Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read online

  He warmed to his topic and said as if addressing only Vasily Kiprianovich, and with fondness: “The language of a work of art is simply everything! Had Leo Tolstoy been able to think as clearly as Comrade Stalin he would not have tangled himself in long sentences. How can one approach the language of the common people? Even Turgenev, that Frenchman in Russian garb, and the Symbolists are simply seduced by the French syntax. I have to admit that in 1917, when I was still living the bohemian life, with an outrageous haircut though terribly shy, I had a literary crisis. I realized that, in fact, I didn’t really know Russian. I didn’t have a feeling for what mode of expression to use in a sentence. And do you know what set me on the right path? Studying legal documents from the seventeenth century and earlier. When an accused was being questioned and tortured, the scribes would record precisely and concisely what he said. While someone was being flogged, stretched on the rack, or burned with a hot iron, the most unadorned speech, coming from his very bowels, would burst forth from him. And this is something absolutely new! It’s the language Russians have been speaking for a thousand years, but none of our writers have used it. Now this,” he said, dripping some of the thick apricot jam from a teaspoon onto a small glass dish, “this very amber transparency, this surprising color and light should be present in the literary language as well.”

  And, indeed, every single apricot lay like a condensed fragment of sunlight in the crystal bowl. The cherry jam also had its own mysterious color, imperceptibly different from a dark claret, yet it was not the right color and could not be compared with the apricot.

  “Now and again these days a letter surfaces from some reader who writes in the primordial language. I had one not long ago from a workman building a factory in Kharkov. His language doesn’t follow today’s rules, yet it had such compelling combinations and use of grammatical cases! I envy the writer! ‘I didn’t bewray my design,’ ‘There was no cause for evadement,’ or, ‘There’s queer small substance to this heroism.’ What do you think? Only an ear that hasn’t been intimidated by book learning can come up with something like that. And his vocabulary! It makes your mouth water. ‘I found myself a sojourning,’ ‘We sweated and strained and learned to live with it,’ ‘forenenst the prison,’ ‘I became entirely bereft of feelings.’ Things like that you can’t invent, even if you swallow your pen, as Nekrasov said. And if someone offers you such turns of phrase, you absolutely have to pick them up . . .”

  “Are you planning to reply in the same fashion?” asked Vasily Kiprianovich.

  “What can I say to him? The point isn’t in the answer. The point is in discovering a language.”

  1994

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  EGO

  1

  Even before he reached his thirties, even before the German War, Pavel Vasilyevich Ektov realized that he was a confirmed and perhaps even a natural-born activist in the rural cooperative movement, and so he never took up any of the grandiose, earth-shaking causes of the time. In order to keep true to his beliefs, he had to engage in some bitter debates on how best to remake the life around him and to resist the temptations and withstand the rebukes of the revolutionary democrats: devoting himself to social change by promoting only “small deeds” was something trivial; he was not merely squandering his energy on useless work, he was betraying the whole of humanity for the sake of a few people around him; it was cheap philanthropy that would lead to no great end. Now, they said, we have found the path to the universal salvation of humanity; now we have the actual key to achieving the ideal of happiness for all the people. And what can your petty notions of one person helping another and the simple easing of day-to-day tribulations achieve in comparison with that?

  Many activists like Ektov were shamed and wounded by such reproaches and tried to justify themselves by arguing that their work was “also useful” for the general progress of humanity. But Ektov ever more stubbornly maintained that he needed no justification for helping the peasants meet their day-to-day and urgent needs and for easing their destitution by any practicable means, prosaic though such things might seem. His activities, he insisted, had nothing in common with the abstract sermonizing of village priests and the pieties drilled in by the parish schools.

