The Foundation Pit Read online

  “Farewell, Yegor Semyonich, and forgive me!”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Nikanor Petrovich. You forgive me!”

  Each one began to kiss an entire queue of people, embracing a body that had until then been alien, and all their lips sadly and lovingly kissed each person.

  “Farewell, Aunt Darya, and forgive me! Don’t hold it against me that I burned your barn down.”

  “God will forgive, Alyosha. Anyway, the barn no longer belongs to me.”

  Many of them, after touching with mutual lips, stood for some time in this feeling, so as to commit their new kin to lasting memory, since they had lived until then without memory of one another and without pity.

  “Well, Stepan, let’s be brothers now!”

  “Farewell, Yegor, we lived cruelly, but we end according to conscience.”

  After the kissing, they all bowed down to the ground, each in front of everyone, and then got back onto their feet, free and empty now in their hearts81.

  “We’re ready now, comrade activist. Put us all down in one column—we’ll point out the kulaks ourselves!”

  But the activist had, even before this, designated all the inhabitants—who was for the collective farm, and who was for the raft.

  “So consciousness has spoken in you?” he said. “Evidently the mass work of the collective of activists has borne fruit! There it is—a precise line towards the light of the future!”

  At this point Chiklin came out onto the high porch and extinguished the activist’s lantern—even without kerosene the night was bright from the fresh snow.

  “All right now, comrades?” asked Chiklin.

  “Yes,” came the word from the whole of the OrgYard. “Now we feel nothing at all—only dust and ashes remain in us.”

  Voshchev was lying a little way apart and he was quite unable to fall asleep without the peace of truth inside his own life—he got up from the snow and entered into the midst of people.

  “Greetings!” he said, rejoicing, to the collective farm. “Now you’ve become like me. I’m nothing too.”

  “Greetings!” The entire collective farm rejoiced at this one man.

  Chiklin too was no longer able to endure being separate up on the porch while people were standing together in lowliness; he came down onto the earth and lit a bonfire from some fencing, and everyone began to warm themselves from the flames.

  It was already late. Night stood murkily over people, and no one else pronounced words; all that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village—just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity.

  Chiklin was the first to come to, since he had remembered something vital, but, on opening his eyes, he forgot everything. Yelisey was standing before him, holding Nastya in his arms. Being frightened of waking Chiklin, he had been holding the little girl like this for around two hours, while the little girl was sleeping peacefully, warming herself against his warm, heartfelt chest.

  “You haven’t harmed the child?” asked Chiklin.

  “How could I?” said Yelisey.

  Nastya opened her eyes onto Chiklin and began to weep over him; she thought that everything on earth was for real and forever, and if Chiklin had gone away, then she would never find him again anywhere in the world. In the barrack Nastya had often dreamed of Chiklin, and she had even wanted not to sleep—so she would not suffer torment in the morning, when it set in without him.

  Chiklin took the little girl in his arms.

  “Nothing’s happened to you?”

  “No,” said Nastya. “And have you made a collective farm here for Stalin? Show me the collective farm.”

  After getting up off the ground, Chiklin tucked Nastya’s head against his neck and set off to dispossess kulaks.

  “Zhachev didn’t upset you, did he?”

  “How could he upset me, when I’ll remain into socialism and he’ll soon snuff it?”

  “Yes, of course he can’t upset you,” said Chiklin, and turned his attention to the mass of people.

  Extraneous newly arrived peasantry was grouped about the OrgYard in clusters and small masses, while the collective farm was still asleep, in a common accumulation beside the night’s faded bonfire. More people from elsewhere were to be found on the collective-farm street, standing silently in anticipation of the joy which Yelisey and the other collective-farm foot-walkers had brought them there for. Some of these wanderers had surrounded Yelisey and were asking him, “Where is all this collective-farm benefit and bounty? Or have we come here for nothing? How long are we going to be wandering without stop?”

  “If you’ve been brought here, then the activist committee must know,” replied Yelisey.

  “So are these activists of yours sleeping?”

