Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  That evening the subject of the film was markedly different. When the black and white flickering on the screen settled down we saw the title appearing in exaggerated lettering, designed to inspire fear:

  THE THREAT OF ATOMIC WAR

  “The threat of atomic war!” repeated one of the domino players, for the benefit of the oldest and the youngest, who could not read. “The hell with it!”

  Then we saw an enormous mushroom cloud with a white cap revolving on a stem. With slightly tremulous solemnity the commentator observed: “On the sixth of August 1945, American imperialism inscribed a new crime against humanity in its bloody annals…. Hiroshima … On the ninth of August… Nagasaki … Hundreds of thousands of civilians …”

  “Dear God, how terrible!” sighed one of the babushkas sitting in the front row.

  “Mom, why isn’t that plane moving?” shrilled a little boy twisting the handlebars of his bicycle.

  “Hush, hush!” came several voices.

  A simplified map of the world appeared on the screen. As the commentator’s explanations unfolded, it gradually became covered with black spots, like the pustules from a fearsome plague. These were the military bases of the United States. From these black spots swift little arrows were launched toward the readily recognizable contours of our country, the poison darts of future nuclear attacks.

  “Those filthy American swine!” growled one of the men at the domino table. “And to think I greeted them with open arms on the Elbe….”

  Once again, to illustrate the message more clearly, ruined buildings appeared, as well as the whitish mushroom, majestic and arrogant. The camera panned over a sequence of injured and blind victims, bodies with horrible burns.

  “And the worst of it is, that filthy stuff gets at you everywhere,” murmured a spectator over by the jasmine.

  “Look, Mom,” a little girl sitting on her mother’s knee cried out suddenly, pointing her finger at the screen. “That man looks like Lyoshka-the-Japanese.”

  “Quiet, Silly!” the mother rebuked her and then added, in a hesitant voice, half addressing the company at large: “The thing is, it’s not like during the last war. Now you don’t know how to protect yourself.

  The spoken commentary seemed to anticipate this question. On the screen and still within the context of a series of simple diagrams, a number of circles appeared, surrounding a kind of large asterisk: the epicenter of the explosion. Maintaining a severely scientific detachment and even, it seemed, betraying a certain relish in the exposition, the voice provided explanations. Thus, in the first circle, Zone One, it said, you would be burned alive. In the second, you would be killed instantly by the blast. All things considered, these first two zones were of very little interest. For in them you would die “normally,” the radioactivity would not have time to take effect on you….

  Things became interesting from the third zone onward. There, and especially in the subsequent circles, everything had to be taken into consideration: the period of exposure to radiation, the wind speed, the nature of your clothes, and even the cracks in your windowpanes.

  A glimmer of hope for survival began to dawn. People stared at the figures that now filled the screen. Percentages of radioactivity, distances in kilometers, acceptable doses of radiation.

  Finally came the most practical part of the film everyone had been waiting for impatiently.

  “In every district of our country,” the voice assured us, “shelters have been erected in accordance with a strictly scientific design that guarantees infallible protection against nuclear radiation.”

  Incredulous exclamations could be heard.

  “So where’s our shelter?” asked the woman who was holding her little daughter on her knee. “Where are we going to go? In the hutches with our rabbits? They must be joking! We haven’t got a shelter….”

  “It’s in Leningrad, your shelter, underneath the Smolny,” jeered somebody, taking advantage of the darkness….

  The commentator, as if he foresaw just such a reaction, revealed himself to be very understanding: “It may well be that, as a result of moving, you now live a long way from any specially constructed shelter. In this case, you should know that you can build a totally effective shelter yourselves….”

  Two men in shirtsleeves appeared on the screen and with the enthusiastic agility of Stakhanovite workers began digging in the earth at the edge of a wood. Hardly had this shot faded when the men could be seen already snugly tucked away in their burrow. Its ceiling was reinforced with stakes and the inside was woven with pine branches. One of the survivors of the atomic war seemed to be flashing a smile at the audience before he pulled shut a panel of neatly dovetailed planks over the opening.

  The figures showed that a layer of soil twenty centimeters thick excludes thirty-five percent of radiation, and a layer forty centimeters thick, seventy percent; with a meter of earth above your head you can be sure that one hundred percent of the radiation will be absorbed by it.

  “And what if you don’t have a spade available?” a voice asked with a sigh.

  But the commentator had foreseen this eventuality too.

  The two Stakhanovite survivors appeared once more. Their only equipment now was ordinary knives. Bent double, like reapers, they began cutting thick armfuls of rushes. In the background a little winding river could be seen.

  “It is important to know,” the voice-over instructed, “that rushes constitute an excellent natural barrier to radiation. A meter and a half of these stems will keep out up to forty-five percent of the radiation….”

  By now the two men were installed in a hut whose thick roof looked like that of a dwelling for gnomes.

  This time the disapproval was unanimous.

  “He’s got some nerve. To start with you have to find yourself a river with all those rushes.”

  “Forty-five percent! And what about the rest? Is he saving it for dessert or what?”

  “It would take you two days to build a thatched cottage like that.”

