The women were usually more scared than the men the first time they went down—some even cried out and screamed—but they got used to it more quickly. Ivan even felt angered by the way they went on chattering, even inside the cage, about everyday, surface concerns like rations and fabrics. And the young ones would talk about films or tell stories along the lines of “So I told him, and he told me, and then Lida asked, but he just laughed and lit a cigarette and didn’t say a word in reply.” Women—Ivan realized—must be very different from him; they simply did not understand the seriousness of the work.
The chain rattled, and the banksman, another evacuee from the Donbass, winked at Ivan and signalled to the engineman.
“Oh, oh, Mama, give us a parachute!” Latkov yelled in a silly voice. As if needing support, he flung one arm round the shoulders of Natasha Popova, the winch operator.
She threw off his arm. “Cut it out, you idiot!” she shouted crossly. “Stop playing the fool!”
But Latkov was not simply playing the fool. Deep down he felt afraid. What if the cable were to choose this minute to snap? They might not be on the front line, but it was still 180 metres to the bottom of the shaft.
The descent was so fast that it made people feel a little dizzy. Ears always felt blocked and there would be a sudden lump in one’s throat. But the cage rumbled on; the shaft’s stone lining zipped past as if it were a smooth grey ribbon. There was more and more water on the walls, and warm, heavy drops spraying onto people’s clothes and faces.
The cage slowed as it approached the upper seam, where coal was already being dug. The shaft lining now seemed less like a mica ribbon and more like a mosaic of rough-hewn stones of different shapes and colours.
The cage came to a stop. With a quick nod to Ivan, a number of people got out: a face worker, a timberman, two female winch operators, the driver of the electric locomotive and a coal-cutter operator—one of Ivan’s neighbours in the family barrack.
The banksman gave the signal—and the cage began its descent to the lower level, where Ivan and his brigade were opening a gallery to a four-metre-thick seam of coking coal.
Ivan had spent three months of the previous winter sinking this deepest part of the shaft. As the cage moved down, he examined the shaft lining. There was no doubt about it: he and his men had done a good job.
The cage even seemed to be moving more smoothly. The drops from the walls felt pleasant, like drops of warm, summer rain when the sun comes out and a rainbow appears. And the air at pit bottom felt drier and cleaner than on the upper level.
Ivan had certainly done his share of hard work here. In midwinter, he had had to contend with an incoming stream. It had been like icy rain, falling onto his hot, sweaty back and slicing straight through him. Even now it was painful to think about. The shaft had been stifling, filled by a filthy fog from day after day of blasting through rock. He used to come back up to the surface exhausted and soaked to the bone. Beneath a howling blizzard he would run to the lamp cabin; the lamp’s icy handle would stick to his fingers, burning them as if it had come straight out of a furnace. He would hand in his lamp and run on to the bathhouse.
He remembered his fifteen months in the Karakum Desert, working down a sulphur mine. While he was there, he had longed for the Russian winter. People would close all the doors and windows and lie about on the clay floors of their homes, wrapped in wet sheets and drinking green tea—but there was no escape from the suffocating heat. And he had to work underground—in the heat and dust, and with no real ventilation. And on top of all that, there was the smoke from repeated explosions. It was a wonder he had been able to breathe at all. At the end of the shift, it was out of one furnace and into another: nothing but dark rock and white sand stretching far into the distance. It was as if the whole earth were burning, gripped by some fever. The night sky, though, was unforgettable: anthracite-black, with huge stars, white and pale blue like anemones in the spring. If you were to strike at the anthracite with a pick, starry flowers would fall from the sky. Yes, the Karakum had been quite something.
•
They had reached the cross-cut. Devyatkin was tapping the support props. There was a gleam from the thin rails.
“It’s certainly good solid flint here,” said Latkov. “Comrade Novikov has signed us up for quite a task. Heaven knows when we’ll get to the coal.” He seemed to be joking, but there was an edge to his words.
Kotov joined in, his voice deep and hoarse, “I heard the surveyor say we’d be lucky to get this job done by December. Especially on our present rations.”
