The two young women were, no doubt, fledgling geologists; their companion too. Probably students who had come for a period of training on the terrain. Their relaxed air, as of city dwellers, fascinated us.
They stared at us with little sign of embarrassment over our nudity. With the curiosity one has for wild animals at the zoo. They were blond. Our eyes, unaccustomed to differentiating women's taces with precision, took them for twin sisters…
At length one of them, whose stare was more insistent, said to her colleague with a grin: "That little one, he looks like a real angel."
And she gave a slight nudge with her shoulder, glancing at her companion roguishly.
The other one stared at me, but without smiling. I noticed a subtle fluttering of her long eyelashes.
"Yes, an angel, but with little horns," she replied with slight irritation, and without paying us any further attention, she slid down onto her seat.
The driver returned, the full bottle in his hand. The first blond woman, before settling down in her turn, continued to look at me with a persistent smile. And I felt the touch of her look on my lips, on my eyebrows, on my chest, almost physically… At that moment the twin sisters became two totally different women to me. One of them, reserved and sensitive, who seemed as if she had a tense string within her, was a fragile blonde, reminiscent of the splinters of crystal we found in the rocks. The other was amber, warm, enveloping, sensual. So women, too, could be different!
Samurai jerked me out of my reverie by splashing my back with long cold gushes. He was already in the water.
"Utkin," he shouted. "Push him in the drink! I'm going to drown this bare-assed Don Juan!"
"Who's that?" I asked, taking the name for some swear word that was unknown to me.
But Samurai did not reply. He was already swimming toward the opposite bank… We often heard such strange words on his lips. They were doubtless all part of the Olga mystery.
Utkin, instead of pushing me, came up to me and muttered in a dull, broken voice: "Go on, then, swim! What are you waiting for?"
He looked at me. And for the first time I noticed that sorrowful, questioning glint: that effort to fathom the sense of the mosaic of beauty… Then, turning away, he started throwing fresh branches on the fire.
On the way home, I noticed that even Samurai had been affected by the encounter alongside the wood fire. He was trying to find an excuse to talk about the two strangers.
"They must be on the faculty at Novosibirsk," he declared, not finding a better opening gambit.
Novosibirsk, the capital city of Siberia, was almost as unreal to us as the Crimea. Anything that was located to the west of Lake Baikal was already redolent of the Western World.
Samurai was silent. Then, giving me a coarsely flippant look, he remarked: "I'll bet he has those two every day, that driver!"
"Sure, he has them," I said, eager to echo his opinion, as well as his man-of-the-world tone of voice.
The conversational exchange stopped there. We sensed something deeply false in our words. It should have been said differently. But how? Should I speak of the tense string, the crystal, the amber? Samurai would certainly have taken me for a madman…
Utkin only caught up with us close to the ferry. In the taiga, as always, he dragged his foot a hundred yards behind us. But for once we had not heard any of his usual shouts. It was we, in turn, who tried anxiously to make out his figure among the dark tree trunks, as we yelled: "Hey, Utkin! The wolves haven't eaten you up, have they? Ow-ooo!"
The ferry over the Olyei – a great raft of blackened logs – provided a shuttle in summer three times a day. The left bank was us, Svetlaya, the East. The right bank was Nerlug, with its brick houses and the Red October cinema. In short, a more or less civilized city, antechamber to the Western World…
The passengers on the ferry were for the most part returning from the city. Their shopping bags were crammed "with paper-wrapped packages of provisions that could not be found in the village.
The one-armed ferryman, Verbin, grasped a great paddle with a special groove in it and began to pull on the steel cable, jamming it adroitly. Passing through iron rings on the handrail of the ferry, the cable guided us toward the opposite bank. Samurai took the auxiliary paddle to assist the ferryman.
I sat on the planks that covered the raft. I listened to the soft lapping of the water and absentmindedly watched the village drawing nearer, with its low izbas surrounded by gardens, the maze of paths and fences, the blue smoke rising from a chimney.
The sun was setting above the right bank, on the city side, that of the distant Lake Baikal, that of the Western World. And our village was completely bathed in its coppery light.
