Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  The upheavals caused by the pendulum had made the population of the village very motley, despite the primitive simplicity of its existence. Among us there was a former "kulak," exiled here during the collectivization of the Ukraine in the thirties; a family of old believers, the Klestovs, who lived in fierce isolation, hardly talking to anyone else; and a ferryman, Verbin, who had only one arm and who always told the same story to his passengers. He was one of the first to have inscribed his name on the walls of the conquered Reichstag; and it was at that ecstatic moment of victory that a stray shell splinter had severed his right arm – when he was only halfway through his name!

  The pendulum had also crushed families. There were hardly any complete ones apart from that of the old believers. My friend Utkin lived with his mother, alone. As long as he was a child and could not understand, she would tell him that his father had been a pilot in the war and that he had perished in a kamikaze attack, hurling his blazing plane at a column of German tanks. But one day Utkin had realized that since he was born twelve years after the war, it was physically impossible for him to have had such a father. Mortified, he said this to his mother. She explained, blushing, that it had been the Korean War… Fortunately, there was no shortage of wars.

  As for myself, I had only my aunt… The pendulum in its flight must have scraped the frozen soil of our land and uncovered rivers with golden sand. Or perhaps some of the gilding on its heavy disk had rubbed off on the rough earth… My aunt had no need to invent aeronautical exploits. My father, a geologist, had followed the pendulum's gilded trail. He must secretly have hoped to discover some new gold-bearing terrain for the day of my birth. His body was never found. And my mother died in labor…

  As for Samurai, who was fifteen at this time, neither Utkin nor I could ever properly understand who the hook-nosed old woman was in whose izba he lived. His mother? His grandmother? He always called her by her first name and cut short all our attempts to learn anything more about her.

  The pendulum stopped swinging. And the life of the village was gradually reduced to three essential matters: timber, gold, and the chill shadow of the camp. It was beyond us to imagine our futures unfolding outside these three prime elements. One day, we thought, we would have to join the men who disappeared into the taiga with their toothed chain saws. Some of these loggers had come to our icy hell in pursuit of the "northern bonus," the premium that doubled their meager wages. Others – prisoners on parole on condition of good work and exemplary conduct – counted not rubles but days… Or perhaps we would be among those gold prospectors we sometimes saw coming into the workers' canteen: huge fox-fur shapkas; short fur coats, held in with broad belts; gigantic boots lined with smooth, glistening fur. It was said that among them were some who "stole gold from the state." Yes, they washed sand on unknown terrains and disposed of their nuggets on a mysterious "black market." As children, we were certainly much tempted by such a future.

  There was one more choice open to us: to freeze there in the chill shadow, aiming an automatic rifle from the top of a watch-tower at the ranks of prisoners drawn up beside their huts. Or ourselves disappear into the seething humanity of those barrack huts…

  All the latest news in Svetlaya revolved around those three elements: taiga, gold, shadow. We would learn that once again a gang of loggers had disturbed a bear in its lair and escaped by piling, all six of them, into the cabin of their tractor. There was talk of the record weight of a gold nugget "as big as your fist." And there were whispers of yet another escapee… Then came the season of violent snowstorms, and even this thin trickle of information was interrupted. Now the talk was of strictly local news: an electric cable that had snapped, traces of wolves found near the barn. Finally, one day, the village did not wake up…

  The villagers got up, prepared breakfast. And suddenly they surprised a strange silence reigning around their izbas. No crunch of footsteps in the snow; no wind whistling around the roof edges, no dogs barking. Nothing. A cotton-wool silence, opaque, absolute. This deaf outside world filtered out all the household sounds that normally went unnoticed. You could hear the sighing of a kettle on the stove, the slight, regular hiss of a lightbulb. We listened, my aunt and I, to the unfathomable depth of this silence. We looked at the clock with its weights. Normally the day should have dawned by then. With our foreheads pressed against the windowpane, we peered into the darkness. The window was completely blocked by snow. Then we rushed to the entrance hall and, already anticipating the unimaginable, which recurred almost every winter, we opened the door…

  A wall of snow rose on the threshold of our izba. The village was entirely buried.

  With a yell of wild joy, I seized hold of a shovel. No school! No homework! A day of happy chaos awaited us.

  I began by digging out a narrow section; then, by packing down the light and feathery snow, I fashioned steps. From time to time my aunt sprinkled the depths of my cavern with hot water from the kettle to ease my task. I was climbing up slowly, compelled at times to proceed almost horizontally. My aunt encouraged me from the threshold of the izba, begging me not to go too fast. I was beginning to be short of breath, I experienced a strange giddiness, my bare hands were burning, my pulse was throbbing heavily in my temples. The light of the dim bulb coming from the izba now scarcely reached the corner where I was hacking away.

  Dripping with sweat, despite the snow that surrounded me, I felt as if I were within warm and protective entrails. My body seemed to have memories of prenatal darkness. My brain, dulled by the lack of air, feebly suggested to me that it might have been sensible to go back down into the izba to recover my breath…

  It was at that moment that my head pierced the crusty surface of the snow! I closed my eyes; the light was blinding.

