The Town By The Sea tof-3 Read online

  an amazing moustache—a great drooping ginger thing.

  Throwing us a careless glance, but without saying hullo, the man with the moustache went into the next room and started fingering the gleaming, freshly painted model of an axle-box. He glanced frowningly at a gap in the roof made by a shell and, walking past a cast-iron fly-wheel, kicked it as if to test how strong it was. The burnished fly-wheel let out a clang and swayed dangerously. The man with the moustache steadied it with his hand, then, without saying a word to anyone, clasping a bright yellow brief case under his arm and looking as if he owned the place, walked out of the foundry on the Hospital Square.

  "Next time don't let anyone in without my permission. We get all sorts of outsiders strolling in here, and then we find the models are missing," said Zhora when he heard about this visit.

  Zhora was afraid somebody might walk off with the gear-wheel models made of ash that was a hundred years old. He had borrowed them from the Motor Factory, where he used to work.

  .. . Two hours later we were attending a social studies class. Nikita was telling us about the country's social system and, as part of the lesson, was reading out an article from the newspaper Molodoi Leninets.

  The door opened and in walked the man in the embroidered shirt who had been round the foundry that morning. Thinking the stranger was merely passing through the class-room to get to the school office, Nikita paid no attention to him and went on reading the article.

  Then the man with the moustache went up to the blackboard and, planting himself in front of Nikita, said to him loudly in Ukrainian:

  "When the person in charge of you comes into the room, it is your duty to report to him what you are doing."

  But that was not enough to put Nikita off. He merely went a shade paler and snapped back: "People in charge usually say good morning when they come into a classroom. . . As for your coming in here, I simply don't know you."

  The stranger tried a new line of attack.

  "Why are you teaching in Russian?"

  "I am not teaching in Russian, I am reading an article from a Russian newspaper and everyone understands perfectly well what I am saying."

  "Are you not aware that all teaching in the Ukraine must be given exclusively in the Ukrainian language?"

  "I repeat: I am not teaching, I am reading an article."

  "This isn't Moscow! The people who live in the Ukraine are Ukrainians..."

  "Comrade Stalin says there are more Russians than Ukrainians in the towns of the Ukraine. In time, of course, they will acquire Ukrainian culture, but I don't see what harm it will do if II read now in Russian—everyone understands me. Come here tomorrow and you will hear us reading an article from the newspaper Visit, in Ukrainian. You are quite welcome."

  "Enough of that waffle! You're too young for that! Before you start teaching, you had better learn the state language."

  "Before you start making your remarks and interrupting our studies, you had better say who you are!" Nikita retorted in purest Ukrainian, to prove that he knew it perfectly.

  "Perhaps you will ask me to leave the room, young man?" the stranger inquired, grinning slyly.

  "Yes, I will!" Nikita shouted unexpectedly. "Listen to me! Either you tell me who you are, or the whole class will show you the quickest way out of here!" And red in the face, Nikita nodded at the window.

  "I am afraid you will soon have to apologize to me for that!" the man with the moustache said ominously, and with a proud toss of his ginger mane, he walked out of the room.

  "Yes, that's the best way!" Nikita shouted after him, and lowering his voice at once to a normal tone, went on reading the paper.

  It turned out that this was the notorious Pecheritsa.

  A few days before his visit, Kartamyshev had come to the school. The Secretary of the District Party Committee had gone round all the workshops examining everything with genuine care. He talked for a long time with the trainees, told the foreman off because there was no drinking water in the hot shop and the chaps' gauntlets were torn, then he came down to the foundry himself. It was he who insisted the shell hole in the ceiling should be patched up before the autumn rains began, and a ventilator installed.

  That day one of the chaps was ill and had stayed in the hostel. He told us how, after looking round the school, Kartamyshev had visited the hostel as well. It was plain that Kartamyshev wanted to know what our living conditions were like as well as how much we were learning. He made the cook show him exactly how much food we were given and hauled the hostel warden over the coals because our blankets were rather thin and threadbare and we had no sheets. Kartamyshev was a real father to us.

  We respected him and there was genuine affection in our voices when we mentioned his name. But Pecheritsa had succeeded in rubbing us up the wrong way right from the start...

  The next day, Polevoi was summoned urgently to the Department of Education.

