We the Living (7 page)

“Born in 1904, eh?” said the Soviet official. “That makes you . . . let’s see . . . eighteen. Eighteen. You’re lucky, comrade. You’re young and have many years to give to the cause of the toilers. A whole life of discipline and hard work and useful labor for the great collective.”

He had a cold, so he took out a large checkered handkerchief and blew his nose.

“I wash my hands of Kira’s future,” Galina Petrovna had said. “Sometimes I think she’s a born old maid and sometimes a born . . . yes, bad woman.”

Kira saw her first years of lengthened skirts and high heels during their refuge in Yalta, where the strange society of emigrants from the North, families of old names and past fortunes, clung together like frightened chickens on a rock with the flood rising slowly around them. Young men of irreproachably parted hair and manicured nails, noticed the slim girl who strode down the streets swinging a twig like a whip, her body thrown into the wind that blew a short dress which hid nothing. Galina Petrovna smiled with approval when the young men called at their house. But Kira had strange eyebrows; she could lift them in such a cold, mocking smile, while her lips remained motionless—that the young men’s love poems and intentions froze at the very roots. And Galina Petrovna soon stopped wondering why the young men stopped noticing her daughter.

In the evenings Lydia read avidly, blushing, books of delicate, sinful romance, which she hid from Galina Petrovna. Kira began reading one of these books; she fell asleep and did not finish it. She never began another.

She saw no difference between weeds and flowers; she yawned when Lydia sighed at the beauty of a sunset over lonely hills. But she stood for an hour looking at the black silhouette of a tall young soldier against the roaring flame of a blazing oil well he had been posted to guard.

She stopped suddenly, as they walked down a street in the evening, and pointed at a strange angle of white wall over battered roofs, luminous on a black sky in the glare of an old lantern, with a dark, barred window like that of a dungeon, and she whispered: “How beautiful!”

“What’s beautiful about it?” Lydia asked.

“Because it’s so strange . . . promising . . . as if something could happen there. . . .”

“Happen to whom?”

“To me.”

Lydia seldom questioned Kira’s emotions; they were not feelings to her but only Kira’s feelings; and the family shrugged impatiently at what they called Kira’s feelings. She had the same feeling for eating soup without salt, and for discovering a snail slithering up her bare leg, and for young men who pleaded, broken-hearted, their eyes humid, their lips soft. She had the same feeling for white statues of ancient gods against black velvet in museums, and for steel shavings and rusty dust and hissing torches and muscles tense as electric wires in the iron roar of a building under construction. She seldom visited museums; but when they went out with Kira, her family avoided passing by any construction works: houses, and particularly roads, and most particularly bridges. She was certain to stop and stand watching, for hours, red bricks and oaken beams and steel panels growing under the will of man. But she could never be made to enter a public park on Sunday, and she stuck her fingers into her ears when she heard a chorus singing folk songs. When Galina Petrovna took her children to see a sad play depicting the sorrow of the serfs whom Czar Alexander II had magnanimously freed, Lydia sobbed over the plight of the humble, kindly peasants cringing under a whip, while Kira sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy, watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.

“How beautiful!” said Lydia, looking at a stage setting. “It’s almost real.”

“How beautiful!” said Kira, looking at a landscape. “It’s almost artificial.”

“In a way,” said the Soviet official, “you comrade women have an advantage over us men. You can take care of the young generation, the future of our republic. There are so many dirty, hungry children that need the loving hands of our women.”

Kira went to school in Yalta. The school dining room had many tables. At luncheon, girls sat at these tables in couples, in fours, in dozens. Kira always sat at a table in a corner—alone.

One day her class declared a boycott against a little freckled girl who had incurred the displeasure of her most popular classmate, a loud-voiced young lady who had a smile, a handshake and a command ready for everyone.

That noon, at luncheon, the little table in the corner of the dining room was occupied by two students: Kira and the freckled girl. They were half through their bowls of buckwheat mush, when the indignant class leader approached them.

“Do you know what you’re doing, Argounova?” she asked, eyes blazing.

“Eating mush,” answered Kira. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Do you know what this girl here has done?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“You haven’t? Then why are you doing this for her?”

“You’re mistaken. I am not doing this
for
her, I am doing it
against
twenty-eight other girls.”

“So you think it’s smart to go against the majority?”

“I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it’s safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries. . . . May I have the salt, please?”

At the age of thirteen, Lydia fell in love with a grand opera tenor. She kept his picture on her dresser, with a single red rose in a thin crystal glass beside it. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi, who talked to the birds and helped the poor, and she dreamed of entering a convent. Kira had never been in love. The only hero she had known was a Viking whose story she had read as a child; a Viking whose eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword, but there was no boundary for the point of his sword; a Viking who walked through life, breaking barriers and reaping victories, who walked through ruins while the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing its weight; a Viking who laughed at kings, who laughed at priests, who looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook and there, over-shadowing the sky, he saw his own picture; a Viking who lived but for the joy and the wonder and the glory of the god that was himself. Kira did not remember the books she read before that legend; she did not want to remember the ones she read after it. But through the years that followed, she remembered the end of the legend: when the Viking stood on a tower over a city he had conquered. The Viking smiled as men smile when they look up at heaven; but he was looking down. His right arm was one straight line with his lowered sword; his left arm, straight as the sword, raised a goblet of wine to the sky. The first rays of a coming sun, still unseen to the earth, struck the crystal goblet. It sparkled like a white torch. Its rays lighted the faces of those below. “To a life,” said the Viking, “which is a reason unto itself.”

