The Life of an Unknown Man

V

The same thirst…,” thinks Shutov as he watches the old man taking long drafts of cold tea.

“Forgive me, I’ve grown unused to talking.” Volsky smiles, sets the cup down on the bedside table again. They are silent, not knowing how to conclude this nocturnal recital. To say good-bye, part, go to bed? Shutov understands that he has just entered a world where one cannot lie, not by word or gesture. He stares into the blackness outside the window: a brief period of dark at the heart of a northern summer night. On the silent television screen the procession of heads of state can be seen entering a banquet hall…

The old man has been speaking for barely an hour. His youth, the dead city in the blockade, the war, the camp. And the wild cherry blossoms fluttering down on a spring evening long ago.

His account has been restricted by a fear of relating facts too familiar, of repeating himself. On several occasions he has observed, “All this is well known now.” It was as if he were afraid of placing his own story beside the epic narratives that have exhausted the subject. “Not everyone had my luck, you know.” Not everyone, no, those who died of hunger during the blockade, those who were killed in battle, those who froze to death in the ice of the camps.

Shutov looks away, the words he could utter seem so pointless. On the screen an aerial view of London, a documentary about the new Russian elite, the title: Moscow on Thames…

“There’s nothing exceptional about my case,” the old man had also remarked. Shutov thinks about this: it is true, even in his youth he has heard tell of these broken lives. Millions of souls lacerated by the barbed wire. The camps occupied one-twentieth of the vast expanse of the Soviet Union, ten times the area of Great Britain, whose green pastures are just now gliding by on the screen. To disappear into this void was not a rare fate, old Volsky is right.

A voice within Shutov rebels: but no, the life story that has just been confided to him is unique and incomparable… He pictures a woman amid the huts surrounded by watchtowers and a man in a line of prisoners. They both look up, observe the slow-moving clouds, feel the cold kiss of snowflakes on their brows. They are thousands of miles apart. And very close to one another, as close as the mist from their breathing.

Shutov knows what he should ask Volsky now: and after that, did he ever again seek to meet up in the sky with the eyes of the one he loved?

He hesitates, stammers, “And after that?…” As if he wanted to know how the story ended, as if the presence of the old man in this little room were not already an ending.

Volsky takes another drink, then, in a voice much less tense, murmurs: “Afterward… I hardly spoke anymore and people began to believe I was dumb. It was as if I were dead, or at least absent from their world.”

This absence was made up of frozen dusks in a small Siberian town, the place where his life had run aground. Of work that reminded him of his labor as a prisoner. Of alcohol, the only means of escape for him, as for so many others. He remained silent, knowing now that one could live very well without words and that all people needed from him was his strength, his resignation, yes, precisely that, his absence.

There was only one day when he broke his silence. He was working in a machine shop where they repaired the side panels of railway carriages, the foreman swore at him, called him a filthy jailbird. Volsky hit out and muttered at the man, as he lay there on the ground, “Choose your weapon, sir!”

The officer in the militia who interrogated him was young, very self-assured. Volsky noticed at once that he resembled the investigating officer who had sent him to the camp. The same fair hair, the same uniform too big for a puny body. There was also a little low window that looked out onto a snowy street…

Volsky stopped answering, dazzled by a truth that suddenly threw light on this world, whose obtuse cruelty he had sought to understand. So this was it: a perpetual vortex, a circle dance with recurring roles, similar faces, always parallel circumstances. And always the same will to deny that which is truest, most profound in man. Snow, a woman looking up at the sky…

“According to the foreman,” the officer was saying, “you made anti-Soviet statements while causing him bodily harm…”

Staring at this young face, animated by fierce scowls, Volsky smiled and remained silent. The world that had just revealed its insane governing principle no longer interested him. “A mad merry-go-round,” he thought. “The same faces, the same wooden animals revolving faster and faster.” A few years after the war with its millions of dead they were already testing a new bomb (he had read about it in a newspaper) that would be able to kill even more people. Three years after Stalin’s death they were explaining that everyone he had massacred had been annihilated by mistake, thanks to a simple doctrinal distortion. And now there was this little blond officer, getting heated, yelling, thumping his fist on the table, no doubt about to strike the prisoner sitting in front of him. “And then this blond fellow’s nose will start bleeding. And I’ll advise him to pick up a handful of snow. He’ll do this. And we’ll have a brief, humane interlude…”

Volsky realized he had been saying all this aloud and the officer was listening to him, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “You’ll see. A handful of snow and the bleeding will stop…” He was then overtaken by a violent outburst of laughter, almost painful, for his wrists, tied behind his back, wrenched his shoulder at each guffaw. “It’s a nightmare circus! A great nightmare circus!” he exclaimed, amazed to find that this simple phrase summed up the madness of the world so well.

