The Foundation Pit Read online

  The director of works of the all-proletarian home left his drawing office during the darkness of night. The pit for the foundations was empty; inside the barrack the team of workers had fallen asleep as a cramped row of torsos, and all that could be seen through the slits in the boards was the glow of a dimmed night lamp, casting light on any case of misfortune or in case anyone suddenly wanted to drink. Prushevsky walked up to the barrack and peered inside through the aperture of a former knot in the wood. Chiklin was sleeping beside the wall; his hand, swollen from strength, lay on his belly and his whole body was rumbling in the nourishing work of sleep. Kozlov was barefoot and sleeping with his mouth open; his throat was gurgling as if the air of breath were passing through dark heavy blood; and out of his half-open, pale eyes were emerging occasional tears—from a dream or some unknown yearning.

  Prushevsky took his head away from the planks and thought. Far away a nighttime factory construction site was shining with electricity, but Prushevsky knew that there was nothing there except dead building material and tired unthinking people. It was he who had thought up a single all-proletarian home in place of the old town where to this day people lived by fencing themselves off into households; in a year’s time the entire local class of the proletariat would leave the petty-proprietorial town and take possession for life of this monumental new home. And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity. With regard to both art and expediency, Prushevsky could already foresee what kind of composition of static mechanics would be required in the center of the world, but he could not foresense the psychic structure of the people who would settle the shared home amid this plain—and still less could he imagine the inhabitants of the future tower amid the universal earth. What kind of body would youth have then? What agitating force would set the heart beating and the mind thinking?

  Prushevsky wanted to know this now, so that the walls of his architecture should not be built in vain; the building would have to be inhabited by people, and people were filled by that surplus warmth of life that had been termed the soul. He was afraid of erecting empty buildings—buildings where people lived only because of bad weather.

  Prushevsky was chilled from night, and he climbed down into the pit that had been begun for the foundations. It was quiet there, and for some time he sat in its depth. There was rock beneath him, and the walls of the excavation rose up on either side of him; he could see how the topsoil rested on a layer of clay and did not originate from it. Could a superstructure develop from any base?15 Was soul within man an inevitable by-product of the manufacture of vital material? And if production could be improved to the point of precise economy, would it give rise to other oblique by-products?

  From as early as the age of twenty-five, Prushevsky the engineer had felt a constriction of his own consciousness and an end to any further understanding of life; it was as though a dark wall had appeared straight in front of his groping mind16. And he had been in torment ever since, moving about beside this wall of his and calming himself with the thought that he had, in essence, already grasped the true, innermost structure of the substance out of which the world and people had been thrown together; the essentials of science all lay on this side of the wall of his consciousness, while beyond the wall could be found only a boring place that there was really no need to struggle towards. All the same, he would have liked to know whether or not anyone else had managed to surmount the wall and move on forward beyond it. Once again Prushevsky walked up to the wall of the barrack, bent down, and peered at a neighboring sleeper, hoping to notice on him something unknown in life; but little could be seen there, since the night lamp was running out of kerosene, and all that could be heard was slow, flagging breathing. Prushevsky left the barrack and set off to the night-shift barber’s to have a shave; at a time of yearning he liked to have someone touch him with their hands.

  After midnight Prushevsky came home to his own room—an outbuilding in an orchard—opened a window into the darkness, and sat down for a sit. Now and again a faint local breeze began to stir the leaves outside, but after a while silence would set in again. Behind the orchard someone was walking along and singing his own song—probably it was an accountant, on his way home after working into the night, or just someone who felt bored by sleep.

  Far away, suspended and without salvation, shone an unclear star, and never would it come any closer. Prushevsky looked at it through the murky air, time passed, and he doubted: “Or should I perish?”

  Prushevsky could not see who might want him so much that he needed to keep himself going until a still-faraway death17. In place of hope all that remained to him was endurance, and somewhere beyond the long sequence of nights, beyond the orchards that faded, blossomed, and perished once more, beyond all the people he had encountered and who had then passed on into the past, there existed his fated day—when he would have to take to his bed, turn his face to the wall, and pass away without being able to cry. Only his sister would then be living in the world, but she would give birth to a child and the pity she felt for it would be stronger than her grief over a dead, destroyed brother.

  “I’d better die,” thought Prushevsky. “People make use of me, but no one is glad of me. Tomorrow I’ll write a last letter to my sister—I must buy a stamp in the morning.”

  And, having decided to pass away, he lay down on his bed and fell asleep with the happiness of indifference towards life. Not having had time to sense all this happiness, he awoke from it at three in the morning and, after lighting a lamp in the room, he sat there amid light and silence, surrounded by nearby apple trees, right up until dawn; he then opened a window so that he could hear the birds and the footsteps of pedestrians.

