We the Living (58 page)

They had had a secret meeting, that night. They had discussed plans, agitation among the workers, a new printing press. He grinned a little at the thought of the G.P.U. agents looking at the huge pile of anti-Soviet proclamations in his room. He frowned; tomorrow the proclamations would have been distributed into countless hands in Petrograd’s factories.

He jumped into a tramway and rode to another friend’s house. Turning the corner, he saw a black limousine at the door. He hurried away.

He rode to a railroad terminal and telephoned again, a different number. No one answered.

He walked, shuffling through a heavy slush, to another address. He saw no light in the window of his friend’s room. But he saw the janitor’s wife at the back yard gate, whispering excitedly to a neighbor. He did not approach the house.

He blew at his frozen, gloveless hands. He hurried to one more address. There was a light in the window for which he was looking. But on the window sill stood a vase of peculiar shape and that had been the danger signal agreed upon.

He took another tramway. It was late and the tramway was almost empty; it was lighted too brightly. A man in a military tunic entered at the next stop. Sasha got out.

He leaned against a dark lamp post and wiped his forehead. His forehead was burning with a sweat colder than the melting snow drops.

He was hurrying down a dark street when he saw a man in an old derby hat strolling casually on the other side. Sasha turned a corner, and walked two blocks, and turned again, and walked a block, and turned once more. Then he looked cautiously over his shoulder. The man in the old derby was studying the window of an apothecary shop three houses behind him.

Sasha walked faster. A gray snow fluttered over yellow lights over closed gates. The street was deserted. He heard no sound but that of his own steps crunching mud. But through the sounds, and through the distant grating of wheels, and through the muffled, rumbling, rising knocks somewhere in his chest, he heard the shuffling, soft as a breath, of steps following him.

He stopped short and looked back. The man in the derby was bending to tie a shoe lace. Sasha looked up. He was at the door of a house he knew well. It took the flash of a second. He was behind the door and, pressed to a wall in a dark lobby, without movement, without breath, he watched the square of the glass pane in the door. He saw the man in the derby pass by. He heard his steps crunching away, slowing down, stopping, hesitating, coming back. The derby swam past the glass square again. The steps creaked, louder and lower, back and forth, somewhere close by.

Sasha swung noiselessly up the stairs and knocked at a door.

Irina opened it.

He pressed a finger to his lips and whispered: “Is Victor home?”

“No,” she breathed.

“Is his wife?”

“She’s asleep.”

“May I come in? They’re after me.”

She pulled him in and closed the door slowly, steadily, taking a long, patient minute. The door touched the jamb without a sound.

Galina Petrovna came in with a bundle under her arm.

“Good evening, Kira. . . . My Lord, Kira, what a smell in this room!”

Kira rose indifferently, dropping a book. “Good evening, Mother. It’s the Lavrovs next door. They’re making sauerkraut.”

“My Lord! So that’s what he was mixing in the big barrel. He’s certainly uncivil, that old Lavrov. He didn’t even greet me. And after all, we’re relatives, in a way.”

Behind the door, a wooden paddle grated in a barrel of cabbage. Lavrov’s wife sighed monotonously: “Heavy are our sins . . . heavy are our sins. . . .” The boy was chipping wood in a corner and the crystal chandelier tinkled, shuddering, with every blow. The Lavrovs had moved into the room vacated by their daughter; they had shared a garret with two other families in a workers’ tenement; they had been glad to make the change.

Galina Petrovna asked: “Isn’t Leo home?”

“No,” said Kira, “I’m expecting him.”

“I’m on my way to evening classes,” said Galina Petrovna, “and I just dropped in for a minute . . .” She hesitated, fingered her bundle, smiled apologetically, and said too casually: “I just dropped in to show you something, see if you like it . . . maybe you’ll want to . . . buy it.”

“To buy it?” Kira repeated, astonished. “What is it, Mother?”

Galina Petrovna had unwrapped the bundle; she was holding an old-fashioned gown of flowing white lace; its long train touched the floor; Galina Petrovna’s hesitant smile was almost shy.

“Why, Mother!” Kira gasped. “Your wedding gown!”

“You see,” Galina Petrovna explained very quickly, “it’s the school. I got my salary yesterday and . . . and they had deducted so much for my membership in the Proletarian Society of Chemical Defense—and I didn’t even know I was a member—that I haven’t . . . You see, your father needs new shoes—the cobbler’s refused to mend his old ones—and I was going to buy them this month . . . but with the Chemical Defense and . . . You see, you could alter it nicely—the dress, I mean—it’s good material, I’ve only worn it . . . once. . . . And I thought, if you liked it, for an evening gown, maybe, or . . .”

“Mother,” Kira said almost severely, and wondered at the little jerking break in her voice, “you know very well that if you need anything . . .”

“I know, child, I know,” Galina Petrovna interrupted, and the wrinkles on her face were suddenly flushed with pink. “You’ve been a wonderful daughter, but . . . with all you’ve given us already . . . I didn’t feel I could ask . . . and I thought I’d rather . . . but then, if you don’t like the dress . . .”

“Yes,” Kira said resolutely, “I like it. I’ll buy it, Mother.”

“I really don’t need it,” Galina Petrovna muttered, “and I don’t mind at all.”

“I was going to buy an evening gown, anyway,” Kira lied.

She found her pocketbook. It was stretched, stuffed full, bursting with crisp new bills. The night before, coming home late, kissing her, staggering, Leo had slipped his hand into his pocket and dropped crumpled bills all over the floor, and stuffed her pocketbook, laughing: “Go on, spend it! Plenty more coming. Just another little deal with Comrade Syerov. Brilliant Comrade Syerov. Spend it, I say!”

