The Life of an Unknown Man

III

On June 21, 1941, at the Nord Café, which was very popular with the people of Leningrad, Volsky lived through the last hours of his old life, the last day of peace, without knowing it. A moment of bliss, epitomized by the taste of a cup of hot chocolate.

A young woman with dark-brown hair had joined this group of friends who, like him, were students at the Conservatory. She was eating a pastry, a trace of cream remained on her lips, a mustache that made everyone laugh… Volsky spoke to her, their conversation became detached from the hubbub in the room. He lived in the same district as she and it pleased him greatly to remark, “It’s a small world and yet we’ve never met before…” Simple words that helped him to grasp with fresh intensity what he had become. From being a penniless provincial he had been transformed into a young singer, speaking on equal terms to a young woman of good family from Leningrad. They agreed to meet again, a hint of a reunion that promised a glorious day very soon.

This was the moment when the taste of hot chocolate became associated with the future life he dreamed of. A peasant’s son, he had managed, not without some gritting of teeth, to win recognition for his talent, to gain acceptance, armed only with his voice. His future was like the overture to an opera, he often pictured himself at the Kirov Theater, in Rigoletto or Boris Godunov.

From his childhood he retained the memory of those hands, his father’s and mother’s, lined palms, encrusted with earth. His arrival in Leningrad had wrenched him away from the gravitational pull of his origins, liberating his footsteps from the mud of country roads, allowing him to run, to escape… He would live in the weightlessness of song, he thought. Just as others lived from the harsh weight of physical labor. He was sufficiently pleased with himself to justify this dispensation and to declare himself the winner. A conqueror who would collude with the proudest city in Russia, and win acclaim from beautiful women with eyes that shone in the darkness of boxes at the theater.

Such thoughts were mingled that evening with the clear light of a late sunset, the laughter of his friends in the café’s great hall, and the taste of hot chocolate drunk in little sips.

The next day the loudspeaker attached to a post opposite the Nord Café was to announce the start of the war. As did thousands of other loudspeakers from the Black Sea to the Pacific.

In the very same street in September he saw an apartment building whose front had just been ripped out by bombing. The insides of the dwellings, almost undamaged, astonished him more than the totally demolished buildings, already numerous in the besieged city. In an armchair at the far end of a room on the second floor Volsky could make out a body, a motionless face… He hastened to think back to that evening of June 21, the taste of hot chocolate.

The same memory returned one morning in October: a woman slipped over on the frozen bank of the Neva and he rushed to her aid, caught the bucket she was trying to fill. In the apartments the water had been cut off for weeks but this was when he became aware of the strangeness of the situation. A modern metropolis in which people drew water from the river and drank the murky liquid. He thought again about that cup of hot chocolate.

He recalled it, too, that night when, in the entrance hall to his apartment building, he heard a child’s voice, a whine similar to the groaning of a drunkard. He climbed the staircase, feeling his way, accustomed to living without electricity, and the moaning came closer, now forming into words, then stopped all at once. He struck a match (a priceless treasure) and saw, at his feet, an old man’s head upon the slender body of a little boy. The flame went out, he gave a call at the doorway to an apartment. A rustling could be heard, no voice. “Wait here,” he said to the child, invisible in the darkness. “I’ll come back. I’ll give you something to eat.” He brought what people fed on in the besieged city: a slab of bread made partly from straw. A burning block of wood from the floor served as a torch to light his path. The child was no longer there. The door to one of the apartments remained open. Volsky peered in and gave a shout, but did not have the courage to venture into the cold caverns of the rooms…

Back at his own place, he devoured the bread as if someone had tried to snatch it from him. Then remained for a long while in the darkness, picturing the child in a labyrinth of rooms where it had become possible to come across a corpse. Now he grasped that it was not hunger driving him to return to the night of June 21 and his cup of hot chocolate. It was distress, rather, at seeing how the city’s death throes were becoming routine. And how he was quickly slipping into a way of life where one went to sleep at night without worrying about a starving child dying in a neighboring apartment…

He blew furiously on the embers at the bottom of a small metal basin transformed into a stove, and threw in several strips of wood levered up from the floor. Closed his eyes. The wave of warmth had the feel of a summer’s evening… The Nord Café, the laughter of his friends, gathered there after a rehearsal. One of them amuses himself by giving voice to everything they say, in song, as in an operatic aria. A girl acquires a mustache by biting into a pastry, blushes, and Volsky, noticing that she is beautiful, blushes as well. Amid the laughter he learns her name: Mila.

He awoke hearing the high-pitched note of a stringed instrument. The sound came from the corridor of the communal apartment, from the room occupied by an old couple. These neighbors no longer got out of bed and when they needed help, one of them would scrape the strings of an old violin… He picked up the can of water that was heating on the stove, the sounds guiding him in the darkness. He told himself he must find the child and take him to the old people’s room, closer to this source of sound that could be lifesaving.

The next day as he consulted the thermometer behind its glass window (minus forty-eight), he became aware of an echo of past happiness within himself: a skating rink, fleeting silhouettes, a loudspeaker pouring forth waltzes and tangos… At present the falling of this fine red line meant only one thing: an increase in the stiffening of people’s bodies.

That morning was a milestone in the history of the besieged city. The bread ration was reduced to a hundred and twenty-five grams per person. A week before, the warehouses containing reserves of food had been bombed, and in the fire the supplies that could have fed the population of two million for a month had gone up in flames. The word “blockade” rang out now like a death sentence: the garrote of encirclement, no link with the outside world, no hope of survival. A slice of bread per day, exhaustion, immobility, nothingness. Those who could pick up Western radio stations learned of Hitler’s decision: the city, soon to be occupied, would not be emptied of its inhabitants; they would remain there, cut off from the world, without food, without water, without medical care, and, at the end of the winter, the army of the Reich would undertake “operations of sanitary maintenance,” that is to say, the destruction of two million corpses. The people of Leningrad said to themselves that this project was already under way.

Volsky ate his bread ration between bombing raids. With three other young men he had just been making his way across the roofs of several buildings where they picked up incendiary bombs, rendering them harmless with the aid of enormous steel tongs. Silence returned, he sat down behind a skylight to shelter from the wind, took out his bread, and chewed it for a long time to outwit his hunger. His gaze took in the lines of the main avenues, the spire of the Cathedral of Peter and Paul and that of the Admiralty. On the promontory of Vasilievsky Island, opposite the Winter Palace, the antiaircraft guns pointed their long barrels into the sky. Some of the monuments were hidden beneath a casing of planks as protection against shells. The Neva extended out into a broad snow-covered plain. The day was clear, blue, more beautiful than ever, thanks to the absence of traffic and crowds. A magnificent shroud, thought Volsky. Yes, a vast graveyard filled with buildings where, day after day, thousands of hearts ceased beating. No other life was possible.

The future life he had dreamed of flitted past in his mind, like a speeded-up theatrical performance: sparkling lights, operatic arias hummed to the rhythm of vaudeville chorus songs, frenzied applause… It still seemed incredibly close. And already hopeless, ludicrous.

He went back to his comrades, who were walking along the roof. Sparing movements, sluggish gestures. One might have thought that this slowness was due to fear of slipping. No, it was how people fed on a hundred and twenty-five grams of bread a day moved. Nevertheless they kept going, through the cold, through days that all presaged the end. Through the only life that remained to them, one far too much like death… One after another, they came down into the attics, then, via an iron ladder, onto the top floor of the building. On the threshold of an apartment stood a woman with a child in her arms. She greeted them with a faint smile… Volsky was astonished by the starkness of the choices imposed by war: if they had not succeeded in putting out the fire this mother and her child would not have survived… Their survival might not be of long duration, with the threat of more bombs, hunger, the plummeting of the red line in the thermometer. But this reprieve was worth the trouble of risking his life. Yes, for this woman’s wan smile, for her child’s calm breathing, one must forget that young man drinking his hot chocolate on a June evening and feeling proudly triumphant.

Since the start of the blockade he had never considered that saving a life at the cost of his own might become his destiny.

One November morning this close proximity of life to death permeated his very breathing. During the previous two days he had not had the strength to leave the apartment. At this first attempt to go and fetch his hundred and twenty-five grams of bread he had collapsed on the stairs, spent a moment before recovering consciousness, and had then taken an hour to climb back up to his room, where, thanks to the fire, his body resisted merging into the lifelessness that prevailed in the streets.

He began exploring the very last zone that precedes extinction. He had always pictured hunger as a relentless, gut-wrenching torment. And so it was, for as long as one had the strength to feel it. Then the torture came to an end for want of a victim, the latter having become a shadow for whom a mouthful of water already represented a painful effort of digestion. The cold, too, caused suffering to those who still clung to life but deadened the pain of those who were utterly exhausted and waiting for the end. Yet this increasing weakness seemed to be external to the body. It was the world that was changing, making objects too heavy (the can in which the water was heating now weighed a ton), lengthening distances (three days ago he had managed to reach the bakery: a veritable polar expedition).

