Mountains surround the jail. As does an ocean of snow.
The blanket is as cold as iron.
The dream has turned to ash.
All the same, not everything can be chained down:
From where do the peals of that bell come?
After a long while, I asked, “Where did they come from, Andrei?”
He said nothing.
The downpour was thick. The wind stirred yellow and green leaves into the rain.
A pinecone fell onto the roof of the shack. It shook Andrei out of his thoughts.
“I served in the Red Army. In the cavalry, you know.” He was narrating this slowly, reflectively, remembering.
If I had paid careful attention to what he was saying, I would have realized that those events were of the utmost importance to him. But the only voice I was listening to right then was that of my own curiosity. The revolution, the war . . . What did war mean to me? War is death. With my lack of experience, it didn’t occur to me that for someone else, war, imprisonment, and death could be closely linked to life.
“And what was there before? I mean before the Russian War?” I asked.
“Nothing. A vacuum.”
“The life of a young aristocrat is a vacuum?” I laughed.
“Look at that stream,” he said, changing the subject.
Why did he always change the subject? Why did he avoid talking about his past?
“What do you see there?” he asked.
“Stones and water,” I answered.
“Yes. The stones last, but the water flows, the stones are silent, but the water makes a sound. Where is it heading?”
“I don’t know.”
“Toward the distant sky, I think,” Andrei said, following the direction of the stream.
“What kind of life would a young aristocrat have led, in the Russia of the czars?” I grimaced.
“When I was little, I longed for Sunday to roll along, when my parents would take me to church. Long Orthodox masses, enigmatic and emotive, full of liturgical chanting, the light given off by the candles, and the gold on the walls, and full, too, of the lively colors of the painted icons, the strong smell of incense, full of half shadows and mystery.”
“And after that kind of childhood?”
“My parents’ palazzo overlooking the Fontanka canal, and in the summers, a chateau in Repino. After that the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, and then the Berlin Academy of Arts, and when that was over, back to the Saint Petersburg Academy.”
“What did you learn there?”
“In Berlin, I discovered the art of the oldest civilizations in the world. I learned how to admire the sculpture of the ancient Sumerians. The Sumerian ruler Gudea, who lived roughly two thousand two hundred years before Christ, was a whole revelation to me: he seemed to me to be the personification of spiritual beauty as I’d known it when I was little, in Russia.”
He stopped and said nothing: he was mulling something over.
“The Red Army. The cavalry division,” he said after a while, in a serious voice.
“Tell me how a young aristocrat and a refined artist from Saint Petersburg ended up with the Bolsheviks in the Red Army.”
“That is easy enough to explain: I believed in the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution,” said Andrei, without a trace of irony. His eyes were fixed on the darkness of the forest.
I longed to continue teasing him, but was starting to listen to something inside me, “I too, a long time ago, believed in—”
“I wanted to help the revolution. I volunteered for the Red Army.” Andrei cut me off.
I was happy now, because I could identify with that; I, too, had wanted to help the world, when I was with the nuns in the convent.
“Of course, just as I did, living with the nuns in the convent!”
“It would be easier to flatten these mountains and dry out the stream from which we’ve drunk than to satisfy the hearts of men,” he said, very quietly.
He ran his long fingers over his forehead. Looking at his white hands, I tried to imagine how that young and refined aristocrat must have felt in combat, he who had been used to hunting for sport and the museums of Berlin.
“You were already an experienced rider, that must have been an advantage,” I smiled at my image of a slim, elegant horseman, riding through the parks that belonged to the summer palaces of Peter the Great.
Andrei was lost in thought. He hadn’t heard me.
“The wind fills the vacuum of the mountains,” he said finally.
“How did an intellectual from the nobility go about joining the revolution?”
“In the cavalry regiment?” Andrei paid no heed to my irony, he continued seriously, forthrightly. “We Reds were waging war against the Whites, then I found myself in the middle of a large group of Cossacks. They knew how to do just about everything: kill a sheep for supper, skin it and disembowel it, roast it. They practically flew along on horseback, like Ilya Muromets, like mythical heroes. At the beginning, for me, a city intellectual, a Cossack was like a fairytale firebird, beautiful and all-powerful. The Cossacks knew how to seduce women, how to sing and dance. They knew how to carry their guns as if they were leading beautiful ladies off to dance a polonaise in a ballroom. They knew how to kill: they knew how to kill sheep, hares, goats. And ultimately men.”
“Have you known death?” I asked, sighing.
He didn’t hear me. The colors of the autumn were playing a nostalgic melody.
“Have you known death?” I asked again. “I have,” I said with a sigh. We were back on a subject I knew something about.
The wind was combing the thick branches of the fir and pine trees. The mountain range shifted in the distance and melted into the horizon.
