That evening those who could get up arranged themselves around the fire to “eat” some, as Mandarin had taught them. He himself, huddled in a corner, kept giving little coughs, as if he were trying to speak and could not manage it. She sat beside him, adjusted a woolen cap that had slipped off his head. He opened his eyes, at first with a glazed look, then recognized her, tried to smile. “Don’t worry, Mandarin. Tomorrow I’ll go to the city. I’ll bring some bread and maybe even some flour…” She broke off, for he was screwing up his eyes like someone who wants to save another person from telling a white lie. It was an adult’s expression and it was also in a very adult voice that he whispered, “Auntie Mila, I’m going to die tonight. You can give my bread to the children…” The dissonance between this little body and the grave voice gave her a start. She began scolding the boy, shaking him: “What nonsense! Tomorrow I’ll make some proper soup for you…” Seeing that he had closed his eyes to spare her these useless words of encouragement, she fell silent…
Half an hour later she was at her lookout post beside a bend in the road that led to the front.
There was a limpid, dark sky, swept clean by the great north wind. The frozen road crunched beneath her feet like broken glass. She knew that in cold like this a starving person does not live long. The notion came to her of going right to the soldiers’ camp and stealing bread from them. The notion of a madwoman. Or else it was the world that was mad, for there was this child who had just calmly said, “I’m going to die tonight…” She felt ready to do anything to snatch a bit of food from this world. The instinct of a she-wolf that will get killed to save its young. She even thought herself capable of crossing the front line to go and ask the Germans for bread. A vision of a trade-off passed through her mind, herself taking food for the children and then returning to the enemy soldiers to be beaten, violated, killed, happy that her own body, her own life, were utterly unimportant.
After walking for twenty minutes she stopped, having stumbled several times. If she fell she would not be able to get up again and the cold was already making her movements stiff. Without her the children were doomed. She had to go back. The star-studded sky was magnificent, funereal. She paused for a few seconds, her gaze lost in its dark splendor, and in lieu of a prayer, made this vow: bread for the children and no matter what suffering for me.
The headlights of a jeep blinded her just as she was opening the door to the hostel. An army officer called out to her, but before noticing his huge frame and his greatcoat, unbuttoned despite the cold, she was struck, to the point of being made giddy, by the aroma of food emanating from his mouth, as well as a strong smell of alcohol. “Would you have a glass of water for me, darling? My soul’s on fire!” He bent over and the breath of this man who had just eaten well caught her by the throat. She led him into the kitchen, offered him water, spoke about the children. “Oh, that can be fixed. I’ve got sausage and bread in the van. I’m the most important man in the city. I supply Smolny.” He got her to give him another glass of water, snorted contentedly, and began describing the foodstuffs he delivered to the city’s top brass.
Mila was hardly listening to him, picturing a large pot on the fire, slices of sausage in a broth thickened with flour, and the happy clatter of spoons.
“Maybe I could have a little flour as well,” she murmured, overcome with giddiness from inhaling the smell of meat given off by this man.
“Oh yes. You can have it all, darling, thanks to your pretty face!” He grasped her arm, pulled her toward him. “But I’ve got sixteen kids here, and several of them are ill…,” she tried to explain, breaking free.
“Oh, so you don’t trust me. Me, a general staff officer!” He was on the brink of losing his temper, then, overcome by lust, he changed his tactics. “Hold on, you can see it with your own eyes!”
He went out to the vehicle and came back carrying a canvas sack. With a salesman’s gesture he opened it in front of Mila: two large cans of food, a packet of meal, a round loaf…
“There you are, darling. It’s just as I said. If you’re nice to me…” He embraced her, breathing words into her face that reeked of stale food and alcohol. A tremulous, inaudible protest formed within her as the man pushed her over to a bedframe. “One of the children told me he’s going to die tonight. You should be ashamed…”
No, she must explain nothing, simply contrive to be nonexistent. To repress the nausea brought on by this mouth stinking of satiety, not to feel this hand brutally burrowing into her body… She managed to be no longer herself right up to the last gasp of pleasure from the man taking her. Until he left in a flurry of guffaws and promises.
She remained in this nonexistent state as she prepared the meal. The children came running, ate in silence, went back to bed. In the sack left by the army man she found a bottle of vodka, drank straight from the bottle, and when drunkenness came, finally allowed herself to weep.
Two days later Mandarin appeared beside the fire, as merry as before. No, not as before. Now his eyes were smiling through the veil of death.
One evening the soldier returned. And everything was repeated: food against a few minutes of nonexistence. And the vodka afterward, which quickly settled the argument between shame and the spirit of sacrifice.
There were other visits, other men, and always this extremely simple barter: the children’s survival assured by a moment of anonymous pleasure. During the March snowstorms and the thaw she would not, in any case, have been able to get to her lookout post or to reach the city, where there were fewer and fewer people left alive.
She did not know when she was driven out of her own life. Possibly that day in May in front of a mirror when she did not recognize herself. Or else during the following winter: the taste of vodka became essential to her without there being any nocturnal visit.
