At the end of the drive, in front of the main entrance to the building, there arose a statue of Lenin made of the same immaculate plaster of Paris. It was as if the sculptor had endowed it with the same muscular verve, as a logical climax to his series of sportspeople. His legs apart, his fists grasping his cap and the lapel of his overcoat, Lenin was portrayed in a boxer’s pose.
On the morning of this particular day, we were lined up in our ranks on the parade ground. Each troop occupied a square clearly defined by white-painted lines. A good pace in front of these serried ranks stood the bugler and the drummer. In front of our troop: the two of us. The male and female instructors, visibly on edge, paced up and down their squares, examining the ranks meticulously A scarf carelessly tied, a button forgotten — nothing escaped their practiced eyes.
The waiting lasted too long. One hour, two hours, time dissolved in the soft heat of the asphalt, the blinding slab of the façade. The word “inspection,” whispered by the instructors, filtered through to us as it hung in the overheated air. But even without these intercepted whispers everything was plain. A visit by important personages, senior Party officials, was to mark this hot summers day.
They made us sing the same songs repeatedly to give us something to do as we waited. They checked the straightness of our ranks once more, and for the umpteenth time the tinny clatter of a final sound check — “testing, one, two, three” — erupted from a loudspeaker.
At last they appeared. We saw three black cars drawing up in front of the main entrance. Half a dozen men struggled free from the padded seats, not without difficulty, and shook their stiff legs. They looked as if they had lunched copiously only a short time earlier. Red faces, loosened ties, glazed looks. They came and sat on chairs facing our squares and the ceremony began.
First of all our troops took several turns around the parade ground, pounding the asphalt with their sandals and bawling out triumphal songs. But the asphalt was too soft. Instead of crisp, dry stamping, our footfalls produced slapping sounds, as if on a mass of well-risen dough. With their triumphant choruses the songs made our parched throats raw.
As it turned out, the men sitting on their chairs showed little interest in our noisy perambulations. They mopped their brows with their handkerchiefs and blew out their cheeks, stifling a yawn or a belch. Their drowsy eyes only became animated when one of the female instructors with bronzed legs beneath a little white skirt passed close by.
After the marching and the songs that, in the symbolic language of the ceremony, were supposed to signify our irresistible progress toward the radiant horizon, came the most important moment. We were to honor the flag. One by one each young troop leader marched up to the chief instructor, flourished his right arm in a pioneer salute, and announced that his troop was prepared.
When the red flag rose up the white mast, the whole parade ground exploded with drum rolls and bugle calls.
At the moment when the rectangle of red cloth halted at the top of the flagpole a kind of electric shock passed through our two heads. All the drums and the bugles fell silent, with the same disciplined crispness. But we, without conferring, without exchanging the slightest glance, continued to go at our instruments full blast. Better than that, we redoubled our efforts!
At first they thought it was simple stupidity. Our instructor hissed at us in a furious whisper: “Stop it, you idiots!” And he flashed a broad smile in the direction of the occupants of the chairs, as if to say: “They got carried away…. The impulsiveness of youth….” The seated gentlemen also smiled, with the indulgence people have for an excess of zeal.
But the bellowing of the bugle and the rattle of the drum resumed louder than ever. Then an incredible suspicion hovered over the ranks of the participants. Was this conscious disobedience, a coup being staged?
While remaining at attention beneath the flagpole, the chief instructor made a number of constrained but energetic gestures with his hands, and directed a silent grimace at the instructor for our troop. The latter hurried to pass on the message, twisting his mouth at us in turn and twice slicing the air with the flat of his hand: “Stop!” The men on the chairs exchanged uneasy smiles, like adults who are beginning to find the mischief of children tiresome.
We hardly felt we were present on that overheated parade ground. The orgy of sound was too intense. Dazzled by the glittering, brassy cascade, deafened by the thunder that made every cell in our bodies vibrate, we were far away. Somewhere beyond the bounds of the forests and meadows that swayed in the hot air. Somewhere beyond the horizon.
Already the instructors, overcome with fury, were shoving us out of the squares. Already snatching at our instruments. But as we wriggled within the grasp of hands that were virtually carrying us, we let fly our last roars from the bugle, extracted the final syncopated beats from the drum.
“This is sheer hooliganism!” whined a nasal voice from the chairs.
The door slammed behind us. We found ourselves in a tiny storeroom where the housekeeper kept her brushes, her cleaning cloths, and her buckets. A narrow dusty window looked out onto a little courtyard where, in anticipation of the visit of the Party bosses, they had stacked up everything that was old, broken, and ugly in the immaculate universe of this pioneer camp. Dismantled iron bedsteads, a wardrobe with smashed-in doors, several ripped mattresses. This heap was crowned with a large portrait in a broken frame, that of Marshal Voroshilov, who had fallen from grace several months previously.
Once the door had closed we were left alone. We were silent.
Our thoughts turned to the essential question, which, after what had happened, had acquired the clarity of an inescapable interrogation. Why all the marching and singing? Why all that fervor we were supposed to keep up day and night? In the name of what? For the glory of whom?
