The Foundation Pit Page 6

  The Dutch-tile factory was on a grassy lane that no one ever walked all the way through, since it was brought to a dead end by the cemetery wall. The factory building was now lower than before, since it was gradually growing into the earth, and its yard was empty and deserted. But one unknown little old man was still to be found there—he was sitting beneath an awning for raw materials and he was mending a pair of bast shoes, evidently intending to set off in them back into the old days.

  “What happens here now?” Chiklin asked of the man.

  “What we have here, my dear man, is shutdown. Soviet power is powerful, but the machines here are puny—they don’t care to please. Though to me it’s all much the same now—there’s only a few last breaths left to me.”

  “From out of the whole wide world,” replied Chiklin, “all that’s come to you is a pair of bast sandals. You wait here in one place while I fetch you something or other by way of clothing or nourishment.”

  “And who might you be?” asked the old man, folding his respectful face for an attentive expression. “Are you a swindler . . . or simply a bourgeois boss?”

  “I’m . . . I’m from the proletariat,” reluctantly announced Chiklin.

  “Aha—today’s tsar! In that case I’ll wait for you.”

  With a power of shame and sorrow, Chiklin entered the old factory building; after a while he even found the little wooden staircase on which he had once been kissed by the boss’s daughter. The staircase had become so frail that it collapsed beneath Chiklin’s weight somewhere into the lower darkness and all he could do in last farewell was to lay a hand on its exhausted dust. After standing a while in the darkness, Chiklin saw in it a motionless, barely living light and a door that led somewhere. Through this door was a room that had been forgotten or not entered into the plan, and on the floor burned a kerosene lamp. There was no knowing what kind of being might have lain low for preservation in this unknown refuge, and so Chiklin stopped in a place in the middle.

  Close to the lamp a woman was lying on the ground—the straw had been worn out beneath her body, and the woman herself was almost not covered by clothing; her eyes were deeply shut, as though she were asleep or in anguish, and the little girl sitting beside her head was also dozing—but all the time she was wiping the rind of a lemon across her mother’s lips, never forgetting. When she came to, the little girl realized that her mother had quietened, since her lower jaw had collapsed from weakness and caused her dark, toothless mouth to gape open; the little girl took fright at her mother and, in order not to be afraid, she tied her mouth up with a piece of string, looping it underneath her jaw and over the top of her head so that the woman’s lips closed together again. Then the little girl snuggled close to her mother’s face, wanting to sense her and sleep. But the mother awoke easily, and she said, “What are you sleeping for? Keep wiping my lips with the lemon. Can’t you see how hard it is for me?”

  The little girl returned to wiping the lemon rind across her mother’s lips. The woman went still for a moment, sensing her nourishment from the remains of the lemon.

  “And you won’t go to sleep, and you won’t leave me?” she asked her daughter.

  “No, I don’t feel sleepy any longer. All I’ll do is close my eyes, but I’ll be thinking of you all the time. Of course I will—you’re my mama!”

  The mother half opened her own eyes, which were suspicious, prepared for any misfortune of life, already paled by indifference—and she pronounced for her own defense: “I’ve no pity for you now, and I don’t need anyone. I’ve become like stone. Put the lamp out and turn me onto my side—I want to die.”

  The little girl remained consciously silent, continuing to moisten the maternal mouth with the lemon rind.

  “Put out the light,” said the old woman. “Otherwise I keep seeing you and living. Only don’t go away yet—you’ll go when I’m dead!”

  The little girl blew on the lamp and cut short the light. Chiklin sat down on the ground, afraid of making a noise.

  “Are you still alive, Mama, or are you gone now?” asked the little girl in the darkness.

  “Just a little bit,” replied her mother. “When you leave me, don’t tell anyone that I’ve stayed behind and I’m dead. Don’t tell anyone you were born from me or it’ll be the end of you. Go somewhere far, far away and then forget who you are there—that way you’ll be alive.”

