November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  It was happiness enough for her to have him sitting there, reading to her.

  Later, lying in the dark beside him, she was a long time going to sleep. Suddenly she spoke. Her longest speech all day.

  “You know what? … The very young ought to be taught not writing or arithmetic or needlework or scripture … But how to love.”

  “How can you teach them that?”

  “There has to be a way. It isn’t something we’re born with, so it has to be taught.”

  He thought she’d fallen asleep. But no. She put her arm around his neck.

  “If you’d been different on my first night I would have felt different too. Ever afterward.”

  Georgi, already half asleep, was mystified. What did their first night have to do with anything? That was ten years ago.

  “I didn’t realize it myself till today.”

  It cost him a great effort to remember that first night.

  But it was as if this new friendship between them had given Alina a certain detachment and she reminded him how it had all been—that room in the dusk, the last light fading, Georgi leaving the room, herself undressing while he was away, lying there feeling frightened, and then he …

  Hmm … maybe it had been like that … Maybe … She hadn’t convinced him, but he was moved by the live pain of her recollection, her effort to exchange confidences with him. Strange as it would once have been to speak of these things, never before mentioned between them, it now seemed simple. This extreme candor filled them with an extraordinary warmth: it was as if their whole life together had been make-believe, and suddenly, for the first time, it was all real, all as it should have been from the first moment.

  But they would have to leave tomorrow, without fail, they had stayed too long already! This was Vorotyntsev’s seventeenth day away from his regiment! Throughout his service career he had felt like a cat on hot bricks if he was a single day overdue. And he still had to look in at GHQ! How much longer was that going to take? Could he really find time?

  Alina, however, had no thought of leaving. She didn’t even realize what the situation was. She wore still that rapt expression of blissful renunciation, looking so fragile that it was impossible to hurry her; try shaking her out of it and you might break her.

  A dilemma. He didn’t want to put off his departure but he had to spare his wife’s feelings.

  The news had not been easy for her to take. And it was of course true that he had started letting slip by, throwing away, wasting one day after another in Petersburg. The crucial days he had squandered with Olda. Once you had set foot on the slippery slope … Now it was time to show Alina some consideration.

  As before, they took their time over breakfast. Then went out for another deliberately unhurried stroll. A hard frost overnight had left a fringe of ice around the pool. The weather remained cold and windy, but the sun was shining. It brought a smile from Alina. Her smile was at once compassionate and mechanical. A smile that seemed to have been borrowed from somebody else.

  From time to time she touched him gently and pointed to something—a leaf trapped in the ice, a belated bird.

  Georgi felt a pang: all this was his fault.

  He had meant to insist on leaving before dinner, but his strength had failed him. She wanted to stay on—and of course it was for her to say.

  Some sort of healing process was going on in her mind.

  It got warmer in the afternoon. A lovely autumn day. They walked and walked—most of the time without speaking, as before. He made an occasional remark, but more often than not she did not reply. She screwed up her eyes in the bright sunshine, but uncomplainingly. Letting herself be led, hand under his arm, without argument, wherever he chose, back to the guesthouse if he wished, drifting with the current.

  The silence they shared, and her meek submissiveness, made Georgi more and more sure that he would never leave her.

  He knew it was imperative for him to move, to act decisively—but he was duty-bound to hang on in this ridiculous guesthouse doing nothing.

  Instead of staying in Petersburg for another meeting with Guchkov he had shamefacedly hurried home for a family celebration—to find himself a prisoner in this place!

  But it wasn’t Alina who had started it. He had. And he had to take responsibility.

  More procrastination, another delayed departure—it was just as it was with Olda in Petersburg, but his feelings were very different.

  Another whole day of this strange, upside-down second honeymoon of theirs went by.

  Toward evening it was no longer freezing and the sky was clouded over again.

  Neither of them wanted to talk, and there was nothing to stop him from thinking. Yet he could not make room even for thoughts about Olda, though deep within him the memory of her was a song of gratitude and happiness. He could not think freely.

  What did the future hold for him and Olda?

