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

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