The Life of an Unknown Man (18 page)

She stopped, pointed at their house. “Look. It’s as if someone’s waiting for us.” One of the windowpanes had caught the gilding of the moon, a discreet and patient light, like a lamp placed there to show the way through the darkness.

During the months that followed they only returned to the city once, when Mila wanted to see “her children” again. It was the day of the first snowfall.

Behind the railings at the orphanage shadowy figures seemed to be waltzing, elated by the dance of the snowflakes. Mila recognized faces, whispered names… A little apart from his comrades stood a boy of about twelve and, with his head thrown back, his eyes half closed, he was holding up his face to the white flurries. Suddenly overcome with giddiness, he stumbled and his shapka fell off, revealing bright red hair, cut very short. He retrieved it and, as he stood up, noticed this couple standing on the other side of the railings. Mila turned away, began walking with her head bowed, Volsky followed her. After a silence he suggested in an uncertain voice: “What if we took him to live with us? And the others too…”

They did not mention it again but from then on their house seemed to be inhabited by this expectation.

Mine clearance operations had begun in August and lasted for a whole month. It was as if the sappers were unraveling a vast spiderweb around the little izba. It was striking to see how many tons of death the two armies had succeeded in burying. Every footpath was stuffed with it. Every forest glade was a trap for an unwary footstep…

As they were leaving, one of the men took them up to the top of the slope and showed them a vast hummocky area. “That’s not mines there,” he said. “Those are graves. But we’re not to do anything about them…”

Graves, contrived in a hurry, after battles. Yes, stray little mounds lost amid the folds in the ground. Here and there a name was preserved on a sign fastened to a post, the only record of a life, but the mounds were mostly mute. Closer to the ridge above the bank they found bones covered in mud and dead plants.

What they would end up accomplishing began with almost random acts: picking up a pistol in a collapsed trench, a notebook with its pages eaten away by damp that made it impossible to read… They gave themselves no plan of action, they imposed on themselves no ritual solemnity. Quite simply, day after day, they were trying to rescue from oblivion those whom they had seen shot down during their last concert.

Only once did they wonder what should be done with the mortal remains. For there were relics of German soldiers too. Helmets, the shreds of uniforms, bones, skulls… There was still bitter hatred, sustained by memories of the stranglehold on Leningrad, the towns razed to the ground that Volsky had passed through, by that immense bloodbath that Russia had become. “All those children who died because of him,” thought Mila as she touched a skull with the edge of her spade. Hatred seemed as natural as breathing. Yet the air they breathed was tinged with the acrid scent of russet leaves, the chill of the hoarfrost whose crystals shone like rainbows in the sun. On the ground the last flowers, burned by the frost, rose up among the bones. And from the pale, luminous sky there emanated a gentle aura of convalescence.

“What are we going to do with all this?” grunted Volsky. “Chuck it into a gully and forget about it?”

Mila shook her head gently. “I don’t know… They took us for savages. Animals to be exterminated. I think they should be buried the same as ours. With names, if possible. That will prove they were wrong about us.”

They did it, extending the rows of mounds, planting a young sapling brought by Volsky from the forest beside each grave. At the start of the fall they learned that the Museum of the Blockade had just been opened in Leningrad. They deposited there all that they had found during their funerary work: weapons, documents, decorations. And even a letter, preserved thanks to the silver wrapping paper from a chocolate bar. Words of tenderness written by a German soldier…

In spring this cemetery would already have the look of a copse, shining with young leaves.

F
rom the ruins of the village Volsky collected a good amount of undamaged timber. Logs, planks, beams, the wherewithal for extending their little hut. “Two more large rooms,” they planned, picturing the children moving in. This future home was being sketched in their minds with a fine line of light.

Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten. Mila could be seen emerging from the school, the sleeves of her dress white with chalk. Volsky could be observed cycling along the rutted roads, his postman’s sack on his back.

And one October day they could be seen running along a station platform in Leningrad, from which a local train was leaving, the only one finally put back in service. They just missed it, stopped, breathless, and saw all kinds of looks at the passing carriage windows, mocking, indifferent, sympathetic. But nobody could guess at the true lives of this couple as they retraced their footsteps, crossed the city and left it on foot, following a familiar road.

