The Life of an Unknown Man (15 page)

He had also changed in what he had once considered to be his true nature, his dream, his gift: singing. Sometimes he would sing along in chorus with his comrades, during a halt, or as he marched in a column of men cheating their weariness with merry tunes. These songs pleased him, evocative as they were of the immediate reality of the war. The banality of death, the carefree spirit of a summer’s day, the scent of grass at the edge of a forest, a handful of berries swiftly gathered among the trees and, pausing there, as he glanced at the column of soldiers, a thought that made him feel giddy: “I’m no longer among them, I’m in this forest, there are these flowers, the drowsy buzzing of bees…” Then he would run back to take his place among the men, singing as they marched toward death.

The speed at which their faces, lit up by singing, were obliterated in the daily slaughter, the ease with which a human being could be wiped out, was the only reality that never ceased to trouble Volsky. And it was thanks to their communal singing that he kept a memory of the faces of so many men who were gone. With his professional’s ear, albeit battered by gunfire, he could recall their voices (fine, dull, touching in their enthusiasm or naively reckless), and this pattern of sounds would bring a look or a smile back to life. These lives, swept away by the war, survived through song.

Thus he came to dislike those grand operatic arias he had dreamed of in the old days. All those stentorian Boris Godunovs, thrusting out their beards the better to squeeze out the vibrations of their vocal power at the height of tragic ecstasy, now struck him as false. Ludicrous, too, those plump legionnaires in Italian opera, tinkling the scales of their brass armor. Or the ones in tailcoats, sticking out their chests like fighting cocks.

His passion for the magic of theater was still alive. But after what he had lived through in Leningrad and later in the Battle of Kursk, he often asked himself about the purpose of such operatic spectacles. To please? To move? To distract? To titillate the ears of women with bare shoulders and men in patent leather shoes, couples who, after the opera, would end up at a restaurant, discussing the performance of a legionnaire or a rooster in tails?

Sometimes, between battles, sitting with his back against the carriage of his gun, he would start humming on his own, a murmur nobody else heard. These were generally d’Artagnan’s songs.

The end of the war found him close to Berlin on the shores of a pond torn up by tank tracks. With two other soldiers he was engaged in positioning the guns when the news of the victory reached them. He stood up and saw what he had already seen the day of his last concert, near Leningrad: a riverbank, soldiers clinging to a gun, survival dependent on the speed of shooting. The circle is complete, he thought, smiling at the soldiers as they yelled in delight. “It’s all over, Grandpa! Let’s have a quick drink now and head for home!”

He told himself that his white hair was simply an ironic token of the interminable duration of the years spent at war. Human stories were so swiftly wiped out in death, so many cities had swept by, that his feeling of having aged quickly was not all that fanciful. A circle completed and, within it, the span of a whole life. His life.

During the first days of peace he sometimes thought of Mila, picturing how she might have felt on meeting this young man with white hair. Their past seemed to belong to a remote youth, lived through by someone else. By that person who had once, on stage, in the costume of a musketeer, kissed a young heroine freshly emerged from a convent. He told himself that the only tie that bound them was the ancient libretto of an old-fashioned operetta written by a forgotten author.

“To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” he sang softly on the train carrying him back to Russia. His traveling companions took him for an old soldier in a cheerful mood.

I
n traveling to his native village, south of Smolensk, he had no hope of discovering a past where he could start a new life. This part of Russia had first been devastated by the Red Army as they retreated, unwilling to leave anything for the enemy, then by aerial bombardment, and finally by the Germans as they withdrew, setting fire to everything that had survived the bombing. Of his own street (a row of charred izbas) all that was left was an old church tower, “saved by a miracle,” one old woman told him, as he questioned her about the fate of the villagers, of his own parents. A miracle… He did not go to the trouble of explaining that the church tower was a good reference point left intact by those who had targeted the nearby railroad junction. Survivors needed to believe in miracles. There was one, as it happened, in the garden of his ruined home: a cherry tree broken in two, but whose branches had taken root again, dusted with tiny snow-white flowers.

