Fyodor took his short-stemmed pipe out of his mouth and poked reflectively at the ash in the bowl with a cautious finger; the pipe was out.
A dense cloud of grey smoke from a dozen cigarettes hovered below the ceiling and over the chair where sat the Chairman of the Gubernia Executive Committee. From the corners of the room the faces of the people seated around the table were only dimly visible through the haze.
Tokarev, sitting next to the Chairman, leaned forward and plucked irritably at his sparse beard, glancing now and again out of the corner of his eye at a short, bald-headed man whose high-pitched voice went on endlessly stringing out phrases that were as empty and meaningless as a sucked egg.
Akim caught the look in the old worker's eye and was reminded of a fighting cock back in his childhood days in the village who had had the same wicked look in his eye just before pouncing on his adversary.
The Gubernia Party Committee had been in conference for more than an hour. The bald man was Chairman of the Railway Firewood Committee.
Leafing with nimble fingers through the heap of papers before him, the bald man rattled on: "..
.Under these circumstances it is clearly impossible to carry out the decision of the Gubernia Committee and the railway management. I repeat, even a month from now we shall not be able to give more than four hundred cubic metres of firewood. As for the one hundred and eighty thousand cubic metres required, well, that's sheer..." the speaker fumbled for the right word, "er... sheer utopia!" he wound up and his small mouth pursed itself up into an expression of injury. There was a long silence.
Fyodor tapped his pipe with his fingernail and knocked out the ashes. It was Tokarev who finally broke the silence.
"There's no use wasting our breath," he began in his rumbling bass. "The Railway Firewood Committee hasn't any firewood, never had any, and doesn't expect any in the future.... Right?"
The bald man shrugged a shoulder.
"Excuse me, Comrade, we did stock up firewood, but the shortage of road transport...." He swallowed, wiped his polished pate with a checkered handkerchief; he made several fruitless attempts to stuff the handkerchief back into his pocket, and finally shoved it nervously under his portfolio.
"What have you done about delivering the wood? After all, a good many days have passed since the leading specialists mixed up in the conspiracy were arrested," Denekko observed from his corner.
The bald man turned to him. "I wrote the railway administration three times stating that unless we had the proper transport facilities it would be impossible...."
Tokarev stopped him. "We've heard that already," he said coldly, eyeing the bald man with hostility. "Do you take us for a pack of fools?"
The bald man felt a chill run down his spine at these words.
"I cannot answer for the actions of counter-revolutionaries," he replied in a low voice.
"But you knew, didn't you, that the timber was being felled a long distance from the railway line?"
"I heard about it, but I could not bring the attention of my superiors to irregularities on a sector outside my province."
"How many men have you on the job?" the chairman of the trade union council demanded.
"About two hundred," the bald man replied.
"That makes a cubic metre a year for every parasite!" fumed Tokarev.
"The Railway Firewood Committee has been allotted special rations, food the workers ought to be getting, and look what you're doing? What happened to those two carriages of flour you received for the workers?" the trade union chairman persisted.
Similar pointed questions rained down on the bald man from all sides and he answered them in the harassed manner of a man trying to ward off annoying creditors. He twisted and turned like an eel to avoid direct answers, but his eyes darted nervously about him. He sensed danger and his cowardly soul craved but one thing: to get away from here as quickly as possible and slink off to his cosy nest, to his supper and his still youthful wife who was probably cosily whiling away the time with a Paul de Kock novel.
Lending an attentive ear to the bald man's replies, Fyodor scribbled in his notebook: "I believe this man ought to be checked up on properly. This is more than mere incompetence. I know one or two things about him.... Stop the discussion and let him go so we can get down to business."
The Chairman read the note and nodded to Fyodor.
Zhukhrai rose and went out into the corridor to make a telephone call. When he returned the Chairman was reading the resolution:
". . .to remove the management of the Railway Firewood Committee for downright sabotage, the matter of the timber workings to be turned over to the investigation authorities."
The bald man had expected worse. True, to be removed from his post for downright sabotage would raise the question of his reliability in general, but that was a mere trifle. As for the Boyarka business, he was not worried, that was not his province after all. "A close shave, though," he said to himself, "I thought they had really dug up something. ..."
Now almost reassured, he remarked as he put his papers back into his portfolio: "Of course, I am a non-Party specialist and you are at liberty to distrust me. But my conscience is clear. If I have failed to do what was required of me that was because it was impossible."
No one made any comment. The bald man went out, hurried downstairs, and opened the street door with a feeling of intense relief.
"Your name, please?" a man in an army coat accosted him.
With a sinking heart the baldhead stammered: "Cher. . . vinsky...."
Upstairs as soon as the outsider was gone, thirteen heads bent closer over the large conference table.
"See here," Zhukhrai's finger jabbed the unfolded map. "That's Boyarka station. The timber felling is six versts away. There are two hundred and ten thousand cubic metres of wood stacked up at this point: a whole army of men worked hard for eight months to pile up all that wood, and what's the result? Treachery. The railway and the town are without firewood. To haul that timber six versts to the station would take five thousand carts no less than one month, and that only if they made two trips a day. The nearest village is fifteen versts away. What's more, Orlik and his band are prowling about in those parts. You realise what this means? Look, according to the plan the felling was to have been started right here and continued in the direction of the station, and those scoundrels carried it right into the depths of the forest. The purpose was to make sure we would not be able to haul the firewood to the railway line. And they weren't far wrong — we can't even get a hundred carts for the job. It's a foul blow they've struck us. The uprising was no more serious than this."
Zhukhrai's clenched fist dropped heavily onto the waxed paper of the map. Each of the thirteen clearly visualised the grimmer aspects of the situation which Zhukhrai had omitted to mention.
Winter was in the offing. They saw hospitals, schools, offices and hundreds of thousands of people caught in the icy grip of the frost; the railway stations swarming with people and only one train a week to handle the traffic.
There was deep silence as each man pondered the situation.
At length Fyodor relaxed his fist.
"There is one way out, Comrades," he said.
"We must build a seven-verst narrow-gauge line from the station to the timber tract in three months. The first section leading to the beginning of the tract must be ready in six weeks. I've been working on this for the past week. We'll need," Zhukhrai's voice cracked in his dry throat, "three hundred and fifty workers and two engineers. There is enough rails and seven engines at Pushcha-Voditsa. The Komsomols dug them up in the warehouses. There was a project to lay a narrow-gauge line from Pushcha-Voditsa to the town before the war. The trouble is there are no accommodations in Boyarka for the workers, the place is in ruins. We'll have to send the men in small groups for a fortnight at a time, they won't be able to hold out any longer than that. Shall we send the Komsomols, Akim?" And without waiting for an answer, he went on: "The Komsomol will rush as many of its members to the spot as possible. There's the Solomenka organisation to begin with, and some from the town. The-task is hard, very hard, but if the youngsters are told what is at stake I'm certain they'll do it."
The chief of the railway shook his head dubiously.
"I'm afraid it's no use. To lay seven versts of track in the woods under such conditions, with the autumn rains due and the frosts coming..." he began wearily. But Zhukhrai cut him short. "You ought to have paid more attention to the firewood problem, Andrei Vasilievich. That line has got to be built and we're going to build it.

