As Is

'But if I get a notch on the top of my head, will I look like a dick?' Vitya asks me.

'Don't worry, buddy, you're a perfect replica without any notch.'

'Look, do me a favor, grab my ears and jerk me off, please?'

You can’t say ‘no’ to your buddy. I squeeze his ears and jerk them up and down.

'Tu-tu-tu… '

I didn't get it right away—a white foam of saliva, in tiny spittle drops, bespattered the chest of my tunic.

'I came', he explains.

A truck with a team of plasterers in the back pulls up in front of the checkpoint. The Dnipropetrovsk guys, of our draft, enter the open gates. Five 'ladles' leap out of the gatehouse door to pounce on the burly 'youngster' like a pack of wolves on a bull.

But proving too much for them, he manages to fight them off, and the pack retreats, hurling obscene threats. The bull picks up his piss-cutter, knocked off in the scuffle.

Both the 'greenhorns' from the big fellow’s team, and we abide by to a non-interference policy, remaining bystanders to the internal squabbles of the third company. The truck driver honks for us to jump in the back…

~ ~ ~

The laying of the walls of the nine-story building went on around the clock: from the morning in natural daylight, and at night under a string of electric lights suspended above the work section of the wall. Two of fellows of our draft were transferred to the night shift—a lanky guy who'd worked as a bricklayer back in civilian life, and me.

He was given a trowel, and he also laid bricks, while I expertly carried mortar from the box with a shovel and slapped it on the wall wherever I was told.

Stavropol nights are chilly even in summer, so we donned threadbare pea coats and quilted fooflo jackets, worn by who knows who and for how many five-year plans.

In the darkness beyond the wall, beyond the garland, the cabin of a motionless tower crane looms, and within it, the vague blur of the crane operator's face. The bricklayers take turns coaxing him to lift a kettle of drinking water. But he's too lazy to climb down the long ladder inside the tower to fill the kettle from the tap on the water pipe next to the mortar hillock dumped in the day, and then climb back up.

Finally, one of the bricklayers climbs onto a pallet of bricks, his hands grasping the steel cables of the 'spider' (the bundle of four iron ropes with hooks used to lift a load), his feet landing on a pair of spider hooks dangling there. The crane operator fires up his machine…

With a whine and a crackle of electric motors, the crane lifts and carries off its boom, taking away the figure of the fellow in between 2 spider’s dangling cables. The remaining pair is taut by his feet standing on its hooks. The rattle-and-clang crane immerses him to the depth of 25 meters below, where a lone bulb casts a mournful light on the tall pile of mortar in the middle of the dump spot.

(Safety regulations, huh? The royal troops know best…)

From down there, the crane lifted an additional pallet of bricks, with a victory trophy teapot put on the top row. The bricklayers settled the pallet onto the scaffolding and shouted to the crane operator to pull the boom away.

A stray hook from the floating 'spider' caught the 'youngster' bricklayer by the strap on his trench coat waist as he hunched over the masonry, and hauled him up, trowel in hand. The soldier’s ascent to the heaven was not exactly high—a meter above the scaffolding, no more—because whistles and cries of 'Down!' arose from all sides.

The crane operator obeyed the command, and that was the end of it. But what did the poor fellow’s soul have to go through while he was hanging in midair, kicking his legs in all directions, screaming, 'Halt! Halt!'?

(… it must have been an accident, because the 'grandpas' on the line were also shouting 'Halt! Down!' to the crane operator…)

Then the foreman of the bricklayers went to the far corner of the section under construction. Standing at the edge of the masonry, he busily urinates down onto the remains of the forest belt, invisible in the darkness. The arced spout from the apex of the parabola flashed the dash-lined reflections of the garland of lightbulbs.

'There’s not a nicer sight

Than you pissing from the height… '

When the trickle dried up, the sergeant jumped off the corner and, joining the line of bricklayers, continued with the masonry…

. .. .

But not everyone always gets away with it so bravely…

In daylight, at this same construction site, a pair of soldiers engaged in a playful wrestling match on the edge of the wall of an unfinished elevator shaft.

Or rather, the bigger one seized the smaller one—big idiots have a natural disposition to stupid frolics. When they both fell into the shaft, and for real, the safety layer of boards on the floor below broke under their combined weight. Thanks to the law of acceleration in free fall, the big guy reached the bottom of the shaft first and splash-crushed to a pulp over heaps of broken brick and other construction debris.

