A Hero's Daughter

by Andrei Makine

  The Demidovs’ daughter, Olya, was growing up and going to school. She already knew the ancient story of the little mirror. To her it seemed legendary and alarming — her father lying in a frozen field, his head all bloody; her mother, whom she could not manage even to picture, choosing him from among hundreds of soldiers lying all around. She knew that once upon a time there had been a battle, for which he had re ceived his Star — thanks to which he could buy train tickets without having to stand in line.

  They had also told her about her mother’s injury which meant she was not supposed to carry heavy loads. But this did not stop her mother from lugging heavy wooden panels around, and Olya’s father used to scold her for her lack of concern.

  When Olya took her entrance exams for the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages she experienced the reality of this legendary wartime past in a quite specific way. The friend with whom she had come to Moscow said to her with ill-concealed jealousy: “You’re bound to pass, of course. They’ll take you just because of your civil status. It’s a foregone conclusion. You’re the daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union….”

  2

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1980 Moscow was unrecognizable. People who lived in the rest of the country were not allowed into the capital. Most of the children were sent off to Pioneer camps. Long before the summer a serious purge had been carried out, in which all “antisocial elements” had been expelled. There was no sign now of lines in the shops, nor of jostling on the buses, nor of the glum throng of people from the provinces coming in with their big bags to do their shopping.

  The cupolas of ancient churches had been hastily whitewashed, and members of the militia had been taught to smile and say a few words in English.

  And the Moscow Olympic Games began. Everywhere buses could be seen coming and going, carrying the athletes to the events, while foreign tourists idly called out to one another in the deserted streets, busying themselves with guides and interpreters.

  From this summer, from these games, from this influx of foreigners, everyone expected something extraordinary, a breath of fresh air, some kind of upheaval, almost a revolution. For the space of a few weeks Brezhnev’s Moscow, like a vast, spongy slab of floating ice at the time of the spring floods, nestled up to this colorful Western life, grinding its gray sides against it, and then drifted off bombastically on its way. The revolution did not take place.

  Olya Demidova was totally caught up in this Olympic bustle, allowing herself to fall into a frenzy of happy exhilaration. She had completed her third year at the Institute and had reached that stage in English and French where you are suddenly seized with an irresistible desire to converse. She already spoke with the hesitant freedom of a child who is just learning to run and enjoying the ability to keep her balance.

  The interpreters hardly slept now. But their youth and their feverish excitement kept them on their feet. It was such fun in the morning to leap onto the platform of a bus, to see the athletes’ young faces, to respond to their jokes and then go flying through Moscow’s resonant streets. In the evening the atmosphere was quite different. Inside the bus, heated up during the day by the burning sun, there hovered the acrid smell of Western deodorants and muscular male bodies exhausted by their efforts. The streets slipped past and the cool evening twilight swept in at the windows of the bus. The men, slumped in their seats, exchanged idle remarks.

  Sitting next to the driver on a seat that swiveled round, Olya glanced at them from time to time. They made her think of gladiators, resting after the fight.

  One of them, Jean-Claude, a typically Mediterranean young man (she was working with a French team), sat there with his head thrown back and his eyes half closed. She guessed he was watching her through lowered eyelids. He smiled as he watched her, and when the coach stopped at the Olympic Village he was the last to get off. Olya stood beside the bus door, taking leave of the athletes and wishing each of them a good night. Jean-Claude shook her hand and remarked carelessly, but loud enough for this to be heard by the keeper who escorted them: “I’ve got something that needs translating. Could you help me? It’s urgent.”

  Olya found herself in his room, surrounded by all those beautiful coveted objects that for her symbolized the Western world. She understood at once that the translation was only a pretext and that something was going to happen which, only a short time before, had still seemed unthinkable. To quell her fear she repeated like an incantation: “I couldn’t care less. It’s all the same to me. If it happens, it happens….”

  When Jean-Claude came out of the shower she was already in bed. Stark naked and swathed in a pungent cloud of eau de cologne, he crossed the room in darkness, and tossed a sports shirt or a terry towel onto the edge of the balustrade. Then he stopped before a tall, dark mirror and, as if lost in thought, ran his fingers several times through his damp hair, on which the blue light of a street lamp glinted. His skin also shone, with a dark, luminous glow. He closed the door to the balcony, and made his way toward the bed. It felt to Olya as if the ceiling were gently caving in on her, in a chamber made of synthetic foam.

  After the third night, she had just emerged from the building in the early hours of the morning when the man who oversaw the interpreters loomed up in front of her. Without greeting her, he barked: “I see you know how to mix business with pleasure! Do I have to drag you out of bed to send you to work? What’s going on? Is this the Olympic Games or a brothel? Report to the Organizing Committee. They’ll soon deal with you!”

  During those three days Olya had been so wildly happy she had not even given a moment’s thought to seeking any justification or to preparing a plausible story. On their last night together Jean-Claude was intoxicated with happiness. He had come in second and won a silver medal. He drank, talked a lot, and looked at her with rather crazed eyes. It all involved a firm he had a contract with and a sports complex he would now be able to open. He talked about money without any embarrassment. He became so excited as he talked about all this that Olya said to him, laughing: “Just listen to you, Jean-Claude, you sound as if you were on drugs!” Pretending to take fright, he put his hand over her mouth, pointing to the radio: “They’re listening to all this.” Then he put his arms around her and pressed her back on the pillows. Recovering his breath, immersed in silent exhaustion, he murmured in her ear: “Yes, I am on drugs … you’re my drug!”

