again the mould was unfinished and Kashket was chatting calmly to the furnace man: '... I come in to Trituzny's office to get signed up and he asks me: 'Where've you been working for the last five years, Comrade Entuta? Why haven't you got a reference from your last place of work?' So I comes back at him: 'Comrade Trituzny! I got that scared of General Wrangel in 1920 it's taken me five years to get back into a fit state for work!' That made old Zuzya sit up. 'Five years!' he gasps. 'What a nervous breakdown!' '
This time Turunda darted up to Kashket, with a pair of tongs in his hand.
'Have we got to send you a special invitation before you'll get to your machine?' Luka said.
'But the slabs were cold!' Kashket exclaimed innocently.
'Your brain's gone cold, not the slabs!' Luka snapped as Kashket slouched back to his machine.
'You in a hurry? Got a train to catch?' Kashket sneered, resuming his work.
'Yes, I am!' Turunda shouted, driving his shovel into the hot sand. 'And we're fed up with all this ballyhoo! If you're too lazy to work, get to hell out of here...'
'That's it! That's the way!' Gladyshev murmured, nodding approvingly.
Seeing that he had no support, Kashket grunted: 'Cor', aren't you strict!' and went back to work.
I couldn't make out what was in the fellow's mind. Either he had always been such a lazy clown, or if I were to believe Volodya the cabman, he had been keeping an eye on the steppe, hoping to see Makhno's machine-gun carts appear over the horizon.
Kashket suddenly broke into a song:
On Monday I woke from a drinking bout,
And all I had spent I did sore regret.
'Twas not for the money I'd lost that I sighed,
But my wife's black shawl she left when she died...
'Kashket showing off his repertoire,' Gladyshev remarked.
'Well, isn't it as good as Chaliapin?' Kashket said, striking an artistic pose.
'The lower mould's packed, Chaliapin, but I can't see the top anywhere!' I shouted.
'I wish I'd never seen you!' Kashket groaned, but started packing his mould.
As he fussed round his machine, he still could not keep quiet.
'There's a song about you. . .'
'What song?'
'Listen... '
And in a lisping vodka-sodden voice he sang:
There was a young man of Podol With a voice like sawing coal...
'You're from Podol, aren't you?'
'Your geography's no good!' I said curtly. 'Podol is a suburb of Kiev. I was born in the Podolia Province.'
Kashket made no reply. Fighting his hang-over, he tried desperately to keep up, but I could see that we should not do anything like as much as Naumenko and I usually did before lunch.
The sand had been watered too liberally the night before. It was steaming like a cracked dunghill in spring, and was not fit for moulding. We needed some dry sand to mix with it.
Near by there was a heap of dry, coarse sand. So as not to hold up the moulding, I ran over to the heap and started throwing sand on to our side.
'Hey, you madman!' Kashket shouted and I felt him grab my elbows from behind.
But he was too late. The shovel plunged into the sand, meeting an unexpected obstacle in its path. There was a crunch as if the shovel had smashed an electric bulb.
'Who asked you to poke your nose in here, you interfering devil!' my partner bawled in despair.
He flopped down on his knees and burrowed in the sand with trembling hands.
'Are you scatty, or what?' I asked uncomprehendingly.
'I'll give you 'scatty!' I'll fix you ... I had a dram buried here and you've bust it.'
Kashket lifted a handful of sand to his nose and smelt it greedily. His hands were trembling. The reek of vodka told me that there really had been a bottle concealed in the heap.
'Let's get on with the moulding!' I said.
'What'll I have to sober me up at dinner-time?'
'Get those frames clear! There are two bottoms ready and waiting for you.'
Surly and frowning, he started moulding again. But the loss of the dram seemed to worry him more than anything else in the world.
'What the hell made you go over there?'
'What the hell made you bring vodka into the foundry?'
'You're a real plague, you are! No wonder Tiktor was saying what a darned nuisance you make of yourself everywhere!'
'Yes, I am a nuisance to those who swindle the Soviet state. I have always been that kind of nuisance, and I always will be. And I don't care two pins whether you and Tiktor like it or not. I'm not going to kow-tow to you. If you don't like the way things are done at a Soviet factory, you'd better get out before we ask you to ourselves.'
'Kashket did disappear after lunch. He must have gone to ask for a medical certificate, or for time-off. Presently Fedorko ran into the foundry and shouted to me:
'I've let your partner off for the rest of the day. Do the moulding by yourself. Turunda will help you to cast.'
After all that wrangling with Kashket, it was a pleasure to work alone. When I had moulded a pair of lower halves, I would put the cores in, then run over to the other machine and do the tops.
I was glad of this spell on my own for another reason. As I ran back from the heater gripping the glowing slabs with my tongs, a happy thought occurred to me.
While I went on with my moulding, I turned the idea ever in my mind. 'Suppose the pipes that supplied compressed air to the machines carried hot air instead of cold? Suppose we heated it beforehand? Then the compressed air system would heat the models at the same time. The system could have taps and hoses. If you wanted air for cleaning your model, all you'd have to do would be to turn the tap on and the hot air would blow the unnecessary sand away. And the rest of the time it would be used for heating. It would be so easy to arrange! All you had to do was block up the slots under the model, make a passage for the hot air to circulate, and the model would be hot all the time. And we should gain such a lot by it! The moulders would no longer have to leave their machines and run to the heaters. They wouldn't catch cold running out into the yard when they were sweating, specially during the winter. Moulding would go on much more steadily. And what a lot of coke we should save the state if we got rid of the heaters for good!'
, Happy with my thoughts, and moulding as hard as I could go, I did not see Fedorko come up to the machine. He stood just behind me, watching how I moulded. I noticed the foreman only when he asked Turunda loudly, 'Well, Luka, what do you think of your neighbour?' and nodded at me.
Turunda put down his tamper and wiped the sweat off his face.
'I think he'll do, Alexei Grigorievich. He tries hard and he's caught on quickly.'
'All right, Mandzhura,' said Fedorko with impressive slowness. 'Your term of probation is over. When you knock off, call in at the office and they'll give you a pay-book. I'll put you in the fifth grade. Then we'll see. . . Does that suit you?'
'Fine, Alexei Grigorievich. Thanks a lot!' And I gripped the foreman's hand.
... Many of the men had knocked off already, but to fill in the time while Luka and Gladyshev finished casting.
I still went on moulding. A great cloud of steam hung over one of the furnaces which was empty.
The furnace men had knocked the bottom out of it and the half-burnt coke, coated with iron and sticky slag, like nuts in sugar, had poured out into the deep pit. The fiery mess had been sprayed and was hissing quietly as it cooled, turning from purple to a dark crimson, and finally black.
Near by, amid the steam, another furnace was belching iron. Sparks flew up as it poured into the ladles. The smoke mingled with the steam and the foundry was stuffy as a bath-house. But although Turunda and I were last to fill our moulds, I had never worked more easily than now, right at the end of the working day. The calm and rather solemn words of the foreman were still ringing in my ears. They meant that at last I was a real foundry man.
