“Help,” she whispered. She was being crushed from one side; she’d almost lost her footing. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back beside me. We grinned at each other, relieved.
The doors of the church were flung open. We passed through them and began to circle the church. Once, twice, three times. Hundreds of feet shuffled through the slush and pushed it back until the earth was revealed. Night air, the deep, slow voices of the choir and the rattling censer. At last we gathered in front of the doors, where the bishop stood silent, surrounded by priests. The babushka beside me was weeping into her scarf.
Raising his arms in an embrace, the bishop cried out: “Christ is risen!”
And the crowd answered in a shout: He is risen indeed.
The bells jangled. The doors of the church opened and inside the light was unbearably bright.
Katya and I left soon after midnight, although the service would continue until morning. As we hugged good-bye, I promised to visit her soon, to see if there was anything I could do to help. Now that there was less of a crowd, I could see she had lost weight. Her brown spaniel’s eyes welling with emotion in her pale little face made me shiver. A less motherly figure would be hard to imagine.
As it happened, I was the one who needed help. A couple of days later, Mitya, Yakov, and I were on a trolleybus trundling along the left bank, going to visit friends, when my head began to spin and everything went black. When I regained consciousness, they’d got me off the bus and were carrying me toward a small wooden house painted green and blue and covered in snow. Katya appeared in the door, eyes wide.
“She fainted,” Mitya explained. “Can she lie down?”
“Oh,” Katya said, looking over her shoulder. “Mama!”
I leaned against the door frame and began to slide gently toward the floor. Mitya caught me under the elbow.
“What have you done to her?” Katya’s mother demanded. “Poor girl.”
Mitya went white. “Nothing—”
“Bring her in, quick!”
I was aware, suddenly, of lying down on a couch. “Just not eaten,” I tried to explain. My tongue felt swollen. “Nothing…”
“Off you go, boys,” Katya’s mother interrupted. “Shoo!”
Mitya and Yakov were bundled out of the house.
“Nothing serious,” I finished to an empty room, and fell asleep.
In the darkness, I jolted awake and couldn’t think where I was. Then a voice loomed mournfully from the road and I realized it had woken me.
“Charlotte!”
Mitya was outside, furious at his dismissal. But as I staggered to my feet, Katya’s mother appeared.
“Where are you going? Now you lie down, you’ve got no slippers on, can’t go wandering about.” She was at the window and calling before I could stop her. “Go on home, Mitya! She’s staying the night! She’s fine! Just leave her alone!” She drew the curtains. “Don’t worry about him,” she said comfortably, tucking the blanket around me. “He’s brought you to the right person. I’m a doctor, you know. Now, put this under your arm. I want to take your temperature.”
Of course I should have demanded Mitya be let in. Instead, with a delicious sense of relief, I lay back, pressing the cold glass of the thermometer under my arm, and allowed her to boss me around. The house had a cozy, solid feeling unlike anywhere else I had been in Voronezh. The wallpaper had faded where the sun fell on it, until the pattern was barely visible. There was a desk with a green-shaded light and a couple of armchairs with knitted rugs over the backs. The room smelled of coal smoke from an old-fashioned stove in the corner.
“Good, no fever. Just low blood pressure,” said Katya’s mother briskly. “Now, lie quietly. Here’s Katya with a tonic for you.”
“You’ve woken up.” Katya gave me a glass of clear liquid and folded herself into the armchair opposite me. “Mama’s giving me tonics, too, for me and the baby.”
“What’s in it?”
“Oh, vitamins, iron, natural extracts that are healthful. Mama makes them herself.”
A tiny, bent old lady appeared, shuffling determinedly toward one of the armchairs. She sat down and leaned forward to peer at me.
“She’s the English girl,” she stated. “Well, she doesn’t look well at all. Natasha was right to keep her here. She’s been living an unhealthy life, like you, Katya.”
“Babushka, she understands Russian, you know.”
Her grandmother looked unconvinced. “What’s her name?”
“Charlotte,” I answered.
“Ah, Charlotte Brontë!”
This was the ritual Russian response to my name. We smiled at each other politely, then she took out the beginnings of something tiny and pale blue on her knitting needles and fell silent.
“What about your father? Where is he?” I asked Katya.
“Oh, he left years ago… We’re a house of women here, my grandmother, my mother and I. And now the baby.” Katya laughed, a breathy little giggle. “We all think she’s sure to be a girl.”
“What about dinner, Katyusha?” said her grandmother. “Your mother’s tired and your guest must eat something.”
“It’s in the oven, Babushka. I’ll go and check.”
Katya’s mother returned and felt my forehead with a cool hand. Then she sat down at her desk and began quietly writing out reports in copperplate script. The warmth and the click of the knitting needles were soporific; in this comfortable industry there was a peace that, it seemed to me, could last for generations.
Here, in this strict, kindly matriarchy, the Revolution breathed its last breath. The Revolution, with its muscled warriors, its glorification of ferocity, violence, and what was deemed the necessary spilling of blood, was a masculine affair. The old regime was feminine: weak, decadent, with soft white hands unused to work. El Lissitzky’s contemporaneous poster, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,” demonstrates this contrast graphically: a white circle—a large, soft, feminine shape—is split open by the Bolsheviks’ red phallus. Propaganda constantly reinforced the idea that it was the battle of the sexes transposed onto class.
Now all those slab-chested images were lying in the snow and the red wedge had shriveled almost to nothing. The Revolution had failed, and Russian men were faltering with it. Oh, the women still came back from work and shouldered the whole burden of looking after the family. They still suffered an average of seven abortions because of the lack of other kinds of birth control; and a beaten wife was hardly an exception. But the men were dying. Young men died during military service, in fights on the street, in car crashes, in or out of prison. Middle-aged men fell ill, went into hospital, and as Gogol put it, “got better like flies.” They were crushed by alcohol and despair. What life was left, after all, for a cosmonaut without a space program, a statistician working with hollow numbers, or an unemployed Hero of Socialist Labor?
At home, however, the women rarely lost faith in the same way. Perhaps they simply could not afford to with children to look after. They concentrated on the basic elements of survivaclass="underline" food, warm clothes, health. Within this framework, the collapse of socialism was hardly a surprise: mothers had seen it coming for twenty years, as they stood in the milk line. And they were prepared for it, in the sense that they were prepared for any new hardship that the regime might ordain. Inside their apartments family life would carry on regardless: mustard plasters would be applied to chesty coughs, drafts would be rigorously excluded, sore throats would be treated with spoonfuls of honey. It made sense to me now that Katya had the courage to have the baby: they would be safe here. Yakov and others like him could come and go; they would always be marginal. They might drink too much, run off, have affairs, and even then the women had their defense: none of it would be unexpected.