The Town By The Sea

LETTERS TO FRIENDS

''You can cackle away, I'm off to write a letter to the chaps!" I said to Petka and Sasha, having listened patiently to all their jokes about my evening out.

I still had not told them where I had been the day before yesterday. From the ruthless interrogation they had given me it appeared that they intended to keep me under perpetual surveillance in case I "broke away from the collective." Comrade-like, they were afraid I might be going to the bad, and they kept dropping hints to find out what I had been doing. But I could not confess. If I so much as mentioned the crayfish supper at the engineer's, they would be down on me like a ton of bricks. Yet hadn't I defended our honour against the engineer? Of course I had!

Leaving my friends in the attic, I changed into slippers and put my foundry boots out in the goat's shed till Monday.

By the fence in our yard stood a little rickety summer-house overgrown with grapes. Inside there was a small table.

The shady summer-house was a fine place to write letters. A light breeze blew from the sea, rustling the pages of my exercise-book.

To start with I wrote some postcards: to Furman at the October Revolution Works in Lugansk, to Monus Guzarchik in Kharkov, and, of course, to Galya Kushnir in Odessa. All the morning I had been thinking what to write to her. The snub she had given me by taking Tiktor's side in the Francis Joseph affair now seemed quite trivial.

Forgetting all the sharp words that had passed between us, I thought only of the fond, gentle things. Suddenly I found myself comparing Galya to Angelika, with all her superstitions, her icon-lamp, her sad fairy, and her craze for the Charleston.

"Of course Galya is a thousand times more genuine and sincere!" I thought. And I carefully wrote at the end of the postcard:

". . . And if this postcard reaches you, Galya, try and find time to write to me. Tell me how you're getting on, how you like the work and Odessa, tell me about everything. And remember our walks round the Old Fortress and all the good things that happened to us. Petka and Sasha Bobir send you their warmest 'Komsomol greetings. We're living together in a little house right by the Azov Sea.

"Komsomol greetings,

"Vasily Mandzhura."

I could not be sure that my postcards would reach my friends. When we parted, we had only noted down the names of the factories where we were going to work. And at those factories there were thousands of other workers!

To Nikita Kolomeyets I decided to write a long, detailed letter. His address was engraved in my memory for life:

"Factory-Training School, Hospital Square, nr. Motor Works." I wrote the address carefully on the envelope and put a pebble on it to stop it blowing away. As soon as I opened the exercise-book, however, I realized that someone had been using it. Two pages had been torn out of the middle, and the first page was scrawled with Sasha's familiar handwriting. I read what was written there and could not help smiling.

"To the Chief of the Town Security Department.

"I have a very good memory. If I see a person once, I never forget him. The reason why I am telling you all this, Comrade Chief, is that you..."

At this point Sasha's letter broke off. The word "you" followed the deleted phrase: "won't laugh at me, like my friends.".

Again I remembered the day of our arrival, and how the agitated Sasha had tried to prove that he had seen Pecheritsa by a refreshment kiosk. I hadn't forgotten Sasha's wrathful shout, when Petka suggested that he might have been seeing a ghost.

Folding the scribbled page, I put it in the pocket of my blouse and started composing my letter to Nikita. It turned out to be a very long one. This was not so much my fault as Nikita's.

The evening before we parted, Nikita had said: "I'll only ask you for one thing, old chap—the more details the better. Everyone's life consists of thousands of little details, and only the man who finds out what they're all about and the right way to deal with them can be called a real man. So tell me all the instructive details you notice at your new place of work, Vasil, old chap. And I'll try to find out what they're all about and make use of them on the next course."

Now I was giving Nikita his instructive details "at full blast," as the stokers say. I told him everything: how Tiktor had turned away from us, how we had been afraid at first that we should be lodging with a big house-owner, how Sasha had "seen" Pecheritsa by a refreshment kiosk. Zuzya Trituzny, the footballer with the cannon-ball shot, who had nearly spoilt our chances of getting a job, I described in sizzling terms. I told Nikita that in my spare time I was thinking of a new way of heating the machines. I gave him a very detailed description of my visit to Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya's dancing-class. And so that Nikita should not tell me off for going to dances (you never knew what ideas he might get into his head!) I explained my reason for visiting the establishment: ". . . to see for myself if this Rogale-Piontkovskaya was a relative of that old Countess in Zarechye who gave Petlura and Konovalets riflemen such a welcome."

I asked Nikita to find out more about what had become of the Countess and her aristocratic brother.

Then followed a very favourable description of our director Ivan Fyodorovich Rudenko, who had been so decent to us. I told Nikita about Ivan Fyodorovich's concern for the workers, how he wanted to raise the foundry roof and how he was trying to puzzle out himself the technical secrets that the former owners had taken away with them.

It was getting dark and I had to finish, but my pen went on writing and writing.

I continued my letter with a piece of information that seemed to me most important:

"... Tell Kozakevich to make his new pupils in the foundry cut their sleeves short at the elbow. We had so much spoilage because of those long sleeves, and no one ever noticed it. I only got to know the dodge when I came here. And it's quite simple really. When a trainee is working on a mould he catches his cuffs in the sand. While he's patching up one place, he makes a mess in others. And the result is all sorts of cracks and bumps. It's much easier and quicker to mould with your sleeves short. Get Zhora to tell the foundry trainees all about metal moulds and what they're for. In fact, the best thing would be if he did a casting or two with an iron mould, just as an example. It would help them a lot. Then they won't feel like me, for instance, who'd never seen an iron mould till I came here. . ."

The sun was already dipping into the sea. A warm milky' twilight crept over the tired, sun-baked earth. But still I wrote. My arm ached, even more than from moulding.