Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  He spent several days looking for her at Moscow University, wandering the corridors, waiting as they came out from lectures. This young woman’s own life, he understood, cast doubt upon that future world he had dreamed of. And yet it was she who gave this dream its simple, human, and tragic truth.

  It’s not the fact that she’s beautiful … He often began in this way without finishing his thought when, after he’d found Anna again, he picked her out amid the rowdy throng of the students. Hiding behind a pillar in the main hall of the faculty he saw young women just as pretty and much better dressed than her. It was the start of the 1970s, the first post-Stalin generation was coming up to the age of twenty … He watched them passing, attracted glances, sometimes amused, sometimes scornful (the whole range of these expressions was familiar to him). And suddenly this long, shapeless black coat, these old shoes, their heaviness jarring with the slenderness of the ankles. The face looked severe, almost hostile. The eyes, slanting toward the temples, resembled those of a she-wolf.

  No, it’s not her beauty …, thought Elias and hastened to go outside, to make his way toward an empty pathway, knowing that very soon he would hear footfalls behind him and would recognize them. A hand would slip round his arm and they would plunge into the maze of little streets over which a winter dusk was falling.

  So many things about her should have displeased him! Her clothes, more suited to the peasant women laden with bundles who jostled one another in the railroad stations of Moscow. Her harsh voice, devoid of seductive musicality. The toughness that sometimes showed through the vulnerability of her youth.

  With other women he had always known where he was going, what he expected of them, and what they hoped for from him. With her … Anna clasped his arm and they began walking at random, or not entirely so, for she was showing him a Moscow he would never have discovered on any map. They spoke little, without any logic, looking at one another through the rippling of the snow, in silence, as if after years of separation.

  Was he right to hide, to wait for her outside in these empty, snow-filled pathways? Like a meeting between secret agents, he thought with a smile. She seemed to be grateful for his discretion. He was not unaware of what it signified in this country, the fact of “going out with a black man.” Sometimes, on the other hand, she showed herself indifferent to what people might think of them as a couple. As on that evening when she stopped in a courtyard beyond the reach of the city s hubbub. They could hear the rustle of the snow against the windows and the slow, grave notes of a piano. On the second floor of an apartment block the interior of a vast room, dimly lit, pictures on the walls and the silhouette of the person playing. People were coming into the courtyard, crossing it, going up to their homes. A few of them turned back to satisfy themselves that this young woman and this African, motionless beneath the falling snow, were not a mirage. Elias felt Annas fingers squeezing his hand. The life that could be guessed at behind the second-floor windows suddenly seemed to him very close to what the two of them could have lived together …

  One day, when they were sitting in a tea shop, he asked her, with a little nod toward the other customers: “What do they think when they see us together?”

  “If I tell you the truth, you’ll be upset …”

  “Go ahead. I’m beginning to be immune.”

  “Two schools of thought. The first think I’m simply a slut. The second think I’m a slut who wants to go abroad at any price. There … No, I almost forgot. There must be one charitable soul among them who thinks that in four generations a union such as ours might produce a new Pushkin …”

  “You know, one of our instructors puts it with a bit more humor. A countrywoman comes to Moscow. For the first time in her life she sees a black man. ‘Oh, look, a monkey in the street!’ The black man remarks politely: ‘No, citizen. I’m an African.’ The countrywoman: ‘Ooh! And, what’s more, it’s a talking monkey’ … After all, the Portuguese didn’t think any differently when they cut our heads off in ‘sixty-one.”

  “Let’s leave! The way they’re looking at us makes me feel as if I had glue on my skin. I feel dirty.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I used to think more or less the same as them!”

  Humor often helped them. That glance, at once alarmed and confused, from a lady who found herself next to Elias one evening at the theater. The lights went down and he whispered in Anna’s ear: ‘Tm going to tell her IVe just been playing Othello and didn’t have time to remove my makeup …” The actors were dressed as soldiers in the civil war. and the stale dialogue matched the dust on their costumes. One of them declaimed ecstatically rolling his eyes upward: “The fire of our revolution will give birth to the new man!” At the interval Anna suggested they leave.

