The Foundation Pit Page 2

  Right until evening, Voshchev walked silently around the town, as though waiting for the world to become a matter of common knowledge. But nothing in the world got any clearer to him, and he could feel in the dark of his own body a quiet place where there was nothing at all, though nothing prevented anything starting there. Like someone living in absence, Voshchev did his walking straight past people, sensing the gathering strength of his grieving mind and becoming more and more secluded in the cramped space of his sorrow.

  Only now did he see the center of the town and the structures that were being constructed there. The evening electricity had already been lit on the scaffolding, but a field light of silence and the fading smell of sleep had approached out of general, shared space and were hanging intact in the air. Separate from nature, in a bright place of electricity, people were laboring with a will, erecting brick partitions, striding with burdens of weight in the timber delirium of the scaffolding. For a long time Voshchev observed the construction of a tower that was unknown to him; he could see that the workers were moving about evenly, without abrupt force, yet something had come about in the site and was drawing the building towards completion.

  “Man puts up a building—and falls apart himself. Who’ll be left to live then?” doubted Voshchev, lost in his passing thoughtfulness.

  Voshchev left the middle of the town for its end. While he was moving there, a deserted night set in; only faraway water and wind inhabited this darkness and nature, and only birds could sing the sorrow of this great substance, since they flew up above and life was easier for them.

  Voshchev wandered into some empty wilderness and discovered a warm pit for the night; having lowered himself into this earthy hollow, he laid under his head the bag where he collected every kind of obscurity for memory and vengeance, felt sad, and so fell asleep. But some man advanced on the wilderness with a scythe in his hands and began to mow grassy thickets that had grown there since time immemorial. Towards midnight the mower reached Voshchev and decreed that he get up and leave the site.

  “What’s it to you?” said Voshchev reluctantly. “It’s not a site, it’s a superfluous place.”

  “From now on it’s a site—it’s going to be situated with stone. Come and have a look in the morning. Soon this place will be hidden forever beneath construction.”

  “But where am I to be?”

  “You go ahead and finish your sleep in the barrack. Go and sleep there till morning—then they’ll sort out who you are.”

  Voshchev went along with the mower’s story and soon noticed a wooden barn on a former vegetable plot. Inside the barn seventeen or twenty men were sleeping on their backs; a dimmed lamp lit up unconscious human faces. All the sleepers were thin, as if they had died; the cramped space between each man’s skin and his bones was occupied by veins, and it was clear from the thickness of these veins how much blood they must let pass during the tension of labor. The cotton of the shirts conveyed with precision the slow refreshing work being carried out by the heart—there the heart was, beating close by, in the darkness of the devastated body of each who had gone to sleep. Voshchev scrutinized the face of a nearby sleeper: Did it express the meek happiness of a satisfied man? But the sleeper lay as if dead; his eyes were deeply and sorrowfully hidden, and his chilled legs stretched out helplessly in a pair of old work trousers. Other than the men’s breathing, there was not a sound in the hut; no one was seeing dreams or conversing with memories. Each was existing without the least surplus of life, and during sleep only the heart remained alive to take care of the man. Voshchev felt the cold of exhaustion, and he lay down for warmth amid two bodies of sleeping workers. He fell asleep, unknown to these men who had closed their eyes, and content to be passing the night beside them—and so he slept, not sensing truth, until bright morning.

  In the morning some instinct struck Voshchev in the head; he woke up and, without opening his eyes, began to listen to the words of others.

  “He’s weak.”

  “He’s not politically conscious.”

  “So what! Capitalism made fools of all our kind. This one’s a relic of darkness too.”

  “As long as his background’s all right, he’ll come in handy.”

  “From his body, I’d say his class is the poor.”

  Voshchev opened his eyes in doubt onto the light of the day that had set in. Yesterday’s sleepers were alive and standing over him, observing his powerless position.

  “You, probably, know everything, do you?” asked Voshchev with the timidity of weak hope.

