After the frenzy of hell, after the moment of disappearance under the stars, this room, filled with a soft, warm half-light, would become a strange paradise for us as night approached. We would remain still for a long time, dreaming. Then Samurai would light his cigar…
He Ht one that evening too. A real Havana, which he drew out of a tube of fine aluminum. I knew cigars like that were sold only in the city, in Nerlug, twenty-three miles from our village, and that they cost sixty kopecks each, including the tube – a fortune! Four school lunches!
But Samurai seemed not to be concerned about the price. He stretched out his arm, seized the ax that was lying near the stove, and, resting his fat cigar on the flat edge of the bathtub, cut off a stray end with a swift and precise action.
After the first puff he settled still more comfortably into the water and announced without preamble, gazing up at the blackened ceiling of the izba: "Olga says that all those little muzhiks who smoke their little cigs, their stinking cigarettes, don't know how to live."
"How do you mean, they don't know how to live?" I asked, lifting my head up from the bench.
"They settle for mediocrity."
"What?"
"Yes, they all want to be average. She's got it right. They all imitate one another. An average job. An average wife. They're average in bed. Mediocrities, you see…"
"And you?"
"I smoke cigars."
"It costs more, is that it?"
"Not just that. Smoking a cigar is a – um – a… it's an aesthetic act."
"What?"
"How can I explain it? Olga knows how to say it…"
"Aesthet… What's that?"
"Well, it's the way. Everything depends on the way you do things and not what you do."
"Well, that's obvious. Or we'd have been flogging each other with nettles…"
"Hm… Only you see, Juan, Olga says beauty begins when the way becomes everything. When only the way matters. We weren't flogging each other so as to get clean. Do you understand?"
"No, not really…"
Samurai was silent. The aromatic cloud from his cigar drifted above his tub. I sensed that he was trying to find words to express what Olga had explained to him.
"Look," he murmured finally, inhaling a puff, with his eyes half closed. "For example, she says that when you are with a woman, you don't need to have a prick as big as that!" Samurai grabbed the ax and brandished its long, slightly curved handle. "That's not what counts…"
"She talked to you about that?"
"Sure… Well, not in those words."
I raised myself on my bench to get a better look at Samurai. I hoped that he was going to reveal a great mystery.
"So. What does count when you 'have' a woman?" I asked in a falsely neutral voice, so as not to disturb his confidences.
Samurai remained silent, then, as if he was disappointed in advance by my incomprehension, he replied a little curtly: "Harmony."
"Huh? Harmony…How?"
"Everything being in harmony – lights, smells, colors…" He stirred in his tub. Turning toward me, he warmed to his theme: "Olga says a woman's body makes time stand still. By its beauty. Everyone else is running and jumping around… and you, you live in that beauty…"
He went on talking, at first hesitantly, then in an increasingly assured voice. He probably had not understood what Olga had confided to him until he began to explain it to me.
I listened absentmindedly. I thought I caught the main drift. What I was seeing again now was the face of the blond stranger on the riverbank. Yes, there was a harmony: the rippling of the Olyei, its coldness, the aromatic breath of the wood fire, the pregnant silence of the taiga. And that feminine presence intensely concentrated in the soft curve of the blond stranger's neck as I stared at her over the dance of the flames.
"Otherwise, Juan, you know, love would be like it is with the animals. Do you remember last summer at the farm?"
Yes, I remembered. It was one of the first warm days of spring. On the way back from school we were crossing the neighboring kolkhoz. Suddenly the furious bellowing of a cow exploded within a long building made of logs, a barn rising up out of thick mud composed of a mixture of snow and dung.
"They must be slaughtering it, the bastards," exclaimed Utkin indignandy, his face distorted with dismay.
Samurai uttered a brief guffaw and beckoned us to follow him. We drew close to the half-open door, lifting our boots with difficulty out of the clinging mud.
Inside, in a section separated from the rest of the barn by a solid barrier of thick planks, we saw a russet cow with fine white patches on its belly. Its legs were shackled. Its head – the horns were cut – was tied to the planks of the barrier. The cow was moving heavily within its enclosure. And an enormous bull was heaving itself up onto the cow's rump with ponderous and ferocious clumsiness. Three men, with the aid of thick ropes, were guiding this relentless assault. The bull had a ring through its nostrils, with a chain attached to it that was being held by one of the men. The bull was uttering ferocious roars as it trampled the muddy ground with its hind feet while with the other two it held the cow's back. That animal's body was supported by a kind of prop, so that its legs should not be broken under this monstrous weight.
The erect thing beneath the bull's belly held our gaze mesmerized on account of the mightiness of its gnarled, purplish shaft. This shaft, glistening with dark blood, was beating heavily against the cow's white rump. A man gave a shout to the one standing closest to the bull. Amid the agitation and trampling, the man addressed seemed not to hear him.
It was at this moment that the bull uttered a deafening groan. We saw the enormous shaft beneath its belly quiver and propel a powerful jet against the white rump. The men began shouting. Then the kolkhoznik who was closest very deftly grasped the shaft and planted it in the right place. The other two men went on yelling and appeared to be bawling him out because he had been slow.
