Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  We were never surprised when you came into our room without knocking and sat down beside me. My mother would get up, pour you some milk, and continue her story.

  A ringing noise responded to her words. It came from a tiny cubbyhole. There my father carried out his work as a cobbler.

  After their marriage my mother had had this idea: what more sedentary job could one think of than that of a cobbler? It was she who had obtained the authorization from the soviet, she who had procured all the necessary tools. When my father moved from Zakha-rovna’s izba into this communal flat, they set up his tiny workshop in a storeroom. Having spent his youth in the country, he had hands that could endow any object with life. He knew how to make them all obedient, useful.

  “Cobbler? Why not?” he had replied to my mother’s suggestion. “Only we’ll have to find some lasts — you know, those cast-iron feet….”

  There was never any shortage of customers. Shoes were unobtainable or too costly. So people went on repairing them until they crumbled into dust. A whole row of shoes, boots, and ankle boots was laid out along the wall. Amid their shriveled wrinkles each pair displayed its ailments: soles with toothy grins, twisted heels, dents. Sometimes there were so many of them that the line stretched well beyond the threshold of the workshop and along the wall of our room. At mealtimes we might glance at the line of footwear and offer comments.

  “Look, Zoika’s broken her heel again! That woman thinks of nothing but showing off on the dance floor…. Good Lord! Yegorych is getting ready for winter: he’s brought in his big walking boots. He really looks ahead, that fellow.

  Another line, not so long, was formed by the repaired shoes. With their thick new soles they had a robust and resolute look.

  It was thanks to this row of footwear awaiting their owners that, for the first time in my life, in a bizarre and rather comic fashion, I became aware of the complexity and fragility of the world beyond the triangle of our courtyard….

  One day I noticed a pair of men’s shoes in the lineup that looked a good deal more elegant than their solid neighbors. You could still see the trace of a gilded stamp inside them. The laces were unusually round and woven. I was very eager to see the stranger who came in to collect them. But he was a long time coming. His shoes were overtaken by the others, relegated to a corner. My father, mainly out of regard for their tarnished elegance, polished them a little from time to time. Still the owner did not come. He would never come. And for the first time I had a sense of the troubling vastness of cities, spaces where a man could go under, vanish just like that, leaving his shoes in a little storeroom in an unknown communal apartment….

  My father used to nail little steel tips in the shape of a crescent moon onto the heels of the shoes. On sidewalks they made a ringing, almost melodious noise. Thanks to this noise the inhabitants of our courtyard could recognize one another in the streets of Leningrad when they went there once in a while to buy provisions. Suddenly amid the ordinary footsteps on the Nevsky Prospekt we would hear this inimitable chinking sound. We would turn, lift up our hands to heaven and exclaim: “Well I never! Those are some of our neighbors from Sestrovsk!”

  And we would embrace as if we had not seen one another for years….

  My mother would finish the ironing, and you would get up, wish us good night, and leave the room. I would retire behind the plywood partition, in the corner where my narrow bed was located. Over it, hanging from a nail, was my bugle. I could hear my mother’s muffled voice as she stopped on the threshold of the storeroom, talking to my father. I could picture him clearly — seated on a stool wedged against the wall, a thick needle thrust into the big knot at the end of one pants leg, a shoe mounted on a last.

  When I came out from my corner one evening I saw my mother standing in the doorway of the little cubbyhole. She was silent and unmoving, staring fixedly at the lightbulb’s yellow halo. My father had his head resting against her breast in a posture of silent repose I had never seen him in before. His eyes were closed…. Hearing my footsteps my parents bestirred themselves.

  “Go to bed, Pyetya,” my mother said to him softly. “You can finish it tomorrow.”

  “One more nail,” he replied with a smile.

  My father was a man of the soil. He had always detested hunting, having one day seen a huntsman advancing on a wounded hare to finish it off. He had heard the little animal’s terrible cry, seen its eyes filled with real tears…. But we lived in a “besieged fortress of socialism” and every citizen needed to be able to shoot accurately.

