by Ayn Rand
“And that, citizens,” said their leader, “is how all counterrevolutionaries get their white necks twisted.”
His stomach bulged over his cartridge belt. He spread his heavy, square boots wide apart. He pushed his fur cap at the back of his head, scratched his neck, and laughed. He had a wide grin and short teeth.
“Pretty smart, aren’t you, citizens?” The cartridge belt shook under his stomach. “But the hand of the proletarian republic is long, and has good sharp claws.”
“What are the orders from those who sent you?” Commandant Kareyev asked slowly.
“Not so fast, citizen. Why the hurry? You’ll have plenty of time to find out.”
“Let’s go,” said Joan, rising. “This man here is wounded. Take him to a doctor.”
“He won’t need one.”
“Their horses are here, behind the house,” a soldier reported, entering.
“Bring them out. . . . Such is the end, citizens, of all who dare to raise a hand against the great will of the proletariat.”
“What are your orders?” repeated Commandant Kareyev.
“The orders are to save your valuable chests for better bullets than ours. The convict, the woman’s husband, is to be taken right back to Strastnoy Island, to be executed. The woman and the traitor Commandant are to be taken for trial to Nijni Kolimsk, to the GPU. Nice place, your ladyship, right across the street from a rich English merchant.”
Joan’s eyes met Kareyev’s. In the house across the street from the rich English merchant, doors could be left unlocked, guards could be absent, prisoners could disappear without trace: for execution—or for freedom.
There were three of them. Two were saved—if they reached that house. One was doomed.
“And, by the way,” asked the soldier, “which one is your husband?”
Joan stood by the table. She leaned far back against it, her tense arms propped against the edge, her head in her shoulders. Her hands grasping the table seemed to hold her body from falling backwards. But her eyes looked straight at the soldier; there was no fear in them, there was the last, desperate resolution of a cornered animal.
“This is my husband,” she answered and pointed at Kareyev.
Commandant Kareyev looked at her. His eyes were calm and grew calmer as they studied hers. Hers were not pleading; they were proud with a defiant hopelessness.
He had asked for a proof of the truth; one beyond doubt. He had it.
Commandant Kareyev looked at the sky where dawn, like a child, smiled its first hope to the beginning of life. Then, he turned to the soldier.
“Yes,” he said calmly, “I am her husband.”
Joan’s body slid from the edge of the table. Her arms pulled it up again. Her eyes widened looking at that for which she had not dared to hope.
“Let’s go,” said the soldier. “You must be crazy, Citizen Convict. I don’t see anything to be smiling about.”
The soldiers bent over Michael. He stirred faintly.
“The traitor’s all right,” said the leader. “He can make the journey to Nijni Kolimsk. Put him into our sleigh, and the woman, too, and take them to town. I’ll take the convict back to the coast. Send an order to have a boat for Strastnoy waiting there.”
Joan did not look at the men lifting Michael and carrying him out to the sleigh. She did not notice the figures passing before her. Her eyes were frozen, staring at Kareyev.
There was a great calm in Commandant Kareyev’s face; a calm that seemed to erase softly the wrinkles of many years on the Beast’s face. He was not looking at Joan. He was staring, wondering, at something he seemed to understand for the first time. He was not smiling; but his face looked as if it were.
“Well, come on,” said the soldier. “What’s the matter, citizen woman? Stop staring at him like that.”
“May I,” asked Kareyev, “say goodbye . . . to my wife?”
“Go ahead. But make it quick.”
Commandant Kareyev turned and met her eyes. Then, he smiled softly and took her hands.
“Goodbye, Joan.”
She did not answer. She was staring at him.
“There is a love beyond all justice, Joan. I understand.”
She did not seem to hear. He added:
“And also there is a love beyond all sorrow. So don’t worry about me.”
“I can’t let you go,” her lips said almost without sound.
“You have been mine. You gave me life. You have a right to take it.”
“I’d rather . . .”
“You’d rather keep quiet. . . . You have a duty to me, now. You must be happy—for my sake.”
“I’ll be . . . happy,” she whispered.
