Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  What lay at the bottom of the Pit? Why had it not been filled in? For us these questions were as mysterious as the origins of the world. We would throw stones into it, we would test its muddy depths with poles, but the Pit guarded its secret well.

  Apparently the only person who knew anything more about it was Zakharovna, an old woman with sharp little eyes half hidden by a headscarf. One of the three redbrick buildings had been erected where her izba once stood. She certainly knew the history of the Pit. But Zakharovna, it was common knowledge, was becoming daily more demented. And whenever anybody questioned her on the subject she would give a sly, mad smile and reply with some altogether unlikely phrase: “So then? Did you sin together and confess separate?”

  And she would begin to chuckle. People shrugged their shoulders. “When you’re crazy, you’re crazy….”

  Throughout the winter, however — that is for a good half of the year — the Pit lost its daunting appearance. Its surface froze over and became transformed into an excellent skating rink.

  In summer it had its uses too. Sometimes a brawl erupted at the domino table. Had someone cheated? Had there been an argument? The men would get up, hurl the dominoes to the ground, and start shoving and grappling with one another. Finally one of them would utter the ritual challenge: “Okay, you! I’ll see you at the back of the Pit. I’ll stick your nose in it, you stupid idiot!”

  The word “Pit” was a signal to the whole courtyard. The children broke off their games. The rows of babushkas on their benches became agitated. Women appeared at the open windows and filled the courtyard with shrill cries, calling to their husbands.

  “Lyosha!”

  “Sergey!”

  “Vanya!”

  Everyone understood that if the word “Pit” had been uttered things were getting serious.

  At that moment Yasha often appeared at the table with my father. He would set him down on the bench and say in a calm voice that mysteriously cut through the uproar of the argument: “All right, you guys, that’s enough. What say we have another game now I’ll bet anything Pyotr and I can take you.”

  Fretting and fuming, the men picked up the dominoes. It was one of the rare occasions when those two would play together.

  The second location was called “the Gap.”

  Our three buildings were situated at the edge of the little town of Sestrovsk. They faced inward onto the courtyard, and seemed to proclaim their own autonomy There was this town and its huge factory with black chimneys, a cinema, a train station. There was Leningrad, misty and alluring, half an hour away by train. But the courtyard clung jealously to its independence. The Gap contributed greatly to this. It was one of the apexes of our triangular courtyard, an apex facing out not toward the town but toward vacant lots.

  The other two apexes had long since been cluttered up with gray wooden sheds and woodpiles. They were redolent, especially in winter, of damp bark and rabbit hutches. In these cramped shacks the inhabitants of the three buildings kept their tools, raised rabbits and chickens, and, above all, accumulated unbelievable old junk that, they thought, could not fail to come in handy one day. From time to time it would transpire that one of the padlocks on one of the doors had been forced. The affair would set the whole courtyard in an uproar. People would imagine the most dramatic scenarios. They would work out the likely hour of the break-in. They would point a finger at the guilty ones — they could only be people from outside, of course. Often, moreover, the crime was confined to the breaking of an old padlock — the contents of the shack being touchingly useless.

  The third apex of the courtyard, the Gap, was beyond these smells and this mundane turbulence. It faced northwest, and at times when there were cold sunsets, veritable palaces of cloud arose there. The summer evenings were light and long, and the marbled and vaporous sumptuous-ness of the northern sky did not fade away. It remained frozen there, above the three redbrick buildings, above the domino table, above the Pit.

  The sky no longer floated along, all flat, parallel to the earth. It reared up vertically. Within this white and pink mass, columns arose, gothic arches took shape, spires thrust upward. The mauve light reflected from this beauty colored the faces of the players, the pages of a large book on Yasha’s knees, the pillowcases and sheets that a woman was hanging up on lines stretched beside the jasmine bushes.

