HOW THE STEEL WAS TEMPERED - Nikolai Ostrovsky (Thép đã tôi thế đấy)

The secretary agreed. He scribbled a few words on a slip of paper.
"Give this to Comrade Tufta, he''ll make all the arrangements."
In the Personnel Department Pavel found Tufta giving a dressing down to his assistant. Pavel stood for a minute or two listening to the heated exchange, but since it threatened to last for a long time, he broke in.
"You''ll finish the argument another time, Tufta. Here''s a note for you about fixing up my paper."
Tufta stared. He looked from the paper to Korchagin, until at last it dawned on him,
"I''ll be damned! So you didn''t die after all? Tut, tut, what are we going to do now? You''ve been struck off the lists. I myself turned in your card to the Central Committee. What''s more, you''ve missed the census, and according to the circular from the Komsomol C.C. those who weren''t registered in the census are out. So the only thing you can do is to file an application again in the regular way." Tufta''s tone brooked no argument.
Pavel frowned.
"I see you haven''t changed, Tufta. The same musty old bureaucrat. When will you learn to be human?"
Tufta sprang up as if a flea had bitten him.
"I would thank you not to lecture me. I am in charge here. Circular instructions are issued to be obeyed and not violated. And you''d better be careful with your accusations!"
With these words, Tufta sat down and demonstratively drew the pile of unopened mail toward him.
Pavel walked slowly to the door, then remembering something, he went back to the desk and picked up the secretary''s slip that lay before Tufta. The latter watched him closely. He was a mean spiteful person, with nothing youthful about him, a trifle ridiculous with his big ears that seemed forever on the alert.
"All right," Pavel said in a calm mocking voice. "You can accuse me of disorganising statistics if you like, but, tell me, how on earth do you manage to wangle reprimands for people who go and die without giving formal notice in advance? After all, anyone can get sick if he wants to, or die if he feels like it, there''s nothing in the instructions about that, I bet."
"Ho! Ho! Ho!" roared Tufta''s assistant, no longer able to preserve his neutrality.
The point of Tufta''s pencil broke and he flung it on the floor, but before he had time to retort several people burst into the room, talking and laughing. Okunev was among them. There was much excitement when Pavel was recognised and endless questions were fired at him. A few minutes later another group of young people came in, Olga Yureneva with them. Dazed by the shock and delight of seeing Pavel again, Olga clung to his hand for a long time.
Pavel had to tell his story all over again. The sincere joy of his comrades, their undisguised friendship and sympathy, the warm handclasps and friendly slaps on the back made Pavel forget about Tufta for the moment.
But when he had finished his account of himself and told his comrades about his talk with Tufta there was a chorus of indignant comments. Olga, with an annihilating look at Tufta, marched off to the secretary''s office.
"Come on, let''s all go to Nezhdanov," cried Okunev. "He''ll take care of him." And with these words he took Pavel by the shoulders and the whole group of young friends trooped after Olga into the office of the secretary.
"That Tufta ought to be taken off the job and sent down to the wharves to work under Pankratov for a year. He''s a hidebound bureaucrat!" stormed Olga.
The Gubernia Committee secretary listened with an indulgent smile when Okunev, Olga and the others demanded that Tufta be dismissed from the Personnel Department.
"Korchagin will be reinstated without question," he assured Olga. "A new card will be issued him at once. I agree with you that Tufta is a formalist," he went on. "That is his chief failing. But it must be admitted that he has not done so badly on the job. Komsomol personnel statistics wherever I have worked have always been in a state of indescribable chaos, not a single figure could be relied on. In our Personnel Department the statistics are in good order. You know yourselves that Tufta often sits up nights working. Here''s how I look at it: he can always be removed, But if his place is taken by some free and easy chap who knows nothing about keeping records, we may not have any bureaucracy, but neither will we have any order. Let him stay on the job. I''ll give him a good talking to. That will help for a while and later on we''ll see."
"All right, let him be," Okunev agreed. "Come on, Pavel, let''s go to Solomenka. There''s a meeting at the club tonight. Nobody knows you''re back yet. Think what a surprise they''ll get when we announce: ''Korchagin has the floor!'' You''re a great lad, Pavel, for not dying. What good would you be to the proletariat dead?" And Okunev threw his arm around his friend and piloted him down the corridor.
"Will you come, Olga?"
"Of course I will."
Korchagin did not return to the Pankratovs for dinner, in fact he did not go back there at all that day. Okunev took him to his own room in the House of Soviets. He gave him the best meal he could muster, then placed a pile of newspapers and two thick files of the minutes of the District Komsomol Bureau meetings before him with the advice:
"Glance through this stuff. Lots of things happened while you were frittering away your time with the typhus. I''ll come back toward evening and we''ll go to the club together. You can lie down and take a nap if you get tired."
Stuffing his pockets full with all kinds of papers and documents (Okunev scorned the use of a portfolio on principle and it lay neglected under his bed), the District Committee secretary said good-bye and went out.
When he returned that evening the floor of his room was littered with newspapers and a heap of books had been moved out from under the bed. Some of them were piled on the table. Pavel was sitting on the bed reading the last letters of the Central Committee which he had found under his friend''s pillow.
"A fine mess you''ve made of my quarters, you ruffian!" Okunev cried in mock indignation. "Hey, wait a minute, Comrade! Those are secret documents you''re reading! That''s what I get for letting a nosy chap like you into my den!"
Pavel, grinning, laid the letter aside.
"This particular one doesn''t happen to be secret," he said, "but the one you''re using for a lampshade is marked ''confidential''. Look, it''s all singed around the edges!"
Okunev took the scorched slip of paper, glanced at the title and struck himself on the forehead in dismay.
"I''ve been looking for the damn thing for three days! Couldn''t imagine where it had got to. Now I remember. Volyntsev made a lampshade out of it the other day and then he himself searched for it high and low." Okunev folded the document carefully and stuffed it under the mattress. "We''ll put everything in order later on," he said reassuringly. "Now for a bite and then off to the club. Pull up to the table, Pavel!"
From one pocket he produced a long dried roach wrapped in newspaper and from the other, two slices of bread. He spread the newspaper out on the table, took the roach by the head and whipped it smartly against the table''s edge to soften it.
Sitting on the table and working vigorously with his jaws, the jolly Okunev gave Pavel all the news, cracking jokes the while.
At the club Okunev took Korchagin through the back entrance behind the stage. In the corner of the spacious hall, to the right of the stage near the piano sat Talya Lagutina and Anna Borhart with a group of Komsomols from the railway district. Volyntsev, the Komsomol secretary of the railway shops, was sitting opposite Anna. He had a face as ruddy as an August apple, hair and eyebrows the colour of ripe corn. His once black leather jacket was extremely shabby.
Next to him, his elbow resting negligently on the lid of the piano, sat Tsvetayev, a handsome young man with brown hair and finely chiselled lips. His shirt was unbuttoned at the throat.
As he came up to the group, Okunev heard Anna say:
"Some people are doing everything they can to complicate the admission of new members. Tsvetayev is one."
"The Komsomol is not a picnic ground," Tsvetayev snapped with stubborn disdain.
"Look at Nikolai!" cried Talya, catching sight of Okunev. "He''s beaming like a polished samovar tonight!"
Okunev was dragged into the circle and bombarded with questions.
"Where have you been?"
"Let''s get started."
Okunev raised his hand for silence.
"Hold on, lads. As soon as Tokarev comes we''ll begin."
"There he comes now," remarked Anna.
Sure enough the Secretary of the District Party Committee approached. Okunev ran forward to meet him.
"Come along, Dad, I''m going to take you backstage to meet a friend of mine. Prepare for a shock!"
"What''re you up to now?" the old man growled, puffing on his cigarette, but Okunev was already pulling him by the sleeve.
Okunev rang the chairman''s bell with such violence that even the noisiest members of the audience were silenced.
Behind Tokarev the leonine head of the genius of the Communist Manifesto, in a frame of evergreen, surveyed the assembly. While Okunev opened the meeting Tokarev could not keep his eyes off Korchagin who stood in the wings waiting for his cue.
"Comrades! Before we get down to the current organisational questions on the agenda, a comrade here has asked for the floor. Tokarev and I move that he be allowed to speak."
A murmur of approval rose from the hall, whereupon Okunev rapped out:
"I call upon Pavel Korchagin to address the meeting!"
At least eighty of the one hundred in the hall knew Korchagin, and when the familiar figure appeared before the footlights and the tall pale young man began to speak, a storm of delighted cries and thunderous applause broke from the audience.
"Dear Comrades!"
Korchagin''s voice was steady but he could not conceal his emotion.
"Friends, I have returned to take my place in the ranks. I am happy to be back. I see a great number of my comrades here. I understand that the Solomenka Komsomol has thirty per cent more members than before, and that they''ve stopped making cigarette lighters in the workshops and yards, and the old carcasses are being hauled out of the railway cemetery for capital repairs. That means our country is getting a new lease on life and is mustering its strength. That is something to live for! How could I die at a time like this!" Korchagin''s eyes lit up in a happy smile.
Amid a storm of applause and greetings he descended the platform and went over to where Anna and Talya were sitting. He shook the hands outstretched in greeting, and then the friends moved up and made room for him between them. Talya laid her hand on his and squeezed it tight. Anna''s eyes were still wide with surprise, her eyelashes quivered faintly as she gave Pavel a look of warm welcome.
The days slipped swiftly by. Yet there was nothing monotonous about their passage, for each day brought something new, and as he planned his work in the morning Pavel would note with chagrin that the day was all too short and much of what he had planned remained undone.
Pavel had moved in with Okunev. He worked at the railway shops as assistant electrical fitter.
He had had a long argument with Okunev before the latter agreed to his temporary withdrawal from work in the Komsomol leadership.
"We''re too short of people for you to cool your heels in the workshops," Okunev had objected. "Don''t tell me you''re ill. I hobbled about with a stick myself for a whole month after the typhus. You can''t fool me, Pavel, I know you, there''s something behind all this. Come on, out with it," Okunev insisted.
"You''re right, Kolya, there is. I want to study."
"There you are!" Okunev cried exultantly. "I knew it! Do you think I don''t want to study too? It''s downright egoism on your part. Expect us to put our shoulders to the wheel while you go off to study. Nothing doing, my lad, tomorrow you start as organiser."
Nevertheless, after a lengthy discussion Okunev gave in.
"Very well, I''ll leave you alone for two months. And I hope you appreciate my generosity. But I don''t think you''ll get along with Tsvetayev, he''s a bit too conceited."
Pavel''s return to the workshops had put Tsvetayev on the alert. He was certain that Korchagin''s coming would mark the beginning of a struggle for leadership. His self-esteem was wounded and he prepared to put up a stiff resistance. He soon saw, however, that he had been mistaken. When Korchagin learned that there was a plan afoot to make him a member of the Komsomol Bureau he went straight to the Komsomol secretary''s office and persuaded him to strike the question off the agenda, giving his understanding with Okunev as the excuse. In the Komsomol shop cell Pavel took a political study class, but did not ask for work in the Bureau. Nevertheless, although he had officially no part in the leadership, Pavel''s influence was felt in all phases of the collective''s work. In his comradely, unobtrusive fashion he helped Tsvetayev out of difficulties on more than one occasion.
Coming into the shop one day Tsvetayev was amazed to see all the members of the Komsomol cell and some three dozen non-Party lads busy washing windows, scraping many years'' accumulation of filth off the machines and carting heaps of rubbish out into the yard. Pavel, armed with a huge mop, was furiously scrubbing the cement floor which was covered with machine oil and grease.
"Spring-cleaning? What''s the occasion?" Tsvetayev asked Pavel.
"We''re tired of all this muck. The place hasn''t been cleaned for a good twenty years, we''ll make it look like new in a week," Korchagin replied briefly.
Tsvetayev shrugged his shoulders and went away.
Not content with cleaning out their workshop, the electricians tackled the factory yard. For years the huge yard had served as a dumping ground for all manner of disused equipment. There were hundreds of carriage wheels, and axles, mountains of rusty iron, rails, buffers, axle boxes â?" several thousand tons of metal lay rusting under the open sky. But the factory management put a stop to the young people''s activities.
"We have more important things to attend to. The yard can wait," they were told.
And so the electricians paved a small area of the yard outside the entrance to their shop, placing a wire mat outside the door and left it at that. But inside their shop the cleaning continued after working hours. When Strizh, the chief engineer, dropped in a week later he found the workshop flooded with light. The huge iron barred windows, freed from their heavy layer of dust and oil, now admitted the sunlight which was reflected brightly in the polished copper parts of the diesel engines. The heavy parts of the machines shone with a fresh coat of green paint, and someone had even painted yellow arrows on the spokes of the wheels.
"Well, well..." Strizh muttered in amazement.
In the far corner of the shop a few of the men were finishing their work. Strizh went over. On the way he met Korchagin carrying a tin of paint.
"Just a moment, my friend," the engineer stopped him. "I fully approve of what you have done here. But where did you get that paint? Haven''t I given strict orders that no paint is to be used without my permission? We can''t afford to waste paint for such purposes. We need all we''ve got for the engine parts."
"This paint was scraped out of the bottoms of discarded cans. We spent two days on it but we scraped out about twenty-five pounds. We''re not breaking any laws here, Comrade Engineer."
The engineer snorted again, but he looked rather sheepish.
"Then carry on, of course. Well, well. Now this is really interesting. How do you explain this ... what shall we call it ... this voluntary striving for cleanliness in a workshop? All done after working hours, I take it?"
Korchagin detected a note of genuine perplexity in the engineer''s voice.
"Of course," he said. "What did you suppose?"
"Yes, but...."
"There is nothing to be surprised at, Comrade Strizh. Who told you that the Bolsheviks are going to leave dirt alone? Wait till we get this thing going properly. We have some more surprises in store for you."

And carefully skirting the engineer so as to avoid splashing him with paint, Korchagin moved on.
Every evening found Pavel in the public library where he lingered until late. He had made friends with all the three librarians, and by using all his powers of persuasion he had finally won the right to browse freely among the books. Propping the ladder against the tall bookcases he would sit there for hours leafing through volume after volume. Most of the books were old. Modern literature occupied one small bookcase â?" a few odd Civil War pamphlets, Marx''s Capital, The Iron Heel by Jack London and several others. Rummaging among the old books he came across Spartacus. He read it in two nights and when he finished it he placed it on the shelf alongside the works of Maxim Gorky. This gradual selection of the more interesting books with a modern revolutionary message lasted for some time.
The librarians did not object.
The calm routine of Komsomol life at the railway shops was suddenly disturbed by what appeared at first to be an insignificant incident: repair worker Kostya Fidin, member of the cell bureau, a sluggish lad with a snub nose and a pock-marked face, broke an expensive imported drill on a piece of iron. The accident was the result of downright carelessness; worse, it looked like deliberate mischief on Fidin''s part.
It happened in the morning. Khodorov, senior repair foreman, had told Kostya to drill several holes in an iron plate. Kostya refused at first, but on the foreman''s insistence he picked up the iron and started to drill it. The foreman, an exacting taskmaster, was not popular with the workers. A former Menshevik, he took no part in the social life of the plant and did not approve of the Young Communists. But he was an expert at his job and he performed his duties conscientiously. Khodorov noticed that Kostya was drilling "dry", without using any oil. He hurried over to the machine and stopped it.
"Are you blind or what? Don''t you know better than to use a drill that way!" he shouted at Kostya, knowing that the drill would not last long with such handling.
