Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (17 page)

Shurik always spoke out with such passion and heat that no one could match him. His classmates were left speechless. He simply drew everyone along in his wake. To say that these discussions were interesting wasn
’
t enough; they provided a connection with living life; whole new currents, previously unknown, flowed from them. Nastenka was one of the most dedicated listeners among his audience, and she spent more and more time asking him questions after the others had gone.

And it was true: one couldn
’
t live only on the literature of the
past,
one had to hearken to what was happening today. Real life was flowing around them in a vigorous stream, and they had to enter into it.

How did Shurik know all these things? When had he found the time to soak it all up? As it emerged, he had wasted no time even in the last years of his high school. While there, he had even made his way through the yellow-, green- and crimson-colored anthologies of the Futurists, then through LEF (
“
Lef
or bluff?
”
), then through
Komfut
(communist futurism), and the
Litfront
(all of them searing his heart) and had already become a dedicated On
Guardist
while at his school desk. (And in fact the journal
On Literary Guard
was right there in the institute
’
s library, but no one bothered to peer into it or take a deep breath of its heady spirit.)

“
None of these Fellow Travelers should even be allowed to exist,
”
Shurik would shoot back.
“
You
’
re either an ally or an enemy! Just look at what they most value: the subtlety of their emotions. But what is decisive is not the writer
’
s
heart,
it
’
s his outlook on life. And we value a writer not because of what and how he experiences life but by his role in our proletarian movement. Psychologism only gets in the way of our triumphant movement forward. But what they call
‘
reincarnation into a character
’
only deadens one
’
s class consciousness. One can say that the revolution in literature hasn
’
t yet truly begun. After the revolution we need not just new words but even new letters for them! Even the periods and commas of the past become repulsive.
”

This was positively staggering! It made your head spin.
Yet how transported he became by all this fervor, this unyielding conviction.

As for the lectures, they moved along the clearly specified paths laid out by the stolid textbooks of
Kogan
and
Friche
. They wrote in similar fashion: Shakespeare was a poet of kings and lords; do we have any use for him? And all these
Onegins
and
Bolkonskys
,
are they not our total class aliens?

That may be so, yet they certainly knew how to love in those days!

There was no way to maintain a sustained argument against
Kogan
, however: he couldn
’
t have constructed all these many things on utter nonsense. Surely there was a genuine historical and social basis for them?

Month by month, it seemed, her father
’
s eyes occupied more and more space on his face and expressed more and more meaning. So much depth and suffering and wisdom had accumulated in them! He seemed to acquire a profound understanding as he detached himself from life. Yet she didn
’
t dare say it aloud: Was this part of his
passing over
? Had he already crossed some sort of threshold? His face had yellowed, he had grown utterly gaunt, and his gray moustache had lost its resilience and now drooped as if it had been pasted on.

How terribly he coughed, and for such a long time, tearing away not only at his own breast but those of his wife and his daughter as well.
The sense of grief now never left their home; it had become permanent. But when she came to the
institute, her mind was filled with other thoughts. Since childhood Nastenka had been closer to her father than her mother, and she always loved to tell him everything; and now everything that absorbed her outside the home was so new and so disconcerting.

He would listen to her. He showed no surprise but only looked, looked at her through
those eyes that had become so large and which, month by month, ever more clearly expressed the inevitability of
loss
—that was
their dominant expression.

He would stroke her head (now he was always in bed, propped up on thick pillows). Sometimes, using his ebbing strength to breathe and speak, he would reply that the acquisition of any form of knowledge is a long and far from straightforward process and that which his daughter had now learned would also pass; she would still look at things in ever new ways, and there was no limit to the depths of human life.

She was growing ever closer to Shurik, and nothing and no one other than he could bring Nastya the very breath of the Era, as hot as Rostov
’
s torrid summer wind. He felt it so strongly, and he conveyed it with such vital power! He had already published things in the regional newspaper
The Hammer;
he never missed an opportunity to speak in class or at institute gatherings or rallies and literary debates; between classes he gladly shared his ideas with his friends and, most of all, with Nastenka, whom he had begun to walk home. (He came from a good family, the son of an important lawyer, and never treated girls with the coarse boorishness that was becoming the norm.)

