Magnetic (Version D)

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:57:13 GMT

Sasha’s hands were warm and scrubbed absolutely clean under the layer of flour. His nails were trimmed short, and unlike many workers here, he had all ten fingers. He shoved the dark brown dough forward with his right hand, and pulled it back to him with his left, giving it a quarter turn each time. His weight was divided between his right foot and his hip, which was braced firmly against the counter. He used all of the force in his arms and back and shoulders to knead the bread, and as much leverage as he could manage.

Popov, the “foreman” of this new bakery, appeared suddenly at Sasha’s left side. “Are you trying to beat it into submission?” Sasha slid to his right, still bracing himself against the counter, and held his chin high as if it he was under inspection, rather than the loaf of black bread he was working on. The foreman pinched the loaf at the top, grabbing a triangle between his index finger and thumb. When he let go, the triangle sat on top, perfectly still. Popov frowned slightly, lost his usual half-smile, and said, “This is the kind of bread I made before the war.” He paused. “Don’t bother being quite so thorough. We’ve got thousands to feed, and they would rather their bread be chewy than go hungry. That said, you’re learning well enough. Keep up the good work, just finish a loaf a little faster.” Sasha nodded, reached into the large metal bowl of oiled balls of dough, and started on the next over-sized chunk with a splash of flour and no comment. Popov, about to inspect the next station in the long line of bakers kneading, called over his shoulder, “Maybe we should consider hiring men here.” Sasha twitched only slightly before digging into the dough even harder. He knew this new job would be harder than his last, but the Party said he could not be unemployed any longer.

The foreman, even bakeries had “foremen” here, was a large man in his late sixties, with curly white hair still covering his head. He had a large, round belly under his apron that made Sasha wonder how much of his wares he was eating, but his red cheeks and nose suggested the only rationed item he depleted was vodka. Sasha had never met the woman he was replacing, but from what Popov had said during his lunch-and-drink break, the working men probably fought as hard for her attention as they did their space in line. He remembered lunch at the factory in Moscow; he never knew what he was eating, but he certainly became acquainted with the serving girl, blue-eyed, soft-smiling Vaylsa. Since he had arrived at Magnitogorsk the evening before, he had only seen twenty women in the roped-off side of his barracks. The workers were not going to like the girl’s replacement.

Sasha was at the biggest steel and manufacturing factory in the modern world because he had been sent here. On the fringes of the Ural Mountains, many kilometers away from any real city or civilization, the artificial town and factory of Magnitogorsk sprung up. The “Magnetic Mountain” was one of the richest and most accessible deposits of iron on the planet, and the Party certainly planned on using it. The bright posters at his factory in Moscow started to advertise it two years or so ago, and some of his dedicated comrades quit their jobs to join there. Sasha had asked his friend Pavel, why go find a new job? Weren’t they building Socialism just working in a factory? So-serious Pavel had replied that the Party said heavy industry was the future, and light industry was superficial. Sasha almost questioned how tires could possibly be superficial, but simply waved goodbye to his friend at the train station. Sasha had visited Pavel’s wife, Olya, to ask if he was still working there. She nervously clutched the edge of her apron before replying that he had been hit in the head by a girder six months ago. Sasha asked about happy, smiling Vanya. He froze to death on one of the top scaffolds. And Kolya, who had three children? He was blown off of one of those same scaffolds in the heavy wind. She clenched her fists in her apron again, and offered the tidbit that Michael had taken a job in Magnitogorsk after the tire factory closed, and was still alive, according to his wife. Sasha and Michael had never cared for each other’s company. He nodded to Widow Olya, thanked her for her information, and left the very next day on the assigned train to his assigned job. If poor Pavel had thought tires were laughable, what would he think of his old friend baking bread instead of outside welding?

