Requiem for a Lost Empire (13 page)

   Feeling his way, he gathered up dead branches, then turned to see the fire. Sometimes a scarlet flash glittered in the darkness. It was Fox lifting his head and seeking him with his eye by the light of the flames. The silence was such that Nikolai could hear the horse's breathing from a long way off, little sighs, now sharp, now reassured. And when he came back toward the fire he had the strange feeling that he was returning home.

   In the morning they crossed the place where the rutted road was piled high with bundles of brushwood, advanced up a valley still white with mist, and finally found the meeting of the ways he had vainly sought the previous evening. Several times Nikolai tried to talk to the young woman, whom he had mounted on Fox's back, deciding to go on foot himself. She did not reply, sometimes smiling, but her smile resembled the tensing of a face on the brink of tears. Finally, toward noon, when they needed to make a halt to eat something, he lost his temper somewhat, irritated by her refusal to speak, "Listen, what's the matter with you? Why don't you say anything? It's finished. We're far away. They won't harm you any more. At least tell me your name."

   The young woman's face twisted into a grimace, she tilted her head back slightly and forced open her lips. Between her teeth, in the place of a tongue, Nikolai saw a broad, oblique gash.

   When he had recovered his wits, he realized that she had been mutilated so that she could no longer tell what she had seen. But tell it to whom? Everyone saw the same thing during these years of war. Moreover, how could one describe those heads in the clearing, those eyes being extinguished one by one? While the birds built their nests on the branches above them.

   Dolshanka, half depopulated during the war, did not notice his return. The village had been scoured by so many waves of armed men, Reds, Whites, anarchists, bandits pure and simple, and then Reds again, by so many lootings, fires, and deaths, that the villagers were no longer surprised at anything. There was just one old woman who asked him as he was passing in the street, "Tell me, soldier, is it true the Bolsheviks have abolished death?" Nikolai nodded.

   Over several weeks, before the child was born, he had time to teach the young woman to read and write. It was perhaps the greatest pride of his life: he never boasted about rescuing her from the tomb but he enjoyed talking about the lessons he gave her in the evenings, after the wearisome labor of plowing. Thanks to his teaching she could tell him her first name, writing it out in capital letters: Anna. And choose a name for the child: Pavel. And sign the papers on the occasion of their marriage. A girlhood friend of Anna's, who came to see them at Dolshanka from time to time, quickly got used to these words, thoughts, questions or answers, traced on a sheet of paper or in the dust on a road. Her friend spoke with a slight accent. From the south, Nikolai reckoned. He told himself that his wife must have had the same lilting voice as this Sasha.

   For his part, he did not need the angular letters to understand her. The work on the land, the silence of their house, the lives of the animals, none of this had any need of words. He and Anna would look at one another for a long time and smile. During the daytime, catching sight of one another from afar, they would wave, without seeing the expressions on one another's faces but picturing the tiniest detail.

   The world around them was becoming more and more talkative. People held forth about work instead of working. They made decrees for the happiness of the people and let an old woman starve to death in her
izba
with its collapsed roof. Above all there was the one who talked about the workers, that young, scabby little muzhik they called Goldfish, on account of his red hair, who had never plowed a furrow in his life. And those who promised happiness, like that man, ageless, faceless, expressionless, you might have said, so pale and evasive were his eyes, that unfrocked monk, who chose to be called Comrade Krassny. This champion of happiness never smiled, included the word "kill" in every sentence, and displayed particular ruthlessness toward anything even remotely connected with the Church. When it came to it, the one Nikolai preferred to these two was the former sailor, Batum, an emissary of the town soviet who at least did not conceal his true nature. He robbed home distillers and drank himself, lived openly with two mistresses and, when the peasants challenged him, chorussing, "You have no right…" would drown their complaints with his merry croak, "Here's my right!" roaring with laughter and patting the enormous holster of the automatic pistol at his thigh. There were many more besides. They all called themselves "activists." They talked endlessly, made everyone listen to them, and would not let anyone else utter a word. Nikolai tried once, arguing with a speech by Comrade Krassny Goldfish exploded, his eyes contracted with anger, "We'll have to shorten your tongue, like your good wife's!" Nikolai lunged at him but came up against the barrel of the automatic pistol. Batum was drunk. He could well have fired it without even feeling the trigger beneath his finger. Nikolai walked out of the House of the Soviet. It had once been Count Dolshansky's home.

