Read The Property of a Lady for Free Online Page A

age of eighteen, and still a loner, he entered the St. Petersburg Politeknik College on another scholarship. The students were mostly the sons of nobility or the military and professional classes, with very few from the working class and even fewer from the peasantry. Grigori had no affinity with any of them, but he acquired a bitter grudging envy for the noble sons who treated their studies with such carefree contempt and who spent more money every night on drink and gypsy girls than Grigori had ever conceived of having in his pocket. One part of him longed to be like them and the other part hated them, because he knew it was impossible. It was then that he realized that he, and others like him—for by now they were growing in numbers—formed a new class, and he knew that one day it would be a force to be reckoned with.
    Young Grigori was a willing victim of the new ideology. He absorbed the teachings of Marx and Engels, Trotsky and Lenin, eagerly, because they struck a chord in his heart.
He
was the man they were talking to, the peasant who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps through hard work and education.
His
were the brains and skills the new Socialist Democratic Labor Party would need when the time of revolution came, as it surely would. Grigori joined the Party and the secret meetings were the highlights of his week. He was soon given minor administrativejobs to do, and by his diligence and dedication earned the respect of the area leaders.
    When he graduated from the Politeknik with a degree in engineering, he got a job with the railway company in Moscow. At last he knew how to build the bridges he had dreamed about as a boy. But that dream was already fading into one of the new Russia owned by the people, for the people, a utopia where ultimately all social categories would be eliminated. Grigori truly believed in his heart that with this accomplished, all men would be equal and would share in their country’s prosperity.
    He became more and more active in the Party, touring the regions, recruiting members, and encouraging the local workers’ committees, or “Soviets,” to strike for their rights. The Bolshevist leader, Lenin, the man glimpsed on the bleak station platform in Siberia twenty years before, remained his idol.
    It was on one of these trips that he met Natalya. She was sixteen years old, the age his own mother had been when she married his father, and she had the cool white skin, rosy cheeks, and bright blond hair typical of the region of Byelorussia. Natalya became his only other obsession. It didn’t matter that she was uneducated. The stocky dark peasant was sensually in love with her plump milky fairness. It was enough just to touch her smooth, flawless skin, to kiss her cherry-red lips that were as innocent as his own and run his hands through her coarse yellow hair. Her family knew he was a catch for Natalya, and the couple were married within a month.
    Grigori took his new bride back to the dismal room that was his “home” in Moscow, and the country girl struggled her best to cope with life in the big city. She kept the old-fashioned samovar bubbling so that she could serve tea to his “friends” when they came for meetings and was secretly shocked when all they drank was vodka. But she had no idea of what their talk of “anarchy” meant, and Grigori traveled so much she was often alone.
    He knew she was unhappy, and after a few months, when she was pregnant with their first child, he took her back to her family in Byelorussia, visiting her as often as he could. Four sons were born in quick succession. He was happy and over the years his prestige with the Party increased. And then tragedy struck with the typhus epidemic that wiped out many thousands of people, including three of his boys. Only Boris, the youngest, was spared.
    In 1914 Russia went to war against the Germans and Grigori was inducted into the army. Because of his degree and his riding skills, he was made a