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✦ 155 ✦ 14 Breathe Deeper,You’re Excited! on may day morning Viktor Mikhailovich Polesov, consumed by his usual thirst for action, leaped out of the house and raced off downtown. At first his multifaceted talents couldn’t be put to the necessary use because there weren’t many people around yet and the festive stage, guarded by mounted police, was empty. But by nine, orchestras had started purring, wheezing , and whistling all over the town. Housewives came running out of gates. A column of workers in the music industry, wearing soft, fold-down collars, somehow squeezed itself into the middle of a procession of railroad workers, getting underfoot and bothering everyone. A truck dressed up with green cardboard as a Shchukinseries steam engine kept driving up into the music workers from behind. Angry shouting at the laborers of the oboe and flute rang out from the very belly of the engine: “Where’s your parade leader? Are you really supposed to be going down Krasnoarmeyskaya Street? Can’t you see you barged in and caused a traffic jam?” At this point Viktor Mikhailovich got involved, much to the music workers’ dismay. “Well, sure, you need to turn off into this dead end! These people can’t even put a festival together!” Polesov shouted. “This way! This way! An astounding disgrace!” 156 ✦ the lion of stargorod Trucks from Millconst and Stargorod Communal Services were ferrying children around. The smallest ones stood up against the truck railings, and those who were a bit taller were in the middle. The underage host waved its little paper flags and enjoyed itself to the point of exhaustion. Young Pioneers’ drums sounded. Youths still too young for the army stuck out their chests and tried to walk in step. It was crowded, noisy, and hot. Traffic jams were forming every other minute, and dissolving every other minute, too. Old men and activists were tossed in the air to pass the time stuck in traffic. The old men keened like peasant women. The activists flew up and down silently, their faces serious. In one merry column they mistook Viktor Mikhailovich, who was elbowing his way through the crowd, for a parade leader and started tossing him up in the air. Polesov kicked his legs around like a clown. An effigy of Chamberlain, the English Prime Minister, his top hat being beaten in by a worker with anatomical musculature wielding a cardboard hammer, was carried past. Three Young Communists in white gloves and tails drove by in an automobile . They kept peering with embarrassment at the crowd. “Vaska!” somebody shouted from the sidewalk. “Bourgeois! Give those suspenders back.” Girls were singing. Alkhen, wearing a big red bow on his breast, walked in the Social Security employees’ group and sang, pensively, through his nose: But from the taiga to the wide-open sea, stronger than all is the Red Army! At a command, physical culture enthusiasts shouted something unintelligible syllable by syllable. Everything was walking, driving, surging, and marching toward the new streetcar depot, from which the first wagon of the first electric streetcar in Stargorod was supposed to set out at exactly one o’clock that afternoon. No one knew for sure when the construction of the Stargorod streetcar line was begun. Once back in ’20, when the volunteer Saturday work brigades were up and running, the depot workers and cable factory workers walked out to Gusishche to musical accompaniment and dug ditches all day. They dug a great many big, deep ditches. A comrade in an engineer’s cap ran around down among the workers. Foremen carrying rods in various colors walked behind him. Two ditches that had been dug in the wrong place had to be filled back in. The comrade in the engineer’s cap flew at the foremen and demanded an explanation. The new ditches were dug even deeper and wider. Then the brick was brought in, and real construction workers appeared. They started laying the foundation. Then everything went quiet. The comrade in the engineer’s cap still came by the deserted construction site sometimes, where he would wander the brick-lined ditch for a long time, muttering, “It has to pay for itself.” He would tap the foundation with a stick for a while and run back home into town, covering his frozen ears with his hands. The engineer’s last name was Treukhov. Treukhov had thought up the streetcar system (whose construction had come to a standstill at the foundation stage...

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