Free We the Living by Ayn Rand

Upravdom never answered. She could read the silent accusation in his sullen eyes: “Bourgeois. Private traders.”
    Kira had been admitted to the Technological Institute. She went there every morning, walking, whistling, her hands in the pockets of an old black coat with a high collar buttoned severely under her chin. At the Institute, she listened to lectures, but spoke to few people. She noticed many red kerchiefs in the crowds of students and heard a great deal about Red builders, proletarian culture and young engineers in the vanguard of the world revolution. But she did not listen, for she was thinking about her latest mathematical problem. During the lectures, she smiled suddenly, once in a while, at no one in particular; smiled at a dim, wordless thought of her own. She felt as if her ended childhood had been a cold shower, gay, hard and invigorating, and now she was entering her morning, with her work before her, with so much to be done.
    At night, the Argounovs gathered around the wick on the dining room table. Galina Petrovna served lentils and millet. There was not much variety in their menus. The millet went fast; so did their savings.
    After dinner, Kira brought her books into the dining room, for they had but one oil wick. She sat, the book between her elbows on the table, her fingers buried in the hair over her temples, her eyes wide, engrossed in circles, cubes, triangles, as in a thrilling romance.
    Lydia sat embroidering a handkerchief and sighed bitterly: “Oh, that Soviet light! Such a light! And to think that someone has invented electricity!”
    “That’s right,” Kira agreed, astonished, “it’s not a very good light, is it? Funny. I never noticed it before.”
    One night, Galina Petrovna found the millet too mildewed to cook. They had no dinner. Lydia sighed over her embroidery: “These Soviet menus!”
    “That’s right,” said Kira, “we didn’t have any dinner tonight, did we?”
    “Where’s your mind,” Lydia raged, “if any? Do you ever notice anything?”
    Through the evenings, Galina Petrovna grumbled at intervals: “A woman engineer! Such a profession for a daughter of mine! . . . Is that a way for a young girl to live? Not a boy, not a single beau to visit her. . . . Tough as a shoe-sole. No romance. No delicacy. No finer feelings. A daughter of mine!”
    In the little room which Kira and Lydia shared at night, there was only one bed. Kira slept on a mattress on the floor. They retired early, to save light. Tucked under a thin blanket, with her coat thrown over it, Kira watched Lydia’s figure in a long nightgown, a white stain in the darkness, kneeling before her ikons in the corner. Lydia mumbled prayers feverishly, trembling in the cold, making the sign of the cross with a hurried hand, bowing low to the little red light and the few glimmers of stern, bronze faces.
    From her corner on the floor, Kira could see the reddish-gray sky in the window and the gold spire of the Admiralty far away in the cold, foggy dusk over Petrograd, the city where so much was possible.

    Victor Dunaev had taken a sudden interest in the family of his cousins. He came often, he bent over Galina Petrovna’s hand as if he were at a Court reception, and laughed cheerfully as if he were at the circus.
    In his honor, Galina Petrovna served her last precious bits of sugar, instead of saccharine, with the evening tea. He brought along his resplendent smile, and the latest political gossip, and the current anecdotes, and news of the latest foreign inventions, and quotations from the latest poems, and his opinions on the theory of reflexes and the theory of relativity and the social mission of proletarian literature. “A man of culture,” he explained, “has to be, above all, a man attuned to his century.”
    He smiled at Alexander Dimitrievitch and hastily offered a light for his home-made cigarettes; he smiled at Galina Petrovna and rose hastily every time she rose; he smiled at Lydia and listened