The whole mass of the bull shuddered with ponderous tremors. The props supporting the cow's body shook and gave out repeated creaks. We saw rapid shivers running across the bull's skin. Its bellowing became duller, as if it was out of breath.
The coupling machine slowed down, and as they watched its functioning, the men were already uttering sighs of relief and mopping their sweaty brows.
Outside, in brilliant sunlight, we headed toward Svetlaya. And we felt a painful numbness in all our limbs… as one feels after a superhuman effort or a long illness. Utkin looked at the two of us, his face contracted, and exclaimed in a cracked voice: "My uncle's right when he says man is the cruelest animal on earth!"
"Your uncle is a poet." Samurai sighed, smiling. "Like you, Utkin. And poets are always afraid of life…"
"Life?" echoed Utkin in a very sharp tone.
And he walked on faster, pointing his right shoulder toward the sky. His exclamation echoed in my head for a long time…
Samurai was looking at me from his tub. He was clearly waiting for me to reply to a question I had not heard, engrossed as I was in my recollections of that carnal machine at the farm.
"So Olga, who is she?" I asked, to conceal my inattention.
"He who learns much grows old soon," replied Samurai with a vague smile.
He got up slowly, stepping over the edge of the tub. "Let's go; it's late already," he added, throwing my linen towel to me.
On the way back we walked quickly. The bodies we now had beneath our short sheepskin coats were once more susceptible to the cold, as our eyes were to the terrifying beauty of the frozen sky. The sky was no longer drawing us up but bearing down on us with its hard nocturnal clarity. The biting wind lashed our faces.
Olga's izba was at the other end of the village. Before leaving me, Samurai stopped and said in a somewhat strained voice, because his lips were frozen: "She thinks the most important thing is to make a success of your death. That the man who dreams of a fine death will have an extraordinary life. But that's something I don't quite under
stand yet…"
"Who can make a success of his death?" I asked, parting my lips with difficulty.
Samurai had already turned and taken several paces away from me. He called out into the icy wind: "A warrior!"
5
It was A phantom train, a dream, an extraterrestrial. The peaceful flow of time in the switch operator's house took its rhythm from the thundering passage of it. Every evening.
The little izba, where my aunt spent twenty-four hours at a time on duty, nestled between the taiga, which overhung its roof, and the tracks. It took you a good three hours to get there on foot. But my aunt fixed it with the carriers of wood who passed through the village early in the morning. They gave her a lift as far as the Devil's Bend, where there was a fork in the road. This gave her a good start. She now had only an hour's walk.
The coziness of this shanty had the ephemeral quality about it that you always find in dwellings where you are not really at home.
A narrow iron bed. A table covered with a waxed cloth on which the pattern had long since faded. A cast-iron stove. A few postcards fixed above the bed in the manner of an iconostasis.
The most important object in this small room was a round clock. The front, where the hands were, had come to take on the look of a human physiognomy. On this familiar face we read all the timetables and the delays, linking each hour and each train with a different expression. In this mimicry there was one evocation that I particularly enjoyed on the occasions when I came to spend the evening with my aunt.
This was the moment of dusk. The sun had completed its low course in the winter sky, grazing the dark tips of the pine trees. It was now asleep at the far end of the tracks, in the direction of the city, to the west. I went out and saw the double Une of the rails, shining under the hoarfrost and tinted with pink rays. The fog was growing thicker. The mauve light above the snowy tracks was vanishing.
I went into the izba, I heard the gentle hissing of the great kettle on the stove, I saw my aunt preparing supper: a few potatoes, some frozen bacon that she had just removed from a lean-to attached to the izba – our fridge – some tea, and some poppy-seed biscuits… Outside the little window, which was garlanded with arabesques of ice, the blue slowly changed to purple, then to black.
With our last cup of tea we began glancing at the clock face. We already sensed its coming, that train, as it wound its way along, somewhere in the depths of the sleeping taiga.
We went out well in advance. And in the silence of the evening we heard it approaching. First of all a distant murmur that seemed to arise from the depths of the earth. Then the dull sound of a cap of snow falling from the summit of a pine tree. Finally a drumming, more and more resonant, more and more insistent.
When it appeared I had eyes only for the luminous carnival of the coaches. And the locomotive – a real old-fashioned one – with enormous wheels painted red and glittering connecting rods. It looked like a dark monster covered in flakes of hoarfrost. And, on its breastplate, a broad red star! This nocturnal meteor emitted a fierce roar and made us step back several paces with its powerful draft. My aunt flashed her lantern, and I opened my eyes very wide.
The snug comfort that I guessed at behind the brightly Ht windows fascinated me. What mysterious beings did that comfort shelter? From time to time I managed to focus on a female silhouette, a couple seated at a little table with two glasses of tea. Occasionally even a shadowy figure reclining on her berth. But such snatched sightings were very rare. Thick hoarfrost or a drawn curtain would make my observation impossible. And yet a glimpsed silhouette was more than enough for me…
I knew that within the train there was one special coach, bearing inscriptions in three languages: Wagon-lit – Schlafwagen – Vagoni-letti. It was in these coaches that the extraterrestrials, which is what people from the Western World were to us, crossed the empire.
