The Life of an Unknown Man (17 page)

Mila was hardly listening to him, picturing a large pot on the fire, slices of sausage in a broth thickened with flour, and the happy clatter of spoons.

“Maybe I could have a little flour as well,” she murmured, overcome with giddiness from inhaling the smell of meat given off by this man.

“Oh yes. You can have it all, darling, thanks to your pretty face!” He grasped her arm, pulled her toward him. “But I’ve got sixteen kids here, and several of them are ill…,” she tried to explain, breaking free.

“Oh, so you don’t trust me. Me, a general staff officer!” He was on the brink of losing his temper, then, overcome by lust, he changed his tactics. “Hold on, you can see it with your own eyes!”

He went out to the vehicle and came back carrying a canvas sack. With a salesman’s gesture he opened it in front of Mila: two large cans of food, a packet of meal, a round loaf…

“There you are, darling. It’s just as I said. If you’re nice to me…” He embraced her, breathing words into her face that reeked of stale food and alcohol. A tremulous, inaudible protest formed within her as the man pushed her over to a bedframe. “One of the children told me he’s going to die tonight. You should be ashamed…”

No, she must explain nothing, simply contrive to be nonexistent. To repress the nausea brought on by this mouth stinking of satiety, not to feel this hand brutally burrowing into her body… She managed to be no longer herself right up to the last gasp of pleasure from the man taking her. Until he left in a flurry of guffaws and promises.

She remained in this nonexistent state as she prepared the meal. The children came running, ate in silence, went back to bed. In the sack left by the army man she found a bottle of vodka, drank straight from the bottle, and when drunkenness came, finally allowed herself to weep.

Two days later Mandarin appeared beside the fire, as merry as before. No, not as before. Now his eyes were smiling through the veil of death.

One evening the soldier returned. And everything was repeated: food against a few minutes of nonexistence. And the vodka afterward, which quickly settled the argument between shame and the spirit of sacrifice.

There were other visits, other men, and always this extremely simple barter: the children’s survival assured by a moment of anonymous pleasure. During the March snowstorms and the thaw she would not, in any case, have been able to get to her lookout post or to reach the city, where there were fewer and fewer people left alive.

She did not know when she was driven out of her own life. Possibly that day in May in front of a mirror when she did not recognize herself. Or else during the following winter: the taste of vodka became essential to her without there being any nocturnal visit.

At all events, when peace returned, she became that other woman (“a loose woman,” the neighbors called her) living in a room in a hostel, a building occupied by new arrivals. Her children were put into an orphanage; she remained alone, buried in a past where everything reminded her of the blockade, in an alcoholic stupor that made her indifferent to the coarseness of the men who called on her.

One evening (the whole building was celebrating the victory over Germany), she was sitting outside her window and suddenly into her memory overcome by drunkenness came words from a life now destroyed: “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…” She sobbed so violently that even the hubbub of a celebration party broke off. One woman exclaimed in indignant tones: “Just listen to that! Everyone’s singing for joy and all that tramp can do is howl her head off…”

This was doubtless the moment when she turned into what people now saw her as. Shortly after that she bleached her dark hair and even had this comforting thought: “If I die now no one will recognize me.” She realized that what she dreaded most was encountering once more the man who had sung: “To you, my beloved…”

A
moth hurtled toward the flame of the stove, Volsky waved his hand to drive it away, to save it, and this gesture broke the stillness that Mila’s words had imposed on them.

“That’s how it was, my life,” she said in a toneless voice. “I hoped you wouldn’t find me again… There are lots of women on their own now. Soldiers coming back have plenty of choice…”

“Well, I have found you again. You can see I have.”

She seemed not to have heard.

“I even dreamed that you died in battle. I knew your grave and I used to go there. And that way you couldn’t see what I’ve become…”

He smiled, in spite of himself.

“Very sorry. I’m afraid I wasn’t killed… And you haven’t changed so much…”

“There’s no point in lying, Georgy. You know very well what I’ve become. A whore.”

He drew a breath, preparing to utter a retort, but let out only an abrupt sigh. And all at once, dreading the return of silence, spoke very quickly and with great agitation.

“All right. Agreed. A whore. But in that case, I’m a killer! Yes, I’ve often killed. That was my job in the war. This red star, you see, they stuck it on me to thank me for having assassinated thousands of Germans. I spent four years killing men. I tried to hit as many as possible and when I got to the trenches I’d just been pounding, what I saw there was a bloody pulp… I wasn’t made for this profession. I loved singing, you know. And I spent four years yelling orders at soldiers, telling them to fire faster, to kill more. Then one day… I chose not to shoot down a German soldier from a tank unit. I could have done it. I was armed, he wasn’t. I didn’t shoot. Because…”

His voice broke off in a shrill cry. And in response to this wail an angry hammering suddenly resounded at their door and a female duet let fly in a burst of oaths and shrieks: “Just you stop that racket or I’ll call the militia! That bitch has them coming in at two o’clock in the morning now…”

The aggressiveness of the attack brought them close to one another, the viperish hissing prompted them to stand up, in a defensive movement, their bodies drawn together, their arms reaching toward an embrace.

“For I realized,” he whispered, in almost joyful tones, “that if I’d fired at that young German then I really would have become a killer. And for you, it’s the same. It’s clearer still, even…”

He fell silent for fear of shattering this understanding, which suddenly had no need of words. It had not been pity that had held him back from killing. Simply, at that moment he had viewed the world (and the German and himself and the whole earth) with a perception that was immeasurably greater than his own view. The same perception that the woman had had in exchanging her body for bread.

