第 37 页

"Hey Manka, where's my oil can gone?"

Sitting in their cramped quarters with the bundles of newspapers shielding them from their neighbours, Pavel and Rita munched bread and apples and laughingly recalled the far from laughable episode with which their journey had begun.

The train crawled along. The old, battered and overloaded carriage creaked and groaned and trembled violently at every joint in the track. The deep blue twilight looked in at the windows.

Then night came, folding the carriage in darkness.

Rita was tired and she dozed with her head resting on the bag. Pavel sat on the edge of the berth and smoked. He too was tired but there was no room to lie down. The fresh night breeze blew through the open window.

Rita, awakened by a sudden jolt, saw the glow of Pavel's cigarette in the darkness. It was just like him to sit up all night rather than cause her discomfort.

"Comrade Korchagin! drop those bourgeois conventions and lie down," she said lightly.

Pavel obediently lay down beside her and stretched his stiff legs luxuriously.

"We have heaps of work tomorrow. So try and get some sleep, you rowdy." She put her arm trustingly around his neck and he felt her hair touching his cheek.

To Pavel, Rita was sacred. She was his friend and comrade, his political guide. Yet she was a woman as well. He had first become aware of this over there at the footbridge, and that was why her embrace stirred him so much now. He felt her deep even breathing; somewhere quite close to him were her lips. Proximity awoke in him a powerful desire to find those lips, and it was only with a great effort of will that he suppressed the impulse.

Rita, as if divining his feelings, smiled in the darkness. She had already known the joy of passion and the pain of loss. She had given her love to two Bolsheviks.

Whiteguard bullets had robbed her of both. One had been a splendid giant of a man, a Brigade Commander; the other, a lad with clear blue eyes.

Soon the regular rhythm of the wheels rocked Pavel to sleep and he did not wake until the engine whistled shrilly the next morning.

Work kept Rita occupied every day until late at night and she had little time for her diary. After an interval a few more brief entries appeared:

August 11

"The gubernia conference is over. Akim, Mikhailo and several others have gone to Kharkov for the all-Ukraine conference, leaving all the paper work to me. Dubava and Pavel have been sent to work at the Gubernia Committee. Ever since Dmitri was made secretary of the Pechorsk District Committee he has stopped coming to lessons. He is up to his neck in work. Pavel tries to do some studying, but we don't get much done because either I am too busy or else he is sent off on some assignment. With the present tense situation on the railways the Komsomols are constantly being mobilised for work. Zharky came to see me yesterday. He complained about the boys being takenaway from him, says he needs them badly himself."

August 23

"I was going down the corridor today when I saw Korchagin standing outside the manager's office with Pankratov and another man. As I came closer I heard Pavel say:

" 'Those fellows sitting there ought to be shot. "You've no right to countermand our orders," he says. "The Railway Firewood Committee is the boss here and you Komsomols had better keep out of it." You ought to have seen his mug.... And the place is infested with parasites like him!' He followed this up with some shocking

language. Pankratov caught sight of me and nudged him. Pavel swung round and when he saw me he turned pale and walked off without meeting my eyes.

He won't be coming around for a long while now. He knows I will not tolerate bad language."

August 27

"We had a closed meeting of the bureau. The situation is becoming serious. I cannot write about it in detail just yet. Akim came back from the regional conference looking very worried. Yesterday another supply train was derailed. I don't think I shall try to keep this diary any more. It is much too haphazard anyway. I am expecting Korchagin. I saw him the other day and he told me he and Zharky are organising a commune of five."

One day while at work in the railway shops Pavel was called to the telephone. It was Rita. She happened to be free that evening and suggested that they finish the chapter they had been studying — the reasons for the fall of the Paris Commune.

As he approached Rita's house on University Street that evening, Pavel glanced up and saw a light in her window. He ran upstairs, gave his usual brief knock on the door and went in. There on the bed, where none of the young comrades were allowed even to sit for a moment, lay a man in uniform. A revolver, knapsack and cap with the red star lay on the table. Rita was sitting beside the stranger with her arms clasped tightly around him. The two were engaged in earnest conversation and as Pavel entered Rita looked up with a radiant face.

