But who will do it? Such people haven’t been seen for a long time.
A very long time.
We went on sitting.
“I was such a fool, Vitya. Remember how I used to go on about world revolution . . . ? But you were the one who knew the countryside—from the bottom up.”
Vitya’s a modest man. No matter how you praise him, he never lets it go to his head. And even though life has dragged him through many rough spots, he’s still the same Vitya, with his patient smile.
“Over there, on the right, was where we celebrated Boyev’s birthday that day. He said that he didn’t know whether he’d live to see his thirtieth. And he never did make it to his thirty-first.”
“Yes, that Prussian night, that was something,” Ovsyannikov recalled. “Dead silence, not a soul to be seen, so how did they mount an offensive? I went across that whole lake, and there was no one and nothing on it. And then—Shmakov gets killed.”
“How did we ever pull ourselves out of that Dietrichsdorf? God must have been helping.”
Ovsyannikov, now with an ironical smile, said: “And from Adlig, across that ravine, through the snow, running and tumbling head over heels ...”
We looked to the left and saw our two jeeps coming toward us, bumping and rocking across the fields around the edge of the village. They must have worried when we disappeared.
Both the administrators were in white shirts and ties. The local one was more plainly dressed, with a rain jacket over his suit. The man from the region wore a blue tie and a good gray pinstripe suit with nothing over it. He had a broad, bony face with a rather sullen expression. His hair was pitch-black and very thick; it gleamed in the sun.
“The people here are being neglected,” we told them.
“What more can we do?” said the man from the region. “We pay their pensions. We provide electricity. Some of them have televisions.”
The local administrator—from what had formerly been the village soviet—had obviously risen from among the local people. He still had a good deal of the peasant in him. He had a long face, long ears, fair hair, and reddish brows. He added: “Some of them have cows. And chickens. Everyone’s got a garden. They do the best they can.”
We got into the jeeps and, the administrators leading the way, we drove along the bumpy road through the village itself and down our slope.
But what’s this? Four women, side by side, had come out to stand across the road in a tight row. They’d brought an old fellow with them, for support, a frail old man in a peaked cap. Three more women came up from various directions, leaning heavily on their sticks. One had a very bad limp. There was not a single younger person.
So, the word about the administrators must have gone round. And it had drawn in a crowd.
There was no way to drive around them. The jeeps stopped.
The place was only about twenty paces above the spot where Andreyashin was killed.
The local fellow got out: “What’s the problem? Has it been that long since you’ve seen anybody from the administration?”
They had blocked the road so no one could pass. There were now six women standing in a row. They would not let him through.
The regional administrator also got out. Vitya and I followed.
The women were wearing gray or brown kerchiefs, and there was one of bright cabbage green. Some had their kerchiefs wrapped right to their eyes, others had their foreheads uncovered so you could see every movement in their wrinkled skin. Right behind the others was a burly, large woman in a red and brown kerchief, her feet planted solidly and not moving. The old man was behind all the others.
The women all began speaking at once:
“Why don’t we have any bread?”
“You’ve got to bring in bread for us!”
“We’re living on just one scrap of bread a day . . .”
“We can’t last long on that...”
The village soviet man was embarrassed, particularly in the presence of the regional administrator.
“Right. First Andoskin was bringing in bread, right from the shop.”
A woman wearing a gray and violet kerchief, in a sleeveless sweater over a bright blue blouse, said: “But you weren’t paying him enough. When the price of bread went up he said he wouldn’t bring in any more for what you gave him. It takes me a whole day, he says, and I don’t want to do it. So he quit.”
“That’s right,” said the village soviet man.
“Not, it’s not right,” said the woman in the blue blouse.
The young man shook his head: “What I’m saying is that’s what happened, it’s true. But now, for a time, Nikolai will be bringing in the bread. He has to come here to pick up milk and he’ll bring bread as well.”
“He’s not going to do it for nothing, neither. I’ll take your milk first, he says, and next time I’ll bring your bread.”
The woman in the dark gray kerchief, the one we met earlier, was straining to see and hear what they’d say: Were they going to come to some decision?
The one in the light brown kerchief said: “And if you don’t sell milk, then what do you do? You ask Kolya—please, just a loaf. I’ve only got one salary, he says. I can only give bread to those on the list.”
A woman in a gray checked kerchief spoke up, with a lot of emotion: “Us folks in the village have come to the end of our rope. There’s no living for us here, there’s nothing to eat.”
The small woman in the green kerchief said: “There’s no proper road here, we know that...”
The village soviet fellow had to justify himself before the regional man and quickly said: “I always keep an eye on things, you know. Nikolai, I say, are you bringing in the bread? I am, he says.”
