“Father, I expect something to be done about this child,” said Victor. “She’s growing up like a bum. If she were to join a children’s organization, such as the Pioneers ...”
“Victor, we won’t discuss that again,” Vasili Ivanovitch interrupted firmly, quietly.
“Who wants to be a stinking Pioneer?” asked Acia.
“Acia, you go back to your room,” Irina ordered, “or I’ll put you to bed.”
“You and who else?” stated Acia, disappearing behind a slammed door.
“Really,” Victor observed, “if I’m able to study as I do and work besides and provide for this household, I don’t see why Irina can’t take proper care of one brat.”
No one answered.
Vasili Ivanovitch bent over the piece of wood he had been carving. Irina drew pictures with a spoon handle on the old table cloth. Victor rose to his feet: “Sorry, Kira, to desert such a rare guest, but I have to go. I have a dinner engagement.”
“Sure,” said Irina. “See that the hostess doesn’t borrow any silverware from Kira’s room.”
Victor left. Kira noticed that the tools were trembling in Vasili Ivanovitch’s wrinkled fingers.
“What are you doing, Uncle Vasili?”
“Making a frame,” Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head, showing his work proudly, “for one of Irina’s pictures. They’re good pictures. It’s a shame to let them get crumpled and ruined in a drawer.”
“It’s beautiful, Uncle Vasili. I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Oh, I used to be good at it. I haven’t done it for years. But I used to be good in the ... in the old days, when I was a young man, in Siberia.”
“How’s your job, Uncle Vasili?”
“No more,” said Irina. “How long do you think one can keep a job in a private store?”
“What happened?”
“Haven’t you heard? They closed the store for back taxes. And the boss, himself, is now more broke than we are.... Would you like some tea, Kira? I’ll fix it. The tenants stole our Primus, but Sasha will help me to light the samovar in the kitchen. Come on!” she threw at him imperiously, and Sasha rose obediently. “I don’t know why I ask him to help,” she winked at Kira, “he’s the most helpless, useless, awkward thing born.” But her eyes were sparkling happily. She took his arm and wheeled him out of the room.
It was growing dark, and the open window was a sharp, bright blue. Vasili Ivanovitch did not light a lamp. He bent lower over his carving.
“Sasha is a nice boy,” he said suddenly, “and I’m worried.”
“Why?” asked Kira.
He whispered: “Politics. Secret societies. Poor doomed little fool.”
“And Victor suspects?”
“I think so.”
It was Irina who switched on the light, returning with a sparkling tray of cups, preceding Sasha with a steaming samovar.
“Here’s the tea. And some cookies. I made them. See how you like them, Kira, for an artist’s cooking.”
“How’s the art, Irina?”
“The job, you mean? Oh, I still have it. But I’m afraid I’m not too good at drawing posters. I’ve been reprimanded twice in the Wall Newspaper. They said my peasant women looked like cabaret dancers and my workers were too graceful. My bourgeois ideology, you know. Well, what do they want? It’s not my specialty. I could scream, sometimes, I can’t get any ideas at all for one more of those damn posters.”
“And now they have that competition,” Vasili Ivanovitch said mournfully.
“What competition?”
Irina spilled tea on the table cloth. “An inter-club competition. Who’ll make the most, the best and the reddest posters. Have to work two hours extra every day — free — for the glory of the Club.”
“Under the Soviets,” drawled Sasha, “there is no exploitation.”
“I thought,” said Irina, “that I had a good idea for a winner: a real proletarian wedding — a worker and a peasant woman on a tractor, God damn them! But I heard that the Club of Red Printers is making a symbolic one — the union of an airplane and a tractor — sort of the spirit of Electrification and Proletarian State Construction.”
“And the wages,” sighed Vasili Ivanovitch. “She spent all of her last month’s salary on shoes for Acia.”
“Well,” said Irina, “she couldn’t go barefooted.”
“Irina, you work too hard,” Sasha remarked, “and you take the work too seriously. Why waste your nerves? It’s all temporary.”
“It is,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.
“I hope it is,” said Kira.
“Sasha’s my life-saver.” Irina’s weary mouth smiled tremulously and sarcastically at once, as if trying to deny the involuntary tenderness in her voice. “He took me to the theater last week. And week before last, we went to the Museum of Alexander III, and we wandered there for hours, looking at the paintings.”
“Leo’s coming back tomorrow,” Kira said suddenly, irrelevantly, as if she could not keep it any longer.
“Oh!” Irina’s spoon clattered down. “You never told us. I’m so glad! And he’s quite well?”
“Yes. He was to return tonight, but the train is late.”
“How is his aunt in Berlin?” asked Vasili Ivanovitch. “Still helping you? There’s an example of family loyalty. I have the greatest admiration for that lady, even though I’ve never seen her. Anyone who’s safe, away, free and can still understand us, buried alive in this Soviet graveyard, must be a wonderful person. She’s saved Leo’s life.”
“Uncle Vasili,” said Kira, “when you see Leo, will you remember never to mention it? His aunt’s help, I mean. You remember I explained to you how sensitive he is about being under obligation to her, and so we’ll all be careful not to remind him of it, will we?”
“Certainly, I understand, child. Don’t worry.... But that’s Europe for you. That’s abroad. That’s what a human life does to a human being. I think it’s hard for us to understand kindness and what used to be called ethics. We’re all turning into beasts in a beastly struggle. But we’ll be saved. We’ll be saved before it gets us all.”
“We don’t have long to wait,” said Sasha.
Kira noticed a frightened, pleading look in Irina’s eyes.
It was late when Kira and Sasha rose to go. He lived far on the other side of the city, but he offered to escort her home, for the streets were dark. He wore an old coat and he walked fast, slouching. They hurried together through a soft, transparent twilight, through the city full of the fragrance of a warm earth somewhere far under the pavements and cobblestones.
“Irina isn’t happy,” he said suddenly.
“No,” said Kira, “she isn’t. No one is.”
“We’re living in difficult times. But things will change. Things are changing. There still are men to whom freedom is more than a word on posters.”
“Do you think they have a chance, Sasha?”
His voice was low, tense with a passionate conviction, a quiet strength that made her wonder why she had ever thought him bashfuclass="underline" “Do you think the Russian worker is a beast that licks its yoke while his mind is being battered out of him? Do you think he’s fooled by the clatter of a very noisy gang of tyrants? Do you know what he reads? Do you know the books that are hidden in the factories? The papers that pass secretly through many hands? Do you know that the people is awakening and ...”
“Sasha,” she interrupted, “aren’t you playing a very dangerous game?”
He did not answer. He looked at the old roofs of the city against a milky, bluish sky.
“The people,” she said, “has claimed too many victims already — of your kind.”
“Russia has a long revolutionary history,” he said. “They know it. They’re even teaching it in their schools, but they think it’s ended. It isn’t. It’s just beginning. And it has never lacked men who did not think of the danger. In the Czar’s days — or at any other time.”