I arrived five minutes after the due time but the train was late. The crowd was waiting on the platform, tightly packed, ready to pile in, hoping to find seats. Near the station building, through the comings and goings of the passengers, I saw the drunkard Sashka, sitting on the ground. He was much older than I had thought. Gray locks clung to his brow. He was singing, his eyes almost closed. His tattoos could not be seen for he had put on a jacket with several medals from the last war pinned to its front …
When the train came in the people surged forward toward the track, Sashka was left alone, I threw him a farewell glance and suddenly saw that both his legs were amputated. A dusty cap was flung down in front of his stumps. A pair of crutches stood there, leaning against the station wall. As the crowd rushed into the carriages he recited the verses I had already heard:
On a marble island lapped by an azure sea
A sorceress waits, in her castle’s gilded glow,
At ease each night beneath a spreading tree,
She weeps and calls me! I shall never go …
During the summer we worked far away from the city, as we used to every year, on construction sites and on kolkhozes in the fields. At the end of August, the day of our return to the orphanage, a supervisor handed me a letter that had been waiting for me since June. The only one I had ever received throughout my childhood. Mail personally addressed to a pupil constituted a notable event, exceptional even, and must have aroused some curiosity. The envelope had been opened and the contents doubtless read. But it contained nothing secret. Some news of the capital, the account of a film Maya had just seen with a girlfriend … She had signed it with a single M and, in essence, was simply writing to send me good wishes for the holidays.
I was boundlessly happy and, at the same time, terribly disappointed: words so precious and so dull! And also, this bizarre short sentence as a postscript, her advice to me to drink milk. Milk? Very well, I would be sure to drink some milk.
The next day, rereading her letter for the hundredth time, I saw the light: milk! Poor fool, how could I have failed to understand at once?
That evening I assembled all I needed: a stub of candle, some matches, a magnifying glass. I hid behind a shed in the orphanage yard and after checking that no troublesome person might interfere with my clandestine activities, I immersed myself in a labor of alchemy. The candle glowed, the flame heated the paper, which slowly began to reveal the hidden message. The faintly yellowed outlines of the words traced by a pen dipped in a drop of milk began to appear, barely visible but decipherable all the same.
Maya wrote: “Now I know why Alexandra Guerdt wouldn’t talk about her past anymore. In the civil war she worked in Lenin’s secretariat. One day she read a telegram he’d just dictated to be sent to a political commissar. A town was resisting the authority of the Soviets. Lenin said he should kill ‘100—1000’ people, as an example. The number was indicated just like that, with a dash. Yes, Lenin was ordering the execution of between a hundred and a thousand men, by way of reprisal, just as the commissar thought fit … Alexandra was furious: a pencil stroke wiping out hundreds of living beings. They laughed in her face. She stormed out … Today she believes the fraternal world she dreamed of was also destroyed by that dash … I hope to see you again one day. On a marble island, perhaps! And don’t forget, really, to drink some milk. Maya.”
All through my life, in calling Alexandra Guerdt to mind, I have never been able to picture her unhappy. Quite the contrary, those summer days long ago were suffused with a profound joy, patient and calm, in a remote village where, for me, she still existed. So much so that the very concept of earthly happiness has come to find its incarnation in a muted June day, the pale expanse of an immense valley with tall plants and a very young girl’s headlong descent toward an elderly woman breaking into a gentle smile.
FOUR. An Eternally Living Doctrine
The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures. Seeking pleasures that do not grow stale, lasting attachments, embraces with the vigor of lianas: the tree dies but their enveloping tracery continues verdant. This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise, the only kind we can aspire to in the course of our lightning journey through this vale of tears. These often make their dazzling appearance in places so humble and ephemeral that we refuse to linger there. We prefer to fashion our dreams from the granite blocks of whole decades. We believe we are destined to live as long as statues.
The paradise that taught me not to take myself for a statue was located in a place difficult to define. An intermediate space between a vast industrial zone and a scrap of an old village that was dying before the onset of a titanic building development: vast concrete structures, steel cylinders thrusting toward the sky, a tangle of thick pipes, the circulatory system that fed the machinery and tanks whose hubbub and hissing could be heard behind the walls.
After lessons on those sunny days in March, I used to walk through a suburb surrounded by railroad lines, pass beneath a broad, dark viaduct, continue beside factory walls, and, following the rusty tracks that led to an old boat landing on the Volga, arrive at this spot it is hard to find a name for. Six or seven izbas, the remnants of orchards, an abandoned barn that spoke of agricultural activity long ago. Somewhat closer to the river a warehouse in ruins, the relic of a little fishing port.
I would head toward a house with two low windows facing the street that reflected the sparkle of the snow in the sunlight and addressed me with a look full of resigned wisdom. A girl, aged about fifteen, like me, was waiting for me at the door; visitors were rare in this remote corner, she could see me from a long way off. I sensed the snowy chill lingering over her body beneath her indoor dress. The distance that lay between us — those last few dozen yards — seemed to me to be at once infinite and nonexistent.
We greeted one another with a simple nod, a quick smile, without shaking hands, without kissing. And nothing happened during the two or three hours that we were together. None of what might have been expected by way of physical bonding, according to the notions of today’s world.
We would talk about a novel in which a couple of young adventurers discovered the underwater entrance to Atlantis on one of the Cape Verde islands. We would laugh when a book on our study program struck us as too stupid (one somewhat visionary author declared that the completion of a five-year plan within four years would speed up time throughout the universe). We stayed silent a lot, especially me, without feeling the least bit embarrassed by it. Words were superfluous, for there was this slipping away of the light that would slowly transform the dazzling March afternoon, from the moment when I arrived, into a mauve dusk, signaling the time for me to leave. There was the tranquillity of this little house with two rooms, its extreme cleanliness, the sleep-inducing tick of an old clock. A calm, completely indifferent to the close proximity of the monstrous factory, to the road where batches of huge trucks hurtled along, to all the brutal, busy, thunderous life that threatened the little village in the depths of its snowy silence. There was the happiness of being together, certain that at every moment we were living through the very essence of what life could be here in this world.
Every time I came from the city I would see enormous red letters mounted on the factory roof, characters cast in concrete, each of them probably ten feet high, spelling out a sentence whose length indicates the dimensions of the building: “Long live Marxism-Leninism, an eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine!” The end of the sentence became lost in the smoke that hung over that industrial site, but the walls continued well beyond the slogan, right out as far as the misty stretch of wasteland and the forest’s gray fringe …