The Foundation Pit Read online

  Prushevsky sat down on a bench near the office. He had used to sit in the same way outside his father’s home—summer evenings had not changed since then—and he had enjoyed watching passersby pass right by him; he had taken a liking to some of them and he had regretted that not all people are acquainted with one another. And one feeling was alive and sad within him to this day: once, on an evening like this, a girl had walked past the home of his childhood, and he could recall neither her face nor the year of this event, but he still looked close into all women’s faces and in none of them had he found the one who had disappeared and yet been his only sweetheart, the one who had passed by so close yet never stopped.

  At the time of the Revolution dogs had barked day and night all over Russia, but now they had fallen silent: labor had set in and the laborers slept in quiet. Militiamen outside kept guard over the silence of the workers’ dwellings, so that their sleep would be deep and nourishing for the morning’s labor. The only people not asleep were the night-shift construction workers and the legless veteran whom Voshchev had met on his advent to this town, and who was now traveling on his low cart to comrade Pashkin to receive from him his own share of life, which he came for once a week.

  Pashkin lived in a substantial house, made of bricks so that it could not burn down, and the open windows of his dwelling looked out onto a cultured garden where flowers gleamed even at night. The freak went past the window of the kitchen—which, during the production of supper, was as noisy as a boiler room—and came to a stop opposite Pashkin’s study. Here the master of the house was sitting motionless at his desk, having thought his way deep into something invisible to the veteran. On his desk were to be found various potions and vials for the reinforcement of health and the development of activism20—Pashkin had acquired for himself a great deal of class consciousness and he belonged to the vanguard; he had already accumulated plenty of achievements, and so he preserved his own body scientifically, not only for his private joy of existence but also for the sake of the neighboring working masses. The veteran bided his time while Pashkin got up from the occupation of thought, limbered up with some quick gymnastic exercises for all his members and, having brought himself to freshness, sat back down again. The freak was about to pronounce his say through the window but Pashkin picked up a small vial and, after three slow sighs, drank one drop from it.

  “Will I be waiting for you long?” asked the veteran, who was unaware of health, or of the value of life. “Or are you wanting to earn something from me again?”

  Pashkin felt inadvertently agitated, but he calmed himself through an exertion of mind; he never wished to expend the nervous energy of his own body.

  “What’s up, comrade Zhachev?21 What have you not been provided with? Why are you arousing yourself?”

  Zhachev replied straight to the fact: “You bourgeois, have you forgotten why I put up with you? Want to receive something heavy in the blind gut? Bear in mind—there’s no criminal code can hold me down!”

  At this point the veteran tore out of the ground a row of roses that stood close at hand and flung them away unused.

  “Comrade Zhachev,” replied Pashkin, “I’m quite unable to understand you: you already get a grade-one pension—what are you after now? As it is, I’ve always done all I can to meet you halfway.”

  “You’re lying, you class superfluity! You never met me anywhere—I was the one who did all the meeting!”

  Into Pashkin’s study came his spouse, her red lips devouring meat.

  “Leon, dear, are you getting agitated again?” she said. “I’ll take a package out to him straightaway. This has become simply unbearable—these people are enough to spoil anyone’s nerves!”

  She went back out, agitation rippling throughout her impossible body.

  “Well, you bastard—you’ve certainly fattened your wife up nicely!” pronounced Zhachev from the garden. “All valves working even when she’s coasting—you know how to manage the bitch all right!”

  Pashkin was too experienced in the leadership of the backward to be irritated by this.

  “Comrade Zhachev, there’s nothing to prevent you from maintaining a female companion of your own. Your pension caters for all minimal requirements.”

  “O-oh! A reptile with tact!” decreed Zhachev from out of the gloom. “I can’t even get proper millet on my pension—only birdseed. But I want some fat and something in the way of dairy produce. And tell that whore of yours not to skimp on the cream!”

  Pashkin’s wife entered her husband’s room with a package.

