'Thank you very much... You can take it to someone else,' I answered rudely, and since then we had had nothing more to do with each other.
True, something of the old feeling lingered in us both. We could not talk calmly to each other and felt awkward when we met.
And now, too, when she saw me standing by Petka's lathe, Galya stopped short. But she overcame her embarrassment and walked up to us. A slight flush had appeared on her cheeks.
'The boys are talking about you outside, Vasil,' Galya said. 'They're saying Tiktor has reported you and he's boasting that you're in for trouble. What have you done, Vasil?'
'What have I done? ... Nothing!' 'What is the report about then?' 'Go and ask him.'
'He's not telling. He says it mustn't be announced until the committee meeting. But when the church bells ring, there must be...'
'I don't care two pins about his report! And you can keep your church out of it!' I snapped. 'He can report on me until he's blue in the face, I haven't done anything!'
'Have you spoken to Kolomeyets?' Galya asked sympathetically.
'What for?'
'Well, I should have thought you would,' Galya said in surprise. 'After all, he's our secretary, and a member of the District Committee, and he's known you a long time...'
By this time Galya's concern had made me thoroughly angry. What was the point of all this! ...
The chaps came in from the yard one by one. Lunch-time was over. So that no one should think me a coward, I said as calmly as I could:
'Well, I'm off to the foundry, I've got a mould that needs attending to there.'
NIKITA IS SILENT
That day Tiktor seemed to be round me all the time. Now he would come to fetch a shovel from my corner, now he would snatch up a chisel under my nose. Then he would go and tinker about in the next room for a little while, but as soon as I glanced up again—there were Tiktor's stiff, rusty-looking boots clumping about round me in the wet sand. Now it was the wire brush he needed! There was a cunning gleam in his eyes and his mop of hair was swept back like a Don Cossack's. Gay and pleased with himself, Tiktor looked as if he had won the day. All the time he kept humming a popular little tune. In
Batavia there's a little house that stands alone in the fields...
When Yasha came near me, I pretended to be engrossed in my work. He needn't think I was afraid of him, the longhaired busybody!
... Knocking-off time at last! I washed my hands quickly and slipped out into the street.
I walked past fences and gardens where the trees were still bare. The market square was alive with noise and bustle. I walked on to Proreznaya Street, not knowing myself what took me there. For a long time I wandered about the deserted avenues of the boulevard. The river, still yellow and muddy from the recent thaw, flowed past below, washing the foot of the cliffs and flooding the allotments of the old part of the town. On the boulevard, which was dry now, they were burning last year's leaves. Here and there, heaps of leaves and twigs were smoking like little volcanoes; the smoke hung low over the sloping avenues and the steep cliff, and its bitterish smell reached me even on the edge of the boulevard. In the distance, beyond a little gate, I caught sight of a lonely bench. I walked over to it and sat down. My fingers wandered over the familiar letters 'V' and 'G.' Before the days of the factory- training school, when I was madly in love with Galya Kushnir and she was going with my rival Kotka Grigorenko, who had now fled the country,
I had come here on a quiet summer's morning and, gritting my teeth with anger, carved those letters with a penknife on the hard oak plank.
How trivial the disappointments of those years seemed in comparison with what confronted me now!
Tiktor's mysterious report pursued me everywhere. The words of warning that I had heard from Petka and Galya made me even more worried. Already the whole school knew about this mysterious report. As I was coming out of the gate today I had run into Monka Guzarchik. Monka was a kind, rather ungainly lad with red, watery eyes.
In our first year at the factory school, Monka quite unexpectedly received an inheritance from his grandmother. He had never seen his grandmother, who had immigrated to New York long ago, in the time of the tsar, but when she died she had left Monka all her savings.
Monka was found through a notary by some distant relatives, and one fine day he received three hundred and twenty-five rubles cash down, in Soviet money. Of course, the simplest thing would have been to donate it all to the Children's Friend Society, or to hand it to Sasha Bobir, who collected money for the Aviation and Aeronautics Society of the Ukraine. But the amount was so large that it turned Monka's head and as soon as he came back from the bank on Saturday he took a party of our chaps to the Venice Restaurant. 'I want to enjoy myself!' he announced, showing the manager his money. 'We must have the whole restaurant to ourselves!'
What they did there, how exactly they enjoyed themselves, I don't know. Most of us were at the club attending a lecture called 'What came first—thought or speech?' The only-thing I do know is that on the following day the revellers and their generous host looked very much the worse for wear. They all felt sick. After stuffing themselves with cakes and pastries, they had eaten every dish on the menu— salted herrings, biscuits, caviare, pork, souffle, beef-steaks, sturgeon... and washed it all down with wine of the most outlandish sort they could order. The whole inheritance had been spent in one evening.
At that time the incident caused quite a sensation in town, and when Monka applied for membership of the Komsomol, we did not accept him. 'You may be a working lad, but you're a playboy. You're petty bourgeois at heart, my lad!' Nikita told Monka at the committee meeting. 'The sons of the rich used to guzzle like that and you're following in their footsteps. You'll have to wait a bit and we'll see.'
Now Monka Guzarchik lived on his grant and liked to refer to himself ironically as 'a member of the non-Party layer of society...'
When he had met me at the gate today, Monka had whispered: 'Poor old Vasya! I hear Tiktor's
started something against you. Is that so? He wants to get you expelled from the Komsomol, doesn't he? Poor old chap! So you'll be one of us.'
I must have sunk pretty low if even Monka was sorry for me!
Sadly I gazed at the far bank of the river, at the fortress bridge linking the two cliffs, at the Old Fortress. So far I had kept the vow that Petka, Yuzik Starodomsky and I had made over Sergushin's grave; I had worked as well as I could for the cause of the Revolution. But why this report, and why were my friends so sorry for me before there was need? ...
The waterfall thundered out of the low tunnel under the bridge, swooping downwards in a thick yellow flood; only when it struck the rocks below did it break into white foam. '
I remembered the old legend that many years ago, when the Turks quit our town for ever, they had thrown from the bridge an iron chest full of ducats, rubies, gold bracelets and huge glittering diamonds as big as hen's eggs.
Before sinking to the bottom, the heavy chest, swept on by the raging current, had been thrown several times against sharp rocks which had split it open. People said that every year, after the ice had gone down the river, the turbulent spring floods brought up gold coins and precious stones from the river-bed. Once, so it was said, in the time of the tsar, Sasha Bobir's grandfather had found a fragment of the ruby-studded crown of some Turkish vizir who had fled before the advancing Russian and Ukrainian army. Beside himself with joy, Sasha's grandfather went to a tavern and scratched a ruby out of the piece of crown. In return for the ruby the tavern-keeper gave him so much vodka that when he drank it he no longer knew what he was doing. Sasha's grandfather woke up at the other end of town, by Windy Gate, without his. crown. It had been stolen by vagrant horse-thieves. The disappointment sent the old man out of his mind and he ended his days in an asylum, where he used to wander about the shady garden with a crown of burdock leaves on his head.
When Sasha was admitted to the Komsomol he related even this sad story about his grandfather, and Nikita did not miss the opportunity of saying: 'You see, chaps, what wealth does for you! We of the young generation must be free of the power of money and possessions!'
The old folk of our town, however, related the story of the crown rather differently. According to them, it was on this bridge that the Turks had strangled the young Yurko, son of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and thrown him into the waterfall with a stone tied to his feet. Before his death, Yurko had cursed the Turks and all their treasure.
