Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  In the past September of 1930, there was an ominous rumbling across the land: forty-eight people—”wreckers in the food supply chain”—were sentenced to be shot. “Responses from workers” appeared in the newspapers: “Wreckers must be wiped from the face of the earth!” The front page of Izvestia proclaimed: “Crush the serpent beneath your heel!” and the proletariat demanded that the OGPU be awarded the Order of Lenin.

  In November they published the indictment in the case of “The Industrial Party,” and that meant a direct attack on the engineers. Once more the chilling phrases appeared in the newspapers: “Agents of the French interventionists and White émigrés” and “Sweep away these traitors with an iron broom!”

  Such things tore at your heart, but you were helpless. Not everyone could even express their fears, and those who did could only speak to someone they knew well, as well as Anatoly Pavlovich had known Friedrich Albertovich these past ten years.

  There was a four-hour demonstration in Rostov on the day the Industrial Party trial began, with the demonstrators demanding that all the accused be shot! It was unbearably vile. (Vozdvizhensky had managed to wriggle out of it and did not attend.)

  Living day after day, feeling the tension and the darkness within, the sense of doom grew ever stronger. But why would they come for him? He had worked as if inspired all through Soviet times; he was resourceful, he believed in what he was doing, and it was only the stupidity and shoddy practices of the party bosses that hindered him at every step.

  One night, less than two months after the trial, they came for Vozdvizhensky.

  ~ * ~

  Then began an incomprehensible, nightmarish time of delirium, and it went on for many days and nights. It began with being stripped naked, having all the buttons of your clothes cut off and the soles of your shoes pierced with an awl; it continued in a stifling underground chamber with no ventilation, breathing air already breathed by many people. There was not a single window and never the light of day, but set in the ceiling were squares of bottle glass you couldn’t see through. In this cell without beds you slept on the floor, on concrete that had been covered with loose planks. Everyone was stupefied from nighttime interrogations, some beaten until they were covered with bruises, others with hands burned by cigarette butts, some sitting in silence, others telling half-insane stories. Vozdvizhensky had never once been called out or touched by anyone, but his mind had already been shaken from its foundations and could no longer grasp what was happening or even connect itself with his former life—now, alas, gone forever. His poor health meant that he hadn’t been called up for the German War; no one had bothered him during the Civil War that had run violently through Rostov-Novocherkassk. He had spent a quarter century at deliberate intellectual labor, and now he could only tremble each time the door opened, by day or by night: Had they come for him? There was no way he was prepared to stand up under torture!

  He wasn’t called out, however. Everyone in the cell in this underground warehouse was amazed. (Only later did they realize it actually was a warehouse, and the thick glass apertures in the ceiling were set into the sidewalk on the city’s main street, along which carefree pedestrians constantly passed, people who had not yet been doomed to end here; and they could feel the walls tremble as streetcars passed above.)

  They didn’t call him out. Everyone was amazed: These newcomers usually get dragged out straightaway.

  So maybe it really was a mistake? Maybe they would let him go?

  But on one of those days—he had lost count which one—he was called out. “Hands behind your back,” and a warder with jet-black hair led him out and then up a flight of stairs—to ground level?—and then higher and higher, several stories, the whole while clucking his tongue like some mysterious bird.

  An interrogator in a GPU uniform sat at a desk in a shadowy room. You could barely make out his features, only that he was young and broad-faced. He silently pointed to a tiny table that stood in the opposite corner, diagonally from his desk. Vozdvizhensky found himself sitting on a narrow chair, facing a gloomy window some distance away. The lamp had not been turned on.

  He waited with sinking heart. The interrogator continued to write in silence.

  Then he said, severely: “Tell me about your wrecking activities.”

  Vozdvizhensky was more astonished than frightened. “There was never anything of the sort, I assure you! “ He wanted to add a perfectly reasonable thought: How can an engineer spoil anything?

  But after the Industrial Party affair?

  “Never mind that, just tell me.”

  “There was nothing, it could never happen!”

  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 naive. 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 Vozdvizhensky’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 sl
eep 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.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  NASTENKA

  1

  Nastenka’s parents died young, and her grandfather, Father Filaret, LKLI 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 fiance 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 fiance. 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.