Seated in front of a stove's red-hot mouth, the engineer in charge of heating received the cardboard cartons impassively. He opened one of them, gave a rather sad little laugh, and began throwing the pamphlets into the fire, one after the other. "Oh, Nikita, they were too smart for you, weren't they?" he observed, contemplating the auto-da-fé. "And now the ones who've not been rehabilitated don't have a chance in hell…" Then, remembering us: "Go on, get a move on, you kids. The bell's rung already…"
On the way back Village asked me to wait for him and slipped into the bushes that bordered the roadside. I took several paces to distance myself from the stink of the bin. Up there on a hill the orphanage windows were strung out in a line: dark in the dormitories, lit up in the classrooms. You could even make out the figures of teachers in front of the blackboards. The only advantage of garbage duty was that you were allowed to be a few minutes late.
"The ones who've not been rehabilitated…" The most widely shared and most jealously cherished myth among the pupils at the orphanage was precisely this: the hero-father, after being unjustly condemned, is finally rehabilitated, he returns, walks into the classroom, interrupts the lesson, and inspires silent rapture in both the female teacher and the rest of the class. A handsome officer, his tunic ablaze with medals. There were other variants on this: fathers who were Arctic explorers, fathers killed in battle, ones who were submarine captains. But the return of the rehabilitated hero took precedence over all the other legends, for it was closer to the truth. It was the special function of this establishment to house the children of men and women who had distinguished themselves during the last war but who had subsequently proved unworthy of their heroic exploits. Such, at least, was the version communicated to us, sometimes with a degree of tact, it must be conceded, sometimes with all the venom of a supervisor in a rage: "Like father, like son…"
"Look at them all slaving away, the little canaries!" Village had just appeared out of the darkness and was pointing up at the windows, where the heads of the pupils could be seen. "Birds in a cage," he added with mild scorn. We set off once more. At that time I did not fully understand what lay behind the engineer's words (we were eleven- and twelve-year-olds, Village must have been fourteen, for he had repeated the same grade at least two years running), but I had grasped the main thrust: another era was beginning that would make our daydreams more unrealistic than ever. The handsome officer, rehabilitated at last, was going to remain forever outside the classroom door, would never bring himself to throw it open now.
These thoughts distracted me, and as we braced ourselves to heave the bin up a slope, I slipped and found myself on the ground with a gash on my thigh from the rusty steel. "Lucky devil! You're done for the day," Village observed, feeling the wound. "Hurry and go see the nurse!"
So there was this day of rest, but above all the obsessive recollection of a woman lifting her left breast and then of my own presence a few inches away from this woman, in the intimacy of a stolen secret.
Love makes us vulnerable. I dare say those who attacked me two days later had sensed in me the weakness of someone in love. All relationships at the orphanage were governed by lines of force stretched to extremes. You had to maintain your position in the hierarchy of the strong and the less strong at all costs. Precisely as in a prison or in the underworld. I was neither one of the young gang leaders, of which there were several, nor one of the underdogs. Attacks were not made at random, however, for even the puniest of us might be clutching between his fingers a thick five-kopeck piece sharpened into a razor blade.
During one break (I was gazing through the glass at the bare trees outside and telling myself that the nurse must be able to see them from her window too), a blow from someone's shoulder thrust me over against the wall, creating a space around me in the crowd of pupils, which quickly parted. It was a little gang leader surrounded by his bodyguard. His face, as is often the case with southerners, already had the texture of a man's and exhibited all the little grimaces of virility, all the tics of a young male who knows he is handsome. A few insults, to initiate the brawl, followed by hoots of laughter from the gang. Finally, as he spat out a mixture of spittle and the scraps of tobacco that stuck to his lip, this sentence, in which his superiority found its ultimate expression, scornful and almost languid: "Look, we all know about your father. The firing squad shot him like a dog…"
Every single one of our codes had been flouted. While we often insulted and fought with one another, we never laid a finger on the legend of the hero-fathers. I hurled myself at him, as he was already turning his back, leaving his henchman to take care of me. Others joined in, excited by the general melee, happy to upgrade themselves in a pecking order suddenly thrown into chaos.
I was rescued by the appearance of a teacher at the end of the hallway. I stood up, hastily adjusting my shirt, which had lost several buttons, and wiping my nose, which was bleeding. In our world aggressors and victims were punished without distinction.
In the toilet area, with my face upturned under the icy jet from a faucet, I gradually recovered my wits. As I waited for the bleeding to stop, I even had time to reflect on the sally that had imperiled all our legends: "Your father gunned down like a dog…" Naturally this little warlord, who was testing his virility, knew nothing about the matter. Or rather, he knew that this tale would serve for every one of our fathers: lapsed heroes who had become mired in drink, crime, or, worse still, dissidence, and who would end their days in a camp, or beneath the bullets of some guard perched high on his watchtower. He had said it out loud but for a while now we had all been aware that cracks were appearing in the heroic myth. And even without listening to the old heating engineer's words as he burned Khrushchev, my fellow pupils could sense that the time when hope was still possible was drawing to a close. It was the middle of the sixties (November 1965, to be precise). Ill informed as we were, we did not know the word "thaw," and yet we were, quite literally, the children of the Thaw. It was thanks to that bald, tubby man, whose books they were burning, that we lived in the relative comfort of an orphanage and not behind the barbed wire of a reeducation colony.
At the time I understood all this very confusedly. A presentiment, a vague anxiety shared with the others. There was a kind of relief, too: it was not my lovesick demeanor that provoked the others' aggression. Quite simply, our little world was beginning to fall apart and one of the first fragments had just come and hit me in the face.
In a novel it would be possible to evoke many nuances to that day and the pain of that day, to invent days that led up to it and followed it. But all that stays in my memory of it is the figure of a boy, standing upright beside the wall, with his nose in the air, squeezing it between his thumb and index finger. The bathroom's dirty little windows look out over a row of bare trees, the meander of a river, a muddy road. The boy smiles. It has just occurred to him that if all he had suffered had been a simple nosebleed he could have reported to the infirmary, gone in, asked for treatment… As in the scene he had dreamed of a thousand times. But his nose is hideously swollen. (Show it to the woman in her white coat? Never!) Another time, perhaps. Blood and pain suddenly seem marvelously linked to the promise of love. He relaxes his finger and thumb, wipes his face, listens. Outside the door, the silence of a long, empty corridor. Over there, gathered in their classrooms, are boys and girls who can still live in their heroic lies. He has just lost the right to dream. The truth tastes of blood spat into the sink and the poignant beauty of the first snowflakes, which he suddenly notices outside the windowpane. Their white, stellar perfection swallowed up by the thick, rutted mud.