I fell in love with this young russet-haired stranger. It was of course a very physical desire, a carnal wonderment at the contrast between her still childishly fragile waist and her already womanly torso… I performed my own dismantling-assembly routine with all my limbs in a state of numbness. I took more than three minutes, and thus ended up near the bottom of the class… But beyond the desire to embrace this body, to feel its smooth, bronzed surface beneath my fingers, I experienced a new and nameless happiness.
There was this table with thick planks placed at the edge of a wood. The sun and the smell of the last of the snow taking refuge in the shadows of the thickets. Everything was blessedly simple. And luminous. Like this body, with its still insouciant femininity. Like my desire. Like the commands of the instructor. No shadow of the past troubled the clarity of this moment. I breathed, felt desire, carried out orders mechanically. And with unspeakable joy I felt the clot of my painful and confused winter reflections dissolving in my mind… The young russet-haired girl swayed her hips gently before the automatic rifle. The sun lit up the contours of her body through the fine fabric of her tunic. Her fiery locks curled up over the cap. And it was as if from the depths of a well, in a dull and melancholy echo, those grotesque names rang out: Marguerite Steinheil, Isabeau de Bavière… I found it hard to believe that my life had once been made up of these dusty relics. I had lived without sunlight, without desire – in the twilight of books. In search of a phantom country, a mirage of a France of yesteryear, peopled with ghosts…
The instructor uttered a cry of delight and showed his stopwatch to everybody: "One minute fifteen seconds!" It was the best time. The redhead turned round, radiant. She took off her cap and shook her head. Her hair caught fire in the sunlight, her freckles flashed like sparks. I closed my eyes.
And the next day, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the very singular sensual pleasure of squeezing a firearm, a Kalashnikov, and feeling its nervous shuddering against my shoulder. And seeing in the distance a plywood figure target riddled with holes. Yes, its insistent quivering and its male power were for me of a profoundly sensual nature.
Furthermore, from the first burst of fire my head was filled with a buzzing silence. The person on my left had fired first, deafening me. The incessant clatter in my ears, the iridescent flurries of sunlight in my eyelashes, the wild smell of the earth beneath my body – I was at the peak of happiness.
For at last I was coming back to life. Living in the happy simplicity of orderly actions: shooting, marching in file, eating millet kasha from aluminum mess tins. Letting oneself be carried along in a collective movement directed by others, by those who knew the supreme objective, who generously relieved us of all the burden of responsibility, making us light, transparent, clear. The objective was simple and unequivocal too: to defend the fatherland. I could not wait to lose myself in this monumental goal, to dissolve into the marvelously irresponsible mass of my comrades. I hurled practice grenades; I shot; I pitched a tent. Happy. Blissful. Healthy. And that adolescent in an old house at the edge of the steppe, who had spent entire days meditating on the life and death of three women seen in a pile of old newspapers, seemed increasingly unreal. If I had been introduced to this dreamer I would doubtless not have recognized him. I would not have recognized myself…
The next day the instructor took us to watch the arrival of a column of tanks. What we made out first was a gray cloud growing larger on the horizon. Then a mighty vibration spread through the soles of our shoes. The earth shook. And the cloud, turning yellow, rose as high as the sun and eclipsed it. All sounds disappeared, shrouded by the metallic din of the caterpillar tracks. The first gun thrust through the wall of dust, the commander's tank loomed, then the second, the third… And, before stopping, the tanks described a tight arc, so as to line up side by side. Then their tracks clattered even more furiously, tearing up the grass in long slices.
Hypnotized by the power of the empire, I had a sudden vision of the terrestrial globe and how these tanks – our tanks! – could strip it entirely bare. A brief command would have sufficed. I took a pride in this, such as I had never felt before…
And the soldiers who emerged from the turrets fascinated me with their serene virility. They were all alike, carved from the same firm and healthy material. I guessed that they would have been invulnerable to the morbid thoughts that had tortured me during the winter. No, all that mental sludge would not have remained for a single second in the clear stream of their thinking, simple and direct, like the orders they executed. I was terribly jealous of their life. It was exposed there, under the sun, without a spot of shadow. Their strength, the male smell of their bodies, their tunics covered in dust. And the presence, somewhere, of the young russet-haired girl, of that adolescent-woman, of that amorous promise. I had only one wish now: to be able one day to emerge from the narrow turret of a tank, leap down onto its tracks, then onto the soft earth, and to walk with pleasantly weary steps toward the promise of a woman.
This life, actually a very Soviet life on whose margins I had always lived, now exalted me. To blend into its easygoing and collec-tivist routine suddenly seemed to me like a brilliant solution. To live the life of everybody else! To drive a tank; then, when demobilized, to pour molten steel amid the machines in a great factory beside the Volga; to go to the stadium every Saturday to watch a football match. But above all to know that this succession of days, tranquil and predictable, was crowned by a grand messianic project – the communism that, one day, would make us all perpetually happy, clear as crystal in our thoughts, strictly equal…
It was then that, almost grazing the forest treetops, the fighter aircraft hurtled over our heads. Flying in groups of three, they caused the exploded sky to fall in about our ears. They surged past, wave after wave, ripping the air, their decibels cutting into my brain.
Later, in the silence of evening, I spent a long time gazing at the empty plain, with the dark streaks of torn-up grass here and there. I said to myself that once upon a time there had been a child who had imagined a fabulous city arising above that misty horizon… That child was no more. I was cured.
After that memorable April day the mini-society at school accepted me. They welcomed me with that condescending magnanimity that people have toward neophytes, the born-again, or enthusiastic penitents. That is what I was. At every opportunity I was eager to show them that my singularity had been put behind me for good. That I was like them. And furthermore, ready for anything in order to expiate my eccentricity.
The mini-society itself had also changed, meanwhile. Imitating the world of adults more and more closely, it had divided itself into several tribes. Yes, almost into social classes. I could distinguish three. They already foreshadowed the future of these adolescents, yesterday still united in a homogeneous little pack. There was now a group of "proletarians." The most numerous, they came for the most part from the workers' families, who provided manual labor for the workshops of the enormous river port. There was in addition a core of students who were good at mathematics, future tekhnars who, having previously been lumped together with the proletarians and dominated by them, increasingly stood out from them, as they occupied the scholastic front ranks. Finally, the most exclusive and the most elitist, as well as the most restrained, that coterie in which one could detect the budding intelligentsia.