We the Living (57 page)

KIRA STOOD LOOKING AT A BUILDING UNDER construction.

Jagged walls of red bricks, new and raw, checkered by a net of fresh, white cement, rose to a gray sky darkening slowly in an early twilight. High against the clouds, workers knelt on the walls, and iron hammers knocked, ringing sonorously over the street, and engines roared hoarsely, and steam whistled somewhere in a tangled forest of planks, beams, scaffoldings splattered with lime. She stood watching, her eyes wide, her lips smiling. A young man, with a tanned face and a pipe in the corner of his mouth, walked swiftly up the narrow planks in the perilous framework, and the movements of his hands were brusque, precise, implacable like the blows of a hammer. She did not know how long she had been standing there. She had forgotten all but the work before her. Then, suddenly, her world returning to her with a jolt, in a blinding second of clear, sharp perception—as if new eyes were taking a first glance at a new world and saw it as she had forgotten to see it—she wondered, astonished, why she was not there, on the scaffolding, giving orders like the man with the pipe, what reason could possibly keep her from her work, her life work, her only desire. It was one swift second, so swift that she felt it only after it was over; and after it was over, she saw the world again as she had grown accustomed to see it, and she remembered why she was not on the scaffolding, what reason had closed to her, forever, the only work she wanted. And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: “Perhaps . . . Some day . . . Abroad . . .”

A hand touched her shoulder: “What are you doing here, citizen?”

A militia-man was staring suspiciously down at her. He wore a peaked khaki cap, with a red star, over a low forehead. He squinted, opening soft lips that had no shape, like pillows: “You have been standing here for half an hour, citizen. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” said Kira.

“Well, then, on your way, citizen.”

“I was just looking,” said Kira.

“You,” decreed the militia-man, opening lips shapeless as pillows, “have no business looking.”

She turned silently and walked away.

Against her skin, sewn on to her skirt, a little pocket was growing thicker, slowly, week by week. She kept in it the money she managed to save from Leo’s reckless spending. It was a foundation rising for their future and perhaps—some day—abroad. . . .

She was returning home from a meeting of excursion guides. There had been a political examination at the Excursion Center. A man with a close-cropped head had sat at a broad desk, and trembling, white-lipped guides had stood before him, one after the other, answering questions in jerking, unnaturally bright voices. Kira had recited adequately the appropriate sounds about the importance of historical excursions for the political education and class-consciousness of the working masses; she had been able to answer the question about the state of the latest strike of textile workers in Great Britain; she had known all about the latest decree of the Commissar of People’s Education in regard to the Schools for the Illiterates of the Turkestan; but she could not name the latest amount of coal produced by the mines of the Don basin.

“Don’t you read the newspapers, comrade?” the examining official had asked sternly.

“Yes, comrade.”

“I would suggest that you read them more thoroughly. We do not need limited specialists and old-fashioned academicians who know nothing outside their narrow professions. Our modern educators must be politically enlightened and show an active interest in our Soviet reality, in all the details of our state construction. . . . Next!”

She might be dismissed, Kira thought indifferently, walking home. She would not worry. She could not worry any longer. She would not allow herself to reach the state of Comrade Nesterova, an elderly guide who had been a school teacher for thirty years. Comrade Nesterova, between excursions, school classes, clubs, and cooking for a paralyzed mother, spent all her time reading the newspapers, memorizing every item word for word, preparing herself for the examination. Comrade Nesterova needed her job badly. But when she had stood before the examiner, Comrade Nesterova had not been able to utter a word; she had opened her mouth senselessly, without a sound, and collapsed suddenly, shrieking, in hysterical tears; she had had to be carried out of the room and a nurse had been called. Comrade Nesterova’s name had been crossed off the list of excursion guides.

Kira had forgotten the examination by the time she reached her house: she was thinking of Leo; she was wondering how she would find him that evening. The question arose, with a small twist of anxiety, every time she came home late and knew that she would find him there. He would leave in the morning, smiling and cheerful and brisk with energy; but she never knew what to expect at the end of the day. Sometimes she found him reading a foreign book, barely answering her greeting, refusing to eat, chuckling coldly once in a while at the bright lines of a world so far from their own. Sometimes she found him drunk, staggering across the room, laughing bitterly, tearing banknotes before her eyes when she spoke of the money he had spent. Sometimes she found him discussing art with Antonina Pavlovna, yawning, talking as if he did not hear his own words. Sometimes—rarely—he smiled at her, his eyes young and clear as they had been long ago, on their first meetings, and he pressed money into her hand, whispering: “Hide it from me. . . . For the escape. For Europe. . . . We’ll do it . . . some day . . . if you can keep me from thinking . . . until then. . . . If we can only keep from thinking. . . .”

She had learned to keep from thinking; she remembered only that he was Leo and that she had no life beyond the sound of his voice, the movements of his hands, the lines of his body—and that she had to stand on guard between him and the something immense, unnameable which was moving slowly toward him, which had swallowed so many. She would stand on guard; nothing else mattered; she never thought of the past; the future—no one around her thought of the future.

