The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

“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 izb
a, 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…

  At the airport he easily exchanges his ticket. “The people who flew in for the celebrations are still here,” he is told. “The ones who chose not to come, on account of the celebrations, will be flying in tomorrow…” So he has come at the right moment, at a dead time, so to speak.

  In the plane he feels for the first time in his life as if he were going from nowhere to nowhere, or rather traveling without any real destination. And yet he has never felt his attachment to a native land more intensely. Except that the country in question is not a territory but an era: Volsky’s. That monstrous Soviet era, the only period Shutov has lived through in Russia. Yes, monstrous, murderous, shamed, and one during which, every day, a man looked up at the sky.

  On his return home he finds a letter from Léa, words that seem to be addressed to someone other than himself. She thanks him, tells him he can keep the two piles of books as she no longer needs them, and, for some reason, quotes Chekhov: in a short story one must cut the ending, which generally makes it too long. He realizes how much his abortive journey has changed him: he no longer comprehends these marks on paper in elegant feminine handwriting. Or rather he no longer comprehends the reasons for writing so many empty or false or hollow words. He can still manage to decode the little psychological games that lurk behind these sentences. An expression of thanks: Léa seeks to defuse the rancor of the man she has left. The books: a sentimental talisman, since she believes him to be a sentimental old man. The quotation from Chekhov: yes, let’s make a clean break and avoid any follow-up.

  All this can still be deciphered. But the life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in. It belongs only in the novels Léa has left behind in a corner of the room, little containers for verbal matter with no substance. “Pygmyism,” he used to call it. Yes, his existence in this dovecote was a game for dolls, one of those little novels that, year in year out, recount the miniature dramas of rather cynical, rather tedious ladies and gentlemen.

  He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible. As in the case of that man and woman separated by thousands of miles of ice, whose eyes met under lightly falling snow. As with that red-haired boy, standing there transfixed, his blind eyes turned toward the stars he has never seen.

  During the first few days following his trip, Shutov discovers, moment by moment, what absolutely must be told. Volsky, of course, but also that winter’s evening in a café, the Café de la Gare, the loneliness of an old man murmuring in a void.

  On arrival he had retrieved a parcel from his mailbox: a book whose title was known to him. After Her Life. He remembered that woman walking along a narrow corridor, removing her makeup with a tissue, looking as if she were wiping away tears.

  After her life. “It’s what I shall live from now on,” he tells himself.

  He has a surprise, too: one evening he rereads that story by Chekhov in which two chaste lovers toboggan together on a big sled, bonded by a murmured declaration of love. He discovers that his memory had greatly modified the plot. For in Chekhov the two lovers do not repeat their ride down a snow-covered slope. In later years the man encounters his former girlfriend and wonders on what whim he had long ago whispered, “I love you, Nadenka.” The story is called “A Little Joke,” a prank. In Russian, shutochka, the same derivation as the name Shutov… He pictures Chekhov, settled in a snow-covered dacha or in sunny Capri, pen in hand, with a vague, gentle smile, his eyes slightly myopic, as he observes these two characters, seated on their toboggan, coming to life on the page… The violent feeling suddenly overcomes Shutov that he will never be a part of the Russian world that is now being reborn within his native land. (“So much the better!” he says to himself.) He will remain to the end in an increasingly despised and, indeed, increasingly unknown, past. A period he knows to be indefensible, yet one in which some beings lived who must, at all costs, be rescued from oblivion.

  He returns to Russia in mid-September. The home to which Volsky had been sent is located not far from Vyborg, about a hundred miles north of Saint Petersburg. Shutov had learned of the old man’s death while he was still in France, in a telephone conversation with the establishment’s head doctor.

  This “home for the elderly” (as it is officially designated) is not the poorhouse he had pictured. Simply, everything there is from another era: the inmates, the staff, the building itself. “The Soviet era,” thinks Shutov, and realizes it may well be the wretched vestiges of those days that enable the old people to have the illusion of not being totally rejected. They die amid a decor they have known during their lifetimes.

  What amazes him more is the graveyard. Especially the number of tombs on which the only inscription is either “u.w.” or “u.m.” “‘Unknown woman,’ ‘unknown man,’” the attendant explains. “They’re sometimes brought to the home in such a state that they’re no longer capable of speech. And there are old people who die in the street, too. Who knows where they’ve come from…”

  The graveyard is small, next to an empty church. By climbing onto the front steps overgrown with wild plants, one can make out the dull gray of the Gulf of Finland… That evening Shutov spends a long while walking among the stone slabs covered with golden leaves, reading strange, ancient Christian names. Then he sits down on the steps. This fresh journey of his into Russia, he thinks, is precisely the final section Chekhov recommended cutting in a short story. Which is where the frontier lies between an elegant plunge into fine prose and the rough, patient prose of our lives.

  What is most troubling is still this way of summing up a human existence: “u.w.,” “u.m.” He has made arrangements with a workman to come next day and erect a stone over Volsky’s grave bearing his complete name, the date of his birth, and that of his death. It had to be done, Shutov reflects (“the final section”…), but, nevertheless, will this inscription tell people any more than the notation “unknown man”? Perhaps even less.

 
; He gets up, moves toward the exit, and suddenly stops. What must be written about is just this: the “unknown women” and “unknown men” who loved one another and whose words have remained unvoiced.

  Walking along the road that leads toward the home he catches sight of the faintly misty line of the Gulf of Finland.

  He has never seen so much of the sky in a single glance before.

  ANDREÏ MAKINE was born in Siberia in 1957, and has lived in France since 1987. His fourth novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Le testament français), won both of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis. His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

  GEOFFREY STRACHAN was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translation of Le testament français in 1998. He has translated all of Andreï Makine’s novels for publication in Britain and the United States.

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