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said it; Mikoyan had supported him; Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich had kept silent. All of them had been faithful disciples and brothers-in-arms of Comrade Stalin. They had all sworn they were prepared to give their lives for him. What had happened to them? Had they gone insane? Had they turned out to be traitors? So wise and perspicacious, how could he have seen through everyone and failed to spot them?
    Now she recalled that there had been certain hints at a change in the attitude to Stalin even earlier. At the end of the previous year Porosyaninov had come to the children’s home and advised her, seemingly in passing and yet insistently, to take down the long banner hanging in the entrance hall with the words THANKS TO COMRADE STALIN FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD! “The slogan’s out of date,” he had commented, and gave Aglaya a meaningful look. But when she had asked what slogan to put up instead of the old one, Pyotr Klimovich had told her she could put up the same one, but with the words COMRADE STALIN replaced by THE COMMUNIST PARTY, so that the entire text read THANKS TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD!
    â€œIt’ll be too long,” Aglaya said doubtfully.
    â€œNever mind if it’s long, so long as it’s politically correct.” Then he had looked at her and added that you had to take life realistically—or, as he said, “reelsickly.”
    Aglaya had done as she often did in such cases: she had promised to take the banner down, but in reality she had no intention of doing so. She had thought Porosyaninov would forget, but the next day he phoned and asked whether she had done as they agreed, and when he heard she hadn’t got around to it yet, he insisted firmly: “Get around to it!”
    And she had obeyed. For her Party instructions were law. Moreover, the situation had not been clarified yet, and two loves still dwelt in her heart in perfect harmony: love for Stalin and love for the Party. But now she was being urged to commit an act that she absolutely could not justify with any theories. Now everything had been said clearly and unambiguously and she faced a stark choice: to stick with the Party or stick with Stalin. An impossible, unnatural choice. For her, Stalin was the Party, and the Party was Stalin. For her, Stalin and the Party together were the people, the honor and the conscience of the entire country, and her own conscience as well. Harsh and uncompromising, a woman possessed, as—we repeat—she was called in those days, she was used to brushing all obstacles aside, but so far she had always forced her march in the direction indicated by Stalin, and that had been an easy and joyful thing to do. But now her guiding star had split into two halves, into two separate luminaries, and each was calling her to follow it.
    That very night she fell ill, as she herself said afterward, with her nerves, although the doctor called in by her neighbor said it was simply flu. A rather nasty flu, certainly, brought to us either from Asiatic parts or—which was more likely—from America. Where, as everyone knew, they deliberately cultivated all sorts of viruses and microbes in scientific laboratories, as well as insects and rats, in order to infect the trusting and defenseless Soviet people and make them suffer.
    By the evening of the following day her temperature had risen above forty degrees Celsius. Aglaya tossed and turned, burning up; she shuddered in her fever, sweated, lost consciousness, raved. But in her raving she experienced a joyful sense of anticipation, of something exceptional about to happen, and she was not deceived. During the first and second nights, Comrade Stalin came to see her alive and in person, dropped in just like a member of the family, genial and good-natured in his prewar-style field jacket and soft box calf boots. He opened the door silently, walked silently across to her bed, sat down at her feet, sucked on