第 63 页

Zakhar held the grating on the anvil and Artem wielded the hammer.

Zakhar had aged. The past few years had left a deep furrow on his forehead and touched his temples with silver. His back was bent and there were shadows in his sunken eyes.

The figure of a man was silhouetted for a moment in the doorway, and then the evening shadows swallowed him up. The blows of the hammer on iron drowned out his first cry, but when he reached the men working at the engine Artem paused with his hammer poised to strike.

"Comrades! Lenin is dead!"

The hammer slid slowly from Artem's shoulder and his hands lowered it noiselessly onto the concrete floor.

"What's that? What did you say?" Artem's hand clutched convulsively at the sheepskin of the man who had brought the fearful tidings.

And he, gasping for breath, covered with snow, repeated in a low, broken voice:

"Yes, Comrades, Lenin is dead."

And because the man did not shout, Artem realised that the terrible news was true. Only now did he recognise the man — it was the secretary of the local Party organisation.

Men climbed out of the pit and heard in silence of the death of the man with whose name the whole world had rung.

Somewhere outside the gates an engine shrieked, sending a shudder through the group of men.

The anguished sound was echoed by another engine at the far side of the station, then by a third.

Their mighty chorus was joined by the siren of the power station, high-pitched and piercing like the flight of shrapnel. Then all was drowned out by the deep sonorous voice of the handsome engine of the passenger train about to leave for Kiev.

A GPU agent started in surprise when the driver of the Polish engine of the Shepetovka-Warsaw express, on learning the reason for the alarming whistles, listened for a moment, then slowly raised his hand and pulled at the whistle cord. He knew that this was the last time he would do so, that he would never be allowed to drive this train again, but his hand did not let go of the cord, and the shriek of his engine roused the startled Polish couriers and diplomats from their soft couches.

People crowded into the railway shops. They poured through all the gates and when the vast building was filled to overflowing the funeral meeting opened amid heavy silence. The old Bolshevik Sharabrin, Secretary of the Shepetovka Regional Committee of the Party, addressed the gathering.

"Comrades! Lenin, the leader of the world proletariat, is dead. The Party has suffered an irreparable loss, for the man who created the Bolshevik Party and taught it to be implacable to its enemies is no more.... The death of the leader of our Party and our class is a summons to the best sons of the proletariat to join our ranks...."

The strains of the funeral march rang out, the men bared their heads, and Artem, who had not wept for fifteen years, felt a lump rising in his throat and his powerful shoulders shook.The very walls of the railwaymen's club seemed to groan under the pressure of the human mass.

Outside it was bitterly cold, the two tall fir-trees at the entrance to the hall were garbed in snow and icicles, but inside it was suffocating from the heated stoves and the breath of six hundred people who had gathered to the memorial meeting arranged by the Party organisation.

The usual hum of conversation was stilled. Overpowering grief muffled men's voices and they spoke in whispers, and there was sorrow and anxiety in the eyes of many.

They were like the crew of a ship that had lost her helmsman in a storm.

Silently the members of the bureau took their seats on the platform. The stocky Sirotenko carefully lifted the bell, rang it gently and replaced it on the table. This was enough for an oppressive hush to settle over the hall.

When the main speech had been delivered, Sirotenko, the Secretary of the Party organisation, rose to speak. And although the announcement he made was unusual for a memorial meeting, it surprised no one.

"A number of workers," he said, "have asked this meeting to consider an application for membership in the Party. The application is signed by thirty-seven comrades."

And he read out the application:

"To the railway organisation of the Bolshevik Party at Shepetovka Station, Southwestern Railway.

"The death of our leader is a summons to us to join the ranks of the Bolsheviks, and we ask that this meeting judge of our worthiness to join the Party of Lenin."

Two columns of signatures were affixed to this brief statement.

Sirotenko read them aloud, pausing a few seconds after each name to allow the meeting to memorise them.

"Stanislav Zigmundovich Polentovsky, engine driver, thirty-six years of service."

