I’m telling you this, Buia continued, because we started to work at this gallery in autumn and the winter that came it was a pretty cold one. However the winter might have been in other places, here in Handal a horrible draft gets you. We used to get out from second shift wet through the skin. Our clothes started to froze. So it won’t cut us under our arm how it got frozen, we kept rising our hands according the cold that caught us on our wet clothes. When we got home our hands were horizontal, at the arms level. We were some frozen crosses. Not by a long sight were we able to open the door. We were punching out the door with the boot, we stand behind a step or two when our wives will get outside, they turned us so we could get inside the house and we won’t slip, in this way they could break off anything from us and they pulled us inside. For a while we were sitting in the tray so the umber won’t pour on the door mats because the acids it was made from would burn. After our arms would fall near our body, they would carefully undress us in such way that the frozen clothes won’t tear us the skin tied up to it.
Now I begin to feel the remains of those days when we used to become frozen crosses. It was a hard time, but probably it was the most beautiful time from my mine digger life. My woman, the woman I got married with, had four kids, from whom only one boy. I liked him a lot although nobody ever called me down for not treating my wife’s kids as a real father, I loved that boy the way I think I would have loved my own child. I cared for him as for my own being. He was austere in work, serviceable, fast in decisions and for his sake “I cut down from my yard” and built him a house near my own so he would be close, to have him near me all the time. He was everything for me; he would carry my name and my reputation after I’m gone. I liked to know him close to me, to have him near me all the time, that’s why I took him near me in my team and taught him the handicraft of mining. I used him anywhere I needed him because he was very austere, he learned fast and even at the engines he was very skilled and if we wouldn’t have a man at the compressor we used to send him to turn it on, to give us air. We didn’t have pipe lines so he lengthens it so we could make holes. He managed great in everything and everybody cherished him and he pleased everyone. He is a very special boy, Buia concludes.
On the bank of the river an old restaurant stud up. Ion, the other guest of Buia, makes a sort of an observation that shocked us too: