1. Comets Are Born at Night

For several weeks Kostia had been thinking about buying a pair of shoes. But then a sudden impulse, which surprised even himself, upset all his calculations. By going without cigarettes, movies, and lunch every other day, he would need six weeks to save up the one hundred and forty rubles which was the price of a fairly good pair of shoes that the salesgirl in a secondhand store had kindly promised to set aside for him on the q.t. Meanwhile, he walked cheerfully on cardboard soles, which he replaced every evening. Fortunately the weather remained fair. When Kostia had accumulated seventy rubles he gave himself the pleasure of going to see the shoes that would one day be his. He found them half hidden on a dark shelf, behind several old copper samovars, a pile of opera-glass cases, a Chinese teapot, and a shell box with a sky-blue Bay of Naples. A magnificent pair of boots, of the softest leather, had the place of honor on the shelf — four hundred rubles, imagine! Men in threadbare overcoats licked their lips over them. Don’t worry, the little salesgirl said to him. Your boots are still here, don’t worry … She smiled at him, and again he noticed her brown hair, her deep-set eyes, her irregular but pretty teeth, her lips — but what was the right adjective for her lips? Your lips are enchanted, he thought and looked straight into her face, but never, never would he dare to say what he was thinking! For a moment her deep-set eyes held him, with their color between green and blue-just the color of those Chinese jades he had noticed under the glass top of the counter! Then his eyes wandered on over the jewels, the paper cutters, the watches, the snuffboxes, until, quite by chance, they fell on a little ebony-framed portrait of a woman, so small that he could have held it in his hand …

How much is that? Kostia asked in a startled voice.

Sixty rubles — it’s expensive, you know, said the enchanted lips.

Hands that were no less enchanted dropped a piece of red-and-gold brocade, reached under the counter, brought out the miniature. Kostia took it. It was a shock to find his big, grimy fingers holding the little portrait. How alive it was! And how strange! It was the strangeness of it that he felt the most. The little black rectangle framed a blond head crowned with a tiara; alert yet sweet, penetrating yet mild, the eyes were an unfathomable mystery …

I’ll take it, Kostia said, to his own surprise.

He had spoken so quietly, the voice had seemed to come from such depths of his being, that the salesgirl did not dare to protest. She looked furtively to right and left, then murmured:

Don’t say anything … I’ll make out the slip for fifty rubles. Just don’t let the cashier see what it is when you pay for it.

Kostia thanked her. But he hardly saw her. Fifty or seventy — what do I care, girl? The price has nothing to do with it — can’t you see that? A fire burned in him. As he walked homeward he felt the little ebony rectangle in his inside coat pocket cling gently to his breast; and from the contact there radiated a growing joy. He walked faster and faster, ran up a dark flight of stairs, hurried down the hall of the collective apartment — today it smelled rankly of naphthaline and cabbage soup — entered his room, switched on the light, looked ecstatically at his cot bed, the old illustrated magazines piled on the table, the window with the three broken panes replaced by cardboard — and felt embarrassed to hear himself murmur: What luck! Now the little black frame stood on the table, tilted against the wall, and the blond woman saw only him, as he saw only her. The room filled with an indefinable brightness. Kostia walked aimlessly from the window to the door — suddenly he felt imprisoned. On the other side of the partition Romachkin coughed softly.

What a man! Kostia thought, suddenly amused by the recollection of the bilious little fellow. He never went out, he was so neat and clean — a real petit bourgeois, living there alone with his geraniums, his gray-paper-bound books, his portraits of great men: Ibsen, who said that the solitary man is the strongest man; Mechnikov, who enlarged the boundaries of life; Darwin, who proved that animals of the same species do not eat each other; Knut Hamsun, because he spoke for the hungry and loved the forest. Romachkin still wore old coats made in the days of the war that preceded the revolution that preceded the Civil War — in the days when the world swarmed with inoffensive and frightened Romachkins. Kostia gave a little smile as he turned toward his half-a-fireplace — because the partition which separated his room from Assistant Clerk Romachkin’s room exactly divided the handsome marble fireplace of what had once been a drawing room.

Poor old Romachkin! you’ll never have any more than half a room, half a fireplace, half a life — and not even half of a face like that …

(The face in the miniature, the intoxicating blue light of those eyes.)

Your half of life is the dark half, poor old Romachkin.

Two strides took Kostia into the hall and to his neighbor’s door, on which he rapped the customary three little knocks. A stale odor of fried food, mingled with talk and quarreling voices, wafted from the other end of the apartment. An angry woman — who was certainly thin, embittered, and unhappy — was clattering pots and saying: So he said, ‘Very well, citizen, I’ll tell the manager.’ And I said, ‘Very well, citizen, I’ll’ — A door opened, then instantly slammed shut, letting a burst of childish sobs escape. The telephone rang furiously. Romachkin came to the door. Hello, Kostia.

