Requiem For A Lost Empire

4

Pavel believed those minutes would continue ripping his sleep apart for long nights to come: the din of the caterpillar tracks a few inches above his head, the collapse of the trench he had fallen into when trying to get away ahead of the tanks. If he had not stumbled he would have continued running amid the breathless stampede and panic of the other soldiers. But he had slipped on a lump of clay, hurtled into a trench that was half dug and therefore quite shallow, had not had time to get up again. The roaring bulk had covered him with its shadow, the steel links of one track were hacking at the earth just above his face. For a moment he had felt as if he were being sucked into the entrails of the machine. The acid smell of the metal and the glaucous trail of the exhaust had filled his lungs. From beyond the trench cries and the crunch of bodies under the tank tracks could be heard through the throbbing of the engines.

That night, slumped down in a fir copse among some survivors from his company, he lay in wait for the return of those seconds spent under the tank. He fell asleep but the dream went off on a tangent, pushed open a secret door, translated everything into its own language, at the same time precise and oblique. Instead of tanks, a gigantic brand new machine tool with nickel-plated screws and levers covered in oil and grease. Its bowels vibrate with a rhythmic sound and disgorge punched disks at regular intervals. You have to slip your hand very nimbly into the coming and going of the mechanism and insert the steel plate into the press underneath the punch. And each time his hand goes in a little bit further, his body stretches up a little bit higher inside the machine, trying to avoid the rotation of the great cogwheels, the driving belts. Moreover the timing of the huge machine is not very well regulated. It is as if it senses the reaching out of the hand, the contortions of the body within its bowels. The fingers grasp a square of metal, the hand goes forward, the shoulder penetrates into the machine, the body worms its way in, edging between dozens of gears, crankshafts, cylinders. He manages to put the metal in place, withdraws his hand just before the punch comes down, and seeks to extricate himself. But all around him the machine is shuddering, without wasting a second, without the smallest opening via which he might reemerge. And through its noisy workings, he recognizes a room, light, and objects that come from his childhood.

The dream did not return on the nights that followed, for there were no nights. Always a flight toward the east, then an abandoned village that, during the brief hours of darkness, they attempted to transform into an entrenched camp. And in the morning, after disorderly resistance, a fresh retreat before the steady advance of the tanks and the German soldiers who smiled as they fired. The grinning of these men as they killed made a deeper impression on him than the tanks.

During those first weeks of the war he had to forget all he had learned during his military service. He still recalled the sergeant wetting his forefinger with saliva, raising it in the air to check the direction of the wind and explaining to them how much they needed to aim off. If anybody had spat on his finger to test the direction of the wind during these painful rearguard actions he would have been taken for a madman. The Germans fired their submachine guns and smiled. They responded with jerky small-arms fire from bolt-action rifles, often their only weapon at the start of the war. And they retreated, without being able to retrieve their wounded, without remembering the names of the villages surrendered. It seemed to him that he and his comrades in arms were fighting in a battle from one of his father's stories; their old-fashioned rifles, their troops of cavalry. On the opposing side quite a different war was being waged-a rapid sweep of armored vehicles across land turned upside down by aerial bombardment. Perhaps the Germans smiled when they saw the sabers flashing above the horses, as one smiles at the passing of an automobile several decades old, one that quaintly recalls a bygone age.

During these murderous days of the collapse there were, too, irrelevant little vignettes that sometimes made it hard to concentrate, to think only of the gray-green figure in one's sights. A dog, wounded by shrapnel, groaning and writhing on the spot, which looked their way with tears in its eyes. They had abandoned several comrades in fleeing from that burned-out hamlet, but it was the sight of the dog, that rust-colored ball with its broken back, that kept coming to mind. And in another place there was a sweet tangle of plants filled with the lazy buzzing of insects, the vegetation of a glorious summer that continued as if nothing were happening, just next door to izbas in flames, where people trapped inside were screaming. The soldiers of his detachment were hiding in a ravine, their rifles thrown to the ground, not a cartridge between them. The warm air, heady with the scent of flowers, was already growing heavy with the acrid emanations coming from the village. Later, a child's face glimpsed in a packed railroad car. Eyes that happily still understood nothing, that reflected a world from which death was still absent. The train set off. Together with other soldiers Pavel was in position around the station, hoping to keep the Germans at bay for the time it took the train to leave the town.

On his way out of a ruined village at the start of the autumn he picked up a page from a torn newspaper, an issue from the previous week. Reading it, you might have believed the enemy had only just crossed the frontier and was about to be driven back any day now. That night there was fighting some sixty miles from Moscow.

He had known for some time now why the Germans smiled when they fired. It was a grin that had nothing to do with joy, but was the unconscious grimace of a man whose hands are absorbing the recoil from a long burst of fire. Like most of his comrades in arms, Pavel was currently equipped with a German submachine gun, recovered in battle. And now they smiled like the Germans. And they no longer ran away in front of tanks, but dove into a trench, pretended to be dead, then got up and threw hand grenades. On awakening they would pry the panels of their greatcoats up from the frozen earth and turn their faces toward the birth of the light, hoping for sunshine. Moscow, which grew ever closer, lay somewhere within this chill vapor, they sensed it, like the swelling of bare veins, throbbing beneath the wind on that icy plain.

He found himself saying that he had seen all that could be seen of death, that no massacred, broken, dismembered body could any longer surprise him with the capriciousness of its mutilations. And yet death remained astonishing. As on that morning by the bright light of the sun, which rose in the direction of Moscow. A soldier whose eyes had been burned in an explosion ran toward the tanks, blind, guided by the sound of the engines and his own agony, and rolled under the tracks, setting off a grenade. Or yet again that young German without a helmet, half lying beside an overturned field gun, his bloody hands pressed against his shattered sides, crying out in the whimpering voice of a child, weeping in a language that, until then, Pavel had only heard barked out and had believed to be made only for barking.

And then, for an infinite second, there was the vision of his own body, lying there, inert among the snow-covered ruts. The explosion of a shell blotted out all sounds and it was in this silence of a vanished world that he saw himself as if from outside and very far away ("as if from the sky," he would later reflect): the body of a soldier in his mud-spattered greatcoat, his arms outstretched, his face flung back, looking up toward a glorious winter sun that would have shone with the same splendid indifference if no one had been left alive on this December morning. He was certain he had lived through those few moments of detached and painless contemplation, certain of having observed the fragile lacework of hoarfrost that surrounded the head of that unmoving soldier. His own head. When he regained consciousness at the hospital and could hear once more, he learned that they had almost abandoned him for dead on that field where there was no one else alive. Mainly to satisfy her conscience, a nurse had approached this corpse with its head trapped in a frozen puddle, had crouched down and held a little mirror to the soldier's lips. The glass had misted over slightly.

On his return to the front at the end of the winter of 1942 he noticed that the world had changed during his absence. In the mornings now, as they resumed their military duties, they had the sun at their backs. And in the evening, during the last miles before they halted, the most wearisome ones, when their boots weighted down with mud seemed to be taking root in the earth, the sun was shining ahead of them to the west, in the direction of Germany. As if in the frozen fields near Moscow the points of the compass had been switched.

There was a comforting logic to this turnaround by the sun. It was the only one in the war's capricious chaos. If he had had the time to reflect on it he would have noticed yet another piece of logic: there were fewer and fewer men in the ranks born, like him, at the very start of the twenties, men who had been fighting since the first day of the war. It was only years later that survivors of his generation might have the leisure to study a population census diagram arranged by age, a triangle with indented sides, like a pointed fir tree, widening toward the base. Moving down from the top to the level of 1920, 1921, and 1922 it would be deeply cut away, as if a mysterious epidemic had exterminated the men born in those years. Only one or two percent of them would be left. Branches pruned almost back to the trunk.

In the fierce thrust of troops toward the west, Pavel had discovered that survival most often depended not on logic but on being aware of chaos's little tricks, its unpredictable whims that defied common sense. A victory could be more murderous than a defeat. The last bullet would kill someone exclaiming in relief at the end of the battle, the first man to light a cigarette. And, whatever happened, you could never say whether it was life-saving or lethal.

It was as he walked through a town that had barely been retaken from the Germans that this notion had struck him of a victory cutting down more men than a lost battle. The streets, now empty, still had an uncertain, disquieting appearance, distorted by eyes that had bored into them when taking aim to fire; by breathless running from the corner of one house to the next. The dead looked as if they were searching for something they had lost in the dust of the courtyards, amid the rubble of gutted buildings. A few minutes before, the length of the silence, longer than a simple pause between bursts of fire, had proclaimed the end and the soldier crouching next to Pavel behind a section of wall had stood up, given a satisfied yawn, as he inhaled the damp air of that May evening. And sat down again immediately, then crumpled over on his side, a pinch of snuff still held between his thumb and forefinger. At the corner of one eyebrow, there was a hollow rapidly filling with blood. Pavel threw himself to the ground, thinking there was a hidden sniper. But, on examining the wound, he recognized the work of a stray piece of shrapnel, one of those bits of metal that came from heaven knows where at the end of a battle, unheralded by the sound of an explosion. Moreover, in the storm-darkened sky the thunder was imitating explosions with muffled rumbling at the other end of the town. Pavel got up and called to the medical orderlies who were running across the street with two bodies loaded on a stretcher.

