Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  Once again a bright horizon hovered before our eyes in air that shimmered with the heat of summer. Once again, before passing through a village, our troop would carefully get in step, everyone tugging at the corners of his scarf.

  You were marching beside me, and I could see your hands nervously poised above the drum, your drumsticks ready to shatter the sleepy tranquillity of the handful of izbas. While I was chewing my lips, raw and chafed from blowing my bugle. When the sound finally exploded we were blind to everything. Everything but the brilliance of the flag above our heads and the far end of the country road trailing off into the sky. The troop’s chief singer swallowed his saliva and yelled out in a piercing voice, with all the rest of us joining in:

  We are the pioneers,

  The workers’ children we.

  The age of radiant years

  Is drawing ever nigh.

  Always prepared are we,

  Our motto bids us be….

  It was only much later that other images we had registered and preserved unconsciously filtered through from this dazzling infatuation of our childhood. An old man walking along the road, stooping painfully to gather dusty sorrel leaves. The face of an old peasant woman who waved her hand feebly as we passed, smiling at us through her tears in a grimace ridged with wrinkles. Yes, it was only many years later that we sensed what it was those weary eyes could still recall. The countless ranks of soldiers who had once passed through that village before sinking without trace. They too had marched in step, stuck out their chests, concealed their weariness. In those ranks there had been a brow, a pair of eyes, a shape that meant more to that peasant woman than life itself. They too had disappeared. Her old confused wits seemed to be rediscovering these features amid our own young shaven heads. This sweet lie sustained her….

  But at the time all our eyes could see was the smile and the wave of the hand.

  That evening a big wood fire burned at the center of our camp. It was time now for other songs, slower, more reflective. One of them, even though we sang it every evening and knew the simple story by heart, caused our eyes to gleam with rather moist reflections of the firelight. It was the one about the civil war. It had a deep, dreamy melancholy. We loved it all the more because it was indeed during the night that a young Red cavalryman had met his death, in a battle with the White Guards:

  He fell at the feet of his great black horse,

  Murmuring, as his brown eyes closed:

  “My steed, my friend,

  Tell my true love

  That I died keeping faith with the workers’ cause….”

  We could picture it all in such vivid detail! The “broad Ukrainian steppe” mentioned in the song. The overheated horse suddenly losing its master in full gallop. The few words whispered by a young horseman, his palm pressed against his bleeding chest, lying on the wet grass and turning his face hopelessly toward his companion’s violet eyes.

  What would we not have given, we too, at that moment, for the workers’ cause! Could we picture a more beautiful death than to be stretched out on the steppe at night, beneath the gaze of a faithful horse, expressive of a more than human compassion? Yes, to die grasping the hilt of one’s saber and contemplating the distress of a fiancee far away …

  It was for the beauty of such a death that we loved “the workers,” in whose name one must sacrifice oneself, with a love that was almost holy These workers bore no resemblance to the big men in sweatshirts, their faces ravaged by weariness, who played dominoes in the evening. No, those were too ordinary for our nocturnal reveries. They smoked, gripping their thick yellow cigarette stubs in fingers spotted with grease, swore and guffawed with guttural laughter. Their lives were too banal. Packed into the beehives like the rest of us, they waited in line for the communal bathroom like everyone else, and crammed into the bus that took them to the factory.

  The workers in our songs were different. They constituted a kind of superior tribe, untouched by the imperfections of our communal life. A worthy, austere, and just people, for whom we must fight and suffer. It seemed to us that this people was already waiting for us beyond the luminous line of the horizon that daily grew closer.

  Our parents said little to us about the past. Perhaps they thought the past provided in songs and the stories in our training manuals was enough for us…. Or did they simply want to spare us, well aware that in our country knowledge is a painful and often dangerous thing?

  My father’s life, or rather his youth, interested me a great deal. Like some seeker after treasure, I felt certain I could discover images in his past as a soldier comparable to those of the nocturnal battle in which the Red cavalryman met his death. A heroic hand-to-hand combat. A dazzling exploit. But his tales were always drily and disappointingly sober.

  I then embarked, almost unconsciously, on constructing a kind of fresco, a mosaic of this youth that fascinated me. Day after day I added fragments from his stories, unguarded confidences, details that emerged by chance in his chats with my mother.

  Indirectly and, indeed, without suspecting it, Yasha had helped me greatly in my long gathering of little shards for this mosaic. There was one thing Yasha wanted at all costs to avoid talking about in company: his own sufferings, life in the camps. If ever he had the feeling that this topic might be brought up, he would hasten to ask for a light, or, at dinners on high days and holidays, propose an amusing toast that made everyone laugh. Immediately afterward, to change the subject once and for all, he would say to my father: “Now then, Pyotr, why don’t you tell us the rest of that story, you remember, when you were in Byelorussia? Last time you didn’t finish it….”

  For my mosaic I even used the chance remarks that the domino players would call out to my father when he sat down to play with them. Even in these I found a handful of fragments that evoked his youth, the war. A few trifles that I could add to my summarily reconstructed mural.

  One day you had asked me, with that spontaneous abruptness we were all marked with by life: “So, your father, what did he do during the war?”

