 Some years back, I read most of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, including his three-volume exposé of the Soviet labor camp system, the Gulag Archipelago, but there's one passage from his work from a little lone novel of his cancer ward that always stuck in my mind and thinking of what to use as my text this morning. I thought of that one. It's a three-page passage, I'm going to read that first and then go on to my theme about the Sovietization of America. In this three-page passage that I always found memorable, a nurse in a hospital, some unnamed state hospital in Kazakhstan, meets an old man who is a patient and we take it up from there. An idle conversation from two people who have not met before. Where do you get all those French books? He asked. There's a foreign language library in town, she said. But why always French? The crow's feet around her eyes and her lips revealed her age and the extent of her suffering. They don't hurt you so much, she said. Her voice was never loud and she enunciated each word softly. Was it because of your husband or because of yourself? She answered at once as straightforwardly as if he were asking her about tonight's duty. It was the whole family and as for who was punished because of whom, I have no idea. Are you all together now? He asked. No, my daughter's in exile. After the war we moved here and they arrested my husband for the second time. They took him to the camps. And now you're alone? I have a little boy, he's eight. Which camp? Tyshet Station. Again, ol'ignotted. I know, he said, that'll be Camp Lake. He might be up there by the Lena River, but the postal address is Tyshet. You've never been there, have you? She asked, unable to restrain her hope. No, I've only heard about it. Everybody bumps into everybody else. His name's Duzarski, she pursued. You didn't meet him? You never met him anywhere? She was still hoping. No, he hadn't met him. You can't meet everybody. He's allowed two letters a year, she said. He nodded. It was the old story. Last year there was only one letter in May. I've heard nothing since then. It doesn't mean anything, he said. Everybody's allowed two letters a year at Spassak Camp. When a prisoner was checking the stoves during the summer he found a couple of hundred unposted letters in the censor's office stove. They just forgot to burn them. You mean your son was born in exile? He resumed. She nodded. And now you have to bring him up on your own salary and nobody will give him, give you a skilled job and they hold your record against you everywhere and you live in some hovel. These were framed as questions, but there was no element of curiosity in the questions. It was all so clear, clear enough to make you sick. Elisaveta's small hands worn out from the everlasting washing and the floor claws and the boiling water and covered in bruises and cuts were now resting on the little book, soft covered and printed in small graceful format on foreign paper. The edges a bit ragged from being cut so many years ago. If only living in a hovel was my only problem, she said. The trouble is my boy's growing up. He's clever. He asks about everything. And how should I bring him up? Should I burden him with the whole truth? The truth's enough to sink a grown man, isn't it? It's enough to break your ribs. Or should I hide the truth and bring him to terms with life? Is that the right way? What would his father say? And would I succeed? After all, the boy's got eyes of his own. He can see. Burden him with the truth, said Oleg confidently. He spoke as though he had brought up children himself and had never made a slip. She propped up her head, cupping her temples in her hands, which were tucked under her head scarf. She looked at him in alarm. It's so difficult bringing up a son without his father, she said. A boy constantly needs someone to lean on. Where to go? And where's he to get this? I'm always saying the wrong thing. And that's why I read these old French novels, but only during the night duty. I have no idea whether these Frenchmen were keeping silent about more important things, or whether the same kind of cruel life as ours was going on outside the world of their books. I have no knowledge of the world, and so I read in peace. Like a drug? Like a blessing, she said, turning her head. It was like a nuns in that white head scarf. I know of no books closer to our life that wouldn't irritate me. Some of them take their readers for fools. Others tell no lies. Our writers take great pride in that achievement. They conduct a deep research into what country lane a great poet traveled along the year, 1800 or something, and what lady he was referring to on page so and so. It may not have been an easy task getting all that out, but it was safe. Oh, yes, it was safe. They chose the easy pain, and they ignored all those who were alive and suffering today. In her youth, she might have been called lily. There could have been no hint then of the spectacle marks on the bridge of her nose. As a girl, she had made eyes and laughed and giggled. There had been lilac and lace in her life, and the poetry of the symbolists. And no gypsy had ever foretold that she would end her life as a cleaning woman somewhere in Asia. Those literary tragedies are just laughable compared with the ones we live through, she said. Aida was allowed to join her husband in the tomb, to love one in the tomb and die with him. But we aren't even allowed to know what's happening to them, even if I went to Camp Lake. Don't go, she said. He said, it don't do any good. Children write essays of the school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. Was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion, and she paid for her passion. That's happiness. She was a free, proud human being. But what if, during peacetime, a lot of great coats and picket caps burst into the house where you were born and ordered the whole family to leave the house and town in 24 hours with only what your hands can carry? You open your doors, you call in the passers by from the streets, and ask them to buy things from you, or throw you a few pennies to buy bread with. And with a ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough, what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us? Only in 100 years? They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. There was 100,000 of them. But we didn't pay much attention. What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children? We knew this. We looked on. We did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims. You bought their pianos, I suppose, Oleg said. We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we did. He could see now that this woman was not yet 50. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old woman's hair, uncurlable, hung down from under her white head scarf. But when you were deported, what was it for? What was the charge? Why bother to think of a charge? Socially harmful. Socially dangerous element. S-D-E. Special decrees just marked by letters of the alphabet. So it was easy. No trial necessary. And what about your husband? Who was he? Nobody, I guess. He was a flute player in the Leningrad Philharmonic. He liked to talk when he had a few drinks. We knew one family with grown up children, a son and a daughter, both Komsomol communist youth party members. Suddenly the whole family was put down for deportation. The children rushed to the Komsomol district office. Protect us, they said. Certainly we protect you, they were told. Just write on this piece of paper. As from today's date, I ask not to be considered the son, the daughter of such and such parents. I renounce them as socially harmful elements and I promise in the future to have nothing whatever to do with them and to maintain no communication with them. Oleg slumped forward. His bony shoulders stuck out and he hung his head. Thousands of people signed letters just like that, he said. Yes, but this brother and sister said, we'll think about it. And they went home and threw their Komsomol cards into the stove and started to pack their things for exile. She sat silent in the twilight. But he could hear her murmur several times, a line from Pushkin. Not all of me shall die. Not all of me shall die. That's the end of the passage.