Honest Moose From the Tribe Of Hooey-Prickers

. .. .

Slightly off to the side, down the slope from the ‘dormitory’s’ barracks, the top of a one-user latrine with tin sides could be seen among the tall grass. The door was missing, so the one in need of the facility had to whistle when approaching, lest they catch the current user in a perched eagle attitude…

Through the missing latrine door, a breathtaking view opened onto the surface of the estuary and its steep bank opposite.

~ ~ ~

(… the concept of 'stream of consciousness', put to use a hundred years ago, still exists today, suggesting that a person is capable of making mental comments (i.e., silently) on what's happening around them, or of random thoughts about something unrelated, seemingly, to what's going on closely to them.

The first writer to use the idea of 'stream' is generally considered to be an Irishman named James Joyce. Although he himself attempted to frame a certain Frenchman, from whom he supposedly adopted the technique. However, long before that, albeit on a smaller scale, 'stream' thoughts were noted in the head of Prince Myshkin's would-be mother-in-law, in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel 'The Idiot '.

Thus, 'stream of consciousness' clearly belongs to the category of discoveries that must be made repeatedly and in different places, just in case, to ensure they won’t get lost. The 'stream' itself, in short, brings to consciousness of the human race, that a person is capable of exchanging thoughts with a slightly reflective self.

What I experienced during that crazy summer of '79, which turned out to be the most wonderful summer of my life, can hardly be called a 'stream of consciousness'. Stream? Good heavens! Not even close! A flood swept over me—uncontrollable, refreshing each of my five senses, keeping them in a constant, sleeplessly tense alertness.

The circle with which I sociably exchanged thoughts included not only myself but also everyone I met, up to a small pebble on the dusty side of the road.

Once, instead of a pebble, there was a domino piece kicking idly back in the dust (plastic, from a white domino with black pips, the blank-to-three one).

'Well, who would have doubted it!' I told her. 'Nothing comes from anywhere and nothing disappears. The law of conservation of matter. From Binkin's lessons.'

Sometimes I even pestered the night stars, shimmering wetly in the dark purple sky.

'Hey, but have you ever seen anything like this?'

And they, with haughty indifference, responded, 'We've seen worse, and not just here.'

And they continued to blink, like millions upon millions of years before our era.

And I wasn't the least bit bothered by this volcanic eruption of incessant thought flow. After all, the human brain only utilizes 10% of its natural potential. So let it stretch its legs and sweep away the cobwebs and dust accumulated in the remaining percent!

Naturally, during work hours, the intensity of my solitary brainstorming diminished somewhat—the workplace seemed more static and stable compared to the constantly changing circumstances of life on the streets of a big city. However, I can proudly state that even at the depth of 38 meters below the Earth's surface, the intensity of my mental activity significantly exceeded the measly 10% standard…)

~ ~ ~

The Dofinovka mine produced 'cubics'—three-dimensional stone blocks measuring 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm, cut from underground limestone deposits. For this purpose, the central tunnel, also known as a shaft tunnel, descended steeply, but not vertically, from a pit formed by a long-depleted quarry. From this tunnel, below, beneath a 38-meter-thick layer of other strata, adits radiated—also tunnels, but lower and narrower—like branches from a tree trunk.

At the end of each adit branch stood a stone-cutting machine, which cut the 'cubics' out of the wall before it.

This is the overall picture from a bird's eye view, if, of course, you can see right through to the aforementioned depths of the earth's crust…

. .. .

Well, delving into particulars, the mentor who taught me the intricacies of the timbering profession bore a resonant princely name from the times of ancient Rus-Mother—Rostislav.

However, he didn't respond to it; the name sounded too foreign even to him personally. To everyone, he was Charlik, and no one called him anything else.

First of all, he took me to the adit of Machine No. 3 because he was in awe of its operator, whom Charlik invariably called by his patronymic, Kapitonovich. Being a petty fiend, Charlik fawned and toadied to Kapitonovich in every way possible. The Machine 3 operator was a distinguished horned Old Scratch who had once served a ten-year sentence.

