Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

Pimukin was a partisan.—This was probably not a lie.

Not some green or yellow partisan, but a genuine red partisan.—This was probably not a lie either.

In the center of Birinsky Village with its ninety-seven households ran a thoroughfare where goats and pigs walked during the deserted daytime hours.
A short way up the hill to the left stood the village soviet building.
Red placards were pasted on the weather-beaten wooden panels whose grain had been raised by years of snow exposure.

When Birinsky Village was finally organized as a collective farm and came to belong to a single tractor center along with another collective farm ten versts away, the small hilltop village soviet building grew crowded, as if heaved up by the village’s surging class tensions.

In front of the village soviet’s carriage porch beneath its old, slightly tilted roof, Young Communist League member Nikita stood with one hand thrust into the belt of his peasant shirt and the other vigorously scratching his carrot-red head.

The villagers gazed at the scene from the thoroughfare or watched it from the bench beneath the large elm tree growing closer to the village soviet, feeling a particular way.
Some spat on the ground.
Some quietly took out loose tobacco from the frayed light-blue pockets of their peasant shirts, propped their elbows on their knees, and rolled the tobacco with their large, rake-like fingertips without looking toward Nikita,

"Hmm... Well now..."

someone muttered under their breath.

The transition to a collective farm was truly a monumental event, and Birinsky Village saw the establishment of various committees.
Young Communist League member Nikita was one of the collective farm membership eligibility screening committee members.
To put it simply, they were property inspection committee members.
Kulaks.
Middle peasants.
Poor peasants.
Only middle and poor peasants could join the Kolkhoz.

Kamibrokhov Village, located thirty versts away, was a settlement encircled by dense fir forests.
The house of Nikiforov—who had previously owned a dyeing factory in the town there—was searched during the investigation into the collective farm organization, yielding three silver samovars and a total of three hundred fifty yards of silk fabric.
There was a rumor that eight pairs of brand-new winter boots had also been found.

Pravda and the Peasant Newspaper arrived from Moscow to Ignat Ignatovich.
It had been clearly reported in the Peasant Newspaper.
The people of Birinsky Village,

“Damn it!”
“Devils!”
“For years they’d been sucking up all the sweet juice without a care.”

“Ptooey!” they spat on the ground.
Nikiforov had not only hidden three silver samovars in the barn’s hay.
In truth, it had come to light that he’d kept six horses and seven head of cattle.

He wasn’t some fool like the Dmitry couple who’d been crushed in the neighboring village’s liquidation of the rich.
He hadn’t made them clomp around his house to show off.
He’d quietly lent everything to Kamibrokhov’s poor peasants, plied the village soviet members with cognac, and gotten away with it.

“Isn’t that terrifying, Marusha? At his place, out of those three hundred fifty yards of silk fabric, ninety yards apparently rotted.”

The large-framed Agusha, wearing a peach-colored cloth, spoke to the widow Marusha at the village communal well. Marusha was thirty-five, had lost her husband last year, and had three small children. She was barefoot, attaching buckets to both ends of a carrying pole while vigorously retorting:

“There’s nothing scary about that! Let it rot, let it rot! What’s 250 yards of silk? I’d rather have four or five more hands working the fields than three hundred yards of silk.”

And, laughing with her white teeth glinting,

“In our village too, there’s probably about two yards of silk rotting away somewhere,”

she said.

Agusha sighed and slowly turned the large well’s windlass.
And she remained silent.
When the village was officially made into a collective farm, Agusha’s husband returned from the village soviet meeting and said nothing.

Agusha prepared the samovar and placed bread before the sturdy-bodied Grigory. And after pouring a cup of hot tea into a saucer, silently blowing on it and finishing it, she said:

“Why’re you being so curt? …You dissatisfied or somethin’? The village… becomin’ a collective farm…”

Grigory stared at his wife with a drill-like gaze,

“Where’s the benefit for us?”

he said shortly from within his beard.

“Shut up.”

Agusha paused for a moment.

“But ain’t our Petya a Pioneer?” she said.

“What does that have to do with anything?!”

“But there’s nothin’ here that’d make us lose out.”

Agusha—whose heart condition kept her cheeks perpetually pale—spoke earnestly, a faint blush coloring her face.

“Didn’t that man from Collective Farm Central say it too? That stuff like a single cow or chicken—them small things—don’t need givin’ to the farm. We got three cows right here at home…”

“D-d-don’t... s-s-start!”
“Understood?”

Grigory did not hit his wife, but Agusha began to suspect her husband.

One afternoon, when Nikita—a Young Communist League member—led three property inspection committee members into view beyond the backyard fence hung with withered sunflowers and a clay pot, Agusha felt an uneasy, unpleasant mood rise within her. Unconsciously, she spat on the ground and wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

Agusha watched suspiciously from afar as her elderly husband walked and talked with the committee members through the house and yard, then stood pressing some document against a pillar while laboriously writing his name on it with a licked pencil.

In the evening, Petya—the son from the previous wife—returned from school in the neighboring village.
Under the lit lamp, parent and child clustered around the large ceramic soup pot, taking turns dipping their wooden spoons into the cabbage soup.
Agusha said to Petya,

“I checked today.”

She said.