  The first snowy breeze restored them to the life they loved. They let themselves wander through the labyrinth of little alleys that had survived the follies of reconstruction, walked down to the frozen ponds in a park, hearkened to the wind lashing the turrets of a mined monastery. The world reminded them of the play they had just fled: a pompous and loquacious farce forever shuffling its masks and its ham actors. Not to mention a certain lady in the eleventh row, contemplating the empty seat on her right with relief … They no longer needed that world.

  What he felt was so simple he did not even try to put it Into words. It was enough for him to be walking with her beneath the snow, to feel the warmth of her hand, then the absence of this hand, the icy scent of the air, and on the frozen window of a late and almost empty bus, to see the dark circle left by Anna’s breath: she would peer through it from time to time, so as not to miss their stop, and that delicate trace of her breath would quickly become covered again with crystals of hoarfrost. When they got off. it seemed to him as if that rickety bus was carrying away with it a very important fragment of their lives.

  He now had a breathless attachment to things that had previously seemed insignificant, invisible. One day, as he waited outside the university cloakrooms, he noticed a black garment in the row of coats and immediately recognized its shape and tired fabric. This gloomy place, bristling with coat hooks, was suddenly filled with an intense and vibrant life for him, much more real than everything happening elsewhere in that great building groaning with marble. He went up to it and saw that the last snowflakes were melting on the black coat’s worn collar. So Anna had only just arrived for her lectures, and the waiting period he must now endure seemed to him very different from the hours and minutes that passed for the others.

  He had never lived through such moments in the company of a woman and indeed had never imagined himself capable of living and seeing with this grievous felicity, this hallucinatory sharpness. It was so new for him that one day he felt tempted to make fun of the extreme sensitivity he now felt within himself. “The new man!” he declared, mimicking the costumed revolutionary in the play he had seen with Anna. He smiled, but the description did not seem incorrect: an unknown being was coming to life within him. And when he thought about this new presence, an alloy of tenderness, confidence, peace, and the terrible dread of losing what he loved, a memory came back to him whole: the threshold of a hut at nightfall and the child burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.

  He now believed he had found the one to whom he could speak of that child, whose existence he had so far never admitted to anyone.

  FOR THE MOMENT THE LECTURE HALL WAS EMPTY. Elias walked right up to the back row, where not even the recalcitrant students bothered to climb. He lay down across the seats and followed the slow awakening of the room as an invisible witness: the first voices, still resonant and distinct, the thumping of bags on the desktops, the rolling of a pen, an oath, then the crescendo of the uproar, laughter and, closer to his row, a tune being whistled, as if apart from the general cacophony. But above all that taut nerve within him, the timid hope of being able to make out Anna’s voice amid all this talk. Finally the rapid diminuendo of the noise, the lecturers abrupt, leonine cough, the prac
ticed rhythm of his percussive delivery.

  Lying there, Elias could see the silent, tumultuous precipitation of the white flurries outside the high bay windows. He told himself that from time to time, as she looked up from her notes, Anna might also be noticing this snowy tempest.

  “… Creatively and with genius, Lenin thus develops the Marxist theory of socialism. Employing arguments that are historically and logically incontrovertible, he demonstrates that the construction of a socialist society is possible within one country, even if it is surrounded by hostile capitalist neighbors …” Elias listened to the less tedious fragments, including this one, which, without the censorship he usually imposed on himself, provoked the thought: “How true all this is. And how pointless …” Yes, incongruous in the universe where outside the window dusk was slowly falling on a snowy day.

  He knew that after these lectures Anna would stay behind in the lecture hall for a few minutes to chat with a tall red-haired girl, her friend, who had transformed her first name into the somewhat improbable “Gina.” On this occasion it seemed to be a conversation embarked on long before, for Anna was merely responding distractedly to Gina s unpleasant and vehement remarks.

