Everything Flows Read Free

towels, and said, “Well, citizens, who’s last in line?”
    The last in the queue, he was told, was a plump woman who had gone away for a moment. She was after a man with a twisted tube of toothpaste and a piece of soap plastered with bits of newspaper. He himself would be after this woman.
    â€œWhy’s there only one washroom open?” said the young man. “We’ll be arriving soon in the capital—and the conductors are only interested in the circulation of goods: their private deals and the packages they’ve been asked to deliver. What do they care about their duties to the passengers?”
    A few minutes later, a stout woman in a dressing gown appeared, and the young man said to her, “Citizen, I’m next after you. But I’ve had enough of hanging about in the corridor—I’m going to go and sit down for a moment.”
    Back in his compartment the young man opened an orange suitcase and began to admire his belongings.
    One of his three fellow travelers was snoring; the back of his head was broad and bulbous. A second—pink-complexioned, young-looking, but bald—was going through the papers in his briefcase. The third, a thin old man, was sitting and looking out of the window, resting his head on his brown fists.
    Addressing the pink-faced man, the young man with the suitcase said, “Have you finished with my book? I need to pack it now.”
    What he really wanted was for his traveling companion to admire his suitcase. In it were some viscose shirts,
A Brief Philosophical Dictionary
, a pair of swimming trunks, and sunglasses in white frames. In one corner, covered by some local newspaper or other, lay some gray village-baked shortbreads.
    The pink-faced man answered, “Here you are—
Eugénie Grandet.
I realized I read it last year, when I was on holiday.”
    â€œIt’s a powerful piece of writing, there’s no denying it,” said the young man. And he packed the book away in his suitcase.
    During the journey they had played cards. And while eating and drinking, they had discussed movies, records, furniture, socialist agriculture, the merits of various houses of recreation in Sochi, and which football team had the better attack—
Spartak
or
Dynamo.
    The bald man with the pink face was an inspector for the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions ; he worked in a provincial capital. The shaggy-haired young man was returning from a vacation he had spent in some village. He worked in Moscow, as an economist for
Gosplan
, the State Planning Committee.
    The third traveler, the one now snoring on the lower bunk, was a Siberian construction superintendent. The two younger men disliked him because of his lack of culture; he swore, and he belched after eating. Learning that one of his fellow travelers was working in
Gosplan
, in the Economic Science Department, he had said, “Political Economy—now what exactly is all that? Tells you why collective farmers go to the city to buy bread from the workers, does it?”
    Once he had got very drunk in the bar of a junction station where he had gone, as he said, “on a brief mission.” After this he had kept his fellow travelers awake for a long time, sounding off about one thing after another: “You can’t keep to the law in our line of work—or you’ll never get anything done at all. To fulfill the plan, you have to work the way life tells you to work. Yes, you have to meet life’s demands: ‘You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.’ Once—under the Tsar—this was called private enterprise. The way
I
put it is ‘Let a man live—he
wants
to live!’ Yes, I could teach you a thing or two about real economics! Once I had my steel fixers registered as nursery-school staff for a whole quarter—until our new budget came through. Yes, the law tries to stop life, but life makes its demands anyway. Fulfill the plan—and