"No, Leo."
She looked at a poster on a steel pillar; it promised a huge orchestra, foreign fox-trots and delicious food at the grand opening of the new cabaret, at nine o'clock tonight. She said, wondering, bewildered, a little frightened, as if realizing it for the first time: "Leo . . . at nine o'clock tonight . . . you won't be here any more."
"No. I won't."
The third bell rang.
He seized her roughly and held her lips in a long, choking kiss, as long as the train whistle that wailed shrilly. He whispered: "Kira . . . my own only one. . . . I love you. . . . I love you so much. . . ."
He leaped to the steps of the car as it started moving, and disappeared inside. He did not come to the window.
She stood and heard iron chains stretching, wheels grinding rails, the engine panting far ahead, white steam spreading slowly under the steel vaults. The yellow squares of windows were suddenly pulled past her. The station smelt of carbolic acid. A faded red banner hung on a steel girder. The windows were streaming faster and faster, melting into a yellow line. There was nothing ahead but steel, steam, smoke and, under an arch very far away, a piece of sky black as a hole.
And suddenly she understood that it was a train, and that Leo was on the train, and that the train was leaving her. And something beyond terror, immense and unnameable, something which was not a human feeling, seized her. She ran after the train. She grasped an iron handle. She wanted to stop it. She knew that there was something huge and implacable moving over her, which she had to stop, which she alone was to stop, and couldn't. She was jerked forward, falling, she was whirled along down the wooden planks of the platform, and then a husky soldier in a peaked khaki cap with a red star grabbed her by the shoulders, and tore her off the handle, and threw her aside, pushing her away from the train with his elbow in her breast.
He roared:
"What do you think you're doing, citizen?"
PART TWO
I
IT WAS ST. PETERSBURG; THE WAR MADE it Petrograd; the revolution made it Leningrad.
It is a city of stone, and those living in it think not of stone brought upon a green earth and piled block on block to raise a city, but of one huge rock carved into streets, bridges, houses, and earth brought in handfuls, scattered, ground into the stone to remind them of that which lies beyond the city.
Its trees are rare strangers, sickly foreigners in a climate of granite, forlorn and superfluous. Its parks are reluctant concessions. In spring, a rare dandelion sticks a bright yellow head through the stones of its embankments, and men smile at it incredulously and condescendingly as at an impudent child. Its spring does not rise from the soil; its first violets, and very red tulips, and very blue hyacinths come in the hands of men, on street corners.
Petrograd was not born; it was created. The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle. An implacable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city. Men brought earth to fill a swamp where no living thing existed but mosquitoes. And like mosquitoes, men died and fell into the grunting mire. No willing hands came to build the new capital. It rose by the labor of soldiers, thousands of soldiers, regiments who took orders and could not refuse to face a deadly foe, a gun or a swamp. They fell, and the earth they brought and their bones made the ground for the city. "Petrograd," its residents say, "stands on skeletons."
Petrograd is not in a hurry; it is not lazy; it is gracious and leisurely, as befits the freedom of its vast streets. It is a city that threw itself down amid the marshes and pine forests, luxuriously, both arms outflung. Its squares are paved fields; its streets are as broad as tributaries to the Neva, the widest river to cross a great city.
On Nevsky, the capital of the capital's streets, the houses were built by generations past for generations to come. They are set and unchangeable like fortresses; their walls are thick and their windows are tiers of deep niches, rising over wide sidewalks of reddish-brown granite. From the statue of Alexander III, a huge gray man on a huge gray horse, silver rails stretch tense and straight to the Admiralty building far away, its white colonnade and thin golden spire raised like the crown, the symbol, the trade mark of Nevsky, over the broken skyline where every turret and balcony and gargoyle bending over the street are ageless features of a frozen stone face.
A golden cross on a small golden cupola rises to the clouds halfway down Nevsky, over the Anichkovsky palace, a bare red cube slashed by bare gray windows. And further, beyond the palace, a chariot raises to the clouds the black heads of its rearing horses, their hoofs hanging high over the street, over the stately columns of the Alexandrinsky theater. The palace looks like a barracks; the theater looks like a palace.
