The Foundation Pit Page 14

  Chiklin turned his head askance and saw that Voshchev had bent down behind a tree and was putting something into a bag that was already full.

  “What are you doing, Voshchev?”

  “This and that,” said Voshchev, and, tying up the neck of the bag, he placed this load on his back.

  The two of them began to make their way back to the OrgYard for the night. The moon had declined far lower, the village was standing in black shadows, and everything had fallen deafly silent; only the river, congealed with cold, was still stirring in its well-settled village banks.

  Back at the OrgYard the collective farm was unshakably asleep; as the members had collapsed, brought down by Zhachev, so they were still to be found without comfort. Yelisey’s face was, as before, covered by Chiklin’s cap, and Chiklin himself forgot about this headgear. The security light—one lamp for the whole extinguished village—was burning in the OrgHouse; beside the lamp the activist was sitting at his mental labor, drawing up the columns of a register where he intended to enter all the data of the provision of poor- and middle-peasant welfare and amenities—so that there would be an eternal, documented picture, and experience as a foundation.

  “List my goods too!” asked Voshchev as he unpacked his bag.

  In the village he had gathered every beggarly and rejected object, unconsciousness of every kind and all the trivia of unknownness—to be avenged by socialist vengeance. This worn-out, enduring frailty had once touched brotherly, laboring flesh; in these things was imprinted forever the burden of a life bent down, a life that had been expended without conscious meaning and that had perished without glory somewhere beneath the earth’s rye stubble. Without fully understanding but with miserly thrift, Voshchev had accumulated in his bag the material remnants of lost people who had lived, like him, without truth and who had passed away earlier than the victorious end. Now he was presenting these liquidated laborers to the attention of the authorities and the future, in order to achieve vengeance through the organization of eternal human meaning89—on behalf of those who are now lying quietly in the earthly depth.

  The activist duly began to list the things that had arrived with Voshchev, organizing a special column in the margin under the heading: “Inventory of proletariat liquidated to death by the kulak as a class, in accordance with escheated remnants.” Instead of people, the activist listed tokens of existence: a bast sandal of a bygone century, a tin ring from the ear of a shepherd, a homespun trouser leg, and sundry other accoutrements of a laboring but dispossessed body.

  Just then Zhachev, who had been sleeping beside Nastya on the floor, managed inadvertently to wake the little girl.

  “Turn your mouth away! You don’t clean your teeth, you fool!” said Nastya to the veteran who had shielded her against the cold from the door. “You’ve already had your legs chopped off by the bourgeoisie—do you want your teeth to go too?”

  Zhachev closed his mouth with terror and began to propel air through his nose. The little girl had a stretch, straightened on her head the warm shawl she had put on for the night, but was unable to get back to sleep again because she had overexcited herself.

  “Have they brought in some utility scrap?” she asked with regard to Voshchev’s bag.

  “No,” said Chiklin. “It’s toys that have been collected for you. Get up and choose.”

  Nastya stood up into her full height, stamped her feet a little for self-development, then sank down on the spot and hooked her legs around the newly registered heap of objects. Chiklin moved the lamp from the table down onto the floor so that the little girl could see better what it was that she liked; as for the activist, he could write without fault even in darkness.

  After a while the activist descended an inventory down onto the floor so that the child could leave a mark confirming receipt in full of all the property acquired in life by the landless laborers who had died without kin and stating that she would put this to good future use. Nastya slowly drew a hammer and sickle on the paper and handed the inventory back.

  Chiklin took off his padded jacket and his shoes and began walking about in his socks, content and peaceful that there was now no one who could take away from Nastya her share of life in the world, and that the current of rivers goes only into the sea’s deeps and that those who had sailed away on the raft would not return to torment Mikhail the hammerer; as for those nameless people from whom there remained only bast sandals and tin earrings, it was wrong that they should have to suffer anguish in the earth for eternity—but then how could they ever arise?

  “Prushevsky!” called Chiklin.

