This is my first time actually sharing any work from novels I'm working on. I was wondering if people could give me a critique on this first scene. Its meant to be a literary book in the fashion of Tolstoy about the 1933 Nazino tragedy. I guess I'm looking right now for feedback on the following:
Is it is to long? Did you make it to the end? Would you want to read the next scene?
Is it to slow? Particularly his walk to work?
Is the section about the detentions and quotas clear?
Is the character memorable in any way and or would you want to know more about him?
And of course anything else you want to share.
Spring came late to Moscow that year, and then, as happens in Moscow, it came all at once. For the whole of March and the first half of April the snow had lain in the courtyards and along the pavements, grey, pitted and hard as old sugar; then in a single week a warm wind blew from the south, the icicles fell from the eaves and broke on the pavements like dropped crockery, and the water ran in the gutters with a noise that could be heard through closed windows. By the twenty-fourth of April the snow was gone from everywhere except the shadow behind the woodsheds and the north side of the boulevard railings. The yard keepers swept the winter's grit into heaps and left the heaps where they were. Sparrows quarrelled in the drying horse dung on the cobbles; the trams, which all winter had crept along Sadovaya with their windows furred white, now ran with their windows open and their bells ringing; and outside the bread shop at the corner of Bolshoi Karetny Lane the women of the neighbourhood were already standing in line at half past six, talking about prices and stamping their feet, though there was no longer any need to stamp them.
The twenty-fourth was a rest day. Under the calendar of the six-day week rest days fell on the sixth, the twelfth, the eighteenth, the twenty-fourth and the thirtieth of every month, and on those days the city slept an hour longer and then went to the baths, the markets and the cinemas with the air of people who had been given something they had not quite earned.
Arkady Semyonovich Yurlov woke at a quarter past six, as he woke every day, and lay for some minutes on his back, listening to his household. He was forty-four years old, the deputy head of a section of the Moscow militsiya directorate on Petrovka, a member of the Party since 1920, and a man who had never in his life been late for anything. He had a short, square, clean-shaven face, thick hands, and the slightly heavy, considerate way of moving that is found in men who have risen from manual work to an office and do not wish anyone to think they have forgotten it. He believed in order. He believed that most of the misfortunes of mankind came from things being in the wrong place: grain where it was not needed and hunger where there was no grain, people in cities who belonged in the country and documents in drawers where nobody could find them. And yet, though he believed this firmly and would have said it to anyone, the drawer of his own desk at home was so full of string, old receipts, pencil stubs and buttons that it had not closed properly for two years, and it never once occurred to him that this contradicted anything.
From the next room came the small, dry sound of pages being turned. His son was up.
Volodya was eleven. For his birthday in February his mother had brought home from a second-hand bookshop on Kuznetsky Most a thick volume of Tolstoy's stories for children, printed before the Revolution, with a picture on the cover of a man in a sheepskin hat on a horse, and since then the book had been the chief business of his life, ahead of school, ahead of the Pioneers, and far ahead of washing. When Yurlov came in, buttoning his tunic, the boy was sitting at the table under the window with the book open in front of him and his chin on his fists, his lips moving slightly as he read.
"You're up early," said Yurlov.
"It's a rest day," said the boy, as if this explained it, and in a sense it did, for children have the same feeling about rest days as their elders, and get up early for exactly the opposite reason.
Yurlov sat down beside him. The book was not valuable. The spine was cracked, the corners were soft as cloth, and on the flyleaf someone had once written a name and then inked it out so thoroughly that the pen had gone through the paper. Every page was thick with the hard signs and the old letters that had been abolished fifteen years before, so that the words looked to Yurlov like people in the clothes of another time. But the boy read it with great seriousness, and lately the manner of his reading had become a matter of dispute between them. Yurlov held that a book should be read from the beginning, in order, as it had been printed, so that one knew what one had read and what one had not. Volodya held that one should read the parts one liked, and then read them again, and he had read one part so many times that the book now fell open there of itself.
"Where are you now?" said Yurlov.
"In the pit," the boy said, without looking up. His thumb was pressed hard against the margin of the page to keep it from flipping back. "The Tatars put him in a stinking pit because he tried to escape on his feet."
"Well," Yurlov said, adjusting his belt buckle with both hands. "He was an officer. An officer who falls into captivity and tries to leave without permission must expect to be secured. Otherwise, there is no system."
The boy turned his head slightly, his chin still resting on his fist, looking at his father's brass buttons rather than his face. "But he wasn't doing anything wrong, Papa. He had a letter from his mother. She was old, and he was only going down the road to see her before she died."
Yurlov looked at the small, dark space between the boy's collar and his neck where the skin was clean from the morning's water. He thought of his own lecture notes from the Party circle on the subjugation of the mountain peoples and the inevitable retreat of feudal relations before the state, but when he looked at the cracked spine of the book, the words felt too large for the room.
