The Life of an Unknown Man

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one around them could perceive this transfigured world. Their neighbors cursed the worse than usual flooding of the Lukhta, the waterlogged roads. Mila and Volsky would nod in agreement, so as not to vex them, but on their return home sat upon the old steps letting their gaze drift across the shining expanse. At night the waters murmured beneath their windows, little waves lapped gently against the steps. This calm and joy should be spoken of to help people live differently. But with what words?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Volsky stared at the woman who was smiling with half-closed eyes through the slow swirl of the petals. A strange being: a woman whom this world had so many times tried to destroy, a body that, only recently, had been worn away by hunger, then a face that could no longer mimic the bone structure of a skull, a woman violated. And this had transformed her little by little into human detritus. “These eyes of hers have been filled with death, with ice, with ugliness, and now they can see this violet sky and, amid the fistfuls of petals, a star, very close, which, in its turn, sees us…”

The perception he had was like a shaft of light. “No,” he thought. “There’s no need to explain anything, but simply to recognize in the other this astonishing being who goes infinitely beyond what she has lived through, and is living now, what people see in her and what the world makes of her. Recognize and love this invisible element in a woman at this very moment, beneath the petals’ slow descent, this bruised body whose tenderness is still intact, these eyes whose brightness makes me alive.”

During those May days the war ended for them. One year after the end of the war.

A long time later, returning in thought to that year lived on the banks of the Lukhta, Volsky would be struck by the length of time taken by what, in fact, was only the first stage of settling in. Each of the seasons would seem like a whole lifetime. An autumn lifetime, the embroidery of the hoarfrost on the gold of the dead leaves. A winter lifetime, that kerosene lamp at their window, a stray gleam in a snowstorm. A spring lifetime, those nights when the waters came right up to the old wooden front steps… And the summer, too, their house afloat on the bluish swell of the grasses and the flowers. He would remember that very slow, very intimate eternity, a single day of which could smooth away all the wounds of his broken life.

The same thought struck them both and they exchanged amused glances: this white foal, yes, with the slightly clumsy grace of infancy, the freedom of a creature still ignorant of life’s barriers… It ran along the shore, went into the water, backed away with an abrupt caper, pranced back up the slope.

Volsky was busy repairing the roof; Mila, on a ladder, was passing him tar-coated wooden battens. From time to time they broke off, happy to see so much simultaneous activity from their lofty perch. The frisking of the foal, children bathing in the river, and a little farther on, beyond the willow plantations, women gathering the hay into haycocks and a very small girl amusing herself by climbing onto the precarious piles and balancing upright on them like an acrobat.

Suddenly she fell and at the same moment an explosion rang out. Beyond the trees a curtain of spurts of earth and smoke arose. The foal galloped on a few more yards before collapsing, its right flank torn away. A mine, which the sappers had failed to remove the previous fall…

Volsky and Mila grasped what had happened: a rapid sequence of events: the foal galloping, the little girl falling, thrown off balance by the roar of the explosion, the frozen postures of the peasant women, and finally that confusion of white and red thrashing about briefly in the dust.

The lives of other people, which they had believed they could keep at a distance, were unfolding, mingling the traces of war with the routine of peacetime, the tears of the little girl as she walked toward the dead foal with her head averted. And the children appearing from all sides, hiding their curiosity behind frightened faces. And a little later the kolkhoznik who came with a wheelbarrow, dismembered the carcass with a few blows of an ax, loaded up the meat, and buried the rest in the hole left by the explosion.