In the company of other soldiers he walked past houses pitted by shells, then, hearing the sound of running, turned the corner into a less damaged sidestreet and began checking the buildings, one after the other. In the last but one he found himself alone. Corridors, classroom doors, and, in the classrooms, blackboards with pieces of chalk in the grooves beneath them. Some of the windows were broken and in the half-light of a stormy evening he felt he recognized that very particular moment in May when the last lessons of the school year were dissolving in the joy of heavy showers of rain and wet clusters of lilac outside the open window, all in a stormy darkness that suddenly invaded the classroom and created a subtle, dreamy complicity between them and the teacher. On the blackboard in one of the rooms he saw this inscription, written up with scholarly application: "The capital of our country is Berlin." Teaching was being done in accordance with German programs drawn up for the "Eastern territories." Moscow was deemed to have sunk without trace to the bottom of an artificial sea. He emerged from the classroom and heard shooting in the corridor on the ground floor. Some German soldiers were still hiding in the building and it was not easy to track them down in these dozens of rooms, where all the time the eye was being distracted by the chalk handwriting on the blackboard, or the pages of some abandoned textbook.

Pavel was not surprised that the memory of these empty classrooms was more tenacious than that of the battle itself, although he received a medal for it and the date of it was marked by victorious gun salutes in Moscow. He knew only too well the unpredictable caprices of war and what the memory retained of it. And it was also by a caprice of ill humor that the commanding officer refused him a week's leave, time to go to Dolshanka, which was less than sixty miles from the reconquered town. It was now the third year of the war, a year made up, like the previous one, of a thousand troop movements, painful advances and chaotic withdrawals. Amid this tangle of trajectories there was one fixed point, unchanged since he had left: his family house, the plantain leaves around the wooden front steps, the familiar creaking of the door. Despite all the towns burned to a cinder, despite all the deaths, the calm of this house seemed to be intact, down to the smile of his parents on the photo in the dining room: his father with his head turned slightly toward his mother, as if waiting for her to say something. In this town, so close to Dolshanka, a town half flattened by shelling, he had been seized by doubt. He just wanted to reassure himself that the photo was still smiling on the wall. His commanding officer's refusal struck him as a bad omen, which was confirmed several days later. They walked onto a minefield like a troop of blind men, into a fountain of shrapnel, into the pain, but, before the pain, the sight of a body cut in half and still crawling: the soldier with whom he had been discussing different fishing tactics an hour earlier. At the hospital he brooded on his grudge against the commanding officer. On the day he was allowed to get up and go out into the corridor he learned that their whole division had meanwhile been wiped out by the German artillery in an ill-conceived offensive. He experienced neither joy at having escaped nor remorse. War made everything one could say or think about it simultaneously true and false, and there was too much evil and too much good mixed up in every moment for one to be able to judge. One could only hold one's peace and watch. Beside the window a young soldier was learning how to light a cigarette, clasping it between the remaining stumps of his hands.

Then came a day in March 1944 when, despite all the murderous caprices of chaos, Pavel thought he could discern a purpose, a great goal that could no longer be doubted. Some yards from their camp, in the middle of a gray plain, with no landmarks and no limits, some soldiers were digging in the ground and sticking a newly squared-off post into the hole. The smells of the freshly turned earth and the bark added a strange note to the inscription on a narrow horizontal panel that they nailed to the top of the post: "U.S.S.R." It was difficult to imagine that there, beneath their great muddy boots, between the stems of the dry plants, lay the frontier, that invisible dotted line he had seen only on maps at school. They had taken almost three years to get there from Moscow. Some of the soldiers were walking back and forth, amused at being able to travel abroad by taking a single step. That night the political commissar spoke to them about their country being "cleansed of Nazi defilement," and the "liberating mission" that was entrusted to them in enslaved Europe. Listening to him Pavel said to himself that the marker on the frontier was more eloquent than all the speeches in the world.

He did not understand why crossing the frontier aroused a fear of dying in him. Perhaps because, for the first time in long months, the end of the war and a return home were no longer unthinkable. And, like a gambler who has won a lot and is afraid of losing it all during the last minutes of the game, he became aware of his winnings, of this life, preserved up until now amid so many deaths, which, with every day of fighting, became more precious and more threatened. In an inadmissible thought, he recognized that, so as not to die, he would have been ready to employ cunning, to drag his feet during an assault, to hide behind someone else's back, to pretend to fall. But he knew the laws of death, which often targeted such sly foxes and spared the daredevils.

The hope that he might return home served only to sharpen his fear. He pictured himself marching down the street in Dolshanka, his chest covered with medals, and could imagine nothing more beautiful than that one moment. During hours of respite he found himself polishing his medals and the buckle on his belt while privately rehearsing a hundred times the same scene he dreamed of: the main street of his native village, the admiring looks of the villagers, himself making his way with blissful stateliness toward the house, whose silent, vibrant expectation he could imagine. During these preparations for his return, made between battles, he had the sensation of transporting a part of himself into the future, thus enabling it to escape from the war, to be living in the post-war era already.

That day the clay he had found on a riverbank was dissolving like soap. The tarnished silver of his two "For Gallantry" medals grew bright, the silhouette of the infantryman in the middle of the red star shone like a layer of mica. He put the decorations away, cleaned his fingers with a handful of sand. The water on that April evening seemed almost warm. And in the stillness of the dusk a bird hidden in the willow groves was repeating two notes with joyful insistence.

As he stood up he heard a brief guffaw. Soldiers from the company, he thought, taking advantage of the halt to bathe or wash their clothes. The guffaw rang out again but was too abrupt for it to be true laughter. Pavel made his way around the willow thicket, stepped over a thick, half-submerged tree trunk, pushed aside a cascade of branches, and saw them. A woman on her back on the beach by the river, her head toward the water, a man with his two hands clamped around her head to stop her crying out, another holding the woman's wrists, the third writhing on top of her.

He had taken rapists by surprise before and had fired shots in the air to make them run away. And been cursed as a stupid motherfucker by the woman who was doing it for two tins of food. This time he must act quickly. The guffaws were those of a half-suffocated mouth. The woman managed to free her head, to gasp a mouthful of air and at once her face was smothered by a broad palm. Pavel beat a path through the branches, overturned the man who was twisting the woman's hands, knocked down the one who was crushing her mouth. And just had time, in a fraction of a second, to catch sight of the woman's face and recognize it. That is to say not to recognize it but to tell himself that he had certainly seen it before, or dreamed it, or imagined it. The first soldier hurled himself at him. Pavel dodged him and grasped the tunic collar of the one who was still lying there, made him topple over to one side and, before he could make out his face in the gloom, recognized the voice cursing. It was one of the company's officers.

Afterward he came to understand that it was the close proximity of death that precipitated things. Had the rape been acknowledged the three men would have been court-martialed and shot. Had he not intervened the woman would have suffocated. The soldiers were drunk, they would have noticed nothing. Had they not been drunk they would in any case have killed her to silence her. Each one in his own way hurled back death, as in close combat you hurl back a hand grenade, a few seconds before it explodes, in a frenzied game of hot potato.

Later he thought about this game, this deadly counting-out rhyme in which the last word had fallen on him. It was weeks later, for at the time everything had happened too quickly. He was arrested, his stripes were torn off, his decorations (those medals burnished with clay) were confiscated. A truck picked him up with a load of men whose uniforms bore no distinctive insignia. He knew he had joined a penal company and this meant death in the very near future.

From the very first battle the distance that lay between him and death could be measured in the numbers killed. Two hundred soldiers from his company advanced directly toward the German positions, without any artillery support, without tanks, on a bare plain. One submachine gun to five men. He knew that behind them a barrage section was ready to shoot down anyone who tried to retreat. Caught between two fires, they could only advance toward death or retreat toward it.

He jumped into a trench behind a dead man, a soldier whose chest was cut to pieces by a burst of fire. For a second this body distracted the attention of two Germans as it fell, they moved aside to avoid the corpse. That second allowed time for a sideways knife thrust, the snatching of a submachine gun from one of the Germans, a shot that was just ahead of the other soldier's move. Pavel always ran, flung himself to the ground, fired a little ahead of the others. Now everything seemed slow to him: the knife plunging slowly in below the German's ear, the fall of the body, flailing and spattering him with blood, the look from the other soldier, hampered by the narrowness of the trench, struggling with his weapon jammed between his belly and the earth wall, who just had time to realize that he was too slow. An instant after the fighting had finished, the moments when Pavel had succeeded in staying ahead unfolded in his mind's eye with delayed action. He emerged from the trench and walked along beside it, moving toward the small group of survivors gathering around the commanding officer. They looked at one another as if seeing one another for the first time.

With the remnants of other penal companies a new one was formed: two hundred men with no name, no rank, and-the late comers-no 'weapons. They were thrown in wherever men could only die, as in that long valley, pitted with crevasses of marshland, which Pavel crossed during the third battle. The Germans hidden in the copse fired at them and gave away their own positions. Now a real offensive could be launched. The men of the penal company were simply bait.