Kostya snapped back at him and restarted the lathe. Khodorov went to the department chief to complain. Kostya in the meantime, leaving the machine running, hurried off to fetch the oiling can so that everything would be in order by the time the chief appeared. When he returned with the oil the drill was broken. The chief submitted a report recommending Fidin''s dismissal. The bureau of the Komsomol cell, however, took up the cudgels on Fidin''s behalf on the grounds that Khodorov had a grudge against all active Komsomol members. The management insisted on Fidin''s dismissal, and the case was put before the Komsomol bureau of the workshops. The fight was on.
Three of the five members of the bureau were in favour of giving Kostya an official reprimand and transferring him to other work. Tsvetayev was one of the three. The other two did not think Fidin should be punished at all.
The bureau meeting to discuss the case was called in Tsvetayev''s office. Around a large table covered with red cloth stood several benches and stools made by the Komsomols of the carpenter shops. There were portraits of the leaders on the walls, and the railway workshops'' banner was spread over one entire wall behind the table.
Tsvetayev was now a "full-time" Komsomol worker. He was a blacksmith by trade, but being a good organiser had been promoted to a leading post in the Komsomol: he was now a member of the Bureau of the Komsomol District Committee and a member of the Gubernia Committee besides. He was a newcomer to the railway shops. From the first he had taken the reins of management firmly into his hands. Self-assured and hasty in his decisions, he had suppressed the initiative of the other Komsomol members from the outset. He insisted on doing everything himself â?" even the office had been decorated under his personal supervision â?" and when he found himself unable to cope with all the work, stormed at his assistants for their inactivity.
He conducted the meeting sprawled in the only soft armchair in the room which had been brought from the club. It was a closed meeting. Khomutov, the Party organiser, had just asked for the floor, when there was a knock on the door which was closed on the latch. Tsvetayev scowled at the interruption. The knock was repeated. Katya Zelenova got up and opened the door. Korchagin stood on the threshold. Katya let him in.
Pavel was making his way to a vacant seat when Tsvetayev addressed him.
"Korchagin, this is a closed meeting of the bureau."
The blood rushed to Pavel''s face, and he turned slowly to face the table.
"I know that. I am interested in hearing your opinion on the Fidin case. I have a point to raise in connection with it. What''s the matter, do you object to my presence?"
"I don''t object, but you ought to know that closed meetings are attended only by bureau members. The more people there are the harder it is to thrash things out properly. But since you''re here you might as well stay."
Korchagin had never suffered such a slight. A crease appeared on his forehead.
"What''s all the formality about?" Khomutov remarked disapprovingly, but Korchagin stopped him with a gesture, and sat down. "Well, this is what I wanted to say," Khomutov went on. "It''s true that Khodorov belongs to the old school, but something ought to be done about discipline. If all the Komsomols go smashing up drills, there''ll be nothing to work with. What''s more, we''re giving a rotten example to the non-Party workers. In my opinion the lad ought to be given a serious warning."
Tsvetayev did not give him a chance to finish, and began voicing his objections. Ten minutes passed. In the meantime Korchagin saw which way the wind was blowing. When the matter was finally put to the vote he got up and asked for the floor. Tsvetayev reluctantly permitted him to speak.
"I should like to give you my opinion of the Fidin case, Comrades," Pavel began. His voice sounded harsh in spite of himself.
"The Fidin case is a signal, and it is not Kostya''s action in itself that''s most important. I collected some-figures yesterday." Pavel took a notebook out of his pocket. "I got them from the timekeeper. Now listen carefully: twenty-three per cent of our Komsomols come to work from five to fifteen minutes late every day. That has become a rule. Seventeen per cent don''t report for work at all one or two days out of every month; the percentage of absenteeism among young non-Party workers is fourteen per cent. These figures sting worse than a whiplash, Comrades. I jotted down a few more: four per cent of our Party members are absent one day a month, and four per cent report late for work. Of the non-Party workers eleven per cent miss one day in the month while thirteen per cent regularly report late for work. Ninety per cent of breakages are accounted for by young workers, seven per cent of whom are newcomers. The conclusion to be drawn from these figures is that we Komsomols are making a far worse showing than the Party members and adult workers. But the situation is not the same everywhere. The foundry record is excellent, the electricians are not so bad, but the rest are more or less on the same level. In my opinion Comrade Khomutov said only a fraction of what ought to be said about discipline. The immediate problem now is to straighten out these zigzags. I don''t intend to begin agitating here, but we''ve got to put a stop to carelessness and sloppiness. The old workers are frankly admitting that they used to work much better for the master, for the capitalist, but now we''re the masters and there''s no excuse for working badly. It''s not so much Kostya or any other worker who''s to blame. We ourselves, all of us, are at fault because instead of fighting the evil properly we sometimes defend workers like Kostya under one or another pretext.
"Samokhin and Butylyak have just said here that Fidin is a good lad, one of the best, an active Komsomol and all that. What if he did bust a drill, it could happen to anybody. He''s one of us, while the foreman isn''t... . But has anyone ever tried to talk to Khodorov? Don''t forget that grumbler has thirty years of working experience behind him! We won''t talk about his politics. In the given case he is in the right, because he, an outsider, is taking care of state property while we are smashing up valuable tools. What do you call such a state of affairs? I believe that we ought to strike the first blow now and launch an offensive on this sector.
"I move that Fidin be expelled from the Komsomol as a slacker and disorganiser of production. His case should be discussed in the wall newspaper, and these figures published in an e***orial article openly without fear of the consequences. We are strong, we have forces we can rely on. The majority of the Komsomol members are good workers. Sixty of them have gone through Boyarka and that was a severe test. With their help and their assistance we can iron out the difficulties. Only we''ve got to change our attitude to the whole business once and for all."
Korchagin, usually calm and reticent, spoke with a passion that surprised Tsvetayev. He was seeing the real Pavel for the first time. He realised that Pavel was right, but he was too cautious to agree with him openly. He took Korchagin''s speech as a harsh criticism of the general state of the organisation, as an attempt to undermine his, Tsvetayev''s, authority, and he resolved to make short shrift of his opponent. He began his speech by accusing Korchagin of defending the Menshevik Khodorov.
The stormy debate lasted for three hours. Late that night the final point was reached. Defeated by the inexorable logic of facts and having lost the majority to Korchagin, Tsvetayev made a false step. He violated the rules of democracy by ordering Korchagin to leave the room just before the final vote was taken.
"Very well, I shall go, although your behaviour does not do you cre***, Tsvetayev. I warn you that if you continue to insist on your viewpoint I shall put the matter before the general meeting tomorrow and I am sure you will not be able to win over the majority there. You are not right, Tsvetayev. I think, Comrade Khomutov, that it is your duty to take up the question with the Party group before the general meeting."
"Don''t try to scare me," Tsvetayev shouted defiantly. "I can go to the Party group myself, and what''s more I have something to tell them about you. If you don''t want to work yourself, don''t interfere with those who do."
Pavel closed the door behind him. He passed his hand over his burning forehead and went through the empty office to the exit. Outside on the street he took a deep breath of air, lit a cigarette and set out for the little house on Baty Hill where Tokarev lived.
He found the old mechanic at supper.
"Come on, let''s hear the news. Darya, bring the lad a plate of gruel," said Tokarev, inviting Pavel to the table.
Darya Fominishna, Tokarev''s wife, as tall and buxom as her husband was short and spare, placed a plate of millet gruel before Pavel and wiping her moist lips with the edge of her white apron said kindly: "Set to, dearie."
Pavel had been a frequent visitor at the Tokarevs'' in the days when the old man worked in the repair shops, and had spent many a pleasant evening with the old couple, but this was his first visit since his return to the city.
The old mechanic listened attentively to Pavel''s story, working busily with his spoon and making no comment apart from an occasional grunt. When he had finished his porridge, he wiped his moustache with his handkerchief and cleared his throat.
"You''re right, of course," he said. "It''s high time the question was put properly. There are more Komsomols down at the workshops than anywhere else in the district and that''s where we ought to start. So you and Tsvetayev have come to blows after all, eh? Too bad. He''s a bit of an upstart, of course. You used to get on with the lads, didn''t you? By the way, what exactly is your job at the shops?"
"I''m working in one of the departments. And generally I''m in on everything that''s doing. In my own cell I lead a political study circle."
"What about the bureau?"
Korchagin hesitated.
"I thought that while I still felt a bit shaky on my legs, and since I wanted to do some studying, I wouldn''t take part officially in the leadership for a while."
"So that''s it!" Tokarev cried in disapproval. "Now, my boy, if it weren''t for your health I''d give you a good scolding. How do you feel now, by the way? Stronger?"
"Yes."
"Good, and now get to work in earnest. Stop beating about the bush. No good will come of sitting on the sidelines! You''re just trying to evade responsibility and you know it. You must put things to rights tomorrow. Okunev will hear from me about this." Tokarev''s tone showed his annoyance.
"No, dad, you leave him alone," Pavel hastened to object. "I asked him not to give me any work."
Tokarev whistled in scorn.
"You did, eh, and he let you off? Oh well, what can we do with you, Komsomols. . . . Will you read me the paper, son, the way you used to? My eyes aren''t as good as they might be."
The Party bureau at the workshops upheld the decision of the majority in the Komsomol bureau. The Party and Komsomol groups undertook the important and difficult task of setting an example of labour discipline. Tsvetayev was given a thorough dressing down at the bureau. He tried to bluster at first but pinned to the wall by Lopakhin, the Secretary, an elderly man with the waxen pallor of the consumptive, Tsvetayev gave in and partly admitted his error.
The following day the wall newspaper carried a series of articles that caused something of a sensation at the railway shops. The articles were read aloud and hotly discussed, and the unusually well-attended youth meeting held that same evening dealt exclusively with the problems they raised.
Fidin was expelled from the Komsomol, and a new member was added to the bureau in charge of political education â?" Korchagin.
Unusual quiet reigned in the hall as the meeting listened to Nezhdanov outline the new tasks confronting the railway workshops at this new stage.
After the meeting Tsvetayev found Korchagin waiting for him outside.
"I have something to say to you," Pavel said.
"What about?" Tsvetayev asked sourly.
Pavel took him by the arm and after they had gone a few yards paused at a bench.
"Shall we sit down for a moment?" he suggested and set the example.
The burning tip of Tsvetayev''s cigarette now glowed red, now faded.
"What have you got against me, Tsvetayev?"
There was silence for a few minutes.
"Oh, so that''s it? I thought you wanted to talk business," Tsvetayev said feigning surprise, but his voice was unsteady.
Pavel laid his hand firmly on the other''s knee.
"Get off your high horse, Dimka. That sort of talk is only for diplomats. You tell me this: why have you taken such a dislike to me?"
Tsvetayev shifted uneasily in his seat.
"What are you talking about? Why should I have anything against you? I offered you work, didn''t I? You refused, and now you''re accusing me of trying to keep you out."
But his words carried no conviction, and Pavel, his hand still on Tsvetayev''s knee, went on with feeling:
"If you won''t say it, I will. You think I want to cramp your style, you think it''s your job I''m after. If you didn''t, we wouldn''t have quarrelled over the Kostya affair. Relations like these can ruin our work. If this concerned only the two of us it wouldn''t matter â?" I wouldn''t care what you thought of me. But from tomorrow we''ll be working together. How can we carry on like this? Now listen. There must be no rift between us. You and I are both workingmen. If our cause is dearer to you than everything else you''ll give me your hand on it, and tomorrow we''ll start as friends. But unless you throw all this nonsense out of your head and steer clear of intrigues, you and I will fight like blazes over every setback in the work that results. Now here''s my hand, take it, while it is still proffered to you in friendship."
A deep sense of satisfaction swept Korchagin as Tsvetayev''s rough fingers closed over his palm.

A week passed. The workday was coming to an end in the District Committee of the Party. Quiet settled over the offices. But Tokarev was still at his desk. He was sitting in his armchair studying the latest reports, when a knock came at the door.
"Come in!"
Korchagin entered and placed two filled out questionnaire blanks on the Secretary''s desk.
"What''s this?"
"It''s an end to irresponsibility, Dad. And high time, if you ask me. If you are of the same opinion I would be grateful for your support."
Tokarev glanced at the heading, looked up quickly at the young man, then picked up his pen. Under the head: "Party standing of comrades recommending Pavel Andreyevich Korchagin for candidate membership in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" he wrote "1903" with a firm hand, and signed his name.
"There, my son. I know that you will never bring disgrace upon my old grey head."
The room was suffocatingly hot. One thought was uppermost in everyone''s mind: to get away to the cool shade of the chestnut trees of Solomenka as quickly as possible.
"Wind up, Pavel, I can''t stand another minute of this," implored Tsvetayev, who was sweating profusely. Katyusha and the others supported him.
Pavel Korchagin closed the book and the study circle broke up.
As they rose the old-fashioned Ericson telephone on the wall jangled. Tsvetayev, who answered its summons, had to shout to make himself heard above the clamour of voices in the room.
He hung up the receiver and turned to Korchagin.
"There are two diplomatic railway carriages down at the station belonging to the Polish consulate. Their lights are out, something''s gone wrong with the wiring. The train leaves in an hour. Get some tools together and run down there, Pavel. It''s urgent."
The two sleepers gleaming with polished brass and plate glass stood at the first platform. The saloon-carriage with its wide windows was brightly lit. But the neighbouring carriage was in darkness.
Pavel went up to the steps of the luxurious carriage and gripped the handrail with the intention of entering the carriage.
A figure hastily detached itself from the station wall and seized him by the shoulder.
"Where are you going?"
The voice was familiar. Pavel turned and took in the leather jacket, broad-peaked cap, the thin, hooked nose and the suspicious look in the eyes.
It was Artyukhin. He had not recognised Pavel at first, but now his hand fell from Pavel''s shoulder, and his grim features relaxed although his glance paused questioningly on the instrument case.
"Where were you heading for?" he said in a less formal tone.
Pavel briefly explained. Another figure appeared from behind the carriage.
"Just a moment, I''ll call their guard." Several people in expensive travelling clothes were sitting in the saloon-carriage when Korchagin entered on the heels of the guard. A woman sat with her back to the door at a table covered with a damask cloth. When Pavel entered she was chatting with a tall officer. They stopped talking when the electrician appeared.
Korchagin made a rapid examination of the wiring which ran from the last lamp into the corridor, and finding it in order, left the carriage to continue his search for the damage. The stout, bull-necked guard, in a uniform resplendent with large brass buttons bearing the Polish eagle, kept close at his heels.
"Let''s try the next carriage, everything is in order here. The trouble must be there."
The guard turned the key in the door and they passed into the darkened corridor. Training his torch on the wiring Pavel soon found the spot where the short circuit had occurred. A few minutes later the first lamp went on in the corridor suffusing it with opaque light.
"The bulbs inside the compartment will have to be changed. They have burned out," Korchagin said to his guide.
"In that case I''ll have to call the lady, she has the key." Not wishing to leave the electrician alone in the carriage, the guard bade him to follow.
The woman entered the compartment first, Korchagin followed. The guard remained standing in the doorway, blocking the entrance. Pavel noted the two elegant leather travelling bags, a silken cloak flung carelessly on the seat, a bottle of perfume and a small malachite vanity case on the table under the window. The woman sat down in a corner of the couch, patted her fair hair and watched the electrician at work.
"Will madam permit me to leave for a moment?" the guard said obsequiously, inclining his bull neck with some difficulty. "The Major has asked for some cold beer."
