by Frank Wynne
‘Time we were on our way,’ everyone started saying immediately, and Manyura Krein, jangling her bracelets, ran into the house for her coat and bag.
They went through the dining room and big dark hallway and came out into the yard where the car was parked. Sushkov’s mother was going back to Paris as well. She put on a hat with a big violet-coloured flower; even her suitcase was a shade of violet. The motor idled a few moments, and then, cautiously spreading its black wings, the car backed up to the gates. Krein, sitting behind the steering wheel, waved once again to those left behind. Manyura, whose porcelain mouth alone was illuminated, smiled behind the glass and said something. The car started up, stopped, shifted into forward, and as if it had hauled itself out, disappeared, leaving behind it a wake of invisible, acrid exhaust.
Chabarov went to find the bicycles.
‘We’d be very happy to see you here any time,’ Sushkov told the Frenchman. ‘We’re staying all summer, and on Sundays, as you see, our friends visit. You’re always welcome.’
‘Enchanté, monsieur,’ Daunou replied. ‘I have spent an unforgettable evening.’
And following behind Chabarov he kissed Maria Leonidovna’s hand.
The next day, as usual, Vassily Georgievich took the train into town, leaving Maria Leonidovna and Kiryusha to themselves. That Monday, at one o’clock in the afternoon, several dozen aeroplanes bombed Paris for the first time.
II
News of the bombardment of Paris only came that evening. During the day you could hear the gunfire, but it was so far away that you couldn’t tell whether it was in Paris or Pontoise, where it had been a few days before. In the evening the papers arrived, and all the people who lived in the little village, in the centre of which stood a neglected church with a caved-in roof, came spilling out into the modest avenue of sturdy plane trees that led from the café to the mairie.
The village consisted almost entirely of old women. Of course they may have only been, as in any French village, about half the population, but they were the ones you saw most often. Seeing them out in the street, talking together or shopping or shaking out a rag or hanging out clothes, they seemed to make up nine-tenths of the inhabitants.
Some of them were no more than fifty, and they were still smart and cheerful, just turning grey, rosy-cheeked and sharp-eyed. Others were wrinkled and toothless, with swollen veins. Others, who could remember the invasion of the Germans in 1870, were hunched up and barely able to put one sore foot in front of the other, and they had darkened hands, long black nails, and lifeless faces. They were all much of a kind, talking to each other in the same way, and using the same words, wherever they met, be it on street corners, beneath the plane trees, or by their front gates. They all wore wide calico aprons that either tied at the back or buttoned in front. Some wore steel glasses on their noses and knitted, rocking in a chair and holding the skein of wool under their left arms. Almost all of them were widows of men killed in the last war, and all without exception had seen either a son or a son-in-law set off for this war.
That evening, in the shady lane that ran alongside the fence to the Sushkovs’ garden, the silence was broken. Kiryusha came to tell Maria Leonidovna that Paris had been bombed, buildings destroyed, warehouses burned, and more than a thousand killed or wounded. Maria Leonidovna looked at Kiryusha, who was smiling broadly, and it saddened her that this human being, who was now completely grown, was still the same child she had first met twelve years before. There was a time – and lately she had thought of it often – when he had suddenly decided to learn the alphabet. A brief light had pierced the darkness of that sick brain. He had tried to learn the letters, but nothing ever came of it. It had all ended with Kiryusha’s short and relatively happy affair with the girl who worked in the charcuterie. Relatively happy because after that he had started to get gradually worse.
Maria Leonidovna went through Paris in her mind. In that city, above all, was Vassily Georgievich, as well as their pretty, sunny, quiet apartment, which she loved so much. Then there were the Kreins, the Abramovs, the Snezhinskys, Edouard Zontag, Semyon Isaakovich Freiberg, Lenochka Mikhailova, and many many more who could have been wounded or killed. And when she thought about all those people living at various ends of the city, scattered across the old creased map of Paris that she kept in her mind, a flashing light lit up, here and there, and then went out.