  “And why are you dying, Mama? From being bourgeois—or from death?”

  “I got bored,” said the mother. “I’m worn out.”

  “Because you were born long, long ago and I wasn’t,” said the little girl. “I won’t tell anyone when you die and no one will find out whether you were or weren’t. There’ll only be me—living and remembering you in my head. You know what?”—the little girl went silent—“I’ll go to sleep now for one little drop, even just half a drop. You lie there and think so you don’t die.”

  “Take that little string of yours off me,” said the mother. “It’ll strangle me.”

  But the little girl was already sleeping inaudibly, and it became utterly quiet. Chiklin could not even hear their breathing. Evidently, not a single creature lived in this place—no rat, no worm, nothing; there was no noise to be heard at all. Only once was there an incomprehensible rumble—either an old brick had fallen down in some neighboring forgotten refuge or else the ground had ceased to endure eternity and had collapsed into the petty stuff of annihilation.

  “Someone come to me!”

  Chiklin listened intently into the air and crawled cautiously into the gloom, trying not to crush the little girl in passing. Chiklin had to move for a long time because of some kind of matter there that got in his way. Eventually, after running his hand over the little girl’s head, Chiklin groped his way to her mother’s face and bent down over her lips, wanting to find out whether or not this really was that former young woman who had once kissed him here in this building. After kissing her, he knew from the dry taste of her lips and the insignificant remnant of tenderness in their parched cracks that it was.

  “Why do I need that?” said the woman with quick understanding. “I’ll be on my own now forever.” And, having rolled over, she died facedown.

  “We must light the lamp,” loudly pronounced Chiklin. And, after laboring a little in the dark, he lit up the room.

  The little girl was asleep, her head resting on her mother’s belly; the chill underground air had made her curl up tight and warm herself within the constraint of her limbs. Wanting rest for the child, Chiklin decided to wait for her awakening; and so that the little girl would not expend her own warmth on her cooling mother, he took her in his arms and so preserved her until morning—the last pitiful remnant of the woman who had perished.

  Autumn set in; Voshchev began to sense the long duration of time and he sat in the dwelling place, surrounded by the darkness of tired evenings.

  The other people were also either lying or sitting; the shared lamp lit up their faces, and they were all silent. Comrade Pashkin had vigilantly furnished the diggers’ dwelling with a radio so that during the time of rest each of them might acquire the meaning of mass life from the loudspeaker.

  “Comrades, our task is to mobilize the stinging nettle onto the Front of Socialist Construction! Beyond our frontiers the stinging nettle is nothing other than an object of crying need!”

  “Comrades, our task”—every minute the loudspeaker was pronouncing a demand—“is to cut off the tails and manes of horses! Every eighty thousand horses will provide us with thirty tractors!32”

  Safronov listened and was triumphant, regretting only that he was unable to talk back into the loudspeaker, so that they would know in there about his sense of activism and readiness to clip horses, and about happiness. Zhachev, however, and Voshchev in common with him, were both being irrationally shamed by the long speeches on the radio; they had nothing in mind against whoever was speaking and exhorting, but personal disgrace made itself felt more and more strongly. This oppress
ed despair of soul from the radio was sometimes more than Zhachev could endure, and, amid the noise of consciousness pouring from the loudspeaker, he would shout out: “Stop that sound! Let me reply at it!”

  Adopting his graceful gait, Safronov would immediately advance forward.

  “Comrade Zhachev, that’s more than enough, I propose, of you throwing your expressions around. It’s time to subordinate yourself entirely to the directive work of the leadership.”

  “Leave the man in peace, Safronov,” Voshchev would say. “Life’s boring enough for us as it is.”