As a new company was brought together the commissar repeated that they must "wash away" with their blood the wrongs done to their country. He had no fear of repeating himself to the company for the contingent was renewed at almost every battle. "A month, or at best two," thought Pavel, when calculating the life expectancy of these men, on the basis of the number of survivors.

This life expectancy found expression in a mathematical formula thanks to the prisoners from the gulag, who were numerous in these so-called kamikaze companies. One of them (like all the others, he had no name, simply a tattoo on the back of his hand: an anchor) was a man whose eyes were unaccustomed to the sun, his face burned by the cold of the far north. He showed Pavel his meticulous counting of the days, five notches on the handle of his knife: for a month of service in the penal companies, he explained, their sentence was reduced by five years, two months wiped out seven years in the camps, three months was worth ten. There was no better equation to express the times they were living through. Anchor was killed after eight years of war (i.e. two months and a few days). Pavel retrieved his knife, its handle notched with hope.

He found himself remembering the face of the violated woman. Not to pity her or to feel self-pity and regret his action. It was the similarity of her face and features to those of another, seen somewhere before, that haunted him. He thought of his sister, his mother, and also of Sasha. Of other women's faces. At times they had had in their eyes the same aura of pain and beauty. One day in a Polish town, passing in front of a church half-destroyed by shelling, he solved the riddle. The memory of the church at Dolshanka came to mind. Likewise demolished, in this case with stubborn vindictiveness: the cupola torn down, the roof burned, a section of wall blown up with dynamite, the work of Comrade Krassny. The interior, open to the sky, had been colonized by nettles and young maple saplings. Obscenities erupted across the wall, scrawled on it with a fragment of brick. Alone, in the corner, at a height beyond the reach of human hands, a face leaned down toward anyone who entered through the gaping door. The eyes of a woman, large and sorrowful, a gaze that came from a fresco blackened by fire.

As they were almost certain they would not meet again the next day, men in the penal companies talked to one another differently from ordinary soldiers. Very simple statements, a tone of voice that was not concerned to be understood, to convince, or to impress. Words you use when talking to yourself or addressing ghosts. Before a battle they knew in advance that a few hours later nine voices out of ten would have fallen silent forever on this earth. This made their voices calm, detached, indifferent to what the ghosts of tomorrow would think. Sometimes the narrative would break off and one could sense it continuing underground among silent memories.

"So as not to crush it, this egg," Anchor was relating two days before he died, "I tied my wrist to my thigh when I was asleep. The egg always kept warm in my armpit. Everyone in our hut helped me to hatch it. During searches we passed it from one to another. We hid it from the guards, like it was a bomb or a gold ingot. What do you expect? There's not much to do in a camp. A tractor had knocked it out of its nest. All the other eggs were smashed but this one hadn't broken. We really wanted to know what kind of bird would come out of it."

What did come out was a tiny bundle of life, a little pulsating thing, covered in down, with a gaping yellow beak that the prisoners fed with a chewed-up mess of bread and saliva. In the end the guards got to know about it but did not interfere. They understood that no one in the camp would have batted an eye if they had doubled the quotas of work, or deprived them of food, or increased the punishments. But had they laid a finger on that little creature, already learning to fly in the stifling air of the barrack huts, there would have been a revolt.

Anchor was killed and Pavel never heard the end of the story. He simply pictured a young bird, under the transfixed gaze of the prisoners, flying out over the lines of barbed wire.

When he was telling his story Anchor sometimes called himself "the brood cock." This nickname amused another prisoner, who had joined the company at the same time as him and who, unlike the rest, made a point of preserving his real name amid the anonymity of the other soldiers. If he spoke to anyone, however briefly, he would tell them his name, Zurin, happy to take possession of it again after being a mere serial number for so long. It was this desire to assert his own identity that gave him the urge to tell his story.

Wounded in the battle of Brest Litovsk, he had been captured by the Germans, had spent a month behind barbed wire, had managed to escape and rejoin our troops and then, in a reverse process, had been arrested, judged to be a traitor, and sent to a Soviet camp.

Pavel had already heard the stories of such escapees who had, without realizing it, fled from one death to another. He knew the meaning of Stalin's words when he declared, "None of my soldiers will be taken prisoner by the enemy." This meant they must never give themselves up alive.

It was not Zurin's fate that struck him but one episode in particular that the soldier related clumsily, stumbling, as if he felt at fault in admitting to his capture.

It was, he told them, the final day of the battle for the citadel of Brest Litovsk. The Germans had just dislodged the last of the defenders putting up resistance in the underground bunkers. Some of them perished when the vaults caved in, others were burned by flamethrowers, asphyxiated by smoke. They lined up the survivors on the central square of the citadel in front of the German troops, who observed them with mocking curiosity. The fighters blinked in the sunlight, too harsh after long weeks spent in the dark in bunkers. Their uniforms had been transformed into crusts of hardened mud. Bandages stained with earth and blood, solid hair plastered over their brows, lips raw with thirst. They looked like beasts that had just been hauled out of their lair. Beasts who had lost count of the days and, moreover, did not know that the frontier fortress they were defending had long since been abandoned by the rest of the army in its retreat toward Moscow.

Exactly as if they were dragging forth a captured animal, two Germans dragged out another of the fighters on a makeshift stretcher and set him down at the feet of the rest. His face touching the stone, he looked as if he were listening to a distant noise. A fragment of bone, very white amid the dirty fabric of his tunic, poked out from his shoulder. He remained motionless, lying between the Germans and the row of prisoners. One of the officers rapped out a brief command. A soldier ran off, came back with a bucket of water, and emptied it over the recumbent man. The latter turned his head. It could be seen that half his face was charred-the same black surface as the walls and the bricks vitrified by the flamethrowers. Painfully, he raised himself onto one elbow. In this face made up of burned skin and mud an eye glittered, conscious and still full of the darkness of the underground chambers.

The officer leaned forward to meet this one-eyed gaze. In the scorched face the lips moved. In place of spittle, a clot of brown blood hurtled from this mouth and flattened itself against the officer's boots.

" 'Now we've had it,' we said to ourselves," Zurin related. " 'The Kraut will finish him off with a pistol. Then they'll give all of us hell just to pay for that gob of spit.' "

The officer stood up and a fresh command snapped out. The line of soldiers quivered and with a fierce clicking of heels came rigidly to attention, their eyes fixed on the officer. He stared hard at them and barked out several words that rang across the square. Zurin understood German, the enemy's language they had learned at school, reading Heine. "This is a true soldier," said the officer. "You should fight like him!"

For a long moment the square remained silent. A line of German soldiers at attention and this man dying, stretched out on the pavement, his brow against the stone.

In the new company, made up of the remnants of the previous ones, Pavel spoke to nobody. He had already grown accustomed to the futility of forming a tie with anyone, knowing the most you might be left with from such a friendship, formed on the brink of death, was either a knife with the handle notched for days of survival or an unfinished story. And if he now embarked on a conversation one night it was because the offense attributed to this new recruit seemed too improbable. They said that on attacks this man had refused to shout Stalin's name.

The two were on guard duty and spoke in whispers, unable to see one another in the darkness. The German positions were very close, you could not even light a cigarette. The soldier's responses left Pavel perplexed. "He's pulling my leg, this guy," he said to himself from time to time, and in the gray light of the June night he tried to make out the features of his strange interlocutor. But the reflected moonlight showed only quick flashes from his spectacles and the pale patch of his forehead.

"Is it true you swap your vodka for bread?" asked Pavel, seeing this refusal to drink the statutory hundred grams before an attack as a bizarre piece of bravado: those few burning mouthfuls gave you the courage to tear yourself up from the earth when the bullets and shrapnel came whistling past. "Don't you like drinking or what?"

"I do, but I'm always hungry. You see, I was a rich kid. My parents force-fed me like a turkey when I was little."

Such honesty was disconcerting. Pavel told himself that, questioned in that way, he would have invented a rather more heroic reason for his refusal. He would have said he did not drink because he 'was afraid of nothing. He would certainly never have admitted to a past as a spoiled child.

"And is it true they put you in a penal company because of Stalin? You really refused to shout?"

"Look, there was a political commissar who hated my guts. There was nothing I could do about it. He never left me alone. One day he got me out in front of the troop and ordered me to shout: 'For our country! For Stalin!' I refused. I said we weren't attacking."

"But on an attack you shouted?"

"Sure, like everyone else. When you shout you don't feel so scared. You know that yourself."

That night Pavel learned that the soldier had gone as a volunteer to the front at the age of seventeen, lying about his age like so many others. He came from Leningrad and had not received a single letter since the start of the siege, even after the blockade was lifted. When their guard duty was relieved the soldier remained stock still for a moment, with the dazed irresolution of someone who is suddenly overtaken by a wave of sleep, until then held at bay. As Pavel was moving away, he turned back and saw him thus: a figure all alone, in the expanse of the fields at night, beneath a sky already filling with the first light.

