The Freedom Factory

Ksenia Buksha’s novel The Freedom Factory won Russia’s National Bestseller award and has just been translated into English by Anne O. Fisher (Phoneme Media, $15, phonememedia.org). The novel tells the story of a real-life military factory through monologues collected from anonymized workers, managers, and engineers.

Engineer H

So N, our new director, comes here from the other factory he used to run and brings H with him as his new chief engineer. H turned out to be a real strange one. Looked nothing like a factory type, just a spindly intellectual. Young, but basically bald already. Only a few sparse remnants of hair sprouting around the sides of his head. Quiet voice. Big eyes, perfectly grey. And here’s the thing: over there at that other factory, he’d been in charge of the Experimental Design Bureau, not the actual factory itself. And then everybody goes oh, right, we get him now. Nobody’s arguing, it’s perfectly clear that he’s a super smart guy. A design engineer. That kind of thing. But see, a factory is another matter altogether. Managing a factory and managing an EDB are two very distinct differences. The chief engineer of a factory isn’t just responsible for all the technical drawings and suchlike, he also has to take care of it when one of the guys goes on a bender, or can’t get his bike to stay up, or whatever. And what we’ve got here, brother, is… that’s right, what we’ve got here is a factory. We’ve got us a real… but he’s all spindly, this H. And everybody concludes that H is probably not gonna make it in Freedom.

So then our certified finishing technicians, many of them with university degrees, they put their heads together and they decide, this is what we’re going to do. We’ve been working with this device here for many years, we know it inside and out. We’re going to give H a little off-schedule test, one there’s no way he can pass. That’s not very nice! intervened the most scrupulous among them. He still has to work here, but nobody’ll respect him after that. No, the first ones countered, we’re not going to haul off and, you know, let him have it right off the bat, we just want to see how the guy handles himself in a difficult situation. How he’ll get out of it. Where he goes for help, who he turns to, or whether he just acts like that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Basically we’re just feeling him out.

So that’s what they do, they give him a little test. They took the device they were calibrating and broke certain things inside it, broke them very cleverly, so that the device ended up with two unrelated defects. And then they act like they’ve been working on it for days, trying to figure out what’s wrong. So in comes H, takes one look at the thing with those grey eyes of his and just offhand he goes, here’s where A, B, and C aren’t working, you need to do X, Y, and Z to fix it. And then he goes quiet for a minute, and then he adds, musingly, there’s just one thing I can’t understand, which is how all this could’ve happened at the same time. Because it couldn’t have. A bewildering, intriguing case. And off he goes. And the highly qualified finishers just watch him go, and then one of them says, but how? How did he know? And another one adds, people are saying that N only agreed to switch over to our factory once they promised to give him H. Otherwise he wouldn’t switch, not a chance. (And that really is the way it was.)

Later, after H had been accepted, after people had gotten used to him and acclimated to his ways, everyone saw that he was, as the factory’s chief dispatcher M put it, just darling. Even-tempered, often melancholy, H never raised his voice. In this he was the diametric opposite of the loud-mouthed, big-bellied head of the finishing shop, B, director N’s other protégée and appointee. B never talked when he could yell. You could say that the two of them, B and H, represented the opposite poles of human nature, the two ends of the rainbow, the two antithetical Kretschmer types. Chief engineer H drank absolutely nothing (a hundred grams of vodka on holidays, which lent H’s drawn cheeks a ruddy glow and curved his thin lips in an involuntary, urbane smirk), while B tossed back buckets of vodka, sometimes to the point of choking, and would miss work for weeks at a time (the written reprimands came raining down, which for managers at his level is really overkill). H spoke clearly, quietly, and little, mostly remaining silent, while B was incapable of shutting up, always thundering and roaring, always getting carried away, whether he was praising or cursing you. B was also boastful, arrogant, and tyrannical; he lorded it over everyone while keeping on familiar terms with the workers, using the informal ty with them and always being treated as one of their own, while H, in that unique secret recipe of Russian (or russified) experts, blended both aristocracy and democracy in his manner, always using the formal vy with everyone and never quite fitting in with the rest of us (although he became one of us fairly quickly). Both were respected. Both were loved. The circles of B’s and H’s devoted fans overlapped, but did not coincide.

