Now he was listening to the speech, with one ear cocked toward the interpreter, who had to stand on tiptoe. The more pompous the words became, the more remote was his expression. At intervals a look flashed out from beneath his heavy eyelids. Like a tracer it would target the crowd of notables, reach the ranks of the white shirts, land upon the speaker. At one moment his eyes rested on our square, and his eyebrows went up slightly, as if speculating about something that he would like to have had confirmed. But already the speaker was folding up his papers to the sound of obedient applause from the audience. With a measured tread, his head bowed in a gesture of concentration, the old giant made his way over to the microphone, which a technician hastily adjusted upward. He produced no sheet of paper and among the Party officials there was a little flutter of anxiety: words spoken off the cuff were by their very nature subversive.
He spoke. And I was certain I was the only one who understood the language he gave voice to. It was the one I had believed dead. French.
The impression I had of being his only audience was not, by and large, false. The notables were incapable of listening to speeches not written down. The giant's entourage thought they knew in advance what was going to be said. The young extras with their red neckerchiefs were aware of the fine, powerful, occasionally somewhat strident music of his sentences, but not of their meaning. The interpreters were concentrating on the syntax.
He said what had to be said at such a ceremony, in the ponderous presence of a concrete monument upon soil heavy with steel and the mortal remains of fighting men. But now, initiated into his secret, I believed I could hear a silent voice, hidden behind the ringing tones of his speech. He spoke of thousands of heroes, but the hidden voice brought to mind not these nameless, faceless thousands but the one who, perhaps, lay beneath our feet. He spoke of the gratitude of peoples, but a perceptible bitterness made it possible to sense that he knew how ungrateful a people can reveal itself to be toward those who have given their lives to it…
At one moment there was a brief stirring among his entourage. A mouth whispering in an ear, a discreet glance at a watch… The diplomats had no doubt noticed that things were running behind schedule for the visit. Like a hardened orator, the giant ignored this distraction, merely turning his head a little in the direction of their confabulations, with one eyebrow arched, as if to say: "Silence in the ranks!" The sight of these people in their elegant suits irritated him. The rhythm of his words did not change. But his silent voice suddenly became even more audible to me, perceptible as he spoke. "Look at them, these bureaucrats! Already counting the time until the banquet. But do they know how much time it took a company to secure this hill? And how many lives it cost to hold it? Do you know how many eternities each second lasts as you force yourself up from the ground and run out under fire?"
Suddenly he fell silent. Someone thought the speech was finished. Two or three hesitant handclaps rang out. Then everyone froze, their eyes riveted to this man in the middle of the space. His stillness turned him into a tall monolith, indifferent to human emotion. Amid this silence that had fallen from the sky – or so it seemed to us – the hot wind's mighty blast could be heard sweeping across the plain.
For several moments the old giant directed his gaze into the distance, over our heads, beyond the unfinished building they had sought to hide from him, beyond the Volga, and into the endless solitude of the steppes. And I believed he could even see the cross, made from two branches of birchwood above an unknown grave.
This minute of silence (in reality six or seven seconds) was very likely involuntary, but it altered the whole sense of the ceremony. The giant roused himself, and in a final coda, throatier than his earlier words, he spoke of victory, of honor, of the mother country. He lifted up his arms and our hearts went with them. The applause, perhaps for the first time ever at such a ceremony, was sincere.
The officials surrounded him, reforming their Lilliputian escort, and began guiding him toward the downward slope. But, with his art of making space pliant to his will, he broke through their circle and walked with giant strides along the line formed by the young. The extras in their white shirts smiled broadly; each one waved the carnation he had been issued for the occasion. The giant passed by, eyeing them with just a tinge of disappointment. In front of our square he halted. We had no flowers and were not smiling, and remained at attention. I do not know if he understood who we were, with our peeling faces and our cropped hair, the minimal difference between the boys and the girls. I think he did. He must, at all events, have realized that we came from another era, the era they were trying to bury beneath the concrete of the memorial. The era that was dear to him. He looked at us, nodded his head, and screwed up his eyes, as if to say: "Chin up!" And we saw him walking away, not with his entourage, but with an elderly army officer. The two of them had no need of the interpreter weaving his way between them. The military man was making broad gestures, no doubt explaining troop movements, the deployment of artillery pieces, breakthroughs of armored divisions. The old giant approved, making up with his hands for the hesitations of the interpreter, now trailing behind…
I spoke to the supervisor, who was waiting for us beside the bus, in the manner of a condemned man formulating his last request: "There's someone in the city I must see. My aunt… If I'm not allowed to go, I'll run away all the same." He gave me a searching look, gauging the unstable frontier between the unlimited submissiveness we normally displayed and a rebellion that might erupt at the most unexpected moment. At that very moment indeed, just as we were being promised a whole morning of bathing in the Volga the following day. As a good psychologist, he sensed that here was an exceptional case. "If you don't show up tomorrow I'll set the militia on you as a fugitive. It'll be a reeducation colony for you. Don't say I didn't warn you. Now, beat it. You can still catch the last train. Hold on: take this as your ticket."
The following morning Alexandra telephoned him and, on the pretext of sunstroke and a high fever, won for me the handful of days I was to spend with her that came to count for more in my life than some whole years.
I had arrived at about ten o'clock at night and, without explaining anything, told her everything in such breathless haste that it could indeed have been taken for fever or the early stages of drunkenness. The window overlooking the railroad tracks was open, and you could hear the heavy clanking of a train on its way from the Urals. She made tea, lit the lamp. It was only when she asked in a very calm voice, too calm: "So what did he speak about?" that I sensed her emotion.
I took a deep breath and suddenly felt utterly tongue-tied. I could tell her about the handkerchief wiping away the slime from the sturgeon. I recalled the smallest of the giant's gestures. I had even had a memory of the moment when he used the past historic tense of a verb that sounded old-fashioned to my ear (some "naquit" or quite simply "fut") that had struck me like the sighting of a prehistoric reptile. I could easily have said: "He spoke about the war and the victory and the debt all peoples owe to their heroes…" But the real essence of it was not there. It was in that silent voice I believed I had heard, in the gaze he directed toward the forgotten cross in the middle of the plain… Yet how to speak of that? And indeed, was it real or had I dreamed it?