The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  Since the start of the blockade he had never considered that saving a life at the cost of his own might become his destiny.

  One November morning this close proximity of life to death permeated his very breathing. During the previous two days he had not had the strength to leave the apartment. At this first attempt to go and fetch his hundred and twenty-five grams of bread he had collapsed on the stairs, spent a moment before recovering consciousness, and had then taken an hour to climb back up to his room, where, thanks to the fire, his body resisted merging into the lifelessness that prevailed in the streets.

  He began exploring the very last zone that precedes extinction. He had always pictured hunger as a relentless, gut-wrenching torment. And so it was, for as long as one had the strength to feel it. Then the torture came to an end for want of a victim, the latter having become a shadow for whom a mouthful of water already represented a painful effort of digestion. The cold, too, caused suffering to those who still clung to life but deadened the pain of those who were utterly exhausted and waiting for the end. Yet this increasing weakness seemed to be external to the body. It was the world that was changing, making objects too heavy (the can in which the water was heating now weighed a ton), lengthening distances (three days ago he had managed to reach the bakery: a veritable polar expedition).

  Despite the physical collapse, his mind remained clear. He contemplated the possibility of no longer being alive the following day, the strangeness of confronting this notion so calmly, and even the vanity this vision of his own death would have represented, had he not really been dying.

  His brain was, indeed, functioning faultlessly. And yet it was something other than thought that one evening commanded him to extricate himself from his torpid state and embark on a journey through the icy darkness that filled the apartment. At the far end of the shadows the violin strings were trembling at the touch of a hand.

  The old couple were stretched out in their bed, which had the look of a tent where the sides, blankets, and jumbled-up clothes had all collapsed on top of them. No fire in the little stove, just the light of a candle that had burned low.

  “My husband is dead… You passed out…,” the old woman murmured, and it took Volsky a moment to realize that the two remarks had not been made at the same time. He had had a brief blackout, the woman had got up to lay a scrap of moistened cloth on his face and, as he came to, he heard her voice (“You passed out…”). He tried to explain that it was not her telling him about the death that had thrown him to the ground, as in a bad stage play. She assured him it had not occurred to her, helped him to sit down in the armchair. They no longer had the strength to speak, their silence became a vigil in which their mutual understanding needed no words.

  They understood that death had ceased to surprise, it occurred too frequently in this city in extremis. Many were the apartments inhabited by corpses, dead bodies were deposited in the public streets, only a slender frontier separating them from the living. Volsky remembered a passerby stopping at the entrance to Palace Bridge one day, beside a man stretched out in the snow, who suddenly collapsed himself, joining the man on the far side of that frontier. “I almost did that just now,” he thought, glancing at the old man’s body.

  Death had always been cordoned off in his mind by a complex game of hide-and-seek with himself, in which he veered between perfumed promises, cynicism, and fear. He had come across the same contrivances in books: a maze of prevarications for keeping quiet about death, if not dressing it up in lies…

  The woman reached out her hand, adjusted the candle. The flame made her emaciated hand transparent, the pattern of the blood vessels was clear. Fingers of ice. The shadow of her gesture passed over the old man’s face like a caress and seemed to animate it with a trace of life. She must have noticed this, smiled as she closed her husband’s eyes and squeezed his hand.

  All that Volsky had known about death now seemed false. This moment he shared with these two ancient beings was vibrant with life. A life clarified in the ultimate simplicity of truth. These old hands joined, this grieving smile on the woman’s face, the calm of her gaze.

  Late in the night she put a little canvas bag on the bedside table and, more rapidly than his eyes, Volsky’s sense of smell detected dry bread. “We’re going to be able to eat,” the woman whispered, as if she were afraid of disturbing her husband’s sleep, and she added, “Thanks to him…” Words whose meaning Volsky could not follow. The dry bread swelled deliciously in the mouth. And with it this taste his tongue had difficulty in recognizing, a lump of sugar that dissolved slowly, becoming not a taste but a vision, the shifting mosaic of a forgotten world. “We shouldn’t eat too much,” they both remarked automatically. The well-known refrain of all starving people facing the danger of sudden abundance. Too much… Volsky looked at the little bag, calculated the time his neighbor might be able to hold on with this reserve supply.

  “Yes, thanks to him,” she repeated. A letter left by her husband had told her about the existence of this bag hidden behind those books that had not yet been burned in the stove. For weeks now the man had been saving a part of his ration, knowing that between himself and his wife a choice had to be made as to who should survive…

  Volsky had already heard tell of such people in Leningrad in the siege who let themselves die to save a loved one, generally a mother sacrificing herself for her children. Now he himself owed his life to a man.

  The old woman fell silent, shut her eyes, her hand clasping her husband’s fingers. Volsky once more had the feeling that the bond between them was indifferent to the demise of bodies. The woman took a deep breath and, with the wry smile that was familiar to him, murmured, “As a matter of fact, I did the same…” With a nod of her head toward a little set of shelves, she indicated a paper package from which she extracted slices of dried bread.

