II. Mascha 
         
         
         
         Moravagine had already sacrificed the greater part of his fortune
         to the revolutionary movement. The small sums that we could
         still lay our hands on were swallowed up by the urgent needs
         of the Party. One day we would be In Warsaw, the next in
         Lodz, then in Byelostock, Kiev or Odessa. We were lodged by
         devoted partisans who almost always lived in the ghettoes of
         these towns. We picked up work here and there in dock-yards
         or factories or, when help failed to arrive from abroad, we stole
         merchandise from the docks or from railway warehouses. After
         such crimes we usually disappeared into the countryside~ village
         schoolmasters would hide us for months on end and finally
         direct us to senior workers, overseers or foremen, who would
         give us employment for a time in the mines of the Urals or the
         steel foundries of the Don basin. Moravagine experienced a
         sensual pleasure in plunging at last into the most anonymous
         abyss of human poverty. Nothing discouraged or disgusted him.
         not even the enervating promiscuity of the poor folk who took
         us in, the putreacent filth of the workers and peasants, the
         nauseating dishes which, in the towns, certain wretched Jews
         offered us at table, nor the overweening presumptuousness that
         was the fashion in revolutionary circles. I could never quite
         grow used to the communist manners of the Russian students
         and intellectuals. and when Moravagine saw me flinch before
         an overripe pickled herring or a plate of kascha, or grimace
         when a comrade borrowed my underwear or pulled on a pair
         of my trousers, he would laugh his head off, enormously
         amused.
              For his part. he was at home everywhere, and I never saw
         him so gay. so talkative and carefree as he was at that time. He
         passed himself off as the famous terrorist Simbirsky, Samuel
         
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          Simbirsky, the narodnovolye, the assassin of Alexander II, 
          escaped from Sakhalin, and his prestige was tremendous every-
          where. It was Mascha Uptschak who had had the idea of this
          subterfuge when the true Samuel Simbirsky died in an attic in
          the Impasse du Maine in Paris. of tuberculosis of the bone.
                Mascha stayed with us through all our wandering. Mora-
          vagine was very taken with her and this relationship which, as
          we shall see, developed in a rather unusual fashion, later had a
          great effect upon his ideas.
                Mascha Uptschak was a Lithuanian Jewess. She was a big
          woman with an opulent bosom. and a belly and behind that
          were, one might say. cumbersome. From this abundant body
          protruded a long, soft, flexible neck which supported a minu-
          scule, bony head with drawn features, a sickly mouth and a
          forehead like a dream. With its frizzled hair it resembled the
          pasty face of a romantic poet, the face of a Novalis. Her great, 
          staring eyes were pale blue, cold blue, blue enamel. Mascha
          was extremely short-sighted. She could have been between
          thirty-five and thirty-eight. She had been a serious scholar in
          Germany, with a solid education in mathematics behind her,
          and had even written a book on perpetual motion. She was a
          cruel, cold and logical woman, never at a loss for Ideas, with
          a satanic inventiveness and perversity when it came to planning
          some new stroke of devilry such as carrying out an assassina-
          tion or slipping out of some police snare. It was she who pre-
          pared our plans down to the slightest detail. and everything
          was foreseen and timed, minute by minute. Each of us knew
          exactly what he had to do, second by second, covering a certain
          area, taking up a certain position, making a certain gesture,
          stooping, running, one, two, three, four, leaping with the bomb,
          firing a revolver in his own mouth or making off; and deeds and
          events took place exactiy as she had calculated, leading one to
          the other and falling into place just as she with her prescience
          and realism had said they would. She often astounded us with
          the daring of her ideas and the clear and logical way in which
          she explained them. She was a mixture of tragic actress and
          prophetess. She had an infallible way of choosing, among all the
          vague generalities that made up the intelligence we received,
         
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