She no longer seemed on her guard; far from it, Elias’s attitude intrigued her. She was clearly hoping for something other than this friendly and attentively protective presence …
The woman with the casket left them at Irkutsk, the gold prospector at a village beyond Baikal. They found themselves alone, their eyes fixed on the fading of the sparks given off by the sunset outside the window layered with hoarfrost. The last night of their journey was beginning. Now they needed to talk, to clarify the situation, or else, without saying anything, embrace, exchange caresses, give themselves … Or instead, laugh, tell jokes, assume the role of good pals. Mentally they were rehearsing these scenarios, but all of them seemed false. The scarlet blaze on the window turned to violet, then was extinguished. There came a moment when it seemed impossible to turn away from the window, to meet one another’s eyes and smile …
A light tapping on the door drew them out of this torpid state. The little Buryat boy was watching them fixedly, with slightly arched eyebrows, pursing his lips, in an expression that seemed to respond to the intensity of what he sensed in them. They exchanged glances and began to laugh softly. Yes, how could he make this young woman understand that the simple freshness of the snow, as it lingered on her dress, was already abundant happiness, a true love story that had unfolded ever since their wanderings through Moscow beneath storms of white? How could she tell this man that he had become important to her, strangely, despite all she thought about men, white or black, and all she believed about herself, tell him that his presence there was obvious and natural, as if he had been at her side long long ago beneath this Russian sky, as if he had always been there, and always would be? She thought he was like that aircraft from the last war set in a block of concrete in the city where she went to high school. It was the district where the city s worthies lived, and there this 11-2 ground attack aircraft, nicknamed “Black Death” by the Germans, proudly reared its dark, elongated silhouette amid pretentious, humdrum lives. Anna suppressed a smile: this far-fetched comparison was perfectly apt but completely unmentionable, as apt things so often are.
The Buryat woman came and fetched her child. They were left in the blue dusk that filled the compartment.
“… In the end this is the one mystery that stays with me from my childhood. Even though my mother was crushed by poverty and the contempt of those who bought her body she was able to give me absolute happiness, peace without any taint of anxiety. I’ve always believed that this capacity for love, which is in fact so simple, is a supreme gift. Yes, a divine power …”
During the last night of the journey he talked about that child on the threshold of a hut in Dondo burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.
The following evening the declaration they had been waiting for finally arrived and was made wordlessly. Quite simply, they came close to death on the ice of a river that served as a road in winter. A truck driver had left them at this intersection of forest roads. He had sworn his comrade would be along at any minute. It was still daylight. An hour later darkness enveloped the little shelter with three walls where they had taken refuge. They spent that hour jumping up and down, pummeling one another, rubbing one another’s cheeks and noses. The air was clear, no breath of wind. The cold molded itself to their bodies as if they were encased in molten glass. And once they moved, this carapace exploded and they felt as if they were swallowing crushed splinters.
They made a fire, but in order to fetch wood they had to climb a steep bank, plunge waist deep into the snow, battle with branches, using hands that no longer obeyed them. This expedition took a good twenty minutes; the fire had time to die down, and their muscles to go numb, anaesthetized by the cold. At one moment, halfway between the shelter and the forest, Elias wanted to lie down, to sink back into the drowsiness that made him light-headed, unfeeling. He shook himself, snatched up a fistful of snow, rubbed his face furiously, then clambered up and, with gritted teeth, began breaking branches. And all at once stood upright, listened … As he came hurtling down the slope he lost half of the firewood. “I heard … I heard … he said in a whisper, as if his voice might alarm the faintly detected sound. They listened, turning their heads right and left. All that was perceptible was tiny crackling noises from the fire that had almost gone out. The mist from their breath rose upward, drawn aloft by the black gulf of the sky. The stars seemed to be closing in on them, surrounding them … Elias felt the pressure of a hand on his wrist and could no longer make out whether he was giving or receiving the warmth that remained to them. Anna pressed herself against him, and there amid the starry space they formed a frail islet of life.
