Sashenka spent three days in bed with a high temperature at Maya’s place. She woke up at dawn and looked at the ceiling, luxuriating on her clean sheets and waiting for the custodian outside the window to start scraping the sidewalk with his spade. Then Sashenka closed her eyes and fell asleep to the monotonous, scraping sounds, and woke up again in the late morning, at about ten o’clock. Sashenka loved to spend the night at Maya’s place. Maya was a pale, unattractive girl with a poor metabolism, which meant that her face was always covered in little pimples, smeared with green antiseptic. Maya was a kind and well-read girl, but she had no friends and she was afraid of boys. And so Maya’s parents were very pleased that she was friends with Sashenka. Maya’s father worked as a lecturer, and her mother taught literature in a vocational school. The father was small, with a bald patch and comically pouting lips, as if he were constantly playing an invisible reed pipe from a folktale. The mother, by contrast, was tall and bulky, with a woman’s sparse sideburns and mustache. In this home Sashenka felt calm and comfortable, and she was well fed, but something awkward had happened that had made Sashenka try to avoid coming around recently, and she had even made friends, although not for long, with Irisha, a colonel’s daughter. In fact, nothing had really happened, it was just a stupid idea that Sashenka got into her head, and she cursed herself for it and eventually decided that every time this nonsense came back into her head, she would pinch and scratch herself in a way that no one would notice. Two months earlier, Sashenka and Maya had gone to the movie theater and watched a captured movie filled with such passionate and tender love that when they came back out, Sashenka was so stunned, she walked along the middle of the street, stumbling along rapidly, as if she were hurrying to get to a date, and the Mexican Frank Capra was waiting for her by the sparkling water kiosk on the corner of Makhno Street and Isaac Street. Maya didn’t like the film.
“Sheer naive mediocrity,” Maya said. “Read An Adventure in a Sealed Pullman Car; one of our secret agents loves a female agent in that…And, of course, he dies for the motherland, but for him the motherland embodies everything: the birch trees, and the Kremlin stars, and the female agent…”
“Maybe you’ll advise me to read Eugene Onegin too?” Sashenka asked with a scornful laugh.
Maya was an outstanding student and good at writing synopses, whereas Sashenka had stayed back in the same class for two years and was actually planning to leave school altogether, but Maya couldn’t possibly know anything about love, she probably didn’t even dream about boys at night. It made Sashenka feel furious that Maya, with her pimples, could even talk about love at all.
At Maya’s place there was a good lunch waiting for them. Sashenka was given a bowl of pearl barley soup filled right up to the brim, with fragrant spots of melted pork fat floating on top of it. There was a large marrow bone lying in the bowl, covered in little pieces of meat and sticky gristle, which Sashenka liked even more than the meat. For the main course, there were rye-flour dumplings with meat gravy. The dumplings had been browned on a griddle and saturated with pork fat—you only had to press a fork down on them and the fat started oozing out, mingling with the gravy and making it thicker. And there was even a third course—tea with pieces of fruit jelly. Sashenka ate it all, her heart was filled with exceptional gratitude to Platon Gavrilovich and Sofya Leonidovna, and she felt guilty for making fun of Maya on the way back. Not long before this, Sashenka had quarreled with her mother, and now she thought how outsiders could sometimes be better than your own mother. After the meal, Sashenka sat down on the plush sofa and decided to think about something good or funny, because she felt calm now and she had a warm feeling in her stomach. She started thinking about the film again and remembered the way Frank Capra had hugged the blonde so tightly that Sashenka, sitting in the hall, had actually felt a sweet aching in her own joints and body, although it was only faint, nowhere near the intense, sweet feeling she got at night. Now, sitting on the plush sofa in a drowsy, well-fed state, Sashenka experienced that feeling again, even more powerfully, so that her breasts started tickling and she pressed her cheek against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes, but something jangled and Sashenka gave a start and jumped to her feet. Sofya Leonidovna was picking up the broken shards of a plate that she had dropped. Her hair escaped from under her scarf and her housecoat came open, revealing her yellow, dangling breasts, and just for a joke Sashenka imagined Platon Gavrilovich embracing Sofya Leonidovna when they were alone, kissing her cheeks with their covering of sparse, curly hairs, and suddenly, instead of feeling cheerful, Sashenka felt sick, so that little pieces of the fruit jelly that Sashenka had eaten rose up into her throat. She put her hand over her mouth and sat there like that for a while, until she felt better and the pieces of fruit jelly crept back down, but she got a little pain in her stomach. Sashenka had this feeling again several times, and she tried not to look at Sofya Leonidovna and even declined supper, a genuine omelet made with American powdered egg, and that evening she made up with her mother. After that, Sashenka didn’t go to Maya’s place for about two weeks, and when she did go, she felt ashamed to look Sofya Leonidovna in the eye, as if she were hiding some secret, disgusting vice of her own and Sofya Leonidovna might guess what it was. Sashenka hadn’t had these feelings for a long time; she had even begun to forget them, but the problem was that now, when Sashenka had come here exhausted and ill, they reappeared and even grew stronger. So when Sashenka woke up in the morning and listened to the voices in the next room, she waited nervously for Sofya Leonidovna to appear, anxiously running her nail across her wrist several times and scratching the skin as a punishment. Sofya Leonidovna came in washed and fresh, with her hair woven into a braid, and lit up by the frosty morning sunlight from the windows. She put her palm on Sashenka’s forehead, then slipped her hand under the blanket and felt Sashenka’s shoulders and chest.
