the most final
concluding work

On November 7, the unusually long Indian summer ended and we moved over to Club to play dances there.

The Ballet Studio Gym opposite the cinema auditorium on the second floor was a tremendous room stretching for about 40 meters from its entrance to the small stage at the far end wall. The stage was intended not for concerts but for Evenings of Recreation and, therefore, was just a low deck with two steps running all its front. That way a recreating participant could easily ascend it when called by the mass-entertainer to take part in some funny competition or another event in the ongoing Evening.

The stage-deck took the central one-third of Ballet Gym's width the rest of which was sealed off with vertical bars of black-paint-coated rebar rods on both sides from the elevation. The light cloth curtains hanging behind the bars formed, like, some backstage.

In the center of Ballet Gym, high overhead, midst the roof bearing structures painted with the black Kuzbass-Lacquer, there was fixed a large white ball encrusted with the scale-like mirror shards all over. Besides, among the joists there was also installed a searchlight focused on the ball and one click of the switch set in motion the ball-rotating electric motor and also hit the ball's rind of mirror-scales with the straight beam from the searchlight to get fractured into innumerable dim specks of light idly floating along over all and everything within the huge Ballet Gym.

The length-side walls consisted mostly of manifold tall windows, below which the handrail for the students of ballet art ran from end to end. The butt wall opposite the stage was paneled, according to the ballet school tradition, with large, tight fitted, squares of mirrors which conferred onto the room its second name – the Mirror Hall…

The Mirror Hall served an ideal place for any get-together, both the New Year matinees for the Settlement kids, and School Graduating Parties, and Evenings of Recreation for the Plant youth, and, last but not least, for dances. And the dances it was to reveal the ideal's weak spot – its floor. In less than a month the treds of a couple of hundred dancers scuffed the red paint coat off the floor and bared its timber planks. Yet, the Club Director, Pavel Mitrofanovich, said it did not matter.

Behind the curtains on both sides of the stage, there were installed the huge loudspeakers transported from the summer cinema in the Plant Park, and they produced some really bomb sound, awesome nyshtyak! In the common reflection, blurred by the distance to the far-off wall of the Mirror Hall, our figures with guitars stuck up over the rhythmically swaying whirlpool of dancers' heads in the huge murky void whose only illumination was the floating swarm of soft light specks – round and round, and round – and everything went on nyshtyak thru and thru.

And only Chuba fussed and bitched that the sound of his bass guitar put out by the two portable loudspeakers on the stage was lost completely behind the mighty boxes with the meter-wide speakers. Lyokha usually assuaged him that he knew a guy who had low-frequency bass speakers for sale, we only had to procure material for making a box to install those. And it was also Lyokha to suggest the relevant place where to get the material in question – the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant. After all, we needed just one sheet of thick plywood, all in all, 3 by 2 meters.

We, the Plant affiliated Orpheuses, started to mull over a plan… In the Repair Shop Floor, there was no plywood whatsoever, iron and steel were all we dealt with. The proper place to look for plywood was surely the Car Repairing Shop Floor, where Chuba worked. And he admitted that the plywood could be extracted from the cars brought for repair, but how to get it outta Plant?

He resolutely declined the proposal to cut the plywood into pieces the size of the bass box parts and drop them over the wall in Professions Street because his overseer would fire off uncomfortable questions about the source for such immodest quantities of so expensive material.

Thus, there remained the one and only option – to get a whole, intact, sheet out of Plant thru the Club building, with its never closed side door to the Plant grounds, next to the movie list painters’ room.

However, the planned mission had a certain slippery point – the Car Repair Shop Floor and Club were located at the opposite ends of Plant. Dragging the whole sheet thru all of the Plant territory? Chuba refused to take such a risk, neither Skully showed any whiff of enthusiasm. As usual, the hardest part in undertaking rested entirely on my and Vladya's shoulders…

Still and all, Chuba partially collaborated and ripped the plywood sheet loose in a car waiting for repair on a sideway outta his shop floor. Besides, leaving the car, he somehow forgot to lock its door as required by the regulations… Thru the above-mentioned door, I and Vladya penetrated the car to find, in the indicated place, the coveted treasure – a standard sheet of thirty-millimeter-thick plywood blotted in a couple of spots but, on the whole, it did not matter.

