Chapter 12
A Busy Summer
We started to prepare the drawings of the elevator at the beginning of the year and by May it would have to step into production. Almost simultaneously the actual building began. I have seen such a haste never before. I have been named project manager for the object and had to coordinate the activities of different workshops and offices.
My actual design work involved general arrangement, the arrangement of living quarters, as well as the whole turning elevator bridge from its steel structure to the hydraulic actuation of the lifting-lowering of its outer (upper) part.
Propulsion came from a Z-drive, and the conveyor belt was driven by a separate Diesel engine. On both sides of the bridge, it was possible for the conveyor overseer to go out to the very end. A big flat balance weight of concrete – stuffed with steel scrap – kept the bridge in place. On a circular rail, the bridge could be rotated from working position to travelling state – at that position, equal to the symmetry axis of the pontoon, the outer part of the bridge was lowered to horizontal position – and fixed at both positions.
Work was finished by the end of May and the elevator taken to its final place. Lack of the hydraulic cylinders made it necessary to lift the bridge to its place first time by portal cranes. For a month’s time I have been assigned to the elevator as guarantee engineer. During that time it was working at normal conditions and a group of our mechanics, locksmiths and welders were doing all repairs necessary either to bring something to normal condition or to make a modification to ensure proper function.
During that month I was living on the elevator, and it was possible only on Sundays to visit my wife. At last, she decided to take a weeks holiday and spend it with me. She arrived by a car that was taking a bunch of our workers to the place. As the weather was fine, and she could do sun-bathing on the large flat surface of the balance weight, she enjoyed herself and we could be together. She even ascended the bridge to the end and praised the fine sight from 40 feet above the water. At the end of her stay she left by ferry, that was taking her to the island of Csepel and, crossing it by foot and by horse-cart, she caught the suburban train to the capital.
Here it comes to my English course again. As I was spending a month on the elevator, the last week of the course has been lost for me. I was left out of the information and could not make my application for the next year into the same group. Even getting my certificate about the course has been a detective job: I had to track down the teacher to her house to get my document.
Simultaneously with my assignment on the elevator, I became mixed up in another job. Our company had been selected years before to be the partner of a Soviet research institute for shipping in a so-called cooperation in the field of automation on ships. My colleague S.S. was leaving the company for a job at the university and he handed back his assignment as a representative in this cooperation. The boss in turn named me for new representative. Before I could have done anything, our office was instructed by the person in charge within the management to delegate the representative for automation to a business trip to Leningrad in July. The machine started to grind. As a man of the field for a long time, my predecessor would have deserved the trip, but as it could involve measures to be taken in the future, he, who was on departure track, would not have been able to effect those measures.
It has been decided I would be sent on the trip. And so my first ever business trip – not to mention my practice in the GDR six years before – began. My wife might have felt the traditional dilemma of wives. She has been happy that I had this opportunity to become one of the important figures of the company and to see more of the world, but she must have sensed envy at the same time for being left alone, left out of something, in which I would take part. She was to get accustomed to this feeling, as I was to repeat it to her many times. Only years after, to my African mission would I be able to take her with me.
About this trip I gave a detailed account in Canned Roaddust. I have written about eight years of my life on the housing estate by the airport. As a 16-year-old I slipped through the fence frequently – officially I would not be allowed to step onto military premises –, and once inside, I could see everything from the hangar with World War II fighters through speed-limit breaking jet airplane models to biplanes for parachute crews. There were light training planes for two – flying coffins – of Czechoslovak manufacture. Fortunately, I have tried it only once with an old friend of my brother-in-law, as they have been very prone to fall. They were objects Czechs had been learning plane-building on.
There were other Czechoslovak planes called Aero, later their successor, Super Aero, became the first type used by our flying ambulance.
There were also IL-14s, built by licence on DC-3s, they had flown infrequently, as their fuel need was high. The type of plane, I was allowed to ride most times, was AN-2, a biplane designed for high altitudes above the Caucasus mountains. I could go in, if the group of paratroopers consisted of less than sixteen people.
