“—a dozen. Tell me which color do you prefer? Always this olive, or should you like some of blue with narrow gray stripes?”
This was what he really said while Nathan loosened, sat back, and finally crossed his legs, one trouser riding up to uncover a pale shin whipped with dark hair.
“You know you may take anything of mine,” said Schild, “and I’ll be disturbed only if you try to pay me back.”
His incredible generosity! It had, more than any other single thing, been the cause of Lichenko’s delay. He understood that far back around the time of Jesus Christ the first Communists worked on that motive and no other, when, that is to say, they were weak and victims rather than victimizers, and it must have been splendid to live then, when good and bad were easy to isolate. Some time since, they had become so mixed that one could no longer take the sayings of one’s mother as a serious guide to life. For example, of Schild his mother would first make some old-peasant observation such as that a man with a high bridge to his nose was untrustworthy, or that ears set at that angle caught only evil wisdom. But if he showed his manners she would think him fine as a “nobleman,” which in her lexicon took on ever more precious connotations as she grew older and had further to look to see the lovely time of her youth when her father had one hundred per cent more land than her husband had now, since the latter owned none at all, and when the fields were the property of a handsome count who never cursed rather than a gang of rude bullies who stole nine-tenths of every harvest in the name of some swindler they called “the people.”
Lichenko’s mother had been illiterate. She had gone under orders to night school and learned to read and write, but she had still been illiterate—according to his brother, who belonged to the Party and, being very literate, wrote articles on agricultural matters for a newspaper in Kiev, which Lichenko, perhaps because he himself was only moderately literate, could never read beyond the first paragraph: “The representative liaison committee from the Stalin Collective Farm at Rusovo yesterday presented to the Central Organization of Rural Co-operative Societies a voluntary petition from the Third Link of field workers on the Stalin Collective Farm that it be permitted to raise its quota in regard to the harvest of wheat. Now, what does this mean relative to the development of large-scale socialist production in the sphere of agriculture? This means...”
Or take his brother—now you would assume he and Schild, being political comrades, would hit it off. But, ah no, his brother had no respect for foreigners, Communists or not, as he had once admitted to Vasya; indeed, he placed little value on any people but the Great Russian and had got so that just before the war he would speak Ukrainian only with the greatest distaste.
No, to understand Nathan one must regard him with one’s own eyes: it was the generosity, not the Communism, that was native to him, and if you said well, the Americans have so much they can afford to give some away, you had only to compare him with another like Captain St. George to see the difference. Nathan lived like a holy man of yore.
“I suppose your dearest wish is to return to your family now the fighting is over,” he said, straightening the undershirt. “Tell me of them. Your sister—is she beautiful? Is she so slender? You have a photograph, of course.”
“No—well, I did have,” Schild spoke in concern, “but in the area of Metz my belongings were stolen.”
“And your mother—can she read and write? No, don’t answer. How silly of me to ask! A fine, cultivated noble—gentleman like you! Besides, certainly everybody in the United States is literate.”
This seemed to soothe Schild, and his black eyes glowed behind the lenses as he protested happily: “Not at all. There are about ten or twelve million Americans who cannot read and write. We are not speaking now of the Soviet Union, Vasili Nikolaievitch.”
“But then it is not necessary for everyone to read and write,” said Lichenko, shrugging with his voice. “All one really needs is something to eat and wear—protection from the golod and kholod, as one says in Russian—girls to love, maybe a drink of spirits now and again, and the policeman not on your tail. I mean, if one belongs to the common people.”
Schild assented by his silence.
“The uncommon ones,” Lichenko went on, “take care of themselves. Then there are the ones between, who don’t know what they want, nicht wahr? Something different, anyway; this is not right and that is not right. Nothing is right for them!” he exclaimed in a kind of joyful hopelessness, pedaling his legs rapidly as if riding a bicycle. “But look at a big oak tree: it loves no girls, drinks only water, does not eat at all, lasts longer than the oldest man, and is satisfied throughout.”
