This was the arrangement under which the thirty invalids of my Battalion of Death were left by me in the village of Tutalsk in March, 1918. The thousand roubles I gave to my mother with instructions to buy shoes for the most destitute of the girls. Of the five hundred roubles given to me by the Consul, I gave three hundred to my mother I decided to take my youngest sister, Nadia, with me to America. Accompanied to the station by my parents, the thirty girls, and half the community, I started eastward, for Irkutsk and Vladivostok, dressed once more as a woman.
At the station in Irkutsk I noticed a young girl, with two tiny children in her arms. Somehow her face looked familiar to me, but I could not recall who she was. She was evidently in trouble, poor and ragged. For a while she stared at me. Then she ran up and cried out breathlessly:
“Mania!”
She was the younger daughter of the woman Kitova, whose husband had killed the dog-catcher and who had accompanied him into exile, at the same time that I had gone into exile with Yasha. Then she was only a little girl, not more than eleven or twelve years old. Now she was the mother of two children.
For three days, she told me, her mother and herself had been living on the floor of the station. They had only seventy kopecks left in their possession. With this money the mother had gone to the town to find a lodging! More than three months they had been travelling from Yakutsk, where this girl had married a political. All the money in my purse was two hundred roubles. I gave forty and then another twenty to the poor girl.
While I was nursing one of the two babies, an official approached me.
“Are you Botchkareva?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
He wanted to detain me, but some of the soldiers who had travelled on the same train with me hurried to my defence. There was a hot argument. I drew out my pass from the Soviet and claimed the freedom to go wherever I pleased. I was finally left in peace.
I waited for the return of old Kitova to the last minute, desirous to see her and especially to learn about Yasha and other friends in North Siberia. Her daughter could only tell me that Yasha had married a Yakut woman, after the local fashion, and was still in Amga when last she heard....