Yes, the streets are not bad at all in the daytime. Especially if you just stand still. Walking anywhere is impossible. Even the cabmen’s horses have trouble negotiating the great blocks of ice, the mountains of snow and the quiet valleys between them. But if you just stand still, it’s really not too bad.
“And where are you off to in such a hurry?”
“Home.”
“Why bother? If you go back home, you might get your throat cut.”
They say the city will empty out soon—half the population will have left. A new decree states that all looters and criminals must leave the city immediately.
A lot of people are jealous: all the trouble you have to go to in order to get permission to travel and now, all of a sudden, the door is wide open, if you please.
And the government’s generosity to the looters is unlikely to stop there. Disbanding this army of bandits will take more than one day. The looters are going to need some help to obey the decree.
First of all, the government should lay on special trains, with the time and route specified: “First Looters’ Express”; “Looters’ Train B”; “Looters’ Medical”; “Looters’ Supply Train” (because, after all, looters have to eat too); “Kislovodsk Looters’ Train”; “Deluxe Looters’ Express”. Or simplest of all, suspend all passenger and goods trains, and arrange a “Looters’ Week”.
Otherwise nothing will come of it.
For the time being, “due to the lack of transport”, the robbers go on robbing.
If several robbers attack one passer-by, this is called the “socialization of capital”.[4]
But if one person attacks several passers-by, this is ideologically unsound and is called “capitalist individualization”.[5]
Apparently a set of rules has been published, stating which streets may be walked along at which time.
Although, it has to be said, there are some streets that should not be walked along at any time.
During the last pogrom,[6] a service was being held in the church on Voskresensky Prospect. As the service was ending, there was the sound of shooting out in the street. A report was sent to the Smolny, following which a guard was dispatched to escort the congregation and the clergy back to their homes.
I don’t imagine that the clergy felt entirely comfortable to be availing themselves of the services of the Bolsheviks.
“If you would be so good as to accompany me home, dear brother-anathema.”[7]
Each member of the clergy was seen to his door by four anathemas.
For some time now there’s been no shooting at all. It’s very quiet. This unaccustomed silence makes our ears ring.
It’s dark. And it’s cold.
“It’s a dog’s life, my dear chap,” I heard a man on the tram complaining. His ears were stuffed with cotton wool. “A dog’s life. You run around all day like a dog, sniffing about for a bone. You grab your bone and drag it home. You snarl at anyone who tries to take it. You gnaw at it, wrap the leftovers in some rags and bury them, just like a dog, so no one can take them. And then again, at night, you sit at your gate like a dog, guarding your house—that is, if you still have bread in the house to guard: the third of an ounce that remains from your four-ounce ration of bread made from straw.”[8]
Not long ago, a man got a splinter in his tongue from the bread. His tongue swelled up and he died. People had a good laugh. And he chose the wrong time, too. The very next day he could have got an egg on his ration card.
All that was a long time ago, needless to say. About ten days ago. Now it sounds like some fairy story.
The only people who can get eggs now are children. Four children are entitled to one egg between them, once a year.
That’s how we live. A lot of people are starting to think that we aren’t living, but quite simply dying. But then, when people are very hungry and very cold, and unhappy into the bargain, it’s probably all too easy for them to imagine they’re dying.
On the other hand…
Dear God, if it’s all the same to you, let us die a warm death.
THE GADARENE SWINE
There are not many of them, of these refugees from Sovietdom. A small group of people with nothing in common; a small motley herd huddled by the cliff’s edge before the final leap. Creatures of different breeds and with coats of different colours, entirely alien to one another, with natures that have perhaps always been mutually antagonistic, they have wandered off together and collectively refer to themselves as “we”. They have wandered off for no purpose, for no reason. Why?
The legend of the country of the Gadarenes comes to mind. Men possessed by demons came out from among the tombs, and Christ healed them by driving the demons into a herd of swine, and the swine plunged from a cliff and drowned.
Herds of a single animal are rare in the East. More often they are mixed. And in the herd of Gadarene swine there were evidently some meek, frightened sheep. Seeing the crazed swine hurtling along, these sheep took to their heels too.
“Is that our lot?”
“Yes, they’re running for it!”
And the meek sheep plunged down after the swine and they all perished together.
Had dialogue been possible in the course of this mad dash, it might have resembled what we’ve been hearing so often in recent days:
“Why are we running?” ask the meek.
“Everyone’s running.”
“Where are we running to?”
“Wherever everyone else is running.”
“What are we doing with them? They’re not our kind of people. We shouldn’t be here with them. Maybe we ought to have stayed where we were. Where the men possessed by demons were coming out from the tombs. What are we doing? We’ve lost our way, we don’t know what we’re…”
But the swine running alongside them know very well what they’re doing. They egg the meek on, grunting “Culture! We’re running towards culture! We’ve got money sewn into the soles of our shoes. We’ve got diamonds stuck up our noses. Culture! Culture! Yes, we must save our culture!”
They hurtle on. Still on the run, they speculate. They buy up, they buy back, they sell on. They peddle rumours. The fleshy disc at the end of a pig’s snout may only look like a five-kopek coin, but the swine are selling them now for a hundred roubles.
“Culture! We’re saving culture! For the sake of culture!”
“How very strange!” say the meek. “‘Culture’ is our kind of word. It’s a word we use ourselves. But now it sounds all wrong. Who is it you’re running away from?”
“The Bolsheviks.”
“How very strange!” the meek say sadly. “Because we’re running away from the Bolsheviks, too.”
If the swine are fleeing the Bolsheviks, then it seems that the meek should have stayed behind.
But they’re in headlong flight. There’s no time to think anything through.
They are indeed all running away from the Bolsheviks. But the crazed swine are escaping from Bolshevik truth, from socialist principles, from equality and justice, while the meek and frightened are escaping from untruth, from Bolshevism’s black reality, from terror, injustice and violence.
5
A term used in Marxist theory to describe the abandonment, as capitalism developed, of the collective solidarity characteristic of feudalism.
6
See “
7
Patriarch Nikon, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, pronounced an anathema on the Bolsheviks in January 1918.
8
Bread rationing was introduced by the Provisional Government in March 1917, and bread continued to be rationed—as well as being adulterated with other substances—under “War Communism” (1918–21). In