November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Hmm, being equally merciful might be difficult. But he should certainly be no enemy to any of his subjects.

  Anyway, since he was shamefully neglecting Guchkov and all the inquiries he had meant to make in Petersburg, Vorotyntsev listened all the more readily to Olda, perhaps even hoping to be converted.

  “Admit it—this is a wretched dynasty for such a flourishing, such a richly endowed, such a great country. The whole royal family has lost its senses.”

  “I don’t agree! The sum of human wisdom, especially in politics, consists of dealing with what exists, not dreaming up something to put in its place.”

  She tugged at the sheet, seeking warmth. There was something touching about the flimsy straps of her shift across her bare shoulders. But he was only half aware of this.

  He could never have foreseen to whom, and where, he would be trying to explain himself.

  He was smoking again.

  “There’s a Russian word, zatsarilsya.* Not used of this Tsar specifically. It’s an old word. But that it exists means that the people can conceive of such a possibility. It means that the Tsar has got above himself, ceased to remember what a Tsar should be. Ceased to be aware of the limits to his power. The limits of his function. His people’s limits. One must always know how far expansion can go. The people also have their limits.”

  “We must spare our country! Centuries have gone into its creation,” Olda darkly admonished him.

  “Indeed we must! That’s just what I’m saying! Whoever possesses power, and is caught in the storm of war, must know how to exercise that power.”

  “But he has been placed in that position. He has his duty to do!”

  “If only! If only he thought of it that way, as his destiny, as a heavy burden, and turned to others for help! If he wore the crown with suffering, and not with a sort of inappropriate smile.”

  He remembered that smile, seen from a march-past.

  “But he does feel the burden!” Olda said, with as much assurance as if she had been at close quarters with the Emperor only yesterday. “He does feel it! He suffers. And he’s besieged on all sides by slander! You need only remember how he was supposed to have given a ball in the Winter Palace immediately after Tsushima. A lying tale—but it stuck, and the damage it did! There hasn’t been a single ball there since 1903. The smile is an attempt to hide his suffering.” Her voice sank still lower. “And his helplessness. He is probably in agony. He’s the prisoner of his throne, and a martyr to it.” She spoke with as much conviction as if she knew him intimately.

  “Well, if it’s really so hard for him, if his thoughts on his situation are as you describe them, if he feels too weak for the country’s needs, ought he not to …? Shouldn’t his supreme duty be to his country? Even if it means … abdication?”

  Olda sounded grief-stricken. “If you can say that, you’re not a monarchist at all. A father, even if he realizes that he’s a bad one, cannot renounce his family. He is tied by his status, by his authority, by the subordination of others to him. Your advanced military studies must have carried the germ of progressivism. The Russian monarchy counts for more in the world than you imagine. It holds all Europe together, to begin with.”

  “Europe? I can’t see that. What do we matter to Europe? What I can see is that saving the people, not the monarchy, must be our first priority. We’re stuck in a self-destructive posture, and we must wrench ourselves out of it. And what is he doing about it? Nothing. I don’t blame him alone. The dynasty as a whole obviously bears some sort of cumulative guilt for a sin that goes all the way back to Peter or even Alexis. They broke faith with the Assembly of the Land, which elected them, they ceased to feel responsible to the Land. So now the moment has come to hand back that responsibility. For the salvation of the people.”

  Knowing that it might come to this would have been more than she could take. Was it true that only the departure of the Tsar from the Supreme Command could clear the way for the sensible and talented elements in the army, so that they could at least change the conduct of the war, or best of all deliver Russia from it? Alas, there was no legal way of removing the monarch from the Supreme Command. Georgi couldn’t formulate the practical implications (he didn’t know them himself), but he could try out a proposition on her, expressing it more uncompromisingly than he did to himself, and see how she would correct him.

  She clenched both hands, as women do, in a single fist.

  “That you should think that way is the most terrible thing of all. That I should have to argue with you about it. Are you planning an attack on the monarchy as such?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “Just think: to renounce the monarchy is to renounce a thousand years of our history. If the monarchic tradition had been a failure a great nation could not have grown from it.”

  “But what if the regime has become impossibly obtuse? Doesn’t listen to argument? Is incapable?”

  “You’ve picked all that up from educated society. But they’re just hysterical. Last year they were saying the regime couldn’t win the war without them; now they say that the regime’s objective is to lose the war. Our intelligentsia is stupid; it has a lot of conscience but no brains.”

  “So what would you advise us to do?”

  “Nothing. Grin and bear it. Lay one finger on the throne—and you’ll start a landslide. The consequences are incalculable. You mustn’t let short-term aims make you forget more distant goals.”

  She shook her head, and her whole body swayed with it.

  Why keep arguing? He would be only too happy if Olda proved right. It might mean that the crime of lying there beside her was no crime, but just what he should be doing.

  “The thing is,” Georgi mumbled, less assertively, “he lacks ability. That’s what the accident of birth means in this case.”

  “He doesn’t have to be a Solomon, he can choose wise counselors.”

  “Well, he’s chosen the wrong ones. Or if he does listen to clever ones, why doesn’t it show in his actions?”

