Derek Lambert - The Man Who Was Saturday

From the other side of the hall came a voice: ‘Sit down you with the face like a boot.’

Svetlana was rising to her feet but Katerina restrained her; sometimes she was wiser than her friend. What I need, she thought, is a rallying cry. She flattened her hands against her audience. ‘By arguing among ourselves we are playing into the hands of the male chauvinists.’

Chauvinistas pigs in the West. But Katerina didn’t feel that way about them: she liked men’s company. It was injustice that angered her.

The heckler, now under attack from her neighbours, finally sat down and Katerina moved triumphantly onto divorce – its alarming popularity – and the plight of the housewife with children abandoned by a husband for a rival down the assembly line.

She had intended to finish as she had started with an ironic reference to Women’s Day. Instead she heard herself saying: ‘The Revolution was supposed to have given women equality. It failed. Now another Revolution is under way. Women of the Soviet Union arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’

Desultory clapping. Well, there was surely nothing wrong with adapting Marx. Or was there? At that moment the militia moved in, three of them in long grey coats, from a door behind the platform.

Hands on the pistols at their hips, they stood beside the speakers menacing the audience.

Tossing her blonde hair, Svetlana said: ‘Hallo boys, and what can we do for you?’ while Katerina shouted: ‘Go on, shoot us.’

A fourth militiaman materialised, a tired-looking officer who needed a shave. He addressed the meeting. ‘Leave quietly by the door over there,’ pointing at the exit by the stove, ‘and you won’t come to any harm.’

Svetlana blew him a kiss.

Katerina, still raging, turned to the audience. ‘Take no notice of him: it’s Women’s Day.’

The officer nodded to a militiaman with a Tartar face and pock-marked skin. He clapped one hand over Katerina’s mouth and trapped her flailing arms with the other. Svetlana hit him on the head with her handbag before she, too, was pinioned.

More militiamen came onto the stage and Katerina thought: ‘This is monstrous, the way foreigners see us. ‘She bit one of the Tartar’s fingers. He swore but didn’t release his grip; oddly there was something gentle about his strength.

Two militiamen jumped from the stage, jackboots exploding puffs of dust on the floorboards. The women backed away knocking over chairs.

The officer shouted: ‘Take it easy, don’t panic. No action will be taken against you.’

Katerina continued to struggle but the Tartar’s arms were steel bands. The hand clamped to her mouth smelled of onions; perhaps he had been preparing a Women’s Day supper before being called out to put down a riotous assembly of female hooligans. Beside her Svetlana was vigorously kicking her captor, young with fat cheeks, with the heels of her magnificent boots.

The militiamen on the floor advanced steadily but placidly on the women. Regaining some of their dignity, they turned and made an orderly exit.

As the door opened the breeze brushed sparks from the glowing stove.

When the women had all gone – all, that was, except for the scribe with the pepper-and-salt hair – Katerina and Svetlana were released.

‘Well done, comrade,’ Svetlana said to the officer. ‘A great job, terrorising a handful of women. Guns against handbags. They’ll make you a Hero of the Soviet Union for this.’

The officer regarded her impassively.

While the Tartar sucked his bleeding finger, Katerina, fight gone out of her, said: ‘So what are the charges?’

They had several to choose from, the officer told her in his tired voice. Creating a breach of the peace, holding an assembly without permission, inciting violence. And how about hooligan behaviour for good measure? But he made no move to arrest them.

The exit door banged shut tossing dust and woodshavings against the stove.

The scribe mounted the platform and showed the officer a red ID card. He nodded and departed with his men.

‘After all, it is Women’s Day,’ she said, smiling at Katerina and Svetlana. ‘And now may I see your papers, please?’ She smelled of lavender water.

They showed her their blue work passbooks and internal passports containing their propiskas , their residential permits. The woman studied them cursorily, as though confirming what she already knew.

‘And now,’ Svetlana said, ‘may we examine your identification?’

‘If you wish.’ The woman dug in her handbag again. The red ID was militia, not KGB; that was something. ‘You know, my dear,’ she said to Katerina as she replaced the ID, ‘I agree with everything you say but not with the way you say it.’

Svetlana said: ‘What you mean is you don’t agree with freedom of speech.’

The woman tut-tutted. ‘Come now, let’s be realistic: this is the Soviet Union not outer space. We can’t allow public protest can we? That’s a phenomenon in the West.’

Svetlana buttoned up her wolfskin with exasperated precision. ‘Without protest we shall achieve nothing.’

‘But, my dear, a lot has been achieved without your assistance. You have no idea, when I was a girl ….’ Perhaps, Katerina thought, she had lost her man in the Great Patriotic War when twenty million souls had perished. ‘The point is that your goals must be achieved with subtlety. Nothing wrong with feminine wiles, is there?’

Katerina said: ‘Do you really believe that we are better off than we were?’

‘You must know that. Your life-style for instance. Clothes, entertainment, your relations with young men …. Why in my day we would have been shot for less.’

‘Then why,’ Katerina demanded, ‘can’t we speak our minds in public if we have such liberty? Why do the police have to be called in?’ She could still smell onions on her fingers.

‘I am merely advising you, nothing more. Just as an elder of your family might warn you.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘A maiden aunt?’ She touched Katerina’s arm. ‘I do hope you’ll take my advice, my dear.’ Apparently Svetlana was beyond redemption. ‘If not ….’

She didn’t finish the sentence. They all smelled smoke at the same time.

The fire was behind the stove. A tongue of flame snaked out from behind it, licked the stripped pine wall, fell back and returned to gain a hold. Resin crackled and spat.

The ‘maiden aunt’ took command. ‘Quick, the sand buckets.’

But the buckets were empty.

The flames leaped onto another wall. Smoke rolled towards the platform.

‘You,’ to Katerina, ‘call the fire brigade. You,’ to Svetlana, ‘get water from the rest-rooms.’ Grabbing a twig broom she jumped from the platform and advanced on the flames.

Katerina ran into the street. There, thank God, was a telephone kiosk. But when she reached it she discovered it had been vandalised. She ran around an apartment block, found another, dialled 01, fire emergency.

By the time she got back to the hall it was a bonfire. A crowd had collected and Svetlana and the ‘maiden aunt’ stood among them, snow melting at their feet. Sparks and ash spiralled into the grey sky. As the roof caved in the crowd sighed.

‘Happy Women’s Day,’ Svetlana said to Katerina.

‘So, what did you make of the maiden aunt?’ Katerina asked as they made their way to Vernadskogo metro station.

They had answered questions from a fresh detachment of militia, signed statements and finally been allowed to leave the smouldering wreckage.

Svetlana said: ‘She showed us the yellow card.’ Her pilot was a soccer fanatic, Moscow Torpedo. ‘Beware the red card next time. That means we’ll be sent off,’ she explained in case Katerina didn’t share her new wisdom. ‘Be warned, Kata.’