Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (3 page)

They issued me a blanket, two pairs of long underwear, some worn, padded pants and new boots with wooden soles that didn
’
t bend—it was hard to walk over icy places in them.

But I
’
d already suffered so much, and I was covered with boils as well. A few days later, I fell down in a faint at work. When I came to, I was in the city hospital, and I
’
m writing you from there. The doctor took me to the boss
’
s office:
“
This man is so exhausted and emaciated that if we can
’
t improve his living conditions, I can guarantee he
’
ll die within two weeks.
”
The boss just said,
“
You know we have no room for patients like him.
”
But they still haven
’
t released me. And so I
’
m explaining my situation to you—who else can I write to? I have no family, no
support from anyone, and I
’
ve got no way to set myself right on my own. I
’
m a prisoner here, near hand to dying and trapped in a life that brings one hurt after the other. Would it cost too much for you to send me a food parcel? Please take pity on me . . .

~ * ~

2

Vasily Kiprianovich, a professor of cinema studies, had been invited to advise a famous Writer on types of screenplays and techniques used in writing them. The Writer, evidently, was considering writing something in this genre and wanted to borrow from someone else
’
s experience. The professor was flattered by the invitation, and one sunny day, in an excellent mood, he set off on a Moscow suburban train. He was well prepared to make an impression on the Writer with his knowledge of the latest developments in writing for the screen, and he was curious to see the Writer
’
s well-appointed dacha, a house even equipped for year-round living. (He himself dreamed of having at least a small summer place, but his earnings were still insufficient for that; he had to save his family from Moscow
’
s summer heat by renting a tiny place somewhere as distant as
Tarusa
, 130 kilometers away. In these times of food shortages everywhere, he would have to take with him suitcases and baskets of sugar, tea, pastries, smoked sausage, and brisket purchased from
Yeliseev
’
s
.)

In his heart of hearts, Vasily Kiprianovich had little respect for this Writer; he had a huge talent, to be sure, and weighty, meaty turns of phrase, but what a cynic he was! Apart from his novels, tales, and a dozen or more plays—weak things though they were (he also had some silly farces in which abandoned elderly ladies recovered their lost youth)—he managed to keep churning out newspaper articles, each one of them filled with lies. When he spoke in public, as he did quite frequently, he displayed an amazing panache in extemporizing—eloquently and smoothly—the propaganda demanded of him, but always in his own distinctively
indi
-vidual manner. One could imagine that he wrote his newspaper articles in the same way: someone from the Central Committee would phone him, and within half an hour he would be dictating a passionate article over the telephone. It might be an open letter to the workers of America: What lies were spreading there about forced labor in timber cutting in the USSR? Or he would roar like a lion:
“
Set free our black comrades!
”
(Eight American Negroes had been condemned to death for murders.) Then there were his fantasies: we will grow apricots under the open sky in Leningrad and Abyssinian wheat in the marshes of Karelia. He was always being allowed to travel in Europe, and he wrote of various abominations in Berlin and Paris, always with convincing details. His trip into industrial London was boldly entitled
“
Orpheus in the Underworld.
”
(Vasily Kiprianovich could only dream of being allowed a week
’
s trip into any such hell-on-earth.) The Writer might publish an article entitled
“
I Call
Upon
You to Hate!
”
And he often replied to questions from the newspapers with the same obviously insincere intellectual poverty. He wrote on a wealth of literary topics, always treating them in terms of the Marxist view of history, something that was his elixir of life. We writers, he might say, now know less than the upper level of the working intelligentsia. But then he might also say:
Until now, only sabotage has prevented our literature from attaining a world-class level, while the American novelists are no better than the pickpockets of an obsolescent culture.

Still, when you think seriously about it, is there anyone today who isn
’
t something of a son of a bitch? All ideology and all art are based on that. Vasily Kiprianovich had made similar comments in his lectures—what else could you do?
Particularly if you had even one little dark spot in your background.
The Writer, in fact, had a very large dark spot, one known to everyone: he had made a major blunder during the Civil War when he emigrated and published some anti-Soviet things over there, but he came to his senses in time and then worked energetically to earn the right to return to the USSR. Vasily Kiprianovich
’
s own dark spot had almost been rubbed clean, though a little stain remained: he came from the Don region. He was able to cover it up when he filled out some questionnaire, though he had never had any connections with the White Guardists and was even a sincere liberal (and his father, in tsarist times, had also been a liberal, though he was a judge). Still, the very word
“
Don
”
was enough to frighten people. And so he could understand the Writer in political terms but not in esthetic terms: How could a man with such talent keep pounding with his sledgehammer and doing it in such inspired language, as if carried away in a rush of sincerity?

The Writer
’
s dacha was surrounded by a tall wooden fence painted dark green, unobtrusive among the natural greenery; the dacha itself, set well back on the property, could not be seen above the fence. Vasily
Kiprianovich rang the bell at the gate. After a time, it was opened by a watchman, a robust old fellow with a magnificent, forked, graying beard who might have stepped from some nineteenth-century painting (wherever could you find someone like that?). He had been informed of the guest and led him along a sandy path past the flowerbeds filled with red, white, and yellow roses. A little farther back was a dense grove of pines with bronze trunks and towering crowns. Deeper into the grounds were some dark spruce with a garden bench beneath them.

