The Foundation Pit Read online

  Kozlov arrived at the foundation pit as a passenger in an automobile driven by Pashkin himself. Kozlov was dressed in a light-gray three-piece suit, he possessed a face that had filled out from some kind of constant gladness, and he had started an intense love for the proletarian mass. Any reply of his to a laboring man would begin with certain self-sufficient words—“Well and good, well and splendid!”—and then he would continue. And in conversation with himself he loved to pronounce, “So where are you now then, you little fascist bitch?,” or “You’re charming, like a precept of Lenin,” and many other brief slogan ditties.

  That morning Kozlov had liquidated as a feeling his love for a certain middling lady. In vain did she write him letters about her adoration—he remained silent, manfully getting the better of his social obligations and renouncing in advance any appropriation of her caresses since he was seeking a more active and noble type of woman. After reading in a newspaper that the postal service was overburdened and operating with insufficient precision, he had decided to reinforce this sector of socialist construction by curtailing the lady’s letters to him. And he wrote the sorrowing lady a last, summary card, disclaiming the responsibility of love:

  Once the table groaned with fare,

  Now there’s just a coffin there.

  Kozlov

  He had only just read these lines and was in a hurry not to forget them. Every day, on waking, he would as a rule read books in bed, and then, after memorizing formulations, slogans, lines of poetry, precepts, all kinds of words of wisdom, the theses of various official reports, resolutions, verses from songs, and so on, he would be off to find his way around the various organs and organizations where he was known and respected as an activizing social force—and there Kozlov would frighten already thoroughly frightened officials by demonstrating his scientificness, his breadth of vision, and the soundness of his political grounding. To supplement his grade-one pension, he had also managed to arrange for himself various payments in kind. On one occasion he had called in on the cooperative food store, summoned the director over to him without moving from the spot himself, and said, “Well and good, well and splendid, but what you have here, as the saying says, is clearly a Rochdale cooperative rather than a Soviet cooperative! So you’re hardly a milestone from the high road to Socialism!43”

  “I don’t comprehend you, citizen,” modestly replied the director.

  “Here we are, evidently, yet again: It wasn’t joy he was after—just to be fed; all the passive man wanted was his daily black bread44. Well and good, well and splendid!” said Kozlov. He went out in full outrage—and, ten days later, was appointed chairman of the cooperative’s store commission45. Nor did he ever learn that he owed this post to a petition from the director himself, a man who took into account not only the quantity of zealous mass fury but also the quality of each furious zealot.

  So now Pashkin was proud of Kozlov. He believed in a near-at-hand day when the entire proletariat would take on the image and likeness of its own vanguard; this, he knew, would be socialism. And so Pashkin exhibited Kozlov everywhere as an elemental example of an activist conceived out of the masses by skillful trade-union leadership. Thanks to having Kozlov at hand, Pashkin was no longer embarrassed by Zhachev; he knew that he needed only to appoint Zhachev to some official position, even simply that of a collector of dues from members—and Zhachev would stop demanding butter from people in positions of authority, for he himself would be on the eve of nourishment by means of fats.

  Having got out of the car, Kozlov walked with an appearance of mind to the arena of construction and stood on the edge of its abyss, in order to possess a general overview of the entire tempo of labor. As for the neighboring diggers, he said to them, “Don’t be opportunists in practice!46”

  During the lunch break comrade Pashkin informed the workers that the poor-peasant stratum of the village was longing in boredom for a collective farm and that it was imperative to hurl into the village something special from the working class in order to begin class struggle against the village stumps of capitalism47.

  “It’s time we put an end to those prosperous parasites once and for all!” Safronov spoke his mind. “We no longer feel the heat from the bonfire of the class struggle, but there has to be a blaze—where else are activizing personnel to warm themselves?”

  After that, the work team appointed Safronov and Kozlov to go to the neighboring village, in order that the poor peasant should not be left alone under socialism as an all-out orphan or as a private swindler in some personal refuge.

  Zhachev wheeled up to Pashkin on his cart, with the little girl, and said to him, “Take note of this socialism in a barefoot body. Bend down, you bastard, to her bones, on the fat of which you have feasted!”

  “A fact!” pronounced the little girl.

  At this point Safronov too decreed his opinion: “Comrade Pashkin, fix and record Nastya! This is our future object of joy!”

  Pashkin took out his notebook and entered in it a dot; a great number of dots had been depicted in Pashkin’s notebook, and each of them signified the full stop of some act of attention towards the masses.

  That evening Nastya made up a separate bed for Safronov and sat down with him for a sit. Safronov himself asked the little girl to feel bored and lonely without him, since she alone there was a kindhearted woman. And throughout the evening Nastya was to be found quietly near him, trying to think about how Safronov would go away to where poor people yearn in their little huts and how he would become louse-ridden among strangers.

  Later, Nastya lay down in Safronov’s bed, warmed it, and went away to sleep on Chiklin’s tummy. She had long ago got used to warming her mother’s bed, before the man who was not her own father lay down there.

