We the Living (17 page)

Andrei was twelve years old when his mother died. Some said it was the wooden trough that had killed her, for it had always been too full; and some said it was the kitchen cupboard, for it had always been too empty.

Andrei went to work in a factory. In the daytime, he stood at a machine and his eyes were cold as its steel, his hands steady as its levers, his nerves tense as its belts. At night, he crouched on the floor behind a barricade of empty boxes in the corner he rented; he needed the barricade because the three other corner tenants in the room objected to candle light when they wanted to sleep, and Agrafena Vlassovna, the landlady, did not approve of book reading. So he kept the candle on the floor, and he held the book to the candle, and he read very slowly, and he wrapped his feet in newspapers because they were very cold; and the snow wailed battering the window, the three corner tenants snored, Agrafena Vlassovna spat in her sleep, the candle dripped, and everybody was asleep but Andrei and the cockroaches.

He talked very little, smiled very slowly and never gave coins to beggars.

Sometimes, on Sundays, he passed Pavel Syerov in the street. They knew each other, as all children did in the neighborhood, but they did not talk often. Pavel did not like Andrei’s clothes. Pavel’s hair was greased neatly and his mother was taking him to church. Andrei never went to church.

Pavel’s father was a clerk in the corner dry-goods store and waxed his moustache six days a week. On Sundays, he drank and beat his wife. Little Pavel liked perfumed soap, when he could steal it from the apothecary shop; and he studied God’s Law—his best white collar on—with the parish priest.

In the year 1915, Andrei stood at the machine, and his eyes were colder than its steel, his hands steadier than its levers, his nerves colder and steadier than both. His skin was tanned by the fire of the furnaces; his muscles and the will behind his muscles were tempered like the metal he had handled. And the little white pamphlets his father had sown, reappeared in the son’s hands. But he did not throw them into crowds on the wings of fiery speeches; he passed them stealthily into stealthy hands and the words that went with them were whispers. His name was on the list of a party about which not many dared to whisper and he sent through the mysterious, unseen veins of the Putilovsky factory messages from a man named Lenin.

Andrei Taganov was nineteen. He walked fast, talked slowly, never went to dances. He took orders and gave orders, and had no friends. He looked at superintendents in fur coats and at beggars in felt boots, with the same level, unflinching eyes, and had no pity.

Pavel Syerov was clerking in a haberdashery. On Sundays he entertained a noisy crowd of friends in the corner saloon, leaned back in his chair and swore at the waiter if service was too slow. He loaned money freely and no one refused a loan to “Pavlusha.” He put on his patent leather shoes when he took a girl to a dance, and put eau-de-cologne on his handkerchief. He liked to hold the girl’s waist and to say: “We’re not a commoner, dearie. We’re a gentleman.”

In the year 1916, Pavel Syerov lost his job in the haberdashery, owing to a fight over a girl. It was the third year of the war; prices were high; jobs were scarce. Pavel Syerov found himself trudging through the gates of the Putilovsky factory on winter mornings, when it was so dark and so early that the lights over the gate cut his puffed, sleepy eyes and he yawned into his raised collar. At first, he avoided his old crowd, for he was ashamed to admit where he was working. After a while, he avoided them because he was ashamed to admit they had been his friends. He circulated little white pamphlets, made speeches at secret meetings and took orders from Andrei Taganov only because “Andrei’s been in it longer, but wait till I catch up with him.” The workers liked “Pavlusha.” When he happened to meet one of his old friends, he passed by haughtily, as if he had inherited a title; and he spoke of the superiority of the proletariat over the paltry petty bourgeoisie, according to Karl Marx.

In February of the year 1917, Andrei Taganov led crowds through the streets of Petrograd. He carried his first red flag, received his first wound and killed his first man—a gendarme. The only thing that impressed him was the flag.

Pavel Syerov did not see the February Revolution rise, triumphant, from the city pavements. He stayed at home: he had a cold.

But in October, 1917, when the Party whose membership cards Andrei and Pavel carried reverently, rose to seize the power, they were both in the streets. Andrei Taganov, his hair in the wind, fought at the siege of the Winter Palace. Pavel Syerov received credit for stopping—after most of the treasures were gone—the looting of a Grand Duke’s mansion.

