Requiem for a Lost Empire

by Andrei Makine

  He leaned on the plow, lifting the plowshare, and urged the horse on. Goldfish nervously seized one of the reins.

  "No, wait, you can go on plowing. Today…" he stammered and turned to seek the inspector's approval. Nikolai pretended to be outraged.

  "How can I go on plowing? With a horse that's no longer mine? Do you take me for a thief? No, if it's decided, it's decided. I'll take it to the kolkhoz, I'll hand over the plow. Handed over, received, signed. This afternoon I'll bring the cart as well. Here, take the ax, for a start!"

  Nikolai knew that the yard in front of the House of the Soviet was piled high with confiscated farm carts, furniture, piles of crockery. The rooms inside resembled the store for a great village bazaar. Goldfish stretched out his hand to take the ax, but withdrew it at once, as if to avoid a trap. The inspector had come to Dolshanka to see how, without losing face, they could calm down this mania for expropriation. It was he who resolved matters.

  "Here's what we're going to do. I see, comrade, that you take the welfare of the kolkhoz to heart. A good deal more than some others" (he gave Goldfish a stern look). "I'm going to propose your candidature for the post of head of the collective stable. As for the blacksmith, I have a couple of words to say to Comrade Batum."

  Nikolai resumed his work, plowing a furrow over the footsteps of the retreating activists. Goldfish and Batum were trying to convince the inspector, waving their arms and beating their chests.

  Nikolai looked up toward the rim of the plain and saw Anna. She was walking slowly away beside the trees in the main street.

  Next day, with the blacksmith released, they shod the horse. The peasants were returning from the House of the Soviet, their arms piled high with recovered crockery and tools. That night a long convoy, coming from neighboring villages, passed under their windows: a long spluttering of weary sobs, punctuated by the rumble of wheels and the clatter of horses. Whole families who would never be seen again.

  Watching his son living and growing, Nikolai lost the habit of going back in his mind to the earlier world. For Pavel was happy. He marched along in the middle of a troop of children his age, sang songs in celebration of the brave revolutionaries, and even came home from school one day with a photo: his class, two rows standing and one sitting down, with the bugler and drummer on one knee in front of them, all proud to be wearing the red scarves of the pioneers, and behind them, on a broad strip of calico, these words painted in white letters: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!" Talking to his son, Nikolai realized that there was some truth in this stupid inscription. The boy really believed that the Red Army was the finest and strongest in the world, that the workers of all countries aspired only to live like the people of Dolshanka, and that somewhere in Moscow there existed that mysterious Kremlin, surmounted with red stars, where the being dwelt who spent his days and nights thinking about every inhabitant of their immense country, who always made wise and just decisions, and unmasked enemies. Pavel also knew that his father was a hero, for he had fought against the Whites, those same Whites who had mutilated his mother. He detested the kulaks and, echoing the stories from his manuals, called them "bloodsuckers." One day, when leafing through his son's history book, Nikolai came upon the portrait of an army leader whom he had encountered during the civil war. The soldier's face had been carefully crossed out in ink. He had just been declared an "enemy of the people." Across the whole country, Nikolai reflected, in thousands and thousands of schools, millions of pupils were picking up their pens and, after a brief explanation from the teacher, blotting out these eyes, that brow, that mustache with waxed ends.

  At such moments he longed to talk to his son about that earlier world, of his own youth before the war, before the revolution. All you had to do, he thought, was to make a subtraction, yes, subtract the present from the past and tell the difference in happiness, in liberty, in the lack of worries that the past contained. The arithmetic seemed so easy, but each time he tried to relive the old days the difference became blurred. For before the revolution there had also been a war, that of 1914 (and the bolsheviks had had no hand in that), carts piled high with the wounded and he a mere youth, on a field covered in corpses, weeping with pain, his horse killed and he unable to withdraw his leg, crushed beneath it. And at Dolshanka, long before the Bolsheviks arrived, the days were as rough and long as plowing, as tough as thick tree trunks beneath the saw, and tasted of hard-earned bread. So all that was left of the happiness of times gone by was just a few dawns, that cool wellspring in the hollow of a little valley on a day of harvesting in the blazing heat of summer, that road in the last snowstorm. As now. As always.

