November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  “What do you mean, the Don isn’t Russia?”

  “You find that strange?”

  As if the Don or any other river could take it into its head not to be Russian! Still, not just the Don, but that little wedge of land between the Don and the Medveditsa, miserable and infertile though it might be, was a place apart.

  Other rivers could make no such claim. The Don could. It had its own songs, its own legends. The steppe even had a smell all its own. No, he had put it badly: he was not equally at home with the Don and with Petersburg.

  “Nothing hurt me more than being deprived of the Don in 1907. Tambov isn’t all that far away. But to me it was exile.”

  (Where people had a highly developed sense of belonging to a unified fatherland it would be different. But in our country …)

  “When the first tremors came in 1905 and after—our blood was up. I’ve got a photograph of Filipp, the one I was talking about, with a caption: ‘We will lay down our lives for the autonomy of the Don Cossacks.’ ”

  No, this was too much for the colonel. He was tempted to laugh.

  “We’ve nearly finished your wine, you know. Let’s call it a day. You’re going to Petersburg straight from the Don, and you won’t have any left for your Cossack friends.”

  “No, not straight from the Don. I stopped somewhere on the way.”

  The clatter of the train wheels made him feel closer to this chance companion—a stranger yesterday, a stranger tomorrow, but today almost an in-law. This shuddering little house on wheels released him from all restraints, disciplinary and professional, all ties of party and family, isolated him even from the jolly conductor and from fellow passengers walking unseen past the thick frosted glass of the door. It left just the two of them, confidingly tête-à-tête.

  I can tell him—or I can skip it. What can these details mean to a fellow passenger? But opening up is somehow pleasurable … I could confess that I left the Rostov train at Kozlov, checked my baggage, and took myself off, feeling twenty years younger, with pounding heart … to Tambov.

  They sat there side by side, Vorotyntsev straining forward, looking toward Petersburg and tomorrow, Kovynev longing to slow things down, looking backward to yesterday and Tambov.

  Tambov? It gave him pleasure even to say the word out loud, it was as sweet on his lips as her name. Naming the town was like naming her. Zina Altanskaya!

  [17]

  It was in Tambov that Kovynev had made the great transition—from the hopeless lot of a provincial high school teacher to a career as a writer on the staff of a metropolitan magazine. He had arrived in Tambov an outcast from the Don, he left for the capital an acknowledged success. And in Tambov, though it was long before he realized it, he had left behind … There had been so many of them over the years, schoolgirls in pelerines sitting at their desks, holding their hands out for corrected essays … It had been there in the back of his mind for years. But never, till then … And, unluckily, at the very last minute …

  They had an interminable evening ahead of them. The gentle rocking of the train was soothing. Two men, no longer young, who had both seen a good deal of life, elbows resting on the solid little table … Why not tell him?

  But where to begin?

  “Yes, of course, I know a lot of people all over the place, I’ve loved all sorts, you know how it is.”

  You speak one way, you think another. There are things one man can’t bring himself to say to another without making a joke of it, without disparagement. Loved all sorts!

  “They’re all long gone and forgotten. But for this one girl …” (His voice almost failed him at the word “girl.”) “I’ve just been to see her, and a hundred versts didn’t seem out of my way.”

  He gave a self-deprecating little laugh.

  But inside was the red-hot agony from which the conversation so far had been merely a distraction. He had put it behind him once, and it should never have gone any further, but no, he had got off at Kozlov and caught the Tambov train …

  These were things you shouldn’t be telling anybody, let alone this colonel … and anyway you’ve forgotten it all a dozen times over, and only now remember … the pigtail brushing the exercise book, a scrap of paper inflated into a sort of bogey, a fancy bookmark left deliberately in her literature essay book, a sudden mysterious fit of giggles, the way she stared at you, all eyes, from the front row. The endearing thing was that all this was addressed not to the former Duma deputy nor to the future writer, at a time when the people of Tambov were not yet breathless with hope and dread that Fyodor Kovynev would “put them on paper”—no, it was meant for that rather seedy, forty-year-old high school teacher.