He spent a little less than a year in a mental hospital. As he was silent, the staff regarded him as a good patient, a shadow, an absence. Despite its wretched, dilapidated state, the place did not seem sinister to him. And the patients there merely echoed the fevers and obsessions of the outside world, as if in a strange mental magnifying glass. One man, so thin his face was almost blue, spent his time hiding behind the screen of his raised hands, a droll shield to protect him against the torturers coming from his past. Others converted their beds into snail shells that they rarely left, their heads hunched between their shoulders. A former theater director was perpetually accusing and defending himself, playing the roles both of investigating magistrate and prisoner. One old man spent his days observing the glistening drops of water falling from the roof when the ice melted. His face was radiant. There was also a man in perfect mental health, an elderly Lithuanian with whom Volsky made friends. This man had chosen to take refuge here to escape from the purges. He told the story of his life very calmly, described the places where he had lived. But whenever Volsky tried to explain to him that Stalin was dead and it was now possible to leave the asylum the Lithuanian became suspicious and asked him in a hoarse voice: “Why are you lying to me? I know perfectly well he will never die!”

Madmen, yes, Volsky said to himself. Then thought back to what he had lived through during the blockade, in the war and in the camp. And the madness of the patients seemed a good deal more reasonable than the society that had locked them up.

The doctor in charge of the annual inspection turned out to be a native of Leningrad. Volsky talked with him for a long time: a whole litany of streets, canals, theaters, memories of a city neither of them had seen for years. “Hold on to something concrete,” he advised Volsky, as he signed the authorization for his discharge. “But above all, think up a project, a dream. Dream of returning to Leningrad one day, for example.”

He followed the doctor’s advice, after a fashion. According to the laws of the time, an ex-prisoner’s place of residence had to be at least sixty miles from any of the big cities. Volsky settled in a small town to the north of Leningrad, not far, he told himself, from the former battlefields.

The little town welcomed him with a noise of engines: a car stuck in a quagmire, a length of cable, a tractor attempting to rescue some people shipwrecked in the mud. Volsky gathered up an armful of branches from the roadside, threw them under the wheels of the car. “Something concrete,” he thought as he went on his way, “a fine project for a madman who’s just been let out.”

Two days later in the same street Volsky wept. A line of children was proceeding along this muddy highway; he stopped and suddenly realized what kind of children they were. During those years after Stalin’s massacres and the bloodbath of the war, orphans were too numerous to cause any surprise. But the orphans he was seeing ought not to have shown themselves: these were the rejects, for the most part carefully hidden from view. Disabled, mentally ill, blind… crushed by the war or else brought into the world in a hut in one of the camps. Too weak to be sent to a reeducation colony, too damaged to be molded into good little workers in an ordinary orphanage.

The line walked slowly, making halting progress. The children clung to one another, some of them fell, the accompanying adult picked them up the way you lift a sack. The damp snow must have made impracticable the route they usually took, where they would remain unseen. So they had to be led along the little town’s main street… Already they were disappearing into the gray winter dusk. At the very end Volsky saw a little girl with a heavy limp, sinking down at each step of her misshapen leg, straightening herself up with an abrupt jerk. It was on seeing her that he bit his lip to hold back his tears.

He discovered their orphanage the same evening, an old building made of almost black bricks, divided into rooms by plywood partitions, part dormitories, part communal rooms. “Much like in our huts at the camp,” thought Volsky.

The next day he returned, offered his services. As teacher or supervisor? He did not know what kind of training these children were given. He was engaged at once, for indeed they were given nothing. The children were temporarily parked here. The weakest died. Others, considered to be mentally ill, were waiting to be sent to an adult mental hospital.

It was pointless to be indignant, to make demands: the staff consisted of two elderly women and a single supervisor, a man with the stump of an arm lost in the war. The director, a self-effacing little woman, explained in embarrassed tones: “It’s hard to know who’s looking after whom: us after the children or the children after us…”

The first day, when he came into the main hall where all the children were assembled, Volsky studied them discreetly, attempting to see each face, each figure, as unique. And suddenly, acting on impulse, began humming, softly at first, just a little murmur, then in tones that rose above the noise, the weeping. A hesitant litany responded to him, their heads began to move with the rhythm, their bodies to sway gently. A little girl, her face marked by the long gash of a scar, came up and offered him a fragment of red glass, her treasure, no doubt.

