He was dozing off when old Marya Ivanovna walked by with a bucket.
“Our water’s no good, it’s stagnant,” she said, stopping beside him. “We can’t even use it for cooking.” He did not say anything himself, but she began telling him how their water would be fine too if it weren’t for their neighbor’s vicious dog. The dog didn’t let anyone near the well, so the water stagnated. “The well is sick,” she said, “it’s like a cow that isn’t being milked.”
“Why are you having to fetch water yourself?” he said, with a blend of mockery and reproach. Looking at her thin brown face and her gray hair, he went on: “Sending an old woman out to fetch water—important cadres ought to know better! You must be about sixty, yes?”
The old woman could not remember her age. When she wanted the women in the neighboring dachas to express surprise at her readiness to fetch water, scrub floors, and do the laundry, she would say that she was seventy-one. In the polyclinic, however, she had registered herself as being fifty-nine, and that was what she had said to her daughter. She wanted her daughter to feel sorry for her when she died, not to be saying, “Oh well, she had a good long life.” She sighed and said to the driver, “I’m into my seventies. Yes, my dear, well into my seventies.”
“Your daughter should be fetching the water herself,” said the driver. “Or she should send the girls. No, an old woman like you shouldn’t be having to fetch water.”
“You don’t understand,” said Marya Ivanovna. “It’s only today she’s here so early. It’s because she’s going on leave. Normally she doesn’t get back here until nighttime. The girl’s completely worn out. It’s getting better now, she’s calming down, but last winter, when she’d only just started working in Moscow, she’d get back here in her car—and burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ I’d ask. ‘Has someone upset you?’ ‘No,’ she’d reply, ‘it’s just that everything’s so new and strange.’ No, she’s certainly not going to start fetching water! As for the little girls, to be honest with you, they’re bitches, right little bitches. Yes, they tell lies and they use foul words. The older one’s not too bad—she just lies there and reads—but Natashka’s a horror. This morning she said to me, ‘Granny, you’ve guzzled all the sweets that my auntie left me. I’m going to punch you in the teeth.’ Yes, that’s Natashka for you.”
“Insulting the aged is a criminal offense. She should be tried in a people’s court,” said the driver. A moment later, he went on to ask, “So they’re not her own daughters?”
“They’re her nieces, they’re the children of my eldest daughter, Shura. Shura died in 1931, during the famine. Yes, she just swelled up and died. And my old man—he was such a hard worker—he died the same year. He was so swollen his heart could barely keep beating, but all he could think about was the house and the yard. I wanted to bake some flatbreads from thorn apple and I needed wood for the fire, but he wouldn’t let me break up the fence. Then Stepanida took charge of us all. Her State farm gave her eight hundred grams of bread a day and so the four of us stayed alive. At the time she was just a little scrap of a girl—but look where she’s got now!”
“So everything’s all right now?” said the driver, pointing at the dacha and its tall windows.
“Yes, of course,” said the old woman. “Only I feel sad, there are things I’ll never forget. Shura, my eldest one, went out of her mind. She kept wailing, ‘Mama, the whole world’s on fire! Mama, our wheat’s all burning!’ No, I won’t be forgetting that. My old man was so gentle...Heavens!” she exclaimed all of a sudden. “I’ve been talking and talking, but who’s going to give Stepanida her tea? She’s got a train to catch. And she’s still got to call at her apartment in town.”
“There’s time enough,” said the driver. “After all, we do have a car.”
Goryacheva was glad to be going away.
For the first time in her life she was going for a holiday by the sea. She still had not got used to how precipitately life had changed. After finishing school, when she was just a fun-loving seventeen-year-old, she had gotten a job on the State farm, as a cleaner in the workers’ hostel. The other girls in the hostel had talked her into going on a nine-month course to become a combine-harvester operator. She had graduated without the least difficulty; she was one of the best students. She had absorbed technical information with extraordinary ease—an ease she herself found surprising—and her technical drawings were outstanding. It took her only a moment to memorize a complex diagram—and then she could dismantle an entire motor. In less than a year she became a senior combine- harvester operator. In 1935 her work had been named the best in the region. In 1937 the agronomist, the head of the repair workshops, and the director of the State farm had all been arrested. A new director was appointed, Semidolenko. Goryacheva did not like him; she was rather afraid of him. If anything went wrong on the farm, Semidolenko always made out it was because of sabotage. The slightest mechanical breakdown, the least delay in a workshop, and Semidolenko would be writing denunciations to the district representative. As a result, there were twelve arrests, one after the other. At public meetings, Semidolenko referred to those who had been arrested as saboteurs and provocateurs. At a meeting after the arrest of Nevraev—a severe, taciturn old man who was an instructor in the repair workshop and who had won everyone’s respect by always working until late into the night and not taking any leave for five years on end, refusing all financial compensation—Semidolenko had said, “This fellow deceived us all. Behind the mask of a shock worker was hidden a sworn enemy of the people, an adept spy, working for a foreign State, who managed to penetrate to the very heart of our State farm.”
