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falling into religious superstition.) In her curiosity regarding Fanya Kaplan there lurked perhaps a shade of longing for Timofeika’s purity. And yet, as had increasingly become the case with all she loved, her yearning was polluted by repulsion and rage.
    And so Krupskaya sat with her hand upon the table, wearing the white blouse and grubby striped vest which she so often affected, gazing drearily upon the prisoner and blinking her tired, protuberant eyes. Her face was tanned almost to griminess, thanks to all her propaganda work in the open air. Her stringy hair and the two vertical creases between her eyes gave her an urgent, almost crazed expression.
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    As for the convict, she scarcely deigned to turn upon Krupskaya her half-closed gaze. The visitor took this unceasing coldness, or at least guardedness, to be evidence of guilt. But in her socialist faith, as in her private relations with her husband, she had been so long accustomed to consider individual peculiarities to be irrelevant that this reticence scarcely affected her. Questions could be answered without “personality” coloring any words. The neat ranks of book-spines behind Volodya’s desk offered statistics, errors, energy, fertilization. What mattered the gaze of their authors? She was interested in Fanya Kaplan only insofar as she embodied a force which threatened her interpretation of history.
    At last the other woman, half turning away, brushed her hair out of her eyes with a long, pallid hand, cleared her throat, and huskily said: Well, why did you come?
    Krupskaya replied: I did not come to save you. I came to understand you. I came to lift a stone from my soul.
    Ah! You speak like a true Russian—so mystical, so emotional . . .
    And you? You’re not Russian?
    I’m a Jewess.
    What has that to do with anything? Trotsky’s a Jew, and Sverdlov, Litvinov, Chicherin, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krestinsky—
    When I was alive I was a Social Revolutionary, but now that I’m dead I’ve become quite the little Jewess. When they arrested me they continually spoke of my Jewish features—
    That’s all cant, Krupskaya insisted. You know that national origins mean nothing. Don’t tell me you committed that crime because you’re a Jew.
    She’d found herself saying that crime because she did not want to utter her husband’s name in front of this wretch. To call him Lenin would be to deny her relationship to him, which felt almost like a betrayal; whereas Volodya would be too intimate; she certainly desired no intimacy with F. D. Kaplan. In public, she frequently used the familiar yet still somewhat official Ilyich, which might be thinkable here, but somehow she preferred that the victim’s presence loom unnamably between them like the blade of a giant guillotine.
    But why not just call what I did a religious act? asked the woman with a nervously goading smile. Why not call it a mystery?
    Her lips pressed together, her chin thrust ever so slightly forward, Krupskaya said: So you acted out of some fanatical superstition—
    I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor.
    Then you do deserve death. At a time like this, when Russia is—
    Of course I’m a fanatic. The fewer possibilities I have, the more urgently I must imagine.
    I cannot understand you.
    The brooding mouth said: Nadezhda Konstantinovna, you know very well what we demand: Universal suffrage, freedom of the press, peasant power, a representative people’s government—
    But those pseudo-democratic phrases of yours are printed in the constitutions of capitalist republics all over the world! Don’t you see that they mean nothing? How can you support universal suffrage when the richest people control the vote? Freedom of the press—who owns that press? A people’s government—of which people? You’ve let yourself become a pawn of the White Guard clique—
    Even a pawn sometimes controls destiny, replied the woman with a beautiful smile.
    You S.R.s want to stand in the middle;