the most final
concluding work

On the first of September, I walked to the Konotop Railway Transportation College together with my brother and sister who were also admitted to the institution after graduating their eighth grade that summer.

The students were split to groups and lined-up in the courtyard and the College Director started to push his annual speech. I felt like a zek who served his ten-year time and somehow ran into additional 3 years for no misdoing at all. After the line-up finished, I went to the Personnel Department of the College, took my papers back and went to enter the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant. There I was given a job at the same shop floor where Vladya was already a locksmith apprentice – in the Experimental Unit for Metal Constructions by the Repair Shop Floor…

Like most other shops at the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant, the Mechanical Shop Floor was built of refractory-like brick. Its walls bore no flamboyant ante-revolution extravagances of lace-like brickwork, simplistic evenness stretched plainly from corner to corner in the massive masonry of the building whose spacious inner dimensions comprised 130 meter in length and 8 in height while being thirty-eight-meter wide.

High overhead, under the roof, there rambled a bridge crane rigged with the cab for her operator driving the crane along the rails fixed close to the walls up there. The huge pulley-hook hung on the thick steel cable pulled by the mighty winch running almost all of the bridge length for except the cubicle of cab at the left end where the crane operator got climbing up the iron rungs planted in the brick wall.

The Mechanical Shop Floor building had three wings of lesser height attached to it. The first wing to the right from the entrance gate was the separate Tools Shop Floor, and the remaining two were parts to the Mechanical Shop Floor, only not so tall and without any bridge crane.

The central aisle in the Mechanical Shop Floor was wide enough for two dolly-cars to drive side by side. A dolly-car was a self-propelled cart on small but sturdy wheels with no tires. It had a small pad in its front for a driver to stand upon. Between the driver and the cargo platform, there was a narrow upright metal box with two levers stuck out from its sides, so that the driver could hold onto them. But it only seemed so, in fact, the driver steered the dolly-car with those levers taking left or right turns.

Dolly-car was, actually, a kind of a pullmi-pushyu. It needed no space for U-turns and, after getting loaded or unloaded in some cramped place, instead of the vehicle, the driver themselves turned round about on their pad and drove back, some clever invention.

The floor in the Mechanical Shop Floor was concrete but, with all those engine oil splotches and smudges from dolly-car tredless wheels, it ages before turned asphalt-black.

Some 30 meters before the end wall, the aisle was crossed by the road from one of the abutting wings to the other, with the fence of upright iron pipes bounding the opposite roadside. Those pipes marked the border between the grounds of the Mechanical and Repair Shop Floors. The border, of course, was transparent and the fence provided three duty-free entries – 1 straight from the central aisle and 2 more alongside the walls…

Past the left-hand border-crossing, beneath the flight of iron stairway, there was a wooden door in the wall opening to the workmen locker room. Next to the door, a small wooden table with a couple of thick, pretty smeared, cardboard folders dropped on its top was abutting the wall, 2 single-plank benches put close by the longer sides of the table completed the arrangement of the Overseers’ Nest which was immediately followed by the line of 8 huge vises screwed, with big intervals, onto the edge of one common workbench running alongside the row of tall windows in the wall.

The first in the line was Yasha's vise, then – Mykola-the-old's, farther on – Peter's, still farther – Mykola-the-young's and so on to the gate at the end of the workbench where the sideway track entered the Repair Shop Floor parallel to the inside part in the butt wall of the building.

The sheet-iron-lined front of the workbench had sheet-iron doors in it, under each of the vises, with a neat well-oiled padlock on each door opening to the toolbox. The first was Yasha's box, then Mykola-the-old's and, well… so on…

On the second floor, over the locker room, there was the Management Office of the Repair Shop Floor. That was where led that iron stairway of two flights furnished with iron handrails which also bordered the landing in front of the office door. And from that same landing, the narrow fixed-in-the-wall ladder went up to the cab in the bridge crane for the operator to get there in the morning, or after her midday break, and rumble away to the space above the Mechanical Shop Floor.

The sideway track entering the Repair Shop Floor was a dead end. Bulky contraptions in need of repair came in there heaped on slowly crawling railway platforms, while those of smaller size were brought to the Repair Shop Floor by dolly-cars.

Behind and parallel to the track, there stretched the butt wall which also had hugely tall windows latticed with iron bindings to hold the panes of dusty glass. In the center of the wall above the windows, under the very roof, there hung a large electrical round clock like those at the railway stations. From time to time, the peaceful slumber of the timepiece got perturbed with a sudden "tick!" which made the half-meter long hand jump for two-three minutes at once and there fall asleep again until the next "tick!".

The third wall had the same five-meter-tall windows. Next to the right-hand border-crossing from the Mechanical Shop Floor, there stood a drilling machine for anyone who felt like using it. Then came the steel-topped acres of the marker's table and, in the corner behind the tracks of the dead-end, the lathe with its turner.

Along the central axis in the Repair Shop Floor, there stood another long workbench or rather two of them abutting each other face-to-face, with an iron-mesh partition in between. Common-sense-based safety rules, if you think of it: had a hammer slipped out of grip, the mesh would prevent knocking out a workman at the opposite workbench.

Walking the Repair Shop Floor, you had to watch your step carefully to safely navigate between giant worm gears, oil-smeared casings, and other whatnots strewn indiscriminately upon the floor. Those things, brought by dolly-cars and dropped at vacant spots a couple of months before, were waiting patiently for the due attention because there always popped up something else, more pressing for urgent repair. But that was not our concern. We were the Experimental Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, sited at the workbench next to the Overseers’ Nest.

No, we did not meddle with repair, our task was to implement the projects experimentally drawn at the Design Bureau in the Plant Management building, to endow them with the real-life forms of metal constructions. The handcart of four wheels, for example, or the stand "Glory to Labor!" to be placed in front of Main Check-Entrance to the Plant. Or all kinds of bearing constructions made of solid rolled-steel channels and joists, like, brackets, pillars, roof trusses.

However, for so bulky products there was no room at the Repair Shop Floor and we assembled them under the open sky outside, on the rack-deck between the welder's booth by the sideway gate and the window of the locker room. By the by, the parts for the city TV tower were also constructed on that rack-deck, and then the team of workers from our Experimental Unit assembled the tower at its site. But that was before me…