Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

Every time my shovel screeched, I thought to myself: "That's another chunk of metal for the sieves. The chaps will sift it out of the sand and it'll go into the furnace with all the other chunks, and then it'll come back here for casting in a big glaring ladle. . ."

Before I came here I had never realized the value of metal to the country. But after our talk with the works director I had begun to see things from another angle. And a few days ago we had re-read Comrade Stalin's report to the Fourteenth Party Congress, in which he had spoken of the shortage of metal. "Under these conditions, our economy and our industry in particular, cannot make further progress," Comrade Stalin had said, advising us to pay special attention to metal. Those words had made a deep impression on me, and now, as I cleared the sand, I felt overjoyed at every piece of metal we found.

The things we found in that dump! Broken shovel handles that might have been used before the

Revolution, half-finished grenades that brought back memories of the time when the troops of the south-west front moved through our town to Lvov armed with grenades of the same type. Our shovels unearthed newspapers in old-fashioned pre-revolutionary type, twisted iron watering cans for sprinkling the moulds, gear-wheels, even cartridge-oases green with age.

We put it all on stretchers and carried it out into the yard.

Soon Yasha pulled off even his blue singlet. The other chaps followed his example. Their bare sweating bodies gleamed in the light of the electric lamps. All of us were glancing at Tiktor. It was a pleasure merely to know that he wasn't spending his clay-off at a cafe table with cronies like the lisping Kashket. "We must fight for every lad we've got, and make him ours for always, not chuck him away to our enemies!" I remembered Golovatsky's words. And I realized that I had been wrong about Tiktor and that Tolya had been right.

"But why can't we fight for Angelika then?" I thought. "Her father's a bourgeois through and through, and doesn't like us. That's a fact. But surely she may turn out better than her parents!" But the way Golovatsky had called her a "conceited young hussy" suggested that he had washed his hands off her entirely. "No, Tolya, old pal, you've made a mistake here somewhere," I thought, and plunged my shovel even harder into the sand.

I had another reason for being in a good mood. The day before I had received a postcard from Galya that Nikita had sent on to me. Apparently my card had never reached her.

The factory to which Galya had been sent had been full up, but the steelworkers' trade union had helped her to get a job as a turner in a shipyard engineering shop. Judging by the tone of the postcard, Galya was very pleased with her job. "If you take a trip through Odessa when you go on holiday next year, don't forget that your old and true friend lives here," she wrote. "Be sure to look me up. And in the meantime, don't forget to write 111"

The three exclamation marks at the end of the postcard, and the whole postcard with its view of the sea, and especially the fact that Galya had gone to the trouble of finding out my address gave me a thrill ofjoy. "I was unjust to Galya," I thought. And as I tossed sand on the stretcher, I firmly decided to make a point of going to Odessa next year...

Without waiting for us to clear away all the sand, the plumbers were bringing in pipes for compressed air. As I glanced at them screwing the pipes together, my thoughts turned to an idea that had been worrying me for some time. What with the reapers for the commune, Nikita's visit, and all sorts of other affairs, I had not been able to get my ideas down on paper...

At that moment I noticed Tiktor throw aside his shovel and, bending down, lift something that looked like a piece of cord. Then he straightened up and, noticing an electrician in blue overalls standing on a step-ladder, shouted: "Hey, lad, come over here."

Thinking that he was being asked to shovel sand, the electrician responded gruffly.

"Can't you see I'm working on the line!"

"Get down quick, there's something else you can work on here."

Reluctantly the electrician climbed down from his steps. Swinging his screwdriver, he walked unhurriedly over to Tiktor and, stooping on one knee, glanced carelessly at the wire.

The wire stuck out of the sand like a rat's tail. Shovels were scraping all round and no one paid the least attention to Tiktor's discovery. The electrician crouched lower and lower over the wire, as if he wanted to lick it, then suddenly he leapt to his feet as if he had been stung by a snake.

"Stop!" he bawled, throwing a wild glance round him.

"Don't panic! Tell us what's up?" Tiktor said tapping the dazed electrician on the shoulder.

"I'm not panicking. I know what I'm talking about," the electrician replied. "That's not a wire, it's a fuse! Understand?. . . Who's the senior here?"

The menacing word "fuse" flashed through my mind like a shaft of lightning. I thought instantly of the unsuccessful attempt to sabotage security headquarters. What should I do—shout for help or break the fuse?

Luckily, at that moment, Flegontov came out of the store. While we were cleaning the moulding floor, Flegontov, Turunda, and other moulders even older than they, had been helping the fitters from the tool shop to test the spare machines.

"Comrade Flegontov! ... Come over here!" Tiktor shouted at the top of his voice.

Flegontov turned in our direction, quickening his pace a little.

"What's the matter?" he asked calmly.

"Look at that!" the electrician said pointing.

"A fuse?" Flegontov said sharply. "Where did that come from?" And making a quick decision, he shouted: "No smoking in here!"

He walked quickly to the glass-fronted office and we saw his lips move as he picked up the telephone...

We finished our job that Sunday so tired that we could hardly stand. It was dusk when we left the shop after the twelfth and last machine had slid from the wooden rollers on to its stone foundation. Many a time that day it had seemed that the shouts of "One, two, heave!" would bring the glass roof down on the heads of the cheering team of young and old men.

The carpenters had made neat, fresh-smelling pinewood boxes for the moulding mixture and set them up between the machines. New pipes were gleaming everywhere. The damped stone floor looked black from a distance.

Before the twelve new "machine-guns" could be used, they had to be tested. Hundreds of new mould-boxes had to be brought into the foundry, the machines had to be partitioned off in pairs. Dozens of tons of clean sifted moulding sand had to be carried in from the bunkers and piled in great heaps on the broad space we had just won from the foundry rubbish dump. But the hardest, preparatory work was over.

Dog-tired as we were, you'd have thought we should have dropped down on our hard mattresses and fallen into a dead sleep. Ahead of us lay a whole week of piece work. But even when we got home, we still could not settle down.

"When did they plant that mine there—that's the question!" Sasha exclaimed.

"Anyone can see that—when Wrangel ran away!" I retorted. "That year their ships often came into our harbour. When those blighters had to pack their bags, they decided to blow up the works, so that we shouldn't get it, but something must have gone wrong. Uncle Vasya was right about those technicians nosing round the shops at night."

Cicadas were chirping in the garden below. Our landlady could be heard sighing heavily in her sleep.

Talking in whispers with my friends, I still imagined myself in the foundry watching the electrician carefully dig out the fuse from under the unfinished sand-covered furnace. Even before the town OGPU chief, a short, amiable-looking man in a grey suit whom Flegontov had called up by phone, had arrived in the foundry, Flegontov himself had discovered a mysterious box under the furnace and said that it contained enough dynamite to blow up the foundations of the blast-furnace, the copper furnace, and even the main wall of the foundry.