“But, Andrei ...”
“It can be done. I could still manage to be sent there, get an assignment, some secret mission for the G.P.U. I’d get you a passport to go as my secretary. Once across the border — we’d drop the assignment, and our Red passports, and our names. We’d run away so far they’d never find us.”
“Andrei, do you know what you’re saying?”
“Yes. Only I don’t know what I’d do there. I don’t know — yet. I don’t dare to think about it, when I’m alone. But I can think of it, I can talk of it when you’re here with me. I want to escape before I see too much of what I see around us. To break with all of it at once. It would be like starting again, from the beginning, from a total void. But I’d have you. The rest doesn’t matter. I’d grow to understand what I’m just beginning to learn from you now.”
“Andrei,” she stammered, “you, who were the best your Party had to offer the world ...”
“Well, say it. Say I’m a traitor. Maybe I am. And maybe I’ve just stopped being one. Maybe I’ve been a traitor all these years — to something greater than what the Party ever offered the world. I don’t know. I don’t care. I feel as if I were naked, naked and empty and clear. Because, you see, I feel certain of nothing in that involved mess they call existence, of nothing but you.” He noticed the look in her eyes and asked softly: “What’s the matter, Kira? Have I said anything to frighten you?”
She whispered without looking at him: “No, Andrei.”
“It’s only what I said once — about my highest reverence — remember?”
“Yes ...”
“Kira, will you marry me?”
Her hands fell limply. She looked at him, silently, her eyes wide and pleading.
“Kira, dearest, don’t you see what we’re doing? Why do we have to hide and lie? Why do I have to live in this agony of counting hours, days, weeks between out meetings. Why have I no right to call you in those hours when I think I’ll go insane if I don’t see you? Why do I have to keep silent? Why can’t I tell them all, tell men like Leo Kovalensky, that you’re mine, that you’re my ... my wife?”
She did not look frightened any longer; the name he had pronounced had given her courage, her greatest, coldest battlefield courage. She said: “Andrei, I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Would you do something for me, if I asked you very urgently?”
“Anything.”
“Don’t ask me why.”
“All right.”
“And I can’t go abroad. But if you want to go alone ...”
“Let’s forget it, Kira. I won’t ask any questions. But as for my going alone — don’t you think you shouldn’t say that?”
She laughed, jumping up: “Yes, let’s forget it. Let’s have our own bit of Europe right here. I’m going to try your gift on. Turn around and don’t look.”
He obeyed. When he turned again, she was standing at the fireplace, her arms crossed behind her head, fire flickering behind the black silhouette of her body, through a thin, black mist.
He was bending her backward, so that the locks of her hair, tumbling down, looked red in the glow of the fire; he was whispering: “Kira ... I wasn’t complaining tonight ... I’m happy ... happy that I have nothing left but you....”
She moaned: “Andrei, don’t say it! Please, please, don’t say it!”
He did not say it again. But his eyes, his arms, the body she felt against her body, cried to her without sound: “I have nothing left but you ... nothing ... but you....”
She came home long after midnight. Her room was dark, empty. She sat wearily down on the bed, to wait for Leo. She fell asleep, exhausted, her hair spilled over the foot of the bed, her body huddled in her crumpled red dress.
The telephone awakened her; it was ringing fiercely, insistently. She jumped up. It was daylight. The lamp was still burning on the table; she was alone.
She staggered to the telephone, her eyes closing heavily, her eyelids leaden. “Allo?” she muttered, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed.
“Is that you, Kira Alexandrovna?” an unctuous masculine voice asked, drawing vowels meticulously, with an anxious note in the pleasant inflection.
“Yes,” said Kira. “Who ...”
“It’s Karp Morozov speaking, Kira Alexandrovna. Kira Alexandrovna, soul of mine, can you come over and take that ... that Lev Sergeievitch home? Really, he shouldn’t be seen at my house so often. It seems there was a party and ...”
“I’ll be right over,” said Kira, her eyes open wide, dropping the receiver.
She dressed hurriedly. She could not fasten her coat; her fingers would not slip the buttons through the buttonholes: her fingers were trembling.
It was Morozov who opened the door when she arrived. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and a vest was fastened too tightly, pulled in taut little wrinkles, across his broad stomach. He bowed low, like a peasant: “Ah, Kira Alexandrovna, soul of mine, how are we today? Sorry I had to trouble you, but ... Come right in, come right in.”
The wide, white-paneled lobby smelled of lilac and mothballs. Behind a half-open door, she heard Leo laughing, a gay, ringing, carefree laughter.
She walked straight into the dining room, without waiting for Morozov’s invitation. In the dining room, a table was set for three. Antonina Pavlovna held a teacup, her little finger crooked delicately over its handle; she wore an Oriental kimono; powder was caked in white patches on her nose; lipstick was smeared in a blot between her nose and chin; her eyes seemed very small without make-up, puffed and weary. Leo sat at the table in his black trousers and dress shirt, his collar thrown open, his tie loose, his hair disheveled. He was laughing sonorously, trying to balance an egg on the edge of a knife.
He raised his head and looked at Kira, astonished. His face was fresh, young, radiant as on an early spring morning, a face that nothing, it seemed, could mar or alter. “Kira! What are you doing here?”
“Kira Alexandrovna just happened to ...” Morozov began timidly, but Kira interrupted bluntly:
“He called me.”
“Why, you ...” Leo whirled on Morozov, his face turned into a vicious snarl; then he shook his head and laughed again, as swiftly and suddenly: “Oh, hell, that’s a good one! So they all think that I have a wet-nurse to watch me!”
“Lev Sergeievitch, soul of mine, I didn’t mean to ...”
“Shut up!” Leo ordered and turned to Kira. “Well, since you’re here, take your coat off and sit down and have some breakfast. Tonia, see if you have another couple of eggs.”
“We’re going home, Leo,” Kira said quietly.
He looked at her and shrugged: “If you insist ...” and rose slowly.
Morozov picked up his unfinished cup of tea; he poured it into his saucer and held the saucer on the tips of his fingers and drank, sucking loudly. He said, looking at Kira, then at Leo, hesitantly, over the edge of the saucer: “I ... you see ... it was like this: I called Kira Alexandrovna because I was afraid that you ... you weren’t well, Lev Sergeievitch, and you ...”
“... were drunk,” Leo finished for him.
“Oh, no, but ...”
“I was. Yesterday. But not this morning. You had no business ...”
“It was just a little party, Kira Alexandrovna,” Antonina Pavlovna interrupted soothingly. “I suppose we did stay a little too late, and ...”
“It was five o’clock when you crawled into bed,” Morozov growled. “I know, because you bumped into my bed and upset the water pitcher.”
“Well, Leo brought me home,” Antonina Pavlovna continued, ignoring him, “and I presume he must have been a little tired....”