We the Living Read Free Page B

Alexander Dimitrievitch possessed. But he was greatly worried lest someone should notice that the rim of his pince-nez was of real gold.
    Crushed against his elbow, Galina Petrovna, his wife, managed to hold her body erect and her book high to the tip of her nose. She had kept her book, but lost all her hairpins in the flight for seats, when her efforts had secured the family’s entrance into the car. She was careful not to let her fellow travelers observe that her book was French.
    Once in a while her foot felt cautiously under the seat to make certain that her best bundle was still there, the one wrapped in the cross-stitch embroidered table cloth. That bundle held the last remnants of her hand-made lace underwear, purchased in Vienna before the war, and the silverware with the Argounov family initials. She greatly resented, but could not prevent the fact that the bundle served as a pillow for a snoring soldier who slept under the bench, his boots protruding into the aisle.
    Lydia, the Argounovs’ elder daughter, had to sit in the aisle, next to the boots, on a bundle; but she made it a point to let every passenger in the car understand that she was not used to such mode of traveling. Lydia did not condescend to hide outward signs of social superiority, of which she proudly displayed three: a jabot of tarnished gold lace on her faded velvet suit, a pair of meticulously darned silk gloves and a bottle of eau-de-cologne. She took the bottle out at rare intervals to rub a few drops on her carefully groomed hands, and hid it promptly, noticing the sidewise, yearning glance of her mother from behind the French novel.
    It had been four years since the Argounov family left Petrograd. Four years ago Argounov’s textile factory on the outskirts of the capital was nationalized in the name of the people. In the name of the people the banks were declared national property. Argounov’s safe-deposit boxes were broken open and emptied. The luminous collars of rubies and diamonds, which Galina Petrovna paraded proudly in sparkling ball-rooms and kept prudently locked afterwards, passed into unknown hands, never to be seen again.
    In the days when the shadow of a growing, nameless fear descended upon the city, hanging like a heavy mist on unlighted street corners, when sudden shots rang in the night, trucks bristling with bayonets rumbled down the cobblestones, and store windows crashed with a sonorous ringing of glass; when the members of the Argounovs’ social set suddenly melted away, like snowdrops over a bonfire; when the Argounov family found themselves in the halls of their stately granite mansion, with a considerable sum of cash, a few last pieces of jewelry, and a constant terror at every sound of the door bell—a flight from the city stood before them as their only course of action.
    In those days the thunder of the revolutionary struggle had died in Petrograd, in the resigned hopelessness of Red victory, but in the south of Russia it still roared on the fields of civil war. The south was in the hands of the White Army. That army was thrown in disjoined troops across the vast country, divided by miles of broken railroad tracks and unknown, desolated villages; that army carried three-colored banners, an impatient, bewildered contempt of the enemy—and no realization of his importance.
    The Argounovs left Petrograd for the Crimea, there to await the capital’s liberation from the Red yoke. Behind them, they left drawing rooms with tall mirrors reflecting blazing crystal chandeliers; perfumed furs and thoroughbred horses on sunny winter mornings; plate-glass windows that opened on the avenue of stately mansions, the Kamenostrovsky, Petrograd’s exclusive thorough-fare. They met four years of crowded summer shacks where piercing Crimean winds whistled through porous stone walls; of tea with saccharine, and onions fried in linseed oil; of nightly bombardments and fearful mornings when only the red flags or the three-colored