We're not going to fold our hands and freeze to death,are we?"

The last crates of tools were loaded onto the train. The train crew took their places. A fine drizzle was falling. Crystal raindrops rolled down Rita's glistening leather jacket.
Rita shook hands warmly with Tokarev. "We wish you luck," she said softly.
The old man regarded her affectionately from beneath his bushy grey eyebrows.
"Yes, they've given us a peck of trouble, blast 'em," he growled in answer to his own thoughts.
"You here had better look to things, so that if there's any hitch over there you can put a bit of pressure on where it's needed. These good-for-nothings here can't do anything without a lot of red tape. Well, time I was getting aboard, daughter."
The old man buttoned up his jacket. At the last moment Rita inquired casually: "Isn't Korchagin going along? I didn't notice him among the boys."
"No, he and the job superintendent went out there yesterday by handcar to prepare for our coming."
At that moment Zharky, Dubava, and Anna Borhart with her jacket thrown carelessly across her shoulders and a cigarette between her slender fingers, came hurrying down the platform toward them.
Rita had time to ask Tokarev one more question before the others joined them.
"How are your studies with Korchagin getting along?"
The old man looked at her in surprise.
"What studies? The lad's under your wing, isn't he? He's told me a lot about you. Thinks the world of you."
Rita looked sceptical. "Are you quite sure, Comrade Tokarev? Didn't he always go to you for a proper explanation after his lessons with me?"
The old man burst out laughing. "To me? Why, I never saw hide or hair of him."
The engine shrieked. Klavicek shouted from one of the carriages:
"Hey, Comrade Ustinovich, give us our daddy back! What'd we do without him?"
The Czech was about to say something else, but catching sight of the three late-comers he checked himself. He noticed the anxious look in Anna's eyes, caught with a pang her parting smile to Dubava and turned quickly away from the window.