  “Yes,” replied the engineer. He was sitting in a corner, leaning his back against it and dozing indifferently. His sister had not written anything to him for a long time; if she had died, he had decided to go and cook nourishment for her children, in order to wear himself out to the point of losing his soul and thus pass away sometime or other as an old man who had grown used to living insensibly. This would be indifferent from dying now, but sadder; if he went to live in place of his sister, he could remember longer, and with more sadness, the young woman who had passed by in his youth and who was probably no longer existing. Prushevsky wanted the excited young woman—forgotten by everyone had she perished, and making cabbage soup for her children were she still alive—to stay a little longer in the world, even if only in his secret feeling.

  “Prushevsky! Will or won’t the successes of higher Science be able to resurrect people back after they’ve rotted?”

  “No,” said Prushevsky.

  “You’re lying!” reproached Zhachev, not opening his eyes. “Marxism will be able to do everything. Why do you think Lenin’s lying there in Moscow still all intact? He’s awaiting Science—he wants to rise again!”

  “Yes!” said Nastya. “He’ll arise and live and be a dear old grandfather. Stalin’s driven out all the bourgeois, and Lenin likes it now!”

  “If it were up to me, I’d put Lenin to work too,” announced Zhachev. “Yes, I could tell him who still needs to receive something supplementary. I don’t know why, but I can see through any vermin from the very start!”

  “’Cuz you’re a fool!” explained Nastya, rummaging through the laborers’ remnants. “All you do is see—but what’s necessary is to labor. Isn’t that true, Uncle Voshchev?”

  Voshchev had already managed to cover himself with the empty bag and was now lying down, listening intently to the beating of his incoherent heart as it dragged the whole of his body into some undesirable far distance of life.

  “Who knows?” replied Voshchev. “You labor and labor, but when you’ve labored your way to the end, when you’ve learned everything—then you get tired to death and you croak. Don’t grow, my little girl—it’ll make you all sad!”

  This did not satisfy Nastya.

  “It’s only the kulaks who’ve got to die—and you’re a fool! Come and watch over me again, Zhachev—I want to sleep now.”

  “Come here, little girl,” responded Zhachev. “Leave that subkulak and come over to me. He wants to earn something from me—and tomorrow he’ll receive it!”

  Everyone fell silent, patiently continuing the night. Only the activist was writing without a moment’s silence, achievements spreading out ever further before his politically conscious mind until in the end he was supposing to himself: “You’re sabotaging the Union, you passive devil! You could have cleansed the whole district into collectivization—and here you are grieving on a single farm! It’s time the population was being packed off to socialism in whole trainloads—and you still attempt on a petty scale! For pity’s sake!”

  Out of the pure lunar silence someone’s quiet hand knocked at the door, and in the sounds of that hand could be heard a surviving trace of the terror of old.

  “Come in,” said the activist. “We’re not sitting.”

  “Oh, I see,” replied someone from outside, not going in. “But I was thinking you were thinking.”

  “Come in,” uttered Zhachev. �
��Don’t irritate me.”

  In came Yelisey; he had already slept his fill on the earth, because his eyes had grown darker from inner blood, and he had grown stronger from the habit of being organized.

  “The bear’s hammering in the forge and growling a song. Now the whole collective farm’s opened its eyes. Without you we’re terrified.”

  “It’s necessary to go and make inquiries,” decided the activist.

  “I’ll go myself,” determined Chiklin. “You sit here and write your lists: your task is mind.”

  “Not for long it won’t be!” Zhachev warned the activist. “Soon we’ll activate each and every one—and we’ll send you lot packing! Just wait till the masses are worn down enough, till the children have grown enough!”

  Chiklin set off for the forge. Great and cool was the night above him, selflessly shone the stars over the snowy purity of the earth, and far and wide resounded the blows of the hammerer—as if the bear had felt ashamed to sleep beneath these expectant stars and were replying to them as best he could. “The bear’s a true old proletarian!” Chiklin honored him in his mind. Further the hammerer began to growl protracted and satisfied growls, announcing aloud some happy song.

  The forge lay open to the lunar night and all the earthly bright surface; a blowing fire was burning in the furnace and the blacksmith was tending it himself, lying on the floor and pulling on the rope of the bellows. And the hammerer, entirely content, was forging a hot iron wheel hoop and singing a song with his maw.

