Before making the journey Elias had thought he would be encountering human detritus, left over from the great workshop of the future society. Scraps, waste products, inevitable in a project on as grand a scale as that of communism. Yet here, among the materials rejected by the march of history, behold, a secret, tenacious life maintained its vigil. This humble existence seemed perfectly emancipated from the capricious rhetoric of the age. No verdict of history, thought Elias, had made its mark on these two beings who, when spring came, would be searching in the forest for their wild orchid.
One morning he saw Ivan leaving his izba and, a moment later, Zoya running after him. The man must have forgotten the leather bag she was holding out to him. She was dressed only in a skirt and pullover, despite the cold having gone down to fifty below, and this run through the snow, the encounter between the two figures in the middle of a white wilderness, their swift embrace, the tenuousness of the bond created between them for a moment, then broken, all this struck Ellas as total evidence of love. A stray dog, he recalled. Human scraps… Yet now in the silvery cold of the morning, there was this woman on the threshold of her house and this man, gliding along on his snow shoes, tracing an extended blue line across the endless white expanse.
ALMOST NOTHING WAS LEFT OF THE CAMP. The shells of huts. The gap-toothed lines of a double wooden perimeter fence. It shook in the wind, and from a distance it was possible to believe that an Alsatian dog was still trotting around between the twin palisades.
They approached with uneasy caution, not knowing what could be said at such a place. Thousands of lives swallowed up by this enclosed space between the watchtowers. Thousands of pairs of eyes staring long ago at barbed wire, all downy with hoarfrost under a cloudless sky. Were cries of pity called for, or indignation, or resignation? Words lost their meaning here. From a blackened pole hung a steel bar, the gong that had once marked the rhythm of the camps activities. Its silence, perpetual now, was like an invisible but still living presence.
Elias listened to the wind, the crunching of their feet, pictured the man Anna had just been speaking about: one sunny day a prisoner clad in a worn quilted jacket leaves the camp, stops, looks back, perplexed. After twelve years of imprisonment, freedom is a threat. His body worn out by penal servitude, betrays him at every step. He finds it hard to understand the people he passes, their smiles, their concerns. “You should have remarried,” he says to his wife. He is terrified by that wait of twelve years. Terrified and sorrowfully grateful. He would like to thrust this woman away from him, thrust her toward joy, toward the youth she had lost on his account… He dies a year after the birth of their daughter. As a child, Anna will claim she remembers her fathers face. It is, of course, impossible. She has simply seen old photos…
Elias noted the moment when the cold suddenly ceased. They walked around the camp, entered a wood of black alders. He took off his scarf and no longer felt the wind’s cutting edge. The young woman facing him seemed breathtakingly close, known to him, as no one had ever been in his life before. He even thought he could recall the voice of the child she had been! As well as all those winter days she had lived through before they met. With the faith of a believer, he guessed at the sadness and beauty of what her eyes remembered. And, like an intoxication, he sensed the silence of the house where, as a small child, she would observe a beam of light from the setting sun on the picture of a soldier, then a branch covered in hoarfrost turning blue outside the window… Now, with the same intensity, he felt at one with the suddenly milder air Anna was breathing, and with the roughness of the bark lightly touched by her hand…
These were the trees the camp authorities had had cut down to put an end to the birdsong. Elias looked up: high above them the bare branches, encrusted with ice jewels, rang softly in the wind, like an echo of the warbling of long ago… His shapka slipped, fell into the snow. He picked it up but was in no hurry to put it on, he was so hot.
I’m here at last… The notion took shape, confused, yet expressing vividly what was happening to him. The serene truth of his presence here, in this place of forgotten evil, in the dazzle of a snowy plain, beside a young woman, thanks to whom everything on this day was turning out to be of the essence of things, even the simple beauty of the tips of her eyelashes silvered with hoarfrost. Life was becoming as it ought to be.
“Mother comes here once a year, at the beginning of June,” Anna said. “On the anniversary of my fathers death. She spends the night here. I came with her once. When you hear the birds you don’t really believe in death anymore and it feels as if he can hear them too… Wrap up well. Its time to go home.”
He felt at one with every tree, with every glint of the low sun on the snow. Or rather he felt at one with himself in that day, which seemed always to have been waiting for him, and into which he was finally returning. Anna’s hand, adjusting his scarf for him, emerged out of a very old memory, heady with tenderness. He grasped her fingers, pressed them to his face, closed his eyes… When they continued on their way, he unbuttoned his coat; the air seemed to him balmy, aromatic. And already in the darkness on the outskirts of Sarma, his breath became so scorching that he felt that with one puff he could have warmed up all the ancient, chilled izbas of the hamlet.
That night, amid the furnace of his fever, a moment of great limpidity burst forth. I love her…, he admitted to himself with disarmed simplicity. Anna was standing on the threshold of the room.
Next day, the eve of their departure for Moscow, Annas mother gave them the money the people of Sarma had collected so that they could return by plane.
During the nine hours that the flight lasted, breathless from his illness, Elias swung between an absolute certainty of happiness and an awareness of never being able to recapture the radiance of that other life briefly glimpsed. It would have meant returning to Sarma, to live there with Anna in perpetual, humble, slow joy, rhythmed by the ebb and flow of the seasons. His cough had him by the throat; he was breathing like a hunted animal and told himself that Anna had done everything in her power to escape those long, somnolent winters, the bleak memory of the dead. No, he would have had to take her to the islands of Luanda beneath the sun, redolent of the warm algae and the hot timber of the boats. He sat up In his seat and began to talk of the fishermen, silhouetted against the sunsets, of the woman, his mother, waiting for their return. They would go and settle there, she would love the country… Suddenly he remembered who he was: a young African, stateless, a half-monkey to those who occupied Angola. The tangled knot that derived from these thoughts drew ever tighter. At one moment Anna’s face appeared to him shrouded in darkness, unrecognizable. Who was she, in fact, this woman offering him a pill and a glass of water? Was it she who had paused in the midst of endless snows and made alive and necessary every moment that passed? Or a young woman from the provinces who wanted to stay in Moscow at all costs? And what was there to be done about the scent of hoarfrost that her dress exhaled when she climbed back into the train? And about the poem she had loved in her youth: a knight going down into the arena among the big cats and retrieving the glove a lady had let fall? And about the child in a silent izba, talking to the photo of a soldier?