Despite the physical collapse, his mind remained clear. He contemplated the possibility of no longer being alive the following day, the strangeness of confronting this notion so calmly, and even the vanity this vision of his own death would have represented, had he not really been dying.

His brain was, indeed, functioning faultlessly. And yet it was something other than thought that one evening commanded him to extricate himself from his torpid state and embark on a journey through the icy darkness that filled the apartment. At the far end of the shadows the violin strings were trembling at the touch of a hand.

The old couple were stretched out in their bed, which had the look of a tent where the sides, blankets, and jumbled-up clothes had all collapsed on top of them. No fire in the little stove, just the light of a candle that had burned low.

“My husband is dead… You passed out…,” the old woman murmured, and it took Volsky a moment to realize that the two remarks had not been made at the same time. He had had a brief blackout, the woman had got up to lay a scrap of moistened cloth on his face and, as he came to, he heard her voice (“You passed out…”). He tried to explain that it was not her telling him about the death that had thrown him to the ground, as in a bad stage play. She assured him it had not occurred to her, helped him to sit down in the armchair. They no longer had the strength to speak, their silence became a vigil in which their mutual understanding needed no words.

They understood that death had ceased to surprise, it occurred too frequently in this city in extremis. Many were the apartments inhabited by corpses, dead bodies were deposited in the public streets, only a slender frontier separating them from the living. Volsky remembered a passerby stopping at the entrance to Palace Bridge one day, beside a man stretched out in the snow, who suddenly collapsed himself, joining the man on the far side of that frontier. “I almost did that just now,” he thought, glancing at the old man’s body.

Death had always been cordoned off in his mind by a complex game of hide-and-seek with himself, in which he veered between perfumed promises, cynicism, and fear. He had come across the same contrivances in books: a maze of prevarications for keeping quiet about death, if not dressing it up in lies…

The woman reached out her hand, adjusted the candle. The flame made her emaciated hand transparent, the pattern of the blood vessels was clear. Fingers of ice. The shadow of her gesture passed over the old man’s face like a caress and seemed to animate it with a trace of life. She must have noticed this, smiled as she closed her husband’s eyes and squeezed his hand.

All that Volsky had known about death now seemed false. This moment he shared with these two ancient beings was vibrant with life. A life clarified in the ultimate simplicity of truth. These old hands joined, this grieving smile on the woman’s face, the calm of her gaze.

Late in the night she put a little canvas bag on the bedside table and, more rapidly than his eyes, Volsky’s sense of smell detected dry bread. “We’re going to be able to eat,” the woman whispered, as if she were afraid of disturbing her husband’s sleep, and she added, “Thanks to him…” Words whose meaning Volsky could not follow. The dry bread swelled deliciously in the mouth. And with it this taste his tongue had difficulty in recognizing, a lump of sugar that dissolved slowly, becoming not a taste but a vision, the shifting mosaic of a forgotten world. “We shouldn’t eat too much,” they both remarked automatically. The well-known refrain of all starving people facing the danger of sudden abundance. Too much… Volsky looked at the little bag, calculated the time his neighbor might be able to hold on with this reserve supply.

“Yes, thanks to him,” she repeated. A letter left by her husband had told her about the existence of this bag hidden behind those books that had not yet been burned in the stove. For weeks now the man had been saving a part of his ration, knowing that between himself and his wife a choice had to be made as to who should survive…

Volsky had already heard tell of such people in Leningrad in the siege who let themselves die to save a loved one, generally a mother sacrificing herself for her children. Now he himself owed his life to a man.

The old woman fell silent, shut her eyes, her hand clasping her husband’s fingers. Volsky once more had the feeling that the bond between them was indifferent to the demise of bodies. The woman took a deep breath and, with the wry smile that was familiar to him, murmured, “As a matter of fact, I did the same…” With a nod of her head toward a little set of shelves, she indicated a paper package from which she extracted slices of dried bread.

He set off for the cemetery in the dense black of a winter morning. Shadowy main thoroughfares, empty of traffic, were evocative of frozen fjords from which the sea had withdrawn. There were more passersby than he would have expected. They stood out against the darkness, as if on a photographic negative. The ones going to the factory walked faster and looked less downcast, Volsky noticed, not knowing whether this impression of energy was due to the extra bread they received or to their robust constitutions. More frequently than these workmen, women passed by, drawing sleds laden with buckets, some empty, some filled with water from the Neva. Their gait did not differ from the shuffling of people who, like Volsky, were transporting a dead person.

He had used a wardrobe door, a plank a couple of feet wide, to support the old man’s body. Rare were those who managed to find a coffin. Most people buried their loved ones in a shroud made from a curtain or a tablecloth.

After three or four crossroads you no longer had to turn into different streets to get to the cemetery and from now on everyone was moving in the same direction. Volsky waded through the snow a short distance behind two women whose burden had been placed on a rectangle of sheet metal. They came to a corner and stopped, one of them embraced the other before leaving her. She had helped her for part of the way and now had to go off to work, thought Volsky. The one who was left in her harness advanced more slowly now and soon he was on the point of overtaking her. It was then that he noticed his mistake. What he had taken for sheet metal was, in reality, a large painting… Amazing and yet not so, he told himself, picturing the disarray, the haste, the impossibility of quickly finding a sled… The figure swathed in cloth and lying at the center of the frame did not appear to be heavy, the canvas sagged very little. But to slide such a rectangle along called for strenuous efforts: the corners of the picture caught in the snow, the body slithered around, risked falling off…

More with a gesture than with words, Volsky offered his help, the woman accepted with a simple nod of her head. With one hand he was now pulling her load. The black of the sky turned to violet, limpid, icy. The fine line of the street, the white filaments of breath above the walkers, could be seen more clearly.

The sound of aircraft arose while they were crossing a large empty square. “The worst kind,” Volsky said to himself, hearing the screams of the Stuka dive-bombers. They could feel the blast from the explosions in the soles of their feet and the din reverberated through the scenery of the dead city. A huge cloud arose from the next street, swirling around itself. The people abandoned their dead and rushed into the entrance halls to apartment buildings. Volsky and the woman he was helping found themselves lying against a wall, behind snowdrifts. She was stretched out on her side, her arms shielding her face. Without knowing anything about her, unaware of whether she was young or old, Volsky felt intense pity for this body flung down amid the dirty snow. Just one fragment of shrapnel and this unknown woman could be left there, an inert piece of human debris. He had an impulse to stand up, to interpose himself between this life and the spurts of metal riddling the street.

After a quarter of an hour they resumed their journey and Volsky could finally see the face of the woman walking beside him. She was young, but her hunger-ravaged features made her ageless, almost without personality. Like all the women in the besieged city. Eyes enlarged and sunken, emaciated cheek lines that allowed the geometry of the jaws and the skull to show through.

When they stopped, breathless, to crunch some dried bread, he spoke, wanting to lighten the weight of their funereal progress.

“I’d never have expected to be giving my neighbor a ride on a contraption like this. It’s sad… And yours isn’t much better provided for… Who is that?”

“It’s my mother.”

They remained still, facing one another, silent, avoiding the slightest facial expression, resisting the onset of tears. It was minus fifty degrees that morning, it was not the moment to weep.

The young woman came to life first, bent down, seized the rope attached to her load.

“I’ve changed more than you, Georgy,” she murmured. “You don’t recognize me.”

Volsky thought he had misheard, amazed by the way she addressed him but also by the speed at which this woman’s voice was once more becoming familiar. Yet he was still looking at a stranger.

“Have we met before?”

The young woman slightly lifted the thick shawl that hid her forehead.

“Yes. I’m the one who doesn’t know how to eat pastries and you love hot chocolate.”

He stopped, thunderstruck, stared at her emaciated features, the huge, darkly ringed eyes… Mila!

One evening at the beginning of December Leningrad moved beyond words. Until recently these had been of some help in thinking about its icy death throes. One could say “war,” “blockade,” “famine,” and it all seemed logical. Until the day when, at the Five Corners intersection, Volsky and Mila saw an expanse of frozen water. Pipes had burst, leaving a vast mirror filled with purple sky and dark facades. They had been proceeding one step at a time, pausing every five minutes to catch their breath. Reaching the open space they stopped, dumbfounded. An unknown city was revealed in the reflection yawning at their feet. At the edge of this abyss sat a young woman, a statue covered in hoarfrost. Words contrived as best they could to reconstruct what had happened: a girl had tried to draw water there, had sat down, overcome with exhaustion. But words were shattered by this upside-down city, by the smile that could be made out on the girl’s frozen face.

