He was brought up short by something else he had not thought of before he had tasted success. How were they to make their decision? They could hardly vote on it. Or could they? Such a large body of workers in which even the most skilled man was dependent on all the rest—how did they generally go about it?
Komarov must know the answer. Dmitriev turned to look at him for the first time. Nothing to worry about there. He was listening with every sign of approval, not disguising the satisfaction he felt simply as a man, not a party member. He was another of those who had not really known about the new gun. This was the first he had been told.
Dmitriev also glanced at the policeman. He would have done better not to. His eyes would not have reminded his listeners of the man’s existence. The policeman was as placid as ever, neither angered nor moved by Dmitriev’s story, but gazing steadily at the assembly as if he expected no good to come of it all.
But now that you and I, brothers, are as one …
“This gun, then, is overdue at the front, it should have been there long ago, last spring. Can we manage it by next spring? We need lots of them! Hundreds in fact! And only our Obukhov factory can produce them.”
But however good-naturedly you speak or listen, there are limits to what you can say, and to what you can believe. However honest you want to be, you can’t blurt out the whole truth. Complete honesty would mean giving reasons for the delay. Why weren’t we ready last spring, or last summer? Well, it was because … because … higher authority took a long time scrutinizing the blueprints. They were dozed and grumbled over by ancient ruins of generals with one foot in retirement but reluctant to part with the office chair. Dozed over by people in no danger of being sent to the trenches themselves and with no feeling for the faceless herd stuck there. They’re the ones who’ve wasted nearly a whole year. But you, brothers …
“It’s up to us now, brothers, to get these guns out in a hurry. Not a single production line must be idle …”
(Though you too, brothers, are all in essential occupations and not many of you are in danger of being sent out there.)
“I got back from the Dvina last August. We’d been trying out the gun. The soldiers were simply overjoyed with it. ‘With a gun like that we could get somewhere,’ they said. ‘Be quick about it! Hurry them up back in Petersburg!’ Just think how many lives this gun can save, lives of Russian soldiers, our brothers!”
Then, in a ringing voice, looking from face to face.
“But you … just the other day you decided not to work overtime. Just tell the men out there, on the Dvina, that the skilled workers in Petersburg are clock-watching, that they can’t stomach staying on after their shift, so there’ll be no trench gun …”
It was true. He had just returned from the Dvina trenches, where he had told the men about it and shared their shocked resentment.
“Let the rest of the factory do what it likes, but you, brothers … I beg you. We beg you. The Workers’ Group as well … Spare them some of the bloodshed.”
He was begging them, but confidently, sure of their support, of their openhearted, generous sympathy.
“The workshops singled out here must start working around the clock, on Sundays as well. Overtime must be shared among shifts.”
His impatient mind was already assigning them to work stations, he knew already who would be doing what, saw already how, tomorrow morning …
No—no resistance. But—some hesitation. But—the high spirits of a moment ago had sagged. They exchanged sidelong looks. Glanced at Komarov. At the policeman.
Well, of course, not one of them was an independent individual. How could they make a decision? The trench gun was a good thing, to be sure they could see that, and the brothers would gladly … if only someone with authority would first put into words what it was they all wanted, they would all agree immediately.
Komarov was in no hurry. He did not feel himself to be the most important man there. He was looking around for someone.
And suddenly someone invisible behind all those backs, and a metal stanchion, cried out, in a voice at once harshly imperious and insolently mocking, like the crowing of a cock: “Let those who started it stem the bloodletting! Riga is nothing to us, let the Germans have it!”
He hadn’t expected this! Dmitriev hadn’t expected it! This was the cry Evdokim had … He must answer it at once! Shout louder! Something apt? What, though? It was so stupid … “let the Germans have it.” He had tried his hardest to explain. How could he answer this?
Too late. He couldn’t pull himself together in time. It had to be done on the instant. And he had lost his head.