We dragged the plywood out of the car, grabbed at the edges, and carried on over the crunching gravel of the track ballast shoulder, then along the even and not so noisy asphalt paths between the Plant shop floors. On the way, we kept persuading each other that the sheet was not particularly heavy and that there was nothing special if two workmen carried it bypassing the shop floors within Plant. Although we, personally, had never observed such a picture because dollies were a usual means of transportation for the purpose.

When to Club there remained the smaller leg – to pass by the Smithy Shop Floor, the All-Plant Bath House, the Fire Brigade building, the Oxygen Tank Filling Station and the Medical Center, Skully raced up from the Mechanical Shop Floor to inform that Borya Sakoon sent after us and if we didn't show up we'd be fired.

That was some news, our Overseer at the Experimental Unit never came up with so fiery threats. Could it happen the Head of the Criminal Investigation Department came on another visit?

So we rested the sheet against the smoky wall of the Smithy Shop Floor under the marble tablet screwed to the bricks to announce that in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Power, there was embedded a message to the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant workers who would work there in the year of the centennial anniversary of the Great October Revolution. Making sure that our sheet did not interfere with the traffic, we went to the Repair Shop Floor.

Borya was raging way more furiously than Fantômas himself – where the heck we two been paddling when the whole Experimental Unit was sent to Harvesting?.

Yes, Harvesting was not a thing to shrug away. It was like parading the entire workforce of the Experimental Unit. That was the moment when everyone was engaged in earnest, to the utmost.

All the locksmiths from the Experimental Unit, in full collection, with the paper slip of order listing the required materials and quantities, were making for the Central Warehouse. There, behind the All-Plant Bath House, heaps of rebar rods of divers diameter, by heaps of metal fittings of powerful profiles, by heaps of pipes with the cross-section of no less than 10 centimeters were piled crisscross by the railway track.

Soon after, the workmen were joined by a dolly-car, and then along the tracks about the Central Warehouse, a stocky railway crane would roll to their group and hover the dangling steel cables of its beam over the tangled heaps and hills of all those piles of metal.

Two of the most experienced workers, equipped with steely breakers, would noose the pipes, rebars or channels named in the paper slip. The rest of the congregation, keeping a reasonably safe distance, would profusely share their sage advice and agitated comments. At last, the crane would strenuously yank the snapped bunch of metal, pull it up and, with scraping screech, tear out from the heap of iron jumbled with all the previous Harvestings by representatives of different shop floors.

The catch would then be lowered onto the waiting dolly-car. The Ware House employee would compare the approximate amount of the cargo with the figures scribbled in the order and give his "go ahead". Returning from a safe distance, the dolly-car driver would drive it to the Repair Shop Floor, scraping, on the way, the asphalt of the paths with dangling ends of rebars, or pipes or whatever else was there in the paper slip. The locksmiths of the Experimental Unit would start back to the Repair Shop Floor in one, cheerful, monolithic mass, proud of the fulfilled duty…

And now the coming back harvesters appeared from the Mechanical Shop Floor aisle, yet we were not among them. We failed to attend the holy rite of Harvesting. Fortunately, our Overseer had a kinda soft sport for Vladya because of having the mutual last name, even though without being relatives, and we again slipped from the Experimental Unit directly to our sheet under the memorial tablet.

The Manager of the Repair Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, Mozgovoy, stood next to it eyeing the plywood avidly and swallowing his managerial saliva. Of course, such a material would whet anyone's appetite. We clawed our prey like two winning vultures.

"Where to?" asked, in pain, Mozgovoy in his plaintive falsetto.

"To the Plant Management," said, casually, Vladya and we dragged the sheet in the direction of the Main Check-Entrance next to the backside of the Club building that substituted—for the stretch of its length—the wall around Plant.

The back door, sure thing, was not locked. We dragged the sheet in and leaned it against the bunch of canvas-covered frames opposite the movie list painters' room…

When after work we came to Club to move the plywood to our room, the crisp-curled House Manager, Stepan, was already wheeling round and about our sheet. By so deficit material, anyone could be tempted into improper dreams and plans, even a do-nothing, who in all of his life did not hold in his fatty hands anything heavier than his personal bunch of keys. Which is not about Stepan though, who once was a good carpenter they said, it's about the Director of Club, who stood by and tinkled his keys hallooing Stepan to our trophy. Don't rub the soap to your cheeks, Pavel Mitrofanovich, it's not your shaving day, as ran a winged Settlement byword rather popular at those days…

~ ~ ~