‘Yes. This had to happen,’ she told herself. ‘We were talking about it only yesterday. So why did he go? The Kreins could have stayed on, too. Yesterday we said … What else were we talking about yesterday? Oh, yes! “You are God, Mozart, and of that fact yourself innocent.” One ought to aspire to something that combines everything beautiful, pure and eternal, like those clouds, not all these terrible things, all these murders and lies. Before the ultimate silence closes in on you, shouldn’t you listen to what the stars are saying to each other?’
She went over to the little radio, brand new, which Kiryusha was strictly forbidden to go near, and turned the knob. First a French voice spoke, then an English voice, then a German voice. All of it was crammed into that wooden box, separated only by invisible barriers. The voices all said the same thing. And suddenly it switched to music, singing, Spanish or maybe Italian, the voluptuous and carefree strumming of a guitar. But she picked up the word amore, and she turned the machine off and walked to the window, from which she could see the village road among the thick fields of oats, green and ash-grey.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, soldiers were billeted on the village: heavy green trucks camouflaged with foliage as if decked out for a carnival and bearing numbers written in red lead paint brought in five hundred young, healthy, raucous soldiers and four officers wearing long overcoats and with tired, worried, feverish faces. A billeting officer appeared at Maria Leonidovna’s door – the house the Sushkovs rented was by far the best in the village – and she immediately moved Kiryusha into the dining room, giving his room to the captain and the space in the annexe to three sub-lieutenants.
The four officers slept in their clothes. The sentry – sometimes a short, swarthy and yellow-eyed man or else a tall, erect and big-faced one – came to wake them several times during the night. Vassily Georgievich called every day; his call came to the post office at the corner of their side street and the square. A little boy missing his front teeth ran to fetch Maria Leonidovna, and she ran after him in her silent, girlish way, wearing whatever she happened to have on, ran into the tiny single-windowed building, picked up the receiver, and listened to Vassily Georgievich say that everything was fine, that he had received the money, seen Edouard, was eating with the Snezhinskys, would arrive on Saturday.
‘I have soldiers staying with me,’ she said, still out of breath from running. ‘I’ve given them Kiryusha’s room. And the annexe.’
‘Maybe I should come? You’re not afraid?’
‘Why should I be afraid? Goodbye.’
And in fact, at that minute, she thought that she wasn’t afraid in the least. In a way, it was even reassuring to have these polite, laconic men close at hand.
But at night she barely slept. She listened. From far away, in the dead of night, she caught the diffuse, persistent sound of a motorcycle. While the sound was on the far side of the woods, it was no more than a whisper, but as it got nearer it became louder and more focused, and then suddenly it was zooming down the lane and stopping at the house next door, where the sentry was posted. The motor was switched off, and then she could hear voices, steps. The gate banged. Someone was walking into the house, into her house, some stranger, and the old blind dog got up from its straw and went to sniff at his tracks in the gravel of the yard, growling. A light went on somewhere, she heard someone running through the house, through the annexe. Something clinked, a door slammed. Kiryusha was asleep close by, in the dining room, whose door she left open. These night sounds didn’t frighten her any more. What frightened her was everything that was going on in the world that night.
Sh
e wasn’t afraid of the quiet strangers either. They left the third night, leaving the doors and the gate wide open, leaving the village in trucks camouflaged with fresh branches. She wasn’t afraid of the sentries who came to see them or of the five hundred strong, half-sober soldiers quartered all over the village. She was afraid of the air, the warm June air, through which gunfire rolled across the horizon and submerged her, her house, and her garden, along with the summer clouds. And there was no question that this puff of wind, which was somehow just like time itself, would in the end bring something terrible and ruinous, such as death itself. Just as, looking at the calendar, no one doubted any longer that in five, ten or fifteen days something dreadful was going to happen, so, feeling that faint breeze on her face day and night, she could say with assurance that it would bring to these parts murder, occupation, devastation and darkness.
