The Life of an Unknown Man (6 page)

Several sheets of paper lie before him, blackened with figures. He reaches the Far East and in Vladivostok a child’s voice calls a grandmother to the telephone, a student at Leningrad University in the same year as Shutov, thirty years ago. “So I’m old enough to be a grandfather,” he says to himself, conscious that his own exile had banished him from the chronology of human beings. His friends were living their lives, marrying, surrounding themselves with children and grandchildren, while he was transforming himself into an ageless ghost.

“Listen, Shutov, I know she went back to Leningrad, well, Saint Petersburg. She’d married a fellow who was in oil. Yes, you get the picture. And it didn’t work out… No, not the oil. The marriage. Wait, I’ve got her best friend’s number. She’ll be able to help you…”

Five minutes later Shutov is writing down the number of Yana’s cell phone. Digits that magically encompass the shade of a remote feminine presence, days filled with autumn gold, declarations never hazarded.

It is half past eight in Paris, half past ten in Saint Petersburg. Shutov dials the number, but just before it rings he hangs up, goes into the bathroom, thrusts his face beneath the cold-water tap, splashes himself, drinks, clears his throat. Then smooths down his wet hair in front of a mirror. He feels the hallucinatory clarity descending upon him that comes from a sleepless night, extreme tension, drink overcome. The sensation of being about to hurl himself into a void, like in the old days, when bailing out of the cabin of an aircraft, but without the parachute’s reassuring weight.

He dials again. In Saint Petersburg a cell phone comes to life. A male voice, strangely rhythmical at first: “The prime minister’s Boeing has just landed. Southern districts of the city will experience extreme traffic disruption…” A woman’s voice, closer: “Yes. It’s to your left just beyond the bridge. But steer clear of the Nevsky…” After a moment Shutov realizes that the male voice is that of a newscaster and that the woman’s voice is speaking to the driver of a car…

“Hello, what? Oh, Ivan! I was thinking about you only the other day and do you know why? Hold on, I’m just going to park…”

This interruption allows Shutov to gather his wits, to make a landing, he thinks. His feet touch the ground, the parachute drags him along, then the canopy collapses, deflates on the grass and now, at last, certainty imposes itself: safe and sound.

“Yes, my son came across your name on a website for French books. He does publicity for a publishing house. He was surprised to see a Russian name. I told him we used to know one another…”

The banality of these words is disconcerting. Even wounding. Shutov feels it like a pinprick: nothing serious and yet it jars. He interrupts the person who has not yet become Yana: “You see, I’m coming to Lenin—Saint Petersburg, today.”

“Oh, what a shame!”

The disappointment is sincere.

“How do you mean? Don’t you want us to meet?” Shutov’s tone is almost aggressive.

“But of course I do! It’s a shame because you’ve missed half the celebrations… Wait. Where have you been? The whole world’s been talking of nothing else. Blair’s plane has just landed. It’s the tercentenary of the city… A hotel? That’ll be difficult. But we’ll sort something out, I work in the hotel business. Or if not… Right, we’ll see when you’re here. I’ve got to go now, Ivan. I’m late already. Make a careful note of my new address…”

Shutov’s departure is a rush to escape. Any minute now Léa and her friend will be knocking at the door. He throws whatever comes to hand into his old traveling bag. Writes a note, rings his Australian neighbor’s bell, gives him the key, runs to catch a taxi. And at the airport, as just now on the telephone, speaks his mother tongue for the first time in many long years. The Russian airline representative reassures him: the flight will be half empty, the stampede took place yesterday, everyone wanted to get there for the opening of the festivities.

In the air Shutov hovers between sleep and unreality. He is on his way to see a woman of whom all he can remember, thirty years on, is a luminous silence, the clear outline of a face. Quite a different woman is now driving beside the Neva in her car. And thinking of him? She works in a hotel (he pictures an establishment from the Soviet era, a matron ensconced at the reception desk), she has a son, a “publicist” (how do you say that in Russian?), but above all, she does not seem to be terrified by the interstellar chasm that has come between them. Does she recall their encounters in those parks where the sunsets would come and fade away over the Baltic?

