November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  So thrilled was Vorotyntsev by the news that everything now seemed to depend on Gurko: his own immediate prospects, where he would be tomorrow, the future of his secret plan, which had become so blurred during his travels that he now hardly understood it himself. His belief in it had been badly shaken by Svechin, and in some respects by Olda, but he was still seeking the formulation which had so far eluded him.

  He badly needed a letter from Olda. How he missed her! It was so long since he had seen her. Did she really exist? He hardly knew: that weekend with Alina at the guesthouse was like a wall between them. His heart, his body were aware of Olda every minute of the day, but his mind sometimes forgot her altogether.

  In the past few hours the warmish, dull day had darkened. A storm was brewing. A brisk wind had sprung up and was chasing black clouds across the sky, though as yet no rain was falling. Sudden powerful gusts whipped off hats, billowed garments, tousled the manes and tails of horses, and even held back pedestrians breasting it on Governor’s Square. Unusually for that time of year, and with a sky so dark, the wind had brought excessive, almost summery warmth. It could not last long, but in the dying hours of the day it troubled breathing and feelings. Work over, and on his way to the post office, Vorotyntsev, feeling hot and overburdened in his greatcoat and his tall fur hat, regretted not bringing raincoat and forage cap.

  To his right the wind was whistling loudly around a white fire tower with a gilded top like a fireman’s helmet. He enjoyed bracing himself and battling against the wind as he crossed the close-fitted cobblestones of Governor’s Square, making for the old Town Hall, a five-story building topped by a bell tower, more or less Polish in inspiration. He came out on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, behind the Town Hall, where Jewish traders were still selling petit fours, “radish fritters,” and other confections to children, from stalls set against the stone wall of the monastery.

  Mogilev’s best pharmacies, photographic studios, and shops were all there on this long street stretching beyond the monastery and its blue belfry. Shop signs showed red gloves, golden boots, festoons of Ukrainian sausages. Dusk was falling and the after-school promenade was beginning. Girls in twos and fours wearing porkpie hats with a ribbon fluttering over one ear: brown ribbon with golden rosette, blue with silver, pink with gold. Some of the girls were very pretty, and almost adult. The boys, also in small groups, sauntered behind them: high school pupils wearing dark blue caps with white piping, stylishly crumpled like those of cavalry officers, modern school pupils in green caps with yellow piping. Mogilev too was now a capital city of sorts, with a bustling life of its own, and people were stimulated, not deterred, by the boisterous warm wind.

  Vorotyntsev was on his way to the post office in the hope of finding a general delivery letter from Olda. The nearer he got, the tighter his chest became, the more insistently his heart hammered her name. He had lived through so many pointless days, useless explanations, futile crises since he had last seen her. He had put her in an intolerable position, and had put his little sister Vera in a stupid one if Alina descended on her looking for explanations. Why had he been in such a hurry? How could he have behaved so idiotically? He had almost been simpleton enough to let Alina worm Olda’s name out of him. Even without it, she had punished him for his candor.

  It was three days since he had heard anything of Alina, but that was something of a relief: the less you saw and heard, the less you ached. Just as long as she had not gone off to Petrograd for a showdown with Olda. Perhaps dear Susanna had made herself useful and held Alina back?

  Alina was suffering, of course (by now probably less than at first). He would still have to meet her, spend time with her, but just now it cost him a mental effort to remember that. Just now what he wanted was not to think about her at all.

  He went first to the telegram window. It was in his hand as soon as he asked—a telegram from Petrograd. He almost tore it in his haste to open it. From Vera. All was well, Alina was not with her. She had been sensible enough to stay away, thank God. But what sort of ordeal had it been for dear Vera? What was she thinking now? It was all horribly unpleasant.