He caught up with him again next day during a halt. Now that the company had been slimmed down to half its size by an unsuccessful attack it was easier to locate faces. The soldier greeted him, held out his hand. "He's Jewish," thought Pavel and experienced a mixture of disappointment and distrust, derived from a source he himself was unaware of. He often heard it said at the front that all the Jews stayed behind the lines or were in cushy jobs in supply. Yet they had all of them come across many Jews in the front line or severely wounded in the hospital, as well as in the rushed interludes that came between the trivial actions before a battle (a tongue wetting a cigarette paper, a joke, a hand brushing aside a bee) and the first steps taken afterward, on a strip of earth covered with silent or howling bodies. And yet he continued to hear that refrain about cushy jobs and crafty little bastards in supply. Now he realized that among the men of the penal companies these remarks were no longer heard. The extreme proximity of death swept away the tawdry trappings of names and origins.

"I'm called Marelst. That's my first name."

Pavel stared at him and could not suppress a smile: he was tall, very thin, with the narrow, bony shoulders of an adolescent and glasses that had a diagonal crack across one of the lenses. His physique corresponded very little to the forename derived from the contraction of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin. One of those revolutionary relics from the twenties. On his tunic, above his heart, you could still see the tear marks left by his confiscated medals.

"Did you have a Red Star?" asked Pavel, noticing an angular patch, darker than the rest, on the fabric bleached by the sun.

"Yes, and a 'For Gallantry,'" replied Marelst, and corrected himself at once, so as to eradicate the note of juvenile pride that had crept into his voice. "Yes, I had them. But, when it comes down to it, I tell myself there's no way I'd have got anything else, short of capturing Hitler in person."

As they marched in a column that extended along a road over the plain, he noticed Marelst three files away from him carrying the steel base for the mortar, the most cumbersome burden, for one never knew how to balance it on one's back. Pavel eyed the slightly bent back, the swerves in Marelst's step necessitated by the rocking of the base. A back like any other, Pavel thought, distractedly, a soldier dragging his weary feet in the dust of a road in wartime. He recalled his distrust and vexation on learning that this man was a Jew. Unwillingly he noted that this vexation seemed to him inexplicably justified by, and even inseparable from, the fact of being Russian. He would have liked to find the reason for it. But from his childhood days the possibility of being a Jew had remained purely theoretical, for no one had ever seen one in Dolshanka, where even the people from the other end of the village were regarded as foreigners. Later, away at school, there were a few old sayings of folk wisdom about Jews "raking in the money with both hands." This wise saw was curiously contradicted by their history teacher, a veteran soldier and a Jew who had lost one arm, and whom it was difficult to picture as a raker-in of money.

The next day (after they had been hurled, as usual without artillery support, into the stone maze of a little Polish town), he observed Marelst yet again, while trying to comprehend it all. There were many wounded because of the bullets rebounding in the narrow streets. Pavel was carrying a soldier whose tunic was swollen with blood, like a strange wineskin. As he came around a corner in the street he caught sight of the figure of Marelst, he, too, with a human burden. For a moment they walked together in silence, both of them sunk in that torpor at the end of a battle, when, finding your body still alive, you resume possession of it, as of your thoughts of a few hours ago that now seem several years old. From time to time Marelst gave way at the knees and straightened himself up with an effort, as he adjusted the position of the wounded man on his back. The lenses of his glasses were spattered with mud; one of the broken earpieces had been replaced by a length of wire. Pavel stared at these glasses, this face, saying nothing, struck by the disproportion: the broad bruise on his chin, a banal bruise, just like one you might receive in a mere fist fight, a mere bruise left by a battle that had just killed so many men. There was a curious irony about this flick of the wrist, with which death seemed to hurl back a man whose hour had not yet come.

Marelst must have noticed this look, or had he guessed that his origins did not find favor? That evening, seated by their campfire, he spoke in that level, dull voice the men in penal companies used to probe the depths of their past lives in whispers, lives which, from one day of reprieve to the next, seemed more and more foreign to them, as if lived by someone else. Somewhere halfway through his story, anxious no doubt to avoid the tones of a confession, he stopped and announced with uncompromising irony, "As a matter of fact, I've decided not to die. So nothing I'm telling you is final. Life continues, as the hanged man said when he saw the first carrion crows arriving. No, you'll see. We'll come through. We'll drink our hundred grams in Berlin. A hundred grams, what am I saying? A barrel." Later, when recalling that story told at nightfall, Pavel could not quite pinpoint the moment at which this gleeful outburst had occurred. As he remembered them, Marelst's words had had a grave, intense rhythm, into which it would have been impossible to introduce the merest scrap of humor.

In this story there was Marelst's father, a young clockmaker in Vitebsk, who one day walked out of his shop and hurled a heavy clock onto the sidewalk, together with its mahogany case, then began to trample on the fragments of glass as he wept. They thought he was mad. In a certain sense he had become mad, on learning that the house of his brother, who lived in Moldavia, had been pillaged and that the looting had degenerated into killing and they were driving nails into the skulls of newborn babies. He felt as if he could hear the crunch of the metal points piercing these heads scarcely covered with hair and could see the children's wide-open eyes. This noise and this vision pursued him relentlessly, so that he could no longer hear the watches ticking or respond to the smiles of his nearest and dearest. What tortured him as well was knowing that for the most part the looters were workers with three days' hunger in their bellies, jealous of the down quilt possessed by his brother. He felt that he had the strength, born of desperation, to seize the terrestrial globe and shake all the evil out of it. He would soon need this strength at the time of arrests, during the years of secrecy, in exile. In the revolution he became the all-powerful governor in his native town, and was then called to Moscow by Lenin himself. The goal seemed to him clearer than ever: not a single person must be left in this country, in the whole world, whom hunger transformed into a killer. To this end, some people must be given food. And, among the others, a few must be killed. During the civil war he understood that more than just a few must be killed. A few thousand, he began by thinking. Then a few tens of thousands, a few million… At a certain moment he caught himself having forgotten why they were killing people. It was the day his secretary had laid on his desk a fresh bundle of denunciations: in one of them he found a form of words that reminded him of the convolutions of a snake: "Citizen N. must be arrested, as he is suspected of being a suspect." It suddenly seemed as if his secretary was waiting for his reaction through the half-open door. That same year he learned that one of his old comrades from the time of secrecy had committed suicide. He tried to think calmly. The choice was becoming limited: he should either follow this friend or forget, once and for all, why they were killing people. He had three children. The youngest, Marelst, was born the day tears had been seen in Stalin's eyes as he stood beside Lenin's coffin. "I have a family," Marelst's father argued with himself. "And besides, you can't make a revolution in kid gloves." A big apartment right opposite the Kremlin, a chauffeur-driven car, a new secretary, even younger and more amenable than the previous one-when she left his office straightening her skirt he experienced a long moment of pleasant torpor, which no questions could any longer disturb. When he learned of the famine organized in the Ukraine and the millions dead he told himself that what was needed, so as not to lose your reason, was to extend this torpor over the entire duration of days. Marelst was ten in that summer of 1934 when they went to the Crimea. The excitement of the long train journey with his parents, his brother, and his sister kept him awake. He saw what he should not have seen. In one station, in a night blinded by floodlights, a crowd of women and children being driven toward cattle cars by soldiers brandishing their rifle butts. "Who are those people?" asked Marelst from his bunk. "Kulaks and saboteurs," his father quickly replied and went down onto the platform to threaten the stationmaster, who had dared to hold up their train in this ideologically dubious situation. His mother put her hand over Marelst's eyes. And he experienced a complex pleasure, comparable to the taste of the cake they had eaten on his sister's birthday: the white cream that lingered on your palate, fine chocolate chips, tiny flakes of crystallized fruit. In the same way he relished both in his mouth and through all his other senses the calm of their compartment, moving gently as it slid along beside the platform, the delicious swaying of his bunk, the smell of the cold tea on the little shelf below the window and, above all, in a foretaste of happiness to come, the Crimean pebbles that you had to pour from one hand to the other, searching for the mysterious chalcedony his father had told him about. The existence of the kulaks, who were being loaded into those hideous cattle cars, only served to add spice to his contentment. He was just about to go to sleep with this taste of patisserie on his lips when suddenly it was as if an icy gust of wind whirled around in the darkness of their compartment. The child was gripped by fear, an irrational fear and an idea that passed his understanding: one day he would be punished for this sugary taste of happiness in his mouth, for his joy at knowing the others were being crammed into freight cars without windows. He would learn how to formulate this fear some years later. For the moment there was only the fleeting draft of cold air and the vision of a woman trying to protect her child in the cut and thrust of rifle butts. He understood this fear during the winter of 1938. In the space of two months his parents grew old and now only spoke in whispers, feeling their way from one word to the next. All conversations carefully avoided the secret, betrayed precisely by this effort not to mention it: the imminent arrest of his father, the disappearance of what it came to them so naturally to call their life, their family. His father succeeded in forestalling the nocturnal ring at their door. In the government building where he was the minister in charge the staircases soared up in a broad, majestic curve and the space between the handrails was at least a yard across. His father threw himself into it from the top story and the employees going up and down had time to see this body as it streaked past the floors and several times struck the ironwork of the banisters. Someone tried to catch the open panels of his jacket in flight but all he was left with was a rapid burning beneath his nails. Thanks to this death, his father did not become an "enemy of the people" and their family, although dislodged from the prestigious apartment building, was not deported. They went to live with friends in Leningrad. The memory of the night when he saw the cattle cars as a child-the memory of his happiness-came back to him every day, together with that burning under the fingernails, which he imagined thanks to the employee's description. But the first battles had wiped out both the memory of this shame and the need to exonerate himself. There were too many deaths, too many bodies sunk in the mud of the fields, too many regrets encroaching on one another: the day when an abandoned wounded man reached out to him with his bloodied hand and he didn't stop, the next day, when an officer, standing up to go into the attack a second before him, was mown down by a burst of gunfire and Marelst had to climb over him. Ah that remained of his former life was a notebook filled with poems from his youth. A notebook now being dismembered, page by page, and used for cigarette papers. At first he saw this as a brutal lesson from life, as it reduced these sheets of paper, with their labored and melancholy sonnets, to ashes. But very quickly the taste of the coarse tobacco that drove away the smell of blood and rotting flesh gave the notebook a new significance-the silence of soldiers after a battle, rolling a cigarette with part of a poem. From now on there seemed to him to be infinitely more truth in the calm of such moments than in anything that might have been said about life or death in those rhyming verses.

