The Town By The Sea

THE TEST

The smell of rough coal told us the factory was near. We knew that smell from our days in the foundry at school.

Somewhere near by we could hear a motor chugging. The street lined, with yellow acacias along which we were walking, led into another street running across it. As we turned into this new street, we saw that it was blocked at one end by a green fence. In the middle of the fence there was a similar, green-boarded gate. Above it hung a smart semi-circular sign in iron lettering.

LIEUTENANT P. P. SCHMIDT

ENGINEERING WORKS

As we stood at the corner of the street, the gates suddenly opened and a long line of reapers drove out of the yard. The drivers sat on springy side-seats, urging on their horses. The windmill-like sails of the reapers were motionless. All the reapers were brand new. We could see they had only just been painted with red and black enamel.

As I listened to the rattle of the reapers' broad iron wheels on the hard road and watched the sunburnt drivers in stiff tarpaulin jackets bobbing up and down on their high seats, I could not help remembering the distant state farm above the Dniester, where I had worked three years ago. We had harvested the farm's wheat with just such machines as these.

The machines that we had used on the state farm, however, had been old and rickety, with foreign trade-marks on them; the state farm had taken them over from the former landlords. But these that were driving past us now were new, Soviet ones. Though the sun was still hidden in the clouds, these reapers shone. Their broad sails were glossy with paint. Now their sharp blades were clicking to and fro like hairclippers, with nothing to cut, but you felt that if any wheat or rye got in their path, they would slash it down in no time.

"Do they make them here?" Petka exclaimed in a thrilled voice. "Look how big they are! A bit different from our straw-cutters!"

"Of course they were made here. Can't you see the trade-mark!" And the sharp-eyed Sasha showed Petka the works trade-mark on the side of one of the reapers: "UAMT Lieutenant P. P. Schmidt Engineering Works."

"But what does UAMT mean?" Petka asked. "Is that the station where they're being sent?"

"Can't you guess!" I said, remembering the same letters on our passes. "UAMT means 'Ukrainian Agricultural Machinery Trust.'"

"What machines!" Sasha crowed. "They take some putting together, I bet. Trickier than a motor-bike engine! I am glad they sent us here!..."

The gate-keeper directed us to a little house at the back of the works yard. We stopped hesitatingly at a black oilcloth-covered door marked "Personnel Department."

"Who's goingA to do the talking?" Sasha asked, glancing at us.

It was a decisive moment and he looked worried.

"Vasil's our team-leader, let him speak," Petka muttered hastily.

"Give me the passes," I said.

A typewriter was clattering in the long, low-ceilinged room. Beside a typist with blonde wavy hair stood a young man in a grey checked suit, chewing a cigarette and dictating. His hair was glossy with hair-cream. I was struck at once by his huge lemon-coloured shoes, with long pointed toes. In the stiff collar of his starched shirt he wore a black bow-tie. His trousers were modishly narrow, well pressed and so short that his ankles showed. Many other people besides me must have thought, "Here's a dandy!" and felt accordingly suspicious of this dressed-up young man.

"... Thus the number of personnel at the plant is gradually increasing," the hair-creamed young man was dictating nasally to the typist. Then, seeing us, he asked in surprise: "What do you want?"

"Good morning!" I said, striding up to the dandy. "Here!" And I held out the passes to him.

He frowned, took the mangled cigarette out of his mouth, silently read all the passes and, returning them to me, said in an affectedly deep voice:

"Altez!"

"What?" I said.

"Not needed," the dandy replied, making a scornful face.

"They were given to us by the Supreme Council of National Economy," Sasha burst out.

"I can read," said the young man with a sidelong glance at Bobir. "And I repeat: we do not need workers with your qualifications."

"But we've been sent to your plant, comrade!" I said, looking the dandy straight in the eye.

"Well, I didn't invite you!" And he spread his arms like an actor. "How can you complain! I don't understand! Why, only a half an hour ago, I accepted a student from your place. Leokadia Andreyevna, what was that blonde fellow's name? You know, the one you said was like your friend, Comrade Kuchkov."

"Tiktor," the typist replied languidly, glancing at a sheet of paper. "He wasn't like my friend, he was like the Don Cossack Kuzma Kuchkov!" And so saying, the typist turned away from the dandified young man and stared indifferently out of the window.

"You see, there was room for one, so I took Tiktor on. And incidentally, I did so at my own risk, because if the town labour exchange gets to know about it, I may collect a nice raspberry. We've got enough local people queuing up, as it is. Even footballers!... But you, young people... Alas!" And again he made that theatrical gesture with his arms.

"We're fifth graders!" Petka exclaimed. "We've been studying a long time and. . ."

"I know and I understand," the young man interrupted Petka and tossed his cigarette out of the window. "I come from the working class myself and I quite understand your awkward position, but there's nothing we can do about it!"

