The Foundation Pit Read online

  Leaning his chest against a pole that had been stuck into the earth for a flag, Yelisey stared into the murky dankness of an empty place. It was there that the rooks had gathered for flight into a warm distance, though the time of their parting from the earth hereabouts had not yet set in; but most likely the rooks felt like departing ahead of time, in order to survive the organizational collective-farm autumn in some sunny region and return later to a universal institutionalized calm. Earlier on, Yelisey had watched the disappearance of the swallows and then he had wished he could become the light, barely conscious body of a bird; but now he no longer thought of turning into a rook, because he could not think. He lived and looked with his eyes only because he possessed the documents of a middle peasant and his heart was beating in accord with the law.

  Some sounds came from the village soviet, and so Yelisey went up to the window and put his face against the glass; he was constantly listening to any sounds given out by the masses or by nature, since no one spoke words to him or ever gave him any idea, and so it was necessary to sense even what sounded from afar.

  Yelisey saw Chiklin sitting between two men lying on their backs. Chiklin was smoking and indifferently comforting those who had died with words of his own.

  “So you’re finished, Safronov! But so what? I still remain here and I’m going to be like you now. I’ll become more clever, and I’ll start to speak out with a point of view. I’ll get to see all your tendency. It’s all right—you can fully afford not to exist!”

  Yelisey could not understand; through the clean glass he was listening only to sounds.

  “And you, Kozlov—you don’t need to bother to live either! I’ll forget my own self, but I shall have you here all the time. All your perished life, all your tasks—I’ll hide them inside me and I won’t throw them away anywhere. So count yourself alive! I’ll be an activist day and night, I’ll keep an eye on the whole of organizationality, I’ll retire onto a pension—so you lie calm, comrade Kozlov!”

  Yelisey had breathed fog onto the glass and he saw Chiklin only weakly, but he went on watching, since there was nowhere for him to look. Chiklin went silent and, sensing that Safronov and Kozlov were now glad, said to them, “Let the whole class die—I alone will remain in its place and I’ll achieve the whole of its task in the world! I don’t know how to live life for myself anyway! . . . Whose is that mug staring at us? Come in, strange man!”

  Yelisey immediately entered the village soviet and stood there, not grasping that his trousers had slipped down from his belly, although the day before they had stayed up well enough. Yelisey had no appetite for nourishment and was therefore growing thinner with the expiry of each passing day.

  “Was it you who killed them?” asked Chiklin.

  Yelisey hitched up his trousers and made sure they did not fall down again, replying nothing and directing at Chiklin eyes that were pale and empty.

  “So who was it then? Go and find me some man who’s been killing our masses.”

  The peasant duly set off across the dank empty place that was the site of the rooks’ last gathering; the rooks made way for him and Yelisey caught sight of the peasant who had yellow eyes—he had placed a coffin up against a fence and was writing his name on it in big letters, taking some kind of dense liquid out of a bottle with his depicting finger54.

  “What’s up, Yelisey? Got news of some decree, have you?”

  “So-so,” said Yelisey.

  “Fair enough,” calmly pronounced the writing peasant. “But tell me—have the dead in the village soviet still not been washed? I’m scared that State veteran will arrive on his little cart and lay a hand on me for being alive when them two are dead.”

  The peasant went off to wash the dead, in order to demonstrate through this his own concern and sympathy. Yelisey also wandered off after him, not knowing where best to find himself.

  Chiklin made no objection while the peasant removed the clothes from the fallen, carried them over in turn to plunge them in naked condition into the pond, and then, after rubbing them dry with a sheepskin, dressed them again and placed both bodies on the table.

  “Well and splendid!” said Chiklin. “But who was it that killed them?”

  “That, comrade Chiklin, we wouldn’t know. We ourselves live without meaning to.”

  “Without meaning to!” pronounced Chiklin—and did the peasant a blow in the face, so that he should start to live with conscious meaning. The peasant staggered but was careful not to lean over too far in case Chiklin thought he had kulak inclinations himself, and so he stood even closer before him, wishing to get himself mutilated more powerfully and then petition for himself, by means of suffering, the right to life of a poor peasant. Seeing such a creature before him, Chiklin mechanically did him one in the belly, and the peasant overturned, closing his yellow eyes.

  Yelisey, who was standing quietly to one side, told Chiklin after a while that the peasant had ended.

  “Are you sorry for him?” asked Chiklin.

  “No,” replied Yelisey.

  “Put him in the middle, between my comrades.”

  Yelisey dragged the peasant over to the table and, mustering all his strength to lift him up, dropped him down across the previous dead persons; then he managed to fit him in properly, placing him in the cramped space between the sides of Safronov and Kozlov. After Yelisey had moved away, the peasant opened his yellow eyes, but he was unable to close them again and so he went on looking.

  “Has he got a woman?” Chiklin asked Yelisey.

  “He found himself alone,” replied Yelisey.

  “What made him be?”

  “He was scared of not being.”

  Voshchev arrived in the doorway and told Chiklin to go: he was required by the activist committee.

