Ольга Палагина – Stories from Lyubavino. Chronicle of an extraordinary Incident (страница 2)

And then Zhenya, unable to contain himself, chimed in:

“Yeah… I’m walking away, all proud of myself. So, I think, now no one’s gonna take a tumble in there, can head home easy. Did a good deed…” He fell silent, heaved another deep, disappointed sigh, and then waved his hand dismissively into nowhere.

“So, here’s the thing,” said Mikhalych, nodding sympathetically at Zhenya, and continued in an ironic-mocking tone: “After having a good drink with us on Friday, going fishing with us again on Saturday,” – Mikhalych used a glass, filled to the brim, to gesture in a circle, indicating all the men sitting at the table – “and after celebrating some buddy’s birthday on Sunday, the poor fellow finally made it to work on Monday. The excavator, his pride and joy, is parked up, bucket on the ground. He fires up the engine and, of course, lifts the bucket!..” Mikhalych paused, hanging on an intriguing cliffhanger…

The men buzzed with eager interest, demanding the continuation.

“So, turns out, our valiant guardian of order locked up a whole crew of our plumbers there for the entire weekend!!!” What a coincidence, I ask you!..” Mikhalych, feigning wide-eyed astonishment, swept his gaze over the laughing faces of his friends and continued with drunken enthusiasm: “Can you imagine, just before leaving, these comrades, distinguished by their particular intellect and quick-wittedness, after their shift, decided it was a brilliant idea to polish off a bottle among the three of them! And they couldn’t find a single other place for it, the weirdos!..”

The men, chuckling, hung on every word uttered by their quick-tongued foreman. It wasn’t the first time they were listening to this comical yet simultaneously tragic story as told by Mikhalych, and and every time, it was an absolute masterpiece! And besides, Mikhalych was known as a humorous and eloquent fellow, with a good imagination and considerable storytelling talent. So even Zhenya, despite this being a tale of his own misadventures, was thoroughly enjoying being immersed once again in the captivating plot.

“So,” Mikhalych went on, “the heat was unbearable back then. They decided to sneak off somewhere for a quiet drink. They figured the coolest spot would be the utility vault, you know, where the heating pipes are! And why not? It was pretty comfortable in there… A little room, about two by two meters; you could get quite cozy. There was a place to lay out their snacks and booze, and room to sit down.

And so, as was to be expected, they went on a proper bender. They poured so much down their collars that they passed out cold, right there in the vault. And as fate would have it, it was precisely at that moment that our valiant Zhenya, wanting to protect the public, started up his excavator and placed the bucket squarely over the open manhole. He then headed home, proud of his good deed.

So the plumbers woke up in utter, tomb-like darkness, with no idea where they were or what had happened.’ He laughed, picturing the sheer absurdity of it all. ‘Just imagine – pitch black, concrete all around, cramped, terrifying! In their hungover haze, they’d completely forgotten where they’d chosen to sleep it off…

Well, one of them, Vasily Gavrilov – Vaska, you know him by now,” Mikhalych nodded at Sasha, “managed to strike a match to see what was going on. And that’s when, before the eyes of these hardened plumbers – men who’d seen a thing or two in their lives and were, let’s be frank, bricking it from fear – a reality no less harsh was revealed: they were trapped in a concrete box, sealed in by several tons of excavator bucket.”

Here, Mikhalych got slightly distracted, raising another shot. With a faux-profound look, he declared solemnly: “It’s not scary when your ass leads you to adventure… What’s scary is when adventure leads you to your ass! There!” As if to confirm the truth of his latest witticism, he raised his index finger affirmatively.

The men burst into unanimous guffaws, nodding their heads in agreement.

Mikhalych, snickering boyishly and unable to contain a fresh wave of laughter, went on:

“So let’s, fellas, hee-hee-hee… let’s drink to… to everything being in its proper place for each of us!.. And for adven… hee-hee… for for-tu…” – here he completely gave up, waved his hand dismissively, and burst into tears of laughter.

The entire work crew roared with laughter, following their foreman’s lead.