He gave them all that he had-his voice. Began to teach them a little singing, tunes easy to remember, melodies whose rhythms infused new life into these frail bodies paralyzed by illness and injuries. The lines of the songs had to be noted down and, without being aware of it, the children wrote out their first words, managed their first reading. Textbooks did not exist and Volsky was feeling his way in the art of teaching, so new to him. The idea occurred of getting them to imagine, through gesture and facial expression, the story told by a song: a horseman arriving beneath the windows of the house where he was born, the welcome given him by his mother and his beloved… These children, condemned to a life as shadows, thus began to gain access to a life where changing your destiny was possible, where they were listened to, loved. Where they offered love.

He himself learned a great deal during those first months. Among the thirty or so children living at the orphanage there were faces that reminded him of Mila’s children. A boy with red hair, who had a fine resonant voice, was a little like Mandarin, though without his energy and ebullience. The parallel was distressing and yet this was how Volsky contrived to conquer the world’s whirligig absurdity. Yes, one could resist its bleak logic. As this redhead did just now, standing in front of the others and singing about a horseman riding through a snowstorm.

The songs spoke of “the wide blue sea,” and Volsky told them what he knew of seas and oceans. One of the ballads featured a boyar and, as a makeshift history teacher, he acted out scenes from the Russian past for his pupils, now as a prince, now as a serf.

He told them about the Three Musketeers as well, mimed battles and cavalcades, imitated the swish of a sword slicing through the air, fluttered a folded newspaper-a fan for a fair lady seated at a castle window… For the children this was their first journey abroad, an inconceivable thing within that country barricaded behind its iron curtain.

One evening he sang d’Artagnan’s song…

From that day forward an idea took hold of him: to get these orphans to perform in a play, whatever their disability might be. He allocated roles and, remembering all the extra walk-on actors in the performances staged during the blockade, invented characters and wrote little scenes so that each of them should have a couple of lines to say or sing.

The show he planned to stage often differed greatly from that old operetta. Their voices were weak; they soon ran out of breath. Some of the children had difficulty moving. The costumes, sewn by the women at the orphanage using old scraps of material, lacked theatrical brio. But the ingenuity of these little actors transfigured everything. A fragment of glass enmeshed in wire became a jeweled crown; battered old boots, with cardboard added to them, were transformed into thigh boots… Acting helped the children to forget their own bodies. The little girl Volsky had seen limping on the muddy road took the part of Marie and instinctively concealed her gait by skipping mischievously from one pose to another.

After dozens of rehearsals he perceived the real meaning of what had at first seemed like an amusing game. Onstage his pupils forgot their suffering. But above all, they were leading a life that no one could forbid them. In a few minutes of acting each of them escaped from the world that had condemned them to nonexistence.

Their first audience consisted of five people: the two women on the staff, the supervisor, the director, and Volsky. At one of the subsequent performances the driver who delivered coal once a month joined them. Then an assistant from a nearby bakery. A few people who lived in the locality and their friends… Some came in search of entertainment, something in short supply in that bleak little town. In others one could sense curiosity about an unusual novelty: that bunch of sick kids was putting on a show!

One day in May the play was performed in front of a very different audience. The director had told Volsky in tremulous tones the previous day that they had been “denounced,” that there was talk in the town of an underground theater and the Party Committee was going to send an inspection. Observing her face twitching with fear, Volsky reflected that the three years that had passed since Stalin’s death were nothing, it might perhaps take thirty years for her features to relax, for the woman no longer to tremble at every word.

The Party inspector marched into the hall and stood like a ponderous monolith at its center. A huge body hewn from a single block, a broad slab of a face, a voice trained to give orders. “Begin!” she said to Volsky, without so much as greeting him and, with a movement of her chin, she indicated to her retinue, two women and a man, that they should seat themselves in the front row.

“The same merry-go-round,” thought Volsky, “the same faces turning up and manifesting more of the world’s gratuitous cruelty. This one has the face of a watchdog, just like that other inspector, in the old days, who came into Mila’s lesson…” It was not so much the recurrence of it that surprised him: he knew the workings of this absurd law. It was the deliberately contrived ugliness of the visitation, yes, the willful contrivance of evil.

