The Town By The Sea

TIKTOR GETS TOUGH

After the night of our vigil at headquarters, the weather had changed. For three days it had been snowing heavily. The drifts were up to the windows, and every morning, before starting to cast, we had to clear the path leading from the road to the foundry with wooden shovels.

One morning Zhora told me to prepare the mould cores for the next day's casting.

I was starting on my second lot, when Tiktor came up to me. I glanced up and saw his blonde forelock dangling right in front of my nose. Tiktor squatted on his heels and lit a cigarette, blowing a cloud of blue smoke into the grate of the stove. I watched him silently out of the corner of my eye, knowing that he wanted to talk to me. Since the evening when Tiktor had not turned up at headquarters, he had kept away from us, speaking to no one and going straight home after school. He lived with his father in Tsiganovka, a remote suburb not far from the station.

Taking a last pull at his cigarette, Tiktor tossed the stub on the blazing slabs of coke and, walking past me, said offhandedly:

"Well, member of the committee, when are you going to try me?"

"You want to know when the committee will go into your affair?"

"Isn't that the same thing!" Tiktor grunted, dragging over a tin of graphite and sitting on it.

"If you want to know when the committee will meet, I can tell you—on Thursday."

"Of course, it's better for you to keep the Komsomol full of twerps like Bobir who can't even hold a rifle, just because they're friends of certain committee members, and chuck out young workers who happen to make a slip... "

I guessed whose window Tiktor was throwing stones at.

"What you did wasn't a slip."

"But that's just what it was. I just had a drink... then gave a profiteer a slap on the jaw, and you make all this fuss. . ."

"Not just a profiteer. He was your client Bortanovsky."

Tiktor made a puzzled face. "My client? That's a funny thing to say!"

"Whose client is he then—mine? Don't make yourself out a fool. The committee knows all about it."

"What do you mean? 'I don't get you. . . Someone's been making things up to spite me, and you. . ."

This was too much. Not content with refusing to admit his mistake frankly, as a Komsomol member should, Tiktor was trying to come the innocent!

I said grimly: "The committee knows, Tiktor, that you cast machine parts for Bortanovsky's private business in working hours, you sold them to him, you..."

"Well, what about it?" Tiktor broke in. "I did it all with my own hands, out of my own aluminium, and it wasn't in working hours at all."

"That's not true, it was! Why tell lies about it?"

"You're lying yourself! I stayed behind after work, when you'd gone home, and did the casting then."

"Did you? What about the sand, and the tools, and the models, whose were they? Don't they belong to the state? Just you tell me what you were doing that day when Kozakevich took the fly-wheel model to the locksmiths to have it changed. If I remember, you were casting a gearwheel for a motor-bike."

Tiktor was cornered.

"I had nothing else to do then," he mumbled. "That's different. I wanted a job, so I started on that gear-wheel. You could cast that blood-sucker of an emperor, couldn't you? Well, I was practising, too, on a gear-wheel."

"Practising to get money from a profiteer afterwards and buy vodka with it..."

"Look here you," Tiktor shouted threateningly, "don't try and scare me with your talk of profiteers! I hate profiteers more than you do. Besides, you can't prove Bortanovsky is a profiteer. He's a private craftsman, true, but he's a craftsman and he works himself. And in Odessa he used to work at the October Revolution Factory. You don't find craftsmen like him all over the place. Who overhauled Pecheritsa's motor-bike? Bortanovsky! And you call him a profiteer!"

"Hold on, Tiktor," I said very calmly, "only a minute ago you yourself called Bortanovsky a profiteer."

"I did?... Nothing of the kind!" Tiktor exclaimed indignantly.

"Yes, you did! You said yourself you gave 'a profiteer a slap on the jaw.' I've got a good memory. You've told one too many..."

"Drop that, Mandzhura, don't try scaring me!" Tiktor bawled, growing furious in his confusion. "You're a bit too green to talk to me like that, kid! I'm a worker born and bred. I know why you're all against me—because I earn more than you! You'd take on jobs from Bortanovsky yourself, but he wouldn't give 'em to you, even if you did them free. Your handiwork wouldn't suit him! They make do on their mingy grants, and if I don't want to live like a beggar—they start persecuting me. Chuck me out of the Komsomol! You can go and stuff yourselves! I'm not a climber, I'm a working chap!"