Nobody knew that they had come to bring the last relics that the earth of the graves had yielded up to them. At the Blockade Museum they had felt a great peace, mingled with bitterness. The rooms, which still resembled those in an ordinary warehouse, contained a jumble of tragic fragments from the past, from those years it was so hard to talk about. Photos, personal items, letters, exercise books in which children dying of hunger had drawn grass, clouds in summer… And the notebook belonging to that child who wrote down the date when each member of her family died.

In the middle of one room the Luftwaffe aircraft shot down over Leningrad loomed large.

The peace they experienced came from saving these fragments of truth from oblivion. But also from the gold of the leaves covering the muddy road. They walked on, happy to have missed the train and to be making their way through a luminous mist redolent of the cool of forest undergrowth. And their joy came from this perception: despite the boundless suffering concentrated in the rooms at the museum, there was still this misty day with its muted light and the pearly droplets on the woman’s eyelashes and the man’s smile, a fleeting smile, no longer to be confused with the grimacing scar from his wound.

No one could guess at this life of theirs that took its course through the fragile tenacity of such moments.

This humble beauty had no need of the fun and games set in motion by the end of the war. Parades, processions, speeches glorifying the Leader who had guided the people to victory. And the desire some had to play a prominent role in these victory celebrations.

They kept apart from this hubbub. Thanks to their solitude, their love. Thanks to the measured resonance they became aware of one December day in the snow-covered forest where they were collecting fallen timber. The wind blew strongly above the tops of the tall fir trees. But down below, seated on their bundle of firewood, all they could make out was a rustling sound: a mass of snow came tumbling down from the treetops and, as it slid from one branch to the next, found time to whisper a brief sequence of words. They did not speak, surprised to see how simple, almost poor, happiness could be, yes, materially poor and yet so abundant. A pile of snow embarked on its slippery descent down the branches, gave off a rapid whispering, fell. And the silent forest seemed to sense the presence of the woman tilting her face, eyes closed, toward the lazy fluttering of the snowflakes… Men had ripped open this earth with trenches, thought Volsky, had buried thousands of mines and then set about killing one another and the massacre had lasted four long years, and when it was over the survivors dug up the mines and went away. And the forest has once more become as it was before the killing. “And now the woman I love has her eyes closed, listening to the wind, and snow crystals settle on her face. A face which resembles that of a very thin young woman, with dark hair, drawn by a child…”

That December evening they tried out the big stove Volsky had built between the two new rooms of their house for the first time. The branches blazed with cheerful ferocity and they pictured Mila’s children seated in a circle, holding out their hands toward the fire.

When the snows melted the water came right up to the front steps of their house and they laughed as, without walking down them, Volsky flung an old piece of fishing net he had found in the loft into this slow tide. A scent of the damp bark of alder trees hung in the air, the warmth of wooden walls heated by the sun. Perched at the top of the steps, they watched the sky slowly turning pale, reflected in the river, and from time to time noticed the bobbing of the floats above the net. In the distance, beyond the waters, the other bank could be made out, and the delicate silhouettes of the trees now watching over the graves.

One glance took it all in. The riverbank where they had seen so many men die. And the river, slow and broad as a lake now, where once the ice had been streaked with the blood of a wounded man crawling up toward the singers. And their voices mingled with the shouting and explosions. A past still so close to the wooden steps where a woman now sat tossing twigs into the water gilded by the setting sun…

“So what was the point of it all?” thought Volsky, and in his memory he saw again those men busily clustered around a gun. There, on the same shore. Men who killed or were killed. What was the point?

“The defense of the country, victory…,” the words proclaimed their harsh truth within him. All those deaths were necessary. And often heroic. “Yes, useful, but only because people are unaware of this happiness,” he said to himself, and once more sensed the approach of a truth that encompassed all men and all lives. The happiness of watching these twigs floating away on the current lit by a low sun. Of seeing this woman stand up, go into the house. The happiness of seeing her face at a window above the waters. Her smile, the glow of her dress perceived through a windowpane.

