We the Living (14 page)

“They don’t always want to use them,” he answered calmly, “so they have to find out for themselves.”

“For themselves? Or for the Party?”

“Sometimes both. But not always.”

They were out of the auditorium, walking together down the corridor. A strong hand clapped Kira’s back; and she heard a laughter that was too loud.

“Well, well, well, Comrade Argounova!” Comrade Sonia roared into her face. “What a surprise! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Walking with Comrade Taganov, the reddest Communist we’ve got?”

“Afraid I’ll corrupt him, Comrade Sonia?”

“Corrupt?
Him?
Not a chance, dear, not a chance. Well, bye-bye. Have to run. Have three meetings at four o’clock—and promised to attend them all!”

Comrade Sonia’s short legs marched resonantly down the hall, her arm swinging a heavy brief case like a knapsack.

“Are you going home,
Comrade Argounova
?” he asked.

“Yes,
Comrade Taganov.
”

“Would you mind if you’re compromised by being seen with a very red Communist?”

“Not at all—if your reputation won’t be tarnished by being seen with a very white lady.”

Outside, snow melted into mud under many hurried steps and the mud froze into sharp, jagged ridges. He took Kira’s arm. He looked at her with a silent inquiry for approval. She answered by closing her eyes and nodding. They walked silently. Then she looked up at him and smiled.

She said: “I thought that Communists never did anything except what they had to do; that they never believed in doing anything but what they had to do.”

“That’s strange,” he smiled, “I must be a very poor Communist. I’ve always done only what I wanted to do.”

“Your revolutionary duty?”

“There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don’t want to do it—it isn’t right. If it’s right and you don’t want to do it—you don’t know what right is and you’re not a man.”

“Haven’t you ever wanted a thing for no reason save one: that
you
wanted it?”

“Certainly. That’s always been my only reason. I’ve never wanted things unless they could help my cause. For, you see, it is
my
cause.”

“And your cause is to deny yourself for the sake of millions?”

“No. To bring millions up to where I want them—for my sake.”

“And when you think you’re right, you do it at any price?”

“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.”

“I loathe your ideals.”

“Why?”

“For one reason, mainly, chiefly and eternally, no matter how much your Party promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring mankind. Whatever your other claims may be, there’s one you can’t avoid, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state.”

“What better purpose can he live for?”

“Don’t you know,” her voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide, “don’t you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: ‘This is
mine
’? Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don’t you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?”

He answered: “No.”

“Comrade Taganov,” she whispered, “how much you have to learn!”

He looked down at her with his quiet shadow of a smile and patted her hand like a child’s. “Don’t you know,” he asked, “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?”

“Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What
are
your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who
are
life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.”

“I’m glad. So do I.”

“But then. . . .”

“Only I don’t enjoy the luxury of loathing. I’d rather try to make them worth looking at, to bring them up to my level. And you’d make a great little fighter—on our side.”

“I think you know I could never be that.”

“I think I do. But why don’t you fight against us, then?”

“Because I have less in common with you than the enemies who fight you, have. I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live.”

“Isn’t it a strange request?”

“Is it? And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?”

“And if your plumbing pipes got badly out of order, wouldn’t it be preposterous to sit still and not make an effort to mend them?”

“I wish you luck, Comrade Taganov. I hope that when you find those pipes running red with your own blood—you’ll still think they were worth mending.”

“I’m not afraid of that. I’m more afraid of what times like ours will do to a woman like you.”

“Then you do see what these times of yours are?”

“We all do. We’re not blind. I know that, perhaps, it is a living hell. Still, if I had a choice, I’d want to be born when I was born, and live the days I’m living, because now we don’t sit and dream, we don’t moan, we don’t wish—we do, we act, we build!”

Kira liked the sound of the steps next to hers, steady, unhurried; and the sound of the voice that matched the steps. He had been in the Red Army; she frowned at his battles, but smiled with admiration at the scar on his forehead. He smiled ironically at the story of Argounov’s lost factories, but frowned, worried, at Kira’s old shoes. His words struggled with hers, but his eyes searched hers for support. She said “no” to the words he spoke, and “yes” to the voice that spoke them.

She stopped at a poster of the State Academic Theaters, the three theaters that had been called “Imperial” before the revolution.

“ ‘Rigoletto,’ ” she said wistfully. “Do you like opera, Comrade Taganov?”

“I’ve never heard one.”

She walked on. He said: “But I get plenty of tickets from the Communist Cell. Only I’ve never had the time. Do you go to the theater often?”

“Not very often. Last time was six years ago. Being a bourgeois, I can’t afford a ticket.”

“Would you go with me if I asked you?”

“Try it.”

“Would you go to the opera with me, Comrade Argounova?”

Her eyebrows danced slyly. She asked: “Hasn’t your Communist Cell at the Institute a secret bureau of information about all students?”

He frowned a little, perplexed: “Why?”

“You could find out from them that my name is Kira.”

He smiled, a strangely warm smile on hard, grave lips. “But that won’t give you a way of finding out that my name is Andrei.”

“I’ll be glad to accept your invitation, Andrei.”

