We the Living (46 page)

“Sasha,” she interrupted, “aren’t you playing a very dangerous game?”

He did not answer. He looked at the old roofs of the city against a milky, bluish sky.

“The people,” she said, “has claimed too many victims already—of your kind.”

“Russia has a long revolutionary history,” he said. “
They
know it. They’re even teaching it in their schools, but they think it’s ended. It isn’t. It’s just beginning. And it has never lacked men who did not think of the danger. In the Czar’s days—or at any other time.”

She stopped and looked at him in the dusk, and said desperately, forgetting that she had met him for the first time but a few hours ago: “Oh, Sasha, is it worth the chance you’re taking?”

He towered over her, strands of blond hair sticking out from under his cap, his mouth grinning slowly over the raised collar of his coat. “You mustn’t worry, Kira. And Irina mustn’t worry. I’m not in danger. They won’t get me. They won’t have the time.”

In the morning, Kira had to go to work.

She had insisted on working; Andrei had found a job for her—the job of lecturer and excursion guide in the Museum of the Revolution. The job consisted of sitting at home and waiting for a call from the Excursion Center. When they called, she hurried to the Museum and led a group of bewildered people through the halls of what had been the Winter Palace. She received a few rubles for each excursion; she was listed as a Soviet employee by the Upravdom of her house; it saved her from an exorbitant rent and from the suspicion of being bourgeois.

In the morning, she had telephoned the Nikolaevsky station; the train from the Crimea was not expected until early in the afternoon. Then the Excursion Center called her; she had to go.

The halls of the Winter Palace displayed faded photographs of revolutionary leaders, yellowed proclamations, maps, diagrams, models of Czarist prisons, rusty guns, splinters of leg irons. Thirty workers were waiting in the Palace lobby for the “comrade guide.” They were on vacation, but their Educational Club had arranged the excursion and they could not ignore its command. They removed their caps respectfully, and shuffled timidly, obediently after Kira, and listened attentively, scratching their heads.

“. . . and this photograph, comrades, was taken just before his execution. He was hanged for the assassination of a tyrant, one of the Czar’s henchmen. Such was the end of another glorious victim on the tortuous path of the Worker-Peasant Revolution.”

“. . . and this diagram, comrades, gives us a clear, visual illustration of the strike movement in Czarist Russia. You will note that the red line drops sharply after the year 1905. . . .”

Kira recited her lecture evenly, mechanically; she was no longer conscious of words; it was nothing but a succession of memorized sounds, each dragging the next one automatically, without any assistance of will; she did not know what she was going to say; she knew that her hand would rise at a given word and point at the right picture; she knew at which word the gray, impersonal blot that was her audience would laugh and at which word it would gasp and grunt with social indignation. She knew that her listeners wanted her to hurry and that the Excursion Center wanted the lecture to be long and detailed.

“. . . and this, comrades, is the genuine carriage in which Alexander II was riding on the day of his assassination. This shattered back was torn by the bomb in the hands of . . .”

But she was thinking of the train from the Crimea; perhaps it had arrived; perhaps the lonely room she hated had now become a temple.

“Comrade guide, can you tell me if Alexander II was paid by International Imperialists?”

The room was empty when she came home.

“No,” said Marisha, “he hasn’t arrived.”

“No,” said the gruff voice over the telephone, “the train isn’t in. Is that you again, citizen? What’s the matter with you? Trains aren’t run for your personal convenience. It’s not expected until tonight.”

She took off her coat. She raised her hand and glanced at her wristwatch; her hand froze in midair; she remembered whose gift it was; she took the watch off and threw it into a drawer.

She curled in an armchair by the window and tried to read a newspaper; the newspaper slipped to the floor; she sat still, her head on her arm.

It was an hour later that she heard steps behind the door, and the door was thrown open without a knock. The first thing she saw was a dusty suitcase. Then she saw the smile, the drooping lips arched over very white teeth in a tanned face. Then she stood with the back of her hand at her mouth and could not move.

He said: “Allo, Kira.”

She did not kiss him. Her hands fell on his shoulders and moved down his arms, all her weight in her fingers, for she was sagging suddenly and her face was sliding slowly down his chest, down the cloth of his coat; and as he tried to lift her head, she pressed her mouth to his hand and held it; her shoulders jerked; she was sobbing.

“Kira, you little fool!”

He was laughing softly; his fingers caressed her hair; the fingers were trembling. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the armchair, and sat down, holding her on his lap, forcing her lips to meet his.

“And that’s the strong Kira who never cries. You shouldn’t be so glad to see me, Kira. . . . Stop it, Kira. . . . You little fool. . . . My dearest, dearest . . .”

She tried to get up: “Leo. . . . You must take your coat off and . . .”

“Stay still.”

He held her, and she leaned back, and she felt suddenly that she had no strength to lift her arms, that she had no strength ever to move again; and the Kira who despised femininity, smiled a tender, radiant, trusting smile, weaker than a woman’s, the smile of a lost, bewildered child, her lashes heavy and sparkling with tears.

He looked at her, his eyes half-closed, and his glance was insulting in its open, mocking understanding of his power, a glance more voluptuous than a lover’s caress.

Then he turned away and asked: “Was it terribly hard for you—this winter?”

“A little. But we don’t have to talk about it. It’s past. Do you cough any more, Leo?”