Petya was thirteen.
Stuffing bread into his mouth and pouring hot shchi into it while slumped over,

“And then?” he said.

Agusha could not explain the feelings in her heart and merely shrugged her shoulders.

“That was all,” she answered.

Grigory scooped the shchi into his wooden spoon a tiny bit at a time, caught it with a piece of bread held in his left hand, and ate slowly, slowly, with a stern face, occasionally chewing on garlic.
He ate as though savoring each cabbage leaf—plucked one by one from his own arable land—with deliberate care.
Agusha again said to Petya,
“Why does Pimukin have to stick his nose into everything?”
“What did he do?”

He went and tagged along with the committee members.
"When Nikita entered the barn, he—acting like some supervisor or chairman—shouted from outside the fence, ‘That’s right!"
“That’s right!”
“‘Yeah, gotta do it!’ he shouted, shaking his head and butting in.”

Petya, in an annoyed manner,

“Don’t mind Pimukin,” he said.

He was out of his mind.

“……Someone… someone said that Pimukin being a partisan was all made up. They say he just deserted, hid deep in the woods, killing rabbits and people to survive.”

Petya, however, no longer answered Agusha and spread out a lithographed picture on the empty part of the table. Agusha, with both elbows planted on her stomach and pressing down, gazed at the face of Stalin—thick-haired, in a high-collared uniform, puffing on a pipe.

With his boots still on, Grigory lay sprawled on the bench beneath the stove.
Lying sprawled out, he glanced sideways at the picture.

“How much’s that worth?”

“Three kopeks.”

Petya, holding the unfurled picture, made to leave.

“Where you goin’?”

“‘Down with Illiteracy!’”

On the opposite side of the village soviet building, beside a small pond, stood a wooden church resembling a wayside chapel. During the 1926 old calendar Easter celebration, a rope had been fastened to the cross atop the roof, and the village's Pioneers and Komsomol members, laughing as they joined forces,

One!
Two!

One!
Two!

And they pulled the rope from above the ground.
All around, the entire village watched—even the dogs, their hind legs splashing in the pond as they gazed upward.
The cross toppled over under the spring sun, then slid clattering down the roof.

At that moment, Ilinka, a female Young Communist League member who had come from a neighboring village,

“There!
Just like that!”

Peering through the viewfinder, she bustled about the area, then snapped the shutter with a crisp click.

“Got it!”

She swiftly waved one hand toward the village crowd.

In *The Anti-Religionist*, a report on the incident was published two months later by the Birinsky Village rural correspondent.
The photograph did not appear.

Ilinka—her face redder than usual and exuding a faintly youthful body odor—exclaimed—

“But I did exactly as it was written!”

She showed everyone the fifteen-kopek pamphlet titled *For Photography Enthusiasts* and the dry plates.

Pimukin gazed over Nikita’s shoulder at the dry plate, where only a pitch-black murkiness floated as if fumigated by soot. And then, before his own wrinkled, sickly yellow face of indeterminate age, he groaned while shaking his fist.

“There! There! This is your new culture!”

“Shut up.”

Ilinka surged toward Pimukin’s face like a sharp wind.

“I failed.
But I tried it with my own hands.
I tried.
What have *you* tried doing?”

Young Communist League member Nikita took Ilinka’s exposed arm—round and warm with a mole—and pulled her firmly to the side.
Nikita knew that if Pimukin so much as started pulling a paper from the inner pocket of his *rubakha*, he wouldn’t be able to escape for a full hour.

A red flag was erected on the church roof in place of the cross.
That autumn, the Revolution Anniversary Celebration demonstration in Birinsky Village began in front of this club.
The "Down with Illiteracy!" night school and the rural youth education night school began to be held there.

Petya was Nikita’s assistant in "Down with Illiteracy!"

II

At the edge of Birinsky Village flowed a river.
When summer came，on this side of the embankment lush with grass，the village women would bathe；a bit upstream on the other side，the village men would do the same.

Under the white night, the Russian moon was white, and the grass was blue.
The naked human bodies looked beautiful.

Through the grass leading to the embankment ran a narrow path—as though trampled by dogs—cutting diagonally leftward. Beyond it stood a single log cabin. Take that cabin on May Day: the moss and mud packed between its logs had crumbled away. From a crack in the entrance door hung a long strip of faded red cloth. It was meant to be a red flag.

To find Pimukin, though, coming to this cabin of his proved futile. He always loitered around the village soviet at the village center. Or clung to some committee member wandering about another part of the village.—

That day was unbelievably fine.

From the eaves of the village soviet came the drip-drip, drip-drip of snowmelt water falling incessantly, splattering the filthy mud.
The snow across the sunlit areas swelled up from the spring warmth.
Water flowing from beneath the snow, mirroring the cloudless sky, rushed past their feet.
In fur coats, sweat broke out from the balmy warmth.

The men and women of Birinsky Village, with eyes like horses annoyed by their winter-grown manes, lined up in front of the village soviet, gazing at the pale sky and listening to the sound of dripping rain.
It was Collective Farm registration day.

They didn’t speak much.
The newly arrived Collective Farm secretary was busily filling out forms in the room to the left upon entering.
The line continued up to that desk, and when the person sitting on the chair finished and stood up still holding their hat, those outside also sluggishly moved forward a step or two.

