a pail of boiling tar falls from the roof, and you’re a lucky devil if the warning yell "run!" makes you jump aside without needless gaping skyward: what's up? Flump!!
It is the place, where a cast-iron heating radiator hits the ground by the wall, hurled from a window on the fourth floor by a criminal having recently returned from his another stretch in Zona. He was not targeting anyone personally and threw it just so, without ever looking out to check who might have their pate cracked open by God’s will.
On the whole, a construction site could be compared to life itself, and there, just as in life, one must not only live but also survive. (Excuse my recidivistic falling back into the rut of pathos.)
Still, it's worth mentioning that bricklayers are not robots but mere humans. And humans, when being cornered properly enough, would take your dear life to save the life of theirs… That is…er…what was it I was about?. Ah, yes!. Construction site.
At a construction site, there's no time for a bricklayer to glide thru whimsical interpretations of esoteric messages from the initiated to the chosen, neither for the deciphering of signs drawn in the sky by ever-changing clouds. Wait for a smoke break, and then play with your irrelevant or over-insightful thoughts, shuffle the puzzle-pieces of signs and symbols of varying significance to your heart's content, read and learn the crypt-glyph messages written with white on blue. Until Mykola the foreman had risen the shnoorka for the next course and yelled along the seizure line: "Off we drive!" To which call Peter Lysoon would respond despondently: "What? Again to attack? And which way lies your "forward"? And that is the signal to grab your shovel, splat dirt atop the wall in progress, and start to live on further…
~ ~ ~
(…a couple of centuries before, on the border with England, or maybe conversely, with Scotland, there lived a farmer earning plenty of dough without any charlatanism whatsoever. His specialty was restoring all kinds of mentally touched, crazed, shifted and otherwise impaired. On the condition, that their loving relatives were not around in the course treatment.
So, they brought to him such a, let’s say, challenged, whose specific perception of the world around had already f-f..er..I mean, fretted brains of all of his household members unfit in earnest consider him a teapot. "Oh, look out! I'm of porcelain! Don't break me up!"
And the following morning the farmer would take the teapot out into the field, together with odd items from other services—crystal highballs, or saltcellars with their lids lost, as well as costume jewelry, which also turned up at times—and carefully harnessed the whole jingling company into the plow. And then, naturally, plowed the field.
By the evening of the day, 88 percent of the glass containers recollected their origin, starting to voice comments and protestations to his erroneous attitude towards human beings. On the second day, the most obstinate pressure cookers also began to pretend being human as everybody else, and the farmer returned to the family and society their fully restored members. For the stipulated fee, of course, plus bonus of the field cultivated by unpaid workforce…)
Eera did not believe in labor therapy in the open, she had more trust in folkloric remedies. That winter she took me to the sorcerer in the district center of Ichnya, in the Chernigov region. We arrived there late in the evening amid the early thickening winter twilight. There was about half-hour before the bus departure back, and the local kids, with some kind of pride, directed us to the sorcerer's khutta.
The door was opened by a regular rural woman of middle age and the rest of the interior was as ordinary, strapped of any hexerei. In the kitchen, there was a pair of visitors, but not from our bus, I would have remembered them. Probably, from somewhere in the neighborhood. A young couple they were, seemingly newlywed, both seated at the table with the man busy shoving away a bowlful of borsch, and she, like, overseeing. Not quite the right time for borsch though, but I did not intervene – might be the sorcerer prescribed it in the way of medication…
The woman led Eera to the next room, and two minutes later they came back together with the sorcerer, a black-haired man about 50 in a khaki shirt from the army parade-crap. We looked at each other, unblinkingly, and he returned to his room with Eera. I stayed with the borsch-eater and the 2 women.
Soon Eera came back, all excitedly wound up, and we left for the bus. On our way to Nezhyn, Eera shared that I was the way I was because they had fed a "giving" to me, and there occurred an overdose, but it was useless to treat me on that particular day since it was a wrong "quarter", that is the moon was not in the right phase. (Or could they run out of the borsch?.)
The sorcerer also said that I did not need to come on a visit anymore, and should be replaced with someone from my blood relatives. Later, instead of me, my sister Natasha a couple of times went with Eera to the district center of Ichnya.
(…it's a commonplace knowledge that a "giving" is a love potion used by a female to make you fall in love with her. The target of the charm is treated to something edible spiced, for the purpose, with a portion of her menstrual humors.
Anyway, it was the fair sex to start experiments on human beings…)
I have no trust in any charms, neither in spells, nor in any other hooey of the kind, but when you chink your trowel against brick or turn the mortar with the shovel, your head remains, basically, free and lots of things may slowly twirl in there.
(…if, purely hypothetically, suppose that the "giving" has, after all, taken place, then – who, where, when?
I am not sure in which from the years of my work