  What he really missed was no longer being able to work with a scythe. He often spoke to us about those mornings in the meadows, the chill grass falling beneath the blade in a fan silvered with dew He would often repeat a rhyme, like a distant echo of those mornings that would never return:

  Cut, cut, my trusty scythe

  While the dew still shines,

  When it’s gone,

  We’ll head for home.

  It was for that reason that no one had ever called him “Cobbler.” Everyone understood that he was made for something else….

  There was one quite extraordinary summer in the life of the courtyard, in our own lives. Filled from start to finish with remarkable events.

  It all began one afternoon in May. Yasha burst into our room, waving a sheet of paper above his head — a paper filled with typing — and exclaimed: “Pyotr, this is it! We’ve won…. Your car: you’re going to get it! I’ve beaten them, those idiots….”

  And indeed, two days later all the inhabitants came out to see my father, solemn and radiant, making a circuit of the courtyard at the steering wheel of a little invalidka. Beside him sat Yasha.

  The tiny car looked like a dog kennel: it had only two seats and backfired deafeningly. But it was a pretty, dark cherry color, and what is more, it was the only car in the courtyard! That same evening Yasha knocked down the partition between our two sheds and threw out all the old junk. The first car acquired the first garage.

  My father would have found it hard to conceal his gratitude.

  “Listen, Yasha, you’ve been lugging me around for long enough. Now I’m going to take you to school every morning! Agreed?”

  Yasha, who used to reach his place of work in ten minutes via shortcuts, tried to dodge this generous offer. But above all he did not want to disappoint my father.

  The next day they set off together, down the main street of the town. It must have felt odd to my father to be traveling along roads that previously he had plodded along with his two sticks, seated in a jolting crate…. Already he was brimming with plans for long journeys. To Leningrad, for example, or even to Moscow, why not?

  Then one evening all eyes were directed toward the sky as it slowly filled with stars. The first sputnik had just been launched! It was Yasha who gave us commentaries. These turned the life of the courtyard upside down for several weeks, even distracting the domino players from their favorite activity.

  “There’s a pretty brief moment,” he told us, “when it’s possible to see it with the naked eye. When the sun has set, and the sky grows dark, but the sun’s not sunk too far below the line of the horizon. That’s when you can make out the sputnik against the background of the sky, lit by the sun’s rays, even though the sun itself is hidden….”

  How tensely we awaited that fleeting moment! Above the Gap the cloud castles slowly darkened, traveling toward the Baltic. The first stars trembled. And we, with our heads tilted back, scanned the sky. From time to time someone would utter a cry: “Over there, over there! I can see it!” and point an index finger toward a star that seemed to be moving. Others would look in that direction and discover his mistake. People would laugh: “Go to bed, astronomer! Put your glasses on, Copernicus!”

  In any event, during the course of that summer everyone claimed to have seen the sputnik at least once. This vigil under the evening sky, this roaming among the first stars, imported a special element of calm into the communal turbulence of the three bu
ildings.

  Our ardent marching toward the promise of the horizon was marked that year by a yet more vibrant enthusiasm. As if the whole world had heard the bugle’s joyful call and the tattoo on the drum.

  One day, when a halt was called, I saw you looking at a map spread out on the grass. You were pointing a finger at a little oblong island lost in the dark blue of the ocean:

  “This is only a first spark. The whole of America will catch fire! Just think, soon it’ll be called the Soviet Socialist Republic of America!”

  But for the moment the little oblong island, which for us had no other name but the Isle of Freedom, looked like a tiny fish ready to be swallowed up in the gaping maw of the Gulf of Mexico. And imperialist Florida loomed over it like a menacing fang.

  Our rallying call had been heard. Already Africa was shaking the chains of slavery, as our instructor used to put it.

  “You must prepare to defend all peoples in love with liberty against the tyranny of American imperialism,” he would add, looking us in the eye one by one.

