The Town By The Sea

THE ROLLERS

I was to remember that conversation at the big table in the soft light of the heavy chandelier all my life. As if it were yesterday, I can see the engineer's contemptuous glance, his puckered slanting eyes, and

hear his ironical, condescending voice. It was not the voice of an older man with far more knowledge and experience than myself. Had it been that, I should, perhaps, have felt differently when I left the Andrykheviches' house amid its ivy and sweet-scented roses that evening. But no, there had been something quite different concealed beneath the contempt he had shown towards me. I had argued with a man of that old decaying world of which Polevoi, the director of our factory-training school, had talked so much. The engineer was sneering quietly to himself at my fieriness, at my sincere belief in the future.

He did not throw words away, he used them sparingly, thoughtfully, concealing his real intention. He did not put all his cards on the table, so that I could say to his face: "You're a traitor to the Revolution and a servant to exploiters like Caiworth who've run away abroad. Go and follow them, get out of this country whose people you don't believe in!"

No, he talked very cunningly and sometimes, to find out what I was thinking, even seemed to ask my advice. My advice! The advice of a pupil from a factory-training school who had not been at the plant even a month. . . and he an old, grey-haired chief engineer!

He was still talking when we left the table with the crayfish lying unfinished in their dish.

"Where do you intend building these new factories? I wonder."

"Wherever they're needed!" I replied boldly, remembering the words the Secretary of the Central Committee had used in his conversation with me in Kharkov.

"Just a little hasty, aren't you, young man? You plan to build factories here, there and everywhere, but you haven't yet learnt how to hold a knife properly. It's little things you ought to start with, tiny little things."

I twisted and turned for a long time that night on my prickly mattress by the open window. As I listened to the snores of the other chaps, I remembered the cutting remarks of the tall, bony engineer, and particularly that last dig about the knife I had used to cut the sturgeon.

How simple and good and warm-hearted it had been at Luka Turunda's, in his little cottage on the sea shore! And Luka himself and his father and Katerina—what real, hospitable people they were!

I went to sleep with a warm feeling of gratitude towards the Turunda family and a convinced hatred of my neighbours in the house with the ivy, a hatred born of the knowledge that they harboured the bad old past against which both Polevoi and Nikita Kolomeyets had so often warned me. And then I had the devil's own nightmare.. .

I dreamed I was wearing a long dress-coat like the pianist at Madame Piontkovskaya's and dancing the Charleston. I danced tirelessly, jerking my arms and legs about, like the beggar with St. Vitus's Dance who used to stand outside the Catholic church at home. I was dancing and looking at myself in a mirror. And I could see my face changing. It was becoming lined and bad-tempered and gradually acquiring a grey beard and shaggy eyebrows. But I still went on dancing and getting as thin as a lath. Great big crayfish were crawling towards me across the dirty parquet floor, hissing at me, and opening and closing their long claws: "Lout! Lout! Dirty lout! Where are you trying to get to? From pauper to prince, eh? Get out of here!" And then Sasha and Petka, still very young, popped up beside one of the columns and stared at me with contempt. And I heard Sasha whisper: "See that, Petka? There he is! Danced all his life away and never learnt anything!"

Breaking into a cold sweat, I opened my lips to make an excuse, but my voice was drowned by the hissing of the crayfish, which grew louder and louder until I wanted to stuff my fingers in my ears...

I turned over on to my other side—and woke up.

The alarm was clattering beside me.

Although the young, yellow moon was still looking in at the window, it was time to get up. The foundry started work much earlier than any of the other shops.

"What rubbish you dream sometimes!" I thought and stepped carefully over my sleeping friends. "I mustn't forget to wind up the alarm, in case they oversleep. . ."

Anyone who has lived for long in seaside towns knows that they are always beautiful.

In our town, the quiet, cloudless sunsets when the pink-tinted sun sank unhurriedly into the sea were wonderful.

And no less wonderful were the times when the sun set behind a bank of clouds and the raging sea battered the wall with mighty waves that sent clouds of spray flying over the near-by railway line. The bora whirled in from the steppes, bringing with it dust and the scent of wormwood, tearing off the hats of passers-by, stirring up dust-spouts on the embankment, chasing bits of paper, dry seaweed and dung down the streets. Even in the little roadside ditches far away from the sea, near Kobazovaya Hill, the yellow muddy water tossed and foamed like the open sea. And yet, even amid the terrible thunder of the storm, which could be heard far inland, the town in the grip of the bora was still beautiful. Perched on the headland at the foot of the hill, it was like a ship that at any moment might cast off from the shore and together with its inhabitants, its houses, its market, its church, sail away before the howling north-easter on a long dangerous voyage across the foaming waves. And the wailing cry of the siren on the lighthouse seemed like the last blast of the ship's siren as it started out on its adventurous voyage.

