Stepanich siam voyage.

Stepanich siam voyage.

Timofey Stepanich was a down-to-earth man. 58 years old, he had a wife his age, colloquially called an old bag, a thirty-seven years old spinster daughter, a two-room flat built in the Chrushchov era (he'd waited half his life to get it), six hundred square meters of land outside of town, and a single entry in his work record booklet.

He started working as a driver in the plant as soon as he returned from the army. No career, no way to make it with only seven grades of school, but the management valued him for his complaisance, and the guys in the garge liked him because he could be trusted with substituting parts, helping fix the truck, and laying waste to a bottle or two on friday.

During the chaotic times, the plant suddenly fell in the private ownership of the fat Kahi Bendukidze, or, strictly speaking, his holding company, which didn't have any substantial effect on the salaries, but they at least started to pay it on time...

For the new year he was given a new Kamaz semi, he drank to it with the guys, cleaned his blackened hands with Fairy and said things like:

- I'll start after the holidays, and everything will be in clover till I retire.

On January First, quickly subduing his hangover by gulping two glasses of moonshine accomanied by the beet-and-pickled-cabbage salad from the previous evening, Stepanovich started preparing for work. He funneled a quarter litre of his magic potion and secured the flask in the fathomless pocket of his parka, a design from the end-70s.

Oh, the moonshine, that's a story for itself.

It was infused with satsuma peels, which (the satsumas) his daughter the nurse purloined for New Years Eve from her boarding school for retarded children. Timofey Stepanovich filtered the single destillate using his own technology, not without help from a homemade system for precise purification of automotive descent.

- Where are you going, yesterday you promised to fix the kitchen faucet?

- Yes, I'll fix it, mother, now I'm going fixing my kamaz, the spray nozzles...

- I know your spray nozzles, that's only your tales. As if that's the only thing you'd do on the first day of the new year.

He only waved his hand and impatiently jumped out into the freezing new day of the new year.

The buses drove awry, and seldom, luckily the plant was only two blocks away. At the gate he was met by an awfully drunk rent-a-cop, kindly hiccupping with his whole body, a half-eaten gherkin sticking out of the breast pocket of his camouflage-patterned jacket.