The Life of an Unknown Man (23 page)

Then one evening he heard a conversation outside the door of his room. Yana and several men were having a somewhat heated discussion about a move that was taking a long time to happen. Suddenly Volsky grasped that they were talking about him. “Listen, be realistic,” Yana was saying, evidently trying to calm things down. “The old man’s here. There’s nothing to be done about it. Obviously it would suit us if he departed this vale of tears in the meantime, but let’s not be too optimistic. He may be deaf and bedridden, but he could live to be a hundred. What I’m proposing is a very reasonable solution…”

Volsky stopped listening and from that day forward no longer replied when spoken to. They took him now for a deaf-mute. He noticed that this made no great difference to his relationship with the people bustling around the apartment. Their attitude may even have become less hypocritical.

A
nd Shutov remembers now. He has heard the name “Volsky” in his youth. Thirty years ago. Articles speaking of a teacher who used drama to bring new life to handicapped children and young delinquents. For journalists in the days of censorship such topics offered a rare zone of freedom: a unique individual who refuses honors and a good career is already in discreet revolt against the massive concrete structure of the regime.

The old man drinks his cold tea. The television, with the sound switched off, shows videos of blond girls and young black men swaying their hips with expressions ranging from the arrogant to the lascivious. Nighttime TV. The light of a lamp fixed to the back of the bed, a dark window, this almost empty room. In a few hours the paramedics will come to take the old man away. So it really is the end of this nocturnal recital.

Shutov is still eager to know what became of the sky where two loving gazes used to meet during those long years. But it is too late to ask, Volsky’s life has merged into that of the country’s battered past: wars, camps, the utter fragility of any bond between two human beings. A heroic life, a life sacrificed. A life Shutov might himself have encountered, since he spent his own childhood in an orphanage. “Yes, I could have had Volsky as my singing teacher,” he thinks.

“You know, I’ve got nothing against your friend Yana,” says the old man, putting his cup down on the night table. “Nor the others, either. Their life isn’t at all enviable. Imagine, they have to own all this!”

He makes a broad gesture and Shutov sees clearly that “all this” is Yana’s new apartment but also the vast television screen and the documentary about the Russian elite settling in London, their town houses, their country residences and the cocktail party where at this moment they are all meeting, and this wholly new way of life that Shutov simply cannot comprehend.

“When it comes down to it, we had such an easy life!” says the old man. “We had no possessions and yet we knew we were happy. In the space between two bullets whistling past, as you might say…” He smiles and adds in jesting tones: “No, but look at those poor people. They’re not happy!” A reception can be seen at a luxury hotel in London, the tense smiles of the women, the glistening faces of the men. “We used to pull faces like that at the Conservatory when they made us listen to cantatas glorifying Stalin…” He laughs softly and his hand makes the same gesture again: “all this.” Very physically, Shutov feels that the world thus referred to is one that spreads itself out horizontally, flat and perfectly level in each of its components. Yes, a flattened world.

“If you could switch off now…,” asks Volsky. Shutov seizes the remote control, gets confused (on the screen an old streetcar appears, slipping along silently, disappearing up a street), finally succeeds in switching off.

Volsky’s face resumes the same expression as at the start of the night: calm, detached, perhaps even a little distant. Shutov does not expect any further word from him. It has all been said, all that remains to be done is to bid him good night and take a few hours’ sleep before Vlad and the paramedics arrive.

The voice that rings out is strikingly firm.

“I have never ceased meeting her gaze. Even when I learned that she was dead… And nobody could forbid me to believe that she saw me too. And tonight I know she is still looking up at the sky. And nobody, you understand, nobody will dare to deny it!”

The voice is so forceful that Shutov stands up. It is the voice of a former singer or perhaps an artillery officer calling out orders amid explosions. Shutov sits down again, ventures a brief gesture, on the point of speaking, but remains silent. Volsky’s features relax, his eyelids close lightly. His hands rest motionless alongside his body. Shutov realizes that it was not the determined voice that had brought him to his feet. The old man’s words had summoned up a lofty radiance in this flattened world, one that seemed to raise the ceiling of that little room.