  Then she left school and went away. They met again purely by chance. If either of them had come by a minute earlier or later nothing would have happened.

  “Do you remember that pretty spot in Tambov—the long embankment over one arm of the Tsna? And a bit higher up there’s a street with houses on one side only, little wooden houses. People sitting on every porch, and at wide-open windows. With samovars. Sipping tea and looking at the river. At the boats. And the meadows beyond. Well, we met in full view of all those tea drinkers, stopped to talk for two minutes. Couldn’t stand there any longer—or the gossip would spread like wildfire. She was as tall as me, she’d put her hair up like a grown woman, but her face was still girlish, a little pudgy, not fined down, but unlined. Chin in the air, she asked me quite brazenly, ‘Fyodor Dmitrich! Can I come and see you, at your place, today or tomorrow?’

  Relationships between a male teacher and a female pupil are frequent, but can be quite innocent. There are boundaries to be drawn, things that “are done” and things that “are not done,” your sense of duty. But your feeling for a girl pupil, or even a girl who was once your pupil, is a special one, unlike your feeling for anyone you meet as a mature woman. You are placed in a position of superiority to her right from the start—to this young creature, on the brink of womanhood, eager to please you. And the older the teacher is—getting on for forty in my case—the more flattering it is, and the harder it is for him to withhold himself. But then again, the older you are, the more hidebound you are, the less capable of making a move … You become so much the more timid and uninteresting. Suppose your objective description of yourself in a story goes like this: “The teacher was a rustic figure, quiet and self-effacing, with a wispy mustache and a sparse beard, eyes that blinked helplessly, a halting voice, a dull plebeian face, without a single striking feature.” In actual fact it was not quite that bad. In fact at times … and as seen by a good-looking seventeen-year-old girl …

  Still, to get involved in that way with a young girl, not knowing what might come of it, God help you! All those tricky maneuvers … all that ducking and weaving … why all that worry and trouble, when there are other teachers’ wives, all sorts of encounters on your travels, and, back in the village, widows, or young women pining for their soldier husbands? Best leave Tambov quickly and for good … Anyway, aren’t you just getting started on your big story? You can’t fit in an affair, you don’t need it. Besides, if a girl starts this way, what does it tell you about her character? What will she do next?

  “Two minutes went by, and I was still lost for an answer. She raised her head still higher and walked off. Two days later there was a letter in the mail: ‘I don’t really know why I’m writing to you after what happened—I just want to make it clear that I do not love you, as you appear to have sometimes thought, and might have thought there on the embankment. But I do like you, as someone out of the ordinary, unlike almost anyone I have met.’ (Who out of the ordinary could she have possibly met in Tambov? That’s laughable!) ‘If this letter becomes public property it won’t matter in the least to me, but it would greatly upset my mother.’ I read it … and was filled with regret. What a clumsy oaf I am! How could I let this pristine sweetness pass me by? I wrote back inviting her to visit me on a certain evening. And what d’you think the answer was? ‘That day, when I in
vited myself to your place, I was in a foul mood, and there was nobody in Tambov I could talk to! But that’s over now, thank you. Anyway, I thought there was a hint of frivolity in your invitation, you somehow seem to have misunderstood me.’ So then I have to write and explain myself: really how can you, of course I didn’t misunderstand you! … Well, two months later I left Tambov altogether to live permanently in Petersburg.”

  It was embarrassing to tell another man about it, but … there followed an endless correspondence with the wretched girl (the only one in Tambov he wrote to). He kept all her letters, and read them over and over again. In Tambov he couldn’t spare her a single evening, but in Petersburg he had squandered many evenings answering her letters, although piles of notes were waiting to be written up. He felt awkward, telling the colonel these things.

  But, surprisingly, the colonel understood. “A letter closes the gap between you, you make up for your separation by showing affection. A letter is always stronger and more effective than anything you say in the ordinary run of things. As words pass through the pen, it gives them an extra twist.”