At all events, when peace returned, she became that other woman (“a loose woman,” the neighbors called her) living in a room in a hostel, a building occupied by new arrivals. Her children were put into an orphanage; she remained alone, buried in a past where everything reminded her of the blockade, in an alcoholic stupor that made her indifferent to the coarseness of the men who called on her.
One evening (the whole building was celebrating the victory over Germany), she was sitting outside her window and suddenly into her memory overcome by drunkenness came words from a life now destroyed: “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…” She sobbed so violently that even the hubbub of a celebration party broke off. One woman exclaimed in indignant tones: “Just listen to that! Everyone’s singing for joy and all that tramp can do is howl her head off…”
This was doubtless the moment when she turned into what people now saw her as. Shortly after that she bleached her dark hair and even had this comforting thought: “If I die now no one will recognize me.” She realized that what she dreaded most was encountering once more the man who had sung: “To you, my beloved…”
A moth hurtled toward the flame of the stove, Volsky waved his hand to drive it away, to save it, and this gesture broke the stillness that Mila’s words had imposed on them.
“That’s how it was, my life,” she said in a toneless voice. “I hoped you wouldn’t find me again… There are lots of women on their own now. Soldiers coming back have plenty of choice…”
“Well, I have found you again. You can see I have.”
She seemed not to have heard.
“I even dreamed that you died in battle. I knew your grave and I used to go there. And that way you couldn’t see what I’ve become…”
He smiled, in spite of himself.
“Very sorry. I’m afraid I wasn’t killed… And you haven’t changed so much…”
“There’s no point in lying, Georgy. You know very well what I’ve become. A whore.”
He drew a breath, preparing to utter a retort, but let out only an abrupt sigh. And all at once, dreading the return of silence, spoke very quickly and with great agitation.
“All right. Agree
d. A whore. But in that case, I’m a killer! Yes, I’ve often killed. That was my job in the war. This red star, you see, they stuck it on me to thank me for having assassinated thousands of Germans. I spent four years killing men. I tried to hit as many as possible and when I got to the trenches I’d just been pounding, what I saw there was a bloody pulp… I wasn’t made for this profession. I loved singing, you know. And I spent four years yelling orders at soldiers, telling them to fire faster, to kill more. Then one day… I chose not to shoot down a German soldier from a tank unit. I could have done it. I was armed, he wasn’t. I didn’t shoot. Because…”
His voice broke off in a shrill cry. And in response to this wail an angry hammering suddenly resounded at their door and a female duet let fly in a burst of oaths and shrieks: “Just you stop that racket or I’ll call the militia! That bitch has them coming in at two o’clock in the morning now…”
The aggressiveness of the attack brought them close to one another, the viperish hissing prompted them to stand up, in a defensive movement, their bodies drawn together, their arms reaching toward an embrace.
“For I realized,” he whispered, in almost joyful tones, “that if I’d fired at that young German then I really would have become a killer. And for you, it’s the same. It’s clearer still, even…”
He fell silent for fear of shattering this understanding, which suddenly had no need of words. It had not been pity that had held him back from killing. Simply, at that moment he had viewed the world (and the German and himself and the whole earth) with a perception that was immeasurably greater than his own view. The same perception that the woman had had in exchanging her body for bread.
“I was thinking of making up the bed for you, but…,” murmured Mila and smiled, as if the notion now seemed pointless to her.
Once again, without explaining anything, they understood that they must leave. Go away before this world woke up and continued with a life from which they were forever excluded.
Their preparations were swift. Mila seemed amazed at how few belongings she possessed. Some clothes, three chipped plates, a kettle. And her children’s drawings, the pieces of paper she took down from the wall around the stove.
They went out, crossed the courtyard, as if on the edge of a waking dream. A tumble of clouds in the sky, a wind losing itself in the drowsy rustling of leaves. A child’s garment trailing in the grass beneath a line where shirts and sheets billowed. Mila picked it up, fastened it with a clothespin… They turned to look back. Behind the dark windows a strange innocence could be sensed: the sleep of those people, so certain of their truths, so easygoing, so hard. And with no notion of what this workers’ hostel had been for the couple who were leaving it.
The road followed the stages they knew: the corner where Mila used to wait for the trucks, then the place where their choir had given its last concert… They walked beside the river. Above its swirling waters the sky was beginning to grow light. From time to time they had to skirt craters left by bombs. Some of these were filled with water and already bristling with rushes, from which birds arose in flight.
Just as they were passing a little collapsed bridge Mila slowed down, suggested that they make a halt. And it was then that they saw an undamaged house on the slope of the valley, away from the roofs destroyed by fire. An empty izba with a wide-open door. A poplar tree some forty feet high stood between a wooden fence and the coping of a well. The mauve pallor of the morning gave the illusion that the walls were transparent and the house was gently rocking, like a vessel on the ocean swell of the tall grasses.
