motherhood

No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

Florence could feel a constriction in her chest_She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat_Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything

Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. __ow far we__e come. How much work there is still to do!_ She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?

Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he__ stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone

Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don__ ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind__ eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past

The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev__ desk

She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting

A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism

Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man__ chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired

Our communists aren__ like your communists. In New York they__e always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!

Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.

Having a kid is like an industrial revolution of the emotions. Suddenly you can mass produce worry, and guilt.

A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the patients been forbidden the ball the might easily have fretted themselves to death.) One came as the Duchesse de Berri with l__nfant du Miracle, and the other as Madame de Montespan and the Duc du Maine. The two husbands, the ghost of the Duc de Berri, a dagger sticking out of his evening dress, and Louis XIV, were rather embarrassed really by the horrible screams of their so very young heirs, and hurried to the bar together. The noise was indeed terrific, and Albertine said crossly that had she been consulted she would, in this case, have permitted and even encouraged the substitution of dolls. The infants were then dumped down to cry themselves to sleep among the coats on her bed, whence they were presently collected by their mothers_ monthly nannies. Nobody thereafter could feel quite sure that the noble families of Bregendir and Belestat were not hopelessly and for ever interchanged. As their initials and coronets were, unfortunately, the same, and their baby linen came from the same shop, it was impossible to identify the children for certain. The mothers were sent for, but the pleasures of society rediscovered having greatly befogged their maternal instincts, they were obliged to admit they had no idea which was which. With a tremendous amount of guilty giggling they spun a coin for the prettier of the two babies and left it at that.