The Town By The Sea

EVERYTHING IS FOR THE BEST

What a success we'd had with those rollers for nearly a whole week! Out of about six hundred we had spoiled only six or seven. We could stand that. It was an allowable percentage of waste considering the speed of our' work. We were turning out far more rollers than anyone else, and all because Uncle Vasya did not spare the trouble to grease the moulds and sharpen the cores beforehand. According to

him it was better to spend an extra half hour in the heat and dust by the glowing moulds, and prepare everything for the next day, than to bother about getting things ready in the early morning, when you wanted to work up a good speed on the job.

The day my period of probation ended Uncle Vasya did not turn up for work. I could not make out why he was late. Nearly all the workers were at their machines. Some were spreading fresh sand, others were warming up their models, yet others were preparing their moulding floor, smoothing the dry sand to make it easier to set the moulds later on. Unexpectedly the foreman appeared.

"I'm giving you another mate today, Mandzhura. Your Naumenko has asked for two days off. He's got to take his wife to Mariupol for an operation."

A few minutes later, who should turn up at the machines but—Kashket! He was carrying his own tamper.

Kashket swaggered up to Uncle Vasya's machine and tested the frame to see that it was tight. Then he lit a cigarette. I looked at him and thought: "What a partner! I'd rather catch a stray cat under the blast-furnace and put it on the machine. At least a cat would do less harm..." True, after his fantastic record spoilage Kashket had become more careful, but though he made a great show of shouting and running about, to impress people, we had been beating him and Tiktor by a good forty moulds every day.

Turunda saw the mate I had been given and shook his head, as if telling me to refuse.

But how could I refuse? If I had been working here for a year or two, it would have been different; I could have objected and asked for someone else. But I was raw on the job. Besides, perhaps the foreman had separated Kashket and Tiktor on purpose.

"Why is the model badly heated?" Kashket asked pompously.

"Get some slabs and warm it up to your liking."

"You're younger—you go for them!" Kashket lisped.

"Do your own work!" I flung out, and hearing the bell for work to begin, I started packing sand into a mould.

Kashket dithered about, then picked up the tongs and went off to the heater.

By the time he came back I had two lower halves ready. I had inserted the cores myself and cleared a space for fresh moulds. Somehow or other we managed to finish ten moulds. Then Kashket began to tire. He went off for a smoke by the furnace and got stuck there gossiping with the furnace men.

I lost my temper. Finishing off my last mould for my partner, I ran over to the furnace.

"Look here, when are you..." I began, topping Kashket on the shoulder.

"That was last year," he said, thinking that I was asking about his story.

"I'm asking you when you're going to stop jawing and do some work?" I shouted in his face.

"Am I interfering with you?" Kashket answered calmly and turned his back on me to continue his story.

"Yes, you are!" I bawled in his ear.

"Interfering with you?"

"Not me personally, but the whole works. The working class! Everybody!" I shouted furiously.

Kashket seemed to cower back for a moment.

"Drop in and see me, Arkhip, I'll tell you the rest there," he said to the furnace man, tossing his cigarette away. "You see what a wild cat they've put on me. . . one of those Komsomolites..."

I said nothing and strode back to the machines. I could hear Kashket padding along behind me and I thought to myself: "We'll see who's been put on whom, you Makhno scum! I can do without you!"

When he got back, Kashket fiddled around, rattled the lever of his machine and, to do him justice, put in thirty minutes' real hard work. Luka and Artem goggled at the sight of Kashket, the lounger, working at such speed. They had not heard our argument at the furnace. I decided to let the matter drop altogether.

But 'Kashket was of a different opinion. Presently he started again.

"Just what am I doing that interferes with the working class?" he lisped.

Without a second thought, I answered: "Millions of peasants are waiting for our reaping machines and you are holding up the programme. The working class is trying to raise its productivity and you just play the fool. Looks as if you're for them, not for us."