  “I didn’t write at first, she found my address herself. Says there’s something in me she finds endearing, something that makes her feel close to me. She treasures just that, and wants no more. Whereas if our relationship went beyond certain limits, that would be lost.”

  And, of course, you can’t help feeling flattered if your letters fill her with “a sort of reckless daring.” Or if she writes, “The way I feel toward you right now—if I had wings or a balloon I would fly to your pillow and inspire ‘golden slumbers.’ But when we meet, I won’t be so bold. In fact, I’m afraid of getting to know you better …” It was as though she stood beside him—by the table, by the arm of his chair, looking over at the letter. He could almost see her bending toward him, more vividly real than reality, her dress nipped in at the waist, the wrists, the throat—so alluring. But she never came. There were only letters.

  The colonel held a cigarette between two fingers and went into the corridor for a smoke. (It seemed people couldn’t steer clear of these love affairs. Whatever more important concerns they might have they got onto that subject sooner or later.)

  Where did she get that easy style? Schoolgirls don’t write like that. And her handwriting moved just as easily, winging its way into your heart—the provocative tone and the handwriting were somehow of a piece. Even the contours of the text were her own; a wide gap between sentences, a mere sigh between paragraphs, lines uneven, awkwardly terraced, as though normal punctuation, dashes and rows of dots, were not enough for her. The pattern varied—you could tell what mood she was in the moment you unsealed her envelope. Reading a letter of hers was like seeing her face to face. (Fyodor Dmitrich had taken careful note of all this, meaning to write about it.)

  She never flattered, never praised him. She wrote not to admonish, not to wheedle, but proudly, unconstrainedly. A chit of a girl, twenty years his junior, looked deep into him, through his letters, his essays, his articles, and said what she thought with a bluntness he wasn’t used to, and would have taken amiss if there was anyone else to hear, but it was just between the two of them, nobody else knew. “You adapt too readily to whatever company you find yourself in! You’re too much in thrall to ‘progressive’ ideas and that is a handicap for an artist! The way you progressive journalists have puffed up Maria Spiridonova! Don’t forget that I know her. She went to our school, and everybody knows she was expelled from the seventh grade because her teacher found a note from a lawyer that showed she’d been his mistress for some time. She went on traveling around the province with him and shot him dead in a private apartment in a fit of jealousy. So you progressive journalists invented the tale that she was a committed member of the SR Party, that she shot him because he had helped suppress the uprisings, that it was on a railway station, and that a squadron of Cossacks had raped her on the spot. There was no such squadron, no such rape, no such station even: she did her lover in sitting on his lap, and ended up a revolutionary icon. That’s where your progressive journals get you, so just look out!”

  Zinaida herself made no pretense of “serving” anyone or anything, she insisted that she had no “social” feelings, no “higher aspirations” in favor of progress—and if you don’t like it, you can lump it! She ridiculed “red study groups” but was equally dismissive of her aunt, who was a nun. She was a rebel—against what, neither she nor anyone else knew, a rebel pure and simple. She concealed none of her negative characteristics—she wrote about herself as she was. But she didn’t spare him either: “I’m sorry for you, you’re always so wishy-washy, you never carry anything through to the end, you just moan about ‘Russia’ and ‘the system,’ but if you were suddenly confronted with complete freedom you wouldn’t know how to organize your life. There’s no knowing whether you’ll ever write a proper book.” At other times she was rapturous: “What a joy life must be when the young make your ideas their own!” Then the old refrain again: “There are times when I’m so sorry for you, you’re something and nothing, passed over by life, I would like to smooth your furrowed brow and even kiss your black muzhik head. I love seeing your mousy handwriting on an envelope.” “Mousy handwriting” was impertinent, offensive, but apt. He hadn’t noticed it till then. It was humiliating to hear such pointed criticism from a slip of a girl, but he was hooked, and felt miserable when there was no letter.

  The colonel was back. By now the compartment was in semi-darkness, they could hardly see each other’s faces, but Vorotyntsev didn’t suggest putting the lights on, and Fedya certainly didn’t want them. A story like his needed the right atmosphere and it was much more comfortable in the twilit compartment.