Encouraged by the sympathetic tone the young man had adopted, I asked:

"What shall we do?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Take the train to Kharkov. You'll get there tomorrow morning. Get the Supreme Council of National Economy to send you somewhere else. To the Don has perhaps. It's all the same to you."

"What do you mean—'all the same to us!' " Petka burst out indignantly. "Where do you think we'll find the money to go to Kharkov? It cost us the last of our grants to come here."

"Well, I can't help it," the dandy replied, and looked out of the window, obviously anxious to finish this unpleasant conversation. I looked at the carefully pressed lapels of his waisted jacket, at his tough, sunburnt, bull neck, and at the fastidiously knotted bow and thought: "What can we do? What else can I' say to this dressed-up noodle? He simply doesn't want to understand what a hole we're in."

Realizing-, however, that it was foolish and pointless to say anything, I turned to my friends and muttered:

"Well... Let's get going, if that's the way things are..." "Au revoir," the dandy called and moved closer to the typist to continue his dictating.

Coming out into the yard, I sat down on the cold stone step. Two workers in rust-stained tarpaulin jackets were pushing a truck of small but for some reason rusty castings along a railway line. I gazed at the workers with envy, although the work they were doing was rough and demanded very little skill.

"What shall we do, eh, Vasil? What are you sitting there for? Can't you hear?" Petka mumbled, standing over me. "We were fools to go with that cabman! That was my fault! We ought to have come straight here with Tiktor. And now he's been taken on and we're left out in the cold," Sasha admitted, very upset.

Sasha's words, his distressed, frightened face spotted with freckles, brought me to my senses.

"The driver's got nothing to do with it, Sasha. Suppose we had all four come here together? There was only one place going. Then what? They might have taken you on, but what about us?"

"Don't get peeved, Vasil! Think of something. You went to Kharkov, you got these passes..." Sasha said very peacefully.

Suddenly I remembered the farewell words of our director at the factory-training school Polevoi: "Don't give up when you meet with failure. Don't take it lying down. Clench your teeth and go on ahead again!"

These words and the memory of all the other things Polevoi had said made me even more furious with that hair-creamed bureaucrat in the office.

"We'll have to go to the very top... That's what we must do!... To the director... And if he doesn't help us— to the Party Committee!" I said firmly.

... The director of the works turned out to be a short grey-haired man in blue overalls. At first we did not believe that he was the owner of the well-lighted office cluttered with machine parts, cultivators, castings, test-tubes of sand and copper filings...

The director's office was more like a laboratory, or an assembly shed. Had it not been for the diagrams on the walls, the comfortable leather arm-chair, and the big oak desk with its telephones and inkstand, we should have thought we had made a mistake.

When we filed into the room, the director was standing at a vice with a hammer and chisel in his hands. The vice was clamped to the window-sill. It held a piece of rusty metal.

Scarcely looking down, the director was cutting through the metal with firm, heavy blows, like a regular mechanic.

Noticing us, he put the hammer down on the window-sill and wiped his hands.

"What can I do for you, young people?"

He looked like an old craftsman and reminded me a little of the fitters' instructor at the factory-training school.

The very tone of the director's voice told us that he was a calm, considerate man. True, he did not read all the passes. He glanced at the first and, when I told him what a fix we were in, he asked:

"All of you from Podolia?"

"Yes, all from the same town," Petka said.

"You've come a long way then. From the Carpathians to Tavria! I know your town a bit. We marched through it on the way to the Austrian front. Some big cliffs and precipices round your way, aren't there? And a fortress standing on the top of the cliffs."

"That fortress is still standing there!" Sasha exclaimed, and we all cheered up a bit.

"But I must say I don't recall there being any industry there," the director said. "Where did your factory-training school spring from?"

"There's a factory-training school, but not much industry yet," I" answered, although I knew the workers of the Motor Factory, who considered themselves a big plant, would have been mortally offended had they heard me. "That's why they sent us to you, because there's nowhere to put us at home yet. The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine told us that young workers like us would soon be needed everywhere— in the Donbas and in Yekaterinoslav and... here!" I added.

The director raised his shaggy eyebrows and looked at me shrewdly.

"You don't need to tell me they've sent you, I can see that for myself..." he said slowly. "But they never asked beforehand whether we needed you just now. Where am I going to put you to start with—that's the question."

He picked up the passes from the desk, looked through them again, and shook his head.

"Which of you is Maremukha?"

"Here!" Petka shouted, as if he were answering roll-call at the Special Detachment Headquarters, and stepped up to the director..

"Well, what can you do, Maremukha?"

"I'm a joiner and ... and a turner. I can turn wood."

"Wood?" the director said in surprise. "I thought bread was your speciality. You look as if you knew how to put it away."