Charlik and I walked with lanterns in our hands. Before descending into the mine, the lamplighter, Lyuda Aksyanova, gave everyone a lantern in her cave, to the left on entering the shaft tunnel. Down below, without light, you find yourself in such pitch darkness that it's impossible to discern the thin narrow-gauge rails on the occasional sleepers. One stumble, and you'll have a nasty fall ending in terrible trouble. The human body isn't equipped with reflexes for falling in the dark.

That's why everyone in the mine wears plastic helmets, and before descending, the workday begins with you signing a logbook stating that you've just been briefed on the safety rules and now understand what you're getting into. That's tradition.

The temperature in the mine is consistently above zero, even in winter. A constant calm and a deep, unfamiliar silence fill the adits, unless someone is talking to someone else, or there's a noisy machine engaged nearby…

. .. .

We walked and walked along the cramped, narrow gallery. The right wall was solid stone, nicked by a stone-cutting saw, and the opposite wall was hidden by dry-laid brickwork. The bricklayerry was quite high, about neck-high, just half a meter short of the low ceiling, which in the mine is called the 'roof’, but more on that later…

A couple of white-insulated 'Gooper' wires, carelessly strung across the bricklayerry, accompanied us the entire way.

Finally, far ahead, a dim yellow light showed up, penetrating the thick dust crust on two light bulbs. The stone-cutting machine stood motionless in front of a blank wall, and Kapitonovich sat, in the silence and windlessness, on its open seat, waiting for us. He managed without an assistant because of his dream: to one day earn 300 rubles a month.

The stone wall of the tunnel in front of the machine (4.5 m x 2.5 m) was already squared with the grooves of the 'sketch'—deep parallel cuts from one side wall to the other intersected by similar vertical cuts, from ceiling to floor, thus, forming the ends of the future cubics. Now you drive a digging bar into a gap sawn in the center of the 'sketch' and break out a cubic. Then a couple from among closely cut cubics until a niche is formed large enough to break out the rest with a sledgehammer.

Kapitonovich was waiting for us, because over the past couple of days his machine had advanced far beyond the point reached by the narrow-gauge railway.

By extending the railway with two pairs of 4-meter rails (delivered the day before), Charlik and I made it possible to move the mine carts 8 meters closer—to load them with the cubics broken from the 'sketch'. However, there are no 'wagonettes' in the mine; they're called instead 'wagonkas' or 'kapelevkas' there.

(… I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it's named after the White Guard General Kappel, but I can't vouch for reliability of the hipothesis…)

A derailed 'wagonka' cart is called a 'bored-in bitch’. To clear such a situation, two or three workers manually re-install the cart on the track, after removing its load, straining with all their might—in mining parlance, this method is called 'farting steamer crane'.

Subsequently, a small-sized mine locomotive will arrive from the quarry and pull the restored and reloaded cart up to the surface, hooking up on the way the 'kapelevkas' that are waiting at the exits of other adits.

. .. .

The cubics cut in the tunnel wall are not breaking out evenly, so (before sketching the next, deeper section) any protruding pieces of stone are knocked down with the same sledgehammer.

These fragments, as well as any defective pieces—cubics that broke too short or split lengthwise due to cracks in the rock—serve as material for continuing the dry bricklayerry under the side wall of the adit. Without this partition bricklayerry, there would be nowhere to collect the sand.

Where does the sand come from? When the machine, mixing the strained whine of the electric motor with the clank of a chainsaw cutting through stone, makes a cut in the wall, a long stream of sand, not sawdust, gushes from under the chain. A metal and glass shield protects the operator from the shot out stream, but not from dust. The high sand dune grows and expands around the machine, and unless this pile is shoveled into the 'pocket' (the space between the bricklayerry and the adit wall), there will be no room for the narrow-gauge railway.

. .. .

To commemorate our labor victory in laying the track, Charlik removes his helmet and sits down, placing it under his backside like a potty under a nursery school child who's doing their poop. It's more comfortable than sinking onto the floor, or the sand, or a rock fragment, aka 'boot'.