  The womb matrix for the house of future life was already complete; the next step was to fill the foundation pit with rubble. But Pashkin was constantly thinking bright thoughts and he reported to the town’s chief revolutionary that the scale of the building was too narrow, since socialist women would be brimming with freshness and full-bloodedness and the entire surface of the earth would be covered by toddling childhood. Surely these children should not be left to live outside, amid unorganized weather?

  “No,” replied the chief revolutionary, knocking a well-stuffed sandwich off the table with an inadvertent movement. “Dig the matrix pit four times bigger!48”

  Pashkin bent down and returned the sandwich up onto the table.

  “You needn’t have bothered,” said the revolutionary. “Our projection for regional agricultural production next year is half a billion49.”

  Then Pashkin placed the sandwich back in the wastepaper basket, afraid of being taken for a man who still lived according to the tempos of the epoch of the economy regime.

  Prushevsky was awaiting Pashkin close to the building—in order to expedite the transmission of instructions for the works. Pashkin himself, however, thought better to enlarge the foundation pit not four times but rather six times, so as to be sure of gaining favor by racing on ahead of the main party line and meeting it again joyfully on open ground—and then the line would see him and he would imprint himself on it forever, making his mark there as an eternal dot.

  “Six times bigger!” he instructed Prushevsky. “I told you the tempo was quiet50.”

  Prushevsky rejoiced and smiled. Noticing the engineer’s happiness, Pashkin felt content too, because he had sensed the mood of the engineering and technical section of his union. But it was not the change of scale that had brought Prushevsky satisfaction; it was, rather, his knowledge that the diggers would exhaust life in the foundation pit as quickly as he himself would die. For him it was better to have his friends dead rather than alive, so that he could lose his own bones in general, shared bones, and leave on the earth’s daytime surface neither memory nor witnesses. Let the future be alien and empty, and let the past find peace in graves, in the cramped closeness of bones that had once embraced, in the dust of loved and forgotten bo
dies that had rotted together.

  Prushevsky set off to find Chiklin, in order to mark out the expansion of the foundation pit. But before he got to him, Prushevsky caught sight of a gathering of diggers and a peasant cart in the middle of people who were keeping silent. Out of the barrack Chiklin carried an empty coffin, and he placed it on top of the cart. Then he brought out the second coffin; Nastya was rushing headlong behind him and tearing her little pictures from off the side of the coffin. To stop the little girl getting angry, Chiklin picked her up, tucked her under one arm, and held her close, still carrying the coffin with his other arm.

  “What do they want coffins for—they’ve died anyway!” exclaimed Nastya with indignation. “There’ll be nowhere for me to put my stuff.”

  “It’s the way things are done,” replied Chiklin. “The dead are all special—they’re important people.”

  “Telling me!” exclaimed Nastya in astonishment. “I don’t know why people go on living. Why doesn’t everyone die and become important?”

  “They go on living in order that there should be no bourgeoisie,” said Chiklin, and put the last coffin on the cart. Sitting on the cart were two men—Voshchev and the subkulak peasant who had gone off with Yelisey.

  “Who are the coffins for?” asked Prushevsky.

  “Safronov and Kozlov have died in a hut and now they’re being given my coffins,” reported Nastya in full. “Well then, what’s to be done?” And she leaned against the wagon, preoccupied by this oversight.

  Voshchev, who had arrived on the cart from places unknown, urged the horse forward, in order to go back to the space where he had been. Leaving Zhachev to guard the little girl and her safety, Chiklin set out on foot after the cart, which had moved off into the distance.

  Chiklin walked on into the distance, into the very depth of the lunar night. Now and again, off to one side in the gully, appeared the secluded lights of unknown dwellings, while dogs barked dejectedly—perhaps feeling bored and lonely, or perhaps noticing the arrival of some official people or other and feeling scared of them. Ahead of him all the time went the cart with the coffins, and Chiklin kept close behind.

  Leaning his back against the coffins, Voshchev was gazing up from the cart at the gathering of stars and the dead, murky mass of the Milky Way. He was waiting: When would a resolution be passed there to curtail the eternity of time and redeem the wearisomeness of life? Without hope, he dozed off and woke up again because of a stop.

  Chiklin walked up to the cart a few minutes later and began to look around. Nearby was an old village51. Over the village lay the general frailty of poverty; the aged, enduring fences and the trees leaning over in silence by the side of the road all possessed an identical appearance of sorrow. In each of the village huts there was light—but no one to be found outside them. Chiklin approached the first hut and struck a match so that he could read the slip of white paper on the door. The notice stated that this was Socialized Property No. 7 of the General Line Collective Farm52 and that here lived the activist of social works pertaining to the execution of State decrees and any campaigns being conducted in the village.

  “Open up!” Chiklin knocked at the door.

  The activist opened the door and let him in. Then he drew up a deed of receipt for the coffins and ordered Voshchev to go to the village soviet and stand all night in a guard of honor beside the two bodies of the fallen comrades.

  “I’ll go myself,” determined Chiklin.

  “Go ahead,” replied the activist. “Only first give me your data. I’ll register you in the mobilized cadre.”