  “An activist can never sleep,” said Yelisey.

  The activist came out onto the porch with his assistants, and beside him was Prushevsky, while Zhachev was crawling behind everyone. Prushevsky had been sent to the collective farm by comrade Pashkin because Yelisey had passed by the foundation pit the day before and eaten porridge with Zhachev but, due to absence of mind, had been unable to say a single word. On hearing of this Pashkin had decided to hurl Prushevsky against the collective farm at full tempo, as a cadre of the cultural revolution, since organized people should not live without mind, while Zhachev had set off of his own accord, in the capacity of a freak; and so, with Nastya in their arms, they had appeared together as a threesome, not counting the roadside peasants whom Yelisey had ordered to come along after him in order to exult in the collective farm.

  “You hurry up and get the raft finished,” Chiklin told Prushevsky. “I’ll be back with you in good time.”

  Yelisey set off together with Chiklin in order to point out to him the most oppressed hired hand of all, who had worked for nothing on propertied farmsteads almost since the beginning of time, and who was now laboring as a hammerer in the collective-farm forge and receiving food and victuals as a blacksmith’s mate; this hammerer, however, was not registered as a member of the collective farm but was listed as a hired hand, and the trade-union line, on receiving reports of this official hired laborer—the only one in the entire district—had been deeply alarmed. As for Pashkin, he felt altogether distraught about the district’s unknown last proletarian, and he wanted to deliver him from oppression as soon as possible.

  An automobile was standing beside the forge and burning up gas in one place. From it had just descended Pashkin, who had arrived together with his spouse and who was intending, with activizing greed, to discover this residual exploited laborer and then, having furnished him with a better share of life, go on to dissolve the district trade-union committee for negligent service of their membered mass. But Chiklin and Yelisey were still on their way towards the forge when comrade Pashkin left the premises and departed back in his car, now hanging his head as if he did not know what to do with himself. Comrade Pashkin’s spouse had not got out of the car at all; she was merely protecting her beloved man from oncoming women, who adored her husband’s power and mistook the firmness of his leadership for the potency of the love he could offer them.

  Chiklin entered the forge with Nastya in his arms; Yelisey remained standing outside. The blacksmith was pumping air into the furnace with a pair of bellows, while the bear was hammering humanly at a strip of incandescent iron on the anvil82.

  “Come on, Misha!” said the blacksmith. “Remember—you and I are a shock brigade!”

  But the bear was already trying with such zeal that the forge smelled of his scorched fur; it was being burned by sparks from the metal, although the bear, for the sake of use and benefit, did not feel this.

  “All right,” decreed the blacksmith. “You knock off for a moment.”

  The bear stopped hammering and, stepping back, drank half a bucket of water because of thirst. After wiping his wearily proletarian face, the bear spat into his paw and returned to his labor as a hammerer. The blacksmith now instructed him to forge a horseshoe
for a certain private holder from the vicinity of the collective farm.

  “No slacking on this one, Misha! The man will be coming for it tonight—and he’ll be bringing something liquid!” And the blacksmith pointed to his own neck, as if it were a duct for vodka. Understanding the pleasure to come, the bear began working on the horseshoe all the more keenly. “And you, man, what are you doing here?” the blacksmith asked Chiklin.

  “Release the hammerer to point out kulaks. I hear he’s got great proletarian experience.”

  The blacksmith thought a little about something and said, “Has this matter been cleared with the activist committee? The forge has its industrial-financial plan—and you’re undermining it!”

  “The matter’s been fully cleared,” replied Chiklin. “And if this plan of yours collapses, then I’ll come back here and hoist it up again myself. Heard of Mount Ararat, have you? Well, if I heaped all the earth I’ve dug into a single heap, that’s how high it would reach.”

  “All right then, let him clear off,” the blacksmith expressed a piece of his mind about the bear. “Just go across to the OrgYard and bang on the church bell so Misha hears that it’s lunchtime. Otherwise he won’t budge—he’s a stickler for discipline!”

