November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  He sat down on the bed.

  Sat, slumped, shrank. His body sank into the mattress, his head sank onto his shoulders, his neck disappeared: his chin rested on his chest, the back of his head on his spine.

  With one hand he held on to the edge of the table in front of him.

  One eye was half closed. His mouth was half open. A tough, untidy stubble bristled on his upper lip. His flat-tipped nose was pushed outward.

  He sat like that for one minute, two, three.

  “Do you want to lie down? Get undressed?” Nadya asked in her soft, toneless voice.

  He was silent.

  “Why didn’t you come back for lunch? Were you working too hard?”

  He nodded with an effort.

  “Will you eat now?” But her voice held no promise of carnivorous delights. She just couldn’t learn to cook.

  How different from Shushenskoye! Then there was always a fire in the stove, pots on it, a roast in the oven (a whole sheep was meat for a week), tubs of pickles, snipe, grouse, you could bathe in milk if you felt like it. And everything was washed sparkling clean by a little servant girl.

  His dome was completely bald now. He had kept only his back hair, and that was thinning. (They themselves had made things worse in 1902: they had begrudged the money for a good doctor, and a half-trained Russian medical student prescribed iodine for a rash on his head, which caused his hair to fall out.)

  Nadya came closer, gently, timidly stroked his head.

  Several long, deep lines furrowed his brow from temple to temple. He sighed loudly, jerkily—more like a man pulling a heavy load than a deskbound intellectual. Without raising his submerged head, looking not at his wife but straight ahead, over the table, he said wearily, oh so wearily, “When the war ends we’ll go to America.”

  She couldn’t believe her ears.

  “But what about the Zimmerwald left? The new International?” She stood there, forlorn and frumpish.

  Her husband sighed, and answered in a hoarse, flat, weak voice. “It’s obvious which way things are going in Russia. The Tsar will make a deal with the Kadets, and they will form a government. Then we’ll have twenty or thirty years of boring, vulgar, bourgeois evolution. With no hope at all for revolutionaries. We won’t live to see the day.”

  Very well, then. They would go. She stroked the thin hair on the back of his head.

  Suddenly the landlady knocked at the door. Someone had come to see them.

  This was all they needed. Whoever it was had chosen a fine time! Without even asking, Nadya went to send the visitor away.

  She came back looking bewildered. “Volodya! It’s Sklarz! From Berlin …”

  * * *

  IT CAN GO ON FOUR LEGS—AS LONG AS IT LAYS EGGS.

  * * *

  [45]

  On the eve of the feast of our Lady of Kazan, a Friday, the women were hard at it boiling and baking, their cheeks flushed all day from the heat of the stove. And from all the neighboring villages—Izobilnaya, Torchki, Bredikhin, and even Zhuravlino-Vershinskoye—guests dressed in their best and drawn by high-steppers assembled for their kinsfolk’s high holiday. After more than two years of culling it was astonishing how populous their volost was. Men in early middle age were still all at home, and the region’s famous horses were as handsome and spirited as ever, with their burnished holiday harness sparkling and jingling. The men wore two-piece or three-piece suits, delivered from the depths of clothes chests, and creaky new boots, no one was ill shod. While the women went to church in frills and flounces all colors of the rainbow, if not in beaver capes, Mother wearing a Turkish shawl, Katya in Romanian lace-up bootees.

  Among those who arrived was Adrian’s wife, Anfisa, bringing her three little ones from the farm at Blue Bushes to visit the Blagodarevs. Though a guest herself she helped with the cooking and serving, as other guests poured in to view the soldier. Anfisa was a good sort, and one of the family, more or less—but she couldn’t hide her envy, and who wouldn’t feel sore? Adrian had been wounded twice, but didn’t have a medal, Senka not even once, and he had two.

  Well, it had just happened that way, and what could Senka do about it? He felt embarrassed himself. Ever since his homecoming his hands had been aching for work, to make up for lost time. Never mind all those years he had spent manhandling gun carriages, ramming shells into the breech, digging holes in the ground—none of that work counted, it was as though he had never done it, he was eager to put his back into it as never before, but this was not the time, he had arrived on the eve of a holiday, three days on end of feasting and friendly faces, going from table to table, showing himself.

