We the Living (33 page)

Leo was late. He had been detained at a University lecture. Kira waited, the Primus hissing feebly, keeping his dinner hot.

The telephone rang. She heard a child’s voice, trembling, panicky, gulping tears between words: “Is that you, Kira? . . . It’s Acia . . . Kira, please come over immediately, right away. . . . I’m scared. . . . There’s something wrong. . . . I think it’s Mother. . . . There’s no one home but Father—and he won’t call, and he won’t speak, and I’m scared. . . . There’s nothing to eat in the house. . . . Please, Kira, I’m so scared. . . . Please come over. Please, Kira. . . .”

With all the money she had, Kira bought a bottle of milk and two pounds of bread in a private store, on her way over.

Acia opened the door. Her eyes were slits in a purple, swollen face. She grabbed Kira’s skirt and sobbed dully, convulsively, her shoulders shaking, her nose buried in Kira’s hem.

“Acia! What happened? Where’s Irina? Where’s Victor?”

“Victor’s not home. Irina’s gone for the doctor. I called a tenant and he said to get the hell out. I’m scared. . . .”

Vasili Ivanovitch sat by his wife’s bed. His hands hung limply between his knees and he did not move. Maria Petrovna’s hair was spilled over the white pillow. She breathed, hissing, the white coverlet rising and falling jerkily. On the white coverlet there was a wide, dark stain.

Kira stood helplessly, clutching the milk bottle in one hand, the bread in the other. Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head slowly and looked at her.

“Kira . . .” he said indifferently. “. . . Milk. . . . Would you mind heating it? . . . It might help. . . .”

Kira found the Primus. She heated the milk. She held a cup to the trembling blue lips. Maria Petrovna swallowed twice and pushed the cup away.

“Hemorrhage . . .” said Vasili Ivanovitch. “Irina’s gone for the doctor. He has no phone. No other doctor will come. I have no money. The hospital won’t send anyone—we’re not Trade Union members.”

A candle burned on the table. Through a sickly, yellow haze, a dusty fog more than a light, three tall, bare, curtainless windows stared like black gashes. A white pitcher lay upturned on a table, slowly dripping a few last drops into a dark puddle on the floor. A yellow circle shivered on the ceiling, over the candle, and a yellow glow shivered on Maria Petrovna’s hands, as if her skin were trembling.

Maria Petrovna whined softly: “I’m all right . . . I’m all right . . . I know I’m all right. . . . Vasili just wants to frighten me. . . . No one can say I’m not all right. . . . I want to live . . . I’ll live. . . . Who said I won’t live?”

“Of course, you will, Aunt Marussia. You’re all right. Just lie still. Relax.”

“Kira, where’s my nail buffer? Find my nail buffer. Irina’s lost it again. I told her not to touch it. Where’s my nail buffer?”

Kira opened a drawer in search of the buffer. A sound stopped her. It was like pebbles rolling on a hard floor, like water gurgling through a clogged pipe and like an animal howling. Maria Petrovna was coughing. A dark froth ran down her white chin.

“Ice, Kira!” Vasili Ivanovitch cried. “Have we any ice?”

She ran, stumbling, down a dark corridor, to the kitchen. A thick coating of ice was frozen over the edge of the sink. She broke some off with the sharp, rusty blade of an old knife, cutting her hands. She came back, running, water dripping from the ice between her fingers.

Maria Petrovna howled, coughing: “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

They rolled the ice into a towel and put it on her chest. Red stains spread on her nightgown.

Suddenly she jerked herself up. The ice rolled, clattering, to the floor. A long pink strand of froth hung on her lower lip. Her eyes were wide with a horror beyond all human dignity. She was staring at Kira. She screamed:

“Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She fell back. Her hair jerked like snakes on the pillow and lay still. Her arm fell over the edge of the bed and lay still. A red bubble grew over her open mouth and burst in a spurt of something black and heavy, gurgling like the last drop through the clogged pipe. She did not move. Nothing moved on the bed but the black that slithered slowly down the skin of her throat.