Then the director’s secretary had taken the floor: only now, he declared, had he understood why Nevraev had stayed on alone at night in the repair-workshop office and why he had ordered photographic apparatus from Moscow. Then Goryacheva had stood up. In a loud, clear voice she had said, “He had nothing whatsoever to do with any foreign State. He was sent here by the district Party committee, and he’s from Puzyri. It’s not far away. His sister and younger brother still live there.”
Semidolenko had turned on her, saying that the district Party secretary who had appointed Nevraev had turned out to be an enemy of the people and that Goryacheva too had evidently succumbed to enemy influence and that there were one or two more things he had recently learned. A few days after this, Semidolenko’s typist informed Goryacheva, after swearing her to secrecy, that she had just typed out a statement by Semidolenko, addressed to the district representative, to the effect that Goryacheva (a Komsomol member) had been cohabiting with Nevraev (an enemy of the people) and had regularly been receiving gifts of money from him. At that moment it had seemed the truth would never come out—everything was just a tangle of lies. Soon afterward, however, everything had changed. Semidolenko himself had been arrested—along with the district representative and a number of provincial officials. And then, suddenly, it had all begun. Goryacheva had been summoned before the secretary of the provincial Party Committee, a man with a broad face who wore a calico shirt and blue canvas shoes with rubber soles.
“We have decided to appoint you director of the State farm,” he told her.
This both frightened Goryacheva and made her angry. “What on earth do you mean? You must be joking. I’m twenty-four. I’m from a village. This is only the third time in my life I’ve been in a train.”
“And I’m twenty-seven,” said the Party secretary. “What can we do about it?”
Two years passed. Goryacheva was transferred to Moscow. She worked and studied at the same time. Often she had the feeling that everything was a dream—the telephones, the secretaries, the meetings of the Presidium, the cars, her Moscow apartment, her dacha. And there were nights when she really did dream that she was walking down the village street with her friends after work, singing songs to the accompaniment of a squeezebox. She would be smiling in these dreams, feeling how nice it was to walk barefoot over the soft cool grass
on the little square in front of the village soviet. And only when she was being driven to the dacha and buildings were appearing from nowhere, then vanishing in front of her eyes, did she feel that there wasn’t really anything so extraordinary about her existence; it was just that her life too had subordinated itself to this precipitate movement, to this swiftness that took one’s breath away.
***
Goryacheva would not be traveling alone that evening; Gagareva, the deputy director of the planning department, was going with her, to the same resort on the Black Sea. Gagareva—who was not a Party member—was a stout old woman with gray hair and a pince-nez on her fleshy nose. Just before ten o’clock Goryacheva called by to collect her. Gagareva was ready and waiting. They did not talk in the car. Goryacheva just looked out of the window, and Gagareva polished her pince-nez. Then they got to the train and found their two-berth compartment.
“I’ll go on top,” said Goryacheva. “I’m young.”
“But it’s not difficult with these little steps,” said Gagareva. “If you’d rather, I can easily go on top myself.”
“Don’t even think of it,” said Goryacheva, looking at Gagareva and laughing.
“I may be big,” said Gagareva, also laughing, “but that’s neither here nor there. I’ve been doing my gymnastics right up to the last minute.”
The attendant brought them some tea, and they decided to have their supper there in the compartment rather than go to the restaurant car. They quickly struck up a rapport. They were smiling, offering each other tastes of their food.
“This will be the first time I’ve ever seen the sea,” said Goryacheva. She went on: “The resort network’s growing so fast now.”
“Yes,” said Gagareva, “a great deal of thought is going into maintaining the health of the country’s citizens. Our commissariat alone has planned eight centers on the shores of the Black Sea.”
“Foreigners are very attracted to our wealth, too,” said Goryacheva. “The Japanese have quite lost their heads over it. And one can understand them. Our seas, our rivers, our forests—there’s such beauty everywhere!”
“The Red Army will soon knock that out of them. This will be the last time they try to get their hands on our Motherland!” said Gagareva.
“Yes, on May Day I couldn’t take my eyes off our tanks. Iron mountains—but they move fast!”
“I didn’t have the good fortune to be there on Red Square myself, but I know anyway that the strength of our army lies not only in its equipment but also in its Socialist ideology.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, comrade Gagareva,” Goryacheva agreed. “Our whole country will want to fight.”
They carried on chatting for a while, then went to bed. Goryacheva woke up during the night. It was comfortable on the upper bunk, like being in a cradle. The train was going at a good speed, but the heavy first-class carriage was barely swaying. Goryacheva looked down. Gagareva was wearing a flannel nightgown and her gray hair was hanging loose on her shoulders; propped up on one elbow, she was looking out of the dark window and crying. Rather than weeping silently, as old women often do, she was sobbing loudly and hoarsely, her fleshy shoulders quivering with each sob. Goryacheva wanted to ask her what was the matter; she wanted to comfort her. Instead, however, she said nothing and very quietly, without Gagareva hearing, lay down again and closed her eyes. She had realized why Gagareva was crying. Eight or nine months before, she had been called to the deputy of the People’s Commissar to discuss Gagareva. Gagareva held an important position, and she was a good worker who knew her job well. But one day she had handed in a statement saying that she considered it her duty to report that in the autumn of 1937 her son-in-law, an important official at the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, had been arrested; soon after this, her daughter had been arrested too.
