Requiem for a Lost Empire (15 page)

   With superstitious confidence, he allowed himself to believe that life had finally triumphed. And that Gutov's death, especially such a death, was a sufficient sacrifice. And that he and Anna had now paid their dues to the unexpected guest. All the books Anna had gradually accumulated in their house were in agreement about this ultimate justice: well-earned happiness, paid for by trials and suffering.

   When, less than a year later, he found himself at the bedside where Anna lay dying, he had a momentary belief that he could understand everything, right to the end: life was no more complicated than the simpleton he had one day encountered in the neighboring village. A woman seated at the crossroads with her legs wide apart, very pale eyes that looked through you without seeing you, lips that babbled happily of "planting three sabers under every window of every
izba,"
and hands that ceaselessly shuffled a little pile of fragments of glass, pebbles, tiny worn coins in the folds of her dress.

   He shook himself, so as not to let himself be carried away toward this grinning folly. And saw Anna's gesture. She was offering him a little gray envelope. He took it, guessed he should not open it until the time came, and, hearing a noise, went to greet the doctor. In the doorway he passed Sasha coming in with a flask of water. Everything was repeating itself, as some months before, but in a different order: the doctor, silence, the proximity of death. Like the little fragments of glass juggled in the simpleton's blind hand.

   Three days previously Anna had been returning from the district capital, walking along beside the river on ground that vibrated, awakened by the break-up of the ice, by the sounds of the thaw. The sunlight, the creaking collisions of ice floes, and the wild chill of the liberated waters were mingled together in a joyful giddiness. The people Anna passed had dazed looks, confused smiles, as if they had been caught drunk in broad daylight. When she went up to the old wooden bridge at the end of the village she thought for a second she must be drunk herself: the bridge no longer straddled the river but reared up, turned in the direction of the current. It must only just have been torn loose, for the children running between its handrails had not yet noticed anything, fascinated by the frenzied whirling of the ice blocks, and their crashing against the pillars. If she had been able to call to them she could have stopped them going to the end of the bridge. But all she could do was hasten her step, then run, then make her way down the frozen slope of the riverbank. Like beads on a broken necklace the children had slipped down into a gulf of black water. The rescue should have been a noisy one, attracting lots of people, but on the deserted riverbank in the sunshine there was just the sound of a little whimpering and the crunching of broken ice. Anna dove into the water, feeling with her hands for the little bodies that had just disappeared. She struggled against each second of cold, first pushed the children up onto the riverbank, then dragged them toward the nearest
izba,
undressed them, rubbed them down. Her own body was ice and, an hour later, fire.

   It was only a month after the funeral that Nikolai found the forgotten envelope almost by chance. Elegant handwriting that he did not recognize and which had no connection with the capital letters he had taught Anna stared up at him. And yet it was indeed a letter from his wife. She told him her real name, the name of her father, the great landowner whose estate used to border on the lands belonging to Dolshansky, a distant relative of their family. She did not want to take the lie to the grave with her. She thanked him for having saved her life, for having taught her life. Nikolai spent several days getting used, not to Anna's absence, but to her new presence in the years they had lived together and in the years before. He had to picture Anna as a young girl who had lived in St. Petersburg, went on long journeys abroad, and whom nothing had prepared for meeting him and living in an
izba
at Dolshanka. Sasha had told him what the letter had not time to tell.

   One night he woke up, struck by the vividness of what he had just dreamed. The light in this dream was the same pale light before the dawn as outside the window. He was walking toward a forest so tall that, even with his head tilted back, he could not see the tops of the trees. He was moving forward, guided by singing that drew him ever closer: its resonance embraced all the beauty of this forest still swathed in night mist, all the expanse of the sky as it began to grow pale, and even the delicate shapes of the leaves he brushed aside on his way. At the surface of his dream there fizzled a doubt: "She can't sing… She's…" But he went on walking, recognizing the voice better and better.

   He recounted this dream to Sasha, who still came to see them in Dolshanka, as in the old days.

