The Life of an Unknown Man (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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