As he talked, Marelst raised his head from time to time and the lenses of his glasses caught the light of the fire, making his eyes disappear, as if beneath a spurt of blood. Pavel told himself that in peacetime they would never have met and even if they had met would never have understood one another. "A man from Leningrad," Pavel would have thought with suspicion, "the son of a minister." It occurred to him now that the war had simplified everything. There was this fire, drying the slabs of mud on their boots and causing it to flake, the darkness over this plain, lost somewhere between Poland and Germany, this scrap of land in the night, just snatched back from the enemy. And this man, sitting close to the fire, a man talking very quietly, as if in his sleep, who was quite complete in what he was saying. Pavel suddenly understood that there was nothing else: darkness, a man, a voice. Everything else was a peacetime invention. Man was simply this naked voice beneath the sky.

The next day, as they set out on the road again, he thought that after the battle he would tell Marelst what he had always kept to himself: the story of that woman buried alive, with her child in her belly, a woman with no voice but whom he could always understand.

In the next battle they were due to liberate a concentration camp. Transformed into a fortified base, it was holding up the offensive of an entire division. It was not known if there were any prisoners left in the huts: all that could be seen was some thirty captives tied to posts around the camp as a shield. They would have to attack without firing a single shell, without hand grenades. "With our bare hands?" exclaimed a newcomer in amazement. No one answered him. Three penal companies were thrown into the assault, six hundred men. After the first attack, which was driven back, Pavel saw that the rolls of barbed wire had half disappeared under inert bodies. Further off, all along the fence, the bound prisoners watched in silence the ebb and flow of soldiers letting themselves be killed without being able to respond.

At the fifth or sixth wave, when only a quarter of the three companies remained, Pavel, by now deaf and with the taste of burned blood in his throat, withdrew in a group of a dozen soldiers toward a broad ditch to the rear of the camp. Someone leaned down to take a drink but straightened up again immediately: his hands had drawn up a viscous, yellowish pulp. It was a narrow dead river, blocked with ashes. They shuffled for several seconds, without mustering the resolve to pass through this stagnant liquid, where several corpses floated. Marelst came up at this moment and Pavel saw his figure moving forward, wading in up to his knees, up to his belt, up to his chest. His arms held his submachine gun high above his head. When he reappeared on the far bank, coated with a thick crust of scum, the soldiers raced after him and time went into turmoil, as if to make up for the delay. On one watchtower the barrel of a machine gun aimed at them frenetically. The scum came to life, seethed with bullets. The machine gunner twisted about at the top of the watch-tower, struggling against the dead angle. An attack from that direction had doubtless not been foreseen. The soldiers rushed toward the barbed wire. And, as always in combat, everything disintegrated into a series of increasingly rapid and random flashes. A beam of the watchtower blows up. The machine gunner with his brow torn open by a burst of fire. He falls and reappears, his face is intact-it's another German. The bullets lash the scum, rake the bank. One soldier stops, sits down, as if to take a rest. Pavel swerves around him as he runs, hurls an oath at him, then realizes… In the distance a mass of gray-green uniforms pours out between the huts-the German reinforcements. To the left, tied to a post, one of the prisoners seems to be smiling; no doubt he's already dead. The first line of barbed wire. The soldier running in front of Pavel leaps and suddenly straightens up, fingers his throat. The lower part of his face has been blown away by a fragment from a hand grenade. His body falls, a bridge across the jagged wire. They climb over his back. Someone else falls. The bridge grows longer. The sky is turned upside down by an explosion. The earth shakes his body and hurls it into the blue. What he sees: an encounter between a clod of earth and a cloud. The sky is beneath his body, which is drowning in the blue. A torn-off arm, as if someone had abandoned it behind a roll of barbed wire. A German's eyes, his mouth open, and the smoothness, almost tenderness, with which the bayonet plunges into his belly. Another explosion. The skewered body protects him from the shrapnel. The gaping door of a barrack hut. The pile of skeletons in striped garments. A German lying in wait behind this heap. A grenade scattering the dead. A section of the wall crumbles-the violence of the sunlight. The German writhes amid the striped bodies. A hut burns. A half-naked being crawls to safety out of the flames. The deafness is total. Explosions are heard by the stomach, the lungs, and pressure on the temples. Silence also comes from inside, from the belly. The eyes, still feverish, ricochet from one wall to another, from a shadow to a door that suddenly bangs, blown by a blast of wind. Then the body no longer hears anything. Gradually the ears start hearing again in their turn. Silence. The chirping of a cricket in the grass between two lines of barbed wire. And, crumpled up against the wall of a hut, a soldier with a broad trail of blood across his chest. And his cry ("water") which for the others is no more than the proof that their hearing has returned and their own lives are intact.

The soldiers walked back and forth across the camp, like runners after a race, strolling about to let the fever of the effort die down. They checked all the huts, they freed the bound prisoners (most of whom collapsed beside their stakes). The commanding officer counted. About forty of the wraiths clad in striped garments showed signs of life, some of them by opening their eyes, some by attempting to get up. Out of the six hundred members of the three penal companies twenty-seven soldiers remained.

Pavel found it difficult to disengage Marelst's body. He had to lift the other bodies, draw out the barbed wire. Most notably, the soldier's fingers seemed to be clinging to the earth. In his comrade's knapsack Pavel found two letters sent from Leningrad before the siege. He kept them.

Despite the fighting that started again the next day and the infinite diversity of the mutilated bodies, he could not forget Marelst's gesture: the hand that had found the time to feel for the lower part of his face, ripped away by shrapnel. He had often thought about his own death, about the last second before dying, about the possibility or impossibility of knowing how to die. This gesture became an answer.

The assault on the camp earned the survivors an amnesty and posting to ordinary units. They heard the news without showing any joy, as if this change did not concern them.

The war had grown younger. Pavel noticed this as he observed the latest conscripts, their indifference to being killed or their fear of dying, their awkwardness in suffering, their youthful receptiveness to all that war offered. He had forgotten how he, too, in the old days, would address amateurish prayers to death, polish his medals, dream of returning home, wait for letters.

On the opposing side this youthfulness was also visible. In the German ranks the bullets easily eroded the soft stratum of very young men, adolescents recruited from the Hitlerjugend. Once this layer was torn away, the core seemed almost mineral in its toughness: soldiers who had survived Stalingrad, Kursk, Konigsberg. Soldiers who knew that their native cities, or the cities from which they received their letters, had been transformed into charred ruins by aerial bombardment. For a long time the war had become their only country. And the soldier who knows that no one anywhere awaits his return is much to be feared.

Pavel encountered just such a soldier late in the day in the suburbs of Berlin, where their company was floundering about among little pockets of resistance. The red flag was already flying over the Reichstag, the victory had been announced, but there, behind a church with a dome shattered by shelling, there were still several concealed snipers who refused to give themselves up. There was one in particular, his face blackened by smoke, who was riddling the street from a hiding place behind a pillar eroded by bullets. He seemed invulnerable. After each burst of gunfire, as the dust cleared, you could see his stiff profile visible behind the column and the shooting started again. The young soldiers, perplexed, shrugged their shoulders, took careful aim, or, on the contrary, began spraying the whole façade, their faces contorted with rage. They finally took him out with a grenade launcher. Drawing closer, Pavel grasped their mistake at the same time as the others did, and whistled in astonishment. In a niche between two pillars stood a bronze statue crammed with their bullets. The German's hiding place had been close by, lower down. He lay there, dead, his face turned toward them. His left hand, covered in blood, was made fast to the butt of the machine gun by a length of wire. This had taken the place of smashed ligaments, so that he could continue firing. Browned with the soot of fires and the dust, his face closely resembled the metal of the statue. His features were expressionless.

This shooting had taken place while around the Reichstag victory was being celebrated. They arrived too late and Pavel did not even have time to write his name on the mutilated walls. The order to board the trucks had already been given and he had failed to find a piece of plaster on the ground strewn with cartridges and shrapnel. His greatest regret was not having written Marelst's name there, as he had for so long promised himself he would.

He felt there was something incomplete about those days of victory. The inscription not written… No, much more than that. The war was over, he thought, and the very idea seemed strange. From one day to the next all that tide of faces, dead or alive, of bodies unscathed or massacred, of cries, of tears, of dying breaths, all that was located in the past now, relegated to the past by the joy of the May sunshine in Berlin. Without being able to say as much, Pavel was waiting for a sign, a change in the color of the sky, in the smell of the air. But the weeks flowed by, confident of their newly established routine rhythm. The trucks arrived at the station. The trains filled with soldiers and traveled slowly back toward the east.

