The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  Volsky remained pinned to the ground low down on the shore, close to the menacing procession of disintegrating ice floes. His chest crushed, his legs caught in the tangle of tree trunks, he could neither cry out nor move. When he regained consciousness night had fallen and he guessed that the search, if there had been one, had not been very thorough. A prisoner’s life was worth nothing and nobody wanted to lose his own by venturing into a chaotic mass of logs that threatened to subside and slide into the river at any moment. They must have reckoned that he had drowned.

  All that was left of his voice was a hissing whisper, all he could move was his hands, which explored his wooden tomb in the darkness. Through the crisscrossed cedar logs he could see a triangle of stars.

  The pain reached what he thought would prove to be a fatal threshold, then it subsided, or rather he became used to this threshold. His thirst became more cruel than the pain and only let up during those moments when his gaze escaped between the tree trunks into the sky. Then his mind cleared, and as there was no longer anyone to convince, not even himself, the simplicity of what he understood was conclusive.

  He understood that in all he had lived through the only thing that was true was the sky, looked at on the same day, perhaps at the same moment, by two beings who loved one another. Everything else was more or less irrelevant. Among the prisoners he had met murderers without remorse and innocent people who spent their time reproaching themselves. Cowards, lapsed heroes, the suicidal. Sybarites sentenced to twenty years who dreamed of meals a woman would cook for them when they left the camp. Gentle people, sadists, crooks, righters of wrongs. Thinkers who perceived this place of labor and death as the result of a humanistic theory badly applied. An Orthodox priest who averred that suffering was given by God so that man should expiate, better himself.

  All this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner’s battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the intermission at the Opera House (he remembered Rigoletto) a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes that she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, sections of tires into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not keep her from drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquillity but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf…

  At moments the pain grew sharper, only leaving him with a vague awareness: it was his thirst that made him picture the prisoner with his cup of tea, the woman imbibing her cold sparkling wine from a tall glass. So, it was all even less significant.

  The water was close, a powerful current just beside his crushed body, and also ice, in little stalactites beneath the tree trunks. He reached out his hand, the effort increased the pain, he lost consciousness.

  At the beginning of the second day the snow began to swirl around in great lazy flakes. Volsky felt the coolness of the crystals on his parched lips. And once more pictured a field in winter, a woman looking up into a white flurry.

  He knew he had few hours to live and the conciseness of his thinking seemed to take account of this limited time. The words of the priest came back to him: the sufferings God inflicts so that man may expiate, purify himself… The smile this brought cracked his dried lips. If that were the case, so many men should be infinitely pure. In the camp. In the country ravaged by war. And, indeed, by the purges! After everything these people had endured they should have been as shining as saints! And yet, after ten years of suffering, a prisoner could still kill for an extra slice of bread. God… Volsky remembered the buckles on the shoulder belts worn by the German soldiers. Gott mit uns, “God is with us,” was embossed on the metal. These soldiers had also suffered. So…

  He looked up: night was beginning to fall and in the tangle of tree trunks above his head there shone a pale, ashen cluster of stars. A woman saw it at that moment and knew that he, too, was looking at the sky… He grasped that even God no longer had any importance from the moment when those two pairs of eyes existed. Or, at least, not this god of human beings, this lover of suffering and belts.

  The thirst torturing him became something else—the burning desire to tell the woman that nothing had any meaning without these moments looking at the sky.

  In the night, or else it was the darkness of his lost consciousness, he heard a very faint voice: somebody was singing but occasionally forgetting the words, and so had to be prompted.

  They had found Volsky thanks to these few snatches of song, explained the men who had heard him. Engineers, who had come with their explosives to blow up the fortress wall of tree trunks soldered together by the ice.

  The singing that had welled up within him became another life, unconnected to the passing of the days. The world’s bustle seemed to him even more feverish and devoid of sense. From his bed in the camp’s sick bay he could see the ice floes hurtling along, revolving and disintegrating in the river. Daylight and darkness rushed by, speeded up. The prisoners assembled for roll call, went off to work, returned. And even when the guards, on a whim, made them wait for long hours in the rain, this torment expressed nothing more than a ludicrous eagerness to do harm, to demonstrate their power as petty torturers. He soon found himself back in the ranks, upright on legs covered in bruises. In the old days his anger would have flared up at the guards’ gratuitous cruelty. Now all he perceived was a vortex of wills, desires, base deeds. He thirsted to tell these men what he had understood in his tomb of timber and ice, and this urge remained intact. But the necessary words belonged to a language he had never yet spoken. Hidden among the ranks of the prisoners who cursed their tormentors, he would raise his eyes and slip away into the life he had imagined.

