We the Living (4 page)

Sometimes some men threw a quick glance back at the girl who sat on the table. She was awake and her eyes followed them. Her eyes were not frightened; they were steady, curious, hostile.

Then the men and the lantern were gone and somewhere in the train the soldier with the accordion wailed:

Sometimes the train stopped at night. No one knew why it had stopped. There was no station, no sign of life in the barren waste of miles. An empty stretch of sky hung over an empty stretch of land; the sky had a few black spots of clouds; the land—a few black spots of bushes. A faint, red, quivering line divided the two; it looked like a storm or a distant fire.

Whispers crawled down the long line of cars: “The boiler exploded. . . .”

“The bridge is blown up half a mile ahead. . . .”

“They’ve found counter-revolutionaries on the train and they’re going to shoot them right here, in the bushes. . . .”

“If we stay much longer . . . the bandits . . . you know. . . .”

“They say Makhno is right in this neighborhood.”

“If he gets us, you know what that means, don’t you? No man leaves alive, but the women do and wish they didn’t. . . .”

“Stop talking nonsense, citizen. You’re making the women nervous.”

Searchlights darted into the clouds and died instantly and no one could say whether they were close by or miles away. And no one could tell whether the black spot that had seemed to move was a horseman or just a bush.

The train started as suddenly as it had stopped. Sighs of relief greeted the screeching of wheels. No one ever learned why the train had stopped.

Early one morning, some men rushed through the car. One of them had a Red Cross badge. There was the sound of a commotion outside. One of the passengers followed the men. When he came back his face made the travelers feel uneasy.

“It’s in the next car,” he explained. “A fool peasant woman. Traveled between the cars and tied her legs to the buffer so she wouldn’t fall. Fell asleep at night, too tired, I guess, and slipped off. Legs tied, it just dragged her with the train, under the car. Head cut off. Sorry I went to see.”

Halfway through the journey, at a lonely little station that had a rotting platform and bright posters and unkempt soldiers on both platform and posters, it was found that the passenger coach in which the Argounov family traveled, could go no farther. The cars had not been repaired or inspected for years; when they suddenly and finally broke down, no repairs could help. The occupants were requested to move out speedily. They had to squeeze themselves into the other over-crowded cars—if they could.

The Argounovs fought their way into a box car. Gratefully, Galina Petrovna and Lydia made the sign of the cross.

The woman with the sagging breasts could not find room for all of her children. When the train pulled out, she was seen sitting on her bundles, the bewildered children clinging to her skirt, watching the train with a dull, hopeless stare.

Across prairies and marshes, the long line of cars crawled wearily, a veil of smoke floating and melting into white puffs behind it. Soldiers huddled in groups on the sloping, slippery roofs. Some of them had harmonicas. They played and sang about the little apple. The song trailed and melted away with the smoke.

A crowd awaited the train in Petrograd. When the last panting of the engine reverberated through the terminal vaults, Kira Argounova faced the mob that met every train. Under the folds of shapeless clothes, their bodies were driven by the tense, unnatural energy of a long struggle that had become habitual; their faces were hard and worn. Behind them were tall, grilled windows; behind these was the city.

Kira was pushed forward by impatient travelers. Alighting, she stopped for one short second of hesitation, as if feeling the significance of the step. Her foot was sunburned, and she wore a home-made wooden sandal with leather straps. For one short second the foot was held in the air. Then the wooden sandal touched the wooden boards of the platform: Kira Argounova was in Petrograd.

PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Kira looked at the words on the bare plaster walls of the station. The plaster had crumbled off in dark blotches that made the walls look skin-diseased. But fresh signs had been printed upon them. Red letters announced: LONG LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT! WHO IS NOT WITH US—IS AGAINST US!

The letters had been made by a smudge of red paint over a stencil. Some lines were crooked. Some letters had dried with long, thin streaks of red winding down the walls.

A young fellow leaned against a wall under the signs. A crumpled lambskin hat was crushed over his pale hair that hung over his pale eyes. He stared aimlessly ahead and cracked sunflower seeds, spitting the shells out of the corner of his mouth.