“You’re not crying, are you, Joan? It’s not as bad as all that. I don’t want to be a ghost who will ruin the life awaiting you. Are you strong enough to promise that you will always smile when you think of me?”
“I’m . . . smiling . . . dear. . . .”
“Remember me only when—in the countries where you’ll be sent by . . . the house across the street from the English merchant—you see the lights . . . dancing.”
She raised her head. She stood straight as a soldier at attention. She said slowly, each word steady and solemn as a step to the scaffold:
“I can’t thank you. I only want you to know that of all the things I’ve done, the one I’m doing now is the hardest.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a long kiss. He wanted to sum up his life in it.
They walked out together, her hand in his. The sun greeted them, rising over the forest. It rose slowly, and its rays were like arms outstretched in a solemn blessing. Far away in the forest, snow glistened on the branches like tears that had dropped from the flaming sunrise and rolled, overfilling the forest, over the wide plain. But the tall, old trees raised their dark heads straight into the sky, above the snow, triumphant, greeting life that was starting again for the first time. And over the white plain little sparks burned in the snow, little twinkling, dancing lights of all colors, like a rainbow.
“To the glory of the world revolution!” said the soldier and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Two sleighs were waiting, their horses turned in opposite directions. Two soldiers sat in one sleigh, waiting for their prisoner. In the other, Michael was propped against the seat. He moaned feebly, still unconscious. A soldier sat next to him, holding the reins.
Joan stopped. She had no strength to go on. Commandant Kareyev smiled calmly. He noticed that her fur collar was open and fastened it. The soldiers’ leader pulled her towards the sleigh.
She stopped and turned, facing Kareyev. She stood straight, leaning against the sunrise, her golden hair in the wind. She smiled proudly, gallantly, in sublime sanction of life.
Kareyev walked to the other sleigh, without an order, stepped in calmly, and sat down between the two soldiers.
A rough hand pulled Joan into the sleigh. She put her arm around Michael and held him, his head on her shoulder.
The soldier clicked his whip. The horses jerked forward, into the sunrise. Their harness creaked. Snow spurted up.
Joan turned to look at the other sleigh. Commandant Kareyev did not turn back when the horses tore forward. She saw his hair waving in the wind and above it the white line of his forehead: Commandant Kareyev’s head was held high.
We the Living (unpublished excerpts)
1931
Editor’s Preface
Ayn Rand returned to We the Living in 1932, but interrupted it again the next year to write her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood in 1934, then on Broadway in 1935. (This play has been separately published by New American Library.) The novel was completed in March 1934, but could find no publisher until 1936. After issuing a first edition of 3,000 copies, the publisher, despite indications of rising sales, destroyed the type, and the book was not to reach its audience for a quarter of a century. In 1959, it was reissued by Random House, and in 1960
in paperback by New American Library. Since that time, more than three million copies of We the Living have been sold.
Ayn Rand’s view of the theme and current relevance of We the Living, and of its place in her work, can be found in her foreword to the reissued edition.
In looking through the manuscript of the novel, I found several passages or “outtakes” that had been cut from the final version. Ayn Rand was a champion of literary economy; she was ruthless in cutting passages she considered inessential. There should not, she held, be an unnecessary scene or word in a piece of writing; in judging any element, the standard is not its interest on its own terms, but its contribution to the total.
Several of the cut passages, however, are of some interest. They can be enjoyed as separate pieces, even while one agrees with Miss Rand that they are not parts of the novel, and must not be viewed as such. I have selected for this anthology two such pieces from the early part of We the Living, both probably written in 1931. Neither has received Ayn Rand’s customary editing and polishing. The titles are my own invention.
“No” is an eloquent montage of life in Soviet Russia after the Revolution. It offers a glimpse of the kind of daily existence Ayn Rand herself had to endure before she could leave for America. Some elements of this montage were retained in the novel, in the form of brief paragraphs integrated with the development of the story. Evidently, Miss Rand judged that a separate extended treatment would be too static. Perhaps she thought also that it would repeat what was already clear elsewhere in the book.
