It turns out that two workers, wishing to get drunk after yesterday's noisy feast, already from the early morning they slurped up the brake fluid, from which one died instantly, and the second, apparently stronger, continued to torment and torment our Light for a long time, sobbing in its voice from its own impotence and screaming "If I only had serum, an antidote, he would not have died!" The corpses lay all day under the scorching sun, and the hard workers now found a "legitimate" occasion to drink again and not go to work - dignified, as it should , In Russian to remember "without time" but gone. "
Sveta liked me at first sight. She was ugly, but with some special charm, which actresses with a similar appearance have - Andy McDowell and Barbara Streisand. I fell in love with her purely platonic love, and for many years we became real friends, which rarely happens between a man and a woman. Already on the second day of our stay in the construction team, we went to the production facility. The essence of our work was as follows: as I said, we built a pond for an elite "mirror carp" - scrapers and graders were preparing a "bowl" of the pool for him, and we had to, respectively, prepare and concreate the space around the lock Sections and pipes that feed water into the pool of the pond. From the very beginning, the capricious Altai nature began to avenge us for our arrogance, disorder and frivolity.
Pyotr Semenov, a man of 45, who recently graduated from the Faculty of Melioration of the Altai Agrarian Institute, recently supervised all the works of the very "cheerful" technician from Pavlovsk, and therefore, like all the present part-timers, he feels in himself simply extraordinary forces and the desire to "turn the northern rivers backwards." It was a real "giant" of hydraulic engineering thought, which did not get tired from day to day, surprising us, miserable and stupid students. Every time he invented something for us, something innovative, we again and again took in the hands of heavy birch chocks for ramming the soil, and, like slaves on the galley, sweating afterwards under the ruthless July sun, with great "warmth" remembering all Closest relatives of hydraulic engineering, began to frenzy knead some very strange blue clay, disgusting "porridge" appearing through the earth in the sluice channel.
A very complicated hydrotechnical situation arose at the site. The fact is that in the Altai the groundwater lies very close to the surface of the earth. Even photography from space (I personally saw this at the scientific and practical conference of the geographical faculty of the ASU, which I visited in 1993) showed that a vast artesian lake stretches along the entire territory of the Altai Territory, relatively in shallow depths. This underground lake, as time, and nourish numerous waterways and "capillaries", which now ruthlessly broke scrapers and graders that cut off the upper layer of the earth. As a wounded beast, the earth now just blew "blood", every minute highlighting the abundant groundwater even under the action of a simple shovel.
Every time when we arrived at the site in the morning, we were disappointed to find out that our entire three-day work per night was washed away with water and mixed with a strange blue clay, which I met in such quantity only in Altai and which locals attribute incredible healing properties. Under the influence of groundwater in the earth formed numerous "pockets" and "voids", in which it was easy to drive the most "hat" three-meter armature. And again our "cheerful devil" - a hydro technician resorted, sanguine waving his hands and enthusiastically insane calling us not to "lower" our hands, but "fun and easy" to start everything from the beginning. And again we, as catechumens, began to ram the slopes and the bottom of the lock, and the next morning there was the same familiar picture of destruction. It resulted in some worthless, completely useless "Sisyphean labor". The first could not stand Valera Khmykin. "Yes, e ... this n .... technician (author - swearing at the bad gynecologist)! He cried angrily one day. "How long will this" gambler "still experience our patience?" Valera Khmykin is a tall, prominent guy of 24 years with the appearance of the then famous actor Yevgeny Kindinov and an unmatched, simply extraordinary sense of humor. He came to our university already "grown-up" from the Soviet Army, where he served an "urgent" in the militia battalion of internal troops in Irkutsk and even contrived to guard the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Valera by that time was already a married man, having a dependent wife and a small child, that's why he used unconditional authority in the construction team, being our "informal" leader. The difficult material situation in the family will soon force him to transfer to the correspondence department of the law faculty and get a job at the police.
With the water element, of course, it was possible to cope with the condition of proper organization of the production process, which, as at the "hero of labor", Sapunov was not in sight. "And why did they only give him the" Hero of Social Labor "?" Khmykin was perplexed all the time. As soon as we prepared the site, carefully ramming it with heavy birch chocks, it was necessary to urgently concreate it, and Sapunov, as always, did not have a mortar ready. Again a day of forced downtime, and in the morning it was necessary to start everything from the very beginning. In the end,