  “Of course! It’s us that give existence to every organization!” a short man replied from out of a dried-up mouth, beside which, out of exhaustion, a beard grew feebly.

  Just then the entrance was opened, and Voshchev saw the nighttime mower with the brigade tea kettle. The water had boiled on a stove kept out in the yard; waking-up time was now past, and the time to nourish oneself for the day’s labor had set in.

  A village clock hung on the wooden wall, moving patiently on because of the momentum of its dead weights; a pink flower was depicted on the face of the mechanism, in order to console whoever saw time. The workers sat in a row down the length of the table, and the mower, who was in charge of the woman’s work around the barrack, sliced the bread and gave a piece to each man, adding some of last night’s cold beef10. The workers earnestly set about eating, taking the food in as their due but not taking pleasure in it.

  “Come and join us!” those who were eating called out to Voshchev.

  Voshchev got to his feet and, still not possessing complete faith in the general necessity of the world, went along to eat, constrained and anguished.

  Having eaten nourishment, the workers went off outside with spades in their hands, and Voshchev followed behind them.

  The mowed wilderness smelled of grass that had died and the dampness of bared places, making more palpable the general sorrow of life and the vain melancholy of meaninglessness. Voshchev was given a spade, and he gripped it in his hands with the ferocity of despair of his own life, as though wanting to obtain truth from amid the earth’s dust; dispossessed as he was, Voshchev was even willing to do without the meaning of existence, but he wished at least to observe it in the substance of the body of another, neighboring man—and to find himself near such a man he was ready to sacrifice in labor the whole of his own weak body that had been exhausted by thought and senselessness.

  Amid the wilderness stood an engineer—not an old man, but gray from the calculation of nature. He pictured the whole world as a dead body, judging it by those parts of it that he had already converted into structures: the world had always yielded to his attentive, imagining mind that was limited only by an awareness of the inertness of nature; if material always gave in to precision and patience, then it must be deserted and dead. But amid all this mournful substance, man was alive and of worth—and this was why the engineer was now meeting the oncoming diggers with a polite smile. Voshchev could see that the engineer’s cheeks were pink and that this was not from being well fed but from the excessive beating of his heart; Voshchev felt pleased that the man’s heart was agitated and beating.

  The engineer told Chiklin11 that he had already divided up the excavation work and measured out the foundation pit, and he pointed to some pegs that had been hammered into the ground: now they could get started. Chiklin listened to the engineer and checked his measurements additionally against his own mind and experience—come the time of rubble masonry, Chiklin would subordinate himself to Safronov, but ground labor was the trade he knew best and so for now he was the brigade leader.

  “We need more hands,” said Chiklin to the engineer. “This job’s a killer. And time will eat up all the use.”

  “The labor exchange12 has promised to send us another fifty men, though I asked for a hundred,” replied the engineer. “But you and I answer for all the work in the bedrock. Remember—you’re the leading brigade!”

  “We won’t be leading—we’ll bring
everyone else to our own level. As long as people show up . . .”

  And, having said this, Chiklin concentrated his impassively thoughtful face down into the ground below and plunged his spade into the soft topsoil. Putting all his strength into his spade, Voshchev too began to dig the soil deep; he was now ready to admit that childhood might, after all, grow up, that joy might become thought, and that future man might find peace in this reliable building, in order to look out from its high windows into a world stretched out and waiting for him. Already he had forever destroyed thousands of rootlets, grass blades, and little soil shelters of diligent creatures, and he was now working in cramped narrows of dreary clay. But Chiklin had outstripped him; he had long ago left his spade and taken a crowbar, to pulverize the compressed layers of rock lower down. Annulling nature’s old order, Chiklin felt unable to understand it.

  “Beneath the soil for some reason there’s sandy loam. Then clay. And after that—limestone. Seems like anything goes. The earth needs the touch of iron or it lies there like some fool of a woman. It’s sad!”