Of course, in such a situation, the only one who could have no role whatsoever was Pimukin alone.
He was walking around the line, going to the side of the secretary’s desk, placing his hands on his hips, and peering down with feigned solemnity at the writing process.

The widow Marusha, tucking her youngest child inside her coat, called out to Pimukin in a cheerful voice from the line.

“Hey, old man!”
“What’ve you done now?”
“Stop wandering around and get in line properly.”

Pimukin brusquely thrust open the front of his tattered goatskin coat.

“None of your damn business.”
“The Collective Farm ain’t some general store’s pickled cucumbers.”
“For me, they’ve always got a spot saved without waiting in line—got it?”
“That’s the damn state for you!”

“The state?… Hmph!”
“Lunatic!”

Cockroaches exist in every kitchen.
The cantankerous Grigory, when his turn came and he tried to sit in the chair, shoved aside Pimukin—who stood beside him with his bulky figure—as though brushing off a bug.

“Don’t get in the way.”

“Well, well! Just like they say—you’re nothing but a dark-souled mud-stomping peasant—”

“And what the hell are you?”

Young Communist League member Nikita stood up on the other side of the desk.

“Comrade Grigory.”
“Don’t waste any more time!”

As the sun set, the early spring temperature dropped sharply, the sound of snowmelt ceased, and with the darkness, the mud froze.
The registration line finally ended.
The secretary set down his violet-ink pen under the lamp and was taking a smoke break when Pimukin approached the desk with the gait of someone returning home.

Kolkhoz Soviet Chairman Ignat Ignatovich was finishing putting away the documents.

"What do you want?"
"Old man."

"Alright now it's my name!"
"A former partisan like me—ain't no way the Collective Farm ain't lettin' me in."

A man from the Central Committee—wearing a black leather half-coat and matching hat—said in a low voice:
"Who is this?"

he asked Ignat Ignatovich.
Ignat Ignatovich stroked his long beard while,

“As you are aware… our village still has all sorts of people… The Civil War left its mark on every part of a man’s body.”

“That’s true.”

Pimukin, awkwardly raising his elbow, pulled out that familiar scrap of paper from the back pocket of his peasant shirt and cut in from the side.

“There’s still a Kolchak bullet lodged in my fifth rib.—But that’s nothing special.
Hell—even Lenin’s bones got bullets in ’em.
……This here’s my documents.”

The man from the Central Committee spread out the document with his fingertips—its creases frayed, the typewritten violet ink blurred—and examined it.
There were ten documents in total.
Some were hastily scribbled in pencil.
On some, the names of village committee members from the War Communism era were written in red ink.

They proved.
Pimukin had once been an elementary school janitor.
At another time, he had been a food carrier for the Red Guards.
And at one time, Pimukin had also fought as a Red partisan near Altai.

——Hmm.

With a gloomy expression, the man from the Central Committee stacked the documents back as they were and silently pushed them toward Pimukin.

“Could I... take a look at those too?”

With a suspicious expression, Pimukin looked at the young man wearing a hunting cap with his overcoat collar turned up.

“Where you from?”

The young man answered in a tone that suggested it was obvious.

“From town.”

Persistent, Pimukin asked again in the same tone.

“What do you do?”

“...I write.”
“You get it?”
“I’m a journalist.”

Pimukin stared intently at the young man’s hat and glasses from straight on, scrutinizing them,

“What’s that s’posed to prove?”

he said.

“A young’un comin’ to our place to get a little smarter before headin’ back—ain’t a bad mindset.”

Pimukin spitefully—slowly—put the documents back into the back pocket of his rubashka just as they were, said goodbye only to Ignat Ignatovich, and left.

III

┌────────────┐

│Long Live the Collective Farm!!! │

│Long Live the New Rural Life!!! │

└────────────┘

The placard glowed red, swaying like a sheer veil toward the morning sun.
It was a village road between fields not yet plowed.

The Birinsky Village Pioneers, who had been marching with the placard, came to a halt at the village border.
Fifteen children clustered together and gazed intently at the horizon.

——…Don’t see it.

——…It isn’t coming.

Natasha, with her braided hair hanging down and the tips tied with red cloth, said in a thin, almost worried voice.

“——It ain’t broken… I… I’m scared.”

Then the children gripped the placard, put strength into their eyes, and began staring at the horizon.
There were only white clouds.

The morning sun pinned their shadows firmly at their feet.

"—It’s here!"

While tumbling down the roadside embankment, Petya shouted.

"—They’re here!"

"Hooray!"
"Aaaaaah!"

"Look!"
"Look!!"

Where soft white clumps of spring clouds glistened，a huge black tractor appeared.
A crowd sent from the neighboring village had gathered around，and the tractor arrived!

One tractor!

Two tractors!!

The Pioneers sprinted.
The red placard crumpled and twisted.

Rumbling the earth and vibrating their steel frames, the tractors came straight toward the Pioneers—toward Birinsky Village.
All around them stretched endless fields, fields.

When they entered the village and reached the front of the village soviet, the two tractors were surrounded by people from the neighboring village and our own—so crowded that only a single engineer gripping the steering wheel high up could be seen.

