Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

Suddenly the whole icy scene softened, grew warmer, became veiled with a little film of mist. Tatyana jumped to her feet, holding the fragment aloft, as the light cloud of breath rapidly faded, and called out: "Manya, he's breathing!"

The hospital had been improvised in a school building on two floors. The desks were piled high beneath the staircase, the bandages and medicines filled the cupboards, the beds were lined up in the classrooms; it had been made ready in great haste. When he recovered consciousness after four days in a deep coma, what he made out through the whitish veil that shrouded his eyes in a viscous and painful fog was the portrait of Darwin. Below it he made out a map on which could be seen diffuse patches of three colors – red for the Soviet Union, green for the English colonies, and purple for those of France. Then the torpor began to be dispelled. Little by little he came to be aware of the nurses and to feel a burning pain when they changed his dressings.

A week later he was able to exchange a few words with his neighbor, a young lieutenant, who had had both legs amputated. This young officer talked a great deal, as if trying to forget, or to keep boredom at bay. Sometimes he would reach out with his hand toward the bottom of his bed, feeling for his missing legs and, getting a grip on himself, would almost jovially and with a certain bravado come out with something the Hero of the Soviet Union had heard before and would hear again from the mouths of soldiers: "Goddamn it! My legs are blown to hell but they're still itching. Now that's a miracle of nature!"

It was this lieutenant who had told him the story of the mirror. He had caught occasional glimpses of the woman who had saved his life. From time to time she helped to bed down the wounded, or brought lunch around, but most of the time, as before, she was traveling over the fields in the ambulance.

When she came into their ward she often glanced timidly in his direction and, with his eyes half closed, as he felt the pain easing and giving way to periods of relief, he would smile lengthily

He lay there, smiling, and what occupied his mind was very simple. He was reflecting that he was a Hero of the Soviet Union; he was still alive, his legs and arms were intact; yesterday they had for the first time opened the window to the warm spring air, with a dry earsplitting noise of coarse paper being torn, tomorrow he would try to get up, to walk a little, and, if he could manage to do so, he would get to know the slim young girl who kept stealing glances at him.

The next day he got up and made his way across the room toward the door, savoring the bliss of these still clumsy first steps. In the corridor he stopped by the open window and gazed with joyful hunger at the pale haze of the first greenery, the dusty little courtyard where the wounded were exercising, some of them on crutches, others with their arms in slings. He rolled a cigarette, lit it. He was hoping to meet her that very day, catch her eye ("On your feet already, after a wound like that!") and speak to her. He had given it much thought during those long days and long weeks. He would give her a little nod as he inhaled a mouthful of smoke, screw up his eyes and remark carelessly: "I have a feeling we've met somewhere before…"

But occasionally it struck him that he should start the conversation quite differently. Yes, begin with the words he had one day heard in a play his class had gone to see. The actor, swathed in his black cloak, had observed to the heroine who was clad in a pale, frothy lace dress: "So it is to you, Madam, that I owe my life…" Words that struck him as splendidly noble.

Abruptly she appeared. Caught off his guard, he hastily rolled a cigarette and screwed up his eyes. He had not even noticed she was running. Her big boots and skirt were spattered with mud, her hair clung to her brow in moist locks. The Chief Medical Officer was coming out of the room next door. He saw her and stopped, as if to say something to her. But she rushed up to him and, with a sob that burst out like a laugh, she exclaimed: "Lev Mikhailovich! The van… It's hit a mine. Near the stream… The stream's burst its banks… I'd already got out to look for the ford…"

The Chief Medical Officer was already steering her into his office in the teachers' room. She went on jerkily: "Tolya tried to drive across the field. It was packed with mines… It was such a blaze you couldn't get near it… Manya… Manya was burned as well…"

There was a rapid commotion in the corridor. The nurses came running, their first-aid kits in their hands. The Hero of the Soviet Union leaned out of the window. The Chief Medical Officer rushed across the school yard, dragging his leg that had been injured in a bombardment. You could hear the throbbing sound from the engine of the van, with its slatted sides reinforced by planks of green wood.

They only became acquainted later. They talked and listened to each other with feelings of joy they had never experienced before. Yet what did they have to talk about? Their two villages, one near Smolensk in the west, the other far away to the north in the marshlands of Pskov. A year of famine lived through in their childhood, something that now, in the midst of the war, seemed quite ordinary. A summer long ago spent in a Pioneer camp, fixed forever in a yellowed photograph – thirty little urchins with close-cropped heads, caught in a tense, somewhat wary pose, beneath a red banner: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!" He was seated to the right of a robust Pioneer who was frowning behind his drum and, like all his comrades, stared spellbound at the camera…

One evening they walked out of the school, strolled slowly through the half-burned village, talking all the time, and stopped beside the very last izba. All that was left of it was a blackened carcass, a charred tracery in the cold spring air. Discernible within it was the gray shape of a great stove, covered with half-burned timbers. But all around it on the ground you could already see the blue gleam of new grass. Above a smashed-in fence the pale branch of an apple tree in bloom glowed timidly in the dusk.

They did not speak. He studied the inside of the izba, as if curious. She stroked the white clusters of apple blossom distractedly. "That's quite a stove!" he said finally. "It looks like ours. Ours had a shelf on the top just like that." Then, without further ado, he began talking, his gaze fixed on the izba's charred entrails.

"Where I lived it was summer when the Fritzes came. They occupied the village, took up their quarters. Two days later the partisans attacked in the middle of the night. They blew up the Fritzes' storehouse and killed several of them. But no chance of driving them out… They weren't well-enough armed. They fell back into the forest. In the morning the Germans were furious. They set fire to the village at both ends. The people who tried to escape were killed on the spot. Even though there were only women and children left. Plus old men, of course. My mother had the baby with her – that was my brother, Kolka. When she saw what was happening, she pushed me out into the vegetable patch. 'Save yourself she said. 'Run toward the forest!' I started running but I saw the whole village was surrounded. So then I turned back. And they were already coming into our yard. There were three of them with submachine guns. In a little meadow near our izba there was a haystack. I thought: 'They'll never find me under that!' Then, just as if someone had whispered in my ear, I see a big basket next to the fence. You know, an enormous basket, with two handles. And I dive under it. I don't know how long I stayed in there. The Germans went into the house. And they killed my mother… She screamed for a long time… I was so scared I lay there stock still… then I see them come out. One of them – I couldn't believe my eyes – he's holding Kolka head downward by his feet. The poor kid started to yell… What saved my life then was my fear. If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have gone for them. But I didn't even catch on to what was happening. At that moment I saw one of them take out a camera and the other one skewers Kolka with his bayonet… He was posing for a photo, the dirty bastard! I stayed under the basket. And that night I ran for it."