DURING his visit to the Tractor Factory raikom Spiridonov learned something unexpected: Ivan Pavlovich Pryakhin, whom he had known for many years, had been promoted. He was to be first secretary of the obkom, the Party committee for the entire province.35
Pryakhin had once worked in the Tractor Factory’s Party office. Then he had gone to study in Moscow. Not long before the war he had returned to the Tractor Factory, this time as Party organizer.
Spiridonov had known Pryakhin for a long time, but they had never seen a lot of each other. He did not understand why he felt so affected by this news, which did not directly concern him.
He went to Pryakhin’s office and found him putting on his coat, about to go out. “Greetings, comrade Pryakhin, and my congratulations on your promotion!”
Pryakhin—large, slow and with a broad forehead—turned to look at Spiridonov and said, “Well, comrade Spiridonov, we’ll still be seeing each other, the same as always, perhaps more often now.”
They left the building together.
“Let me give you a lift,” said Spiridonov. “I can drop you off on my way back to Stalgres.”
“No, I’d rather walk,” said Pryakhin.
“Walk?” Spiridonov said in surprise. “That’ll take you three hours.”
Pryakhin smiled but didn’t reply. Spiridonov looked at Pryakhin, smiled and also didn’t say anything. He realized that this taciturn man wanted, as the war drew closer, to walk the streets of the city where he had been born, to walk past a factory he had seen being built, past gardens he had seen being planted, past the school he had helped to build, past new blocks of apartments into which he had helped people to settle.
Spiridonov stood by the main door, waiting for his driver. He watched Pryakhin walk away.
“Now it’ll be him I have to report to!” he thought. He wanted to smile, but he was too moved. He remembered some of his previous meetings with Pryakhin. During the official opening of the school for the factory workers’ children Pryakhin had reprimanded the foreman for the appalling state of the parquet floors in some of the classrooms; his cross voice and preoccupied look had jarred with the celebratory atmosphere of the day. Spiridonov also remembered how, long before the war, there had been a bad fire in one of the workers’ settlements; seeing Pryakhin stride through the grey-blue smoke, he had said to himself with relief, “Ah, the district committee—here to the rescue!” And then there had been an occasion when a new workshop was about to come into operation. For three days and nights Spiridonov barely slept. Then Pryakhin turned up. It was as if he were just passing by, not needing to say anything in particular, but, each time he spoke, he had said something helpful about whatever was most troubling Spiridonov at that moment. Today, hearing of Pryakhin’s promotion, Spiridonov had felt the same as he had during the fire: “Ah, the district committee—here to the rescue!”
Spiridonov now saw Pryakhin in a new light: “The man must be feeling real anguish. He’s put his whole life into building this city. He wants to look at everything one more time. Yes, Stalingrad is our life—his life and mine.”
And it seemed likely that, when they were saying goodbye, Pryakhin had guessed what Spiridonov was thinking; he had squeezed his hand very firmly, as if to thank him both for his understanding and for his reticence, for not saying, “Ah, yes, I see. You’re wanting to look once more at the places where your life has gone by, at what you’ve worked so hard to construct.”
Few people like it when someone digs about in their soul and then broadcasts to the world what they’ve discovered there.
When he got back to Stalgres, Spiridonov returned at once to his everyday concerns, but the thoughts stirred up by this chance encounter remained with him. They did not simply dissolve in the noise of the everyday.