Apricot Jam

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  The interrogator went on writing but still didn’t switch on the lamp. Then, without getting to his feet, he said in a firm voice: “You’ve had a good look at your cell? But you haven’t seen everything yet. We can have you sleep on concrete without any planks. Or in some damp pit. Or keep you under a thousand-watt light that’ll blind you.”

  Vozdvizhensky could barely prop up his head in his hands. They really could do any of these things. And how would he ever endure it?

  At this point the interrogator switched on his desk lamp, rose, switched on the overhead light, and moved to the middle of the room to look at the person he was interrogating.

  Though he wore a Chekist’s uniform, his face looked utterly simple and naïve. Broad-boned, a short, wide nose, and thick lips.

  Then, in a milder voice: “Anatoly Palych, I know very well that you weren’t involved in wrecking. But even you have to understand that from here no one leaves with an acquittal. It’s either a bullet in the back of the neck or a term in the camps.”

  It was not the harsh language, it was the kindly voice that amazed Vozdvizhensky. He stared fixedly at the interrogator’s face, and saw something familiar in it. It was such a simple face. Had he seen it before?

  The interrogator went on standing in the middle of the room, under the light. He said not a word.

  Vozdvizhensky knew he’d seen him before. But he couldn’t recall where.

  “You don’t remember Konoplyov?” he asked.

  Konoplyov! Of course! The fellow who didn’t know his strength of materials. And who then disappeared from the faculty.

  “Yes, I didn’t finish at the institute. On orders of the Komsomol they took me into the GPU. I’ve been here three years.”

  So what now?

  They chatted a bit, quite easily, a normal human conversation. Just as if it were happening in that life, before the nightmare.

  Konoplyov said: “Anatoly Palych, the GPU doesn’t make mistakes. No one ever gets out of here just like that. And though I’d like to help you, I don’t know how I can. So think about it. You have to make up something.”

  Vozdvizhensky returned to the cellar with new hope.

  But also with a fog whirling about in his mind. He wouldn’t be able to make up anything.

  But then to go to a camp? To Solovki?

  He was struck and encouraged by Konoplyov’s sympathy. Inside these walls? In a place like this?

  He thought about these people from the Workers’ Faculties who were now rising through the ranks. What he had seen of them until now was something different: a crude, conceited fellow had been Vozdvizhenky’s boss when he worked as an engineer. And in the school that Lyolka had finished, some dimwit had been assigned to replace the gifted Malevich.

  And, to be sure, poets long before the Revolution had foreseen it and predicted the coming of these new Huns . . .

  After three more days in the cellar under the street, beneath the steps of unsuspecting passersby, Konoplyov summoned him again.

  Vozdvizhensky still hadn’t thought of anything to make up.

  “But you must,” Konoplyov insisted. “There’s nothing else you can do. Please, Anatoly Palych, don’t make me resort to measures. Or have them give you a new interrogator. Then you’ve had it for sure.”

  Meanwhile, he was moved to a better cell—less damp and with bunks to sleep in. They gave him some tobacco and allowed him to receive a parcel from home. The joy over the parcel came not because of the food and clean underwear it contained, it came because his family now knew he was here! And alive. (His wife would get his signature on the receipt for the parcel.)

  Konoplyov summoned him again and again tried to persuade him. But how could he dishonor his twenty years of diligent, absorbing work? Simply—how could he dishonor himself, his very soul?

  As for Konoplyov, he would now pass on the investigation—inconclusive —to someone else.

  Another day Konoplyov told him: “I’ve thought of something and made the arrangements. There’s a way you can be let out: just sign a promise to supply us with the information we need.”

  Vozdvizhensky recoiled: “How can that be . . . ? How . . . ? What . . . ? And what information can I give you?”

  “About the mood among the engineers. About some of your acquaintances, Friedrich Werner, for instance. And there’s others on the list.”

  Vozdvizhensky squeezed his head in his hands: “That I can never do!”

  Konoplyov shook his head. He simply couldn’t believe it.

