We the Living (6 page)

The logs were damp; a fretful blue flame hissed feebly, dying and flaring up again in a burst of acrid smoke.

Kira sat in the deep, silken fur of a white bear rug at the fireplace, her arm encircling affectionately the huge monster’s ferocious head. It had been her favorite since childhood. When visiting her uncle, she had always asked for the story of how he had killed that bear, and she had laughed happily when he threatened that the bear would come back to life and bite disobedient little girls.

“Well,” said Maria Petrovna, her hands fluttering in the fire glow, “well, here you are back in Petrograd.”

“Yes,” said Galina Petrovna, “here we are.”

“Oh, Saint Mother of God!” sighed Maria Petrovna. “It makes it so hard sometimes to have a future to think about!”

“It does,” said Galina Petrovna.

“Well, what are the plans for the girls? Lydia darling, quite a young lady, aren’t you? Still heart-free?” Lydia’s smile was not a grateful one. Maria Petrovna sighed: “Men are so strange, nowadays. They don’t think of marriage. And the girls? I was carrying a son at Irina’s age. But she doesn’t think of a home and family. The Academy of Arts for her. Galina, do you remember how she used to ruin my furniture with her infernal drawings as soon as she was out of diapers? Well, Lydia, are you going to study?”

“I have no such intention,” said Lydia. “Too much education is unfeminine.”

“And Kira?”

“It’s funny to think that little Kira is of college age, isn’t it?” said Victor. “First of all, Kira, you’ll have to get a labor book—the new passport, you know. You’re over sixteen. And then. . . .”

“I think,” Maria Petrovna suggested eagerly, “that a profession is so useful nowadays. Why don’t you send Kira to a medical school? A lady doctor gets such nice rations!”

“Kira a doctor?” Galina Petrovna sneered. “Why, the selfish little thing just loathes physical injury. She wouldn’t help a wounded chicken.”

“My opinion . . .” Victor began.

A telephone rang in the next room. Irina darted out and returned, announcing aloud with a significant wink at Victor: “For you, Victor. It’s Vava.”

Victor walked out reluctantly. Through the door, left open by a draft, they heard some of his words: “. . . I know I promised to come tonight. But it’s an unexpected examination at the Institute. I have to study every minute of the evening. . . . Of course not, no one else. . . . You know I do, darling. . . .”

He returned to the fireplace and settled himself comfortably on the white bear’s back, close to Kira.

“My opinion, my charming little cousin,” he stated, “is that the most promising career for a woman is offered not by a school, but by employment in a Soviet office.”

“Victor, you don’t really mean that,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.

“One has to be practical nowadays,” Victor said slowly. “A student’s ration doesn’t provide much for a whole family—as you ought to know.”

“Employees get lard and sugar,” said Maria Petrovna.

“They are using a great many typists,” Victor insisted. “A typewriter’s keys are the stepping stones to any high office.”

“And you get shoes, and free tramway tickets,” said Maria Petrovna.

“Hell,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “you can’t make a drayhorse out of a racing steed.”

“Why, Kira,” asked Irina, “aren’t you interested in the subject of this discussion?”

“I am,” Kira answered calmly, “but I think the discussion is superfluous. I am going to the Technological Institute.”

“Kira!”

There were seven startled voices and they all uttered one name. Then Galina Petrovna said: “Well, with a daughter like this even her own mother isn’t let in on secrets!”

“When did you decide that?” Lydia gasped.

“About eight years ago,” said Kira.

“But Kira! What will you do?” Maria Petrovna gasped.

“I’ll be an engineer.”

“Frankly,” said Victor, annoyed, “I do not believe that engineering is a profession for women.”

“Kira,” Alexander Dimitrievitch said timidly, “you’ve never liked the Communists and here you select such a modern favorite profession of theirs—a woman engineer!”

“Are you going to build for the Red State?” asked Victor.

“I’m going to build because I want to build.”

“But Kira!” Lydia stared at her, bewildered. “That will mean dirt, and iron, and rust, and blow-torches, and filthy, sweaty men and no feminine company to help you.”

“That’s why I’ll like it.”

“It is not at all a cultured profession for a woman,” said Galina Petrovna.

“It’s the only profession,” said Kira, “for which I don’t have to learn any lies. Steel is steel. Most of the other sciences are someone’s guess, and someone’s wish, and many people’s lies.”

“What you lack,” said Lydia, “are the things of the spirit.”

“Frankly,” said Victor, “your attitude is slightly anti-social, Kira. You select a profession merely because you want it, without giving a thought to the fact that, as a woman, you would be much more useful to society in a more feminine capacity. And we all have our duty to society to consider.”

“Exactly to whom is it that you owe a duty, Victor?”

“To society.”

“What is society?”

“If I may say it, Kira, this is a childish question.”

“But,” said Kira, her eyes dangerously gentle and wide, “I don’t understand it. To whom is it that I owe a duty? To your neighbor next door? Or to the militia-man on the corner? Or to the clerk in the co-operative? Or to the old man I saw in line, third from the door, with an old basket and a woman’s hat?”

“Society, Kira, is a stupendous whole.”

“If you write a whole line of zeroes, it’s still—nothing.”

“Child,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “what are you doing in Soviet Russia?”

“That,” said Kira, “is what I’m wondering about.”

“Let her go to the Institute,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.

“I’ll have to,” Galina Petrovna agreed bitterly. “You can’t argue with her.”

“She always gets her way,” said Lydia resentfully. “I don’t see how she does it.”

Kira bent over the fire to blow at the dying flame. For one moment, as a bright tongue leaped up, a red glow tore her face out of the darkness. Her face was like that of a blacksmith bending over his forge.