  Pecheritsa flatly demanded that Polevoi should dismiss Mikita from school. He said Nikita had "undermined his authority." Just exactly what passed between them we never knew, but Furman came back from the District Komsomol Committee with a story that in reply to Pecheritsa's complaint Polevoi had sapped out: "The authority of a real Bolshevik can never be undermined. A Bolshevik wins his authority by his conduct." I don't know whether that was exactly how Polevoi put it, but one thing was clear— he had stood up for Nikita. But although the battle was won, everyone realized that Pecheritsa would bear the factory-school trainees a grudge for some time to come.

  Pecheritsa soon made his presence felt in our sleepy little town. On his way out to the country districts he often drove through the steep streets of the town in his tall yellow cabriolet drawn by two glossy black horses. Muffled in a grey tarpaulin coat with the hood thrown back, Pecheritsa looked down on the passers-by, carelessly acknowledging the bows of teachers who knew him.

  Soon the town learnt that the new director of education was a great lover of singing. For several evenings running, Pecheritsa gathered all the school and student choirs in the big drill hall and taught them a lot of songs. After a while he arranged for the choir to perform publicly in the town theatre, at a ceremonial evening. The lads stood in a semi-circle in astrakhan hats, embroidered shirts and blue sharovary tucked into high top-boots. The girls tied ribbons of different colours in their plaits. Their blouses were also embroidered and gay sashes hung down their skirts. In a glare of flood-lights the choristers filling the whole stage of the theatre made a very pretty picture.

  We, trainees, sat. in the gallery. The curtain went up after the interval and in the expectant hush we gazed at the dazzling display of singers. No one thought that Pecheritsa would dare conduct such a huge choir. It didn't seem to fit in with his way of carrying on.

  But after keeping the singers standing motionless on the stage for a few seconds, he strode up to the footlights and with a shake of his flowing ginger mane announced:

  "Revolutionary for Ever, a song by Ivan Franko!"

  Someone in the audience gave a last cough so as not to interrupt later on, then there was silence.

  Pecheritsa turned his back on the audience, poised himself on tip-toe and, whipping a little stick out of his boot, swept it high above his head. The silence seemed to break in half. The young ringing voices burst forth so confidently that we listened spell-bound. Now, lat a sign from the stick, the choir would die away and the soloist would continue the song; now the basses—a picked group of tall, strapping fellows standing separately—would come in, and a thunderous but pleasant roar would fill the hall; now the descants would ring out, as a hundred girls' voices took up the melody. The theatre seemed to grow lighter; you felt like jumping up and singing too.

  And in front of the singers, on a sort of box, now rising on tip-toe, now crouching, now swaying in time with the melody, stood the imposing figure of Pecheritsa, whom Nikita had so boldly turned out of our class-room.

  Pecheritsa was a fine conductor. He had the whole choir, so recently as
sembled, under perfect control. And as I listened to the singers and watched how cleverly the ginger-moustached Pecheritsa conducted them, II began to take a liking to him.

  Then the choir sang 0, the poor lasses of Galicia. The melody went rollicking along. Pecheritsa conducted with special gusto, whirling his baton like a cavalryman cutting down practice twigs. The audience listened to the quick marching song about the lasses of Galicia who were sorry because their "gunner-boys" had marched away to the Ukraine and because there would be no one to kiss them "on their scarlet lips, hazel eyes, and black brows," and I tried desperately to remember where I had heard those words before.

  The song sounded strange and out of place in our Soviet times. In those days the young people used to sing the Carmagnole, Racing on Ahead, We've Dug our Graves Ourselves, The Reapers Reap upon the Hill, Rumbling Guns, The Mist is Creeping o'er the Field, and now, all of a sudden, Pecheritsa had dug up this ditty about the scarlet lips of the sorrowful lasses of Galicia. Only as the choir sang the last couplet, did I remember that it was this song that the Galician "gunner-boys" had sung in 1918 when they marched across our fortress bridge. Their grey uniforms were the same as those of their Austrian officers and they burnt and pillaged as ruthlessly as their masters. They smashed up Orlovsky's mill under the cliff, stole the peasants' grain and carted it off to Austria while the people of our town were starving. I listened to the song and just could not understand why the choir should be singing it in our Soviet times.