  “He just won’t let me sleep,” complained the blacksmith. “He got up and he roared for all he was worth. I got the furnace going for him and he started his battering . . . He was always peaceful, but now it’s as if he’s out of his mind!”

  “What’s got into him?” asked Chiklin.

  “Who knows? Yesterday he came home from kulak-bashing and he was just stomping about and mumbling happily. It seemed like he was pleased with us all. And then along comes one of the activist’s lot and pins some material on the fence. And ever since then Mikhail’s been gazing at it and thinking. ‘No more kulaks,’ he says to himself, ‘and that’s why a red slogan hangs there.’ Something’s got into his mind, I reckon, and now it’s stopped there.”

  “All right, you go to sleep and I’ll blow,” said Chiklin. Taking the rope, he began pumping air into the forge, so that the bear could prepare wheel hoops for the collective farm’s to-ing and fro-ing.

  Towards dawn the previous day’s visiting peasants began to disperse into the surrounding countryside. The collective farm, however, had nowhere to go away to, and, after getting up from the OrgYard, it began to move towards the forge, whence could be heard the hammerer’s work. Prushevsky and Voshchev also appeared in common with everyone else and watched Chiklin helping the bear. On the fence outside the forge hung an invocation painted on a banner: “For the Party, for Party Loyalty, for the Shock Labor Forcing Open for the Proletariat the Doors into the Future!”

  Whenever he tired, the hammerer went outside and ate some snow for his own chilling, and he then went back to driving his hammer into the soft pulp of the iron, constantly increasing the frequency of his blows; by now the hammerer had altogether stopped singing and was expending all his furious, speechless joy into the zeal of labor, while the collective-farm peasants gradually came to feel for the bear, letting out collective grunts at each blow of the sledgehammer in order that the wheel hoops should be more robust and dependable. Yelisey took a closer look, then gave advice to the hammerer: “Steady on, Misha! Go a bit slower—otherwise the hoop will be brittle and it’ll end up cracking. That’s good iron you’ve got there—don’t beat the hell out of it as if it were some bitch! It’s not right!”

  But the bear opened his mouth at Yelisey, and Yelisey backed off, anguished about the iron. The other peasants, however, were also unable to bear such blight any longer.

  “Don’t hammer so hard, you devil!90” they wailed. “Don’t damage what’s shared by us all! Property’s like an orphan now—there’s no one to pity it . . . Take it easy, you house fiend!”

  “Why are you bashing the iron so hard? It doesn’t belong to some kulak of a private holder, does it?”

  “Go cool off outside, you devil! Pack it in, you woolen-furred idol!”

  “He should be struck out of the collective farm. That’s what I say! Why should we all endure shortfalls? Answer me that!”

  But Chiklin was pumping air into the furnace, while the hammerer was trying to keep pace with the fire, destroying the iron as if it were the enemy of life—as if, now that there were no more kulaks, the bear was alone in the bright world.

  “Such grief!” sighed the members of the collective farm.

  “Such sin and waste—it’ll be useless, all of it! The iron will be all cracks and holes!”

  “It’s the wrath of the Lord . . . And none of us can lay a hand on him. We’d never hear the end of it—a poor peasant, the proletariat, the five-year plan!”

  “And that’s not the half of it. What if they say he’s a cadre? Then we’ll really be in for it!”

  “Who cares about cadres? What if some big shot of an instructor comes, or comrade Pashkin himself? That’s when things will really hot up!”

  “But maybe nothing will happen at all? Maybe we should just thrash him?”

  “Are you out of your head? He’s union, he’s soviet. Comrade Pashkin came over the other day especially to see him. Comrade Pashkin’s like us—he gets bored and lonely without any hired hands.”

  Yelisey said the least, but he grieved almost more than anyone. When he had had a farmstead of his own, he had lain awake at night, forever fretting that one of his animals might die, that the horse might eat or drink too much or that the cow might turn moody; but now that the entire collective farm, the whole world here around him, was entrusted to his care—since he was wary of relying on others—his belly was aching ahead of time from the terror of such property.

