How terribly he coughed, and for such a long time, tearing away not only at his own breast but those of his wife and his daughter as well. The sense of grief now never left their home; it had become permanent. But when she came to the institute, her mind was filled with other thoughts. Since childhood Nastenka had been closer to her father than her mother, and she always loved to tell him everything; and now everything that absorbed her outside the home was so new and so disconcerting.
He would listen to her. He showed no surprise but only looked, looked at her through those eyes that had become so large and which, month by month, ever more clearly expressed the inevitability of loss—that was their dominant expression.
He would stroke her head (now he was always in bed, propped up on thick pillows). Sometimes, using his ebbing strength to breathe and speak, he would reply that the acquisition of any form of knowledge is a long and far from straightforward process and that which his daughter had now learned would also pass; she would still look at things in ever new ways, and there was no limit to the depths of human life.
She was growing ever closer to Shurik, and nothing and no one other than he could bring Nastya the very breath of the Era, as hot as Rostov’s torrid summer wind. He felt it so strongly, and he conveyed it with such vital power! He had already published things in the regional newspaper The Hammer; he never missed an opportunity to speak in class or at institute gatherings or rallies and literary debates; between classes he gladly shared his ideas with his friends and, most of all, with Nastenka, whom he had begun to walk home. (He came from a good family, the son of an important lawyer, and never treated girls with the coarse boorishness that was becoming the norm.)
Now he admitted that the On Guardists had been in error when they took the side of Trotsky during a party debate, but they had admitted their mistake and corrected themselves. And even before the Shakhty Affair, he boldly declared: “We are proud to be labeled literary Chekists, proud that our enemies call us informers!” Now he was entirely consumed with the struggle against Polonsky-ism, against Voronsky-ism, against the literary group Pereval that had descended to the point of neo-Slavophilism, of kulak humanism, of “love for man in general,” of “the beauty of the universal man.” At last the Literary Section of the Communist Academy sentenced Voronsky-ism to liquidation. But the enemies multiplied: simultaneously, there was a struggle against Pereverzevism. Those people—though they were correct in understanding that the author’s personality, biography, and literary predecessors had no significance whatsoever in his work and that his system of imagery stemmed from the system of production—still overdid it in arguing that every author was a writer only of his own class, and that a proletarian writer could not describe a bourgeois. And this was certainly a leftist deviation.
After the walk home he and Nastenka kissed in the semidarkness— and sometimes under a full moon—on Pushkin Boulevard, about twenty paces across from the window behind which her father lay, coughing his life away.
But Shurik was now insisting, more and more assertively, on taking their relationship right to its final point. She put him off, imploring him. She yielded as much as she could, but still, there was a limit!
In fact, did marriage really exist these days? It might as well have been abolished. When people came to an arrangement, they went to the registry office, and many of them never bothered with that and simply got together and then separated without bothering to register.
But Shurik demanded: Either, or! Either that or a breakup.
She was wounded by his stubborn refusal to be swayed. She wept in his arms and begged him to wait.
Absolutely not!
But she was not yet prepared to let him have his way about this.
On one of these intensely painful evenings, he brusquely and emphatically broke up with her.
In class in the days that followed he made a point of showing his indifference and avoided her.
How her heart ached!
She loved him and she revered him. But still, she couldn’t. . .
How long would her suffering have gone on? And how far would it have gone? But at this point her father began living out his final days.
Now each day and each week before the numbing cold of parting were numbered; soon the final thread that linked the consciousness and the purpose of the three of you would slip from your caring fingers, and you and Mama would be left here, while he, forever, would . . .
The full sense of emptiness set in after the funeral (her mother was a believer, but there was not a single church or a single priest left in the city of four million; a religious funeral was a very risky thing in any case). Her mother grew wrinkled; she weakened and lost all her vitality. It happened so quickly that Nastenka felt somehow older and more responsible. Mama now could offer her no guidance.
As for Shurik, once he had broken with her, he made no move to restore their previous relations. He had a will of iron.
At the end of winter the graduates were being given their job assignments, and now Nastenka held out for a place in Rostov. She had nowhere else to go. And she got her place.
That last summer, nervous about her coming encounter with the forty-odd young minds that would be entrusted to her, Nastenka spent a lot of time in the library. She worked through the Encyclopedia of Literature that was just now being published, the methodological journal of the Directorate of Education of the Russian Republic, and various other journals filled with critical essays. She filled in the gaps in what she had learned earlier from Shurik, and all those things, to be sure, were being published everywhere. You needed only the time to read and summarize them.
As for Shurik, he went to Moscow for good. He’d been given a job in some publishing house. Back to that beautiful Moscow that she’d left behind and now would never recover . . .
Yet it was better that he had gone.