  But, as though sensing my doubts and desiring to banish them, Pecheritsa's choir struck up with Taras Shevchenko's Commandment, then the Internationale that we all knew and loved so well. In those days all our meetings ended with our standing up and singing the Internationale and the Young Guard. But it was one thing for us to sing the hymn of the workers of the world in our little group, or at the Komsomol club, in thin untrained voices, and something quite different to hear the Internationale ring forth from the lips of this enormous choir. That evening I began to feel that Nikita had done wrong to turn Pecheritsa out of the room. The new director of education may have acted arrogantly. But what a conductor!

  The next day, however, I was again disappointed in Pecheritsa.

  We had a drawing master called Maxim Yakovlevich Nazarov. This little grey-haired old man, an engineer by profession, came from the town of Sormovo, on the Volga. Maxim Yakovlevich used to tell us much that was new and interesting about the Red Sormovo Plant, where he had worked nearly all his life. The old man had seen a lot, working in shops where there were more people than in forty factories like our Motor. Our school badly needed men like Maxim Yakovlevich with long experience of industry.

  The day after the concert Pecheritsa summoned all the teachers and instructors from our school to test their knowledge of the Ukrainian language. Obviously our drawing master, who had only recently come from Russia to live with his daughter—the wife of a frontier guard—could neither write nor read Ukrainian.

  In front of everyone, Pecheritsa told Polevoi to dismiss the old man from school. Our director did all he could to defend Maxim Yakovlevich, but it was no good.

  Later, when he was telling us about his interview with Pecheritsa, Polevoi said: "I told Pecheritsa,

  'You want to force a Russian to give up his native language and go over to Ukrainian straightaway. Why, he hasn't been living in the Ukraine five minutes. Give him time, don't force him to distort his own language and talk God knows how just for your sake. Compelling him like that will only make him hate the Ukraine... ' "

  But Pecheritsa could not be persuaded. He sent round a circular flatly stating that all school-teachers in the Ukraine must teach children only in Ukrainian.

  "But look here, what children have we got at this school?" Polevoi argued heatedly. "Our youngsters are quite grown-up. And besides, ours is a technical school. We study trades."

  "That has nothing to do with me," Pecheritsa answered coldly. "You live in the Ukraine, here are the instructions, please obey them. As for the type of school you are running, that is quite absurd. What on earth is the use of a factory-training school when there isn't a factory within a hundred miles of you!"

  "The time will come when factories will spring up here too, as they have in the Donbas, and people will thank us for being first to train the workers that will be needed to run them!" Polevoi replied.

  "Rubbish!" Pecheritsa snapped back. "No one will let you soil the blue sky of Podolia with factory smoke."

  "We shall see!" Polevoi said stubbornly and, as Nikita told us later, even gritted his teeth to stop himself cursing.

  "Others will see, not you!" the ginger-moustached Pecheritsa flung at our director. "Your job is to be a disciplined worker in my system of education, and to obey my instructions without wrangling."

  Polevoi was obliged to ask Maxim Yakovlevich to leave the school. We collected all the money we had left from our small grants and presented the old man with a good set of drawing instruments as a memento. Furman fixed a brass disc on the case and neatly scratched an inscription: "To our well-loved teacher Maxim Yakovlevich, in parting, but not in farewell. From his pupils."

  As a matter of fact, Nazarov did not lose much by Pecheritsa's order. There were very few good engineers in the town and he was snapped up by the transport office at once. He started drawing plans of new roads leading to the border.

  The steam-rollers for these roads were repaired at our school, and so Maxim Yakovlevich sometimes came to see us.

  "A-a-ah! Maxim Yakovlevich, victim of the Pecheritsa regime!" Zhora greeted him one day. "Well, hasn't he got as far as your office yet?"

  "That road's barred to him," Nazarov replied. ''We're on military work now. Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze of Moscow is interested in what we are doing. He doesn't care what language a man speaks, as long as he's Soviet at heart!..."

  As Petka and I walked back to the hostel after our guard duty, Petka said to me: "What a pity we didn't catch that bandit, Vasil! Just let him slip through our fingers! I'm afraid Pecheritsa may get to know about it. If he does, he'll use it against Polevoi. 'Look at the blunderers he's trained,' he'll say. Then he'll start slinging mud at Polevoi."

  "Don't worry, Petka. Kartamyshev won't let anything happen to Polevoi. He's known Polevoi since the time when they were at the Party School. Polevoi used to be the Secretary of the Party group there. He's an old Bolshevik, and a worker... But Sasha's a sap, that's a fact. Think how smashing it would have been if Sasha had nabbed that bandit!"

  "Not half!" Petka said despondently.

  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..."