But the beauty of this new town on the shore of the Azov Sea impressed me most just before dawn in summer.

Three o'clock in the morning. The port bells have just sounded the hour and their pleasant chimes have died away somewhere on the hill. The garden gate creaks as I push it open. I hook it shut and set off along the railway by the sea-shore.

The coal-black sea, only near the port furrowed with yellow gleams from the signal lights, nestles quietly in the bay. It seems to be asleep too, sighing from time to time as a wave rustles on the beach.

It is so quiet you feel you could melt away into the silence of the sleeping streets. Not a single light in the windows. Street lamps are burning only at the main crossings, casting pools of yellow light on the roadway. Clouds of white, grey and cream-coloured moths hover round the lamps, battering them with their silky wings as if they want to break the hot glass.

Passing from one deserted cross-road to another, you plunge into the darkness of the neat rows of houses, make your way along the acacia avenues, and gradually shake off the last traces of sleep.

The drowsy watchman at the factory gate glances at your pass and nods his head. Your workers' number-disc makes a nice ring as it drops to the bottom of the green box. And you know your disc won't appear in the foundry until after sunrise, when everybody else has arrived at work. The foundry time-keeper will hang it on a nail in a frame covered with wire netting. And every time you run past it on your way to the heater, you will see your number gleaming on the disc and think to yourself with satisfaction: "Another day without being late or missing work!"

During my first weeks at work, the thing that had worried me most was the fear of being late. And this was not because I might be fined or reprimanded by the foreman. It simply made me ashamed to think of walking through the busy foundry, knowing that you were late and that everyone was looking down on you. People would already be at work, there would be finished moulds standing behind the machines,

ready for filling. And the other foundry men would look at you and think: "Here's a fine time to turn up at work, the slacker! Everybody started long ago, but he's been taking life easy on his feather-bed, the lazy good-for-nothing!"

It was even hard to imagine how I could turn up late in front of my mate Naumenko and say to him calmly: "Hullo, Uncle Vasya!" What sort of conscience had a man who could come to work late and then share wages with his mate!

And something else might happen. Suppose you had just dropped your disc into the box after it had been emptied and were dashing across the yard towards the foundry, when suddenly you bumped into Ivan Fyodorovich, the director. "Hullo, Mandzhura!" he says. "Where are you off to in such a hurry? And why are you here when all your mates have been at work for I don't know how long?" What would I say to the director then? "I'm late, Ivan Fyodorovich?" Could I say that to him after our pledge to carry out our duties honestly and well?...

When our shift foreman had warned me that we should be starting work at four instead of at the usual time with all the others, I felt shivers running down my spine. Would I be able to get up so early? Wouldn't I be late?

But my doubts were banished by a reasonable argument. How else can we manage? If you tell the foundry men to start work with the rest, at the sound of the hooter, that'll mean casting will start about midday. The sun will be at its zenith and the midday heat combined with the waves of heat from the molten metal will make the foundry into a blazing hell. No, the director's quite right to arrange a special time-table for the foundry—at least until we've got the roof raised.

Usually I managed to be one of the first to arrive in the foundry. Today, as I came up to the furnace, I heard voices in the semi-darkness of the shed. Naumenko had arrived already. Hot slabs were glowing under our machines. My partner had put them there to warm up the babbitt that had cooled during the night.

The engineer's salty crayfish and strong beer had given me a terrible thirst. I drank from the tap and went to get the shovels. We used to keep them under the foundations of the blast-furnace that the old owner had not had time to build.

Bending down, I slipped into the vaulted tunnel under the blast-furnace and found the two well-rosined shovels. A pair of green eyes gleamed in the darkness and vanished—there were several stray cats living here underground. They kept hidden during the day, only coming out into the foundry in the evening, when the iron had cooled in the moulds and there was no risk of burning their tender paws on drops of molten metal. What they found to eat in our hot shop, I could not understand. There was nothing here to attract mice or rats. Perhaps they lived on the scraps the workers left from their lunches.