In Leningrad the room he had once rented was occupied. His new landlady announced, “With you, I don’t have a problem. Not like one of those empty-headed young men. I only take people of a certain age…” Volsky was amazed to see that, after so many had died, the apartments were crammed, then realized that people were coming in from the surrounding villages, razed to the ground by the fighting. “So the war didn’t do you much harm in the end,” the woman went on. “And now with all your medals, you’ll be a fine sight.” Volsky shrugged his shoulders: what could he reply to that? So as not to seem rude, he stammered, “Well, I don’t have many medals. In the artillery you’re always behind the others…” He felt this was a stupid remark, talking about the war was not easy. What else was there that could be spoken of? The tanks with their overheated steel that made a hissing sound in the rain? The turrets where wounded men, Russian and German, were dying? Explain how his greatest joy at the front was not those little disks of medals but a fistful of wild strawberries he’d picked in a hurry before rejoining the column of soldiers? And that his greatest fear had lasted for a few seconds at most: when the gun on a tank took aim at him, as if relishing the pleasure of terrifying him? And that those seconds had turned him into this young old man, so respectable in the eyes of a landlady? No, such things, true as they were, were impossible to admit to.

Volsky remembered feeling tongue-tied like this before: with Mila in the besieged city.

He went to see the place where she used to live. The building was still standing but a freakish bombing raid had destroyed the staircase between the first and second floors. People were getting into their homes by means of ladders. Nobody knew Mila. They were mainly provincials who had come in from their ruined villages.

Thanks to them, the city seemed rejuvenated. The people of Leningrad, who had endured the blockade, threaded their way, pale and silent, through this ill-assorted crowd. The variety of female faces was intoxicating. People spoke to one another more readily; people smiled more, everyone was eager to come to life again in an encounter, in an exchange of looks. Volsky had never engaged so much in conversations with strangers, with women. One day he spoke to two female students he encountered at the Nord Café… Everything was surprising about this agreeable chatter: the room, which had not changed, these laughing girls, the ease with which he touched on the war, showing off, telling how shells would occasionally hit a flight of ducks and then—what feasting! “You have such a young voice…,” one of them said, and he caught her glancing at his white hair.

The next day he went to a hairdresser. Offered a choice of six colors, he opted for black. While the white was giving way to darker locks he thought of Mila. “She must be dead,” he said to himself with the brutality the war had taught him. And he sensed that this idea was killing someone within him. “No, why dead? She’s married and may well be living very close by. Besides, what ties are there between us now? We once kissed one another in an operetta. ‘To you, my beloved…’ With my white hair she’d never have recognized me. But now, with this Moor’s head!” He managed to recover the merry mood that had animated him the day before in the company of the two students.

One Saturday he went to the Kirov Opera. Before climbing up to take his seat in the balcony he studied himself furtively in the mirrors. His hair, a little too glossy, nevertheless did not look dyed. He just felt something like the stiffness of a wig at the top of his forehead. Otherwise, a young man, proud of the impact of the heavy red star fastened above his heart.

In the auditorium there were many uniforms, armor-plated with decorations, well-cut outfits hard to picture on the muddy roads of the war. “Theatrical costumes…,” thought Volsky, amazed at the sharpness of the comparison. Officers’ insignia, gleaming boots reflecting the glitter of the great chandelier, weighty, complacent looks… “The looks of conquerors,” Volsky said to himself and, inexplicably, he felt excluded from this camp. The whiteness of the skin revealed by the women’s dresses struck him like a flesh tint long forgotten…

The opera itself (it was
Rigoletto
) soon banished both his fake brunet’s nervousness and the impact of those uniforms. He sensed something strange resonating within him, a combination of his vocal cords and his memory. He listened as a singer listens. And at one moment he felt he was breathing along with the king.

His concentration was such that when this regret reverberated in his thoughts— “That could have been me…”—he gave a start, convinced that the remark had come from one of his neighbors. The applause brought him out of his reverie. He clapped like the others but his hands seemed as false to him as his dark hair.

