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

He made a sugary-nasal voice meaning everyday start-up pop stars, "Rains again… but you wait for me… no, I won't wait… fuck off, you stupid fucker…"

We couldn’t help laughing. That particular song was heard by Zampolit for the first time in his life but he accurately grasped the essence of lyrics in the musical mass production of that sort.

"I'll pass thru any rains
Because I'm loving you! Uh-uh!.."

~ ~ ~

And again our team-squad saw the rotation of commander. Prostomolotov got transferred back to his previous squad without demotion from the Lance-Corporal rank though because he wasn't caught at anything. His clash of personalities with the Ensign, the platoon commander, became the reason for the shuffle. He, most likely, at some point, was not careful enough to keep back his intellectual superiority over the Ensign. "Thief-swaggering" was the conbat term to denote that kind of behavior of the sort.

Alik Aliyev, an Azerbaijani in the slinky pants of pheasantly upgraded outfit, came in his place. He was a slim tall guy with a beautiful round face in which a thin clean skin tightly fitted his high cheekbones and the well-developed jaw.

A week later he was promoted to the rank of Lance-Corporal. For that ceremonial occasion, Alik Aliyev ordered our squad-team to fall in, clapped his hands (the right fist into the opposite palm) and announced, full of bubbling delight, "I would-a fuckan!"

But he somewhat hurry-scurried in his predictions and joyful expectations. There were no less tall but more emotionally reserved privates in our squad, who quietly shared with the Lance-Corporal their concepts (which he understood and accepted) that if people who got to the construction battalion after doing their times in Zona still did not thief-swagger, then for him, who was honored to become a conbatist simply on the grounds of insufficient fluency in Russian, moderation and modesty were the ticket to not dented survival.

And about me personally, he never meant to be mean. While still a private man, he accidentally witnessed a situation in the Leninist Room of our Company when 2 senior servicemen from The Orion interpreted to Prostomolotov, the then commander of my squad-team, the postulate of the musicians being above the vanilla army relations as presented by the Statute of the Internal Military Service…

So we just did our job at work—digging, dragging, laying, hoisting—and after it, we got rest within the built-in limitations of construction battalion life.

Of course, we were not qualified to lie down on our beds in the koobriks before the lights-out (that was the privilege of grandpas) but then there were stools along the aisle, as well as in the Leninist Room, so one could sit down and have a rest, because it was already too cold for sitting in the gazebo next to the entrance vestibule…

Then the winter began. We were given warm hats and scarcely padded khaki jackets. They pulled canvas tops over the truck beds by which we were taken to work, and also installed plank benches—from side to side—and now we rode not seated on our haunches…

In the blue darkness of starting night, our squad-team gathered after work at the foot of the nine-story building, but our truck was late. We even walked a little off to meet it on the other side of the windbreak belt remainder, and then some 100 meters more, to the sidewalk stretching towards the distant blocks of five-story buildings, with no passers-by at such an hour. There we formed a wide circle on the trampled snow, tap-taping one freezing boot against the other… Jokes, laughter, friendly jabs and claps on the shoulders – usual vivacity at the end of a usual working day before leaving for the usual havvage at the conbat Canteen.

I felt too bored by listening to the jokes heard before lots of times and walked back to the speck of light from a distant electric bulb on the butt wall of the nine-story building.

(…one of the ways to overcome the drag of time is fiddling about the accessible space…)

So, I padded back to from where we came, knowing that the team would not leave without me, as well as without a couple of grandpa-bricklayers who were still changing into their uniforms in the nine-story building… Boos, yells, and laughter of comrades died down behind… I walked in a measured step thinking of nothing.

(…such reflections are also named "wistful yearnings of a soul", that is when you don't finalize your thoughts about anything specific, but still, for some reason, feel sort of blues…)

On entering the leftovers of the forest belt, I, like, heard a call muffled by the distance between me and the spot in space from where someone called me.

I switched over to here-and-now, and reluctantly looked back over my shoulder just in time to see the rear side of the truck rushing on me. It was too late for a jump aside, though I instinctively bent my legs to hit the road. And that initial tilting in the direction of the intended jump saved me – the bat of the truck rear side completed the started move and threw me away under the tree, instead of toppling onto the road, under the huge wheels of the vehicle…

"We kept shouting to warn you," said Vitya Strelyany, as we rode home. Well, I donno. All I heard was just one call and from really very far… My right shoulder hurt for a couple of days…

~ ~ ~

At the end of December, our squad-team was transferred to the construction site of a multi-apartment building. Or rather to the initialization of that site. There was just a deep pit still empty of any foundation blocks with a short length of tower crane tracks alongside the excavation and the crane itself standing idly over the wide rectangular crater.

Ah, yes, there also was a tin-roofed trailer made of planks with a door and two windows, taken off its wheels and put on the ground by the pit.

We got a clear-cut task – to dig the trench for the sidewall foundation blocks because the wall, as it turned out, should pass two meters closer to the trailer, kinda adding to the project's width. The reason was that at digging out the foundation pit, they omitted to observe that the building would get sitting smack on the pipeline providing running water for a whole city neighborhood and any emergency caused by corrosion would turn the project into a Noah's arc were in made of wood. Now, they woke up and decided to slightly change the project’s location before it was started. And while they were figuring out this and that, winter came, frost struck and no backhoes could widen the foundation pit – the frozen ground was too hard for the excavator buckets, and therefore they brought us, the rescuers at unsolvable situations…

Half of the trailer was packed with brand-new shovels and bayonet spades, we even were given the unheard-of luxury – protective canvas mitts. Of course, the ground was too hard for any kind of spades, breakers were the must there. And they were also brought, a whole truckload of breakers, and dumped with clang-and-ding next to the trailer. Heavy, iron, a meter-and-half long, breakers, and their only weak point was in being self-made. At one of the local factories, they took thick rebar rods, cut them into the pieces of proper length, hammered the rod ends in a smithy to make them pointed, and dumped by the pit.

