The Life of an Unknown Man by Andreï Makine Page B

“It’s a small world and yet we’ve never met before…” Simple words that helped him to grasp with fresh intensity what he had become. From being a penniless provincial he had been transformed into a young singer, speaking on equal terms to a young woman of good family from Leningrad. They agreed to meet again, a hint of a reunion that promised a glorious day very soon.
    This was the moment when the taste of hot chocolate became associated with the future life he dreamed of. A peasant’s son, he had managed, not without some gritting of teeth, to win recognition for his talent, to gain acceptance, armed only with his voice. His future was like the overture to an opera, he often pictured himself at the Kirov Theater, in Rigoletto or Boris Godunov.
    From his childhood he retained the memory of those hands, his father’s and mother’s, lined palms, encrusted with earth. His arrival in Leningrad had wrenched him away from the gravitational pull of his origins, liberating his footsteps from the mud of country roads, allowing him to run, to escape… He would live in the weightlessness of song, he thought. Just as others lived from the harsh weight of physical labor. He was sufficiently pleased with himself to justify this dispensation and to declare himself the winner. A conqueror who would collude with the proudest city in Russia, and win acclaim from beautiful women with eyes that shone in the darkness of boxes at the theater.
    Such thoughts were mingled that evening with the clear light of a late sunset, the laughter of his friends in the café’s great hall, and the taste of hot chocolate drunk in little sips.
    The next day the loudspeaker attached to a post opposite the Nord Café was to announce the start of the war. As did thousands of other loudspeakers from the Black Sea to the Pacific.
    In the very same street in September he saw an apartment building whose front had just been ripped out by bombing. The insides of the dwellings, almost undamaged, astonished him more than the totally demolished buildings, already numerous in the besieged city. In an armchair at the far end of a room on the second floor Volsky could make out a body, a motionless face… He hastened to think back to that evening of June 21, the taste of hot chocolate.
    The same memory returned one morning in October: a woman slipped over on the frozen bank of the Neva and he rushed to her aid, caught the bucket she was trying to fill. In the apartments the water had been cut off for weeks but this was when he became aware of the strangeness of the situation. A modern metropolis in which people drew water from the river and drank the murky liquid. He thought again about that cup of hot chocolate.
    He recalled it, too, that night when, in the entrance hall to his apartment building, he heard a child’s voice, a whine similar to the groaning of a drunkard. He climbed the staircase, feeling his way, accustomed to living without electricity, and the moaning came closer, now forming into words, then stopped all at once. He struck a match (a priceless treasure) and saw, at his feet, an old man’s head upon the slender body of a little boy. The flame went out, he gave a call at the doorway to an apartment. A rustling could be heard, no voice. “Wait here,” he said to the child, invisible in the darkness. “I’ll come back. I’ll give you something to eat.” He brought what people fed on in the besieged city: a slab of bread made partly from straw. A burning block of wood from the floor served as a torch to light his path. The child was no longer there. The door to one of the apartments remained open. Volsky peered in and gave a shout, but did not have the courage to venture into the cold caverns of the rooms…
    Back at his own place, he devoured the bread as if someone had tried to snatch it from him. Then remained for a long while in the darkness, picturing the child in a labyrinth of rooms where it had become possible to come across a corpse.