The Foundation Pit Page 16

  “He’s dead,” announced Voshchev to everyone, as he rose from below. “He knew everything—but he’s come to an end all the same.”

  “Maybe he’s still breathing?” doubted Zhachev. “Try him again—he still hasn’t received from me. I could give him something additional right away.”

  Voshchev leaned down again over the activist’s body, which had once acted with such predatory significance that the whole of universal truth, the whole meaning of life had been located in him and in him alone, leaving Voshchev with nothing but torment of mind, nothing but unconsciousness in the rushing current of existence and the submissiveness of a blind element.

  “You vermin!” whispered Voshchev over this speechless torso. “So that’s why I never knew meaning! It wasn’t just me you sucked dry, you arid soul, it was the whole of our class! And we were left to ferment like quiet dregs, and to know nothing!”

  And Voshchev struck the activist on the forehead—for the reinforcement of his destruction and for his own conscious happiness.

  Sensing that his mind was now full, although he was not yet able to articulate or lead out into action its very first strength of all, Voshchev rose to his feet and said to the collective farm, “And now I’m the one who’s going to mourn and grieve for you.”

  “Yes!” the collective farm unanimously gave him a piece of its mind. “Please do!!”

  Voshchev opened the door of the OrgHouse into space and knew the desire to live into that unfenced distance, where the heart can beat not only from cold air alone but from the true joy of overcoming all the earth’s murky substance.

  “Take the dead body away from here!” ordered Voshchev.

  “Where to?” asked the collective farm. “Without music there’s no way he can be buried! At least switch on the radio!”

  “You could de-kulakize him downriver and out into the sea!” surmised Zhachev.

  “That’s an idea!” agreed the collective farm. “The water’s still flowing!”

  And several men raised the activist’s body up on high and carried it to the riverbank. Chiklin kept Nastya in his arms all the time, meaning to set off with her for the foundation pit, but he was being delayed by the conditions now happening.

  “The juice is coming out from every bit of me,” said Nastya. “Hurry up, you old fool, and take me to Mama! I’m bored!”

  “We’ll be off in a moment, my little girl. I’ll carry you at a run. Yelisey, go and call Prushevsky—tell him we’re leaving and that Voshchev’s staying on behalf of us all. The child’s fallen ill.”

  Yelisey went off and returned alone; Prushevsky had said he did not want to go. First he had to finish teaching all the local youth—otherwise it might perish in the future and he felt pity for it.

  “Let him stay then,” agreed Chiklin. “As long as he’s intact himself.”

  As a cripple, Zhachev was unable to walk fast; he could only crawl. Chiklin thought out that he could tell Yelisey to carry Nastya while he himself carried Zhachev. And so, hurrying, they set off towards the foundation pit along a wintry path.

  “Take care of Mishka the Bear!” directed Nastya, after turning around. “I’ll come and visit him soon!”

  “Don’t worry, miss,” promised the collective farm.

  Towards evening time the walkers saw in the distance the electrical illumination of the town. Zhachev had long tired of sitting in Chiklin’s arms, and he said they should have taken a horse from the collective farm.

  “We’ll get there quicker on foot,” replied Yelisey. “Our horses have been standing idle so long they’ve forgotten what it is to carry a rider. They’ve even got swollen feet—the only walking they do is when they’re out stealing fodder.”

  When the wayfarers reached their own place, they saw that the whole foundation pit was filled with snow, while in the barrack it was dark and empty. After placing Zhachev down on the ground, Chiklin set about laying a bonfire for the warming of Nastya, but she said to him, “Bring me Mama’s bones. I want them.”

  Chiklin ordered Zhachev and Yelisey to kindle the fire, while he himself set off to fetch the bones from the refuge in the Dutch-tile factory; it was unlikely, after all, that anyone would have carried away from there a dead woman.