Between the train and the walls, a whirlpool of khaki and red dragged Kira into the midst of soldiers’ coats, red kerchiefs, unshaved faces, mouths that opened soundlessly, their screams swallowed in a roar of boots shuffling down the platform, beating against the high steel ceiling. An old barrel with rusty hoops and a tin cup attached on a chain bore a painted inscription: “Boiled water” and a huge sign: “BEWARE OF CHOLERA. DO NOT DRINK RAW WATER.” A stray dog with ribs like a skeleton’s, its tail between its legs, was smelling the littered floor, searching for food. Two armed soldiers were fighting through the crowd, dragging a peasant woman who struggled and sobbed: “Comrades! I didn’t! Brothers, where are you taking me? Comrades dear, so help me God, I didn’t!”

From below, among the boots and swishing, mud-caked skirts, someone howled monotonously, not quite a human sound nor a barking: a woman was crawling on her knees, trying to gather a spilled sack of millet, sobbing, picking up the grain mixed with sunflower-seed shells and cigarette butts.

Kira looked at the tall windows. She heard, from the outside, the old familiar sound of the piercing tramway bell. She smiled.

At a door marked in red letters “Commandant,” a young soldier stood on guard. Kira looked at him. His eyes were austere and forbidding like caverns where a single flame burned under cold, gray vaults; there was an air of innate temerity in the lines of his tanned face, of the hand that grasped the bayonet, of the neck in the open shirt collar. Kira liked him. She looked straight into his eyes and smiled. She thought that he understood her, that he guessed the great adventure beginning for her.

The soldier looked at her coldly, indifferently, astonished. She turned away, a little disappointed, although she did not know just what she had expected.

All the soldier noticed was that the strange girl in the child’s stocking-cap had strange eyes; also that she wore a light suit and no brassiere, which fact he did not resent at all.

“Kira!” Galina Petrovna’s voice pierced the roar of the station. “Kira! Where are you? Where are your parcels? How about your parcels?”

Kira returned to the box car where her family was struggling with the luggage. She had forgotten that she had to carry three bundles, porters being a luxury out of reach. Galina Petrovna was fighting off these porters, husky loafers in ragged soldiers’ coats, who seized luggage without being asked, insolently offering their services.

Then, arms strained by the bundled remains of their fortune, the Argounov family descended upon the ground of Petrograd.

A gold sickle and hammer rose over the station’s exit door. Two posters hung by its side. One bore a husky worker whose huge boots crushed tiny palaces, while his raised arm, with muscles red as beefsteaks, waved a greeting to a rising sun red as his muscles; above the sun stood the words: COMRADES! WE ARE THE BUILDERS OF A NEW LIFE!

The other bore a huge white louse on a black background with red letters: LICE SPREAD DISEASE! CITIZENS, UNITE ON THE ANTI-TYPHUS FRONT!

The smell of carbolic acid rose higher than all the rest. Station buildings were disinfected against the diseases that poured into the city on every train. Like a breath from a hospital window, the odor hung in the air as a warning and a grim reminder.

The doors into Petrograd opened upon the Znamensky square. A sign on a post announced its new name: SQUARE OF UPRISING. A huge gray statue of Alexander III faced the station, against a gray hotel building, against a gray sky. It was not raining heavily, but a few drops fell at long intervals, slowly, monotonously, as if the sky were leaking, as if it too were in need of repairs, like the rotted wooden paving where raindrops made silver sparks on dark puddles. The raised black tops of hansom cabs looked like patent leather, swaying, quivering, wheels grunting in the mud with the sound of animals chewing. Old buildings watched the square with the dead eyes of abandoned shops in whose dusty windows the cobwebs and faded newspapers had not been disturbed for five years.

But one shop bore a cotton sign: PROVISION CENTER. A line waited at the door, stretching around the corner; a long line of feet in shoes swollen by the rain, of red, frozen hands, of raised collars that did not prevent the raindrops from rolling down many backs, for many heads were bent.

“Well,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch, “we’re back.”

“Isn’t it wonderful!” said Kira.

“Mud, as ever,” said Lydia.

“We’ll have to take a cab. Such an expense!” said Galina Petrovna.

