The idea then came to me of making a precise note of dates, places, recollecting names, signposting our shared past. It felt like finding oneself in the kingdom of the dead. Several countries, including our own, had meanwhile disappeared, their names and frontiers had changed. Among the people you and I had mixed with, fought against, or assisted, some were living under other identities, others were dead, still others had settled down into this modern era, in which I often felt like a phantom, a ghost from an increasingly archaic age. But, overwhelmingly, my striving after precise details was taking me away from what we had truly experienced. I tried to make a list of the political forces at work, the causes of conflicts, the notable heads of state. My notes resembled a strange reportage emanating from a nonexistent world, a void. I realized that in place of this inventory of facts, with its pretensions to historical objectivity, I should be describing the quite simple, often invisible, subterranean fabric of life. I recalled you sitting on the threshold of a house, your eyes lost in the light of the sunset. I again saw that young soldier's arm, that wrist with a leather bracelet, in the shell of a gutted armored car. The beauty of a child who, a few yards away from the fighting but a thousand leagues removed from all its madness, was building a little pyramid from still-warm cartridge cases. With tightly shut eyes, I traveled back to that house on the shores of a frozen lake, the drowsiness of that house you had sometimes told me about. More and more often I found myself admitting that what was essential was condensed into these glimpses of the past.
One day, answering the telephone, I thought I could hear your voice, almost inaudible in the susurration of a call that seemed to be coming from the other end of the world. I called out your name several times, mine too, the last ones we had been known by. After a dull crackling, a faultless connection was made, and I heard, too close to my ear now, a swift singsong delivery in an Asiatic language (Vietnamese or Chinese, perhaps), a very shrill and insistent woman's voice, giving continuous little giggles or sobs, it was impossible to tell which. For several days the sound of that brief, infinitely remote whispering stayed in my mind, that impossible double of your voice, swiftly obliterated by the screeching of the Asian woman.
The whispering, which I had thought I could recognize as your voice, reminded me of an evening in days gone by, in that city on fire outside our window with its torn mosquito netting. I remembered how the proximity of death and our complicity in the face of this death had given me the courage that night to tell you something I had never previously admitted to anyone: the story of the child and the woman hiding deep in the mountains, the words crooned in an unknown language.
I knew now that I was incapable of telling the truth of our age. I was neither an objective witness, nor a historian, and certainly not a wise moralist. All I could do was to continue that story, interrupted then by the coming of night, by the journeys that awaited us, by fresh wars.
I began to talk, seeking simply to preserve the tone of our conversation in the dark long ago, the bitter serenity of words spoken with death close at hand.
The words I silently addressed to you conjured up the white-haired woman and the child once more-but ten years after the night of their escape. A December evening, a little town lost in snow close to a switching yard, a few miles away the shadow of a big city, the city which its inhabitants, in their confusion, still call by the name that has been taken away from it, Stalin's. The woman and the child are sitting in a room that is low and meagerly furnished but clean and well-heated, on the top floor of a massive wooden house. The woman has changed little in ten years, the child has turned into an adolescent of twelve with a thin face, a shaven head, his hands and wrists red with cold.
The woman, her head bowed toward the lamp, is reading aloud. The adolescent stares at her face but does not listen. He has the look of one who knows a brutal and ugly truth, a look fully aware that the other person is in the process of camouflaging this truth beneath the innocent routine of a habitual pastime. His eyes focus on the woman's hands as they turn the page and he cannot help pulling a quick, dismissive face.
The boy knows that this room, with its reassuring coziness, is hidden away in a great dark izba, a log house swarming with lives, cries, arguments, sorrows, bouts of drunkenness. You can hear the long-suffering sobs of a woman in the room next door, the tapping of a cobbler's little hammer in the apartment opposite, the cry of a voice calling after clattering footsteps, amplified by the stairwell. And under the windows, in the winter dusk, the ponderous passing of trains, whose loads can be glimpsed-long tree trunks, blocks of concrete, machinery under tarpaulins.
The boy tells himself that this woman reading aloud is totally foreign to him. She's a foreigner! From a country that, to the inhabitants of that town, is more remote than the moon. A foreigner who has long since lost her original name and answers to the name of Sasha. The one trace that still links her to her improbable native land is this language, her mother tongue, which she is teaching the boy on Saturday evenings, when he obtains permission to leave the orphanage and come to this great black izba. He stares at her face, her lips, as they emit strange sounds, which, nevertheless, he understands.
Who is she in reality? He remembers old stories she used to tell him, now overlaid by the new experiences of his childhood. It seems she was the friend of his grandparents, Nikolai and Anna. One day she took the boy's father, Pavel, into her house. She is the woman who crossed a suspension bridge, holding onto the worn ropes and carrying the child by his shirt gripped in her teeth.
These shadowy figures, who are the boy's only family, seem insubstantial to him. He listens to what the woman is reading: through the canopy of foliage a young knight catches sight of a castle keep. The boy's face sharpens, his lips tighten into a defiant grin. He is getting ready to tell this woman the truth that he now knows, the brutal, bald truth she is trying to cover up with her "canopies," "keeps," and other fancy, old-fashioned rubbish.
It is a truth that burst forth that morning at the orphanage when a little gang leader, surrounded by his henchmen, yelled these words at him, half words, half spittle, "Look. Everyone knows about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog!"
All the truth in the world was concentrated in this spat-out remark. It was the very stuff of life. His assailant certainly could not tell how the boy's father had died, but he knew that's all there was in their orphanage: children of parents fallen from grace, often former heroes, who had died in prison, executed so as not to tarnish the country's image. The children invented fathers for themselves who were polar explorers trapped by ice, pilots who were missing in the war. Now this spittle-word has deprived him forever of a tacitly agreed fiction.
The woman breaks off from her reading. She must have sensed his inattention. She gets up, goes to the wardrobe, takes out a hanger. The boy gives a little cough, preparing a harsh tone of voice in which to interrogate, accuse, mock. Especially to mock these Saturday evenings, once a paradise to him, as she read aloud amid the clatter from the railroad and the drunken sobs, there at the heart of that great snow-covered, grudgingly inhabited void which is their country. He turns to the woman, but what she says anticipates by a second the words he already feels burning in his throat.
"Look, I've made this for you," she says, unfolding a shirt of coarse gray-green cotton. "A real soldier's tunic, wouldn't you say? You could wear it on Monday."