Andreï Makine - The Life of an Unknown Man

They went home in silence, walking along the dark streets where one often came across frozen bodies. In the sky, mingling with the snowflakes, there fluttered sheets of paper that the passersby picked up, read, destroyed. Leaflets dropped by a German aircraft: Moscow had been captured, the army of the Reich had crossed the Volga and was advancing into the Urals, meeting no resistance… It was vitally important not to be tempted to believe this for a second, danger lay in doubt taking root in the mind, undermining all resolve.

No, Moscow could not surrender! They thought about Leningrad, remembered the mud-caked faces of the soldiers hanging on to a narrow strip of frozen plain a few miles from there.

“Those trucks that were bombed in the night,” murmured Mila. “I was told about it just before the show. I didn’t think he’d be able to hold on to the end…” She stooped and picked up several leaflets, “for the fire,” she said with a little smile. They walked on. That man in tears who had sung and laughed on stage became a fragile but strangely irrefutable proof for them: no, the city would not fall.

The next day they learned that further performances were going to be suspended; the mobilization of the remaining men who were not yet at the front had just been decreed.

And in the evening, walking along the embankments beside the Neva, they saw sailors carrying big black crates and loading them onto a tug. Volsky tried to get close, a soldier sent him packing. They did an about-face and walked back beside an old man who, like them, must have seen the loading of the cargo. “I was in the navy myself,” he explained softly. “What they’re doing is mining the harbor. Then they’ll sink all the warships. So as to leave nothing for the Germans. It’s finished. Our city’s lost.”

For several days they gave concerts close to the front line, where death could occur between a couple of remarks exchanged in a trench. The same wind, at minus fifty, which seemed to sheathe their singing in a layer of ice, the same shivering that the actors concealed behind bold gestures. But the looks they encountered in the crowd of soldiers had changed. These men now knew that their deaths could protect no one. To save Moscow, where the resistance was already being broken by the Germans, Leningrad was to be sacrificed. That winter the old rivalry between the two capitals posed an impossible choice.

The singers no longer returned home, they were billeted in a workers’ hostel emptied by the mobilization. From this outlying area it was easier to get to the front. Several times already they had asked to be armed, so they could be sent to a fighting unit. But, curiously enough, the old soldier who used to escort their troupe would always echo the reply given that day by the manager of the Musical Comedy Theater: “We need your voices…”

He said it again one evening, when he told them that the following day their concert would take place at a very exposed site. “You will be singing under fire,” he added. “So only volunteers are to come with me.” The response was a torrent of cheerfully indignant exclamations. “Oh, Captain, do you doubt your musketeers?” one of the actors burst out, the song sung by Porthos. The “captain” hushed them with a gesture. “That’s all I can tell you. The conditions will be really tough. Think about it…”

They set off just before dawn in an army truck: fourteen singers, ten musicians carrying their instruments, no one refused the call. The journey was short (there were no long distances around the besieged city anymore) and the spot where they piled out did not look very different from the places where their concerts generally took place. Except that this time no human presence was visible. The gleaming pinpricks of stars, a white expanse sloping down to a frozen river, then rising up to a ridge above the opposite bank. No sound apart from their whispers (the “captain” had asked them not to speak out loud). No platform, they took up position on a square of packed snow, the singers in front, the musicians a little way behind them, all facing the river, more in response to an instinct than to any order. Over there beyond the ridge, a mysterious listening presence could be sensed…

Their military guide passed among them, shook each one’s hand, sometimes muttering a proverb (“No one dies twice, no one escapes a single death”), sometimes wishing them good luck in words that sounded bizarre coming from an army officer: “Off you go now, with God’s help.” His tones were muffled but the emotion sincere and that was the moment when they realized that this would be a concert quite unlike the previous ones.

“Look, that’s the star you can see from my window…,” Volsky had time to murmur in Mila’s ear. She had time to look up…

The plain, which had looked bare, shivered into life and was covered in tiny dots. The night, caught off guard, remained silent for several seconds, then suddenly erupted into gunfire. The dull sound of a “hurrah!” swelled in the air. The “captain” waved his arm, the music rang out. With the power of their voices the singers drowned the shouting of the soldiers and the first shots.

They sang the “Internationale,” hardly surprised at the “captain’s” choice (their usual repertoire was more lyrical). There were few fervent believers in communism among them, but the words bursting forth from their lips spoke of a truth it was difficult to deny. One appearing right before their eyes. At first the white plain bristling with little black figures running down toward the river. Then the first bodies falling and on the ridge above the opposite bank the German positions revealing themselves, breaking the line of snowy dunes with indentations made for their machine guns. Finally, in the glorious clear light of this winter morning, a long scarlet stain left by a soldier crawling back toward the singers, as if they could have protected him.

All was confusion on both banks. A wave of attackers fell back, decimated, and collided with the next line as it moved into the assault, joined with it, managed to advance several dozen yards, fell beneath the increasingly accurate fire from the Germans. Yet another dotted line of human beings rose up and hurled itself at the icy slope on the far shore. The crackling of the gunfire became continuous, punctuated by explosions, the shouts of the commanding officers, and the cries of the wounded. In particular those of that wounded man still crawling up toward the musicians, emitting a harrowing death rattle and spattering the snow with his blood.

To the anarchy of all these deaths the singing gave a solemn, measured rhythm, which seemed to resonate beyond the battlefield. They were few in number on their stage of compacted snow, but it felt to the soldiers as if the power of the whole country rose behind them.

They were embarking on the anthem for the third time when Volsky noticed the fighting men who had reached the top of the bank opposite. A burst of machine gun fire mowed them down, but their bodies marked the most advanced frontier of the assault. He could see it all, despite the effort the singing demanded On the frozen river men were grappling with a gun carriage, its wheels embedded in a snowdrift. Their movements were both frenzied and painfully slow, like those of someone running in a nightmare.

He also saw what the darkness had hidden: at the bottom of the valley a ruined village, charred roofs and, amazingly intact, one house beneath a very tall tree, miraculously preserved. The quirk of a day of warfare… Another quirk, that young wounded soldier, huddled close to the singers, gazing at them in tears. The logical suffering of that mass of human beings and suddenly this singular suffering, which no logic could justify.

The assault was an act of desperate bravery, a heroic last stand rather than a strategists’ decision. Long years after the war Volsky would come across references to that day in December in two history books. The first would speak of “the participation of the artists of Leningrad in the defense of the city,” without referring to anyone in particular. The second, much more recent, would refer to “a sham counteroffensive dreamed up by those responsible, seeking to clear their names in Stalin’s eyes.” Neither one nor the other would make any mention of the soldier who had just traced a line of blood in the snow, of the tranquillity of that house, safe beneath its tree, or, least of all, of the lock of dark hair that had escaped from under Mila’s headscarf and was stirred by Volsky’s breath as he sang.