We the Living (40 page)

Kira slammed hers, too. She decided to forget Andrei Taganov.

It took a month, but at the end of a month, she was convinced that the door of the State sanatoriums was locked to Leo and that she could not unlock it.

There were private sanatoriums in the Crimea. Private sanatoriums cost money. She would get the money.

She made an appointment to see Comrade Voronov and asked for an advance on her salary, an advance of six months—just enough to start him off. Comrade Voronov smiled faintly and asked her how she could be certain that she would be working there another month, let alone six.

She called on Doctor Milovsky, Vava’s father, her wealthiest acquaintance, whose bank account had been celebrated by many envious whispers. Doctor Milovsky’s face got very red and his short, pudgy hands waved at Kira hysterically, as if shooing off a ghost: “My dear little girl, why, my dear little girl, what on earth made you think that I was rich or something? Heh-heh. Very funny indeed. A capitalist or something—heh-heh. Why, we’re just existing, from hand to mouth, living by my own toil like proletarians one would say, barely existing, as one would say—that’s it—from hand to mouth.”

She knew her parents had nothing. She asked if they could try to help. Galina Petrovna cried.

She asked Vasili Ivanovitch. He offered her his last possession—Maria Petrovna’s old fur jacket. The price of the jacket would not buy a ticket to the Crimea. She did not take it.

She knew Leo would resent it, but she wrote to his aunt in Berlin. She said in her letter: “I am writing, because I love him so much—to you, because I think you must love him a little.” No answer came.

Through mysterious, stealthy whispers, more mysterious and stealthy than the G.P.U. who watched them sharply, she learned that there was private money to be lent, secretly and on a high percentage, but there was. She learned a name and an address. She went to the booth of a private trader in a market, where a fat man bent down to her nervously across a counter loaded with red kerchiefs and cotton stockings. She whispered a name. She named a sum.

“Business?” he breathed. “Speculation?”

She knew it best to say yes. Well, he told her, it could be arranged. The rates were twenty-five per cent a month. She nodded eagerly. What security did the citizen have to offer? Security? Surely she knew they didn’t lend it on her good looks? Furs or diamonds would do; good furs and any kind of diamonds. She had nothing to offer. The man turned away as if he had never spoken to her in his life.

On her way back to the tramway, through the narrow, muddy passages between the market stalls, she stopped, startled; in a little prosperous-looking booth, behind a counter heavy with fresh bread loaves, smoked hams, yellow circles of butter, she saw a familiar face: a heavy red mouth under a short nose with wide, vertical nostrils. She remembered the train speculator of the Nikolaevsky station, with the fur-lined coat and the smell of carnation oil. He had progressed in life. He was smiling at the customers, from under a fringe of salami.

On her way home, she remembered someone who had said: “I make more money than I can spend on myself.” Did anything really matter now? She would go to the Institute and try to see Andrei.

She changed tramways for the Institute. She saw Andrei. She saw him coming down the corridor and he was looking straight at her, so that her lips moved in a smile of greeting; but he turned abruptly and slammed the door of an auditorium behind him.

She stood frozen to the spot for a long time.

When she came home, Leo was standing in the middle of the room, a crumpled paper in his hand, his face distorted by anger.

“So you would?” he cried. “So you’re meddling in my affairs now? So you’re writing letters? Who asked you to write?”

On the table, she saw an envelope with a German stamp. It was addressed to Leo. “What does she say, Leo?”

“You want to know? You really want to know?”

He threw the letter at her face.

She remembered only the sentence: “There is no reason why you should expect any help from us; the less reason since you are living with a brazen harlot who has the impudence to write to respectable people.”

On the first rainy day of autumn, a delegation from a Club of Textile Women Workers visited the “House of the Peasant.” Comrade Sonia was an honorary member of the delegation. When she saw Kira at the filing cabinet in Comrade Bitiuk’s office, Comrade Sonia roared with laughter: “Well, well, well! A loyal citizen like Comrade Argounova in the Red ‘House of the Peasant’!”

“What’s the matter, comrade?” Comrade Bitiuk inquired nervously, obsequiously. “What’s the matter?”

“A joke,” roared Comrade Sonia, “a good joke!”

Kira shrugged with resignation; she knew what to expect.

