The Music of a Life

by Andrei Makine

  In the trenches this unassuaged hunger would return, but already more all-embracing; he yearned both for the dust of that path leading to the izba (he would have given all he had simply to be able to touch those warm ruts lit by the setting sun) and for the glistening of the raindrops trickling down from the roof after a brief nocturnal shower, catching the moon’s brilliance as they fell. He realized he even had a longing now for the sharp smell of iodine that emanated from those rather rough hands, whose caress he still felt on his face. This smell withstood time better than the physical memory of her, as that came to be erased by the sight of so many lifeless bodies, by brief encounters with women who left him neither the memory of a face nor a talisman like tincture of iodine.

  The fear of being unmasked returned only on those occasions when he had the luck — ill luck, for him — to receive an award for bravery. The commission that decided these matters, especially if an order was under consideration, would check the soldier’s past, so as to avoid decorating a former convict or someone expelled from the Party. Alexeï had long ago learned to appear lackluster, and though he often led the way in assaults, he knew how to make himself scarce after the end of a battle, when the commanding officer was noting down the names of the bravest.

  He did hear music occasionally, that of military bands or sometimes, at halts on the march, the plaintive merriment of an accordion. On his guard against a sinking feeling in his heart, he noted that no feeling of nostalgia swept over him, no special emotion that might have recalled his youth as a pianist.

  As for pianos, he saw one in the Lithuanian town where his regiment’s offensive got bogged down for a whole week. Their advance was hampered by a number of snipers who had all the crossroads in their sights and were killing officers in a precise, clinical selection process. One of the snipers was hidden in an apartment building with blown-out windows, on the first floor of which the interior of a drawing room could be glimpsed, with velvet armchairs and a grand piano. A hundred yards from there Alexeï lay stretched out in the entrance hall of a house, and from time to time, for the space of a second, poked his lure out through the open door: a plywood oval surmounted by an officer’s cap, with two cylinders cut from a tin can fixed to the middle of it — an officer looking through his field glasses, the sniper’s favorite target. Alexeï kept sticking it out and snatching it back in again, sending a brief whistle to his two comrades who were watching the street from the top floor…. The shot rang out at a moment when he was no longer expecting it, the manipulation of the lure having become a reflex action. The rending of the plywood was drowned at once by the sound of bursts of gunfire from the top floor, then the thunder of boots on the staircase. “We’ve got him!” shouted the soldier carrying a machine gun on his shoulder. The bullet had pierced the plywood just above the two tin circles. They examined the hole, touched it, laughed at it. Then went across the road to collect the German’s rifle. Alexeï stopped beside the piano, let a hand come down on the keyboard, listened, closed the lid again. His joy at not feeling within himself the presence of a young man in love with music was very reassuring. He looked at his hand, the fingers covered in scars and scratches, the palm with its yellowish calluses. Another man’s hand. In a book, he thought, a man in his situation would have rushed to the piano and played it, forgetting everything, weeping perhaps. He smiled. Such a thought, such a bookish notion, was probably the only link that still bound him to his past. Catching up with the soldiers, he encountered the lifeless stare of the German sniper lying on the floor and reflected that to this man he was just an incautious Russian officer allowing the lenses of his field glasses to glint. The plywood officer with eyes cut out of a tin can.

  He hoped he could make his way through this war without adding any distinguishing marks to the identity of the man whose life he was now living. To be smooth, with no prominent features or personality, a little like that plywood oval. But in its whimsical way, which no longer surprised him, the war decided to make its own mark on the photo of the blond young man whom he so much resembled.

  This was a second wound, much more serious than the previous one, and after two weeks suspended between life and death, this first sight of himself in a mirror, at the moment when the dressing was being changed: a bare, ageless cranium, and a scar that ran aslant his brow from his hairline toward his temple.

  He did everything possible to avoid being declared unfit for service. Pretended good health despite the dull, persistent pain that permeated his whole being, despite the silence of death that had become lodged in his thoughts. The doctor spoke to him as if to a child trying to cling to its mothers hand when she has to go away: “Listen, you’re going to go and spend a month in your village. Mothers going to feed you up a bit, get some pies into you. And then we’ll see.” Alexeï wanted to stay, not because of some spirit of heroic self-sacrifice but quite simply because he had nowhere to go.

  The roads were still covered in ice: those early days of March saw little sunshine. He walked, sometimes rode on trucks, getting off in a village, telling the driver he lived there, and continuing on foot. From time to time, pausing amid empty white fields, amid all this land bruised by the war, he would sniff the air, believing he could detect something like a fleeting breath of warmth. He sensed that all the life that was left to him was concentrated in this faintly springlike breeze, in this airy, misty sunlight, in the scent of the waters awakening beneath the ice. And not in his emaciated body, which no longer even felt the wind’s scorching.

  Confusedly, he realized that these roads, despite the detours, were leading him toward Moscow. Or rather toward a vague, nocturnal city, a place pictured through a haze of exhaustion: the final landing at the top of a stairwell, old cardboard cartons spread out on the ground, a warm radiator he could lean his back against, remaining silent, motionless, claiming nothing, conscious only that, on the whole earth, this was his only refuge, the ultimate goal of his endless trek.