Now he admitted that the On Guardists had been in error when they took the side of Trotsky during a party debate, but they had admitted their mistake and corrected themselves. And even before the Shakhty Affair, he boldly declared:
“
We are proud to be labeled literary Chekists, proud that our enemies call us informers!
”
Now he was entirely consumed with the struggle against
Polonsky
-ism, against
Voronsky
-ism, against the literary group
Pereval
that had descended to the point of neo-
Slavophilism
, of kulak humanism, of
“
love for man in general,
”
of
“
the beauty of the universal man.
”
At last the Literary Section of the Communist Academy sentenced
Voronsky
-ism to liquidation.
But the enemies multiplied: simultaneously, there was a struggle against
Pereverzevism
. Those people—though they were correct in understanding that the author
’
s personality, biography, and literary predecessors had no significance whatsoever in his work and that his system of imagery stemmed from the system of production—still overdid it in arguing that every author was a writer only of his own class, and that a proletarian writer could not describe a bourgeois. And this was certainly a leftist deviation.

After the walk home he and Nastenka kissed in the semidarkness— and sometimes under a full moon—on Pushkin Boulevard, about twenty paces across from the window behind which her father lay, coughing his life away.

But Shurik was now insisting, more and more assertively, on taking their relationship right to its final point. She put him off, imploring him. She yielded as much as she could, but still, there was a limit!

In fact, did
marriage
really exist these days? It might as well have been abolished. When people came to an arrangement, they went to the registry office, and many of them never bothered with that and simply got together and then separated without bothering to register.

But Shurik demanded: Either, or!
Either that or a breakup.

She was wounded by his stubborn refusal to be swayed. She wept in his arms and begged him to wait.

Absolutely not!

But she was not yet prepared to let him have his way about
this.

On one of these intensely painful evenings, he brusquely and emphatically broke up with her.

In class in the days that followed he made a point of showing his indifference and avoided her.

How her heart ached!

She loved him and she revered him. But still, she couldn
’
t. . .

How long would her suffering have gone on? And how far would it have gone? But at this point her father began living out his final days.

Now each day and each week before the numbing cold of parting were numbered; soon the final thread that linked the consciousness and the purpose of the three of you would slip from your caring fingers, and you and Mama would be left here, while he, forever, would . . .

The full sense of emptiness set in after the funeral (her mother was a believer, but there was not a single church or a single priest left in the city of four million; a religious funeral was a very risky thing in any case). Her mother grew wrinkled; she weakened and lost all her vitality. It happened so quickly that Nastenka felt somehow older and more responsible. Mama now could offer her no guidance.

As for Shurik, once he had broken with her, he made no move to restore their previous relations. He had a will of iron.

At the end of winter the graduates were being given their job assignments, and now Nastenka held out for a place in Rostov. She had nowhere else to go. And she got her place.

That last summer, nervous about her coming encounter with the forty-odd young minds that would be entrusted to her, Nastenka spent a lot of time in the library. She worked through the
Encyclopedia of Literature
that was just now being published, the methodological journal of the Directorate of Education of the Russian Republic, and various other journals filled with critical essays. She filled in the gaps in what she had learned earlier from Shurik, and all those things, to be sure, were being published everywhere. You needed only the time to read and summarize them.

As for Shurik, he went to Moscow for good. He
’
d been given a job in some publishing house. Back to that beautiful Moscow that she
’
d left behind and now would never recover . . .

Yet it was better that he had gone.

You could reach the library by taking the narrow
Nikolaevsky
Lane that dropped down through the ravine that was there in those days, or you could go more directly through the city park. The park had many things to offer. There was a straight and level central pathway from which the ground sloped downward on both sides to little squares with flowerbeds and fountains. A band shell where there were free classical music concerts in summer stood on the hills on one side, and on the other side was a summer restaurant where a tiny variety band played irritating music.

Nastenka
’
s face was rather broad, and her figure was nothing special, but her eyes were filled with an amazing radiance and she had a smile that simply captured people
’
s hearts, as she was often told and was well aware.

During her years at the institute there would be parties with the kids from other faculties, and if they could get some gramophone records they would dance the foxtrot and the tango (and though older people generally denounced such things, the dances were something that was
ours!).
Now she and the one or two girlfriends she had left in Rostov would go to the city park in the evenings; the young people who knew each other would pair off and slip away along the dark pathways to find some privacy. (Once you
’
ve become a teacher, though, there
’
ll be no more of such foolery.) The surprising thing was that every single boy behaved crudely, with a complete lack of sensitivity. None of them could understand the slow, gradual development of feelings. All of the boys had accepted the notorious and opportunistic slogan,
“
Forget about the cherry blossoms.
”
People said with conviction that love was nothing more than
“
some bourgeois gimmick.
”
One of the characters in some new play expressed it like this:
“
I need a woman, so why can
’
t you do me this favor, as a comrade and a Komsomol girl?
”