They forced themselves not to see this death as a portent. For a while their own world, this fragile timelessness apart from the world, could survive. And then one day at the end of August this strange observer made his appearance. They were high on the ridge above the shore in the middle of putting up a fence around the place where the soldiers were buried. Mila was writing a name they had managed to identify on one of the grave markers…

She was the first to notice the strange lookout. On the opposite bank, not far from their house, stood a black car, an army officer had a huge pair of binoculars focused on the graveyard where they were working. His bizarrely static posture, his cape, excessively long in view of the fine drizzle that veiled the horizon, everything about this dumb show seemed disproportionate and menacing. It was rather like picturing a general surveying a battlefield. Another officer appeared and the statue with the binoculars stirred, shook its head, and both walked toward the house. The daylight was fading but from the top of the ridge the two men could clearly be seen going up to the windows, peering inside…

In the time it took Volsky and Mila to go down to their boat and cross the Lukhta, the officers had gone. The only traces were a cigarette stub with a fine gold band and the imprint of a boot on the flower bed in front of the house. “They must have been surveyors on reconnaissance,” said Volsky, pretending to be unconcerned. “They’ve probably got a map to draw up.”

For him the army officers’ visit was a secret relief. As if, not having the courage to wake up from his dream and to arouse Mila, he had been helped by their appearance. The world was there, on the threshold of their love.

In referring to them as “army officers” he had been lying, their uniform was unmistakable. And it was Mila who remarked on it. “It’s odd, those two fellows from State Security. It reminds me of what happened the other day at school. Yes, there was an inspector… The head teacher told me in advance she’d be coming, so there was nothing unexpected about it. Except that she stood there, as still as a stone. Like that man spying on us with his binoculars. Then she went away without saying a word. Apparently the songs I teach the children are not ideologically correct…”

They were sitting on the front steps of their izba. Now that the waters had subsided, the house seemed to be perched even higher above the fields and more solitary. Volsky listened, hesitated before replying: he must either attempt a reassuring tone and therefore lie, or else… He bowed his head and suddenly noticed another cigarette stub ringed with a band of gold among the tufts of grass. Like a gimlet eye staring at them.

“You know, Mila, I haven’t mentioned this to you, but the mail I deliver…” He broke off, conscious that his voice sounded guilty, although there was no fault to confess. “Yes, I notice more and more letters coming from prisons. I think it’s started again, the purges…”

They said very little to one another, using the oblique turns of phrase that everyone employed at the time. One did not say “so and so has been arrested” but “he’s had problems.” Indeed, Mila could not have said “those fellows from State Security”; that form of words would come later in Volsky’s reminiscences, when it became possible to talk about it. At the time, she would simply have spoken of “the Big House,” which was how people referred to the secret police headquarters in Leningrad.

In a few more or less coded words, they said it all to one another: the waves of arrests, unleashed to an extent worse than ever before, the fear that, after a brief relaxation at the end of the war, was turning faces to stone again, the suspicion that marked every word. The victory over the Nazis had freed the hands of the local persecutors, now eager to make the people pay for their own cowardice.

Mentioning two or three details about each of the individuals who had disappeared, Volsky and Mila recalled those who had “had problems”: people living in the neighboring small town, old friends in Leningrad. Already a long litany of ghosts. They knew people chose different tactics for survival. Some pretended to notice nothing, talked, went to work, smiled at their families, sleepwalking like torpid automatons. Others transformed their lives into the waiting of a condemned man, rehearsing in soliloquy the arguments they believed would prove their innocence, slept fully dressed, knowing that arrests took place at night. Sometimes they went mad. Yet others attempted to defuse the threat by mocking it.

“My father did that.” Volsky realized he was talking about this for the first time. “In the days of collectivization in our village, if they found a bag of corn hidden in a peasant’s house the fellow was shot. Soon it was enough that you hadn’t declared a tool or a dozen eggs. I was still a child but I remember the day very well. It was winter, you know, freezing cold. My father went out without his coat, barefoot in the snow, and carried the only pair of boots he had left to the Expropriation Committee. He managed to adopt a very serious, almost fervent expression: ‘I’m giving everything I have for the building of socialism!’ The Party bosses were terribly embarrassed by fervor like this. In the end they decided he wasn’t all there. They gave him back his boots and left us alone… Sometimes being mad could save you.”

“My father was saved by dying.”

Mila murmured this, echoing Volsky’s words and at once, seeing his puzzled look, hastened to explain.