  Chiklin began to tell him, and within an hour the activist had registered him in the cadre. As for Voshchev, the activist burdened him with another task—to probe all the hens during the night and so determine by morning the presence of new-laid eggs.

  “I can’t. My hand’s too big,” pronounced Voshchev.

  “Your mind’s in thrall to what’s narrow and backward,” the activist was crushingly astonished. “Who exists in the world—the Party or you? Who is it that is?”

  “This one isn’t,” replied the yellow-eyed peasant with regard to Voshchev. Until then he had stood in silence, but now he had taken fright.

  Voshchev felt his body with his hands and decided: it was best to stop thinking—let what went on living be something shared and general! Why, in any case, torment oneself for the sake of a torso? What was so big and important about a corporeal torso?

  Stooping down for the sake of less size and feeling, Voshchev disappeared to do his hen work. The activist bent down towards his papers, probing with painstaking eyes every precise task and thesis; with the greed of ownership, without memory of domestic happiness, he was constructing an essential future, preparing eternity for himself in it—and so he had now gone to seed; he had swollen from worries, and his fat face, similar to the appearance of a woman, was overgrown with thin hairs. The lamp burned in front of his suspicious gaze as it kept a mental and factual watch over the kulak scum.

  All through the night the activist sat by this never-extinguished lamp and listened: Might not a horseman from district headquarters be galloping down the dark road to descend a new directive onto the village? Each new directive he would read with the curiosity of future pleasure, as though he were peeping into the passionate secrets of grown-up, central people. Seldom did a night pass without a directive appearing—and the activist would study it until morning, accumulating by daybreak the enthusiasm of indestructible action. And only occasionally did he seem, for a moment, to stop dead because of the anguish of life; then he would look plaintively at whoever was to be found beneath his gaze, and he would remember that he himself was a bungler and blind overlooker—as he had sometimes been called in papers from district headquarters. “Why don’t I enter the masses, why don’t I lose myself in a shared life led by a leader?” the activist would ask at such moments, but he quickly remembered himself, since he did not want to be a member of the general orphanhood and he felt afraid of the long anguish of waiting for socialism, of waiting until every last shepherd came to be in the midst of joy, when he knew that it was possible to be an assistant to the vanguard53 this very day and to possess straightaway all the benefit of future time. The activist always spent a particularly long time examining the signatures on the papers; each letter of each word had been traced by the ardent hand of a revolutionary—and that hand was a part of an entire body living in the satisfaction of glory before the eyes of devoted, convinced masses. Even tears would appear in the eyes of the activist as he admired the precision of the handwritten signatures and the terrestrial globes depicted on the seals: soon, after all, the entire earthly globe, in all its softness, would fall into precise iron hands—and was it really possible that he would then be left without influence on the universal body of the earth? And so, with the miserliness of assured happiness, the activist would stroke his emaciated, burden-worn chest.

  “Why are you standing without movement?” he said to Chiklin. “Go and protect the political corpses from kulak defilement. See how our heroic brother is falling!”

  Through the dark of the collective-farm night Chiklin made his way to the deserted hall of the village soviet. There rested his two comrades, in eternal condition. The very largest lamp of all, intended for the illumination of meetings, was burning over the dead persons. They lay side by side on the presidium table, covered by a banner up to their chins lest their mortal mutilations should become visible and the living begin to feel afraid of dying in the same way.

  Chiklin stood at the foot of the men who had passed away and gazed with calm wonder into their silent faces. Never again would Safronov speak out of his own mind, nor would Kozlov ache with his soul over the entirety of organizational construction and go on receiving the pension that was his due.

  Current time went on quietly passing in the midnight gloom of the collective farm; nothing violated the property that had been taken into common ownership or the silence of collective consciousness. Chi
klin lit a cigarette, approached the faces of the dead, and touched them with his hand.

  “So, Kozlov, is it boring for you?”

  Kozlov went on lying in a silenced way, having been killed; Safronov was also calm, like a contented man, and the reddish-brown mustache that hung over his weakened, half-open mouth was even growing out of his lips, because he had never been kissed in life. Around the eyes of both Kozlov and Safronov could be seen the dried-up salt of former tears, and so Chiklin had to wipe it away and think: What could have made Safronov and Kozlov cry at the end of their lives? Probably because they had been moved by the imagination of music that would strike up for them after their decease.

  “Well, Safronov, have you lain down there for good, or might you decide to arise again?”

  Safronov could not reply, because his heart lay in a shattered chest and did not possess feeling.

  Chiklin listened to the rain that had begun to fall outside, to its long, sorrowful sound that sang in the leaves, in the wattle fences, and in the village’s peaceful roofing; without concern, as if in a void, the fresh moisture poured down, and only the anguish of at least one man listening to the rain could have rewarded this emaciation of nature. From time to time hens being probed by Voshchev cried out in fenced-off out-of-the-way places, but Chiklin was no longer listening to them and had lain down to sleep beneath the shared banner, between Kozlov and Safronov, because the dead are people too. The village-soviet lamp went on squandering light over them until morning, until Yelisey appeared on the premises—and also did not put it out, because light and dark were now all the same to him. He stood for a while without use and went out just as he had come.