Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  If I had to rewrite that book now I would not devote a line of it to the battles or to my escape….

  I would describe a single afternoon in a little village that our company had retaken from the resistance fighters. The soldiers moved forward, treading warily, from one house to the next. At the slightest noise they would fire brief, nervous bursts. If the noise came from inside a house they would toss a hand grenade in at the window. At random.

  When I first encountered this practice, soon after my arrival in Afghanistan, I came down on them like a ton of bricks: “You bastards! There may be people in there!” Then one day I saw a soldier who had not tossed in his grenade. He had come staggering out of the house with lowered eyes, staring at what he was trying to hold in with his hands. It was his guts, his belly sliced open by the blade of an old sword…. The next-to-last year of the war was coming to an end. The decision to withdraw the troops had already been made. Each man wanted to survive at all costs.

  They advanced, firing bursts at shadows, threw grenades, then went in.

  In one of the houses, amid furniture dismembered by the explosion and spattered with blood, I came upon a pile of rags that was gently stirring. Incredulous, I poked it with the toe of my boot. The bundle of rags turned around. It was a child clothed in a long brown garment. Its face was burnt, its arms covered in shreds of torn skin. With the dread you feel when coming upon a wounded bird — what am I going to do with it? — I took it in my arms and went out. The sergeant who had heard the whimpering from the bundle nestling in my arms said to me: “Leave it, Lieutenant! We’re not going to get screwed up by a kid. Besides, it’s burnt: it won’t live.”

  I knew he was right. Along the wall of the house there was a shelf of packed earth.

  “Put it down there,” said the sergeant. “If the Afghans come along they’ll take it.”

  He said that so I could abandon the child without scruples.

  “No, no … I’ll bring it,” I said, looking at the swollen face from which shrill wails arose.

  “We’ve got four wounded men,” grumbled the sergeant. “If the mujahedin come for us in the gorges we’ll be up shit creek.”

  On our return the commandant gave me a withering glare: “Where the hell do you think you are, at Treptow Park? Which war do you think you’re in? Where are we going to stow that? The hospital’s bursting at the seams…. There you are playing the hero and now the medics will have to go out of their minds looking for some skin to graft….”

  I knew it had been an act of folly to take it with me. Which is what I should want to talk about now if I had to rewrite that first book. No question. About the folly you commit when you rescue a child.

  After the book came out, the French journalists took an interest in me. Is Islam the binding element for the resistance groups? Will Gorbachev be able to transform a military defeat into a political victory? How serious are the ethnic tensions at the heart of the Soviet army? These questions, each time in slightly different combinations, recurred from one interview to the next. After the first one I knew what kind of reply was expected.

  One day I tried to talk about the child. I said that, once I had seen its burned face, Islam and Gorbachev no longer had any importance. There I was, carrying the child. Because of its burns I did not know if it was a baby girl or a boy. A burned child. That’s all. A burned child among men crushed with weariness and hatred. A child in the arms of someone who does not know why he has encumbered himself with this burdensome little body. And the most astonishing thing was that the little bundle in my arms seemed to sense my hesitation. Seemed to sense that I was committing a folly in bringing it along. And, when, during the following night, we were traveling through the rocky gorges, it kept quiet. Yes, it no longer wailed, as if it did not want to provoke the others’ anger. From time to time I would anxiously put my ear to its chest.

  After this verbal sally the interviews became less frequent. Then the war came to an end. And as happens with any product, stories about Afghanistan passed their “sell-by” date. As did my presence in the media.

  There was another time in Sestrovsk: it was you I was hoping to find there.

  After nine months’ service in Afghanistan I was on leave. Those nine months had turned out to be quite enough to make me unused to life away from the war. As I walked through Leningrad I was unconsciously avoiding areas without cover. When the sun shone I would seek to hide my shadow within that of a tree or a house. Each sound I heard was the double of one that spelled danger.

