Every day above the workers’ settlement the factory siren quivered and roared in the smoky, oily air, and, obedient to the call, out into the street from the small grey houses there ran, like frightened cockroaches, morose people who had as yet been unable to refresh their muscles with sleep. They walked in the cold gloom down the unpaved street towards the tall, stone cells of the factory, and it awaited them with indifferent certainty, lighting the muddy road with dozens of greasy square eyes. Mud squelched underfoot. The hoarse exclamations of sleepy voices rang out, coarse abuse tore angrily through the air, while towards the people floated other sounds – the heavy commotion of machines, the grumbling of steam. Morose and stern loomed the tall black chimneys, rising above the settlement like fat sticks.
In the evening, when the sun was setting, and its red rays shone wearily on the houses’ window panes, the factory would toss the people out from its stone depths like waste slag, and again they would walk down the streets, smoke-begrimed, black-faced, spreading the sticky smell of machine oil through the air and with their hungry teeth shining. In their voices now there was the sound of animation and even joy – the penal servitude of labour was over for the day, and waiting at home were dinner and rest.
The day had been swallowed by the factory, and the machines had sucked as much strength as they needed from men’s muscles. The day had been expunged from life without trace, each man had taken one more step towards his grave, but he could see not far ahead of him the pleasure of rest, the joys of the smoky tavern, and he was content.
On days off people would sleep until about ten o’clock, then the solid and married ones would dress in their best clothes and go to hear the Liturgy, criticizing youngsters on the way for their indifference to the church. From church they would return home, eat pies and go back to bed again until evening.
Tiredness which had accumulated over years deprived men of their appetite, and in order to eat they would have a lot to drink, irritating their stomachs with the sharp burning of vodka.
In the evening they would stroll lazily around the streets, and anyone who had galoshes put them on, even if it was dry, and if they had an umbrella they carried it with them, even though the sun might be shining.
Meeting with one another, they would talk about the factory, about the machines, and criticize the foremen: they talked and thought only about things connected with work. Solitary sparks of clumsy, impotent thought barely glimmered in the boring monotony of their days. Returning home, they would quarrel with their wives and often beat them, not sparing their fists. The youngsters sat in taverns or organized parties at each other’s homes; they played accordions, sang smutty, ugly songs, danced, used foul language and drank. Exhausted by labour, men got drunk quickly, and in every breast an incomprehensible, morbid irritation was awakened. It demanded an outlet. And grasping tenaciously at every opportunity to discharge this alarming feeling, people threw themselves upon one another over trifles with the animosity of beasts. Bloody fights broke out. At times they ended in serious mutilation, occasionally in murder.
Most of all in people’s relations there was a sense of watchful malice, and it was just as chronic as the incurable tiredness of their muscles. People were born with this sickness of the soul, inheriting it from their fathers, and it accompanied them like a black shadow to the grave, prompting them during their lives to a series of deeds, repellent in their aimless cruelty.
On days off, youngsters would arrive home late at night in ripped clothing, covered in dirt and dust and with battered faces, boasting with malicious delight of the blows inflicted upon their comrades, or else insulted, in a rage or in tears of resentment, drunk and wretched, unhappy and offensive. Sometimes lads were brought home by their mothers or fathers. They would seek them out, drunk and insensible, somewhere beside a fence in the street or in the taverns; they would curse them with foul words and use their fists to beat the soft bodies, diluted with vodka, of their children, then put them to bed, more or less solicitously, only to wake them early in the morning, when the angry roar of the siren flowed in a dark stream through the air, for work.
They cursed and beat their children hard, but the drunkenness and fights of the youngsters seemed to the old men a perfectly legitimate phenomenon – when the fathers were young, they too had drunk and fought, they too had been beaten by their mothers and fathers. Life had always been thus: evenly and slowly, year after year, it kept on flowing away somewhere in a turbid stream, and it was all bound together by strong, ancient habits of thinking and doing one and the same thing day in, day out. And no one had any desire to try to change it.
Outsiders would occasionally come to the settlement from elsewhere. At first they attracted attention simply because they were strangers, next they aroused a slight, superficial interest with stories about the places where they had worked, and then their novelty wore off, people grew accustomed to them, and they became insignificant. From their stories it was clear: the life of a worker was the same everywhere. And if that was the case, then what was there to talk about?
But there were times when some of them would say something unheard of in the settlement. People did not argue with them, but listened to their strange speeches with distrust. These speeches excited blind irritation in some, in others vague anxiety, while a third group were disturbed by a slight shadow of hope for something unclear, and they would start drinking more to expel the needless, troubling anxiety.
Having noticed something unusual in a stranger, the people of the settlement were long unable to forgive him for it and responded to the man who did not resemble them with unaccountable apprehension. It was as if they were afraid that the man would throw something into their life that would disturb its cheerlessly proper progress, hard, maybe, but serene. People were accustomed to life crushing them with always identical force and, not expecting any changes for the better, considered all changes capable only of increasing their oppression.
People who said new things were silently shunned by the settlement-dwellers. Those people would then disappear, going away elsewhere once more, but if they did remain at the factory, and if they did not know how to merge into a single whole with the monotonous mass of the settlement-dwellers, then they lived apart…
Having lived such a life for some fifty years, a man would die.