  When he was released it seemed to make no difference to this other life. The truck taking him drove out through the entrance (“Forward to the Victory of Communist Labor!” was inscribed above the iron gates) and the camp vanished behind a hill turned russet by the autumn. “Just a turn of the steering wheel,” thought Volsky, “and a whole planet is swept away, like a fragment of ice in a river.” A terrifying planet of misery, cruelty, hope, prayers, and, suddenly, nothing: a road gleaming with rain, this sparse northern vegetation, waiting for winter.

  He dwelt in a world where it was all one to him. Found work at a railroad marshaling yard, lodged nearby, in a room whose windows looked out on the tracks. People saw him as halfway between a not very bright worker and an ex-prisoner eager for his past to be forgotten. Sometimes they must even have thought him a bit soft in the head. He would be observed alone, among the snow-dusted tracks, his head thrown back, scanning a perfectly empty sky with half-closed eyes.

  After months of research, Volsky learned that Mila had been given a sentence that she was serving somewhere in a camp. But where? And what sentence? “Ten years of hard labor,” replied a former employee at the Blockade Museum, with whom he had managed to establish contact. Ten years. He did the sums, saw opening up within him an abyss of five years’ wait, was not plunged into despair. He knew that every day Mila’s gaze joined him in the increasingly wintry sky and that at such moments time did not exist.

  … Twenty or thirty years later Volsky would read accounts written by former prisoners. Some spoke of how their lives were destroyed, others told how they managed to resume “normal life.” He would then reflect that, while his own life had remained intact, it was the world that, little by little, faded away.

  He did not have to wait five years. Two and a half years late
r Stalin died and in the human tide pouring out through the gates of the camps Volsky was sure he would find Mila again.

  One evening in April he was walking beside the railroad track on his return from work and from a long way off saw a woman seated on a little bench beneath the windows of the building where he lived. He slowed his pace, hearing dull, heavy drumbeats pounding in his brain. The woman’s hair was white and her face, seen in profile, lined with deep wrinkles. “More than seven years in a camp…,” he thought, and felt himself bowed down beneath a weight pressing him toward the earth. Mila’s face, aged, was a final ordeal for him, possibly the hardest. And yet this culminating blow, struck by a god who delights in causing suffering, seemed to him petty and futile. Nothing could harm a life that would be reborn beneath the sky where for so many years their eyes had met.

  His urge to say this was so acute that he broke into a run.

  The woman turned. It was not Mila! A much older woman, who had been arrested with her, who had promised Mila she would find him. What she had to say amounted to a few words. “Ten years in a camp without the right to correspondence,” such was the official sentence. Few people knew that this “without the right to correspondence” signified that the condemned person was shot following the verdict. Sometimes letters from family members continued to arrive throughout those ten years of waiting…

  Volsky remained sitting down, his eyes fixed upon the silhouette of the woman as she walked away, jolting from one tie to the next. He should have detained this freed prisoner, asked her questions, offered her tea, given her shelter… He would have done so but the world, already scarcely real, had vanished. There was nothing but these rails disappearing into the dusk, this elderly woman, walking away into the void, the words she had spoken, the last words that concerned him. An empty world.

  He got up, looked at the sky. And sensed on his lips the emergence of a voice that would reach Mila. His lungs dilated. But instead of a cry, what came out was a long whisper tormented by a thirst. A terrible craving. One that came from not knowing how, with words, to bring the one he loved back to life.

  V

  The same thirst…,” thinks Shutov as he watches the old man taking long drafts of cold tea.

  “Forgive me, I’ve grown unused to talking.” Volsky smiles, sets the cup down on the bedside table again. They are silent, not knowing how to conclude this nocturnal recital. To say good-bye, part, go to bed? Shutov understands that he has just entered a world where one cannot lie, not by word or gesture. He stares into the blackness outside the window: a brief period of dark at the heart of a northern summer night. On the silent television screen the procession of heads of state can be seen entering a banquet hall…

  The old man has been speaking for barely an hour. His youth, the dead city in the blockade, the war, the camp. And the wild cherry blossoms fluttering down on a spring evening long ago.

  His account has been restricted by a fear of relating facts too familiar, of repeating himself. On several occasions he has observed, “All this is well known now.” It was as if he were afraid of placing his own story beside the epic narratives that have exhausted the subject. “Not everyone had my luck, you know.” Not everyone, no, those who died of hunger during the blockade, those who were killed in battle, those who froze to death in the ice of the camps.

  Shutov looks away, the words he could utter seem so pointless. On the screen an aerial view of London, a documentary about the new Russian elite, the title: Moscow on Thames…

  “There’s nothing exceptional about my case,” the old man had also remarked. Shutov thinks about this: it is true, even in his youth he has heard tell of these broken lives. Millions of souls lacerated by the barbed wire. The camps occupied one-twentieth of the vast expanse of the Soviet Union, ten times the area of Great Britain, whose green pastures are just now gliding by on the screen. To disappear into this void was not a rare fate, old Volsky is right.

