As Kuznets listens, his neck, which is already crimson, is gradually turning purple, too. Kuznets can’t contain himself by the time all the fingers on one of Sumlinsky’s hands have been used and he’s moving on to the next.
“Who are you anyway,” he hisses, “you bastard, setting conditions for me, Zinovy Kuznets?”
Konstantin Arnoldovich lowers his hands and wilts.
“Probably nobody,” he says. “But at one time I was head of the applied botany department at the Institute of Experimental Agronomy – there is such a place in Leningrad. And a very long time ago – one might say in a previous life – I was a member of the scientific committee at the Ministry of Arable Farming and State Property. That was back in Petersburg.”
“I’ll set the conditions for you; you won’t do it for me, you minister of arable farming. When I give the order, you’ll improve the collective farm on your own, without the sturdiest and handiest men and without oxen, too. You’ll plow the land with your own rod, not some tools.”
“You can give an order to me,” Sumlinsky says to the floor, “but you can hardly give an order to the grain.”
Ignatov tears his heavy, unwieldy head off the table.
“Let’s have a drink, Zin. And that one” – Ignatov’s dulled gaze has trouble fumbling around for Konstantin Arnoldovich’s frail figure, which seems to be soaring over the floor in the dense cigarette smoke – “toss him out of here. Let him put it all in writing.”
Kuznets is breathing loudly; he throws a parsley leaf in his mouth and rolls it along his teeth.
“Let’s drink,” says Ignatov, pounding his hand on the table and not calming down. “Drink! Drink!”
“Let’s,” Kuznets finally agrees, raising his glass and staring straight at the pale Sumlinsky. “To the future collective farm. To it blossoming like a magnificent socialist flower and as soon as possible. Fine, minister, I accept your conditions. But if you let me down…”
They clink glasses. As they’re drinking, Sumlinsky vanishes outside without a sound. And that’s how the seeds of the Semruk collective farm were sown and the second agenda item for the day was closed; midnight has already rolled past by this time.
The third item is so serious they head off to the bathhouse for discussions. They bring the vodka with them and chill it in a bucket of icy-cold Angara water. This point is called “informant and agent work,” which Ignatov has set up outrageously badly. The situation must be rectified. Moreover, immediately.
“Who am I supposed to recruit as agents, anyway – the bears?” Ignatov listlessly resists as Kuznets whacks his back with a splendid bundle of birch leaves that’s been conscientiously soaked three times in boiling water.
“It can even be elks and wolverines,” grunts Kuznets, the thick pearlescent air wavering around his powerful torso like a live cloud. “Just be ready to hand over five informants, that’s what I need.”
When Ignatov was in charge of the special train, he regularly called in the minders from each car for a conversation. But it was one thing to talk and listen, and another thing entirely to note down observations and send them to central office, understanding that when your paper was placed in the person’s individual file it would remain there for a long time, likely forever, outliving both the person himself and his observer.
They lash themselves to the bone and run down to the Angara – naked, they don’t get dressed – to take a dip. They shout in the icy water, scaring away all the nocturnal fish in the vicinity, splash around, and scurry back to the bathhouse to warm up.
“Understand, Zin, brother,” says Ignatov, trying pitifully to pour vodka into small wooden dippers (they forgot to bring the glasses from the commandant’s headquarters and are too lazy to run back for them), “this agent… agent business… makes me sick…”
Kuznets gulps from the dipper, chasing the drink with a dark brown birch leaf that’s stuck to Ignatov’s forehead, then spits out the leaf stem.
“Look, Vanya, here’s what you have to do.”
He kicks the door and night coolness blows in from outside; a creamy-yellow half-moon is dangling in the dark blue sky. Kuznets whistles briefly, like a master calling a pet dog. Gorelov’s concerned face appears in the doorway a minute later.
“The women,” he reports, “are already sitting at the commandant’s headquarters, waiting on the front steps. One’s dark-complexioned, the other’s light, like last time. If they need to be brought over here for you, just say…”
Kuznets’s finger beckons to Gorelov, who cautiously makes his way into the crowded little bathhouse, which is filled with the smells of smoke, white-hot stones, birch leaves, vodka, and sturdy male bodies. He averts his eyes from the delicate parts of the naked chiefs’ bodies, looking only at bright-red faces covered with glistening sweat.
“What’s your…?” Kuznets is snapping his fingers in the air.
“Gorelov!”
“Gorelov, why’re you cooling your heels here in the settlement instead of working off your term in a camp? The camp’s crying out for you, pouring bitter tears.”
“I’m not a felon.” Gorelov’s bristling like a wild animal, backing away toward the door. “I’m just not part of a social class…”
“You’re lucky, you dog.” Kuznets smiles. He splashes some vodka in a dipper and extends it to Gorelov, who nods with cautious thanks and drinks, his sharp Adam’s apple measuring the swallows like a piston. “I’d have put you in as a felon. Anyway, fine, don’t be a scaredy-cat. You’re better off telling me who’s breeding anti-Soviet ideas here in Semruk.”
Gorelov sneers and squints out from behind the ladle with distrust, wondering if he’s being tested.
“There’s a lot.”
“Ah!” Kuznets meaningfully lifts a tensed finger. “And can you write them all down?”
“I’ve learned to read and write.”
“And might there be people who could help you, fill you in on details – the who, what, and where? The things you yourself might not have seen?”
“I’ll find them, you can be sure I will.” Half of Gorelov’s mouth grins as if he still can’t believe the leaders are appealing to him with such an important request.
“Good!” Kuznets waves his hand like a king. “Go, you’re dismissed for now.”
And he looks victoriously at Ignatov, who’s collapsed by the walclass="underline" So what do you think of that? A lightning-fast recruitment in two steps, even just one and a half.
“I can do it right now! Right now!” Gorelov’s bursting with concealed knowledge that he absolutely wants to report, in its entirety, to chiefs who look on him favorably at this anxious moment. “I can show you the main one! He’s not sleeping yet – he’s painting up his anti-Soviet stuff, that turncoat. I know it!”
“Who?” Ignatov’s heavy gaze comes out from under his puffy eyelids and bores into Gorelov.
“Ikonnikov! They say he has done ‘quite something’ at the clubhouse!”
“Well, if it’s quite something, then go on, show us.” Kuznets stands. Reeling a bit, he ties a white sheet around his muscular purple torso. He takes on an immediate resemblance to an ancient Roman patrician in the hot springs at Caracalla.
They built the clubhouse five years ago when there was an order from on high requiring labor settlements to establish domestic as well as agitational and cultural elements of life for the re-educated peasantry. Ignatov would have been more eager to put his workforce into expanding the infirmary or storage space, but an order is an order so they built it.