  The festivals dovetailed one into the other. On Saturday it was Our Lady of Kazan, their patron saint’s day. The local authorities never failed to raise the flag on the eve of the feast, which was also the anniversary of the Emperor’s accession. This year, St. Dmitri’s Saturday, the day of remembrance of dead relatives, fell on the same day as the parish feast. On Sunday, the second day of the parish feast, there were prayers from house to house, the reveling knew no bounds, night was falling when guests went their ways. Monday was the feast of Our Lady Comforter of All the Afflicted, with yet another service in the church, yet another whole day of holiday, this time among your own folk, the villagers of Kamenka.

  So every morning the Blagodarevs doused their heads with ice-cold water to clear them after yesterday’s jollification, and went off to morning prayers and mass, leaving Mother or Katya or Fenya at home with the little ones.

  Summoned by the bells, the villagers walked down from their homes on all the hills of Kamenka, and uphill again to the church, all in their best clothes, the women wearing bright red or dark blue head scarves and shawls, jackets, or even pelisses, which they could always hang up in the narthex should they feel too warm. The men too wore bright clothes. The old women were in their Sunday black. Even the boys had their boots on, picking the drier places to strut around and show off. Why dress up otherwise?

  Arseni was eternally indebted to Father Mikhail. His father would not have let him, any more than Adrian and their sisters, go to school, he couldn’t afford it, and anyway going to school wasn’t the rule at the time. Senka’s father wanted him to go and work for the village herdsman, but when Father Mikhail got wind of it he talked to Elisei and gave him ten poods of rye to let his son attend the church school. (There was as yet no zemstvo school in Kamenka.) That was the old Father Mikhail, the present one’s father, who used to call grown-up parishioners his “little ones,” he was dead now, and his son had taken his place. Also called Father Mikhail Molchanov, he performed the rites just as punctiliously—mass could take more than two hours on Sunday—officiated at services by request just as zealously, was just as meek, and people consulted him on matters of conscience just as willingly. The only difference was that he didn’t call grown-ups his “little ones.” He was always in the garden with spade and shears, following his father in this respect too, and had let the lilacs around his little house grow even more profusely.

  In the past Arseni had said the responses for him, and sung in the choir. So Father Mikhail sent word that he should walk straight up and take his place in the choir for the holidays, and receive communion on Our Lady of Kazan’s day. It was as though the last two years and a bit had never been, as if Arseni had never been wrenched from his village, snatched away as though in the jaws of a wolf, to drag himself along with fires and explosions all around him, hide from cross fire in trenches and shell holes, and return the German bounty in kind. There it was, the church of his childhood, his very own church, unchanged, the icons and candelabra still in their old places, the same chancel rail, and Father Mikhail standing in the same chasuble before the same wrought-iron sanctuary gates. Arseni had attended services and requiems at the front, standing before a collapsible field altar, and the liturgy had been sung to the same chant, but there, as with everything else in a soldier’s life, it somehow wasn’t the real thing. You got used to it, and stop
ped noticing, it was only when you went home to your village that you felt the difference. Now Arseni could sing out again, heartily, without constraint. And listen with the people of his own village to the festival hymn: “Mother of God, unworthy as we are we will never cease to proclaim Thy power: for if Thou didst not intercede and pray for us who would deliver us from such great troubles? Who would have kept us free unto this time?”

  Whether it was sung or chanted, whether it could be understood at once or its meaning was dark, whether you followed every word or started thinking your own thoughts about what it would be like after the war, say, and what a fine life you and Katya would have together, the words of the prayer still lifted you above life’s rough-and-tumble, as did the church itself. Humbly adorned as it was, the best of the cottages could not compare with it. It was open to everyone, and treated all alike. As they stood through the service of their patron saint, they were conscious all the time of what would very shortly follow, the general merrymaking, the heavy drinking, the horse racing, the horse trading, the brawling, with young men confronting each other in pitched battles, and even grown men in a fighting frenzy, but here in church you were reminded that all this was froth and scum, that we, all of us together, are the mir, children of the same God, and that it is not meet we should bear malice one toward another. All stand quietly, all bend their heads when they should, even the proud and quarrelsome, and when it is time to kneel, all kneel, and if a man’s mind has room only for his everyday concerns, if all he asks from God is to give his children or his cattle good health, or to help him in his plans for his holding, that too is as it should be, there is no harm in it. But hope you choke! Bust a gut! Die, why don’t you! Nobody here will pray for anything like that. “We have no other help, save only for Thee, Queen of Heaven. Be Thou our help: Thou art our hope and our glory. For we are Thy servants, and we shall not be shamed.”

