The Foundation Pit Read online

“Not bad eh? But people still don’t believe me—they say I believe in secret and that I’m a manifest bastard as far as the poor are concerned. I must earn my probation in order to be allowed to enter the circle of atheism68.”

  “And just how are you earning it, you heathen swine?” asked Chiklin.

  The priest folded his bitterness away in his heart and answered readily: “What I do is sell candles to the people. Look—the entire hall is ablaze with them. Resources accumulate into the alms bowl, and from there they go to the activist—for a tractor.”

  “You’re lying. There’s nobody praying here now.”

  “Nobody’s allowed here at all,” announced the priest. “People merely buy a candle, stand it here for God like an orphan, instead of their own prayer, and then disappear from here straightaway.”

  Chiklin sighed from fury and questioned further: “And what stops people coming and crossing themselves here, you bastard?!”

  For the sake of respect, the priest rose to his feet before Chiklin, preparing to announce with precision: “Making the sign of the cross, comrade, is no more allowed than baptism. Any such thing I note down in shorthand in the list of those to be remembered in prayer . . .”

  “Speak further and faster!” ordered Chiklin.

  “I’m not curtailing my tale, comrade brigade leader, I’m just weak in my tempo, please be patient with me . . . And then I take these lists, with the designation of any person who has either created by hand the sign of the cross, or bowed their own body before the heavenly powers, or committed any other act of reverence towards the subkulak prelates, and every midnight I forward them in person to the comrade activist70.”

  “Come right up close to me,” said Chiklin.

  The priest duly came down from the pulpit.

  “Shut your eyes tight, wretch!”

  The priest closed his eyes and expressed ingratiating politeness on his face. Chiklin, his torso unwavering, did the priest a conscious blow on the cheekbone. The priest opened his eyes and screwed them up tight again, but he could not fall, lest Chiklin take him for an insubordinate martyr.

  “Want to live?” asked Chiklin.

  “It’s no use, comrade, for me to live,” the priest replied with reason. “I no longer feel the charm of creation. I’ve been left without God, and God without Man . . .”

  Having said these last words, the priest bent down to the ground and began to pray to his guardian angel, touching the floor with his foxtrot head69.

  There was a long whistle from the village, followed by the neighing of horses.

  The priest stopped his praying hand and grasped the meaning of this signal.

  “An assembly of founder constituents,” he said with resignation.

  Chiklin went out of the church and back onto the grass. Crossing the grass on her way to the church, straightening the crushed goosefoot behind her, was a woman. At the sight of Chiklin, she froze on the spot and, from fright, held out to him a five-kopek piece for a candle.

  The Organizational Yard was covered with total people; organized members of the collective farm were present together with unorganized private holders who were still feeble with regard to consciousness, or possessors of a subkulak share of life, and who had failed to join the collective farm.

  The activist was to be found on the high porch, observing with silent sorrow the movement of the vital masses on the damp evening earth; he speechlessly loved the poor-peasant class which, after eating plain bread, was hopefully hurling itself forward into the invisible future, since the earth was empty and alarming for them anyway; he secretly handed out city sweeties to the children of the destitute and he had decided, once communism had set in throughout agriculture, to take a directive towards marriage, especially since women by then would be better manifest. And even now someone’s little boy was standing beside the activist and looking into his face.

  “What are you gawping at?” asked the activist. “Here—have a sweetie!”

  The boy took the sweetie, but nourishment alone was too little for him.

  “Uncle, how come you’re the cleverest of all but you don’t have a peaked cap?”

  By way of an answer the activist patted the boy on the head71; the boy, in astonishment, bit the totally stone sweetie in two—it glittered like split ice and inside it there was only hardness. The boy gave half of the sweetie back to the activist.

  “Finish it yourself. There’s no jam in the middle. It’s a total collectivization—not much joy for us!”

  The activist smiled with penetrating consciousness; he fore-sensed that the boy, in the maturity of his own life, would remember him amid the burning light of socialism that the activist committee had wrested, through their concentrated power, from the villages’ wattle-fenced yards.

  Voshchev and three convinced peasants were carrying logs72 to the gates of the OrgYard and stacking them into a pile—they had received advance instructions for this labor from the activist. Chiklin followed the laborers and, taking a log from near the gully, he carried it over to the OrgYard: let more benefit go into the communal cauldron, so that there should be less sadness all around.

  “Well, citizens, how are we going to be now?” pronounced the activist into the popular substance that was to be found before him. “Are you planning to sow capitalism once again, or have you come to your senses?73”

  Those who had been organized were sitting down on the ground and smoking, sensing satisfaction as they stroked their beards, which had somehow begun to grow more sparsely over the last six months; as for the unorganized ones, they were still standing on their feet, trying to get the better of the vanity of their souls, except that a subordinate of the activist had taught them that they didn’t have any souls in them, only a propertied mood of mind—and so now they did not know what chance might bring them, since there would be no property. Some of them bent down and knocked at their breasts, listening for some thought of their own from in there, but their hearts went on beating lightly and sadly, as if void, and made no reply. The standing people did not let the activist out of their sight for even a moment; those who were closest to the porch were looking up at their leading man with all their desire in their unblinking eyes, so that he would see their mood of readiness.

