The Life of an Unknown Man (14 page)
He also saw what the darkness had hidden: at the bottom of the valley a ruined village, charred roofs and, amazingly intact, one house beneath a very tall tree, miraculously preserved. The quirk of a day of warfare… Another quirk, that young wounded soldier, huddled close to the singers, gazing at them in tears. The logical suffering of that mass of human beings and suddenly this singular suffering, which no logic could justify.
The assault was an act of desperate bravery, a heroic last stand rather than a strategists’ decision. Long years after the war Volsky would come across references to that day in December in two history books. The first would speak of “the participation of the artists of Leningrad in the defense of the city,” without referring to anyone in particular. The second, much more recent, would refer to “a sham counteroffensive dreamed up by those responsible, seeking to clear their names in Stalin’s eyes.” Neither one nor the other would make any mention of the soldier who had just traced a line of blood in the snow, of the tranquillity of that house, safe beneath its tree, or, least of all, of the lock of dark hair that had escaped from under Mila’s headscarf and was stirred by Volsky’s breath as he sang.
No history, either, would record that line of soldiers who managed to haul themselves up onto the ridge. Their silhouettes were etched against the sky before being felled by bullets, the following wave managed to cling on a little farther up. The singers lost count of the number of times they had struck up the “Internationale,” but, at the sight of these men, as the words about “the final conflict” rang out, they were freshly apposite.
It was then that the explosions began to occur all around them. Later on, in the army, Volsky would learn to recognize this as mortar fire, with its perfidious trajectories straight up into the air, which create the impression that the shells are falling out of the sky. All he noticed at the time was the increasing accuracy of the fire closing in on them. An explosion threw up snow behind the band and, without turning around, he sensed from a jolt in the music that one of the musicians had been hit. The singers reinforced their voices with wild exhilaration, glad to be identified by the enemy and therefore counting for something in this fight.
He fell without being wounded. A singer on his right, who had caught a shell splinter full in the face, toppled backward and brought him down. In the time it took to get up Volsky saw their troupe as they must appear from the water’s edge: two rows of singers, a semicircle of musicians and gaps already left by those who had been killed. Yet the singing had lost none of its intensity. And on the ridge several dozen soldiers were fighting on, hurling grenades, setting up machine guns among the bodies of their dead comrades.
They should have fallen back, retreated, escaped to the truck. Saved themselves. No one stirred. The order to fall back could have been given but their “captain” now lay on the path leading down to the river… They sang with a freedom never before experienced. Scorn for death caused a fierce exultation to well up in their emaciated bodies. Tears shone upon their eyelashes. Volsky saw one of the singers, his head all bloody, trying to rise to his feet and return to his place. Then a cymbal went rolling down the icy slope.
And now silence swept in, the light turned into a darkness from out of which emerged words he was struggling to make sense of. So it was… The effort he made woke him up. In the cotton wool density left by an explosion he could hear a voice and when his sight returned he found himself lying among other bodies and very close to his face he saw Mila’s eyes, her dark brown locks, no longer covered by her shawl, and, high up on her brow, a long wound. He spoke but could not hear himself. The only audible words were those she was crooning softly. Lines sung by Marie, from the operetta they had been performing in…
Before losing consciousness again he stared at this woman’s face bent over him, a face furrowed by hunger and disfigured by wounds. And, very briefly, he experienced the start of a life he would never have thought possible on this earth.
H
e did not see Mila again, did not even know if she had been treated in Leningrad or perhaps evacuated one night in a convoy of trucks. Discharged from the hospital on New Year’s Eve, he found himself in an artillery battery a few miles from the spot where their last concert had taken place. The stranglehold of the blockade had loosened a little; it had been possible to retake a few small towns from the enemy and in one of them Volsky’s comrades picked up a packet of elegant cards with German text printed in fine Gothic lettering. An officer read them, spat out an oath. They were invitations to the celebration to mark the fall of Leningrad. The festivities were planned for December 18 at the Astoria Hotel. Volsky remembered that their choir had been singing two days before that date.