In midflight he falls asleep, carrying into his dreams the question that causes so much pain: “But if I were not coming, would the lives of the people I’ve been telephoning continue just as before? And Yana’s life? So why come?”

I
n his mind Shutov has contrived to add thirty years to the face of the girl he had known. To age her with a silvery patina, a fine web of wrinkles… The woman who opens the door to him has certainly grown older, but differently. He pictured a physical consolidation, a heaviness that, when he was young, women acquired from a certain age, their lives being hardly conducive to refinement. A female worker at the controls of a steamroller was not such a rare occurrence in the old days… Yana kisses him with a twittering welcome, and making a rapid visual adjustment, he has to accept this slim woman with ocherish blond hair and a youthful appearance.

“She looks like… Léa!” The realization is so disconcerting that now nothing else surprises him. Not the length of the corridor, nor all these rooms leading into one another (a communal apartment?), nor even this invitation of Yana’s: “Come along, I’m going to show you the Jacuzzi…” They arrive in an extremely spacious bathroom, half of which is occupied by an oval tub. Two plumbers are busily engaged around this pink monster. “Hey! Watch out for the gold plating!” Yana calls out, at once severe and teasing. The men respond with grunts of reassurance. She winks at Shutov and leads him into a large empty room.

“Look! This’ll be the drawing room. Leave your luggage, I’ll give you a guided tour.”

They resume their stroll through this very white interior, lit by clusters of halogen spotlights, which Shutov hesitates to call an “apartment.” As he put his bag down he had experienced a childish fear: would he be able to find it again in this labyrinth? Yana walks on, smiling, explaining. The kitchen, the dining room, another dining room, “in case we ever have a full house,” a bathroom but with an ordinary tub, a bedroom, another bedroom… She says “we” and Shutov does not dare to ask if she is married… He remembers that she works in the hotel business. So could this perhaps be a suite for renting? He lacks the Russian words to translate such a new reality.

He had noticed this deficiency a short while earlier. The taxi dropped him at the edge of a district closed to traffic. He was walking along, light, curious, relaxed—a demeanor appropriate, he thought, for his status as a foreigner whose clothes and movements would not pass unremarked. Very quickly he realized that no one was paying him any attention. The people were dressed as they would be in a city in the West, perhaps a little less casually. And if he did stand out in the midst of this summery throng it was thanks to his own clothes looking tired. Disconcerted, Shutov had told himself he was not far off being taken for a tramp…

“And here, you see, this part of the ceiling will open up. We’ll be able to see the sky. We need to take advantage of every ray of sunlight. We’re not in Florida…” Shutov subjects Yana to the intense scrutiny an explorer would reserve for a new species awaiting classification. She is reminiscent of Léa… No, this is a false similarity. Quite simply she corresponds to a certain type of European woman: svelte, sleekly blond, face carefully smoothed of wrinkles.

“So will your family live here?” He would have liked to talk to Yana about their past but he must first ask conventional questions like this.

“As a matter of fact, the move was planned for tomorrow. But with these celebrations we had to put everything off… As a result, if you’d like to sleep here… Finding a good hotel won’t be easy. We’ve got four in our chain but with the number of VIPs arriving, you’d feel as if you were in a fortress under siege, there are ten bodyguards at every entrance. So welcome to my humble abode! Two of the rooms are already more or less furnished… And this is another corridor, you see. When we joined all the apartments together we fixed up a two-room suite for my son. Vlad, may we come in?”

The young man who welcomes them looks strangely familiar: a gangling youth in T-shirt and jeans, a fair-haired twenty-year-old such as one might come across in London or Amsterdam or an American sitcom.