You could reach the library by taking the narrow Nikolaevsky Lane that dropped down through the ravine that was there in those days, or you could go more directly through the city park. The park had many things to offer. There was a straight and level central pathway from which the ground sloped downward on both sides to little squares with flowerbeds and fountains. A band shell where there were free classical music concerts in summer stood on the hills on one side, and on the other side was a summer restaurant where a tiny variety band played irritating music.
Nastenka’s face was rather broad, and her figure was nothing special, but her eyes were filled with an amazing radiance and she had a smile that simply captured people’s hearts, as she was often told and was well aware.
During her years at the institute there would be parties with the kids from other faculties, and if they could get some gramophone records they would dance the foxtrot and the tango (and though older people generally denounced such things, the dances were something that was ours!). Now she and the one or two girlfriends she had left in Rostov would go to the city park in the evenings; the young people who knew each other would pair off and slip away along the dark pathways to find some privacy. (Once you’ve become a teacher, though, there’ll be no more of such foolery.) The surprising thing was that every single boy behaved crudely, with a complete lack of sensitivity. None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings. All of the boys had accepted the notorious and opportunistic slogan, “Forget about the cherry blossoms.” People said with conviction that love was nothing more than “some bourgeois gimmick.” One of the characters in some new play expressed it like this: “I need a woman, so why can’t you do me this favor, as a comrade and a Komsomol girl?”
No, Shurik wasn’t like that.
But all that was over.
Time rushed on. (There was even a new novel entitled Forward, Time!) The Five-Year Plan in Four Years extended itself and rumbled over them. Back in the Pedagogical Institute they had all been instilled with the idea that Soviet literature—and therefore, teachers of literature—must not lag behind the demands of the Period of Re
construction. The very same month Nastya was preparing to teach her first lessons, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers published its resolution calling for positive heroes in literary works and for shock-worker projects in literature; workers themselves should become writers and thus ensure that art did not lag behind the demands of the working class. Some were even setting forth the idea that only the newspaper or the propaganda poster could be the literature of our time—certainly not the novel.
Well, this was all so rash and impetuous that it took your breath away. What did they mean—no novels? What would happen to the novel?
Now you have to go and meet the children, at a time when the Education Directorate is saying that teaching Krylov’s fables within the walls of the Soviet school poses a definite pedagogical risk.
Nastenka (now she was addressed as Anastasia Dmitrievna) was given three parallel fifth-grade classes—twelve-year-olds—and was the homeroom teacher for Five A.
Her first lesson! But it was the first for the children as well: in this second level they were no longer little kids, and how proud they were of that! September 1 was a joyful, sunny day. A few of the parents brought flowers to class. Anastasia Dmitrievna wore a bright shantung dress; the girls were all in white frocks, and many of the boys wore white shirts. Their funny little faces and brightly shining eyes were full of exultation. At long last her dream had come true, and she could do all that Maria Feofanovna had done ... (And even more: in this present age, when everything had become coarse and crude, she could make sure that these little boys became decent men, not like the ones today.) Now, in lesson after lesson, she could pour into their heads all the things she had preserved from this great and good literature.
But somehow it wasn’t happening that way. She could not yet see a way to break through the rigidly determined teaching program:
The building cranes crash
By the foundation pit. . .
And the regional inspector might drop in on any of her classes to check on her. She had to begin with the Turkestan-Siberian Railway that was now being completed and see that the children memorized how the trains passed through the desert:
. . . past all they fly
Scaring people and flocks,
Not letting them by
On the caravan tracks.
And then she had to take up Magnitogorsk, and then the Dnieper Dam and Bezymensky’s poem ridiculing a doomed professor-suicide from the dying class. And then there was the poem about an Indian boy who had heard something about Lenin, the inspiring leader of all the oppressed in the world, and who had made his way to him in Moscow on foot all the way from India.
Next, they saddled her with the slogan “To Demyanize Literature”: to instill it with the militant spirit of Demyan Bedny.
Anastasia Dmitrievna, completely perplexed, saw no way to resist these things. And how could she take the responsibility for shutting off these little children from the era in which they were living?
It was good, though, that they were still in the junior grades. Today’s harsh conditions will pass, and with a few years’ more study they’ll get to the cherished classics. And even today not all of Pushkin has been written off:
Here all bear heavy yokes unto the grave,
Afraid to cherish hope or private dream;
A maiden blossoms to become a slave
And victim of her heartless master’s scheme.
She read it aloud in class, striving to convey to the children the poet’s pain, but alongside the crashing of the cranes, the lines of his verse seemed to be coming from another world, one that was far, far away.
Inspiration came only in her Russian language classes: this was a straightforward, unshakeable, and eternal subject. But it, too, had been shaken! Look at what they were doing with the new orthography! And the rules were changing so quickly, she couldn’t keep up with them herself.
