A Hero's Daughter

by Andrei Makine

  They chattered on till dusk, as in the good old days. And, as in the old days, Ninka the Hungarian came to see them from time to time. She, too, set about consoling Olya, relating melancholy tales of her own life hitting the rocks many times, of disappointed hopes and other people’s black ingratitude…. But she, too, found it hard to conceal her own happiness. In June she was to make her last visit to the Black Sea coast. In October she would marry and would found what she herself laughingly called “a model Soviet family.”

  Yes, everything remained as before. Nothing changed. Just one thing, perhaps. When Olya came home from work now she was vexed to notice that it was as if her face were covered by a sticky mask. She hastened to the bathroom to rid herself of it, scrubbing her cheeks. She tried to reassure herself: “I’m running around like a madwoman at the moment. And in all this heat…” She remembered how after work Svetka always used to hurry to the bathroom, calling out to her, without stopping: “Hang on, Olyechka. We’ll have a word in a minute. Just let me put on a new face.”

  Olya realized it was not just the tiredness and the heat she was talking about.

  Prior to the summer vacation there was a great deal of work at the Center. On occasion Olya did not return home for three days in a row. During the day she attended trade meetings and in the evening put on her usual performance at the restaurant. During these three days she had not had a single minute to go see her father in hospital.

  One morning, when she was able to get there, he was waiting with cheerful and nervous impatience. They took their places on their usual bench, in front of the flower bed. Ivan lit a cigarette. Then, rapidly stubbing it out, he spoke in a low voice. When Olya heard these muted tones a shiver ran down her spine. She thought her father was going to ask her questions about her work, about her life or — worse still — try to justify himself. Ivan had something else to say.

  “You know, Olyuch, it’s a very good thing you’ve come today. Tomorrow they’re giving me my discharge and transferring me into preventive detention. I want to hand something over to you. Keep it and hide it somewhere. I’m afraid they’ll take it away from me when they search me.”

  Ivan unclenched his fingers — in the hollow of his hand shone the Gold Star.

  Olya returned home in a rickety, half-empty bus. It was traveling along the beltway. On one side could be seen the new concrete apartment buildings, stuck there amid churned-up clay. On the other side open fields, misted over with transparent greenery. Olya sat with her face turned toward the window, so that her tears should not be seen. She had begun crying when she opened her bag and caught sight of the Gold Star, right at the bottom, where normally either her keys or her lipstick would be hiding. “This is still his life,” she thought with tender bitterness. “He thinks there are still people around who remember that war long ago, all that comradeship at the front…. They’re all just like children. A. whole generation of grown-up children who’ve been betrayed. I only hope he doesn’t know anything about me! I just hope he doesn’t!”

  She was still crying as she climbed the stairs to the seventh floor. She did not want to take the elevator for fear of meeting someone she knew. But when she got to the sixth floor she could already hear Svetka’s laughter and merry shouts. “Aha,” thought Olya. “Ninka’s there and they’re having a good time.” And at once she felt a little comforted. She pictured them already bustling around her, cheering her up, putting the kettle on to boil. No doubt Ninka had come to say good-bye before setting off for the south. With her fund of stories she would be unstoppable. Olya turned the key and went in.

  Svetka’s bedroom door was wide open. Svetka was sitting on her bed screaming with horrible, sobbing laughter. Her swollen eyes, on which not the smallest trace of mascara was left, glittered wildly, madly. On the floor was a suitcase with several garments spilling out of it. Her shoes lay in two opposite corners of the room — as if one giant stride had left them there. Olya stopped on the threshold without trying to understand a word of this horrible howling because it was all too clear. She simply repeated like an incantation: “Svetka … Svetka …”

  Choking with tears, Svetka was silent for a moment. She sat there, with her eyes closed, her whole body shuddering, breathing jerkily and noisily. Cautiously Olya sat down beside her. Svetka felt her hand on her shoulder and began wailing in ever more desperate tones: “Olka, a sealed zinc coffin … and you can see nothing … just his eyes, through the little glass window … no eyelashes, no eyebrows … Maybe there’s nothing there … in the coffin!”

  And as she shook her head, she burst into tears once more. And once more, in a broken voice she cried out: “A little glass window … and only his eyes… only his eyes… he’s not there…. No … burned in the helicopter! There’s nothing in that coffm. Nothing …”

  Then, breaking free from Olya’s arms, she jumped up and rushed to the wardrobe. She opened the door with a violent gesture and began pulling out boxes and cardboard cartons and hurling them to the floor.

  “So who’s going to make use of any of this stuff now?” she cried. “Who?”

  Out of the cardboard cartons tumbled men’s shoes, brand-new shiny boots made of first-rate leather; there were piles of shirts with Beriozka labels, jeans, ties. And, uttering a heavy sigh, Svetka collapsed in a heap on the bed and buried her head in the pillow.

  Sitting beside her, Olya scarcely recognized her friend in this woman, now so crumpled and aged. She stroked her hand gently, murmuring: “Don’t cry, Svetka, don’t cry. It’ll be all right. It’ll all come out right in the end. Look, things are going badly for me, too, but I’m bearing up … I’m bearing up….”