The woman peered at the stage with a contemptuous sneer, dilating her nostrils from time to time, as if these costumed children smelled bad. They acted particularly well, as it happened, sensing that this was a special performance. “What’s she going to accuse me of?” Volsky wondered, occasionally noting the faces the inspector was pulling. “A play not conforming to ideological precepts? Absence of educational significance? Lack of class consciousness?” He was not uneasy, realizing that the children would not know such a verdict was foreseeable. He had arranged for the supervisor to take them out for a walk as soon as it ended. Later they could be told that their acting had been much appreciated but from now on they would have to learn different songs…

He had pictured the sequence of events along the lines of what used to happen under Stalin. From the judges: monolithic silence, verdict, punishment. But times had changed, they improvised now, they innovated…

Suddenly the woman waved her arms with a shout that made the whole company jump: “Stop this circus! Enough! Not only do you have these children performing foolish antics, totally alien to our class consciousness, but… but…”

The children broke off their performance, the adults on their feet surrounding the inspector were waiting in awe for the final phase of the eruption. “But… but…” She was visibly searching for a more aesthetic argument to prop up her accusation.

“But… you haven’t even taught your pupils how to move properly onstage. They’re all walking like wooden marionettes! That one, that boy, especially. The musketeer, if you can call him that. Is he sleepwalking or what? You could have shown him the proper way for a soldier to march!”

She turned to Volsky. Silence fell. On the stage the red-haired boy who played d’Artagnan was standing very straight, his gaze far away above the heads of his comrades.

“That child isn’t sleepwalking, Comrade Inspector. He’s… blind.”

Everyone froze. Volsky was about to say more, then changed his mind. Impossible to describe the months of rehearsal during which the redhead, with obstinate patience, had learned to conquer the darkness on the stage. Step by step, the youth had learned the positions of each actor, the place each line was directed to, had mastered the play for himself like a moving picture that was alive within him. Few were the spectators who noticed his blindness. Generally people had the impression that he could see his little Marie very well as she emerged through a great cardboard gateway and rushed toward him.

The inspector blew her nose noisily on a square of striped fabric, coughed, blew her nose again, muttered, “I’ll come back…,” and left the hall.

Volsky signaled to the children, the play continued… Songs, the clash of wooden swords, painted blue for lack of silver paint, the flickering flame of a candle on the table where Marie was writing a letter. The inspector entered silently, sat on a chair near the door.

“To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” the red-haired boy was singing.

During his long life Volsky would come to know dozens of orphanages, hospitals, reeducation colonies. He taught singing and movement to those who were afraid to speak and whose bodies only had memories of violent brutality: abandoned and disabled children, young offenders. Above all, he taught them how to exist otherwise than in the world manufactured by the petty cruelty of men… One of his first pupils, the red-haired boy, would tell him one day that when he sang d’Artagnan’s song, about “the sky where the stars float above,” he could see the clusters of stars, he understood how they might look.

Volsky had acted as Mila had asked him to on the day of their arrest: tried to live without looking back at their past, got married, had a son. Clearheaded, he considered that this life was close enough to happiness and forbade himself to wish for more. Routine allowed him not to make comparisons between this existence and what he had known with Mila.

During the post-Stalin thaw his work made him almost famous for a time: the newspapers spoke of his “innovative educational methods,” there was even a book about him. He was offered a post in a research institute. He refused it, continuing to choose out-of-the-way places, establishments where he felt truly useful. His wanderings finally wearied his wife, they divorced. His son, when he reached adulthood, also moved away and much later Volsky learned that he had gone to live in Germany…

At the time of the collapse of the USSR Volsky was working in Central Asia and already used a wheelchair to get about. “Once a whole forest fell on top of me,” he would say jokingly to doctors, explaining how, when he was still young, he had found himself crushed beneath a pyramid of cedar trunks. He did not specify that this had occurred in a camp. For new generations such things belonged to a legendary past… Like the archives from the time of the purges, which were now being opened up and which Volsky could consult in Moscow. The legal file on Mila was there, the now yellow pages from the interrogations she had undergone. From reading these depositions he learned that she had done everything possible to exculpate him, taking on herself the accusations leveled at them both. “So what saved me wasn’t that little officer’s nosebleed…,” he thought, and this sacrifice, which had saved his life, reminded him again that the evil of this world could be put to rout by the will of a single human being.

A year later one of his former pupils helped him to return to Leningrad, found him this little room in a communal apartment.

Volsky did not feel unhappy, just a little overtaken by the speed of the changes.

