A Razor Wrapped in Silk

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Mitka looked up. He saw the high ceiling of the spinning-shop through a haze of cotton dust scored with countless lines of yarn. The dust was white, like snow but finer. It hung in the hot air, beneath the turning shafts that spanned the workshop and drove the machines. Incessantly moving, yet going nowhere, they held him entranced with a vision of infinity, presented as unrelenting monotony.

He could always taste the dust, always feel it, on him and in him, smothering him. Even in his parched dreams, even in the best of them, when he dreamt of her, and the great feeling took him over — even then, she came to him through a shifting white mist and fed him sweetmeats that tasted of cotton. And in those dreams, the throbbing noise that drowned out her tender words was the chiming clatter of the machines.

Was he dreaming now? The thought frightened him into a state of strained alertness.

He was crouched within the great jaws of the spinning mule. The mule itself, the movable frame which carried over a thousand spindles, or so Mr Ustyantsev claimed, was edging away from the fixed part of the machine. It drew the unspun rovings of cotton from the creel and stretched the fibres into the finest of prison bars. It was Mitka’s job to watch for broken threads and tie up the ends, conspiring in his own imprisonment. Once the mule had completed its outward carriage, it would begin its return, walked home by Mr Ustyantsev as it wound in the threads it had spun. Mitka knew of children who, in falling asleep, had been caught in its inexorable bite, unseen by the machine operator. If they were lucky they’d lose a finger, ripped off in the blink of an eye. The hobgoblins and ogres of fairytales were nothing compared to the lurking terrors of the factory.

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