  Lying on the grass, we stared silently at this vertical sky, not knowing what to make of its aerial architecture. We knew that somewhere beyond the open ground, only a few dozen miles away, lay the sea. A sea that led to unknown lands, all those Englands and Americas. We knew their cruel and unjust existence was drawing to a close, and their inhabitants would soon be joining us on our march toward the radiant horizon. But as we lay beneath these cloudy castles not even these thoughts touched us. For a moment the marching had stopped, the country roads still rang with the echo of our songs. We marked a pause.

  The dominoes clattered, plates and dishes rattled together in busy kitchens, and something arose above the Gap for which we had no name but which nevertheless made us happy.

  *

  They had met on the third anniversary of the Victory.

  Pyotr had long since settled down into his role as a disabled man. He had come to accept it. He moved around on a kind of cart he had made for himself, a chest mounted on four big wheels with ball bearings.

  On paved roads it moved well, he overtook passersby, but on the earth, especially in spring and autumn, he suffered as if on a treadmill, twisting and turning in his crate, swearing and thrusting his two sticks into the ground. In winter he did not go out at all, spending whole days in the izba belonging to Zakharovna, who rented half a room to him.

  On that day in May he got up, splashed his face from the bowl that Zakharovna placed every morning next to the curtain that marked his corner, shaved, and combed his hair with particular care. He picked up his overcoat from the mattress, where it served him as a blanket. He was afraid the morning might be chilly. Then, climbing onto a piece of burlap, he slid across the floor toward the exit, toward his crate on wheels.

  The weather was mild. He folded his coat and laid it on the bottom of the crate. That was certainly more comfortable. The earth, still soft and damp, gave way under his efforts, the wheels with their ball bearings got stuck, but today this did not seem to upset Pyotr all that much. He moved on toward the paved road, inhaled the bitter scent of the poplar shoots, and even softly whistled a tune remembered from the war.

  An hour later he was at his usual spot in front of the left wing of the train station, beside the staircase used by passengers coming into the town.

  When the muffled voice from the loudspeaker announced the arrival of the train from Leningrad, Pyotr sat up in his seat and molded his features into an expression that was both mournful and submissive.

  The passersby gave freely. The spring air and the public holiday made them generous. Some of them bent down a little to put money in his palm, others, in a hurry, tossed their rubles into the crate….

  Pyotr counted his take in the little dusty garden next to the station. Before setting off again he ate the slice of bread he had put in the pocket of his coat that morning. After three years he knew the route by heart: the station, a loaf of bread at the baker’s, a bottle in a booth by the market entrance.

  Almost all of his disability pension went to Zakharovna. The money he collected at the bottom of his crate was transformed into long evenings beside the open window when his mind slowly became clouded and the outlines of the houses melted into the distance. His body would melt too, like candle wax. You could have kneaded him at will, molded him into any shape you chose. And all the “if onlys” that had tormented him over those years became less and less impossible….

  Pyotr accelerated spiritedly and headed for the market stall at full tilt, with ball bearings rattling. It was a kind of kiosk attached to the wall, with a little window too high for him, through which the goods were served. He began knocking on the side of
it.

  “Mila!” he called up from below. “Are you asleep or what? Let’s have two half liters!”

  Mila, a buxom market woman, who generally recognized the rattling of his cart from a long way off, made no reply.

  Pyotr could not see the window very well and the whole front of the stall was encumbered with cans of food, packets of tea, and bottles.

  “Hey, wake up, you great fat lump!” he cried angrily, drumming even more fiercely on the edge of the window.

  Suddenly he heard a voice above him.

  “What is it you want?”

  He shifted in his crate, turned around. The side door to the stall was open. A young woman stood in front of him with her hand on the handle.

  “Where’s Mila?” he demanded brusquely.

  “She’s got the day off,” replied the young woman. “I’m filling in for her.”

  “Ah, I see … the day off,” Pyotr repeated and fell silent.

  She was silent as well, her hand still on the handle. She was not beautiful, only young. Her dull hair gathered into a bunch at the back of her neck, her eyes gray, her face simple, little used to smiling.

