At eight o’clock he left the factory, deaf and dejected, an absurd and bulging scream shooting up his throat. This he could never have imagined. What were books, dull misery, starvation, and tables of abstract statistics next to this? Here for the first time, his eyes wide with terror, he spanned the whole abyss of human distress and disgrace, the entire enormity of the average man’s suffering.
An unbearable heat swam in the factory, and the people worked half-naked, streaming with sweat. White foremen brandished whips as they paced the hall between the machines, and every other moment a serpentine whip cracked as it rose over the bent back of an unwary worker and fell with a mournful groan. Red streaks appeared on the arched backs, like hours being ticked off, staining the sweat crimson. Over half the workers were women and children, some not even ten years old, and beads of sweat as big as tears poured down their strained faces, like those inconceivable, terrible drops that fall from the helpless, astonished eyes of tortured animals.
The enormous machines were like monstrous two-headed dragons, swallowing gray skeins of oakum as filthy as smoke, then spitting them out in long, fibrous saliva, swiftly wound on the spinning tops of spools. Then the iron fingers grabbed and unwove the fibers for the hundredth time, pulled them apart in infinite slender threads, and these threads, strained till they groaned, broke in the air with a snap, where they were caught in mid-flight and tied in a split-second knot by the women’s lively fingers. The spools dribbled from the slobbering maws of the machines into the spittoons of enormous baskets, and the filled baskets were carried off somewhere into the fog by spindly-legged boys, straining under the terrible weight.
In the evening, when the people were numb from exhaustion and felt their movements begin to flag, to grow sluggish and more fitful, like the stubborn grinding of unlubricated gears, the lines of the apocalyptic red pencil ticked off each row of backs in turn, as though an enraged mystical censor had gone about the work of crossing all the helpless verses of human beings from the Book of Creation, one by one.
A cloud of down hovered in the air, and in the acrid smoke the naked human figures convulsed with barking coughs, like the thrashing death agonies of the condemned in illustrations to a catechism.
This is precisely how the medieval painters had envisioned hell, except theirs, it seems, had no children. Or perhaps the subtle Christian god, already bored of torturing adults, had created a special new hell for children, a dogma the priests were keeping from the faithful.
He returned to his hovel feeling as though he’d smoked opium, his head full of chaos and his feet full of lead.
That night he dreamt of the striped backs, the mouths wrought in anguish, the eyes wide with terror and inhuman yearning, amidst the suffocating billows of smoke. Then red tongues of flame began piercing the smoke, everything exploded in a blinding fire, and amid the flaming tongues the white pockmarked foreman from the drying house, a harp in each hand, performed a snake dance. Ultimately it all dissolved into streams of chaotic nonsense; sleep began the work of rhythmically flooding the red-hot poker of his brain.
In a month he’d toughened up, grown used to it. The blows, the coughing and howling, the acrid cloud of down, none of it made his head spin. His eyes were calm and stern from behind the bars of their lashes. He got down to work, organizing a group. This was extremely difficult. During the day there was no talking to anyone. Every step was marked and accounted for. In the evenings, the workers, reeling from exhaustion, listened without comprehending.
He tried to make contact on days off. The older workers glared fearfully at him and scowled. They were afraid of even sighing aloud in the factory. They were dismissed for the slightest word, let alone outright resistance. Who could even think of opposition in those circumstances? They avoided him and observed him cautiously: He was clearly up to no good. Even so, by the end of the second month he managed to gather a small group of young workers. The work loped onward. Most of the young people were illiterate. He set up basic evening classes. Few came. After twelve hours of exhausting work their eyelids drooped low. They were asphyxiated by the smoke of fatigue and couldn’t get the difficult letters through their skulls. How to teach these people? His powerlessness made him lose heart.
One, a sixteen-year-old spool worker named Chen, turned out to be surprisingly clever. An extraordinarily bright girl, and she studied hard. Top of the class. Passionately campaigning among her friends, she brought over a dozen workers into the group.
P’an liked her a great deal. She asked about everything in detail. Memorized things avidly. Her questions became acute, adult, thoughtful, and precise. Her slanted, rational eyes were gentle and open.
Once, on the way home from the factory, she told P’an her short life’s story. She’d come from the countryside. There were thirteen of them at home, and only two mu of land. Hard times. When she was only thirteen, her father sold her to an old man. She fled. Made it to the city on foot. She had worked in a Japanese factory – the pay was low, survival impossible. Now she was working as a spool worker. That was rough, too, but a bit better at least.
P’an hadn’t met any girls before. Even though there had been no chance at the Lazarists’, he had unconsciously started to despise them. They were slaves, breeders, nothing more, reflecting ages of discrimination, the legacy of generations. The word “woman” was a slur.
But this one struck him with her childlike, unconquerable gentleness, her keen and ungirlish mind, her eagerness to discover, her conscious will to fight, which was so inconceivable in such a miniature frame.
They spoke long into the evenings, forgetting their meals and their fatigue. Returning to his little hovel after the group meetings, stretched out on his straw mattress, P’an recalled words both mild and honest, eyes wide from curiosity, and in his mind he repeated: My darling! And here he caught himself. And what was this now? Love? What a laugh! And what is love exactly? Copulation and children? No, that’s not it. Something else. Just a nice, kind comrade – that’s all. But he knew all too well that this wasn’t it either! And he fell asleep more quickly if he tried not to think.
One evening, after work (he had the night off), P’an stood in front of the female workers’ exit. The last ones dispersed.
Obviously he had missed her. Chen was probably busy. She was teaching a few workers by now. He wandered off home: he’d work on his own. He didn’t waste his nighttime hours.
Meanwhile, as Chen was leaving down the narrow corridors of the factory, her path was barred by the stocky, pockmarked foreman. He had been molesting and harassing her for some time. This time she didn’t even manage to scream. He covered her mouth with a big, hairy paw. He dragged the flailing girl into his cell. In her helpless misery she bit his nose. He knocked her out with a blow of his fist, as if pacifying a horse. Then he threw her on the floor and raped her while she lay there unconscious.
He walked away wiping his nose with a handkerchief.
A few days later P’an met Chen at a group meeting. He was astonished by the change that had come over her. She’d been tiny to begin with, but now she seemed even smaller, as if someone had knocked out her supports from within. Her eyes were wide and astonished, like those of a wounded child. Once they’d been open and brave, and now they fearfully avoided his gaze.
He went up to her when the meeting was finished and asked what was going on, if she was ill. She gave a rueful smile. Hard to say if she was smiling or about to cry. She mumbled something about a headache.