We the Living (18 page)

When they saw the color of the flag, Andrei stopped and put the man down cautiously and stretched his arms to rest and in greeting. The flag was red.

The man said strangely: “Leave me here.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Andrei, “we’re not so hard on fellow soldiers.”

“No,” said the man, “not on fellow soldiers.”

Then Andrei saw a torn coat sleeve hanging at the man’s belt and on the sleeve the epaulet of a captain.

“If you have pity,” said the man, “leave me here.”

But Andrei had brushed the man’s sticky hair off his forehead and was looking attentively, for the first time, at a young, indomitable face he had seen in photographs.

“No,” said Andrei, very slowly, “I can’t do that, Captain Karsavin.”

“I’m sure to die here,” said the captain.

“One doesn’t take chances,” said Andrei, “with enemies like you.”

“No,” said the captain, “one doesn’t.”

He propped himself up on one hand, and his forehead, thrown back, was very white. He was looking at the dawn.

He said: “When I was young, I always wanted to see a sunrise. But Mother never let me go out so early. She was afraid I’d catch a cold.”

“I’ll let you rest for a while,” said Andrei.

“If you have pity,” said Captain Karsavin, “you’ll shoot me.”

“No,” said Andrei, “I can’t.”

Then they were silent.

“Are you a man?” asked Captain Karsavin.

“What do you want?” asked Andrei.

The captain said: “Your gun.”

Andrei looked straight into the dark, calm eyes and extended his hand. The captain shook it. When he took his hand out of the captain’s, Andrei left his gun in it.

Then he straightened his shoulders and walked toward the village. When he heard the shot, he did not turn. He walked steadily, his head high, his eyes on the red flag beating against the sunrise. Little red drops followed the steps in the soft, damp earth—on one side of the road only.

“ARGOUNOV’S NAVY SOAP” WAS A FAILURE.

The unshaven bookkeeper scratched his neck, muttered something about unprincipled bourgeois competition and disappeared with the price of the three pieces he had sold.

Alexander Dimitrievitch was left with a tray full of soap and a black despair.

Galina Petrovna’s energy found their next business venture.

Their new patron had a black astrakhan hat and a high astrakhan collar. He panted after climbing four flights of stairs, produced from the mysterious depths of his vast, fur-lined coat a heavy roll of crinkling bills, counted them off, spitting on his fingers, and was always in a hurry.

“Two kinds,” he explained, “the crystals in glass tubes and the tablets in paper boxes. I furnish the materials. You—pack. Remember, eighty-seven tablets is all you have to put into a box labeled ‘One Hundred.’ Great future in saccharine.”

The gentleman in the astrakhan hat had a large staff; a net of families packing his merchandise; a net of peddlers carrying his trays on street corners; a net of smugglers miraculously procuring saccharine from far-away Berlin.

Four heads bent around the wick in the Argounov dining room and eight hands counted carefully, monotonously, despairingly: six little crystals from a bright foreign tin can into each little glass tube, eighty-seven tiny white tablets into each tiny white box. The boxes came in long sheets; they had to be cut out and folded; they bore German inscriptions in green letters—“Genuine German Saccharine”; the other side of the sheet bore the bright colors of old Russian advertisements.

“Sorry, it’s too bad about your studies, Kira,” Galina Petrovna said, “but you’ll just have to help. You have to eat, you know.”

That evening, there were only three heads and six hands around the wick: Alexander Dimitrievitch had been mobilized. There had been snow storms; snow lay deep and heavy on Petrograd’s sidewalks; a mobilization of all private traders and unemployed bourgeois had been effected for the purpose of shoveling snow. They had to report for duty at dawn; they grunted and bent in the frost, steam rising to blue noses, old woolen mittens clutching shovels, red flesh in the slits of the mittens; they worked, bending and grunting, shovels biting wearily into white walls. They were given shovels, but no pay.

Maria Petrovna came to visit. She unrolled yards of scarfs from around her neck, shaking snow off her felt boots in the anteroom, coughing.

“No, no, Marussia,” Galina Petrovna protested. “Thanks, but you can’t help. The powder’ll make you cough. Sit by the stove. Get yourself warm.”

“. . . seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six . . . What news, Aunt Marussia?” Lydia asked.

“Heavy are our sins,” Maria Petrovna sighed. “Is that stuff poisonous?”

“No, it’s harmless. Just sweet. The dessert of the revolution.”

“Vasili sold the mosaic table from the drawing room. . . . Fifty million rubles and four pounds of lard. I made an omelet with the egg powder we got at the co-operative. They can’t tell me they made that powder out of fresh eggs.”

“. . . sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . . they say their NEP is a failure, Marussia . . . nineteen, twenty . . . they’re going to return houses to owners before long.”

Maria Petrovna took a little nail buffer out of her bag and went on talking, polishing her nails mechanically; her hands had always been her pride; she was not going to neglect them, even though she did think, at times, that they had changed a little.

“Did you hear about Boris Koulikov? He was in a hurry and he tried to jump into a crowded tramway at full speed. Both legs cut off.”

“Marussia! What’s the matter with your eyes?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been crying so much lately . . . and for no reason at all.”

“There’s no spiritual comfort these days, Aunt Marussia,” Lydia sighed, “. . . fifty-eight, fifty-nine. . . . Those pagans! Those sacrilegious apostates! They’ve taken the gold ikons from the churches—to feed their famine somewhere. They’ve opened the sacred relics . . . sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five . . . We’ll all be punished, for they defy God.”

“Irina lost her ration card,” sighed Maria Petrovna. “She gets nothing for the rest of this month.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Lydia coldly. “Irina is not to be trusted.”