A murmur of approval rippled over the hall.

"Artem Andreyevich Korchagin, mechanic, seventeen years of service."

"Zakhar Filippovich Bruzzhak, engine driver, twenty-one years of service."

The murmur increased in volume as the man on the platform continued to call out the names of veteran members of the horny-palmed fraternity of railwaymen.

Silence again reigned when Polentovsky, whose name headed the list, stood before the meeting.

The old engine driver could not but betray his agitation as he told the story of his life.

". . . What can I tell you, Comrades? You all know what the life of a workingman was like in the old days. Worked like a slave all my life and remained a beggar in my old age. When the Revolution came, I confess I considered myself an old man burdened down by family cares, and I did not see my way into the Party. And although I never sided with the enemy I rarely took part in the struggle myself. In nineteen hundred and five I was a member of the strike committee in the Warsaw railway shops and I was on the side of the Bolsheviks. I was young then and full of fight.

But what's the use of recalling the past! Ilyich's death has struck right at my heart; we've lost our friend and champion, and it's the last time I'll ever speak about being old. I don't know how to put it, for I never was much good at speech making. But let me say this: my road is the Bolsheviks' road and no other."

The engine driver tossed his grey head and his eyes under his white brows looked out steadily and resolutely at the audience as if awaiting its decisive words.

Not a single voice was raised in opposition to the little grey-haired man's application, and no one abstained during the voting in which the non-Party people too were invited to take part.

Polentovsky walked away from the presidium table a member of the Communist Party.

Everyone was conscious that something momentous was taking place. Now Artem's great bulk loomed where the engine driver had just stood. The mechanic did not know what to do with his hands, and he nervously gripped his shaggy fur cap. His sheepskin jacket, threadbare at the edges, was open, but the high-necked collar of his grey army tunic was fastened on two brass buttons lending his whole figure a holiday neatness. Artem turned to face the hall and caught a fleeting glimpse of a familiar woman's face. It was Galina, the stonemason's daughter, sitting with her workmates from the tailor shop. She was gazing at him with a forgiving smile, and in that smile he read approval and something he could not have put into words.

"Tell them about yourself, Artem!" he heard Sirotenko say.

But it was not easy for Artem to begin his tale. He was not accustomed to addressing such a large audience, and he suddenly felt that to express all that life had stored within him was beyond his powers. He fumbled painfully for words, and his nervousness made it all the harder for him. Never had he experienced the like. He felt that this was a vital turning point for him, that he was about to take a step that would bring warmth and meaning into his harsh, warped life.

"There were four of us," Artem began.

The hall was hushed. Six hundred people listened eagerly to this tall worker with the beaked nose and the eyes hidden under the dark fringe of eyebrows.

"My mother worked as cook for the rich folk. I hardly remember my father; he and mother didn't get along. He drank too much. So mother had to take care of us kids. It was hard for her with so many mouths to feed. She slaved from morning till night and got four rubles a month and her grub. I was lucky enough to get two winters of school. They taught me to read and write, but when I turned nine my mother had to send me to work as an apprentice in a machine shop. I worked for three years for nothing but my grub. . .. The shop owner was a German named Foerster. He didn't want to take me at first, said I was too young. But I was a sturdy lad, and my mother added on a couple of years. I worked three years for that German, but instead of learning a trade I had to do odd jobs around the house, and run for vodka. The boss drank like a fish. . . . He'd send me to fetch coal and iron too.. . . The mistress made a regular slave out of me: I had to peel potatoes and scour pots. I was always getting kicked and cuffed, most times for no reason, just out of habit. If I didn't please the mistress — and she was always on the rampage on account of her husband's drinking — she would beat me. I'd run away from her out into the street, but where could I go, who was there to complain to? My mother was forty miles away, and she couldn't keep me anyway.... And in the shop it wasn't any better. The master's brother was in charge, a swine of a man who used to enjoy playing tricks on me. 'Here boy,' he'd say, 'fetch me that washer from over there,' and he'd point to the corner by the forge. I'd run over and grab the washer and let out a yell.

