Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  Our second surprise was the discovery that the sides of the former Pit were strewn with human remains. So the skull dug up at the time of our excavations was not the only one….

  The local Soviet’s refuse collection department was not due to arrive until the next day, Monday. We had a whole day to examine the war relics ripped out of the Pit by the explosion.

  We began our exploration with the fear and respect that death inspires. We peered silently at the empty eye sockets, we poked at the brownish bones with the end of a branch. It was the jaws complete with teeth and missing noses that especially fascinated us.

  “After all, they may be heroes,” you said. “They were defending Leningrad. They were the ones who stopped Hitler —”

  You broke off suddenly. Just at our feet we saw a helmet. It had none of the even, somewhat naive roundness that characterized our soldiers’ helmets. Instead, it was equipped with panels designed to cover the temples of the soldier wearing it. For us this angular shape was an infallible sign. In all the war films, in all the pictures in our history books it was this helmet with side panels that crowned the silhouette of the enemy, the German.

  “Look, here’s one more,” someone shouted, aiming a kick that sent rolling another helmet with the same menacing shape. “And over there!”

  At that moment from among the broken branches I picked up a badge: a flat eagle made of metal. And you were already scouring an Iron Cross with sand. So they were the bones of Germans!

  Hardly had we understood this when a veritable rage for vengeance seized us. The big branches and the planks from the fragmented wooden dome were the instruments of our fury. The bones cracked under our blows, the skulls bowled along like soccer balls and shattered into fragments. We raised them high on our sticks before smashing them against the concrete blocks. We ground under our heels those very missing noses that, only a moment earlier, had inspired us with respectful fear. We crushed the dark eye sockets. We hurled the brownish ribs across the courtyard like boomerangs polished by time. And each of us vied with his comrade to break them with a louder crunch, to demolish them with one blow, to proclaim his victorious disgust louder than the others. We were waging our little war. We were making up for lost time.

  “Stop that, you monsters.”

  In our orgy of destruction we did not immediately hear Yasha’s voice. We were gathered under a tree. Shouting and egging him on, we were lifting up one of our number who had had the brilliant idea of sticking a skull on the end of a broken branch.

  “Stop that, I tell you!”

  We turned around. Our sticks in our hands, standing amid the whitish shards, we waited.

  “What do you think you’re doing, you idiots?” asked Yasha with a slight quaver in his voice.

  “What do you think? They’re Germans! Can’t you see?” retorted the eldest of our band, Gyenka-the-Brick. “So we’re smashing their faces in. You have a problem with that?”

  “Stop that,” Yasha said again, and we saw that his cheek was trembling.

  “Why? They’re Germans!” yelled Gyenka defiantly, sure of himself. “They’re Hitlerites! Nazis!”

  There was a moment of silence. It was a confrontation. We, proud of our victory, our muscles tensed in the desire to continue this enthusiastic massacre. And this man, thin, pale, his eyes sunken in dark sockets.

  “They are dead people,” he finally said, very softly.

  He had uttered these few words with such sorrowful simplicity that we stayed mute, overcome. Nobody dared reply.

  “Help me gather all this up,” he added. “We’ll start with that.”

  And Yasha pointed at the impaled skull.

  We followed him silently. We gathered up all the debris of bones, all the skulls, all the helmets. Little by little the bottom of the crater disappeared under this mixture of relics. Yasha brought two spades. We threw the planks from the wooden dome onto the bones, we buried them under the earth. We tamped the earth down with our sandals. The Pit was no more….

  On Monday morning a truck tipped out a load of silky white sand on this spot. They constructed a sandpit for the children. Only the trees and the windows in the buildings bore the traces of the unveiled mystery of the Pit.

  But the sequence of exceptional events that had disrupted the life of our courtyard did not end with the disappearance of the Pit. For on the very day the sand was delivered, heavy clouds with the bluish luminosity of lead began to appear from the direction of the sea. With them they brought icy showers and piercing squalls, the end of summer.

