Many of the young lads he had once taught, who had called him Uncle Vanya, had also gone up in the world. One was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet; another worked in the Komsomol central committee and had once come to visit Ivan in a ZIS-101. And there were many others who had done well for themselves, more than he could remember.
But not once had Ivan’s brother, Pyotr—or any of these former schoolmates, fellow workers or juniors now working in such exalted spheres—ever thought of condescending to Ivan. Not once had anyone said, “Still stuck at the coalface, are you? No hope of a change?” And Ivan, for his part, had always seen himself as strong and successful, a man who had done well in the world.
It was, in fact, Ivan whose friendliness and warmth to these others concealed a hint—though no more than a hint—of condescension. He had always thought of his work as the most important thing in his life; the title of worker meant a great deal to him. And he took it for granted that others—his brother, or old friends now living in Moscow—should glance questioningly at him as they told him about their lives, seeking his advice or approval.
Ivan began to climb the slope towards the barracks. Taking a shortcut between two loops in the road, he reached the top of the hill, then stopped to get his breath back.
In a distant hollow he could see the factory workshops, the pithead structures, the slag heaps and the rails of the broad-gauge line that served the pit and the factory. He admired the pearly smoke over the coke furnaces, and the puffs of steam. As they rose into the sunlit morning sky, they reminded him of a large flock of well-fattened geese.
A powerful locomotive, its proud breast gleaming like a mirror, was letting out quiet hoots as it moved between the spur tracks, and Ivan looked with sudden envy at the driver, who was waving angrily at the pointsman. “A real warrior of a locomotive!” he thought. “Yes, it would be good to work on an engine like that.” And he imagined himself driving a huge freight train, carrying guns, tanks and ammunition. It was a stormy night and Ivan’s train was doing seventy kilometres per hour. The rain lashed at the cab window, but his train was still tearing along, the broad southern steppe trembling beneath it.
Ivan was a born worker and he knew it. His greed for work, his profound curiosity about labour of every kind, had not diminished over the years. He would get carried away—thinking how interesting it would be to try his hand as a copper smelter, or as an engineer on a seagoing steamer, or to go to eastern Siberia and work in the gold mines.
He wanted to see how people live and work all over the earth. But he could not imagine himself as a mere traveller, idly observing cities, forests, fields and factories. And for this reason, no doubt, his dream of wandering was always linked to a dream of working as a locomotive driver, or as a mechanic on a plane or an oceangoing ship. And Ivan had done much to realize this dream; he had seen a great deal in his life. He was lucky in that his wife, Inna Vasilievna, was always ready to pack up and go, to accompany her husband to distant parts. Within a year or two, however, they always wanted to go back home—and they would return to the Donbass, to their village, to their pit.
They went to Spitsbergen;58 Ivan worked for two years underground, and Inna taught Russian language and arithmetic to the Soviet children there. They lived for fifteen months in the Karakum Desert, where Ivan helped dig for sulphur and Inna taught adults. They also worked at a lead plant in the Tian Shan Mountains; Ivan worked as a borer, while his wife ran the adult literacy school.
During the last years before the war, however, they lost interest in travel. After many years without children, Inna finally gave birth to a little daughter—a frail child who was constantly falling sick. And, as often happens with couples who have had to wait for a child, there was something excessive, almost desperate about their love for this little girl and their constant fears with regard to her health.
Ivan looked at the workers’ settlement on the eastern slope of the hill and felt a sudden warmth in his heart. In his mind’s eye he could see little Masha, with her fair hair and her pale face. He would enter the barrack and she would come running out to meet him, wearing only her knickers. She looked pale—ever so slightly bluish. And she would call out, “Papa’s back!”