"Now I see that you must be expelled from the Komsomol!" I told Tiktor, looking him straight in the eye. "If you can say things like that..."

"Now, you young people, what's all the jawing about in working hours?" Zhora asked sternly coming into the room. "Finished cleaning the cores, Mandzhura?. . . Are these them? That'll be about enough for today. Now listen, get dressed and fly over to the school. In the forge they'll give you some rams for us."

Worked up after my quarrel with Tiktor, I flung out into the yard without even buttoning my chumarka.

It was wonderfully quiet and snowy all round. My eyes pricked as I looked at the deep drifts on the allotment and in the foundry yard. The trees were fluffy with snow. A tomtit with a black comb fluttered past me knocking a twig with its wing and a great pile of snow showered silently off the tree.

A narrow path had been trodden across Hospital Square. I walked slowly. It was like going down a crowded corridor and the hem of my chumarka brushed the snowdrifts. The roofs of the little houses round the square were piled high with snow; lilac and jasmine bushes in their gardens poked out of the snow like birch-brooms; even the tall, narrow chimney on the Motor Factory was caked with snow-flakes on one side.

"We don't need a hooligan like you!" That had been a good reply to Tiktor. He had gone a bit too far with his rotten conduct and all the dirty things he had said about the Komsomol, and now he would complain that it was all our fault. If he had been a decent, honest chap, who would say anything against him! H hadn't told him off for personal reasons—I was thinking of our organization. Why couldn't he understand that! If he started swindling and robbing the state, working against the people when he was young, what would become of him later? We had advised him last year to stop going with 'Kotka

Grigorenko. "Mind you don't slip up," Petka and I had told him. "We've known that Kotka ever since he was a kid. His father was all for Petlura, he betrayed our friends, and his son's got a bad streak in him too. Surely he's not the kind of fellow for you to go with, is he?" But did Tiktor listen to us? What a hope! "You can't teach me anything, I'm not green like you!" He and Kotka used to go staggering down Post Street arm in arm, and to parties and weddings with kulak lads in the neighbouring village, and then Kotka ran away to Poland. He must have done something pretty bad, if he had to resort to a thing like that. And then Tiktor was in a mess; twice he, a Komsomol member, was summoned by the security men and given a serious talking-to because he had been a close friend of Kotka's. After that he had moped about looking sorry for himself, and now it was starting all over again. . .

Turning these thoughts over in my mind I crossed the snowy expanse of the yard and entered the forge.

The rams were not ready, and while I was waiting for them to be forged, I went up into the locksmiths' shop, fit was dinner-time and everyone had gone out. The workshop was amazingly quiet.

No one stood at the benches sprinkled with filings. I went to the club and found our chaps crowding round the glass-fronted case on the wall reading the latest newspaper. Our Red Cordon was attracting particular attention today, I squeezed closer.

"An Absurd School," it read in big letters across the top of the page and knew in a flash what it was about. The article, signed "Dr. Zenon Pecheritsa," said that the director of the factory-training school, Polevoi, was sabotaging the spread of Ukrainian culture, that for a long time he had kept at his school a teacher who could not speak Ukrainian; when the teacher was eventually dismissed, Polevoi had organized a collection to buy him a costly present. Pecheritsa concluded his article by remarking that the very existence of a factory-training school in our little town where there was no industry was absurd...

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. It was Polevoi coming from his office. He was wearing his khaki jacket. His cap was tilted on the back of his head, exposing his high sunburnt forehead. We made way for Polevoi to go up to the newspaper, but he smiled and said, "Read it yourselves. I know everything that's written there."

Sasha Bobir darted up to Polevoi.

"Nestor Varnayevich, what does 'Dr.' mean?" he asked unexpectedly.

A laugh went up and even Polevoi hid a smile.

" 'Dr.' Well, I suppose it means 'Doctor.' "

"But how can Pecheritsa be a doctor?" Sasha insisted. "Doctors go round hospitals curing people, but he conducts a choir and orders teachers about. Are there doctors like that?"

"There are all kinds of doctors," Polevoi replied. "They're not all doctors of medicine. Pecheritsa is a Galician. I ought to tell you that in Galicia they're very fond of showing off a bit by putting 'Doctor' in front of their names. Nearly every officer in that legion of Galician riflemen who fought with the Austrians against the Russian army called himself a doctor. There were all kinds: doctors of law, philosophy, philology, veterinary science... Perhaps Pecheritsa is a doctor of music."

