The Foundation Pit Read online

  The old man who had been making bast sandals had left the yard; lying in his place, like a memory of someone who had disappeared forever, was some worn-out footwear.

  The sun had already climbed high, and the moment of labor had long ago set in. And so Chiklin and Prushevsky advanced hurriedly on the foundation pit, along dirt tracks strewn with leaves beneath which the seeds of a future summer were sheltering and warming themselves.

  In the evening of that day the diggers did not put the loud-speaking wireless into action; instead, after eating their fill, they sat down to look at the little girl, thus undermining the trade union’s cultural work on the radio. That very morning Zhachev had made up his mind that, once this little girl and other children like her had matured a little, he would put an end to all the big inhabitants of his locality. He alone knew that the USSR was inhabited by all-out enemies of socialism, egotists, and blood-suckers of the bright future world, and he secretly consoled himself with the thought that sometime soon he would kill the entire mass of them, leaving alive only proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood.

  “Now who might you be, my little girl?” asked Safronov. “What did your dear papa and mama do?”

  “I’m nobody,” said the little girl.

  “How can you be nobody? Surely some kind of principle of the female sex must have been pleased to oblige you, if you got yourself born under Soviet power?”

  “But I didn’t want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois.”

  “How did you get yourself organized then?”

  In constraint and fear the little girl hung her head and began to pull at her shirt; she knew that she was now present in the proletariat and so she was keeping watch on herself, as her mother, long ago and at length, had told her she must.

  “But I know who’s most important of all!”

  “Who?” asked Safronov, listening intently.

  “Stalin’s most important of all, and then—Budyonny36. Before they came, when only bourgeoisie lived, I couldn’t be born, because I didn’t want to be born. But now that Stalin’s become, I’ve become too!”

  “Well, my girl,” Safronov managed to say, “your mother must have been a woman of consciousness! And our Soviet power goes deep indeed if children, even when they have no memory of their own mothers, already sense comrade Stalin!”

  The forsaken peasant with the yellow eyes went on whimpering in a corner of the barrack about some unchanging sorrow of his, only he never let on what it was all about and he tried to please everyone as much as he could. What kept appearing to his yearning mind was a village in the rye, the wind blowing above the village as it quietly turned the sails of a wooden mill and ground the flour for his peaceful daily bread. He had lived there until not long ago, with ample food in his belly and family happiness in his soul; and no matter how many years he had looked out from the village into the distance and into the future, all he had seen at the end of the plain was the fusion of heaven and earth, while up above he had possessed the plentiful light of the sun and the stars. So as not to think further, the peasant would lie down in lowliness and, quick as he could, weep urgent flowing tears.

  “That’s enough, you petty bourgeois, of you and your grieving!” Safronov would stop him. “There’s a child living here now. Do you not realize that sorrow among us has been abolished?”

  “I’m already dry, comrade Safronov,” the peasant declared from a distance. “I just got moved out of backwardness.”

  The little girl left her place and leaned her head against the wooden wall. Without her mother it had become lonely and boring for her. She was terrified of the new lonely night, and she was also thinking how long and how sad it would be for her mother to lie waiting till her little girl should become a little old woman and die.

  “Where’s there a tummy for me?” she asked, turning to face the men who were watching her. “What am I going to sleep on?”

  Chiklin lay down at once and got himself ready.

  “And what about food?” said the little girl. “Look at them all —sitting there like so many Julias while I’ve got nothing to eat!”

  Zhachev wheeled up to her on his little cart and offered her some fruit fudge he had requisitioned that morning from the director of the provisions store.

  “Eat, my poor girl. There’s no knowing what will become of you —but it’s clear that nothing’s going to become of us has-beens.”

  The little girl ate and lay down, her face on Chiklin’s belly. She went pale from tiredness and, forgetting, threw an arm around Chiklin as if he were her usual mother.