The “month to wait” mentioned in the opening lines is the month Kira, the heroine, must wait between meetings with Leo, the man she loves and is not to see again until October 28.
In the novel, there is one paragraph describing a story about a Viking that the young Kira had read; the Viking became her private symbol of man the hero. I had always loved this brief reference and was delighted to find that the story had originally been given a fuller treatment.
“Kira’s Viking” may be read as a lushly Romantic fairy tale for adults, as well as for children. The language is simple, evocative, Biblical in its cadence and power. Miss Rand’s admirers will recognize the similarity in this regard to her later novelette Anthem—and also to the legends about John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand was expert in creating the mood and reality of this kind of haunting, timeless legend, and I could not let this small example of her talent stay buried. (Besides, it is the only fairy tale I know with a viewpoint on the relationship between statism and religion.)
The story was cut, presumably, because it was not necessary for the purpose of the novel at this point—that is, to establish Kira’s character.
The last paragraph of “Kira’s Viking,” which I have placed after a sequence break, originally appeared much later, near the end of the book, in Kira’s death scene; it was cut when the story was cut.
“No” is the world Ayn Rand escaped from. “Kira’s Viking” is why she escaped—what she wanted to find in the world instead.
—L. P.
“No”
A month to wait is a fortnight in Paris, a week in New York, a year in Soviet Russia.
“No,” said the saleslady in the bookstore, “we have no foreign magazines, citizen. Foreign magazines? You must be new in Petrograd. We have no more publications from abroad than from Mars, citizen. Unsuitable ideology, you know. What can one expect of bourgeois countries? . . . Here’s a nice selection, citizen: The Young Communist, Red Weekdays, Red Harvest. . . . No? . . . We have splendid novels, citizen. Naked Year—all about the civil war. Sickle and Hammer—it’s the class awakening of the village—futuristic, you know—but very profound.”
The shelves were bright with white covers and red letters, white letters and red covers—on cheap, brownish paper and with laughing, defiant broken lines and circles cutting triangles, and triangles splitting squares, the new art coming through some crack in the impenetrable barrier, from the new world beyond the borders, whose words could not reach the little store where a picture of Lenin winked slyly at Kira, from above a sign: “State Publishing House.”
“No,” said Galina Petrovna, “we have no money to waste on theater tickets. You ought to be glad we have enough for tramway tickets.”
In the streets, there were big posters with little blue letters announcing the opening season of the “State Academic Theaters”—the three theatrical giants of Petrograd that were called “the Imperial Theaters” five years ago: the Alexandrinsky, with a chariot high on its roof, stone horses’ hoofs suspended over the city, with five balconies of red and gold inside, watching Russia’s best dramas; the Marinsky—blue and silver, solemn and majestic, a temple to operas and the fluttering skirts of ballet; the Michailovsky—orange and silver, friendly and impudent, winking at its two serious brothers with the newest daring plays and the gayest light operas.
“No,” said the cashier, “no tickets under three hundred and fifty rubles. Then we have profunion nights—free tickets from your union. . . . If you’re not a union member, citizen, who cares if you don’t get to see a show?”
“No,” said Irina Dunaeva, “I get no new dresses this winter either. So you don’t have to worry, Kira. We’ll look alike. . . . Yes, I have powder. Soviet powder. Doesn’t stay on very well. But do you know Vava Miloslavsky, Victor’s girl—for the time being? Her father’s a doctor—a Free Profession, they call it—you see, he doesn’t ‘exploit labor’ so they leave him alone—and he makes money—and Vava—now don’t talk about it—she has a box of Coty’s powder . . . yes, French. Yes, real. From abroad. Smuggled. Ten thousand rubles a box. . . . I think Vava uses lipstick. You know, I think it’s going to be a fashion. Daring, isn’t it? But they say they use it—abroad. . . . Vava, she has a pair of silk stockings. Don’t say I told you. She likes to show them off—and I don’t want to give her the satisfaction.”
“No!” said the red letters on a poster. “The Proletarian Consciousness is not Contaminated by Paltry Bourgeois Ideology. Comrades! Tighten our Class Welding!”