We were far from being little idiots intoxicated by the abstract and ideal beauty of some “ism.” Everything we appreciated in this world was, on the contrary, very material, concrete, palpable. From our parents we had learned a serene indifference to the ideological torrent that daily flowed from the airwaves, newspapers, and public platforms.
We were far from being dupes. Had we not been witnesses to a scene repeated each time a new guest came into your room? Yasha would point to a photo on the wall and, without lowering his voice, would remark: “And that’s my uncle, a journalist. Killed at the Kolyma camp by Stalin and company.”
He used to speak like that before the thaw, without hesitation, paying no attention to your mother’s warnings, as she murmured in an anxious tone: “Yasha, you know very well
Thanks to my father, we had little by little discovered the hidden face of the Great Victory. The shade of the triumphant generalissimo did not make appearances in our heroic dreams.
No, we were not dupes at all.
And yet every summer we would line up in our ranks once more and set off toward the radiant horizon. There was no pretense, no hypocrisy in our ringing songs that celebrated the young Red cavalryman and the workers of the world.
For if, during our imprisonment in the little storeroom, someone had put this simple question to us: “In the name of what does the bugle sound and the drum roll ring out each summer?” the reply would have been simple too. We would have answered quite artlessly: “In the name of our courtyard.”
Yes, in the name of those three redbrick buildings constructed in a hurry on a terrain still riddled with steel from the war. In the name of the triangle of sky above them, in the name of the benches overgrown with jasmine. The domino table. The Gap.
In the name of the man with a great, pale cranium, the man who had been dragged out of a mass of frozen corpses. Within that mass, as it was slowly blanketed with gentle snowflakes from a Christmas story, one heart was silently beating. The only heart still alive in all that mass.
That man had had incredible luck to be in the middle. Protected by the others. By the deaths of the others.
The bugle and the drum celebrated that incredible luc
k.
They also rang out in the name of a soldier. This man had stood alone beneath a sky that was breaking apart, falling back to earth in flames and fragments of burning steel. The soldier, firing his rifle with a telescopic sight, was operating among craters that opened up with the precision of a well-prepared artillery bombardment. Sector after sector. To the left, to the right. Closer, farther off. The earth was stripped bare beneath his feet, the trees flew into the air in flurries of leaves, leaving the soldier alone on the bare earth. He saw the village where a few moments before he had been selecting his living targets. Now in the ruins of the little houses there was no one left to kill. The soldier dived into a crater. He knew that the second shell never lands in a crater already dug. That’s the probability. He obeyed this lifesaving rule instinctively. But the blast from a new shell flung him out again.
What would become of them, these two men? If you believed in probability … The first would remain an anonymous unit among thousands of frozen blocks. The second would be a wretched legless cripple, a drunkard who would one day be found dead in his crate on wheels.
Each summer the bellowing of the bugle and the rattle of the drum celebrated the slip these two men had given to the laws of probability.
In the name of what?
In the name of the silence of our mothers. As children we had managed to learn nothing from mine about Siberia or yours about the siege of Leningrad.
“I’ll tell you about it another time, it’s all so long ago, first I need to remember. …” they would say, and they told us nothing.
They knew that in a child’s mind a mother must remain free from suffering, from tears, from harm.
In whose name?
In the name of those women who, in the midst of poverty and the humiliation of being crammed together communally, managed to carve out for us our share of childhood, of dreams, of sunlight. Your mother, as she carefully peeled the big potatoes, would tell us, as if it were a legend: “And the most surprising thing is that on his way to the duel Pushkin passed his wife. Yes, their coaches went right past one another. If she had seen him the duel could have been avoided. Just picture it! But sadly, she was shortsighted, like me….”
And in our room, while she was waiting for the laundry to thaw, my mother would talk to us about Siberia: “In the village the front doors of the izbas always had a little opening, like a tiny window, and every evening the villagers would put out a piece of bread and a pot of milk for the traveling people. They never went to bed without doing it …”
“And the siege? And the prisons?”
“I’ll tell you about it another time, it’s all so long ago, first I need to remember….”
No, our singing was not hypocritical, for we were singing of our happiness at being alive. Happiness at being born contrary to all the probabilities calculated by men of common sense and in contempt for all the wars invented by the makers of History. Happiness at being born, living, and knowing that there is nothing better in this world than the measured words of a woman with red hands seated in a room perfumed with the snowy chill of linen covered in hoarfrost.
In the name of what?
In the name of the call that used to ring out on summer evenings above our courtyard.
“Yasha!”
When Yasha and my father came in all you could make out in the dusk was the silhouette of a single man — tall and well-built.
In the name of that call…
When it began to grow dark in our storeroom we managed to pry out two nails that had secured the narrow window, picked up our instruments, and slipped outside. The whole camp was already asleep. Only the windows in the directors office remained lit. From there came bursts of laughter, the muffled tinkling of tableware, women’s voices. Clearly the administration was trying to wipe out the bad impression made on the Party bosses by arranging a banquet.