“No.”

“And you’re well? Quite, quite, completely well? Free to live again?”

“I am well—yes. As to living again. . . .”

He shrugged. His face was tanned, his arms were strong, his cheeks were not hollow any longer; but she noticed something in his eyes that had not been cured; something that, perhaps, had grown beyond cure.

She said: “Leo, isn’t the worst of it over? Aren’t we ready now to begin. . . .”

“Begin with what? I have nothing to bring back to you—but a healthy body.”

“What else can I want?”

“Nothing else—from a gigolo.”

“Leo!”

“Well, am I not one?”

“Leo, don’t you love me?”

“I love you. I love you too much. I wish I didn’t. It would all be so simple if I didn’t. But to love a woman and to see her dragging herself through this hell they call life here, and not to help her, but to let her drag you instead . . . Did you really think I’d bless this health you gave back to me? I hate it because
you
gave it back to me. And because I love you.”

She laughed softly: “Would you rather hate me, too?”

“Yes. I’d rather. You are that which I’ve lost long ago. But I love you so much that I’m trying to hold on to it, to that which you think I am, which I know I was, even though I can’t hold on much longer. And that’s all I have to offer you, Kira.”

She looked up at him quietly, and her eyes were dry, and her smile was not a child’s and stronger than a woman’s. She said: “There is only one thing that matters and that we’ll remember. The rest doesn’t matter. I don’t care what life is to be nor what it does to us. But it won’t break us. Neither you nor me. That’s our only weapon. That’s the only banner we can hold against all those others around us. That’s all we have to know about the future.”

He said more tenderly, more earnestly than she had ever heard him say: “Kira, I wish you weren’t what you are.”

Then she buried her face on his shoulder and whispered: “And we won’t ever talk about it again. And now we don’t have to talk at all, do we? I have to get up and powder my nose, and you have to take that coat off, and take a bath, and I’ll fix you some lunch. . . . But first let me sit with you, for just a few moments, just sit still . . . don’t move . . . Leo. . . .”

Her head slid slowly to his breast, to his knees, to his feet.

IN THE AFTERNOON, THREE DAYS LATER, THE door bell rang and Kira went to answer it.

She threw the door half-open, protected by a chain. On the stair-landing stood a heavy woman in a smart, expensive overcoat. Her face, slanting back from a prominent, pointed chin, was raised with a studied movement of graceful inquiry, revealing a stout, white neck; her full lips, smeared with a violent magenta, were half-open, revealing strong white teeth. Her hand poised on a broad expanse of green silk scarf, she drawled in a self-consciously gracious voice: “Does Leo Kovalensky live here?”

Kira looked incredulously at the diamond rings sparkling on the short, white fingers. She answered: “Why . . . yes.”

She did not remove the chain; she stood staring at the woman. The woman said with a little accent of gentle firmness: “I want to see him.”

Kira let her enter. The woman looked at Kira curiously, inquisitively, narrowing her eyes.

Leo rose with a surprised frown when they entered the room. The woman extended both hands to him in a dramatic greeting. “Leo! So delightful to see you again! I’ve remembered my threat to find you. I really intend to be a nuisance!”

Leo did not smile in answer to her expectant giggle; he bowed graciously; he said: “Kira, this is Antonina Pavlovna Platoshkina—Kira Alexandrovna Argounova.”

“Oh! . . .
Argounova? . . .
Oh . . .” said Antonina Pavlovna, as if noting the fact that Kira’s name was not Leo’s; she sounded almost relieved. She extended her arm, in a straight line, her fingers drooping, as if she were giving her hand to a man and expecting him to kiss it.

“Antonina Pavlovna and I were neighbors in the sanatorium,” Leo explained.

“And he was a perfectly ungracious neighbor, I must complain,” Antonina Pavlovna laughed huskily. “He wouldn’t wait for me—and I wanted so much to leave on the same train. And, Leo, you didn’t give me your apartment number and I had a perfectly terrible time trying to get it out of the Upravdom. Upravdoms are one of the unavoidable nuisances of our era, and all we of the intelligentsia can do is bear with it with a sense of humor.”

She took off her coat. She wore a plain black dress of new, expensive silk in the latest fashion, and foreign earrings of green celluloid circles. Her hair was combed back severely off her forehead and two trim, sleek coils were flattened against her cheeks smeared with a very white powder. Her hair was an incredible orange, the color of a magnificent string of amber that swung like a pendulum, striking her stomach, when she moved. Her dress fitted tightly, slanting sharply from very wide hips down to heavy legs with very thin ankles and very small feet that seemed crushed under their disproportionate burden. She sat down and her stomach settled in a wide fold over her lap.

“When did you return, Tonia?” Leo asked.

“Yesterday. And oh, what a trip!” she sighed. “These Soviet trains! Really, I believe I lost everything I accomplished in the sanatorium. I was taking a rest cure for my nerves,” she explained, pointing her chin at Kira. “And what sensitive person isn’t a nervous wreck these days? But the Crimea! That place saved my life.”

“It was beautiful,” Leo agreed.

“But, really, it lost all its charm after you left, Leo. You know, he was the most charming patient in that dull sanatorium and everybody admired him so much—oh, purely platonically, my dear, if you’re worried,” she winked at Kira.

“I’m not,” said Kira.