A little later, having had their fill of laughter, wiped away a tear, taken a drink and a bite to eat, Mikhalych, skillfully stoking everyone’s curiosity, continued:

“So, there they are, sitting in this tiny two-by-two meter cubicle, surrounded by concrete, and the only window to the outside world is blocked by something heavy and clearly immovable! The poor devils didn’t know then that they were stuck there, of all places, until Monday morning! They did have, fortunately for them, one bottle of water to share among themselves and half a loaf of sausage. Not to mention the fact that they had to improvise a latrine right there on the spot!!!”

Mikhalych’s face contorted into a perfect pantomime of tortured revulsion, his entire posture screaming the unbearable plight of plumbers trapped in a

latrine-less prison. Then, switching gears in a heartbeat, he brandished three splayed fingers under the noses of his listeners and carried on, his voice dripping with theatrical passion:

“Pushing three whole days! Can you conceive of it?! In a four-meter square!!! Just picture the scene!.. So there’s our three-man crew of plumbers, now completely and utterly feral… you have to imagine this spectacle! These are serious men, coarse, men of few words, with fists like blocks of granite… And then, when our ever-so-thoughtful Zhenya,” – Mikhalych jabbed mockingly – “hoisted his excavator bucket, they, naturally, were thirsting for blood. By that point, their rage was so absolute, they came spewing out of that hole like demons vomited forth from the infernal pits! And each face was a train wreck, uglier than Quasimodo’s worst day! And they’re armed, I tell you: one with an adjustable wrench, another with a beast of a thirty-two-millimeter… The moment Zhenya laid eyes on that whole apocalypse bearing down upon his very soul… he was blown out of the excavator’s cab at the speed of sound! And then, all hell broke loose!!!”

“And then Zhenya, with eyes as big as saucers, takes off running for all he’s worth, with no particular destination in mind. And hot on his heels, with curses that would make a sailor blush and the most blood-curdling death threats, come these three horsemen of the apocalypse, holy moly… in the form of these grimy, furious plumbers, clutching, and I mean clutching, these monstrous pipe wrenches in their gnarled, work-calloused hands!” – Mikhalych gestured vividly to convey the sheer, unimaginable size of the wrenches and the calloused hands – “Chasing after them comes the supervising foreman, white as a sheet from pure terror. Then our boys, seeing the commotion, joined in the fray, and I was right behind them… And so there we were, all running after one another in a giant circle, just running… We must have done a good five laps, for sure, when their Kostya upped and hurled that damn thirty-two-millimeter wrench, smack dab into our Zhenya’s head.”

“Well, it mowed down our intrepid soldier of the hidden fronts right in mid-stride! The vision, I tell you plainly, was not for the squeamish! The Battle of Kulikovo can take a holiday, right alongside the Battle on the Ice!* They swarmed over him, a single furious mob, and we swarmed over them… They wouldn’t back down an inch, pounding him with anything they could lay their hands on. And that Kostya, he was downright trying to gnaw his ear clean off…”

“Somehow, by some miracle, we managed to wrestle him back from the clutches of those zombie-plumbers. The final result? We carted our poor, unfortunate Zhenya off to the hospital with a shiner under his eye the size of a dinner plate, a broken rib, a cracked skull, and a thoroughly chewed-up ear.”

The whole boisterous, well-lubricated company was now bent double, howling with laughter, but Sasha’s infectious, pealing laugh rose above all others. Only Zhenya stood apart, barely suppressing a smile, gazing upon the rest with proud defiance as he gently rubbed his heroic, patched-up left ear – a veritable roadmap of stitches and glorious combat scars.

“Oh, he’s a great one for cooking up some weekend trouble, that one!” Mikhalych went on with gusto. “The stories about him are piled up to the rafters!..” – and to illustrate his point, he sketched something immense and immeasurable in the air with his hands.

“Take his first winter with us, for instance. He decided to save time on warming up his excavator in the mornings. So, you know what he dreamed up?!…” – Mikhalych turned to Sasha again, who responded with nothing but a puzzled shake of his head. “And the frosts we had that year – don’t even get me started!..” – He gave a sudden, full-body shudder, as if that bitter, icy cold had pierced him to the bone even now, and added with a dramatic sigh: “And it wasn’t just for a day or two…”