The Life of an Unknown Man (20 page)

… It was not the bloodiest day in the history of the regime holding sway in that country. It was its day of greatest shame. And when, decades later, they opened the archives on the killings and repressions, they did not always dare to mention this deadly bonfire…

Mila was not aware how she found herself in the middle of the battle. She felt the scorching of the flames on her hands, her lips were bleeding, one sleeve of her dress dangled, half torn off. The heavy pounding of male fists thrust her back, she crouched, forced a way out for herself, seized a book, a photograph, tried to protect them, to hide them. An unfamiliar joy was mingled with the frenzy of this salvage operation: no protest had ever arisen in the country against the monolith of these dark uniforms and here the very first rebellion saw these women rising up, their bodies emaciated by the years of war, survivors with the angular faces of starved women.

Hysterical shouting suddenly broke out at the exhibition hall’s exit. A plump man of small stature appeared, surrounded by his entourage. Mila quickly recognized him from official portraits in the newspapers: Malenkov, a member of the Leader’s praetorian guard. The uniforms stood to attention, breaking off the massacre.

“Aha! The factionalists in hiding!” he bellowed. “They’ve spun themselves a web of rampant reaction here! They’ve fabricated the myth of a Leningrad fighting all alone, without the leadership of the Party! They’ve left out the vital role of the great Stalin, father of our victory! Everyone out! All this stale rubbish to the fire! Quickly! Move!”

The uniforms went into action again and this time, assisted by Malenkov’s henchmen, they seized the staff and hurled them into a van waiting in the street. Mila grasped a bundle of letters and escaped, taking advantage of a thick trail of smoke given off by the flames as they devoured fresh armfuls of documents.

She went home on foot, had time to tell Volsky everything. And to say what people who loved one another used to say in those days: “If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll live your life without looking back at the past…” They revealed nothing as they took their supper with the children (the first four had moved in two weeks previously). For a while they even hoped the arrest would take place at night or else in the morning, when the children were at school…

They came looking for her an hour later: a car of the same type as before, they were nicknamed “black crows,” the same uniforms. Volsky came out first and it was him they spread-eagled brutally across the hood. The second car arrived, the agents emerging from it snatched the little case from Mila’s hands that she planned to take with her. “Look at what’s inside, it’s very important,” she shouted, and while the two agents, intrigued, were rummaging through the few items of clothing and toiletries, she threw herself toward Volsky, they kissed and, despite the arms already separating them, succeeded in whispering a few words. “Every day look at the sky, at least for a moment. I’ll do the same…” They were each thrown into one of the cars. Volsky could not remember which of them, he or Mila, had suggested looking at the sky, knowing that the other would also see it. He just had the bitter taste of blood in his mouth, Mila’s lips were still bleeding.

The cars drove away with absurd haste along the dirt road that led around the house. For several seconds Mila and Volsky saw a youth running after this black motorcade, waving his arms and shouting, as if he wanted to catch up with it. In the pale light of the evening his red hair glowed like a cluster of fruits on a service tree.

T
he hardest moment after the arrest was this interrogation. The investigating officer was young but knew that, whatever the prisoner’s attitude, he must hit him. Only he was not yet in full command of torture techniques. He struck clumsily and too hard. Volsky, his hands tied behind his back, fell, pressing his head against one shoulder to hide his face. Inexplicably the blows stopped. He turned to look at the officer and could not repress an “oh” of surprise. The man was standing upright, his head thrown back, pinching his nostrils, his fingers spotted with blood. “Open the window, take a little ice…,” suggested Volsky in a deliberately neutral voice. The officer snorted a kind of oath but, strangely, obeyed. The interrogation room was in the cellar, a basement window, protected by thick bars, looked out onto a sidewalk covered in fresh snow. The officer opened it, seized a fistful of flakes, pressed it against his nose. The bleeding calmed down and Volsky sensed that moment when a human mind wavers between compassion and scorn. He was to experience this several times during his years in the camp.

A rapid sequence of expressions passed across the young officer’s face: Start hitting even harder, to punish the witness of this ridiculous discomfiture? Resume questioning as if nothing had happened? Or else… It was the expression in the prisoner’s eyes that astonished him: a perfect detachment, an almost smiling lucidity. The officer saw that the man thrown to the ground was staring at the tiny trace of blue through the window, the line of sky that he could manage to see from the floor.

He helped Volsky back onto the stool, and repeated his question, to which he had received only negative replies.

“I will ask again. Do you admit that you intended to fly the German aircraft exhibited at the so-called Blockade Museum and drop bombs on Smolny, in order to kill the members of the city’s leadership?”

If Volsky had not previously heard tales of demented accusations of this type he would have thought he was going mad. But this forensic delirium was no longer a secret, people spoke of it, both terrified and almost elated by the excessiveness of the absurdity: such and such a person had been shot for attempting to poison the waters of all the great rivers in the country, another was said to have contrived to create a dozen subversive organizations in a village of a hundred inhabitants… And now here he was, planning to take off in an aircraft riddled with shrapnel that had had its undercarriage torn away!

He was silent. There was not much choice. Deny it and lay himself open to more blows? Agree and sign his own death warrant?

Suddenly the investigating officer’s voice slid down into a whisper: “Say you wanted to bomb Smolny to eliminate anti-Party factionalists at the heart of the city’s leadership.” And Volsky saw he was already putting this crackpot confession into writing. The young officer was indeed engaged in fabricating a criminal, but a criminal inspired by a praiseworthy desire to struggle against the enemies of the Party and its Guide. Lowering his head slightly, Volsky could see through the basement window a little snow and the reflection of the sky in a windowpane.

