第 74 页

"And now tell me about yourself."

Pavel gave Ledenev an account of his life since they had last met, and as he talked he felt his friend's warm approving glance on him.

Under the shade of spreading trees in one corner of the terrace a group of sanatorium patients were seated around a small table. One of them was reading the Pravda, his

bushy eyebrows knitted. The black Russian shirt, the shabby old cap and the unshaved face with deep-sunken blue eyes all bespoke the veteran miner. It was twelve years since Khrisanf Chernokozov had left the mines to take up an important post in the government, yet he seemed to have just come up from the pit.

Everything about him, his bearing, his gait, his manner of speaking, betrayed his profession.

Chernokozov was a member of the Territorial Party Bureau besides. A painful disease was sapping his strength: Chernokozov hated his gangrenous leg which had kept him tied to his bed for nearly half a year now.

Opposite him, puffing thoughtfully on her cigarette, was Zhigareva — Alexandra Alexeyevna Zhigareva, who had been a Party member for nineteen of her thirty-seven years. "Shurochka the metalworker", as her comrades in the Petersburg underground movement used to call her, had been hardly more than a girl when she was exiled to Siberia.

The third member of the group was Pankov. His handsome head with the sculptured profile was bent over a German magazine, and now and then he raised his hand to adjust his enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. It was painful to see this thirty-year-old man of athletic build dragging his paralysed leg after him. An editor and writer, Pankov worked in the People's Commissariat of Education. He was an authority on Europe and knew several foreign languages. He was a man of considerable erudition and even the reserved Chernokozov treated him with great respect.

"So that is your room-mate?" Zhigareva whispered to Chernokozov, nodding toward the chair in which Pavel Korchagin was seated.

Chernokozov looked up from his newspaper and his brow cleared at once.

"Yes! That's Korchagin. You ought to know him, Shura. It's too bad illness has put many a spoke in his wheel, otherwise that lad would be a great help to us in tight spots. He belongs to the first Komsomol generation. I am convinced that if we give him our support — and that's what I have decided to do — he will still be able to work."

Pankov too listened to what Chernokozov was saying.

"What is he suffering from?" Shura Zhigareva asked softly.

"The aftermath of the Civil War. Some trouble with his spine. I spoke to the doctor here and he told me there is a danger of total paralysis. Poor lad!"

"I shall go and bring him over here," said Shura.

That was the beginning of their friendship. Pavel did not know then that Zhigareva and Chernokozov were to become very dear to him and that in the years of illness ahead of him they were to be his mainstays.

Life flowed on as before. Taya worked and Pavel studied. Before he had time to resume his work with the study groups another disaster stole upon him unawares. Both his legs were completely paralysed. Now only his right hand obeyed him. He bit his lips until the blood came when after repeated efforts he finally realised that he could not move. Taya bravely hid her despair and bitterness at being powerless to help him. But he said to her with an apologetic smile:

"You and I must separate, Taya. After all, this was not in our compact. I shall think it over properly today, little girl!"

She would not let him speak. The sobs burst forth and she hid her face against his chest in a paroxysm of weeping.

When Artem learned of his brother's latest misfortune he wrote to his mother. Maria Yakovlevna left everything and went at once to her son. Now the three lived together. Taya and the old lady took to each other from the first.

Pavel carried on with his studies in spite of everything.

One winter's evening Taya came home to report her first victory — she had been elected to the City Soviet. After that Pavel saw very little of her. When her day's work in the sanatorium kitchen was over Taya would go straight to the Soviet, returning home late at night weary but full of impressions. She was about to apply for candidate membership in the Party and was preparing for the long-awaited day with eager anticipation. And then misfortune struck another blow. The steadily progressing disease was doing its work. A burning excruciating pain suddenly seared Pavel's right eye, spreading rapidly to the left. A black curtain fell, blotting out all about him, and for the first time in his life Pavel knew the horror of total blindness.

