We the Living (28 page)

Leo came home earlier than usual.

The blue flame of the Primus hissed in the gathering dusk. Kira’s white apron was a white spot bending over the Primus.

Leo threw his cap and brief case on the table. “That’s that,” he said. “I’m out.”

Kira stood holding a spoon. She asked: “You mean . . . the Gossizdat?”

“Yes. Fired. Reduction of staffs. Getting rid of the undesirable element. Told me I had a bourgeois attitude. I’m not social-minded.”

“Well . . . well, it’s all right. We’ll get along.”

“Of course, it’s all right. Think I care about their damn job? This affects me no more than a change in weather.”

“Certainly. Now take your coat off and wash your hands, and we’ll have dinner.”

“Dinner? What do you have there?”

“Beet soup. You like it.”

“When did I say I liked it? I don’t want any dinner. I’m not hungry. I’m going to the bedroom to study. Please don’t disturb me.”

“I won’t.”

Left alone, Kira took a towel and lifted the cover of the pan and stirred the soup, slowly, deliberately, longer than it required. Then she took a plate from the shelf. As she was carrying it to the table, she saw that the plate was trembling. She stopped and, in the dusk, whispered, addressing herself for the first time in her life, as if speaking to a person she had never met before: “Now, Kira, you don’t. You don’t. You don’t.”

She stood and held the plate over the table and stared down, all her will in her eyes, as if a great issue depended on the plate. Presently the plate stopped trembling.

When he had stood in line for an hour, he smoked a cigarette.

When he had stood for two hours, he began to feel that his legs were numb.

When he had stood for three hours, he felt that the numbness had risen to his throat, and he had to lean against a wall.

When his turn came, the editor looked at Leo and said: “I don’t see how we can use you, citizen. Of course, our publication is strictly artistic. But—Proletarian Art, I may remind you. Strictly class viewpoint. You do not belong to the Party—nor is your social standing suitable, you must agree. I have ten experienced reporters—Party members—on my waiting list.”

She really didn’t have to fry fish in lard, Kira decided. She could use sunflower-seed oil. If she bought good oil it would leave no odor and it was cheaper. She counted the money out carefully over the co-operative counter and walked home, cautiously watching the heavy yellow liquid in a greasy bottle.

The secretary said to Leo: “Sorry you had to wait so long, citizen, but the comrade editor is a very busy man. You can go in now.”

The comrade editor leaned back in his chair; he held a bronze paper knife; the knife tapped the edge of a desk calendar bearing a picture of Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of Education and Art; the editor’s voice sounded like a knife cutting paper:

“No. No opening. None expected. Plenty of proletarians starving and you bourgeois asking for a job. I’m a proletarian myself. Straight from the work-bench. I’ve been jobless—in the old days. But your bourgeois class brothers had no pity. It’ll do you good to learn how it feels on your own hide.”

“It’s a misunderstanding, citizens. Help interview hours are from nine to eleven, Thursday only. . . . An hour and a half? Well, how did I know what you were sitting here for? Nobody asked you to sit.”

When he came home in the evenings, he was silent.

Kira served dinner and he sat down at the table and ate. She had given great care to the dinner. He said nothing. He did not look into the steady gray eyes across the table, nor at the lips that smiled gently. He offered no complaint and no consolation.

Sometimes, for many long moments, he stood before the crystal vase on the malachite stand, the one that had not been broken, and looked at it, his eyes expressionless, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth; he stood without moving, without blinking, the smoke alone stirring slowly, swaying. Then he smiled and the cigarette fell to the floor, and burned, smoking, a dark ring widening on the parquet; but he did not notice it; and Kira did not notice it, for her eyes were fixed, wide and frightened, on Leo’s icy, sardonic smile.

“Any past experience, citizen?”

“No.”

“Party member?”

“No.”

“Sorry. No opening. Next.”

It was Monday and the job had been promised to him for Monday. Leo stood before the little wizened office manager and knew that he should smile gratefully. But Leo never smiled when he knew he should. And perhaps it would have been useless. The office manager met him with a worried, apologetic look and avoided his eyes.

“So sorry, citizen. Yes, I promised you this job, but—you see, the big boss’s cousin came from Moscow and she’s unemployed, and. . . . Unforeseen circumstances, citizen. You know—man proposes and God disposes. . . . Come again, citizen.”

Kira went to the Institute less frequently.

But when she sat in a long, cold room and listened to lectures about steel, and bolts, and kilowatts, she straightened her shoulders as if a wrench had tightened the wires of her nerves. She looked at the man who sat beside her; at times she wondered whether those words about steel beams and girders were not about his bones and muscles, a man for whom steel had been created, or, perhaps, it was he that had been created for steel, and concrete, and white heat; she had long since forgotten where Andrei Taganov’s life ended and that of engines began.

When he questioned her solicitously, she answered: “Andrei, any circles under my eyes are nothing but your own imagination. And you’ve never been in the habit of thinking about my eyes.”