The bugle roared, the drum thundered. We emerged from the shadows.
I blew as I had never blown in my life before. The bugle no longer called, it yelled, it vociferated, burst into sobs. In its cry could be heard the death rattle of our extinguished young dreams. The wailing of a betrayed lover. A last hurrah from the desperado of the radiant paradise. A tragic bawling from the kamikaze of the impossible horizon.
You had left your drumsticks behind on the pile of gutted mattresses. The drum was transformed into a tomtom with solemn, funereal vibrations. The beat had a penetrating power, a rhythm that, once heard, does not leave you. This was what rooted the occupants of the ornamental bench to the spot out there on the forbidden lawn. They sat bolt upright and remained transfixed, much like the plaster statues.
The situation toppled over into catastrophe as a result of the caretakers strict professional conscience. He had been drinking and then fallen asleep, tormented by remorse and doom-laden forebodings. At the first bugle calls he bounded out of his narrow iron bed, overwhelmed by the noise, and pressed down the levers for all the electric switches.
The camp was flooded with harsh, blinding light. Had not our instructor promised us that you could play soccer at night there?
It was under this pitiless light that the guests at the banquet, attracted by the clamor of our instruments, appeared on the lawn. The women with traces of makeup trickling down their wan faces, the men with glazed eyes and features that seemed blurred and washed out. Their resemblance to the plaster statues was striking.
We quickly perceived that our millipede was at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of these pallid pleasure-seekers. Seeing him in this delicate situation, they swiftly snapped to attention in almost Pavlovian fashion.
Ludmilla was writhing, trying to pull down her skirt, which had ridden up to her armpits. But the skirt was too tight, and the new arrivals stared in fascination at her long, tanned legs as they quivered in a strange, febrile, and involuntary striptease.
It was while this was happening that the young troop leaders began to arrive on the double. No doubt they thought it was a night alert, an exercise we had been promised ever since the start of our visit. They arrived, having thrown on their clothes, their shirts unbuttoned, their knotted scarves awry. As they reached the lawn, deafened and blinded, they came to a halt, some in front of the chief instructor, some in front of Ludmilla, raising their right arms and yelling at the tops of their voices to drown our uproar:
“Always prepared!”
But in place of the time-honored saluting response, the instructors bellowed:
“Get lost!”
The troop leaders, thinking they were living through a nightmare, froze in their turn into the same greenish, phosphorescent plaster.
The millipede, not noticing the flagrant disarray of his pants, kept adjusting his necktie with practiced agility. The magnitude of the disaster had palpably clouded his brain. For he stamped and shouted:
“Turn off that fountain at once! At once! Is this what you call the political education of youth? Turn off the fountain! At once! Turn it off!”
What he was really objecting to was you and me. And the blinding light. When the men standing to attention had finally managed to decode the sense of his enigmatic commands, the light was put out and we were hauled off to our dormitory. There in our bedside stands were our rations: two slices of bread and a mug filled with cold tea.
Next morning we walked together down a country lane that led to the station. We were being sent home. The punishment could have been much more severe, but in view of the importance of the personages implicated, our educators had decided to hush up the affair and get us off their hands as quickly as possible.
We walked along, our sandals throwing up warm dust, and from time to time we turned back to look at the white silhouette of the great building that dominated the plain. We carried our meager luggage in two identical string bags. Like cowards, they had confiscated the bugle and drum while we slept.
It was a strange experience for us to walk along, shuffling our feet, stopping wherever we felt like it. No ranks. No flag. No songs. The sky was gray, low. The swifts were skimming over the ground. The meadows that ran down to a river gave off the strong, humid smell that precedes rain. We felt as if we were seeing and sensing all this for the first time in our lives.
What surprised us as well was the horizon. It continued to quiver in the same place, even though we had turned our backs on our camp and were advancing in the opposite direction to that of our daily marches. So all is not lost, we thought.
