10
PARTISAN REVIEW
They had made haste to exchange part of the furniture for supplies
from thieving farmers and they used the rest for heating the place.
Having pried open the strong box with an acetylene torch, they
found only torn folders, from which most of the filed documents
had been ripped. The gaping hole in the strong box, which had been
turned into a pantry, showed behind a large desk on which a Navy
Yard lathe-worker kept his tools; when he returned from the fac–
tory where he spent most of his time waiting in line for his ration
of grain, he made knives from fragments of stolen machinery and
later exchanged them for flour. The water pipes, frozen at the
beginning of the winter, had burst. The women went down two
flights of stairs to fetch water at Professor Lytaev's place; they
missed the old warm wooden cottage in the suburbs, lit up in the
evenings by the yellow windows of the taverns. "That was the good
life," they said, with rancour. "Everything will be broken . up,
you'll see! A plague on it!" they added.
A poster announced that the Committee of the Poor would
open the tenants' assembly with a lecture on the Paris Commune.
The poster showed the Vendome column, in blue, broken in two,
collapsing amid scarlet flames; it read: DANCING!!! The lec–
turer, sent by the Central Club Service, a thin archivist with a
small, colorless beard, spoke for an hour without raising his voice,
just as a light persistent rain falls.
The poor man discussed the history of "all those political
massacres" in a melancholy way suited to the taste of the day. He
did so only because the subject was the means of support for him
and an ugly wife who suffered from rheumatism. This subject
interested him no more than had, not so long ago, his genealogical
researches for
nouveaux riches
families. And sometimes he had to
restrain himself from coming out of this persistent bad dream,
from waking, from interrupting himself to say, in an enlivened
voice, his face changed and lightened by twenty years:
" ... but let us pass over these terrible and unprofitable mat–
ters. The work of a poet is so much more precious to humanity
than all these massacres! Let us speak now of the youth of
Pushkin...."
At such moments, he would blink his eyes strangely, like a
man dazzled on coming in from the darkness;-he was afraid of
