Music of a Life

by Andrei Makine

  The garage, some streets away from their apartment building, was squeezed up against the wall of a demolished monastery. At this time of day the place was still deserted, the doors to the other garages closed. He stood up on tiptoe, holding his breath, as if catching a butterfly, and reached out with his hand toward a little cavity beneath the corrugated tin of the roof. His father, being absentminded, often left the duplicate key there. His fingers fumbled feverishly in the depths of the hiding place and suddenly touched metal.

  He put two cans of gasoline, kept in reserve, into the trunk, and before getting in behind the wheel, he looked around. His mind, drained by weariness and fear, came to life: the garage, with a dull lightbulb in the ceiling, the smell of gasoline, these objects his father had touched – the last glimpse of their old life?

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel. Alexei slipped in behind the wheel, his mind a blank once more, his heart in his mouth, his body ready to go through the familiar motions and propel the heavy black car against the half-open door… But the sounds outside resolved themselves into an unthreatening sequence: the clink of a bunch of keys, the creaking of hinges, departure.

  Stopping at a crossroads, he realized that he had only once had occasion to drive outside Moscow: to take Lera to the dacha in Bor.

  In the car he found a bunch of road maps, including one of the region in the Ukraine where his aunt lived. There was a jacket and an old cap lying on the back seat. He put them on and later noticed how much this garb facilitated his passage at militia checkpoints. Thanks, in particular, to the cap, he looked like a chauffeur in a hurry to reach the home of a high-ranking person. And the farther he got from Moscow, the more the appearance of the big black car commanded respect.

  At the end of the second day of his journey, on what was already a country lane, he met an old farm cart being driven by a young peasant who stared open-mouthed at this car appearing in the midst of all these fields. With a strong nasal accent, in a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, he gave him directions. Alexeï was a dozen miles from his destination.

  Before night fell, he drove on farther, then turned off, following a dirt road that plunged into the forest, and stopped when a thick tree trunk barred his way. He ate a whole loaf, bought in a small town he had passed through at noon, felt intoxicated by the food and by the onset of sleep. On all sides the forest seemed endless. He wanted to look at the time, remind himself of the date, as if to have a buoy to cling to amid the ocean of branches and shadows. Lying down on the back seat, he held up his arm to the light filtering through the leaves. It was only half past eight in the evening, May 24.

  "My concert!" he breathed, sitting up suddenly. A beautiful moth was fluttering against the rear window, its wings covered in fine, mysterious calligraphy, leaving traces of pollen on the glass. And it was thus, as if through the thickness of the glass, that he pictured the hall, the lights on the stage, a young man walking toward the piano. For a moment, in a poignant fantasy, he watched the continuation of that life somewhere without him.

  In the morning he left the forest on foot. And looked back several times: the sun, still low, filled the interior of the abandoned car with a golden light. It looked as if it had been left there by a family who had spread out among the trees to gather wild strawberries.

  His aunt listened to him in silence, let him talk for a long time, repeating himself. She sensed that this was how he would get used to his new life. His uncle returned from the town about noon and was equally taciturn. Weeks later, Alexe'i would guess that behind this silent acceptance of his coming, and the danger of his coming, there doubtless lay an unspoken desire to make him understand: Now look, we're plain country folk. We welcome you with open arms. We don't have grudges against our own kin, even though they forgot all about us. But at the time all he needed was to be able to tell them his story, to win approval, to have confirmed to him that, in any event, even if he had stayed in Moscow, he could not have done anything for his parents. He also realized that, in a few swift moves, they were already preparing for his clandestine existence in that house. Their economy with words and actions reminded him that the epidemic of fear his own family had known in 1937 had made its assault on these people much earlier, at the end of the 1920s, from the time when collectivization began in that part of the world. They had lost their two children in the famine that followed it, and had hidden fugitives before.