  So the song we sang most often that summer chimed well with the struggle we looked forward to, burning with impatience:

  From Moscow to far Britain’s shores

  The Red Army will conquer all….

  You used to dream of learning “the African language.” For this would make our struggle all the more effective. I was preparing for it differently: I took off my sandals and marched barefoot over the pine needles, the stony ground, the hot sand…. And when, after a march, we happened to hear in the courtyard the dreamy nostalgia of the record player singing “Havana, that land of blue,” we shrugged our shoulders indignantly. How could anyone talk of this “land of blue” as long as the fang of Florida threatened the Isle of Freedom?

  All in all, we were filled with naive and spontaneous goodwill; we felt a need to help, to rescue, to show ourselves to be generous. An impulse quite natural and proportional to the extreme poverty in which we lived. This impulse could be manipulated, directed toward a specific goal. The mechanism for this manipulation had long since been tried and tested. But how could we know that?

  At night we sometimes mounted guard together at camp. First, we took several turns among the sleeping tents, then we stoked up the fire and became absorbed in our silent occupations. Lacking a textbook of the African language, you were learning the Morse code. I was tending the soles of my feet, removing splinters and applying plantain leaves to the scratches.

  Finally, to keep ourselves awake, we would both take up our instruments and embark on a silent duet. Without putting the bugle to my lips I would blow into it softly. And a sound could be heard, barely audible, yet most profound and subtle. As if at the end of the world a weary saxophone player were pouring out a lethargic and interminable blues into the night air. You caressed the skin of your drum with your fingers, and this dry friction kept time with the saxophone player’s weary melody. Thus we lived out the rhythm of a night whose existence we sensed unconsciously. We said nothing to each other in those moments. We stared at the glowing embers and with halfclosed eyes focused on the modulations of the unknown music that was being born within us….

  Yes, that summer brought us many extraordinary things. Even the habits of the domino players changed. We noticed now that their pieces would often be abandoned in a useless pile. And they talked. They argued hard. The names of Stalin, Khrushchev, Zhukov, and Castro came hurtling out and landed with as much clatter as their dominoes did in the old days.

  “He killed twenty million.”

  “He won the war.”

  “Without Zhukov he wouldn’t have won anything!”

  “What about the camps!”

  “And the corn!”

  “And law and order!”

  The pitch rose. The voices grew heated.

  “Hey! I had four years in the trenches, in the front line! And you don’t even know which end to load a rifle!”

  “Hang on, fellows! I finished the war in Berlin!”

  “Ha ha, in Berlin … Yes. In the canteen, with your ass in the soup!”

  Finally the word “Pit” would interrupt the communal symphony of the evening.

  “Listen, Pyotr, let’s go over there,” Yasha would say to my father, who sat beside him in the recess. “Let’s have us a game or two.

  During these long evenings the groans that came from the old swing were more languorous than ever. And we, wildly envious, watched the wide arc of the wooden plank. On its unstable surface, standing upright, with their hands gripping the ropes, they flew into the sky together, She and He. Lyoshka-the-Japanese, who was known by this name because of his slightly slanting eyes, and Zoïka, who used to bring her shoes with their broken heels to my father almost every week. Those two were the boldest and most reckless people in the whole courtyard. The babushkas grumbled about them on principle: “I ask you, would any self-respecting girl fly like that with her skirt in the air? She looks more like a parachutist!”

  But it was all in good fun, without ill-feeling.

  Zoïka hurled herself forward. The groans rose to an intolerable pitch. The girl’s hair, flung into the sky, blazed in the sinking sun. Fascinated, we contemplated her high heels as they dragged lightly against the plank, and risked coming unstuck altogether. Her long legs, too, exposed right up to dizzying limits. And her joyful eyes still dazzled by the sunlight that had already quit the courtyard.