How could anyone understand what he felt? He would take her in his arms, run one hand over her soft, warm hair, and gently carry her to their room. And she would kick about with her bare feet, push against him with her little fists, look him straight in the eye, tilt her head to one side and burst out laughing. It was almost too much for him. How could there be room in his heart for these little hands full of living warmth, these tiny fingers with nails like the scales of the very smallest of carp—and for the grinding howl of a drill, the muffled explosions of buried dynamite, the red, smoky fire flaring over the coke ovens? How could this warm, clean breath, these clear eyes coexist in his heart with the troubles and hardships of war, with the exhausted faces of the evacuees, with the blazing fires of that winter’s night when he and her and Inna had boarded a train and left the village that was their home?
48
HE CAME back in to find Inna hurriedly clearing the table and getting ready to go out to work—school would be starting in twenty minutes. She looked at her husband, picked up the pile of children’s exercise books she’d been marking, and put them into her briefcase. Then she put an empty can and a glass jar into a bag; after lessons, she meant to go to the store. Speaking quickly, she said, “Vanya, there’s a kettle of hot water under the pillow and bread in the drawer of the bedside table. If you want kasha, there’s a pot outside.”
“Where’s Masha?”
“With the neighbours. Old Doronina will heat up some soup for her lunch. And I’ll be back by five.”
“Still no letter from Pyotr?” Ivan asked, and let out a sigh.
“You’ll get one in the next few days,” said Inna. “I’m sure of it.”
She began to walk towards the door but then turned round, went up to her husband and put her hands on his broad shoulders. The gentleness of her smile made her weary face, for all its tiny wrinkles, look young and pretty.
“Go to bed, Vanya. Go to bed. Not even you can carry on working like this without a break,” she said quietly.
“I’m all right,” he answered. “I need to go to the pit office. Masha can come with me.”
She took her husband’s large, rough hand, held it against her cheek and laughed. “So then, workers of the world?” she said loudly. “All on course? You won’t let your drills run wild? Oh Vanya! Dear, dear Vanechka!”
Ivan went with his wife to the main door and watched her go on her way. The schoolgirls walking beside her were swinging their oilskin briefcases, and she too swung her bag and her briefcase. Short, narrow-shouldered, walking with quick steps—from a distance, she too could have been a schoolgirl. And Ivan remembered his wife over the many years he had known her: as a young girl with a pigtail, fearlessly berating her father when he went on a pay-day bender; as a student at the pedagogical technical school, reading Taras Bulba aloud to him as they sat near the pond; wearing tall fur boots and a fur coat, holding a pile of exercise books to her chest as she walked through the snows of Spitsbergen, the harsh clarity of the street lamps alternating with the marvellous light of the aurora borealis; reading a Sovinform Bureau bulletin in a freight car during the long hungry days of their journey east, from Stalino to the Urals.
“Yes, I’m a lucky man,” he said to himself.
Just then there was a barely audible, mouse-like rustle behind his back—and his daughter flung her arms around his leg.
He bent down and picked her up. His head began to spin—perhaps from joy, perhaps from the strain of night after night of working underground.
After he’d had some tea, Ivan sat Masha on his shoulders, went out onto the street and set off towards the pit office.
The dugouts along the hillside, the long squat barracks, and even the individual houses for the engineers, foremen and leading Stakhanovites—all bore the
imprint of the hardships of war. It was clearer than ever how little difference there was between the lives of the front-line soldiers and the lives of their brothers and fathers working in the mines and factories of the Urals.
This Urals workers’ settlement had come into being, during the bitterly cold winter of 1941, as swiftly as the dugouts, trenches and bunkers of rifle divisions and artillery regiments had materialized amid similar hills and forests to the west.
The cables hanging between tree trunks, the telephone lines linking the houses of the director, the chief engineer and the secretary of the mine Party committee both to the pithead buildings and to the office, shop floors and control room, were similar to the field telephone cables that linked divisional HQ commanders to their front-line units and to workshops, food stores and support services in the rear. And the factory newspaper posted at the door of the pit’s Party committee office, with its short articles on the achievements of mine workers, resembled the pages of a divisional newspaper brought out in a hurry at the height of a German offensive.
