The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  From the old man’s bedroom comes a dull coughing, then the rustle of a page. Shutov glances in through the half-open door, remembers about the chamber pot, is it time already? Go and say good night to him? Spend a moment beside him? This human presence, at once mute and filled with grave sense, makes him ill at ease.

  “It’s because we’re from the same era…” An unattractive notion, Shutov tries to qualify it. No, it’s more than that, this old man is a whole era on his own. According to Yana’s account, the life whose shadow lies huddled beneath the green blanket can easily be imagined. In his youth this man sang in one of the choirs that often went to the front to support the soldiers. Trenches on a plain swept by snow, a stage put together from ammunition boxes, singers, concealing their shivering, who would laugh, perform a medley of classics. After that… What could have become of him? The same as everyone else: with Leningrad under siege, able-bodied men found themselves out on those icy plains. Then the years of a slow advance on Berlin, which, if Yana is to be believed, was where he ended his war. And then what? Rebuilding the country, marriage, children, work, routine, old age… A banal life. But also an extraordinary one. This same man, as a youth, in a city that Hitler planned to turn into a vast desert. Two and a half years of siege, more than a million victims, which is to say a small township wiped out every day. Bitterly harsh winters, death lying in wait in the dark labyrinths of the streets, an ice megalopolis without bread, without heat, without transport. Apartments populated by corpses. Incessant bombing. And theaters continuing to put on performances, people going to them after working fourteen hours in arms factories… In the old days at school they used to learn the history of that city bled white, which stood its ground.

  The old man coughs in his bedroom, then the scrape of a cup can be heard as he sets it down on his bedside table. What is one to think of his life? Shutov fails to silence conflicting voices within himself. A heroic life? Yes, but also one quite stupidly sacrificed. Fine, doubtless, in its self-denial. And absurd because the country for which he fought no longer exists. Tomorrow this old man will find himself in some humdrum provincial poorhouse in the company of forsaken invalids, surrounded by nurses who steal everything there is in the home to be stolen. What a glorious end!

  Another rustle of a page. Shutov feels a prickle of anger. In his youth he saw too much of this fatalistic Russian resignation. Yes, tomorrow the old man will be thrown out, but this does not stop him clinging to his cup of cold tea, his book with its yellowed pages. They promised him paradise on earth, they ruined the best years of his life, they made him live in this dump as crowded as a commuter train. He did not flinch. He simply lost the use of his legs and his tongue. So as not to be tempted to protest, no doubt. They pay him a monthly pension equal to the tip Yana’s friends leave the waiter in a nightclub. He does not even grumble. He reads. Makes no demands, uncomplaining, uncritical of the new life that will spring up out of his remains. Yes, this life Shutov can see on television: gold-painted performers prancing about in front of the forty-five heads of state when they go off to dine in the Throne Room… But is he aware of this life? Perhaps, if he could see it, might he not emit one of those protracted cries mute people are capable of, a mixture of indignation and pain? Yes, he must see it!

  Shutov acts without leaving himself time to think. Unplugs the television, pushes it toward the old man’s bedroom, nudges open the door with his shoulder, places the set at the foot of the bed, plugs it in again. And settles down a little way off, so as to observe the reactions of this strange viewer.

  The man does not seem to be particularly surprised. He removes his glasses and focuses a severely tranquil gaze on Shutov, which mellows into indifference. His big hand covers the book he has just closed. His eyes stare at the screen without hostility but also without curiosity.

  Shutov begins channel hopping. The old man’s face appears just as neutral as at the start. Nicholas II’s English great-nephew arrives in Saint Petersburg, the Greek priests process with their relics, two lesbian rock singers complain of the English being too prudish, Berlusconi sings his duet with Pavarotti, a Russian oligarch buys himself six chalets in the Alps… No particular expression appears on that old face, with its sunken eye sockets, its massive straight nose. “He must be deaf…,” Shutov says to himself, but the eyes staring at the screen are those of someone who hears and understands.