  Ektov had experience with all types of cooperatives and was wholeheartedly committed to them. He had spent some time in Siberia and was amazed to find butter-making cooperatives that, without any large plants, managed to feed the whole of Europe on their fragrant and delectable butter. Back in Tambov Province he spent some years energetically working in a cooperative savings bank and continued this work during the war. (At the same time, he took part in the City and Rural Zemstvo system, though he felt squeamish about its partisan politics and the personal exemption from army service that it offered.) He ran the cooperative all through the revolutionary year of 1917, and only in January of 1918, on the eve of what now was the clearly inevitable confiscation of all cooperative funds, did he insist that his credit union secretly return all deposits to the depositors.

  For this Ektov would certainly have been put away had they made a close check on him, but the energetic Bolsheviks had their hands full. Once they did bring Ektov in to the Kazan Monastery, where the “Extraordinary Commission,” the Cheka, had set themselves up, but he got by with just one hasty interrogation and managed to evade their questions. They had plenty of bigger fish to fry. One day, on the main square near this monastery, five age groups being called up to the army had assembled. Suddenly a dashing rider with a Cossack forelock galloped up on a gray horse and shouted: “Comrades! What did Lenin promise? That we wouldn’t go to war anymore! So go back to your homes! We’ve just finished one war. Do you want to be shipped off to another? Go on back to your homes!” And the cry of this young fellow in dark gray peasant clothes was like a spark on tinder: everyone scattered this way and that, some fled the town, some went to the forests to hide as deserters, others rushed through the town to raise the revolt there—and the bosses themselves ran off. They came back a day later with Kikvidze’s cavalry.

  Ektov lived through the Civil War years utterly bewildered. After the cruel slaughter of some of his countrymen by other countrymen and under the iron heel of the Bolshevik dictatorship, he could find no sense of purpose in Russian life or in his own. Nothing remotely similar had ever happened in his homeland. Human life in general had lost its normal, reasoned flow: it was no longer the activity of reasonable beings; under the Bolsheviks it had become diminished and disfigured, something that moved in mysterious, roundabout ways or by cunning and ingenuity. The staunch democrat Ektov, however, never believed that a White victory and the return of the Cossack whip could be the solution either. And for two days in August 1919, when Mamontov’s cavalry broke through to Tambov, he felt no sense of inner liberation or satisfaction—even though the Cheka had fled from the Kazan Monastery. (In any case, it was obvious that Mamontov’s horsemen had never planned to stay for long.) Indeed, the whole of the Tambov intelligentsia thought the Bolshevik regime would be short-lived: Give them a few years and they’ll collapse; Russia will come back, now as a democratic state. And even the Bolsheviks’ most extreme actions stemmed not only from malice or ignorance but from the accumulated problems of three years of foreign war and the Civil War that came in its wake.

  Tambov, lying in the middle of a grain-growing province, never experienced real famine in those years, but in the winters it was gripped by critical shortages, shortages that demanded its residents summon up all their bodily strength and resourcefulness in order to survive. The happy and prosperous existence of the Tambov peasantry began to break down under the onslaught of merciless incursions made into it, first by blocking detachments—units stationed here to prevent front-line troops from deserting. They simply confiscated grain and food from peasants taking it to market by road. Then came food requisitioning detachments and more troops sent to hunt down deserters. The coming of one such detachment into an utterly terrified village meant the
inevitable execution of a handful of peasants or at least one or two for the edification of all the villagers. (They might also fire off a few random machine gun bursts from the steps of the district administrative office.) These detachments would always indulge in wide-scale robbery. A food requisitioning detachment would be stationed in a village for a time and would first of all demand that it be fed: “Hand over a sheep! Hand over some geese! Eggs, butter, milk, bread!” (And then it was towels, bedsheets, and boots.) The peasants would have been relieved to get off with merely that, but after a day or two of feasting and pillaging, the detachment would force a melancholy train of carts driven by those same villagers to haul away their own grain, meat, butter, honey, and sackcloth—gifts for proletarian power that never shared its salt, soap, or iron with the peasants. (A few village shops would suddenly get a shipment of ladies’ silk stockings, kid gloves, or kerosene lamps without burners and without kerosene.) And so they cleaned out the granaries, one after the other, often leaving nothing for food or seed. The peasants called them “The Black Ones,” whether because they came from the Devil or because there were many non-Russians among them. The provincial Commissar of Food, Goldin, raged across the whole of Tambov Province, neither sparing human lives nor caring for human misery and women’s tears, things that shook even the food requisitioning detachments. The Borisoglebsk County Food Commissar, Alperovich, was not much gentler than he. (The Bolsheviks themselves chose some appropriate titles for their own: there was even the Nachpogub Veydner, and it took even Ektov a long time to comprehend what this word meant: Head of the Provincial Political Section, or Nacbalnik politicheskogo otdela gubernii.)