It had just come out of the forge; and though it looked black lying there on the ground, when you touched it, it burned right through the flesh. I'd stand there screaming with the pain and he'd burst his sides laughing. I couldn't stand any more of this and I ran away home to mother. But she didn't know what to do with me, so she brought me back. She cried all the way there, I remember. In my third year they began to teach me something about the trade, but the beatings continued. I ran away again, this time to Starokonstantinov. I found work in a sausage factory and wasted more than a year and a half washing casings. Then our boss gambled away his factory, didn't pay us a kopek for four months and disappeared. I got out of that hole, took a train to Zhmerinka and went to look for work. I was lucky enough to meet a railwayman there who took pity on me. When I told him I was a mechanic of sorts, he took me to his boss and said I was his nephew and asked him to find some work for me. By my size they took me for seventeen, and so I got a job as a mechanic's helper. As for my present job, I've been working here for more than eight years. That is all I can tell you about my past. You all know about my present life here."

Artem wiped his brow with his cap and heaved a deep sigh. He had not yet said the chief thing.

This was the hardest thing of all to say, but he had to say it before anyone asked the inevitable question. And knitting his bushy eyebrows, he went on with his story:

"Why did I not join the Bolsheviks before? That is a question you all have the right to ask me.

How can I answer? After all, I'm not an old man yet. How is it I didn't find the road here until today? I'll tell you straight, for I've nothing to hide. I missed that road, I ought to have taken it back in nineteen eighteen when we rose against the Germans. Zhukhrai, the sailor, told me so many a time. It wasn't until 1920 that I took up a rifle. When the storm was over and we had driven the Whites into the Black Sea, we came back home. Then came the family, children. ... I got all tied up in family life. But now that our Comrade Lenin is gone and the Party has issued its call, I have looked back at my life and seen what was lacking. It's not enough to defend your own power, we have to stick together like one big family, in Lenin's place, so that the Soviet power should stand solid like a mountain of steel. We must become Bolsheviks. It's our Party, isn't it?"

When he finished, a little abashed at having made such a long speech, he felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and, pulling himself up to his full height, he stood waiting for the questions to come.

"Any questions?" Sirotenko's voice broke the ensuing silence.

A stir ran over the gathering, but no one responded at first to the chairman's call. Then a stoker, straight from his engine and black as a beetle, said with finality:

"What's there to ask? Don't we know him? Vote him in and be done with it!"

Gilyaka, the smith, his face scarlet from the heat and the excitement, cried out hoarsely:

"This comrade's the right sort, he won't jump the rails, you can depend on him. Vote him, Sirotenko!"

At the very back of the hall where the Komsomols were sitting, someone, invisible in the semidarkness, rose and said:

"Let Comrade Korchagin explain why he has settled on the land and how he reconciles his peasant status with his proletarian psychology."

A light rustle of disapproval passed over the hall and a voice rose in protest:

"Why don't you talk so us plain folks can understand? A fine time to show off...."

But Artem was already replying:

"That's all right, Comrade. The lad is right about my having settled on the land. That's true, but I haven’t betrayed my working-class conscience. Anyhow, that's over and done with from today.

I'm moving my family closer to the sheds. It's better here. That cursed bit of land has been sticking in my throat for a long time."

Once again Artem's heart trembled when he saw the forest of hands raised in his favour, and with head held high he walked back to his seat. Behind him he heard Sirotenko announce:

"Unanimous."

The third to take his place at the presidium table was Zakhar Bruzzhak, Polentovsky's former helper. The taciturn old man had been an engine driver himself now for some time. When he finished his account of a lifetime of labour and brought his story up to the present, his voice dropped and he spoke softly but loud enough for all to hear:

"It is my duty to finish what my children began. They wouldn't have wanted me to hide away in a corner with my grief. That isn't what they died for. I haven't tried to fill the gap left by their death,but now the death of our leader has opened my eyes. Don't ask me to answer for the past. From today our life starts anew."