He felt proud to have assisted, through this concert, in the defense of the city. Before learning that in mid-December the Germans had been defeated close to Moscow, and that this had saved Leningrad, making those fine invitation cards, with their Gothic script, superfluous… Impossible in war to judge between the impact of collective action and that of individual heroism, the fluctuating imprecision of weighing both in the balance—this would be one of the lessons of those four years of fighting.
The war had little else to teach him. In the siege of Leningrad he had lived with death as intimately as a soldier would have done. Now, crossing fields strewn with corpses, he was astonished at their number, but the absolute singularity of each death was somewhat blunted here at the front, blurred by this very number.
Of course, there was a mass of detail, often of vital importance, for him to learn. That unharmed house in a village razed to the ground and the very tall tree he had seen during their last concert. He knew now that it was the tree that had protected the shack. A target that, logically, should have been the first to be blown up. But gunners have their own logic. They take aim by selecting a reference point (a church tower, a post, or a tree) and it is the reference point that survives amid the ruins, as a reward for its value in pinpointing targets.
He also had a memory of those soldiers shuffling about beside their gun on the riverbank on the day of the desperate attack. From now on his war was just this shuffling about, in snow or mud, and he came no longer to expect glorious feats of arms, dazzling exploits. Resigned himself to studying the crude mechanics of battle. Soon he could evaluate at a glance the steel of the armored vehicles he was aiming at. His ear could judge the caliber of guns being fired, the different whistlings of the shells. Distances, trajectories, took on a palpable density, inscribed in the very air he breathed.
And then, on occasion, all this knowledge became futile, as on a particular evening at the end of an engagement. The shooting had stopped, his comrades were rolling their cigarettes, and suddenly one of them fell over, with a little red mark above his temple: a stray fragment of shrapnel. No glorious goal would compensate for this young face frozen, this unique presence, turning into dead matter before their eyes. Yes, he learned this lesson as well: in war the most testing moments are those of peace, for a dead man lying in the grass makes the living see the world as it would be, but for their folly. It was a spring day, the battle had taken place near a forest where the undergrowth was white with wild cherry trees in flower and lilies of the valley.
He was posted to the front defending Leningrad. Then transferred to the Volga, to a city that must at all costs be victorious, for it bore Stalin’s name. In this battle a bullet grazed his face, his left cheek was gashed, leaving a scar like a little grin. “You’re never sad with me,” he took to joking.
A year later, in the gigantic Battle of Kursk, Volsky became unrecognizable.
He had already seen what hell one day, a beautiful spring day, of warfare could be. But previously these had been hells controlled by men. This time the creators lost control of their own handiwork. Instead of an offensive in which the infantry made the running, with the artillery in support, it was a monstrous confrontation between thousands of tanks, hordes of black tortoises, their carapaces ramming one another, spitting fire, ejecting from their blazing shells human beings who burned like torches. The sky was filled with smoke, the air reeked of exhaust from the engines. No sound could be heard above the explosions and the grinding of overheated metal. With his fellow gunners, Volsky found himself hemmed in against the remains of a fortified post, unable either to retreat or properly to open fire. The duels between tanks were happening too close at hand, too fast, the gun would have had to be handled with the dexterity of a revolver. Nevertheless they tried their luck, hit the turret of a Tiger, but glancingly, and received a burst of machine gun fire in reply. A heavy black tortoise had just located them. Keeping his eyes fixed on the maneuverings of the monster, Volsky signaled to those behind him to bring up the shell. No one stirred. He turned: one gunner was dead, another sat there, his face streaming with red, his screams muted by the noise.
What followed had the slowness of a nightmare, so familiar to him, in which each action seemed to take long minutes. A shell to be lifted out of the crate, the sleek heaviness of a toy asleep in his hands, to be carried, inserted into the breech, loaded, then he began to take aim… Interminable seconds during which the tank lowered its gun toward him, as if the man aiming it were amusing himself by taking his time. No hell could be such a torment.
