The journey lasted so long that one evening he caught himself having forgotten its goal. Or rather the sole purpose of the endless pounding of the track was now these brief lapses into beauty, and he did not know how to talk about them to Anna.
She no longer seemed on her guard; far from it, Elias’s attitude intrigued her. She was clearly hoping for something other than this friendly and attentively protective presence…
The woman with the casket left them at Irkutsk, the gold prospector at a village beyond Baikal. They found themselves alone, their eyes fixed on the fading of the sparks given off by the sunset outside the window layered with hoarfrost. The last night of their journey was beginning. Now they needed to talk, to clarify the situation, or else, without saying anything, embrace, exchange caresses, give themselves… Or instead, laugh, tell jokes, assume the role of good pals. Mentally they were rehearsing these scenarios, but all of them seemed false. The scarlet blaze on the window turned to violet, then was extinguished. There came a moment when it seemed impossible to turn away from the window, to meet one another’s eyes and smile…
A light tapping on the door drew them out of this torpid state. The little Buryat boy was watching them fixedly, with slightly arched eyebrows, pursing his lips, in an expression that seemed to respond to the intensity of what he sensed in them. They exchanged glances and began to laugh softly. Yes, how could he make this young woman understand that the simple freshness of the snow, as it lingered on her dress, was already abundant happiness, a true love story that had unfolded ever since their wanderings through Moscow beneath storms of white? How could she tell this man that he had become important to her, strangely, despite all she thought about men, white or black, and all she believed about herself, tell him that his presence there was obvious and natural, as if he had been at her side long long ago beneath this Russian sky, as if he had always been there, and always would be? She thought he was like that aircraft from the last war set in a block of concrete in the city where she went to high school. It was the district where the city s worthies lived, and there this 11-2 ground attack aircraft, nicknamed “Black Death” by the Germans, proudly reared its dark, elongated silhouette amid pretentious, humdrum lives. Anna suppressed a smile: this far-fetched comparison was perfectly apt but completely unmentionable, as apt things so often are.
The Buryat woman came and fetched her child. They were left in the blue dusk that filled the compartment.
“… In the end this is the one mystery that stays with me from my childhood. Even though my mother was crushed by poverty and the contempt of those who bought her body she was able to give me absolute happiness, peace without any taint of anxiety. I’ve always believed that this capacity for love, which is in fact so simple, is a supreme gift. Yes, a divine power…”
During the last night of the journey he talked about that child on the threshold of a hut in Dondo burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.
The following evening the declaration they had been waiting for finally arrived and was made wordlessly. Quite simply, they came close to death on the ice of a river that served as a road in winter. A truck driver had left them at this intersection of forest roads. He had sworn his comrade would be along at any minute. It was still daylight. An hour later darkness enveloped the little shelter with three walls where they had taken refuge. They spent that hour jumping up and down, pummeling one another, rubbing one another’s cheeks and noses. The air was clear, no breath of wind. The cold molded itself to their bodies as if they were encased in molten glass. And once they moved, this carapace exploded and they felt as if they were swallowing crushed splinters.
They made a fire, but in order to fetch wood they had to climb a steep bank, plunge waist deep into the snow, battle with branches, using hands that no longer obeyed them. This expedition took a good twenty minutes; the fire had time to die down, and their muscles to go numb, anaesthetized by the cold. At one moment, halfway between the shelter and the forest, Elias wanted to lie down, to sink back into the drowsiness that made him light-headed, unfeeling. He shook himself, snatched up a fistful of snow, rubbed his face furiously, then clambered up and, with gritted teeth, began breaking branches. And all at once stood upright, listened… As he came hurtling down the slope he lost half of the firewood. “I heard… I heard… he said in a whisper, as if his voice might alarm the faintly detected sound. They listened, turning their heads right and left. All that was perceptible was tiny crackling noises from the fire that had almost gone out. The mist from their breath rose upward, drawn aloft by the black gulf of the sky. The stars seemed to be closing in on them, surrounding them… Elias felt the pressure of a hand on his wrist and could no longer make out whether he was giving or receiving the warmth that remained to them. Anna pressed herself against him, and there amid the starry space they formed a frail islet of life.
The driver who picked them up would seemingly have remained just as impassive had he come upon their frozen corpses inside the shelter. Elias studied the hands resting on the wheeclass="underline" fresh scratches, the blood scarcely dried, and showing through beneath it, a faint tattoo: 46-55 and the name of one of the camps at Kolyma.
The man spoke, offering no excuses but simply to establish what Ellas already knew: “Worse things happen.” Worse was the frosts that followed a brief thaw. The ice on the rivers he drove along became covered in water, and this froze in its turn. One river on top of another, as it were. The wheels sank into it and in a matter of moments were caught, welded in. That was what had happened to him a little earlier. Sometimes trucks were discovered under six feet of snow… Between the two numerals on his tattoo the computation was simple: 1946-1955, nine years of forced labor somewhere beneath this icy sky After that, thought Elias, nothing else can really touch him…
“You should have come to Sarma in the spring,” lamented the driver suddenly. “There’s a copse over there, half a dozen miles or so, full of birds. How they sing, the little bastards! Nightingales. You wouldn’t believe it. Over there. Near where the camp was…”A minute later he began making little clacking noises with his tongue, followed by a whistling and clicking sound. Elias thought he was imitating the trilling of a nightingale. The driver growled: “What a stupid bitch, that dentist! I told her to take it out. She s filled it, that bloody back tooth. And now I don’t need a thermometer any more. As soon as it gets to forty below it has me howling like a wolf.”
As he dropped them at Sarma just after midnight, he whispered to Elias with a wink: “You look a lot like Pelé. I saw him playing a couple of years ago, on television… Off you go. Stoke the stove well!” For a moment they watched the swaying of the long trailer laden with tree trunks. The sensation of parting from a man in the midst of this white infinity had a grievous intensity about it. Nine years in the camp, nightingales, a badly filled molar, Pelé… Elias felt he had made contact, in a brief space of time, with the subterranean and tangled truth of a human being.
This intimacy with the truth, at once poignant and radiant, struck him more than everything else at Sarma. From the very first look Annas mother gave him. She opened the door to them, put her arms around them, without wasted words, incuriously A calm, absolute certainty was transmitted to Elias: he could walk in at this door in ten years’ time, and she would be waiting for him.
“The bath’s still hot,” the mother said. “In this cold, I knew you’d be late.”
To him everything in the tiny bathhouse was amazing: the bitter scent of the smoke-caked walls, the birch twigs with which he was expected to lash himself, the steam burning his nostrils. But this exoticism was nothing beside the blue darkness perceived through the narrow window above a bench. Outside the cloudy glass the cold forbade any trace of life, while here, on the planks drenched in boiling water, was his naked body, more alive than ever.