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 anti-religious 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 gathered 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.
A few days later Roman Korzun came to Taranovka, begging her to come back to him and promising to marry her. Nastya felt a wave of anger at him and scornfully turned him down. Then he threatened to kill himself. “What, a party member like you? No, you won’t do that.” Then he submitted an official paper demanding that the librarian return to the village—she was a deserter! The central executive committee refused his request. Korzun even called a meeting of the villagers and made them vote: Return our librarian! Nastya was very afraid they would send her back to Okhochye. (Thank God she hadn’t come down with the disease there.) But Arandarenko said no.
He ordered Nastya to pack her things and go to Kharkov for a two-month librarian’s course. He went along. He reserved a room with a cot for her for a few days.
And he would come to her. To this point she had only been unhappy, but now some new feelings were stirring inside her and she began to sense what might happen to her. Arandarenko had compliments for her: “You’re turning into a proper young tart. Your eyes sparkle, you’re lovely.”
Then Arandarenko went back to Taranovka, and Nastya’s courses continued. She came back to Taranovka as a regular librarian. She was expecting Arandarenko to come to her, but he didn’t see her even once and seemed to have forgotten about her.
There was a drama society in the Komsomol club, and Nastya began attending in the evenings. They were putting on the Ukrainian play Till the Sun Rises and a new play about the class struggle, showing how the children of kulaks try to make children of poor peasants fall in love with them so as to “sneak their way into socialism.” One of the people in their drama society was Sashko Poguda—broad-shouldered and slim, with curly blond hair, and he could sing the Ukrainian song, “Something Fills Me with Sadness Today” so beautifully.
Nastenka began to like him more and more, in the real way, from her heart. Spring came, this one her seventeenth. Nastenka was happy to go out walking with him along the railway or across the fields. He began talking of marrying her, without asking his parents. And they became lovers. They wandered into the cemetery and there, on the fresh grass of April, just beside the church . . . Anyway, what did she have left to preserve, and why? She conceived from their very first time. She told Sashko, and all he said was: “How
do I know who else you’ve been running around with?”
She wept. She made a point of lifting heavy loads and moving heavy furniture, but nothing helped. And Sashko began dodging meetings with her. His parents wanted to marry him to the medical assistant’s daughter, who would bring a good dowry.
She tried to drown herself in a well, but one of her friends managed to stop her. Word leaked out. And the Komsomol cell forced Sashko to marry her. They went to the registry office. (As the popular taunt at the time had it, “Civil marriage—that’s just doggy-style in the barn.”) His parents didn’t want Nastya to show her face in their home.
They rented a wretched little apartment. Sashko never shared what he earned but spent it carousing. In January, in a very cold snap, Nastya gave birth on the sleeping platform atop a Russian brick stove. They couldn’t get her to move from that spot to go to the hospital. Her little girl burned her foot on a hot brick and carried the scar for the rest of her life.
And her daughter—was she to go unbaptized? But these days, where could she have it done? If word got out, they’d kick her out of the Komsomol, and then she’d have nothing.
Poguda was drinking even more. He’d basically abandoned her and didn’t care at all about their daughter. Nastya decided to leave him. Divorce was simple enough: you paid your three rubles and they sent you a postcard from the registry office: divorced. The Komsomol helped her get a librarian’s job on the outskirts of Kharkov, in Kachanovka, a settlement attached to a slaughterhouse and a sausage factory. She found a nice childless couple who agreed to take in little Yulka, now weaned, for six months or a year and Nastya could visit. There was no choice if she wanted to find a place to live, and she rented a little corner of a room from a widow who was alone.
But swearing off men didn’t last. The warm weather set in again. One of the people in their Komsomol cell was Teryosha Repko, a quiet, sweet, pale fellow. Once, after a long evening meeting (that year they were battling with the Trotskyite opposition) he offered to see her home: the settlement was notorious for its number of robberies, and they had to go past a rubbish dump on a piece of waste ground where dead bodies would even turn up. When they came to her house, they kissed with a tenderness that Nastya had never experienced. He went on walking her home from the library—a second time, then a third. Each of them had a powerful longing for the other, but they had nowhere to go. She couldn’t take him back to the widow’s; she went to bed early, and there was just one room. But there was a glassed-in veranda, and they tiptoed into it and reveled in each other right on the floor.
She loved him, she wanted to cling to him, to hold him in her arms, to keep caressing him. She wanted to marry him. Late that fall she became pregnant. And then suddenly Teryosha’s landlady, a woman of forty, burst into the library: “I came to have a look at you and see for myself just what you are!” Nastya froze while the woman shouted abuse at her. Only later did she find out that the landlady was supporting Teryosha and in exchange he was living with her and couldn’t leave.
But why on earth didn’t he tell her that before? She was lost in black despair. She had an abortion—it was only a month, after all.
Her life now was utterly empty. And she had to collect Yulka.
