Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (15 page)

She wept. She made a point of lifting heavy loads and moving heavy furniture, but nothing helped. And Sashko began dodging meetings with her. His parents wanted to marry him to the medical assistant
’
s daughter, who would bring a good dowry.

She tried to drown herself in a well, but one of her friends managed to stop her. Word leaked out. And the Komsomol cell forced Sashko to marry her. They went to the registry office. (As the popular taunt at the time had it,
“
Civil marriage—that
’
s just doggy-style in the barn.
”
) His parents didn
’
t want Nastya to show her face in their home.

They rented a wretched little apartment. Sashko never shared what he earned but spent it carousing. In January, in a very cold snap, Nastya gave birth on the sleeping platform atop a Russian brick stove. They couldn
’
t get her to move from that spot to go to the hospital. Her little girl burned her foot on a hot brick and carried the scar for the rest of her life.

And her daughter—was she to go
unbaptized
? But these days, where could she have it done? If word got out, they
’
d kick her out of the Komsomol, and then she
’
d have nothing.

Poguda was drinking even more. He
’
d basically abandoned her and didn
’
t care at all about their daughter. Nastya decided to leave him. Divorce was simple enough: you paid your three rubles and they sent you a postcard from the registry office: divorced. The Komsomol helped her get a librarian
’
s job on the outskirts of Kharkov, in
Kachanovka
, a settlement attached to a slaughterhouse and a sausage
factory. She found a nice childless couple who agreed to take in little Yulka, now weaned, for six months or a year and Nastya could visit. There was no choice if she wanted to find a place to live, and she rented a little corner of a room from a widow who was alone.

But swearing off men didn
’
t last. The warm weather set in again. One of the people in their Komsomol cell was Teryosha
Repko
, a quiet, sweet, pale fellow. Once, after a long evening meeting (that year they were battling with the Trotskyite opposition) he offered to see her home: the settlement was notorious for its number of robberies, and they had to go past a rubbish dump on a piece of waste ground where dead bodies would even turn up. When they came to her house, they kissed with a tenderness that Nastya had never experienced. He went on walking her home from the library—a second time, then a third. Each of them had a powerful longing for the other, but they had nowhere to go. She couldn
’
t take him back to the widow
’
s; she went to bed early, and there was just one room. But there was a glassed-in veranda, and they tiptoed into it and reveled in each other right on the floor.

She loved
him,
she wanted to cling to him, to hold him in her arms, to keep caressing him. She wanted to marry him. Late that fall she became pregnant. And then suddenly Teryosha
’
s landlady, a woman of forty, burst into the library:
“
I came to have a look at you and see for myself just what you are!
”
Nastya froze while the woman shouted abuse at her. Only later did she find out that the landlady was supporting Teryosha and in exchange he was living with her and couldn
’
t leave.

But why on earth didn
’
t he tell her that before? She was lost in black despair. She had an abortion—it was only a month, after all.

Her life now was utterly empty. And she had to collect Yulka.

It was the icehouse manager, Kobytchenko, who took notice of her and found her a room. She took Yulka back. Kobytchenko kept her well fed all through the winter. This time she missed the first signs of her pregnancy and had to go to a private hospital. They took out a three-month fetus, and the doctor cursed her; they could already tell that it was a boy: his body was tossed into the waste bucket.

Kobytchenko either lost his job or was transferred, but he vanished. And Nastya developed pneumonia. She knew that Sashko Poguda was now in the central committee of the trade union, so she went to ask him for a voucher for a sanatorium in the Crimea. He promised, but while he was arranging it her pneumonia passed. She went away just the same, without Yulka.

The sanatorium was in the former St. George
’
s Monastery, not far from Sevastopol. It was the year after the huge Crimean earthquake, and not many people wanted to come here so there was no shortage of rooms. And just think: right around the corner was a detachment of sailors. A few women and girls from the sanatorium would go over for a visit and spend an hour or two under the bushes. And Nastya couldn
’
t fight off her constant cravings. She had become
something of a charmer and never lowered her eyes. She, too, found herself a sailor, and then another.

She came back to
Kachanovka
, and the elderly bookkeeper from the factory told her he had to make a business trip to some far-off town. She could bring Yulka as well. It took a few days to get there, traveling in a private compartment on the train. They spent a few more days there and then came back. He was nice to her in a lot of ways. She had her nineteenth birthday there in the train, and they celebrated it with a bottle of wine. But after the trip, the bookkeeper never visited her again. He had a family.

Somehow, she had to get herself back on her feet. Thank heavens the club manager sent her on some preparatory courses for an institute. It was like a workers
’
faculty, but just for six months. The stipend was thirty rubles, just enough for some thin soup and porridge. Things were getting a lot more expensive. The dormitory was in a former church, vast and cold. The courses had already started, and all the double bunks were taken. So she wouldn
’
t have to sleep on the concrete floor, she and Yulka made a bed on the table where they had once laid the shroud or rested the coffin at funerals. Then, since she was a mother with a child, they moved her into an unused bathroom in another dormitory, a place without a window. She would leave Yulka at the nursery school from seven in the morning until seven at night. Here, too, a
“
visitor
”
turned up—Shcherbina, a well-fed, strong, heavy fellow. He was married and claimed he got on well with his wife, but would drop himself on Nastya like an eager stallion. Given the hunger and barrenness of her life, Nastya welcomed his visits and was always ready for him. Shcherbina would bring something for her whenever he came—a pair of silky cotton stockings, some perfume, sometimes just money. And what could she do? She accepted it all. Maybe it was because of her last, difficult abortion, but she never got pregnant again.

