“Going. Anywhere. I don’t want to stay here.”
“Stepan, don’t you think that I see it, too? But screaming about it won’t help. And drinking yourself to death won’t help. One can still fight.”
“Sure. Go on fighting. It’s none of my business. I’m going to have a drink.”
Andrei watched him buttoning the jacket, pulling the starless sailor cap over one ear. “Stepan, what are you going to do?”
“Now?”
“No. In the years to come.”
“The years to come?” Timoshenko laughed, throwing his head back, the mangy rabbit collar shaking on his huge shoulders. “That’s a cute sentence: the years to come. Why are you so sure they’re coming?” He leaned toward Andrei, and winked slyly, mysteriously. “Did it ever occur to you, Comrade Taganov, what a peculiar thing it is that so many of our Party comrades are dying of overwork? You’ve read it in the papers, haven’t you? Another glorious victim fallen on the path of the revolution, a life burned out in a ceaseless task.... You know what they are, don’t you, those comrades dying of a ceaseless task? Suicides. That’s what they are. Suicides. Only the papers will never say it. Funny how many of them are killing themselves these days. Wonder why.”
“Stepan,” Andrei took a huge, hot, clammy hand into his strong, cold ones, “you’re not thinking of ...”
“I’m not thinking of anything. Hell, no. All I want is a drink. And, anyway, if I do think, I’ll come to say good-bye. I promise.”
At the door, Andrei stopped him once again: “Stepan, why don’t you stay here? For a while?”
Stepan Timoshenko waved with the majesty of sweeping a mantle over his shoulders, and shook his head, reeling out to the landing of the long marble stairway:
“No. Not here. I don’t want to see you, Andrei. I don’t want to see that damn face of yours. Because ... you see, I’m an old battleship, ready for the scrap heap, with all its guts rusted and rotted. But I don’t mind that. And I’d give the last of these rotted guts to help the only man I know left in the world — and that’s you. But I don’t mind that. What I mind is that I know that could I take my guts out and give them for you — it still wouldn’t save you!”
VII
KIRA STOOD LOOKING AT A BUILDING UNDER construction.
Jagged walls of red bricks, new and raw, checkered by a net of fresh, white cement, rose to a gray sky darkening slowly in an early twilight. High against the clouds, workers knelt on the walls, and iron hammers knocked, ringing sonorously over the street, and engines roared hoarsely, and steam whistled somewhere in a tangled forest of planks, beams, scaffoldings splattered with lime. She stood watching, her eyes wide, her lips smiling. A young man, with a tanned face and a pipe in the corner of his mouth, walked swiftly up the narrow planks in the perilous framework, and the movements of his hands were brusque, precise, implacable like the blows of a hammer. She did not know how long she had been standing there. She had forgotten all but the work before her. Then, suddenly, her world returning to her with a jolt, in a blinding second of clear, sharp perception — as if new eyes were taking a first glance at a new world and saw it as she had forgotten to see it — she wondered, astonished, why she was not there, on the scaffolding, giving orders like the man with the pipe, what reason could possibly keep her from her work, her life work, her only desire. It was one swift second, so swift that she felt it only after it was over; and after it was over, she saw the world again as she had grown accustomed to see it, and she remembered why she was not on the scaffolding, what reason had closed to her, forever, the only work she wanted. And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: “Perhaps ... Some day ... Abroad ...”
A hand touched her shoulder: “What are you doing here, citizen?”
A militia-man was staring suspiciously down at her. He wore a peaked khaki cap, with a red star, over a low forehead. He squinted, opening soft lips that had no shape, like pillows: “You have been standing here for half an hour, citizen. What do you want?”
“Nothing,” said Kira.
“Well, then, on your way, citizen.”
“I was just looking,” said Kira.
“You,” decreed the militia-man, opening lips shapeless as pillows, “have no business looking.”
She turned silently and walked away.
Against her skin, sewn on to her skirt, a little pocket was growing thicker, slowly, week by week. She kept in it the money she managed to save from Leo’s reckless spending. It was a foundation rising for their future and perhaps — some day — abroad....
She was returning home from a meeting of excursion guides. There had been a political examination at the Excursion Center. A man with a close-cropped head had sat at a broad desk, and trembling, white-lipped guides had stood before him, one after the other, answering questions in jerking, unnaturally bright voices. Kira had recited adequately the appropriate sounds about the importance of historical excursions for the political education and class-consciousness of the working masses; she had been able to answer the question about the state of the latest strike of textile workers in Great Britain; she had known all about the latest decree of the Commissar of People’s Education in regard to the Schools for the Illiterates of the Turkestan; but she could not name the latest amount of coal produced by the mines of the Don basin.
“Don’t you read the newspapers, comrade?” the examining official had asked sternly.
“Yes, comrade.”
“I would suggest that you read them more thoroughly. We do not need limited specialists and old-fashioned academicians who know nothing outside their narrow professions. Our modern educators must be politically enlightened and show an active interest in our Soviet reality, in all the details of our state construction.... Next!”
She might be dismissed, Kira thought indifferently, walking home. She would not worry. She could not worry any longer. She would not allow herself to reach the state of Comrade Nesterova, an elderly guide who had been a school teacher for thirty years. Comrade Nesterova, between excursions, school classes, clubs, and cooking for a paralyzed mother, spent all her time reading the newspapers, memorizing every item word for word, preparing herself for the examination. Comrade Nesterova needed her job badly. But when she had stood before the examiner, Comrade Nesterova had not been able to utter a word; she had opened her mouth senselessly, without a sound, and collapsed suddenly, shrieking, in hysterical tears; she had had to be carried out of the room and a nurse had been called. Comrade Nesterova’s name had been crossed off the list of excursion guides.
Kira had forgotten the examination by the time she reached her house: she was thinking of Leo; she was wondering how she would find him that evening. The question arose, with a small twist of anxiety, every time she came home late and knew that she would find him there. He would leave in the morning, smiling and cheerful and brisk with energy; but she never knew what to expect at the end of the day. Sometimes she found him reading a foreign book, barely answering her greeting, refusing to eat, chuckling coldly once in a while at the bright lines of a world so far from their own. Sometimes she found him drunk, staggering across the room, laughing bitterly, tearing banknotes before her eyes when she spoke of the money he had spent. Sometimes she found him discussing art with Antonina Pavlovna, yawning, talking as if he did not hear his own words. Sometimes — rarely — he smiled at her, his eyes young and clear as they had been long ago, on their first meetings, and he pressed money into her hand, whispering: “Hide it from me.... For the escape. For Europe.... We’ll do it ... some day ... if you can keep me from thinking ... until then.... If we can only keep from thinking....”