It was the icehouse manager, Kobytchenko, who took notice of her and found her a room. She took Yulka back. Kobytchenko kept her well fed all through the winter. This time she missed the first signs of her pregnancy and had to go to a private hospital. They took out a three-month fetus, and the doctor cursed her; they could already tell that it was a boy: his body was tossed into the waste bucket.
Kobytchenko either lost his job or was transferred, but he vanished. And Nastya developed pneumonia. She knew that Sashko Poguda was now in the central committee of the trade union, so she went to ask him for a voucher for a sanatorium in the Crimea. He promised, but while he was arranging it her pneumonia passed. She went away just the same, without Yulka.
The sanatorium was in the former St. George’s Monastery, not far from Sevastopol. It was the year after the huge Crimean earthquake, and not many people wanted to come here so there was no shortage of rooms. And just think: right around the corner was a detachment of sailors. A few women and girls from the sanatorium would go over for a visit and spend an hour or two under the bushes. And Nastya couldn’t fight off her constant cravings. She had become something of a charmer and never lowered her eyes. She, too, found herself a sailor, and then another.
She came back to Kachanovka, and the elderly bookkeeper from the factory told her he had to make a business trip to some far-off town. She could bring Yulka as well. It took a few days to get there, traveling in a private compartment on the train. They spent a few more days there and then came back. He was nice to her in a lot of ways. She had her nineteenth birthday there in the train, and they celebrated it with a bottle of wine. But after the trip, the bookkeeper never visited her again. He had a family.
Somehow, she had to get herself back on her feet. Thank heavens the club manager sent her on some preparatory courses for an institute. It was like a workers’ faculty, but just for six months. The stipend was thirty rubles, just enough for some thin soup and porridge. Things were getting a lot more expensive. The dormitory was in a former church, vast and cold. The courses had already started, and all the double bunks were taken. So she wouldn’t have to sleep on the concrete floor, she and Yulka made a bed on the table where they had once laid the shroud or rested the coffin at funerals. Then, since she was a mother with a child, they moved her into an unused bathroom in another dormitory, a place without a window. She would leave Yulka at the nursery school from seven in the morning until seven at night. Here, too, a “visitor” turned up—Shcherbina, a well-fed, strong, heavy fellow. He was married and claimed he got on well with his wife, but would drop himself on Nastya like an eager stallion. Given the hunger and barrenness of her life, Nastya welcomed his visits and was always ready for him. Shcherbina would bring something for her whenever he came—a pair of silky cotton stockings, some perfume, sometimes just money. And what could she do? She accepted it all. Maybe it was because of her last, difficult abortion, but she never got pregnant again.
In September of the next year, Nastya was accepted into a three-year course in the Institute of Social Education. She moved to a proper dormitory—one room for three mothers—and put Yulka in nursery school.
That winter Auntie Hanna, who had disappeared for a long time, showed up in Kharkov again. Nastya rushed to see her. It turned out that Granddad Filaret had been exiled to Solovki.
She felt cold shivers all over. She could see his considerate, kind face framed in gray hair, and she could even hear his warm voice that gave so much good advice. Solovki! The most terrible word in the language after “GPU.”
And so for fear of showing our connection with him, we had all abandoned him. We betrayed him.
But how could we help him?
We couldn’t. Auntie Frosya from Poltava, it seems, had been writing to him while he was still in Milostayki, and so they found out she was a priest’s daughter and kicked her out of the accounts office and wouldn’t let her get a decent job. And through Auntie Frosya, Auntie Hanna was also found out and lost everything. But she had a friend in the GPU and he set up a job for her: she was to get herself a good apartment in Kharkov and seduce whomever they told her to. Even though she was past thirty, she still had her looks and now dressed very well; and her apartment had all you could ask for, three rooms and it was warm. (Warm! These days, not everyone had such luck.)
After they had met a few times, Auntie Hanna asked: “Do you know what Athenian evenings are?” Nastya didn’t know. “All the women have to walk around undressed, and the men make their choice. Next time I don’t have enough women, I’ll give you a call on the telephone, OK?”
Well, it was OK, of course. In fact, Nastenka even went eagerly, so hungry had she become for loving. Auntie Hanna had a skintight dress made for Nastya and then one as transparent as muslin.
It was all carefree fun. The life all around her had become so barren—just ration cards, and little enough you could get on them—but here her cup was overflowing.
And so two winters passed, and the summer between them. Yulka had already turned four, then five, and Nastenka was twenty-two. Then, suddenly, a couple of agents picked up Auntie Hanna, and she disappeared without a trace. And all that life was over.
In her final year, Nastya worked all the harder to get good marks. Now all the general schools were full of “socialist education”; it was pedagogy and pedology everywhere. The graduates were supposed to bring socialist thinking into mass education.
At the same time, deathly famine hung over the whole province and over Kharkov itself. Your ration card would get you 200 grams of bread. Starving peasants would slip past the guard posts to get into the city where they could beg for food. Mothers abandoned their dying children at strangers’ doorways. Dying people lay here and there on the streets.
A letter came from Auntie Frosya saying that Father Filaret had died. (The letter couldn’t say plainly where, but it was clear enough that it had happened out there.)
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 9