Awkwardly, diffidently, Sasha moved a chair for Kira, offering it to her silently with a wave of his hand and a helpless grin.
"Sasha is studying history," said Irina, "that is, he was. He's been thrown out of the University for trying to think in a country of free thought."
"I will have you understand, Irina," said Victor, "that I won't tolerate such remarks in my presence. I expect the Party to be respected."
"Oh, stop acting!" Irina snapped. "The Party Collective won't hear you."
Kira noticed Sasha's long, silent glance at Victor; Sasha's steely blue eyes were neither bashful nor friendly.
"I'm sorry about the University, Sasha," said Kira, feeling suddenly that she liked him.
"I did not mind it," Sasha drawled in a quiet, measured tone of conviction. "It, really, was not essential. There are some outward circumstances which an autocratic power can control. There are some values it can never reach nor subjugate."
"You will discover, Kira," Victor smiled coldly, "that you and Sasha have much in common. You are both inclined to disregard the rudiments of caution."
"Victor, will you . . ." Vasili Ivanovitch began.
"Father, I have a right to expect, as long as I'm feeding this family, that my views . . ."
"You're feeding whom?" a shrill voice asked from the next room. Acia appeared on the threshold, her stockings loose around her ankles, the shreds of a torn magazine in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. "I wish someone'd feed someone. I'm still hungry and Irina wouldn't give me a second helping of soup."
"Father, I expect something to be done about this child," said Victor. "She's growing up like a bum. If she were to join a children's organization, such as the Pioneers . . ."
"Victor, we won't discuss that again," Vasili Ivanovitch interrupted firmly, quietly.
"Who wants to be a stinking Pioneer?" asked Acia.
"Acia, you go back to your room," Irina ordered, "or I'll put you to bed."
"You and who else?" stated Acia, disappearing behind a slammed door.
"Really," Victor observed, "if I'm able to study as I do and work besides and provide for this household, I don't see why Irina can't take proper care of one brat."
No one answered.
Vasili Ivanovitch bent over the piece of wood he had been carving. Irina drew pictures with a spoon handle on the old table cloth. Victor rose to his feet: "Sorry, Kira, to desert such a rare guest, but I have to go. I have a dinner engagement."
"Sure," said Irina. "See that the hostess doesn't borrow any silverware from Kira's room."
Victor left. Kira noticed that the tools were trembling in Vasili Ivanovitch's wrinkled fingers.
"What are you doing, Uncle Vasili?"
"Making a frame," Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head, showing his work proudly, "for one of Irina's pictures. They're good pictures. It's a shame to let them get crumpled and ruined in a drawer."
"It's beautiful, Uncle Vasili. I didn't know you could do that."
"Oh, I used to be good at it. I haven't done it for years. But I used to be good in the . . . in the old days, when I was a young man, in Siberia."
"How's your job, Uncle Vasili?"
"No more," said Irina. "How long do you think one can keep a job in a private store?"
"What happened?"
"Haven't you heard? They closed the store for back taxes. And the boss, himself, is now more broke than we are. . . . Would you like some tea, Kira? I'll fix it. The tenants stole our Primus, but Sasha will help me to light the samovar in the kitchen. Come on!" she threw at him imperiously, and Sasha rose obediently. "I don't know why I ask him to help," she winked at Kira, "he's the most helpless, useless, awkward thing born." But her eyes were sparkling happily. She took his arm and wheeled him out of the room.
It was growing dark, and the open window was a sharp, bright blue. Vasili Ivanovitch did not light a lamp. He bent lower over his carving.
"Sasha is a nice boy," he said suddenly, "and I'm worried."
"Why?" asked Kira.
He whispered: "Politics. Secret societies. Poor doomed little fool."
"And Victor suspects?"
"I think so."
It was Irina who switched on the light, returning with a sparkling tray of cups, preceding Sasha with a steaming samovar.
"Here's the tea. And some cookies. I made them. See how you like them, Kira, for an artist's cooking."
"How's the art, Irina?"