The poster showed a milling crowd of workers, the size of ants, in the shadow of a huge wheel.
“No,” said the student in the red bandanna, “you gotta stand in line for the bread, same as us all, citizen. Sure, it might take two hours. And it might take three hours. What’s the hurry, citizen? You ain’t got anything better to do with your time. Expecting privileges, perhaps? Too good to stand in line with us proletarians? Don’t wiggle your feet, citizen. Certainly, I’m cold, too. . . . Sure, you’ll miss the lecture. And I’ll miss a meeting of the Cell. But this is Bread Day.”
Every student had a provision card. The floor of the University shop was covered with sawdust. The clerk at the counter briskly shoved hunks of dried bread at the line moving slowly past him, and dipped his hand into a barrel to fish out the pickles, and wiped his hand on the bread. The bread and pickles disappeared, unwrapped, into briefcases filled with books.
“No,” said the article in Pravda, “the New Economic Policy is not a surrender of our revolutionary ideology. It is a temporary compromise with a historical necessity. The fight isn’t over. Come on, comrades, let’s show the fat-bellied foreign imperialists, our new, united ranks on the front of economic recovery! This is the day of the factory and the tractor instead of the bayonet! This is the day to demonstrate our red discipline in the slow, monotonous routine of proletarian State Construction! This is the time of heroic Red weekdays!”
“No,” said Galina Petrovna, “I didn’t break the kerosene stove. There’s no kerosene. If you mix the coarse flour with cold water, it’ll taste like gruel.”
“No,” said the militia man, “you can’t cross the street, citizen. What’s the hurry? Don’tcha see there’s a demonstration of the toilers?”
A string of women waddled down Nevsky, spreading to fill its broad expanse, stopping the trucks and tramways, mud flying in little spurts from under heavy shoes. The red banner at the head of the demonstration said:
“The Women of the First Factory of the Red Food-trust Protest Against the Imperialistic Greed of England and Lord Chamberlain!”
The women hid their hands in their armpits, to warm them, and sang:“We are the young red guard
and our aim is set. We’re told: don’t hang your guns
and bravely march ahead . . .”
“No,” said the drunken sailor in the darkness under the window, on the street far below, “I ain’t gonna stop. I’m a free citizen. To hell with your sleep.”
And he pulled the harmonica as if he were going to tear it apart, and it squealed in terror, and he sang, leaning against a lamp post, throwing his raucous words at the moon over the dark roofs above:“Vanka ’nd Mashka fell in love
and he swore by stars above
‘I will treat you good
and I’ll buy you wood
and the wood is pure birch-tree
lots of heat for you and me’ . . .
Lamtsa-dritsa-tsa-tsa!”
“No,” said the Upravdom, “you can’t be no exception, citizen. Even if you are a student. Social duty comes above all. Every tenant gotta attend the meeting.”
So Kira sat in the long, bare room, the largest in the house, in the apartment of a tramway conductor. Behind her sat Galina Petrovna in her oldest dress, and Alexander Dimitrievitch stretching out his run-down boots, and Lydia shivering in a torn shawl. Every tenant in the house was present. The apartment had electrical connections and one bulb burned in the center of the ceiling. The tenants chewed sunflower seeds.
“Seeing as how I’m the Upravdom,” said the Upravdom, “I declare this meeting of the tenants of the house . . . on Moika open. On the order of the day is the question as regards the chimneys. Now, comrades citizens, seeing as how we are all responsible citizens and conscious of the proper class consciousness, we gotta understand that this ain’t the old days when we had landlords and didn’t care what happened to the house we lived in. Now this is different, comrades. Owing to the new regime and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and seeing as how the chimneys are clogged we gotta do something about it, seeing as how we’re the owners of the house. Now if the chimneys are clogged, the stoves won’t burn, and if the stoves won’t burn we’ll have the house full of smoke, and if we have the house full of smoke—it’s sloppy, and if we’re sloppy—that’s not true proletarian discipline. And so, comrades citizens . . .”
