Вахта
Sixty On, Sixty Off
C1 · Advanced · fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
An advanced story about a job a great many Russian families are run on and that almost no reader outside the country has heard of: sixty days at a site four hours' flight north, then sixty days at home, and the same again for eleven years. Andrei is forty-three and knows the flight timetable by heart. What the story is about is not the cold or the distance but the fact that both halves of his life have learned to work — a household that runs without him in it, a daughter whose childhood arrived in sixty-day steps, and a wife who long ago got used to deciding everything alone and never got out of the habit. Once a year they sit down and do the arithmetic of stopping, and it comes out the same way every time. Carries the everyday vocabulary of shift work, the north, and living to a timetable.
Characters
- Andrei (Андрей) — Forty-three, rotation worker
- Marina (Марина) — His wife
- Lyosha (Лёша) — His workmate
- Vika (Вика) — Their daughter, sixteen
Vocabulary from this story
- вахта — rotational shift
- смена — shift
- бригада — crew
- общежитие — dormitory
- столовая — canteen
- посёлок — settlement
- аэропорт — airport
- рейс — flight
- пропуск — pass, permit
- спецодежда — work clothing
- сигнал — signal
- коридор — corridor