  “No, you do what you like,” Gina was saying. “Look. When it comes to negroes, I know the score. Hes nice enough today, your Congolese … right, Angolan, I mean. But don’t forget. A black man’s a rutting orangutan. And once he’s screwed you it’s bye-bye babyl And you’ll be left with a little half-monkey on your hands. And taking pills for who knows how many tropical diseases …”

  “Listen, Gina, we haven’t got to that stage at all, him and me. And he’s never

  “Okay, he hasn’t got into your pants yet, this saint. He’s just biding his time, that’s all. So it’s up to you to choose your day Yes, your day He’s polygamous like they all are down there. And it’ll be your turn to get laid on, let’s say, Wednesdays. After all the rest of the tribe …”

  On his way there Elias had been planning to appear in front of them, leaping out from the row where he had hidden, to take them by surprise. He was hoping to get himself accepted by the redheaded Gina. He was even preparing to do his number, emitting the cry of a rutting orangutan, when the true sense of this teasing suddenly became clear to him. All these taunts about the erotic excesses of black men were nothing more than folklore, to which he had long since become accustomed. The true question had the unvarnished and woeful banality of real life: after her studies Anna ran the risk of ending up in some remote corner of her native Siberia, so she must invent a means of remaining in the paradise of Moscow. Marry an African? Gina had considered this and arrived at her verdict: you’d be better off going and teaching Hegelian dialectics to the wolves in the taiga …

  At a certain moment the argument began to go around in circles. Elias remained lying there, and with his head tilted slightly backward, he saw the swirling of long plumes of snow around a lamppost. A simple and intense happiness was conjured up by this hypnotic movement. Their wanderings through Moscow beneath surges of white … The little circle of melted hoarfrost made by Anna’s breath on the window of a bus … He closed his eyes, tried not to hear the two voices down at the bottom of the lecture hall, discussing the pros and cons of his blackness.

  Anna said very little, in fact. Elias thought he could make out the rather slow intonation that he often noticed when she was speaking. “Look, Gina, of course he s black and all that. But he understands me like nobody else …” There was an exaggeratedly scornful laugh from Gina, the click of a lighter, and this observation: “You’re really stupid, my little Anna. Though … come to think of it maybe you’re made for each another. He’s just climbed down from his baobab tree and you’ve just emerged from your bear’s den.” As if she had not heard, Anna continued in the same dreamy tone: “And then, don’t laugh, but he’s a bit like a knight in shining armor! Yes. You know, I read that poem a thousand times in my teens. You remember. A lady drops her glove into an arena full of lions and tigers. The beasts roar, but this knight goes to retrieve the glove and returns it to the lady … Yes, I know, I know … A childishly romantic German poem … But you see, with him I feel I’m never telling lies. While with Vadim everything becomes false. Even the way I walk. With Vadim even the snow smells like ice from the fridge …”

  Elias saw this young man with Anna the following evening. Thanks to the conversation in the lecture hall he knew that Vadim was a Muscovite, the son of a senior government official. “If I were you,” Gina had yelled, Td stick to him like glue. In two years’ time hell have a diplomatic post abroad.” Elias had pictured him as tall, arrogant, athletic, a worthy representative of the capital’s gilded youth. He detested him before having seen him.

  Vadim came into the entrance hall of the library and for a few seconds was blinded. He took off his misted-over spectacles, began wiping them, and, with his myopic eyes tightly screwed up, peered into the surrounding haze. He was tall, with a slight stoop and a handsome face spoiled by the childish softness of his lips. In taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his glasses he had dropped a small piece of card, no doubt his library ticket. He leaned forward, looking around him still with this tentative, myopic air. Elias, who was watching the scene reflected in a mirror at the end of the entrance hall, had an impulse to go and help him.