  The surrealist folly of the spectacle ought to bring grimaces to this old mask focused on the television. First comes a beautiful greyhound, with all the curvature of its pedigree, which its master, to amuse his guests, regales with a dish of caviar. No, the features of the mask are impassive. To keep the clouds away during the celebrations the town hall spent a million dollars… The mask remains rigid. Chancellor Schröder, arm in arm with Putin, inaugurates the Amber Room at the Peterhof Palace, in the township once razed to the ground by the Nazis. Shutov peers to see if the mask will show any bitterness, any trace of rancor. Nothing. “Women,” says Madame Putin, “should go to a personal dressmaker for their wardrobe.” An ancient streetcar that carried the dead during the blockade of Leningrad… The old man’s gaze sharpens, as if he can see beyond what is visible to today’s viewers.

  Shots of the carnival. An erotic film. CNN: Bush landing by helicopter. A program devoted to the tercentenary, a survivor of the blockade recalls the daily ration: a hundred and twenty-five grams of bread. An Orthodox priest relates how, in the darkest days of the siege, a procession passed around the city three times, carrying the icon of Our Lady of Kazan, and Leningrad did not fall…

  The mask acquires a faint line of severity. Shutov seems to be entering into communication with the silent man.

  A football match. The cruise ship Silver Whisper, with its nine presidential suites. Two female rock singers perched on top of one another. At the Mariinsky Theatre the soprano Renée Fleming is singing Tatyana in Eugene Onegin…

  The mask wavers and at once closes up again, retreats into its solitude. The show goes on. The ladies in crinolines pass through the galleries at the Hermitage. Fireworks at the Peterhof. Putin shakes Paul McCartney’s hand after a performance in Moscow on Red Square. “Your songs, Paul, have always been a breath of freedom for us…”

  Absurdity has reached its limits, thinks Shutov. He again hits upon the program about the lives of the new rich and no longer takes the trouble to switch channels. The two presenters are visiting a model house on an estate under construction close to Saint Petersburg. “High security,” “luxury homes,” “top-quality materials”… Language evocative of this grotesque social climbing, higher, ever higher, toward the best place in the sun.

  Shutov begins to doze off. This paradise from which simple mortals are excluded is less outrageous than dogs lapping up caviar. Villas crammed with electronics, but, after all, the rich have to live somewhere. Each dwelling will have a name, there will be an “Excelsior,” a “Capitol”… The two presenters emerge from “Buckingham” and set about describing the beauties of gardens in the English style… “And in the greenhouses, you’ll be harvesting pineapples and guavas…”

  “That’s exactly the place where we were fighting to the death. For the motherland, as we used to say in those days…”

  Shutov gives a start, the remark is too unusual to have come from the mouth of one of the presenters. Besides, they are still singing the praises of the gardens. He looks at the old man. The same mask, the same calm eyes. Suddenly his lips move: “Yes, there. That river, the Lukhta. They had to cross it under heavy fire…”

  Shutov is speechless, turning over in his mind what he has just heard: “We were fighting… for the motherland.” The words came out with no rhetorical flourish, there was even an ironic hesitation, acknowledging the naïveté of the time-honored expression. But that last remark, which he saw forming on the old man’s lips, was neutral, the name of a river, a topographical fact. Shutov clears his throat and speaks as if he were the one recovering the power of speech: “Forgive me… I
… I thought… Well, in fact, they told me you couldn’t…” The old man turns his head, changes his position to look at Shutov. “Yes, they told me that you were… That you had lost… er… the power of speech.”

  The old man smiles.

  “You can see that’s not so.”

  “But, then, why… have you never spoken to anyone?”

  “Spoken about what?”

  “I don’t know… Life… Yes, this new life.”

  And this, too!

  On the screen a kennel can be seen adjoining the model house, the presenter is explaining about the air-conditioning system, as a large white greyhound rubs against his leg.

  “Well, what’s to be said about it? Everything’s clear these days.”

  He falls silent and Shutov is gripped by an irrational fear: what if the old man should relapse into terminal mutism! The program shows workmen felling a tree: the shrill whine of the trunk being sawn, the crash of the branches.

