Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

That day, the last before her long collapse, in the stifling heat of noon Tatyana heard the song currently in vogue that was played every day The flies buzzed against the windowpanes, the village was mute, poleaxed by the sun, and this song rippled out, as sweet and tender as Turkish delight:

All the world turns blue and green about us,

Nightingales at every window sing.

There's never love without a touch of sadness…

Ivan walked along taking great strides. In his old knapsack he carried two loaves of black bread, a paper bag containing millet, twelve onions, and a piece of bacon wrapped in a scrap of cloth. But most precious of all, the liter of milk, that had long since turned sour, he carried in his hands. "With this we can feed the kid and then we'll see…" he thought.

A dense, dry heat hovered over the fields, like the exhalation from the mouth of an oven. A burning copper sun was plunging down behind the forest but scarcely any evening cool could be felt.

He passed through the deserted village flooded with the violet light of the sunset. The radio above the soviet was still blaring away.

As he crossed the threshold he had a premonition of disaster. He called out to his wife. All that could be heard was the incessant buzzing of the flies. A fine golden ray of light pierced the gloom of the izba as Ivan rushed into the bedroom. Tatyana lay there on the bed, the child in her arms, and appeared to be asleep. He lifted the cover in haste and pressed his ear to her breast. Beneath the rough scar he heard her heart beating faintly. He heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness! I've arrived in time…" Then he touched the child. The cold, rigid little body already had a waxen sheen to it. Outside the window the sweet voice was unflaggingly pouring out these words:

All the world turns blue and green about us

In the forest gaily purls the stream.

There's never love without a touch of sadness…

Ivan bounded out of the house and ran over to the soviet. Blinded with tears, he began hurling stones at the black disk of the loudspeaker, without managing to hit it. Struck at last, the loudspeaker screeched and fell silent. A vertiginous stillness ensued. Only, somewhere at the edge of the forest, like a well-oiled machine, the cuckoo flung out its insistent, plaintive call.

The next day Tatyana was able to get up. She went out on the doorstep and saw Ivan driving nails into the little coffin's pine planks.

After burying their son and gathering together their meager luggage, they took the road to the station. Ivan had heard that in the small town of Borissov, some sixty miles from Moscow, they were recruiting drivers for the construction of a hydroelectric center and providing them with accommodation.

That was how they came to settle in the Moscow region. Ivan found himself behind the wheel of an old truck, whose side panels bore the inscription in flaking paint: "Next stop: Berlin!" Tatyana went to work at the furniture factory.

And the days, months, and years followed one another, calmly and uneventfully. Ivan and Tanya were content to see their lives following this ordinary, peaceful course. The same as everyone else, that of decent people. They had been given a room in a communal apartment. There were already two families living there, the Fedotovs and the Fyodorovs. And in the little room next to the kitchen lived Sofia Abramovna.

The Fedotovs, still a young couple, had three sons whom the father beat frequently and conscientiously. When their parents were out at work these rascals would take their father's heavy bicycle down from the wall. With a hellish din, running over the other tenants' shoes, they careered up and down the long, dark corridor, where there hovered a persistent and bitter smell of stale borscht.

The Fyodorovs were almost twice as old as the Fedotovs. Their son had been killed just before the end of the war and the mother lived in the hope that the death notice had been sent by mistake: there were so many Fyodorovs in Russia! Secretly she hoped he had been taken prisoner and that some day or other he would return. Fyodorov, the father, had himself been in the war from the first day to the last and was under no illusions. Sometimes, when he had been drinking and could stand it no longer, exasperated by his wife's daily expectation, he would yell right through the apartment: "Oh sure, you can count on it. He'll be coming back. But if he's discharged from the POW camp he's not coming back here to you. He'll be sent beyond the Urals – or even farther!"

Sofia Abramovna belonged to the old Moscow intelligentsia. In the 1930s she had been sent to a camp and had only been released in 1946, subject to a ban on living in Moscow and some hundred other cities. During her ten years in the camp she had lived through what human language was incapable of expressing. But her neighbors guessed it. When a quarrel broke out in the kitchen Sofia did not try to stand on the sidelines but lost her temper, cursed and swore, using surprising language. Sometimes she hurled turns of phrase at her adversaries contemptuous in their exaggerated politeness: "I give you my most humble thanks, Comrade Fyodorov. You are the very pinnacle of courtesy." On other occasions she would suddenly come out with expressions she had picked up in the camps: "See here, Fedotov, you keep your damned thieving hands off the stash in my sideboard. You're wasting your time casing it. There's no liquor in there."

But even at the height of these neighborly quarrels Sofia 's eyes were always staring into space to such an extent that it was clear to everyone: she was still back there beyond the Urals. Which was why arguing with her was not very rewarding.

Whether they liked it or not, the Demidovs used to find themselves drawn into these conflicts. But their role was generally confined to acting as conciliators between the Fyodorovs and the Fedotovs when they squabbled and calming the wives as they sobbed noisily.

Life would have been somewhat lacking in savor for all of them without these altercations. For three days after a quarrel the neighbors would edge by when they met without exchanging greetings, glowering at one another. Then they would make up around a communal table and, after drinking a few vodkas, would begin to embrace, swearing eternal friendship and abjectly begging one another's forgiveness with tears in their eyes. The Fedotovs had an old windup phonograph. They would bring it down into the courtyard, put it on a small stool, and all the inhabitants of their little building would gather in the mauve dusk of spring. They would shuffle around to the strains of a languid tango, forgetting for an hour or two the lines outside the communal toilets every morning, the squabbles over the disappearance of a piece of soap, forgetting everything that made up their lives.

The Demidovs enjoyed these evenings. Tanya would put on her white wedding blouse, Ivan threw a jacket over his shoulders with all his medals in a row. And they danced together, smiling at each other, letting themselves be carried away by the sweet dreaminess of the words:

Do you remember how we whispered, On those summer nights so blue, Words of tenderness and passion   dearest lover true… ?

The years rolled by at once slowly and rapidly. Imperceptibly the Fedotov sons had grown up, developed into hefty young men with bass voices. They had all married and left in one direction or another.

Some records had had their day, others came into vogue. And now it was the younger generation who played them on their windowsills, commenting: "That's Lolita Torrez… Oh, this one's Yves Montand."

The only event that stuck in Ivan's memory during those years was the death of Stalin. And, in fact, not the death itself, because on that day they had drunk and wept buckets and that was all. No, it was another day, already under Khrushchev, when they removed the statue of Stalin. Why did they choose him, specifically him, Demidov, for this task? Was it because he was a Hero of the Soviet Union? The head of the motor pool had called him in. Ivan found himself among the local Party bosses. They explained to him what it was all about. He had to take his Zis truck that night and work some overtime.