However, the breaker should be smooth because that's a hand tool. Yet, rebar, which, actually, is intended for making reinforced concrete, bears frequent oblique scars for firmer merging with the cement slurry. Those scars, though rounded, would tear any mitts after a dozen strikes with the rebar-rod breaker against the ground, and then the make-believe handtool would start rubbing off the palm skin, however calloused and hardened it were. But if not we, then who else would defend our beloved Homeland from the plan-drawing ass-holes? Conbat would redress all faults and deal with any situation…

The wind, like a mongrel cut loose off its chain, tumbles in helter-skelter around, snaps at the loosened ear-flaps of our hats, whips their strings against the faces. Yet, the wind’s main job is to drag along in its current the black and gray clouds tumbling and scudding as low as the cabin top of the tower crane. Because of those clouds, all around from morning to night drowns in gloomy twilight. To get warm there's the trailer heated with our breathing.

The mitts had long since got worn to tatters, we grab the frosty rebar-rods with the rags found in the trailer. A strike of the rebar breaker against the frozen ground cleaves off a sliver of it hardly bigger than a walnut; then another splinter, and one more.

With his back to the wind, your partner waits for you to break away a shovelful of chips for him to scrape them off and throw away. Then you change each other… As Vitya Strelyany cared to put it:

"We were brought to Stavropol
To dig and shovel the ground,
But it is so fucking hard,
Harder can't be found."

(…however, I entertain an unshared suspicion that it was an adaptation of a Zona couplet from the period of first five-year plans in the Soviet history, turned out in the mines of Donbas…)

But there's always a nook to feel happy in – oh, how sweet is dozing off when seated on the floor of the trailer with your back leaned against the backs of your comrades!

After half-day of breaking-scraping, we discovered that at the depth of half-meter-plus the permafrost transformed into the ground of almost equal hardness, yet yielding to the strikes with a bayonet spade. Three days later we developed the trench digging technique. First, you dig a hole meter-by-meter and two meters deep, then with an interval of one meter, you dig another such hole and connect these two by a burrow thru the softer ground at their bottoms under the bridging crust of frozen layer. The bridge is cinched about by the crane slings and you will hollow out two grooves across the edges of the permafrost bridge until the crane power is enough to tear off and hoist the whole block of frozen ground. Ha! Fuck you, bitch!.

Yes, the construction battalion did it!. And although there remained many days of breaking and scraping to the very end of the trench, we won the day. We broke the backbone of the polar night twilight that had descended as far as the city of Stavropol…

Besides the trailer, you also could shelter from the frost in the staircase-entrances of the multi-apartment block on the other bank of the pit. Out of the piercing wind, a cigarette chiseled from a passer-by in a staircase could also warm you up…

While I was basking in the staircase-entrances, Alimosha and Novikov explored the surrounding territories and discovered a dairy factory there, as well a bakery plant. Just a question of climbing a pair of fencing walls. They returned swollen like balloons with cardboard half-liter pyramids of milk, and loaves of hot bread tucked under their padded jackets. Since that day we were sending foragers there. The workers of both enterprises allowed you to lift your loot directly from the production lines…

At times, we went out on the street to beg money from the passers-by. "Bro, 27 kopecks short of a bottle, can you help out?"… "Sister, 11 kopecks for a pack of "Belomor", eh? Two days without a smoke.."

Alimosha explained the nuances to me. Never address the pensioner oldies – no go, and they might even start to yell. Asking for a round sum was also a mistake; instead of 27 he would give you at least 30, and instead of 11 you'd get 15 kopecks.

What the money for? Well, instead of 9-kopeck shag, or bitter "Pamir" for 11 kopecks, you could buy Cuban "Portugas", aka "the thermonuclear", or that same "Prima" again; but not Indian "Red and White" – a sour crap in golden-foil wrappers. And sometimes we drink wine too; to drive away fatigue and flush down the snack from the bakery plant.

Oh, how low I fell! Cadging on the street! Where's my decency, my self-esteem? How could I possibly not die of shame?

(…well, firstly, in our cant there was a more precise term for that activity: we were not cadging, but jackalling.

As for my decency and self-esteem whereabouts, they're always by me only their shape vacillate unlike some rigidly constant values as that of never-ending Pi we were taught at school for I don’t know what purpose.

And in regard to shame, I'm probably a pervert here. I feel more ashamed of robbing that Whatman paper tophat from credulous Valya Pisanko, than of receiving soiled coppers in my capped palm from the passers-by.

And even though I might, at certain points, be a noble man, yet, on the whole, I'm anything but a Spanish grandee, and you can safely take my word for it…)

In February, the bread-and-butter carnival was over; we were transferred to the construction of the Medical Center whose basement was already bridged over with concrete flooring slabs, but not completely. Underneath those slabs, we were hiding from the winter wind around a fire built of any lumber or raw-timber we came across and split with the breakers because there was no trailer to shelter in.

The territory of the future Medical Center were vast indeed, but being on the city outskirts it provided no hunting grounds for jackalling…

The trucks for our transportation to work and back all were from a local motor depot manned by the civvy drivers… Ours was a hairy asshole. He flew into the grounds of the would-be Medical Center on his UAZ-66, hit the brakes and the truck glided over the icy ground, turned around and stopped still – get in, off we go!

During the trick, the badly fixed, tattered, canvas top quacked and bubbled like a parachute in arms of a landed saboteur. The driver grinned his bad-teeth smile from under his thin mustache – he was in high spirits from that sort of gypsy romanticism.