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

He was her co-worker at Rags where she got a job because she hadn't gone to her mother in Theodosia but stayed in Konotop by her aunt.

"Rags" was how they named Recycling Factory on the very outskirts of Konotop, by the first stop of the local train going towards the Seim and farther.

Why not pick a job somewhere closer? Because at Rags they didn’t care too much for the labor legislation, and Olga then was barely just 15…

~ ~ ~

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