A new obstacle had moved noiselessly onto his path barring his way. A terrifying, seemingly insurmountable obstacle. It plunged Taya and his mother into despair. But he, frigidly calm,resolved:

"I must wait and see what happens. If there is really no possibility of advancing, if everything I have done to return to the ranks has been swept away by this blindness I must put an end to it all."

Pavel wrote to his friends and they wrote back urging him to take courage and carry on the fight.

It was in these days of grim struggle for him that Taya came home radiant and announced:

"I am a candidate to the Party, Pavel!"

Pavel listened to her excited account of the meeting at which her application was accepted and remembered his own initial steps in the Party.

"Well, Comrade Korchagina, you and I are a Communist faction now," he said, squeezing her hand.

The next day he wrote to the secretary of the District Party Committee asking the latter to come and see him. The same evening a mud-spattered car drew up outside the house and in a few moments Volmer, a middle-aged Lett with a spreading beard that reached to his ears, was pumping Pavel's hand.

"Well, how goes it? What do you mean by behaving like this, eh? Up with you and we'll send you off to work in the village at once," he said with a breezy laugh. He stayed for two hours, forgetting all about the conference he was to have attended. He paced up and down the room, listening to Pavel's impassioned appeal for work.

"Stop talking about study groups," he said when Pavel had finished. "You've got to rest. And we must see about your eyes. It may still be possible to do something. What about going to Moscow and consulting a specialist? You ought to think it over.. . ." But Pavel interrupted him:

"I want people, Comrade Volmer, live, flesh-and-blood people! I need them now more than ever before. I cannot go on living alone. Send the youth to me, those with the least experience. They're veering too much to the left out there in the villages, the collective farms don't give them enough scope, they want to organise communes. You know the Komsomols, if you don't hold them back they're liable to try and dash forward ahead of the lines. I was like that myself." Volmer stopped in his tracks.

"How do you come to know about that? They only brought the news in today from the district."

Pavel smiled.

"My wife told me. Perhaps you remember her? She was admitted to the Party yesterday."

"Korchagina, the dishwasher? So that's your wife! I didn't know that!" He fell silent for a few moments, then he slapped his forehead as an idea occurred to him. "I know whom we'll send you.

Lev Bersenev. You couldn't wish for a better comrade. He's a man after your own heart, the two of you ought to get along famously. Like two high-voltage transformers. I was an electrician once, you know. Lev will rig up a wireless for you, he's an expert at that sort of thing. I often sit up till two in the morning at his place with those earphones. The wife actually got suspicious. Wanted to know what I meant by coming home so late." Korchagin smiled. "Who is Bersenev?" he asked.

Volmer ceased his pacing and sat down. "He's our notary public, although he's no more notary public really than I am a ballet dancer. He held an important post until quite recently. Been in the movement since 1912 and a Party member since the Revolution. Served in the Civil War on the revolutionary tribunal of the Second Cavalry Army; that was the time they were combing out the Whiteguard lice in the Caucasus. He was in Tsaritsyn too, and on the Southern Front as well. Then for a time he was a member of the Supreme Military Court of the Far Eastern Republic. Had a very tough time of it there. Finally tuberculosis got him. He left the Far East and came down here to the Caucasus. At first he worked as chairman of a gubernia court, and vice-chairman of a territorial court. And then his lung trouble knocked him out completely. It was a matter of coming down here and taking it easy or giving up the ghost. So that's how we come to have such a remarkable notary. It's a nice quiet job too, just the thing for him. Well, gradually the people here got him to take up a group. After that he was elected to the District Committee, then, before he knew it, he had charge of a political school, and now they've put him on the Control Commission.

He's a permanent member on all important commissions appointed to unravel nasty tangles. Apart from all that he goes in for hunting, he's a passionate radio fan, and although he has only one lung, you wouldn't believe it to look at him. He is simply bursting with energy. When he dies it'll be somewhere on the way between the District Committee and the court." Pavel cut him short.

"Why do you load him down like that?" he asked sharply. "He is doing more work here than before!"