"I'm one of the working class myself! What are you babbling about. Who do you mean—them?"

"I mean the Whiteguards and the capitalists, all that scum which you helped in 1919!"

"Me? ... Helped them? ... Oh no, Lad. That's a silly thing to say!"

He suddenly quietened down and became very meek. He even started going for slabs out of turn. As I watched him slink away to the distant heater, I wondered whether I had acted right. Kashket was a lot older than me, and he had been in the foundry for a long time—was I going too far?

As though guessing my doubts, Turunda called over to me: "That's right, Vasil! You took the right line with him! Where does he think he is—in a nursing home? There's a limit to what we can put up with."

"He ought to have got the boot long ago!" Gladyshev added. "Pity Fedorko's so soft-hearted! Go and put it to him at lunch-time. Tell him he'd better get rid of that slacker and leave you to mould alone until Naumenko comes back."

The older workers' sympathy encouraged me. But I decided not to follow Gladyshev's advice. "I'll stick out these two days somehow with Kashket," I thought, "then my partner will come back and everything will be all right."

It was not long, however, before I regretted my decision. My turn came to go for slabs. When I returned— again the mould was unfinished and Kashket was chatting calmly to the furnace man: "... I come in to Trituzny's office to get signed up and he asks me: 'Where've you been working for the last five years, Comrade Entuta? Why haven't you got a reference from your last place of work?' So I comes back at him: 'Comrade Trituzny! I got that scared of General Wrangel in 1920 it's taken me five years to get back into a fit state for work!' That made old Zuzya sit up. 'Five years!' he gasps. 'What a nervous breakdown!' "

This time Turunda darted up to Kashket, with a pair of tongs in his hand.

"Have we got to send you a special invitation before you'll get to your machine?" Luka said.

"But the slabs were cold!" Kashket exclaimed innocently.

"Your brain's gone cold, not the slabs!" Luka snapped as Kashket slouched back to his machine.

"You in a hurry? Got a train to catch?" Kashket sneered, resuming his work.

"Yes, I am!" Turunda shouted, driving his shovel into the hot sand. "And we're fed up with all this ballyhoo! If you're too lazy to work, get to hell out of here..."

"That's it! That's the way!" Gladyshev murmured, nodding approvingly.

Seeing that he had no support, Kashket grunted: "Cor', aren't you strict!" and went back to work.

I couldn't make out what was in the fellow's mind. Either he had always been such a lazy clown, or if I were to believe Volodya the cabman, he had been keeping an eye on the steppe, hoping to see Makhno's machine-gun carts appear over the horizon.

Kashket suddenly broke into a song:

On Monday I woke from a drinking bout,

And all I had spent I did sore regret.

'Twas not for the money I'd lost that I sighed,

But my wife's black shawl she left when she died...

"Kashket showing off his repertoire," Gladyshev remarked.

"Well, isn't it as good as Chaliapin?" Kashket said, striking an artistic pose.

"The lower mould's packed, Chaliapin, but I can't see the top anywhere!" I shouted.

"I wish I'd never seen you!" Kashket groaned, but started packing his mould.

As he fussed round his machine, he still could not keep quiet.

"There's a song about you. . ."

"What song?"

"Listen... "

And in a lisping vodka-sodden voice he sang:

There was a young man of Podol With a voice like sawing coal...

"You're from Podol, aren't you?"

"Your geography's no good!" I said curtly. "Podol is a suburb of Kiev. I was born in the Podolia Province."

Kashket made no reply. Fighting his hang-over, he tried desperately to keep up, but I could see that we should not do anything like as much as Naumenko and I usually did before lunch.

The sand had been watered too liberally the night before. It was steaming like a cracked dunghill in spring, and was not fit for moulding. We needed some dry sand to mix with it.

Near by there was a heap of dry, coarse sand. So as not to hold up the moulding, I ran over to the heap and started throwing sand on to our side.

