Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Forty pairs of childish eyes were fixed on Anastasia Dmitrievna every day, and how could she betray their trust? Yes, children, sacrifices are inevitable, and the whole of Russian literature has called out to us to make sacrifices. Yes, there has been “wrecking” going on here and there, but the unprecedented scale of our industrialization will bring us all a happiness we’ve never known before. And when you grow up, you’ll have a chance to take part in it. You have to examine every event carefully, even the dark ones, as the poet said so aptly:

  Only he can rise to glory,

  Only he can join our rush

  Who finds, ‘neath petty facts, the story

  Of Revolution’s forward push.

  But then they took back the textbooks they had just given out for the year: they had been found incorrect and lagging behind reality. They began publishing “loose” textbooks—ones that dealt with contemporary issues and were to be used only for the current half of the year, because by the next year they would already be outdated. A newspaper published Gorky’s article “To the Humanists,” in which he denounced and damned those humanists—and this was immediately included in the next loose textbook: “It is entirely natural that workers’ and peasants’ power is crushing its enemies like lice.”

  It all left you terrified, scarcely able to catch your breath, and utterly confused. How could you possibly present that to the children? And why?

  But Gorky was a great writer, a Russian classic, and an authority respected across the globe, so how could your wretched little mind dare challenge him? And here, right alongside, he writes about those who have lost contact with reality and live lives of ease: “What is it that this class of degenerates wants? ... a well-fed, colorless, licentious, and irresponsible life.” And then you remember Nekrasov’s lines, “From the exultant, idle chatterers . . .” And didn’t Chekhov call for a little man with a hammer to trouble the sleeping conscience each day?

  So she decided to organize a literary circle. A dozen of her most responsive, favorite students from Six A signed up, and after class Anastasia Dmitrievna would take them through the best of the nineteenth century, things that weren’t included in the syllabus. But there was no way she could hide her circle from the principal (a caustic woman who taught social science). From her it went up to the Region, and an instructor from the methodology office came and sat down like a toad at one of the meetings of the literary circle. Anastasia Dmitrievna cut out all of the enthusiasm, all the sense, all the inspiration, and could scarcely recognize what remained as her own. The verdict of the toad was: Enough harping on the classics! The fact is that it distracts students from life.

  “Fact” had become a byword in these years. The word rang out as something incontestable, deadly as a pistol shot. (And the toad-like instructor could have reached a far more brutal verdict: “This was sneak attack!”)

  There was another possibility—outings to the theater. The five-day week had now changed to six days, and every date divisible by six was a common rest day, similar to the former Sunday. On these free days the theater put on cheap matinees for schoolchildren. Children, accompanied by their teachers, would come from all across the city. The enchantment of the lights dimming in the hall, the curtains drawing back, the actors moving under the bright spotlights, their vivid appearance in makeup, their ringing voices—how these things could capture the heart of a child, and what a shining path to literature they offered.

  It was true that the plays were what you could expect, requisites of the Five-Year Plan: Trenyov’s Lyubov Yarovaya, in which the wife of a White officer shoots her husband out of ideological commitment; and quite a lot of Kirshon—The Rails Are Humming, about the subversive activities of engineers; and Bread, about the vicious resistance of the kulaks and the ardor of the poor peasantry. (After all, you couldn’t deny the class struggle and its role in history.) She did manage to bring her students to Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. And so, taking up the children’s enthusiasm, Anastasia Dmitrievna arranged a reading in which students in group Seven A took the various roles in the play. A star student, a skinny boy with disheveled hair that would never stay in place, read in an unnatural voice dripping with tragedy and aping his favorite actor: “Louisa, did you love the marshal? This candle will not burn out before you die ...” (This same boy was the class deputy on the school pedagogical council, as was the practice.) Schiller’s play was considered compatible with revolutionary times and attending it would not bring a reprimand. But if they were thinking of reading anything by Ostrovsky they had to choose very, very carefully.

  Rostov-on-the-Don was declared “a city of hundred-percent literacy” (though there were still more than plenty illiterates). In the schools, they were using the “brigade-laboratory method”: the instructor did not present the lesson and did not assign individual grades. The class was split into brigades of four or five, and the desks were rearranged accordingly; one of the students in each brigade would read aloud, in a low voice, from the “loose” textbook. Then the instructor would ask for one student to answer for the whole brigade. And if the answer was “satisfactory” or “very satisfactory,” then each member of the brigade would receive a “sat.” or a “v. sat.”

  Then there was a school quarter when none of the usual loose textbooks arrived and no required curriculum was assigned. Without them, even the city education authorities were lost: Did this mean some major shift in the party line? They decided that for the time being each teacher would carry on however they chose and take responsibility for what they did.