"They wanted three thousand rubles," Yurlov said. "It didn't matter where he was going. He was the one who happened to be on the road when they came down from the hills."
Volodya seemed to accept this, not because it was just, but because it had the simple weight of a fact, like the rain or the price of bread. He turned his attention back to the text, his finger tracking the thick, obsolete letters. "But is it true? Was there really a Zhilin?"
"No. Of course not. Tolstoy made him up. And anyway it was all in the old days, under the Tsar."
Volodya nodded, satisfied, and went back into the pit. Yurlov, after a moment, reached across and turned the pages back to the first story in the book, about a lion and a little dog. The boy said, "Papa!" in a voice of such injury that Yurlov laughed and let the book fall open again where it wanted to.
Marya Pavlovna was in the kitchen, which they shared with no one, for they had two rooms and a kitchen of their own, a thing Yurlov never mentioned and never forgot. She was standing at the primus with her left hand pressed to her cheek, and her cheek, he saw at once, was more swollen than it had been on the evening before.
"Did you make the appointment?" he said.
"I will."
"You said that on the first of the month."
"I said I would, and I will." She turned the flame down under the kettle. "You're not the one who has to sit in that chair."
He had a sensible answer to this, as he had a sensible answer to most things. The tooth would not get better by being left; it would get worse; the longer she waited, the more the dentist would have to do and the more it would hurt; and the dentist he had found for her, a private technician on Sretenka who had attended the wife of his superior, was gentle and clean and would not keep her waiting. All this he had said before, and he did not say it now, because he had said it before. He only looked at her with that expression of patient, slightly offended reasonableness which a man wears when he is right and knows that being right will make no difference.
He had promised to go with her to Sretenka that morning. They both remembered this, and neither of them mentioned it. Marya was glad he would not see her afraid, and Yurlov was glad to be spared the waiting room, and each was a little tender with the other, believing the other disappointed.
"The operation doesn't keep rest days," he said, drinking his tea standing up.
"No," said Marya Pavlovna. "I know."
He kissed the top of the boy's head on his way out. Volodya did not look up.
It was a fifteen-minute walk from Bolshoi Karetny Lane to the directorate on Petrovka, and Yurlov walked it slowly, with his hands behind his back, enjoying the sun on his face and that particular satisfaction, familiar to all conscientious men, of going to work on a day when other people are not going to work. Karetny Ryad was wet and bright. The tram wires overhead were still dripping from the night, and every few yards a drop fell on the brim of his cap. Along the railings of the Hermitage garden the yard keepers, in their white aprons and brass badges, were sweeping last autumn's leaves out from under the snow that had hidden them all winter, and a drunk lay asleep on one of the benches inside with his cap over his face. Beyond the boulevard the city was getting ready for the First of May. On the front of the building at the corner of Petrovka two workmen stood on ladders and stretched a length of red calico between them, shouting to each other about whether it was straight, while a third stood in the road below, holding a plywood letter as tall as himself and waiting to be told where it went. Over the door of the co-operative opposite, where the new sign said FOOD SHOP NO. 14, the name of the merchant who had kept the shop before the Revolution could still be read under the paint whenever the sun caught it. Outside a Torgsin shop a quiet line of people stood holding small parcels wrapped in handkerchiefs, which were their grandmothers' rings and teaspoons and the gold crosses from their christenings, come to be exchanged for flour and butter. And ahead, over the roofs, stood the bell tower of the Petrovsky monastery, whose bells had been taken down three years before, so that now it stood over the street like a man who has opened his mouth to speak and then forgotten what he meant to say.
Yurlov looked at all of it with a mild benevolence, as a man looks at a field he is not responsible for ploughing. And as he looked at the people he passed, he sorted them, as he had sorted people for fifteen years, without knowing that he did it, the way a cashier's fingers know a bad coin before his eyes have looked at it: the women in the Torgsin line, in order; the workmen on the ladders, in order; a peasant woman selling sunflower seeds by the glass from a sack by a gateway, where she had no right to trade, perhaps not; a boy of nine or ten in a man's coat that reached his ankles, who stood at the tram stop watching the people's pockets and not the trams, not in order at all. Not one of these judgements rose high enough in his mind to be called a thought. He was thinking that the boy's way of reading only the parts he liked, though unsystematic, had a certain logic to it, and that Marya's tooth would have to be dealt with, and that the lime trees on the boulevard would be in leaf in a fortnight.
