The Town By The Sea

A DISCOVERY

The weather was getting hotter and hotter. Except for an occasional storm, there was no wind. But the stifling, sultry days could not stop us from carrying out our plans. Our success in making the five reapers for the youth commune seemed to spur us on.

At first we thought that the chief engineer would at least condescend to read the second issue of our wall newspaper, particularly the article by Zakabluk. But not a bit of it! When Andrykhevich came into the foundry, he never so much as glanced at the newspaper.

But we went on thinking about the future of the foundry and, supported by the Party organization, appealed to the young workers of the foundry to do a voluntary job on Sunday.

As Petka, Sasha, and I walked to work on the following Sunday, I thought over all that had happened in the past few days: the long searches for spare parts and models to fit the twelve new machines that we were planning to install in the foundry; the drawings we had made of the new row (we had decided in advance to call it "'Komsomol Row"); the distribution of key jobs among our most active members; the furious wrangling in the chief engineer's office, where our project had been condemned on all sides; and finally, my first report to the foundry Party committee.

At first I had tried to get out of making the report. As Komsomol secretary and an ex-foundry worker, Golovatsky seemed to be the best man to explain our idea. But Golovatsky would not hear of such a thing.

"Don't be shy, Vasil," he said. "The idea started in the foundry, didn't it? It's you who ought to tell the Party organization about it."

Our young draftsmen managed to produce several copies of the project for the future "Komsomol Row" in time for the meeting, and before I started making my report I handed them out to the members of the committee.

While I was speaking, Flegontov studied the drawing intently and kept looking up to glance through the dusty office windows into the foundry.

By one of the smoke-stained walls there were several piles of dry, unused sand, "old regime" sand, as we called it. Under this sand lay the concrete bases for the moulding machines, which the world war had

prevented the old owner from installing. In those days, the works had stopped making reapers, some of the workers had been called into the army, and the moulders who remained behind were all put on one job—the casting of hand-grenades. The works turned out hundreds of thousands of those little pineapple-shaped missiles. The moulding was done fast and no one objected to the workers' throwing away scrap, cinder, burnt sand, and all sorts of rubbish on to the unfinished furnace. It was this foundry rubbish dump that we had decided to get rid of.

"It's a first-class idea, Komsomols!" said Flegontov. "And you've worked it all out properly. Twelve new machines—that will mean hundreds of reapers above plan! It'll mean jobs for the workers who are still waiting their turn at the labour exchange..."

We parted at the plant gates. Petka went to the joiners' shop, Sasha disappeared into the store, where his mates were fitting out the new machines, and I went off to my "sand brigade."

The first thing I noticed in the foundry was Tiktor's broad back. Yasha was standing by his machine pulling off his blue blouse.

"So you've come!" I thought with a thrill of pleasure.

On Flegontov's advice and carrying out a promise I had given Golovatsky, I had gone over to Tiktor after work on Saturday and said: "We're doing some voluntary work tomorrow, Yasha. Feel like coming along?"

"I've heard about it!..." Tiktor had grunted without looking at me, and had gone on piling his empty mould-boxes.

From such an answer I had been unable to tell whether he would come or not, and now I was very glad to see him.

When we began to hand out spare shovels to chaps from the other shops, Tiktor strode up to me in his singlet and said gruffly: "Well, where's my job?"

"Take your choice," I suggested. "Either you can stay here and clear the moulding floor, or you can carry sand. Or perhaps you'd rather sift it over on the other side?"

"I'll stay here," Tiktor decided. "Let's get hold of a shovel."

"You'd better put a cap on," I advised, glancing at his flowing hair. "You'll never wash the dust out, if you don't."

"Who cares!" Tiktor said with an obstinate shake of his head.

A few minutes later he was one of the first to plunge his gleaming shovel into the dry, caked sand.

Soon there was such a dust in the place that we seemed to see each other through a fog. The shovels soon grew blunt from grinding on the iron cinder and broken mould-boxes buried in the sand.

Every time my shovel screeched, I thought to myself: "That's another chunk of metal for the sieves. The chaps will sift it out of the sand and it'll go into the furnace with all the other chunks, and then it'll come back here for casting in a big glaring ladle. . ."

Before I came here I had never realized the value of metal to the country. But after our talk with the works director I had begun to see things from another angle. And a few days ago we had re-read Comrade Stalin's report to the Fourteenth Party Congress, in which he had spoken of the shortage of metal. "Under these conditions, our economy and our industry in particular, cannot make further progress," Comrade Stalin had said, advising us to pay special attention to metal. Those words had made a deep impression on me, and now, as I cleared the sand, I felt overjoyed at every piece of metal we found.

