“How can I thank you, dear man, how can I thank you!” he murmured.
The girl was waiting for me, and I accompanied her home, on the other side of the Moskva River. Up a dark, crooked stairway that creaked piteously under our feet, she led me to her room. She lit a sputtering candle, and I gradually began to discern things. The place was entirely bare, save for two small cots, the space between them and the opposite wall just big enough for a person to pass through. Seeing no chair about, I sat down on the bed. Something moved under the rags that covered it, and I quickly jumped up. “Don’t mind,” the girl said; “it’s mother and baby brother.” From the other bed rose a curly head. “Lena, did you bring me something?” a boyish voice asked.
The girl took a chunk of black bread from her coat pocket, broke off a small piece and gave it to the boy. “Mother is paralyzed,” she turned to me, “and Masha is now also sick.” She pointed to the cot where the curly-headed boy lay. I saw that two were there.
“Does he go to school?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“No, Yasha can’t go. He has no shoes. They’re all in tatters.”
I told her of the fine schools I had visited in the morning, and of the chicken dinner served to the children. “Oh, yes,” she said bitterly, “they are pokazatelniya.10 What chance has Yasha to go there? There are several like that in the city, and they are warm, and the children well fed. But the others are different. Yasha has frozen his fingers in his school. It’s better at home for him. It’s not heated here, either; we’ve had no wood all winter. But he can stay in bed; it’s warmer so.”
I thought of the big apartment I had left an hour before; of the appetizing odors, the popping of champagne corks, and Demian Bedni reciting in drunken voice.
“Why so silent?” Lena asked. “Tell me something about America. I have a brother there, and maybe you know some way I could get to him. We’ve been living like this two years now. I can’t stand it any longer.”
She sat by me, the picture of despair. “I can’t go on like this,” she repeated. “I can’t steal. Must I sell my body to live?”
—My friend Sergei was ordered out of the Kharitonensky and spent two nights in the street. Today I found him in a small unheated room at the lodgings of the Central Cooperative Union. He lay in bed, feverish, covered with his Siberian fur. “Malaria,” he whispered hoarsely, “caught in the taiga11 hiding from the Whites. I often get these relapses.” He had seen no doctor, and received no medical attention.
I discovered the dvornik (house porter) and several girls amusing themselves in the basement kitchen. They were busy, they said. Nothing could be done, anyway. A special order must be procured to get a physician, and who’s to attend to that? It’s no simple matter.
Their indifference appalled me. The Russian, the common man of the people, had never been callous to misery and misfortune. His sympathies were always with the weak and the underdog. In the popular mouth the criminal was “the unfortunate,” and the peasants were ever responsive to a cry for help. In Siberia they used to place food outside their huts, in order that escaped prisoners might appease their hunger.
Starvation and misery seem to have hardened the Russian and stifled his native generosity. The tears he has shed have dried up the wells of sympathy.
“The House Committee is the one to see to the matter,” the porter said; “it’s their business, and they don’t like us folks to interfere.”
He refused to let me use the telephone. “You must ask permission of the house commissar,” he said.
“Where can I find him?”
“He’ll return in the evening.”
But my American cigarettes persuaded him. I telephoned to Karakhan, who promised to send a physician.
—Mrs. Harrison, my neighbor in the Kharitonensky, accompanied me to Sergei’s room, taking some of her American delicacies along. She is the correspondent of the Associated Press, and seems very clever. Her entry to Russia was adventurous, involving arrest and difficulties with the Cheka.
We found Sergei still very ill; no physician had called. Mrs. Harrison promised to send the woman doctor with whom she shares her room at the ossobniak.
On our return we passed the Lubianka, the headquarters of the Cheka. Groups of people, mostly women and girls, stood near the big iron gates. Some prisoners were to be led out for distribution to various camps, and the people hoped to catch a glimpse of arrested friends and relatives. Suddenly there was a commotion, and frightened cries pierced the air. I saw leather-coated men rushing into the street toward the little groups. Revolvers in hand, they threatened the women, ordering them to “go about their business.” With Mrs. Harrison I stepped into a hallway, but Chekists followed us there with drawn guns.
Russia, the Revolution, seemed to disappear. I felt myself in America again, in the midst of workers attacked by the police. Mrs. Harrison spoke to me, and the sound of English strengthened the reality of the illusion.
Coarse Russian oaths assailed my ears. Am I in old Russia? I wondered. The Russia of the Cossack and the knout?
XIII
Lenin
—Yesterday Lenin sent his auto for me, and I drove to the Kremlin.