  After going down into the factory cellar, where Prushevsky had once been too, Chiklin had to spend a long time removing stones from the doorway that he himself had blocked up for the preservation of the deceased. Chiklin had no matches to hand, and he had to grope his way to the woman. First he touched her hair, still as fresh as in life; then he felt every part of her skeleton down to her feet—she was still all intact, only the body itself had vanished and the moisture had all dried up93. Carrying the skeleton away in one piece was difficult, all the more so since the fastening ligaments had long ago withered; for this reason Chiklin had to break the whole skeleton apart into separate bones and stack them, as if in a sack, inside his shirt. There was still a lot of room in the shirt after all the bones had been placed there—so small was the woman after her death.

  The maternal bones greatly gladdened Nastya; she kept holding each of them to her body in turn, kissing them, wiping them with a little rag, and arranging them in order on the earth floor.

  Chiklin sat down opposite the little girl and tended the fire all the time for light and warmth, and he sent Zhachev off to demand milk from someone. Yelisey sat for a long time on the threshold of the barrack, observing the neighboring shining city where something was making a constant noise, producing rhythmic sounds of agitation in the universal, driven unrest—and then he collapsed onto his side and fell asleep, not having eaten anything.

  Past the barrack walked many people, but no one came to call on the sick Nastya, because each had bowed his head and was thinking incessantly about total collectivization.

  Now and again silence would suddenly set in and all that could be heard was Nastya moving the dead bones, but then train sirens once again sang out in the distance, pile drivers let out long heads of steam, and there were shouting voices from shock brigades who had come up against some obstacle; the air round about was charged unremittingly with the tension of labor being carried out for the common use and benefit of society.

  “Chiklin, why do I feel my mind all the time and there’s no way I can forget it?” asked Nastya in surprise.

  “I don’t know, my little girl. Probably because you’ve never seen anything good.”

  “And why do they labor in the city at night and not sleep?”

  “It’s because they’re taking care of you.”

  “And I lie here all sick. Chiklin, put Mama’s bones closer to me, I’ll hug them and begin to sleep. I feel so bored now!”

  Chiklin laid the bones against Nastya’s stomach, covered her as warm as he could with two coats, and said in farewell, “Sleep, maybe you’ll forget your mind.”

  Weak as she now was, Nastya suddenly raised herself up a little and kissed Chiklin, who had bent down over her, on his mustache; like her mother, she knew how to kiss people first, without warning them.

  His life’s repeated happiness made Chiklin go still, and he went on silently breathing over the child’s body until he once again felt concern for this small hot torso. For the protection of Nastya from the wind, and for general warming, Chiklin picked Yelisey up from the threshold and placed him beside the child.

  “Lie here!” said Chiklin to Yelisey, who was horror-struck in his sleep. “Embrace the little girl with your arm and breathe on her more often.”

  Yelisey did as he was told, while Chiklin lay down close by, propping himself up on one elbow, and listened keenly with his dozing head to the alarming noise on the city’s constructions.

  Zhachev appeared around midnight; he brought two pastries and a bottle of cream. He had not been able to obtain anything else, since all the reactivated bourgeoisie was parading about outside instead of being present in its apartments. Entirely worn out by his efforts, Zhachev had eventually resolved to penalize his most reliable
reserve of all—comrade Pashkin; but Pashkin was not at home either—he was present, it turned out, in the theater, together with his spouse. And so Zhachev himself had had to appear at the performance, amidst darkness and attention to elements tormenting themselves onstage, and loudly demand Pashkin to the buffet, thus stopping the action of art. Pashkin had come out instantaneously, speechlessly bought Zhachev some products from the buffet, and hurriedly distanced himself into the hall of the performance in order to agitate himself there once again.

  “I must go and call on Pashkin again tomorrow,” said Zhachev, as he calmed down in a far corner of the barrack. “Let him put a stove in here—otherwise we’ll never get to socialism in this clapped-out old barrack-train!”

  Chiklin awoke early in the morning; he was chilled, and he listened out for Nastya. It was quiet and barely light—only Zhachev was muttering his anxiety in sleep.

  “Are you breathing there, you middle-peasant devil?” said Chiklin to Yelisey.

  “I’m breathing, comrade Chiklin, of course I am. I’ve been breathing warmth on the child all night.”

  “And?”

  “The girl, comrade Chiklin, isn’t breathing. Somehow she’s gone all cold.”