  After general awakening, an outsider appeared at the diggers’ nighttime barrack; out of all the workers, it was only Kozlov, thanks to past conflicts of his, who knew him. Comrade Pashkin, chairman of the Area Trades Union Council, had a face that was already elderly and a bodily torso bowed down not so much from the count of years as by his social burden; these data caused him to speak in a paternal manner and to know—or foresee—almost everything.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he would usually say at a time of difficulty. “Happiness will set in historically all the same.” And he would submissively bow his mournful head that no longer had anything to think.

  Pashkin stood for a while beside the foundation pit that had been begun, confronting the earth as he would confront any other form of production.

  “The tempo’s quiet,” he pronounced to the workers. “Why aren’t you willing to raise your productivity? Socialism will get along fine without you lot, but without socialism you’ll all live life in vain and then snuff it.”

  “Comrade Pashkin, we are, as the saying says, trying our best,” said Kozlov.

  “Your best?! You’ve only dug out a single heap!”

  Constrained by Pashkin’s reproach, the workers had nothing to say for themselves. They stood and saw: the man was talking sense—it was necessary to hurry up and get the earth dug and the home built, or else they would die and be too late. Life might be ebbing away now like a flow of breath, but it could still be organized to future use through the structure of the building—for the sake of immovable happiness to come, and for childhood.

  Pashkin glanced into the distance, into the plains and ravines; somewhere out there was where winds began and cold clouds had their origins, where diseases and all kinds of mosquito pettiness were breeding, where kulaks reflected and village backwardness slept, while the proletariat—poor son of a bitch—lived alone, in this boring emptiness, obliged to think up everything for everyone and to make by hand the substance of long life. And Pashkin pitied all his trade unions and recognized within him a kindness towards those who labor.

  “Comrades,” he said, “I shall decree you some benefits, down through the trade union.”

 
“And where are you going to get those benefits from?” asked Safronov. “We’re the ones around here who make benefits. We advance them to you, and you advance them back down to us.”

  Pashkin looked at Safronov through mournfully foreseeing eyes and set off back to his work inside the town. Kozlov followed straight after him and, having distanced himself, said, “Comrade Pashkin, there’s a Voshchev here—just joined up with us, but he has no assignation papers from the labor exchange. You must, as the saying says, disjoin him back.”

  “I see no conflict at all here—nowadays there’s a shortfall of proletariat,” concluded Pashkin, and left Kozlov without consolation. Kozlov at once began to lose proletarian faith and wanted to head off inside the town, in order to write defamatory reports there and to see to various conflicts with a view to organizational achievements.

  Right up until noon time passed without incident. There were no visits to the foundation pit from any organizational or technical personnel, but the earth, nevertheless, kept deepening beneath the spades, reckoning only with the diggers’ strength and endurance. Sometimes Voshchev would bend down and pick up a pebble, or other dust that had adhered together, and tuck it away inside his trousers for storage. The pebble’s almost eternal sojourn in the midst of clay, in an accumulation of darkness, made him glad and anxious: if it was to the pebble’s advantage to find itself there, then it followed all the more that a man should live. All the same, the grief of the general condition was again beginning to torment Voshchev; sometimes he sensed the whole of external life just as he sensed his own innards, and now and then he made a hoarse sound in his throat, opening his mouth for announcement.

  After noon Kozlov became unable to get enough breath—he was trying to sigh seriously and deeply but the air was acting only superficially, no longer penetrating, as before, right down to his belly. Kozlov sat down into the bared earth and grieved his hands towards his bony face.

  “Falling apart?” Safronov asked him. “You should reinforce yourself with physical culture18. But you hold conflict in respect—you’re a backward thinker.”

  Without interval or quarter, Chiklin was pounding at a slab of native rock, not stopping for thought or mood. There was no point in living any other way—you might end up a thief, or causing injury to the Revolution.

  “Kozlov’s gone weak again!” said Safronov to Chiklin. “He won’t survive socialism—there must be some function missing in him!”

  Chiklin stopped laboring and noticed Kozlov, who was by then caressing himself with both hands. Chiklin at once started thinking: there was nowhere else his life could go now that its outlet into the earth had been curtailed; he leaned his damp back against the excavation wall, glanced into the distance, and imagined memories—the only way he could think. In a gully close by the foundation pit grass was growing a little and inconsequential sand lay as if dead; the never absent sun had generously squandered its body on every trifle of the base life here below, and it was the sun, long ago, that had hollowed out this gully by means of warm downpours—but nothing of proletarian use had yet been placed here. To check his own mind, Chiklin walked over to the gully and measured it with accustomed stride, breathing evenly for calculation. The gully turned out to be completely necessary for a foundation pit—all that was required was to level the sides and to dig the depth down to impermeable rock.

  “Let Kozlov be sick if he wants,” said Chiklin when he returned back. “We won’t try to dig any farther here—we’ll sink the house into the gully and organize it upwards from there. Kozlov will manage to live long enough.”