"If the Galicians fought against us with the Austrians, why do we let them come here? Haven't we got enough Petlura hangers-on, as it is!" Sasha insisted.

"Never speak like that again, Bobir!" Polevoi exclaimed. "You must never judge a whole people by its renegades... The Galicians are a good, hard-working, honest people, they're our blood brothers. They speak the same language as we do, their country's been Ukrainian for centuries."

And Polevoi reminded us how not long ago, at the Fourteenth Party Congress, Comrade Stalin had said it was only because the Treaty of Versailles had carved up many states that our Ukraine had lost Galicia and Western Volyn.

"If anybody knows the Galicians, I should," Polevoi went on. "When Peremyshl was captured, I was badly wounded out there, in Galicia... The army retreated and I was left lying on the ground, unconscious. Well, do you think those people gave me away to the Austrians? Nothing of the kind! I lay for over a year in a peasant's cottage, in the village of Kopysno. They brought a doctor to me secretly from Peremyshl. He operated on me twice. I might have been a Galician myself the way those Galicians looked after me... Yes, it would be good to meet some of those people again. Just think, the little Zbruch is all that divides us! It's not the fault of the Galician working folk that they're under foreign domination and have been suffering under it for years."

... When we came out of school and went to the hostel to have dinner, Petka, who adored Polevoi, pounced on Sasha: "Couldn't you ask your questions another time? You could see he was upset by that rotten article, but you had to start worrying him: 'What's "Dr." mean?' Do you want to know what it means? 'Dr.' means daft like you!"

"All right, don't shout," Sasha grunted. "Perhaps I did it on purpose to cheer him up, I wanted to take his mind off things. How about that?" And Sasha smiled complacently.

I remembered how Polevoi had been liked and respected by the students at the Party School when he was group secretary there.

One day, when he was still at the Party School, Polevoi had dropped in to see us. Father was out—he was printing the school newspaper Student's Voice in our little print-shop. Polevoi noticed a poetry album on my table. We still had the high-school boys' habit of keeping such albums. The girls in our class would stick pictures in their albums and draw flowers all round them—narcissuses and tulips usually—then write sentimental verses there about beautiful flowers, white-winged angels, harps, forget-me-nots, and so on.

I am ashamed now to admit it, but I had such an album too. It was full of verses and good wishes from friends. To my amazement, Polevoi leafed through my album, chuckled to himself, then, sitting down at the table, picked up a pen and wrote on a clean page:

Far beyond the stormy present

Lies the Future's happy shore

Where the sky is clear and pleasant

And the tempest roars no more.

It is only the courageous

Whom the waves will carry there.

Forward, friends! The tempest rages,

But these sails it cannot tear!

I had not asked him to do it. He just wrote, then got up and left the room without a word.

I was very surprised, I remember. At first, I thought it was an acrostic. I read the first letters of each line from top to bottom, but couldn't make any sense of it.

Polevoi's action pleased me. lit was nice to feel that he didn't mind having to do with a youngster like me...

At the factory-training school everyone knew that Polevoi was rather rough and strict on the outside, but a very kind man at heart. He spent all day at the school trying to make us into skilled workers and

good citizens.

We all liked our director and Pecheritsa's article staggered us. Although Polevoi gave no sign of being hurt, we guessed it was only in front of us that he was so calm; underneath he must be feeling very bitter.

After dinner I left the forge with two rams under my arm and headed for the school gate. Just as I was going through the gate I heard a shout from Nikita:

"Special committee meeting after school!"

"Oh, good! Tiktor's been asking..."

"I don't suppose we'll have time for Tiktor today. There's something more important," said Nikita. "What's up?"

"Don't you know?"

"No. What is it?"

"Pecheritsa wants to close down the school."

"You don't mean it?"

"Of course, I do!"

"But what about us?"

"Private tinkering, labour exchange, or get your Mum and Dad to keep you," Nikita said, twisting his face into a grin.

I thought for a moment he was pulling my leg. "But they can't do that! Surely, you're joking, Nikita?" "Never been more serious in my life! Mind you come," Nikita answered shortly.