  But the film was already coming to an end. By way of a conclusion a quotation appeared against a leafy background:

  “We have a Motherland to defend, the men to defend it, the arms to defend it. “

  J. Stalin

  So the film dated from before the thaw….

  The last sentence, however resolute, had failed to dispel the doubts inspired by the rush shelter. People got slowly to their feet, picked up their stools and, with seeming reluctance, lugged them back to the main entrances.

  “You’d have done better to bring us a film about Kara Kum, like last time,” one of the women said to the operator as he closed the truck doors. “At least there were camels in it. And jerboas. The kids enjoyed that…. But with all your bombs just before bedtime they won’t sleep now, that’s for sure. And as for those rushes; that was ajoke.”

  “I bring what they give me,” replied the operator. “And when it comes to the bomb, there’s only one thing to do if there’s an atomic attack….”

  “What’s that?”

  The spectators all put down their stools and turned toward him.

  “Wrap yourself in a white sheet and crawl to the nearest cemetery.”

  The people laughed uncertainly, not sure of having understood.

  “And why a white sheet?” asked the woman who had missed the jerboas.

  “So as to be buried in a shroud, as befits an honest man!

  The operator guffawed, slammed the door, and climbed up into his truck. Lurching across the uneven ground of the courtyard, the truck headed for the Gap.

  “Don’t worry,” said my father, trying to set people’s minds at rest. “Now, thanks to Fidel, we’ll be able to plant our rockets right under their Yankee noses.”

  “Yes, assuming their working class hasn’t already shoved the whole imperialist bordello overboard,” said Yasha, smiling.

  We listened to them avidly. The Isle of Freedom no longer looked like a defenseless little fish. Now we saw the spines of
our rockets bristling along its back. We were sure that Florida would break its yellow fang on these spikes.

  “But all the same,” you said to me very seriously, “we ought to try out the rush shelter. Say we put two meters on. Who knows, it might keep out a hundred percent of the radiation.”

  This plan never came to fruition. For a few days later the Pit was discovered all dried out. Now the film about atomic war would reveal its strange symbolic significance….

  That morning we hardly touched breakfast. A single idea obsessed us: to be the first to explore the bottom of the Pit.

  Seven or eight of us gathered to trample on its slippery, muddy bottom that made a noise beneath the soles of our sandals like suction cups being pulled off a patient s back.

  The frenzy of a gold rush was as nothing beside the feverishness with which we plunged into the bowels of this place, finally accessible. We jabbed rusty spades into it, requisitioned from among the junk in the sheds. We lifted rocks by means of levers. Some of us even grunted like animals, tearing at the slimy brown interior with our fingernails. It had guarded its secret far too long, the Pit. Now we wanted to rip it out by force, as fast as we could.

  The jostling at the bottom of the crater was fierce. Heads banged together; elbows, in their frenzied movements, rammed noses; mud spurted out of everything. But the importance of our first discoveries led us to put up with the discomfort of the excavations. A huge shell case, a piece of barbed wire wrapped in shreds of rotten cloth, a gas mask with the glass broken, a skull. Priceless treasures. They seemed to be leading us on toward a unique, major discovery, toward some fabulous object that was already slowly awakening within the mass of warm clay.

  The thing wasted little time before revealing itself. First in the form of an obstacle that blocked all our efforts, then as a sort of metallic flank, convex, greenish, whose smooth surface we uncovered little by little. We thought we must be dealing with a thick drainpipe embedded in the clay. We were disappointed. Had we shifted all that earth for a bit of ironwork such as you could find in great abundance in many vacant lots?

  Suddenly a boy who was digging at one end of the pipe emitted a whistle of surprise. This part of the tube was growing narrower and had strange fins on it. We looked at it more closely.

  “But it’s a bomb!” you cried. “An unexploded bomb!” We stepped back a pace. The stupid bit of piping had suddenly transformed itself into a great menacing beast, with its blackened stabilizers sticking up out of the earth….

  Without being alerted, the adults began to gather around the crater, as if they had had an intuition of our discovery. In the frozen gaze they focused on the monster emerging from the clay we discerned the ghost of ancient terrors, of griefs from long ago.

  Three hours later the Pit was surrounded by a rope to which scraps of red cloth were tied. At the four corners of this area notices were posted: “Danger.” Engineers were stripping away the undergrowth around the Pit and performing their magic rituals.

  Minutes ticked away unusually slowly and silently. The children were made to go indoors, the Gap was blocked by a truck. It was strange to look out of the window and see the domino table unoccupied, the swing motionless, the babushkas’ benches empty. Adults passing one another in the apartment spoke in hushed tones.

  Finally, a rumor filtered through the closed windows and doors. The bomb was embedded between two blocks of concrete. It could neither be defused on the spot nor extracted to be transported elsewhere….

  People hesitated to raise the third possibility. But Yasha, assuming an air of comic alarm, dared to remark: “If they explode it here in the courtyard we all run the risk of being allocated new apartments. Separate ones! It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, wouldn’t you say?”

  In the courtyard we saw several army officers appear, for whom one of the engineers was clearly acting as guide. They inspected the Pit and looked at the windows in our three buildings, shaking their heads and exchanging heavily significant glances. Two soldiers unrolled a dekameter measuring chain between the edge of the Pit and the closest of the walls.

