The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  They should have fallen back, retreated, escaped to the truck. Saved themselves. No one stirred. The order to fall back could have been given but their “captain” now lay on the path leading down to the river… They sang with a freedom never before experienced. Scorn for death caused a fierce exultation to well up in their emaciated bodies. Tears shone upon their eyelashes. Volsky saw one of the singers, his head all bloody, trying to rise to his feet and return to his place. Then a cymbal went rolling down the icy slope.

  And now silence swept in, the light turned into a darkness from out of which emerged words he was struggling to make sense of. So it was… The effort he made woke him up. In the cotton wool density left by an explosion he could hear a voice and when his sight returned he found himself lying among other bodies and very close to his face he saw Mila’s eyes, her dark brown locks, no longer covered by her shawl, and, high up on her brow, a long wound. He spoke but could not hear himself. The only audible words were those she was crooning softly. Lines sung by Marie, from the operetta they had been performing in…

  Before losing consciousness again he stared at this woman’s face bent over him, a face furrowed by hunger and disfigured by wounds. And, very briefly, he experienced the start of a life he would never have thought possible on this earth.

  He did not see Mila again, did not even know if she had been treated in Leningrad or perhaps evacuated one night in a convoy of trucks. Discharged from the hospital on New Year’s Eve, he found himself in an artillery battery a few miles from the spot where their last concert had taken place. The stranglehold of the blockade had loosened a little; it had been possible to retake a few small towns from the enemy and in one of them Volsky’s comrades picked up a packet of elegant cards with German text printed in fine Gothic lettering. An officer read them, spat out an oath. They were invitations to the celebration to mark the fall of Leningrad. The festivities were planned for December 18 at the Astoria Hotel. Volsky remembered that their choir had been singing two days before that date.

  He felt proud to have assisted, through this concert, in the defense of the city. Before learning that in mid-December the Germans had been defeated close to Moscow, and that this had saved Leningrad, making those fine invitation cards, with their Gothic script, superfluous… Impossible in war to judge between the impact of collective action and that of individual heroism, the fluctuating imprecision of weighing both in the balance—this would be one of the lessons of those four years of fighting.

  The war had little else to teach him. In the siege of Leningrad he had lived with death as intimately as a soldier would have done. Now, crossing fields strewn with corpses, he was astonished at their number, but the absolute singularity of each death was somewhat blunted here at the front, blurred by this very number.

  Of course, there was a mass of detail, often of vital importance, for him to learn. That unharmed house in a village razed to the ground and the very tall tree he had seen during their last concert. He knew now that it was the tree that had protected the shack. A target that, logically, should have been the first to be blown up. But gunners have their own logic. They take aim by selecting a reference point (a church tower, a post, or a tree) and it is the reference point that survives amid the ruins, as a reward for its value in pinpointing targets.

  He also had a memory of those soldiers shuffling about beside their gun on the riverbank on the day of the desperate attack. From now on his war was just this shuffling about, in snow or mud, and he came no longer to expect glorious feats of arms, dazzling exploits. Resigned himself to studying the crude mechanics of battle. Soon he could evaluate at a glance the steel of the armored vehicles he was aiming at. His ear could judge the caliber of guns being fired, the different whistlings of the shells. Distances, trajectories, took on a palpable density, inscribed in the very air he breathed.

  And then, on occasion, all this knowledge became futile, as on a particular evening at the end of an engagement. The shooting had stopped, his comrades were rolling their cigarettes, and suddenly one of them fell over, with a little red mark above his temple: a stray fragment of shrapnel. No glorious goal would compensate for this young face frozen, this unique presence, turning into dead matter before their eyes. Yes, he learned this lesson as well: in war the most testing moments are those of peace, for a dead man lying in the grass makes the living see the world as it would be, but for their folly. It was a spring day, the battle had taken place near a forest where the undergrowth was white with wild cherry trees in flower and lilies of the valley.

