“Then we’ll forget about it.”
“Yes, Leo.”
He slipped his hands under her armpits and pulled her up into his arms, and said wearily: “You crazy, hysterical child! You drive yourself into a fit over some weird fears. Now forget about it. We’ll save every ruble from now on, if that’s what you want. You can put it away for a trip to Monte Carlo or San Francisco or the planet Jupiter. And we won’t talk about it again. All right?”
He was smiling, his arrogant smile on a face that remained incredibly beautiful, a face that was like a drug to her, inexplicable, unconditional, consummate like music. She buried her head on his shoulder, repeating helplessly, hopelessly, a name as a drug: “Leo ... Leo ... Leo ...”
X
PAVEL SYEROV HAD A DRINK BEFORE HE came to his office. He had another drink in the afternoon. He had telephoned Morozov and a voice he knew to be Morozov’s had told him that the Citizen Morozov was not at home. He paced up and down his office and smashed an inkstand. He found a misspelled word in a letter he had dictated, and threw the letter, crumpled into a twisted ball, at his secretary’s face. He telephoned Morozov and got no answer. A woman telephoned him and her soft, lisping voice said sweetly, insistently: “But, Pavlusha darling, you promised me that bracelet!” A speculator brought a bracelet tied in the corner of a dirty handkerchief, and refused to leave it without the full amount in cash. Syerov telephoned Morozov at the Food Trust; a secretary demanded to know who was calling; Syerov slammed the receiver down without answering. He roared at a ragged applicant for a job that he would turn him over to the G.P.U. and ordered his secretary to throw out all those waiting to see him. He left the office an hour earlier than usual and slammed the door behind him.
He walked past Morozov’s house on his way home and hesitated, but saw a militia-man on the corner and did not enter.
At dinner — which had been sent from a communal kitchen two blocks away, and was cold, with grease floating over the cabbage soup — Comrade Sonia said: “Really, Pavel, I’ve got to have a fur coat. I can’t allow myself to catch a cold — you know — for the child’s sake. And no rabbit fur, either. I know you can afford it. Oh, I’m not saying anything about anyone’s little activities, but I’m just keeping my eyes open.”
He threw his napkin into the soup and left the table without eating.
He called Morozov’s house and let the telephone ring for five minutes. There was no answer. He sat on the bed and emptied a bottle of vodka. Comrade Sonia left for a meeting of the Teachers’ Council of an Evening School for Illiterate Women House Workers. He emptied a second bottle.
Then he rose resolutely, swaying a little, pulled his belt tight across his fur jacket and went to Morozov’s house.
He rang three times. There was no answer. He kept his finger on the bell button, leaning indifferently against the wall. He heard no sound behind the door, but he heard steps rising up the stairs and he flung himself into the darkest corner of the landing. The steps died on the floor below and he heard a door opening and closing. He could not let himself be seen waiting there, he remembered dimly. He reached for his notebook and wrote, pressing the notebook to the wall, in the light of a street lamp outside:
Morozov, you Goddamn bastard!
If you don’t come across with what’s due me before tomorrow morning, you’ll eat breakfast at the G.P.U., and you know what that means.
Affectionately, Pavel Syerov.
He folded the note and slipped it under the door.
Fifteen minutes later, Morozov stepped noiselessly out of his bathroom and tiptoed to the lobby. He listened nervously, but heard no sound on the stair-landing. Then he noticed the faint blur of white in the darkness, on the floor.
He picked up the note and read it, bending under the dining-room lamp. His face looked gray.
The telephone rang. He shuddered, frozen to the spot, as if the eyes somewhere behind that ringing bell could see him with the note in his hand. He crammed the note deep into his pocket and answered the telephone, trembling.
It was an old aunt of his and she sniffled into the receiver, asking to borrow some money. He called her an old bitch and hung up.
Through the open bedroom door, Antonina Pavlovna, sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair, called out in a piercing voice, objecting to the use of such language. He whirled upon her ferociously: “If it weren’t for you and that damn lover of yours ...”
Antonina Pavlovna shrieked: “He’s not my lover — yet! If he were, do you think I’d be squatting around a sloppy old fool like you?”
They had a quarrel.
Morozov forgot about the note in his pocket.
The European roof garden had a ceiling of glass panes; it looked like a black void staring down, crushing those below more implacably than a steel vault. There were lights; yellow lights that looked dimmed in an oppressive haze which was cigarette smoke, or heat, or the black abyss above. There were white tables and yellow glints in the silverware.
Men sat at the tables. Yellow sparks flashed in their diamond studs and in the beads of moisture on their red, flushed faces. They ate; they bent eagerly over their plates; they chewed hurriedly, incredulously; they were not out on a carefree evening in a gay night spot; they were eating.
In a corner, a yellowish bald head bent over a red steak on a white plate; the man cut the steak, smacking his fleshy red lips. Across the table, a red-headed girl of fifteen ate hastily, her head drawn into her shoulders; when she raised her head, she blushed from the tip of her short, freckled nose to her white, freckled neck, and her mouth was twisted as if she were going to scream.
A fierce jet of smoke swayed by a dark window pane; a thin individual, with a long face that betrayed too closely its future appearance as a skull, rocked monotonously on the back legs of his chair, and smoked without interruption, holding a cigarette in long, yellow fingers, spouting smoke out of wide nostrils frozen in a sardonic, unhealthy grin.
Women moved among the tables, with an awkward, embarrassed insolence. A head of soft, golden waves nodded unsteadily under a light, wide eyes in deep blue rings, a young mouth open in a vicious, sneering smile. In the middle of the room, a gaunt, dark woman with knobs on her shoulders, holes under her collar-bones and a skin the color of muddy coffee, was laughing too loudly, opening painted lips like a gash over strong white teeth and very red gums.
The orchestra played “John Gray.” It flung brief, blunt notes out into space, as if tearing them off the strings before they were ripe, hiding the gap of an uncapturable gaiety under a convulsive rhythm.
Waiters glided soundlessly through the crowd and bent over the tables, obsequious and exaggerated, and their flabby jowls conveyed expressions of respect, and mockery, and pity for those guilty, awkward ones who made such an effort to be gay.
Morozov did remember that he had to raise money before morning. He came to the European roof garden, alone. He sat at three different tables, smoked four different cigars and whispered confidentially into five different ears that belonged to corpulent men who did not seem to be in a hurry. At the end of two hours, he had the money in his wallet.
He mopped his forehead with relief, sat alone at a table in a dark corner and ordered cognac.
Stepan Timoshenko leaned so far across a white table cloth that he seemed to be lying on, rather than sitting at, the table. His head was propped on his elbow, his fingers on the nape of his broad neck; he had a glass in his other hand. When the glass was empty, he held it uncertainly in the air, wondering how to refill it with one hand; he solved the problem by dropping the glass with a sonorous crash and lifting the bottle to his lips. The maitre d’hotel looked at him nervously, sidewise, frowning; he frowned at the jacket with the rabbit fur collar, at the crumpled sailor cap sliding over one ear, at the muddy shoes flung out onto the satin train of a woman at the next table. But the maitre d’hotel had to be cautious; Stepan Timoshenko had been there before; everyone knew that he was a Party member.