vocation,
the realisation of their dreams,
a social position,
a way to develop...
their personalities.
For me of course these things
partly remain.
But mostly it is just
a means to survive.
To survive.
l don't live, l survive.
This is not life.
This is an existence.
Just survival.
Something pushes us
to survive, to survive, to survive.
Because you cannot do
anything else.
To feed your family.
Because...
you have to survive.
For a long time
l believed in my own strength.
l still believe in it.
To a lesser extent.
Hopelessness
stamps its mark on you.
You lose faith.
l used to believe before.
To believe in myself.
lt always worked.
But perhaps, when it doesn't work,
you tend to forget.
Which commandments
do you hold dear?
All of them.
The Commander was grateful
to his friend
for sharing
the burden of his soul.
And he remembered how,
not long ago,
they put out with their two ships
to the White Sea.
They dropped anchor
by the shore.
And the bosun
from his friend's ship,
seizing the little steering wheel,
towed a raft of coal to the shore,
where
a deathly cold outpost
could be seen.
And it seemed to him
that the bosun
looked very much like
Dante's Charon.
Here they go along the shore.
A scent of fog in the air...
and here is the fog.
And then something begins,
something hard to forget.
The soldiers start
to carry the coal,
further away from the water,
nearer to the houses.
The settlement was empty.
Nobody came
out of the houses.
Watching this,
the Commander wanted to ask
the young soldiers:
''Boys,
what era do you come from?
Have l gone mad?
You, boy, come back,
you've lost your way.
You've strayed
into a different time.
The tyrant is dead.
You don't have to go on
any longer.''
lt seemed to him he had
shouted all this many times,
but nobody heard him.
Then somebody shouted
that the tide was on the ebb.
With the remains of the coal
the raft returned to the ship.
Of course, they were freezing,
but come what may
they had to load again
and with the next tide
they had to go back
to the outpost.
The Commander was thinking
of what he saw around him.
What was needed,
he thought,
was not a reform,
but a complete overhaul.
We have to reconsider completely,
what the army should be like.
lt must be reinvented,
starting from the beginning.
Perhaps our whole life, too,
needs this:
to be reinvented, one day,
starting from the beginning.
Perhaps we could invite someone
to help us invent a reasonable life?
wrote the Commander.
What binds us together?
We understand each other,
we trust each other.
We rely on each other,
we have lived
very similar lives,
and most likely
something similar awaits us both
in the future.
Just recently he had had a dream,
in which he was a very old man,
nearing the end,
but he still served
on the same ship.
And he understood
that what terrified him
was not becoming old,
but that his ship
did not become old,
the sea was not old,
the air around was young...
But he was old
and he knew all too well
the rest of the story.
Then he saw his friend's ship
moving along by a rocky shore.
lt struggled against the squall
that was driving the ship
onto the rocks.
''The sea was big...''
The Commander smiled, remembering
this phrase of Chekhov's.
Towards evening, the bosun
and a seaman returned to the ship.
They had taken medical officers
on shore.
All the crew was on board.
We will stay the night here
anchored by the shore
till the storm is over
and in the morning,
God willing,
we will move on,
wrote the Commander.
He added a full stop,
and went to bed.
Serguei Bakai
The Commander
Camera
Alexei Fiodorov
Editor
Leda Semionova
Sound
Serguei Moshkov
Alexander Sokurov
CONFESSlON
from the diary
of a ship Commander
End of Part Three
© Nadejda 1998
Subtitles: Alexei Jankowski
Subtitling by TVS - TlTRA FlLMThe State Film Committee
of Russia
Nadezhda Productions
St.Petersburg