We the Living

by Ayn Rand

  "In other words, you refuse to do your share?"

  "I do."

  "Very well. This service is not compulsory. Oh, not in the least. Its meaning and novelty is the free will of those participating. I was merely thinking of your own good when I made the offer. I thought, in view of certain events in your past, that you'd be only too glad to. . . . Never mind. However, I must call to your attention the fact that Comrade Zoubikov of the Communist Cell had been rather unpleasant about a man of your social past on our pay roll. And when he hears about this. . . ."

  "When he does," said Leo, "tell him to come to me. I'll give him a free lesson--if he cares for the subject."

  Leo came home earlier than usual.

  The blue flame of the Primus hissed in the gathering dusk. Kira's white apron was a white spot bending over the Primus.

  Leo threw his cap and brief case on the table. "That's that," he said. "I'm out."

  Kira stood holding a spoon. She asked: "You mean . . . the Gossizdat?"

  "Yes. Fired. Reduction of staffs. Getting rid of the undesirable element. Told me I had a bourgeois attitude. I'm not social-minded."

  "Well . . . well, it's all right. We'll get along."

  "Of course, it's all right. Think I care about their damn job? This affects me no more than a change in weather."

  "Certainly. Now take your coat off and wash your hands, and we'll have dinner."

  "Dinner? What do you have there?"

  "Beet soup. You like it."

  "When did I say I liked it? I don't want any dinner. I'm not hungry. I'm going to the bedroom to study. Please don't disturb me."

  "I won't."

  Left alone, Kira took a towel and lifted the cover of the pan and stirred the soup, slowly, deliberately, longer than it required. Then she took a plate from the shelf. As she was carrying it to the table, she saw that the plate was trembling. She stopped and, in the dusk, whispered, addressing herself for the first time in her life, as if speaking to a person she had never met before: "Now, Kira, you don't. You don't. You don't."

  She stood and held the plate over the table and stared down, all her will in her eyes, as if a great issue depended on the plate. Presently the plate stopped trembling.

  When he had stood in line for an hour, he smoked a cigarette.

  When he had stood for two hours, he began to feel that his legs were numb.

  When he had stood for three hours, he felt that the numbness had risen to his throat, and he had to lean against a wall.

  When his turn came, the editor looked at Leo and said: "I don't see how we can use you, citizen. Of course, our publication is strictly artistic. But--Proletarian Art, I may remind you. Strictly class viewpoint. You do not belong to the Party--nor is your social standing suitable, you must agree. I have ten experienced reporters--Party members--on my waiting list."

  She really didn't have to fry fish in lard, Kira decided. She could use sunflower-seed oil. If she bought good oil it would leave no odor and it was cheaper. She counted the money out carefully over the co-operative counter and walked home, cautiously watching the heavy yellow liquid in a greasy bottle.

  The secretary said to Leo: "Sorry you had to wait so long, citizen, but the comrade editor is a very busy man. You can go in now."

  The comrade editor leaned back in his chair; he held a bronze paper knife; the knife tapped the edge of a desk calendar bearing a picture of Lunacharsky, People's Commissar of Education and Art; the editor's voice sounded like a knife cutting paper:

  "No. No opening. None expected. Plenty of proletarians starving and you bourgeois asking for a job. I'm a proletarian myself. Straight from the work-bench. I've been jobless--in the old days. But your bourgeois class brothers had no pity. It'll do you good to learn how it feels on your own hide."

  "It's a misunderstanding, citizens. Help interview hours are from nine to eleven, Thursday only. . . . An hour and a half? Well, how did I know what you were sitting here for? Nobody asked you to sit."

  When he came home in the evenings, he was silent.

  Kira served dinner and he sat down at the table and ate. She had given great care to the dinner. He said nothing. He did not look into the steady gray eyes across the table, nor at the lips that smiled gently. He offered no complaint and no consolation.

  Sometimes, for many long moments, he stood before the crystal vase on the malachite stand, the one that had not been broken, and looked at it, his eyes expressionless, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth; he stood without moving, without blinking, the smoke alone stirring slowly, swaying. Then he smiled and the cigarette fell to the floor, and burned, smoking, a dark ring widening on the parquet; but he did not notice it; and Kira did not notice it, for her eyes were fixed, wide and frightened, on Leo's icy, sardonic smile.