  I spent this month on leave living with a woman friend in Leningrad. All those days were filled with a bizarre mixture of hasty love — as if we were trying to build up a reserve of it — brief, violent quarrels, and preparations for a trip to the Baltic coast, a trip that we constantly postponed, sometimes because of a quarrel, sometimes because of some problem she had at work. We would gather up our beach things, make plans, and then not leave.

  In the end we never made the trip.

  Two days before the end of my leave I decided — heaven knows why — to go to Sestrovsk. Which is to say that in fact I knew very well why, but the reason was an absurd one. I had recalled the officer and the young woman at the open window of the Leningrad-Sukhumi train. A concrete fence overgrown with nettles, our observation post. The pilot with his talk about pulling out of a dive. The pretty stranger’s smiling admiration.

  I asked my friend if she had a timetable for the local trains.

  “A local train? For Sestrovsk?” she exclaimed in amazement. “But you can go on the subway, it’s twenty minutes from the center!”

  I was flabbergasted. To be able to go to Sestrovsk on the subway? The thing seemed inconceivable to me, unheard of. Almost against nature.

  Yes, Sestrovsk had become the last stop on a subway. I emerged facing the town’s old cinema, and ten minutes later I was going in through what in days gone by we used to call the Gap.

  Two huge apartment buildings twenty stories high had been erected at this opening. They looked like two enormous liners slowly steaming into the triangle of our courtyard one behind the other. The first of them towered from where the domino table and the Pit had been; the other was lodged in the Gap.

  In any case, the triangle itself no longer existed. One of the redbrick buildings had been razed to the ground. Another looked uninhabited. Only our own still had curtains and pots of flowers at the windows.

  Life around these white liners was now organized on a different plan, the key points of which were the new school, the supermarket’s wide plate glass windows, and a bus stop on a route that ran across what used to be open ground.

  I looked up, located the windows of our communal apartment, then that of our room — the fourth from the left.

  Your mother opened the door to me, did not seem to be surprised to see me, kissed me on the cheek. Her hair was of a fragile silvery whiteness, with long strands that she adjusted with a slightly trembling hand.

  I followed her into the depths of the corridor, cluttered as ever, with shelves, coatstands, cardboard boxes.

  “No, but life is for living,” she said to me as she made the tea. “And really, it’s paradise here now. Just think what it was like when it was all under construction. They were driving in piles from dawn till dusk, the cranes were grinding away, the bulldozers were turning everything upside down. It’s peace at last. And they’ve promised to rehouse us before the end of the year. It must give you a funny feeling, doesn’t it, seeing our courtyard now?”

  I nodded, smiling. In your room, however, nothing had changed. The portrait of Yasha’s uncle on the wall, the rows of books, the clock.

  “Look what I’ve saved,” your mother said, bringing out a box stored under the bed.

  She dragged it close to my chair and opened it. I could not believe my eyes. It was those iron feet, the lasts my father used in repairing his shoes.

  “When your mother died I couldn’t throw them away. I don’t know why….”

  We dra
nk our tea. Outside the window the great liners’ multitude of glass panes glittered with hot reflections of the summer evening. Your mother had difficulty in speaking.

  “It’s my asthma,” she said, pausing to catch her breath. “After all, I am the last of the old guard,” she added with a smile.

  I noticed some thick bundles of letters on a set of shelves. She intercepted my look, her face lit up: “That’s my administrative correspondence. I haven’t told you yet. … I finally got them to put that plaque on the wall of the building. Well, on one of the buildings. A wonderful victory, isn’t it? A bit late, it’s true. No one gives a fig for our old stories these days. …”

  So it was, thanks to my wandering glance, that your mother came to tell me about the siege. “I’ve never talked to Arkady about this,” she confided in me. “As a child he was too sensitive. The smallest things upset him. And now when he comes to see me, it’s always a whirlwind, we never really have time to talk. Wait, I’ll put the water on to boil again….”

  Your mother’s name was Fayna Moysseyevna. I shall call her Faya, as everyone in the courtyard called her.

  The Siege Building

  (an old story)

  She would doubtless never have survived had it not been for that encounter in the depths of winter in a dark, icy apartment building. Yes, that young woman, Svetlana, whom the people in the apartments always referred to with sly hints, winking at one another. Faya’s grandmother had a kinder name for her, “the merry spinster….”

