Andreï Makine - The Life of an Unknown Man

At one moment the king sang, “I am a student… and poor!” He had just donned a disguise the better to seduce the heroine. He was an actor of mature years, a portly figure whose plump face was plastered with pink makeup. There was an ambiguous voluptuousness about his fleshy thighs clad in fine knitted tights. A poor student! Volsky lowered his head to hide his smile, rubbed his chin, coughed… But the laughter was already bubbling up in his lungs, rising toward his throat. There were hisses of “Shh!,” he covered his face, dug his nails into his cheeks, helpless to control this explosion of mirth, and struggled toward the exit, stepping on toes, bumping into knees, pursued by enraged glances… The applause welled up, as if to salute the departure of this boor.

In the cool of the cloakroom area his laughter abated. A female attendant looked at him with compassion: his eyes were now red with tears. Amid his guffaws there was also sadness. A fifty-year-old with fat thighs trying to pass himself off as a student… That is how his comrades in the regiment would doubtless have viewed this scene, the soldiers who sang as they marched toward death.

He was on the point of leaving the theater when the noise of the applause grew louder (someone had half opened a door). Volsky pictured the rows of splendid uniforms and evening dresses, the vigor of those hands clapping energetically. A recollection of the performances during the blockade stabbed at his memory: a theater lit by a few candles, the appalling cold and those human shadows, lacking the strength to clap, who used to bow their thanks to the actors… He remained motionless, his eyes closed, but open, in truth, onto that past, the heartrending beauty of which he now appreciated.

In this reflection on days gone by a forgotten address occurred to him: the workers’ hostel where their troupe had lodged to be close to the soldiers, to whom they sang songs about “the hot southern sun.”

The road leading to that outlying area took him back in time. The city center had already wiped away many scars. But the farther one traveled from the Nevsky Prospekt the more the imprint of war was perceptible. He even saw a German tank, its tracks shattered, its gun pointing at the passing cars.

The hostel building seemed freshened up thanks to the laundry hanging at the windows. The rooms had been occupied, Volsky guessed, by the tide of kolkhozniks escaping from ruined villages.

He sought someone who could give him information. But without much hope: why would Mila have remained here amid all these new arrivals? A woman with blond hair was sitting on a bench, Volsky wanted to speak to her but her posture was like that of one asleep, her chin resting on her chest, her hands relaxed… Two adolescent girls were playing at hopscotch on the patch of tarmac. At his question they giggled, turned away, and mumbled, “No one knows where she is…” Puzzled, he went to ask a housewife who was hanging sheets on a line. She gave him a hostile look and spat out, “You might at least wait until after dark for your goings-on! It’s a disgrace. They’ll soon be coming in broad daylight!” This retort was so unexpected that Volsky backed away, without trying to obtain an explanation. An elderly man who was reading his paper in front of a doorway responded in more or less the same way but adopted a fatherly manner. “Try going to a dance hall, young man. You’ll find lots of pretty girls to kiss there.”

Disconcerted, Volsky walked around the building, not knowing if there was some mistake about the name… or suspicion due to… He smoothed his hair and told himself that maybe they took him for a gypsy. It all seemed increasingly mysterious.

He crossed the courtyard and sat down on the bench occupied by the blond woman. Her hair was unkempt. “A blond tramp,” he thought. He hesitated, gave a little cough, ventured an exaggeratedly cheerful “Good evening.” The woman was dozing and seemed not to be aware of his presence. She was probably tipsy and kept moaning sadly. He remained beside her, irresolute, telling himself, as one does when uncertain whether to wait: “but as soon as I go, Mila will appear.”

The life of the building amazed him by its routine domesticity. Just a few months after the end of the war, this washing hung between two trees, the hiss of oil in a frying pan, a child crying, a tango stuttering on a scratched phonograph record. A Sunday evening, just as if there had never been those streets dotted with corpses, those little towns transformed into charred black lace…

A long comfortable yawn could be heard from an open window on the first floor. Volsky felt the dull pain with which this regenerated life afflicted him. The arrogance of happiness, the vigorous indifference of the living. This world was alien to him, just like the parterre at the theater the night before, crammed with dress uniforms. “The victors’ world…” Yes, the real winner is the one who knows how to forget more quickly and more scornfully than the rest.

Dusk fell, the soft, silvery transparency of northern nights. The woman had changed position, and now, her head falling on one shoulder, was murmuring snatches of rhythmic phrases, like nursery rhymes. A stocky face, flushed from sunshine and wine, her discolored locks falling into her eyes, a trace of blurred makeup. He experienced a certain compassion for her, almost fellow feeling. He had known a few such women at the front, a bitter tenderness amid the slaughter, sham embraces and yet true enough, for that was all the man carried with him as he went to his death. Fallen women… Relics of war, thought Volsky, this “blond tramp,” just like that German tank with broken tracks. “And me…,” he admitted.

He got up, prepared to say good-bye, and suddenly froze, pricked up his ears. What the woman was murmuring seemed familiar to him. Not the words but the voice itself, or rather the quality of that voice. The whispered humming through drunkenness had not varied and yet its modulation was striking, thanks to the accuracy of the nuances. “She has a trained voice…,” he had time to think, and, already with a sharpness that took his breath away, these muted tones began conjuring up a face painfully preserved by memory.

The woman half opened her eyes. Her dull expression revealed quite different features shining through, like the design in a decal, then lapsed into a dough of somnolence and disgust. The woman Volsky kept stored in his memory was a survivor with a trembling body, big eyes sunk deep in the ink of their sockets, a bony skull that stuck out through her skin… This woman, who went back to her murmuring again, had swollen features, the body of one who has overeaten after starving. And yet the old face kept reappearing, intermittently, in a rippling of light.

He took her hand and spoke in purposely neutral tones: “It’s me. Do you recognize me, dear?” She withdrew her hand, stared at him with an uneasy look, clumsily assuming an air of offended dignity. “I’m not your dear! I’m not just anyone, you know!” The voice was at once coarse and vulnerable. He experienced a brief moment of hesitation: profit from this rebuff and leave? Return to the world of the victors… He moved away from the bench and saw the woman’s face fade and solidify. The features whose pattern he had recognized were engulfed in sullen heaviness. Her eyelids closed, her chin sank onto her chest.

Already a few steps away, he looked back. Through the dusk he saw a woman all alone beneath a sky that seemed to be there only for her. No sound, as if the inhabitants of the building had disappeared. Trees motionless. This woman in a darkness where everything lived on hold. And where no thought could be hidden.

He went back to the bench, crouched down, and sang softly, as if crooning a lullaby. “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…” His memory prompted him with the words that came next. He sang a little louder and was not surprised when the woman’s lips responded to him. Her eyes were closed, she was smiling softly, allowing the other being awakening within her to sing. Volsky helped her to get up. She walked beside him, still sunk in her melodious lethargy.