Even those who weren’t actively pleased about the collective farm couldn’t bear to stay sitting at home. When the engineer descended from his high perch with a solemn expression and shook hands earnestly with Ignat Ignatovich, the young people involuntarily shouted “Ura!” The old women fumbled hurriedly to make the sign of the cross over their chests, tears glistening in their eyes.

In front of the village soviet adorned with fir branches, Ignat Ignatovich stood alongside two engineers and others to deliver his speech.

“Now then—the machinery has arrived,” declared Ignat Ignatovich to the villagers. “Along with this machinery begins our new endeavor as Soviet farmers. The machinery—you understand—belongs neither to you peasants nor to me.” He paused, letting his gaze sweep across the crowd. “It belongs to all members of our collective farm—no, to every Soviet farmer across this land!”

Pimukin fidgeted like a mad dog that day, uncharacteristically agitated. He pressed himself against Ignat’s side as they faced the throng. At every pause in the chairman’s speech, he shook his shaggy head and muttered commentary into the air between them.

“It’s high time the peasants caught on.”
“Hah.”

Young Communist League member Nikita, his face flushed all the way to his hairline, stood out in the open beside the tractor and gave a speech.

“Children!
You understand, don’t you?
The machinery is a new weapon of production.
It is the weapon of our proletarian class!
Would we hand over weapons to our enemies?
We won’t hand them over!
It’s the same principle.
We must not hand over the machinery to kulaks or their lackeys.
Understood?!”

“We got it!”
“We know!”
Several voices answered Nikita’s speech.

When night fell, a bonfire was lit in the plaza below the village soviet where the tractors were parked.
In every house in Birinsky Village that night, people found their attention drifting toward this plaza.

Petya finished eating his porridge and stepped outside, leaving his brooding father behind.
Around the low bonfire in the plaza, five or six people had gathered.
Nikita.
Nina.
Vashka was among them.
Vashka was also a Young Communist League member like Nikita—the village shepherd.
Scowling, he poked at the bonfire with his whip handle.
But why was everyone acting so strangely silent—or rather, why were they all acting so strange?
Petya peered through to the fire's opposite side.
Unconsciously, his gaze rose to Nikita's face.
Nikita feigned ignorance.
There was Pimukin!

He stuck out feet clad in tattered boots toward the bright fire, pulled hay from somewhere, and lay down on it. Sausages, black bread, a battered tin kettle and such were at Pimukin's feet.

What business did Pimukin have here?

Petya thought—so that was it.
A fearful yet gallant feeling surged through him as suddenly the darkness beyond the bonfire thickened into depth, the stars in the sky receding into remoteness.

He realized Nikita, Vashka, Nina and the rest were keeping watch over both tractors and Pimukin.
Pimukin was no ordinary man.
Whenever he spoke of villagers at all, he sneered them as dirt peasants.
Pimukin had always been spiteful through and through—
stories of those who’d wreck tractors to sabotage the collective farm weren’t things Petya had heard just once or twice himself.

In the dim, reddish-yellow light of the bonfire, a portion of the tractor’s large wheel—with its wide, wave-shaped teeth—appeared to float.
The tips of Pimukin’s tattered boots were visible.

A considerable amount of time passed.

Pimukin abruptly stood up and disappeared into the darkness.
Nikita hurried from the opposite side toward the tractor.

Before long, Pimukin returned to the bonfire.
Nikita returned whistling.

Pimukin was no longer sleeping; he pushed the tin kettle toward the bonfire and began gnawing on a sausage in one hand while tearing into black bread.

Petya and the young ones silently watched it from this side of the bonfire.
Pimukin did not even attempt to speak.
Vashka swung his whip with a whoosh,

“Hey, you! Let’s liven things up a little!” he said.

Vashka and Nina brought an armful of hay and an accordion.

Nikita sat cross-legged and played the accordion.
Vashka whistled interjections, and Nina cracked sunflower seeds between her front teeth while—

“Granny, use the soap!”

“Don’t be a fool!
Did ya scrub your mama’s belly with soap?”

“Old man, use the toothbrush!”

“Pipe down, you little brat!
If you’ve got those teeth—”

“Heh! Quit yer bellyachin’!”

As they sang, everyone laughed.

“Here, Petya.”

Nina poured sunflower seeds into his palm.

The bonfire flames swayed, and each time, Nina’s garish orange skirt appeared to brightly draw near, then retreat into the distance.
Pimukin now lay on his stomach on the other side of the bonfire.

IV

At the Collective Farm Soviet Assembly, Pimukin,

“Comrade Chairman!
“That’s not ninety-two percent—it’s ninety-two point two!”

With that, he corrected the sowing area report from the front row in an instructive manner.
Someone snapped angrily,

“Shut up!”

a voice shouted from the audience.
But Ignat Ignatovich, who stood before the long table draped in red cloth, tinkled the rattling bell around his neck—*tinkle, tinkle, tinkle*—

“Comrades, Collective Farm members!”
“That’s correct.”
“It’s correct.”
“In our case, this spring’s sowing area reached 92.2 percent of the planned acreage.”

he added with a smile.

"I sure hope next year we’ll smash through with results so big I’ll forget what the numbers even were!"

Everyone rejoiced, laughing and clapping.

