Pasha and I bought dried fish and rusks, millet and barley, and from a tall, well-built woman, even a couple of pounds of butter – half melted, so I bargained her down a little.
‘Take it, and good health to you,’ said the woman cheerfully. ‘The devil of a life this is anyway. I’ll leave for home now, and you better hurry too; I’ve got a feeling those Red bastards will be along soon.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
She lowered her voice. ‘Old crooked legs over there is packing up and leaving, and he’s…’ She knocked her fist quietly on the palm of her other hand. I understood her – he was a stukach, an informer, who knock-knock-knocked on the police door.
‘I’m one of the sort who can see that kind of thing,’ the woman murmured. ‘Always have been able to. If you like I’ll tell your fortune, and I won’t charge too much either.’
‘That’s all superstition,’ said Pasha. ‘You must forget such nonsense now.’
‘Nonsense? And me only offering you a favour, bozhe moi.’
I felt it then – a ruffle, like a wind, from the other end of the market. Shouting. ‘Comrades, beware!’
‘Pasha, they’re here, the guards are here—’
I saw them – one shoving the butt of his rifle in a trader’s face, bright red blood, several more pushing further into the market, glints of their rifles, ripples of people panicking, crashing into each other, a child’s screams… We squeezed past the butter lady’s stall and ran across the bare expanse of the square. I heard my breath loud in my ears. Shouts behind me. Then bang! A rifle shot, my knees buckled. For a moment I thought I had been hit. ‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ hissed Pasha in my ear. He hauled me up by the arm. ‘It’s just the shock, you’re all right’, and we reached the side streets and dived into a courtyard, slid down the wall. Pasha was still holding me by the arm.
‘Oh, Gerty,’ he whispered after a moment, giving me a lopsided grin, ‘you are my one true love, even though you do fall over in the most inconvenient places.’
‘Just – stop, Pasha,’ I spat back at him, furious. I was shaking, I could hardly get my words out. ‘Why do you still have to talk like that? In the old days, it was a joke that we all understood, but—’
‘What?’
‘Well, we’re all trying to be honest now. Sincere.’
‘I suppose I must mean it, then,’ he whispered, still smiling. ‘I love you, Miss Gerty. Especially when you’re telling me off.’
‘It’s so easy to mock the governess, isn’t it?’ Tears of rage pricked my eyes. ‘All your Revolutionary ideas, and at heart you are just a snob, like your aunt.’
At home I avoided the others, who were returning from their work in dribs and drabs, and took our purchases to the kitchen. I went into the cool back larder and leaned against the wall until my breathing settled down and my heart stopped pounding.
None of us said much about the fear that we felt on the streets. All around us were those whose suffering was much worse – the soldiers fighting the civil war, the civilians in the paths of warring armies, the pathetic, half-starved ‘former people’. The Kobelevs – I wondered, as I did several times a day, how they were managing in the south. At the IRT, after all, we were in the vanguard of history; we were Revolutionaries, who had nothing to fear from the future. In those fluid days it felt as if fear itself was a cause for guilt or a failure of faith. It was quite common for me to return home and find my fingers white-knuckled and clamped to the stick I carried. I would slip quietly into the back rooms and wait until I was able to enter the communal sitting room with a smile.
I was never going to be much use to the commune in terms of scientific or philosophical understanding, and no doubt I was such a dullard that people like Pasha would always use me for the butt of their jokes, but I did have a role – a useful one – and Nikita always showed how much he appreciated it.
‘Ah,’ he used to say when I appeared, ‘here’s Gerty, cheerful as always! English phlegm… that is what this commune needs.’
8
On Friday evenings, as long as we had enough fuel, the IRT bolstered its Revolutionary spirit by taking a communal steam bath. No other form of washing could ever be so good for morale. While it heated up, filling the air with the tang of woodsmoke, we ate outside on the terrace under a sky filled with violent, flaming cobs of cloud – caused, so people said, by the huge quantity of munitions dust and gas in the atmosphere. Then we made our way quietly across the yard; we’d voted for no talking in the banya.
I slipped out of my clothes in the women’s section and entered, shutting the door quickly behind me. One by one we took our places and settled down. I breathed in the sweet, resiny steam and leaned back, feeling the painful tensions of the week begin to relax, the clamp of anxiety loosen. There was only the creak of wooden benches and the occasional sigh; and from the men’s side of the partition, the slap and shuffle of bare feet. Around me the women lolled, eyes closed, rosy and sweating, at ease. Dr Marina ladled water onto the stove. Thick, blinding steam billowed out into the room and then there was nothing, nothing at all, but the heat, and my breath in little gasps, and the prickle of sweat on my skin.
The habit of modesty had been fiercely bred in me, and at first, I confess, I found the banya uncomfortable. It had seemed wrong – animal – to walk about naked, and I didn’t enjoy seeing these women reduced (as I saw it) to cows in a barn, with their undignified female shapes. Then Dr Marina noticed my awkwardness and forced me to look through her medical dictionary. ‘For goodness’ sake, Gerty, look at elephantiasis,’ she said. ‘No, wait! Look at psoriasis… Well, you feel squeamish about these poor sufferers, I quite understand. But why shy away from normal, healthy, strong bodies? That I can’t comprehend.’
Dr Marina was not the subtlest of teachers, but in this case her incredulity made us both laugh. ‘I mean, look, this poor man with the strawberry nose – it’s drink that’s done that – you’d have to be a stone not to feel for him! But what could be wrong with your body, or mine for that matter?’
So now if I felt shy, I took a deep breath and observed quite dispassionately how my mother’s remarks bobbed up in my mind, unsinkable:
‘Whatever shall we do about her nose?’
‘It’s a pity she didn’t inherit my chest…’
‘Oh dear, how she does overheat, it isn’t attractive!’
And just: ‘Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.’
I observed how I constantly compared myself with the other women around me. Then I sliced those thoughts out, surgically, using Dr Marina’s words as the knife: ‘A normal, healthy body – a thing of beauty.’
Not for the first time, I noticed the wave of pleasure it gave me to identify a splinter of the old me – of the old, pre-Revolutionary world – and to destroy it.
For the last couple of weeks, however, there had been a new preoccupation to distract me during the steam bath. Since the IRT’s decision to collectivise our clothes, clean laundry was issued each Friday evening from the general store. We were meant not to sift through the clothes rail, but simply to take the outfit closest to us; but in practice the last members to be kitted out had an eccentric time of it that week.
As I lay with my eyes closed, outwardly calm, I observed that my ears were straining to hear who had already left the banya, and that my muscles were actually tensed, ready to jump up and push in front of them, even though there was at least another half an hour of the steam bath left. The collectivisation of our clothes had clearly not yet succeeded in eliminating vanity from my soul. I did my best to be firm with myself, although I did notice (still without opening my eyes) that the others were cutting short their banya as well.