  "Any past experience, citizen?"

  "No."

  "Party member?"

  "No."

  "Sorry. No opening. Next."

  It was Monday and the job had been promised to him for Monday. Leo stood before the little wizened office manager and knew that he should smile gratefully. But Leo never smiled when he knew he should. And perhaps it would have been useless. The office manager met him with a worried, apologetic look and avoided his eyes.

  "So sorry, citizen. Yes, I promised you this job, but--you see, the big boss's cousin came from Moscow and she's unemployed, and. . . . Unforeseen circumstances, citizen. You know--man proposes and God disposes. . . . Come again, citizen."

  Kira went to the Institute less frequently.

  But when she sat in a long, cold room and listened to lectures about steel, and bolts, and kilowatts, she straightened her shoulders as if a wrench had tightened the wires of her nerves. She looked at the man who sat beside her; at times she wondered whether those words about steel beams and girders were not about his bones and muscles, a man for whom steel had been created, or, perhaps, it was he that had been created for steel, and concrete, and white heat; she had long since forgotten where Andrei Taganov's life ended and that of engines began.

  When he questioned her solicitously, she answered: "Andrei, any circles under my eyes are nothing but your own imagination. And you've never been in the habit of thinking about my eyes."

  When Leo sat down at the table, Kira's smile was a little forced.

  "You see, there's no dinner tonight," she explained softly. "That is, no real dinner. Just this bread. The co-operative ran out of millet before my turn came. But I got the bread. That's your portion. And I've fried some onions in sunflower-seed oil. They're very good on the bread."

  "Where's your portion?"

  "I've . . . eaten it already. Before you came."

  "How much did you get this week?"

  "Oh . . . well . . . they gave us a whole pound, imagine? Instead of the usual half. Nice, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Very. Only I'm not hungry. I'm going to bed."

  The little man next to Leo in line had an uncomfortable laugh, a servile, hissing sound at his palate, that did not reach his throat, as if he repeated mirthlessly the printed letters: "h-ee-h-ee."

  "I see you're looking at the red handkerchief in my breast pocket, citizen, hee-hee," he whispered confidentially into Leo's ear. "I'll let you in on a secret. It's no handkerchief at all. See? Just a little silk rag. When you go in, they think at first glance that it's a Party badge or something, hee-hee. Then they see it ain't, but still there's the psychological effect, hee-hee. Helps--if they have an opening for a job. . . . Go on. Your turn. Lord Jesus Christ! It's dark outside already. How time flies in lines, citizen. Hee-hee."

  At the University co-operative, the student in line ahead of Leo said aloud to a companion, both wearing Party badges: "Funny, isn't it? the way some citizens neglect their lectures, but you're sure to find them in line for food rations."

  Leo said to the clerk behind the counter, trying to make his voice pleading and making it only wooden, expressionless: "Comrade clerk, would you mind if I tear next week
's coupon off, too? I'll keep it and present it to you for my bread next week. You see, I have . . . there's someone at home and I want to tell her that I got a two weeks' ration and ate my half on the way home, so that she'll eat all of this piece. . . . Thank you, comrade."

  The burly office manager led Leo down a narrow corridor into an empty office with Lenin's picture on the wall, and closed the door carefully. He had a friendly smile and heavy cheeks.

  "More privacy here, citizen. It's like this, citizen. A job's a rare thing, nowadays. A very rare thing. Now, a comrade that's got a responsible position and has jobs to hand out--he's got something valuable to hand out, hasn't he? Now then, a comrade that's got a responsible position isn't making much of a salary these days. And things are expensive. One's got to live. A fellow that gets a job has something to be grateful for, hasn't he? . . . Near broke, you say? Well, what do you want here, you bum? Expecting us proletarians to give jobs to every stray bourgeois?"

  "English, German and French? Valuable, very valuable, citizen. We do need teachers for classes of languages. Are you a Union member? . . . Not any Trade Union? . . . Sorry, citizen, we employ only Union members."