“You’re soaking wet,” Sofya Leonidovna said, “you need to change your shirt…”
Maya came in, also washed and fresh, with hardly any patches of green antiseptic on her face today. She brought her own nightshirt, a silk one with lace around the collar. Maya was taller than Sashenka, almost as tall as Sofya Leonidovna, and Maya’s nightshirt came down almost to Sashenka’s heels.
“Your mother hasn’t even asked about you this time,” Sofya Leonidovna said. “Usually she comes to see me in the school when you’re with us, and asks…But this time she isn’t even interested in knowing if her daughter’s unwell…”
“I hate her,” Sashenka said in a low voice, like a man’s, because she had a cold. “She’s not my mother…I only acknowledge my father, who died for the motherland…”
“You can live independently,” said Platon Gavrilovich, showing his soapy face in the doorway because he was shaving. “You’ll get a pension for your father for another two years. You can finish seven-year school and go to the vocational school.”
Maya carried a steaming cup of broth into the room. It was genuine chicken broth, strong and heady, made from chickens that Platon Gavrilovich had obtained in some distant village shop after giving a lecture on the international situation. With every swallow, Sashenka felt her body growing stronger, or so it seemed to her, but it was still hard for her to hold the cup, since it was heavy, filled right up to the brim with strong, rich broth, and Sashenka’s hands were weak after she’d had a temperature for three days. The cup tilted over and greasy drops of broth fell onto the blanket cover. Sofya Leonidovna took the cup from Sashenka and set the edge of it to Sashenka’s lips. Sashenka drank, feeling exceptional gratitude, and she wanted to hug and kiss this kind woman, but at the same time the familiar old anxiety was still prowling around in Sashenka’s head, and she suddenly found herself wanting to shout to Platon Gavrilovich: “Don’t, don’t stand beside me, don’t come close…” But Platon Gavrilovich walked over and took Sofya Leonidovna by the arm, his bald spot touching her dusty shoulder, and Sashenka spitefully surrendered to her own absurd imaginings, which she was afraid of and didn’t know how to get rid of. She imagined everything that Frank Capra did with the lithe blonde, but instead of the hotheaded Mexican there was Platon Gavrilovich, with his bald spot and juvenile body, and the lithe blonde’s place was taken by Sofya Leonidovna. This vision was so funny and so appalling that Sashenka pinched her leg hard under the blanket as a punishment, and almost gagged on the broth.
“Drink it in little sips,” Soya Leonidovna said sternly.
“All right,” Sashenka said and started laughing; she couldn’t help it.
“What’s wrong?” asked Platon Gavrilovich
“She’s got a fit of the giggles,” Maya said, starting to laugh too.
“That means she’s getting better,’ said Sofya Leonidovna. “She won’t go running about in marquisette in freezing cold weather again.”
Fortunately, someone knocked on the front door. The visitor hammered with his fist, and it was obvious immediately that a stranger was knocking.
“Who could that be first thing in the morning on the weekend?” Platon Gavrilovich said. “Perhaps it’s a messenger for me from the district executive committee, to go and give a lecture at the Khazhin village Soviet…But then, yesterday they postponed that until Thursday.”