Sasha and I laughed at Petka's confusion. Plump and rather clumsy, he stood at attention before the works director like a soldier. His trousers were badly crumpled from sleeping in them during the long journey.

"Well, Maremukha, your luck's in," said the director. "Good joiners are just what we happen to be short of. And I don't suppose there are any down at the labour exchange. Now which of you is

Mandzhura Vasily Mironovich?"

I stepped up to the director.

"What are you, a 'Galician?" the director asked.

"Why?" I said, taken aback.

"The name's Galician. . . But you're not far from Galicia in any case. Almost the same people as you, they are. Only the Zbruch in between... Well, what has Vasily Mironovich Mandzhura got to say for himself?"

"I'm a foundry man!"

"A foundry man?" The director walked over to the little table, picked up the first piece of metal that came to hand, and holding it out to me, asked: "What metal was this cast from?"

"Pig iron," I said, looking at the broken length of metal.

"Oh, was it?" The director puckered his eyes slyly, giving me a piercing glance.

Without another word, he went over to the vice, took out the old, battered piece of metal, put in the piece he had just shown me, and gave it a resounding blow with his hammer. The metal bent like proper iron, but did not even crack.

"Well, is it pig iron?" the director asked and glanced at me even more slyly from under his shaggy brows.

"That's nothing," I said slowly. "There's all kinds of pig iron. Malleable, for instance..."

"You mean ductile, don't you?" the director corrected me, livening up noticeably.

"Yes, ductile."

"And how do you make pig iron ductile?"

"You have to ... put a bit more iron into it ... and a drop of steel..."

"Steel? Steady on, that'll make the casting more brittle! Everyone knows that steel makes iron brittle."

"You have to cast the metal first, then anneal it in special ore... Manganese ore, I think," I said, remembering what our instructor Rozakevich had told us.

"Ah, anneal it!" the director grew even more lively, and a pleased smile spread over his face. "That's the answer to the mystery! I've been struggling with that annealing for over a year now, counting from the time when the workers elected me director of the plant. We took this plant away from the foreign capitalists after the Revolution, and when they ran away with the Whites, they took all the production secrets with them. They thought we'd be done for without their help. But little by little we're finding things out ourselves. Now we're getting down to the secrets of annealing by scientific means, so to speak, so that we won't have to do our founding by rule of thumb. I mean to give the pig iron at this works the same ductibility as iron itself. Get it? So that if a peasant starts harvesting his wheat with one of our reapers and happens to run against a stone, nothing will go wrong. So that the teeth won't break! And those teeth, lad, are a great thing. They save the blades from all sorts of devil's tricks. Get it? And I want the Ukrainian peasant to feel thankful to us for our reapers! It's not enough to blather about bringing town and country together. Those teeth are the things that'll do it!" And the director stroked the rusty piece of metal as if it were a favourite kitten. "Well, young man, what did they teach you?" he asked, swinging his gaze on Sasha Bobir.

"They put me in the fifth grade as a fitter," said Sasha, "but the thing I like most is taking engines to pieces."

The director eyed Bobir, chuckling slyly. "You take engines to pieces! That's the spirit! And who puts them together again after you?"

"I can put them together myself, if there's need. Depends on the engine. If it's a Sunbeam motor-bike, I can do it easy as pie," Sasha could not help boasting.

"I'll have to put you into RIP then," the director decided.

"How do you mean, 'RIP'?" Sasha's voice trembled slightly.

"That's what one of our departments is called—the Repair, Instrument, and Power department. We call it RIP, because it's easier to say. RIP caters for all the other departments."

Going through our passes again, the director said: "Well, you, young people, for right or wrong, I'm going to take you on at the works. Why do I make such a favour of it, you'll ask. Because in our country there is still unemployment. We've got lots of people and, as yet, not many factories. But that will pass, I'm sure. Very soon we shall get rid of unemployment, just as we've got rid of other troubles. We'll build new factories and maybe, one day, no one will believe that there ever was such a thing as unemployment in Soviet times. But at the moment it exists... All right then, go round the works today, get your papers in order, and tomorrow, at the sound of the hooter, report to the foremen. If you'd been local lads, I'd have sent you to queue up at the labour exchange. But sometimes, I repeat, we have to make exceptions. But mind you work well, to the best of your ability! -Get it? No shirking or turning up late! This is a Soviet works. Get it? We've sent the old owner, John Caiworth, packing, and taken the business we built for him into our own hands. It's to our own advantage to run the works properly. We value and respect workers who treat the works as their own.. . Any Komsomol members among you?"

"All of us," Sasha put in hastily. "And Vasil was even on the committee!"

"All the better!" the director said gladly. "Those Komsomol lads are a great help to us. When you've signed up in your shops, go to the works Komsomol committee and see Golovatsky. Put your names down there and start your new life."