We the Living (30 page)

A streetwalker passed by and stopped; and looked, startled, at that man among the others; and winked an invitation. He did not move, only turned his head away.

A HOUSE COLLAPSED, EARLY ONE afternoon. The front wall crashed, with a shower of bricks, in a white cloud of limey dust. Coming back from work, the inhabitants saw their bedrooms exposed to the cold light of the street, like tiers of stage settings; an upright piano, caught by a naked beam, hung precariously high over the pavement. There were a few weary moans, but no astonishment; houses, long since in need of repair, collapsed without warning all over the city. Old bricks were piled high over the tramway rails and stopped traffic. Leo got a job for two days, clearing the street. He worked, bending and rising, bending and rising, through many hours, a numb ache in his spine, red dust on bleeding fingers stiff and raw in the cold.

The Museum of the Revolution had an exhibition in honor of the visiting delegates of a Swedish Trade Union. Kira got a job lettering cardboard inscriptions. She bent through four long evenings, eyes dull, hands trembling over a ruler, painfully tracing even black letters that said: “WORKERS STARVING IN THE TENEMENTS OF THE CAPITALISTIC EXPLOITERS OF 1910,” “WORKERS EXILED TO SIBERIA BY THE CZARIST GENDARMES OF 1905.”

Snow grew in white drifts in the gutters, under basement windows. Leo shovelled snow for three nights, his breath fluttering in spurts of white vapor, icicles sparkling on the old scarf wound tightly around his neck.

A citizen of no visible means of support, who owned an automobile and a five-room apartment, and who held long, whispered conversations with officials of the Food Trust, decided that his children had to speak French. Kira gave lessons twice a week, dully explaining the “passé imparfait” to two haggard brats who wiped their noses with their fingers, her voice hoarse, her head swimming, her eyes avoiding the buffet where glossy white muffins sparkled with brown, well-buttered crusts.

Leo helped a proletarian student who had an examination to pass. He explained slowly the laws of capital and interest to a sleepy fellow who scratched his knuckles, for he had the itch.

Kira washed dishes two hours a day, bending over a greasy tub that smelt of old fish, in a private restaurant—until it failed.

They disappeared for hours every day and when they came home they never asked each other in what lines they had stood, what streets they had trudged wearily to what doors closed brusquely before them. At night, Kira lighted the “Bourgeoise” and they sat silently, bent over their books. They still had things to study and one goal to remember, if all the others had to be forgotten: to graduate. “It doesn’t matter,” Kira had said. “Nothing matters. We mustn’t think. We mustn’t think at all. We must remember only that we have to be ready and then . . . maybe . . . maybe we’ll find a way to go abro. . . .” She had not finished. She could not pronounce the word. That word was like a silent, secret wound deep in both of them.

Sometimes they read the newspapers. Comrade Zinoviev, president of the Petrograd Soviet, said: “The world revolution is not a matter of years, comrades, not a matter of months, but a matter of days now. The flame of a Proletarian Uprising will sweep the Earth, wiping out forever the Curse of World Capitalism.”

There was also an interview with Comrade Biriuchin, third stoker on a Red battleship. Comrade Biriuchin said: “Well, and then we gotta keep the machines oiled, and again we gotta look out for rust, seeing as how it’s up to us to watch over the people’s engines, and we being conscientious proletarians, we do our share, on account of we don’t care for no nonsense outside of good, practical work, and again, there’s the foreign bourgeois watching us, and . . .”

Sometimes they read the magazines.

“. . . Masha looked at him coldly.

“ ‘I fear that our ideologies are too far apart. We are born into different social classes. The bourgeois prejudices are too deep-rooted in your consciousness. I am a daughter of the toiling masses. Individual love is a bourgeois prejudice.’

“ ‘Is this the end, Masha?’ he asked hoarsely, a deathly pallor spreading on his handsome, but bourgeois face.

“ ‘Yes, Ivan,’ said she, ‘it is the end. I am the new woman of a new day.’ ”

There was also poetry to read:

Once they went to a motion picture.

It was an American film. In the bright glare of showcases, clusters of shadows stood gazing wistfully at the breath-taking, incredible,
foreign
stills; big snowflakes crashed into the glass; the eager faces smiled faintly, as if with the same thought, the thought that glass—and more than glass—protected this distant, miraculous world from the hopeless Russian winter.

Kira and Leo waited, jammed in the crowd of the foyer. When a show ended and the doors were opened, the crowd tore forward, knocking aside those who tried to come out, squeezing in through the two narrow doors, painfully, furiously, with a brutal despair, like meat ground through a tight grinder.

The title of the picture shivered in huge white letters:

The picture was puzzling. It trembled and flickered, showing a hazy office where blurred shadows of people jerked convulsively. An English sign on the office wall was misspelled. The office was that of an American Trade Union where a stern comrade entrusted the hero—a blondish, dark-eyed young man—with the recovery of documents of vast importance to the Union, stolen by a capitalist.