   Sometimes, as the plow jolted slowly and ponderously along, Nikolai told himself that this whole new order of things was only a transient clouding of people's minds, comparable to the posturing of a drunkard. Yes, it was a kind of hangover that would one day come to an end of its own accord. How could they change essential things, all these prattlers in leather jackets? This Krassny, whose principal achievement 'was mobilizing activists to tear down the domes of churches in the vicinity of Dolshanka. Or Batum, whose repertoire of gestures, when he did not have a bottle in his hand, was limited to two: unbuttoning his fly and reaching for his revolver. Nikolai shook his head, smiled, leaned heavily on the handles of the plow. No, they were powerless against the course of this plowshare polished by the earth, against this earth, open in the expectation of seed, against this wind that still had a snowy chill but was already mingling with the warm exhalation of the plowed lands.

   At other moments when he talked with the villagers, who grew increasingly wary of speaking about such things, or learned that yet another committee had been created (Committee of the Poor, Committee of the Godless, Committee of the Horseless-it seemed to him as if the activists invented a new one every day), Nikolai no longer felt this confidence in the solidity of things. He stopped at the end of the field to let Fox catch his breath and ran his eyes over the plain that sloped gently up toward the houses of Dolshanka, pictured all those people who, a few years before, during the war, had passed through these places, killing, dying, burning houses, raping women, torturing men, burying them alive in fields reverted to wilderness. Then he said to himself that this seed, nourished with so much blood, was bound to produce a good crop. And that perhaps the noisy efforts of the activists had a hidden force, whose meaning for the moment eluded him.

   This force made itself manifest in the spring of 1928 in the same field amid the morning warmth of the same plowing. Without interrupting his slow progress behind the horse, out of the corner of his eye Nikolai observed the approach of four figures from the village: Goldfish, Krassny, Batum, and a stranger dressed in a long leather coat, no doubt an inspector eager to monitor the first steps taken toward collectivization. A group of activists, men and women, followed them some paces behind. Nikolai knew why they were coming. For several months now the talk in Dolshanka had been of nothing else. The posters pasted on the door of the soviet announced it clearly: the organization of a kolkhoz, a collective farm. The only obscure point in Krassny's declarations concerned sewing needles. The peasants had not fully understood if these had to be handed in to the kolkhoz, along with their animals and their tools. Some people, afraid of being suspected of opposing the Party's policies, had even brought their crockery to the soviet. Others were biding their time in the hope that this excess of madness would abate. Nikolai was of their number.

   He finished the furrow and, when he reached the headland, stopped the horse and waited. Following the activists' progress across the field, he felt a choking rage that reminded him of a day long ago: disconsolate hostages gathered in a courtyard and that slim paper snake slithering out of the telegraphic apparatus to proclaim death. He had not slept a wink the night before, wrestling with thoughts that led nowhere. "Run away, taking the family with him? Burn the house down so as to leave nothing for those parasites? But run away where? In neighboring villages it's even worse, they're putting people in prison who own two horses. Into the forest? But how could we live there, with a child of eight, when the nights are still cold?" Picturing this escape, he saw the whole country peopled with activists, entangled in coils of ticker tape.

   They were drawing close. Nikolai bent down, removed a tuft of dry grass that had become wrapped around the plowshare and, with his other hand, checked his secret store: in the rounded rut by the headland his fingers brushed against the handle of an ax. Now he felt free. No more reflection, no more hesitation. They would surround him, he would lean over, as if to change the angle of the plowshare, would seize the ax, would bring it down on Batum, then on the inspector. Goldfish, the most cowardly, would try to escape. Krassny, incapable of action, would start yelling. He felt as if his head were enveloped in icy, liquid glass. With hallucinatory precision he saw the gleam of a turned furrow, a black beetle scurrying along, climbing onto his boot. The wind stirred for a moment and he could hear the words, still indistinct, of the people coming toward him.