“I was thinking of making up the bed for you, but…,” murmured Mila and smiled, as if the notion now seemed pointless to her.

Once again, without explaining anything, they understood that they must leave. Go away before this world woke up and continued with a life from which they were forever excluded.

Their preparations were swift. Mila seemed amazed at how few belongings she possessed. Some clothes, three chipped plates, a kettle. And her children’s drawings, the pieces of paper she took down from the wall around the stove.

They went out, crossed the courtyard, as if on the edge of a waking dream. A tumble of clouds in the sky, a wind losing itself in the drowsy rustling of leaves. A child’s garment trailing in the grass beneath a line where shirts and sheets billowed. Mila picked it up, fastened it with a clothespin… They turned to look back. Behind the dark windows a strange innocence could be sensed: the sleep of those people, so certain of their truths, so easygoing, so hard. And with no notion of what this workers’ hostel had been for the couple who were leaving it.

The road followed the stages they knew: the corner where Mila used to wait for the trucks, then the place where their choir had given its last concert… They walked beside the river. Above its swirling waters the sky was beginning to grow light. From time to time they had to skirt craters left by bombs. Some of these were filled with water and already bristling with rushes, from which birds arose in flight.

Just as they were passing a little collapsed bridge Mila slowed down, suggested that they make a halt. And it was then that they saw an undamaged house on the slope of the valley, away from the roofs destroyed by fire. An empty izba with a wide-open door. A poplar tree some forty feet high stood between a wooden fence and the coping of a well. The mauve pallor of the morning gave the illusion that the walls were transparent and the house was gently rocking, like a vessel on the ocean swell of the tall grasses.

P
eople found their life as a couple completely ordinary. An old izba without electricity, among ruins? But after the war half the country was living like that. Always dressed in the same worn clothes? But there was little elegance in the Russia of those years. Nor was there anything unusual about the work they did: Mila taught music at the school in the neighboring small town, Volsky found work as a postman. People got used to their self-effacing presence. They saw the woman going in at the school entrance early in the morning, they noticed the man as he cycled past, his big sack filled with good or bad news. People spoke to them, they would reply politely but were not forthcoming. Besides, who was forthcoming in those days when an incautious word could cost talkative people dear?

If the truth be told, their only distinctive feature was the color of their hair: over a few months the man’s lost its somber hue and turned white and the woman’s dark tresses reappeared. But this curiosity caused little surprise. The towns were full of war wounded, disfigured faces… Yes, a commonplace couple.

What seemed more unusual was the spot where they had settled. Hidden in the valley and the woods along its slopes were minefields, often indicated by plywood signs, occasionally not. And the earth was heavy with the bodies of soldiers.

On one of the first days after they moved in they went back to the site of their last concert. Volsky walked down toward the river and there was a sudden, sharp metallic clatter beneath his foot. He bent down and searched among the plant stems… And withdrew a cymbal stained with mud and eaten into by verdigris. Mila fingered the tarnished disk. The sound set off long-reverberating echoes… It was a hot, sweetly lazy summer’s day, one made up of languid forgetfulness. They looked at one another, the same memory in the depths of their eyes: the end of a winter’s night, the icy expanse from which the soldiers are mounting an attack. That singing in defiance of death. And this cymbal falling, rolling across the snow, down toward the river…

Their true life would be this invisible journey against the current of the time people live by.

One evening, on a return visit to Leningrad, they went up into the apartment building that Volsky had lived in before the war. On the top landing the violet of the sky came spilling in at the window, a star glittered through a heat haze… In the courtyard the children were scuffling around a ball. Behind the door of a communal apartment two housewives were arguing about the oven. A couple in their Sunday best walked down the stairs talking about a comedy that had just been released at the cinema. Life… Volsky and Mila exchanged glances. Yes, the life they no longer had to lead.

Their thoughts returned more than once to this freedom of theirs not to live like other people. One day, back in the city, they stopped under the windows of the Conservatory where they had trained. A joyous tumult of notes and snatches of song poured forth over them in a flood of memories. “A musical box… going off the rails,” said Mila, and they smiled. The students hurrying down the front steps looked just like little figures spilling out from the tiny revolving stage. Once again Volsky and Mila felt they had been rescued from a life they might have lived by mistake.

Another musical box was the opera they went to one evening. The actors, dressed up as soldiers, sang of feats of arms, heroism, the motherland. The ingenious way the war had been put on the stage left Volsky perplexed. There was no mention of their own past but here, on a heavy stage set, with a background of cardboard cutout flames, voices celebrated the defense of Leningrad in vibrant, wordy arias. At the climax an actor appeared in the role of one of the Party leaders. “The Ci-i-ity of Lenin shall ne-ver fa-a-all!” he sang. He was a big fat man, wearing a uniform too tight for his portly figure. “The thighs of the king in
Rigoletto
…,” Volsky recalled.

After the performance they took a streetcar, which dropped them at the gates of the city. From there the way was familiar. Two hours of walking along roads damaged by bombing, then through sleeping fields beside the Lukhta. In the still night the rustle of plants on the banks of the river could be heard. In unison with this, Volsky was softly murmuring the simple words he used to sing at the front, when marching along in a column of soldiers. Their house appeared, tinged with blue by the twinkling dark of the sky: small, stuck there lopsidedly on a hillside beneath the immense arrow of a poplar.

“Mila will soon have had enough of this shack of ours,” he thought. “She’ll come to be envious of those people at the theater who went quietly home tonight instead of trekking through the fields like us…”