  He was posted to the front defending Leningrad. Then transferred to the Volga, to a city that must at all costs be victorious, for it bore Stalin’s name. In this battle a bullet grazed his face, his left cheek was gashed, leaving a scar like a little grin. “You’re never sad with me,” he took to joking.

  A year later, in the gigantic Battle of Kursk, Volsky became unrecognizable.

  He had already seen what hell one day, a beautiful spring day, of warfare could be. But previously these had been hells controlled by men. This time the creators lost control of their own handiwork. Instead of an offensive in which the infantry made the running, with the artillery in support, it was a monstrous confrontation between thousands of tanks, hordes of black tortoises, their carapaces ramming one another, spitting fire, ejecting from their blazing shells human beings who burned like torches. The sky was filled with smoke, the air reeked of exhaust from the engines. No sound could be heard above the explosions and the grinding of overheated metal. With his fellow gunners, Volsky found himself hemmed in against the remains of a fortified post, unable either to retreat or properly to open fire. The duels between tanks were happening too close at hand, too fast, the gun would have had to be handled with the dexterity of a revolver. Nevertheless they tried their luck, hit the turret of a Tiger, but glancingly, and received a burst of machine gun fire in reply. A heavy black tortoise had just located them. Keeping his eyes fixed on the maneuverings of the monster, Volsky signaled to those behind him to bring up the shell. No one stirred. He turned: one gunner was dead, another sat there, his face streaming with red, his screams muted by the noise.

  What followed had the slowness of a nightmare, so familiar to him, in which each action seemed to take long minutes. A shell to be lifted out of the crate, the sleek heaviness of a toy asleep in his hands, to be carried, inserted into the breech, loaded, then he began to take aim… Interminable seconds during which the tank lowered its gun toward him, as if the man aiming it were amusing himself by taking his time. No hell could be such a torment.

  What happened next would be pieced together later, at nightfall, when he became capable of remembering, of understanding. He had no time to fire and yet the turret of the Tiger blew up, flinging out the bodies crammed together in its cockpit. The violence of the explosion threw Volsky to the ground and momentarily he glimpsed the angular carapace of another monster, the enormous self-propelling gun, the famous SU-152, that killer of tanks, that had just saved his life…

  The evening spilled down sluggish rain. Having recovered the use of his ears he could hear the hissing of the water on the incandescent metal of the armored vehicles. Groans across the plain encumbered with black machines. Words spoken in Russian, allowing him to understand whose the victory was in this clash of steel.

  And suddenly, appearing in the half-light, this teetering silhouette: a German from a tank unit, stunned, no doubt, wandering blindly among the carapaces. Volsky drew his gun, aimed… But did not fire. The soldier was young and seemed indifferent to what could happen to him after the horror of what he had just lived through. Their eyes met and, in spite of themselves, each waved a hand at the other. Volsky put away his pistol, the soldier disappeared into the summer dusk.

  The night was brief and by about 3:00 a.m. an ashen pallor was already casting a glow over the surrounding area. He got up, climbed onto a low wall in the fortified post. The mist lifted over the plain to the hazy limits of the horizon. And its whole
surface was hidden under the dark armature of tangled tanks. A human presence could be sensed within all this metallic darkness: wounded men, Russian or German, waiting in the suffocating heat of the turrets. Men burned, with wounds beyond hope, whose eyes could see the sky, which the rain had now left, and a star poised directly above… He thought… “above this hell,” but the word seemed imprecise. Hell teemed with little torturers, eager to inflict suffering on the fallen. Here the wounded awaited death in the solitude of a block of steel, pressed up against the bodies of dead comrades.

  He caught himself making no distinction between the Russian and the German wounded. The hell created by men… Disturbed by a truth that was taking hold of him, he hastened to return to a more clear-cut judgment: the enemy had just been beaten and these Germans dying in their tanks had deserved it… Yet that perception of the suffering of all mankind was not easy to eradicate. In it Volsky sensed a great and terrible wisdom that bowed him down beneath the weight of a very old man’s experience. In the siege of Leningrad he had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope.

