The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

3

That winter marked a hiatus between two generations, the notorious "twenty years after," which, though too vague for historians, nevertheless defines the rhythm of a country's chronology. The war's end was already twenty years old. A generation had had the time to be born, grow up, and produce offspring. All without war. Blood ties to it were being stretched, the heritage of memory was collapsing, the dead were once and for all taking on solid shape in bronze. Now was precisely the time that they began erecting a forest of monuments in our city – vast concrete memorials in celebration of the battle of Stalingrad, colossal statues – and lighting "everlasting flames." And they closed our orphanage with the view that the quarantine had lasted long enough, we had expiated our fathers' past, and it would now be more ideologically judicious to disperse us, like fragments from that past, among the healthy population.

The last months before our departure were filled in equal measure with excitement and anxiety. We knew that the myth of the hero-fathers could not fail to raise smiles among the people in whose midst we would soon be living. Not only did we come from a strange place, but also from another era, from those days when the statues still moved and spoke, warm with the blood that flowed beneath the bronze. We would all, we knew very well, have to make up for lost time and find a place for ourselves in other people's reality. Learn to forget.

What I am left with from those months is a few brief fragments, snapshots in my memory, apparently random, but without which I should certainly have become a different person. Notably, that January afternoon, a biting cold that forces us to rub our noses and lips, which have lost all feeling, despite being ordered to remain still. The motorcade we are waiting for on one of the great avenues of the city is delayed. Everyone shifts on their feet to avoid turning into pillars of ice: the militiamen stationed several yards apart, ourselves behind them, along with other representatives of the "toiling masses." According to the rumor circulating, a very important person is expected, Brezhnev himself. Our curiosity is aroused by the desire to guess which of the cars in the motorcade this person will travel in. Not the one at the head, we are sure of that. The second, the third? A state secret. We feel we have been entrusted with a mission. And still the motorcade is not there. Our feet feel like ice cubes. Irritated, one of the pupils from the orphanage tells a joke. Wafted along by the breeze, it warms our ears. An attempt on Brezhnev's life. The gunman misses, is arrested, interrogated:

"So what stopped you from shooting straight?" "The crowd. They were all trying to shoot first." Laughter thaws our lips. The militiamen look around. A supervisor looms up behind us, cuffs heads rapidly… The motorcade sweeps past at such a speed that it is impossible to get a good look at the windows in this black stream of limousines. Our hands spring into action too late, merely saluting the motorcyclists who bring up the rear. They have helmets white with frost and ruddy faces… The "toiling masses" break ranks and disperse, hastening toward home and a hot drink. But our own mission is not yet accomplished. We are loaded onto a bus and taken to the foot of a brand-new monument, to act out the same charade of popular jubilation all over again, in Potemkin style. The wind from the steppes on this hillside is appalling. They arrange us in a hollow square, doubtless in simulation of a large crowd. We no longer talk, remaining motionless without the supervisors having to rebuke us. Even they seem to understand the inhuman absurdity of this waiting. The day wanes, the motorcade does not come. A noncom approaches our ranks, speaks into a supervisor's ear. The latter smiles at us a little mournfully: "At ease!"

At this moment I flee. Everyone is too tired to count us. I make my way down the other side of the hill and run toward the city. I do not explain to myself the reasons for this truancy. Possibly contempt for this visiting V.I.P., who has not deigned to come. Or else the picture I have of the rest of the extras, who have already gone home, happily drinking hot cups of tea in the bosom of their families. Probably the latter thought. This dazzling vision of domestic bliss, warmth, peace. I make my way through the streets, mimicking the gait of the passersby, I go into a store. Then pause for a moment, mingling with the gathering at a bus stop. With the ill-considered hope that their life will draw me into itself, make me like them. A screen like a fine sheet of glass separates me from these people… I find myself inside a church for no particular reason, simply to get warm. My rejection of everything connected with religion is instinctive. I do not like these old women crossing themselves and mumbling in front of the icons wreathed in smoke. The reverberation beneath the vaulted ceilings is unpleasant, chilling. The gleaming richness of the iconostasis is crushing. And even the candle flames are no good for unfreezing my fingers; they burn them, bite them, or else shrink away beneath them. I recall how one day at the orphanage one of the pupils was made to step forward to be castigated for his shameful crime: some reactionary old aunt of his had secretly taken him to the church and had him baptized! Our contempt for this tearful redhead had been sincere. "It was one of these old women here," I say to myself, at the sight of their bowed shadows. The priest's voice is slightly plaintive, quavering with cold. I find his prayers hard to follow. He calls on us to pray for all and sundry, to pray for everyone, for those close at hand, for those far away, for the dead… I get back to the orphanage just before supper. I cannot admit to anyone that my first attempt to live among the others has failed.