  “Olya, now he’s demanding cream!” appealed Pashkin.

  “Oh is he now? And I suppose he’d like us to buy him some crepe de chine for a new pair of trousers . . . Whatever next!”

  “So she wants me to slash her skirt off in public, does she?” said Zhachev from the flower bed. “Or else smash through her window right up to that little powder table where she tarts up her mug! Wants to earn something from me, does she?”

  Pashkin’s wife remembered the time Zhachev had denounced her husband in a letter to the Provincial Party Committee. The investigation had lasted for an entire month and they had even found fault with his name and patronymic: “Leon” and then “Ilyich”—just whose side was he on?22 And so she promptly fetched the veteran a bottle of cooperative cream, and, after collecting both package and bottle through the window, Zhachev departed from the garden.

  “I’ll check the quality of the products when I get home,” he announced, halting his carriage by the garden gate. “If there’s leftovers again, or a piece of spoiled beef, you can count on a brick in the guts. In terms of humanity, I’m better than you are—I need fitting nourishment!”

  Left alone with his spouse, Pashkin was unable until midnight to get the better of the anxiety inside him due to the freak. Out of boredom Pashkin’s wife was able to think and, during the family silence, she came up with a thought.

  “You know what, Leon? Somehow or other you need to organize this Zhachev. Then you can promote him into an official post—let him at least lead the maimed! After all, every person needs to possess at least a little bit of dominating significance if they’re to settle down and behave . . . Oh, Leon darling, how absurd and trusting you still are!”

  Pashkin, hearing his wife, sensed love and calm—his fundamental life was returning to him again.

  “Oh Olya, Olly, you darling dolly, your feel for the masses is simply gigantic! For that, let me organize myself close to you!23”

  He laid his head against his wife’s body and fell silent in the enjoyment of happiness and warmth. Night continued in the garden, Zhachev’s cart creaked in the distance, and from this creaking sign all the town’s lesser inhabitants well knew that there was no butter available, since Zhachev always chose butter, which he obtained in packages from prosperous persons, to grease the wheels of his cart; he did away with this product on purpose, wanting to ensure that no extra strength found its way into the bourgeois body yet not wanting to nourish his own self with such a well-to-do substance. During the last two days Zhachev had somehow developed an appetite to go and see Nikita Chiklin, so he directed the movement of his cart at the foundation pit in the earth.

  “Nikita!” he called out beside the sleeping barrack.

  After this sound, the night, the silence, and the general sadness of weak life in the darkness became all the more noticeable. There was no answer to Zhachev from the barrack; nothing could be heard but pitiful breathing. “Without sleep the workingman would have come to an end long ago,” thought Zhachev and, without noise, drove on farther. But from the gully emerged two men with a lantern—and so Zhachev became visible to them.

  “Who’s that down there?” asked the voice of Safronov.

  “It’s me,” said Zhachev, “because capital curtailed me halfway. Now between the two of you, might there be one Nikita?”

  “It’s not an animal, it’s already a man!” responded the same Safronov. “Go on, Chiklin, give an opinion o
f yourself.”

  Chiklin shone his lantern onto Zhachev’s face and all of his brief body; then, in embarrassment, he turned the lantern away towards the dark side.

  “What is it, Zhachev?” quietly pronounced Chiklin. “Have you come for some porridge? Come on—there’s still some left over. It’ll go sour by tomorrow, and then it’ll get thrown out anyway.”

  Chiklin felt afraid that Zhachev might take offense at help; it was best if he ate the porridge with the thought that it no longer belonged to anyone and was going to be thrown out anyway. Previously, when Chiklin’s work was the clearing of snags from the river24, Zhachev had used to visit him in order to feed off the working class; in the middle of summer, however, he had changed course and begun to nourish himself from the maximalist class, calculating that this would benefit the entire movement of the dispossessed into future happiness.

  “I’ve missed you,” announced Zhachev. “I’m tormented by the whereabouts of scum, and I want to ask you when you’ll finish building this nonsense of yours so we can burn the town down!”

