Hubert Mingarelli

Four Soldiers – Hubert Mingarelli (2003 transl. Sam Taylor 2018) 155 pages

I really loved Hubert Mingarelli’s A Meal in Winter when I read it six years ago and so I was overjoyed to find a copy of Four Soldiers in my beloved local charity bookshop. This had a lot in common with its predecessor, being a sparse tale of servicemen which focussed on their humanity rather than their role in conflict. But it was resolutely its own tale too.

The four soldiers are friends thrown together by circumstance during the Russian Civil War in 1919. Resourceful, skilled Pavel, naïve gentle giant Kyabine, quiet, thoughtful Sifra and the narrator Benia. They keep each other company during the tedium of waiting for orders, close to the Romanian border:

“Because we didn’t know where we would be tomorrow. We had come out of the forest, the winter was over, but we didn’t know how much time we would stay here, nor where we would have to go next. The war wasn’t over, but as usual we didn’t know anything about the army’s operations. It was better not to think about it. We could already count ourselves lucky to have found this pond.”

What is so striking about the soldiers is how terribly young they are. We are never told their ages, but their behaviour, their lack of experience, their superstitions – all emphasise that they are little more than children caught up in something far beyond their control, for which they may have to pay the highest price.

Their concerns are ordinary, not political or idealistic. They play dice; they swim; they smoke; Pavel has nightmares; they take turns to sleep with a watch that contains a picture of a woman that they think brings them luck.

Mingarelli doesn’t seek to explain how they ended up there or what they hope for beyond it. By focussing on the present he is able to convey how caught they are by circumstance, how hope lingers but is unexpressed.

“Barely had we finished drinking that tea before we became nostalgic for it. But, all the same, it was better than no tea at all.”

The simplicity of the plot, imagery and prose is so finely balanced. Mingarelli conveys a vital story that needs no adornment while at the same time driving home its importance and universality.

“I advanced. But I did so evermore sadly. The sadness was stronger than me. It was because of the smell of potatoes slung over my shoulder. It didn’t evoke anything precise, that smell. Not one specific event, in any case. What it evoked was just a distant time.”

Four Soldiers isn’t remotely sentimental or sensationalist, and it’s the ordinariness it depicts that makes it so devastating, and humane.

“The silence and the darkness covered us.

Then suddenly, almost in a whisper: ‘I wrote at the end that we had a good day.’

It was very strange and sweet to hear him say that, because, my God, it was true, wasn’t it? It had been a good day.”

Susan at A Life in Books, a great champion of novellas whose reviews are a significant contributor to my ever-spiralling TBR, has written about Four Soldiers here.

Temperatures have dropped in the UK and I’m writing this after coming in from a surprise snow flurry, while Scotland’s had proper snow, so I think now it’s December & officially winter. My choices this week are suitably wintry in theme, but they’re not a big tome to curl up with on a winter’s day. I’m going through a prolonged novella phase at the moment and these are excellent examples of how much can be achieved in a short space. They’re small, but powerful.

Firstly, A Life’s Music by Andre Makine (2001, trans. Geoffrey Strachan) which comes in at 106 pages. The narrator is stuck in a snowbound railway station awaiting the Moscow train:

“Suddenly everything is illuminated by a truth that has no need of words: this night lost in a void of snow; a good hundred travellers huddled here; each seems as if he were breathing gently upon the fragile spark of his own life; this station with its vanished platforms; and these notes stealing in like moments from an utterly different life.”

The notes come from a piano being played by an elderly gentleman, tears streaming down his face. When they finally board the train, he tells the narrator his story, and why the music makes him cry. It is a tale of war and persecution, and of shifting identities in order to survive:

“As a result of this fear, and the assiduity with which he copied the actions of others during those first few weeks, he did not feel as if he were engaged in combat. And when he was finally able to relax the constantly taut string within him, he found himself in the sin of a veteran soldier”

Makine is interested in human endurance, in cruelty, in love and in moments of transcendence. He is brilliant at using small moments to illuminate big themes.

“To his surprise he felt himself growing increasingly separate from the wind, the earth, the cold, into which he had almost merged. But more surprising still was this simple bliss: the warm line where the woman’s body touched his own at night. Just this line, a gentle, living frontier, more substantial than any other truth in the world.”

A Life’s Music is a haunting tale written by a master. Makine proves that you don’t need to write at length to create something substantial. Stunning.

Secondly, A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli (2012 trans. Sam Taylor 2013) which is only 138 pages long. The premise of A Meal in Winter is incredibly simple, and the themes it explores incredibly complex. Three German soldiers find a Jewish man when they are on patrol in Poland. They do not share a common language with the young man and they take him prisoner with ease . They then retreat to an abandoned cottage to cook their meagre rations on a freezing winter’s day before taking him back to their barracks to be shot.

“everything would be better once it was warmer. Smoking and eating in front of the stove! What could be better? We would smoke while we waited for the bread to thaw and for the cornmeal to cook.”

The focus on essential human need for food, warmth and shelter is a master stroke by Mingarelli. The men are human first, soldiers second. Will they recognise their common humanity with their terrified prisoner and what will it mean if they do?

Mingarelli is excellent at building characters, scenes and atmosphere in a few words, and the desperate situation for all concerned is brilliantly evoked, within a harsh, freezing landscape:

“Sky and earth had blurred into one, and there was no comfort to be found in either. While I packed the snow into our mugs, I wondered again how it was possible that we had once seen so many sunflowers here, and not so long ago either. The landscape had been so full of them, so completely covered, that it seemed their oil must have been flowing like a river somewhere.”

A Meal in Winter is a powerful and moving novella that does not offer simple answers; it has really stayed with me.

To end, I know it’s a wee bit early for Christmas tunes, but I’ve chosen it because of the excellent snowy outfits. Remember kids: real fur is cruel, and spandex leggings are not suitable winter attire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxm1FlLSfe4