Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

"Daddy did?" Lika exclaimed, as if her father could do no wrong.

"Yes, your father! I had an idea ... it was about heating the moulding slabs automatically... My suggestion was put forward at a foundry production meeting and supported by both the Party organization and the older workers. Then they sent it to your father, as the chief engineer. And do you know what he wrote on my suggestion?"

"He doesn't tell me much about his affairs," Lika said.

"He could just have written 'no' and left it at that. I'd have tried somewhere else. But he put in a crack with it: This young spark is hot enough without heating.' What do you think of that?"

"I recognize Daddy's style," said Lika. "But don't let that worry you. He's got all sorts of cranky ideas. He even eats apples with maggots in them and says: I’ll eat this maggot while I've got the chance, or one day it'll eat me.' "

"But he was just making fun of me!"

"I can tell you this quite frankly, my father's a great egoist and very fond of himself. Very often he enjoys seeing other people's failures. The worse, the better!' that's what he says. Would you like me to try and persuade him to change his decision?" Lika suggested eagerly, and I saw sympathy in her eyes.

"No, don't bother. I'll manage without that."

A band was playing loudly when we walked into the brightly lit entrance-hall of the metal-workers' club. I recognized the old waltz A Forest Tale.

The first thing that struck me when we got near the dancers was the old men waltzing round the hall. They had not gone home, nor had they dropped in at "The Little Nook," as they usually did. Their visit to the youth of the works seemed to have restored their own youth. Even the close-cropped Gladyshev was waltzing gaily, if not very gracefully, with his wife. And the young people were-breaking all records.

There were far more of them here than at Madame's saloon, even on the most popular evenings. A glance at the faces of young workers was enough to tell me that they all felt themselves far more at ease than in the Genoa Street saloon.

Luka Turunda in a blue and white sailor's suit whirled past with his wife, who was wearing an amber

necklace. He winked at me, and then, noticing the engineer's daughter with me, opened his eyes wide in surprise. He knew about the offensive remark Andrykhevich had made on my plan. Luka's comment had been that the engineer was a "devil of the old regime," no wonder he could not understand why I was talking so peaceably to Angelika.

The band struck up a polka. I was about to invite Lika to dance, when I started as if I had been pricked with a pin. On the other side of the hall, not far from Petka, stood Golovatsky, arms folded and watching us intently. Apparently Tolya had not forgotten his joking advice to me "not to get tied up with the neighbours." Now, seeing us together, he was lost in speculation.

"Who cares!" I thought. "I'll tell you all about it afterwards, Tolya." And taking Lika's elbow, I led her on to the floor.

Before we had finished the polka, however, Grisha Kanuk appeared at the entrance. His sweat-stained face showed that he had only just finished work in the foundry.

I wondered why Grisha had not gone home to change, instead of coming to the club in his dirty working clothes. The moment he caught sight of me, he started beckoning me out of the hall.

"Somebody wants to see me, Lika, excuse me," I said and after finding her a seat went straight over to Grisha.

"Golovatsky, you and all the active members of the Komsomol are wanted at the works at once," Kanuk whispered panting. He must have run all the way from the works.

"But there's no one there..." I began bewilderedly.

Luka Turunda touched my elbow as he ran past.

"'Hurry, Mandzhura," he said. "It's a meeting with Rudenko."

By the time we got to the director's office, the room was full of Communists and Komsomol secretaries from the works. By the light of the two green-shaded lamps I recognized Kazurkin, Secretary of the Town Party Committee, our Flegontov, and the OGPU chief whom I had seen when the mine was discovered under the foundations of the blast-furnace.

"We won't wait any longer," Rudenko said looking round when we had all sat down. "Tonight, comrades, making use of the fact that tomorrow would be a day-off, our enemies intended blowing up all the vital sections of our plant. Their plan is in our hands! There it is." Rudenko pointed to a crumpled paper lying before him. "I consider it my duty to thank our comrades, the security men, for discovering this document in time."

Ivan Fyodorovich turned to the security man and gripped his hand warmly. The latter shook his head, as much as to say that neither he nor his assistants deserved any gratitude.

The announcement shocked us, and in the tense silence that followed the director's voice sounded even more impressive.

'The first warning we got of this kind of thing came to us, as you know, during the Komsomol members' voluntary work on Sunday. The despicable hireling of the bourgeoisie who had been entrusted with the task of detonating the mine lost his nerve and failed to carry out this act of sabotage. Then the lads in the foundry spoilt everything for him. Fortunately he has now been arrested, and at the first interrogation turned out to be very talkative. Similar mines planted by the old owner and his assistants in 1919 have been discovered in the stoke-hole and near the furnaces..."

"Who was it, Ivan Fyodorovich?" several voices asked at once.

"The worst worker and the worst drunkard at the plant —Entuta," the director said amid tense silence.

"So that was the man who tried to frighten us with his anonymous letter after we had showed him up!" the thought flashed through my mind.

After a pause the director went on: "Our comrade here will tell you the rest." And again he looked at the benevolent little man in the grey suit, beckoning him to take the chair.

All night, until daybreak, we stood watch in the shops, guarding the works until every fresh mine that had been discovered was rendered harmless.

The fact that the good-for-nothing drunkard Kashket had turned out to be a foreign agent soon lost its novelty. "Wasn't it obvious from the start that the foreign capitalists would recruit their agents among such degraded types!" I reflected as I paced up and down between the cooling furnaces. "People like him who've never had any feeling for their country will do any filthy work to get more money or another bottle of vodka... "

Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya, about whom the security man had spoken in a restrained but very impressive manner that evening, had known about Kashket's past for a long time, ever since she had agreed to become a resident foreign agent in our town, concealing her secret activities against the Soviet state under the mask of being a dancing-mistress.

The first messenger to arrive on a cargo ship from London met her in secret. Besides handing her a letter from her husband, the sugar-refinery owner who had escaped to England, the messenger presented her with a certain "business document." This document was a list of people who were "still loyal," compiled by Nestor Makhno himself, who was in those days living in Paris and, so it was rumoured, even lectured on his bandit activities at the Staff Academy. With the help of the Entente forces he was hoping to return on his machine-gun carts to the shores of the Azov Sea.

This list included the name of the anarchist Entuta, nicknamed Kashket. Madame had got her plump bejewelled fingers on him back in the days when she still owned the "Little Nook" restaurant. Kashket came to his "mama" to cadge drinks, which thanks to Madame's "kind heart" he rarely paid for. And when at her own dancing-saloon in Genoa Street Madame demanded Kashket’s first signature on a receipt for a hundred rubles received from the British Intelligence Service, Kashket did not hesitate.