The Life of an Unknown Man (19 page)

Volsky stared at the woman who was smiling with half-closed eyes through the slow swirl of the petals. A strange being: a woman whom this world had so many times tried to destroy, a body that, only recently, had been worn away by hunger, then a face that could no longer mimic the bone structure of a skull, a woman violated. And this had transformed her little by little into human detritus. “These eyes of hers have been filled with death, with ice, with ugliness, and now they can see this violet sky and, amid the fistfuls of petals, a star, very close, which, in its turn, sees us…”

The perception he had was like a shaft of light. “No,” he thought. “There’s no need to explain anything, but simply to recognize in the other this astonishing being who goes infinitely beyond what she has lived through, and is living now, what people see in her and what the world makes of her. Recognize and love this invisible element in a woman at this very moment, beneath the petals’ slow descent, this bruised body whose tenderness is still intact, these eyes whose brightness makes me alive.”

During those May days the war ended for them. One year after the end of the war.

A long time later, returning in thought to that year lived on the banks of the Lukhta, Volsky would be struck by the length of time taken by what, in fact, was only the first stage of settling in. Each of the seasons would seem like a whole lifetime. An autumn lifetime, the embroidery of the hoarfrost on the gold of the dead leaves. A winter lifetime, that kerosene lamp at their window, a stray gleam in a snowstorm. A spring lifetime, those nights when the waters came right up to the old wooden front steps… And the summer, too, their house afloat on the bluish swell of the grasses and the flowers. He would remember that very slow, very intimate eternity, a single day of which could smooth away all the wounds of his broken life.

T
he same thought struck them both and they exchanged amused glances: this white foal, yes, with the slightly clumsy grace of infancy, the freedom of a creature still ignorant of life’s barriers… It ran along the shore, went into the water, backed away with an abrupt caper, pranced back up the slope.

Volsky was busy repairing the roof; Mila, on a ladder, was passing him tar-coated wooden battens. From time to time they broke off, happy to see so much simultaneous activity from their lofty perch. The frisking of the foal, children bathing in the river, and a little farther on, beyond the willow plantations, women gathering the hay into haycocks and a very small girl amusing herself by climbing onto the precarious piles and balancing upright on them like an acrobat.

Suddenly she fell and at the same moment an explosion rang out. Beyond the trees a curtain of spurts of earth and smoke arose. The foal galloped on a few more yards before collapsing, its right flank torn away. A mine, which the sappers had failed to remove the previous fall…

Volsky and Mila grasped what had happened: a rapid sequence of events: the foal galloping, the little girl falling, thrown off balance by the roar of the explosion, the frozen postures of the peasant women, and finally that confusion of white and red thrashing about briefly in the dust.

The lives of other people, which they had believed they could keep at a distance, were unfolding, mingling the traces of war with the routine of peacetime, the tears of the little girl as she walked toward the dead foal with her head averted. And the children appearing from all sides, hiding their curiosity behind frightened faces. And a little later the kolkhoznik who came with a wheelbarrow, dismembered the carcass with a few blows of an ax, loaded up the meat, and buried the rest in the hole left by the explosion.

They forced themselves not to see this death as a portent. For a while their own world, this fragile timelessness apart from the world, could survive. And then one day at the end of August this strange observer made his appearance. They were high on the ridge above the shore in the middle of putting up a fence around the place where the soldiers were buried. Mila was writing a name they had managed to identify on one of the grave markers…

She was the first to notice the strange lookout. On the opposite bank, not far from their house, stood a black car, an army officer had a huge pair of binoculars focused on the graveyard where they were working. His bizarrely static posture, his cape, excessively long in view of the fine drizzle that veiled the horizon, everything about this dumb show seemed disproportionate and menacing. It was rather like picturing a general surveying a battlefield. Another officer appeared and the statue with the binoculars stirred, shook its head, and both walked toward the house. The daylight was fading but from the top of the ridge the two men could clearly be seen going up to the windows, peering inside…

In the time it took Volsky and Mila to go down to their boat and cross the Lukhta, the officers had gone. The only traces were a cigarette stub with a fine gold band and the imprint of a boot on the flower bed in front of the house. “They must have been surveyors on reconnaissance,” said Volsky, pretending to be unconcerned. “They’ve probably got a map to draw up.”