… The previous day they had helped the old woman, Volsky’s neighbor, to leave the city. This tiny chance of getting away currently existed thanks to trucks that ventured across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga. This route was not yet referred to by the people of Leningrad as “The Road of Life” but hundreds fled the city in this way, blessing the cold that solidified the waves, the cold that was deadly for those who remained… This escape route was the last scrap of meaning they could cling to in the dead city. The war, the siege, these trucks carrying children and old people to survival. Words and actions still linked in a semblance of logic…

The dusk at Five Corners turned that world upside down onto the purple surface of the ice-a vertiginous vision of apartment buildings, streetlamps, stars plunged deep into the earth. And at the edge of the frozen water, a girl seated there, smiling from the depths of her death.

They hardly spoke anymore. Words had lost their grip on what they were living through. They would have had to refer to these blocks of stone harboring corpses as “buildings.” And these vague, angular sketches of humanity as “townspeople.” “Food” meant boiled leather, and the paste from wallpaper diluted in water.

To protect these last sparks of life, thousands of women, thin as skeletons, worked flat-out at the conveyor belts of munitions factories, lining up rows of shells, thunderous streams of bullets. On the icy plains surrounding the city, men with faces furrowed by chilblains were hurling this steel against other men, who, with insane obstinacy, sought to conquer the immense graveyard that Leningrad was turning into. Every night the trucks set out across the ice of the lake, exposed targets that had to pit their wits against the bombers hounding them in the midst of the snow. Often the human cargo would vanish through the holes opened up by the bombs. On their return journey the trucks that got through brought bread, from which one-hundred-and-twenty-five-gram slices could be cut, giving a new lease, for a few more days, to this life words could no longer describe.

And above this ghostly world the mauve sun of the great frosts would rise, a dull disk, making only a brief appearance, inspiring thoughts of some unknown planet.

Everything that happened to them seemed as if it were taking place following their death. In an afterlife where, deep in labyrinths of stone, unique beings were dying, lost amid the confusion of emaciated bodies, amid the frenzy of the last shudders of hope, amid the fever of memories, while other human beings, a little more robust, were cutting out pieces of metal that men with faces scorched by the cold employed to kill those who had come to these snowy wastes to die.

This was how Volsky and Mila now saw the world, from a very remote perspective. A perspective that could have seemed godlike in its detachment, yet was grievously human, for each of them greatly dreaded the other’s death.

On that evening when they saw the city turned upside down, this dread had eyes that spied on them in the darkness. They had come home, had tried to light the fire, had failed. Their hands, made clumsy from weakness, could no longer manage to break up a piece of flooring. Someone was staring at them in the darkness with a scornful grimace, like a hunter contemplating his prey as it quakes at his feet…

Volsky turned away from this gaze, seized a bundle of sheets of paper, crumpled them one by one, filled the stove with them. All the books had already been burned, all that was left was these pages of sheet music and an opera libretto they had once been studying at the Conservatory. The fire was lit, they held out their hands to it, massaged their fingers, managed to dislodge a dozen or so blocks of wood.

As the sheets blazed, ripples of music and singing went up in smoke. Fear yielded to an unknown feeling: perhaps death was the birth of these echoes escaping from the burnt pages. This certainty of being somewhere other than in their starving bodies had nothing triumphant about it. Quite simply, without needing to say it, they knew that was how it was.

The next day this faith gave them the strength to go to the place where they had met on June 21… The Nord Café was shut, the street closed off with blocks of concrete, the entrances to the buildings transformed into machine gun posts. The city was preparing to undergo the final assault from the enemy. The inside of the café had changed little. The same counter with its bronze top, the same mirrors, and there, beneath a big mosaic on the wall, “their” table… Yes, a table in an empty room, bathed in coppery sunlight, deep calm. And in the window pane the reflection of two faces with their bones protruding from their skulls. So this was what death was.

They knew they were too far away from their building and that the crust of bread eaten that morning would not be enough for the return journey. The streets were lined with frozen bodies, some of them wrapped in makeshift shrouds, others sitting or lying there, frozen in the pose determined by their collapse. They walked slowly, experiencing no emotion at the sight of these dead people, nor at the idea, hazy and painless, of falling, becoming rigid. At one point Volsky noticed that Mila’s chin had turned white, it looked like a smear of powder, the warning sign of frostbite. He tried to rub this spot but he could barely command his numb fingers. Then he opened his coat for the young woman to lay her frozen face against his chest. They remained there, hugging one another in the middle of a street where, in the dusk, the dead kept watch. It was their first embrace.

Turning toward the Neva they saw a long queue outside a building. Famished as they were, they instinctively made the link: a crowd, ration tickets, a piece of bread. But this queue had an unusual look about it. People were going in at the door but no one was coming out, as if they had decided to eat their rations on the spot, away from the icy blast coming off the Baltic Sea. As they drew closer Volsky and Mila discovered to their amazement that this was a theater and people, rendered mute with exhaustion, were going to watch a performance. The poster for the Musical Comedy Theater announced an operetta: The Three Musketeers…

Without conferring, they moved toward the stage door. An old man, candle in hand, reminiscent of a lost character in a Chekhov play, greeted them, led them to the manager’s office. The latter was in the middle of breaking up wood and stoking an iron stove on which a saucepan was warming. He raised an emaciated face to them and his smile stretched the skin on his angular cheekbones. His eyes seemed fixed on a vision of horror. Volsky mentioned the Conservatory, asked if they could be useful…

Suddenly the man thrust him aside and, by moving adroitly, just had time to catch Mila as she passed out. When she came to he murmured, still with that smile that left the expression in his eyes unaltered, “In the old days actors were trained to support heroines who fainted…” He invited them to drink a bowl of soup, which was, in fact, hot water with a little meal floating in it.

Their offer was accepted with a remark Volsky would remember for the rest of his life: “We need voices.” His eyes met Mila’s. Voices… In truth, that was all they had left.

Their lives merged with that of the theater. They assisted in putting up scenery, gave a helping hand to wardrobe, cooked meals for the singers and musicians. And in the evening they went on stage. Volsky believed that by engaging an excess of walk-on actors, the director was seeking to encourage them. But after several performances he realized that this casting related to the frequency with which the actors died. By taking part in the show, the walk-ons were learning all the roles and could thus take over from anyone who, one day, did not return.

Volsky and Mila already knew this Three Musketeers by heart, an operetta written by a certain Louis Varney, the libretto of which had been substantially reworked by a Russian author. The piece had very little in common with the novel by Dumas. Apart from the musketeers, of course. When they got home they lit the fire, rehearsed the songs, and on occasion burst out laughing, as the line about “the hot southern sun” caused a cloud of mist to emerge from Volsky’s mouth… The hardest part was in the first act, when thanks to this “hot southern sun,” Marie, d’Artagnan’s beloved, had to stand there shivering in a pale satin dress.

Everyone strove for the performances to go on as before. But, of course, everything was very different. They acted by candlelight in an auditorium where it was minus twenty degrees. Often the show was interrupted by an air raid siren. The audience would go down into the basement, those who no longer had the strength to do so remaining huddled in their seats, staring at the stage emptied by the sound of bombing… Applause was no longer heard. Too weak, their hands frozen in mittens, people would bow to thank the actors. This silent gratitude was more touching than any number of ovations.

One evening, just before the performance, one of the musketeers stumbled on the threshold of his dressing room and collapsed, with a surprised smile still on his made-up face… It was not the first death Volsky and Mila had witnessed here at the theater, but this time they were the ones who carried the actor to the cemetery. The road was familiar and along the way the real difference between the performances now staged and the life of the theater before the war was brought home to them. Death was something those singing on stage shared with those listening in the auditorium. A theatrical illusion created so close to extinction acquired the force of a supreme truth.

This truth was even more alive in the concerts the singers gave at the front. Frozen plains, plowed up by shells, makeshift platforms balanced on ammunition boxes, and the faces of soldiers, most of whom would die during the days ahead. Volsky and Mila often found themselves singing songs from The Three Musketeers; this was their “dress rehearsal,” they would say with a smile.

They would not have believed that the front line was so close to Leningrad. When they mounted the platform they could see the frozen oscillogram of spires and domes through the cold gray mist. Their voices seemed to soar up like a fragile screen between this city and the enemy positions. They met the looks of the soldiers, young or older men, some maintaining a certain bold front, others drained, devoid of hope. The songs spoke of sunshine and love. But what could be glimpsed at times in these looks was the terrible brotherhood of the doomed. Yes, the acceptance of death, but also the mad certainty of being more than this body hurled beneath the bombs.

The singers were easy prey now for the machine gun fire from dive-bombing aircraft. And yet it was here, at the front, sharing a meal with the fighting men, that Volsky and Mila regained a little strength. One evening, at the theater Volsky remarked, “Thanks to their mess cooking, I could play d’Artagnan now from start to finish…” In the early days, they recalled, they had had to sit down and catch their breath at the end of each scene.

When Volsky spoke of playing d’Artagnan he was joking, never imagining that one day he could be given a part, albeit a supporting one. However, the allocation of roles was no longer decided by the director but by a silent being, present at every performance. The grim reaper himself, whom the actors used to make the butt of their mockery, to keep their courage up.

