“You’re welcome.” Vika looked at her with a smile. “I hope that now you will no longer argue that these are harmful poems?”

“These are wonderful poems,” Iskra sighed. “I think, no, I am even certain, that soon they will be recognized, and there’ll be a monument built for Sergey Yesenin.”

“What would you write on such a monument? Let’s conduct a competition: I’ll compose my own inscription and you will compose yours.”

They did so, and Vika immediately conceded that Iskra had won with her composition of “Thank you, heart, that beat for us.” They only unanimously agreed to replace the words “beat for” with “hurt for”.

“I’ve never really considered what love really is,” Iskra said with as much disinterest as possible, after they talked about school for a little while. “Probably it was the poems that made me think about it.”

“Dad says that in life, there are two sacred responsibilities that should be considered: for a woman, to learn to love, and for a man, to serve his work.”

Iskra was moving on to the topic that she had come for, and was pondering how to turn the conversation, and only for this reason did she fail to sink her teeth into this thesis like a bulldog. She let it pass by, only noting to herself that for a woman, serving her work was as important as it was for a man, as the Great October Revolution had liberated the slave of hearth and husband.

“How do you picture happiness?” Vika asked, as her guest had plunged deep into thought.

“Happiness? Happiness is being useful to one’s people.”

“No,” Vika smiled. “That is duty, and I’m asking about happiness.”

Iskra had always imagined happiness as being, so to say, astride a steed. Happiness is help for oppressed peoples, it is the destruction of capitalism in the whole world, it’s “I went off to fight with a gun and a pack, so the poor in Granada could get the land back”; her breath would catch when she read those lines. But now she suddenly thought that Vika was right, that this was not happiness, but duty. And she asked, to win some time,

“So how do you picture it?”

“Loving and being loved,” dreamily said Vika. “No, I don’t want some extraordinary kind of love: let it be ordinary, but real. And let there be children. Three: I’m all alone, and that’s not fun. No, two boys and a girl. And I’d do everything I could for my husband, so he would be…” she wanted to say “famous”, but held it back. “So he would always be happy with me. And so we would live together joyously and die on one day, as Grin says.”

“Who?”

“You haven’t read Grin? I’ll give you the book and you absolutely must read it.”

“Thank you.” Iskra thought for a little while. “Don’t you think that’s a bourgeois mindset?”

“I knew you’d say that.” Vika laughed. “No, it’s no bourgeois mindset. It’s a normal kind of womanly happiness.”

“What about work?”

“I don’t rule it out, but work is our duty, and that is all. Dad thinks that these are separate things: duty is public, and happiness is purely personal.”

“And what does your dad say about a bourgeois mindset?”

“He says that it is a condition of a person when he becomes a slave without even noticing. A slave of things, of comfort, of money, career, ease, habit. He ceases to be free, and he develops a typically slavish worldview. He loses his self, his opinion, begins to agree, to be a yes-man for those whom he sees as his masters. That’s how dad explained the bourgeois state of mind to me. He calls people bourgeois if for them, convenience is stronger than honor.”

“Honor is an aristocratic concept,” Iskra objected. “We refuse to acknowledge it.”

Vika gave a strange smile. Then she said, with a sad tone in her voice, “I want to love you, Iskra, you’re the best girl that I know. But I can’t love you, and I’m not sure that I will ever love you the way that I want to, because you’re a maximalist.”

Iskra suddenly really wanted to cry, but she held it back.

The girls sat in silence for a long while, as if getting used to the confession being said out loud. Then Iskra asked quietly, “But is it so bad to be a maximalist?”

“No, it’s not bad at all, and I’m certain they are necessary to society. But it is very hard to be friends with them, and loving them is just impossible. Do keep this in mind, please, you are, after all, a future woman.”

“Yes, of course.” Iskra got up, suppressing a sigh. “I should go. Thank you… for Yesenin.”