We the Living Read Online Free PDF

chain bore a painted inscription: “Boiled water” and a huge sign: “BEWARE OF CHOLERA. DO NOT DRINK RAW WATER.” A stray dog with ribs like a skeleton’s, its tail between its legs, was smelling the littered floor, searching for food. Two armed soldiers were fighting through the crowd, dragging a peasant woman who struggled and sobbed: “Comrades! I didn’t! Brothers, where are you taking me? Comrades dear, so help me God, I didn’t!”
    From below, among the boots and swishing, mud-caked skirts, someone howled monotonously, not quite a human sound nor a barking: a woman was crawling on her knees, trying to gather a spilled sack of millet, sobbing, picking up the grain mixed with sunflower-seed shells and cigarette butts.
    Kira looked at the tall windows. She heard, from the outside, the old familiar sound of the piercing tramway bell. She smiled.
    At a door marked in red letters “Commandant,” a young soldier stood on guard. Kira looked at him. His eyes were austere and forbidding like caverns where a single flame burned under cold, gray vaults; there was an air of innate temerity in the lines of his tanned face, of the hand that grasped the bayonet, of the neck in the open shirt collar. Kira liked him. She looked straight into his eyes and smiled. She thought that he understood her, that he guessed the great adventure beginning for her.
    The soldier looked at her coldly, indifferently, astonished. She turned away, a little disappointed, although she did not know just what she had expected.
    All the soldier noticed was that the strange girl in the child’s stocking-cap had strange eyes; also that she wore a light suit and no brassiere, which fact he did not resent at all.
    “Kira!” Galina Petrovna’s voice pierced the roar of the station. “Kira! Where are you? Where are your parcels? How about your parcels?”
    Kira returned to the box car where her family was struggling with the luggage. She had forgotten that she had to carry three bundles, porters being a luxury out of reach. Galina Petrovna was fighting off these porters, husky loafers in ragged soldiers’ coats, who seized luggage without being asked, insolently offering their services.
    Then, arms strained by the bundled remains of their fortune, the Argounov family descended upon the ground of Petrograd.
    A gold sickle and hammer rose over the station’s exit door. Two posters hung by its side. One bore a husky worker whose huge boots crushed tiny palaces, while his raised arm, with muscles red as beefsteaks, waved a greeting to a rising sun red as his muscles; above the sun stood the words: COMRADES! WE ARE THE BUILDERS OF A NEW LIFE!
    The other bore a huge white louse on a black background with red letters: LICE SPREAD DISEASE! CITIZENS, UNITE ON THE ANTI-TYPHUS FRONT!
    The smell of carbolic acid rose higher than all the rest. Station buildings were disinfected against the diseases that poured into the city on every train. Like a breath from a hospital window, the odor hung in the air as a warning and a grim reminder.
    The doors into Petrograd opened upon the Znamensky square. A sign on a post announced its new name: SQUARE OF UPRISING. A huge gray statue of Alexander III faced the station, against a gray hotel building, against a gray sky. It was not raining heavily, but a few drops fell at long intervals, slowly, monotonously, as if the sky were leaking, as if it too were in need of repairs, like the rotted wooden paving where raindrops made silver sparks on dark puddles. The raised black tops of hansom cabs looked like patent leather, swaying, quivering, wheels grunting in the mud with the sound of animals chewing. Old buildings watched the square with the dead eyes of abandoned shops in whose dusty windows the cobwebs and faded newspapers had not been disturbed for five years.
    But one shop bore a cotton sign: PROVISION CENTER. A line waited at the door, stretching around the corner; a long line of feet in shoes swollen by the rain, of red,