The woman in blue spoke up now, sharply: “So you keep an eye on us, do you? When did you ever pay us a visit? You, the chairman of the village soviet, haven’t been here even a single time . . . None of you people have been here since Adam was a boy.”
Others now added their complaints:
“Things have gone to rack and ruin ...”
“Everybody’s forgotten we’re still here ...”
The clean-shaven old fellow in the second row stood silently, not seeming to understand what was happening. He yawned and then went on standing with his mouth open.
Ovsyannikov had bowed his balding head. His peasant heart ached.
“Wait a minute, now,” the village soviet man hastened to say. “Why didn’t you tell me before that he hasn’t been bringing in the bread?”
“We don’t quite know how to go about it,” said the woman in green.
“We’re afraid,” said Iskiteya.
At this point the regional administrator joined in, in a powerful voice: “I’m telling you, you have to speak up. You’re afraid to tell Nikolai, you’re afraid to tell Mikhail Mikhailovich, you’re afraid to tell me. What are you afraid of?”
The woman in blue said: “Well, I’m not afraid, and I’d come in to see you. But I can’t get around at all anymore. And my old man’s in even worse shape.”
The woman in the red and brown kerchief leaned her left elbow on her stick, bent over, pressed her fist to her shoulder, closed her eyes, and said: “I don’t want nothing to do with any of you ...”
“But haven’t I come to see you now? I keep asking Mikhail Mikhailovich, are they bringing bread for you? Every day, he says. Why didn’t you speak up?”
The woman in the gray check made a chopping motion with her hand: “Well, we’re speaking up now!”
“We just don’t know how to get back on our feet again.”
One of the women we met, the one in the dark gray scarf, had black hands on which the soil had forever left its mark; her fingernails were rimmed with black. She stood there, her hands clasped over the top of her stick. She had dozens and dozens of wrinkles on her face—you’d think there wouldn’t be enough room for them all. She’d calmed down now and fixed her eyes on something in the distance and stood there, frozen.
/> The regional administrator made his decision: “Let’s agree as follows. Mikhail Mikhailovich will come to you every day for the next week ...”
“Every day? What for? Every other day, maybe ...”
“Even if we got some bread every third day . . .”
“I’m not saying he’s to bring you bread each day. But for a week, up to Victory Day, he’ll come here every day and check that you have all you need.”
(But would he manage to write it all down?)
“. . . We chose him here, voted for him in the village administration, so he should carry out his responsibilities as head of the local government. At the very least, he has to see that you’ve got bread to eat. We’re not saying that he should start building houses for you—that’s something we can’t do, given our present circumstances.”
“Houses . . . Just imagine ...”
“You’ve got water. And you’ll have bread. He’ll see that you have the essentials. That’s his job.”
A soft moan came from the women:
“A bit of bread and we could get by and we wouldn’t squawk ...”
“We’d have some hope left...”
“Rye bread, now, that’s solid stuff . . .”
The village soviet man recovered as well: “Let’s agree as follows. Not only will you have bread, but every week I’ll send you a mobile sales van.”
The women were amazed: “A sales van each week as well! Now that’s something! “
The woman in the gray check didn’t miss her opportunity: “There’s another thing we’ve been needing. For a long time. While the front was here, some of us went off to do work there ...”
“From August ‘43, when the front moved on …” said Iskiteya.
The woman in the gray check was somewhat younger than the others; her eyelids weren’t swollen, and her gray eyes were wide open and lively. The words poured out of her readily, though only a single tooth flashed in her lower jaw: “I worked for almost three years in a war plant, for example. It was in the town of Murom, Vladimir Oblast. So you know how we worked and what for. Never a holiday, never a day off, never a bit of leave. And what did they tell us then? Your labor will be our victory; it will help us end the war quickly and bring some peace to the country. So why have you forgotten those who toiled away, tell me that? Now even our pensions are less than what other women get...”
The regional administrator brushed back his black forelock: “Yes, this year for the first time we have been remembering those who worked on the home front. Almost every day now I award a jubilee medal to our mothers. They’re moved to tears … Every day they’re getting these jubilee medals and weeping. Finally they’ve remembered us, they say, because we were carrying the whole front on our shoulders. We pulled the plows ourselves, we sowed the grain, we sent our last socks to the soldiers. So if you really were a war worker, in accordance with the Decree you have to either find the documents to show that you worked or find at least two witnesses ...”
“There’s two of us right here. We’ll be witnesses for each other.”
“You’ll need a third person.”
“There’s one in Podmaslovo.”
“If you worked more than six months on the home front prior to 1945 and can document it or get statements from witnesses, we’ll certainly give you a medal. And there are certain stipulated benefits that come with the medal.”
The village soviet man, though, seemed to have a better knowledge of the regulations. He turned to caution the regional man.