Platon Gavrilovich was dressed in breeches that would have suited a fourteen-year-old boy perfectly well, and over them he had a warm, juvenile-sized undershirt, with the little buttons on the chest unfastened, revealing his puerile chest, covered in curly gray hair. He pulled on a Soviet functionary’s semimilitary tunic over the undershirt and walked into the hallway, fastening on a broad officer’s belt on the way.
“It’s for you, Sasha,” he said when he came back a little while later. “Someone’s here to see you…It’s Olga,” he added, turning toward Sofya Leonidovna, “the woman who used to wash our floors…And there’s someone else with her…”
For some reason Sashenka suddenly felt afraid, and she huddled into the corner of the sofa bed, pulling the blanket up under her throat. When Olga walked in, she gave Sashenka a frightened look too. The tank-crew master of ceremonies walked into the room after Olga. Their faces were red from the frosty air. There was an awkward silence for a while, and then the master of ceremonies spoke.
“Hello, Sasha…I’ve come around to see how you are…Olga showed me the way here…”
“And who might you be to Sasha?” Sofya Leonidovna asked, glancing suspiciously and jealously at the master of ceremonies.
“He’s no one to me,” Sashenka suddenly shouted out furiously, “I don’t know what they want. What they’ve come for…They want to find out something from me…They want to do something to hurt me…”
The moment Sashenka shouted, Olga backed away to the door in fright, the master of ceremonies gave Sashenka an astonished look, and Sofya Leonidovna quickly moved in between the visitors and Sashenka, putting her hand on Sashenka’s head.
“Don’t you be afraid, darling,” said Sofya Leonidovna. “You’re at home here, no one will hurt you here…This is obviously more of your mother’s tricks…Only she ought to have come herself, and not sent strangers…You’re her daughter, after all…”
“I’m sorry, of course,” the master of ceremonies said, clearing his throat. “Your mother would have been glad to come, but she can’t, she was arrested two days ago…”
“I just knew it,” Platon Gavrilovich shouted out neurotically, “I could tell that a woman who can’t bring up her own daughter would end up as a criminal…A woman who has no motherly feelings has no moral foundations either…”
“I’m sorry, of course,” said the master of ceremonies. “It’s not really much of a crime…She was detained with foodstuffs at the checkpoint where she works…I don’t approve of her actions, of course…Only she didn’t do it for herself…her daughter’s high-strung and she needs a nourishing diet…”
“I asked her not to, I asked her,” Sashenka shouted. “I told her she was disgracing…She was disgracing my father…His memory…She didn’t do it for me…She gave away half…More than half…She didn’t do it for me…”
“Calm down, Sashenka,” said Sofya Leonidovna, “your temperature will go up…Your eyes are feverish.”
“That’s true enough,” said the master of ceremonies, “and what’s the point now…I went to see her today…She asked for you to come and see her before she’s sent away…They’re going to be transferred to Gaiva. They’ll try her here at the local court, I spoke to the investigator…But they’re sending her to the prison there in the meantime…The prison here is in ruins, and they won’t keep her in the detention cell for long…They’re going to let people see them on Friday…”
“Sashenka’s not well,” Sofya Leonidovna said hastily.
“I see that now,” the master of ceremonies replied.
“And who might you be to her mother?” Platon Gavrilovich asked sternly, moving right up close to the master of ceremonies and standing on tiptoe.
“He’s her lover,” Sashenka shouted with a shudder. “She’s shaming my father’s memory…”
Sashenka was trying not to look at the master of ceremonies, but suddenly she glanced at him and caught her breath, as if everything that she knew about herself had become known to him in a single instant, every last little thing, even the things that she sometimes hid from herself, and now Sashenka was entirely in his power, sitting there naked and defenseless in his gaze. It didn’t last long, perhaps only a minute, and then Sashenka recovered, but she didn’t shout any more, she just sat there quietly, huddling in the corner.
“Please, sit down,” Maya said unexpectedly, and moved up chairs for the master of ceremonies and Olga. They sat down, the master of ceremonies leaning firmly against the back of his chair and Olga perching sideways, right on the very edge of hers.
“Your mom sent you this note,” the master of ceremonies said quietly, shifting to a formal tone of voice. He leaned across and handed Sashenka a piece of paper folded into a triangle, like the letters from her father at the front. Sashenka took it, unfolded it, and started reading the crooked lines written in indelible pencil.
