Everything Flows Read Free Page A

you get a pay raise and a bonus. But who knows? You might end up doing ten years in the camps instead. The law fights against life, and life fights against the law.”
    The two younger men said nothing. But when the construction superintendent fell silent—or, rather, when he began to snore loudly—they said what they thought of him:
    â€œOne needs to keep an eye on people like him. Behind that comradely mask...”
    â€œA wheeler-dealer. A man without principles. Bad as a Yid.”
    This man was a nobody, an uncouth nobody from the back of beyond. It was infuriating to sense that he held cultured people like them in contempt. “I’ve got prisoners working on my construction site,” he had said on one occasion. “Their name for people like you is ‘layabouts.’ But when the time comes to decide who built Communism, no doubt it’ll turn out to be you lot who did all the plowing . ” And with that he had gone off to the compartment next door to play cards.
    As for the fourth passenger, it seemed that he seldom traveled in a carriage with reserved seats. Most of the time he just sat there, his palms on his knees, as if wanting to hide the darns on his trousers. The sleeves of his black sateen shirt ended somewhere between his elbows and his wrists, and the white buttons on the collar and the chest made it look like the shirt of a child. There is something absurd and touching about the combination of white, childish buttons and the gray temples and exhausted eyes of an old man.
    When the construction superintendent said to him, in the voice of a man used to giving orders, “Move out of the way, Grandad—I need the table for my tea!”, the old man jumped to his feet like an obedient soldier and went out into the corridor.
    Inside his plywood suitcase with its peeling paint lay a loaf of crumbling bread and some threadbare underwear. He smoked makhorka and, after rolling a cigarette, he would go to the platform at the end of the carriage, so as not to upset the others with his horrible smoke.
    Sometimes his fellow travelers would offer him a piece of sausage; once the construction superintendent presented him with a hard-boiled egg and a glass of vodka.
    Even people half his age addressed him familiarly as
Ty
, rather than politely as
Vy.
And the superintendent kept saying that when they got to Moscow, “Grandad” would pretend to be a bachelor and marry a young girl.
    On one occasion the conversation turned to the subject of collective farms. The young economist began criticizing “village loafers”: “I’ve seen it now with my own eyes. In the morning they just hang about outside the farm office and scratch their arses. The collective-farm chairman and the brigade leaders have to sweat blood to get them out onto the fields. And all they do is complain. They make out that under Stalin they didn’t get paid at all, and that they hardly get paid even now.”
    The trade-union inspector, thoughtfully shuffling a pack of cards, agreed with him: “And why should our dear friends be paid if they don’t keep up with their grain deliveries? They need to be taught a lesson—like this!” And he shook his white fist in the air—the strong fist of a peasant, though it had clearly not seen manual labor for many years.
    The construction superintendent stroked his stout chest with its rows of greasy ribbons—he had evidently been awarded many orders and medals.
    â€œThere was bread enough for us in the army, on the front line. We were fed by the Russian people. And no one had to teach them how to do it.”
    â€œYou’re right there,” said the economist. “What matters is that we’re Russians. Yes, Russians—that’s quite something.”
    The inspector smiled and winked at his companion. It was as if he were saying those well-known words: “The Russian is the elder brother, the first among equals .