Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

by Andrei Makine

  The person who was in this room had noticed nothing. His back turned, his legs stretched out, he was sitting beside the stove. He opened it regularly to stoke it with firewood from the pile beside him. From time to time he scraped the glowing stove with a knife. It was this grating sound that Faya had heard from the landing. Then he began to eat. He chewed very noisily, choked. Faya stared at his padded jacket with its ragged back, his shapka pulled down over the nape of his neck.

  She was getting ready to ask softly: “Little Uncle, couldn’t you give me just a tiny piece, too? …” when suddenly she noticed the presence of another man in the room. Lying close to the stove, he looked as if he was asleep. But he was sleeping in a strange way, naked to the waist. Faya looked more closely at him and saw that one of his shoulders was missing. In place of it something gray projected out of a pinkish cavity.

  She could no longer understand anything: the stove, the seated man with his back turned and the other man sleeping full length on the ground….

  But everything became stranger still when the man with the padded jacket stretched out his arm and seemed to delve into the pink cavity and throw something onto the burning metal…. Faya felt as if a spring, stretched to its full extent, had suddenly been released in her head. She felt she was about to understand something appalling, that could not be understood, that did not exist, should not exist!

  The smoke seemed quite different from that of their stove at home. Heavy, acrid. She took a step backward. But then the fragments of a china plate crunched beneath her felt boot. The man in the padded jacket turned around sharply.

  It was a woman…. Svetlana!

  Fayna Moysseyevna came with me as far as the end of the courtyard. The windows of the great liners were ablaze now with liquid crimson reflections.

  “That was the night my hands froze. It was the end of my piano lessons. I ran through the streets of Leningrad, yes, like a mad creature…. My mittens were still on my grandmother’s hands. I was picked up by the driver of an army truck….”

  We were moving slowly toward what in the old days had been the Gap. From time to time she stopped to catch her breath. Beside our building there stood the last vestiges of the old shrubbery. A few clumps of jasmine. A hint of the tumbledown fence. All around the liner-buildings there seethed a life that I could not manage to associate with the redbrick building we had just emerged from. Beside a row of garages there were men washing cars, plunging into the entrails of their engines. There were women, whose youthfulness astonished me, pushing baby carriages. The balconies swirled with multicolored laundry. Masses of children came hurtling off the little red plastic slide onto the sand.

  Guessing my thoughts, your mother smiled at me.

  “You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think they were right not to want to put that plaque on the siege building. You can’t preserve that past forever…. I’m upset with myself now. I shouldn’t have told you all my old stories.

  She fell silent. We took several steps without speaking.

  “But you see,” she added, without looking at me…. “It’s like in that Tibetan legend. The past is a dragon kept in a cage in the depths of a cave. You can’t think about the dragon all the time. Otherwise you couldn’t live your life. But from time to time you need to make sure the lock on the cage is in good repair. If it rusts away the dragon could break it and reappear more cruel and insatiable than ever. I really like that legend.”

  We stopped in the Gap. The white liner engulfed us with its shadow and a mixture of sounds spilling out of the windows from the television sets.

  “If Arkady comes to see me I’ll give him your greetings,” your mother promised, as she kissed me. Then suddenly she squeezed my elbow and whispered very swiftly, bringing her face close to mine: “I know it’s horrible now in Afghanistan. A massacre. Dirty and cowardly. But even in that filthy mess you must try to…. You know what I mean….”

  At the corner of the liner I looked back. With her head bowed, your mother was walking slowly along beside the remnants of the jasmine toward our entrance.

  Two weeks later, on a scorching summer afternoon, with my finger on the trigger, I stepped into a house where a grenade had just exploded. On the threshold of a room wrecked by the explosion I saw a bundle of rags gently stirring at my feet and emitting muffled wails….

  I’m in the reception room of the publishing house. The switchboard operator has already signaled my arrival to the upper floors, where my fate will be determined. She juggles with two telephones, answers the calls that come flowing into her little glass cabin, taps away at her keyboard. Among the flood of visitors for the day can she identify those authors whose manuscripts are destined for refusal?

  I have the strange, disturbing feeling of having committed a betrayal. The very weight of the manuscript that drags at the handle of my briefcase bears witness to this.

  I have told all, described all, revealed all. I have kept nothing back. I have totally gutted the pathetic interiors of the three redbrick dwellings. I have exposed their humble joys and futile sufferings to public view, like used goods displayed on a strip of pavement. I have delivered the lot.

  And the height of irony is that even so, I shall probably never receive my thirty pieces of silver!

  You should despise me heartily now. Isn’t that what true confessions are for?

  Whereas you, I know, will never breathe a word to anyone about our past. You will bottle it all up. You will transform yourself into a mass of energy and forward planning, and, as you set out to conquer your new world, there will be no holding you back.