“Hell!” whispered Leo. “Do they also make pictures like that in America?”

Suddenly, as if a fog had lifted, the photography cleared. They could see the soft line of lipstick and every hair of the long lashes of a beautiful, smiling leading lady. Men and women in magnificently foreign clothes moved gracefully through a story that made no sense. The subtitles did not match the action. The subtitles clamored in glaring white letters about the suffering of “our American brothers under the capitalistic yoke.” On the screen, gay people laughed happily, danced in sparkling halls, ran down sandy beaches, their hair in the wind, the muscles of their young arms taut, glistening, monstrously healthy. A woman left her room wearing a white dress and emerged on the street in a black suit. The hero had suddenly grown taller, thinner, very blond and blue-eyed. His trim full-dress suit was surprising on a toiling Trade Union member; and the papers he was seeking through the incoherent jumble of events seemed suspiciously close to something like a will for his uncle’s inheritance.

A subtitle said: “I hate you. You are a blood-sucking capitalistic exploiter. Get out of my room!”

On the screen, a man was bending over the hand of a delicate lady, pressing it slowly to his lips, while she looked at him sadly, and gently stroked his hair.

The end of the picture was not shown. It finished abruptly, as if torn off. A subtitle concluded: “Six months later the bloodthirsty capitalist met his death at the hands of striking workers. Our hero renounced the joys of a selfish love into which the bourgeois siren had tried to lure him, and he dedicated his life to the cause of the World Revolution.”

“I know,” said Kira, when they were leaving the theater. “I know what they’ve done! They’ve shot that beginning here, themselves. They’ve cut the picture to pieces!”

An usher who heard her, chuckled.

Sometimes the door bell rang and the Upravdom came in to remind them of the house meeting of all tenants on an urgent matter. He said: “No exceptions, citizens. Social duty comes above all. Every tenant gotta attend the meeting.”

Then Kira and Leo filed into the largest room of the house, a long, bare room with one electric bulb in the ceiling, in the apartment of a street-car conductor who had offered it graciously for the social duty. Tenants came bringing their own chairs and sat chewing sunflower seeds. Those who brought no chairs sat on the floor and chewed sunflower seeds.

“Seeing as how I’m the Upravdom,” said the Upravdom, “I declare this meeting of the tenants of the house Number—on Sergievskaia Street open. On the order of the day is the question as regards the chimneys. Now, comrade citizens, seeing as how we are all responsible citizens and conscious of the proper class consciousness, we gotta understand that this ain’t the old days when we had landlords and didn’t care what happened to the house we lived in. Now this is different, comrades. Owing to the new régime and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and seeing as how the chimneys are clogged, we gotta do something about it, seeing as how we’re the owners of the house. Now if the chimneys are clogged, we’ll have the house full of smoke, and if we have the house full of smoke, it’s sloppy, and if we’re sloppy, that’s not true proletarian discipline. And so, comrade citizens . . .”

Housewives fidgeted nervously, sniffing the odor of burning food. A fat man in a red shirt was twiddling his thumbs. A young man with a mouth hanging open, was scratching his head.

“. . . and the special assessment will be divided in proportion to the. . . . Is that you, Comrade Kira Argounova, trying to sneak out? Well, you better don’t. You know what we think of people that sabotage their social duties. . . . And the special assessment will be divided in proportion to the social standing of the tenants. The workers pay three per cent and the Free Professions ten, and the Private Traders and unemployed—the rest. Who’s for—raise your hands. . . . Comrade secretary, count the citizens’ hands. . . . Who’s against—raise your hands. . . . Comrade Michliuk, you can’t raise your hand for and against on the one and same proposition. . . .”

Victor’s visit was unexpected and inexplicable.

He stretched his hands to the “Bourgeoise,” rubbed them energetically, smiled cheerfully at Kira and Leo.

“Just passing by and thought I’d drop in. . . . It’s a charming place you have here. Irina’s been telling me about it. . . . She’s fine, thank you. . . . No, Mother’s not so well. The doctor said there’s nothing he can do if we don’t send her south. And who can think of affording a trip these days? . . . Been busy at the Institute. Re-elected to Students’ Council. . . . Do you read poetry? Just read some verses by a woman. Exquisite delicacy of feeling. . . . Yes, it’s a lovely place you have here. Pre-revolutionary luxury. . . . You two are quite the bourgeois, aren’t you. Two huge rooms like these. No trouble with the Domicile Norm? We’ve had two tenants forced upon us last week. One’s a Communist. Father’s just gritting his teeth. Irina has to share her room with Acia, and they fight like dogs. . . . What can one do? People have to have a roof over their heads. . . . Yes, Petrograd is an overcrowded city, Petrograd certainly is.”

She came in, a red bandana on her hair, streaks of powder on her nose, a bundle tied in a white sheet in her hand, one black stocking hanging out of the bundle. She asked: “Where’s that drawing room?”