The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

I did not draw Arsen's attention to all those details, keeping down to a short quotation from the work itself. Yura, who happened about, suddenly snapped in demanding that I never ever dare start provocative talks like this in his presence because he was a communist and knew where to give a phone call on statements of that sort.

For the first time in our clashes, the last word remained by him. He dumbfounded me with his threat to halloo the KGB at the founders of Marxism-Leninism. And that's no fun, they would easily run them down, for all I know…

Another time, I was depicting to Arsen the Wagner's ballet about Scottish witches which I attended during the business trip to Kiev. Dancing a solo dance, one of the hexes stumbled and with a wooden knock fell flat onto the stage floor.

"Ha-ha-ha!" cheerfully reacted Yura on his visit to the overhaul room from the administration barrack.

"And imagine, Arsen, in the whole hall there was not a single jerk to laugh at her. She got up and danced on, showed her high mettle, you know."

And Yura also showed that it was not in vain that he spent so much time by the administration. As a result, I was transferred to the factory’s production section, to embrace the position of a presser…

What, actually, was Rags? It served a place where freight cars were bringing rubbish sorted at garbage dumps. Discarded dreck clothing for the most part, as well as waste paper.

Women from the nearby village of Popovka dissected the tatters with the howling disks of their machine tools and sorted the rugs again into soft mounds on the cemented floor in the aisle between their workplaces – cotton tatters, knitted rags, artificial fur collars from winter coats, etc.

Day after day they stood in front of their machine tools in dusty spetzovka wear with dangling clusters of safety pins on their chest, which they detected and pulled out from fabrics so that the steely trifles did not damage the disk. Such grapes of pins made them evil-eye-proof forever…

Time and again, 2 loaders approached those rag mounds with a deep box on long poles, like a sedan chair. Their faces were wrapped with bandannas, in the style of bank robbers, so as not to inhale the dense clouds of dust hanging around the machine tools. They piled rags high into their box and carried to the neighboring pressing section, pacing in a precipitated half-trot. That jogging gait was dictated by the weight of the load.

(…once or twice I replaced someone of the missing loaders but was not able to do more than a couple of goes.

"Sehryoga! You must be relaxed when carrying. Relax!"

Yet even after that instruction, I could not reach relaxation with the long pole-handles slipping slowly, unlocking by their unsustainable weight my fingers strained in a vain grip…)

The press was also a box but it had a door and no poles because it stood on the floor, anchored to its place. With the door open, you needed, first of all, to put over the box bottom 2 thin and narrow metal strips, aka shinka, leaving their ends out of the box. Then you had to line the box from inside with a couple of throwaway burlap sacks and lock the door with a hook outside. After stuffing the box with the trash brought by the loaders, you hit one of the 3 buttons on the press side. The electric motor, fixed atop the press shield over the box, started to creak and howl, and crept down the shaft, pushing the shield also down. It pressed the trash towards the bottom as deep as it could. When the pitch of the motor howling rose to whine, it meant the motor had done all it could and didn't have power to squeeze any firmer. At that point, you hit the "stop" button and then the button "up". The shield with the motor started the reverse creeping, up the shaft. Those ups and downs, the press executed really slowly.

Then you filled the hollow, produced in the box by the shield's cyclic travel, stuffing in additional armfuls of trash because the readied bale should weigh about 60 kg. After the third going down, the shield was stopped to keep all that in place while you tied tightly the ends of shinka about the produced, roughly cubic, bale. There remained only to send the shield up and roll the readied bale out of the box. The farther away you rolled it over the floor the better, it wouldn’t now be in the way of the upcoming bales.

About the press, there gradually accumulated a flock of bales and then Misha the loader came with a two-wheel barrow. He shoved the bottom shelf of the barrow under the bale and yanked the handles toward himself. The bale lay upon the handles, propped by the shelf from behind, and Misha dragged the barrow to the exit from the pressing section.