  But the socialist Safronov was afraid of forgetting about the obligation of joy and he would reply to everyone once and for all, in a supreme voice of might: “Anyone in whose trousers lies the Party’s card must ceaselessly take care that there should be enthusiasm in his body. So I challenge you, comrade Voshchev, to join in socialist competition for the highest happiness of mood!33”

  The radio loudspeaker worked all the time, like a blizzard, but then, after proclaiming once again that every laboring man must assist the accumulation of snow on the collectivized fields34, it fell silent; most likely, the power of science, which until then had been indifferently hurling through nature words that were essential to everyone, had abruptly snapped.

  Safronov, noticing a passive silence, began to act instead of the radio. “Let us pose the question: ‘Where did the Russian people come from?’ And we must reply: ‘From bourgeois pettiness!’ It would have been born from some other place, but there was no more room. And this is why we must throw everyone into the brine of socialism, so that the hide of capitalism will peel away and the heart will attend to the heat of life around the blazing bonfire of the class struggle and enthusiasm will originate!”

  Possessing no outlet for the power of his mind, Safronov discharged it out into words and would go on speaking them for a long time. Heads resting in hands, some of the men listened to him, in order to fill up with these sounds the empty yearning in the head, while others grieved monotonously, not hearing the words and living in their own personal silence. Prushevsky was sitting on the very threshold of the barrack and looking into the late evening of the world. He could see dark trees, and sometimes he heard distant music agitating the air. With his feelings Prushevsky made no retort to anything. To him life seemed good when happiness is unattainable and the trees merely rustle about it and brass band music sings about it in the Trade Union Park.

  Soon the entire work team, submitting to a common exhaustion, fell asleep as it lived, in daytime shirts and trousers, so as not to labor over the undoing of buttons and to preserve its powers for production.

  Only Safronov remained without sleep. He looked down at the supine people and spoke his mind with sorrow.

  “Ay, you masses, you masses! It’s difficult to organize you all into the gruel of communism! What do you bastards want? You’ve worn out the entire vanguard, you vermin!”

  And, with a precise awareness of the masses’ wretched backwardness, Safronov clung to someone tired and lost himself in the deaf backwaters of sleep.

  The next morning, not rising from his lying state, Safronov welcomed as an element of the future a little girl who came in with Chiklin, and then dozed off again.

  The little girl sat carefully down on a bench, saw a map of the USSR amid the slogans on the wall, and asked Chiklin about the meridians of longitude.

  “What are they, uncle? Fences to keep out the bourgeoisie?”

  “That’s right, my little daughter,” explained Chiklin, wishing to give the girl a revolutionary mind. “They’re to stop the bourgeoisie climbing over.”

  “But my mama never tried to climb over, and she died all the same!”

  “That’s the way it is,” said Chiklin. “Bourgeois women are all dying now.”

  “Let them die,” pronounced the little girl. “After all, I can remember her all the same, and I’ll be seeing her in my dreams. Only now her tummy’s gone there’s nowhere I can sleep my head on at night.”

  “Don’t worry—you’re going to sleep on my tummy,” promised Chiklin.

  “Which is better—the icebreaker Krasin35 or the Kremlin?”

  “I don’t know, my little one. I’m nothing!” said Chiklin—and began to think about his head, which alone in his entire body was unable to feel. Had it been able to feel, he would have explained the whole world to the child, so that she would know how to live her life free of danger.

  The little girl went around the new place of her life and counted all the objects and all the people, wanting to determine straightaway whom she would be with and whom not, whom she loved and whom she did not love; when she had done this, she felt at home in the wooden shed and wanted something to eat.

  “Give me some food! Hey, Julia—or I’ll do you in!”

  Chiklin brought her some porridge and covered her childish tummy with a clean towel.

  “Cold porridge! Hey, Julia—shame on you!”

  “Why am I Julia?”

  “When my mother was called Julia, when she was still looking with her eyes and breathing all the time, she went and married Martynich because he was from the proletariat, and when Martynich got home, that’s what he always said to Mama: ‘Hey, Julia—or I’ll do you in!’ But Mama never said a word and went on being with him all the same.”

