by Ayn Rand
He stood looking down at her. He said nothing. He did not move. He did not take his eyes off hers.
She walked toward him, her legs crossing each other, with a slow, unsteady deliberation, her body slouching back. She stood looking at him, her face suddenly empty and calm, her eyes like slits, her mouth a thin incision into a flesh without color. She spoke, and he thought that her mouth did not open, words sliding out, crushed, from between closed lips, a voice frightening because it sounded too even and natural:
"That's the question, you know, don't you? Why can't one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? You don't understand that, do you? You and your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that's what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A great gift, isn't it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it. In you and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State--well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you to the last hell of despair--well then, why don't you say that one's own life doesn't really matter?" Her voice was rising, like a whip, lashing him ferociously on both cheeks. "You loved a woman and she threw your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten thousand bushels of wheat last month! You've had every beam knocked from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new electric plant on the Volga! Why don't you smile and sing hymns to the toil of the Collective? It's still there, your Collective. Go and join it. Did anything really happen to you? It's nothing but a personal problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could worry about, isn't it? Don't you have something greater--greater is the word your comrades use--left to live for? Or do you, Comrade Taganov?"
He did not answer.
Her arms were thrown wide, and her breasts stood out under her old dress, panting, and he thought he could see every muscle of her body, a female's body in the last convulsion of rage. She screamed:
"Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want--isn't that life itself? And who--in this damned universe--who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . But you've tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts--and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls--and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it's doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left--look!"
She laughed, her shoulders shaking, stepping close to him. She screamed at his face:
"Why do you stand there? Why don't you speak? Are you wondering why you've never known what I was? Well, here I am! Here's what's left after you took him, after you reached for the heart of my life--and do you know what that is? Do you know what it meant when you reached for my highest reverence . . ."
She stopped short. She gasped, a choked little sound, as if he had slapped her. She slammed the back of her hand against her mouth. She stood in silence, her eyes staring at something she had seen suddenly, clearly, full for the first time.
He smiled, very slowly, very gently. He stretched out his hands, palms up, shrugging sadly an explanation she did not need.
She moaned: "Oh, Andrei! . . ."
She backed away from him, her terrified eyes holding his.
He said slowly: "Kira, had I been in your place, I would have done the same--for the person I loved--for you."
She moaned, her hand at her mouth: "Oh, Andrei, Andrei, what have I done to you?"
She stood before him, her body sagging, looking suddenly like a frightened child with eyes too big for its white face.
He approached her and took her hand from her mouth and held it in his steady fingers. He said, and his words were like the steps of a man making an immense effort to walk too steadily: "You're done me a great favor by coming here and telling me what you've told. Because, you see, you've given me back what I thought I'd lost. You're still what I thought you were. More than I thought you were. Only . . . it's not anything you've done to me . . . it's what you had to suffer and I . . . I gave you that suffering, and all those moments were to you . . . to you . . ."
His voice broke. Then he shook his head, and his voice was firm as a doctor's: "Listen, child, we won't talk any more. I want you to keep silent for a little while, quite silent, even silent inside, you understand? Don't think. Try not to think. You're trembling. You have to rest. Here. I want you to sit down and just sit still for a few minutes."
He led her to a chair, and her head fell on his shoulder, and she whispered: "But . . . Andrei . . . You . . ."
"Forget that. Forget everything. Everything will be all right. Just sit still and don't think."
He lifted her gently and put her down on a chair by the fire. She did not resist. Her body was limp; her dress was pulled high above her knees. He saw her legs trembling. He took his leather jacket and wrapped it around her legs. He said: "This will keep you warm. It's cold here. The fire hasn't been on long enough. Now sit still."
She did not move. Her head fell back against the edge of the chair; her eyes were closed; one arm hung limply by her side, and the pink glow of the fire twinkled softly on her motionless hand.
He stood in the darkness by the fireplace and looked at her. Somewhere in the Club someone was playing the "Internationale."
He did not know how long he had stood there, when she stirred and raised her head. He asked: "Do you feel better now?"
Her head moved feebly, trying to nod.
He said: "Now let's put your coat on and I'll take you home. I want you to go to bed. Rest and don't think of anything."
She did not resist. Her head bent, she watched his fingers buttoning her coat. Then she raised her head, and her eyes looked into his. His eyes smiled at her, in quiet understanding, as he had smiled on their first meetings at the Institute.
He helped her down the long, frozen stairs. He called a sleigh at the garden gate and gave the address of her home, Leo's home. He buttoned the fur blanket over her knees, and his arm held her as the sleigh tore forward. They rode in silence.
When the sleigh stopped, he said: "Now I want you to rest for a few days. Don't go anywhere. There's nothing you can do. Don't worry about . . . him. Leave that to me."
