by Ayn Rand
"I'm sorry, Leo, I can't. I have a guides' meeting tonight. . . . And, Leo, are you sure you want to go? This is the third night club opening in two weeks."
"This is different," said Antonina Pavlovna. "This is a real casino, just like abroad. Just like Monte Carlo."
"Leo," Kira sighed helplessly, "gambling again?"
He laughed: "Why not? We don't have to worry if we lose a few hundreds, do we, Tonia?"
Antonina Pavlovna smiled, pointing her chin forward: "Certainly not. We just left Koko, Kira Alexandrovna." She lowered her voice confidentially. "There's another shipment of white flour coming from Syerov day after tomorrow. How that boy can handle his business! I admire him tremendously."
"I'll jump into my dinner jacket," Leo said. "It won't take me a second. Do you mind turning to the window for a moment, Tonia?"
"Certainly," Antonina Pavlovna smiled coquettishly, "I do mind. But I promise not to peek, no matter how much I'd love to."
She stood at the window, putting a friendly hand on Kira's shoulder. "Poor Koko!" Antonina Pavlovna sighed. "He works so much. He has a meeting tonight--the Food Trust's Employees' Educational Circle. He's vice-secretary. He has to keep up his social activity, you know." She winked significantly. "He has so many meetings and sessions and things. I'd positively wilt of loneliness if our dear Leo wasn't gallant enough to take me out once in a while."
Kira looked at Leo's tall black figure in his immaculate dinner clothes, as she had looked at herself in the medieval wedding gown: as if he were a being from many centuries away, and it seemed strange to see him standing by the table with the Primus.
He took Antonina Pavlovna's arm with a gesture that belonged in a foreign film scene, and they left. When the door had closed behind them in Lavrov's room, Kira heard Lavrov's wife grunting: "And they say private traders don't make no money."
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat!" Lavrov growled and spat loudly.
Kira put on her old coat. She was not going to the excursion guides' meeting. She was going to the pavilion in a lonely palace garden.
A fire was burning in Andrei's fireplace. The logs creaked with sharp little explosions, long hulks broken into checks of an even, transparent, luminous red, and little orange flames swayed, fluttering, meeting, curving softly, dying suddenly, leaping up again, little blue tongues licking glowing coals; over the logs, as if suspended motionless in the air, long red flames tapered into the darkness of the chimney; yellow sparks shot upward, dying against black sooted bricks. An orange glow danced, trembling, on the white brocaded walls, on the posters of Red soldiers, smokestacks and tractors. One of Leda's feet drooped over the edge of the mantelpiece, its toes pink in the glow.
Kira sat on a box before the fireplace. Andrei sat at her feet, his face was buried in her knees; his hand caressed slowly the silken arch of her foot; his fingers dropped to the floor and came back to her tight silk stocking.
". . . and then, when you're here," he whispered, "it's worth all the torture, all the waiting. . . . And then I don't have to think any more. . . ."
He raised his head. He looked at her and pronounced words she had never heard from him before: "I'm so tired. . . ."
She held his head, her two hands spread on his temples. She asked: "What's the matter, Andrei?"
He turned away, to the fire. He said: "My Party." Then he whirled back to her. "You know it, Kira. Perhaps you knew it long ago. You were right. Perhaps you're right about many things, those things we've tried not to discuss."
She whispered: "Andrei, do you want to discuss it--with me? I don't want to hurt you."
"You can't hurt me. Don't you think I can see it all, myself? Don't you think I know what that great revolution of ours has come to? We shoot one speculator and a hundred others hire taxis on Nevsky every evening. We raze villages to the ground, we fire machine guns into rows of peasants crazed with misery, when they kill a Communist. And ten of the avenged victim's Party brothers drink champagne at the home of a man with diamond studs in his shirt. Where did he get the diamonds? Who's paying for the champagne? We don't look into that too closely."
"Andrei, did you ever think that it was you--your Party--who drove the men you call speculators into what they are doing--because you left them no choice?"
