by Janet Fitch
But I could not put the baby into that picture. With the baby, there should be a promenade by the sea—Yalta, or Nice. The Lido at Venice, why not? The baby—no, a child by then. Nicely dressed, a laughing boy, running after a ball, followed by a small, bright-eyed dog. A boy in a white sailor suit…
I groaned at my own bourgeois longings. What had happened to my revolutionary fervor? Equality and good conditions for all? Why not picture a bold and rugged boy, sticking up for his little comrades, skillful and useful and practical? But it was harder to picture than the Ligurian seashore. Why? Because I could not see the end of it, only this blasted queue, the eternal waiting, and I had to pee. I asked the woman behind me, a woman with a small girl, if she would hold my place.
What madness, I thought, squatting on the far side of the depot, teetering and struggling not to fall into the snow or wet myself. Flailing like a goose, I lost my balance and fell anyway. I cursed the world as I lurched to my feet, my derriere and skirt wet through. What kind of irresponsible God would give me a poor innocent baby to care for?
“Thanks,” I said to the woman when I finally came back into line, my clothes freezing to my backside. How somberly the woman’s child looked up at me, big-eyed and blue with cold, half-starved already. This was what I was bringing into the world. Not that rosy-faced boy in the sailor suit. Just another starveling. Someone who would never know a good meal, the thrill of a winter’s gallop in a sleigh nestled under a fur rug. No, he would attend a school much like Liza’s with its out-of-date textbooks, and potatoes cooked in castor oil. He would have cracked shoes and be inspected for lice. No Avdokia to take tender care of him. How I envied my mother, how I envied my younger self.
Now I was the servant. And mine would be a servant’s child, that most expendable of expendable human commodities. I smiled at the little girl, tried to get her to smile back. Suddenly it seemed of absolute importance to see if I could get that child to grin, or stick out her tongue. I touched my tongue to my nose, whistled like a dove through my hands, pretended to insert my finger to the first knuckle into my nose, but she just stared, drawing closer to her mother. I had to stop. There just wasn’t a smile in her. She was like a somber little woman, suspicious of my oversized child self and my antics. No childhood for these children of the revolution.
How selfish I was, to have this baby. So stubborn. What a romantic. Every bit as foolish as the foolish Yulia chasing her man to Tver.
At last, the line lurched on, the shop opened. After a time, I peered back at the shy little girl from between my fingers, like a mask. She clung to her mother’s hand, staring at my odd Ionian clothes. Had she never seen a clown before? She was what, four? Five? What had she known but hunger, the hunched, resigned shoulders of women in their kerchiefs and shawls, their bags and worn boots and patched coats. But these women had been young once, had laughed, had danced, had teased a handsome man. There had been joy in Tikhvin, once upon a time.
I took my notebook from my bag and began to write something about the wasted time of all of us women, “A Poem to the Queue.” The little girl with the somber face had inspired me. I was tired of the clumsy drabness of my own thoughts. Fun was rarer than peacocks. It made me laugh. Not a sound much heard in a morning bread queue. The old woman in front of me, fragile shouldered, in a heavy scarf, turned my way. “What are you writing, devushka?”
I shrugged. “Something I was thinking.”
“Something funny? Read it.” She nudged another woman, a broad-shouldered baba with a faint moustache. “Listen, she’s written a funny joke.”
“Well, let’s hear it,” said the bigger woman. The lines on her face were weathered hard, like ironed taffeta, I swear I could hear her face crinkle when she spoke. “God have mercy, I could use a laugh.”
“It’s not done yet,” I said. Tickled that someone would want to hear it, especially this crusty old girl.
“Go on.” She squinted to read the tiny scrawl.
I couldn’t resist. “A Poem to the Queue,” I began.
Attention, comrades. Podrugi.
Sisters, mothers, aunts.
(You too, Granny.)
“Snothead,” the solid baba murmured good-naturedly.
It has come to the attention
Of the regional soviet
A widespread speculation
In the matter of queues.
