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I tramp from one car to the next, increasingly convinced I shall have to spend another day trapped in this town. My verdict of the night before returns, revived by the cold and my rage: Homo sovieticus! That says it all. At this point you could tell them to climb onto the roofs of the cars, or worse still, run behind the train, and not one of them would complain… Homo sovieticus!
Suddenly this whistle. Not the whistle of the train. A short street urchin's whistle, a piercing, peremptory summons, intended for an accomplice. I raise my head above the crowd besieging the steps to the coaches. At the end of the train I see the pianist waving his arm.
"They sometimes add one on, especially when there's a holdup like this," he explains to me as we settle into an ancient third-class coach. "We won't be warm, but you'll see, the tea's even better here."
Which is more or less all he says to me throughout the day His nocturnal recital already hardly seems real to me. In any case, questioning him about that silent music would be to admit that I had seen him crying. So… stretched out on the hare wood of the bench, I set about conjuring up images of the human caravanserai I had observed camped in the waiting room, who are now having a fabulous experience, without paying the slightest attention to it: crossing from Asia into Europe! Europe… Outside the window, in the small rectangle left clear by the frost, what rushes past is always the same infinity of snow, as far as the eye can see, impassive before the breathless advance of the train. The white undulation of the forests. An icebound river, immense, gray, reminiscent of an arm of sea. And once more the sleep of the white, uninhabited planet. I turn slightly, study the old man, motionless on the opposite bench, his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced on his chest. Fingers that know how to play silent melodies. Is he thinking of Europe? Is he aware that we are approaching civilization, cities where time can have a value in stimulating social intercourse, meetings, the exchange of ideas? Where space is tamed by architecture, curved inward by the speed of a highway, humanized by the smile of a caryatid whose face can be seen from the window of my apartment, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt?
Curiously enough, it is on the subject of the beauty of certain streets that our conversation finally takes off, when it is already nearly evening. We have just pulled out of a large city on the Volga. The train has been reorganized, and for a moment I was even afraid we might be abandoned on a siding. There is plenty of room here, as if people considered it beneath them to enter this archaic third-class coach.
My companion gets up, fetches two glasses of tea. On learning that I know Moscow well, he becomes animated, talks to me about the capital with an unexpected precision, with a fondness for this street or that subway station. It's the fondness of a provincial who has lived in the capital, I say to myself, and who likes impressing the people he is talking to with the originality of his personal guided tour. But the more he talks, the more I become aware that his Moscow is quite an odd city, with obvious gaps, with little networks of streets where my memory sees only broad avenues and open spaces. Paying closer attention, I notice several hiatuses in his narrative that the man attempts to avoid, sometimes by breaking off in mid-sentence, or again by telling an anecdote. "Before the war," "During the thirties"; these traces of the past slip out and suggest to me that he is strolling through a city that no longer exists. He finally becomes aware of this, falls silent. At this moment of embarrassment his ear must have detected the same discordant tonality as last night, when I came upon him at the piano. To change the subject, I begin cursing the weather and the delays that will make me miss my co
In earlier times it used to be the name of his father, a playwright, that he would look out for on such posters, and also, from time to time, that of his mother, Victoria Berg, when she was giving recitals. On that day, for the first time, it was his own name that was being advertised. His first concert, a week from now, May 24, 1941.
The shower of rain had made the paper almost transparent, so the previous poster (for a parachute jumping competition) showed through. And the picture of Tchaikovsky, all crinkled, looked like that of a court jester. Furthermore, the concert was to take place at the ball-bearing factory's house of culture. But none of this could spoil his pleasure. The delight irradiated by this waterlogged blue sheet was much more complex than simple pride. There was the joy of the damp, luminous evening emerging, as the storm abated, with all the freshness of a picture printed from a decal. And the smell of foliage dusted with sundrenched raindrops. The joy of streets darkened by rain, along which he strolled absentmindedly, making his way back from the outskirts of the city, where the house of culture was situated, toward the center. Even the auditorium where he was due to perform, an auditorium whose walls were covered with photos of machine tools and whose acoustics left much to be desired, had seemed to him festive and airy.
That evening Moscow was airy. Light beneath his tread in the network of little streets he knew by heart. Light and fluid in his thoughts. Pausing for a moment on the Stone Bridge, he looked at the Kremlin. The restless, gray blue sky lent an unstable, almost dancing air to the cluster of domes and battlements. And to the left of it one's gaze toppled over into the immense void left by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, dynamited several years before.
Several years… As he resumed his walk, Alexeï tried to recall the sequence of those years. The cathedral had been destroyed in 1934. He was fourteen. Fantastic excitement as he felt the sidewalk shuddering after each explosion! Those were the years of happiness. Nineteen-thirty-four, 1935, 1936… Then suddenly this long quarantine descends, as it would during an epidemic. The city grows oppressive around their family. One evening, going up the stairs, he hears the whispering of a man one floor above him, climbing laboriously, absorbed in an almost inaudible but frenzied soliloquy. "No, no, you can't accuse me… What proof do you have? What proof?" Alexeï hears these snatches, slows down, embarrassed to be eavesdropping like this, and suddenly recognizes his own father. This little old man muttering away is his father!… The quarantine lasts. Certain words can no longer be spoken. The Dictionary of the Theater, published by his father at the begi