Lighting a Prima cigarette, borrowed from Kapitonovich, he asks with cautious fawning—what could that wide, blood-red stain in the stone wall to the right mean? Kapitonovich, with an air of potency, offers an explanation: when the sea was here, a steamship burned on it, and when it sank, it was deposited in the rock as red. Charlik readily giggles, and I am waving away the unnecessary thought that 'a ten' is the standard sentence for murder; because I like Kapitonovich.

. .. .

Before heading off to the rest of the stone-cutting adits, aka galleries, we secure the roof. To do this, Kapitonovich fires up the machine to cut a series of short horizontal slits just under the ceiling of the side wall. By breaking the membranes between the slits with the digging bar, we create a deep niche with a square entrance (20 cm x 20 cm).

Another niche, exactly the same, is made in the opposite wall using the same method. Now Charlik and I push the end of a moderately thick log into one of the holes, as far as it will go. We lift the other end to the opposite niche and insert it inside, but not all the way, so as not to pull the log out of the first one. This log is called a 'ploshchak'. We support the 'ploshchak' with two shorter logs—'risers'—pressed against the side walls. The gallery roof support is complete.

. .. .

Where did the three logs come from? It couldn't be simpler—we retreated about thirty meters back into the darkness of the adit/gallery and pulled out one of the previous supports. Where else could it come from?

During my entire tenure at the Dofinovka mine, exactly three logs arrived there. I personally stripped the bark off them in the quarry with a 'planer' device (like an axe welded to the end of a digging bar, point first) before Slavik Aksyanov hauled the logs—bared to the white of a wedding dresses—on a kapelevka into the shaft tunnel. So the roof in the adits was supported by the saved materials…

Sometimes the roof starts to 'drip' or 'rain'. A cracking sound is the symptom, and chunks of rock break off from the ceiling and fall to the floor. Like a cave-in, but not completely.

Charlik got caught in such a 'rain' right before my eyes while he was pulling out another 'saved' piece of wood.

He was lucky to be lying in a 'pocket' between the wall and the bricklayerry, on a high pile of sand, almost reaching the ceiling. The stone slab that had fallen from the roof had no room to run and no choice but to land softly on his chest. It wasn't a particularly large piece of stone, too, just half a meter by half a meter and ten cm thick.

He crawled out from under the slab and immediately found his own Prima by him. Lighting a cigarette, Charlik sat comfortably on the helmet pot and immediately began remembering Alik the Armenian.

When it started 'raining' over him, Alik had to back away sixteen meters, backwards. Running, of course. There was no time to turn around. The roof was cracking and crumbling—the 'rain' was catching up. So he ran, heels first, screaming at the top of his lungs, 'Fuck the mine! Fuck the money!'—but in his haste, he couldn't quite articulate who exactly.

Without a name, the specifics were lost. Yes, morphologically, it's possible to guess that the acting person was male and unassisted. However, overall, the information remains vague…

Basically, the mine roof isn't a roof in the traditional sense…

~ ~ ~

Besides the active adits, the mine also has abandoned ones, where the usable rock layer has been exhausted and further extraction is futile, or even too dangerous. The entrance to these adits is sealed with defective stone cubics (the aforementioned 'rubble/boot'). When the adits are sealed, the bricklayerry is no longer dry-laid, but put on mortar joints, to prevent possible drafts.

However, not all abandoned adits are sealed. One day, the foreman showed me an emergency exit. One such unsealed adit leads into a former shaft tunnel, where, in the past, the carts were pulled along the rails by horses. The former shaft also originated in the quarry wall, but way higher than the current one.

And, of course, the mine of yore also had its adits… When Charlik went on vacation, and I was left as a lone timberman, I procured ploshchaks torn from those adits.

One time I returned to the new half of the mine, to the adit of Engine No. 4, all proud and pleased – well, of course! I'd hauled a log all by myself. I even quipped with the blunt end of my tongue: 'For Engine No. 4, on a special order, straight from Rio de Janeiro!'

I dropped the log from my shoulder, and the bitch – crack! – snapped in two, it right in halves. The material turned out to be too ancient.

. .. .

But all those rumors about me wandering around abandoned adits without a flashlight are complete lies.

The impetus for such speculation was my habit of turning off the flashlight if anybody else was shining one nearby.