“Yes,” said Devyatkin. “Comrade Novikov’s promises may cost us dear. Before the war, there was a Pole who worked at our factory. He liked to say, ‘Promises, promises—cheap to speak, but dear to keep.’”
“Where was he from?” asked Braginskaya.
“Why?”
“My uncle used to say the very same words.”
“My own uncle,” Latkov began dreamily—and he launched into some strange story.
Ivan, meanwhile, was taking note of the work done by the day shift. Here there was a damaged timber—it would need reinforcement or the roof might fall in. Here the wall had buckled a little. And here there was strong lateral pressure—the base of the timber set was unstable. The director had, of course, promised to bring compressed air to the adjacent cross-cut, but the pipe still came to an end exactly where it had come to an end yesterday. No more lengths of pipe had been brought down from the surface. Nor had Ivan seen any in the store. They’d undertaken to bring some from the station, but maybe there hadn’t been any available trucks. Someone had at least brought a power cable, but what use was that when there was still no additional power supply? At present there was barely enough power even for the machines already at work on the upper level. The coal-cutter alone consumed a crazy amount.
They turned into another cross-cut, and Devyatkin said, “Here we are—this is where we got to yesterday.”
“Yes,” said Latkov, “and we did a good job. The props are lined up like soldiers on parade. Firm and solid. And this is where I nearly got buried. Remember, Kotov? We’d finished blasting and I was putting in a post.”
“Really?” said Kotov, “I’d completely forgotten.” In fact, he remembered very well—he simply wanted to annoy Latkov. Then he turned to Ivan and said crossly, “I’d expected our neighbours to have got their compressed air by now, but there’s no sign of any new pipes. Neither down here, nor at the pithead.”
“Ah,” said Ivan. “You’ve noticed too.”
But Kotov merely frowned. He felt he was doing the wrong kind of work. Not long ago he’d been in charge of procurement at a poultry-processing centre—and now here he was, stuck at the bottom of a pit. As for Devyatkin, he’d worked in a Galalith factory, making the bodies for fountain pens. Then he’d worked in another factory, operating a press and punching out components. He was an experienced worker, but once, in the hostel, he too had said, “When I look up at that roof, when I remember there are houses up above me, and pine trees, when I think about all that—no, I can’t bear it . . .”
Kotov, ever contrary, had said, “All right—if you’re scared of the pit, then volunteer for the front!”
“Maybe I will,” said Devyatkin.
The two men were walking side by side, glancing now and then at Ivan’s broad back as he walked quietly towards the coalface. He was the gentlest and most good-natured of men, but Latkov seemed unable to stop needling him: “So, Novikov, I hear you signed some document in the office yesterday, giving your word that we’d get to the coal by the first of the month. Did you ask us what we thought? Or will you be going it alone? Or will Party Secretary Motorin be working alongside you?”
“You know very well who I’ll be working with,” Ivan replied calmly.
“Think we all have eight hands and a few extra skins?” asked Devyatkin.
“Before agreeing to take on more work, you should see the rations I received from the store yesterda
y,” said Kotov.
“Why?” Ivan replied. “Do you think mine are any different?”
“Like it or not, Novikov, you’re a born bureaucrat,” retorted Kotov.
“I don’t think so,” said Ivan. “I’ve been a worker all my life. You’re the one who wants to get back to your office.”
Latkov saw two lights flickering in the distance and said, “Look, Niura Lopatina and Vikentiev are at work already. They’ve got political consciousness all right—soon they’ll be brigade leaders themselves!”
51
MORE AND more clearly, they could sense how close they were to the coal seam. It was as if the coal were growing angry, turning vicious, knowing it was about to be disturbed. Now and then there were small escapes of gas while they were boring, and the jet of water they used to clean out the boreholes was splashing about alarmingly. Sometimes the gas escapes were strong enough to shoot out small pieces of rock.
