Alexander Yashin
THE LEVERS*
In the evening in the kolkhoz office, as always, a kerosene
lamp was burning and a battery radio crackling. A program of
marches was on, though hardly audible. At
a:
rectangular pine table
four persons sat talking. The tobacco smoke was so thick that the
flame in the lamp barely flickered, as during a large meeting. It
seemed that even the radio was crackling because of
all
the smoke
in the hut. On the table there stood an t>arthenware pot for cigarette
butts. It was already full. From time to time fire flared up from a
cigarette tossed into the pot. Then the bearded livestock breeder
Tsipyshev would cover the pot with a fragment of broken plate
gl~
from the table top. Every time this was done someone cracked one
and the same joke: "Burn your beard, and the cows will stop being
afraid of you."
To which Tsipyshev invariably replied,
"If
they stop being
afraid, then maybe they'll increase the milk yield."
And everyone laughed.
They shook cigarette a:sh on the floor, on the windowsills, but
threw only butts into the pot.
They had been sitting long, talking unhurriedly-a little about
everything-and trustingly, without circumspection, like old
and
good friends.
Through the semi-darkness there peered from the timbered walls
*
ED. NOTE :
This story, by a young Soviet writer of fiction and poetry, appeared
in
Literary Moscow,
Vol. II, 1956, during the brief period of cultural liberaliza–
tion that followed the attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress. Now that
orthodoxy is again enforced, the story is virtually unobtainable in the Soviet
Union. It has figured prominently and repeatedly in official and semi-official
denunciations of "subversive" trends in literature.