  These showers caught us unprepared. The window-panes had not yet been fitted and the cold interiors of our beehives were filled with the salty scent of the sea. It seemed to us as if, in a freak high tide, the waves had swept in over several dozen miles and were now breaking close to our courtyard, just beyond the mist over the open ground.

  Curiously enough, this inclement weather that lasted for several days gave rise to an unexpected flowering in our life as a community. We set to work and helped one another, became so close that we simply formed one big family, a united, energetic tribe, motivated by a cheerful will to survive.

  Our three dwellings were transformed into a cave where, during these few long days and evenings, there reigned a somewhat primitive relish for the communal life. The delight of a fire in a great cast-iron stove, around which we gathered. The pleasure of hearing the wind hurling itself against the thin squares of plywood that blocked the broken windows. The happiness for us children of feeling ourselves protected by the grown-ups, who all of a sudden brimmed with solicitude and tenderness, as if it were everybody’s birthday.

  In our communal cave the reassuring sound of hammering was to be heard. The men came into the apartments, sawed up plywood, and nailed it to the windows. The women mopped up the flooded floors, lit the fires. Bowed under the icy squalls, the bravest spirits crossed the courtyard, bringing in damp wood from the shacks and unloading it beside the stoves. And in the smoke-filled kitchens no one was surprised to see people from all three dwellings gathered together at the same table.

  One of these days was particularly bitter. Several times the rain turned to hail. The wind veered slightly, and now, blowing at an angle, was managing to make its way in under the plywood, through the cracks. What’s more, the bakery where everyone in the courtyard stocked up with bread had already been closed for two days. The area around it looked like a deep and turbulent bog. An expedition to the town had to be organized.

  We saw Yasha leaving the apartment with my father. On the landing Yasha turned back and winked at our mothers, and at all the people with grave faces who were crowded into the corridor.

  “If we’re not back by this evening,” he said, with a grin, “alert the captain of the icebreaker Sedov. You never know in this weather.

  Even in the courtyard we could not see them, with all the windows blocked. We could only hear the noise of the invalidka muffled by the drumming of the hailstones against the woodwork. It was an odd noise, too, somewhat reminiscent of water lapping against a boat as it struggled through high seas.

  Our mothers pretended not to be anxious. But from time to time we noticed them glancing furtively at the clock.

  The men returned after the murky glimmerings of daylight through the cracks at the windows had faded. First Yasha set down my father. Then he brought an enormous sack up to our apartment.

  “Thirty-six!” he said in a breathless voice. “One per apartment.”

  You told me it was the most delicious bread we had ever eaten. It was a little damp and smelled of cold fog and mighty winds.

  One of the babushkas who came to collect her loaf smiled at Yasha and murmured in emotional tones: “This is all so good! All in it together. Just like in the war….”

  Many years later I recalled this touchingly silly remark. So perhaps the dream we pursued as we marched toward the horizon did actually come to fruition. During those few days of life in the cave. In that primitive comfort. With that da
mp bread distributed by Yasha, a tired smile on his lips …

  That winter, in the stillness of short, dark days, the courtyard seemed to be recovering little by little, nursing its wounds. The broken branches on the poplar trees were swathed in hoarfrost, deep snow hid the great mounds of clay thrown up by the explosion. Traceries of ice grew on the newly installed windowpanes. The December blizzards created high ridges of snow along the hedge, with the same configuration as in previous years.

  Like a patient in recovery, weakened and anemic, the courtyard was learning to breathe again.

  In May our fears for its health were finally allayed. Within the space of a single night the poplar trees, butchered, decapitated, split in two, became covered with the bluish tinge of the first leaves. Their boughs were still quite transparent, the dead branches with their brown leaves still swayed in the warm winds and the sun-drenched showers. But already the triangle of the courtyard was filling up with the same verdant clarity, the same heady brew that nurtured all the sounds of communal life every summer and fused them together in harmony.