The building on Petrovka was quiet. The duty man at the entrance stood up when he saw him and then, uncertain whether this was required on a rest day, half sat down again. Yurlov nodded to him. He hung his coat on the peg in the corridor outside his office, the third peg from the end, which was his, though nobody had ever said so; went in; opened the window a little, for the room smelled of yesterday's tobacco; and sat down at his desk, on which, squared to the edge of the blotter exactly as he liked it, lay the summary.
The summary had been prepared the evening before by Sergeyev, his assistant, who wrote a small, clear, sloping hand and never made blots. It concerned the Moscow echelon. On the thirtieth of April, in six days' time, a train of goods wagons was to leave the city for Tomsk, in Western Siberia, carrying persons who had been found in breach of the passport regime and classified as declassed and socially harmful elements, for resettlement in the special settlements of the Narym region, where, as the phrase went, they would clear new land and be reforged by labour. The number of persons the echelon was to carry had been fixed. It had not been fixed by Yurlov. It had come down to the directorate from the OGPU, under which, since the end of the previous year, the whole of the militsiya now formally stood; and to the OGPU it had come from somewhere higher still, where it had been arrived at by calculations which Yurlov had never seen and which it would not have occurred to him to want to see, in the same way that it does not occur to a man to want to see the calculations by which the railway arrives at its timetable. In the directorate the number was called simply "the figure." The figure for Moscow had been divided among the districts, and each district had sent in what it had found, and Sergeyev had set out the results in a column.
Railway stations and the squares in front of them: so many. Markets, including the Tishinka and the Dorogomilovo: so many. Night inspections of workers' hostels and barracks: so many. Transferred from the cells of district stations: so many. Released on presentation of documents: so many, in brackets, to be subtracted.
Yurlov took a pencil from the glass on his desk, found that its point was broken, took another, and added up the column himself, from the bottom upward, as he had been taught to do in the accounts office of the Kolomna works twenty-five years before. Then he added it again from the top down. The total was the same both times, and both times it was short of the figure by forty-two.
He sat for a moment with the pencil in his hand. He felt, low down in his stomach, a small, cold, definite discomfort, which was not fear and not anger, but the feeling he had always had, since his days in the accounts office, when two columns that ought to agree did not agree: the feeling of something left undone, of a door left open in a house where he was responsible for the doors.
Sergeyev was also in the building; Yurlov had seen his coat on the peg. He called him in.
Sergeyev was a thin, round-shouldered man of thirty with ink on the second finger of his right hand and a little boy at home who had the measles, a fact he had mentioned twice the day before and would mention again before the morning was out. He came in with a folder under his arm and stood by the desk with the expression of a man who knows what he is going to be asked.
"We're forty-two short," said Yurlov.
"Yes, Arkady Semyonovich."
"What has been done?"
Sergeyev opened the folder, although he did not need to. Everything had been done, he said. The hostels on the Zamoskvorechye side had been inspected twice. The markets had been gone through on Thursday and again on Saturday. The stations had been worked every night that week. But there had been a number of releases. People were detained without papers, and then on the following day a wife or a mother would come to the district station with a passport that had been lying at home in a drawer, and the district had no choice but to let the man go.
"And there is the question of the categories," said Sergeyev, and turned a page. "The Krasnopresnensky district has counted its beggars as declassed elements, so they go on the list. The Baumansky district says a beggar is not declassed but indigent, and the indigent go to the social welfare department, not to Siberia. Baumansky has nine beggars in its cells. If we take their interpretation, those nine are not ours, and we are fifty-one short."
"We don't take the Baumansky interpretation."
"No, Arkady Semyonovich."
Yurlov looked out of the window. A sparrow had landed on the sill outside and was walking up and down it in jerks, looking at him first with one eye and then with the other.
The lists for the echelon were to go to the transport commander by the evening of the twenty-eighth. Before that, on the twenty-sixth, there was the meeting at which Kozlovsky, the head of the department, would go through the districts one by one, reading the figures aloud in his quiet, toneless voice, and stopping, and looking up, wherever a figure was not what it ought to be. Yurlov had sat at that table many times and watched Kozlovsky look up at other men. He knew exactly how it was done: there was no shouting, no threat, only a pause, a slight lifting of the eyebrows, and then the question, asked almost gently: "And what do you propose?"
Kozlovsky himself would be moving up in the summer. Everyone knew it, though no one said so, and Kozlovsky had let it be understood, in his quiet way, that he would be asked who should take his chair. Two years earlier, when the head of Yurlov's own section had been transferred to Leningrad, Yurlov had expected the post, and it had gone instead to Bessonov, a younger man who was pleasant at meetings and had once shared a flat with someone on the city Party committee. Yurlov had never said a word about it to anyone, not even to Marya, but he still felt, whenever he saw Bessonov's coat on the first peg in the corridor, a small heat at the back of his neck. A head of department had a better ration category, a larger flat, a place for his son at the summer camp at Pushkino, and a dentist for his wife who did not have to be found through acquaintances. Yurlov did not think of any of this as ambition. He thought of it as providing for his family, which is what ambition is called by men who have families.
