Before going into Dolshanka the road made a sharp bend, hugging the winding course of the river. If you looked back you could see the place you had just passed, as you see the last coaches of a train on a curve in the track. Pavel turned his head and by the red light of the sunset, shining low over the earth, he saw the swaying dust from his footsteps as it lingered in the still, warm air on the far side of the loop in the road. He saw more than this trace. He almost pictured himself there, exactly as he had been a moment ago: a soldier who had just dusted his boots, straightened up his tunic, and washed his face, scooping up warm water from among the reeds. And for a few seconds he felt very remote from this happy double who was so thrilled to be going home. He walked past the copse at the entrance to the village, gave the bottom of his tunic one more tug, suddenly stopped, then ran, then stopped again.
What he saw did not frighten him, so deep was the stillness. The greenery from the orchards that had run wild covered the charred remains of the izbas almost completely. The trees had grown unchecked across the street, breaking the straight line of it. Dolshanka no longer existed. But its ruins did not have the violence of recent destruction. The rains had long since washed away the blackness of the burned walls, wild grasses hid the foundation stones. Only the stoves with their chimneys still reared up, showing where the houses had stood. Pavel crouched down, drew open the little cast iron door to an oven-the creaking of the hinges was the only sound evocative of a human presence in this silence of plants.
Walking slowly along the main street, he spoke out loud. Even spilling out at random, his words lent a semblance of logic to these moments. He recognized the forge, brown with rust, the horns of the anvil sticking out among the nettles. Still talking, he made this very simple calculation: the village had been burned during the German offensive in the autumn of 1941, so for four years, the snow the trees… He stopped in front of a building whose walls remained almost intact, remembered it as the House of the Soviet. Above the door lengths of rope bleached in the sun hung from great nails. And on the ground skeletons covered in shreds of clothing were sitting or lying stretched out, with sharp stems and leaves growing through them, surrounded by large creamy umbels with the scent of mulled wine.
He spent the night in the square of blackened tree trunks that still marked the site of their vanished house amid the underbrush. He no longer felt any pain. From his first steps around the site of this blaze of long ago (beneath the debris of beams reduced to pieces of charcoal he had caught sight of an iron bed, all black, and had recognized it), from the first crunching of glass underfoot, his grief had crossed the threshold of what was bearable and had numbed him. There were just a few absurd little details it still hurt him to see. In the evening it was the garlands of white flowers growing around the chimney: near to the ground the flowers were already closed but high up, where the sun was still shining, their bell-shaped trumpets stood out. He had gone up to them, tugged forcibly at the garland. And now, in the night, there was this shadow. Something nosing about swiftly behind the ruins of the house (a stray dog? a wolf?)-and the fear, and the humiliation of feeling fear. Here. At this moment. But the real torture was the sky, with the stars, slightly hazy from the heat, which beguiled the eye with the geometry of their constellations, learned at school and since then stubbornly unchanged. There was in their soft light a kind of mild deception, a promise eroded by millions and millions of prayers never granted. Even when he closed his eyes he did not escape these timeless patterns. He sat down and suddenly imagined himself to be very old, yes, an old man watching beside his ruined house. And in this imagined old body, the body of a dying man, without memories, without desires, he felt unspeakably happy. But he was twenty-five and it was summer 1945. The interval of time that lay between him and that old man now seemed of inhuman duration. He took out his pack, his hand felt the butt of the automatic pistol, wrapped in a scrap of cloth.
He left the village before first light. As he walked along he sensed his own gaze pursuing him. A scornful gaze. He knew that if his courage had failed him it was because of the woman with her hands stained by raspberry juice.
To begin with he managed to find pretexts for his wanderings. He made fruitless attempts to find his sister and spent several months in the area traveling from one town to the next. Then he went to Leningrad -so as to meet Marelst's family, or so he persuaded himself-as if there were still any hope of finding someone alive after several years' silence. An official whom he asked for information about Dolshanka, a very perspicacious official, sensed this nomadic mania in him and reprimanded him, saying, "It's time to roll up your sleeves, comrade, and play your part in the reconstruction of the country!" Indeed, if everyone had embarked on searching for the survivors of all the burned villages… He found no one in Leningrad. Nevertheless, very conscientiously, he rang the bell on all the floors of a great, damp, sinister apartment building, constructed around an enclosed courtyard that could give no life to a tall tree with pale leaves. His zeal produced a result he had not intended. An old woman emerged from a cavernous apartment, regarded him almost joyfully, and suddenly began talking louder and louder, recounting the story of the siege, the frozen corpses in the streets, the apartments inhabited by dead people whose bodies were no longer even collected. He backed away onto the landing, stammered a word of farewell, began his descent. He knew all these stories. The woman sensed that he was escaping her and shouted out with demented glee, "And in our building people ate their own dogs! And the ones who didn't eat their dogs died. And the dogs tore their corpses to bits." As Pavel hurtled down the staircase the voice, amplified by the echo, pursued him as far as the exit, then through the streets, and, later still, on the train, in his sleep.
Once he had been staying in the same place for several weeks, he believed, he would begin to forget. Forgetfulness, in these post-war days was, more than ever before, the secret of happiness. Those who had no desire to forget drank, took their own lives, or traveled around from place to place, like him, in an endless semblance of returning home.
One day happiness snapped him up. The woman looked like the raspberry picker and was even closer to what a man starved of flesh longs for: a weighty plenitude in her body that gave her breasts, her buttocks, her belly, a life of their own. Returning home after one or two days' absence (he was with a team installing electric cables along the roads), he would lose himself in this body, in the sickly sweet steam of boiled potatoes, and rejoice that one could live without anything other than the heavy flesh of these breasts and the pungent smell of this izba on the outskirts of a district capital.
Twice only he had doubts about this happiness. One evening he was watching his companion stirring the contents of a broad frying pan, from which arose the bluish aura of bacon rashers in burned fat. "She looks as if she were mixing it up for pigs," he thought unmaliciously, numbed both by his day's work in the rain and the happiness. "But one could very well turn into a pig if things go on like this," he said to himself, aware of the faint tremor of an awakening, a rush of memories. And he hastened to plunge back into the agreeable torpor of the evening.
The second time (their team had returned earlier than expected on account of frosts, he removed his muddy boots in the hall and went noiselessly upstairs) this happiness almost turned him into a killer. The bedroom door was ajar and already from the kitchen he could see his companion naked, and, glued to her, a very thin man, who seemed, as he huffed and puffed, to be trying to push her out of bed. He looked for the ax in the entrance hall and could not see where it had gone. The few seconds of searching for it calmed him. "What? End up in jail for the sake of that lump of pork and that worm with a wrinkled ass? I'm not crazy." He put on his boots and hurried to leave, knowing it would have been enough for him to see the woman's face, or hear her voice, to kill. He spent the night with a friend and did not sleep, at one minute almost indifferent, at the next planning revenge. In a moment of weariness he believed he had understood what kind of woman she was, whose life he had shared for a year. He had never thought about it before. The war was a time of women without men and men without women, but also one of women who, more from the chance of a town being near the front than from lewdness, had made love recklessly, accustomed to men who went back to the war and whom death made irremediably faithful to their mistress of one night. "Filthy whore!" he muttered in the darkness of the kitchen where his friend had made up a bed for him, but in reality this curse was a way of trying to silence a covert pardon. His concubine reminded him, through her very infidelity of the days of war. She was still living in those days. "Like me!" he thought.