  It was then that their social science teacher and principal began teaching bits from Marx’s Capital to the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades at once. Did that mean Anastasia Dmitrievna could now teach some of the Russian classics? But how could she make the right choice and not fall into error? Dostoevsky, of course, was ruled out, and in any case the students were not yet ready to be exposed to him. And Leskov—no, even he was ruled out. Nor could she take Aleksei Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan the Terrible or Tsar Fyodor. As for Pushkin—well, not everything. And Lermontov—not everything. (And if any of the young lads asked about Esenin she would change the subject and not answer—he was strictly forbidden.)

  In fact, she had grown unaccustomed to such freedom. She herself could no longer even express what she had once felt. After all that Nastenka had read, discovered, and had been taught to see over these past years, even the former unshakeable integrity of Russian literature now seemed to have been shaken. Now she was frightened to talk about an author or a book without providing some class basis for them. She paged through Kogan and found the phrase, “the types of ideas with which this work falls into line.”

  Meanwhile, new issues of Soviet literary journals were coming out, and the newspapers were heaping praises on some new works. She lost heart: she could not allow these young adolescents to lag behind. They were the ones, after all, who would have to live in this world, and she must help them find their way into it.

  And so she sought out these new poems and stories that had been hailed in the press and brought them to her students. Here, children, is the highest degree of selflessness for the sake of the common cause:

  I’ll gladly give up both my name and rank

  For a number, a letter, a tag!

  This did not go over well. Young hearts must be set aflame with something that soars, something romantic. And then there was:

  Cavalry horses

  Carried us there!

  The enemy forces

  Advanced ‘cross the square!

  But, dripping hot blood,

  We rose up once again

  And our unseeing eyes

  We opened again!

  ... So that this harsh nation

  Would flow with our blood,

  So a new generation

  Would stand where we stood.

  And her students’ glowing, inspired little eyes were Anastasia Dmitrievna’s best reward.

  A reward for a whole life that, till no
w, had been a failure.

  1993; 1995

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  ~ * ~

  ADLIG SCHWENKITTEN

  A TALE OF TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

  Dedicated to the Memory of

  Major Pavel Afanasyevich Boyev and

  Major Vladimir Kondratyevich Baluev

  1

  On the night of January 25-26, the army artillery staff informed the staff of our artillery brigade that our forward tank corps had broken through to the Baltic coast! East Prussia, therefore, had been cut off from Germany.

  It had been cut off, but for the moment only by this long, thin wedge that was still far in advance of all its supporting troops. But the days when we retreated were over. Prussia had been cut off! Surrounded!

  And so, Comrade Political Officers, a conclusive victory. Put it down in your war diaries. Now we’re no more than a stone’s throw away from Berlin, unless they give that job to someone else.

  During the five days of our advance through a Prussia of burning houses there had been no shortage of celebrations. In the eleven days after we broke out of our expanded bridgehead on Narew and the five days when we moved through Poland there had been some stubborn resistance, but once we crossed the Prussian border it was as if some miraculous curtain had been drawn aside: the German units fell back on both our flanks, revealing an undamaged land of abundance that simply fell into our hands. Clusters of stone houses with tall, steep roofs; soft beds to sleep in, sometimes even under eiderdown; stocks of food in the cellars with sweet stuff and other goodies we’d never laid eyes on before. There was even free drink to be had for those who could find it.

  And so we advanced through Prussia in a kind of half-drunken, joyous haze, as if we had lost the precision of our movements and our thoughts. Naturally, after so many years of war casualties and deprivations, we sometimes slackened off a little.

  This feeling of enjoying some well-deserved rewards took hold of everyone, right up to the higher commanders. The troops felt it even more. And they found some rewards. And they drank.

  After we had cut off Prussia this feeling grew even stronger.

  On the morning of January 26, seven of the brigade’s tractor and truck drivers died in convulsions after drinking methyl alcohol. There were also some victims from the gun crews, and others who went blind.

  So began this day in the brigade. Those who had gone blind were taken to the hospital. Captain Toplev, with a plump, boyish face and only recently promoted from senior lieutenant, knocked at the door of the room where the CO of Second Battalion, Major Boyev, was sleeping, to report on the incident.

  Boyev was a sound sleeper, but it was always easy to wake him. With such a marvelous bed to sleep in and with a plump eiderdown as well, he had allowed himself to take off his tunic for the night. He now pulled it on and was standing on the carpet in his woolen socks. His tunic was covered with an amazing array of orders and medals: two Orders of the Red Banner, an Alexander Nevsky, an Order of the Fatherland War, and two Orders of the Red Star (one came from as far back as the battle with the Japanese at Lake Khasan, the other from the Finnish War; and there was a third Red Star, the most recent, but it had been lost or stolen after he’d been wounded). And so his whole chest was covered in metal, since he wore the orders themselves, not just the ribbons, and it was a soldier’s pleasure to feel the weight of them.