  Not knowing whether to rejoice or to be desolate that these moments of happiness, though recurring, were so rare, Nikolai recalled that night beside a river, already long ago, Anna sleeping by the fire, the unique joy with which that instant was filled. In what time could he locate that night? The war, his escape, the country whose name and borders were still provisional, himself the enemy of both Reds and Whites, a woman whose name and life history were unknown to him. She, barely surviving death, the night scattering its stars over the river, the fire, the silence. All his happiness derived from that alone.

  One day he tried to explain the earlier life to his son. And even thought he had found the words he needed. He spoke of the czar, of old Count Dolshansky, of the revolution. It was a warm, still October day. The fields were already bare, the riverbank where they sat was carpeted with long, yellowing grasses. Noticing the flight of wild geese in the sky, Nikolai realized that for several minutes now the boy had not been listening to him. The birds were reflected in the river's smooth flow and Pavel was following their reflection, which seemed to be traveling upstream, amid long willow boughs and some stranded boats. Nikolai fell silent, looked where his son was looking and smiled: this limpid gliding of the wings over the water was more beautiful than the flight itself

  After the famous spring of the confiscated needles there were two years of famine, a hundred dead in Dolshanka, several arrests. The disgust Nikolai had experienced that day at the sight of the telegraph machine became so familiar that he no longer noticed it. Everyone knew that the famine had been organized. But in order not to lose your reason, to survive in the midst of this madness, it was best not to think about it, it was better to concentrate on the straightness and depth of the furrow.

  Besides, even during those years, they could still wake up in the middle of a beautiful October day with a flight of birds above the river. Or again on that day of great frost: coming home, Nikolai saw Anna beside the window, one hand on the cradle of their second child and the other holding a book. He went up to her, sat beside her, quite numb from the icy wind, glanced at the pages. It was a foreign book, Anna was looking only at the pictures, of men and women in ample old-fashioned clothes, of unknown cities. In the houses in the village one still came across these volumes from the scattered library of Count Dolshansky, and since people could not read them they used them for stoking up the fire or rolling a cigarette. "Now that, even if you asked me, I couldn't teach you!" he said, laughing, running his finger along the enigmatic letters. Anna smiled, but in a slightly distant way, as if she were trying to call to mind a forgotten word. There was infinite calm in their izba at that moment. The child was asleep, the fire hissed softly in the stove, the window, all covered in ice, blazed with the thousand scarlet granules of a sinking sun. This brilliance, this silence were enough for life. Everything else was a bad dream. Speeches, hate-filled voices talking about happiness. Fear of not being hard enough, not showing yourself to be happy enough, hate-filled enough toward all the enemies, fear, fear, fear. While all life needed was these minutes of a winter sunset, in a room protected by this woman's silence as she leaned over the sleeping child.

  As in a bad dream, changes came, hard on one another's heels, contradicting one another, defying comprehension. One summer night Batum died in a hayloft at the center of a blaze started by his cigarette butt. H
is mistress escaped. He, being too drunk, was enmeshed in the bundles of hay. How could you comprehend that? This man, who had driven so many people to their deaths, had perished in the manner of a simple village drunk such as almost inspired pity. It was beyond the kolkhozniks' comprehension. Goldfish got married in the district capital and remained there with his wife, a woman with an enormous bosom who stood a whole head taller than her husband. This mass of flesh seemed to have engulfed the red-haired revolutionary, along with his volatile temper and all his grudges. You could see them together: he looked like a placid little official carrying crackers and a bottle of milk in a shopping bag. The inhabitants of Dolshanka shrugged their shoulders. Comrade Krassny's career within the Party apparatus was meteoric. His name, preceded by his latest title, appeared in the town newspaper on several occasions-and on the last of these without a title but with a qualifying phrase that had become current: "Unmasked traitor, lickspittle of the bourgeoisie, spy in the pay of the imperialists." Those who had known him at Dolshanka wondered why it had taken more than ten years to "unmask" him. But there was already a whole younger generation in the village to whom in this year of 1936, the names of those activists from the Twenties meant nothing.

