Unforgiving Years (18 page)

How to express, in this tangential language embroidered with arabesques around essential blanks, the anguish of thought? Present and absent, it was everywhere at once, and everywhere elusive. How to refine a set of contradictory yet blinding clarities into nuances of shadow? Daria believed she had done it. That first rendezvous with Sacha at the Jardin des Plantes, then in the back room of a Parisian bar on boulevard de l’Hôpital, translated into the play of light on the streets, a drab scent of autumnal decay floating among pruned shrubs, a blue sheen of greenhouses in the distance, an unease of footsteps on the path, a tan-upholstered interior in all its tense, hospitable, anonymous, shattering banality. Sacha himself was associated with images of tropical landscapes that she was wary of developing. (Because they knew she had never been to the tropics and might ask: Who do you know in those countries? They might even guess.) Instead she painted — in words — a little bamboo wood in an Adjari botanical garden near Tsikhes-Dziri, those names unspoken though, no names, no names! Thin green shoots after rainfall, the pungency of red earth, the graceful thrust of ferns … She also wrote a gloss on Lermontov’s classic poem “Three Palms,” in which the sensations of her childhood were ramified.

The worst questionings, the ones born of devastating bereavements, had her filling a notebook on the death of the musician, the death of the gold-seeker, the death of the inventor, the death of the great atheist believer, the death of the devout but limited believer, the death of the cynic, the surprise at death of the intelligent utopian, the indignation at death of the misled fighter, and how each of them faced up to the end with scruple, astonishment, courage, consciousness of the void, furious disappointment, desolate faith, quailing flesh … This was the most imprudent of the notebooks — and the one it would have been impossible not to write. She did not, however, write about the simple death of the militant, and most often when she talked about death, she was really only talking to herself about the higher life of the mind. Not good enough! The abyss, the plunge into the abyss were unequaled … Those pages she burned quickly, well before her departure, and none too soon, because when Major Ipatov of the Special Troops showed up on a tour of inspection, he was affable and comradely, left some quality cigarettes and a flask of Armenian cognac — “more aromatic than Hennessy, you know” — while inquiring in a familiar way about just what this deportee could possibly be writing through the long and lonely evenings in her hut. “I know how many copybooks you order, I know you write and write, I know everything!” Daria slapped her notebooks onto the table. “May I?” He thumbed through them, paying careful attention to some passages, and wanting to know the reason for certain crossings-out. “Good gracious, you’re turning into a regular prose stylist, Daria Nikiforovna! Are these the preparations for a book?” “Yes.” “I sincerely hope they’ll let you publish … You could make twenty thousand rubles out of it one day. Very fine, this paragraph on the rain. Of course, it might be a bit too disjointed for the average reader … But here, this piece about the hands, deeply moving I think …” It was too dark for Major Ipatov to see the exile’s face redden. “I see male and female hands, I sense a complexity of relation between them … In such a refined form, I wonder if it’s really publishable … You have talent!” Since he was not untalented himself as a lettered-bloodhound-reader, Daria congratulated herself for having destroyed the death notebook two days earlier. Major Ipatov might actually have understood it.

She burned all the books without a twinge of regret. (There was not one line in them about regret.)

* * *

The little village, made up of some fifty Kazak families, lay along the edge of a streambed blessed with a muddy trickle for a few weeks only, during the spring in the mountains. Its fifty-odd uneven shacks leaned at angles, like outcroppings of the earth, that is, of hardened sand; the tallest, reaching twelve feet to the top of its crumbling turret, was surely the most godforsaken of all the Prophet’s mosques, though an ardent faith still burned among its faithful. Flat roofs shone dustily red at this sunset hour. Timeless women seemed fixed motionless around the well, thick silhouettes becoming graceful as one drew near: the young ones had slender bodies, angular features, and eyes like fawns; the old ones, worn down at thirty by the privations of this lonely spot, had been drained to the bottom of their black gaze by the unvarying spectacle of the desert and relentless worrying about food and water — since the fitful stream of the Ak-Aul dried up even quicker than maternal breasts … Beside them crouched the freakish outline of a camel with flaccid humps.

