“Wait here for me,” Bruno said to Noémi. He prowled the ship, scrutinizing forms and faces, and returned from his inspection content — which proved nothing. Nothing at all.
The last scattered points of light on the coast of Europe disappeared over the horizon. The ship’s hull was plowing through a resisting mineral sea at the end of which, perhaps, lay nothing.
II. The Flame Beneath the Snow
All the cities I have known, all the cities unknown
Adrift, sheared glaciers, fissured icebergs drifting toward naked dawns…
THE ANTIQUATED bomber banked ponderously through the freezing mist. “Difficult zone… Tara-ta-ta…” breathed Klimentii. The cold cut through his furs because the cold was already in his bones. To make a joke of it, he joyfully exaggerated the chattering of his teeth. He said, “I’ve gone through it so often, nothing can happen to me now. Only trouble is, Comrade, I know that’s a superstitious idea… so it bothers me just a bit. What if luck were a superstition, when luck is all a man has left?” Daria said, “You’re not superstitious, you’re healthy as a wolf… You look like a wolf… True luck is courage, when it comes down to it. Nothing more real.”
“But I’m permanently scared stiff!”
“Well, that’s real courage, to be always scared and still do what has to be done…”
Klimentii glanced around the inside of the plane. It was cluttered but comfy, like a sturdy tent in the snow, where in spite of the cold you feel good. “It would take so little,” he murmured, “and then…” Daria understood, she shrugged her shoulders, said, “And then what?” She tucked the bearskin she’d slept in more snugly around her. The plane’s hold made her think of a metal tunnel crammed with parcels and people. The glacial air stank of the excretions of one desperately wounded man. Daria rubbed her face with her fingers, as she often did on waking. “Want to see the earth?” Klimentii offered. The metal body, punctured by shrapnel, had been hurriedly and badly patched up. The soldier shifted a metal plate that was blocking a crescent-shaped hole next to his knee. Daria gasped with pleasure as a jet of damp, cold, but fresh air hit her full in the face. “See the front line? They always take potshots at us around here.” But the fog was milky and opaque. “It’ll be touch and go landing…” In a low, amused voice he told the story of the luckless VIPs whose plane had strayed off course in this cursed Baltic fog, and landed smoothly, obeying all the usual signals… behind Finno-German lines. All of them shot after a week’s interrogation. “Tara-ta-ta, one day the happy life will come, Comrade!”
“Are you trying to scare me, you moron?” said the woman, her eyes pale as the fog.
“Whoa, don’t get mad, Daria Nikiforovna! I’ll never be cured of fear, no one will, but I don’t care, it hardly bothers me anymore. I put up with it like a chronic bellyache, that’s all. Man is such a small thing… We don’t matter, you, me, whoever, it’s the country that counts… I really did mean the happy life, the one in which man will count, will be built one day over our graves. This city is one big graveyard. And I love it. You can’t help but love it. I promise you a glass of firewater, you’ll see…”
“Is your wife waiting for you?”
“Faithfully, below ground. No carbohydrates, no vitamins, thirteen-hour days at the plant, she went out in six months like a lamp starved of oil… I applied to have her evacuated, but the wives of technicians, officers, and heroes come first. As they should. By the time I got my medal, it was too late. I’m cold to the marrow, no one’s waiting for me, I’m the one waiting — waiting for what luck will bring. The epilogue, or another attachment… It’s always the same warm rush between two people, isn’t it? The warmth of the past is never completely dead, while I’m alive… I won’t remarry until after our victory, though. ‘Togetherness without tears,’ that’s my motto.”
“And quite right too, Klim,” Daria said.
He concluded, proudly or mockingly, it was hard to tell with him: “I’ve learned.”
The whitish mist was thinning under the bomber’s belly, allowing glimpses of flat black country marbled with white veins. A wide dark loop sliced through it, like a fissure in the earth’s crust. They haven’t invented war toys to split open the planet yet, but they will at the rate we’re going… “The Neva!” Klimentii cried.
