We the Living by Ayn Rand
Lydia's head drooped listlessly; she had heard it all many times.
"I'm glad you're enjoying your work, Galina Petrovna," said Leo.
"I'm glad you get your rations," said Kira.
"I do, indeed," Galina Petrovna stated proudly. "Of course, our distribution of commodities has not as yet reached a level of perfection and, really, the sunflower-seed oil I got last week was so rancid we couldn't use it . . . but then, this is a transitional period of . . ."
". . . State Construction!" Alexander Dimitrievitch yelled suddenly, hastily, as a well-memorized lesson.
"And what are you doing, Alexander Dimitrievitch?" Leo asked.
"Oh, I'm working!" Alexander Dimitrievitch jerked as if ready to jump forward, as if defending himself hastily against a dangerous accusation. "Yes, I'm working. I'm a Soviet employee. I am."
"Of course," Galina Petrovna drawled, "Alexander's position is not as responsible as mine. He's a bookkeeper in a district office somewhere way on the Vasilievsky Island--such a long trip every day!--and just what kind of an office is it, Alexander? But, anyway, he does have a bread card--though he doesn't get enough even for himself alone."
"But I'm working," Alexander Dimitrievitch said meekly.
"Of course," said Galina Petrovna, "I get better ration cards because I'm in a preferred class of pedagogues. I'm very active socially. Why, do you know, Leo, that I've been elected assistant secretary of the Teachers' Council? It is gratifying to know that the present regime appreciates qualities of leadership. I even gave a speech on the methodology of modern education at an inter-club meeting where Lydia played the 'Internationale' so beautifully."
"Sure," Lydia said mournfully, "the 'Internationale.' I'm working, too. Musical director and accompanist in a Workers' Club. A pound of bread a week and carfare and, sometimes, money, what's left after the contributions each month."
"Lydia is not pliable," sighed Galina Petrovna.
"But I play the 'Internationale,' " said Lydia, "and the Red funeral march--'You fell as a victim'--and the Club songs. I even got applauded when I played the 'Internationale' at the meeting where Mother made the speech."
Kira rose wearily to make tea. She pumped the Primus and put the kettle on, and watched it thoughtfully--and through the hissing of the flame, Galina Petrovna's voice boomed loudly, rhythmically, as if addressing a class: ". . . yes, twice, imagine? Two honorable mentions in our students' Wall Newspaper, as one of the three most modern and conscientious pedagogues. . . . Yes, I do have some influence. When that insolent young teacher tried to run the school, she was dismissed fast enough. And you can be sure I had something to say about that. . . ."
Kira did not hear the rest. She was watching the letter on the table, wondering. When she heard a voice again, it was Lydia's and it was saying shrilly: ". . . spiritual consolation. I know. It has been revealed to me. There are secrets beyond our mortal minds. Holy Russia's salvation will come from faith. It has been predicted. Through patience and long suffering shall we redeem our sins. . . ."
Behind the door, Marisha wound her gramophone and played "John Gray." It was a new record and the swift little notes jerked gaily, clicking in sharp, short knocks.
"John Gray
Was brave and daring,
Kitty
Was very pretty . . ."
Kira sat, her chin in her hands, the glow of the Primus flame flickering under her nostrils, and she smiled suddenly, very softly, and said: "I like that song."
"That awful, vulgar thing, so overplayed that I'm sick of it?" Lydia gasped.
"Yes. . . . Even if it is overplayed. . . . It has such a nice rhythm . . . clicking . . . like rivets driven into steel. . . ." She was speaking softly, simply, a little helplessly, as she seldom spoke to her family. She raised her head and looked at them, and--they had never seen it before--her eyes were pleading and hurt.
"Still thinking of your engineering, aren't you?" asked Lydia.
"Sometimes . . ." Kira whispered.
"I can't understand what's wrong with you, Kira," Galina Petrovna boomed. "You're never satisfied. You have a perfectly good job, easy and well-paid, and you mope over some childish idea of yours. Excursion guides, like pedagogues, are considered no less important than engineers, these days. It is quite an honorary and responsible position, and contributes a great deal to social construction--and isn't it more fascinating to build with living minds and ideologies rather than with bricks and steel?"
