He found him at some distance from the others. A very young soldier whose shaven head rose up from a dark mound. Nikolai leaned over, touched the buried man's neck, found no wound on it. The soldier opened his eyes and groaned at length with a rhythmical sound, as if to prove that he was indeed a human being. Nikolai walked toward Fox ("I'm leaving now! Let them all go to hell!" a voice whispered inside him), hesitated, took out a flask, went back toward the head. The soldier drank, choked, his cough sounded almost alive. Nikolai began to dig, first with his hands to free the neck, then, when he reached the shoulders, with an ax blade. He liberated the back and, as he had expected, found the arms forced behind him and bound together with wire. Going down deeper, he noted with satisfaction that the soldier had not been buried standing up, but kneeling, to save time, no doubt.
Now he must lift him out. Nikolai placed himself behind the still-inert body, found a good purchase for his feet, took hold of the soldier under his arms. And at once let him go. In gripping the buried person, his fingers had just pressed against a woman's breasts.
He took hold of one of the freed hands, turned it toward the moon to examine it. The hand was frozen, bruised, black with earth. But it was a woman's hand all right, he could not be mistaken.
With a man everything would have been easier. He would have tipped him onto his back and then heaved him out of his hole. But with her… Muttering oaths that he was not even aware of, Nikolai dug at the front of the body. His fingers touched the remnants of a coarse wool garment and bare skin came through where it was torn. Further down the earth was warm, heated by the living energy spreading outward before being extinguished.
The woman said nothing, her half-closed eyes did not seem to see the man digging her out. Lying in front of her, Nikolai thrust aside the earth in broad armfuls, like a swimmer. It was when he arrived at the middle of the body and disengaged her belly that, all of a sudden, he raised himself up on his knees and shook his head, as if to rid himself of a mirage. Then he leaned forward and, already with a grown man's authority, felt the torso stained with earth, the round belly, heavy with a life.
She remained motionless, crouching close to the great fire he had lit in a recess in the steep riverbank. Two buckets filled with water were heating, suspended above the flames. Nikolai worked as he would have done in building a house or at a blacksmith's forge. Precise, confident actions. The thoughts colliding with one another in his head had no connection with what he was doing. "What are you going to do with her? What if she dies tomorrow morning? What about the child?" He also told himself that generally in these killings they opened the bellies of pregnant women and trampled on the infants. And that the killers in this glade were probably drunk or in too much of a hurry. And that they had already killed so many people during the war they were becoming lazy. He did not listen to himself. His hands broke sticks, drew charred wood out of the fire, spread it out on the clay of the riverbank. When the earth was sufficiently hot he trampled the embers, covered them with young branches, one armful, then another, and laid out the woman's unresponsive body on this warm couch. The water in the buckets was already boiling hot. He mixed it with the river water. Then he undressed the woman, threw her rags into the fire and began to bathe the body smeared with mud and blood. He coated it gently with still-warm ashes, turned it over, washed it, drew water from the stream, put it on again to heat. At each new rinsing the bitter stench of defilement and earth was dissipated a little more, carried away by a blackish trickle that lost itself in the river. It was the scent of young foliage steeped in hot water that now emanated from this woman's body. Returning to life, the woman for the first time looked up and focused on Nikolai, a look that finally expressed comprehension. She sat with her arms folded across her breast in the middle of a little lake that steamed in the night. He wanted to question her but changed his mind, drew a new shirt from his pack and began rubbing the body, which was unresisting, like a child's body. He dressed her in two other shirts, helped her to put on some pants, laid her down beside the fire, wrapped in his long cavalryman's coat. During the night he went to sleep for a few minutes, then got up to stoke the fire. He moved away in search of wood and turned, saw their fire and a shifting circle of light, surrounded by darkness, defined by the dancing of the flames. And this sleeping body, an incredibly foreign, unknown being, which seemed to him, he could not say why, very close.
Feeling his way, he gathered up dead branches, then turned to see the fire. Sometimes a scarlet flash glittered in the darkness. It was Fox lifting his head and seeking him with his eye by the light of the flames. The silence was such that Nikolai could hear the horse's breathing from a long way off, little sighs, now sharp, now reassured. And when he came back toward the fire he had the strange feeling that he was returning home.
In the morning they crossed the place where the rutted road was piled high with bundles of brushwood, advanced up a valley still white with mist, and finally found the meeting of the ways he had vainly sought the previous evening. Several times Nikolai tried to talk to the young woman, whom he had mounted on Fox's back, deciding to go on foot himself. She did not reply, sometimes smiling, but her smile resembled the tensing of a face on the brink of tears. Finally, toward noon, when they needed to make a halt to eat something, he lost his temper somewhat, irritated by her refusal to speak, "Listen, what's the matter with you? Why don't you say anything? It's finished. We're far away. They won't harm you any more. At least tell me your name."
The young woman's face twisted into a grimace, she tilted her head back slightly and forced open her lips. Between her teeth, in the place of a tongue, Nikolai saw a broad, oblique gash.
When he had recovered his wits, he realized that she had been mutilated so that she could no longer tell what she had seen. But tell it to whom? Everyone saw the same thing during these years of war. Moreover, how could one describe those heads in the clearing, those eyes being extinguished one by one? While the birds built their nests on the branches above them.
Dolshanka, half depopulated during the war, did not notice his return. The village had been scoured by so many waves of armed men, Reds, Whites, anarchists, bandits pure and simple, and then Reds again, by so many lootings, fires, and deaths, that the villagers were no longer surprised at anything. There was just one old woman who asked him as he was passing in the street, "Tell me, soldier, is it true the Bolsheviks have abolished death?" Nikolai nodded.
Over several weeks, before the child was born, he had time to teach the young woman to read and write. It was perhaps the greatest pride of his life: he never boasted about rescuing her from the tomb but he enjoyed talking about the lessons he gave her in the evenings, after the wearisome labor of plowing. Thanks to his teaching she could tell him her first name, writing it out in capital letters: Anna. And choose a name for the child: Pavel. And sign the papers on the occasion of their marriage. A girlhood friend of Anna's, who came to see them at Dolshanka from time to time, quickly got used to these words, thoughts, questions or answers, traced on a sheet of paper or in the dust on a road. Her friend spoke with a slight accent. From the south, Nikolai reckoned. He told himself that his wife must have had the same lilting voice as this Sasha.
For his part, he did not need the angular letters to understand her. The work on the land, the silence of their house, the lives of the animals, none of this had any need of words. He and Anna would look at one another for a long time and smile. During the daytime, catching sight of one another from afar, they would wave, without seeing the expressions on one another's faces but picturing the tiniest detail.