“One day my commander ordered me to follow him. We rode for over fifty versts and caught up with the Thirty-Third Division in a small Ukrainian village. My commander knew as well as I did that the soldiers of the Thirty-Third Division, who were almost all Cossacks, traveled everywhere completely drunk, and wherever they arrived they ransacked the village and rumor had it, murdered all the inhabitants. My commander burst into a house that was low to the ground; I followed him in. A wounded man was moaning on a bed. He was Jewish—those Ukrainian villages were almost all Jewish. In a corner, a woman was sobbing and covered in blood. They’d raped her. On the floor I saw a dozen corpses. And in the middle of all this, two of our own soldiers from the Red Army, and a nurse, were filling sacks and trunks and washtubs and boxes, whatever they could, with the belongings of these dying people.”
“What happened to the two soldiers and the nurse?”
“The commander shot dead the Cossacks who were ransacking that house. The nurse fell on her knees before him pleading for mercy, not for herself, but for her children. The commander let her live. He got out of there as fast as he could, with a bunch of drunken Cossacks at his heels. I stayed behind. During the attack on that house, our soldiers, some of whom were after my commander, broke into the other rooms. In one, a Jewish family squeezed into a dark corner, trying to hide there. They pulled a man out of that group. They told me to finish him off. The man trembled like a leaf; he was short, stout, a typical family man with big eyes behind metal-framed glasses. I could see nothing else except those eyes full of terror.”
Andrei fell silent. I didn’t take my eyes off him. “That little man trembling with fear said, ‘Kill me, but spare my wife. Sir, I beg of you to make sure that nothing happens to her, but shoot me dead right now,’ and he pointed to his chest.”
“And then?” I asked softly.
“I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t. But I saw the pogrom that they launched afterward.”
“They?”
“They, the Red Army. Our people. The Cossacks. I saw the whole thing. Everything.”
“And then?” I asked after a long stretch of silence.
Andrei said nothing.
The bus came and left.
Eyes full of terror. I knew
them. In that instant, I saw them again in Andrei’s face.
The heavy rain didn’t let up, but I could see in the distance a single white cloud against the dark sky.
“Then? After many other similar massacres I fled from the Red Army. I hid in the forest. I became familiar with its secrets. But I couldn’t stay there forever, so in the end I joined the White Army.”
“The Whites believed you were sincere?”
“The same evening I turned up, the Whites had condemned a young boy to death. A deserter, like I’d been. That boy was full of panic. They led him over to a tree, and tied him to it. He kept begging for mercy. He talked about his mother, who had no one else in the world but him. He was crying so much, sobbing like a little child. They killed him anyway; five men shot him dead.”
“And you? What happened to you?”
“In the beginning, the Whites wouldn’t trust me. Then, when they saw I was . . . ”
“That you were what?”
“After that they did what they could to be rid of me.”
“That you were what?” I repeated.
“Eventually I also managed to flee from the Whites. I made it to Prague, where Masaryk’s government gave me a grant as part of the Czechoslovak government aid program to support exiled Russian intelligentsia.”
“So you lived in Prague!”
It had stopped raining, we stepped out of the hut. Behind Andrei’s head, over the dip in the hills, a bright cloud flew. Andrei turned and followed my gaze.
“That white cloud, free as it is, is pushing the wind,” he said.
He turned up his coat collar, then did the same with mine. He smiled.
“Yes, it was in Prague that I discovered my Venus born of the rain. And of music. You played the piano and sang. I watched you through a curtain of rain.”
His face was soaked by the wetness in the air. Two rows of mountains protected Andrei from the outside world.
Stepping away from me, he said something that surprised me. At that moment I remembered the Gypsy woman in blue, who could only say, “Oh! Oh!”
Andrei said, “I pray to the god of the mountains that he carry away all sadness. And that he fill us with warmth to dry out all the evil and pain in the world.”
“A god who fled Prague for the mountains.” I tried to smile when Andrei came back to where I was standing.
I tried to fill him with light, just as he wished. But above all I wanted to get rid of that image of the woman at the window, the neighbor opposite, who until recently had cried and laughed standing next to this very man. Now I knew why Andrei’s face was so familiar to me.
“How do you know I ran away?” Andrei was stunned. “Who told you?” he roared.
This change of behavior frightened me.
“Have you been spying on me?” Andrei asked, beside himself.
I remained silent, scared.
I didn’t understand the sudden change in this man. His face had gone dry and white.
“What are you, an informer?” he went on howling.
“Are you a spy? Always on the lookout for me?” Andrei bellowed.
I stepped away from him. The Gypsy’s words ran through my head, “You be careful!”
“Have I got it right, then? Were you running away from something when you came here?” I made an effort to smile.
Andrei himself was shaking.
“Tell me everything, Andrei, if you want to,” I whispered to calm him down, “I’d like to hear it, your story really does interest me.”
Another transformation took place. Now, Andrei watched me the way the horse from my childhood looked at the carter.
I took his hand. At first he flinched, then he gradually quieted.
Once he had calmed himself, he stroked my hand, so delicately it was as if he weren’t touching a human hand, but rather the white fluff of a dandelion.
His gaze fixed on the distant peaks. He said, “These mountains are black without their knowing it, the night is gray but doesn’t realize it. And I, unthinkingly, am tottering through the empty darkness. My soul follows, flying, at a distance.”
