We the Living (42 page)

“Yes.”

“You see . . . with me—there’s my family. With you—there’s the Party. I’m not . . . I’m not the kind of a . . . mistress your Party would approve. So it’s better . . . You see, it’s a dangerous thing we’re doing. A very dangerous thing. I want to try not to let it . . . not to let it break our lives.”

“Break our lives? Kira!” He was laughing happily, pressing her hand to his lips.

“It’s better if no one—not a soul anywhere—knows this, but you and I.”

“No, Kira, I promise, no one will know but you and I.”

“And now I’ll go.”

“No. Please don’t go tonight. Just tonight. You can explain to them somehow—make up a reason. But stay. I can’t let you go. . . . Please, Kira. . . . Just to see you here when I awaken. . . . Good night . . . Kira. . . .”

She lay very still for a very long time, until he was asleep. Then she slipped noiselessly out of bed and, holding her breath, her bare feet soundless on the cold floor, she dressed hurriedly. He did not hear her open the door and slip out.

There was a wind whistling down the long, empty streets and a sky like pencil lead. She walked very fast. She knew there was something she had to escape and she tried to hurry. The dead, dark glass panes were watching her, following her, rows and rows of them, on guard along her way. She walked faster. Her steps beat too loudly and the houses of the whole city threw echoes back at her, echoes screaming something. She walked faster. The wind whirled her coat, raising it high over her knees, hurling it between her legs. She walked faster. She passed the poster of a worker with a red banner; the worker was laughing.

Suddenly she was running, like a shivering streak between dark shop windows and lamp posts, her coat whistling, her steps beating like a machine gun, her legs flashing and blending, like the spokes of a wheel, into one circle of motion carrying her forward. She was running or flying or being rocketed through space by something outside her body, and she knew it was all right, everything was all right if only she could run faster and faster and faster.

She came panting up the stairs. At the door, she stopped. She stopped and stood looking at the door knob, panting. And suddenly she knew that she could not go in; that she could not take her body into Leo’s room, into his bed, close to his body. She ran her finger tips over the door, feeling it, caressing it uncertainly, for she could come no closer to him.

She sat down on the steps. She felt as if she could hear him—somewhere behind that door—sleeping, breathing with effort. She sat there for a long time, her eyes empty.

When she turned her head and saw that the square of the window on the landing was a dark, bright blue which was not night any longer, she got up, took her key and went in. Leo was asleep. She sat by the window, gathered into a tight huddle. He would not know what time she had come home.

Leo was leaving for the south.

His bag was packed. His ticket was bought. His place was reserved in a private sanatorium in Yalta and a month paid for in advance.

She had explained about the money: “You see, when I wrote to your aunt in Berlin, I also wrote to my uncle in Budapest. Oh, yes, I have an uncle in Budapest. You’ve never heard him mentioned because . . . you see . . . there’s a family quarrel behind it—and he left Russia before the war, and my father forbade us ever to mention his name. But he’s not a bad fellow, and he always liked me, so I wrote him, and that’s what he sent, and he said he’d help me as long as I need it. But please don’t ever mention it to my family, because Father would—you understand.”

She wondered dimly how simple and easy it was to lie.

To Andrei, she had mentioned her starving family. She did not have to ask: he gave her his whole monthly salary and told her to leave him only what she could spare. She had expected it, but it was not an easy moment when she saw the bills in her hand; then, she remembered the comrade commissar and why one aristocrat could die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics—and she kept most of the money, with a hard, bright smile.

It had not been easy to convince Leo to go. He said he would not let her—or her uncle—keep him. He said it tenderly and he said it furiously. It took many hours and many evenings. “Leo—your money or my money or anyone’s money—does it really matter? Who made it matter? But you want to live. I want you to live. So much is still possible to us. You love me. Don’t you love me enough to live for me? I know it will be hard. Six months. All winter. I’ll miss you. But we can do it. . . . Leo, I love you. I love you. I love you. So much is still possible!”

She won.

His train was to leave at eight-fifteen in the evening. At nine, she would meet Andrei; she had asked him to take her to the opening of a new cabaret.

Leo was silent when they left their room, and in the cab on the way to the station. She went into the car with him to see the wooden bench on which he was to sleep for many nights; she had brought a pillow for him and a warm plaid blanket. Then, they stepped out again and waited on the platform by the car. They had nothing to say.

When the first bell rang, Leo said: “Please, Kira, don’t let’s have any nonsense when the train starts. I won’t look out of the window. No waving, or running after the train, or anything like that.”

“No, Leo.”

She looked at a poster on a steel pillar; it promised a huge orchestra, foreign fox-trots and delicious food at the grand opening of the new cabaret, at nine o’clock tonight. She said, wondering, bewildered, a little frightened, as if realizing it for the first time: “Leo . . . at nine o’clock tonight . . . you won’t be here any more.”

“No. I won’t.”

The third bell rang.

He seized her roughly and held her lips in a long, choking kiss, as long as the train whistle that wailed shrilly. He whispered: “Kira . . . my own only one. . . . I love you. . . . I love you so much. . . .”

He leaped to the steps of the car as it started moving, and disappeared inside. He did not come to the window.