In a very much fainter echo of that cry comes a whisper of regret that Volsky keeps more or less to himself: “A shame, though, not to have seen the Lukhta again… The shore where we gave our last concert… The trees I planted with Mila… You go to sleep. Don’t worry… I can manage very well on my own…”

He grasps the switch on the lamp above his bed. Shutov stands up, goes to the door. He takes slow steps, looking as if he were trying to delay his departure, to come up with some last word that he had to say and that he had forgotten.

“Wait, just a moment!” he finally blurts out, and rushes into Vlad’s office. Beside the telephone, the list of useful numbers the young man had left for him when he went out: ambulance, police, taxi… Shutov makes a call, orders a taxi, comes running back into Volsky’s bedroom, gets his words in a tangle, apologizes, explains his plan to him. The old man smiles: “I’m partial to adventures, but I shall need to put on my Sunday best. There, on the hook, behind the door, a windbreaker and pants…”

Shutov asks the taxi driver to come up and help him carry “an invalid” downstairs, he says, keeping things simple. At once the powerfully built, stocky young man begins to express his displeasure. When he learns that this will not be a simple trip to a hospital but a long drive outside the city he goes off the deep end: “Forget it! I don’t do tourist trips. You should have hired a minibus, buddy…” Shutov insists, clumsily, realizing that current parlance has changed, as well as everything else, and that his arguments (an old soldier who wants to revisit the places where he fought in the war) must seem surreal.

“Listen, man, there’s no set fare for trips like that. And what’s more it’s the middle of the night…” The driver turns toward the door to show he is about to go. Shutov hates this thick neck, this very round skull with its close-cropped hair, the sullen look of someone who knows the other man is no match for him.

“I’ll pay what it costs. Tell me your price. We can agree on a figure.”

“But I’m telling you there’s no fixed fare. And we’ve got to lug the… grandpa downstairs into the bargain!”

“A hundred dollars, would that do?”

“You’re joking. For a trip like that…”

“Five hundred?”

“Listen, pal, you have a think about it and call me next week. OK?”

He turns away, opens the door. Shutov catches him on the landing, negotiates, ends up giving him three hundred-dollar notes. He glimpses a rather childish delight on the man’s face: pleasure at having ripped off a simpleton, surprise, pride in having come out on top. Money does not yet have an established value in this new country; there’s an element of roulette about it and he has won.

He drives quite slowly at first, doubtless for fear of running into a police patrol. But once outside the city, he speeds along, straight over every crossroads. It feels as if he is beginning to relish this escapade. Shutov winds down the window: monotonous suburban streets hurtle past, a city asleep, and from time to time, within the endless slabs of building fronts, a window lit up, very yellow, a life keeping watch.

At last, like the lash of a branch, the scent of grass, the bitter night smell of foliage. The car leaves the main road, begins jolting along badly paved lanes. Two or three times the old man tries to point the way but the driver rejoins, “No, man. That village doesn’t exist anymore… They’ve got a shopping center there now…” His tone of voice has changed, he responds to Volsky in somewhat contrite tones…

And suddenly he brakes, surprised himself by a barrier across the road.

Beyond it arises a veritable wall, at least twelve feet high. A bronze plaque set into a stone pillar gleams in the headlights. Richly ornamental letters imitating Gothic script: “Palatine Residential Estate: Private Road. Residents only.” The driver gets out, with Shutov close behind him. Beyond a monumental wrought iron gate can be seen the outlines of the “palaces,” illuminated by the floodlights of a building site. A crane throws the shadow of its hook across a wall. A bulldozer sleeps beneath a tree. Site offices stationed at each corner of the enclosure are reminiscent of watchtowers…

The resemblance is not lost on Volsky. “It looks like a prison,” he murmurs, when the two men get back into the car.

“What do you want me to do?” asks the driver. “Try to work around it?” And without waiting for a word from Shutov and Volsky he drives off. Rising to this challenge becomes a point of honor for him. The car gets stuck in the mud almost at once and Shutov has the door half open, ready to get out and push. “It’s OK!” snorts the driver, twisting the wheel and looking as if he were wrestling a bull with his bare hands. A long hysterical scream from the engine, a painful slithering, and finally they shoot away, like a bat out of hell.