"I know it. . . . We were to raise men to our own level. But they don't rise, the men we're ruling, they don't grow, they're shrinking. They're shrinking to a level no human creatures ever reached before. And we're sliding slowly down into their ranks. We're crumbling, like a wall, one by one. Kira, I've never been afraid. I'm afraid, now. It's a strange feeling. I'm afraid to think. Because . . . because I think, at times, that perhaps our ideals have had no other result."
"That's true! The fault was not in men, but in the nature of your ideals. And I . . . No, Andrei, I won't speak about it. I wish I could help you. But of all people, I'm the one who can help you least. You know it."
He laughed softly: "But you are helping me, Kira. You're the only one in this whole world who's helping me."
She whispered: "Why?"
"Because, no matter what happens, I still have you. Because, no matter what human wreckage I see around me, I still have you. And--in you--I still know what a human being can be."
"Andrei," she whispered, "are you sure you know me?"
He whispered, his lips in her hand so that she heard the words as if she were gathering them, one by one, in the hollow of her palm: "Kira, the highest thing in a man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence. . . ."
"It's me," a voice whispered behind the door, "Marisha. Let me in, Irina."
Irina unlocked the door, cautiously, uncertainly. Marisha stood on the threshold with a loaf of bread in her hand.
"Here," she whispered, "I brought you something to eat. Both of you."
"Marisha!" Irina screamed.
"Keep quiet!" Marisha whispered with a cautious glance down the corridor. "Sure, I know. But don't worry. My mouth's shut. Here, take this. It's my own bread ration. No one will notice. I know why you didn't eat any breakfast this morning. But you can't keep that up."
Irina seized her arm, jerked her into the room, closed the door and giggled hysterically: "I . . . You see . . . oh, Marisha, I didn't expect it of you to . . ." Her hair hung over one eye, the other eye was full of tears.
Marisha whispered: "I know how it is. Hell! You love him. . . . Well, I don't know anything officially, so I don't have to tell anything, if they ask me. But for God's sake don't keep him here long. I'm not so sure about Victor."
"Do you think he . . . suspects?"
"I don't know. He's acting mighty queer. And if he knows--I'm afraid of him, Irina."
"It's just till tonight," Irina whispered, "he's leaving . . . tonight."
"I'll try to watch Victor for you."
"Marisha . . . I can't thank you . . . I . . ."
"Oh, hell! Nothing to cry about."
"I'm not crying . . . I . . . It's just . . . I haven't slept for two nights and . . . Marisha, you're so . . . I thank you and . . ."
"Oh, that's all right. Well, so long. I won't hang around here."
When the door closed, Irina listened cautiously till Marisha's steps died down the corridor; then she stood listening for other sounds, trembling; the house was silent. She locked the door and tiptoed across the room, and slipped noiselessly into the little storage closet that opened by her bed. Sasha sat on an old trunk in the closet, watching a sparrow behind a dusty glass pane on the sill of a tiny window high under the ceiling.
"Irina," he whispered, his eyes on the window, "I think I'd better go now."
"Why, of course not! I won't let you."
"Listen, I've been here for two days. I didn't intend to do that. I'm sorry I gave in to you. If anything happens--do you know what they'll do to you for this?"
"If anything happens to you," she whispered, slipping her arm around his big, stooped shoulders, "I don't care
what they do to me."
"I was to expect it some day. But you . . . I don't want to drag you into it."
"Listen, nothing will happen. I have your ticket for Baku. And the clothes. Victor has a Party meeting tonight. We'll sneak out safely. And, anyway, you can't go now, in broad daylight. The street is watched."
"I almost wish I had let them take me without ever coming here. Irina, I'm so sorry!"
"Darling, I'm so glad!" She laughed soundlessly. "I really think I've saved you. They've arrested everyone of your group. I've pumped that out of Victor. Everyone but you."
"But if . . ."
"Oh, we're safe now. Just a few more hours to wait." She crouched on a box by his side, dropping her head on his shoulder, brushing the hair out of her feverish, sparkling eyes. "Then, when you get abroad, be sure and write to me the very first day, remember? The very first."
"Sure," he said dully.
"Then I'll manage to get out somehow. And just think of it! Abroad! We'll go to a night club and you'll look so funny in full dress clothes! Really, I think the tailors will refuse to fit you."
