The institution Anna Modestovna had to go to for the document was closed for lunch. This was annoying but it made sense to wait: it would only be 15 minutes, and she could get everything finished before her own lunch break was over.
Anna Modestovna didn't want to wait on the staircase, so she went back outside. It was a late October day, damp but not cold. There'd been some fine drizzle during the night, but it had stopped now. Lorries roared by along the tarmac, sometimes sparing the passers-by but more often spraying them with thin mud. There was something appealing about the grey, raised boulevard between the carriageways, and Anna crossed onto it.
There was hardly anyone on the boulevard, even in the distance. Here, if you avoided the puddles, you could walk over the coarse sand without getting your shoes wet. Under the trees lay a dark layer of wet leaves and, if you went close, a faint smell seemed to waft up from them-perhaps left over from when the leaves were alive, or maybe the beginning of decay; between the two carriageways of exhaust fumes, this boulevard was a rest for your lungs.
Anna stopped. There was no wind and the whole thick network of branches, little twigs and next year's buds was strung with countless drops of water, all silvery-white in the gloom. There being no wind, the moisture had collected and formed into hanging drops. Taking her folded umbrella in the same hand as her handbag, and pulling off her glove, Anna began running her fingers underneath the drops, sliding them off. When she did this carefully the drop would transfer intact onto her finger, not breaking up but just slightly flattening. The wavy patterns on her finger showed up more clearly through the drop, which acted like a magnifying glass.
Each drop was also a convex mirror. In this mirror, against a light background of cloudy sky, she could see dark shoulders in a coat, and a head in a woollen hat, and even the interwoven branches above her head.
Anna forgot herself and began hunting for bigger and bigger drops, sometimes slipping them onto a fingernail and sometimes onto the fleshy part of her finger. Then, right beside her, she heard firm footsteps and she let her hand drop, ashamed to be behaving in a way more appropriate to her youngest son.
The passer-by, however, had seen neither the game she was playing nor Anna Modestovna herself-he was the kind of person who notices nothing on a street except a free taxi or a tobacco kiosk. He was a young man with the unmistakable stamp of a higher education, carrying a bulging bright-yellow briefcase and wearing a bright overcoat of soft worsted and a fur hat with a crease down the middle. Only in the capital do you encounter men with such expressions-self-assured, victorious. Anna knew people like this and she was afraid of them.
On guard now, she walked on and came across a newspaper display board standing on pale blue posts. Behind the glass lay the inside and outside pages of Labour. The glass had been chipped in one corner, water had got inside, and one sheet of newspaper was soaked. But at the bottom of this sheet, Anna saw a headline above two columns of print: "The New Life of the Chu River."
This was somewhere she knew: she had been born there, in the Seven Rivers region. Wiping the pane with her glove, Anna Modestovna began to skim through the article.
The writer of the article was no miser with words. He began at the Moscow aerodrome: how he had taken his seat in the aeroplane and, as if in contrast with the dismal weather, how everyone had been in a joyful mood. Then he described his fellow-travellers: who was flying with him and why. He even said a word about the stewardess. After that he described the aerodrome at Frunze and how, as if in harmony with the sunny weather, everyone was still in a joyful mood. Then he recounted his journey along the Chu valley. Using a rich variety of technical terms, he described the hydraulic works, the hydroelectric power station and the irrigation canals; he enthused at the sight of desert lands that were now irrigated and fruitful, and he expressed astonishment at the harvest statistics of the collective farms.
At the end he wrote: "But few know that this grandiose and majestic transformation of an entire region of nature was first conceived a long time ago. Our engineers did not have to carry out detailed surveys of the valley, its geological strata and water systems. The whole of the central project was completed on the basis of laborious calculations carried out in 1912, 40 years ago, by the talented Russian hydrographer and hydraulic engineer, Modest Aleksandrovich V, (Modest is an uncommon name and the heroine's patronymic is Modestovna. It is clear that he is her father) who then, in the same year, began the initial works, risking his own capital."
Anna Modestovna was neither shocked nor overcome with joy; it was rather that she had begun to tremble, both inside and outside, as if at the start of an illness. She bent down, to see the final paragraphs right in the corner, and she again tried to wipe the glass clean. With difficulty she read: "But under the bigoted Tsarist regime, indifferent as it was to the interests of the people, his plans could not be realised. They ended up gathering dust in the Department of Land Amelioration, and the excavations he had already completed were abandoned."
"What a pity!" the journalist exclaimed in conclusion. "What a pity that the young enthusiast did not live to see the triumph of his brilliant ideas! That he is unable to gaze upon the now transformed valley!"
Anna felt a sudden fear, surging up like boiling water, because she knew what she was going to do now: she was going to steal this newspaper! Like a thief, she looked round, first to her right, then to her left. There was nobody on the boulevard, just someone's back in the distance. What she was doing was unseemly, quite disgraceful, but...
The newspaper was held in place by three drawing pins across the top. Anna put her hand through the break in the glass. Where the newspaper was wet in the corner, it crumpled at once into a little damp ball and came off the pin. Standing on tiptoe, Anna managed to reach across to the middle pin, loosen it and pull it out. But the third, furthest pin was beyond her reach-and Anna just pulled on the newspaper. It tore-and the whole sheet came away in her hand.