It was fine to stride over the soft sand of the foundry at dawn, with a couple of shovels on your shoulder, feeling strong and cheerful and ready to start moulding.

The workers whose voices I had heard when I entered the foundry had gathered round the machines of Kashket and Tiktor. Artem Gladyshev was among them, and my mate Naumenko was there too, tongs in hand.

"They've done it this time, the navvies!"

"No need to insult the navvies! A good navvy wouldn't disgrace himself like that!"

"And it's not the lad's fault. Pupils take after their teachers."

"Kashket was always moaning he hadn't got enough money to buy himself a drink. 'Faster! Faster!' he kept shouting. Well, this is a 'fast one' all right."

At first I did not realize what had happened. But as soon as I glanced at the pile of empty moulds,

everything became clear.

On one of the mould-boxes were chalked the figures "115—605." They indicated the results of the previous day's work. When the castings were inspected, the examiners chalked up the results on the mould-boxes. These figures meant that out of the 605 moulds Kashket and Tiktor had made, only 115 were any use.

I heard someone breathing heavily behind me.

"Enjoying yourself?" said a familiar voice.

I glanced round. It was Tiktor. His collar was unbuttoned, his forelock dangled.

"I'm not such an egoist as you," I said very quietly. "I don't gloat over other people's failures. But it's a pity so much iron has been wasted!"

"All right, buzz off out of here! Don't try to lecture me."

I looked at Tiktor's spiteful, greenish eyes and realized just how low he had sunk.

"Still at your old game, Tiktor?" I said bitterly and turned away.

Those hours before dawn, in the cool of approaching day, when your arms were not tired and there were no beads of sweat on your dusty forehead, were a real delight. One by one the electric lamps would go out as daylight filtered through the glass roof of the foundry.

That morning Naumenko and I worked well. Three rows of moulds with "sausages" in them were soon lined up behind us. Seeing that Naumenko had stopped for a rest, I asked: "How did they manage to turn out such a lot of bad work, Uncle Vasya? I just can't understand it."

"It's not very hard to understand," Naumenko turned at the sound of my voice and rested his foot up on the mixture box. "Every machine and model has a soul of its own, just like a man has. One model may be fussy and need a bit of careful handling, another may have a steadier character and not be afraid of any knocks. You've got to feel it all with your heart. There's some models you have to treat carefully with a warm slab and plenty of dusting. And there's others you can just mould with your eyes shut."

"But the machines are all the same, aren't they?"

"Not on your life! Everything here ought to be mechanized. Even packing and tamping ought to be done with compressed air. That's how it was to start with, when they first installed these machines. But as soon as the Soviets started taking over the factories, the old owners tried to mess everything up. They destroyed the plans, they pulled the compressors to pieces and buried the parts or threw them into the sea. Those foreign engineers and clerks did their dirty work at nights."

"And where was Andrykhevich? Why didn't he look after things?"

Naumenko took a pull at his cigarette.

"Who knows!" he said. "Maybe he was fishing out there on the breakwater, maybe he was swigging whisky with his bourgeois pals. He had everything he could wish for, so he wasn't much concerned about what those wreckers were doing here..."

"Did they always heat up the machines with slabs like we do now, Uncle Vasya?" I asked, feeling my model which was beginning to cool. "It's a lot of trouble."

Naumenko regarded me in astonishment.

"A lot of trouble! Why?"

"But of course it is! As soon as you've done a few moulds, your slab's cold. Then you've got to run all the way across the foundry to the heater..."

"You are a young gent', aren't you? Too lazy to run a few paces? Perhaps you'd like a horse and cart to take you there? All the work in the foundry is based on running about. If you want to take it easy, you'd better ask for a job in the office."

Naumenko's words touched me on the raw, but I did not want to argue with him.

So as not to hold up the moulding, I grabbed the tongs and ran off to the heater.

As I darted across the foundry, I thought to myself: "But you're wrong, Uncle Vasya! What's the sense in all this running about? Where does rationalization come in? If you added up the distance we cover going backwards and forwards to the heaters, you'd be half way to Mariupol!"

Before we had finished our hundred and first mould, Fedorko, the foreman, came up and asked: "Going to knock-off soon, Naumenko?"

"What's up, Alexei Grigorievich?"

"We're going to change you over."

Uncle Vasya stopped moulding.