Kira stood still.

Someone seized her hand. Vasili Ivanovitch buried his face in her hip and sobbed. He sobbed without a sound. She saw the gray hair shaking on his neck.

Behind a chair in a corner, Acia crouched on the floor and whined softly, monotonously.

Kira did not cry.

When she came home, Leo was sitting by the Primus, heating her dinner. He was coughing.

They sat at a small table in a dark corner of the restaurant. Kira had met Andrei at the Institute and he had invited her for a cup of tea with “real French pastry.” The restaurant was almost empty. From the sidewalk outside, a few faces stared through the window, dull, incredulous faces watching those who could afford to sit in a restaurant. At a table in the center, a man in a huge fur coat was holding a dish of pastry for a smiling woman who hesitated in her choice, her fingers fluttering over the glistening chocolate frostings, a diamond glistening on her finger. The restaurant smelt of old rubber and stale fish. A long, sticky paper tube dangled from the central chandelier, brown with glue, black-dotted with dead flies. The tube swayed every time the kitchen door was opened. Over the kitchen door hung a picture of Lenin trimmed with bows of red crêpe paper.

“Kira, I almost broke my word. I was going to call on you. I was worried. I still am. You look so . . . pale. Anything wrong, Kira?”

“Some . . . trouble . . . at home.”

“I had tickets for the ballet—‘Swan Lake.’ I waited for you, but you missed all your lectures.”

“I’m sorry. Was it beautiful?”

“I didn’t go.”

“Andrei, I think Pavel Syerov is trying to make trouble for you in the Party.”

“He probably is. I don’t like Pavel Syerov. While the Party is fighting speculators, he patronizes them. He’s been known to buy a foreign sweater from a smuggler.”

“Andrei, why doesn’t your Party believe in the right to live while one is not killed?”

“Do you mean Syerov or—yourself?”

“Myself.”

“In our fight, Kira, there is no neutrality.”

“You may claim the right to kill, as all fighters do. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living.”

She looked at the pitiless face before her; she saw two dark triangles in the sunken cheeks; the muscles of his face were taut. He was saying: “When one can stand any suffering, one can also see others suffer. This is martial law. Our time is dawn. There is a new sun rising, such as the world has never seen before. We are in the path of its first rays. Every pain, every cry of ours will be carried by these rays, as on a gigantic radius, down the centuries; every little figure will grow into an enormous shadow that will wipe out decades of future sorrow for every minute of ours.”

The waiter brought the tea and pastry.

There was a convulsive little jerk in Kira’s fingers as she raised a piece of pastry to her mouth, an involuntary, frightened hurry which was not mere greed for a rare delicacy.

“Kira!” Andrei gasped and dropped his fork. “Kira!”

She stared at him, frightened.

“Kira! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Andrei . . . I don’t know what you’re talking ab . . .” she tried to say, but knew what he had guessed.

“Wait! Don’t eat that. Waiter! A bowl of hot soup right away. Then—dinner. Everything you have. Hurry! . . . Kira, I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know it was that bad.”

She smiled feebly, helplessly: “I tried to find work. . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I know you don’t believe in using Party influence to help friends.”

“Oh, but this . . . Kira . . . this!” It was the first time she had ever seen him frightened. He jumped up: “Excuse me a moment.”

He strode across the room to a telephone. She could hear splinters of conversation: “Comrade Voronov. Urgent. . . . Andrei Taganov. . . . Conference? Interrupt it! . . . Comrade Voronov? . . . who has to be . . . immediately. . . . Yes . . . I don’t care. Make one. . . . Yes . . . No . . . No! . . . Tomorrow morning. . . . Yes. . . . Thank you, comrade. Good-bye.”

Andrei came back to the table. He smiled down at her startled, incredulous face. “Well, you go to work tomorrow. In the office of the ‘House of the Peasant. ’ It’s not very much of a job, but it’s one I could get for you right away—and it won’t be hard. Be there at nine. Ask for Comrade Voronov. He’ll know who you are. And—here.” He opened his wallet and, emptying it, pressed a roll of bills into her hand.

