November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  But these last few months the food situation had become very much worse. Several items were unobtainable. Georgi made fun of her: as bad as when a supply train is cut off in the mountains and there’s nothing to eat for three days? No, not like that, but anything in short supply was sold at an inflated price, twice or three times more than usual. Even the wretched Dolgachev, in Princess Lvova’s basement across the road, kept things out of sight and made you beg. The recently established cooperative shop for officers helped to some extent. There were queues everywhere. He must have seen them on his way there.

  “Do I stand in line? Not likely. I would have no time left for living. I have to sit at the piano for five hours a day. I can see you don’t remember anything …”

  Of course he remembered.

  Well, she did queue sometimes for meat. And French rolls first thing in the morning. There was no sugar to be had at all. They’d introduced ration coupons for sugar the week before. Still, we’ve got some of Mama’s jam from Borisoglebsk … Expensive sweets and honey you could get anywhere. All at twice the price.

  “Do you really have any idea what life is like here? You get your rations, everything’s taken care of for you. But here … the refugees make it worse, they’ve descended on us in droves, and some of them are rich. And they get a living allowance on top of it all. And how much d’you think servants are paid now? You have to give them a raise almost every month.”

  His face clouded over. “So how do you …?”

  “It’s hard, of course. Things are bad. Mama helps. Who else is there?”

  Alina’s mother, as the widow of a senior civil servant, had a large pension for life. Alina herself had been in receipt of a sizable pension because of her father, but, as the law stipulated, only till she married. He knew she was no spendthrift, but living on an officer’s pay had always been a bit of a struggle. Being assigned to GHQ had meant an improvement in status but no extra money.

  Alina knew, though, that he didn’t play cards, didn’t drink, didn’t go to restaurants. He had always detested the average Russian gentleman’s profligacy, and was a work fanatic.

  “I have to save myself, dear. You do see, don’t you? For the future. And for you.”

  Of course, of course. He looked confused, miserable, downcast. No, he wasn’t beyond hope. When he was living in a warm family atmosphere again, he would be as sensitive as ever.

  In fact, he was perking up already. In a day or two he would thaw out and be himself again.

  Their hands, with identical wedding rings, moved about the little table, transferring food from serving dish to plate.

  “Is it nice?” Alina smiled, sure that it was. “After what you get in the trenches?”

  He liked it, loved it. His head swayed toward her.

  “Behave yourself! Be patient!” She coquettishly wriggled away from him. “Oh, look, you’ve got some gray hairs! Better pull them out, who wants a gray-headed husband?”

  She was joking. The husband she had was the one she wanted. She must be a loyal wife and work hard to polish the rough diamond as best she could.

  Happily fussing over him, Alina failed for the first time ever to notice that uneasy, hangdog look: it meant not that Georgi was sorry for something he had done but that he was afraid to tell her something. But when she started making plans, talking about concerts they simply must go to next week—(Meichik, Frei)—she saw that things weren’t so simple, that something was wrong, that the load on his mind was getting heavier all the time.

  At last, with embarrassment and painfully slowly, he came out with it. He simply couldn’t help it. This was not leave; rather, he had been sent on urgent business to the War Ministry. Strictly speaking, he should have gone straight to Petersburg via Mogilev, not via Moscow.

  Alina was deeply hurt. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she wailed. “You treat me like dirt.”

  Over her sparkling dinner service, over all the things she had gone to such trouble to prepare, she shed tears of mortification. It was so cruel, so humiliating.

  “You should have gone straight there! And told me nothing about it! Then I wouldn’t have gotten all excited. It would have been kinder that way.”

  She was right, absolutely right, and there was nothing he could say in reply. He hovered uneasily behind her.

  “All the things you said in your letters! That you were miserable not hearing from me! That it would be more than you could bear if we didn’t see each other this year. That when we met you wouldn’t be able to say a word, you’d just kiss me and kiss me …”

  It was a peculiarity of his. If he made someone happy, he had to do something to spoil it, had to cast a cloud. If he went to a concert he would grumble about the waste of time all evening. At the theater he would refuse to go to the buffet during the intermission, pretending that it would clash with the mood of the play. He had bought her a camera once, but when he wouldn’t look at her photographs, she lost interest in mounting them, getting them enlarged, classifying and showing them off, although they were quite splendid. Why was he so unfeeling?

  Wait, though: “What about my birthday? D’you mean you won’t be here for that?”

  Yes, yes, he would—his face told her so as he came from behind her. How many days would he be in Petersburg? Still looking guilty and apprehensive—er, four days, say … All right then, my birthday’s twelve days away, so that’s not too bad. But was he absolutely sure?

  They finished eating her delicious lunch. The usual ritual after a meal was a kiss on the cheek. But this time Alina felt entitled to a kiss on the lips.

  After lunch Georgi came into the kitchen while she was washing the dishes, perhaps intending to say something, but she had put the light on—it was a dull day—and, cold fish or not, he noticed the translucency of her ear—her ears were indeed one of Alina’s best features, shapely, delicate, shell-like, like two exquisite treasures plucked from the ocean—and, standing behind her, kissed it. Then her neck. Then drew her out of the kitchen, not even giving her time to dry her hands properly.