Near the exit gate, there stood the booth of Valya the weigher, with a large luggage scales next to it. Misha toppled the bale onto the scales and, having dipped a short stick into a tin can with red paint, wrote on the burlap wrapping of the bale figures of its weight, which Valya yelled to him thru the glass of her booth because Misha was old and half deaf. Then he dumped the bale from the scales, heaved it onto his two-wheel barrow again, and rolled it out of the pressing section into the open air, and there along the path of crippled concrete into the Quonset Hut for the processed product…

When an empty railway freight car came to the dead-end track by the Hut, the team of loaders stacked the bales into the car and it was driven away, no matter where, probably, to some factories for further processing of recyclables…

In the pressing section, there was only 1 window crusted with the dust accumulated there from the period of the First Five-Year Plan. The illumination was served by dim yellowish bulbs, one over each of the 4 presses. True, one of them did not work after donation some of it parts to the remaining 3 manned by 2 operators in the pressing section.

The production norm for a presser was 32 bales per shift. I hardly turned them out during the working day, while the other presser, another Misha, who lived with Valya the bale weigher, would have finished the norm ahead of time and left, whistling haphazard airs. He was more experienced presser and did not put excessive quantities of rags into the press box, while my bales showed abnormal overweight. Misha the loader would shake his deaf head disapprovingly, scribbling with the dipped stick "78" or "83" on the bales of my production. Then he, with a grunt, heaved the bale onto the barrow and dragged it out, because he was a strong old man. He was silent by nature and never reprove me. But I felt guilty all the same because I could not catch the hang of guessing the weight of the rags stuffed into the press box…

Apart from the midday break, there were 2 more half-hour breaks, just for having rest. We spent them in the common large room with lockers alongside 2 of its walls. In the wall opposite the door, there were 2 windows large enough to make the room light because the dust stuck to them was not quite opaque. 4 square tables with white plastic-cover tops were put in a close row under the windows, forming one common table for the midday meal, with long plank benches along its sides. That was the locker room of pressers and loaders who changed their clothes there. However, in the midday break, the Popovka women also came in because at theirs there was not a table to have a meal at.

I did not havvat there. For the midday meal, I traveled to the canteen of the "Motordetail" plant… After crossing the railway track, I went over the field and turned away from the city limit into the windbreak belt to follow the trail between the trees and bushes there to the terminal of Streetcar 1, opposite the plant check-entrance. The whole journey took 15 to 20 minutes.

It was a very modern plant, and thru the glass walls of the canteen on the second floor, there opened the view on the field from where I was coming. And there were no problems at the check-entrance, anyone in a spetzovka was considered a workman at the plant. The havvage portions at the canteen were small but cheap, and for a couple of hours after you did not feel hungry.

Sometimes, the bale weigher Valya ordered to bring her a custard cake from the canteen. On the way back, when crossing the railway track in front of pulled up locomotives in the head of their freight trains waiting for "the green" to pass thru the Konotop junction, I made attempts at bribing the locomotives with the cake wrapped in a piece of paper. They had such good-natured faces with beards in red paint coat, like the image in the sail on the Kon-Tiki raft. But they remained incorruptible.

“Well, as you please, then!" and I was taking the cake to the bale weigher Valya…

And the half-hour breaks, were for gossip and playing dominoes, the ubiquitous "goat". Besides the mujiks, the breaks were also attended by bale weigher Valya, and a couple of younger women from Popovka, and sometimes technologist Valya came in as well. She was an able-bodied woman, sufficient to fill impulsive poetic dreams, but I had already kicked off those things.

There were 4 loaders in the locker room of whom only old Misha kept silent all the time and never chip in, and even "goat" he played very rarely. Loader Volodya Kaverin with a narrow reddish horseshoe mustache trickling down to his chin, on the contrary, was loud and passionate, but loader Sasha sporting a dark toothbrush mustache soberly pacified his partner's fervor. He was tall, calm, reliable and—what a small place the world is!—married to that very Valya from the typist pool who had typed the collection of short stories by Maugham in Ukrainian.

