The Foundation Pit Page 5

  “Maybe he wants to eat?” he asked for Prushevsky. “If he does, then I’ve got some bourgeois nourishment.”

  “What do you mean, comrade, by bourgeois nourishment, and how much nutrition is there in it?” pronounced Safronov in amazement. “Where is it you’ve been encountering bourgeois personnel?”

  “Silence, you benighted pettiness!” replied Zhachev. “Your task is to remain whole in this life. Mine is to perish, in order to vacate a place!”

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Chiklin to Prushevsky. “Lie down and close your eyes. I won’t be far off. The moment you feel scared—just shout me.”

  Crouching down, so as not to make a noise, Prushevsky went over to Chiklin’s place and lay down there without undressing. Chiklin took off his padded jacket and threw it onto Prushevsky’s legs for him to put over himself.

  “It’s four months since I last paid my trade union dues,” quietly said Prushevsky, immediately feeling cold down below and covering himself up. “I kept thinking I’d get around to it.”

  “You’re dismembered then—defaulted out automatically!” announced Safronov from his own place. “And that’s a fact!”

  “Sleep in silence!” Chiklin told them all and went out into the outside, so as to live alone a little amid a boring night.

  In the morning Kozlov stood for a long time over the sleeping body of Prushevsky; it pained him that this intelligent figure from the leadership was sleeping, like an insignificant citizen, amid supine masses and would now lose all his authority. A circumstance as perplexed as this required deep consideration. Kozlov did not have it in him to permit the entire State to be damaged by the inappropriate conduct of the work supervisor; he even got agitated and washed hurriedly in order to be prepared. At such moments of life, at moments of threatening danger, Kozlov felt inside him an ardent social joy, and he wanted to apply this joy to some heroic deed and die with enthusiasm, in order that the entire class should know him and weep over him. At this point Kozlov even began to shiver from ecstasy, forgetting about it being summertime. With deliberate consciousness he went over to Prushevsky and awoke him from sleep.

  “Go back to your own quarters, comrade work supervisor,” he said with calm. “Our workers have yet to extend themselves to a complete concept and it will be unseemly for you to continue with your duties.”

  “It’s none of your business,” replied Prushevsky.

  “Excuse me!” retorted Kozlov. “Each citizen is obliged, as the saying says, to carry the directive given to him, but you throw your own directive down below and align yourself to the level of backwardness. This really won’t do, I must refer the matter to the authorities, you’re spoiling our line, you’re against the tempo and leadership—that’s what this amounts to!”

  Zhachev ate with his gums and said nothing, preferring to strike Kozlov in the belly that very day, only a little later, for being a pushy bastard who was tearing ahead. As for Voshchev, hearing these words and exclamations, he lay without a sound, still unable to comprehend life. “I should have been born a mosquito,” he supposed. “Their fate is fleeting.”

  Prushevsky, saying nothing to Kozlov, rose from his lying, looked at Voshchev, whom he knew from before, and focused his gaze further on the sleeping people; he wanted to pronounce a word that was tormenting him, or a request, but a feeling of sadness, like tiredness, passed over Prushevsky’s face, and he began to depart. Appearing from the side of dawn, Chiklin told Prushevsky to come and spend another night with them if it seemed frightening again in the evening; and if there was anything he wanted, he should say.

  But Prushevsky did not reply, and the two of them went along their way without speaking. Dreary and hot, a long day was starting; the sun, like blindness, was to be found indifferently above the lowly poverty of the earth; but there was no other place given to life.

  “Once, long ago, almost in childhood,” said Prushevsky, “I noticed a woman passing by me, comrade Chiklin, a woman as young as I was at the time. It was probably in June or July, and from then I began to yearn and I’ve begun to remember and understand everything, but I haven’t seen her and I want to look at her again. And there’s nothing else I want.”

  “In what locality did you notice her?”

  “In this very town.”

  “Then she must have been the tile-maker’s daughter!” surmised Chiklin.

  “Why?” pronounced Prushevsky. “I don’t understand!”

