We the Living (70 page)

Leo chuckled, his eyes dark, his mouth twisted: “A disappointment, isn’t it, Comrade Taganov?”

Andrei did not answer. He took the dresses out slowly, one by one, and ran his fingers through the pockets, through the soft folds that smelled of a French perfume.

“I say you can’t, citizen!” The guard’s voice roared suddenly behind the door. “You can’t go in now!”

There was the sound of a struggle behind the door, as if an arm had pushed a body aside.

A voice screamed, and it was not a woman’s voice, it was not a female’s voice, it was the ferocious howl of an animal in mortal agony: “Let me in there! Let me in!”

Andrei looked at the door and walked to it slowly and threw it open.

Andrei Taganov and Kira Argounova stood face to face.

He asked slowly, evenly, the syllables falling like measured drops of water: “Citizen Argounova, do you live here?”

She answered, her head high, her eyes holding his, the sound of her voice like his: “Yes.”

She stepped into the room; the soldier closed the door.

Andrei Taganov turned very slowly, his right shoulder drooping, every tendon of his body pulled to the effort of the motion, very cautiously, as if a knife had been thrust between his shoulder blades and he had to move carefully, not to disturb it. His left arm hung unnaturally, bent at the elbow, his fingers half-closed as if holding something they could not spill.

He turned to the soldiers and said: “Search that cabinet—and the boxes in the corner.”

Then he walked back to the open wardrobe; his steps and the logs of the fireplace creaked in the silence.

Kira leaned against the wall, her hat in her hand. The hat slipped out of her fingers and fell to the floor, unnoticed.

“I’m sorry, dearest,” said Leo. “I hoped it would be over before you came back.”

She was not looking at Leo. She was looking at the tall figure in a leather jacket with a holster on his hip.

Andrei walked to her dresser, and opened the drawers, and she saw her underwear in his hands, white batiste nightgowns, lace ruffles crumpled in his steady, unhurried fingers.

“Look through the davenport pillows,” Andrei ordered the soldiers, “and lift that rug.”

Kira stood pressed against the wall, her knees sagging, her hips, arms and shoulder blades holding her upright.

“That will be all,” Andrei ordered the soldiers. He closed the last drawer, evenly, without sound.

He took his brief case from the table and turned to Leo. He said, his mouth opening strangely, his upper lip motionless and only the lower one moving to form the sounds: “Citizen Kovalensky, you’re under arrest.”

Leo shrugged and reached silently for his coat. His mouth was drooping contemptuously, but he noticed that his fingers were trembling. He threw his head up, and flung his words at Andrei: “I’m sure this is the most pleasant duty you’ve ever performed, Comrade Taganov.”

The soldiers picked up their bayonets, kicking aside the things on the cluttered floor.

Leo walked to the mirror and adjusted his tie, his coat, his hair, with the meticulous precision of a man dressing for an important social engagement. His fingers were not trembling any longer. He folded his handkerchief neatly and slipped it into his breast pocket.

Andrei stood waiting.

Leo stopped before Kira on his way out. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye, Kira?” he asked.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a long kiss. Andrei stood waiting.

“I have only one last favor to ask, Kira,” Leo whispered. “I hope you’ll forget me.”

She did not answer.

A soldier threw the door open. Andrei walked out and Leo followed. The soldier closed the door behind them.

LEO HAD BEEN LOCKED IN a cell at the G.P.U. Andrei had come home. At the gate of the palace garden, a Party comrade, hurrying into the Club, had stopped him.

“You’re giving us a report on the agrarian situation tonight, Comrade Taganov, aren’t you?” he had asked.

“Yes,” Andrei had answered.

“At nine o’clock, isn’t it? We’re all looking forward to it, Comrade Taganov. See you at nine.”

“Yes,” Andrei had answered.

He had walked slowly through the deep snow of the garden, up the long stairs, to his dark room.

A Club window was lighted in the palace and a yellow square fell across the floor. Andrei took off his cap, his leather jacket, his gun. He stood by the fireplace, kicking gray coals with his toe. He threw a log on the coals and struck a match.

He sat on a box by the fire, his hands hanging limply between his knees, his hands and his forehead pink in the darkness.

He heard steps on the landing outside, then a hand knocking sharply. He had not locked the door. He said: “Come in.”

Kira came in. She slammed the door behind her and stood in the archway of his room. He could not see her eyes in the darkness; black shadows swallowed her eyes and forehead; but the red glow fell on her mouth, and her mouth was wide, loose, brutal.

He rose and stood silently, looking at her.

“Well?” she threw at him savagely. “What are you going to do about it?”

He said slowly: “If I were you, I’d get out of here.”

She leaned against the archway, asking: “And if I don’t?”

“Get out of here,” he repeated.

She tore her hat off and flung it aside, she threw her coat off and dropped it to the floor.

“Get out, you—”

“—whore?” she finished for him. “Certainly. I just want to be sure you know that that’s what I am.”

He asked: “What do you want? I have nothing to say to you.”

“But I have. And you’ll listen. So you’ve caught me, haven’t you, Comrade Taganov? And you’re going to have your revenge? You came with your soldiers, with a gun on your hip, Comrade Taganov of the G.P.U., and you arrested him? And now you’re going to use all your influence, all your great Party influence, to see that he’s put before the firing squad, aren’t you? Perhaps you’ll even ask for the privilege of giving the order to fire? Go ahead! Have your revenge. And this is mine. I’m not pleading for him. I have nothing to fear any more. But, at least, I can speak. And I’ll speak. I have so much to say to you, to all of you, and I’ve kept silent for so long that it’s going to tear me to pieces! I have nothing to lose. But you have.”