  Chiklin slowly rose from the ground and stopped on the spot. After standing for a while, he went to where Zhachev was lying and checked that the cripple had not destroyed the cream and the pastries. Then he found a broom and cleaned the whole barrack from the drift of diverse litter that had accumulated during the uninhabited time.

  After putting the broom in its place, Chiklin felt like digging the earth; he smashed the lock of the abandoned storeroom where the tools were kept, dragged out a spade, and set off unhurriedly for the foundation pit. He began to dig, but the soil had frozen and Chiklin had to cut the earth into blocks and prise it out in whole dead pieces. Deeper down was softer and warmer; Chiklin plunged into the earth with slashing blows of his iron spade and soon disappeared, almost to his full height, into the quiet of its inner depths—but even there he was unable to exhaust himself, and so he began to batter the ground sideways, gaping open the earth’s cramped space. Striking a slab of native rock, the spade buckled from the power of the blow, whereupon Chiklin flung both spade and handle up onto the daytime surface and leaned his head against the bared clay.

  In these actions he wanted straightaway to forget his own mind, but his mind went on immovably thinking that Nastya had died.

  “I’ll go and get another spade!” said Chiklin, and climbed out of the pit.

  In the barrack, in order not to believe his own mind, he went up to Nastya and felt her head. Then he leaned his hand on Yelisey’s forehead, checking Yelisey’s life by the warmth.

  “What makes her cold and you hot?” asked Chiklin, and did not hear an answer, because his mind had now forgotten itself of its own accord.

  Further to this, Chiklin sat all the time on the earth floor, and Zhachev, having now awoken, was also to be found with him, preserving immovably in his hands the bottle of cream and the two pastries. As for Yelisey, who had been breathing on the little girl all night without sleep, he was now exhausted and he fell asleep beside her—and he went on sleeping till he heard the neighing voices of his dear and familiar socialized horses.

  Into the barrack came Voshchev, followed by the bear and the entire collective farm; the horses remained waiting outside.

  “What’s got into you?” Zhachev clapped eyes on Voshchev. “Why have you left the collective farm—do you want the whole of our RussSSR to die? Or do you fancy earning from the whole of the proletariat? Come over here then! You’ll receive as if from the class!”

  But Voshchev had gone outside to the horses, and he did not hear Zhachev to the end. He had brought Nastya a present—a sack of handpicked items of scrap in the form of rare toys that are not for sale anywhere, each of them an eternal memory about a forgotten human being. Nastya was looking at Voshchev, but she did not rejoice in any way, and Voshchev reached out to touch her, seeing her open, silenced mouth and her indifferent, tired body. Voshchev stood in bewilderment over this stilled child. He no longer knew: Where in the world was communism now going to be if it didn’t first begin in a child’s feeling and convinced impression? What need had he now of life’s meaning and the truth of the universal origin if there were not a small, loyal human being in whom truth would become joy and movement?

  Voshchev would have agreed to go back to knowing nothing and to living without desire in a troubled longing of vain mind, if only the little girl could be intact, ready for life, even if she were to suffer torment with the flow of time. Voshchev picked Nastya up in his arms, kissed her on lips that had fallen apart, and, with greed of happiness, held her close, finding more than he was looking for.

  “Why have you brought the collective farm? I’m asking you for the second time!” appealed Zhachev, letting go of neither the cream nor the pastries.

  “The peasants want to register in the proletariat,” replied Voshchev. “They’re as nothing, so I’ve brought them along for utility scrap94.”

  “Let them register,” pronounced Chiklin from the earth. “Now the foundation pit must be dug broader and deeper still. Let every man from a barrack and a clay hut find room in our house. Call all the authorities here along with Prushevsky—I’m off to dig.”

  Chiklin took a crowbar and a new spade and walked slowly away to the far border of the foundation pit. There he again began to gape the motionless earth wide open, since he was unable to cry, and he went on digging, lacking the strength to exhaust himself, until nightfall, and all through the night, until he heard the cracking of bones in his laboring torso. Then he stopped and glanced around. The collective farm was following him and, without stopping, was digging the earth; all the poor and middle peasants were working with such zeal of life as if they were seeking to save themselves forever in the abyss of the foundation pit. Nor were the horses standing idle—the collective-farm peasants were riding to and fro on them, clasping crushed stone in their arms, while the bear dragged this same stone on foot, his maw yawning wide from the strain.