For him the army officers’ visit was a secret relief. As if, not having the courage to wake up from his dream and to arouse Mila, he had been helped by their appearance. The world was there, on the threshold of their love.

In referring to them as “army officers” he had been lying, their uniform was unmistakable. And it was Mila who remarked on it. “It’s odd, those two fellows from State Security. It reminds me of what happened the other day at school. Yes, there was an inspector… The head teacher told me in advance she’d be coming, so there was nothing unexpected about it. Except that she stood there, as still as a stone. Like that man spying on us with his binoculars. Then she went away without saying a word. Apparently the songs I teach the children are not ideologically correct…”

They were sitting on the front steps of their izba. Now that the waters had subsided, the house seemed to be perched even higher above the fields and more solitary. Volsky listened, hesitated before replying: he must either attempt a reassuring tone and therefore lie, or else… He bowed his head and suddenly noticed another cigarette stub ringed with a band of gold among the tufts of grass. Like a gimlet eye staring at them.

“You know, Mila, I haven’t mentioned this to you, but the mail I deliver…” He broke off, conscious that his voice sounded guilty, although there was no fault to confess. “Yes, I notice more and more letters coming from prisons. I think it’s started again, the purges…”

They said very little to one another, using the oblique turns of phrase that everyone employed at the time. One did not say “so and so has been arrested” but “he’s had problems.” Indeed, Mila could not have said “those fellows from State Security”; that form of words would come later in Volsky’s reminiscences, when it became possible to talk about it. At the time, she would simply have spoken of “the Big House,” which was how people referred to the secret police headquarters in Leningrad.

In a few more or less coded words, they said it all to one another: the waves of arrests, unleashed to an extent worse than ever before, the fear that, after a brief relaxation at the end of the war, was turning faces to stone again, the suspicion that marked every word. The victory over the Nazis had freed the hands of the local persecutors, now eager to make the people pay for their own cowardice.

Mentioning two or three details about each of the individuals who had disappeared, Volsky and Mila recalled those who had “had problems”: people living in the neighboring small town, old friends in Leningrad. Already a long litany of ghosts. They knew people chose different tactics for survival. Some pretended to notice nothing, talked, went to work, smiled at their families, sleepwalking like torpid automatons. Others transformed their lives into the waiting of a condemned man, rehearsing in soliloquy the arguments they believed would prove their innocence, slept fully dressed, knowing that arrests took place at night. Sometimes they went mad. Yet others attempted to defuse the threat by mocking it.

“My father did that.” Volsky realized he was talking about this for the first time. “In the days of collectivization in our village, if they found a bag of corn hidden in a peasant’s house the fellow was shot. Soon it was enough that you hadn’t declared a tool or a dozen eggs. I was still a child but I remember the day very well. It was winter, you know, freezing cold. My father went out without his coat, barefoot in the snow, and carried the only pair of boots he had left to the Expropriation Committee. He managed to adopt a very serious, almost fervent expression: ‘I’m giving everything I have for the building of socialism!’ The Party bosses were terribly embarrassed by fervor like this. In the end they decided he wasn’t all there. They gave him back his boots and left us alone… Sometimes being mad could save you.”

“My father was saved by dying.”

Mila murmured this, echoing Volsky’s words and at once, seeing his puzzled look, hastened to explain.

“He was an officer in Mongolia in 1939. He took part in the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol. One day, when he was talking to a man he thought was his best friend, he ventured on a piece of black humor: ‘If you ask me, there are more army officers in the camps than we have here in our ranks.’ Some throwaway remark like that. The commanding officer summoned him and told him to prepare himself for the worst. The next day during the assault on the Japanese he was the first to be shot down. The truth is he got himself killed. One of his comrades told us about his death. The people who were supposed to arrest him came back empty-handed: instead of apprehending an enemy of the people, they were confronted with an officer fallen on the field of battle, almost a hero. After that they left my mother and me alone as well.”

