The Life of an Unknown Man by Andreï Makine

Author:Andreï Makine [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

In traveling to his native village, south of Smolensk, he had no hope of discovering a past where he could start a new life. This part of Russia had first been devastated by the Red Army as they retreated, unwilling to leave anything for the enemy, then by aerial bombardment, and finally by the Germans as they withdrew, setting fire to everything that had survived the bombing. Of his own street (a row of charred izbas) all that was left was an old church tower, “saved by a miracle,” one old woman told him, as he questioned her about the fate of the villagers, of his own parents. A miracle… He did not go to the trouble of explaining that the church tower was a good reference point left intact by those who had targeted the nearby railroad junction. Survivors needed to believe in miracles. There was one, as it happened, in the garden of his ruined home: a cherry tree broken in two, but whose branches had taken root again, dusted with tiny snow-white flowers.

In Leningrad the room he had once rented was occupied. His new landlady announced, “With you, I don’t have a problem. Not like one of those empty-headed young men. I only take people of a certain age…” Volsky was amazed to see that, after so many had died, the apartments were crammed, then realized that people were coming in from the surrounding villages, razed to the ground by the fighting. “So the war didn’t do you much harm in the end,” the woman went on. “And now with all your medals, you’ll be a fine sight.” Volsky shrugged his shoulders: what could he reply to that? So as not to seem rude, he stammered, “Well, I don’t have many medals. In the artillery you’re always behind the others…” He felt this was a stupid remark, talking about the war was not easy. What else was there that could be spoken of? The tanks with their overheated steel that made a hissing sound in the rain? The turrets where wounded men, Russian and German, were dying? Explain how his greatest joy at the front was not those little disks of medals but a fistful of wild strawberries he’d picked in a hurry before rejoining the column of soldiers? And that his greatest fear had lasted for a few seconds at most: when the gun on a tank took aim at him, as if relishing the pleasure of terrifying him? And that those seconds had turned him into this young old man, so respectable in the eyes of a landlady? No, such things, true as they were, were impossible to admit to.

Volsky remembered feeling tongue-tied like this before: with Mila in the besieged city.

He went to see the place where she used to live. The building was still standing but a freakish bombing raid had destroyed the staircase between the first and second floors. People were getting into their homes by means of ladders. Nobody knew Mila. They were mainly provincials who had come in from their ruined villages.

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