At the foot of the palace, Nevsky is cut by a stream, and a bridge arches over its swirling, muddy water. Four black statues stand at the four corners of the bridge. They may be only an accident and an ornament; they may be the very spirit of Petrograd, the city raised by man against the will of nature. Each statue is of a man and a horse. In the first one, the furious hoofs of a rearing beast are swung high in the air, ready to crush the naked, kneeling man, his arm stretched in a first effort toward the bridle of the monster. In the second, the man is up on one knee, his torso leaning back, the muscles of his legs, of his arms, of his body ready to burst through his skin, as he pulls at the bridle, in the supreme moment of the struggle. In the third, they are face to face, the man up on his feet, his head at the nostrils of a beast bewildered by a first recognition of its master. In the fourth, the beast is tamed; it steps obediently, led by the hand of the man who is tall, erect, calm in his victory, stepping forward with serene assurance, his head held straight, his eyes looking steadily into an unfathomable future.
On winter nights, strings of large white globes flare up over Nevsky--and snow sparkles over the white lights like salt crystals--and the colored lanterns of tramways, red, green, yellow, wink far away swimming over a soft darkness--and through lashes moist with frost the white globes look like crosses of long white searchlights on a black sky.
Nevsky starts on the shore of the Neva, at a quay as trim and perfect as a drawing room, with a red-granite parapet and a row of palaces, of straight angles, tall windows, chaste columns and balustrades, severe, harmonious and luxuriously stern in their masculine grace.
Divided by the river, Petrograd's greatest mansion, the Winter Palace, faces Petrograd's greatest prison, the Peter-Paul Fortress. The Czars lived in the Winter Palace; when they died, they crossed the Neva: in the cathedral of the Fortress, white slabs rose over the graves of the Czars. The prison stood behind the cathedral. The walls of the Fortress guarded the dead Czars and the Czar's living enemies. In the long, silent halls of the palace, tall mirrors reflected the ramparts behind which men were forgotten, alive for decades in lonely stone graves.
Bridges rise over the river, as long humps of steel, with tramways crawling slowly up to the middle and rolling swiftly, clattering, down to the other shore. The right bank, beyond the Fortress, is a gradual surrender of the city to that earth, that countryside it has driven out; the Kamenostrovsky, a broad, quiet, endless avenue, is like a stream full of the fragrance of a future sea, a street where each step is a forecast of the country to come. The avenue and the city and the river end at the Islands, where the Neva breaks among bits of land held together by delicate bridges, where heavy white cones rise in tiers edged with dark green, over a deep silence of snow, and fir branches and bird footprints alone break the white desolation, and beyond the last island, the sky and sea are an unfinished water color of pale gray with a faint greenish band smeared across to mark a future horizon.
But Petrograd also has side streets. Petrograd's side streets are of colorless stone rain-washed into the gray of the clouds above and of the mud below. They are bare as jail corridors; they cut each other in naked corners of square buildings that look like prisons. Old gateways are locked at night over mud-swollen ruts. Little shops frown with faded signs over turbid wind
ows. Little parks choke with consumptive grass into which mud and dust and mud again have been ground for a century. Iron parapets guard canals of refuse-thickened water. On dark corners, rusty ikons of the Madonna are nailed over forgotten tin boxes, begging coppers for orphanages.
And farther up the Neva, rise forests of red-brick chimneys, spewing a black cloud that hangs over old, stooping, wooden houses, over an embankment of rotting logs at the placid, indifferent river. Rain falls slowly through the smoke; rain, smoke and stone are the theme-song of the city.
Petrograd's residents wonder, sometimes, at the strange bonds that hold them. After the long winter, they curse the mud and the stone, and cry for pine forests; they flee from the city as from a hated stepmother; they flee to green grass and sand and to the sparkling capitals of Europe. And, as to an unconquerable mistress, they return in the fall, hungry for the wide streets, the shrieking tramways and the cobblestones, serene and relieved, as if life were beginning again. "Petrograd," they say, "is the only City."
