Ayn Rand - We the Living

He answered: “No.”

“Comrade Taganov,” she whispered, “how much you have to learn!”

He looked down at her with his quiet shadow of a smile and patted her hand like a child’s. “Don’t you know,” he asked, “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?”

“Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top — and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.”

“I’m glad. So do I.”

“But then....”

“Only I don’t enjoy the luxury of loathing. I’d rather try to make them worth looking at, to bring them up to my level. And you’d make a great little fighter — on our side.”

“I think you know I could never be that.”

“I think I do. But why don’t you fight against us, then?”

“Because I have less in common with you than the enemies who fight you, have. I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone — to live.”

“Isn’t it a strange request?”

“Is it? And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?”

“And if your plumbing pipes got badly out of order, wouldn’t it be preposterous to sit still and not make an effort to mend them?”

“I wish you luck, Comrade Taganov. I hope that when you find those pipes running red with your own blood — you’ll still think they were worth mending.”

“I’m not afraid of that. I’m more afraid of what times like ours will do to a woman like you.”

“Then you do see what these times of yours are?”

“We all do. We’re not blind. I know that, perhaps, it is a living hell. Still, if I had a choice, I’d want to be born when I was born, and live the days I’m living, because now we don’t sit and dream, we don’t moan, we don’t wish — we do, we act, we build!”

Kira liked the sound of the steps next to hers, steady, unhurried; and the sound of the voice that matched the steps. He had been in the Red Army; she frowned at his battles, but smiled with admiration at the scar on his forehead. He smiled ironically at the story of Argounov’s lost factories, but frowned, worried, at Kira’s old shoes. His words struggled with hers, but his eyes searched hers for support. She said “no” to the words he spoke, and “yes” to the voice that spoke them.

She stopped at a poster of the State Academic Theaters, the three theaters that had been called “Imperial” before the revolution.

“ ‘Rigoletto,’ ” she said wistfully. “Do you like opera, Comrade Taganov?”

“I’ve never heard one.”

She walked on. He said: “But I get plenty of tickets from the Communist Cell. Only I’ve never had the time. Do you go to the theater often?”

“Not very often. Last time was six years ago. Being a bourgeois, I can’t afford a ticket.”

“Would you go with me if I asked you?”

“Try it.”

“Would you go to the opera with me, Comrade Argounova?”

Her eyebrows danced slyly. She asked: “Hasn’t your Communist Cell at the Institute a secret bureau of information about all students?”

He frowned a little, perplexed: “Why?”

“You could find out from them that my name is Kira.”

He smiled, a strangely warm smile on hard, grave lips. “But that won’t give you a way of finding out that my name is Andrei.”

“I’ll be glad to accept your invitation, Andrei.”

“Thank you, Kira.”

At the door of the red-brick house on Moika she extended her hand.

“Can you break Party discipline to shake a counter-revolutionary hand?” she asked.

He held her hand firmly. “Party discipline isn’t to be broken,” he answered, “but, oh! how far it can be stretched!”

Their eyes held each other longer than their hands, in a silent, bewildering understanding. Then he walked away with the light, precise steps of a soldier. She ran up four flights of stairs, her old tam in one hand, shaking her tousled hair, laughing.

ALEXANDER DIMITRIEVITCH KEPT HIS SAVINGS SEWN IN his undershirt. He had developed the habit of raising his hand to his heart once in a while, as if he had gas pains; he felt the roll of bills; he liked the security under his fingertips. When he needed money, he cut the heavy seam of white thread and sighed as the load grew lighter. On November sixteenth, he cut the seam for the last time.

The special tax on private traders for the purpose of relieving the famine on the Volga had to be paid, even though it closed the little textile store in the bakery shop. Another private enterprise had failed.

Alexander Dimitrievitch had expected it. They opened on every corner, fresh and hopeful like mushrooms after a rain; and, like mushrooms, they faded before their first morning was over. Some men were successful. He had seen them: men in resplendent new fur coats, with white, flabby cheeks that made him think of butter for breakfast, and eyes that made him raise his hand, nervously, to the roll over his heart. These men were seen in the front rows at the theaters; they were seen leaving the new confectioners’ with round white cake boxes the price of which could keep a family for two months; they were seen hiring taxis — and paying for them. Insolent street children called them “Nepmen”; their cartoons adorned the pages of Red newspapers — with scornful denunciations of the new vultures of NEP; but their warm fur hats were seen in the windows of automobiles rocketing the highest Red officials through the streets of Petrograd. Alexander Dimitrievitch wondered dully about their secrets. But the dreaded word “speculator” gave him a cold shudder; he lacked the talents of a racketeer.

He left the empty bakery boxes; but he carried home his faded cotton sign. He folded it neatly and put it away in a drawer where he kept old stationery with the embossed letterhead of the Argounov textile factories.

“I will not become a Soviet employee if we all starve,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch.

Galina Petrovna moaned that something had to be done. Unexpected help appeared in the person of a former bookkeeper from the Argounov factory.

He wore glasses and a soldier’s coat and he was not careful about shaving. But he rubbed his hands diffidently and he knew how to respect authority under all circumstances.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, Alexander Dimitrievitch, sir,” he wailed. “This is no life for you. Now, if we get together ... if you just invest a little, I’ll do all the work....”

They formed a partnership. Alexander Dimitrievitch was to manufacture soap; the unshaved bookkeeper was to sell it; had an excellent corner on the Alexandrovsky market.

“What? How to make it?” he enthused. “Simple as an omelet. I’ll get you the greatest little soap recipe. Soap is the stuff of the moment. The public hasn’t had any for so long they’ll tear it out of your hands. We’ll put them all out of business. I know a place where we can get spoiled pork fat. No good for eating — but just right for soap.”

Alexander Dimitrievitch spent his last money to buy spoiled pork fat. He melted it in a big brass laundry tub on the kitchen stove. He bent over the steaming fumes, blinking, his shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, stirring the mixture with a wooden paddle. The kitchen door had to be kept open; there was no other stove to heat the apartment. The bitter, musty odor of a factory basement rose, with the whirling steam of a laundry, to the streaked ceiling. Galina Petrovna chopped the spoiled pork fat on the kitchen table, delicately crooking her little finger, clearing her throat noisily.