Volsky remained pinned to the ground low down on the shore, close to the menacing procession of disintegrating ice floes. His chest crushed, his legs caught in the tangle of tree trunks, he could neither cry out nor move. When he regained consciousness night had fallen and he guessed that the search, if there had been one, had not been very thorough. A prisoner’s life was worth nothing and nobody wanted to lose his own by venturing into a chaotic mass of logs that threatened to subside and slide into the river at any moment. They must have reckoned that he had drowned.
All that was left of his voice was a hissing whisper, all he could move was his hands, which explored his wooden tomb in the darkness. Through the crisscrossed cedar logs he could see a triangle of stars.
The pain reached what he thought would prove to be a fatal threshold, then it subsided, or rather he became used to this threshold. His thirst became more cruel than the pain and only let up during those moments when his gaze escaped between the tree trunks into the sky. Then his mind cleared, and as there was no longer anyone to convince, not even himself, the simplicity of what he understood was conclusive.
He understood that in all he had lived through the only thing that was true was the sky, looked at on the same day, perhaps at the same moment, by two beings who loved one another. Everything else was more or less irrelevant. Among the prisoners he had met murderers without remorse and innocent people who spent their time reproaching themselves. Cowards, lapsed heroes, the suicidal. Sybarites sentenced to twenty years who dreamed of meals a woman would cook for them when they left the camp. Gentle people, sadists, crooks, righters of wrongs. Thinkers who perceived this place of labor and death as the result of a humanistic theory badly applied. An Orthodox priest who averred that suffering was given by God so that man should expiate, better himself.
All this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner’s battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the intermission at the Opera House (he remembered Rigoletto) a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes that she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, sections of tires into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not keep her from drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquillity but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf…
At moments the pain grew sharper, only leaving him with a vague awareness: it was his thirst that made him picture the prisoner with his cup of tea, the woman imbibing her cold sparkling wine from a tall glass. So, it was all even less significant.
The water was close, a powerful current just beside his crushed body, and also ice, in little stalactites beneath the tree trunks. He reached out his hand, the effort increased the pain, he lost consciousness.
At the beginning of the second day the snow began to swirl around in great lazy flakes. Volsky felt the coolness of the crystals on his parched lips. And once more pictured a field in winter, a woman looking up into a white flurry.
He knew he had few hours to live and the conciseness of his thinking seemed to take account of this limited time. The words of the priest came back to him: the sufferings God inflicts so that man may expiate, purify himself… The smile this brought cracked his dried lips. If that were the case, so many men should be infinitely pure. In the camp. In the country ravaged by war. And, indeed, by the purges! After everything these people had endured they should have been as shining as saints! And yet, after ten years of suffering, a prisoner could still kill for an extra slice of bread. God… Volsky remembered the buckles on the shoulder belts worn by the German soldiers. Gott mit uns, “God is with us,” was embossed on the metal. These soldiers had also suffered. So…
He looked up: night was beginning to fall and in the tangle of tree trunks above his head there shone a pale, ashen cluster of stars. A woman saw it at that moment and knew that he, too, was looking at the sky… He grasped that even God no longer had any importance from the moment when those two pairs of eyes existed. Or, at least, not this god of human beings, this lover of suffering and belts.
The thirst torturing him became something else-the burning desire to tell the woman that nothing had any meaning without these moments looking at the sky.
In the night, or else it was the darkness of his lost consciousness, he heard a very faint voice: somebody was singing but occasionally forgetting the words, and so had to be prompted.
They had found Volsky thanks to these few snatches of song, explained the men who had heard him. Engineers, who had come with their explosives to blow up the fortress wall of tree trunks soldered together by the ice.
The singing that had welled up within him became another life, unconnected to the passing of the days. The world’s bustle seemed to him even more feverish and devoid of sense. From his bed in the camp’s sick bay he could see the ice floes hurtling along, revolving and disintegrating in the river. Daylight and darkness rushed by, speeded up. The prisoners assembled for roll call, went off to work, returned. And even when the guards, on a whim, made them wait for long hours in the rain, this torment expressed nothing more than a ludicrous eagerness to do harm, to demonstrate their power as petty torturers. He soon found himself back in the ranks, upright on legs covered in bruises. In the old days his anger would have flared up at the guards’ gratuitous cruelty. Now all he perceived was a vortex of wills, desires, base deeds. He thirsted to tell these men what he had understood in his tomb of timber and ice, and this urge remained intact. But the necessary words belonged to a language he had never yet spoken. Hidden among the ranks of the prisoners who cursed their tormentors, he would raise his eyes and slip away into the life he had imagined.
When he was released it seemed to make no difference to this other life. The truck taking him drove out through the entrance (“Forward to the Victory of Communist Labor!” was inscribed above the iron gates) and the camp vanished behind a hill turned russet by the autumn. “Just a turn of the steering wheel,” thought Volsky, “and a whole planet is swept away, like a fragment of ice in a river.” A terrifying planet of misery, cruelty, hope, prayers, and, suddenly, nothing: a road gleaming with rain, this sparse northern vegetation, waiting for winter.
He dwelt in a world where it was all one to him. Found work at a railroad marshaling yard, lodged nearby, in a room whose windows looked out on the tracks. People saw him as halfway between a not very bright worker and an ex-prisoner eager for his past to be forgotten. Sometimes they must even have thought him a bit soft in the head. He would be observed alone, among the snow-dusted tracks, his head thrown back, scanning a perfectly empty sky with half-closed eyes.
After months of research, Volsky learned that Mila had been given a sentence that she was serving somewhere in a camp. But where? And what sentence? “Ten years of hard labor,” replied a former employee at the Blockade Museum, with whom he had managed to establish contact. Ten years. He did the sums, saw opening up within him an abyss of five years’ wait, was not plunged into despair. He knew that every day Mila’s gaze joined him in the increasingly wintry sky and that at such moments time did not exist.