  Olda laid chilly hands on him to make him see reason.

  “But perhaps even chance happenings are providential, perhaps there is some mysterious purpose in them. If he was born weak—let us strengthen him with our loyalty!”

  “Put it any way you like—a monarch has no right to be so wishy-washy. You said yourself that if people do not feel a mystical love for their sovereign, he does not exist. Has he really helped us to go on feeling such love for him, to go on regarding the throne as something sacred? Listening to you now, I can see clearly how sick our monarchy is: our unquestioning trust has been lost and the Emperor is in no hurry to restore it. And that is where his guilt lies. He has done a great deal to make the halo fade. You’ve said so yourself. So let him refurbish it—by strength of will, by vision, and by courage.”

  Only a grudging gray twilight filtered through the uncurtained window, but he could see how vexed Olda was, see her disheveled hair.

  “It’s dreadful! An officer with your record! With such a firm hand! With such ardent public spirit! You’re probably a good speaker too. And at such a critical time. But you’ve lost your bearings, lost your will …”

  “Will? Will for what?”

  Olda lifted one of his hands with both of hers, and dandled it as though weighing it. “In our present extremity only manly hands like these can save Russia.”

  “That’s what I want to be doing! That’s all I want! But how?” He was eager for an answer—but inwardly he felt some amusement. She didn’t know that by going to bed with him she had at least neutralized him. Didn’t know that she had as good as won already.

  She let his hand fall and held out her own bare, delicate hands, hands without muscle, hardly the hands to lift two pails—but what she was reaching for was the snaffle, the reins, to control the chariot’s wild career herself, if there were no men left to do it.

  “We must shore up the monarchy!” she cried out as the chariot flew on. “Give it guide rails
!”

  Fast as she was traveling, Vorotyntsev swiftly interrupted. “Stolypin tried to! Look what thanks he got!”

  “I can’t believe it!” She shook her bare forearms like a witch flapping her sleeves in a fairy tale. “You show greater enthusiasm for intimacy with a woman than for your obvious duty!”

  “Are you complaining?” he half howled, half laughed, and buried his head, face, beard in her bosom.

  They were still.

  No arguing, no movement.

  Georgi, intoxicated with Olda, euphorically grateful to her, held her slender frame between conciliatory paws. He felt his mentor’s whole warm, inviting body beside him, pressed against his own, under the same coverlet. Who would not make his peace, on terms he would reject in the sitting room?

  Distant aims should not distract you from those nearer to hand. No argument there!

  A little doze …?

  Except that the slightest contact …

  The very slightest …

  The smallest imaginable hand moving over his skin somewhere. Not even touching. It was as if her fingers could breathe and his skin felt their breath.

  One step. Two steps. Lightly gliding … but the lighter the contact, the more powerful the effect.

  Feeling their way around, getting to know him. His shaggy, battle-hardened chest.

  And now the tip of a claw.

  Recognizing. Pressing harder. Harder.

  What a gift you have been given! Already you are a man transformed! Infused with some new feeling by that featherlike touch! Taken by surprise—you were at rest, inert, oblivious, but now you are transformed!

  Her fingers play their little tune and he is on fire—just like that first time.

  What would follow? What would follow was always unsure. Every time there was some startling novelty.

  As a horse in full stride, if his gallop permitted, might twist his head to stare up at his spirited rider, tossed and bounced in the saddle

  —but not tossed or bounced, she holds the bit tight, and with soldierly skill and authority guides her disobedient horse’s run to the victory she sees ahead

  —but no riding habit disfigures her form—untrammeled, wind-caressed, symmetrical—her legs, drawn up for the leap, tensed in the stirrups …

  The leap, with lips pressed together, eyes tightly closed as though, like that, her course is easier to see, to whip her way over. Her unbound hair streams in the wind as the rider, losing fear and reason, rushes toward her preordained destruction—she is hurt! she cries out!

  She droops, eyes closed, hair hanging limply in the still air, curtaining her face—her hands, too slack to pull on the reins, struggle to hold on, to prevent her from crashing to the ground.

  Her faithful steed must finish the gallop for her. Will he hold her safe, will he carry her home …?

  That is what a horse is for.

  *Literally: “over-Tsared himself.” [Trans.]

  [29]

  Half the factories in Petrograd had been on strike, or so they were told after it was all over. Flags, it seemed, had been hung on government buildings (on what was in fact the day of the Emperor’s accession) and taken down afterward. Newspaper summaries of military operations had mentioned something “south of Kimpolung,” but he had not taken it in. Then a new imperial decree was published calling up category 2 militiamen. What in God’s name were they trying to do? They’d gotten it the wrong way around. What had been happening in Petrograd in those … how many days was it? Six days were missing, and they couldn’t all be holidays. But for Georgi and Olda, as they remembered it later, it had been bed, bed, bed, with an occasional walk when the weather cleared up for an hour or two. They thought of taking a trip to Mustamyaki, where Olda had a little dacha, but they never got around to that either. Some other time.