It had all been said. The two stories, they knew, summed up the country in which they lived. Its fears, its wars, the defenseless nakedness of private existence, the impossibility of sharing one’s distress. The extreme difficulty of having faith in human goodness and at the same time the awareness that only this faith could still save. A country where millions of people woke in the night, listening to the hiss of tires on the asphalt: Is that car going past? Or is it stopping outside?

“You’ve never talked to me about your father…,” said Volsky, as if in reproachful tones.

“We never had time… Besides, if we’d started thinking about all that, we’d not have had the will to go on living.”

Volsky’s first impulse was to object, to invoke the need to bring the truth out into the open. But he thought better of it, sensing in Mila’s words a truth at once more humble and almost arrogant in its frankness. She smiled. “We wouldn’t even have been able to act at the theater. Remember: ‘To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…’ It was partly those songs that helped us to survive. And so many people with us!”

Thirty years later Volsky would reflect that this, too, had been his country: a couple who had been through hell, whose lives were now caught in the lens of a pair of binoculars, as if in a marksman’s sights, yes, this pair of lovers seated on the front steps of an izba, in the pale light of an August evening, gazing at a ridge punctuated with graves above a riverbank, softly singing light melodies from an ancient, old-fashioned operetta.

T
hey often talked now about those performances given during the blockade, the audience shivering in the darkness, Porthos singing, his face bathed in tears, actors collapsing onstage, exhausted by cold and hunger. Those wartime days became their strength, their courage, and when they pictured that last concert under gunfire, all fears seemed to them ludicrous: those two agents from Security come to spy on them? A single minute of that concert was far more daunting than any other threat.

Thinking about the children they were going to house also helped them not to live in the humiliation of fear. Constructing a bed, cutting a shirt out of an old sheet, the routine nature of such actions linked them to a future in which young lives would take possession of these objects, use them, bring them to life. And when they recalled from what depths of unhappiness these children would be coming to them, those two agents with their binoculars just seemed like ham actors.

One evening they set up a big screen that was to divide the dormitory in two. Handling the slippery fabrics reminded them of the curtain going up and the idea arose, like a spark, in their exchanged glances: they should teach the children to act in a play, yes, to make theater—and sing in an operetta, why not?

To the very end they resisted fear. And when, on one occasion, Volsky happened upon a cigarette stub with a gilded ring among the graves in the cemetery, he trampled this menacing token with scorn and gave a laugh: “The Germans used to smoke elegant cigs like that, too.”

So they did not live through the sleepless nights that so many people underwent, on the alert for the hiss of tires outside the entrance to their building. The danger they braved erupted in broad daylight, in a huge uproar of curses, gesticulating hands, absurdly angry faces. A far cry from the silent, sly terror slowly seeping into everyone’s spirits.

On this September day Mila went into Leningrad to hand in a notebook at the Blockade Museum: it had been found on a sandy slope by the shore, notes in German. When she made her way into the courtyard of the building she thought at first it must be a fire, then an anarchic demolition site, then a brawl taking place amid a conflagration. It was all these things at once. A bonfire was blazing in front of the entrance to the warehouse that served as the exhibition hall. Military personnel (those “army officers” from State Security) were actively thrusting back the employees of the museum who seemed to be trying to leap into the flames. There was little shouting and this absence of words made the scene all the more distressing. But these women were not trying to immolate themselves, their hands were reaching into the fire to extract objects in order to save them. And the agents of State Security were hurling humble items into the blaze that they had just snatched from the exhibition hall: bundles of letters, clothes, photographs… The struggle was fierce. Elderly women were battling against a wall of fists and rifle butts, falling, picking themselves up, rushing toward the fire.