“And is chopped down by the first fellow who needs wood,” said Schild, nodding pleasantly. His shirt pocket might be unbuttoned, but his tie and collar were fast and most uncomfortable to see through the heavy, still air. Keeping the windows shut had been a phase of Lichenko’s scheme of absolute pressure to the body as well as the spirit, and while no effect could be discerned in Schild, he himself was sweating like a plowhorse.
“Yet,” Nathan continued, not so much as a gloss on his steep forehead, “isn’t even that oak better than a worker under capitalism?, who is chopped down when he is not needed.”
“Stupid!”
“Yes, stupid is a better word for it than evil.”
Stupid Nathan! He saw even a tree politically, and no doubt would be the first to cut down an oak, to make paper for pamphlets to celebrate someone else’s sowing of the reclaimed ground, or to denounce them for seeding the wrong thing, whichever would be most bleak and deadly and contradictory of his generous heart. There was a difference of thousands of meters, in more than land and sea, between him and Lichenko’s brother, in spite of their similar faiths. His brother had, all to himself, a four-room apartment with a refrigerator and a private bathroom, but what had Schild to gain? He even disapproved of his father’s wealth.
“It would be better, I think, if the window were open.” Lichenko scrubbed his face with the undershirt tail, which when he pulled it down again was wet as a swimming suit, and since by that time Schild had opened one half of the casement and the evening air made chill entry, his belly was shortly cramped with cold.
“Good, that is just enough. Now please close it.”
“You haven’t a fever?” asked Schild as he came back to his chair softly as a cat.
“Frankly, I don’t know. I feel very strange. Perhaps I should take a bath. ... Of course you have a bathroom in your home in the U.S.A. And with hot water, no? Schön!”
“But there are many people who have not. My grandparents lived in the working-class quarter of New York City, in unbelievable slums. They had nothing but a cold-water flat, one room for living and sleeping, and the other a combination kitchen-bath. The tub had a wooden cover that served as dining table.”
“Wundervoll!” Lichenko chortled. “I knew it! They were workers and yet had a private bath, and their son grew up to be a great industrialist of buttons and his son became a fine intellectual.” He saw a cruel angle develop in the corner of Schild’s mouth, at odds with a sad cast of the eye. He, Vasya, had been carried away as usual: fact, fact was wanted and not his opinions, which only irked his friend in the proportion they were genuine.
He writhed about until his feet hung over one side of the bed and his head, the other. In upside-down vision Schild looked like a baldheaded man with a beard—indeed, somewhat like a Lenin with glasses. He had played this game as a boy: if you frowned, the lines of the forehead resembled a mouth; the real mouth you must ignore, and also that the nose opens in the wrong direction; with the remainder you had a fairly credible face which gave to the expressions what the Moscow radio gave to the truth—an odd twist, both human and not. It was years since he had played it, however, and he had lost his old proficiency in interpretation.
“What are you doing now?”
The mouth in the center of Schild’s head answered: “I’m smiling.”
“Forgiv
e me, one gets restless in bed. To entertain myself while you are gone I have remembered certain boyhood amusements.” He righted himself, all hot above the neck, and sighed. “When I was sick as a child my mother sang little songs to me. They were always about food. For the life of me I cannot now recall a note, or I should sing one. They only come back when I am hungry.”
Schild bathed in a pond of jocularity as he said: “Then we shall have to starve you.”
“No,” Lichenko answered, “that has already been done, and believe me, my friend, just for the singing it is not worth it.”
It was aired, his first open attack on the regime of his country; he felt excellent well for having made it, and he stared fearlessly at Schild, who appropriately cast his eyes aside in deep embarrassment. Which meant he knew, then, of the Kremlin-made famine of 1933, and it meant as well that he was not so corrupt as to try to defend it. Yet if Nathan did know and, regardless of a disapproval however sincere, continued to work for those devils who had not only created the famine but standing on two million corpses denied they were there... Lichenko lost the path as all at once he found he wanted Schild to be both innocent and guilty, for only in that combination could he forgive him.
