The Life of an Unknown Man (7 page)

She starts walking again, stops in front of an open window. A bright fresh May evening, strangely autumnal in feel. “You see, when we were young we didn’t have time to talk to people like him. But now he’s the one who can’t speak…”

Shutov is preparing to tell her why he came, to remind her of their youth… “Guess what this is!” Yana insists, resuming her tour guide’s voice. A huge marble hand placed on an occasional table in the entrance hall to the apartment. “It’s Slava’s hand!” Perceiving Shutov’s puzzled expression, she pulls a surprised face, as if failing to recognize “Slava’s hand” were a flagrant breach of taste. “Yes, Rostropovich’s hand. He’s a friend. It was my idea. Everyone has visiting cards these days and I thought our guests could leave their cards in this hand… People generally put out one of those earthenware things but a hand is much more original…” Shutov reflects that in the days of his youth he never saw anyone in Russia taking out a visiting card. Yes, their youth…

“You know, I didn’t come here for the celebration…,” he says with slightly gruff insistence. “I thought that…” Yana’s cell phone rings. “Yes, I’m on my way. I was in a traffic jam. Well, have you seen the chaos? I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour…”

She shows Shutov the two bedrooms he may choose between and races away. That “owner’s tour” of hers was also, in fact, a way of taking evasive action. Yana kept on talking, laughing, addressing other people, as if she were afraid of what he might have to say about their past. But how, in any case, could he have brought up those distant days that still form a bond between them? “I love you, Nadenka…” Shutov smiles. Yes, he could have quoted Chekhov.

He leaves the apartment five minutes after Yana. The gravitational pull of the city sucks him in, thrusts him toward a life in which he will be himself once again, speaking the language of his childhood, immersed in a human mass to which he belongs by origin. He feels like an old actor who has been performing in an overlong play (“my life in the West,” he thinks), now casting aside his tattered finery and losing himself in the crowd.

Not far from the Admiralty policemen bar his way. He makes a detour and encounters another street closed. Heads toward the Palace Embankment and finds himself thrust back into Millionnaya Street. He tries to argue, then, naively, demands an explanation, and finally walks away, no longer trying to reach the site of the celebrations. The festival is at its height, so close, just a few blocks away, yet inaccessible, as on a tortuous path in a nightmare. “You should have read the papers,” grunts one of the policemen. “They showed all the closed-off districts…”

He keeps moving, guided by increasingly vague indications. The luminous hiss of a firework, a gust of wind, autumnally sharp, coming from the Neva… Or else the two couples, walking along squabbling, who seem to know the route to the festivities. He is about to approach them but they get into a car, drive off…

He is so weary that when he comes to the Summer Garden he mistakes the high grille for yet another barrier. He grips the iron bars, his face straining toward the fragrant darkness of the pathways. The foliage is delicate, as always in this fleeting foretaste of summer. He has to force himself to concentrate so that the words dreamed of for so long can be spoken with fitting gravity: “Beneath these very trees, thirty years ago…”

He hears a groan, moves away from the grille, hesitates over what attitude to adopt. The young woman he sees appears to be drunk. Or rather… She has just trodden on a shard from a bottle and cut herself. The festive streets are strewn with fragments of glass. “You need rubber boots here…,” she moans. Shutov tells her to sit down on the ledge beside the railings, takes hold of the gashed foot, cleans the wound with the towel they gave him on the plane. The girl must be seventeen or eighteen. The age Yana was, he thinks. And he was right: she is drunk, she staggers, he needs to escort her as far as the metro. He goes down with her. The train comes so quickly they do not have time to exchange a single word. Beyond the closing doors he glimpses her sitting down, already absorbed into a life where he does not exist. And yet his hand still retains the ephemeral impression of that delicate injured foot.

He goes back to Yana’s new apartment after midnight. Vlad lets him in, his ear glued to his cell phone. The conversation is in English: the young man is talking to a client in Boston. Without breaking off he leads Shutov to the kitchen, shows him where the coffeemaker is, opens the refrigerator with a gesture of invitation, smiles, goes away.

Shutov eats, amazed by the variety of the food, the quality of the coffee. This is the kind of apartment, the type of food, which in the Soviet era the Russians used to picture when they spoke of the West… And here it is, they have re-created a quintessence of the West that he himself never really experienced in the West at all. A paradox that helps him feel less behind the times.