  If I’m still among the living …

  Anyway, could you really speak of “days” in Petersburg at the end of October? There were only nights. It started getting dark before it was really light; you couldn’t call them full days. Daylight was just the fading rays of a veiled sun.

  Vorotyntsev had lost sight of his reason for coming to this city, and stopped trying to contact Guchkov after his initial failures. He had no time left for it, although he had postponed his departure three times. It was lucky that he had managed to look in, as promised, on certain people in the War Ministry and the General Staff in his first two days, otherwise he would not have gotten around to it. He had not made contact with the Society for the Advancement of Military Science. Even Vera, dear attentive Vera, who always anticipated her brother’s thoughts and wishes—he had hardly seen or spoken to her since that first evening at Shingarev’s—and he had asked her nothing about herself. Why wasn’t she married? At twenty-five! To ask such a question point-blank was something he couldn’t do. He and Vera were in any case always tongue-tied on that one subject, they had never succeeded in opening their hearts to each other, and so he told her nothing about Olda now, but she, clever girl, of course knew all about it anyway. He hadn’t found time even for his minimal fraternal duties, and had soon stopped going back to spend the night under Nanny’s roof. He just sent for Alina’s letters and telegrams instead.

  The one thing that marred those blissful days was the need to put together some sort of reply to those letters and telegrams, to explain why he was not on his way back when he had said he’d be gone for only four days (four clear days, or four including travel time?). It wasn’t difficult thinking up excuses, he could plead official business, but he remembered Alina calling out as she saw him off, “Write every day!” It was agony, though, trying to put sentences together, searching for the right little word to follow the one before, and stringing them together. The form of address and the ending were particularly difficult: every word looked like an impostor, every single one jarred on ear and eye. And this falsity had to be blurred somehow.

  It wasn’t just writing his own letters—it was hard, hateful, dishonest work reading what came from Alina. The last thing he needed at that particular time. He was amazed to find that Alina had suddenly become a stranger. Previously, he had gone for a whole year without seeing her, but had not felt like this. And had happily written letters. But now, after just a few days …

  Alina’s latest untimely demand was that they should talk over the telephone—a direct connection between Moscow and Petrograd could be arranged. Luckily, the line between the two capitals was out of order for two days, so Georgi was able to avoid this conversation. His voice, live, even muted by the receiver, would have given him away. Talking to her directly would be unbearable.

  The days raced by. He had to be in Moscow on 9 November without fail, for Alina’s birthday. And now she had sent a telegram to say that she expected him at least one day before. He consulted Olda. Did one day before mean that he must get there on the 7th or on the 8th? How would it be generally understood? It obviously meant “on the eve,” Olda thought, nobody would take it to mean anything different.

  Although Georgi was being unfaithful to his wife, he did not feel the least bit guilty of deception or of base behavior. This was simply something quite different, nothing to do with Alina. He had never felt like this with Alina or with anyone else, he was reborn, a different man. That first evening with Olda had cleft his life in two, as a heavy wound might—except that this had not laid him low but raised him to the heights, made him lighter than air, able to soar unaided, and to fall without being dashed to pieces. The Vorotyntsev now afloat with Olda was not the man who had been with Alina, and so there was no betrayal.

  He had no wish to think of Alina for the present, but Olda herself returned to the subject several times. He found it both unpleasant and pointless. Whatever they were discussing, Olda was likely to ask, “What does Alina think about it?” “What does Alina do on such occasions?” And once she asked him outright, “Do you love her very much?” He said something evasive.

  Georgi had forgotten that it was possible to feel such ease,
such freedom. His heart overflowed with gratitude to Olda, and there was no room left for doubt or for guilt.

  Throughout those fleeting days and nights, being with Olda, being near her was something innocent, legitimate, yes, legitimate, his due after all those frozen months of trench warfare, after all his unappreciated efforts on the staff and in the field. Well, the Supreme Command had shown no appreciation, so this little woman was his living reward, the best that Russia’s abundance could offer, better than any number of medals.

  Was she then, the one—that nameless, unknown she, never seen, never glimpsed in imagination, beyond the limits of clear vision, but so keenly sensed in his dream at Usdau?

  It was in fact Olda who said one day, looking meditatively into the distance, fantasizing, pretending to remember, “We know each other of old. Can’t you feel it?”

  Not exactly. I could never have invented, imagined anyone quite like her.

  But listen. There was that one time …

  “Where were you on 27 August 1914? Who was with you? What were you thinking about?”

  He told her his story.

  She smiled. Stroked his mustache, his beard.

  “You’re very passionate.”

  “I’ve never noticed it.”

  She screwed up her eyes, quizzically.

  “You still don’t know anything about yourself. Even if you are forty. You didn’t make the best of your younger days!”

  “If I had I wouldn’t have gotten anything done, Olda my love!”

  “And what have you done that matters so much?”

  She was right. What did it amount to? Plans, rash gestures, defeats. And his fall from favor. Colonels on the General Staff usually dodged regimental postings—no career there, and anyway only one officer in four or five was trained for General Staff duties, and it cost too much for them to be used on regimental service. After two years commanding a regiment Vorotyntsev should by rights be a general. But was not.