   A year and a half later, one fine morning in June, Nikolai was returning from the town on horseback. The sun was not yet risen and the forest beside which the road ran had the resonance of a vast, empty cathedral nave. The calls of the birds still had a muted, nocturnal sound. Before making his way up a sandy slope he turned aside, and went into the forest, searching for the place known only to himself. But more than twenty years later the glade of long ago was disappearing under a whole copse of aspen. He was about to rejoin the road when suddenly a thunder of hoofbeats arose. The noise was growing louder so rapidly that it could only be a horse ridden at full gallop. Nikolai tugged at the reins a little, and stationed himself behind a tree. A horseman appeared on the road. A soldier crouched over the mane of his horse, welded to it as if into a single dark arrow, streaking past the trunks of the birch trees. His face was frozen in a grimace, baring his teeth. "A madman," Nikolai said to himself, tossing his head. The dust swirled gently around the marks left by the flurry of hooves.

   Passing through the village adjacent to Dolshanka, he noticed the simpleton sitting on a stack of felled pine trees. Several of the trunks had already been squared off, trickles of resin gleamed on their pink flesh, like drops of honey. The sight of this pale wood, ready to be erected into the wall of an
izba,
promised happiness. The simpleton was asleep, her mouth half open, as if she had some news to tell. Her hand, as she slept, continued to shuffle her glass treasures, scattered over the worn fabric of her dress.

   On arrival at Dolshanka close to noon Nikolai saw a big crowd in front of the village soviet. The women were weeping, the men frowning, the children laughing and being cuffed. A voice repeated several times, mechanically, "Hitler, Hitler…" Others were saying, "The Germans." The war had just begun.

   It seemed to him that there was no disruption in the sequence of days. Quite simply the normal routine of work in the fields now found correspondence in the parallel advance of the front line. The names of the fallen cities left him incredulous, these were already in the depths of Russia, where the presence of the Germans seemed like an optical illusion, a cartographical error. He remembered the films of the past few years: the enemy was always defeated close to the frontier. The songs he found himself humming promised, "Like Stalin, we'll confront the foe!"

   Vitebsk, Chernigov, Smolensk…

   One day even this bizarre topography disappeared. Cities were on the move, as if on a crumpled map. Routed Soviet soldiers fled through Dolshanka: the Germans had encircled several divisions. The village, surrounded, found itself on a strange territory located within the enemy army. The circle tightened, driving the villagers into the forest, then beyond the river all riddled with bullets, onto a charred wheatfield, and finally into the main street of the district capital, where there was still fighting. People stumbled about on this map that was being ripped apart under their feet, crumpled by tank tracks, pitted with explosions. With a rifle picked up close by a dead soldier Nikolai hid behind a fence observing the Germans' progress. They seemed not to notice the tremors of the map, advanced calmly, with precise and economical movements: a burst of gunfire, a house burned with a flamethrower, a tank clearing the street ahead of them.

   He left his hiding place, the smoke from the blaze burned his eyes. A number of civilians ran across the road with a determined air. They must know the way out of the encircled town. He followed them as far as the long trains on the railroad sidings, near the station. One by one they dove under one train, then under another. When Nikolai climbed up from beneath the last train he just had time to catch sight of the German soldiers stationed at the bottom of the embankment, precisely where people were coming out. He did not feel the pain but had time to think of his son, already mobilized. "I must tell Pavel these people are machines." The soldiers kept firing, reloading, firing. If fugitives had continued to emerge from beneath the train these nine soldiers would have spent the rest of their lives killing them.

4

   Pavel believed those minutes would continue ripping his sleep apart for long nights to come: the din of the caterpillar tracks a few inches above his head, the collapse of the trench he had fallen into when trying to get away ahead of the tanks. If he had not stumbled he would have continued running amid the breathless stampede and panic of the other soldiers. But he had slipped on a lump of clay, hurtled into a trench that was half dug and therefore quite shallow, had not had time to get up again. The roaring bulk had covered him with its shadow, the steel links of one track were hacking at the earth just above his face. For a moment he had felt as if he were being sucked into the entrails of the machine. The acid smell of the metal and the glaucous trail of the exhaust had filled his lungs. From beyond the trench cries and the crunch of bodies under the tank tracks could be heard through the throbbing of the engines.

