One evening, leaving the village, I noticed Elsa’s figure walking beside the factory wall. She seemed to be waving a hand in greeting or even beckoning me to follow her. In the dusk it was hard to see and I was on the point of going my way, paying no attention to her gesture. However, an uneasy curiosity impelled me toward her.
I quickly realized that Elsa had not seen me, her summons had merely been the action of readjusting a canvas bag she carried on her shoulder. As if drawn along in a dream, I walked on beside that interminable wall … It was already fairly dark when the woman I was following disappeared. A minute later I reached the corner, followed around it, and involuntarily took several steps backward …
A battle was in progress, at once clumsy and ferocious. A crowd of women were pressed up against a plywood partition covering a passage that linked one of the factory exits to the platform beside a railroad track. This long chamber shook beneath the tramp of an invisible host leaving the building and plunging into freight wagons coupled to an engine. The women were thrusting one another aside, using their elbows, weaving their way toward the plywood screen so as to end up in front of a gap two feet wide through which the faces of men walking along the passage could be glimpsed. The violence of the struggle was unthinking, they were unaware of the blows they received or struck. The air seemed to be riven with cries held in check by fear, but which, on account of this restraint, rang out even more savagely. It was mainly men’s names that went flying through the narrow opening toward the column on the move. “Sergei!” “Sasha!” “Kolya!” From time to time, a lean face appeared, a husband managed to stop opposite the gap for a few seconds. If his wife spotted him she endeavored to hand him a package, which he seized before melting into the human flow. Sometimes the package got torn, a hunk of bread and packets of tea could be seen falling in the dirty snow … Some names caused the appearance of a person no one was waiting for, the women would regard him with scorn and begin shouting out a surname as well. Elsa reached the opening, yelled a name in a desperate voice that froze me, and held out her canvas bag to a hand that came through the gap. A violent jolt shoved the hand back and the gap was blocked by a uniform greatcoat. The bag fell, Elsa bent down to pick it up. By the railroad track two armed guards could be seen approaching …
I ran along beside the wall with a very real sense of no longer existing, no longer being capable of formulating the slightest thought. I was empty, bereft of all I believed I knew, all I hoped for, dreamed of … Back at the orphanage it felt as though my comrades were speaking a foreign language, or rather a language whose words I knew but whose meaning I no longer understood.
The next day I had to join another paramilitary exercise, the final round, in fact, of that set of competitions during which I had captured Vika. I took part in it absentmindedly, allowing myself to be swept along in the assaults, scaling the ice ramparts as if on the brink of sleep. Even the final hand-to-hand battle, in which the two armies confronted one another, could not rouse me from my stupor. I ended up finding myself face-to-face with a youth stationed on the fortification of a defended position, who was fighting gleefully, an aggressive grimace on his lips. He noticed at once that I was not in a very warlike mood. His expression became tinged with scorn and he pushed me over with excessive brutality, evidently intending to topple me right down. I fell, becoming caught on a guardrail made of tree trunks and colliding with a block of ice. Coming to with a bleeding nose, I found myself sitting at the center of the melee, my left foot oddly twisted. Above the ankle, beneath the fabric of my pant leg, I noticed a curiously prominent lump. I looked up, saw the victor’s laughing face, his astonishing delight at having caused harm. The pain was already welling up when, in a muted echo, this thought occurred to me, in a language incomprehensible to the others: “The only true doctrine … the fact of loving one another …”
My broken leg delayed my return to the village until the middle of May. Arriving there, I thought I must have stepped off the bus at the wrong stop. Instead of the little street leading to the river, a vast terrain, being turned over by bulldozers, extended all along the shore. No, I had not made a mistake for the factory was still there, its endless enclosing wall, the red letters on the roof, “an eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine” …
As for the village, all that was left of it was a single house, the one where an old woman lived whom we sometimes saw going to fetch water from the well. The only trace of the other houses was the wreckage of their timbers. The bulldozers were busy shifting these remains to the edge of the site. The roar of the engines, the acrid stench of their emissions, and, in particular, the pitiless, radiant sun, all this proclaimed the triumph of the life that forged ahead, with its promise of new happiness, victorious dynamism.
The waters had risen and the jetty was afloat several yards from the riverbank, like an island separated from this new life.
The other little island was that last house, which I went to in the evening after the noise of the demolition had ceased and the workers had gone home. The old woman who lived there did not wait to hear my questions. She understood at once why I had come. But what she told me added little to what I could already guess for myself.
There had been an accident at the factory a month earlier. Several workshops had been flattened in an explosion, becoming a mass grave for the prisoners who were brought in to work there from a nearby camp. No one knew the precise number of the victims but my friend’s father was probably among them. Or else it was the demolition site on the riverbank that had caused Elsa and her daughter’s sudden departure. In the previous year they had come to live in the village to be close to the factory where, for a few seconds, you could exchange glances with the prisoners as they passed through the chamber between the workshops and the freight wagons … With the village demolished, they had to move. So, after the explosion, Vika’s father might simply have been transferred to another workplace. The old woman hinted at this possibility, wanting to give hope a little chance.
Stunned, I did not have the presence of mind to ask her what she herself was going to do amid this chaos of overturned earth. I went away, vaguely thanking her the way a neighbor certain of seeing her again the next day might have done. Many years later that old woman, whom I left all alone on the little front steps of her doomed house, would inspire feelings of remorse such as recur throughout our lives and for which we never receive absolution.
It also took me many years to learn how to appreciate, beyond a brief episode of adolescent affection, the luminous happiness my friend and Elsa, her mother, had so discreetly afforded me. Of course, I remembered their hospitality, the gentleness with which they had surrounded the wild young lad that I was, a being hardened by roughness and violence. As I grew older I would come to recognize more fully that the peace they succeeded in causing to reign in such a desolate place, yes, that serenity indifferent to the ugliness and coarseness of the world, was a form of resistance, perhaps more effective than the dissident whisperings I later heard in intellectual circles in Moscow or Leningrad. Those women’s rebellion was not at all spectacular: keeping their little antiquated house perfectly neat and tidy, Vika’s always even-tempered serenity, never revealing her pain, Tchaikovsky’s Seasons, Elsa’s silence and her smile, while still shaken by her vigil among the women fighting to exchange glances with their husbands or sons.
I had to wait longer still before truly recognizing what this humble and precious gift was that I had received from them. The country of our youth has sunk without trace, carrying away with it, as it foundered, the substance of so many lives of which no vestige remains. That girl locating the tune we loved on a long-playing record, her mother thrusting a canvas bag into a prisoner’s hands, myself hobbling about in the mud on my broken leg … And a host of other lives, sufferings, hopes, griefs, promises. And the dream of an ideal city peopled by men and women who would no longer know hatred. And that “eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine,” it, too, carried away by the frenzy of time.