The day after the concert Pecheritsa summoned all the teachers and instructors from our school to test their knowledge of the Ukrainian language. Obviously our drawing master, who had only recently come from Russia to live with his daughter—the wife of a frontier guard—could neither write nor read Ukrainian.
In front of everyone, Pecheritsa told Polevoi to dismiss the old man from school. Our director did all he could to defend Maxim Yakovlevich, but it was no good.
Later, when he was telling us about his interview with Pecheritsa, Polevoi said: "I told Pecheritsa,
'You want to force a Russian to give up his native language and go over to Ukrainian straightaway. Why, he hasn't been living in the Ukraine five minutes. Give him time, don't force him to distort his own language and talk God knows how just for your sake. Compelling him like that will only make him hate the Ukraine... ' "
But Pecheritsa could not be persuaded. He sent round a circular flatly stating that all school-teachers in the Ukraine must teach children only in Ukrainian.
"But look here, what children have we got at this school?" Polevoi argued heatedly. "Our youngsters are quite grown-up. And besides, ours is a technical school. We study trades."
"That has nothing to do with me," Pecheritsa answered coldly. "You live in the Ukraine, here are the instructions, please obey them. As for the type of school you are running, that is quite absurd. What on earth is the use of a factory-training school when there isn't a factory within a hundred miles of you!"
"The time will come when factories will spring up here too, as they have in the Donbas, and people will thank us for being first to train the workers that will be needed to run them!" Polevoi replied.
"Rubbish!" Pecheritsa snapped back. "No one will let you soil the blue sky of Podolia with factory smoke."
"We shall see!" Polevoi said stubbornly and, as Nikita told us later, even gritted his teeth to stop himself cursing.
"Others will see, not you!" the ginger-moustached Pecheritsa flung at our director. "Your job is to be a disciplined worker in my system of education, and to obey my instructions without wrangling."
Polevoi was obliged to ask Maxim Yakovlevich to leave the school. We collected all the money we had left from our small grants and presented the old man with a good set of drawing instruments as a memento. Furman fixed a brass disc on the case and neatly scratched an inscription: "To our well-loved teacher Maxim Yakovlevich, in parting, but not in farewell. From his pupils."
As a matter of fact, Nazarov did not lose much by Pecheritsa's order. There were very few good engineers in the town and he was snapped up by the transport office at once. He started drawing plans of new roads leading to the border.
The steam-rollers for these roads were repaired at our school, and so Maxim Yakovlevich sometimes came to see us.
"A-a-ah! Maxim Yakovlevich, victim of the Pecheritsa regime!" Zhora greeted him one day. "Well, hasn't he got as far as your office yet?"
"That road's barred to him," Nazarov replied. ''We're on military work now. Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze of Moscow is interested in what we are doing. He doesn't care what language a man speaks, as long as he's Soviet at heart!..."
As Petka and I walked back to the hostel after our guard duty, Petka said to me: "What a pity we didn't catch that bandit, Vasil! Just let him slip through our fingers! I'm afraid Pecheritsa may get to know about it. If he does, he'll use it against Polevoi. 'Look at the blunderers he's trained,' he'll say. Then he'll start slinging mud at Polevoi."
"Don't worry, Petka. Kartamyshev won't let anything happen to Polevoi. He's known Polevoi since the time when they were at the Party School. Polevoi used to be the Secretary of the Party group there. He's an old Bolshevik, and a worker... But Sasha's a sap, that's a fact. Think how smashing it would have been if Sasha had nabbed that bandit!"
"Not half!" Petka said despondently.
TIKTOR GETS TOUGH
After the night of our vigil at headquarters, the weather had changed. For three days it had been snowing heavily. The drifts were up to the windows, and every morning, before starting to cast, we had to clear the path leading from the road to the foundry with wooden shovels.
One morning Zhora told me to prepare the mould cores for the next day's casting.
I was starting on my second lot, when Tiktor came up to me. I glanced up and saw his blonde forelock dangling right in front of my nose. Tiktor squatted on his heels and lit a cigarette, blowing a cloud of blue smoke into the grate of the stove. I watched him silently out of the corner of my eye, knowing that he wanted to talk to me. Since the evening when Tiktor had not turned up at headquarters, he had kept away from us, speaking to no one and going straight home after school. He lived with his father in Tsiganovka, a remote suburb not far from the station.
Taking a last pull at his cigarette, Tiktor tossed the stub on the blazing slabs of coke and, walking past me, said offhandedly:
"Well, member of the committee, when are you going to try me?"
"You want to know when the committee will go into your affair?"
"Isn't that the same thing!" Tiktor grunted, dragging over a tin of graphite and sitting on it.
"If you want to know when the committee will meet, I can tell you—on Thursday."
"Of course, it's better for you to keep the Komsomol full of twerps like Bobir who can't even hold a rifle, just because they're friends of certain committee members, and chuck out young workers who happen to make a slip... "
I guessed whose window Tiktor was throwing stones at.
"What you did wasn't a slip."
"But that's just what it was. I just had a drink... then gave a profiteer a slap on the jaw, and you make all this fuss. . ."
"Not just a profiteer. He was your client Bortanovsky."
Tiktor made a puzzled face. "My client? That's a funny thing to say!"
"Whose client is he then—mine? Don't make yourself out a fool. The committee knows all about it."
"What do you mean? 'I don't get you. . . Someone's been making things up to spite me, and you. . ."
This was too much. Not content with refusing to admit his mistake frankly, as a Komsomol member should, Tiktor was trying to come the innocent!
I said grimly: "The committee knows, Tiktor, that you cast machine parts for Bortanovsky's private business in working hours, you sold them to him, you..."
"Well, what about it?" Tiktor broke in. "I did it all with my own hands, out of my own aluminium, and it wasn't in working hours at all."
"That's not true, it was! Why tell lies about it?"
"You're lying yourself! I stayed behind after work, when you'd gone home, and did the casting then."
"Did you? What about the sand, and the tools, and the models, whose were they? Don't they belong to the state? Just you tell me what you were doing that day when Kozakevich took the fly-wheel model to the locksmiths to have it changed. If I remember, you were casting a gearwheel for a motor-bike."
Tiktor was cornered.
"I had nothing else to do then," he mumbled. "That's different. I wanted a job, so I started on that gear-wheel. You could cast that blood-sucker of an emperor, couldn't you? Well, I was practising, too, on a gear-wheel."
"Practising to get money from a profiteer afterwards and buy vodka with it..."
"Look here you," Tiktor shouted threateningly, "don't try and scare me with your talk of profiteers! I hate profiteers more than you do. Besides, you can't prove Bortanovsky is a profiteer. He's a private craftsman, true, but he's a craftsman and he works himself. And in Odessa he used to work at the October Revolution Factory. You don't find craftsmen like him all over the place. Who overhauled Pecheritsa's motor-bike? Bortanovsky! And you call him a profiteer!"