“Unfortunately, I have to interrupt. That’s true only when an error is being rectified. In other cases the Decree does not take witnesses’ statements into account. If there’s no notation in your employment record book the jubilee medal can’t be awarded. We’ve raised this problem a number of times ...”
The regional man frowned, slightly embarrassed: “In my opinion, this is a case that calls for rectification.”
The gray-scarfed woman pressed him again: “How can that be? The Military Committee mobilized us and treated us like serving women. When a few of our girls left their jobs, they were put on trial by a military tribunal. Don’t you realize how they treated us?”
Iskiteya could only nod her agreement: “Yes, that’s how it was.”
The village soviet man said: “Then we’ll have to make a request through the Military Committee.”
“That’s right,” said the regional man. “We’ll compile a list and send in an official request. They can find the documents from 1943. A lot of cases like this come up.”
I could see Ovsyannikov making a terrible face. His head was sinking lower and lower as he listened to all this, and he was holding it with one hand and looking as if he’d lost hope.
The small woman in green spoke up, as if she would not be interrupted: “I’ve already got a medal for the war years. Not the actual medal, you know, but I’ve got all the papers, right and proper. And I do get some benefits—like I only pay half for my electricity. But Lord knows what else I should be getting. I went to the office once but they just told me our collective farm is poor and we’ve got nothing to give you. I didn’t even get my seed grain ‘cause the chairman never put in for any for the pensioners.”
“As for benefits, they’re all built into the regional budget. And through the regional budget we can allocate funds to those who should only pay fifty percent. Of course, I can’t be here every day to sort these things out...”
“We understand,” the women said, all smiles.
Then Iskiteya ventured to say a few words. She spoke in that same soft and undemanding old woman’s voice she had used with me under the birch tree: “My husband fought in the war. He was wounded, and he got some benefits. But after he died they were all taken away.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ovsyannikov roused himself and spoke out indignantly: “You should be getting all the benefits that were being paid to your husband, and unless you’ve remarried . . .”
Iskiteya looked astonished, and her lips formed a weak smile: “Remarried? How could that be?”
“… then you should still have all those same benefits! And it doesn’t matter when he died.”
“It’s eight years now he’s been gone . . .”
“Well,” said the regional man, rousing himself and looking at his watch. “I’ll personally look into the questions that concern you, our veterans and mothers. And if I can’t do anything, then I’ll take it up with the oblast. But we shouldn’t bother Moscow with things like this, absolutely not.”
1998
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~ * ~
TIMES OF CRISIS
1
Yorka Zhukov, born into a peasant family, could handle a rake at hay cutting when he was seven and helped around the family farm as he got older, though he finished the three-year parish school. Then his father sent him all the way to Moscow as an errand boy and apprentice to a distant, wealthy relative, a furrier. That’s where he grew up, starting as a servant, running errands and working bit by bit until he mastered the furrier’s trade. (When he finished his training he had his photo taken in a borrowed black suit and silk tie. He sent it back to the village, signed “master furrier.”)
But the German war broke out, and in 1915, when Yorka was nineteen, he was called up. Though he wasn’t that tall, he was strong and broad-shouldered, and they chose him for the cavalry and sent him to a squadron of dragoons. He learned about horses and he learned to keep his back straight. After six months he was chosen for more training and finished as a junior NCO. In August 1916, his dragoon regiment went to the front. Two months later he was concussed by an Austrian shell, and it was off to the hospital. Then Zhukov became chairman of the squadron committee in a reserve regiment and never went back to the front. At the end of 1917, his squadron simply disbanded itself: each one of them was given a valid pass, all right and proper, told to take their weapons if they wished, and head for home.
He stayed in Moscow for a bit and then went back to his village in Kaluga Provi
nce, where he came down with typhus, which was everywhere at the time; the typhus kept recurring. It was now August 1918, and general mobilization for the Red Army began. They took Zhukov into the First Moscow Cavalry Division and sent the division after the Ural Cossacks, who weren’t inclined to accept Soviet power. (He saw Frunze himself a few times while serving there.) They crossed sabers with the Cossacks and drove them into the Kirghiz steppe. Then the division was transferred to the lower Volga. They were stationed near Tsaritsyn and then sent to Akhtuba to fight the Kalmyks. Those Kalmyks had gone completely off their heads: not one of them wanted anything to do with the Soviets, and you couldn’t hammer any sense into them. Yorka was wounded by a hand grenade there, so it was back to the hospital again. The typhus came back as well—that plague was just jumping from one person to the next. In the spring of that year of 1919, Zhukov, as a conscientious soldier, was accepted into the Russian Communist Party, and at the beginning of 1920, he was promoted as a “Red officer.” They sent him to a place near Ryazan on a course for Red commanders. And here, too, he wasn’t just an ordinary officer trainee but the leader of his group. Everyone could see he was made to command.
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 24