  The restored domino table rang with the din of pieces being slammed down. The damp depths of the thickets were alive with our cries. Out of the kitchen windows spilled the smell of fried onions and the clatter of dishwashing. On the benches near each main entrance there was a gentle flow of somewhat indolent backbiting from the babushkas, who were gradually getting back in shape after the enforced abstinence of winter. The swing caroled its joie de vivre and the newborn spring. The children dug in the mountain of white sand, forgetful of the Pit that had been there before. Above the Gap the first hints of our evening fantasies took shape in the sky. My mother’s face appeared at a third-floor window and her ringing call penetrated beyond the bluish transparency of the first foliage: “Yasha!”

  This summer promised to be yet more marvelous than the one before. I had grown a good deal since the fall. Like a dandelion tucked away against a wall. In springtime the sun changes its angle a little and the pale stem shoots up into infinite space, responding to this unexpected caress. Our instructor noticed this and from now on the honor fell to me to carry the flag for our troop.

  Nor were you left out of these benign upheavals. It was your voice that now assured you of a distinguished role. Our lead singer had to be replaced, a victim, like the rest of us, of the unfortunate mutations affecting his vocal cords. Of all the troop you alone — and with surprising rapidity — had acquired a fine manly voice. Our unstable windpipes were still belching forth rattling sounds, emitting shrill whines, swelling with dull growls. But you would strike up the song, with perfect pitch and no wavering, in a velvety baritone.

  We had grown. The luminous line of the horizon that inspired our passionate marching seemed close at hand. We understood almost everything in the domino players’ conversations. No longer were the names of Stalin and Zhukov simply sounds in the communal cacophony. We were proud to see people from the town coming into our courtyard wanting to view the site of the explosion with their own eyes. They looked at us with respectful curiosity. We told them the details, drawing on the accounts of the sole witness, Zakharovna, and discreetly elaborating them. We felt we were grown up, endowed with a history, a past….

  And for the first time in our lives we believed we could sense a significance that had previously escaped us in the melodic moaning of the swing….

  “You won’t need your tents anymore this summer,” the instructor told us at the start of the spring. “They’ve built a pioneers’ camp especially for you. A veritable palace! You’ll see, there’s everything: a ceremonial hall, sports fields, a rifle range, everything!”

  We started counting the days. Each morning the fresh foliage had grown more dense. The traces of the explosion became less and less visible. You obtained a tiny tube of red varnish and stained the cylinder of your drum. For my part, I polished my bugle until it became impossible to look at it in sunlight. These exciting preparations seemed to bring the summer closer. Waiting had become unbearable to us.

  It was amid the vibrant and joyous notes of spring life awakening in the courtyard that an unthinkable event occurred. Yasha died….

  He did this as he did everything — without attracting attention, without fuss. A stealthy death and for that reason all the more incomprehensible. It was as if he were afraid of marring the joy of this new spring. No one had any time to talk about his illness. He seemed to make a lightning transition from one day to the next, and suddenly there he was, where all the residents, stunned, devastated, mute, saw him on the morning of the funeral. In a simple coffin draped in red twill, laid on the stools by the main entrance to the building. We were waiting for the hearse to arrive….

  Yasha lay there, dressed in his dark suit that was familiar to us all. It was the one from school, from our mathematics lessons. There was nothing rigid about his pale face. His eyebrows were slightly raised, as if in amused surprise. His fingers were not clenched, petrified for all time, but simply and delicately interlaced. And on his breast, just above the pocket in his suit coat, you could see a white mark. During his lessons, absorbed in his explanations, he would often put a piece of chalk in this pocket.

  No one could believe he was dead. The hearse stopped in the Gap. The band dissolved into shrill, grating notes. The coffin borne by men wearing dark shirts made its way across the courtyard. Our mothers walked together surrounded by the other residents. It was mine who wept, shaking her head and crushing a fist against her lips, her sobs drowned by the horrible clashing of the cymbals.

  Yours had no more tears. She walked slowly, as if at each step she were testing the ground with her feet. Her big eyes, with dark shadows under them, stared, unseeing, at the slight swaying of the coffin.