  Because the clay was alien, and because he knew that his brigade was undermanned, Chiklin hurried to break up the age-old ground, turning all the life of his own body into blows at dead places. His heart was beating as usual and his patient back was wearing away in sweat; Chiklin had no protective fat beneath the skin—his aged veins and innards lay close to the outside and he sensed what surrounded him without calculation or consciousness but with precision. Once he had been younger, and the girls had loved him, greedy for his powerful body that wandered wherever it wandered, reckless of itself and devoted to all. Many people then had needed Chiklin—needing peace and shelter amid his faithful warmth—but he had wanted to shelter too many of them, so that there would be something for him to feel himself, and then women and comrades had abandoned him out of jealousy, while Chiklin, yearning with nighttime melancholy, took to going out into the marketplace and overturning the stalls, or simply carrying them away somewhere, as a result of which he had languished in prison, singing songs from there into the cherry-red evenings of summer.

  By noon Voshchev’s zeal was yielding less and less earth; digging had begun to irritate him and he had fallen behind the team. Only one skinny worker was working more slowly than he was. This laggard was sullen and insignificant throughout his body, and the sweat of weakness was dripping down into the clay from his blurred, monotonous face that had thin hair sprouting around its edges. Each time he raised some earth to the rim of the foundation pit, he coughed and compelled some moisture out of himself and then, calming down, shut his eyes as if wishing for sleep.

  “Kozlov!” Safronov shouted to him13. “Getting too much for you again, is it?”

  “Yes,” replied Kozlov in his poor, child’s voice.

  “Conflicts give you a lot of pleasure,” pronounced Safronov. “That’s why you weaken!”

  Kozlov looked at Safronov with red, moist eyes and remained silent from indifferent exhaustion.

  Voshchev looked around at these people and decided somehow to keep on living, since they all endured and lived; he had originated together with them and, when his time came, he would die inseparably from people.

  “Kozlov, lie down on your front and get your breath back!” said Chiklin. “He coughs, he sighs, he grieves, he goes silent—that’s the way graves are dug, not buildings!”

  But Kozlov did not respect other people’s pity for him. Slipping his hand beneath his shirt, he quietly stroked his deaf, decrepit chest and went on digging the cohesive earth. He still believed in the life to come after the construction of the big buildings and he was afraid that he might not be accepted into this life if he presented himself there as a plaintive nonlaboring element. In the mornings Kozlov felt only one feeling—how hard it was for his heart to go on beating; but he still hoped to live in the future even if only with a small remnant of his heart. Because of the weakness of his chest, however, it was necessary to stroke his hands over his bones now and again during work and, in a whisper, urge endurance.

  Midday had passed, but no diggers had been sent by the labor exchange. The night mower of grass had slept his fill, boiled some potatoes, covered them with liquid egg, greased all this with oil, added yesterday’s kasha, sprinkled some dill on top for luxury, and then brought this mixed nourishment along in a mess tin for the development of the falling strength of the brigade.

  They ate in silence, without looking at one another and without greed, not recognizing that nourishment was of value, as if a man’s strength originates from consciousness alone. Sometimes Kozlov coughed inadvertently into the mess tin and crumbs could be seen in the air from his mouth, but none of those who were eating defended the purity of the nourishment of the stomach against Kozlov, and Voshchev, seeing this, scooped up with his own spoon precisely those places of the food into which Kozlov had coughed—the better to sympathize with him.

  Having completed his daily round of various inevitable institutions, the engineer now appeared at the foundation pit. He stood a little way off while the men ate everything from the mess tin, and then said, “Come Monday there’ll be another forty men. But today’s Saturday—it’s time to end.”

  “What d’you mean?” asked Chiklin. “We’re still fit for another cubic meter or two—why end now?”

  “You have to end,” retorted the director of the works. “You’ve already worked six hours, and the law’s the law.”

  “That law’s only for tired elements,” objected Chiklin. “I’ve still got a little strength left to see me through until sleep. How about the rest of you?” he asked everyone.

  “Evening’s a long way off,” announced Safronov. “Why let life disappear when there’s a thing we can achieve? After all, we’re not animals—we can live for the sake of enthusiasm14.”