“But it’s sad, all the same,” you suddenly said in a low voice, without looking at me. “It’s sad….”
I tried to reassure you.
“Hey, don’t worry about it! We’ll join the paratroopers. It’s a lot more interesting than marching all day long.”
You said nothing. You had meant something different. A minute later you raised your head, looked me in the eye, and repeated with edgy insistence: “It’s sad. Ludmilla with that guy … It’s horrible!”
I gave you a quizzical look. But you broke off, lowered your head and walked faster.
It is true that you and I had very different temperaments. And besides, all of us were a bit in love with the beautiful Ludmilla.
Close to the little station where we were due to catch the train to Sestrovsk we passed a troop of pioneers who had just arrived. Their feet pounded the earth conscientiously, the bugle deafened passersby, the drum faultlessly repeated its dull refrain.
We stared at them, dumbstruck. Their eyes open wide, their mouths tensed. And to think that only the day before we had lookedjust like them down to the tiniest detail! It seemed incredible to us.
“He’s thumping away on it like a jackhammer,” you observed, gazing disdainfully at the drummer.
“And that one looks as if he’s spitting into it,” I added, referring to the bugler.
We, too, spat with disgust and moved off toward the ticket windows.
On one of the last days in August the inhabitants of our three buildings witnessed a scene that definitively marked the end of an era in the history of the courtyard — as well as our own.
One peaceful evening, much like the others, a quarrel erupted at the domino table. The pieces flew. The explosive force of the oaths rose rapidly.
We saw big fists, heavy as bludgeons, swinging back and forth. The first bloodied face. A man on the ground. Hate-filled hisses. The shrill cries of women. The tears of frightened children. The protracted stamping, clumsy and ponderous, of men out of breath.
Finally they stopped. Confronting one another, their faces screwed up with hatred, their shirts in tatters, their lips bleeding. Filled with mutual loathing.
It was the hatred of those who suddenly see in others, as if in a mirror, the blind alley of their own lives. The fine promises for the future they have swallowed with trusting naïveté. The Great Victories they have been robbed of. The beautiful dream in the name of which they have spent all their lives in a narrow hole in an anthill.
And so this brawl was inevitable. They had forgotten the magic word “Pit” that in the old days used to mobilize the whole courtyard. Pit! Then a man with weary but smiling eyes would get up from his bench. He would walk over to the table, carrying another man on his back. He would set him down and then call out into the mass of shoulders already jostling one another: “All right, boys. There’s just time for one more game before the sputnik!”
A definitive page had been turned. And as all the real grand farewells are spoken lightly, in the cheerful confidence of meeting again very soon, our own leavetaking a year later was confined to several playful punches, a few trivial remarks, a nonchalant handshake. We were just fourteen. I was entering the Suvorov military academy, that nursery for the army. You were off to Leningrad to a mathematics school.
As we shook hands we mentioned various vague plans for the next vacation. We haven’t seen each other since….
&
nbsp; I saw my mother for the last time a few days before leaving for Central Asia, where I was to take up my first military assignment.
It is a dream well-worn from having been nurtured in the heads of so many more or less sentimental young officers: to walk across the courtyard of the dwelling where you spent your childhood, carelessly greeting those residents who recognize you, as they marvel at the overcoat on your swelling torso and the crunch of your well-polished boots. I, too, was in thrall to that old dream.
It was not a particularly propitious day for this dazzling scenario of a return under the parental roof. All morning a light autumn drizzle had been embroidering the air with its fine gray dots. I took a bunch of roses. I was afraid they were a bit too faded. “Will they still smell of anything?” I wondered anxiously. When there was no one around me I sniffed them furtively. They smelled of autumn leaves moistened with the “Baltic” eau de cologne I used to sprinkle on myself after shaving.
At the entrance to the courtyard, in the Gap, I saw a trench like one where they are laying gas pipes. It was partly flooded and surrounded by clods of earth covered in heel marks. So as not to dirty the boots of my old dream, I hugged the redbrick wall.
