MAHOGANY
421
hurtled down.
As
they were moved slowly by the ropes, the bells
still chanted their ancient lament. They fell with a roar and a
thud, digging holes some five feet into the ground. At the time
of
this
tale the whole town was full of the moaning of these
ancient
bells.
The most important thing in the town was to have a Trade
Union card; there were two queues in the shops-one for those
with cards and another for those without them. Rowboats on the
Volga were rented to people with cards for ten kopecks, and to
the others for forty kopecks an hour. Movie tickets cost some
people twenty-five, forty and sixty kopecks, but they were sold
to card-holders at only five, ten and fifteen kopecks. A Trade
Union card, wherever it was shown, had priority together with
the bread card; the bread card and, accordingly bread itself,
were issued only to people who had the vote-they got four
hundred grams a day; the disenfranchised and their children had
no allocation of bread at all. The movie house was situated in
the Trade Union park, in a heated shed; the beginning of the
performances was announced, not by the customary ringing of a
bell, but by signals from the power station which reached every–
body
in
the town at once. The first signal meant that it was time
to
drink up one's tea and the second that it was time to put on
one's coat and leave the house. The power station worked till
one o'clock in the morning, but on the occasion of birthdays,
"October
days"~
and other such unpredictable festivities at the
house of the chairman of the Soviet executive committee, the
chairman of the industrial combine and other such high officials,
the electric power would sometimes be kept on throughout the
night and the rest of the populace arranged for their own cele–
brations to coincide with these occasions. In the movie house one
evening a representative of the ministry of Internal Trade, a
certain Satz (or it may have been Katz), though he was quite
4. In early Soviet times, a lubititute for christening
in
orthodox commun–
iat
circles.