  But he, on the other hand, had a rather splendid look about him. He was boldly upright on his folded coat, one fist on his hip, his medals pinned to his fatigues for the occasion. A little out of breath from his efforts, he was breathing deeply. His face was young, animated by his haste. His eyes dark, with a hint of bitter madness in his look. A lock of fair, curly hair hung over his brow. He was handsome. If only … If only …

  “What is it you want?” she asked again, trying to smile at him.

  “A packet of Belomor,” he said, after a brief hesitation.

  Without going into her kiosk, she first took the cigarettes from the display through the open door, then the bill he offered her.

  Pyotr tossed the pack of cigarettes into the crate, gripped his sticks, and began thrusting furiously against the ground. Faster, faster! He was almost fleeing. The sand grated under the wheels, the pavement clattered. On the corner of the street he turned and saw her, still standing by the open door.

  He bought his two bottles at the other end of the town. At home he found a piece of fish pâté on the stool where Zakharovna used to leave the bowl in the morning. A holiday treat.

  He was lying on his mattress, beneath the open window. The bottle and the glass close to hand. Vague sounds and barely perceptible scents drifted in from outside, impinging on his slow, confused thoughts. He was already molding himself, adding in to this malleable clay something of the gilded clouds at the end of the day, a handful of prewar days, the avenues that once opened up so willingly before him. Now he added in a timid echo of the smile the young woman at the market stall had given him. Catching his eye, a dazzling beam of coppery light slipped onto the floor and laid to rest the residue of incredulity within him.

  When the young market girl appeared behind his curtain, accompanied by whispering from Zakharovna, Pyotr did not even stir. Why spoil the stately course of his dreams? She stopped, irresolute, holding back the flap of the curtain. The dazzling sunbeam slid over to her feet. He looked at her from his blissful fog and still did not stir.

  “I forgot to give you your change,” she softly said at last and put down a crumpled bill and several coins on a corner of the stool.

  Pyotr closed his eyes.

  Almost everything about my mothers childhood was unknown to me.

  One day, when the babushkas were chatting, I overheard a sigh and a remark mentioning my mother’s name.

  “Who? Lyuba? Yevdokimova? Well, let me tell you. What she went through as a girl I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

  The phrase stuck in my mind. I spent a long time wondering what this fearful thing might be that you wouldn’t even wish upon an enemy.

  The rare occasions when my mother talked to me about her childhood years coincided in my memory with Sunday evenings in winter. It was the day she did her ironing.

  From the courtyard she would bring in an enormous armful of laundry covered in hoarfrost and put it down on the chest. All the petrified sheets, shirts with sleeves as hard as cardboard, and rigid socks, bent in half, would glitter with a thousand crystals beneath the dull light of the electric bulb. And what the angular pile gave off, above all, was the rough, fresh smell of winter. The frozen heap seemed to be breathing.

  My mother took off her coat and seated herself, to give the laundry time to “settle down,” as she put it. I would perch with my bowl of warm milk at the corner of the table. Outside the window the dusk was already glowing blue. It was at such times that she began to talk, her big red hands relaxed on her knees, her gaze lost in the blue as it grew slowly deeper outside the window. For me her stories were always associated with that aromatic heap on the chest, the blissful relaxation of that woman with her cold, red hands.

  And if you came in to see me at that moment, she would get up and, without interrupting her story, still relaxed and dreamy, would pour you a bowl of milk. And we would listen together.

  Tale with the Smell of Frozen Laundry, One Sunday over the Ironing

  I shall call her Lyuba, which is what everyone in the courtyard called her. What the babushkas called her, who would not have wished the girlhood she had on their worst enemy.

