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

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tanks with oxygen.

      In the Smithy, no explanations were audible behind the deafening hum of giant fans and the roar of fire in the brick furnaces from which black-overalled workers were pulling with tremendous tongs huge glowing slugs and carrying them by jib cranes onto the anvils under hydraulic hammers.

      Our class stood for a while and watched the worker turning by his steely tongs a big white-hot slug upon the anvil, this way and that way, under the mighty strikes of huge hammer shooting with dinosaurous puffs from above, between its oily stands, to shape the needed form. The floor vibrated from the tremor sent about by the hammer bangs. Flakes of metal fell off the workpiece while it got darker, changing color to scarlet, then to dark cherry. But the most surprising was the sensitiveness of the hammer which could also strike very lightly, and even stop halfway in its sharply accelerated fall. It was operated by a woman in a kerchief on her head, who used just a pair of levers sticking from the juggernaut’s side frame.

      On our way out of the shop past another, silent, hydraulic hammer I saw a scattering of round metal tablets the size of a jubilee ruble, only thicker. I liked their pleasant lilac color, besides, such a tablet would do for a good bitok to turn kopecks over in the game for money. Moreover, the pieces were surely just a waste if thrown there on the floor. I picked one up and dropped at once – it badly burned my fingers. A passing-by worker laughed and said, “What? Too heavy, eh?”

      And in the Mechanical Shop Floor, I was impressed by a planing machine in a low narrow frame, scraping off, in no hurry, shavings from the clamped metal plate. The astounding feature about the machine tool was its bas-relief boilerplate – “Manufactured in Riga in 1904.” From before the Revolution! And still working!. Farther along, there stood a large Soviet machine tool, also a planer, its cutter kept traveling long runs and the worker sat next to it in a chair just watching idly. Some nice job, huh?

      When at home I shared my impressions from the excursion, Mother said I might start taking shower at some of Plant’s shop floors instead of going to the City Bathhouse behind Square of the Konotop Divisions. Then she asked if I knew that Vadya Kubarev’s mother worked at the Plant cooling tower and that would simplify access to the tower’s shower room.

      I discussed the idea with Skully who told that all his life he had been going to Plant on his bath days, and there were shop floors with better shower rooms than that at the cooling tower. The majority of the showers worked only till eight at night but those in the shop floors with three work shifts were open round the clock. Of course, they might not allow us to Plant at the Main Check-Entrance but who cared about going that way? There remained 24/7 free access to the territory thru the Plant rear end, along the tracks where the cars were pulled in for repair and the repaired ones pulled out. Yet, there was no need to go even that far, because the high concrete wall along Professions Street was full of convenient stiles for the workforce to easily take home shabashkas after their working day.

      (…and again I have to break out from the consequently flowing timeline, and take a jump from Konotop to the Varanda River, how otherwise would a metropolitan woman from the third millennium understand the everyday provincial lingo of the last century?

      At times even the Dahl’s Dictionary is of little help. Although he correctly noted that the word “shabash”, aka Sabbath, was used to signal the end of work, yet no further revelations beyond that point. It took the Russian language another hundred years and adapting to the era of developed socialism in the country to produce “shabashka” from the Sabbath.

      Shabashka is some product manufactured at workplace to take and use it at home or, at least, a bundle of timber pieces acquired and chopped at work for burning in the stove of the worker’s khutta. Hauling the shabashka home is the period, sort of, to mark the end of a working day.

      How do you estimate my etymological efforts?. Well, and since I’m here, perhaps, it’s time to crawl into this one-person Chinese pagoda of mine. What I do like about it are these folding bamboo rods. Some cleverly designed gizmo – a dozen half-meter tubes assemble into the pair of three-meter-long elastic poles to stretch the tent over them. And this mosquito net at the entrance works fine – zip it up, and no mosquito can fly in. Buzz outside, bloodsuckers! Fig at you!

      Now I’ll take off my shirt and pants, get into this sleeping bag “Made in Germany”, get warm and all the king’s men can’t make you feel cozier.

      It feels good when such an ancient civilization and so technocratic nation, from East and West, work for you. Although, when you come to think about it, these 2 are only manufacturers who put to use the ideas accumulated by the humans as a whole. Any widget, even the most sophisticated one, rolled out by this or that advanced nation is the mutual achievement of mankind, to which the Amazonia Indians contributed also by the mere fact of their existence. But they, just like me, have to pay for things from public domain.

      Look at this zipper here: you know who invented it? Me neither, but hardly they were the Liang Jin dynasty or, say, Kaiser Wilhelm…)

      ~ ~ ~

      The stage is a complex mechanism, in addition to the block system for operating the curtains, besides the electrical board full of fuses, switches, buttons to control its diverse illumination, you will also find up there, high above the stage, a whole cobweb of metal beams for hanging drops, lamps and side wings.

      At concerts, we not only stood beside virtuoso accordionist Ayeeda, and not only shot the breeze with Moldovan-Ukrainian peacocks made in the Ballet Studio before their dance was announced, no, we were also exploring the mysterious world of the backstage. There was discovered a vertical iron ladder to a short catwalk, from which you could climb the beams under the roof and cross over to the opposite side of the stage, where was another catwalk but without any ladder, so retrace your Tarzan-walk thru the flies you, short-sighted Chung!.

      But still, what possibly could be there – behind that lumber partition stretched high above the stage from one wall to the other? Ha! The attic must it be! Over the auditorium!.

      And thus was conceived and matured the plan for getting free access to movie shows at Club – thru the attic to the catwalk, down the ladder to the stage, wait for the lights to go out, dive under the screen, take a vacant seat, sit back and enjoy the show!

      On the first floor of Club, next to the movies list painters’ room there was a door eternally ajar to the Plant territory where the Club wall got furnished with a comfortable iron stairway running up to the very roof that had a dormer for easy access to the attic. So, it only remained to penetrate the plank partition which separated attic from the stage. Kuba, for some reason, refused to participate in moving the problem of penetration out of the way to free cinema and the realization of so brilliant a plan was left to me and Skully.

      Before long, one dark and windy winter night, we smuggled the ax from the Skully’s shed to the Plant territory over one of frequent stiles in the concrete wall. Without any delay or obstacle, we approached the Club building, climbed to the attic and looked around…

      The extensive space harbored some incomprehensible metal disk in the middle, about 2-3 meters in diameter and somewhat-less-than-a-meter tall, under a one-piece cover also of metal, a kinda jumbo casserole lid. Moving it tad bit aside, we discovered that the disk was hollow and its round bottom much deeper than you might suppose considering the object from outside. The frequent narrow slits cut the bottom in a spoke-wise pattern reaching neither the hub not the rim in the unknown contraption. The location of the "casserole"-disk as well as the outline of the slits in the bottom suggested that it was from where the giant chandelier adorned with dangling pieces of milky glass hung into the auditorium. The guess was promptly confirmed by the burst of dogged assault-rifles rounds interspersed by booms of explosions coming up thru the slits—a war movie down there turned an accomplice in our not strictly legitimate intentions.

      The prowling circle of light carved in the darkness by a flashlight frisked over the leveled layer of cinder for thermal isolation ahead of our sneaking feet to where the plank partition crossed the attic. Deducting the approximate location of the catwalk screened by the sturdy planks, we started to split and break them so as to produce, by application of the ax, a sizable hole. The wood turned out rather hard, besides, our work was slowed down

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