  It was in one such hiding place that his uncle installed him. They went to a tiny hay barn, and by the half-light coming in between the planks Alexe'i saw it was an empty space, with no window and not the smallest corner where one could hide. Seeing his disconcerted look, his uncle smiled and explained softly, "It's a case with a false bottom." He leaned on a plank, which gave way, and, peering in through the opening, Alexe'i saw a kind of narrow passage between two wooden walls, scarcely more than eighteen inches wide, with a folding bunk, a shelf nailed to the wall, a bucket, a jug, a bowl. "You'll have to get your Moscow nose used to the smell of manure," his uncle added. "I put it all around the shed just in case they come with a dog."

  Two days later his uncle announced to him, a little awkwardly, "I guess this'll go hard with you, but… that car… We've got to drown her. I'll show you the place where we can shove her in."

  * * *

  Alexeï rapidly learned to mold his body and his movements within the confined section between the walls. One day he managed to suspend his secret life in mid-gesture when a voice rang out on the other side of the planks, rebuking his uncle: "He's not far away, your nephew. Folks have seen him. It's in your own interest to help us, before we find him ourselves in your loft." The uncle, very calm, replied in a dull voice, "This nephew of mine, I ain't never seen him in my life. If you find him, I reckon I'll be meeting him for the first time." Alexeï remained frozen, a spoon close to his lips, not even daring to chase a fly away from his forehead.

  In the middle of the night he would leave his hiding place. He would get up, change, stretch his legs. The serenity of the fields, the sky, the stars seen through a heat haze, called on him to have faith, to take joy in life. They were all lying.

  In the end he had studied the tiniest of the cracks between the planks, knew what field of vision each offered. This one, above the shelf, enabled one to observe a narrow part of the road that linked the village to the district capital. That other one, next to the bunk flap, cut across a fence of dry branches.

  One day he saw a man asleep, drunk, at the foot of this fence, lying there as if felled by a rifle shot. The panels of his jacket were spread out in the dust of the road; his snores reached all the way to the barn. This slumped body expressed such a blithe indifference to what anyone might think of him, such a lack of constraint in this temporary death, such a physical oblivion, that Alexeï became aware of a violent jealousy. Or rather, of a temptation: to lay hands on this snoring corpse, search him, rob him of his papers, disguise himself in his clothes, return to life under this stolen name…

  The splinters in the wooden plank pricked his cheek. Alexeï stared at the drunkard as if this were a miraculous vision. The man was nothing like him, at least twice as old as he was, red-haired, with a flat nose. But this notion of stealing an identity, unlikely as it seemed for the moment, took root in his memory.

  It was through one of the cracks between the planks that he saw his uncle's cart driving off one evening: his uncle held the reins, his aunt sat amid the crates of vegetables they were going to sell in the Sunday market at the district capital.

  That night the sound of horses' hooves invaded his sleep. "Back already?" he thought in surprise, still only half awake. The clatter became louder, reminiscent of thunder. His shoulder was pressed against the planks of the wall, he could feel them vibrating. "All these horses!" his dream whispered to him, teeming with herds that made the earth tremble as they galloped. And at once, shaking off the dream's deception, he jumped down from the bunk, leaned against the board of the hidden door, went out into the night, and saw the ho
rizon on fire. Now the successive waves of bombing assaults could be heard more distinctly, settling into a regular rhythm. Very low, skimming over the roofs of the village, came one airplane after another. It was like an aerobatic display. But already the road was filling with people making their escape. Alexe'i hastened to slip back into his hiding place. His field of vision, between two planks, let him snatch a glimpse of a mother stumbling as she dragged two sleepy children behind her, an old woman whipping a cow. Then, more quickly, traveling in the opposite direction, soldiers colliding with the waves of fugitives. And less than an hour later the smoke and the drumming of bullets, chipping the loam off the walls, and then suddenly there was this roaring hulk that grazed the barn in passing, hacking to pieces with its tracks the vegetable patch his aunt had been watering only the day before.