Volmer gave him a quizzical look:

"And if I give you a study circle and something else Lev would be sure to say: 'Why must you load him down like that?' But he himself says he'd rather have one year of intensive work than five years on his back in hospital. It looks as if we'll have to build socialism before we can take proper care of our people."

"That's true. I too prefer one year of life to five years of stagnation, but we are sometimes criminally wasteful of our energies. I know now that this is less a sign of heroism than of inefficiency and irresponsibility. Only now have I begun to see that I had no right to be so stupidly careless about my own health. I see now that there was nothing heroic about it at all. I might have held out a few more years if it hadn't been for that misguided Spartanism. In other words, the infantile disease of leftism is one of the chief dangers."

"That's what he says now," thought Volmer, "but let him get back on his feet and he'll forget everything but work." But he said nothing.

The following evening Lev Bersenev came. It was midnight before he left Pavel. He went away feeling as if he had found a brother.

In the morning a wireless antenna was set up on the roof of Korchagin's house, while Lev busied himself inside the house with the receiving set, regaling Pavel the while with interesting stories from his past. Pavel could not see him, but from what Taya had told him he knew that Lev was a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed young man with impulsive gestures, which was exactly as Pavel had pictured him the moment they had first met.

When evening came three valves began to glow in the room. Lev triumphantly handed Pavel the earphones. A chaos of sounds filled the ether. The transmitters in the port chirped like so many birds, and somewhere not far out at sea a ship's wireless was sending out an endless stream of dots and dashes. But in this vortex of noises and sounds jostling one another the tuning coil picked out and clung to a calm and confident voice:

"This is Moscow calling...."

The tiny wireless set brought sixty broadcasting stations in different parts of the world within Pavel's reach. The life from which he had been debarred broke through to him from the earphone membranes, and once again he felt its mighty pulse.

Noticing the glow of pleasure in Pavel's eyes, the weary Bersenev smiled with satisfaction.

The big house was hushed. Taya murmured restlessly in her sleep. Pavel saw little of his wife these days. She came home late, worn out and shivering from cold. Her work claimed more and more of her time and seldom did she have a free evening. Pavel remembered what Bersenev had told him on this score:

"If a Bolshevik has a wife who is his Party comrade they rarely see one another. But this has two advantages: they never get tired of each other, and there's no time to quarrel!" And indeed, how could he object? It was only to be expected. There was a time when Taya had devoted all her evenings to him. There had been more warmth and tenderness in their relationship then. But she had been only a wife, a mate to him; now she was his pupil and his Party comrade.

He knew that the more Taya matured politically, the less time she would be able to give him, and he bowed to the inevitable.

He was given a study group to lead and once again a noisy hum of voices filled the house in the evenings. These hours spent with the youth infused Pavel with new energy and vigour.

The rest of the time went in listening to the radio, and his mother had difficulty in tearing him away from the earphones at mealtimes.

The radio gave him what his blindness had taken from him — the opportunity to acquire knowledge, and this consuming passion for learning helped him to forget the pain that racked his body, the fire that seared his eyes and all the misery an unkind fate had heaped upon him.

When the radio brought the news from Magnitostroi of the exploits of the Komsomols who had succeeded Pavel's generation he was filled with happiness.

He pictured the cruel blizzards, the bitter Urals frosts as vicious as a pack of hungry wolves. He heard the howling of the wind and saw amid the whirling of the snow a detachment of second-generation Komsomols working in the light of arc lamps on the roof of the giant factory buildings to save the first sections of the huge plant from the ravages of snow and ice. Compared to this,how tiny seemed the forest construction job on which the first generation of Kiev Komsomols had battled with the elements!

The country had grown, and with it, the people.And on the Dnieper, the water had burst through the steel barriers and swept away men and machines. And again the Komsomol youth had hurled themselves into the breach, and after a furious two-day battle had brought the unruly torrent back under control. A new Komsomol generation marched in the van of this great struggle. And among the heroes Pavel heard with pride the name of his old comrade Ignat Pankratov.