The town Magnitogorsk was two kilometers southeast of the factory. Sasha got off the train at the small passenger station last night, and started to walk through the small cluster of weathered wooden commercial buildings toward the looming shapes of the barracks on the other side. Not all of them were at perfect right angles to the frozen-mud ground, and popped out of the small drifts of dry snow like old headstones. One store, better built than the others and with actual goods in the window, must have been the shop for the foremen, managers, administrators and foreign specialists. The clothing store was dark and closed, despite the late hours Sasha saw written on the door. The largest of the shops was clearly the laborers’ store, and was the only one with a column of workers pouring out of the door, easily two hundred men standing in the cold, shivering in their sheepskin coats, stamping their valinkis on the hard ground. Their faces were frost-bitten and snarling. This was where that slip of paper from the party was sending him. Sasha tried to minimize his limp as he walked past the column to the cluster of giant barracks to find his new home.

Sasha reached into the large bowl for his next ball of dough, but in his reverie, he’d kneaded the last one already. Right behind him, the foreman said, “Put the dough from early this morning in the oven.” Popov had been sitting on a stool next to the ovens, enjoying the lingering effects of his beverage at lunch. Sasha hadn’t seen him move. He had always remained awake and alert at the factory in Moscow; it was why he was still alive after the accident, and the four other men he worked with weren’t. He bit the inside of his lip.

“Come on. The breadboards are over there. Snap out of it.” Popov punched him lightly on the shoulder. Sasha saw it coming, and managed to brace himself against the counter again. The foreman noticed, and said “I’ve seen you limping around all day, but you’re really badly injured, aren’t you?”

Sasha nodded and commented, “Industry accident.” He frowned, and then started slowly toward the bread boards, back straight, chin up like a good ex-soldier.

The dark lumps of rye flour, water, and yeast shimmered in the heat of the oven. The dough steamed, at first, futilely. Then the crust darkened, became hard in the harsh environment inside the burning brick walls. They were taken out of the oven, eventually, but that hard shell and the burning heat remained.

Sasha’s job in the evening was to serve the bread to the hungry workers. There were full-time serving girls in the laborer’s shop, of course, but never enough to do the job efficiently, so the bakers always pulled double-shifts to fill in. Sasha stood at the counter by a large scale and a basket full of freshly baked bread. He could see the silhouettes of the first men through the frosted window at the front of the shop. The doors had been closed so the salespeople could prepare.

Sasha may have been out of the factory for the last year, but he could see himself through their eyes. First they would wonder why he was not doing his real duty in the Industrial Front. Even the kulak scoundrels had finished exploiting peasants and were out in the cold and the violence with everyone else, battling the wind and the bad scaffolding and the bad lighting to help the cause. The men would watch him carefully for those hours in line, and see his severe limp. They would think he was faking, failing, wrecking the revolution effort. He certainly looked capable of riveting or welding. He was six feet and two inches, and still built like a dedicated solider, or maybe the iconic, muscular laborer on all of those so-bright posters. He’d needed all of that upper-body strength to get around after he hurt his leg. He had dark olive eyes, not blue like many peasants, surely a sign of a class enemy. The sheepskin coat on the hook behind him had clearly seen a sheep within the last few years, and the men had no way of knowing that was because his brother was a tanner, not through any sort of dishonest privilege. They would see him as corrupt, and weak for taking a woman’s position. He would smile, and try not to be offended, or to offend. The doors were opening.

“Hey. Hey! Hleb!” The Polish-sounding man at the front of the line wanted Sasha’s attention. Sasha wondered whether he had only learned the word for bread and not the word for please, or if he was just being irritable. Speciba, kind sir, the word is speciba. He placed a hunk of bread on the scale and was pleased to see it was exactly a kilogram. He held out a hand for the Pole’s ration card and 35 kopeks, and then gave him the bread.

The second customer walked up as he was bending down to grab another loaf, and Sasha struggled to remember that this shining example of an ethnic Russian was another proletariat. This angry man was part of his class, the class that would change the world. The comrade said, “Baker. Where’s the usual girl? Why you here?”

Sasha straightened up to his full height, several centimeters taller than the laborer, and said, “She got pregnant, and left.”

The worker gave him an ugly smile, and the new baker remembered the grin of a White Russian officer holding a bayonet to Sasha’s throat. The Red and the White had the same smile. “Well, I don’t expect you to do everything she did for me. And I’m sure as hell angry about the lack of service.”