  “So—is it the camps? Just keep in mind: your daughter will also get kicked out of her last year as a class alien. And maybe your possessions and your apartment will be confiscated. I’m doing you a big favor.”

  Anatoly Pavlovich sat there, unable to feel the chair beneath him and scarcely able to see Konoplyov right before him.

  He dropped his head on the little table—and broke into sobs.

  A WEEK LATER he was set free.

  1993

  NASTENKA

  1

  NASTENKA’S PARENTS DIED young, and her grandfather, Father Filaret, who by then had also lost his wife, raised her from the age of five. The girl lived in his house in the village of Milostayki until she was twelve, through the years of the German War and the revolution. Her grandfather took the place of her own father—and of her parents, in fact—and, with his gray head and bright, penetrating eyes (eyes that filled with tenderness when they fell on her), he became the dominant and unfailing figure in her childhood. Other figures, and her two aunts as well, came later. She learned her first prayers from her grandfather, along with moral precepts to guide her through life. She loved going to church. On sunny mornings, on her knees, she would lose herself in contemplating the rays of sunlight shining through the tiny windows of the cupola, in which she saw the solemn yet compassionate descent of the Almighty from the dome above. When she was eleven, at St. Nicholas in the Spring, Nastenka walked alone some twenty-five versts through the fields to the monastery. At confession, she would search her conscience for something to tell and then complain that she could find no sins. Father Filaret, speaking through his stole he had placed over her, would say: “Now you, my girl, must repent for what is to come. Repent for what is to come, for there will be sins, many sins.”

  The times were quickly changing. The fifteen desyatins of church land Father Filaret and his parishioners had been allotted were confiscated and he was given four hectares, in accordance with the mouths he had to feed, which included the two aunts. But then, to ensure that all of them would work with their own hands, even those were taken away. At school they began looking askance at Nastenka, and her schoolmates would taunt her as “the priest’s granddaughter.” The school in Milostayki, in any case, was soon closed. If she hoped to get any more schooling, she would have to leave her home and her grandfather.

  Nastenka moved the ten versts to Cherenchitsy, where four of the girls had taken a room. The boys in that school were bullies: they would line each side of the narrow corridor and let none of the girls through until each boy had felt her all over. Nastya made a quick exit to the schoolyard, broke off a branch of prickly acacia, then boldly walked back and whipped any boy who reached for her. They left her alone after that. And in fact she was red-haired, freckled, and not considered pretty. (And if one of the other girls read a passage about love from some book, she would feel vaguely troubled.)

  Like all priests’ daughters, her two aunts—Auntie Hanna and Auntie Frosya—could see no future for themselves. Just as Uncle Lyoka had earlier bought himself a certificate stating that he was the son of an impoverished peasant and then disappeared in some distant province, so now Auntie Frosya went off the Poltava in hopes of “changing her social origins.” Auntie Hanna, on the other hand, had a fiancé back in Milostayki, and would have stayed on there, but she happened to find out in the town hospital that a woman friend of hers had aborted a child fathered by her fiancé. Auntie Hanna came home, scarcely able to breathe, and within a
week, out of spite, married a Red Army soldier, a communist, one of the troops then billeted in their house. And what kind of a wedding could they have? They simply went to the registry office, and she moved to Kharkov with him. Father Filaret, shattered, damned his daughter from the pulpit for not having her marriage sanctified by the church. Now he was entirely alone in the house.

  Another winter passed, and Nastenka finished her seven-year school. What should she do now, and where should she go? Auntie Hanna, meanwhile, was doing rather well: she was the head of an orphanage on the outskirts of Kharkov, but she and her husband could not get on together and divorced, though he held an important post. She invited her niece to live with her. Nastenka spent a final summer with her grandfather. At his bidding she took with her a little paper icon of the Savior, “Persevere and Pray.” She hid it in an envelope and then put it inside a notebook: it was a bad idea to let anyone see it there. And when autumn came, she went off to her aunt.