  “Here’s a ruble for you,” said Chiklin, hurriedly giving Yelisey the money. “Now go to the foundation pit, see if the little girl Nastya is alive there, and buy her a candy. My heart’s begun to ache for her.”

  The activist was sitting with his three assistants, well and truly poor people who had grown thin from uninterrupted heroism—yet their faces depicted one and the same steadfast feeling of zealous selflessness. The activist let Chiklin and Voshchev know that in accord with a directive from comrade Pashkin they must synchronize all their hidden strengths in favor of the collective farm’s imminent deployment.

  “And truth?” asked Voshchev. “Is truth the due of the proletariat?”

  “Movement is the due of the proletariat,” summarized the activist, “along with whatever the proletariat comes across on the way. Doesn’t matter if it’s truth or a looted kulak jacket—it’ll all go into the organized cauldron till you won’t be able to recognize anything at all. Have you checked the hens?”

  “I spent the whole night probing them. There isn’t an egg in a single bird.”

  The activist concentrated his attention. His assistants went correspondingly deep into thought: Were these fowl really pro-kulak?

  “Every hen must be stockpiled, made dead—and eaten,” declared a member of the activist body, after thinking a thought through.

  “Did you notice cocks?” asked the activist.

  “There aren’t any,” said Voshchev. “One man was lying in his yard and he told me that you ate the last one when you were walking about the collective farm and you suddenly felt hunger.”

  “What must be clarified,” declared the activist, “is not who ate the last cock, but who ate the first cock.”

  “Maybe the first one dropped dead?” surmised an assistant activist.

  “How in the world could he drop dead by himself?” asked the activist in astonishment. “Are you telling me he’s a conscious saboteur—to die of his own accord at such a moment? Come on—we must do an all-round interrogation. Somewhere here lies the base of another kulak superstructure.”

  And they all rose and went in search of that saboteur eater who, for the sake of his own nourishment, had destroyed the first cock. Voshchev and
Chiklin also moved after the activists.

  “It’s a serious matter,” said Chiklin. “Without eggs the children will waste away and never claim their own age!”

  “Of course,” confirmed Voshchev, although he was pining, because he was willing to live until death without a hen’s egg—if only he could know the fundamental arrangement of the whole world.

  After passing about ten households with a precise interrogation that yielded only passive results, the activist committee tired and leaned against one of the huts to think: How were they to go on further? Another hundred or so people had already managed to join up with the activist committee, and the whole of this mass was manifestly grieving over the first cock, which had been eaten by some unknown mouth, as a result of which the last cock had perished. Lest the hens feel bored and lonely, people took them in their arms and carried them with them, stroking their feathers with the palms of their hands. The hens made separate nests for themselves in these hands, but they were content.

  Soon the entire collective farm was in full view of the activist, thanks to the disciplinarian calculation that it is better for a thousand men to take a hundred strides than for one man to walk three miles55.

  “Where is the cock, comrades?” the activist appealed, with something close to indifference, to all those who were clinging to him. “From where among us is an egg to emerge if our poultry mass does not have in its midst a productive leadership?”

  The population of the collective farm, concealing its thought and standing in silent closeness to its activist committee, sorrowfully lowered its collective face; one of the women quietly began to shed tears and then worked herself into such a state of suffering that she completely let herself go and had to be done away with to a storeroom.

  The rooks, not far distant from here in former hours, took off and flew away into other parts; some peasants looked at the rooks but others did not look, since the rooks would return all the same, however much they might search for something in distant parts, while life for the peasants was immovably good.

  “Where, citizens, is the cock?” dolefully questioned the activist. “So this is how you care to please Soviet power? Do you understand the meaning of de-membering? Remember that de-membering the collective farm will be nothing like de-kulakizing it! Yes, it’ll be a far cry from the dispossession of the kulaks, when every propertyless peasant was possessed with joy! I’ll disband and dismember even the poorest of you—yes, there’s more than enough poor class around without you lot!56”

  The entire class was standing and unable to reply to one single question. Barren hens began quietly groaning in people’s arms; from out of distant nature came a chilled wind, stirring the residual leaves on a local tree.

  “The cock has gone,” said the activist with sorrow. “There’s no rooster.”

  “No-o roo-ooster,” pronounced a neighboring grief-struck woman.

  The activist recovered from the surrounding influence and quickly went into the office; and all the other organizationally active figures managed to get away after him. There remained only Chiklin, who did not want the collective farm to end up backward in its development because of a single cock.

  “Come on now! What is all this really? Are you going to be without a cock for long?”

  One collective-farm participant made a movement deep in the mass and said something there, but then political unconsciousness or constraint of space made him go still again.

  “Whoever just moved—come forward!” called Chiklin.

  Out came a small but already old man, wearing a cap and trousers while his shirt dried on a fence somewhere after being washed. On one of his palms he held a bird, something like a chicken that had been shat on by a cow, and he offered it to Chiklin.

  “Look, comrade—some little mongrel of ours. It’s four years now since it was born to us, and it still keeps quietly growing!”

  “But what is it? Is it a cock, or isn’t it?”

