This happened repeatedly and I was already getting used to-having him mix into my responsibilities all the time, even though it disappointed me. But usually I forgot about my disappointment as soon as we started off. Turning away from the instruments which recorded the condition of the locomotive and from watching the left side of the train and the tracks ahead of us, I would watch Maltsev. He drove the train with the bold self-confidence of a great expert, with the concentration of an inspired artist, absorbing everything around him and thus achieving mastery over it. Alexander Vassilievich’s eyes looked straight in front of him, empty and abstracted, but I knew that through them he was watching the tracks in front and all of nature rushing toward us—even a swallow, swept upward by the edge of the wind made by the train, would catch his glance for an instant, and in that instant his head would turn after the swallow: what happened to him behind us, where had he flown?
We were never late through our own fault; on the contrary, they held us up often at way stations which were not scheduled stops, because we were ahead of the timetable and they could get us back into the schedule only by delaying us.
Usually we worked without talking. Occasionally Alexander Vassilievich would rap the boiler with his wrench, without even turning toward me, wanting to direct my attention to something that wasn’t quite right in the way the engine was working, or preparing me for some sudden change, so I would be ready for it. I always understood these unspoken instructions of my senior comrade and I carried them out diligently, but he still treated me as impersonally as if I had been a fireman or an oiler, and at all our stops he always tested the pressure gauges and the tightness of the bolts in the connecting rods, and he would check the axle-boxes on the driving wheels, and everything else. If I had just examined and oiled some moving part, Maltsev would examine and oil it again, right after me, as if he didn’t consider my work efficient.
“I just checked that crosshead, Alexander Vassilievich,” I told him once when he started to examine the block between a piston rod and a connecting rod just after I had done the same thing.
“And I want to do it myself,” Maltsev answered, smiling, and there was a kind of sadness in his smile which startled me.
I later understood the meaning of this sadness and the reason for his always holding himself aloof from us. He felt a superiority over us because he understood the locomotive better than we did and because he didn’t believe that I or anybody else could learn the secret of his skill, the secret of seeing at the same time the swallow flying by and the signal ahead, being aware at the same moment in time of the track, the whole train, and the power of the locomotive. Maltsev realized of course that we could outdo even him in our zeal, but he couldn’t imagine that we could love the engine more than he did or drive the train better—anything better, he thought, would be impossible. And this was why Maltsev was sad with us; he was lonesome with his talent, as if he lived all by himself, not knowing how to express it to us so we could understand.
And it’s true, we couldn’t have understood his skill. I asked him once to let me drive the engine by myself; Alexander Vassilievich let me have his place for forty kilometers, and sat in the assistant’s place. I drove the train, and after twenty kilometers I was already four minutes late, and at the end of the longer climbs we were doing no better than thirty kilometers an hour. Maltsev took the engine back again from me; he took the grades at a speed of fifty kilometers an hour, and the engine didn’t sway on the curves as it did with me, and he quickly made up the time that I had lost.
[II]
I worked as Maltsev’s assistant for about a year, from August to July, and on July 5 Maltsev made his last trip as the engineer of an express train…
We had picked up a train of forty passenger cars which was four hours late when we took it on. The train dispatcher came out to the engine and especially asked Alexander Vassilievich to make up as much of this time as he could, cutting it down to three hours if possible, for otherwise it would be hard for him to send a train of empty cars out on the next track. Maltsev promised him to make up the time, and we started off.
It was eight o’clock in the evening, but the summer day was still hanging on and the sun was shining with a kind of triumphal, morning-time power. Alexander Vassilievich asked me to keep the steam pressure in the boiler constant at only half an atmosphere below maximum.
In a half hour we pulled out into the steppe, on a quiet, soft stretch of land. Maltsev raised the speed to ninety kilometers and didn’t let it fall below this; on the contrary, he raised it to a hundred on the level and on small grades. On the grades I forced the firebox up to its maximum and made the fireman shovel coal by hand to help out the stoking machine, because my steam pressure was falling.
Maltsev drove the locomotive on, throttle wide open. We were now headed straight for a big stormcloud which had appeared above the horizon. From our side the cloud was lighted up by the sun, but its interior was being ripped by severe, angry bolts of lightning, and we could see how the shafts of lightning plunged vertically down onto the quiet distant earth and we were racing madly toward that distant ground as if hurrying to its defense. It was clear that the sight appealed to Alexander Vassilievich; he leaned far out of his window as he stared ahead, and his eyes which were used to smoke and flame and distance were glittering now with excitement. He realized that the work and the power of our locomotive were comparable with the might of the storm, and perhaps this idea made him feel proud.
Soon we saw a whirlwind of dust moving toward us across the steppe. This meant the storm was carrying the thundercloud straight at us. The air grew dark around us: the dry earth and the sand of the steppes whistled and crackled against the steel body of the locomotive, there was no visibility at all, and I started the generator to give us light and switched on the headlight on the front of the locomotive. Breathing was made hard by the burning whirlwind of dust forcing its way into the cabin and doubled in strength by the motion of the train toward it, and also by the gases from the firebox and by the early twilight surrounding us. The locomotive plunged on with a howl into the confused, stifling darkness, along the crack of light made by the front headlight. Our speed went down to sixty kilometers an hour; we were working and staring in front of us as if in a dream.
Suddenly a big drop of water hit the windshield and dried up at once, consumed by the hot wind. Then an instantaneous flash of blue light blazed past my eyelashes and seemed to move through me to my shuddering heart itself. I grabbed at the injector stopcock, but the pain in my heart had already stopped, and I looked at once toward Maltsev—he was looking in front and driving the engine, with nothing changed in his face.
“What was that?” I asked the fireman.
“Lightning,” he said. “It wanted to get us, and it didn’t miss by much.”
Maltsev heard what we were saying.
“What lightning?” he asked, quite loud.
“What we had just now,” the fireman said.
“I didn’t see it,” Maltsev said, and he turned his face again toward the tracks in front of us.
I was also wondering if this had really been lightning.
“But where’s the thunder?” I asked.
“We’ve gone right through it,” the fireman explained. “Thunder always comes afterwards. While it was striking, while the air was shaking loose, we’d already run past it. Probably the passengers heard it, they’re behind us.”
We went on through the downpour but were soon past it, and we came out onto the hushed and darkened steppe over which peaceful clouds were now resting motionless, their work done.