'A little vodka with your sturgeon, young man?' the engineer suggested, holding up the decanter.
'No, thanks. I don't drink vodka,' I said, and feeling that this would lead to no good, put my fork down on the table-cloth.
'Praiseworthy!' said Andrykhevich. 'Young people should not drink vodka, it's poison!' Whereupon, bunching his shaggy eyebrows, he poured himself a full glass of 'poison' and drank it down in one gulp.
Recovering his breath, the engineer noticed my hesitation.
'People eat crayfish with their fingers, young man,' he advised. 'Drop your knife and fork and tackle the job boldly. Don't be afraid of them.'
Now for it! I reached out and took the biggest crayfish out of the dish, but before I could put it on my plate, a maid appeared from nowhere and changed my plate for a clean one. 'Is she in the foodworkers' trade union, or do they exploit her on the quiet, without a contract?' I wondered.
Before me lay a huge crayfish, but how I was supposed to eat it in 'polite society' I had not the faintest idea. It had been a different matter feasting on crayfish in the field by the candle factory. You would just flick one of those crayfish out of the boiling water with a couple of twigs and sit there breaking bits off it and throwing the red scales into the fire.
Andrykhevich ate with a kind of solemn triumph, as if he really were performing some sort of holy rite, as Lika had suggested. Anyone could see that food held a prominent place in his life.
'Crayfish are a weakness of mine!' Andrykhevich said, cracking a claw. 'Good beer and crayfish make a perfect combination.' And he filled my glass with beer that was black as tar. 'What have you been arguing about with the young man, my dear?' he asked.
'Vasil wants to remake the world and I've been persuading him against it.'
'Indeed! That is interesting. He who was nothing shall become everything? From pauper to prince? Is that the idea?' And Andrykhevich glanced at me, screwing up his eyes.
'Yes!' I said, pushing the crayfish aside and trying to appear calm. 'And I suppose you'd like to have everything as it was of old—a hundred capitalists enriching themselves on the labour of millions ... Is that it?'
'Those who have become everything are completely lacking in two things—ability and knowledge.'
'No need to worry yourself about that! We'll learn. We'll fight for the knowledge we need.'
'But ability is a gift from God. Ability is given to a man at birth and passed on from generation to generation!' the engineer retorted sharply.
'Do you think the working class hasn't any ability?'
Lika burst out laughing. 'I told you he was a terrible arguer, Daddy. Our guest's sense of contradiction is developed to an extraordinary degree.'
'Just a moment, dear! That is really quite interesting. So you asked me, sir, whether the working class has any ability? Not the slightest doubt of it! If 'Russian craftsmen had no ability, I should have chosen a different profession. What would be the use of working as an engineer, if there were no one capable of putting your ideas into practice! But try and understand this: for the natural, original talent of the working class to develop, the working class must have a technical intelligentsia. And where are you going to get it from?'
'Where from? What about the working class itself? The class that made the Revolution?'
'Don't tell me those fairy-tales!' Andrykhevich exclaimed with visible annoyance. 'It's the easiest thing in the world to destroy everything that generations have built up before you. But just try to raise the ruins, to build it all up again. Where can you find the educated people to carry out all these fantastic plans of remaking, the world? Especially when all the countries are against us!'
'We're doing it now ourselves and we'll go on doing it! We're not afraid! With a leader like our Party, the working class needn't be afraid of any difficulties,' I said with growing inspiration, looking at Andrykhevich fierily.
'By yourselves? 'One, two—heave! See how she goes!' Like that, eh?'
'Never mind that old song, we'll manage without that,' I answered, feeling a great truth on my side.
'In a few years' time we'll have thousands of our own, Soviet experts. They'll work not just for their own gain, but for the general good, to build communism with all the working people. And then those who aren't backing us up now will be sorry for themselves.'
'Whom do you have in mind, young man?' Andrykhevich asked and gave me an angry look.
'Who do you think? Don't you know yourself that any man who goes against the will of the whole people is bound sooner or later to be brought out into the open and thrown overboard? Do you think the working class will let people sneer at it and doubt its strength, and at the same time eat its bread? We don't need spongers. We need friends. You sit here laughing at what we are doing now. And what were you saying, I wonder, when the old owners ran away abroad? Thought everything would go smash, I expect. But look how things are going now—the works is turning out more reapers than it was before the war. Isn't that a fact? And how many other factories in our country are doing the same! And how many more shall we build in time!'
'Time will tell...' the engineer grunted meaningfully.
And much was the distrust and hidden resentment in those laconic words ...
THE ROLLERS
I was to remember that conversation at the big table in the soft light of the heavy chandelier all my life. As if it were yesterday, I can see the engineer's contemptuous glance, his puckered slanting eyes, and
hear his ironical, condescending voice. It was not the voice of an older man with far more knowledge and experience than myself. Had it been that, I should, perhaps, have felt differently when I left the Andrykheviches' house amid its ivy and sweet-scented roses that evening. But no, there had been something quite different concealed beneath the contempt he had shown towards me. I had argued with a man of that old decaying world of which Polevoi, the director of our factory-training school, had talked so much. The engineer was sneering quietly to himself at my fieriness, at my sincere belief in the future.
He did not throw words away, he used them sparingly, thoughtfully, concealing his real intention. He did not put all his cards on the table, so that I could say to his face: 'You're a traitor to the Revolution and a servant to exploiters like Caiworth who've run away abroad. Go and follow them, get out of this country whose people you don't believe in!'
No, he talked very cunningly and sometimes, to find out what I was thinking, even seemed to ask my advice. My advice! The advice of a pupil from a factory-training school who had not been at the plant even a month. . . and he an old, grey-haired chief engineer!
He was still talking when we left the table with the crayfish lying unfinished in their dish.
'Where do you intend building these new factories? I wonder.'
'Wherever they're needed!' I replied boldly, remembering the words the Secretary of the Central Committee had used in his conversation with me in Kharkov.
'Just a little hasty, aren't you, young man? You plan to build factories here, there and everywhere, but you haven't yet learnt how to hold a knife properly. It's little things you ought to start with, tiny little things.'
I twisted and turned for a long time that night on my prickly mattress by the open window. As I listened to the snores of the other chaps, I remembered the cutting remarks of the tall, bony engineer, and particularly that last dig about the knife I had used to cut the sturgeon.
How simple and good and warm-hearted it had been at Luka Turunda's, in his little cottage on the sea shore! And Luka himself and his father and Katerina—what real, hospitable people they were!
I went to sleep with a warm feeling of gratitude towards the Turunda family and a convinced hatred of my neighbours in the house with the ivy, a hatred born of the knowledge that they harboured the bad old past against which both Polevoi and Nikita Kolomeyets had so often warned me. And then I had the devil's own nightmare.. .
I dreamed I was wearing a long dress-coat like the pianist at Madame Piontkovskaya's and dancing the Charleston. I danced tirelessly, jerking my arms and legs about, like the beggar with St. Vitus's Dance who used to stand outside the Catholic church at home. I was dancing and looking at myself in a mirror. And I could see my face
