Straining my memory, I asked: "Has this Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya been living here long?"
"Ever since the Revolution. She came here with her daughter. From somewhere near Uman."
"What about her husband?"
"No one's ever seen her husband. She must have buried him back there in Uman, or else he's run away."
"And the chaps from the foundry go to her classes?"
"I wish it was only the foundry chaps! They go there from the other shops too. Our Komsomol organization hasn't succeeded in organizing any recreation for them and Madame takes advantage of it. And bear this in mind, Mandzhura, some of the chaps in your shop have very little education. No more of this standing aloof! It's time you made friends with some good chaps and got into harness with them. Grisha Kanyuk, for instance, or Kolya Ziakabluk..."
"I'll do everything, Tolya," I promised.
"Everything's about half what you've got to do," Golovatsky said with a grin, and gripping my hand he said: "Off you go, you've only got three minutes before the hooter..."
Back in the days of the tsar, when we lived in Zarechye, under the walls of the Old Fortress, the estate of the Countess Rogale-Piontkovskaya had covered a whole district on the outskirts of the town. The yellow mansion with its columned portico lay half-hidden among trees in a large, shady garden. A gravel drive bordered with flowers led up to the house from tall wrought-iron gates, on which hung a heavy, rusty padlock that was hardly ever opened.
One day, however, the gates of the mansion were flung open with the willing consent of its owner. That was in 1919, when Ataman Petlura and his men seized our town. The remnants of his forces were clinging to the railway. Only a few small towns and villages of Podolia and Volyn remained in their hands. But although the Petlura front was crumbling on all sides, the ataman ceremonially declared our town the capital of "Petluria," and chose as his residence the half-empty mansion of the Countess Rogale-Piontkovskaya.
Petlura’s car was greeted at the gates by the countess herself, a gaunt woman in a black flounced dress who held a lorgnette to her eyes all the time. Peeping over the wall of the neighbouring churchyard, we, youngsters, saw the blue-uniformed Petlura alight from his car, kiss the countess's thin, bejewelled fingers and walk up the drive with her to the yellow mansion.
While he lived at the mansion Petlura held conferences with officers from Konovalets's Galician rifle corps and from Denikin's forces. Later, foreign military missions took up their residence with the countess. These officers of the Entente, which was helping Petlura, paced the shady avenues of the countess's garden in uniforms we had never seen before. We never had a chance to look at them very closely, however, for the gaiduks who guarded Petlura and his suite drove all passers-by away from the gates.
Only once my friends and I climbed on to the stone coping of the railings and tried to see what was going on round the mansion. As we stood barefoot on the rough sun-warmed granite, pressing our faces against the iron railings, a tall, gaunt man in a long grey jacket popped up out of the garden and lashed at me with a black silver-embossed walking-stick.
We scattered like frightened sparrows, afraid that the tall man might call up the Petlura guards to deal with us. They would give us a taste of something worse than a walking-stick—their long whips tipped with bits, of lead.
I well remembered the face of the stranger—cruel and scraggy and covered with yellow wrinkles. He was said to be the brother of the countess, who had fled from somewhere near Kiev, to escape the Bolsheviks.
So it was not for nothing that the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolutionary Activities had arrested the countess when Petlura was driven out of the town. What happened to her after that, I did not know.
Perhaps her brother was the husband of the local Rogale-Piontkovskaya, who, as Golovatsky put it, was "luring the youth into her net..."
The day was still sultry, but there were many people about on the avenue. Holiday-makers in skull-caps, broad-brimmed straw hats, or simply with wet towels wound round their heads, were wandering home from the beach, bemused and exhausted by the heat. Some of them clustered round the kiosks to buy cool buza, iced lemonade, and mineral waters. Others, mostly men, slipped into the co-operative wine-shop on the corner, where they quenched their thirst with glasses of Azov wine.
Peering into the shops and lingering in front of their smart windows, I walked down the avenue, my heels sinking into" the soft asphalt. Before knocking-off time I had found out from Gladyshev that Rogale-Piontkovskaya's saloon was at 25, Genoa Street.
