After another fifteen minutes I went into the washroom, took a bucket of water and scrubbed myself, briskly but thoroughly, for ten. Only then did I approach the laundry dispensary in the changing room, taking note of the distinct quickening of my heart when I saw how few clothes were left on the rail. Almost all the other women had already taken their pick. Dr Marina was still dressing; she had the rather nice jacket I’d used a couple of weeks ago. I saw a cotton skirt – good; a shirt with no collar and a flannel waistcoat, rather large, but all right. But underwear… oh, underwear! I couldn’t help a lurch of disgust at the tattered, greyish bloomers that lay at the top of the underwear basket. But here, yes, another pair, really quite acceptable. I hesitated. It simply would not do, my conscience told me, to mind so much about bloomers. It was over just such matters as these that we had to be strict with ourselves in the Institute. Quailing a little, but determined, I took up the tattered pair, noticing that they had some truly repulsive yellowish marks.
‘Have you everything you need, comrade?’ Vera bustled over, her kind, plump face strained with anxiety over this important moment in the Laundry Commissar’s week. ‘Here, let me help you, Gerty – there’s some better ones here, wouldn’t you prefer—’
‘The most important thing, Verochka, is not to care.’
‘Oh, well, of course, but really I wouldn’t have thought it matters – look, there’s a nasty stain on those—’
‘Shall I sign here?’
The delicious, unravelled feeling of the bath suddenly reasserted itself; I beamed at Vera as I interrupted her and, surprised, she smiled back. All this pettiness, these belittling preoccupations were falling away; the process of conquering the ego could only become more joyful. I dressed quickly and hurried to join the other members in the drawing room. It was time for our evening meeting.
In the early days of the IRT, many of our evenings were spent listening to and discussing each member’s piece on their Revolutionary Development. They were varied. Fyodor, smacking his rosy lips, gave us a curt few lines on his father’s incompetent management of their family estates and his own determination to learn a profession – engineering – and to devote his life to the technological advances that would make Communism possible. ‘The tasks of our commune’, he said, ‘are discipline and efficiency.’ They were his two favourite words. ‘We must mould men and women as punctual and regular as machines.’ If mild depression assailed us at these words, we tried not to let it show.
Marina wrote about her life as a trainee doctor, Vera as a nurse and Volodya described the trenches; all of them, in their different ways, driven by a sense of the injustice of the autocracy.
That evening after the steam bath, as we drank the hot water flavoured with a little grated carrot that we called tea and smoked our ‘goat’s leg’ cigarettes rolled out of newspaper, Sonya read us her account. We breathed the cool, scented air and listened to her little well-brought-up voice floating out of the darkness, describing the failure of her marriage. In 1915 she had married Petya, the son of a manufacturer of dandruff shampoo – we had all witnessed her tantrums over the guest list, the invitations, the wrong kind of quails’ eggs – only to wave him off to war just a few months later. In 1916 he was badly wounded and lost a leg to septicaemia. Throughout 1917, while he was ill, she devoted herself completely to him; I remember how impressed I was by this new side to her character. But as he recovered, all her attempts to be a good wife were met by increasing hostility on his part and frustration on hers. They had married young and in haste – Sonya, I suspect, had been longing to escape the shadow of her mother’s illness – and the foundations of their relationship had been shattered by war. What common ground was there to sustain them in this new situation? When he and his mother moved back to Petrograd, Sonya came back to Gagarinsky Lane, and soon afterwards left Moscow with the family for the south. I thought the marriage would probably have foundered even without the injury, but of course that didn’t stop Sonya from feeling that she had failed him at his most vulnerable.
‘Ptichka,’ said Pasha gently, ‘Little bird, you know that it was his decision as much as yours, even though he didn’t admit it. He went back to Petrograd and he didn’t even ask you to come, did he?’
Sonya’s voice caught. ‘Well, perhaps he just assumed I would. But he used to look at me with such hatred – he used to rail at me, abuse me, as if he blamed me.’ She cleared her throat. ‘And then, of course, I saw him again in Yalta… It was while my father still thought there might be a chance for them to leave immediately for Turkey, before he decided to rent the villa. I bumped into my mother-in-law who told me where she and Petya were staying; they fled Petrograd just about the same time we left Moscow. “Don’t imagine he’s longing to see you,” she said grimly – there was never a great deal of warmth between Evgenia Maksimovna and me.
‘He was in bed when I came, and made no attempt to sit up. It was only a couple of months since I’d last seen him but he seemed to have swelled up – I don’t know, perhaps it was some health problem – and his face was quite different, eyes and mouth tiny in big, pallid cheeks. I was shocked, and perhaps it showed on my face, because he was immediately angry, accused me of all sorts of vile behaviour—’ She hesitated, and laughed. ‘Well, it’s ridiculous, but he accused me of having an affair with you, Nikita. “That student, I’ve seen how he looks at you.” His mind was filled with every sort of warped nonsense. Then just as I was thinking I would have to leave, he burst into tears, and told me I was well out of it. “I couldn’t look after you now, could I? It’s better this way. You must live your life, and I’ll try to do something with mine, God knows what—” I cried too, and for a moment we sat together quietly, without speaking, and I thought we understood each other. And then he suddenly sat up and hissed into my ear, “The least you can do is get me some money! Ten thousand roubles – come on, I know you can lend it to me!” He pushed me away as hard as he could. Hating him, I went and sold some jewellery, and returned with a wallet. And then I made up my mind. I couldn’t go abroad with my parents. The only choice left to me, from the moment I left my husband, was to try to do something towards the Revolution.’
Sonya stopped. She was blushing. ‘After that we returned, and you know it all from then on.’
Anna Vladimirovna spoke into the pause that followed, ‘My dear,’ she drawled in her grandest voice, ‘it’s really not suitable to repeat all that in public. I tell you this in your parents’ absence.’
‘Oh, Aunt, but—’
‘Don’t interrupt. But I must say that boy was extremely badly brought up. You did the only thing you could, dear.’ She sank back in her chair, then suddenly added with a mad glint in her eye, ‘If I’d been there I would have horsewhipped him myself.’
She laughed with all of us, still nodding fiercely. ‘I would have. Bring the whip! Swish, swish!’
‘You did well,’ Nikita said.
Sonya looked up at him and I saw that she was crying. ‘No,’ she retorted. ‘I did not. That’s what I mean – now I must work hard and do well. All my life I’ve wasted time, squandered my privileges, but now—’
‘Now,’ murmured Nikita, ‘you have changed.’
He was looking at her and I couldn’t help breaking in: ‘Well, yes,’ I blurted out. ‘Yes, but we’ve all changed, haven’t we?’