We the Living (8 page)

The Argounovs had found an apartment.

They had been congratulated as if it were a miracle. The miracle had been made possible by a handshake between Alexander Dimitrievitch and the Upravdom—the manager—of that house, a handshake after which Alexander Dimitrievitch’s hand remained empty, but the Upravdom’s did not. Three rooms and a kitchen were worth a little gratitude in an over-crowded city.

“A bath?” the indignant Upravdom had repeated Galina Petrovna’s timid question. “Don’t be foolish, citizen, don’t be foolish.”

They needed furniture. Bravely, Galina Petrovna paid a visit to the gray granite mansion on Kamenostrovsky. Before the stately edifice rising to the sky, she stood for a few moments, gathering her faded coat with the shedding fur collar tightly around her thin body. Then she opened her bag and powdered her nose: she felt ashamed before the gray slabs of granite. Then she did not close her bag, but took out a handkerchief: tears were painful in the cold wind. Then she rang the bell.

“Well, well, so you’re Citizen Argounova,” said the fat, glossy-cheeked sign painter who let her in and listened patiently to her explanation. “Sure, you can have your old junk back. That which I don’t use. It’s in the coach house. Take it. We’re not so hard-hearted. We know it’s tough for all you citizens bourgeois.”

Galina Petrovna threw a wistful glance at her old Venetian mirror whose onyx stand bore a bucket of paint, but she did not argue and went down to the coach house in the back yard. She found a few chairs with missing legs, a few priceless pieces of antique porcelain, a wash stand, a rusty samovar, two beds, a chest of old clothes, and Lydia’s grand piano, all buried under a pile of books from their library, old boxes, wood shavings and rat dung.

They hired a drayman to transfer these possessions to the little flat on the fourth floor of an old brick house whose turbid windows faced the turbid Moika stream. But they could not afford a drayman twice. They borrowed a wheelbarrow—and Alexander Dimitrievitch, silently indifferent, carted the bundles left at the Dunaevs to their new home. The four of them carried the bundles up the stairs, past landings that alternated grimy doors and broken windows; the “black stairway” it used to be called, the back entrance for servants. Their new home had no front entrance. It had no electrical connections; the plumbing was out of order; they had to carry water in pails from the floor below. Yellow stains spread over the ceilings, bearing witness to past rains.

“It will be very cozy—with just a little work and artistic judgment,” Galina Petrovna had said. Alexander Dimitrievitch had sighed.

The grand piano stood in the dining room. On top of the grand piano, Galina Petrovna put a teapot without handle or nose, the only thing left of her priceless Sachs tea service. Shelves of unpainted boards carried an odd assortment of cracked dishes; Lydia’s artistry decorated the shelves with borders of paper lace. A folded newspaper supported the shortest leg of the table. A wick floating in a saucer of linseed oil threw a spot of light on the ceiling in the long, dark evenings; in the mornings, strands of soot, like cobwebs, swayed slowly in the draft, high under the ceiling.

Galina Petrovna was the first one to get up in the morning. She threw an old shawl over her shoulders and, blowing hard to make the damp logs burn, cooked millet for breakfast. After breakfast the family parted.

Alexander Dimitrievitch shuffled two miles to his business, the textile store he had opened. He never took a tramway; long lines waited for every tramway and he had no hope of fighting his way aboard. The store had been a bakery shop. He could not afford new signs. He had stretched a piece of cotton with crooked letters by the door, over one of the old black glass plates bearing a gold pretzel. He had hung two kerchiefs and an apron in the window. He had scraped the bakery labels off the old boxes and stacked them neatly on empty shelves. Then he sat all day, his freezing feet on a cast-iron stove, his arms folded on his stomach, drowsing.

When a customer came in, he shuffled behind the counter and smiled affectionately: “The best kerchiefs in town, citizen. . . . Certainly, fast colors, as fast as foreign goods. . . . Would I take lard, instead of money? Certainly, citizen peasant, certainly. . . . For half a pound? You can have two kerchiefs, citizen, and a yard of calico for good measure.”

Smiling happily, he put the lard into the large drawer that served as cash register, next to a pound of rye flour.

Lydia wound an old knitted scarf around her throat, after breakfast, put a basket over her arm, sighed bitterly and went to the co-operative. She stood in line, watching the hand of the clock on a distant tower moving slowly around its face and she spent the time reciting mentally French poems she had learned as a child.

“But I don’t need soap, citizen,” she protested when her turn came, at the unpainted counter inside the store that smelled of dill pickles and people’s breath. “And I don’t need dried herring.”

“All we’ve got today, citizen. Next!”

“All right, all right, I’ll take it,” Lydia said hastily. “We’ve got to have something.”

Galina Petrovna washed the dishes after breakfast; then she put on her glasses and sorted out two pounds of lentils from the gravel that came with them; she chopped onions, tears rolling down her wrinkles; she washed Alexander Dimitrievitch’s shirt in a tub of cold water; she chopped acorns for coffee.

If she had to go out, she sneaked hurriedly down the stairs, hoping not to meet the Upravdom. If she met him, she smiled too brightly and sang out: “Good morning, Comrade Upravdom!”

Comrade Upravdom never answered. She could read the silent accusation in his sullen eyes: “Bourgeois. Private traders.”