  The following morning there could no longer be any doubt about it. We were awakened by the continuous clatter of jackhammers. Our noses pressed to the window, we saw the Pit flattened by a slab of concrete. Around its edges the soldiers were erecting a kind of wooden dome, constructed from thick pine planks fastened to a broad skeleton.

  “It’s to screen off shrapnel,” explained my father in a grave voice.

  So the third possibility had won the day.

  The main business was carried out on Saturday. The inhabitants of the three buildings came out into the courtyard in an orderly manner and proceeded toward the army trucks that awaited them in the Gap. It looked as if we were simulating a wartime evacuation. The women carried little bags — emergency supplies for the whole family. The men assisted the most decrepit of the babushkas. The children, whose parents had made them wear warm clothes — no one knew why — frowned solemnly, happy to look grown up. Yes, it was a real evacuation.

  When we were all packed into the trucks a voice called out several times at the main entrances to the buildings: “Is everyone out? Is anyone still there? Hello! Hello! Anybody there?”

  There was no reply. The trucks moved off.

  They drove us a few miles away. We climbed down in the middle of a field of grain without taking our eyes off the indistinct pinkish smudge formed in the distance by our three buildings. The military also kept the pink smudge under observation, consulting their watches with a preoccupation that was more assumed than real.

  Everyone in our group of evacuees was convinced that the explosion would take place at a precise time, army fashion, at ten or eleven on the dot. Such rigor seemed to us absolutely essential for the gravity of the occasion to be properly felt.

  However, eleven o’clock came and went and the sun grew hot, but the air above the pink smudge still remained serenely clear. It was then that someone had a flash of inspiration: the explosion would take place at noon precisely, for it was at noon that the radio broadcast the bulletin with the latest news. In it the mystery of our Pit would doubtless enjoy a place of honor. Everyone was of the same opinion. We were surprised at not having thought of it earlier. Of course it would be at twelve noon sharp.

  Yasha, who was beginning to grow bored, then decided to test the accuracy of this forecast. He went to the officer for information…. Yasha had not brought the straw hat he always wore in sunlight. He had thought our expedition would be over quickly. On his head he had now put a handkerchief, knotted tightly at the corners, with a large burdock leaf slipped underneath it. It was my father who had advised him to do this.

  “I used to do it at the front,” he explained.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Yasha had said with a smile. “The leaf wilts and absorbs part of the heat.

  With his handkerchief on his head he looked to the officer less like an evacuated tenant than a typical vacationer. The stalk of the burdock leaf was sticking out over one ear, not unlike a snails semi transparent horn. The officer scowled at him.

  “Comrade Captain,” asked Yasha, pretending to confuse the little star on the officers epaulettes with the other kind, the large one: “If it’s not a military secret, when’s the explosion due?”

  The officer turned away so as not to see the snail’s horn and replied between clenched teeth. “Keep calm, citizen. No pointless questions. The exact timing of the operation is not to be relayed to just anyone.”

  “Tell me, at least, if it’s for noon or later,” insisted Yasha.

  “For noon? You must be joking. You’ve seen how much they still have to —”

  At that very moment a cloud of dust and smoke made its appearance above the pink smudge of the three buildings. A few seconds later the ground shook beneath our feet and we heard the echoing roar of the explosion.

  “Wow! That was a bigger bang than we expected!” exclaimed the officer. For a few moments he had become a
normal human being again.

  “But take care not to relay that information to just anyone, Comrade Second Lieutenant,” said Yasha, with a wink.

  It was only toward evening that they took us back home. A scene of devastation met our eyes. The ground was strewn with fragments of timber, branches, the trunks of uprooted trees. On the site of the Pit we saw a crater twice as wide as before: in it the roots of several young poplar trees were sticking up into the air. Even the tall trees had not been spared: foliage thinned out, as in autumn, crowns smashed, branches dangling.

  And, as the height of irony, the great wooden dome, half in pieces, had landed on the domino table.

  Fortunately the night was warm. We swept up the fragments of windowpanes and went to bed in rooms open onto the strange nocturnal landscape of our ravaged courtyard. That night we felt closer than ever to its tormented soul.

  Next morning, Sunday, two pieces of news emerged to underline the transformation of our communal life. First of all we learned that Zakharovna had not left the building at all during the explosion. She had simply remained in her apartment and, taking advantage of her neighbors’ absence, had put up her tomatoes.

  “Otherwise, I should never have had the kitchen to myself,” she explained.

  The explosion seemed to have restored her wits. She spoke in a measured fashion and recounted in detail the preparations the engineers had made. People were dumbfounded.

  “What did I tell you? It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” joked Yasha.

  My father interpreted the joke in his own fashion.

  “She told me one day, when I was still living at her place, that she’d seen a bomb fall close to her izba during the war. She heard it coming and flung herself to the ground. But there was no explosion. That happens. Very rarely, but it happens. And then a few days later she got a notice from the front. Her son had been blown up by a mine. She must have mixed up the two events in her mind. Ever since then she’s had a screw loose…. Now it’s all right: everything’s been shaken back into place….”