The driver who picked them up would seemingly have remained just as impassive had he come upon their frozen corpses inside the shelter. Elias studied the hands resting on the wheel: fresh scratches, the blood scarcely dried, and showing through beneath it, a faint tattoo: 46-55 and the name of one of the camps at Kolyma.
The man spoke, offering no excuses but simply to establish what Ellas already knew: “Worse things happen.” Worse was the frosts that followed a brief thaw. The ice on the rivers he drove along became covered in water, and this froze in its turn. One river on top of another, as it were. The wheels sank into it and in a matter of moments were caught, welded in. That was what had happened to him a little earlier. Sometimes trucks were discovered under six feet of snow … Between the two numerals on his tattoo the computation was simple: 1946-1955, nine years of forced labor somewhere beneath this icy sky After that, thought Elias, nothing else can really touch him …
“You should have come to Sarma in the spring,” lamented the driver suddenly. “There’s a copse over there, half a dozen miles or so, full of birds. How they sing, the little bastards! Nightingales. You wouldn’t believe it. Over there. Near where the camp was …”A minute later he began making little clacking noises with his tongue, followed by a whistling and clicking sound. Elias thought he was imitating the trilling of a nightingale. The driver growled: “What a stupid bitch, that dentist! I told her to take it out. She s filled it, that bloody back tooth. And now I don’t need a thermometer any more. As soon as it gets to forty below it has me howling like a wolf.”
As he dropped them at Sarma just after midnight, he whispered to Elias with a wink: “You look a lot like Pelé. I saw him playing a couple of years ago, on television … Off you go. Stoke the stove well!” For a moment they watched the swaying of the long trailer laden with tree trunks. The sensation of parting from a man in the midst of this white infinity had a grievous intensity about it. Nine years in the camp, nightingales, a badly filled molar, Pelé … Elias felt he had made contact, in a brief space of time, with the subterranean and tangled truth of a human being.
This intimacy with the truth, at once poignant and radiant, struck him more than everything else at Sarma. From the very first look Annas mother gave him. She opened the door to them, put her arms around them, without wasted words, incuriously A calm, absolute certainty was transmitted to Elias: he could walk in at this door in ten years’ time, and she would be waiting for him.
“The bath’s still hot,” the mother said. “In this cold, I knew you’d be late.”
To him everything in the tiny bathhouse was amazing: the bitter scent of the smoke-caked walls, the birch twigs with which he was expected to lash himself, the steam burning his nostrils. But this exoticism was nothing beside the blue darkness perceived through the narrow window above a bench. Outside the cloudy glass the cold forbade any trace of life, while here, on the planks drenched in boiling water, was his naked body, more alive than ever.
At Sarma he saw death, survival, and life combining in a secret, constant transfusion.
He awoke dazzled by the abundance of sunlight. And the first thing he saw on this white planet was a dot moving slowly along in the middle of a valley surrounded by the taiga. A man? An animal? Elias watched the sinuous path followed by this little black speck, then made a tour of the room, looked for a long time at the photo
of a young soldier. “Smolensk, April 1941,” it read at the bottom of the picture. The wooden front steps groaned loudly under someone’s footsteps. Elias hurried into the entrance hall and saw Annas mother. “She’s gone to see Georgi, the hunter, to fetch a good fur jacket for you. You won’t get far with that coat of yours. It’s forty-eight below this morning … Come and drink some tea.” The surface of the water in the two pails she set down was pearly with ice.
At table the silence that fell was not oppressive. The crackling of the fire, the drowsy ticking of a clock, and most of all, the great tranquillity, all this made words less necessary. And yet Elias felt he needed to give an account of himself, to explain his presence (my African face, he thought, vexed with himself for not finding any way to start a conversation). Then he remembered the driver who had given them a lift the night before, his tale of the nightingales … The woman listened to him then, after a moments hesitation murmured: “Yes. There used to be a lot of birds at the time when the camp was there. Yes. Nightingales more than anything … Then one day, at the end of the forties, I think, the authorities gave orders to cut down all the trees. They d noticed that in springtime, as soon as the birds began to sing, the number of escapes went up. Under Khrushchev they closed the camp. The trees have grown again. The birds have come back …”
Anna returned, bringing a long fur jacket, “There. Put that on and you can go into hibernation. It’s bear.”
