“Comrade Ta ...”
“Brothers! Listen! We have to answer this!” The two luminous white hands flew up over a black void, and his voice rose, ringing, as it had risen in a dark valley over the White trenches many years ago. “We have to answer this! If we don’t — history will answer it for us. And we shall go down with a burden on our shoulders that will never be forgiven! What is our goal, comrades? What are we doing? Do we want to feed a starved humanity in order to let it live? Or do we want to strangle its life in order to feed it?”
“Comrade Taganov!” roared the chairman. “I deprive you of speech!”
“I ... I ...” panted Andrei Taganov, staggering down the platform steps. “I have nothing more to say....”
He walked out, down the long aisle, a tall, gaunt, lonely figure. Heads turned to look at him. Somewhere in the back row someone whistled through his teeth, a long, low, sneering triumphant sound.
When the door closed after him, someone whispered:
“Let Comrade Taganov wait for the next Party purge!”
XIV
COMRADE SONIA SAT AT THE TABLE, IN a faded lavender kimono, with a pencil behind her ear. The kimono did not meet in front, for she had grown to proportions that could not be concealed any longer. She bent under the lamp, running through the pages of a calendar; she seized the pencil once in a while, jotting hurried notes down on a scrap of paper, and bit the pencil, a purple streak spreading on her lower lip, for the pencil was indelible.
Pavel Syerov lay on the davenport, his stocking feet high on its arm, reading a newspaper, chewing sunflower seeds. He spat the shells into a pile on a newspaper spread on the floor by the davenport. The shells made a little sizzling sound, leaving his lips. Pavel Syerov looked bored.
“Our child,” said Comrade Sonia, “will be a new citizen of a new state. It will be brought up in the free, healthy ideology of the proletariat, without any bourgeois prejudices to hamper its natural development.”
“Yeah,” said Pavel Syerov without looking up from his newspaper.
“I shall have it registered with the Pioneers, the very day it’s born. Won’t you be proud of your living contribution to the Soviet future, when you see it marching with other little citizens, in blue trunks and with a red kerchief around its neck?”
“Sure,” said Pavel Syerov, spitting a shell down on the newspaper.
“We’ll have a real Red christening. You know, no priests, only our Party comrades, a civil ceremony, and appropriate speeches. I’m trying to decide on a name and ... Are you listening to me, Pavel?”
“Sure,” said Syerov, sticking a seed between his teeth.
“There are many good suggestions for new, revolutionary names here in the calendar, instead of the foolish old saints’ names. I’ve copied some good ones. Now what do you think? If it’s a boy, I think Ninel would be nice.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“Pavel, I won’t tolerate such language and such ignorance! You haven’t given a single thought to your child’s name, have you?”
“Well, say, I still have time, haven’t I?”
“You’re not interested, that’s all, don’t you fool me, Pavel Syerov, and don’t you fool yourself thinking I’ll forget it!”
“Aw, come on, now, Sonia, really, you know, I’m leaving the name up to you. You know best.”
“Yes. As usual. Well, Ninel is our great leader Lenin’s name — reversed. Very appropriate. Or we could call him Vil — that’s for our great leader’s initials — Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin. See?”
“Yeah. Well, either one’s good enough for me.”
“Now, if it’s a girl — and I hope it’s a girl, because the new woman is coming into her own and the future belongs, to a greater extent than you men imagine, to the free woman of the proletariat — well, if it’s a girl, I have some good names here, but the one I like best is Octiabrina, because that would be a living monument to our great October Revolution.”
“Sort of ... long, isn’t it?”
“What of it? It’s a very good name and very popular. You know, Fimka Popova, she had a Red christening week before last and that’s what she called her brat — Octiabrina. Even got a notice in the paper about it. Her husband was so proud — the blind fool!”
“Now, Sonia, you shouldn’t insinuate ...”
“Listen to the respectable moralist! That bitch Fimka is known as a ... Oh, to hell with her! But if she thinks she’s the only one to get a notice in the paper about her litter I’ll ... I’ve copied some other names here, too. Good modern ones. There’s Marxina, for Karl Marx. Or else Communara. Or ...”
Something clattered loudly under the table.
“Oh, hell!” said Comrade Sonia. “Those damn slippers of mine!” She wriggled uncomfortably on her chair, stretching out one leg, her foot groping under the table. She found the slipper and bent painfully over her abdomen, pulling the slipper on by a flat, wornout heel. “Look at the old junk I have to wear! And I need so many things, and with the child coming ... You would choose a good time to write certain literary compositions and ruin everything, you drunken fool!”
“Now we won’t bring that up again, Sonia. You know I was lucky to get out of it as I did.”
“Yeah! Well, I hope your Kovalensky gets the firing squad and a nice, loud trial. I’ll see to it that the women of the Zhenotdel stage a demonstration of protest against Speculators and Aristocrats!” She fingered the pages of the calendar and cried: “Here’s another good one for a girclass="underline" Tribuna. Or — Barricada. Or, if we prefer something in the spirit of modern science: Universiteta.”
“That’s too long,” said Syerov.
“I prefer Octiabrina. More symbol to that. I hope it’s a girl. Octiabrina Syerova — the leader of the future. What do you want it to be, Pavel, a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t care,” said Syerov, “so long as it isn’t twins.”
“Now I don’t like that remark at all. It shows that you ...”
They heard a knock at the door. The knock seemed too loud, too peremptory. Syerov, his head up, dropped the newspaper and said: “Come in.”
Andrei Taganov entered and closed the door. Comrade Sonia dropped her calendar. Pavel Syerov rose slowly to his feet.