And just as divisional newspapers call on new recruits to study grenades, machine guns and anti-tank rifles, so a leaflet issued by the Party committee called on former housewives and kolkhoz workers to familiarize themselves with the workings of coal cutters, percussion drills and both light and heavy jackhammers. It was imperative that they learn to recognize when a cutter is unstable, when a motor sounds abnormal, when a cable has too much play and when a power drill is overheating.
The similarities between a front-line position and this Urals settlement made the sight of the local children all the more affecting. Fair-haired and dark-haired, timid or loud-mouthed, serious or mischievous—there they all were, playing beside the dugouts, on the slag heaps, above the quarries, amongst the autumn leaves.
Ivan stopped beside a wall newspaper.
“We’ve done it!” he said, after reading that senior shaft sinker Ivan Novikov’s brigade—shaft sinkers Kotov and Devyatkin and timbermen Vikentiev and Latkov—had now made up for various delays and, according to every indicator, caught up with the most advanced brigades.
He read the article through, trying to hold Masha’s feet still, patiently repeating now and again, “Masha, Masha, what’s got into you?” Masha, for her part, was trying to kick the newspaper.
When she at last succeeded, her big toe landed bang on her father’s name, which was printed in large script.
“Masha, Masha! Kicking your father like that! How could you?”
“I didn’t kick you,” Masha replied with conviction. And she stroked the cap on her father’s head.
Nothing in the article was incorrect, but there was not a word about any of the most important things: that Ivan’s subordinates were all exceptionally difficult and incompetent; that Kotov and Devyatkin had previously been in a labour battalion59 and were desperate to return to working above ground, and that Latkov was a bully and a troublemaker—once he had even turned up for work drunk. Vikentiev, admittedly, was a professional miner, and mine work was something he understood and loved. But even he was not easy to work with; he was captious to the extreme, constantly finding fault with the trammers, none of whom had ever worked in a pit before. There was an evacuee from Kharkov, a woman by the name of Braginskaya, whom Vikentiev had reduced to despair. This had been inexcusable: her husband, an economist, had been killed at the front, and she was trying her best.
Even Ivan himself might have found it hard to explain how it was that the lazy Devyatkin, always wanting to sit down for a minute and eat another crust of bread, and Braginskaya, the thin, sad-eyed Russified Pole, and the troublesome Latkov ended up fulfilling their norm in these difficult, sometimes dangerous conditions. Did this simply happen of itself? Or was it Ivan’s doing? He was responsible, certainly, for various improvements to the conditions: ensuring better ventilation, increasing the depth of the blast holes from one and a half to two metres, eliminating delays in the supply of pit posts and empty trucks . . . Probably, though, there was more to it than that.
Ivan looked crossly at the workers passing by. Why did none of them stop to read this newspaper? Were they all illiterate, or what?
As he approached the barrack that housed the mines administration, he caught sight of Braginskaya. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You should be at home, resting.”
Braginskaya looked strange up on the earth’s surface, in a beret and high-heeled shoes. Down below, when she was wearing rubber boots and a tarpaulin jacket, with a kerchief around her head, it had felt entirely natural to address her as Auntie. “Hey, Auntie, bring us a few empty trams!” Now, though, that would have felt wrong.
“I went to the clinic to make an appointment for my son,” she explained. “I really can’t cope. Yesterday I asked Yazev for an attestation. I was hoping to send my boy to the boarding school in the city. He’d get three meals a day there. But Yazev refused. So I’m still fighting on two fronts—at work and at home.”
She held up a page of the factory newspaper. “Have you seen this?”
“I have,” said Ivan. “And I’m sorry they didn’t include your name.”
“Why should they?” she replied. “It’s enough that there’s something about the brigade. Although . . . Well, it would have been nice if they had . . .” Embarrassed by what she had said, she put her hand on Masha’s arm and asked, “Your daughter?”