"Hey, you madman!" Kashket shouted and I felt him grab my elbows from behind.

But he was too late. The shovel plunged into the sand, meeting an unexpected obstacle in its path. There was a crunch as if the shovel had smashed an electric bulb.

"Who asked you to poke your nose in here, you interfering devil!" my partner bawled in despair.

He flopped down on his knees and burrowed in the sand with trembling hands.

"Are you scatty, or what?" I asked uncomprehendingly.

"I'll give you 'scatty!' I'll fix you ... I had a dram buried here and you've bust it."

Kashket lifted a handful of sand to his nose and smelt it greedily. His hands were trembling. The reek of vodka told me that there really had been a bottle concealed in the heap.

"Let's get on with the moulding!" I said.

"What'll I have to sober me up at dinner-time?"

"Get those frames clear! There are two bottoms ready and waiting for you."

Surly and frowning, he started moulding again. But the loss of the dram seemed to worry him more than anything else in the world.

"What the hell made you go over there?"

"What the hell made you bring vodka into the foundry?"

"You're a real plague, you are! No wonder Tiktor was saying what a darned nuisance you make of yourself everywhere!"

"Yes, I am a nuisance to those who swindle the Soviet state. I have always been that kind of nuisance, and I always will be. And I don't care two pins whether you and Tiktor like it or not. I'm not going to kow-tow to you. If you don't like the way things are done at a Soviet factory, you'd better get out before we ask you to ourselves."

'Kashket did disappear after lunch. He must have gone to ask for a medical certificate, or for time-off. Presently Fedorko ran into the foundry and shouted to me:

"I've let your partner off for the rest of the day. Do the moulding by yourself. Turunda will help you to cast."

After all that wrangling with Kashket, it was a pleasure to work alone. When I had moulded a pair of lower halves, I would put the cores in, then run over to the other machine and do the tops.

I was glad of this spell on my own for another reason. As I ran back from the heater gripping the glowing slabs with my tongs, a happy thought occurred to me.

While I went on with my moulding, I turned the idea ever in my mind. "Suppose the pipes that supplied compressed air to the machines carried hot air instead of cold? Suppose we heated it beforehand? Then the compressed air system would heat the models at the same time. The system could have taps and hoses. If you wanted air for cleaning your model, all you'd have to do would be to turn the tap on and the hot air would blow the unnecessary sand away. And the rest of the time it would be used for heating. It would be so easy to arrange! All you had to do was block up the slots under the model, make a passage for the hot air to circulate, and the model would be hot all the time. And we should gain such a lot by it! The moulders would no longer have to leave their machines and run to the heaters. They wouldn't catch cold running out into the yard when they were sweating, specially during the winter. Moulding would go on much more steadily. And what a lot of coke we should save the state if we got rid of the heaters for good!"

, Happy with my thoughts, and moulding as hard as I could go, I did not see Fedorko come up to the machine. He stood just behind me, watching how I moulded. I noticed the foreman only when he asked Turunda loudly, "Well, Luka, what do you think of your neighbour?" and nodded at me.

Turunda put down his tamper and wiped the sweat off his face.

"I think he'll do, Alexei Grigorievich. He tries hard and he's caught on quickly."

"All right, Mandzhura," said Fedorko with impressive slowness. "Your term of probation is over. When you knock off, call in at the office and they'll give you a pay-book. I'll put you in the fifth grade. Then we'll see. . . Does that suit you?"

"Fine, Alexei Grigorievich. Thanks a lot!" And I gripped the foreman's hand.

... Many of the men had knocked off already, but to fill in the time while Luka and Gladyshev finished casting.

I still went on moulding. A great cloud of steam hung over one of the furnaces which was empty.

The furnace men had knocked the bottom out of it and the half-burnt coke, coated with iron and sticky slag, like nuts in sugar, had poured out into the deep pit. The fiery mess had been sprayed and was hissing quietly as it cooled, turning from purple to a dark crimson, and finally black.