Kira had been admitted to the Technological Institute. She went there every morning, walking, whistling, her hands in the pockets of an old black coat with a high collar buttoned severely under her chin. At the Institute, she listened to lectures, but spoke to few people. She noticed many red kerchiefs in the crowds of students and heard a great deal about Red builders, proletarian culture and young engineers in the vanguard of the world revolution. But she did not listen, for she was thinking about her latest mathematical problem. During the lectures, she smiled suddenly, once in a while, at no one in particular; smiled at a dim, wordless thought of her own. She felt as if her ended childhood had been a cold shower, gay, hard and invigorating, and now she was entering her morning, with her work before her, with so much to be done.

At night, the Argounovs gathered around the wick on the dining room table. Galina Petrovna served lentils and millet. There was not much variety in their menus. The millet went fast; so did their savings.

After dinner, Kira brought her books into the dining room, for they had but one oil wick. She sat, the book between her elbows on the table, her fingers buried in the hair over her temples, her eyes wide, engrossed in circles, cubes, triangles, as in a thrilling romance.

Lydia sat embroidering a handkerchief and sighed bitterly: “Oh, that Soviet light! Such a light! And to think that someone has invented electricity!”

“That’s right,” Kira agreed, astonished, “it’s not a very good light, is it? Funny. I never noticed it before.”

One night, Galina Petrovna found the millet too mildewed to cook. They had no dinner. Lydia sighed over her embroidery: “These Soviet menus!”

“That’s right,” said Kira, “we didn’t have any dinner tonight, did we?”

“Where’s your mind,” Lydia raged, “if any? Do you ever notice anything?”

Through the evenings, Galina Petrovna grumbled at intervals: “A woman engineer! Such a profession for a daughter of mine! . . . Is that a way for a young girl to live? Not a boy, not a single beau to visit her. . . . Tough as a shoe-sole. No romance. No delicacy. No finer feelings. A daughter of mine!”

In the little room which Kira and Lydia shared at night, there was only one bed. Kira slept on a mattress on the floor. They retired early, to save light. Tucked under a thin blanket, with her coat thrown over it, Kira watched Lydia’s figure in a long nightgown, a white stain in the darkness, kneeling before her ikons in the corner. Lydia mumbled prayers feverishly, trembling in the cold, making the sign of the cross with a hurried hand, bowing low to the little red light and the few glimmers of stern, bronze faces.

From her corner on the floor, Kira could see the reddish-gray sky in the window and the gold spire of the Admiralty far away in the cold, foggy dusk over Petrograd, the city where so much was possible.

Victor Dunaev had taken a sudden interest in the family of his cousins. He came often, he bent over Galina Petrovna’s hand as if he were at a Court reception, and laughed cheerfully as if he were at the circus.

In his honor, Galina Petrovna served her last precious bits of sugar, instead of saccharine, with the evening tea. He brought along his resplendent smile, and the latest political gossip, and the current anecdotes, and news of the latest foreign inventions, and quotations from the latest poems, and his opinions on the theory of reflexes and the theory of relativity and the social mission of proletarian literature. “A man of culture,” he explained, “has to be, above all, a man attuned to his century.”

He smiled at Alexander Dimitrievitch and hastily offered a light for his home-made cigarettes; he smiled at Galina Petrovna and rose hastily every time she rose; he smiled at Lydia and listened earnestly to her discourses on the simple faith; but he always managed to sit next to Kira.

On the evening of October tenth, Victor came late. It was nine o’clock when the sound of the door bell made Lydia dash eagerly to the little anteroom.

“Sorry. So terribly, terribly sorry,” Victor apologized, smiling, hurling his cold overcoat on a chair, raising Lydia’s hand to his lips and patting his unruly hair with a quick glance in the mirror, all within the space of one second. “Detained at the Institute. Students’ Council. I know this is an indecent hour to visit, but I promised Kira a ride around the city and . . .”

“It’s perfectly all right, Victor dear,” Galina Petrovna called from the dining room. “Come in and have some tea.”

The tiny flame floating in linseed oil quivered with every breath, as they sat at the table. Five huge shadows rose to the ceiling; the feeble glow drew a triangle of light under the five pairs of nostrils. Tea gleamed green through heavy glasses cut out of old bottles.

“I heard, Victor,” Galina Petrovna whispered confidentially, like a conspirator, “I heard—on good authority—that this NEP of theirs is only the beginning of many changes. The beginning of the end. Next they’re going to return houses and buildings to former owners. Think of it! You know our house on Kamenostrovsky, if only. . . . The clerk in the co-operative is the one who told me about it. And he has a cousin in the Party, he ought to know.”

“It is highly probable,” Victor stated with authority, and Galina Petrovna smiled happily.

Alexander Dimitrievitch poured himself another glass of tea; he looked at the sugar, hesitated, looked at Galina Petrovna, and drank his tea without sugar. He said sullenly: “Times aren’t any better. They’ve called their secret police G.P.U. instead of Cheka, but it’s still the same thing. Do you know what I heard at the store today? They’ve just discovered another anti-Soviet conspiracy. They’ve arrested dozens of people. Today they arrested old Admiral Kovalensky, the one who was blinded in the war, and they shot him without trial.”

“Nothing but rumors,” said Victor. “People like to exaggerate.”

“Well, anyway, it’s becoming easier to get food,” said Galina Petrovna. “We got the nicest lentils today.”

“And,” said Lydia, “I got two pounds of millet.”

“And,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch, “I got a pound of lard.”

When Kira and Victor rose to go, Galina Petrovna accompanied them to the door.

“You’ll take care of my child, won’t you, Victor dear? Don’t stay out late. Streets are so unsafe these days. Do be careful. And, above all, don’t speak to any strangers. There are such odd types around nowadays.”