  “How do you mean, what did he do? He was a marksman. He killed Germans,” I replied in a rather doubtful voice. “He killed thousands and thousands of them….”

  At the time I did not know much about it. Your revelation to me of my own ignorance may have been the starting point for my mosaic.

  Now, all these years later, I can unveil it before your eyes (in “Portland … Cleveland …”). As before, it is incomplete. But today we can be sure no more fragments will ever be added to its uneven surface….

  Incomplete Mosaic of a Youth in the War

  In his early days at the front it did not feel to Pyotr as if he was killing people. In his capacity as a sniper he had a very particular relationship with death….

  The human figure in his sights that had to be immobilized had become familiar to him while he was still young. Like all his generation, living in “the besieged fortress of socialism,” he had learned to shoot very early, in the training circle of the “Voroshilov marksmen.”

  In the war a great distance always separated him from his living targets, and that, too, seemed to soften the deaths he caused. The human figurines, over half a mile distant, looked very much like the plywood silhouettes he used to pepper with lead in the old days, in his training with the target. Tiny dolls moving about beside papier-mache izbas. Jumping jacks whose very heedlessness was provocative.

  He would take up a stance somewhere on high ground, seeking out shadow, thick foliage. Most of the time he went to work with the help of an observer. But occasionally he took up a position on his own.

  His secret vigil would then be steeped in perfect silence. His eye glued to the rifles telescopic sight kept watch on a distant scene. The air between the barrel and the target became more and more dense, tangible. Pyotr felt his own breath dissolving into this space, which was concentrated by the sharpness of his gaze.

  At the other end of this distance a village, occupied by the Germans, was living
out its strange wartime routine. Jolting motorcycles with sidecars swept past the big izba where the staff headquarters was located. A broad, black car swayed along the rutted road. The door to the izba opened, people went in and out, paused on the front steps. They shook hands, saluted, talked. All this — as if in the glaucous transparency of an aquarium — was encrusted in the compact silence of the eyepiece.

  Pyotr saw an old woman crossing the road, walking along with a furtive gait beside a hedge. A terrified chicken just managed to escape the wheels of the black car. A pot with a pale flower in it drowsed behind a murky windowpane.

  The telescopic sights attentive circle slid across this noiseless space and began to focus on human figures…. Over there a soldier, a big gangling fellow, is walking toward a well, carrying two empty buckets. The wind-adjustment graduations in the telescopic sight follow him for a moment, then let him go; he would be too easy a prey He is still in the field of vision, this hulk of a man. Besides, this is a good sign: as long as he’s there, one can be sure there have been no troop movements.

  The watery circle slides toward the open window of the izba. A young officer sits writing by the window, another is seated beside him and seems to be talking to an invisible conversational partner. Which one of the two? No, it is better to wait a bit. If death comes in through a narrow window it shows too clearly the place where the sniper is hiding. Wait.

  The young officer puts his papers into a briefcase, vanishes, reappears on the front steps, runs briskly down them, and walks toward a motorcycle that is waiting for him in the courtyard. The soldier jerks upright on his saddle as he starts the engine. The officer settles into the sidecar, and at the same moment, as if he had sunk into a deep reverie, he lets his chin fall on his chest. With the backfiring of the engine the soldier has noticed nothing.

  The empty cartridge case flies out, the new cartridge slides into place. Boring a hole in the tranquil summers day, the silent circle approaches the izba once more.

  The two conversationalists appear on the steps. One of them takes out a cigar case, the other rummages in his pocket. Yes, that must be it, the lighter has been left indoors. He goes to look for it…. The vital thing now is to stay awake!

  The officer who has just opened the cigar case suddenly flings it away, as if in disgust, grasps the handrail, and crumples to the ground. As his companion comes out, fiddling with the lighter, he just has time to see the cigarettes scattered, before collapsing in the doorway with his head thrown back.

  Now every second counted. To put a cover over the telescopic sight, gather up the three cartridge cases, and, alternating between short bursts of running and frozen pauses, to reach the nearest thicket.

  Around the staff headquarters the people were already in turmoil. They pointed in the direction of the copse Pyotr had just left. Yes, they had guessed: a sniper. Raising a cloud of dust, the motorcycle combination returned toward the front steps with its dead passenger. The silence was broken by the furious barking of dogs.

  Pyotr knew that he would get away. He knew that the soldiers flung toward the copse in pursuit of him would flounder about for a good ten minutes in a marshy meadow. He had noticed it the previous day when he was crawling along choosing his position. He knew that when they were finally close to the copse they would start raking the thick foliage of a great oak tree with bursts of fire. But Pyotr had never gone anywhere near this tree. For he knew the time-honored rule that regularly saved his life: when choosing a place to shoot from, seek out the best location, a well-protected spot on high ground — and then move a good distance away from it and select another, much less suitable. Then you may have a chance of surviving.

  He returned to his regiment that evening, spoke to the commandant, and took his rest. Before going to bed he cut three fine notches on the butt of his rifle.

  Right from the start he had viewed the war through the hazy transparency of the telescopic sight. By dint of this his right eyebrow had become arched, as if expressing permanent amazement. … As for the notches on the butt — there were already almost a hundred.