  I know you will be successful. You will be successful with a disdainfully nonchalant air, as if to thumb your nose at the success everyone craves. You will attain the sought-after comfort, luxury even, that causes so many peoples past lives simply to fade away.

  Your sense of humor will be quite sufficient for you to fulfill the role to perfection, to excess, smiling as you continue to flirt with the kitsch of the American way of life. Your wife will be a ravishing blonde, with the glossy radiance of a fashion magazine. Your house — filled with thoroughbred objects, serious, steeped in their own importance, whose very functions will, on occasion, be unknown to you. What does it matter? Your wife will know. And when people see you slipping into the soft embrace of your car — first one arm, holding your suit coat, then a leg, your head, your hand already reaching for the telephone — who will ever believe that this elegant man with graying hair and a relaxed smile was once the drummer for a pioneer troop mesmerized by the radiant horizon?

  The ideal will have been achieved. The goal attained. The gamble paid off

  But there will be a fault line in this success….

  For there will be a day when you are traveling along in the company of your wife and your friends somewhere on the coastline of the warm seas, perhaps even on that peninsula, that yellowish fang, that in the old days threatened the Isle of Freedom.

  It is evening, the holiday atmosphere and a few drinks will make you a little mellow, a little pensive. An unexpected question will touch on that past you have obstinately kept secret until now. This time you will speak. There will be smiles, amazement, teasing. Polite incomprehension, you will think. You will empty your glass, speak again, with the somewhat aggrieved insistence of a person who wants to be understood. Glances will be exchanged, eyebrows raised, several hands will hasten to serve you, with the solicitude generally reserved for the sick. You will talk faster, louder, explaining, justifying….

  And you will be repeating my own confession! Then in the uneasy silence you will get up and walk away without another word, hearing your wife’s voice behind your back: “Pay no attention … it’s an attack of nostalgia…. You know what these Russians are like … with the life they had back there….”

  At the wheel, driving your expensive car headlong into the warm ocean breeze, you will explode into one of those horrible Russian oaths, whose resonance you had almost forgotten. It will embrace everything —
your house with its thoroughbred objects, your wife’s diets and cures, and, above all, your car, which you will detest particularly when you think about that little garage your father once fixed up among our shacks.

  And what will infuriate you the most is that this explosion will be quite pointless. For the gamble has paid off. The goal is attained. And the dreamed-of ideal is that little relaxed and smiling world you have just turned your back on….

  All the rest is simply the bluster of a onetime pioneer with a red scarf.

  At the end of your drive you will sit down to eat in some obscure place where the salty exhalations from the nocturnal ocean will keep you silent, discreet company. You will lose count of your drinks. Your breathless heart will stumble and skid, inundated with viscous liquid, but it will survive. Like one that kept on beating long ago within that mass of frozen bodies.

  You’ll see, one day we’ll be even. My commercialism … your bluster.

  And besides… Besides, you should know that in this manuscript that weighs heavy on my arm I have not told the most important thing. And I shall never tell it. It will remain between us like a pledge of reunion in the uncertain future of our buffeted lives. Like an echo of that electrie charge that one day welded our two minds together, filled as they were with the dream of a radiant horizon.

  … It was one morning long ago. One morning in that wonderful summer when the secret of that pond they used to call “the Pit” (do you remember?) was revealed. The summer of our evacuation into the field of grain, the summer of the great rains and the damp bread … It was at the beginning of June in the first few days of our vacation. Before all those great events that were to shake the peaceful existence of our courtyard.

  My mother woke me very early. The sky, which is never really dark during summer nights in the north, nevertheless had that ashen hue it takes on before sunrise. For a few moments I was puzzled. School? But why so early? And anyway, no, it was the vacation.

  “Get dressed, your father and Yasha are waiting for you,” my mother said to me, smiling somewhat mysteriously. “They’re already out in the courtyard….”

  “But what for?” I asked, still half asleep.

  “Run along and you’ll see,” my mother replied with a look of mischief in her eye.

  I gave my face a quick wash in the kitchen, drank a bowl of warm milk, and, with a hunk of bread in my hand, I raced downstairs.

  The courtyard was still plunged in silence. There were blurred nocturnal shadows deep at the heart of the shrubbery. The planks of the domino table had a black, wet, nighttime gleam. The little clump of trees around the Pit gave off a muted rustling. The washing on the lines stretched out behind the jasmine had the misty pallor of ghosts.

  In front of our sheds I saw the little invalidka, its windows misted up. For there were a lot of people inside! My father at the steering wheel, Yasha beside him, and, between his knees, you, curled up, your hands clinging to the big handle beneath the windshield. I felt outraged. I had been awakened last of all, like a little child, the best seats were taken, and no one had told me anything about the expedition. Furthermore, because of the wheel above my head, I should see nothing.

  “So where are you going?” I asked in a grumpy voice as I clambered onto the floor in front of my father’s seat.

  Apparently you knew nothing either, which cheered me up a little.

