According to Natalya, Solzhenitsyn was very pensive throughout the meeting. He had much to be pensive about. Their relationship, it seemed, was held together by a thread.
A couple of months later, on May 19, 1950, Solzhenitsyn was transferred, along with several other prisoners, from the relative “luxury” of Marfino to an unknown destination. His feelings, and those of his fellow prisoners, were described at the conclusion of The First Circle:
They all knew well enough that what awaited them was incomparably worse than Mavrino. They all knew that when they were in their labour camps they would dream nostalgically of Mavrino as of a golden age. For the moment, however, to bolster their morale they felt a need to curse the special prison so that none of them might actually feel any regrets about it or blame himself for whatever action had led to his transfer…. The prospects that awaited them were the taiga and the tundra, the Cold Pole at Oi-Myakoi and the copper mines of Jezkazgan, kicking and shoving, starvation rations, soggy bread, hospital, death. No fate on earth could possibly be worse. Yet they were at peace within themselves. They were as fearless as men are who have lost everything they ever had—a fearlessness hard to attain but enduring once it is reached.16
After yet another short spell at Butyrki, Solzhenitsyn began a long and insufferable journey across the Soviet Union, which took two exhausting months to complete. He eventually arrived at his destination, Ekibastuz labor camp, deep in the semi-arid steppes of Kazakhstan in Soviet central Asia, in the third week of August. The first sight of his new “home” confirmed that Solzhenitsyn was now more securely clasped within the jaws of the Soviet prison system than ever before. The “special camp” in which he found himself was enclosed by double fences of barbed wire, between which Alsatian dogs prowled menacingly, overlooked by armed guards. A strip of ploughed land encircled the perimeter to reveal the footprints of anyone attempting to escape, and sharp-pointed stakes were set in the ground at forty-five-degree angles, designed to impale would-be escapees before they had the opportunity to leave their footprints on the ploughed strip beyond. Thoughts of escape were futile, and, beyond the perimeter, hundreds upon hundreds of miles separated the new arrival from the world he had once known. The thin thread between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya, his only remaining link with his old life, was about to snap.
For Natalya, who had lived a life of heroic exile from her husband for almost a decade, it was too much to bear. Until his transfer to the labor camp, she had still clung to the last lingering hopes that some day she and Solzhenitsyn would embrace again in freedom. “But when the first letter came from faraway Ekibastuz, I learned that now we were not to see each other at all. Now there would be no meetings, and letters would arrive only twice a year. Now we were separated not only by time but by distance.”17
The distance separating them went beyond the merely geographical. Gradually, to her dismay—or perhaps, if she was looking for an excuse to escape, to her relief—she sensed another remoteness. In his infrequent letters, he was “expressing moods entirely different from those I had known”. They appeared to be written by a Solzhenitsyn who was completely new to her. Instead of his impetuous and impatient will and his worldly ambition, there was now a “passive waiting… resignation… submission to destiny”. “Perhaps,” he wrote in one of the rare letters he was permitted to send, “this faith in destiny is the beginning of religiosity? I don’t know. It seems to me I’m still far from having reached the point of believing in a god.” Such a discussion of “god” was itself an example of the remoteness that so alienated Natalya. Neither of them had ever taken religion seriously, both having absorbed the atheism of the Soviet education system, so Natalya viewed this rising religiosity with an element of alarm. “Although the word ‘god’ was still not capitalized,” she wrote, “it nevertheless began to crop up with increasing frequency.” She then quotes a letter of December 1950, in which reference to the divine is indeed frequently made: “Haven’t been ill here yet, thank god, and may god grant that no illness befall me in the future.” Natalya’s memoirs display her continuing irritation with this further example of what she calls one of Solzhenitsyn’s “precious ideas”.18
During 1951, Natalya no longer perceived Solzhenitsyn “as a living person, in flesh and blood. He was an illusion.”19 The end was nigh and was hastened by the arrival of a new admirer in Natalya’s life, the flesh and blood she needed to exorcise Solzhenitsyn’s ghost. This was Vsevolod Somov, a scientific colleague, who began courting her in earnest in the spring, encouraged by Natalya’s mother, who was understandably anxious about her daughter’s uncertain future.
Natalya was still going through the motions of corresponding with Solzhenitsyn, but by July he detected from the tone of her letters that something was amiss. “It seems as though you had to force yourself to begin the letter”, he wrote. “A kind of reticence fettered your tongue, and after a few lines you broke off.”20 Soon she stopped writing altogether, except for a solitary birthday greeting in December wishing him happiness in life.
In the spring of 1952, Natalya decided to restructure her life in its entirety. She moved in with Vsevolod Somov without any formal marriage ceremony, declaring to her friends that they should now be considered man and wife. “I shall neither justify nor blame myself”. Natalya wrote in her memoirs. “After all the years of trials, I could no longer sustain my ‘saintliness’. I began to live a real life.”21
Natalya admitted that she lacked the courage to write to her former husband, and Solzhenitsyn was forced to write repeatedly to Natalya’s Aunt Nina requesting that she clear up the uncertainty. Feeling that she could say nothing without her niece’s consent, she did not reply until, at Natalya’s request, she finally wrote a short note in September 1952: “Natasha has asked me to tell you that you may arrange your life independently of her.”22 Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn was more confused than ever by the vagueness and terseness of the note and wrote to Natalya directly, urging a full explanation of “such an insignificant, enigmatic phrase”.
No matter what you’ve done during the past two years, you will not be guilty in my eyes. I shall not criticize or reproach you either in my thoughts or my words. Neither by my former behaviour nor my luckless life, which has ruined and withered your youth, have I justified that rare, that great love that you once felt for me and that I don’t believe is exhausted now. The only guilty one is me. I have brought you so little joy, I shall be forever in your debt.23
Natalya responded by informing him of her “marriage” to another man, ending their careworn, sixteen-year relationship with a finality that confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s fears.
However, Solzhenitsyn had other fears to contend with during this period of uncertainty. In December 1951, at around the time Natalya had sent him the birthday card wishing him happiness in life, his own luckless life was thrown into further anxiety by the discovery of a small swelling on his right groin. At first he tried to ignore it, but gradually it grew to the size of a lemon and was becoming increasingly painful. On January 30, 1952, he was diagnosed as having cancer and was admitted to the camp hospital. Having survived the first grueling winter at Ekibastuz, the sufferings of which became the inspiration for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he had been struck down with a potentially fatal disease. He had survived all the cruelty and bullying, the starvation rations, the manual labor in icy winds that slashed knife-like across the flat defenseless steppe at forty below zero, only to succumb to something worse. He had passed from the desperation of the labor camp to the desolation of his deathbed, from bare existence on the edge of death to the final triumph of death itself. Such must have been the thoughts whirling endlessly through Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he waited two long weeks in the camp hospital for an operation that the doctors had recommended should be carried out at once. It was eventually performed on February 12, under a local anaesthetic. For a while after the operation, he ran a high fever and was in considerable pain.