As he walked along he thought about his return to Dolshanka, a return so often pictured that now the desire seized him to steal in quietly, passing through kitchen gardens, to avoid people's stares, their greetings. Unconsciously, he was transporting to Dolshanka all the people he had encountered on the return journey, in Moscow, in the district capital. He pictured the village filled with this war-free vitality, a happiness that was already routine, confident of its rights. There would be the bustle of young people in the main street, the long-drawn-out strains, at once merry and plaintive, of the accordion, crowds gathering, questions, a multitude of unknown children. And in order to be able to bear this agonizing gaiety he would need to down a good glass of vodka, then another.
Not to go back at all? The idea suddenly struck him as plausible and it was at that very moment he noticed that the road, a road of which he knew every twist and turn, had changed. It was not the line of burned-out trucks outside the district capital, nor the shell craters that gave this impression. Quite simply, the earth road was disappearing here and there under the advance of the forest. Young wild cherry trees were growing in the middle of it, grass filled the ruts. He found himself catching his boot against the cap of a fly agaric fungus, walking around an anthill. But the major landmarks were still there: the oak grove that plunged down into a ravine, a large chalky mound surrounded by fir trees. Pavel bent down, touched the layer of sand and pine needles. It was formed into a solid crust, all interwoven with stems and roots. Continuing on his way he unconsciously accelerated his pace.
Before going into Dolshanka the road made a sharp bend, hugging the winding course of the river. If you looked back you could see the place you had just passed, as you see the last coaches of a train on a curve in the track. Pavel turned his head and by the red light of the sunset, shining low over the earth, he saw the swaying dust from his footsteps as it lingered in the still, warm air on the far side of the loop in the road. He saw more than this trace. He almost pictured himself there, exactly as he had been a moment ago: a soldier who had just dusted his boots, straightened up his tunic, and washed his face, scooping up warm water from among the reeds. And for a few seconds he felt very remote from this happy double who was so thrilled to be going home. He walked past the copse at the entrance to the village, gave the bottom of his tunic one more tug, suddenly stopped, then ran, then stopped again.
What he saw did not frighten him, so deep was the stillness. The greenery from the orchards that had run wild covered the charred remains of the izbas almost completely. The trees had grown unchecked across the street, breaking the straight line of it. Dolshanka no longer existed. But its ruins did not have the violence of recent destruction. The rains had long since washed away the blackness of the burned walls, wild grasses hid the foundation stones. Only the stoves with their chimneys still reared up, showing where the houses had stood. Pavel crouched down, drew open the little cast iron door to an oven-the creaking of the hinges was the only sound evocative of a human presence in this silence of plants.
Walking slowly along the main street, he spoke out loud. Even spilling out at random, his words lent a semblance of logic to these moments. He recognized the forge, brown with rust, the horns of the anvil sticking out among the nettles. Still talking, he made this very simple calculation: the village had been burned during the German offensive in the autumn of 1941, so for four years, the snow the trees… He stopped in front of a building whose walls remained almost intact, remembered it as the House of the Soviet. Above the door lengths of rope bleached in the sun hung from great nails. And on the ground skeletons covered in shreds of clothing were sitting or lying stretched out, with sharp stems and leaves growing through them, surrounded by large creamy umbels with the scent of mulled wine.
He spent the night in the square of blackened tree trunks that still marked the site of their vanished house amid the underbrush. He no longer felt any pain. From his first steps around the site of this blaze of long ago (beneath the debris of beams reduced to pieces of charcoal he had caught sight of an iron bed, all black, and had recognized it), from the first crunching of glass underfoot, his grief had crossed the threshold of what was bearable and had numbed him. There were just a few absurd little details it still hurt him to see. In the evening it was the garlands of white flowers growing around the chimney: near to the ground the flowers were already closed but high up, where the sun was still shining, their bell-shaped trumpets stood out. He had gone up to them, tugged forcibly at the garland. And now, in the night, there was this shadow. Something nosing about swiftly behind the ruins of the house (a stray dog? a wolf?)-and the fear, and the humiliation of feeling fear. Here. At this moment. But the real torture was the sky, with the stars, slightly hazy from the heat, which beguiled the eye with the geometry of their constellations, learned at school and since then stubbornly unchanged. There was in their soft light a kind of mild deception, a promise eroded by millions and millions of prayers never granted. Even when he closed his eyes he did not escape these timeless patterns. He sat down and suddenly imagined himself to be very old, yes, an old man watching beside his ruined house. And in this imagined old body, the body of a dying man, without memories, without desires, he felt unspeakably happy. But he was twenty-five and it was summer 1945. The interval of time that lay between him and that old man now seemed of inhuman duration. He took out his pack, his hand felt the butt of the automatic pistol, wrapped in a scrap of cloth.
He left the village before first light. As he walked along he sensed his own gaze pursuing him. A scornful gaze. He knew that if his courage had failed him it was because of the woman with her hands stained by raspberry juice.
To begin with he managed to find pretexts for his wanderings. He made fruitless attempts to find his sister and spent several months in the area traveling from one town to the next. Then he went to Leningrad -so as to meet Marelst's family, or so he persuaded himself-as if there were still any hope of finding someone alive after several years' silence. An official whom he asked for information about Dolshanka, a very perspicacious official, sensed this nomadic mania in him and reprimanded him, saying, "It's time to roll up your sleeves, comrade, and play your part in the reconstruction of the country!" Indeed, if everyone had embarked on searching for the survivors of all the burned villages… He found no one in Leningrad. Nevertheless, very conscientiously, he rang the bell on all the floors of a great, damp, sinister apartment building, constructed around an enclosed courtyard that could give no life to a tall tree with pale leaves. His zeal produced a result he had not intended. An old woman emerged from a cavernous apartment, regarded him almost joyfully, and suddenly began talking louder and louder, recounting the story of the siege, the frozen corpses in the streets, the apartments inhabited by dead people whose bodies were no longer even collected. He backed away onto the landing, stammered a word of farewell, began his descent. He knew all these stories. The woman sensed that he was escaping her and shouted out with demented glee, "And in our building people ate their own dogs! And the ones who didn't eat their dogs died. And the dogs tore their corpses to bits." As Pavel hurtled down the staircase the voice, amplified by the echo, pursued him as far as the exit, then through the streets, and, later still, on the train, in his sleep.
Once he had been staying in the same place for several weeks, he believed, he would begin to forget. Forgetfulness, in these post-war days was, more than ever before, the secret of happiness. Those who had no desire to forget drank, took their own lives, or traveled around from place to place, like him, in an endless semblance of returning home.