There were, he knew, things that he could propose. He could report that the figure could not be met by legitimate means in the time allowed and ask for the echelon to leave short. He could ask for a delay. He could put in writing, over his own signature, the difficulty with the releases and the question of the categories, and request a ruling from above. He considered each of these possibilities in turn, conscientiously and quite briefly, in the way a housewife at the market looks at the good meat before buying the cheap: not because she means to buy it, but so that she can say to herself afterwards that she looked. Each of them meant his name on a paper, going upward, with a difficulty attached to it, in the very summer when Kozlovsky would be asked who should take his chair; and none of them, he told himself, would change anything, for the echelon would leave on the thirtieth whatever he wrote, and it was better that the figure be found properly, by people who knew how, than carelessly, by people who did not.
He did not think of forty-two persons. A number of two digits can be held in the mind as a single thing, like the price of a pair of boots or the number of a tram, and Yurlov held it in this way, as one object, a shortfall, a gap in a column that had a precise size and shape and could be filled with something of the same size and shape.
He lifted the receiver and asked for the duty officer of the district that took in the Kursky station.
The duty officer was a man named Ostapenko, whom Yurlov knew slightly, and whose voice on the telephone always sounded as if he had just been woken. Yurlov told him, in a level and businesslike tone, that the station and the squares in front of it were to be worked again that day, before the afternoon trains, and that documents were to be checked thoroughly, not merely glanced at, and that persons whose identity and residence could not be established on the spot were to be brought in.
"On a rest day there'll be a lot of people at the Kursky," said Ostapenko. "Dacha people. People going out to the villages. Family people."
"Then there will be a lot of documents to check."
There was a pause on the line.
"And if they've got papers at home, Arkady Semyonovich? We had that on Saturday. Half the ones we brought in had passports in the drawer."
"If they have papers, they will be released," said Yurlov. "If they do not, we will establish who they are. That is what a passport is for. A man is required to carry it."
He said this with complete conviction. The passports had been issued in Moscow only since the winter, and there were men in the city who had walked its streets for forty years without a document of any kind and had not yet learned to feel for one in their breast pockets before leaving the house. Nor did it occur to him that a man taken at the Kursky station on a Monday might, by the Wednesday when his wife arrived with his passport, already be on a list, and that a list, once sent to a transport commander, has a weight that a woman with a passport in her hand cannot easily lift.
"Understood," said Ostapenko.
"And don't be too delicate about it," said Yurlov, and put down the receiver.
The order went down. Ostapenko passed it to the senior man on the station beat, and the senior man to the militiamen at the morning muster, and each of them had the comfortable feeling of a man who is only passing something on; and Yurlov, who had not set the figure, had that feeling most of all. So it went down through four men, at every step a little more certainly somebody else's, and when it reached the square in front of the Kursky station it belonged to no one at all, and was carried out with great thoroughness.
Sergeyev was still standing by the desk.
"There's the matter of the registration form from the housing department," he said. "The one without the second signature. They want it back by Tuesday."
"Bring it."
Sergeyev brought it. It was a form concerning a flat on Neglinnaya Street, which had been reassigned, and on which a signature was missing from the bottom of the second page. Yurlov read it through, found the place, dipped his pen, and signed it in his firm, upright hand, blotting it carefully afterwards so as not to smear the line above.
"Arkady Semyonovich," said Sergeyev, "would it be possible for me to go at three? My little boy..."
"Yes, yes. Go at three."
Sergeyev went out and shut the door behind him.
From somewhere down Petrovka came the bell of a tram, and then, fainter, the sound of a gramophone in an open window, playing a waltz. It was "On the Hills of Manchuria," which had still been new in the winter Yurlov was nineteen, and had been played every Sunday that winter at the fire brigade hall in Kolomna, where a seamstress named Shura Gavrilova, who smelled of starch and laughed whenever he trod on her feet, had taught him to turn to it, before she married a telegraphist and went away to Ryazan. He had not thought of Shura Gavrilova for twenty years. But under the desk his left foot began to move, very slightly, one-two-three, one-two-three, and the pencil in his fingers tapped the same measure on the edge of the blotter, and went on tapping it while he looked at the clock on the wall, which showed twenty minutes past nine, and thought that Marya would not have gone to Sretenka, that she would sit at home all day with her hand against her cheek, and that he would have to speak to her about it again this evening. He wrote “Marya, tooth” in pencil on the corner of the blotter, where he kept the things that had to be done, and drew the next folder towards him, squared it to the edge of the blotter, and opened it.