  Infinite calm reigned over the sun-drenched plain: the serenity of nature at rest after the turmoil of the night. Now the blue distances of the taiga were clearly revealed: it seemed to be asleep in the sweet air. And above the glittering expanse, white columns of smoke arose from invisible chimneys.

  The first men appeared, emerging from the snow, and stood up. With dazed looks they took in the glittering desert now spread out where the village had been. Laughing, we hugged one another, pointing at the smoke – it was really comic to picture somebody cooking a meal under six feet of snow! A dog bounded out of the tunnel and seemed to be equally bemused by the unaccustomed spectacle… I saw Klestov, the old believer, appearing. He turned toward the east, crossed himself slowly, then greeted everyone with an air of exaggerated dignity.

  Little by little the village rediscovered its familiar sounds. The few men of Svetlaya, helped by all the rest of us, began to dig corridors linking the izbas with one another and opened up the path to the well.

  We knew that this abundance of snow in our country of dry cold had been brought by winds that blew from the misty void of the ocean. We also knew that the storm had been the very first sign of spring. The sunlight of this mild spell would soon beat down the snow, would reduce it to heavy piles below our windows. And the cold weather would begin again, even more extreme, as if to take revenge on this brief interval of light abandon. But spring would come! We were sure of it now. A spring as brilliant and sudden as the light that had blinded us as we emerged from our tunnels.

  And spring did come: one fine day the village broke its moorings. Our river began to move. Vast acres of ice began their stately procession. Their progress grew faster; the glittering layers of water dazzled us. The raw smell of the ice mingled with the wind from the steppes. And the earth slipped away under our feet. And it was our village, with its izbas, its worm-eaten fences, its sails of multicolored linen on the lines, it was Svetlaya that was embarking on a joyful cruise.

  The eternity of winter was coming to an end.

  The voyage did not last long. A few weeks later the river returned to its bed and the village landed on the shores of a fleeting Siberian summer. And during this brief interlude the sun spilled out the warm scent of cedar re
sin. We talked of nothing now but the taiga.

  It was in the course of one of our expeditions into the heart of the taiga that Utkin discovered the Kharg root…

  With his lame leg, he always lagged behind us. From time to time he would call out to Samurai and me: "Hey, wait up!" Understandingly we would slacken our pace.

  This time instead of his usual "Wait up!" he gave a long whistle of surprise. We turned back.

  How could he have unearthed it, this root that only the expert eyes of the Yakut women could manage to detect in the soft layer of the humus? Maybe thanks to his leg. His left foot, which he dragged along like a rake, dug up extraordinary things, often without his being aware of it…

  We looked closely at the Kharg root. Without admitting it to ourselves, we sensed that there was something feminine about its shape. It was, in fact, a kind of plump, dark-hued pear, with a skin like suede, slightly cracked, the underside was covered in purplish down. From top to bottom the root was divided by a groove that resembled the line of a vertebral column.

  The Kharg was very pleasant to touch. Its velvety skin seemed to respond to contact with the fingers. This bulb with its sensual contours hinted at a strange life that animated its mysterious interior.

  Intrigued by its secret, I made a scratch on its chubby surface with my thumbnail. A blood-red liquid poured into the scratch mark. We exchanged puzzled looks. "Let me see," demanded Samurai, taking the Kharg from my hands.

  He produced his knife and cut into the bulb of the root of love, following the groove. Then, thrusting his thumbs into the down at the base of the fleshy oval, he pulled them apart smartly.

  We heard a kind of brief creak – like the sound of a door frozen fast with ice when it finally yields under pressure.

  We all bent forward to get a better view. Within a pinkish fleshy lap we saw a long, pale leaf. It was curled up with that moving delicacy often encountered in nature. And it inspired mixed feelings in us: to destroy, to smash this useless harmony, or… We really did not know what should be done with it. And thus for several moments we gazed at the leaf; it was reminiscent of the transparency and fragility of the wings of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

  Even Samurai seemed vaguely embarrassed, faced with this unexpected and disconcerting beauty.

  Finally, with a brisk movement, he stuck the two halves of the Kharg together and thrust the root into a pocket of his knapsack.

  "I'll ask Olga," he called out to us as he moved off. "She must have heard of it…"

  3

  WE lived in a strange universe, without women. The discovery of the bulb of love simply brought this reality out into the open.

  Yes, there were a few shadowy figures who were often dear to us; we were fond of them. But for us they had no feminine aura. My aunt; Utkin's mother; old Olga… Some of the faces of the women teachers at the school located at Kazhdai. Their femininity had long since been eroded in the harsh business of daily resisting the cold, the solitude, the absence of any foreseeable change. No, they were not ugly. Utkin's mother, for example, had a fine pale face, with a kind of ethereal transparency in her features. But did she know this herself? It is only long afterward, seeing her again in my memory, that I have been able to perceive this: yes, she could have been attractive, desirable. But attractive to whom? Desirable where? Cold, darkness, the eternity known as "winter"… And the pendulum had gone to sleep, enmeshed in the ice-covered barbed wire.