  Hearing Chiklin, many of the men stopped digging and sat down for a sigh. But Kozlov had already got over his exhaustion, and he wanted to go and tell Prushevsky that the earth was no longer being dug and that it was necessary to undertake essential disciplinary measures. Preparing to bring about such organizational benefit, Kozlov began to rejoice in advance and to recover his strength. No sooner had he set off, however, than Safronov halted him in his place.

  “What’s up, Kozlov? Heading towards the intelligentsia, are you? Look! Here it comes—descending down to the level of us masses!”

  Prushevsky was advancing on the foundation pit at the head of some unknown people. He had posted the letter to his sister and now he wanted to act obstinately, to concern himself with current matters, to construct for others any building their future required—anything not to disturb his consciousness, in which he had now established a special tender indifference, in accord with death and a sense of orphanhood towards the remaining people. He felt especially tender towards those whom he had previously disliked for some reason; what he sensed in them now was almost the central riddle of his life, and he gazed for a long time, excited and without understanding, into their strange and familiar stupid faces.

  The unknown people turned out to be new workers, sent by Pashkin in order to guarantee the State tempo. But the new arrivals were not workers; without intentness of observation, Chiklin immediately discovered them for what they were—various steppe recluses, desk workers from the town who had been reeducated back to front, and men used to walking quietly behind a laboring horse. No proletarian talent of labor was to be noted in their body—they looked more capable of lying on their backs or resting in peace in some other manner.

  Prushevsky decreed Chiklin to assign the fresh workers to places in the pit and give them some training, seeing as you have to be able to live and work with whatever people there are in the world.

  “Nothing to it!” Safronov spoke his mind. “We’ll slam that backwardness of theirs straight into activism.”

  “That’s right!” pronounced Prushevsky with trust, and, following Chiklin, he advanced on the gully.

  Chiklin said that in the gully they had a foundation pit more than halfway ready; by means of this gully weak people could be preserved for the future. Prushevsky agreed, since he, in any case, would die before the building came to an end.

  “But what stirs in me is a scientific doubt,” said Safronov, wrinkling his polite, politically conscious face. And everyone listened to him intently. With a smile of enigmatic reason, Safronov looked at the people around him19.

  “Now just where is it that comrade Chiklin gets his representation of the world from?” Safronov gradually pronounced. “Or did he have a special kiss in infancy that he can set his sights on a gully better than an educated expert? How is it that you can think, comrade Chiklin, whereas me and comrade Prushevsky wander like pettiness between classes and I see no betterment for myself?”

  Chiklin was too morose for cunning and so his reply was approximate: “There’s nowhere for life to go, so you think thoughts into your head!”

  Prushevsky looked at Chiklin, as if at a purposeless martyr, but then asked for prospective drilling to be carried out in the gully and went off to his office. There he began diligent work on the parts of the all-proletarian house he had thought up, in order to sense objects and forget the people there in his memories. About two hours later Voshchev arrived with some samples from the drill holes.

  Prushevsky took hold of a sample of ground from the gully and concentrated on it—he wanted to be left alone with nothing but this dark lump of earth. Voshchev retreated behind the door and disappeared, whispering his sorrow to himself.

  The engineer examined this ground and for a long time, with the momentum of a self-acting reason that was free from hope and any desire for satisfaction, assessed it for compression and deformation. In the past, during the time of sensual life and the appearance of happiness, Prushevsky would have checked the reliability of the ground less precisely; now, however, he wanted to attend without interruption to objects and mechanisms, so as to possess them inside his mind and empty heart in place of friendship and affection for people. Engineering the peace and stability of the future building guaranteed Prushevsky the indifference of clear thought, an indifference close to delight—while the interest awoken in him by the construction details was something better and more
reliable than comradely excitement with like-minded people. Eternal matter, needing neither movement, nor life, nor extinction, had come to take the place, for Prushevsky, of something forgotten and necessary, like the being of a lost sweetheart.

  Having completed the calculation of his dimensions, Prushevsky ensured the indestructibility of the future all-proletarian dwelling and felt comforted by the sureness of the materials destined to protect people who until then had lived on the outside. And inside him it began to feel light and muffled, as though he were living not an indifferent life-before-death, but the very life his mother had once whispered to him about with her own lips, though he had lost it even in memory.

  Without infringing his own peace and surprise, Prushevsky left the office of the ground works. Out in nature a devastated summer’s day was departing into evening; everything, near and far, was gradually ending; birds were hiding away, people were lying down to sleep, smoke was wafting up meekly from remote field huts, and there a tired and unknown man was sitting by his pot and waiting for supper, resolved to endure his life to the end. The foundation pit was empty—the diggers had gone over to labor at the gully, and that was where their movement was happening now. Prushevsky suddenly felt like visiting a faraway central city —where people go without sleep for a long time, where they think and argue, where food stores are open in the evening and give off a smell of wine and confectionery, where you can meet a strange woman and talk with her all through the night, experiencing the mysterious joy of friendship and wishing you could live forever in this alarm, and then, come morning, having said farewell beneath an extinguished gaslight, the two of you go your ways in the emptiness of dawn without promise of a meeting.