In the year 1918, Andrei Taganov, in the uniform of the Red Army, marched with rows of other uniforms, from shops and factories, through the streets of Petrograd, to the tune of the Internationale, to the depot, to the front of civil war. He marched solemnly, with silent triumph, as a man walks to his wedding.

Andrei’s hand carried a bayonet as it had fashioned steel; it pulled a trigger as it had pushed a lever. His body was young, supple, as a vine ripe in the sun, on the voluptuous couch of a trench’s mud. He smiled slowly and shot fast.

In the year 1920, Melitopol hung by a thread between the White Army and the Red. The thread broke on a dark spring night. It had been expected to break. The two armies held their last stand in a narrow, silent valley. On the side of the White Army was a desperate desire to hold Melitopol, a division numbering five to one of their adversaries, and a vague, grumbling resentment of the soldiers against their officers, a sullen, secret sympathy for the red flag in the trenches a few hundred feet away. On the side of the Red Army was an iron discipline and a desperate task.

They stood still, a few hundred feet apart, two trenches of bayonets shimmering faintly, like water, under a dark sky, of men ready and silent, tense, waiting. Black rocks rose to the sky in the north and black rocks rose to the sky in the south; but between them was a narrow valley, with a few blades of grass still left among the torn clots of earth, and enough space to shoot, to scream, to die—and to decide the fate of those beyond the rocks on both sides. The bayonets in the trenches did not move. And the blades of grass did not move, for there was no wind and no breath from the trenches to stir them.

Andrei Taganov stood at attention, very straight, and asked the Commander’s permission for the plan he had explained. The Commander said: “It’s your death, ten to one, Comrade Taganov.”

Andrei said: “It does not matter, Comrade Commander.”

“Are you sure you can do it?”

“It has been done, Comrade Commander. They’re ripe. They need but one kick.”

“The Proletariat thanks you, Comrade Taganov.”

Then those in the other trenches saw him climb over the top. He raised his arms, against the dark sky; his body looked tall and slender. Then he walked, arms raised, toward the White trenches; his steps were steady and he did not hurry. The blades of grass creaked, breaking under his feet, and the sound filled the valley. The Whites watched him and waited in silence.

He stopped but a few steps from their trenches. He could not see the many guns aimed at his breast; but he knew they were there. Swiftly, he took the holster at his belt and threw it to the ground. “Brothers!” he cried. “I have no weapons. I’m not here to shoot. I just want to say a few words to you. If you don’t want to hear them—shoot me.”

An officer raised a gun; another stopped his hand. He didn’t like the looks of their soldiers; they were holding bayonets; but they were not aiming at the stranger; it was safer to let him speak.

“Brothers! Why are you fighting us? Are you killing us because we want you to live? Because we want you to have bread and give you land to grow it? Because we want to open a door from your pigsty into a state where you’ll be men, as you were born to be, but have forgotten it? Brothers, it’s your lives that we’re fighting for—against your guns! When our red flag, ours and yours, rises . . .”

There was a shot, a short, sharp sound like a pipe breaking in the valley, and a little blue flame from an officer’s gun held close under blue lips. Andrei Taganov whirled and his arms circled against the sky, and he fell on the clotted earth.

Then there were more shots and fire hissing down the White trenches, but it did not come from those on the other side. An officer’s body was hurled out of the trench, and a soldier waved his arms to the Red soldiers, yelling: “Comrades!” There were loud hurrahs, and feet stamping across the valley, and red banners waving, and hands lifting Andrei’s body, his face white on the black earth, his chest hot and sticky.

Then Pavel Syerov of the Red Army jumped into the White trenches where Red and White soldiers were shaking hands, and he shouted, standing on a pile of sacks:

“Comrades! Let me greet in you the awakening of class consciousness! Another step in the march of history toward Communism! Down with the damn bourgeois exploiters! Loot the looters, comrades! Who does not toil, shall not eat! Proletarians of the world, unite! As Comrade Karl Marx has said, if we, the class of . . .”

Andrei Taganov recovered from his wound in a few months. It left a scar on his chest. The scar on his temple he acquired later, in another battle. He did not like to talk about that other battle; and no one knew what had happened after it.