I imagined a woman who had been in her compartment for a day already and was going to spend a whole week there! Mentally I pieced together her long journey: Lake Baikal, the Urals, the Volga, Moscow… How I longed to be at the side of this unknown traveler! To be within, in the warm and narrow confines of the compartment where you sit so close together that every movement, every look, takes on an erotic significance, especially with the approach of night. And the night itself, with the rhythmic swaying of the car, is long, so long…
But already the snow squall provoked by the passage of this fabulous train was calming down, and all one could see in the cold fog down the track was two red lights fading from view…
I went again to see my aunt in the switch operator s izba one gray afternoon in February. On the path through the taiga I had noticed a strange languor abroad in the air. The blue distance was misty, but this mist did not glitter like the fog of the great frosts. It clouded over the brilliance of the snows, softened outlines. The taiga no longer seemed like a block of ice streaked with the black lines of the pine trees. Not at all. Every tree was alive, awaiting a sign, already recovering from the long immobility of winter.
On the branches of the pine tree that touched the roof of the little house I saw two crows. As they uttered their guttural cries, they seemed to be conversing. And in these cries one could also hear a soft, languorous weariness. Their voices no longer barked out, as in the deep heart of winter, but floated in the pleasantly mild air, occasionally summoning up a lazy echo.
"We're going to have one of those mild spells!" my aunt said to me when I appeared at the door. "And then if it starts to snow it certainly won't stop tonight…"
The misty languor in nature that day was strangely close to me. For several weeks now I had felt within myself- more in my heart than in my head – a bizarre uneasiness. Its presence was so new to me that I experienced it very physically, I could almost touch it, like the box of matches in my pocket. But the reason for it escaped me.
It sometimes seemed to me that it had all begun that evening at the bathhouse when Samurai spoke of the beauty of the female body, which, according to him, made time stand still. From then on, the smell of his cigar gave me the feeling of a singular nostalgia. One of the most terrible kind: for places and faces one has never seen. Which one mourns as being lost forever. Young savage that I was, I could not know that this was simply love that had not yet found its object. This gave it a violent but blind intensity. For instance, just now I had almost started running after the crows as they flew away slowly, hoping to lose myself in the lascivious idleness of their guttural calls. I felt that nature was already instinctively preparing for its amorous rite of spring. I yearned to be a part of it by surrendering entirely… But to whom?
I was angry with Samurai for having talked about all these weighty things – love, life, death – in a way that was incomprehensible to me, rhetorical, bookish. I was used to perceiving life very concretely. Love – and I saw the graceful curve of the beautiful stranger's body beyond the wood fire. Life – and I saw the living procession of faces that gravitated around the three poles of our universe: taiga, gold, camp. Death – a truck sinking slowly beneath the ice in a long hole at that accursed place the Devil's Bend. And also the wolf, large and handsome, that some loggers had killed and then flung down from their tractor near Verbin's izba, calling out to him: "Here! Make yourself a new shapka, grandpa!" The wolf was already rigid, its paws hard, inert. And at the corner of its proud eye there was a great frozen tear…
I wanted to continue experiencing life in only that way, in all its joy and all its sorrow, immediate, unthinking. Samurai, with his unanswered questions, had made me uneasy.
Waiting for the night train seemed to me stupid. Yes, waiting for this famous Transsiberian, with wide eyes and a thumping heart, to catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure who did not even have an inkling of my existence – what stupidity! And how many of these female silhouettes had there been already, whom I had fallen in love with and accompanied on their journey across the empire? Without knowing if beside my beautiful strangers their husbands were snoring peacefu
lly?
I felt disillusioned, duped, almost betrayed by my night-walking woman of the West.
Outside in the gray air swirled the great fluffy snowflakes that everything had predicted. The view above the track was woven with their white filaments.
I went up to my aunt, who was polishing the nuts of the switch system.
"I'm going off," I said, wrapping my hand around the lever.
"What's got into you? Without supper? Just as it's getting dark?"
"No, I've looked – it's only half past six…"
"But by the time you get to the Devil's Bend it'll be night… And besides, take a look at the sky: in an hour we'll have a real blizzard."
She wanted to stop me from going at all costs. Did she even have some kind of presentiment, derived from her acute intuition as a solitary and unhappy woman? She gave me all possible reasons.
"What about the wolves? You know it's not autumn now, when their bellies are full…"
"I've got my pike… and something to light a torch with."
Finally she mentioned the temptation that she thought irresistible:
"Don't you even want to wait for the Transsiberian?"
"No, not today," I replied, after a brief hesitation. "Besides, if it really starts to snow there's going to be a hell of a delay to the train."
"Yes, that's true," she agreed, seeing that nothing could stop me.
She slipped several poppy-seed biscuits into my pocket and offered me a box of matches – for all eventualities.
I grasped my pike – a long pole with a steel point. I gave my aunt a farewell wave. And I set off walking beside the track, ahead of the train in one of whose compartments was the unknown woman of my dreams. Who did not yet know that our rendezvous was not going to be kept…
Once Upon The River Love Page 4
