Sofia Petrovna Quotes

The typists were a bit afraid of her and called her the schoolmarm behind her back. But they obeyed her. And she wanted to be strict, but fair. In the lunch hour she chatted in a friendly way with those who did their work well and conscientiously, talked about how difficult it was to make out the director’s handwriting and how lipstick was far from suitable for everyone. But with those who were capable of typing things like “rehersal” or “collective” she adopted a haughty manner.

Sofia Petrovna would open the door and the assistant manager would drag Erna Semyonovna’s typewriter out of the typing pool into the restricted special department. Erna Semyonovna would follow her typewriter with a triumphant expression: as they’d explained to Sofia Petrovna, she had a “security clearance” and the party secretary summoned her to the special department to type up secret party documents.

Sofia Petrovna didn’t really understand what it was all about, she was bored and wanted to leave, but she was afraid it wasn’t the thing to do and glared at one of the typists who was making her way to the door.

The Mestkom gave her the job of collecting the union dues. Sofia Petrovna thought very little about why the trade union actually existed, but she liked drawing lines on sheets of paper with a ruler and marking in the various columns who had paid their dues for the current month and who had not; she liked pasting in the stamps and presenting impeccable accounts to the auditing commission. She liked being able to walk into the director’s imposing office whenever she chose and remind him jokingly that he was four months in arrears, and have him jokingly present his apologies to his patient comrades on the Mestkom and pull out his wallet and pay up. Even the sullen party secretary could safely be reminded that he owed his dues.

Sofia Petrovna had one consolation for the loss of her apartment: the tenants unanimously elected her official apartment representative. She became, as it were, the manager, the boss of her own apartment. She gently, but firmly, spoke to the wife of the accountant about the trunks standing in the corridor. She calculated the amount each person owed for electricity as accurately as she collected the Mestkom dues at work.

Sofia Petrovna even wrote to Kolya about the injustice Natasha had suffered. But Kolya replied that injustice was a class concept and vigilance was essential. Natasha did after all come from a bourgeois, landowning family. Vile fascist hirelings, of the kind that had murdered comrade Kirov, had still not been entirely eradicated from the country. The class struggle was still going on, and therefore it was essential to exercise the utmost vigilance when admitting people to the party and the Komsomol.

Two years before, after the murder of Kirov (Oh! What grim times those were! Patrols walked the streets…and when Comrade Stalin was about to arrive, the station square was cordoned off by troops…and there were troops lining all the streets as Stalin walked behind the coffin)—after Kirov’s murder there had also been many arrests, but at that time they first took all kinds of oppositionists, then old regime people, all kinds of “vons” and barons. But now it was doctors.

After the murder of Kirov they had sent away, as a member of the nobility, Madame Nezhentseva, an old friend of Sofia Petrovna’s—they had attended school together. Sofia Petrovna had been astonished: what connection could Madame Nezhentseva possibly have to the murder? She taught French in a school and lived just like everybody else. But Kolya had explained that it was necessary to rid Leningrad of unreliable elements. “And who exactly is this Madame Nezhentseva of yours anyway? You remember yourself, Mama, that she didn’t recognize Mayakovsky as a poet and always said that things were cheaper in the old days. She’s not a real Soviet person…”

“Arrested last night was the ex-supervisor of our print shop, now unmasked as an enemy of the people—Gerasimov. He turned out to be the nephew of the Moscow Gerasimov, who was unmasked a month ago. With the connivance of our party organization, which is suffering, to use Comrade Stalin’s apt expression, from the idiotic disease of complacency, Gerasimov continued to, so to speak, ‘operate’ in our print shop even after his own uncle, the Moscow Gerasimov, had been unmasked.”

“And really, why are you so upset? Since [your husband] isn’t guilty—then everything will be all right. Nothing can happen to an honest man in our country. It’s just a misunderstanding. Come on, don’t be discouraged…Stop by and have a cup of tea sometime!”

“They say our director has been abroad,” Natasha recalled. “Also on a mission. Remember Marya Ivanovna, the elevator woman, told us that he’d brought his wife a light-blue knitted suit from Berlin?”