  For a long time Safronov, Chiklin, and all the other diggers observed the sleep of this small being who one day would have dominion over their graves and live on a pacified earth that had been packed with their bones.

  “Comrades!” Safronov began to decree the universal feeling. “Before us without consciousness lies the fact of socialism. From the radio and other cultural material all we hear is a line—there’s nothing we can get hold of. Here, however, rests the substance of creation and the aim and goal of every directive, a small person destined to become the universal element. That is why it is essential we finish the foundation pit as suddenly as we can, so that the home may originate more quickly and childhood personnel may be shielded from ill wind and ailment by a stone wall.”

  Voshchev felt the little girl’s hand and looked all of her up and down, just as he had looked in childhood at an angel on the church wall; this weak body, abandoned without kin among people, would one day feel the warming current of the meaning of life, and her mind would see a time like the first primordial day.

  And it was decided then and there to start digging the earth an hour earlier the next day, in order to bring forward the date of laying the rubble for the foundation and the remaining architecture.

  “As a freak, I only welcome your opinion, but I can’t help,” said Zhachev. “You’re all going to perish one way or another anyway, because inside your heart lies nothing. So it’s best to love something small and living and do yourselves in with labor! Exist, you bastards, for now!”

  In view of the cool time Zhachev made the peasant take off his coat, and he himself put it on for the night; the peasant had been accumulating capitalism all through his life, so he had had time to warm himself.

  Prushevsky used to spend the days of his rest in observations or writing letters to his sister. The moment when he glued on a stamp and dropped a letter into the postbox always afforded him a calm happiness, as if he felt himself being drawn, by another person’s need for him, to remain in life and act painstakingly for the common use and benefit. His sister did not write anything to him. She had many children and was exhausted and lived as if in unconsciousness. Just once a year, before Easter, she would send her brother a postcard, in which she would announce: “Christ has risen, dear brother! We live as of old, I cook, the children are growing, my husband has been promoted one grade, now he brings home forty-eight rubles. Come and visit us. Your sister Anya.”

  Prushevsky would carry this card around in his pocket for a long time and, rereading it, he would sometimes cry.

  In his walks he would go far away into space and solitude. Once he stopped on a hill, apart from the town and the road. The day was clouded, indefinite, as if time were not continuing further—on such days plants and animals doze, while people remember the souls of their parents. Prushevsky looked quietly into all of nature’s misty old age and saw at its end some peaceful white buildings that shone with more light than there was in the air around them. Prushevsky did not know a name for this completed construction, nor did he know its purpose, although it was clear that these distant buildings had been arranged not only for use but also for joy. With the surprise of a man accustomed to sadness, Prushevsky observed the precise tenderness and the chilled, comprised strength of the remote monuments. He had yet to see such faith and freedom in composed stones, nor did he know of a self-luminous law for the gray color of his mot
herland. Like an island, amid a remaining world that was being newly constructed, this white narrative of structures stood and shone from peace. But not everything in these buildings was white; in some places they possessed blue, yellow, and green colors, which lent them the deliberate beauty of a child’s depiction. “But when on earth was this built?” asked Prushevsky with bitterness. On an earthly extinct star it was more comfortable for him to feel sadness; an alien and distant happiness awoke shame and alarm in him—what he would have liked, without admitting it, was for the whole world, forever under construction yet never constructed, to be like his own destroyed life37.

  Once more he looked intently at this new city, not wanting to forget it or to be mistaken, but the buildings stood clear as before, as if around them lay not the murk of Russian air but a cool transparency.

