An unappealing business, with my breathlessness…”

“She’s a good girl,” the mother said vaguely, thinking about what Yegor had told her. She was hurt to have heard it not from her son, but from an outsider, and she pursed her lips tight, dropping her brows low.

“She is!” Yegor nodded. “I can see you feel sorry for her. Which is wrong! You won’t have enough heart left if you start feeling sorry for all of us plotters. None of us has a very easy life, to tell the truth. A comrade of mine came back from exile just recently. As he was travelling through Nizhni, his wife and child were waiting for him in Smolensk, but when he arrived in Smolensk, they were already in a Moscow prison. Now it’s the wife’s turn to go to Siberia. I, too, used to have a wife, an excellent person, but five years of that sort of life drove her to an early grave…”

He drank down his glass of tea in one gulp and continued his story. He enumerated the years and months of imprisonment and exile, told of various misfortunes, of beatings in prison, of hunger in Siberia. The mother looked at him, listened and wondered at how simply and calmly he spoke about this life, full of suffering, persecution and people being mocked…

“But let’s talk about the matter in hand!”

His voice altered, and his face became more serious. He began asking her how she was thinking of carrying the booklets into the factory, and the mother wondered at his excellent knowledge of all sorts of minor details.

Once they had finished with that, they again started reminiscing about their native village; he made jokes, while she wandered pensively in her past, which seemed to her strangely like the marsh, monotonously dotted with tussocks and overgrown with slender, fearfully trembling aspens, small fir trees and silver birches, gone astray amongst the tussocks. The birches grew slowly, and after standing on the unsteady, rotten ground for half a dozen years, they fell and rotted. She looked at this picture, and felt unbearably regretful about something. Before her stood the figure of a girl with a sharp, stubborn face. Now she was walking amidst wet snowflakes, lonely and tired. And her son was in prison. Perhaps he was still awake, thinking… But thinking not of her, his mother – he had someone who was dearer than her. Difficult thoughts crept up on her in a motley, jumbled storm cloud and gripped her heart in a firm embrace…

“You’re tired, Mamasha! Let’s go to bed!” said Yegor with a smile.

She said goodnight to him and sidled cautiously into the kitchen, carrying a caustic, bitter feeling away in her heart.

In the morning, over tea, Yegor asked her:

“And if you’re caught and asked where you got all these heretical booklets from, what will you say?”

“‘None of your business,’ I’ll say!” she replied.

“They won’t agree with that, not for anything!” Yegor objected. “They’re deeply convinced that their business is precisely what it is! And they’ll keep asking, zealously and for a long time!”

“And I won’t tell!”

“And you’ll go to prison!”

“What of it? Thank God – at least that’s something I’m good for!” she said with a sigh. “Who needs me? No one. And they won’t use torture, so they say…”

“Hm!” said Yegor, looking at her carefully. “Use torture they won’t. But a good person should look after themselves…”

“That won’t be a lesson from you!” the mother replied with a grin.

After a pause, Yegor paced around the room, then went up to her and said:

“It’s hard, fellow countrywoman! I can sense it’s really hard for you!”

“It’s hard for everyone!” she replied, waving a hand. “Maybe only for those who can understand – for them it’s a bit easier… But I can understand a little bit, too, about what good people want…”

“And if you can understand that, Mamasha, then they all need you – all of them!” Yegor said seriously.

She glanced at him and smiled in silence.

At noon, in a calm and businesslike way, she covered her chest with booklets, and did it so cleverly and comfortably that Yegor clicked his tongue in appreciation, declaring: “Sehr gut!”* as a good German says when he drinks a bucket of beer. “The literature hasn’t changed you, Mamasha: you’ve remained a kind, older woman, tall and plump. May innumerable gods bless your undertaking!…”

Half an hour later, bent by the weight of her burden, calm and confident, she stood by the factory gates. Two guards, irritated by the gibes of the workers, were rudely frisking and squabbling with all who were entering the yard. To one side stood a policeman and a thin-legged man with a red face and quick eyes. Shifting her yoke from shoulder to shoulder, the mother watched him from under her brows, sensing that this was a spy.

A tall, curly lad with his hat tilted onto the back of his head shouted at the guards who were searching him:

“Search inside our heads, you devils, not in our pockets!”

One of the guards replied:

“There’s nothing in your head but lice…”

“It’s lice you should be trying to catch, not mice!” the worker responded.