Stupidly, like a schoolchild, Daria found herself imagining that intelligent sadistic brute Czar Peter, pacing the moors on the banks of this river and suddenly pulling his sickly-soft, wrinkled, feline face into a mask of will, saying, “On this spot I will build a city!” Asia will open a window on the West here, we will no longer be Asia… His inspired folly aimed at our escape from Asia. Then he had the severed head of his wife’s young lover preserved in a jar which he put on the mantelpiece under the great mirror so his wife, Empress Catherine, could join the three-headed tête-à-tête supper… We have good examples to follow.
When I came through this city four years ago, Daria was thinking, we were coming back to life. The passably well-dressed crowd of the privilegentia ambled down the central prospect in soft spring sunshine. Our dead shivered within me, but the crowd was indifferent to them. It only wanted to live its own life; there was a lot of dancing… I was aghast at the nightmare of the coming war, of which the crowd knew nothing because the papers were full of the peace policy and how it would prevail, if it meant a pact with the Devil himself. Let the Devil take his hellfire elsewhere, we just want to live in peace and quiet, and we’ve earned the right having suffered so much more than the egotistical, degenerate bourgeois West… It’s the West’s turn to pay for a change: let it learn that life’s not just about a good meal, a good roll in the hay, and a good night’s sleep but something ferocious, so ferocious there’s no name for it. We know that, don’t we — for having tried to change the world (and no doubt too for failing to put a more human world in its place, or to prevent the return of the cruel ones…). On the broad sidewalk with its leisurely succession of palaces, where bronze horse trainers rear over the four entrances to a bridge, I met corps-de-ballet starlets who were more or less the mistresses of influential men; writers doing their best to produce a felicitous page in spite of the censor, and spending more time censoring themselves than writing; engineers released from concentration camps with medals; historians fresh from prison who were busy tracing the glorious continuity between Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and socialism with all the rigor they once applied to demonstrating the same thing between Gracchus Babeuf, the Paris Commune, Karl Marx, and ourselves… “But, you see,” a fat academician assured me, “it’s all true, we’re just widening the scope of historical continuity…” He may have been right. Dramatists were writing plays about betrayal, and I met one who had hastily adapted his epic for the treason market so that in Act Five, the hero is unmasked as an enemy agent. It was the hit of the season.
They flirted, they talked books, they led silky hounds on leashes. The cathedral colonnade of Our Lady of Kazan seemed svelte, white clouds were reflected in the dark water of the canal, the church of the Holy Savior on the Blood (an emperor’s blood) was as vividly colored as an illuminated manuscript, for blood causes color to blossom from stone… A group of us went to look at the gilded, winged lions of a small Chinese bridge, and I was pestered for news about Paris fashions and the bombing of Madrid, rather more about the fashions than about the bombing (though it was good form to seem concerned about the demise of Spain). There were finely bound books for us to leaf through. I went to admire the vertical waves of pink granite of the security building, erected on the site of the small old law court burned down in 1917… Fifteen stories high, how many offices! A towering proof of progress. The prison next door looked unchanged… Painful topics were never broached, out of understandable caution or as a kindness to me. No one seemed to doubt the future… I listened politely to the views of a man of letters. “Tragedy is just one of history’s overhead costs… Paris frolicked while Robespierre’s men were being killed. Paris was right. The true, the lasting revolution was never about extreme issues, the justice or otherwise of the guillotine, the victories in rags. It was all about vitality, the Parisian flair for l’amour, its lust for life in spite of everything, its rich exuberance… I’m going to write a novel about Madame Récamier. Marvelous character!” “What about Madame Rolland?” I demanded. “Wasn’t she quite a character too?” “Dear me no, she’s a bore. So pedantic, up to the very last minute! And a Girondist. I can’t bear the Girondists.” This scribbler was installing his porcelain collection in a villa on the gulf, and pressed me to visit: “I have some extraordinary Meissen!” I promised, cravenly, without mentioning that at least the Girondists had given up fine china… His gaze was keen and melancholy. I nearly asked him, Why do you always lie? But that would have sent him off drinking for a week. He was killed at the front. His last war dispatches were completely worthless… He had a sentimental kindness. He cried like a child over calves killed in the fields, so whenever he had to interview some optimistic general, his attempts at valiant patriotism gave off a hollow ring…