One night he woke up, saw he was alone, heard the breathlessness of a coughing fit subsiding behind the kitchen door. The woman often took refuge there to conceal her sickness. He lay there, his eyes open, with an intense awareness of the life returning to him, the pleasure of breathing, the sharpness of vision recovered. The moon, delicately outlined in the blackness, proclaimed a remarkable night, hanging upon the fragile first warmth of spring. He scarcely recognized himself in this moment of return. He was someone else. "A man," he thought, "lying beside a window in an unknown house, in a village he could never find again on a map, a man who has seen so many people die, who has killed many, who almost died himself and now observes this slender crescent moon in a milder sky."
Outside the door the coughing started again and was stifled in a scrap of cloth. He thought about her suffering, this woman who had taken him in, her exhaustion, her illness. Realized it was the first time he had given a thought to these things, and that this was a sign he himself was cured. He reflected that there must be a word for it, some key to understanding this suffering and this moon, and his own life, changed beyond recognition, and above all, the simplicity with which two human beings could give one another not love, no, but this peace, this respite, this release, derived simply from the warmth of a hand.
The next day he walked to the bridge construction site. The morning was vibrant with sunlight, with streams released by the snow. Though still weak, he had the joyful sensation of thrusting down against the earth at each step.
The building work would soon be finished. The women were preparing the access track. From the mass of them there arose a hubbub of raucous voices, coughing, oaths. He went away for fear of being seen by the woman who had cured him. Or rather of seeing her amid this jostling of padded jackets covered in earth, amid these faces gaunt with hunger. Between two posts, at the entrance to the bridge, he read this slogan: "Everything for the front! Everything for victory!"
The train that carried him back to the war a week later passed over this bridge. The same human swarm still covered the riverbank under squalls of wet snow. Alexei reflected that plunging back to face the bullets again would now have a personal meaning for him. Not the meaning of a feat of arms, such as he had earlier striven for. But, quite simply, an end to the war, which for these women would also bring an end to their wading about in the mud, amid the coarseness of those voices, amid despair.
He also recalled the words he had chanced to overhear when some officers were talking: "After the victory, you know, there's going to be an amnesty, that's for sure. They'll let out the people they locked up before the war." In the course of the battles of this last year of war he often caught himself repeating these words inside his head, forbidding himself to think of his parents and thinking of nothing else, as if in an unconscious prayer: Before the war…
This prayer was probably running through his mind during a halt one day when he saw some young soldiers who, for lack of anything better to do, were amusing themselves by hunting a squirrel. The panic-stricken beast was leaping about in the middle of a cluster of tall aspens, and the soldiers, wild with glee, were shaking the trunks, driving it from one tree to the next. The squirrel finally toppled down, killed not by its fall but by the violent recoil of a branch. The soldiers picked it up and amused themselves by whirling it around, holding onto its tail, and letting go.
Before the war… Alexe'i picked up the little animal, felt a slight warmth beneath the fur spilling across his palm. The soldiers went down to the river, thirsty after their sport. He suddenly sensed within himself the presence of another being, an astonishingly sensitive presence beneath the armor of indifference and toughness he had forged for himself, day after day, in battle. Before the war…
A shout from an officer took him unawares, still caught up in that forgotten life. "Hey, Maltsev, do you know how to drive?"
Ever adrift somewhere far away, Alexe'i replied, "Sure… I used to have a license – " If he had not had the warm body of the squirrel in his hand, he would have said no, with a wariness that had become second nature. The man whose name he bore, this Sergei Maltsev, had arrived at the front from a remote village and had little chance of knowing how to drive. But, still absentminded, he was replying in his old voice, "… before the war."
Thus it was that he took the place of a general's wounded driver, one General Gavrilov, who had previously been only a name to him.
A squirrel. An ill-considered reply given to an officer. A new assignment that probably saved his life during those months of the last battles. The laughter of the young soldiers as they hunted the creature down: most of them had been killed since then. The parade of European cities – some in ruins, some in their pristine state. Some skies crowded with bombers – other skies clear, with the provocative heedlessness of clouds, birds, sun… He often thought about these things, aware that the disorderly torrent of life and death, of beauty and horror, ought to have some hidden meaning, a key that might give a rhythm to it all, shaping it into some kind of shining, tragic harmony.
But everything continued to happen by accident, like the explosion that hurled their car off the road one day, deafening him and obliging him to carry the badly bruised general, trudging for long hours through a wet forest streaked with little streams of icy water. When the general came to and learned that Alexei, himself hit by a shell splinter, had carried him for miles, he pronounced in solemn tones, and with tearstained cheeks, "Maltsev, my boy, from now on you must think of yourself like a son to me." Alexe'i listened to him, embarrassed by this effusiveness, his attention caught by only one detail: the name of a city he had noticed on a signpost as he crossed a road, bowed under the general's weight. Salzburg… And there on this road, despite the weariness and pain, he had been aware of a distant echo, distorted by the throbbing of the blood in his temples and the general's groans: Before the war…
Even more difficult to decipher in the context of this spate of accidents, be they happy or painful, was the end of the war. For neither he nor the general had noticed it. The division under Gavrilov's command was fighting in Austria, where the war continued for a good two weeks after victory had been celebrated in Berlin. The general's car plowed up and down roads cratered by shells; everywhere soldiers could be seen hurling themselves into hand-to-hand combat; the HQ rang with hoarse voices, bellowing orders into quivering telephone receivers.
And then one afternoon there was silence, the victory long since past, and the genial triteness of a young lieutenant's words when he accosted Alexe'i, his hand on the car door handle: "Hey, Maltsev, do you know I've just spent two days trying to find you! My my, don't you look grand in your big jalopy! I guess you don't recognize old buddies anymore." As he carried on joking, Alexe'i was trying to guess at the past, unknown to him, that lay behind these scraps of mockery. This friend, an old schoolmate. The life in their native village… "Your folks didn't know what to think. Everyone thought you were dead or missing. Why didn't you write, you son of a bitch? Now look. Once we're demobilized, we're heading home and celebrating, right? And don't you worry about that scar: it'll make the girls love you all the more!"
He had the illusion of an instant transit from Vienna to Moscow, as if the streets of the two cities ran into one another, with no frontiers. His meeting with the lieutenant, his apprehension about the life that lay in wait for him, about the life stolen from a dead man, had telescoped the weeks of repatriation together, completely muddled the two cities, catapulted his car straight from the Graben onto Arbat.