The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  In referring to them as “army officers” he had been lying, their uniform was unmistakable. And it was Mila who remarked on it. “It’s odd, those two fellows from State Security. It reminds me of what happened the other day at school. Yes, there was an inspector… The head teacher told me in advance she’d be coming, so there was nothing unexpected about it. Except that she stood there, as still as a stone. Like that man spying on us with his binoculars. Then she went away without saying a word. Apparently the songs I teach the children are not ideologically correct…”

  They were sitting on the front steps of their izba. Now that the waters had subsided, the house seemed to be perched even higher above the fields and more solitary. Volsky listened, hesitated before replying: he must either attempt a reassuring tone and therefore lie, or else… He bowed his head and suddenly noticed another cigarette stub ringed with a band of gold among the tufts of grass. Like a gimlet eye staring at them.

  “You know, Mila, I haven’t mentioned this to you, but the mail I deliver…” He broke off, conscious that his voice sounded guilty, although there was no fault to confess. “Yes, I notice more and more letters coming from prisons. I think it’s started again, the purges…”

  They said very little to one another, using the oblique turns of phrase that everyone employed at the time. One did not say “so and so has been arrested” but “he’s had problems.” Indeed, Mila could not have said “those fellows from State Security”; that form of words would come later in Volsky’s reminiscences, when it became possible to talk about it. At the time, she would simply have spoken of “the Big House,” which was how people referred to the secret police headquarters in Leningrad.

  In a few more or less coded words, they said it all to one another: the waves of arrests, unleashed to an extent worse than ever before, the fear that, after a brief relaxation at the end of the war, was turning faces to stone again, the suspicion that marked every word. The victory over the Nazis had freed the hands of the local persecutors, now eager to make the people pay for their own cowardice.

  Mentioning two or three details about each of the individuals who had disappeared, Volsky and Mila recalled those who had “had problems”: people living in the neighboring small town, old friends in Leningrad. Already a long litany of ghosts. They knew people chose different tactics for survival. Some pretended to notice nothing, talked, went to work, smiled at their families, sleepwalking like torpid automatons. Others transformed their lives into the waiting of a condemned man, rehearsing in soliloquy the arguments they believed would prove their innocence, slept fully dressed, knowing that arrests took place at night. Sometimes they went mad. Yet others attempted to defuse the threat by mocking it.

  “My father did that.” Volsky realized he was talking about this for the first time. “In the days of collectivization in our village, if they found a bag of corn hidden in a peasant’s house the fellow was shot. Soon it was enough that you hadn’t declared a tool or a dozen eggs. I was still a child but I remember the day very well. It was winter, you know, freezing cold. My father went out without his coat, barefoot in the snow, and carried the only pair of boots he had left to the Expropriation Committee. He managed to adopt a very serious, almost fervent expression: ‘I’m giving everything I have for the building of socialism!’ The Party bosses were terribly embarrassed by fervor like this. In the end they decided he wasn’t all there. They gave him back his boots and left us alone… Sometimes being mad could save you.”

  “My father was saved by dying.”

  Mila murmured this, echoing Volsky’s words and at once, seeing his puzzled look, hastened to explain.

  “He was an officer in Mongolia in 1939. He took part in the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol. One day, when he was talking to a man he thought was his best friend, he ventured on a piece of black humor: ‘If you ask me, there are more army officers in the camps than we have here in our ranks.’ Some throwaway remark like that. The commanding officer summoned him and told him to prepare himself for the worst. The next day during the assault on the Japanese he was the first to be shot down. The truth is he got himself killed. One of his comrades told us about his death. The people who were supposed to arrest him came back empty-handed: instead of apprehending an enemy of the people, they were confronted with an officer fallen on the field of battle, almost a hero. After that they left my mother and me alone as well.”

  It had all been said. The two stories, they knew, summed up the country in which they lived. Its fears, its wars, the defenseless nakedness of private existence, the impossibility of sharing one’s distress. The extreme difficulty of having faith in human goodness and at the same time the awareness that only this faith could still save. A country where millions of people woke in the night, listening to the hiss of tires on the asphalt: Is that car going past? Or is it stopping outside?

  “You’ve never talked to me about your father…,” said Volsky, as if in reproachful tones.

  “We never had time… Besides, if we’d started thinking about all that, we’d not have had the will to go on living.”

  Volsky’s first impulse was to object, to invoke the need to bring the truth out into the open. But he thought better of it, sensing in Mila’s words a truth at once more humble and almost arrogant in its frankness. She smiled. “We wouldn’t even have been able to act at the theater. Remember: ‘To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…’ It was partly those songs that helped us to survive. And so many people with us!”

  Thirty years later Volsky would reflect that this, too, had been his country: a couple who had been through hell, whose lives were now caught in the lens of a pair of binoculars, as if in a marksman’s sights, yes, this pair of lovers seated on the front steps of an izba, in the pale light of an August evening, gazing at a ridge punctuated with graves above a riverbank, softly singing light melodies from an ancient, old-fashioned operetta.