  “Try making wheat out of burdock like him!” said Safronov with regard to the freak. “Here we are, squeezing our entire body out for the communal building—and then out he comes with some slogan to the effect that our condition is nonsense and nowhere is there a moment of a sense of mind!”

  Safronov knew that socialism was a scientific matter, and so he pronounced words equally logically and scientifically, reinforcing them with two meanings—one fundamental and one reserve—the same as he would any other material. The three men had reached the barrack and they went in. Voshchev took from the corner an iron pot, wrapped in a quilted jacket for the preservation of warmth, and gave the new arrivals some porridge. Chiklin and Safronov were severely chilled—and all in damp and clay; they had gone to the foundation pit to dig down to an underground water source and seal it dead with a clay bolt.

  Zhachev did not undo his own package but ate the communal porridge, using it both for satiety and for the confirmation of his own equality with the two people eating. After their nourishment, Chiklin and Safronov went out outside—to have a sigh before sleep and a look around. And so they remained standing for the time that was theirs. The starry precise night did not correspond to the difficult earth of the gully and the straying breathing of the sleeping diggers. If one looked only at what lay below, at the dry pettiness of the soil and the grasses living in the very thick and in poverty, then there was no hope in life; a general, universal unprepossessingness, along with people’s uncultured gloom, perplexed Safronov and shook the ideological directive in him. He even began to doubt the happiness of the future, which he imagined in the form of a blue summer lit by a motionless sun—all around him, day and night, was too much murk and vanity.

  “Chiklin, why do you live so silently? Can’t you say or do me something for the sake of joy?”

  “Like what? Throw my arms around you?” replied Chiklin. “Let’s just dig the pit and leave it at that. And you must speak to those men from the labor exchange. They pity their own body during work—as though a body is really something to them!”

  “Leave it to me!” replied Safronov. “I’ll go ahead and knock those shepherds and clerks into working-class shape. I’ll have them digging so hard that all their mortal element will show on their bare faces. But why, Nikita, do the fields lie there so boringly? Is it really sorrow inside the whole world—and only in ourselves that there’s a five-year plan?”

  Chiklin possessed a small stony head, densely overgrown with hair, because all his life he had been either digging with a spade or pounding with a sledgehammer; he had not had time to think, and he did not explain Safronov’s doubts25.

  They sighed amid the silence that had set in and went back to the barrack. Zhachev was already bent over in his little cart, having gone to sleep as best he could, while Voshchev was lying flat on his back, his eyes seeing things with the patience of curiosity.

  “You said you know everything in the world,” said Voshchev. “But all you ever do is dig and sleep! I’d be better off on my own—begging my way around the collective farms. Without truth I simply feel ashamed to be alive.”

  Safronov did a definite expression of dominance on his face and strode past the feet of the sleepers with the light gait of a leader.

  “So in what form would you like to receive this product, comrade? Liquid or in the round?”

  “Leave him alone,” decreed Chiklin. “We all live in an empty world. Is there peace in your own soul?”

  Safronov, who loved beauty of life and politeness of mind, stood in respect for Voshchev’s fate, although at the same time he felt deeply agitated: Wasn’t truth merely a class enemy? After all, the class enemy was now capable of appearing even in the form of dream and imagination!

  “You should hold back for a while, comrade Chiklin, from these declarations of yours!” counseled Safronov with complete significance. “The question has arisen in principle, and it needs to be laid back down again according to the entire theory of feelings and mass psychosis—”

  “That’s enough of you, Safronov, as the saying says, lowering my wages,” said Kozlov, now awakened. “Don’t take the floor when I’m due for sleep, or I’ll lodge a complaint against you! I’ll have you know that sleep too is considered a wage and that the authorities will understand this even if you don’t.”