"You may go," replied the woman in an affected voice.
The exchange had been in Polish.
A shaft of light from the corridor fell on the woman''s shoulder. Her exquisite gown of fine silk made by the best Paris dress designers left her shoulders and arms bare. In the lobe of each delicate ear a diamond drop blazed and sparkled. Korchagin could only see one ivory shoulder and arm. The face was in shadow. Working swiftly with his screwdriver Pavel changed the outlet in the ceiling and a moment later the lights went on in the compartment. Now he had only to examine the other bulb over the sofa on which the woman sat.
"I need to test that bulb," Korchagin said, pausing in front of her.
"Oh yes, I am in your way," the lady replied in perfect Russian. She rose lightly and stood close beside him. Now he had a full view of her. The arched eyebrows and the pursed, disdainful lips were familiar. There could be no doubt of it: it was Nelly Leszczinskaya, the lawyer''s daughter. She could not help noticing his look of astonishment. But though Pavel had recognised her, he had altered too much in these four years for her to realise that this electrician was her troublesome neighbour.
With a frown of displeasure at his surprised stare, she went over to the door of the compartment and stood there tapping the heel of her patent-leather shoe impatiently. Pavel turned his attention to the second bulb. He unscrewed it, raised it to the light and almost as much to his own surprise as hers he asked in Polish:
"Is Victor here as well?"
Pavel had not turned when he spoke. He did not see Nelly''s face, but the long silence that followed his query bore testimony to her confusion.
"Why, do you mean you know him?"
"Yes, and very well too. We were neighbours, you know." Pavel turned to look at her.
"You''re . . . you''re Pavel, the son. . . ." Nelly broke off in confusion.
". . .Of your cook," Korchagin came to her assistance.
"But how you have grown! You were a wild youngster when I knew you."
Nelly examined him coolly from head to foot.
"Why do you ask about Victor? As far as I remember you and he were not exactly friends," she said in her cooing voice. This unexpected encounter promised to be a pleasant relief to her boredom.
The screw swiftly sank into the wall.
"There is a certain debt Victor hasn''t paid yet. Tell him when you see him that I haven''t lost hope of seeing it settled."
"Tell me how much he owes you and I shall pay you on his account."
She knew very well what debt Korchagin had in mind. She knew that her brother had betrayed Pavel to the Petlyura men, but she could not resist the temptation to make fun of this "ragamuffin".
Korchagin said nothing.
"Tell me, is it true that our house has been looted and is now falling into decay? I daresay the summer house and the bushes have all been torn up," Nelly inquired wistfully.
"The house is not yours any more, it is ours, and we are not likely to destroy our own property."
Nelly gave a mocking little laugh.
"Oh, I see you have been well schooled! Incidentally, this carriage belongs to the Polish mission and here I am the mistress and you are the servant just as you always were. You see, you are working now to give me light so that I may lie comfortably on the sofa and read. Your mother used to wash clothes for us and you used to carry water. We meet again under precisely the same circumstances."
Her voice rang with malicious triumph. Scraping the insulation off the end of the wire with his penknife, Pavel gave her a look of undisguised contempt.
"I wouldn''t hammer a single rusty nail for you, but since the bourgeoisie have invented diplomats we can play the same game. We don''t cut off their heads, in fact we''re even polite to them, which is more than can be said of yourself."
Nelly''s cheeks crimsoned.
"What would you do with me if you succeeded in taking Warsaw? I suppose you would make mincemeat out of me, or perhaps take me for your mistress?"
She stood in the doorway in a graceful pose; her sensitive nostrils that were no strangers to cocaine quivered. The light went on over the sofa. Pavel straightened up.
"You? Who would bother to kill the likes of you! You''ll croak from too much cocaine anyway. I''d sooner take a whore than the likes of you!"
He picked up his tool case and strode to the door. Nelly moved aside to let him pass. He was half-way down the corridor when he heard the curse she spat after him: "Damned Bolshevik!"
The following evening as he was on his way to the library Pavel met Katyusha Zelenova. She caught hold of his sleeve with her tiny hand and laughingly barred his path.
"Where are you dashing off to, old politics-and-enlightenment?"
"To the library, auntie, let me pass," Pavel replied in the same bantering tone. He took her gently by the shoulders and shifted her aside. Katyusha shook herself free and walked along beside him.
"Listen here, Pavel! You can''t study all the time, you know. I''ll tell you what â?" let''s go to a party tonight. The crowd is meeting at Zina Gladysh''s. The girls keep asking me to bring you. But you never think of anything but political study nowadays. Don''t you ever want to have some fun? It will do you good to miss your reading for once," Katyusha coaxed.
"What sort of a party is it? What are we going to do there?"
"What are we going to do!" Katyusha smilingly mocked him. "We''re not going to say prayers, we''re going to have a good time, that''s all. You play the accordion, don''t you? I''ve never heard you play! Do come and play for us this evening, won''t you? Just to please me? Zina''s uncle has an accordion but he can''t play for anything. The girls are very much interested about you, you old bookworm. Who said Komsomols mustn''t enjoy themselves? Come along, before I get sick of persuading you or else we''ll quarrel and then I shan''t talk to you for a month."
Katyusha was a house painter, a good comrade and a first-rate Komsomol member. Pavel did not want to hurt her feelings and so he agreed, although he felt awkward and out of place at such parties.
A noisy crowd of young people had gathered at engine-driver Giadysh''s home. The adults had retired to another room, leaving some fifteen lads and girls in possession of the large living room and porch which gave onto a small front garden. A game called "feeding the pigeons" was in progress when Katyusha led Pavel through the garden into the porch. In the middle of the porch stood two chairs back to back. At a call from the hostess who was leading the game, a boy and a girl seated themselves on the chairs with their backs to each other, and when she cried "Now feed the pigeons!" the couple leaned back until their lips met, much to the delight of the onlookers. After that they played "the ring" and "postman''s knock", both kissing games, although in "postman''s knock" the players avoided publicity by doing their kissing not on the brightly lit porch but in the room with the lights out. For those who did not care for these two games, there was a pack of "flower flirt" cards on a small round table in the corner. Pavel''s neighbour, a girl of about sixteen with pale blue eyes who introduced herself as Mura, handed him one of the cards with a coy glance and said softly:
"Violet."
A few years back Pavel had attended parties of this kind, and if he had not taken a direct part in the frivolities he had not thought them anything out of the ordinary. But now that he had broken for ever with petty-bourgeois small-town life, the party struck him as disgusting and silly.
Yet here he was with the "flower" card in his hands. Opposite the "violet" he read the words: "I like you very much."
Pavel looked up at the girl. She returned his look without a trace of embarrassment.
"Why?"
His question sounded rather flat. But Mura had her answer ready.
"Rose," she murmured and handed him another card.
The card with the "rose" bore the legend:
"You are my ideal." Korchagin turned to the girl and making a conscious effort to soften his tone, asked:
"Why do you go in for this nonsense?"
Mura was so taken aback that she did not know what to say.
"Don''t you like my message?" she said with a capricious pout.
Pavel ignored the question. Yet he was curious to know more about her. He asked her a number of questions which she willingly answered. Within a few minutes he had learned that she attended secondary school, that her father worked at the repair shops and that she had known Pavel for a long time and had wanted to make his acquaintance.
"What is your surname?" Pavel asked.
"Volyntseva."
"Your brother is secretary of the Komsomol cell at the yards, isn''t he?"
"Yes."
Now it was clear to him that Volyntsev, one of the most active Komsomols in the district, was allowing his own sister to grow up an ignorant little philistine. She and her friends had attended innumerable kissing parties like this in the past year. She told Pavel she had seen him several times at her brother''s place.
Mura felt that Pavel did not approve of her. Noticing the scornful smile on his face, she flatly refused to obey the summons to come and "feed the pigeons". They sat talking for another few minutes while Mura told him more about herself. Presently Katyusha came over to them.
"Shall I bring you the accordion?" she asked, adding with a mischievous glance at Mura, "I see you''ve made friends?"
Pavel made Katyusha sit down beside them, and taking advantage of the noise and laughter around them, he said:
"I''m not going to play. Mura and I are leaving."
"Oho! So you''ve fallen for her, have you?" Katyusha teased.
"That''s right. Tell me, Katyusha, are there any other Komsomols here besides ourselves? Or are we the only ''pigeon fanciers''?"
"They''ve stopped that nonsense," Katyusha said placatingly. "We''re going to dance now."
Korchagin rose.
"All right, old girl, you can dance, but Mura and I are going."
One evening Anna Borhart dropped in to Okunev''s place and found Korchagin there alone.
"Are you very busy, Pavel? Would you care to come with me to the plenary session of the Town Soviet? I would rather not go alone, especially since we''ll be returning late."
Korchagin agreed at once. He was about to take the Mauser from the nail over his bed, but decided it was too heavy. Instead he pulled Okunev''s pistol out of the drawer and slipped it into his pocket. He left a note for Okunev and put the key where his room-mate would find it.

At the theatre where the plenum was being held they met Pankratov and Olga Yureneva. They all sat together in the hall and during the intermissions strolled in a group on the square. As Anna had expected, the meeting ended very late.
"Perhaps you''d better come to my place for the night?" Olga suggested. "It''s late and you''ve a long way to go."
But Anna declined. "Pavel has agreed to see me home," she said.
Pankratov and Olga set off down the main street and the other two took the road up the hill to Solomenka.
It was a dark, stuffy night. The city was asleep as the young people made their way through the deserted streets. Gradually the sound of their steps and voices died away. Pavel and Anna walked at a brisk pace away from the centre of the town. At the market place they were stopped by a patrol who examined their papers and let them pass. They crossed the boulevard and came out onto a dark silent street which cut across a vacant lot. Turning left, they continued along the highway parallel to the main railway warehouses, a long row of gloomy and forbidding concrete buildings. Anna was seized by a vague feeling of apprehension. She peered anxiously into the darkness, giving nervous jerky answers to her companion''s questions. When a sinister shadow turned out to be nothing more terrible than a telephone pole, she laughed aloud and confided her nervousness to Pavel. She took him by the arm and the pressure of his shoulder against hers reassured her.
"I am only twenty-three but I''m as nervous as an old woman. If you think I''m a coward, you are mistaken. But somehow my nerves are all on edge tonight. With you here though I feel quite safe, and I''m really ashamed of my fears."
And indeed Pavel''s calmness, the warm glow of his cigarette which for an instant lit up part of his face, revealing the courageous sweep of his brows â?" all this drove away the terrors evoked by the dark night, the loneliness of the spot and the story they had just heard at the meeting about a horrible murder committed the night before on the outskirts of town.
The warehouses were left behind. They crossed the plank spanning a small creek and continued along the main road to the tunnel which ran under the railway line and connected this section of the town with the railway district.
The station building was now far behind them to the right. A train was pulling into a siding beyond the engine-shed. They were already on home ground. Up above on the railway track the coloured lights of switches and semaphores twinkled in the darkness, and over by the shed a shunting engine on its way home for the night sighed wearily.
Above the mouth of the tunnel a street lamp hung from a rusty hook. The wind swayed it gently, causing its murky yellow light to dance on the tunnel walls.
A small cottage stood solitary by the side of the highway some ten yards from the tunnel entrance. Two years ago it had been hit by a heavy shell which had burnt out the interior and badly damaged the facade, so that it was now one huge gaping hole, and it stood there like a beggar on the roadside exhibiting its deformity. A train roared over the embankment above.
"We''re nearly home now," Anna said with a sigh of relief.
Pavel made a furtive attempt to extricate his arm. But Anna would not release it. They walked past the ruined house.
Suddenly something crashed behind them. There was a sound of running feet, hoarse breathing. They were overtaken.
Korchagin jerked his arm but Anna, petrified with fear, clung wildly to it. And by the time he was able to tear it loose, it was too late; his neck was caught in an iron grip. Another moment and he was swung round to face his assailant. The hand crept up to his throat and, twisting his tunic collar until it all but choked him, held him facing the muzzle of a revolver that slowly described an arc before his eyes.
Pavel''s fascinated eyes followed the arc with superhuman tension. Death stared at him through the muzzle of the revolver, and he had neither the strength nor the will to tear his eyes from that muzzle. He waited for the end. But his assailant did not fire, and Pavel''s dilated eyes saw the ban***''s face, saw the huge skull, the heavy jaw, the black shadow of unshaven beard. But the eyes under the wide peak of the cap were invisible.
Out of the corner of his eye Korchagin had one brief and stark glimpse of the chalk-white face of Anna whom one of the three dragged into the gaping hole in the wall at that moment. Twisting her arms cruelly he flung her onto the ground. Another shadow leapt towards them; Pavel only saw its reflection on the tunnel wall. He heard the scuffle within the ruined house behind him. Anna was fighting desperately; her choking cry broke off abruptly as a cap was stuffed against her mouth. The large-skulled ruffian who had Korchagin at his mercy, was drawn to the scene of the rape like a beast to its prey. He was evidently the leader of the gang and the role of passive observer under the circumstances did not suit him. This youngster he had covered was just a greenhorn, looked like one of those "railway yard softies". Nothing to fear from a snotnose like him. Give him a couple of good knocks on the head and tell him to cut along over the field and he''d run all the way to town without looking back. He relaxed his hold.
"All right you, hop it, clear out the way you came, but no squealin'', mind, or you''ll get a bullet in your neck." He pressed the barrel of the gun against Korchagin''s forehead. "Hop it, now," he said in a hoarse whisper and lowered his gun to show that his victim need not fear a bullet in the back.
Korchagin staggered back and began to run sideways keeping his eyes on his assailant. The ruffian, thinking the youngster was still afraid that he would shoot, turned and made for the ruined house.
Korchagin''s hand flew to his pocket. If only he could be quick enough! He swung round, thrust his left hand forward, took swift aim and fired.
The ban*** realised his mistake too late. The bullet tore into his side before he had time to raise his hand.
The blow sent him reeling against the tunnel wall with a low howl, and clawing at the wall he slowly sank to the ground. A shadow slid out of the house and made for the gully below. Korchagin sent another bullet in pursuit. A second shadow bent double darted toward the inky depths of the tunnel. A shot rang out. The dark shape, sprinkled with the dust from the bullet-shattered concrete, leapt aside and vanished into the blackness. Once again the Browning rent the night''s stillness. Beside the wall the large-headed ban*** writhed in his death agony.
Korchagin helped Anna to her feet. Stunned and shaken, she stared at the ban***''s convulsions, unable to believe that she was safe.
Korchagin dragged her away into the darkness back toward the town and away from the circle of light. As they ran toward the railway station, lights were already twinkling on the embankment near the tunnel and a rifle shot rang out on the track.
By the time they reached Anna''s flat, on Baty Hill, the ****s were crowing. Anna lay down on the bed. Korchagin sat by the table, smoking a cigarette and watching the grey spiral of smoke floating upward. ... He had just killed for the fourth time in his life.
Is there such a thing as courage, he wondered. Something that manifests itself always in its most perfect form? Reliving all his sensations he admitted to himself that in those first few seconds with the black sinister eye of the gun muzzle upon him fear had laid its icy grip on his heart. And was it only because of his weak eyesight and the fact that he had had to shoot with his left hand that those two shadows had been able to escape? No. At the distance of a few paces his bullets would have found their mark, but tension and haste, sure signs of nervousness, had made him waver.
The light from the table lamp fell on his face. Anna studied his features anxiously. But his eyes were calm; only the knitted brow showed that he was deep in thought.
