In all honesty, the building came out botched. The tall, rectangular log frame building could hold two hundred people at most, and only standing. They initially held general gatherings there, but with Semruk’s rapid population growth, the gatherings were moved outside to the square, by the agitational board, meaning the clubhouse was empty most of the time. Ignatov proposed using the building as a school instead, or at least a storehouse, but Kuznets was adamant that the clubhouse exist in the settlement as its own entity. In other labor settlements, interest groups met in clubhouses: the Union of the Militant Godless, the Down with Illiteracy Society, and even Automobile Roads, a group focused on the development of automobilism and road improvements. It wouldn’t hurt to bring clubs of this sort to Semruk. No way in holy hell, thought Ignatov, picturing red-bearded Lukka diligently listening to a paper about a month-long campaign to fight roadlessness in Turkestan or Granny Yanipa in the ranks of the godless demonstrators. It’s better if they’re felling trees.
They’d recently decided to decorate the clubhouse with agitational art. More importance has been placed on agitational work of late, though until now it’s been limited to just supplying bright posters wound in tight rolls. Watching the settlement’s residents from the posters are curly-haired collective-farm women driving steel tractors with one hand while insistently and meaningfully pointing somewhere with the other (Konstantin Arnoldovich just sighed dreamily, running a finger along the carefully traced side of a jagged tractor wheel and explaining its mechanics in simple terms to peasants who’d never seen an iron horse). Others show well-fed male and female figures directing their inspired profiles toward an infant with splotchy red cheeks and chubby little hands waving in support of its own “joyful and happy childhood” (1938 was significant for Semruk in terms of demography because the birth rate exceeded the death rate that year for the first time since the settlement’s founding, apparently thanks in part to the powerful agitational influence of the poster). There are also red-hot Komsomol members striding along giant long-fingered hands that have been raised toward them in hope (under a special Gulag circular from 1932, it was forbidden to organize Young Pioneer squads from children of special migrants, but a reversal of policy in 1936 allowed this, and even declared it highly desirable, with the recommendation that future members of the Komsomol organization be diligently cultivated from those newly converted Young Pioneers). For some reason, a packet of posters from the Moscow Zoological Garden (“Entry fee only twenty kopeks!”) was sent from the central office along with three posters advertising squirrel coats from Soyuzmekhtorg for the ladies, although nobody considered hanging those on the board.
Then came a sudden order to use agitational art – the lusher and heartier the better – to beautify places for leisure activity. The clubhouse was the only such place in Semruk. And so a decision was made to decorate it. Ignatov wanted to limit decorations to standard posters and a couple of street banners with full-throated inscriptions, but then Kuznets remembered something. Isn’t there an artist here, one of the “remainders,” somebody well known? Let him sweat a little and portray something a bit more original. Kuznets knew that inspectors from Moscow, who were sure to descend upon them one day, would duly appreciate the fact that places for public cultural uses existed in this out-of-the-way Siberian settlement, and not only that but that a creative approach had been taken to the complex matter of agitational art.
Kuznets himself brought canvases, paints, and a small canister of turpentine from Krasnoyarsk. As Ikonnikov ran fingers coarsened by tree felling and shaking with excitement over the treasures that had fallen to him – Neapolitan yellow, cadmium, and Indian paints; ochres light and dark; mars, sienna, and umber; cinnabar, chrome, and Veronese green – he had a fit of creative inspiration and unexpectedly proposed that they start a mural for the ceiling.
Kuznets narrowed his eyes balefully. “Like in a church?”
“No, like in a subway station!” said Ikonnikov.
So a mural it was. They brought plywood and covered the ceiling. More medicine or fishing gear would have been better than this indulgence, brooded Ignatov, observing the pensive Ikonnikov as he wandered among scaffolding standing in rows in the clubhouse’s empty space and incessantly grumbled to helpers who were nailing thin sheets of plywood to the log ceiling “too roughly.” They didn’t understand how you could hit “more softly” and “more gently” with a hammer, and they cast suspicious sideways glances at the eccentric artist and exchanged significant looks among themselves.
Ikonnikov was anguishing. He was weary from a surge of emotions that blended inspiration, pining, long-forgotten youthful elation, despair, and some sort of aching tenderness for a mural that had not yet been created nor even fully visualized. Only a week before, when he was finishing sawing the eleventh pine trunk for the day or harnessing himself into rope to drag logs to the timber landing, he couldn’t have possibly imagined he’d be standing like this with his face raised toward the ceiling, toward a boundless space on which faces and cities and countries and times and all human life, from its very origin to spectral future horizons, were already glimmering for him and beginning to show themselves on the yellow plywood.
“Agitational art should be simple and understandable,” Ignatov declared. “And without any of your tricks, so watch out.”
During a week of creative torment, Ikonnikov’s face thinned and his pendulous nose sharpened, lending their master a resemblance to a large and sullen bird; his eyes flared with a rather wild fire. He primed the plywood day and night, lying under the ceiling on wooden scaffolding and only occasionally taking breaks to sleep and eat. With the commandant’s permission, he slept at the clubhouse, too. He completely stopped drinking the home brew that some of the exiles had learned to make from berries; Ikonnikov was known to imbibe. He used up his monthly supply of candles in five days; working at night was somehow jollier and more wicked. Finally, he began on the mural.
Ignatov, who’d initially made daily stops at the clubhouse to inspect the creative process, was surprised to realize that agitational art was no quick matter. A month after work began, the ceiling had only been ruled into some kind of little squares, streaked with incomprehensible lines, and partially covered with colored dots whose intended use was unclear.
“Will it be ready soon?” Ignatov asked Ikonnikov, with a sense of doom.
“I’ll try to have it done by the November holidays,” Ikonnikov promised.
It was the height of spring. Out of annoyance, Ignatov gave up and stopped going to check. He’d heard that Ikonnikov was using his free time away from agitational art to indulge himself by painting his own pictures on canvases that had ended up at his disposal. Ignatov hadn’t placed any particular meaning on that, but it turned out he should have.
They pound on the door so hard that the scaffolding shakes and shudders under Ikonnikov.
“Coming!” He speeds down the rungs in a hurry, his feet missing slats from nervousness.
He forgets his candle above, so now it’s burning right under the ceiling, illuminating someone’s large, half-drawn hand with long Raphaelesque fingers and casting angular black shadows in all directions as its light catches scaffolding that towers high and threateningly, a homemade easel Ikonnikov had crafted from beams, and Ilya Petrovich himself, who’s scrambling to the door. He finally gropes at the bolt and unlocks it, just as the door swings open from a powerful blow, nearly flying off its hinges.