The peaceful fire of the horizon set interiors ablaze with gold reflections. Daria had to visit almost every house in order to say goodbye to the schoolchildren. “I won’t be able to tell you any more stories about the Golden Cockerel and the Cat That Purred. Work hard on the alphabet and love our great country, which is destined for a happiness you’ll know when you’re grown up …” (Those of you who do grow up, if the enemy universe doesn’t slaughter us, if our own young egotism doesn’t drag us down to the abyss … ) “Your elder brothers are fighting as bravely as the warriors of Timur-Lenk …” That at least was something they understood: Tamerlane! A historic figure who now seemed distinctly modern … The ironwork glinted on ancient chests; old people rose to receive her, tiny women hung with necklaces of antique silver coins and their bronzed, wizened menfolk, stern, morose, wearing robes of brightly striped cloth eaten away by filth. Grave, parchmenty faces inclined before her, thin dark lips shaped words of good wishes for the future in formulas prescribed by the Koran to attend the departure on a journey of a friendly traveler, be he an infidel …

Daria distributed her riches: a kilo of dried black bread, a pound of sugar, some boiled sweets, and a bar of perfumed soap which she cut into slices to go around to the new brides and young mothers, kindling sparks of delight in the glossy sable pupils, for “you’d think it was a cake of roses,” even if nobody here could have the least idea of what roses were. Daria left some borax to treat the children’s eyes, inflamed by the mineral dust and often eaten away by conjunctivitis resulting from venereal disease. She urged the Polish woman to take over the school, assuring her of official backing to come. “The intelligence of those children, it’s so alive! Their minds are as thirsty as the earth …” Then, a knapsack on her back, she walked away alone into the flat distance, the tragic, darkening horizon where the quenched fires of evening had left only violet dunes, a yellow-blue sky, the sense of a vast cicatrization covering vast mute sorrows …

“Congratulations,” said the chief of the region, “I’m going to drive you to the aerodrome myself.” He was smoking coarse seedy tobacco rolled in newspaper. Outside, the petrified sand sparkled. Seeing this officer in this abandoned office — scrawny, his right eye covered with a black patch, his hands dirty — Daria realized for the first time that his feeble persecution of the deportees was merely a way to escape the suffocation of total boredom. “What news from the front, Akim Akimich? The second front?” “Oh yes, the second front of those imperialist scum, you believe in that, do you?” sneered the one-eyed man. “They’re all in it together, they intend to wipe us out, you mark my words. We’re on our own.” And the fire went out of him; he seemed exhausted by this small fit of verve. Daria told him about the school, sixty-seven eager children, two hour-long lessons every day, reading, writing, arithmetic, I’d recommend the Polish woman, she’s very keen … The regional boss, Akim Akimich, whose eye had been put out by a Polish bullet, replied sharply, “She’s a landowner’s daughter, she’s the widow of an insurance company tycoon, a capitalist, and a Catholic to boot! How can you answer to me for her where the education of our children is at stake?”

“I’m not answerable for anyone, in any shape or form, I wouldn’t even answer for you, if they asked me! But the school happens to be under your jurisdiction, Akim Akimich. If you could arrange to have a professional teacher sent here, I should be delighted to hear it …”

That deflated him, for he was both leery of responsibility and flattered to have some degree of it in the midst of all this hateful sand which makes you want to drink yourself into oblivion. Mentally, he considered the pleasure of ordering in the Polish woman for an interview laced with implicit threats, at the end of which might lie the belly of a white woman …

“I’ll think about it … It’s true that we should make the most of the human material we’ve got … How’s morale among the Kazaks?”

“They’re hungry, Akim Akimich.”

“And you think I’m not hungry too?”

“Much less than they are, Akim Akimich.”

He spat into the inkwell and scraped at it with a classroom quill.

“I’m even starved of ink. The newspapers I read are a month old. I haven’t seen a blade of grass for two years.”

“The Kazaks of Aul-Ata have never seen one,” Daria reflected, and they never will … But she was beginning to warm to this embittered lonely officer who probably doesn’t trust his trio of Uzbek soldiers. “Will you permit me to send you some books about the war?” “Not about the war. I know all there is to know about that. What it does to men! No book can do it justice … You can send me things on plants. With pictures of trees, if possible. A botanical treatise.”

“Or the tale of the Sleeping Forest?”

“And of the whispering reeds, Comrade!”

They regarded each other amicably. And yet how he had plagued her, this wrinkled, red-haired, crafty Akim, delaying the mail and spreading ridiculous rumors about her with the wiles of a village sorcerer — just to enliven the tedium of the desert days and give himself the illusion of existing as a human!

* * *

A blizzard of thickly falling snowflakes, more opaque than white, held nightfall back over the airfield and gave Daria her first deep thrill. Snow, I salute you, dear whirling snow, you that soften the cold and fill the darkest of nights with intimations of lightness, blotting the pathways, making space huge, and setting the wolves to howling! You deliver me from the sands, no more desert, yesterday is simply the past. You deliver me from the rot of inaction. We never feel ourselves dying in life except through such contrasts, when one present suddenly splits apart to let another in, and we come back to life as yesterday’s being dies. When the slaughter is over, perhaps man will find that by transcending erstwhile distances, by flying over continents and climates, he has grown and conquered the possibility of self-renewal. Who knows, one day neuroses may be treated with airplane travel.