They were listening, the two babas and the little girl’s mother.
Look at these hours DAYS Weeks
Squandered!
You, sisters.
Standing like tired horses
Stamping before the station
your steamy breath
Knee-deep in snow, in mud.
The waste of precious Soviet time!
Now they smiled, recognizing the official Bolshevik/Pravda tone, understanding it was a joke—a poem for them! More people turned to listen, a girl behind the woman with the child.
It must be
Capitalists! Foreign imperialists!
Wreckers. Take warning!
From now on
Time
Will be closely rationed by Narkompros.
Outright chuckles. I held my finger up to my nose, and then pointed, discreetly, at each one, a village admonishment. Laughter was like water in this desert. The baba with the moustache murmured, “Why not? They’ve rationed everything else.” The woman with the child unconsciously stroked her long plaits.
This is not your old bourgeois time
Served up with lace and opera capes.
This is Soviet time you’re wasting.
Soviet women
Measuring time in bread and sweat and shoe leather.
Therefore it’s been declared
only a pood and a half of time
per family per week!
Now they were laughing openly, the woman in the wool scarf clapped her mittened hands to her cheeks.
The hours of your beautiful red blood
flow out with the hands of the clock.
Nobody’s getting any younger,
Four hours in the queues?
Such extravagance!
And in wartime?
It’s counterrevolutionary
Anti-Communistic!
Down with the capitalist, piecework queue!
Wrecking our days
Digesting us whole
consuming our Soviet dreams.
Now I had come to the end of the written poem, but was caught up in the joke and the rhythm of the thing. I kept going, making it up like Misha’s chastushki.
Slaves of the queue!
I propose we
declare this
the International Day of Waiting.
Sisters, we should demand speeches!
Where are our medals?
Our slogans?
Our Internationale?
We demand a newspaper
The Stander’s Gazette.
“Call it ‘My Varicose Veins,’” said the woman with the kerchief.
“‘My Aching Feet,’” said the little woman with the patched coat.
Oh, the beautiful, phlegmy music of their laughter! I hadn’t realized just how tired of creeping around like a kitchen mouse I was, scuttling across the floor ahead of the housewife’s broom. To touch for one moment these tired, hungry women, to lift their spirits, knowing we were not crazy, laughing together at the life we all found ourselves living, this ridiculous world that had us all by the throat.
A woman with two loaves had stopped to listen.
Our slogan—
“Those who do not Stand
Do Not Eat.”
I thought it was very good, but my sisters suddenly faded back into the submissive postures of the queue, freezing like jonquils caught in a late frost.
“Who are you?” demanded the woman with the loaves. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“Just a joke, Alexandra Sergeevna,” said the woman behind me with the little girl. “She wrote a poem.”
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The woman turned her flat-cheeked, gravel-eyed face to me. “A fine time to criticize our struggling Soviet system. Too bad about your petty-bourgeois dissatisfactions. This”—she waved at the queue, raising her voice like someone on a podium—“is no joking matter. We’re fighting for our lives here. Our soldiers are spilling blood that’s quite real. And we women are doing our part.”
Sober morning gray returned to the faces of my listeners. There was nothing the least bit funny about being alive in the bread queue on Ulitsa Truda, Labor Street, in early spring 1919. I had forgotten myself. The day when one could safely stand on a street corner and proclaim poems to workers was over.
“Who are you?” she demanded again.
“Kuriakina,” I replied. Did she need to see my labor book?
A woman in a felt hood said, “She’s the new girl over at Korsakova’s. She’s took the place of the daughter.”
The officious woman eyed me closely, as if memorizing me for a police report. I felt myself stiffening. I wanted to argue with her, defend my rights, my labor book securely in my pocket, but I’d grown cautious—something to do with my encounter with the Cheka, at Pulkovo, and in the cells at Gorokhovaya 2. With her self-righteousness, this puffed-up woman had to be a big local Bolshevik to dictate so freely to the others.