“My darling little daughter Sasha,” her mother wrote, “your mother Ekaterina sends you greetings. See what misfortune I’ve suffered, my dearest daughter. But don’t you worry, the investigator says they won’t give me a long sentence if I frankly confess everything, they’ll choose a good charge, like petty theft, and not theft of government property at a military establishment. God grant they will. And perhaps they’ll take into account my being a widow and my husband, your father, being killed at the front. Little daughter, I can’t sleep here at night when I wonder how you’re going to live without me. You need to study, and you’re frail, you need to eat well. My thanks to Sofya Leonidovna, she’s like a real mother to you, even better, be grateful for that, because after all she’s a stranger to you, and she takes care of you. My dear little daughter, I hit you before we parted. Forgive me, my heart stopped dead after that and ached for a long time and it’s still aching now. Don’t be angry, and come on Friday, I want to see you very much. Your mother Ekaterina.”
Sashenka spent a long time reading it—starting, stopping and rereading parts, reaching the end and reading the first lines again. Mist drifted in front of her eyes, she had a heavy feeling in her chest, and there was nothing in the world she wanted except to sit there like that with that mist in front of her eyes and the heavy feeling in her chest.
“What has she written there?” Sofya Leonidovna asked angrily. She tried to take the letter, but Sashenka hastily, even abruptly, pushed her hand aside and hid the letter on her chest under the nightshirt. Seeing that Sashenka had turned quiet and was sitting there sadly with her cheeks wet from tears, Olga became a bit bolder.
“They arrested Vasya too,” she said pitifully…“He was considerate, and quiet…With him I would have got by all right…But who needs me apart from Vasya?”
“Come on, Olga,” said the master of ceremonies, “we’ve done what we came for…And perhaps we’re out of place here now…In the sense that perhaps people want to get a bite to eat, or perhaps we’ve harmed the patient’s health…” He turned to Sofya Leonidovna. “Thank you, ma’am, for looking after Ekaterina’s daughter, nevertheless…”
He walked to the door with Olga, but immediately came back with something: he must have left the large, greasy, appetizingly fragrant package out in the hallway.
“There,” he said, “this is some rations…a gift…”
Platon Gavrilovich, standing behind the master of ceremonies, made a fierce face and shook his head, as if to say: don’t take it.
“No, no, no,” said Sofya Leonidovna, nodding briefly to Platon Gavrilovich and pushing the package away with both hands, “we don’t need it…You’d better…Better use it for a food parcel…”
“It’s all right,” said the master of ceremonies, “we’ve arranged a food parcel too.”
He put the package down on Sashenka’s legs, on top of the blanket, and walked out. Sashenka heard Olga and the master of ceremonies putting on their coats and Olga winding string around her galoshes to fasten them on. Sashenka could guess what it was from the wheezing and stamping of feet. Then the front door slammed and everything went quiet.
Sashenka lay there all day long, facing the wall in a semiconscious state. She felt hot, and she pulled the quilted blanket out of its cover. Then she felt cold, but to stuff the blanket back into the cover, Sashenka would have had to sit up on the bed and make more movements with her arms, and she decided to get warm by pulling her knees up to her stomach. When the doctor came, it was very difficult to get Sashenka up; although it wasn’t exactly painful, it was irritating, because she had finally found a comfortable position, with her knees bent up and her palms grasping the soles of her feet. The edges of the blanket, covering Sashenka’s head, formed a cloth canopy between the pillow and the wall; there was a snug, gray twilight in front of Sashenka’s face, and she could stroke her heels and the hollows of her feet with her fingers. But when they fished Sashenka out into the light, into the pitiless, frosty sunshine that flooded the room and hurt her eyes, Sashenka’s legs ended up in an uncomfortable position that made her hips and middle hurt and her heels ache, and her hands ended up flung far away across the blanket, not able to do anything to help her aching body. Sashenka saw the doctor’s face, frozen and red from the frost, like the master of ceremonies’ face, but she had no strength left to get furious with him, she only had enough strength to make the doctor and Sofya Leonidovna feel sorry for her.
“Doctor,” Sashenka said in a weak voice, “doctor, my dearest, wonderful doctor…what can I do…who can I ask for advice…Sofya Leonidovna, my dearest, wonderful…” But Sashenka couldn’t say any more than that. She had misjudged her strength and spoken too many words that she could have easily managed without, and she’d had enough time, hadn’t she, when she was lying under the cloth canopy, in the twilight, to find two or three words that would have made everything clear to her and everyone else. And Sashenka was so annoyed with herself that she burst into tears.