  At dinner Alina wore an absent smile. But something was different—this was not the sublime resignation he had seemed to see the night before. The corners of her mouth looked very tight.

  That evening she insisted on hearing her schoolgirl favorite, Jane Eyre, all over again. And although Georgi knew that yet again she would not be listening, he could not get out of reading to her.

  He read without himself understanding a single word of what he was reading. He was racked with worry about the time he was wasting. And worry for Alina. He stole anxious and fearful looks from time to time at her strange, mindlessly blissful smile.

  And felt that he was shackled to this woman.

  What terrible thing had he done?

  * * *

  HE MAY HAVE SET OUT FOR LADOGA, BUT HE LANDED IN TIKHVIN.

  * * *

  [55]

  One thing’s for sure, no matter how many marvelous people you meet later on, there’s no one like the friend of your youth. No one else will ever be so close. If only because there’s no one else with whom you can relive your past in such detail. Your friend knows all about it, has shared it, and when memory is suddenly jogged two pairs of eyebrows twitch at once, and you are both roaring with laughter, convulsed. “Those were the days!” Or: “Remember what we had to put up with in Cadet School? ‘Heads up! Straighten that leg! This isn’t the u-ni-ni-versity!’ ”

  In fact Cadet School had left them less to remember than anything else. Their time had been wasted so idiotically! Those uncouth senior cadets! Practicing saluting when they would have been better occupied with their training manuals. Folding their clothes at bedtime—no more than five inches high or eight in width, or you’d be woken up in the night to fold them again. Cramming regulations irrelevant in battle. (While no one taught them the essentials. Indeed, the teachers themselves still had it all to learn.)

  I’ve just thought of something! Remember when we were sitting in the big room at the Rumyantsev Academy, up in the corner by the bookcase with the encyclopedias, looking at Vladimir Soloviev’s thoughts on the theocratic state being the realization of the Kingdom of Heaven? Which got us absolutely nowhere. Surely the Kingdom of Heaven is not merely an earthly institutional ideal, achievable by practical social measures? Surely it presupposes a world transformed, in which the flesh and the disembodied spirit are governed by other laws, and surely it has no relevance to human historical reality? Would you believe it—our brigade chaplain has just given me an article by Evgeni Trubetskoy to read, one we missed. (None of this had yet been said, but it would be, without fail, when next they met.)

  And all that they had seen of the war, all that they had gone through separately in the last eighteen months—who could be told about it, and expected to understand, if not the friend of your youth? They had experienced it separately, but their thoughts about it would be identical. So many different roads traveled, different binoculars looked through, but their angle of vision was the same. If we get through the war alive we two will be doing something or other together, that goes without saying. As things are, we can find ways of meet
ing without waiting for the war to end: across a table planted in the ground under a pine tree, or lying on the pine needles, prone on a cape with room for two, looking into each other’s eyes—could any two people in the world understand each other better! To talk and talk for hours on end! Cleansing your soul! Time more precious than that you might spend with your beloved. (Might—because you have no such person, and neither do I.)

  Back in Artillery School, sitting beside each other in topography lessons, learning to draw maps with universal coordinates, they had thought up a marvelous scheme: you could indicate every square verst on the continent with a single Roman letter followed by six figures. Add a seventh figure and you were down to one ninth of a square verst—one hundred and seventy by one hundred and seventy sazhens. With such precision they would never have any difficulty in locating each other. Simply insert those figures at intervals among the words of a letter, and the army censors will never guess that I have told you in code on which square my battery is located. The names of units can be mentioned openly, they are common knowledge. (For that matter, you could identify the square openly, and they still wouldn’t notice. The camouflage was just a precaution.) Of course, if one of them was somewhere near Vilna, and the other in the Carpathians, this wily scheme wouldn’t help. But if they were near enough, say twenty or thirty versts apart, and told each other, one of them could surely manage a visit sooner or later.

