He did hear music occasionally, that of military bands or sometimes, at halts on the march, the plaintive merriment of an accordion. On his guard against a sinking feeling in his heart, he noted that no feeling of nostalgia swept over him, no special emotion that might have recalled his youth as a pianist.
As for pianos, he saw one in the Lithuanian town where his regiment's offensive got bogged down for a whole week. Their advance was hampered by a number of snipers who had all the crossroads in their sights and were killing officers in a precise, clinical selection process. One of the snipers was hidden in an apartment building with blown-out windows, on the first floor of which the interior of a drawing room could be glimpsed, with velvet armchairs and a grand piano. A hundred yards from there Alexe'i lay stretched out in the entrance hall of a house, and from time to time, for the space of a second, poked his lure out through the open door: a plywood oval surmounted by an officer's cap, with two cylinders cut from a tin can fixed to the middle of it – an officer looking through his field glasses, the sniper's favorite target. Alexe'i kept sticking it out and snatching it back in again, sending a brief whistle to his two comrades who were watching the street from the top floor… The shot rang out at a moment when he was no longer expecting it, the manipulation of the lure having become a reflex action. The rending of the plywood was drowned at once by the sound of bursts of gunfire from the top floor, then the thunder of boots on the staircase. "We've got him!" shouted the soldier carrying a machine gun on his shoulder. The bullet had pierced the plywood just above the two tin circles. They examined the hole, touched it, laughed at it. Then went across the road to collect the German's rifle. Alexeï stopped beside the piano, let a hand come down on the keyboard, listened, closed the lid again. His joy at not feeling within himself the presence of a young man in love with music was very reassuring. He looked at his hand, the fingers covered in scars and scratches, the palm with its yellowish calluses. Another man's hand. In a book, he thought, a man in his situation would have rushed to the piano and played it, forgetting everything, weeping perhaps. He smiled. Such a thought, such a bookish notion, was probably the only link that still bound him to his past. Catching up with the soldiers, he encountered the lifeless stare of the German sniper lying on the floor and reflected that to this man he was just an incautious Russian officer allowing the lenses of his field glasses to glint. The plywood officer with eyes cut out of a tin can.
He hoped he could make his way through this war without adding any distinguishing marks to the identity of the man whose life he was now living. To be smooth, with no prominent features or personality, a little like that plywood oval. But in its whimsical way, which no longer surprised him, the war decided to make its own mark on the photo of the blond young man whom he so much resembled.
This was a second wound, much more serious than the previous one, and after two weeks suspended between life and death, this first sight of himself in a mirror, at the moment when the dressing was being changed: a bare, ageless cranium, and a scar that ran aslant his brow from his hairline toward his temple.
He did everything possible to avoid being declared unfit for service. Pretended good health despite the dull, persistent pain that permeated his whole being, despite the silence of death that had become lodged in his thoughts. The doctor spoke to him as if to a child trying to cling to its mother's hand when she has to go away: "Listen, you're going to go and spend a month in your village. Mother's going to feed you up a bit, get some pies into you. And then we'll see." Alexe'i wanted to stay, not because of some spirit of heroic self-sacrifice but quite simply because he had nowhere to go.
The roads were still covered in ice: those early days of March saw little sunshine. He walked, sometimes rode on trucks, getting off in a village, telling the driver he lived there, and continuing on foot. From time to time, pausing amid empty white fields, amid all this land bruised by the war, he would sniff the air, believing he could detect something like a fleeting breath of warmth. He sensed that all the life that was left to him was concentrated in this faintly springlike breeze, in this airy, misty sunlight, in the scent of the waters awakening beneath the ice. And not in his emaciated body, which no longer even felt the wind's scorching. Confusedly, he realized that these roads, despite the detours, were leading him toward Moscow. Or rather toward a vague, nocturnal city, a place pictured through a haze of exhaustion: the final landing at the top of a stairwell, old cardboard cartons spread out on the ground, a warm radiator he could lean his back against, remaining silent, motionless, claiming nothing, conscious only that, on the whole earth, this was his only refuge, the ultimate goal of his endless trek.
That day he was skirting a forest of fir trees that still retained its wintry air, imprisoned and weighed down by the snow. At one bend in the road a woman appeared in front of him, walking in the same direction and drawing a sled behind her. He quickened his step, glad to find himself in an inhabited area. The woman did not turn at the crunching of ice beneath his boots. He was getting ready to speak to her but suddenly recognized what load the sled was bearing: a little coffin whose rough, unplaned planks full of knots were neither draped in red twill, as was the custom, nor even painted. The wood reminded him of ammunition crates.
They greeted each other in silence and walked along side by side. The cemetery, covered with snow, looked like a forest glade. The grave, evidently dug that morning, was not very deep and already dusted with snowflakes. The spadefuls of frozen earth thrown in by the woman resounded noisily against the wood of the coffin. When it was all over, Alexeï leaned forward to place the last clods of earth on the little mound. As he stood up again, the trees, the figure of the woman and the crosses all pitched forward in a rapid curve, flying up toward the faded void of the sky. He did not feel as if he was falling.
Consciousness returned to him in the midst of a smooth, fluid motion. He saw the crenellated fringe of the forest, processing slowly past him on his right, then, slightly raising his head, observed, at first uncomprehendingly these two legs, these huge soldier's boots, sliding along the frozen road. He grasped that it was himself, this inanimate body, being pulled forward by the woman on her sled. Sometimes the boots slithered along on the back of the heel, sometimes on their sides. Through half-closed eyelids he watched this rather bumpy haulage and felt as if nothing belonged to him, neither the frozen shadow that was this body, nor what his own eyes saw, nor what was visible of him. There was nothing left of him. At the foot of an uphill slope the woman paused to catch her breath. They looked at each other for a long time, motionless, silent, understanding everything.
Her days were spent half a dozen miles distant from the village, on the steeply sloping bank of a river. Here, until nightfall, a human anthill would swarm over the site where a bridge was being built. There was virtually no one there but women. They worked with no lunch break, floundering about in the mixture of mud and ice and covering the snow with their bloody spittle. The first military trains must at all costs cross the bridge before the end of March. It was, they were told, an order from Stalin himself.
She brought home bread, dried fish, but above all, "the gifts of the forest," as she explained with a smile: pine kernels, young fir shoots, which she boiled up with semolina. To his surprise, he felt himself growing increasingly separate from the wind, the earth, the cold, into which he had almost merged. But more surprising still was this simple bliss: the warm line where the woman's body touched his own at night. Just this line, a gentle, living frontier, more substantial than any other truth in the world.