Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  In each exercise everything would change. Except for that jar of tomatoes in the studio at the national radio station. And also that unease when it came to firing at the phantom children. One day Elias caught himself imagining faces he had seen in Dondo, in Kivu, in Cuba …

  A revolution, the instructors used to say, is not just a matter of explosives. It takes long and meticulous preparation. Initially the “popular masses” must be worked on in depth, creating both networks of fighting men and looser ones of fellow travelers and sympathizers, essential to the success of the uprising. The overthrow of a dictatorship cannot be embarked on without first infiltrating the army and the police, winning the approval, or at least the neutrality, of the intellectuals and the media, and sounding out the diplomatic terrain. But ultimately it is a question of having a nose for it: a people ready to support you, a regime ripe for collapse, these things can be smelled. But it still reeks of explosives, thought Elias, sensing the deeply held conviction of his masters in revolution.

  And when your nose failed you, the specialists were there to guide you. These instructors had taken part in the overthrow of plenty of regimes; their experience was undeniable. Professional revolutionaries, Elias reminded himself. On one occasion, they would recount, the kin of the former dictator had been spared; the result: civil war broke out again for another two years. In a coup detat in Central America a banker who should have been subjected to “specific means of pressure” (in plain language, torture or watching the simulated killing of his family) had simply been imprisoned and, after a successful escape, had set about financing a counterrevolution, thanks to his foreign bank accounts (which he would certainly have surrendered under torture). In Southeast Asia, negligence over the execution of a British journalist: instead of using a submachine gun taken from the enemy, the soldiers had given themselves away by using their own service weapons …

  At the end of all these sessions on insurrection techniques, so ingenious and ruthless were the tricks designed to outwit ones fellow human beings that Elias found himself asking, What s the point? In the mouths of the instructors these tactics for fighting and subversion became art for arts sake, glorious goals in their own right, which eclipsed the goal of the revolution itself. They would spend their whole lives, Elias told himself, perfecting their methods, like chess players hypnotized by the marquetry of their own chessboards. What’s the point? … He hurriedly silenced this question, unworthy of a professional.

  His study of Marx, which he returned to at Patrice Lumumba University, helped him to forget this dilettante questioning for a time. Despite the dogmatic solemnity with which the doctrine was taught, for him it still held the savor of that first intellectual revelation, his gropings under the direction of Carvalho, the vet in Dondo. He absorbed and expounded for the examiners the dialectical thickets of Das Kapital, but what remained in his memory was the somewhat crude clarity of Carvalho s observations: “The world is governed by human beings’ desire to dominate their fellows. Man’s exploitation of man. Marx was right! Look at the Portuguese and the colonized peoples. And the rich Portuguese and the poor Portuguese … No truce can ever be possible.” And he would go on to talk about the class struggle.

  And this struggle, Elias now recalled, meant the impaled heads of Angolans displayed alongside the fields, like scarecrows. “For a capitalist,” Carvalho explained, “everything becomes a commodity, everything!” In Das Kapital Elias discovered the secret of this world up for sale. But one step ahead of his comprehension, his memory turned a spotlight on a room painted yellow, where an ugly little soldier, entangled in his lowered pants, hopped up and down in front of a naked, unbearably beautiful black woman. “Commodity — money — commodity,” was Marx’s formula. This naked body transformed into a commodity produced money that, in its turn, became a commodity again: bread brought by the woman to her child, Elias.

  … Later on, during his travels in Europe, he would often hear intellectuals referring, with a little sneer of contempt, to “the Marxist Bible.” Then he would remember his studies in Moscow, aware that his fellow students could all have been accused of taking their expositions of Marx too lightly. Except that for them this much-derided Bible carried with it the crushing weight of the dead, the grief of years of battles and humiliations.

  One day doubt assailed him in the most unexpected way He had just been masterminding the seizure of the airport in that mock-up of a city in which so many successful revolutions took place. The coach taking them back to Moscow broke down, and his companions in arms, both the “revolutionaries” and the “henchmen of the dictatorship,” set off toward a suburban railroad station. He decided to return on foot, intoxicated by the softness of the snow silvering the empty fields and low roofs of a few mournful houses — the first snow since his arrival in Moscow. The first snow of his life. He had imagined a stinging, numbing cold. Now, feeling these large, almost lukewarm snowflakes brushing against his face, he broke into a joyful smile.

  On what was still partly a country road he noticed a very old woman walking so slowly that it looked as if every step she took was set down with great care upon the delicate white embroidery. In a string shopping bag she carried several packets parceled up in coarse gray paper and a loaf wrapped in newspaper. As she made her way around a puddle of water, she steadied herself on the branch of an apple tree that leaned out over the road. Elias suddenly had a profound perception of the moment linking that aged hand with the gnarled bark. The woman stopped, raised her face toward the whirling snow. He believed she was smiling faintly.