The smaller soldier reached the bottom second and landed on a mat made from the body of the deceased prankster, escaping with multiple fractures. After the hospital, he wasn't discharged, and he served until his demobilization as a guard at various construction sites built by the MCU-11's slave workforce…

. .. .

Every two to six months, during morning parades, we were read a circular order. Another fatality resulting from yet another malicious violation of safety regulations in the military construction units of the Baku Air Defense District, to which our battalion belonged…

~ ~ ~

All 'youngsters' get fairly pressed and overloaded at the beginning of their service, but our squad turned out to be the 'youngest' of the 'youngsters'. A chain of meanly twined circumstances had brought to so loathsome situation.

First, the ensign, our platoon commander, caught the sergeant, our squad commander, with two bottles of wine from a nearby grocery store.

What is an ensign, aka a piece (no one added of what exactly, but it was too obvious to entire Soviet Army)?

He's a 'grandpa' who enjoys being a scarecrow (wow! The 'youngsters' fear him) and who's smart enough to figure out that after demobilization, back in civilian life, this cushy life will be over and he'll be a complete nobody.

(… in civilian life, the hierarchy is different…)

These are the motives that prompt the 'grandpa' to stay on for extended military service. Four months at ensign school they’ll bust his ass, and then he pops up back at the same unit where he served his conscription. Now there’s a starlet in each of his shoulder boards, and not a chance at promotion. He wears his parade crap every day, busts personal’s asses, and earns one hundred and twenty rubles a month for this hobby. We can be only happy for a man who has found his place in life.

. .. .

And now, on the occasion of a successful hunt, the soldiers of our squad have been summoned and gathered from various locations, where each was performing his own combat mission. Someone was laying partitions, someone else was digging a trench, and still another was stacking bricks on a pallet. But then the order came, 'Form up!', next to a pile of rubble at the entrance to the second, still unfinished section.

Our sergeant stands facing our line without his belt—a clear indication of being under arrest. Next to his boots are lined two 0.5-liter bottles with identical ruby stickers. A fair-haired ensign in a short-sleeved dress shirt (it's summer, after all) takes up a position on the left flank of our dusty, dirty, and splattered formation.

So, this young brat, who's not even a 'grandpa' anymore, decided to stage a rant. Like, this traitor to our great socialist Fatherland treacherously abandoned his comrades in arms and deserted to a grocery store, but the vigilant fellow caught him red-handed…

And after he blurted out all this hooey, he stands there, sniffling, and doesn't know what to do next. But apparently, at ensign school, he watched some TV series about the lives of military cadets, where someone got a package from home, and he ate it on the sly, not sharing it with his buddies. However, in the next episode, he's caught, and the school's political officer forces him to eat a chocolate bar in front of his comrades in formation. And that glutton, head bowed, burns with shame and begs for everyone's forgiveness. Watch episode 17 tomorrow, after the news program 'Vremya'…

And now this blond Pestalozzi, with one shabby star in shoulder board, started playing the political officer star of the TV series: 'So you traded your comrades for wine?! Well, well… Then drink it!'

But he didn't take into account that real life is a completely different movie, not like this Central Television crap…

Instead of bowing his head, the sergeant tilted it back and gurgled from the bottleneck, obeying the order. The ensign froze in place. The line of spectators hungrily pumped their Adam's apples—dry, but in sync with the sergeant's gulps—and he slammed it in without stopping.

He didn't have time for a second shot, though—the ensign came to his senses, took off like a sprinter, and smashed it into a pile of gravel.

The sergeant was taken to his unit and locked in the checkpoint ‘guardhouse’ room. The next day, he was demoted to private during morning parade, and he returned to the squad as a simple bricklayer, where he worked until our conscription arrived at the MCU-11.

How else could it be? Should he spend ten days in the ‘guardhouse’ room and eat his bread for nothing? No way! We have a five-year plan, the Party, and the Government have been working on it from top to bottom. With or without the explanatory tattoo across our foreheads, we are all slaves of the USSR…

Our squad was assigned a new commander, and he's just a 'ladle', named Prostomolotov. 'Call me just… Molotov.'