Nor would I have become the person that I am without having experienced a certain night at the end of the winter. Or rather that particular moment when for a very brief spell the passing of the trains that ran beside the house where Alexandra lived came to a stop. During the day the tracks, only a few yards away from the wooden walls, gave rise to the noisy symphony of trains on their way through the township. The inhabitants no longer even noticed all this pounding, clattering, whistling, and grinding, the crescendos and diminuendos. Just from the sound they could recognize the heavy drumming of a train coming from the Urals, its freight cars loaded with ore, the shock wave raised by the Novosibirsk express, the interminable clanking of the dark tank cars bringing oil from the Caspian Sea… Around about two o'clock in the morning there was a slack period in this rail activity, a brief respite between the very late trains and the ones that roused the switch yard at the crack of dawn. Sometimes this pause in the night was shattered by special trains passing through very rapidly. As I lay in my bed, separated from the rest of the room by an old curtain, all I had to do was crane my neck to see the long, low flatcars rolling past, the transport covers that allowed one to guess at the contours of armored vehicles, the shapes of guns. Then I remembered the things our teachers used to tell us about the world situation. These armaments were probably on their way to the defenders of Vietnam, currently being burned with napalm by the Americans, or to the Cubans, at their last gasp, thanks to the blockade, or to the Africans in their liberation struggle.

The cause seemed to me just. I loved being awakened by these trains shrouded in mystery.

That night I missed the passing of the nocturnal train. I sat up in bed as the last of the flatcars was already slipping by under the window. All I could make out was the unusual size of the devices being transported: the covers reached up higher than our first floor. "Maybe they're rockets…" I thought, still half asleep, and remained like that for a while, listening to the slow fading of the sound. The night, as so often after the February thaws, was icy and clear. In the upper part of the window, where the fronds of frost had not made inroads, the darkness gleamed like clean-cut granite flecked with mica. Between two stalactites of ice that hung from the gutter, a star stood out clearly, alive and aware of our lives, of the existence of this old wooden house, suspended in total isolation in the somewhat terrifying splendor of this animated sky.

The final reverberations of the rails fell silent, the stillness was about to become absolute. And it was then that I became aware of a barely perceptible murmuring that still clouded the settling of the silence. I pricked up my ears and recognized Alexandra's voice, or rather the shadow of Alexandra's voice. The ceiling was faintly tinged with the glow of her night light. Embarrassed at overhearing this whispering, I was about to get back into bed when I suddenly thought I heard my name. "Perhaps she's having a heart attack," I thought, "and hasn't the strength to call out to me…" Anxious, but not wanting to give myself away, I delicately pushed aside the tired satin of the curtain… In the corner of the room, on the other side of the wardrobe that formed my cubbyhole, I saw an old woman seated on her bed, her feet, below a long nightdress, resting on a small rectangle of carpet. At first she seemed like a stranger. Her white hair was undone and reached her shoulders. Most striking was her pose: her head deeply bowed, her fingers pressed against her brow. Among her faint, tremulous words I once more caught my name…

I did not think, I did not say to myself: "A woman saying her prayers." What occurred to me at that moment was much less considered. My whole being was filled with an awareness of the infinite night in which our house was adrift, the depth of the darkness, of the icy expanses of sky and earth, and, at the heart of this gaping space, of a woman, giving voice to my presence in the universe.

The night light went out. I lay there, unsleeping. Amid the early-morning uproar of the trains, it struck me that she had been murmuring those secret words in her mother tongue.

