It’s a perfect recipe for daily misery. The worst sort of slavery you can imagine. You are bound not by shackles but the realization that if you refuse to be an ant, you will lose the support of the colony, and then you might as well be dead. You have to live your life not as you want to but as the collective dictates. The irony is that you are part of it and, therefore, your own slave.
What should we do then? Toughen up the outer shells of our bodies? Sharpen our mandibles? Arm ourselves with poison? We’ll definitely need it at some point. And we’ll have to master the art of mimicry—to pass ourselves off as ants. According to zoologists, small spiders and grasshoppers use this form of self-defense very effectively.
All day long, Nina stared through the gap in the white curtains at the stinging nettles growing by the fence, the sentry walking to and fro, or the mangy stray dog that had made its home on the station platform.
“Dogs aren’t allowed here!” the nurse cried. “Get it away from here!”
She didn’t know that Nina had been secretly pinching off pieces of bread and throwing them out of the window. When you can’t get up and are bored to death, there are still the pleasures of petty disobedience to be had.
Behind the thin screen that divided the hospital car were two sailors with broken legs who were acting up too. They constantly told ribald jokes and talked about their girlfriends in the most colorful language and shocking detail. For some reason, Nina found this unbearably funny.
Maybe it was just her nerves. The doctor had told Nina not to laugh for fear of bursting her stitches, but now, the slightest tomfoolery would reduce her to feeble, debilitating laughter. She asked the sailors to stop, but they continued to tell each other their outrageous stories, claiming a good laugh is the best cure for any ill.
Klim would come after lunch. The nurses were glad to see him because he always brought them something—a bouquet of daisies picked at the fence, a few cigarettes, or some other small gift. Nina felt proud to see the nurses fussing around Klim but annoyed at them for taking up her precious time with him. Skudra never let him get away for more than half an hour.
When Klim came to visit Nina, he would sit beside her, and the two of them would talk in whispers about how wretched and terrified of losing each other they had been during their separation.
Nina never admitted that Fomin had visited her, but she did hint that she and Zhora had taken part in preparing the uprising.
“Why?” Klim gasped. “Why did you risk so much for the sake of someone else’s interests?”
“They are not someone else’s,” Nina protested. “There is something in this world worth fighting and dying for.”
“What exactly is it that you are planning to die for? Some ‘Just Cause’ nobody will remember in ten years?”
Nina didn’t know what to say when she had realized how upsetting it had all been for Klim. He had sacrificed everything he had had to save her, and it appeared to him that she hadn’t been taking her own life seriously.
“Zhora and I couldn’t just sit on our hands,” she said, looking down. “If you do nothing, you begin to feel that you don’t exist.”
The next day, Klim brought Nina the ring from the safety pin of a hand grenade, which consisted of two rings joined together.
“I’ve found something that symbolizes us in a funny way,” Klim said. “Individually, we’re nothing but zeros, but together, we become a symbol of infinity and perfection.” He straightened the ring into a figure of eight. “We must never part from each other again.”
Nina asked Klim to put the symbol of infinity onto the chain that held the “key from his heart” as well as a small anchor that had been made for her by one of the sailors. The sailor had said it was a symbol of hope, a sign that one day Nina would return to her home harbor.
I wish I could go home and find my brother, she thought.
Klim kissed Nina goodbye and ruffled her cropped curls—he found her boyish hairstyle amusing. “See you tomorrow.”
He paused at the screen, pretending he had something to say but had forgotten what it was. In fact, he was just trying to prolong the final precious moments of his visit.
“Well, bye-bye for now.”
Nina heard his footsteps, the creak of the door as it closed, and then a knock at the window. Then there were more farewells, waves, smiles, and faces traced in the dusty glass of the car window.
Nina stared after him as he made his way down the empty platform.
“You’re truly lucky to have made such a rare catch,” said one of the nurses.
The Red Army troops were lined up on Kafedralnaya Square. As a foreign journalist, Klim had a prime view of the parade from the roof of a staff automobile.
It was a curious sight to see an army of atheists parading against the backdrop of ancient churches. The clouds were riding high in the sky, the golden domes shone brightly, and a little further along next to the cliff’s edge stood a veiled monument to a revolutionary hero.
“The Volga River must and will belong to the Soviets!” shouted Trotsky from the stage in the middle of the square. “There are far many more of us than the Whites. Our forces in Sviyazhsk number nearly fifteen thousand men.”
I don’t suppose anyone knows that for sure, thought Klim.
The Red Army was difficult to quantify, taking into account mass desertion and the lack of uniforms and documents. Some regiments had no more than two or three dozen men, and they only lent half an ear to their commanders.
Klim had talked to the mobilized Red Army soldiers and the captured Whites, who were peasants recruited by force from the local villages. No one wanted to fight.
“What the hell are we doing here?” they complained. “They promised us peace!”
At the first opportunity, both Reds and Whites were ready to surrender just to have a chance to avoid any fighting.
“Hey there!” someone called.
Klim turned his head, and his heart grew cold as he recognized Pukhov standing on the footboard of a staff automobile.
“I saw you from miles away perched up here above the crowd,” Pukhov said. “Where have you been all this time?”
He pulled himself up and sat next to Klim.
Klim was feverishly racking his brain, trying to come up with a story that would satisfy his former boss. Pukhov knew that Klim wasn’t here representing an Argentine newspaper, and if he found out that Countess Odintzova was being cared for in Trotsky’s hospital car, he would have a fit. Why should a class enemy have special treatment while wounded Red Army soldiers were rotting to death in the overcrowded field hospitals?
Klim told Pukhov about what had happened to the tramcar that had taken him away from the bank in Kazan.
“It was derailed, and I suffered shellshock.”
Pukhov looked suspiciously at Klim. “Oh, really? So, what are you doing now?”
“I’ve joined the propaganda team.”
“I need you back. We can’t do without an interpreter. I managed to get my Chinese soldiers away from Kazan and bring them here. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the valuables out of the bank, and the Whites have got their hands on all of it. By the time we got here, all we had were thirty pots and twelve spoons between two hundred men. And the supply officer still yelled at us, telling us we had no right to have even that. Come with me when the rally’s over. I need to take the Chinese to the bathhouse. I’m afraid they’ll get lice and come down with typhus.”
“Raise your hands,” demanded Trotsky, “if you want the land go back to the landlords.”
The crowd stood silent and motionless, only a stray goat scratched its burr-covered flank against the corner of the stage.