I shrugged. “Just a poem, Comrade. Having some fun. Making the time go faster.”
Having told me off and spoiled the moment, she settled herself importantly, like a hen who’d been disturbed. “I could report you. Stirring people up against the government.”
Oh God. “A little joke makes people feel less alone, Comrade,” I said.
“Alone?” The woman hoisting her bread under her arm. “Does this look like you’re alone?” She gestured to the queue, front to back.
“She’s pregnant, Alexandra Sergeevna,” said the woman with the little girl. “She’s been standing a long time.”
I touched my belly through my coat, wanting to hide him from this sour woman.
Her eyes narrowed, circled in black around the iris like a bull’s-eye. “Why haven’t we seen you at the Mothers’ Course? We have an excellent Women’s Club here. We’re not some benighted village, you know.”
Oh, the infernal Women’s Club! “I’m just so tired these days, Comrade,” I said. “I don’t sleep well.”
“We’re building socialism, devushka. We have to take our place, mothers and grandmothers, and not grumble in the breadlines. There’s a lecture tonight. ‘The Future of the Family.’ Seven o’clock. I want to see you there.” She turned and briskly walked off, having done her socialist duty. It looked like I would be attending the Women’s Club of Tikhvin after all.
The sun had come up, and the frost on the stones rose as mist into the sunlight. Although the sour woman had taken the steam out of the moment, a wisp of good cheer remained. I could smell it off the other women, just a hint of it, the way woodsmoke clings to your coat. The girl with the hollow eyes peeped out at me from behind her mother’s legs, still staring.
3 The Future of the Family
After the men’s dinner was cleared that night and my own portion consumed—devoured—I scrubbed the table, and Styopa helped me put the silverware back into the pantry. I would have liked to crawl upstairs to bed, but instead, I forced myself back into my coat and boots for the hike over to the old Duma building, the long yellow structure of the Tikhvin Soviet. What choice did I have? I had to live in this town, and now that I’d taken the risk of becoming known, I had to fork over my pound of flesh.
“You shouldn’t go alone,” said Styopa. “I’ll walk you. It’s dangerous out there.”
I looked over at Raisa Filipovna. “She’ll be fine,” she said. “Just be careful. And watch your tongue.” The thing I hated most. I clapped my fox hat onto my head.
I steeled myself as I approached the loitering soldiers under the one operating streetlight of the square, men who knew nothing about the New Soviet Woman, and were desperate for sex. “Hey, girl, come with me, I’ve got chocolate.” “I’ve got some dynamite and it’s about ready to explode.” The chocolate was tempting but the syphilis held me at bay. If I were Misha, I’d point out they would have their share of explosions when they faced Admiral Kolchak and the Whites. But if I were Misha, I would not have to listen to this at all. Our poor, rude, ignorant Red heroes. Half the women in town wished they were dead already. Korsakova had to collect Liza from school herself, or I had to do it, you couldn’t have a thirteen-year-old girl walking through a town like this by herself. I wished I’d said yes to Styopa Radulovich despite Korsakova’s disapproval. My pregnancy didn’t shield me—they would be happy to have me. We were coarsening like abused beasts, the whole country. We thought only of food, and sex, and sleep, of warmth and safety. No more morality, none of those burzhui niceties. I shut my ears and hurried toward the lit portal of the soviet like a small boat tacking toward a dock on a dark night.
A hand-lettered sign indicated ROOM 145, TIKHVIN SOVIET WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ WOMEN’S CLUB. LECTURE TONIGHT. Oh, were there any happier two words in the Russian language?
The Women’s Club occupied two cold rooms toward the end of the hall, past the printing press and a classroom in which a potato-shaped woman was wearily teaching people to read. Her adult students sat, fist to forehead, as if in pain with the passage of a new idea, like they were passing a kidney stone.