Still, Nastenka taught all these production and Five-Year Plan works with the same dedication that she felt to her own sacred cause of literature; she taught so that the kids loved her, surrounded her during recess and looked at her with gratitude, reflecting the constant radiance in her own eyes.
Meanwhile, the stores in the city stood empty, and all the private shops had been closed. There were the first mentions of “difficulties in the meat supply,” and then “difficulties in the sugar supply.” Soon there was nothing left to buy, and food ration cards were introduced. (Teachers were considered civil servants, and this entitled them to 400 grams of bread, while her ever-weakening mother went to work in a tobacco factory so as to get a “worker’s” ration card for 600 grams.) A hungry time set in, and no one had wages high enough for the private market. In fact, the militia were driving off the market sellers.
Even the old week, with each day measured off, had ended. Now there was an “unbroken five-day week.” Members of a family would have free days at different times, and the common Sunday was done away with . . . “Forward, Time!” Time rushed along so quickly that it lost its very dignity and seemed to stop simply being.
Life grew ever harsher. One day you might get 200 grams of bread on your ration card, the next day 300, and the amounts would alternate. You always went around feeling hungry. Rumor had it that people were dying of hunger in the villages across the whole region. You would come across the bodies of people who had made their way from the countryside and dropped dead on the streets of the city. Nastenka herself never stumbled on a corpse, but once a peasant woman from the Kuban, emaciated beyond belief and barely able to stand on her feet, knocked at her door. They fed her some of their own thin soup and she, no longer able to weep, told of how she had buried her three little children and set off across the steppe haphazardly in hope of saving herself. The whole of the Kuban had been cordoned off by soldiers, and they would catch anyone trying to flee and turn them back. This woman had somehow managed to slip through the cordon by night, but boarding a train was impossible: they could pick her out near a station or inside the train, and then it was back behind the line of doom or to prison.
Should they let her stay with them?
She left, stumbling at every step.
Mama said: “I feel like dying myself. Where will all this end?”
Nastenka tried to raise her spirits: “We’ll break through to a better world, Mama! Communism, after all, is based on the same ideals as Christianity; it just takes a different path to reach them.”
Student notebooks had disappeared from the stationery stores. There were a few lucky children who still had some from their previous stock, but a regular two-hundred-page notebook bound in oilcloth was now a real treasure. Then notebooks were reduced in width and made with rough paper that caught at the pen nibs. They began distributing notebooks through the schools, each pupil getting two of them for a quarter of the school year, and they had to be used for all the subjects together. Somehow the kids had to divide these skinny little notebooks among their different subjects and write smaller—so much for penmanship. What remained was the blackboard and more rote memorization. A few parents were able to get old bookkeeping forms or warehouse timesheets, and their children wrote on the backs of them.
But children of that age could cope with absolutely everything. They still laughed and ran around at recess. But what about you? How were you to get through this painful year? How were you to lead the children toward a better time while preserving unspoiled their sense of the Pure and the Beautiful? And how were you to teach them to discern the lightness and the inevitability of the New Era through all the jumbled ugliness of the life around them? Nastenka vividly recalled Shurik’s enthusiasm. Even now she was still infected by him: there was someone who possessed a true vision! As the poet said:
They’ll bear it all, and build themselves a road
With muscle and bone . . .
Was Russian literature not continuing even today? Was the present love for the people not the direct product of the sacred precepts of Nekrasov, Belinsky, Dobroliubov, and Che
rnyshevsky? All those dry commentaries of Kogan and Friche, or the passionate monologues of Shurik— surely they weren’t built on thin air?
When one considered it carefully, Dobroliubov’s ray of light had never stopped shining! It had penetrated into our time as well, but now was it not a ray of burning scarlet? One simply had to be able to pick it out in today’s conditions.
But then she went to read the latest instructional guidelines from the Education Directorate, the articles of Osip Martynovich Beskin in particular, and her heart sank: she read that an artist could not rely on intuition in his work; he was obliged to take control of his perception through class consciousness. And furthermore: this so-called literature with a heart was nothing more than a slogan soiled by the greasy fingers of Russophiles, and it had been raised in Russia over a foundation laid by a patriarchal cabal.
Literature with a heart! That was what she longed for most of all!
The program for next year included the “iron foundation” of Soviet literature: Fadeev’s Rout; Panfyorov’s Bruski, about collectivization; Gladkov’s Cement (a horrid thing because it presented thirteen-year-old children with violent scenes of erotic conquest). Yet it was true that Serafimovich’s Iron Flood showed in remarkably laconic fashion the actions by a mass of people as a whole—something, it seems, that our literature had never done before. Libedinsky’s The Week aroused sympathy for Robeyko as he forced his tubercular throat to call out the inhabitants to cut down the monastery forest for firewood so that the peasants could buy seed grain. (Still, that must mean that every tiny bit of last year’s seed grain had been confiscated.)
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 11