One day at dawn, already in Russia, while the train was stopped beside a village, Pavel saw a young woman rinsing bed linen, squatting at the edge of a stream. The strangeness of that calm morning bordered on madness. In Pavel's understanding, without his being able to put it into words, it was impossible, after all that had happened in the war, for anyone to be kneeling there calmly on the bank at this time, making those pieces of white cloth undulate in the water. It was impossible to have those legs, those thighs. That body made for love ought not to exist. She should have arisen, looked at him and shouted for joy, or wept and fallen back to earth. He shook his head, got a grip on himself. The soldiers around him were asleep. He sensed his face trembling in a grimace of jealousy The girl stood up, grasped the handle of the pail filled with the laundry she had just wrung out. He followed her movements, desired her, and, despite the violent joy that filled him, felt as if he were betraying someone.

They crossed Moscow at nightfall in trucks, from one station to another. Pavel did not know the city and was unconsciously expecting that the street speeding past the open back of the van would teach him about the mystery of this life without war. As they waited for a red light at a crossroads he saw the open window of a restaurant, the kitchen end. It was a heavy July evening. Painstakingly, a cook was carrying a vast saucepan, his body leaning backward, his mouth tensed with the effort. It was strange to think of a life in which this great cooking pot and its contents were important. At the far end of the kitchen a door opened and, as the truck carried them away, Pavel had time to see, moving past him, the dining room of the restaurant, the cluster of lights on the chandelier, a woman leaning over her plate, a man shaking his hand to extinguish a match. "They're having dinner," thought Pavel, and this activity seemed quite disconcertingly strange. At the station, while awaiting the departure of the long train composed of freight cars on which they were to be made to embark, he overheard the parting words of a couple saying their good-byes beside a suburban train, "Tomorrow, then, about seven." He made a face and shook his head, as if to rid himself of a fit of giddiness. This rendezvous at seven o'clock was located in a time, in a life, in a world that he could never enter.

He was still living in the days when after a battle the soldiers would pace numbly up and down among the dead, getting used to being alive. It was from those days that he had his knife with the notches on it, left by a soldier from a penal company. Back in those days there was the soldier who, before crumpling up, had fingered the emptiness in the place where his jaw had been torn off. That night a cry woke him. "The tanks! Over there on the right!" yelled his neighbor, wrestling with a nightmare. There were several sniggers, several sighs in the darkness, then once again silence and the drumming of the rails.

He was sure, now, that in Dolshanka he would find a new life, even one in which he could forget. In the district capital, before setting out on the road, he saw a woman gathering raspberries behind her garden fence. The house opposite had had the roof blown off by an explosion and seemed uninhabited. He observed the woman's hands, strangely delicate and white, her fingers stained with purple juice. Her forearms were full, unbearable to look at. He gave a little cough, approached with a hesitant step, leaned on the fence with aggressive casualness and asked the way to Dolshanka. "What's that you say, Dolshanka?" said the woman, amazed, and shrugged her shoulders. In her tone of voice there was both flattered curiosity at speaking to a soldier and a desire to flaunt her pride. Pavel walked away, then turned back, thinking: "What a cow! Why not grab her, snatch her basket, rape her?" But one part of him, a very gentle part, was already crumbling, melting warmly and touching his heart, including in the happiness of that morning both the woman with her red-stained fingers and the old wooden fence as it began to grow warm under the still-pale rays of the sun.

As he walked along he thought about his return to Dolshanka, a return so often pictured that now the desire seized him to steal in quietly, passing through kitchen gardens, to avoid people's stares, their greetings. Unconsciously, he was transporting to Dolshanka all the people he had encountered on the return journey, in Moscow, in the district capital. He pictured the village filled with this war-free vitality, a happiness that was already routine, confident of its rights. There would be the bustle of young people in the main street, the long-drawn-out strains, at once merry and plaintive, of the accordion, crowds gathering, questions, a multitude of unknown children. And in order to be able to bear this agonizing gaiety he would need to down a good glass of vodka, then another.

Not to go back at all? The idea suddenly struck him as plausible and it was at that very moment he noticed that the road, a road of which he knew every twist and turn, had changed. It was not the line of burned-out trucks outside the district capital, nor the shell craters that gave this impression. Quite simply, the earth road was disappearing here and there under the advance of the forest. Young wild cherry trees were growing in the middle of it, grass filled the ruts. He found himself catching his boot against the cap of a fly agaric fungus, walking around an anthill. But the major landmarks were still there: the oak grove that plunged down into a ravine, a large chalky mound surrounded by fir trees. Pavel bent down, touched the layer of sand and pine needles. It was formed into a solid crust, all interwoven with stems and roots. Continuing on his way he unconsciously accelerated his pace.

Before going into Dolshanka the road made a sharp bend, hugging the winding course of the river. If you looked back you could see the place you had just passed, as you see the last coaches of a train on a curve in the track. Pavel turned his head and by the red light of the sunset, shining low over the earth, he saw the swaying dust from his footsteps as it lingered in the still, warm air on the far side of the loop in the road. He saw more than this trace. He almost pictured himself there, exactly as he had been a moment ago: a soldier who had just dusted his boots, straightened up his tunic, and washed his face, scooping up warm water from among the reeds. And for a few seconds he felt very remote from this happy double who was so thrilled to be going home. He walked past the copse at the entrance to the village, gave the bottom of his tunic one more tug, suddenly stopped, then ran, then stopped again.

What he saw did not frighten him, so deep was the stillness. The greenery from the orchards that had run wild covered the charred remains of the izbas almost completely. The trees had grown unchecked across the street, breaking the straight line of it. Dolshanka no longer existed. But its ruins did not have the violence of recent destruction. The rains had long since washed away the blackness of the burned walls, wild grasses hid the foundation stones. Only the stoves with their chimneys still reared up, showing where the houses had stood. Pavel crouched down, drew open the little cast iron door to an oven-the creaking of the hinges was the only sound evocative of a human presence in this silence of plants.

Walking slowly along the main street, he spoke out loud. Even spilling out at random, his words lent a semblance of logic to these moments. He recognized the forge, brown with rust, the horns of the anvil sticking out among the nettles. Still talking, he made this very simple calculation: the village had been burned during the German offensive in the autumn of 1941, so for four years, the snow the trees… He stopped in front of a building whose walls remained almost intact, remembered it as the House of the Soviet. Above the door lengths of rope bleached in the sun hung from great nails. And on the ground skeletons covered in shreds of clothing were sitting or lying stretched out, with sharp stems and leaves growing through them, surrounded by large creamy umbels with the scent of mulled wine.

He spent the night in the square of blackened tree trunks that still marked the site of their vanished house amid the underbrush. He no longer felt any pain. From his first steps around the site of this blaze of long ago (beneath the debris of beams reduced to pieces of charcoal he had caught sight of an iron bed, all black, and had recognized it), from the first crunching of glass underfoot, his grief had crossed the threshold of what was bearable and had numbed him. There were just a few absurd little details it still hurt him to see. In the evening it was the garlands of white flowers growing around the chimney: near to the ground the flowers were already closed but high up, where the sun was still shining, their bell-shaped trumpets stood out. He had gone up to them, tugged forcibly at the garland. And now, in the night, there was this shadow. Something nosing about swiftly behind the ruins of the house (a stray dog? a wolf?)-and the fear, and the humiliation of feeling fear. Here. At this moment. But the real torture was the sky, with the stars, slightly hazy from the heat, which beguiled the eye with the geometry of their constellations, learned at school and since then stubbornly unchanged. There was in their soft light a kind of mild deception, a promise eroded by millions and millions of prayers never granted. Even when he closed his eyes he did not escape these timeless patterns. He sat down and suddenly imagined himself to be very old, yes, an old man watching beside his ruined house. And in this imagined old body, the body of a dying man, without memories, without desires, he felt unspeakably happy. But he was twenty-five and it was summer 1945. The interval of time that lay between him and that old man now seemed of inhuman duration. He took out his pack, his hand felt the butt of the automatic pistol, wrapped in a scrap of cloth.

He left the village before first light. As he walked along he sensed his own gaze pursuing him. A scornful gaze. He knew that if his courage had failed him it was because of the woman with her hands stained by raspberry juice.

To begin with he managed to find pretexts for his wanderings. He made fruitless attempts to find his sister and spent several months in the area traveling from one town to the next. Then he went to Leningrad -so as to meet Marelst's family, or so he persuaded himself-as if there were still any hope of finding someone alive after several years' silence. An official whom he asked for information about Dolshanka, a very perspicacious official, sensed this nomadic mania in him and reprimanded him, saying, "It's time to roll up your sleeves, comrade, and play your part in the reconstruction of the country!" Indeed, if everyone had embarked on searching for the survivors of all the burned villages… He found no one in Leningrad. Nevertheless, very conscientiously, he rang the bell on all the floors of a great, damp, sinister apartment building, constructed around an enclosed courtyard that could give no life to a tall tree with pale leaves. His zeal produced a result he had not intended. An old woman emerged from a cavernous apartment, regarded him almost joyfully, and suddenly began talking louder and louder, recounting the story of the siege, the frozen corpses in the streets, the apartments inhabited by dead people whose bodies were no longer even collected. He backed away onto the landing, stammered a word of farewell, began his descent. He knew all these stories. The woman sensed that he was escaping her and shouted out with demented glee, "And in our building people ate their own dogs! And the ones who didn't eat their dogs died. And the dogs tore their corpses to bits." As Pavel hurtled down the staircase the voice, amplified by the echo, pursued him as far as the exit, then through the streets, and, later still, on the train, in his sleep.