  Before the sun rose he heard a bird calling, briefly, repeatedly, with rather muted resonance. A dull, humble song, but one that rang out for all the living and the dead.

  The soldier who helped Volsky to carry his comrades’ bodies greeted him oddly: “Now then, cheer up, Granddad!” Granddad! Volsky smiled, telling himself that, drained by a sleepless night, the other, a man of his own age, was babbling nonsense. He would have thought no more about that incongruous greeting but then the nurse, who was putting a dressing on his wrist, concluded: “There you are, Grandpa. Like that you’ll be all set for the next battle.” He burst out laughing and saw a flicker of doubt in the woman’s eyes. A mirror hung on the wall of the dressing station. He went up to it… And clapped his hand to his head, as if to hide it. His hair was white, that snowy white that some old men sport with such elegance.

  From that day onward he stopped writing to Mila. The blockade of Leningrad continued and Volsky knew what that signified for a woman who had already been living through it for two years. He could imagine the city under siege in summer, those thousands of buildings filled with corpses… No letter from Mila had reached him: the postal service rarely broke through the mesh of the blockade. Besides, how could he be found, with his transfers from one front to another? Dreaming up all these reasons helped him to think that Mila was still alive.

  On the day after the Battle of Kursk, when he saw himself in the mirror at the dressing station all these speculations about the mail became pointless. This old soldier with a strangely young face, scarred with a slight rictus, was another man.

  This other man went back to the war almost serenely, telling himself that the person he had once been no longer existed, a little as if he had been killed. The extinguishing of all hope made a good soldier of him. No letters, no waiting for letters, no becoming emotional, which, in war, is the frequent cause of carelessness and hence of death. He became fused with the gun he served, became effectively mechanical, impassive, thrifty with words. And as time passed he even ceased to be surprised when young people addressed him as “Grandpa.”

  He had also changed in what he had once considered to be his true nature, his dream, his gift: singing. Sometimes he would sing along in chorus with his comrades, during a halt, or as he marched in a column of men cheating their weariness with merry tunes. These songs pleased him, evocative as they were of the immediate reality of the war. The banality of death, the carefree spirit of a summer’s day, the scent of grass at the edge of a forest, a handful of berries swiftly gathered among the trees and, pausing there, as he glanced at the column of soldiers, a thought that made him feel giddy: “I’m no longer among them, I’m in this forest, there are these flowers, the drowsy buzzing of bees…” Then he would run back to take his place among the men, singing as they marched toward death.

  The speed at which their faces, lit up by singing, were obliterated in the daily slaughter, the ease with which a human being could be wiped out, was the only reality that never ceased to trouble Volsky. And it was thanks to their communal singing that he kept a memory of the faces of so many men who were gone. With his professional’s ear, albeit battered by gunfire, he could recall their voices (fine, dull, touching in their enthusiasm or naively reckless), and this pattern of sounds would bring a look or a smile back to life. These lives, swept away by the war, survived through song.

  Thus he came to dislike those grand operatic arias he had dreamed of in the old days. All those stentorian Boris Godunovs, thrusting out their beards the better to squeeze out the vibrations of their vocal power at the height of tragic ecstasy, now struck him as false. Ludicrous, too, those plump legionnaires in Italian opera, tinkling the scales of their brass armor. Or the ones in tailcoats, sticking out their chests like fighting cocks.

  His passion for the magic of theater was still alive. But after what he had lived through in Leningrad and later in the Battle of Kursk, he often asked himself about the purpose of such operatic spectacles. To please? To move? To distract? To titillate the ears of women with bare shoulders and men in patent leather shoes, couples who, after the opera, would end up at a restaurant, discussing the performance of a legionnaire or a rooster in tails?

  Sometimes, between battles, sitting with his back against the carriage of his gun, he would start humming on his own, a murmur nobody else heard. These were generally d’Artagnan’s songs.

