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winding thin strands of rubber for the flying club on the backs of two chairs.
I scanned them both keenly.
"You aren't pulling my leg, are you, chaps?" I said.
Petka flared up indignantly. "Why, you disbelieving Thomas! He thinks we sent him the rotten thing on
behalf of Makhno and his men!"
And Petka told me how he had found the envelope under the stone.
Petka's story convinced me. It would have been hardly the thing for Komsomol members to play a
joke of that kind.
"Who do you think wrote it, Vasil?" Petka asked. "Could it have been someone in the foundry?"
"Of course it was. One of the shirkers. We've trodden on their toes and now they're trying to scare
us," I replied.
"If you're sure it was Kashket," Sasha said in a low voice, "go and report it. It's a political matter!"
"If I knew for sure. . . But no man's a thief till he's caught, you know. He'd wriggle out of it, and I'd
look a fool."
But Sasha went on confidently: "Never mind that! ' They'll sort things out. The people there know
what they're doing. They can find a man anywhere just by his handwriting."
"Sasha's right, Vasil," Petka broke in again. "Show that note to the right people. They'll do something
about it. That's a piece of sabotage, you know it."
Until late in the evening we discussed the wretched anonymous letter. We could talk of nothing else.
In the end we came to the conclusion that it wasn't their prosperity or strength that made our enemies
resort to such low methods, but rather weakness and failure.
Only a short time ago I used to be very offended when people treated me as a boy. How I had
wanted to skip ahead of my years and become grown-up like Turunda, or even Golovatsky! Yet today
the offensive word "half-baked," which hinted at my youth, did not affect me so much as the insulting and
hated nickname "khokhol." Under tsarism it was the police and the gentry who used to call Ukrainians by
that name. I had often heard the Denikin boy scouts speaking contemptuously of us workers' children as
khokhols. Nowadays the term was hardly ever used and on any document I wrote my nationality as
Ukrainian with a feeling of pride. I liked to go to the club of an evening and sing Ukrainian songs. I spoke
Ukrainian. Now I could see that the scoundrel who had written this anonymous letter was sneering at my
nationality, and that offended me more than anything.
.. . Sasha and Petka had been silent for some time. Sasha was breathing heavily. A yellow moon, like
a thin slice of pumpkin, peeped in at the wide-open window. A light wind blew from the east. It being
Saturday, there was still much noise coming from the park. As I lay listening to the sounds of the evening,
I heard the gate click. Footsteps crunched on the gravel path leading from the gate to the house. Who
could it be? The landlady had gone to bed long ago. She was rarely disturbed by visitors so late at night.
I called out of the window at the man coming up the path.
"Telegram! For Vasily Mandzhura," came the reply.
I dashed down the stairs. While I signed for the telegram and climbed back into the attic, my
awakened friends had put the light on. Their faces were sleepy and impatient.
By the light of the lamp I read the sender's address: "Sinelnikovo." But that didn't make sense! I didn't
know anyone in Sinelnikovo. Perhaps my father had decided to pay me a visit and was on his way from
Cherkassy to spend a holiday by the sea?
"Open it, can't you! Don't keep us on edge!" Sasha groaned.
The printed letters danced before my eyes. At first I could scarcely piece them together, then I
shouted:
"Chaps! Nikita's coming here!"
"Nikita coming to see us? You're joking? It's a mistake!" Petka cried, standing on tip-toe and peering
at the telegram over my shoulder.
"No, it isn't! Listen!" And I read the message out loud:
ARRIVING GOODS TRAIN TOMORROW MIDDAY MEET ARRANGE IMMEDIATE
RECEPTION OF FREIGHT STOP KOLOMEYETS
"What a pity I can't be there!"
"Are you crazy?" I swung round on Sasha. "Aren't you going to meet Nikita?"
"I can't, Vasya. I've got an important job to do," Sasha answered plaintively.
"How can there be anything important on Sunday?" Petka chimed in, backing me up.
But Sasha would not give in.
"Well, there is something," he said mysteriously. "But for the time being it's a secret."
"You won't come to meet Nikita, your old Komsomol secretary? But he's bringing us iron, you mut!...
You've got to be at the station! It's a matter of Komsomol discipline, understand?" Petka shouted, as if it
were an order.
"Well, I can't!" Sasha insisted firmly. "Midday's just when I've got to.. .''
And nothing would move him. No matter how we reproached him for keeping a date instead of
meeting his old friend and teacher, Sasha could not be persuaded.
The next day, taking Golovatsky with us, Petka and I went to the station. The passenger train from
Ekaterinoslav had arrived in the morning and its empty green carriages had long ago been shunted into a
siding. Weighers, pointsmen, stall-keepers everyone had taken refuge from the midday heat in the cool
station building which only a short time ago had seemed so new and strange to us. Today this seaside
terminus with its hot rails gleaming in the sun seemed as if we had known it for ages. How quickly you get
used to a new town if you meet good people there! I found myself regarding the young freckled
stationmaster, like a toadstool in his red railwayman's cap, as an old acquaintance.
The steel wires beside the rails hummed faintly, and far away up the line the signals clicked to "Go
Ahead." We heard the distant whistle of an engine.
"What's Nikita like now?" I thought, fixing my eyes on the growing billow of smoke in the distance.
"Will he still talk down to us, or will he treat us as equals?"
The goods train hauled by a massive engine charged out of the steppe towards the sea. At last,
belching clouds of hot steam over the already sun-scorched platform, it rumbled into the station, a great
mass of oily, glistening iron with la grimy young engine-driver hanging out of the cab window.
Brown trucks loaded with timber, crates, potash, and coal lumbered past us until I thought there
would be no end to them. Suddenly on one of the trucks I caught sight of a figure in a straw hat who did
not look like a guard. The next second I recognized Kolomeyets. Dressed in blue overalls, he was
standing on what looked like a huge lathe.
As our eyes met, Nikita ripped off his hat and waved it in greeting. Thin and amazingly sunburnt, his
hair flying in the wind, he shouted something to us but his voice was drowned by the rumble of the
wheels. Before the train stopped, Nikita had leapt agilely on to the platform.
"Hullo there, chaps!" he shouted.
At first Nikita simply shook hands with me, but then, after a moment's hesitation, he took me in his
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