anything.”
“Stop it, Ania,” Masha said reproachfully, “This person is broken as it is, and you’re dealing the final blow.”
Anna Timofeevna looked at Masha with her eyes full of tears and in an unexpectedly low voice, so as not to let her weeping be heard, said, “You know, the main thing, girls, is that I am not guilty of anything. They sentenced me for no reason.”
“Here in this barrack alone there are a hundred and twenty of us, and every one, Anna Timofeevna, sits here for no reason; every one is innocent.”
“Listen, Ania, I beg you to stop, but if you can’t, then no one is keeping you here by force. You’ve finished your tea . . .” Aleksandra Ivanovna’s voice did not portend anything pleasant.
“All right, there’s other stuff to talk about. I’m going to the drying shed; there at least I’ll find people, not just sheared little sheep.”
Ania left. Anna Timofeevna sighed.
261
“People like that are so rude and so difficult. It’s enough to make you cry.”
“Don’t worry about it, Anna Timofeevna, everything will pass, like the white petals off the apple trees. So, which article did you get?”
“Fifty-eight, point eight.”
“Eighth point?” Masha looked through the steam from the tea at Anna Tim-ofeevna, whose legs didn’t reach the floor and who sat entirely childlike on her stool, and smiled involuntarily.
“Well, now, the eighth point, that’s for terrorism, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Anna Timofeevna said in a hushed voice.
“Well how about that! A nice terrorist indeed.”
“Ah, girls, as I told you, this business of mine is very distressing. This is why I’m so nervous and lost. It would be a sin for me to complain about my life. I worked as head midwife at a maternity home. And the pay was good, thank God. Thirty years of service and no one stinted on the presents. And on the side, sometimes you would get to do an abortion. And I had a little apartment; any one would love to have the likes of it. I even picked up matching furniture. And my neighbor wasn’t too bad. But now look at me: I have nothing. I sit here at the edge of the world and drink someone else’s tea out of a half-liter jar, and thanks be to those who gave it to me.”
“I sympathize with you completely, but all the same, what has this got to do with terrorism? Because, excuse me, but making a terrorist out of you is like making bullets out of sh-t.”
“I see that you’re both kind women. I’ll tell you only but, God forbid, don’t tell anyone else or people will indeed be frightened of me.”
“Our kind isn’t timid. What did you do, cut someone’s throat?”
“Listen to you! I used to have to get my neighbor to slaughter my chickens for me. I could never cut someone’s throat. Oi, girls, it’s terrible to say—I am in prison on account of Stalin. . . .Well, as I said, I was managing just fine; I couldn’t ask for much more. I was respected and everyone treated me with deference. But there was one fellow in our town, a driver. An attractive blond, tall, intelligent, well-read, and in general pleasant. He wanted to become a pilot, only the entrance exam was very difficult, and he didn’t pass. So, he worked as a driver. Pilot or not, he still gets to hang around motors. And so this Lenia [diminutive for Leonid] suddenly went to war and only returned last year.
From the front, he immediately landed in a camp, was given a sentence, sat it out for five years, and came out when he was amnestied. They accused him of transporting some kind of [contraband?] goods around Germany in his truck. I don’t know, it’s easy to pin things on people. To make a long story short, he came back to our town. His father died before the war yet, and his mother had gone to her daughter in Vladivostok to help look after the grandchildren. Lenka
262
went to work as a driver on a poultry farm. And he brought poultry to us at the maternity home, and sometimes he came for the refuse, to collect any remains. They fed us well. There was one time when he was unloading, and I was just going off duty. So he says to me, “Come on, Anna Timofeevna, I’ll give you a lift home; why tramp through the mud?” He dropped me off. I wanted to pay him. He wouldn’t take it. He dropped me off once, he dropped me off twice. The third time, I say to him, “Come in, Lenia, I’ll make you some tea, since you don’t want to take any money for driving me.”
The next day he came already dressed in civilian clothes made out of a foreign fabric. He lit his cigarette with a lighter, like in the movies, and told me everything about having been abroad. My husband had vanished at the very beginning of the war, when everything was still a muddle; I didn’t even get a death telegram about him. Lenka moved in with me. Everything would have been fine if it weren’t for my neighbor. Like a cancer of the womb, she gnawed at me. It was one thing and another, and the fellow is twenty years younger than you. Only she lied, it wasn’t twenty, it was fifteen. He’s only after your money, she says, and all of your belongings. He’ll take everything, and then, like in American movies, he’ll strangle you. Now I’m telling you, like a cancerous growth she ate away at me. It was all from envy. I put up with it; I didn’t say anything. I just tried to do the best I could by Lenka. After all, a man can always leave. True enough, he didn’t bring home his pay, but when he managed to get some extra he’d give me a hundred rubles or fifty. Shortly after Christmas, I went and bought a calendar, a pretty, tear-off one. I was always trying to buy pretty things for the house. I bought a picture with swans, gave two hundred rubles for it—a hundred of mine and a hundred of Lenka’s. I boasted about it and showed it to Praskov’ia. So all at once she says, “Well, at least you’ll have a picture with a proper couple in it.” I brought home this calendar, and on it there was such a lovely portrait of comrade Stalin wearing officers’ epaulets, all covered in medals. Lenka came home from work. I showed it to him: a calendar, I say, I bought it. All right, he says. But there were quarrels between us even before that, especially when Praskov’ia wasn’t home, since I didn’t want her to hear us and be gleeful. Then in the evening I wanted to go to the movies.
Lenia ate heartily and then sat down to shave. I said to him, “Let’s go to the movies today.” But he answered, “I can’t, I met one of my army buddies today and promised to go out with him this evening for a beer.” I answered him, “So what are you doing shaving your mug for an army buddy? What, he’s never seen you unshaven?” One word led to another, and we wound up having a major talk. Suddenly, Lenka jumped up and said that there were two people ruining his young life—Stalin and me. “How I’d like to slash you with a razor right now,” he says, “but, I never again want to go to prison.” He took
263
the razor (he never shaved with a safety razor) and one, two, three, he went and sliced up the entire face of