The snow was deep at the curb by the sidewalk. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the door and up the stairs. She whispered, and there was no sound, but he saw the movements of her lips: ". . . Andrei. . . ."
He said: "Everything will be all right."
He returned to the sleigh, alone. He gave the driver the address of the Party Club, where his comrades were waiting for a report on the agrarian situation.
". . . and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! You've taken upon your shoulders a burden such as no shoulders in history have ever carried! You said that your end justified your means. But your end, comrades? What is your end?"
The chairman of the Club struck his desk with his gavel. "Comrade Taganov, I'm calling you to order!" he cried. "You will kindly confine your speech to the report on the agrarian situatio
n."
A wave of motion rippled through the crowded heads, down the long, dim hall, and whispers rose, and somewhere in the back row someone giggled.
Andrei Taganov stood on the speaker's platform. The hall was dark. A single bulb burned over the chairman's desk. Andrei's black leather jacket merged into the black wall behind him. Three white spots stood out, luminous in the darkness: his two long, thin hands and his face. His hands moved slowly over a black void; his face had dark shadows in the eyesockets, in the hollows of the cheekbones. He said, his voice dull, as if he could not hear his own words:
"Yes, the agrarian situation, comrades . . . In the last two months, twenty-six Party members have been assassinated in our outlying village districts. Eight clubhouses have been burned. Also three schools and a Communal Farm storehouse. The counter-revolutionary element of village hoarders has to be crushed without mercy. Our Moscow chief cites the example of the village Petrovshino where, upon their refusal to surrender their leaders, the peasants were lined in a row and every third one was shot, while the rest stood waiting. The peasants had locked three Communists from the city in the local Club of Lenin and boarded the windows on the outside and set fire to the house. . . . The peasants stood and watched it burn and sang, so they would hear no cries. . . . They were wild beasts. . . . They were beasts run amuck, beasts crazed with misery. . . . Perhaps there, too--in those lost villages somewhere so far away--there, too, they have girls, young and straight and more precious than anything on earth, who are driven into the last hell of despair, and men who love them more than life itself, who have to stand by and see it and watch it and have no help to offer! Perhaps they too . . ."
"Comrade Taganov!" roared the chairman. "I'm calling you to order!"
"Yes, Comrade Chairman. . . . Our Moscow chief cites the . . . What was I saying, Comrade Chairman? . . . Yes, the hoarders' element in the villages . . . Yes . . . The Party has to take extraordinary measures against the counter-revolutionary element in the villages, that threatens the progress of our great work among the peasant masses. . . . Our great work. . . . We came as a solemn army and forbade life to the living. We thought everything that breathed knew how to live. Does it? And aren't those who know how to live, aren't they too precious to be sacrificed in the name of any cause? What cause is greater than those who fight for it? And aren't those who know how to fight, aren't they the cause itself and not the means?"
"Comrade Taganov!" roared the chairman. "I'm calling you to order!"
"I'm here to make a report to my Party comrades, Comrade Chairman. It's a very crucial report and I think they should hear it. Yes, it's about our work in the villages, and in the cities, and among the millions, the living millions. Only there are questions. There are questions that must be answered. Why should we be afraid if we can answer them? But if we can't. . . ? If we can't? . . . Comrades! Brothers! Listen to me! Listen, you consecrated warriors of a new life! Are we sure we know what we are doing? No one can tell men what they must live for. No one can take that right--because there are things in men, in the best of us, which are above all states, above all collectives! Do you ask: what things? Man's mind and his values. Look into yourself, honestly and fearlessly. Look and don't tell me, don't tell any one, just tell yourself: what are you living for? Aren't you living for yourself and only for yourself? Call it your aim, your love, your cause--isn't it still your cause? Give your life, die for your ideal--isn't it still your ideal? Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn't--doesn't live at all. You cannot change it. You cannot change it because that's the way man is born, alone, complete, an end in himself. No laws, no Party, no G.P.U. will ever kill that thing in man which knows how to say 'I.' You cannot enslave man's mind, you can only destroy it. You have tried. Now look at what you're getting. Look at those whom you allow to triumph. Deny the best in men--and see what will survive. Do we want the crippled, creeping, crawling, broken monstrosities that we're producing? Are we not castrating life in order to perpetuate it?"
"Comrade Ta . . ."
"Brothers! Listen! We have to answer this!" The two luminous white hands flew up over a black void, and his voice rose, ringing, as it had risen in a dark valley over the White trenches many years ago. "We have to answer this! If we don't--history will answer it for us. And we shall go down with a burden on our shoulders that will never be forgiven! What is our goal, comrades? What are we doing? Do we want to feed a starved humanity in order to let it live? Or do we want to strangle its life in order to feed it?"