For the air, over the last few days, had been warm, clear and fragrant. Kiryusha worked in the garden, watering the flowers in front of the house every evening and looking after the neighbours’ ducklings. Maria Leonidovna, wearing a bright cotton print dress, and a scarf around her head, went to clean out the annexe, where she found a bag of cartridges which had been left behind and two unsealed letters, which she threw away without reading. There were cigarette butts in the cup by the washstand, and a charred newspaper lay on the floor. She made up Kiryusha’s bed in his room and when the woman from next door came over to do the housework, told her to wash all the floors in the house.
On the same day, towards evening, fugitives from Soissons arrived at the neighbours’: two fat, pale women, an old man, and some children. A mattress was laid out on the roof of their filthy car, and to the amazed questioning of the villagers the new arrivals explained that this was what everybody was doing now, that this was what would protect you from bullets. The old man was carried into the house by his hands and feet: he was unconscious.
Before night other fugitives arrived to stay in the sky-blue, toy-like house opposite the church. People said that some of the soldiers were still there, and were, spending the night at the other end of the village. There seemed to be a stranger who had come from far away by foot or by car hiding in every house for the night. There were no lights, all was dark, but voices could be heard everywhere from behind the shutters; the café was full of shouting and singing. Under the plane trees the old ladies, who had stayed longer than was normal, spoke in low voices.
Maria Leonidovna locked the front door, hung the curtains over the windows, cleared away the remains of supper, and as she always did, sat in the next room and talked with Kiryusha while he got ready for bed. From time to time he exclaimed happily:
‘I cleaned my teeth! I took off my left shoe!’
And if you didn’t know it was a nineteen-year-old man in there – who ate enormous meals, snored loudly in his sleep, and couldn’t read – you would think it was a ten-year-old boy going to bed and, for a joke, talking in a bass voice.
After she had turned out the light in the dining room and Kiryusha’s room and went to her own, she stood for a long time by the open window and looked out at where, in the daytime, she could see the road and the oat-fields. Tomorrow Vassily Georgievich was due to return. The idea was pleasant and consoling. But today Maria Leonidovna had barely given a thought to her husband; in fact she hadn’t stopped thinking about Mozart. Or rather, not about Mozart himself. Right now, as a new crescent moon appeared on the edge of this anxious but subdued night, her thoughts took on a special clarity. All day long, or rather, over the last few days and this evening, she had been asking herself the same question, and there was no answer to it: why was it that horror, cruelty, and affliction made themselves felt so easily, became concrete and weighed all the more heavily, whereas everything sublime, gentle, unexpected and full of charm cast a frail shadow across the heart and thoughts, so one couldn’t touch it or look at it closely or feel its shape and weight? ‘Except for love, of course,’ she thought, standing by the window. ‘Only love gives that kind of joy. But what about someone who doesn’t want to love any more, who can no longer love? I have no one to love; it’s too late for me. I have a husband, I don’t need anyone else.’
And all of a sudden she thought she heard the latch on the gate click, and she distinctly heard someone come into the yard, take two steps, and stop.
‘Who’s there?’ she asked quietly.
The darkness was not yet total, and the faint, blurred shadow of a man lay on the whitish gravel in the yard. The shadow moved and the gravel crunched. The man must have been able to see Maria Leonidovna clearly as she stood in the open window, to the right of the front door. The door, as Maria Leonidovna recalled, was locked. But the man, who was slowly and purposefully walking across the yard, made no response. She could hardly see him. He walked up the porch stairs, stopped three paces away from Maria Leonidovna, put out his hand, and the door opened. And when he had already walked into the house she wanted to scream. But, as in a dream, she was unable to produce any sound.
He was pale and thin, with a long nose and tangled hair. Everything he had on, from his boots to his hat, seemed to have been borrowed from someone else. His dusty hands were so slender and frail that he couldn’t have used them even if he had wanted to. His face was weary, youthful, but it wasn’t a boy’s face. She could tell that he looked younger than he was, but that in fact he could be over thirty.
