Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  I caught just a glimpse of the glittering night sky, filled with constellations… Then the red-haired prostitute let her thighs fall back and pushed me away slightly, to free herself. She was unplugging me from her body…

  There was none of the humid warmth of the bath for me to get into. None of the intoxicating smell of Samurai's cigar. A pitiless light with a dry and powdery whiteness. I saw the red-haired woman get up and stand in the middle of the room. Her nakedness terrified me. Especially viewed from behind. I hoped she was going to put out the light. But she started to dress. Her body went through the actions with difficulty, balancing clumsily now on one leg, now on the other. From time to time I saw her profile bending over the garments she was buttoning up. Her lips moved slowly, as if she were addressing silent words to herself. Her eyelids were heavy with sleep. The alcohol must be affecting her more and more.

  Finally she turned around, probably to urge me to hurry. Her gaze met mine. Her eyes grew wide. She saw me! Her lips trembled. Putting her great hand to her mouth, she repressed a cry. Only a kind of dull choking sound was heard.

  Leaving her blouse half unbuttoned, she rushed to a little cupboard, opened it with a violent movement, and took out a bottle. Then, without offering me the slightest explanation, she sat on the edge of the bed beside me and flung back the blanket. I had no time to react. She poured what I took to be water into the hollow of her palm and began to rub my genitals and the lower part of my belly vigorously. Dumbfounded, I allowed this to be done to me. The rubbing burned my skin: the water turned out to be alcohol… Every now and then the woman gave me a look that I could not understand. It was both sorrowful and pitying. Like the one I would observe in Utkin's mother when she saw her son limping across the courtyard.

  Besides, there was no longer anything to understand. What I was experiencing simply could not be thought about at all. The burning of the alcohol, equally incomprehensible, was welcome, rather: it corresponded to the intoxication that was slowly invading every corner of my being.

  It was this drunkenness that freed me from all amazement. What was happening to me was becoming absurdly natural: both the red-haired woman, who, before putting away the bottle, filled herself a glass right to its lipstick-stained brim; and the light that suddenly went out again; and the packet of old photos she fetched at the same time as the candle…

  Everything was natural. This great woman in her unbuttoned blouse sitting beside me, laying out these black-and-white snapshots on the blanket. She wept silently, whispering explanations that I could not hear. I did not see the photos; I lived their tarnished images. There was almost always a young, smiling woman, shading her eyes from the sun. In her arms she held an infant who looked like her. Sometimes a man appeared beside them, dressed in wide trousers and an open-necked shirt such as nobody had worn for a long time now. And I breathed the air of these unknown days that I recognized by the flickering light of the candle. A fragment of river, the shadow of a forest. Their looks, their smiles. Their family complicity. In spite of myself, I experienced the happiness of these unknown people.

  The commentaries the red-haired woman gave me through her silent tears constantly referred to that heavenly summer. And then came the fateful dissolution of the warmth focused on these yellowed snapshots. Someone had gone away, disappeared, died. And the sun that had made the young woman screw up her eyes in those photos had given way to the deceptive halo of the night trains at the snow-covered station in Kazhdai…

  The edges of the photos had been carefully shaped. The person who had trimmed them must have dreamed of the long family history they would one day evoke, gathered together in an album. I picked up a photo and stroked the trimmed edge: I felt the breeze of the sunny days on my face, I heard the laughter of the young woman, the crying of the baby…

  The candle flame was flagging, flickering; the storm rattled noisily in the chimney; the fire, revived, embalmed the darkness with warm, penetrating odors. My drunkenness detached this moment from what had gone before. The red-haired woman's izba became my rediscovered home. And this woman sitting beside me was someone close to me, whose absence, from now on, I would be aware of.

  When there were no more photos, the woman tried to smile at me through the mist of her tears. Closing her eyes, she leaned toward me. With a tentative hand, I touched her shoulder. Everything was mixed up in my wine-soaked young head. The woman was this body and this stormy night and this moment with the smell of the fire… and this rediscovered being. I wanted to cling to her, to live in the shade of her body, by the rhythm of her silent sighs. Not to depart from this moment.