When I returned from the Soviet Union it was already August and that far we have not been on holiday that year. Incidentally, I was offered a room for two weeks in the hills in the northern part of the country. That time two weeks in a trade union recreation home has been really cheap. We accepted it and went to have a good holiday. We were wandering a lot in the woods, picked mushrooms and dried them in our room. Anyway, two weeks have been a little long in that small room with trade union discipline, and we decided after nine days to leave it and go to aunt E. We took with us Cecily, the youngest in my wife’s family. She was fifteen, and my wife considered it ripe to take her with us to show her something of the world.
We took our tent along. We wanted to disturb my aunt as little as possible, we would sleep outside in the garden. The weather turned foul and first C., later also my wife moved in. The second night we all spent inside the house.
In my childhood there was a deserted house not far from aunt E. called squeezing house. Behind it, there was a vineyard, and the grapes on vintage had been squeezed in the house. In the lower part of it there was also a wine cellar. At that time a brave entrepreneur rented it, renovated it and opened a good restaurant. For some years it was functioning excellently. Our German friends had found it also very fine. With C. we took our meal there often, even so that C. always wanted the most expensive dishes.
It was the last time, C. let herself consider a child. Soon she began to work, and her life has not been so eventless as my wife’s maiden life.
About torsional vibrations and towing tank experiments done by our design office in the open backwater in our yard I had to make lectures in a graduate training course of the Technical University. My texts of the lectures have been published in the official papers of the course.
As autumn arrived, I went on my English lessons. The group I got into was a mixed one. There were young girls and boys with excellent knowledge, and there were some people on the other side of the scale. The teacher has been a young lady with a newly born son at home. She left her former job for this reason. Fortunately, she had no intent to make a slow progress because of the backward. She aligned our progress with the better, and our group would lose the weak gradually. Her speech has been a little harder to recognize and understand, but her knowledge was extensive.
We took the 3rd book of Eckersley, but the 4th volume she left out, she took a locally edited text-book instead. It was very useful, as there were American stories in it, and it was worth more to read them than further adventures of Hobb with his uncle Albert and Lucille. In the coming year I would finish this course and get acceptation to the 2nd year of English in the national institute.
In the autumn months in our office there were some changes. My former boss completely left the company and the chief of my group took his place as chief engineer. The engine group swallowed ours, and two new colleagues arrived. One of them was a man of booty tourism, and once he succeeded in taking us with himself and his son and daughter. His charming wife took advantage of their absence and would make a gross cleaning in their apartment.
The other new colleague has been a kind of means for fate to draw us even more into the mushroom hobby. As he took us some Bernardie mushrooms – member of the same family as grown champignon –, my wife has been convinced to enlist to a course training mushroom experts. It has been organized by her workplace.
There were other changes in the office, that involved the formation of a group for project documentation. It was expected I would be assigned for chief of the group, but another one has been selected. When I tried to find out, what happened, I learned, he stole it from me actually by cornering the new chief engineer with the menace of his leaving. It hurt me painfully, but first I wanted to accept that decision. Paying more thoughts to the topic, however, I phoned to the former boss of ours and asked him:
"Hello, F., I have been cheated here. They assigned someone else to the job I was expecting.”
"Sad.” He did not say more.
"How do you fare there?” I asked. He became chief designer in the shipyard, building push-boats for the Soviets.
"Not very easy task, but I hope I killed all my enemies here.”
"Was it really so dangerous?”
"Yes, a wasp nest.” He did not overstressed it, as I would learn it later.
After a while of neutral chat he asked:
"Do you want me to take you here?”
"Exactly that was my intention”, I answered with a lighter heart.
"Bad”, he said, "I promised to G.J. (his successor) not to draw his people here.”
”He would lose me anyway.”, I answered, "I cannot trust him any more.”
"Well, when could you start at me?”
We agreed that I would give in my notice and start with him as soon as possible. My employer would not let me leave by agreement, it meant, I would have some disadvantages for 3 years. In the first days of the year 1970 I moved to my new workplace.