MAHOGANY
449
"You've come, you've come," he whispered, pressing his
trembling hands to his trembling breast.
He gave his nephew a seat on an upturned wheelbarrow.
'They've kicked you out?" he said jubilantly.
"Kicked me out of where?" asked Akim.
"Out of the Party," said Ivan.
"No."
"No? They haven't?" Ivan asked again and a note of sad–
ness crept into his voice, but he added cheerfully:
"Well, they haven't done it yet, but they will sooner or later.
All the Leninists and all the Trotskyists will go. They'll all be
kicked out!"
Ivan Karpovich now went into a delirium and in
his
de–
lirium he spoke about his commune, about his having been the:
first chairman of the executive committee of the local Soviet,
about those awesome years that had gone never to return, about
how he had been cast off by the Revolution and was now a pil–
grim among men, enjoining them to weep, remember and love;
he spoke again of his commune with its brotherhood and equal–
ity. Communism, he affirmed, was above all a matter of love,
of solicitude for others, of friendship, fellowship and labor done
in
common. Communism meant the renunciation of material
I
things and true communism was love and, above all, respect for
one's fellow men. The neat little man shivered in the wind and
fingered the collar of his jacket with his thin, trembling hands.
The yard of the brickworks proclaimed havoc and destruction.
The engineer Akim Skudrin was flesh of the flesh of Ivan Ozho–
gov . . . beggars and tramps, wandering cripples and vagabond
I
monks, the feeble-minded and the halt and the lame, prophets
and seers and holy madmen- these were the leaven of life in
the Holy Russia which has gone forever, a brotherhood in Christ
which prayed for the world. The man who stood before the
ert–
gineerAkim was a beggar and an outcast, a holy fool of Soviet
Russia who prayed for the world, for justice and for corluTluhisrn:·
Uncle Ivan was
p~obably
deranged. His particular point of lun-
