The Shoemaker and his Daughter by Conor O'Clery

Author:Conor O'Clery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

CHAPTER 16

HOME AND ABROAD

ONE DISADVANTAGE OF being the youngest member of staff in any organization is that the old hands like to pass on the most unpleasant tasks to the newcomer. When in September 1982 the Krasnoyarsk party headquarters ‘invites’ the pedagogical institute to provide its annual quota of ‘volunteers’ to help with the harvest on a state farm, naturally the staff look to Zhanna to be brigade leader. As komsorg at school she led pupils on day trips to pick potatoes. This will be different – two weeks on a distant stretch of muddy fields with no facilities and primitive sleeping arrangements.

Her mother has already grappled with the problem of sending shoe-factory workers to the countryside every year to harvest the factory’s allocation of five hectares of potatoes, five of beetroot and five of cucumbers. As trade union leader at the enterprise, Marietta has more than once spoken out against the practice, not only on behalf of the cutters, machinists, last-makers, stitchers, finishers and all those whose hands are their livelihood and who hate such work, but also on behalf of the management. During the harvest machines lie idle and the factory loses production. She has suggested that the money which the enterprise allocates for buses, petrol and food would be better spent paying the farm workers to do the work themselves. But logic cannot argue with ideology; the principle of factory workers volunteering on state and collective farms is always upheld.

Zhanna is given charge of one hundred students from the institute. Three buses take them to a state farm where they will work for two weeks. Her daughter, Yulia, is not yet two years old and Zhanna is still finding her feet as a lecturer, but she has no choice. All across Russia similar arrangements are being made to bring in the harvest with the aid of millions of students and urban workers.

Equipped with food packages, tape recorders and a few guitars, they pile onto the buses for the six-hour journey to their destination. The further they get from the city the more they become aware of what the Russians call bezdorozhnost, meaning literally ‘without roadness’ – vast stretches where the highways marked on the map turn out to be muddy tracks. They arrive late in the day to find that nothing has been made ready for them by the farm management. They clean out a barn that has housed animals for use as a dormitory. There is no canteen and no running water. One of Zhanna’s first tasks is to locate a well and some buckets. The city arrivals have to make do with a tiny electric stove and one big cooking pot for a hundred hungry mouths. The farm manager appears the following day to show them where to gather the potatoes. It is back-breaking work in which Zhanna also participates. That evening and every evening they have to beg villagers to allow them the use of their primitive banyas to wash off the glutinous mud that sticks to everything.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.