“He was an officer in Mongolia in 1939. He took part in the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol. One day, when he was talking to a man he thought was his best friend, he ventured on a piece of black humor: ‘If you ask me, there are more army officers in the camps than we have here in our ranks.’ Some throwaway remark like that. The commanding officer summoned him and told him to prepare himself for the worst. The next day during the assault on the Japanese he was the first to be shot down. The truth is he got himself killed. One of his comrades told us about his death. The people who were supposed to arrest him came back empty-handed: instead of apprehending an enemy of the people, they were confronted with an officer fallen on the field of battle, almost a hero. After that they left my mother and me alone as well.”

It had all been said. The two stories, they knew, summed up the country in which they lived. Its fears, its wars, the defenseless nakedness of private existence, the impossibility of sharing one’s distress. The extreme difficulty of having faith in human goodness and at the same time the awareness that only this faith could still save. A country where millions of people woke in the night, listening to the hiss of tires on the asphalt: Is that car going past? Or is it stopping outside?

“You’ve never talked to me about your father…,” said Volsky, as if in reproachful tones.

“We never had time… Besides, if we’d started thinking about all that, we’d not have had the will to go on living.”

Volsky’s first impulse was to object, to invoke the need to bring the truth out into the open. But he thought better of it, sensing in Mila’s words a truth at once more humble and almost arrogant in its frankness. She smiled. “We wouldn’t even have been able to act at the theater. Remember: ‘To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…’ It was partly those songs that helped us to survive. And so many people with us!”

Thirty years later Volsky would reflect that this, too, had been his country: a couple who had been through hell, whose lives were now caught in the lens of a pair of binoculars, as if in a marksman’s sights, yes, this pair of lovers seated on the front steps of an izba, in the pale light of an August evening, gazing at a ridge punctuated with graves above a riverbank, softly singing light melodies from an ancient, old-fashioned operetta.

They often talked now about those performances given during the blockade, the audience shivering in the darkness, Porthos singing, his face bathed in tears, actors collapsing onstage, exhausted by cold and hunger. Those wartime days became their strength, their courage, and when they pictured that last concert under gunfire, all fears seemed to them ludicrous: those two agents from Security come to spy on them? A single minute of that concert was far more daunting than any other threat.

Thinking about the children they were going to house also helped them not to live in the humiliation of fear. Constructing a bed, cutting a shirt out of an old sheet, the routine nature of such actions linked them to a future in which young lives would take possession of these objects, use them, bring them to life. And when they recalled from what depths of unhappiness these children would be coming to them, those two agents with their binoculars just seemed like ham actors.

One evening they set up a big screen that was to divide the dormitory in two. Handling the slippery fabrics reminded them of the curtain going up and the idea arose, like a spark, in their exchanged glances: they should teach the children to act in a play, yes, to make theater-and sing in an operetta, why not?

To the very end they resisted fear. And when, on one occasion, Volsky happened upon a cigarette stub with a gilded ring among the graves in the cemetery, he trampled this menacing token with scorn and gave a laugh: “The Germans used to smoke elegant cigs like that, too.”

So they did not live through the sleepless nights that so many people underwent, on the alert for the hiss of tires outside the entrance to their building. The danger they braved erupted in broad daylight, in a huge uproar of curses, gesticulating hands, absurdly angry faces. A far cry from the silent, sly terror slowly seeping into everyone’s spirits.

On this September day Mila went into Leningrad to hand in a notebook at the Blockade Museum: it had been found on a sandy slope by the shore, notes in German. When she made her way into the courtyard of the building she thought at first it must be a fire, then an anarchic demolition site, then a brawl taking place amid a conflagration. It was all these things at once. A bonfire was blazing in front of the entrance to the warehouse that served as the exhibition hall. Military personnel (those “army officers” from State Security) were actively thrusting back the employees of the museum who seemed to be trying to leap into the flames. There was little shouting and this absence of words made the scene all the more distressing. But these women were not trying to immolate themselves, their hands were reaching into the fire to extract objects in order to save them. And the agents of State Security were hurling humble items into the blaze that they had just snatched from the exhibition hall: bundles of letters, clothes, photographs… The struggle was fierce. Elderly women were battling against a wall of fists and rifle butts, falling, picking themselves up, rushing toward the fire.