The air was scented with pine resin. There was absolute silence. Yes, this is the way to live! (And people say that he also has an intricately decorated old mansion in Tsarskoe Selo.)

The Writer himself descended the staircase from the second floor into the hallway. He was very gracious, and from his first words and gestures he showed cordiality—a particular Russian, expansive cordiality without the least affectation. He was not yet fat but had a very fleshy, broad body with a large face and large ears. The buttonhole of his jacket carried the badge of a member of the Central Executive Committee.

This was a man who, after marking the passing of his fiftieth year with a lavish party, had obviously tasted enough success and fame and behaved with an almost aristocratic simplicity. He led Vasily Kiprianovich up to his spacious, sunlit office. The stove with its large tiles must give off a lot of heat, and it would be cozy here in winter, looking out on the snowy forest. The huge oak desk was not stacked with books and papers; it held a massive writing set—a model of the Kremlin,
evidently one of his birthday presents. On a pull-out shelf sat an uncovered typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. (The Writer explained that he always composed his work directly on the typewriter, without any preliminary manuscript. It was odd that given his massive body, his voice was a reedy tenor.)

They sat in armchairs by a small, round table. An open veranda could be seen through the broad glass door. The Writer smoked a pipe filled with expensive, fragrant tobacco. His fair, sleek hair had not yet turned gray, though he had a touch of gray at his temples and a large bald spot. His thick brows seemed to weigh down on his
eyes,
and the lines of his jowls and chin had lost their sharpness and were beginning to sag.

Their conversation went on in a very friendly though serious manner. The Writer took no notes, and he had a quick grasp of the subject and asked germane and intelligent questions.

Vasily Kiprianovich spoke of the various ways a screenplay could be written: the concise synopsis that allowed the director complete freedom; the emotional, whose main aim was merely to instill a mood in the director and cinematographer; the detailed scenic type in which the writer sets out each scene and even specifies whether the scenes should change using long takes or montage. It was obvious that the Writer was taking this all in and that he particularly liked the idea that a screenplay must always be coordinated with
gesture.

“
Absolutely true!
”
he agreed, with passion.
“
That
’
s virtually the most important thing. In fact, I believe that
every
sentence has a gesture to go with it, and sometimes even every word. A person is constantly gesturing— if not physically, then always emotionally. And above all we must find gestures appropriate to whatever social environment we are depicting.
”

It was already getting on to five o
’
clock, and the Writer invited the professor to go downstairs for tea. They went back to the ground floor and passed through the living room, filled with antique furniture—a fretwork sofa, some armchairs, a mirror with an intricately modeled frame. There were copies of
Serov
’
s
Girl with Peaches
and a Monet landscape with a pink-sailed boat; just as upstairs, there was a huge, white-tiled stove. Obviously they did not spare the firewood in this house.

The Writer led him around the corner from the dining room, not failing to boast artlessly about a remarkable new appliance—an electric refrigerator he had brought from Paris.

At this point—had he known that this was the time for sitting and chatting?—his dacha neighbor, Yefim Martynovich, dropped in. Alongside the massive thoroughbred body of the Writer, he seemed a puny figure, little more than a gnome, yet he behaved with no less importance than the master of the house.

He was about forty, somewhat younger than Vasily Kiprianovich, but what a success he had made of himself! His name was pronounced with awe in Soviet
literature, though only until recently and not at the moment. A militant Marxist critic, he was famous for his devastating attacks on some writers and his fulsome praise of others. In all cases he demanded a militant class-based approach from writers, and he was having some success in achieving it. He was everywhere: he taught in the Institute of Red Professors, headed the literary department in the State Publishing House (in other words, it was he who determined which writers would be published and which would not), and he was also the head of the Fine Art Publishing House as well as the editor of two literary journals. In short, he held the reins of the whole of literature in his hands, and it would be dangerous to have him as an enemy. When he was in RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, he was responsible for the rout of Voronsky
’
s group and the school of
Pereverzev
; and after the recent dissolution of RAPP he had taken up with lightning speed
“
the consolidation of communist forces on the literary front.
”
All these things he did with such great success that now he too had acquired a fine dacha, right next door and very likely not a bit worse than this one.

Vasily Kiprianovich had heard a great deal about him, of course, and was now seeing him for the first time. He had an unintelligent face, eyes that were very alert, and hair with a touch of red in it. Had you met such a person socially, even one wearing a good suit, you would never have guessed that he was a Servant of the Muses but would take him for a successful manager of a manufactured goods depot or, at best, the chief accountant of a complex of enterprises. Dealing with him, however, was like handling a newly sharpened razor. Their paths had not crossed, though one never knew what the future might hold, and Vasily Kiprianovich found it useful to meet the Critic in the home of the Writer, especially when the latter was looking at him favorably.

The Writer
’
s wife was not at home, but on the ground floor veranda, facing the rays of the late afternoon sun; tea had already been served by an elderly maid with a peasant
’
s face. They sat down in comfortable wicker chairs. Some soft white bread had already been sliced for the butter and cheese, while there were dishes with two types of pastry and two types of jam—cherry and apricot.