Romachkin’s domain was nine feet long by eight feet wide, just like Kostia’s. Paper flowers, carefully dusted, decorated the half-a-mantelpiece. His geraniums bordered the window sill with reddish purple. A cold glass of tea stood on the table, which was neatly covered with white paper. I’m not interrupting, I hope? Were you reading? The thirty books stood ranged on the double shelf over the bed.

No, Kostia, I wasn’t reading. I was thinking.

The faded wall, the portraits of the four great men, the glass of tea, and Romachkin sitting there thinking with his coat buttoned. What, Kostia wondered, does he do with his hands? Romachkin never put his elbows on the table; when he spoke, his hands usually lay spread flat on his knees; he walked with his hands behind his back; he sometimes folded his arms over his chest, timidly raising his shoulders. His shoulders suggested the humble patience of a beast of burden.

What were you thinking about, Romachkin?

Injustice.

A vast subject, you certainly didn’t exhaust it, my friend. Odd — it was chillier here than in his own room. I came to borrow some books, said Kostia. Romachkin’s hair was neatly brushed, his face was sallow and aging, his lips were thin, his eyes fastened on you, yet they looked afraid. What color were they? They didn’t seem to have any color. No more, indeed, did Romachkin — at first you thought gray, and then not even that. He studied his shelves for a moment, then took down an old paper-bound volume. Read that, Kostia. It’s the stories of brave men. It was issue Number 9 of Prison, official organ of the Association of Former Convicts and Life-Exiles. Thank you, good-by. Good-by, my friend. Would he go back to his thinking now, the poor creature?

Their two tables exactly faced each other on the two sides of the partition. Kostia sat down, opened the magazine, and tried to read. Now and again he looked up at the miniature, each time with the happy certainty that he would find the greenish-blue eyes fixed on his. Spring skies, pale above the snow, had that light when the river ice went out and the earth began to live again. Romachkin, in his private desert on the other side of the partition, had sat down again with his head in his hands — solitary, absorbed, convinced that he was thinking. Perhaps he really was thinking.

For a long time Romachkin had been living in solitary communion with a depressing thought. His job as assistant clerk in the wages department of the Moscow Clothing Trust would never be made permanent, since he was not a member of the Party. On the other hand, unless he should be arrested or die, he would never be replaced because, of all the 117 employees of the central office who, from nine to six, filled forty rooms under the Alcohol Trust and over the Karelian Furs Syndicate and next door to the Uzbekistan Cottons Agency, he alone knew every detail of the seventeen categories of wages and salaries, in addition to the seven types of remuneration for piecework, the possible combinations of basic wages with production bonuses, the art of reclassifications and paper raises which had no upsetting effect on the total salary budget. Romachkin, the order would come, the director wants you to prepare the application of the new circular from the Plan Committee in conformity with the Central Committee’s circular of January 6, of course taking into consideration the decision of the Conference of Textile Trusts — you know the one? He knew. The head of his office, former capmaker and member of the Party since last spring, knew nothing — he couldn’t even add. But he was said to be connected with the secret service (supervision of technical personnel and manual labor). He spoke with the voice of authority: Understand, Romachkin? Have it ready by five o’clock tomorrow. I am going to the board meeting. The office was in the third court of a brick building in St. Barnaby Alley; a few sickly trees, half killed by rubble from a demolished building, made a touching spot of green under his window.

Romachkin immersed himself in his calculations. And after a time it appeared that the 5 per cent increase in the basic wage published by the Central Committee, combined with the reclassifications whereby certain workers in Category 11 were transferred to Category 10, and certain workers in Category 10 to Category 9, thus improving the condition of the lowest wage groups (as not only justice but also the directive of the Council of Syndicates demanded), resulted in a 0.5 per cent reduction in the total wage budget if the regulations were applied with the utmost strictness. Now, the workmen in the two mills earned between 110 and 120 rubles, and the new rent increase became effective at the end of the month. Romachkin sadly turned his conclusions over to be typed. Every month he went through some similar operation (though the pretext for it was always new), brought his explanatory tables for the accounting office up to date, waited until quarter to five before he went to wash his hands, which he did slowly, humming tra-la-la, tra-la-la or mmmm-mmmmm like a melancholy bee … He dined hurriedly in the office restaurant, reading the leading article in the paper, which always announced, in the same tone of authority, that the country was progressing, was making rapid strides, that there had never been anything to compare with it, that despite all opposition history was being made for the glory of the Republic, the happiness of the working masses — witness the 210 factories opened during the year, the brilliant success in creating a grain reserve, and …

But I, Romachkin said to himself one day as he swallowed his last spoonful of cold semolina, am squeezing the poor.

