over to the machines, he asked sympathetically:
'Feeling whacked, Vasil?'
In Bobir's voice I sensed an acknowledgement that he considered the work of foundry man higher than his own job as a mechanic. . .
'Whacked! What makes you think that? Just an ordinary day’s work!' I answered quietly, rubbing my eyes.
'Where were you so late last night?' Now Sasha s voice was searching and curious.
'Where I had to be! Mind you get that slab fitted straight and screw the bolts up tight.'
'Don't worry we know what we're doing!' Sasha grunted, and setting his feet against the mixture-box, tugged wildly at the spanner handle.
'Come and smear the moulds, lad!' Naumenko called.
He had already brought in a box of iron moulds from the stores. I got a tin of graphite grease and sat down with my partner on the sand.
It was so hot and stuffy that the grease which had been firm in the morning was now like thin
porridge. I felt muzzy. The sweat dripped off us even at this easy job of dipping our fingers into the grease and smearing the inside of each mould.
'Know what this is for?' Naumenko asked. 'To make the moulds slip easily on the rollers?' 'That's right. And the other reason is to make them slip off easily with the sand.'
'Do they stay in the mould-box then?' 'What did you think? When the iron cools in moulds like these, it gets a smooth hard surface and you can use it straightaway, without grinding.'
'Neat idea!' I said and remembered that I had often seen a drop of liquid iron fall on a smooth metal slab and become quite smooth when it got cool.
Kashket's red kerchief showed up for a moment behind the smoking moulds. He was strolling down the alley nibbling sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells.
Today he had drifted into the foundry later than anyone. As soon as he saw the examiner's notice, he raised a terrible howl, ran to the foreman, took him into the yard where defective castings were usually dumped, threatened to complain to the disputes commission and denied emphatically that the spoilage was his fault. Since then he had been wandering about the shop doing nothing.
Noticing us at our box of moulds, Kashket swung round sharply. For a moment he posed before us in his red kerchief, munching sunflower seeds, then he asked: 'Getting ready beforehand?'
The question seemed rather pointless and Uncle Vasya did not answer. He went on silently smearing the moulds with graphite.
'Out to earn more than anyone else? Want to buy yourself a house and garden?' 'Kashket taunted.
'I'm out to help the working class, not fill the scrapyard like you!' Naumenko cut him short, reaching for a mould,
'I wonder what tune you'll sing the day after tomorrow when they give you a write-up like I got today?'
'Wonder as much as you like, but don't chuck your sunflower shells down here. They get in the sand!' Uncle Vasya said angrily.
'The sifters will look after that, don't worry!' said Kashket and spat a shell neatly at our feet.
'Little stuff like that won't come out in sifting. It'll get in the mould and there'll be a flaw... Stop making a mess, I say!' Uncle Vasya snapped, quite fiercely this time.
'All right, old pal, keep your hair on,' said Kashket soothingly and put the seeds in his pocket.
Squatting beside me, he picked up a mould and started smearing it with grease. His breath reeked of vodka.
'But if you reason the thing out calmly, Uncle Vasya, you'll see you're only wasting your time with what you're doing now,' Kashket lisped, rubbing his finger round the mould.
'What do you mean?' Naumenko asked with a stern look at Kashket.
'However much you grease the things, it won't do any good. The model's badly constructed, and that's why the castings are bad. It's high time they made new ones instead of blaming the workers for spoilage!'
'You brought that on yourself,' Naumenko replied. 'You jaw a lot, but you don't know how to mould.'
'We'll see how much you and your Komsomol pal turn out,' Kashket said, getting up and hoisting his trousers.
'You'd better push off out of here and leave others to do the watching, you half-baked tiddler. I've had enough of you dancing around in front of me like a devil in church!'
And although Naumenko spoke as though he attached no importance to Kashket's words, I realized that Kashket had got under his skin. I could see that Naumenko would give his ears to turn out those rollers well.
'Perhaps the model really isn't constructed right, Uncle Vasya?' I said.
'You listen to that scatter-brain a bit longer!' Naumenko burst out. 'He'll tell you plenty more yarns like that.. . Do you think you can believe a single word he says!'
. . . The next day we buckled into the work and went ahead even faster. Before lunch we had packed eighty- seven moulds. I wanted to slip out to see Golovatsky after lunch, but Uncle Vasya gave me the job of sharpening up the cores with a rasp. As I sharpened the cores for our last lot of moulds, I reflected that moulding these rollers had turned out to be the easiest job I had ever done. But what the castings would be like, we still did not know. We should know that only on Monday, when the moulds were opened.
Today was Saturday.
When we knocked off, one hundred and five glowing moulds stood on the moulding floor.
LETTERS TO FRIENDS
''You can cackle away, I'm off to write a letter to the chaps!' I said to Petka and Sasha, having listened patiently to all their jokes about my evening out.
I still had not told them where I had been the day before yesterday. From the ruthless interrogation they had given me it appeared that they intended to keep me under perpetual surveillance in case I 'broke away from the collective.' Comrade-like, they were afraid I might be going to the bad, and they kept dropping hints to find out what I had been doing. But I could not confess. If I so much as mentioned the crayfish supper at the engineer's, they would be down on me like a ton of bricks. Yet hadn't I defended our honour against the engineer? Of course I had!
Leaving my friends in the attic, I changed into slippers and put my foundry boots out in the goat's shed till Monday.
By the fence in our yard stood a little rickety summer-house overgrown with grapes. Inside there was a small table.
The shady summer-house was a fine place to write letters. A light breeze blew from the sea, rustling the pages of my exercise-book.
To start with I wrote some postcards: to Furman at the October Revolution Works in Lugansk, to Monus Guzarchik in Kharkov, and, of course, to Galya Kushnir in Odessa. All the morning I had been thinking what to write to her. The snub she had given me by taking Tiktor's side in the Francis Joseph affair now seemed quite trivial.
Forgetting all the sharp words that had passed between us, I thought only of the fond, gentle things. Suddenly I found myself comparing Galya to Angelika, with all her superstitions, her icon-lamp, her sad fairy, and her craze for the Charleston.
'Of course Galya is a thousand times more genuine and sincere!' I thought. And I carefully wrote at the end of the postcard:
'. . . And if this postcard reaches you, Galya, try and find time to write to me. Tell me how you're getting on, how you like the work and Odessa, tell me about everything. And remember our walks round the Old Fortress and all the good things that happened to us. Petka and Sasha Bobir send you their warmest 'Komsomol greetings. We're living together in a little house right by the Azov Sea.
'Komsomol greetings,
