The Life of an Unknown Man (16 page)

A long comfortable yawn could be heard from an open window on the first floor. Volsky felt the dull pain with which this regenerated life afflicted him. The arrogance of happiness, the vigorous indifference of the living. This world was alien to him, just like the parterre at the theater the night before, crammed with dress uniforms. “The victors’ world…” Yes, the real winner is the one who knows how to forget more quickly and more scornfully than the rest.

Dusk fell, the soft, silvery transparency of northern nights. The woman had changed position, and now, her head falling on one shoulder, was murmuring snatches of rhythmic phrases, like nursery rhymes. A stocky face, flushed from sunshine and wine, her discolored locks falling into her eyes, a trace of blurred makeup. He experienced a certain compassion for her, almost fellow feeling. He had known a few such women at the front, a bitter tenderness amid the slaughter, sham embraces and yet true enough, for that was all the man carried with him as he went to his death. Fallen women… Relics of war, thought Volsky, this “blond tramp,” just like that German tank with broken tracks. “And me…,” he admitted.

He got up, prepared to say good-bye, and suddenly froze, pricked up his ears. What the woman was murmuring seemed familiar to him. Not the words but the voice itself, or rather the quality of that voice. The whispered humming through drunkenness had not varied and yet its modulation was striking, thanks to the accuracy of the nuances. “She has a trained voice…,” he had time to think, and, already with a sharpness that took his breath away, these muted tones began conjuring up a face painfully preserved by memory.

The woman half opened her eyes. Her dull expression revealed quite different features shining through, like the design in a decal, then lapsed into a dough of somnolence and disgust. The woman Volsky kept stored in his memory was a survivor with a trembling body, big eyes sunk deep in the ink of their sockets, a bony skull that stuck out through her skin… This woman, who went back to her murmuring again, had swollen features, the body of one who has overeaten after starving. And yet the old face kept reappearing, intermittently, in a rippling of light.

He took her hand and spoke in purposely neutral tones: “It’s me. Do you recognize me, dear?” She withdrew her hand, stared at him with an uneasy look, clumsily assuming an air of offended dignity. “I’m not your dear! I’m not just anyone, you know!” The voice was at once coarse and vulnerable. He experienced a brief moment of hesitation: profit from this rebuff and leave? Return to the world of the victors… He moved away from the bench and saw the woman’s face fade and solidify. The features whose pattern he had recognized were engulfed in sullen heaviness. Her eyelids closed, her chin sank onto her chest.

Already a few steps away, he looked back. Through the dusk he saw a woman all alone beneath a sky that seemed to be there only for her. No sound, as if the inhabitants of the building had disappeared. Trees motionless. This woman in a darkness where everything lived on hold. And where no thought could be hidden.

He went back to the bench, crouched down, and sang softly, as if crooning a lullaby. “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…” His memory prompted him with the words that came next. He sang a little louder and was not surprised when the woman’s lips responded to him. Her eyes were closed, she was smiling softly, allowing the other being awakening within her to sing. Volsky helped her to get up. She walked beside him, still sunk in her melodious lethargy.

S
everal hours of that pale night sufficed for Mila to tell him what she had lived through since their last concert. If she had wept in recounting it, uttered cries of distress, her story would, doubtless, have been less painful to listen to. But she went behind a screen and a moment later Volsky saw a woman who bore little resemblance to the tipsy “blond tramp” of just now. After she had splashed her face with cold water it became more refined, her hair drawn back onto her neck gave her features the look of someone facing a powerful, icy night wind. The trace of an old scar marked the top of her brow. On a wall he noticed several drawings, doubtless made by children, and a sketch: a woman with dark hair, a very thin face, and great, shadowed eyes… The woman who sat down before him now bore a resemblance to this drawing.

They did not switch on the light, contenting themselves with the bluish luminescence filtering through the window, and the red glow of the little stove beneath a kettle (both of them referred to plain boiled water as “tea,” for this was the tea they used to drink during the blockade: and the word became their first sign of recognition).