  Lighter at heart, Vorotyntsev went to ask for his letters with pleasurable anticipation. The clerk behind the highly polished oak barrier began sorting through the “V” pile with careful fingers, in no hurry at all to find what he was looking for, but determined not to miss it. Vorotyntsev’s eyes tried to wrest the expected envelope from the clerk’s fingers, though he had no idea as yet what it would look like, since he had never received a letter from Olda and did not yet know her handwriting well enough to recognize it at a distance and upside down, but longing for, loving in advance her envelope, her handwriting and what she had written—whatever it was it would send the hot blood coursing through his veins, he could feel it already!

  The clerk, good man, had found it! A smallish envelope, but not at all ladylike, slightly elongated, of stout corrugated paper, white but with a grayish tinge. Its delicate silky lining rustled as it changed hands. The handwriting was upright, the letters as small and compact as Olda herself when she sat with her arms tightly folded and her legs tucked up under her on the sofa.

  He was in a feverish hurry, but afraid that he might carelessly tear the precious envelope. The clerk, excellent fellow, observed the colonel’s predicament and offered him a pair of scissors. All this with no trace of a smile. Before slitting the envelope Vorotyntsev looked hard at the stamps. They belonged to the “Help Our Fighting Men and Their Families” series. He was familiar with them, had often seen them, but this particular combination heightened his excitement. Was it coincidence? One showed St. George, Bringer of Victory, mounted, lance leveled, the other a woman wearing the headdress of a boyar’s wife, and embracing infant orphans. This great lady, pictured from behind, was tall and quite unlike Olda in appearance, but her queenly persona, at once majestic and kindly, was of course that of Olda!

  Vorotyntsev slit the envelope, taking care not to cut off the least little strip, and carried the letter over to an oak reading desk quartered by diagonal partitions, which made it impossible for anyone standing beside him to look over as he read. How he had longed to take Olda’s tiny hands in his own! To hear her low, lilting voice! Now it was as though all this was happening at once. This was not a letter he was holding, but her hands. He was not reading the words, he was hearing Olda’s voice. He read random snatches, making no sense of them, happily skipping sentences and looking back at them, reading the same passage three times in succession and still not taking it in. Shielded by the partitions and the slant of the desk from the eyes of his neighbors he was completely absorbed in Olda, plunging his face into her, chattering with her, and the tone of their happy chatter was more important than the half-understood and quickly forgotten sentences. There would be time for them later.

  Little by little he began to realize that she had written the letter as confusedly as he was reading it. She had paced and paced, as full of him as if he had not left her the night before, but was still beside her, and she was walking and conversing with him. Then, tired out, she had sat down five minutes before midnight to write what little remained in her mind—just those few sentences—of all that she had said to him. Sat down? Or was she walking, as if she had never seen it before, around the room she had paced so often, with open arms, as if to say, “Are you here? Where are you? Sweep me off my feet! Lift me in your arms!”

  Vorotyntsev half closed his eyes, the better to see her walking toward him with open arms, as if she was playing blind man’s buff! Lift me in your arms! Yes, my darling! Light as a feather!

  Walking? Letter? Talking? Kissing? It was all mixed up in his head. Where was it all happening? Who was talking to whom? He stood leaning on the desk, reading it over and over again, feeling faint … What was all this? … When the war’s over … we’ll go somewhere … walk barefoot through the meadows … he could see her little bare feet clearly. He kissed them, kissed the soles, kissed every tiny toe in turn.


  Vorotyntsev put the precious letter away and walked off, his feet like those of a drunken man, cautiously aware of the smooth, flagged floor. He had reached the door before it occurred to him that there might also have been some serious message in the letter. He had read it, but nothing had registered. Read it carefully later on? No, right now.

  Back he went. As far as the lamp on the wall there.

  No, better go all the way back to my cozy little section of the reading desk.

  As he drew the letter from the envelope again, another scrap of paper, with a postscript, fell out. How had he failed to notice it before? It might have gotten lost!

  “Written this morning. For no particular reason. Just reluctant to part with it! I shall be lonely! Listen to the wind! That will be me! Listen to the rustling of the boughs! That will be me!”

