436
BORIS PILNYAK
asleep
in
their subterr.anean shelter next to the furnace. They
slept
all
in
a heap, the head of one resting in the lap of another,
and rags were their only covering. The last to fall asleep was their
chairman Ivan Ozhogov. He had lain for a long time with a
sheet of paper near the mouth of the furnace. He lay on his
stomach, with the sheet spread on the ground. Licking the point
of his pencil, he tried to write verse. "We raised a world . . ."
he wrote and crossed it out. "We lighted a world ..." he wrote
and crossed it out. "You who warm your thievish hands," he
wrote and crossed it out. "You, be ye lackeys or lunatics," he
wrote and crossed it out. The right words did not come. He fell
asleep, dropping his head on the scribbled sheet of paper. Here
slept the communists who answered the call of War Communism
and who had been disbanded in nineteen hundred and twenty–
one, men of arrested ideas, madmen and drunkards who in their
underground refuge and in their labor of unloading barges and
sawing timber, had created for themselves a strict brotherhood,
a strict communism, men who possessed nothing for themselves,
neither money nor belongings nor wives- their wives had left
them to their dreams, their madness and their alcohol. It was
very stifling in the underground, very hot and very bare.
Midnight descended on the town, as turgid and as black as
the history of these parts.
At midnight, Stepan, the younger of the two antique–
dealers, stopped Katerina on the staircase leading to the second
floor, touched her shoulders, which were as strong as a horse's,
felt them with his drunken hand and said in a low voice:
"Go and tell your sisters .. . you know ... we'll do it again.
They
should find a place, tell them. . .."
Katerina stood there meekly and meekly whispered back:
"Very good. I'll tell them."
Downstairs at that minute Yakov Karpovich was unfolding
his theory of civilization to Pavel Feodorovich. · On the round
table in the sitting-room stood a glass and bronze frigate which
had been specially adapted as a receptacle for liquor; dispensed