  A voice within Shutov rebels: but no, the life story that has just been confided to him is unique and incomparable… He pictures a woman amid the huts surrounded by watchtowers and a man in a line of prisoners. They both look up, observe the slow-moving clouds, feel the cold kiss of snowflakes on their brows. They are thousands of miles apart. And very close to one another, as close as the mist from their breathing.

  Shutov knows what he should ask Volsky now: and after that, did he ever again seek to meet up in the sky with the eyes of the one he loved?

  He hesitates, stammers, “And after that?…” As if he wanted to know how the story ended, as if the presence of the old man in this little room were not already an ending.

  Volsky takes another drink, then, in a voice much less tense, murmurs: “Afterward… I hardly spoke anymore and people began to believe I was dumb. It was as if I were dead, or at least absent from their world.”

  This absence was made up of frozen dusks in a small Siberian town, the place where his life had run aground. Of work that reminded him of his labor as a prisoner. Of alcohol, the only means of escape for him, as for so many others. He remained silent, knowing now that one could live very well without words and that all people needed from him was his strength, his resignation, yes, precisely that, his absence.

  There was only one day when he broke his silence. He was working in a machine shop where they repaired the side panels of railway carriages, the foreman swore at him, called him a filthy jailbird. Volsky hit out and muttered at the man, as he lay there on the ground, “Choose your weapon, sir!”

  The officer in the militia who interrogated him was young, very self-assured. Volsky noticed at once that he resembled the investigating officer who had sent him to the camp. The same fair hair, the same uniform too big for a puny body. There was also a little low window that looked out onto a snowy street…

  Volsky stopped answering, dazzled by a truth that suddenly threw light on this world, whose obtuse cruelty he had sought to understand. So this was it: a perpetual vortex, a circle dance with recurring roles, similar faces, always parallel circumstances. And always the same will to deny that which is truest, most profound in man. Snow, a woman looking up at the sky…

  “According to the foreman,” the officer was saying, “you made anti-Soviet statements while causing him bodily harm…”

  Staring at this young face, animated by fierce scowls, Volsky smiled and remained silent. The world that had just revealed its insane governing principle no longer interested him. “A mad merry-go-round,” he thought. “The same faces, the same wooden animals revolving faster and faster.” A few years after the war with its millions of dead they were already testing a new bomb (he had read about it in a newspaper) that would be able to kill even more people. Three years after Stalin’s death they were explaining that everyone he had massacred had been annihilated by mistake, thanks to a simple doctrinal distortion. And now there was this little blond officer, getting heated, yelling, thumping his fist on the table, no doubt about to strike the prisoner sitting in front of him. “And then this blond fellow’s nose will start bleeding. And I’ll advise him to pick up a handful of snow. He’ll do this. And we’ll have a brief, humane interlude…”

  Volsky realized he had been saying all this aloud and the officer was listening to him, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “You’ll see. A handful of snow and the bleeding will stop…” He was then overtaken by a violent outburst of laughter, almost painful, for his wrists, tied behind his back, wrenched his shoulder at each guffaw. “It’s a nightmare circus! A great nightmare circus!” he exclaimed, amazed to find that this simple phrase summed up the madness of the world so well.

  He spent a little less than a year in a mental hospital. As he was silent, the staff regarded him as a good patient, a shadow, an absence. Despite its wretched, dilapidated state, the place did not seem sinister to him. And the patients there merely echoed the fevers and obsessions of the outside world, as if in a strange mental magnifying glass. One man, so thin his face was almost blue, spent his time hiding b
ehind the screen of his raised hands, a droll shield to protect him against the torturers coming from his past. Others converted their beds into snail shells that they rarely left, their heads hunched between their shoulders. A former theater director was perpetually accusing and defending himself, playing the roles both of investigating magistrate and prisoner. One old man spent his days observing the glistening drops of water falling from the roof when the ice melted. His face was radiant. There was also a man in perfect mental health, an elderly Lithuanian with whom Volsky made friends. This man had chosen to take refuge here to escape from the purges. He told the story of his life very calmly, described the places where he had lived. But whenever Volsky tried to explain to him that Stalin was dead and it was now possible to leave the asylum the Lithuanian became suspicious and asked him in a hoarse voice: “Why are you lying to me? I know perfectly well he will never die!”

  Madmen, yes, Volsky said to himself. Then thought back to what he had lived through during the blockade, in the war and in the camp. And the madness of the patients seemed a good deal more reasonable than the society that had locked them up.

  The doctor in charge of the annual inspection turned out to be a native of Leningrad. Volsky talked with him for a long time: a whole litany of streets, canals, theaters, memories of a city neither of them had seen for years. “Hold on to something concrete,” he advised Volsky, as he signed the authorization for his discharge. “But above all, think up a project, a dream. Dream of returning to Leningrad one day, for example.”

  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.