THIRTEEN

The man was at a meeting in the clubhouse in the Siberian forest—a shack made of wide, knotty planks—and he sat on a bench among his comrades, listening with attention to the comrade foreman about their project, which was to clear a wide area of the forest, then dynamite the earth, then build a great furnace, stoked with trees cut into damp logs, to run the steam-driven bores that would descend deeper into the earth to determine the depth of the water that they would then dig down to.

They started digging in the summer. Just before winter began, they reached a depth that required the sides of the crater to be reinforced, and for a month, the men watched from above a pile driver sink steel piles, with earth-shuddering blows, around the inside of the pit, and deeper than the pit, wedging them in tightly against one another to form a massive iron drum. The man stood about on a raw hill of dug-up earth and stones and looked down into the pit. The day he went back down into the pit, snow began to fall.

The digger next to him struck his spade against a stone and, scraping it clear with the edge of the spade, called to him, in the midst of sounds of pickaxes and spades, “Hey, comrade, who would have expected to find a stone so far down?” A number of men circled round the stone. They gave way only when the comrade foreman came and seemed about to give a speech, but he only reached out to take a pickax from one of the men and, swinging the pickax under the boulder and thrusting his weight against the handle, dislodged what had been where it was from the beginning of time. He didn’t have to give a speech, as his actions did it for him: there was nothing man could imagine that would not be realized.

The man, a month later, was the first to shout out as he dug, “Mud!”

Then all the men, with the help of pumps to suck up the water, began to dig through the mud. Their boots were always deep in the black, thick wash. About the round wall of the pit silt oozed through the cracks between the steel piles, however tightly they had been wedged. Cigarette smoke at that depth hung thick and still in the air. Now, the sound of the pumps made it impossible to talk, and the men in the pit worked silently in the light of small electric bulbs suspended from long wires.

Slowly, piles in the round wall began to bulge inward, then suddenly great clots of silt fell between the piles into the pit.

Someone roared, “Comrades!”

Throwing down their spades and pickaxes, the men all together hefted a metal beam and tried to prop the bulge to keep it from swelling further. But the lower end of the beam was sinking into the silt, and planks, spades, pickaxes, even, from some men, jackets, caps, and boots, were thrown into the mud to keep the beam from sinking. Again and again, the beam sank into the black slime. Old truck tires hung around the wall as bumpers, and these the men pulled down, and while some workers, their muscles straining to bursting, raised and lowered the end of the beam, others wedged the tires under it. When the end of the beam was placed down into the midst of the tires, it held, and the top pressed against the bulge in the pile with enough force to keep it from buckling farther. But the silt, with a constant, heavy, dark flow, continued to pour into the pit and rise above the boots of the men to their knees. The pump was unable to cope with the load, and more pumps were brought and orders screamed out above the men’s heads in the high dimness, hung with rising and lowering gondolas and illuminated by bulbs that began to flicker. As the silt poured in, it became more watery and might soon start to splash in. Reinforcements of men were lowered into the pit in the gondolas, so there were so many men digging away the silt left by the pumps they hardly had room to swing their spades.

Among them, the foreman shouted, “Comrades, for the love of God, save our great Soviet Union!”

While some men dug, others wedged thick planks into the opening caused by the bulge to try to stop the flow of silt. The planks were flung out by the force of the pressure behind them, and one, flung out, hit a worker in the head and killed him. The foreman shouted for the pit to be abandoned, and men began to jump into the gondolas, so many that some of the men had to hang on to the cables as the gondolas rose. Then the power failed, electric lights went out, and the gondolas, packed with men, stopped, swaying in space.

The man was left in the pit with other men, all watching, with passive wonder, at buckling and twisting piles that gave way to great gushes of mud as dawn light began to show in the vast round of the pit opening high overhead.