… It was not the bloodiest day in the history of the regime holding sway in that country. It was its day of greatest shame. And when, decades later, they opened the archives on the killings and repressions, they did not always dare to mention this deadly bonfire…

Mila was not aware how she found herself in the middle of the battle. She felt the scorching of the flames on her hands, her lips were bleeding, one sleeve of her dress dangled, half torn off. The heavy pounding of male fists thrust her back, she crouched, forced a way out for herself, seized a book, a photograph, tried to protect them, to hide them. An unfamiliar joy was mingled with the frenzy of this salvage operation: no protest had ever arisen in the country against the monolith of these dark uniforms and here the very first rebellion saw these women rising up, their bodies emaciated by the years of war, survivors with the angular faces of starved women.

Hysterical shouting suddenly broke out at the exhibition hall’s exit. A plump man of small stature appeared, surrounded by his entourage. Mila quickly recognized him from official portraits in the newspapers: Malenkov, a member of the Leader’s praetorian guard. The uniforms stood to attention, breaking off the massacre.

“Aha! The factionalists in hiding!” he bellowed. “They’ve spun themselves a web of rampant reaction here! They’ve fabricated the myth of a Leningrad fighting all alone, without the leadership of the Party! They’ve left out the vital role of the great Stalin, father of our victory! Everyone out! All this stale rubbish to the fire! Quickly! Move!”

The uniforms went into action again and this time, assisted by Malenkov’s henchmen, they seized the staff and hurled them into a van waiting in the street. Mila grasped a bundle of letters and escaped, taking advantage of a thick trail of smoke given off by the flames as they devoured fresh armfuls of documents.

She went home on foot, had time to tell Volsky everything. And to say what people who loved one another used to say in those days: “If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll live your life without looking back at the past…” They revealed nothing as they took their supper with the children (the first four had moved in two weeks previously). For a while they even hoped the arrest would take place at night or else in the morning, when the children were at school…

They came looking for her an hour later: a car of the same type as before, they were nicknamed “black crows,” the same uniforms. Volsky came out first and it was him they spread-eagled brutally across the hood. The second car arrived, the agents emerging from it snatched the little case from Mila’s hands that she planned to take with her. “Look at what’s inside, it’s very important,” she shouted, and while the two agents, intrigued, were rummaging through the few items of clothing and toiletries, she threw herself toward Volsky, they kissed and, despite the arms already separating them, succeeded in whispering a few words. “Every day look at the sky, at least for a moment. I’ll do the same…” They were each thrown into one of the cars. Volsky could not remember which of them, he or Mila, had suggested looking at the sky, knowing that the other would also see it. He just had the bitter taste of blood in his mouth, Mila’s lips were still bleeding.

The cars drove away with absurd haste along the dirt road that led around the house. For several seconds Mila and Volsky saw a youth running after this black motorcade, waving his arms and shouting, as if he wanted to catch up with it. In the pale light of the evening his red hair glowed like a cluster of fruits on a service tree.

The hardest moment after the arrest was this interrogation. The investigating officer was young but knew that, whatever the prisoner’s attitude, he must hit him. Only he was not yet in full command of torture techniques. He struck clumsily and too hard. Volsky, his hands tied behind his back, fell, pressing his head against one shoulder to hide his face. Inexplicably the blows stopped. He turned to look at the officer and could not repress an “oh” of surprise. The man was standing upright, his head thrown back, pinching his nostrils, his fingers spotted with blood. “Open the window, take a little ice…,” suggested Volsky in a deliberately neutral voice. The officer snorted a kind of oath but, strangely, obeyed. The interrogation room was in the cellar, a basement window, protected by thick bars, looked out onto a sidewalk covered in fresh snow. The officer opened it, seized a fistful of flakes, pressed it against his nose. The bleeding calmed down and Volsky sensed that moment when a human mind wavers between compassion and scorn. He was to experience this several times during his years in the camp.