The singer who played Marie was fatally wounded in a bombing raid a few yards away from the theater. Mila had to take over for her that same evening. During the interval, while roguish tunes still hung on the air, she ran to the dressing room where the actress, surrounded by singers and musicians, was dying. When she saw Mila, she whispered, “In the second act, when you’re escaping with d’Artagnan, don’t move too fast. Otherwise you’ll be out of breath from running. The first few times, I remember…” Her voice broke off, her eyes fastened on a tall candle flame. The bell announced the start of the next act.

Two days later, Volsky played d’Artagnan. He took over from an actor who had been found lifeless in an apartment with shattered windows.

The show went ahead without mistakes. There were not even any air raid warnings to interrupt it. Only Volsky knew that his performance was hanging by a thread. Halfway through the play his strength deserted him. He did not collapse, however, and continued to brandish his sword and sing lustily. But a split perception took over: his body trudged up the steps to a castle, his voice pealed out in merry runs, while far away from this performance the words of someone at several years’ distance threw out their echo. In the icy darkness of the auditorium, he could see the spectators bowing, apologetic about no longer being able to clap. And onstage a young woman was singing to whom he had just declared his love, following the play’s story line. He sensed that for her their theatrical kiss had been more than a piece of stage business required by the plot. This detail should have amused him, yet he felt an intense sadness that seemed to come from a future in which their stage embrace would have quite a different meaning… He also noticed that the actor playing Porthos was sweating profusely.

Instead of putting him off, this split perception enabled him to carry on right up to the moment when, holding hands, the actors walked forward to greet the audience. Mila was smiling, moved, her face on fire, Porthos was bowing, breathless, brushing the boards with his musketeer’s hat, Volsky could feel the song he had just been singing still throbbing in his throat. It was even possible to imagine the swell of applause and the beautiful bare shoulders of the women in the audience…

His joy then found a selfish rationale, a hunger for admiration which reminded him of that young man drinking his hot chocolate: a summery past that would surely be reborn, life, his young life would resume its course, the nightmare of a starving Leningrad would pass, and the city would not fall!

He went into his dressing room, tossed his plumed hat into an armchair, removed the shoulder belt and sword, peeled away the mustache, wincing into the mirror. And suddenly, in the same reflection, caught sight of Porthos. The man was sitting in a corner, like a punished child, his hands clasped between his knees, his face shining with sweat. Volsky was about to go and clap him on the shoulder, to congratulate him on his performance, when Mila appeared and beckoned to him to come away… The previous night Porthos had managed to get his wife and children onto one of those trucks that evacuated the rare lucky ones out of the besieged city. That morning he had learned that the convoy had been bombed and there were no survivors. He had come to the theater, given a performance. The stage was poorly lit, the audience did not see his tears. Even the cast thought he had a fever and was perspiring, in spite of the cold.

They went home in silence, walking along the dark streets where one often came across frozen bodies. In the sky, mingling with the snowflakes, there fluttered sheets of paper that the passersby picked up, read, destroyed. Leaflets dropped by a German aircraft: Moscow had been captured, the army of the Reich had crossed the Volga and was advancing into the Urals, meeting no resistance… It was vitally important not to be tempted to believe this for a second, danger lay in doubt taking root in the mind, undermining all resolve.

No, Moscow could not surrender! They thought about Leningrad, remembered the mud-caked faces of the soldiers hanging on to a narrow strip of frozen plain a few miles from there.

“Those trucks that were bombed in the night,” murmured Mila. “I was told about it just before the show. I didn’t think he’d be able to hold on to the end…” She stooped and picked up several leaflets, “for the fire,” she said with a little smile. They walked on. That man in tears who had sung and laughed on stage became a fragile but strangely irrefutable proof for them: no, the city would not fall.

The next day they learned that further performances were going to be suspended; the mobilization of the remaining men who were not yet at the front had just been decreed.

And in the evening, walking along the embankments beside the Neva, they saw sailors carrying big black crates and loading them onto a tug. Volsky tried to get close, a soldier sent him packing. They did an about-face and walked back beside an old man who, like them, must have seen the loading of the cargo. “I was in the navy myself,” he explained softly. “What they’re doing is mining the harbor. Then they’ll sink all the warships. So as to leave nothing for the Germans. It’s finished. Our city’s lost.”

For several days they gave concerts close to the front line, where death could occur between a couple of remarks exchanged in a trench. The same wind, at minus fifty, which seemed to sheathe their singing in a layer of ice, the same shivering that the actors concealed behind bold gestures. But the looks they encountered in the crowd of soldiers had changed. These men now knew that their deaths could protect no one. To save Moscow, where the resistance was already being broken by the Germans, Leningrad was to be sacrificed. That winter the old rivalry between the two capitals posed an impossible choice.

The singers no longer returned home, they were billeted in a workers’ hostel emptied by the mobilization. From this outlying area it was easier to get to the front. Several times already they had asked to be armed, so they could be sent to a fighting unit. But, curiously enough, the old soldier who used to escort their troupe would always echo the reply given that day by the manager of the Musical Comedy Theater: “We need your voices…”

He said it again one evening, when he told them that the following day their concert would take place at a very exposed site. “You will be singing under fire,” he added. “So only volunteers are to come with me.” The response was a torrent of cheerfully indignant exclamations. “Oh, Captain, do you doubt your musketeers?” one of the actors burst out, the song sung by Porthos. The “captain” hushed them with a gesture. “That’s all I can tell you. The conditions will be really tough. Think about it…”

They set off just before dawn in an army truck: fourteen singers, ten musicians carrying their instruments, no one refused the call. The journey was short (there were no long distances around the besieged city anymore) and the spot where they piled out did not look very different from the places where their concerts generally took place. Except that this time no human presence was visible. The gleaming pinpricks of stars, a white expanse sloping down to a frozen river, then rising up to a ridge above the opposite bank. No sound apart from their whispers (the “captain” had asked them not to speak out loud). No platform, they took up position on a square of packed snow, the singers in front, the musicians a little way behind them, all facing the river, more in response to an instinct than to any order. Over there beyond the ridge, a mysterious listening presence could be sensed…

Their military guide passed among them, shook each one’s hand, sometimes muttering a proverb (“No one dies twice, no one escapes a single death”), sometimes wishing them good luck in words that sounded bizarre coming from an army officer: “Off you go now, with God’s help.” His tones were muffled but the emotion sincere and that was the moment when they realized that this would be a concert quite unlike the previous ones.

“Look, that’s the star you can see from my window…,” Volsky had time to murmur in Mila’s ear. She had time to look up…

The plain, which had looked bare, shivered into life and was covered in tiny dots. The night, caught off guard, remained silent for several seconds, then suddenly erupted into gunfire. The dull sound of a “hurrah!” swelled in the air. The “captain” waved his arm, the music rang out. With the power of their voices the singers drowned the shouting of the soldiers and the first shots.

They sang the “Internationale,” hardly surprised at the “captain’s” choice (their usual repertoire was more lyrical). There were few fervent believers in communism among them, but the words bursting forth from their lips spoke of a truth it was difficult to deny. One appearing right before their eyes. At first the white plain bristling with little black figures running down toward the river. Then the first bodies falling and on the ridge above the opposite bank the German positions revealing themselves, breaking the line of snowy dunes with indentations made for their machine guns. Finally, in the glorious clear light of this winter morning, a long scarlet stain left by a soldier crawling back toward the singers, as if they could have protected him.

All was confusion on both banks. A wave of attackers fell back, decimated, and collided with the next line as it moved into the assault, joined with it, managed to advance several dozen yards, fell beneath the increasingly accurate fire from the Germans. Yet another dotted line of human beings rose up and hurled itself at the icy slope on the far shore. The crackling of the gunfire became continuous, punctuated by explosions, the shouts of the commanding officers, and the cries of the wounded. In particular those of that wounded man still crawling up toward the musicians, emitting a harrowing death rattle and spattering the snow with his blood.

To the anarchy of all these deaths the singing gave a solemn, measured rhythm, which seemed to resonate beyond the battlefield. They were few in number on their stage of compacted snow, but it felt to the soldiers as if the power of the whole country rose behind them.

They were embarking on the anthem for the third time when Volsky noticed the fighting men who had reached the top of the bank opposite. A burst of machine gun fire mowed them down, but their bodies marked the most advanced frontier of the assault. He could see it all, despite the effort the singing demanded On the frozen river men were grappling with a gun carriage, its wheels embedded in a snowdrift. Their movements were both frenzied and painfully slow, like those of someone running in a nightmare.

He also saw what the darkness had hidden: at the bottom of the valley a ruined village, charred roofs and, amazingly intact, one house beneath a very tall tree, miraculously preserved. The quirk of a day of warfare… Another quirk, that young wounded soldier, huddled close to the singers, gazing at them in tears. The logical suffering of that mass of human beings and suddenly this singular suffering, which no logic could justify.