During the days that followed, when I had managed to find the language to understand that night, I recalled the priest's litany, his quavering voice that had displeased me. Among others, he had called on us to pray "for those who have no one to pray for them." This form of words, incomprehensible to me at the time, now seemed poignantly apt. Knowing nothing about religious practice, I saw prayer as, broadly speaking, the act of thinking about a person, picturing them lost and isolated under the sky and, by this thought, reaching them, even if they were unaware, especially if they were unaware of it.

"… Who have no one to pray for them." In the gray light of a dawn slow to appear, I helped Village retrieve his fishing lines, all of them without a catch. So the little wood fire he had just lit would serve no purpose. "The months with an Y in them are no goddamned use for fishing," he explained, making light of it. We had, in fact, reached the first days of March. The setback did not seem to affect him. He sat down on the carcass of an old boat, took out a hunk of bread, and offered me half of it. The river was still covered with a white carapace. Above it the clouds were beginning to turn pale. He ate, and then he became still, silent, his gaze directed beyond the river. I looked at him attentively, insistently even. "… Those who have no one to pray for them," I thought again.

"So, do you want to go and see her?" he said suddenly, without looking at me.

"See who?" I asked, perplexed.

"Don't talk crap. You know very well. That nurse."

"Why should I? You're crazy."

He said nothing, his eyes once more lost among the bushes along the riverbank. Frantically I racked my brains over what it was in our talks together that had betrayed me. Nothing. And everything… Every word, every gesture.

"Give me your hand," he said in almost brutal tones. He got up. I held out my right hand; he pushed it away, seized my other hand, and, before I could react, slashed the palm with a lump of ice, or so it seemed to me. No, it was a five-kopeck piece, sharpened into a razor blade. The shallow cut glistened, began to bleed.

"You can tell her it was that rusty pile of crap…" I stood there, irresolute, looking now at him, now at the thread of blood. "Go on," he said more softly, without brutality, and he gave me a kindly smile, such as I had never seen on any face at the orphanage.

At the infirmary I was plunged for several minutes in that hypnotic state the woman's slowness caused to reign about her. A blissful state for me, a blend of maternal gentleness and loving tenderness.

Nothing now remained of Samoylov's collection of books in the sealed-off room, apart from volumes badly damaged by the fire. My hands covered in ash, I was trying to resuscitate them, chiefly out of respect for their infirm state. Often, reading became impossible. I would just have time to focus on a page scorched by the fire when it would disintegrate in my fingers, carrying away its contents forever. Thus it was that I read, without being able to reread, a short poem in which the scenes depicted were strangely in harmony with the fragility of this single reading. I did not know the author, doubtless one of the obscure poets on the fringes of the romantic movement. Samoylov's library, assembled with the omnivorous appetite of a neophyte, was well stocked with these names neglected by the anthologies and might well, I would tell myself years later, have formed the basis for an original history of literature, almost parallel to the one that is taught and honored.

The poem had as its title "The Last Square," probably borrowed from Victor Hugo, echoing the warlike epics of the early nineteenth century. The soldiers in their ranks in this square were falling one by one, under attack from an enemy more numerous and better armed. The hero expressed only one fear, that of seeing his companions weaken. They stood firm, however (a couplet would come back to me one day in which "batterie" [the battery] rhymed with "fratrie" [brotherhood]), closing rank in the square to fill the gaps left by the dead. At the end only two were left, the hero and his friend. Back-to-back they fought on, out of pure gallantry, each one fearing to leave the other on his own. When finally the warrior's heart was pierced, he looked around, and in his friend s place saw an angel whose powerful wings were flecked with blood.

The page crumbled between my fingers like a fine sliver of slate. This ephemeral aspect reinforced the impact of the words. Few lines of verse have remained so vividly in my memory as these unknown stanzas.

I remember, too, one of the last times (perhaps the very last) I spent reading in Alexandra's company. That evening at the end of March, it stayed light for a long time; we could drink our tea and read without lighting the lamps. Sometimes a train would go by and in its lit sleeping compartments the lives of the passengers could be covertly observed: a woman tucking in a sheet on her berth, a young man, his hands held up like blinders, his brow pressed against the window, as if he hoped to see those he had just left behind… Alexandra had opened the window, the mild air brought in with it the pleasantly bitter scent of the last mounds of snow, the swollen bark of the trees. The promise of spring. I thought of this as I observed Alexandra reading aloud, the ghost of a smile playing over her lips. For the first time I thought about what a woman could feel at the coming of a new spring. A woman of her age. Or perhaps age did not count?