"Comrade Taganov!" roared the chairman. "I deprive you of speech!"
"I . . . I . . ." panted Andrei Taganov, staggering down the platform steps. "I have nothing more to say. . . ."
He walked out, down the long aisle, a tall, gaunt, lonely figure. Heads turned to look at him. Somewhere in the back row someone whistled through his teeth, a long, low, sneering triumphant sound.
When the door closed after him, someone whispered:
"Let Comrade Taganov wait for the next Party purge!"
XIV
COMRADE SONIA SAT AT THE TABLE, IN a faded lavender kimono, with a pencil behind her ear. The kimono did not meet in front, for she had grown to proportions that could not be concealed any longer. She bent under the lamp, running through the pages of a calendar; she seized the pencil once in a while, jotting hurried notes down on a scrap of paper, and bit the pencil, a purple streak spreading on her lower lip, for the pencil was indelible.
Pavel Syerov lay on the davenport, his stocking feet high on its arm, reading a newspaper, chewing sunflower seeds. He spat the shells into a pile on a newspaper spread on the floor by the davenport. The shells made a little sizzling sound, leaving his lips. Pavel Syerov looked bored.
"Our child," said Comrade Sonia, "will be a new citizen of a new state. It will be brought up in the free, healthy ideology of the proletariat, without any bourgeois prejudices to hamper its natural development."
"Yeah," said Pavel Syerov without looking up from his newspaper.
"I shall have it registered with the Pioneers, the very day it's born. Won't you be proud of your living contribution to the Soviet future, when you see it marching with other little citizens, in blue trunks and with a red kerchief around its neck?"
"Sure," said Pavel Syerov, spitting a shell down on the newspaper.
"We'll have a real Red christening. You know, no priests, only our Party comrades, a civil ceremony, and appropriate speeches. I'm trying to decide on a name and . . . Are you listening to me, Pavel?"
"Sure," said Syerov, sticking a seed between his teeth.
"There are many good suggestions for new, revolutionary names here in the calendar, instead of the foolish old saints' names. I've copied some good ones. Now what do you think? If it's a boy, I think Ninel would be nice."
"What the hell's that?"
"Pavel, I won't tolerate such language and such ignorance! You haven't given a single thought to your child's name, have you?"
"Well, say, I still have time, haven't I?"
"You're not interested, that's all, don't you fool me, Pavel Syerov, and don't you fool yourself thinking I'll forget it!"
"Aw, come on, now, Sonia, really, you know, I'm leaving the name up to you. You know best."
"Yes. As usual. Well, Ninel is our great leader Lenin's name--reversed. Very appropriate. Or we could call him Vil--that's for our great leader's initials--Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin. See?"
"Yeah. Well, either one's good enough for me."
"Now, if it's a girl--and I hope it's a girl, because the new woman is coming into her own and the future belongs, to a greater extent than you men imagine, to the free woman of the proletariat--well, if it's a girl, I have some good names here, but the one I like best is Octiabrina, because that would be a living monument to our great October Revolution."
"Sort of . . . long, isn't it?"
"What of it? It's a very good name and very popular. You know, Fimka Popova, sh
e had a Red christening week before last and that's what she called her brat--Octiabrina. Even got a notice in the paper about it. Her husband was so proud--the blind fool!"
"Now, Sonia, you shouldn't insinuate . . ."
"Listen to the respectable moralist! That bitch Fimka is known as a . . . Oh, to hell with her! But if she thinks she's the only one to get a notice in the paper about her litter I'll . . . I've copied some other names here, too. Good modern ones. There's Marxina, for Karl Marx. Or else Communara. Or . . ."
Something clattered loudly under the table.
"Oh, hell!" said Comrade Sonia. "Those damn slippers of mine!" She wriggled uncomfortably on her chair, stretching out one leg, her foot groping under the table. She found the slipper and bent painfully over her abdomen, pulling the slipper on by a flat, wornout heel. "Look at the old junk I have to wear! And I need so many things, and with the child coming . . . You would choose a good time to write certain literary compositions and ruin everything, you drunken fool!"
"Now we won't bring that up again, Sonia. You know I was lucky to get out of it as I did."
"Yeah! Well, I hope your Kovalensky gets the firing squad and a nice, loud trial. I'll see to it that the women of the Zhenotdel stage a demonstration of protest against Speculators and Aristocrats!" She fingered the pages of the calendar and cried: "Here's another good one for a girl: Tribuna. Or--Barricada. Or, if we prefer something in the spirit of modern science: Universiteta."
"That's too long," said Syerov.
"I prefer Octiabrina. More symbol to that. I hope it's a girl. Octiabrina Syerova--the leader of the future. What do you want it to be, Pavel, a boy or a girl?"