  It was in Byelorussia that the deaths of the people who were swallowed up in the watery glass of his telescopic sight one day became real to Pyotr.

  His position, this time, was a dream: a steep riverbank, a tangle of willow groves, and, just beyond that, the forest. A little town occupied by the Germans offered itself to view as if spread out on the palm of a hand. Low houses, wide streets. It lay in a single field of fire from one end to the other.

  “We’ve got a real rest cure here,” Pyotr said to himself.

  He took up position, created a shelter in the fork of a tree, beat down a pathway for his withdrawal, studied the air currents, allowed for the pitfall presented by the river. Rivers or ravines always deceive marksmen, they cause distances to vanish and seem to bring targets closer. Finally, taking his time, he began to explore this silent town peopled with gray military figures. -

  The first day he made two notches on the rifle butt; the second, three. “It’s like a fairground shooting gallery,” he said to himself. He even killed a soldier whom, at first, he did not want to touch. The man was in the middle of a courtyard, stretched out full length, and playing the harmonica. He looked as if he were deliberately offering himself to the bullet.

  The next day the Germans were wary. At the main crossroads in the town, where Pyotr had killed two officers, a plywood screen had been erected. Pyotr could no longer see people crossing the road, and the cars and motorcycles also went past under the shelter of this panel. “Who cares.” He laughed nervously. “You can’t all hide behind the screen,” and he began to study the streets.

  Almost at once he spotted an entire council of war beneath a broad mulberry tree in one of the courtyards. At a garden table two officers sat with their backs to him. Another stood facing them, leaning against the trunk of the tree. There were papers spread out on the table top.

  “Those must be maps,” thought Pyotr.

  His eye slid first over the backs of the seated men, then moved on to the figure of the one standing up. Yes. There. Just below the glittering metallic eagle on his chest.

  Slowly Pyotr squeezed the trigger. The officer remained motionless. The two others did not move either.

  “Hell’s bells!” breathed Pyotr, taken aback. “I’ve darned well missed him!”

  He reloaded, aimed again — at the eagle — fired. The officer did not flinch.

  Dumbfounded, Pyotr narrowed his eyes and uttered a cry of surprise. A little trickle of dust was spilling out of the officer’s chest.

  “Oh no!” murmured Pyotr. “They must have …”

  He had no time to formulate his thought, understood everything, hurled himself down from his tree fork to the ground, and rolled toward the track through the willow groves he had made two days before.

  Under a hail of machine-gun fire his shelter was already being transformed into a whirlwind of mutilated foliage.

  This crackling was accompanied by another noise, closer, louder — someone was firing at him with a submachine gun. Pyotr rolled some more. Clinging to life, his body seemed to ricochet off the uneven ground. When he was able to get up he felt a strange numbness where his right foot should be. As if his boot were swathed in a great cushion.

  That evening the medical orderly extracted a submachine-gun bullet from his foot. Pyotr cleaned the mud-spattered telescopic sight, then reached from habit for a penknife to carve some notches and spat with vexation at the recollection of the dummy officer filled with sand.

  “I fell for that like some kid wet behind the ears,” he repeated to himself, unable to sleep, tormented by rage and burning twinges from his foot. Then in the night he mastered his pain and calmed down.

  “Lucky to be alive,” he reflected, his gaze lost in the warm, dark rectangle of the half-open window. The wind scattered this blackness with occasional drops of hesitant rain. And Pyotr again recalled the officer at the foot of the tree, with a little haze of du
st escaping from his tunic.

  Suddenly a dazzlingly simple notion occurred to him. He pictured all the bullets he had dispatched, not into statues of sand but into living people. Before then he had never given it a thought.

  *

  As a child I was vaguely disappointed at not having come across that Red cavalryman again in my own father’s story Other people found it hard to understand what he was driving at when he talked about his thoughts that night after he was wounded.

  Only Yasha took a serious interest in the end of the story. He would press the point: “And after that, did you go on shooting them down, just as before?”

  “After that I stopped making notches,” my father replied.

  He had lost his legs on the German-Polish border: on returning from one of his missions he had come under fire from an artillery bombardment by our own army. They were preparing an offensive along a whole front and evidently could not anticipate the position of one sniper, a certain Pyotr Yevdokimov.

  The fact that he had been wounded not by the Germans but by our own artillery was subsequently a source of considerable complications for my father. They would not even recognize this injury as a war wound. So he had not been allocated the invalid car that others had received. It was Yasha who, by moving heaven and earth, much later managed to ensure that he obtained one.

  In our courtyard there were two very special locations that, each in its own way, shaped the topography of our young years.

  First of all, there was “the Pit.” An almost mythical place and as much a part of our vision of the world as the clouds, the moon, and the sun. It was a kind of pool with high banks covered in plants that did not grow anywhere else. Little flowers, with the bluish luminosity of neon, perched on sticky, fleshy stems. The surface of this little crater, which was covered in duckweed, was surrounded by the inevitable poplar trees. It even seemed to us that the leaves of these poplars rustled in a quite special way and cast shadows of a different consistency.