The Life of an Unknown Man (22 page)

He followed the doctor’s advice, after a fashion. According to the laws of the time, an ex-prisoner’s place of residence had to be at least sixty miles from any of the big cities. Volsky settled in a small town to the north of Leningrad, not far, he told himself, from the former battlefields.

The little town welcomed him with a noise of engines: a car stuck in a quagmire, a length of cable, a tractor attempting to rescue some people shipwrecked in the mud. Volsky gathered up an armful of branches from the roadside, threw them under the wheels of the car. “Something concrete,” he thought as he went on his way, “a fine project for a madman who’s just been let out.”

Two days later in the same street Volsky wept. A line of children was proceeding along this muddy highway; he stopped and suddenly realized what kind of children they were. During those years after Stalin’s massacres and the bloodbath of the war, orphans were too numerous to cause any surprise. But the orphans he was seeing ought not to have shown themselves: these were the rejects, for the most part carefully hidden from view. Disabled, mentally ill, blind… crushed by the war or else brought into the world in a hut in one of the camps. Too weak to be sent to a reeducation colony, too damaged to be molded into good little workers in an ordinary orphanage.

The line walked slowly, making halting progress. The children clung to one another, some of them fell, the accompanying adult picked them up the way you lift a sack. The damp snow must have made impracticable the route they usually took, where they would remain unseen. So they had to be led along the little town’s main street… Already they were disappearing into the gray winter dusk. At the very end Volsky saw a little girl with a heavy limp, sinking down at each step of her misshapen leg, straightening herself up with an abrupt jerk. It was on seeing her that he bit his lip to hold back his tears.

He discovered their orphanage the same evening, an old building made of almost black bricks, divided into rooms by plywood partitions, part dormitories, part communal rooms. “Much like in our huts at the camp,” thought Volsky.

The next day he returned, offered his services. As teacher or supervisor? He did not know what kind of training these children were given. He was engaged at once, for indeed they were given nothing. The children were temporarily parked here. The weakest died. Others, considered to be mentally ill, were waiting to be sent to an adult mental hospital.

It was pointless to be indignant, to make demands: the staff consisted of two elderly women and a single supervisor, a man with the stump of an arm lost in the war. The director, a self-effacing little woman, explained in embarrassed tones: “It’s hard to know who’s looking after whom: us after the children or the children after us…”

The first day, when he came into the main hall where all the children were assembled, Volsky studied them discreetly, attempting to see each face, each figure, as unique. And suddenly, acting on impulse, began humming, softly at first, just a little murmur, then in tones that rose above the noise, the weeping. A hesitant litany responded to him, their heads began to move with the rhythm, their bodies to sway gently. A little girl, her face marked by the long gash of a scar, came up and offered him a fragment of red glass, her treasure, no doubt.

He gave them all that he had—his voice. Began to teach them a little singing, tunes easy to remember, melodies whose rhythms infused new life into these frail bodies paralyzed by illness and injuries. The lines of the songs had to be noted down and, without being aware of it, the children wrote out their first words, managed their first reading. Textbooks did not exist and Volsky was feeling his way in the art of teaching, so new to him. The idea occurred of getting them to imagine, through gesture and facial expression, the story told by a song: a horseman arriving beneath the windows of the house where he was born, the welcome given him by his mother and his beloved… These children, condemned to a life as shadows, thus began to gain access to a life where changing your destiny was possible, where they were listened to, loved. Where they offered love.

He himself learned a great deal during those first months. Among the thirty or so children living at the orphanage there were faces that reminded him of Mila’s children. A boy with red hair, who had a fine resonant voice, was a little like Mandarin, though without his energy and ebullience. The parallel was distressing and yet this was how Volsky contrived to conquer the world’s whirligig absurdity. Yes, one could resist its bleak logic. As this redhead did just now, standing in front of the others and singing about a horseman riding through a snowstorm.

