worker equaled to the student monthly scholarship of 45 rubles. At that moment Auto-Depot 4 ran out of nails, and we had nothing to assemble the formworks with any more. The enthusiasm dried up completely because of the grim prospect of sitting idly for the final 10 days doing no job, during which period our food expenses would eat away the pittance we had earned.

The student construction platoon sent a negotiating team for talks with Director of Auto-Depot 4. The delegation consisted of me and one of the two paramedic-cook girls who did not understand a fig either in construction works or nails for carpentering, but she was a blonde, which quality imparts the right angle to the process of any negotiations… The chief engineer we met at the management office disclosed that Director was not around, harvesting crops in the fields of the patronized collective farm. Good news that a truck with spare parts was leaving soon for the patronizers' field camp, which could also take us along. If there were no blondes in the delegation, he hardly would mention the truck which he himself was driving with the blonde seated in the cab, between him and me…

I was surprised by his knack at recognizing the Auto-Depot 4 vehicles on the highway long before their number plates became discernible. The chief engineer explained that he saw them by their horns, and asked if I knew Tshombe.

Of course, I knew Tshombe who machine-gunned Patrice Lumumba when I was still a pioneer. However, I could not figure out any connection between the trucks rushing in the opposite direction along the sunlit highway and the dictator from I could not recollect which African country, because I was still a pioneer then. So, I denied any acquaintance and said, no, I did not know him.

The chief engineer explained that Tshombe was Auto-Depot 4 Director to whom we were riding now. This Tshombe of a director ordered the radiators of all the vehicles in Auto-Depot 4 to be marked with white paint to produce a large Roman digit V. The marks were visible from afar and, in the opinion of the drivers, resembled horns. The drivers cursed Tshombe's meanness because such marks added complexity to going on their contingent runs. However, Director himself was Tshombe even before the Depot vehicles acquired the horns…

Director was not in the field camp made up of four big trailers; they said he was reaping another field. The chief engineer with the brought spare parts and the blonde stayed by the trailers, and I went to Tshombe. The brand new water tanker of the UAZ-66 make was driven by a ten-year boy, the Director’s son…

Wrapped in the thick cloud of dust, a brown harvester with the white inscription "Niva" on its side was circling about a yellow sun-smitten field. I went to meet it but the harvester rumbled by, and I had to run after, and jump onto the short ladder that led to the inclined cab of the machine. The harvester roared and pounded on in its ride thru the dust. For the first time in my life I had climbed aboard such a juggernaut, but everything went on intuitively – here’s the ladder, that's the door…

In the narrow cabin, a man in a workman cap sat with his back to me and watched thru the glass of the tilted windshield how his combine fell and drew in jagged portions of the cut-down wheat shoots. I slammed the door, cutting off the knock in the bunker behind my back, and joined staring at the shags of ears crawling-up the harvester conveyor belt, while reporting to the top of his cap that our platoon sat jobless, nails were over and we wouldn't earn a kopeck. The engine rumbled, the cut shoots twitched, collapsed onto the wide rotating shaft and flowed, in rared bunches, up the belt. Director never turned around but answered that he would see what could be done, and let the chief engineer come to see him.

I got out of the cab into the cloud of dust about the bunker, climbed down the ladder and jumped off. Having seen neither the face nor the skin color of the man I had talked to, I still felt that some dictators were worthy of respect…