Their progress becomes steadier now, lulled as they sway broadly along a dirt road, the rustling of tall plants can be heard against the sides of the car. The air smells more and more of the coolness of a river. The beam from the headlights comes up against a plantation of willows. They follow a slope. They stop. The headlights are switched off, their eyes quickly grow accustomed to the pale northern night. Silence settles and the ear begins to identify the tiniest rustlings. The music of the long willow leaves, the soporific purling of the current, from time to time a quick, frail call emitted by a bird in flight…

The driver helps Shutov to settle Volsky down at the shore’s edge on the broad trunk of a felled tree whose timber, stripped of its bark, traces a white line in the darkness. Without needing to confer, the two men move away.

They inhale deeply, amazed by the lively sharpness of the air, by this calm found very close, after all, to the bustle of the festive city. To their right, against the background of the sky’s ashen pallor, can be seen the line of the Palatine Residential Estate’s enclosure (“Excelsior,” “Trianon”… Shutov remembers). On the far bank coppices separated by long pathways can be divined. “The trees Volsky and Mila planted,” he thinks, “the graveyard…” In the sky a mass of transparent clouds; from time to time a star shivers, very close, alive.

The driver, sitting on a tree stump, mutters something. He turns his wrist to make out the illuminated dial of his watch in the darkness. Shutov reassures him: “We’ll be on our way soon…” “No, let the old man take his time! I don’t get much work at night…” His tone is still marked by a trace of guilt. “He was really in the war here?” he asks. Shutov whispers, as if someone could hear them. Yes, it was here. The blockade of Leningrad; the last concert given by a theater troupe; and then this old man, a young soldier at that time, pushing a gun along a frozen shore; Berlin. He becomes aware that he is now the only person in the world who knows Volsky’s story so well…

He breaks off as he hears a voice rising up from the stream. The singing must have begun to ring out a moment ago but was mingled with the rustle of the willows, the murmur of the grasses. Now its melody dominates the silence, ripples effortlessly, like a very long, deep sigh. The driver is the first to get up, his face turned toward the source of the sound. Shutov stands as well, takes several steps toward the bank, stops. It is a song that gives back a forgotten, primal meaning to all that he can see: the earth, laden with dead, and yet so light, so full of springtime life, the ruins of an old izba, the imagined radiance of those who lived there and loved one another beneath its roof… And this sky, beginning to turn pale, which Shutov will never look at again the way he did before.

The return journey seems like lightning, almost instantaneous. As if these early-morning streets, totally empty, are vanishing as they pass through them.

And in the apartment this speeding up is even more feverish. The old man is hardly settled in his bed when Vlad arrives, passing the taxi driver in the hall. The door slams behind the latter, Shutov turns and sees placed there within the marble hand, “Slava’s hand,” which lies on the occasional table, three hundred-dollar notes…

And already the paramedics are ringing the bell and cluttering up the corridor with their wheelchair. Shutov slips into Volsky’s room hoping to be able to speak to him again, to tell him that his story… They shake hands. The paramedics are there, Vlad as well, they are busy packing the old man’s books into a bag… Volsky’s eyes smile at Shutov for the last time, then his face freezes into a final, indifferent mask.

The entrance hall teems with Vlad’s friends, who are coming to the party at Yana’s country house. The workmen make way for the two paramedics taking the old man away and start bringing in pipes for the plumbing. A housekeeper drags in a vacuum cleaner, dives into the little bedroom, now finally vacated. Various cell phones ring, conversations overlap, become mixed up…

Shutov drinks a cup of tea in the kitchen and tries to picture himself as still involved in the whirlwind occurring all around him. “Ma has just called,” shouts Vlad. “She’ll be here in ten minutes. She says hello…” Someone has switched on the television. “To be on time, when every second counts…” “You wouldn’t have a cigarette?” a very young woman asks him, and he suddenly feels struck dumb, stammers, gesticulates. She laughs, goes away.

It comes to him at last, with blinding clarity: he would never be able to exist in this new life.

Five minutes suffice to gather up his belongings, to slip toward the door without being intercepted by Vlad, to leave…