for hours was I – in what way to bump Gray off?
Bumping off was not much of a problem, given the presence of that same breaker, but what then? It was necessary to whack him and cop out, but how? I didn’t even have a thing to simply dig a hole in the field, just that hammer-and-chisel in the workshop. To ask Ter-Terian for a shovel? Fucking stupid…
Or, say, take it to the pump-station room, in that deep pit always filled up with water, hitch a load and drop there. But what if the water catches stench with the decomposition of the body? The surest way was to shove it into the boiler furnace, the two-meter long flame shooting from the nozzle would incinerate it without a trace. It's only that Vanya would come for his shift and the whole stoker-house filled with the smell of barbecue – how’s about that?.
The problem had no solution and I simply kept moving, week after week, in a vicious circle until the on-duty cook would come and say it was time to turn the boiler off.
You never can tell, I might have coped after all with that quadrangle of the circle problem, but then the Tula draft was demobilized and they drove in new youngs from Uzbekistan and Stavropol Region, and Major Avetissian kicked me out of the stoker-house replacing with some young from the Pyatigorsk city.
Fare thee well, Vanya! And you, Round Table, the confidant silent of my fruitless designs…
Yes, I became a grandpa and I got it in full when, entering the sorteer, I saw there Vasya from Buryn with whom, as youngs, we had been slaving in the squad-team under Prostomolotov. Vasya was squatting over an ochco holding a newspaper open wide before his nose.
I’m fucked if it’s not the lost picture by the great Russian artist Repin – “A squatter in the reading-room”! Behold how all so grandly, with his belt hanging from around his neck, kinda stylish muffler, giving himself Great Gatsby's airs he checks the news of the day, sort of. And at that point, the cuntfucker had finished me off completely. He raised himself from his full squat to a deep-curtsy level, like, a dance teacher demonstrating the technique of a reverence to the hole underneath and announced, "Good evening!" I was fucking fucked to pieces; that's some Vasya! Where did he fucking find such fucking words?.
~ ~ ~
My grandpa period of service unfolded rather chaotically. I no longer belonged to the gang of chmomen but the commanding officers were too lazy to transfer me from Fourth Company somewhere else for only 6 months. So, I had to work here and there, most of all at MCU.
That MCU had nothing to do with Missile Controlling Units, it was a mortar-concrete unit. Although, a grandpa wouldn't die of overwork even at so strenuous a workplace. I could shove the sand with a shovel as well as not shove the sand with the shovel, it depended.
The squad-team there was commanded by Misha Khmelnytsky from our draft who had turned so portly, with those Sergeant stripes across his shoulder-straps. And he roughed the youngs as we had been roughed so long before…
Then for a period, I was sent to a brick factory and there were neither squad-teams nor youngs. My job there was stacking clamp, raw bricks, in the ring kiln for burning. The ring kiln from inside is a low arched tunnel and it works continuously. At one spot in the tunnel, the mobile conveyor belt brings raw bricks thru the opening in the wall—be quick or they’ll pour in a pile, grab them in time and stack in loose rows up to the ceiling!—while on the opposite side in the ring kiln diameter, the fire rages from the nozzles in the arched walls to burn the bricks. The heat, of course, was felt all over the kiln and you had to work in an undershirt, still sweltering. The job grew much hotter when loading the freshly fried bricks on that same conveyor belt but moving in reverse. The heat scorched your hands even thru the canvas mitts and was radiating from the walls around so you had to undress and work with only high boots and pants on. Take care not to touch the scorching wall with your bare shoulder. And the next shift would be stacking raw bricks in this very spot, and so over and over again without an end to the loop cycle of ring kiln…
When at home, I started to spend more time in the Company barrack. In case of off-the-wall situations, the servicemen from younger drafts approached me to get advised. For example, outside the brick-fencing, a taxi pulled up with a Sergeant from our Company – blind, deaf and dead – on the back seat. They called me, I went out to check and it was real easy because the grunting body stretched over the back seat was naked to the waist – yea, him ours. The taxi driver wanted no fee, thank you, says he, just take the shit away.
And as the Sergeant was a real boar, it took three youngs to plop him over the wall into a snowdrift from where he was dragged into the dryer room next to the cabinet-box guarded by the on-duty, where the jackets were dried after the working day, and there he dried off too till the morning.
Once some Uzbeks treated me to a dried melon plated in a braid, from a parcel they received from their home, sweet it was, I even remembered the parcel from my parents when I was a young – four cans of condensed milk shared in the musicians’.
And the Uzbeks came up to and treated me on their own accord, I wouldn’t even know they had any parcel. Probably, because of, though a grandpa, I never hewed from their rations of butter and sugar in the Canteen…
The commander of Fourth Company, Captain Chernykh, was transferred somewhere from