In September of the next year, Nastya was accepted into a three-year course in the Institute of Social Education. She moved to a proper dormitory—one room for three mothers—and put Yulka in nursery school.

That winter Auntie Hanna, who had disappeared for a long time, showed up in Kharkov again. Nastya rushed to see her. It turned out that Granddad Filaret had been exiled to
Solovki
.

She felt cold shivers all over. She could see his considerate, kind face framed in gray hair, and she could even hear his warm voice that gave so much good advice.
Solovki
!
The most terrible word in the language after
“
GPU.
”

And so for fear of showing our connection with him, we had all abandoned him.
We betrayed him.

But how could we help him?

We couldn
’
t. Auntie Frosya from Poltava, it seems, had been writing to him while he was still in Milostayki, and so they found out she was a priest
’
s daughter
and kicked her out of the accounts office and wouldn
’
t let her get a decent job. And through Auntie Frosya, Auntie Hanna was also found out and lost everything. But she had a friend in the GPU and he set up a job for her: she was to get herself a good apartment in Kharkov and seduce whomever they told her to. Even though she was past thirty, she still had her looks and now dressed very well; and her apartment had all you could ask for, three rooms and it was warm. (Warm! These days, not everyone had such luck.)

After they had met a few times, Auntie Hanna asked:
“
Do you know what Athenian evenings are?
”
Nastya didn
’
t know.
“
All the women have to walk around undressed, and the men make their choice. Next time I don
’
t have enough women, I
’
ll give you a call on the telephone, OK?
”

Well, it was OK, of course. In fact, Nastenka even went eagerly, so hungry had she become for loving. Auntie Hanna had a skintight dress made for Nastya and then one as transparent as muslin. It was all carefree fun. The life all around her had become so barren—just ration cards, and little enough you could get on them—but here her cup was overflowing.

And so two winters passed, and the summer between them. Yulka had already turned four, then five, and Nastenka was twenty-two. Then, suddenly, a couple of agents picked up Auntie Hanna, and she disappeared without a trace. And all that life was over.

In her final year, Nastya worked all the harder to get good marks. Now all the general schools were full of
“
socialist education
”
; it was pedagogy and
pedology
everywhere. The graduates were supposed to bring socialist thinking into mass education.

At the same time, deathly famine hung over the whole province and over Kharkov itself. Your ration card would get you 200 grams of bread. Starving peasants would slip past the guard posts to get into the city where they could beg for food. Mothers abandoned their dying children at strangers
’
doorways. Dying people lay here and there on the streets.

A letter came from Auntie Frosya saying that Father Filaret had died. (The letter couldn
’
t say plainly where, but it was clear enough that it had happened
out there.)

And yet, somehow, there wasn
’
t much grieving.

Could that really be?

It was the past. All of it, every trace, had vanished somewhere.

In January
‘
32 the students were sent out on teaching practice. But a lot of the village schools stood empty because of the collectivization and the famine—there weren
’
t any school kids left. Nastya
’
s assignment was to the
Tsyurupa
Children
’
s Village on the former estate of General
Brusilov. The children were from
Kharkov, but since it was easy for the local peasants to get here, they brought in their starving children and then went back home to die. (In fact, there were even cases of cannibalism in some villages.) Many of the little boys in the orphanage were so emaciated they had become
“
wetters
”
—they couldn
’
t hold their urine. They were fed barely enough to stay alive, and they fought over every scrap of food and clothing they were given. In the spring, the kids from the city, not knowing any better, would pick the wrong sort of grasses to eat and poison themselves on henbane. An ex-soldier ran the Children
’
s Village, and he would go around in a service jacket and breeches, strict, straight-backed, always insisting on good order everywhere and in everything. (He had a pretty wife who would come out from the city, yet he began paying visits to Nastya. There was something about her that drew in the men.)

In May they returned to Kharkov for their final exams. Nastya had a classmate, Emma, who was already married and came from a well-off family. She could have easily gone to the very best institute, but for some reason she had come to this one. One day in May—Nastya knew nothing about this and only later figured it out—the Civil War hero, Viktor Nikolaevich Zadorozhny, came from Moscow to Kharkov on business. He knew Emma from somewhere and sent her a note to arrange a meeting—
“
I
’
m waiting to hear from you.
”
The messenger thoughtlessly delivered it when her husband was there, and Emma had to read it aloud. But, laughing, she read out that Zadorozhny was looking for her classmate but didn
’
t know her address. While her husband watched, she wrote down where and when to find Nastya. But then she had no chance to slip away from her husband in time to warn Nastya. Zadorozhny got the note and was surprised, but went to Nastya
’
s at once and invited her out to the boulevard and sat with her beneath a fragrant acacia.