One day his neighbors informed him that a big move was being planned, a complicated exchange that would allow each of them to have a self-contained one-room apartment in the suburbs. He did not grasp all the details of the scheme. Quite simply he now saw smartly dressed men coming in and out, talking about square meters and works to be undertaken, calculating in dollars. A blond woman often appeared among them, talking about makes of tiles, bathtubs, furniture. The men called her Yana. Volsky liked hearing her voice. He even thought that someday he might be able to tell her his life story…

Then one evening he heard a conversation outside the door of his room. Yana and several men were having a somewhat heated discussion about a move that was taking a long time to happen. Suddenly Volsky grasped that they were talking about him. “Listen, be realistic,” Yana was saying, evidently trying to calm things down. “The old man’s here. There’s nothing to be done about it. Obviously it would suit us if he departed this vale of tears in the meantime, but let’s not be too optimistic. He may be deaf and bedridden, but he could live to be a hundred. What I’m proposing is a very reasonable solution…”

Volsky stopped listening and from that day forward no longer replied when spoken to. They took him now for a deaf-mute. He noticed that this made no great difference to his relationship with the people bustling around the apartment. Their attitude may even have become less hypocritical.

And Shutov remembers now. He has heard the name “Volsky” in his youth. Thirty years ago. Articles speaking of a teacher who used drama to bring new life to handicapped children and young delinquents. For journalists in the days of censorship such topics offered a rare zone of freedom: a unique individual who refuses honors and a good career is already in discreet revolt against the massive concrete structure of the regime.

The old man drinks his cold tea. The television, with the sound switched off, shows videos of blond girls and young black men swaying their hips with expressions ranging from the arrogant to the lascivious. Nighttime TV. The light of a lamp fixed to the back of the bed, a dark window, this almost empty room. In a few hours the paramedics will come to take the old man away. So it really is the end of this nocturnal recital.

Shutov is still eager to know what became of the sky where two loving gazes used to meet during those long years. But it is too late to ask, Volsky’s life has merged into that of the country’s battered past: wars, camps, the utter fragility of any bond between two human beings. A heroic life, a life sacrificed. A life Shutov might himself have encountered, since he spent his own childhood in an orphanage. “Yes, I could have had Volsky as my singing teacher,” he thinks.

“You know, I’ve got nothing against your friend Yana,” says the old man, putting his cup down on the night table. “Nor the others, either. Their life isn’t at all enviable. Imagine, they have to own all this!”

He makes a broad gesture and Shutov sees clearly that “all this” is Yana’s new apartment but also the vast television screen and the documentary about the Russian elite settling in London, their town houses, their country residences and the cocktail party where at this moment they are all meeting, and this wholly new way of life that Shutov simply cannot comprehend.

“When it comes down to it, we had such an easy life!” says the old man. “We had no possessions and yet we knew we were happy. In the space between two bullets whistling past, as you might say…” He smiles and adds in jesting tones: “No, but look at those poor people. They’re not happy!” A reception can be seen at a luxury hotel in London, the tense smiles of the women, the glistening faces of the men. “We used to pull faces like that at the Conservatory when they made us listen to cantatas glorifying Stalin…” He laughs softly and his hand makes the same gesture again: “all this.” Very physically, Shutov feels that the world thus referred to is one that spreads itself out horizontally, flat and perfectly level in each of its components. Yes, a flattened world.

“If you could switch off now…,” asks Volsky. Shutov seizes the remote control, gets confused (on the screen an old streetcar appears, slipping along silently, disappearing up a street), finally succeeds in switching off.

Volsky’s face resumes the same expression as at the start of the night: calm, detached, perhaps even a little distant. Shutov does not expect any further word from him. It has all been said, all that remains to be done is to bid him good night and take a few hours’ sleep before Vlad and the paramedics arrive.

The voice that rings out is strikingly firm.

“I have never ceased meeting her gaze. Even when I learned that she was dead… And nobody could forbid me to believe that she saw me too. And tonight I know she is still looking up at the sky. And nobody, you understand, nobody will dare to deny it!”

The voice is so forceful that Shutov stands up. It is the voice of a former singer or perhaps an artillery officer calling out orders amid explosions. Shutov sits down again, ventures a brief gesture, on the point of speaking, but remains silent. Volsky’s features relax, his eyelids close lightly. His hands rest motionless alongside his body. Shutov realizes that it was not the determined voice that had brought him to his feet. The old man’s words had summoned up a lofty radiance in this flattened world, one that seemed to raise the ceiling of that little room.

