The Music of a Life by Andreï Makine

Author:Andreï Makine [Makine, Andreï]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-431-4
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Published: 2011-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

During the first two years at the front, Alexeï received four or five letters addressed to the man whose name he bore. He did not reply, and reflected that his lie was certainly giving several people the strength to hope, the energy to survive.

Moreover, he had long ago learned that in war truth and falsehood, magnanimity and callousness, intelligence and naïveté, could not be so clearly told apart as in the life before. The memory of the corpses on the bank of a river often came back to him. But now the horror of those minutes revealed its obverse side: if the young man from Moscow he then was had not spent that time among the dead, he would doubtless have been shattered, from the very first battles, by the sight of eviscerated bodies. The boot he had wrenched off that corpse had been like a cruel but necessary vaccination for him. Sometimes, in a judgment he did not admit to himself, it even seemed to him that, compared with the removal of that dead mans boot, all the carnage he now witnessed was easy to endure.

* * *

One day, when he was first wounded, he discovered another paradox. Having come among these soldiers to escape death, he was exposing himself to a much more certain death here than in the reeducation colony where they would have sent him after his parents’ arrest. He would have been safer behind the barbed wire of a camp than in possession of this lethal liberty.

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