For the Good of the Cause (6 page)

“Very good,” the principal nodded, lost in his own thoughts. What worried him was that only a few trifling details remained to be done and that Khabalygin, who must have seen this two or three weeks ago, could easily have speeded things up and signed for the building. It almost looked as though Khabalygin was dragging his feet.

“On a quite different matter, Fyodor Mikheyevich: We’ve discussed the case of Yengalychev in the Committee. He has given us his word and we’re prepared to answer for him. So please restore his stipend on September first.” Lidia looked at him pleadingly.

“You’re always sticking up for them, aren’t you?” The principal shook his head and looked at her with his pale-blue eyes. “And what if he does it again?”

“No, no, he won’t,” she assured him. They had reached the top of the stairs and could see the other teachers and the school secretary.

“I hope you’re right.”

He went into his cramped office and sent for his assistant and the department heads. He just wanted their assurance that they were ready to start the new school year, come what may, and that they had already prepared everything without having to be told.

In all his years at the school, Fyodor had tried to run things to keep everything going with a minimum of intervention on his part. He had finished his studies before the war and couldn’t possibly keep up with all the latest developments in his rapidly changing field or with the specialists working under him. He was a modest man without personal ambition, and he had his own ideas about leadership. His idea of a leader was a man who, instead of following his own whims, settled things fairly by bringing together people who trusted one another and could work together harmoniously.

Fayina, the school secretary, came into the office. Very independent, and no longer young, she was wearing a colored kerchief tied under her chin. Its loose ends trailed behind her like a pennant as she walked. She handed the principal a diploma that needed his signature and opened a bottle of India ink.

“What’s this?” Fyodor asked blankly.

“Gomiozina’s diploma. You remember … she couldn’t take the exam because she was ill …”

“Yes, of course.”

He tried the pen and dipped it in the ink. Then he clasped his right wrist firmly in his left hand. And then he signed.

When he was wounded for the second time—that was in Transylvania—not only did his broken collarbone fail to heal properly, he also suffered severe shock. It had affected his hearing and his hands shook, so he always signed important papers in this manner.

An hour and a half later the crowd had gone. Those teachers who had to prepare experiments remained behind with their lab assistants. Students were thronging the school office to register their addresses. Lidia and the Committee members drew up their moving plan and got it approved by the principal and the department heads.

The principal was still sitting with the dean of students when Fayina, her kerchief flying, burst into the office and announced dramatically that two limousines were coming from the town, apparently heading for the school. The principal looked out of the window and saw that two cars—one blue-green, the other gray—were indeed approaching.

There could be no doubt about it. Some bigwigs coming to visit the school. He should really go down to meet them. But he wasn’t expecting anybody important, so he stayed where he was—at the open window on the second floor.

Big, white clouds were swirling across the sky.

The cars drew up to the entrance and out stepped five men in fedoras—two of them in the kind of green ones worn by the higher-ups in this town, the three others in light-colored ones. Fyodor immediately recognized the first man. It was Vsevolod Khabalygin, manager of the relay factory and hence nominally the “proprietor” of the new school building. He was a real big shot. By comparison Fyodor was a nobody, but Khabalygin had always been friendly toward him. Twice that morning Fyodor had tried to reach Khabalygin on the phone. He wanted to ask him to relent and let his building office sign for the new school and draw up a list of the work still to be done, but on both occasions he had been told that Khabalygin was out.

Fyodor had a sudden thought. Turning to the dean, who was standing there as tall and thin as a rail, he said:

“Grisha, maybe it’s a commission to speed things up. Wouldn’t that be great?”

And he hurried out to meet the visitors. The stem, brisk dean, of whom the students were very much afraid, followed after him.

But Fyodor had only got as far as the first-floor landing when he saw the visitors corning up the stairs, one after the other. First came Khabalygin. He was a snort man, still under sixty, but overweight. He had passed the 250-pound mark long ago, and he was suffering as a result. His hair was graying at the temples.