  Prushevsky was listening to the little girl and observing her; he had been awake for a long time, alarmed by the child who had appeared and at the same time saddened that this being—who was filled, as if by a frost, with fresh life—would be required to suffer for longer and in a more complex manner than he himself.

  “I’ve found your young woman,” said Chiklin to Prushevsky. “Come and have a look at her—she’s still intact.”

  Prushevsky got to his feet and set off, since it was all the same to him whether he lay down or moved forward.

  The old man in the yard of the Dutch-tile factory had finished making his bast sandals, but he was afraid of walking through the world in such footwear.

  “What do you think, comrades? Will I be arrested at for going about in bast sandals or will they let me be? Nowadays every last man jack of ’em struts about in fancy leather boots. And as for the women, ever since the world began they used to walk about naked in their skirts—but now they all wear undergarments with flowers on them. Well, no one can say life’s boring!”

  “Who’ll bother about someone like you?” said Chiklin. “Get going and keep quiet!”

  “I won’t say a word! But I’ll tell you what scares me: ‘Aha!’ they’ll say, ‘you’re walking about in bast sandals—evidently, you’re a poor peasant! But if you’re a poor peasant, then why do you live on your own? Why haven’t you accumulated yourself with the other poor peasants?’ That’s what scares me! Otherwise I’d have gone on my way long ago.”

  “Think, grandad,” advised Chiklin.

  “But there’s nothing to think with.”

  “You’ve been living a long time—you can get by on memory alone.”

  “I’ve already forgotten everything. I’ll have to live all over again.”

  After making his way down into the woman’s refuge, Chiklin bent down and kissed her once more.

  “But she’s dead!” said Prushevsky, astonished.

  “So what!” said Chiklin. “Enough mortal torments and anyone can be dead. Anyway, you don’t need her for day-to-day life—only for remembering.”

  Prushevsky knelt down and touched the woman’s dead, embittered lips and, having felt them, knew neither joy nor tenderness.

  “It’s not the one I saw in my youth,” he pronounced. And then, rising over the perished woman, he added: “Or maybe it is—after close sensations, I’ve always not recognized people I love, though in the distance I’ve yearned for them.”

  Chiklin was silent. Even in a stranger, or in someone who was dead, he was used to feeling some last remnant of warmth or kinship, if he happened to kiss them or somehow get more deeply close to them.

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p; Prushevsky could not move away from the deceased woman. Light and ardent, she had once walked past him—and he had wanted death for himself when he saw her walking away with downcast eyes, her body swaying and sorrowful. And then he had listened to the wind in a mournful world and had yearned for her. Once he had been afraid of catching up with this woman, this joy in his youth, and he had, perhaps, left her defenseless for her entire life, so that in the end, worn out from torment, she had come and hidden away here, in order to perish of hunger and grief. She was now lying on her back—since Chiklin had turned her that way for his kiss. Her lips were still clamped by the little piece of string around her chin and the top of her head, and her long, bared legs were covered by a thick down, almost fur, that had grown because of diseases and lack of shelter; some ancient energy had reawoken and had begun to transform the dead woman—even in life—into an animal growing a pelt.

  “All right,” said Chiklin, “that’ll do. Let the various dead objects preserve her here. There are plenty of dead, just as there are plenty of living—there’s company enough for them not to get bored.”

  And Chiklin stroked the wall bricks, picked up an unknown, obsolete thing, and placed it beside the woman who had passed away, and both men left. The woman remained—to lie in that eternal age in which she had died: thirty-two years and three months.

  After crossing the yard, Chiklin returned back to the door that led to the dead woman, and blocked it with crushed bricks, old stone slabs, and other heavy substance. After not helping him, Prushevsky asked: “Why attempt?”

  “What do you mean—why?” asked Chiklin in astonishment. “The dead are people too.”

  “But she doesn’t need anything.”

  “True—but I need her. Let at least some worth be retained from a person. When I see the grief of the dead, or their bones—that’s when I sense why I live!”