"What are you thinking about, Pavel?"
His thoughts, startled by the sudden question, floated away like smoke beyond the circle of light, and he said the first thing that came into his head:
"I must go over to the Commandant''s Office. This business must be reported at once."
He rose with reluctance, conscious of a great weariness.
She clung to his hand for she shrank from being left alone. Then she saw him to the door and stood on the threshold until he had vanished into the night.
Korchagin''s report cleared up the mystery of the murder that had puzzled the railway guards. The body was identified at once as that of a notorious criminal named Fimka Death-Skull, a murderer and ban*** with a long prison record.
The next day everybody was talking about the incident by the tunnel. As it happened that incident was the cause of an unexpected clash between Pavel and Tsvetayev.
Tsvetayev came into the workshop in the middle of the shift and asked Korchagin to step outside. He led the way in silence to a remote corner of the corridor. He was extremely agitated, and did not seem to know how to begin. At last he blurted out:
"Tell me what happened yesterday."
"I thought you knew?"
Tsvetayev jerked his shoulders uneasily. Pavel was unaware that the tunnel incident affected Tsvetayev more keenly than the others. He did not know that, for all his outward indifference, the blacksmith had formed a deep attachment for Anna Borhart. He was not the only one who was attracted to her, but he was seriously smitten. Lagutina had just told him what had happened the night before at the tunnel and he was now tormented by one question that had remained unanswered. He could not put the question bluntly to Pavel, yet he had to know the answer. His better self told him that his fears were selfish and base, yet in the conflict of emotions that seethed within him the savage and primitive prevailed.
"Listen, Korchagin," he said hoarsely. "This is strictly between ourselves. I know you don''t want to talk about it for Anna''s sake, but you can surely trust me. Tell me this, while that ban*** had you covered did the others rape Anna?"
He lowered his eyes in confusion before he finished speaking.
Dimly Korchagin began to see what was in his mind. "If he cared nothing for Anna he would not be so upset. But if Anna is dear to him, then...." And Pavel burned at the insult to Anna the question implied.
"Why do you ask?"
Tsvetayev mumbled something incoherent. He felt that Pavel understood what was in question and he lost his temper:
"Don''t beat about the bush. All I want is a straight answer."
"Do you love Anna?"
There was a long silence. At last Tsvetayev forced out: "Yes."
Korchagin, suppressing his anger with an effort, turned and strode down the corridor without looking back.
One night Okunev, who had been hovering uncertainly around his friend''s bed for some time, finally sat down on the edge and laid his hand on the book Pavel was reading.
"Listen, Pavel, there''s something I''ve got to get off my chest. On the one hand, it mightn''t seem important, but on the other, it''s quite the reverse. There''s been a misunderstanding between me and Talya Lagutina. You see, at first, I liked her quite a bit." Okunev scratched his head sheepishly, but seeing no sign of laughter on his friend''s face, he took courage. "But then, Talya .. . well, you know. All right, I won''t give you all the details, you know how it is. Yesterday she and I decided to hitch up and see how it works out. I''m twenty-two, we''re both of age. We want to live together on an equality basis. What do you think?"
Korchagin pondered the question.
"What can I say, Kolya? You are both friends of mine, we''re all members of the same clan, and we have everything else in common. Talya''s a very nice girl. It''s all plain sailing."
The next day Korchagin moved over to the workers'' hostel, and a few days later Anna gave a party, a modest Communist party without food and drink, in honour of Talya and Nikolai. It was an evening of reminiscences, and readings of excerpts from favourite books. They sang many songs and sang them well; the rousing melodies echoed far and wide. Later on, Katyusha Zelenova and Volyntseva brought an accordion, and the rich rolling basses and silvery cadences filled the room. That evening Pavel played even better than usual, and when to everyone''s delight the hulking Pankratov flung himself into the dance, Pavel forgot the new melancholy style he had adopted and played with his old abandon.
When Denikin gets to know
Of old Kolchak''s overthrow,
Oh, how crazy he will go!
The accordion sang of the past, of the years of storm and stress and of today''s friendship, struggles and joys. But when the instrument was handed over to Volyntsev and the whirling rhythm of the "Yablochko" dance rang out, Korchagin surprised everyone by breaking into a wild tap dance â?" the third and last time he was to dance in his life.

Chapter Four
This is the frontier â?" two posts facing one another in silent hostility, each standing for a world of its own. One of them is planed and polished and painted black and white like a police box, and topped by a single-headed eagle nailed in place with sturdy spikes. Wings outspread, claws gripping the striped pole, hooked beak outstretched, the bird of prey stares with malicious eyes at the cast-iron shield with the sickle-and-hammer emblem on the opposite pole â?" a sturdy, round, rough-hewn oak post planted firmly in the ground. The two poles stand six paces apart on level ground, yet there is a deep gulf between them and the two worlds they stand for. To try to cross this no man''s land means risking one''s life.
This is the frontier.
From the Black Sea over thousands of kilometres to the Arctic Ocean in the Far North stands the motionless line of these silent sentinels of the Soviet Socialist Republics bearing the great emblem of labour on their iron shields. The post with the rapacious bird marks the beginning of the border between Soviet Ukraine and bourgeois Poland. It stands ten kilometres from the small town of Berezdov tucked away in the Ukrainian hinterland, and opposite it is the Polish townlet of Korets. From Slavuta to Anapol the border area is guarded by a Frontier Guard battalion.
The frontier posts march across the snowbound fields, push through clearings cut in forests, plunge down valleys and, heaving themselves up hillsides, disappear behind the crests only to pause on the high bank of a river *****rvey the wintry plains of an alien land.
It is biting cold, one of those days when the frost makes the snow crunch under the soles of felt boots. A giant of a Red Army man in a helmet fit for the titans of old moves away from a post with the sickle-and-hammer shield and with heavy tread sets out on his beat. He is wearing a grey greatcoat with green tabs on the collar, and felt boots. On top of the greatcoat he has a sheepskin coat reaching down to his heels with a collar of generous proportions to match â?" a coat that will keep a man warm in the cruellest blizzard. On his head he wears a cloth helmet and his hands are encased in sheepskin mittens. His rifle is slung on his shoulder, and as he proceeds along the sentry path, the tail of his long coat wearing a groove in the snow, he pulls at a cigarette of home-grown tobacco with obvious relish. On open stretches the Soviet border guards are posted a kilometre apart so that each man can always see his neighbour. On the Polish side there are two sentries to the kilometre.
A Polish infantryman plods along his sentry path toward the Red Army man. He is wearing rough army issue boots, a greenish grey uniform and on top a black coat with two rows of shining buttons. On his head he has the square-topped uniform cap with the white eagle emblem; there are more white eagles on his cloth shoulder straps and the collar tabs, but they do not make him feel any warmer. The frost has chilled him to the marrow, and he rubs his numb ears and knocks his heels together as he walks, while his hands in the thin gloves are stiff with cold. The Pole cannot risk stopping his pacing for a moment, and sometimes he trots, for otherwise the frost would stiffen his joints in a moment. When the two sentries draw together, the zolnierz turns around to walk alongside the Red Army man.
Conversation on the frontier is forbidden, but when there is no one around within a kilometre â?" who can tell whether the two are patrolling their sectors in silence or violating international laws.
The Pole wants a smoke very badly, but he has forgotten his matches in the barracks, and the breeze wafts over from the Soviet side the tantalising fragrance of tobacco. The Pole stops rubbing his ear and glances back over his shoulder, for who knows when the captain, or maybe Pan the lieutenant, might pop up from behind a knoll with a mounted patrol on one of their eternal inspection rounds. But he sees nothing save the dazzling whiteness of the snow in the sun. In the sky there is not so much as a fleck of a cloud.
"Got a light, Comrade?" The Pole is the first to violate the sanctity of the law. And shifting his French magazine rifle with the sword bayonet back on his shoulder he laboriously extracts with stiff fingers a packet of cheap cigarettes from the depths of his coat pocket,
The Red Army man hears him, but the frontier service regulations forbid conversation across the border. Besides, he could not quite catch what the soldier wanted to say. So he continues on his way, firmly treading down on the crunching snow with his warm, soft felt boots.
"Comrade Bolshevik, got a light? Maybe you''ll throw a box of matches across?" This time the Pole speaks Russian.
The Red Army man looks closely at his neighbour. "The frost has nipped the Pan good and proper," he says to himself. "The poor beggar may be a bourgeois soldier but he''s got a dog''s life. Imagine being chased out into this cold in that miserable outfit, no wonder he jumps about like a rabbit, and without smoke either." Not turning around, the Red Army man throws a box of matches across to the other. The soldier catches it on the fly, and getting his cigarette going after several unsuccessful attempts, promptly sends the box back across the border.
"Keep it. I''ve got some more," says the Red frontier guard, forgetting the rules.
From beyond the frontier comes the response:
"Thanks, I''d better not. If they found that box on me I''d get a couple of years in jail."
The Red Army man examines the match box. On the label is an airplane with a sinewy fist instead of a propeller and the word "Ultimatum".
"Right enough, it won''t do for them."
The soldier continues to walk, keeping pace with the Red Army man. He does not like to be alone in the midst of this deserted field.
The saddles creaked rhythmically as the horses trotted along at an even, soothing pace, their breath congealing into momentary plumes of white vapour in the frosty air. A hoary rime stood out around the nostrils of the black stallion. Stepping gracefully, her fine neck arched, the Battalion Commander''s dappled mare was playing with her bit. Both horsemen wore army greatcoats belted in at the waist and with three red squares on the sleeves; the only difference was that Battalion Commander Gavrilov''s collar tabs were green, while his companion''s were red.
Gavrilov was with the Frontier Guards; it was his battalion that manned the frontier posts on this seventy-kilometre stretch, he was the man in charge of this frontier belt. His companion was a visitor from Berezdov â?" Battalion Commissar Korchagin of the universal military training system.
It had snowed during the night and now the snow lay white and fluffy, untouched by either man or beast. The two men cantered out from the woods and were about to cross an open stretch some forty paces from border posts when Gavrilov suddenly reined in his horse. Korchagin wheeled around to see Gavrilov leaning over from his saddle and inspecting a curious trail in the snow that looked as if someone had been running a tiny cogwheel over the surface. Some cunning little beast had passed here leaving behind the intricate, confusing pattern. It was hard to make out which way the creature had been travelling, but it was not this that caused the Battalion Commander to halt. Two paces away lay another trail under a powdery sprinkling of snow â?" the footsteps of a man. There was nothing uncertain about these footprints â?" they led straight toward the woods, and there was not the slightest doubt that the intruder had come from the Polish side. The Battalion Commander urged on his horse and followed the tracks to the sentry path. The footprints showed distinctly for a dozen paces or so on the Polish side.
"Somebody crossed the border last night," muttered the Battalion Commander. "The third platoon has been napping again â?" no mention of it in the morning report!" Gavrilov''s greying moustache silvered by his congealed breath hung grimly over his lip.
In the distance two figures were approaching â?" one a slight man garbed in black and with the blade of a French bayonet gleaming in the sun, the other a giant in a yellow sheepskin coat. The dappled mare responded to a jab in her flanks and briskly the two riders bore down on the approaching pair. As they came, the Red Army man hitched up the rifle on his shoulder and spat out the butt of his cigarette into the snow.
"Hullo, Comrade. How''s everything on your sector?" The Battalion Commander stretched out his hand to the Red Army man, who hurriedly removed a mitt to return the handclasp. So tall was the frontier guard that the Commander hardly had to bend forward in his saddle to reach him.
The Pole looked on from a distance. Here were two Red officers greeting a soldier as they would a close friend. For a moment he pictured himself shaking hands with Major Zakrzewski, but the very thought was so shocking that he glanced furtively over his shoulder.
"Just look over, Comrade Battalion Commander," reported the Red Army man.
"Seen the track over there?"
"No, not yet."
"Who was on duty here from two to six at night?"
"Surotenko, Comrade Battalion Commander."
"All right, but keep your eyes open."
As the Commander was about to ride on he added a stern word of warning:
"And you''d better keep away from those fellows."
"You have to keep your eyes open on the border," the Commander said to his companion as their horses cantered along the broad road leading from the frontier to Berezdov. "The slightest slip can cost you dearly. Can''t afford to take a nap on a job like ours. In broad daylight it''s not so easy to skip the border, but at night we''ve got to be on the alert. Now judge for yourself, Comrade Korchagin. On my sector the frontier cuts right through four villages, which complicates things considerably. No matter how close you place your guards you''ll find all the relatives from the one side of the line attending every wedding or feast held on the other. And no wonder â?" it''s only a couple of dozen paces from cottage to cottage and the creek''s shallow enough for a chicken to wade across. And there''s some smuggling being done, too. True, much of it on a petty scale â?" an old woman carting across a bottle or two of Polish vodka and that sort of thing. But there is quite a bit of large-scale contraband traffic â?" people with big money to operate with. Have you heard that the Poles have opened shops in all the border villages where you can get practically everything you want? Those shops aren''t intended for their own pauperised peasants, you may be sure."
As he listened to the Battalion Commander, Korchagin reflected that life on the border must resemble an endless scouting mission.
"Probably there''s something more serious than smuggling going on. What do you say, Comrade Gavrilov?"
"That''s just the trouble," the Battalion Commander replied gloomily.
Berezdov was a small backwoods town that had been within the Jewish pale of residence. It had two or three hundred small houses scattered haphazardly, and a huge market square with a couple of dozen shops in the middle. The square was filthy with manure. Around the town proper were the peasant huts. In the Jewish central section, on the road to the slaughter house, stood an old synagogue â?" a rickety, depressing building. Although the synagogue still drew crowds on Saturdays, its heyday had gone, and the rabbi lived a life that was by no means to his liking. What happened in 1917 must have been evil indeed if even in this Godforsaken corner the youngsters no longer accorded him the respect due his position. True, the old folk would still eat only kosher food, but how many of the youngsters indulged in the pork sausage which God had cursed. The very thought was revolting! And Rabbi Borukh in a fit of temper kicked viciously at a pig that was assiduously digging in a heap of manure in search of something edible. The rabbi was not at all pleased that Berezdov had been made a district centre, nor did he approve of these Communists who had descended on the place from the devil knows where and were now turning things upside down. Each day brought some fresh unpleasantness. Yesterday, for instance, he had seen a new sign over the gate of the priest''s house: "Berezdov District Committee, Young Communist League of the Ukraine," it had read.
To expect this sign to augur anything but ill would be useless, mused the rabbi. So engrossed was he in his thoughts that he did not notice the small announcement pasted on the door of his synagogue before he actually bumped into it.
A public meeting of working youth will be held today at the club. The speakers will be Lisitsyn, Chairman of the Executive Committee, and Korchagin, Acting Secretary of the Komsomol District Committee. After the meeting a concert will be given by the pupils of the nine-year school.
In a fury the rabbi tore down the sheet of paper. The struggle had begun.
In the centre of a large garden adjoining the local church stood an old house that had once belonged to the priest. A deadly air of boredom filled the musty emptiness of the rooms in which the priest and his wife had lived, two people as old and as dull as the house itself and long bored with one another. The dreariness was swept away as soon as the new masters of the place moved in. The big hall in which the former pious residents had entertained guests only on church holidays was now always full of people, for the house was the headquarters of the Berezdov Communist Party Committee. On the door leading into a small room to the right just inside the front hall the words "Komsomol District Committee" had been written in chalk. Here Korchagin spent part of his working day. Besides being Military Commissar of the Second Universal Military Training Battalion he was also Acting Secretary of the newly-organised Komsomol District Committee.
