On the footpath that led back up to the orphanage, he confided to me in somewhat embarrassed tones: "You know that boat where that bastard and Muza… Well, I've sunk it now."
Twenty years later, when I was beginning to write, I contemplated turning that evening spent in the company of Village into a short story about the last twenty-four hours in the life of a young man. For he was to die at the end of the following day. A striking subject, I thought, the quintessence of a life revealed amid the mellow banality of a May dusk. I never wrote it, no doubt sensing the falseness of a contrivance of this kind. Instead of reinventing those twenty-four hours in such a way as to milk them for significance, I needed to hold on to what little I knew of them, tell that and avoid the temptation to wax philosophical.
The following evening (it was a Sunday), the same gang of loutish "recruiting sergeants" appeared and this time invited us to have a drink with them. It was clear that – between the stick and the carrot – they were seeking our weak spots. We did not refuse, some of our number eager to act like hard men, and others, perhaps all of us, eager to respond to the least promise of friendship. They drank, too, and had probably not even foreseen the brawl that erupted on account of an overturned glass, an oath, a slap. Or else, on the contrary, everything was calculated, to divide us up into those who would nibble the carrot and those who would resist.
The only weapons we had were our five-kopeck pieces sharpened into blades, along with an iron bar snatched from one of the louts and a broken bottle. I already knew that hand-to-hand combat only looked good in films and that this brawl would be much like the previous ones: clumsy shuffling, blows missing the target, no mercy for those who fell, animal glee at any sign of weakness. The alcohol made the fight even uglier; we all simply felt we were saving our own skins. One of our number was already on the ground, huddled in on himself like a scarab to ward off blows to his head.
I noticed Village during a moment's respite as, with broken bottle in hand, I contrived to keep at bay an adversary as out of breath as I was. Village was coming up from the river, doubtless attracted by our gasps and groans. I saw him drop his lines, pick up a big stone, rush toward us. Then a few minutes later (finding I had time to spit out a fragment of broken tooth) I saw him again. Inexplicably the assault by the louts had just started to falter, they were retreating; one of them, tapping the others on the back, was urging them to leave. At length they all ran across a patch of waste ground, leaving us an unhoped-for victory. Now we were laughing, wiping away the blood, discussing the best bits of the fight… Suddenly we heard this voice. We saw Village sitting there, his arms lolling on the ground, and – as it seemed to us – glassy-eyed with astonishment. He was not groaning but from his lips came forth a wet babbling, like that of a babe in arms. Someone touched his shoulder, and Village toppled gently backward. We gathered around him, crouching, made uneasy by this fixed stare, clumsily felt his chest, his head… All the arms clutching at him seemed to be straining to hold him back on a slippery slope. There was still time for one of our number to jokingly suggest a glass of vodka, but already beneath the unbuttoned shirt a fine trickle of blood was to be seen and the gray glint of a blade – that of a "Finnish knife," which had snapped at the hilt.
All I can remember of our headlong run to the orphanage and the minutes that followed it is the desperate hammering on the sick-bay door: we had forgotten it was a Sunday.
During the days that followed I was haunted by the notion that this death expected some gesture from me, some idea that I could not contrive to come up with. Some serious, significant gesture. But the trifling nature of everything that happened now was distressing to me. The next day, just as if nothing had occurred, the nurse opened the infirmary at nine o'clock precisely. Two days later they ordered us to carry out our old desks from the classrooms, and among the tabletops covered in drawings and writing, nobody took note of the one that had belonged to Village. Trifling, too, was my feverish speculation about the odds: what if I had had the idea of taking along the Misericordia dagger that day. Then, maybe… Yet I knew a blow from an iron bar would have smashed that slender blade like glass.
One evening at the beginning of June, I found a way to force myself from this verbiage of remorse as I remembered that little raft Village had launched on its nocturnal voyage. It suddenly seemed to me that it was very important to keep picturing this tiny craft with its freight of smoky charcoal. Not to allow its slow progress toward the Caspian Sea to be interrupted in my mind. To believe it was still afloat.
At the time of the funeral we had all noted that there was no one to inform about Village's death. For us this was not a new idea, but we were struck by the cosmic absoluteness of it: no one upon the whole terrestrial globe! That priest's words from the preceding winter came back to me then: "… Those who have no one to pray for them." Once more I pictured the little raft, the glowing embers drifting away into the night beneath the Volga 's immense sky.
4
The sky white with heat, the timeless lethargy of the steppes, a bird flapping its wings, unable to make any progress in a void that was too dense. Like the bird, we moved forward with no other point of reference than the vastness of the plains and a horizon made molten by the flow of overheated air. The gigantic excavator advancing in front of us ripped open the earth's crust with its bucket wheel, tracing an endless straight line. Covered in dust, deafened by the roar of the machine and the grinding of crushed rocks, we dragged along lengthy slabs of pine which the workmen used to reinforce the sides of this future irrigation canal. As if in the mad hope of containing the changeless surge of the infinite with this ephemeral casing… In the evening our weariness could be gauged by the buzzing of a bee that beat against the walls of the barrack hut and which no one had the strength left to chase away. That would have meant getting up, stepping over bodies stretched out on their bunks, flapping a shirt, steering the insect toward the door… But we were already asleep and its hum was blending into the beginnings of our dreams.
To melt into this desert of light was the best way to forget, the best way to mourn, the best way to forget mourning. We talked a good deal less than in previous years, when we had still viewed this summertime penal servitude as a purgatory with promise. Now we knew that the future would not be very different from this daily trudge of ours behind the disemboweling machine, from the absurdly stubborn line of this ditch, whose sides must unremittingly be strengthened.
One day, along with scoops of earth, the digger began hurling out human remains, skulls, soldiers' boots, helmets from the last war. On another occasion there were much older bones, ancient helms, swords brown with rust… possibly a millennium lay between these warriors and the others. A thousand years of sleep. Ten centuries of nothingness. The next day when the machine plowed on, away from these ransacked graves, we saw archaeologists moving into the area. A handful of black specks lost amid the sunlit void of the plain.
As in previous summers, our work was often interrupted: they would disguise us in white short-sleeved shirts and clean pants and take us to appear as extras on vast esplanades, where important visitors were making speeches in front of commemorative monuments and concrete obelisks. In this way we were privileged one day to see a certain North Korean leader, from a distance, as always. He spent a long time reading from a sheaf of papers that the warm breeze, very strong that day, threatened to snatch away from him at every moment. This man, puny and with a slight stoop, was battling to control the flapping sheets, like a seaman unable to master a shivering sail… There was also an African statesman, who decided to hold forth in Russian and spoke very slowly, detaching each syllable from the next and getting the stresses all wrong. The tip of the monument showed greenish white against a dark sky heavy with a storm. The lazy rumbling of thunder beyond the river sounded like muffled laughter someone was trying to repress. But we did not flinch: the photographers needed us in unmoving ranks, with faces all turned in the same direction… Many years later, when I chanced to meet my former comrades, we would regret not having paid more attention to all those V.I.P. guests. As time went by we would have been able to identify them, some still active in political life, some having passed into the pages of history books. But in those days we were simply waiting for the moment when our patience would be rewarded with a dip in the Volga. That summer, however, even these swims did not give rise to the shouting enthusiasm of past times.