She pulled me down to speak in my ear.
“And what about your...? I am sure ... your papers ... are....”
“Of course they are,” I laughed. “But you don’t expect a clown of a Red guard to see the difference, do you?”
I made up my mind to get rid of Stepanovna and come back later for some meat, but all at once a commotion arose in the crowd over the way and people began running out of the shed. Round the corner, from the side of the Ekaterina Canal, appeared a band of soldiers in sheepskin caps and brown-grey tunics, with fixed bayonets. The exits from the building were quickly blocked. Fugitives fled in all directions, the women shrieking and hugging their baskets and bundles, and looking back as they ran to see if they were pursued.
Stepanovna and I stood on a doorstep at the corner of the Zabalkansky Prospect, where we could see well, and whence, if need be, we could also make good our escape.
The market place was transformed in the twinkling of an eye. A moment before it had been bristling with life and the crowded street-cars had stopped to let their passengers scramble laboriously out. But now the whole square was suddenly as still as death, and, but for a few onlookers who watched the scene from a distance, the roadway was deserted.
From fifty to sixty soldiers filed slowly into the shed and a few others, with rifles ready, hurried now and again round the outside of the building. A fiendish din arose with the entry of the soldiers. The shrieking, howling, booing, cursing, and moaning sounded as if hell itself had been let loose! It was an uncanny contrast—the silent square, and the ghastly noise within the shed!
Stepanovna muttered something, but the only word I caught was “devils.” Sacks and bundles were being dragged out by the guards and hoisted on to trucks and lorries. At one door people were let out one by one after examination of their clothes and papers. The women were set at liberty, but the men, except the old and quite young boys, were marched off to the nearest Commissariat.
“What does it all mean?” I exclaimed, as we moved off along the Zabalkansky Prospect.
“Mean, Ivan Pavlovitch? Don’t you see? ‘Let’s grab!’ ‘Down with free-trading!’ ‘Away with speculators!’ That is what they say. ‘Speculation’ they call it. I am a ‘speculator,’ too,” she chuckled. “Do you think I ever got any work from the labour bureau, where I have been registered these three months? Or Varia, either, though we both want jobs. The money Ivan Sergeievitch left us is running out, but we must live somehow, mustn’t we?”