The Foundation Pit (Fragment)

Voshchev wished to ask for some kind or other of the weakest work just so he would get enough for his nourishment: he would think in non-working hours. But to make a request it is necessary to have respect for people, and Voshchev did not see any sympathy from them for him.

“You are afraid to be on the tail end: it is an extremity, and so you are riding on peoples’ necks.”

“To you, Voshchev, the state has given an extra hour for your pensiveness. You used to work eight and now you work seven. You would have done better to go on living and keep your mouth shut! If all of us all at once were to start to ponder, who would act?”

“Without thinking people act meaninglessly!” Voshchev declared thoughtfully.

He left the trade union office without getting help. His way afoot lay in the middle of the summer; off to the sides they were building apartment buildings and technical public facilities—in those apartment houses the masses who till now had been without shelter would exist in silence. Voshchev’s body was indifferent to comfort; he could live, in the open air without getting exhausted, and he languished in unhappiness when he was well fed on rest days at his former apartment. Once more he had to pass by the beer parlor on the city’s outskirts, and once more he looked at the place where he had spent the night; something was left there in common with his life, and Voshchev found himself out in space, where before him lay only the horizon and the sensation of the wind in his face which was bent forward.

One verst further on stood the house of a highway supervisor. Accustomed to emptiness, the supervisor was quarreling loudly with his wife, and the woman was sitting at the open window with her child on her knees, and she was answering her husband with screams of abuse: the child himself silently pulled at the flounces of his shirt, understanding, but saying nothing.

This patience of the child emboldened Voshchev. He saw that the mother and father had no feeling for the meaning of life and were in a state of irritation, while the child lived unreproachingly, nurturing himself for his own coming anguish. So then and there Voshchev decided to hitch up his soul, not to spare his body in the work of the mind, so as to return the more swiftly to the home of the highway supervisor and tell the meaningful child the secret of life which was all the time being forgotten by his parents.

“Their body is straying automatically now,” Voshchev observed of the parents. “They do not feel the essence.”

“Why don’t you feel the essence?” asked Voshchev, addressing himself into the window. “Your child lives, and you scold, and he was born to complete the whole world.”

The husband and wife, with awe of conscience, concealed behind maliciousness of faces, gazed upon the witness.