"Probably," he said, trying to smile.
"And then we'll see girls dancing in funny costumes, just like the ones I draw. And think! I can get a job designing fashions and costumes and stage sets. No more posters for me. Not a single poster! I won't draw another proletarian so long as I live!"
"I hope so."
"But, you know, I must warn you. I'm a very bad housekeeper. Really, I'll be impossible to live with. Your steak will be burned for dinner--oh, yes, we'll have steak every day!--and your socks won't be darned, and I won't let you complain. If you try to--I'll batter the life out of you, your poor little helpless, delicate creature!" She laughed hysterically, and buried her face on his shoulder, and bit his shirt, for her laughter was slipping into sounds that were not laughter.
He kissed her hair; he whispered bravely: "I won't complain at all if you can go ahead with your drawing. That's one more crime I'll never forgive this country. I think you could be a great artist. And listen, do you know that you've never given me a drawing, and I've asked you so often?"
"Oh, yes!" she sighed. "I've promised them to so many people, but I never concentrate long enough to finish one properly. Here's a promise, though: I'll draw two dozen pictures--there, abroad--and you can stick them all over the walls of our house. Sasha, our house !"
His arms closed tightly over a trembling body with a tousled head turned away from him.
"This mush," said Victor, "is burned."
"I'm sorry," Irina muttered, "I guess I didn't watch it closely and I . . ."
"Is there anything else for lunch?"
"No, Victor, I'm sorry. There's nothing in the house and . . ."
"There's never anything in this house! Funny, how the food seems to have disappeared--these last few days."
"No more than usual," said Marisha. "And remember, I didn't get my bread ration this week."
"Well, why didn't you?"
"I was too busy to stand in line and . . ."
"Why couldn't Irina get it?"
"Victor," said Vasili Ivanovitch, "your sister is not feeling well."
"So I notice."
"I'll eat your mush, if you don't want it," said Acia, reaching for his plate.
"You've had enough, Acia," Irina protested. "You have to hurry back to school."
"Oh, hell!" said Acia.
"Acia! Where did you learn such language?"
"I don't wanna go back," Acia whined. "We've gotta decorate Lenin's Nook this afternoon. Oh, I hate gluing pictures outta magazines on their old red blotters. I got bawled out twice, 'cause I get them on crooked."
"You hurry and get your coat. You'll be late."
Acia sighed with a resigned glance at the empty lunch dishes and shuffled out.
Victor leaned back in his chair, his hands in his pockets, and looked at Irina closely. "Not going to work today, Irina?" he asked casually.
"No. I've telephoned them. I don't feel well. I think I have a temperature."
"It's better not to take the chance of going out in this awful weather," said Marisha. "Look at it snowing."
"No," said Victor, "Irina shouldn't take chances."
"I'm not afraid," said Irina, "only I think it's safe to stay in."
"No," said Victor, "you've never been afraid of anything. A commendable trait--sometimes. And sometimes--it may go too far."
"Just what do you mean?"
"You really should be more careful--of your health. Why don't you call a doctor?"
"Oh, it's not necessary. I'm not that bad. I'll be all right in a few days."
"Yes, I think so," said Victor, rising.
"Where are you going today, Victor?" Marisha asked.
"Why do you have to know?"
"Oh, nothing . . . I . . . well . . . You see, I thought if you weren't too busy, I'd like you to come over to my Club and say a few words about something. They've all heard about my prominent husband and I've promised to bring you to address them--you know, something on Electrification or modern airplanes or something."
"Sorry," said Victor, "some other time. I've got to see a man today. About a job. About that job on the dam."
"May I go with you, Victor?"
"Certainly not. What's this? Checking up on me? Jealous or something?"
"Oh, no, no, darling. No. Nothing."
"Well, then, shut up. I'm not going to have a wife tagging me around."
"Are you looking for a new job, Victor?" Vasili Ivanovitch asked.
"Well, what do you think? Think I'll settle down to a ration-card slave's drudgery for the rest of my life? Well, you'll see."
"Are you sure?" the official asked.
"I'm sure," said Victor.
"Who else is responsible?"