Once he had been staying in the same place for several weeks, he believed, he would begin to forget. Forgetfulness, in these post-war days was, more than ever before, the secret of happiness. Those who had no desire to forget drank, took their own lives, or traveled around from place to place, like him, in an endless semblance of returning home.

One day happiness snapped him up. The woman looked like the raspberry picker and was even closer to what a man starved of flesh longs for: a weighty plenitude in her body that gave her breasts, her buttocks, her belly, a life of their own. Returning home after one or two days' absence (he was with a team installing electric cables along the roads), he would lose himself in this body, in the sickly sweet steam of boiled potatoes, and rejoice that one could live without anything other than the heavy flesh of these breasts and the pungent smell of this izba on the outskirts of a district capital.

Twice only he had doubts about this happiness. One evening he was watching his companion stirring the contents of a broad frying pan, from which arose the bluish aura of bacon rashers in burned fat. "She looks as if she were mixing it up for pigs," he thought unmaliciously, numbed both by his day's work in the rain and the happiness. "But one could very well turn into a pig if things go on like this," he said to himself, aware of the faint tremor of an awakening, a rush of memories. And he hastened to plunge back into the agreeable torpor of the evening.

The second time (their team had returned earlier than expected on account of frosts, he removed his muddy boots in the hall and went noiselessly upstairs) this happiness almost turned him into a killer. The bedroom door was ajar and already from the kitchen he could see his companion naked, and, glued to her, a very thin man, who seemed, as he huffed and puffed, to be trying to push her out of bed. He looked for the ax in the entrance hall and could not see where it had gone. The few seconds of searching for it calmed him. "What? End up in jail for the sake of that lump of pork and that worm with a wrinkled ass? I'm not crazy." He put on his boots and hurried to leave, knowing it would have been enough for him to see the woman's face, or hear her voice, to kill. He spent the night with a friend and did not sleep, at one minute almost indifferent, at the next planning revenge. In a moment of weariness he believed he had understood what kind of woman she was, whose life he had shared for a year. He had never thought about it before. The war was a time of women without men and men without women, but also one of women who, more from the chance of a town being near the front than from lewdness, had made love recklessly, accustomed to men who went back to the war and whom death made irremediably faithful to their mistress of one night. "Filthy whore!" he muttered in the darkness of the kitchen where his friend had made up a bed for him, but in reality this curse was a way of trying to silence a covert pardon. His concubine reminded him, through her very infidelity of the days of war. She was still living in those days. "Like me!" he thought.

In the morning the desire for vengeance got the better of him. He went back to the izba and found it already empty. The woman had gone to work, leaving him a saucepan of potatoes. He withdrew the cartridges from his automatic pistol, determined to put them in the stove, picturing with malicious glee the fireworks that evening. Then he changed his mind, went up to the bedroom, drew his knife. He stabbed at the down quilt halfheartedly, as if to satisfy his conscience, and stopped. A few feathers fluttered around the bed. The room already looked unrecognizable to him, as if he had never lived there. He stroked the notches on the handle of the knife, then gathered up several things that belonged to him and left. In the hall he noticed the ax, propped in a corner behind the door.

Once again he lived nowhere for several months, still playing at the soldier's return, cunningly avoiding the new life the others were embarking on, so he could stay in the company of those who were no more. Thinking about them one day, he remembered his mother's friend, the foreign woman, Sasha, who was so very Russian and who often came to see them at Dolshanka. He caught up with her in the little town where she lived, near Stalingrad, allowed himself to be persuaded to stay at her house, and began to work at a railroad depot. The third anniversary of the victory was approaching, the town was being covered in red and gold panels with triumphal slogans, and the radiant faces of heroic soldiers. Pavel had the strange impression that the people around him were talking about a different war and coming more and more to believe in the war that was being invented for them in the newspapers, on billboards, on the radio. He talked about his own war, the penal companies, about attacks made with their bare hands. The head of the workshop rebuked him, they grappled with each other. Pavel let go when he saw a long scar on the chief's arm, crudely sutured the way they used to do it at the front. When their quarrel had abated and they were alone the man took him outside behind a pile of old ties and warned him, "It's all true, what you say. But if they take you away tomorrow for your truth I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. There are spies in the workshop." Pavel told Sasha about it. She gave him bread and all the money she had in the house and advised him to spend the night with an old friend who lived in Stalingrad. She was right. They came looking for him at three in the morning.

He no longer needed to find a pretext for his wanderings. He simply needed to move farther and farther away from Stalingrad, make himself invisible, merge into the new life he had so far been running away from. He left the Volga region heading west, then through one chance or another began descending southward, thinking of the sea, the ports, the teeming, colorful south, in which his dubious air of a vagabond soldier would pass unnoticed. For a long time now stations and trains had become his true home. The weeks spent at the depot had given him the self-confidence of a professional. More than once he detected the presence of a military patrol. He would change, put on his blue overalls, and pass as a railroad worker. Then he became a soldier again: engineers rarely refused to help a "defender of the nation."

That day Pavel was in uniform. The train he had spotted that morning was already unloaded and was due to start at any minute. Its destination suited him. He still had to negotiate with the engineer or, if he were refused, leap into a freight car after the train had started. It was while he was keeping watch between two warehouse storage buildings that he heard their voices: two men's voices, backing one another up-with menacing jocularity-and that of a woman, whose strongly oriental accent he noticed straight away. Curious, he turned the corner and saw them. The men (one of them leaning on a broom, the other, switching his lamp on and off, teasingly, for it was still light) were preventing the woman from leaving, blocking her path, pushing her against the warehouse wall. They were doing it without violence but their movements had the authority of a cat playing with an already damaged bird.

"No, my beauty, first tell us where you're going and what train you're catching, then tell us your name," repeated the man with the broom, moving his shoulder forward to check the young woman.

"And then we'd like to have a look at your papers," chimed in the railroad worker, shining his lamp in the woman's face.

She took a more vigorous step to free herself, in her voice a weary cord snapped, "Let me alone!" The man with the lamp thrust his hand against her chest, as if to ward off an attack. "Now you be nice to us, honey, that's all we ask. Otherwise the militia are going to want to know about you."

The woman, dazed, her eyes half closed as if to avoid seeing what was happening to her, could no longer repulse the four hands that were pulling at her dress, squeezing her waist, pushing her toward the gaping warehouse door.

In an effort to forestall the warnings to be prudent sounding in his head Pavel moved up to them with one bound. It was not an urge to come to the rescue that decided him but an irrational vision: the violent contrast between the beauty of the woman, the chiseled delicacy of her face, and the quagmire of words, physiognomies, and actions that held her fast.

His sudden appearance and his uniform made an impression on them, even frightened them. At the sound of his harsh voice the railroad worker turned, stepped away from the young woman, bent down to pick up the lamp he had put on the ground. He stammered, "No, look, it's like this, Sergeant… She's a thief. When we saw her she was lifting stuff from the warehouse."

He began justifying himself, invoking the sweeper as a witness. But gradually, as he got the better of his fear, he realized that the sergeant had a bizarre look about him: his cheeks covered with a four-day beard, a tunic coarsely patched here and there and with no collar, his top boots battered and swollen by wear. Appalled by his mistake, he changed his tone.

"And what about you? What are you doing here? Did you want to visit the stores, too? So she was with you, this thief? You're two of a kind."

Pavel, scenting danger, tried to silence him. "Right, shut your trap, you! Leave the woman and go tap some wheels! Get going! And not another sound from your whistle."

But the other man, on whom it was dawning more and more clearly that this soldier who had given him such a fright was on shaky ground himself, exploded, "What's that? Wheels? Just who do you think you are? You wait. We're going to find out what regiment you've deserted from! Hold him, Vassilich! I'm going to call the patrol! They're here, somewhere, near the station."

Pavel threw off the sweeper as he tried to seize him, turned and saw the man was not lying: an officer and two soldiers were making their way along the track. He struck out to stop the two men shouting. One fist impacted against a clammy, slippery mouth, the other hand hit a chin. But the yelling continued, only in shriller tones. And the fingers twisted, clutching at his tunic. He struck again. The lamp fell, rolled along the ground, lit up by itself, and its beam cut across the wheels of a train that was just moving off. In the distance the two soldiers of the patrol began to run, the officer quickened his pace.

It was the young woman who dragged him away from this fruitless brawl. Rooted to the spot close to the wall, she suddenly seemed to come to her senses and sped like an arrow toward the train that was moving forward with somnambulistic slowness. Pavel grabbed his pack and followed her, wiping his bloodstained hand on his trousers.