  She touched my forehead with her chin. My hands brushed against the collar of her blouse, touched her breasts. I closed my eyes…

  She pushed me away violently. On the wall I saw the rapid swing of a shadow. My head was shaken by two resounding slaps. I came to my senses.

  She was standing up, her face closed, hard.

  "I… What…?" I stammered, completely lost.

  "Beat it, quick, you dirty little shit!" she said in a weary, disgusted voice.

  And in one armful she threw my clothes at me.

  If I did not hurl myself into the white abyss right away, it is because when I reached the crown of the bridge I became aware that there was no longer any me. There was no longer a person to be hurled into the icy river.

  There was certainly a ghost from before – that adolescent who would avidly seize on any tale of love; that spy on sexual confidences let fall by the hulking great loggers in the workers' canteen. An unrecognizable ghost.

  And there was that other one who, a few moments before, was thrashing around between the thighs of an unknown woman, his eyes fixed on her face with the pitiless light beating down on it. That one, too, was a stranger.

  As for the one who had just been exploring old photos, this was a being I had never encountered within me…

  I found myself on the bridge with several scraps of myself being scattered into the snow-lashed darkness. The wind was so violent that it seemed to empty my body of all the warmth from my short sheepskin coat. I could no longer feel my lips, or my cheeks, now covered with a layer of crystals. I no longer existed.

  Unhappiness and madness have their own logic too…

  It was in accordance with this logic that the bridge suddenly lit up. The headlights of a truck, late, untimely, fortuitous, crazy. The driver should have crossed the bridge at full speed and disappeared in pursuit of his own obscure goal. But he braked abruptly. For – that was it – he had no goal. Other than this absurd race through the storm. Quite simply he was drunk. Drunk and sad. Like the brawl he had just been involved in on the steps of the liquor store under a dim streetlamp. The light had gone out, and he could not even hit the man who had cut his cheek with a fragment of bottle glass. Cursing, they had gone their ways into the darkness…

  Now it was vital not to stop. The two patches of yellow from the headlights were the only source of light, the throbbing of the engine was the only reservoir of warmth. Yes, his drunken heartbeats and that engine. Despite the snow, the whole universe was black.

  And if he stopped suddenly on the crown of the bridge, it was because he must have detected the presence of a tiny parcel of life in this icy pass. He saw a shadowy figure transfixed behind the parapet, clinging to the cast-iron railing. A shadowy figure that seemed to be waiting for the ultimate extinction of its last spark. When the numbed fingers let go…

  Or maybe, quite simply, he saw this solitary silhouette and his cloudy brain imagined a woman. One he could accost and cheer up with whatever was left of the vodka in the bottle he kept hidden behind the seat. Some desperate girl whose whole life had been rather like this teetering on the parapet of a bridge at night. A crumpled body he could lay down on the narrow bench behind the seats. A woman he could "have."

  Or maybe he guessed what kind of shadowy figure it was; and felt bad about his own thoughts; and would even have had pity on that frozen girl he wanted to drag into
his cabin.

  Maybe… Who knows what went on inside the head of a drunken Siberian truckdriver, a big, rough man, his forearms covered by tattoos (anchors, crosses on a tombstone, women with big breasts), with one cheek covered in dried blood, and sad gray eyes that were forced to peer out through a fog of drunkenness?

  He saw a shadowy figure, thought of an easy body stretched out on the bench, felt a pleasant heaviness at the base of his stomach. And he was angry; the whole of life is governed by this heaviness. Food, woman, blood!

  He braked and jumped down into the snow, slamming the door. Rubbing his cheek with a ball of ice scooped up from the slatted side of the truck, he walked toward the shadowy figure. You could no longer see anything three yards ahead. The waves of snow were so dense that you would have thought the earth itself was rocking and tipping into the Olyei.

  The figure stood behind the parapet, above the white abyss of the river. The driver tapped it on the shoulder. Then he cast a look down below. His eyes opened wide. It was the void: the invisible frontier of a vertiginous beyond. He grabbed the collar of the snow-covered sheepskin coat and pulled the figure over the parapet.