  At the Organizing Committee, it all began with shouting. A shriveled old official of the Komsomol, with a clammy bald head, dressed in a suit with bulging pockets, methodically tore into their three days of happiness. “It’s not just us you’re dragging through the mire,” he yelled. “You bring shame on the whole country. What are they going to think of the USSR in the West now? Well, what do you suppose? That all the Communist Youth are prostitutes, like you? Is that it? Don’t interrupt. And the daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union, what’s more! Your father gave his blood…. And what if this incident reached the ears of the Central Committee? Have you thought of that? The daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union! Coming from such stock, to soil yourself like that! Well, we have no intention of covering up for you. Make no mistake about that. They’ll kick you out of the Institute and the Komsomol. As they say among your young friends: ‘Pleasure has to be paid for.’ There’s no point in crying now. You should have thought of it before.”

  After this tirade he removed the stopper from a carafe with a dry creak, poured out a glassful of tepid, yellowish water and drank it with a grimace of disgust. He went over to the window and drummed on the grayish windowsill, waiting for Olya to stop crying. The heat in the office was stifling. A red butterfly with tattered, tarnished wings struggled inside the double glazing. Nauseated, he studied the dusty glass, the dark poplars outside the window. He turned back to Olya, who was screwing up a little damp handkerchief “That’s all. You can go. I have nothing else to say to you. What happens to you is up to the competent authorities. Report to the third floor, Room Twenty-seven. They’ll deal with you the
re.”

  Olya stumbled out and climbed up to the third floor, where, blinded by tears, she could scarcely find the door he had indicated. Before going in she took a quick look in her little pocket mirror, fanned her swollen eyes with her hand and knocked.

  Behind the desk a handsome man in his forties was talking on the telephone. He looked up at her, greeted her with a nod, and, smiling, indicated the armchair. Olya sat down timidly on the edge of the seat. While continuing to give laconic replies, the man took out a bottle of water from under the desk and deftly opened it with one hand. He poured some into a glass and slid it gently across toward Olya, blinked, and smiled at her again. “He doesn’t know why I’m here yet,” she thought, swallowing a little sparkling mouthful. “When he discovers he’ll yell at me and throw me out.”

  The man put down the receiver, extracted a sheet of paper from a drawer and scanned it quickly. He studied his visitor and said: “Good. Olya Ivanovna Demidova, if I’m not mistaken? Well, Olya, let’s get to know one another.” And he introduced himself: “Sergei Nikolaievich.” Then he paused, sighed, rubbed his temples and went on, as if regretfully: “You see, Olya, what took place is without any doubt unfortunate and, I fear, heavy with consequences for you. As a man, I can understand you: youth’s the season made for joy of course. You yearn for new sensations…. Essenin, you remember, calls it ‘the flood tide of feelings’ — that’s his phrase, isn’t it? But that’s the poet speaking. And you and I are living in the world of political and ideological realities. Today your Frenchman is throwing the javelin or doing the high jump. Tomorrow he’s being trained for some kind of intelligence work and comes back here as a spy Well, I’m not going to make a speech. You’ve already had an earful. I’m just going to say one thing to you. We, for our part, will do everything possible to get you out of trouble. You understand, no one wants to cast a shadow over your father; and you yourself, we don’t want to ruin your future. But for your part you must help us. I shall have to talk about this whole business to my superiors. And so, to make sure that I don’t give them a cock-and-bull story, we’re going to put it all down in black and white. Right, here’s some paper. As to the form of words, I’ll help you.”

  When Olya emerged from Room 27 an hour later, she felt as if, with a kick of her heels, she could have taken flight. How ridiculous he seemed to her now, that Komsomol official with his glistening pate!

  She had just had fleeting contact with the mechanism of real power in the country. Filled with wonder, she found a way to spell out to herself in naive but accurate enough terms all that had happened: “The KGB can do anything.”

  That evening, however, she was seized by an impression quite different from that of the morning. She recalled a sentence she had written in Room 27. Describing that first evening with Jean-Claude she had written: “Finding myself in the bedroom of the French athlete, Berthet, Jean-Claude … I engaged in intimate relations with him.” It was that sentence that jarred. “Intimate relations,” she thought. “What an odd turn of phrase! And yet, basically, why odd? That’s all it was. Certainly not love, in any event….”

  She only saw Jean-Claude one more time and, as the polite man in Room 27 had advised, said a few friendly words to him and slipped away.

  On the day before the athletes left she came across him in the company of a friend. The two men passed quite close by without noticing her. The friend was patting Jean-Claude on the shoulder and he was smiling with a contented air. Olya heard Jean-Claude remarking somewhat languidly, drawing out the syllables:

  “You know, I think I’m going ahead with that property in the Vendée. They simply hand the house over to you, with the keys: no problem.”

