It was past midnight and she did not know whether she had been asleep or not. Leo breathed painfully on the pillow beside her, his forehead clammy with cold perspiration. In the haze of her mind, one thought stood out clearly: the apron. That apron of hers was filthy; it was loathsome; she could not let Leo see her wearing it another day; not another day.
She crawled out of bed and slipped her coat over her nightgown; it was too cold and she was too tired to dress. She put the pan of cold water on the bathroom floor, and fell down by its side and crammed the apron, the soap and her hands into a liquid that felt like acid.
She did not know whether she was quite awake and she did not care. She knew only that the big yellow grease spot wouldn’t come off, and she rubbed, and she rubbed, and she rubbed, with the dry, acrid, yellow soap, with her nails, with her knuckles, soap suds on the fur cuffs of her coat, huddled on the floor, her breasts panting against the tin edge of the pan, her hair falling down, down into the suds, beyond the narrow crack of the bathroom door a tall blue window sparkling with frost, her knuckles raw, the skin rubbed off, beyond the bedroom door someone in Marisha’s room playing “John Gray” on a piano with a missing key, the pain growing in her back, the soap suds brown and greasy over purple hands.
They saved the money for many months and on a Sunday evening they bought two tickets to see “Bajadere,” advertised as the “latest sensation of Vienna, Berlin and Paris.”
They sat, solemn, erect, reverent as at a church service, Kira a little paler than usual in her gray silk dress, Leo trying not to cough, and they listened to the wantonest operetta from over there, from abroad.
It was very gay nonsense. It was like a glance straight through the snow and the flags, through the border, into the heart of that other world. There were colored lights, and spangles, and crystal goblets, and a real foreign bar with a dull glass archway where a green light moved slowly upward, preceding every entrance — a real foreign elevator. There were women in shimmering satin from a place where fashions existed, and people dancing a funny foreign dance called “Shimmy,” and a woman who did not sing, but barked words out, spitting them contemptuously at the audience, in a flat, hoarse voice that trailed suddenly into a husky moan — and a music that laughed defiantly, panting, gasping, hitting one’s ears and throat and breath, an impudent, drunken music, like the challenge of a triumphant gaiety, like the “Song of Broken Glass,” a promise that existed somewhere, that was, that could be.
The public laughed, and applauded, and laughed. When the lights went on after the final curtain, in the procession of cheerful grins down the aisles many noticed with astonishment a girl in a gray silk dress, who sat in an emptying row, bent over, her face in her hands, sobbing.
XVI
AT FIRST THERE WERE WHISPERS.
Students gathered in groups in dark corners and jerked their heads nervously at every approaching newcomer, and in their whispers one heard the words: “The Purge.”
In lines at co-operatives and in tramways people asked: “Have you heard about the Purge?”
In the columns of Pravda there appeared many mentions of the deplorable state of Red colleges and of the coming Purge.
And then, at the end of the winter semester, in the Technological Institute, in the University and in all the institutes of higher education, there appeared a large notice with huge letters in red penciclass="underline"
THE PURGE
The notice directed all students to call at the office, receive questionnaires, fill them out promptly, have their Upravdom certify to the truth of the answers and return them to the Purging Committee. The schools of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics were to be cleaned of all socially undesirable persons. Those found socially undesirable were to be expelled, never to be admitted to any college again.
Newspapers roared over the country like trumpets: “Science is a weapon of the class struggle! Proletarian schools are for the Proletariat! We shall not educate our class enemies!”
There were those who were careful not to let these trumpets be heard too loudly across the border.
Kira received her questionnaire at the Institute, and Leo — his at the University. They sat silently at their dinner table, filling out the answers. They did not each much dinner that night. When they signed the questionnaires, they knew they had signed the death warrant of their future; but they did not say it aloud and they did not look at each other.
The main questions were:
Who were your parents?
What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?
What was your father’s occupation from the year 1917 to the year 1921?
What is your father’s occupation now?
What is your mother’s occupation?
What did you do during the civil war?
What did your father do during the civil war?
Are you a Trade Union member?
Are you a member of the All-Union Communist Party?
Any attempt to give a false answer was futile; the answers were to be investigated by the Purging Committee and the G.P.U. A false answer was to be punished by arrest, imprisonment or any penalty up to the supreme one.
Kira’s hand trembled a little when she handed to the Purge Committee the questionnaire that bore the answer:
What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?
Owner of the Argounov Textile Factory.
What awaited those who were to be expelled, no one dared to think; no one mentioned it; the questionnaires were turned in and the students waited for a call from the committee, waited silently, nerves tense as wires. In the long corridors of the colleges, where the troubled stream of students clotted into restless clusters, they whispered that one’s “social origin” was most important — that if you were of “bourgeois descent,” you didn’t have a chance — that if your parents had been wealthy, you were still a “class enemy,” even though you were starving — and that you must try, if you could, at the price of your immortal soul, if you had one, to prove your “origin from the work-bench or the plough.” There were more leather jackets, and red kerchiefs, and sunflower-seed shells in the college corridors, and jokes about: “My parents? Why, they were a peasant woman and two workers.”
It was spring again, and melting snow drilled the sidewalks, and blue hyacinths were sold on street corners. But those who were young had no thought left for spring and those who still thought were not young any longer.
Kira Argounova, head high, stood before the Purge Committee of the Technological Institute. At the table, among the men of the committee whom she did not know, sat three persons she knew: Comrade Sonia, Pavel Syerov, Andrei Taganov.
It was Pavel Syerov who did most of the questioning. Her questionnaire lay on the table before him. “So, Citizen Argounova, your father was a factory owner?”
“Yes.”
“I see. And your mother? Did she work before the revolution?”
“No.”
“I see. Did you employ servants in your home?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
Comrade Sonia asked: “And you’ve never joined a Trade Union, Citizen Argounova? Didn’t find it desirable?”
“I have never had the opportunity.”
“I see.”
Andrei Taganov listened. His face did not move. His eyes were cold, steady, impersonal, as if he had never seen Kira before. And suddenly she felt an inexplicable pity for him, for that immobility and what it hid, although he showed not the slightest sign of what it hid.