"What to this time?" he growled, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.

"We're going to give you some rollers to do."

"Rollers? But look here, Alexei Grigorievich, let us stay on 'sausages!' We've only just got into the way of the job and now you want to change us over!"

"It's got to be done," Fedorko said sternly. "The store's chock-full of those sausages of yours, but there's hardly a roller in the place. I put those basher-boys on it, but you can see for yourself what their work's like—enough spoilage to fill a couple of railway trucks! Another performance like that and the assembly shop will be out of work. Can we risk that?"

"I get you," Uncle Vasya said, "but. . ."

"What are you 'butting' about, Uncle Vasya?" Gladyshev shouted from behind his machine. "It's a fine change! You need half a furnace of iron to cast those sausages of yours, but you can fill up a roller-mould in a couple of ticks!"

Two navvies brought some spare slabs in from the tool shop and dropped them on the dry sand, where the few empty mould-boxes we had left were piled. Whenever I went to the moulding floor to set the lower half of a mould, I took a look at the new model. It seemed very simple. Six rollers like the ones that turn the sails of a reaper were soldered to the smooth babbitt slab. On each of the rollers there was a small nipple to hold the core. And the top was even more simple. There was a nest of six little thimbles for the cores, and several small channels—like the veins on a maple-leaf—for pouring the metal into each mould.

"How could anyone make a mess of such a simple casting?" I wondered as I set my moulds.

Lunch-time was near. Turunda and Gladyshev had finished their moulds and started casting. It was too hot to do any more moulding. The heat from the filled moulds near by was scorching. There was a clang on the furnace bell and the daily distribution of metal began.

"Stop moulding!" Naumenko commanded. "Let's go to the furnace."

We did our casting to the sound of the furnace bell, which was rung every time the furnace was tapped.

Between one gong and the next there was just time to carry the heavy ladle of molten metal to the machines 'and fill the moulds.

How glad we were when the iron at last rose to the top of the mould and the round hole of the

pouring gate filled up and turned red! It was good to know that all our moulds were properly damped, and would fill up well, without spluttering hot, stinging drops of metal all round. Burbling softly inside the mould, the metal gradually filled every cranny in the mould and grew thick and firm in its cold sandy prison.

Scarcely had we tipped away the brownish slag into the sand when the furnace bell rang again calling the foundry men to refill their ladles. Then we would go back to where the teemers, in dark glasses, with their hats pulled down over their foreheads, and their tapping bars at the ready, were bustling about round the roaring furnaces. We went back at a run. Uncle Vasya would hop along like a youngster, quite forgetting his age.

I liked this risky work, the race against the other moulders across the soft sand of the shop, and the careful return with a heavy ladle of molten metal.

The air was thick with fumes. My throat felt dry from the smell of sulphur. The glare of flying sparks made the few electric lamps that were still burning in the foundry almost invisible.

Close by, behind the unfinished blast-furnace, a round pot-bellied furnace for melting copper was roaring—we used to call it the "pear," because of its shape. Now and then we felt the acrid smell of molten copper. Caught up in the general excitement, however, I noticed neither the heat nor the fumes, which increased as the casting went on.

The sweating faces of the moulders gleamed dark brown in the light of the flames.

I stood by the furnace spout, down which a yellowish stream of iron poured into our ladle, glancing at Uncle Vasya's grim attentive face, and I realized yet again that I had chosen the right job.

The little glowing splashes of molten iron flew over my head cooling in their flight, but I no longer tried to dodge them as I had once; perhaps my face quivered a bit, but I kept a firm hold on the metal ring of the handle.

In our marches across the foundry with a ladle full of molten metal there was a kind of valour, there was risk, there was cheerful daring. As we carried the heavy ladles back and forth, tired and dripping with salty sweat, but proud of ourselves and our work, I felt unbelievably.

Not until the casting was nearly over did I notice Sasha Bobir with an adjustable spanner in his hand, and another fitter tinkering about round our machines, adjusting the new 'models for the next day's casting. Apparently Sasha had been watching us filling the moulds for some time, and when I put the ladle down on the sand and came over to the machines, he asked sympathetically:

"Feeling whacked, Vasil?"

In Bobir's voice I sensed an acknowledgement that he considered the work of foundry man higher than his own job as a mechanic. . .

"Whacked! What makes you think that? Just an ordinary day’s work!" I answered quietly, rubbing my eyes.