The collective farm of Birinsky Village had safely completed its second sowing.
It had already been a full year since Petya and Nikita had stood guard over the tractors and spent the night on the hay.

That night’s assembly finally deliberated on the collective farm nursery establishment proposal, which had been submitted since last autumn, as an actionable plan.

For several hours, each spoke without reserve.
Then, a committee member stood up and read aloud.

1. The nursery shall be placed in the cottage of the kulak Bukhanov, who was expelled from the village.
2. Twenty rubles shall be allocated monthly through the cooperation of the collective farm and the village soviet sanitation committee, and the doctor from Brokhov Village shall be invited once every seven days.
3. Two nursery caregivers: candidates shall be the widow Marusha and Young Communist League member Nina.
4. Each collective farm member shall contribute at minimum one pillow and one bedsheet for the nursery, regardless of whether they have children to send there.

1. Collective farm members who entrust their children to the nursery shall send along, to the extent possible, items that the child had previously used, such as a cradle, a box, or a bed.

1. The management of the organized collective farm nursery shall be the economic responsibility of the Collective Farm Sanitation Committee.

End of Resolutions

Clap, clap, clap.

We shall now vote.
Those in favor of establishing the nursery under the above conditions, raise your hands!

Pimukin, raising his own hand high, spun around as he stood up and looked toward the audience.
Everyone felt uneasy.
But Agusha, who had absentmindedly raised her hand, suddenly made a flustered face and poked her husband sitting beside her with her elbow.

It's a vote—

“──…”

“Why didn’t you raise your hand?”

“──…”

Grigory stubbornly kept silent, lowered his eyes, and tugged at his beard with one hand from his crossed arms.
While Agusha alone kept her hand raised with a bewildered look, Ignat’s raspy voice rang out again.

“Those opposed to establishing the nursery under these terms—raise your hands!”

Arms still crossed, Grigory remained.

“With an absolute majority, the nursery proposal stands approved.”
“Another victory achieved at Bolshevik speed!”

“Ignat Ignatovich!”
“Where we s’posed to haul these pillows and sheets?”
“Straight to Bukhanov’s cottage?”

“No—first collect everything at the Sanitation Committee’s office.”

A shuffling crowd began dispersing along the unlit village road.
Walking briskly beside her husband toward their cottage, Agusha untied her woolen headscarf while—

“How disgraceful!” she said in an unusually rough tone. “You’re part of the Collective Farm too, ain’t ya? Why didn’t you raise your hand?”

Grigory answered as he took off his shoes and adjusted the hemp cloth wrapped around his foot. “What’s the need? To me, Petya’s thirteen.”

“If that’s how you’re gonna talk, then Ignat Ignatovich’s left high ’n dry... But even at our place... it ain’t like we couldn’t have little ones someday.” ——

――What nonsense!
Hand over the cows.
Hand over the horses.
Hand over the plows.
In the end—hand over the pillows.
"Where's anything of mine?!"
"Where are my own things?!"

"Don’t raise your voice… Instead, we’re using other people’s tools to work—could you ever buy a damn tractor that big yourself?"
*Heh heh heh.*

“Enough talk!”
*Hmph!*
“Since Soviet power says women equal men now, why don’t you go become a delegate yourself!”
“Neither law nor husbands chain women down anymore.”

Agusha sat gazing at the dark window with her large eyes, one hand pressed to her cheek, then spoke mournfully.

“I just don’t get why you keep sayin’ there’s no benefit—none at all.”
“When my heart gave out last year—who got me to a doctor?”
“Wasn’t you.”
“The Collective Farm did.”
“Same with Blisha’s family.”
“Fifteen-year-old Grisha slaved year-round on Bukhanov’s fields—survived on Holy Mother’s water.”
“Now under the Collective Farm? They earn sixty rubles between them.”

Grigory suddenly jerked up his thickly bearded chin and struck the table with such force that even the plate resting there leapt up and slammed against it.

“Shut... up!”
“Understood?”
“Don’t say another damn word—I won’t have it.”
“Understood?”

Outside was a starry night, and the treetops of birch and linden trees were scenting the tender spring leaves into the night air.
Petya was sitting on the bench next to the village soviet with Nikita and a few unaffiliated children.

“Don’t get it wrong. We’re gathering at Bukhanov’s cottage from three o’clock the day after tomorrow. And we’ll all paint it together.”

“So, uh—what’s this paint like?”

“We saw it, I tell ya!”
“It’s like paste!”
“What kinda color’s that?!”
It was so vividly red.

“Nikita!”
“Nikita!”
“Are we painting the nursery bright red?”

“Huh? Not red—white.”
“…Alright, go home now!”
“Go home!”

As Petya was walking at the rear, Nikita, who had temporarily gone back to the building, caught up from behind.
And in a low voice,

“Did you see?”

he said.

“What…”
“Your father didn’t raise his hand during the resolution vote.”
“……Agusha too?”

Petya always called his father’s stepmother by her name only.

“Agusha had raised hers.”

Nikita groaned as he stretched his chest, used his hand to push the small brimless cap from his forehead to the back of his head, took a deep breath, and inhaled the thick, soft-scented night air.

His father might be thinking of leaving the Collective Farm.