Eight months had passed since that gathering at Anna''s, yet it seemed that it had been only yesterday. Korchagin pushed the stack of papers aside, and leaning back in his chair gave himself up to his thoughts. ...
The house was still. It was late at night and the Party Committee office was deserted. Trofimov, the Committee''s Secretary, had gone home some time ago, leaving Korchagin alone in the building. Frost had woven a fantastic pattern on the window, but the room was warm. A paraffin lamp was burning on the table. Korchagin recalled the recent past. He remembered how in August the shop Komsomol organisation had sent him as a youth organiser with a repair train to Yekaterinoslav. Until late autumn he had travelled with the train''s crew of a hundred and fifty from station to station bringing order into the chaotic aftermath of war, repairing damage and clearing away the remnants of smashed and burnt-out railway carriages. Their route took them from Sinelnikovo to Polog, through country where the ban*** Makhno had once operated leaving behind him a trail of wreckage and wanton destruction. In Gulyai-Polye a whole week went into repairing the brick structure of the water tower and patching the sides of the dynamited water tank with iron sheets. Though lacking the skill of a fitter and unaccustomed to the heavy work, Pavel wielded a wrench along with the others and tightened more thousands of rusty bolts than he could remember.
Late in the autumn the train returned home and the railway shops again were the richer for a hundred and fifty pairs of hands. . . .
Pavel was now a more frequent visitor at Anna''s place. The crease on his forehead smoothed out and his infectious laughter could again be heard.
Once again the grimy-faced fraternity from the railway shops gathered to hear him talk of bygone years of struggle, of the attempts made by rebellious but enslaved peasant Russia to overthrow the crowned monster that sat heavily on her shoulders, of the insurrections of Stepan Razin and Pugachov.
One evening at Anna''s, when even more young people than usual had gathered there, Pavel announced that he was going to give up smoking, which unhealthy habit he had acquired at an early age.
"I''m not smoking any more," he declared firmly.
It all came about unexpectedly. One of the young people present had said that habit â?" smoking, for instance â?" was stronger than will power. Opinions were divided. At first Pavel said nothing, but drawn in by Talya, he finally joined the debate.
"Man governs his habits, and not the other way round. Otherwise what would we get?"
"Sounds fine, doesn''t it?" Tsvetayev put in from his corner. "Korchagin likes to talk big. But why doesn''t he apply his wisdom to himself? He smokes, doesn''t he? He knows it''s a rotten habit. Of course he does. But he isn''t man enough to drop it." Then, changing his tone, Tsvetayev went on with a cold sneer: "He was busy ''spreading culture'' in the study circles not so long ago. But did this prevent him from using foul language? Anyone who knows Pavel will tell you that he doesn''t swear very often, but when he does he certainly lets himself go. It''s much easier to lecture others than to be virtuous yourself."
There was a strained silence. The sharpness of Tsvetayev''s tone had laid a chill on the gathering. Korchagin did not reply at once. Slowly he removed the cigarette from between his lips and said quietly:
"I''m not smoking any more."
Then, after a pause, he added:
"I''m doing this more for myself than for Dimka. A man who can''t break himself of a bad habit isn''t worth anything. That leaves only the swearing to be taken care of. I know I haven''t quite overcome that shameful habit, but even Dimka admits that he doesn''t hear me curse very often. It''s harder to stop a foul word from slipping out than to stop smoking, so I can''t say at the moment that I''ve finished with that too. But I will."

Just before the frosts set in, rafts of firewood drifting down the river jammed the channel. Then the autumn floods broke them up and the much-needed fuel was swept away by the rushing waters. And again Solomenka sent its people to the rescue, this time to save the precious wood.
Unwilling to drop behind the others, Korchagin concealed the fact that he had caught a bad chill until a week later, when the wood had been piled high on shore. The icy water and the chill dankness of autumn had awakened the enemy lurking in his blood and he came down with a high fever. For two weeks acute rheumatism racked his body, and when he returned from hospital, he was able to work at the vice only by straddling the bench. The foreman would look at him and shake his head sadly. A few days later a medical board declared him unfit for work and he was given his discharge pay and papers certifying his right to a pension. This, however, he indignantly refused to accept.
With a heavy heart he left the shops. He moved about slowly, leaning on his stick, but every step caused excruciating pain. There were several letters from his mother asking him to come home for a visit, and each time he thought of her, her parting words came back to his mind:
"I never see you unless you''re crippled!"
At the Gubernia Committee he was handed his Komsomol and Party registration cards and, with as few leave-takings as possible, he left town bound for home. For two weeks his mother steamed and massaged his swollen legs, and a month later to his great joy he was able to walk without the cane. Once again sunlight pierced the gloom. Before long he was back in the gubernia centre; three days there and the Organisational Department sent him to the regional military commissariat to be used as a political worker in a military training unit.
Another week passed and Pavel arrived in a small snowbound town as Military Commissar assigned to Battalion Two. The Regional Committee of the Komsomol too gave him an assignment: to rally the scattered Komsomol members in the locality and set up a youth league organisation in the district. Thus life got into a new stride.
Outside it was stifling hot. The branch of a cherry-tree peeped in through the open window of the Executive Committee Chairman''s office. Across the way the gilded cross atop the gothic belfry of the Polish church blazed in the sun. And in the yard in front of the window tiny downy goslings as green as the grass around â?" the property of the caretaker of the Executive Committee premises â?" were busily searching for food.
The Chairman of the Executive Committee read the dispatch he had just received to the end. A shadow flitted across his face, and a huge gnarled hand strayed into his luxurious crop of hair and paused there.
Nikolai Nikolayevich Lisitsyn, the Chairman of the Berezdov Executive Committee, was only twenty-four, but none of the members of his staff and the local Party workers would have believed it. A big, strong man, stern and often formidable in appearance, he looked at least thirty-five. He had a powerful physique, a big head firmly planted on a thick neck, piercing brown eyes, and a strong, energetic jaw. He wore blue breeches and a grey tunic, somewhat the worse for wear, with the Order of the Red Banner over the left breast pocket.
Like his father and grandfather before him Lisitsyn had been a metalworker almost from childhood, and before the October Revolution he had "commanded" a lathe at a Tula munitions plant.
Beginning with that autumn night when the Tula gunsmith shouldered a rifle and went out to fight for the workers'' power, he had been caught up in the whirlwind of events. The Revolution and the Party sent Lisitsyn from one tight spot to another along a glorious path that witnessed his rise from rank-and-file Red Army man to regimental commander and commissar.
The fire of battle and the thunder of guns had receded into the past. Nikolai Lisitsyn was now working in a frontier district. Life went on at a quiet measured pace, and the Executive Committee Chairman sat in his office until late night after night poring over harvest reports. The dispatch he was now studying, however, momentarily revived the recent past. It was a warning couched in terse telegraphic language:
"Strictly confidential. To Lisitsyn, Chairman of the Berezdov Executive Committee.
"Marked activity has been observed latterly on the border where the Poles have been trying to send across a large band to terrorise the frontier districts. Take precautions. Suggest everything valuable at the Finance Department, including collected taxes, be transferred to area centre."
From his window Lisitsyn could see everyone who entered the District Executive Committee building. Looking up he caught sight of Pavel Korchagin on the steps. A moment later there was a knock on the door.
"Sit down, I''ve got something to tell you," Lisitsyn said, returning Pavel''s handshake.
For a whole hour the two were closeted in the office.
By the time Korchagin emerged from the office it was noon. As he stepped out, Lisitsyn''s little sister, Anyutka, a timid child far too serious for her years, ran toward him from the garden. She always had a warm smile for Korchagin and now too she greeted him shyly, tossing a stray lock of her cropped hair back from her forehead.
"Is Kolya busy?" she asked. "Maria Mikhailovna has had his dinner ready for a long time."
"Go right in, Anyutka, he''s alone."
Long before dawn the next morning three carts harnessed to well-fed horses pulled up in front of the Executive Committee. The men who came with them exchanged a few words in undertones, and several sealed sacks were then carried out of the Finance Department. These were loaded into the carts and a few minutes later the rumble of wheels receded down the highway. The carts were convoyed by a detail under Korchagin''s command. The forty-kilometre journey to the regional centre (twenty-five of them through forests) was made without mishap and the valuables safely deposited in the vaults of the Regional Finance Department.
Some days later a cavalryman galloped into Berezdov from the direction of the frontier. As he passed through the streets he was followed by the wondering stares of the local idlers.
At the gates of the Executive Committee the rider leapt to the ground, and, supporting his sabre with one hand, stamped up the front stairs in his heavy boots. Lisitsyn took the packet with a worried frown. A few minutes later, the messenger was galloping back in the direction whence he had come.
No one but the Chairman of the Executive Committee knew the contents of the dispatch. But such news had a way of getting round, especially among the local shopkeepers many of whom were smugglers in a small way and had almost an instinct for sensing danger.
Two men walked briskly along the pavement leading to the headquarters of the Military Training Battalion. One of them was Pavel Korchagin. Him the watchers knew; he always carried a gun. But the fact that his companion, the Party Committee Secretary Trofimov, had strapped on a revolver looked ominous.
Several minutes later a dozen men ran out of the headquarters carrying rifles with bayonets fixed and marched briskly to the mill standing at the crossroads. The rest of the local Communist Party and Komsomol members were being issued arms at the Party Committee offices. The Chairman of the Executive Committee galloped past, wearing a Cossack cap and the customary Mauser. Something was obviously afoot. The main square and sidestreets grew deserted. Not a soul was in sight. In a flash huge medieval padlocks appeared on the doors of the tiny shops and shutters boarded windows. Only the fearless hens and hogs continued to rummage among piles of refuse.
The pickets took cover in the gardens at the edge of the town where they had a good view of the open fields and the straight road reaching into the distance.
The dispatch received by Lisitsyn had been brief:
"A mounted band of about one hundred men with two light machine-guns broke through to Soviet territory after a fight in the area of Poddubtsy last night. Take precautionary measures. The trail of the band has been lost in the Slavuta woods. A Red Cossack company has been sent in pursuit of the band. The company will pass through Berezdov during the day. Do not mistake them for the enemy. Gavrilov, Commander, Detached Frontier Battalion.
No more than an hour had passed when a rider appeared on the road leading to the town, followed by a group of horsemen moving about a kilometre behind. Korchagin''s keen eyes followed their movements. The lone rider was a young Red Army man from the Seventh Red Cossack Regiment, a novice at reconnaissance, and hence, though he picked his way cautiously enough, he failed to spot the pickets ambushed in the roadside gardens. Before he knew it he was surrounded by armed men who poured onto the road from the greenery, and when he saw the Komsomol emblem on their tunics, he smiled sheepishly. After a brief confab, he turned his horse around and galloped back to the mounted force now coming up at a trot. The pickets let the Red Cossacks through and resumed their watch in the gardens.
Several anxious days passed before Lisitsyn received word that the raid had failed. Pursued by the Red cavalry, the riders had had to beat a hasty retreat across the frontier.
A handful of Bolsheviks, numbering nineteen in all, applied themselves energetically to the job of building up Soviet life in the district. This was a new administrative unit and hence everything had to be created from bottom up. Besides, the proximity of the border called for unflagging vigilance.
Lisitsyn, Trofimov, Korchagin and the small group of active workers they had rallied toiled from dawn till dusk arranging for re-elections of Soviets, fighting the ban***s, organising cultural work, putting down smuggling, in ad***ion to Party and Komsomol work to strengthen defence.
From saddle to desk, and from desk to the common where squads of young military trainees diligently drilled, then the club and the school and two or three committee meetings â?" such was the daily round of the Military Commissar of Battalion Two. Often enough his nights were spent on horseback, Mauser at his side, nights whose stillness was broken by a sharp "Halt, who goes there?" and the pounding of the wheels of a fleeing cart laden with smuggled goods from beyond the border.
The Berezdov District Committee of the Komsomol consisted of Korchagin, Lida Polevykh, a girl from the Volga who headed the Women''s Department, and Zhenka Razvalikhin, a tall, handsome young man who had been a Gymnasium student only a short time before. Razvalikhin had a weakness for thrilling adventures and was an authority on Sherlock Holmes and Louis Boussenard. Previously he had been office manager for the District Committee of the Party, and though he had joined the Komsomol only four months before, posed as an "old Bolshevik". Someone was needed in Berezdov to take charge of political education work, and since there was no one else to send, the Regional Committee, after some hesitation, had chosen Razvalikhin.
The sun had reached its zenith. The heat penetrated everywhere and all living creatures sought refuge in the shade. Even the dogs crawled under sheds and lay there panting, inert and sleepy. The only sign of life in the village was a hog revelling in a puddle of mud next to the well.
Korchagin untethered his horse, and biting his lip from the pain in his knee, climbed into the saddle. The teacher was standing on the steps of the schoolhouse shading her eyes from the sun with the palm of her hand.
"I hope to see you soon again, Comrade Military Commissar," she smiled.
The horse stamped impatiently, stretched its neck and pulled at the reins.
"Good-bye, Comrade Rakitina. So it''s settled: you''ll give the first lesson tomorrow."
Feeling the pressure of the bit relax, the horse was off at a brisk trot. Suddenly wild cries reached Pavel''s ears. It sounded like the shrieking of women when villages catch fire. Wheeling his mount sharply around, the Military Commissar saw a young peasant woman running breathlessly into the village. Rakitina rushed forward and stopped her. From the nearby cottages the inhabitants looked out, mostly old men and women, for all the able-bodied peasants were working in the fields.
"0-o-oh! Good people! Come quickly! Come quickly! They''re a-murdering each other over there!"
When Korchagin galloped up people were crowding around the woman, pulling at her white blouse and showering her with anxious questions, but they could make nothing of her incoherent cries. "It''s murder! They''re cutting them up..." was all she could say. An old man with a tousled beard came up, supporting his homespun trousers with one hand as he ran.
"Stop your noise," he shouted at the hysterical woman. "Who''s being murdered? What''s it all about? Stop your squealing, damn you!"
"It''s our men and the Poddubtsy crowd . . . fighting over the boundaries again. They''re slaughtering our men!"
That told them all. Women wailed and the old men bellowed in fury. The news swept through the village and eddied in the backyards: "The Poddubtsy crowd are cutting up our fellows with scythes.... It''s those boundaries again!" Only the bedridden remained indoors, all the rest poured into the village street and arming themselves with pitchforks, axes or sticks pulled from wattle fences ran toward the fields where the two villages were engaged in their bloody annual contest over the boundaries between their fields.
Korchagin struck his horse and the animal was off at a gallop. The animal flew past the running village folk and, ears pressed back and hooves furiously pounding the ground, steadily increased its breakneck pace. On a hillock a windmill spread out its arms as if to bar the way. To the right, by the river bank, were the low meadows, and to the left a rye field rose and dipped all the way to the horizon. The wind rippled the ears of the ripe grain. Poppies sprinkled the roadside with bright red. It was quiet here, and unbearably hot. But from the distance, where the silvery ribbon of the river basked in the sun, came the cries of battle.
The horse continued its wild career down toward the meadows. "If he stumbles, it''s the end of both of us," flashed in Pavel''s mind. But there was no stopping now, and all he could do was to listen to the wind whistle in his ears as he bent low in the saddle.
Like a whirlwind he galloped into the field where the bloody combat was raging. Several already lay bleeding on the ground.