  "So you want to join the Union of Pedagogues? Very well, citizen. Where are you working?"

  "I'm not working."

  "You cannot join the Union if you're not working."

  "I can't get a job if I'm not a Union member."

  "If you have no job, you can't become a Union member. Next!"

  "Half a pound of linseed oil, please. The one that's not too rancid, please, if you can. . . . No, I can't take sunflower-seed oil, it's too expensive."

  "Kira! What are you doing here in your nightgown?"

  He raised his head from the book. A single bulb over the table left shadows in the corners of the drawing room and in the circles under Leo's eyes. Kira's white nightgown trembled in the darkness.

  "It's after three . . ." she whispered.

  "I know it. But I have to study. There's a draft here. Please go back to bed. You're trembling."

  "Leo, you'll wear yourself out."

  "Well, and if I do? That'll be the end of it, so much the quicker."

  He guessed the look of the eyes he could not see in the darkness. He got up and gathered the trembling white shadow in his arms.

  "Kira, of course I don't mean it. . . . Just one kiss, if you go back to bed. . . . Even your lips are cold. . . . If you don't go, I'll carry you back."

  He lifted her in two arms, still strong and firm and warm through her nightgown. He carried her back into the bedroom, his head pressed close to hers, whispering: "Just a few more pages and I'll be with you. Go to sleep. Good night. Don't worry."

  "In my duty of Upravdom, Citizen Argounova, I gotta tell you. Laws is laws. The rent's raised on account of neither of you citizens being a Soviet employee. That puts you in the category of persons living off an income. . . . How do I know what income? Laws is laws."

  Behind him, men stood in line; men cringing, shrinking, crouching; hollow chests and hunched shoulders; yellow hands clasped and trembling; a few last convulsions in the depths of extinguished souls; eyes staring with a forlorn hopelessness, a dull horror, a crushed plea; a line like that at a stock yard. He stood among them, tall, straight, young, a god's form with lips that were still proud.

  A streetwalker passed by and stopped; and looked, startled, at that man among the others; and winked an invitation. He did not move, only turned his head away.

  XIV

  A HOUSE COLLAPSED, EARLY ONE afternoon. The front wall crashed, with a shower of bricks, in a white cloud of limey dust. Coming back from work, the inhabitants saw their bedrooms exposed to the cold light of the street, like tiers of stage settings; an upright piano, caught by a naked beam, hung precariously high over the pavement. There were a few weary moans, but no astonishment; houses, long since in need of repair, collapsed without warning all over the city. Old bricks were piled high over the tramway rails and stopped traffic. Leo got a job for two days, clearing the street. He worked, bending and rising, bending and rising, through many hours, a numb ache in his spine, red dust on bleeding fingers stiff and raw in the cold.

  The Museum of the Revolution had an exhibition in honor of the visiting delegates of a Swedish Trade Union. Kira got a job lettering cardboard inscriptions. She bent through four long evenings, eyes dull, hands trembling over a ruler, painfully tracing even black letters that said: "WORKERS STARVING IN THE TENEMENTS OF THE CAPITALISTIC EXPLOITERS OF 1910," "WORKERS EXILED TO SIBERIA BY THE CZARIST GENDARMES OF 1905."

  Snow grew in white drifts in the gutters, under basement windows. Leo shovelled snow for three nights, his breath fluttering in spurts of white vapor, icicles sparkling on the old scarf wound tightly around his neck.

  A citizen of no visible means of support, who owned an automobile and a five-room apartment, and who held long, whispered conversations with officials of the Food Trust, decided that his children had to speak French. Kira gave lessons twice a week, dully explaining the "passe imparfait" to two haggard brats who wiped their noses with their fingers, her voice hoarse, her head swimming, her eyes avoiding the buffet where glossy white muffins sparkled with brown, well-buttered crusts.

  Leo helped a proletarian student who had an examination to pass. He explained slowly the laws of capital and interest to a sleepy fellow who scratched his knuckles, for he had the itch.

  Kira washed dishes two hours a day, bending over a greasy tub that smelt of old fish, in a private restaurant--until it failed.