  He remained lying on the ground for a long while. The walls of his hiding place had been pierced with bullets here and there. Gradually the gamut of sounds became simpler, less varied. Still a few cries, the grinding of tank tracks, a burst of gunfire, already distant. And in the end just the hissing of the fire. Alexe'i peered through one of the peepholes drilled by the shooting. Near the fence, at the exact spot where two weeks earlier he had seen a sleeping drunkard, sprawled the body of a soldier, his bloodied face turned directly toward the sunrise, as if sunbathing.

  It took him two days to find his man, his identity donor. His searches in the village devastated by fire had been fruitless. He had come upon several survivors and had had to make himself scarce. On the road he found mainly the bodies of women and children or of men who were too old.

  At the end of his second day of walking, he went down toward a river, and on the bank, at the entrance to a bridge demolished by shelling, saw a complete battlefield: dozens of soldiers to whom death had lent poses that were sometimes extremely banal, like the one of a body with its legs buckled beneath it, sometimes touching, like that of a young infantryman, his hand outstretched in an orator's gesture. Hiding in the undergrowth, Alexeï waited, listening intently, but could hear no moaning. The evening was still light; the faces of the dead, when he finally dared to approach them, were exposed in defenseless simplicity. He noticed that there were no German soldiers; these had presumably been carried away by their own side.

  He looked into eyes, often wide open, noted the color of hair, the build. From time to time his fascination with death led him to forget the purpose of his search, he sank into a robotlike torpor, transforming himself into a hypnotic camera, focused on these truncated lives one after another. Then he took a grip on himself, resumed the search for his double. Hair color, shape of the face, build.

  Very close to the river he found a face similar to his own, but the soldier's hair was dark brown, almost black. He said to himself that he could shave off his blond hair and that in the photo on an identity document this difference in color would hardly be visible. With trembling fingers, he unbuttoned the soldier's tunic pocket, seized the little book embossed with a red star, and hurriedly put it back again. In the photo the soldier did not look like him at all, and his hair framed his face like a charcoal line.

  Pausing close to another, he noted the similarity of their features. But he suddenly observed that the soldier's left ear had been cut to pieces by a bullet. He moved on quickly, realizing at once that such a wound in no way undermined the resemblance, but lacking the courage to go back to that bloodied head.

  He discovered another dead man by chance when, to get rid of the stench that hung over the river, he went into the water up to his knees and began rinsing his face and neck. The soldier's body was half crushed under a beam of the collapsed bridge. All you could see was the blond oval of his head, one arm pressed against his chest. He went closer, leaned forward, surprised by the degree to which this unknown face resembled his own, seized the beam, thrust it aside… And started back: the soldier's eyes came to life, and a rapid torrent of words whispered in plaintive relief poured forth from his lips. In German! Then a long spurt of blood. And once again the fixity of death.

  Taking long strides, in an effort to avoid seeing again the faces he already knew, he left the riverbank. He tried neither to make excuses for this retreat nor to seek comfort by telling himself that perhaps somewhere else… He was drained of himself, contaminated by death, driven out of his own body by ll the dead men he had been dressing in his clothes as he slipped into theirs. He spoke in rhythm with his footsteps, eager to replenish himself with what he had been before… But suddenly stopped. Far away from the others, his head washed by the current of the stream, lay a soldier. The one he had been looking for.

  Alexe'i began to strip him with actions that belonged to someone else, rather brutal and businesslike… Once dressed, he noted that the boots were too tight. He went back toward the bridge and, in the same state of detachment, removed another soldier's boots. The right boot resisted. He sat down, stared helplessly at the great body his efforts had disturbed, saw himself from outside, a young man in the midst of a beautiful summer's evening on the riverbank fringed with sand – and these scores of corpses. From time to time a fish would stir idly among the reeds, beating the water with a resounding slap… He stood up, seized the boot stuck to the leg, began shaking it, tugging at it savagely. He was unaware that, for some time now, he had been weeping, and talking to someone, and even believing he could hear replies.

  Continuing along the road, he grew calmer. In the middle of a night spent in an abandoned farm cart he woke up, struck a match, read the name of the soldier he now was. In the pocket of the tunic he found the photograph of a young woman and a postcard, folded in two, with a view of the Winter Palace.