“Oh, Andrei! I can’t!”

“Well, maybe you can’t—for yourself. But you can—for someone else. Isn’t there someone at home who needs it—your family?”

She thought of someone at home who needed it. She took the money.

WHEN KIRA SLEPT, HER HEAD FELL BACK on the pillow, so that the faint starlight outside made a white triangle under her chin. Her lashes lay still on pale, calm cheeks. Her lips breathed softly, half open, like a child’s, with the hint of a smile in the corners, trusting and expectant, timid and radiantly young.

The alarm clock rang at six-thirty A.M. It had been ringing at six-thirty A.M. for the last two months.

Her first movement of the day was a convulsive leap into an icy precipice. She seized the alarm clock after its first hysterical shriek and turned it off—to let Leo sleep; then stood swaying, shivering, the sound of the alarm still ringing in her ears like an insult, a dark hatred in her body, a cry rising in every muscle like the pain of a great illness, calling her back into bed, her head too heavy for her body, the cold floor like fire under her bare feet.

Then she staggered blindly, groping in the darkness, into the bathroom. Her eyes wouldn’t open. She reached for the bathtub faucet; it had been running slowly, gurgling in the darkness, all night; it had to be left running or the pipes would freeze. Eyes closed, she slapped cold water over her face with one hand; with the other, she leaned unsteadily on the edge of the bathtub, to keep from falling forward head first.

Then her eyes opened and she pulled her nightgown off, steam rising from her wet arms in the frozen air, while she tried to smile, her teeth chattering, telling herself that she was awake now and the worst was over.

She dressed and slipped back into the bedroom. She did not turn on the light. She could see the black silhouette of the Primus on the table against the dark blue of the window. She struck a match, her body shielding the bed from the little flare of light. She pumped the handle nervously. The Primus wouldn’t light. The clock ticked in the darkness, the precious fleeting seconds hurrying her on. She pumped furiously, biting her lips. The blue flame sprang up at last. She put a pan of water over the flame.

She drank tea with saccharine and chewed slowly a piece of dry bread. The window before her was frozen into a solid pattern of white ferns that sparkled softly; beyond the window it was still night. She sat huddled by the table, afraid to move, trying to chew without a sound. Leo slept restlessly. He turned uneasily; he coughed, a dry, choking cough smothered by the pillow; he sighed once in a while in his sleep, a raucous sigh that was almost a moan.

She pulled on her felt boots, her winter coat, wound an old scarf around her throat. She tiptoed to the door, threw a last glance at the pale blue in the darkness that was Leo’s face, and brushed her lips with her finger tips in a soundless kiss. Then she opened the door very slowly and as slowly closed it again behind her.

The snow was still blue outside. Above the roofs, the blue darkness receded in circles, so that far away down the sky one could guess a paler blue if one looked hard. Somewhere beyond the houses, a tramway shrieked like an early bird of prey.

Kira bent forward, gathered her hands into her armpits, in a tight, shivering huddle against the wind. The cold caught her breath with a sharp pain in her nostrils. She ran, slipping on the frozen sidewalks, toward the distant tramway.

A line waited for the tramway. She stood, bent to the wind and silent as the others. When the tramway came, yellow squares of light in space, shaking toward them through the darkness, the line broke. There was a swift whirlpool at the narrow door, a rustle of crushed bodies; the yellow squares of lighted windows filled speedily with shadows pressed tightly together, and Kira was left outside as the bell rang and the tramway tore forward. There was half an hour to wait for the next one; she would be late; if she were late, she would be fired; she ran after the tramway, leaped, caught a brass handle; but there was no room on the steps; her feet were dragged down the frozen ground as the tramway gained speed; someone’s strong arm seized her shoulder blade and pulled her up; her one foot found space on the steps; a hoarse voice roared into her ear: “You—insane, citizen? That’s how so many get killed!”