Ayn Rand: We the Living

After a long sleep, Nevsky was opening its eyes slowly. The eyes were not used to the light; they had opened in a hurry and they stared, wide, frightened, incredulous. New signs were cotton strips with glaring, uneven letters. Old signs were marble obituaries of men long since gone. Gold letters spelled forgotten names on the windows of new owners, and bullet holes with sunburst cracks still decorated the glass. There were stores without signs and signs without stores. But between the windows and over closed doors, over bricks and boards and cracked plaster, the city wore a mantle of color bright as a patchwork: there were posters of red shirts, and yellow wheat, and red banners, and blue wheels, and red kerchiefs, and gray tractors, and red smokestacks; they were wet, transparent in the rain, showing layers of old posters underneath, growing — unchecked, unrestricted — like the bright mildew of a city.

On a corner, an old lady held timidly a tray of home-made cakes, and feet hurried past without stopping; someone yelled: “Pravda! Krasnaya Gazeta! Latest news, citizens!” and someone yelled: “Saccharine, citizens!” and someone yelled: “Flints for cigarette lighters, cheap, citizens!” Below, there was mud and sunflower-seed shells; above, there were red banners bending over the street from every house, streaked and dripping little pink drops.

“I hope,” said Galina Petrovna, “that sister Marussia will be glad to see us.”

“I wonder,” said Lydia, “what these last years have done to the Dunaevs.”

“I wonder what is left of their fortune,” said Galina Petrovna, “if anything. Poor Marussia! I doubt if they have more than we do.”

“And if they have,” sighed Alexander Dimitrievitch, “what difference does it make now, Galina?”

“None,” said Galina Petrovna, “ — I hope.”

“Anyway, we’re still no poor relations,” Lydia said proudly and pulled her skirt up a little to show the passersby her high-laced, olive-green shoes.

Kira was not listening; she was watching the streets.

The cab stopped at the building where, four years ago, they had seen the Dunaevs in their magnificent apartment. One half of the imposing entrance door had a huge, square glass pane; the other half was filled in with unpainted boards hastily nailed together.

The spacious lobby had had a soft carpet, Galina Petrovna remembered, and a hand-carved fireplace. The carpet was gone; the fireplace was still there, but there were penciled inscriptions on the white stomachs of its marble cupids and a long, diagonal crack in the large mirror above it.

A sleepy janitor stuck his head out of the little booth under the stairs and withdrew it indifferently.

They carried their bundles up the stairs. They stopped at a padded door; the black oilcloth was ripped and gray lumps of soiled cotton made a fringe around the door.

“I wonder,” Lydia whispered, “if they still have their magnificent butler.”

Galina Petrovna pressed the bell.

There were steps inside. A key turned. A cautious hand half opened the door, protected by a chain. Through the narrow crack, they saw an old woman’s face cut by hanging gray hair, a stomach under a dirty towel tied as an apron, and one foot in a man’s bedroom slipper. The woman looked at them silently, with hostile inquiry, with no intention of opening the door farther.

“Is Maria Petrovna in?” Galina Petrovna asked in a slightly unnatural voice.

“Who wants to know?” asked the toothless mouth.

“I’m her sister, Galina Petrovna Argounova.”

The woman did not answer; she turned and yelled into the house: “Maria Petrovna! Here’s a mob that says them’s your sister!”

A cough answered from the depths of the house, then slow steps; then a pale face peered over the old woman’s shoulder and a mouth opened with a shriek: “My Lord in Heaven!”

The door was thrown wide open. Two thin arms seized Galina Petrovna, crushing her against a trembling chest. “Galina! Darling! It’s you!”

“Marussia!” Galina Petrovna’s lips sank into the powder on a flabby cheek and her nose into the thin, dry hair sprinkled with a perfume that smelled like vanilla.

Maria Petrovna had always been the beauty of the family, the delicate, spoiled darling whose husband carried her in his arms through the snow to the carriage in winter. She looked older than Galina Petrovna now. Her skin was the color of soiled linen; her lips were not red enough, but her eyelids were too red.

A door crashed open behind her and something came flying into the anteroom; something tall, tense, with a storm of hair and eyes like automobile headlights; and Galina Petrovna recognized Irina, her niece, a young girl of eighteen with the eyes of twenty-eight and the laughter of eight. Behind her, Acia, her little sister, waddled in slowly and stood in the doorway, watching the newcomers sullenly; she was eight years old, needed a haircut and one garter.

Galina Petrovna kissed the girls; then she raised herself on tiptoe to plant a kiss on the cheek of her brother-in-law, Vasili Ivanovitch. She tried not to look at him. His thick hair was white; his tall, powerful body stooped. Had she seen the Admiralty tower stooping, Galina Petrovna would have felt less alarmed.

Vasili Ivanovitch spoke seldom. He said only: “Is that my little friend Kira?” The question was warmer than a kiss.

His sunken eyes were like a fireplace where the last blazing coals fought against slow, inevitable ashes. He said: “Sorry Victor isn’t home. He’s at the Institute. The boy works so hard.” His son’s name acted like a strong breath that revived the coals for a moment.

Before the revolution, Vasili Ivanovitch Dunaev had owned a prosperous fur business. He had started as a trapper in the wilderness of Siberia, with a gun, a pair of boots, and two arms that could lift an ox. He wore the scar of a bear’s teeth on his thigh. Once, he was found buried in the snow; he had been there for two days; his arms clutched the body of the most magnificent silver fox the frightened Siberian peasants had ever seen. His relatives heard no word from him for ten years. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he opened an office of which his relatives could not afford the door knobs; and he bought silver horseshoes for the three horses that galloped with his carriage down Nevsky.

His hands had provided the ermines that swept many marble stairways in the royal palaces; the sables that embraced many shoulders white as marble. His muscles and the long hours of the frozen Siberian nights had paid for every hair of every fur that passed through his hands.

He was sixty years old; his backbone had been as straight as his gun; his spirit — as straight as his backbone.

When Galina Petrovna raised a steaming spoonful of millet to her lips in her sister’s dining room, she threw a furtive glance at Vasili Ivanovitch. She was afraid to study him openly; but she had seen the stooped backbone; she wondered about the spirit.

She saw the changes in the dining room. The spoon she held was not the monogrammed silverware she remembered; it was of heavy tin that gave a metallic taste to the mush. She remembered crystal and silver fruit vases on the buffet; one solitary jug of Ukrainian pottery adorned it now. Big rusty nails on the walls showed the places where old paintings had hung.

Across the table, Maria Petrovna was talking with a nervous, fluttering hurry, a strange caricature of the capricious manner that had charmed every drawing room she entered. Her words were strange to Galina Petrovna, words like milestones of the years that had been parted and of what had happened in those years.

“Ration cards — they’re for Soviet employees only. And for students. We get only two ration cards. Just two cards for the family — and it isn’t easy. Victor’s student card at the Institute and Irina’s at the Academy of Arts. But I’m not employed anywhere, so I get no card, and Vasili....”