“The last time we saw one another was in December, you know, at our concert… But after that things became worse than ever…”

She spoke calmly, no sighs, no tears. “Worse than ever,” he repeated mentally. “No. Worse could only be death. And we stayed alive.” He wanted to say this, so that Mila’s voice should relax, but the doomed city he had known was already taking shape in her account and the more she spoke, the more he realized he did not know everything, not this other frontier, beyond life.

Yet there was nothing new in Mila’s recollections: two million human beings waiting to die in a city that was an architectural fairyland. He saw this young woman leaving the hospital, with a bandaged forehead, embarking on a long journey across Leningrad to reach the apartment they had left a week before. One had to imagine her hunger, her attempts to light the fire, and even, perhaps, her emotion at the sight of a scarf of his, hanging from a hook on the door.

There was nothing surprising either in the existence of the children who came to Mila’s during the great frosts in January. First of all, twins aged twelve, a brother and sister, whose mother had just died. Then a much younger child, possibly five, who remained obstinately silent by day but emitted screams of horror in his sleep. Another, with bright red hair and the nickname “Mandarin,” boasted, at the age of eight and a half, of having run away from his orphanage twice. “And now they’ve
evasculated
the orphanage. And they’ve forgotten all about me…” Mila guessed that he had taken advantage of the evacuation to light out yet again. Mandarin’s vitality was disconcerting, as was his constant good humor. He was the one who taught the others to eat sunshine. The ravenous children would sit in a row facing the window embellished with hoarfrost, open their mouths and bite into the light illuminating their pale faces, pretending to chew, to swallow… Among these stray children there was also a boy with transparent skin, his eyelids always a little lowered, for whom it was a great effort to speak. This languid air contrasted oddly with the brisk resonance of his name in Russian, Edward. Mila noticed that, though generally in the background, he became extremely alert at the time when their bread ration was being shared out, eager to obtain a little more than the others… Almost every week another child would come to join the “family.” At the end of January Mila brought two little girls in from the street, the elder was carrying her sister like a mother carrying her baby.

Shortly after this their small tribe moved to other quarters. Mila decided to house the children in that empty workers’ hostel on the outskirts of Leningrad. The center of the city was being bombed far more, the suburbs were left alone. Wood for heating was easy to find in that great deserted building. But, above all, on the road that ran beside that district one could beg for bread from soldiers going to or returning from the front.

As with the lives of everyone in that dying city, whether they survived or not could be a matter of several extra degrees of frost, a fall in the street just before collecting your slice of bread, extra tiredness that could suddenly shatter the body. And above all, the chance of the scrap of food that might or might not be tossed out from an army truck. Yes, one little mishap was enough to threaten the existence of her “family,” which already comprised sixteen children.

It was not just one mishap but a whole sequence of events, taken together, on one particular day, that became fateful. On her way back from the city Mila slipped and twisted her ankle. The next day she was unable to go and beg for bread at the roadside. That night, after a week of thaw, the winter unleashed a blizzard that covered the footpaths linking the hostel to the rest of the district in three feet of snow. Several of her children were no longer getting up and only Mandarin remained lively and merry. He helped her light the stove and called out to the others. “Come on, stir your stumps, you bunch of lazybones! I’m going to show you how to eat fire…” Some of them, roused by his energy, dragged themselves over to the stove and imitated him, opening their mouths to bite into the warmth given off by the flames.

“He’s indestructible, that one,” thought Mila, watching Mandarin’s red head bobbing up, now in the entrance hall, now in the dormitory installed around the stove.

And yet it was him she found one evening stretched out in the corridor, with a fixed stare, his body frozen. He was gasping for breath, then, when carried close to the fire, he managed to whisper: “I’ve got bells ringing in my chest…” The last scraps of bread had been eaten the day before.

