Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

~ * ~

Apricot Jam

and
Other Stories

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No copyright 
 201
3
by MadMaxAU eBooks

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contents

APRICOT JAM

EGO

THE NEW GENERATION

NASTENKA

ADLIG SCHWENKITTEN

ZHELYABUGA VILLAGE

TIMES OF CRISIS

FRACTURE POINTS

NO MATTER WHAT

glossary

~ * ~

APRICOT JAM

1

…M
Y mind is all awhirl right now, and if some of the things I say don
’
t seem quite right I want you to keep reading, you won
’
t be wasting your time. I
’
ve heard that you
’
re a famous writer. I got a little book of your articles out of the library. (I
’
ve been to school—the one in our village.) I had no time to read the whole book, but I did read a piece of it. You say that the foundation of happiness is our collectivized agriculture and that now even the most miserable peasant is riding around on his own bicycle. You say also that heroism is becoming a part of our everyday lives and that the purpose and meaning of life is labor in a communist society. To that I reply that there is queer small substance to this heroism and this labor because it comes from driving people like us nigh to we drop. I don
’
t know where you saw all the things you write about. You also say a lot about other countries and how bad things are there and how often you noticed people looking at you with envy: Look, there
’
s the Russian. Well, I
’
m also a Russian and I recommend me to you. My name is Fedya (Fyodor Ivanovich, if you like), and I want to tell you about myself.

As long as anyone can remember, our family lived in the village of Lebyazhy Usad in Kursk Province. But then they put an end to the way we thought to live. They called us kulaks because we had a house with a galvanized iron roof and four horses, three cows, and a fine orchard by the house. The first thing in the orchard was a spreading apricot tree, and there would be heaps of apricots on it every year. My younger brothers and I would climb all over that tree. Apricots were our most favorite fruit, and I never ever tasted any as good as ours. In the summer kitchen in the yard my mother would make us apricot jam, and my brothers and I just couldn
’
t get enough of that sweet foam. Before they deported us as kulaks, they tried to make us tell them where we had hidden our goods. Otherwise, they said, we
’
ll chop down your apricot tree. And they chopped it down.

They took our whole family and a few others besides to Belgorod in carts. There they
shoved
us into a church they had confiscated for a prison, and they brought people there from a lot of other villages. There was no room to lie down on the floor, and they didn
’
t give us anything to eat, though a few folks had brought a bit of food with them. At night a train pulled into the station, and there was a deal of heaving and shoving while we were
aboarding
it, with guards rushing here and there and lanterns flickering. My father told me:
“
You, at least, can make a run for it.
”
And I did manage to slip away through the huge crowd. The rest of my family went on into the taiga, where they were left to live as best they could, and I never heard from them again.

For me began a life filled with one pain atop the other. Where was I to go now? I couldn
’
t go back to the village, and though this town wasn
’
t small, there was no place for me here, and how could I ever hide out in it? Who would give me shelter in their house and risk grievous troubles? Though I was near to full grown, I did find a sojourning among a band of street kids—orphans and runaways. They
had their own secret dwellings in abandoned houses and barns and sewer manholes. The police wouldn
’
t
bother with these ragged, barefoot kids because they had nowhere to put them and no means to feed them all. They were all dirty, smudgy-faced, and dressed in tatters. They would go
abegging
from house to house. But the quicker ones would band together, and the crowd of them would run to the market, tip over the trays, and jostle the sellers so that a few of them could pick up some goods. Another might slit a woman
’
s
purse,
and another grab someone
’
s wallet right out of his hand and disappear in a flash. Or they might rush into a dining hall, running among the tables and spitting in people
’
s plates. Some of the people didn
’
t manage to cover their plates. Others would stop eating. And that
’
s all these raggedy kids needed—they
’
d polish off whatever they could grab. They would also rob people at the railway station, and they could warm themselves by the kettles of asphalt when the streets were being paved. But I stood out for being too healthy, not ragged enough, and I wasn
’
t a kid anymore. I could have become the boss of the whole lot, sitting in a cozy spot and sending the others out to bring back some loot, but my heart
’
s too soft for that.

Before long, a task force from the GPU picked me out of the gang and took me to prison. At first I didn
’
t
betray
my design—they
’
d picked me up, and that was that, so I spun them a few stories, but then they threatened to lock me away in a solitary cell and let me rot. I could see it was no good trying to deny it—lying is also an art and one I had not mastered, so I confessed: I was the son of a kulak. They kept me there until the beginning of winter. Then they changed their minds: Maybe they should send me away to my family, but then how could they find that family of mine they
’
d destroyed? I expect there was a great confusion in their paperwork. And so it was: I was to go to the town of Dergachi near Kharkov and present the local authorities with my certificate of release. The GPU people never asked how I, with ne
’
er a kopek to my name, was to make my way there, and all they did was make me sign a paper not to say a word to anyone about what I
’
d seen and heard during these months in a GPU prison, else they would put me back in jail with no investigation and no trial.