When we reached the middle of the river, Utkin nudged me with his elbow, indicating something in the distance with a swift movement of his chin.
I followed his gaze. On the bank where we were to land I saw the figure of a woman. I recognized her easily. She was standing at the water's edge, shading her eyes with her hand and watching the ferry as it slipped slowly across the orange flood of the setting sun.
It was Vera. She lived in a little izba at the edge of the village. Everyone said she was mad. We knew she would stand like that until all the passengers had alighted on the bank and started climbing toward the village. Then she would approach the ferryman and ask him a question in a low voice. Nobody knew either what she said to him or what Verbin replied to her.
For years and years she had been making her way down to the riverbank, waiting for someone who could come only in summer, in the evening, with the dreamlike slowness of this old ferry blackened by time. She watched, certain that one day she would make out his face in the midst of the crowd in its Sunday best.
When the ferry was close to shore, Samurai abandoned his paddle and came to join us. Like us, he was watching the woman waiting for the ferry to arrive.
"Hey! She must really have loved him!" he said, shaking his head with conviction.
We were the first to jump out onto the sand. And as we passed close to Vera, what we saw in her somber eyes was the death of hope for that day…
The sun, now stranded on top of the taiga on the western bank, might have been the gilded disk of that immobilized pendulum. Time had stood still. The vast swings of days gone by had narrowed down to the back and forth of an old ferry guided by a rusty cable…
When I reached the izba, I took a mirror with an oval frame out of my aunt's chest of drawers and studied myself in it, taking advantage of the pale luminosity of the summer twilight. This study, I knew, was unworthy of a real man. I did not dare to imagine all the taunts of Samurai and Utkin if they had chanced to catch me at this occupation for ladies. But the words of the two blond women were still ringing in my ears: "An angel"… "but with little horns." The dull oval, which was slowly growing dim, was crammed with many secrets. So the features it reflected could be loved… and make a woman mad… and bring her back to the riverbank over long years, with an impossible hope…
A strange confirmation of my first intimations of love came to me on the anniversary of the Revolution.
My aunt had invited three of her best friends, two of whom, like her, worked on the railroad as switch operators; the third worked as a sales clerk in a food store in Kazhdai. They were all single women.
On the table, on a great china dish, there was a block of pork in aspic, looking like a cube of grayish, shiny ice; cold sauerkraut, reasoned with oil and garnished with cranberries; gherkins, of course; stroganina, the fish gelatinized and cut into transparent slices that you eat raw; potatoes with fresh cream; beef rissoles grilled in the stove. And vodka, which they mixed with blueberry syrup.
The sales clerk had brought pancakes, little biscuits, and chocolates, otherwise impossible to find, that she had saved up.
The women drank; as their voices grew soft, it was as if one could hear the chink of the ice breaking, melting. Long live the Revolution! Despite the rivers of blood, it had given birth to
this fleeting moment of happiness… Don't think about all the rest! It's too hard; don't think about it anymore! Not this evening, at least… It won't bring back their dear faces; or that handful of happy days; or those kisses redolent of the first snows – or was it the last? It's hard to remember now. Or the eyes in which you could see the clouds hurrying toward Lake Baikal, toward the Urals, toward siege-struck Moscow. They set off in pursuit of those clouds, caught up with them at the walls of Moscow, in the frozen fields gutted by the tanks. And they stopped them with their wide-open eyes, staring at them forever as they floated lightly westward. Lying in a frozen rut, their faces buried in the black sky…
But let's not speak of it. The first snows, the last snows…
Hold on, Tanya, let me give you this piece; it's not so burned… I had a couple of letters from him, and then… Don't think about it… Two letters in two years… Let's not think about it…
Perched on the broad, warm surface of the great stone stove, on top of which were piled old felt boots, a woolen blanket, and two limp pillows, I was drowsing. I knew them by heart, these conversations that were forever slipping off into their wartime past. They tried to get away from it and began to talk about the latest village news. Apparently, they said, the headmistress had been seen again with… now, what is his name?
