Fomin stood for a long time next to this tree of his childhood. His numbed heart suddenly seemed to lose all feeling, so as not to take any more grief into itself. But Fomin picked up some of the tiles which were still whole and put them in a neat little pile, as if he were getting material ready for future building, or collecting seed with which to plant all of Russia once again. This tile and all the others around it had been made in the kiln which Fomin had established here in the old days of peace and which he had managed for years.
Fomin walked out into the steppe; there, about a mile from the city, he had once upon a time built his first dam. He had been a happy builder then, but now the meadow of his youth was sad and empty, ripped up by the war and barren; unfamiliar little blades of grass could be seen in places through the thin, melting snow, indifferent to man, bowing humbly under the wind…. The earth dam had been shattered in the middle, the reservoir had dried up, and the fish in it had died.
Fomin went back to the city. He found Shevchenko Street and the house where he had lived after his return from Rostov, when he had finished the polytechnic institute. The house was no longer there, but a bench remained. It had formerly stood under the windows of his apartment; he used to sit on this bench in the evenings, at first alone and then with Aphrodite, and in this house that was now destroyed they had lived together in one room, with windows facing on the street. His father, a foundry worker, had suddenly died while Fomin was still studying in Rostov, and his mother had married again and gone away to settle in Kazan. The young Nazar Fomin had been left then to live by himself, but the whole sunlit world, filled with attractive people, that seductive world of youth and eternal unsolved mysteries, a world not yet constructed, poor, but filled with the hope and with the will of the Bolshevik workers, this world was waiting for young people, and their familiar, native land, made hungry and naked by the miseries of the first world war, lay there in front of them.
Fomin sat down on the bench where he had passed so many quiet summer evenings talking and making love with Aphrodite. Now there was an empty, shattered world in front of him, and his best friend, perhaps, was no longer on this earth. Everything had now to be done from scratch, in order to go on with what had been planned a quarter of a century ago.
Probably Nazar Fomin’s life would have worked out quite differently if belief in the idea of the working class had not inspired him in those bygone days of his youth. It is possible he might have lived more quietly, but cheerlessly and fruitlessly; he might have worked out his own individual destiny, but he would not have known that invincible necessity which came when, trusting his people with nothing but his heart, he felt and understood the meaning and sense of his own existence. But when he presses close to the people who gave him birth, and through them to nature and to the world, to past time and to future hope—then there is opened to his spirit that secret spring where a man must drink to win strength without limit for what he does, and the power of really believing that his own life is important.
Soviet Russia was then only starting to work out its own fate. The people had set off on a great road with no returning, into that historical future where no one had marched before: it wanted to find the fulfillment of all its hopes, to achieve through work both deeds of lasting value and the dignity of human life, and to share these with other peoples…. Fomin had once seen a simple vision on the Sea of Azov when he was a boy. He was on the shore, and the single sail of a fishing boat was moving in the distance on a blue sea under a shining light-gold cloud; the boat moved farther and farther away, its white sail reflecting the sun with its gentle light, and the boat was still visible for a long time to the people on the shore; then it disappeared entirely over the enchanted horizon. Nazar had felt a melancholy happiness then, just as if someone he loved had called to him from the shining distance of sky and water when he could not follow him. And Soviet Russia seemed to him just like that boat disappearing into the distance, sailing off into the world and into time. He also remembered a midday hour of a forgotten day. Nazar had been walking through fields, moving down into a ravine where wonderful wild grass was growing; the sun called out to everyone from high in the sky, and plants and beasts moved up to answer it from the darkness of the earth—they were all of different colors, each of them different, not resembling each other: each took shape and came to life on the earth as best it could, just so it could come for this, take breath and celebrate, and play its part in the general assembly of all existence, succeed in loving all living things and then once more part forever from them. The young Nazar Fomin felt at that moment the great, dumb, and universal grief which only man can understand, express, and overcome, and this is precisely what man is for. Nazar was happy then about what he owed to mankind; he knew in advance that he would pay it because the working class and the Bolsheviks had taken on themselves all the obligations and all the burdens of humanity, and by heroic labor and by the power of an accurate understanding of their meaning on this earth the working people would carry out their assignment, and the dark destiny of mankind would have the truth break over it. This was how Nazar Fomin thought in his youth. He felt things then more than he knew them, he could not yet express the idea of all the people in clear language, but he was content with just the happy certainty that the dusk which had covered the world and shadowed the hearts of men was not an eternal darkness but only the dark which comes before the dawn.
Nazar Fomin’s contemporaries, Young Communists and Bolsheviks, were inspired by the same idea of creating a new world; just like Nazar, they were convinced that they had been challenged by Lenin to take part in a worldwide triumph of humanity. It was in order that a time of true living should begin at last on this earth, in order to fulfill all the hopes which people had earned by their centuries of hard work and of sacrifice, the hopes they had saved up through long trials and much patient thinking…
When he had finished the special institute in Rostov, Nazar Fomin returned to his birthplace, to this same town where he was now sitting all alone. Nazar had become a technical builder, and started his lifework. He took everything that was material, rough, and ordinary so close to his heart that it became something spiritual for him, and sustained his passion for his work. Now he no longer remembered: had he realized then or not that everything that is truly spiritual comes only from the living needs of human beings? But with his own hands he accomplished this transformation of the material into the spiritual, and he believed in the truth of the revolution because he had accomplished this and seen its effect on the destiny of his people.
At first Nazar Fomin had been in charge of rural production of fireproof materials throughout the district; this was not considered a big responsibility. But he was excited by this work and he cherished it, not just as a public service but as the very meaning of his existence, and he looked with passionate eyes at the first baked tiles prepared in his village kiln. He stroked the first tile, sniffed it, and carried it back to the room where he was living so that he could look at it again in the evening and in the morning, to make sure it really was completely good and solid, fit to last for long years in place of the straw on the roofs of village houses and thus to save the peasants’ homes from fire. Then he studied the fire statistics of his district in the rural reports and figured out that if straw thatch could be replaced by tiles, this economy alone would save the peasants enough from fire damage to build, for example, an artesian well with abundant clean water in every village in three years’ time, or even more; and then in the next three or four years, out of the same funds saved from fire by the tiled roofs, enough to construct a local electric power station with a mill for hulling grain and another for grinding it. With these ideas Nazar Fomin could stare at a tile for a long time without growing bored, thinking about how it could be made stronger and cheaper. Tiles had become both feeling and experience for him, they had replaced books and friends; later on he understood that no object could really replace human beings, but when he was young just thinking about man was enough for him.