After walking for a while, Petya said gravely.

*Hmm.*
Did I say that?

They don’t tell me anything.
They don’t say a word about it.

Agusha—what would you do if that happened? And first off—Petya—what would you do?

Petya walked straight along the spring night road in silence, his slender boyish frame moving forward.

V

When they went to paint the siding of Bukhanov’s cottage—the one designated for the nursery—for the second time, Lyolya the coward was there,

“I quit!”
“I’m not painting anymore.”

He shook his bowl-shaped head.

“Tomorrow, right?”

“Even if the rubashka gets dirty—Mom’ll beat me—so I quit.”

Petya,

“Then take off your rubashka!”

Taking the lead, he twisted around and peeled off his shrimp-brown rubashka from his back.
One after another, Lyolya finally took his off and painted.

The painting would be finished tomorrow.
Petya still had work to do.
He had to divide the children into groups and draw nineteen pictures of things like chickens, horses, sunflowers, and cats.
The nursery needed those kinds of pictures.

Petya took a shortcut with the rubashka he had taken off draped over his arm and entered through the kitchen door from the back fence.

At first, he thought a thief had broken in. Under the table lay scattered pieces of white torn cloth, and the lid of the large box in the corner had been left open. And more cloth had been dragged out.

When he slowly approached, from the dim shadow of the box—

“Who’s there?”

That was Agusha’s voice, but it sounded utterly drained, parched dry.

"What happened?!"

Agusha crawled out from the shadow of the box on her knees.
She remained sitting on the floor and let out a sigh,

"Isn’t your father here?"

she asked.
Then, she let out another sigh and began to spill tears.
Petya knelt beside Agusha.

“What’s wrong?!”
“Huh?”
“Was it Dad? Did Father do it?”

“He nearly killed me.”

Agusha wiped her tears with the back of her hand and brushed away the hair clinging to her lips.
But no matter how much she wiped, the tears kept streaming down Agusha’s cheeks.

After lying dazed on the floor for a long time, Agusha slowly began to move her hands and gather the scattered cloth.

“Why he gets so angry at me—I just don’t get it,” she said. “I only tried to take some pillows and bedding to the nursery—and your old baby basket from when you were little—since there’s no one using them here.”

A purple bruise had formed on Agusha’s chin.
Petya looked at her bitterly.

“Father didn’t raise his hand during the resolution—that’s what happened.”

he said.

“Hey, Petya. You’re a Pioneer.”
“Honestly, just tell me straight, will you?”

After a while, Agusha said in her characteristically quiet, resolute tone.

“Am I the one who’s wrong? I just can’t help but see the good in Soviet power. I just can’t believe I was being fooled.”

Petya unconsciously took Agusha’s arm gently.

“Stand up. Agusha.”

he encouraged her.

“You’re the one who’s right. Father’s gotten old—he can’t grasp how the new society’s taking shape right here where we live.”

Petya felt much closer to the uneducated Agusha than to his father.
Lately, Father and Agusha often had terrible fights.
And they always did it when Petya wasn’t around.

“Just recently, when I borrowed a cart to earn some pocket money and pulled it, he threw a fit about the office taking thirty percent—did he hit you then too?”

Petya brought boiled potatoes to the table and asked while eating.

“Yes.”
“But back then, he only hit me three times.”

When Grigory returned, Petya was asleep on the bench beneath the pechka stove, wrapped in a blanket.

He was pretending to be asleep.

By and large, the nursery was popular.

“What something grand they’re putting up... They say in Ivanovo-Voznesensk there’s even a nursery with a proper bathhouse—you turn the faucet and hot water comes right out.”

“Well, not getting devoured by bedbugs alone is a relief for the little ones.”

Widow Marusha said to Agusha one day with a laugh.

“Agusha, listen! Yesterday that lunatic Pimukin brought a real nice feather pillow for the nursery—swiped it from who knows where... Just wait—any day now he’ll come demandin’ that pillow back...”

In the fields, wheat grew lush and green across several sulii of land; when the early summer wind blew over it, the stalks aligned their heads and rippled in dazzling waves.

The thick growth of wheat cultivated by tractors and sown by seed drills was clearly distinguishable at a glance from the fields worked with horse plows and hand-sowing.

The people of Birinsky went to bathe in the river at the edge of the village.
Beyond the embankment lay a field, where pale purple wild chrysanthemums and foxtail grasses sprouted their ears of grain amidst the weeds.
Beyond that lay the fields of Garusukii Village.
While slapping his bare chest, Nikita gazed at the fields from the embankment,

“How’s this any different from wasteland…” he said.

So that’s how it is.
Those Garusukii bastards—last year too, even with Stalin’s speech to rally them, they didn’t form a collective farm… What scheme are they banking on to keep holding out like this…

This autumn too, mark my words—they’ll raise a stink about wheat procurement again.
They just can’t shake off the grubby hoarders’ ways.

In Garusukii Village, there was one small brick factory. Under the Five-Year Plan, Soviet brick demand had increased tremendously. The factory used natural drying and operated only during the summer months. The Pioneers from surrounding villages organized a shock brigade and set off to tour and assist at the brick factory.