The autumn rain lashed the face. Low clouds, leaden-hued and swollen with moisture, crawled over the earth. Late autumn had stripped the woods bare; and the old hornbeams looked gaunt and downcast, their wrinkled trunks hidden under the brown moss. Remorseless autumn had robbed them of their luxuriant garments, and they stood there naked and pitiful.
The little station building huddled forlornly in the midst of the forest. A strip of freshly dug earth ran from the stone freight platform into the woods. Around this strip men swarmed like ants.
The clayey mud squelched unpleasantly underfoot. There was a ringing of crowbars and a grating of spades on stone over by the embankment where the men were furiously digging.
The rain came down as if through a fine sieve and the chill drops penetrated the men's clothing.
The rain threatened to wash away what their labour had accomplished, for the clay slid down the embankment in a soggy mass.
Soaked to the skin, their clothing chill and sodden, the men worked on until long after dark.
And with every day the strip of upturned earth penetrated farther and farther into the forest.
Not far from the station loomed the grim skeleton of what had once been a brick building.
Everything that could be removed bodily, torn out or blasted loose had long since been carried off by marauders. There were gaping holes in place of windows and doors; black gashes where stove doors had once been. Through the holes in the tattered roof the rafters showed like the ribs of a skeleton.
Only the concrete floor in the four large rooms remained intact. At night four hundred men slept on this floor in their damp, mud-caked clothing. Muddy water streamed from their clothes when they wrung them out at the doorway. And the men heaped bitter curses on the rain and the boggy soil. They lay in compact rows on the concrete floor with its thin covering of straw, huddling together for warmth. The steam rose from their clothing but it did not dry. And the rain seeped through the sacks that were nailed over the empty window frames and trickled down onto the floor. It drummed loudly on the remnants of sheet metal roofing, and the wind whistled through the great cracks in the door. In the morning they drank tea in the tumbledown barracks that served for a kitchen, and went off to their work. Dinner, day after day with sickening monotony, consisted of plain boiled lentils, and there was a daily allowance of a pound and a half of bread as black as coal.
That was all the town could provide. The job superintendent, Valerian Nikodimovich Patoshkin, a tall spare old man with two deep lines at his mouth, and technician Vakulenko, a thickset man with a coarse-featured face and a fleshy nose, had put up at the station master's house.
Tokarev shared the tiny room occupied by the station Cheka agent, a small, volatile man named Kholyava.
The men endured the hardships with dogged fortitude, and the railway embankment reached farther into the forest from day to day.
True, there had been some desertions: at first nine, and a few days later, another five.
The first major calamity occurred a week after the work started, when the bread supply failed to arrive with the night train.

Dubava woke Tokarev and told him the news. The secretary of the Party group swung his hairy legs over the side of the bed and scratched himself furiously under the armpit.
"The fun's beginning!" he growled and began hastily to dress.
Kholyava waddled in on his short legs.
"Run down to the telephone and call the Special Department," Tokarev instructed him, and turning to Dubava added, "and not a word to anybody about the bread, mind."
After berating the railway telephone operators for a full half hour, the irrepressible Kholyava succeeded in getting Zhukhrai, the assistant chief of the Special Department, on the line, while Tokarev stood by fidgeting with impatience.
"What! Bread not delivered? I'll find out who's responsible for that!" Zhukhrai's voice coming over the wire had an ominous ring.
"What are we going to give the men to eat tomorrow?" Tokarev shouted back angrily.
There was a long pause; Zhukhrai was evidently considering some plan of action. "You'll get the bread tonight," he said at last. "I'll send young Litke with the car. He knows the way. You'll have the bread by morning."
At dawn a mud-spattered car loaded with sacks of bread drove up to the station. Litke, his face white and strained after a sleepless night at the wheel, climbed out wearily.
Work on the railway line became a struggle against increasing odds. The railway administration announced that there were no sleepers to be had. The town authorities could find no means of shipping the rails and engines to the railway job, and the engines themselves turned out to be in need of substantial repairs. No workers were forthcoming to replace the first batch who had done their share and were now so completely worn out that there could be no question of detaining them.
The leading Party members met in the tumbledown shed dimly lit by a wick lamp and sat up late into the night discussing the situation.
The following morning Tokarev, Dubava and Klavicek went to town, taking six men with them to repair the engines and speed up the shipment of the rails. Klavicek, who was a baker by trade, was sent as inspector to the supply department, while the rest went on to Pushcha-Voditsa.
The rain poured down without ceasing.