  “Is Fabienne happy with that?” asked the other.

  “Absolutely! She adores sailing!”

  In the spring of 1982 no one in the country yet knew that it was going to be a quite extraordinary year. In November Brezhnev would die and Andropov would accede to the throne. The liberal intelligentsia, gathered in their kitchens, would begin to be tormented by the worst forebodings. Everyone knew he was once the head of the KGB. He’s bound to crack down hard. Under Brezhnev you could still risk opening your mouth from time to time. Now there’s going to be a reaction, that’s for sure. They say he’s already ordering police raids in the streets. You step out of your office for five minutes and the militia pounce on you. Let’s hope it’s not going to be another 1937….

  But History, as likely as not, had had enough of the dreary monolithic solemnity of those long decades of socialism and decided to have a bit of fun. The man whose character the alarmed intellectuals identified as that of another “Father of all the Peoples,” or even another “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, turned out to be a mortally weary and sick monarch. He knew that the majority of the members of the Politburo ought to be put up against a wall and shot. He knew that the Minister of the Interior, with whom he chatted amiably on the telephone, was a criminal against the state. He knew how much each of his colleagues in the Politburo had in Western bank accounts. He even knew the names of the banks. He knew that a feudal system had long since been reinstated in Central Asia and that the right place for all those responsible was prison. He knew that in Afghanistan the American scenario in Vietnam was being replicated. He knew that in the villages in the whole of the northwest, there was a shortage of bread. He knew that for a long time now the country had been run by a small family mafia who detested him personally, and who despised the people. He knew that if the ruble had been convertible half the country’s rulers would have decamped to Miami or elsewhere long ago. He knew that the dissidents in prison or in exile did not know the hundredth part of what he knew and that the things they commented on were small potatoes. He knew so many things about this society that one day at the Party Plenum he let slip: “We have no cognizance of the society in which we live.”

  History had its little joke. The terror this man inspired in some and the hope he inspired in others, both arose, as it were, from beyond the grave. He was dying of nephritis and in his moments of lucidity used to derive amusement from a story he had been told by the Kremlin doctor. It tickled him greatly. It happens during a meeting of the Politburo. They are all discussing who is to succeed Brezhnev. Suddenly the door is flung open and Andropov bursts in, accompanied by Aliev. Brandishing a revolver, Andropov shouts: “Hands up!” All the old men raise their trembling hands. “Lower the left hand!” commands Andropov. Turning to Aliev, he says: “Make a note! A unanimous vote for Andropov!”

  History delighted in making a mockery of those who thought they could determine its course with impunity. Andropov died. Chernenko followed him. With the indecent haste of a comic strip, all of Brezhnev’s entourage were dying off. They celebrated funeral rites to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march on Red Square so often that the people of Moscow found themselves whistling the tune as if it were a current popular song.

  But in the spring of 1982 no one could even imagine that History might be up to such tricks.

  In March the head of the transport organization called Demidov into his office. “You’ve got visitors, Ivan Dmitrevich. These comrades are going to make a film about you.” Two television journalists from Moscow were there, the scriptwriter and the director.

  The film in question was to be devoted to the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. They had already shot the scenes of the memorial ceremony where, beneath the enormous concrete monuments, veterans from all four corners of the country wandered like ghosts from the past.

  They had rediscovered documentary footage from the period, fragments of which they intended to use in the course of the film. They had already interviewed the generals and marshals who were still alive. What remained to be filmed was, in the eyes of the director, a very important episode. In this scene the principal role fell to Demidov. The director saw it like this: after the dachas on the outskirts of Moscow and the spacious Moscow apartments, where the retired marshals, buttoned up tight in their uniforms
, command armies and juggle with divisions in their memory, there appear the twisting streets of Borissov and a truck splashed with mud driving into the entrance of a garage. A man gets down from the truck, without turning toward the camera, wearing a battered cap and an old leather jacket. He crosses the yard, littered with scrap iron, and makes his way over to the little office building. A somewhat metallic voice-over raps out the citation of the Hero of the Soviet Union: “By the decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for heroism and bravery displayed in battle….”

  The truck driver hands in some papers at the office, nods to a colleague, shakes hands with another and goes home.

  In the course of this scene Demidov’s voice, a simple, informal voice, talks about the Battle of Stalingrad. The sequence of shots that follows is in the context of a home: the celebratory meal, a spread-out copy of Pravda on a set of shelves; yellowing photographs of the postwar years on the wall.

  But the high point of the film was elsewhere. From time to time the story of this modest hero “who saved the world from the brown plague,” as the commentary put it, breaks off. The Soviet foreign correspondent in one or another European capital appears on the screen, stopping passersby and asking them: “Tell me, what does the name of Stalingrad mean to you?” The passersby hesitate, make inept replies, and laughingly recall Stalin.

  As for the correspondent in Paris, he had been filmed in melting snow, chilled to the bone, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the street: “I’m standing just ten minutes’ walk away from the square in Paris that bears the name of Stalingrad. But do the Parisians grasp the significance of this name, so foreign to French ears?” And he begins to question passersby, who prove incapable of giving an answer.