  “You’ll see,” my father said to me, exchanging sly glances with Yasha.

  My bad mood quickly dissipated. From the first back-firings of the overloaded little invalidka. As it moved out of the courtyard the car filled the redbrick enclosure with a deafening roar. And, thrown together by the lurching of its fragile steel chassis, we pictured the surprise of the residents. They must have awakened with a start, opened their eyes wide, and pointed their noses toward the dials of their alarm clocks. Then, realizing what was happening, they would have pulled the covers around them. And we imagined their delight at going back to sleep, confident that it had been a false alarm and they still had three good hours of rest ahead of them.

  As it turned out, my perch had its advantages. It is true that I could not, like you, watch the road unwinding in front of us. I also had to duck my head when the steering wheel was turned. On the other hand, every time my father accelerated by pressing a curved lever, his rough palm rubbed against my ear. This gave me the feeling of participating fully in the driving of the car. Moreover, I found time to rest my cheek against one of the knots in my father’s pants legs and watch through the crack between the door and the floor. First, I saw the uniform gray strip of asphalt rushing past this crack, then a dirt road. Finally, when we slowed down, and still through the same crack, long damp grasses and seed heads began to penetrate inside the car.

  We stopped in the middle of an endless, silent plain, which at this early hour had the same ashen tonality as the sky. A few yards away we could see a solitary izba, fast asleep. Beyond it the dark shadow of a copse.

  Subdued by this misty silence, we jumped, you and I, out of the smoke-filled warmth of the invalidka. Leaving our fathers in the vehicle, we began to charge across the tall grass of the meadow. It was steeped in cold dew, and the stems that crunched beneath our feet seemed to burn our bare legs. The silence of the sleeping plain was so intense that our shouts froze close to our lips and gave rise to no resounding echoes. Only the dragonflies, awakened by our running, striped the air with their frenzied flights.

  We emerged onto the muddy bank of a river. Its dull, motionless surface reflected the dark stems of the reeds with an almost unreal precision. At our approach this smooth mirror became covered with little swift flashes — young pike were fleeing from under our sandals as we splashed along on the wet mud. Then we ran beside the water, stamping with our soles, preceded by little arrows that streaked across the sleeping mirror.

  Finally, out of breath, and transfixed with an intoxicating chill, we retraced our path. We saw the invalidka parked close to the hedge and the little deserted courtyard of the izba. We pricked up our ears. It seemed as if we could hear our fathers’ voices beyond the copse. We pictured them sitting on a tree trunk, smoking and chatting peacefully. The idea of giving them a fright came to both of us at the same moment. Yes, to creep up slowly and stealthily, as we came around the copse and suddenly: “Aha!” leap forward, waving our arms.

  We moved ahead, parting the tall stems with our hands so that they would not snap under our feet. We skirted the copse. We sensed the presence of the two men close at hand. We broke into a run, hurtling toward them. But the shout never passed our lips….

  Yasha was walking along with slow rhythmic steps, his head and shoulders thrown back. He was facing away from us. In his arms, folded across his belly, he was carrying my father. He had never carried him like that before. And my father, with broad and free strokes, was swinging a scythe. The grass trembled and fell in a broad silvery fan. They said nothing to one another. They seemed to have found their rhythm.

  I turned to you and winked, as much as to say: “Not bad, eh?” But suddenly I saw your lips trembling and your eyelids rapidly blinking. You turned away and began to run toward the river, shaking your head. I thought it was a game. I followed you. A few yards farther on, like an airplane losing height, you dived into the grass, your face hidden in the crook of your arm. Sobs were bursting out between your clenched teeth. I nudged your elbow: “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  You pushed my hand away with savage violence.

  With a shrug I got up and retraced my footsteps. Apparently there was something you had grasped that escaped me….

  Once more I saw our two fathers. I heard Yasha say in a merry tone: “How are we doing, Pyotr? I guess we haven’t got as far as the Nevsky Prospekt, have we!”

  I looked at his great pale cranium. A thick dark vein throbbed on his temple. A deep weariness could be sensed in the curve of his back, his tensed legs.

  They walked along, surrounded by the tart freshness of the cut grass. Flowers with
their bright petals still asleep, muted, fell at their feet. They walked along and each swing of the dew-spangled blade carried them forward to meet the fragile, silent dawning of the day.

  They walked along and seemed to be alone upon the earth. Far away, beyond the silvery undulations of the plain, a long mauve cloud was forming. The wind smelled of mud and the first chimney smoke. They were alone. All alone in the joyful and primitive boundlessness of that plain. All alone in the immensity of that northern sky …

  One day, you know, we shall play it again, that soft melody from a night long ago. Do you remember our duet of brassy murmurings and the caress of drumming fingers? To learn it, we needed those cloud castles above the Gap, our courtyard, and even the radiant horizon. But once learned, it could pour forth again wherever we might be. So long as there is a scrap of sky over our heads.