A rapid sequence of expressions passed across the young officer’s face: Start hitting even harder, to punish the witness of this ridiculous discomfiture? Resume questioning as if nothing had happened? Or else… It was the expression in the prisoner’s eyes that astonished him: a perfect detachment, an almost smiling lucidity. The officer saw that the man thrown to the ground was staring at the tiny trace of blue through the window, the line of sky that he could manage to see from the floor.

He helped Volsky back onto the stool, and repeated his question, to which he had received only negative replies.

“I will ask again. Do you admit that you intended to fly the German aircraft exhibited at the so-called Blockade Museum and drop bombs on Smolny, in order to kill the members of the city’s leadership?”

If Volsky had not previously heard tales of demented accusations of this type he would have thought he was going mad. But this forensic delirium was no longer a secret, people spoke of it, both terrified and almost elated by the excessiveness of the absurdity: such and such a person had been shot for attempting to poison the waters of all the great rivers in the country, another was said to have contrived to create a dozen subversive organizations in a village of a hundred inhabitants… And now here he was, planning to take off in an aircraft riddled with shrapnel that had had its undercarriage torn away!

He was silent. There was not much choice. Deny it and lay himself open to more blows? Agree and sign his own death warrant?

Suddenly the investigating officer’s voice slid down into a whisper: “Say you wanted to bomb Smolny to eliminate anti-Party factionalists at the heart of the city’s leadership.” And Volsky saw he was already putting this crackpot confession into writing. The young officer was indeed engaged in fabricating a criminal, but a criminal inspired by a praiseworthy desire to struggle against the enemies of the Party and its Guide. Lowering his head slightly, Volsky could see through the basement window a little snow and the reflection of the sky in a windowpane.

Every day in the camp he found a moment of freedom to meet Mila’s gaze up in the sky.

The life of a prisoner did not destroy him. He had often had occasion to sleep on the ground at the front, in mud or under snow. Here the bedsteads in huts equipped with stoves could almost seem comfortable. Cutting down trees was painful work but his arms retained the knack of handling the weight of shells. Hunger and scurvy were killers and yet, compared with the hundred and twenty-five grams of bread during the blockade, the poorest food seemed lavish.

As for the length of his sentence, four and a half years in a camp, it was enough to make you smile: ten years of hard labor was the modest norm here. “Praise be for that officer’s nosebleed,” Volsky would say to himself.

And in the worst hours of despair there was this sky, whether gray, luminous, or nocturnal, and the link created by the power of a single gaze, beyond the world of human beings.

The clemency of his own sentence made him hope for an even lighter penalty for Mila. What could she be accused of? Bringing a notebook stained with earth to the museum? Volsky contrived to believe her acquitted, free, settled with the children in their old izba: in the evening she would step outside under the quivering of the first stars, look up at the sky… Then this hope became muddied, he recalled that for a long time the repressions had parted company with all logic. He, who had never set foot in the cockpit of an aircraft, was said to have decided to bomb Leningrad. Even crazier intentions could have been attributed to Mila. She might have been sent to a camp thousands of miles from the one where he was!

This supposition was a hideous torment. And yet, on occasion, he ventured on a declaration whose harsh and beautiful truth he feared himself: nothing could alter the moment when their eyes rose up to encounter one another. Then he pictured Mila amid white fields, her face uplifted toward the slow swirling of the snow.

This vision helped him not to live in hatred, which was a good way of surviving in the camp. He understood this when one day in spring he found himself buried under a pile of logs: a gigantic pyramid of cedar trunks, which the prisoners were preparing to float downriver. The breakup of the ice was happening early and more violently than usual. The stack of tree trunks stirred, shaken by the vibration of the ice floes, waking into life on that great Siberian river. And all at once the mountain of logs began rolling, scattering. The timber was swallowed into cavities in the ice shelf, hurtled into the water, rose up vertically, fell back, reared up into walls that caved in… Several prisoners were trapped by the collapse. Two or three vanished into the river. They were able to save one of them, whose shoulder was shattered.