They climbed onto the platform of a freight car, jumped down onto the track on the other side, rolled under another train, and seeing that the soldiers had run around it right at the far end, dove under again, ran the length of the train and crawled between the wheels once more. The whistle blasts of the patrol guided them, now far off, now deafening, separated from them by a single line of freight cars. And their eyes had time to take in the calm of a workman, quietly smoking, sitting on a pile of ties, and the enamel plaque (with an improbable destination) on an old freight car on a siding, and even the inside of the compartments (children, tea, a woman making up the bed) in a passenger train that came hurtling past at high speed and saved them, separating them from their pursuers. They raced forward, drawn along by the draft of its passing, and found themselves once more between the express train and a freight train that was hardly moving at all, as if it could not make up its mind to leave. They saw the opening of a sliding door, for the first time exchanged a look of complicity, and climbed in. Pavel closed the door, found the young woman's arm in the darkness. They remained there without moving, listening behind the thin wooden partition to the coming and going of footsteps, shouts, whistle blasts. Footfalls came closer, walking beside the train, which was still sliding along with agonizing slowness, and a voice addressing someone on the other side of the track shouted, "Hey, they must be somewhere. I saw them! Tell him to bring his dog!" Their eyes were already accustomed to the darkness. They stared at one another fixedly, both sensing that each one's danger, so unique, so linked to each one's past, was now merged with the danger the other was escaping. That their lives were merging. In the distance an angry voice rang out, an order, then there was some barking. And it was at that moment that a shudder ran through the train and Pavel sensed in his own body, at the same moment as in the woman's, an involuntary straining of every muscle in the infantile desire to help the train move off. Its speed accelerated very little but after a dozen clanks of the wheels the noise changed, became more resonant, more vibrant. The train began crossing a bridge and moved faster and faster.

Very early in the morning Pavel got up, quite numbed by a night of watching, his head filled with fleeting visions of the day before. He slid open the heavy door of the freight car and suddenly stepped back a pace, alarmed, dazzled. Against a still-dark sky, beyond heavily wooded valleys, there gleamed the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, almost menacing in their beauty. Their faintly bluish bulk seemed to be growing closer with every second, towering over the train. And, thanks to their height, the whole space reared up vertically. It was impossible for someone who had always lived on the plain to imagine life at the foot of this silent grandeur.

The young woman came to the door as well and looked out, tossing aside her long hair which the wind blew in her face. Through the clattering of the wheels Pavel cried out in admiration. She nodded her head but expressed neither surprise nor fear. She seemed not to be interested in the snowy peaks on the horizon but was studying the wooded hills and the rare villages, still slumbering.

Pavel wanted to get off at the first opportunity, attracted by a large town the train stopped in for a few minutes. This vertical country seemed too foreign to him. The woman held him back.

They jumped from the car when the train slowed down on a bend as it emerged from a long tunnel in the middle of the mountains.

The woman walked quickly, climbing down the slope covered in trees and shrubs that were unfamiliar to Pavel. He followed her with difficulty, getting caught up in brambles that she knew how to avoid, slipping on little screes concealed beneath the heather. With no pathway the forest seemed virgin. Emerging onto the bank of a stream, the woman stopped. Catching up with her ("Does she want to shake me off or what?" he had said to himself a few moments earlier), and without being able to conceal his anxiety beneath a tone of bravado, Pavel asked, "So, are we going to climb up Kazbek mountain, while we're at it? Where are you taking me?" The woman smiled and it was at that moment he noticed how tired she was. Without replying she walked out over the pebbles and into the stream, plunged into it fully clothed, and remained still, letting the water wash her body, her face, and her dress with its frayed sleeves. Pavel wanted to call out to her, then changed his mind. He smiled and walked off toward the rocks that led into the river a little downstream. Everything suddenly seemed simple to him, as if foreseen by an unusual order of things that he had yet to fathom. He undressed behind the rocks and slipped into the water. The sun was already at its height and roasted their skin. Their clothes dried in a few minutes.

During this halt on the bank he learned what he had already guessed. The woman was a Balkar. One of those Caucasian people deported in 1944. Some of them had tried to return secretly, but were caught well before they had seen the snow of the mountain peaks.

She showed him her village in the distance: a deserted street, orchards with branches bowed down to the ground under a vain abundance of fruit, and in the yard of one house, hanging on a line, a row of washing in tatters.

For reasons of prudence they settled several miles from there. From time to time Pavel went down into the empty village where he found a few carpenter's tools, a box of nails, an old tinder box. One day he saw wheel marks imprinted in the thick dust of the road. He identified them as a military four-wheel-drive. The months passed, the vehicle did not reappear. He said nothing to the woman. "My wife," he often thought now.

The shelter they had built in the rocky fold of a valley was a day's walk from a little town with a railroad station. It was from this town that Pavel sent a letter to Sasha. She was the only one to know of their secret life. The only one to come and see them once or twice a year.

She came, too, for the birth of their child and stayed longer that time. One evening Pavel was returning from the beehives set up on the other side of the valley at the edge of a chestnut forest. He crossed the stream, carrying a pail filled with fresh honey on his shoulder, and stopped to catch his breath at the foot of the little slope that led up to their house. Through the half-open door he saw the figures of the two women. Sasha was standing, a candle in her hand, his wife was sitting down, her face bent over the child. He heard not the words but just the music, slow and even, of their hushed conversation. He thought of Sasha with the wistful gratitude inspired by a person who expects no word of thanks, who never even thinks of such a thing, and who gives much too much for it ever to be possible to repay her. "If she were Russian she would never have dared to come here," he said to himself, realizing that this was a very imperfect manner of expressing the woman's nature. A foreigner, she took greater liberties with the weighty laws and customs governing the country: she did not consider them to be absolute, so they ceased to be absolute.

From the place where Pavel had stopped he heard the rippling of the stream, the supple and resonant murmur that filled their house at night, merging with the sounds of the forest, the crackling of the fire. Below the rock, facing their house, the water was smooth and very black. The sky tossed into it the reflection of a constellation that swayed gently, changing its shape. He was amazed to think that man needed so little in order to live in happiness. And that in the world they had fled, this little got lost in innumerable stupidities, in lies, in wars, in the desire to snatch this little away from others, in the fear of having only this little.

He lifted the pail and began climbing toward the house. His wife was standing on the threshold with their son in her arms. The child had waked up but was not crying. The stars cast a weak light on his tiny brow. They remained there for a moment in that night, without moving, without saying a word.

She who was telling me the story of Pavel's life broke off the narrative at this nocturnal moment. I thought it was simply a pause between two words, between two sentences, and that the past would once more come alive in her voice. But little by little her silence merged with the immensity of the steppe surrounding us, with the silence of the sky that had the dense luminosity of the first moments after the sunset. She was seated in the middle of an endless expanse of undulating grass, her head tilted slightly upward, her eyes half closed, gazing into the distance. And it was when I realized there was nothing more to come, that I suddenly understood: the end of the story was already known to me. I already knew what would happen to the soldier, his wife, their child. The tale had been confided to me more than a year before, one winter's evening in the great dark izba, the day when the words a youth yelled at me had almost been the death of me. "The firing squad gunned your father down like a dog." After that, from one Saturday evening to the next, the story had continued, giving me what I had missed most at the orphanage-the certainty that I had been preceded on this earth by people who loved me.

As I looked at this white-haired woman seated a few yards away from me, it was becoming clearer to me all the time that the real ending to her story was this silence, this tide of light hovering over the steppe and the two of us, bonded together by the lives and deaths of beings who now survived only in ourselves. In her words and henceforth in my memory. She did not speak but now I could picture her shade: in the depths of the house hidden in a narrow valley in the Caucasus. There she was, a woman holding a candle, smiling at a young mother as she walked in, carrying a child in her arms, at a man who was setting down on a bench a heavy pail covered with a cotton cloth.

Mentally I spoke her name, Sasha, as if to ensure that the woman sitting on the grass of the steppe beside me was one and the same as that other who had so discreetly, so constantly, threaded her way through the life of my family. At that moment she made an effort to get up, no doubt noticing that the night was drawing in. Clumsily, I hurried to come to her aid, to offer her my arm, sensing for the first time the frailty of her body, the frailty of age, which at fourteen one finds hard to imagine. In this hasty gesture my fingers grasped her injured hand. I felt an instinctive trembling, that decorous reflex certain disabled people have when they do not want to cause alarm or elicit sympathy. She smiled at me and spoke in a voice that had rediscovered its serene and precise tones.

After walking for several minutes I realized that I had left behind the book we used to take with us during those long days spent on the steppe beside the river. I told Sasha, ran back, and when I turned, saw her in the distance, all alone amid the limitless expanse filled with the translucency of the evening. I walked slowly, catching my breath, and watched her waiting for me in that absolute solitude, with the detachment that made her presence like a mirage. I was not thinking about the history of my family, of which she had just given me the last memories. I was thinking about her, herself, this woman who in a most discreet manner, almost accidentally, I might have believed, had taught me her language, and in that language had taught me about the land of her birth, the land that had never left her during her long life in Russia.

From afar I recognized her smile, the gesture of her hand. And with ah the ardor of my youth I made a silent oath to give back to her one day her true name and her native country, just as she had dreamed of it in the endlessness of this steppe.