When a reduction of staffs came to the “House of the Peasant” and she saw her name among those dismissed as “anti-social element,” she was not surprised. It made no difference now. She spent most of her last salary to buy eggs and milk for Leo, which he would not touch.

In the daytime, Kira was calm, with the calm of an empty face, an empty heart, a mind empty of all thoughts but one. She was not afraid: because she knew that Leo had to go south, and he would go, and she could not doubt it, and so she had nothing to fear.

But there was the night.

She felt his body, icy and moist, close to hers. She heard him coughing. Sometimes in his sleep, his head fell on her shoulder, and he lay there, trusting and helpless as a child, and his breathing was like a moan.

She saw the red bubble on Maria Petrovna’s dying lips, and she heard her screaming: “Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She could feel Leo’s breath in hot, panting gasps on her neck.

Then, she was not sure whether it was Maria Petrovna or Leo screaming when it was too late: “Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

Was she going insane? It was so simple. She just needed money; a life,
his
life—and money.

“I make more money than I can spend on myself.”

“Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She made one last attempt to get money.

She was walking down a street slippery with autumn rain, yellow lights melting on black sidewalks. The doctor had said every week counted; every day counted now. She saw a resplendent limousine stopping in the orange cube of light at a theater entrance. A man stepped out; his fur coat glistened like his automobile fenders. She stood in his path. Her voice was firm and clear:

“Please! I want to speak to you. I need money. I don’t know you. I have nothing to offer you. I know it isn’t being done like this. But you’ll understand, because it’s so important. It’s to save a life.”

The man stopped. He had never heard a plea that was a command. He asked, squinting one eye appraisingly: “How much do you need?”

She told him.

“What?” he gasped. “For one night? Why, your sisters don’t make that in a whole career!”

He could not understand why the strange girl whirled around and ran across the street, straight through the puddles, as if he were going to run after her.

She made one last plea to the State.

It took many weeks of calls, letters, introductions, secretaries and assistants, but she got an appointment with one of Petrograd’s most powerful officials. She was to see him in person, face to face. He could do it. Between him and the power he could use stood only her ability to convince him.

The official sat at his desk. A tall window rose behind him, admitting a narrow shaft of light, creating the atmosphere of a cathedral. Kira stood before him. She looked straight at him; her eyes were not hostile, nor pleading; they were clear, trusting, serene; her voice was very calm, very simple, very young.

“Comrade Commissar, you see, I love him. And he is sick. You know what sickness is? It’s something strange that happens in your body and then you can’t stop it. And then he dies. And now his life—it depends on some words and a piece of paper—and it’s so simple when you just look at it as it is—it’s only something made by us, ourselves, and perhaps we’re right, and perhaps we’re wrong, but the chance we’re taking on it is frightful, isn’t it? They won’t send him to a sanatorium because they didn’t write his name on a piece of paper with many other names and call it a membership in a Trade Union. It’s only ink, you know, and paper, and something we think. You can write it and tear it up, and write it again. But the other—that which happens in one’s body—you can’t stop that. You don’t ask questions about that. Comrade Commissar, I know they are important, those things, money, and the Unions, and those papers, and all. And if one has to sacrifice and suffer for them, I don’t mind. I don’t mind if I have to work every hour of the day. I don’t mind if my dress is old—like this—don’t look at my dress, Comrade Commissar, I know it’s ugly, but I don’t mind. Perhaps, I haven’t always understood you, and all those things, but I can be obedient and learn. Only—only when it comes to life itself, Comrade Commissar, then we have to be serious, don’t we? We can’t let those things take life. One signature of your hand—and he can go to a sanatorium, and he doesn’t have to die. Comrade Commissar, if we just think of things, calmly and simply—as they are—do you know what death is? Do you know that death is—nothing at all, not at all, never again, never, no matter what we do? Don’t you see why he can’t die? I love him. We all have to suffer. We all have things we want, which are taken away from us. It’s all right. But—because we are living beings—there’s something in each of us, something like the very heart of life condensed—and
that
should not be touched. You understand, don’t you? Well, he is that to me, and you can’t take him from me, because you can’t let me stand here, and look at you, and talk, and breathe, and move, and then tell me you’ll take him—we’re not insane, both of us, are we, Comrade Commissar?”