  They often talked now about those performances given during the blockade, the audience shivering in the darkness, Porthos singing, his face bathed in tears, actors collapsing onstage, exhausted by cold and hunger. Those wartime days became their strength, their courage, and when they pictured that last concert under gunfire, all fears seemed to them ludicrous: those two agents from Security come to spy on them? A single minute of that concert was far more daunting than any other threat.

  Thinking about the children they were going to house also helped them not to live in the humiliation of fear. Constructing a bed, cutting a shirt out of an old sheet, the routine nature of such actions linked them to a future in which young lives would take possession of these objects, use them, bring them to life. And when they recalled from what depths of unhappiness these children would be coming to them, those two agents with their binoculars just seemed like ham actors.

  One evening they set up a big screen that was to divide the dormitory in two. Handling the slippery fabrics reminded them of the curtain going up and the idea arose, like a spark, in their exchanged glances: they should teach the children to act in a play, yes, to make theater—and sing in an operetta, why not?

  To the very end they resisted fear. And when, on one occasion, Volsky happened upon a cigarette stub with a gilded ring among the graves in the cemetery, he trampled this menacing token with scorn and gave a laugh: “The Germans used to smoke elegant cigs like that, too.”

  So they did not live through the sleepless nights that so many people underwent, on the alert for the hiss of tires outside the entrance to their building. The danger they braved erupted in broad daylight, in a huge uproar of curses, gesticulating hands, absurdly angry faces. A far cry from the silent, sly terror slowly seeping into everyone’s spirits.

  On this September day Mila went into Leningrad to hand in a notebook at the Blockade Museum: it had been found on a sandy slope by the shore, notes in German. When she made her way into the courtyard of the building she thought at first it must be a fire, then an anarchic demolition site, then a brawl taking place amid a conflagration.
It was all these things at once. A bonfire was blazing in front of the entrance to the warehouse that served as the exhibition hall. Military personnel (those “army officers” from State Security) were actively thrusting back the employees of the museum who seemed to be trying to leap into the flames. There was little shouting and this absence of words made the scene all the more distressing. But these women were not trying to immolate themselves, their hands were reaching into the fire to extract objects in order to save them. And the agents of State Security were hurling humble items into the blaze that they had just snatched from the exhibition hall: bundles of letters, clothes, photographs… The struggle was fierce. Elderly women were battling against a wall of fists and rifle butts, falling, picking themselves up, rushing toward the fire.

  … It was not the bloodiest day in the history of the regime holding sway in that country. It was its day of greatest shame. And when, decades later, they opened the archives on the killings and repressions, they did not always dare to mention this deadly bonfire…

  Mila was not aware how she found herself in the middle of the battle. She felt the scorching of the flames on her hands, her lips were bleeding, one sleeve of her dress dangled, half torn off. The heavy pounding of male fists thrust her back, she crouched, forced a way out for herself, seized a book, a photograph, tried to protect them, to hide them. An unfamiliar joy was mingled with the frenzy of this salvage operation: no protest had ever arisen in the country against the monolith of these dark uniforms and here the very first rebellion saw these women rising up, their bodies emaciated by the years of war, survivors with the angular faces of starved women.

  Hysterical shouting suddenly broke out at the exhibition hall’s exit. A plump man of small stature appeared, surrounded by his entourage. Mila quickly recognized him from official portraits in the newspapers: Malenkov, a member of the Leader’s praetorian guard. The uniforms stood to attention, breaking off the massacre.

  “Aha! The factionalists in hiding!” he bellowed. “They’ve spun themselves a web of rampant reaction here! They’ve fabricated the myth of a Leningrad fighting all alone, without the leadership of the Party! They’ve left out the vital role of the great Stalin, father of our victory! Everyone out! All this stale rubbish to the fire! Quickly! Move!”

  The uniforms went into action again and this time, assisted by Malenkov’s henchmen, they seized the staff and hurled them into a van waiting in the street. Mila grasped a bundle of letters and escaped, taking advantage of a thick trail of smoke given off by the flames as they devoured fresh armfuls of documents.

  She went home on foot, had time to tell Volsky everything. And to say what people who loved one another used to say in those days: “If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll live your life without looking back at the past…” They revealed nothing as they took their supper with the children (the first four had moved in two weeks previously). For a while they even hoped the arrest would take place at night or else in the morning, when the children were at school…

  They came looking for her an hour later: a car of the same type as before, they were nicknamed “black crows,” the same uniforms. Volsky came out first and it was him they spread-eagled brutally across the hood. The second car arrived, the agents emerging from it snatched the little case from Mila’s hands that she planned to take with her. “Look at what’s inside, it’s very important,” she shouted, and while the two agents, intrigued, were rummaging through the few items of clothing and toiletries, she threw herself toward Volsky, they kissed and, despite the arms already separating them, succeeded in whispering a few words. “Every day look at the sky, at least for a moment. I’ll do the same…” They were each thrown into one of the cars. Volsky could not remember which of them, he or Mila, had suggested looking at the sky, knowing that the other would also see it. He just had the bitter taste of blood in his mouth, Mila’s lips were still bleeding.

