We the Living (79 page)

Snow rose to her knees, and each step was like a fall forward, and she held her skirt high, clutched in her fist. Around her, a blue that did not seem blue, a color that was no color, that had never existed in the world she had known, stretched without end, and sometimes she thought she was standing alone, very tall, very high over a flat circle, and sometimes she thought the bluish whiteness was a huge wall closing in over her head.

The sky hung low, in grayish patches, and black patches, and streaks of a blue that one could never remember in the daytime; and blots of something which was not a color and not quite a light ray, flowed from nowhere, trickling once in a while among the clouds, and she bent her head not to see it.

There were no lights ahead; she knew that the lights behind her had long since vanished, even though she did not look back. She carried nothing: she had left her suitcase and her old clothes in the village; she would need nothing—there—ahead—but the little roll in the lining of her jacket, and she touched it cautiously once in a while.

Her knees hurt with the piercing pain of stretched sinews, as if she were climbing a long stairway. She watched the pain, a little curiously, like an outsider. Scalding needles pierced her cheeks, and they itched, and she scratched them once in a while with a white mitten, but it did not help.

She heard nothing but the rustle of the snow under her boots, and she tried to walk faster, not to listen beyond the sound of her feet, not to notice the slurred shadows of sounds hanging around her, floating from nowhere.

She knew she had been walking for hours, that which she had once called hours. There were no hours here; there were only steps, only legs rising and falling deep into the snow, and a snow that had no end. Or had it an end? That, really, did not matter. She did not have to think of that. She had to think only that she had to walk. She had to walk west. That was the only problem, that was the total of all the problems. Had she any problems? Had she any questions to be answered? If she had—they would be answered—there. She did not have to think. She had to get out. She would think—then—if there were thoughts to be faced. Only she had to get out. Only to get out.

In the white mittens, her fingers ached, her bones drawn tight, her joints squeezed as in a vise. She must be cold, she thought; she wondered dimly whether it was a very cold night.

Before her, the blue snow was luminous, the snow lighting the sky. There was nothing but a haze, ahead of her, where the earth was smeared into the clouds, and she was not sure whether the clouds were close to her face and she would knock against them, or many miles away.

She had left nothing behind. She was walking out of a void, a void white and unreal as that earth around her. She could not give up. She still had them—those two legs that could move—and something lost somewhere within her, that told them to move. She would not give up. She was alive; alive and alone in a desert which was not a living earth. She had to walk, because she was still alive. She had to get out.

Long spirals of snow rose in the wind, brushing the low sky, far ahead. She saw strips of a shiny black above her and specks of bright dust twinkling at her from between the clouds. She huddled tighter, hunching her shoulders; she did not want to be seen.

Something hurt in her waistline, as if each step jerked her spine forward, and something throbbed, rising up her back. She pressed her fingers to the roll in her jacket. She had to watch that. She could not lose it. She had to watch that and her legs. The rest did not matter.

She stopped short when she saw a tree, the long white pyramid of a giant fir, rising suddenly out of the snow, and she stood without breath, her knees bent, crouching like an animal, listening. She heard nothing. Nothing moved behind the low branches. She went on. She did not know how long she had waited.

She did not know whether she was moving forward. Perhaps she was only stamping her feet, up and down, on the same spot. Nothing changed in that white immensity around her. Would it ever change? She was like an ant crawling over a white table, a hard, bright, lustrous, enameled table. She threw her arms wide, suddenly feeling the space around her. She looked up at the sky. She looked, her head and shoulders thrown back. Those twinkling splinters above—they were endless worlds, people said. Wasn’t there room for her in the world? Who was moving her feet off the small space they held in that vast universe? Who were they and why were they doing it? She had forgotten. She had to get out.

Those legs were not hers any longer. They moved like a wheel, like levers, rising, bending, falling, up and down, down with a jerk that reverberated up to her scalp.

She felt, suddenly, that she was not tired, she had no pain, she was light and free, she was well, too well, she could walk like this through years to come. Then, a sudden jolt of pain shot through her shoulder blades, and she wavered, and she felt as if hours went by while a motionless leg rose, rose the space of an atom at a time and fell down again, cutting the snow, and she was walking again. She bent, her arms huddled over her stomach, drawing herself into a little ball, so that her legs would have less to carry.

Somewhere there was a border and it had to be crossed. She thought, suddenly, of a restaurant she had seen, for the flash of a second, in a German film. It had a sign over the door, with plain, thin letters, nickel-plated letters, insolent in their simplicity, on dull white glass—“Café Diggy-Daggy.” They had no signs like that in the country she was leaving. They had no pavements lustrous as a ball-room floor. She repeated senselessly, without hearing the sounds, as a charm, as a prayer: “Café Diggy-Daggy . . . Ca . . . fé . . . Dig . . . gy . . . Dag . . . gy . . .” and she tried to walk in rhythm with the syllables.

She did not have to tell her legs to move any longer. She thought they were running. An instinct was driving her, the instinct of an animal, whipping her blindly into the battle of self-preservation.

She was whispering through frozen lips: “You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova, you’re a good soldier. . . .”

Ahead of her, the blue snow billowed dimly against the sky. The waves did not change as she came closer; they stood out, sharper, harder, low hills undulating in the darkness. White cones rose to the sky, with black edges of branches.

Then she saw a black figure. The figure was moving. It was moving in a straight line across the hills, across the horizon. She saw the legs, like scissors, opening and closing. She saw a small black spike on his shoulder, and it gleamed sharply, once, against the sky.