The book she was reading came from the devastated library, the accumulation of volumes by forgotten authors that had included "The Last Square." This one was a collection of short tales, interesting only for their elegant construction, maintaining the suspense for the space of half a page before the final triumph of Good. I was listening, lulled by all these predictable happy endings, when the next story, even shorter than the others, suddenly upset all these neat narrative rhythms. A young man falls passionately in love with a young woman, as cruel as she is beautiful, he declares his love to her and offers her his heart. "No, my dear, I already have your heart. To prove to me that you love me truly, bring me your mother's heart. Yes, rip the heart out from her breast." The lover runs home, stabs his mother, makes off with her heart. In his haste to satisfy his beloved, he stumbles on the journey, falls, and drops the heart, which lands among stones. The lover groans, gets up, and suddenly hears an anxious voice, his mother's heart speaking: "You're not hurt, are you, my son?"

I had no memory of getting to my feet, leaving the room, running. Quite simply, after a total loss of awareness, I found myself standing in the sealed-off room, to which I had gained access by going out onto the landing, sliding along against the wall of the house on an old skirting board, and pushing open the door. There I was, biting my lip until it bled, so as not to howl, my eyes seeing nothing at first, then seeing the space outside the door: the fields blanketed with tired gray snow, the dull sky, spring. A world at once perfectly familiar and unrecognizable. Alexandra did not call me, she left me alone, waited quietly for me to come down. And never referred to that story again.

Many years later the difference between one's mother tongue and an acquired language was to become a fashionable topic. I would often hear it said that only the former could evoke the deepest and most subtle – the most untranslatable – ties that bind our souls. Then I would think of maternal love, which I had first discovered and experienced in French, in a very simple little book, its pages tarnished by the fire.

UNDER the sun's blaze, immense slabs of ice slid down the river, collided, broke up, revealing their greenish rims, sometimes several feet thick. Just as we were crossing the bridge a section of floating ice struck one of the pillars. The roadway shook beneath our feet. The impact made an explosion of sound. Breaking rank, we rushed over to the handrail. It was giddy intoxication: the dazzle of the shafts of light, the wild chill of the liberated waters, the brutish power of the ice floes, rearing against the pillar, jolting upward in spasms. On the opposite bank, looking like black ants, children played at rafting, leaping from one slab of floating ice to the next. As the white surface broke up, the young daredevils would dash onto the broadest fragment, which in its turn disintegrated, now driving them back onto terra firma, now, for the wildest of them, onto a slab whose instability demanded the contortions of a tightrope walker. Seen from the eminence of the bridge, these games were reminiscent of the flickering of a kaleidoscope.

During those spring months our own life, too, was reminiscent of a kaleidoscope where the tube has been shattered so that, bit by bit, the glass sequins and mirrors spill out. Events followed one another, not so much leading us on to the future as draining our years in the orphanage, down to the last fragment of a dream.

During the course of a few weeks, several people ran away – really ran away, never to return – one of them ending up, so we learned, in the Far East. Then, just before the May celebrations, one of the girls was escorted by the director into an ambulance parked near the entrance. It was difficult to grasp that an adolescent of fourteen, a thin girl with drab features, was about to become a mother, and that since the previous autumn she had been carrying this other life within her and had contrived not to give herself away, while we scribbled on the pages of our textbooks and told jokes about Brezhnev.

On one of the first evenings of May, it became clear to me that the world of other people was going to exact a tribute from us. I was leaning against a tall table beside a kiosk where they served beer. I had no money, but as long as the serving woman did not notice my presence, I could listen to the customers' conversations. They were almost all men who, before returning joylessly to their homes (I was discovering that a family home could be joyless), were here flaunting their virility, discussing women (two categories: those who "did it" and the rest), and cursing the injustice of fate. There were not many women in this male preserve. Only one that evening, two tables away from mine. The man with her was addressing her in tones of such contempt that it was as if at every word he was gathering up his saliva to spit. At one moment he struck her with a dry, furtive little slap. She turned her face away, I recognized her. It was Muza, a girl from the orphanage, three years older than me. She may have had some Caucasian or Tartar blood in her veins, for her features were remarkably finely formed, one of those faces whose nobility and harmony make one doubt the animal origins of the human race. No one among the pupils at the orphanage had ever ventured to court her. For us, such a degree of beauty placed her in another living species, somewhere between a snow-laden branch and a shooting star…