  “I met her in the month of June too, and at that time I refused to look at her. But later, some time later, something in my breast grew warm to her—the same as with you. You and I shared the same female person.”

  Prushevsky smiled modestly.

  “But why?”

  “Because I’ll bring her to you and you’ll see her—as long as she’s living in the world now!”

  Chiklin could imagine Prushevsky’s grief with precision, because he too, although more forgetfully, had once sorrowed with the same sorrow—for a thin, slight, strange-kinned person who had silently kissed him on the left side of his face27. Evidently one and the same rare charming object had acted, from close by and from a distance, on each of them.

  “Most likely she’s getting on by now,” said Chiklin after a while. “Probably she’s all worn out, and her skin will be brown and kitchen-worn.”

  “Probably,” confirmed Prushevsky. “A lot of time has gone by—and if she’s still alive, she’ll be all charred.”

  They stopped by the edge of the gully foundation pit; they should have got down long ago to digging such an abyss for a communal home—then the being Prushevsky now needed would have stayed intact and complete here.

  “Most likely she’s become a woman with consciousness,” pronounced Chiklin, “and she’s working for all our good. If you have unhappiness in your young years, then mind appears later.”

  Prushevsky surveyed the empty region of nature nearest to hand, and he felt sad that his lost companion and many necessary people should have to live and be lost on this mortal earth, where comfort had yet to be arranged, and he said to Chiklin a distressing thought: “But I don’t know her face! How will we be, comrade Chiklin, when she comes?”

  Chiklin replied to him, “You’ll sense her—and you’ll know. Think she’s the only person in the world who’s been forgotten? Your own sorrow alone will recall her to you!”

  Prushevsky understood that this was the truth and, afraid of somehow displeasing Chiklin, he took out his watch to show his concern about the day’s impending labor.

  Doing a thoughtful face and the gait of a member of the intelligentsia, Safronov went up to Chiklin.

  “I hear, comrades, that you’ve been throwing tendencies of yours around, so I shall ask you to be a little more passive—the time for production is now setting in! And you, comrade Chiklin, should aim your directive against Kozlov—his line now is sabotage!”

  Kozlov, at this time, was eating breakfast in a mood of anguish: he had calculated his revolutionary merits to be inadequate and his daily contribution of social benefit to be minimal. He had awoken after midnight and, until morning, he had pined attentively—because the main organizational construction was proceeding outside his participation while he himself acted only in a gully but not on the giant scale of leadership. By morning Kozlov had formulated his resolution. So agonizing were the demands made by his proletarian conscience that he had no choice but to move over onto a disability pension, in order wholly to abandon himself to the very greatest social benefit.

  Safronov heard this thought from Kozlov, classified him as a parasite and pronounced, “You, Kozlov, clearly live on principles of your own and are leaving the working mass behind while you crawl out into the distance. Evidently you are an alien louse who always holds his line back to front and only for show.”

  “You, as the saying says, had better shut up!” said Kozlov. “Or you’ll be called quick to account! Remember how, at the height of the collectivization drive, you incited a certain poor peasant to
slaughter a cock and eat it? Remember? We know who wanted to enfeeble collectivization! We know your idea of precision!”

  Safronov, within whom ideology was always to be found amidst the passions of everyday life, left Kozlov’s eloquence unanswered and walked off away from him with his freethinking gait. He did not think too highly of denunciations against him.

  Chiklin went up to Kozlov and asked him about everything.

  “I’m going today to the social security office to retire onto a pension,” announced Kozlov. “I want to keep a close eye on everything—against social harm and petty-bourgeois uprising.”

  “The working class isn’t the tsar,” said Chiklin. “It’s not afraid of uprisings.”

  “Let it not be afraid,” agreed Kozlov. “But all the same, it’s better, as the saying says, to watch over it!”