"No one. Just my sister."
"Who else lives in your apartment, Comrade Dunaev?"
"My wife, my father, and my little sister--she's just a child. My father doesn't suspect a thing. My wife is a scatter-brained creature who wouldn't notice anything right under her nose. And anyway, she's a member of the Komsomol. There are also tenants, but they never come in contact with our side of the apartment."
"I see. Thank you, Comrade Dunaev."
"I'm merely doing my duty."
The official rose and extended his hand. "Comrade Dunaev, in the name of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, I thank you for your courage. They are still few, those whose devotion to the State rises above all personal ties of blood and family. That is an attitude of the future, toward which we are trying to educate our backward people. That is the highest proof of loyalty a Party man can give. I shall see to it that your heroism does not remain unknown."
"I do not deserve this high praise, comrade," said Victor. "The only value of my example is in showing our Party that the family is an institution of the past, which should not be considered when judging a member's loyalty to our great Collective."
VIII
THE DOOR BELL RANG.
Irina shuddered and dropped her newspaper. Marisha lowered her book.
"I'll open it," said Victor, rising.
Irina looked at the dining-room clock. One hour was left before the train's departure. And Victor had not gone to the Party meeting; and he would not leave the house.
Vasili Ivanovitch was carving a paper knife, sitting by the window. Acia yelled from somewhere under the table, rustling old magazines: "Say, is this a picture of Lenin? I gotta cut out ten of them for the Nook and I can't find that many. Is this Lenin or is it a Czechoslovakian general? I'll be damned if I can . . ."
They heard the steps of many heavy boots in the lobby. The door was thrown open. A man in a leather jacket stood on the threshold, a slip of paper in his hand. Two soldiers in peaked caps stood behind him, their hands on the butts of the guns at their belts. A third one stood at the entrance door in the lobby, holding a bayonet.
They heard a scream; it came from Marisha. She jumped up, p
ressing both hands to her mouth. Vasili Ivanovitch rose slowly. Acia stared up from under the table, her mouth hanging open. Irina stood very straight, too straight, leaning back a little.
"Search warrant," said the man in the leather jacket, throwing the paper on the table, and motioning to his soldiers. "This way!"
They walked down the corridor to Irina's room.
They threw the closet door open. Sasha stood on the threshold, looking at them with a somber grin.
Vasili Ivanovitch gasped, in the corridor, behind the soldiers. Acia yelled: "Oh, God! That's why she wouldn't let me open . . ." Marisha kicked her ankles. A drawing on the edge of a table slid down, rustling, fluttering to the floor.
"Which one is the Citizen Irina Dunaeva?" asked the man in the leather jacket.
"I am," said Irina.
"Listen," Sasha jerked forward. "She had nothing to do with it . . . she . . . it's not her fault. . . . I threatened her and . . ."
"With what?" the man in the leather jacket asked, his voice expressionless.
A soldier ran his hands swiftly down Sasha's clothes. "No weapons," he reported.
"All right," said the man in the leather jacket. "Take him down to the car. The Citizen Dunaeva, too. And the old man. Search the apartment."
"Comrade," Vasili Ivanovitch approached the leader, his voice steady, his hands shaking. "Comrade, my daughter couldn't be guilty of . . ."
"You'll have a chance to talk later," said the man and turned to Victor. "Are you a Party member?"
"Yes," said Victor.
"Your card?" Victor showed his Party card. The man pointed to Marisha: "Your wife?"
"Yes."
"All right. These two can stay. Get your coats, citizens."
On the floor, melting snow trailed the soldiers' boots. A lamp with a shade that had slipped sidewise, threw a broken patch of light into the corridor, on Marisha's face, greenish-white, with sunken eyes staring at Victor.
The soldier on guard in the lobby opened the door to admit the Upravdom. The Upravdom's coat was thrown hurriedly over his shoulders, over a dirty, unbuttoned shirt. He wailed, clutching his fingers with a dry little crackle of stretched joints: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! . . . Comrade Commissar, I knew nothing about this. Comrade Commissar, I swear. . . ." The soldier slammed the door in the faces of curious neighbors gathered on the stair-landing.