  Auntie had already figured out which way the wind was blowing: “So now what can you do? Work at the brick factory? Or scrub floors? You’ve got no choice, you have to join the Komsomol. Then you can come and work for me.” For the time being, she took her on as a teacher’s assistant to play around with the kids. Nastenka liked that a lot, though it was just a temporary job. But she already knew what she had to do: to tell the children what was right and not lead them astray, while she prepared herself to join the Komsomol. There already was a Komsomol girl, Pava, who was the leader of the Young Pioneers and carried around a red volume of Marx and Engels from which she never parted. Even worse were the really nasty books she had, one of them a novel about a Catholic nunnery in Canada and how they prepared the girls for consecration. Just before this was to happen, they would take the girl to spend a night in a cell where a beefy young monk would pull her into his bed. And then he would console her:

  “This is only for your instruction. The body will perish whatever you do. It’s not the body that needs salvation, it’s the soul.”

  This could not be, it was a lie! Or maybe . . . somewhere across the ocean? But Pava kept insisting it was so, claiming that she knew the Russian nunneries were nothing more than lies and hypocrisy.

  It was just sickening to think about going into the Komsomol: Would they sneer at things in the same way? Would they all be like Pava?

  But Auntie Hanna kept insisting and trying to impress on her: “You’ve got to understand that the Komsomol’s your only choice. Otherwise, you might as well hang yourself.”

  Yes, her path in life was becoming more and more narrow and constricted . . . Was it really leading her to the Komsomol?

  Late one evening when no one was watching, Nastya took out the little icon of Christ and gave it one final and penitent kiss. Then she tore it into tiny pieces so that no one could tell what it had been.

  January 21 was the first anniversary of Lenin’s death. The Council of People’s Commissars of Ukraine was in charge of their orphanage, and Vlas Chubar himself came to the commemorative ceremony. The stage was draped in red and black, and before a huge portrait of Lenin, the little Mishkas and Mashkas entering the Young Pioneers were being renamed Kim, Vladlen, Marxina, and Oktyabrina. The kids beamed with joy to have their names changed and kept repeating their new ones.

  As for Nastya, she took the Komsomol oath.

  She stayed at the orphanage until spring had passed, but there was still no job open for her there. So Auntie Hanna managed to find her a place running a tiny reading room in the village of Okhochye. Nastya, who was not yet sixteen, took the little bundle containing all her possessions and went there in a cart, jolting all the way, via the regional town of Taranovka.

  She found her “library” was a single, dirty room in a hut shared with the Okhochye Village Soviet. She tucked up her skirt and set to washing the floor. She had to wipe down or wash everything and hang the portrait of Lenin—along with a rifle with no bolt that for some reason belonged in the room—on the wall. (It was just at this point that the chairman of the regional executive committee, the tall Arandarenko with jet-black hair, popped in and oohed and aahed, praising her for the way she had cleaned up the room.) The little reading room carried a few pamphlets and the newspaper The Village Poor. A couple of peasants might drop by to have a look at the paper (and, at the same time, how could they keep from carrying it off to roll cigarettes?), but no one ever picked up any of the pamphlets.

  So now, where was she supposed to live? The chairman of the village soviet, Roman Korzun, told her: “It’s not safe for you to go off too far, someone might take a shot at you.” He found a spot for her in part of a house requisitioned from a deacon, quite near the village soviet.

  It took a while for Nastya to understand why it was dangerous: now she was a dyed-in-the-wool part of Soviet power. Then came St. John’s Day, the festival of the church in Okhochye; there was to be a fair, and a lot of visitors were expected. Their Komsomol cell had rehearsed an antireligious play for the holiday, and they put it on in a large shed. They also sang a little ditty:French kisses only make me bored,

  I’m not the Virgin Mary.

  I won’t give birth to Christ the Lord,

  So let us both be merry.

  This wrung her heart. It was a humiliation, a disgrace.