  “Maybe nature will show us something down there,” said Voshchev.

  “That too!” pronounced an unrecorded worker.

  The engineer bowed his head. He was afraid of empty domestic time; he did not know any way to live on his own.

  “I’ll go and do a little more drawing then. And I’ll calculate the pile sockets again.”

  “Yes, you go back to your sums and drawings!” agreed Chiklin. “In any case, the earth’s been churned up, all around is boring. Wait till we’re finished. Then we can appoint life and breathe easy.”

  The director of the works walked slowly away. He remembered his own childhood, how, on the eve of holy days, servants would wash the floors, Mother would tidy the rooms, homeless water would flow down the street, and he, a boy, did not know what to do with himself and was lost in thought and melancholy. It was the same today—the weather had turned, slow twilit clouds had begun to roll over the plain, and all over Russia floors were now being washed on the eve of socialism; somehow it was too early for pleasure, and what use would it be? It was better to sit down, lose oneself in thought, and draft parts of the future building.

  Satiety had filled Kozlov with gladness, and his mind had grown bigger.

  “Lords of the world, as the saying says, but they like to stuff themselves,” Kozlov announced. “A real lord and master would build himself a building in no time, but you lot will snuff it on empty earth.”

  “Kozlov, you’re a goat!” determined Safronov. “What do you care about a building for the proletariat? The only thing you can enjoy is the proletariat’s external organization.”

  “Let me have joy!” replied Kozlov. “Who, even once, has loved me? Everyone kept telling me to endure until old man capitalism finally snuffs it. And now capitalism’s ended—but I live alone under the blanket again, and I feel sad!”

  Voshchev began to feel agitated by his friendship towards Kozlov.

  “Sadness is nothing, comrade Kozlov,” he said. “It means that our class senses the whole world, and anyway happiness is a bourgeois business. Happiness will lead only to shame.”

  In the time that followed Voshchev and the others got up again for work. The
sun was still high, and birds were singing plaintively in the illuminated air, not in triumph and celebration but searching for nourishment in space. Over bent, digging people swallows were hurtling low; tiredness stilled their wings, and beneath their down and feathers was the sweat of need; they had been flying since first light, ceaselessly tormenting themselves to fill the stomachs of their chicks and mates. Once Voshchev picked up a bird that had died in an instant in midair and fallen to earth; the bird was all in sweat, and when Voshchev plucked it, so as to see its body, what remained in his hands was a scant, sad creature that had perished from the exhaustion of its own labor. And now Voshchev did not spare himself in annihilation of the close-knit earth. Here the building would stand; in it people would be stored away from adversity, and they would throw crumbs out of the windows to the birds living outside.

  Chiklin, not sensing thought and seeing neither the birds nor the sky, was weightily destroying the earth with a crowbar. His flesh was being worn out in the clay ditch, but his tiredness did not cause him anguish; he understood that his body would fill up anew in the night’s sleep.

  Exhausted, Kozlov had sat down on the ground and was hacking the exposed limestone with an ax. He worked without memory of time or place, discharging the remnants of his own warm strength into the stone he broke up, the stone getting warmer as Kozlov himself grew gradually colder. All of him could have imperceptibly passed away, and shattered stone would have been his poor legacy to the future growing people. Kozlov’s trousers had gone bare from movement; his sharp, crooked bones were like jagged knife blades tight against the skin of his shins. The defenselessness of these bones filled Voshchev with anguished nervousness: the bones might tear the flimsy skin and come out through it. After checking his own legs in the same bony places, Voshchev said to everyone, “Time to call it a day! Or else you’ll wear yourselves out and die—and then who’ll be left to be people?”

  Voshchev heard not a word in reply. Evening was already setting in; blue night was rising in the distance, promising sleep and cool breathing; and above the earth, like sorrow, stood the dead height. As before, Kozlov was annihilating stone in the earth, not turning his eyes away for anything, and his weakened heart was probably beating boringly.