He said: “Don’t you think it’s useless? Why say anything? If you have any excuses to offer . . .”

She laughed, a human laughter that did not sound human, that did not sound like laughter: “You fool! I’m proud of what I’ve done! Hear me! I don’t regret it! I’m proud of it! So you think I loved you, don’t you? I loved you, but I was unfaithful to you, on the side, as most women are? Well, then, listen: all you were to me, you and your great love, and your kisses, and your body, all they meant was only a pack of crisp, white, square, ten-ruble bills with a sickle and hammer printed in the corner! Do you know where those bills went? To a tubercular sanatorium in the Crimea. Do you know what they paid for? For the life of a man I loved long before I ever saw you, for the life of a body that had possessed mine before you ever touched it—and now you’re holding him in one of your cells and you’re going to shoot him. Why not? It’s fair enough. Shoot him. Take his life. You’ve paid for it.”

She saw his eyes, and they were not hurt, they were not angry. They were frightened. He said: “Kira . . . I . . . I . . . I didn’t know.”

She leaned back, and crossed her arms, and rocked softly, laughing: “So you loved me? So I was the highest of women, a woman like a temple, like a military march, like a god’s statue? Remember who told me that? Well, look at me! I’m only a whore and you’re the one who made the first payment! I sold myself—for money—and you paid it. Down in the gutter, that’s where I belong, and your great love put me there. I thought you’d be glad to know that. Aren’t you? So you think I loved you? I thought of Leo when you held me in your arms! When I spoke of love—I was speaking to him. Every kiss you got, every word, every hour was given to him, for him. I’ve never loved him as I loved him in your bed! . . . No, I won’t leave you your memories. They’re his. I love him. Do you hear me? I love him! Go ahead! Kill him. Nothing you can do to him will compare with what I’ve done to you. You know that, don’t you?”

She stood, swaying, and her shadow rose to the ceiling, and the shadow rocked as if it were going to crash down.

He repeated helplessly, as if she were not present, as if he were hanging on to the syllables for support: “I didn’t know. . . .”

“No, you didn’t know. But it was very simple. And not very unusual. Go through the garrets and basements where men live in your Red cities and see how many cases like this you can find. He wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know. But he was one who could have lived. There aren’t many of them, so they don’t count with you. The doctor said he was going to die. And I loved him. You’ve learned what that means, too, haven’t you? He didn’t need much. Only rest, and fresh air, and food. He had no right to that, had he? Your State said so. We tried to beg. We begged humbly. Do you know what they said? There was a doctor in a hospital and he said he had hundreds on his waiting list.”

She leaned forward, her voice soft, confidential, she spread her hands out, trying to explain, suddenly gentle and businesslike and childishly insistent, her lips soft and a little bewildered, and only her eyes fixed and in her eyes, alone, a horror that did not belong in a room where human beings lived but only in a morgue:

“You see, you must understand this thoroughly. No one does. No one sees it, but I do, I can’t help it, I see it, you must see it, too. You understand? Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Millions of what? Stomachs, and heads, and legs, and tongues, and souls. And it doesn’t even matter whether they fit together. Just millions. Just flesh. Human flesh. And they—it—had been registered and numbered, you know, like tin cans on a store shelf. I wonder if they’re registered by the person or by the pound? And they had a chance to go on living. But not Leo. He was only a man. All stones are cobblestones to you. And diamonds—they’re useless, because they sparkle too brightly in the sun, and it’s too hard on the eyes, and it’s too hard under the hoofs marching into the proletarian future. You don’t pave roads with diamonds. They may have other uses in the world, but of those you’ve never learned. That is why you had sentenced him to death, and others like him, an execution without a firing squad. There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me that a hundred thousand workers had died in the civil war and why couldn’t one aristocrat die—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? And what is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the face of one man? But that is a question not for you to answer. I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you—he did it first!”

He stood looking down at her. He said nothing. He did not move. He did not take his eyes off hers.

She walked toward him, her legs crossing each other, with a slow, unsteady deliberation, her body slouching back. She stood looking at him, her face suddenly empty and calm, her eyes like slits, her mouth a thin incision into a flesh without color. She spoke, and he thought that her mouth did not open, words sliding out, crushed, from between closed lips, a voice frightening because it sounded too even and natural:

“That’s the question, you know, don’t you? Why can’t one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? You don’t understand that, do you? You and your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that’s what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A great gift, isn’t it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it. In you and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State—well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you to the last hell of despair—well then, why don’t you say that one’s own life doesn’t really matter?” Her voice was rising, like a whip, lashing him ferociously on both cheeks. “You loved a woman and she threw your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten thousand bushels of wheat last month! You’ve had every beam knocked from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new electric plant on the Volga! Why don’t you smile and sing hymns to the toil of the Collective? It’s still there, your Collective. Go and join it. Did anything really happen to you? It’s nothing but a personal problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could worry about, isn’t it? Don’t you have something greater—greater is the word your comrades use—left to live for? Or do you, Comrade Taganov?”

He did not answer.

Her arms were thrown wide, and her breasts stood out under her old dress, panting, and he thought he could see every muscle of her body, a female’s body in the last convulsion of rage. She screamed:

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn’t that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . But you’ve tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts—and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls—and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left—look!”