  Svetka was leaving from Kazan Station. She seemed completely calm now, simply screwing up her eyes as if to avoid seeing the happy and excited crowd. Olya made her way along beside her, holding in her hand a big plastic bag into which Svetka had thrown everything that would not go into her suitcase. The bag was a great weight. Heavily burdened people came charging along, bumped into one another, colliding with their luggage. It felt to Olya as if the handles of the bag were slowly stretching and would tear. The crowd moved forward with painful slowness. Sweating faces, skullcaps on shaven heads, children whimpering …

  The compartment was pervaded by a warm smell of thick dust.

  “Oh, you haven’t brought anything to drink on the journey,” Olya suddenly realized.

  Svetka shook her head silently. Leaping down from the coach, Olya weaved her way toward the buffet. Standing in line in front of a long glass-fronted counter where there were piles of dried-up sausage sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and hazelnut biscuits, she consulted her watch nervously.

  When she got back to the platform with a bottle of warm lemonade and two biscuits in a little bag, she saw two red lights receding down the track into the distance in a hot gray mist. She stayed on the platform for a moment, then set the bottle and the bag down on a bench and headed for the subway.

  During one of those crazy days at the start of the summer, Olya realized that she was pregnant. She accepted the fact with dull and weary resignation. “In fact, there’s nothing surprising about it,” she reflected on her return from the clinic. “With all that pressure and stressed-out as I was…. At such times you could end up producing twins and not notice….” At the Center she asked for three days’ break to have an abortion and get herself on her feet again.

  She had counted the days and she knew it had happened at the beginning of May when, as she listened to that tall German with the attractive name, she had forgotten the role she was playing. And she knew it was not just a matter of forgetting, either.

  She arrived at the hospital two hours before the wards and clinics were due to open. In the stillness of the morning she walked around the pale yellow building, crossed the road, and sat down on a bench in a little courtyard surrounded by old houses on two floors. At the windows there were flowers in pots and crudely painted earthenware statuettes. “Its just like at home in Borissov,” she though
t. The pale, watery sunlight gradually filled the courtyard, illuminating the entrance halls with their wooden staircases and causing a cat sitting on a little wobbly bench to blink its eyes. Later on, Olya would try to understand what had happened on that sun-drenched early morning. She looked at the pale flowers behind the window panes, the sandbox all pockmarked by the rain that had fallen in the night, the tufts of grass thrusting up through the trampled earth of the courtyard. She looked as if seeing all this for the first time. Even the ordinary gray soil mixed with sand was astonishingly present to her eyes, there before her, with its little stones, its twigs, its burned matches. She suddenly felt a sharp and gripping tenderness for this new vision, this joyful and silent wonder. This vision was no longer hers. She could already feel it within herself as something separate from her, but at the same time close, pulsating, inseparable from her breathing and her own life…. As if she were experiencing it almost physically. Her eyes followed the cat as it slowly crossed the courtyard, shaking its paws and arching its tail. Olya knew she was not the only one watching it and knew for whom she was silently murmuring: “Oh, look at that pretty little pussy…. Look at its lovely whiskers, its white tail, its little gray ears…. Let’s go stroke it.

  The houses were beginning to wake up. People emerged from the hallways with a busy tread, hurrying toward the bus stop. Olya followed them. Arriving home, she went to bed without undressing and fell asleep at once. Toward evening she was woken by the strident screaming of the swifts. She stayed in bed for a long time, watching the dusk deepening outside the open window. Occasionally a woman’s voice would ring out from high up on a balcony: “Maxim, Katya, come in! How many times do I have to call you?”

  And at once, echoing in reply, a shrill pair of voices: “Oh please, Mom! Just five little minutes more!”

  The swifts sped by, close to the window, with a rapid rustling of wings. It sounded as if someone were abruptly tearing a thin strip of silk. “How simple everything is,” thought Olya. “And no one understands it. They go charging along, pushing and shoving. They don’t even have time to ask themselves, ‘What’s the point?’ And yet everything’s so simple. And I was going crazy, too — Alyosha, the apartment in Moscow, abroad … It’s painful to think about it, but I’d begun to hate his parents so violently it gave me nightmares. All the time I dreaded them persuading him not to marry me. I almost prayed for them to be killed in a car or a plane crash! How horrible!”

  It was so silent in the purple dusk that the sizzling of potatoes in a frying pan could be heard through an open kitchen window. Olya thought about the one whose presence in the world she had so clearly felt that morning. And now she immersed herself with calm joy in the future needs of the child, its little clothes, feeding it. Without knowing why, she was sure she would have a boy. She knew she would call him Kolka, that she would live with him at Borissov, that she would find some dull, monotonous job there, and the monotony of the peaceful, gray days that lay ahead suddenly seemed to her an unspeakable blessing.

  She pictured how he would learn about the life of his grandfather, Ivan, and her own life. What had seemed to them like the disastrous collapse of all their plans would pass into his childish mind like a fairy tale, a kind of family legend: his heroic grandfather, who had suffered for the truth in his old age; his mother who had refused to live in Moscow, because the life they lead there is noisy, and dangerous even, on account of the crazy cars.

