The young women observe them, meet their eyes, catch sight of the first steps of that staircase descending into black night and turn their gaze away like children who will only venture a little way down a staircase into a cellar.
On a road at right angles, coming from the north, a long dusty streak appears: a company sent on reconnaissance. A light armored car and a four-wheel-drive, soldiers already jumping down and running toward the crowd gathered at the crossroads. The young women begin weeping, laughing, embracing the soldiers. The prisoners are silent, still, absent.
The child will be born under the spring sunshine on a great canvas cape, which the officer spreads out beside the road. The cord will be cut by a bayonet rinsed in alcohol, a blade that has been plunged so many times into men's entrails. When the young mother ceases crying out there will be a moment of silence poised in the lightness of the spring sky, in the scent of the earth warmed by the sun, in the coolness of the last snows. They will all gather round the square of canvas: the young bondwomen, the prisoners, the soldiers.
This moment will endure, set apart from human time, apart from the war, beyond death. There is still no one in that sun-drenched space to give history lessons, to do the accountancy for the suffering, to judge who is more worthy of compassion than the others.
There will be these young women who, on returning to their country, will be regarded as traitors until the day they die. These soldiers who on the following day will continue on their road to Berlin and half of whom will not see the end of the war. These prisoners, who will soon be dragooned into the ranks of the millions of anonymous victims.
But at this moment there is only silence around the mother and her child, wrapped in a broad, clean shirt, which the officer has taken out of his knapsack. Where the roads cross there is this prisoner lying dead on the verge, with a box on his forearm in which mosquitoes buzz about, sucking the blood of the lifeless body. There is this woman with cropped hair and huge eyes in a transparent face, she who has helped the mother and who now raises her eyes toward the others, eyes in which they can see, as it were, a slow return from the pit of darkness. There is the child's first cry.
We drove back through the little German town, traveling through it in the opposite direction: the warehouses, the tavern, the viaduct, the window with lace curtains. Watching the procession of housefronts washed out by the rain, you murmured softly and without emotion: "I quite likely have cousins who live in these parts. Maybe even my father. The world is such a small place."
On that return journey you told me about the house in the north of Russia where you spent the first years of your childhood. About the clock with its weights and the chain that your mother often rewound, for fear that the knot in it should stop the march of time. Your mother had died when you were three and a half. Your only memory of her was of that winter's day with the flakes dreamily swirling, the forest slumbering beneath the snow and the lake no one dared to cross, on ice that was still too thin, having just begun to spread over the water's brown surface. And, in the midst of this calm, a faint anxiety lest that knot in the chain might at any moment interrupt the passage of the snowy hours.
I wrote down your name and the name of the German town near which you were born. And I realized that the sheet of paper came from the bunch Vinner had given me. Never before had the traces of our past seemed to me so derisory and fleeting. I remembered how, several years previously, in talking about our past, you had said to me, in tones that seemed wistful about the elusiveness of all testimonies: "It must be possible to tell the truth one day…" The truth was there on that sheet of paper. A message destined for no one, with no hope of convincing anyone. Like all the ghosts we carried within ourselves. The soldier in front of the lines of barbed wire, his hand raised to his face, smashed by a splinter from a grenade. The couple in their mountain refuge surrounded by armed men.
The shuffling feet slipped along the corridor, and stopped outside my door (a nurse? someone sent by Vinner? such anxious thoughts would be inextinguishable until death, thanks to a survival reflex). This reminded me uselessly of the brevity of my reprieve. Strangely enough, this period of time under threat now seemed very long, almost infinite. Sufficient for telling the truth that needed no other addressee than you, one that would be told without my needing to argue a case, offer justification, convince. It was very simple, independent of words, of the time that was left for me to live, of what others might think of it. This truth corresponded to a saying I had heard long ago, whose haughty strength and humility had always appealed to me: "I have not been called upon to make you believe, but to tell you." I did not think this truth, I saw it.
I saw the soldier who had just fallen, a hand reaching out toward his smashed face. I saw him not at the moment of his death but in the early light of a morning that no longer belonged to his life but was still his life, the very sense of his life. I saw him sitting beside other soldiers on the benches of an army truck. Their eyes watched the road through the open tarpaulin at the rear. They were silent. Their faces were serious and as if illuminated by a great pain finally overcome. Their tunics, bleached by the sunlight, bore no decorations, but at chest height retained the darker traces left by medals that had been removed. The truck passed through the still-sleeping suburbs of a great city, stopped in a street shrouded in half-light. The soldier jumped to the ground, saluted his comrades, followed them with his gaze as far as the corner. Adjusting the knapsack on his shoulder, he walked in through the entrance to a building. In the courtyard, in that stone well with echoing walls, he raised his head: a tree that seemed to be the only thing awake at the dawning of this day and, above its branches with their pale foliage, a window at which a lamp was shining.
The truth of the soldier's return was undemonstrable, but for me it had the force of a life-and-death wager. If it made no sense nothing made sense any more.
I also saw, within me and very remote from me, the man and the woman standing motionless in the night on the bank of a watercourse. The outlines of the mountains were incised into the air's resonant transparency. The current of the stream carried the stars along, thrust them into the shadow of the rocks, into shelter from the waves. The man turned, looked for a long time at the half-open door of a wooden house, at the ruddy glow from a fire dying down between the heavy stones of the hearth and the tall, straight flame from the candle on a fragment of rock in the middle of the room.
It was not a memory or a moment lived through. I simply knew that one day it would be so, that it already was so, that this couple were already living in the silence of that night.
You know, I shall have to go soon. But before leaving I shall have enough time to tell you what is essential. The winter's day I can see, which one part of me is beginning to inhabit. A muted day, traversed by slowly eddying flakes. A time will come when everything is like that moment in winter. You will appear amid the snowbound sleep of the trees, on the shore of a frozen lake. And you will begin walking on the still-fragile ice; every step you take will be deep pain and joy for me. You will walk toward me, letting me recognize you at every step. As you draw closer you will show me, in the hollow of your hand, a fistful of berries, the very last of them, found beneath the snow. Bitter and frozen. The icy steps on the wooden stairway will give off a crunching sound that I have not heard for an eternity. In the house I shall remove the chain from the weight-driven clock so as to undo the knot. But we shall no longer have any need of its hours.