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others. Probably all of them would gladly have gone to bed
with her. But were any of them in love with her? As far as
true love is concerned, not many people are capable of that,
as you know. It’s hard to find, especially on a building site.
The construction wasn’t finished, it was three quarters done
at most, when here the machinery started arriving from
abroad, in accordance with the plan. Soon after that a crew
came to install it, including a couple of men who worked
for the foreign company that had sent the machinery. It
looked like they wouldn’t have a whole lot to do for the
moment, but they suddenly got all busy. They told us to
quickly finish off one of the shops, and began installing
some of the machines. Luckily for us they had to redo the
measurements, because something had come out wrong,
they even had to redraw their plans, and that gave us time
to catch up with our own schedule. They were constantly
sitting around the table in management, adjusting, arguing,
threatening, saying it was supposed to be this way and not
that.
They were classy guys. Every second one was a qualified
engineer. A whole separate barracks was prepared for them
to stay in. They even started calling it a pavilion instead of a
barracks. They plastered the outside, painted the interior,
weather-stripped it, put in new doors and windows. Each of
them had his own room. Those of us who’d been living in
that barracks before, they moved us to private lodgings,
cramming seven or eight guys into one room. They bought