“What does it mean?” Pavel asked.
“Nothing,” Clara answered, gleaming through her tears.
There were four or five Jews in the assemblage, but Makar was not among them. His cherished dream had been realised at last. He was working in a secret printing office. Establishments of this sort were guarded with special solicitude, so in view of his absent-mindedness, Makar never left the place for fear of bringing back some spy. The other revolutionists who worked in the same printing shop and who were registered at the police station as residents of the house had each his or her day off. Makar alone was not registered. The porters of the house had never seen him, and the composing room was his prison.
The only other Jewess in the room was a dark insignificant looking woman named Hessia Helfman. She was touchingly bashful, so that at one time Clara had offered to befriend her. She had soon discovered, however, that the dark little Jewess was in charge of a most important conspiracy station. On closer acquaintance Hessia had proved to be quite talkative and of an extremely affectionate nature. Clara’s attachment to her had become greater still when she had learned that Purring Cat was her husband. The great thing was that he was a Gentile and a nobleman, although not a prince. Clara had told herself that the equality of Jew and Gentile and their intermarriage among socialists was a matter of course and that the circumstance attracted no special attention on her part, but she knew that it did.
As she now looked at Hessia and her husband, she said to herself, with a great sense of relief: “She is as good as I, anyhow. If she could marry the man she loves I can.”
But her joy in this absolution from her self-imposed injunction soon faded away. To sacrifice her happiness seemed to her the highest happiness this evening. She would surpass Hessia. If there was a world in which platonic relations were called for theirs was that world. The image of a demented woman fondling a rag in her prison cell came back to her.