  They disappeared for hours every day and when they came home they never asked each other in what lines they had stood, what streets they had trudged wearily to what doors closed brusquely before them. At night, Kira lighted the "Bourgeoise" and they sat silently, bent over their books. They still had things to study and one goal to remember, if all the others had to be forgotten: to graduate. "It doesn't matter," Kira had said. "Nothing matters. We mustn't think. We mustn't think at all. We must remember only that we have to be ready and then . . . maybe . . . maybe we'll find a way to go abro. . . ." She had not finished. She could not pronounce the word. That word was like a silent, secret wound deep in both of them.

  Sometimes they read the newspapers. Comrade Zinoviev, president of the Petrograd Soviet, said: "The world revolution is not a matter of years, comrades, not a matter of months, but a matter of days now. The flame of a Proletarian Uprising will sweep the Earth, wiping out forever the Curse of World Capitalism."

  There was also an interview with Comrade Biriuchin, third stoker on a Red battleship. Comrade Biriuchin said: "Well, and then we gotta keep the machines oiled, and again we gotta look out for rust, seeing as how it's up to us to watch over the people's engines, and we being conscientious proletarians, we do our share, on account of we don't care for no nonsense outside of good, practical work, and again, there's the foreign bourgeois watching us, and . . ."

  Sometimes they read the magazines.

  ". . . Masha looked at him coldly.

  " 'I fear that our ideologies are too far apart. We are born into different social classes. The bourgeois prejudices are too deep-rooted in your consciousness. I am a daughter of the toiling masses. Individual love is a bourgeois prejudice.'

  " 'Is this the end, Masha?' he asked hoarsely, a deathly pallor spreading on his handsome, but bourgeois face.

  " 'Yes, Ivan,' said she, 'it is the end. I am the new woman of a new day.' "

  There was also poetry to read: ". . . My heart is a tractor raking the soil,

  My soul is smoke from the factory oil. . . ."

  Once they went to a motion picture.

  It was an American film. In the bright glare of showcases, clusters of shadows stood gazing wistfully at the breath-taking, incredible, foreign stills; big snowflakes crashed into the glass; the eager faces smiled faintly, as if with the same thought, the thought that glass--and more than glass--protected this distant, miraculous world from the hopeless Russian winter.


  Kira and Leo waited, jammed in the crowd of the foyer. When a show ended and the doors were opened, the crowd tore forward, knocking aside those who tried to come out, squeezing in through the two narrow doors, painfully, furiously, with a brutal despair, like meat ground through a tight grinder.

  The title of the picture shivered in huge white letters: "THE GOLDEN OCTOPUS" DIRECTED BY REGINALD MOORE CENSORED BY COMRADE M. ZAVADKOV

  The picture was puzzling. It trembled and flickered, showing a hazy office where blurred shadows of people jerked convulsively. An English sign on the office wall was misspelled. The office was that of an American Trade Union where a stern comrade entrusted the hero--a blondish, dark-eyed young man--with the recovery of documents of vast importance to the Union, stolen by a capitalist.

  "Hell!" whispered Leo. "Do they also make pictures like that in America?"

  Suddenly, as if a fog had lifted, the photography cleared. They could see the soft line of lipstick and every hair of the long lashes of a beautiful, smiling leading lady. Men and women in magnificently foreign clothes moved gracefully through a story that made no sense. The subtitles did not match the action. The subtitles clamored in glaring white letters about the suffering of "our American brothers under the capitalistic yoke." On the screen, gay people laughed happily, danced in sparkling halls, ran down sandy beaches, their hair in the wind, the muscles of their young arms taut, glistening, monstrously healthy. A woman left her room wearing a white dress and emerged on the street in a black suit. The hero had suddenly grown taller, thinner, very blond and blue-eyed. His trim full-dress suit was surprising on a toiling Trade Union member; and the papers he was seeking through the incoherent jumble of events seemed suspiciously close to something like a will for his uncle's inheritance.

  A subtitle said: "I hate you. You are a blood-sucking capitalistic exploiter. Get out of my room!"