No sooner does she cross the threshold than she drops the bundle that was her pretend babe and kicks it, scattering the rags. Scraps of cloth fly. She picks up an oil lamp and lights it, then gathers the cloth scraps from the floor and rolls them up under one arm. She uncovers her head and neck, her thick mane is wild, and she shakes it out as she traverses the dark passageway to the back of the shop. Clementine puts the bundle of scraps on the table and wraps herself in her cloak once more as she says to herself, “It’s cold.”

Inside the workshop, which is large, no one sits ruining their eyesight at the sewing machines. Clementine once worked here, her family’s breadwinner, supporting her grandmother and her siblings until first the old woman, then the little ones, died of the flu; her mother had died in another epidemic when she was five years old. She’s a seamstress by training (one of the best in St. Petersburg) with the heart of an activist—she was relieved of her responsibilities for participating in a strike and briefly imprisoned thereafter, but since she’s an attractive woman, they underestimated the role she had played in organizing her coworkers, ignoring their only informant, certain that he was laying the blame on her to protect the real culprit. That’s Clementine: she’s wary, and she’s angry. Back in those days, all she wanted was for the wealthy to have some pity, to show some charity to the poor and treat the workers with respect, but that experience showed her how foolish she had been, and now she’s a true radical. She exchanged her needle for a sword, and not just in a manner of speaking: she traded in her scissors and thread for homemade bombs.

The workshop is dark, except for her lamp and a timid candle burning in the far left corner. Clementine says aloud, “It’s very cold. How can you sew, your fingers stiff from this cold? It’s freezing!” She begins arranging her hair to cover it again. “Sitting here without natural light, in this damp air, how can you stand it?”

In the darkness, the deep, well-enunciated voice of an educated man answers her. “Eleven and a half hours a day.”

“What are you doing here, Vladimir?” Clementine is taken aback. “Didn’t you promise me not to use the pick again?”

“I had to…. Eleven and a half hours a day.”

“Without stopping,” Clementine replies as her expression fills with a different kind of light (her face is always full of light), one of joy. “An eleven-and-a-half-hour day.”

“Compared to the fourteen they worked until a few years ago, it’s nothing.”