The figures proved it. He lost his peace of mind. The trouble is that I think … or rather, there is a being in me that thinks without my being aware of it, and then suddenly raises its voice in the silence of my brain and utters some short, acid, intolerable sentence. And after that, life can’t be the same. Romachkin was terrified by his twofold discovery — that he thought, and that the papers lied. He spent evenings at home, making complex calculations, comparing millions in goods rubles with millions in nominal rubles, tons of wheat with masses of human beings. He went to libraries and opened dictionaries and encyclopedias to Obsession, Mania, Insanity, Mental Diseases, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, and concluded that he was neither paranoid nor cyclothymic nor schizophrenic nor neurotic, but at most suffering from a slight degree of hysteromaniacal depression. Symptoms: an obsession with figures, a propensity to find falsehood everywhere, and an idea which was almost an obsession, an idea which was so sacred that he feared to name it, an idea which solved all intellectual problems, which put all falsehood to flight, an idea which a man must keep perpetually in his consciousness or he would cease to be more than a miserable wretch, a sub-human paid to nibble at other men’s bread, a cockroach snug in the brick building of the Trusts … Justice was in the Gospels, but the Gospels were feudal and pre-feudal superstition; surely Justice was in Marx, though Romachkin could not find it there; it was in the Revolution, it watched in Lenin’s tomb, it illuminated the embalmed brow of a pink and pallid Lenin who lay under crystal, guarded by motionless sentries; in reality they were guarding eternal Justice.

The doctor whom Romachkin consulted at the neuropsychiatric clinic at Khamovniki said: Reflexes excellent, nothing to worry about, citizen. Sex life? Not much, only occasionally, Romachkin answered, blushing. I recommend intercourse twice a month, said the doctor dryly. As to the idea of justice, don’t let it worry you. It is a positive social idea resulting from the sublimation of the primitive ego and the suppression of individualistic instincts; it is called upon to play a great role in the period of transition to Socialism … Macha, call in the next patient. Your number, citizen? The next patient was already in the room, his number in his fingers — fingers of paper, shaken by an inner storm. A being disfigured by an animal laugh. The man in the white blouse, the doctor, disappeared behind his screen. What did he look like? Romachkin had forgotten his face already. Satisfied with his consultation, Romachkin was in a mood to joke: The patient is yourself, Citizen Doctor. Primitive sublimation — what nonsense! You have never had the least notion of justice, citizen.

He emerged from the crisis strengthened and illuminated. As a result of the doctor’s advice on sexual hygiene he found himself, one cloudy evening, on a bench on the Boulevard Trubnoy, haunt of painted girls who ask you, in soft, alcoholic voices, for a cigarette … Romachkin did not smoke. I am very sorry, mam’selle, he said, trying to sound lewd. The prostitute took a cigarette from her pocket, lit it slowly to display her painted nails and her charming profile — then crushed her body against his: Looking for something? He nodded. Come over on the other bench, it’s farther from the light. You’ll see what I can do … Three rubles, right? Romachkin was overwhelmed by the thought of poverty and injustice; yet what connection was there between such thoughts and this prostitute, and himself, and sexual hygiene? He said nothing. Yet he was half aware of a connection, as tenuous as the silvery rays that on clear nights link star to star. For five rubles, I’ll take you home, said the girl. You pay in advance, darling — that’s the rule. He was glad that there was a rule for this sort of transaction. The girl led him through the moonlight to a hovel almost indistinguishable in the shadow of an eight-story office building. Discreet knocking on a windowpane brought out a poverty-stricken woman clutching a shawl over her sunken chest. It’s comfortable inside, she said, there’s a little fire. Don’t hurry, Katiuchenka, I’ll be all right here smoking a butt while I wait. Don’t wake the baby — she’s asleep on the far side of the bed. In order not to wake the baby, they lay down on the floor on a quilt which they took from the bed, in which a little dark-haired girl lay sleeping with her mouth open. A single candle gave the only light. Everything, from the dirty ceiling to the cluttered corners, was sordid. The iniquity of it went through Romachkin like a cold that freezes to the bone. He too was iniquitous, an iniquitous brute. In his person, iniquity itself writhed on the body of a miserable, anemic girl. Iniquity filled the huge silence into which he plunged with bestial fury. At that instant, another idea was born in him. Feeble, faraway, hesitant, not wanting to live, it yet was born. Thus from volcanic soil rises a tiny flame, which, small though it be, yet reveals that the earth will quake and crack and burst with flowing lava.