  The cars drove away with absurd haste along the dirt road that led around the house. For several seconds Mila and Volsky saw a youth running after this black motorcade, waving his arms and shouting, as if he wanted to catch up with it. In the pale light of the evening his red hair glowed like a cluster of fruits on a service tree.

  The hardest moment after the arrest was this interrogation. The investigating officer was young but knew that, whatever the prisoner’s attitude, he must hit him. Only he was not yet in full command of torture techniques. He struck clumsily and too hard. Volsky, his hands tied behind his back, fell, pressing his head against one shoulder to hide his face. Inexplicably the blows stopped. He turned to look at the officer and could not repress an “oh” of surprise. The man was standing upright, his head thrown back, pinching his nostrils, his fingers spotted with blood. “Open the window, take a little ice…,” suggested Volsky in a deliberately neutral voice. The officer snorted a kind of oath but, strangely, obeyed. The interrogation room was in the cellar, a basement window, protected by thick bars, looked out onto a sidewalk covered in fresh snow. The officer opened it, seized a fistful of flakes, pressed it against his nose. The bleeding calmed down and Volsky sensed that moment when a human mind wavers between compassion and scorn. He was to experience this several times during his years in the camp.

  A rapid sequence of expressions passed across the young officer’s face: Start hitting even harder, to punish the witness of this ridiculous discomfiture? Resume questioning as if nothing had happened? Or else… It was the expression in the prisoner’s eyes that astonished him: a perfect detachment, an almost smiling lucidity. The officer saw that the man thrown to the ground was staring at the tiny trace of blue through the window, the line of sky that he could manage to see from the floor.

  He helped Volsky back onto the stool, and repeated his question, to which he had received only negative replies.

  “I will ask again. Do you admit that you intended to fly the German aircraft exhibited at the so-called Blockade Museum and drop bombs on Smolny, in order to kill the members of the city’s leadership?”

  If Volsky had not previously heard tales of demented accusations of this type he would have thought he was going mad. But this forensic delirium was no longer a secret, people spoke of it, both terrified and almost elated by the excessiveness of the absurdity: such and such a person had been shot for attempting to poison the waters of all the great rivers in the country, another was said to have contrived to create a dozen subversive organizations in a village of a hundred inhabitants… And now here he was, planning to take off in an aircraft riddled with shrapnel that had had its undercarriage torn away!

  He was silent. There was not much choice. Deny it and lay himself open to more blows? Agree and sign his own death warrant?

  Suddenly the investigating officer’s voice slid down into a whisper: “Say you wanted to bomb Smolny to eliminate anti-Party factionalists at the heart of the city’s leadership.” And Volsky saw he was already putting this crackpot confession into writing. The young officer was indeed engaged in fabricating a criminal, but a criminal inspired by a praiseworthy desire to struggle against the enemies of the Party and its Guide. Lowering his head slightly, Volsky could see through the basement window a little snow and the reflection of the sky in a windowpane.

  Every day in the camp he found a moment of freedom to meet Mila’s gaze up in the sky.

  The life of a prisoner did not destroy him. He had often had occasion to sleep on the ground at the front, in mud or under snow. Here the bedsteads in huts equipped with stoves could almost seem comfortable. Cutting down trees was painful work but his arms retained the knack of handling the weight of shells. Hunger and scurvy were killers and yet, compared with the hundred and twenty-five grams of bread during the blockade, the poorest food seemed lavish.

  As for the length of his sentence, four and a half years in a camp, it was enough to make you smile: ten years of hard labor was the modest norm here. “Praise be for that officer’s nosebleed,” Volsky would say to himself.

  And in the
worst hours of despair there was this sky, whether gray, luminous, or nocturnal, and the link created by the power of a single gaze, beyond the world of human beings.

  The clemency of his own sentence made him hope for an even lighter penalty for Mila. What could she be accused of? Bringing a notebook stained with earth to the museum? Volsky contrived to believe her acquitted, free, settled with the children in their old izba: in the evening she would step outside under the quivering of the first stars, look up at the sky… Then this hope became muddied, he recalled that for a long time the repressions had parted company with all logic. He, who had never set foot in the cockpit of an aircraft, was said to have decided to bomb Leningrad. Even crazier intentions could have been attributed to Mila. She might have been sent to a camp thousands of miles from the one where he was!

  This supposition was a hideous torment. And yet, on occasion, he ventured on a declaration whose harsh and beautiful truth he feared himself: nothing could alter the moment when their eyes rose up to encounter one another. Then he pictured Mila amid white fields, her face uplifted toward the slow swirling of the snow.

  This vision helped him not to live in hatred, which was a good way of surviving in the camp. He understood this when one day in spring he found himself buried under a pile of logs: a gigantic pyramid of cedar trunks, which the prisoners were preparing to float downriver. The breakup of the ice was happening early and more violently than usual. The stack of tree trunks stirred, shaken by the vibration of the ice floes, waking into life on that great Siberian river. And all at once the mountain of logs began rolling, scattering. The timber was swallowed into cavities in the ice shelf, hurtled into the water, rose up vertically, fell back, reared up into walls that caved in… Several prisoners were trapped by the collapse. Two or three vanished into the river. They were able to save one of them, whose shoulder was shattered.