  “For the moment I’ll say nothing to my father,” she thought. “After the court case, when he’s well again, I’ll tell him everything.”

  * * *

  Vitaly Ivanovich listened to Olya without interrupting. His silence slightly disconcerted her. She spoke calmly striving to be logical and convincing. Vitaly Ivanovich kneaded his face with his hand, nodding his head and from time to time threw her a twinkling and somewhat distant glance. Olya knew that from her very first words he had grasped everything she was about to tell him and was now patiently waiting for the conclusion of her speech. She uttered her final words in louder and more resolute tones: “You know, Vitaly Ivanovich, maybe this is my destiny. In the end we each have our cross to bear. For some it’s Moscow, for others, Borissov….”

  Olya thought he would be in a hurry to dissuade her, and start to reason with her in an amiable and friendly manner: “Listen, this is just a whim, you’ll get over it,” or, alternatively, remind her in a dry voice of her duty and her responsibilities. But he continued rubbing his face, nodded, and said nothing. It was only when he heard her final words that he murmured: “Yes, yes, destiny … destiny …” Then, lifting up his face with its reddened cheekbones, he said: “It’s been a crazy night, the telephone didn’t stop ringing. I’m finding it hard to keep my eyes open. As soon as I sit down I fall asleep. I’m telling you this because, as you so aptly pointed out just now, we each have our cross to bear.”

  He smiled, weary and absent-minded. “When I was a student, you know, I studied philosophy at first; it was only later I changed to law. I was, so to speak, looking for myself. It always seemed to me that something didn’t quite hang together, that it wasn’t…. When I embarked on philosophy I thought I should be immersed at once in the unfathomable mysteries of existence. Very well, I open Aristotle and he argues as follows: Why — excuse me — does the urine of a man who’s eaten onions smell of onion? And the pinnacle of all philosophical thought was Brezhnev’s speech to the last historic Party Plenum. When you’re young all that’s very painful! Now, of course, it’s ridiculous even to think about it. We had a professor, you know, a kind of last of the Mohicans, one of the remaining ones who had qualified at St. Petersburg University. And been in the camps under Stalin, of course. Young people love professors like this. So I ran to him.

  “‘Here’s how it is, Igor Valerianovich. I’m in the middle of an intellectual crisis, a crisis as profound as that of bourgeois philosophy itself. Suppose I do law studies. I qualify and I set out to crush the Rostov mafia as an investigating magistrate, braving the gangsters’ bullets….’

  “And then, of course, I talk to him about destiny, about vocation, about the cross I have to bear. And this old philosopher went on listening and then said to me: ‘And you, distinguished young man, do you know the parable of the human cross?’

  “‘No,’ I told him. ‘Never heard of it.’

  “‘Well, listen. A man was bearing his heavy cross. He bore it and bore it and in the end he started cursing God. Too heavy, this cross. It’s cutting into his neck, crushing him, bowing him low over the earth. He can’t stand it any longer. God heard his lamentations and took pity on him.’

  “‘Right,’ he told him. ‘Follow me, unhappy man.’ He leads him to a vast pile of crosses.

  “‘Behold. All these are human destinies, you see. Cast aside your own cross and choose another. Perhaps you’ll find a lighter one.’

  “The man is overjoyed and begins trying them out. He puts one of them on his shoulder. ‘No, too heavy. Heavier than mine.’ And he takes up another one. He spends the whole day running around the mountain of crosses and doesn’t manage to choose one. Heavy are the crosses humans bear. Finally, toward evening, he finds one.

  “‘Here,’ he says. ‘This one is lighter than the rest. It’s not a cross, it’s a real delight.’

  “And God smiles. ‘But that’s your old cross, the one you cast aside this morning….’

  “And that’s the story. I approve of the professor myself, of course, and in my heart of hearts I think, like Goethe, as perhaps you do now: ‘AH theory’s gray, my friend, and green and golden is the tree of life.’ Ah, well. But in practical terms this is what we’ll do, Olya. When is your vacation due? In October? We’ll bring it forward to July. You’ll have the time you need for reflection. To choose a lighter cross….”

  Ivan’s case came up at the beginning of July in the ugly little court building for the area, from which the Moskva River and the huge dockside warehouses could be seen. It was an old building on two floo
rs, the staircases were worn and the courtrooms full of dust. In the dark corridor there was a whole row of doors, padded with black imitation leather. When one of them opened there was a glimpse of dark shelves piled high with thick files, a desk covered in papers, and, in the corner, a kettle on an electric burner. Out in the noisy, sun-drenched streets it was difficult to imagine that just two steps away from there such a place could exist, drab and silent, with people making tea on electric burner in this somnolent semi-darkness.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon Ivan was led into one of the courtrooms where shaky chairs were set out in untidy rows. On a little platform stood the desk for the judge and the assessors; fastened to the front of this desk was the emblem of the Soviet Union. Behind a wooden rail could be seen the bench for the accused. The rail had been marked by hundreds of hands: scratches, crosses, dates, initials…. On each side of the judge’s desk stood the rather smaller tables for the prosecutor and the defense lawyer.