Afterwards, they walked back to the boulevard together. She chattered contentedly: Still got to find one more tonight. It’s not easy. Yesterday I hung around till dawn, and then didn’t get anyone but a drunk who didn’t have quite three rubles left. What do you think of that? Cholera! People are too hungry, men don’t think about making love these days. Romachkin politely agreed, preoccupied with watching the struggles of the new little flame: Of course. Sexual needs are influenced by diet … Thus encouraged, the girl talked of what was happening in the country. I just got back from my village, oh cholera! Cholera must be her favorite word, he thought. She said it charmingly, now blowing out a straight stream of cigarette smoke, now spitting sidewise. "The horses are all gone, cholera! What will people do now? First they took the best horses for the collective, then the township cooperative refused to furnish fodder for the ones the peasants had been left or had refused to give up. Anyway, there wasn’t any more fodder because the army requisitioned the last of it. The old people, who remembered the last famine, fed them roof thatch — imagine what fodder that makes for the poor beasts after it’s been out under rain and sun for years! Cholera! It made you weep to see them, with their sad eyes and their tongues hanging out and their ribs sticking through their sides — I swear they really came through the hide! — and their swollen joints and little boils all over their bellies and their backs full of pus and blood and worms eating right into the raw flesh — the poor creatures were rotting alive — we had to put bands under their bellies to hold them up at night or they’d never have been able to get back on their legs in the morning. We let them wander around the yards and they licked the fence palings and chewed the ground to find a scrap of grass. Where I come from, horses are more precious than children. There are always too many children to feed, they come when nobody wants them — do you think there was any need for me to come into the world? But there are never enough horses to do the farm work with. With a horse, your children can grow up; without a horse a man is not a man any more, is he? No more home — nothing but hunger, nothing but death…. Well, the horses were done for — there was no way out. The elders met. I was in the corner by the stove. There was a little lamp on the table, and I had to keep trimming the wick — it smoked. What was to be done to save the horses? The elders couldn’t even speak, they were so sunk. Finally my father — he looked terrible, his mouth was all black — said: ‘There’s nothing to be done. We’ll have to kill them. Then they won’t suffer any more. There’s always the leather. As for us, we will die or not, as God pleases.’ Nobody said anything after that, it was so quiet that I could hear the roaches crawling under the stove bricks. My old man got up slowly. ‘I’ll do it,’ says he. He took the ax from under the bench. My mother threw herself on him: ‘Nikon Nikonich, pity …’ He looked as if he needed pity himself, with his face all screwed up like a murderer. ‘Silence, woman,’ says he. ‘You, girl, come and hold a light for us.’ I brought the lamp. The stable was against the house; when the mare moved at night we heard her. It was comforting. She saw us come in with the light, and she looked at us sadly, like a sick man, there were tears in her eyes. She hardly turned her head because her strength was nearly gone. Father kept the ax hidden, because the mare would surely have known. Father went up to her and patted her cheeks. ‘You’re a good mare, Brownie. It’s not my fault if you have suffered. May God forgive me — — ’ Before the words were out of his mouth Brownie’s skull was split open. ‘Clean the ax,’ Father said to me. ‘Now we have nothing.’ How I cried that night! — outside, because they would have beaten me if I’d cried in the house. I think everybody in the village hid somewhere and cried … Romachkin gave her an extra fifty kopecks. Then she wanted to kiss him on the mouth — You’ll see how, darling — but he said No, thank you," humbly, and walked away among the dark trees, his shoulders sagging.