  Thinking about these young people, Nikolai took note of the solidity of the new world. Little by little the revolution was casting aside the revolutionaries and life was reverting to essentials, land and bread. Gutov, the blacksmith, passed on his anvil to his son and was elected president of the kolkhoz. He was already a member of the Party and had drawn Nikolai into it, saying, "You need to join, neighbor, otherwise they're going to dredge up another Goldfish for us." For a long time now the portrait of Stalin in every house had become almost invisible in its conspicuousness, as familiar as an icon used to be in the old days. Nikolai had great faith in the endurance of the snows, the rains, the winds, in the constancy of the fields, in the blissful routine of days that would set everything to rights. And when the heads began to roll again in Moscow he thought of the vast stretch of plains, forests, snows that lay between them and the capital. With the hope of a weary man, he was eager to convince himself at any price.

  In spring when the work was at its height, the president of the kolkhoz was arrested. They spent several nights without going to bed, watching at the window: Nikolai, Anna, Pavel (who had come home from the town for a week's holiday), and Sasha. Above all, they did not want to be surprised when they were asleep and find themselves in the black car only half-dressed, like so many people taken for questioning. No one spoke and Nikolai was glad he had not succeeded in explaining to his son the difference between their current lives and life in the old days. Now the young man could judge for himself.

  The car arrived very early in the morning. Anna woke Nikolai who had fallen asleep sitting on a chair. They took him immediately. He just had time, as if gulping a rapid mouthful, to take note of what he was leaving behind: their faces, the hesitant wave of a hand, the light of a lamp on the table.

  At the town, even before the start of the interrogation the examining magistrate declared that the president of the kolkhoz had told them "everything, absolutely everything," that their conspiracy had been "unmasked," and that it was in his own interest for him to confess the facts. The questions came hurtling at him but during the first few minutes Nikolai heard them as if through a wall: the former blacksmith's treachery had hit a raw nerve in him, found a vulnerable spot he had not been aware of. Then he thought about the tortures that could extract all kinds of calumny, grew calmer, and resolved to defend himself right to the end.

  Listening to the magistrate, he realized that this man knew nothing about him, had not even the vaguest conception of where Dolshanka was or how its inhabitants lived and, in fact, had no file on him of any kind, just a dozen sheets of paper that needed to be substantiated by the accused's replies, so as to make a guilty man of him as quickly as possible. That night, in the cell, where two-thirds of the prisoners remained upright for lack of benches, Nikolai talked to an old man, who from time to time gave up to him his place by the wall, against which everyone was eager to lean. The old man was due to return to the camp for the second time, having already spent six years there. It was he who explained to Nikolai that the number of people found guilty was subject to planning, just like the tons of the harvest. And as the forecasts in the plan always had to be surpassed… They talked until morning. Before being taken for interrogation Nikolai learned that the old man was three years younger than himself. An old man of thirty-nine.

  The judge was counting on settling the matter in an hour. After several questions, he announced the main charge, which the evidence given by the president of the kolkhoz made irrefutable: Nikolai had written scurrilous satires that his wife read out to the members of the kolkhoz, thus disseminating counter-revolutionary propaganda.

  Nikolai managed not to betray his feelings. Calmly he explained why what was imputed to his wife was impossible. In the magistrate's eyes he thought he could see flitting past all the variations that would have made it possible to circumvent this line of reasoning. You could accuse Anna of an attempt on Stalin's life, of wanting to set fire to the Kremlin or poison the Volga. But you could not accuse her of speaking. "I shall send the doctor tomorrow for an expert opinion," barked the magistrate and he called the guard.