  While Yelisey wandered indifferently over to the OrgYard, the bear finished four horseshoes and begged to go on laboring. The blacksmith, however, wanted to make charcoal, so he sent him off to fetch some wood, and the bear came back with an entire fence that was just right for the job. Looking at the bear, all blackened and scorched, Nastya rejoiced that he was on our side and not on the bourgeoisie’s.

  “He suffers too,” she said, “so that means he’s for Stalin, doesn’t it?”

  “You bet it does!” replied Chiklin.

  “Beasts can sense what’s what too,” announced Nastya.

  The bell rang out and the bear instantly left his labor without attention; until then he had been breaking the fence into small pieces, but he now immediately straightened himself and sighed a steadfast sigh, as if to say, “That’ll do for now!” After lowering his paws into a bucket of water to soak the cleanness back onto them, he went off outside for the receipt of his food. The blacksmith pointed him towards Chiklin and the bear calmly followed the man, holding himself habitually upright on his hind paws alone. Nastya tapped the bear on the shoulder and he in return touched her gently with one paw and yawned with his entire mouth, out of which came a smell of past nourishment.

  “Look, Chiklin, he’s all gray!”

  “He’s lived with people—so he’s gone gray with grief.”

  The bear waited for the little girl to look at him again and, when she did, he screwed up one eye for her; Nastya laughed and the hammerer thumped his belly, whereupon something down there rumbled and Nastya laughed even better—though the bear now paid no attention to the minor.

  Walking beside some yards felt as cool as in the open fields, while beside others there was a sense of warmth. Cows and horses were lying in these yards, their carcasses gaping and rotting—and the heat of life accumulated during long years beneath the sun was still seeping out from them into the air, into the shared wintry space. Chiklin and the hammerer had already passed a number of yards, but somehow they had not yet liquidated any kulaks anywhere.

  The snow, which hitherto had only occasionally been descending from higher places, now began to fall faster and more harshly; as happens when winter is getting established, some chance wind was producing a blizzard. But Chiklin and the bear continued street-wise through the snowy, slashing thicket, since it was impossible for Chiklin to take into account a mood of nature—except that he hid Nastya underneath his shirt against the cold, leaving only her head outside lest she feel bored in the dark warmth. The little girl didn’t once take her eyes off the bear—she felt good that the animal was working class too—while the hammerer looked at her as if she were the forgotten sister together with whom he had fattened beside his mother’s belly in the summer forest of his childhood. Wishing to gladden Nastya, the bear looked around: Was there anything to snatch or break off and give to her as a present? But there was not one even in the least little bit happy object anywhere nearby—only wattle dwellings and fences. Then the hammerer peered into the snowy wind, quickly plucked from it something little, and held a clenched paw up to Nastya’s face. Nastya took a fly from his paw, knowing that there were no flies now either—they had died long ago, at the end of summer. The bear then began to chase flies all the way down the street—they were flying along in whole clouds, mingling with the driving snow.

  “Why are there flies when it’s winter?” asked Nastya.

  “Because of the kulaks, my little daughter,” said Chiklin.

  Nastya suffocated in her hand the fat kulak fly presented to her by the bear, and then said, “Well, you kill them as a class then! Otherwise there’ll be flies in winter and not in summer and the birds will have nothing to eat.”

  The bear suddenly let out a roar outside a clean, solidly built hut83 and did not want to go farther, forgetting about the flies and the little girl. A woman’s face stared out through the glass of the window and down this glass trickled the liquid of tears—as though the woman kept them all the time at the ready. The bear opened his maw at the woman on show and roared still more furiously, with the result that the woman jumped backwards within her dwelling.

  “Kulaks!” said Chiklin and, entering the yard, opened the gate from inside. The bear too stepped across the boundary and into the property.