  He set off for the cemetery in the dense black of a winter morning. Shadowy main thoroughfares, empty of traffic, were evocative of frozen fjords from which the sea had withdrawn. There were more passersby than he would have expected. They stood out against the darkness, as if on a photographic negative. The ones going to the factory walked faster and looked less downcast, Volsky noticed, not knowing whether this impression of energy was due to the extra bread they received or to their robust constitutions. More frequently than these workmen, women passed by, drawing sleds laden with buckets, some empty, some filled with water from the Neva. Their gait did not differ from the shuffling of people who, like Volsky, were transporting a dead person.

  He had used a wardrobe door, a plank a couple of feet wide, to support the old man’s body. Rare were those who managed to find a coffin. Most people buried their loved ones in a shroud made from a curtain or a tablecloth.

  After three or four crossroads you no longer had to turn into different streets to get to the cemetery and from now on everyone was moving in the same direction. Volsky waded through the snow a short distance behind two women whose burden had been placed on a rectangle of sheet metal. They came to a corner and stopped, one of them embraced the other before leaving her. She had helped her for part of the way and now had to go off to work, thought Volsky. The one who was left in her harness advanced more slowly now and soon he was on the point of overtaking her. It was then that he noticed his mistake. What he had taken for sheet metal was, in reality, a large painting… Amazing and yet not so, he told himself, picturing the disarray, the haste, the impossibility of quickly finding a sled… The figure swathed in cloth and lying at the center of the frame did not appear to be heavy, the canvas sagged very little. But to slide such a rectangle along called for strenuous efforts: the corners of the picture caught in the snow, the body slithered around, risked falling off…

  More with a gesture than with words, Volsky offered his help, the woman accepted with a simple nod of her head. With one hand he was now pulling her load. The black of the sky turned to violet, limpid, icy. The fine line of the street, the white filaments of breath above the wa
lkers, could be seen more clearly.

  The sound of aircraft arose while they were crossing a large empty square. “The worst kind,” Volsky said to himself, hearing the screams of the Stuka dive-bombers. They could feel the blast from the explosions in the soles of their feet and the din reverberated through the scenery of the dead city. A huge cloud arose from the next street, swirling around itself. The people abandoned their dead and rushed into the entrance halls to apartment buildings. Volsky and the woman he was helping found themselves lying against a wall, behind snowdrifts. She was stretched out on her side, her arms shielding her face. Without knowing anything about her, unaware of whether she was young or old, Volsky felt intense pity for this body flung down amid the dirty snow. Just one fragment of shrapnel and this unknown woman could be left there, an inert piece of human debris. He had an impulse to stand up, to interpose himself between this life and the spurts of metal riddling the street.

  After a quarter of an hour they resumed their journey and Volsky could finally see the face of the woman walking beside him. She was young, but her hunger-ravaged features made her ageless, almost without personality. Like all the women in the besieged city. Eyes enlarged and sunken, emaciated cheek lines that allowed the geometry of the jaws and the skull to show through.

  When they stopped, breathless, to crunch some dried bread, he spoke, wanting to lighten the weight of their funereal progress.

  “I’d never have expected to be giving my neighbor a ride on a contraption like this. It’s sad… And yours isn’t much better provided for… Who is that?”

  “It’s my mother.”

  They remained still, facing one another, silent, avoiding the slightest facial expression, resisting the onset of tears. It was minus fifty degrees that morning, it was not the moment to weep.

  The young woman came to life first, bent down, seized the rope attached to her load.

  “I’ve changed more than you, Georgy,” she murmured. “You don’t recognize me.”

  Volsky thought he had misheard, amazed by the way she addressed him but also by the speed at which this woman’s voice was once more becoming familiar. Yet he was still looking at a stranger.

  “Have we met before?”

  The young woman slightly lifted the thick shawl that hid her forehead.

  “Yes. I’m the one who doesn’t know how to eat pastries and you love hot chocolate.”

  He stopped, thunderstruck, stared at her emaciated features, the huge, darkly ringed eyes… Mila!

  One evening at the beginning of December Leningrad moved beyond words. Until recently these had been of some help in thinking about its icy death throes. One could say “war,” “blockade,” “famine,” and it all seemed logical. Until the day when, at the Five Corners intersection, Volsky and Mila saw an expanse of frozen water. Pipes had burst, leaving a vast mirror filled with purple sky and dark facades. They had been proceeding one step at a time, pausing every five minutes to catch their breath. Reaching the open space they stopped, dumbfounded. An unknown city was revealed in the reflection yawning at their feet. At the edge of this abyss sat a young woman, a statue covered in hoarfrost. Words contrived as best they could to reconstruct what had happened: a girl had tried to draw water there, had sat down, overcome with exhaustion. But words were shattered by this upside-down city, by the smile that could be made out on the girl’s frozen face.

