Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  Beneath our feet, in the marine depths, the steel tubes continue to pump the black blood that will turn into money, arms, the red blood of the dead, bought female flesh. I want to say this to Elias, to shake his faith, to mock his obstinacy. Two months previously I had seen Anna at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Maputo, where her husband had been posted. She reminded me of a big smiling doll, uttering bland inanities, batting her eyelashes with the regularity of an automaton. I was positioned somewhat to one side, and I could see that the fingers of her left hand were kneading the handle of her handbag, her thumbnail was tearing the leather, and this tensed hand was the only true and living part of this clockwork doll.

  “Two months ago, at Maputo,” I say, “I ran into … Anna.”

  Maputo. Beyond words.

  I take a breath before deciding to tell him what I think of this woman, what a Russian can think of this Russian woman, and what might perhaps be missed by an African or, quite simply, the man who loved her and still loves her. I don’t have time to go on. Elias starts to talk very softly, his gaze lost in the supple motion of the waves slipping along the jetty. An evening, the same gathering of guests in an embassy garden, the same expressions, either rigid or, on the contrary, animated by the grimaces of social chitchat, the same routine conversations where no one listens to anyone. He is separated from Anna by a few feet of this air laden with hypocrisy. They cannot speak to one another; they must not betray their past in any way, not a gesture, not a smile. For them to stand so close to one another without recognizing one another is the best way of pretending to be strangers. She looks like a big, beautiful doll, he thinks, and doubtless everyone else thinks the same. He has aged, she must be telling herself; his hair is turning gray, there’s that scar on his temple, and his wrist in the plaster cast concealed by the sleeve of his shirt. She lets this doll do the talking for her, he thinks, and is becoming just as I knew her in Moscow, that quivering of the eyelashes is exactly as it used to be … For several minutes, as the guests come and go across the garden, they are left alone. Without turning his head toward Anna, Elias recites the names of streets in Moscow at random. She repeats them, in a hesitant echo, then grows bolder and murmurs: “So you haven’t forgotten them …” Other names, precious passwords, are whispered: those of little stations far away in the middle of the taiga. The beautiful doll smiles at a couple who greet her in passing. Anna whispers again, her lips hardly open: “I’ve had a letter from Sarma. They’re asking when you’ll come back … So glad to meet you … Oh, very lovely! Especially the Maputo game reserve and Inhaca Island …” The doll speaks to a couple, an extremely suntanned man, a pale, sickly looking woman. Elias moves away, carrying with him just the melody of that “when you’ll come back …”

  That night in Cabinda I believe I have understood what he truly experienced at Sarma: a life that comes into being when history, having exhausted its atrocities and promises, leaves us naked beneath the sky, confronting only the gaze of the one we love.

  Some weeks after that encounter with Anna at the reception he almost died in an ambush to the north of Mox-ico. He hardly mentioned it to me, not wanting to strike a warrior’s pose. All I remember is the comment he made softly, as if to himself: “When death stares us coolly in the eye we perceive that in our lives there have been a few hours of sunlight or of darkness, a few faces to which we return continually and that what has kept us alive, in fact, is the simple hope of finding them again …”

  Moxico. Games for grown-ups.

  For us, the years that will follow are to be a time of defeat, flight, scattering. Elias will live through them without any change of attitude, as if the goal he has always pursued had not lost all meaning. One day I will learn that he has conducted negotiations single-handedly with the men of UNITA in southern Moxico and succeeded in avoiding the resumption of fighting. Just on that occasion, just in that area, saving the lives of the inhabitants of just one village. I will remember what he said about the modesty of the tasks he henceforth set himself. In the conflagration Africa was entering into at that time, this modest success will seem to me more important than all the planning for the planet. Throughout the discussions in a hut in the village a child was playing at the other end of the room; sitting on the ground, she was building a pyramid of empty cartridge cases from a machine gun, on top of a wobbly table. When the argument was at its height, and Elias no longer had any hope of reaching agreement, and therefore of remaining alive once the bargaining broke down, the whole edifice of cartridge cases collapsed with a metallic clatter. The grownups looked round. The child froze, contrite. Elias remembered that village in Kivu half burned in the war and a little girl curled up between the legs of a low table, the child trembling so much that the piece of furniture seemed alive … He began talking again with the arrogant strength of one no longer concerned about his own survival. This indifference in the face of death, as he already knew, gives one a great advantage over those who have yet to come to terms with their fear of dying.