The man freed himself from her embrace and rose.

"Pavel," said Rita shaking hands with him, "this is ...."

"David Ustinovich," the man said, clasping Korchagin's hand warmly.

"He turned up quite unexpectedly," Rita explained with a happy laugh.

Pavel shook hands coldly with the newcomer and a gleam of resentment flashed in his eyes. He noticed the four squares of a Company Commander on the sleeve of the man's uniform.

Rita was about to say something but Pavel interrupted her. "I just dropped in to tell you that I shall be busy loading wood down at the wharves this evening," he said.

"And anyhow you have a visitor. Well, I'll be off, the boys are waiting for me downstairs."

And he disappeared through the door as suddenly _ as he had come. They heard him hurrying down the stairs. Then the outside door slammed and all was quiet.

"There's something the matter with him," Rita faltered in answer to David's questioning look.

Down below under the bridge an engine heaved a deep sigh, exhaling a shower of golden sparks from its mighty lungs. They soared upward executing a fantastic dance and were lost in the smoke.

Pavel leaned against the railing and stared at the coloured signal lights winking on the switches.

He screwed up his eyes.

"What I don't understand, Comrade Korchagin, is why it should hurt so much to discover that Rita has a husband? Has she ever told you she hadn't? And even if she has, what of it? Why should you take it like that? You thought, Comrade, it was all platonic friendship and nothing else. ... How could you have let this happen?" he asked himself with bitter irony. "But what if he isn't her husband? David Ustinovich might be her brother or her uncle.... In which case you've done the chap an injustice, you fool. You're no better than any other swine. It's easy enough to find out whether he's her brother or not. Suppose he turns out to be a brother or an uncle, how are you going to face her after the way you've behaved? No, you've got to stop seeing her!"

The scream of an engine whistle interrupted his reflections.

"It's getting late. Time to be going home. Enough of this nonsense."

At Solomenka, as the district where the railway workers lived was called, five young men set up a miniature commune. They were Zharky, Pavel, Klavicek, a jolly fair-haired Czech, Nikolai Okunev, secretary of the railway-yards Komsomol, and Stepan Artyukhin, a boiler repairman who was now working for the railway Cheka.

They found a room and for three days spent all their free time cleaning, painting and whitewashing. They dashed back and forth with pails so many times that the neighbours thought the house was on fire. They made themselves bunks, and mattresses filled with maple leaves gathered in the park, and on the fourth day the room, with a portrait of Petrovsky and a huge map on the wall, literally shone with cleanliness.

Between the windows was a shelf piled high with books. Two crates covered with cardboard served for chairs, another larger crate did duty as a cupboard. In the middle of the room stood a huge billiard table, minus the cloth, which the room's inmates had carried on their shoulders from the warehouse. By day it was used as a table and at night Klavicek slept on it. The five lads fetched all their belongings, and the practical-minded Klavicek made an inventory of the commune's possessions. He wanted to hang it up on the wall but the others objected. Everything in the room was declared common property. Earnings, rations and occasional parcels from home were all divided equally; the sole items of personal property were their weapons. It was unanimously decided that any member of the commune who violated the law of communal ownership or who betrayed his comrades' trust would be expelled from the commune. Okunev and Klavicek insisted that expulsion should be followed by eviction from the room, and the motion was carried.

All the active members of the District Komsomol came to the commune's house-warming party. A gigantic samovar was borrowed from the next-door neighbour. The tea party consumed the commune's entire stock of saccharine. After tea, they sang in chorus and their lusty young voices rocked the rafters:

The whole wide world is drenched with tears,

In bitter toil our days are passed,

But, wait, the radiant dawn appears....

Talya Lagutina, the girl from the tobacco factory, led the singing. Her crimson kerchief had slipped to one side of her head and her eyes, whose depths none as yet had fathomed, danced with mischief. Talya had a most infectious laugh and she looked at the world from the radiant height of her eighteen years. Now her arm swept up and the singing poured forth like a fanfare of trumpets:

Spread, our song, o'er the world like a flood,Proudly our flag waves unfurled.

