During those weeks of waiting he often found himself thinking again about the impossibility of explaining the war: telling himself that after the event everyone would talk about it, publish commentaries, accusations, justifications. Everyone, and, above all, those who had not fought in it. Everything would be crystal clear at last: enemies, allies, the righteous and the monsters. The years of fighting would be recorded, day after day, in terms of troop movements and glorious battles. The essential truth would be forgotten: that the whole of wartime was made up of myriad moments of war, and that sometimes behind the vast turmoil of the fronts there lurked a sunlit courtyard, a March day, with a man in black leather killing another man because he felt like killing. And that on the very same day there would be a certain Colonel Krymov, a naked man, quickly satisfying his lust for the flesh of a woman before being cut to pieces by machine-gun fire. And also that young man, his jaws clenched around the telegraphic cable… He soon lost his way among his recollections, and this led him to conclude that the vital thing was to keep all these fragments of war in one's memory, all these tiny wars fought by soldiers now forgotten.
At the start of May he crossed the Volga at Stalingrad and recalled Witold's words: "For the Russians, the Volga is like…" He got off the train too soon by mistake and spent a long time walking along the tracks at a switch yard. Through the smoke from a tank car set on fire by incendiary bombs, he saw a woman directing the chaotic traffic. "Here is yet another war," he thought. "This woman, so beautiful, so poorly clad, so soon forgotten…" He did not immediately grasp that he was the one the woman was shouting at.
6
That summer when Alexandra told me about the French pilot I was thirteen. The questions I asked were about the maximum speed of the Bloch aircraft, the operating range of the bomber Jacques Dorme had shot down, the type of pistol the man in the black leather greatcoat was armed with, the gas mask that allowed you to talk on the telephone (the ones we used during paramilitary exercises at the orphanage offered no such possibility). She smiled, confessing her ignorance of such matters.
Years later I would come to know what her smile had left unspoken: the infinite distance between what aroused my curiosity and her life of a few days with Jacques Dorme. She could not tell me about their love. Because of my age, I would at first think, lamenting the stupidity of that age, focused as it is on the minutiae of warfare and bold strategic thrusts. Because of her old-fashioned modesty, I would later tell myself, regretting the elusiveness of those few furtive moments in May 1942 that her story had scarcely allowed me to glimpse. And then one day I would come to realize that nothing more could have been said about that love. And that those moments ("She talked to me about what the weather was like," I more than once thought bitterly), those random recollections of rain or of a misty morning, were enough and told the essential truth about this brief and simple love affair. As the years passed, I learned to read them better, to conjure up their light, to hear the wind and the hiss of the rain coming in through the gap in the wall, transmitting its chill right over to the bed. This love, never referred to, came to reveal itself and ripen in me as I grew older. As did the moment when the old amber bead necklace snapped, which had at first been merely evocative of a night of rain and wind.
The wind banishes the sultry, resinous heat of the steppes, the smell of burning oil, the dense breath of human beings crammed into hundreds of rail cars. As the raindrops begin pattering down on the floor through the gap, they suddenly blend in with the clatter of the beads from the broken necklace. For a moment, the bodies pause in their amorous struggle, their breathing stilled, then all at once they fuse again, lost in a tempo quickened by desire, letting the beads beat time as they slip from the thread.
I needed to have lived to understand both the rain and the blissful weariness which permeated the woman's movements as she got up, went over to the gap, lingered in the warm, fluid embrace of the storm. To understand the measured pace of the remarks obliterated by the downpour's noisy torrent, to perceive that what was important was precisely this measured pace and not the sense of the words spoken. To understand that these lost remarks, the bliss of these slow movements, the wild cherry's scent, mingled with the acidity of the lightning flashes, all these elements, not retained in any memory, amounted to the essence of a life, one that the two lovers had truly lived, which was the first thing doomed to disappear into oblivion.
Also hidden behind those recollections of "what the weather was like," there was that other night, the hypnotic stillness of the air, the static density of a storm that does not break. They go down, cross the tracks, walk out from the township, which lies unmoving in the darkness, like scenery in a closed theater, and set out along a sandy path across the steppe. The silence lets them hear the rustle of every footfall and, when they stop, the faint crackling of bone-dry plants. The heat casts a veil over the stars; they seem more alive, less severe toward human brevity. At one moment an antitank obstacle raises its crossed steel girders. They finger these sections of rail rearing up in the darkness. The metal is still hot from the day's sunlight. In the torpor of the night these metal crosses, strung out in a line, look like the relics of some ancient, forgotten war. They say nothing, knowing the thought is unavoidable: a line of defense on the far side of the Volga, a willingness to envisage the war crossing the Volga, engulfing its left bank, strangling Stalingrad. They think this and yet the soldered steel seems to derive from a past history with no relevance to this night. They walk on in silence, with a physical sense that the ties binding them to the houses of the township, to the labyrinth of tracks in the switch yard, and their lives back there are growing weaker. There is only the chalky gleam of the path, the darkness tinged with blue by the silent flickering of lightning flashes, and suddenly, there at their feet, the abyss of this night sky, the stars floating on the black surface of the water.
It is one of the seasonal oxbow lakes that appear in the spring with the melting of the snows, only to be swallowed in a few gulps by the steppe during the summer drought. Its fleeting existence is for the moment at its most abundant. The water fills its ephemeral banks to the brim, the clayey smell seems as if it has always hung there. And the body, as it dives in, is tickled by the long stems of yellow water lilies, solidly rooted.
They remain for a whole hour in this sluggish flow, scarcely moving, starting to swim, then lingering at the center of the water's shallow expanse. The silent flashes of lightning last long enough for them to see each other, for him to see this woman with wet hair, her hands smoothing a face upturned toward the stars. To see the woman's closed eyes. To see her stretched out on the shore, where the fine, smooth soil seems to be heated deep down.
"If it had not been for this war I should never have met you…" The man's voice is at once very close, like a whisper in the ear, and lost in the remoteness of the steppes. It must be audible even over there, on the horizon where the summer lightning glimmers. "No, that's not what I meant to say," he corrects himself. "You see, this plain, this water, this night. All this is so simple and, in fact, this is all we need. This is all anyone needs. And yet the war will come all the way here…" He falls silent, feels the woman placing her hand on his arm. A bird flies by, they can hear the hushed stirring of the air. It feels to them as if the war, now so imminent, has already passed over these steppes, bringing destruction and death, and has finally evaporated into the void. They are going to live through it soon, to be sure, and yet one part of them is already beyond it, already in a night where the recently erected steel obstacles are nothing more than rusting relics. Where there is nothing left but the soundless glittering of the horizon, this star in a footprint filled with water, the face of the woman, leaning over him, the caress of the damp ends of her hair. A postwar night, endless.