He said ‘most of us have only two’ and introduced me to the three men and the woman in our compartment. I remember only the name of the woman. She was Marusia Kirillovna and she was dark and delicate and grim. My mother must have looked like her. She had the same dark eyes, the same expression, half-open, half-shut. ‘Good afternoon, comrade,’ she said. She was pulling on tight leather gloves and there was a holstered automatic Mauser in her lap. She sat nearest the window. Her book was poetry by Mandelstam, and of recent issue, judging by the bad production. The others were good-natured idiots, but Marusia Kirillovna seemed a woman of reliable instinct. I determined to say nothing to her unless asked a direct question. Russia was throwing up better women than men at that time. All the worthwhile men had been killed. And they were more ruthless, some of those women. They judged themselves harshly. Their self-control became fanatical: dangerous to anyone who did not display the same quality. That was one of the reasons I remained uncommunicative. The only way to impress such women is to let their imagination work on your behalf. They are always inclined to see virtue in silence. They assume that a man with nothing to say is more intelligent. I have had long relationships, since my Russian years, which were only maintained because I had the sense to keep my mouth shut. I could have been Sophocles. It would not have mattered. Two or three sentences, and they would know I was ‘a sham’. They are the kind of women who shun mirrors as vanity, yet forever seek mirrors in their lovers. Sure enough, by the time the train was on its way, leaving corpses and cheering Cossacks in its wake, she had already begun to treat me with exaggerated respect. I pulled my hat down over my eyes, pretending to sleep.