  At first the peasants couldn’t believe it: What on earth was going on? Soldiers returning from the German front, from reserve regiments, or from prisoner of war camps (where they’d been given a good dose of Bolshevik propaganda) came to their villages with the news that now, at last, the time of peasant rule had come and a revolution had been made for the sake of the peasants: peasants would now be masters over the land. But what happened? The city folk sent out mobs of heathens to abuse the working peasants. They didn’t sow any of their own grain, so they hanker after ours? Yet Lenin said, he who does not plow or sow, neither shall he eat!

  There was another rumor that ran through the villages: They’ve betrayed us! They’ve slipped a false Lenin into the Kremlin!

  For his whole life, Pavel Vasilyevich’s heart had been at one with the peasants and their troubles, with their sense of life and their well-reasoned thrift (boots for going to church, bast shoes for the village, and bare feet for plowing), and now that heart ached over the devastation of the countryside: the Bolsheviks were stripping the villages bare (and every featherbrained inspector or instructor who stopped by made sure to scoop up whatever he could as well). There was a time when one could watch the leisurely return of a fine herd of several hundred cows to the village in the evening. Here and there, children with switches are separating their own cattle; a steady cloud of translucent dust, glowing in the rays of the setting sun, hangs over them; the well sweeps groan, heralding the watering that will come before the abundant milking. Such scenes of the prosperous and peaceful life in the villages were nowhere to be seen now, however. These days there were no brightly lit windows in the peasants’ huts: kerosene lamps stood dark, and within there was only the faint glow from the mutton fat burning in saucers.

  Meanwhile, the Civil War had ended, and the opportunity for the Tambov peasants to join the Whites had passed. Now, however, their patience had reached its limit and they were seething. In the autumn of 1919, the peasants killed the chairman of the provincial executive committee, Chichkanov, while he was making a trip around the province. The authorities responded by sending in a powerful punishment detachment (Hungarians, Latvians, Finns, Chinese—you could find all sorts in the punishment detachments); and again there were many executions.

  Peasant anger continued to mount and accumulate through that winter of pillaging. In the spring, as the snow was melting, Pavel Ektov made a trip in the wagon of a peasant friend to lay in some supplies: he went from Karavaynovo to a spot he knew well, where the Mokraya Panda and the Sukhaya Panda join and then go on to flow into the Vorona. He knew the villages in that region: Grushevka, Gvozdyovka, Treskino, Kurgan, Kalugino. Grushevka, with its lush hayfields that lay right outside the village and filled it each June with the aromas of meadow grass, brome, and clover; Treskino and its peculiar church, a three-story cube, and the grand church in Nikitino, faced in bluish brown tiles and a roof of fish-scale pattern shingles; Kurgan, where there was a burial mound from Tatar times; and Kalugino, laid out in a curved line with its disorderly row of huts scattered along the bare gully of the Sukhaya Panda. And the bottomland along the winding Mokraya Panda, covered in lush grass, with the quails singing their hearts out. This was a glorious spot for village kids, for fishermen, geese and ducks—the children would play in the water, only as deep as their waists, though the cows would climb out of the same river for their daily milking. Beyond Grushevka and Gvozdyovka was a large forest, and near Nikitino, with its many orchards, there were a few wooded gullies.

