girl and the swarthy boy. In hands the girl – a bouquet, at the boy has a basket with flowers.
– Good morning, dear companion Fit! – the girl speaks good German. – I brought to you fresh flowers.
– Good morning! – welcomes Phyto and the kid with a flowers basket.
Fit greets children, thanks for flowers. The girl quickly changes a bouquet of flowers on a table. In a vase tea roses flaunt now. The become obsolete carnations rush to a garbage pipe. This pipe carries away together with water all garbage of the house far to the country where they are processed.
Fit still wants to talk to children, to question them about that about this, but children hurry. They accepted patronage of flowers of the house and strictly treat the duties, and put at chiefs this summer morning a lot. Children friendly bow to Fit and hurry further. Fit long smiles to them following, then looks at the dial over a door. Seven hours twelve minutes. Fit opens a door and comes to a balcony. A massive handrail is buried in flowers. Climbers close a balcony from sides. Fit looks down, from height of the third floor.
From here, from height, the city struck not with grandness, but an originality: he least of all resembled the city though its population approached sixty thousand.
The sea of greens it was spread below – infinite parks and gardens. They flooded all city as spring tides, and among this green sea rose, like rocky islands, beautiful houses, it is not higher than four floors, painted in light tone, well being in harmony with a green background of parks and gardens. Only far to the right houses stood more densely – there was Revolution Square where government agencies were located. And on the left the river bend covered in this early hour with rowboats and sailing yachts shone: “vykhodnik” hurried to use day of rest on an open air.
From where the sound of the wheels which are softly sliding on rails reached and through the green sea the air electric train – Rapid-transit which brought to the plant of workers proceeded at height of tops of trees. Such trains went with five-minute breaks throughout half an hour, taking away a third of adult population of the city for work. The quantity and structure of trains were calculated so that each worker could take seat in the train on the place, without crush and turns. In this city any minute was not lost in vain. In five hours “Slow motion” will return workers and will take away new change. The plant works in three changes on five hours – from seven in the morning till ten in the night. Fit by all means will visit the plant and will look how work is organized.
Fit comes back to the room, approaches a desk and takes out the typewriter from a box. Such machines are available in each table of each living room of this house. In a minute Fit writes on silently working machine.
“Dear Fritz!
You asked to write about my impressions. It is hard to make it. Feature of the socialist city in which I live is in what it strikes not with the American scales, but the internal expediency. I would call this city factory for alteration of people. We in Germany just should build such factories. Beginning from architecture of buildings and finishing tenor of life, everything is arranged so that you imperceptibly for yourself become absolutely other person. To begin at least with this small Spartan room in which I am. You know that our workers – and in particular our wives – yet did not manage to be released from bourgeois “cosiness”. And I am sure that you – and the more so your lovely Marta – would be horrified by this room. It would seem to you too poor, too idle time. Neither carpet, nor curtains, nor shelves. But… it is necessary to live day to understand all expediency of this simplicity and uselessness of blocking up of rooms all that stuff – vases, zanavesochka, shelves, statuetochka which do so-called “cosiness” of our German apartments.
Present in my room – the only chair! Unless it is not horror? I cannot even receive the guest! But it is enough to leave in a corridor and to pass several steps, and you already in a drawing room – with carpets, upholstered convenient leather furniture, flowers on a table, fine pictures on walls, you meet whom to you there is a wish, you choose the place and you conduct friendly chat with friends. Chairs, little tables and sofas are placed so that groups of talking do not interfere with each other. I, for example, chose a corner at a window where there is couple of chairs surrounded with the huge blossoming oleanders. You are as though in a garden. In an open window the clean air saturated with ozone flows. Nobody disturbs you, and you disturb nobody, and in this wonderful corner I spent not one evening, talking to my new friends. I learned from them a lot of interesting that it is difficult for the foreign tourist who besides is poorly knowing Russian to learn and notice.
But forgive me. Overloaded with new impressions, I distract aside and I write irregularly. I will try to drive myself in a framework, adhering at least to a chronological order.
From Moscow I took off on the airplane, flew on the southeast, with greedy curiosity looking down, at open spaces of the new world which does not know slavery and forced labor. If not deployed card before me where the flight route was noted, I could think that I fly not over the country of peaceful work, and over the field of battle. On wide fields “tanks”, in single file and the developed system, alone and the whole herds moved. They gathered in small groups, as though frolicing, ran away from each other.
Well, and if our far ancestor or even the savage never seeing modern cars “sat in my place, of course, would think that he flew to the unknown world where there live strange monsters which are grazed on fields and devour high herbs with extraordinary speed. You, of course, already guessed that I speak about tractors, about tractor columns which, it is similar to hardworking continued animals, busy scurry about back and forth, doing easily and soon on what the incredible number of human work was required before.
By the way, I can tell you a curious trifle. Local doctors assured me that tractors and cars were enemies of a number of diseases which sharply began to decline after the country was a traktorizovana and is sated with cars. The tractor and the car almost absolutely destroyed a typhoid, dysentery and other infectious diseases. “How?” – you will ask. Very simply. Distributors of these diseases were flies, and flies breed, putting testicles mainly in horse manure. Horses were replaced now by cars and tractors. And flies were almost brought.
Here I heard such tale. The swallow complains to a sparrow that now there is no place even to sit down – telegraph supposedly wireless. And the sparrow answers: “… also there is nothing to have dinner: all cars yes tractors, any horse!” To it it is possible to add also the complaint of a fly that now there is no place to put eggs for reproduction.
But, forgive, I distracted again.
So – the airplane, boundless steppes, fields and on them herds of lovely, hardworking, obedient machines – tractors. On all this immense space the industrial and agricultural cities, however, a little by what differing from each other are scattered. The old cities, from tserkva, with diversity of wooden and stone constructions meet their wrong confused streets seldom… Already here, at height, sitting in the big passenger airplane and looking from height of bird’s flight down, you see and feel that you are in the country of planned housekeeping. The agricultural cities are located more or less evenly, industrial – in the locations of raw materials. And there are no villages – old Russian villages – at all. The words “man”, “peasant” disappeared from a living language. They became the same historical reminiscence as “landowner” and “nobleman”. In this country there are only workers, only workers of agricultural or industrial work. By the way, you will not see a difference between the engineer and the worker here. All of them live in identical conditions.
But