Near by, amid the steam, another furnace was belching iron. Sparks flew up as it poured into the ladles. The smoke mingled with the steam and the foundry was stuffy as a bath-house. But although Turunda and I were last to fill our moulds, I had never worked more easily than now, right at the end of the working day. The calm and rather solemn words of the foreman were still ringing in my ears. They meant that at last I was a real foundry man.

I walked home through the sun-drenched streets. I was dirty from head to foot and my face was stained with sweat, but I kept proudly to the middle of the road, for in the side pocket of my jacket there was a new pay-book stamped with my worker's number. On the front page a firm, neat hand had written that Vasily Mironovich Mandzhura was in the fifth grade. I wanted to show the book to everyone I met, although I knew my appearance alone was enough to tell them without any documents that I belonged to the great army of the working class.

After the broiling foundry, I hardly noticed the heat of the streets. I was still trying to think out my plan for heating the machines. But now that I had left the foundry, my thoughts were rambling and it was hard to put them into shape. "Never mind, the main idea's settled, the details will come later," I thought.

At the corner I was overtaken by Angelika.

"Hullo, Vasil!" she said panting. "What a hurry you're in!"

"Hullo," I grunted. "I'm in a hurry because I'm dirty. I want to wash."

"Are you angry with me?"

"What gave you that idea?"

"Why do you never come round and see me?"

"I haven't had time."

"But I left you a note. And spoke to your friends. Didn't they give you my message?"

"They did." I said grimly, trying to be as stern as I could with Lika. I was thinking: "It would have been better if you hadn't come. The chaps are giving me enough trouble as it is with their jokes about wedding rings. I can't even look out of the window without them grinning all over their faces!"

Somewhere or other Sasha had found a bunch of orange blossom that people wear at weddings, and while I had been washing at the well one day, had stuck it in my button-hole. Luckily I had noticed it in time, or I should have looked a proper fool when I went into town.

After a pause, Lika said: "But it's rude, you know. I make the first move. I call on you—a thing I've never done with anyone before—and you... It would have been only politeness!"

"Look here, Lika," I said, bracing myself, "I'm afraid I'm not the sort to suit you and your politeness."

"Am I really so hopeless? An unprincipled creature with petty-bourgeois tendencies? Is that how I must take it?"

I realized that Lika wanted to talk frankly. But I did not feel like a heart-to-heart talk and avoided the challenge.

"Take it how you like... you know best."

"My greatest misfortune, Vasil, is that I can't be angry with you."

"You'll manage it one day," I said indifferently.

"It'll be very hard," Lika said slowly. "And I was thinking..."

"What?"

"... that at last I'd found someone who would put me on the right path..."

We were nearing my gate. After the day's work in the foundry I could not make myself fit in with Angelika's mood.

I cut her short: "Why don't you ask Zuzya. He's got a kick like a cannon-ball, land he can do the Charleston, and he knows all about politeness. There's the man for you! So long!"

I waved a work-hardened hand in her direction and pushed the gate...

The first response to my postcards came from Monus Guzarchik. There was nothing surprising about that; Kharkov was only a night's journey away. Monus wrote:

"... I was very happy to receive your postcard. All our petty squabbles are forgotten and I have only good memories of our days together. Your not wanting to accept me for the Komsomol because of that spree in the restaurant doesn't worry me at all now. I shall become a Komsomol member all the same! I am now working at the Kharkov Locomotive Works. Do you know how many workers we have here? You'd never believe it! Over ten thousand! Compared with the Kharkov Locomotive Works, our Motor Factory is a village smithy...