“They must be having a huge feast over there!” you remarked, smacking your lips.
We had had nothing to eat since morning.
“You know, the best way not to feel hungry is to try and think of something else,” you advised me. “You’ll see, it’ll pass, like the pain when you get a bruise.”
We climbed onto the pile of gutted mattresses and tried to think of something else.
In the glow from some streetlights hidden by the trees we could clearly make out the empty parade ground, its huge, useless flagstaff, and the pale ghosts of the plaster athletes. Despite his stocky boxer’s body, Lenin among his flower beds was looking rather lonely.
Without exchanging a word we took up our instruments, and the distant music, the weary saxophonist’s blues, poured out softly over the drowsing camp.
This time it had new accents. In the murmuring of the brass and the soft moaning of the drum we felt we could make out some fresh truths that had never before occurred to our young minds, filled as they were with rousing songs and heroic films.
We were stunned to discover that the blues from the other end of the world could take shape even in this hostile milieu, lonely, imprisoned, and hungry as we were. Yes, it could unfold its nocturnal lassitude even on a heap of gutted mattresses. Confronted by the stony gaze of a famous military leader fallen from grace, whose portrait, in its broken frame, lay at our feet …
The weary saxophonist was swaying somewhere beyond the oceans: the world we lived in no longer seemed unique to us. With sneaking, sacrilegious dread we contemplated a daring thought: the saxophonist at the edge of a tropical night might never have any desire to exchange his own weariness for the paradise we were prepared to impose on the whole planet. The paradise of the radiant horizon, the rousing songs, and our communal life. This notion verged on blasphemy. We hastened to return to the bewitching drowsiness of the rhythm.
Its soporific beat was interrupted in an unexpected way.
The presentable face of our storehouse, the other side from the little courtyard-cum-dumping-ground, looked out over a lawn with freshly mown grass. At its center was a fountain sculpted in the same spectral plaster of Paris as the athletes and Lenin. Like the majority of fountains, it only issued forth its jets of water at times of great rain or, in the case of our camp, on the occasion of grand inspections by the Party. This fountain was all the more unimpressive because the lawn was strictly out of bounds. The two wooden benches located beside the fountain were purely ornamental in character.
That day, because of the visit of the three black cars, the fountain was in continuous operation. Even after nightfall it went on spilling out gurgling water into its basin.
It was over this monotonous trickling that we heard the sound of footfalls accompanied by voices that seemed to be approaching. Our reflex was immediate. To topple off the soft mountain of mattresses and creep back to the little open window of our jail. We were sure we had heard the instructor’s voice. We needed to return as quickly as possible to being resigned prisoners, conscious of the gravity of our offense.
I was the first to slip back into the cluttered space of the storeroom. Poised to follow me, you stopped suddenly, sitting astride the windowsill, your forefinger to your lips. We pricked up our ears. The voices were not coming any closer, the sound of the footfalls had stopped. You swung out of the window and summoned me with a motion of your head. We skirted the wall of the storeroom and found ourselves a few yards away from the ornamental benches.
Our eyes, accustomed to the darkness, straight away noticed that one of them was occupied. We had no difficulty in recognizing the white skirt and blonde hair of the instructor Ludmilla. Beside her, or rather right up against her, sat a man whom our sharp young eyes quickly identified. It was one of the visitors from the Party.
In fact, to say that he was seated would be quite incorrect. His head, his hands, and even his legs were aquiver with hasty thrusting movements. The extreme rapidity of his actions gave us the impression that he had several pairs of arms and legs and at least two heads. Ludmilla, it seemed, had her work cut out for her to resist the assault
of these multiple limbs that embraced her waist, slid over her knees, clasped her hips. But did she, in truth, want to resist them? To judge by the speed with which she unbuttoned her blouse and raised the hem of her skirt — not all that much. The voice of the Party millipede was as feverish as his actions:
“But ‘later’ when? What do you mean ‘later’? ‘Later’ is now! You’re gorgeous. You’re really gorgeous! No, no! There’s no ‘later’! Let me … Listen, you and I are no longer pioneers. He who dares not, drinks no champagne! Look, they’re all asleep. What director? I don’t give a damn about the director. If he shows up I’ll drown him in the fountain. Do you know who I am? No, look. Just let me … Well, why not here? You know, I really like you! Now, that’s just bourgeois prejudice…. Undo it yourself if I’m hurting you…. No, there’s no one there…. It’s just cats having a ball…. My, but you’re beautiful! Don’t worry, I’ll put my coat… Hell! That goddamned fountain’s made it soaking wet…. Ah, you have no idea how you turn me on! …”
Ludmilla’s responses were rather more restrained. She confined herself to mentioning, between two playful grins, on the one hand the severity of the director and on the other the omnipresence of the caretaker. Finally even these convenient formulas gave out….
It was at this precise moment that the explosion occurred. Once again there was not the slightest element of conferring between us. No conspiratorial winks. No whispers exchanged. An impulse as percussive as an electric charge fused us together.
Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer Page 7