  He often thought of that woman again. In a world where the poor, fated to be unhappy, were engaged in their class struggle against the rich, who were inevitably brimming over with happiness, it was difficult to find a place for this elderly passerby on the day of the first snow. Was she poor? Certainly. Markedly more deprived, indeed, than the “popular masses” in capitalist societies battling against the bourgeoisie. But was she unhappy? Elias already knew enough about life in Russia to know the extent to which these unremarked lives could be mysteriously replete with meaning. Besides, would she have been happier if her bag had been bulging with food? If, instead of having passed through wars, purges, famines, she had led a calm and fortunate existence somewhere in the West?

  These questions seemed to him childish and even foolish, and yet they disturbed the rigor of the theories he was learning at the university. An old woman, walking slowly on the day of the first snow, leans on a branch, looks up toward the flurry of snowflakes … Impossible to find a place for this human being in the propaganda trio one saw everywhere on the facades of buildings in Moscow: a worker with muscular arms, a kolkhoznik laden with sheaves of wheat, a bespectacled intellectual with his scientific instruments. These three classes symbolized the present and the future of the country. The old woman was not of their time. Like so many others in this country thought Elias. A whole stratum of life was excluded from the philosophers’ fine systems.

  From that day onward he traveled a lot on foot, in the hope of discovering behind the facades a world peopled by these unclassifiable human beings who challenged Marx.

  One of these strolls on the outskirts of Moscow nearly cost him dearly. He was walking that evening through the heart of an outer suburb where dreary prefabricated dwellings stood cheek by jowl with old wooden houses and structures from the postwar years, those long, single-story erections where in Stalin’s day they deposited the workmen recruited for the reconstruction of Moscow. Occasionally a dark brick wall would rear up, concealing the blackened buildings of a factory. Whether alone or in groups, people walked quickly and in silence, as if to get away from the area.

  Elias was familiar with the different reactions his face provoked. Often a discreet but hostile curiosity, a quick, astonished glance: What’s that negro doing here? Some people, especially the young, had no hesitation in saying it. Occasionally, on the other hand, a broad smile that ought to signify tolerance and hospitality, the ploy he feared th
e most. Rarely simple indifference, which he preferred. But that evening the snow was falling copiously and under the cover of this moving curtain his progress attracted very little attention. His pace was matched by an apparently very simple train of thought: What I can see Is the outcome, admittedly only provisional, of three revolutions, several wars, and the work of two hundred million men and women who for over half a century have been building a new world, in accordance with a grand plan, the dream of humanity …

  He did not notice at what moment the lane he was following began to run alongside a snow-covered railroad track, then dipped beneath the crumbling roof of a kind of train depot. He stopped, attempted to retrace his footsteps, and realized that it was already too late to escape.

  “Shit! I guess they forgot to shut the cages at the zoo. Look, there’s a monkey! Any minute now well see a giraffe!” Elias met the eye of the man who had just spoken. Then all the men, seated in a semicircle, howled with laughter. They were sitting around a metal stove, whose open top belched out flames and acrid, purplish smoke. One of them withdrew a slender iron spike from the fire and plunged it into a bucket. The hissing of the steam mingled with the last of the guffaws.

  “So where did you spring from, sunshine? You climb down out of your tree. You learn to walk. And, fuck me, on your first time out you come round to our place. Well, thanks a lot, you stupid fucker. You Ve made our day…” The men laughed again; the one who had put the spike in the water did an imitation of a monkey jumping out of a tree, starting to hobble along on three legs and scratching the back of his neck with his fourth. Elias tried to back away but, looking round, he saw one of them behind him holding a strip of heated metal, clasped between leather mittens, with a glowing tip that appeared transparent. No threatening gestures, just scorn, almost casual.

  This was not one of those little gangs of youths Elias had so far contrived to avoid. These were older men, he noted, caught off guard themselves by his appearance and seeking to divert attention from whatever they were up to through mockery. “You can get the hell out of here now, Mr. Ape. And well have your shapka. You won’t need it in Africa. Go on. Fuck off! Move it! The zoo shuts in an hour …” A hand reached out toward his head. Elias pushed it away, and at once a rapid blow from an iron rod knocked off his shapka. There was a perceptible smell of burning. He spun round and saw a wisp of smoke rising from the bottom of his coat.

  “Go on, piss off! Don’t you understand human language? Or do you want to be incinerated?” A white-hot spike began waving around in front of his face.

  “I need my shapka … It’s snowing … And as for language, you’re talking like those bastard slave drivers who …”

  Several men got up. “Okay, so you don’t want to get out of here on two legs like everyone else. Fair enough. You can go home on all fours like an ape …”

  He was able to parry the first blows but suddenly felt a sharp burning on the back of his neck, could not repress a cry of pain, was thrown to the ground, dragged outside. A heavy boot kicked him in the head; his vision clouded over. He came to very quickly tried to pick himself up, but was thrust back into a snowdrift. His cheek was pressing against the snow, and this cold seemed salutary to him. With one hand he picked up a handful of ice, clamped it against his burning neck.

