The directors of the two sites, one in a graphite-gray tunic, the other in a white Russian-style shirt, chatted peacefully near the arrow, and against his will, a snake-like smile occasionally appeared on the Northern director’s face.
He hurried to extinguish it, and praised the South, but the smile would soon raise his sun-washed mustache again.
Ostap rushed to the Northern cars, but the site was empty.
All the occupants had left for the reviewing stand; the musicians were already sitting in front of it.
Burning their lips on the hot metal mouthpieces, they played an overture.
The Soviet journalists occupied the left wing of the stand.
Lavoisian leaned down and begged Menshov to take a picture of him performing his professional duties.
But Menshov was too busy.
He was shooting the best workers of the Line in groups and individually, making the spike drivers raise their mallets and the diggers lean on their shovels.
The foreigners sat on the right.
Soldiers were checking passes at the entrance to the bleachers.
Ostap didn’t have one.
The train administrator distributed them from a list, and O. Bender from the Chernomorsk Gazette was not on it.
Gargantua beckoned the grand strategist upstairs in vain, shouting
“Isn’t that right?
Isn’t it true?” Ostap just shook his head in refusal, his eyes searching through the bleachers that were tightly packed with heroes and guests.
Alexander Koreiko, the timekeeper from the Northern Site, sat quietly in the first row.
His head was protected from the sun by a tricorne made out of a newspaper.
He pushed his ear forward a bit so that he could better hear the first speaker, who was already making his way to the microphone.
“Alexander Ivanovich!” shouted Ostap, folding his hands into a megaphone.
Koreiko looked down and rose from his seat.
The orchestra struck up The Internationale, but the wealthy timekeeper wasn’t paying proper attention to the national anthem.
The unnerving sight of the grand strategist, running around the space that had been cleared to lay the last rails, instantly destroyed his inner peace.
He glanced over the heads of the crowd, trying to figure out a possible escape route.
But all around him was desert.
Fifteen thousand horsemen kept moving back and forth, fording a cold stream dozens of times, until finally they settled behind the bleachers in cavalry formation.
But some of them, too proud and shy, continued to hang around on the tops of the hills throughout the day, never venturing closer to the howling and roaring rally.
The builders of the Eastern Line celebrated their victory with gusto, shouting, playing music, and tossing their favorites and heroes into the air.
The rails flew onto the track with a ringing sound.
They were put into place in a minute, and the workmen, who had driven millions of spikes, ceded the honor of delivering the final blows to their superiors.
“In compliance with the laws of hospitality,” said the barman, who was sitting on the roof of the dining car with the cooks.
An engineer with the Order of the Red Banner on his chest pushed his large felt hat to the back of his head, grabbed a mallet with a long handle, grimaced, and hit the ground.
The spike drivers, some of whom were so strong they could drive a spike with a single blow, greeted his efforts with friendly laughter.
Soon, however, soft strikes on the ground began to alternate with clanging noises, indicating that, on occasion, the mallet was actually making contact with the spike.
Next to take up the mallet was the regional Party Secretary, followed by members of the government, the directors of the North and the South, and several guests.
It took a mere thirty minutes for the director of the Line to drive the final spike.
Then the speeches began.
Each was delivered twice—in Kazakh and in Russian.
“Comrades,” said a distinguished spike driver slowly, trying not to look at the Order of the Red Banner that had just been pinned to his shirt, “what’s done is done, and there’s no need to talk about it.
But our entire track-laying team has a request for the government: please send us to a new project immediately.
We work together very well now, and we’ve been laying down three miles of track each day in recent months.
We pledge to maintain this rate and even exceed it!
And long live our world revolution!
I also wanted to say, comrades, that too many ties were defective, we had to reject them.
This needs to be fixed.”
The journalists could no longer complain about the lack of things to report.
They jotted down the speeches.
They grabbed the engineers by their waists and demanded information and precise figures.
It became hot, dusty, and businesslike.
The rally in the desert started smoking like a huge bonfire.