“I fear for your future, Kira,” said Victor. “It’s time to get reconciled to life. You won’t get far with those ideas of yours.”

“That,” said Kira, “depends on what direction I want to go.”

TWO HANDS HELD A LITTLE BOOK BOUND in gray burlap. They were dry and calloused. They had seen many years of labor in the oil and the heat and the grease of roaring machines. The wrinkles were encrusted in black on a skin stiff with the dust of years. There were black tips on the cracked fingernails. One finger wore a tarnished ring with an imitation emerald.

The office had bare walls. They had served as towel to many a dirty hand, for traces left by five fingers zigzagged across the faded paint. In the old house now nationalized for government offices, it had been a washroom. The sink was removed; but a rusty outline with glaring nailholes still drew its picture on the wall, and two broken pipes hung out, like the bowels of the wounded building.

The window had an iron grate and broken panes which a spider had tried to mend. It faced a bare wall with red bricks losing the last scabs of paint which had been the advertisement of a hair-restorer.

The official sat at his desk. The desk had a blotter torn in one corner and a half-dry inkstand. The official wore a khaki suit and glasses.

Like two silent judges presiding behind their spokesman, two pictures flanked his head. They had no frames; four thumbtacks nailed each to the wall. One was of Lenin, the other of Karl Marx. Red letters above them said: IN UNION LIES OUR STRENGTH.

Head high, Kira Argounova stood before the desk.

She was there to receive her labor book. Every citizen over sixteen had to have a labor book and was ordered to carry it at all times. It had to be presented and stamped when he found employment or left it; when he moved into an apartment or out of one; when he enrolled at a school, got a bread card or was married. The new Soviet passport was more than a passport: it was a citizen’s permit to live. It was called “Labor Book,” for labor and life were considered synonymous.

The Russian Socialist Federalist Soviet Republic was about to acquire a new citizen.

The official held the little book bound in gray burlap, whose many pages he was going to fill. He had trouble with his pen; it was old and rusty, and dragged strings from the bottom of the inkstand.

On the clean open page he wrote:

Kira’s body was slender, too slender, and when she moved with a sharp, swift, geometrical precision, people were conscious of the movement alone, not of the body. Yet through any garment she wore, the unseen presence of her body made her look undressed. People wondered what made them aware of it. It seemed that the words she said were ruled by the will of her body and that her sharp movements were the unconscious reflection of a dancing, laughing soul. So that her spirit seemed physical and her body spiritual.

The official wrote:

Kira’s eyes were dark gray, the gray of storm clouds from behind which the sun can be expected at any moment. They looked at people quietly, directly, with something that people called arrogance, but which was only a deep, confident calm that seemed to tell men her sight was too clear and none of their favorite binoculars were needed to help her look at life.

Kira’s mouth was thin, long. When silent, it was cold, indomitable, and men thought of a Valkyrie with lance and winged helmet in the sweep of battle. But a slight movement made a wrinkle in the corners of her lips—and men thought of an imp perched on top of a toadstool, laughing in the faces of daisies.

Kira’s hair was short, thrown back off her forehead, light rays lost in its tangled mass, the hair of a primitive jungle woman over a face that had escaped from the easel of a modern artist who had been in a hurry: a face of straight, sharp lines sketched furiously to suggest an unfinished promise.

The Soviet official picked a thread off his pen, rolled it in his fingers and wiped them on his trousers.

Kira was born in the gray granite house on Kamenostrovsky. In that vast mansion Galina Petrovna had a boudoir where, at night, a maid in black fastened the clasps of her diamond necklaces; and a reception room where, her taffeta petticoats rustling solemnly, she entertained ladies with sables and lorgnettes. Children were not admitted into these rooms, and Galina Petrovna seldom appeared in any of the others.

Kira had an English governess, a thoughtful young lady with a lovely smile. She liked her governess, but often preferred to be alone—and was left alone. When she refused to play with a crippled relative of whom the family’s compassion had made a general idol—she was never asked to do it again. When she threw out of the window the first book she read about the good fairy rewarding an unselfish little girl—the governess never brought another one of that kind. When she was taken to church and sneaked out alone in the middle of the services, to get lost in the streets and be brought home to her frantic family—in a police wagon—she was never taken to church again.

The Argounov summer residence stood on a high hill over a river, alone in its spacious gardens, on the outskirts of a fashionable summer resort. The house turned its back upon the river and faced the grounds where the hill sloped down gracefully into a garden of lawns drawn with a ruler, bushes clipped into archways and marble fountains made by famous artists.

The other side of the hill hung over the river like a mass of rock and earth disgorged by a volcano and frozen in its chaotic tangle. Rowing downstream, people expected a dinosaur to stretch its head out of the black caves overgrown with wild ferns, between trees that grew horizontally into the air, huge roots, like spiders, grasping the rocks.

For many summers, while her parents were visiting Nice, Biarritz and Vienna, Kira was left alone to spend her days in the wild freedom of the rocky hill, as its sole, undisputed sovereign in a torn blue skirt and a white shirt whose sleeves were always missing. The sharp sand cut her bare feet. She swung from rock to rock, grasping a tree branch, throwing her body into space, the blue skirt flaring like a parachute.

She made a raft of tree branches and, clutching a long pole, sailed down the river. There were many dangerous rocks and whirlpools on the way. The thrill of the struggle rose from her bare feet, that felt the stream pulsating under the frail raft, through her body tensed to meet the wind, the blue skirt beating against her legs like a sail. Branches bending over the river brushed her forehead. She swept past, leaving threads of hair entwined in the leaves, and the trees leaving wild red berries caught in her hair.

The first thing that Kira learned about life and the first thing that her elders learned, dismayed, about Kira, was the joy of being alone.