the most final
concluding work

For the initial three months, I was a locksmith apprentice couched by Peter Khomenko. For him, it was a good news because a locksmith's wages somewhat increased when he was in charge of training a newbie. On the other hand, Peter was not sure what else to do about his apprentice, after he handed me a spare key from his toolbox in the workbench under his vise, so that I could keep there my hammer, chisel, and file they handed me at the Tool Shop Floor. Okay, he showed how to produce a scratcher out a throwaway length of thin steel wire to draw marks on a sheet of iron but now what?

Along all our line of vises by the Overseers’ Nest, a workman at work was a completely rare sight. Unless at the end of the working day when someone was tinkering up some kind of shabashka for household needs at his khutta.

Nevertheless, the entire workforce was principally always busy. A couple of locksmiths pottering with the welder at the mainstay props outside the locker room window. Some went to dismantle the roller table in the Foundry Shop Floor. Another group was led by Senior Oversee to the Boiler Shop Floor to install four anchor bolts for a jib crane under the construction there. In general and on the whole, the work was running high. Somewhere… If not at one, then at the other place… Maybe.

The managers of the Repair Shop Floor were doing their work in the office upstairs even though the CEO of the Repair Shop Floor, Lebedev, visited the premises no oftener than two times a day. Where he worked before and after those visits I had no idea.

He wore a black greatcoat of the railwaymen uniform. In summer, of course, it was swapped for a jacket of that same uniform with silver-colored buttons. At walking, the CEO’s back was held so plumb upright that it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the man’s being in a well-befogged state already. However, even though his front side could betray the fact of Lebedev's being drunk as a fiddler, he never stumbled the slightest bit. No, never. The workers respected him, probably, for his never staying in the office longer than for five-ten minutes.

In the table of ranks, the CEO was followed by Managers of the Units by the Repair Shop Floor. The Repair Unit was headed by Manager Mozgovoy, whose thin falsetto somehow did not fit his portly frame, still, he also was respected for his being harmless.

Once at the Repair Unit, they were restoring the concavity profile of some bulky incomprehensible thing. Whoever you asked what the crap was that thing, the answer was invariably uniform, "Who the fuck knows what hooey it is." And even that "hooey" was pronounced identically, almost in a howl, like, "…hooooey it is."

So for half of a month, they kept scraping that concavity in turns. Whoever got tired of doing nothing took the hand scraper and commenced to scrape. Eventually, it got polished to a mirror shine and another hooey (the convex thing) began to freely enter and rotate, back and forth, inside the scraped one. Mozgovoy, sure thing, was delighted by such a labor achievement at his Section…

Well, now, locksmith Lekha from the Podlipnoye village, freshly after his army service, in the end of a working day puts a chisel at the shiny surface of the polished hooey and asks, with the hammer raised to his shoulder, "Look here, Mozgovoy, wanna me fuck the fucker?"

In a wistful, tired falsetto, Mozgovoy responded, "If you have no brains, go – fuck it."

Lyokha, certainly, was just horsing around, yet Mozgovoy did not tell on him although he could…

Then followed Manager of the Experimental Unit, Lyonya…

About him, it was not clear yet: to respect or not to respect? He was still wet behind his ears and until recently was sitting in the Overseers’ Nest by the locker room door. Then he graduated something in absentia and got raised, with his diploma, up the iron stairway, to the Management Office where were already sitting Engineer-Technologist (at the desk with his back to the window, but I don't even remember his name) and Senior Overseer, Melai, Anatoly Melai's father. He had a wide horizontal gash of a mouth and he was always silent, unlike his yodeling son…

Twice a month the stairway to the Management Office was climbed by the cashier with her tarpaulin bag from which she portioned out the advance or monthly payment to the workers depending on which of her two visits it was. The very first time, she gave me the advance of just 20 rubles.

When I brought my first earnings home, then, before Mother’s return from her work, I scattered those 20 bills all over the couch in the kitchen, one by one, so that it would seem more. And when she was back home, I said, "Mom, that's for you to dispose of." And right away I asked 2 rubles for cigarettes, without going into detail because she did not know that I had started smoking…

The working day began at eight in the morning. We passed thru the still silent aisle in the Mechanical Shop Floor to our locker room with tall plywood boxes along three blind walls and two additional rows of lockers put back to back to split the room into the oblong halves.

Each locker-box had two vertical sections: one for the clean clothes and the other for the working dress, aka spetzovka, given out to a workman once a year. From above, the sections were spanned by a plywood shelf for the hat and the package with the midday meal. However, at the midday meal breaks, both Vladya and I went home over a stile in the concrete wall to Professions Street from where it took just five minutes to get to our khuttas.

