We the Living (77 page)

To her family, three silent, startled faces, Kira explained quietly and Galina Petrovna gasped: “But what happened to . . .”

“Nothing. We’re just tired of each other.”

“My poor, dear child! I . . .”

“Please don’t worry about me, Mother. If you’ll forgive me the inconvenience, Lydia, it will be only for a little while. I couldn’t have found another room for just a few weeks.”

“Why certainly! Why, I’ll be only too glad to have you, Kira, after all you’ve done for us. But why for a few weeks? Where are you going after that?”

She answered and her voice had the intensity of a maniac’s:

On the following morning, Citizen Kira Argounova filed an application for a foreign passport. She had several weeks to wait for an answer.

Galina Petrovna moaned: “It’s insanity, Kira! Sheer insanity! In the first place, they won’t give it to you. You have no reasons to show why you want to go abroad, and with your father’s social past and all. . . . And even if you do get the passport—then what? No foreign country will admit a Russian and I can’t say that I blame them. And if they admit you—what are you going to do? Have you thought of that?”

“No,” said Kira.

“You have no money. You have no profession. How are you going to live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What will happen to you?”

“I don’t care.”

“But why are you doing it?”

“I want to get out.”

“But you’ll be all alone, lost in a wide world, with not a . . .”

“I want to get out.”

“. . . with not a single friend to help you, with no aim, no future, no . . .”

“I want to get out.”

On the evening of his departure, Leo came to say good-bye. Lydia left them alone in her room.

Leo said: “I couldn’t go, Kira, after parting as we did. I wanted to say good-bye and . . . Unless you’d rather . . .”

She said: “No. I’m glad you came.”

“I wanted to apologize for some of the things I said to you. I had no right to say them. It’s not up to me to blame you. Will you forgive me?”

“It’s all right, Leo. I have nothing to forgive.”

“I wanted to tell you that . . . that . . . Well, no, there’s nothing to tell you. Only that . . . we have a great deal to . . . remember, haven’t we?”

“Yes, Leo.”

“You’ll be better off without me.”

“Don’t worry about me, Leo.”

“I’ll be back in Petrograd. We’ll meet again. We’ll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don’t they?”

“Yes, Leo.”

“Then we won’t have to be so serious any more. It will be strange to look back, won’t it? We’ll meet again, Kira. I’ll be back.”

“If you’re still alive—and if you don’t forget.”

It was as if she had kicked a dead animal in the road and saw it jerking in a last convulsion. He whispered: “Kira . . . don’t . . .”

But she knew it was only a last convulsion and she said: “I won’t.”

He kissed her and her lips were soft and tender and yielding to his. Then he went.

She had several weeks to wait.

In the evenings, Alexander Dimitrievitch came home from work and shook snow off his galoshes in the lobby, and wiped them carefully with a special rag, for the galoshes were new and expensive.

After dinner, when he had no meeting to attend, he sat in a corner with an unpainted wooden screen frame and worked patiently, pasting match box labels on the frame. He collected the labels and guarded them jealously in a locked box. At night, he spread them cautiously on the table, and moved them slowly into patterns, trying out color combinations. He had a whole panel completed, and he muttered, squinting at it appraisingly: “It’s a beauty. A beauty. I bet no one in Petrograd has anything like it. What do you think, Kira, shall I use two yellow ones and a green one in this corner, or just three yellows?”

She answered quietly: “The green one will be nice, Father.”

Galina Petrovna thundered in, at night, and flung a heavy brief case on a chair in the lobby. She had had a telephone installed, and she tore the receiver off the hook and spoke hurriedly, still removing her gloves, unbuttoning her coat: “Comrade Fedorov? . . . Comrade Argounova speaking. I have an idea for that number in the Living Newspaper, for our next Club show. . . . Now when we present Lord Chamberlain crushing the British Proletariat, we’ll have one of the pupils, a good husky one, wearing a red blouse, lie down on the floor and we’ll put a table on him—oh, just the front legs—and we’ll have the fat one, playing Lord Chamberlain, in a high silk hat, sit at the table and eat steak. . . . Oh, it doesn’t have to be a real steak, just papier-mâché. . . .”

Galina Petrovna ate her dinner hurriedly, reading the evening paper. She jumped up, looking at the clock, before she had finished, dabbed a smear of powder on her nose and, seizing her brief case, rushed out again to a Council meeting. On the rare evenings when she stayed at home, she spread books and newspaper clippings over the dining-room table, and sat writing a thesis for her Marxist Club. She asked, raising her head, blinking absent-mindedly: “Kira, do you happen to know, the Paris Commune, what year was that?”

“Eighteen seventy-one, Mother,” Kira answered quietly.

Lydia worked at night. In the daytime, she practiced the “Internationale” and “You fell as a victim” and the Red Cavalry song on her old grand piano that had not been tuned for over a year. When she was asked to play the old classics she loved, she refused flatly, her mouth set in a thin, foolish, stubborn line. But once in a while, she sat down at the piano suddenly and played for hours, fiercely, violently, without stopping between pieces; she played Chopin and Bach and Tchaikovsky, and when her fingers were numb she cried, sobbing aloud in broken hiccoughs, senselessly, monotonously, like a child. Galina Petrovna paid no attention to it, saying: “Just another one of Lydia’s fits.”

