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.

II

And thus lived Mikhail Vlasov, a metalworker, hirsute and morose, with small eyes; they looked out suspiciously from beneath thick brows with an unpleasant smirk. The best metalworker in the factory and the number-one strong man in the settlement, he conducted himself rudely with the management, and for that reason earned but little; every day off he would beat someone up, and everyone disliked and feared him. People tried to beat him up too, but without success. When Vlasov saw there were men coming for him, he would grab a stone or a piece of wood or iron, and, setting his feet wide apart, would wait in silence for his enemies. His face – overgrown with a black beard from eyes to neck – and his hairy arms instilled fear in everyone. People were especially afraid of his eyes – small and sharp, they drilled into you like steel gimlets, and all who met his gaze felt before them a savage strength, impervious to fear, prepared to beat without mercy.

“Right, scum, break it up!” he would say in muffled tones. Through the thick hair on his face gleamed large yellow teeth. The men would break up, cursing him in cowardly fashion with howls of abuse.

“Scum!” he would say tersely in their wake, his eyes shining with a smirk as sharp as an awl. Then, holding his head provocatively high, he would go after them and challenge them:

“Well, who wants to die?”

Nobody did.

He said little, and “scum” was his favourite word. It was what he called the factory management and the police, and he used it to address his wife.

“You, scum, can’t you see – my trousers are torn!”

When Pavel, his son, was fourteen, Vlasov tried pulling him out of his way by the hair. But Pavel picked up a heavy hammer and said tersely:

“Don’t touch me.”

“What?” asked his father, advancing on the tall, slim figure of his son like a shadow on a birch tree.

“Enough!” said Pavel. “I’m not taking any more…”

And he brandished the hammer.

His father looked at him, put his shaggy arms behind his back and said with a smirk:

“All right…”

Then, with a heavy sigh, he added:

“Oh you scum…”

Soon after this he said to his wife:

“Don’t ask me for money any more, Pashka can keep you fed…”

“And are you going to spend it all on drink?” she took the liberty of asking.

“None of your business, scum! I’m going to find myself a lover…”

Find himself a lover he did not, but from then on, for almost two years, right up until his death, he never took any notice of his son and never spoke to him.

He had a dog, just as big and shaggy as he himself was. It walked him to the factory every day, and would be waiting every evening by the gates. On days off, Vlasov would set off to go round the taverns. He walked in silence and, as if trying to find someone, would scratch at people’s faces with his eyes. And the dog would follow him all day, with its big, fluffy tail drooping. Returning home drunk, he would sit down to have dinner and feed the dog from his own cup. He did not beat it, did not curse it, but never showed it any affection either. After dinner, he would throw the crockery from the table onto the floor, if his wife had not managed to clear it away in time, set a bottle of vodka down in front of him and, leaning his back against the wall, in an indistinct, depressing voice, would howl out a song, opening his mouth wide and closing his eyes. The doleful, ugly sounds got caught in his moustache, knocking the breadcrumbs out of it; the metalworker smoothed the hair of his beard and moustache with his thick fingers and sang.