This happiness rendered absurd men’s desire to dominate, to kill, to possess, thought Volsky. For neither Mila nor he possessed anything. Their joy came from the things one does not possess, from what other people had abandoned or scorned. But, above all, this sunset, this scent of warm bark, these clouds above the young trees in the graveyard, these belonged to everybody!

The fisherman’s net, which he began to haul up onto the steps, emerged empty. From time to time, amid the meshes slipping through the water, there was a dull golden flash of moonlight.

N
o one around them could perceive this transfigured world. Their neighbors cursed the worse than usual flooding of the Lukhta, the waterlogged roads. Mila and Volsky would nod in agreement, so as not to vex them, but on their return home sat upon the old steps letting their gaze drift across the shining expanse. At night the waters murmured beneath their windows, little waves lapped gently against the steps. This calm and joy should be spoken of to help people live differently. But with what words?

Explain nothing, Volsky thought one day, just show this other life… He was returning from Leningrad and, without intending to, he witnessed the rehearsal for a parade at the edge of the city. Bearing an enormous effigy of Stalin, a procession of workers was due, according to the scenario, to meet up with a column of soldiers, so that the head of the Leader should appear above the victorious army. A band then launched into its brassy din. The merging of the two was slow to achieve the desired artistic effect. Angry shouts rang out from a wooden perch on which there was a little man in a fedora hat shouting, “I can’t see Comrade Stalin!” (The workers hoisted the portrait up as high as possible.) Or else: “Come on! Look lively now!” The soldiers lifted up their chins, their eyes wide…

Volsky went pedaling on amid the fields. The barking of the loudspeaker faded, giving way to the clatter of the old bicycle. What he had seen was comic, he could have laughed at it but sadness lingered in his mind. It would doubtless not have been difficult to find workers in the procession who had lived through the horrors of the blockade. And many among the soldiers would be those who carried within them a heavy burden of mangled bodies, faces gone forever. Such grief should have led them toward a new and luminous truth. Instead of which it was this return to the same old circus parade, these foolishly radiant faces.

He went to the school where Mila taught, stopped beneath the windows of the music room, listened. And as the children sang in chorus, recognized a song his regimental comrades used to sing between battles. He had often hummed these tunes, his voice eloquent both of the soldiers’ weariness and the fragile nature of the hope they clung to, despite the mud and carnage. This was the music Mila was teaching her pupils, unusual in the school repertoire, which consisted of cheerful, patriotic outpourings.

It was a moment that gave expression to the true meaning of his new life: these faint voices that seemed to come from a daydream, a day lit up by the very first foliage, the scent of flooded woodland, and, so close at hand, snatched from death, the presence of the woman he loved. The rippling movement of her arm conducting the children’s singing…

He thought again about the war, which had brought them the wisdom of simple happiness. And became confused, unwilling to accept the terrible price for such wisdom. Mila emerged, came to kiss him. He wanted to question her: “Why couldn’t we be as happy as this before the war? From the moment we first met? When we were young and carefree?” But Mila’s look was expecting other words.

“This is it. I’ve got it,” he said, and saw a shadow of anxiety vanish from the woman’s face. From his postman’s sack he drew a typewritten sheet bearing several signatures and stamps. It was the license given by the city authorities for them to adopt the orphans, “Mila’s children,” as Volsky called them. The first four of them were to arrive at the start of the September term.

One evening in May it seemed as if he had fathomed the mystery of their new happiness… The dusk was mild; they had no desire to return home, remained lying amid the trees, beside a spring that they had cleared of scrub a week earlier. The earth was white from the petals of a wild cherry, it was like being in a winter snowstorm. The scent of this white blossom and the acrid freshness of lilies of the valley… “I’ve lived through this before,” thought Volsky. “Yes, in the war, after a battle. This blizzard of petals. That soldier who waved his hand, like swatting a mosquito, and then collapsed. Not a mosquito but a stray piece of shrapnel, a scrap of metal from an explosion. Heady blossom, the icy scent of lilies of the valley, a lovely spring evening and that fine young man who’d just died…”