The horse ran down a bearded peasant armed with the stub of a scythe handle who was pursuing a young man with blood streaming down his face. Nearby a sunburned giant of a man was aiming vicious kicks with his big heavy boots at the solar plexus of his victim.
Charging into the mass of struggling men at full speed, Korchagin sent them flying in all directions. Before they could recover from the surprise, he whirled madly now upon one, now on another, realising that he could disperse this knot of brutalised humanity only by terrorising them.
"Scatter, you swine!" he shouted in a fury. "Or I''ll shoot every last man of you, you blasted ban***s!"
And pulling out his Mauser he fired over an upturned face twisted with savage rage. Again the horse whirled around and again the Mauser spoke. Some of the combatants dropped their scythes and turned back. Dashing up and down the field and firing incessantly, the Commissar finally got the situation in hand. The peasants took to their heels and scattered in all directions anxious to escape both from responsibility for the bloody brawl and from this man on horseback so terrible in his fury who was shooting without stop.
Luckily no one was killed and the wounded recovered. Nevertheless soon afterward a session of the district court was held in Poddubtsy to hear the case, but all the judge''s efforts to discover the ringleaders were unavailing. With the persistence and patience of the true Bolshevik, the judge sought to make the sullen peasants before him see how barbarous their actions had been, and to impress upon them that such violence would not be tolerated.

"It''s the boundaries that are to blame, Comrade judge," they said. "They''ve a way of getting mixed up â?" every year we fight over them."
Nevertheless some of the peasants had to answer for the fight.
A week later a commission came to the hay lands in question and began staking out the disputed strips.
"I''ve been working as land surveyor for nearly thirty years, and always it''s been the dividing lines that caused trouble," the old surveyor with the commission said to Korchagin as he rolled up his tape. The old man was sweating profusely from the heat and the exertion. "Ljooking at the way the meadows are divided you''d hardly believe your eyes. A drunkard could draw straighter lines. And the fields are even worse. Strips three paces wide and one crossing into the other â?" to try and separate them is enough to drive you mad. And they''re being cut up more and more what with sons growing up and fathers splitting up their land with them. Believe me, twenty years from now there won''t be any land left to till, it''ll all be balks. As it is, ten per cent of the land is being wasted in this way."
Korchagin smiled.
"Twenty years from now we won''t have a single balk left, Comrade surveyor."
The old man gave him an indulgent look.
"The communist society, you mean? Well, now, that''s pretty much in the future, isn''t it?"
"Have you heard about the Budanovka Collective Farm?"
"Yes. I''ve been in Budanovka. But that''s the exception, Comrade Korchagin."
The commission went on measuring strips of land. Two young men hammered in stakes. And on both sides stood the peasants watching closely to make sure that they went down where the half-rotten sticks barely visible in the grass marked the previous dividing lines.
Whipping up his wretched nag, the garrulous driver turned to his passengers.
"Where all these Komsomol lads have sprung up from beats me!" he said. "Don''t remember anything like it before. It''s that schoolteacher woman who''s started it, for sure. Rakitina''s her name, maybe you know her? She''s a young wench, but she''s a troublemaker. Stirs up all the womenfolk in the village, puts all kinds of silly ideas into their heads and that''s how the trouble begins. It''s got so a man can''t beat his wife any more! In the old days you''d give the old woman a clout whenever you felt out of sorts and she''d slink away and sulk, but now she kicks up such a row you wished you hadn''t touched her. She''ll threaten you with the People''s Court, and as for the younger ones, they''ll talk about divorce and reel off all the laws to you. Look at my Ganka, she quietest wench you ever saw, now she''s gone and got herself made a delegate; the elder among the womenfolk, I think that means. The women come to her from all over the village. I nearly let her have a taste of the whip when I heard about it, but I spat on the whole business. They can go to the devil! Let them jabber. She isn''t a bad wench when it comes to housework and such things."
The driver scratched his hairy chest visible through the opening in his homespun shirt and flicked his whip under the horse''s belly. The two in the cart were Razvalikhin and Lida. They both had business in Poddubtsy. Lida planned to call a conference of women''s delegates, and Razvalikhin had been sent to help the local cell organise its work.
"So you don''t like the Komsomols?" Lida jokingly asked the driver.
He plucked at his little beard for a while before replying.
"Oh I don''t mind them.... I believe in letting the youngsters enjoy themselves, putting on plays and such like. I''m fond of a comedy myself if it''s good. We did think at the beginning the young folk would get out of hand, but it turned out just the opposite. I''ve heard folks say they''re very strict about drinking and rowing and such like. They go in more for book learning. But they won''t leave God be, and they''re always trying to take the church away and use it for a club. Now that''s no good, it''s turned the old folks against them. But on the whole they''re not so bad. If you ask me, though, they make a big mistake taking in all the down-and-outs in the village, the ones who hire out, or who can''t make a go of their farms. They won''t have anything to do with the rich peasants'' sons."
The cart clattered down the hill and pulled up outside the school building.
The caretaker had put up the new arrivals and gone off to sleep in the hay. Lida and Razvalikhin had just returned from a meeting which had ended rather late. It was dark inside the cottage. Lida undressed quickly, climbed into bed and fell asleep almost at once. She was rudely awakened by Razvalikhin''s hands travelling over her in a manner that left no doubt as to his intentions.
"What do you want?"
"Shush, Lida, don''t make so much noise. I''m sick of lying there all by myself. Can''t you find anything more exciting to do than snooze?"
"Stop pawing me and get off my bed at once!" Lida said, pushing him away. Razvalikhin''s oily smile had always sickened her and she wanted to say something insulting and humiliating, but sleep overpowered her and she closed her eyes.
"Aw, come on! You weren''t brought up in a nunnery by any chance? Stop playing the little innocent, you can''t fool me. If you were really an advanced woman, you''d satisfy my desire and then go to sleep as much as you want."
Considering the matter settled, he went over and sat on the edge of the bed again, laying a possessive hand on her shoulder.
"Go to hell!" Lida was now wide awake. "I''m going to tell Korchagin about this tomorrow." Razvalikhin seized her hand and whispered testily: "I don''t care a damn about your Korchagin, and you''d better not try to resist or I''ll take you by force."
There was a brief scuffle and then two resounding slaps rang out. Razvalikhin leapt aside. Lida groped her way to the door, pushed it open and rushed out into the yard. She stood there in the moonlight, panting with fury and disgust.
"Get inside, you fool!" Razvalikhin called to her viciously.
He carried his own bed out under the shed and spent the rest of the night there. Lida fastened the door on the latch, curled up on the bed and went to sleep again.
In the morning they set out for home. Razvalikhin sat gloomily beside the old driver smoking one cigarette after another.
"That touch-me-not may really go and spill the beans to Korchagin, blast her!" he was thinking. "Who''d have thought she''d turn out to be such a prig? You''d think she was a raving beauty by the way she acts, but she''s nothing to look at. But I''d better make it up with her or there may be trouble. Korchagin has his eye on me as it is."
He moved over to Lida. He pretended to be ashamed of himself, put on a downcast air and mumbled a few words of apology.
That did the trick. Before they had reached the edge of the village Lida had given him her promise not to tell anyone what had happened that night.
Komsomol cells sprang up one after another in the border villages. The District Committee members carefully tended these first young shoots of the Communist movement. Korchagin and Lida Polevykh spent much time in the various localities working with the local Komsomol members.
Razvalikhin did not like making trips to the countryside. He did not know how to win the confidence of the peasant lads and only succeeded in bungling things. Lida and Pavel, on the other hand, had no difficulty in making friends with the peasant youth. The girls took to Lida at once, they accepted her as one of themselves and gradually she awakened their interest in the Komsomol movement. As for Korchagin, all the young folk in the district knew him. One thousand six hundred of the young men due to be called up for military service went through preliminary training in his battalion. Never before had his accordion played such an important role in propaganda as here in the village. The instrument made Pavel tremendously popular with the young folk, who gathered of an evening on the village lane to enjoy themselves, and for many a towheaded youngster the road to the Komsomol began here as he listened to the enchanting music of the accordion, now passionate and stirring, now strident and brave, now tender and caressing as only the sad, wistful songs of the Ukraine can be. They listened to the accordion, and they listened to the young man who played it, a railway worker who was now Military Commissar and Komsomol secretary. And the music of the accordion seemed to mingle harmoniously with what the young Commissar told them. Soon new songs rang out in the villages, and new books appeared in the cottages beside the prayer-books and Bibles.
The smugglers now had more than the frontier guards to reckon with; in the Komsomol members the Soviet Government had acquired staunch friends and zealous assistants. Sometimes the Komsomol cells in the border towns allowed themselves to be carried away by their enthusiasm in hunting down enemies and then Korchagin would have to come to the aid of his young comrades. Once Grishutka Khorovodko, the blue-eyed Secretary of the Poddubtsy cell, a hot-headed lad fond of an argument and very active in the anti-religious movement, learned from private sources of information that some smuggled goods were to be brought that night to the village mill. He roused all the Komsomol members and, armed with a training rifle and two bayonets, they set out at the dead of night, quietly laid an ambush at the mill and waited for their quarry to appear. The border post, which had been informed of the smugglers'' move, sent out a detail of its own. In the dark the two sides met and clashed, and had it not been for the vigilance displayed by the frontier guards, the young men might have suffered heavy casualties in the skirmish. As it was the youngsters were merely disarmed, taken to a village four kilometres away and locked up.
Korchagin happened to be at Gavrilov''s place at the time. When the Battalion Commander told him the news the following morning, Pavel mounted his horse and galloped off to rescue his boys.
The frontier man in charge laughed as he told him the story.
"I''ll tell you what we''ll do, Comrade Korchagin," he said. "They''re fine lads and we shan''t make trouble for them. But you had better give them a good talking to so that they won''t try to do our work for us in the future."
The sentry opened the door of the shed and the eleven lads got up and stood sheepishly shifting their weight from one foot to the other.
"Look at them," the frontier man said with studied severity. "They''ve gone and made a mess of things, and now I''ll have to send them on to area headquarters."
Then Grishutka spoke up.
"But Comrade Sakharov," he said agitatedly, "what crime have we committed? We''ve had our eye on that kulak for a long time. We only wanted to help the Soviet authorities, and you go and lock us up like ban***s." He turned away with an injured air.
After a solemn consultation, during which Korchagin and Sakharov had difficulty in preserving their gravity, they decided the boys had had enough of a fright.
"If you will vouch for them and promise us that they won''t go taking walks over to the frontier any more I''ll let them go," Sakharov said to Pavel. "They can help us in other ways."
"Very well, I''ll vouch for them. I hope they won''t let me down any more."
The youngsters marched back to Poddubtsy singing. The incident was hushed up. And it was not long before the miller was caught, this time by the law.
In the Maidan-Villa woods there lived a colony of rich German farmers. The kulak farms stood within half a kilometre of each other, as sturdily built as miniature fortresses. It was from Maidan-Villa that Antonyuk and his band operated. Antonyuk, a one-time tsarist army sergeant major, had recruited a band of seven cutthroats from among his kith and kin and, armed with pistols, staged hold-ups on the country roads. He did not hesitate to spill blood, he was not averse to robbing wealthy speculators, but neither did he stop at molesting Soviet workers. Speed was Antonyuk''s watchword. One day he would rob a couple of co-operative store clerks and the next day he would disarm a postal employee in a village a good twenty kilometres away, stealing everything the man had on him, down to the last kopek. Antonyuk competed with his fellow-brigand Gordei, one was worse than the other, and between them the two kept the area militia and frontier guard authorities very busy. Antonyuk operated just outside Berezdov, and it grew dangerous to appear on the roads leading to the town. The ban*** eluded capture; when things grew too hot for him he would withdraw beyond the border and lie low only to turn up again when he was least expected. His very elusiveness made him a menace. Every report of some fresh outrage committed by this brigand caused Lisitsyn to gnaw his lips with rage.
"When will that rattlesnake stop biting us? He''d better take care, the scoundrel, or I''ll have to settle his hash myself," he would mutter through clenched teeth. Twice the District Executive Chairman, taking Korchagin and three other Communists with him, set out hot on the ban***''s trail, but each time Antonyuk got away.
A special detachment was sent to Berezdov from the area centre to fight the ban***s. It was commanded by a dapper youth named Filatov. Instead of reporting to the Chairman of the Executive Committee, as frontier regulations demanded, this conceited youngster went straight to the nearest village, Semaki, and arriving at the dead of night, put up with his men in a house on the outskirts. The mysterious arrival of these armed men was observed by a Komsomol member living next door who hurried off at once to report to the Chairman of the Village Soviet. The latter, knowing nothing about the detachment, took them for ban***s and dispatched the lad at once to the district centre for help. Filatov''s foolhardiness very nearly cost many lives. Lisitsyn roused the militia in the middle of the night and hurried off with a dozen men to tackle the "ban***s" in Semaki. They galloped up to the house, dismounted and climbing over the fence closed in on the house. The sentry on duty at the door was knocked down by a blow on the head with a revolver-butt, Lisitsyn broke in the door with his shoulder and he and his men rushed into a room dimly lighted by an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. With a grenade in one hand and his Mauser in the other Lisitsyn roared so that the window panes rattled:
"Surrender, or I''ll blow you to bits!"
Another second and the sleepy men leaping to their feet from the floor might have been cut down by a hail of bullets. But the sight of the man with the grenade poised for the throw was so awe-inspiring that they put up their hands. A few minutes later, when the "ban***s" were herded outside in their underwear, Filatov noticed the decoration on Lisitsyn''s tunic and hastened to explain.
Lisitsyn was furious. "You fool!" he spat out with withering contempt.
Tidings of the German revolution, dim echoes of the rifle fire on the Hamburg barricades reached the border area. An atmosphere of tension hung over the frontier. Newspapers were read with eager expectation. The wind of revolution blew from the West. Applications poured in to the Komsomol District Committee from Komsomols volunteering for service in the Red Army. Korchagin was kept busy explaining to the youngsters from the cells that the Soviet Union was pursuing a policy of peace and that it had no intentions of going to war with its neighbours. But this had little effect. Every Sunday Komsomol members from the entire district held meetings in the big garden of the priest''s house, and one day at noon the Poddubtsy cell turned up in proper marching order in the yard of the District Committee. Korchagin saw them through the window and went out into the porch. Eleven lads, with Khorovodko at their head, all wearing top boots, and with large canvas knapsacks on their backs, halted at the entrance.
"What''s this, Grisha?" Korchagin asked in surprise.
Instead of replying, Khorovodko signed to Pavel with his eyes and went inside the building with him. Lida, Razvalikhin and two other Komsomol members pressed around the newcomer demanding an explanation. Khorovodko closed the door and wrinkling his bleached eyebrows announced:
"This is a sort of test mobilisation, Comrades. My own idea. I told the boys this morning a telegram had come from the district, strictly confidential of course, that we''re going to war with the German bourgeoisie, and we''ll soon be fighting the Polish Pany as well. All Komsomols are called up, on orders from Moscow, I told them. Anyone who''s scared can file an application and he''ll be allowed to stay home. I ordered them not to say a word about the war to anyone, just to take a loaf of bread and a hunk of fatback apiece, and those who didn''t have any fatback could bring garlic or onions. We were to meet secretly outside the village and go to the district centre and from there to the area centre where arms would be issued. You ought to see what an effect that had on the boys! They tried hard to pump me, but I told them to get busy and cut out the questions. Those who wanted to stay behind should say so. We only wanted volunteers. Well, my boys dispersed and I began to get properly worried. Supposing nobody turned up? If that happened I would disband the whole cell and move to some other place. I sat there outside the village waiting with my heart in my boots. After a while they began coming, one by one. Some of them had been crying, you could see by their faces, though they tried to hide it. All ten of them turned up, not a single deserter. That''s our Poddubtsy cell for you!" he wound up triumphantly.