  Brazzaville. The purity of gemstones.

  He was on his way out of his hotel when two policemen in civilian clothes accosted him. Everything now happened with split-second timing. He looked them up and down scornfully, handed one of them his suitcase, and without raising his voice, ordered: “Here. Put this in my car out there. A gray Mercedes…” The trick worked perfectly. The tone of calm, peremptory authority. The policemen, who were supposed to be arresting him, obeyed, walked over to the exit, subjugated, hypnotized, and it was only once they were outside, where no “gray Mercedes” was to be seen, that they roused themselves and retraced their steps quickly. Elias had time to slip out through the side entrance, in front of which a car was waiting for him …

  From those final years I retain a handful of such anecdotes that he used to recount to me with a smile when we ran into one another between flights, in the course of some mission or other. The memory of them is buried in a jumble of details that seem utterly pointless today but which were a matter of life and death at the time. The business with the suitcase … It is a routine technique, in fact, known as the “relay-object,” which he had doubtless learned during the course of his training as an intelligence agent. The procedure is simple: if anyone obstructs you, you must on any pretext whatever hand them an object that encumbers them and for which they become responsible. To a fierce gatekeeper barring your way at the entrance to a protected place you hand a briefcase, remarking: “General X’s sergeant will come to collect this at six-thirty hours. Take good care of it.” And while the guard is pondering, overwhelmed by the weight of the onus put on him, you pass through.

  What remains in my memory is Elias s smile as he told me about these tricks of the trade, sometimes adding: “So in the end our practical training in Moscow wasn’t wasted. All those assaults on the presidential palace’… And by and large, I can confirm, it does happen more or less the way our instructors taught us it would. And the hardest thing of all is to avoid killing the children when there are bursts of gunfire on all sides … In our training they were celluloid dolls.”

  Behind his light touch with the detail lay concealed long wars, sometimes raging, sometimes running out of steam, villages populated with corpses, and one morning, a fine spring morning, that youth dragging his mother’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, along a road in the south of Moxico. Elias took them to the nearest town. The intolerable weight of that body.

  Behind the anecdote about the policemen encumbered by a “relay-suitcase” there had been very discreet negotiations that evening in Brazzaville between the emissaries of the South African regime (the demons of apartheid!) and the representatives of the socialist regime of Angola — the caution of two reptiles feeling one another in the dark, sniffing one another, hesitating between confrontation and doing a deal. And all mixed up with this nest of vipers, several CIA agents, as well as those of UNITA, and the indiscreet oilmen from Elf, and the diamond buyers (that Lebanese of Armenian origin, among others, the
lid of his left eye grotesquely distended by a magnifying glass), and the arms salesmen, one of whom remarked to me one day with cheerful amazement: Tve sold such a lot, there really shouldn’t be many people left on earth

  Some years later the diamond merchant would be discovered at his desk with his bloodied head resting on a pile of gemstones. The wife of the president who offered his hospitality for the secret meeting at Brazzaville would be accused of this murder. The arms salesmen would change the names of their agencies and the oilmen those of their companies. UNITA would be decapitated. But this would make no difference to the background noise at those African summits: the discreet chink of diamonds being appraised, the pumping of black blood beneath the waves, the crunch of armored vehicles on the rutted tarmac of cities in flames, the screams of raped women, children having their throats cut, the crackle of the flames on the burning roofs of huts, and somewhere at some great film festival the ecstatic whispers surrounding a star who is wearing around her neck stones of the first water, so rare, so pure …

  At the emperors. Twelve pianists.