The assault was an act of desperate bravery, a heroic last stand rather than a strategists’ decision. Long years after the war Volsky would come across references to that day in December in two history books. The first would speak of “the participation of the artists of Leningrad in the defense of the city,” without referring to anyone in particular. The second, much more recent, would refer to “a sham counteroffensive dreamed up by those responsible, seeking to clear their names in Stalin’s eyes.” Neither one nor the other would make any mention of the soldier who had just traced a line of blood in the snow, of the tranquillity of that house, safe beneath its tree, or, least of all, of the lock of dark hair that had escaped from under Mila’s headscarf and was stirred by Volsky’s breath as he sang.

No history, either, would record that line of soldiers who managed to haul themselves up onto the ridge. Their silhouettes were etched against the sky before being felled by bullets, the following wave managed to cling on a little farther up. The singers lost count of the number of times they had struck up the “Internationale,” but, at the sight of these men, as the words about “the final conflict” rang out, they were freshly apposite.

It was then that the explosions began to occur all around them. Later on, in the army, Volsky would learn to recognize this as mortar fire, with its perfidious trajectories straight up into the air, which create the impression that the shells are falling out of the sky. All he noticed at the time was the increasing accuracy of the fire closing in on them. An explosion threw up snow behind the band and, without turning around, he sensed from a jolt in the music that one of the musicians had been hit. The singers reinforced their voices with wild exhilaration, glad to be identified by the enemy and therefore counting for something in this fight.

He fell without being wounded. A singer on his right, who had caught a shell splinter full in the face, toppled backward and brought him down. In the time it took to get up Volsky saw their troupe as they must appear from the water’s edge: two rows of singers, a semicircle of musicians and gaps already left by those who had been killed. Yet the singing had lost none of its intensity. And on the ridge several dozen soldiers were fighting on, hurling grenades, setting up machine guns among the bodies of their dead comrades.

They should have fallen back, retreated, escaped to the truck. Saved themselves. No one stirred. The order to fall back could have been given but their “captain” now lay on the path leading down to the river… They sang with a freedom never before experienced. Scorn for death caused a fierce exultation to well up in their emaciated bodies. Tears shone upon their eyelashes. Volsky saw one of the singers, his head all bloody, trying to rise to his feet and return to his place. Then a cymbal went rolling down the icy slope.

And now silence swept in, the light turned into a darkness from out of which emerged words he was struggling to make sense of. So it was… The effort he made woke him up. In the cotton wool density left by an explosion he could hear a voice and when his sight returned he found himself lying among other bodies and very close to his face he saw Mila’s eyes, her dark brown locks, no longer covered by her shawl, and, high up on her brow, a long wound. He spoke but could not hear himself. The only audible words were those she was crooning softly. Lines sung by Marie, from the operetta they had been performing in…

Before losing consciousness again he stared at this woman’s face bent over him, a face furrowed by hunger and disfigured by wounds. And, very briefly, he experienced the start of a life he would never have thought possible on this earth.

He did not see Mila again, did not even know if she had been treated in Leningrad or perhaps evacuated one night in a convoy of trucks. Discharged from the hospital on New Year’s Eve, he found himself in an artillery battery a few miles from the spot where their last concert had taken place. The stranglehold of the blockade had loosened a little; it had been possible to retake a few small towns from the enemy and in one of them Volsky’s comrades picked up a packet of elegant cards with German text printed in fine Gothic lettering. An officer read them, spat out an oath. They were invitations to the celebration to mark the fall of Leningrad. The festivities were planned for December 18 at the Astoria Hotel. Volsky remembered that their choir had been singing two days before that date.

He felt proud to have assisted, through this concert, in the defense of the city. Before learning that in mid-December the Germans had been defeated close to Moscow, and that this had saved Leningrad, making those fine invitation cards, with their Gothic script, superfluous… Impossible in war to judge between the impact of collective action and that of individual heroism, the fluctuating imprecision of weighing both in the balance-this would be one of the lessons of those four years of fighting.

The war had little else to teach him. In the siege of Leningrad he had lived with death as intimately as a soldier would have done. Now, crossing fields strewn with corpses, he was astonished at their number, but the absolute singularity of each death was somewhat blunted here at the front, blurred by this very number.

Of course, there was a mass of detail, often of vital importance, for him to learn. That unharmed house in a village razed to the ground and the very tall tree he had seen during their last concert. He knew now that it was the tree that had protected the shack. A target that, logically, should have been the first to be blown up. But gunners have their own logic. They take aim by selecting a reference point (a church tower, a post, or a tree) and it is the reference point that survives amid the ruins, as a reward for its value in pinpointing targets.

He also had a memory of those soldiers shuffling about beside their gun on the riverbank on the day of the desperate attack. From now on his war was just this shuffling about, in snow or mud, and he came no longer to expect glorious feats of arms, dazzling exploits. Resigned himself to studying the crude mechanics of battle. Soon he could evaluate at a glance the steel of the armored vehicles he was aiming at. His ear could judge the caliber of guns being fired, the different whistlings of the shells. Distances, trajectories, took on a palpable density, inscribed in the very air he breathed.

And then, on occasion, all this knowledge became futile, as on a particular evening at the end of an engagement. The shooting had stopped, his comrades were rolling their cigarettes, and suddenly one of them fell over, with a little red mark above his temple: a stray fragment of shrapnel. No glorious goal would compensate for this young face frozen, this unique presence, turning into dead matter before their eyes. Yes, he learned this lesson as well: in war the most testing moments are those of peace, for a dead man lying in the grass makes the living see the world as it would be, but for their folly. It was a spring day, the battle had taken place near a forest where the undergrowth was white with wild cherry trees in flower and lilies of the valley.

He was posted to the front defending Leningrad. Then transferred to the Volga, to a city that must at all costs be victorious, for it bore Stalin’s name. In this battle a bullet grazed his face, his left cheek was gashed, leaving a scar like a little grin. “You’re never sad with me,” he took to joking.

A year later, in the gigantic Battle of Kursk, Volsky became unrecognizable.

He had already seen what hell one day, a beautiful spring day, of warfare could be. But previously these had been hells controlled by men. This time the creators lost control of their own handiwork. Instead of an offensive in which the infantry made the running, with the artillery in support, it was a monstrous confrontation between thousands of tanks, hordes of black tortoises, their carapaces ramming one another, spitting fire, ejecting from their blazing shells human beings who burned like torches. The sky was filled with smoke, the air reeked of exhaust from the engines. No sound could be heard above the explosions and the grinding of overheated metal. With his fellow gunners, Volsky found himself hemmed in against the remains of a fortified post, unable either to retreat or properly to open fire. The duels between tanks were happening too close at hand, too fast, the gun would have had to be handled with the dexterity of a revolver. Nevertheless they tried their luck, hit the turret of a Tiger, but glancingly, and received a burst of machine gun fire in reply. A heavy black tortoise had just located them. Keeping his eyes fixed on the maneuverings of the monster, Volsky signaled to those behind him to bring up the shell. No one stirred. He turned: one gunner was dead, another sat there, his face streaming with red, his screams muted by the noise.

What followed had the slowness of a nightmare, so familiar to him, in which each action seemed to take long minutes. A shell to be lifted out of the crate, the sleek heaviness of a toy asleep in his hands, to be carried, inserted into the breech, loaded, then he began to take aim… Interminable seconds during which the tank lowered its gun toward him, as if the man aiming it were amusing himself by taking his time. No hell could be such a torment.

What happened next would be pieced together later, at nightfall, when he became capable of remembering, of understanding. He had no time to fire and yet the turret of the Tiger blew up, flinging out the bodies crammed together in its cockpit. The violence of the explosion threw Volsky to the ground and momentarily he glimpsed the angular carapace of another monster, the enormous self-propelling gun, the famous SU-152, that killer of tanks, that had just saved his life…

The evening spilled down sluggish rain. Having recovered the use of his ears he could hear the hissing of the water on the incandescent metal of the armored vehicles. Groans across the plain encumbered with black machines. Words spoken in Russian, allowing him to understand whose the victory was in this clash of steel.

And suddenly, appearing in the half-light, this teetering silhouette: a German from a tank unit, stunned, no doubt, wandering blindly among the carapaces. Volsky drew his gun, aimed… But did not fire. The soldier was young and seemed indifferent to what could happen to him after the horror of what he had just lived through. Their eyes met and, in spite of themselves, each waved a hand at the other. Volsky put away his pistol, the soldier disappeared into the summer dusk.

