Five minutes later they headed downstairs, hid both their satchels behind a radiator, having first put the sandwiches in the pockets of their coats, and set off for the Novoslobodskaya metro station. On the metro they only got as far as Belorusskaya. The transfer to the radial line toward the center of town was closed, and when they emerged upstairs, they discovered that Gorky Street was cordoned off. They saw an enormous multitude of red-and-black flags, and the ever-practical Toma wondered when they had managed to sew so many of them. From there they returned to Novoslobodskaya on foot, turning down Kaliaevskaya Street onto Chekhov Street.
The closer they approached to Pushkin Square, the more people there were, and even though there was no public transportation and people walked in the street, everything bottlenecked at Pushkin Square, where passage to Gorky Street was blocked by trucks and a chain of soldiers. Toma, who knew the city much better, pulled Tanya off to the left, and they found themselves on Pushkin Street in a tight crowd of silent people.
In this city accustomed to long lines no one had ever seen anything like this line before. For the moment it still preserved the shape and character of a line: it shifted, moved ahead slightly, rocked, squabbled, reeked, and ranked everyone fairly, giving each an equal ration of what they wanted—in this case, a piece of the spectacle about which each and every one of its participants would tell for the rest of their lives. But this line had one particular quality that made it singular and unique in all of Soviet history: people came here of their own free will and not out of some necessity—to grab a bread ration, a piece of soap, a quart of kerosene, or a forty-pound sack of grain . . . They had been standing in line all night to pay their civil respects, to bow, to grieve collectively, and to express their grief . . . and something elemental, deeply bestial—like a presentiment of an earthquake or the smell of a distant forest fire—had driven them from their homes and herded them into a single pack. Those who like Tanya were unable to find this invincible call deep in their hearts stayed home . . . But Tanya had been brought here by the ingenuous Toma, a child of the street, of communal apartments, and more susceptible to the laws of the herd.
No one had organized this funeral march, as all parades were usually organized. And the militia—in part paralyzed by the introduction of troops, in part thrown for a loop by all the various, mutually exclusive directives issued by the city’s authorities—was thoroughly unable to deal with the patient lines that slowly and irreversibly closed in on each other.
The girls squeezed between people, passing the theater where not long ago they had been taken to see Swan Lake; now they were simply incapable of imagining that such an amazing inanity as ballet could even exist in this world . . . They bored their way to the corner of Stoleshnikov Lane and got stuck near the small flower shop on the corner. The window of the half-basement shop was set so low that a fat water pipe driven into the wall of the building blocked the windowpane, which extended about two feet below the level of the street. A wide-spaced iron grating covered the rectangular pit just beneath the window. Their slow, laborious movement seemed to have bottlenecked, and then suddenly from somewhere below, from Pushkin Street, a sound—midway between a roar and a howl, a prolonged moan, and a muffled shout—swept over them like a strange tidal wave.
The sound came closer, crescendoed, and seemed like something entirely disconnected from the crowd, like the wind or rain. Holding each other by the hand, the girls now clasped each other even more tightly. The stalled crowd shifted and pushed them straight into the pipe protecting the shop window. A woman just in front of them with a big silver fox collar twisted around and let out a wild howl. The pipe seemed to have broken her in half. She hung from the pipe briefly, and the people pressing from behind trampled the lower part of her body into the window pit, and then with a loud thump her whole body toppled into it . . . When she fell, she was as dead as the silver fox on her shoulders.
The girls were swept past the pipe, then hauled toward the opposite side of the street right into one of the trucks lined up one after the other. They had just seen that woman crushed against the pipe and understood that there would be nothing they could do if they got pushed against the side of the truck.
“Get down,” Toma shouted. It was the only direction they could go—down. They were swept under the truck. There, between the wheels, among orphaned galoshes, they lay on the street—jumbled feet and the hems of clothing blocking the light to the right and to the left. It was stuffy and terrifying. Toma began to cry.
“Don’t cry,” Tanya said. Toma turned her pale face toward her.
“I feel sorry for Stalin . . .”
“Then you’re an idiot,” Tanya said in a tired adult voice.
She did not feel a drop of pity for Stalin. Inside she felt disgusted, as if by some immoral act. Probably because they had played hooky from school. She was so ashamed and felt so bad for having lied . . . Especially to Dad . . . The family probably already knew that they were not in school, and Vasilisa was probably waiting for them with dinner, wondering where they were.
They lay underneath the truck for quite a long time. It reeked of a public toilet, grease, and gasoline. At one point the forest of shoes, tattered trousers, and coat bottoms shifted and parted and seemed to thin out a bit.
“Let’s try getting out of here.” Tanya pulled Toma out from under the truck.
Just at that instant a break in the crowd occurred, and they slipped out from their shelter. While they had been lying under the truck, they had forgotten how easy it was to get lost in the crowd: their grip weakened, their hands broke apart, and they were pulled in different directions . . . They shouted desperately, but even as they still heard each other’s voices they floated, like two splints in a river, in the most uncertain of directions . . .
When they lost each other entirely, their powerful but nonetheless ordinary fear gave way to panicked terror. Toma was picked up and carried toward the wall of a building where the windows of the secondhand fur shop on the first floor had already been boarded up. The double doors onto the street also had been boarded up from within. Lower down, at the level of Toma’s chest, a part of the wooden door had been pushed in and the boards were coming apart. When Toma was pressed against the boards she pushed one of the boards with her shoulder, and it caved in, and Toma tumbled into the dark space between the two doors and found herself inside, as if in a cabinet. She sat down on her haunches and froze.
Toma could not recall how many minutes or hours she sat, huddled, watching through the wide crack between the boards as one set of feet in trampled footwear slowly replaced the next . . . until she saw a familiar red boot. Something lifted her from the ground. She pulled apart the boards and grabbed the leg just above the fleecy fur trim and shouted with all her might, “Tanya! Tanechka!”
It felt to Tanya like a dog had seized her by the leg.
“Where would a dog have come from?” The thought was running through her head, when suddenly she heard Toma’s voice.
“Tanechka! This way, down!”
Not letting go of Tanya’s leg, Toma pressed her entire skinny body against the loose board, which obediently gave way, and Tanya, crouching, squeezed into the narrow space between the doors. This movement downward toward the ground that killed so many that day saved the girls.
They reached for each other like long lost lovers, hugged, and froze. At precisely that moment they became sisters. Everything else remained as it was: Tanya’s uncontested superiority and indulgent patronage and Toma’s groveling deference, servile gratitude, and inner imploring dependence, but their sisterhood—imposed by circumstance and until now dubious, even false—had become real. All their lives they would remember this minute; the memory never faded—their hours embracing in a doorway six inches from a stampeding crowd, from death itself, which from that time on both of them saw in their minds’ eye as a closed, dark, malodorous place where unfortunate victims were trampled, their faces, extremities, and very souls crushed beyond recognition . . .