But Nathan was neither. So solemnly eloquent he almost cracked one’s heart, yet with a peculiar elation that seemed to swell his own, he spoke of Hitler’s assault on the USSR and the scorched-earth tactics and withdrawals which, because of the treacherous surprise, had been at first the Soviets’ only defense. He spoke well; indeed, so well that Lichenko almost believed the hunger here at issue was rather that of 1941 than 1933. No question that the invasion by the Germans had been worse than living under Stalin: they were foreigners. Yet, although the data was of course suppressed, hundreds of thousands of his compatriots had had another opinion, hung garlands on the invaders and enlisted in General Vlasov’s anti-Kremlin army or even in the Wehrmacht. They were wrong. If you must have a tyrant, why not keep your own?
He could not help it, he still had scruples about disabusing Schild. The Red Army, as Nathan was saying, had done a magnificent job; they were heroes; he, Vasya, was a hero and it was just and proper to hear someone say so. The Soviet Union was the greatest country in the world: there lay no contradiction between believing that and fleeing to America, or the Black Forest, or some southern land where dark-complexioned people drank wine and slept all day in the shade. And it was very probable that the Party elite represented a new and superior kind of man. He even believed Bolshevism would triumph in the long run, everywhere, because he could see in it no weaknesses and knew by experience it would stop at nothing. Even Hitler had a limit: the Germanic “race,” by which he measured everything, including his Ukrainian allies, and in the end this folly brought down his house. He was wrong.
The Communists, however, were right—oh yes, no doubt even the famine was correct from the high point of vantage, the Kremlin had its eye always on the main chance, for there in the grave lay Lichenko’s father and mother, who starved, yet there was he, son and heir, fewer than ten years later at the breech of the rocket gun, fighting loyally to save Moscow, and Stalin, from the enemy.
Communism, Nathan, is never wrong—as you would immediately agree but not understand—because its only principle is success. Just as yours is failure; what you really love is not the Red Army’s victories but the sacrifices and agony required to achieve them. How you would have approved of the famine! ...But the point I wish to make is that Stalin and his gang neither liked nor disliked starving two million people. They saw it as necessary to their plan that they requisition more foodstuffs than the peasants produced. If as a result the peasants died, they simply did not care. Communism is never wrong, Nathan, because it has no feelings at all, certainly no good ones, but no bad ones either—none at all. It is difficult to tell you that, because I have and you have, and furthermore I am a man without ambition and thus discredited.
The unspoken rang so loudly against his frontal bone that Lichenko could hardly believe Schild had not heard it, too; crystalline, cold, and true it was, like the sound of a gong made of glass. And he had never been a great one for thinking, which was his brother’s talent.
Once before the war his brother in a literary phase had read a book called The Idiot by a writer towards whom his brother had mixed feelings—saying on the one hand he did show a consciousness of something, although on the other he was of course hopelessly something and you could not look to him for something else—at any rate, in an unusually amiable mood he quoted to Vasya the very kernel of what in this writer he thoroughly disapproved: this Idiot, who if that were not enough was also a prince, appropriately found everything strange; but one evening in Switzerland, where typical of the decadent Russian nobility having nothing else to do he went to drink sulfur-water or whatnot, he heard the bray of an ass in the marketplace: “I was immensely struck with the ass, and for some reason extraordinarily pleased with it, and suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head.”
Following the quotation his brother observed that heavy silence which means such nonsense speaks for itself. To Vasya it had said nothing until this moment more than five years later when, without the ass’s aid, he found himself in the princely condition. Everything seemed to clear up. ... He had stayed on not to save Schild but to understand him, not because Schild was good but rather because he was interesting. It was the game of the Communists, who were never wrong, to save people. For an ordinary man, an idiot, it was enough to know how the next fellow used the privilege and obligation of life, which was not the best thing imaginable, but we none of us—his brother, Stalin, Hitler, the Americans, the prince—had anything else.