"The job, you mean? Oh, I still have it. But I'm afraid I'm not too good at drawing posters. I've been reprimanded twice in the Wall Newspaper. They said my peasant women looked like cabaret dancers and my workers were too graceful. My bourgeois ideology, you know. Well, what do they want? It's not my specialty. I could scream, sometimes, I can't get any ideas at all for one more of those damn posters."
"And now they have that competition," Vasili Ivanovitch said mournfully.
"What competition?"
Irina spilled tea on the table cloth. "An inter-club competition. Who'll make the most, the best and the reddest posters. Have to work two hours extra every day--free--for the glory of the Club."
"Under the Soviets," drawled Sasha, "there is no exploitation."
"I thought," said Irina, "that I had a good idea for a winner: a real proletarian wedding--a worker and a peasant woman on a tractor, God damn them! But I heard that the Club of Red Printers is making a symbolic one--the union of an airplane and a tractor--sort of the spirit of Electrification and Proletarian State Construction."
"And the wages," sighed Vasili Ivanovitch. "She spent all of her last month's salary on shoes for Acia."
"Well," said Irina, "she couldn't go barefooted."
"Irina, you work too hard," Sasha remarked, "and you take the work too seriously. Why waste your nerves? It's all temporary."
"It is," said Vasili Ivanovitch.
"I hope it is," said Kira.
"Sasha's my life-saver." Irina's weary mouth smiled tremulously and sarcastically at once, as if trying to deny the involuntary tenderness in her voice. "He took me to the theater last week. And week before last, we went to the Museum of Alexander III, and we wandered there for hours, looking at the paintings."
"Leo's coming back tomorrow," Kira said suddenly, irrelevantly, as if she could not keep it any longer.
"Oh!" Irina's spoon clattered down. "You never told us. I'm so glad! And he's quite well?"
"Yes. He was to return tonight, but the train is late."
"How is his aunt in Berlin?" asked Vasili Ivanovitch. "Still helping you? There's an example of family loyalty. I have the greatest admiration for that lady, even though I've never seen her. Anyone who's safe, away, free and can still understand us, buried alive in this Soviet graveyard, must be a wonderful person. She's saved Leo's life."
"Uncle Vasili," said Kira, "when you see Leo, will you remember never to mention it? His aunt's help, I mean. You remember I explained to you how sensitive he is about being under obligation to her, and so we'll all be careful not to remind him of it, will we?"
"Certainly, I understand, child. Don't worry. . . . But that's Europe for you. That's abroad. That's what a human life does to a human being. I think it's hard for us to understand kindness and what used to be called ethics. We're all turning into beasts in a beastly struggle. But we'll be saved. We'll be saved before it gets us all."
"We don't have long to wait," said Sasha.
Kira noticed a frightened, pleading look in Irina's eyes.
It was late when Kira and Sasha rose to go. He lived far on the other side of the city, but he offered to escort her home, for the streets were dark. He wore an old coat and he walked fast, slouching. They hurried together through a soft, transparent twilight, through the city full of the fragrance of a warm earth somewhere far under the pavements and cobblestones.
"Irina isn't happy," he said suddenly.
"No," said Kira, "she isn't. No one is."
"We're living in difficult times. But things will c
hange. Things are changing. There still are men to whom freedom is more than a word on posters."
"Do you think they have a chance, Sasha?"
His voice was low, tense with a passionate conviction, a quiet strength that made her wonder why she had ever thought him bashful: "Do you think the Russian worker is a beast that licks its yoke while his mind is being battered out of him? Do you think he's fooled by the clatter of a very noisy gang of tyrants? Do you know what he reads? Do you know the books that are hidden in the factories? The papers that pass secretly through many hands? Do you know that the people is awakening and . . ."
"Sasha," she interrupted, "aren't you playing a very dangerous game?"
He did not answer. He looked at the old roofs of the city against a milky, bluish sky.
"The people," she said, "has claimed too many victims already--of your kind."
"Russia has a long revolutionary history," he said. "They know it. They're even teaching it in their schools, but they think it's ended. It isn't. It's just beginning. And it has never lacked men who did not think of the danger. In the Czar's days--or at any other time."
