[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

seaweed that looked like wild grasses growing under water.
We enjoyed our bathe all the more because we knew our old friend Nikita was washing himself near
by!
Sasha burst into the room when the three of us, fresh from our bathe, were eating the okroshka that
our landlady had made for us out of strong ice-cool kvass. Flushed with excitement, his face and hands
begrimed with oil, Sasha greeted Nikita as if he had parted with him only the day before.
"Did you see us flying?" he panted.
"We did, we did, Sasha, old chap! I must admit I didn't think you had it in you," Nikita replied with a
wink at us.
Sasha was up in arms at once.
"Who hadn't! ... When we've tested the engine properly we'll be flying to Nogaisk or Genichesk.
We're going to make a propaganda flight. Rudenko said so himself. And I'm going to be flying mechanic.
Yes, I am... Rudenko wouldn't let any of the other chaps assemble the engine with him except me..."
"Congratulations, Sasha. And I believe you'll be flying farther than Nogaisk one of these days. Now
you've started it, keep on climbing and never stop!" said Nikita.
A WONDERFUL NIGHT
The iron that our friends in Podolia had collected was unloaded.
The sun was still high in the sky when after finishing our dinner and resting a little we gathered round
the pile-driver and on the instructions of the pile-driver man started dragging over pieces of old
road-building machines, greasy bed-plates from unknown machines of the last century, and even a
broken rusty press for making unleavened bread, which Nikita said had been found in the yard of an old
synagogue.
The hardest job was to drag the heavy iron bed-plate of the printing-machine under the pile-driver.
We sweated and strained and even the old furnace men came out to help us.
At last the operator closed the gates of the enclosure and we ran back out of the way.
Then Tolya set the winch in motion. A creaking steel cable hauled the heavy ram to the top of the
winch. It hung poised for a moment clearly outlined against the pink-blue of the evening sky, then Tolya
pulled a lever and the ram swept down with a crash. The huge metal pear had to be raised several times
to bombard the scrap-metal before the massive bed-plate cracked apart.
"Hurrah!" Tolya shouted, abandoning the lever and rubbing his greasy hands with delight. The worst
was over.
When we entered the enclosure, we discovered in place of the old machines a heap of shattered
metal. Good, coarse grained iron glittered where it had broken. Tolya picked up a chunk of bed-plate
and looked at the break.
"Good iron!" he said to Nikita. "There's not much graphite in it, but plenty of phosphorus and silicon.
This kind of iron melts like butter, and it lasts a long time when it's cast."
And Tolya lifted the lump of iron on his right hand as if to test his strength. Now he was not a bit like
the immaculate secretary whose appearance had given me such a shock at our first meeting.
To prevent the Komsomol iron being mixed up with the general supply, Zakabluk roped off a special
enclosure for it. We carried the heavy lumps of metal into the enclosure, and when the contents of all
three trucks were piled in a heap, Zakabluk hung up a notice on the rope: "Iron for Komsomol Reapers."
Already I could see the yellow fields of wheat waving above the Dniester, and the reapers that we
had made with our own hands sailing across them like ships on a golden sea...
Turunda took over the job of the foundry's Party secretary Flegontov, who had been sent to
Leningrad by the management on business. Every day I would ask Turunda's advice on how best to get
our chaps keen on the job, how to make them reliable helpers of the Party in all things.
With the simple, practical advice of a Bolshevik and experienced production worker Turunda
directed our youthful enthusiasm towards concrete achievement. He knew just when and how to give his
advice. After a talk with him I could see the weak spots in our work. I learnt to understand Turunda's
merest hint and he, in his turn, directed the Komsomol members in such a way as to give full scope to
their initiative.
The first is always the worst. A week after my argument with the chief engineer, a second issue of the
wall newspaper appeared. Grisha Kanuk was doing famously.
A tall brawny chap in a leather apron and goggles stood at the controls of a crane-operated pouring
ladle. A stream of iron flowed from the lip of the ladle writing letters that made up the title of our
newspaper: Young Foundry Man. The fiery title at once caught the attention of the foundry workers,
young and old.
All the articles had been neatly typed out in the management office by Kolya Zakabluk, who had
written two of them himself.
In an article about the economy drive our time-keeper went round the foundry as attentively as if it
was his own property.
"Neither the shop storekeepers, nor Fedorko, nor the chief engineer Andrykhevich," Kolya wrote,
"are paying due attention to the Party's call for economy. Has the chief engineer thought how much space
is being wasted round the unfinished blast-furnace? Yet all we have to do is to clear away the sand and
scrap and it would make a fine place to set up the moulding machines that have been awaiting repair for
over a year in the foundry stores... And how many tampers with broken wedges are lying about the
foundry! Yet, when we run short of tampers, foreman Fedorko always sends up to RIP for new ones.
The tool-makers waste expensive metal making new tampers for us. Wouldn't it be simpler and just as
efficient to put new wooden wedges on the iron handles?"
Zakabluk discovered many striking examples of this kind. Without mincing his words he accused the
management of wasting graphite, sulphite liquor, and molasses in the fettling shop. And he did not merely
pick on shortcomings, he called on the workers to fight for every drop of iron, for every handful of the
coarse sand which was brought to us from a long distance away, for every cracked mould-box which
could be patched up and used without recasting.
In his article "The Soft-Heartedness of Foreman Fedorko" Zakabluk "emery-papered" the shop
foreman for his lenient attitude towards slackers and bad workers. Zakabluk told the bald truth. He
wrote that a bad worker had only to invite the foreman to a family wedding, or ask him to be godfather at
a christening and Fedorko would be ready to turn a blind eye to all his blunders. "If those slackers won't
change their ways," Zakabluk wrote, "the foreman ought to clear them out of the foundry."
I signed my article "Vasil Mallet." I had liked that word ever since I had started at the factory-training
school. It was a mallet that the moulders used to shake up the model before drawing it out of the sand
moulds. And I wanted to act like a mallet in shaking up the lazy and complacent people who were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]