“You may count,” replied the officer.
“One, two, three, five, seven, ten! Good. There are two of us.”
The officer betrayed his impatience. We handed him our American passports—which we naïvely thought would be sufficient to induce him to respect us. At that time I had not yet learned that in the heart of Russia to be an American citizen means no more than to belong to one of the tribes of the Iroquois Indians. We were possessed of other credentials in addition to our passports, however, and these were finally accepted, though with evident reluctance.
During the examination, our student-hosts sat nonchalantly by, smoking cigarettes. The ceremony was familiar enough to them. Their quarters were searched by this same officer and his men sometimes two or three times a week, and any book, pamphlet, or piece of handwriting that he took a fancy to declare “dangerous” was confiscated.
When the officer and his ten soldiers withdrew we
| The peasants’ friend | Medical students from Moscow University in charge of a famine relief station in Saratoff |
could hear other feet outside the window. Curiosity prompted me to look out, so we unbarred the shutter and let the lamp-light flood the yard. Thirty more brown-coated soldiers were drawn up in two phalanxes.