In the morning, once they were out of the factory gates, they stood in line at the store to buy bread or cloth. Before the war, material for making dresses was very hard to get, there was never enough bread and living standards in general were extremely low.
People have now forgotten what it was like, and my Stalinist neighbors in Pskov were always insisting that before the war they didn't know what poverty was and that they had only learned the taste of it nowadays. It is remarkable how willfully oblivious of the past people can be.
In Strunino I learned that a woman forced to live beyond the hundred-kilometer limit was popularly known as a "hundred-and-fiver" (stopiatnitsa). The word reminded them of the martyred St. Para- skeva, and when I later told it to Akhmatova, she used it in a poem. All the workers in the factory referred to me in this way, and they were all very kind to me—particularly the older men. Sometimes they would come into the spinning shop and offer me an apple or a piece of pie ("Eat some of this, my wife baked it yesterday"). In the factory cafeteria during the meal break they always kept a place for me and made me take some soup to "keep my strength up." Everywhere I found this warm sympathy which was shown to me as a stopiatnitsa. There was never the slightest hint of anti-intellectual prejudice among these people.
Once during a night shift two dapper young men came into the spinning shop, switched off my machines and asked me to follow them into the personnel section. This was located in another building and we had to go through several shops to get to it. Seeing us go by, other workers switched off their machines and began to follow us. As we went down some stairs leading outside, I was afraid to look around because I sensed that this was a way of saying goodbye to me—the workers knew only too well that people were often taken straight from the personnel section to the secret police.
My conversation with the two young men was quite ludicrous. They asked me why I was doing a job for which I was not qualified, and I replied that I had no qualification of any kind. And why had I come to live in Strunino? I told them I had no other place to live. "Why does an educated woman like you want to work in a factory?" At that time I still had no college diploma and was only educated in the sense that I had been to a grammar school before the Revolution and belonged to the intelligentsia—as the two men realized instinctively. "Why didn't you try to get work in a school?" "Because I don't have a diploma." To which one of them said: "There's something funny about this—tell us the truth." I couldn't make out what they wanted, but that night they decided to let me go—perhaps because of the workers who had gathered outside in the yard. They asked me whether I was working the night shift again the next day and told me to come back to the personnel section before I started work. I even had to sign a paper saying I would.
I didn't go back to the shop that night, but went straight home. My hosts were still awake—somebody had come to tell them that I had been hauled off "to personnel." The man produced a small bottle of vodka and poured out three glasses: "Let's have a drink and think what to do."
When the night shift ended, workers kept coming up to the house and stood talking to us by the window. Some said I should go away at once, and put money on the window sill for me. My landlady packed my things, and her husband and two neighbors took me to the station and put me on one of the early-morning trains. In this way I escaped a new disaster, thanks to these people who had still not learned to be indifferent. Even if the personnel section had not originally intended to hand me over to the police, I am certain they would never have let me go free after seeing how the workers had gathered to say goodbye.
The people of Strunino were sensitive to our misfortunes and knew very well what it was like to be the outlawed wife of a prisoner, a stopiatnitsa. The prison trains generally passed through at night, and in the mornings the workers from the textile factory would always look carefully as they crossed the tracks to see whether there were any notes written on scraps of paper—sometimes prisoners managed to throw them out. Anybody who found such a note put it in an envelope and mailed it. In this way the relatives of prisoners sometimes received news. If one of these trains happened to stop in Strunino during the day, everybody tried to throw the prisoners something—food or tobacco—behind the backs of the guards as they paced up and down. This was how my landlady had managed to throw a piece of chocolate to a prisoner.
There had been many arrests in Strunino itself, and this had embittered the local people. For the first time I heard Stalin referred to here as "the pockmarked fellow." When I asked why, they said: "Don't you know he had smallpox? They're always getting it down in the Caucasus." They themselves could have got something worse than smallpox for saying such things, but they were extremely careful whom they talked to, and they knew very well who all the local informers were. This is the great advantage of living in a village—in the big cities we were never sure whom we could trust.
In Strunino too they were all very law-abiding, but their inborn good nature made it impossible for them not to voice their feelings.
As Yakulov once said to me, "The Russian Revolution is not cruel— the State has sucked out all the cruelty and passed it on to the Cheka."
In Russia everything always happens at the top. The people hold their peace, resisting only in the meekest way. They hate cruelty, but do not believe in fighting it actively. How these qualities can be squared with the great uprisings and revolutions of the past, I do not know. What is one to make of it?
74 The Shklovskis
I
n Moscow there was only one house to which an outcast could always go. If Victor and Vasilisa Shklovski happened not to be at home when M. and I called during our trips to the city in the months before his arrest, one of the children would run out to greet us: little Varia, who always had a piece of chocolate in her hand, the tall Vasia (the daughter of Vasilisa's sister Natalia), or Nikita, their gangling son, who liked to go out catching birds and was also a great stickler for the truth. Nobody had ever explained anything to them, but they always knew what they had to do: children generally reflect their parents' standards of behavior. They would take us into the kitchen, which at the Shklovskis' was run like a cafeteria, give us food and drink, and entertain us with their chatter. Vasia, who played the viola, always told us about the latest concert—at that time Shostakovich's symphony was all the rage. Shklovski listened to what Vasia said and commented gleefully: "That puts Shostakovich right at the top!" Those were times in which everybody had to be given his precise place in the hierarchy, with everybody trying to come out on top. The State encouraged people to behave like the boyars in medieval Russia who fought each other over their place at the Czar's table, always reserving to itself the final decision as to who should sit "at the top." It was in those days that Lebedev-Kumach, who was said to be actually a very modest man, found himself elevated to the status of "top poet." Shklovski also had his ambitions, but he wanted to see things decided on the basis of his famous "Hamburg reckoning."* M. would have loved to go and hear Shos-
* In the preface to Hamburg Reckoning (Leningrad, 1928), Shklovski notes that Hamburg's prizefighters were ranked once each year in a day of long, hard fighting behind closed doors, rather than by their public fights manipu- pated by promoters. He suggests that the same methods should be applied to writers.