Naturally, Nathan had not heard. That inner ear through which the rest of humanity hears the most important sounds is confiscated when one joins the Communists. He had often confirmed this by speaking silently to his brother: “You bastard, the only reason I wouldn’t shoot you if I had the chance is that we have the same blood.” Results always negative, despite his brother’s noted gift for smelling out heresy.
However, Schild had picked up a subtler noise which Lichenko missed. His voice became furtive as he left the siege of Stalingrad to warn: “St. George is coming upstairs.”
At last Lichenko heard the footsteps, which being both heavy and soft like those of any large animal but the horse, were unmistakable: those shoes which he so coveted, with their fat soles of yellow gum rubber; shod so, a man could run right up a smooth wall. Why Schild should think St. George a menace, however, was far from clear—if at the same time, as Nathan insisted, and Lichenko had to agree, the captain was also a fool. But a good fool, a jovial one, at least wise enough not to try to be clever. He did not even suspect he had a political as second-in-command, and was the happier for it. In a Russian company the most harmless-looking boob was invariably the secret-police informer. The wonderful American invention was a man who looked his role.
He lay badly in need now of just the neutrality that St. George dispensed. He readied his mouth to call “Kom een!” his pronunciation of which the captain never failed to approve; he was already enmired in St. George’s warm sludge, that secure, absolute, fool’s medium in which all was forever orderly—when, just as the footfalls reached the door, darkness smothered him in its close sheet.
Outside the window night had come unnoticed, but the room was blacker still, for even a night swollen and dim with cloud has its suggestions of distant fire. Damn you, Nathan, for extinguishing the lamp on a friend! Now what had been merely necessary became imperative. He called to St. George and could not hear his own voice; he strove to rise but lost the first fall to inertia, the second to his knotted bedclothes, and won the third only to hear his quarry pad beyond the bend of the hall. Nevertheless he got to the lamp, eerily not meeting Schild on the way, choked the button in its narrow throat, making light—of which he had the conviction it would reveal nothing but a chamber enclosing only himself.
Yet there sat Nathan on his hard chair, on
his cast-iron behind, and looking not at all guilty, when for once he should have, but rather self-righteous.
“Yes, it’s all right now,” he said. “He’s gone to his room.”
In the interval of darkness the lamp had prepared for a success, developing its weak yellow into a splendid flare—only to lose the contest to Schild’s face, which like unpolished bone claimed all the light and gave none back. He had never looked more saintly.
“But come,” he said, rising to Lichenko’s aid and fading quickly into his old contrition. “You shouldn’t be up—you’ll take a chill.” He offered to support him and, when that was spurned, walked before, as if he were clearing a channel through some invisible marsh between the dresser and bed; alone and unwitting he went, and no one followed.
For Lichenko had turned to the big clothes cabinet in the corner next the window, turned the key, and peered into its cavern which gave the illusion of a vaster space than the surrounding room. At one end of the rod Schild’s uniforms hung unruly, as if rifled by a thief. At the other, his own, which seemed unusually small upon its hanger; and his boots, bow-legged, slumped, wanting straight heels.
“My cap, I do not see my cap, and I cannot go without it,” he said, into the depths but to Schild.
“Oh yes,” Schild answered, in a strangely strong voice. “You will want your cap. Isn’t it there on the shelf?”
Surely it was; he had forgotten the single shelf across the top of the cabinet, perhaps because he was too short to use it, but the edge of the cap’s shiny visor poked an inch beyond the board, like the nose of a midget peeking down from hiding, and he seized it. Upon his head the cap was tight, since he had not had a real haircut for three weeks, only Nathan’s trim-job around the ears with a little sewing scissors. He also got into his boots, balancing badly on one leg at a time—you cannot live abed for more than a day, even faking, and not feel giddy on your feet—and then seeing in the mirror a soldier on tropics-duty, for he wore cap, olive-drab shorts and undershirt, and boots, he groaned at his stupidity and sat upon the floor.