  “We shall all wither away!” pronounced a middle peasant who had lived through the entire Revolution in silence. “In the old days it was my own household I feared for, but now we have to take care of everyone! With such a deal of dependency on us we’ll all get our death of the runs!”

  Voshchev began to feel sad that the beast was laboring so hard—as if he sensed the meaning of life nearby—while he himself stood back in retirement and did not force his way through the door of the future: Maybe there really was something beyond the door? By now Chiklin had stopped blowing air and was helping the bear to prepare the teeth for the harrow. Oblivious of the observing people and of the entire horizon, the two craftsmen worked tirelessly according to their sense of conscience, as was proper. The hammerer forged the teeth and Chiklin tempered them—except that he did not know precisely how long to hold the teeth in the water without overtempering them.

  “And what if a tooth harrows against a stone?” moaned Yelisey. “The moment it runs into some hard firmament, the poor tooth will be snapped halfway!”

  “Take the poor iron out of the liquid, you devil!” exclaimed the collective farm. “Don’t torment matter!”

  Chiklin would have taken the perished metal out of the water, but Yelisey entered the forge in person, took Chiklin’s tongs from him, and began to temper the teeth himself with his own two hands. The other organized peasants also rushed inside the establishment and, with relieved souls, began to labor over the iron objects—feeling the painstaking greed of when profit is more essential than shortfall. “We must remember to whitewash this forge,” calmly thought Yelisey as he labored. “Otherwise it stands all black everywhere—anyone would think the forge has been orphaned!”

  “Let me do the rope!” said Voshchev to Yelisey. “Your air goes into the furnace too quietly.”

  “All right,” agreed Yelisey. “Only don’t pull too hard—rope doesn’t come cheap these days, and we won’t get what we need for a new pair of bellows just from wandering about with the collective-farm begging pouch!”
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  “I’ll go gently,” said Voshchev, and began pulling and releasing the rope, forgetting himself in the patience of labor.

  The morning of a winter’s day was approaching, and ordinary light was spreading over the entire district. But the lamp in the OrgYard went on burning until Yelisey took note of this superfluous flame. Once he had noticed it, he went over and extinguished the lamp, so that the kerosene should remain whole.

  The young girls and adolescents who until then had been asleep in the village huts had by now awoken. For the main part they were indifferent to the alarm of their fathers; they were not interested in their torment, and they lived in the village like strangers, as if pining with love towards something far distant. Domestic poverty was something they endured without attention, and they lived instead off their sense of a happiness that was meek and unrequited but sure to happen all the same. Most of the young women and the entire growing generation went off every morning to the reading hut and stayed there all day without eating—learning to read, to write, and to do sums, getting used to friendship, and imagining something in expectation. Prushevsky alone had stood aside when the collective farm set about the forge; all this time he had been by the fence without motion. He did not know why he had been sent to this village or how he was to live forgotten amidst the masses, and so he decided to appoint a precise date for the conclusion of his stay on earth; he took out his notebook and wrote down in it a late-evening hour of a deaf and dreary day in the dead of winter: let everyone go to bed, let the numbed earth fall silent from the noise of all construction work—and he, wherever he found himself, would lie down faceup and cease breathing. For there was no apparatus, no contentment, no dear friend, no conquest of the stars that could overcome the impoverishment of his soul; no matter what, he would remain aware of the vanity of friendship founded on dominance rather than on carnal love—and of the boredom of the most distant stars, in whose depths lay the same copper ores and which would need the same Supreme National Economic Soviet. It appeared to Prushevsky that all his feelings, all his attractions and his inveterate melancholy had met in his reason and recognized themselves all the way to their source of origin, until the mortal destruction of the naïveté of any kind of hope. But the origin of feelings still remained an agitating place of life; having died, one might lose forever this uniquely happy and true region of existence without having ever entered it. What was to be done, oh God, if there were none of those self-forgetting impressions whence life becomes agitated and, rising up, stretches its hands forwards towards its own hope?