“So you’re not a Union member, citizen?” said the Soviet official. “Too bad, too bad. The trade unions are the steel girders of our great state building, as said . . . well, one of our great leaders said. What’s a citizen? Only a brick and of no use unless cemented to other bricks just like it.”

From somewhere in the aristocratic Middle Ages, Kira had inherited the conviction that labor and effort were ignoble. She had gone through school with the highest grades and the sloppiest composition books. She burned her piano etudes and never darned her stockings. She climbed to the pedestals of statues in the parks to kiss the cold lips of Greek gods—but slept at symphony concerts. She sneaked out through a window when guests were expected, and she could not cook a potato. She never went to church and seldom read a newspaper.

But she had chosen a future of the hardest work and most demanding effort. She was to be an engineer. She had decided it with her first thought about the vague thing called future. And that first thought had been quiet and reverent, for her future was consecrated, because it was
her
future. She had played with mechanical toys, which were not intended for girls, and had built ships and bridges and towers; she had watched rising steel and bricks and steam. Over Lydia’s bed hung an ikon, over Kira’s—the picture of an American skyscraper. Even though those who listened smiled incredulously, she spoke about the houses she would build of glass and steel, about a white aluminum bridge across a blue river—“but, Kira, you can’t make a bridge of aluminum”—about men and wheels and cranes under her orders, about a sunrise on the steel skeleton of a skyscraper.

She knew she had a life and that it was her life. She knew the work which she had chosen and which she expected of life. The other thing which she expected, she did not know, for it had no name, but it had been promised to her, promised in a memory of her childhood.

When the summer sun sank behind the hills, Kira sat on a high cliff and watched the fashionable casino far down by the river. The tall spire of the music pavilion pierced the red sky. The slim, black shadows of women moved against the orange panels of the lighted glass doors. An orchestra played in the pavilion. It played gay, sparkling tunes from musical comedies. It threw the fire of electric signs, of ringing glasses, of shining limousines, of nights in Europe’s capitals—into the dark evening sky over a silent river and a rocky hill with prehistorical trees.

The light tunes of casinos and beer-gardens, sung all over Europe by girls with sparkling eyes and swaying hips, had a significance for Kira that no one else ever attached to them. She heard in them a profound joy of life, so profound that it could be as light as a dancer’s feet. And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety.

They came from the strange world where grownups moved among colored lights and white tables, where there was so much that she could not understand and so much that was awaiting her. They came out of her future.

She had selected one song as her, Kira’s, own: it was from an old operetta and was called “The Song of Broken Glass.” It had been introduced by a famous beauty of Vienna. There had been a balustrade on the stage, overlooking a drop with the twinkling lights of a big city, and a row of crystal goblets lined along the balustrade. The beauty sang the number and one by one, lightly, hardly touching them, kicked the crystal goblets and sent them flying in tingling, glittering splinters—around the tight, sheer stockings on the most beautiful legs in Europe.

There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter.

The wind blew Kira’s hair across her eyes and sent a cold breath at the toes of her bare feet hanging over the cliff’s edge. In the twilight, the sky seemed to rise slowly to a greater height, growing darker, and the first star dropped into the river. A lonely little girl on a slippery rock listened to her own hymn and smiled at what it promised her.

Such had been Kira’s entrance into life. Some enter it from under gray temple vaults, with head bowed in awe, with the light of sacrificial candles in their hearts and eyes. Some enter it with a heart like a pavement—tramped by many feet, and with a cold skin crying for the warmth of the herd. Kira Argounova entered it with the sword of a Viking pointing the way and an operetta tune for a battle march.

The Soviet official angrily wiped his pen with his checkered handkerchief, for he had made an ink spot on the last page.

“Toil, comrade,” he said, “is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat.”

The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer.

“Here’s your Labor Book, Citizen Argounova,” said the Soviet official. “You are now a member of the greatest republic ever established in the history of the world. May the brotherhood of workers and peasants ever be the goal of your life, as it is the goal of all Red citizens.”

He handed her the book. Across the top of the first page was printed the slogan:

KIRA HAD BLISTERS ON HER HANDS WHERE the sharp string had rubbed too long. It was not easy to carry packages up four floors, eight flights of stone stairs that smelled of cats and felt cold through the thin soles of her shoes. Every time she hurried down for another load, skipping briskly over the steps, sliding down the bannister, she met Lydia, climbing up slowly, heavily, clutching bundles to her breast, panting and sighing bitterly, steam blowing from her mouth with every word: “Our Lord in Heaven! . . . Saint Mother of God!”