For the Good of the Cause (9 page)

Valka Guguyev slipped off the banister, pushed the people next to him out of the way, and stood for a moment studying the rail. Then he gripped it firmly with both hands, swung his body up effortlessly, and calmly did a handstand over the steep drop.

It was a very dangerous stunt.

A hush fell over the staircase. All heads were turned toward him. The boys were impressed. The girls watched with a mixture of admiration and horror.

Lusya, the girl for whose benefit this was being done, was already on the staircase. She now turned and, her blue eyes wide open, looked straight up at Guguyev, who would have crashed right on top of her and on to the stone floor below if he were to fall. But he never did fall! Almost motionless, except for a slight swaying movement, he kept up his handstand over the stairwell and seemed in no hurry to come down. His back was to the drop, and his legs, held tightly together, arched out—on purpose, it seemed—right over the empty space. And his head, too, was strained back, so that he was looking straight down at tiny, slim Lusya, standing there wrapped in a light colored raincoat with a turned-up collar. She was hatless, which suited her very well, and her short, fair hair was wet from the rain.

But could he really see her? Dark as the stairway was, you could tell that the young hero’s face and neck were purple from the rush of blood.

Suddenly the others called a warning:

“Look out!”

Guguyev immediately swung off the banister, landed lightly on his feet, and putting on an innocent look, leaned against the rail.

This performance could easily have cost him his stipend. It had happened to him once before when he rang the school bell ten minutes before the end of classes (so they wouldn’t be late for the movies) .

Before they’d had time to start their usual din again, Grigori Lavrentyevich, the gaunt and gloomy dean, started up the stairs. They made way for him respectfully.

He had heard that warning “Look out,” and he realized there was something odd about the silence that met him. But he had not seen the cause of it all—particularly since Rogozkin, who never missed a chance to make trouble, immediately fastened onto him.

“Sir!” Rogozkin shouted down the stairs. “Why have we given up the building? After all,
we
built it!”

And he tilted his head to one side inquiringly and put on a halfwitted expression. From his very first day there, he’d played the fool and made people laugh, especially in class.

They all kept quiet, waiting to hear what the dean would say.

A teacher’s life was like this—he was always having to answer such questions and you never knew what they were going to ask next.

The dean gave Rogozkin a long, hard look. But Rogozkin didn’t flinch. He kept his head tilted to one side.

“Well, now,” the dean said slowly, “when you finish school here … But wait a minute … how on earth
will
you finish school?”

“You mean because of athletics?” Rogozkin came back at him quickly. (Every spring and autumn he missed any number of classes because he was competing in either local or national events. But he always managed to make up for it and he never had bad marks.) “That’s no way to talk. As a matter of fact,” and he tapped his temple comically with a finger, “I already have some ideas up here about the project for my diploma.”

“Really? That’s fine. And when you finish school, where will you look for a job?”

“Wherever I’m needed most,” Rogozkin answered with exaggerated gusto, throwing up his head high and standing at attention.

“Maybe you’ll be given a job at the new building. Or perhaps some of the others will. So all that work you did on it will not have been in vain. It belongs to all of us.”

“Oh, how nice! Nothing would please me more. Thank you so much,” Rogozkin said, brimming over with mock gratitude.

The dean went on his way. But before he had reached the corridor, Rogozkin reversed his decision in the same flippant manner:

“No, sir, I’ve changed my mind! I don’t really think I want to work in that building!”

“Where do you want to go then?” The dean peered at him.

“I want to go and work on the virgin lands!” Rogozkin said loudly.

“Well, why don’t you fill out an application?” the dean suggested with a faint smile.

And he went off down the corridor to the principal’s study.

Fyodor himself was not there. He had not managed to get an appointment with Knorozov the day before, so he had gone down to the District Committee again today. But the teachers who were now waiting in the study for a call from the principal were not very hopeful.

A few drops of rain splashed against the windowpanes. The rough, uneven ground right up to the railroad was wet and dark.

The heads of departments were poring over the huge sheets of their schedules. They were passing colored pencils and erasers to each other and coordinating their classes. Yakov Ananyevich, the Secretary of the Party Buro, was sitting at a little table by the window near the safe with the files of the school’s Party group and was sorting papers. Lidia was standing at the same window. In the way women have of changing their looks overnight, she had turned from the happy, brisk, youthful woman of yesterday into the middle-aged, haggard one of today. And she had changed yesterday’s blue-green suit for a darker one.

The Party Secretary, short and balding, was dapper and clean-shaven, with a clear, fresh complexion. He was talking without interrupting his work. He handled the papers in their folders as delicately as though they were living things, taking great care not to crease them, and he treated documents written on thin paper with something akin to loving care.

His voice was soft and quiet, but you could hear every word.

“No, Comrades, certainly not. There will be no general meeting. Neither will there be any meetings on this subject by departments or by classes. It would mean giving the matter undue attention, and there’s no point to it. They will find out all about it sooner or later, without us telling them.”

“They already know,” the dean said. “But they would like some explanation.”

“Well, so what?” Yakov Ananyevich replied calmly, dismissing the problem. “You can explain things to them privately, and that’s what you’ll have to do. What you should say? What you should say is: This institute is of vital importance to the nation as a whole. It is concerned with the sort of thing we are studying. Today, electronics is the basis of all technical progress, and no one must be allowed to put any obstacles in its way. On the contrary, we must do everything we can to further it.”

Nobody said anything. The Party Secretary carefully turned over two or three more papers, but he couldn’t find the one he wanted.

“Actually, you don’t even have to go into all that. You can just tell them that this is a State institute and the why’s and wherefore’s of the matter are none of our business.”