  Whatever the clock said, the light was fading fast as they lay there. Alina felt happy and at peace. Suddenly she wanted to tell him things. When you talk about your experiences to someone you love you relive them, live them more fully than before, make them more meaningful. And so much had happened in the last few months. They’d once given a concert in the Botkin house, for instance. And a charity concert at the Huntsman’s Club—the acoustics were a bit strange. Chelnokov, the mayor of Moscow, no less, had kissed Alina’s hand.

  “And one lieutenant colonel told me the next day, ‘Do you know, after hearing you play Chopin’s ballade I couldn’t sleep all night.’ ”

  But Georgi wasn’t at all thrilled. He lay there smoking (he’d taken it up again after his dismissal from GHQ and made no effort to stop), taking care not to miss the ashtray and drop ash on the bedside table. He listened without interrupting, but showed no interest. After all the time they’d been apart. He didn’t even respond to her most cherished dream—that, though belatedly and in a roundabout way, this hectic concert giving would help her to make up for missing the Conservatoire.

  He was still lost in a fog! He really had grown dull, cooped up in a trench for all those years. Why shouldn’t she aspire to the heights of art? Nothing in this world was higher than that. Was his masculine pride perhaps hurt by the blossoming of her talent when he himself had dried up and gone to seed?

  “Aren’t you pleased by my success? Are you jealous or something? Would you rather I spent all my time within four walls?”

  He assured her that he was pleased, very pleased—by the bouquets and all the rest of it.

  She was eager to hear what he had to say. But he wasn’t going to talk. And Alina suddenly realized that this was their one and only evening together! How best to spend it? They must make up their minds quickly. “Why don’t we just stay in?” Georgi said hopefully.

  “It’s your own fault! You should have got yourself sent to th
e Moscow Military District. It’s too late to get tickets for anything. But we can invite ourselves out.” (And I can show him off to Susanna.) “Will you wear all your medals?” No, that was only on ceremonial occasions. Just the George and the Vladimir. Pity.

  Alina’s mind raced. How could she let people know? Where could they all get together? She dressed carefully. Lucky they now had a wall telephone out on the landing. No need to go to the pharmacy.

  She went out, made several calls, and came back.

  “We’re meeting at Muma’s. She’ll sing, and I’ll accompany.”

  Georgi looked sour. Go all that way just to hear you accompany? It would be better if you just stayed at home and played, I like your music best when you play by yourself.

  Alina protested. “You think accompanying is demeaning? You’re a freak! You don’t know the first thing! There’s nothing a pianist enjoys more than accompanying. Have you any idea what ensemble playing means? Have you ever asked yourself how I could bear our long separations if it wasn’t for music?”

  He looked as though he would like to merge with the wallpaper.

  “You no sooner come home than you’re away again, and I’m left all alone. I’m spiritually starved. My friends are my world—the atmosphere I breathe and in which I blossom. When you go away, all I have left is what those people think of me. Won’t you let me feel just for a little while that I’m not a grass widow to them? Help them remember that I have a husband somewhere?” She saw that he was upset. “I will play too, of course! And you can tell us about the front—everybody needs to know about it, not just me!”

  So the party was at Muma’s. She was a good friend of Alina’s, and had a contralto voice and a splendid Becker grand. The guests were whoever could be assembled in a hurry, including even Muma’s neighbors. Never mind, the main object was to show Georgi off to Susanna.

  The musical part of the proceedings went off very well. Muma sang an aria from Samson and Delilah superbly. Alina played a few charming Chopin mazurkas and Liszt’s headlong “Rome-Naples-Florence” étude. There was also an “artistic whistler.” Everybody enjoyed the program and applauded warmly. By suppertime Alina was in high spirits. She drank a glass of wine and needed no persuasion to take a second.

  Then, as always happened when an officer on active service appeared in company, everyone was eager to hear what Colonel Vorotyntsev could tell them. But the mean creature had no stories for them, not one single episode, although he was a good raconteur. (Wouldn’t make an effort for his poor little wife’s sake!) It was amazing how they all took to him in spite of this, and Alina felt proud. They saw his medal ribbons, his sunburnt and weather-beaten features, the dormant—perhaps excessive—willfulness: he looked at first disapproving, and seemed to be restraining himself from taking command and giving everyone present a dressing-down. But later he relaxed. Everybody was asking Alina how they could arrange another occasion and hear what he had to say.

  Alina was interested to see what impression Georgi would make on Susanna. They moved away from the company to sit on a distant sofa. Alina walked past, quite close, eavesdropping. Might have known! Georgi on his, Susanna on her own hobbyhorse.

  “Is it honest,” Susanna was asking, “to shift the blame for your own defeats, retreats, and general obtuseness onto Jewish spies?”

  “I absolutely agree with you. It’s dishonest.”

  “But if they can mount such a campaign against the Jews while the war is on, what’s it going to be like when we win? And how can Jews be expected to want us to win?”