Pavel Korchagin pulled his foot out of the sticky slime with an effort. A sharp sensation of cold told him that the worn sole of his boot had finally parted from the uppers. His torn boots had been a source of keen discomfort to Pavel ever since he had come to the job. They were never dry and the mud that filtered in squelched when he walked. Now one sole was gone altogether and the icy mire cut into his bare foot. Pavel pulled the sole out of the mud and regarded it with despair and broke the vow he had given himself not to swear. He could not go on working with one foot exposed, so he hobbled back to the barracks, sat down beside the field kitchen, took off his muddy footcloth and stretched out his numb foot to the fire.
Odarka, the lineman's wife who worked as cook's helper, was busy cutting up beetroots at the kitchen table. A woman of generous proportions, still youthful, with broad almost masculine shoulders, an ample bosom and massive hips, she wielded the kitchen knife with vigour and the mountain of sliced vegetables grew rapidly under her nimble fingers.

Odarka threw a careless glance at Pavel and snapped at him:
"If it's dinner you're hankering after you're a bit early, my lad. Ought to be ashamed of yourself sneaking away from work like that! Take your feet off that stove.

This is a kitchen, not a bathhouse!"
The cook came in at that point.
"My blasted boot has gone to pieces," Pavel said, explaining his untimely presence in the kitchen.
The elderly cook looked at the battered boot and nodding toward Odarka he said: "Her husband might be able to do something with it, he's a bit of a cobbler. Better see to it or you'll be in a bad way. You can't get along without boots."
When she heard this, Odarka took another look at Pavel.
"I took you for a loafer," she admitted.
Pavel smiled to show that there were no hard feelings. Odarka examined the boot with the eye of an expert.
"There's no use trying to patch it," she concluded.
"But I'll tell you what I can do. I'll bring you an old galosh we've got lying around at home and you can wear it on top of the boot. You can't go around like that, you'll kill yourself! The frosts will start any day now!"
And Odarka, now all sympathy, laid down her knife and hurried out, returning shortly with a deep galosh and a strip of stout linen.
As he wrapped his foot, now warm and dry, in the thick linen and put it into the galosh, Pavel rewarded Odarka with a grateful look.

