Советую тем, кто любит читать патриотичные книги о...

Советую тем, кто любит читать патриотичные книги о жизни поколения, которое перенесло годы войны, гонений, лагерей, но при этом не сдалось и не было сломлено! Читайте выписки из книги внутри...

Andreï Makine "The Life of an Unknown Man"

…Volsky and Mila discovered to their amazement that this was a theatre and people, rendered mute with exhaustion, were going to watch a performance. The poster for the Musical Comedy Theatre announced an operetta: “The Three Musketeers”. Without conferring, they moved towards the stage door. An old man greeted them, Volsky mentioned the Conservatoire, asked if they could be useful… Their offer was accepted with a remark Volsky would remember for the rest of his life: “We need voices”…

…He went into the dressing room, peeled away the moustache, wincing into the mirror. And suddenly, in the same reflection, caught sight of Porthos. The man was sitting in a corner, like a punished child, his face shining with sweat. The previous night Porthos has managed to get his wife and children onto one of those lorries that evacuated that lucky ones out of the besieged city. That morning he had learned that the convoy had been bombed and there were no survivors. He had come to the theatre, given a performance. The stage was poorly lit, the audience did not see the tears…That man in tears who had sung and laughed on stage became a fragile but strangely irrefutable proof: no, the city would not fall!..

…Several times the singers has asked to be armed, so they could be sent to a fighting unit. But, curiously enough, the old soldier, who used to escort their troupe would always echo the reply given that day by the manager of the Musical Comedy Theatre: “We need your voices…” He said it again one evening, when he told them that the following day the concert would take place at a very exposed site. “You will be singing under fire. So only volunteers are to come with me”. The response was a torrent of cheerfully indignant exclamations. “Oh Captain, do you doubt your musketeers?”…

…The military guide passed among them, shaked each one’s hand, sometimes muttering a proverb: “No one dies twice, no one escapes a single death”.

….He was posted to the front defending Leningrad. Then transferred to the Volga, to a city that must at all costs be victorious for it bore Stalin’s name. In this battle a bullet grazed his face, his left cheek was gashed, leaving a scar like a little grin: “ You’re never sad with me,” – he took to joking.

…The nurse, who was putting a dressing on his wrist, concluded: “ There you are, Grandpa. Like that you’ll be all set for the next battle”. He burst out laughing and saw a flicker of doubt in the woman’s eyes. A mirror hung on the wall, he went up to it.. And clapped his hand to his head, as if to hide it. His hair was white…

… I spent four years killing men. I wasn’t made for this profession. I loved singing… And I spent four years yelling orders at soldiers, telling them to fire faster, to kill more…

Mila taught music at the school in a neighboring small town. “The head teacher told me the inspector would be coming…She stood there, as still as a rock. Then she went without saying a word. Apparently the songs I teach the children are not ideologically correct”.

…. They often talked now about performances given during the blockade, the audience shivering in the darkness, Porthos singing, his face bathed in tears, actors collapsing on stage, exhausted with cold and hunger. Those wartime days became their strength, their courage, and when they pictured that last concert under gunfire, all fears seemed to them ludicrous: those two agents from Security come to spy on them? A single minute of that concert was far more daunting than any other threat.

… They came looking for her: they were nicknames “black crows”. She threw herself towards Volsky, they kissed, and despite the arms already separated them, succeeded I whispering a few words: “Every day look at the sky, I’ll do the same…”

…Woman, who had been arrested with her, had promised Mila she would find him. What she had to say amounted to a few words: “Ten years in a camp without the right to correspondence”. Few people knew that this “the right to correspondence” signified that the condemned person was shot following the verdict…