434
BORIS PILNYAK
the period of War Communism
ll
and they had elected Ivan
Ozhogov as their chairman. On the straw beside the board which
served them as a table three of the ragged crew lay resting.
Ozhogov squatted down beside them, shivered a little as one
does when warming up after being in the cold, and placed
the
money and the piece of pie on the table.
"They didn't weep?" asked one of the ragged men.
"No, they didn't weep," replied Ozhogov.
They were all silent for a while.
"Your turn to
go,
comrade Ognev," Ozhogov said.
Two more men with matted beards and moustaches crawled
into the clay interior of the underground and, in all their ragged
poverty, slumped on the bare earth, placing some money and
bread on the boards. Ognev, about forty years of age and an
old man already, who was lying stretched out where it was dark-
I
est and warmest, crawled up to the board, counted the money
and climbed out of the underground. The rest remained lying or
sitting in silence, except one of the new arrivals who remarked
that they would have to load the barge with logs first thing in "
the morning. Before long Ognev returned with bottles of vodka.
Then the ragged crew moved to the board, pulled out their mugs
and sat down in a circle. Comrade Ognev poured a round of
vodka; they clinked their mugs and drained them in silence.
"Now I shall speak," Ozhogov declared. "There were the
brothers Wright, and they decided to fly into the sky, and they
perished, crashing to earth after falling from the sky. They
perished, but their cause was not abandoned; men reached for
the sky and grasped it, and men are flying now, comrades,
th~y
are flying above the earth like birds, like eagles! Comrade Lenin
perished like the Wright brothers. In our town I was the first
chairman of the Soviet executive committee. In twenty-one
everything came to an end. The only real communists left in the
11. The short period (1917-1921) preceding N.E.P. during which there was
an attempt at the vigorous application of communist principles.