Cities grow like forests, like weeds. Petrograd did not grow. It was born finished and complete. Petrograd is not acquainted with nature. It was the work of man.
Nature makes mistakes and takes chances; it mixes its colors and knows little of straight lines. But Petrograd is the work of man who knows what he wants.
Petrograd's grandeur is unmarred, its squalor unrelieved. Its facets are cut clearly, sharply; they are deliberate, perfect with the straight-forward perfection of man's work.
Cities grow with a people, and fight for the place at the head of cities, and rise slowly up the steps of years. Petrograd did not rise. It came to be at the height. It was commanded to command. It was a capital before its first stone was laid. It was a monument to the spirit of man.
Peoples know nothing of the spirit of man, for peoples are only nature, and man is a word that has no plural. Petrograd is not of the people. It has no legend, no folklore; it is not glorified in nameless songs down nameless roads. It is a stranger, aloof, incomprehensible, forbidding. No pilgrims ever traveled to its granite gates. The gates had never been opened in warm compassion to the meek, the hurt and the maimed, like the doors of the kindly Moscow. Petrograd does not need a soul; it has a mind.
And perhaps it is only a coincidence that in the language of the Russians, Moscow is "she," while Petrograd has ever been "he."
And perhaps it is only a coincidence that those who seized on the power in the name of the people, transferred their capital to the meek Moscow from the haughty aristocrat of cities.
In 1924, a man named Lenin died and the city was ordered to be called Leningrad. The revolution also brought posters to the city's walls, and red banners to its houses, and sunflower-seed shells to its cobblestones. It cut a proletarian poem into the pedestal of the statue of Alexander III, and put a red rag on a stick into the hand of Catherine II in a small garden off Nevsky. It called Nevsky "Prospect of October 25th," and Sadovaia, a cross street--"Street of July 3rd," in honor of dates it wanted remembered; and at the intersection, hefty conductoresses yell in the crowded tramways: "Corner of October twenty-fifth and July third! Terminal for yellow tickets. New fare, citizens!"
In the early summer of 1925 the State Textile Trust put out new cotton prints. And women smiled in the streets of Petrograd, women wearing dresses made of new materials for the first time in many years.
But there were only half-a-dozen patterns of prints in the city. Women in black and white checks passed women in black and white checks; women in red-dotted white met women in green-dotted white; women with spirals of blue on a gray dress met women with the same spirals of brown on a tan dress. They passed by like inmates of a huge orphanage, frowning, sullen, uncomfortable, losing all joy in their new garments.
In a store on Nevsky, the State Porcelain Trust displayed a glistening window of priceless china, a white tea service with odd, fuzzy, modern flowers engraved in thin black by the hand of a famous new artist. The service had stood there for months; no one could afford to buy it.
Windows sparkled with foreign imitation jewelry--strings of flowered wax beads, earrings of bright celluloid circles, the latest fashion, protected by a stupendous price from the wistful women who stopped to admire them.
In a street off Nevsky, a foreign book store had been opened; a window two floors high flaunted the glossy, radiant, incredible covers of volumes that had come from across the border.
Bright awnings spread over Nevsky's wide, dry sidewalks, and barometers sparkled in the sun with the clear, piercing fire of clean glass.
A huge cotton billboard stood leaning against a building, presenting the tense face, enormous eyes and long, thin hands of a famous actor painted in bold brush strokes under the name of a German film.
Pictures of Lenin looked down at the passersby, a suspicious face with a short beard and narrow Oriental eyes, draped in red bunting and mourning crepe.
On street corners, in the sun, ragged men sold saccharine and plaster busts of Lenin. Sparrows chirped on telephone wires. Lines stood at the doors of cooperatives; women took off their jackets and, in short-sleeved, wrinkled blouses, offered flabby white arms to the first heat of the summer sun.
A poster hung high on a wall. On the poster, a huge worker swung a hammer toward the sky, and the shadow of the hammer fell like a huge black cross over the little buildings of the city under his boots.
Kira Argounova stopped by the poster to light a cigarette.
