There were ways and ways of dying slowly while remaining partly alive, getting dressed, walking down the street, doing the day’s work, eating tasteless food, submitting to the ceaseless assaults of the belly and its deliriums during sleep. Some shrank till they were nothing but insubstantial bags of skin over the knobs of their bones, with dreadful ball-like eyes… Others swelled up. Others became hollowed from within, pretending to be fit until the day they collapsed against the wall, saying, like Valentinov the schoolmaster: “Here we go, I’m dying… Twenty-three years in the teaching profession… Please doctor, put a little piece of sugar on my tongue. Ah, so good, thank you… And tell the principal from me that…” This man expired in a sigh of euphoria, but was it really wise to lavish sugar upon the dying? Doctor and nurse shook their heads uncertainly, one cube the poorer. You can’t be rational to the bitter end. The doctor could always tell the ones who were faking it, both men and women, even military officers, even technicians! They had themselves brought in on a toboggan dragged by a woman, feigning to be at death’s door, all to obtain a drop of glucose. Once he found an old friend reduced to this ploy, a professor of mathematics named Aristi Petrovich. “You, my dear friend, and in such a state!” The doctor was playacting too, as though he had been taken in. He rummaged in his precious store cupboard for an onion (but not the largest, to be fair): “Here, Aristi Petrovich, it’ll do you good, you must eat it in three stages to avoid a stomach upset…” (That old Aristi, he got around me!)
Each corpse was firmly tied to a sled pulled on a string by its next of kin; a new breed of resourceful specialists earned their food by sewing discarded sheets or squares of sackcloth around the remains: There, look, isn’t that nice, almost as snug as a coffin! Daria passed several such mummies on the street, rigid pods floating just above the trodden snow. A living man or woman to pull the string and sometimes a child behind, steering the mummy so as to spare it too many knocks and jolts — a somewhat superfluous solicitude… Inclined like a figurehead, a solitary form was plowing toward you, in a fading halo of snow. Her shawl framed the slightly scary face of a wizened child, and what she was pulling could not have weighed much — a small form neatly parceled in tar paper and string, with some naïvely cut-out cloth flowers pinned to its breast. Daria greeted her. “Going far, Citizen?” “Too far by half! The Smolenskoe cemetery…” “That’s on my way,” Daria said, “give me the string for a bit.” No, not heavy at all, not even with the weight of a question… The young woman was explaining nonetheless. “There used to be four of us and now I’m all alone in the world. It’s probably for the best, don’t you think?… If I can hang on for another three months, the factory’s promised me an evacuation permit. I’m still meeting my production quotas, though!” “I’m going too fast, sorry,” Daria said, “you’re out of breath.” “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m always out of breath!” The young survivor halted, with a brief smile of distress. The cold was gentle…
There were caved-in roofs, whole stories exposed to the air and clogged with snow, gaping bays, stage-set façades of wood and sailcloth with rows of windows painted sketchily across them. A faded inscription read INTREPID CITY! TOMB OF — — . As the banner was torn, its last words missing, the city could be the tomb of whoever you liked… Daria noticed the absence of huge pictures of the Chief, and indeed it was hard to imagine one. How would he look? Standard confident smile, full cheeks, bushy mustache? No portraitist would dare to give him the only face appropriate for this city — hollow as a death’s-head, wet with tears. The only things that must remain officially foreign to a nation’s Leader are tears, desperate suffering, the most human of human things… So how is it that leaders do not go mad? “Perhaps they are mad,” Daria answered herself.
A tram, looking out of place on these streets, clanged slowly past a rubble of white armor platings, snow-caked sandbags, the burned-out carcass of another tram. “Their artillery often targets this crossroads, once they got sixty people in one hit, a whole tramload…” It was by the public library that used to house the books of Voltaire. The streets were punctured with what looked like wells dug into the cemented snow, boreholes over burst pipes, where women and children and people recovering from their wounds lined up with listless discipline to lower a saucepan, a jug, a can on the end of a wire hook, down into the greenish sludge. An icing of snow lay over the mountains of human waste scraped together in the center of vast square courtyards; what a festering would be released by the thaw, what epidemics would steam from the ground poisoned by rotting shit! But that’s the least of our worries, for spring is an age away, and who knows which of us will live to see it! The squares stood triumphant as ever, lined with colonnaded palaces, dominated by golden spires, gigantic and deserted. The empire of cold whiteness. To cross them was to plunge into implacable solitude; and should some bomb land just then, its nearby explosion was endowed with a natural solemnity that in no way disturbed the dignity of these spaces and architectures. A cupola that once had shone pale gold, now dull, reigned over the iceberg city.
Daria walked into a nondescript house where she found a guardroom scrupulously swept of dust, but brown with ingrained dirt from floor to ceiling. She showed her papers and was given a pass for the second floor. A man with a bayonet opened a door onto an expanse of freezing corridors, there was a marble staircase, a warm whiff of cabbage soup, and an anteroom full of captains having a smoke; then the astounding office of Major Makhmudov. Astounding in that it was spacious, heated, with green filing cabinets and leather armchairs, tastefully adorned with drapery and plants; in short, a proper office in a city whose apartments were now little more than lairs for beasts. Telephones, the Leader’s picture (he was looking well), maps, calendar — this was no painted scenery, the presence of Major Makhmudov testified to that. At first all she saw was a razored, greeny-pink scalp. “Sit,” he said, without looking up. Burly, almost fat, how strange. His blue pencil was underlining words on an arcane mottled document. “Well, what?” he said. “Your report?” The voice was neutral, too low for that polished-stone dome. Daria pushed her papers across. He went “Ah!” A round face, two yellowish chins, a blob of a nose, puffy eyelids, no neck; he lacked the infernal eyes of the street people, but the erratic gaze was animal in its own way… The upper lip peeled back, presumably in lieu of a smile. “Four years in Kazakhstan… Cured of a few errors, are we, Comrade? Serious medicine. Well, you come recommended by Krantz, that’s good enough for me. Speak German? Sehr gut. You’re assigned to office 5 downstairs, room 12, under Captain Potapov. On the front line. Here the front line is everywhere, I warn you…” (As though to confirm this, an emphatic explosion resounded some hundred yards away… A blinding idea: that it was supposed to land here, between the telephone and the winged chair, no it couldn’t land here…) “Dismissed.” He called her back with a short cluck of the tongue. “The rule is discipline and silence, understood?” “Understood, Comrade Major.” He dialed a number, pressing his foot on a bell button hidden beneath the carpet, and a door swung open to the right. Through it came a young soldier in green, pistol in hand, followed by a bespectacled man with a beard, clad in the tunic of a Wehrmacht officer. Makhmudov began shouting, “So, Herr Dingel, you lied to me!” Daria caught the German’s muffled, shaky reply: “It was my duty…”