There were not many customers; the booth was about to close. I could clearly hear the words the man was hissing through his teeth: "You'll go just where I tell you, you dirty little whore… If it weren't for me you wouldn't even have anything to cover your ass with…" Muza shook her head in protest. At this, with a hate-filled grimace, the man very calmly pinched her lower lip, thrusting his finger into her now distorted mouth. He was twice her age and his beige suit and the color of his sparse hair made him look like a long cigar with the tobacco spilling out of it. She tried to break free but he squeezed her mouth more violently, preventing her from speaking. With this thumb thrust in behind her cheek she managed to mumble in pitifully comic tones: "I know where to go, I do. I won't sleep in the street…" He released his grip, sneering as if disgusted: "Oh, sure! Go back to your filthy hole. They'll soon be kicking you all out…" She began to weep and I was struck by these tears, for she sobbed like a woman already mature, already wearied by life.

The waitress made half a dozen empty tankards clink as she picked them up with fanned-out fingers. "All right, you. Finish your popsicle right now or I'll call the militiaman. He's not far away. Beat it, before I get angry!"

I walked away regretting that I had not intervened, with that feeling of shame every man experiences a dozen or more times in his life. This particular time would remain one of the most painful for me.

I was not alone in having seen Muza in the company of the man who looked like a beige cigar. Some days later one of the boys claimed to have spied on them in a boat moored upstream from the orphanage. Despite the salacious exaggerations in his story, I believed him, for the behavior of the beige man as he described it corresponded precisely to what I had seen. Stuttering with excitement, he described the man seated in the boat with his pants unbuttoned and his lower abdomen exposed, whistling to himself, while Muza, on her knees, had her head pressed against his stomach, although her hair made it impossible to see anything. Proud of his success, the storyteller went over the scene once more, described how the man stared at the clouds and whistled to himself, while the woman's mouth was distorted by the strenuous thrusting… Village, who never took part in our discussions, suddenly broke into our circle and, without saying anything, struck. The storyteller collapsed, his arms flailing. His lips bloody, he got up, hurled an oath, and fell silent as he met Village's look. A look not threatening, but sad.

In one other way or another we all approved of what Village had done, even the one who had received the blow.

I saw the nurse again in May on a public holiday. She was coming out of a shop, holding one handle of a huge shopping bag. The other handle was held by (I thought at first) her twin brother. But it was her husband, and he looked like a comical masculine copy of her. Almost the same height, middling. The same build, rather well rounded. Fair, diaphanous curls, the man's even more dazzling. I experienced neither jealousy nor disappointment. The couple looked like little piglets in a strip cartoon and could therefore have nothing in common with the silent woman who had tended my wound. With all my strength I wanted to believe in the possibility that this was her double. Within the cracked kaleidoscope of our lives I at least needed this shard of a dream to hold on to.

Among the flickering visions reflected in the glass there were also those two girls and their boyfriends, chatting at the entrance to a lane. We saw them from a truck bringing us back from a work site. The driver had parked it under the trees and gone off in search of a pack of cigarettes. One of the boys was seated on his bicycle, the other was holding his by the handlebars. Fenced in as we were by the sides of the truck, we studied them in their little carefree oasis. Their freedom enthralled us. Even their skin was different from ours. After several baking hot days our faces were peeling, our short hair rough and discolored. The golden skin of these girls gave evidence of a mysterious way of life in which one took care of one's body, as of an asset… At one moment the boy seated on his bike took hold of a fine lock of hair that had slipped over his girlfriend's cheek and tucked it back behind her ear. She seemed not to notice, and continued talking. I sensed around me a swift muscular tension, as at the movies, when the hero is getting close to some danger… A volley of oaths erupted in the midst of our tightly packed crowd. Laughter, obscenities, banging on the metal of the cabin, and then, as if someone had given the order for it, silence. The two couples moved off rapidly down the lane beneath the trees. A girl leaning on the panel beside me had her eyes swollen with tears.