  Yet another detail strangely preserved from oblivion: it could be called a dumb show, for the performance was entirely silent and the recounting of it left us speechless, giving rise to an almost metaphysical amazement. One of Bokassas residences, a room where the lights are low; a dozen piano stools in a row occupied by naked women who have their backs turned. A hand clap, and in a perfectly synchronized movement all twelve of them swivel round to face the master, who has a strangely weary, almost aggrieved air, as if this carnal treasure disappoints him profoundly … The vision of these “beautiful pianists with no piano,” as Elias called them, was on a level with other acts of depravity dreamed up by the tyrants of that continent, the pharaonic cathedrals and castles erected upon the graves of famine victims. But the twelve piano stools went further, for this spinning harem touched the most sensitive spot in a man’s heart: the impossibility of loving, even while possessing so much flesh, purchased in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere … The master of the pianists — the “Emperor 1 —- would be overthrown a year later in a country strewn with mutilated bodies. And amid all the jumble of wealth and obscenities that such a reign leaves in its wake, we are left with the picture of those twelve piano stools, absurdly lined up in a hall hung with valuable pelts.

  Moscow. The death of a poet.

  That vignette would soon find its echo during the trip to Moscow on which Elias accompanied President Agostinho Neto. The poison that killed the president had the characteristic of causing a spasm in the cardiac muscle, which made the death appear to be a perfectly convincing heart attack. It took just a psychological trigger, an additional rush of blood, to unleash the effect of the substance … The president was entering the suite placed at his disposal when in a small circular room he was passing through, this woman (she was busy cleaning the keyboard of a grand piano: a discordant lament of merry notes) greeted him and informed him that she would be taking care of his nocturnal requirements. The sentence was uttered in correct but somewhat rudimentary Portuguese, allowing for some ambiguity: nocturnal requirements? … A young blond woman, an apron fitting tightly over broad hips, emphasizing a slender waist … She stared at him as if awaiting a reply. He hesitated, sat down in an armchair, smiled at her. She settled down on the piano stool, as if she were resting for a moment before resuming her dusting. Beside the armchair, on a low table, stood several bottles of drink. Did he succumb straight away? After a glass? After an embrace? Or did they have time to undress and he to take his pleasure? The next day the Soviet authorities announced that the Angolan president, suffering from a serious illness, had come to the USSR to be treated, but despite all the efforts of the best doctors, he had not survived.

  Elias will retain from all this the piano stool he had seen the previous day when he brought a dispatch to the presidents secretary. A quite ordinary black stool, like the ones the Central African tyrant’s “pianists” had spun round on. Details, yes, but it was perhaps the first time that he perceived with such intensity the supreme absurdity that ruled the lives and deaths of human beings. Before they left, the Soviets showed the members of the Angolan delegation a short documentary film. It was an account of the conflict between perfidious Somalia and faithful Ethiopia. Panoramic shots displayed the titanic disembarking of hundreds of armored vehicles, entire squadrons, countless artillery pieces. A complete prepackaged war, handed on a plate by the empire to its Ethiopian protégé. And then the results: arid stretches of the Ogaden in Ethiopia, covered in Somalian corpses and the debris of their weapons. At its close, the camera, no doubt mounted on a helicopter, swooped down over endless columns of distraught prisoners. The film had no sound track, and this silence gave the images an even more crushing force, a bleak and categorical argument. It was a lesson, yes. The Angolan leaders were supposed to appreciate the weight of the vengeance that fell upon the enemies of the empire.

  Moscow. An hour with Anna.