  By then Chiklin and Voshchev had managed to fetch the logs and were hewing all the ends into tenon joints, preparing for the construction of some large object. The same as the day before, there was no sun in nature, and a mournful evening had set in early over the damp fields; silence was now spreading over the whole visible world, and amidst it sounded only Chiklin’s ax, answered by frail creaks from the nearby mill and the wattle fencing.

  “Well then?” patiently said the activist from up above. “Or are you going to stand there forever in between capitalism and communism?74 It’s time to get moving—over at district headquarters the fourteenth plenum is already in session!”

  “Active comrade, let us middle peasants stand a bit longer!” asked the rear peasants. “Maybe we’ll get used to it all. Habit’s the main thing—with habit we can bear anything.”

  “All right, you stand while the poor sit,” allowed the activist. “In any case, comrade Chiklin hasn’t yet had time to knock the logs together into a single block.”

  “Why are they wasting logs, comrade activist?” asked a rear-middle peasant.

  “That’s for the liquidation of the class—a raft’s being organized for tomorrow, so that the kulak sector can travel downriver into the sea, and so farther and so on.”

  Taking out the lists of those to be remembered in prayer and his official records of class stratification, the activist began marking signs on his papers. He had a multicolored pencil; sometimes he would apply the blue, and sometimes the red, and sometimes he would simply sigh and think, placing no mark until his judgment. The standing peasants opened their mouths and looked at the pencil with the weariness of a weak soul that had now appeared in them from out of their last remnants of property, because it had begun to s
uffer. Meanwhile Chiklin and Voshchev were chopping away with two axes at once, the logs slotting closely together to establish the foundations for a spacious place.

  A neighboring middle peasant leaned his head against the porch and stood in such peace for some time.

  “Active comrade, er, comrade!”

  “Speak clearly,” suggested the activist, between one task and another.

  “Allow us to grieve our grief for a last night—and then we’ll join you and rejoice forever.”

  The activist thought briefly.

  “A night’s a long time. All-out tempos are in progress throughout the region. Grieve till the raft’s ready.”

  “Well, I suppose even that’s a joy,” said the middle peasant, and burst into tears, not losing the time of his last grief. The women standing the other side of the OrgYard fence all began to wail at once, at the top of their most heartfelt voices, as a result of which Chiklin and Voshchev stopped chopping the wood with their axes. The membered and organized poor class stood up, content not to have to be grieving, and went off to look at its own shared and essential daily property of the village.

  “You turn away from us too for a brief time!” two middle peasants asked the activist. “Let us not see you.”

  The activist absented himself from the porch and went back into the building, where he greedily began writing a report on the precise execution of the measures with regard to total collectivization and the liquidation of the kulak as a class by means of floating him off on a raft (the activist could not insert a comma after “kulak” since there had been none in the original directive75). Furthermore he asked the district for a new militant plan of campaign for himself, in order that the local activist committee should work without interruption and extend the precious general line boldly and precisely forward. The activist would also have liked the district to proclaim him the most ideological worker in the entire district superstructure, but this desire fell silent in him without consequence, because he remembered how, after the grain requisitioning, it had been necessary for him to declare himself the most intelligent man at the village’s given stage of development and how this had prompted one peasant to proclaim that, in that case, then he himself was an old woman.

  The door of the building opened, and into the doorway reverberated the noise of torment from the village. The man who came in wiped the damp off his clothes and said, “Active comrade, it’s blowing cold out there, and it’s begun to snow.”

  “Let it snow. What’s that to us?”

  “It’s nothing to us. Whatever comes at us, we peasants will cope!” fully agreed the newly arrived elderly poor peasant. He was constantly surprised still to be alive in the world, because he possessed nothing except vegetables from his little plot and the privileges of a poor peasant and there was no way he could achieve any higher, satisfied life.

  “Put my mind at rest, comrade chief. Shall I sign up for the peace of the collective farm, or shall I wait?”

  “Sign up, of course, or I’ll be sending you off to the ocean.”

  “There’s no place as can frighten a poor peasant. I’d have registered long ago—only I’m frightened of having to sow Zoya76!”

  “Zoya? If you mean soya, well that’s an official cereal crop.”

  “That’s the bitch!”

  “All right, don’t sow soya. I’ll take into account your psychology.”

  “Yes, please take it into account!”

  After registering the poor peasant, the activist was compelled to give him a notification that he had been accepted into membership and that there would be no Zoya on the collective farm, and he thought up an appropriate form of wording for this receipt then and there, since the poor peasant would in no way leave without it.

  Outside, meanwhile, cold snow was falling thicker and denser; the snow made the earth more resigned, but the sounds of the middle-peasant mood prevented a total onset of silence. An old plowman, Ivan Semyonovich Krestinin77, was kissing the young trees in his orchard and then destroying them up out of the soil by their roots, while his wife lamented over the bare branches.