  It seemed to Lyuba as if she had never seen her father in his indoor clothes. He always had his supple leather shoulder belt slung about him, and wore his high black boots. In the days of the harshest purges (“when Yezhov was in charge,” as my mother used to say, so as to avoid naming Stalin in front of us) for weeks at a time her father used to go to bed without undressing. Every night he knew they could come searching for him at any moment and take him away.

  By the end of 1939 he believed he could begin to breathe again. Thinking the worst was over, he even allowed himself to relax a little. For the New Year he dressed up as Santa Claus, especially for her, his daughter. He rigged himself out with a cotton-wool beard, and her only memory of him was this unrecognizable face, the conventional face of Santa Claus. Unconsciously, she spent the rest of her life trying to picture the features, the look, the smile that lay beneath this crude disguise….

  After New Year’s Day, for the winter vacation, Lyuba went with her mother to the country.

  In the Siberian izba, redolent of cedar and birch logs, the course of life was quite different. Here, for example, even the milk was transported to the village in quite another way. In the resonant cold of the morning the delicate music of sleigh bells would arise. Lyuba and her mother would lift up their heads from their teacups and cock an ear. Soon they could hear the crunching of runners, the harsh clatter of hoofs. They stood up — and put on their sheepskin coats.

  A horse had come to a stop in the yard, all white and encrusted with hoarfrost. Glebych, an old man with a ruddy face, swung himself heavily down from the sleigh. When he saw them descending the front steps he would bend down, withdraw a coarse gray cloth from the sleigh, and spread it out. Lyuba’s eyes opened wide. In his big fur mittens Glebych was holding a broad disk of frozen milk that glistened in the morning sun. Carefully he laid it on the embroidered napkin that her mother held out to him.

  On the ribbed surface of the crystalline disk Lyuba sometimes discovered a wisp of straw stuck to it or a kernel of corn. Sometimes even a cornflower … But her greatest delight was secretly to go up to the big frozen block, lick it right in the middle, and feel the breath of an exhilarating chill on her face!

  *

  Did they love each other, Lyuba and Pyotr? When I was a child the question never occurred to me. Everything seemed natural to me. I simply could not imagine my father being any different, or my mother experiencing any regrets at having such a husband, at knowing him to be irremediably as he was.

  Everything in our lives seemed natural to us. The doors to our apartments that were never locked at night — like the burrows in an anthill. And your father grading homework on the windowsill. He taught mathematics at the
school…. Nor were we surprised by your mother’s activities in the evenings. She wrote letters. Scores of letters. To ministries, to the Central Committee, to the local soviets. In them she always made the same request: that in a little garden in Leningrad a monument should be erected in memory of the victims of the siege. In reply she always received the same refusals — which bore the hallmarks of administrative politeness — or else simply silence. “At the very least a marble plaque on the wall!” she would beg. “There is no provision for this in the five-year plan for the social development of the area,” they would reply. She persevered, for she bore within her the harrowing memory of all the deaths she had witnessed as a child in the city under siege. She would be writing…. Your father would be making marks in red ink beside countless columns of figures…. And you would get up, turn down the corner of a page, and come along to see us.

  Twice in succession, first on the way to your apartment and then to ours, which was strictly identical, you had to make your way through a continuous human bustle. In the communal corridor children bowled along on their little bicycles. A man was painting a door. A woman carrying an enormous basin of boiling water emerged from the kitchen and, with a resounding whoosh, emptied the contents into the bathtub full of washing. The corridor filled with hot steam and smells of laundry.

  “Yegorych! Have you gone to sleep in there?” somebody demanded, rattling the toilet door handle.

  “Katya!” a woman’s voice cut through the steam. ‘Off to bed, quickly!”

  In the kitchen they were furiously scouring huge black cast-iron frying pans. And the music from a record player lulled us all with yearning for remote islands:

  When I left for Havana, that land of blue,

  My sorrow was known, my love, only to you….

  Inside our door it all started up again: the hubbub, the bustle, a restless music that seemed to insinuate itself among the busy women, seeking a space where it could flow in all tranquillity.