“What do you make of it all?” the deputy had asked Goryacheva. “Kozhuro, you know, has handed me a carefully argued summary of the reasons why she should be removed from her post.”
Goryacheva and the deputy had both laughed; Kozhuro, the head of the planning department, was known as the most cautious and fearful of all the heads of department. He had dismissed a huge number of people and had even been reprimanded for this by the Moscow Party Committee: he was too ready, apparently, to dismiss his staff at the merest hint of suspicion. Once he had dismissed a young woman, the wife of a cost accountant, merely because the cost accountant’s sister was married to a professor who had been excluded from the Party “for links to enemies of the people.” All this had only come to light when the professor was reinstated in the Party and Kozhuro could not decide whether or not to bring back the cost accountant’s wife.
In reply to the deputy’s question, Goryacheva had said, “Kozhuro’s the one who should be dismissed—he over-insures his every move. If Gagareva’s fired, I’m going straight to the Central Committee. She’s an old woman I really admire!”
The deputy had replied, “It’s not for you and me to make decisions about Kozhuro—that’s not our concern. And there will be no need for you to appeal to the Central Committee, since Gagareva is not being dismissed.”
Goryacheva had thought to herself, “This fellow’s pretty careful too,” but she had said nothing.
And just now, in the train, she had understood: Gagareva was crying because she was on her way to a holiday resort, in a comfortable train compartment—while her daughter was in a camp barrack, sleeping on bed boards.
In the morning Gagareva asked, “How was your night, comrade Goryacheva? These last few years I’ve been sleeping badly on trains. I wake up feeling battered, like after a serious illness.” Her face looked puffy, and her eyelids were red.
“Do you receive letters from your daughter?” Goryacheva asked suddenly.
Gagareva was taken aback. “How can I put it?” she began. “Really I have no official contact with her. She and I have nothing in common. But I happen to know that she’s working in Kazakhstan, and that she’s petitioning for a review of her case.”
It was stuffy in the compartment, but they had to close the window because of the dust. All around them were fields of ripe grain. In the evening, after Kharkov, they came to places where the harvest had already started, where there were trucks and combine harvesters waiting in the fields. “I used to work on those,” said Goryacheva, her heart beating faster.
The house of recreation for senior cadres was small but very comfortable. Each of the visitors had their own room. There was a choice of dishes for lunch, and there was always wine—proper wine made from grapes. There would even be a choice of desserts—ice cream, custard, blintzes with jam. Goryacheva did not see a lot of Gagareva; not only were they on different floors but there were also days when Gagareva felt unwell and had her meals brought to her room. In the evenings, when it was cooler, Gagareva would wrap a shawl around her shoulders and go for a walk, book in hand, along the avenue of cypress trees above the sea; she took short steps, often pausing to get her breath back, and sometimes she would sit on one of the low stone benches. She had no regular companions. The only person who visited her in her room was Kotova, an old doctor who worked there; she and Gagareva would talk together for a long time. And sometimes, after supper, Gagareva would call on Kotova.
“I feel I’m in a kindergarten here,” Gagareva would complain. “I’ve got no one to talk to.”
“Yes,” said Kotova. “It really is like a kindergarten. Nobody here in August is older than thirty—apart from me, of course.”
Gagareva talked about what a good time they had all had in this same house of recreation in 1931. There had always been things going on: evenings of reminiscences, amateur singers and musicians, readings from books, literary debates.
“Yes, there were some interesting people then,” said Kotova, “but I sometimes had a hard time of it myself. There was one man I remember—a handsome man with a blond beard. He had heart problems—an accumulation of fat around the heart, some degree of metabolic
disturbance, and symptoms of gout in the joints of his left arm. I’ve forgotten his name and where he worked. None of his illnesses was serious, but he didn’t half give me a lot of trouble. He was so capricious, so very used to getting whatever he wanted. I even ended up writing to the Health Department, asking to be relieved from my post.”
“Oh, I know the man you mean,” said Gagareva. “He isn’t around anymore. During collectivization he was head of the regional land department. We used to talk about him a lot in our activist group.”
“Well,” said Kotova, “all I can say is that he was unbearable when he was here. Once I was woken up in the middle of the night. He’d called me. He was sitting on his bed, and all he could say was, ‘Doctor, I feel sick.’ At that point I lost all patience. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I snapped, ‘waking an old woman in the middle of the night just because you ate too much supper.’ ”
“Yes,” said Gagareva, “people are strange...”
Kotova lived on her own, and Gagareva liked her white clean room and her little “private” garden outside the window. She preferred this small plot to the large and splendid park, and she liked to sit on the little step with a book, beside the pot with the pink oleander.