“You really meant it!” she blurted.
“Da.” He nodded. “Why not?” He didn’t see anything extraordinary about that. The work was as straightforward as you pleased.
But she said, “Two weeks from now, most people would still be telling me lies about how soon it would be ready.” To prove she wasn’t joking, she paid him half again as much as she’d told him she would. He didn’t ask her for the extra-she did it of her own accord.
The same kind of thing happened when Vasili made a little brick shed for Nikolai Feldman, who wanted to use it to smoke fish. Staring at how quickly one course of bricks went onto another, Feldman said, “You’re a regular Stakhanovite, aren’t you?”
Vasili knew only vaguely what a Stakhanovite was. It had to do with working long and hard; he knew that much. He said, “The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can start something else.”
Feldman eyed him. “Were they all like you in Khabarovsk?” he asked-he’d found out where Vasili was supposed to have come from.
If that wasn’t a loaded question, though, Vasili had never heard one. “I got along,” he answered cautiously. “How come?”
“On account of if they were all like you over there, no wonder the American fuckers bombed the place,” the Jew said.
“I’d sooner work than sit around playing with my dick all the time.” Vasili’s father had smacked him whenever he dropped in some mat that he picked up from other Russian exiles in Harbin. The filthy dialect flourished here. His old man had said it sprang from the foul mouths of convicts and political prisoners. Convicts and political prisoners who’d served their stretches in the gulag made up a big part of the population here. Who else would want to, or could be made to, live in this part of the Soviet Union? No wonder mat grew like a weed in these parts.
By his cackle, Feldman could have been a laying hen. “You work too hard, sonny, somebody’s gonna kick you in the stones hard enough to smash ’em into gravel.”
“I don’t want trouble,” Vasili said: an understatement of epic proportions. “I just want to get by, same as I did there.”
“People in hell want cold water to drink, too,” the old Jew said. “That’s doesn’t mean they’re gonna get it. You keep doing like you’re doing, you’re the one who’s gonna get it-right in the neck.”
“What are you talking about?” Vasili didn’t get it now. He was behaving the way he would have back in Harbin. If you didn’t jump in there and outhustle the Chinese, they’d steal your lunch and eat it before you even knew it was gone. They worked hard all the time. They knew they had to. There were swarms of them, which made every one easily replaceable. Wasn’t it like that everywhere?
Evidently it wasn’t. Nikolai Feldman cackled some more. “What? I’ll tell you what. You make everybody in Smidovich look bad, that’s what. How many friends have you got here?”
Vasili hadn’t made any, or missed them. These weren’t the kind of people he wanted to get friendly with (well, except some of the pretty girls, but that wasn’t what Feldman meant). To him, they seemed like a bunch of lazy bums.
And the way they drank! The Russians in Harbin had put it away, but not like this. Vasili hadn’t believed some of the stories his old man told. Now he was starting to.
He had to say something. He tried “I’m only trying to get by” again.
“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not whining. I’ve got my smoking shed now, and that’s great. But people, ordinary people, they don’t love Stakhanovites. If you want to bust your balls, that means they got to bust theirs whether they want to or not. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you.” Vasili’d gone at top gear his whole life. In China, that was as automatic as breathing. Here? Maybe not.
A couple of days later, a burly bruiser named Grigory Papanin gave him the same message in almost the same words. “You piece of shit, you make me look like a chump,” said Papanin, who had been the number one handyman in Smidovich till Vasili got there. Unlike Vasili, he had friends-of about his own size. He also had a hatchet. One friend carried a crowbar, the other a meter’s worth of galvanized pipe.
A Chinese would have said You’re breaking my rice bowl. This also got the message across. Vasili just hoped they wouldn’t cripple him. (He also hoped his hand in his pocket would make them worry that he had a pistol. He wished like anything he did.)
“Khorosho,” he said. “I won’t make like a fucking Stakhanovite any more.” He showed his left hand, open in apology. The right stayed where it was. A straight razor wasn’t much, but it was all he was carrying.
He waited to see whether they would knock the crap out of him any which way. Three against one made bad odds. But they didn’t know what was in his pocket. They didn’t want to find out, either. Scowling, Papanin snarled, “You better not, cuntface, or you’ll be sorry.” He stomped off, his buddies in tow. Vasili didn’t sag with relief till after they’d gone around a corner.
–
Daisy Baxter felt giddy and guilty at the same time. She’d gone dancing with Bruce McNulty. Now, though the world was burning all around them, they headed for the seaside. It seemed a mad extravagance, especially since the Russians had hit the airfield at nearby Sculthorpe with ordinary bombs and visited atomic hell on Norwich, less than thirty miles east of Fakenham.
Mad extravagance or not, here she was, pedaling along on a bicycle next to the American bomber pilot. “But you’re from California!” she said. “The North Sea will seem like ice to you!”
“I’m from California, yeah, but I’m from San Francisco,” he said, and surprised her by laughing. “The way to bet is, the water in the Pacific there’ll be colder than it is here.”
“You’re pulling my leg!” she exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, looking at her in a way that made her cheeks heat and her heart race. But, shaking his head, he went on, “I’m not kidding, though. San Francisco’s foggy, and it can get chilly. And the ocean never warms up, not even in summertime.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. When she thought of California, she thought of Hollywood miles ahead of anything else. But running a distant second were oranges. She knew they needed hot weather to grow.
He must have picked the thought from her brain, because he said, “Sweetie, my state’s half again as big as your whole country. It’s got room for all kinds of stuff. Cities and mountains and deserts and beaches and farms and…well, like that.”
A state half again as big as the United Kingdom? And the USA had forty-eight states! California was a big one-Daisy knew that. Even so, was it any wonder the United States was top nation now, with Britain trundling along on its coattails? The wonder had to be that Britain had kept the lead as long as it had.
But that was visibly coming to an end. The two great wars were more than any nation was meant to endure. Britain had won them both, but all the bills were coming due at last. The empire was falling to pieces. India gone, Egypt and the rest of Africa restive…
“Mighty pretty countryside,” Bruce said. “Flatter than it is where I come from, but everything is so green!”
The land sloped gently down from Fakenham to Wells-next-the-Sea. Cattle and sheep grazed in the meadows. They didn’t even look up as the two humans pedaled by; they were used to that. A kestrel hung in the air above a field, looking for grasshoppers or mice or whatever else it could swoop down on and kill. They’d seen only a couple of autos since they set out. Petrol was rationed as tightly as it had been during the last war, and hideously dear even when you could get the coupons.
“It’s peaceful,” Daisy said.