  Although they had both graduated from the Heavy Artillery Department there were no suitable vacancies (there was hardly any heavy artillery) and they were assigned to different divisions. At first they were too far apart, but then Kotya was moved closer, and that May, after a light shower of warm spring rain, which the earth returned in perfumed vapors, in a Belorussian village overburdened with the horde of soldiers billeted on it, Sanya had asked one officer, then another, if he knew where Second Lieutenant Gulai was, Kotya had heard about it, charged down the street, caught sight of his friend—and the two second lieutenants ran into each other’s arms, laughing aloud to think how cunning they had been, how cleverly they had contrived it!

  In August, Kotya had found his way to Sanya here in Dryagovets. So today he had no need at all to consult the map. He even knew exactly which dugout to head for. Reining in his horse by a pine tree, he dismounted and gave the reins to his orderly. As he set off on foot, Sanya appeared from an unexpected direction. So here we are! An unlooked-for holiday for some hours!

  They embraced. Gripped each other hard. Kotya had grown stronger. He clasped Sanya around the ribs till it hurt. (Sanya might have done the same—you don’t realize you’re doing it yourself.) His lips seemed to be all muscle. His small clipped mustache pricklier.

  They embraced—but with no trace of their old eager, laughing ardor. Let’s see now—how else have you changed? Cheeks hollower? Look a bit sterner? Even the dome of your head and the shape of your temples seem different. What has happened to you? All this in the space of a few months?

  No, my friend—in just a couple of days.

  His head seemed longer, less rounded. His eyelids rose and half closed again, tremulously, as though he was taking aim.

  “So how are things with you?”

  “I’ll tell you shortly.”

  Sanya, holding him by the shoulders: “You’ll stay the night, won’t you?”

  “That’s what I came for.”

  “Good!”

  “Can you do something about the horses, and put the orderly up?”

  “Yes, of course. Tsyzh! Let’s have some fried potatoes! And some of the emergency ration, all right?”

  Sanya was falling over himself to make his guest at home. But while he was bustling in and out making arrangements something impelled him to change his tunic, complete with George medal, for another, unadorned one. Kotya was brave and more of a soldier than Sanya, but the chance to win a medal had not yet come his way. They both knew that it was not a matter of derring-do, but of luck—whether the commendation was effectively worded, whether it landed on the right desk and at the right moment—and that someone who had never caught a whiff of battle might receive a decoration “with swords,” but Sanya was nevertheless determined that no awkward shadow would come between them. Sanya was as proud of his new medal as a little boy, but when he stopped to think, it seemed absurd and unfair that his friend had only the red sword knot of St. Anna and the Order of St. Stanislav.

  Evening was drawing near, and Sanya suggested a walk before supper. There was something they hadn’t gotten around to on Kotya’s last visit, and had agreed to do this time—take a look at the way in which the grenadiers had positioned their antiaircraft guns: their own carpenters had fashioned swiveling bases, tilted each gun carriage, and dug a circular trench under its trail. Strangely, all this now intrigued them as much as sweet philosophy once had. All these binoculars and compasses had become part of their lives and conversation.

  Kotya went along without demur. But to all appearances mechanically. They buttoned themselves up against the wind. There were still ragged clouds overhead, their western edges fringed with red and violet—the sky was clearing, and it would be getting colder. The ground was freezing already, hardening into irregular ridges.

  Last time Kotya himself had said that if you have to make war do it properly, learn all you can. He had talked about 35th Corps’s Gvozdev platforms (made of railroad ties) which one man could maneuver unaided: they scared off enemy planes, though there were no direct hits. Now Sanya said, as if apologizing on behalf of the grenadiers, “Some batteries, of course, now have antiaircraft guns mounted on armored cars, or so we’re told. That’s the kind of thing we need. At present it’s all rather primitive.”

  Kotya said nothing.

  Sanya went on to complain that the Germans coordinated aerial and artillery strikes, that they had spotters to correct the line of fire, captive balloons and aerial photography, while Russian planes broke down, no balloons were issued, and communications were inadequate. And insofar as reconnaissance was carried out at all the results were not passed on promptly.

  They were walking on the edge of the forest, stumbling over frozen hummocks. Kotya suddenly woke up, and stopped.

  “Why are we behaving like children? Or idiots? It’ll soon be winter. What kind of soldier goes charging around in the cold when he could be sitting in the warmth?”