  * * *

  He had a clear picture of his first encounter with the soldiers among whom he would have to lose himself, get himself accepted, not betray himself. Questions, inspections, he thought. And suspicion.

  No such encounter really took place. At the edge of an unknown town, amid streets noisy with gunfire, he was quite simply drawn into a disorderly stampede of soldiers, fleeing an as yet invisible danger, falling and shooting, almost without taking aim, at a cloud of smoke down at the end of a long avenue.

  He ran along with them, picked up a rifle, imitated their firing and even their panic, although he did not feel it himself at that moment, having had no time to take stock either of their exhaustion or the monstrousness of the force they were attempting to confront. When at nightfall an officer succeeded in mustering some remnants of the routed army, Alexe'i noticed that the soldiers came from the most diverse units, companies that had been wiped out, decimated regiments. So he was like them. The only difference was that sometimes he was more afraid of letting slip his real name than of finding himself under fire. As a result of this fear, and the extreme care with which he copied the actions of the others during these first few weeks, he did not feel as if he was engaged in combat. And when he was finally able to relax the constantly taut string within him, he found himself in the skin of a veteran soldier, taciturn and respected for his nerve, a man among thousands like him, indistinguishable in the column as it trudged along a muddy road, headed toward the heart of the war.

  During the first two years at the front, Alexeï received four or five letters addressed to the man whose name he bore. He did not reply, and reflected that his lie was certainly giving several people the strength to hope, the energy to survive.

  Moreover, he had long ago learned that in war truth and falsehood, magnanimity and callousness, intelligence and naivete, could not be so clearly told apart as in the life before. The memory of the corpses on the bank of a river often came back to him. But now the horror of those minutes revealed its obverse side: if the young man from Moscow he then was had not spent that time among the dead, he would doubtless have been shattered, from the very first battles, by the sight of eviscerated bodies. The boot he had wrenched off that corpse had been like a cruel but necessary vaccination for him. Sometimes, in a judgment he did not admit to himself, it e
ven seemed to him that, compared with the removal of that dead man's boot, all the carnage he now witnessed was easy to endure.

  * * *

  One day, when he was first wounded, he discovered another paradox. Having come among these soldiers to escape death, he was exposing himself to a much more certain death here than in the reeducation colony where they would have sent him after his parents' arrest. He would have been safer behind the barbed wire of a camp than in possession of this lethal liberty.

  Nor could he ever have believed that during one short week, at the time of his convalescence and with one arm still in a sling, in a hospital that echoed with the groans of the wounded, it was possible to love, to become attached to a woman, with the feeling of having always known these eyes, this rather gruff voice, this body. And above all, if in the days of his former life in Moscow a friend had spoken to him of such a love, Alexeï would have laughed in his face, perceiving nothing more in such a relationship than a few hasty couplings and dull silences between a nurse and a convalescent soldier, who had only their bodies to offer each other. He would have scoffed at all the ridiculous details, the trappings of a novel of rustic life: the untidy bouquet picked along a roadside with his one good hand, a pair of worn gilt earrings, the woman's fingers stained brown with tincture of iodine.

  All these things happened during that week of convalescence. There was the hospital, which, while an offensive was being prepared, was living through several days of respite in the expectation of fresh train-loads of wounded. The heavy smell of blood and bruised flesh. This woman, fifteen years older than he, who seemed to be once more noticing that seasons existed: that the warm breath of the earth and the foam of lilac were called spring; and that a man, this rather awkward soldier, with whom she had started talking one day, could become very close to her, that they were becoming very close, in spite of herself, in spite of him, in spite of everything. And when he surprised her one evening, as she appeared on the path that led from the hospital to the izba where she lodged, he with his arm in a sling and holding that bunch of flowers, she felt her voice thawing out: "It's the first time anyone has ever…" He did not let her finish, hastened to crack a joke, to make her laugh. Then fell silent and, right up to his departure a week later, sensed that but for his arm, which was still painful, he could have sated himself utterly on this woman's body, draining the cup of everything she gave him.