  A scrap of paper, two lines. But again his heart leapt, filled with youthful eagerness, yearned toward her. Olda! My gift from heaven! My recompense!

  Yes, but was there any serious message in the letter? Ah—there it was:

  “Now that you are there—I beg you to look around you, look carefully, talk to people, find out with whom you can do the things I so wanted to inspire you to do. Seek out men who are loyal and true! Our life together, the life of all of us, depends on it, we must not let anything cut it short!”

  Still scarcely feeling the floor under his feet, he walked to the broad heavy door, which closed itself behind him.

  As he stepped out, the crazy wind buffeted him in the chest—a strong wind, but its unusual warmth made it seem merely playful.

  Listen to it! That will be me!

  While Vorotyntsev had been in the post office evening had set in. It was still early, but dark. The lamps at short intervals along Bolshaya Sadovaya Street had been lit. It must have been raining a little, there were fresh puddles, and the roadway and the sidewalk gleamed near the streetlamps, brightening the Mogilev evening. The light shower had made the embrace of the gusting wind all the warmer. What weather! Spring in November!

  Vorotyntsev wanted to walk and keep walking, and this wind was a joy. His greatcoat and his tall fur hat were no longer a burden. He felt weightless. It cost him no effort to return the salutes of passing soldiers. The evening promenade was in full swing. Besides the high school pupils there were now couples on the street, with here and there a soldier and his girl, some of them withdrawing from the brightly lit street into darker corners. Vorotyntsev, feeling as young as any of these young lovers, strode on at a brisk, businesslike pace, footsteps loud on the flagstones, spurs jingling, borne along and buoyed up by his happiness.

  Just now, in the post office, it was his Olda he held by her hands, and now he was carrying her, little thing, in his bosom.

  How easy it all was: all yours, held tight against your breast, all there, carried with you!

  And you yourself borne along like a hot-air balloon!

  Riders, army automobiles, supply wagons went by, a detachment of soldiers marched past—yet somehow these things were not reminders of war. This town, burdened as it was with all the soldiers billeted there, and the worries they brought with them, seemed, perhaps because it was new to him, perhaps because of the blustering of that crazy warm wind, or the lamplight reflected in the puddles, a place of beauty and carefree youthful happiness. No more than that.

  He wanted to stay with those young people, not to return to his dreary hotel. He had reached Governor’s Square and, enjoying his struggle with the wind, straddling its gusts, he began crossing the square again, not toward the Quartermaster’s side, but bearing right toward the little square with the sundial, beyond which lay the path to a little public park, known as the Rampart, because it loomed steeply over the Dnieper, and might once have been a man-made embankment. He walked on, greedily inhaling that hot, moist, joyous air!

  A second life. It might soon begin. Olda was like a new galaxy, with an infinite number of unexplored worlds still awaiting discovery.

  He strode across the Rampart without slackening his pace, forgetting how short the path was and that it would end abruptly against a wooden fence above the embankment. There were few lampposts here, and no places of entertainment—the open-air stage to one side was dark, it was out of season. On the fringes of the park the courting couples, freer from constraint, kissed without concealment, swelling Vorontyntsev’s joy.

  Listen to the branches rustling—that will be me!

  He ranged the Rampart, taking first one path, then another.

  In the light from the streetlamp he saw the tall figure of a general advancing toward him. The general was entering the pool of light, walking slowly, hands behind his back, head bowed, as if unhappy. Vorotyntsev was some distance away, but was borne briskly along so that they met directly under the lamp.

  Even at a distance he had thought that there was something rather familiar about that lean figure. As he approached, he effortlessly exchanged his loping stride for a more soldierly step, raised himself to his full height, and turned slightly toward the general, who also drew one hand from behind his back and turned toward the colonel. And then, directly under the lamp, Vorotyntsev could not fail to recognize him.

  “Good evening, Your Excellency!”