A blower appeared in the roof; an invisible stream of gas was escaping into the gallery. There was an ominous whistle and, when they brought the lamp up close, they could see glistening particles of swift-moving shale dust. Niura Lopatina’s blonde hair quivered when she moved her head close to the crack, as if someone were blowing on it. Before they started work, the grey-haired gas foreman came to carry out a check, and the flame in his indicator lamp swelled up alarmingly. The miners exchanged looks and the foreman said gravely, “Did you see what that flame did, comrade Novikov?”
“Of course I did,” Ivan replied calmly. “The coal’s not far away—it’s breathing.”
“’You know what that flame means?”
“Of course I do. It means we’re nearly there.” Turning to Kotov and Devyatkin, Ivan said, “So, before we bore any more blast holes, we’ll drill a deep exploratory hole with a hand-operated machine. Once there’s a proper vent, we can bore more blast holes. That way there’ll be no risk.”
“Yes,” the foreman replied. “That’s what the ventilation director said. ‘Haste,’ he said, ‘makes waste.’”
“Worse than waste,” said Ivan. “It can kill.”
“Is it dangerous down here?” asked Braginskaya.
Ivan shrugged. He had worked on the western slope of Smolyanka 11, a deep, hot and difficult mine prone to gas escapes that could lead to a whole gallery being buried under hundreds of tons of coal dust and rubble. It was certainly dangerous down there. A bad rock fall—and it would be a week before you could dig out the bodies. After that, the gallery would be closed off once and for all. And he had helped sink the shaft of Rutchenkovo 17-17. Those were the worst blowers he’d ever seen. The howl of escaping gas was so loud you couldn’t hear people speak. Outbursts had smashed the shield of the borer. Yet in the end it had worked out—they’d got through to the seam. But as for this new blower . . . He couldn’t make promises. A severe outburst could do a lot worse than send a quiver through Lopatina’s blonde hair. They were, after all, working underground—this wasn’t a sweets factory. What could he say to reassure Braginskaya? Only that it was a great deal more dangerous where his brother, Pyotr, was working. And then Braginskaya, as if understanding Ivan’s silent smile and involuntary shrug, said in embarrassment, “I’m sorry. I realize no one asked questions like that where my husband was working.”
Ivan looked at the faces of the hushed workers, all thinking thoughts of their own. He looked at the part of the working that had yet to be timbered, at the low roof, at the borer, at the dark, threatening sheen of the rock face, at the empty tram waiting to take out the rock they extracted, at the props with their fresh damp smell of pitch. For a second he saw little Masha’s face, red and feverish, and her shining, wide-open eyes. He saw his wife, frowning anxiously. Almost diffidently, he said, “Well, I suppose we should start work.”
Slowly, as if reluctantly, he went up to the borer and began checking the mechanism.
There is a particular beauty about this first moment of work, about this very first movement, as a worker finds his balance, as he overcomes the inertia of rest, apparently unaware of his own strength yet fully believing in it, not feeling any sense of pressure or tension but knowing he soon will.
A locomotive driver feels this as he gets ready to take a powerful freight locomotive out of the depot and his heart senses the first slight push of the piston. A lathe operator knows this at the beginning of his shift, when he senses the first birth of movement in a machine tool that has been standing idle. A pilot knows it, when his first almost meditative routine makes the propeller begin to rotate, sleepily and uncertainly.
A furnaceman, a ripper, a tractor driver, a metalworker taking hold of his wrench, a carpenter picking up his axe, a miner switching on his rock drill—all these people know, love and appreciate the beauty of these first movements that give birth to the rhythm, the power and the music of their work.
That night the work was particularly difficult. The ventilation was poor. The fan recently installed near the blower was malfunctioning and the damp heat was enervating. When blasts were carried out at a working nearby, the greasy, caustic smoke spread into the cross-cut. There was a pale blue mist around the workers’ lamps and there were times when they could hardly breathe. Their throats burned and they were covered in sweat. All they wanted was to sit down for a few minutes. The thought of the fresh air high above them seemed like a mirage, a vision of a cool spring seen by a traveller in a desert.