I don't understand why, because Lyuda would put it for recharge anyway—after the shift.

The black cord from the flashlight's bulb goes into a canvas shoulder bag with a strap. Nothing inside but a battery box with a handwritten number. The flashlight with a clumsy '16' on the box—that's mine.

. .. .

However, in the abandoned mines, I never turned it off, and once, an unearthly beauty shone in its beam. From afar.

I look, and I can't figure out what that white thing is, gleaming below the roof, midst the deafening underground silence.

It's impossible to describe. Well, maybe, like a patchy alien structure of twiggy turfs, pure white; Or from the depths of the ocean, where bathyscaphes cannot dive. And in the nodes of its structure—tiny sparkles like crushed diamonds. Shimmering in the sircle of light from the torch. Beautiful—even eerie.

And I had an axe in my hand, to check the ploshchaks for rot. The axe whistled in the darkness, above the beam, and the whiteness fell to the floor. And—instead of inexplicable beauty—I stood over a wide spit. Only then did it dawn on me that it was a garland of mold.

Later, I came across more similar garlands, but all brown—punishment for having destroyed pure beauty.

. .. .

Soon, Charlik returned from vacation, and Vasya joined the mine. He became a timberman, and I was transferred to the assistant of stone-cutting machine operator. Of course, it's not as romantic as wandering through ancient adits without a headlamp, the machine roar keeps filling your ears, and a mask is the need – to keep the dust out, but—wow! Familiar faces! The gang are inseparable: Digging Bar, Shovel, and Sledgehammer!…

~ ~ ~

However, all of the above only seemed so at first, uninformed glance. What did the Dofinovka mine actually produce under the unspoken supervision of the Chief of all Chiefs, aka Yakovlevich?

It varied. To each his own… Jedem das Seine.

Pugachev, the mine engineer, with his pyramidal nose, which appeared under the earth for about five minutes once a month, was only interested in gold. Or rather, gold sand. He would click his fang in its gold cap and quietly ask the machine operator, 'Much of the sand today?'

When I (inadvertently) heard him say this, I started emptying the pockets of my spetsookha robe after every shift. You can't buy me with gold! Especially since I have no idea how to process the sand into unworthy pelf… Tolik, the operator of Machine No. 2, was dumbfounded when he saw what I was getting rid of.

But they definitely made gold out of it there, and then, disguised as aluminum castings, they piled them up in the weeds next to the ‘dormitory’. Just like bank gold bars, only aluminum-colored, for camouflage, of course.

The foreman told me (almost bluntly) as much when we were passing by, one-to-one: 'Such valuable things, and no one would think to pick them up. They're just kicking around here.'

And where, and for what purpose, would aluminum ingots come from at a stone mine?

~ ~ ~

As for the cubics themselves, there's no question—they're souls. Machine No. 5, for example, whose operator was Hitler or Adolf (well, at least no one called him anything else, only Adolf or Hitler), churned out human souls.

Ivan, from Machine No. 1, complained loudly that when his wagonkas were rolled up in the open, many of the cubics were rejected, while Adolf's—even cracked ones, or short ones, in short: every 'rubble-boot'—passed!

But if you think about it, that's right—after all, many people have flaws in their souls. And, paradoxically, his namesake (Hitler) destroyed so many souls, while this one here underground churns them out, and even makes fun of Ivan.

For whom the other machines saw up souls, I can only guess. Archangels? Demons? Titans? This was what depressed me most—my ignorance. Yes, I certainly felt being the chosen one, but at the same time, I remained a pathetically ignorant chosen one, like a pawn in a game whose rules were known to everyone but you.

. .. .

Progress toward understanding was made by trial and error, by groping, by intuition. Sometimes there happened revelations, like the time after my shift I climbed the truck to New Dafinovka to get groceries for tomorrow's lunch.

Among the workers standing in the back of the truck was an elderly woman wearing a headscarf. The truck was just pulling away from the ‘dormitory’, when the Bessarabian woman appeared in the doorway holding her child. 'Oh, what a beautiful little baby!' With these words, the woman untied her headscarf and tied it back again, but somehow differently…

Returning home through the fields along the forest belt, I went into my room, but I couldn't rest – the Bessarabian family's one-year-old daughter was choking with a shrieking scream, and her mother, unsure how to calm the child, was carrying her up and down the corridor, rocking her in her arms, chanting 'aa-aa ah!' to no avail.