  Safronov pronounced in his mouth some didactic sound and said in his greater voice, “Be so good, citizen Kozlov, as to sleep normally. What kind of nerve-ridden intelligentsia is present here that the least sound grows straight into bureaucratism? And if you, Kozlov, possess mental stuffing and are lying in the vanguard, then please rise up on one elbow and announce why it is that the bourgeoisie has left comrade Voshchev without a register of the universal dead stock and here he is living in shortfall and such laughableness.”

  But Kozlov was already asleep and feeling only the depth of his own body. As for Voshchev, he lay facedown and began to whisper complaints to himself against the mysterious life into which he had been born without mercy.

  All the last vigilers had lain down and gone quiet; night lay still before dawn and only one small animal was crying out somewhere on the brightening steppe horizon, in anguish or joy. Chiklin was sitting amid the sleepers and silently living his life; he liked sometimes to sit in quiet and observe everything that was visible. He could think only with difficulty, and this greatly upset him—like it or not, all he could do was feel and be speechlessly agitated. And the more he sat, the more densely immobility made sorrow accumulate inside him, until in the end Chiklin got to his feet and pushed with his hands against the barrack wall, just so as to have something to oppress and be moving against. There was no way he could feel sleepy—on the contrary, he could have gone out into the fields and danced with various girls and people beneath the small branches, as he had in the old days when he worked at the Dutch-tile factory. Once the boss’s daughter had momentarily kissed him there. He had been going downstairs to the clay mixer in the month of June; she had been coming the other way and, standing on tiptoe, her legs hidden beneath her dress, she had taken him by the shoulders and kissed the rough hair on his cheek with swollen, silent lips. Chiklin no longer remembered either her face or her character, but he had disliked her then, as if she were a shameless animal—and so he had walked on past her without stopping, while she, perhaps, had wept afterwards, the noble being.

  Chiklin put on his typhus-yellow quilted jacket—the only jacket he had owned since the subjugation of the bourgeoisie—and prepared himself for the night as if for winter; he was meaning to go out for a walk along the track and, after achieving something or other, to fall asleep in the morning dew.

  An initially unknown man came into the sleeping quarters and stood in the darkness of the entrance.

  “Still awake, comrade Chiklin?” said Prushevsky. “I’m still walking about too and I just can’t fall asleep. I keep thinking I’ve lost someone and there’s no
way I can meet them.”

  Respecting the engineer’s mind as he did, Chiklin did not know how to reply sympathetically; constrained, he said nothing.

  Prushevsky sat down on the bench and hung his head; having decided to disappear from the world, he no longer felt awkward with people, and he had come, of his own accord, to be with them.

  “I’m sorry, comrade Chiklin, but I keep getting anxious alone in my room. May I sit here till morning?”

  “Why not?” said Chiklin. “Here among us you can rest peacefully. Yes, lie down where I’m lying—I’ll find somewhere else for myself.”

  “I’d rather just sit. At home I began to feel sad and frightened—I don’t know what to do with myself. Only please don’t think anything wrong about me.”

  Chiklin was not thinking anything anyway.

  “You stay here,” he pronounced. “Don’t go away anywhere. And don’t be afraid now—we won’t let anyone touch you!”

  Prushevsky went on sitting, still in this same mood of his. The lamp lit up the serious face of a man who was a stranger to any happy sense of himself—but he was already regretting that, in coming here, he had acted without consciousness. He did not, after all, have so very long to endure until death and the liquidation of everything.

  The noise of conversation made Safronov half open one eye, and he considered what was the optimal line for him to follow with regard to a sitting representative of the intelligentsia. Having considered this through, he said, “You, comrade Prushevsky, insofar as I possess information, have spoiled your own blood in order to think up, according to all conditions, an all-proletarian living space. And now, I observe, you have presented yourself at night to the proletarian mass, as if behind you is to be found some fury. But since the line is now directed in favor of technical specialists26, please lie down across from me so that you can constantly see my face and go ahead and sleep boldly.”

  Zhachev too awoke on his little cart.