  Toplev, who just a month ago had moved from head of battalion reconnaissance to Boyev’s adjutant, gave a dignified, regulation salute and made his report. His baby face was worried, but his voice still had the warmth of a child’s. Two men from Second Battalion, Podkliuchnikov and Lepetushin, had died from alcohol poisoning.

  The major was of average height, but his long head with closely trimmed hair stood out like a rectangle whose corners were formed by his temples and jaw. His eyebrows were not quite level and his nose twisted just slightly toward a deep crease in his cheek, as if he were in a constant state of tension.

  He listened to Toplev’s report with the same tension. He made no reply for a time and then said, bitterly: “Ahh, the slack-brained fools …”

  After surviving so many shells and bombs in so many river crossings and bridgeheads, only to cop it from some bottle in Germany . . .

  They’d have to be buried, but where? Well, they’d chosen their own gravesite.

  After passing through Allenstein the brigade had taken up firing positions here, just in case, though it seemed unlikely they would do any firing. It was just for the sake of order.

  “We won’t use the German cemetery. We’ll bury them around our firing position.”

  Lepetushin. Well, he was that kind of fellow. Talkative, always ready to help, never complained. But Podkliuchnikov? That tall, serious peasant with a bit of a stoop. He just couldn’t resist.

  ~ * ~

  2

  The ground was frozen and stony, impossible to dig very deeply.

  Sortov, their carpenter from Mari, built the coffins quickly from some nicely planed planks he’d found nearby.

  Should they put up a flag? No one ever saw flags except when the brigade formed up for a medals parade. Their colors were always kept in the stores, somewhere in the third echelon where they wouldn’t be captured.

  Podkliuchnikov had been in Five Battery, Lepetushin in Six. The party organizer, Gubaydulin—the laughingstock of the whole battalion—showed up to give a speech. He’d been drunk since morning and he strung together the usual glowing phrases about the sacred Motherland, the beast’s den into which we had now entered, and the revenge we would take for our fallen comrades.

  The commander of one of Six Battery’s gun platoons, the very young but solidly built Lieutenant Gusev, listened to this, ashamed and irritated. Did this fellow become a party organizer because of the quick promotion for political officers? Or was it because the brigade commissar had some special liking for him? But over the course of a year and a half, before everyone’s eyes, he went from junior sergeant to senior lieutenant, and now he thought he had lessons to give to everyone.

  Gusev was only eighteen, but he had already spent a year at the front as a lieutenant, the youngest officer in the brigade. He was so eager to go into battle that his father, a general, had put him into an accelerated course for junior lieutenants while he was still underage.

  It’s different for everyone. Next to him stood Vanya Ostanin, from the battalion fire control platoon. He was a clever fellow, and he could direct fire as well as any officer. But during the days of Stalingrad in ‘42 every third person on their course had been yanked out of their academy and sent to the front before his training had been completed. The personnel department selected people for promotion, and there was a note in Ostanin’s file that his family had stubbornly resisted joining the collective farm. Now this twenty-two-year-old, essentially an officer, was wearing the shoulder straps of a senior sergeant.

  The party organizer finished his speech. Gusev was driven by emotion to step toward the graves two paces in front of him. This wasn’t at all what was needed. The party organizer’s speech hadn’t struck any sparks. Gusev could only ask in a choked voice: “Why, boys? Why’d you have to end that way?”

  The lids of the coffins were closed.

  The nails were hammered in.

  The coffins were lowered on ropes.

  They were covered with foreign earth.

  Gusev recalled how a Junkers had bombed them along a road near Rechitsa. No one was wounded and little damage was done, but a three-liter bottle of vodka in the supply truck was shattered by a bit of shrapnel. Lord, how sorry the fellows were about that! Taking some casualties wouldn’t have been much worse. Soviet soldiers aren’t pampered by too much booze.

  Grave markers, still unpainted, were driven into the little mounds.

  And who would tend these graves? Gravestones of German soldiers had been standing in Poland since 1915. When they were on the Narew, the signals officer Ishchukov had dug up the German graves and scattered the bones—he was “taki
ng revenge.” No one said anything to him: Larin, the SMERSH officer, had been standing right beside him.

  Gusev passed by some soldiers standing quietly in a group and heard one of the men of his own platoon, the lively little Yursh from the same number three gun crew in which Lepetushin had served, say plaintively: “So how are we going to get by now, boys?”

  How were they going to get by? But that’s a soldier’s lot: you have to think you’ll make it.