The policeman, though, sprang nimbly to his feet, stood on tiptoe, spotted his man, and made a beeline for him.
Only to find himself looking at an unbroken row of hostile backs. Talk about a needle in a haystack!
He’d only made things worse.
The two hundred and fifty sat silent. Heads bowed.
[34]
The workers of the night shift were all in the factory by now. For ten short minutes, the day shift, a dark crowd denser than at any demonstration or jollification, flooded the wide roadway of the Schlüsselburg Prospect outside the factory, then trickled away. In such a throng anything might happen. But nothing did. Some walked off toward the two-storied Obukhov housing development, others dispersed along side streets. Those who had no farther to go than the Glassmakers’ Quarter walked along the Prospect. Others packed the steam tram, all three coaches, inside and out, and still others were left waiting at the stop. The area in front of the factory, brilliantly lit by many electric lamps, was cleared. Now you could see the tricolor flag flying over the factory gates (for the anniversary of the Tsar’s accession). The policeman at the crossroads. A patrol (introduced after the disturbances) passing slowly along the Prospect. A belated carter with an overloaded wagon and a horse that nodded its head at the whip without quickening its pace. There was light in the windows of Zhakhov’s “porter shop” (alehouse to us) and the door opened frequently. The butcher and the baker had bolted and barred their shutters and doors. On the other side of the Prospect there was a church porch, and the lights from the narthex showed that vespers was in progress. On this side stood a pharmacy. And a shack housing the mutual aid society, jammed up against the long factory fence.
The evening was still almost wintry, with a fine drizzle, scarcely visible in the lamplight, and a light dusting of snow on untrodden parts of the roadway.
People were going into the mutual aid building, in full view of the sentry and the police patrol, and not only men from the factory, but a young lady in a waisted fur coat, unlike anything worn at the far end of the Neva Quarter. But checking up on all this was not the job of the police. They had no instructions. If someone else saw any need, let him get on with it. Both police and factory management knew that the mutual aid and insurance offices, introduced two years before the war, were a hive of illegal activity, and that people with no business there were forever coming and going, but it was thought politically inadvisable to pick on these particular institutions. And after what had boiled up at the beginning of the week in the Vyborg Quarter the policeman was all for a quiet life, and not poking his nose in: if you’re standing sentry, and nobody bothers you, continue standing.
Apart from the vestibule the mutual aid office had only two rooms. In the first abacuses were indeed at work, and sick-pay vouchers and disability pension forms were filled in (though even in these the clerks inserted the latest propaganda leaflet, copied in their own handwriting). But the clerks in the second room were not in the least surprised when Mashistov—an Obukhov man like themselves, an ordinary worker, but not all that ordinary, known for his connections and his activities—turned up and dismissed them with a nod. Which meant that there was to be a conference, a conspiratorial meeting. The two clerks grabbed papers, pens, inkstand and blotter, and moved into the first room. They were replaced immediately by a stern young man in a thick woollen overcoat,
sand-colored, and a stout, warm reddish-brown peaked cap, together with the young lady in the expensive winter coat, but with a simple Orenburg scarf on her head.
Mashistov, a forty-year-old with a wooden, rectangular face, greeted the young man as “Comrade Vadim.”
The young man took off his damp cap and put it on the sheet of cardboard covering the main desk, shook Mashistov’s hand, and introduced him to “Comrade Maria.” “She will take my place from time to time. Make a note.”