He turned over some more papers and found what he wanted. Then he looked up again, turned his clear, calm eyes on them, and said:

“Hold meetings? Make this the subject for a sort of formal debate? No, that would be a political mistake. As a matter of fact, if the students or the Komsomol Committee insist on a meeting, then they must be dissuaded.”

“I don’t agree!” Lidia turned on him so abruptly that her short, brushed-back hair shook.

The Party Secretary looked at her blandly and asked in his usual punctilious manner:

“But what is there for you to disagree with, Lidia Georgievna?”

“First of all,” and saying this she drew herself up and moved toward him, “first of all … well, it’s your whole tone! It’s not only that you’re already reconciled to their taking our building away, but you even seem pleased—yes, actually
pleased!
”

The Party Secretary spread his hands slightly, without moving his arms.

“But, Lidia Georgievna, if the national interest is involved, how can I be anything
but
pleased?”

“It’s your approach I don’t like … I mean the principle of the thing!” She couldn’t keep still any more and started pacing the small room, gesticulating as she spoke. “None of you has as much to do with the young people as I do. After all, I’m with the Komsomols from morning till night. And I know how it’ll look to them, the thing you’re trying to push down their throats. They’ll think we’re afraid to tell them the truth—and they’ll be right! How will they ever respect us again? Eh? When something good happens we let everybody know about it. We plaster it all over the walls and talk about it on the radio. But when there’s something bad or hard to explain, then they’re supposed to find out as best they can and rely on rumor, eh? Is that what you want? It’s all wrong!” Her voice rang out, but, unfortunately, for the second time that day she found herself on the verge of tears. “No! You can’t do this, especially not to young people! Lenin said that we should never be afraid to bring things into the open. Publicity is a healing sword, he said.”

She choked with tears and left the study abruptly so as not to break down in front of everybody.

The Party Secretary watched her go with a pained expression on his face; shutting his eyes, he shook his head sadly.

Lidia went quickly down the dark corridor. Near the storeroom with its crates of vacuum tubes, two third-year students called out to her. While cleaning up, they had come across the scale model of the new building and wondered what to do with it. It was the model they had carried, hoisted on four poles, at the head of the school’s contingent in the October and May Day parades.

There it was, standing on some boxes. The building, every detail of which they had come to know so well and which meant so much to them, looked almost like the real thing. It was white, with some features in blue and green. There were the two turrets on top of the pilasters. And there were the huge windows of the auditorium and the smaller windows for the rooms—already assigned to somebody or other—on all four floors.

“Maybe we should break it up?” one of the boys asked, avoiding her eyes, and with a guilty expression. “We may as well. There’s no room to turn around here as it is.”

Ivan Grachikov never told wartime stories. He disliked them because during the War he had had more than his share of trouble and very few pleasures. Every day he had lived and every move he had made in the War were linked in his mind with suffering, the sacrifice and the death of decent people.

Another thing he didn’t like was that almost twenty years after the end of the War, people were still mouthing the same old military expressions, even where they were quite inappropriate. At the factory he had never used—and he had tried to discourage others from using—such phrases as: “Going over to the offensive,” “Throwing people into the breach,” “Going over the top,” “Bringing up reserves.” He felt that all such expressions, which introduced a wartime atmosphere into peacetime conditions, just made people weary. And the Russian language could manage perfectly well without them.

But today he broke his rule about wartime reminiscences. He was sitting with the principal in the reception room of the First Secretary of the Party District Committee and waiting (while in his own reception room, of course, people were also sitting, waiting for
him
). Grachikov was very nervous. He telephoned his secretary a couple of times and smoked two cigarettes. He turned to look at Fyodor, who was sitting there miserable and all hunched up. Grachikov thought that Fyodor’s hair was much grayer than it had been the day before. Then, trying to cheer Fyodor up a little, Grachikov started telling him a funny story about some fellows they had both met during a brief lull when their division was resting behind the front line. That was in forty-three, after Fyodor was wounded for the first time.

Bur the story fell flat. Fyodor did not laugh. Grachikov knew that it was better not to revive war memories. But having started this train of thought, he now recalled what had happened the following day, when his division was suddenly ordered to cross the River Sozh and deploy itself on the other side.

The bridge across the river had been badly damaged. The engineers had repaired it during the night, and Grachikov was posted as the officer in charge of the guard on it. He had instructions that nobody was to be allowed through until the division had crossed over. It was a narrow bridge—the sides had collapsed, the surface was very bumpy, and it was important to keep the traffic moving, because twice already single-engine Junkers had sneaked up on them from behind the trees and dive-bombed the bridge, though so far they had missed. The business of moving the division across, which had begun before dawn, dragged on into the afternoon. Some other units which were also anxious to get across had moved up, but they waited their turn in a small pine woods nearby. Suddenly, six covered vehicles—they were brand-new and all alike—drove up to the head of the column and tried to force their way onto the bridge. “St-o-p!” Grachikov shouted furiously at the first driver and ran across to head him off, but he kept going. Grachikov may have reached for his pistol, perhaps he actually did. At that point a middle-aged officer in a cape opened the door of the first truck and shouted just as furiously. “Hey you, Major, come over here!” and with a quick movement of one shoulder he threw back his cape. And Grachikov saw that he was a Lieutenant-General. Grachikov ran up, his heart in his mouth.

“What were you doing with your hand?” the General shouted ominously. “Do you want to be court-martialed? Let my vehicles through!”

Until the General ordered his trucks to be let through, Grachikov had been willing to settle things amicably, without raising his voice, and he might even have let them through. But when right and wrong clashed head-on (and wrong is more brazen by its very nature), Grachikov’s legs seemed to become rooted to the ground and he no longer cared what might happen to him. He drew himself up, saluted, and announced:

“I shall not let you through, Comrade Lieutenant General!”

“What the hell … ?” The General’s voice rose to a scream and he stepped down onto the running board. “What’s your name?”