  By then Zhachev was nearby on his little cart; he rolled back, then tore forward and smashed his silent head, from full speed, into Kozlov’s belly. Kozlov, momentarily losing his desire for the very greatest social benefit, was felled backwards by horror. Chiklin bent down, lifted both Zhachev and his cart into the air, and hurled them away into space. Bringing the movement into equilibrium, Zhachev managed to announce his say from the trajectory of his flight—“Why, Nikita? I wanted him to receive a grade-one pension!28”—and then, thanks to the fall, smashed his carriage into fragments between his body and the earth.

  “Go on your way, Kozlov!” said Chiklin to the supine man. “We’ll all have to collect our dues in due course. It’s time you took a breather.”

  Kozlov, when he came to his senses, declared that he had dreamed several nights of comrade Romanov, the head of the Central Administration of Social Security29, and all manner of smartly dressed people, and so he had been feeling agitated all this week.

  Soon after this, Kozlov dressed himself in a jacket and Chiklin, in common with the others, brushed off the earth and litter that had stuck to his clothes. Safronov managed to fetch Zhachev and, dumping his disabled body into a corner of the barrack, said, “Let this proletarian substance lie here for a bit—some kind of principle will grow up from it.”

  Kozlov allowed everyone to shake his hand, then went off to retire onto his pension.

  “Farewell,” Safronov said to him. “You are now like a vanguard angel from the body of the workers, in view of its ascension upwards into official institutions.”

  Kozlov was also able to think thoughts and so he departed speechlessly into a higher life of general use and benefit, taking in his hand his small box of personal possessions.

  At that moment a man who could not yet be made out or stopped was hurtling across the fields on the far side of the gully; his body had wasted inside his clothes and his trousers were swaying on him as if empty. The man ran on till he came to people, then sat down apart on a mound of earth, as if alien to everyone. He closed one eye and watched everyone with the other, expecting no good but not meaning to complain; his eye was the yellow of farmstead greed and it evaluated every appearance with the sorrow of thrift.

  After a while the man sighed a sigh and lay down to doze on his belly. Nobody objected to his finding himself here: he was not the only one who had yet to join in the task of construction—and anyway the hour of labor in the gully had already set in.

  Various dreams come to a laboring man at night—some express a fulfilled hope, while others foresense a personal coffin in a clay grave—but daytime is lived by everyone according to the same stooped method, through the endurance of a body digging the earth in order to plant into a fresh abyss an eternal stone root of indestructible architecture.

  The new diggers gradually settled in and got used to working. Each of them thought up for himself an idea of future salvation from here—one hoped to accumulate a work record and go off and study, another was waiting for a chance to retrain for a new occupation, a third preferred to make his way into the Party and disappear in the apparatus of leadership—and each of them dug the earth with zeal, constantly remembering this idea he had of salvation.

  Pashkin came to visit the foundation pit every other day and, as before, found the tempo quiet. As a rule, he used to come on horseback—since he had sold off his carriage during the epoch of the economy regime30—and so he would observe the great digging from the back of an animal. Zhachev, however, was present here too, and he managed, during Pashkin’s absences on foot into the depth of the foundation pit, to poison his horse to such effect that Pashkin grew wary of riding and took to coming by automobile instead.

  Voshchev, just as before, did not feel the truth of life, but exhaustion from the heavy ground resigned him to humility—and he simply collected, on rest days, all kinds of petty and unfortunate scraps of nature, as documentary proof of the planless creation of the world, as facts of the melancholy of each living breath.

  And during the evenings, which were now darker and longer, living in the barrack got boring. The yellow-eyed peasant, the one who had come running from someplace in the field country, now also lived amidst the work team; he found himself without speech there but was redeeming his existence by taking on all the woman’s work in the shared economy, even the diligent repair of torn clothing. Safronov was already discussing with himself whether the time had come to register this peasant in the trade union as service personnel, but he did not know whether or not the man was free of hired hands back in his village or how many head of livestock he owned, and so he held his intention back.