She stopped and looked at him in the dusk, and said desperately, forgetting that she had met him for the first time but a few hours ago: "Oh, Sasha, is it worth the chance you're taking?"
He towered over her, strands of blond hair sticking out from under his cap, his mouth grinning slowly over the raised collar of his coat. "You mustn't worry, Kira. And Irina mustn't worry. I'm not in danger. They won't get me. They won't have the time."
In the morning, Kira had to go to work.
She had insisted on working; Andrei had found a job for her--the job of lecturer and excursion guide in the Museum of the Revolution. The job consisted of sitting at home and waiting for a call from the Excursion Center. When they called, she hurried to the Museum and led a group of bewildered people through the halls of what had been the Winter Palace. She received a few rubles for each excursion; she was listed as a Soviet employee by the Upravdom of her house; it saved her from an exorbitant rent and from the suspicion of being bourgeois.
In the morning, she had telephoned the Nikolaevsky station; the train from the Crimea was not expected until early in the afternoon. Then the Excursion Center called her; she had to go.
The halls of the Winter Palace displayed faded photographs of revolutionary leaders, yellowed proclamations, maps, diagrams, models of Czarist prisons, rusty guns, splinters of leg irons. Thirty workers were waiting in the Palace lobby for the "comrade guide." They were on vacation, but their Educational Club had arranged the excursion and they could not ignore its command. They removed their caps respectfully, and shuffled timidly, obediently after Kira, and listened attentively, scratching their heads.
". . . and this photograph, comrades, was taken just before his execution. He was hanged for the assassination of a tyrant, one of the Czar's henchmen. Such was the end of another glorious victim on the tortuous path of the Worker-Peasant Revolution."
". . . and this diagram, comrades, gives us a clear, visual illustration of the strike movement in Czarist Russia. You will note that the red line drops sharply after the year 1905. . . ."
Kira recited her lecture evenly, mechanically; she was no longer conscious of words; it was nothing but a succession of memorized sounds, each dragging the next one automatically, without any assistance of will; she did not know what she was going to say; she knew that her hand would rise at a given word and point at the right picture; she knew at which word the gray, impersonal blot that was her audience would laugh and at which word it would gasp and grunt with social indignation. She knew that her listeners wanted her to hurry and that the Excursion Center wanted the lecture to be long and detailed.
". . . and this, comrades, is the genuine carriage in which Alexander II was riding on the day of his assassination. This shattered back was torn by the bomb in the hands of . . ."
But she was thinking of the train from the Crimea; perhaps it had arrived; perhaps the lonely room she hated had now become a temple.
"Comrade guide, can you tell me if Alexander II was paid by International Imperialists?"
The room was empty when she came home.
"No," said Marisha, "he hasn't arrived."
"No," said the gruff voice over the telephone, "the train isn't in. Is that you again, citizen? What's the matter with you? Trains aren't run for your personal convenience. It's not expected until tonight."
She took off her coat. She raised her hand and glanced at her wristwatch; her hand froze in midair; she remembered whose gift it was; she took the watch off and threw it into a drawer.
She curled in an armchair by the window and tried to read a newspaper; the newspaper slipped to the floor; she sat still, her head on her arm.
It was an hour later that she heard steps behind the door, and the door was thrown open without a knock. The first thing she saw was a dusty suitcase. Then she saw the smile, the drooping lips arched over very white teeth in a tanned face. Then she stood with the back of her hand at her mouth and could not move.
He said: "Allo, Kira."
She did not kiss him. Her hands fell on his shoulders and moved down his arms, all her weight in her fingers, for she was sagging suddenly and her face was sliding slowly down his chest, down the cloth of his coat; and as he tried to lift her head, she pressed her mouth to his hand and held it; her shoulders jerked; she was sobbing.
"Kira, you little fool!"
He was laughing softly; his fingers caressed her hair; the fingers were trembling. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the armchair, and sat down, holding her on his lap, forcing her lips to meet his.
"And that's the strong Kira who never cries. You shouldn't be so glad to see me, Kira. . . . Stop it, Kira. . . . You little fool. . . . My dearest, dearest . . ."
She tried to get up: "Leo. . . . You must take your coat off and . . ."
