By one of the smoke-stained walls there were several piles of dry, unused sand, "old regime" sand, as we called it. Under this sand lay the concrete bases for the moulding machines, which the world war had
prevented the old owner from installing. In those days, the works had stopped making reapers, some of the workers had been called into the army, and the moulders who remained behind were all put on one job—the casting of hand-grenades. The works turned out hundreds of thousands of those little pineapple-shaped missiles. The moulding was done fast and no one objected to the workers' throwing away scrap, cinder, burnt sand, and all sorts of rubbish on to the unfinished furnace. It was this foundry rubbish dump that we had decided to get rid of.
"It's a first-class idea, Komsomols!" said Flegontov. "And you've worked it all out properly. Twelve new machines—that will mean hundreds of reapers above plan! It'll mean jobs for the workers who are still waiting their turn at the labour exchange..."
We parted at the plant gates. Petka went to the joiners' shop, Sasha disappeared into the store, where his mates were fitting out the new machines, and I went off to my "sand brigade."
The first thing I noticed in the foundry was Tiktor's broad back. Yasha was standing by his machine pulling off his blue blouse.
"So you've come!" I thought with a thrill of pleasure.
On Flegontov's advice and carrying out a promise I had given Golovatsky, I had gone over to Tiktor after work on Saturday and said: "We're doing some voluntary work tomorrow, Yasha. Feel like coming along?"
"I've heard about it!..." Tiktor had grunted without looking at me, and had gone on piling his empty mould-boxes.
From such an answer I had been unable to tell whether he would come or not, and now I was very glad to see him.
When we began to hand out spare shovels to chaps from the other shops, Tiktor strode up to me in his singlet and said gruffly: "Well, where's my job?"
"Take your choice," I suggested. "Either you can stay here and clear the moulding floor, or you can carry sand. Or perhaps you'd rather sift it over on the other side?"
"I'll stay here," Tiktor decided. "Let's get hold of a shovel."
"You'd better put a cap on," I advised, glancing at his flowing hair. "You'll never wash the dust out, if you don't."
"Who cares!" Tiktor said with an obstinate shake of his head.
A few minutes later he was one of the first to plunge his gleaming shovel into the dry, caked sand.
Soon there was such a dust in the place that we seemed to see each other through a fog. The shovels soon grew blunt from grinding on the iron cinder and broken mould-boxes buried in the sand.
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.