Controls were not all that strict at the Obukhov gates. When necessary Comrade Vadim could get in even there, and as many as twenty men could be squeezed into some cubbyhole, but there was no need for that today, and they had arranged to meet here so as not to invite trouble by flitting in and out. What made the mutual aid office so useful was not so much the miserable handouts tossed to workers—free medicines and doctoring, two-thirds of wages in case of illness or accident—but the legitimate opportunity they gave to assemble under one roof, disseminate propaganda, organize and conspire unhindered. Such opportunities expanded from year to year, with the establishment not only of more mutual aid societies but of workers’ cooperatives, factory canteens—an ever-growing number of convenient places for conspiratorial gatherings, assignations, transmission of messages, and simple proselytizing. In spite of the war this kind of work was becoming easier every year, more like what older comrades (not Vadim, he was only twenty-two) remembered from the revolutionary years. They had survived even 1914, that turbid year when everyone was intoxicated with the stinking fumes of chauvinism, when, so it was said, you couldn’t breathe a word against the war in the presence of ordinary workers, when nobody would accept a leaflet and those who wrote them gave up in despair, and when a man concealed his party affiliation even from his neighbors at the next bench, for fear of being beaten up. There would never be a worse time than that.
“What about the others?” Comrade Vadim asked. He didn’t take off his overcoat, just tugged the scarf from around his neck and placed it on the main desk. He smoothed down his hair, which was ash blond with a sprinkling of ginger, and so wiry that even his cap couldn’t flatten it. And sat at the desk. Young as he was, his deportment commanded unquestioning respect.
“They should be here shortly,” Mashistov said, stiff-jawed, weighing out his words deliberately, importantly. “Uksila will be a bit late.”
Uksila would be a bit late, and Makarov was also missing, but in came Efim Dakhin, a man who moved briskly and seemed to be frowning heavily, but only because his little eyes were so deep-set.
“Hello, Vadim!” he said curtly. He scowled at the girl, but was introduced and shook hands with her as if she was a man.
“Hello, Comrade Maria.”
Maria greeted each of them with a respectful handshake, a little bow, and a voice hushed by emotion. She undid the top button of her coat, but did not remove it, and threw back her wet scarf, revealing a black blouse, fastened at the side with shining student’s buttons. And although her dark auburn hair was smoothed back close to her head, and although the men behaved as though they had no thought for any such thing, it was impossible not to see that she was—a beauty!
Dakhin had not come alone. He pointed to his companion. “This is the pride of our engineering shop, Akindin Kokushkin!”
The young man standing before them, cap in hand, was obviously no party member, obviously inexperienced, a simpleton. His hair, tossed back from his brow, had been smoothed over neck and ears by a careless hand, his face was thin and beardless, and his mouth half open with joy.
“Come on, Kesha, let’s hear how you told the engineer where to get off,” Dakhin said, looking at him with grim satisfaction.
“Well, er … it’s … um … I … er … like …”
Kesha smiled still more happily, showing his crooked teeth. But telling his story was beyond him, so Dakhin took it on himself.
“It’s like this,” he said in his hoarse, toneless voice, “the lackey Komarov, the policeman, and the management pulled us in for one of their prayer meetings. In the name of the ace of hearts and the sack of gold. Then this engineer starts plucking our heartstrings—says we’ve got to work nights and Sundays to make another new gun for them …”
Mashistov knew all this, but Vadim listened carefully, and as for Maria—Maria’s eyelashes rose higher and higher, her dark hazel eyes opened wider and wider in amazement at the engineer’s brazenness and the daring rebuff it had met with.
“They all know my voice, so I told Kesha what to do. ‘Stand behind that pillar,’ I said. ‘Shout what I tell you loud as you can, and I’ll cover you.’ ”
Kesha had no voice at all now, not even that insolent cockcrow. He could only bare his crooked teeth in a smile as he saw how pleased with him all of them, the visiting gentlefolk included, were.
There was a thoroughbred quality about Vadim. Imposing to look at, he was perhaps not much good in a fight. His skin was white and delicate; you wouldn’t need a gauntlet to draw blood, the touch of a bare hand could do it. White, but not smooth, it was dotted with little pink spots asking to be picked.
“Good. Very good,” he said, smiling at Akindin. “Thank you, Comrade Kokushkin.”
He hesitated, then rose and shook Akindin’s hand from across the desk.
