"Perhaps you will ask me to leave the room, young man?" the stranger inquired, grinning slyly.
"Yes, I will!" Nikita shouted unexpectedly. "Listen to me! Either you tell me who you are, or the whole class will show you the quickest way out of here!" And red in the face, Nikita nodded at the window.
"I am afraid you will soon have to apologize to me for that!" the man with the moustache said ominously, and with a proud toss of his ginger mane, he walked out of the room.
"Yes, that's the best way!" Nikita shouted after him, and lowering his voice at once to a normal tone, went on reading the paper.
It turned out that this was the notorious Pecheritsa.
A few days before his visit, Kartamyshev had come to the school. The Secretary of the District Party Committee had gone round all the workshops examining everything with genuine care. He talked for a long time with the trainees, told the foreman off because there was no drinking water in the hot shop and the chaps' gauntlets were torn, then he came down to the foundry himself. It was he who insisted the shell hole in the ceiling should be patched up before the autumn rains began, and a ventilator installed.
That day one of the chaps was ill and had stayed in the hostel. He told us how, after looking round the school, Kartamyshev had visited the hostel as well. It was plain that Kartamyshev wanted to know what our living conditions were like as well as how much we were learning. He made the cook show him exactly how much food we were given and hauled the hostel warden over the coals because our blankets were rather thin and threadbare and we had no sheets. Kartamyshev was a real father to us.
We respected him and there was genuine affection in our voices when we mentioned his name. But Pecheritsa had succeeded in rubbing us up the wrong way right from the start...
The next day, Polevoi was summoned urgently to the Department of Education.
Pecheritsa flatly demanded that Polevoi should dismiss Mikita from school. He said Nikita had "undermined his authority." Just exactly what passed between them we never knew, but Furman came back from the District Komsomol Committee with a story that in reply to Pecheritsa's complaint Polevoi had sapped out: "The authority of a real Bolshevik can never be undermined. A Bolshevik wins his authority by his conduct." I don't know whether that was exactly how Polevoi put it, but one thing was clear— he had stood up for Nikita. But although the battle was won, everyone realized that Pecheritsa would bear the factory-school trainees a grudge for some time to come.
Pecheritsa soon made his presence felt in our sleepy little town. On his way out to the country districts he often drove through the steep streets of the town in his tall yellow cabriolet drawn by two glossy black horses. Muffled in a grey tarpaulin coat with the hood thrown back, Pecheritsa looked down on the passers-by, carelessly acknowledging the bows of teachers who knew him.
Soon the town learnt that the new director of education was a great lover of singing. For several evenings running, Pecheritsa gathered all the school and student choirs in the big drill hall and taught them a lot of songs. After a while he arranged for the choir to perform publicly in the town theatre, at a ceremonial evening. The lads stood in a semi-circle in astrakhan hats, embroidered shirts and blue sharovary tucked into high top-boots. The girls tied ribbons of different colours in their plaits. Their blouses were also embroidered and gay sashes hung down their skirts. In a glare of flood-lights the choristers filling the whole stage of the theatre made a very pretty picture.
We, trainees, sat. in the gallery. The curtain went up after the interval and in the expectant hush we gazed at the dazzling display of singers. No one thought that Pecheritsa would dare conduct such a huge choir. It didn't seem to fit in with his way of carrying on.
But after keeping the singers standing motionless on the stage for a few seconds, he strode up to the footlights and with a shake of his flowing ginger mane announced:
"Revolutionary for Ever, a song by Ivan Franko!"
Someone in the audience gave a last cough so as not to interrupt later on, then there was silence.
Pecheritsa turned his back on the audience, poised himself on tip-toe and, whipping a little stick out of his boot, swept it high above his head. The silence seemed to break in half. The young ringing voices burst forth so confidently that we listened spell-bound. Now, lat a sign from the stick, the choir would die away and the soloist would continue the song; now the basses—a picked group of tall, strapping fellows standing separately—would come in, and a thunderous but pleasant roar would fill the hall; now the descants would ring out, as a hundred girls' voices took up the melody. The theatre seemed to grow lighter; you felt like jumping up and singing too.
And in front of the singers, on a sort of box, now rising on tip-toe, now crouching, now swaying in time with the melody, stood the imposing figure of Pecheritsa, whom Nikita had so boldly turned out of our class-room.
Pecheritsa was a fine conductor. He had the whole choir, so recently assembled, under perfect control. And as I listened to the singers and watched how cleverly the ginger-moustached Pecheritsa conducted them, II began to take a liking to him.
Then the choir sang 0, the poor lasses of Galicia. The melody went rollicking along. Pecheritsa conducted with special gusto, whirling his baton like a cavalryman cutting down practice twigs. The audience listened to the quick marching song about the lasses of Galicia who were sorry because their "gunner-boys" had marched away to the Ukraine and because there would be no one to kiss them "on their scarlet lips, hazel eyes, and black brows," and I tried desperately to remember where I had heard those words before.
The song sounded strange and out of place in our Soviet times. In those days the young people used to sing the Carmagnole, Racing on Ahead, We've Dug our Graves Ourselves, The Reapers Reap upon the Hill, Rumbling Guns, The Mist is Creeping o'er the Field, and now, all of a sudden, Pecheritsa had dug up this ditty about the scarlet lips of the sorrowful lasses of Galicia. Only as the choir sang the last couplet, did I remember that it was this song that the Galician "gunner-boys" had sung in 1918 when they marched across our fortress bridge. Their grey uniforms were the same as those of their Austrian officers and they burnt and pillaged as ruthlessly as their masters. They smashed up Orlovsky's mill under the cliff, stole the peasants' grain and carted it off to Austria while the people of our town were starving. I listened to the song and just could not understand why the choir should be singing it in our Soviet times.
But, as though sensing my doubts and desiring to banish them, Pecheritsa's choir struck up with Taras Shevchenko's Commandment, then the Internationale that we all knew and loved so well. In those days all our meetings ended with our standing up and singing the Internationale and the Young Guard. But it was one thing for us to sing the hymn of the workers of the world in our little group, or at the Komsomol club, in thin untrained voices, and something quite different to hear the Internationale ring forth from the lips of this enormous choir. That evening I began to feel that Nikita had done wrong to turn Pecheritsa out of the room. The new director of education may have acted arrogantly. But what a conductor!
The next day, however, I was again disappointed in Pecheritsa.
We had a drawing master called Maxim Yakovlevich Nazarov. This little grey-haired old man, an engineer by profession, came from the town of Sormovo, on the Volga. Maxim Yakovlevich used to tell us much that was new and interesting about the Red Sormovo Plant, where he had worked nearly all his life. The old man had seen a lot, working in shops where there were more people than in forty factories like our Motor. Our school badly needed men like Maxim Yakovlevich with long experience of industry.