"Where were you so late last night?" Now Sasha s voice was searching and curious.

"Where I had to be! Mind you get that slab fitted straight and screw the bolts up tight."

"Don't worry we know what we're doing!" Sasha grunted, and setting his feet against the mixture-box, tugged wildly at the spanner handle.

"Come and smear the moulds, lad!" Naumenko called.

He had already brought in a box of iron moulds from the stores. I got a tin of graphite grease and sat down with my partner on the sand.

It was so hot and stuffy that the grease which had been firm in the morning was now like thin

porridge. I felt muzzy. The sweat dripped off us even at this easy job of dipping our fingers into the grease and smearing the inside of each mould.

"Know what this is for?" Naumenko asked. "To make the moulds slip easily on the rollers?" "That's right. And the other reason is to make them slip off easily with the sand."

"Do they stay in the mould-box then?" "What did you think? When the iron cools in moulds like these, it gets a smooth hard surface and you can use it straightaway, without grinding."

"Neat idea!" I said and remembered that I had often seen a drop of liquid iron fall on a smooth metal slab and become quite smooth when it got cool.

Kashket's red kerchief showed up for a moment behind the smoking moulds. He was strolling down the alley nibbling sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells.

Today he had drifted into the foundry later than anyone. As soon as he saw the examiner's notice, he raised a terrible howl, ran to the foreman, took him into the yard where defective castings were usually dumped, threatened to complain to the disputes commission and denied emphatically that the spoilage was his fault. Since then he had been wandering about the shop doing nothing.

Noticing us at our box of moulds, Kashket swung round sharply. For a moment he posed before us in his red kerchief, munching sunflower seeds, then he asked: "Getting ready beforehand?"

The question seemed rather pointless and Uncle Vasya did not answer. He went on silently smearing the moulds with graphite.

"Out to earn more than anyone else? Want to buy yourself a house and garden?" 'Kashket taunted.

"I'm out to help the working class, not fill the scrapyard like you!" Naumenko cut him short, reaching for a mould,

"I wonder what tune you'll sing the day after tomorrow when they give you a write-up like I got today?"

"Wonder as much as you like, but don't chuck your sunflower shells down here. They get in the sand!" Uncle Vasya said angrily.

"The sifters will look after that, don't worry!" said Kashket and spat a shell neatly at our feet.

"Little stuff like that won't come out in sifting. It'll get in the mould and there'll be a flaw... Stop making a mess, I say!" Uncle Vasya snapped, quite fiercely this time.

"All right, old pal, keep your hair on," said Kashket soothingly and put the seeds in his pocket.

Squatting beside me, he picked up a mould and started smearing it with grease. His breath reeked of vodka.

"But if you reason the thing out calmly, Uncle Vasya, you'll see you're only wasting your time with what you're doing now," Kashket lisped, rubbing his finger round the mould.

"What do you mean?" Naumenko asked with a stern look at Kashket.

"However much you grease the things, it won't do any good. The model's badly constructed, and that's why the castings are bad. It's high time they made new ones instead of blaming the workers for spoilage!"

"You brought that on yourself," Naumenko replied. "You jaw a lot, but you don't know how to mould."

"We'll see how much you and your Komsomol pal turn out," Kashket said, getting up and hoisting his trousers.

"You'd better push off out of here and leave others to do the watching, you half-baked tiddler. I've had enough of you dancing around in front of me like a devil in church!"

And although Naumenko spoke as though he attached no importance to Kashket's words, I realized that Kashket had got under his skin. I could see that Naumenko would give his ears to turn out those rollers well.

"Perhaps the model really isn't constructed right, Uncle Vasya?" I said.

"You listen to that scatter-brain a bit longer!" Naumenko burst out. "He'll tell you plenty more yarns like that.. . Do you think you can believe a single word he says!"

. . . The next day we buckled into the work and went ahead even faster. Before lunch we had packed eighty-seven moulds. I wanted to slip out to see Golovatsky after lunch, but Uncle Vasya gave me the job of sharpening up the cores with a rasp. As I sharpened the cores for our last lot of moulds, I reflected that moulding these rollers had turned out to be the easiest job I had ever done. But what the castings would be like, we still did not know. We should know that only on Monday, when the moulds were opened.

Today was Saturday.

When we knocked off, one hundred and five glowing moulds stood on the moulding floor.