It was the singing that came and rescued them from the clouds frozen in the eyes of their fleeting lovers and the gossip several years old. Their voices grew bright, soared. And I was always surprised to see the extent to which these women, these shadowy figures from another era, could suddenly become grave and remote… They sang, and in the haze of my sleep I could picture the horseman battling through a snowstorm and his fair one waiting for him at the dark window. And that other lovesick damsel, begging the wild geese to carry her words to her true love, who has gone "beyond the steppes, beyond the blue sea." And I began to dream of all that might he hidden beyond this blue sea that had suddenly surged up in our snowbound izba…
My aunt always checked to see if I had gone to sleep before they began to talk about the headmistress's imaginary cavortings. "Mitya!" she would call, turning her head toward the stove. "Are you asleep?" I did not reply. And for good reason. I was absolutely determined not to miss the recital of the latest adventures of the only woman deemed to be capable of having any. I remained silent. I was listening.
This time I heard my aunt's question once again. And then her sigh.
"And there's another worry," she said in a low voice. "As if I didn't have enough on my plate. The girls are soon going to start clinging to him like burrs to a dog's tail. I can see it coming already…"
"That's right," agreed the sales clerk. "With his good looks, Petrovna, you'll have more fiancees than you know what to do with…"
"Oh yes, they'll soon spoil him for you, your Dmitri," put in another friend.
I raised myself on one elbow, listening avidly. Spoil me! I was desperate for a set of instructions for this appalling activity, which I sensed must be intensely voluptuous. But they had already begun to talk about a good recipe for salted mushrooms…
And I was left feeling that even the limp pillow beneath my cheek concealed, within the warmth of its stuffing, a strange disguised concupiscence. The promise of some fabulous night when the hours, the darkness… and even the air would have the consistency of flesh and the taste of desire. I saw myself on the banks of the Olyei. Standing stark naked in front of a wood fire. My body pierced through with the icy cold of the water. And one of the blond strangers – crystal or amber: I no longer knew which – was standing on the other side of the flames, naked as well. And she smiled at me, bathed in sunlight, in the rich scent of cedar resin, in the bottomless silence of the taiga. I entered ever more deeply into that moment. I stretched out my hand across the fire to touch that of the stranger… The bank suddenly became white, the silence of the taiga wintry. And the slow eddying of the snowflakes enveloped our bodies in muted sunlight.
4
That winter Samurai and I formed the habit of going to the baths together…
Despite his air of a village tough guy, he was quite a sensitive person. The attitude of the two blond women when we were bathing in the summer had not been lost on him. From that encounter onward he started to treat me as his equal. Even though I had only been fourteen at the time! While he was almost sixteen. A difference that to me seemed infinite.
Utkin never came with us. He washed at baths closer to his izba. He was afraid of freezing his leg.
The baths we went to every Sunday were not different in any way from the others. The little izba was divided into two unequal sections: a small entrance hall, where we left our clothes and our felt boots, then a square room with a bench along one wall and a great stove that heated an enormous cast-iron vessel. We filled it with water from the Brook. All around this bowl was piled up a great heap of pebbles, which quickly became burning hot and had to be sprinkled so that the room should be engulfed in hot steam. Finally there was a kind of little mezzanine, made from two wooden planks, on which you took turns stretching out while your companion whipped you with a bunch of fine birch twigs dipped in the bubbling water. These bunches had been hung up to dry since the summer, under the ceiling in the entrance hall. It was their leaves that, when swollen by the boiling water, made the whole room fragrant with their penetrating scent.
Yes, there was nothing special about the baths. Except that they were located not at the bottom of a kitchen garden but some distance from the village, on the riverbank where the Brook flowed into the Olyei. The izba had been abandoned for years. We had cleaned the great cast-iron bowl and repaired the sunken door. Once established as our Sunday headquarters, the bathhouse seemed to be preparing, through the alchemy of its vapors, for the astonishing transmutation of our bodies…
The cold was such that evening that when we arrived we could no longer feel our numb fingers.