Suddenly I lost interest in all other passers-by except one who had popped up in front of me, as if from nowhere. The soldierly bearing of the man in front struck me as being very familiar. But for his light summer suit and soft panama hat with a broad blue ribbon, I should have rushed up to him at once and greeted him as an old friend.
"But I've never seen him in civilian clothes before... His walk's the same though, and the way he holds his head up!... He must have come here for a holiday! Yes, that's it! Why didn't I think of it before!"
Overtaking the man in the light suit, who had stopped in front of a chemist's shop-window stacked with bottles and jars, I peered into his face.
Yes, it was him!
I stepped forward and touching his elbow said: "Hullo, Comrade Vukovich! How did you get here?"
With surprising coolness, as if he had been expecting me to approach him, the man with the face of Vukovich turned round and said: "You must be mistaken, young man. . ." And he gave me a mocking glance, as if pitying me for my foolish error.
I don't remember what I muttered in reply. It was not an apology. I must have said "Gosh!" or something like that. And utterly confused, I walked quickly away, so as not to attract the attention of bystanders. "Well, some people are alike, aren't they!" I thought. That man was just like Vukovich... If it had been Vukovich, he would have been sure to say "hullo" to me. Specially after that long talk we had in his office, when Nikita and I went to see him. Coming home, I decided not to tell the boys about my blunder.
25, Genoa Street turned out to be quite an ordinary-looking house. From the ticket-seller in a plaid frock who was laying out little books of tickets on her table I learnt that the dancing would begin in an hour. Well, I wasn't going to hang about here all that time just to see their capers! I wandered slowly down Genoa Street, towards the outskirts.
The street led me to a. district of little cottages, known as the Liski. All round me there were allotments. I made my way along the edge of the settlement to the beach.
Tarred fishing smacks with lowered sails heaved at anchor near the shore. Nets were drying on the seaweed-strewn sand. I felt the breeze from the open sea on my face mingled with the smells of smoked fish, seaweed, and tar.
The deserted sandy beach stretched away towards Nogaisk. At the mouth of a ravine that ran down to the sea stood a large villa with a red-tiled roof. The purple glow of the setting sun was reflected in the windows that looked on to the Liski and the glass seemed to flame in the sun's nays. It was as if a fire were raging inside the villa. I remembered the foundry men's tales about the former owner of the works, John Caiworth, who had gone back to his home abroad, and decided that it must !be his villa I could see in the distance. You had only to compare it with the little white cottages scattered along the sea shore to realize that it had once been the home of a rich man.
Crossing the soft sand, I went down to the sea and, scooping up the clear water in my hands, washed my perspiring forehead and wetted my hair.
"Hey, lad, come over here!" I heard a voice in the distance.
"That's not for me," I thought without turning round. "Who would know me here?" And I started walking back towards Genoa Street. But the voice went on shouting:
"Vasily Stepanovich! Comrade Mandzhura!"
Luka Turunda, my neighbour on the machines, was walking quickly towards me from one of the little cottages. He had changed into blue sun-bleached overalls.
/> "You are getting high and mighty," Luka said as he ran up. "I might as well be shouting at a brick wall. I saw you as you were going down to the sea. Surely, I thought, the lad isn't going to drown himself because Naumenko gives him such a hot time!"
"Hullo."
"Let's go to my cottage," Turunda suggested.
I hesitated.
"I ought to be getting back to town," I said. "Perhaps we could make it another time."
"Well, I'm not inviting you to a wedding, you know. We'll just sit down for a bit, then go off together."
Turunda's cottage stood right by the sea.
"Don't you get flooded, when there's a storm?" I asked as we walked into the yard.
"Sometimes. Last autumn the maistra started blowing and the waves were so big they knocked out one of the window-panes. My wife had to put the chickens up in the attic."
It was cool in the low-ceilinged parlour. All the windows except one that stood wide open were hung with muslin to keep the flies out. Pots of geraniums and fig-plants and bottles of cherry-wine stood on the window-sills.