I don't tolerate babies crying well, but a dorm isn't like an EMU train where you can walk out into another car. And suddenly I remembered how the fellow traveler had re-tied her scarf, praising this then-silent child.

Stepping out into the corridor and silently but persistently looking at the baby's mother, I took my handkerchief out of my pocket, unfolded it, and folded it again, this time on the other side, after which I went to the ravine to get water from the well. Upon my return, I was greeted by the joyful gaze of a Bessarabian woman—the girl in her arms was completely calm, and a kerchief had appeared on her head, tied in a knot on her forehead. Bingo!

. .. .

But there were also misfires. The rooster, the cock of the walk strutting pompously at the entrance to the ‘dormitory’, did not accept my good intentions. He turned away with disdain from the grains of linen blueing I offered him, forgotten by someone on the wide bench by the entrance.

My attempt to add variety to the bird's diet stemmed from good intentions, based on newly acquired knowledge: that day, it was revealed to me that the combination of blue and black is a sign of strength. A peck of blueing would have turned the rooster, in his black feathers, into a rooster-Gordzilla!

~ ~ ~

Confirmation that I, as the chosen one, was actually being protected came when a glass-eyed stalker snuck up on me. And with the most undoubtedly malicious intentions…

. .. .

There are glass-eyed and glass-eyed ones; they differ from each other and can be easily divided into three distinct categories.

Let's start with those whose glassy organs of vision are combined with a pronounced whiteness of the eyeballs. Such ones are harmless. They are undoubtedly possessed, but they remain merely a tool, a means of collecting information—how does land lies today?

This variety is merely a kind of spyglass, but nothing more. Whereto does the information get transmitted? Who’s the recipient? A naive question—to the former inhabitants of Olympus in their current incarnation, of course. They've mastered metamorphosis since ancient times; they can change shape as easily as peeing on their two fingers… and so on.

The distinguishing feature of the glass-eyed of the second category is a cloudy sheen spread across the whites of their eyes. These serve to themselves, looking for a chance to have 'a sip of blood' or otherwise recharge at your expense.

'There'll be an underground passage for people, but we can use it too,' one of them told me, clearly taking me for one of their own in an unfamiliar and poorly lit area of Odessa at night.

Before that, I'd asked for directions to the bus station—their favorite feeding ground. It was precisely these bastards who were waiting for me, prodding the cloakroom attendant at the Bratislava restaurant to cut chatting (but it wasn't idle chatter, but a conversation imbued with deep meaning, understandable to both of us, although not each of us understood the gist of the conversation equally and completely), and to quickly set the game—me—out the door with the lacerated thigh…

. .. .

And when I went through the medical examination for employment (retroactively, two weeks later), I was dropped off at the Vapnyarka’s medical center for a blood test.

Entering the office, I found there (besides a nurse in a white uniform) a plump woman in civilian clothes, with the aforementioned mist in her cloudy eyes. (Second-category glassy eyes.)

She sat, you understand, on the couch, and from the corner of her lips dangled a long, flexible, khaki-colored sting. Then the nurse rushes to assure me that the tube is just a probe, and the woman won't be in our way.

As if I couldn't see in her eyes what kind of woman she is, and what exactly she wants here.

Then, as usual, the nurse pricked my finger, squeezed it, and bam! Instead of the usual drop of blood from the punctured pad, my finger suddenly produces a miniature fountain! As thick as a needle, like at pumping the nipple of a nursing mother. But it's not the same color as milk. I've never seen anything like it in my life!

And I wasn't the only one amazed: the woman's jaw is wide open, and this supposed probe is about to jump out. Just like a drunkard who begged for a hundred grams, and then, into his shot glass, an entire three-liter jar of moonshine… Wham! So much goodness wasted in a splash!

. .. .

But as for extracting blood by fang drilling—that's just old wives' tales for little kids. They get the fill discreetly, using an effective (though not fully understood by me) technology…