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

militiaman and subjected tipsy mujiks to self-invented sadistic check: those still capable of articulating "Jawaharlal Nehru" were let go, while the phonetically hopeless ones transported to the sobering-up station.

(…Konotop is Konotop, where even a mere rank-and-file militiaman knew and popularized the name of the first president of India…)

When on his turn, the former militiaman sealed the window in the oversees' compartment from within with a self-made cardboard trencher. Otherwise, he could not sleep at all because of his service, as a young man, in the troops fighting Bandera resistance, and the windows in their barracks were closed for the night with lumber shields so that the repose of servicemen would not be disturbed by the guerrillas' grenades hurled thru the window panes…

After donning their spetzovka robes, the entire team collected in the men bricklayers' trailer to exchange the news about At-Seven-Winds, the hostel barracks, and SMP-615 itself. Yes, sometimes Gregory Gregoryevich would start bulldozing Grynya that at 8.00 he should stand at the line, chink his trowel and lay a brick upon another. To which Grynya would produce a grunting chortle and readily agree, "Very truly!" Because until the mortar was brought to the site and crane-hauled to the line, the bricklayers had nothing to do up there.

The mortar was brought to the site by a dump truck. It would reverse over the rows of empty sheet-iron boxes, and raise its dump for the mortar to crawl down the steep slope, but it would not drop into the boxes completely. And it's good news if at least half of it had slid out off the dump. Firstly, on the way from the mortar-concrete unit, the mortar had grown dense, squeezing water out from the slush, and it was, for the most part, that very water to fall down into the boxes on the ground. And secondly, the dump floor and sides were not smooth anymore but covered with the ever-growing crust of frozen, upon frozen, upon frozen, mortar from the previous deliveries in winter, or of the dried up, upon dried up, upon dried up, rind in summer. That's why it's necessary to climb the tailgate hanging off behind the dump. It would swing in its hinges under your feet so one of them should be propped against the up-tilted dump's side for stability.

Now, you’re in the position to cut the impacted mortar with your shovel and send swaths of it down onto the heap growing over the boxes. When a cut-off layer of mortar pours in the boxes, the truck dump will give a vigorous jerk-and-quake, getting relieved of the load, at this point, keeping your balance on the tailgate is of vital importance.

The dump truck would go, leaving behind a hillock of mortar over 4 to 5 boxes. But that's wrong because each bricklayer is supposed to have a separate box. Katerina and Vera Sharapova would restore the just distribution with their shovels.

Although each box had 4 hook-loops atop its sides, the riggers hooked the boxes by only 2, diagonally, so that the crane would haul the mortar for 2 bricklayers in 1 go…

The part of wall in the process of being laid by the team was called "the seizure". A string, aka the shnoorka, was tightly stretched from end to end of the seizure. Usually, shnoorka was a thick fishing line smeared with stuck, dried up, mortar, the knots in its length marked places where a strike of an incautious trowel had cut it up, giving rise to reproving exclamations from along the seizure, "Again? What son of a bitch was it?!." The shnoorka served for maintaining the right direction and horizontal leveling of the brick courses so everyone paid it close attention…

To the right of a bricklayer, the crane left a box, aka banka, full of mortar. The boxful of mortar was not exceedingly large – just about a quarter of one ton. When the banka-box got emptied, the crane took it off to the riggers for refilling from the remaining or newly brought heap of mortar. The boxed mortar gradually lost its elasticity but then you had to simply add water fetched in a crumpled pail from the multi-ton container standing nearby, behind the seizure, and temper the “dirt” applying your shovel. That's why a shovel handle stuck out from each box. However, the main purpose of the shovel was to put the mortar from the box onto your part in the seizure. Then the shovel returned to its stuck up posture in the box, and the mortar dumped onto the wall was spread by the bricklayer using their trowel, a tool approximately the size of a large kitchen knife with a triangular spade substituting for the blade.

To the left from a bricklayer, there stood a pallet of bricks, 3 to 4 hundred pieces stacked in dense rows on top of each other. Snatching a brick from the upper row, the bricklayer laid it upon the spread mortar and tap-tapped with the tin-clad end of the trowel handle, so as to level the brick to the line dictated by the stretched shnoorka.

When the course bond called for a brick of special size—a half, a three-quarter, or (the smallest) a one-fourth piece—the bricklayer's hammer was used to gauge the brick by cutting off the excess. After the bricks on the pallet were finished off, the crane operator delivered another one, hooked by Katerina and Vera Sharapova from among the pallets stacked on the ground.

The rhythmic change of interlinked movements—stooping, stretching, turning, bending—transformed the labor process, taking into account its outdoor nature, into a real aerobics sprinkled with a weeny admixture of weightlifting. Looped, consistently ordered, motion, which you might even call spiraling. Do you follow?

And now spit in the eye of that pathetic bullshit and forget it, because the construction site is not a circus with evenly smoothed sand in its arena. Construction site is a danger zone, where spiky ends of rebar-rods lurk in dark nooks, a seemingly firm board snaps off under your foot,