“Ah—good.” He stretched out his hand approvingly toward the principal. And as he reached the landing, he turned and said: “This is a Comrade from our Ministry in Moscow.”

The Comrade from the Ministry was a good deal younger than Khabalygin, but he was also putting on weight. He permitted Fyodor to hold the tips of three smooth, dainty fingers for a moment and then moved on.

Actually, for two years “our” Ministry had had nothing to do with the school, which now was under the local Economic Council.

“I tried to get you on the phone twice today,” Fyodor said to Khabalygin with a smile of pleasure and reached out to take him by the arm. “I was going to ask you …”

“And here,” Khabalygin went on, “is a Comrade from the Department of …” He mentioned the department by name, but in his confusion Fyodor didn’t catch it.

The Comrade from the Department was young, well-built, good-looking, and very well-dressed.

“And this,” Khabalygin continued, “is the Head of the Electronics Section from …” Khabalygin said where from, but while speaking he resumed climbing the stairs, so again Fyodor failed to catch the name.

The Head of the Electronics Section was a short, dark, polite man with a small black mustache.

And finally there was the Supervisor of the Industrial Department of the District Party Committee, whom Fyodor knew well. They exchanged greetings.

Not one of the five men was carrying anything.

The dean was standing stony-faced, straight as a soldier, next to the banister at the top of the landing. Some of them nodded to him; others didn’t.

Khabalygin managed to hoist his hefty bulk to the top of the stairs. Nobody could have walked next to him or passed him on the narrow staircase. After reaching the top he stood still, puffing and blowing. But his expression, always animated and forceful, discouraged any inclination to sympathize with him for the way in which, every time he walked or made a movement, he had to battle his large body, on which the layers of unlovely fat had been skillfully camouflaged by his tailors.

“Shall we go into my office?” Fyodor asked when he reached the top.

“Oh no, there’s no point in sitting around,” Khabalygin objected. “You go ahead and show us what you’ve got here. What do you say, Comrades?”

The Comrade from the Department pushed back the sleeve of his foreign raincoat, looked at his watch, and said:

“Of course.”

Fyodor Mikheyevich sighed. “Honestly, we just don’t know where to turn. We have to hold classes in two shifts. There aren’t enough places in the laboratories. Different types of experiments have to be carried out in the same room, so that we’re always having to put one batch of instruments away to make room for another.”

He looked from one to the other, speaking almost in a tone of apology.

“You do make it sound terrible,” Khabalygin said, and started to shake with either coughing or laughter—it wasn’t clear which. And the rolls of flabby fat hanging from his neck like an ox’s dewlap also shook. “It’s amazing how you’ve managed to stand it these seven years!”

Fyodor arched his fair, bushy eyebrows: “But we didn’t have so many departments then! And there were fewer students!”

“Oh well, lead on. Let’s take a look.”

The principal nodded to the dean as a signal that everything should be opened up, and he started to show the visitors around. They followed him without bothering to take off their hats and coats.

They went into a large room with shelves all around the walls, all crammed with equipment. A teacher, a girl lab assistant in a blue smock, and a senior student—it was Chursanov, the boy with the patched collar—were setting up an experiment. The room faced south and was flooded with sunlight.

“Well,” Khabalygin said brightly. “What’s wrong with this? It’s a beautiful room.”

“But you must understand,” Fyodor said with some annoyance, “that in this one room there are three laboratories, one on top of the other: theory of radio and aerials, transmitters, and receivers.

“Well, so what?” The Comrade from the Ministry turned his large, handsome head and said, also with some annoyance, “Do you think there’s more space between the desks in our Ministry after the latest reorganization? On the contrary, there’s less than ever.”

“These subjects are very closely related, after all.” Khabalygin, very pleased with himself at this idea, patted the principal on the shoulder. “Don’t act the pauper, Comrade. You’re not so badly off as all that!”

Fyodor threw him a puzzled look.