She went out and, after an hour of wading through the snow, reached the road. For the first time she did not have the strength to remain upright, collapsed against a lamppost, waited, no longer able to feel her hands in her mittens or her frozen feet in her felt boots. A truck appeared, she rushed out, barred its way, resolved to snatch what food there was from the people it was carrying to the front. The driver jumped down off the running board, advanced through the snow flurry, ready to knock aside this phantom that was obstructing him. “Sixteen kids. Nothing to eat for two days…,” she stammered. The soldier replied in a voice shredded by the wind: “Fifty-two corpses in the truck. We’re eating dead horses. I can give you tobacco, nothing else…”

Next morning she was able to bring back a few slices of bread from the city. She heated the water, prepared to throw the crusts in to make a brew intended for the whole household… While she was getting the bowls ready the bread disappeared. The child who was eating it (it was Edward) did not hide himself, looked at her like an animal that knows it has done wrong. She slapped him, yelled oaths never uttered in front of children, wept. Then went rigid, helpless, staring at this young face disfigured by fear and the instinct to survive. Still chewing, he sniffled, “I was very hungry… My uncle works in the Party administration.” These words disarmed her, so absurd did this reference to the apparatus of power sound coming from a boy of eleven standing at a table where there were still several crumbs of bread left. She knew he was lying. With a highly placed uncle he would not have been there among these lost children. He must have heard someone using the phrase, sensed the weight of authority that lay behind it, and repeated it like a parrot, hoping for privileged treatment. Other children, attracted by the smell of bread, were busy nibbling at the crumbs in the expectation of a meal.

That evening those who could get up arranged themselves around the fire to “eat” some, as Mandarin had taught them. He himself, huddled in a corner, kept giving little coughs, as if he were trying to speak and could not manage it. She sat beside him, adjusted a woolen cap that had slipped off his head. He opened his eyes, at first with a glazed look, then recognized her, tried to smile. “Don’t worry, Mandarin. Tomorrow I’ll go to the city. I’ll bring some bread and maybe even some flour…” She broke off, for he was screwing up his eyes like someone who wants to save another person from telling a white lie. It was an adult’s expression and it was also in a very adult voice that he whispered, “Auntie Mila, I’m going to die tonight. You can give my bread to the children…” The dissonance between this little body and the grave voice gave her a start. She began scolding the boy, shaking him: “What nonsense! Tomorrow I’ll make some proper soup for you…” Seeing that he had closed his eyes to spare her these useless words of encouragement, she fell silent…

Half an hour later she was at her lookout post beside a bend in the road that led to the front.

There was a limpid, dark sky, swept clean by the great north wind. The frozen road crunched beneath her feet like broken glass. She knew that in cold like this a starving person does not live long. The notion came to her of going right to the soldiers’ camp and stealing bread from them. The notion of a madwoman. Or else it was the world that was mad, for there was this child who had just calmly said, “I’m going to die tonight…” She felt ready to do anything to snatch a bit of food from this world. The instinct of a she-wolf that will get killed to save its young. She even thought herself capable of crossing the front line to go and ask the Germans for bread. A vision of a trade-off passed through her mind, herself taking food for the children and then returning to the enemy soldiers to be beaten, violated, killed, happy that her own body, her own life, were utterly unimportant.

After walking for twenty minutes she stopped, having stumbled several times. If she fell she would not be able to get up again and the cold was already making her movements stiff. Without her the children were doomed. She had to go back. The star-studded sky was magnificent, funereal. She paused for a few seconds, her gaze lost in its dark splendor, and in lieu of a prayer, made this vow: bread for the children and no matter what suffering for me.

The headlights of a jeep blinded her just as she was opening the door to the hostel. An army officer called out to her, but before noticing his huge frame and his greatcoat, unbuttoned despite the cold, she was struck, to the point of being made giddy, by the aroma of food emanating from his mouth, as well as a strong smell of alcohol. “Would you have a glass of water for me, darling? My soul’s on fire!” He bent over and the breath of this man who had just eaten well caught her by the throat. She led him into the kitchen, offered him water, spoke about the children. “Oh, that can be fixed. I’ve got sausage and bread in the van. I’m the most important man in the city. I supply Smolny.” He got her to give him another glass of water, snorted contentedly, and began describing the foodstuffs he delivered to the city’s top brass.