  “Of course, to keep such a correspondence going—you know how it is—you have to write in a way that says, ‘I am not and never have been on such terms with any other woman, I’m amazed at myself, I just can’t understand it.’ All the same, when I invited her to visit me, she wouldn’t. She would suddenly be overcome by doubt—was no other sort of relationship possible between beings of opposite sex? As though any ‘other sort’ was what she wanted. You try to explain to her: ‘Look, Zina, my love, if there’s nothing sensual behind it people aren’t interested in each other.’ To which she replies, ‘I’ve rigorously reviewed my feelings for you this week and found nothing immodest in them. That wasn’t the sort of love you used to tell us about in your lessons!’ Yes, but lessons are—just lessons. In real life, you explain to her, everything that happens is the result of an instinctive impulse. We have to take what life offers. She snaps back, ‘No! Not everything life offers! You have to be very choosy! Otherwise you won’t notice the good things among all the rubbish that pours in! To accept whatever comes means you have no self-respect. Anyway, you don’t really think that way, I don’t believe it!’ Hopeless trying to explain to her how different from them we are. Sometimes, just to heat things up, perhaps you come out with a whopper, drop hints about some woman met by the wayside. Right, my love, if you’re so frank let’s see if you can stand a bit of masculine frankness for a change. A man always tries to hide his other women, but I’ll come clean. Does it repel you? And what do you think? She stood for it. Didn’t stop writing.”

  Fyodor Dmitrich smiled, one man of the world to another. “You could drive yourself crazy trying to understand them, best not to trouble your head. You fix yourself up with two or three women in the village. ‘Why quarrel? I hate your quarreling,’ you tell them, ‘there’s love enough in my heart for the three of you, don’t quarrel.’ If a Cossack troubles his head over a woman’s caprices he is done for! But if some woman’s pining for you—don’t let her get away.”

  The colonel swayed, shifting his seat in the half-darkness. Was he going to say something? No.

  “Anyway, there’s no love that lasts forever. Everything passes, all love is transient. And if you put yourself in a woman’s hands she’ll twist your whole life out of shape.”

  That’s the way
it goes. First you turn her down, then you’re hankering after her—she’s the one, I must have her now, nobody else will do!

  Zina, my love! Don’t let our “holiday of the heart” pass us by! Come to me! Come!

  No! To be human is to be alone. When we meet we only touch elbows.

  “She did come once, though. Thought of taking a dentistry course in Petersburg. We didn’t just touch elbows. Just once I drew her very close to me … but no, she went away.”

  And you would always remember the way her long yellow scarf dangled over her breast.

  She went away, but didn’t stop writing. “You’ve known women since you weren’t much more than fifteen, but you’ll always be warming yourself at somebody else’s flame, no ‘holiday of the heart’ for you … You’re too circumspect, and your desires are actually too feeble. ‘F’ for ‘Fyodor’ and ‘F’ for ‘footling.’ I can hardly bring myself to gratify you by writing your name. You’re one of those who like to go mushrooming but not to get their feet wet. Go and defend your fatherland, why don’t you! And joy go with you!”

  A fractious girl! Listening to her insults was all the more hurtful because there was truth in them. He should, indeed, be at the front. He regretted missing the Japanese war. As a writer, he should have been there. And as a Cossack—of course.

  At last! At long last the glumly humorous black-haired conductor had reached them, with a half-gallon samovar on a tray, still purring, and a teapot on top of it. A crimson glow filtered through the vents around the samovar into the gathering darkness of the compartment.

  Electric light from the corridor spilled over the conductor’s shoulders. He asked anxiously whether their bulb was dead. No, we just don’t want it on, Fyodor Dmitrich explained. The easygoing conductor left it at that.

  He hadn’t put sugar on the tray—sorry, there isn’t any. But Fyodor Dmitrich climbed up top again, felt in his basket, and brought out a jar. His companion was astonished to find him so well supplied.