Ivan set about drilling a deep exploratory borehole. At first, this went relatively smoothly. Calmly, sleepily, if a little crossly, the drill ground its way through the rock. It too seemed troubled by the heat and the lack of air, but it did not get jammed.
Latkov was helping Vikentiev to position the pine props and to bring him the tie beams he needed to complete the roof.
“That one’s only half-finished,” said Vikentiev, pointing to the base of one of the props. “Gone blind, or what?”
“It’s the heat,” said Latkov. He went on, with feeling, “There’s nothing worse for a Russian than real heat. Cold’s not so bad.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Vikentiev. “Last winter I worked on the surface in the Bogoslovsky district. Forty degrees below, and a fog like frozen sour cream, not lifting for weeks on end. Open-cast mines—when the wind comes off the Chelyabinsk steppe, that’s when you learn what cold can do to you. Being out in the open isn’t so easy. I caught pneumonia. No, we’re better off down below.”
Kotov and Devyatkin were helping Ivan. They kept looking at him, wondering when he would stop adding extension rods to the drill bit. Devyatkin’s temples and forehead were covered with dark drops of sweat; he was no longer wiping them away. Gasping for breath, he said, “I know we’ve only just started, but I need a rest.”
“Keep going, Gavrila,” said Kotov. Finding it difficult to turn the hand crank on his own, he stopped and wiped his face with his sleeve. Ivan looked back and said, “Keep at it—or the bit will jam! Devyatkin, you’re soaking!”
“It’s still running smoothly, thank God,” said Kotov.
“Why thank God?” said Ivan. “You don’t find coal smoothly.”
There were moments when Ivan, bending forward, focused on the drill and its progress, imagined he was still in the Donbass and that there was no war. The rock formation here was similar to that around the Smolyanin seam, and the dank air was like the air in the lower galleries of Smolyanka 11. At the end of the shift he would leave, go a short way on a bus and then walk back to the building where he had lived for so many years. He inhaled the moist, close air and took pleasure in the feel of the sweat on his forehead.
A sudden jet of water mixed with small pieces of rock struck him in the chest and shoulders with such force that he staggered, momentarily winded. Kotov and Devyatkin looked at him anxiously. In response, Ivan took a deep breath, shouted hoarsely, “Don’t stop now—we must keep the bit moving!”
Somewhere in these dark depths lay the seam and Ivan’s drill bit was feeling its way towards it.<
br />
Within him, in all its fullness, he felt the strongest, truest force in the world—that of a working man. And he expended it generously, with no backward looks.
At this point, something happened that everyone present, astonished by what they witnessed, tried later to explain in their own way. Gentle, courteous Ivan Novikov was transformed. This man who so rarely raised his voice; who affably laughed off all Latkov’s attempts to needle him; who always stood meekly in line both in the food store and when he was waiting to be taken up in the cage at the end of the shift; who quietly took his little daughter for walks down the settlement’s single mud street; who was happy, if his wife had to go out, to check the washing on the clothes line or to sit outside the front door and peel potatoes—this man was transfigured. His bright eyes darkened; his movements, usually calm and slow, became swift and sharp; even his quiet voice became brusque and commanding.
Latkov inadvertently made everyone laugh. Appearing to think of Ivan as a Cossack leader, he yelled, “Careful, comrade Ataman—there might be a fall!”
And Niura Lopatina came out with something oddly similar. As she and Braginskaya were taking out a heavy load of rock, she looked back, saw Ivan in the lamplight, spattered with water and black mud, and said, “He’s a second Yemelyan Pugachov!”63
Pushing away the strands of hair stuck to her forehead, Braginskaya replied, “There must be some pagan god in him—I’ve never seen such a man.”
A little later, when they sat down for a rest after completing this first borehole, Niura Lopatina said, “Kotov, did you hear Braginskaya just now? She said our brigade leader’s a pagan god!” They all turned to look at Ivan. His ear to a crack in the rock, he was listening out for the whistle of escaping gas.
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