  Returning back, Prushevsky noticed many women on the town streets. The women were walking slowly, in spite of their youth; probably they were going for a stroll and expecting a starry evening. Their feet stepped with a power of greed and their corporeal torsos had broadened and rounded out, like reservoirs of the future—all of which meant that there will be a future, that the present is unfortunate, and that it was a long way to the end. The sight of these alarming women afforded Prushevsky endurance for further inexplicable existence of his own, all the way to an ever-nearer conscious doom. Back in his technical office of works, Prushevsky sat down to draft the project of his own death, in order to secure it for himself sooner and with more certainty. After the project’s completion, Prushevsky felt tired and fell calmly asleep on the couch. All that remained for the morrow was to draw up an explanatory note for the project and then to find a woman whose charms were adequate for a single-fold act of love; after the satisfaction of love Prushevsky always felt the normal desire to pass away, and now too he had made the same precise calculation.

  At dawn Chiklin came to the office with an unknown man wearing only a pair of trousers.

  “Someone to see you, Prushevsky,” said Chiklin. “He’s asking for the coffins to be given back to their village.”

  “What coffins?”

  The huge, naked man, who was swollen from the wind and from grief, did not immediately say his say; first he hung his head and achieved a strenuous thought. He must have been constantly forgetting to remember about his own self and his own concerns; either he was exhausted or else he was dying, bit by petty bit, in the course of life’s passing.

  “The coffins!” he announced in a hot, woolly voice. “We stacked those wooden coffins into the cave for future use—and now you’re digging up the whole gully. Give us our coffins back!”

  Chiklin said that a hundred empty coffins had indeed been unearthed the previous evening, near the northern picket; he had taken two of them for the little girl. In one coffin he had made her a bed for future time, when she began to sleep without his tummy, and he had given her the second for her toys and any other childhood belongings: let the girl possess a little red corner of her own!

  “Give the peasant back the rest of the coffins!” replied Prushevsky.

  “Give them all back!” the man said from out of himself, as if out of rubbish. “We’re short of dead stock. The people is expecting its property back. We’ve paid for those coffins out of self-taxing work38. Don’t try to take away what we’ve earned!”

  “No,” pronounced Chiklin. “You leave two coffins for our child—they’re undersized for you, anyway.”

  The unknown man stood there for a while, felt something, and did not agree.

  “Nothing doing! Where are we going to put our own children? Them coffins are made to measure—we’ve marked each one so we know who goes where. Our coffins are what keep us all going. Yes, they’re all we’ve got left—a coffin’s an entire livelihood to us. And before we buried them in the cave, we lay down in them—we’ve got them worn in!”

  At this point the yellow-eyed peasant who had been living at the foundation pit for a long time rushed into the office.

  “Yelisey!” he said to the half-naked man. “I’ve strapped them together with rope into a single train. Come on—let’s drag them back while the ground stands dry!”

  “You failed to guard two coffins,” Yelisey spoke his mind. “Where will you lie yourself down now?”

  “I shall lie me down in my own yard, Yelisey Savvich, beneath an oak-grove maple, at the foot of a mighty tree39. I’ve dug a little pit for myself underneath its root—I’ll die, and my blood will course up the trunk like sap, mounting right to the crown. Or are you going to say my blood’s grown thin and the tree won’t like the taste of it?”

  The half-naked man stood without any impression and replied nothing. Not noticing the stones underfoot and the chilling wind of dawn, he set off with the other peasant to collect the coffins. Chiklin followed behind, observing Yelisey’s back, which was covered by an entire layer of night soil and already beginning to grow a coat of protective fur40. From time to time Yelisey would stop in one place and survey space through sleepy, emptied eyes, as if trying to remember something forgotten or seeking a secluded lot for sullen peace. But his motherland had become unknown to him, and he lowered downwards his quietened eyes.

  The coffins were waiting in a long procession on a dry height above the edge of the foundation pit. The peasant who had earlier come running to the barrack was glad that the coffins had been found and that Yelisey had appeared; he had already managed to drill holes through the coffin headboards and footboards and tie the coffins together into a common yoke. Taking the end of the rope from the front coffin over his shoulder, Yelisey leaned forward and, like a barge hauler, began to heave these plank objects across the dry ups and downs of life’s everyday sea41. Chiklin and the entire work team stood without hindrance to Yelisey and looked at the boundary line scored into the ground by the empty coffins.