  That spring the peasants waited and worried, and many didn’t even want to begin seeding: It’s all for naught, they’ll just come and take it. But how can we get by with nothing to eat? They began gathering in gangs in the woods and ravines, talking of how they might defend themselves.

  It was no easy matter, though, for peasants from different villages to agree to join forces, make the decision, and then to find the right moment to cross the line into full-scale war.

  Meanwhile, Goldin’s food detachments kept up their pillaging of the villages, and they continued their lavish feasting when they took up quarters. (There were instances when they ordered a certain number of women be sent to them for the night, and the village would comply—what else could they do? It was better than being shot.) The detachments hunting down deserters would still make examples of those they caught by executing them. (They had called up three age groups at once, the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds. But if you joined the party, you were exempted.)

  In August 1920 there was a spontaneous uprising in Kamenka, in Tambov Region: the peasants massacred the food detachment that had arrived and seized their weapons. About the same time, something similar happened in Treskino: a food detachment had called together a group of local communists outside the district administration office when suddenly a band of peasants armed with pitchforks, spades, and axes came running down the street. The detachment fired at them, but the peasants rushed over them like a wave and cut down two dozen along with some communist wives. (They also killed a small boy from the crowd. He recognized one of the rebels: “Uncle Petya, remember me?” And the man killed him so that the boy would not later give him up.) And in Grushevka they were so enraged by all the pillaging that they knocked down one of the men in the detachment and sawed through his neck as if it were a log.

  It’s a long and difficult task to get the Russian peasant to move, but once the pressure from the people’s ferment bursts forth, it cannot be contained by the limits of reason. A crowd in bast shoes, armed with axes, oven forks, and pitchforks and driven by a righteous quest for justice, set off from Knyazhe-Bogoroditskoe in Tambov Region to “take Tambov.” They were “men with pitchforks” such as had risen up in the time of the Tatars. They marched to the sound of church bells in the villages along the way, their numbers growing as they went. They advanced toward the provincial capital until, at Kuzmina Gat, the helpless crowd was cut down by machine gun fire from the outposts guarding the town. The survivors scattered.

  Like fire along a line of thatched roofs, the rebellion immediately spread across the whole district; the Kirsanov and Borisoglebsk districts were ignited as well. Local communists were massacred everywhere (and the women attacked them with sickles), village soviets were destroyed, state farms and communes were broken up. Those communists and activists who survived fled into Tambov itsel
f.

  The communists from outside—well, you could understand where they came from. But how did we come to have our own homegrown ones? Pavel Vasilych had figured this out from things he picked up in the villages, and there were other facts he had known already. In the first regional and local soviet elections, the peasants still didn’t realize the all-embracing power this new system would have. They imagined it would be a small thing, since now that everybody had got their freedom, what mattered was taking over the landowners’ land, not the elections. And what proper peasant would drop all his farmwork to take up some elected post? So the ones who got these posts were peasants only by birth, not by the work they did. They were the troublemakers, the reckless, the lazy, the beggars, and the ones who had moved from one unskilled job to another in towns and on building sites, managing to pick up a few revolutionary slogans along the way. And then there were all those who had deserted from the army in 1917, the ones who were quick to take up pillaging. Such were the people who became village communists and activists, the ones who held the power.

  All of Pavel Ektov’s education and the humanitarian tradition he came from made him absolutely opposed to bloodshed. But now, particularly after this righteous march of the people at Kuzmina Gat, the relationship between those who were powerless but right and those who relentlessly wielded brute force was as obvious as the naked truth itself: the peasants could do nothing other than take up arms. (And there were still many rifles, cartridges, sabers, and grenades available, brought home from the German War or left behind after Mamontov’s breakthrough. Some had been hidden, some buried.)