She stood and heard iron chains stretching, wheels grinding rails, the engine panting far ahead, white steam spreading slowly under the steel vaults. The yellow squares of windows were suddenly pulled past her. The station smelt of carbolic acid. A faded red banner hung on a steel girder. The windows were streaming faster and faster, melting into a yellow line. There was nothing ahead but steel, steam, smoke and, under an arch very far away, a piece of sky black as a hole.

And suddenly she understood that it was a train, and that Leo was on the train, and that the train was leaving her. And something beyond terror, immense and unnameable, something which was not a human feeling, seized her. She ran after the train. She grasped an iron handle. She wanted to stop it. She knew that there was something huge and implacable moving over her, which she had to stop, which she alone was to stop, and couldn’t. She was jerked forward, falling, she was whirled along down the wooden planks of the platform, and then a husky soldier in a peaked khaki cap with a red star grabbed her by the shoulders, and tore her off the handle, and threw her aside, pushing her away from the train with his elbow in her breast.

He roared:

“What do you think you’re doing, citizen?”

IT WAS ST. PETERSBURG; THE WAR MADE it Petrograd; the revolution made it Leningrad.

It is a city of stone, and those living in it think not of stone brought upon a green earth and piled block on block to raise a city, but of one huge rock carved into streets, bridges, houses, and earth brought in handfuls, scattered, ground into the stone to remind them of that which lies beyond the city.

Its trees are rare strangers, sickly foreigners in a climate of granite, forlorn and superfluous. Its parks are reluctant concessions. In spring, a rare dandelion sticks a bright yellow head through the stones of its embankments, and men smile at it incredulously and condescendingly as at an impudent child. Its spring does not rise from the soil; its first violets, and very red tulips, and very blue hyacinths come in the hands of men, on street corners.

Petrograd was not born; it was created. The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle. An implacable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city. Men brought earth to fill a swamp where no living thing existed but mosquitoes. And like mosquitoes, men died and fell into the grunting mire. No willing hands came to build the new capital. It rose by the labor of soldiers, thousands of soldiers, regiments who took orders and could not refuse to face a deadly foe, a gun or a swamp. They fell, and the earth they brought and their bones made the ground for the city. “Petrograd,” its residents say, “stands on skeletons.”

Petrograd is not in a hurry; it is not lazy; it is gracious and leisurely, as befits the freedom of its vast streets. It is a city that threw itself down amid the marshes and pine forests, luxuriously, both arms outflung. Its squares are paved fields; its streets are as broad as tributaries to the Neva, the widest river to cross a great city.

On Nevsky, the capital of the capital’s streets, the houses were built by generations past for generations to come. They are set and unchangeable like fortresses; their walls are thick and their windows are tiers of deep niches, rising over wide sidewalks of reddish-brown granite. From the statue of Alexander III, a huge gray man on a huge gray horse, silver rails stretch tense and straight to the Admiralty building far away, its white colonnade and thin golden spire raised like the crown, the symbol, the trade mark of Nevsky, over the broken skyline where every turret and balcony and gargoyle bending over the street are ageless features of a frozen stone face.

A golden cross on a small golden cupola rises to the clouds halfway down Nevsky, over the Anichkovsky palace, a bare red cube slashed by bare gray windows. And further, beyond the palace, a chariot raises to the clouds the black heads of its rearing horses, their hoofs hanging high over the street, over the stately columns of the Alexandrinsky theater. The palace looks like a barracks; the theater looks like a palace.

At the foot of the palace, Nevsky is cut by a stream, and a bridge arches over its swirling, muddy water. Four black statues stand at the four corners of the bridge. They may be only an accident and an ornament; they may be the very spirit of Petrograd, the city raised by man against the will of nature. Each statue is of a man and a horse. In the first one, the furious hoofs of a rearing beast are swung high in the air, ready to crush the naked, kneeling man, his arm stretched in a first effort toward the bridle of the monster. In the second, the man is up on one knee, his torso leaning back, the muscles of his legs, of his arms, of his body ready to burst through his skin, as he pulls at the bridle, in the supreme moment of the struggle. In the third, they are face to face, the man up on his feet, his head at the nostrils of a beast bewildered by a first recognition of its master. In the fourth, the beast is tamed; it steps obediently, led by the hand of the man who is tall, erect, calm in his victory, stepping forward with serene assurance, his head held straight, his eyes looking steadily into an unfathomable future.

On winter nights, strings of large white globes flare up over Nevsky—and snow sparkles over the white lights like salt crystals—and the colored lanterns of tramways, red, green, yellow, wink far away swimming over a soft darkness—and through lashes moist with frost the white globes look like crosses of long white searchlights on a black sky.

Nevsky starts on the shore of the Neva, at a quay as trim and perfect as a drawing room, with a red-granite parapet and a row of palaces, of straight angles, tall windows, chaste columns and balustrades, severe, harmonious and luxuriously stern in their masculine grace.

Divided by the river, Petrograd’s greatest mansion, the Winter Palace, faces Petrograd’s greatest prison, the Peter-Paul Fortress. The Czars lived in the Winter Palace; when they died, they crossed the Neva: in the cathedral of the Fortress, white slabs rose over the graves of the Czars. The prison stood behind the cathedral. The walls of the Fortress guarded the dead Czars and the Czar’s living enemies. In the long, silent halls of the palace, tall mirrors reflected the ramparts behind which men were forgotten, alive for decades in lonely stone graves.