  If he turned his head slightly Arseni could see Katya out of the corner of his eye, standing on the left, the women’s side of the church, in the throng of holiday worshippers, and praying. So meek and mild, so neat, so quick in her movements, gazing so devoutly at the Mother of God, bowing from the waist so eagerly and easily, with a little flutter of her head scarf. And to see her cheerful devoutness, her eager obeisances, nobody would have said, nobody could imagine, that she had ever had sinful thoughts, in the bathhouse just now, or before, or that she harbored any for the future. Arseni dutifully sang along with the choir, but in his heart there was a song of praise: I thank Thee, Lord, for sending me such a wife, good to look at, good worker, good-tempered. Little wife of mine, none could be better!

  Afterward people poured out of the church, scattering downhill, to their festivities. Previously no one in Kamenka had taken strong drink except at holiday times—anyone who did was not a man, no head of household, and when the war came distilling under license had been suspended anyway. But they were not left without strong drink. They had always brewed braga and beer, but now they learned how to distill, from grain, a liquor stronger than vodka. It lifted you out of this world, left you ever so merry. By now there were maybe seven phonographs in Kamenka and the fashion was to stand them on benches outside the gates, or at a window, to entertain the world at large, and keep the accordionists quiet for a bit. The young people would dance in front of the fire station where the ground had been trampled down. They sang songs at the tops of their voices, sang fit to burst, hill answering hill.

  After the jollifications of the patron saint’s day the young men always fought, village against village, and even grown men were drawn into the fray. Nowadays there was noticeably less jollity than usual and fighting went on with or without the parish feast. This year there was a fight almost to the death between drunken conscripts—Kamenka versus Volkhonskoye. They couldn’t save it for the Germans. The two constables from the big town and the village had a hard time breaking it up and had to turn the fire hose on them. And the mischief the village boys got up to beat anything ever heard of. Eighteen-year-old Mishka, son of a respected father, got together a band of youths and the village had never experienced anything like the malicious damage they did. They stole poultry, blocked chimneys, broke branches in orchards belonging to other peasants. That was definitely out of order—the rule had always been that you could steal the squire’s apples but nobody else’s. Not one of them was caught red-handed, and Mishka Rul’s father could do nothing with him, he was due to go into the army anyway.

  The three days merged into one, you went from cottage to cottage, from feast to feast, until you couldn’t say whom you’d seen, where, or what you’d scoffed down—meat or fish, pies or galantines. Arseni made the rounds, jingling his two medals, removing them from his greatcoat to pin them on his tunic, gladly telling his listeners for the umpteenth time how he had won them, how things were generally at the front, what the Germans were like, yelling across the table, above the roar of voices, and the strains of the accordion. “What every soldier should know: spit on your rifle, but don’t wet the barrel!!” “A soldier doesn’t need a fur coat, marching will keep him warm.” There was another saying, that “a soldier on leave means shirt outside breeches,” but he himself was always tightly belted, if only because he would have been ashamed to let his belly sag and hunch his shoulders with such a fine figure of a father beside him. Whatever anybody asked Senka, yelling above the hubbub, plucking at his tunic, planting a hand on his shoulder, he answered confidently, whether he knew or not. Was it true that the Germans weren’t just throwing bombs anymore but belching fire? And was it true that the Frenchies had black devils fighting for them, in the flesh, not hiding themselves? And why were we fighting the Germans, a Christian people like ourselves, so fiercely? With the Turks or the Japanese it was different …

  Then, of course, they sang, at the tops of their voices.