  "What the hell are you doing there?" he demanded, dragging his burden toward the truck. "Where'd you get pissed like that, idiot? Why, at your age I was sweating my guts out in the factory! And today all these kids can think about is getting pissed out of their skulls."

  The shadowy figure made no reply. In any case the truckdriver was really asking himself these questions, while thinking about something quite different. About that nameless abyss, about the solitude he had just encountered in the night, about the fine trickle of warmth the frozen ghost was still giving off.

  He went on talking in the same way in the cabin. The storm wind had woken him up, had made him garrulous. These snatches of nighttime conversation were the first things I was aware of when, slowly, I began to reinhabit the inanimate ghost shaken by the jolting of the road.

  I was warming up, becoming myself again. I needed to assume my new identity. The unrecognizable strangers were once again assembling within me: the virgin of a few days ago who spied on adult confidences; the young frenzied body ripping the belly of a prostitute with his sex; and the figure in the storm, waiting to take the final step, waiting for his numbed fingers to give way… All this was me!

  The man asked where I lived and read my reply in the quivering of my lips, which I could still hardly control. I stared at him. His face swollen from the cold, the alcohol, and the blows he had just received. His broad, hairy wrists. His hands covered in shiny scars, his thick fingers with their broad, hardened nails…

  And without being able to reach the logical conclusion of my thought, I was feeling: Now I am like him; yes, I am in the same boat he is; in his skin, pretty much. Instead of the immense joy that, for years, I expected at this turning point of my life, a cruel despair! Like him… Soon the same tattooed hands on the steering wheel of a heavy truck, the same face, the same smell of vodka. But above all the same experience with women. I gave a sidelong glance at his heavy legs and imagined the force with which they would part a woman's thighs. The thighs of a woman… Of the red-haired woman! I felt something tremble inside me: of course he had "had" her. Before me…

  "So what are you gawking at me like that for?" he muttered, noticing how intently I was staring at him. "One thing's for sure: we can't go any faster. Have you seen the road?"

  At each stroke the windshield wipers flung aside a thick layer of clinging snow. It seemed as if only the taiga was guiding the truck, as it plowed on into the storm.

  I looked away. No further need to look at my man: he was an exact replica of me in a few years' time…

  Now I knew precisely what was going to happen. I knew that we had only a few minutes left to live!

  I was waiting for the Devil's Bend. Drunk as he was, the driver was sure to miss it. I could already picture the long sideways slide of the truck, the frantic and useless wrenching of the steering wheel; I heard the engine choking in an impotent roar. I saw the black breach in the ice, which was always very thin at that point on account of warm springs in the bed of the Olyei.

  I swallowed my saliva nervously, focusing on the road. I was like the bullet in a revolver primed for firing. Abrupt burning thoughts, searing images, propelled the tension to its peak. Those hands resting on the steering wheel had crushed the breasts of the red-haired woman. We had both of us been ensnared in the same moist wound at the base of her belly. We would both of us be forever floundering in the same narrow space at the edge of the endlessness of Siberia: the dreary streets of the district center; the cabins of trucks stinking of diesel il; the taiga – wounded, pillaged, hostile. And that red-haired woman. Open to all. And this stormy night that cut us off from the world. And this tiny cabin crammed with homogeneous soiled flesh that was going to disappear. As my fingers gripped the door handle, the nails became white…

  The driver braked and shouted at me, grinning: "Before that bitch of a corner I need to take a leak…"

  I saw him open the door, climb onto the running board, and begin to unbutton his padded pants. My anticipation had been so frenzied that I perceived in his smile a hidden meaning, which seemed to be saying: Ha ha! So that's it, you little squirt – you thought you had me with your goddamned bend. Well, I'm not stupid.

  I understood that this dark and absurd world was also endowed with wily and sly cunning. It wasn't so easy to annihilate it by killing yourself. Even as it slid along the razor's edge, this world knew how to stop abruptly and smile with cunning geniality. "A red-haired woman, you say? Some photos spread out on a blanket? First love?

  Solitude? Well, look at me! I'm going to unbutton my pants and piss on every one of your first loves and solitudes!"