  Anna arrived at that moment, picked up the card, walked with Vadim to the exit. They paused a few yards away from Elias, who caught the young man’s half wistful, half vexed words: “No. You know, Mama’s told me I’ve got to be careful about my bronchitis. Especially because out there, in midwinter …” They went out, and Elias noticed that Anna’s gait was indeed no longer the same: the measured steps you take alongside an old man.

  Two days later he learned that during the vacation she would be going to her village in eastern Siberia. “Perhaps I could …” It did not feel as if he were asking her, it was the echo of a dream finding expression almost without his knowing it. “It takes seven days, and it can easily reach fifty below over there,” she replied, as if trying to dissuade him.

  In the course of the umpteenth assault on the “presidential palace,” Elias stumbled, fell, and sprained his foot. Having succeeded in making the doctor believe this, he gained an extra week of leave.

  They set off just as the weather had turned warmer. Moscow smelled of damp turf. During the second night, in a station close to the Urals, Elias climbed down onto the footboard of the coach and found he could not breathe. The frozen air had the cutting hardness of a crystal.

  3

  EXTREME COLD DARKENS THE SKIN more than sunburn. Elias learned this from observing the Siberian who got onto the train at Krasnoyarsk. A face burned by chilblains, hands rutted with swarthy cracks. “That’s right. It’s the true color of gold,” the man joked, in response to Anna’s quick glance. He was sharing a compartment with them. Out of his bag a meal appeared: an earthenware pot containing salted mushrooms (“We’ll give them time to breathe, the brine’s completely frozen”), smoked elk meat, a couple of pints of dark vodka infused with bilberries. He offered it, too, to an elderly woman who spent every day on her couchette opening and closing a little casket. He talked about his occupation, about extracting nuggets from the permafrost, about how his sleep was plagued by swarms of mosquitoes and the growling of bears. After the third glass he thumped Elias on the shoulder and proclaimed with warm, fraternal emotion, “Last January when it was sixty below and windy as well, I turned blacker than you in the —” He was about to say “face” but stopped himself and uttered a word that was incongruous, because too old-fashioned and poetic in the context, life, more appropriate for the countenance of an icon.

  Everyone laughed, and Elias perceived the distance they had traveled since Moscow. His color no longer made a monkey of him, nor a propaganda symbol, nor a totem that required bowing and scraping from humanists. It was visible, of course, but just like the marks of frost on a face. All the man in his clumsy way wanted to say to him was:
“The fact that you re black is nothing. Worse things happen.” He talked about one of his comrades who had had an arm torn off by an excavator. The woman told them that what she was carrying in her casket was her husbands ashes, as well as the fragment of a shell that had remained in the old soldiers leg for thirty years …

  They were drawing close to the limits of the empire, a place where brutalized lives run aground, human beings considered undesirable in the big cities. This end of the world blended together a multiplicity of ethnic groups and customs, a variegated universe that embraced this African as one more nuance in the chaotic mosaic of humanity. Elias would become aware of this later. For the moment he was trying to befriend a Buryat child, who was out in the corridor staring at him from the narrow slits of his eyes. Who am I for this child? Elias wondered. Maybe simply the closest to what I am …

  At the start of the journey Anna seemed tense, vigilant over every word spoken. Traveling in the company of a black man, that’s a bold exploit! he thought, with a smile. The “rutting orangutan” came to mind, and he guessed that she dreaded an even more extreme gesture, a remark that would put her on the spot. To be taken for a monster of lubricity amused him, especially since for days now the only question that had truly preoccupied him was how to explain what the scent of the snow in the folds of that gray woolen dress meant to him. And the footprints they left at a tiny remote station in the middle of the taiga. And the fragrance of the tea she brewed for him each morning. There was more truth in the headiness of these moments than in all the declarations of love in the world. But to say so would already have been a declaration.

  The journey lasted so long that one evening he caught himself having forgotten its goal. Or rather the sole purpose of the endless pounding of the track was now these brief lapses into beauty, and he did not know how to talk about them to Anna.