  The doctor spent scarcely a minute in their house. When he took his leave he apologized, heaving a sigh and raising his eyes to heaven. It was Sasha who described the scene to him when Nikolai was finally freed.

  Returning home after a week's absence, he paused beside the locked door of the smithy. Thanks to nights spent among prisoners packed close together, he could imagine what a man like Gutov must have experienced who had spent several months in those overflowing cells. He made an effort not to imagine the torture. And the nights following the torture, with his mouth filled with blood, his nails torn off. Gutov must have lived through that and in the course of one night, through the suffocating mists of pain, invented this accusation which would save those he denounced: Anna talked to the kol-khozniks. Continuing on his way, Nikolai noticed that beside the izba of the smithy the first grasses and flowers were already thrusting up in bright fresh tufts, as happened every spring.

  With superstitious confidence, he allowed himself to believe that life had finally triumphed. And that Gutov's death, especially such a death, was a sufficient sacrifice. And that he and Anna had now paid their dues to the unexpected guest. All the books Anna had gradually accumulated in their house were in agreement about this ultimate justice: well-earned happiness, paid for by trials and suffering.

  When, less than a year later, he found himself at the bedside where Anna lay dying, he had a momentary belief that he could understand everything, right to the end: life was no more complicated than the simpleton he had one day encountered in the neighboring village. A woman seated at the crossroads with her legs wide apart, very pale eyes that looked through you without seeing you, lips that babbled happily of "planting three sabers under every window of every izba," and hands that ceaselessly shuffled a little pile of fragments of glass, pebbles, tiny worn coins in the folds of her dress.

  He shook himself, so as not to let himself be carried away toward this grinning folly. And saw Anna's gesture. She was offering him a little gray envelope. He took it, guessed he should not open it until the time came, and, hearing a noise, went to greet the doctor. In the doorway he passed Sasha coming in with a flask of water. Everything was repeating itself, as some months before, but in a different order: the doctor, silence, the proximity of death. Like the little fragments of glass juggled in the simpleton's blind hand.

  Three days previously Anna had been returning from the district capital, walking along beside the river on ground that vibrated, awakened by the break-up of the ice, by the sounds of the thaw. The sunlight, the creaking collisions of ice floes, and the wild chill of the liberated waters were mingled together in a joyful giddiness. The people Anna passed had dazed looks, c
onfused smiles, as if they had been caught drunk in broad daylight. When she went up to the old wooden bridge at the end of the village she thought for a second she must be drunk herself: the bridge no longer straddled the river but reared up, turned in the direction of the current. It must only just have been torn loose, for the children running between its handrails had not yet noticed anything, fascinated by the frenzied whirling of the ice blocks, and their crashing against the pillars. If she had been able to call to them she could have stopped them going to the end of the bridge. But all she could do was hasten her step, then run, then make her way down the frozen slope of the riverbank. Like beads on a broken necklace the children had slipped down into a gulf of black water. The rescue should have been a noisy one, attracting lots of people, but on the deserted riverbank in the sunshine there was just the sound of a little whimpering and the crunching of broken ice. Anna dove into the water, feeling with her hands for the little bodies that had just disappeared. She struggled against each second of cold, first pushed the children up onto the riverbank, then dragged them toward the nearest izba, undressed them, rubbed them down. Her own body was ice and, an hour later, fire.

  It was only a month after the funeral that Nikolai found the forgotten envelope almost by chance. Elegant handwriting that he did not recognize and which had no connection with the capital letters he had taught Anna stared up at him. And yet it was indeed a letter from his wife. She told him her real name, the name of her father, the great landowner whose estate used to border on the lands belonging to Dolshansky, a distant relative of their family. She did not want to take the lie to the grave with her. She thanked him for having saved her life, for having taught her life. Nikolai spent several days getting used, not to Anna's absence, but to her new presence in the years they had lived together and in the years before. He had to picture Anna as a young girl who had lived in St. Petersburg, went on long journeys abroad, and whom nothing had prepared for meeting him and living in an izba at Dolshanka. Sasha had told him what the letter had not time to tell.