After a moment, he said, “Did I run away? I walked along a Prague street until I reached the city limits; then I walked along a very long road. At the feet of the mountains I found an unpaved path that led me here. Is that running away?”
He flinched again, jerked his fingers out of my hand, and sprang to his feet. He kicked at a stone.
“So now you are going to report me, to tell them everything!”
I remembered my “That’s enough!” that had such a strong effect on my husband, all that time ago. With him, it had been like a magic word.
“That’s enough!” I shouted.
Andrei stood stock-still.
“Enough! I’m fed up with all of this!” I was letting off accumulated steam.
With a long, pained howl, Andrei vanished into the forest.
I set off after him. The trees calmed me. In the forest, the rain only whispered. Nothing broke the silence, no footsteps, no sighs. Only the song of the rain, sliding through the branches.
I pushed myself forward through the wet forest, bumping into the tree trunks. Trees stay stiff and upright, I thought, they don’t dither the way people do, who twist about, deform themselves, make contortions. The rain caressed my face and hair. It was almost dark by now. Nothing stirred. The only thing I heard was another bus, arriving and then departing.
In the street, the snow was mixing with rain. It was Christmas.
I was watching the window of the woman who lived across the street; the candles were flickering on the Christmas tree. A bald man with a thin line of a mustache, like a bank clerk’s, was having dinner with her. Yes, maybe my neighbor’s new friend was nothing but a clerk, but she had a Christmas tree in her home, and the atmosphere was warm, cozy, and gay. My neighbor and the man with the thin line of a mustache were keeping each other company. Although I had company for the holiday, I was alone.
“Now that your grandmother is dead,” my mother mentioned this fact—which I found so difficult to accept—so casually, so without sentimentality, “we will celebrate our Christmas dinner at your home, Sylva, and we will decorate the tree here too.”
Mr. Singer, the father of one of my students, and my mother’s new husband, gave a discreet yawn. Not a single move made by Bruno Singer escaped my mother’s notice. She straightened up fast as a cat.
“Bruno would prefer to celebrate Hanukkah. Wouldn’t you, Bruno?” I said jokingly, although I knew that my mother’s husband didn’t celebrate the Jewish holidays.
Bruno Singer stroked his thick, shiny, chestnut mustache.
“You know perfectly well, Sylva, that I am an atheist.”
I poured more tea into the old, Chinese porcelain cups.
“A good thing Grandma can’t hear you,” I said, as if Grandmother were in the next room.
“Your grandmother has not lived to see these terrible times,” sighed Bruno Singer as he picked up his cup by the handle. As he moved I could see how much thinner he’d become. I remembered just how astonished he’d been, a few years ago, at the change he saw in me after my husband’s death.
At that time I could only think of the past: it had become an obsession of mine. Bruno Singer, on the other hand, only had eyes for the future. It scared him. Would his Jewish firm withstand the Nazis’ lack of self-restraint? I looked out at the street and at my neighbor’s window through the slush. Her Christmas tree was glowing.
Bruno Singer went pale. Who was that knocking at the door? Since the Germans—the ones from Germany, of course, but also our Germans, the ones who until recently had formed part of our own country—had begun shouting hostile slogans in the streets and raising their right arms while they slammed their military boots to the ground, and clenched their teeth in puffed-up expressions of disdain and proud violence, since then anything at all would send Bruno Singer into paroxysms of fear.
The knocking at the door grew louder and louder.
My mother took her husband’s hand. I quickly went to answer it.
On the landing in front of the door, Andrei leaned against the wall. I hadn’t seen him in a long while.
I hastened to put my mother and Bruno’s fears to rest. With a wave of my hand, I told them I had a visitor, that there was no cause for concern.
I introduced Andrei to my mother and her husband. They looked at him, surprised. There they were, both with cigarettes in holders, their shoes shined to perfection, shoes with square toe caps, in accordance with the latest fashion, both of them were wearing French colognes. They stared at this bearded stranger who had come down from the mountains as if he were a genie that had just popped out of its lamp.
I asked my mother to accompany me to my room. There I told her that I needed time alone with Andrei. I suggested that he and I could take a stroll around the neighborhood, and that she and Bruno could finish their tea undisturbed.
She bowed her head. In a very low voice, she replied, “There’s going to be a war. I can smell it in the air. I’ve already been through one and I know how the atmosphere grows saturated with war fever. Sylva, during war, you come to realize what is most important to you: your children. The lives of your children are the most important, more important than your own life.”
Maman went on talking. Her words sounded something like the litanies recited by the nuns of my childhood. I didn’t listen to what she was saying, I knew she was having a go at my relationship with Andrei.
On Kampa Island, Andrei was chasing after the falling snowflakes.
“Why have you come? What did you want to say to me?” I asked.
“I’m here with you. Isn’t that enough? Do we need words?”
“What did you want to talk about? I’d like to know.”
“I haven’t seen you in a long while.”
“Just tell me, don’t keep me in suspense!”
“I haven’t seen you in a long, long while.”
The Silent Woman Page 13