Immediately, behind her back, she heard the piercing staccato of a policeman's whistle.
As if scorched (there was little she didn't know about fear, and a policeman's whistle was frightening enough at any time), Anna withdrew her now empty hand and turned round.
It was too late to run away, and it would have made things worse. Coming towards her-not down the boulevard, but through a gap in the boulevard fence, which Anna had not noticed before-was a tall policeman, looking all the bigger because of the wet raincoat he was wearing with the hood thrown back.
He did not call out. He came up to her, in no hurry. He looked down at Anna Modestovna, then at the newspaper-which had dropped down, somewhat crumpled, behind the glass-then at Anna again. He towered over her, strict and severe. It was clear from his hands and from his pink, broad-nosed face that he was someone fit and strong-the kind of man to drag people out of a blaze or carry out an arrest without using firearms.
Without raising his voice, the policeman asked: "What's all this, citizen? Do we want to be fined 25 roubles?" (Oh, please, let it just be a fine! She was afraid of some harsher interpretation of her behaviour.)
"Or do you not like people reading newspapers?"
"What do you mean? No, no! Forgive me!" said Anna, somehow almost wriggling. "I'll put it back straight away... if you'll allow me..."
No, hardly. Even if he did allow her, a sheet of newspaper with one wet corner and one torn corner would not be so very easy to put back.
The policeman continued to look down at her, giving no indication of his decision.
He'd been on duty a long time and it had been raining. It would be nice to take the woman back to the station, along with her newspaper. While he filed his report, he'd dry out a little. But he wanted to understand. A respectably-dressed woman, middle-aged, not drunk.
She looked at him, waiting for her punishment.
"What have you got against the newspaper?"
"There's something about my father!" All apology, she was clasping to her chest the handle of her umbrella, her handbag and the glove she had taken off. She had not noticed that she had cut her finger against the glass.
Now the policeman understood. Pitying her because of her bleeding finger, he nodded.
"Being criticised, is he? But what difference is one copy going to make?"
"No-o! No, no! The opposite-he's being praised!"
At this point she saw the blood on her finger and began to suck it. And she kept on looking at the policeman's large, simple face.
His lips barely parted. "But why? Couldn't you have bought it in a kiosk?"
"But look at the date!" She quickly took her finger from her lips and pointed to the undamaged sheet of newspaper beneath the other half of the glass. "It's been there three days. Where am I going to find another copy now?"
The policeman looked at the date. Again at the woman. And again at the crumpled sheet of newspaper. He sighed: "I should file a report. And fine you... All right then, but don't do it again. Take it quickly, before anyone sees."
"Oh thank you! Thank you! How kind you are! Thank you!" Anna Modestovna said the words over and over again, at the same time as repeating some kind of wriggle or bow. Instead of putting her handkerchief to her finger, she quickly slipped the hand with the pink finger under the glass, seized the edge of the newspaper and pulled it out. "Thank you!"
The newspaper opened out. Anna, as best she could with one edge being soaked and having only one free hand, folded it. With one more polite little wriggle, she said: "I'm very grateful to you. You can't imagine what a joy this will be to my mother and father! May I go?"
Standing alongside her, he nodded.
And she walked quickly away, quite forgetting why she had come to this street, clutching the newspaper, which she had folded skew-whiff, and sucking now and again on her finger.
She must hurry back to her mother. So the two of them could read this together! Once her father's place of exile had been determined, mother would go and visit him. She could take the newspaper with her.
The journalist hadn't known! He hadn't known-or he would never have written that! And the editorial board didn't know-or they'd never have let it through. The young enthusiast had lived to see the day. He had lived to see the triumph of his brilliant ideas, because his death sentence had been commuted and he had instead spent 20 years in prisons and camps. And then, while on his way, under guard, to some remote place of eternal exile, he had petitioned Beria himself, asking to be sent to the Chu valley. But in the end he had been sent somewhere else, and the local internal affairs office had no idea what to do with the useless old man: there was no suitable job for him-and as for a pension, he had not yet put in enough years of work.
After working briefly as a maths teacher, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer during the second world war. In 1945, he was sentenced to eight years' hard labour for criticising Stalin in a letter to a friend. Shortly before his release, he was operated on for stomach cancer. In 1954, he was admitted to an oncological clinic in Tashkent; he responded unusually well to treatment. At the height of Khrushchev's thaw in 1961, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a realistic account of life in a Soviet labour camp, was published to huge acclaim. Other short works were published in the Soviet Union, but his long novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle, could be published only in the west.
Few books in world literature have had the impact of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet system of labour camps first published, in the west, in 1973-75. No author played a bigger part than Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union's eventual collapse. The writer Yuri Buida has argued that the figures who most influenced Russia's 20th-century destiny were Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Solzhenitsyn's heroic and prophetic mantle no longer commands automatic respect. Few people have read The Red Wheel, his most recent and longest work, a cycle of novels set in 1914-17. What has perhaps been forgotten is that Solzhenitsyn is not only a man of formidable will but also, at least in his earlier works, a writer of considerable delicacy. "What a Pity" has never before been translated into English and is known to few Russians. Set in 1952, the year before Stalin's death, it is based on a true story recounted in part six of The Gulag Archipelago.
Robert Chandler