  A kind of indifference overcame him. The physical pain was nothing beside the abyss that had just opened up within him. After three revolutions, several wars, over half a century of striving … The dream of humanity …, a faint echo reverberated in his head.

  Even the words now ringing out above his body in the darkness seemed of no interest to him at first. And if they finally intrigued him, it was because he could hardly understand a thing. And yet it was Russian. Not the foul-mouthed Russian often spoken in the streets of Moscow, whose smutty coarseness was familiar to him. No, a language whose rhythms he could make out very well, but whose words were quite unknown. Then he turned his head, trying to see whoever it was uttering these brief delphic sentences.

  To the left of his face he saw a woman’s shoes, of a heavy and ugly design, their leather all worn. Then coarse cotton stockings and the side of a dark coat made of rough woollen cloth. He pictured an elderly woman; the voice matched these clothes and that age, a dull, rather harsh voice. The old woman I saw on the day of the first snow, he suddenly thought, and strangely, this harebrained notion reassured him.

  He heard the crunch of the snow beneath retreating footfalls, then felt a hand touching his head, his cheek. “You can get up now. They Ve gone …”

  He sat up and then, gritting his teeth to suppress a groan, rose to his feet. And remained on the spot for a long while, teetering slightly, not collapsing, thanks to the gaze that rested on him and sustained him. At that moment neither the woman’s beauty nor her youth struck him. No word of gratitude formed in his head. There was this silence, the swirling of snow, and a face that seemed to have been traced in the darkness by the incessant fluttering of the crystalline flakes.

  He would later come to grasp that this was a beauty of an unusually high order. Others would speak of it to him, sometimes enviously, sometimes with regret: a gift from heaven too rich for a young woman from the provinces. And he would feel incapable of explaining that for him what was beautiful, too, was the touching ugliness of the battered shoes she wore that evening, and the muted music of their footfalls on a snow-covered road, and the resinous smell of the railroad in the icy air …

  Throughout his life he would have the impression that he could recall every minute ever spent with her, every twist and turn of the streets they followed together, every fleeting cloud shape above their heads. And yet in the moments closest to death, and therefore the most real, this would be the instant that came back to him, with the patient sorrow of his love: the sharp fragrance of snow, the stillness of a particular dusk, and those eyes that had kept him upright.

  “I THOUGHT I’D FORGOTTEN IT, THAT LANGUAGE. And then when I heard those idiots the words came back to me. In an instant. That’s all there was in our village: prisoners who’d been in the camps. They all dreamed of going off to a big city but they could never manage to get away. Those frozen lands held them captive. The truth is, they were scared of not being able to get back into normal life. For a start there was this lingo they spoke in the camps … So they stayed. Even one of my family …” Her voice broke off; she murmured with a clumsy change of intonation, “I’m called Anna …”

  Elias introduced himself. This only added to the feeling of unreality. They were walking along beneath great cascades of falling snow, as if in the middle of a flapping sail. He had tied the scarf the young woman had lent him over his head. He let himself be guided, in the insane hope that in the end all that had happened would be miraculously made good. Those men for whom he was nothing but a monkey his shapka thrown in the fire, their hatred. In a country that promised a world without hatred …

  “And these prisoners were common criminals, were they?” he asked. His voice betrayed his eager hope of a way out.

  “No. The common criminals managed pretty well at making a fresh start. At least a thief knows why he s been put in prison. These were politicals. Absurd cases. A kolkhoznik had dumped some manure on his vegetable patch. It was just his luck that it was Stalins birthday, and they’d hung up his portrait on the house across the road. The fellow got twenty years. After serving his sentence he was still baffled by how a whole life can be buried under a pile of dung. Well, in fact, it was me that couldn’t understand how he could go on living. Because he did live. He went hunting now and then in the taiga. Even made a collection of dried plants … Or there was that student who, when he was taking notes, wrote down ‘SOSialism.’ For a joke. Someone denounced him. When he came back from the camp he was an old man …” She must have sensed a stifled cry in him and guessed that the pain did not come from the blows he had received. “I don’t know why I started telling you all that. Whatever you do, don’t repeat it to anyone! Oh yes. I was talking about t
he language of the camps …”

  She’s afraid, thought Elias. This young woman, who had the courage to intervene just now, is afraid.

  “So what did you say to those guys at the depot?” he asked her, assuming a relaxed tone. Anna’s voice responded casually echoing his own: “It was the fact that I was talking the convicts’ lingo that surprised them. Not the sense of what I was saying. You see, what mattered most of all to them was to put you down. Human society’s very similar to the animal world in this respect. I’ve studied it on my ethology course. Except that animals don’t use words to injure one of their own species … Here we are. We’ve arrived. Your hostel’s over there. Now I’m going to take the metro …”

  She vanished into the white tempest. Elias took several steps, then ran to return her scarf to her and at the entrance to the metro stopped, stamping his feet amid the piles of snow. He felt himself becoming again what he was for that crowd of Muscovites: a tall black man, vaguely comic, his curly hair white with snowflakes.