The doctor examined her, then walked away to the table and started talking in a low voice with Sofya Leonidovna and Platon Gavrilovich, and meanwhile Maya wiped Sashenka’s face with a handkerchief.
“A chill and emotional trauma,” said the doctor.
“Yes,” said Sofya Leonidovna, “the girl has been though a very harrowing experience…”
“Never mind,” said the doctor, writing out prescriptions, “her body’s young, it will pass.”
And indeed, by early evening Sashenka was feeling better: as she lay there, her head felt sound and clear and her body felt well, neither cold nor hot. At night Sashenka slept well, with light, pleasant dreams, and in the morning she ate a delicious piece of cold chicken for breakfast. After a few days of living like this, Sashenka had completely recovered her strength and she told Maya, who hadn’t been going to school because of her: “You can go to school…I’m leaving today…”
“But you’re still pale,” said Maya, “and you have a cold…And it’s freezing outside…”
“You know, Maya,” said Sashenka, “maybe I’m a fool, of course, and I’m sorry, but it seems to me that you all have some kind of designs on me…”
Then Maya suddenly started crying and said:
“It’s true…I’ll be honest with you…I once heard mom talking to dad, and she said that with you I’d be able to make friends with boys too, because you’re beautiful…And the hurtful thing, really hurtful, was that dad disagreed with that as well…But you know, Sashenka…Komsomol word of honor and a gun salute to all the leaders, I just love you…I won’t find any other friends…”
“You’ll find some,” said Sashenka—together with her strength, the pleasurable, ticklish yearning in her bosom had returned, and it made her words firm and strong again, and every word Sashenka spoke inflamed the yearning that she had already begun to miss. “I’ll go home,” said Sashenka, “and you’ll find some friends…There’s Irisha, she’s a colonel’s daughter…Or Zara…But I’m a prisoner’s daughter…Don’t cry…What have you got to cry about…Your dad’s alive, and your mom hasn’t been stealing from the state…”
The yearning made Sashenka’s head start aching again; she hurriedly put on her marquisette blouse, skirt, and boots, all the things she was wearing for New Year’s Eve and still had on when she arrived here. Looking beautiful, Sashenka sauntered past Maya, whose face today was especially thickly dotted with green antiseptic, and then she put on her fur coat and walked out into the street. It was a very clear day, the snowdrifts were gleaming brightly, and the white smoke hung vertically above the chimneys of the buildings, because there was no wind, with not a single cloud to be seen in the blue sky. It wasn’t very cold, only about 19 degrees. A column of Romanian prisoners was being led down the center of the roadway. Prisoners usually walked along hunched over and shivering, with their noses tucked into the collars of their greatcoats. But these were tall, strapping men, with healthy faces, and although they were being escorted by several soldiers with submachine guns, they strode along cheerfully, and the standard-bearers at the front carried a red flag and their national flag, and two of them were carrying a banner written in Russian and their own language.
“Down with reactionaries,” Sashenka read. “Down with boyars and monarchists.”
Sashenka turned off into her own side street and almost ran into Zara. Sashenka recoiled and got stuck in a snowdrift, but Zara didn’t even notice her—she was standing with her back to Sashenka and peeping around the corner into the courtyard, in the direction of the sheds. Sashenka had actually been quite friendly with Zara during the first few months after she got back from evacuation, and then they had quarreled over Markeev and become enemies. It was strange, but Sashenka and Zara always fell in love with the same person; for instance, they had both secretly been in love with the military instructor at school, and they had managed it so deftly that no one had noticed, not even the military instructor; only Sashenka had noticed Zara’s love and Zara had noticed Sashenka’s. And so, just by looking at Zara, even though it was from behind, Sashenka realized that Zara was in love, and not simply in love, but forever and ever, until the end of her life, with sweet musings lasting long into the night and the kind of dreams that thrilled your heart and set your cheeks burning at the mere memory of them in the daytime. Markeev and the military instructor had obviously been forgotten. Zara was standing there, stroking an ice-covered downspout with her mitten, and now her big, black eyes, which the boys liked so much and Sashenka hated, were watching in a way that wasn’t contemptuous and scornful—they were full of meek entreaty, they were summoning someone and promising everything in return. At the back of the courtyard the handsome lieutenant, Franya, and the buildings superintendent were walking around by the sheds. Franya was holding a spade and clearing away the snow, knocking on the frozen earth to make some kind of marks on it and measuring the distance in strides from the wall of the shed or from the wall of the burned-out ruins, and obviously getting confused and arguing with the buildings superintendent. Sashenka stopped too, peering into the yard and pressing up against a tree, so that the tree would hide her from Zara, but so that she could watch Zara, and laugh at her if necessary. Lit up by the afternoon sunlight, the lieutenant’s face was especially handsome, and the light, silvery hoarfrost lay like gray streaks on the gypsy-black hair escaping from under his fur cap with earflaps, and his eyes were such a dense blue that there were bluish shadows lying on his cheekbones. As he talked with Franya and the buildings superintendent, he walked past very close to Zara, almost right beside her, so that Sashenka saw the little pinkish cloud of his breath touch Zara’s face. Without noticing Zara, he got into an army Willis automobile, covered in hoarfrost, said something to the soldier at the wheel, and they drove off. Franya and the building superintendent walked toward Sashenka, dousing her with a scent of coarse tobacco, homebrew and frozen dung.
