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"A few scraps of food. "
"I'll do you for a loaf of bread," the woman said. "My children are starving. "
Grigori thought of those plump breasts. "Where?"
"In the back room of the shop. "
At least, Grigori thought, I won't be mad with sexual frustration when I meet Katerina. "All right. "
She opened the door, led him in, and closed and bolted it. They walked through the empty shop and into another room. Grigori saw, in the dim illumination from the streetlight, that there was a mattress on the floor covered with a blanket.
The woman turned to face him, letting her coat fall open again. He stared at the thatch of dark hair at her groin. She put out her hand. "The bread first, please, Sergeant. "
He took a big loaf of black bread from his sack and gave it to her.
"I'll be back in a moment," she said.
She ran up a flight of stairs and opened a door. Grigori heard a child's voice. Then a man coughed, a hacking rasp from deep in his chest. There were muffled sounds of movement and low voices for a few moments. Then he heard the door again, and she came down the stairs
.
She took off her coat, lay back on the mattress, and parted her legs. Grigori lay beside her and put his arms around her. She had an attractive, intelligent face lined with strain. She said: "Mm, you're so strong!"
He stroked her soft skin, but all desire had left him. The entire scene was too pathetic: the empty shop, the sick husband, the hungry children, and the woman's false coquetry.
She unbuttoned his trousers and grasped his limp penis. "Do you want me to suck it?"
"No. " He sat upright and handed her the coat. "Put this back on. "
In a frightened voice she said: "You can't have the bread back-it's already half-eaten. "
He shook his head. "What happened to you?"
She put her coat on and fastened the buttons. "Have you got any cigarettes?"
He gave her a cigarette and took one himself.
She blew out smoke. "We had a shoe shop-high quality at reasonable prices for the middle class. My husband is a good businessman and we lived well. " Her tone was bitter. "But no one in this town, apart from the nobility, has bought new shoes for two years. "
"Couldn't you do something else?"
"Yes. " Her eyes flashed anger. "We didn't just sit back and helplessly accept our fate. My husband found he could provide good boots for soldiers at half the price the army was paying. All the small factories that used to supply the shop were desperate for orders. He went to the War Industries Committee. "
"What's that?"
"You've been away for a while, haven't you, Sergeant? Nowadays, everything that works here is run by independent committees: the government is too incompetent to do anything. The War Industries Committee supplies the army-or it did, while Polivanov was war minister. "
"What went wrong?"
"We got the order, my husband put all his savings into paying the bootmakers, and then the tsar fired Polivanov. "
"Why?"
"Polivanov allowed workers' elected representatives on the committee, so the tsaritsa thought he must be a revolutionist. Anyway, the order was canceled-and we went bankrupt. "
Grigori shook his head in disgust. "And I thought it was just the commanders at the front who were mad. "
"We tried other things. My husband was willing to do any job, waiter or streetcar driver or road mender, but no one was hiring, and then with the worry and lack of food he fell ill. "