   He looked at them, then lifted his eyes higher, toward the slope rising up from the plain, where the first
izbas
of Dolshanka could be seen. And, as he did from time to time when plowing, saw the figure of Anna. She was standing there, motionless, the two pails placed at her feet. At this distance he was unable to discern the expression in her eyes and he knew that she could not but maintain her silence. But, more than any voice, more than the trembling of her eyelids that he could sense, it was the very air of that morning that suddenly diverted him from the moment he had lived through. The air was gray, light. The wind bore with it the humid sharpness of branches scarcely touched by greenery and the last resistance of the remaining snowdrifts hidden in the woods. Nikolai felt that the woman over there, his wife, Anna, and he at the other end of the plain, were linked by this air, by its pale light, the mark of a spring day, one of the springtimes in their lives.

   The four men slowed down before accosting him, as if they were surrounding a wild beast ready to spring. For a second he thought he had forgotten their names and the purpose of their expedition. He was still far away, lost amid the suddenly awakened memory of all the springtimes, of all the snows, of all the dawns and all the nights he had lived through and seen with Anna. Especially that night on the banks of a river, beside a wood fire, on the road back from death.

   He greeted the delegation of the activists with a tilt of his head. And made an effort to restrain a smile. Their extremely grave and worthy expressions contrasted with their boots, transformed into veritable elephants' feet by the clods of clay stuck to them. In place of the anger of the past months, Nikolai experienced only the irritation provoked by the stupidity of children at a difficult age, stupidity that is dangerous and impossible to avoid until "they get over it." Goldfish took a pace forward, looked behind him, to make sure that Batum was there, and launched into a carefully prepared tirade.

   "So, bourgeois landowner, you don't read the newspapers, you treat the decisions of the soviet with contempt."

   Here Krassny intervened, but in tones which formulated the condemnation rather better: "… and you continue to make use of property that belongs to the people. And you are not prepared to hand it over!"

   Nikolai pretended to listen with an attentive and respectful air. And he spoke without abandoning this expression, even adding to it the look of an obtuse but well-meaning peasant.

   "Hand it over to the soviet? But how could I hand it over? It would be the worst kind of fraud!" he exclaimed, with an air of offended honor.

   The activists exchanged glances, disconcerted.

   "Fraud, how's that? Now what do you mean by that?" the inspector exclaimed in amazement, his voice becoming increasingly loud and rasping.

   "Well, take a look at this, Comrade Inspector!"

   And profiting from the confusion, Nikolai grasped him by the elbow and led him toward the horse.

   "Now, just take a look. Do you think it'd be honest to hand over to the kolkhoz a horse in a state like this? Have you seen these hooves? But how to get it shod? The last blacksmith we had was arrested by Comrade Batum two weeks ago. Yes, the blacksmith, Ivan Gutov. And look at that. That's not a plow, any more. It's scrap metal. And why? Because the screw for adjusting the plowshares broken. But as the forge is closed… I tell you, hand on heart, giving this to the kolkhoz would be worse than fraud. It'd be…" (Nikolai lowered his voice) "It'd be sabotage!"

   It was the key word of the age, the conclusion of so many verdicts published in all the newspapers, the word Krassny was so fond of in his speeches. This time the three activists avoided the inspector's gaze. Batum, shifting his feet, was removing the mud from one boot with the other. Krassny cleared his throat. Goldfish licked his lips. Nikolai sighed and, without giving them time to react, announced in resigned tones, "But, after all, if Comrade Krassny decides it's better like that, there's nothing I can do. I'll bring the horse and the plow right away. Why delay? I'll come with you. And the secretary will give me a paper to say the kolkhoz accepts broken implements."

   He leaned on the plow, lifting the plowshare, and urged the horse on. Goldfish nervously seized one of the reins.

   "No, wait, you can go on plowing. Today…" he stammered and turned to seek the inspector's approval. Nikolai pretended to be outraged.