  “Uncle, were they bourgeoisie?” inquired the little girl, clutching at Chiklin.

  “No, my little daughter,” replied Chiklin. “They live in straw huts, they sow grain for bread, and they share and share alike with us.”

  The little girl looked up, at all the old faces of the people.

  “Why do they need coffins then? It’s the bourgeoisie that must die, not the poor!”

  The diggers kept silent, not yet possessing the data to speak.

  “And one of them was naked!” pronounced the little girl. “Clothes are removed when a person isn’t needed, so that the clothes remain whole. My mother’s lying naked too.”

  “You’re right, my little daughter,” decided Safronov. “One hundred percent right. Two kulaks have just distanced themselves from us.”

  “Go and kill them then!” said the little girl.

  “That’s not allowed, my daughter. Two persons don’t make a class.”

  “There was one, and then another one,” counted the little girl.

  “But overall there were still too few of them,” regretted Safronov. “Our task, according to the plenum, is to liquidate them as a class and nothing less42—the landless laborers and the entire proletariat must be orphaned from their enemies!”

  “Who will you be left with then?”

  “We’ll be left with tasks. With the hard line of the furthest measures—get what I mean?”

  “Yes,” replied the little girl. “You mean kill off all the bad people because there aren’t enough good ones.”

  “You’re a fully class generation,” Safronov rejoiced. “You may only be a minor, but you have a precise consciousness of every relationship. Monarchism had no discrimination, it needed people for war, but only one class is precious to us, and soon even this one and only class of ours will need to be purged of unconscious elements.”

  “Of scum!” surmised the little girl, quick on the uptake. “And then there’ll only be really, really important people. My mother used to say she was scum too, for still being alive—but now she’s died, and that makes her good, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Chiklin, “it d
oes.”

  Remembering that her mother now found herself all alone in the dark, the little girl silently walked away, not reckoning with anyone, and sat down to play with the sand. But she did not play; she merely touched something with an indifferent hand and thought.

  The diggers went over to be near her and, bending down, asked, “All right?”

  “S’pose so,” said the little girl, paying no attention. “I’ve got bored being here with you, you don’t love me. As soon as you all go to sleep tonight, I’ll beat you up.”

  The workers looked at one another with pride, and each of them wanted to take the child in his arms and squeeze her tight—in order to feel for himself the warm place that was the source of this reason and charm of a small life.

  Only Voshchev stood weak and joyless, mechanically observing the distance. As before, he did not know whether there really was anything special about existence in general; no one could recite to him from memory a codex of universal laws, and events on the earth’s surface were not charming him. Having distanced himself a little, Voshchev quietly disappeared into a field and, unseen by anyone, lay down there for a lie, content that he was no longer a participant in insane circumstances.

  Later he found the trail of the coffins that the two peasants had dragged away beyond the horizon—into their own land of buckled wattle fences overgrown with burdock. There, maybe, was the silence of warm farmstead kingdoms, or perhaps poor-peasant collective-farm orphanhood would be standing in the wind of the roads, with a heap of dead stock there in the middle of them. Voshchev set off with the gait of a man who has been defaulted out, unaware that it was only the feebleness of the cultural work back at the foundation pit that had left him so unconcerned about the construction of the future home. In spite of an adequately bright sun, his soul felt unrequited, all the more so because a cloudy fume of the breath and smell of grasses was spreading into the fields and Voshchev was walking inside this warmed cloud of struggling life that was sweating in the labor of its own growth. He looked around: everywhere the steam of living breath hung over space, creating a sleepy, stifling invisibility; endurance dragged on wearily in the world, as if everything living found itself somewhere in the middle of time and its own movement; its beginning had been forgotten by everyone, its end was unknown, and nothing remained but a direction to all sides. And so Voshchev disappeared down the only open road.