Enlisted men rarely had pistols, so that officer did bother to look for one in Sasha’s hand. He knew he could outfight this blowhard any day, injury or not. Sasha nodded and said sarcastically, “I’m sorry I don’t do that, comrade.”

A derisive snort from a frostbitten face. “No, I’m glad you don’t. But you should give this job to someone who does.” Sasha’s implied insult was ignored, and the endgame weapon of “and then you can get out there with the real men” was deployed.

Sasha cut exactly a kilo, hoping to be a hair short for the bastard, before replying, “But then she’d just have to leave again so soon, and I’d be hired here again.” The man was not amused.

The line lasted more than two hours, half an hour longer than the average day. The three women from the bakery each sold almost a third more bread than he did. Cutting bread and taking money and ration cards was not hard, and Sasha had certainly done more complicated tasks with skill, but his line was slowed down considerably to allow for posturing, demeaning, and insulting. The fact that they were slowing down the factory’s progress even more than a real shirker never seemed to strike them as important.

Popov asked him to clean up and lock up. With a guilty glance at the unusually small collection of kopeks in his till, Sasha agreed readily enough. When he was finally locking the front door and leaving, the horde of the factory workers had gone home to the barracks, and only three dim shapes outside the clothing store were visible. He laughed to himself softly; not only was the store always closed, when he looked in the windows he saw the winter stock had not arrived yet. He hoped those shadows enjoyed their light summer shirts. One of the men looked up at him and snarled like a dog. It took Sasha a moment to remember, but by the time the three had crossed the square, he had placed the man as his second customer.

He had given up carrying a cane after his third one was stolen for firewood in a relatively mild Moscow winter, but he wished for one now. He knocked down one of the two sidekicks with a right hook and dodged two punches from the other man, but when the leader’s punch connected, he collapsed to the frozen ground. He tried to kick with his one good foot, but almost immediately found himself curled in a ball to protect his insides. The man who looked like that White Russian began kicking his kidneys. The dry snow flashed red in Sasha’s vision, but when he rolled over to stop the pain, they started in on his stomach.

Sasha could hear balalaika music in the distance – people singing folk songs along with the strings, and he was glad the cold winter air carried sound so well, if this was going to be his last night. Last night indeed! he thought. The fool should have seen I have a pistol. But the White wasn’t falling to the ground this time, he was kicking, and that wasn’t right. The balalaika music became louder, but Sasha realized the words were in Polish, and he didn’t know them after all. He couldn’t see the stars now, and he couldn’t hear the music anymore.

The hospital building was between the long lines of barracks and the stores; it was a very short way to be carried. Sasha sat in the largest room in the building on a low, padded table. To his left was the door outside. To his right, there were eight beds, but currently only one patient asleep: a woman. The walls were covered in yellowing newspaper for insulation, and the stove in the corner was nearly out. Sasha could see his breath when it hissed out as the doctor wrapped his broken ribs. The doctor said, “Well, your ribs are done. I can’t be sure how much internal damage you’ve taken. Do you feel nauseous? Feverish?”

Sasha was looking at the woman in the bed. “Yes. Both.”

The doctor sighed and looked around the nearly empty room. “Could be a burst appendix. If we were back in Moscow or Stalingrad, or any actual city, I would probably remove it as a precaution, but surgery here might be more dangerous than waiting for more of the symptoms.”

She was sleeping, and had restlessly turned her head toward the men at the corner of the room. Her face was delicate and heart-shaped. In the cold hospital, both her nose and cheeks were tinted pink, like a doll. Sasha blinked and turned back to the doctor. “So what do we do?”

The doctor patted his shoulder. “You just wait. I’ll just leave the nurse’s bell next to your bed. If you start vomiting, ring it. Very loudly. My room is just behind that door, but I’m a heavy sleeper.”

Sasha nodded absently. Under the heavy blankets, the woman was wearing a man’s army shirt, and her dark hair was tossed across her face.

The doctor nodded, and left through the second door. Sasha glanced away from the woman to wonder exactly how heavy a sleeper the doctor was. The door slammed, and she opened her eyes. Blue like an alpine lake, surrounded by dark lashes that stood out against her pale skin. The pink in her cheeks seemed brighter now. He wondered if she had a fever, but didn’t think she looked sick. She was looking at him, too, and he had to say something. His mouth was dry, and his lungs seemed to hold even less air than when he was being kicked.

