One evening he sang d’Artagnan’s song…
From that day forward an idea took hold of him: to get these orphans to perform in a play, whatever their disability might be. He allocated roles and, remembering all the extra walk-on actors in the performances staged during the blockade, invented characters and wrote little scenes so that each of them should have a couple of lines to say or sing.
The show he planned to stage often differed greatly from that old operetta. Their voices were weak; they soon ran out of breath. Some of the children had difficulty moving. The costumes, sewn by the women at the orphanage using old scraps of material, lacked theatrical brio. But the ingenuity of these little actors transfigured everything. A fragment of glass enmeshed in wire became a jeweled crown; battered old boots, with cardboard added to them, were transformed into thigh boots… Acting helped the children to forget their own bodies. The little girl Volsky had seen limping on the muddy road took the part of Marie and instinctively concealed her gait by skipping mischievously from one pose to another.
After dozens of rehearsals he perceived the real meaning of what had at first seemed like an amusing game. Onstage his pupils forgot their suffering. But above all, they were leading a life that no one could forbid them. In a few minutes of acting each of them escaped from the world that had condemned them to nonexistence.
Their first audience consisted of five people: the two women on the staff, the supervisor, the director, and Volsky. At one of the subsequent performances the driver who delivered coal once a month joined them. Then an assistant from a nearby bakery. A few people who lived in the locality and their friends… Some came in search of entertainment, something in short supply in that bleak little town. In others one could sense curiosity about an unusual novelty: that bunch of sick kids was putting on a show!
One day in May the play was performed in front of a very different audience. The director had told Volsky in tremulous tones the previous day that they had been “denounced,” that there was talk in the town of an underground theater and the Party Committee was going to send an inspection. Observing her face twitching with fear, Volsky reflected that the three years that had passed since Stalin’s death were nothing, it might perhaps take thirty years for her features to relax, for the woman no longer to tremble at every word.
The Party inspector marched into the hall and stood like a ponderous monolith at its center. A huge body hewn from a single block, a broad slab of a face, a voice trained to give orders. “Begin!” she said to Volsky, without so much as greeting him and, with a movement of her chin, she indicated to her retinue, two women and a man, that they should seat themselves in the front row.
“The same merry-go-round,” thought Volsky, “the same faces turning up and manifesting more of the world’s gratuitous cruelty. This one has the face of a watchdog, just like that other inspector, in the old days, who came into Mila’s lesson…” It was not so much the recurrence of it that surprised him: he knew the workings of this absurd law. It was the deliberately contrived ugliness of the visitation, yes, the willful contrivance of evil.
The woman peered at the stage with a contemptuous sneer, dilating her nostrils from time to time, as if these costumed children smelled bad. They acted particularly well, as it happened, sensing that this was a special performance. “What’s she going to accuse me of?” Volsky wondered, occasionally noting the faces the inspector was pulling. “A play not conforming to ideological precepts? Absence of educational significance? Lack of class consciousness?” He was not uneasy, realizing that the children would not know such a verdict was foreseeable. He had arranged for the supervisor to take them out for a walk as soon as it ended. Later they could be told that their acting had been much appreciated but from now on they would have to learn different songs…
He had pictured the sequence of events along the lines of what used to happen under Stalin. From the judges: monolithic silence, verdict, punishment. But times had changed, they improvised now, they innovated…
Suddenly the woman waved her arms with a shout that made the whole company jump: “Stop this circus! Enough! Not only do you have these children performing foolish antics, totally alien to our class consciousness, but… but…”
The children broke off their performance, the adults on their feet surrounding the inspector were waiting in awe for the final phase of the eruption. “But… but…” She was visibly searching for a more aesthetic argument to prop up her accusation.
“But… you haven’t even taught your pupils how to move properly onstage. They’re all walking like wooden marionettes! That one, that boy, especially. The musketeer, if you can call him that. Is he sleepwalking or what? You could have shown him the proper way for a soldier to march!”
She turned to Volsky. Silence fell. On the stage the red-haired boy who played d’Artagnan was standing very straight, his gaze far away above the heads of his comrades.
“That child isn’t sleepwalking, Comrade Inspector. He’s… blind.”
Everyone froze. Volsky was about to say more, then changed his mind. Impossible to describe the months of rehearsal during which the redhead, with obstinate patience, had learned to conquer the darkness on the stage. Step by step, the youth had learned the positions of each actor, the place each line was directed to, had mastered the play for himself like a moving picture that was alive within him. Few were the spectators who noticed his blindness. Generally people had the impression that he could see his little Marie very well as she emerged through a great cardboard gateway and rushed toward him.
The inspector blew her nose noisily on a square of striped fabric, coughed, blew her nose again, muttered, “I’ll come back…,” and left the hall.
Volsky signaled to the children, the play continued… Songs, the clash of wooden swords, painted blue for lack of silver paint, the flickering flame of a candle on the table where Marie was writing a letter. The inspector entered silently, sat on a chair near the door.
“To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…,” the red-haired boy was singing.
During his long life Volsky would come to know dozens of orphanages, hospitals, reeducation colonies. He taught singing and movement to those who were afraid to speak and whose bodies only had memories of violent brutality: abandoned and disabled children, young offenders. Above all, he taught them how to exist otherwise than in the world manufactured by the petty cruelty of men… One of his first pupils, the red-haired boy, would tell him one day that when he sang d’Artagnan’s song, about “the sky where the stars float above,” he could see the clusters of stars, he understood how they might look.
Volsky had acted as Mila had asked him to on the day of their arrest: tried to live without looking back at their past, got married, had a son. Clearheaded, he considered that this life was close enough to happiness and forbade himself to wish for more. Routine allowed him not to make comparisons between this existence and what he had known with Mila.
During the post-Stalin thaw his work made him almost famous for a time: the newspapers spoke of his “innovative educational methods,” there was even a book about him. He was offered a post in a research institute. He refused it, continuing to choose out-of-the-way places, establishments where he felt truly useful. His wanderings finally wearied his wife, they divorced. His son, when he reached adulthood, also moved away and much later Volsky learned that he had gone to live in Germany…
At the time of the collapse of the USSR Volsky was working in Central Asia and already used a wheelchair to get about. “Once a whole forest fell on top of me,” he would say jokingly to doctors, explaining how, when he was still young, he had found himself crushed beneath a pyramid of cedar trunks. He did not specify that this had occurred in a camp. For new generations such things belonged to a legendary past… Like the archives from the time of the purges, which were now being opened up and which Volsky could consult in Moscow. The legal file on Mila was there, the now yellow pages from the interrogations she had undergone. From reading these depositions he learned that she had done everything possible to exculpate him, taking on herself the accusations leveled at them both. “So what saved me wasn’t that little officer’s nosebleed…,” he thought, and this sacrifice, which had saved his life, reminded him again that the evil of this world could be put to rout by the will of a single human being.