"Forty-eight below!" Samurai exclaimed happily as he slid down the icy path that led toward our baths. "I looked as I went out."
"It'll go down to at least fifty below tonight, that's for sure," I added, understanding his delight very well.
The stars glittered with a shimmering, provocative fragility. The snow spurted up under our feet with a dry, sonorous whispering.
The door was frozen solid. We pushed at it with all our strength. It gave way with a rending squeal, like a smashed windowpane. We lit a candle stuck to the bottom of an empty can. Around its hesitant flame there glowed an iridescent halo. Squatting down, Samurai began to fill the stove: I tore off the birch bark that was needed for the first flames.
Little by little the icy interior of the dark room was coming back to life. Its somber walls, made of logs, became warm. Above the bowl a fine cloud of steam arose.
Samurai filled a ladle and sprinkled the pebbles. The angry hiss was a good sign. We went to undress in the entrance hall, which now seemed arctic…
A true bath should resemble hell. The flames dart through the little door of the stove. As the pebbles are sprinkled more and more copiously, they hiss like a thousand serpents. The planks become slippery. Movements, in the darkness, become clumsy. And as for the bunches of birch twigs, they are a veritable torture! But also an intense pleasure. It is my turn first. I stretch out on the narrow planks of the mezzanine, and Samurai begins to whip me with fury. He dips his bunch of twigs into the boiling water and lashes my back with it. I yell with pain and joy. The fine and supple twigs seem to penetrate between my ribs. My mind is dulled. The steam grows hotter and hotter. With satanic relish, Samurai continues to riddle my back with smarting stabs. Nor does he forget to empty a ladle over the burning pebbles from time to time. For several seconds the fresh cloud of steam hides my torturer…
At length my mind, annihilated by the excess of pain and pleasure, announced to me in its final message that I no longer had a body. It was true! Where my body had once been I experienced a blissful absence, a delicious void made up of misty shadow, of
the slightly piquant aroma of birch leaves macerated in boiling water. And also of the rhythmic strokes of the twigs, which were now striking a vacuum, passing through me as if I were air…
At that moment, exhausted, Samurai stopped, let fall the bunch of twigs, and stretched out on the planks at right angles to mine. I performed my task while remaining a stranger to my body. It was my arms that rose and fell, flagellating Samurai's muscular back as he groaned with pleasure. Everything happened without my being aware of it…
Strangely enough, it was Samurai's great body that first revealed to me how naked flesh could be beautiful.
The steam was so burning hot that we could no longer breathe. Our heads buzzed, and red bubbles swelled and burst in our eyes. It was time to perform the essential act.
We opened the door to the room, then that to the entrance hall. We rushed outside under the resonant, trembling stars, into the dense cold of the night…
A second later we stopped, naked, at the base of the slope that led down toward the Olyei. One, two, three! and we flung ourselves backward into the virgin snow. We felt no cold. For we no longer had bodies.
The crystalline sound of the stars. The dull sound of our heartbeats. Our hearts seem as if they are abandoned, all alone, sunk in the pure, dry snow. The dark sky draws us into its abyss, crammed with constellations.
An instant… And then the wisps of steam that had been rising above us vanished. We began to feel our skin being burned by the melted snow, our shoulders and our wet hair being tugged at by the crust of ice already forming…
We returned to our bodies.
And jumping to our feet with one bound, so as not to spoil the fine imprints we had made in the snow, we ran toward the baths…
That evening Samurai was seated as usual in his favorite tub. It was made of copper that he polished from time to time with sand from the river: almost a little bathtub. He folded up his long legs and immersed himself. I stretched out on a bench.
The room seemed quite different after our mad excursion under the icy sky The heat was no longer suffocating but swathed our rediscovered bodies pleasantly. The scents were still vivid but more distinct, clarified. It was so delicious to inhale the warm, dry breath of the stones and then, turning one's head slightly, to ingest the scent of a bunch of birch twigs left in the bowl. And to follow the slow progress through the darkness of another odor, that of the bark burning in the stove.
Once Upon The River Love Page 3