  During the evenings Voshchev lay with open eyes and yearned for the future, when everything would become a matter of common knowledge and be accommodated in the miserly feeling of happiness. Zhachev tried to convince Voshchev that this desire of his was insane, since hostile propertied forces were once more originating and blocking off the light of life; what mattered was to preserve the children—the tenderness of the Revolution—and leave them a testament.

  “What do you think, comrades?” said Safronov on one occasion. “Should we not install a radio so we can duly listen to achievements and directives? We have backward masses here, to whom cultural revolution and every musical sound would be of use and benefit—lest they accumulate inside them a dark mood of gloom!”

  “Better than your radio,” retorted Zhachev, “would be to take the hand of a little orphan girl and bring her along here!”

  “And what merits, comrade Zhachev, or edification, might there be in your little girl? In what way is she suffering for the elevation of all construction?”

  “She’s going without sugar for the sake of your construction—that’s how she’s serving. So to hell with you and your unanimous soul!”

  “Aha!” Safronov came to an opinion. “In that case, comrade Zhachev, fetch us on your transport this plaintive little girl! The melodious sight of her will make us start to live more in harmony.”

  And Safronov stopped before them all in the position of a leader of the Campaign for Enlightenment and the Liquidation of Illiteracy, and then he strode with a convinced gait and did an actively thoughtful face.

  “It is essential, comrades, that we should possess here, in the form of childhood, the leadership of the future proletarian bright world: Comrade Zhachev has now justified the position that his head is whole though he has no legs.”

  Zhachev wanted to say a reply to Safronov, but he chose instead to grab the neighboring farmstead peasant by one trouser leg and give him two blows in the side with a well-developed fist—as an available guilty bourgeois. The peasant’s yellow eyes merely narrowed from torment, but he did no defense for himself and stood silently on his ground.

  “Iron stock! I’ll teach you to stand stock-still and not fear!” said Zhachev in anger—and took another swing at the peasant with his long arm. “If the viper finds it so cozy here, then he must have had an even harder time of it someplace else—there, get a taste of who’s in power now, heifer-lover!”

  The peasant sat down on the ground to get his breath back. He was already used to earning blows fro
m Zhachev in return for his private property in the village, and he got the better of his pain inaudibly.

  “And it would also be fitting for comrade Voshchev to acquire from Zhachev a punitive blow,” said Safronov. “As it is, he alone among the proletariat doesn’t know what to live for.”

  “Why, comrade Safronov?” said Voshchev, listening from the far end of the barrack. “It’s for the productivity of labor that I want truth.31”

  Safronov depicted with his hand a gesture of admonition, and his face came up with a wrinkled thought of pity towards a backward man.

  “The proletariat, comrade Voshchev, lives for enthusiasm! It’s time you received this tendency! The body of every union member should be aflame from this slogan!”

  Chiklin was not there. He was wandering about the vicinity of the Dutch-tile factory. Everything was to be found in its former guise, except that it had acquired the decrepit frailty of a world growing obsolete; the trees on the street had begun to split from age and had been standing for a long time without leaves, but there were still one or two people existing, lying low behind double windows in small homes and living more sturdily than a tree. In Chiklin’s youth there had been the smell of a bakery, charcoal burners had ridden by and there had been loud propaganda for milk from village carts. Then the sun of childhood had warmed the dust of the roads, and his own life was an eternity amid a deep-blue, troubled earth that Chiklin was only beginning to touch with his bare feet. Now, however, it was the air of frail decrepitude and farewell memory that stood over the extinguished bakery and the aged apple orchards.

  Chiklin’s constantly functioning sense of life was bringing him to sadness, all the more so when he caught sight of a fence beside which he had sat and rejoiced as a child, but now it was bent over and silvered with moss and long-ago nails were sticking out from it, being freed from the wood’s cramped tightness by the power of time; it was sad and mysterious that Chiklin should have matured into manhood, forgetfully expended feelings, wandered about distant places and labored in various ways while that old man of a fence had stood there motionless and, remembering him, had waited to see the hour when Chiklin passed by and stroked boards forgotten by everyone with a hand that was no longer used to happiness.