"Stay still."
He held her, and she leaned back, and she felt suddenly that she had no strength to lift her arms, that she had no strength ever to move again; and the Kira who despised femininity, smiled a tender, radiant, trusting smile, weaker than a woman's, the smile of a lost, bewildered child, her lashes heavy and sparkling with tears.
He looked at her, his eyes half-closed, and his glance was insulting in its open, mocking understanding of his power, a glance more voluptuous than a lover's caress.
Then he turned away and asked: "Was it terribly hard for you--this winter?"
"A little. But we don't have to talk about it. It's past. Do you cough any more, Leo?"
"No."
"And you're well? Quite, quite, completely well? Free to live again?"
"I am well--yes. As to living again. . . ."
He shrugged. His face was tanned, his arms were strong, his cheeks were not hollow any longer; but she noticed something in his eyes that had not been cured; something that, perhaps, had grown beyond cure.
She said: "Leo, isn't the worst of it over? Aren't we ready now to begin. . . ."
"Begin with what? I have nothing to bring back to you--but a healthy body."
"What else can I want?"
"Nothing else--from a gigolo."
"Leo!"
"Well, am I not one?"
"Leo, don't you love me?"
"I love you. I love you too much. I wish I didn't. It would all be so simple if I didn't. But to love a woman and to see her dragging herself through this hell they call life here, and not to help her, but to let her drag you instead . . . Did you really think I'd bless this health you gave back to me? I hate it because you gave it back to me. And because I love you."
She laughed softly: "Would you rather hate me, too?"
"Yes. I'd rather. You are that which I've lost long ago. But I love you so much that I'm trying to hold on to it, to that which you think I am, which I know I was, even though I can't hold on much longer. And that's all I have to offer you, Kira."
She looked up at him quietly,
and her eyes were dry, and her smile was not a child's and stronger than a woman's. She said: "There is only one thing that matters and that we'll remember. The rest doesn't matter. I don't care what life is to be nor what it does to us. But it won't break us. Neither you nor me. That's our only weapon. That's the only banner we can hold against all those others around us. That's all we have to know about the future."
He said more tenderly, more earnestly than she had ever heard him say: "Kira, I wish you weren't what you are."
Then she buried her face on his shoulder and whispered: "And we won't ever talk about it again. And now we don't have to talk at all, do we? I have to get up and powder my nose, and you have to take that coat off, and take a bath, and I'll fix you some lunch. . . . But first let me sit with you, for just a few moments, just sit still . . . don't move . . . Leo. . . ."
Her head slid slowly to his breast, to his knees, to his feet.
III
IN THE AFTERNOON, THREE DAYS LATER, THE door bell rang and Kira went to answer it.
She threw the door half-open, protected by a chain. On the stair-landing stood a heavy woman in a smart, expensive overcoat. Her face, slanting back from a prominent, pointed chin, was raised with a studied movement of graceful inquiry, revealing a stout, white neck; her full lips, smeared with a violent magenta, were half-open, revealing strong white teeth. Her hand poised on a broad expanse of green silk scarf, she drawled in a self-consciously gracious voice: "Does Leo Kovalensky live here?"
Kira looked incredulously at the diamond rings sparkling on the short, white fingers. She answered: "Why . . . yes."
She did not remove the chain; she stood staring at the woman. The woman said with a little accent of gentle firmness: "I want to see him."
Kira let her enter. The woman looked at Kira curiously, inquisitively, narrowing her eyes.
Leo rose with a surprised frown when they entered the room. The woman extended both hands to him in a dramatic greeting. "Leo! So delightful to see you again! I've remembered my threat to find you. I really intend to be a nuisance!"
Leo did not smile in answer to her expectant giggle; he bowed graciously; he said: "Kira, this is Antonina Pavlovna Platoshkina--Kira Alexandrovna Argounova."
"Oh! . . . Argounova? . . . Oh . . ." said Antonina Pavlovna, as if noting the fact that Kira's name was not Leo's; she sounded almost relieved. She extended her arm, in a straight line, her fingers drooping, as if she were giving her hand to a man and expecting him to kiss it.