Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

With smiling grace he talked about trips he had made, knowing that for his young companion the names of Venice or Naples had the same exotic ring as that of Eldorado. Generally in such recitals Olya used to detect a note of superiority, be it open or covert, on the part of those who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Almendinger's stories were different. For example, in Italy he had for the first time in his life heard a cats' concert. A sadistic Neapolitan had gathered up a dozen cats, had arranged them according to their voices, putting them into tiny cages fitted inside a piano. He had inserted needles into the felt on the hammers so that every time the keys were struck they pricked the cats' tails. The wretched animals each emitted a different sound and their wailing blended into a horrible and pitiful symphony. The sadistic pianist had almost been lynched by the members of the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

After telling, this story Almendinger threw Olya a somewhat sheepish glance.

"I shouldn't be telling you about such horrible things. After all, we Germans have the reputation among you as a people somewhat lacking in humanity. Yes, that war… When I think that in '41 I could see the Kremlin towers through my binoculars! And now I can see them from my bedroom window. It truly is as the Bible says: 'Die Wege Gottes sind unergrundlich.' God's ways are unfathomable. Have you ever come across that expression?"

He fell silent, his gaze lost somewhere among the cups and plates. Remembering the part she had to play, Olya suggested with exaggerated animation: "Oh listen, Wilfried! I'd completely forgotten. They have an absolutely delicious cocktail here…"

Never before had those words seemed so loathsome to her. It was just at the moment when they brought the cocktail that he began to talk about the Germany of his childhood.

"You know children these days have a great many toys. But all these toys are too cold, too – how can I put it? – technological. When I was a child I had a collection of miniature lighthouses. The top of each one unscrewed and inside there was sand. Each contained a different kind of sand that came from a different beach in Europe…"

Almendinger lay there, his arms folded, his face motionless, now and then emitting a sigh, a brief moan. He knew he would have to remain lying there like that for an hour, or maybe two. He had heard Olya standing stock-still above him, listening to his breathing, then telephoning. He had also heard the door open and close again. He somewhat regretted having chosen to remain stretched out on his back. On his side, with his face hidden in the pillow, it would have been easier. On the other hand, by slightly opening his eyes he could observe what was happening in the room. But even this was of little interest to him. Within his attaché case, a few pages of anodyne disinformation had been slipped with professional dexterity into the middle of a wad of scientific documents. This should smooth the path for his successor as he made a start in Moscow. What Almendinger was preparing to take away with him boiled down to four columns of figures learned by heart.

While he was talking about his childhood collection of lighthouses and their sand, he had been slowly bending the straw in his cocktail glass with his thumb. The glass stood behind the bottle of champagne and the carafe of water. Olya could not see it. He drew gently on the straw and slipped the end of it into an empty glass.

"And then," Almendinger went on, "my cloudless childhood came to an end, alas. I turned into a clumsy great oaf, a nasty little monster. One day I poured out all the sand into one small heap on the lawn. I mixed it ah up."

Olya, who was listening attentively and dreamily, asked in surprise in German: "Warum?"

Almendinger smiled. She suddenly seemed so young to him!

"Und warum sind die Bananen krumm?" he asked her, laughing. "Why are bananas bent?" After that he remarked: "This cocktail is quite excellent. I must remember its name. What did you say? ' Moscow Bouquet'? Ah! A very good name for it…"

He put the straw to his lips. The last drops of delicate pink foam were disappearing from the bottom of the glass.

And now, lying there in the darkness of his bedroom, he reflected that everything in this world was strangely linked. That mixing of the sands had come back to him one night in a trench near Moscow. It was appallingly cold. The soldiers crowded round the stove. The red-hot metal burned their hands, while their backs grew hard and stiff like bark under the piercing snow squalls. Above their heads the icy stars twinkled. And close by, in similar trenches, crouched their enemies, the Russians. But these men, savages that they were, did not even have a stove.

"Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow," he was thinking, "we'll be in Moscow. We'll have dealt with Russia. It'll be warm and clean. I'll get a medal…" A solitary flare went up, momentarily eclipsing the starry sky. Then their eyes had adjusted to the dark once more. And once more the stars began to shine and the deep black of the sky was restored. Trying to think of nothing, he reached out toward the stove, mentally repeating: "Tomorrow we'll be in Moscow. It'll be warm, and clean…" But the thought he was trying to keep at bay returned. It returned not in words but in a vivid, instinctive flash: this snow-filled ditch dug in the earth, floating away into the dark of the night, among the stars. And all of them in this ditch, who have already seen death, who have already killed. And over there in a similar ditch, covered in hoarfrost, those whom they will have to kill. And this stove into which all the heat in the universe is concentrated that night. And the grains of sand from all the shores of Europe mixed up together in a little grayish mound on the lawn in a German town that has recently come to know the whistle of falling bombs…

In the bedroom the silence of the night reigned. Only from time to time the hiss of a car disappearing up Gorky Street and apart from that, somewhere up on another floor, the short, sharp creak of a floorboard. From the Kremlin tower came the airborne melody of the chimes, then three solemn and measured strokes.

Olya was comfortable in her armchair. She observed the German as he slept and with difficulty restrained an incomprehensible impulse – to approach the bed on tiptoe and run her hand lightly over that plaster mask and bring it back to life.

Almendinger was automatically counting the vibrant strokes from the chiming clock in the tower: "One, two, three. Three o'clock… They're spending a long time searching. They're testing it by radio, they're listening with a stethoscope. No, it's better not to think about it. Once you focus your mind on it for a minute you realize the totally phantasmagoric nature of everything around us. The night… and them. They've put their gloves on and now they're fingering, reading, taking photos. Red-eyed, yawning, their shirt sleeves rolled up. And I'm lying here stupidly motionless. I who, forty years ago, lay on the frozen earth, dreaming of warmth and rest in Moscow… And her. She's still so young; I have a daughter older than her. She sits there in her armchair, waiting for that idiotic briefcase. Absurd!"

Once more he remembered how, as a prisoner, he had been led through the streets of Moscow in that interminable column with other German prisoners. On both sides of the road, the people of Moscow stood on the sidewalk, staring at the gray tide of soldiers with somewhat wary curiosity. After them, following in their footsteps, came a slow-moving water cart, more or less symbolically washing the streets of the capital clean of the "Fascist plague." It suddenly seemed to Almendinger that he was starting to picture the faces of the Muscovites standing in the street, to hear snatches of their conversation…