The Free World by David Bezmozgis

Author:David Bezmozgis [Bezmozgis, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9781250002518
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

17

It was at the front that Samuil had become aware of the intersection between the dreamlife of the living and the afterlife of the dead. When he stole a few minutes of sleep under an artillery barrage, his fallen comrades had visited him. Later, when he had abandoned all hope of seeing his mother, uncle, and aunt alive again, they appeared too. For a time he couldn’t sleep without encountering their ghosts. After he’d received notice of Reuven’s death, he couldn’t close his eyes without meeting his brother. In these dreams, Reuven was sometimes whole, the way he’d been when Samuil saw him last; other times he was disfigured, wounded in the legs or with a shattered face. But no matter what shape he was in, his brother seemed calm, at peace, either unmoved by or unaware of the fact that he was no longer among the living. Nights Reuven or his mother failed to materialize, Samuil felt disconsolate. To think that he would never see them again, not even in his dreams, filled him with sadness and apathy. He had known better than to share these feelings. He’d seen many of his fellow soldiers succumb to the same bleak and despondent feelings. These were men who’d received bad news in the field post—confirmation of a relative’s death or of a wife’s inconstancy. He saw his comrades mutilate themselves, commit suicidal acts in combat, attempt desertion, and make defeatist, ill-conceived statements. More than once Samuil referred these offenders to the NKVD and the military tribunals, having no illusion about the fate to which he’d consigned them.

Now again, all these years later, Samuil found himself regularly visited by his mother and his brother in his dreams. The dreams were like a precious gift and Samuil knew that if he spoke about them it would only cheapen them. Sometimes his mother and brother appeared as they had been when they died, still young. Other times, his mother and brother appeared as if they, too, had aged in the intervening years, looking nothing like themselves and yet remaining somehow intrinsically themselves. The one constant in all the dreams was that Samuil himself never varied. He was always an old man.

When Samuil started writing the account of his life, it hadn’t occurred to him that this concerted effort at remembering would summon his mother and brother back into his dreams. In many ways, the project no longer resembled the original design. It had become an excuse to immerse himself in the past. There were certain things he wrote down, things that he felt suited the original purpose, but there were many other things that he didn’t write down. These things he simply turned over in his mind.

He thought of Emma’s grandfather as he’d been in his waning days. Samuil and Emma were then newly married. They were living with Emma’s parents in the small Latgalian town of Baltinava. Emma’s father, Yasha Aronovich, a formidable military man, had been posted there to impose order. Aizsargi, collaborators, Hitlerites, Latvian nationalist rabble camped in the forests, defying Soviet power.

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