Tokarev came back from town fuming. He called a meeting of the leading Communists in Kholyava's room and told them the unpleasant news.
"Nothing but obstacles all along the line. Wherever you go the wheels seem to be turning but they don't get anywhere. Far too many of those White rats about, and it looks as if there'll be enough to last our lifetime anyway. I tell you, boys, things look bad. There are no replacements for us yet and no one knows how many there will be. The frosts are due any day now, and we must get through the marsh before then at all costs, because when the ground freezes it'll be too late. So while they're shaking up those fellows in town who're making a mess of things, we here have to double our speed. That line has got to be built and we're going to build it if we die doing it.
Otherwise it isn't Bolsheviks we'll be but jelly-fish." There was a steely note in Tokarev's hoarse bass voice, and his eyes under their bushy brows had a stubborn gleam.
"We'll call a closed meeting today and pass on the news to our Party members and tomorrow we'll all get down to work. In the morning we'll let the non-Party fellows go; the rest of us will stay.
Here's the Gubernia Committee decision," he said, handing Pankratov a folded sheet of paper.
Pavel Korchagin, peering over Pankratov's shoulder, read: "In view of the emergency all members of the Komsomol are to remain on the job and are not to be relieved until the first consignment of firewood is forthcoming. Signed R. Ustinovich, on behalf of the Secretary of the Gubernia Committee."
The kitchen barracks was packed. One hundred and twenty men had squeezed themselves into its narrow confines. They stood against the walls, climbed on the tables and some were even perched on top of the field kitchen.
Pankratov opened the meeting. Then Tokarev made a brief speech winding up with an announcement that had the effect of a bombshell:
"The Communists and Komsomols will not leave the job tomorrow."
The old man accompanied his statement with a gesture that stressed the finality of the "decision. It swept away all cherished hopes of returning to town, going home, getting away from this hole.
A roar of angry voices drowned out everything else for a few moments. The swaying bodies caused the feeble oil light to flicker fitfully. In the semidarkness the commotion increased. They wanted to go "home"; they protested indignantly that they had had as much as they could stand.
Some received the news in silence. And only one man spoke of deserting.
"To hell with it all!" he shouted angrily from his corner, loosing an ugly stream of invective. "I'm not going to stay here another day. It's all right to do hardlabour if you've committed a crime. But what have we done? We're fools to stand for it. We've had two weeks of it, and that's enough. Let those who made the decision come out and do the work themselves. Maybe some folks like poking around in this muck, but I've only one life to live. I'm leaving tomorrow."
The voice came from behind Okunev and he lit a match to see who it was. For an instant the speaker's rage-distorted face and open mouth were snatched out of the darkness by the match's flame. But that instant was enough for Okunev to recognise the son of a gubernia food commissariat bookkeeper.
"Checking up, eh?" he snarled. "Well, I'm not afraid, I'm no thief."
The match flickered out. Pankratov rose and drew himself up to his full height.
"What kind of talk is that? Who dares to compare a Party task to a hard-labour sentence?" he thundered, running his eyes menacingly over the front rows. "No, Comrades, there's no going to town for us, our place is here. If we clear out now folks will freeze to death. The sooner we finish the job the sooner we get back home. Running away like that whiner back there suggests doesn't fit in with our ideas or our discipline."
Pankratov, a stevedore, was not fond of long speeches but even this brief statement was interrupted by the same irate voice.
"The non-Party fellows are leaving, aren't they?"
"Yes."
A lad in a short overcoat came elbowing his way to the front. A Komsomol card flew up, struck against Pankratov's chest, dropped onto the table and stood on edge.
"There, take your card. I'm not going to risk my health for a bit of cardboard!"
His last words were drowned out by a roar of angry voices:
"What do you think you're throwing around!"
"Treacherous bastard!"
"Got into the Komsomol because he thought he'd have it easy."
"Chuck him out!"
"Let me get at the louse!"
The deserter, his head lowered, made his way to the exit. They let him pass, shrinking away from him as from a leper. The door closed with a creak behind him.
Pankratov picked up the discarded membership card and held it to the flame of the oil lamp.
The cardboard caught alight and curled up as it burned.

A shot echoed in the forest. A horseman turned from the tumbledown barracks and dived into the darkness of the forest. A moment later men came pouring out of the barracks and school building.
Someone discovered a piece of plywood that had been stuck into the door. A match flared up and shielding the unsteady flame from the wind they read the scrawled message: "Clear out of here and go back where you came from. If you don't, we will shoot every one of you. I give you till tomorrow night to get out. Ataman Chesnok."
Chesnok belonged to Orlik's band.

An open diary lies on the table in Rita's room.

December 2

"We had our first snow this morning. The frost is severe. I met Vyacheslav Olshinsky on the stairs and we walked down the street together.
" 'I always enjoy the first snowfall,' he said. 'Particularly when it is frosty like this. Lovely, isn't it?'
"But I was thinking of Boyarka and I told him that the frost and snow do not gladden me at all. On the contrary they depress me. And I told him why.
" 'That is a purely subjective reaction,' he said. 'If one argues on that premise all merriment or any manifestation of joy in wartime, for example, would have to be banned. But life is not like that.
The tragedy is confined to the strip of front line where the battle is being fought. There life is overshadowed by the proximity of death. Yet even there people laugh.