When the shocked Lida Polevykh began to scold him, he stared at her in amazement.
"What do you mean? This is the best way to test them, I tell you. You can see right through each one of them. There''s no fraud there. I was going to drag them to the area centre just to keep up appearances, but the poor beggars are dog-tired. You''ll have to make a little speech to them, Korchagin. You will, won''t you? It wouldn''t be right without a speech. Tell them the mobilisation has been called off or something, but say that we''re proud of them just the same."
Korchagin seldom visited the area centre, for the journey took several days and pressure of work demanded his constant presence in the district. Razvalikhin, on the other hand, was ready to ride off to town on any pretext. He would set out on the journey armed from head to foot, fancying himself one of Fenimore Cooper''s heroes. As he drove through the woods he would take pot shots at crows or at some fleetfooted squirrel, stop lone passersby and question them sternly as to who they were, where they had come from and whither they were bound. On approaching the town he would remove his weapons, stick his rifle under the hay in the cart and, hiding his revolver in his pocket, stroll into the office of the Komsomol Regional Committee looking his usual self.
"Well, what''s the news in Berezdov?" Fedotov, Secretary of the Regional Committee, inquired as Razvalikhin entered his office one day.
Fedotov''s office was always crowded with people all talking at once. It was not easy to work under such con***ions, listening to four different people, while replying to a fifth and writing something at the same time. Although Fedotov was very young he had been a Party member since 1919; it was only in those stormy times that a 15-year-old lad could have been admitted into the Party. "Oh, there''s plenty of news," answered Razvalikhin nonchalantly. "Too much to tell all at once. It''s one long grind from morning till night. There''s so much to attend to. We''ve had to start from the very beginning, you know. I set up two new cells. Now, tell me what you called me here for?" And he sat down in an armchair with a businesslike air.
Krymsky, the head of the economic department, looked up from the heap of papers on his desk for a moment.
"We asked for Korchagin, not you," he said. Razvalikhin blew out a thick cloud of tobacco smoke.
"Korchagin doesn''t like coming here, so I have to do it on top of everything else.... In general, some secretaries have a fine time of it. They don''t do anything themselves. It''s the donkeys like me who have to carry the load. Whenever Korchagin goes to the border he''s gone for two or three weeks and all the work is left to me."
Razvalikhin''s broad hint that he was the better man for the job of district secretary was not lost on his hearers.
"That fellow doesn''t appeal to me much," Fedotov remarked to the others when Razvalikhin had gone.
Razvalikhin''s trickery was exposed quite by chance. Lisitsyn dropped into Fedotov''s office one day to pick up the mail, which was the custom for anyone coming from the district, and in the course of a conversation between the two men Razvalikhin was exposed.
"Send Korchagin to us anyway," said Fedotov in parting. "We hardly know him here."
"Very well. But don''t try to take him away from us, mind. We shan''t allow that."
This year the anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated on the border with even greater enthusiasm than usual. Korchagin was elected chairman of the committee organising the celebrations in the border villages. After the meeting in Poddubtsy, five thousand peasants from three neighbouring villages marched to the frontier in a procession half a kilometre long, carrying scarlet banners and with a military band and the training battalion at the head. They marched in perfect order on the Soviet side of the frontier, parallel to the border posts, bound for the villages that had been cut in two by the demarcation line. Never before had the Poles witnessed the like on their frontier. Battalion Commander Gavrilov and Korchagin rode ahead of the column on horseback, and behind them the band played, the banners rustled in the breeze and the singing of the people resounded far and wide. The peasant youth clad in their holiday best were in high spirits, the village girls twittered and laughed gaily, the adults marched along gravely, the old folk with an air of solemn triumph. The human stream stretched as far as eye could see. One of its banks was the frontier, but no one so much as stepped across that forbidden line. Korchagin watched the sea of people march past. The strains of the Komsomol song "From the forests dense to Britain''s seas, the Red Army is strongest of all!" gave way to a girls'' chorus singing "Up on yonder hillside the girls are a-mowing...."
The Soviet sentries greeted the procession with happy smiles. The Polish guards looked on bewildered. This demonstration on the frontier caused no little consternation on the other side, although the Polish command had been warned of it in advance. Mounted gendarme patrols moved restlessly back and forth, the frontier guard had been strengthened fivefold and reserves were hidden behind the nearby hills ready for any emergency. But the procession kept to its own territory, marching along gaily, filling the air with its singing.
A Polish sentry stood on a knoll. The column approached with measured tread. The first notes of a march rang out. The Pole brought his rifle smartly to his side and then presented arms, and Korchagin distinctly heard the words: "Long live the Commune!"
The soldier''s eyes told Pavel that it was he who had uttered the words. Pavel stared at him fascinated.
A friend! Beneath the soldier''s uniform a heart beat in sympathy with the demonstrators. Pavel replied softly in Polish:
"Greetings, Comrade!"
The sentry stood in the same position while the demonstration marched past. Pavel turned round several times to look at the dark little figure. Here was another Pole. His whiskers were touched with grey and the eyes under the shiny peak of his cap expressed nothing. Pavel, still under the impression of what he had just heard, murmured in Polish as if to himself:
"Greetings, Comrade!"
But there was no reply.
Gavrilov smiled. He had overheard what had passed.
"You expect too much," he observed. "They aren''t all plain infantrymen, you know. Some of them are gendarmes. Didn''t you notice the chevron on his sleeve? That one was a gendarme for sure."
The head of the column was already descending the hill toward a village cut in two by the frontier. The Soviet half of the village had prepared to meet the guests in grand style. All the inhabitants were waiting at the frontier bridge on the bank of the stream. The young folk were lined up on either side of the road. The roofs of cottages and sheds on the Polish side were covered with people who were watching the proceedings on the opposite bank with tense interest. There were crowds of peasants on the cottage steps and by the garden fences. When the procession entered the human corridor the band struck up the Internationale. Later stirring speeches were delivered from a platform decorated with greenery. Young men and white-headed veterans addressed the crowd. Korchagin too spoke in his native Ukrainian. His words flew over the border and were heard on the other side of the river, whereupon the gendarmes over there began to disperse the villagers for fear that those fiery words might inflame the hearts of those who listened. Whips whistled and shots were fired into the air.
The streets emptied out. The young folk, scared off the roofs by gendarme bullets, disappeared. Those on the Soviet side looked on and their faces grew grave. Filled with wrath by what he had just witnessed, an aged shepherd climbed onto the platform with the help of some village lads and addressed the crowd in great agitation.
"You''ve seen, my children? That''s how we used to be treated too. But no more. Nobody dare whip us peasants any more. We''ve finished with the gentry and their whippings. We''re in power now and it''s for you, my sons, to hold on firmly to that power. I''m an old man and I''m not much good at speech-making. But I''d tell you a lot if I could. I''d tell you how we used to toil like oxen in the days of the tsars. That''s why it hurts to see those poor folks over there." He pointed with a shaking hand toward the other side of the river, and fell to weeping as old men do.
Then Grishutka Khorovodko spoke. Gavrilov, listening to his wrathful speech, turned his horse around and scanned the opposite bank to see whether anyone there was taking notes. But the river bank was deserted. Even the sentry by the bridge had been removed.
"Well, it looks as if there won''t be any protest note to the Foreign Affairs Commissariat after all," he laughed.
One rainy night in late autumn the bloody trail of Antonyuk and his seven men came to an end. The ban***s were caught at a wedding party in the house of a wealthy farmer in the German colony in Maidan-Villa. It was the peasants from the Khrolinsky Commune who tracked him down.
The local women had spread the news about these guests at the colony wedding, and the Komsomols got together at once, twelve of them, and armed with whatever they could lay their hands on, set out for Maidan-Villa by cart, sending a messenger post-haste to Berezdov. At Semaki the messenger chanced to meet Filatov''s detachment, which rushed off hot on the trail. The Khrolinsky men surrounded the farm and began to exchange rifle fire with the Antonyuk band. The latter entrenched themselves in a small wing of the farmhouse and opened fire at anyone who came within range. They tried to make a dash for it, but were driven back inside the building after losing one of their number. Antonyuk had been in many a tight corner like this and had fought his way out with the aid of hand grenades and darkness. He might have escaped this time too, for the Khrolinsky Komsomols had already lost two men, but Filatov arrived in the nick of time. Antonyuk saw that the game was up. He continued firing back till morning from all the windows, but at dawn they took him. Not one of the seven surrendered. It cost four lives to stamp out the viper''s nest. Three of the casualties were lads from the newly-organised Khrolinsky Komsomol group.
Korchagin''s battalion was called up for the autumn manoeuvres of the territorial forces. The battalion covered the forty kilometres to the divisional camp in a single day''s march under a driving rain. They set out early in the morning and reached their destination late at night. Gusev, the Battalion Commander, and his commissar rode on horseback. The eight hundred trainees reached the barracks exhausted and went to sleep at once. The manoeuvres were due to begin the following morning; the headquarters of the territorial division had been late in summoning the battalion. Lined up for inspection, the battalion, now in uniform and carrying rifles, presented an entirely different appearance. Both Gusev and Korchagin had invested much time and effort in training these young men and they were confident that the unit would pass muster. After the official inspection had ended and the battalion had shown its skill on the drill ground, one of the commanders, a man with a handsome though flaccid face, turned to Korchagin and demanded sharply:
"Why are you mounted? The commanders and commissars of our training battalions are not entitled to horses. Turn your mount over to the stables and report for manoeuvres on foot."
Korchagin knew that if he dismounted he would be unable to take part in the manoeuvres, for his legs would not carry him a single kilometre. But how could he explain the situation to this loud-mouthed coxcomb festooned with leather straps?
"I shall not be able to take part in the manoeuvres on foot."
"Why not?"
Realising that he would have to give some explanation, Korchagin replied in a low voice:
"My legs are swollen and I will not be able to stand a whole week of running and walking. But perhaps you will tell me who you are, Comrade?"
"In the first place I am Chief of Staff of your regiment. Secondly, I order you once more to get off that horse. If you are an invalid you ought not to be in the army."
Pavel felt as if he had been struck on the face with a whip. He jerked the reins, but Gusev''s strong hand checked him. For a few moments injured pride and self-restraint fought for supremacy in Pavel. But Pavel Korchagin was no longer the Red Army man who could shift light-heartedly from unit to unit. He was a Battalion Commissar now, and his battalion stood there behind him. What a poor example of discipline he would be showing his men if he disobeyed the order! It was not for this conceited ass that he had reared his battalion. He slipped his feet out of the stirrups, dismounted and, fighting the excruciating pain in his joints, walked over to the right flank.
For several days the weather had been unusually fine. The manoeuvres were drawing to a close. On the fifth day the troops were in the vicinity of Shepetovka, where the exercises were to end. The Berezdov Battalion had been given the assignment of capturing the station from the direction of Klimentovichi village.
Korchagin, who was now on homeground, showed Gusev all the approaches. The battalion, divided into two parts, made a wide detour and emerging in the enemy rear broke into the station building with loud cheers. The operation was given the highest appraisal. The Berezdov men remained in possession of the station while the battalion that had defended it withdrew to the woods having been judged to have "lost" fifty per cent of its men.
Korchagin was in command of one half of the battalion. He had ordered his men to deploy and was standing in the middle of the street with the commander and political instructor of the third company when a Red Army man came running up to him.
"Comrade Commissar," he panted, "the Battalion Commander wants to know whether the machine-gunners are holding the railway crossings. The commission''s on its way here."
Pavel and the commanders with him went over to one of the crossings. The Regimental Commander and his aides were there. Gusev was congratulated on the successful operations. Representatives from the routed battalion looked sheepish and did not even try to justify themselves.
Gusev said: "I can''t take the cre*** for it. It was Korchagin here who showed us the way. He hails from these parts."
The Chief of Staff rode up to Pavel and said with a sneer: "So you can run quite well after all, Comrade. The horse was just a show-off, I suppose?" He was about to say something else, but the look on Korchagin''s face stopped him.
"You don''t happen to know his name, do you?" Korchagin asked Gusev when the higher commanders had gone.
Gusev slapped him on the shoulder.
"Now then, don''t you pay any attention to that upstart. His name is Chuzhanin. A former ensign, I believe."
Several times that day Pavel racked his brains in an effort to recall where he had heard that name before, but he could not remember.
The manoeuvres were over. The battalion, having been highly commended, went back to Berezdov. Korchagin, utterly exhausted, remained behind to rest for a day or two at home. For two days he slept round the clock, and on the third day he went to see Artem down at the engine sheds. Here in this grimy, smoke-blackened building Pavel felt at home. Hungrily he inhaled the coal smoke. This was where he really belonged and it was here he wished to be. He felt as if he had lost something infinitely dear to him. It was months since he had heard an engine whistle, and the one-time stoker and electrician yearned as much for the familiar surroundings as the sailor yearns for the boundless sea expanse after a prolonged stay on shore. It was a long time before he could get over this feeling. He spoke little to his brother, who now worked at a portable forge. He noticed a new furrow on Artem''s brow. He was the father of two children now. Evidently Artem was having a hard time of it. He did not complain, but Pavel could see for himself.
They worked side by side for an hour or two. Then they parted.

At the railway crossing Pavel reined in his horse and gazed for a long while at the station. Then he struck his mount and galloped down the road through the woods.
The forest roads were now quite safe. All the ban***s, big and small, had been stamped out by the Bolsheviks, and the villages in the area now lived in peace.
Pavel reached Berezdov around noon. Lida Polevykh ran out into the porch of the District Committee to meet him.
"Welcome home!" she said with a warm smile. "We have missed you here!" She put her arm around him and the two went in doors.
"Where is Razvalikhin?" he asked her as he took off his coat.
"I don''t know," Lida replied rather reluctantly. "Oh yes, I remember now. He said this morning he was going to the school to take the class in sociology instead of you. He says it''s his job not yours."
This was an unpleasant surprise for Pavel. He had never liked Razvalikhin. "That fellow may make a hash of things at the school," he thought in annoyance.
"Never mind him," he said to Lida. "Tell me, what''s the good news here. Have you been to Grushevka? How are things with the youngsters over there?"
While Lida gave him the news, Pavel relaxed on the couch resting his aching limbs.
"The day before yesterday Rakitina was accepted as candidate member of the Party. That makes our Poddubtsy cell much stronger. Rakitina is a good girl, I like her very much. The teachers are beginning to come over to our side, some of them are with us already."
Korchagin and Lychikov, the new Secretary of the Party District Committee, often met at Lisitsyn''s place of an evening and the three would sit studying at the big desk until the early hours of the morning.
The door leading to the bedroom where Lisitsyn''s wife and sister slept would be tightly closed and the three bending over a small volume would converse in low tones. Lisitsyn had only time to study at night. Even so whenever Pavel returned from his frequent trips to the villages he would find to his chagrin that his comrades had gone far ahead of him.
One day a messenger from Poddubtsy brought the news that Grishutka Khorovodko had been murdered the night before by unknown assailants. Pavel rushed off at once to the Executive Committee stables, forgetting the pain in his legs, saddled a horse with feverish haste and galloped off toward the frontier.