In a very much fainter echo of that cry comes a whisper of regret that Volsky keeps more or less to himself: “A shame, though, not to have seen the Lukhta again… The shore where we gave our last concert… The trees I planted with Mila… You go to sleep. Don’t worry… I can manage very well on my own…”

He grasps the switch on the lamp above his bed. Shutov stands up, goes to the door. He takes slow steps, looking as if he were trying to delay his departure, to come up with some last word that he had to say and that he had forgotten.

“Wait, just a moment!” he finally blurts out, and rushes into Vlad’s office. Beside the telephone, the list of useful numbers the young man had left for him when he went out: ambulance, police, taxi… Shutov makes a call, orders a taxi, comes running back into Volsky’s bedroom, gets his words in a tangle, apologizes, explains his plan to him. The old man smiles: “I’m partial to adventures, but I shall need to put on my Sunday best. There, on the hook, behind the door, a windbreaker and pants…”

Shutov asks the taxi driver to come up and help him carry “an invalid” downstairs, he says, keeping things simple. At once the powerfully built, stocky young man begins to express his displeasure. When he learns that this will not be a simple trip to a hospital but a long drive outside the city he goes off the deep end: “Forget it! I don’t do tourist trips. You should have hired a minibus, buddy…” Shutov insists, clumsily, realizing that current parlance has changed, as well as everything else, and that his arguments (an old soldier who wants to revisit the places where he fought in the war) must seem surreal.

“Listen, man, there’s no set fare for trips like that. And what’s more it’s the middle of the night…” The driver turns toward the door to show he is about to go. Shutov hates this thick neck, this very round skull with its close-cropped hair, the sullen look of someone who knows the other man is no match for him.

“I’ll pay what it costs. Tell me your price. We can agree on a figure.”

“But I’m telling you there’s no fixed fare. And we’ve got to lug the… grandpa downstairs into the bargain!”

“A hundred dollars, would that do?”

“You’re joking. For a trip like that…”

“Five hundred?”

“Listen, pal, you have a think about it and call me next week. OK?”

He turns away, opens the door. Shutov catches him on the landing, negotiates, ends up giving him three hundred-dollar notes. He glimpses a rather childish delight on the man’s face: pleasure at having ripped off a simpleton, surprise, pride in having come out on top. Money does not yet have an established value in this new country; there’s an element of roulette about it and he has won.

He drives quite slowly at first, doubtless for fear of running into a police patrol. But once outside the city, he speeds along, straight over every crossroads. It feels as if he is beginning to relish this escapade. Shutov winds down the window: monotonous suburban streets hurtle past, a city asleep, and from time to time, within the endless slabs of building fronts, a window lit up, very yellow, a life keeping watch.

At last, like the lash of a branch, the scent of grass, the bitter night smell of foliage. The car leaves the main road, begins jolting along badly paved lanes. Two or three times the old man tries to point the way but the driver rejoins, “No, man. That village doesn’t exist anymore… They’ve got a shopping center there now…” His tone of voice has changed, he responds to Volsky in somewhat contrite tones…

And suddenly he brakes, surprised himself by a barrier across the road.

Beyond it arises a veritable wall, at least twelve feet high. A bronze plaque set into a stone pillar gleams in the headlights. Richly ornamental letters imitating Gothic script: “Palatine Residential Estate: Private Road. Residents only.” The driver gets out, with Shutov close behind him. Beyond a monumental wrought iron gate can be seen the outlines of the “palaces,” illuminated by the floodlights of a building site. A crane throws the shadow of its hook across a wall. A bulldozer sleeps beneath a tree. Site offices stationed at each corner of the enclosure are reminiscent of watchtowers…

The resemblance is not lost on Volsky. “It looks like a prison,” he murmurs, when the two men get back into the car.

“What do you want me to do?” asks the driver. “Try to work around it?” And without waiting for a word from Shutov and Volsky he drives off. Rising to this challenge becomes a point of honor for him. The car gets stuck in the mud almost at once and Shutov has the door half open, ready to get out and push. “It’s OK!” snorts the driver, twisting the wheel and looking as if he were wrestling a bull with his bare hands. A long hysterical scream from the engine, a painful slithering, and finally they shoot away, like a bat out of hell.

Their progress becomes steadier now, lulled as they sway broadly along a dirt road, the rustling of tall plants can be heard against the sides of the car. The air smells more and more of the coolness of a river. The beam from the headlights comes up against a plantation of willows. They follow a slope. They stop. The headlights are switched off, their eyes quickly grow accustomed to the pale northern night. Silence settles and the ear begins to identify the tiniest rustlings. The music of the long willow leaves, the soporific purling of the current, from time to time a quick, frail call emitted by a bird in flight…

The driver helps Shutov to settle Volsky down at the shore’s edge on the broad trunk of a felled tree whose timber, stripped of its bark, traces a white line in the darkness. Without needing to confer, the two men move away.

