trampled on her. She raised against us a little fist, withered and yellow, wrinkled as a chestnut, propping herself up with the other fist on the cobblestones, as she shouted, "Down with the gentry!" or, rather, "Down with! Gentry!" as if they were two curses, in crescendo, and as if in calling us gentry she considered us doubly cursed, and then a word in the local dialect that means "brothel people," and also something like "It will end"; but at that moment she noticed my uniform and was silent, hanging her head.
I am narrating this incident in all its details because— not immediately, but afterward—it was considered a premonition of everything that was to happen, and also because all these images of the period must cross the page like the army vehicles crossing the city (even if the words "army vehicles" evoke somewhat indefinite images; it's not bad for a certain indefiniteness to remain in the air, appropriate to the confusion of the period), like the canvas streamers hung between one building and the next to urge the citizenry to subscribe to the national loan, like the processions of workers whose routes must not coincide because they are organized by rival trade unions, one demonstrating in favor of the unlimited continuation of the strike in the Kauderer munitions factories, the other
----
for the end of the strike in order to assist arming the people against the counterrevolutionary armies about to surround the city. All these oblique lines, intersecting, should define the space where we moved, I and Valerian and Irina, where our story can emerge from nothingness, find a point of departure, a direction, a plot.
I had met Irina the day the front collapsed, less than twelve kilometers from the Eastern Gate. While the citizens' militia—boys under eighteen and old men from the reserves—was taking up a position around the low buildings of the Slaughterhouse—a place whose very name had a ring of ill omen, but we didn't yet know for whom—a flood of people was withdrawing into the city over the Iron Bridge. Peasant women balancing on their heads baskets with geese peeping out, hysterical pigs running off among the legs of the crowd, followed by yelling children (the hope of saving something from the army's requisitions drove the rural families to scatter their children and their hogs as much as possible, sending them off at random), soldiers on foot or on horseback who were deserting their units or trying to regain the body of the dispersed forces, elderly noblewomen at the head of caravans of maidservants and bundles, stretchers with the wounded, patients discharged from the hospitals, wandering peddlers, officials, monks, gypsies, pupils from the former College of Officers' Daughters in their traveling uniform—all were channeled through the grilles of the bridge as if swept along by the cold, damp wind that seemed to blow from the rents in the map, from the breaches that ripped fronts and frontiers. There were many that day seeking refuge in the city: those who feared the spreading of riots and looting and those instead who had their own good reasons for not being found in the path of the reactionary armies; those who sought protection under the fragile legality of the Provisional Council and those who wanted only to hide in the confusion in
----
order to act undisturbed against the law, whether new or old. Each felt his personal survival was at stake, and precisely where any talk of solidarity would have seemed out of place, because what counted was clawing and biting to clear a path for yourself, there was nevertheless a kind of common ground and understanding established, so that in the face of obstacles, efforts were united and all understood one another without too many words.
It may have been this, or it may have been that in general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices: whatever it was, crossing the Iron Bridge in the midst of the crowd that morning, I felt satisfied and lighthearted, in
I am narrating this incident in all its details because— not immediately, but afterward—it was considered a premonition of everything that was to happen, and also because all these images of the period must cross the page like the army vehicles crossing the city (even if the words "army vehicles" evoke somewhat indefinite images; it's not bad for a certain indefiniteness to remain in the air, appropriate to the confusion of the period), like the canvas streamers hung between one building and the next to urge the citizenry to subscribe to the national loan, like the processions of workers whose routes must not coincide because they are organized by rival trade unions, one demonstrating in favor of the unlimited continuation of the strike in the Kauderer munitions factories, the other
----
for the end of the strike in order to assist arming the people against the counterrevolutionary armies about to surround the city. All these oblique lines, intersecting, should define the space where we moved, I and Valerian and Irina, where our story can emerge from nothingness, find a point of departure, a direction, a plot.
I had met Irina the day the front collapsed, less than twelve kilometers from the Eastern Gate. While the citizens' militia—boys under eighteen and old men from the reserves—was taking up a position around the low buildings of the Slaughterhouse—a place whose very name had a ring of ill omen, but we didn't yet know for whom—a flood of people was withdrawing into the city over the Iron Bridge. Peasant women balancing on their heads baskets with geese peeping out, hysterical pigs running off among the legs of the crowd, followed by yelling children (the hope of saving something from the army's requisitions drove the rural families to scatter their children and their hogs as much as possible, sending them off at random), soldiers on foot or on horseback who were deserting their units or trying to regain the body of the dispersed forces, elderly noblewomen at the head of caravans of maidservants and bundles, stretchers with the wounded, patients discharged from the hospitals, wandering peddlers, officials, monks, gypsies, pupils from the former College of Officers' Daughters in their traveling uniform—all were channeled through the grilles of the bridge as if swept along by the cold, damp wind that seemed to blow from the rents in the map, from the breaches that ripped fronts and frontiers. There were many that day seeking refuge in the city: those who feared the spreading of riots and looting and those instead who had their own good reasons for not being found in the path of the reactionary armies; those who sought protection under the fragile legality of the Provisional Council and those who wanted only to hide in the confusion in
----
order to act undisturbed against the law, whether new or old. Each felt his personal survival was at stake, and precisely where any talk of solidarity would have seemed out of place, because what counted was clawing and biting to clear a path for yourself, there was nevertheless a kind of common ground and understanding established, so that in the face of obstacles, efforts were united and all understood one another without too many words.
It may have been this, or it may have been that in general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices: whatever it was, crossing the Iron Bridge in the midst of the crowd that morning, I felt satisfied and lighthearted, in
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