He goes to look for the bedroom Yana assigned to him, gets lost, smiles. “Why not go to sleep on the doormat, here upon the threshold of this new world?” In the great bathroom the taps gleam like weighty museum pieces. “Scythian gold… ,” he murmurs, continuing on his way.

How should he regard this new life? With delight? With regret for its frenzied materialism? After all, in ten years’ time the young may well feel no feverish excitement when confronted by this intrusive stuff. Young Vlad, here, lounging on a leather sofa in front of the television. He sips a beer while on the screen, in almost the same pose, a young man embraces a blond girl whose shoulder is gradually bared in time with their sighs. A commercial break cuts short their clinch: a head of hair enriched by a particular shampoo flits by; a cat pounces upon the gleaming contents of a can; a tall, dark, handsome man inhales his cup of coffee; a car embeds itself in a sunrise… Shutov remembers the slogan and mentally repeats it: “To be on time, when every second counts!”

The old man’s door is ajar. A bedside lamp, a blanket, the outline of a motionless body. And suddenly the rustle of a page. Should he go in? Speak to him, even without any hope of a reply? Or simply say good night? Shutov hesitates, then resumes his journey: if he starts from Vlad’s office he can remember the way better.

In his bedroom he discovers what had escaped his notice earlier during the guided tour: volumes on a large wooden bookshelf painted silver. Russian and foreign classics in deluxe editions. Leather spines with generously wide bands, gold, paper that gives sensual pleasure to the fingers. Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy… He seizes a volume of Chekhov. The story he is looking for is there. Two lovers, their descent on a toboggan. “I love you, Nadenka…”

I
n the morning Shutov follows Yana, who talks incessantly on her cell phone, while performing a thousand useful acts: retrieving a stumbling child, pointing out the splashes of paint on the marble to the workmen in the bathroom, plugging in a kettle for breakfast, adjusting a skirt that Vlad’s young girlfriend is trying on… Catching Shutov’s eye she smiles, shakes her head by way of saying, “I’ll be with you in a second,” and the whirlwind resumes, the workmen want her opinion on the color of a sealant, Vlad asks for money, a woman laden with a bundle of clothes proclaims that tomorrow the old man’s room will be vacated. None of this prevents her from giving instructions over the telephone: “If he needs a sitting room get number twenty-six ready… He ought to be perfectly happy with a standard room… So what? We’ve got fifteen ministers in our hotels. If they all started demanding suites… Well, let Putin put them up in his Konstantin Palace! All right, give this one a different room but not the others… Let me know what happens!”

Before the next call she finds time to give Shutov the name of the restaurant where they can meet for lunch and “finally have a heart-to-heart talk.” The phrase is hackneyed but it touches him; he embarks on a sentence that is far too long, too nostalgic, ill suited to the frenzied rhythm of the morning. Along the lines of: “Do you remember that pathway through the trees in the Summer Garden?…” Yana blows him a kiss and runs toward the elevator, shouting into her cell: “It’s no good here. I’ll call you from the car.”

The energy of this new life is pleasantly contagious, a euphoriant that Shutov encounters again in the street in even stronger doses. He feels rejuvenated, almost mischievous, leaps up to catch the balloon a child has let go of, favors its mother with a wink. Buys himself an ice cream, gives directions to two young female tourists who are lost. And having reached the Nevsky Prospekt, attests to the miracle: he feels completely at one with the carnival crowd making its way toward the Winter Palace, and it is a physical belonging, a bodily adherence.

It is also a… face transplant! A violent image, but it expresses vividly what he feels. His new physiognomy has a skin that is regenerated by the glances alighting on him, amid a flood of smiles, shouts, embraces. Yes, a man with a skin graft must go through the same mixture of dread and delight on walking out into the street: Will they notice? Turn away as I pass by? Give me pitying looks? No, it seems they perceive nothing. They all smile at this man who is not me. So I have the right to live among them once again.