Petya was in the first group from Birinsky Village.
He pressed fifty bricks into molds, and then, following the leader’s orders, everyone washed the workers’ barracks’ floor together.

Barefoot, with his red collar fluttering and dragging a long shadow in the western sun as he came along the road back to Birinsky, Petya unexpectedly spotted his father coming toward him from the opposite direction.

On the single road, they gradually approached each other from both directions.
Walking along the village road thick with summer dust, Father wore a long formal rubakha that reached to his knees.
He was wearing long boots.
On his shoulders, he carried a birch box and a hemp sack.
And on his large, frightening face turned toward the western sun—a face that looked feverish—agonized sweat streamed down.
Petya saw it.
But Grigory, for his part, walked on as if he didn’t even notice there was a person there.
He advanced with his eyes fixed on the ground—

Petya instinctively took a quiet step to the side of the road.
This was no ordinary matter.
Where—where are you going⁉

A voice welled up from Petya’s chest to his throat，but his mouth wouldn’t move.
Yesterday，Father had said.

“Hmph!”
“I’ve got no land.”
“I have no use for a son either．… Land and sons—they’re all the state’s now…”

While Petya stood frozen at the roadside，Father—sweat dripping，looking like a beast—approached and passed by，step by step disappearing into the distant western sun，heading back the way Petya had come．

The corner of Petya’s downy-haired lips began to tremble as if he were about to cry.

Six

A crowd had gathered.

In front of his own house was a crowd.
When Petya saw the crowd from afar, the corner of his lips quivered again.

Something bad was happening here too.

Petya trudged forward slowly.

“Hey, isn’t that Petya!”

“That’s him!”
“Quit dawdling—get over here!”
“Hey! Hurry up!”
“Hurry!”

When Petya was pushed forward by the villagers who had opened their ring and stood before his house’s entrance, there at the base of a pillar sat Agusha, her body half-supported by Marusha the widow.

Marusha looked up at Petya and said urgently.

“Did you see your father?”

Someone from the circle said.

“Petya, stay strong! Your father ran off and left you and Agusha behind, but he’ll come back—Garusukii’s uncle scared him straight.”

All along the way, Petya had sensed it.
As if being shaken through a sieve, her entire body trembling violently, deathly pale Agusha muttered through clenched teeth.

“Your father’s gone.”
“But… well, that’s my fault, isn’t it?”

“What was I supposed to do? Your father hates the collective farm and even hit me. But I just can’t bring myself to think so badly of the collective farm… Is it my fault for staying on? I ain’t got no kin in Garusukii, and here’s my collective farm…”

Don’t you worry!

Petya said to the pitiful Agusha—who kept trembling without even crying properly—

“I’ll work here! This here’s my collective farm. Don’t you worry! Huh?”

“Look! What’s there for you to worry ’bout?”

Marusha said while hoisting Agusha’s torso and holding her up.

“C’mon, let’s get you inside to rest a bit now.”

As Agusha finally stood up and began to head inside, the collective farm members who had been gathered there started chattering noisily all at once.
Petya,

“Look!”
“The Soviet’s son and the wife’s whore!”
“I got no business with dissidents.”
“That’s enough!”
“Go feed yourselves with Garusukii’s wheat!”

The sound of Pimukin’s voice and,

“Don’t howl over others’ misfortune, Pimukin!”

They heard Vashka’s voice.

Agusha lay in a daze inside the house for two days. Then she went out to the collective farm office and began working in the nursery kitchen.

There was pure white painted paneling. On the window frames sat pots of geraniums bursting with pink blossoms, and in the two rooms’ spotless floors, children played divided by age.

Small hand towels hung in a neat row at a low height. Above them were pasted pictures of flowers, birds, horses, houses, and signposts. There were toothbrushes and cups. On the nursery’s opening day, the adults and children of Birinsky Village spent two hours touring just two such rooms.

The weather was splendid on fine days.
In the shade of the linden tree in the nursery's outer courtyard, baskets and cots of various shapes stood lined up.
Through the toddlers—their navels exposed as they gleefully kicked their legs atop these—Nina and Marusha moved about wearing white smocks and headscarves, their expressions sharper than mere observers as they laughed and chattered.

"Hey now, they put 'em down for naps right on schedule here at the nursery!"

While turning hay with pitchforks, the women of Birinsky Collective Farm conversed.

“Heh, heh, heh.
“It’s downright shameful how spotless that place is!”

“Well, hah—ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”

Agusha now saw daily at the nursery the rattan basket she had been beaten for.
The one being laid down there was eight-fingered Alyosha's youngest child.
Agusha was gradually growing accustomed to Grigory’s absence.

In the nursery courtyard, Agusha peeled potatoes.
Marusha, holding a child in one arm and changing its diaper while looking off into the distance,

“Oh, look, Agusha!”
“Pimukin plans on comin’ to see the nursery today.”

Marusha said.

“Where is he?”

“There!”
“Look.”
“He washed his rubashka and hung it out to dry.”

Six or seven birch trees grew clustered together.
Beside them was a small stream where a goose floated.
Pimukin sat there on the grass, half-naked in yellow.
On a birch branch hung Pimukin’s rubashka—its color indeterminate—like an old flag.

It was the day the doctor from Brokhov Village would come.
Marusha gazed for a while at Pimukin’s bare back visible in the distance,

“Pfft! You lunatic!”

