THE LEVERS
407
some chance placards and slogans, a list of the members of the kol–
khoz with a monthly record of the number of workdays put in, a
fragment of an old wall newspaper and an empty all-black slate
divided into two equal parts by a white line. On one half was
written in chalk "black," on the other half-"red."
"You know they brought sugar again to the kolkhoz shop a
couple of days ago," said the storehouse keeper, Sergei Shchukin, the
youngest of those present, in whose dress a citified appearance was
already to be noted. He wore a shirt with a tie. From the breast
pocket of his jacket a fountain pen and a comb protruded.
"Someone let you in on it, eh?" slyly asked a third person of
those seated at the table, a stout, somewhat bloated man missing his
left arm, with a bedraggled tarpaulin raincoat-apparently of war–
time vintage-thrown about him.
"No one let me in on it. Mikola himself sent a woman around
to my house with about two kilograms, saying we'd settle later."
"And you took it?"
"I did.
If
you don't, you can sit all your life without sugar.
You, too, would have taken it."
"Well, he won't send
you
any, Piotr Kuz'mich!" Tsipyshev said
laughing in his beard, and screwing up his eyes in a sideward glance
at the one-armed man. "He's mad at you. But Sergei is in good with
him," he said turning to Shchukin, "Sergei didn't remove him from
his storehouse post, even though he took his place."
Sergei Shchukin had just recently been an ordinary kolkhoznik.
On entering the Party a month before, he began to talk about the
fact that all commanding positions in the kolkhoz should be filled
by Communists, and that it was simply embarrassing now for
him
not to advance to a better job. He met with agreement.
It
was re–
membered that the kolkhoz storehouse keeper had already been
spoken to several times for stealing and Shchukin was put into the
storehouse. At the scheduled general meeting no one saw any reason
to object to this decision. Shchukin bought himself a fountain pen
and began to wear a tie. And his predecessor went to work in the
kolkhoz shop.
It
was about him that there was now talk.
"As far as taking the sugar goes, I took it," said Shchukin after
some thought, "but where is the justice of it, after all? Where does
the sugar go, where's the soap, where is everything?" After these