From time to time Khabalygin moved his lips and his fleshy jowls, as though he had just had a good meal but hadn’t yet had time to remove bits of food stuck between his teeth.

“What are these things for?” The Comrade from the Department was standing before some strange looking rubber boots with turned-down tops which looked big enough for a giant. He touched them with the sharply pointed toe of his shoe.

“Safety boots,” the teacher said quietly.

“What?”

“Safety boots!” Chursanov shouted in the impudent tone of one who has nothing to lose.

“Oh yes, of course,” the Comrade from the Department said and followed the others.

The Supervisor from the District Committee, who was-the last to leave the room, asked Chursanov: “But what are they for?”

“For when you repair a transmitter,” Chursanov replied.

Fyodor had meant to show them all the rooms, but the visitors passed some of them by and went into the lecture hall. On the walls there were charts of English verbs and various visual aids. Geometric models were piled high on the cabinet shelves.

The electronics expert counted the desks (there were thirteen) and, stroking his toothbrush mustache with two fingers, asked:

“How many do you have to a class? About thirty?”

“Yes, on the average …”

“That means you have less than three to a desk.”

And they continued their tour.

In the small television workshop there were about ten sets of various makes, some brand-new and some partly dismantled, standing on the tables.

“Do they work? All of them?” the Comrade from the Department asked, nodding at the sets.

“Those that are supposed to work all right,” a young, smartly dressed lab assistant said. He was wearing a sand-colored suit with some kind of badge in his lapel, and a loud tie.

Some instruction manuals were lying around on a table. The electronics expert glanced through them, reading out the titles to himself under his breath:

Tuning a Television Set by the Test Table; The Use of the Television Set as an Amplifier; The Structure of Visual Signals.

“You see, there are no shelves here, but you still manage,” Khabalygin commented.

Fyodor grew more puzzled every minute and wondered what the commission was getting at.

“That’s because everything is next door in the demonstration room. Show them, Volodya.”

“So there’s a demonstration room as well? You certainly are well off!”

The door leading into the demonstration room was unusually narrow, more like a closet door. The slim, dapper lab assistant went through it with ease. But when the Comrade from the Ministry tried to follow him, he realized at once that he couldn’t make it. The others just poked their heads in, one after the other.

The demonstration room turned out to be a narrow corridor between two sets of shelves from floor to ceiling. With the sweeping gesture of a professional guide, the lab assistant pointed to the shelves and said:

“
This
belongs to the TV lab.
This
to the electricity lab. And
this
is the radio lab’s.”

Instruments with dials, and black, brown, and yellow boxes cluttered the shelves.

“And what’s that doing there?” the Comrade from the Ministry asked, pointing to something.

He had noticed that the assistant had managed to keep a little wall space free of instruments, and to this he had affixed a colored pinup—the head and shoulders of a young woman. Without seeing the caption you couldn’t tell whether she had been cut out of a Soviet or foreign magazine. But there she was—a beautiful, auburn-haired woman wearing a blouse with red embroidery. With her chin resting on her bare arms and her head tilted to one side, she eyed the young lab assistant and the more worldly-wise Comrade from the Ministry with a look that was anything but a call to duty.

“Well! You say you have no space,” the Comrade sputtered, struggling around to get out again, “but just look at the sort of stuff you hang up around the place!”

And, with another quick glance at the lovely creature out of the corner of his eye, he walked away.

The news that some awful commission was around had already spread throughout the school. People kept peering out of doorways and poking their heads into the halls.

Lidia, walking along one of the corridors, bumped into the commission. She stood aside, flattened herself against the wall, and studied them anxiously. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could tell from the look on the principal’s face that something was wrong.

Fyodor took the Supervisor from the District Committee by the arm and, holding him back a little, asked quietly:

“Tell me, who actually sent this commission? Why is nobody from the Economic Council with you?”

“Knorozov just told me to come along. I don’t know what’s going on myself.”