The first thing that Kira learned about life and the first thing that her elders learned, dismayed, about Kira, was the joy of being alone.
“Born in 1904, eh?” said the Soviet official. “That makes you ... let’s see ... eighteen. Eighteen. You’re lucky, comrade. You’re young and have many years to give to the cause of the toilers. A whole life of discipline and hard work and useful labor for the great collective.”
He had a cold, so he took out a large checkered handkerchief and blew his nose.
Family Position: SINGLE.
“I wash my hands of Kira’s future,” Galina Petrovna had said. “Sometimes I think she’s a born old maid and sometimes a born ... yes, bad woman.”
Kira saw her first years of lengthened skirts and high heels during their refuge in Yalta, where the strange society of emigrants from the North, families of old names and past fortunes, clung together like frightened chickens on a rock with the flood rising slowly around them. Young men of irreproachably parted hair and manicured nails, noticed the slim girl who strode down the streets swinging a twig like a whip, her body thrown into the wind that blew a short dress which hid nothing. Galina Petrovna smiled with approval when the young men called at their house. But Kira had strange eyebrows; she could lift them in such a cold, mocking smile, while her lips remained motionless — that the young men’s love poems and intentions froze at the very roots. And Galina Petrovna soon stopped wondering why the young men stopped noticing her daughter.
In the evenings Lydia read avidly, blushing, books of delicate, sinful romance, which she hid from Galina Petrovna. Kira began reading one of these books; she fell asleep and did not finish it. She never began another.
She saw no difference between weeds and flowers; she yawned when Lydia sighed at the beauty of a sunset over lonely hills. But she stood for an hour looking at the black silhouette of a tall young soldier against the roaring flame of a blazing oil well he had been posted to guard.
She stopped suddenly, as they walked down a street in the evening, and pointed at a strange angle of white wall over battered roofs, luminous on a black sky in the glare of an old lantern, with a dark, barred window like that of a dungeon, and she whispered: “How beautiful!”
“What’s beautiful about it?” Lydia asked.
“Because it’s so strange ... promising ... as if something could happen there....”
“Happen to whom?”
“To me.”
Lydia seldom questioned Kira’s emotions; they were not feelings to her but only Kira’s feelings; and the family shrugged impatiently at what they called Kira’s feelings. She had the same feeling for eating soup without salt, and for discovering a snail slithering up her bare leg, and for young men who pleaded, broken-hearted, their eyes humid, their lips soft. She had the same feeling for white statues of ancient gods against black velvet in museums, and for steel shavings and rusty dust and hissing torches and muscles tense as electric wires in the iron roar of a building under construction. She seldom visited museums; but when they went out with Kira, her family avoided passing by any construction works: houses, and particularly roads, and most particularly bridges. She was certain to stop and stand watching, for hours, red bricks and oaken beams and steel panels growing under the will of man. But she could never be made to enter a public park on Sunday, and she stuck her fingers into her ears when she heard a chorus singing folk songs. When Galina Petrovna took her children to see a sad play depicting the sorrow of the serfs whom Czar Alexander II had magnanimously freed, Lydia sobbed over the plight of the humble, kindly peasants cringing under a whip, while Kira sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy, watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.
“How beautiful!” said Lydia, looking at a stage setting. “It’s almost real.”
“How beautiful!” said Kira, looking at a landscape. “It’s almost artificial.”
“In a way,” said the Soviet official, “you comrade women have an advantage over us men. You can take care of the young generation, the future of our republic. There are so many dirty, hungry children that need the loving hands of our women.”
Union Membership: NONE.
Kira went to school in Yalta. The school dining room had many tables. At luncheon, girls sat at these tables in couples, in fours, in dozens. Kira always sat at a table in a corner — alone.
One day her class declared a boycott against a little freckled girl who had incurred the displeasure of her most popular classmate, a loud-voiced young lady who had a smile, a handshake and a command ready for everyone.
That noon, at luncheon, the little table in the corner of the dining room was occupied by two students: Kira and the freckled girl. They were half through their bowls of buckwheat mush, when the indignant class leader approached them.
“Do you know what you’re doing, Argounova?” she asked, eyes blazing.
“Eating mush,” answered Kira. “Won’t you sit down?”
“Do you know what this girl here has done?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“You haven’t? Then why are you doing this for her?”
“You’re mistaken. I am not doing this for her, I am doing it against twenty-eight other girls.”
“So you think it’s smart to go against the majority?”
“I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it’s safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.... May I have the salt, please?”
At the age of thirteen, Lydia fell in love with a grand opera tenor. She kept his picture on her dresser, with a single red rose in a thin crystal glass beside it. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi, who talked to the birds and helped the poor, and she dreamed of entering a convent. Kira had never been in love. The only hero she had known was a Viking whose story she had read as a child; a Viking whose eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword, but there was no boundary for the point of his sword; a Viking who walked through life, breaking barriers and reaping victories, who walked through ruins while the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing its weight; a Viking who laughed at kings, who laughed at priests, who looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook and there, over-shadowing the sky, he saw his own picture; a Viking who lived but for the joy and the wonder and the glory of the god that was himself. Kira did not remember the books she read before that legend; she did not want to remember the ones she read after it. But through the years that followed, she remembered the end of the legend: when the Viking stood on a tower over a city he had conquered. The Viking smiled as men smile when they look up at heaven; but he was looking down. His right arm was one straight line with his lowered sword; his left arm, straight as the sword, raised a goblet of wine to the sky. The first rays of a coming sun, still unseen to the earth, struck the crystal goblet. It sparkled like a white torch. Its rays lighted the faces of those below. “To a life,” said the Viking, “which is a reason unto itself.”
“So you’re not a Union member, citizen?” said the Soviet official. “Too bad, too bad. The trade unions are the steel girders of our great state building, as said ... well, one of our great leaders said. What’s a citizen? Only a brick and of no use unless cemented to other bricks just like it.”
Occupation: STUDENT.
From somewhere in the aristocratic Middle Ages, Kira had inherited the conviction that labor and effort were ignoble. She had gone through school with the highest grades and the sloppiest composition books. She burned her piano etudes and never darned her stockings. She climbed to the pedestals of statues in the parks to kiss the cold lips of Greek gods — but slept at symphony concerts. She sneaked out through a window when guests were expected, and she could not cook a potato. She never went to church and seldom read a newspaper.