"I was very surprised to read that you had 'a bit of a fight' before they took you on at the Lieutenant Schmidt Works. I had no trouble at all. I just showed them my papers and they put me straight in the diesel shop. It was here that I first saw how the huge machines for generating electricity—diesels—are assembled. You just can't picture what a giant a diesel is, Vasil! The little motor that we had at school to drive the lathes and circular saw is a toadstool compared with our power unit. I can tell you quite frankly that I find the work extremely interesting and am very satisfied with it. Every time I write the word 'satisfy' I remember our school and Bobir, who used to write it 'tasify.' How's he getting on by the sea? Give him my best wishes.

"I was put into a six-man team straightaway. The works is a long way from where I live—about nine kilometres, but I hardly notice the distance. In fact, I rather like it. It's nice to ride through the capital in a tram, looking out of the windows. I arrive at work early and get my tools ready. The foreman praised me once. 'It's not long since Monus was at a factory-training school,' he said, 'but he tries as hard as our people.' The men in my team are a good crowd, most of them old fellows. One of them tried to take the rise out of me and sent me to the tool department for a 'bigmo.' I went there and started demanding a 'bigmo,' and afterwards it turns out that there isn't such a thing. They had a good laugh at me for that.

"In the diesel department there are quite a few workers who actually took part in the Revolution. Besides establishing Soviet power in the Ukraine, some of them even took part in the May strike of 1902 and fought the police in 1905. Real proletariat! They've told me quite a lot about the Kharkov workers' fight against tsarism. Yesterday, when we'd finished work, I came out of the shop with a fitter who must

be about sixty. The tram was full up, so he suggested we should walk as far as the centre. I wasn't a bit sorry I agreed. The old chap told me how they prepared the Kharkov uprising and how the delegates from the Central Committee came down from St. Petersburg. When we got to Rosa Luxemburg Square, near the university, he showed me where the revolutionary headquarters were, where the ammunition was stored, where the first shots were exchanged with the police, and where the workers put up a barricade.

"Customs are different here from those in our town. Do you remember how even non-Party members used to get told off at our meetings for wearing ties? Here things are quite different. The young workers at my works, specially in the diesel department, think nothing of dressing well. 'Ties don't matter,' they say, 'it's what a man's got inside him that matters.' The chaps wash after work and change into clean clothes before going home. That's the right way of looking at things! It's much better than the kind of thing you meet with sometimes—a fellow wants to show he's a worker, so he gets into a tram in a greasy old set of overalls and smudges everybody's clothes.

"There is a big Komsomol organization in the diesel department. For the time being I'm a visitor.

When I told the secretary why you hadn't accepted me, he laughed and said: 'Yes, you might have gone right off the rails!' And he advised me to put in an application for membership as soon as possible. How's that, Vasil!

"Well, I must close now. If the other chaps write to you, Vasil, send me their full addresses as soon as you can. Give Maremukha and Bobir my very best wishes."

I read the letter standing, even before I had changed my clothes. In spite of Monus's sly digs about our former relations, I began to forget the day's troubles—my scrap with Kashket and the rather rude way I had spoken to Angelika.

As I shook the sand out of my boots, I reflected that it would not be a bad idea to introduce Kharkov ways at our foundry. What was the sense in walking all the way through town in a dirty, scorched set of overalls, when you could wash and change at the works, like the men on the case-hardening furnace!

I remembered the spring evening when we had been strolling through the streets of our home town, munching sunflower seeds and nuts, and Furman and Guzarchik had run up to tell us our passes to the factories of the Ukraine had arrived. It was such a short time ago, and yet how much had happened in our lives since that Saturday evening, and how confident and grown-up we all felt now.

"Dear old home town," I thought, splashing about like a duck beside the well. "Shall I ever see you again? Shall I ever walk down the boulevards again listening to the rustle of the leaves? Shall I climb up on to the battlemented wall of the Old Fortress and gaze down on the broad lands of my Podolia, on the foaming spring waters of the Smotrich? We have scattered over the Ukraine to take up new lives. I wonder if we shall ever come together again on the steep cliffs of our old town and march together, with songs and torches, through the dark forests to the swift-flowing Dniester."