“I buried Leopold Lvovich twice,” Franya said. “It was hot…I buried him, the dogs sniffed him out and dug him up…The sanitary inspector Shostak came…He’s a goner now, coughing up blood in the lockup…But back then he started waving his fists around in front of my face…And I told him: I’m a buildings custodian…I’m not going to stand guard over dead bodies. I get the lowest rate of pay there is, and you have a meat ration and milk coupons, and you have the Jews’ stuff, too…Well, naturally, I didn’t actually say all of that back then, but I thought it…And I thought: just you wait till our boys get here, you groveling toady…”
“The commissariat is providing the lieutenant with coffins, manpower, and transport,” the buildings superintendent said, listening absentmindedly to Franya’s drunken babbling, “and the bodies will be taken away during the night…There are neighbors here, and children…It is only permitted to carry out the work at night…” They turned a corner and for a while their voices and the squeaking of snow underfoot could still be heard.
Zara stood there, slumping against the downspout. As he strode around the yard, the lieutenant had been holding a long twig, with which he drew on the snow, probably unthinkingly, and as he walked away, he dropped the twig quite close to Zara. Sashenka saw Zara glance around and set off as if reluctantly, as if the thought had come to her purely by chance; she leaned down, picked up the twig and went back into her hiding place, then suddenly pressed the thick part of the twig, which the lieutenant had been holding in his hand, against her lips. And at that point Sashenka couldn’t help herself—she laughed out loud, remembering the way the lieutenant had walked past Zara without even noticing her. At the sound of laughter, Zara darted away, as if she had been caught doing something shameful. When she spotted Sashenka, she shouted out:
“Lousy bitch, they’ve arrested your mother…”
“And your father’s a polizei—they’re going to hang him,” Sashenka shouted in spiteful glee. “A Soviet lieutenant won’t ever have anything to do with you…Find yourself some Hitlerite gauleiters…”
“I couldn’t give a rotten damn,” Zara shouted, snapping the twig and flinging it into the snow. Two black-eyed urchins, Zara’s brothers, ran out of the old, ramshackle outbuilding at the back of the yard and started throwing snowballs at Sashenka. One of them was about five, with a round, jolly face, and the way he threw was very funny, panting solemnly, not throwing very far and showering himself with snow, but the other one was already about thirteen, he was nimble and adroit, and he threw skillfully and ruthlessly, knowing that he had to aim a bit higher—at the eyes or the teeth. He hit Sashenka so hard on the nose with a freezing lump of ice that for a moment the air blurred and rippled in front of her eyes and Zara’s laughing face started drifting off to one side. The name or the nickname of the second boy, the nimble one, was Louty. Everybody in the yard called him Louty, even his own mother. Sashenka clenched her fists and dashed at Louty, but his mother, the wife of Shuma, who was dying in the Ivdel camp, also came running out of the outhouse, with her black eyes, large nose, and gold teeth. She grabbed Zara and her two sons and dragged them back along the path into the outhouse, looking around in fright. Louty resisted furiously, trying to break out of her grasp and savagely trying to reach Sashenka with his foot from behind his mother’s back. After the entire family had disappeared into its outhouse, Sashenka stood in the middle of the path for a while, feeling the salty taste of blood on her lip and breathing tiredly. Then she bent down, put some snow on her bruised nose, felt for the keys in the pocket of her fur jacket, and plodded off home. She climbed heavily up the stairs and put the key in the keyhole. But the door was locked on the inside with the hook. Sashenka remembered about Olga and knocked.