His concentration lapsed. He now saw what many other members of the audience could see without admitting it: actors dressed up, one as a king, another as a victim of this king’s lust, characters singing arias, now sad, now jaunty. All this was being watched by men feeling cramped in their uniforms and women, suffering, no doubt, from tight shoes put on for the occasion. And by an idiot who had dyed his hair in the hope of pleasing these women… Volsky smiled at this sequence of ideas and it made him forget the unease of those words: “That could have been me…”

At one moment the king sang, “I am a student… and poor!” He had just donned a disguise the better to seduce the heroine. He was an actor of mature years, a portly figure whose plump face was plastered with pink makeup. There was an ambiguous voluptuousness about his fleshy thighs clad in fine knitted tights. A poor student! Volsky lowered his head to hide his smile, rubbed his chin, coughed… But the laughter was already bubbling up in his lungs, rising toward his throat. There were hisses of “Shh!,” he covered his face, dug his nails into his cheeks, helpless to control this explosion of mirth, and struggled toward the exit, stepping on toes, bumping into knees, pursued by enraged glances… The applause welled up, as if to salute the departure of this boor.

In the cool of the cloakroom area his laughter abated. A female attendant looked at him with compassion: his eyes were now red with tears. Amid his guffaws there was also sadness. A fifty-year-old with fat thighs trying to pass himself off as a student… That is how his comrades in the regiment would doubtless have viewed this scene, the soldiers who sang as they marched toward death.

He was on the point of leaving the theater when the noise of the applause grew louder (someone had half opened a door). Volsky pictured the rows of splendid uniforms and evening dresses, the vigor of those hands clapping energetically. A recollection of the performances during the blockade stabbed at his memory: a theater lit by a few candles, the appalling cold and those human shadows, lacking the strength to clap, who used to bow their thanks to the actors… He remained motionless, his eyes closed, but open, in truth, onto that past, the heartrending beauty of which he now appreciated.

In this reflection on days gone by a forgotten address occurred to him: the workers’ hostel where their troupe had lodged to be close to the soldiers, to whom they sang songs about “the hot southern sun.”

The road leading to that outlying area took him back in time. The city center had already wiped away many scars. But the farther one traveled from the Nevsky Prospekt the more the imprint of war was perceptible. He even saw a German tank, its tracks shattered, its gun pointing at the passing cars.

The hostel building seemed freshened up thanks to the laundry hanging at the windows. The rooms had been occupied, Volsky guessed, by the tide of kolkhozniks escaping from ruined villages.

He sought someone who could give him information. But without much hope: why would Mila have remained here amid all these new arrivals? A woman with blond hair was sitting on a bench, Volsky wanted to speak to her but her posture was like that of one asleep, her chin resting on her chest, her hands relaxed… Two adolescent girls were playing at hopscotch on the patch of tarmac. At his question they giggled, turned away, and mumbled, “No one knows where she is…” Puzzled, he went to ask a housewife who was hanging sheets on a line. She gave him a hostile look and spat out, “You might at least wait until after dark for your goings-on! It’s a disgrace. They’ll soon be coming in broad daylight!” This retort was so unexpected that Volsky backed away, without trying to obtain an explanation. An elderly man who was reading his paper in front of a doorway responded in more or less the same way but adopted a fatherly manner. “Try going to a dance hall, young man. You’ll find lots of pretty girls to kiss there.”

Disconcerted, Volsky walked around the building, not knowing if there was some mistake about the name… or suspicion due to… He smoothed his hair and told himself that maybe they took him for a gypsy. It all seemed increasingly mysterious.

He crossed the courtyard and sat down on the bench occupied by the blond woman. Her hair was unkempt. “A blond tramp,” he thought. He hesitated, gave a little cough, ventured an exaggeratedly cheerful “Good evening.” The woman was dozing and seemed not to be aware of his presence. She was probably tipsy and kept moaning sadly. He remained beside her, irresolute, telling himself, as one does when uncertain whether to wait: “but as soon as I go, Mila will appear.”

The life of the building amazed him by its routine domesticity. Just a few months after the end of the war, this washing hung between two trees, the hiss of oil in a frying pan, a child crying, a tango stuttering on a scratched phonograph record. A Sunday evening, just as if there had never been those streets dotted with corpses, those little towns transformed into charred black lace…