Outside, in the valleys blinding whiteness, the same black speck continued its winding course. “And that? Is that a bear too?” asked Elias.
“No. It’s the student I told you about. Well, he’s over fifty now. You remember, the one who wrote ‘SOSialism’ … He’s out searching for his treasures. But it’d be better for him to tell you about them himself. We’ll go and see him this evening, if you like
Elias was expecting to find a madman undermined by the harshness of exile. The “student” spoke with an irony that presumed a diagnosis along these lines and thus refuted it. “To begin with,” he recounted, “it was just a schoolboy’s bright idea. Most meteorites either land in inaccessible places, oceans, seas, lakes, or mountains, for example. Or else on rocky terrain where these intergalactic visitors remain hidden amid the stones. So this poor student (who was obliged, alas, to interrupt his studies for a time) decided to search for heavenly objects where they’re most visible: on the immaculate whiteness of our beloved Siberia. I have a hundred correspondents more or less everywhere this side of the Urals … And now take a look at my collection!”
In long cases squared off into compartments they saw smooth fragments, some as small as cherry stones, some bulkier, reminiscent of dark Stone Age flints. On a large table covered with a waxed cloth there was an accumulation of chemistry apparatus, a star atlas, a telescope on a tripod. The commentary now delivered soon became at once too technical and too rhapsodic. To follow it all one would have had to fall in love with the tiniest streak on the surface of these aerolites … The “student” realized this, characterized himself as “obsessed with stars,” and, as if seeking their pardon for his astronomical pedantry, proclaimed: I’ve even written a poem.” He took down a sheet of paper that hung above his worktable, put on his glasses, and began to read. It was the tale of a meteorite hunter who constructed a planet for himself from his finds and quit the Earth. The tone was that of the verses one wrote at the age of twenty. He stopped growing up at the moment of his arrest, thought Elias.
They were already at the door, poised to leave, when the “student” led them back into the room. “You know, I want to say this without any political inference. From time to time the human race should judge itself from the point of view of these pebbles from heaven. That might make it less confident of its greatness.”
On the way back, as they passed through the “valley of the meteorites,” they each caught themselves distractedly glancing down at every dark stain. They laughed about it. “You know, he’s never talked like that to anyone before,” said Anna. “You must have impressed him. Yes. Like an extraterrestrial he can finally confide in …”
The next day at the edge of the taiga they came upon a couple who appeared to be seeking to bury themselves under the snow. An elderly man, dressed in a simple quilted jacket, a woman with slanted eyes, probably a Yakut. “Are you digging a den?” Anna called out to them. “Yes, a den for a flower,” replied the man. “This time they won’t go and trample on it.” He went back to thrusting long poles obliquely into the snow. Grasping the principle of this strange scaffolding, Elias helped them to complete it. They all went back together. The man told them that for years he had been watching out for the flowering of the “golden fire,” a kind of wild orchid, which opens at night and dies at dawn. He had located the spot where it grew, but each time he had missed the night when it bloomed. Once winter was over, the plant was often found trampled or uprooted by animals. So he had decided to construct a shelter before the snows melted …
They spent a while in the izba where the couple lived, ate some of the smoked fish prepared by the woman. The man was very eager to offer Elias a shapka. ‘Tve got five of them. I used to hunt a bit in the old days … Choose which one you like. Not that one. That s a museum piece. I wore it at the camp. Well. I got through several over twenty years. This is the last of them. And as for the flower, the golden fire, I mean, it was a thief who told me where to find it. A gold washer, in point of fact. He used to work with his panning trough in secret. He was caught, and for this he got ten years in the camp. Then one day in spring he tried to make a run for it. They tracked him down and the guards had dogs, as big as wild boar, that tore his throat out… He often used to talk to me about the flower, so straight off, I began to imagine I might find it one night when I was free. And now, you see, I tell myself, it was that plant that helped to stop me losing my mind. Because over twenty years there was plenty to make you do that. Especially when I got to thinking about the price I’d paid for three cartloads of muck. You know the story, Anna, but what you don’t know is that in ‘fifty-six, when I came out, they’d already chucked Stalin on the scrap heap. Then this fellow says to me: ‘Come on, Ivan. Take his picture and throw it on the dunghill. That way you’ll be quits.’ Well, I didn’t do it. Because now anyone could do it. Besides, I don’t like to kick a man when he’s down. And most of all, I couldn’t care less. I’d already started looking for the golden fire … Now then. One more glass so you don’t catch cold when you go out.”