"It's your own fault, Kira," said Lydia. "You'll always be unhappy since you refuse the consolation of faith."
"What's the use, Kira?" sighed Alexander Dimitrievitch.
"Who said anything about being unhappy?" Kira asked loudly, sharply, jerking her shoulders; she got up, took a cigarette and lighted it, bending, from the Primus flame.
"Kira has always been unmanageable," said Galina Petrovna, "but one would think that these are times to make one come down to earth."
"What are your plans for the winter, Leo?" Alexander Dimitrievitch asked, suddenly, indifferently, as if he expected no answer.
"None," said Leo. "Nor for any winter to come."
"I had a dream," said Lydia, "about a crow and a hare. The hare crossed the road--and that's an unlucky omen. But the crow sat on a tree that looked like a huge white chalice."
"You take my nephew Victor, for instance," said Galina Petrovna. "There's a smart, modern young man. He's graduating from the Institute this fall and he has an excellent job already. Supporting his whole family. Now there's nothing sentimental about him. He has his eyes open to modern reality. He'll go far, that boy."
"But Vasili isn't working," Alexander Dimitrievitch remarked with a dull, quiet wonder.
"Vasili has never been practical," stated Galina Petrovna.
Alexander Dimitrievitch said suddenly, irrelevantly: "It's a pretty red dress you have, Kira."
She smiled wearily: "Thank you, Father."
"You don't look so well, child. Tired?"
"No. Not particularly. I'm fine."
Then Galina Petrovna's voice drowned out the roar of the Primus: ". . . and, you know, it's only the best teachers who are praised in the Wall Newspaper. Our students are very severe and . . ."
Late at night, when the guests had gone, Kira took the letter into the bathroom and opened it. It contained two lines:
Kira dearest, Please forgive me for writing. But won't you telephone me? Andrei
She led two excursions on the following day. Coming home, she told Leo that she would be dismissed if she did not attend a guides' meeting that evening. She put on her red dress. On the stair-landing, she kissed Leo lightly, as he stood watching her go: she waved to him, vaulting down the stairs, with a cold, gay chuckle. On a street corner, she opened her purse, took out the little French bottle and pressed a few drops of perfume into her hair. She leaped into a tramway at full speed and stood hanging onto a leather strap, watching the lights swim past. When she got off, she walked, lightly, swiftly, with a cold, precise determination, toward the palace that was a Party Club.
She ran soundlessly up the crumbling marble stairway of the pavilion. She knocked sharply at the door.
When Andrei opened the door, she laughed, kissing him: "I know, I know, I know. . . . Don't say it . . . I want to be forgiven first, and then I'll explain."
He whispered happily: "You're forgiven. You don't have to explain."
She did not explain. She did not let him utter a complaint. She whirled around the room, and he tried to catch her, and the cloth of her coat felt cold in his hands, cold and fragrant of summer night air. He could whisper only: "Do you know that it's been two weeks since . . ." But he did not finish the sentence.
Then she noticed that he was dressed for the street. "Were you going out, Andrei?"
"Oh . . . yes, I was, but it's not important."
"Where were you going?"
"Just to a Party Cell meeting."
"A Party Cell meeting? And you say it's not important? But you
"Yes, I can. I'm not going."
"Andrei, I'd rather come tomorrow and let you . . ."
"No."
"Well, then, let's go out together. Take me to the European roof."
"Tonight?"
"Yes. Now."
He did not want to refuse. She did not want to notice the look in his eyes.
They sat at a white table in the roof garden on top of the European Hotel. They sat in a dim corner, and they could see nothing of the long room but the naked white back of a woman a few tables away, with a little strand of golden hair curling at the nape of her neck, escaping from the trim, lustrous waves of her coiffure, with a little golden shadow between her shoulder blades, her long fingers holding a glass with a liquid the color of her hair, swaying slowly; and beyond the woman, beyond a haze of yellow lights and bluish, rippling smoke, an orchestra played fox-trots from "Bajadere," and the violinists swayed to the rhythm of the golden glass.