They crowded into one cab, Kira sitting on top of the bundles. The horse jerked forward, sending a shower of mud on Kira’s legs, and turned into the Nevsky Prospect.

The long, broad avenue lay before them, as straight as if it were the spine of the city. Far away, the slender gold spire of the Admiralty gleamed faintly in the gray mist, like a long arm raised in a solemn greeting.

Petrograd had seen five years of revolution. Four of those years had closed its every artery and every store, when nationalization smeared dust and cobwebs over the plate-glass windows; the last year had brought out soap and mops, new paint and new owners, as the state’s New Economic Policy had announced a “temporary compromise” and allowed small private stores to re-open timidly.

After a long sleep, Nevsky was opening its eyes slowly. The eyes were not used to the light; they had opened in a hurry and they stared, wide, frightened, incredulous. New signs were cotton strips with glaring, uneven letters. Old signs were marble obituaries of men long since gone. Gold letters spelled forgotten names on the windows of new owners, and bullet holes with sunburst cracks still decorated the glass. There were stores without signs and signs without stores. But between the windows and over closed doors, over bricks and boards and cracked plaster, the city wore a mantle of color bright as a patchwork: there were posters of red shirts, and yellow wheat, and red banners, and blue wheels, and red kerchiefs, and gray tractors, and red smokestacks; they were wet, transparent in the rain, showing layers of old posters underneath, growing—unchecked, unrestricted—like the bright mildew of a city.

On a corner, an old lady held timidly a tray of home-made cakes, and feet hurried past without stopping; someone yelled: “
Pravda! Krasnaya Gazeta!
Latest news, citizens!” and someone yelled: “Saccharine, citizens!” and someone yelled: “Flints for cigarette lighters, cheap, citizens!” Below, there was mud and sunflower-seed shells; above, there were red banners bending over the street from every house, streaked and dripping little pink drops.

“I hope,” said Galina Petrovna, “that sister Marussia will be glad to see us.”

“I wonder,” said Lydia, “what these last years have done to the Dunaevs.”

“I wonder what is left of their fortune,” said Galina Petrovna, “if anything. Poor Marussia! I doubt if they have more than we do.”

“And if they have,” sighed Alexander Dimitrievitch, “what difference does it make now, Galina?”

“None,” said Galina Petrovna, “—I hope.”

“Anyway, we’re still no poor relations,” Lydia said proudly and pulled her skirt up a little to show the passersby her high-laced, olive-green shoes.

Kira was not listening; she was watching the streets.

The cab stopped at the building where, four years ago, they had seen the Dunaevs in their magnificent apartment. One half of the imposing entrance door had a huge, square glass pane; the other half was filled in with unpainted boards hastily nailed together.

The spacious lobby had had a soft carpet, Galina Petrovna remembered, and a hand-carved fireplace. The carpet was gone; the fireplace was still there, but there were penciled inscriptions on the white stomachs of its marble cupids and a long, diagonal crack in the large mirror above it.

A sleepy janitor stuck his head out of the little booth under the stairs and withdrew it indifferently.

They carried their bundles up the stairs. They stopped at a padded door; the black oilcloth was ripped and gray lumps of soiled cotton made a fringe around the door.

“I wonder,” Lydia whispered, “if they still have their magnificent butler.”

Galina Petrovna pressed the bell.

There were steps inside. A key turned. A cautious hand half opened the door, protected by a chain. Through the narrow crack, they saw an old woman’s face cut by hanging gray hair, a stomach under a dirty towel tied as an apron, and one foot in a man’s bedroom slipper. The woman looked at them silently, with hostile inquiry, with no intention of opening the door farther.

“Is Maria Petrovna in?” Galina Petrovna asked in a slightly unnatural voice.

“Who wants to know?” asked the toothless mouth.

“I’m her sister, Galina Petrovna Argounova.”

The woman did not answer; she turned and yelled into the house: “Maria Petrovna! Here’s a mob that says them’s your sister!”

A cough answered from the depths of the house, then slow steps; then a pale face peered over the old woman’s shoulder and a mouth opened with a shriek: “My Lord in Heaven!”