Just think of it, all these women, the mothers, wives and sisters of saboteurs, terrorists and spies! And the men, the husband or brother of one…They all looked perfectly ordinary, like those on a streetcar or in a store. Except they all looked tired and baggy-eyed. “I can imagine how awful it must be for a mother to learn that her son is a saboteur,” thought Sofia Petrovna.

The night before, in the line, one woman had said to another—Sofia Petrovna had heard her: “No point waiting for him to return! Those who wind up here never return.” Sofia Petrovna had wanted to interrupt, but decided not to get involved. In our country innocent people aren’t held. Particularly not Soviet patriots like Kolya. They’ll clear the matter up and let him go.

No, Sofia Petrovna had been quite right to keep aloof from her neighbors in the lines. She was sorry for them, of course, as human beings, sorry especially for the children; but still an honest person had to remember that all these women were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers.

“And who is this Frolenko? She’s the daughter of a colonel who under the old regime was the owner of a so-called estate. What, it is asked, was citizeness Frolenko doing in our publishing house, the daughter of an alien element, appointed to her job by the bandit Zakharov? Another document will tell us about that. Under the wing of Zakharov, citizeness Frolenko learned to blacken our beloved Red Army of workers and peasants, to strike counterrevolutionary blows: she calls the Red Army, the Rat Army…”

“So she thinks he’s some kind of innocent lamb,” the nurse began again. “Excuse me, please, but people don’t get locked up for nothing in our country. Enough of this. They haven’t locked me up, have they? And why not? Because I’m an honest woman, a real Soviet citizen.”

“You’re still very young, I assure you, you’re mistaken. It’s all a question of tact. For instance, yesterday I defended Natalia Sergeyevna at the meeting. And the result? Nothing’s happened to me because of it. Believe me, this business with Kolya is a nightmare to me. I’m his mother. But I understand it’s a temporary misunderstanding, exaggerations, disagreement…One has to be patient.

“You have to be persistent,” said Sofia Petrovna quietly. “If they won’t tell you here, you must write to Moscow. Or else, what’s going to happen? You’ll lose track of each other completely.”

The director’s wife looked her up and down.

“Who is it? Your husband? Your son?” she asked with such intense fury that Sofia Petrovna involuntarily drew back closer to Alik. All right then, when they send your son away—you just be persistent, you go find out his address.”

“They won’t send my son away,” said Sofia Petrovna apologetically. “You see, he’s not guilty. He was arrested by mistake.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed the director’s wife, carefully enunciating each syllable.

Lying in her bed, she would think about her next letter to Comrade Stalin. Since Kolya had been taken away, she had already written three letters to Comrade Stalin. In the first she had asked him to review Kolya’s case and have him released since he was not guilty of anything. In the second, she had asked to be told where he was so that she might go there and see him just once more before she died. In the third, she implored him to tell her one thing only: was Kolya alive or dead? But there was no answer…The first letter she had simply dropped into the mailbox, the second she had sent by registered mail, and the third, with a return slip for confirmation of delivery. The return slip came back after a few days. In the space “signature of recipient” was an incomprehensible scribble, in small letters: “…eryan.”

Who was this “Eryan”? And had he given Comrade Stalin the letter? After all the envelope had been marked: “Personal and Private.”

Sofia Petrovna went back to her own room and sat down on the sofa. She needed to sit somewhere quiet, to recover from her own words and grasp their meaning. Kolya’s been released. They’ve released Kolya. Looking back at her from the mirror was a wrinkled old woman with dirty-gray hair streaked with white. Would Kolya know her when her [sic] returned? She stared deep into the mirror until everything began to swim before her eyes and she could no longer tell which was the real couch and which the reflection.

“Don’t write it!” whispered Kiparisova, bringing her huge eyes, ringed with yellow, close up to Sofia Petrovna’s face. “Don’t write one for your son’s sake. They’re not going to pat you on the back for an appeal like that. Neither you, nor your son. Do you really think you can write that the investigator beat him? You can’t even think such a thing, let alone write it. They’ve forgotten to deport you, but if you write an appeal—they’ll remember. And they’ll send your father away, too…and who brought this letter, anyway? And where are the witnesses?...And what proof is there?...”