“Has the city suffered very much, Klimentii?”
“Not as much as you’d expect… At least not the stones. It’s architecture that ensures permanence, after all. We suffered a little less than a million dead last winter, or perhaps more than a million, who knows? One in three, let’s say. In some areas, one in two…”
“What are you saying!”
“Don’t get upset, Daria Nikiforovna. In a country like ours, a million is one hundred and eightieth… In a war like this… Anyway, isn’t the earth already overpopulated, in relation to the means of production?”
Again Daria had to wonder whether he was being simply honest or unpleasantly scathing; she inclined toward the first. Dexterously he closed up the horrible gash in the plane’s belly. The badly wounded man had fallen into a fitful, whistling sleep. A cockpit voice intoned “Prepare for landing…” Klimentii’s pallid thinness concealed no irony. It seemed to say: This is how we are, the young generation, what’s left of us: resigned, aware, steadfast, no more bitter than the statistics, no more discouraged than the course of history. The river believes in itself. Ferrying blocks of ice, bits of straw, dead bodies, or fecund silt, the river passes — and remains — with no regret for the drops left behind among wild bul-rushes, or dashed against the granite quays. Klimentii was fitting the straps of a knapsack over his shoulders. Daria thought suddenly about herself.
The release she had been waiting four years for brought her no joy, probably because there was no joy left in the world. The bitter years fell away in one go, without regret or longing, with barely a dull wonder at this unexpected new start. A message had arrived from district command with her marching orders, the next combat mission, as though nothing had happened since Paris: “…to report to Service X, Army X…” “When can you be ready to leave?” the district commander asked. “Oh… by tomorrow,” Daria replied unthinkingly. I could just as well leave tonight, there’s nothing to keep me in your desiccated wastes, your sordid tedium, my useless life…
All she needed was the time it took to collect some linen and a few clothes, the time to burn the journal she had kept to ward off the fear of sinking into obsession. A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because — since it could be seized — it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past, a single allusion to assignments accomplished (about which it is forbidden to write without prior permission). No expression of torment or sorrow (this for the sake of pride), no expression of doubt or calculation (for the sake of prudence), and nothing ideological, naturally, for ideology is the sludge at the bottom of the pitfall…
The construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable and secret fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation. In it, Daria could not evoke either Barcelona or the Caproni bombers, or the efforts to save a republic in its death throes, or even the ravishing interludes of those times: her nights with a man of artless energy for whom the slaking of passion was such a feast that afterward he would talk on and on, with a touch of genius, about the war, the future, the sense of the human, the whole world which he loved… Of these discussions punctuated by embraces nothing, nothing! Every sentence, read by a professional third party, would have prompted an unjust condemnation, and this man might still be living (with another woman — fortunate woman! — I only hope she understands him). Daria wrote of the colors of the sea, the heave of the swell contemplated from the top of the nameless mountain they had picked for their meetings. And it did help to refresh her at times when the hot sand rolling in swirling waves of suffocation across the desert clouded the village, penetrated the low clay hovel, and made the flame of the lamp tremble. Daria described the man’s breathing without saying it was the lover’s breathing, and the enchanted tremor of his muscles without saying it was during the communion of love. Waves, swells, exhalations, movements, tightenings, releases, surrenders of the flesh, phosphorescences of the spirit transmuted into inner riches she’d had no inkling of before, an inexhaustible treasure that she could draw up from a well of darkness and carry into the light! No wave, no contoured shoulder, no quiver of lashes can ever be wholly expressed… We live almost without seeing, and now it turns out we see what is no more, but once was, through a prodigious magnifying lens, so that the rough grain of a skin or the carved planes of a torso gain an intensity of pathos whose pale echoes we recognize in a fragment of Greek sculpture. The broken piece of statue arrays itself in mystery, stirs the imagination, and should it happen to be a breast swollen with life, that breast, alone and unique on earth, asserts its own human density and the whole of woman.
The man’s face would have filled a book in itself, if overwhelming feelings had not often interrupted her as she worked on those pages. All faces are illuminated in a single one; yet his appeared incomparable, its radiance lighting up souls without number. Daria didn’t feel strong enough to confront so great, so stabbing a vision on her own. The face stirred the totality of life, internal and external simultaneously, communicating through the natural marvel of the eyes, of expression… The dizziness of looking, the dizziness of standing on the edge of a sovereign understanding… Daria fell back to the world, that is, to the sensation of a storm in calm weather, in the middle of a blessedly fine spring day when several modern reinforced-concrete buildings suddenly blew up, expelling all of their human contents from their carcasses; but there was no description of falling rubble, of a city gone mad beneath the planes, of planes in the fulminating noonday sky; the writing created only a naked feeling of storm and terror, of revulsion and murder, of a fragile universe; it was a sensation born for no apparent reason out of the gilded blue zenith.