  Even more: the whole family from the deacon’s house was now looking at Nastya with hostility, and she didn’t dare explain things and be honest with them. That, maybe, would make things even worse. She went quietly past the house to her own entryway. But Roman lived here as well, and though he was over thirty, he was a bachelor or perhaps divorced. He told her that he was taking the first room; it led into a second, where Nastya would live.

  The problem was that there was no proper door between the rooms, just a curtain.

  Yet Nastya felt quite safe. Roman Korzun was a grown-up and he was her boss, so she would go to her room, lie down on the bed, and read a book by the kerosene lamp. But only a day went by before he was grumbling : “I don’t like these city bitches. Every one of them acts like she’s still got her cherry.” On the third evening she was again lying on her bed reading. Korzun silently came up to the doorway, tore back the curtain, and rushed at her. He immediately pinned back both her arms and stopped her from crying out by covering her mouth with his burning lips.

  She couldn’t move. Even more, she was utterly stunned. He was damp with sweat, disgusting. So, is this how it happens?

  Roman saw the blood and was amazed: from a Komsomol girl? And he asked her forgiveness.

  Now she had to wash it all off in the basin so the deacon’s family wouldn’t see.

  But that same night he came back to enjoy himself once more, and then again, covering her with kisses.

  Nastya felt as if someone had struck her over the head, and she had no strength to resist.

  After that he no longer came to her; he would call her to his room every evening, and somehow she would meekly obey. He would keep her there for a long time, smoking a cigarette in the intervals.

  It was during those same days that she heard something that made her blood run cold: syphilis was raging in Okhochye.

  What if he had it?

  But she dared not ask him directly.

  How long could this go on, anyway? Korzun was masterful and insatiable. Early one morning when it was already light, while he slept and she was awake, she caught sight of the hateful little secretary of the village soviet looking in the window. He had probably come to summon Korzun for some emergency, but he had already seen what was going on—and seen that she saw him—and he only smirked in a vile and filthy way. He even stood there for a time to have a good look and then went away without knocking.

  The secretary’s fiendish grin pierced and cut through all the stupor and numbness in which Nastya had spent these weeks. It wasn’t just that he would now spill this story all through the village, his grin alone was a disgrace!

  She kept fidgeting, but Roman wouldn’t wake up. She stealthily gat
hered her few things into the same small bundle she had brought here and quietly went out. The village was still asleep. She went to the road to the region’s main town, Taranovka.

  The morning was still and mild. The cattle were being driven out to pasture. She could hear the crack of the herdsman’s whip, but not a single carriage was yet rumbling along the road, and there was nothing to raise the dust that lay like velvet beneath her feet. (It reminded her of that morning a few years back when she had made her trip to the monastery.)

  She didn’t know where she was going and why. She knew only that she couldn’t stay in the village.

  But she did know someone: Shura, the unmarried girl who carried messages for the regional executive committee. She went to Shura’s tiny room, burst into sobs, and told her everything.

  Shura hugged her and wiped away her tears. Nastya thought: I’ll go straight to Arandarenko and tell him the whole thing.

  Arandarenko didn’t even call her in, but he remembered her. He gave orders to have her taken to someone’s desk in the executive committee office, and she was given some papers and paid her wages.

  Her surprise at his kindness didn’t last long. People in the office told her that he was a regular outlaw where women were concerned. This was how he worked: He would take one of the nurses from the hospital or a young teacher for a ride—in summer in a carriage with springs, in winter in a sleigh. His driver would race the horses into the steppe to someplace where there wasn’t a soul to be seen and then, while they raced along at full gallop, he’d spread the girl’s legs. That was how he liked it.

  Nastya, too, didn’t have to wait long for her turn. (Anyway, how could she fight him off? And where else could she go with her little bundle ?) Smolyanoy, the driver, called her in, gave her a pat on the shoulder, and gestured for her to follow him. And off they galloped! Lord, those horses flew like demons, and it seemed for certain they’d be thrown out of the carriage. The vicious Arandarenko with the forelock threw her on her back and twisted her arms over her head. Past his dangling forelock she could see the driver’s broad back—he never turned around once—and the clouds in the sky above.