  Her parents had gone to Kiev to attend a cousin’s wedding. F aya and her grandmother had gone with them to the station. The train had pulled out, her father’s and mother’s faces were pressed against the window. Faya had waved her arm, holding up a doll with a patched leg…. It was June 21, 1941. Ten hours before the start of the war…. That was the only memory she had of her parents — two loving faces pressed against the windowpane. The editorial in Pravda that her grandmother had spread out that evening as she sat in her armchair carried the headline:

  THE WORKERS’ SUMMER VACATION

  Faya was old enough to know that people were dying from two causes in the beleaguered city: hunger and cold. Her grandmother used to spend the night in her armchair. Like that it was easier for her to stoke the small stove in the corner of the room.

  One day she did not get up. Neither during the night — Faya had not heard the scraping of the little door to the stove — nor in the morning. Her grandmother did not answer, did not stir, stayed in her armchair, her eyes half shut. With trembling fingers Faya touched the old woman’s face. It was cold, rigid….

  Then she set about covering the body with everything that was warm in that icy apartment. She wrapped the armchair in two fleecy blankets, and on top of them she spread the heavy fur coat that her grandmother used to put on when she went out to fetch their bread ration. She even removed her thick mittens that she kept on all through the winter and put them onto her grandmother’s numb, heavy hands. Faya was convinced that all this warmth must suffuse the frozen body, fill it with life. She knew that she must also fight against the second cause of death — hunger. But on the shelves of the little cupboard where her grandmother stored their bread there were only a few small crumbs left. Faya gathered them up carefully one by one.

  Next morning her grandmother still did not wake. Although Faya had so much hoped she would, especially in the morning. With the same wild hope she opened the door of the little cupboard again, but there were no longer even any crumbs there now. She tried to light the stove, could not manage it, and went back to bed. She felt a strange mist sweeping over her. It seemed to her as if she no longer felt cold….

  Svetlana found her curled up on the floor, close to the front door of the apartment. She, too, lived on the sixth floor of this building. There was no one else left there: all the other inhabitants were dead, disappeared, gone. Most of the doors were left open: the blacked-out windows turned even the rare sunny days into twilight.

  Before the war Svetlana had not been what malicious tongues claimed she was. Simply a “merry spinster,” liking men who did not count every ruble and enjoying the atmosphere of restaurants heavy with the smell of tobacco and spicy dishes.

  At the height of the siege the military men passing through Leningrad, whom she used to meet on a street corner and bring to her room, were a means of survival. Should she have worked herself to death fourteen hours a day at the factory for a pound of bread like the others? Or dug antitank trenches? Or, worse still, scrambled over ice-covered roofs to put out incendiary bombs?

  On their departure the officers would leave canned food, bread, army biscuits on her table. One could live….

  *

  In Svetlana’s room Faya would stoke the stove until it was red-hot by throwing in pieces of wood. They came from the most diverse objects: among them you could recognize chair legs, plinths ripped off and chopped up with an axe, even the struts of a toboggan. It was in this very search for wood that Svetlana had entered their apartment, believing it to be long since empty.

  The pieces of timber crackled, giving out fine sizzling sounds and radiating a pleasant heat into her pinched face. Soon the whole room was bathed in this comfortable warmth that made one forget the dark city outside the blacked-out windows. Fascinated by the ruddy dance of the flames, Faya stared wide-eyed, yielding to blissful drowsiness.

  It was the footfalls on the staircase that aroused her. She would jump to her feet, grasp the handle of the big kettle, and put it on the stove. For “the guest,” as Svetlana used to say. The key clattered in the lock with an exaggerated noise — the agreed signal. Faya would already be concealed on a sofa in a room tucked away at the end of the apartment.

  “See how warm it is here, my friend.” Svetlana’s bright voice reached all the way to the sofa, muffled by the icy air in the rooms. “I stoked it till it was red-hot just before going out. Here, give me your coat. I’ll put it by the fire. Like that you’ll be warm when you leave.