The songs spoke of “the wide blue sea,” and Volsky told them what he knew of seas and oceans. One of the ballads featured a boyar and, as a makeshift history teacher, he acted out scenes from the Russian past for his pupils, now as a prince, now as a serf.

He told them about the Three Musketeers as well, mimed battles and cavalcades, imitated the swish of a sword slicing through the air, fluttered a folded newspaper—a fan for a fair lady seated at a castle window… For the children this was their first journey abroad, an inconceivable thing within that country barricaded behind its iron curtain.

One evening he sang d’Artagnan’s song…

From that day forward an idea took hold of him: to get these orphans to perform in a play, whatever their disability might be. He allocated roles and, remembering all the extra walk-on actors in the performances staged during the blockade, invented characters and wrote little scenes so that each of them should have a couple of lines to say or sing.

The show he planned to stage often differed greatly from that old operetta. Their voices were weak; they soon ran out of breath. Some of the children had difficulty moving. The costumes, sewn by the women at the orphanage using old scraps of material, lacked theatrical brio. But the ingenuity of these little actors transfigured everything. A fragment of glass enmeshed in wire became a jeweled crown; battered old boots, with cardboard added to them, were transformed into thigh boots… Acting helped the children to forget their own bodies. The little girl Volsky had seen limping on the muddy road took the part of Marie and instinctively concealed her gait by skipping mischievously from one pose to another.

After dozens of rehearsals he perceived the real meaning of what had at first seemed like an amusing game. Onstage his pupils forgot their suffering. But above all, they were leading a life that no one could forbid them. In a few minutes of acting each of them escaped from the world that had condemned them to nonexistence.

Their first audience consisted of five people: the two women on the staff, the supervisor, the director, and Volsky. At one of the subsequent performances the driver who delivered coal once a month joined them. Then an assistant from a nearby bakery. A few people who lived in the locality and their friends… Some came in search of entertainment, something in short supply in that bleak little town. In others one could sense curiosity about an unusual novelty: that bunch of sick kids was putting on a show!

One day in May the play was performed in front of a very different audience. The director had told Volsky in tremulous tones the previous day that they had been “denounced,” that there was talk in the town of an underground theater and the Party Committee was going to send an inspection. Observing her face twitching with fear, Volsky reflected that the three years that had passed since Stalin’s death were nothing, it might perhaps take thirty years for her features to relax, for the woman no longer to tremble at every word.

The Party inspector marched into the hall and stood like a ponderous monolith at its center. A huge body hewn from a single block, a broad slab of a face, a voice trained to give orders. “Begin!” she said to Volsky, without so much as greeting him and, with a movement of her chin, she indicated to her retinue, two women and a man, that they should seat themselves in the front row.

“The same merry-go-round,” thought Volsky, “the same faces turning up and manifesting more of the world’s gratuitous cruelty. This one has the face of a watchdog, just like that other inspector, in the old days, who came into Mila’s lesson…” It was not so much the recurrence of it that surprised him: he knew the workings of this absurd law. It was the deliberately contrived ugliness of the visitation, yes, the willful contrivance of evil.

The woman peered at the stage with a contemptuous sneer, dilating her nostrils from time to time, as if these costumed children smelled bad. They acted particularly well, as it happened, sensing that this was a special performance. “What’s she going to accuse me of?” Volsky wondered, occasionally noting the faces the inspector was pulling. “A play not conforming to ideological precepts? Absence of educational significance? Lack of class consciousness?” He was not uneasy, realizing that the children would not know such a verdict was foreseeable. He had arranged for the supervisor to take them out for a walk as soon as it ended. Later they could be told that their acting had been much appreciated but from now on they would have to learn different songs…

He had pictured the sequence of events along the lines of what used to happen under Stalin. From the judges: monolithic silence, verdict, punishment. But times had changed, they improvised now, they innovated…

Suddenly the woman waved her arms with a shout that made the whole company jump: “Stop this circus! Enough! Not only do you have these children performing foolish antics, totally alien to our class consciousness, but… but…”

The children broke off their performance, the adults on their feet surrounding the inspector were waiting in awe for the final phase of the eruption. “But… but…” She was visibly searching for a more aesthetic argument to prop up her accusation.

