Despite the overtime, there weren’t that many volunteers for working on the poles. Most of the guys preferred installing electricity in people’s homes. So the lines were behind, they had to catch up with the houses. We’d sometimes be working on the poles right up until dusk. It was another matter that if you weren’t used to it, you couldn’t stay up on one of those poles for long. Oh no, you’d have spikes on your feet, you could put your weight on them. Have you never seen electricians working up on a pole? The whole planet is covered in those poles. Here, on the lake, the electricity comes from poles. Concrete ones, but back then they were wooden. How can I explain what the spikes looked like. They’re like sickles, semicircular, they fasten onto the soles of your boots. You don’t know what a sickle is? Never seen one? Way back when, they’d cut the crops with sickles. What does a sickle look like? You know, like a new moon. Plus, you’d have a big belt around your lower back that went around you and the pole. Despite that, you had to have strength in your back and in your legs to go up one pole after another, day after day.
Most of the electricians were older guys, from before the war, some of them were sickly after their wartime experiences, so when they’d climbed one pole, climbed a second, on the third one their legs wouldn’t obey them and their lower back would be killing them. When the weather turned colder their hands would be numb. They had gauntlets, but it wasn’t the kind of work you could do in gauntlets. And though overtime paid double, they left the pole work to the younger men. They’d make up for it and more when they were installing electricity in the houses. Otherwise they wouldn’t have given us the overtime so easily.
Another thing was, most all of them drank. Boy did they ever! In the lodgings, after work, not a day went by. But also at work. Sometimes they’d drink from the early morning. And if they didn’t drink it was because they hadn’t yet sobered up from the previous day. How could you climb a pole in that state? Whereas for me climbing a pole was nothing, like I said. I could clamber up poles the whole livelong day. I even enjoyed it. And back then I still didn’t drink. I was protected from it by the saxophone, I was trying to earn as much as I could and save as much as I could.
Actually, the other guys might not have drunk so much themselves, but in almost every home people made their own moonshine. You could get hold of booze any time of the day or night. You’d just knock on someone’s window and they’d hand you the bottle through the window. Not to mention that moonshine was the preferred form of payment. In general you could do anything with moonshine. No one believed in money anymore. The true currency was moonshine. And what else could you do with moonshine but drink it? So they drank.
I have to hand it to them though, despite the fact they drank, they were first-rate electricians. They could do any job, drunk or sober. All the things I learned in school were nothing compared to what I learned from them. You just had to watch closely when they were doing something. And listen real carefully, not miss a single word. Each one of them had his secrets, and sometimes one or another of them would give them away despite themselves. What secrets? You’re not an electrician, what would be the point of telling you?
Well, it’s not hard to guess. You didn’t know what spikes are, what a sickle is. I will tell you one thing, a pro can recognize another pro from two or three words, especially one from the same line of work. I’m not denying that ignorance is also a kind of knowledge. But ignorance won’t help you learn the secrets of electricians. When someone doesn’t have any trade at all it’s hard to understand him even as a person. In any case, when I’d sometimes watch them at work I had the impression that electricity flowed through them the way it does through wiring. There was no problem they couldn’t fix. Often there was a shortage of materials, so they’d switch one part from here to there, wrap it in something, solder something or other. For them, nothing was impossible. So later on, when I started working on building sites, I could handle the most difficult installations. For instance I worked on the building of a cold storage plant where all the machinery ran on electricity. I set it all up without a hitch.
The one thing I didn’t learn from them was drinking vodka. That wasn’t till the building sites. Back then though I never touched a drop, the saxophone meant that much to me. At one of the lodgings I was living with a group of men and every evening they kept trying to persuade me, invite me, and they were heavy drinkers. They even started to accuse me of being a snitch. Because in their eyes, anyone who didn’t drink had to be a snitch. Especially a young guy like me. They didn’t trust young people. That’s understandable. Young people will do anything to get ahead of their elders. Young people are in a hurry. They don’t have the patience that comes with experience. They don’t realize that either way we’re all headed toward the same thing. Young people always think they’re going to build a new and better world. All of them. New young people, old young people. And they end up leaving behind the kind of world no one wants to live in. If you ask me, the quicker you outgrow your youth the better it is for the world, really. I was young once and I know. I believed in a new and better world too. Especially since after a war like that it wasn’t hard to believe in, because there wasn’t anything else to believe in. And few things are easier to believe in than a new and better world.
So it’s hardly surprising they’d accuse me of one thing or another, even of informing, since I didn’t drink. They didn’t know I was saving up for a saxophone. I kept that a total secret. I might have often had a drink with them, but I knew the expectations for when you drank. If I drank a glass I’d have to provide at least one bottle. Plus bread, pickled cucumbers, sausage. And I would regret every least penny. I excused myself by saying I had duodenal ulcers. I didn’t actually know what ulcers were, I didn’t know what a duodenum was. But one time I went into a compartment in a train calling out, pears, plums, apples, and someone offered some to someone else but the other person refused saying he had duodenal ulcers and he had to stick to a strict diet. As it happened, I looked like I had ulcers. Years later, when I was abroad, it turned out I in fact did.
According to those electricians of mine, however, and not just those ones but other ones I lived with in different lodgings, when I was on the building sites already, vodka was the best medicine for ulcers too. Because why did they not have ulcers? Well, why?
I may surprise you by saying this, but perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that they drank. Because when they didn’t drink they had trouble sleeping. You’d think that when they were exhausted after a long day’s work, they ought to have been out like a light. But one of them couldn’t get to sleep, another one would wake up all the time, a third one slept such a shallow sleep he couldn’t say if he’d been asleep or not. And here it was morning already, time for work. The worst of it is that when you have problems sleeping, all kinds of different thoughts come to you and make it even harder to sleep.
In one village five of us were sharing a place together, all of them older guys, I was the only youngster, and one of the master electricians was also living with us. We called him master even when he wasn’t there. Go see the master, ask the master, the master’ll know what to do. I don’t know if you know how people usually talk about masters behind their back. In any case, they don’t call them master.