believe that he was the owner of the well-lighted office cluttered with machine parts, cultivators, castings, test- tubes of sand and copper filings...
The director's office was more like a laboratory, or an assembly shed. Had it not been for the diagrams on the walls, the comfortable leather arm-chair, and the big oak desk with its telephones and inkstand, we should have thought we had made a mistake.
When we filed into the room, the director was standing at a vice with a hammer and chisel in his hands. The vice was clamped to the window-sill. It held a piece of rusty metal.
Scarcely looking down, the director was cutting through the metal with firm, heavy blows, like a regular mechanic.
Noticing us, he put the hammer down on the window-sill and wiped his hands.
'What can I do for you, young people?'
He looked like an old craftsman and reminded me a little of the fitters' instructor at the factory-training school.
The very tone of the director's voice told us that he was a calm, considerate man. True, he did not read all the passes. He glanced at the first and, when I told him what a fix we were in, he asked:
'All of you from Podolia?'
'Yes, all from the same town,' Petka said.
'You've come a long way then. From the Carpathians to Tavria! I know your town a bit. We marched through it on the way to the Austrian front. Some big cliffs and precipices round your way, aren't there? And a fortress standing on the top of the cliffs.'
'That fortress is still standing there!' Sasha exclaimed, and we all cheered up a bit.
'But I must say I don't recall there being any industry there,' the director said. 'Where did your factory- training school spring from?'
'There's a factory-training school, but not much industry yet,' I' answered, although I knew the workers of the Motor Factory, who considered themselves a big plant, would have been mortally offended had they heard me. 'That's why they sent us to you, because there's nowhere to put us at home yet. The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine told us that young workers like us would soon be needed everywhere— in the Donbas and in Yekaterinoslav and... here!' I added.
The director raised his shaggy eyebrows and looked at me shrewdly.
'You don't need to tell me they've sent you, I can see that for myself...' he said slowly. 'But they never asked beforehand whether we needed you just now. Where am I going to put you to start with—that's the question.'
He picked up the passes from the desk, looked through them again, and shook his head.
'Which of you is Maremukha?'
'Here!' Petka shouted, as if he were answering roll-call at the Special Detachment Headquarters, and stepped up to the director..
'Well, what can you do, Maremukha?'
'I'm a joiner and ... and a turner. I can turn wood.'
'Wood?' the director said in surprise. 'I thought bread was your speciality. You look as if you knew how to put it away.'
Sasha and I laughed at Petka's confusion. Plump and rather clumsy, he stood at attention before the works director like a soldier. His trousers were badly crumpled from sleeping in them during the long journey.
'Well, Maremukha, your luck's in,' said the director. 'Good joiners are just what we happen to be short of. And I don't suppose there are any down at the labour exchange. Now which of you is
Mandzhura Vasily Mironovich?'
I stepped up to the director.
'What are you, a 'Galician?' the director asked.
'Why?' I said, taken aback.
'The name's Galician. . . But you're not far from Galicia in any case. Almost the same people as you, they are. Only the Zbruch in between... Well, what has Vasily Mironovich Mandzhura got to say for himself?'
'I'm a foundry man!'
'A foundry man?' The director walked over to the little table, picked up the first piece of metal that came to hand, and holding it out to me, asked: 'What metal was this cast from?'
'Pig iron,' I said, looking at the broken length of metal.
'Oh, was it?' The director puckered his eyes slyly, giving me a piercing glance.
Without another word, he went over to the vice, took out the old, battered piece of metal, put in the piece he had just shown me, and gave it a resounding blow with his hammer. The metal bent like proper iron, but did not even crack.
'Well, is it pig iron?' the director asked and glanced at me even more slyly from under his shaggy brows.
'That's nothing,' I said slowly. 'There's all kinds of pig iron. Malleable, for instance...'
'You mean ductile, don't you?' the director corrected me, livening up noticeably.
'Yes, ductile.'
'And how do you make pig iron ductile?'
'You have to ... put a bit more iron into it ... and a drop of steel...'
'Steel? Steady on, that'll make the casting more brittle! Everyone knows that steel makes iron brittle.'
'You have to cast the metal first, then anneal it in special ore... Manganese ore, I think,' I said, remembering what our instructor Rozakevich had told us.
'Ah, anneal it!' the director grew even more lively, and a pleased smile spread over his face. 'That's the answer to the mystery! I've been struggling with that annealing for over a year now, counting from the time when the workers elected me director of the plant. We took this plant away from the foreign capitalists after the Revolution, and when they ran away with the Whites, they took all the production secrets with them. They thought we'd be done for without their help. But little by little we're finding things out ourselves. Now we're getting down to the secrets of annealing by scientific means, so to speak, so that we won't have to do our founding by rule of thumb. I mean to give the pig iron at this works the same ductibility as iron itself. Get it? So that if a peasant starts harvesting his wheat with one of our reapers and happens to run against a stone, nothing will go wrong. So that the teeth won't break! And those teeth, lad, are a great thing. They save the blades from all sorts of devil's tricks. Get it? And I want the Ukrainian peasant to feel thankful to us for our reapers! It's not enough to blather about bringing town and country together. Those teeth are the things that'll do it!' And the director stroked the rusty piece of metal as if it were a favourite kitten. 'Well, young man, what did they teach you?' he asked, swinging his gaze on Sasha Bobir.
'They put me in the fifth grade as a fitter,' said Sasha, 'but the thing I like most is taking engines to pieces.'
The director eyed Bobir, chuckling slyly. 'You take engines to pieces! That's the spirit! And who puts them together again after you?'
'I can put them together myself, if there's need. Depends on the engine. If it's a Sunbeam motor-bike, I can do it easy as pie,' Sasha could not help boasting.
'I'll have to put you into RIP then,' the director decided.
'How do you mean, 'RIP'?' Sasha's voice trembled slightly.
'That's what one of our departments is called—the Repair, Instrument, and Power department. We call it RIP, because it's easier to say. RIP caters for all the other departments.'
Going through our passes again, the director said: 'Well, you, young people, for right or wrong, I'm going to take you on at the works. Why do I make such a favour of it, you'll ask. Because in our country there is still unemployment. We've got lots of people and, as yet, not many factories. But that will pass, I'm sure. Very soon we shall get rid of unemployment, just as we've got rid of other troubles. We'll build new factories and maybe, one day, no one will believe that there ever was such a thing as unemployment in Soviet times. But at the moment it exists... All right then, go round the works today, get your papers in order, and tomorrow, at the sound of the hooter, report to the foremen. If you'd been local lads, I'd have sent you to queue up at the labour exchange. But sometimes, I repeat, we have to make exceptions. But mind you work well, to the best of your ability! -Get it? No shirking or turning up late! This is a Soviet works. Get it? We've sent the old owner, John Caiworth, packing, and taken the business we built for him into our own hands. It's to our own advantage to run the works properly. We value and
