It was in one such hiding place that his uncle installed him. They went to a tiny hay barn, and by the half-light coming in between the planks Alexe'i saw it was an empty space, with no window and not the smallest corner where one could hide. Seeing his disconcerted look, his uncle smiled and explained softly, "It's a case with a false bottom." He leaned on a plank, which gave way, and, peering in through the opening, Alexe'i saw a kind of narrow passage between two wooden walls, scarcely more than eighteen inches wide, with a folding bunk, a shelf nailed to the wall, a bucket, a jug, a bowl. "You'll have to get your Moscow nose used to the smell of manure," his uncle added. "I put it all around the shed just in case they come with a dog."
Two days later his uncle announced to him, a little awkwardly, "I guess this'll go hard with you, but… that car… We've got to drown her. I'll show you the place where we can shove her in."
Alexeï rapidly learned to mold his body and his movements within the confined section between the walls. One day he managed to suspend his secret life in mid-gesture when a voice rang out on the other side of the planks, rebuking his uncle: "He's not far away, your nephew. Folks have seen him. It's in your own interest to help us, before we find him ourselves in your loft." The uncle, very calm, replied in a dull voice, "This nephew of mine, I ain't never seen him in my life. If you find him, I reckon I'll be meeting him for the first time." Alexeï remained frozen, a spoon close to his lips, not even daring to chase a fly away from his forehead.
In the middle of the night he would leave his hiding place. He would get up, change, stretch his legs. The serenity of the fields, the sky, the stars seen through a heat haze, called on him to have faith, to take joy in life. They were all lying.
In the end he had studied the tiniest of the cracks between the planks, knew what field of vision each offered. This one, above the shelf, enabled one to observe a narrow part of the road that linked the village to the district capital. That other one, next to the bunk flap, cut across a fence of dry branches.
One day he saw a man asleep, drunk, at the foot of this fence, lying there as if felled by a rifle shot. The panels of his jacket were spread out in the dust of the road; his snores reached all the way to the barn. This slumped body expressed such a blithe indifference to what anyone might think of him, such a lack of constraint in this temporary death, such a physical oblivion, that Alexeï became aware of a violent jealousy. Or rather, of a temptation: to lay hands on this snoring corpse, search him, rob him of his papers, disguise himself in his clothes, return to life under this stolen name…
The splinters in the wooden plank pricked his cheek. Alexeï stared at the drunkard as if this were a miraculous vision. The man was nothing like him, at least twice as old as he was, red-haired, with a flat nose. But this notion of stealing an identity, unlikely as it seemed for the moment, took root in his memory.
It was through one of the cracks between the planks that he saw his uncle's cart driving off one evening: his uncle held the reins, his aunt sat amid the crates of vegetables they were going to sell in the Sunday market at the district capital.
That night the sound of horses' hooves invaded his sleep. "Back already?" he thought in surprise, still only half awake. The clatter became louder, reminiscent of thunder. His shoulder was pressed against the planks of the wall, he could feel them vibrating. "All these horses!" his dream whispered to him, teeming with herds that made the earth tremble as they galloped. And at once, shaking off the dream's deception, he jumped down from the bunk, leaned against the board of the hidden door, went out into the night, and saw the horizon on fire. Now the successive waves of bombing assaults could be heard more distinctly, settling into a regular rhythm. Very low, skimming over the roofs of the village, came one airplane after another. It was like an aerobatic display. But already the road was filling with people making their escape. Alexe'i hastened to slip back into his hiding place. His field of vision, between two planks, let him snatch a glimpse of a mother stumbling as she dragged two sleepy children behind her, an old woman whipping a cow. Then, more quickly, traveling in the opposite direction, soldiers colliding with the waves of fugitives. And less than an hour later the smoke and the drumming of bullets, chipping the loam off the walls, and then suddenly there was this roaring hulk that grazed the barn in passing, hacking to pieces with its tracks the vegetable patch his aunt had been watering only the day before.
He remained lying on the ground for a long while. The walls of his hiding place had been pierced with bullets here and there. Gradually the gamut of sounds became simpler, less varied. Still a few cries, the grinding of tank tracks, a burst of gunfire, already distant. And in the end just the hissing of the fire. Alexe'i peered through one of the peepholes drilled by the shooting. Near the fence, at the exact spot where two weeks earlier he had seen a sleeping drunkard, sprawled the body of a soldier, his bloodied face turned directly toward the sunrise, as if sunbathing.
It took him two days to find his man, his identity donor. His searches in the village devastated by fire had been fruitless. He had come upon several survivors and had had to make himself scarce. On the road he found mainly the bodies of women and children or of men who were too old.
At the end of his second day of walking, he went down toward a river, and on the bank, at the entrance to a bridge demolished by shelling, saw a complete battlefield: dozens of soldiers to whom death had lent poses that were sometimes extremely banal, like the one of a body with its legs buckled beneath it, sometimes touching, like that of a young infantryman, his hand outstretched in an orator's gesture. Hiding in the undergrowth, Alexeï waited, listening intently, but could hear no moaning. The evening was still light; the faces of the dead, when he finally dared to approach them, were exposed in defenseless simplicity. He noticed that there were no German soldiers; these had presumably been carried away by their own side.
He looked into eyes, often wide open, noted the color of hair, the build. From time to time his fascination with death led him to forget the purpose of his search, he sank into a robotlike torpor, transforming himself into a hypnotic camera, focused on these truncated lives one after another. Then he took a grip on himself, resumed the search for his double. Hair color, shape of the face, build.
Very close to the river he found a face similar to his own, but the soldier's hair was dark brown, almost black. He said to himself that he could shave off his blond hair and that in the photo on an identity document this difference in color would hardly be visible. With trembling fingers, he unbuttoned the soldier's tunic pocket, seized the little book embossed with a red star, and hurriedly put it back again. In the photo the soldier did not look like him at all, and his hair framed his face like a charcoal line.
Pausing close to another, he noted the similarity of their features. But he suddenly observed that the soldier's left ear had been cut to pieces by a bullet. He moved on quickly, realizing at once that such a wound in no way undermined the resemblance, but lacking the courage to go back to that bloodied head.
He discovered another dead man by chance when, to get rid of the stench that hung over the river, he went into the water up to his knees and began rinsing his face and neck. The soldier's body was half crushed under a beam of the collapsed bridge. All you could see was the blond oval of his head, one arm pressed against his chest. He went closer, leaned forward, surprised by the degree to which this unknown face resembled his own, seized the beam, thrust it aside… And started back: the soldier's eyes came to life, and a rapid torrent of words whispered in plaintive relief poured forth from his lips. In German! Then a long spurt of blood. And once again the fixity of death.