At first Shutov walks along with the wariness of just such a skin-grafted man. But quite quickly the madness of what is happening all around him rids him of any fear. The music from several bands creates such a din that people communicate by facial expression and gesture. Besides, the only message to be shared is one of permanent amazement. A giant inflatable cow with eight legs floats above the crowd, its enormous udder sprinkles the onlookers, who yell, dodging the jets, opening their umbrellas. A little farther on the human tide is cut in half by a procession of Peter the Great look-alikes! Military frock coats, three-cornered hats, mustaches like an angry cat’s whiskers, canes. Most of them are of a stature at least faintly evocative of the czar’s six foot six, but there are also some little ones and even a woman dressed as the czar. At one crossroads this regiment gets mixed up with a squad of near-naked “Brazilian dancers,” adorned with feathers. The czars’ uniforms brush against long bronzed thighs, graze the hemispheres of plump buttocks. And quickly these give way to courtiers in periwigs, the avenue is awash with crinolines, sunlight dancing off the high powdered coiffures. The whipped cream of their attire is succeeded by a new inflatable monster. A dinosaur? No, a ship. Shutov reads the name on its stern:
Aurora.
“That was the cruiser in the October Revolution,” a mother explains to her son of about twelve… If that historic gunshot, which children in the old days would have come across in primary school, now has to be explained, this really is a new era… The forgetfulness is refreshing: yes, spare them your wars and revolutions!

The loudspeakers cutting through the musical hullabaloo seem to be in agreement with Shutov: “Welcome to the launch of the Great May Revolution. Everyone to Palace Square. The mayor of Saint Petersburg is going to have his head cut off.” Laughter erupts, masks scowl, another Peter the Great, this time on horseback, towers above the crowd.

And down below, almost on the ground, a shrill voice rings out: “Let me through, I’m late! Make way!” A dwarf, an elderly man, dressed as a king’s fool, or rather a czar’s fool. This waddling figure scurries along, pushing the crowd aside with his short arms. One of the “Brazilian dancers” is with him, clearing a passage for him, shaking her feathers and her bracelets. Clearly they are expected at Palace Square and their disarray is both comic and touching. “A buffoon,” thinks Shutov, stepping aside for the little man. “A
shut
…” The half-naked dancer bumps into him, her feathers tickle his cheek, he senses the vigor of this young perfumed body but the woman’s gaze is strangely sad.

“Hey you, oaf! Why aren’t you laughing like everyone else? How dare you? A head with no smile belongs on the block!” Shutov tries to break free from the hands that grip him, then yields to the game. Actors dressed as executioners surround him, he remembers the orders repeated by the loudspeakers: people with sour faces are enemies of the carnival: off with their heads! There is nothing cruel about the execution: a hilarious sentence, the swing of a plastic ax, with the crowd shouting encouragement… One of the executioners asks him, “So, is it a long time since you were in Saint Petersburg?” but does not listen to the reply and rushes off to hunt down other resisters to the general merriment.

Once at Palace Square, Shutov begins to grasp what lies at the heart of the changes. A geyser of energy, held in check for a long time. The frenzied search for a new logic to life after the highly logical madness of dictatorship. He sees the mayor mounting the scaffold, yes, the mayor of Saint Petersburg in person! (Would this be possible in Paris or New York?) The firecrackers explode, the crowd hoots noisily, the mayor smiles, almost flattered. An executioner brandishes… an enormous pair of scissors, points them at the condemned man’s neck, seizes his tie and cuts it off! A wave of delirium ripples across the square at the sight of the trophy displayed. A loudspeaker chokes with delight: “A Gucci tie!” Shutov surprises himself by cheering with the others, slapping strangers’ hands, physically bonded with these thousands of living beings. The little clown seen just now climbs breathlessly onto the throne and a magistrate in ceremonial robes declares him to be the governor of the city.

“A collective exorcism,” he thinks as he goes to his rendezvous with Yana. “Three days of this burlesque May Revolution to undo decades of terror, to wash away the blood of real revolutions. To deafen themselves with the noise of firecrackers so as to forget the sound of bombs. To unleash these merry executioners into the streets so as to blot out the shadowy figures that came knocking at doors in the night not so long ago, dragging men out, still half asleep, throwing them into black cars.”

Behind the Winter Palace a placard announces a “family portrait.” Seated on folding chairs, a Peter the Great, a Lenin, a Stalin, and, beyond an untoward gap, a Gorbachev, complete with birthmark painted on the middle of his bald head. Stalin, pipe in mouth, talks on his cell phone. A Nicholas II and a Brezhnev (the missing links) rejoin the group, laden with packs of beer. Laughter, camera flashes. The barker, a young woman in a miniskirt, moves among the crowd: “Now then, ladies and gentlemen, spare a coin for the losers of history. We accept dollars too…”