The things we found in that dump! Broken shovel handles that might have been used before the

Revolution, half-finished grenades that brought back memories of the time when the troops of the south-west front moved through our town to Lvov armed with grenades of the same type. Our shovels unearthed newspapers in old-fashioned pre-revolutionary type, twisted iron watering cans for sprinkling the moulds, gear-wheels, even cartridge-oases green with age.

We put it all on stretchers and carried it out into the yard.

Soon Yasha pulled off even his blue singlet. The other chaps followed his example. Their bare sweating bodies gleamed in the light of the electric lamps. All of us were glancing at Tiktor. It was a pleasure merely to know that he wasn't spending his clay-off at a cafe table with cronies like the lisping Kashket. "We must fight for every lad we've got, and make him ours for always, not chuck him away to our enemies!" I remembered Golovatsky's words. And I realized that I had been wrong about Tiktor and that Tolya had been right.

"But why can't we fight for Angelika then?" I thought. "Her father's a bourgeois through and through, and doesn't like us. That's a fact. But surely she may turn out better than her parents!" But the way Golovatsky had called her a "conceited young hussy" suggested that he had washed his hands off her entirely. "No, Tolya, old pal, you've made a mistake here somewhere," I thought, and plunged my shovel even harder into the sand.

I had another reason for being in a good mood. The day before I had received a postcard from Galya that Nikita had sent on to me. Apparently my card had never reached her.

The factory to which Galya had been sent had been full up, but the steelworkers' trade union had helped her to get a job as a turner in a shipyard engineering shop. Judging by the tone of the postcard, Galya was very pleased with her job. "If you take a trip through Odessa when you go on holiday next year, don't forget that your old and true friend lives here," she wrote. "Be sure to look me up. And in the meantime, don't forget to write 111"

The three exclamation marks at the end of the postcard, and the whole postcard with its view of the sea, and especially the fact that Galya had gone to the trouble of finding out my address gave me a thrill ofjoy. "I was unjust to Galya," I thought. And as I tossed sand on the stretcher, I firmly decided to make a point of going to Odessa next year...

Without waiting for us to clear away all the sand, the plumbers were bringing in pipes for compressed air. As I glanced at them screwing the pipes together, my thoughts turned to an idea that had been worrying me for some time. What with the reapers for the commune, Nikita's visit, and all sorts of other affairs, I had not been able to get my ideas down on paper...

At that moment I noticed Tiktor throw aside his shovel and, bending down, lift something that looked like a piece of cord. Then he straightened up and, noticing an electrician in blue overalls standing on a step-ladder, shouted: "Hey, lad, come over here."

Thinking that he was being asked to shovel sand, the electrician responded gruffly.

"Can't you see I'm working on the line!"

"Get down quick, there's something else you can work on here."

Reluctantly the electrician climbed down from his steps. Swinging his screwdriver, he walked unhurriedly over to Tiktor and, stooping on one knee, glanced carelessly at the wire.

The wire stuck out of the sand like a rat's tail. Shovels were scraping all round and no one paid the least attention to Tiktor's discovery. The electrician crouched lower and lower over the wire, as if he wanted to lick it, then suddenly he leapt to his feet as if he had been stung by a snake.

"Stop!" he bawled, throwing a wild glance round him.

"Don't panic! Tell us what's up?" Tiktor said tapping the dazed electrician on the shoulder.

"I'm not panicking. I know what I'm talking about," the electrician replied. "That's not a wire, it's a fuse! Understand?. . . Who's the senior here?"

The menacing word "fuse" flashed through my mind like a shaft of lightning. I thought instantly of the unsuccessful attempt to sabotage security headquarters. What should I do—shout for help or break the fuse?

Luckily, at that moment, Flegontov came out of the store. While we were cleaning the moulding floor, Flegontov, Turunda, and other moulders even older than they, had been helping the fitters from the tool shop to test the spare machines.

"Comrade Flegontov! ... Come over here!" Tiktor shouted at the top of his voice.

Flegontov turned in our direction, quickening his pace a little.

"What's the matter?" he asked calmly.

"Look at that!" the electrician said pointing.

"A fuse?" Flegontov said sharply. "Where did that come from?" And making a quick decision, he shouted: "No smoking in here!"

He walked quickly to the glass-fronted office and we saw his lips move as he picked up the telephone...

We finished our job that Sunday so tired that we could hardly stand. It was dusk when we left the shop after the twelfth and last machine had slid from the wooden rollers on to its stone foundation. Many a time that day it had seemed that the shouts of "One, two, heave!" would bring the glass roof down on the heads of the cheering team of young and old men.

The carpenters had made neat, fresh-smelling pinewood boxes for the moulding mixture and set them up between the machines. New pipes were gleaming everywhere. The damped stone floor looked black from a distance.

