Requiem for a Lost Empire (17 page)

   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.