  Zhachev alone was taking part in nothing and watching all the digging labor with a gaze of great sorrow.

  “What are you doing—sitting there like some desk worker?” Chiklin asked him on returning to the barrack. “The least you could do is sharpen some spades!”

  “I can’t, Nikita. I don’t any longer believe in communism!” replied Zhachev on this morning of the second day.

  “Why, you bastard?”

  “I’m a freak of imperialism—you can see that. But communism’s something for the children, that’s why I loved Nastya. Now I’ll go and kill comrade Pashkin goodbye.”

  And Zhachev crawled away into the city, nevermore returning to the foundation pit.

  At noon Chiklin began to dig Nastya a special grave. He dug it for fifteen hours on end—in order that it should be deep and that neither a worm nor the root of a plant, nor warmth, nor cold should be able to penetrate it, and so that the child would never be troubled by the noise of life from the earth’s surface. Chiklin gouged out a sepulchral bed in eternal stone and, by way of a lid, he prepared a special granite slab so that the vast weight of the grave’s dust should not press down on the little girl95.

  After he had rested, Chiklin took Nastya in his arms and carried her out with care, to lay her in the stone and fill in the grave. The time was night, the whole collective farm was asleep in the barrack, and only the hammerer, sensing movement, awoke96, and Chiklin allowed him to reach out and touch Nastya farewell.

  Will our soviet socialist republic perish like Nastya97 or will she grow up into a whole human being, into a new historical society? This alarming feeling is what constituted the theme of the work, when the author was writing it. The author may have been mistaken to portray in the form of the little girl’s death the end of the socialist generation, but this mistake occurred only as a result of excessive alarm on behalf of something beloved, whose loss is t
antamount to the destruction not only of all the past but also of the future.

  The final page of Platonov’s pencil-written manuscript of The Foundation Pit. The underlined word at the bottom of the page reads, “The end.”

  AFTERWORD

  PLATONOV’S deepest concerns may always have been more philosophical than political, and it is likely that readers will continue to enjoy his work even when the Soviet Union is all but forgotten—just as readers and theatergoers enjoy Shakespeare today even if they know nothing of the sixteenth-century religious and political controversies to which he so often alludes. Nevertheless, The Foundation Pit is located in a very particular historical and political context—that of Stalin’s drive towards rapid industrialization and Total Collectivization—and some knowledge of this period may help us towards an understanding of Platonov’s achievement.

  The collectivization of agriculture and the Terror Famine of 1932–33 are among the greatest—but also the least-acknowledged —catastrophes of Soviet history. The Soviet Union adopted as its emblem the hammer, symbolizing the workers, and the sickle, symbolizing the peasants. It claimed to be a “workers’ and peasants’ State” and many people still take this claim at face value, failing to realize the depth of the Bolsheviks’ hostility to the peasantry. Most Bolsheviks, in fact, saw the peasants as no better than the petit bourgeois; many of them probably felt much the same as Lenin’s friend, Maksim Gorky, who once declared, “You’ll pardon my saying so, but the peasant is not yet human . . .. He’s our enemy, our enemy.” Gorky’s last sentence, at least, was probably accurate; the peasants’ whole way of life was indeed a threat to the Bolshevik project of a strong, centrally planned State.

  In 1917, in order to destabilize the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks opportunistically encouraged the peasants to rise up against their landlords and seize their land. Having succeeded in this, the Bolsheviks then found themselves having to fight a long war in order to reassert the power of the central government. The peasants resisted the Bolshevik policy of “grain requisitioning”—of forcibly confiscating grain from the peasants in order to feed the cities—and peasant revolts continued on a massive scale until as late as 1924. After an uneasy truce in the mid-1920s, the Bolsheviks returned to the attack in 1929. Collectivization and the Terror Famine were the last and most terrible battles of a protracted war.