What happened next would be pieced together later, at nightfall, when he became capable of remembering, of understanding. He had no time to fire and yet the turret of the Tiger blew up, flinging out the bodies crammed together in its cockpit. The violence of the explosion threw Volsky to the ground and momentarily he glimpsed the angular carapace of another monster, the enormous self-propelling gun, the famous SU-152, that killer of tanks, that had just saved his life…
The evening spilled down sluggish rain. Having recovered the use of his ears he could hear the hissing of the water on the incandescent metal of the armored vehicles. Groans across the plain encumbered with black machines. Words spoken in Russian, allowing him to understand whose the victory was in this clash of steel.
And suddenly, appearing in the half-light, this teetering silhouette: a German from a tank unit, stunned, no doubt, wandering blindly among the carapaces. Volsky drew his gun, aimed… But did not fire. The soldier was young and seemed indifferent to what could happen to him after the horror of what he had just lived through. Their eyes met and, in spite of themselves, each waved a hand at the other. Volsky put away his pistol, the soldier disappeared into the summer dusk.
The night was brief and by about 3:00 a.m. an ashen pallor was already casting a glow over the surrounding area. He got up, climbed onto a low wall in the fortified post. The mist lifted over the plain to the hazy limits of the horizon. And its whole surface was hidden under the dark armature of tangled tanks. A human presence could be sensed within all this metallic darkness: wounded men, Russian or German, waiting in the suffocating heat of the turrets. Men burned, with wounds beyond hope, whose eyes could see the sky, which the rain had now left, and a star poised directly above… He thought… “above this hell,” but the word seemed imprecise. Hell teemed with little torturers, eager to inflict suffering on the fallen. Here the wounded awaited death in the solitude of a block of steel, pressed up against the bodies of dead comrades.
He caught himself making no distinction between the Russian and the German wounded. The hell created by men… Disturbed by a truth that was taking hold of him, he hastened to return to a more clear-cut judgment: the enemy had just been beaten and these Germans dying in their tanks had deserved it… Yet that perception of the suffering of all mankind was not easy to eradicate. In it Volsky sensed a great and terrible wisdom that bowed him down beneath the weight of a very old man’s experience. In the siege of Leningrad he had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope.
Before the sun rose he heard a bird calling, briefly, repeatedly, with rather muted resonance. A dull, humble song, but one that rang out for all the living and the dead.
The soldier who helped Volsky to carry his comrades’ bodies greeted him oddly: “Now then, cheer up, Granddad!” Granddad! Volsky smiled, telling himself that, drained by a sleepless night, the other, a man of his own age, was babbling nonsense. He would have thought no more about that incongruous greeting but then the nurse, who was putting a dressing on his wrist, concluded: “There you are, Grandpa. Like that you’ll be all set for the next battle.” He burst out laughing and saw a flicker of doubt in the woman’s eyes. A mirror hung on the wall of the dressing station. He went up to it… And clapped his hand to his head, as if to hide it. His hair was white, that snowy white that some old men sport with such elegance.
From that day onward he stopped writing to Mila. The blockade of Leningrad continued and Volsky knew what that signified for a woman who had already been living through it for two years. He could imagine the city under siege in summer, those thousands of buildings filled with corpses… No letter from Mila had reached him: the postal service rarely broke through the mesh of the blockade. Besides, how could he be found, with his transfers from one front to another? Dreaming up all these reasons helped him to think that Mila was still alive.
On the day after the Battle of Kursk, when he saw himself in the mirror at the dressing station all these speculations about the mail became pointless. This old soldier with a strangely young face, scarred with a slight rictus, was another man.
This other man went back to the war almost serenely, telling himself that the person he had once been no longer existed, a little as if he had been killed. The extinguishing of all hope made a good soldier of him. No letters, no waiting for letters, no becoming emotional, which, in war, is the frequent cause of carelessness and hence of death. He became fused with the gun he served, became effectively mechanical, impassive, thrifty with words. And as time passed he even ceased to be surprised when young people addressed him as “Grandpa.”