Her arms still around her father’s neck, Masha said loudly and defiantly, “Yes, I’m his daughter, he goes underground, and I’m not giving him up to anyone. I won’t let go of him.” After a pause, she asked in an admonishing tone, “Auntie, why are you angry? Because you weren’t in the newspaper?”
Braginskaya murmured, “My Kazimir let go of his papa—and now his papa will never come back.”
“You’re a silly girl, Masha,” said Ivan. And then, “You’ve been riding me long enough. It’s time you went under your own steam.”
And he took the little girl from his shoulders and set her down on the ground.
49
IVAN LOOKED at the three dust-covered cars parked outside the office. One, an Emka, belonged to Yazev, the mine director; the second, a ZIS-101, was the car used by the obkom secretary; and the third, a foreign make, probably belonged to the director of the military factory next to the railway station.
“I was called here, but I fear I’m wasting my time. It seems the bosses are having a meeting,” Ivan said to the mine-director’s driver, whom he knew.
“What makes you think that?”
Ivan explained: “Three cars at once means an official meeting. The bosses catch sight of one another—and that’s that. Meetings are like gravity—there’s no getting away from it. The bosses just have no choice.”
The driver laughed. The girl behind the wheel of the foreign car smiled. The driver of the obkom ZIS frowned disapprovingly.
Just then Yazev looked out from his office window and said, “Ah, Novikov, come and join us!”
Ivan walked down the corridor, glancing at some of the announcements posted on the walls. Section head Rogov told Ivan that a representative of the State Defence Committee was visiting and that he had convened a technical discussion. “He’s with the director now,” Rogov continued. Winking, he added, “Have no fears, brother.”
Ivan looked around in bewilderment. “But what about Masha? Where can I leave Masha? I thought they only wanted me for a few minutes—to sign some document or other.”
Masha took a firm hold of her father’s hand and issued a warning, “Don’t leave me on my own, Papa—or I’ll scream!”
“Why? You’ll be with Auntie Niura, the cleaning lady—she’s your friend,” Ivan whispered pleadingly. But at that moment the office door opened, and the director’s young secretary said impatiently, “Come on, Novikov. Where’ve you been all this time?”
Ivan picked Masha up in his arms and went into the office.
Yazev, a handsome, tight-lipped thirty-five-year-old, in a smart tunic
with a broad, shiny leather belt, was pacing about his office, his box-calf boots letting out satisfying creaks. Several other men were sitting around his desk. One, built like a warrior, was wearing a frayed general’s jacket; he had bags under his eyes and tousled hair hanging over his large forehead. The second—in a grey summer jacket and a pale blue shirt with no tie—had the sallow face of a man accustomed to working all night. He wore spectacles and was sitting in Yazev’s chair. Lying on the desk in front of him were an open briefcase, piles of documents and large sheets of crumpled blue tracing paper. Lapshin, director of the coal trust, a man with yellow teeth and a constant frown, and Motorin, the grey-haired secretary of the pit Party committee, sat on chairs pushed back against the walls. Motorin, with his lively brown eyes, was usually loud and forthright; now, though, he looked preoccupied and confused.
Standing by the window was a tall, thin man in a black jacket with a turndown collar. Ivan knew him from a meeting the previous May. He was Ivan Kuzmich, the obkom secretary responsible for industry.
“Georgy Andreyevich, this is shaft sinker Novikov,” said Yazev, addressing the pale man in spectacles. He then frowned and said in a low voice, “Why have you brought the child here? It was the mine director who summoned you, not the director of the nursery.” He pronounced nursery strangely, placing the stress on the final y and somehow making the word sound ridiculous and offensive.
“I think she may be a little old for the nursery,” said the obkom secretary. And then, “How old are you, my girl?”
Masha did not reply. Her eyes large and round, she looked enigmatically out of the window.
“Soon she’ll be four,” said Ivan. “And I thought you only wanted me here for a minute, to sign a statement about a malfunction in the supply of compressed air. Anyway, the nursery and the kindergarten are both closed—they’re in quarantine.”
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