It burns and glows throughout the world,On fire from our heart's blood.

The party broke up late and the silent streets awoke to the echo of their young voices.

The telephone rang and Zharky reached for the receiver.

"Keep quiet, I can't hear anything!" he shouted to the noisy Komsomols who had crowded in the Secretary's office.

The hubbub subsided somewhat.

"Hullo! Ah, it's you. Yes, right away. What's on the agenda? Oh, the same old thing, hauling firewood from the wharves. What's that? No, he's not been sent anywhere.

He's here. Want to speak to him? Just a minute."

Zharky beckoned to Pavel.

"Comrade Ustinovich wants to speak to you," he said and handed him the receiver.

"I thought you were out of town," Pavel heard Rita's voice say. "I happen to be free this evening.

Why don't you come over? My brother has gone. He was just passing through town and decided to look me up. We haven't seen each other for two years."

Her brother!

Pavel did not hear any more. He was recalling that unfortunate evening and the resolve he had taken that night down on the bridge. Yes, he must go to her this evening and put an end to this.

Love brought too much pain and anxiety with it. Was this the time for such things?

The voice in his ear said: "Can't you hear me?"

"Yes, yes. I hear you. Very well. I'll come over after the Bureau meeting." And he hung up.

He looked her straight in the eyes and, gripping the edge of the oak table, he said: "I don't think I'll be able to come and see you any more." He saw her thick eyelashes sweep upward at his words.

Her pencil paused in its flight over the page and then lay motionless on the open pad.

"Why not?"

"It's very hard for me to find the time. You know yourself we're not having it so easy just now. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we'll have to call it off...."

He was conscious that the last few words sounded none too firm.

"What are you beating about the bush for?" he raged inwardly. "You haven't the courage to strike out with both fists."

Aloud he went on: "Besides, I've been wanting to tell you for some time — I have difficulty in grasping your explanations. When we studied with Segal what I learned stayed in my head somehow, but with you it doesn't. I've always had to go to Tokarev after our lessons and get him to explain things properly. It's my fault — my noodle just can't take it. You'll have to find some pupil with a bit more brains."

He turned away from her searching gaze, and, deliberately burning all his bridges, added doggedly: "So you see it would just be a waste of time for us to continue."

Then he got up, moved the chair aside carefully with his foot and looked at the bowed head and the face that turned pale in the light of the lamp. He put on his cap.

"Well, good-bye, Comrade Rita. Sorry I've wasted so much of your time. I ought to have told you long before this. That's where I'm to blame."

Rita mechanically gave him her hand, but she was too stunned by his sudden coldness to say more than a few words.

"I don't blame you, Pavel. If I haven't succeeded in finding some way of making things clear to you I deserve this."

Pavel walked heavily to the door. He closed it after him softly. Downstairs he paused for a moment — it was not too late to go back and explain.... But what was the use? For what? To hear her scornful response and find himself outside again? No.

Graveyards of dilapidated railway carriages and abandoned engines grew on the sidings. The wind whirled and scattered the dry sawdust in the deserted woodyards.

And all around the town in the forest thickets and deep ravines lurked Orlik's band. By day they lay low in surrounding hamlets or in wooded tracts, but at night they crept out onto the railway tracks, tore them up ruthlessly and, their evil work done, crawled back again into their lair.

And many an iron steed went crashing down the railway embankment. Boxcars were smashed to smithereens, sleepy humans were flattened like pancakes beneath the wreckage, and precious grain mingled with blood and earth.

The band would swoop down suddenly on some small town scattering the frightened, clucking hens in all directions. A few shots would be fired at random. Outside the building of the Volost Soviet there would be a brief crackle of rifle fire, like the sound of bracken underfoot, and the bandits would dash about the village on their well-fed horses cutting down everyone who crossed their path. They hacked at their victims as calmly as if they were splitting logs. Rarely did they shoot, for bullets were scarce.