  “Yes. That’s where we were fighting. And with no help from any icons either… Let me introduce myself. The name’s Volsky, Georgy Lvovich.”

  III

  On June 21, 1941, at the Nord Café, which was very popular with the people of Leningrad, Volsky lived through the last hours of his old life, the last day of peace, without knowing it. A moment of bliss, epitomized by the taste of a cup of hot chocolate.

  A young woman with dark-brown hair had joined this group of friends who, like him, were students at the Conservatory. She was eating a pastry, a trace of cream remained on her lips, a mustache that made everyone laugh… Volsky spoke to her, their conversation became detached from the hubbub in the room. He lived in the same district as she and it pleased him greatly to remark, “It’s a small world and yet we’ve never met before…” Simple words that helped him to grasp with fresh intensity what he had become. From being a penniless provincial he had been transformed into a young singer, speaking on equal terms to a young woman of good family from Leningrad. They agreed to meet again, a hint of a reunion that promised a glorious day very soon.

  This was the moment when the taste of hot chocolate became associated with the future life he dreamed of. A peasant’s son, he had managed, not without some gritting of teeth, to win recognition for his talent, to gain acceptance, armed only with his voice. His future was like the overture to an opera, he often pictured himself at the Kirov Theater, in Rigoletto or Boris Godunov.

  From his childhood he retained the memory of those hands, his father’s and mother’s, lined palms, encrusted with earth. His arrival in Leningrad had wrenched him away from the gravitational pull of his origins, liberating his footsteps from the mud of country roads, allowing him to run, to escape… He would live in the weightlessness of song, he thought. Just as others lived from the harsh weight of physical labor. He was sufficiently pleased with himself to justify this dispensation and to declare himself the winner. A conqueror who would collude with the proudest city in Russia, and win acclaim from beautiful women with eyes that shone in the darkness of boxes at the theater.

  Such thoughts were mingled that evening with the clear light of a late sunset, the laughter of his friends in the café’s great hall, and the taste of hot chocolate drunk in little sips.

  The next day the loudspeaker attached to a post opposite the Nord Café was to announce the start of the war. As did thousands of other loudspeakers from the Black Sea to the Pacific.

  In the very same street in September he saw an apartment building whose front had just been ripped out by bombing. The insides of the dwellings, almost undamaged, astonished him more than the totally demolished buildings, already numerous in the besieged city. In an armchair at the far end of a room on the second floor Volsky could make out a body, a motionless face… He hastened to think back to that evening of June 21, the taste of hot chocolate.

  The same memory returned one morning in October: a woman slipped over on the frozen bank of the Neva and he rushed to her aid, caught the bucket she was trying to fill. In the apartments the water had been cut off for weeks but this was when he became aware of the strangeness of the situation. A modern metropolis in which people drew water from the river and drank the murky liquid. He thought again about that cup of hot chocolate.

  He recalled it, too, that night when, in the entrance hall to his apartment building, he heard a child’s voice, a whine similar to the groaning of a drunkard. He climbed the staircase, feeling his way, accustomed to living without electricity, and the moaning came closer, now forming into words, then stopped all at once. He struck a match (a priceless treasure) and saw, at his feet, an old man’s head upon the slender body of a little boy. The flame went out, he gave a call at the doorway to an apartment. A rustling could be heard, no voice. “Wait here,” he said to the child, invisible in the darkness. “I’ll come back. I’ll give you something to eat.” He brought what people fed on in the besieged city: a slab of bread made partly from straw. A burning block of wood from the floor served as a torch to light his path. The child was no longer there. The door to one of the apartments remained open. Volsky peered in and gave a shout, but did not have the courage to venture into the cold caverns of the rooms…

  Back at his own place, he devoured the bread as if someone had tried to snatch it from him. Then remained for a long while in the darkness, picturing the child in a labyrinth of rooms where it had become possible to come across a corpse. Now he grasped that it was not hunger driving him to return to the night of June 21 and his cup of hot chocolate. It was distress, rather, at seeing how the city’s death throes were becoming routine. And how he was quickly slipping into a way of life where one went to sleep at night without worrying about a starving child dying in a neighboring apartment…

  He blew furiously on the embers at the bottom of a small metal basin transformed into a stove, and threw in several strips of wood levered up from the floor. Closed his eyes. The wave of warmth had the feel of a summer’s evening… The Nord Café, the laughter of his friends, gathered there after a rehearsal. One of them amuses himself by giving voice to everything they say, in song, as in an operatic aria. A girl acquires a mustache by biting into a pastry, blushes, and Volsky, noticing that she is beautiful, blushes as well. Amid the laughter he learns her name: Mila.