Volsky remained pinned to the ground low down on the shore, close to the menacing procession of disintegrating ice floes. His chest crushed, his legs caught in the tangle of tree trunks, he could neither cry out nor move. When he regained consciousness night had fallen and he guessed that the search, if there had been one, had not been very thorough. A prisoner’s life was worth nothing and nobody wanted to lose his own by venturing into a chaotic mass of logs that threatened to subside and slide into the river at any moment. They must have reckoned that he had drowned.

All that was left of his voice was a hissing whisper, all he could move was his hands, which explored his wooden tomb in the darkness. Through the crisscrossed cedar logs he could see a triangle of stars.

The pain reached what he thought would prove to be a fatal threshold, then it subsided, or rather he became used to this threshold. His thirst became more cruel than the pain and only let up during those moments when his gaze escaped between the tree trunks into the sky. Then his mind cleared, and as there was no longer anyone to convince, not even himself, the simplicity of what he understood was conclusive.

He understood that in all he had lived through the only thing that was true was the sky, looked at on the same day, perhaps at the same moment, by two beings who loved one another. Everything else was more or less irrelevant. Among the prisoners he had met murderers without remorse and innocent people who spent their time reproaching themselves. Cowards, lapsed heroes, the suicidal. Sybarites sentenced to twenty years who dreamed of meals a woman would cook for them when they left the camp. Gentle people, sadists, crooks, righters of wrongs. Thinkers who perceived this place of labor and death as the result of a humanistic theory badly applied. An Orthodox priest who averred that suffering was given by God so that man should expiate, better himself.

All this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner’s battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the intermission at the Opera House (he remembered Rigoletto) a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes that she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, sections of tires into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not keep her from drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquillity but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf…

At moments the pain grew sharper, only leaving him with a vague awareness: it was his thirst that made him picture the prisoner with his cup of tea, the woman imbibing her cold sparkling wine from a tall glass. So, it was all even less significant.

The water was close, a powerful current just beside his crushed body, and also ice, in little stalactites beneath the tree trunks. He reached out his hand, the effort increased the pain, he lost consciousness.

At the beginning of the second day the snow began to swirl around in great lazy flakes. Volsky felt the coolness of the crystals on his parched lips. And once more pictured a field in winter, a woman looking up into a white flurry.

He knew he had few hours to live and the conciseness of his thinking seemed to take account of this limited time. The words of the priest came back to him: the sufferings God inflicts so that man may expiate, purify himself… The smile this brought cracked his dried lips. If that were the case, so many men should be infinitely pure. In the camp. In the country ravaged by war. And, indeed, by the purges! After everything these people had endured they should have been as shining as saints! And yet, after ten years of suffering, a prisoner could still kill for an extra slice of bread. God… Volsky remembered the buckles on the shoulder belts worn by the German soldiers. Gott mit uns, “God is with us,” was embossed on the metal. These soldiers had also suffered. So…

He looked up: night was beginning to fall and in the tangle of tree trunks above his head there shone a pale, ashen cluster of stars. A woman saw it at that moment and knew that he, too, was looking at the sky… He grasped that even God no longer had any importance from the moment when those two pairs of eyes existed. Or, at least, not this god of human beings, this lover of suffering and belts.

The thirst torturing him became something else-the burning desire to tell the woman that nothing had any meaning without these moments looking at the sky.

In the night, or else it was the darkness of his lost consciousness, he heard a very faint voice: somebody was singing but occasionally forgetting the words, and so had to be prompted.

They had found Volsky thanks to these few snatches of song, explained the men who had heard him. Engineers, who had come with their explosives to blow up the fortress wall of tree trunks soldered together by the ice.