Just like that, she started singing and briskly set about washing the children.

The day grew hot.
Agusha sat barefoot in the shade of the backyard apple tree and spread out the children’s undergarment mending work on her lap.

Because the doctor was coming, the basket beds were moved from the courtyard into the building.
Bees droned buzz after buzz through the fragrant, sweltering summer afternoon.

Agusha, startled by the clamorous voices, opened her eyes and looked around.
In the backyard, she was alone.
The commotion was at the nursery’s front.

“Hah… They’ve started up over there…”

When she rounded the side of the building and reached the entrance, Nina stood frozen in shock.
The doctor from Brokhov Village in white trousers was pressing his cheek and spitting on the ground.
And Pimukin was closely surrounded by five or six men.

“What happened?”
“Pimukin hit the Doctor!”
“He hit him?!” “Has he lost his mind?!”
“Quickly, go call Ignat Ignatovich!”
“Damn it! What kind of law says you can hit the Doctor?!”
“You’re possessed by the devil!”
“Look!”
“Get that bastard out of the village already!”

Pimukin shook his yellow, unsightly face, only his two eyes glaring as if embedded with shards of the sun from the sky.

Ignat Ignatovich came hurrying over with a limping half-run.
—The entire Collective Farm had come rushing in.
Some had shouldered scythes.
Some had come without letting go of their sickles.

“Bastard! What the hell’ve you done?!”

“I told ya so! Letting a guy like Pimukin into the Collective Farm—you thought that’d work out?!”

“Children!”
“Shut your mouths!”

Nikita shouted.

“Pimukin—is it true you hit the Doctor?”

Ignat Ignatovich grabbed Pimukin by the shoulder and asked.

“Hell yeah, I hit him!”
“Look!”
“Look!”
“The Doctor’s spitting blood-tinged spit.”

“Pimukin! Do you realize? In our village, doctors are pitifully few! We finally got one to come from Brokhov Village—and you go hit him? What were you thinking?! They’ll never come back now! You’ve robbed the Birinsky Collective Farm and Nursery of its doctor! Is this how an ex-partisan acts?”

“Ignat Ignatovich!”
“Smell this!”
“Smell this!”
“Smell the doctor’s mouth!”

Pimukin pressed Ignat with blazing eyes and urgent hands.

“Why?”

“Smell this!”

The doctor—his round, stout frame clad in a linen rubakha fastened with a green silk cord—turned toward Ignat of his own accord.

“Really, I can’t handle these villagers anymore.”

With that, he waved his hand and spat on the ground again. The motion made him stagger unsteadily. Ignat stared fixedly at the scene.

—Well…

He stroked his beard and turned toward the now densely gathered collective farm members.

“Comrades, Collective Farm members!”
“What’re we s’posed to do?”
“The Doctor showed up drunk to the nursery.”

“Listen up!”
“Y’think I didn’t go through hell gettin’ this nursery built?”
“Took a whole year—every last one of us draggin’ pillows an’ bedsheets from our houses—but we finally got ’er done.”

Pimukin, hemmed in by the crowd, contorted his ugly mug in thought and kept going.

“I’m just street trash.
“Nobody ever answers me straight.
“But… I don’t need no pillow.
“I’ll croak without no pillow.
“Let’s leave it to the little ’uns.
“The little ’uns gotta grow up tough here and become guardians for my tractor and the Soviet.
“This here’s the cleanest spot in all Birinsky Village.
“That’s what I say.
“Who the hell’s ever come here drunk?!
“Who’s ever stumbled into the nursery soused⁉”

A silent unease rippled through the crowd. Someone muttered in a low, earnest voice:

“That’s the honest truth.”

“Pfft! Doctor! Doctor!”

Pimukin bared his gums and shook his fist, tears spilling into the folds of his wrinkles.

“Look! The doctor came to the nursery drunk—where’s that supposed to be⁉”

Ignat Ignatovich approached the doctor—who stood off to the side rolling a cigarette—and said quietly:

“I’ll have you go home today.”

By the roadside under the blazing sun sat the two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage that had brought the doctor.
The people of Birinsky Village cleared a wide path and let the doctor and Ignat Ignatovich pass.
A few villagers spat on the ground.

Everyone stood there silently for a while without any particular reason.
Before long, they began to disperse one by one.

Pimukin sat on the step at the nursery entrance, cradling his head at Nina’s feet.
Petya walked in silence for a very long time, and when he came alongside the collective farm’s hay shed, he drew close to Nikita and said in a small voice:
“Nikita… That night when someone came to sabotage the tractors… It wasn’t Pimukin after all, was it?”
“Yeah.”
Young Communist League member Nikita stood rooted in place with a pensive expression, tugging at his carrot-colored bangs—but soon—

“—Alright!”

He perked up and said to Petya,
“Come on!
One more push—let’s get to it!”

Clang!

Clang-clang!

Clang!

Clang-clang!

The summer sky was a blue flame that burned unshaken.
While flinging wood chips toward sunflower roots in full bloom, Petya and Nikita struck their adzes into the timber.

Petya was naked.
Around his bare neck hung a Pioneer’s red neckerchief tied loosely—