Here’s a story: one time a military committee was on site inspecting its order of an item that, according to its specs, was supposed to be extremely durable. They’d almost passed the item when, at the very last minute, a technician accidentally dropped the thing on the floor and it split in two. It was awkward. The military committee issued a fine. So chief engineer H called a meeting to discuss product quality. Lots of shop heads were present at that meeting, including B, and the lawyer Inga Arkadyevna was there too, since fines for product quality fell under her purview, and Pal Palych P (Pashka the fitter, aka Pashka the champion boxer), a man both determined and hot-tempered, and others. Everybody opined vigorously and at length, trying to pin the blame on somebody else. Everybody interrupted everybody else. At times vicious squabbles broke out. At some point B, without missing a beat in his tirade, stood up and loomed over the table as he barked back at everyone left, right, and center, because it was his shop, the finishing shop, that was the final link in the chain of production, and so of course everyone was trying to make it his fault. Him taking that pose of his was the last straw; after that, everyone really let rip. It was such bedlam that it felt less like the office of a defense-industry factory’s Chief Engineer than like a Wall Street trading floor out there in the land of the damned capitalists. Or like the toddler room in a day care. The only one still in her chair was Inga, in her shadows and angles, who’d recoiled from B and sat brimming with silent hostility. H listened to the shop managers’ shouting match quite calmly, even appearing to doze off. But at one point his eyes changed from light grey to steely. You might argue that it’s not a big difference. But everyone who was there in that office felt it immediately. As though the light had changed, or it’d gotten colder. The bedlam started simmering down, and finally everyone went quiet. Even B.

H raised his head and asked dryly: All done shouting? I’m going to tell you a joke. It’s a freezing-cold day. A little bird’s flying around. It freezes and falls down into the road. A horse goes past. It poops on the little bird. The little bird warms up and starts chirping. And a wolf comes along and eats the little bird. The moral: if you land in a pile of shit, don’t chirp. Go do your work.

Let’s Go Slurp Our Camp Swill

We’re on vacation. That means we’re down South. That is, at the Black Sea. This is where the sea, the sun, and the south is. There’s a lot of flowers and the nettles really sting. Natasha feeds her doll with rose petals and makes pretend soup out of them. An orchestra plays in the square, but with a break for the heat. It’s already warm, over twenty-five degrees, at nine o’clock in the morning! Yesterday we went to the market and ate some black fish with a salted head. Today we didn’t go swimming since we’ve already been swimming every day, and we need to take a break or else we’ll get swim exhaustion. That one summer Natashka got swim exhaustion and her temperature went up to about forty degrees. I’ve never had such a high temperature. But one time I did fall out of a tree and break my arm. That was a few years ago. By the way, the water temperature is over twenty-four degrees. Some people live way up high, and that’s really bad because they have to walk and walk to get to the water, and there’s no shade there at all. But we live a little bit off to the side, where the pink buildings with the balconies are. I met Seryozhka and his brother Shurik, it turns out that they live in Leningrad on our street, there where the grocery store is on the corner. But that’s actually not surprising, since their parents also work at papa’s factory.

Today something interesting happened. While we were taking my bike apart a black Volga drove into our courtyard, and it was N, the director of papa’s factory. The black Volga was really dusty, and right away I could tell the director had driven all the way from Leningrad without stopping. The whole factory that the director runs comes here for vacation, or maybe not the whole factory, but half of it, for sure. So that’s why N came out, to find out how everyone’s vacations are going, but especially my father’s, because they’re friends. He got out of the car, the director, and he was all red and rumpled, and he was wearing a red-and-white bucket hat, and he pulled it off his bald head, fanned himself with it, and wiped his face. Just then papa was busy taking apart my bike, but he stood right up with his dirty hands, and he and N had to shake hands some other way, not with a handshake, and so they ended up just bending in towards each other this way and that, and then papa said, welcome! The director said, and here we have Pal Palych junior, hello, Pashka! Hello, I said. Then the director turned to my father and said, shall we head over to the market? Oh! Let’s go! said my father. I’ll just wash my hands! And that’s when I knew I wasn’t going to get my bike that day. Unless I put it back together myself, of course. But then director N saw I was disappointed and said, Pashka, want to wash my car? You bet your life I do! It’s not every day you get this kind of luck, the chance to wash a Volga! Here, said director N. Here’s a sponge and a pail for you, and we’ll just take a trip to the market in the meantime.