  They went back. Somewhere soldiers lined up for their supper were singing the last words of the evening hymn.

  They had not reached their destination, but they were already tired, and conversation flagged. Kotya was not his old self, best hurry back into the warmth.

  Coats off. Chernega won’t be here today, there’s a spare bunk. When Ustimovich turns up he won’t be in our way.

  Now’s the time to say all the things you can’t put in letters. Things for which a whole night’s talk would be too little.

  But now that he had looked more closely Sanya hardly recognized Kotya. It wasn’t just absentmindedness or automatism, it was as though nothing he saw meant anything to him. He seemed to be completely at a loss—he never had been in the past. And although there was nothing gladdening about any of this, Sanya somehow felt that his friend was closer than ever in this new, melancholy frame of mind.

  Kotya’s hair was close-cropped—not for him a stylish haircut—and that made him look almost like a common soldier, rough and ready, prepared for anything.

  He stared at Sanya, eyebrows raised.

  “Why are we standing?”

  They sat down.

  “How much have you people here heard about our battle at Skrobotovo?”

  “Ah, so that’s where all the racket was? At Skrobotovo again, like in the summer? We don’t really know much about it …”

  “No, of course not.” Kotya’s stiff half-shaven lip twisted in a wry grin. “If a battle goes badly the rule with us is to hush it up, conceal it from those up above and from the neighbors. But you did hear the guns?”

  “Yes, there were a lot
of big bangs to our right. Let’s see, when was it, the day before yesterday?”

  “And the day before that. I barely came through alive, brother, I can tell you. I don’t know how I survived.”

  Sanya saw it all now: Konstantin had come back “from the other side.” And had begun to feel so much at home there that returning gave him no joy. His heart was a cinder. He sat with one leg over the other, clasping his upper knee with interlaced fingers, and looking despondently, fixedly past his friend, past the table, down at the floor.

  Kotya had told his friend last time that the Russian command had decided to launch in that sector what was to be an offensive all along the Western Front, throwing in three army corps. They tried to breach the German positions at the village of Skrobotovo. And what do you think? No sooner had they taken two lines of German trenches than an inexplicable order was given to withdraw. Then when the Germans were back and well dug in, our troops were sent to retake the trenches, but were made to look silly. To their right the 46th Division, instead of just making a demonstration, advanced deep into enemy territory and entrenched itself, but there was no backup and it had to withdraw. In short, there was no breakthrough at Skrobotovo, no objective was taken, but they did occupy a depression, advance along it right up to enemy lines, and go to ground there. They were as close as they possibly could be, as close as you are always ordered to get but never do. So the top brass thought it would be a pity to abandon such a position and ordered them not to go home to their own cozy trenches but to dig in, thirty paces from the enemy. The ground was too soggy for deep digging, so under cover of darkness they hauled in bodies to make a parapet—there were more than enough of them—covered it with earth, and there you were, a strongpoint. They stayed there in that stench, and a cloud of blowflies, for a month, got used to the smell, made themselves dugouts—shallow holes in the ground, half walled around with sacks filled with earth. It was a deadly place. The 81st Division dragged out a dozen or two dead men every night. But the deadliest spot of all was the right-hand trench, where Lieutenant Colonel Kupryukhin’s battalion was stationed. The trench was right at the foot of a slope occupied by the Germans, no more than a few dozen paces away, there was no cover at all, the Germans could even empty their slops on them. The regimental commander asked permission to evacuate that trench, because the Germans could simply jump on them from above, but General Parchevsky, the corps commander, replied, “The rule for Russians is: not one step backward!” Kupryukhin was a little man, bald-headed, nothing much to look at, but he knew his business. He had to stay where he was, but did his best to fortify the position. From the artillery observation post on Lapin Hill you could see infantry with no hope of survival in the trench digging themselves foxholes in the sloping sides of the depression, ramming themselves in up to the waist or beyond, and leaving their legs to be riddled by enemy bullets. The dead remained there in those ready-made coffins until they were pulled out by their legs. Or in some cases were not.