“Normally I’d say, ‘how are you?’ But it doesn’t seem to make sense in a hospital.” Her voice was soft but healthy, her accent a very decent Great Russian working class. “You look like a man beaten within an inch of your life.”

Sasha considered whether or not he may be laying out in that snowy field, dying, his psyche comforting itself with pleasant dreams. They say freezing to death is like falling asleep. A woman was quoting an old Lenin speech to him. They do not say that falling in love is anything like freezing to death.

In lieu of a better comment, he answered, “Some people don’t approve of a man serving bread instead of riveting or welding.”

She laughed softly. “Well, I can’t say I do either, but I suppose I can only blame myself for this.”

“Why’s that?” She spoke like it should be obvious, but he still felt the ringing in his head and saw the bright metalworking sparks at the corners of his eyes.

She gave him a bitter smile, and with a hand on her abdomen, rolled from lying on her side to her back, where her round stomach showed more clearly. “Oh. You’re the one that I-”

She laughed. “Yeah. But don’t believe what Dima was saying about me.” She saw his blank expression. “Dima is that little snit that is always first in line. Well, almost always, and he throws a fit whenever that Pole beats him.”

“So it’s not-” He trailed off, unable to ask.

“It’s not his, or probably anyone else who claims I ‘served them something special.’ I’m not saying who, but-” It was her turn to trail off. The darkness and the papered-over walls reminded Sasha of the inside of the confessional booth in his village church. He had not confessed in nineteen years.

“It’s your business what you do. Not mine. I’m certainly not a priest.”

“Yes, it is my business. And I would certainly hope not. Opium dealers of the people, Marx would probably say.”

Sasha realized she had not finished her sentence. “But what?”

“But I’d hate for anyone to think I’d been with Dima and the others.”

He nodded slowly. “Understandable.”

“So that’s my embarrassment. I’m trying not to judge you, but why are you baking bread when you could be working to build Socialism?”

Sasha raised one eyebrow. The girl must have been asleep when he was brought in and he fought the doctor to keep his boot on. That boot was like his skin now. “Can’t weld anymore. Can’t walk on the scaffolds, can’t keep my balance on the uneven ground at the base.”

She made a soft pshhaw noise. “Why not?”

He licked his lips. The last of his friends in Moscow knew not to mention it. Pavel’s widow had looked down at his left valinka, trying to see how it was different than his right. He wrapped his wooden leg with rags every morning to make it look the same. “I lost my left leg just below the knee two years ago in Moscow. I was making tires, and the giant cauldron melting the rubber tipped. The three men below it died immediately, a fourth man near it within hours. I was on a scaffold, but one side of the supports buckled. I held on, but my leg was burned beyond anything anyone could do, and the doctor took it off.”

The young woman paled. “I see.” Sasha nodded, and waited for a reaction. “That’s very unfortunate. But you were hurt in the service of the people, and you’re here now. History is being fulfilled here, with iron, not in Moscow.” Her voice was level, her chin was even. She was perfectly serious.

A year of not talking burned in his throat. The judgment from his peers, people who were his peers before, but now his betters, burned and stuck like melted rubber. His resolve broke like his ribs two hours ago. “I was only fifteen years old when I enlisted in the army. I joined the Bolshevik party the next year, in the trenches, and went straight from pushing back the damn Germans to fighting the oppressive White Russian Army. My parents were killed while I was away. One of my brothers died of starvation. I was twenty-four when the Civil War ended, twenty-six by the time I got a job in Moscow. I worked there six years until the accident that took my leg, and it wasn’t even really an accident. For weeks, every worker reported to their supervision that the supports at the melting station needed to be reinforced or replaced, and every supervisor reported it to their supervisors, and it was always rejected as unnecessary. Four of my friends died horribly that day, and I have to live with my uselessness now. I believed in the Party, since I was a kid at the front in Poland, and I gave everything to the People. And they took it. And now I have nothing but splinters.”