  The end of the war found him close to Berlin on the shores of a pond torn up by tank tracks. With two other soldiers he was engaged in positioning the guns when the news of the victory reached them. He stood up and saw what he had already seen the day of his last concert, near Leningrad: a riverbank, soldiers clinging to a gun, survival dependent on the speed of shooting. The circle is complete, he thought, smiling at the soldiers as they yelled in delight. “It’s all over, Grandpa! Let’s have a quick drink now and head for home!”

  He told himself that his white hair was simply an ironic token of the interminable duration of the years spent at war. Human stories were so swiftly wiped out in death, so many cities had swept by, that his feeling of having aged quickly was not all that fanciful. A circle completed and, within it, the span of a whole life. His life.

  During the first days of peace he sometimes thought of Mila, picturing how she might have felt on meeting this young man with white hair. Their past seemed to belong to a remote youth, lived through by someone else. By that person who had once, on stage, in the costume of a musketeer, kissed a young heroine freshly emerged from a convent. He told himself that the only tie that bound them was the ancient libretto of an old-fashioned operetta written by a forgotten author.

  “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” he sang softly on the train carrying him back to Russia. His traveling companions took him for an old soldier in a cheerful mood.

  In traveling to his native village, south of Smolensk, he had no hope of discovering a past where he could start a new life. This part of Russia had first been devastated by the Red Army as they retreated, unwilling to leave anything for the enemy, then by aerial bombardment, and finally by the Germans as they withdrew, setting fire to everything that had survived the bombing. Of his own street (a row of charred izbas) all that was left was an old church tower, “saved by a miracle,” one old woman told him, as he questioned her about the fate of the villagers, of his own parents. A miracle… He did not go to the trouble of explaining that the church tower was a good reference point left intact by those who had targeted the nearby railroad junction. Survivors needed to believe in miracles. There was one, as it happened, in the garden of his ruined home: a cherry tree broken in two, but whose branches had taken root again, dusted with tiny snow-white flowers.

  In Leningrad the room he had once rented was occupied. His new landlady announced, “With you, I don’t have a problem. Not like one of those empty-headed young men. I
only take people of a certain age…” Volsky was amazed to see that, after so many had died, the apartments were crammed, then realized that people were coming in from the surrounding villages, razed to the ground by the fighting. “So the war didn’t do you much harm in the end,” the woman went on. “And now with all your medals, you’ll be a fine sight.” Volsky shrugged his shoulders: what could he reply to that? So as not to seem rude, he stammered, “Well, I don’t have many medals. In the artillery you’re always behind the others…” He felt this was a stupid remark, talking about the war was not easy. What else was there that could be spoken of? The tanks with their overheated steel that made a hissing sound in the rain? The turrets where wounded men, Russian and German, were dying? Explain how his greatest joy at the front was not those little disks of medals but a fistful of wild strawberries he’d picked in a hurry before rejoining the column of soldiers? And that his greatest fear had lasted for a few seconds at most: when the gun on a tank took aim at him, as if relishing the pleasure of terrifying him? And that those seconds had turned him into this young old man, so respectable in the eyes of a landlady? No, such things, true as they were, were impossible to admit to.

  Volsky remembered feeling tongue-tied like this before: with Mila in the besieged city.

  He went to see the place where she used to live. The building was still standing but a freakish bombing raid had destroyed the staircase between the first and second floors. People were getting into their homes by means of ladders. Nobody knew Mila. They were mainly provincials who had come in from their ruined villages.

  Thanks to them, the city seemed rejuvenated. The people of Leningrad, who had endured the blockade, threaded their way, pale and silent, through this ill-assorted crowd. The variety of female faces was intoxicating. People spoke to one another more readily; people smiled more, everyone was eager to come to life again in an encounter, in an exchange of looks. Volsky had never engaged so much in conversations with strangers, with women. One day he spoke to two female students he encountered at the Nord Café… Everything was surprising about this agreeable chatter: the room, which had not changed, these laughing girls, the ease with which he touched on the war, showing off, telling how shells would occasionally hit a flight of ducks and then—what feasting! “You have such a young voice…,” one of them said, and he caught her glancing at his white hair.