Andrei said: "It's been two weeks, Kira, and . . . and you probably need it." He slipped a roll of bills into her hand, his monthly salary.
She whispered, pushing it back, closing his fingers over the bills: "No, Andrei. . . . Thank you. . . . But I don't need it. And . . . and I don't think I'll need it again. . . ."
"But . . ."
"You see, I get so many excursions to lead, and Mother got more classes at the school, and we all have clothes and everything we need, so that . . ."
"But, Kira, I want you to . . ."
"Please, Andrei! Don't let's argue. Not about that. . . . Please. . . . Keep it. . . . If . . . if I need it, I'll tell you."
"Promise?"
"Yes."
The violins rumbled dully, heavily, and suddenly the music burst out like a firecracker, so that the swift, laughing notes could almost be seen as sparks shooting to the ceiling.
"You know," said Kira, "I shouldn't ask you to bring me here. It's not a place for you. But I like it. It's only a caricature and a very poor little one at that, but still it's a caricature of what Europe is. Do you know that music they're playing? It's from 'Bajadere.' I saw it. They're playing it in Europe, too. Like here . . . almost like here."
"Kira," Andrei asked, "that Leo Kovalensky, is he in love with you or something?"
She looked at him, and the reflection of an electric light stood still as two sparks in her eyes and as a bright little oval on her patent leather collar. "Why do you ask that?"
"I saw your cousin, Victor Dunaev, at a club meeting and he told me that Leo Kovalensky was back, and he smiled as if the news should mean something to me. I didn't even know that Kovalensky had been away."
"Yes, he's back. He's been away somewhere in the Crimea, for his health, I think. I don't know whether he's in love with me, but Victor was in love with me once, and he's never forgiven me for that."
"I see. I don't like that man."
"Victor?"
"Yes. And Leo Kovalensky, too. I hope you don't see him often. I don't trust that type of man."
"Oh, I see him occasionally."
The orchestra had stopped playing.
"Andrei, ask them to play something for me. Something I like. It's called the 'Song of Broken Glass.' "
He watched her as the music burst out again, splattering sparks of sound. It was the gayest music he had ever heard; and he had never seen her look sad; but she sat, motionless, staring helplessly, her eyes forlorn, bewildered.
"It's very beautiful, this music, Kira," he whispered, "why do you look like that?"
"It's something I liked . . . long ago . . . when I was a child. . . . Andrei, did you ever feel as if something had been promised to you in your childhood, and you look at yourself and you think 'I didn't know, then, that this is what would happen to me'--and it's strange, and funny, and a little sad?"
"No, I was never promised anything. There were so many things that I didn't know, then, and it's so strange to be learning them now. . . . You know, the first time I brought you here, I was ashamed to enter. I thought it was no place for a Party man. I thought . . ." he laughed softly, apologetically, "I thought I was making a sacrifice for you. And now I like it."
"Why?"
"Because I like to sit in a place where I have no reason to be, no reason but to sit and look at you across the table. Because I like those lights on your collar. Because you have a very stern mouth--and I like that--but when you listen to that music, your mouth is gay, as if it were listening, too. And all those things, they have no meaning for anyone on earth but me, and when I've lived a life where every hour had to have a purpose, and suddenly I discover what it's like to feel things that have no purpose but myself, and I see suddenly how sacred a purpose that can be, so that I can't even argue, I can't doubt, I can't fight it, and I know, then, that a life is possible whose only justification is my own joy--then everything, everything else suddenly seems very different to me."
She whispered: "Andrei, you shouldn't talk like that. I feel as if I were taking you away from your own life, from everything that has been your life."
"Don't you want to feel it?"
"But doesn't it frighten you? Don't you think sometimes that it may bring you to a choice you have no right to make?"