The night was brief and by about 3:00 a.m. an ashen pallor was already casting a glow over the surrounding area. He got up, climbed onto a low wall in the fortified post. The mist lifted over the plain to the hazy limits of the horizon. And its whole surface was hidden under the dark armature of tangled tanks. A human presence could be sensed within all this metallic darkness: wounded men, Russian or German, waiting in the suffocating heat of the turrets. Men burned, with wounds beyond hope, whose eyes could see the sky, which the rain had now left, and a star poised directly above… He thought… “above this hell,” but the word seemed imprecise. Hell teemed with little torturers, eager to inflict suffering on the fallen. Here the wounded awaited death in the solitude of a block of steel, pressed up against the bodies of dead comrades.

He caught himself making no distinction between the Russian and the German wounded. The hell created by men… Disturbed by a truth that was taking hold of him, he hastened to return to a more clear-cut judgment: the enemy had just been beaten and these Germans dying in their tanks had deserved it… Yet that perception of the suffering of all mankind was not easy to eradicate. In it Volsky sensed a great and terrible wisdom that bowed him down beneath the weight of a very old man’s experience. In the siege of Leningrad he had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope.

Before the sun rose he heard a bird calling, briefly, repeatedly, with rather muted resonance. A dull, humble song, but one that rang out for all the living and the dead.

The soldier who helped Volsky to carry his comrades’ bodies greeted him oddly: “Now then, cheer up, Granddad!” Granddad! Volsky smiled, telling himself that, drained by a sleepless night, the other, a man of his own age, was babbling nonsense. He would have thought no more about that incongruous greeting but then the nurse, who was putting a dressing on his wrist, concluded: “There you are, Grandpa. Like that you’ll be all set for the next battle.” He burst out laughing and saw a flicker of doubt in the woman’s eyes. A mirror hung on the wall of the dressing station. He went up to it… And clapped his hand to his head, as if to hide it. His hair was white, that snowy white that some old men sport with such elegance.

From that day onward he stopped writing to Mila. The blockade of Leningrad continued and Volsky knew what that signified for a woman who had already been living through it for two years. He could imagine the city under siege in summer, those thousands of buildings filled with corpses… No letter from Mila had reached him: the postal service rarely broke through the mesh of the blockade. Besides, how could he be found, with his transfers from one front to another? Dreaming up all these reasons helped him to think that Mila was still alive.

On the day after the Battle of Kursk, when he saw himself in the mirror at the dressing station all these speculations about the mail became pointless. This old soldier with a strangely young face, scarred with a slight rictus, was another man.

This other man went back to the war almost serenely, telling himself that the person he had once been no longer existed, a little as if he had been killed. The extinguishing of all hope made a good soldier of him. No letters, no waiting for letters, no becoming emotional, which, in war, is the frequent cause of carelessness and hence of death. He became fused with the gun he served, became effectively mechanical, impassive, thrifty with words. And as time passed he even ceased to be surprised when young people addressed him as “Grandpa.”

He had also changed in what he had once considered to be his true nature, his dream, his gift: singing. Sometimes he would sing along in chorus with his comrades, during a halt, or as he marched in a column of men cheating their weariness with merry tunes. These songs pleased him, evocative as they were of the immediate reality of the war. The banality of death, the carefree spirit of a summer’s day, the scent of grass at the edge of a forest, a handful of berries swiftly gathered among the trees and, pausing there, as he glanced at the column of soldiers, a thought that made him feel giddy: “I’m no longer among them, I’m in this forest, there are these flowers, the drowsy buzzing of bees…” Then he would run back to take his place among the men, singing as they marched toward death.

The speed at which their faces, lit up by singing, were obliterated in the daily slaughter, the ease with which a human being could be wiped out, was the only reality that never ceased to trouble Volsky. And it was thanks to their communal singing that he kept a memory of the faces of so many men who were gone. With his professional’s ear, albeit battered by gunfire, he could recall their voices (fine, dull, touching in their enthusiasm or naively reckless), and this pattern of sounds would bring a look or a smile back to life. These lives, swept away by the war, survived through song.

Thus he came to dislike those grand operatic arias he had dreamed of in the old days. All those stentorian Boris Godunovs, thrusting out their beards the better to squeeze out the vibrations of their vocal power at the height of tragic ecstasy, now struck him as false. Ludicrous, too, those plump legionnaires in Italian opera, tinkling the scales of their brass armor. Or the ones in tailcoats, sticking out their chests like fighting cocks.

His passion for the magic of theater was still alive. But after what he had lived through in Leningrad and later in the Battle of Kursk, he often asked himself about the purpose of such operatic spectacles. To please? To move? To distract? To titillate the ears of women with bare shoulders and men in patent leather shoes, couples who, after the opera, would end up at a restaurant, discussing the performance of a legionnaire or a rooster in tails?

Sometimes, between battles, sitting with his back against the carriage of his gun, he would start humming on his own, a murmur nobody else heard. These were generally d’Artagnan’s songs.

The end of the war found him close to Berlin on the shores of a pond torn up by tank tracks. With two other soldiers he was engaged in positioning the guns when the news of the victory reached them. He stood up and saw what he had already seen the day of his last concert, near Leningrad: a riverbank, soldiers clinging to a gun, survival dependent on the speed of shooting. The circle is complete, he thought, smiling at the soldiers as they yelled in delight. “It’s all over, Grandpa! Let’s have a quick drink now and head for home!”

He told himself that his white hair was simply an ironic token of the interminable duration of the years spent at war. Human stories were so swiftly wiped out in death, so many cities had swept by, that his feeling of having aged quickly was not all that fanciful. A circle completed and, within it, the span of a whole life. His life.

During the first days of peace he sometimes thought of Mila, picturing how she might have felt on meeting this young man with white hair. Their past seemed to belong to a remote youth, lived through by someone else. By that person who had once, on stage, in the costume of a musketeer, kissed a young heroine freshly emerged from a convent. He told himself that the only tie that bound them was the ancient libretto of an old-fashioned operetta written by a forgotten author.

“To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” he sang softly on the train carrying him back to Russia. His traveling companions took him for an old soldier in a cheerful mood.

In traveling to his native village, south of Smolensk, he had no hope of discovering a past where he could start a new life. This part of Russia had first been devastated by the Red Army as they retreated, unwilling to leave anything for the enemy, then by aerial bombardment, and finally by the Germans as they withdrew, setting fire to everything that had survived the bombing. Of his own street (a row of charred izbas) all that was left was an old church tower, “saved by a miracle,” one old woman told him, as he questioned her about the fate of the villagers, of his own parents. A miracle… He did not go to the trouble of explaining that the church tower was a good reference point left intact by those who had targeted the nearby railroad junction. Survivors needed to believe in miracles. There was one, as it happened, in the garden of his ruined home: a cherry tree broken in two, but whose branches had taken root again, dusted with tiny snow-white flowers.

In Leningrad the room he had once rented was occupied. His new landlady announced, “With you, I don’t have a problem. Not like one of those empty-headed young men. I only take people of a certain age…” Volsky was amazed to see that, after so many had died, the apartments were crammed, then realized that people were coming in from the surrounding villages, razed to the ground by the fighting. “So the war didn’t do you much harm in the end,” the woman went on. “And now with all your medals, you’ll be a fine sight.” Volsky shrugged his shoulders: what could he reply to that? So as not to seem rude, he stammered, “Well, I don’t have many medals. In the artillery you’re always behind the others…” He felt this was a stupid remark, talking about the war was not easy. What else was there that could be spoken of? The tanks with their overheated steel that made a hissing sound in the rain? The turrets where wounded men, Russian and German, were dying? Explain how his greatest joy at the front was not those little disks of medals but a fistful of wild strawberries he’d picked in a hurry before rejoining the column of soldiers? And that his greatest fear had lasted for a few seconds at most: when the gun on a tank took aim at him, as if relishing the pleasure of terrifying him? And that those seconds had turned him into this young old man, so respectable in the eyes of a landlady? No, such things, true as they were, were impossible to admit to.

Volsky remembered feeling tongue-tied like this before: with Mila in the besieged city.

He went to see the place where she used to live. The building was still standing but a freakish bombing raid had destroyed the staircase between the first and second floors. People were getting into their homes by means of ladders. Nobody knew Mila. They were mainly provincials who had come in from their ruined villages.

Thanks to them, the city seemed rejuvenated. The people of Leningrad, who had endured the blockade, threaded their way, pale and silent, through this ill-assorted crowd. The variety of female faces was intoxicating. People spoke to one another more readily; people smiled more, everyone was eager to come to life again in an encounter, in an exchange of looks. Volsky had never engaged so much in conversations with strangers, with women. One day he spoke to two female students he encountered at the Nord Café… Everything was surprising about this agreeable chatter: the room, which had not changed, these laughing girls, the ease with which he touched on the war, showing off, telling how shells would occasionally hit a flight of ducks and then-what feasting! “You have such a young voice…,” one of them said, and he caught her glancing at his white hair.

