With a resounding crack, my head broke the fine layer of ice.
Dazzled, I stretched out on the smooth, sparkling surface. The sunny air resounded with freshness, seemed as if it were quite a different substance from what I had been breathing hitherto. The sky, revitalized by the mild spell, extended as far as the eye could see. The silence of the taiga was so deep that all the little sounds gathered around me, coming only from my movements – the crunch of snow under my elbow; the echo of my hungry breathing; the resonant slithering of white slabs breaking as they fell from my shapka, from the collar of my sheepskin…
All I could see of Kazhdai was a few dark patches: the roofs of the tallest houses. Some straight outlines as welclass="underline" the buried trains sleeping on the tracks. I could identify streets thanks to the columns of white smoke rising from the chimneys. The tiny black dots were the inhabitants busy around these columns, making passageways.
The house I had just left was a little distance from the town, at the edge of the taiga. Its smoke seemed as if it were rising from the midst of a deserted plain. And on the branch of a birch tree, buried in the snow, I saw a miniature house designed to give shelter to the birds.
I put on my snowshoes and went up to the solitary chimney. Bending toward its mouth, which was shielded by a pitch-black iron cap, I uttered a resounding yell. It was the custom. The signal for the person left behind… I heard the creaking of the stove door, then an echo that seemed to come from the depths of the earth. A kind of slow sigh that was dissipated in the dazzling clarity of this day after the storm…
I glided briskly along on my snowshoes, crossing the valley that ran down to the Olyei. The taiga, half awake, stayed beside me at a distance. Great pine trees covered in snow had within their shade the brilliance of a bluish, transparent silver. And their tops glittered, dusted with nuggets of gold.
From time to time I glanced behind me. The column of smoke in the midst of the plain still marked the entombed izba, that room buried beneath the snow, the flickering light of a candle, that interior where the darkness of a winter's night still reigned. An unreal evening spent beneath the compact silence of the snows… The red-haired woman!
I remained still for a moment. I gazed at the plain with its thousands of crystals, flooded with sunlight, the endless sky extending its blue freshness; the mother-of-pearl shadow of the taiga. And in the distance, that column of smoke, white, all alone, in the midst of it all… Suddenly, with an unbearable clarity, I understood: I am condemned both to this beauty and to the suffering that it conceals. The snow would melt. Kazhdai would become a dark little town once again. The Transsiberian would move off and make up for its delay. And the red-haired prostitute would return to the waiting room. There could not be any other life.
For some time I followed the ample curve of the Olyei, overhung with immense dunes of snow.
Passing close to the three legendary cedar trees, where they hanged the men in the civil war, I stopped, stupefied. This morning the great rusty nails, which I was used to seeing high above me as I tilted my head back, were within easy reach. Yes, they were there, immediately before my eyes. I went up to them and, taking off my mittens, touched the rough brown metal. A slow cold, accumulated over long decades, invaded my fingers. I quickly withdrew my hand. I caressed the rough scales of the trunk. They seemed to harbor a warmth that was sleeping but alive. And suddenly what had happened long ago at the foot of these giant trees – that brutal but swift death – did not seem to me all that terrible. A moment of sharp pain and then this silence in the sun-drenched air, this secret life, sleeping, in perfect fusion with the breathing of this great trunk, with the sharp smell of the clusters of needles, with the glittering of the resin frozen in the indentations on the bark. This life without thoughts, without memories. This oblivion.
I gripped the great nail, I leaned my full weight on it. With half-closed eyes, I tried to enter into that narrow zone which separated me from the blissful silence of the trunk…
Suddenly, through my closed eyelids, I saw them: two black specks were following the blue ridge of the snowdrifts above the riverbank. Soon they were on a level with the three cedars. They hurtled down the ridge and crossed the Olyei. Their tiny silhouettes were becoming more and more distinct. The first of them moved forward with long strides, stopping at intervals to wait for the other one. I recognized them. And I was struck by their rustic and naive appearance. There was something childish about their sheepskins and their faces, which I could see more and more clearly. The earflaps of their shapkas bounced up and down – dogs' ears. They turned the corner by the forest, and in a few moments they were going to pass beside me. I wanted to run away. To hide deep among the snowy pine trees. I was certain I could no longer be a part of their lives…
But already the first of the skiers, Samurai, had noticed me. His harsh cry broke the silence. He came toward me.
Smiles, greetings, teasing. They gave me friendly pats on the shoulder. Told me the latest news from the village…
"They are children," observed some voice deep within me. "Absolute children, carefree and divinely insubstantial."
It seemed inconceivable that only yesterday morning we had been at school together. That only yesterday I had been like them.
"Have you swallowed your tongue or what?" exclaimed Samurai, shoving my shapka down onto my eyebrows. "Look at him, Utkin. He's not a Don Juan anymore. He's a bear that's half asleep!"
Tears came to my eyes. I was so jealous I could have howled. To be like them once again. To glide across the plain, light as the wind, as translucent as this sun-drenched air, as fresh as the breath of the taiga. Innocent!
Samurai must have noticed my tortured expression. He turned away and called out as he sped off, without looking at me: "Come on! There's no time to lose. Otherwise there won't be any seats left. Get going, you sleeping bear! You sleeping beauty!"
I followed them automatically, without even asking where we were going.
After we had been on the move for an hour I saw that Samurai, following an oblique course, was moving away from Kazhdai and heading toward a distant gray cloud that hung above the taiga – toward the city, toward Nerlug.
Another two and a half hours to go, I thought bitterly. Why am I trailing after them? What business do I have in that city?
Now they were walking side by side, chatting. Everything was so luminous, so serene, in the sunny little world that traveled with them. My gaze reached it as if from the depths of a prison cell. From time to time Samurai turned and called out to me cheerfully: "Come on, bear, move your great paws!"
It was no longer jealousy I felt toward them but a sort of malevolent contempt. Especially toward Samurai. I remembered his long discourses at the baths. About women. About love. His endless quotations from that old madwoman Olga. What was it he had said? "Love is harmony." What an idiot! Love, my dear Samurai, is an izba that smells of cold smoke. And the horrible solitude of two naked bodies under a garish yellow lightbulb. And the ice-cold knees of the red-haired prostitute that I brushed against when it was over, when I slid out from her belly, which had shaken me around in the damp hollow of the bed. And the bleary features of her face. And her heavy breasts, stretched by so many callused, blind, hasty hands. Like the hands of my phantom truckdriver – covered with scars, stained with grease. Oh, Samurai, if you had seen him! Before tackling the Devil's Corner he unbuttoned his pants and with his hand took out this huge swollen flesh; it looked like a huge piece of raw, warm, flaccid meat. Don't talk to me about love… And you will be like him, Samurai, in spite of your cigar and all that rubbish Olga tells you. You won't get away from it! Nor will I, or even Utkin. And we shall stay in this district center where the endless brawling stops only when the light goes out in a snowstorm. In our village, where the only memory is of the war thirty years ago that turned the whole of life into a memory. And in this railroad station, where the only woman one could still love waits for the Transsiberian that will never take her anywhere. This world will not let us go… You both are laughing as you hurry along there in your little circle of sunlight. But just wait. I know how to escape from it all. I know…