LITMIR.BIZ

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the forty women listening impassively to the speaker, Katerina thought that was extremely unlikely. If, like Svetlana, you were leggily tall with wild blonde hair and didn’t give a damn what people thought about you then, yes, you could slay them.

      Katerina shifted on her rickety chair. It creaked so loudly that the speaker turned and glared. The trapped bird beat its wings with renewed agitation.

      It was daunting enough making a first speech but when you knew that three women had already been expelled from the Soviet Union for promoting the same cause …. Like her they had been loyal to their country, like her all they had wanted to do was improve the lot of its women. Their expulsion had been wicked and it had sharpened the protest within her.

      From her vantage point in the hall in which a stove was burning incandescently in one corner, Katerina surveyed her small band of rebellious womanhood. The turn-out was disappointing but what did you expect with an icy breeze still at large? Come the thaw and the women of Moscow would unfurl their banners of feminism.

      The women were mostly young but there were one or two of the older generation among them padded with valenki boots and heavy coats, scarves folded on their laps.

      Svetlana, wearing a wolfskin coat bought in Vladivostok by an Aeroflot pilot – when you were employed by Intourist as a courier you had such luck, not when you worked with foreign defectors – nudged her. ‘That one over there who looks like a maiden aunt. KGB – bet you five roubles.’

      The maiden aunt, pepper-and-salt hair combed into a bun, was writing busily in a blue notebook. ‘No bet,’ Katerina whispered. Through a window she could see the fur hat and bulky shoulders of a militiaman. Ten policemen to control forty women. What did they expect, an armed uprising?

      The speaker sat down. Katerina stood up. The bird’s wings beat inside her. ‘Good luck,’ from Svetlana. The faces had become a blur, stationary white moths.

      When she opened her mouth the bird flew out. Her voice rang and words bore little resemblance to the ones she had rehearsed. She astonished herself. This Katerina Ilyina was a stranger. She crumbled her notes into a ball and dropped it on the floor.

      ‘Today is Women’s Day and today your man will be kind and charming. Perhaps he has already prepared the breakfast, bought you a carnation …. How very considerate of him. Perhaps even now he is making the beds, queuing at the gastronom ….’ She paused with the cunning of a seasoned orator. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he did just one of those things for the other 364 days of the year?’

      Some women smiled at such an improbable vision. That was the trouble: too many women were indulgent; their plight was a radio and TV joke alongside absenteeism from work and graft.

      Katerina hurried on. ‘They say we enjoy equality with men. They being men. All right, there is equality during the day when you and your husbands are both at work. But what about those long evenings after work. Is there equality then? Well, is there?’

      A few heads shook.

      ‘While you scrub and sew and cook they enrich their minds in front of the television and refuel the inner man with firewater. What sort of equality is that? How can they talk about emancipation when fifty-one per cent of the work force are women? When eighty-three per cent of all doctors and health workers are women? When seventy-four per cent of all teachers are women?’

      ‘And what are you?’ a tough-looking woman wearing a red shawl demanded.

      ‘An adviser,’ Katerina retorted. My first heckler, she thought. ‘A seeker of women’s rights. Your rights,’ pointing at the woman. She felt quite capable of handling her. ‘Sad, isn’t it, that Soviet women are still cowed, yes cowed, by the fear of pregnancy. Not because you don’t want children,’ hastily, ‘because every woman wants children, but because you can’t afford them. Granted a mother is given twelve months off work after she’s had a baby. But if she wants to continue giving the child the care it needs she loses her job. And what does the State do about that? It provides facilities for abortion, that’s what. Only the other day I read about a woman in Kiev who had fifteen ….’

      The woman with pepper-and-salt hair scribbled furiously.

      The heckler in the red shawl shouted: ‘Tell her old man to buy some goloshes.’

      A few women smirked at the reference to sheaths spurned by most men because the latex was so thick that it spoiled pleasure. For the first time Katerina faltered. Smut she hadn’t anticipated. Then she decided to invoke it. She was amazed at her adaptability.

      She said resonantly: ‘In a truly liberated society there won’t be any place for remarks like that. Sex isn’t dirty, you know. Smut is merely a by-product of suppression.’

      There, that should put paid to the potato-faced heckler. If she wasn’t interested in the movement why had she come? A paid trouble-maker?

      Svetlana clapped her hands. ‘Hear, hear!’

      Face screwed up with fury, the heckler rose to her feet and pointed a stubby finger at Svetlana. ‘I bet she’s fitted a few goloshes in her time.’

      Svetlana had this effect on some women. Innocently she reminded them of girlhood dreams never fulfilled. Once she had worn a mini-skirt in the Arbat and women had leaped from doorways bunching their fists.

      This time no one smiled and that might have been the end of it if Svetlana had allowed the heckler to get away with it; but that wasn’t Svetlana’s style. ‘What can she know about sex?’ she asked Katerina in a penetrating whisper. ‘Except on a very dark night.’

      The heckler planted her hands on her hips. ‘Night,’ she proclaimed, ‘is for the modest, daytime for the shameless. There are some,’ glaring at Svetlana, ‘who don’t care whether they see the sun or the stars when they’re lying on their back.’

      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.

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