“Whiskey? Martini? Beer?” Vlad offers with a smile, indicating a tray with an array of bottles. “So this is it,” thinks Shutov. “We’ve reached the stage of irony.” At first Russia copied these Western fashions, now they delight in pastiching them. Near the window is a coatrack surmounted by a plaster cast of Andy Warhol’s shaggy head. Across from that a scarlet banner, with letters in gold: “Forward to the Victory of Communist Toil!” A poster of Madonna, with Second World War medals attached to her chest. A television set with a screen at least three feet wide: a car comes to a halt on a mountaintop, facing a magical sunrise. “To be on time, when every second counts!” says the warm, virile voice of the commercial…

Vlad sits down at his computer. Yana smooths a tuft of his hair. Annoyed, he moves away: “Hey, stop that, Ma…” A momentary look crosses the mother’s face, which Shutov recognizes with a sudden intake of breath.

“I’ve checked,” says Vlad. “They don’t market you too well in Europe.” Shutov bends over and is stunned to recognize his photograph.

“I’m not too well… known. Besides… I didn’t know my books were listed on the Internet. In fact, I don’t have a computer. I write everything by hand, then I type it out…”

Vlad and Yana laugh uncertainly: their guest has a somewhat ponderous sense of humor.

There is a muffled cough in the room next door, which relieves the situation. Through the half-open door Shutov catches sight of patterned wallpaper, the foot of a bed covered in a dark green blanket, like those provided on night trains in the old days…

“Yes, this is pure Ionesco!” Yana exclaims, anticipating his question. “No, I must tell you. We managed to clear four communal apartments and that was on two floors. Eleven rooms to be joined up, twenty-six people to be relocated! A real estate management maneuver crazier than a game of chess. We’ve rehoused them all. For some of them we had to make a triple swap. Piles of paper, lots of red tape, palm greasing. I’ll spare you the details. In the end both floors were ours. There was just this room. With a housewarming gift in it! Yes, this old man (he’s paraplegic, poor thing), who was due to be admitted to an old people’s home ten days ago. And then, what happens? We have this wretched tercentenary, the city’s all closed off. And lo and behold, we have to live with a grandfather who doesn’t even belong to us! Well, actually, the day after tomorrow he’s going to be moved. But, as I say, it’s like the play by Ionesco, you remember, that apartment where there’s a corpse and no one knows how to get rid of it…”

The comparison is rather dubious and to retrieve the situation, Yana knocks on the door. “Georgy Lvovich, may we come in to say hello?” To Shutov she murmurs: “I think he’s a bit deaf. And what’s more, he’s lost… the power of speech.”

It is a slip of the tongue this “power of speech”; she should have said “he has aphasia” or “he’s mute.” But they are already entering the room.

An old man lies on a bed constructed from nickel-plated tubes, of a type Shutov believed had long since disappeared. On his night table is a cup in which a tea bag is macerating, and the glint of thick bifocal glasses. His eyes return Shutov’s look, with perfect lucidity. “It’s all been arranged, Georgy Lvovich. You’ll be in good hands very soon.” Yana speaks in loud and artificially cheerful tones. “The doctors are going to take you right out into the country. You’ll be able to hear the birds singing…” The old man’s face remains unchanged, maintaining its air of grave detachment, with no hint of bitter tension, showing no inclination to make contact through facial expression in default of language. Does he understand everything? Almost certainly, even though his only response is to close his eyes. “Fine. Have a good rest, Georgy Lvovich. Vlad’s here all the time if you need anything…” With a little tilt of her head, Yana indicates to Shutov that the visit is at an end. As he backs out he notices a book lying on the bed: the old man’s hand is touching the volume as if it were a living being.

Yana closes the door and raises her eyebrows with a sigh. “For someone of his generation it would have been better to depart this world before the latest upheavals. Do you know what monthly pension he gets? One thousand two hundred. Rubles. Forty dollars. That’s enough to strike you dumb. After fighting in the war all the way to Berlin. But, you know, these days, nobody could give a damn! And it’s a crying shame we can’t hear his voice anymore. He was a professional singer. His neighbors told me that in the war, well, during the siege of Leningrad, he went out with a whole choir to sing to the troops…”