  … The previous day they had helped the old woman, Volsky’s neighbor, to leave the city. This tiny chance of getting away currently existed thanks to trucks that ventured across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga. This route was not yet referred to by the people of Leningrad as “The Road of Life” but hundreds fled the city in this way, blessing the cold that solidified the waves, the cold that was deadly for those who remained… This escape route was the last scrap of meaning they could cling to in the dead city. The war, the siege, these trucks carrying children and old people to survival. Words and actions still linked in a semblance of logic…

  The dusk at Five Corners turned that world upside down onto the purple surface of the ice—a vertiginous vision of apartment buildings, streetlamps, stars plunged deep into the earth. And at the edge of the frozen water, a girl seated there, smiling from the depths of her death.

  They hardly spoke anymore. Words had lost their grip on what they were living through. They would have had to refer to these blocks of stone harboring corpses as “buildings.” And these vague, angular sketches of humanity as “townspeople.” “Food” meant boiled leather, and the paste from wallpaper diluted in water.

  To protect these last sparks of life, thousands of women, thin as skeletons, worked flat-out at the conveyor belts of munitions factories, lining up rows of shells, thunderous streams of bullets. On the icy plains surrounding the city, men with faces furrowed by chilblains were hurling this steel against other men, who, with insane obstinacy, sought to conquer the immense graveyard that Leningrad was turning into. Every night the trucks set out across the ice of the lake, exposed targets that had to pit their wits against the bombers hounding them in the midst of the snow. Often the human cargo would vanish through the holes opened up by the bombs. On their return journey the trucks that got through brought bread, from which one-hundred-and-twenty-five-gram slices could be cut, giving a new lease, for a few more days, to this life words could no longer describe.

  And above this ghostly world the mauve sun of the great frosts would rise, a dull disk, making only a brief appearance, inspiring thoughts of some unknown planet.

  Everything that happened to them seemed as if it were taking place following their death. In an afterlife where, deep in labyrinths of stone, unique beings were dying, lost amid the confusion of emaciated bodies, amid the frenzy of the last shudders of hope, amid the fever of memories, while other human beings, a little more robust, were cutting out pieces of metal that men with faces scorched by the cold employed to kill those who had come to these snowy wastes to die.

  This was how Volsky and Mila now saw the world, from a very remote perspective. A perspective that could have seemed godlike in its detachment, yet was grievously human, for each of them greatly dreaded the other’s death.

  On that evening when they saw the city turned upside down, this dread had eyes that spied on them in the darkness. They had come home, had tried to light the fire, had failed. Their hands, made clumsy from weakness, could no longer manage to break up a piece of flooring. Someone was staring at them in the darkness with a scornful grimace, like a hunter contemplating his prey as it quakes at his feet…

  Volsky turned away from this gaze, seized a bundle of sheets of paper, crumpled them one by one, filled the stove with them. All the books had already been burned, all that was left was these pages of sheet music and an opera libretto they had once been studying at the Conservatory. The fire was lit, they held out their hands to it, massaged their fingers, managed to dislodge a dozen or so blocks of wood.

  As the sheets blazed, ripples of music and singing went up in smoke. Fear yielded to an unknown feeling: perhaps death was the birth of these echoes escaping from the burnt pages. This certainty of being somewhere other than in their starving bodies had nothing triumphant about it. Quite simply, without needing to say it, they knew that was how it was.

  The next day this faith gave them the strength to go to the place where they had met on June 21… The Nord Café was shut, the street closed off with blocks of concrete, the entrances to the buildings transformed into machine gun posts. The city was preparing to undergo the final assault from the enemy. The inside of the café had changed little. The same counter with its bronze top, the same mirrors, and there, beneath a big mosaic on the wall, “their” table… Yes, a table in an empty room, bathed in coppery sunlight, deep calm. And in the window pane the reflection of two faces with their bones protruding from their skulls. So this was what death was.

  They knew they were too far away from their building and that the crust of bread eaten that morning would not be enough for
the return journey. The streets were lined with frozen bodies, some of them wrapped in makeshift shrouds, others sitting or lying there, frozen in the pose determined by their collapse. They walked slowly, experiencing no emotion at the sight of these dead people, nor at the idea, hazy and painless, of falling, becoming rigid. At one point Volsky noticed that Mila’s chin had turned white, it looked like a smear of powder, the warning sign of frostbite. He tried to rub this spot but he could barely command his numb fingers. Then he opened his coat for the young woman to lay her frozen face against his chest. They remained there, hugging one another in the middle of a street where, in the dusk, the dead kept watch. It was their first embrace.

  Turning toward the Neva they saw a long queue outside a building. Famished as they were, they instinctively made the link: a crowd, ration tickets, a piece of bread. But this queue had an unusual look about it. People were going in at the door but no one was coming out, as if they had decided to eat their rations on the spot, away from the icy blast coming off the Baltic Sea. As they drew closer Volsky and Mila discovered to their amazement that this was a theater and people, rendered mute with exhaustion, were going to watch a performance. The poster for the Musical Comedy Theater announced an operetta: The Three Musketeers…