The Foundation Pit (Fragment)

He continued walking along the road to the point of complete exhaustion; and Voshchev got completely exhausted very quickly, whenever his soul recollected that it had ceased to know the truth.

But the city could already be seen in the distance, smoke rose from its cooperative bakeries, and the evening sun illuminated the dust which rose above the houses from the movements of the population. This particular city began with a smithy and in the smithy at the time of Voshchev’s passage by it they were repairing an automobile from roadless travel. A fat cripple stood near a tethering post and addressed the smith:

“Mish, give me some tobacco: if you don’t I’ll break the lock again tonight!” The smith who was under the automobile did not reply. Then the cripple banged him on his rear with a crutch:

“Mish! You’d better drop your work and give me some tobacco: I’ll smash something up!”

Voshchev stopped next to the cripple because along the street from out of the depths of the city was marching a formation of children, Young Pioneers, with weary music leading them.

“I gave you one whole ruble yesterday,” said the smith. “Give me some peace— for at least a week! Otherwise I’m going to bide my time, bide my time, and then I’ll burn up your crutches!”

“Go ahead and burn them!” the cripple consented. “The boys will push me about on an amputee’s cart— and I’ll rip the roof off your smithy!”

The smith was distracted by the sight of the children and, becoming more kind, he poured some tobacco into the cripple’s tobacco pouch:

“Go ahead and steal, you locust!”

Voshchev directed his attention to the fact that the cripple had no legs, one of them gone entirely and in place of the other a wooden stump. The maimed man supported himself on his crutches and on the wooden extension of his severed right leg. The cripple had no teeth at all, he had worn them to nothing on food, and on the other hand he had an enormous face and a fat remaining torso; his brown, narrowly opened eyes kept a watch over the outer world with the greediness of deprivation, with the longing of accumulated passion, and in his mouth his gums rubbed together, pronouncing the inaudible thoughts of a legless man.

The Young Pioneer orchestra, passing into the distance, played the music of a young march. Past the smithy, with consciousness of the importance of their future, the barefoot girls stepped in precise step; their weak, maturing bodies were clothed in sailor suits, on their thoughtful, attentive heads red berets lay freely, and their legs were covered with the down of youth. Each girl, moving within the rhythm of the common formation, smiled with a sense of her own significance and with a consciousness of the seriousness of life which was necessary for the continuity of the formation and the strength of their hike. Any one of these Young Pioneers was born at a time when out in the fields lay the dead horses of the social war, and not all of the Pioneers had skin at the hour of their origin, because their mothers were nourished only by the stores of nourishment of their own bodies; therefore on the face of each young Pioneer girl there remained a trace of the difficulty, the feebleness of early life, meagerness of body and beauty of expression. But the happiness of childhood friendship, the realization of the future world in the play of youth and in the worthiness of their own severe freedom signified on the childish faces important gladness, replacing for them beauty and domestic plumpness.