statistics and ideas more difficult to steer than the heaviest trucks. And the next day, at the Party meeting, he reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out newspaper clippings in the margins of which he had scribbled equations in pencil. “Here, comrades, is the equation for the life of a worker in our factory: I call labour-time h , wages w , rent r , and I say that . . .”
At first they listened to him with indulgence, then with boredom. But his thinking made a breach in the general torpor, his voice grew passionate, his x’s suddenly transformed themselves into kilos of bread and meat, into roubles and kopecks, and they saw him, swaying from side to side, standing on a platform draped with red calico in front of a puny little black bust of Lenin, a stubborn kid with his head pulled into his neck, who was demonstrating by algebra, by Marx, by Lenin, by the day-before-yesterday’s Pravda , by Stalin’s own six points, that “the worker in our factory is hungry, dear comrades, and that’s the problem of problems—it’s the very meaning of life. Hegel said . . .”
He stopped short, unable to recapture the idea which had come to him out of the heap of words in a pamphlet on Hegel. “Hegel said: the worker in our factory can’t live on wages like these, that’s all.” His face beamed with satisfaction while the Party activists, following each other to the platform at a signal from the cell secretary, called him a demagogue, a careerist, an egotist who thought only of filling his belly, a Trotskyite, and a panic-monger. The truth was buzzing inside his skull; he didn’t understand a word of the arguments they were assaulting him with. Only at the end of the meeting, amid the scraping of benches, did he stand up to say loudly—and everybody heard him—with a broad smile, “Talk all you like! You know very well I’m right.”
Out in the street—a dismal street of perpetual mud, lined with picket fences which people were tearing down piece by piece each night to keep warm—an old worker put his hand on Rodion’s shoulder and, in a friendly voice, said, “You’re lost, comrade, that’s for sure, but you’re right. You’re great.”
“That’s right,” said Rodion warmly.
In reality, Rodion had both lost himself and found himself. He came to know the cellars of State Security, new faces, Northern skies. With the first half-pint of alcohol in him, problems appeared clearer, he began to feel intelligent. Then everything got cloudy again, and he felt like splitting wood with an axe, like he used to when he lived at home; or like grabbing young birch-trees in both hands to break them, uproot them and feel strong and victorious in the end. Then he could be heard to say, alternatively, “I’m nothing but a brute” or “Comrade Gorky is right. It’s a fine thing to be a man.” During these periods when he crashed, shattered, soared and suffered confusedly, the thing Rodion feared most was meeting up with Comrade Elkin.
They were arriving at the meeting place, a sort of rocky clearing under the slate cliff on the bank of the Black-Waters. It was a good spot, for you could see the approaching paths without being seen. A clump of birches filled a whole piece of universe there. The trees were waking back to life, their thin trunks all covered with silver whiteness and coolness. The sky filled their tracery of branches: the inescapable sky which cast its blue hues over the rock and over the dark, clear waters. Between the rock and the trees appeared a head, white mane blowing in the breeze. Avelii shouted: “Greetings, Ryzhik!” And the man, whose face was clean-shaven and wrinkled, raised his voice a little to reply. “The springtime, comrades! It’s magnificent.” He was talking with Elkin, who was seated comfortably on the stone, his cap skewed sideways over his temple: “An invention of the pre-industrial ages,” said Elkin in that solemn voice he liked to use when he made outlandish
At first they listened to him with indulgence, then with boredom. But his thinking made a breach in the general torpor, his voice grew passionate, his x’s suddenly transformed themselves into kilos of bread and meat, into roubles and kopecks, and they saw him, swaying from side to side, standing on a platform draped with red calico in front of a puny little black bust of Lenin, a stubborn kid with his head pulled into his neck, who was demonstrating by algebra, by Marx, by Lenin, by the day-before-yesterday’s Pravda , by Stalin’s own six points, that “the worker in our factory is hungry, dear comrades, and that’s the problem of problems—it’s the very meaning of life. Hegel said . . .”
He stopped short, unable to recapture the idea which had come to him out of the heap of words in a pamphlet on Hegel. “Hegel said: the worker in our factory can’t live on wages like these, that’s all.” His face beamed with satisfaction while the Party activists, following each other to the platform at a signal from the cell secretary, called him a demagogue, a careerist, an egotist who thought only of filling his belly, a Trotskyite, and a panic-monger. The truth was buzzing inside his skull; he didn’t understand a word of the arguments they were assaulting him with. Only at the end of the meeting, amid the scraping of benches, did he stand up to say loudly—and everybody heard him—with a broad smile, “Talk all you like! You know very well I’m right.”
Out in the street—a dismal street of perpetual mud, lined with picket fences which people were tearing down piece by piece each night to keep warm—an old worker put his hand on Rodion’s shoulder and, in a friendly voice, said, “You’re lost, comrade, that’s for sure, but you’re right. You’re great.”
“That’s right,” said Rodion warmly.
In reality, Rodion had both lost himself and found himself. He came to know the cellars of State Security, new faces, Northern skies. With the first half-pint of alcohol in him, problems appeared clearer, he began to feel intelligent. Then everything got cloudy again, and he felt like splitting wood with an axe, like he used to when he lived at home; or like grabbing young birch-trees in both hands to break them, uproot them and feel strong and victorious in the end. Then he could be heard to say, alternatively, “I’m nothing but a brute” or “Comrade Gorky is right. It’s a fine thing to be a man.” During these periods when he crashed, shattered, soared and suffered confusedly, the thing Rodion feared most was meeting up with Comrade Elkin.
They were arriving at the meeting place, a sort of rocky clearing under the slate cliff on the bank of the Black-Waters. It was a good spot, for you could see the approaching paths without being seen. A clump of birches filled a whole piece of universe there. The trees were waking back to life, their thin trunks all covered with silver whiteness and coolness. The sky filled their tracery of branches: the inescapable sky which cast its blue hues over the rock and over the dark, clear waters. Between the rock and the trees appeared a head, white mane blowing in the breeze. Avelii shouted: “Greetings, Ryzhik!” And the man, whose face was clean-shaven and wrinkled, raised his voice a little to reply. “The springtime, comrades! It’s magnificent.” He was talking with Elkin, who was seated comfortably on the stone, his cap skewed sideways over his temple: “An invention of the pre-industrial ages,” said Elkin in that solemn voice he liked to use when he made outlandish
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