Unforgiving Years (17 page)

“But I’m permanently scared stiff!”

“Well, that’s real courage, to be always scared and still do what has to be done …”

Klimentii glanced around the inside of the plane. It was cluttered but comfy, like a sturdy tent in the snow, where in spite of the cold you feel good. “It would take so little,” he murmured, “and then …” Daria understood, she shrugged her shoulders, said, “And then what?” She tucked the bearskin she’d slept in more snugly around her. The plane’s hold made her think of a metal tunnel crammed with parcels and people. The glacial air stank of the excretions of one desperately wounded man. Daria rubbed her face with her fingers, as she often did on waking. “Want to see the earth?” Klimentii offered. The metal body, punctured by shrapnel, had been hurriedly and badly patched up. The soldier shifted a metal plate that was blocking a crescent-shaped hole next to his knee. Daria gasped with pleasure as a jet of damp, cold, but fresh air hit her full in the face. “See the front line? They always take potshots at us around here.” But the fog was milky and opaque. “It’ll be touch and go landing …” In a low, amused voice he told the story of the luckless VIPs whose plane had strayed off course in this cursed Baltic fog, and landed smoothly, obeying all the usual signals … behind Finno-German lines. All of them shot after a week’s interrogation. “Tara-ta-ta, one day the happy life will come, Comrade!”

“Are you trying to scare me, you moron?” said the woman, her eyes pale as the fog.

“Whoa, don’t get mad, Daria Nikiforovna! I’ll never be cured of fear, no one will, but I don’t care, it hardly bothers me anymore. I put up with it like a chronic bellyache, that’s all. Man is such a small thing … We don’t matter, you, me, whoever, it’s the country that counts … I really did mean the happy life, the one in which man will count, will be built one day over our graves. This city is one big graveyard. And I love it. You can’t help but love it. I promise you a glass of firewater, you’ll see …”

“Is your wife waiting for you?”

“Faithfully, below ground. No carbohydrates, no vitamins, thirteen-hour days at the plant, she went out in six months like a lamp starved of oil … I applied to have her evacuated, but the wives of technicians, officers, and heroes come first. As they should. By the time I got my medal, it was too late. I’m cold to the marrow, no one’s waiting for me, I’m the one waiting — waiting for what luck will bring. The epilogue, or another attachment … It’s always the same warm rush between two people, isn’t it? The warmth of the past is never completely dead, while I’m alive … I won’t remarry until after our victory, though. ‘Togetherness without tears,’ that’s my motto.”

“And quite right too, Klim,” Daria said.

He concluded, proudly or mockingly, it was hard to tell with him: “I’ve learned.”

The whitish mist was thinning under the bomber’s belly, allowing glimpses of flat black country marbled with white veins. A wide dark loop sliced through it, like a fissure in the earth’s crust. They haven’t invented war toys to split open the planet yet, but they will at the rate we’re going … “The Neva!” Klimentii cried.

Stupidly, like a schoolchild, Daria found herself imagining that intelligent sadistic brute Czar Peter, pacing the moors on the banks of this river and suddenly pulling his sickly-soft, wrinkled, feline face into a mask of will, saying, “On this spot I will build a city!” Asia will open a window on the West here, we will no longer be Asia … His inspired folly aimed at our escape from Asia. Then he had the severed head of his wife’s young lover preserved in a jar which he put on the mantelpiece under the great mirror so his wife, Empress Catherine, could join the three-headed tête-à-tête supper … We have good examples to follow.