  * * *

  That day he was skirting a forest of fir trees that still retained its wintry air, imprisoned and weighed down by the snow. At one bend in the road a woman appeared in front of him, walking in the same direction and drawing a sled behind her. He quickened his step, glad to find himself in an inhabited area. The woman did not turn at the crunching of ice beneath his boots. He was getting ready to speak to her but suddenly recognized what load the sled was bearing: a little coffin whose rough, unplaned planks full of knots were neither draped in red twill, as was the custom, nor even painted. The wood reminded him of ammunition crates.

  They greeted each other in silence and walked along side by side. The cemetery, covered with snow, looked like a forest glade. The grave, evidently dug that morning, was not very deep and already dusted with snowflakes. The spadefuls of frozen earth thrown in by the woman resounded noisily against the wood of the coffin. When it was all over, Alexeï leaned forward to place the last clods of earth on the little mound. As he stood up again, the trees, the figure of the woman and the crosses all pitched forward in a rapid curve, flying up toward the faded void of the sky. He did not feel as if he was falling.

  Consciousness returned to him in the midst of a smooth, fluid motion. He saw the crenellated fringe of the forest, processing slowly past him on his right, then, slightly raising his head, observed, at first un-comprehendingly, these two legs, these huge soldier’s boots, sliding along the frozen road. He grasped that it was himself, this inanimate body, being pulled forward by the woman on her sled. Sometimes the boots slithered along on the back of the heel, sometimes on their sides. Through half-closed eyelids he watched this rather bumpy haulage and felt as if nothing belonged to him, neither the frozen shadow that was this body, nor what his own eyes saw, nor what was visible of him. There was nothing left of him. At the foot of an uphill slope the woman paused to catch her breath. They looked at each other for a long time, motionless, silent, understanding everything.

  Her days were spent half a dozen miles distant from the village, on th
e steeply sloping bank of a river. Here, until nightfall, a human anthill would swarm over the site where a bridge was being built. There was virtually no one there but women. They worked with no lunch break, floundering about in the mixture of mud and ice and covering the snow with their bloody spittle. The first military trains must at all costs cross the bridge before the end of March. It was, they were told, an order from Stalin himself.

  She brought home bread, dried fish, but above all, “the gifts of the forest,” as she explained with a smile: pine kernels, young fir shoots, which she boiled up with semolina. To his surprise, he felt himself growing increasingly separate from the wind, the earth, the cold, into which he had almost merged. But more surprising still was this simple bliss: the warm line where the woman’s body touched his own at night. Just this line, a gentle, living frontier, more substantial than any other truth in the world.

  One night he woke up, saw he was alone, heard the breathlessness of a coughing fit subsiding behind the kitchen door. The woman often took refuge there to conceal her sickness. He lay there, his eyes open, with an intense awareness of the life returning to him, the pleasure of breathing, the sharpness of vision recovered. The moon, delicately outlined in the blackness, proclaimed a remarkable night, hanging upon the fragile first warmth of spring. He scarcely recognized himself in this moment of return. He was someone else. “A man,” he thought, “lying beside a window in an unknown house, in a village he could never find again on a map, a man who has seen so many people die, who has killed many, who almost died himself and now observes this slender crescent moon in a milder sky.”

  Outside the door the coughing started again and was stifled in a scrap of cloth. He thought about her suffering, this woman who had taken him in, her exhaustion, her illness. Realized it was the first time he had given a thought to these things, and that this was a sign he himself was cured. He reflected that there must be a word for it, some key to understanding this suffering and this moon, and his own life, changed beyond recognition, and above all, the simplicity with which two human beings could give one another not love, no, but this peace, this respite, this release, derived simply from the warmth of a hand.

  The next day he walked to the bridge construction site. The morning was vibrant with sunlight, with streams released by the snow. Though still weak, he had the joyful sensation of thrusting down against the earth at each step.

  The building work would soon be finished. The women were preparing the access track. From the mass of them there arose a hubbub of raucous voices, coughing, oaths. He went away for fear of being seen by the woman who had cured him. Or rather of seeing her amid this jostling of padded jackets covered in earth, amid these faces gaunt with hunger. Between two posts, at the entrance to the bridge, he read this slogan: “Everything for the front! Everything for victory!”

  The train that carried him back to the war a week later passed over this bridge. The same human swarm still covered the riverbank under squalls of wet snow. Alexeï reflected that plunging back to face the bullets again would now have a personal meaning for him. Not the meaning of a feat of arms, such as he had earlier striven for. But, quite simply, an end to the war, which for these women would also bring an end to their wading about in the mud, amid the coarseness of those voices, amid despair.

