In one other way or another we all approved of what Village had done, even the one who had received the blow.
I saw the nurse again in May on a public holiday. She was coming out of a shop, holding one handle of a huge shopping bag. The other handle was held by (I thought at first) her twin brother. But it was her husband, and he looked like a comical masculine copy of her. Almost the same height, middling. The same build, rather well rounded. Fair, diaphanous curls, the man's even more dazzling. I experienced neither jealousy nor disappointment. The couple looked like little piglets in a strip cartoon and could therefore have nothing in common with the silent woman who had tended my wound. With all my strength I wanted to believe in the possibility that this was her double. Within the cracked kaleidoscope of our lives I at least needed this shard of a dream to hold on to.
Among the flickering visions reflected in the glass there were also those two girls and their boyfriends, chatting at the entrance to a lane. We saw them from a truck bringing us back from a work site. The driver had parked it under the trees and gone off in search of a pack of cigarettes. One of the boys was seated on his bicycle, the other was holding his by the handlebars. Fenced in as we were by the sides of the truck, we studied them in their little carefree oasis. Their freedom enthralled us. Even their skin was different from ours. After several baking hot days our faces were peeling, our short hair rough and discolored. The golden skin of these girls gave evidence of a mysterious way of life in which one took care of one's body, as of an asset… At one moment the boy seated on his bike took hold of a fine lock of hair that had slipped over his girlfriend's cheek and tucked it back behind her ear. She seemed not to notice, and continued talking. I sensed around me a swift muscular tension, as at the movies, when the hero is getting close to some danger… A volley of oaths erupted in the midst of our tightly packed crowd. Laughter, obscenities, banging on the metal of the cabin, and then, as if someone had given the order for it, silence. The two couples moved off rapidly down the lane beneath the trees. A girl leaning on the panel beside me had her eyes swollen with tears.
From the same broken kaleidoscope this spray of sparks came fizzing out: the town hoodlums who sometimes arrived to taunt us were armed with short, two-edged blades known as "Finnish knives." On that particular evening the impact of a blade against an iron bar in the already darkening air caused a tiny spurt of blue-green. We had yet to discover that these brawls were, in fact, a means for the local underworld to test our mettle. For it was from among youths such as ourselves that they recruited people with nothing to lose and no one to love. This burst of sparks fixed in my vision the flat, ugly face of one of our assailants. Some days later I was to pass him near the station. He was giving the beige man a light.
It was from this station that I used to set out for the township where Alexandra lived. I had not been back to see her since the May celebrations, and it was already the end of the month. The passengers were talking about a fire that had just destroyed a railway depot; the warm breeze carried a bitter taste of charred resin… Not finding Alexandra at home, I went downstairs, walked around the house, and caught sight of her in the distance, standing beside the railroad tracks. I saw her from behind but guessed at her gesture: her hand shading her eyes, she was looking up at the clouds of smoke above the long buildings of the depot. The train traffic had been interrupted, the firemen's helmets were glinting amid the tracks. You could hear the crash of beams collapsing, the hiss of fire hoses. From time to time the murk framed a ghostly sun through the smoke, and the day froze into the contrasting black and white of a negative. Then the vividness of the flames and the intensity of the sky would flood back into this momentary dusk. The clusters of flowers on a lilac bush next to a buffer stop between the tracks seemed to be blooming on another day in another world.
Alexandra looked like a tiny figure beside the soaring clouds of smoke against the plain horizon, toward which led the deserted tracks. I stared at her and, more clearly than ever, believed I understood who she was. I recalled her neighbor, the old Tartar, Yussuf, once remarking to her: "You know, Alexandra, you Russians…" He was right, this woman standing among the railroad tracks, her gaze fixed on the flames, was Russian. Time had erased in her everything that could still distinguish her from the life of this country, its wars, its sufferings, its sky. She was as much a part of it as the quivering of a blade of grass on the endless ocean swell of the steppe. She had invented a remote homeland and a language for herself. But her real homeland was that tiny room in an old wooden house, half destroyed by bombs. That house and the infinity of the steppes all around. The place where she would remain forever incarcerated, the prisoner of an era made up of wars and suffering. I felt myself reeling on the brink of this past, in danger of letting myself be drawn into its yawning darkness. I must distance myself from it, flee.
A ball of fire, fringed with soot, billowed up over the depot. Alarmed, I drew back, and focused an uneasy gaze once more upon the figure of Alexandra, who was still there, unmoving. And I made off very quickly, jumping over the ties. I was afraid I might see her turning, calling me…
In the train I thought about the language she had taught me. Its words, I knew, had no bearing on anything in the world that surrounded us. I remembered Muza and her beauty, the beige man, the story told by the boy who had spied on them… One of the last poems I had come across in the ruins of Samoylov's library spoke of a pair of lovers disporting themselves in "a meadow shimmering with a thousand flowers." I suddenly felt something akin to disgust for the affectation of this torrent of words. Outside the carriage window lay the monotonous expanse of the steppe, dry and rough, stained blood red by the sunset.
So what I had learned was a dead language.
On my return to the orphanage I noticed that Village was absent. He had not come in to supper. I caught up with him among the willow groves on the riverbank at one of his fishing spots. He was embarrassed to be discovered constructing a child's toy: a tiny raft made of sticks that he was binding together with strips of bark. The remains of a fire were smoldering gently. So as not to lose face, he explained to me with a wink: "Look at this. It'll float down our river first. Then, zip, on to the Volga. And then, so long as a pike doesn't have it for breakfast, straight on to the Caspian Sea. One day those Persians'll be picking it up, you mark my words!" Using a piece of wood, he lifted several still glowing brands out of the embers, laid them on his raft, and put it in the water. We stayed for a long while, watching these tiny lights as they drifted away in the purple air of dusk.