Ayn Rand: We the Living

“Oh, Lord,” sighed the lady in the fur coat, “if I could have a bath, a nice, hot bath with soap when I get to Petrograd.”

“Citizens,” Lydia asked boldly, “do they have ice-cream in Petrograd? I haven’t tasted it for five years. Real ice-cream, cold, so cold it takes your breath away....”

“Yes,” said Kira, “so cold it takes your breath away, but then you can walk faster, and there are lights, a long line of lights, moving past you as you walk.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Lydia.

“Why, about Petrograd.” Kira looked at her, surprised. “I thought you were talking about Petrograd, and how cold it was there, weren’t you?”

“We were not. You’re off — as usual.”

“I was thinking about the streets. The streets of a big city where so much is possible and so many things can happen to you.”

Galina Petrovna remarked dryly: “You’re saying that quite happily, aren’t you? I should think we’d all be quite tired of ‘things happening,’ by now. Haven’t you had enough happen to you with the revolution, and all?”

“Oh, yes,” said Kira indifferently, “the revolution.”

The woman in the red kerchief opened a package and produced a piece of dried fish, and said to the upper berth: “Kindly take your boots away, citizen. I’m eating.”

The boots did not move. A voice answered: “You don’t eat with your nose.”

The woman bit into the fish and her elbow poked furiously into the fur coat of her neighbor, and she said: “Sure, no consideration for us proletarians. It’s not like as if I had a fur coat on. Only I wouldn’t be eating dried fish then. I’d be eating white bread.”

“White bread?” The lady in the fur coat was frightened. “Why, citizen, who ever heard of white bread? Why, I have a nephew in the Red Army, citizen, and ... and, why, I wouldn’t dream of white bread!”

“No? I bet you wouldn’t eat dry fish, though. Want a piece?”

“Why ... why, yes, thank you, citizen. I’m a little hungry and....”

“So? You are? I know you bourgeois. You’re only too glad to get the last bite out of a toiler’s mouth. But not out of my mouth, you don’t!”

The car smelt of rotting wood, clothes that had not been changed for weeks and the odor coming from a little door open at the end of the coach.

The lady in the fur coat got up and made her way timidly toward that door, stepping over the bodies in the aisle.

“Could you please step out for a moment, citizens?” she asked humbly of the two gentlemen who were traveling comfortably in that little private compartment, one of them on the seat, the other stretched in the filth of the floor.

“Certainly, citizen,” the one who was sitting answered politely and kicked the one on the floor to awaken him.

Left alone where no one could watch her, the lady in the fur coat opened her handbag furtively and unwrapped a little bundle of oiled paper. She did not want anyone in the car to know that she had a whole boiled potato. She ate hurriedly in big, hysterical bites, choking, trying not to be heard beyond the closed door.

When she came out, she found the two gentlemen waiting by the door to retrieve their seats.

At night, two smoked lanterns trembled over the car, one at each end, over the doors, two shivering yellow spots in the darkness, with a gray night sky shaking in the squares of broken windows. Black figures, stiff and limp as dummies, swayed to the clatter of the wheels, asleep in sitting postures. Some snored. Some moaned. No one spoke.

When they passed a station, a ray of light swept across the car, and against the light Kira’s figure flashed for a second, bent, her face in her lap on folded arms, her hair hanging down, the light setting sparks in the hair, then dying again.

Somewhere in the train, a soldier had an accordion. He sang, hour after hour, through the darkness, the wheels and the moans, dully, persistently, hopelessly. No one could tell whether his song was gay or sad, a joke or an immortal monument; it was the first song of the revolution, risen from nowhere, gay, reckless, bitter, impudent, sung by millions of voices, echoing against train roofs, and village roads, and dark city pavements, some voices laughing, some voices wailing, a people laughing at its own sorrow, the song of the revolution, written on no banner, but in every weary throat, the “Song of the Little Apple.”

“Hey, little apple,

Where are you rolling?”

“Hey, little apple, where are you rolling? If you fall into German paws, you’ll never come back.... Hey, little apple, where are you rolling? My sweetie’s a White and I’m a Bolshevik.... Hey, little apple, where....”

No one knew what the little apple was; but everyone understood.

Many times each night the door of the dark car was kicked open and a lantern burst in, held high in an unsteady hand, and behind the lantern came gleaming steel bands, and khaki, and brass buttons; bayonets and men with stern, imperious voices that ordered: “Your documents!”

The lantern swam slowly, shaking, down the car, stopping on pale, startled faces with blinking eyes, and trembling hands with crumpled scraps of paper.

Then Galina Petrovna smiled ingratiatingly, repeating: “Here you are, comrade. Here, comrade,” thrusting at the lantern a piece of paper with a few typewritten lines which stated that a permission for a trip to Petrograd had been granted the citizen Alexander Argounov with wife Galina and daughters: Lydia, 28, and Kira, 18.

The men behind the lantern looked at the paper, and curtly handed it back, and walked farther, stepping over Lydia’s legs stretched across the aisle.

Sometimes some men threw a quick glance back at the girl who sat on the table. She was awake and her eyes followed them. Her eyes were not frightened; they were steady, curious, hostile.

Then the men and the lantern were gone and somewhere in the train the soldier with the accordion wailed:

“And now there is no Russia,

For Russia’s all sprawled.

Hey, little apple,

Where have you rolled?”

Sometimes the train stopped at night. No one knew why it had stopped. There was no station, no sign of life in the barren waste of miles. An empty stretch of sky hung over an empty stretch of land; the sky had a few black spots of clouds; the land — a few black spots of bushes. A faint, red, quivering line divided the two; it looked like a storm or a distant fire.

Whispers crawled down the long line of cars: “The boiler exploded....”

“The bridge is blown up half a mile ahead....”

“They’ve found counter-revolutionaries on the train and they’re going to shoot them right here, in the bushes....”

“If we stay much longer ... the bandits ... you know....”

“They say Makhno is right in this neighborhood.”

“If he gets us, you know what that means, don’t you? No man leaves alive, but the women do and wish they didn’t....”

“Stop talking nonsense, citizen. You’re making the women nervous.”

Searchlights darted into the clouds and died instantly and no one could say whether they were close by or miles away. And no one could tell whether the black spot that had seemed to move was a horseman or just a bush.

The train started as suddenly as it had stopped. Sighs of relief greeted the screeching of wheels. No one ever learned why the train had stopped.

Early one morning, some men rushed through the car. One of them had a Red Cross badge. There was the sound of a commotion outside. One of the passengers followed the men. When he came back his face made the travelers feel uneasy.

“It’s in the next car,” he explained. “A fool peasant woman. Traveled between the cars and tied her legs to the buffer so she wouldn’t fall. Fell asleep at night, too tired, I guess, and slipped off. Legs tied, it just dragged her with the train, under the car. Head cut off. Sorry I went to see.”