* * *

When I came through this city four years ago, Daria was thinking, we were coming back to life. The passably well-dressed crowd of the privilegentia ambled down the central prospect in soft spring sunshine. Our dead shivered within me, but the crowd was indifferent to them. It only wanted to live its own life; there was a lot of dancing … I was aghast at the nightmare of the coming war, of which the crowd knew nothing because the papers were full of the peace policy and how it would prevail, if it meant a pact with the Devil himself. Let the Devil take his hellfire elsewhere, we just want to live in peace and quiet, and we’ve earned the right having suffered so much more than the egotistical, degenerate bourgeois West … It’s the West’s turn to pay for a change: let it learn that life’s not just about a good meal, a good roll in the hay, and a good night’s sleep but something ferocious, so ferocious there’s no name for it. We know that, don’t we — for having tried to change the world (and no doubt too for failing to put a more human world in its place, or to prevent the return of the cruel ones … ). On the broad sidewalk with its leisurely succession of palaces, where bronze horse trainers rear over the four entrances to a bridge, I met corps-de-ballet starlets who were more or less the mistresses of influential men; writers doing their best to produce a felicitous page in spite of the censor, and spending more time censoring themselves than writing; engineers released from concentration camps with medals; historians fresh from prison who were busy tracing the glorious continuity between Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and socialism with all the rigor they once applied to demonstrating the same thing between Gracchus Babeuf, the Paris Commune, Karl Marx, and ourselves … “But, you see,” a fat academician assured me, “it’s all true, we’re just widening the scope of historical continuity …” He may have been right. Dramatists were writing plays about betrayal, and I met one who had hastily adapted his epic for the treason market so that in Act Five, the hero is unmasked as an enemy agent. It was the hit of the season.

They flirted, they talked books, they led silky hounds on leashes. The cathedral colonnade of Our Lady of Kazan seemed svelte, white clouds were reflected in the dark water of the canal, the church of the Holy Savior on the Blood (an emperor’s blood) was as vividly colored as an illuminated manuscript, for blood causes color to blossom from stone … A group of us went to look at the gilded, winged lions of a small Chinese bridge, and I was pestered for news about Paris fashions and the bombing of Madrid, rather more about the fashions than about the bombing (though it was good form to seem concerned about the demise of Spain). There were finely bound books for us to leaf through. I went to admire the vertical waves of pink granite of the security building, erected on the site of the small old law court burned down in 1917 … Fifteen stories high, how many offices! A towering proof of progress. The prison next door looked unchanged … Painful topics were never broached, out of understandable caution or as a kindness to me. No one seemed to doubt the future … I listened politely to the views of a man of letters. “Tragedy is just one of history’s overhead costs … Paris frolicked while Robespierre’s men were being killed. Paris was right. The true, the lasting revolution was never about extreme issues, the justice or otherwise of the guillotine, the victories in rags. It was all about vitality, the Parisian flair for
l’amour
, its lust for life in spite of everything, its rich exuberance … I’m going to write a novel about Madame Récamier. Marvelous character!” “What about Madame Rolland?” I demanded. “Wasn’t she quite a character too?” “Dear me no, she’s a bore. So pedantic, up to the very last minute! And a Girondist. I can’t bear the Girondists.” This scribbler was installing his porcelain collection in a villa on the gulf, and pressed me to visit: “I have some extraordinary Meissen!” I promised, cravenly, without mentioning that at least the Girondists had given up fine china … His gaze was keen and melancholy. I nearly asked him, Why do you always lie? But that would have sent him off drinking for a week. He was killed at the front. His last war dispatches were completely worthless … He had a sentimental kindness. He cried like a child over calves killed in the fields, so whenever he had to interview some optimistic general, his attempts at valiant patriotism gave off a hollow ring …

“Has the city suffered very much, Klimentii?”

“Not as much as you’d expect … At least not the stones. It’s architecture that ensures permanence, after all. We suffered a little less than a million dead last winter, or perhaps more than a million, who knows? One in three, let’s say. In some areas, one in two …”

“What are you saying!”

“Don’t get upset, Daria Nikiforovna. In a country like ours, a million is one hundred and eightieth … In a war like this … Anyway, isn’t the earth already overpopulated, in relation to the means of production?”

