Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read Free Page 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 . . .
     
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    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