MAHOGANY
443
when everything-both bread and labor-was shared in com–
mon, when there was neither past nor future, when people lived
for ideas and when there was no money, because money was not
needed.
An hour later the bathhouse was empty. The Bezdetov
brothers went home and so did the drunken women, creeping
silently into their beds. A notebook remained lying on the bath–
house floor. In it was written: "Call parents' meeting for 6 p.m.
on the 7th." "At the trade-union meeting suggest subscription of
month's salary to the industrialization loan." "Ask Alexander
Alexeyevich to go through the A.B.C. of Communism again."
In the early morning the bells set up their whine again and
carts laden with mahogany of the time of Catherine, Paul and
Alexander, lumbered down to the wharf under the supervision
of Yakov Karpovich. The Bezdetov brothers slept till noon. By
this time a crowd had gathered in the kitchen, eager to learn the
fate of their old rubles, lamps and candlesticks.
The town
is
a Russian Bruges.
About the time of which we are speaking, a couple of days
after the arrival of the Bezdetov brothers, the engineer Akim
Skudrin, the youngest son of Yakov Karpovich, also visited the
town. He did not go to his father's, but stayed with his aunts,
Kapitolina and Rimma. Akim d id not come on business, it was
just that he happened to have a free week.
Kapitolina Karpovna went up to her window. What a back–
water it was! The wall of crumbling red brick ran to an ocher–
colored house with a belvedere at one corner, and to a church at
the other; and further on were a square, a weigh-bridge and
another church. It was raining. A pig was sniffing at a puddle.
A
water-carrier came round the corner. Klavdia went out of the
gate in shammy leather boots, and a black overcoat that reached
down to her ankles; a blue kerchief was tied round her head.
With her head bent down, she crossed the street, walked along
the crumbling wall and turned the corner on the square. Kapi-
