She takes in the image in the glass. A certain slackening to her features now, a looseness, subtle but undeniable. Wrinkles like sketch marks smattered around her eyes. Fine details that perhaps she alone can see, but she can’t stave off the thought that middle age is on its way. Three years of working here are beginning to take their toll. She wonders what she’ll look like in another three.
And yes, it’s true she’s reconfigured herself to become what they’ve asked of her. She dresses anonymously, she nods her head in agreement with almost any statement floated in her direction. She has made it a point to avoid eye contact with everyone other than a few trusted friends, so she walks with her head bowed, a kind of self-containment, moving like a vessel, constant, never deviating from her course. But she’s still here, surviving.
Maria takes off her package-brown work coat, bangs the dust off it, and then puts it on again. It drops shapelessly around her. She’s lost weight in the past year. Her cheekbones protrude, her arms feel slightly insubstantial. There is only so much food that she and Alina can queue for, only so many hours in the day, although she’s started to have decent meals in the canteen of the university—another reason to love the building.
She slaps her cheeks to give them some colour. She knows Mr. Shalamov likes his employees to look vibrant, full of the joys, despite requiring them to spend all these dogged hours in this spartan shed. Should she leave the coat off or keep it on? She keeps it on. Mr. Shalamov will surely mention its absence, and it’s not as if she has a tantalizing figure.
Okay.
She glides out the door and moves hurriedly to the metal steps that lead to the management offices. Rough squares of brown carpet tiles. A secretary at the desk with a typewriter in front of her, a telephone, and nothing else. The secretary looks at her with deadened eyes. Maria thinks that this is a woman whose days pass in staggered increments of time, her hours comprised of finely sliced segments. Answer a phone, five minutes pass. Type up dictation, fifteen minutes pass. No other workers to talk to. Managers who see her as barely human. Things could be worse. She could be this woman.
“I’m here to see Mr. Shalamov.”
“Yes. He’s been waiting.”
She says this with distaste. As if Maria should feel guilt at keeping the man from the reports he has to flick through, from the nap he has to take.
She makes a call and replaces the receiver. Maria stands in front of the desk. The woman types while Maria waits. A few minutes pass. The phone rings, she answers it.
“He’ll see you now.”
“Thank you.”
Maria walks into his office with its large plate-glass windows that look out over the factory floor, so self-contained that Maria can hear her feet pad along the carpet. The silence makes what’s happening out there seem like an intricate mime. Mr. Shalamov is standing with his back to her, looking out over the waves of industry. He doesn’t turn to acknowledge her. She doesn’t speak. While she waits she looks down to her empty stool. Her comrades at her workstation going through the same motions, moving as fluidly as any of the larger machinery in the midground, where aluminium panels and steel parts grind forward in endless sequences. A series of interlocking arcs and twirls. Nothing out of sync in this moving tableau.
ON HER FIRST MORNING, having resigned herself to a future of repetition, she was surprised at the comfort that she was deriving from the crowd, the sense of common purpose, each individual working their way through a collective life.
The scale of it was astonishing, ten thousand employees. And there are other complexes nearby: an ammonia plant, a chemical-processing factory; a vast migratory movement makes its way from the city on buses and trolley cars and marshrutkas and she is one of them, stepping in tandem with hordes of scarfed women and hooded men.
She wonders sometimes if perhaps she was born for this, that this life of hers was inevitable. Isn’t this how people truly live: clocking in for work; whispered, surreptitious parties on a Friday night; duck feeding on a Sunday?
The first sight of the factory made her pause in shock, made her realign her sense of scale. When she passed through the enormous, hulking doors, six times taller than a person, her superintendent met her and recited the facts: the assembly line a kilometre long, a new car produced every twenty-two seconds of every minute of every hour of every day. A sea of calibrated metal, waves of industry pushing onward with meticulously timed precision, a constellation of spinning parts.
The factory floor.
There was a grating whirr that vibrated into her feet, and Maria knew she would become wedded to this sound. She knew instantly that she would carry this noise home, sleep with it for maybe years, perhaps until death. There was a timeline here that was permanent and previously alien. There was a time clock, a punch machine. Punch in and out. The superintendent gave her a card and let her know it was an imprisonable offence to cheat the clock. He had personally sent employees to prison. The machine punched perfectly symmetrical holes, exactly in the centre of the boxes.
There were time slots and days, printed in embossed type.
Her name in embossed type. Maria Nikolaevna Brovkina.
And she took this card five days a week, for the past three years. Punching in and out, marking her time.
Maria worked into the work, eventually finding comfort in camshafts. It had taken months for this to manifest itself—it was endless and repetitive and crushingly dull—but after a time the religious beauty of the task emerged. The detail, the exactitude required in working the lathe. How deep can an action go? How perfect can a human act be? Maria worked to a precision of thousandths of a millimetre. A micron, they call it. A micron.
And the repetition.
And the repetition.
And the repetition.
Guiding the mechanical arm as fluently as if it were her own.
Over time, Maria found her body easing into and around the action. Her body incorporated and enveloped it. Drinking water in the kitchen, a mid-night, mid-sleep drink, and her arm would reach for the tap in the same flowing arc as the motion at her workbench. Her hand clutching the glass with a regularity only she knew.
Sometimes she works with her eyes closed. A dangerous act, dangerous machinery, but she can feel the precision of the task with a clarity that she still finds astounding.
MR. SHALAMOV TURNS and points to the chair in front.
“Please.”
She sits, resisting an urge to take out a handkerchief and place it down on the seat to gather any dust she’s brought in.
“Mrs. Brovkina. Thank you for coming to see me.”
Mrs. Brovkina. It’s still her name, of course, and she’s seen it written down often enough. But no one uses her last name. It sounds odd still to be linked to Grigory, and it saddens her to hear it, carrying as it does a residue of failure.
“Of course.”
“I’ve been looking at your file.”
She can’t think of any recent discrepancies in her work, but of course that doesn’t mean someone hasn’t perceived, or even invented, any number of offences.
“Comrade Popov has been very complimentary. He says you’re a very consistent worker. In fact, your production rates are in the higher percentiles.”
She feels no relief. The statement is a prelude. He’s been through this process far more often than she.
“I try hard to contribute to the collective effort.”
“Of course. Just as we all do.”
She has spoken too early, singled herself out, made it sound like there are others who don’t contribute. She could qualify her statement, but it’s better to let it rest. Let him say what he has to say.