  “You could say it’s as good as!”

  “Then let him labor!” concluded Chiklin—and set off for the council of the soviet57.

  Banners were being carried out from the dwelling of the activist committee; the activist himself was walking behind, for he did not want to hurry towards eternal separation from the dead comrades. He did not become surprised when Chiklin informed him about the cock that had been made manifest; the activist had already known that every kind of advanced and progressive fact would be accomplished under his leadership and that there would also be a cock.

  Beside the dead men in the village soviet, the activist initially felt sad, but, after a while, remembering the future now being constructed anew, he gave a spirited smile and ordered those who surrounded him to mobilize the collective farm for a funeral procession, so that everyone should feel the solemnity of death at the time of the developing bright moment of the socialization of property.

  Kozlov’s left arm was hanging downwards and his entire perished torso was slipping off the table, ready to fall from lack of awareness. Chiklin straightened Kozlov and noticed how very cramped it had become for the dead—instead of three of them, there were now four. Chiklin could not remember a fourth one, so he appealed to the activist for illumination of the mishap, even though this fourth one was not a proletarian but some boring peasant who had come to rest on his side with silenced breath. The activist explained to Chiklin that this farmstead element was the deadly wrecker of Safronov and Kozlov, but that because of the organized movement against him he had now taken note of his own sorrow, made his way here, lain down on the table among the deceased, and died in person.

  “I’d have unmasked him in half an hour anyway,” said the activist. “Every last drop of the elemental has been organized—there’s nowhere anyone can hide. But now there’s another superfluous one lying here!”

  “I finished off that one myself,” explained Chiklin. “I thought the bastard was presenting himself for a blow. I gave him one—and he went weak.”

  “Quite right too! The center will never believe me if I say that there was just one murderer. But two—that’s a well and truly kulak class and organization for you!”

  After the dead had been buried a little way apart from the collective farm, the sun set and it at once became desolate and alien in the world. A dense underground cloud was rising from beneath the morning edge of the district; by midnight it would reach the fields here and pour down on them its entire weight of cold water. Looking that way, the members of the collective farm were starting to feel chilled; as for the hens, they had long been clucking in their coops, foresensing the duration of time of an autumn night. Soon total darkness set in on earth, and this was intensified by the blackness of the soil that the wandering masses had trampled; the upper strata, however, were still bright—in the midst of height, damp, and an inaudible wind the departed sun had left a yellow glimmer58, which was reflected in the last leaves of orchards that had bowed down in the silence. People did not wish to be inside their huts, where they were assailed by thoughts and moods, so they walked about the open places of the village and tried constantly to keep one another in sight. In addition, they listened intently: Might not some sound from far away carry through the damp air and bring them comfort in this difficult space? The activist had long ago issued an oral directive about the observance of sanitary principles in the people’s life; persons were obliged to be found outside all the time and not suffocate in family huts. This made it easier for the sitting activist committee to observe the masses through the window and so lead them further and further.

  The activist had also managed to notice this yellow dusk that was like the light of a burial, and he decided to appoint for the very next day, in the morning, a collective-farm star march through the neighboring villages still clinging to private ownership, and to follow this star march with popular games.

  The chairman of the village soviet, a little old middle peasant, went up to the activist, about to ask him for some instructions or other, since he
was afraid of inactivity, but the activist dismissed him with his hand, saying merely that the village soviet should secure the rear conquests of the activist committee and guard the now dominant poor peasants against kulak predators. The old chairman gratefully calmed down and went off to make himself a night-watchman’s wooden rattle.

  Voshchev was afraid of nights; he lay in them without sleep and doubted; his fundamental sense of life strove towards something right and fitting in the world, and the secret hope of thought promised him distant salvation from the obscurity of general existence. He walked beside Chiklin towards their night quarters and felt anxious that Chiklin would immediately lie down and go to sleep, and that he alone would be looking with his eyes into the dark above the collective farm.

  “Don’t sleep tonight, Chiklin. Somehow I feel afraid.”

  “Don’t be afraid. Tell me who’s frightening you and I’ll kill him.”

  “What frightens me, comrade Chiklin, is the bewilderment in my heart. I don’t even know what it is myself. I keep thinking that there’s something special far in the distance, or some luxurious object that will never come true—and so I live sadly.”

  “We’ll get it for you. Don’t be sad, Voshchev, as the saying says.”

  “When will you get it, comrade Chiklin?”

  “You can consider it got. Nowadays we can make nothing of anything.”

  On the edge of the collective farm stood the Organizational Yard, and it was there that the activist and other leading poor peasants produced inspiration of the masses; it was also where unproven kulaks stayed, along with various felonious members of the collective. Some of these found themselves in the Yard because they had fallen into a petty mood of doubt, others because they had wept at a time of rejoicing and kissed the fence posts in their own yard as they departed into common ownership, yet others were there for some other reason, and finally there was one little old man who had drifted into the Organizational Yard of his own spontaneous accord59. This was the watchman from the Dutch-tile factory; he had been passing through on his way somewhere and been stopped because of the expression of alienness possessed by his face.