10 rubles a month. The jacket looked classy, of a nice brown color but cuffs and the belt of a darker cloth. If watched from afar, it even glistened in the sun… In two weeks the leatherette at the elbows fretted to its gunny base, but at the moment when I received my award, the jacket still had good looks.
Yes, the Trade-Union Committee of the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant rewarded me for outstanding participation in amateur activities. At the All-Plant trade-union conference in Club, the Chairman of the Plant Trade-Union Committee personally handed me not a useless Certificate of Honor, but a sizable paper packet which contained dark rubber fins and a mask, yet, sadly, no snorkel.
Nonetheless, I took the equipment to the Seim once, but swimming in the fins turned out much harder than you might think when watching flicks alike to "The Amphibian Man". Besides, water found the way to penetrate inside the mask and get into my nose, but then, perhaps, it couldn't be otherwise… However, I was not too keen on studying the bottom life of large water bodies because my main concern that summer was finding a job. I desperately needed money, lots of it, because of my "horselessness".
Vladya had a motor scooter "Riga-4", Chuba drove "Desna-3", Skully reconstructed his bike into a moped, and when a flock of the Settlement scooter-riders buzzing their motors scudded along Peace Avenue, he did not fell too far behind… Yet, "Riga-4" was the coolest. Vladya, of course, allowed me to drive it a couple of times – the buzz of the engine, wind in the face, speed operating, delight! But begging Chuba's scooter for a ride was of no use. Straddling his "Desna-3", the feet firmly on the ground, he'd only scoff in answer.
"Let me, eh? Don't be greedy."
"I ain't greedy, I am gritty!"
"Churls aren’t gritty. One ride to Professions Street and back, I swear!"
Another chuckle at nothing funny.
"A scrimpy asshole!"
But Chuba only scoffed again.
Skully's moped I did not want myself; but where to get money to buy a scooter? That was the question…
Mother said that a guy after the ninth grade might get a job at the Vegetable Storage Base, if he applied at the Head Office of the Department for Workingmen Provision, aka ORS, near the Under-Overpass.
It sounded a great idea, there should be truckloads of strawberries and watermelons too were surely passing the Vegetable Base before they got on sale at stores. But would they give me a job if I wasn't sixteen yet? In the long narrow corridor of the barrack-like ORS Head Office, I felt more uptight than thru all the session of summer examinations at school. And I got the job! So began my labor career…
The Vegetable Base was located at the end of Depot Street and I was getting there by bike. Besides me, the enterprise employed about 10 other summer hands, mostly from School 14. I recognized one of them – a short guy sporting long hair, handled Luke, he it was who slapped me in the face for shooting in his back. The guy tacitly let the bygones be bygones, and so did I, of course.
The initial couple of days on the job we were sorting boxes, just empty boxes with no strawberries whatsoever. The whole ones were stacked in the shed, those in need of repair piled next to the shed, while split and shattered throwaways had to be schlepped to the stoves under the open sky in the middle of the Base yard…
Arriving in the Base, a truck with a load of vegetables goes onto a weighbridge to get weighed. After dumping the cargo they weigh the vehicle once again; the difference between the loaded and empty truck shows the weight of the brought vegetables if only the weighbridge works correctly. That's where arises the need for a trained calibrator who knows how to tune the weighbridge. To do the calibration, you also need a trial one-ton load of 20 kg pig iron weighs, as well as some workforce to move that ton from one corner of the weighbridge to another, to another, to another, to the middle…
The job of hands at calibration disclosed who of us was who. At first, it was like a sporting event, we carried the weighs racing ahead each other, by the third corner we started to notice which of us shirked and who was going to the end…
Then for two or three days, we cleaned the potato storage block of its stock gone rotten in winter. I never imagined there could be so sickening a stench in the world. Wrapping our mugs in our tank tops, we dragged that horrid muck out, in two-handle wicker baskets, to dump in the thicket of tall grass on the Vegetable Base outskirts. The number of working school guys diminished to 5…
The main workforce at the Base were women in black robes and pattern-printed kerchiefs on their hair. They sorted the carrots or beetroots in the respective blocks, and we moved and stacked the boxes filled by them. Sitting in a circle around a dusty knoll of vegetables, they never stopped yakking, not for half a minute, faith. They were telling each other endless sagas of "he" and "she". About how that "she" of theirs grew fat, then skinny, then got to the hospital, then told her mother she couldn't live without him, then died, then cheated on him and fled with someone else… And "he" was tall, then short, then pot-bellied, then bald, then black-haired, then a drunk; "he" refused to pay alimony and asked to marry him, they treated him for alcoholism before “he” ripped off the linoleum from the kitchen floor to take it to his lover widowed two times…
And so they would pour out their chin music until the blonde guy from School 14, Long by his handle, addresses the peppiest one in the circle of squaws seated on the upset empty boxes, "Well, you give or what?"
"At once!" says she. "But when