Lydia disliked her cousin ever since Irina, following her custom of expressing her character judgments in sketches, had drawn Lydia in the shape of a mackerel.

“What’s that on your handkerchief, Marussia?” Galina Petrovna asked.

“Oh . . . nothing . . . sorry . . . it’s a dirty one. . . . I can’t sleep at night any more, it seems. Seems my nightgown is always so hot and sticky. I’m so worried about Victor. Now he’s bringing the strangest fellows into the house. They don’t remove their caps in the drawing room and they shake ashes all over the carpet. I think they’re . . . Communists. Vasili hasn’t said a word. And it frightens me. I know what he thinks. . . . Communists in the house!”

“You’re not the only ones,” said Lydia and threw a dark glance at Kira. Kira was stuffing crystals into a glass tube.

“You try and speak to Victor and he says: ‘Diplomacy is the highest of the Arts.’ . . . Heavy are our sins!”

“You’d better do something about that cough, Marussia.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the cold weather. Doctors are fools and don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Kira counted the little crystals in the palm of her hand. She tried not to breathe or swallow; when she did, the white powder, seeping through her lips and nostrils, bit her throat with the pain of a piercing, metallic sweetness.

Maria Petrovna was coughing: “Yes, Nina Mirskaia. . . . Imagine! Not even a Soviet registration wedding. And her father, God rest his soul, was a bishop. . . . Just sleeping together like cats.”

Lydia cleared her throat and blushed.

Galina Petrovna said: “It’s a disgrace. This new love freedom will ruin the country. But, thank God, nothing like this will ever happen to us. There still are some families with some standards left.”

The bell rang.

“It’s Father,” said Lydia and hurried to open the door. It was Andrei Taganov.

“May I see Kira?” he asked, shaking snow off his shoulders.

“Oh! . . . Well, I can’t stop you,” Lydia answered haughtily.

Kira rose, when he entered the dining room, her eyes wide in the darkness.

“Ah! . . . Well, what a surprise!” said Galina Petrovna, her hand holding a half-filled box, trembling, the saccharine tablets rolling out. “That is . . . yes . . . a most pleasant. . . . How are you tonight? . . . Ah! . . . Yes. . . . May I present? Andrei Fedorovitch Taganov—my sister, Maria Petrovna Dunaeva.”

Andrei bowed; Maria Petrovna looked, astonished, at the box in her sister’s hand.

“May I speak to you, Kira?” Andrei asked. “Alone?”

“Excuse us,” said Kira. “This way, Andrei.”

“I daresay,” gasped Maria Petrovna, “to your room? Why, modern youth behaves almost like . . . like Communists.”

Galina Petrovna dropped the box; Lydia kicked her aunt’s ankle. Andrei followed Kira to her room.

“We have no light,” said Kira, “just that street lamp outside. Sit down here, on Lydia’s bed.”

Andrei sat down. She sat on her mattress on the floor, facing him. The street light from beyond the window made a white square on the floor, with Andrei’s shadow in the square. A little red tongue flickered in space, high in the corner of Lydia’s ikons.

“It’s about this morning,” said Andrei. “About Syerov.”

“Yes?”

“I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry. He had no authority to question you. No one can issue an order to question you—but me. The order won’t be issued.”

“Thank you, Andrei.”

“I know what you think of us. You’re honest. But you’re not interested in politics. You’re not an active enemy. I trust you.”

“I don’t know his address, Andrei.”

“I’m not asking whom you know. Just don’t let them drag you into anything.”

“Andrei, do you know who that man is?”

“Do you mind if we don’t discuss it, Kira?”

“No. But will you allow me one question?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Why are you doing this for me?”

“Because I trust you and I think we’re friends. Though don’t ask me why we are, because I don’t know that myself.”

“I know that. It’s because . . . you see, if we had souls, which we haven’t, and if our souls met—yours and mine—they’d fight to the death. But after they had torn each other to pieces, to the very bottom, they’d see that they had the same root. I don’t know if you can understand it, because, you see, I don’t believe in souls.”

“I don’t either. But I understand. And what is the root?”

“Do you believe in God, Andrei?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But that’s a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they’d never understand what I meant. It’s a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do—then, I know they don’t believe in life.”

“Why?”

“Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.”

“You’re a strange girl.”

“You see, you and I, we believe in life. But you want to fight for it, to kill for it, even to die—for life. I only want to live it.”

Behind the closed door, Lydia, tired of counting saccharine, rested by playing the piano. She played Chopin.

Andrei said suddenly: “You know, that’s beautiful.”

“What’s beautiful, Andrei?”

“That music.”

“I thought you didn’t care for music.”

“I never have. But, somehow, I like this, now, here.”

They sat in the darkness and listened. Somewhere below, a truck turned a corner. The window panes trembled with a thin, tense shudder. The light square with Andrei’s shadow rose from the floor, swept, like a fan, across the walls, and froze at their feet again.

When the music ended, they returned to the dining room. Lydia still sat at the piano. Andrei said hesitantly: “It was beautiful, Lydia Alexandrovna. Would you play it again?”

Lydia jerked her head proudly. “I’m sorry,” she said, rising brusquely. “I’m tired.” And she left the room with the step of a Jeanne d’Arc.

Maria Petrovna cringed in her chair, as if trying to squeeze herself out of Andrei’s sight. When her cough attracted his eyes, she muttered: “I’ve always said that our modern youth does not follow sufficiently the example of the Communists.”

When Kira accompanied him to the door, Andrei said: “I don’t think I should call on you, Kira. It makes your family uncomfortable. It’s all right, I understand. Will I see you at the Institute?”

“Yes,” said Kira. “Thank you, Andrei. Good night.”