In the Name of a Soldier

I will spend the following month in Russia and will not see Jean-Claude until the end of October. The geographic separation gives the illusion of a long gap; the time we spent looking for a publisher and waiting for the book’s release was in another era—a far distant past. Especially since in this part of central Siberia, on the banks of the Taimura, the snow arrived the last week in September. In the morning, the fishing nets hanging over the fence of the house where I am staying are covered in a lace made of frost. Piotr, an old friend of mine who invites me to stay with him in this almost deserted village, works in Moscow and runs around Europe and America, but as soon as the moment presents itself he comes back here, to the house where he was born and that he wants to save from ruin. The only street in the area features many izbas—log huts—with sunken roofs and empty windows.

Just like his return to this house, Piotr’s story often goes back toward a subject that has pursued him since his youth and that he talks about, unaware of the repetition, with what must be the same experience of turmoil, the same pain, every time. Every night, concerned that he will bring it up and suffer as a result, I try to reroute the conversation, pushing him to tell me about his latest travels or reminding him of when we were young, our military service in Afghanistan. He gives in, responding through a haze of visions that cloud his gaze, and then, inevitably, he begins talking about his father.

I know by heart the story of the man who died when Piotr was eleven. An artilleryman during the Second World War, the young soldier had found himself all alone with his cannon one day, facing the German tanks. The other gunners had just been killed. There were a few interminable seconds during which the idea of his finished life—an imminent death beneath the tracks of a tank, his body being crushed between the steel and the dirt, this physical contact with the void—became a part of him, a gash that would never heal over in his memory.

Piotr sighs. “He told me about that episode more than once, but I was ten years old, I wanted to be running through the taiga forest, not staying at the house and listening to the old people.”

A short while afterward, his father died. The boy, without realizing it, had retained not so much the story itself (the shots of a nearby battery would save the young artilleryman) but the impression of a very great fragility in his father, who in the end he had known so little and had tried so little to get to know. With age, this vague culpability would only worsen, and now, fifty years later, Piotr probably tells himself that the twenty-year-old soldier (his father) could today be his son.

He must also think that by letting his father speak, by listening to him, he could have, by way of his childish questions, his curiosity, or his naive astonishment, erased from his father’s wounded memory the deadly emptiness he felt in front of those tank cannons.

“I believe my father understood a very simple truth that most people avoid thinking about,” Piotr tells me. “Whatever story we tell, religion or not, belief or not, we are always alone before death. And essentially, he lived his whole life like that—alone! No, he loved my mother, me, and my sister, to be sure. But that other solitude, the one he experienced during the war, he never got over it.”

I don’t interrupt him, telling myself that this sense of solitude, like an inheritance of culpability, had been passed down from the father whose confidences he had neglected. And now he will continually—and, as he grows older, more and more painfully—relive this scene: his father’s wavering silhouette, that terribly young man lost amid explosions, overturned earth, and dead bodies ripped to shreds by the caterpillar tracks. Alone.

I begin to talk to him about Lieutenant Schreiber as a response to his own story. A young French tank operator at the other end of Europe, the same frozen plains in that winter of 1944–1945, the same vision—monotone and atypical every time—of torn bodies, the same banging of shell bursts on steel, the same awareness of the extreme speed with which his breath (“my breath,” the soldier thinks) could be mixed with the snow, catch, and give out.

Minute by minute, Piotr seems to be emerging out of the past that has been keeping him prisoner and starts asking me questions, asking me to specify certain dates, names, and places.

I end up taking him through Lieutenant Schreiber’s entire book! I don’t even notice, at first, that in the evening Piotr no longer starts in again with his chronicle of the young artilleryman, his father, alone in the face of death.

From now on, he knows that his father was not alone, and that another life, so different from his own and yet so close, was keeping the young Russian soldier company in the inferno of battle. And that perhaps, by an unimaginable chain of coincidences, his father’s life had been saved thanks to the courage of a young French lieutenant, thanks to that “smiling and fearless kid” who was fighting in Alsace, in Germany, and attracting his share of Panzers, too. The very same tank, a heavy German Tiger, that could have, had it found itself on the Eastern Front, wiped out with one shell or a round of machine gun fire the silhouette of a young artilleryman astray among the dead.

Piotr’s voice changes, free of the tension that always gave him away as soon as he talked about himself, about his parents. His gaze loses that saddened background he usually tried to conceal by exaggerating his cheerfulness and carefree mood.

He seems soothed to me, like a man who, after a very long wandering, has finally returned to his home.

The day of my departure, I am awakened by the sound of hammering. The sun has not yet come up and it is the frost’s whiteness that is filling the izba with brightness, an already wintry light. I think that Piotr is perhaps in the process of repairing his old boat, or perhaps strengthening the fence. I get dressed, go out onto the small wooden front steps, and I see him. One nail squeezed tightly between his lips, he sticks another in as he attaches a small board to the corner of his house. I take a few steps and make out the characters lined up next to each other on it from one end to the other. The inscription, in blue felt pen, marks the freshly planed wood: Rue du Lieutenant Schreiber (Lieutenant Schreiber Street).

During the six-hour return flight from Siberia to Moscow, I have the time to recall a good number of the cities, towns, and villages that Jean-Claude liberated aboard his tank between Provence and Alsace. I know that not one street, not one town square in any of those amnesiac localities, bears the soldier’s name.