Again Daria had to wonder whether he was being simply honest or unpleasantly scathing; she inclined toward the first. Dexterously he closed up the horrible gash in the plane’s belly. The badly wounded man had fallen into a fitful, whistling sleep. A cockpit voice intoned “Prepare for landing …” Klimentii’s pallid thinness concealed no irony. It seemed to say: This is how we are, the young generation, what’s left of us: resigned, aware, steadfast, no more bitter than the statistics, no more discouraged than the course of history. The river believes in itself. Ferrying blocks of ice, bits of straw, dead bodies, or fecund silt, the river passes — and remains — with no regret for the drops left behind among wild bul-rushes, or dashed against the granite quays. Klimentii was fitting the straps of a knapsack over his shoulders. Daria thought suddenly about herself.

The release she had been waiting four years for brought her no joy, probably because there was no joy left in the world. The bitter years fell away in one go, without regret or longing, with barely a dull wonder at this unexpected new start. A message had arrived from district command with her marching orders, the next combat mission, as though nothing had happened since Paris: “ … to report to Service X, Army X …” “When can you be ready to leave?” the district commander asked. “Oh … by tomorrow,” Daria replied unthinkingly. I could just as well leave tonight, there’s nothing to keep me in your desiccated wastes, your sordid tedium, my useless life …

* * *

All she needed was the time it took to collect some linen and a few clothes, the time to burn the journal she had kept to ward off the fear of sinking into obsession. A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because — since it could be seized — it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past, a single allusion to assignments accomplished (about which it is forbidden to write without prior permission). No expression of torment or sorrow (this for the sake of pride), no expression of doubt or calculation (for the sake of prudence), and nothing ideological, naturally, for ideology is the sludge at the bottom of the pitfall …

The construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable and secret fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation. In it, Daria could not evoke either Barcelona or the Caproni bombers, or the efforts to save a republic in its death throes, or even the ravishing interludes of those times: her nights with a man of artless energy for whom the slaking of passion was such a feast that afterward he would talk on and on, with a touch of genius, about the war, the future, the sense of the human, the whole world which he loved … Of these discussions punctuated by embraces nothing, nothing! Every sentence, read by a professional third party, would have prompted an unjust condemnation, and this man might still be living (with another woman — fortunate woman! — I only hope she understands him). Daria wrote of the colors of the sea, the heave of the swell contemplated from the top of the nameless mountain they had picked for their meetings. And it did help to refresh her at times when the hot sand rolling in swirling waves of suffocation across the desert clouded the village, penetrated the low clay hovel, and made the flame of the lamp tremble. Daria described the man’s breathing without saying it was the lover’s breathing, and the enchanted tremor of his muscles without saying it was during the communion of love. Waves, swells, exhalations, movements, tightenings, releases, surrenders of the flesh, phosphorescences of the spirit transmuted into inner riches she’d had no inkling of before, an inexhaustible treasure that she could draw up from a well of darkness and carry into the light! No wave, no contoured shoulder, no quiver of lashes can ever be wholly expressed … We live almost without seeing, and now it turns out we see what is no more, but once was, through a prodigious magnifying lens, so that the rough grain of a skin or the carved planes of a torso gain an intensity of pathos whose pale echoes we recognize in a fragment of Greek sculpture. The broken piece of statue arrays itself in mystery, stirs the imagination, and should it happen to be a breast swollen with life, that breast, alone and unique on earth, asserts its own human density and the whole of woman.

The man’s face would have filled a book in itself, if overwhelming feelings had not often interrupted her as she worked on those pages. All faces are illuminated in a single one; yet his appeared incomparable, its radiance lighting up souls without number. Daria didn’t feel strong enough to confront so great, so stabbing a vision on her own. The face stirred the totality of life, internal and external simultaneously, communicating through the natural marvel of the eyes, of expression … The dizziness of looking, the dizziness of standing on the edge of a sovereign understanding … Daria fell back to the world, that is, to the sensation of a storm in calm weather, in the middle of a blessedly fine spring day when several modern reinforced-concrete buildings suddenly blew up, expelling all of their human contents from their carcasses; but there was no description of falling rubble, of a city gone mad beneath the planes, of planes in the fulminating noonday sky; the writing created only a naked feeling of storm and terror, of revulsion and murder, of a fragile universe; it was a sensation born for no apparent reason out of the gilded blue zenith.