Mother Russia Read Online Free PDF Page B

smiles. “Funny birds are what they are,” he comments.
    “The originals were funny birds too,” Mother Russia says. “I knew them, you know. I knew them all. Ha! I am an old anti-Bolshevik. Kerensky was a fiery speaker but a prude. His fingernails were a walking disaster: narrow, indicating ambition; ingrown too, a sign of luxurious tastes. Oh, I had a certain respect for him in the beginning, I will admit it to you. He was caught between two immense forces neither of which he really understood, neither of which he could have controlled even if he had understood them. For a long time I saw him as that modern existential hero, the man in the middle. But all that ended when he scurried from a back door of the Winter Palace, skirts whipping around his thick ankles, as the Bolsheviks stormed through the front door. Enter Trotsky! He was always nasty and needling. His nails were as pale as yours, come to think of it, though they were much smaller than yours; small nails mean conceit. Vladimir Ilyich was by far the least sexy of the three. His nails were broad, indicating a timidness that was only apparent to those who had the misfortune to be close to him, and round, indicating a generous liberal spirit underneath the hard pragmatic exterior. When I was a child Lenin hid in my father’s apartment in Petersburg. I remember it as if it were yesterday. (I consider memory a form of time travel. But that’s another story.) Lenin, looking ridiculously like a female impersonator in his red wig, presented himself at our door. Mother had no idea who he was and obliged him to walk on canvas rectangles to polish the floors. She made us all walk on the canvas,even father. When I was sixteen I entered the living room one day walking directly on the floor. I remember the clickety-click of my Paris heels on the tiles. Conversation stopped. It was my great moment of revolt, more important even than when I parted with my virginity, which I organized the following year. My mother looked down at my shoes and then at my father, but my father continued reading his newspaper. I never walked on canvas again.”
    “And Lenin?” Pravdin demands curiously.
    “Lenin,” Mother Russia rummages for memories, “seemed to me like an old woman, shuffling around like that in a wrinkled robe polishing my mother’s floors. He stayed three days and spent a great deal of time in the bathroom; his intestines were not in any condition to make a revolution. People came and went. My mother ran out of canvas and made them walk about in their stockings. Her floors shone like they had never shone before. Trotsky was embarrassed to remove his shoes and had to be asked several times. He had holes in his stockings, you see. There was whispering late into the night. One man raised his voice and banged a table with his fist and everyone shushed him. Lenin shuffled back and forth on the canvas and said, ‘All right, what do we have to lose,’ and went off to the toilet. Through the worst of the Civil War someone appeared at our flat twice a week with a basket of bread, some eggs, a bottle of jam, tea and an endless supply of pamphlets.”
    “Waak, rev-lutions are verbose, waak, waak.”
    Pravdin’s lust for the theater gets the upper hand. Thrusting an imaginary microphone across the table in a parody of an eager TV reporter, he blurts: “In your opinion, Zoya Aleksandrovna, what is the difference between our life today and the days before the Revolution?”
    Mother Russia responds instantly to the game. “Ha!”she cackles, “the greatest difference is there are fewer birds in the trees today. And fewer trees. But that’s another story.”
    “Waak, waak, help, help,” barks Pravdin.
    By the time Nadezhda arrives home, just before dinner, they are on their fifth glass of rose hip wine (Mother Russia’s own concoction) and carrying on like long lost friends.
    “Picture it,” Pravdin cries, folding himself into a comic crouch. “After four hours on line