  Faya knew well the sequence of words and sounds she would hear. She lay in wait for the very last in the series, the clatter of boots in the corridor, the final click of the lock. Then she could appear in the doorway Svetlana would be opening a can and would simmer the contents in a little saucepan. They would sit down to eat. A whiff of tobacco hung over the room along with the rather sickly sweet smell of cheap perfume. Svetlana ate in silence, staring at the flames through the half-open door of the stove.

  On occasion Faya asked her if she could go and see her grandmother. “No, no!” Svetlana would reply in categorical tones: she seemed angry. “She must stay on her own. I’ve locked the door.”

  At these moments Svetlana’s voice had a really nasty ring to it. Faya kept her peace. She was afraid lest the “merry spinster” would lose her temper and drive her out onto the cold landing. Before the war they used to say such things about her….

  One evening Svetlana came back without “the guest.” Sitting on the sofa in the dark in that room tucked away, Faya heard the hasty chink of the keys, rapid footfalls, a brief, raw cough like the bark of a dog. She saw Svetlana. Alone.

  “I’ve caught one of these colds!” she told the child, between coughing fits.

  Trying to smile, she began to prepare supper with the food that was left to them.

  Svetlana was wearing an elegant pale jacket. Too elegant for the dead streets. Too thin for the cold that turned the deserted avenues into slabs of ice with sharp, cutting corners.

  Faya did not know how many nights and days were filled with that convulsive barking that shook the darkness of the room, with feverish murmurings, with hunger. After the abundance of recent times, this hunger was appalling, quite different from the dull listlessness with which Faya used to await a slice of bread brought by her grandmother.

  One day an emaciated shape arose from the bed, shaken with feverish coughing. It staggered toward the shelves where the gifts from the guests used to be stored, felt along the shelf. Nothing. She looked
at the child wrapped up in her blanket and said, in too loud a voice, as if she could not hear herself speak: “Listen, Faya, I must go down. I must find something. Otherwise we’re both going to croak here. …”

  Faya was afraid. It was the first time anyone had spoken bluntly to her like that, as if to a grown-up. She heard Svetlana dressing in the corridor, cursing softly, her movements were clumsy, things would not do what they were supposed to do.

  “Light the stove!” she shouted and slammed the door.

  That night Svetlana did not come home. Faya opened the apartment door onto the darkness of the landing, keeping her eyes peeled, pricking up her ears. She made her way through the frozen silence of the great dead dwelling, and took hold of the handle of the door opposite, the door to their old apartment. It was locked. Faya walked along as far as the staircase and whispered into the black void: “Svetlana! S veta. …”

  A protracted, lifelike echo rang out in the stairwell.

  In the darkness she felt the treads with her feet and descended half a floor as far as the landing window. At this spot her fear diminished. Fragments of the broken pane, dangling from strips of paper, tinkled slightly in the wind. The beam of a searchlight raked the sky. Her hands clasped her rag doll. One day a hole had opened up in its pink heel and sawdust had trickled out. Faya was devastated. But while she was asleep her grandmother had neatly patched it up. The doll was particularly dear to her because of those few delicate stitches. Especially now.

  Suddenly from the darkness of the lower floors she detected a grating noise. Faya pricked up her ears. But her primitive, animal sense of smell was ahead of her hearing, and her whole being whispered to her: “It’s the scent of food!”

  Yes! It was a smell of smoke, of a cooking fire. She leaned over the banister and made out a faint glow. Grasping the banister now, she began to go downstairs.

  The glow filtered from a door on the third floor. Faya remained irresolute for a moment, then pushed it open timidly. Her head was troubled by the smell of food, which became almost unbearable in the passageway she now plunged into. The light was coming from another room right at the end. It was from there that the smoke wafted out, tickling her nostrils and tensing her jaws. Faya moved forward cautiously, stepping over piles of old newspapers, chairs without legs, a mound of broken plates. Finally she stopped in silence in front of the illuminated threshold.