Ostrakova had nevertheless discharged herself.
Then had she at least children to look after her? they had asked. Oh, but she had a mass of them! she said. Daughters who would pander to her smallest whim, sons to assist her up and down the stairs! Any number – as many as they wished! To please the sisters, she even made up lives for them, though her head was beating like a war-drum. She had sent out for clothes. Her own were in shreds and God Himself must have blushed to see the state she was in when they found her. She gave a false address to go with her false name; she wanted no follow-up, no visitors. And somehow, by sheer willpower, at the stroke of six that evening, Ostrakova became just another pale ex-patient, stepping cautiously and extremely painfully down the ramp of the great black hospital, to rejoin the very world which that same day had done its best to be rid of her for good. Wearing her boots, which like herself were battered but mysteriously unbroken; and she was quaintly proud of the way they had supported her.
She wore them still. Restored to the twilight of her own apartment, seated in Ostrakov’s tattered armchair while she patiently wrestled with his old army revolver, trying to fathom how the devil it loaded, cocked, and fired itself, she wore them like a uniform. ‘I am an army of one.’ To stay alive : that was her one aim, and the longer she did it, the greater would be her victory. To stay alive until the General came, or sent her the magician.
To escape from them, like Ostrakov? Well, she had done that. To mock them, like Glikman, to force them into corners where they had no option but to contemplate their own obscenity? In her time, she liked to think, she had done a little of that as well. But to survive, as neither of her men had done; to cling to life, against all the efforts of that soulless, numberless universe of brutalized functionaries; to be a thorn to them every hour of the day, merely by staying alive, by breathing, eating, moving, and having her wits about her – that, Ostrakova had decided, was an occupation worthy of her mettle, and her faith, and of her two loves. She had set about it immediately, with appropriate devotion. Already she had sent the fool concierge to shop for her : disability had its uses.
‘I have had a small attack, Madame la Pierre’ – whether of the heart, the stomach or the Russian secret police she did not divulge to the old goat. ‘I am advised to leave off work for several weeks and rest completely. I am exhausted, madame – there are times when one wishes only to be alone. And here, take this, madame – not like the others, so grasping and over-vigilant.’ Madame la Pierre took the note in her fist, and looked at just one corner of it before tucking it away at her waist somewhere. ‘And listen, Madame, if anyone asks for me, do me a favour and say I am away. I shall burn no lights on the street side. We women of sensitivity are entitled to a little peace, you agree? But, madame, please, remember who they are, these visitors, and tell me – the gasman, people from the charities – tell me everything. I like to hear that life is going on around me.’
The concierge concluded she was mad, no doubt, but there was no madness to her money, and money was what the concierge liked best, and besides, she was mad herself. In a few hours, Ostrakova had become more cunning even than in Moscow. The concierge’s husband came up – a brigand himself, worse than the old goat – and, encouraged by further payments, fixed chains to her front door. Tomorrow he would fit a peephole, also for money. The concierge promised to receive her mail for her, and deliver it only at certain agreed times – exactly eleven in the morning, six in the evening, two short rings – for money. By forcing open the tiny ventilator in the back lavatory, and standing on a chair, Ostrakova could look down into the courtyard whenever she wanted, at whoever came and went. She had sent a note to the warehouse saying she was indisposed. She could not move her double bed, but with pillows and her feather coverlet she made up the divan and positioned it so that it pointed like a torpedo through the open door of the drawing-room at the front door beyond it, and all she had to do was lie on it with her boots aimed at the intruder and shoot down the line of them, and if she didn’t blow her own foot off, she would catch him in the first moment of surprise as he attempted to burst in on her : she had worked it out. Her head throbbed and caterwauled, her eyes had a way of darkening over when she moved her head too fast, she had a raging temperature and sometimes she half fainted. But she had worked it out, she had made her dispositions, and till the General or the magician came, it was Moscow all over again. ‘You’re on your own, you old fool,’ she told herself aloud. ‘You’ve nobody to rely on but yourself, so get on with it.’