  Chiklin and the hammerer first documented the homestead’s thrifty and secluded places. In one shed lay four or more dead mutton sheep, covered over with chaff. When the bear touched one sheep with his foot, flies flew up from it; they had fixed themselves up with a fattening method of life inside the hot, beefy gorges of a sheep body and, feeding diligently, they flew satedly amid the snow without being in the least chilled by it. Out from the shed came a breath of warmth, and it was probably hot in the cadaveric crevices of the slaughtered carcasses, just as in smoldering peaty earth in summertime, and the flies must have been living quite comfortably there. Chiklin began to find it oppressive in the large shed—it was as if it were being heated by the stoves of a bathhouse—while Nastya screwed up her eyes from the stench and wondered why it was warm on the collective farm in winter and there was no sign of the four seasons that Prushevsky had told her about back at the foundation pit when the singing of birds had come to an end in the empty autumn fields.

  The hammerer went from the shed into the hut and, after roaring in a hostile voice in the entrance room, he hurled out through the porch a huge and age-old chest, from which spools of thread came tumbling out.

  In the hut Chiklin found a woman and a little boy; the little boy was straining on his potty, while his mother had squatted down, making a nest for herself amid the room, and looking as if all the substance had sunk right down within her. She was no longer screaming; she just opened her mouth and tried to breathe.

  “Husband, husband!” she began to call, not moving from the powerlessness of grief.

  “What?” responded a voice from on top of the stove. Then came a creak from a cracked coffin, and out climbed the master of the house.

  “The tsars have arrived,” gradually narrated the woman. “Come and greet them. O, my bitter, bitter heart!”

  “Out!” Chiklin ordered the entire family.

  The hammerer tweaked the boy’s ear and the boy leaped up from the potty; not knowing what to make of this low bowl, the bear then sat down on it for a sample.

  The boy stood in only his shirt and, taking thought, looked at the sitting bear.

  “Uncle, give me back my bit of poo!” he asked. But the bear quietly growled at him, straining from the uncomfortable position.

  “Out!” Chiklin pronounced to the kulak population.

  The bear, not moving from the pot, let a sound out from his maw, and the well-to-do peasant replied, “Don’t make a hullabaloo, masters. We can see ourselve
s out.”

  The hammerer recalled how in the olden days he had uprooted tree stumps on this peasant’s land, eating grass out of speechless hunger since the man gave him nourishment only in the evening—and even then the bear only got what was left behind from the pigs, and the pigs used to lie down in the troughs and eat the bear’s portion in their sleep. Recalling such things, the bear got up off the bowl, took hold of the peasant’s body in a comfortable embrace, and then, squeezing him with a force that wrung all the sweat and kulak fat out of the man, bellowed into his head in a range of voices: fury, and hearsay, had made the hammerer almost able to talk.

  The well-to-do peasant waited for the bear to move back from him and bolted straight out of the hut, just as he was; only when he had already gone past the window did the woman rush out after him. Left in the hut without family, the little boy stood there for a while in bored bewilderment, then snatched up his potty and ran off after his mother and father.

  “He’s a sly one,” Nastya said of this boy who had carried off his potty.

  From then on the kulaks came thicker. Chiklin and the bear had only gone past three more yards when the bear let out another roar, designating the presence here of his class enemy. Chiklin handed Nastya over to the hammerer and entered the hut alone.

  “And what’s brought you here, my friend?” asked a calm, courteous peasant.

  “Get out of here!” replied Chiklin.

  “What is it? Have I displeased you?”

  “We need this collective farm. Don’t you corrupt it.”

  The peasant thought unhurriedly, as if he found himself in the middle of a heart-to-heart conversation.

  “The collective farm is no use to you.”

  “Out, reptile!”

  “All right then, make the whole republic into a collective farm—but the whole republic will end up belonging to a single man. It’ll be his private holding!”

  This took Chiklin’s breath away; he rushed to the door and opened it for a glimpse of freedom—long ago he had once hurled himself in the same way against the closed door of a prison, not understanding captivity, and the grinding power of his heart had made him scream. Chiklin turned his back on this reasoning peasant, not wanting him to participate in a passing sorrow of his that concerned only the working class alone.