From the same broken kaleidoscope this spray of sparks came fizzing out: the town hoodlums who sometimes arrived to taunt us were armed with short, two-edged blades known as "Finnish knives." On that particular evening the impact of a blade against an iron bar in the already darkening air caused a tiny spurt of blue-green. We had yet to discover that these brawls were, in fact, a means for the local underworld to test our mettle. For it was from among youths such as ourselves that they recruited people with nothing to lose and no one to love. This burst of sparks fixed in my vision the flat, ugly face of one of our assailants. Some days later I was to pass him near the station. He was giving the beige man a light.

It was from this station that I used to set out for the township where Alexandra lived. I had not been back to see her since the May celebrations, and it was already the end of the month. The passengers were talking about a fire that had just destroyed a railway depot; the warm breeze carried a bitter taste of charred resin… Not finding Alexandra at home, I went downstairs, walked around the house, and caught sight of her in the distance, standing beside the railroad tracks. I saw her from behind but guessed at her gesture: her hand shading her eyes, she was looking up at the clouds of smoke above the long buildings of the depot. The train traffic had been interrupted, the firemen's helmets were glinting amid the tracks. You could hear the crash of beams collapsing, the hiss of fire hoses. From time to time the murk framed a ghostly sun through the smoke, and the day froze into the contrasting black and white of a negative. Then the vividness of the flames and the intensity of the sky would flood back into this momentary dusk. The clusters of flowers on a lilac bush next to a buffer stop between the tracks seemed to be blooming on another day in another world.

Alexandra looked like a tiny figure beside the soaring clouds of smoke against the plain horizon, toward which led the deserted tracks. I stared at her and, more clearly than ever, believed I understood who she was. I recalled her neighbor, the old Tartar, Yussuf, once remarking to her: "You know, Alexandra, you Russians…" He was right, this woman standing among the railroad tracks, her gaze fixed on the flames, was Russian. Time had erased in her everything that could still distinguish her from the life of this country, its wars, its sufferings, its sky. She was as much a part of it as the quivering of a blade of grass on the endless ocean swell of the steppe. She had invented a remote homeland and a language for herself. But her real homeland was that tiny room in an old wooden house, half destroyed by bombs. That house and the infinity of the steppes all around. The place where she would remain forever incarcerated, the prisoner of an era made up of wars and suffering. I felt myself reeling on the brink of this past, in danger of letting myself be drawn into its yawning darkness. I must distance myself from it, flee.

A ball of fire, fringed with soot, billowed up over the depot. Alarmed, I drew back, and focused an uneasy gaze once more upon the figure of Alexandra, who was still there, unmoving. And I made off very quickly, jumping over the ties. I was afraid I might see her turning, calling me…

In the train I thought about the language she had taught me. Its words, I knew, had no bearing on anything in the world that surrounded us. I remembered Muza and her beauty, the beige man, the story told by the boy who had spied on them… One of the last poems I had come across in the ruins of Samoylov's library spoke of a pair of lovers disporting themselves in "a meadow shimmering with a thousand flowers." I suddenly felt something akin to disgust for the affectation of this torrent of words. Outside the carriage window lay the monotonous expanse of the steppe, dry and rough, stained blood red by the sunset.

So what I had learned was a dead language.

On my return to the orphanage I noticed that Village was absent. He had not come in to supper. I caught up with him among the willow groves on the riverbank at one of his fishing spots. He was embarrassed to be discovered constructing a child's toy: a tiny raft made of sticks that he was binding together with strips of bark. The remains of a fire were smoldering gently. So as not to lose face, he explained to me with a wink: "Look at this. It'll float down our river first. Then, zip, on to the Volga. And then, so long as a pike doesn't have it for breakfast, straight on to the Caspian Sea. One day those Persians'll be picking it up, you mark my words!" Using a piece of wood, he lifted several still glowing brands out of the embers, laid them on his raft, and put it in the water. We stayed for a long while, watching these tiny lights as they drifted away in the purple air of dusk.

On the footpath that led back up to the orphanage, he confided to me in somewhat embarrassed tones: "You know that boat where that bastard and Muza… Well, I've sunk it now."