  For three whole days they were living on top of one another, indoors the whole time, and it was only as he walked from cottage to cottage, or went outside to cool his head in the damp, chill air that Arseni saw the sky, through clouds sometimes stretched to the thinness of fine linen, with the sun shining through, and saw his village spread out before him from the hill on which Davydov the landowner’s house stood, and from which the main street ran down to the bridge over the stream, then on beyond the bridge and past Pluzhnikov’s brick house, to another hill, beyond the crest of which the road ran down again all the way to the river Savala and to another hill over against the Prince’s Forest, or else you could turn aside toward the hill on which the church and the priest’s garden stood, together with the cemetery, the parish school which Arseni had attended, the zemstvo school, the hospital, the horse clinic, and the copse. There was also a broad view of the rolling water meadows along the Savala, and in the distance the bend where it rounded the village, retreating here and there to touch outlying farms, then, farther up, the highroad, where it turned around on itself and vanished in the direction of the station at Rzhaksa. After surveying all this, and picturing his own future farm growing up there somewhere over the Savala, it was back to the table, where dishes not yet sampled had appeared, and you were invited to dunk limp wheaten pancakes in cream or wash down buckwheat cakes with tea.

  After which the festive meal was crowned with golden slumbers.

  During the holidays he also found time to overcome Sevastyan’s shyness: he never passed the child without patting or stroking him. But the little boy still wouldn’t come to his father’s arms—he hid behind his mother or his grandmother. He could say “grand-da” and liked pulling the old man’s mustache, but didn’t know the word “daddy” yet. Never mind—three weeks would make all the difference. It was amazing how acutely aware Arseni was of the blood tie with Sevastyan. He didn’t just know that this was his child, the child his wife had borne him. If the child had been hidden from him, if they’d told him that it was someone else’s child, he would still have sought him out, blood would have called to blood. The little boy himself seemed to sense it—s
taring wide-eyed at his father, and once, just once, quietly snuggling up to him.

  It wasn’t just Sevastyan, though. Proska too, when she caught sight of her father from her cradle, dropped her pacifier and followed him with her eyes as far as she could.

  Proska’s eyes were like the sky on a spring day.

  Today was the feast of Our Lady Comforter of All the Afflicted, and they went to mass again, but the service was shorter. In his sermon, as befitted the day, the priest told them that we all have sorrows, no one escapes sorrow, and things still worse, but that sorrows should unite us before God, not divide us, unite us more surely than our successes, our joys, and our festivals.

  The congregation dispersed, and as they left Elisei and Arseni were approached by Pluzhnikov himself, a fine figure of a man with a pitch-black cowlick, an expensive dark blue serge coat, nipped in at the waist, and patent-leather boots with stiff, non-crease tops. He invited father and son to dinner in two hours’ time.

  Honoring the George medalist! And his father no less. Pluzhnikov was perhaps the most important man in the mir, not in terms of wealth or years, but in the estimation of the community. He had reached that position in the few years after the troubles. At one time no one could have foreseen that he would rise in the world: he had been a bit of a troublemaker, one of a handful of peasants whom the landowner Vasil’ Vasilich, and Alyoshka Khersonsky, the deacon’s son, surreptitiously incited against the Tsar. Vasil’ Vasilich himself had gone off to France, but seven peasants from that district and two neighboring ones, Pluzhnikov among them, were rounded up and banished to Olonets province. In addition to this they had some sort of link with Socialist Revolutionaries in Tambov. Moreover, Pluzhnikov was at the time the elected head of a mutual aid society which collected money to buy land—money for which the SRs were supposed to have exchanged counterfeit notes on the very steps of the bank. Nobody really knew the ins and outs of the affair, but Pluzhnikov had spent two years in exile. When he returned he was unrecognizable: still a leader of men but a sensible one. He built himself a brick house, made his own farm profitable, with two hundred hives, bought extra land, and also started a credit cooperative, which gave peasants a chance to make good and greater freedom of action: instead of the bother of seeking out purchasers, and making long journeys themselves, they could dispatch produce through the cooperative, which would also make loans. Good? They had never known anything like it. In the few years before the war Pluzhnikov’s efforts, his good judgment, and the advice he gave the commune had earned him, scarcely forty, the title of “bat’ka,” but it hadn’t stuck, it never became a street name, and people went on respectfully calling him Grigori Naumovich. He was recognized as a leader far beyond his own district.