She fell down on her stomach. She felt, dimly, as through an anesthetic, snow biting the wrists under her sleeves, rolling into her boots. She lay still, her heart pounding against the snow.

Then she raised her head a little and crawled slowly forward, on her stomach. She stopped and lay still, watching the black figure in the distance, and crawled again, and stopped, and watched, and crawled again.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov was six feet tall. He had a wide mouth and a short nose, and when he was puzzled, he blinked, scratching his neck.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov was born in the year 1900, in a basement, in a side street of the town of Vitebsk. He was the ninth child of the family. At the age of six, he started in as apprentice to a shoemaker. The shoemaker beat him with leather suspenders and fed him buckwheat gruel. At the age of ten, he made his first pair of shoes, all by himself, and he wore them proudly down the street, the leather squeaking. That was the first day Citizen Ivan Ivanov remembered all through his life.

At the age of fifteen, he lured the neighborhood’s grocer’s daughter into a vacant lot and raped her. She was twelve years old, with a chest as flat as a boy’s, and she whined shrilly. He made her promise not to tell anyone, and he gave her fifteen kopeks and a pound of sugar candy. That was the second day he remembered.

At the age of sixteen, he made his first pair of military boots for a real general, and he polished them thoroughly, spitting on the flannel rag, and he delivered them to the general himself, who patted him on the shoulder and gave him a tip of a ruble. That was the third day he remembered.

There was a gay bunch of fellows around the shoemaker’s shop. They rose at dawn and they worked hard and their shirts stuck to their backs with sweat, but they had a good time at night. There was a saloon on the corner of the street, and they sang gay songs, their arms about one another’s shoulders. There was a house around the corner, where a wizened little man played the piano, and Ivan’s favorite was a fat blonde in a pink kimono; she was a foreigner called Gretchen. And those were the nights Citizen Ivan Ivanov remembered.

He served in the Red Army, and, shells roaring overhead, made bets on lice races with the soldiers in the bottom of the trench.

He was wounded and told he would die. He stared dully at the wall, for it did not make any difference.

He recovered and married a servant girl with round cheeks and round breasts, because he had gotten her in trouble. Their son was blond and husky, and they named him Ivan. They went to church on Sundays, and his wife cooked onions with roasted mutton, when they could get it. She raised her skirt high over her fat legs, and knelt, and scrubbed the white pine floor of their room. And she sent him to a public bath once every month. And Citizen Ivan Ivanov was happy.

Then he was transferred to the border patrols, and his wife went back to live with her parents in the village, and took their son with her.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov had never learned to read.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov was guarding the border of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

He walked slowly through the snow, his rifle on his shoulder, blowing at his frozen fingers, cursing the cold. He did not mind going down hill, but going up hill was hard, and he scrambled, groaning, to stand there alone on the summit, with the wind biting his nose, and not a living soul for miles around.

Then, Citizen Ivan Ivanov saw something moving in the snow, far away.

He was not sure it had moved. He peered into the darkness, but the wind raised whirls of snow dust over the plain and he thought he might have been mistaken; only it had seemed as if something had moved, which was not snow dust. He yelled, cupping his hands over his mouth: “Who goes there?”

Nothing answered. Nothing moved in the plain under the hill.

He yelled: “You’d better come out or I’ll shoot!”

There was no answer.

He hesitated, scratching his neck. He stared far out into the night. But he had to be safe.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired.

A blue flame streaked through the darkness and a dull echo rolled in the distance, far away. There was no sound after the echo had died, no movement in the white plain under the hill.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov scratched his neck. He should go down there and investigate, he thought. But it was too far, and the snow was too deep, and the wind was too cold. He waved his hand and turned away. “Just a rabbit, most likely,” he muttered, descending the hill to continue his route.

Kira Argounova lay very still in the snow, on her stomach, her arms thrown forward, and only a lock of hair moved, falling from under the white scarf, and her eyes followed the black figure walking away across the hills, disappearing in the distance. She lay still for a long time, watching a red spot widening slowly under her in the snow.

She thought, clearly, sharply, in words she could almost hear: “Well, I’m shot. Well, that’s how it feels to be shot. It’s not so frightful, is it?”

She rose slowly to her knees. She took off a mitten and slipped her hand into her jacket to find the roll of bills over her left breast. She hoped the bullet had not gone through the bills. It hadn’t. The little hole in the jacket was just under them. And her fingers felt something hot and sticky.

It did not hurt much. It felt like a sharp little burn in her side, with less pain than in her tired legs. She tried to stand up. She swayed a little, but she could stand. There was a dark patch on her jacket and the fur was drawn into red, warm clusters. It did not bleed much; just a few drops she could feel slithering down her skin.

She could walk. She would keep her hand on it and it would not bleed. She was not far from the border now. Over there, beyond, she would have it bandaged. It was not serious and she could stand it. She had to go on.

She staggered forward and wondered at the weakness in her knees. She whispered to herself through lips that were turning blue: “Of course, you’re wounded and you’re a little weak. That’s to be expected. Nothing to worry about.”

Swaying, her shoulders drooping forward, her hand at her side, she went on, through the snow, stumbling, her knees meeting, faltering as if she were drunk. She watched little dark drops falling off the hem of her lace gown, slowly, once in a while. Then the drops stopped falling. She smiled.