“Thank you, Kira.”

At the door of the red-brick house on Moika she extended her hand.

“Can you break Party discipline to shake a counter-revolutionary hand?” she asked.

He held her hand firmly. “Party discipline isn’t to be broken,” he answered, “but, oh! how far it can be stretched!”

Their eyes held each other longer than their hands, in a silent, bewildering understanding. Then he walked away with the light, precise steps of a soldier. She ran up four flights of stairs, her old tam in one hand, shaking her tousled hair, laughing.

ALEXANDER DIMITRIEVITCH KEPT HIS SAVINGS SEWN IN his undershirt. He had developed the habit of raising his hand to his heart once in a while, as if he had gas pains; he felt the roll of bills; he liked the security under his fingertips. When he needed money, he cut the heavy seam of white thread and sighed as the load grew lighter. On November sixteenth, he cut the seam for the last time.

The special tax on private traders for the purpose of relieving the famine on the Volga had to be paid, even though it closed the little textile store in the bakery shop. Another private enterprise had failed.

Alexander Dimitrievitch had expected it. They opened on every corner, fresh and hopeful like mushrooms after a rain; and, like mushrooms, they faded before their first morning was over. Some men were successful. He had seen them: men in resplendent new fur coats, with white, flabby cheeks that made him think of butter for breakfast, and eyes that made him raise his hand, nervously, to the roll over his heart. These men were seen in the front rows at the theaters; they were seen leaving the new confectioners’ with round white cake boxes the price of which could keep a family for two months; they were seen hiring taxis—and paying for them. Insolent street children called them “Nepmen”; their cartoons adorned the pages of Red newspapers—with scornful denunciations of the new vultures of NEP; but their warm fur hats were seen in the windows of automobiles rocketing the highest Red officials through the streets of Petrograd. Alexander Dimitrievitch wondered dully about their secrets. But the dreaded word “speculator” gave him a cold shudder; he lacked the talents of a racketeer.

He left the empty bakery boxes; but he carried home his faded cotton sign. He folded it neatly and put it away in a drawer where he kept old stationery with the embossed letterhead of the Argounov textile factories.

“I will not become a Soviet employee if we all starve,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch.

Galina Petrovna moaned that something had to be done. Unexpected help appeared in the person of a former bookkeeper from the Argounov factory.

He wore glasses and a soldier’s coat and he was not careful about shaving. But he rubbed his hands diffidently and he knew how to respect authority under all circumstances.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, Alexander Dimitrievitch, sir,” he wailed. “This is no life for you. Now, if we get together . . . if you just invest a little, I’ll do all the work. . . .”

They formed a partnership. Alexander Dimitrievitch was to manufacture soap; the unshaved bookkeeper was to sell it; had an excellent corner on the Alexandrovsky market.

“What? How to make it?” he enthused. “Simple as an omelet. I’ll get you the greatest little soap recipe. Soap is the stuff of the moment. The public hasn’t had any for so long they’ll tear it out of your hands. We’ll put them all out of business. I know a place where we can get spoiled pork fat. No good for eating—but just right for soap.”

Alexander Dimitrievitch spent his last money to buy spoiled pork fat. He melted it in a big brass laundry tub on the kitchen stove. He bent over the steaming fumes, blinking, his shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, stirring the mixture with a wooden paddle. The kitchen door had to be kept open; there was no other stove to heat the apartment. The bitter, musty odor of a factory basement rose, with the whirling steam of a laundry, to the streaked ceiling. Galina Petrovna chopped the spoiled pork fat on the kitchen table, delicately crooking her little finger, clearing her throat noisily.

Lydia played the piano. Lydia had always boasted of two accomplishments: her magnificent hair, which she brushed for half an hour every morning, and her music, which she practiced for three hours each day. Galina Petrovna asked for Chopin. Lydia played Chopin. The wistful music, delicate as rose petals falling slowly in the darkness of an old park, rang softly through the haze of soap fumes. Galina Petrovna did not know why tears dropped on her knife; she thought that the pork fat hurt her eyes.

Kira sat at the table with a book. The odor from the kettle raked her throat as if with sharp little prongs. She paid no attention to it. She had to learn and remember the words in the book for that bridge she would build some day. But she stopped often. She looked at her hand, at the palm of her right hand. Stealthily, she brushed her palm against her cheek, slowly, from the temple to the chin. It seemed a surrender to everything she had always disliked. She blushed; but no one could see it through the fumes.

The soap came out in soft, soggy squares of a dirty brown. Alexander Dimitrievitch found an old brass button off his yachting jacket and imprinted an anchor in the corner of each square.

“Great idea! Trademark,” said the unshaved bookkeeper. “We’ll call it ‘Argounov’s Navy Soap.’ A good revolutionary name.”

A pound of soap cost Alexander Dimitrievitch more than it did on the market.

“That’s nothing,” said his partner. “That’s better. They’ll think more of it if they have to pay more. It’s quality soap. Not the old Jukov junk.”

He had a tray with straps to wear over his shoulders. He arranged the brown squares carefully on the tray and departed, whistling, for the Alexandrovsky market.