“Well, I wasn’t sure it was the man. I might have been mistaken ... and ...”
“And your help in the matter would have been — valuable to you.”
“Why, old pal, you’re not accusing me of any personal motives, are you? Maybe I did overstep my authority in these little G.P.U. matters that belong to your job, but I was only thinking of helping a fellow proletarian in his duty. You know that nothing can stop me in fulfilling my duty, not even any ... sentimental attachments.”
“A breach of Party discipline is a breach of Party discipline, no matter by whom committed.”
Pavel Syerov was looking at Andrei Taganov too fixedly, as he answered slowly: “That’s what I’ve always said.”
“It is never advisable to be overzealous in one’s duty.”
“Certainly not. It’s as bad as being lax.”
“In the future — any political questioning in this unit is to be done by me.”
“As you wish, pal.”
“And if you ever feel that I cannot perform that task — you may report it to the Party and ask for my dismissal.”
“Andrei! How can you say that! You don’t think that I question for a single minute your invaluable importance to the Party? Haven’t I always been your greatest admirer — you, the hero of Melitopol? Aren’t we old friends? Haven’t we fought in the trenches together, under the red flag, you and I, shoulder to shoulder?”
“Yes,” said Andrei, “we have.”
In the year 1896, the red-brick house in the Putilovsky factory district of St. Petersburg had no plumbing. The fifty worker families that clotted its three floors had fifty barrels in which to keep their water. When Andrei Taganov was born, a kindly neighbor brought a barrel from the stair-landing; the water was frozen; the neighbor broke the ice with an ax, and emptied the barrel. The pale, shivering hands of the young mother stuffed an old pillow into the barrel. Such was Andrei’s first bed.
His mother bent over the barrel and laughed, laughed happily, hysterically, until tears fell into the dimples of the tiny, red hands. His father did not hear of his birth for three days. His father had been away for a week and the neighbors spoke about it in whispers.
In the year 1905, the neighbors did not need to whisper about the father any longer. He made no secret of the red flag he carried through the streets of St. Petersburg, nor of the little white pamphlets he sowed into the dark soil of crowds, nor of the words his powerful voice sent like a powerful wind to carry the seeds — the flaming words to the glory of Russia’s first revolution.
It was Andrei’s tenth year. He stood in a corner of the kitchen and looked at the brass buttons on the gendarmes’ coats. The gendarmes had black moustaches and real guns. His father was putting his coat on slowly. His father kissed him and kissed his mother. The gendarmes’ boots grated the last paint off the kitchen floor. His mother’s arms clung to his father’s shoulders like tentacles. A strong hand tore her off. She fell across the threshold. They left the door open. Their steps rang down the stairs. His mother’s hair was spilled over the bricks of the stair-landing.
Andrei wrote his mother’s letters. Neither of them had been taught to write, but Andrei had learned it by himself. The letters went to his father and the address bore, in Andrei’s big, awkward handwriting, the name of a town in Siberia. After a while his mother stopped dictating letters. His father never came back.
Andrei carried the baskets with the laundry his mother washed. He could have hidden himself, head and toes, in one of the baskets, but he was strong. In their new room in the basement there was a white, billowing, sour foam, like clouds, in the wooden trough under his mother’s purple hands and a white, billowing, sour steam, like clouds, under the ceiling. They could not see that it was spring outside. But they could not have seen it, even without the steam: for the window opened upon the sidewalk and they could watch only the shiny new galoshes grunting through the mud of melting snow, and, once, someone dropped a young green leaf right by the window.
Andrei was twelve years old when his mother died. Some said it was the wooden trough that had killed her, for it had always been too full; and some said it was the kitchen cupboard, for it had always been too empty.
Andrei went to work in a factory. In the daytime, he stood at a machine and his eyes were cold as its steel, his hands steady as its levers, his nerves tense as its belts. At night, he crouched on the floor behind a barricade of empty boxes in the corner he rented; he needed the barricade because the three other corner tenants in the room objected to candle light when they wanted to sleep, and Agrafena Vlassovna, the landlady, did not approve of book reading. So he kept the candle on the floor, and he held the book to the candle, and he read very slowly, and he wrapped his feet in newspapers because they were very cold; and the snow wailed battering the window, the three corner tenants snored, Agrafena Vlassovna spat in her sleep, the candle dripped, and everybody was asleep but Andrei and the cockroaches.
He talked very little, smiled very slowly and never gave coins to beggars.
Sometimes, on Sundays, he passed Pavel Syerov in the street. They knew each other, as all children did in the neighborhood, but they did not talk often. Pavel did not like Andrei’s clothes. Pavel’s hair was greased neatly and his mother was taking him to church. Andrei never went to church.
Pavel’s father was a clerk in the corner dry-goods store and waxed his moustache six days a week. On Sundays, he drank and beat his wife. Little Pavel liked perfumed soap, when he could steal it from the apothecary shop; and he studied God’s Law — his best white collar on — with the parish priest.
In the year 1915, Andrei stood at the machine, and his eyes were colder than its steel, his hands steadier than its levers, his nerves colder and steadier than both. His skin was tanned by the fire of the furnaces; his muscles and the will behind his muscles were tempered like the metal he had handled. And the little white pamphlets his father had sown, reappeared in the son’s hands. But he did not throw them into crowds on the wings of fiery speeches; he passed them stealthily into stealthy hands and the words that went with them were whispers. His name was on the list of a party about which not many dared to whisper and he sent through the mysterious, unseen veins of the Putilovsky factory messages from a man named Lenin.
Andrei Taganov was nineteen. He walked fast, talked slowly, never went to dances. He took orders and gave orders, and had no friends. He looked at superintendents in fur coats and at beggars in felt boots, with the same level, unflinching eyes, and had no pity.
Pavel Syerov was clerking in a haberdashery. On Sundays he entertained a noisy crowd of friends in the corner saloon, leaned back in his chair and swore at the waiter if service was too slow. He loaned money freely and no one refused a loan to “Pavlusha.” He put on his patent leather shoes when he took a girl to a dance, and put eau-de-cologne on his handkerchief. He liked to hold the girl’s waist and to say: “We’re not a commoner, dearie. We’re a gentleman.”
In the year 1916, Pavel Syerov lost his job in the haberdashery, owing to a fight over a girl. It was the third year of the war; prices were high; jobs were scarce. Pavel Syerov found himself trudging through the gates of the Putilovsky factory on winter mornings, when it was so dark and so early that the lights over the gate cut his puffed, sleepy eyes and he yawned into his raised collar. At first, he avoided his old crowd, for he was ashamed to admit where he was working. After a while, he avoided them because he was ashamed to admit they had been his friends. He circulated little white pamphlets, made speeches at secret meetings and took orders from Andrei Taganov only because “Andrei’s been in it longer, but wait till I catch up with him.” The workers liked “Pavlusha.” When he happened to meet one of his old friends, he passed by haughtily, as if he had inherited a title; and he spoke of the superiority of the proletariat over the paltry petty bourgeoisie, according to Karl Marx.