Before the twelve new "machine-guns" could be used, they had to be tested. Hundreds of new mould-boxes had to be brought into the foundry, the machines had to be partitioned off in pairs. Dozens of tons of clean sifted moulding sand had to be carried in from the bunkers and piled in great heaps on the broad space we had just won from the foundry rubbish dump. But the hardest, preparatory work was over.

Dog-tired as we were, you'd have thought we should have dropped down on our hard mattresses and fallen into a dead sleep. Ahead of us lay a whole week of piece work. But even when we got home, we still could not settle down.

"When did they plant that mine there—that's the question!" Sasha exclaimed.

"Anyone can see that—when Wrangel ran away!" I retorted. "That year their ships often came into our harbour. When those blighters had to pack their bags, they decided to blow up the works, so that we shouldn't get it, but something must have gone wrong. Uncle Vasya was right about those technicians nosing round the shops at night."

Cicadas were chirping in the garden below. Our landlady could be heard sighing heavily in her sleep.

Talking in whispers with my friends, I still imagined myself in the foundry watching the electrician carefully dig out the fuse from under the unfinished sand-covered furnace. Even before the town OGPU chief, a short, amiable-looking man in a grey suit whom Flegontov had called up by phone, had arrived in the foundry, Flegontov himself had discovered a mysterious box under the furnace and said that it contained enough dynamite to blow up the foundations of the blast-furnace, the copper furnace, and even the main wall of the foundry.

Tolya Golovatsky pointed to the box of dynamite and said: "Look at the present those capitalists left for the working class, and remember it! They took the drawings away and put dynamite in their place. What for? To blow up the foundry and stop the works for many months. To wet this sand with workers' blood."

"One thing's not quite clear," Sasha said, breaking the silence. "Those capitalists want to get back here. Why should they blow up the foundry?"

"You are a silly fellow," Petka said in quite a grown-up way. "What's insurance for? Perhaps Caiworth insured this works before the Revolution. Whatever happens, he's bound to get his money out of the insurance company, if the tsarist government gets here."

"All right, but why didn't they hide that fuse better?" Sasha insisted.

A new idea occurred to Petka.

"Perhaps one of them put it like that on purpose. We were always throwing dregs of iron out on that dump. Just think, if a drop of hot iron had fallen on that fuse, the mine would have gone off!"

"It's better not to think of it!" Sasha replied in an awed tone.

"But you tell us this, Sasha," Petka said, tapping Sasha on the shoulder. "Why did the OGPU chief shake hands with you? Do you know him?"

"Oh he shook hands with everybody," Sasha said evasively.

"None of that! He only shook hands with Flegontov and ^A you," Petka retorted.

"Well, I don't know," Sasha grunted.

"But I do! Give me the matches, Petka," I broke in.

Petka rummaged under his mattress and tossed me a match-box. Striking a match, I lighted the lamp. As it burnt up, I pulled out of my breast-pocket a folded slip of paper whose existence I had almost forgotten.

"Read this, Petka. Recognize the handwriting?" I said, handing him the paper.

"His! Of course it's his!" Petka exclaimed pointing at Sasha.

Peering at the paper that Petka kindly thrust under his nose, Sasha gave a groan.

"Gosh, what a memory!... Why didn't I burn it!" "Come on, out with your story! We're your pals, aren't we?" I said.

"What is there to tell? You know yourselves. . . You wouldn't believe me when I said I'd seen Pecheritsa. You laughed at me. But I thought to myself: 'Let them laugh, but my eyes can see all right.' And I reported it. Pity I didn't destroy the copy... There's no need for you to laugh!"

"Who's laughing? You are a funny bloke! It was the right thing to do!. . . Do you think we ought to go stargazing while they plant mines under us?" I said to Sasha.

That night I was the last to go to sleep. Listening to the steady breathing of my friends I thought over everything I had seen during the day until my head ached.

The quiet, sunny seaside town seemed a very different place to me now. A desperate, struggle between the new and the old was being waged behind its facade of blissful calm. The signs of this struggle came to light suddenly, like the anonymous letter from one of Makhno's men, or the hidden fuse that Tiktor had discovered today. Our hidden class enemies were still hoping to recover the power of

which the 'Revolution had deprived them for ever. In order to hinder our progress, they would sink to any depths.

"They are on the watch for every mistake, every blunder we make," I thought. "And they are still hoping to take advantage of our carelessness and good-nature. They are hoping that we shall collapse; if we live and prosper, sooner or later we shall rid the whole world of them... They realize that and will stoop to anything to prevent it. But if that's the way things are, don't be caught out, you of the Komsomol! Have ears like axe-blades, as Polevoi used to say. Wherever you are, wherever you go, always be on the alert."