Some intellectual guy, glasses on his nose, knows about Molotov, too. But he's just a 'ladle'! And although he was soon promoted to corporal, the 'grandpas' bossed him around as they pleased, and he didn't dare utter a word about at least occasionally loading another squad of 'youngsters', for a change.

. .. .

Under these circumstances, after a workday, instead of lights out, our squad would be assigned to the kitchen. And we peeled potatoes so that the entire personnel plus the Separate Company would have something to eat the next day, despite the potato peeler's failure…

All night long, until five in the morning. The last sack, of course, was carried out, in portions, to the trash, six buckets of it, and sprinkled with peelings on top, so the kitchen on-duty ensign wouldn't get it. And then at six—'Company-ee! Reveille!'—morning parade and—march, bitch, to work!

Or, they'd bring us home from work in the evening, straight to the mess hall—eat up quickly, the truck's waiting! And they take it back to the nine-story building, because dump trucks carry alabaster there from the train station, and if it rains, a whole carload of valuable building material will turn useless crap.

And, knee-deep in loose alabaster, we shovel it into the basement of the first section, through an opening in the foundation blocks under the end wall.

And as soon as we've cleared one mound, the next KAMAZ truck arrives with its 13 tons of cargo, and then the next, and the next, and… a very effective way to practically grasp that a railway car has a capacity of 68 tons…

However, inside the basement, this same alabaster must be moved to the adjacent compartment, otherwise it won't all fit.

(… no horror movie can recreate that purple-blue hue on Vasya from Buryn. When he fell asleep on a dune of white alabaster under the of a basement bulb shedding scrimpy dim light onto his lurid face…)

In short, Just-Molotov, the army saying is right: 'It's better to have a prostitute daughter than a corporal son.'

~ ~ ~

Grisha Dorfman's dad arrived, talked to someone in the headquarters barracks, and when he left, Grisha was transferred to the fourth company. His current rank is tailor.

Very soon, our Grisha is showing off in the 'peshA' outfit, and doesn't even spend the night in the barracks, since he has a room in the sewing workshop in the same building as the boiler house. The 'peshA' is a uniform made of a semi-wool fabric, a sturdier material than cotton, the color of dark swamp mud—another shade of khaki. The 'peshA' is a corporative badge, the prerogative of the aristocrats of conscript service, like the driver of the Combat’s 'goat' or the Club projectionist, who also doubles as a postman.

It's good to have a dad who knows how to negotiate…

. .. .

And Vanya, in whose boots the mouse was planning to make a cozy nest, was discharged after all.

The sergeant who escorted him home from the mental hospital later recounted that at the Stavropol train station, Vanya threw his string bag loaded with a newspaper package of victuals onto the floor in the waiting room. He started yelling, 'Run, folks, run! There's a bomb! It's ticking!' People rushed out, and who knows—a soldier in uniform sounded the alarm!

Well, when the sergeant brought Vanya to his parents' place and was setting off on the return journey, the discharged explained—in a perfectly even tone of voice—as a parting shot: 'Learn, 'pheasant', the way how smart people serve in the army!'

. .. .

So, basically, it was because of all this, on that very first Sunday off in mid-August, that seeking solitude from the beach crowd in tarpaulin boots, I rounded the corner of the Club. Right there I stood still, arrested by the sound of an acoustic guitar through the bars of the window, next to the porch of the locked cinema booth door. Guitar…

I stood listening, although there wasn't much to listen to—someone clumsily trying to play the chords of 'Shyz-gary'. But the rhythm was simply off—someone was thumping away with a balalaika beat. Unable to bear it, I turned back around the corner and entered the Club.

At the end of the hall, on either side of the projection booth's loopholes, are two doors; one of them is wide open, and the sound of a guitar is coming from within.

In the room under the only barred window stands a hard hospital cot. On it sits a soldier with stubble, blending with the wisps of hair that stick out softly from the gaping opening of his overalls. A flattened piss-cutter lies like a flimsy pancake on the crown of his head. His feet are in slippers covered with shaggy hair that has escaped from the legs of his black overalls. A guitar is in his paws.

Another soldier, also in slippers, sits on a chair with its back pressed against the blank wall opposite.

‘What the fuck you need here?’

‘You wanna play Shokin Blue here. I can show how.‘

They exchanged glances: 'Well, show.'