She took a paper box from the pocket of her old coat and, with two straight fingers, swiftly, without looking, swung a cigarette into her mouth. Then she opened her old handbag of imitation leather and took out an expensive foreign lighter ingraved with her initials. She flicked a brief little flame, hurled a jet of smoke from the corner of her mouth and slammed the bag shut over the lighter. She jerked the frayed cuff of her coat sleeve and glanced at a sparkling watch on a narrow gold band. She swung forward; the high heels of her slippers rang hurriedly, resonantly down the granite sidewalk. Her slippers were patched; her legs displayed the tight, sheer luster of foreign silk stockings.
She walked toward an old palace that bore a red, five-pointed star over the entrance and an inscription in gold letters: DISTRICT CLUB OF THE ALL-UNION COMMUNIST PARTY
Its glass door was severely, immaculately polished, but the latch on its garden gate was broken. Weeds grew over what had been gravelled walks, and cigarette stubs rocked softly in an abandoned fountain, around a dejected marble cupid with a greenish patch of rust across its stomach, at the dry mouth of an urn.
Kira hurried down deserted walks, through a thick, neglected green tangle that drowned the clatter of tramways outside; blue pigeons fluttered lazily into the branches at the sound of her steps, and a bee rocked on a heavy purple tuft of clover. A giant regiment of oaks stood with arms outstretched, hiding the palace from the eyes of the street.
In the depths of the garden stood a small two-storied wing linked to the palace by the bridge of a short gallery. The windows of the first floor were broken and a sparrow sat on a sharp glass edge, jerking its head sidewise to look into the mouldy, deserted rooms. But on a window sill of the second floor lay a pile of books.
The heavy, hand-carved door was not locked. Kira went in and swung impatiently up the long stairway. It was a very long stairway. It rose to the second floor in a straight line, an endless flight of bare stone steps, cracked and crumbling in little trails of gravel. The stairway had had a magnificent white balustrade; but the balustrade was broken; empty holes gaped over the jagged stumps of marble columns and their white bodies still lay at the foot of the stairs. Hollow echoes rolled against the walls, against the murals of graceful white swans on blue lakes, of rose garlands, of sensual nymphs fleeing from grinning satyrs; the murals were faded and cut by gashes of peeling plaster.
Kira knocked at the door on the top of the stairs.
Andrei Taganov opened it and stepped back, astonished; his eyes widened in the slow, incredulous glance of a
man looking at a miracle that could not become habitual; he forgot to move, he stood before her, the collar of a white shirt thrown open at his sunburnt throat.
"Kira!"
She laughed, a clear, metallic laughter: "How are you, Andrei?"
His hands closed slowly, softly over her shoulders, so softly that she could not feel his hands, only their strength, their will holding her, bending her backward; but his lips on hers were brutal, uncontrollable. His eyes were closed; hers were open, looking indifferently up at the ceiling.
"Kira, I didn't expect you till tonight."
"I know. But you won't throw me out, will you?"
She stepped aside, preceding him through the dim little lobby into his room, throwing her bag on a chair, her hat on a table, with imperious familiarity.
She alone knew why Andrei Taganov had had to economize, that winter; why he had given up his room and moved into an abandoned wing of the palace, which the Party Club could not use and had given to him free of rent.
It had been the secret love nest of a prince. Many years ago, a forgotten sovereign had waited there for the light, stealthy footsteps and the rustle of a silk skirt up the long marble stairway. His magnificent furniture was gone; but the walls, the fireplace and the ceiling remained.
The walls were covered with a white brocade hand-embroidered in delicate little wreaths of blue and silver leaves. A marble row of cupids with garlands and cornucopias spouting frozen white flowers encircled the cornice. A marble Leda reclined voluptuously in the embrace of white wings over the fireplace. And from the soft blue of a sky painted on the ceiling, among pale, downy clouds, white doves--that had watched long nights of luxurious orgies--now looked at an iron bed, broken-down chairs, a long unpainted table loaded with books in bright red covers, wooden boxes piled as a dresser, posters of Red Army soldiers hiding the splits in the white brocade, and a leather jacket hanging on a nail in a corner.
Kira said peremptorily: "I came now to tell you that I can't come tonight."