"Make yourself at home," Luka said. "This is my father and this is. my wife. This is Vasily Stepanovich. He's come to help us in the foundry... Where are you from, Vasil?"
"From Podolia," I said,' shaking hands with Luka's father and his wife. "But I'm not Stepanovich, I'm Mironovich."
"Is that so?" Luka said in surprise. "I must have got you mixed up with your mate; he's a Stepanovich. Now sit down here, by the window; it looks as if we're going to get a breeze from the sea."
I squeezed behind the spotless table and sat down by the window. Luka's father, a sunburnt old man, just as lean as his son, sat down facing me, while my host's wife, a pleasant-looking woman of about twenty-five, bustled about round the stove, which could be seen on the other side of the passage. Dark and sturdy, with her plaits arranged in a crown on the top of her head, she moved silently about the kitchen, now appearing at the stove, now vanishing behind the partition.
"Dad and I have been talking about a little family matter," Luka said. "As you probably know, for over two months now one per cent of our pay has been deducted for the workers of Britain, who're on strike. Well, whenever I bring my pay-book home, my family here makes a fuss. 'What,' they say, 'those B.W.s, again! What are they, your own kith and kin? You'd do better to buy a dress for the wife, or something that's needed in the house, than waste your money on them...' "
"What have dresses got to do with it!" Old Turunda interrupted his son, and as he spoke I noticed his sparse yellow teeth stained dark with tobacco. "Those B.W.s, did they help us in 1905, when the Potemkin blew the red flag? Not a bit of it! Old Caiworth called in a regiment of Cossacks from
Melitopol to put down the strikers. Do you think anyone abroad helped us then? Never on your life! We had to live on whiting all the summer. Why should we help their strikers now?"
"Because we're the Motherland of all the workers of the world," I said cautiously, reluctant to anger the grumpy old man. "We've got the Soviets in power, but they haven't..."
"That's no answer," the old man grunted. "Don't you try to talk politics to me. You go to the root of things."
Old Turunda's words touched me on the raw. I remembered our discussions on international affairs at the factory-training school, and just as fierily as I used to then, I said: "Why isn't it an answer? Anybody can see that we're in la better position than the British miners, who have to swallow coal dust so that the capitalists can make their profits."
"We swallowed plenty o' dustunder tsarism to give that British capitalist a mansion to live in and a yacht of his own to cruise around in, didn't we?" The old man jerked his thumb in the direction of the villa that I had seen from the shore. "He could afford to hold garden parties in the fresh air, but all we had was a dingy little pub to amuse ourselves in, and even that ran us into debt!"
"It's no good trying to argue with my old man," Luka said. "He's just like one of those high-ups in the church. You talk about one thing and he talks about another. All at cross purposes. I've been telling him the same thing: since we've got a workers' government we ought to help every worker that's in need."
At that moment Luka's wife entered the room, making no sound on the clay floor with her bare sunburnt feet. She was carrying a blackened baking-pan. When she set it down on two wooden blocks, I saw that it contained four large, fat fish. The strong scent of garlic struck my nostrils.
"Ever eaten this before?" Luka asked.
I shook my head.
"Fisherman's chebak!" Luka announced. "Fresh from the morning's catch. Dad collared 'em land now we're going to taste 'em." And pronging a large fish with his fork, he placed it on a plate in front of me.
Then I noticed that the chebak had not even been cleaned of its scales. Curled by the heat of the oven, they were standing up as if someone had stroked them the wrong way.
As I followed my host's example and took the skin off the fish, I soon realized the simple method of cooking this tasty dish. Before putting the fish in the hot oven, you had to stuff it with lumps of garlic. The fish were baked whole, in their own fat. Their white flesh came away from the bones easily and gave off a smell that made your mouth water. "But fish can't swim on dry land, can they, Vasil?" And winking at me, Luka fetched a heavy jug from a dark corner and poured us glasses of wonderfully clear wine.