“Military ID check. Are you dreaming, Citizen?”

“Yes, I am,” said Daria joyfully.

The small snow-covered shack was glacial; a single bulb struggled fearfully against the piercing night. Haggard NCOs, their boney faces framed in fur, were working noiselessly. One murmured numbers into the telephone. Another was changing the dressing on his right wrist. The one who had just spoken was going over some papers. He sniffed as he heard the crump of an explosion reverberating into the emptiness beyond, like the dying sigh of some colossal monster.

“They’ve got ammunition to spare, the bastards! It’s the same thing night after night.”

Her three documents were in order, unambiguously so, yet tainted by a whiff of mystery and prison. The man looked her coldly up and down, not without sympathy. People so rarely emerge from mysteries and prisons these days … Then again, it seems it’s possible to survive and that nearly everyone will have his turn …

“You won’t be able to report to military headquarters until tomorrow … Do you want to spend the night here in the barracks? You’re welcome to my bunk, Citizen. It’s all right as shelters go. I’m on duty till dawn.”

Klimentii stepped in and Daria realized that he was waiting for her. “The citizen can easily spend the night at my place …” The checkpoint corporal stared at them. He was around twenty years old, extremely skinny, with scarcely more than a glimmer, an indomitable spark, of vitality left in him.

“Been at the front long?”

“Oh, about a hundred years.”

“Is that all?”

“Not enough in your opinion? Try it.”

Embarrassed at seeming to rebuff a kindness, Daria said, “Thanks all the same, Comrade.” He threw a black look at before resuming his businesslike manner. “Four hundred yards to the truck. Compulsory wearing of shrouds. And no smoking!” One swoops down from the sky, having vanquished distance and danger, and then one puts on a shroud to go into the city at night … The conceit pleased Daria as she got into the loose, hooded overgarment of white canvas. The twenty-year-old NCO sang under his breath:

He walked ahead of the new arrivals through the swarm of gray flakes that softly buried everything around. Their shrouded forms, resembling dim cutouts of fog, were invisible at more than three paces. Klimentii was silent. Daria continued the poem in her mind, lines once written by a poet (who had recently died or been killed at the front) for another poet, who had killed himself.
¹
So it goes with our poets, Old Russia, Young Russia!

Frustrated at being unable to recall more than that one quat-rain, she racked her brain for other important lines, those two lines that say it all — how do they go? She stumbled in the pathless snow, dark as cinders. Klim’s arm held her up firmly as she was about to fall, and Daria regained her balance like a dancer on her partner’s arm. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “Nothing, I was remembering two lines of poetry …” But he had already let go, and the two meaningful lines shone for her alone, unspoken:

She almost bumped into the ghostly truck. The journey was slow, guided by phosphorescent signals that moved along the ground. The invisible convoy traveled through a shifting, milky gloom of formless shadows. A desperate cold penetrated the flesh. The suffering was one of organic extinction and it effectively extinguished all thoughts apart from the craving for deliverance, the craving for warmth. Klim, Daria, and three shapeless, faceless soldiers squeezed together into a human heap at the back of the truck so as to conserve their meager supply of warmth. At times all that Daria could see were a pair of slanted eyes, green as a cat’s, seemingly full of quiet anger. It went on forever. Toward the end, a hand crawled between the compacted furs and bodies to find Daria’s gloved hand as though by instinct, squeezed it, and she returned the friendly pressure. Klim said, “We’re entering the city …” How did he know? They couldn’t see a thing. But through the gash in the mica window black walls slid by. The truck was weaving slowly, no doubt to avoid the potholes. Melodious night-watchmen’s whistles rang out. Klim extracted himself from the huddle. “Ahoy, comrade chauffeur! Stop your dreadnought. I’ve reached port.” The driver was clearly in no hurry to oblige, either because he was hanging on to the wheel half asleep or because he had no sympathy for someone who thought he’d reached port: you’re never home safe in this bloody life, or when you are, it blows up in your face. No such thing as a port! Not even a berth in the cemetery, unless you can produce half a loaf for the grave-digger! Barely raising his voice, Klim displayed his cursing abilities with contained fury in a barrage of the filthiest army swearwords combined with imperious supplication. The truck hiccupped to a halt, like a drunken mastodon. Klim helped Daria to get down. All that could be seen of the driver was his bearish bulk as he hopped up and down on the ground to get his circulation going and to shake off the cold. (The dancing bear, the fossil mastodon … ) It was no longer snowing; there was not a spark of life in the night.