The courtyard, with its bare poplar trees, its domino table, its benches dark with rain, seemed to me abandoned, shrunken.
There was nobody in our apartment. I rang at yours. Before greeting me, as if to spare me even a second of anxious anticipation, your mother hastily declared: “It’s nothing serious, nothing serious! She’s in the hospital, but there’s nothing seriously wrong with her.”
I put my flowers down on the shelf in your corridor. At the top of the staircase I turned to ask: “And Arkady? Does he come by from time to time?”
“Oh, he’s in Moscow now. Most of the time he telephones to say he won’t be coming….”
The old hospital in Sestrovsk was filled with the comings and goings of pallid patients in their crumpled pajamas. Visitors could be seen sitting on the edges of beds taking apples and jars of jam out of their bags. The young nurse escorting me stopped halfway along a corridor and said to me: “There!”
The wards were packed. Several beds had been lined up along the walls of the corridor. Among them was my mother’s. To avoid her bedside stand obstructing the traffic they had set it behind the metal bars at the head of her bed. After she had kissed me she stretched out her hand through the bars and picked up off the stand a semicircular comb that she always used to put in her hair.
What I saw on this night table was like a snapshot of our life in the old days. A strange encounter with familiar objects now standing guard over this bed against the long corridor with its cold, bare walls. The comb, a little mirror in a nickel-plated frame. And on the top shelf an old cup with a gilded edge half worn away.
We spent a moment engaged in a semblance of a conversation made up of the assurances one gives as a matter of course, while scrutinizing the others features, searching for imperceptible unadmitted signs.
In the dining room somebody sounded a summons with the aid of an aluminum plate and a spoon.
“Lunchtime. Lunchtime!” a tremulous voice called out.
“Should you be going?” I asked, getting up from the chair the nurse had brought me.
“No, no … There’s plenty of time,” my mother replied. “There are three sittings. The dining room’s too small. I can go with the last group.”
I sat down again. The corridor was filled with the procession of faded pajamas and the shuffling of slippers. All the patients carried their own cups.
I failed to notice the moment in our routine conversation when a story began to emerge, slow and interrupted by the words of people walking past. By the time I became aware of this, it was already well under way I listened to her tale. I was touched and embarrassed to realize that my mother had begun to repeat the episode she had recounted to us on those Sundays when she was ironing. The one about the Siberian izba and the frozen milk brought on a snow-covered sleigh.
My mouth tensed in a strained smile. I listened to her, filled with compassion for this old head whose hair had the transparency of grayish glass. The tale was repeated with painful precision. That of a scratched record, of a needle stuck in a worn groove, I thought. The sound of the sleigh bells in the frozen air, the grating of the runners, the noise of the hooves, the crystalline milk … I was already preparing to interrupt her gently, to nudge her on toward another reminiscence, just as one nudges the arm of a record player.
But suddenly, while sticking to the simplicity of our winter evenings of long ago, the story took a different turn. Then I understood that my mother was in the process of confiding to me what in our childhood she had always avoided telling us: “I’ll tell you about it later, its all so long ago, first I need to remember….” Now the time to relate the whole story had come….
Once again amid the frozen silence of the Siberian village there arose the tinkling of distant bells. Once again Lyuba, as everyone in the courtyard called my mother, heard the creak of runners and the clatter of hoofs on the ice. She told her mother. Her mother hastened to put on her sheepskin coat, and wrapped up her daughter; they went out. A horse, all blanketed in hoarfrost, already stood before the izba. Everything was repeated as in those tales of our childhood. Old Glebych grasped the glittering disk of milk in his mittens. He held it out to Lyuba’s mother with her embroidered linen cloth, murmuring to her a verbal rigmarole of no interest to the little girl, a grown-up’s remark.
