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