  He also recalled the words he had chanced to overhear when some officers were talking: “After the victory, you know, there’s going to be an amnesty, that’s for sure. They’ll let out the people they locked up before the war.” In the course of the battles of this last year of war he often caught himself repeating these words inside his head, forbidding himself to think of his parents and thinking of nothing else, as if in an unconscious prayer: Before the war …

  This prayer was probably running through his mind during a halt one day when he saw some young soldiers who, for lack of anything better to do, were amusing themselves by hunting a squirrel. The panic-stricken beast was leaping about in the middle of a cluster of tall aspens, and the soldiers, wild with glee, were shaking the trunks, driving it from one tree to the next. The squirrel finally toppled down, killed not by its fall but by the violent recoil of a branch. The soldiers picked it up and amused themselves by whirling it around, holding onto its tail, and letting go.

  Before the war … Alexeï picked up the little animal, felt a slight warmth beneath the fur spilling across his palm. The soldiers went down to the river, thirsty after their sport. He suddenly sensed within himself the presence of another being, an astonishingly sensitive presence beneath the armor of indifference and toughness he had forged for himself, day after day, in battle. Before the war …

  A shout from an officer took him unawares, still caught up in that forgotten life. “Hey, Maltsev, do you know how to drive?”

  Ever adrift somewhere far away, Alexeï replied, “Sure … I used to have a license —” If he had not had the warm body of the squirrel in his hand, he would have said no, with a wariness that had become second nature. The man whose name he bore, this Sergei Maltsev, had arrived at the front from a remote village and had little chance of knowing how to drive. But, still absentminded, he was replying in his old voice, “… before the war.”

  Thus it was that he took the place of a generals wounded driver, one General Gavrilov, who had previously been only a name to him.

  A squirrel. An ill-considered reply given to an officer. A new assignment that probably saved his life during those months of the last battles. The laughter of the young soldiers as they hunted the creature down: most of them had been killed since then. The parade of European cities — some in ruins, some in their pristine state. Some skies crowded with bombers — other skies clear, with the provocative heedlessness of clouds, birds, sun…. He often thought about these things, aware that the disorderly torrent of life and death, of beauty and horror, ought to have some hidden meaning, a key that might give a rhythm to it all, shaping it into some kind of shining, tragic harmony.

  But everything continued to happen by accident, like the explosion that hurled their car off the road one day, deafening him and obliging him to carry the badly bruised general, trudging for long hours through a wet forest streaked with little streams of icy water. When the general came to and learned that Alexeï, himself hit by a shell splinter, had carried him for miles, he pronounced in solemn tones, and with tearstained cheeks, “Maltsev, my boy, from now on you must think of yourself like a son to me.” Alexeï listened to him, embarrassed by this effusiveness, his attention caught by only one detail: the name of a city he had noticed on a signpost as he crossed a road, bowed under the general’s weight. Salzburg…. And there on this road, despite the weariness and pain, he had been aware of a distant echo, distorted by the throbbing of the blood in his temples and the general’s groans: Before the war …

  Even more difficult to decipher in the context of this spate of accidents, be they happy or painful, was the end of the war. For neither he nor the general had noticed it. The division under Gavrilov’s command was fighting in Austria, where the war continued for a good two weeks after victory had been celebrated in Berlin. The general’s car plowed up and down roads cratered by shells; everywhere soldiers could be seen hurling themselves into hand-to-hand combat; the HQ rang with hoarse voices, bellowing orders into quivering telephone receivers.

  And then one afternoon there was silence, the victory long since past, and the genial triteness of a young lieutenant’s words when he accosted Alexeï, his hand on the car door handle: “Hey, Maltsev, do you know I’ve just spent two days trying to find you! My my, don’t you look grand in your big jalopy! I guess you don’t recognize old buddies anymore.” As he carried on joking, Alexeï was trying to guess at the past, unknown to him, that lay behind these scraps of mockery. This friend, an old schoolmate. The life in their native village…. “Your folks didn’t know what to think. Everyone thought you were dead or missing. Why didn’t you write, you son of a bitch? Now look. Once we’re demobilized, we’re heading home and cel
ebrating, right? And don’t you worry about that scar: it’ll make the girls love you all the more!”

  He had the illusion of an instant transit from Vienna to Moscow, as if the streets of the two cities ran into one another, with no frontiers. His meeting with the lieutenant, his apprehension about the life that lay in wait for him, about the life stolen from a dead man, had telescoped the weeks of repatriation together, completely muddled the two cities, catapulted his car straight from the Graben onto Arbat.

  And when, one day, after depositing the general at his home, he parked the car on one of the boulevards and plunged in beneath their greenery on foot, this Moscow seemed a good deal more unreal to him than the foreign cities he had passed through.

  In the courtyard a child was zigzagging on his bicycle around a sandpit, the wheels squeaking shrilly, just as they had done before. For a moment Alexeï thought that the child himself had not changed, that it was still the same boy who, in a past that had become quite improbable, had stared up at a young man hidden behind a dusty window. On a bench a chess player was bent over his moves. The same one? A different one? At the other end of the bench sat a man, still young, with one leg. He was reading a humorous magazine, and from time to time he burst out laughing. It was clear that he was already accustomed to his condition and had made a study of comfortable positions for his disabled body. At each guffaw the chess player gave a start, settled down again, peered uncom-prehendingly at the soldier’s laughing face.