  Yasha’s face was turned toward the foliage that once more covered the broken branches, toward the luminous glow of the clouds. And from his window on the third floor my father gazed at this face bathed in the light of spring.

  His reddened eyes could discern something that no one else saw. Something essential, something ineffable. Was this not why, when the men thrust the coffin into the hearse, his head gestured a sorrowful “no” …?

  During the days that followed the burial you became a very special being for us. People spoke to you in low tones, avoiding your eyes. When you walked past the main entrance the babushkas broke off from their chat and sighed deeply, gently shaking their heads. It no longer occurred to any of your playmates or marching companions to tease you by mimicking your fathers face.

  You had been marked by the shadow of death. You knew the difference between the light of the clouds and the chatter of the swifts before and after. From now on you had the key to a whole realm in the past life of that universe we called “our courtyard.”

  This very special attitude toward you would no doubt have lasted much longer had another death, much more expected and comprehensible than Yasha’s, not occurred four weeks later. That of my father.

  Everything made it predictable. His absence throughout those four weeks from the bench overgrown with jasmine and dahlias. The ambulances that had stopped beside our main entrance on two or three occasions. A lengthy line of shoes waiting to be repaired arranged all along the wall of our room. The silence in his little cubbyhole. The darkness of drawn curtains. The sleepless nights. His heavy breathing.

  His death took no one by surprise. The babushkas, those chroniclers of our communal life, interpreted the event with just that note of fatalism, characteristic of folk tales, that was needed to offer to us all deeply convincing consolation.

  “What do you expect? They were like a single man, Yasha and he. Once one was gone, the other couldn’t linger on….”

  To tell the truth, it was not the day of my father’s funeral that was the saddest. On the contrary, that day, without admitting it to themselves, the residents of our three dwellings experienced a sorrowful feeling of relief.

  No, it was one evening in May, in the middle of those four weeks that cam
e between the two deaths. My mother, dazed by sleepless nights, her head buzzing with weariness, leaned out of the kitchen window, no doubt preparing to call us in for supper. She saw the fresh foliage, heard the mixed tumult of cries and familiar sounds. The harmony of the evening flowed along, as it always used to in its slow self-assurance. My mother smiled absentmindedly and, without thinking what she was doing, called: “Yasha!”

  The whole courtyard froze in silence. The domino players were immobilized, their hands holding the pieces poised above the table. The babushkas lowered their eyes. The women stood up from their washboards, pricking up their ears at this call. We stopped our running and chasing through the bushes. It seemed as if even the twittering of the birds fell silent. Only somewhere on one of the floors a record player stuck in a worn groove repeated absurdly: “My sorrow was known, my love, only to you…. My sorrow was known, my love….”

  Above the Gap, marble columns, vertiginous vaults, castles in the air towered up in silence. Our senses may have been dull, communal cave-dwellers that we were, but they still picked up the echoes of that call, as they resonated in the unfathomable cavalcade of clouds.

  We were conscious, you and I, of having been brought close by these two deaths. An unspoken bond that went beyond all those ties of comradeship woven casually in our games together. More than a childhood friendship, this shared experience marked us out in the merry band of our marching companions.

  This bond, that had no need of words or protestations, manifested itself one day in a dramatic fashion.

  We finally saw for ourselves the new pioneers’ camp, whose praises our instructor had been singing ever since the month of March. He had not lied. The whole thing was extremely impressive. A majestic whitewashed building with two wings, dazzlingly white. A vast asphalt parade ground capable of accommodating at least ten troops like ours. In the middle stood a gigantic flagpole equipped with a pulley mechanism for hoisting the flag. A soccer field. A rifle range. Loudspeakers that deluged the whole area with deafening, heroic music. And finally, the main drive lined with thorny bushes in the midst of which, at regular intervals, stood plaster statues on cubic pedestals. Shot-putters with enormous monolithic backs, female swimmers with monumental hips and thighs …