The next day he went to a hairdresser. Offered a choice of six colors, he opted for black. While the white was giving way to darker locks he thought of Mila. “She must be dead,” he said to himself with the brutality the war had taught him. And he sensed that this idea was killing someone within him. “No, why dead? She’s married and may well be living very close by. Besides, what ties are there between us now? We once kissed one another in an operetta. ‘To you, my beloved…’ With my white hair she’d never have recognized me. But now, with this Moor’s head!” He managed to recover the merry mood that had animated him the day before in the company of the two students.

One Saturday he went to the Kirov Opera. Before climbing up to take his seat in the balcony he studied himself furtively in the mirrors. His hair, a little too glossy, nevertheless did not look dyed. He just felt something like the stiffness of a wig at the top of his forehead. Otherwise, a young man, proud of the impact of the heavy red star fastened above his heart.

In the auditorium there were many uniforms, armor-plated with decorations, well-cut outfits hard to picture on the muddy roads of the war. “Theatrical costumes…,” thought Volsky, amazed at the sharpness of the comparison. Officers’ insignia, gleaming boots reflecting the glitter of the great chandelier, weighty, complacent looks… “The looks of conquerors,” Volsky said to himself and, inexplicably, he felt excluded from this camp. The whiteness of the skin revealed by the women’s dresses struck him like a flesh tint long forgotten…

The opera itself (it was Rigoletto) soon banished both his fake brunet’s nervousness and the impact of those uniforms. He sensed something strange resonating within him, a combination of his vocal cords and his memory. He listened as a singer listens. And at one moment he felt he was breathing along with the king.

His concentration was such that when this regret reverberated in his thoughts- “That could have been me…”-he gave a start, convinced that the remark had come from one of his neighbors. The applause brought him out of his reverie. He clapped like the others but his hands seemed as false to him as his dark hair.

His concentration lapsed. He now saw what many other members of the audience could see without admitting it: actors dressed up, one as a king, another as a victim of this king’s lust, characters singing arias, now sad, now jaunty. All this was being watched by men feeling cramped in their uniforms and women, suffering, no doubt, from tight shoes put on for the occasion. And by an idiot who had dyed his hair in the hope of pleasing these women… Volsky smiled at this sequence of ideas and it made him forget the unease of those words: “That could have been me…”

At one moment the king sang, “I am a student… and poor!” He had just donned a disguise the better to seduce the heroine. He was an actor of mature years, a portly figure whose plump face was plastered with pink makeup. There was an ambiguous voluptuousness about his fleshy thighs clad in fine knitted tights. A poor student! Volsky lowered his head to hide his smile, rubbed his chin, coughed… But the laughter was already bubbling up in his lungs, rising toward his throat. There were hisses of “Shh!,” he covered his face, dug his nails into his cheeks, helpless to control this explosion of mirth, and struggled toward the exit, stepping on toes, bumping into knees, pursued by enraged glances… The applause welled up, as if to salute the departure of this boor.

In the cool of the cloakroom area his laughter abated. A female attendant looked at him with compassion: his eyes were now red with tears. Amid his guffaws there was also sadness. A fifty-year-old with fat thighs trying to pass himself off as a student… That is how his comrades in the regiment would doubtless have viewed this scene, the soldiers who sang as they marched toward death.

He was on the point of leaving the theater when the noise of the applause grew louder (someone had half opened a door). Volsky pictured the rows of splendid uniforms and evening dresses, the vigor of those hands clapping energetically. A recollection of the performances during the blockade stabbed at his memory: a theater lit by a few candles, the appalling cold and those human shadows, lacking the strength to clap, who used to bow their thanks to the actors… He remained motionless, his eyes closed, but open, in truth, onto that past, the heartrending beauty of which he now appreciated.

In this reflection on days gone by a forgotten address occurred to him: the workers’ hostel where their troupe had lodged to be close to the soldiers, to whom they sang songs about “the hot southern sun.”

The road leading to that outlying area took him back in time. The city center had already wiped away many scars. But the farther one traveled from the Nevsky Prospekt the more the imprint of war was perceptible. He even saw a German tank, its tracks shattered, its gun pointing at the passing cars.

The hostel building seemed freshened up thanks to the laundry hanging at the windows. The rooms had been occupied, Volsky guessed, by the tide of kolkhozniks escaping from ruined villages.

He sought someone who could give him information. But without much hope: why would Mila have remained here amid all these new arrivals? A woman with blond hair was sitting on a bench, Volsky wanted to speak to her but her posture was like that of one asleep, her chin resting on her chest, her hands relaxed… Two adolescent girls were playing at hopscotch on the patch of tarmac. At his question they giggled, turned away, and mumbled, “No one knows where she is…” Puzzled, he went to ask a housewife who was hanging sheets on a line. She gave him a hostile look and spat out, “You might at least wait until after dark for your goings-on! It’s a disgrace. They’ll soon be coming in broad daylight!” This retort was so unexpected that Volsky backed away, without trying to obtain an explanation. An elderly man who was reading his paper in front of a doorway responded in more or less the same way but adopted a fatherly manner. “Try going to a dance hall, young man. You’ll find lots of pretty girls to kiss there.”

Disconcerted, Volsky walked around the building, not knowing if there was some mistake about the name… or suspicion due to… He smoothed his hair and told himself that maybe they took him for a gypsy. It all seemed increasingly mysterious.

He crossed the courtyard and sat down on the bench occupied by the blond woman. Her hair was unkempt. “A blond tramp,” he thought. He hesitated, gave a little cough, ventured an exaggeratedly cheerful “Good evening.” The woman was dozing and seemed not to be aware of his presence. She was probably tipsy and kept moaning sadly. He remained beside her, irresolute, telling himself, as one does when uncertain whether to wait: “but as soon as I go, Mila will appear.”

The life of the building amazed him by its routine domesticity. Just a few months after the end of the war, this washing hung between two trees, the hiss of oil in a frying pan, a child crying, a tango stuttering on a scratched phonograph record. A Sunday evening, just as if there had never been those streets dotted with corpses, those little towns transformed into charred black lace…

A long comfortable yawn could be heard from an open window on the first floor. Volsky felt the dull pain with which this regenerated life afflicted him. The arrogance of happiness, the vigorous indifference of the living. This world was alien to him, just like the parterre at the theater the night before, crammed with dress uniforms. “The victors’ world…” Yes, the real winner is the one who knows how to forget more quickly and more scornfully than the rest.

Dusk fell, the soft, silvery transparency of northern nights. The woman had changed position, and now, her head falling on one shoulder, was murmuring snatches of rhythmic phrases, like nursery rhymes. A stocky face, flushed from sunshine and wine, her discolored locks falling into her eyes, a trace of blurred makeup. He experienced a certain compassion for her, almost fellow feeling. He had known a few such women at the front, a bitter tenderness amid the slaughter, sham embraces and yet true enough, for that was all the man carried with him as he went to his death. Fallen women… Relics of war, thought Volsky, this “blond tramp,” just like that German tank with broken tracks. “And me…,” he admitted.

He got up, prepared to say good-bye, and suddenly froze, pricked up his ears. What the woman was murmuring seemed familiar to him. Not the words but the voice itself, or rather the quality of that voice. The whispered humming through drunkenness had not varied and yet its modulation was striking, thanks to the accuracy of the nuances. “She has a trained voice…,” he had time to think, and, already with a sharpness that took his breath away, these muted tones began conjuring up a face painfully preserved by memory.

The woman half opened her eyes. Her dull expression revealed quite different features shining through, like the design in a decal, then lapsed into a dough of somnolence and disgust. The woman Volsky kept stored in his memory was a survivor with a trembling body, big eyes sunk deep in the ink of their sockets, a bony skull that stuck out through her skin… This woman, who went back to her murmuring again, had swollen features, the body of one who has overeaten after starving. And yet the old face kept reappearing, intermittently, in a rippling of light.

He took her hand and spoke in purposely neutral tones: “It’s me. Do you recognize me, dear?” She withdrew her hand, stared at him with an uneasy look, clumsily assuming an air of offended dignity. “I’m not your dear! I’m not just anyone, you know!” The voice was at once coarse and vulnerable. He experienced a brief moment of hesitation: profit from this rebuff and leave? Return to the world of the victors… He moved away from the bench and saw the woman’s face fade and solidify. The features whose pattern he had recognized were engulfed in sullen heaviness. Her eyelids closed, her chin sank onto her chest.

Already a few steps away, he looked back. Through the dusk he saw a woman all alone beneath a sky that seemed to be there only for her. No sound, as if the inhabitants of the building had disappeared. Trees motionless. This woman in a darkness where everything lived on hold. And where no thought could be hidden.

He went back to the bench, crouched down, and sang softly, as if crooning a lullaby. “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…” His memory prompted him with the words that came next. He sang a little louder and was not surprised when the woman’s lips responded to him. Her eyes were closed, she was smiling softly, allowing the other being awakening within her to sing. Volsky helped her to get up. She walked beside him, still sunk in her melodious lethargy.

