She smiled feebly, helplessly: “I tried to find work....”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I know you don’t believe in using Party influence to help friends.”
“Oh, but this ... Kira ... this!” It was the first time she had ever seen him frightened. He jumped up: “Excuse me a moment.”
He strode across the room to a telephone. She could hear splinters of conversation: “Comrade Voronov. Urgent.... Andrei Taganov.... Conference? Interrupt it! ... Comrade Voronov? ... who has to be ... immediately.... Yes ... I don’t care. Make one.... Yes ... No ... No! ... Tomorrow morning.... Yes.... Thank you, comrade. Good-bye.”
Andrei came back to the table. He smiled down at her startled, incredulous face. “Well, you go to work tomorrow. In the office of the ‘House of the Peasant. ’ It’s not very much of a job, but it’s one I could get for you right away — and it won’t be hard. Be there at nine. Ask for Comrade Voronov. He’ll know who you are. And — here.” He opened his wallet and, emptying it, pressed a roll of bills into her hand.
“Oh, Andrei! I can’t!”
“Well, maybe you can’t — for yourself. But you can — for someone else. Isn’t there someone at home who needs it — your family?”
She thought of someone at home who needed it. She took the money.
XV
WHEN KIRA SLEPT, HER HEAD FELL BACK on the pillow, so that the faint starlight outside made a white triangle under her chin. Her lashes lay still on pale, calm cheeks. Her lips breathed softly, half open, like a child’s, with the hint of a smile in the corners, trusting and expectant, timid and radiantly young.
The alarm clock rang at six-thirty A.M. It had been ringing at six-thirty A.M. for the last two months.
Her first movement of the day was a convulsive leap into an icy precipice. She seized the alarm clock after its first hysterical shriek and turned it off — to let Leo sleep; then stood swaying, shivering, the sound of the alarm still ringing in her ears like an insult, a dark hatred in her body, a cry rising in every muscle like the pain of a great illness, calling her back into bed, her head too heavy for her body, the cold floor like fire under her bare feet.
Then she staggered blindly, groping in the darkness, into the bathroom. Her eyes wouldn’t open. She reached for the bathtub faucet; it had been running slowly, gurgling in the darkness, all night; it had to be left running or the pipes would freeze. Eyes closed, she slapped cold water over her face with one hand; with the other, she leaned unsteadily on the edge of the bathtub, to keep from falling forward head first.
Then her eyes opened and she pulled her nightgown off, steam rising from her wet arms in the frozen air, while she tried to smile, her teeth chattering, telling herself that she was awake now and the worst was over.
She dressed and slipped back into the bedroom. She did not turn on the light. She could see the black silhouette of the Primus on the table against the dark blue of the window. She struck a match, her body shielding the bed from the little flare of light. She pumped the handle nervously. The Primus wouldn’t light. The clock ticked in the darkness, the precious fleeting seconds hurrying her on. She pumped furiously, biting her lips. The blue flame sprang up at last. She put a pan of water over the flame.
She drank tea with saccharine and chewed slowly a piece of dry bread. The window before her was frozen into a solid pattern of white ferns that sparkled softly; beyond the window it was still night. She sat huddled by the table, afraid to move, trying to chew without a sound. Leo slept restlessly. He turned uneasily; he coughed, a dry, choking cough smothered by the pillow; he sighed once in a while in his sleep, a raucous sigh that was almost a moan.
She pulled on her felt boots, her winter coat, wound an old scarf around her throat. She tiptoed to the door, threw a last glance at the pale blue in the darkness that was Leo’s face, and brushed her lips with her finger tips in a soundless kiss. Then she opened the door very slowly and as slowly closed it again behind her.
The snow was still blue outside. Above the roofs, the blue darkness receded in circles, so that far away down the sky one could guess a paler blue if one looked hard. Somewhere beyond the houses, a tramway shrieked like an early bird of prey.
Kira bent forward, gathered her hands into her armpits, in a tight, shivering huddle against the wind. The cold caught her breath with a sharp pain in her nostrils. She ran, slipping on the frozen sidewalks, toward the distant tramway.
A line waited for the tramway. She stood, bent to the wind and silent as the others. When the tramway came, yellow squares of light in space, shaking toward them through the darkness, the line broke. There was a swift whirlpool at the narrow door, a rustle of crushed bodies; the yellow squares of lighted windows filled speedily with shadows pressed tightly together, and Kira was left outside as the bell rang and the tramway tore forward. There was half an hour to wait for the next one; she would be late; if she were late, she would be fired; she ran after the tramway, leaped, caught a brass handle; but there was no room on the steps; her feet were dragged down the frozen ground as the tramway gained speed; someone’s strong arm seized her shoulder blade and pulled her up; her one foot found space on the steps; a hoarse voice roared into her ear: “You — insane, citizen? That’s how so many get killed!”
She hung in a cluster of men on the tramway steps, holding on with one hand and one foot, watching the streaked snow speed by on the ground, pressing herself with all her strength into the cluster of bodies, when a passing truck came too close and threatened to grind her off the tramway steps.
The “House of the Peasant” occupied someone’s former mansion. It had a stairway of pale pink marble with a bronze balustrade, lighted by a huge stained-glass window where purple grapes and pink peaches rolled out of golden cornucopias. A sign was posted over the stairs: COMRADES! DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR.
There were other signs: a huge sickle and hammer of gilded papier-mâché, a poster with a peasant woman and a sheaf of wheat, more posters of sheafs, golden sheafs, green sheafs, red sheafs, a picture of Lenin, a peasant grinding under foot a spider with the head of a priest, a picture of Trotsky, a peasant and a red tractor, a picture of Karl Marx, “Proletarians of the World, Unite!” “Who does not toil, shall not eat!” “Long live the reign of workers and poor peasants!” “Comrade peasants, crush the hoarders in your midst!”
A new movement had been started in a blare of newspapers and posters for “a closer understanding between workers and peasants, a wider spread of city ideas through the country,” a movement called “The Clamping of City and Village.” The “House of the Peasant” was dedicated to such clamping. There were posters of workers and peasants shaking hands, of a worker and a peasant woman, also of a peasant and a working woman, of work bench and plow, of smokestacks and wheat fields, “Our future lies in the Clamping of City and Village!,” “Comrades, strengthen the Clamping!,” “Comrades, do your share for the Clamping!,” “Comrades, what have you done for the Clamping?”
The posters rose like foam from the entrance door, up the stairway, to the office. In the office there were carved marble columns and partitions of unpainted wood; also — desks, files, pictures of proletarian leaders and a typewriter; also — Comrade Bitiuk, the office manager, and five office workers, among them Kira Argounova.
Comrade Bitiuk was a tall woman, thin, gray-haired, military and in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government; her chief aim in life was to give constant evidence of how strict that sympathy was, even though she had graduated from a women’s college and wore on her breast an old-fashioned watch on a bow of burnished silver.