The woman, her head bowed toward the lamp, is reading aloud. The adolescent stares at her face but does not listen. He has the look of one who knows a brutal and ugly truth, a look fully aware that the other person is in the process of camouflaging this truth beneath the innocent routine of a habitual pastime. His eyes focus on the woman's hands as they turn the page and he cannot help pulling a quick, dismissive face.
The boy knows that this room, with its reassuring coziness, is hidden away in a great dark izba, a log house swarming with lives, cries, arguments, sorrows, bouts of drunkenness. You can hear the long-suffering sobs of a woman in the room next door, the tapping of a cobbler's little hammer in the apartment opposite, the cry of a voice calling after clattering footsteps, amplified by the stairwell. And under the windows, in the winter dusk, the ponderous passing of trains, whose loads can be glimpsed-long tree trunks, blocks of concrete, machinery under tarpaulins.
The boy tells himself that this woman reading aloud is totally foreign to him. She's a foreigner! From a country that, to the inhabitants of that town, is more remote than the moon. A foreigner who has long since lost her original name and answers to the name of Sasha. The one trace that still links her to her improbable native land is this language, her mother tongue, which she is teaching the boy on Saturday evenings, when he obtains permission to leave the orphanage and come to this great black izba. He stares at her face, her lips, as they emit strange sounds, which, nevertheless, he understands.
Who is she in reality? He remembers old stories she used to tell him, now overlaid by the new experiences of his childhood. It seems she was the friend of his grandparents, Nikolai and Anna. One day she took the boy's father, Pavel, into her house. She is the woman who crossed a suspension bridge, holding onto the worn ropes and carrying the child by his shirt gripped in her teeth.
These shadowy figures, who are the boy's only family, seem insubstantial to him. He listens to what the woman is reading: through the canopy of foliage a young knight catches sight of a castle keep. The boy's face sharpens, his lips tighten into a defiant grin. He is getting ready to tell this woman the truth that he now knows, the brutal, bald truth she is trying to cover up with her "canopies," "keeps," and other fancy, old-fashioned rubbish.
It is a truth that burst forth that morning at the orphanage when a little gang leader, surrounded by his henchmen, yelled these words at him, half words, half spittle, "Look. Everyone knows about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog!"
All the truth in the world was concentrated in this spat-out remark. It was the very stuff of life. His assailant certainly could not tell how the boy's father had died, but he knew that's all there was in their orphanage: children of parents fallen from grace, often former heroes, who had died in prison, executed so as not to tarnish the country's image. The children invented fathers for themselves who were polar explorers trapped by ice, pilots who were missing in the war. Now this spittle-word has deprived him forever of a tacitly agreed fiction.
The woman breaks off from her reading. She must have sensed his inattention. She gets up, goes to the wardrobe, takes out a hanger. The boy gives a little cough, preparing a harsh tone of voice in which to interrogate, accuse, mock. Especially to mock these Saturday evenings, once a paradise to him, as she read aloud amid the clatter from the railroad and the drunken sobs, there at the heart of that great snow-covered, grudgingly inhabited void which is their country. He turns to the woman, but what she says anticipates by a second the words he already feels burning in his throat.
"Look, I've made this for you," she says, unfolding a shirt of coarse gray-green cotton. "A real soldier's tunic, wouldn't you say? You could wear it on Monday."
The boy takes the gift and remains dumb. With a mechanical gesture he strokes the fabric, notices the lines of stitching, absolutely regular although done by hand. By hand… with sudden pain he thinks of her right hand, the hand wounded by shrapnel, those numb fingers that must have been forced to master the to-and-fro of the needle. He understands that all the truth in the world is nothing if you omit this hand streaked with a long scar. That the world would make no sense if one forgot the life of this woman, come from abroad, who has unflinchingly shared the destiny of that great white void, with its wars, its cruelty, its beauty, its suffering.
He sinks his head lower and lower so as not to show his tears. The woman sits down, ready to begin reading again. Just before her first sentence he blurts out in a halting whisper, "Why did the firing squad kill him?"
The woman's reply does not come straight away. From one Saturday to the next, it will take several months. She will speak of a family in which, little by little, the boy comes to recognize people who had previously only existed in the misty legends of his childhood. Her recital will reach its conclusion one summer's evening after the sun has set, in the still warm and fluid air that bathes the steppes.
It was this light that I had in my mind's eye as I told my silent story, relating to you what Sasha had told me.
3
The horse turned its head slightly, its eye violet, reflecting the brilliance of the sunset, the sky clear and cold. Nikolai slipped his hand beneath its mane, gently patted its warm neck, heard a brief, plaintive sigh in reply. They were walking along the edge of a forest which, at nightfall, seemed endless and gave off the scent of the last sheets of ice lurking in the thickets. Nikolai knew that at any moment the horse would repeat the maneuver, a look turned toward its rider, an imperceptible slowing down of its pace. He would then have to chide it gently, in a soft voice, "For shame, lazybones! He wants to turn in already. Very well, if that's how it is, I'll have to sell you to the bandits. See how you like that." At these words the horse lowered its head, with an air at once resigned and sulky. After their two years at war together it even understood its rider's jokes.
These hours of dusk were the best time to avoid meeting anyone. You could still see where the horse was putting its feet but in the open camps scattered across the plain the soldiers were already lighting fires and it was easier to skirt around them. He had to avoid the Reds, whose troops he had just quit. To avoid the Whites, for whom he was still a Red. To steer clear of armed bands, who varied their color to suit their looting. And the forest in spring, with the leaves still in bud, offered poor protection.
He had already been riding for more than a week, first traveling up the course of the Don, then turning off toward the east. The steppe, up till then monotonous and flat, was now broken up by forests and valleys. There were more villages. During the first days he took his direction from the river and from the sun. Everywhere it was the same limitless Russian soil. But the closer he came to his own village the more his perception seemed to sharpen. As if the lands he was crossing had changed in scale, so that places came into focus with more and more detail. The day before, still dimly, he thought he had recognized the white steeple of the district capital. That morning a bend in a river, with the bank all trodden down at the approach to a ford, reminded him of a journey he had made before the civil Avar. Now he was almost sure he could travel clear of the forest before nightfall and link up with a road they used to take to go to the fair in the town. Yes, the corner of the forest, then a sandy slope, then, off to the right, this road. Half a day's trot from home.
During his long journey Nikolai had seen fields strewn with the bodies of men and horses left behind after a battle, villages populated by corpses hanging in front of doorways, and also that face he had at first taken for his own reflection when he peered into a well, before realizing… Dead people, fire, ruined houses no longer surprised him as long as he was a part of that immense ragged army, marching toward the south, driving the Whites before it. Killing and destruction was what war was all about. But now in the silence and emptiness of sunny days in May, and, above all, in the radiance of the evenings, the battlefields and deserted villages he skirted around were detached from the war, from its logic, from its causes, which a week earlier had seemed to justify everything. No more logic now. A field abandoned, as if capriciously. No sod turned, no seed sown for two springs. And there, on a slope running down to a little stream, the blackened, swollen carcass of a horse. And the cawing that rent the silence as the horseman approached.