He answered with so quiet a conviction that the word sounded light, unconcerned, with a calm beyond earnestness: "No." He leaned toward her across the table, his eyes serene, his voice soft and steady: "Kira, you look frightened. And, really, you know, it's not a serious question. I've never had many questions to face in my life. People create their own questions, because they're afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it--walk. I joined the Party because I knew I was right. I love you because I know I'm right. In a way, you and my work are the same. Things are really very simple."
"Not always, Andrei. You know your road. I don't belong on it."
"That's not in the spirit of what you taught me."
She whispered helplessly: "What did I teach you?"
The orchestra was playing the "Song of Broken Glass." No one sang it. Andrei's voice sounded like the words of that music. He was saying: "You remember, you said once that we had the same root somewhere in both of us, because we both believed in life? It's a rare capacity and it can't be taught. And it can't be explained to those in whom that word--life--doesn't awaken the kind of feeling that a temple does, or a military march, or the statue of a perfect body. It is for that feeling that I joined a Party which, at the time, could lead me only to Siberia. It is for that feeling that I wanted to fight against the most senseless and useless of monsters standing in the way of human life--and that's something we call now humanity's politics. And so my own existence was only the fight and the future. You taught me the present."
She made a desperate attempt. She said slowly, watching him: "Andrei, when you told me you loved me, for the first time, you were hungry. I wanted to satisfy that hunger."
"And that's all?"
"That's all."
He laughed quietly, so quietly that she had to give up. "You don't know what you're saying, Kira. Women like you don't love only like that."
"What are women like me?"
"What temples are, and military marches, and . . ."
"Let's have a drink, Andrei."
"You want a drink?"
"Yes. Now."
"All right."
He ordered the drinks. He watched the glow of the glass at her lips, a long, thin, shivering line of liquid light between fingers that looked golden in its reflection. He said: "Let's drink a toast to something I could never offer but in a place like this: to my life."
"Your new life?"
"My only one."
"Andrei, what if you lose it?"
"I can't lose it."
"But so many things can happen. I don't want to hold your life in my hands."
"But you're holding it."
"Andrei, you must think . . . once in a while . . . that it's p
"Why think about it?"
"But it's possible."
She felt suddenly as if the words of his answer were the links of a chain she would never be able to break: "It's also possible for every one of us to have to face a death sentence some day. Does it mean that we have to prepare for it?"
IV
THEY LEFT THE ROOF GARDEN EARLY, AND Kira asked Andrei to take her home; she was tired; she did not look at him.
He said: "Certainly, dearest," and called a cab, and let her sit silently, her head on his shoulder, while he held her hand and kept silent, not to disturb her.
He left her at her parents' house. She waited on a dark stair-landing and heard his cab driving away; she waited longer; for ten minutes, she stood in the darkness, leaning against a cold glass pane; beyond the pane there was a narrow airshaft and a bare brick wall with one window; in the window, a yellow candle shivered convulsively and the huge shadow of a woman's arm kept rising and falling, senselessly, monotonously.
After ten minutes, Kira walked downstairs and hurried to a tramway.
Passing through Marisha's room, she heard a stranger's voice behind the door of her own room, a slow, deep, drawling voice that paused carefully, meticulously on every letter "o" and then rolled on as if on buttered hinges. She threw the door open.
The first person she saw was Antonina Pavlovna in a green brocaded turban, pointing her chin forward inquisitively; then she saw Leo; then she saw the man with the drawling voice--and her eyes froze, while he lumbered up, throwing at her a swift glance of appraisal and suspicion.
"Well, Kira, I thought you were spending the night with the excursion guides. And you said you'd be back early," Leo greeted her sharply, while Antonina Pavlovna drawled:
"Good evening, Kira Alexandrovna."
"I'm sorry. I got away as soon as I could," Kira answered, her eyes staring at the stranger's face.
"Kira, may I present? Karp Karpovitch Morozov--Kira Alexandrovna Argounova."
She did not notice that Karp Karpovitch's big fist was shaking her hand. She was looking at his face. His face had large blond freckles, light, narrow eyes, a heavy red mouth and a short nose with wide, vertical nostrils. She had seen it twice before; she remembered the speculator of the Nikolaevsky station, the food trader of the market.