Several hours of that pale night sufficed for Mila to tell him what she had lived through since their last concert. If she had wept in recounting it, uttered cries of distress, her story would, doubtless, have been less painful to listen to. But she went behind a screen and a moment later Volsky saw a woman who bore little resemblance to the tipsy “blond tramp” of just now. After she had splashed her face with cold water it became more refined, her hair drawn back onto her neck gave her features the look of someone facing a powerful, icy night wind. The trace of an old scar marked the top of her brow. On a wall he noticed several drawings, doubtless made by children, and a sketch: a woman with dark hair, a very thin face, and great, shadowed eyes… The woman who sat down before him now bore a resemblance to this drawing.

They did not switch on the light, contenting themselves with the bluish luminescence filtering through the window, and the red glow of the little stove beneath a kettle (both of them referred to plain boiled water as “tea,” for this was the tea they used to drink during the blockade: and the word became their first sign of recognition).

“The last time we saw one another was in December, you know, at our concert… But after that things became worse than ever…”

She spoke calmly, no sighs, no tears. “Worse than ever,” he repeated mentally. “No. Worse could only be death. And we stayed alive.” He wanted to say this, so that Mila’s voice should relax, but the doomed city he had known was already taking shape in her account and the more she spoke, the more he realized he did not know everything, not this other frontier, beyond life.

Yet there was nothing new in Mila’s recollections: two million human beings waiting to die in a city that was an architectural fairyland. He saw this young woman leaving the hospital, with a bandaged forehead, embarking on a long journey across Leningrad to reach the apartment they had left a week before. One had to imagine her hunger, her attempts to light the fire, and even, perhaps, her emotion at the sight of a scarf of his, hanging from a hook on the door.

There was nothing surprising either in the existence of the children who came to Mila’s during the great frosts in January. First of all, twins aged twelve, a brother and sister, whose mother had just died. Then a much younger child, possibly five, who remained obstinately silent by day but emitted screams of horror in his sleep. Another, with bright red hair and the nickname “Mandarin,” boasted, at the age of eight and a half, of having run away from his orphanage twice. “And now they’ve evasculated the orphanage. And they’ve forgotten all about me…” Mila guessed that he had taken advantage of the evacuation to light out yet again. Mandarin’s vitality was disconcerting, as was his constant good humor. He was the one who taught the others to eat sunshine. The ravenous children would sit in a row facing the window embellished with hoarfrost, open their mouths and bite into the light illuminating their pale faces, pretending to chew, to swallow… Among these stray children there was also a boy with transparent skin, his eyelids always a little lowered, for whom it was a great effort to speak. This languid air contrasted oddly with the brisk resonance of his name in Russian, Edward. Mila noticed that, though generally in the background, he became extremely alert at the time when their bread ration was being shared out, eager to obtain a little more than the others… Almost every week another child would come to join the “family.” At the end of January Mila brought two little girls in from the street, the elder was carrying her sister like a mother carrying her baby.

Shortly after this their small tribe moved to other quarters. Mila decided to house the children in that empty workers’ hostel on the outskirts of Leningrad. The center of the city was being bombed far more, the suburbs were left alone. Wood for heating was easy to find in that great deserted building. But, above all, on the road that ran beside that district one could beg for bread from soldiers going to or returning from the front.

As with the lives of everyone in that dying city, whether they survived or not could be a matter of several extra degrees of frost, a fall in the street just before collecting your slice of bread, extra tiredness that could suddenly shatter the body. And above all, the chance of the scrap of food that might or might not be tossed out from an army truck. Yes, one little mishap was enough to threaten the existence of her “family,” which already comprised sixteen children.

It was not just one mishap but a whole sequence of events, taken together, on one particular day, that became fateful. On her way back from the city Mila slipped and twisted her ankle. The next day she was unable to go and beg for bread at the roadside. That night, after a week of thaw, the winter unleashed a blizzard that covered the footpaths linking the hostel to the rest of the district in three feet of snow. Several of her children were no longer getting up and only Mandarin remained lively and merry. He helped her light the stove and called out to the others. “Come on, stir your stumps, you bunch of lazybones! I’m going to show you how to eat fire…” Some of them, roused by his energy, dragged themselves over to the stove and imitated him, opening their mouths to bite into the warmth given off by the flames.

“He’s indestructible, that one,” thought Mila, watching Mandarin’s red head bobbing up, now in the entrance hall, now in the dormitory installed around the stove.

And yet it was him she found one evening stretched out in the corridor, with a fixed stare, his body frozen. He was gasping for breath, then, when carried close to the fire, he managed to whisper: “I’ve got bells ringing in my chest…” The last scraps of bread had been eaten the day before.

She went out and, after an hour of wading through the snow, reached the road. For the first time she did not have the strength to remain upright, collapsed against a lamppost, waited, no longer able to feel her hands in her mittens or her frozen feet in her felt boots. A truck appeared, she rushed out, barred its way, resolved to snatch what food there was from the people it was carrying to the front. The driver jumped down off the running board, advanced through the snow flurry, ready to knock aside this phantom that was obstructing him. “Sixteen kids. Nothing to eat for two days…,” she stammered. The soldier replied in a voice shredded by the wind: “Fifty-two corpses in the truck. We’re eating dead horses. I can give you tobacco, nothing else…”

Next morning she was able to bring back a few slices of bread from the city. She heated the water, prepared to throw the crusts in to make a brew intended for the whole household… While she was getting the bowls ready the bread disappeared. The child who was eating it (it was Edward) did not hide himself, looked at her like an animal that knows it has done wrong. She slapped him, yelled oaths never uttered in front of children, wept. Then went rigid, helpless, staring at this young face disfigured by fear and the instinct to survive. Still chewing, he sniffled, “I was very hungry… My uncle works in the Party administration.” These words disarmed her, so absurd did this reference to the apparatus of power sound coming from a boy of eleven standing at a table where there were still several crumbs of bread left. She knew he was lying. With a highly placed uncle he would not have been there among these lost children. He must have heard someone using the phrase, sensed the weight of authority that lay behind it, and repeated it like a parrot, hoping for privileged treatment. Other children, attracted by the smell of bread, were busy nibbling at the crumbs in the expectation of a meal.

That evening those who could get up arranged themselves around the fire to “eat” some, as Mandarin had taught them. He himself, huddled in a corner, kept giving little coughs, as if he were trying to speak and could not manage it. She sat beside him, adjusted a woolen cap that had slipped off his head. He opened his eyes, at first with a glazed look, then recognized her, tried to smile. “Don’t worry, Mandarin. Tomorrow I’ll go to the city. I’ll bring some bread and maybe even some flour…” She broke off, for he was screwing up his eyes like someone who wants to save another person from telling a white lie. It was an adult’s expression and it was also in a very adult voice that he whispered, “Auntie Mila, I’m going to die tonight. You can give my bread to the children…” The dissonance between this little body and the grave voice gave her a start. She began scolding the boy, shaking him: “What nonsense! Tomorrow I’ll make some proper soup for you…” Seeing that he had closed his eyes to spare her these useless words of encouragement, she fell silent…

Half an hour later she was at her lookout post beside a bend in the road that led to the front.

There was a limpid, dark sky, swept clean by the great north wind. The frozen road crunched beneath her feet like broken glass. She knew that in cold like this a starving person does not live long. The notion came to her of going right to the soldiers’ camp and stealing bread from them. The notion of a madwoman. Or else it was the world that was mad, for there was this child who had just calmly said, “I’m going to die tonight…” She felt ready to do anything to snatch a bit of food from this world. The instinct of a she-wolf that will get killed to save its young. She even thought herself capable of crossing the front line to go and ask the Germans for bread. A vision of a trade-off passed through her mind, herself taking food for the children and then returning to the enemy soldiers to be beaten, violated, killed, happy that her own body, her own life, were utterly unimportant.

After walking for twenty minutes she stopped, having stumbled several times. If she fell she would not be able to get up again and the cold was already making her movements stiff. Without her the children were doomed. She had to go back. The star-studded sky was magnificent, funereal. She paused for a few seconds, her gaze lost in its dark splendor, and in lieu of a prayer, made this vow: bread for the children and no matter what suffering for me.

The headlights of a jeep blinded her just as she was opening the door to the hostel. An army officer called out to her, but before noticing his huge frame and his greatcoat, unbuttoned despite the cold, she was struck, to the point of being made giddy, by the aroma of food emanating from his mouth, as well as a strong smell of alcohol. “Would you have a glass of water for me, darling? My soul’s on fire!” He bent over and the breath of this man who had just eaten well caught her by the throat. She led him into the kitchen, offered him water, spoke about the children. “Oh, that can be fixed. I’ve got sausage and bread in the van. I’m the most important man in the city. I supply Smolny.” He got her to give him another glass of water, snorted contentedly, and began describing the foodstuffs he delivered to the city’s top brass.

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.