The singing that had welled up within him became another life, unconnected to the passing of the days. The world’s bustle seemed to him even more feverish and devoid of sense. From his bed in the camp’s sick bay he could see the ice floes hurtling along, revolving and disintegrating in the river. Daylight and darkness rushed by, speeded up. The prisoners assembled for roll call, went off to work, returned. And even when the guards, on a whim, made them wait for long hours in the rain, this torment expressed nothing more than a ludicrous eagerness to do harm, to demonstrate their power as petty torturers. He soon found himself back in the ranks, upright on legs covered in bruises. In the old days his anger would have flared up at the guards’ gratuitous cruelty. Now all he perceived was a vortex of wills, desires, base deeds. He thirsted to tell these men what he had understood in his tomb of timber and ice, and this urge remained intact. But the necessary words belonged to a language he had never yet spoken. Hidden among the ranks of the prisoners who cursed their tormentors, he would raise his eyes and slip away into the life he had imagined.

When he was released it seemed to make no difference to this other life. The truck taking him drove out through the entrance (“Forward to the Victory of Communist Labor!” was inscribed above the iron gates) and the camp vanished behind a hill turned russet by the autumn. “Just a turn of the steering wheel,” thought Volsky, “and a whole planet is swept away, like a fragment of ice in a river.” A terrifying planet of misery, cruelty, hope, prayers, and, suddenly, nothing: a road gleaming with rain, this sparse northern vegetation, waiting for winter.

He dwelt in a world where it was all one to him. Found work at a railroad marshaling yard, lodged nearby, in a room whose windows looked out on the tracks. People saw him as halfway between a not very bright worker and an ex-prisoner eager for his past to be forgotten. Sometimes they must even have thought him a bit soft in the head. He would be observed alone, among the snow-dusted tracks, his head thrown back, scanning a perfectly empty sky with half-closed eyes.

After months of research, Volsky learned that Mila had been given a sentence that she was serving somewhere in a camp. But where? And what sentence? “Ten years of hard labor,” replied a former employee at the Blockade Museum, with whom he had managed to establish contact. Ten years. He did the sums, saw opening up within him an abyss of five years’ wait, was not plunged into despair. He knew that every day Mila’s gaze joined him in the increasingly wintry sky and that at such moments time did not exist.

… Twenty or thirty years later Volsky would read accounts written by former prisoners. Some spoke of how their lives were destroyed, others told how they managed to resume “normal life.” He would then reflect that, while his own life had remained intact, it was the world that, little by little, faded away.

He did not have to wait five years. Two and a half years later Stalin died and in the human tide pouring out through the gates of the camps Volsky was sure he would find Mila again.

One evening in April he was walking beside the railroad track on his return from work and from a long way off saw a woman seated on a little bench beneath the windows of the building where he lived. He slowed his pace, hearing dull, heavy drumbeats pounding in his brain. The woman’s hair was white and her face, seen in profile, lined with deep wrinkles. “More than seven years in a camp…,” he thought, and felt himself bowed down beneath a weight pressing him toward the earth. Mila’s face, aged, was a final ordeal for him, possibly the hardest. And yet this culminating blow, struck by a god who delights in causing suffering, seemed to him petty and futile. Nothing could harm a life that would be reborn beneath the sky where for so many years their eyes had met.

His urge to say this was so acute that he broke into a run.

The woman turned. It was not Mila! A much older woman, who had been arrested with her, who had promised Mila she would find him. What she had to say amounted to a few words. “Ten years in a camp without the right to correspondence,” such was the official sentence. Few people knew that this “without the right to correspondence” signified that the condemned person was shot following the verdict. Sometimes letters from family members continued to arrive throughout those ten years of waiting…

Volsky remained sitting down, his eyes fixed upon the silhouette of the woman as she walked away, jolting from one tie to the next. He should have detained this freed prisoner, asked her questions, offered her tea, given her shelter… He would have done so but the world, already scarcely real, had vanished. There was nothing but these rails disappearing into the dusk, this elderly woman, walking away into the void, the words she had spoken, the last words that concerned him. An empty world.

He got up, looked at the sky. And sensed on his lips the emergence of a voice that would reach Mila. His lungs dilated. But instead of a cry, what came out was a long whisper tormented by a thirst. A terrible craving. One that came from not knowing how, with words, to bring the one he loved back to life.