We the Living (64 page)

“Well,” Leo shrugged, “she had a beautiful body.”

“Let’s go, Leo,” said Kira.

“Wait a minute, Lev Sergeievitch,” Morozov said slowly, putting his saucer down. “Just where did you get all that money?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo. “Tonia gave it to me.”

“Antonina, where did you . . .”

“Oh?” Antonina Pavlovna raised her eyebrows and looked bored. “I took that package you had under the waste basket.”

“Tonia!” Morozov roared, jumping up, so that the dishes rattled on the table. “You didn’t take that!”

“Certainly I took it,” Antonina Pavlovna tilted her chin defiantly. “And I’m not accustomed to being reproached about money. I took it and that’s that, so what are you going to do about it?”

“My God! Oh, my God! Oh, my Lord in Heaven!” Morozov grasped his head and nodded, rocking like a toy with a broken spring. “What are we going to do? That was the money we owe Syerov. It was due yesterday. And we haven’t got another ruble on hand . . . and Syerov . . . well, if I don’t deliver it today, he’ll kill me. . . . What am I going to do? . . . He won’t be kept waiting and . . .”

“Oh, he won’t, eh?” Leo chuckled coldly. “Well, he’ll wait and he’ll like it. Stop whining like a mutt. What are you afraid of? He can do nothing to us and he knows it.”

“I’m surprised at you, Lev Sergeievitch,” Morozov growled, his freckles drowned in red. “You get your fair share, don’t you? Do you think it was honorable to take . . .”

“Honorable?” Leo laughed resonantly, his gayest, lightest, most insulting laughter. “Are you speaking to me? My dear friend, I’ve acquired the great privilege of not having to worry about that word at all. Not at all. In fact, if you find something particularly dishonorable—you may be sure I’ll do it. The lower—the better. I wish you a good day. . . . Come on, Kira.” He looked around uncertainly: “Where the hell’s my hat?”

“Don’t you remember, Leo?” Antonina Pavlovna reminded him gently. “You lost it on the way home.”

“That’s right, I did. Well, I’ll buy another one. Buy three of them. So long.”

Kira called a sleigh and they rode home in silence.

When they were alone in their room, Leo said brusquely: “I won’t have any criticism from you or anybody else. And you, particularly, have no complaints to make. I haven’t slept with any other woman, if that’s what you’re worried about, and that’s all you have to know.”

“I wasn’t worried, Leo. I have no complaints to make and no criticism. But I want to speak to you. Will you listen?”

He said: “Sure,” indifferently, and sat down.

She knelt before him and slipped her arms around him and shook her hair back, her eyes wide, intent, her voice tense with the calm of a last effort: “Leo, I can’t reproach you. I can’t blame you. I know what you’re doing. I know why you’re doing it. But listen: it’s not too late; they haven’t caught you; you still have time. Let’s make an effort, a last one: let’s save all we can and apply for a foreign passport. Let’s run to the point of the earth that’s the farthest from this damned country.”

He looked into her flaming eyes with eyes that were like mirrors which could not reflect a flame any longer. “Why bother?” he asked.

“Leo, I know what you’ll say. You have no desire to live. You don’t care any more. But listen: do it without desire. Even if you don’t believe you’ll ever care again. Just postpone your final judgment on yourself; postpone it till you get there. When you’re free in a human country again—then see if you still want to live.”

“You little fool! Do you think they give foreign passports to men with my record?”

“Leo, we have to try. We can’t give up. We can’t go on for one minute without that hope ahead of us. Leo, it can’t get you! I won’t let it get you!”

“Who? The G.P.U.? How are you going to stop it?”

“No! Not the G.P.U. Forget the G.P.U. There’s something worse, much worse. It got Victor. It got Andrei. It got Mother. It won’t get you.”

“What do you mean, it got Victor? Are you comparing me to that bootlicking rat, that . . .”

“Leo, the bootlicking and all those things—that’s nothing. There’s something much worse that it’s done to Victor, underneath, deeper, more final—and the bootlicking, it’s only a consequence. It does that. It kills something. Have you ever seen plants grown without sunlight, without air? I won’t let it do that to you. Let it take a hundred and fifty million living creatures. But not you, Leo! Not you, my highest reverence . . .”

“What an exaggerated expression! Where did you get that?”

She stared at him, repeating: “Where did I . . .”

“Really, Kira, sometimes I wonder why you’ve never outgrown that tendency to be so serious about everything. Nothing is getting me. Nothing is doing anything to me. I’m doing what I please, which is more than you can say about anyone else these days.”

“Leo, listen! There’s something I want to do—to try. We have a lot of things to untangle, you and I both. And it’s not easy. Let’s try to slash it all off, at once.”

“By doing what?”

“Leo, let’s get married.”

“Huh?” He stared at her incredulously.

She repeated: “Let’s get married.”

He threw his head back and laughed. He laughed resonantly, a clear, light, icy laughter, as he had laughed at Andrei Taganov, as he had laughed at Morozov. “What’s this, Kira? The make-an-honest-woman-of-you nonsense?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Rather late for the two of us, isn’t it?”

“Why not, Leo?”

“What for? Do we need it?”

“No.”

“Then why do it?”

“I don’t know. But I’m asking it.”

“That’s not reason enough to do something senseless. I’m not in a mood to become a respectable husband. If you’re afraid of losing me—no scrap of paper, scribbled by a Red clerk, is going to hold me.”

“I’m not afraid of losing you. I’m afraid that you will lose yourself.”

“But a couple of rubles at the Zags and the Upravdom’s blessing will save my soul, is that it?”

“Leo, I have no reasons to offer. But I’m asking it.”

“Are you delivering an ultimatum?”

She said softly, with a quiet smile of surrender and resignation: “No.”