Whereupon Maria also rose, went over to Kesha, and shook his hand. Tenderly? Tentatively? Whichever it was, Kesha’s heart raced and his head was in a whirl. He had never remotely dreamed of meeting such a fine young lady, let alone of touching her.
Maria went back to her seat. Mashistov then lowered himself slowly, deliberately onto a chair. Akindin decided that he too was allowed to sit, and anyway the room was too small for five people to walk around. So he sat by the nearer desk, placing his cap before him. Still smiling.
Only Dakhin was left standing. And frowning.
Vadim looked from the one to the other, noted a certain embarrassment, and judged that all was as it should be.
“Well done, Comrade Kokushkin,” he said, measuring out each word clearly and precisely, as if it were a reward. “Always follow your instinct as a worker and it will not let you down.”
“He’s not a bad metalworker either,” Mashistov added.
“No, it won’t let you down. If somebody comes collecting for aid to the wounded, or the families of men killed in action, or refugees, what do you say to them?”
Perhaps Akindin knew, perhaps he would have found the right answer to the collector, but—here and now? He couldn’t put his finger on it, he was lost for words, with half an eye on the amazing young lady.
“What does your instinct tell you?”
Akindin stared at the pale, solemn little gentleman, lips still apart, teeth bared, spellbound.
But Vadim didn’t expect an answer. Listening carefully to his own voice, gazing at Kesha with shining eyes, he patiently explained. “What you have to say is: ‘Did the government ask us before it started this war? Is it our fault if there are widows and orphans and cripples and refugees? Let those who started it and made them that way, let them pay for it. Anyway, what can the workers’ few pennies do against a sea of national calamities?’ But if anybody comes collecting for political martyrs or exiles, for wreaths, or for their families, that’s our collection, there’s nobody else to do it, only us workers.”
Although Vadim was no longer rejoicing or praising him, the half-smile remained fixed on Akindin’s face.
Maria sat there with a composure unusual in one so young. Hers was the serene beauty often seen in Russian women’s faces. She listened to Vadim without missing a word, glancing at Kesha to make sure that he understood, and turning friendly looks upon the others.
“Patriotism is the hook on which they hope to catch us. Catch those whose hearts are not forged on the anvil.”
What a metaphor! Maria could not take her wide, dark eyes off him. How true. How apt. Mashistov sat facing her across the desk. It was not just his face that seemed to have been hammered into shape
—with no narrowing at the jaw or widening at the brow, with its hard, unmoving eyes—the palpable hardness of his nature must come from that anvil-forged heart.
Vadim ungrudgingly continued, for the benefit of Kesha alone. To the others these matters were rudimentary. “We have to open our eyes, Comrade Kokushkin, to the fact that our enemy is not in some far-off country, not abroad, but right here, among us. How long will we go on falling for the line that the Russian soldier is our brother and must have his gun in a hurry—what about the German soldier, the German worker, isn’t he our brother too? Does it really matter to the proletariat who the exploiter is—a Russian or a German capitalist? Those who too importunately call on you to save the fatherland you must answer with the old Obukhov slogan of 1901—your very own slogan. Do you remember it?”
It wasn’t just Kesha, who was only a youngster; the others didn’t seem to know it or to have read of it either. Ah, but Vadim, though not an Obukhov worker himself, did know, and spoke for all of them: “Where there is bread—there is our fatherland.”
Right, right … Akindin, flattered, blinked eager agreement. He had no thought of leaving.
But Dakhin loomed over him, looking angry. He had made a point of not sitting down.
Enough had been said, but, perhaps because the others had not turned up, Comrade Vadim wiped the corners of his mouth with a white handkerchief, and continued, in the same clear, even, unemphatic voice. “We are supposed to die, but for them it’s a banquet, they won’t mind if the war goes on for ten years. You get paper money, while the bigwigs plunder the people’s gold. What, for instance, have you got to eat nowadays? Nothing at all.”
November 1916 Page 69