was not exhausting and returning home after a day's work, she often shared news about what was going on in the collective comprising only females, except for the unit chief and his deputy.
At her workplace, her main function was that of a conflict-extinguisher, sort of, while at the periods of lull she played compliments. That is, after telling someone another of her pleasantries she scored herself a point.
(…it calls for a good self-schooling and close self-control not to get stuck in the repetition of what had been already used to please…)
Sometimes the chief of their unit would shake his head and say, "That's a cunning she-Jew for you! Found again how to lick!"
And my mother would joyously laugh in response, and she laughed at home retelling the compliment which brought her one more point…
My brother Sasha worked at the PMS in a team of repairers. They were in charge of replacing the ties in the railway tracks and ramming the gravel under them with a massive dildo-type hand-vibrator.
Our sister Natasha, while out of work, was taking my daughter Lenochka to the kindergarten and back…
To the request of my father, the personnel department at the RepBase let me have a temporary job, till end summer, at the construction shop floor there. With three permanent workmen, I was demolishing and building some walls within the RepBase grounds. The most straining part in the job was long waits before they brought mortar for us to start our work. There I earned a fig plus another fig and one more fig, but then the work was just to get seated and sit tight, or stand up and stand patiently. Anyway, the RepBase was fully satisfied with my masonry skills.
Having nothing better to do, I again grew a beard and the RepBase workforce handled me "Fidel Castro". My father liked it, maybe because he and Fidel were born in the same year. When run out of the smoke, I went to beg from my father. He was a locksmith at the shop floor with strict regulations about smoking, which only was allowed in specially designated places, like an open gazebo in the yard…
My father was respected on the shop floor for his golden hands and readiness to share the know-how… When coming across a bungler wasting both himself and the stuff to turn out a pitiful throwaway, you can quietly scoff to yourself and go away minding your business. Not so was my father’s ways, because of his intolerance to illiteracy.
With a painful wince in his face, he would stand by, as if made to watch some vulgar act of dicking around, then he'd come up, take the instrument from the dilettante’s hands and show how to go about that particular task, "See? It’s just a lead-pipe cinch, easier than boiling turnips!" That's why he was respected, and they did not take offense at his grumpy mutter, "Really have to do it askew? So they taught you, eh?"
The majority of the RepBase workers came there from the nearby village of Popovka, and too few of then trained in the "seminary". Popovka had integrated with the RepBase so closely that in the village you could come across fencing made of helicopter blades, discarded, of course. But the blade cinched up to the stake with a piece of wire looks ugly, and fixing it by a neat binding as suggested uncle Kolya was completely another kettle of fish…
In the unpaneled half-khutta at Decemberists 13, resided auntie Zeena, a lonely pensioner. She plaited her half-gray hair into stringy maiden braids and tied them together at the back of her head. On the porch at her door, for the most of the year, there also hung a yellow braid of dried onions forming a plaited circle. Auntie Zina did not interfere with the life of the yard and smiled at everyone. Each spring, following the directive of our father, my brother and I turned the dirt in her part of the garden… Once, she was very friendly with Olga, and secretly resented my role in our divorce, but she still kept smiling even at me…
There was enough living space in our brick-paneled half-khutta of three rooms and a kitchen plus veranda, apart from the summer room in the yard under one roof with the shed. Among the inhabitants of all that area, only five-year-old Lenochka was not smoking. The rest of us smoked Belomor-Canal for 22 kopecks, except for Natasha with her filtered Metropolitan for 40 kopecks. She once counted up that the total expenditure for cigarettes by the family was 25 to 30 rubles monthly…
The summer was over and before my first departure for the fourth course at the English Department, my mother asked if I would bring and introduce to her my Eera from Nezhyn. She knew about Eera from Natasha's report and subsequent questioning of me. And she had even seen Eera on the all-out photograph taken at the Borzna wedding. The picture was staged in the photo studio of the district center, where the guests and relatives of the newlyweds were standing in three rows on the long benches of descending height, behind the happy bride and groom in their chairs.
My mother asked me to show who from the multitude was Eera, and I answered, "Find for yourself." In the picture, I stood in the upper row on the right, surrounded by 3 girls, and Eera was in the diagonally opposite corner.
My mother's finger touched her face, "That's her?"
I felt that she, for some reason, would rather be mistaken, but I couldn't lie to my mother. "How d'you guess?"
"I don't know."
(…the first prosaic work in Ukrainian was The Witch of Konotop written by Kvitka-Osnovyanenko in 1833.
Ask whoever you choose, "Why?" and they will answer, "I don't know."…)
Therefore, in September following the serene summer of 1977, the meeting of your mother and grandmother took place at 13, Decemberists Street…
Of course, I had been bringing Eera to Konotop even before that and introduced her to the high