His passion for the magic of theater was still alive. But after what he had lived through in Leningrad and later in the Battle of Kursk, he often asked himself about the purpose of such operatic spectacles. To please? To move? To distract? To titillate the ears of women with bare shoulders and men in patent leather shoes, couples who, after the opera, would end up at a restaurant, discussing the performance of a legionnaire or a rooster in tails?
Sometimes, between battles, sitting with his back against the carriage of his gun, he would start humming on his own, a murmur nobody else heard. These were generally d’Artagnan’s songs.
The end of the war found him close to Berlin on the shores of a pond torn up by tank tracks. With two other soldiers he was engaged in positioning the guns when the news of the victory reached them. He stood up and saw what he had already seen the day of his last concert, near Leningrad: a riverbank, soldiers clinging to a gun, survival dependent on the speed of shooting. The circle is complete, he thought, smiling at the soldiers as they yelled in delight. “It’s all over, Grandpa! Let’s have a quick drink now and head for home!”
He told himself that his white hair was simply an ironic token of the interminable duration of the years spent at war. Human stories were so swiftly wiped out in death, so many cities had swept by, that his feeling of having aged quickly was not all that fanciful. A circle completed and, within it, the span of a whole life. His life.
During the first days of peace he sometimes thought of Mila, picturing how she might have felt on meeting this young man with white hair. Their past seemed to belong to a remote youth, lived through by someone else. By that person who had once, on stage, in the costume of a musketeer, kissed a young heroine freshly emerged from a convent. He told himself that the only tie that bound them was the ancient libretto of an old-fashioned operetta written by a forgotten author.
“To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” he sang softly on the train carrying him back to Russia. His traveling companions took him for an old soldier in a cheerful mood.
In traveling to his native village, south of Smolensk, he had no hope of discovering a past where he could start a new life. This part of Russia had first been devastated by the Red Army as they retreated, unwilling to leave anything for the enemy, then by aerial bombardment, and finally by the Germans as they withdrew, setting fire to everything that had survived the bombing. Of his own street (a row of charred izbas) all that was left was an old church tower, “saved by a miracle,” one old woman told him, as he questioned her about the fate of the villagers, of his own parents. A miracle… He did not go to the trouble of explaining that the church tower was a good reference point left intact by those who had targeted the nearby railroad junction. Survivors needed to believe in miracles. There was one, as it happened, in the garden of his ruined home: a cherry tree broken in two, but whose branches had taken root again, dusted with tiny snow-white flowers.
In Leningrad the room he had once rented was occupied. His new landlady announced, “With you, I don’t have a problem. Not like one of those empty-headed young men. I only take people of a certain age…” Volsky was amazed to see that, after so many had died, the apartments were crammed, then realized that people were coming in from the surrounding villages, razed to the ground by the fighting. “So the war didn’t do you much harm in the end,” the woman went on. “And now with all your medals, you’ll be a fine sight.” Volsky shrugged his shoulders: what could he reply to that? So as not to seem rude, he stammered, “Well, I don’t have many medals. In the artillery you’re always behind the others…” He felt this was a stupid remark, talking about the war was not easy. What else was there that could be spoken of? The tanks with their overheated steel that made a hissing sound in the rain? The turrets where wounded men, Russian and German, were dying? Explain how his greatest joy at the front was not those little disks of medals but a fistful of wild strawberries he’d picked in a hurry before rejoining the column of soldiers? And that his greatest fear had lasted for a few seconds at most: when the gun on a tank took aim at him, as if relishing the pleasure of terrifying him? And that those seconds had turned him into this young old man, so respectable in the eyes of a landlady? No, such things, true as they were, were impossible to admit to.
Volsky remembered feeling tongue-tied like this before: with Mila in the besieged city.
He went to see the place where she used to live. The building was still standing but a freakish bombing raid had destroyed the staircase between the first and second floors. People were getting into their homes by means of ladders. Nobody knew Mila. They were mainly provincials who had come in from their ruined villages.
Thanks to them, the city seemed rejuvenated. The people of Leningrad, who had endured the blockade, threaded their way, pale and silent, through this ill-assorted crowd. The variety of female faces was intoxicating. People spoke to one another more readily; people smiled more, everyone was eager to come to life again in an encounter, in an exchange of looks. Volsky had never engaged so much in conversations with strangers, with women. One day he spoke to two female students he encountered at the Nord Café… Everything was surprising about this agreeable chatter: the room, which had not changed, these laughing girls, the ease with which he touched on the war, showing off, telling how shells would occasionally hit a flight of ducks and then-what feasting! “You have such a young voice…,” one of them said, and he caught her glancing at his white hair.
The next day he went to a hairdresser. Offered a choice of six colors, he opted for black. While the white was giving way to darker locks he thought of Mila. “She must be dead,” he said to himself with the brutality the war had taught him. And he sensed that this idea was killing someone within him. “No, why dead? She’s married and may well be living very close by. Besides, what ties are there between us now? We once kissed one another in an operetta. ‘To you, my beloved…’ With my white hair she’d never have recognized me. But now, with this Moor’s head!” He managed to recover the merry mood that had animated him the day before in the company of the two students.
One Saturday he went to the Kirov Opera. Before climbing up to take his seat in the balcony he studied himself furtively in the mirrors. His hair, a little too glossy, nevertheless did not look dyed. He just felt something like the stiffness of a wig at the top of his forehead. Otherwise, a young man, proud of the impact of the heavy red star fastened above his heart.
In the auditorium there were many uniforms, armor-plated with decorations, well-cut outfits hard to picture on the muddy roads of the war. “Theatrical costumes…,” thought Volsky, amazed at the sharpness of the comparison. Officers’ insignia, gleaming boots reflecting the glitter of the great chandelier, weighty, complacent looks… “The looks of conquerors,” Volsky said to himself and, inexplicably, he felt excluded from this camp. The whiteness of the skin revealed by the women’s dresses struck him like a flesh tint long forgotten…
The opera itself (it was Rigoletto) soon banished both his fake brunet’s nervousness and the impact of those uniforms. He sensed something strange resonating within him, a combination of his vocal cords and his memory. He listened as a singer listens. And at one moment he felt he was breathing along with the king.
His concentration was such that when this regret reverberated in his thoughts- “That could have been me…”-he gave a start, convinced that the remark had come from one of his neighbors. The applause brought him out of his reverie. He clapped like the others but his hands seemed as false to him as his dark hair.