All the nights of his life were alike, equally empty. After leaving the office, he wandered from co-operative to co-operative with a crowd of idlers like himself. The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them: Empty Boxes. Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curve of weekly sales. Romachkin bought some pickled mushrooms and reserved a place in a line that was forming for sausage. From a comparatively well-lighted street he turned into another that was dark, and walked up it. Electric signs, themselves invisible, filled the end of it with an orange glory. Suddenly heated voices filled the darkness. Romachkin stopped. A brutal masculine voice was lost in uproar, a woman’s voice rose, rapid and vehement, heaping insults on the traitors, saboteurs, beasts in human guise, foreign agents, vermin. The insults spewed into the darkness from a forgotten loud-speaker in an empty office. It was frightful — that voice without a face, in the darkness of the office, in the solitude, under the unmoving orange light at the end of the street. Romachkin felt terribly cold. The woman’s voice clamored: In the name of the four thousand women workers … Romachkin’s brain passively echoed: In the name of the four thousand women workers in this factory … And four thousand women of all ages — seductive women, women prematurely old (why?), pretty women, women whom he would never know, women of whom he dared not dream — were present in him for an incalculable instant, and they all cried: We demand the death penalty for these vile dogs! No pity! (Can you mean it, women? Romachkin answered severely. No pity? All of us need pity so much, you and I and all of us …) To the firing squad with them! Factory meetings continued during the trial of the engineers — or was it the economists, or the food control board, or the Old Bolsheviks, who were being tried this time? Romachkin walked on. Twenty steps farther he stopped again, this time in front of a lighted window. Between the curtains he saw a table set for supper — tea, plates, hands, only hands on the checked linoleum: a fat hand holding a fork, a gray slumbering hand, a child’s hand … A loud-speaker in the room showered the hands with the cry of the meetings: Shoot them, shoot them, shoot them! Who? It didn’t matter. Why?

Because terror and suffering were everywhere mingled with an inexplicable triumph tirelessly proclaimed by the newspapers. Good evening, Comrade Romachkin. Have you heard? Marfa and her husband have been refused passports because they were disenfranchised as artisans formerly working on their own account. Have you heard? Old Bukin has been arrested, they say he had hidden dollars sent him by his brother, who is a dentist in Riga … And the engineer has lost his job, he’s suspected of sabotage. Have you heard? There is going to be a fresh purge of employees, get ready for it, I heard at the house committee meeting that your father was an officer … — It’s not true, said Romachkin, choking, he was only a sergeant during the imperialist war, he was an accountant … (But since that right-thinking accountant had belonged to the Russian People’s Union, Romachkin’s conscience was not entirely at ease.) — Try to produce witnesses, they say the commissions are severe … They say there is trouble in the Smolensk region — no more wheat … — I know, I know … Come and play checkers, Piotr Petrovich … They went to Romachkin’s room, and his neighbor began telling his own troubles in a low voice: his wife’s first husband had been a shopkeeper, so it was more than likely that her passport for Moscow would not be renewed. They give you three days to get out, Comrade Romachkin, and you have to go somewhere at least two hundred miles away — but will they give you a passport there? If it turned out that way, their daughter obviously couldn’t enter the Forestry School. Gilded by the lamplight, the ax came down on the head of a horse with human eyes, voices lashed through fiery darkness demanding victims, stations were filled with crowds waiting almost hopelessly for trains which crawled over the map toward the last wheat, the last meat, the last combines; a prostitute from the Boulevard Trubnoy lay gaping wide open on a pallet beside a sleeping child pink as a sucking pig, pure as the innocents Herod slaughtered, and a prostitute cost money, five rubles, a day’s pay — yes, he must find witnesses to face the new purge with, was the new rent scale going into effect? If in all this there was not some immense wrong, some boundless guilt, some hidden villainy, it must be that a sort of madness filled everyone’s brain. The game of checkers was over. Piotr Petrovich went home, thinking of his troubles: Most serious, the matter of the interior passport … Romachkin turned down his bed, undressed, rinsed out his mouth, and lay down. The electric light burned on his bed table, the sheet was white, the portraits mute — ten o’clock. Before he went to sleep, he read the paper carefully. The face of the Chief filled a third of the front page, as it did two or three times a week, surrounded by a seven-column speech: Our economic successes … Prodigious, they were. We are the chosen people, the most fortunate of peoples, envied by a West destined to crises, unemployment, class struggle, war; our welfare increases daily, wages, as the result of Socialist emulation by our shock brigades, show a rise of 12 per cent over the past year; it is time to stabilize them, since production has shown an increase of only 11 per cent. Woe to the skeptics, to those of little faith, to those who nourish the venomous serpent of Opposition in their secret hearts! — It was set forth in angular periods, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; numbered too were the five conditions (all now fulfilled) for the realization of Socialism; numbered too the six commandments of Labor; numbered too the four grounds for historic certainty … Romachkin could not believe his senses, he turned a sharp eye on the 12 per cent increase in wages. This increase in nominal wages was accompanied by a reduction at least three times as great in real wages, as a result of the depreciation of paper money and the rise in prices…. But in this connection the Chief, in his peroration, made a mocking allusion to the dishonest specialists of the Commissariat of Finance, who would receive exemplary punishment. "Continued applause. The audience rise and acclaim the orator for minutes. Salvos of shouts: ‘Long live our unconquerable Chief! Long live our great Pilot! Long live the Political Bureau! Long live the Party!’ The ovation is resumed. Numerous voices: ‘Long live the Secret Police!’ Thunderous