And away from the front, life goes on as always: people laugh, weep, suffer, rejoice, love, seek amusement, entertainment, excitement.'
"It was difficult to detect any shade of irony in Olshinsky's words. Olshinsky is a representative of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. He has been in the Party since 1917. He dresses well, is always cleanly shaven with a faint scent of perfume about him. He lives in our house, in Segal's apartment. Sometimes he drops in to see me in the evenings. He is very interesting to talk to, he knows a lot about Europe, lived for many years in Paris. But I doubt whether he and I could
ever be good friends. That is because for him I am primarily a woman; the fact that I am his Party comrade is a secondary consideration. True, he does not attempt to disguise his sentiments and opinions on this score, he has the courage of his convictions and there is nothing coarse about his attentions. He has the knack of investing them with a sort of beauty. Yet I do not like him.
"The gruff simplicity of Zhukhrai is far more to my taste than all Olshinsky's polished European manners.
"News from Boyarka comes in the form of brief reports. Each day another two hundred yards laid.
They are laying the sleepers straight on the frozen earth, hewing out shallow beds for them. There are only two hundred and forty men on the job. Half of the replacements deserted. The conditions there are truly frightful. I can't imagine how they will be able to carry on in the frost. Dubava has been gone a week now. They were only able to repair five of the eight engines at Pushcha-Voditsa, there were not enough parts for the others.
"Dmitri has had criminal charges laid against him by the tramcar authorities. He and his brigade held up all the flatcars belonging to the tram system running to town from Pushcha-Voditsa, cleared off the passengers and loaded the cars with rails for the Boyarka line. They brought 19 carloads of rails along the tram tracks to the railway station in town. The tram crews were only too glad to help.
"The Solomenka Komsomols still in town worked all night loading the rails onto railway cars and Dmitri and his brigade went off with them to Boyarka.
"Akim refused to have Dubava's action taken up at the Komsomol Bureau. Dmitri has told us about the outrageous bureaucracy and red tape in the tramcar administration.

They flatly refused to give more than two cars for the job.
"Tufta, however, privately reprimanded Dubava. 'It's time to drop these partisan tactics,' he said, 'or you'll find yourself in jail before you know it. Surely you could have come to some agreement without resorting to force of arms?'
"I had never seen Dubava so furious.
" 'Why didn't you try talking to them yourself, you rotten pen-pusher?' he stormed. 'All you can do is sit here warming your chair and wagging your tongue. How do you think I could go back to Boyarka without those rails? Instead of hanging around here and getting in everybody's hair you ought to be sent out there to do some useful work. Tokarev would knock some sense into you!'
Dmitri roared so loudly he could be heard all over the building.
"Tufta wrote a complaint against Dubava, but Akim asked me to leave the room and talked to him alone for about ten minutes, after which Tufta stamped out red and fuming."

December 3

"The Gubernia Committee has received another complaint, this time from the Transport Cheka. It appears that Pankratov, Okunev and several other comrades went to Motovilovka station and removed all the doors and window frames from the empty buildings. When they were loading all this onto a freight train the station Cheka man tried to arrest them. They disarmed him, emptied his revolver and returned it to him only after the train was in motion. They got away with the doors and window frames.
"Tokarev is charged by the supply department of the railway for taking twenty poods of nails from the Boyarka railway stocks. He gave the nails to the peasants in payment for their help in hauling the timber they are using for sleepers.
"I spoke to Comrade Zhukhrai about all these complaints. But he only laughed. 'We'll take care of all that,' he said.
"The situation at the railway job is very tense and now every day is precious. We have to bring pressure to bear here for every trifle. Every now and then we have to summon hinderers to the Gubernia Committee. And over at the job the boys are overriding all formalities more and more often.
"Olshinsky has brought me a little electric stove. Olga Yureneva and I warm our hands over it, but it doesn't make the room any warmer. I wonder how those men in the woods are faring this bitter cold night? Olga tells me that it is so cold in the hospital that the patients shiver under their blankets. The place is heated only once in two days.
"No, Comrade Olshinsky, a tragedy at the front is a tragedy in the rear too!"

December 4

"It snowed all night. From Boyarka they write that everything is snowbound and they have had to stop working to clear the track. Today the Gubernia Committee passed a decision that the first section of the railway, up to where the wood was being cut, is to be ready not later than January 1,1922. When this decision reached Boyarka, Tokarev is said to have remarked: 'We'll do it, if we don't croak by then.'
"I hear nothing at all about Korchagin. I'm rather surprised that he hasn't been mixed up in something like the Pankratov 'case'. I still don't understand why he avoids me."

December 5

"Yesterday there was a bandit raid on the railway job."

The horses tro............