She was silent. The cracks in his ribs suddenly throbbed worse, and the tight wrapping over them had him panting for air. He waited, and she still said nothing, just looked into him with those alpine blue eyes. It was glass cutting into him again, and he lashed out. “But you know why I’m here now. Why are you on bed-rest? I know you’re nowhere near nine months.”

Her expression deadened, and its frostbite coldness hurt him, too. He opened his mouth, but was unable to think of a single thing to correct his mistake. Watching his dark hazel eyes, she reached down to her belly, and pulled the roundness away. She pulled the bulky shape up to her chest, and pulled down the covers just enough to show what it was. Sasha did not understand at first – but it was a bag of cracked rye.

“The nurses put it by the stove, so it gets nice and hot. It helps me stop aching.” Her stomach was flat underneath. “They didn’t get me a replacement because I got pregnant. They got me a replacement because-” She stopped. “Did you know the rations are the same for a shop worker and a shop worker eating for two? I had the usual kilo of bread a day. I had some potatoes. The nurse said starvation can cause miscarriage, but I don’t understand why it happened to me and my Yevgeniy. I’m here, alive, the whole of the Russian population exists, after all. And by the way - the father was one of the foremen from the factory. I don’t know his name, just that having the workers’ approval as a woman is just as dangerous as not having it as a man.” The pink in her face deepened to a red not unlike blood on snow.

Sasha slowly crawled out of his bed, futilely trying to mind his bruised kidneys and cracked ribs. The doctor had hidden his fake leg away with his boots, afraid Sasha would leave, so he crawled to the other bed. He knelt carefully on the floor, and offered his hand for her to hold. She took a deep breath and looked at the man on the floor beside her bed. She took his hand held it tightly.

He told himself carefully that the broken glass in his chest was his badly injured ribs. They would heal, given a few weeks. He opened his mouth, and closed it.

Her breathing was steady again. “I’ve been in here for three weeks, you know. The same day they said I’d have to leave soon, they hired you. Not the most intelligent bureaucracy.” The subject was closed.

Sasha said, “It’s not as if they couldn’t use another baker here. The assistants work nearly double shifts each day.” They both knew that an administrator can never order more, more rivets, more wood, more coal, or more men and women. To have enough was to have excess. The woman only looked at him again, and then lowered her eyes.

Sasha squeezed her hand gently. “I don’t really want to leave, now.”

“I think you should stay, too. I just don’t know how.”

Only half a kilometer away from where his new assistant knelt at the bedside of his old assistant, Popov raised his only unbroken mug to his mouth once more. Sasha had guessed at his liquor habit, but certainly would have been astonished at the number of pails of homebrewed vodka in the corner of his little shack. A true Russian to the end, Popov finished the alcohol in his cup without even feeling it burn. He’d seen his newest and most promising worker being beaten nearly to death, and had already been too deep in the grip of his 90 proof to do more than bang on the hospital door. He slid lower against the wall, hatefully thinking, Even if I had been sober enough to help, I would have been too old. His vision was nearly gone into swirls and black, but he raised his cup once more, to toast to the next generation in power. The woman he regarded as a daughter, who he also failed to protect from the animals of the factory. The new man with the dark eyes, who may or may not be dead now. Finishing his drink in another hot mouthful, he wished there was something he could give them.

Sinking slowly to what could only be the floor, but felt like one of the walls, he had finally had enough of his favorite comfort to sleep in this labyrinth, these Modern Times. He was caught in the wheels, like Charlie Chaplin in that film they showed in Moscow. Normally a peaceful sleeper, he could not help but remember the younger man’s kicks and struggles, and like a dreaming dog, his right foot struck out. He was too far into the dark burning haze of his drink to feel the sole of his foot scorch and sear as he kicked the small brazier warming his shack over onto the buckets of vodka.

Sasha woke in the woman’s bed. He lay on top of her blankets, with his own sheets spread across them both. Though their bodies were curled as close together as two kittens, only their hands were really touching, skin to skin. He opened his eyes slowly, to find her icy lake eyes looking curiously back. She sat up by a few degrees so her porcelain doll mouth could reach his ear. “I should have told you earlier. My name is Nadia,” she said.

“My name is Sasha.”

Remains of a Chemical Mind

Magnetic (Version D)