They went home, cutting through the forest. Anna’s words sounded like an echo lost among the great cedar trunks. “When he met his wife, Zoya, she was … well, a kind of stray dog. Worse than a dog, a sick, half-mad wild animal, whom everyone despised. There are mines fifty miles away from Sarma. For a time the miners shared Zoya between them. When they went to work they locked her up in a shed and when they came back they raped her. In fact it wasn’t even rape by then, more like a regular routine … Then they got rid of her. Yes, a dog rooting among rubbish. One evening Ivan was passing close by the miners’ huts and, in the darkness, he thought he saw a fox. He was about to shoot it with his gun. Zoya was wearing an old coat scorched by fire … It took her several months to get back on her feet again. And one day Ivan told me he now knew why he went on living. And it was above all for her that he wanted to see that plant flowering in the night, the golden fire …”
Before making the journey Elias had thought he would be encountering human detritus, left over from the great workshop of the future society. Scraps, waste products, inevitable in a project on as grand a scale as that of communism. Yet here, among the materials rejected by the march of history, behold, a secret, tenacious life maintained its vigil. This humble existence seemed perfectly emancipated from the capricious rhetoric of the age. No verdict of history, thought Elias, had made its mark on these two beings who, when spring came, would be searching in the forest for their wild orchid.
One morning he saw Ivan leaving his izba and, a moment later, Zoya running a
fter him. The man must have forgotten the leather bag she was holding out to him. She was dressed only in a skirt and pullover, despite the cold having gone down to fifty below, and this run through the snow, the encounter between the two figures in the middle of a white wilderness, their swift embrace, the tenuousness of the bond created between them for a moment, then broken, all this struck Ellas as total evidence of love. A stray dog, he recalled. Human scraps … Yet now in the silvery cold of the morning, there was this woman on the threshold of her house and this man, gliding along on his snow shoes, tracing an extended blue line across the endless white expanse.
ALMOST NOTHING WAS LEFT OF THE CAMP. The shells of huts. The gap-toothed lines of a double wooden perimeter fence. It shook in the wind, and from a distance it was possible to believe that an Alsatian dog was still trotting around between the twin palisades.
They approached with uneasy caution, not knowing what could be said at such a place. Thousands of lives swallowed up by this enclosed space between the watchtowers. Thousands of pairs of eyes staring long ago at barbed wire, all downy with hoarfrost under a cloudless sky. Were cries of pity called for, or indignation, or resignation? Words lost their meaning here. From a blackened pole hung a steel bar, the gong that had once marked the rhythm of the camps activities. Its silence, perpetual now, was like an invisible but still living presence.
Elias listened to the wind, the crunching of their feet, pictured the man Anna had just been speaking about: one sunny day a prisoner clad in a worn quilted jacket leaves the camp, stops, looks back, perplexed. After twelve years of imprisonment, freedom is a threat. His body worn out by penal servitude, betrays him at every step. He finds it hard to understand the people he passes, their smiles, their concerns. “You should have remarried,” he says to his wife. He is terrified by that wait of twelve years. Terrified and sorrowfully grateful. He would like to thrust this woman away from him, thrust her toward joy, toward the youth she had lost on his account… He dies a year after the birth of their daughter. As a child, Anna will claim she remembers her fathers face. It is, of course, impossible. She has simply seen old photos …
Human Love Page 10