The orphanage, the equivalent of the prison into which our fathers had vanished, suddenly took on a different character, revealing its hospitable, almost familial side to us. The lives led by other people, whose freedom we had always envied, now alarmed us. We were like the prison inmate who counts the hours at the end of a long sentence and at the same time dreads going outside, often escaping just before the great day, allowing himself to be caught, and settling down to a new number of days to be crossed off.
In outward appearance, our daily life remained the same. The most noticeable change was a kind of solidarity that imposed itself of its own accord, canceling the former hierarchies of weak and strong. Strength, hostile and unknown, now lay outside our walls.
One Saturday evening in January I went up to the sealed-off room where I had almost finished sorting through the books. In the half-light, their worlds came to life, their words resonated softly in my ears. On one of the boxes lay the blade of the future dagger, Misericordia… Alexandra called to me from the landing. I took a last look around me, thinking that I would soon have to leave these books behind for a long time, perhaps forever, and that I would try to carry away within me the land their pages had brought to life.
3
That winter marked a hiatus between two generations, the notorious "twenty years after," which, though too vague for historians, nevertheless defines the rhythm of a country's chronology. The war's end was already twenty years old. A generation had had the time to be born, grow up, and produce offspring. All without war. Blood ties to it were being stretched, the heritage of memory was collapsing, the dead were once and for all taking on solid shape in bronze. Now was precisely the time that they began erecting a forest of monuments in our city – vast concrete memorials in celebration of the battle of Stalingrad, colossal statues – and lighting "everlasting flames." And they closed our orphanage with the view that the quarantine had lasted long enough, we had expiated our fathers' past, and it would now be more ideologically judicious to disperse us, like fragments from that past, among the healthy population.
The last months before our departure were filled in equal measure with excitement and anxiety. We knew that the myth of the hero-fathers could not fail to raise smiles among the people in whose midst we would soon be living. Not only did we come from a strange place, but also from another era, from those days when the statues still moved and spoke, warm with the blood that flowed beneath the bronze. We would all, we knew very well, have to make up for lost time and find a place for ourselves in other people's reality. Learn to forget.
What I am left with from those months is a few brief fragments, snapshots in my memory, apparently random, but without which I should certainly have become a different person. Notably, that January afternoon, a biting cold that forces us to rub our noses and lips, which have lost all feeling, despite being ordered to remain still. The motorcade we are waiting for on one of the great avenues of the city is delayed. Everyone shifts on their feet to avoid turning into pillars of ice: the militiamen stationed several yards apart, ourselves behind them, along with other representatives of the "toiling masses." According to the rumor circulating, a very important person is expected, Brezhnev himself. Our curiosity is aroused by the desire to guess which of the cars in the motorcade this person will travel in. Not the one at the head, we are sure of that. The second, the third? A state secret. We feel we have been entrusted with a mission. And still the motorcade is not there. Our feet feel like ice cubes. Irritated, one of the pupils from the orphanage tells a joke. Wafted along by the breeze, it warms our ears. An attempt on Brezhnev's life. The gunman misses, is arrested, interrogated:
"So what stopped you from shooting straight?" "The crowd. They were all trying to shoot first." Laughter thaws our lips. The militiamen look around. A supervisor looms up behind us, cuffs heads rapidly… The motorcade sweeps past at such a speed that it is impossible to get a good look at the windows in this black stream of limousines. Our hands spring into action too late, merely saluting the motorcyclists who bring up the rear. They have helmets white with frost and ruddy faces… The "toiling masses" break ranks and disperse, hastening toward home and a hot drink. But our own mission is not yet accomplished. We are loaded onto a bus and taken to the foot of a brand-new monument, to act out the same charade of popular jubilation all over again, in Potemkin style. The wind from the steppes on this hillside is appalling. They arrange us in a hollow square, doubtless in simulation of a large crowd. We no longer talk, remaining motionless without the supervisors having to rebuke us. Even they seem to understand the inhuman absurdity of this waiting. The day wanes, the motorcade does not come. A noncom approaches our ranks, speaks into a supervisor's ear. The latter smiles at us a little mournfully: "At ease!"
At this moment I flee. Everyone is too tired to count us. I make my way down the other side of the hill and run toward the city. I do not explain to myself the reasons for this truancy. Possibly contempt for this visiting V.I.P., who has not deigned to come. Or else the picture I have of the rest of the extras, who have already gone home, happily drinking hot cups of tea in the bosom of their families. Probably the latter thought. This dazzling vision of domestic bliss, warmth, peace. I make my way through the streets, mimicking the gait of the passersby, I go into a store. Then pause for a moment, mingling with the gathering at a bus stop. With the ill-considered hope that their life will draw me into itself, make me like them. A screen like a fine sheet of glass separates me from these people… I find myself inside a church for no particular reason, simply to get warm. My rejection of everything connected with religion is instinctive. I do not like these old women crossing themselves and mumbling in front of the icons wreathed in smoke. The reverberation beneath the vaulted ceilings is unpleasant, chilling. The gleaming richness of the iconostasis is crushing. And even the candle flames are no good for unfreezing my fingers; they burn them, bite them, or else shrink away beneath them. I recall how one day at the orphanage one of the pupils was made to step forward to be castigated for his shameful crime: some reactionary old aunt of his had secretly taken him to the church and had him baptized! Our contempt for this tearful redhead had been sincere. "It was one of these old women here," I say to myself, at the sight of their bowed shadows. The priest's voice is slightly plaintive, quavering with cold. I find his prayers hard to follow. He calls on us to pray for all and sundry, to pray for everyone, for those close at hand, for those far away, for the dead… I get back to the orphanage just before supper. I cannot admit to anyone that my first attempt to live among the others has failed.
Nor would I have become the person that I am without having experienced a certain night at the end of the winter. Or rather that particular moment when for a very brief spell the passing of the trains that ran beside the house where Alexandra lived came to a stop. During the day the tracks, only a few yards away from the wooden walls, gave rise to the noisy symphony of trains on their way through the township. The inhabitants no longer even noticed all this pounding, clattering, whistling, and grinding, the crescendos and diminuendos. Just from the sound they could recognize the heavy drumming of a train coming from the Urals, its freight cars loaded with ore, the shock wave raised by the Novosibirsk express, the interminable clanking of the dark tank cars bringing oil from the Caspian Sea… Around about two o'clock in the morning there was a slack period in this rail activity, a brief respite between the very late trains and the ones that roused the switch yard at the crack of dawn. Sometimes this pause in the night was shattered by special trains passing through very rapidly. As I lay in my bed, separated from the rest of the room by an old curtain, all I had to do was crane my neck to see the long, low flatcars rolling past, the transport covers that allowed one to guess at the contours of armored vehicles, the shapes of guns. Then I remembered the things our teachers used to tell us about the world situation. These armaments were probably on their way to the defenders of Vietnam, currently being burned with napalm by the Americans, or to the Cubans, at their last gasp, thanks to the blockade, or to the Africans in their liberation struggle.