  “Don’t cry, old girl,” said Krestinin. “You’ll soon be a collective-farm tart78. But these trees are my own flesh, and my flesh must suffer now—it’s boring and lonely for it to be collectivized into captivity!”

  Hearing her husband’s words, the woman began to roll about on the ground, while another woman—either an old maid or a widow—first ran down the street, propagating such agitational, nunnish shrieks that Chiklin felt like shooting at her, and then, seeing Krestinin’s woman rolling about in lowliness, flung herself down onto the ground too and began to thrash about with her cloth-stockinged legs.

  Night was total at village level. It covered everything, and snow made the air cramped and impenetrable, such that chests were at a loss for breath, yet women were shrieking in every place, keeping up a constant howl as they got used to grief. The dogs, together with other petty and nervous animals, also maintained these sounds of anguish, and there was as much noise and alarm in the collective farm as in the changing room of a bathhouse; as for the men, the middle and higher peasants were working silently in their sheds and yards, guarded by the wailing of their womenfolk beside wide-open gates. The residual, uncollectivized horses slept sadly in their stalls, tethered so firmly in order that they should never fall, since some horses already stood dead on their feet79; in anticipation of the collective farm the less impecunious peasants had kept their horses without nourishment, so that they would enter social ownership only with their own bodies and not lead their animals after them into sorrow.

  “Are you alive, dear breadwinner?”

  The horse was dozing in her stall, having lowered her sensitive head forever; one of her eyes was feebly closed, but she did not have enough strength for the other and so it was left looking into the dark. The shed had grown cold without equine breath and snow began to fall inside, settling on the mare’s head and not melting. Her master blew out his match, embraced the horse’s neck, and stood there in his orphanhood, smelling in memory the mare’s sweat, as when they were plowing.

  “So you’ve died, have you? Well, don’t worry—soon I’ll croak too. It’ll be quiet for us.”

  Not seeing the man, a dog came into the shed and sniffed at the horse’s hind leg. It then growled, sank its teeth into her flesh, and tore itself out some beef. The horse’s two eyes shone white in the darkness—she was now looking through them both—and she moved her legs a step forward, not yet forgetting to live because of the pain.

  “Maybe you’ll enter the collective farm? Go ahead then, but I’ll wait,” said the master of the yard.

  He took a clump of hay from the corner and held it to the horse’s mouth. Her eye places had grown dark, the mare had already closed her last vision, but she could still smell the hay, because her nostrils twitched and her mouth fell apart either way, although it was unable to chew. Having twice managed to return, for the sake of pain and hunger, her life was diminishing ever further from her; and then her nostrils no longer moved because of the hay and two new dogs were indifferently gnawing a leg behind her, but the life of the horse was still intact—this life was just sinking into further places of poverty, breaking down into smaller and smaller parts, yet still not managing to exhaust itself.

  Snow fell on the cold ground, meaning to remain for the winter; a peaceful shroud covered the entire visible earth for its sleep to come; only around the animals’ sheds did the snow melt and the earth become black, since the warm blood of cows and sheep had seeped out underneath the boards, and summer places had been bared. After liquidating all their last breathing livestock80, the peasants had begun to eat beef and had instructed all the members of their households to do the same; during this brief time they had eaten beef as if it were a communion—no one had wanted to eat, but the flesh of dear and familiar carcasses had to be hidden away inside one’s own body and preserved there from social ownership. Some calculating peasants had long
ago swollen up from meaty food and were now walking heavily, like moving barns; others were vomiting continually, but they were unable to part with their cattle and so they destroyed it down to the bone, not expecting benefit of stomach. As for anyone who had managed to eat his stock of life in advance or else released it into collective imprisonment—he lay in an empty coffin and lived there as if confined in a snug home, sensing enclosed peace.

  On such a night Chiklin abandoned work on the raft. Without ideology Voshchev too had grown so weak in body that he could not raise his ax, and he lay down in the snow: like it or not, there was no truth in the world—or maybe there had been once, in some plant or heroic creature, but then a wandering beggar had come by and eaten the plant, or trampled this creature down there on the ground in lowliness, and then the beggar had died in an autumn gully and the wind had blown his body clean into nothing.

  The activist could see from the OrgYard that the raft was not ready; in the morning, however, he had to send to the district a packet containing his final report, so he gave an immediate blast on his whistle for a general constituent assembly. This sound brought people out from their yards, and the entire population, in all its still unorganized body, reported to the OrgYard square. The women were no longer weeping and their faces had dried up, and the men too now bore themselves with no sense of self, ready to be organized for eternity. Drawing close to one another, people stood without a word in all the thick of their middle peasantry and gazed up at the porch, where the activist was to be found with a lantern in his hand. Because of this light of his own, the activist could not see the varied pettiness on people’s faces, but they for their part all observed him with clarity.

  “So,” asked the activist, “are you ready?”

  “Wait a moment,” said Chiklin. “Let them say farewell to one another until the life to come.”

  The men had all almost readied themselves for something, but in the silence one of them pronounced: “Give us one more moment of time!”

  And having said these last words, the peasant embraced his neighbor and kissed him three times, and they said farewell.