For the Good of the Cause by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Page B

bargain.
    Grachikov had always been of the opinion that it was wrong to wait until a Party �ember actually broke the law. He believed that the Party should immediately expel anyone who exploited his job, his position, or his contacts to get something for himself—whether it was a new apartment, a house in the country, or anything at all, however trifling. There was no point in just reproving or reprimanding such people. They had to be expelled, because in their case it was not just a matter of a minor offense or a mistake or personal weakness. Their whole outlook was completely alien: They were really capitalists at heart.
    The local newspaper had just exposed and pilloried a truckdriver and his wife who had grown flowers in their back garden and sold them on the market.
    But how could you expose the Khabalygins?

    Fyodor walked slowly because he wanted to get a breath of fresh air. The lack of sleep, the two Nembutals he had taken, and all the things that had been going through his mind for the last day or so had given him a feeling of discomfort, of being somehow poisoned. But the fresh air gradually blew it away.
    Oh well, he thought, we’ll just have to start all over again. We’ll get all nine hundred of them together and tell them frankly: “We haven’t got that building any more. We’ve got to build another. The harder we work, the sooner we’ll have it.”
    It wasn’t going to be easy at first.
    But they’d soon be just as enthusiastic as ever about it. That’s the effect work always has on people.
    They would have faith.
    And they would build.
    All right, they’d put up with the old place for another year.
    And now, before he knew where he was, Fyodor found himself at the new building. It shone with metal and glass.
    The other one, next to it, still just a mass of earth and clay, had scarcely gotten above ground level.
    Grachikov’s questions about Khabalygin had set off a train of half-formed, nagging thoughts in Fyodor’s unsuspicious mind, and he was now beginning to piece them together: the way Khabalygin had delayed signing for the building in August, and how cheerful he had been with the commission.
    Oddly enough, the first person Fyodor saw on the grounds at the back of the site was the man in his thoughts, the man he had just begun to fathom. Vsevolod Khabalygin, wearing his green hat and a good brown overcoat, was striding about the sodden grounds, ignoring the mud he was getting all over his shoes and giving orders to a group of workmen, apparently his own. Two of the men and a driver were unloading stakes from a truck. Some of the stakes were freshly painted, others were rather grubby, as though they had already been in use—you could tell by their points, which had rotted and then been trimmed again. Two other workmen were bending down and doing something under Khabalygin’s direction; he gave his orders with rapid movements of his short arms.
    Fyodor went closer and saw that they were driving the stakes into the ground. But they were cheating. Instead of placing them in a straight line, they were being crafty and putting them up in a long, sweeping curve, so as to take in as much of the land as possible for the institute and leave as little as possible for the school.
    “Listen, Comrade Khabalygin! Be fair! What’s all this?” the principal shouted upon seeing this swindle. “Kids of fifteen and sixteen need space to breathe and run around in! Where will they go?”
    At that moment, Khabalygin had planted himself at a strategic spot from which the last section of his misbegotten fence would run. Straddling the future boundary, he had already raised his arm to give the signal when he heard Fyodor just behind him. With his hand still poised at eye level, Khabalygin turned (his thick neck didn’t make it easy for him to turn his head), bared his teeth slightly, and snarled:
    “What? What do you say?”
    And without waiting for an answer, he turned away, checked the alignment of his men