“May I take my things,” Kira asked, “or do you want to keep them?”
“I don’t want one single thing of yours left here! I don’t want your breath in this room! I don’t want your name mentioned in this house!”
Lydia was sobbing hysterically, her head in her arms on the table. “Tell her to go, Mother!” she cried through sobs like hiccoughs. “I can’t stand it! Such women should not be allowed to live!”
“Get your things and hurry!” Galina Petrovna hissed. “We have but one daughter left! You little tramp! You filthy little street ...”
Lydia was staring with incredulous awe, at Kira’s legs.
Leo opened the door and took the bundle she had wrapped in an old bed sheet.
“There are three rooms,” he said. “You can rearrange things any way you want. Is it cold outside? Your cheeks are frozen.”
“It’s a little cold.”
“I have some hot tea for you — in the drawing room.”
He had set a table by the fireplace. Little red tongues flickered in the old silver. A crystal chandelier hung against the gray sky of a huge window. Across the street, a line stood at the door of a co-operative, heads bent; it was snowing.
Kira held her hands against the hot silver teapot and rubbed them across her cheeks. She said: “I’ll have to gather that glass. And sweep the floor. And ...”
She stopped. She stood in the middle of the huge room. She spread her arms out, and threw her head back, and laughed. She laughed defiantly, rapturously, triumphantly. She cried: “Leo! ...”
He held her. She looked up into his face and felt as if she were a priestess, her soul lost in the corners of a god’s arrogant mouth; as if she were a priestess and a sacrificial offering, both and beyond both, shameless in her laughter, choking, something rising within her, too hard to bear.
Then his eyes looked at her, wide and dark, and he answered a thought they had not spoken: “Kira, think what we have against us.”
She bent her head a little to one shoulder, her eyes round, her lips soft, her face serene and confident as a child’s; she looked at the window where, in the slanting mist of snow, men stood in line, motionless, hopeless, broken. She shook her head.
“We’ll fight it, Leo. Together. We’ll fight all of it. The country. The century. The millions. We can stand it. We can do it.”
He said without hope: “We’ll try.”
XI
THE REVOLUTION HAD COME TO A COUNTRY that had lived three years of war. Three years and the Revolution had broken railroad tracks, and scorched fields, and blown smokestacks into showers of bricks, and sent men to stand in line with their old baskets, waiting at the little trickle of life still dripping from provision centers. Forests stood in a silence of snow, but in the cities wood was a luxury; kerosene was the only fuel to burn; there was only one device to burn kerosene. The gifts of the Revolution were to come. But one — and the first — had been granted; that which in countless cities countless stomachs had learned to beg for the fire of their sustenance to keep the fire of their souls, the first badge of a new life, the first ruler of a free country: the PRIMUS.
Kira knelt by the table and pumped the handle of the little brass burner that bore the words: “Genuine Primus. Made in Sweden.” She watched the thin jet of kerosene filling a cup; then she struck a match and set fire to the kerosene in the cup, and pumped, and pumped, her eyes very attentive, the fire licking the black tubes with a tongue of soot, sending the odor of kerosene into her nostrils, until something hissed in the tubes and a wreath of blue flames sprang up, tense and hissing like a blow-torch. She set a pot of millet over the blue flames.
Then, kneeling by the fireplace, she gathered tiny logs, damp and slippery in her fingers, with an acrid odor of swamp and mildew; she opened the little door of the “Bourgeoise” and stacked the logs inside, and stuffed crumpled newspapers over them, and struck a match, blowing hard, bending low to the floor, her hair hanging over her eyes, whirls of smoke blowing back at her, rising high to the white ceiling, the crystals of the chandelier sparkling through gray fumes, gray ashes fluttering into her nostrils, catching on her eyelashes.
The “Bourgeoise” was a square iron box with long pipes that rose to the ceiling and turned at a straight angle into a hole cut over the fireplace. They had had to install a “Bourgeoise” in the drawing room, because they could not afford wood for the fireplace. The logs hissed in the box and, through the cracks in the corners, red flames danced and little whiffs of smoke fluttered once in a while, and the iron walls blazed a dull, overheated red, smelling of burned paint. The new little stoves were called “Bourgeoise,” for they had been born in the homes of those who could not afford full-sized logs to heat the full-sized stoves in their once luxurious homes.
Admiral Kovalensky’s apartment had seven rooms, but four of them had to be rented long ago. Admiral Kovalensky had had a partition built across a hall, which cut them off from the tenants. Now Leo owned three rooms, the bathroom and the front door; the tenants owned four rooms, the back door and the kitchen. Kira cooked on the Primus and washed dishes in the bathroom. At times, she heard steps and voices behind the partition, and a cat meowing; three families lived there, but she never had to meet them.
When Leo got up in the morning, he found a table set in the dining room, with a snow-white cloth and hot tea steaming, and Kira flitting about the table, her cheeks glowing, her eyes laughing, light and unconcerned, as if these things had happened all by themselves. From their first day together in her new home, she had stated her ultimatum: “When I cook — you’re not to see me. When you see me — you’re not to know that I’ve been cooking.”
She had always known that she was alive; she had never given much thought to the necessity of keeping alive. She found suddenly that that mere fact of keeping alive had grown into a complicated problem which required many hours of effort, the simple keeping alive which she had always haughtily, contemptuously taken for granted. She found that she could fight it only by keeping, fiercer than ever, that very contempt; the contempt which, once dropped, would bring all of life down to the little blue flame of the Primus slowly cooking millet for dinner. She found she could sacrifice all the hours the struggle required, if only it would never rise between Leo and her, if only life itself, the life that was Leo, were kept intact and untouched. Those wasted hours did not count; she would keep silent about them. She kept silent, a hidden spark in her eyes twinkling with the exhilaration of battle. It was a battle, the first blows of a vague, immense battle she could not name, but felt, the battle of the two of them, alone, against something huge and nameless, something rising, like a tide, around the walls of their house, something in those countless weary steps on the pavements outside, in those lines at the doors of co-operatives, the something that invaded their home with the Primus and the “Bourgeoise,” that held millet and damp logs and the hunger of millions of strange, distorted stomachs against two lives fighting for their right to their future.
After breakfast Leo buttoned his overcoat and asked: “Going to the Institute today?”
“Yes.”
“Need change?”
“A little.”
“Back for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be back at six.”
He went to the University, she went to the Institute. She ran, sliding along the frozen sidewalks, laughing at strangers, blowing at a red finger in the hole of her glove, jumping on tramways at full speed, disarming with a smile the husky conductoresses who growled: “You oughta be fined, citizen. You’ll get your legs cut off some day.”