IV
People found their life as a couple completely ordinary. An old izba without electricity, among ruins? But after the war half the country was living like that. Always dressed in the same worn clothes? But there was little elegance in the Russia of those years. Nor was there anything unusual about the work they did: Mila taught music at the school in the neighboring small town, Volsky found work as a postman. People got used to their self-effacing presence. They saw the woman going in at the school entrance early in the morning, they noticed the man as he cycled past, his big sack filled with good or bad news. People spoke to them, they would reply politely but were not forthcoming. Besides, who was forthcoming in those days when an incautious word could cost talkative people dear?
If the truth be told, their only distinctive feature was the color of their hair: over a few months the man’s lost its somber hue and turned white and the woman’s dark tresses reappeared. But this curiosity caused little surprise. The towns were full of war wounded, disfigured faces… Yes, a commonplace couple.
What seemed more unusual was the spot where they had settled. Hidden in the valley and the woods along its slopes were minefields, often indicated by plywood signs, occasionally not. And the earth was heavy with the bodies of soldiers.
On one of the first days after they moved in they went back to the site of their last concert. Volsky walked down toward the river and there was a sudden, sharp metallic clatter beneath his foot. He bent down and searched among the plant stems… And withdrew a cymbal stained with mud and eaten into by verdigris. Mila fingered the tarnished disk. The sound set off long-reverberating echoes… It was a hot, sweetly lazy summer’s day, one made up of languid forgetfulness. They looked at one another, the same memory in the depths of their eyes: the end of a winter’s night, the icy expanse from which the soldiers are mounting an attack. That singing in defiance of death. And this cymbal falling, rolling across the snow, down toward the river…
Their true life would be this invisible journey against the current of the time people live by.
One evening, on a return visit to Leningrad, they went up into the apartment building that Volsky had lived in before the war. On the top landing the violet of the sky came spilling in at the window, a star glittered through a heat haze… In the courtyard the children were scuffling around a ball. Behind the door of a communal apartment two housewives were arguing about the oven. A couple in their Sunday best walked down the stairs talking about a comedy that had just been released at the cinema. Life… Volsky and Mila exchanged glances. Yes, the life they no longer had to lead.
Their thoughts returned more than once to this freedom of theirs not to live like other people. One day, back in the city, they stopped under the windows of the Conservatory where they had trained. A joyous tumult of notes and snatches of song poured forth over them in a flood of memories. “A musical box… going off the rails,” said Mila, and they smiled. The students hurrying down the front steps looked just like little figures spilling out from the tiny revolving stage. Once again Volsky and Mila felt they had been rescued from a life they might have lived by mistake.
Another musical box was the opera they went to one evening. The actors, dressed up as soldiers, sang of feats of arms, heroism, the motherland. The ingenious way the war had been put on the stage left Volsky perplexed. There was no mention of their own past but here, on a heavy stage set, with a background of cardboard cutout flames, voices celebrated the defense of Leningrad in vibrant, wordy arias. At the climax an actor appeared in the role of one of the Party leaders. “The Ci-i-ity of Lenin shall ne-ver fa-a-all!” he sang. He was a big fat man, wearing a uniform too tight for his portly figure. “The thighs of the king in Rigoletto…,” Volsky recalled.
After the performance they took a streetcar, which dropped them at the gates of the city. From there the way was familiar. Two hours of walking along roads damaged by bombing, then through sleeping fields beside the Lukhta. In the still night the rustle of plants on the banks of the river could be heard. In unison with this, Volsky was softly murmuring the simple words he used to sing at the front, when marching along in a column of soldiers. Their house appeared, tinged with blue by the twinkling dark of the sky: small, stuck there lopsidedly on a hillside beneath the immense arrow of a poplar.
“Mila will soon have had enough of this shack of ours,” he thought. “She’ll come to be envious of those people at the th
eater who went quietly home tonight instead of trekking through the fields like us…”
She stopped, pointed at their house. “Look. It’s as if someone’s waiting for us.” One of the windowpanes had caught the gilding of the moon, a discreet and patient light, like a lamp placed there to show the way through the darkness.
During the months that followed they only returned to the city once, when Mila wanted to see “her children” again. It was the day of the first snowfall.
Behind the railings at the orphanage shadowy figures seemed to be waltzing, elated by the dance of the snowflakes. Mila recognized faces, whispered names… A little apart from his comrades stood a boy of about twelve and, with his head thrown back, his eyes half closed, he was holding up his face to the white flurries. Suddenly overcome with giddiness, he stumbled and his shapka fell off, revealing bright red hair, cut very short. He retrieved it and, as he stood up, noticed this couple standing on the other side of the railings. Mila turned away, began walking with her head bowed, Volsky followed her. After a silence he suggested in an uncertain voice: “What if we took him to live with us? And the others too…”
They did not mention it again but from then on their house seemed to be inhabited by this expectation.
Mine clearance operations had begun in August and lasted for a whole month. It was as if the sappers were unraveling a vast spiderweb around the little izba. It was striking to see how many tons of death the two armies had succeeded in burying. Every footpath was stuffed with it. Every forest glade was a trap for an unwary footstep…
As they were leaving, one of the men took them up to the top of the slope and showed them a vast hummocky area. “That’s not mines there,” he said. “Those are graves. But we’re not to do anything about them…”
The Life of an Unknown Man Page 13