‘Forgive me for frightening you,’ he said in French, but with a slight foreign accent. ‘Could I spend the night here somewhere?’
By the light of the lamp illuminating the spacious entryway Maria Leonidovna looked at him, standing silently and barely able to control herself. But the moment he uttered those first words and looked at her with his long, hesitant look, her fear passed, and she asked:
‘Who are you?’
But he dropped his eyes.
‘Where are you from?’
He shivered slightly, and his fingers clutched the upturned collar of his ample jacket, which might have been covering an otherwise naked body.
‘Oh, from far, far away … and I’m so tired. I’d like to lie down somewhere, if that’s all right.’
‘A fugitive,’ she decided, ‘and maybe he’s a Frenchman from some out-of-the-way province. Judging by his age, he could be a soldier; by his clothes, a fugitive? Maybe a spy?’
She led him to the annexe, thinking all the time that he might strike her from behind, but at the same time knowing he wouldn’t. By the time they had entered the bedroom, she had lost all fear of him. He didn’t even look around, but silently walked over to the bed, sat down on it, and closed his eyes. Between his shoe and trouser-leg she saw a thin, bare ankle.
‘Do you want to eat?’ she asked, closing the shutters on the low, folding windows from inside. ‘It’s the war, we’re not supposed to show any light on the outside.’
‘What did you say?’ he asked, shuddering a little.
‘I asked whether you’d like to eat something.’
‘No, thank you. I had a bite to eat in your local restaurant. They were all full up, though, and couldn’t give me a place to stay.’
She realised it was time she went.
‘Are you alone?’ she spoke again, rearranging something on the table as she passed.
‘What do you mean “alone”?’
‘I mean, did you come here – to the village – with friends or what?’
He raised his eyes.
‘I came alone, just as I am, without any luggage,’ he said smiling, but not revealing his teeth. ‘And I’m not a soldier, I’m a civilian. A musician.’
She took another look at his hands, said goodnight, and having shown him where to turn off the light, walked out of the room.
That time she gave two turns to the lock in the door and suddenly, feeling a strangely animal weariness, went straight to bed and fell asleep. In the morning, as always, she got up early. Kiryusha was already in the garden bawling out some song, and in the annexe all was quiet.
III
Just before lunch she wondered, anxiously, if something had happened: the shutters and door were still closed. ‘Can he still be asleep?’ she thought. At four o’clock Vassily Georgievich was due to arrive, and a little before then she went again to see whether her lodger was up. She half-opened the door to the tiny entryway, and then the door of the room. The man was sleeping, breathing evenly. He had not removed any of his clothes, not even his boots. He lay on his back on the wide mattress, the pillow on one side. Maria Leonidovna closed the door again.
Vassily Georgievich was late getting back; the train coming from Paris had stopped for a long time at some bridge. Sushkov had carried a large suitcase from the station to the house, practically a trunk, on his broad, strong shoulder. It was full of things gathered up from their Paris apartment without which Vassily Georgievich could not imagine either his own or his wife’s existence. There were his winter coat, Maria’s old squirrel coat, warm underwear which he always wore during the winter, an album of photographs of Prague (he had lived in Czechoslovakia for a long time), expensive binoculars in their case, a pound of dried figs, which he liked to keep in reserve, a handsomely bound edition of Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, and Maria Leonidovna’s ball gown, sewn for a charity ball the year before at which she had sold champagne. Maria Leonidovna was surprised to see warm underwear and heavy coats in June. But Sushkov assured her that they might be cut off from Paris or could be forced to escape, and then they wouldn’t know what was going to happen.
‘Escape from here? Yes, of course, we’ll have to escape if everyone else does. Those fugitives from Soissons are packing up their things again, and the old man is being carried out of the house to the car.’ She took up the newspaper her husband had brought but learned nothing from it. Vassily Georgievich spoke to her sensibly and gently. Sometimes he argued with himself, sometimes he told her what Snezhinsky and Freiberg thought about what was going on. And everything he said was accurate, fair, intelligent.