Once we couldn’t determine what was the mass of white that had aggregated on the sides of the soup bowls. These were maggots; the soup had been made with completely rotten flour.
No, Misha was not able to treat himself to sour cream here.
208
We were charged with compiling a list of how much grain was still due from each farmstead and we dragged ourselves from house to house over barely walked-on, snowy paths. My city boots were soaked through and I wrapped my feet in newspaper. It froze to the soles of the boots. I was coughing violently, but I visualized the headline on the institute’s wall newspaper: “Saboteurs have no place in a Soviet institution of higher education!” And I continued on, making notations with ossified fingers.
For some reason, meetings were always scheduled at night and, in hoarse voices, we translated the stereotypical speeches of the regional orators. Sometimes the
Once I was going to a women’s meeting, as usual, scheduled late in the evening. My friend was occupied at the other end of our district and I struggled along on my own from the school. I tried not to lose the path and fall into knee deep snow. Clouds alternately blocked off the sky or revealed a narrow sickle of the cold moon. My path followed a sparse wood, then it led out to the public road. It was there by the woods that I saw a dark figure lying right on the trail and moving slightly to the right and to the left, the way a person does in a shooting gallery preparing for an unerring shot at the target.
I turned cold: at this instant there will be a flash from the sawn-off muzzle. I will fall into the snow and never see my mother again . . . But why would anyone shoot me? The colonists, after all, understand that we are only screws in the machine, that we are incapable of changing anything in this fearful operation. Maybe the person is lying in wait for someone else, not me? To run is hopeless—the shot would get me in the back. I tear off my hat that hides my hair and go directly at the dark figure.
But there is no shot. . . . Only having come up very close do I see that this is a dying horse moving its head in agony. Then I run across the barren, cold fields choking from the tension. Only upon reaching the road do I notice that I am still clutching my hat in my hands.
The trees are covered with bright, still sticky leaves, and baskets of lilies of the valley are being sold in the streets. I really don’t want to be stuck in boring meetings at the institute. But this time I will not be able to slip away easily. My name is listed in the agenda for the day. It is proposed that I and some other friends be inducted into the professional union. This is essential in order to obtain work—but I do not worry since I feel that everything is in place. My grades are high, I have some half dozen social commitments, and my old ladies, housewives whom I am bringing out of illiteracy, are already reading in syllables. And suddenly, completely unexpectedly— rejection.
209
“Comrade Pavlova [the author’s maiden name] must be more fully immersed in the proletarian kettle and definitively reject her bourgeois ways,” drones a horse-jawed student who does not miss the occasion to flaunt his vigilance. “Even today, look at her dress!”
All stare at me and, bewildered, even I look at my humble dress, re-sewn out of something by my mother. Finding nothing reprehensible, I wait perplexed. Sustaining an effective pause, my accuser triumphantly announces:
“See how long it is? A whole quarter below the knees.”
Here he is truly correct. In accordance with fashion magazines, waistlines were raised and skirts lowered— and mother’s creation reflects these tendencies. In a period when engineers did not shave for weeks so as to graphically demonstrate their enthusiasm and zeal for the building of socialism—ostensibly having not even a minute for personal matters—and a student who showed up at an institute in a white shirt and tie would be immediately censured by the wall newspaper, any manifestation of femininity irritated the guardians of the purity of proletarian taste.
“I cannot consider the length of my dress to be a reason interfering with my entry into the professional union at this time,” I say with a non-penitential look, “Comrade Tarasov’s displeasure would be understandable if I raised my skirt a quarter above the knees.”
There are giggles in the hall, but Shura Zapiller, who is running the meeting, interrupts me: “A motion has been made to postpone the entry of comrade Pavlova into the professional union until she liquidates the left-over bourgeois habits in her consciousness. In the name of the institute’s professional organization, I fully support this action for re-education. Who is against?”
It is difficult to say when the necessary shifts in my behavior would have appeared. Unexpectedly, Sergo Ordzhonikidze [Minister of Heavy Industry] stopped accepting unshaven engineers and it was proposed to Komsomol secretaries that they lift the ban on white collars.
I was accepted as a union member in the fall.
Nila Magidoff, Only to Travel! Only to Live!
Nila Magidoff was born in Belarus in 1905 to a peasant family. Her family moved to Kursk in central Russia when she was still a child. There she was accepted into a school for indigent girls funded by Maria Fedorovna (Romanov), the Queen Mother. After the Revolution the active and restless Nila trained to parachute jump and joined the Soviet merchant marine. These activities were far more interesting to her than the factory work that she was doing. In 1938 she married and American in Moscow, Robert Magidoff, a noted correspondent for the Associated Press and NBC radio. She was unexpectedly able to come to America in October 1941 where she became heavily involved as a speaker and fundraiser for Russian War Relief. The book
I worked at this factory for some time and then I want to see the world. I understand I can go to the Merchant Marines and apply to be a sailor. I had a nice, clean biography. It was absolutely pure like a white page —nothing written there. I came from poor family with no capitalists, which was all they required. So here I went. It was very strange, I suppose you think, Willie, this married life. I don’t understand it myself. I loved my husband very much, and he loved me. It was just that I was young and crazy to travel and Karel at this time was so involved in his work.
I was assigned to a big freight boat, the Karl Marx. It was carrying the sunflower seeds and also butter. For weeks I hadn’t seen the butter. Russia exported everything: butter, ham, caviar. There was a crew of fifty-two people, fifty man and two woman.