  He stood and waited. There was nothing else to do.

  The general had also stopped, though he had not yet recognized his companion.

  “Good evening, Colonel … Oh, oh, it’s Vorotyntsev, isn’t it?”

  He held out his hand. He looked and sounded old, but his grip was firm and tenacious.

  “Don’t tell me you’re back at GHQ again?”

  “What, me-e? Certainly not, Aleksandr Dmitrich,” Vorotyntsev said cheerfully. “Just here for two days, more or less by accident. And you?”

  “Me-e?” Nechvolodov’s “me-e” was as long-drawn-out as Vorotyntsev’s, but not at all cheerful. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully.

  “I’ve been staying here in reserve. For over a month now. They can’t find me a job.”

  Vorotyntsev was so elated, and this unhappy note was so much out of tune with his own feelings that he felt like leaving it there and hurrying on, although this one-man race of his had no real objective.

  Nechvolodov saw him wavering.

  “You’re in a hurry?”

  “Er … no. I’m in no hurry. Just taking a walk.”

  “Well then, would you mind if we walk together?”

  “Of course not … Let’s do that.”

  He turned around, lost his momentum, and fell in with Nechvolodov’s funereal step.

  There, on the gravel of the Rampart, his boots, his greatcoat turned for him, but the hot-air balloon that was his breast sailed on, riding the playful wind, through the darkness, to no matter where.

  [68]

  He had turned around and almost come to a halt, but, after his happiness striding headlong into the darkness with Olda in his arms, falling in with the general at his pace and finding him apparently deeply depressed left him at a loss for a moment. He answered his companion’s questions, and even asked some of his own, but at first without making much sense.

  (Sweep me off my feet! Lift me up!)

  Nechvolodov’s story, however, claimed his attention. He had been relieved of his command by Brusilov a month earlier, because of serious misunderstandings with the Unions of Zemstvos and Towns, with which Brusilov had no wish to quarrel. As a major general he was automatically put in reserve, and summoned to GHQ to await a new assignment. But there was a surplus of errant generals relegated to GHQ, to await pardon and a new senior command. More than a month later, Nechvolodov had not been offered a division, brigades were being abolished, and it was beneath his dignity to accept a regiment. His case had apparently gone astray in the GHQ underbrush. Nobody, it seemed, had any use for him. At the height of a great war he was apparently superfluous to the Russian army.

  Vorotyntsev himself could not endure that sly fox Brusilov, and personal feelings apart, he knew that the ma
n’s reputation was inflated, that he was hopeless as a commander in the field.

  As for Nechvolodov, Vorotyntsev thought not for the first time that in their young days he and the general had been much alike: the same uprush of talent, the same exaggerated sense of their own strength, the same impatience to reform the Russian army from top to bottom, almost single-handed. But Nechvolodov had happened upon a less favorable time, and really had found himself quite alone. There were only twelve years between them. An age difference of less than a generation. But of a whole reign. Then again, Nechvolodov had risen more rapidly and spectacularly, had become an officer at an earlier age, and entered the Academy a good twenty years before Vorotyntsev. So that where their friends, their memories, their service records were concerned they were in effect a whole generation apart.

  (When the war’s over … we’ll walk barefoot through the meadows …)

  Though not much over fifty, in the lamplight Nechvolodov looked … not exactly old, but very weary. Unlike most officers, he was clean-shaven, so that his sunken cheeks were difficult to ignore. This was only too obviously a man who had never succeeded in anything. Vorotyntsev found the comparison with himself chilling. In the summer of 1914 he himself had still been proudly confident that he would acquit himself brilliantly. Two years of war had dimmed and dismissed his hopes. Yet in occasional brighter moments he began believing again that he was destined to do great things: he had not been wounded, he was not enfeebled, he had not aged, his talents had not lost their fine edge. But his morale was sometimes low. (Perhaps that was why he was so eager to find an occupation with more scope than that of an officer in the line.)