Every day in the camp he found a moment of freedom to meet Mila’s gaze up in the sky.

The life of a prisoner did not destroy him. He had often had occasion to sleep on the ground at the front, in mud or under snow. Here the bedsteads in huts equipped with stoves could almost seem comfortable. Cutting down trees was painful work but his arms retained the knack of handling the weight of shells. Hunger and scurvy were killers and yet, compared with the hundred and twenty-five grams of bread during the blockade, the poorest food seemed lavish.

As for the length of his sentence, four and a half years in a camp, it was enough to make you smile: ten years of hard labor was the modest norm here. “Praise be for that officer’s nosebleed,” Volsky would say to himself.

And in the worst hours of despair there was this sky, whether gray, luminous, or nocturnal, and the link created by the power of a single gaze, beyond the world of human beings.

The clemency of his own sentence made him hope for an even lighter penalty for Mila. What could she be accused of? Bringing a notebook stained with earth to the museum? Volsky contrived to believe her acquitted, free, settled with the children in their old izba: in the evening she would step outside under the quivering of the first stars, look up at the sky… Then this hope became muddied, he recalled that for a long time the repressions had parted company with all logic. He, who had never set foot in the cockpit of an aircraft, was said to have decided to bomb Leningrad. Even crazier intentions could have been attributed to Mila. She might have been sent to a camp thousands of miles from the one where he was!

This supposition was a hideous torment. And yet, on occasion, he ventured on a declaration whose harsh and beautiful truth he feared himself: nothing could alter the moment when their eyes rose up to encounter one another. Then he pictured Mila amid white fields, her face uplifted toward the slow swirling of the snow.

This vision helped him not to live in hatred, which was a good way of surviving in the camp. He understood this when one day in spring he found himself buried under a pile of logs: a gigantic pyramid of cedar trunks, which the prisoners were preparing to float downriver. The breakup of the ice was happening early and more violently than usual. The stack of tree trunks stirred, shaken by the vibration of the ice floes, waking into life on that great Siberian river. And all at once the mountain of logs began rolling, scattering. The timber was swallowed into cavities in the ice shelf, hurtled into the water, rose up vertically, fell back, reared up into walls that caved in… Several prisoners were trapped by the collapse. Two or three vanished into the river. They were able to save one of them, whose shoulder was shattered.

Volsky remained pinned to the ground low down on the shore, close to the menacing procession of disintegrating ice floes. His chest crushed, his legs caught in the tangle of tree trunks, he could neither cry out nor move. When he regained consciousness night had fallen and he guessed that the search, if there had been one, had not been very thorough. A prisoner’s life was worth nothing and nobody wanted to lose his own by venturing into a chaotic mass of logs that threatened to subside and slide into the river at any moment. They must have reckoned that he had drowned.

All that was left of his voice was a hissing whisper, all he could move was his hands, which explored his wooden tomb in the darkness. Through the crisscrossed cedar logs he could see a triangle of stars.

The pain reached what he thought would prove to be a fatal threshold, then it subsided, or rather he became used to this threshold. His thirst became more cruel than the pain and only let up during those moments when his gaze escaped between the tree trunks into the sky. Then his mind cleared, and as there was no longer anyone to convince, not even himself, the simplicity of what he understood was conclusive.

He understood that in all he had lived through the only thing that was true was the sky, looked at on the same day, perhaps at the same moment, by two beings who loved one another. Everything else was more or less irrelevant. Among the prisoners he had met murderers without remorse and innocent people who spent their time reproaching themselves. Cowards, lapsed heroes, the suicidal. Sybarites sentenced to twenty years who dreamed of meals a woman would cook for them when they left the camp. Gentle people, sadists, crooks, righters of wrongs. Thinkers who perceived this place of labor and death as the result of a humanistic theory badly applied. An Orthodox priest who averred that suffering was given by God so that man should expiate, better himself.

All this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner’s battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the intermission at the Opera House (he remembered
Rigoletto
) a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes that she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, sections of tires into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not keep her from drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquillity but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf…

At moments the pain grew sharper, only leaving him with a vague awareness: it was his thirst that made him picture the prisoner with his cup of tea, the woman imbibing her cold sparkling wine from a tall glass. So, it was all even less significant.

The water was close, a powerful current just beside his crushed body, and also ice, in little stalactites beneath the tree trunks. He reached out his hand, the effort increased the pain, he lost consciousness.

At the beginning of the second day the snow began to swirl around in great lazy flakes. Volsky felt the coolness of the crystals on his parched lips. And once more pictured a field in winter, a woman looking up into a white flurry.

He knew he had few hours to live and the conciseness of his thinking seemed to take account of this limited time. The words of the priest came back to him: the sufferings God inflicts so that man may expiate, purify himself… The smile this brought cracked his dried lips. If that were the case, so many men should be infinitely pure. In the camp. In the country ravaged by war. And, indeed, by the purges! After everything these people had endured they should have been as shining as saints! And yet, after ten years of suffering, a prisoner could still kill for an extra slice of bread. God… Volsky remembered the buckles on the shoulder belts worn by the German soldiers.
Gott mit uns,
“God is with us,” was embossed on the metal. These soldiers had also suffered. So…

He looked up: night was beginning to fall and in the tangle of tree trunks above his head there shone a pale, ashen cluster of stars. A woman saw it at that moment and knew that he, too, was looking at the sky… He grasped that even God no longer had any importance from the moment when those two pairs of eyes existed. Or, at least, not this god of human beings, this lover of suffering and belts.