“Then we’ll forget about it.”

“Yes, Leo.”

He slipped his hands under her armpits and pulled her up into his arms, and said wearily: “You crazy, hysterical child! You drive yourself into a fit over some weird fears. Now forget about it. We’ll save every ruble from now on, if that’s what you want. You can put it away for a trip to Monte Carlo or San Francisco or the planet Jupiter. And we won’t talk about it again. All right?”

He was smiling, his arrogant smile on a face that remained incredibly beautiful, a face that was like a drug to her, inexplicable, unconditional, consummate like music. She buried her head on his shoulder, repeating helplessly, hopelessly, a name as a drug: “Leo . . . Leo . . . Leo . . .”

PAVEL SYEROV HAD A DRINK BEFORE HE came to his office. He had another drink in the afternoon. He had telephoned Morozov and a voice he knew to be Morozov’s had told him that the Citizen Morozov was not at home. He paced up and down his office and smashed an inkstand. He found a misspelled word in a letter he had dictated, and threw the letter, crumpled into a twisted ball, at his secretary’s face. He telephoned Morozov and got no answer. A woman telephoned him and her soft, lisping voice said sweetly, insistently: “But, Pavlusha darling, you promised me that bracelet!” A speculator brought a bracelet tied in the corner of a dirty handkerchief, and refused to leave it without the full amount in cash. Syerov telephoned Morozov at the Food Trust; a secretary demanded to know who was calling; Syerov slammed the receiver down without answering. He roared at a ragged applicant for a job that he would turn him over to the G.P.U. and ordered his secretary to throw out all those waiting to see him. He left the office an hour earlier than usual and slammed the door behind him.

He walked past Morozov’s house on his way home and hesitated, but saw a militia-man on the corner and did not enter.

At dinner—which had been sent from a communal kitchen two blocks away, and was cold, with grease floating over the cabbage soup—Comrade Sonia said: “Really, Pavel, I’ve got to have a fur coat. I can’t allow myself to catch a cold—you know—for the child’s sake. And no rabbit fur, either. I know you can afford it. Oh, I’m not saying anything about anyone’s little activities, but I’m just keeping my eyes open.”

He threw his napkin into the soup and left the table without eating.

He called Morozov’s house and let the telephone ring for five minutes. There was no answer. He sat on the bed and emptied a bottle of vodka. Comrade Sonia left for a meeting of the Teachers’ Council of an Evening School for Illiterate Women House Workers. He emptied a second bottle.

Then he rose resolutely, swaying a little, pulled his belt tight across his fur jacket and went to Morozov’s house.

He rang three times. There was no answer. He kept his finger on the bell button, leaning indifferently against the wall. He heard no sound behind the door, but he heard steps rising up the stairs and he flung himself into the darkest corner of the landing. The steps died on the floor below and he heard a door opening and closing. He could not let himself be seen waiting there, he remembered dimly. He reached for his notebook and wrote, pressing the notebook to the wall, in the light of a street lamp outside:

He folded the note and slipped it under the door.

Fifteen minutes later, Morozov stepped noiselessly out of his bathroom and tiptoed to the lobby. He listened nervously, but heard no sound on the stair-landing. Then he noticed the faint blur of white in the darkness, on the floor.

He picked up the note and read it, bending under the dining-room lamp. His face looked gray.

The telephone rang. He shuddered, frozen to the spot, as if the eyes somewhere behind that ringing bell could see him with the note in his hand. He crammed the note deep into his pocket and answered the telephone, trembling.

It was an old aunt of his and she sniffled into the receiver, asking to borrow some money. He called her an old bitch and hung up.

Through the open bedroom door, Antonina Pavlovna, sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair, called out in a piercing voice, objecting to the use of such language. He whirled upon her ferociously: “If it weren’t for you and that damn lover of yours . . .”

Antonina Pavlovna shrieked: “He’s not my lover—yet! If he were, do you think I’d be squatting around a sloppy old fool like you?”

They had a quarrel.

Morozov forgot about the note in his pocket.

The European roof garden had a ceiling of glass panes; it looked like a black void staring down, crushing those below more implacably than a steel vault. There were lights; yellow lights that looked dimmed in an oppressive haze which was cigarette smoke, or heat, or the black abyss above. There were white tables and yellow glints in the silverware.

Men sat at the tables. Yellow sparks flashed in their diamond studs and in the beads of moisture on their red, flushed faces. They ate; they bent eagerly over their plates; they chewed hurriedly, incredulously; they were not out on a carefree evening in a gay night spot; they were
eating
.

In a corner, a yellowish bald head bent over a red steak on a white plate; the man cut the steak, smacking his fleshy red lips. Across the table, a red-headed girl of fifteen ate hastily, her head drawn into her shoulders; when she raised her head, she blushed from the tip of her short, freckled nose to her white, freckled neck, and her mouth was twisted as if she were going to scream.

A fierce jet of smoke swayed by a dark window pane; a thin individual, with a long face that betrayed too closely its future appearance as a skull, rocked monotonously on the back legs of his chair, and smoked without interruption, holding a cigarette in long, yellow fingers, spouting smoke out of wide nostrils frozen in a sardonic, unhealthy grin.

Women moved among the tables, with an awkward, embarrassed insolence. A head of soft, golden waves nodded unsteadily under a light, wide eyes in deep blue rings, a young mouth open in a vicious, sneering smile. In the middle of the room, a gaunt, dark woman with knobs on her shoulders, holes under her collar-bones and a skin the color of muddy coffee, was laughing too loudly, opening painted lips like a gash over strong white teeth and very red gums.

The orchestra played “John Gray.” It flung brief, blunt notes out into space, as if tearing them off the strings before they were ripe, hiding the gap of an uncapturable gaiety under a convulsive rhythm.