(… 'Beauty will save the world…' Hmm, that's a bit of a stretch. Beauty is a very vague thing. Music, on the other hand, is a different matter. It's tangible, capable of performing concrete mira cles, building bridges, cutting away the unnecessary.

Instead of the 'pheasant' Zameshkevich, the 'ladle' Rassolov, and the 'greenhorn' Ogoltsoff, there remain simply three guys passing a guitar from hand to hand…)

~ ~ ~

A couple of days later, a 'youngster' from Dnepropetrovsk, Sasha Rudko, knocked on the tin-clad door with fingers sore from lime mortar—plaster 'mud'. Musician Alexander Rudko, who in his civilian life worked as a bass guitarist at the regional philharmonic.

This was the beginning of the creation of the VIA 'Orion' in the eleventh military construction unit. Using the equipment and instruments left behind by the musicians, aka labookhs, of yore. The guys went to the headquarters barracks and spoke with the MCU-11 political officer. Alexander was appointed head of the unit's club. But he never got a uniform of 'peshA'; he slept in the second company barracks and stood there for evening roll calls…

He could read music and played anything that ever popped up there. He taught us to do the 'mi-me-ma-mo-mu' chant and blinked, painfully and silently, at my poor singing… His big nose was constantly swollen from a rhinorrhea, and he burred.

But he was the Musician…

. .. .

And I began living a double life. After work and a quick supper in the mess hall, I'd turn left—to the Club. Before evening roll call…

'Permission to form up, Comrade Sergeant Major!'

'Why are you late, Ogoltsoff?'

'I was at the Club.'

'And what are you, club-goers, doing there?'

Fawning giggles from the ranks, echoing the hint.

'We're practicing solfeggio there, Comrade Sergeant Major.'

The commander's face froze in stupefied amazement; he'd never encountered such a fucking word in his career. The laughter intensified, but in the opposite direction.

'The unit's political officer is aware, Comrade Sergeant Major.'

'Get in line, suffl… soffle… Son of a bitch!'

. .. .

Well, during working hours, I'm like everyone else…

We were transferred to a five-story building—it was being prepared for delivery. Vitya Novikov and Valik Nazarenko invited me into an empty apartment. They had a bottle of wine. We shared it from the neck. A forgotten thrill. It all wore off before the evening roll call, and what was there, anyway, between the three of us?

During evening roll call, Captain Pissak sent the on-duty private to the dishwasher for a clean mug to perform an alcohol test.

Moving down the line, Pissak randomly hands soldiers a mug to breathe into. The resulting mixture he consumes alone, meaning sniffs it personally.

He's already ordered two to break ranks and turn around.

When he handed me the mug, I realized I'd been fucked utterly.

Not even waiting for the test I'd given myself away before exhaling by those hot and cold waves running all over me. Pissak had given me five fatibues for loosening my belt, and now I'm fucked beyond salvation.

Captain took a sniff from the mug, sadistically dropped his gaze, and said, 'Well, if a man hasn't been drinking, it's immediately obvious.'

After the roll call, Vitya Strelianny, with a grin, shared, 'You were whiter than a wall.'

As if I don't know myself… Pissak, bitch, what kind of Tom And Jerry was that?

~ ~ ~

And another day off, unbelievable! They even showed a movie this evening. A Polish film, 'Anatomy of Love,' with erotic hints.

Maybe there were more erotic hints in Poland, but by the time the film reached here, a bunch of rippers had hacked it up. Starting with the censors to the pimply projectionists who cut out the film in chunks wherever there flashed a glimpse of naked tits. For close friends and personal use. Morons.

The next morning, in the line facing the urinal channel toward the cesspool, I sadly shook mine from the last drops and silently informed him, amid the general hubbub in the latrine: 'That's how it is, buddy, you'll be just a drain faucet for two years'. And I buttoned up the fly…

At the site, we were hauling construction debris and excess soil from the basement on a stretcher—it's called planing. Everyone was kind of silent, in a pensive mood. The unfortunate consequences of the ripped Polish film, although overall, it didn't seem like a tragedy.

At a smoke break, having nothing better to do, I started pestering Alimosha. He didn't respond, or just gave me curt 4-letter replies, and then suddenly he jumped up at me, punching. I had to fight him off as best I could, and frankly, I’m not any good at the sport.