Twenty years later, when I was beginning to write, I contemplated turning that evening spent in the company of Village into a short story about the last twenty-four hours in the life of a young man. For he was to die at the end of the following day. A striking subject, I thought, the quintessence of a life revealed amid the mellow banality of a May dusk. I never wrote it, no doubt sensing the falseness of a contrivance of this kind. Instead of reinventing those twenty-four hours in such a way as to milk them for significance, I needed to hold on to what little I knew of them, tell that and avoid the temptation to wax philosophical.

The following evening (it was a Sunday), the same gang of loutish "recruiting sergeants" appeared and this time invited us to have a drink with them. It was clear that – between the stick and the carrot – they were seeking our weak spots. We did not refuse, some of our number eager to act like hard men, and others, perhaps all of us, eager to respond to the least promise of friendship. They drank, too, and had probably not even foreseen the brawl that erupted on account of an overturned glass, an oath, a slap. Or else, on the contrary, everything was calculated, to divide us up into those who would nibble the carrot and those who would resist.

The only weapons we had were our five-kopeck pieces sharpened into blades, along with an iron bar snatched from one of the louts and a broken bottle. I already knew that hand-to-hand combat only looked good in films and that this brawl would be much like the previous ones: clumsy shuffling, blows missing the target, no mercy for those who fell, animal glee at any sign of weakness. The alcohol made the fight even uglier; we all simply felt we were saving our own skins. One of our number was already on the ground, huddled in on himself like a scarab to ward off blows to his head.

I noticed Village during a moment's respite as, with broken bottle in hand, I contrived to keep at bay an adversary as out of breath as I was. Village was coming up from the river, doubtless attracted by our gasps and groans. I saw him drop his lines, pick up a big stone, rush toward us. Then a few minutes later (finding I had time to spit out a fragment of broken tooth) I saw him again. Inexplicably the assault by the louts had just started to falter, they were retreating; one of them, tapping the others on the back, was urging them to leave. At length they all ran across a patch of waste ground, leaving us an unhoped-for victory. Now we were laughing, wiping away the blood, discussing the best bits of the fight… Suddenly we heard this voice. We saw Village sitting there, his arms lolling on the ground, and – as it seemed to us – glassy-eyed with astonishment. He was not groaning but from his lips came forth a wet babbling, like that of a babe in arms. Someone touched his shoulder, and Village toppled gently backward. We gathered around him, crouching, made uneasy by this fixed stare, clumsily felt his chest, his head… All the arms clutching at him seemed to be straining to hold him back on a slippery slope. There was still time for one of our number to jokingly suggest a glass of vodka, but already beneath the unbuttoned shirt a fine trickle of blood was to be seen and the gray glint of a blade – that of a "Finnish knife," which had snapped at the hilt.

All I can remember of our headlong run to the orphanage and the minutes that followed it is the desperate hammering on the sick-bay door: we had forgotten it was a Sunday.

During the days that followed I was haunted by the notion that this death expected some gesture from me, some idea that I could not contrive to come up with. Some serious, significant gesture. But the trifling nature of everything that happened now was distressing to me. The next day, just as if nothing had occurred, the nurse opened the infirmary at nine o'clock precisely. Two days later they ordered us to carry out our old desks from the classrooms, and among the tabletops covered in drawings and writing, nobody took note of the one that had belonged to Village. Trifling, too, was my feverish speculation about the odds: what if I had had the idea of taking along the Misericordia dagger that day. Then, maybe… Yet I knew a blow from an iron bar would have smashed that slender blade like glass.

One evening at the beginning of June, I found a way to force myself from this verbiage of remorse as I remembered that little raft Village had launched on its nocturnal voyage. It suddenly seemed to me that it was very important to keep picturing this tiny craft with its freight of smoky charcoal. Not to allow its slow progress toward the Caspian Sea to be interrupted in my mind. To believe it was still afloat.

At the time of the funeral we had all noted that there was no one to inform about Village's death. For us this was not a new idea, but we were struck by the cosmic absoluteness of it: no one upon the whole terrestrial globe! That priest's words from the preceding winter came back to me then: "… Those who have no one to pray for them." Once more I pictured the little raft, the glowing embers drifting away into the night beneath the Volga 's immense sky.