She emptied the pocketbook into Galina Petrovna’s hands. “Why, child!” Galina Petrovna protested. “Not all that! I didn’t want that much. It isn’t worth that!”

“Of course, it’s worth it. All that lovely lace. . . . Don’t let’s argue, Mother. . . . And thank you so much.”

Galina Petrovna crammed the bills into her old bag, with a frightened hurry. She looked at Kira and shook her head wisely, very sadly, and muttered: “Thank you, child. . . .”

When she had gone, Kira tried on the wedding gown. It was long and plain as a medieval garment; its tight sleeves were low over the backs of her hands; its tight collar was high under her chin; it was all lace with no ornaments of any kind.

She stood before a tall mirror, her arms at her sides, palms up, her head thrown back, her hair tumbling down on her white shoulders, her body suddenly tall and too thin, fragile in the long, solemn folds of a lace delicate as a cobweb. She looked at herself as at a strange figure from somewhere many centuries away. And her eyes seemed suddenly very large, very dark, frightened.

She took the dress off and threw it into a corner of her wardrobe.

Leo came home with Antonina Pavlovna. She wore a sealskin coat and a turban of violet satin. Her heavy French perfume floated through the odor of sauerkraut from Lavrov’s quarters.

“Where’s the maid?” Leo asked.

“She had to go. We waited, but you’re late, Leo.”

“That’s all right. We had dinner at a restaurant, Tonia and I. You haven’t changed your mind, have you, Kira? Will you go with us to that opening?”

“I’m sorry, Leo, I can’t. I have a guides’ meeting tonight. . . . And, Leo, are you sure you want to go? This is the third night club opening in two weeks.”

“This is different,” said Antonina Pavlovna. “This is a real casino, just like abroad. Just like Monte Carlo.”

“Leo,” Kira sighed helplessly, “gambling again?”

He laughed: “Why not? We don’t have to worry if we lose a few hundreds, do we, Tonia?”

Antonina Pavlovna smiled, pointing her chin forward: “Certainly not. We just left Koko, Kira Alexandrovna.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “There’s another shipment of white flour coming from Syerov day after tomorrow. How that boy can handle his business! I admire him tremendously.”

“I’ll jump into my dinner jacket,” Leo said. “It won’t take me a second. Do you mind turning to the window for a moment, Tonia?”

“Certainly,” Antonina Pavlovna smiled coquettishly, “I do mind. But I promise not to peek, no matter how much I’d love to.”

She stood at the window, putting a friendly hand on Kira’s shoulder. “Poor Koko!” Antonina Pavlovna sighed. “He works so much. He has a meeting tonight—the Food Trust’s Employees’ Educational Circle. He’s vice-secretary. He has to keep up his social activity, you know.” She winked significantly. “He has so many meetings and sessions and things. I’d positively wilt of loneliness if our dear Leo wasn’t gallant enough to take me out once in a while.”

Kira looked at Leo’s tall black figure in his immaculate dinner clothes, as she had looked at herself in the medieval wedding gown: as if he were a being from many centuries away, and it seemed strange to see him standing by the table with the Primus.

He took Antonina Pavlovna’s arm with a gesture that belonged in a foreign film scene, and they left. When the door had closed behind them in Lavrov’s room, Kira heard Lavrov’s wife grunting: “And they say private traders don’t make no money.”

“Dictatorship of the Proletariat!” Lavrov growled and spat loudly.

Kira put on her old coat. She was not going to the excursion guides’ meeting. She was going to the pavilion in a lonely palace garden.

A fire was burning in Andrei’s fireplace. The logs creaked with sharp little explosions, long hulks broken into checks of an even, transparent, luminous red, and little orange flames swayed, fluttering, meeting, curving softly, dying suddenly, leaping up again, little blue tongues licking glowing coals; over the logs, as if suspended motionless in the air, long red flames tapered into the darkness of the chimney; yellow sparks shot upward, dying against black sooted bricks. An orange glow danced, trembling, on the white brocaded walls, on the posters of Red soldiers, smokestacks and tractors. One of Leda’s feet drooped over the edge of the mantelpiece, its toes pink in the glow.

Kira sat on a box before the fireplace. Andrei sat at her feet, his face was buried in her knees; his hand caressed slowly the silken arch of her foot; his fingers dropped to the floor and came back to her tight silk stocking.

“. . . and then, when you’re here,” he whispered, “it’s worth all the torture, all the waiting. . . . And then I don’t have to think any more. . . .”

He raised his head. He looked at her and pronounced words she had never heard from him before: “I’m so tired. . . .”

She held his head, her two hands spread on his temples. She asked: “What’s the matter, Andrei?”

He turned away, to the fire. He said: “My Party.” Then he whirled back to her. “You know it, Kira. Perhaps you knew it long ago. You were right. Perhaps you’re right about many things, those things we’ve tried not to discuss.”

She whispered: “Andrei, do you want to discuss it—with me? I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me. Don’t you think I can see it all, myself? Don’t you think I know what that great revolution of ours has come to? We shoot one speculator and a hundred others hire taxis on Nevsky every evening. We raze villages to the ground, we fire machine guns into rows of peasants crazed with misery, when they kill a Communist. And ten of the avenged victim’s Party brothers drink champagne at the home of a man with diamond studs in his shirt. Where did he get the diamonds? Who’s paying for the champagne? We don’t look into that too closely.”