And then came a declaration much more unexpected than those words whose tenderness I at once hoped for and dreaded.
That day the mounting spiral of the petty cares of existence seemed to be doing all it could to give the lie to the slogan I used to read on the factory roof when I went to the village, with its “eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine.” I had a swollen lip, the result of a quarrel, a brief and violent one, as our scuffles at the orphanage always were: an abrupt upsurge of hatred, fists raw from the exchange of blows, the conviction that one could kill … Then there was a bus, packed with bodies crushed against one another, people on the way home to their suburbs, exhausted workmen, aggressive, ready to exchange insults and tear one another to pieces at the slightest jolt of that scrap metal on wheels. “Fraternity … The radiant future …,” I said to myself bitterly. And just beside the stop where I got off four drunkards were fighting, trading soft, clumsy blows, trampling on the one who fell over, falling over beside him …
The sun threw glaring light on the factory roof with its monumental message of the “eternally living doctrine.” A voice within me was yelling and weeping.
I turned the corner into the village street and from a long way off I could see the faint patch of a dress lit up by the blue luminescence of the snow. An invisible frontier, compounded of this brilliance and the icy scent of the river, separated me from the world of a moment ago. Only the taste of blood in my mouth reminded me of where I had come from.
We often used to go for a walk among the old izbas of the village, strolling down toward the boat landing, toward the shore. Sensing that an unaccustomed tension was mounting within the dreamy calm of our těte-à-těte, we did so that day …
The mild warmth of March had woven a filigree of melting sheets of ice, lacy rose windows. As I snatched them up they shattered in my hands, just as my friend was noticing their star-studded beauty. We walked down a slope of virgin snow, punctuated only with birds’ footprints. Sinking up to our knees, we could feel the little lumps of ice working their way into our shoes.
Like an abandoned raft, the old jetty lay amid the pack ice. It was attached by rusty cables to the stumps of steel posts embedded in the bank. We climbed onto this wreck and with incredulous joy touched the surface of the planks: they were already dry and warm from having been exposed to the sun all day. Beneath a partially collapsed lean-to a bench stood waiting for the ghosts of former travelers. We sat down facing the white immensity of the still-sleeping river, our gaze lost in the distance, and gradually recovered the slow pulse of the happiness that always used to set the rhythm for our encounters.
That day such serenity no longer seemed enough for me. The bitterness I had been storing up since the morning gave me a longing for some vast, radical change, a revolution that would wipe away the hatred from the world’s countenance and from all those grimacing faces I had come across on my way to the village: those of the men and women crammed together in the bus, and before that, at the orphanage, the boy who had punched me in the face, his gleeful guffaw at the sight of my blood. But also the somber mass of workers whom the factory swallowed up every morning and spat out in the evening, a lava of drained bodies and lackluster looks. The march of History toward the promised future, toward that ideal city where men would at last become worthy of the name, must be speeded up.
For the first time I spoke about this to my friend. I got up from the bench, gesticulating, my enthusiasm growing the more my talking about it made the dream seem close and achievable. Yes, a fraternal society, a way of life that would exclude aggression and greed, a plan that would bond together everyone’s goodwill, at present fettered by the pettiness of individualism. I think I also talked about the disappearance of the State, for which there would be no need, since all men would form a single community, in which police, army, and prisons would be superfluous. I knew Lenin had promised this in his vision of the future … That was it, a community of men destined for happiness!
“But aren’t you happy now?” Vika asked suddenly.
The question threw me.
“Er … Yes … But I’m not talking about myself. What I meant, you see, was that … in general, this new society will allow other people to lead lives of joy …”
“I don’t understand. All these people you want to bring happiness to in the future. What’s to stop them being happy now? Not hating other people, not being greedy, like you said. Not punching other people in the face, at any rate …”
“Well … you see … I don’t think they know the true path yet. They need to be shown. They need to be given a plan, a theory … You know, a doctrine!”
“A doctrine? What for? We’re happy here, admit it. We’re happy because the air smells of snow and spring. Because the sun’s been warming the planks, because … Yes, because we’re together. Do the others need a doctrine to come down here to the shore and look at the fields beyond the Volga. And watch that bird flying from one branch to another in the willows?”
I would have preferred to hear a political or moral argument, a theoretical challenge, but Vika’s words expressed a visible and concrete truth, difficult to contradict. The sky, the snow, the noisy trickle of the waters beneath the thick ice floes. To cover up my confusion I exaggerated the intensity of our disagreement.
“Oh, if it was only as simple as that! Of course they could come here, look at the river, breathe the good air. But they have to work! You forget that we’re talking about the working class …”
She did not reply at once, remained still for a moment, her eyes blinking gently in the flood of sunlight. Then, in a dry, impersonal voice she asked me, “This working class, do you know what they make at that factory?”
“I don’t know. Fertilizers, maybe. Or ceramic stuff …”
“Yes, fertilizers … Very explosive ones. The factory supplies chemical products to other concerns that make the charges for shells and bombs. Don’t repeat that to anyone or you’ll be in trouble.”
She fell silent, then added in a voice that was calm once more: “This future you talk about is wonderful but too complicated. It’s as if before they can come and look at the river, people have to make reinforced concrete terraces. What’s the point? This old jetty’s enough for us. What needs to be explained to other people is the only true doctrine. It’s very simple. It all comes down to the fact … of loving one another.”
We returned more slowly than usual. Every step, every glance now had a new meaning for me, the reflection of a world transfigured by this “fact of loving one another.”
Two or three times when leaving the village, I had chanced to come across my friend’s mother, a thin, short woman, her face hollow with weariness. She was called Elsa. We exchanged a few words, she invited me to come on a Saturday or Sunday to take a meal with them … In one of the rooms in the house I had seen a picture of Vika’s father. He was, according to what she had told me one day, “absent for professional reasons.” I had not sought to learn more about this: at the orphanage all my comrades had fathers who were busy sailing around the world, or they turned out to have been pilots killed in action, outnumbered in dogfights against our country’s countless enemies. To cast doubt on any of this would have been cruel, faith in it made it possible not to lose all hope. Respect for these innocent lies was, for all of us, an inviolable pact.
A time came when it seemed as if my friend’s mother was returning home earlier and earlier. The notion that she might have wanted to keep an eye on us did not even cross my mind, so natural was the trust that bound us together. There was, in fact, a commonplace explanation for this change in her routine. We were in March, the days were very quickly getting longer, and, as I used to leave at sunset, this time was shifting.