In the first room of the Women’s Club, a girl in a white scarf with a face like a pancake handed out tea with saccharine. A number of children played quietly under the eye of two other girls—too weak to make much of a racket. In the second room, fifty women assembled on benches and sills of the windows, some with babies in arms—an impressive turnout. The panes were frosted with their breath. The soviet clearly didn’t consider the Women’s Club worth sparing the firewood for. I saw the woman in the felted hood who had told the Bolshevik where I lived, and stayed away from her. The woman who’d had the little girl in the queue waved me over, opened a space on the bench for me.
“Get your maternity ration after,” she advised.
Well, that was something to look forward to.
The Bolshevik woman came out with an armload of papers, wearing her coat against the cold, a red kerchief on her head, self-consciously echoing the Communist poster on the wall behind her. She rose to the lectern, puffing up to a round of applause.
“The commissar’s wife. Alexandra Sergeevna,” the woman next to me whispered. Followed by a derisive exhale.
Sergeevna cleared her throat and opened a pamphlet. “Last time, we talked about the four categories of housework doomed to extinction. Does anyone remember what they were?”
I worried a loose tooth—lower left canine. There was no hope of finding a dentist—anyone with any medical training was doing surgery at the front. I’d told Korsakova about it, but she’d shrugged, saying a woman lost a tooth for every child, it was normal. How privileged I’d been, I hadn’t even understood the distance between my life and that of an ordinary woman. Now I would lose a tooth. Now I would truly become what I’d only been pretending to be, a nineteen-year-old proletarian on my way to becoming an old woman as the baby leached the precious calcium from my bones. I was being eaten alive. The Drops of Milk campaign would be a godsend. I shouldn’t have waited this long.
“Four categories of housework are doomed to extinction with the victory of Communism,” she read. “In the future, the Soviet working woman will be surrounded by the same ease, hygiene, and beauty as the rich once had under Capitalism. Instead of spending her free hours in a private kitchen and laundry, she will have public restaurants and communal kitchens, collective laundries and clothes-mending centers, at her disposal.” She received a polite, apple-polishing round of applause. “Questions?”
A woman perched on the windowsill raised her hand. She had strange shiny blue eyes that contrasted oddly with her drawn, hungry face. “How’ll they know whose clothes are whose if we all take ’em to th
e same place?”
Sergeevna frowned, blinked. It was not a question she’d expected, and clearly not one she welcomed. “I don’t understand.”
I actually felt sorry for this officious woman, trying to inspire these tired Fraus into envisioning a new socialist future, and having them worry about how they were going to reclaim their clothes at the nonexistent repair center. Women who had never taken their clothes to a laundry or a tailor, they couldn’t imagine such an exotic exchange.
“At the mending center,” the woman tried to explain. “How will they know whose are whose?”
The commissar’s wife let out an exasperated sigh. “They’ll fill out a ticket for you. And you’ll bring it when you pick up the clothes.”
“What if I lose the ticket?”
The speaker leaned on her stack of printed material and pointed to the poster behind her, a firm-faced Soviet matron before a series of upright shapes that could have been smokestacks and could have been rifles, the whole thing boldly titled FREE WOMEN BUILD SOCIALISM. “What’s the point in having a hundred women at home washing their own individual clothes, when five women could have a paying job working in that laundry? With rations and a crèche. Leaving ninety-five women free to contribute to society. Capitalism outmoded the family as a unit of production. Communism makes its domestic arrangements obsolete.”
But the words she was using were meaningless to them: unit of production, domestic arrangements. She was making sense, but not to this audience.
She opened a pamphlet, smoothed down the pages. “What of the mothers?” she read. She pointed to another poster behind her on the wall. CHILDREN ARE EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY. On it, two women, a peasant and a worker, stood with their children, a barn behind one, a factory behind the other.
“Society needs more workers and rejoices in the birth of your child,” she valiantly read on. “You don’t have to worry about its future. Your child will know neither hunger nor cold. Society will feed, bring up, and educate the child. The joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them. But the old type of family is withering away, not because it’s being forced out of existence but because it is no longer necessary. The task of raising children is passing into the hands of the collective.”