Then there was only the imp left, on the back of the empty seat before him, grinning with a wide, crescent mouth, one eye winking.
IX
COMRADE VICTOR DUNAEV, ONE OF OUR YOUNGEST and most brilliant engineers, has been assigned to a job on the Volkhovstroy, the great hydroelectric project of the Soviet Union. It is a responsible post, never held previously by one of his years.
The clipping from Pravda lay in Victor’s glistening new brief case, along with a similar one from the Krasnaya Gazeta, and, folded carefully between them, a clipping from the Moscow Izvestia, even though it was only one line about “Comrade V. Dunaev.”
Victor carried the brief case when he left for the construction site on Lake Volkhov, a few hours ride from Petrograd. A delegation from his Party Club came to see him off at the station. He made a short, effective speech about the future of proletarian construction, from the platform of the car, and forgot to kiss Marisha when the train started moving. The speech was reproduced in the Club’s Wall Newspaper on the following day.
Marisha had to remain in Petrograd; she had her course at the Rabfac to finish and her social activities; she had suggested timidly that she would be willing to give them up and accompany Victor; but he had insisted on her remaining in the city. “My dear, we must not forget,” he had told her, “that our social duties come first, above all personal considerations.”
He had promised to come home whenever he was back in the city. She saw him once, unexpectedly, at a Party meeting. He explained hurriedly that he could not come home with her, for he had to take the midnight train back to the construction site. She said nothing, even though she knew that there was no midnight train.
She had developed a tendency to be too silent. At the Komsomol meetings, she made her reports in a strident, indifferent voice. When caught off guard, she sat staring vacantly ahead, her eyes puzzled.
She was left alone in the big, empty rooms of the Dunaev apartment. Victor had talked intimately to a few influential officials, and no tenants had been ordered to occupy their vacant rooms. But the silence of the apartment frightened Marisha, so she spent her evenings with her family, in her old room, next to Kira’s.
When Marisha appeared, her mother sighed and muttered some complaint about the rations at the co-operative, and bent silently over her mending. Her father said: “Good evening,” and gave no further sign of noticing her presence. Her little brother said: “You here again?” She had nothing to say. She sat in a corner behind the grand piano, reading a book until late at night; then she said: “Guess I’ll be going,” and went home.
One evening, she saw Kira crossing the room hurriedly on her way out. Marisha leaped to her feet, smiling eagerly, hopefully, although she did not know why, nor what she hoped for, nor whether she had anything to say to Kira. She made a timid step forward and stopped: Kira had not noticed her and had gone out. Marisha sat down slowly, still smiling vacantly.
Snow had come early. It grew by Petrograd’s sidewalks in craggy mountain ranges, veined with thin, black threads of soot, spotted with brown clods and cigarette stubs and greenish, fading rags of newspapers. But under the walls of the houses, snow grew slowly, undisturbed, soft, white, billowing, pure as cotton, rising to the top panes of basement windows.
Above the streets, window sills hung as white, overloaded shelves. Cornices sparkled, trimmed with the glass lace of long icicles. Into an icy, summer-blue sky little billows of pink smoke rose slowly, melting like petals of apple blossoms.
High on the roofs, snow gathered into menacing white walls behind iron railings. Men in heavy mittens swung shovels high over the city and hurled huge, frozen white clods, as rocks, down to the pavements below; they crashed with a dull thud and a thin white cloud. Sleighs whirled sharply to avoid them; hungry sparrows, their feathers fluffed, scattered from under the muffled, thumping hoofs.
On street corners, huge cauldrons stood encased in boxes of unpainted boards. Men with shovels swung the snow up into the cauldrons, and narrow streams of dirty water gurgled from under the furnaces, running by the curb, long black threads cutting white streets.
At night, the furnaces blazed open in the darkness, little purplish-orange fires low over the ground, and ragged men slipped out of the night, bending to extend frozen hands into the red glow.
Kira walked soundlessly through the palace garden. A narrow track of footprints, half-buried under a fresh white powder, led through the deep snow to the pavilion; Andrei’s footprints, she knew; few visitors ever crossed that garden. Tree trunks stood bare, black and dead like telegraph poles. The palace windows were dark; but, far at the end of the garden, showing through the stiff, naked branches, a bright yellow square hung in the darkness and a little patch of snow was golden-pink under Andrei’s window.
She rose slowly up the long marble stairway. There was no light; her foot searched uncertainly for every frozen, slippery step. It was colder than in the street outside, the dead, damp, still cold of a mausoleum. Hesitantly, her hand followed the broken marble rail. She could see nothing ahead; it seemed as if the steps would never end.
When she came to a break in the railing, she stopped. She called helplessly, with a little note of laughter in her frightened voice: “Andrei!”
A wedge of light split the darkness above as he flung the door open. “Oh, Kira!” He rushed down to her, laughing apologetically: “I’m so sorry! It’s those broken electric wires.”
He swung her up into his arms and carried her to his room, while she laughed: “I’m sorry, Andrei, I’m getting to be such a helpless coward!”
He carried her to the blazing fireplace. He took off her coat and hat, his fingers wet with snow melting on her fur collar. He made her sit down by the fire, removed her mittens and rubbed her cold fingers between his strong palms; he unfastened her new felt overshoes, and took them off, shaking snow that sizzled on the bright red coals.
Then he turned silently, took a long, narrow box, dropped it in her lap and stood watching her, smiling. She asked: “What is this, Andrei?”
“Something from abroad.”
She tore the paper and opened the box. Her mouth fell open without a sound. The box held a nightgown of black chiffon, so transparent that she saw the flames of the fireplace dancing through its thin black folds, as she held it high in frightened, incredulous fingers. “Andrei ... where did you get that?”
“From a smuggler.”
“Andrei! You — buying from a smuggler?”
“Why not?”
“From an ... illegal speculator?”
“Oh, why not? I wanted it. I knew you’d want it.”
“But there was a time when ...”
“There was. Not now.” Her fingers wrinkled the black chiffon as if they were empty. “Well?” he asked. “Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, Andrei!” she moaned. “Andrei! Do they wear things like that abroad?”
“Evidently.”
“Black underwear? How — oh, how silly and how lovely!”
“That’s what they do abroad. They’re not afraid of doing silly things that are lovely. They consider it reason enough to do things because they’re lovely.”
She laughed: “Andrei, they’d throw you out of the Party if they heard you say that.”
“Kira, would you like to go abroad?”
The black nightgown fell to the floor. He smiled calmly, bending to pick it up: “I’m sorry. Did I frighten you, Kira?”
“What ... what did you say?”
“Listen!” He was kneeling suddenly by her side, his arms around her, his eyes intent with a reckless eagerness she had never seen in them before. “It’s an idea I’ve had for some time ... at first, I thought it was insane, but it keeps coming back to me.... Kira, we could ... You understand? Abroad ... forever....”