I walked home through the sun-drenched streets. I was dirty from head to foot and my face was stained with sweat, but I kept proudly to the middle of the road, for in the side pocket of my jacket there was a new pay-book stamped with my worker's number. On the front page a firm, neat hand had written that Vasily Mironovich Mandzhura was in the fifth grade. I wanted to show the book to everyone I met, although I knew my appearance alone was enough to tell them without any documents that I belonged to the great army of the working class.
After the broiling foundry, I hardly noticed the heat of the streets. I was still trying to think out my plan for heating the machines. But now that I had left the foundry, my thoughts were rambling and it was hard to put them into shape. 'Never mind, the main idea's settled, the details will come later,' I thought.
At the corner I was overtaken by Angelika.
'Hullo, Vasil!' she said panting. 'What a hurry you're in!'
'Hullo,' I grunted. 'I'm in a hurry because I'm dirty. I want to wash.'
'Are you angry with me?'
'What gave you that idea?'
'Why do you never come round and see me?'
'I haven't had time.'
'But I left you a note. And spoke to your friends. Didn't they give you my message?'
'They did.' I said grimly, trying to be as stern as I could with Lika. I was thinking: 'It would have been better if you hadn't come. The chaps are giving me enough trouble as it is with their jokes about wedding rings. I can't even look out of the window without them grinning all over their faces!'
Somewhere or other Sasha had found a bunch of orange blossom that people wear at weddings, and while I had been washing at the well one day, had stuck it in my button-hole. Luckily I had noticed it in time, or I should have looked a proper fool when I went into town.
After a pause, Lika said: 'But it's rude, you know. I make the first move. I call on you—a thing I've never done with anyone before—and you... It would have been only politeness!'
'Look here, Lika,' I said, bracing myself, 'I'm afraid I'm not the sort to suit you and your politeness.'
'Am I really so hopeless? An unprincipled creature with petty-bourgeois tendencies? Is that how I must take it?'
I realized that Lika wanted to talk frankly. But I did not feel like a heart-to-heart talk and avoided the challenge.
'Take it how you like... you know best.'
'My greatest misfortune, Vasil, is that I can't be angry with you.'
'You'll manage it one day,' I said indifferently.
'It'll be very hard,' Lika said slowly. 'And I was thinking...'
'What?'
'... that at last I'd found someone who would put me on the right path...'
We were nearing my gate. After the day's work in the foundry I could not make myself fit in with Angelika's mood.
I cut her short: 'Why don't you ask Zuzya. He's got a kick like a cannon-ball, land he can do the Charleston, and he knows all about politeness. There's the man for you! So long!'
I waved a work-hardened hand in her direction and pushed the gate...
The first response to my postcards came from Monus Guzarchik. There was nothing surprising about that; Kharkov was only a night's journey away. Monus wrote:
'... I was very happy to receive your postcard. All our petty squabbles are forgotten and I have only good memories of our days together. Your not wanting to accept me for the Komsomol because of that spree in the restaurant doesn't worry me at all now. I shall become a Komsomol member all the same! I am now working at the Kharkov Locomotive Works. Do you know how many workers we have here? You'd never believe it! Over ten thousand! Compared with the Kharkov Locomotive Works, our Motor Factory is a village smithy...
'I was very surprised to read that you had 'a bit of a fight' before they took you on at the Lieutenant Schmidt Works. I had no trouble at all. I just showed them my papers and they put me straight in the diesel shop. It was here that I first saw how the huge machines for generating electricity—diesels—are assembled. You just can't picture what a giant a diesel is, Vasil! The little motor that we had at school to drive the lathes and circular saw is a toadstool compared with our power unit. I can tell you quite frankly that I find the work extremely interesting and am very satisfied with it. Every time I write the word 'satisfy' I remember our school and Bobir, who used to write it 'tasify.' How's he getting on by the sea? Give him my best wishes.
'I was put into a six-man team straightaway. The works is a long way from where I live—about nine kilometres, but I hardly notice the distance. In fact, I rather like it. It's nice to ride through the capital in a tram, looking out of the windows. I arrive at work early and get my tools ready. The foreman praised me once. 'It's not long since Monus was at a factory-training school,' he said, 'but he tries as hard as our people.' The men in my team are a good crowd, most of them old fellows. One of them tried to take the rise out of me and sent me to the tool department for a 'bigmo.' I went there and started demanding a 'bigmo,' and afterwards it turns out that there isn't such a thing. They had a good laugh at me for that.
'In the diesel department there are quite a few workers who actually took part in the Revolution. Besides establishing Soviet power in the Ukraine, some of them even took part in the May strike of 1902 and fought the police in 1905. Real proletariat! They've told me quite a lot about the Kharkov workers' fight against tsarism. Yesterday, when we'd finished work, I came out of the shop with a fitter who must
be about sixty. The tram was full up, so he suggested we should walk as far as the centre. I wasn't a bit sorry I agreed. The old chap told me how they prepared the Kharkov uprising and how the delegates from the Central Committee came down from St. Petersburg. When we got to Rosa Luxemburg Square, near the university, he showed me where the revolutionary headquarters were, where the ammunition was stored, where the first shots were exchanged with the police, and where the workers put up a barricade.
'Customs are different here from those in our town. Do you remember how even non-Party members used to get told off at our meetings for wearing ties? Here things are quite different. The young workers at my works, specially in the diesel department, think nothing of dressing well. 'Ties don't matter,' they say, 'it's what a man's got inside him that matters.' The chaps wash after work and change into clean clothes before going home. That's the right way of looking at things! It's much better than the kind of thing you meet with sometimes—a fellow wants to show he's a worker, so he gets into a tram in a greasy old set of overalls and smudges everybody's clothes.
'There is a big Komsomol organization in the diesel department. For the time being I'm a visitor.
When I told the secretary why you hadn't accepted me, he laughed and said: 'Yes, you might have gone right off the rails!' And he advised me to put in an application for membership as soon as possible. How's that, Vasil!
'Well, I must close now. If the other chaps write to you, Vasil, send me their full addresses as soon as you can. Give Maremukha and Bobir my very best wishes.'
I read the letter standing, even before I had changed my clothes. In spite of Monus's sly digs about our former relations, I began to forget the day's troubles—my scrap with Kashket and the rather rude way I had spoken to Angelika.
As I shook the sand out of my boots, I reflected that it would not be a bad idea to introduce Kharkov ways at our foundry. What was the sense in walking all the way through town in a dirty, scorched set of overalls, when you could wash and change at the works, like the men on the case-hardening furnace!
I remembered the spring evening when we had been strolling through the streets of our home town, munching sunflower seeds and nuts, and Furman and Guzarchik had run up to tell us our passes to the factories of the Ukraine had arrived. It was such a short time ago, and yet how much had happened in our lives since that Saturday evening, and how confident and grown-up we all felt now.
'Dear old home town,' I thought, splashing about like a duck beside the well. 'Shall I ever see you again? Shall I ever walk down the boulevards again listening to the rustle of the leaves? Shall I climb up on to the battlemented wall of the Old Fortress and gaze down on the broad lands of my Podolia, on the foaming spring waters of the Smotrich? We have scattered over the Ukraine to take up new lives. I wonder if we shall ever come together again on the steep cliffs of our old town and march together, with songs and torches, through the dark forests to the swift-flowing Dniester.'