  Lyoshka-the-Japanese watched her differently. With a subtle and mysterious smile, the pupils of his narrow eyes laughing and piercing. As he reached the apex he would bend his knees vigorously, thrusting his companion still higher as she chased the rays of the setting sun.

  How jealous we were! In six or seven years’ time, we told ourselves, we would be like him, we would fly high above the courtyard so that a girl might be transformed into just such a parachute with fiery tresses. For the moment we were content to feel our hearts taking wing with the leaping heels, then tumbling back in blissful weightlessness.

  Besides, we too had our share of heady joys more accessible to boys of our age. We would cross a piece of open ground, then another one, smaller and littered with old rusty scrap iron, and go down a steep path. Already on the way down we became aware of a strong scent of tar and the somewhat acrid reek of coal. The smells of the railroad. We climbed onto a concrete barrier overgrown with giant nettles and waited.

  The trains went by at full speed and we hardly ever managed to decipher their destinations. But sometimes, when a distant red eye lit up in the warm dusk, the train came to a halt. We studied the coaches eagerly. Behind the windows there was a life unfolding within the snug intimacy of the compartments that was totally foreign to our presence. One person was making his bed, another opening a bottle of mineral water. They drank tea, they read, they walked along the corridor with towels draped around their necks. All these people, who seemed not to have the faintest notion of the existence of our courtyard, fascinated us.

  One day we saw a young officer at an open window with a pretty woman, whose acquaintance he had clearly just made. We could hear their voices in the quiet of the evening. The officer was talking in an offhand manner, very much at ease, making broad, sweeping gestures in the air. The woman looked at him with evident wonder.

  “On the other hand,” he was saying, with raised eyebrows, “when you’ve managed to pull your plane out of a nosedive, I can tell you, you feel a hell of a — “

  The engine roared, the train lurched forward. The officer’s last words were lost in the clatter of the wheels. We swallowed a regretful sigh.

  “Leningrad to Sukhumi,” one of our number made out on an enamel plaque, then, when the last coach had disappeared into the warm haze above the track, he repeated dreamily: “Sukhumi … That must be really something!”

  We agreed with him, picturing this fabulous Sukhumi as a town of perpetual summer, inhabited by impressive officers and attractive young women who could be seduced with tales of dive-bombing.

  But
the most remarkable event of that extraordinary summer took place at the very heart of our courtyard.

  One day in early August a piercing cry obliterated all the other sounds, the peaceful, habitual sounds of an evening just like any other. This cry came from beside the Pit. The domino players broke off their game and turned their heads toward the thickets that surrounded the pool. The anxious faces of women appeared at windows. Old Zakharovna flapped her bony hand. We rushed toward the mythical location.

  On arrival at the edge of the crater we remained rooted to the spot, faced with an inconceivable sight. The Pit had dried up.

  Yes, it was empty, dry. And on its clay bottom stood a little boy, one of our gang, so dumbfounded he could not utter a word.

  True, the heat that year had been quite exceptional. But this argument was not enough for us. It did not begin to match the significance of the Pit in the life of our buildings. Particularly since this location was soon to suffer a rather extraordinary fate. One that would change the very appearance of our courtyard.

  As luck would have it, this event had been preceded in an obscurely symbolic way by an apparently banal occurrence.

  A few days before the surprising discovery a huge jolting truck appeared in the Gap. The children recognized it at once and proclaimed at the tops of their voices: “The cinema! The cinema!”

  Indeed it was the traveling cinema that came at dusk once or twice a month in summer to show its films. As it happens, they were always very ordinary films. Never features. Documentaries about Arctic exploration, about the areas of Leningrad with a revolutionary past, or even about the construction of the great canal in the Kara Kum desert… Nevertheless we watched them with genuine pleasure. There was not a single television set among the inhabitants of the three buildings. The cinema in the town was a long way off and generally packed. Here the show was free and you did not even have to get up from the domino table. The truck stopped just across from the players. People brought out chairs and stools, the children sat on the ground, some people even watched sitting on their bicycles.