Grishutka''s body lay amid spruce branches on a table in the Village Soviet cottage, the red banner of the Soviet draped over him. A frontier man and a Komsomol stood on guard at the door admitting no one until the authorities arrived. Korchagin entered the cottage, went over to the table and turned back the banner.
Grishutka, his face waxen, his dilated eyes transfixed in agony of death, lay with his head to one side. A spruce branch covered the spot where the back of his head had been bashed in by some sharp weapon.
Who had taken the life of this young man? He was the only son of widow Khorovodko. His father, a mill hand and member of the Poor Peasants'' Committee, had died fighting for the Revolution.
The shock of her son''s death had brought the old woman to her bed and neighbours were trying to comfort her. And her son lay cold and still preserving the secret of his untimely end.
Grishutka''s murder had aroused the indignation of the whole village. The young Komsomol leader and champion of the poor peasants turned out to have far more friends in the village than enemies.
Rakitina, greatly upset by the news, sat in her room weeping bitterly. She did not even look up when Korchagin came in.
"Who do you think killed him, Rakitina?" Korchagin asked hoarsely, dropping heavily into a chair.
"It must be that gang from the mill. Grisha had always been a thorn in the side of those smugglers."
Two villages turned up for Grisha Khorovodko''s funeral. Korchagin brought his battalion, and the whole Komsomol organisation came to pay its last respects to their comrade. Gavrilov mustered a company of two hundred and fifty border guards on the square in front of the Village Soviet. To the accompaniment of the mournful strains of the funeral march the coffin swathed in red bunting was brought out and placed on the square where a fresh grave had been dug beside the graves of the Bolshevik partisans who had fallen in the Civil War.
Grishutka''s death united all those whose interests he had so staunchly upheld. The young agricultural labourers and the poor peasants vowed *****pport the Komsomol, and all who spoke at the graveside wrathfully demanded that the murderers be brought to book, that they be tried here on the square beside the grave of their victim, so that everyone might see who the enemies were.
Three volleys thundered forth, and fresh spruce branches were laid on the grave. That evening the cell elected a new secretary â?" Rakitina. A message came for Korchagin from the border post with the news that they were on the trail of the murderers.
A week later, when the second District Congress of Soviets opened in the town theatre, Lisitsyn, gravely triumphant, announced:
"Comrades, I am happy to be able to report to this congress that we have accomplished a great deal in the past year. Soviet power is firmly established in the district, ban***ism has been uprooted and smuggling has been all but wiped out. Strong organisations of peasant poor have come into being in the villages, the Komsomol organisations are ten times as strong as they were and the Party organisations have expanded. The last kulak provocation in Poddubtsy, which cost us the life of our comrade Khorovodko, has been exposed. The murderers, the miller and his son-in-law, have been arrested and will be tried in a few days by the gubernia assizes. Several delegations from the villages have demanded that this congress pass a resolution demanding the supreme penalty for these ban***s and terrorists."
A storm of approval shook the hall.
"Hear, hear! Death to the enemies of Soviet power!"
Lida Polevykh appeared at one of the side doors. She beckoned to Pavel.
Outside in the corridor she handed him an envelope marked "urgent". He opened it and read:
"To the Berezdov District Committee of the Komsomol. Copy to the District Committee of the Party. By decision of the Gubernia Committee Comrade Korchagin is recalled from the district to the Gubernia Committee for appointment to responsible Komsomol work."
Pavel took leave of the district where he had worked for the past year. There were two items on the agenda of the last meeting of the Party District Committee held before his departure: 1) Transfer of Comrade Korchagin to membership in the Communist Party, 2) Endorsement of his testimonial upon his release from the post of Secretary of the Komsomol District Committee.
Lisitsyn and Lida wrung Pavel''s hand on parting and embraced him affectionately, and when his horse turned out of the courtyard onto the road, a dozen revolvers fired a parting salute.

Chapter Five
The tramcar crawled laboriously up Fundukleyevskaya Street, its motors groaning with the effort. At the Opera House it stopped and a group of young people alighted. The car continued the climb.
"We''d better get a move on," Pankratov urged the others, "or we''ll be late for sure."
Okunev caught up with him at the theatre entrance.
"We came here under similar circumstances three years ago, you remember, Genka? That was when Dubava came back to us with the ''Workers'' Opposition''. A grand meeting! And tonight we''ve got to grapple with him again!"
They had presented their passes and been admitted into the hall before Pankratov replied:
"Yes, history is repeating itself on the very same spot."
They were hissed to silence. The evening session of the conference had already begun and they had to take the first seats they could find. A young woman was addressing the gathering from the rostrum. It was Talya.
"We''re just in time. Now sit quiet and listen to what wifie has to say," Pankratov whispered, giving Okunev a dig in the ribs.
". . .It''s true that we have spent much time and energy on this discussion, but I think that we have all learned a great deal from it. Today we are very glad to note that in our organisation Trotsky''s followers have been defeated. They cannot complain that they were not given a hearing. On the contrary: they have had every opportunity to express their point of view. As a matter of fact they have abused the freedom we gave them and committed a number of gross violations of Party discipline."
Talya was nervous; you could tell by the way she kept tossing back a lock of hair that fell forward over her eyes as she spoke.
"Many comrades from the districts have spoken here, and they have all had something to say about the methods the Trotskyites have been using. There are quite a number of Trotskyites at this conference. The districts deliberately sent them here to give us another opportunity to hear them out at this city Party conference. It is not our fault if they are not making full use of this opportunity. Evidently their complete defeat in the districts and cells has taught them something. They could hardly get up at this conference and repeat what they were saying only yesterday."
A harsh voice from the right-hand corner of the hall interrupted Talya at this point:
"We haven''t had our say yet!"
Talya turned in the direction of the voice:
"All right, Dubava, come up here now and speak, we''ll listen to you."
Dubava stared gloomily back at her and his lips twisted in anger.
"We''ll talk when the time comes!" he shouted back. He thought of the crushing defeat he had sustained the day before in his own district. The memory still rankled.
A low murmur passed over the hall. Pankratov, unable to restrain himself, cried out:
"Going to try shaking up the Party again, eh?"
Dubava recognised the voice, but did not turn round. He merely dug his teeth into his lower lip and bent his head.
"Dubava himself offers a striking example of how the Trotskyites are violating Party discipline," Talya went on. "He has worked in the Komsomol for a long time, many of us know him, the arsenal workers in particular. He is a student of the Kharkov Communist University, yet we all know that he has been here with Shumsky for the past three weeks. What has brought them here in the middle of the university term? There isn''t a single district in town where they haven''t addressed meetings. True, during the past few days Shumsky has shown signs of coming to his senses. Who sent them here? Besides them, there are a good number of other Trotskyites from various organisations. They all worked here before at one time or another and now they have come back to stir up trouble within the Party. Do their Party organisations know where they are? Of course not."
The conference was expecting the Trotskyites to come forward and admit their mistakes. Talya, hoping to persuade them to take this step, appealed to them earnestly. She addressed herself directly to them as if in comradely, informal debate:
"Three years ago in this very theatre Dubava came back to us with the former ''Workers'' Opposition''. Remember? And do you remember what he said then: ''Never shall we let the Party banner fall from our hands.'' But hardly three years have passed and Dubava has done just that. Yes, I repeat, he has let the Party banner fall. ''We haven''t had our say yet!'' he just said. That shows that he and his fellow Trotskyites intend to go still further."
"Let Tufta tell us about the barometer," came a voice from the back rows. "He''s their weather expert."
To which indignant voices responded:
"This is no time for silly jokes!"
"Are they going to stop fighting the Party or not? Let them answer that!"
"Let them tell us who wrote that anti-Party declaration!"
Indignation rose higher and higher and the chairman rang his bell long and insistently for silence. Talya''s voice was drowned out by the din, and it was some time before she was able to continue.
"The letters we receive from our comrades in the outlying localities show that they are with us in this and that is very encouraging. Permit me to read part of one letter we have received. It is from Olga Yureneva. Many of you here know her. She is in charge of the Organisational Department of an Area Committee of the Komsomol."
Talya drew a sheet of paper out of a pile before her, ran her eye over it and began:
"All practical work has been neglected. For the past four days all bureau members have been out in the districts where the Trotskyites have launched a more vicious campaign than ever. An incident occurred yesterday which aroused the indignation of the entire organisation. Failing to get a majority in a single cell in town, the opposition decided to rally their forces and put up a fight in the cell of the Regional Military Commissariat, which also includes the Communists working in the Regional Planning Commission and Educational Department. The cell has forty-two members, but all the Trotskyites banded together there. Never had we heard such anti-Party speeches as were made at that meeting. One of the Military Commissariat members got up and said outright: ''If the Party apparatus doesn''t give in, we will smash it by force.'' The oppositionists applauded that statement. Then Korchagin took the floor. ''How can you applaud that fascist and call yourselves Party members?'' he said, but they raised such a commotion, shouting and banging their chairs, that he could not go on. The members who were disgusted by this outrageous behaviour demanded that Korchagin be given a hearing, but the uproar was repeated as soon as he tried to make himself heard. ''So this is what you call democracy!'' he shouted above the din. ''I''m going to speak just the same!'' At that point several of them fell on him and tried to drag him off the platform. There was wild confusion. Pavel fought back and went on speaking, but they dragged him off the stage, opened. a side door and threw him onto the stairway, his face was bleeding. After that, nearly all the members left the meeting. That incident was an eye-opener for many. ..."
Talya left the platform.
Segal, who had been in charge of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Gubernia Party Committee for two months now, sat in the presidium next to Tokarev and listened attentively to the speeches of the delegates. So far the conference had been addressed exclusively by young people who were still in the Komsomol.
"How they have matured these past few years!" Segal was thinking.
"The opposition is already getting it hot," he remarked to Tokarev, "and the heavy artillery has not yet been brought into action. It''s the youth who are routing the Trotskyites."
Just then Tufta leapt onto the platform. He was met by a loud buzz of disapproval and a brief outburst of laughter. Tufta turned to the presidium to protest against his reception, but the hall had already quieted down.
"Someone here called me a weather expert. So that is how you mock at my political views, Comrades of the majority!" he burst out in one breath.
A roar of laughter greeted his words. Tufta appealed indignantly to the chairman:
"You can laugh, but I tell you once again, the youth is a barometer. Lenin has said so time and again."
In an instant silence reigned in the hall.
"What did Lenin say?" came voices from the audience.
Tufta livened up.
"When preparations were being made for the October uprising Lenin issued instructions to muster the resolute working-class youth, arm them and send them together with the sailors to the most important sectors. Do you want me to read you that passage? I have all the quotations down on cards." Tufta dug into his portfolio.
"Never mind, we know it!"
"But what did Lenin say about unity?"
"And about Party discipline?"
"When did Lenin ever set up the youth in opposition to the old guard?"
Tufta lost the thread of his thoughts and switched over to another theme:
"Lagutina here read a letter from Yureneva. We cannot be expected to answer for certain excesses that might occur in the course of debate."
Tsvetayev, sitting next to Shumsky, hissed in fury: "Fools barge in. . . ."
"Yes," Shumsky whispered back. "That idiot will ruin us completely."
Tufta''s shrill, high-pitched voice continued to grate on the ears of his hearers:
"If you have organised a majority faction, we have the right to organise a minority faction."
A commotion arose in the hall.
Angry cries rained down on Tufta from all sides:
"What''s that? Again Bolsheviks and Mensheviks!"
"The Russian Communist Party isn''t a parliament!"
"They''re working for all sorts of factionists, from Myasnikov to Martov!"
Tufta threw up his arms as if about to plunge into a river, and returned an excited rapid-fire:
"Yes, we must have freedom to form groups. Otherwise how can we who hold different views fight for our opinions against such an organised, well-disciplined majority?"
The uproar increased. Pankratov got up and shouted:
"Let him speak. We might as well hear what he has to say. Tufta may blurt out what the others prefer to keep to themselves."
The hall quieted down. Tufta realised that he had gone too far. Perhaps he ought not to have said that now. His thoughts went off at a tangent and he wound up his speech in a rush of words:
"Of course you can expel us and shove us overboard. That sort of thing is beginning already. You''ve already got me out of the Gubernia Committee of the Komsomol. But never mind, we''ll soon see who was right." And with that he jumped off the stage into the hall.
Tsvetayev passed a note down to Dubava. "Mityai, you take the floor next. Of course it won''t alter the situation, we are obviously getting the worst of it here. We must put Tufta right. He''s a blockhead and a gas-bag."
Dubava asked for the floor and his request was granted immediately.
An expectant hush fell over the hall as he mounted the platform. It was the usual silence that precedes a speech, but to Dubava it was pregnant with hostility. The ardour with which he had addressed the cell meetings had cooled off by now. From day to day his passion had waned, and after the crushing defeat and the stern rebuff from his former comrades, it was like a fire doused with water, and now he was enveloped by the bitter smoke of wounded vanity made bitterer still by his stubborn refusal to admit himself in the wrong. He resolved to plunge straight in although he knew that he would only be alienating himself still further from the majority. His voice when he spoke was toneless, yet distinct.
"Please do not interrupt me or annoy me by heckling. I want to set forth our position in full, although I know in advance that it is no use. You have the majority."
When at last he finished speaking it was as if a bombshell had burst in the hall. A hurricane of angry shouts descended upon him, stinging him like whiplashes.
"Shame!"
"Down with the splitters!"
"Enough mud-slinging!"
To the accompaniment of mocking laughter Dubava went back to his seat, and that laughter cut like a knife-thrust. Had they stormed and railed at him he would have been gratified, but to be jeered at like a third-rate actor whose voice had cracked on a false note was too much.
"Shumsky has the floor," announced the chairman.
Shumsky got up. "I decline to speak."
Then Pankratov''s bass boomed from the back rows.
"Let me speak!"
Dubava could tell by his voice that Pankratov was seething inwardly. His deep voice always boomed thus when he was mortally insulted, and a deep uneasiness seized Dubava as he gloomily watched the tall, slightly bent figure stride swiftly over to the platform. He knew what Pankratov was going to say. He thought of the meeting he had had the day before with his old friends at Solomenka and how they had pleaded with him to break with the opposition. Tsvetayev and Shumsky had been with him. They had met at Tokarev''s place. Pankratov, Okunev, Talya, Volyntsev, Zelenova, Staroverov and Artyukhin had been present. Dubava had remained deaf to this attempt to restore unity. In the middle of the discussion he had walked out with Tsvetayev, thus emphasising his unwillingness to admit his mistakes. Shumsky had remained. And now he had refused to take the floor. "Spineless intellectual! Of course they''ve won him over," Dubava thought with bitter resentment. He was losing all his friends in this frenzied struggle. At the university there had been a rupture in his friendship with Zharky, who had sharply censured the declaration of the "forty-six" at a meeting of the Party bureau. And later, when the clash grew sharper, he had ceased to be on speaking terms. Several times after that Zharky had come to his place to visit Anna. It was a year since Dubava and Anna had been married. They occupied separate rooms, and Dubava believed that his strained relations with Anna, who did not share his views, had been aggravated by Zharky''s frequent visits. It was not jealousy on his part, he assured himself, but under the circumstances her friendship with Zharky irritated him. He had spoken to Anna about it and the result had been a scene which had by no means improved their relations. He had left for the conference without telling her where he was going.
The swift flight of his thoughts was cut short by Pankratov.