  Elias had an extremely brief meeting with Anna, on the very last evening of that visit to Moscow. Agostinho Neto s body, the entrails cleaned of all trace of poison, had already been prepared to be sent back to Luanda. In subdued tones the members of the delegation, some devastated, some relieved, were discussing the film they had just seen. Elias managed to escape, rang up from a public phone box, learned that Anna was celebrating her husband Vadims birthday with friends. She went down into the park where Elias was waiting for her, and they began walking under the mild September rain by a light reminiscent of the soft blue haze of a spring they had never lived through together. At first sight Annas face seemed to him coarsened by a fixed smile intended for her guests, by smooth, impersonal makeup. Little by little the showers banished this fixity from her features, and he saw, perhaps only with the vision that lay hidden in his heart, the young woman who once used to lead him through the snow-covered streets of Moscow. The one who believed in a knight brave enough to go down into the arena and bring back a glove for his fair lady. The one who boarded the train with the scent of a forest In winter clinging to the gray wool of her dress … They hardly spoke, and before parting (she had to hurry back to rejoin the guests, doubtless already uneasy about her absence), they embraced with such violence that he slightly grazed his lip in this clumsy and feverish kiss.

  The logic of history.

  I know they saw one another again in Africa on several occasions, even during the years when the USSR’s Imperial adventure on the black continent was drawing to a close. Lucapa, Kinshasa, Maputo, Mogadishu … Elias spoke little of them to me, and it was especially those few days spent in Moscow at the time of Neto’s death that he sought to describe to me, as if they offered a digest of all the contradictions of his life as a fighter. He told me things he did not have time to recount to Anna, and in any case would never have told her. Details that suddenly offered proof of the madness of history Yes, piano stools and a dozen whores trained to spin round on them at a hand clap. And that stool where a young woman sits before supervising a man s death agony with professional calm. And beyond the farcical insanity of these coincidences, millions of men pitched against one another in the name of a hatred that will appear stupid the next day, after these men have been bled to death. So then another hatred will have to be invented and dressed up in humanistic or messianic rags, placated with the sound of tank tracks on the tarmac of ruined cities, with the roar of big guns firing on unarmed men. And all of this so that in a great hall where the walls are hung with pelts, a man, weary of massacres, wealth, and female flesh, should rest his heavy and nauseated gaze on the backsides of women as they spin round on their piano stools. And so that another man, an occasional poet, should suddenly let his glass of brandy slip onto the carpet and tumble out of his armchair, his eyes rolling upward, at the feet of a woman whose breasts he has just been fondling. The circle is complete. History has done its work.

  There are a few loose ends, of no use to the specialists who will be writing it: that di
amond merchant, his face crushed into a glittering mound of gemstones, and in a documentary film about the war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a sequence that probably passed unnoticed by the makers, a goat wounded by shrapnel thrashing about around its stake as the columns of victorious armored vehicles surge past.

  All he had to counter to the insanity of this farce, in truth, was his love.

  London. Postscript to history.

  I saw him again in London, scarcely two years before the disappearance of the USSR, before the “end of history,” as proclaimed by a Japanese visionary, whom everyone took seriously at the time. It was the honeymoon between Russia and the West, a great “phew!” of relief at the grinning softness of the empire that, with Gorbachev, was learning to smile and calling this “democracy” For the first time, perhaps, I perceived in Elias’s words the sarcasm of a man betrayed. “You 11 see,” he had said. “You’re going to become best friends with the USA, ultra-obedient students of capitalism. When the USSR no longer exists …”

  Such remarks seemed preposterous at the time. The empire had lost none of its power and was capable, as some years previously, of waging several wars at once, in Afghanistan, in Ethiopia, in Angola … Unwilling to contradict him for fear of upsetting the one within him whose life had been lived in the name of a dream, I adopted the somewhat condescending tone (I now realize) authorized by the crushing weight of our country when addressing our allies, the “auxiliaries” of the USSR’s messianic project. Half seriously and half in jest, I remarked that you can’t make a revolution “in kid gloves” and that history, as Lenin said, “is not the sidewalk on the Nevsky Prospekt.” I had heard these maxims tossed out like epigrams, from Elias’s own lips.