While we changed and had a smoke in the locker room, the Mechanical Shop Floor machine-tools started to turn on, one after another. The howling, rapping, and rumbling of their engines merged with the piercing screech of steel peeled off the workpieces. The cacophony of a working day was muffled to some extent by the locker room door but very soon it swung open and Overseer Borya Sakoon drove us out to our workplaces – to the line of vises or to the rack-deck in the yard where we seemed being busy with doing something…

The rest of the day, Borya Sakoon spent sitting by the locker room door on a bench at the Overseers’ Nest table. He leaned on it with his elbow, then with the other one and was chain-smoking cigarettes "Prima", one after another. Short, with thin fair hair and dun faded face, he had the same last name as Vladya but wasn’t a relative because both denied any kinship.

Frequent coughing fits made him pull his cap down and press it to his face to choke the discharge. When his therapeutics did not work, he slammed the cap atop the table and went on coughing with his face dropped into it. Then he snapped out of his pocket another cigarette, lit it up and the cough eventually died away until the next attack. At times, he stood up from the bench to stretch his whole body—a scraggy shrimp with his arms aloft against the tide of mad rambling of the machine-tools in the Mechanical Shop Floor—then he lit another cigarette, turned back and sat down again.

Once Overseer beckoned me with a finger inviting to get seated on the opposite bench at the table and, yelling over the roaring howl of the machine-tools, began to tell how soon after the war he went to dances in the club of Podlipnoye, where the village yobos started bullying him so he cut and ran but they were chasing and he had to lie down in a ditch and shoot his Walther pistol from there, and that he also witnessed how the law enforcing bodies did away with the All-Union thief-in-law, handled Kushch, who came to Konotop but they were following him and in Budyonny Street just neared from behind and banged into the back of his head, one second later a "black raven" drove up and he, a young guy Borya at that time, was told to grab Kushch by the legs and help to heave the corpse into the vehicle.

"Up to these days it’s nowhere you can buy the fabric like to that in the Kushch's suit pants," he shouted out and his fingers picked off his lips a stuck thread of tobacco fiber from a cigarette “Prima”.

However, not always Borya Sakoon looked such a total good-for-nothing. One day, Vladya called me to drop into Loony and watch our Overseer drilling the Ballet Group in the hall on the second floor, where a dozen girls held onto the handrail along the mirror wall, while our geezer strolled along their line like a karra cock sporting a short, diamond-shaped, necktie. Then, demonstrating some of the moves, he shot his leg almost above his head. That’s some Borya Sakoon…

The hardest period in the whole working day was the concluding half-hour. In that half-hour there was no time at all: it just stopped and it was better not to even look at that electric round clock above the huge windows in the end wall. Some endless stretch of vexing disappointment which brought about a strange itch to push the frozen clock hand with a straw.

The Mechanical Shop Floor machine tools would slow down and fell silent, one after another. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit gathered from elsewhere to line the workbench with their backs leaned against their respective vises.

The two-meter-tall Mykola-the-old empties his horse-long nose into the crumpled lump of a rag the color of earth-and-ash. Could you ever suspect so gentlemanly habits by the geezer?! Mykola-the-young froze at pensive picking fresh acne on his cheeks.

Tick! Twenty-seven to five.

Swarthy-faced Yasha begins to tell me a story how the Red Army took him along after liberating Konotop of Germans. A solitary shabashka-tinker at the grinding wheel in the corner does not interfere with the calm flow of Yasha's narration.

They ran to attack and the ours supported them from behind shooting the "forty-fivers" when one of the supporting shells shot off the balls of an attacker. With the slow move of his palm-down hand, Yasha demonstrates the low-arc trajectory of a flying 45-mm shell. After which the poor wretch ran another half-kilometer before he died…

Recollecting how I also felt nothing and only saw the ground of the bumpy field jumping before my eyes, as we ran to attack thru the shaggy fog in the military game of Zarnitsa, I believe Yasha.

He shifts his cap far back revealing the sharp, like an arrowhead, angle from which his black hair runs up under the halo of his cap peak. Not a speckle of gray. Looks twice younger than Borya Sakoon who once told me that at the installation of the TV tower something went wrong with the uppermost section. It was in winter with severe frost and Yasha took off his sheepskin coat, climbed up by the cable and put it to rights.

Mykola-the-old two heads taller than Yasha. They're sort of chums and after work go home by the same diesel train, only to different stops.

Tick! Seven to five. Okay, that's that; time to go to change…