Suddenly the great glistening disk slipped out of the woman’s hands! It even seemed to Lyuba as if her mother had let her arms give way on purpose.
The disk crashed onto the hardened snow of the path with a sharp crunch, shattered. Overcome with joyful amazement, Lyuba flung herself down to gather up all the fragments. In her haste she confused crystals of milk with lumps of ice. It seemed so important to her to gather up all the fragments down to the very last…. Her mother was already drawing her toward the izba, repeating mechanically: “Drop it, drop it, Lyuba. There’s no time. Drop it! Let’s go in quickly.”
Lyuba’s father had been arrested the night before. Glebych had learned this from a neighbor, a woman in the town. He had reached the village an hour ahead of the two emissaries of the NKVD. Enough time for Lyuba’s mother to pack her bags.
… The shattering of the milky crystal on the pathway in a Siberian village threw up a cascade of fragments reflecting a sequence of days, years, life histories all too readily foreseeable. They had become almost classic. The arrest of the mother; the “boarding institution for the children of traitors to their country” — that was the official name for the place where Lyuba spent her childhood — war, typhus, famine …
My mother spoke of these things in a simple and neutral tone of voice, like someone who has to do it to set her mind at rest. An admission such as you make once in your life and never speak of again.
To tell the truth, I was a little upset with her because of this story. Did I feel cheated of my role as the dashing army officer? Disappointed not to be able to act out that old dream of the clatter of well-polished boots? The corridor was busy with the coming and going of young nurses who gazed admiringly at the elegant lieutenant with his cap on his knees and his coat on the back of the chair displaying its smart creases. This past now resurrected by way of a childhood story seemed to be encroaching on my own youth, my own future. All the things my mother was telling me were already broadly known to me, as elements in the life histories of other people. To include them in our own family’s past struck me as an unnecessary infliction of grief.
I looked at her dull eyes, her lips confiding this useless past to me with a feeble smile. “Why is she telling me all this? What good does it do me to know this now?” I thought, with irritation.
For I was no longer the inquisitive child I had been, ready to share the burdens of others thanks to having no past of my own to bear. I accepted such sharing less and less. For in my past now there were helicopters
that had crashed on maneuvers, from which we had to extricate burned and crushed human flesh. There were the bodies of men whose parachutes had not opened, bodies that were like sacks filled with a mixture of blood and bones. “Shut up and fold ‘em neatly!” the sergeant would yell, rebuking the young soldiers who were being trained on the ground to lay out their harnesses. “Or there’s one more guy who’ll have to look for his teeth in his boots!” He knew what he was talking about.
What was slowly building up in my own past was that thick layer of experience that protects us from the pain of others….
When I left my mother I mistook the exit, and had to retrace my steps and walk back down her corridor. I was a little embarrassed at reappearing beside her bed. I saw her stretching her thin arm through the bars and taking her cup from her night table. The metallic clatter could be heard again from the dining room. The people for the third sitting were moving along the corridor. As I approached I was still seeing this gesture: an arm reaching through the bars, a hand stretched out to pick up a cup. And at that moment I thought I could guess why she had decided to tell me the story of her life.
She saw me. She understood at once why I had reappeared: she withdrew her arm from the bars and smiled at me. Then, when I bent forward, she lightly grasped the sleeve of my coat and, without saying a word, brushed my temple with her lips.
*
I hated that first book of mine, you know, the one about the war in Afghanistan.
When I wrote it I took as my starting point actual events, which had all the disconcerting implausibility of real life. Introduced into a fictitious, totally invented plot they sounded false, these hard, raw little facts. Yet it was the plot that had found favor and it was thanks to it that the manuscript had been accepted. The chapter titles, with their blatant symbolism, had been particularly well received. When they start to echo in my ears I shake my head violently “The Tanks Are Drunk with Blood,” “The Hills Glutted with Death,” “A Captivity Longer Than a Lifetime” …
Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer Page 8
