Volsky realized he had been saying all this aloud and the officer was listening to him, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “You’ll see. A handful of snow and the bleeding will stop…” He was then overtaken by a violent outburst of laughter, almost painful, for his wrists, tied behind his back, wrenched his shoulder at each guffaw. “It’s a nightmare circus! A great nightmare circus!” he exclaimed, amazed to find that this simple phrase summed up the madness of the world so well.
He spent a little less than a year in a mental hospital. As he was silent, the staff regarded him as a good patient, a shadow, an absence. Despite its wretched, dilapidated state, the place did not seem sinister to him. And the patients there merely echoed the fevers and obsessions of the outside world, as if in a strange mental magnifying glass. One man, so thin his face was almost blue, spent his time hiding behind the screen of his raised hands, a droll shield to protect him against the torturers coming from his past. Others converted their beds into snail shells that they rarely left, their heads hunched between their shoulders. A former theater director was perpetually accusing and defending himself, playing the roles both of investigating magistrate and prisoner. One old man spent his days observing the glistening drops of water falling from the roof when the ice melted. His face was radiant. There was also a man in perfect mental health, an elderly Lithuanian with whom Volsky made friends. This man had chosen to take refuge here to escape from the purges. He told the story of his life very calmly, described the places where he had lived. But whenever Volsky tried to explain to him that Stalin was dead and it was now possible to leave the asylum the Lithuanian became suspicious and asked him in a hoarse voice: “Why are you lying to me? I know perfectly well he will never die!”
Madmen, yes, Volsky said to himself. Then thought back to what he had lived through during the blockade, in the war and in the camp. And the madness of the patients seemed a good deal more reasonable than the society that had locked them up.
The doctor in charge of the annual inspection turned out to be a native of Leningrad. Volsky talked with him for a long time: a whole litany of streets, canals, theaters, memories of a city neither of them had seen for years. “Hold on to something concrete,” he advised Volsky, as he signed the authorization for his discharge. “But above all, think up a project, a dream. Dream of returning to Leningrad one day, for example.”
He followed the doctor’s advice, after a fashion. According to the laws of the time, an ex-prisoner’s place of residence had to be at least sixty miles from any of the big cities. Volsky settled in a small town to the north of Leningrad, not far, he told himself, from the former battlefields.
The little town welcomed him with a noise of engines: a car stuck in a quagmire, a length of cable, a tractor attempting to rescue some people shipwrecked in the mud. Volsky gathered up an armful of branches from the roadside, threw them under the wheels of the car. “Something concrete,” he thought as he went on his way, “a fine project for a madman who’s just been let out.”
Two days later in the same street Volsky wept. A line of children was proceeding along this muddy highway; he stopped and suddenly realized what kind of children they were. During those years after Stalin’s massacres and the bloodbath of the war, orphans were too numerous to cause any surprise. But the orphans he was seeing ought not to have shown themselves: these were the rejects, for the most part carefully hidden from view. Disabled, mentally ill, blind… crushed by the war or else brought into the world in a hut in one of the camps. Too weak to be sent to a reeducation colony, too damaged to be molded into good little workers in an ordinary orphanage.
The line walked slowly, making halting progress. The children clung to one another, some of them fell, the accompanying adult picked them up the way you lift a sack. The damp snow must have made impracticable the route they usually took, where they would remain unseen. So they had to be led along the little town’s main street… Already they were disappearing into the gray winter dusk. At the very end Volsky saw a little girl with a heavy limp, sinking down at each step of her misshapen leg, straightening herself up with an abrupt jerk. It was on seeing her that he bit his lip to hold back his tears.
He discovered their orphanage the same evening, an old building made of almost black bricks, divided into rooms by plywood partitions, part dormitories, part communal rooms. “Much like in our huts at the camp,” thought Volsky.
The next day he returned, offered his services. As teacher or supervisor? He did not know what kind of training these children were given. He was engaged at once, for indeed they were given nothing. The children were temporarily parked here. The weakest died. Others, considered to be mentally ill, were waiting to be sent to an adult mental hospital.
It was pointless to be indignant, to make demands: the staff consisted of two elderly women and a single supervisor, a man with the stump of an arm lost in the war. The director, a self-effacing little woman, explained in embarrassed tones: “It’s hard to know who’s looking after whom: us after the children or the children after us…”
The first day, when he came into the main hall where all the children were assembled, Volsky studied them discreetly, attempting to see each face, each figure, as unique. And suddenly, acting on impulse, began humming, softly at first, just a little murmur, then in tones that rose above the noise, the weeping. A hesitant litany responded to him, their heads began to move with the rhythm, their bodies to sway gently. A little girl, her face marked by the long gash of a scar, came up and offered him a fragment of red glass, her treasure, no doubt.
He gave them all that he had-his voice. Began to teach them a little singing, tunes easy to remember, melodies whose rhythms infused new life into these frail bodies paralyzed by illness and injuries. The lines of the songs had to be noted down and, without being aware of it, the children wrote out their first words, managed their first reading. Textbooks did not exist and Volsky was feeling his way in the art of teaching, so new to him. The idea occurred of getting them to imagine, through gesture and facial expression, the story told by a song: a horseman arriving beneath the windows of the house where he was born, the welcome given him by his mother and his beloved… These children, condemned to a life as shadows, thus began to gain access to a life where changing your destiny was possible, where they were listened to, loved. Where they offered love.
He himself learned a great deal during those first months. Among the thirty or so children living at the orphanage there were faces that reminded him of Mila’s children. A boy with red hair, who had a fine resonant voice, was a little like Mandarin, though without his energy and ebullience. The parallel was distressing and yet this was how Volsky contrived to conquer the world’s whirligig absurdity. Yes, one could resist its bleak logic. As this redhead did just now, standing in front of the others and singing about a horseman riding through a snowstorm.
The songs spoke of “the wide blue sea,” and Volsky told them what he knew of seas and oceans. One of the ballads featured a boyar and, as a makeshift history teacher, he acted out scenes from the Russian past for his pupils, now as a prince, now as a serf.
He told them about the Three Musketeers as well, mimed battles and cavalcades, imitated the swish of a sword slicing through the air, fluttered a folded newspaper-a fan for a fair lady seated at a castle window… For the children this was their first journey abroad, an inconceivable thing within that country barricaded behind its iron curtain.