She never thought of Andrei; she never allowed herself to wonder what the days, perhaps the years, ahead of them would have to be. She knew that she had gone too far and could not retreat. She was wise enough to know that she could not leave him; she was brave enough not to attempt it. In averting a blow he would not be able to stand, she was paying him, silently, for what she had done. Some day, she felt dimly, she would have to end the payment; the day when, perhaps, a passage abroad would open for Leo and her; then she would end it without hesitation, since Leo would need her; then Leo would be safe; nothing else mattered.

“Kira?” a gay voice called from the bathroom, when she entered their room.

Leo came out, a towel in his hand, naked from the waist up, shaking drops of water off his face, throwing tangled hair off his forehead, smiling.

“I’m glad you’re back, Kira. I hate to come home and not find you here.”

He looked as if he had just stepped out of a stream on a hot summer day, and one could almost see the sun sparkling in the drops of water on his shoulders. He moved as if his whole body were a living will, straight, arrogant, commanding, a will and a body that could never bend because both had been born without the capacity to conceive of bending.

She stood still, afraid to approach him, afraid to shatter one of the rare moments when he looked what he could have been, what he was intended to be.

He approached her and his hand closed over her throat and he jerked her head back to hold her lips to his. There was a contemptuous tenderness in his movement, and a command, and hunger; he was not a lover, but a slave owner. Her arms holding him, her mouth drinking the glistening drops on his skin, she knew the answer, the motive for all her days, for all she had to bear and forget in those days, the only motive she needed.

Irina came to visit Kira, once in a while, on the rare evenings she could spare from her work at the Club. Irina laughed sonorously, and scattered cigarette ashes all over the room, and related the latest, most dangerous political anecdotes, and drew caricatures of all their acquaintances on the white table cloth.

But on the evenings when Leo was busy at the store, when Kira and Irina sat alone at a lighted fireplace, Irina did not always laugh. Sometimes, she sat silently for long minutes and when she raised her head and looked at Kira, her eyes were bewildered, pleading for help. Then she whispered, looking into the fire:

“Kira, I . . . I’m afraid. . . . I don’t know why, it’s only at times, but I’m so afraid. . . . What’s going to happen to all of us? That’s what frightens me. Not the question itself, but that it’s a question you can’t ask anyone. You ask it and watch people, and you’ll see their eyes, and you’ll know that they feel the same thing, the same fear, and you can’t question them about it, but if you did, they couldn’t explain it, either . . . You know, we’re all trying so hard not to think at all, not to think beyond the next day, and sometimes even not beyond the next hour. . . . Do you know what I believe? I believe
they’re
doing it deliberately.
They
don’t want us to think. That’s why we have to work as we do. And because there’s still time left after we’ve worked all day and stood in a few lines, we have the social activities to attend, and then the newspapers. Do you know that I almost got fired from the Club, last week? I was asked about the new oil wells near Baku and I didn’t know a damn thing about them. Why should I know about the oil wells near Baku if I want to earn my millet drawing rotten posters? Why do I have to memorize newspapers like poems? Sure, I need the kerosene for the Primus. But does it mean that in order to have kerosene in order to cook millet, I have to know the name of every stinking worker in every stinking well where the kerosene comes from? Two hours a day of reading news of state construction for fifteen minutes of cooking on the Primus? . . . Well, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If we try, it’s worse. Take Sasha, for instance . . . Oh, Kira! I’m . . . I’m so afraid! . . . He . . . he . . . Well, I don’t have to lie to you. You know what he’s doing. It’s a secret organization of some kind and they think they can overthrow the government. Set the people free. His duty to the people, Sasha says. And you and I know that any one of that great people would be only too glad to betray them all to the G.P.U. for an extra pound of linseed oil. They have secret meetings and they print things and distribute them in the factories. Sasha says we can’t expect help from abroad, it’s up to us to fight for our own freedom. . . . Oh, what can I do? I would like to stop him and I have no right to stop him. But I know they’ll get him. Remember the students they sent to Siberia last spring? Hundreds, thousands of them. You’ll never hear from any of them again. He’s an orphan, hasn’t a soul in the world, but me. I would try to stop him, but he won’t listen, and he’s right, only I love him. I love him. And he’ll go to Siberia some day. And what’s the use? Kira! What’s the use?”

Sasha Chernov turned the corner of his street, hurrying home. It was a dark October evening and the little hand that seized his coat belt seemed to have shot suddenly out of nowhere. Then he distinguished a shawl thrown over a little head and a pair of eyes staring up at him, huge, unblinking, terrified.

“Citizen Chernov,” the girl whispered, her trembling body pressed to his legs, stopping him, “don’t go home.”

He recognized his neighbor’s daughter. He smiled and patted her head, but, instinctively, stepped aside, into the shadow of a wall. “What’s the matter, Katia?”

“Mother said . . .” the girl gulped, “mother said to tell you not to come home. . . . There are strange men there. . . . They’ve thrown your books all over the room. . . .”

“Thank your mother for me, kid,” Sasha whispered and whirled about and disappeared behind the corner. He had had time to catch sight of a black limousine standing at the door of his house.

He raised his collar and walked swiftly. He walked into a restaurant and telephoned. A strange man’s voice answered gruffly. Sasha hung up without a word; his friend had been arrested.