They went to the market, and I took the pail and ran over to the water pump where the girls were hanging around and mama was there too, sitting with Yelena Vladimirovna. Mama asked what I was so happy for, and while the pail was filling up I said that N had arrived and that I was going to wash his Volga now. Mama said, so they’ve gone to the market, is that it? and exchanged a look with Yelena Vladimirovna. I said, you got it! and dragged the pail back. The water inside it slopped around and splashed my feet. Then I brought over probably like ten more pails because the road from Leningrad to the south is really long and dusty. I washed the roof, and the hood, and the grill, and the headlights, and the windows, and especially the windshield, because it had mosquitoes splattered all over it. The sun was baking hotter and hotter, and even though I’d been splashing around in cold water, which didn’t help by the way, I still felt like swimming and ice cream. But the good thing was that the Volga was getting prettier and prettier, I eventually got it so clean it was black and shiny all over, and everything kept burning brighter and brighter in the sun, and the ground around the car was soaked. Then I started on my bike. I thought that since I’ve seen other people put it together a hundred times, then I should be able to do it myself. But it turned out to be not that easy, even though I dragged the bike over into the shade and spent a long time thinking about it. … until fifteen days later, said director N’s voice behind the bushes. Then he appeared himself, along with my father. They were walking along the path by the old dried-up apple tree and laughing. Director N was holding a string bag with bottles, and papa was holding one with apricots. Pashka! said director N, looking at me and the Volga. That’s a bang-up wash job! Thank you very much! Director N walked up to me, clapped me on the shoulder, and said: so you’re probably starving, right? Well, let’s go slurp our camp swill! And I thought, hmm, I didn’t like the food at my camp either, but I’m not sure I know that word swill.

We went to eat lunch. We called mama and Natasha, and for lunch we had the usual: cold borshcht, potatoes, and tomatoes and cucumbers, and then tea. The grown-ups also had wine. There wasn’t any camp swill, as far as I could tell. After all, borshcht isn’t swill, and neither are apricots. We sat outside, as usual, at a big table. Director N smoked and cracked a ton of jokes, especially with Natasha, who still doesn’t understand jokes, and so it’s super funny to joke around with her, and I waited for a good time and then asked papa surreptitiously: but where’s the swill? What swill? my father whispered back. The swill that director N said we’d have, he said “let’s go slurp our camp swill.” Shhh, said my father, and that’s all he said. Pashka, the director asked my father, what’s the little guy asking about? He’s asking what camp swill is. Director N gave a short laugh.

And then we managed to break mama’s resistance and so we all went swimming after all. The hottest part of the day had just ended and there were lots and lots of people! Mama always hates that, but we love it. The more people there are, the more fun it is, how does she not understand that! But mama hates it because she’s afraid we might get lost without her noticing, or drown without her noticing. At the seashore in the South, everybody strips down to their underwear, and you can really see which of the men were in the war. From a distance you can see that lots of them still have all their arms and legs, but when you go down to the water and look at all their backs and bodies, you’re just amazed how some of them managed to stay alive after such wounds. The one good thing is that we socked it to the Fritzes a whole lot worse. That’ll teach them. And I’ve already tried floating on my back a little bit, and I’ve gone into the water twelve times.

That evening we played Cossacks and robbers and we played so hard we didn’t notice when it got completely dark. In the dark Seryozhka plopped right down on a nettle and yelled something awful. And there’s also these red berries growing behind our building, I don’t know what they’re called. They taste like a mix of spruce tree and pencil lead. And then mama called us in for supper and bedtime, and while I was washing my hands I remembered that word and I asked mama, what’s camp swill? Is it good? Mama was washing dishes. She answered, no. But what’s it made of, anyway? Have you tasted it? Swill is any yucky, watery soup, and it doesn’t matter what it’s made of. You make it out of whatever you have to make it out of. Rotten potatoes, for example. I went to bed. I dreamed of the orchestra’s red music, and of the bright sunny water in the bucket, and how it drips off the sparkling black Volga, and how the bright, golden chains of sunlight glitter in the sea.