"That's enough!" I said to Luka when my glass was only half full.
"What's the matter?" Luka's quick eyes glanced up sharply. "Do you think it's strong? It's only 'beryozka.' Weak stuff. Little children round here drink it instead of water."
"All the same, that's enough. I'm not used to it." "You'll have to get used to it," Luka's father remarked. "If you live by the Azov Sea, a 'beryozka'-drinker you must be!"
"Well, here's to your success, Vasil!" Luka said. "To your becoming a good foundry man. Good luck to you in your young life!" And we clinked glasses.
Pushing her dark crown of hair into place with a plump hand, his wife raised her glass too. Her kind deep-set eyes, dark as olives, seemed to radiate good feeling. I felt as if I had known the kindly owners of this little cottage, perched on the sandy shore of the Azov Sea, for a very long time. The wine was cool and fragrant, with a faint bitterish tang in it. And it wasn't strong at all.
I put down my empty glass and shot a glance at the clock hanging on the wall, by the stove. Luka
noticed it and said reassuringly: "Don't worry, lad, I've got to go out too, to the university."
"What university?" I asked in surprise.
"He's a student," Luka's wife answered for him, and glancing at Luka very affectionately, put her brown arm round his shoulders.
"I've been attending since last year. In the evenings," Luka said. "When Katya and I got married I thought to myself, 'I'd better do some studying, I've been wasting my leisure time long enough.' So I started on the preliminary courses. I remembered all they'd taught me at the parish school and mastered algebra, and then the workers' evening university opened. That was a chance that was too good to miss!"
"Do you like it?" I asked, feeling a warm glow from the wine spread through me.
Luka nodded cheerfully.
"No question about it! A lot better than before. You'd knock off and spruce yourself up a bit, then off to the avenue. And from the avenue where would you go? To The Little Nook.' And after that you'd stagger home with your knees sagging. Sometimes you'd give yourself such a sousing that you'd just plunk into bed in your cap and boots. And as soon as you shut your eyes—the hooter was going. Well, what sort of work can you do with a hang-over? You'd crawl about like a fly in autumn, and your mate would curse you up hill and down dale because you were holding him up. I'm real thankful to Ivan Fyodorovich, it was him got the university started."
"The director?"
"Yes, the director. He twigged there were a lot of teachers knocking about the town—chemistry teachers, astronomy teachers... So he got them all together and says: 'Here,
you fellows, what about teaching the lads of an evening, I'll find the money to pay you!' And that started the ball rolling. Since I've been attending those evening classes, I've felt myself a different man. While the furnace hums away up at the end of the shop, there am I going over the formulas that our instructor has explained to us, and thinking out the reasons for everything—why the iron melts, how steel is made, what the temperature ought to be... And the result is that instead of looking at the world out of a little window, you start looking out of a great big one..
"But you're going to be late for your classes today," his wife said very softly, almost in a whisper.
"Late for classes? No fear!" Luka jumped up and, running over to the bookshelf, started gathering up his books.
"Just call on us when you feel like it," Katerina said when I was leaving. "And if you feel like going out in a boat, the old man will take you fishing."
I thanked my hosts for their hospitality and said that next time I came I would bring my friends.
Luka and I walked down Genoa Street together.
"Prickly old chap, my Dad, isn't he? He'll snap your head off if you give him half a chance. He used to work in the foundry too, before the Revolution."
"Why doesn't he go back there now?"
"When the Civil War started and the works closed down, he took to fishing. Got real keen on it, he did. One day, near the end of winter, he went out to sea with his crew to fish under the ice for big fish. The wind had been blowing from the west all the time, then suddenly a levant sprung up from the east.
The ice broke away from the shore and was carried out to sea. That levant took my Dad well nigh over to the Kuban shore. Half the crew were drowned, and the rest just managed to escape by wading through the shallows. And the water was icy, you know. It froze Dad's legs right to the bone. Now, when there's a change in the weather, Dad's properly crocked up. It's a good thing the sanatorium's near by.
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