Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

Svetka's bedroom door was wide open. Svetka was sitting on her bed screaming with horrible, sobbing laughter. Her swollen eyes, on which not the smallest trace of mascara was left, glittered wildly, madly. On the floor was a suitcase with several garments spilling out of it. Her shoes lay in two opposite corners of the room – as if one giant stride had left them there. Olya stopped on the threshold without trying to understand a word of this horrible howling because it was all too clear. She simply repeated like an incantation: "Svetka… Svetka…"

Choking with tears, Svetka was silent for a moment. She sat there, with her eyes closed, her whole body shuddering, breathing jerkily and noisily. Cautiously Olya sat down beside her. Svetka felt her hand on her shoulder and began wailing in ever more desperate tones: "Olka, a sealed zinc coffin… and you can see nothing… just his eyes, through the little glass window… no eyelashes, no eyebrows… Maybe there's nothing there… in the coffin!"

And as she shook her head, she burst into tears once more. And once more, in a broken voice she cried out: "A little glass window… and only his eyes… only his eyes… he's not there… No… burned in the helicopter! There's nothing in that coffin. Nothing…"

Then, breaking free from Olya's arms, she jumped up and rushed to the wardrobe. She opened the door with a violent gesture and began pulling out boxes and cardboard cartons and hurling them to the floor.

"So who's going to make use of any of this stuff now?" she cried. "Who?"

Out of the cardboard cartons tumbled men's shoes, brand-new shiny boots made of first-rate leather; there were piles of shirts with Beriozka labels, jeans, ties. And, uttering a heavy sigh, Svetka collapsed in a heap on the bed and buried her head in the pillow.

Sitting beside her, Olya scarcely recognized her friend in this woman, now so crumpled and aged. She stroked her hand gently, murmuring: "Don't cry, Svetka, don't cry. It'll be ll right. It'll all come out right in the end. Lopk, things are going badly for me, too, but I'm bearing up… I'm bearing up…"

Svetka was leaving from Kazan Station. She seemed completely calm now, simply screwing up her eyes as if to avoid seeing the happy and excited crowd. Olya made her way along beside her, holding in her hand a big plastic bag into which Svetka had thrown everything that would not go into her suitcase. The bag was a great weight. Heavily burdened people came charging along, bumped into one another, colliding with their luggage. It felt to Olya as if the handles of the bag were slowly stretching and would tear. The crowd moved forward with painful slowness. Sweating faces, skullcaps on shaven heads, children whimpering…

The compartment was pervaded by a warm smell of thick dust.

"Oh, you haven't brought anything to drink on the journey," Olya suddenly realized.

Svetka shook her head silently. Leaping down from the coach, Olya weaved her way toward the buffet. Standing in line in front of a long glass-fronted counter where there were piles of dried-up sausage sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and hazelnut biscuits, she consulted her watch nervously.

When she got back to the platform with a bottle of warm lemonade and two biscuits in a little bag, she saw two red lights receding down the track into the distance in a hot gray mist. She stayed on the platform for a moment, then set the bottle and the bag down on a bench and headed for the subway.

During one of those crazy days at the start of the summer, Olya realized that she was pregnant. She accepted the fact with dull and weary resignation. "In fact, there's nothing surprising about it," she reflected on her return from the clinic. "With all that pressure and stressed-out as I was… At such times you could end up producing twins and not notice…" At the Center she asked for three days' break to have an abortion and get herself on her feet again.

She had counted the days and she knew it had happened at the beginning of May when, as she listened to that tall German with the attractive name, she had forgotten the role she was playing. And she knew it was not just a matter of forgetting, either.

She arrived at the hospital two hours before the wards and clinics were due to open. In the stillness of the morning she walked around the pale yellow building, crossed the road, and sat down on a bench in a little courtyard surrounded by old houses on two floors. At the windows there were flowers in pots and crudely painted earthenware statuettes. "It's just like at home in Borissov," she thought. The pale, watery sunlight gradually filled the courtyard, illuminating the entrance halls with their wooden staircases and causing a cat sitting on a little wobbly bench to blink its eyes. Later on, Olya would try to understand what had happened on that sun-drenched early morning. She looked at the pale flowers behind the window panes, the sandbox all pockmarked by the rain that had fallen in the night, the tufts of grass thrusting up through the trampled earth of the courtyard. She looked as if seeing ll this for the first time. Even the ordinary gray soil mixed with sand was astonishingly present to her eyes, there before her, with its little stones, its twigs, its burned matches. She suddenly felt a sharp and gripping tenderness for this new vision, this joyful and silent wonder. This vision was no longer hers. She could already feel it within herself as something separate from her, but at the same time close, pulsating, inseparable from her breathing and her own life… As if she were experiencing it almost physically. Her eyes followed the cat as it slowly crossed the courtyard, shaking its paws and arching its tail. Olya knew she was not the only one watching it and knew for whom she was silently murmuring: "Oh, look at that pretty little pussy… Look at its lovely whiskers, its white tail, its little gray ears… Let's go stroke it…"

The houses were beginning to wake up. People emerged from the hallways with a busy tread, hurrying toward the bus stop. Olya followed them. Arriving home, she went to bed without undressing and fell asleep at once. Toward evening she was woken by the strident screaming of the swifts. She stayed in bed for a long time, watching the dusk deepening outside the open window. Occasionally a woman's voice would ring out from high up on a balcony: "Maxim, Katya, come in! How many times do I have to call you?"

And at once, echoing in reply, a shrill pair of voices: "Oh please, Mom! Just five little minutes more!"

The swifts sped by, close to the window, with a rapid rustling of wings. It sounded as if someone were abruptly tearing a thin strip of silk. "How simple everything is," thought Olya. "And no one understands it. They go charging along, pushing and shoving. They don't even have time to ask themselves, 'What's the point?' And yet everything's so simple. And I was going crazy, too – Alyosha, the apartment in Moscow, abroad… It's painful to think about it, but I'd begun to hate his parents so violently it gave me nightmares. All the time I dreaded them persuading him not to marry me. I almost prayed for them to be killed in a car or a plane crash! How horrible!"

It was so silent in the purple dusk that the sizzling of potatoes in a frying pan could be heard through an open kitchen window. Olya thought about the one whose presence in the world she had so clearly felt that morning. And now she immersed herself with calm joy in the future needs of the child, its little clothes, feeding it. Without knowing why, she was sure she would have a boy. She knew she would call him Kolka, that she would live with him at Borissov, that she would find some dull, monotonous job there, and the monotony of the peaceful, gray days that lay ahead suddenly seemed to her an unspeakable blessing.

She pictured how he would learn about the life of his grandfather, Ivan, and her own life. What had seemed to them like the disastrous collapse of all their plans would pass into his childish mind like a fairy tale, a kind of family legend: his heroic grandfather, who had suffered for the truth in his old age; his mother who had refused to live in Moscow, because the life they lead there is noisy, and dangerous even, on account of the crazy cars.