  He awoke hearing the high-pitched note of a stringed instrument. The sound came from the corridor of the communal apartment, from the room occupied by an old couple. These neighbors no longer got out of bed and when they needed help, one of them would scrape the strings of an old violin… He picked up the can of water that was heating on the stove, the sounds guiding him in the darkness. He told himself he must find the child and take him to the old people’s room, closer to this source of sound that could be lifesaving.

  The next day as he consulted the thermometer behind its glass window (minus forty-eight), he became aware of an echo of past happiness within himself: a skating rink, fleeting silhouettes, a loudspeaker pouring forth waltzes and tangos… At present the falling of this fine red line meant only one thing: an increase in the stiffening of people’s bodies.

  That morning was a milestone in the history of the besieged city. The bread ration was reduced to a hundred and twenty-five grams per person. A week before, the warehouses containing reserves of food had been bombed, and in the fire the supplies that could have fed the population of two million for a month had gone up in flames. The word “blockade” rang out now like a death sentence: the garrote of encirclement, no link with the outside world, no hope of survival. A slice of bread per day, exhaustion, immobility, nothingness. Those who could pick up Western radio stations learned of Hitler’s decision: the city, soon to be occupied, would not be emptied of its inhabitants; they would remain there, cut off from the world, without food, without water, without medical care, and, at the end of the winter, the army of the Reich would undertake “operations of sanitary maintenance,” that is to say, the destruction of two million corpses. The people of Leningrad said to themselves that this proj
ect was already under way.

  Volsky ate his bread ration between bombing raids. With three other young men he had just been making his way across the roofs of several buildings where they picked up incendiary bombs, rendering them harmless with the aid of enormous steel tongs. Silence returned, he sat down behind a skylight to shelter from the wind, took out his bread, and chewed it for a long time to outwit his hunger. His gaze took in the lines of the main avenues, the spire of the Cathedral of Peter and Paul and that of the Admiralty. On the promontory of Vasilievsky Island, opposite the Winter Palace, the antiaircraft guns pointed their long barrels into the sky. Some of the monuments were hidden beneath a casing of planks as protection against shells. The Neva extended out into a broad snow-covered plain. The day was clear, blue, more beautiful than ever, thanks to the absence of traffic and crowds. A magnificent shroud, thought Volsky. Yes, a vast graveyard filled with buildings where, day after day, thousands of hearts ceased beating. No other life was possible.

  The future life he had dreamed of flitted past in his mind, like a speeded-up theatrical performance: sparkling lights, operatic arias hummed to the rhythm of vaudeville chorus songs, frenzied applause… It still seemed incredibly close. And already hopeless, ludicrous.

  He went back to his comrades, who were walking along the roof. Sparing movements, sluggish gestures. One might have thought that this slowness was due to fear of slipping. No, it was how people fed on a hundred and twenty-five grams of bread a day moved. Nevertheless they kept going, through the cold, through days that all presaged the end. Through the only life that remained to them, one far too much like death… One after another, they came down into the attics, then, via an iron ladder, onto the top floor of the building. On the threshold of an apartment stood a woman with a child in her arms. She greeted them with a faint smile… Volsky was astonished by the starkness of the choices imposed by war: if they had not succeeded in putting out the fire this mother and her child would not have survived… Their survival might not be of long duration, with the threat of more bombs, hunger, the plummeting of the red line in the thermometer. But this reprieve was worth the trouble of risking his life. Yes, for this woman’s wan smile, for her child’s calm breathing, one must forget that young man drinking his hot chocolate on a June evening and feeling proudly triumphant.