The Librarian

Two squads were dispatched urgently into the yard to guard the gates and the fence—no one could be allowed to slip away.

The approaches to the director’s office and the reception area were blocked off to exclude the possibility of a phone call. From the cubbyhole of the caretaker Chizhov, who was drinking his vodka for the last time in his life, they took a wood cleaver, a carpenter’s axe, a small sledgehammer, a screwdriver with a long blade, a crowbar, a shovel and a spade for clearing snow.

The old women infiltrated the kitchen, where they found half a dozen knives and a meat cleaver, with which they promptly and pitilessly dispatched two of the female cooks and the dishwashers. The third cook, Ankudinova, was a massive woman: scattering the old women with her mighty arms, she managed to get to the door and hid somewhere on that floor of the building. They didn’t pursue her for the time being.

The cutting weapons were given to the strongest old women, those who in their previous lives had been used to slitting the throats of cattle and poultry. The sledgehammer went to a large individual of proletarian origin, a former structural fitter.

The death squads scattered across the various floors. The nurses mistakenly thought they could escape by locking themselves in the wards. The sledgehammer broke down the door and the old women poured in through the breach, jostling and growling. They threw the nurses on the floor and, not having any cold weapons, tore at them with their hands and gnawed on them with their false teeth or removed the rubber pad from a crutch so that it wouldn’t soften the blow and beat the nurses on the face, the breasts and the stomach with the wooden frame.

Three nursing assistants managed to get up onto the roof and batten the hatch behind them. They tried to get down the fire-escape ladder. Old women, prepared to die themselves in order to prevent an escape, jumped out of nearby windows and clutched on tight to the fugitives’ dressing gowns. Dragged down by the extra weight, the nursing assistants tumbled off the ladder with a squeal and fell, breaking their bones.

In the men’s section a squad of ten old women with pillows ran from bed to bed, suffocating the paralysed old men. On Gorn’s orders the men who could walk were herded together and driven onto the knives. The old men went as meekly as sheep, making no attempt to escape.

Only one man managed to flee—a war veteran, the retired colonel Nikolai Kaledin. Despite his age, he had retained the ability to think and fight.

Kaledin, the cook Ankudinova, the nursing assistants Basova and Shubina, and the building manager Protasov offered worthy resistance. They managed to break through to the firefighting-equipment point and get hold of two crowbars and a gaff.

With courage worthy of the Ryazan folk hero Yevpaty Kolovrat, the small group broke through the lines of old women several times, but there was nowhere they could go to escape from them. The first to fall was Shubina, and then the building manager was killed. The cook Ankudinova, the nursing assistant Basova and the colonel were pinned against the wall and held there with crutch blows from a distance until the old women with the axes and knives arrived.

The old women piled corpses on beds to increase the force of the blow. Loaded up with bodies, the beds smashed into the small group like trucks with battering rams. The colonel, Ankudinova and Basova were crushed against the wall. Kaledin fell and was finished off immediately, and Mokhova ordered the old women not to finish off the courageous cook and nursing assistant

These women were no longer young and they possessed exceptional strength and fighting spirit—Gorn had informed Mokhova of this and suggested luring Ankudinova and Basova over to their side.

The outcome was that the nursing home was taken in less than an hour. Mokhova’s army lost only six old “mums”. Another ten of them were slightly injured.

On Monday a new shift came to work—a female doctor, a senior nurse and nursing assistants. These were easily captured, frightened and enslaved. No further killings were necessary; the old women had already realized their own strength.

Paradoxically, no one found out about the bloody battle. The building stood out on the very edge of town. Not many people visited the old folk. The last check had been a month before the skirmish and no review committee was expected now until the New Year. In any case, times were getting difficult and the authorities had no time for the elderly.

Mokhova made a careful study of the personal files on each employee of the Home who had been killed. In all cases personnel without families had been selected.

The old director Avanesov lived alone. They put an old woman in his flat, and she told everyone she was Avanesov’s sister. Any visitors and review commissions could be dealt with by the tamed doctor and senior nurse. Mokhova herself attended meetings at the social-security department, presenting a fake letter with Avanesov’s seal.

The nursing assistants proved to be gratifying material. These women, who had come here twenty years earlier from remote villages, had been completely written off by their relatives. Their lives were failures, they had worked hard, never married and vegetated in hostels. Mokhova sent appropriate letters to the hostels, saying that so-and-so had finally been allocated her own living space.

The caretaker Chizhov, two unmarried nurses and the dishwashers had been living temporarily in an outhouse on the grounds of the Home, so no problems at all arose with them. The dead continued to receive wages for many years and were then sacked retrospectively.

A document was cooked up, supposedly from Protasov, to say that he had been recruited to a job somewhere in the Urals. False documents were also used to dispatch the dead cooks to some remote back-of-beyond. The cohabitee of one nurse was sent a fake letter from her, saying that she was leaving for the Soviet Far East with her lover. Another nurse was divorced and had only a mother and a son. They were finished off by a suicide granny who was sent to them and poisoned both her victims and herself with carbon monoxide.

That left the numerous dead old men and the problem of burying them. Even with the strength that the Book granted them, the old women could not have buried so many corpses rapidly. Mokhova simply hired an excavator, explaining that a foundation pit needed to be dug for a new laundry.

The excavator dug the pit in one day and they piled the corpses into it. The old men didn’t have any near and dear ones, and if any were to show up suddenly, there was an appropriate record of death ready and waiting.

The captured Home became Mokhova’s citadel. In civilian terms, it was effectively impregnable, with a three-metre-high wall and sturdy gates. A vigilant female guard was always on duty at the checkpoint and the wall was patrolled by an armed detachment.

The army was distinguished by iron discipline and obedience. Mokhova had found something with which to oppose both Lagudov’s select representatives of the intelligentsia and Shulga’s lumpens—the principle of collective motherhood proved to be a reliable ideological platform.

As a former dean of a faculty of Marxism-Leninism, Polina Vasilyevna Gorn knew many things, and in particular that no organization would survive for long without a General Line. “Promise them eternal life. And then we’ll see how it goes,” Gorn wisely suggested to Mokhova.

Mokhova lined up her militia in the yard and told them the story of the Books and the Great Goal. The conclusion to be drawn from her story was that anyone who stayed with Mokhova to the end would be rewarded with eternity. When they heard these dubious good tidings, the old women set the parade ground ringing with roars of triumph. They had acquired a Great Dream.