They inhale deeply, amazed by the lively sharpness of the air, by this calm found very close, after all, to the bustle of the festive city. To their right, against the background of the sky’s ashen pallor, can be seen the line of the Palatine Residential Estate’s enclosure (“Excelsior,” “Trianon”… Shutov remembers). On the far bank coppices separated by long pathways can be divined. “The trees Volsky and Mila planted,” he thinks, “the graveyard…” In the sky a mass of transparent clouds; from time to time a star shivers, very close, alive.

The driver, sitting on a tree stump, mutters something. He turns his wrist to make out the illuminated dial of his watch in the darkness. Shutov reassures him: “We’ll be on our way soon…” “No, let the old man take his time! I don’t get much work at night…” His tone is still marked by a trace of guilt. “He was really in the war here?” he asks. Shutov whispers, as if someone could hear them. Yes, it was here. The blockade of Leningrad; the last concert given by a theater troupe; and then this old man, a young soldier at that time, pushing a gun along a frozen shore; Berlin. He becomes aware that he is now the only person in the world who knows Volsky’s story so well…

He breaks off as he hears a voice rising up from the stream. The singing must have begun to ring out a moment ago but was mingled with the rustle of the willows, the murmur of the grasses. Now its melody dominates the silence, ripples effortlessly, like a very long, deep sigh. The driver is the first to get up, his face turned toward the source of the sound. Shutov stands as well, takes several steps toward the bank, stops. It is a song that gives back a forgotten, primal meaning to all that he can see: the earth, laden with dead, and yet so light, so full of springtime life, the ruins of an old izba, the imagined radiance of those who lived there and loved one another beneath its roof… And this sky, beginning to turn pale, which Shutov will never look at again the way he did before.

The return journey seems like lightning, almost instantaneous. As if these early-morning streets, totally empty, are vanishing as they pass through them.

And in the apartment this speeding up is even more feverish. The old man is hardly settled in his bed when Vlad arrives, passing the taxi driver in the hall. The door slams behind the latter, Shutov turns and sees placed there within the marble hand, “Slava’s hand,” which lies on the occasional table, three hundred-dollar notes…

And already the paramedics are ringing the bell and cluttering up the corridor with their wheelchair. Shutov slips into Volsky’s room hoping to be able to speak to him again, to tell him that his story… They shake hands. The paramedics are there, Vlad as well, they are busy packing the old man’s books into a bag… Volsky’s eyes smile at Shutov for the last time, then his face freezes into a final, indifferent mask.

The entrance hall teems with Vlad’s friends, who are coming to the party at Yana’s country house. The workmen make way for the two paramedics taking the old man away and start bringing in pipes for the plumbing. A housekeeper drags in a vacuum cleaner, dives into the little bedroom, now finally vacated. Various cell phones ring, conversations overlap, become mixed up…

Shutov drinks a cup of tea in the kitchen and tries to picture himself as still involved in the whirlwind occurring all around him. “Ma has just called,” shouts Vlad. “She’ll be here in ten minutes. She says hello…” Someone has switched on the television. “To be on time, when every second counts…” “You wouldn’t have a cigarette?” a very young woman asks him, and he suddenly feels struck dumb, stammers, gesticulates. She laughs, goes away.

It comes to him at last, with blinding clarity: he would never be able to exist in this new life.

Five minutes suffice to gather up his belongings, to slip toward the door without being intercepted by Vlad, to leave…

At the airport he easily exchanges his ticket. “The people who flew in for the celebrations are still here,” he is told. “The ones who chose not to come, on account of the celebrations, will be flying in tomorrow…” So he has come at the right moment, at a dead time, so to speak.

In the plane he feels for the first time in his life as if he were going from nowhere to nowhere, or rather traveling without any real destination. And yet he has never felt his attachment to a native land more intensely. Except that the country in question is not a territory but an era: Volsky’s. That monstrous Soviet era, the only period Shutov has lived through in Russia. Yes, monstrous, murderous, shamed, and one during which, every day, a man looked up at the sky.

