We the Living (80 page)

She felt no pain. The last of her consciousness had gone into one will into two legs that were growing weaker and weaker. She had to go on. She had to get out. She had to get out.

She whispered to herself, as if the sound of her voice were a living fluid giving her strength: “You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova, you’re a good soldier and now’s the time to prove it. . . . Now. . . . Just one effort. . . . One last effort. . . . It’s not so very bad yet, is it? . . . You can make it. . . . Just walk. . . . Please, walk. . . . You have to get out . . . get out . . . get out . . . get out . . .”

She pressed her hand to the roll of bills in her jacket. She could not lose that. She had to watch that. She could not see things clearly any longer. She had to remember that.

Her head was drooping forward. She closed her eyes, leaving slits open between her lashes to watch her legs, her legs that should not stop.

She opened her eyes suddenly to find herself lying in the snow. She raised her head slowly, wondering, for she did not remember having fallen.

She must have fainted, she thought, wondering curiously how it felt to faint, for she did not remember.

It took a long time to rise. She noticed a red spot in the snow where she had fallen. She must have lain there for some time. She staggered forward, then stopped, some thought forming itself slowly in her dull eyes, and she came back and covered the red spot with snow, with her foot.

She went on, wondering dimly why the weather had become so hot and why the snow did not melt when it was so hot, so hot that she could hardly breathe, and what if the snow did melt? She would have to swim, then, well, she was a good swimmer and that would be easier than walking, for her legs could rest, then.

She went reeling forward. She did not know whether she was walking in the right direction. She had forgotten that she had to think of a direction. She remembered only that she had to walk.

She did not notice that the hill ended sharply on the edge of a ravine, and she fell and rolled down the white slope in a whirl of legs, arms and snow.

She could move nothing but one hand, at first, to rub the wet snow off her face, off her lips, off her frozen lashes. She lay huddled in a white heap on the bottom of a white gulch. The time it took to rise again seemed like hours, like years: just to draw her hands to her body, at first, palms down, to press her elbows to her body, turn her legs, push her feet out, then rise to her knees, leaning on tense, trembling arms, and breathe, with a breath like a knife inside, then rise a little further, leaning on one hand, then tear that hand, too, off the snow, and rise, and stand erect, panting.

She made a few steps. But she could not walk up the other side of the gulch. She fell and crawled up the hill on her hands and knees, digging her burning face into the snow to cool her cheeks.

She rose to her feet again on the top of the hill. She had lost her mittens. She felt something in the corners of her mouth and she rubbed her lips and looked at her fingers: her fingers were pink with froth.

She felt too hot. She tore the white scarf off her hair and threw it down into the gulch. The wind was a relief, blowing her hair back in a straight, shivering line.

She went on, raising her face to the wind.

She felt too hot and it was so difficult to breathe. She tore off her fur jacket and dropped it into the snow, and went on, without looking back.

In the sky, the clouds were rolling away in whirls of blue and gray and dark green. Ahead of her, above the snow, a pale line glowed, rising, and it was a transparent white, but above the snow it looked like a very pale green.

She pitched forward and jerked back again, brushing the hair out of her eyes, and faltered, and went on, a trembling, swaying, reeling, drunken figure in a long wedding gown of lace white as the snow around her.

The train was torn off her waistline and it dragged behind her, her legs getting tangled in the long lace. She staggered blindly, the wind waving her hair, her arms swinging, as if they, too, were loose in the wind. She leaned back and her breasts stood out under the white lace, and from under her left breast a little stream of red trickled down slowly, and long dark patches spread down to the train, and delicate flowers of lace were red on the white satin.

And suddenly her dry lips, caked and sealed with froth, opened again, and she called softly, one name, as a plea for help from over there, from across the border, as a caress, her voice tender and almost joyous:

“Leo! . . .”

She repeated, louder and louder, without despair, as if the sound, that one sound in the world, were giving her life: “Leo! . . . Leo! . . . Leo! . . .”

She was calling him, the Leo that could have been, that would have been had he lived there, where she was going, across the border. He was awaiting her there, and she had to go on. She had to walk. There, in that world, across the border, a life was waiting for her to which she had been faithful her every living hour, her only banner that had never been lowered, that she had held high and straight, a life she could not betray, she would not betray now by stopping while she was still living, a life she could still serve, by walking, by walking forward a little longer, just a little longer.

Then she heard a song, a tune not loud enough to be a human sound, a song as a last battle-march. And it was not a funeral dirge, it was not a hymn, it was not a prayer. It was a tune from an old operetta, the “Song of Broken Glass.”

Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unconditional, consummate human joy.

She did not know whether she was singing. Perhaps she was only hearing the music somewhere.

But the music had been a promise; a promise at the dawn of her life. That which had been promised then, could not be denied to her now. She had to go on.

She went on, a fragile girl in the flowing, medieval gown of a priestess, red stains spreading on the white lace.

At dawn, she fell on the edge of the slope. She lay very still, for she knew that she could not rise again.

Far down, below her, an endless snow plain stretched into the sunrise. The sun had not come. A band of pink, pale and young, like the breath of a color, like the birth of a color, rose over the snow and glowed, trembling, flowing up into a pale blue, a blue immensity of sparks twinkling under a thin veil, like the faint, fading ghost of a lake in a summer sun, like the still surface of a lake with a sun drowned far in its depths. And the snow, at the rise of that liquid flame, seemed to quiver, breathing, glittering softly. Long bands stretched across the plain, shadows that seemed light itself, a heavier, bluer light with edges ready to burst into dancing fires.