It was the battle of Perekop in 1920 that surrendered the Crimea for the third and last time into Soviet hands. When Andrei opened his eyes he saw a white fog flat upon his chest, pressing him down like a heavy weight. Behind the fog, there was something red and glowing, cutting its way toward him. He opened his mouth and saw a white fog escaping from his lips, melting into the one above. Then he thought that it was cold and that it was the cold which held him chained to the ground, with pain like pine needles through his every muscle. He sat up; then he knew that it was not only the cold in his muscles, but a dark hole and blood on his thigh; and blood on his right temple. He knew, also, that the white fog was not close to his chest; there was enough room under it for him to stand up; it was far away in the sky and the red dawn was cutting a thin thread through it, far away.

He stood up. The sound of his feet on the ground seemed too loud in a bottomless silence. He brushed the hair out of his eyes and thought that the white fog above was the frozen breath of the men around him. But he knew that the men were not breathing any longer. Blood looked purple and brown and he could not tell where bodies ended and earth began, nor whether the white blotches were clots of fog or faces.

He saw a body under his feet and a canteen on its hip. The canteen was intact; the body was not. He bent and a red drop fell on the canteen from his temple. He drank.

A voice said: “Give me a drink, brother.”

What was left of a man was crawling toward him across a rut in the ground. It had no coat, but a shirt that had been white; and boots that followed the shirt, although there did not seem to be anything to make them follow.

Andrei knew it was one of the Whites. He held the man’s head and forced the canteen between lips that were the color of the blood on the ground. The man’s chest gurgled and heaved convulsively. No one else moved around them.

Andrei did not know who had won last night’s battle; he did not know whether they had won the Crimea; nor whether—more important to many of them—they had captured Captain Karsavin, one of the last names to fear in the White Army, a man who had taken many Red lives, a man whose head was worth a big price in Red money. Andrei would walk. Somewhere this silence must end. He would find men, somewhere; Red or White—he did not know, but he started walking toward the sunrise.

He had stepped into a soft earth, damp with cold dew, but clear and empty, a road leading somewhere, when he heard a sound behind him, a rustling as of heavy skis dragged through the mud. The White man was following him. He was leaning on a piece of stick and his feet walked without leaving the ground. Andrei stopped and waited for him. The man’s lips parted and it was a smile. He said: “May I follow you, brother? I’m not very . . . steady to find my own direction.”

Andrei said: “You and I aren’t going the same way, buddy. When we find men—it will be the end for either you or me.”

“We’ll take a chance,” said the man.

“We’ll take a chance,” said Andrei.

So they walked together toward the sunrise. High banks guarded the road, and shadows of dry bushes hung motionless over their heads, with thin branches like a skeleton’s fingers spread wide apart, webbed by the fog. Roots wound across the road and their four feet crossed them slowly, with a silent effort. Ahead of them, the sky was burning the fog. There was a rosy shadow over Andrei’s forehead; on his left temple little beads of sweat were transparent as glass; on his right temple the beads were red. The other man breathed as if he were rattling dice deep inside his chest.

“As long as one can walk—” said Andrei.

“—one walks,” finished the man.

Their eyes met as if to hold each other up.

Little red drops followed their steps in the soft, damp earth—on the right side of the road and on the left.

Then, the man fell. Andrei stopped. The man said: “Go on.”

Andrei threw the man’s arm over his shoulder and went on, staggering a little under the load.

The man said: “You’re a fool.”

“One doesn’t leave a good soldier, no matter what color he’s wearing,” said Andrei.

The man said: “If it’s my comrades that we come upon—I’ll see that they go easy on you.”

“I’ll see that you get off with a prison hospital and a good bed—if it’s mine,” said Andrei.

Then, Andrei walked carefully, because he could not allow himself to fall with his burden. And he listened attentively to the heart beating feebly against his back.

The fog was gone and the sky blazed like a huge furnace where gold was not melted into liquid, but into burning air. Against the gold, they saw the piled black boxes of a village far away. A long pole among the boxes pointed straight at a sky green and fresh, as if washed clean with someone’s huge mop in the night. There was a flag on the pole and it beat in the morning wind like a little black wing against the sunrise. And Andrei’s eyes and the tearless eyes on his shoulder looked fixedly at the little flag, with the same question. But they were still too far away.