Thoughts on "A Life's Music" by Andrei Makine

A bit about Makine himself. Born in 1957 in Siberia, Soviet Union, he emigrated to France in 1987 and was permitted to stay there. He published in French but claimed his first three novels were translations from Russian. Since his third novel, he came out stating that they had been written in French though Makines written and spoken French are far apart. He studied French literature at university.

A Life's Music was published in 2001 and translated into english by Geoffrey Strachan. This text is 106 pages long and yet it tells a story spanning a good part of 1930s Russia until the post-Stalinist period. There are no markers or names to delineate the time periods (ie, Khrushchev? Brezhnev?) but there is no need. Because A Life's Music is here to show the reader that for homo soveticus, a phrase which is used encapsulate the depths of human suffering experienced under the Soviet Union. It speaks of the weight of history which can reduce diverse peoples to grey slush under a boot, or the weight of the great coats worn by hordes of men and women trekking through Russia from East to West or West to East. Makine reminds the reader that Russia is both Asiatic and Occidental. It is both "civilization" and "savagery", Moscow and the gulags, Siberia.

The main character is Alexei Berg and he has experienced both. A pianist by training, born into a family of reknowned musicians and the Moscovite intelligentsia, he is forced by 1941 to flee. He is 21 then, and due to give his first piano recital at the House of Culture. He enjoys moments of bliss with a girl named Lera. Her family will later betray him to the Soviet police.  Berg's family had by then survived the purges of '37-9 but at the end, the system squashes them. People ostracize and avoid the Bergs. Familiar faces assume new identity: "long-nosed masks", like the ones stuffed with herbs during the Plague to ward off the evil. The look askance at him in hallways and streets. Then, they are coming for him. Symbolic to all of this this - the first part of the narration, is his father's violin. The Bergs burn this incriminating evidence of their bourgeoisie in a desperate attempt to avoid their almost certain fate. But the strings are not loosened and so there is the sharp, resounding sound of strings snapping which resounds throughout the book and in Berg's memories decades later. That's is how his old life ends.

His new life as Sergei Maltev: he assumes a new identity. Not a musician, not an individual, but a soldier. He steals the identity from the corpse of the dead man. He takes clothes. He wrenches off a pair of boots. In this horrifying process, in a remains of a battle field and wounded bodies and human carcasses, he focuses his mind on gathering a new image. He enters the army and is careful to remain anonymous in terms of service and injuries. In the process of killing people and receiving wounds and scars, he feels his old self completely recede - it is barely remembered:

"And when he was finally able to relax the constantly taut string within him, he found himself in the skin of a veteran soldier, taciturn and respected for his nerve, a man among thousands like him, indistinguishable in the column as it trudged along a muddy road, heading towards the heart of the war." (55)

His appearance has changed. So there is both physical and mental reduction or shift, all for the survival of the individual. Makine  highlights these paradoxes, in the soldier's anonymity, there is also danger of being killed. But Sergei Maltev is a survivor. He falls in love for the second time, not the love of a young boy and an alluring, seductive girl but the love of a soldier during convalescence, with the woman who is nursing him. In "smell of iodine" and wounded, bruised bodies, the older women is a saviour. This experience will stay with him for a long time - the iodine stained hands, warm. Sunlight. (59) But no matter, he moves on. He is once more the inanimate soldier, "plywood" and "tin", not the pianist. He cannot even imagine how it was like to sit before a piano and caress the keys. The only consolation he has is a vague feeling of warmth which punctures his exhaustion as he marches, pretending to be visiting his home town. He will be warm one day.

He helps a women bury a small coffin - presumably her son. In turn, she takes him in briefly in return when he faints from exhaustion. Her village part of an effort to build a bridge. The "human ant-swarm" labour and labour, from an order given by Stalin himself. It is a tragic image; human suffering ("padded jackets covered in earth...faces gaunt with hunger" 67) seems boundless when the number of people is endless and not a soul is distinguishable. How far removed, Stalin is, from all of this! Maltev experiences again the warmth of a woman. It is "more substantial than any other truth in the world." Here, there it is obvious that there is a certain hot/cold imagery. Much of the war is set in the desperate Winter offensive of 1941-2 and the Third Reich slowly begins to buckle. Regardless, Soviet deaths are round about ten million. Pre-war life (warm) associated with brief moments of relief and bliss during the war (warm) resonate together, and contrast with the cold winter and war itself, which is hardly every described by Makine. In Berg's memory, it is the moments of warmth which really matter. (68)

A dead squirrel changes Berg/Maltev's life again. A group of soldiers are shaking some trees and pursing it. A branch recoils and hits the creature. It lands lifeless in the snow. Berg watches. Then picks it up. The receding warm from its small, fragile and limp body create an immediate reaction, like an arrow to its target, it wakens the "astonishingly sensitive presence beneath the armour of indifference and toughness he had forged for himself, day after day, in Battle. Before the war..."

The squirrel - warmth - tantalizing life "before the war..."

He saves a General who he as chauffeuring from the wreckage of a bomb. They trek towards Salzburg. Fighting under General Gavrilov's division continues for another two weeks before news of victory reaches them.

Disconnect from reality and victory - "he had the illusion of transit from Vienna to Moscow" (72). A man with one leg is comfortably playing chess - like before the war. He has lost something in the war. But he seems at peace. That is how it will be from now on. Juxtaposition between memories before the war, reality after the war creates difference and a feeling of being lost. Again, there are no details of what Maltev is doing, before General Gravrilov seeks him out again. There is a break in the text. (74-5)

Maltzev falls in love with Gavrilov's daughter, Stella. It is not the love of warmth or comfort but a love lived in the past, a "first love".  She is 17, the age he was, before the war. Makine never fails to highlight their age difference, their appearance (one youthful, frail, the other scarred and old):

He was 27 now. But the girl at the piano made this question of age irrelevant, for he felt he was outside the ordinary currency of days, in a parallel time, in which he could relive those three  years spent amid the masks.

 It would appear that the Soviet arm of coercion has pitilessly stripped Berg of his youth and changed it into a time of caution and terror, the time when the family burned the violin. Instead, he should have been growing and falling in love. And so it was for a whole generation of Russian people under the Soviet state.