Then Prostomolotov came into the basement, shouted, 'Halt!' and we took up the stretcher again. I made a couple of trips, and I noticed the pain in my right hand wasn't going away. I must have hit Alimosha's Tatar-Mongolian face with my thumb all wrong…

. .. .

The next morning, my whole hand was swollen, and after the inspection at the paramedic's office (by the same country bumpkin from our draft, but now in a peshA outfit) the guy took me to the Stavropol military hospital. We reached the city in a truck with some squad, and then took a bus, because public transportation is free for soldiers.

When we arrived at the hospital, he told me to wait and went into some building. It was so nice around here, a lush garden with yellow cherry plum trees. It's a shame I don't have an appetite—my damn hand aches. So, I sat down on a bench in a shady alley between the buildings and fell asleep.

Opening my eyes, I rammed into the sight, right in front of my nose, of a round face in cat-like whiskers. I even flinched, but luckily the bench had a back; it kept me from falling. I glanced again and saw captain's boards on the cat's shoulders. Well, clear as day, he’d spotted a private in his peaceful sleep early in the morning, and came sniffing him to detect the presence of alcohol on his breath.

Then my escort came and took me to another building to have my injured limb checked. They twisted my thumb, and I responded by making a goose hissing, while my free hand patted my left side, like a broken wing.

For these symptoms, they diagnosed me with a fracture, bandaged my hand, put a cast on it, and left me in the hospital.

Thank you, Alimosha! But washing with just my left hand is still not convenient…

~ ~ ~

What could be better than a broken bone? No injections, just lie there and wait for the fracture to heal. The dining room has square tables with four chairs instead of benches. And the food is much better than what we have in the mess hall. It's understandable, because officers get treatment here too.

Of course, the patients are all in pajamas, without insignia. Officers' rooms are on the second floor, while the enlisted personnel are kept in the basement. What difference does it make where you sleep? And it's closer to the mess hall from here; which is right next to us, at the end of the corridor.

The hospital is a quiet and uncrowded place. In my room, besides me and a Georgian named Rezo, there are four free beds.

Rezo's black hair is so long that he can comb it back. A clear sign of a 'grandpa'. He usually holds his left arm close to his side; this pose stems from his patronage of a steppe collective farm, where he was sent as a truck driver. At the camp, he started having an affair with a cook, and her husband stabbed him in the back with a large kitchen knife. Now the cook comes to the hospital to check on the injured man.

They go into the neglected garden, and back in the ward, Rezo offers me some cherry plums from his pajama pocket, but I don't want any, even though my hand in the cast doesn't hurt anymore…

~ ~ ~

And the next door ward is packed. There's even one of our construction battalion's guys there, also a 'grandpa', like Rezo, but a Russian, and his name is Sanyok. Besides, his hair is light brown, and one eyebrow is missing—a flat scar had licked it away. He was also a driver when he went AWOL in his tractor, and then crashed into something or flipped over. His legs were amputated above the knees.

He doesn't go to the mess hall. The guys from his ward bring him grub onto his nightstand, even though he has crutches, and a pair of tall prosthetic legs are propped up against the wall next to his bed.

He liked a shock worker from Stavropol on the cover of 'Village Life' magazine, with her combine harvester in a field of wheat in the background, and he started writing her letters: 'Hello, unknown Valentina… '

Sometimes his buddies, drivers from our construction battalion, come to visit. After these closed-door meetings, he yells songs and gets into arguments with the medical staff. But he gets away with it, because he's to be discharged from the army…

On the second floor, there was a library, sort of, because both shelves were filled exclusively with translations of Chinese novels about the socialism being built up in the Chinese village. The books were published in the fifties, before the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU denounced the cult of personality/ Then Mao Zedong took offense on behalf of his buddy, Generalissimo Stalin, and both great powers stopped singing:

'Moscow – Beijing,

Friendship forever… '

And what can you do under such dire circumstances? So you read masterpieces of socialist realism in the best traditions of the central newspaper 'Zhemin Ribao'…

. .. .

The neiboring room, the entire corridor is in a tumult—Valentina, the combine operator, has responded to Sanyok's letter with a visit, in person. She's sitting in the courtyard on a bench under a tree. A dark-skinned Moldavian style woman of over thirty, pretty looks of an actress from the first Soviet color films about collective farms in Cossack villages.