The fourth loader, Vanya, was chubby and he shaved all of his round face. He sometimes threatened to smash my fucking mug for some of my remarks, but I doubted it – you could see from his face that he was a kind block. Besides, he was a real, big-time woman-hater and, holding the dominoes bones in his palm he used to ofttimes declare all of them were bitches.

"I'm on top of her, pumping, digging, doing my level best and she just lays with her eyes into the ceiling, 'Oy, Vanya! there's such cobweb in the corner!', well, ain't they bitches after that?!"

Even a saint wouldn't hold back a passing remark, "Poor boy!" says I, "Such a humiliation leaves no choice but become gay indeed."

And the loader begins fiddling his customary score about breaking my fucking mug. However, odds are very poor he'd ever keep his threat because behind the firmly knitted brows of a hard-core misogynist, it was hard not to see in Vanya's round face his heart of gold and tender nature.

~ ~ ~

End winter, the factory workers traditionally went on a three-day excursion to Moscow. Not all, of course, only those who wanted to. Technologist Valya asked me if I wanted. I had to admit that I hardly had enough money to live until the payday.

"Don't talk nonsense," she said, "the trade-union pay for food and accommodation. You can go there with just 3 rubles."

That was a challenge to Experimentalist. I signed up for the tour and prepared a three-ruble bill…

We arrived in Moscow filled with the winter dark. The small column of the tourists was headed by Yura who led thru the immense railway station to the square, it was not his first year in those tours. I was the file closer keeping my hands in the empty pockets of the demi-saison camel’s hair coat. A bus was already waiting for us before the station to take to the Red Square.

Arriving there, the bus stopped, and all the tourists went out to pass by the mummy of Lenin in the Mausoleum. There only remained the bus driver, the guide Olya and I.

"Are not you going?" asked Olya.

"I disgust the dead."

The driver slightly creaked his seat turning back from the steering wheel…

Obviously, to the Red Square arrived more buses with the excursionists from different other places in our vast Motherland, because the driver opened the door and 3 more guide girls climbed up inside. They knew each other and in a brisk shoptalk were discussing the internal affairs of their tour operating organization and anything else…

Their sacred tribute paid, the Konotop excursionists came back from the frosty snow-clad Red Square. Elatedly rubbing and slapping the shoulders of their coats and pea-jackets, they filled the bus with animated whoops and the stomps of treds in their footwear against the entrance steps… We were taken to the Veh-Deh-eN-Kha area, to a hotel built in the late fifties for the participants in the World-Festival of Youth and Students. The guide Olya specified details of further cooperation: on the morning of the third day the bus would take us to the railway station because we were more interested in combing thru all kinds of stores than in "look-to-the-right, look-to-the-left", wasn't it so? Everyone joined in the joyous chorus chant that, yes, it was so…

Our havvage was served at the canteen in a separate building and paid for with the stamped paper slips of the coupons distributed among the excursionists… One of the canteen employees recommended me not to leave my camel coat on the hanger by the entrance door to the hall.

"But eating with the coat off is more convenient."

"Look, Vera!" she yelled back to another worker in the canteen kitchen. "There's one more guest from Communism!"

Since I was not interested in shopping of any kind, I mostly walked about the area, had a ride on a trolley bus to its terminal, and even found a newsstand with Morning Star on sale. In Konotop, because of the explosive situation in Poland, that newspaper was often missing even from the news stall at the station. Probably, the editors in England were covering Polish events incorrectly.

3 rubles was not a sum to live in a grand style, but I still watched a historical action movie starring Karachentsev.

(…the ours, in general, can make 15 minutes of a movie quite watchable, but the rest may have been safely skipped…)

To the hotel Polar I went by the grandiose Moscow subway, aka metro. Since it was the daytime, the restaurant guests were some kind of excursionists because they all were sitting side by side in a row along the table assembled from smaller ones, and ate their havvage with their fur coats and overcoats on.

I asked a man in the waiter’s uniform garb to call waiter Nikolay but he only shrugged his shoulders. Then I demanded the head waiter, a tall woman came out in the same stripe-sleeved jacket.