Read The Life of an Unknown Man for Free Online Page B

talk whenever you like. But before that I want to tell you a little story. Quite Chekhovian, by the way. I have it from a friend. He was an orphan. As a child he used to be sent with his comrades to gather vegetables on collective farms. On one occasion it was a type of rutabaga they had to dig up from more or less frozen soil. They were scrabbling about in the mud and suddenly my pal unearthed a skull, then a soldier’s helmet. Their supervisor told him to go and take them to the farm management. He set off and spent a long time floundering across plowed fields, then he stopped and… How can I put it? He realized that he was all alone on this earth. The low northern sky, icy fields as far as the eye could see, and himself with that skull and the helmet in a bag. It’s quite upsetting, you know, for a child to confront such complete, almost cosmic, loneliness: himself, the sky, the mud under his feet, and no one from whom he can expect a word of tenderness. No one in the whole universe! No grandfather to send a letter to… So, you see, I’m quits with Chekhov and his Vanka. As you’ll have guessed, that little lad amid the fields was me.”
    As it happened, his story would achieve nothing. It might even have furnished one more motive for their breakup: a refusal to share the past of someone you no longer love.
    A wounded man can do no other: Shutov had learned this in the army. When hit, a body struggles against the first wave of pain, flails about, fights, then, overcome, goes rigid. During the final months of their relationship he had behaved like a wounded man embarking on his dance with death, resisting it, clutching it to his heart. Then one day in a crowded café he had gone rigid. “In Russian shut means ‘clown,’” Léa was saying. “A buffoon.” A sad clown, he had added, conscious that the word defined all too well what he had become.
    A gray spring came, without savor: the emptiness of the streets at night, the blue of days that started for him at three o’clock in the afternoon, and this attic, the only place where his life still had any kind of meaning. Thanks to those cardboard boxes Léa was going to take away.
    And if anywhere else existed it was that park of thirty years ago in Leningrad, two shadowy figures walking slowly along, beneath the autumn leaves, their breathing matched to the rhythm of a poem.
    Drink helped him to believe that this country beneath the golden foliage still existed. This certainty became so intense that one day Shutov accomplished something that had earlier seemed inconceivable: he found an agency that obtained visas for Russia and now, once a fortnight, he packed a suitcase, booked a ticket. And did not go.
    In the end he admired the dexterity with which Léa had transformed their relationship into a vague camaraderie. After two months’ absence she began to show signs of life but now in the guise of an old friend, well disposed, devoid of passion. Asexual. It was in this guise that she telephoned him toward the middle of May. Her voice created a distance such that Shutov thought he must be speaking to a woman he had met during another period of his life. At the end of the conversation the old Léa gave herself away but advisedly: “Do you remember the coffee table I bought that’s at your place? And my corner bookshelf? I’m going to come over with a friend who’s got a car. But I wanted to let you know in advance… In fact, I’ve told him we were just good friends and I’d left those bits of furniture at your place for the time being. He doesn’t need to come up if you’d prefer him not to…”
    Shutov protested vehemently, afraid of seeming like a jealous old fogy. And in this way he was able to see Léa’s friend (the figure of a tall adolescent, a fine, harmonious face). He greeted him and retreated to the kitchen, heard them talking about their apartment. They were discussing where they would put the pieces of furniture they were collecting.