   That night, slumped down in a fir copse among some survivors from his company, he lay in wait for the return of those seconds spent under the tank. He fell asleep but the dream went off on a tangent, pushed open a secret door, translated everything into its own language, at the same time precise and oblique. Instead of tanks, a gigantic brand new machine tool with nickel-plated screws and levers covered in oil and grease. Its bowels vibrate with a rhythmic sound and disgorge punched disks at regular intervals. You have to slip your hand very nimbly into the coming and going of the mechanism and insert the steel plate into the press underneath the punch. And each time his hand goes in a little bit further, his body stretches up a little bit higher inside the machine, trying to avoid the rotation of the great cogwheels, the driving belts. Moreover the timing of the huge machine is not very well regulated. It is as if it senses the reaching out of the hand, the contortions of the body within its bowels. The fingers grasp a square of metal, the hand goes forward, the shoulder penetrates into the machine, the body worms its way in, edging between dozens of gears, crankshafts, cylinders. He manages to put the metal in place, withdraws his hand just before the punch comes down, and seeks to extricate himself. But all around him the machine is shuddering, without wasting a second, without the smallest opening via which he might reemerge. And through its noisy workings, he recognizes a room, light, and objects that come from his childhood.

   The dream did not return on the nights that followed, for there were no nights. Always a flight toward the east, then an abandoned village that, during the brief hours of darkness, they attempted to transform into an entrenched camp. And in the morning, after disorderly resistance, a fresh retreat before the steady advance of the tanks and the German soldiers who smiled as they fired. The grinning of these men as they killed made a deeper impression on him than the tanks.

   During those first weeks of the war he had to forget all he had learned during his military service. He still recalled the sergeant wetting his forefinger with saliva, raising it in the air to check the direction of the wind and explaining to them how much they needed to aim off. If anybody had spat on his finger to test the direction of the wind during these painful rearguard actions he would have been taken for a madman. The Germans fired their submachine guns and smiled. They responded with jerky small-arms fire from bolt-action rifles, often their only weapon at the start of the war. And they retreated, without being able to retrieve their wounded, without remembering the names of the villages surrendered. It seemed to him that he and his comrades in arms were fighting in a battle from one of his father's stories; their old-fashioned rifles, their troops of cavalry. On the opposing side quite a different war was being waged-a rapid sweep of armored vehicles across land turned upside down by aerial bombardment. Perhaps the Germans smiled when they saw the sabers flashing above the horses, as one smiles at the passing of an automobile several decades old, one that quaintly recalls a bygone age.

   During these murderous days of the collapse there were, too, irrelevant little vignettes that sometimes made it hard to concentrate, to think only of the gray-green figure in one's sights. A dog, wounded by shrapnel, groaning and writhing on the spot, which looked their way with tears in its eyes. They had abandoned several comrades in fleeing from that burned-out hamlet, but it was the sight of the dog, that rust-colored ball with its broken back, that kept coming to mind. And in another place there was a sweet tangle of plants filled with the lazy buzzing of insects, the vegetation of a glorious summer that continued as if nothing were happening, just next door to
izbas
in flames, where people trapped inside were screaming. The soldiers of his detachment were hiding in a ravine, their rifles thrown to the ground, not a cartridge between them. The warm air, heady with the scent of flowers, was already growing heavy with the acrid emanations coming from the village. Later, a child's face glimpsed in a packed railroad car. Eyes that happily still understood nothing, that reflected a world from which death was still absent. The train set off. Together with other soldiers Pavel was in position around the station, hoping to keep the Germans at bay for the time it took the train to leave the town.