The town of Shebekino, located ten kilometers from the Ukrainian border, is small, inconspicuous and rarely smelly.

He meets all his guests with a strong aroma of low-grade household soap, which spreads to the whole district a chemical plant located in the very center of the city, producing laundry detergents, detergents and other, less popular rubbish among the people, up to rat poison. The equipment of its workshops was mostly exported from Germany in the first post-war years to reparations, so its current state left much to be desired. Needless to say, there were no gas emission filters there, and the treatment facilities chronically lay in ruins - not a factory, but an ecologist's nightmare! It was to this “advanced” enterprise that I was distributed immediately after graduating from the Institute of Chemical Technology.

At first I was working there not so much as looking around and wondering. The first thing that surprised me was when I first crossed the threshold of the workshop, there was a group of women in rubberized aprons and gas masks who, with buckets (!), Were dragging through the entire workshop some kind of stinky poison, pouring from the flanges as old as the shop itself , and therefore always flowing decubus apparatus with a stirrer. At the same time, the men who worked in the workshop, as if nothing had happened, continued to sit at a distance from the wide-open window and melancholically slaughter the goat, enjoying the life-giving coolness and by no means wishing to somehow help the dull chain of their busty elephant friends. However, the attitude towards women in our factory is generally a topic for a separate discussion ...

Then I was very surprised by the deputy. the foreman, who was gesticulating and swearing at sluggish women, immediately began to lead the process of nailing a poster on the wall, “It is strictly forbidden to smoke!” without taking a smoking cigarette from the mouth. Finally, I established myself in the opinion that now everything is possible in our chemical industry, after one evening I saw how the shop manager, who took the most active part in organizing a grandiose drinking party for the Day of the Chemist, directly inside the walls of his own shop, moted the shift personnel . However, all these were still flowers. The berries began when, as a young specialist, for lack of free departmental living space, I was temporarily instilled into a working community on the banks of the sleepy Nezhegoli River. There, I immediately realized that neither the head of the workshop, corrupting labor discipline, nor his deputy, frankly spitting on safety equipment, in terms of drunkenness and general marasmus could not hold a candle to our valiant working class. And as regards the sophistication of the mind and everyday savvy, our laborers had no equal at all! The fact that the guys from our hostel came up with in terms of improving communal amenities naturally shocked me. This, in fact, is devoted to further narration.

The chemical factory hostel was a long five-story domino built of whitish-gray silicate brick, whose appearance and, in particular, dull corridor interiors, evoked an inescapable longing and caused involuntary pity for its inhabitants. However, this pity was quickly replaced in my poorly concealed irritation: the people here, as it soon became clear, lived in the mass of their coarse, uncouth, and thieving, some even with an openly criminal past. True, this applied mainly to the male half of the dormitory, but in fairness it should be noted that the fighting friends of these young people for the most part did not shine with their minds or external articles.The only exceptions were units, but they were all married, and my attitude towards them was inevitably determined by this restrictive factor. Some couples, especially with children, made a rather pleasant impression, but there was nothing to catch there in terms of leisure and entertainment, and indeed it was a spoonful of honey in a barrel of tar. The overwhelming majority of the local people excited only one feeling in me - the desire to stay away from them.

In short, I was a stranger on this wretched celebration of life. Even my relatively correct Russian and the absence of the habit of using foul language as ligaments were perceived by the majority as a kind of oddity of an eccentric visitor. For almost everyone here expressed themselves in some unthinkable “surzhik” with a pronounced Little Russian pronons, with the result that now and then one could easily hear something like: “Have you forgotten Russian since morning ?!” First I it was even amusing, but in the end it began to nauseated ...

My troubles in this house of grief began with the fact that they did not even give me a separate room in it, identifying me as inmates of a gloomy and heavily drinking dental technician with a complete lack of a sense of humor and of any common interests with me. As a subtle mockery, I perceived the release of a locked mailbox without a key to me, as a result of which, at first, I was forced to extract correspondence right through a narrow upper slot with the dexterity of a pick-up gable. However, it was still little things, albeit unpleasant. But what finally finished me off was the fact that only three toilets functioned on five residential floors in this bedlam, two of which turned out to be female! This, in particular, was located on my fifth floor, but I had to rush headlong straight to the second one in which case !!! It was damn inconvenient, but I did not see a way out of this situation. If in the middle of the night I, stealthily looking around, could still risk relieving a little need of an empty woman! com, then during the day this possibility was completely excluded: How others managed to cope with this problem, I did not know the time, and when I found out, I couldn’t look at this audience for a long time without an internal shudder!

However, more about that later:

Gradually, I still formed a certain social circle (the neighbor-dental technician, of course, did not enter it). It was partly a necessary measure, but I could no longer continue to ignore those around me. Man, I am refined to a certain extent, with whom I do not converge - but somehow it was necessary to break the situation! In this case, the unifying start was not someone's personal charm or outstanding intellect (it’s foolish to assume that there would be a person here who could keep up a conversation on high matters), but: love of preference! I really didn’t have enough partners for the “bullet” since I graduated from the institute, and what was my surprise when I found at least three people who smelt of moonshine and at least three people who knew the rules of this tricky card game! One of them was a certain Vova, a mechanic from a shop next to me. Vova was originally from Tavolzhanka, a large suburban village from which it was almost closer to the plant than from our hostel. Nevertheless, he basically settled here, fading from his father's house, fleeing, as he explained, from the constant tediousness of the ancestors. His appearance, due to the nose that was once broken in a fight, left much to be desired, and he was built like a fair-haired freak, however, his nose was crotched, and the absurd cupboard-like build was miraculously combined with Igor Talkov's fanatical love for the work of reading cards on the passes. In addition, I was bribed by Vova's genuine piety for my modest leadership position.His best friend and roommate, a promising young plumber by the name of Vasily, on the contrary, outwardly could have passed for an intellectual, if not for his excessive love of alcohol and sly shifty eyes under glasses. This Basil, in my opinion, even cursed with great reluctance and only in case of emergency, which compares favorably with most of the inhabitants of this bedlam. True, Vova, drunk, often whacked Vasya in the corridor and shortly before the described events even broke his glasses, but seriously darken their friendly relations such ...