On his return home he finds a letter from Léa, words that seem to be addressed to someone other than himself. She thanks him, tells him he can keep the two piles of books as she no longer needs them, and, for some reason, quotes Chekhov: in a short story one must cut the ending, which generally makes it too long. He realizes how much his abortive journey has changed him: he no longer comprehends these marks on paper in elegant feminine handwriting. Or rather he no longer comprehends the reasons for writing so many empty or false or hollow words. He can still manage to decode the little psychological games that lurk behind these sentences. An expression of thanks: Léa seeks to defuse the rancor of the man she has left. The books: a sentimental talisman, since she believes him to be a sentimental old man. The quotation from Chekhov: yes, let’s make a clean break and avoid any follow-up.

All this can still be deciphered. But the life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in. It belongs only in the novels Léa has left behind in a corner of the room, little containers for verbal matter with no substance. “Pygmyism,” he used to call it. Yes, his existence in this dovecote was a game for dolls, one of those little novels that, year in year out, recount the miniature dramas of rather cynical, rather tedious ladies and gentlemen.

He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible. As in the case of that man and woman separated by thousands of miles of ice, whose eyes met under lightly falling snow. As with that red-haired boy, standing there transfixed, his blind eyes turned toward the stars he has never seen.

During the first few days following his trip, Shutov discovers, moment by moment, what absolutely must be told. Volsky, of course, but also that winter’s evening in a café, the Café de la Gare, the loneliness of an old man murmuring in a void.

On arrival he had retrieved a parcel from his mailbox: a book whose title was known to him. After Her Life. He remembered that woman walking along a narrow corridor, removing her makeup with a tissue, looking as if she were wiping away tears.

After her life. “It’s what I shall live from now on,” he tells himself.

He has a surprise, too: one evening he rereads that story by Chekhov in which two chaste lovers toboggan together on a big sled, bonded by a murmured declaration of love. He discovers that his memory had greatly modified the plot. For in Chekhov the two lovers do not repeat their ride down a snow-covered slope. In later years the man encounters his former girlfriend and wonders on what whim he had long ago whispered, “I love you, Nadenka.” The story is called “A Little Joke,” a prank. In Russian, shutochka, the same derivation as the name Shutov… He pictures Chekhov, settled in a snow-covered dacha or in sunny Capri, pen in hand, with a vague, gentle smile, his eyes slightly myopic, as he observes these two characters, seated on their toboggan, coming to life on the page… The violent feeling suddenly overcomes Shutov that he will never be a part of the Russian world that is now being reborn within his native land. (“So much the better!” he says to himself.) He will remain to the end in an increasingly despised and, indeed, increasingly unknown, past. A period he knows to be indefensible, yet one in which some beings lived who must, at all costs, be rescued from oblivion.

He returns to Russia in mid-September. The home to which Volsky had been sent is located not far from Vyborg, about a hundred miles north of Saint Petersburg. Shutov had learned of the old man’s death while he was still in France, in a telephone conversation with the establishment’s head doctor.

This “home for the elderly” (as it is officially designated) is not the poorhouse he had pictured. Simply, everything there is from another era: the inmates, the staff, the building itself. “The Soviet era,” thinks Shutov, and realizes it may well be the wretched vestiges of those days that enable the old people to have the illusion of not being totally rejected. They die amid a decor they have known during their lifetimes.

What amazes him more is the graveyard. Especially the number of tombs on which the only inscription is either “u.w.” or “u.m.” “‘Unknown woman,’ ‘unknown man,’” the attendant explains. “They’re sometimes brought to the home in such a state that they’re no longer capable of speech. And there are old people who die in the street, too. Who knows where they’ve come from…”

The graveyard is small, next to an empty church. By climbing onto the front steps overgrown with wild plants, one can make out the dull gray of the Gulf of Finland… That evening Shutov spends a long while walking among the stone slabs covered with golden leaves, reading strange, ancient Christian names. Then he sits down on the steps. This fresh journey of his into Russia, he thinks, is precisely the final section Chekhov recommended cutting in a short story. Which is where the frontier lies between an elegant plunge into fine prose and the rough, patient prose of our lives.

What is most troubling is still this way of summing up a human existence: “u.w.,” “u.m.” He has made arrangements with a workman to come next day and erect a stone over Volsky’s grave bearing his complete name, the date of his birth, and that of his death. It had to be done, Shutov reflects (“the final section”…), but, nevertheless, will this inscription tell people any more than the notation “unknown man”? Perhaps even less.

He gets up, moves toward the exit, and suddenly stops. What must be written about is just this: the “unknown women” and “unknown men” who loved one another and whose words have remained unvoiced.

Walking along the road that leads toward the home he catches sight of the faintly misty line of the Gulf of Finland.

He has never seen so much of the sky in a single glance before.