A lonely little tree stood far away in the plain. It had no leaves. Its slim, rare twigs had gathered no snow. It stretched, tense with the life of a future spring, thin black branches, like arms, into the dawn rising over an endless earth where so much had been possible.

She lay on the edge of a hill and looked down at the sky. One hand, white and still, hung over the edge, and little red drops rolled slowly in the snow, down the slope.

She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.

AS A YOUNGSTER, AYN RAND CONTINUALLY IMAGINED ideas for plays and novels to write when she grew up. Not a single one of her stories pertained to Russia, which she hated. It was something of a paradox to her, therefore, that she set her first novel in Soviet Russia.

Part of the explanation is that, having finally escaped to the United States, she had to get Russia out of her system—by telling the world what was actually happening there. Her husband, Frank O’Connor, and his brother Nick urged her to write the novel. Both were horrified by her experiences in Russia, and they convinced her that Americans had no idea of the truth. A young Russian had said to her at a party in 1926, just before she left for America: “When you get there, tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and that we are all dying.”
We the Living
told them.

Her novel, AR wrote on its completion, is “the
first
story written by a Russian who knows the living conditions of the new Russia and who has actually lived under the Soviets in the period described . . . the first one by a person who
knows
the facts and also having escaped can
tell
them.”
¹

Another part of the explanation for a Russian novel is that, being an immigrant and a beginner, AR did not feel ready yet for anything else. She did have in mind the idea for a novel set in an airship orbiting the earth, and she debated between the two projects. But the Russian novel had a great advantage: no research was necessary for
We the Living
; she already knew the background—whereas she did not know the conditions, the people, or the language well enough to do a story set in America (or in an airship).

Further, since AR was only twenty-five in 1930, when she started the book, “I thought I was too young to write about adults.”
²
She was not yet ready to present her kind of hero or broad, philosophical theme—she had not defined her ideas fully enough or acquired the necessary literary skill—and the Russian story did not require these developments.

The theme of
We the Living
—identified by AR in the Foreword—is indicated by its original title,
Airtight
, the meaning being that under dictatorship man cannot survive. Dictatorship, she writes in her journal, “crushes a whole country and smothers every bit of life, action, and air. . . . It makes the atmosphere choking, airtight. . . .”

The plot of the novel occurred to her initially as a twist on a standard plot, the story of the virtuous girl who sells herself to a villain in order to save the hero, whom she loves. AR thought: Wouldn’t it be interesting if “the man to whom the girl sells herself is not a villain but a hero—and the man for whom she makes her sacrifice is the villain in the end”? With this twist, the heroine’s conflict deepens immeasurably, while the final tragedy becomes in a sense even greater for the “villain” than for the other two.
³

When she started to project the story, the first scene in AR’s mind was the arrest scene, when Andrei, the GPU agent who loves Kira, comes to take Leo away to jail—and discovers that Kira is Leo’s mistress. The drama of this kind of scene was AR’s personal motivation to do the novel. She then constructed the story backward, by deciding what events had to be presented to lead to this climax.

Several of the characters were suggested by people whom AR had known in Russia. Kira, of course, though not intended as a self-portrait,
is
AR intellectually and morally; she has all of AR’s ideas and values. Irina is based on her youngest sister, Nora, who drew the very same kind of caricatures. Uncle Vasili was taken, in essence and appearance, from her own father. As to the two men, Andrei is a pure invention, but Leo is real; he is a romanticized version of the first man AR ever loved, a student she had met in college at the age of seventeen and gone out with many times. His name was Leo. She disliked the name, but felt that she had no choice about using it: in her mind, the character was inseparable from the man.

I have often heard people argue about who is superior: Andrei or Leo (Kira is superior to both). Despite the book’s hero-villain plot twist, there is no doubt as to AR’s answer, which I heard her state on several occasions. Her favorite was Leo, not only for the personal reason mentioned but also for a philosophical reason: the fact that Leo, by conscious premises, is an egoist, an individualist, a man of arrogant self-esteem who lives for
his
values. Andrei, by contrast, is a man explicitly committed to the opposite ideas; he accepts the principles of selflessness and collectivism as his moral ideal, and then acts on them, down to spilling all the blood they require. Given the plot twist, AR worked hard to make Andrei as noble as possible; but his nobility exists basically on the subconscious level. It lies in his soul, his unidentified individualistic premises, which are at war with his actions and conscious viewpoint. AR judged people, essentially, by these last.

When Andrei discovers his error, he commits suicide; he is totally honest. But the point is: what he discovers is that he gave his life to a lie. Leo knew better from the start (even if he breaks in the end).

If Leo had been born in America, he would have become Francisco D’Anconia of
Atlas Shrugged
; that is, the measure of his heroic potential. In Russia, however, he is crushed. To the extent that an individual is rational, independent, uncompromising, passionate—to the extent that he tries to act according to his own mind and value judgments—his life under the rule of physical force becomes unendurable. The only answer he sees to his questions and ambitions is the muzzle of a gun. In principle, such a man has three choices.

One is to commit suicide. This is the choice Andrei makes, when he grasps the depravity of his “ideal.”

Another is to attempt to make the clash between mind and force endurable by nullifying one of the two clashing elements, the only one in the victim’s power: his own mind. This means: drowning his mind, and thereby losing the ability to know or care any longer what is being done to him. This is Leo’s choice; it is living death, or drawn-out suicide, as against immediate self-destruction. In her journal, AR does not regard Leo’s choice as evil. Rather, she describes him as a man who is “too strong to compromise, but too weak to withstand the pressure, who cannot bend, but only break.”