  It happened that, owing to the chance of some allocation decided a thousand leagues from our village, a young woman teacher found herself at our school. A rare commodity. A figure who became the focus of intense curiosity. But we detected such anguish on her face, such a desire to escape as quickly as possible, that we ourselves were made uneasy by it: was our life really so unbearable? Her anguish distorted her features. Her beauty, her fascinating strangeness, became blurred beneath this grimace of terror. We all felt that she was mentally counting the days – she looked at us as if we were already in the past. People who figured in an unhappy memory. Characters in a nightmare.

  And the men, in thrall to those three elements – taiga, gold, and the shadow of the watchtowers – were doing their counting as well… in cubic meters of cedarwood or kilograms of gold-bearing sand. They, too, dreamed of a completely different existence, when all this counting was over; of a life ten thousand leagues distant from this country – beyond the Urals, at the other end of the empire. They would mention the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Crimea. As their saws bit into the aromatic flesh of the cedar trees, they seemed to be shrieking: "Crrr-i-mea," out of yearning for it. And the dredging machines of the gold prospectors echoed them as they dug: "Crrr-i-mea."

  And as for love… The only word we ever heard them use was "have." Not "have a night with," which might have evoked the occasion. Still less "have an affair"; that might even have suggested a process of seduction; but simply "have a woman." Lurking in a corner of the workers' canteen, behind our glasses of stewed fruit, we listened to them exchanging secrets and were always desperately disappointed by them. Their stories only told us of one thing: that one of them had "had" an unknown woman. No backdrops, no portraits, no erotic imagery. They did not even bother trying to characterize their exploits by using one of the obscene verbs that regularly reverberated in their throats, burned with vodka and the wind.

  "Huh! I've had her, that little Yakut…"

  "You know that Maria on the cash till? I've had her." We hoped at least for some details: What was she like, that young Yakut woman? Beneath her fur coat hardened by the fierce hoarfrosts, her body must have seemed particularly warm and smooth. And her hair must have had the scent of cedar smoke; and her strong, slightly curved legs and her muscular thighs doubtless made her groin a veritable trap that closed in on her lover's body… We awaited just one of these revelations so feverishly! But the men had already started talking about cubic meters of wood, or a tube that needed to be extended so that the nuggets could be dislodged more readily… We swallowed the soft fruits in our stew noisily, we cracked the apricot stones with the heavy handles of our knives. And chewing on the kernels, we went out into the icy wind, with a bitter taste on our lips.

  Love seemed to us to be something carved from the gray dusk of a dreary district center, where all the streets led out into wastelands covered by wet sawdust.

  And then one day we had this encounter in the heart of the taiga. It was the same summer that Utkin's injured foot had unearthed the love root. I was just fourteen, and I still did not know whether I was ugly or handsome, or whether there was any more to love than "I've had her."

  On the bank of a river, on a hot August afternoon, we had lit a wood fire. Casting off our clothes, we hurled ourselves into the water. Despite the sun, it was icy cold. A few moments later we were already warming ourselves by the fire. Then once more a dive and quickly the burning caress of the flames. It was the only way to spend all day in the water. Utkin – he never bathed because of his leg – kept the fire going, and we two, Samurai and I, stark naked, would pit ourselves against the rapid current of the Olyei. Then, our teeth chattering, we rushed back toward the fire, jostling each other but never forgetting to bring a little water in the hollow of our palms. We hurled it at Utkin so that he could share in our pleasure. Dragging his leg, he would try clumsily to dodge these cascades that flashed in the air like fleeting rainbows. The drops of water scattered over the fire. Utkin's cries of outrage were mingled with the furious hissing of the flames.

  Then came the moment of great silence. Our frozen bodies were gradually impregnated with the heat. The smoke enveloped us, tickled our nostrils. We stood stock-still, in the contented torpor of basking lizards. With the transparent dance of the flames. The plenitude of the sun caressing our wet hair. The piercing cold of the river, its rippling, lulling melody. And around us the infinite quiet of the taiga. Its slow breathing, its blue-tinted immensity, dense and profound…

  It was the throbbing of the engine that shatte
red our blissful trance. We did not even have time to pick up our clothes. A four-wheel-drive loomed up on the riverbank, turned in a rapid curve, and stopped a few paces from our wood fire.

  Samurai and I had barely enough time to cross our hands over our crotches; then we froze, caught off guard in our languid nakedness.

  The vehicle had its top down. Apart from the driver, there were two passengers, two young women. One of them in the parked vehicle held out a large plastic bottle to the driver. The man opened his door and set off toward the river.

  Dumbfounded, keeping our genitals covered, we stared at the two strangers. The women got up from their seats and perched themselves on the folded top. As if to get a better look at us. Seated on the ground at the other side of the fire, Utkin awaited the outcome of the scene with a mischievous smile, meanwhile stuffing blueberries into his mouth.