“But… you haven’t even taught your pupils how to move properly onstage. They’re all walking like wooden marionettes! That one, that boy, especially. The musketeer, if you can call him that. Is he sleepwalking or what? You could have shown him the proper way for a soldier to march!”

She turned to Volsky. Silence fell. On the stage the red-haired boy who played d’Artagnan was standing very straight, his gaze far away above the heads of his comrades.

“That child isn’t sleepwalking, Comrade Inspector. He’s… blind.”

Everyone froze. Volsky was about to say more, then changed his mind. Impossible to describe the months of rehearsal during which the redhead, with obstinate patience, had learned to conquer the darkness on the stage. Step by step, the youth had learned the positions of each actor, the place each line was directed to, had mastered the play for himself like a moving picture that was alive within him. Few were the spectators who noticed his blindness. Generally people had the impression that he could see his little Marie very well as she emerged through a great cardboard gateway and rushed toward him.

The inspector blew her nose noisily on a square of striped fabric, coughed, blew her nose again, muttered, “I’ll come back…,” and left the hall.

Volsky signaled to the children, the play continued… Songs, the clash of wooden swords, painted blue for lack of silver paint, the flickering flame of a candle on the table where Marie was writing a letter. The inspector entered silently, sat on a chair near the door.

“To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” the red-haired boy was singing.

During his long life Volsky would come to know dozens of orphanages, hospitals, reeducation colonies. He taught singing and movement to those who were afraid to speak and whose bodies only had memories of violent brutality: abandoned and disabled children, young offenders. Above all, he taught them how to exist otherwise than in the world manufactured by the petty cruelty of men… One of his first pupils, the red-haired boy, would tell him one day that when he sang d’Artagnan’s song, about “the sky where the stars float above,” he could see the clusters of stars, he understood how they might look.

Volsky had acted as Mila had asked him to on the day of their arrest: tried to live without looking back at their past, got married, had a son. Clearheaded, he considered that this life was close enough to happiness and forbade himself to wish for more. Routine allowed him not to make comparisons between this existence and what he had known with Mila.

During the post-Stalin thaw his work made him almost famous for a time: the newspapers spoke of his “innovative educational methods,” there was even a book about him. He was offered a post in a research institute. He refused it, continuing to choose out-of-the-way places, establishments where he felt truly useful. His wanderings finally wearied his wife, they divorced. His son, when he reached adulthood, also moved away and much later Volsky learned that he had gone to live in Germany…

At the time of the collapse of the USSR Volsky was working in Central Asia and already used a wheelchair to get about. “Once a whole forest fell on top of me,” he would say jokingly to doctors, explaining how, when he was still young, he had found himself crushed beneath a pyramid of cedar trunks. He did not specify that this had occurred in a camp. For new generations such things belonged to a legendary past… Like the archives from the time of the purges, which were now being opened up and which Volsky could consult in Moscow. The legal file on Mila was there, the now yellow pages from the interrogations she had undergone. From reading these depositions he learned that she had done everything possible to exculpate him, taking on herself the accusations leveled at them both. “So what saved me wasn’t that little officer’s nosebleed…,” he thought, and this sacrifice, which had saved his life, reminded him again that the evil of this world could be put to rout by the will of a single human being.

A year later one of his former pupils helped him to return to Leningrad, found him this little room in a communal apartment.

Volsky did not feel unhappy, just a little overtaken by the speed of the changes.

One day his neighbors informed him that a big move was being planned, a complicated exchange that would allow each of them to have a self-contained one-room apartment in the suburbs. He did not grasp all the details of the scheme. Quite simply he now saw smartly dressed men coming in and out, talking about square meters and works to be undertaken, calculating in dollars. A blond woman often appeared among them, talking about makes of tiles, bathtubs, furniture. The men called her Yana. Volsky liked hearing her voice. He even thought that someday he might be able to tell her his life story…