The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
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So Club became a part of my life and if I didn’t show up home for a long time after school, they didn’t worry – I was dawdling at Club as usual….
In the dark of winter nights, we got together for hanging out along the streetcar track because our favorite pastime became riding the streetcar “sausage”, so was called the tubular grille hanging under the driver cab. We ambushed a streetcar at the stop, neared from behind and, when it started rolling forward, we jumped onto the “sausage”, grabbing at the small ledge under the windshield of the empty driver cabin. The narrow ledge provided nothing to catch a hold at, and you strained your fingers to the utmost seeking some absent point of vantage in its smooth surface. The streetcar rolled and rumbled, and bumped on the rail joints, the springy “sausage” jumped up and down under your feet – wow! Super!
The speediest stretch in the track was between Bazaar and School 13. It’s where the streetcars fancied being racing cars and it was there that once my fingers grew too numb and began slipping off the smooth ledge, but Skully shouted, “Hold on!” and pressed them back with his palm, but in a minute Kuba cried, “Kapets!” because his fingers also slipped off, and he jumped from the “sausage” shooting along at full speed. Fortunately, he didn’t ram against the trunk of some huge poplar and he caught up with us jogging from the darkness, while the streetcar waited at the stop for its counterpart coming from the Settlement, so we went on riding without losses…
The attraction was not exclusively our hobby-horse though but in common ownership of the Settlement guys. At times there collected a whole bunch of “sausage”-riders so that the springy grille began to scrape the railheads. At longer stops, the conductors got off the car in an attempt at driving us away. We fled into the frosty winter night, yet as the streetcar started off the stop, we lighted back onto the grille before the means of public transportation gained full speed…
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One day the classes for our 7th “B” were canceled because we walked for an excursion to the KahPehVehRrZeh Plant.
First of all, we visited the Plant Fire Brigade which was not too far from the Main Check-Entrance. Thence we proceeded to the shop floor for filling tall cylinder iron 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!