Kira was lying on her mattress on the floor, when Lydia came home from work. Lydia took a long time to undress and a longer time to whisper endless prayers before the ikons in her corner. Some evenings, she came over to Kira and sat down on the mattress, and shivering in the darkness, in her long white nightgown, her hair falling in a thick braid down her back, whispered confidentially, a ray of the street lamp beyond the window falling on her tired face with swollen eyes and dry little wrinkles in the corners of the mouth, on her dry, knotty hands that did not look young any longer: “I had a vision again, Kira, a call from above. Truly, a prophetic vision, and the voice told me that salvation shall not be long in coming. It is the end of the world and the reign of the Anti-Christ. But Judgment Day is approaching. I know. It has been revealed to me.”

She whispered feverishly, she expected nothing but a peal of laughter from her sister, she was not looking at Kira, she was not certain whether Kira heard it; but she had to talk and she had to think that some human ears were listening.

“There is an old man, Kira, God’s wanderer. I’ve been to see him. Please don’t mention this to anyone, or they’ll fire me from the Club. He is the Chosen One of the Lord and he knows. He says it has been predicted in the Scriptures. We are punished for our sins, as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished. But hardships and sorrows are only a trial for the soul of the righteous. Only through suffering and long-bearing patience shall we become worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Kira said quietly: “I won’t tell anyone, Lydia. And now you’d better go to bed, because you’re tired and it’s so cold here.”

In the daytime, Kira led excursions through the Museum of the Revolution. In the evening, she sat in the dining room and read old books. She spoke seldom. When anyone addressed her, she answered evenly, quietly. Her voice seemed frozen on a single note. Galina Petrovna wished, uncomfortably, to see her angry, at least once; she did not see it. One evening, when Lydia dropped a vase in the silence of the dining room, and it broke with a crash, and Galina Petrovna jumped up with a startled little scream, and Alexander Dimitrievitch shuddered, blinking—Kira raised her head slowly, as if nothing had happened.

But there was a flicker of life in her eyes when, on her way home from the Excursion Center, she stopped at the window of a foreign book store on Liteiny, and stood looking thoughtfully at the bright covers with gay, broken, foreign letters, with chorus girls kicking long, glistening legs, with columns and searchlights and long, black automobiles. There was a jerk of life in her fingers when, every evening, as methodically as a bookkeeper, with a dull little stub of a pencil, she crossed another date off an old calendar on the wall over her mattress.

The foreign passport was refused.

Kira received the news with a quiet indifference that frightened Galina Petrovna, who would have preferred a stormy outbreak.

“Listen, Kira,” said Galina Petrovna vehemently, slamming the door of her room to be left alone with her daughter, “let’s talk sense. If you have any insane ideas of . . . of . . . Now, I want you to know that I won’t permit it. After all, you’re my daughter, I have some say in the matter. You know what it means, if you attempt . . . if you even dare to think of leaving the country illegally.”

“I’ve never mentioned that,” said Kira.

“No, you haven’t. But I know you. I know what you’re thinking. I know how far your foolish recklessness can . . . Listen, it’s a hundred to one that you don’t get out. And you’ll be lucky if you’re just shot at the border. It will be worse if you’re caught and brought back. And if you’re lucky enough to draw the one chance and slip out, it’s a hundred to one that you’ll die in a blizzard in those forests around the border.”

“Mother, why discuss it?”

“Listen, I’ll keep you here if I have to chain you. After all, one can be allowed to be crazy just so far. What are you after? What’s wrong with this country? We don’t have any luxuries, that’s true, but you won’t get any over there, either. A chambermaid is all you can hope to be, there, if you’re lucky. This is the country for young people. I know your crazy stubbornness, but you’ll get over it. Look at me. I’ve adapted myself, at my age, and, really, I can’t say that I’m unhappy. You’re only a pup and you can’t make decisions to ruin your whole life before you’ve even started it. You’ll outgrow your foolish notions. There is a chance for everyone in this new country of ours.”

“Mother, I’m not arguing, am I? So let’s drop the subject.”

Kira returned home later than usual from her excursions. There were people she had to see in dark side streets, slipping furtively up dark stairs through unlighted doorways. There were bills to be slipped into stealthy hands and whispers to be heard from lips close to her ear. It would cost more than she could ever save to be smuggled out on a boat, she learned, and it would be more dangerous. She had a better chance if she tried it alone, on foot, across the Latvian border. She would need white clothes. People had done it, dressed all in white, crawling through the snow in the winter darkness. She sold her watch and paid for the name of the station and the village, and for a square inch of tissue paper with the map of the place where a crossing was possible. She sold the fur coat Leo had given her and paid for a forged permit to travel.