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At such moments he longed to talk to his son about that earlier world, of his own youth before the war, before the revolution. All you had to do, he thought, was to make a subtraction, yes, subtract the present from the past and tell the difference in happiness, in liberty, in the lack of worries that the past contained. The arithmetic seemed so easy, but each time he tried to relive the old days the difference became blurred. For before the revolution there had also been a war, that of 1914 (and the bolsheviks had had no hand in that), carts piled high with the wounded and he a mere youth, on a field covered in corpses, weeping with pain, his horse killed and he unable to withdraw his leg, crushed beneath it. And at Dolshanka, long before the Bolsheviks arrived, the days were as rough and long as plowing, as tough as thick tree trunks beneath the saw, and tasted of hard-earned bread. So all that was left of the happiness of times gone by was just a few dawns, that cool wellspring in the hollow of a little valley on a day of harvesting in the blazing heat of summer, that road in the last snowstorm. As now. As always.
Not knowing whether to rejoice or to be desolate that these moments of happiness, though recurring, were so rare, Nikolai recalled that night beside a river, already long ago, A
One day he tried to explain the earlier life to his son. And even thought he had found the words he needed. He spoke of the czar, of old Count Dolshansky, of the revolution. It was a warm, still October day. The fields were already bare, the riverbank where they sat was carpeted with long, yellowing grasses. Noticing the flight of wild geese in the sky, Nikolai realized that for several minutes now the boy had not been listening to him. The birds were reflected in the river's smooth flow and Pavel was following their reflection, which seemed to be traveling upstream, amid long willow boughs and some stranded boats. Nikolai fell silent, looked where his son was looking and smiled: this limpid gliding of the wings over the water was more beautiful than the flight itself
After the famous spring of the confiscated needles there were two years of famine, a hundred dead in Dolshanka, several arrests. The disgust Nikolai had experienced that day at the sight of the telegraph machine became so familiar that he no longer noticed it. Everyone knew that the famine had been organized. But in order not to lose your reason, to survive in the midst of this madness, it was best not to think about it, it was better to concentrate on the straightness and depth of the furrow.
Besides, even during those years, they could still wake up in the middle of a beautiful October day with a flight of birds above the river. Or again on that day of great frost: coming home, Nikolai saw A
As in a bad dream, changes came, hard on one another's heels, contradicting one another, defying comprehension. One summer night Batum died in a hayloft at the center of a blaze started by his cigarette butt. His mistress escaped. He, being too drunk, was enmeshed in the bundles of hay. How could you comprehend that? This man, who had driven so many people to their deaths, had perished in the ma
Thinking about these young people, Nikolai took note of the solidity of the new world. Little by little the revolution was casting aside the revolutionaries and life was reverting to essentials, land and bread. Gutov, the blacksmith, passed on his anvil to his son and was elected president of the kolkhoz. He was already a member of the Party and had drawn Nikolai into it, saying, "You need to join, neighbor, otherwise they're going to dredge up another Goldfish for us." For a long time now the portrait of Stalin in every house had become almost invisible in its conspicuousness, as familiar as an icon used to be in the old days. Nikolai had great faith in the endurance of the snows, the rains, the winds, in the constancy of the fields, in the blissful routine of days that would set everything to rights. And when the heads began to roll again in Moscow he thought of the vast stretch of plains, forests, snows that lay between them and the capital. With the hope of a weary man, he was eager to convince himself at any price.
In spring when the work was at its height, the president of the kolkhoz was arrested. They spent several nights without going to bed, watching at the window: Nikolai, A
The car arrived very early in the morning. A