Ayn Rand - We the Living

Students received bread cards and free tramway tickets. In the damp, bare offices of the Technological Institute, they waited in line to get the cards. Then, in the Students’ Co-operative, they waited in line to get the bread.

Kira had waited for an hour. The clerk at the counter shoved hunks of dried bread at the line moving slowly past him, and dipped his hand into a barrel to fish out the herring, and wiped his hand on the bread, and collected the wrinkled bills of paper money. The bread and herring disappeared, unwrapped, into brief cases filled with books. Students whistled merrily and beat tap steps in the sawdust on the floor.

The young woman who stood in line next to Kira, leaned suddenly against her shoulder with a friendly, confidential grin, although Kira had never seen her before. The young woman had broad shoulders and a masculine leather jacket; short, husky legs and flat, masculine oxfords; a red kerchief tied carelessly over short, straight hair; eyes wide apart in a round, freckled face; thin lips drawn together with so obvious and fierce a determination that they seemed weak; dandruff on the black leather of her shoulders.

She pointed at a large poster calling all students to a meeting for the election of the Students’ Council. She asked: “Going to the meeting this afternoon, comrade?”

“No,” said Kira.

“Ah, but you must go, comrade. By all means. Tremendously important. You have to vote, you know.”

“I’ve never voted in my life.”

“Your first year, comrade?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful! Wonderful! Isn’t it wonderful?”

“What’s wonderful?”

“To start your education at a glorious time like this, when science is free and opportunity open to all. I understand, it’s all new to you and must seem very strange. But don’t be afraid, dear. I’m an old-timer here, I’ll help you.”

“I appreciate your offer, but ...”

“What’s your name, dear?”

“Kira Argounova.”

“Mine’s Sonia. Just Comrade Sonia. That’s what everybody calls me. You know, we’re going to be great friends, I can feel it. There’s nothing I enjoy more than helping smart young students like you.”

“But,” said Kira, “I don’t remember saying anything particularly smart.”

Comrade Sonia laughed very loudly: “Ah, but I know girls. I know women. We, the new women who are ambitious to have a useful career, to take our place beside the men in the productive toil of the world — instead of the old kitchen drudgery — we must stick together. There is no sight I like better than a new woman student. Comrade Sonia will always be your friend. Comrade Sonia is everybody’s friend.”

Comrade Sonia smiled. She smiled straight into Kira’s eyes, as if taking, gently, irrevocably, those eyes and the mind behind them into her own hand. Comrade Sonia’s smile was friendly; a kindly, insistent, peremptory friendliness that took the first word and expected to keep it.

“Thank you,” said Kira. “What is it you want me to do?”

“Well, to begin with, Comrade Argounova, you must go to the meeting. We’re electing our Students’ Council for the year. It’s going to be a tough battle. There is a strong anti-proletarian element among our older students. Our class enemies, you know. Young students like you must support the candidates of our Communist Cell, who stand on guard over your interests.”

“Are you one of the Cell’s candidates, Comrade Sonia?”

Comrade Sonia laughed: “See? I told you you were smart. Yes, I’m one of them. Have been on the council for two years. Hard work. But what can I do? The comrade students seem to want me and I have to do my duty. You just come with me and I’ll tell you for whom to vote.”

“Oh,” said Kira. “And after that?”

“I’ll tell you. All Red students join some kind of social activity. You know, you don’t want to be suspected of bourgeois tendencies. I’m organizing a Marxist Circle. Just a little group of young students — and I’m the chairman — to learn the proper proletarian ideology, which we’ll all need when we go out into the world to serve the Proletarian State, since that’s what we’re all studying for, isn’t it?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” asked Kira, “that I may be here for the very unusual, unnatural reason of wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it?”

Comrade Sonia looked into the gray eyes of Comrade Argounova and realized that she had made a mistake. “Well,” said Comrade Sonia, without smiling, “as you wish.”

“I think I’ll go to the meeting,” said Kira, “and — I think I’ll vote.”

An amphitheater of crowded benches rose like a dam, and the waves of students overflowed onto the steps of the aisles, the window sills, the low cabinets, the thresholds of the open doorways.

A young speaker stood on the platform, rubbing his hands solicitously, like a sales clerk at a counter. His face looked like an advertisement that had stayed in a shop window too long: a little more color was needed to make his hair blond, his eyes blue, his skin healthy. His pale lips made no frame for the dark hole of his mouth which he opened wide as he barked words like military commands at his attentive audience.

“Comrades! The doors of science are open to us, sons of toil! Science is now in our own calloused hands. We have outgrown that old bourgeois prejudice about the objective impartiality of science. Science is not impartial. Science is a weapon of the class struggle. We’re not here to further our petty personal ambitions. We have outgrown the slobbering egoism of the bourgeois who whined for a personal career. Our sole aim and purpose in entering the Red Technological Institute is to train ourselves into efficient fighters in the vanguard of Proletarian Culture and Construction!”

The speaker left the platform, rubbing his hands. Some hands in the audience clapped noisily. Most hands remained in the pockets of old coats, under the desks, silent.

Kira leaned toward a freckled girl beside her and asked: “Who is he?”

The girl whispered: “Pavel Syerov. Of the Communist Cell. Party member. Be careful. They have spies everywhere.”

The students sat in a huddled mass rising to the ceiling, a tight mass of pale faces and old, shapeless overcoats. But there was an unseen line dividing them, a line that drew no straight boundary across the benches, but zigzagged over the room, a line no one could see, but all felt, a line as precise and merciless as a sharp knife. One side wore the green student caps of the old days, discarded by the new rulers, wore them proudly, defiantly, as an honorary badge and a challenge; the other side wore red kerchiefs and trim, military leather jackets. The first faction, the larger one, sent speakers to the platform who reminded their audience that students had always known how to fight tyranny, no matter what color that tyranny was wearing, and a thunder of applause rolled from under the ceiling, down to the platform steps, an applause too loud, too long, earnest, hostile, challenging, as the only voice left to the crowd, as if their hands said more than their voices dared to utter. The other faction watched them silently, with cold, unsmiling eyes. Its speakers bellowed belligerently about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, ignoring the sudden laughter that seemed to burst from nowhere, and the impudent sunflower-seed shells sent expertly at the speaker’s nose.

They were young and too confident that they had nothing to fear. They were raising their voices for the first time, while the country around them had long since spoken its last. They were graciously polite to their enemies and their enemies were graciously polite and called them “comrades.” Both knew the silent struggle of life or death; but only one side, the smaller, knew whose victory was to come. Young and confident, in their leather jackets and red kerchiefs, they looked with a deadly tolerance at those others, young and confident, too, and their tolerance had the cold glint of a hidden bayonet they knew to be coming.