  “Again, I agree. If Jews are denied any of the rights Russians enjoy, they can’t be expected to love Russia unreservedly. And it’s not insulting them to suppose that many Jews have more sympathy with Germany, where they enjoy equal rights.”

  Susanna had nonetheless taken a close look at him, and said to Alina later that evening, “Oh no, he doesn’t look emotionally stunted to me! So keep a close watch on him. When you’re in company, notice how he looks at women, and how they look at him.”

  “Really, now!” Alina said, laughing. “Thanks for the warning, but that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. Women are outside his field of vision. And always were. No other woman will ever take my place. In fact, it would make me proud, Susanna Iosifovna, if he was capable of strong emotions. But all that went into making the Russian Schlieffen manqué.”

  On the way home she wondered whether to go with him to Petrograd right then. She was quite capable of impulsive decisions, indeed there was nothing she liked better than abrupt changes of plan. What did he think? Well, you know, it’s difficult getting tickets. I barely managed to book a seat in the international class. Anyway, she was taking part in a concert in two days’ time, and it would be a pity to miss it. I know! Stay on for two days and you can hear me at full volume in a good concert hall, not just in a living room, and after that we can go to Petrograd together. What do you say?

  [12]

  When he was sent away from GHQ in August 1914 to command a front-line regiment, Vorotyntsev had left nothing of himself behind, had transferred his whole existence to this new locale. He knew as well as anyone that his busybodying in high places at the time of the Samsonov disaster had been futile, that he deserved to be sent down and harnessed to the immediate task. He merged into his regiment, rooted himself in it, more deeply than duty demanded. Since taking over he had never once gone on leave, neither this year nor the year before. A wall of resentment shut him off from the privileged and the free, and indeed from civilian life generally, and he would not permit himself to abandon his regiment for as much as a week. He had dedicated his life to military service—well, now he was stuck with it to the end of his days. When Nikolai Nikolaevich, Yanushkevich, and Danilov were replaced, Vorotyntsev could have made some attempt to start up the ladder again. He didn’t do it. Out of pride. The horror of repeated setbacks in the field overshadowed such trivialities as Colonel Vorotyntsev’s wrecked career. He had not lost his strategic insight and often found himself unable to believe, from all that he could see, that operations into which their division, their corps, their army were drawn had any higher significance. At the regimental level it was obvious that scrambling over the Carpathians, and without shells, was a major absurdity. But he would not allow himself to get too hot under the collar. With his regiment he was just where he should be, and that was enough. He was no longer eager to distinguish himself, to adorn himself with medals, to go up in the world again: he had spent a little time up there, and it had lost its attraction. He shrank into his new shell, decided to consider himself doomed, and at times was genuinely, recklessly indifferent to death. But he was only wounded twice, superficially. With the months of prudent trench squatting came a calm consciousness of having done his duty to the best of his ability. And the more sordid and offensive stories about the rear filtered in—through men returning from leave—stories about what civilians were driven to and how they had gotten used to war as their normal element—the more the home front disgusted him, the cleaner he felt in the atmosphere of the trenches, with men pure of heart around him, men ready to die from one hour to the next. Once no more than front-line soldiers, they were reborn, a new breed of men. They? Who, exactly? The regular officers, reservist NCOs, case-hardened ensigns, yes. But the men in the ranks, the mainstream, had been channeled in under duress, they were held in under duress, and why they should be there to get wounded and to die was more than he could easily have said. Vorotyntsev had been roughing it with them, grinning and bearing it, burying man after man after man for the past twenty-four months, and he could not help looking at the war from inside the common soldiers’ doomed but uncomplaining hide.

  Strange, perhaps, for a regular officer to start questioning the utility of war.

  Vorotyntsev had with due deliberation dedicated his life to the army, so that for him war was the supreme form of activity. All that was best in him was geared to waging war. From his earliest days his one wish was to serve
in the army, his only dream was to help improve it—to what end, if not to make war? The soldiers’ task was simply to implement a declaration of war. It had never occurred to him before that an officer might entirely disapprove of a war waged by his motherland. He had fought all through the Japanese war and never once thought that. Some of the generals had aroused his indignation, and so had the sarcastic, indeed the downright treasonable attitude of educated society, and that was all. He himself believed that he thoroughly understood the war: Russia was hacking herself a window onto the Pacific, and if two historic powers in the course of their growth came into close contact on tightly drawn frontiers, a trial of strength to determine the dividing line was inevitable. It was the same with all living things on earth. (Later, he realized that moderation would have given Russia a way out, but greedy mouths were watering for what belonged to others.)

  Nor had Vorotyntsev felt the slightest misgiving at the beginning of this war, or during the hectic maneuverings in its first phase. A youthful joy in anticipation of battle gripped him. Just once—in the forest slaughterhouse in East Prussia—a strange thought had strayed briefly into his mind: what are we doing in this war?

  But two years dragged by, month after weary month, every one an endless tale of Russian soldiers destroyed in his own regiment, his own sector and those adjoining it, and it was more and more painfully, blindingly borne in on Vorotyntsev that this particular war was all wrong. They had blundered into it—on the wrong foot. And were waging it self-destructively. Russia was not in danger of defeat in the field, but he could not see her winning.