  I jumped down from the truck and began to run in the opposite direction, following the tracks of its wheels…

  Against all expectation, I heard neither shouts from the man nor the noise of the engine. No, the driver did not call out, did not rush off in pursuit of me, did not make a U-turn to catch up with me… When I stopped after twenty yards I could no longer see the outline of the truck, could hear no noise. The white blizzard, the fierce whistling of the wind in the branches of the cedar trees, nothing more. The truck had vanished! As I continued on my way, I wondered whether the red-haired woman, the bridge, and that drunken driver had not been a dream. A kind of delirium similar to the one I had once had when ill with scarlet fever… Even the wheel tracks I was following were becoming less and less visible and soon disappeared…

  I found the dark streets of Kazhdai again. Instinctively, I headed for the station. I went into the barely lit main hall. In fact, it was largely the white reflection of the blizzard that filled this deserted space with a somewhat ghostly luminosity.

  I went up to the clock. It was half past ten. The Transsiberian had left at nine. Dumbfounded, I could not manage to do the simple arithmetic, so astounding did the answer seem to me. All that had been lived through in no more than an hour and a half! The interminable wait in front of the newsstand; the Redhead's izba; her body and that pain they called "love"; my flight; the frozen eternity on the bridge; the drunken truck… Its disappearance. My return.

  Then, as if to add to the unreality of what I was living through, I heard a voice behind my back, probably that of the deputy station-master, explaining to some passenger: "Oh, you know. It'll be when it stops snowing… As you saw, even the Transsiberian had to come back. It'd hardly left the station and there was already three feet of snow on the track…"

  I pushed open the glass door and went out onto the platform. So this mass of sleeping coaches was the Transsiberian. Its windows gleamed feebly with the blue reflection of the night-lights on the compartment ceilings. Behind the tracery of hoarfrost you could sense the silent comfort within. And the presence of the beautiful Western woman, who had kept our rendezvous after all. I remembered her, or, more precisely, how I used to spy on her in the old days near
the switch operator's izba. My memories of all that were so intense that the events of this evening were now firmly transformed into no more than a particularly vivid daydream. Afraid of shattering this certainty, I went back into the station. So nothing at all had happened. Nothing… Nothing!

  The door opposite, the one that led out onto the square in front of the station, opened. In the dim light of the main hall I saw a woman coming in, glancing rapidly around her. She was wearing an autumn coat and a thick woolen shawl. She came up to me, as if finding me there were the most natural thing in the world. I watched her approaching. It seemed to me that she no longer had a face. Her features, without makeup, washed out – cleansed by the snow or by tears – were only pale watercolor outlines. All one saw of her face was the expression: an intensity of extreme suffering and weariness.

  "Come on. You're going to spend the night at our house," she said in a very calm voice that could only be obeyed.

  7

  In my dream the corridor of the sleeping car led to a compartment that was a replica of the switch operator's izba, but still smaller. As if that house, being a part of the corridor, were perched on the track, waiting for an improbable departure. A woman was seated at the little table under the window of this strange – but quite natural – compartment. She seemed to be staring out into the darkness of the night outside the window. Not in order to see what the thick hoarfrost was hiding, but so as to avoid seeing what was happening around her. At the center of the little table there was an extraordinary fleshy bulb, cut in two. Inside it could be seen a kind of cocoon composed of semitransparent leaves, delicately folded over one another. It resembled a carefully swaddled baby.

  I was supposed – I did not know why – to unwrap its fragile leaves without attracting the attention of the silent passenger. My numb, clumsy fingers were fumbling with this cocoon, this silken cone. I already sensed that what would appear would be painful to see… The further I progressed with my meticulous efforts, the more my anxiety about this revelation increased. I was going to see a living thing whose birth would be compromised by my curiosity but whose vitality I could ascertain only by stripping off the leaves. I was killing it by opening the bulb. But it would not have existed if I had not dared to rip open the cocoon. In my dream the tragic significance of my action did not appear so clearly. It was the slow upsurge of a harrowing cry that expressed it. A cry that rose to my throat – a dry, strangled cry. My fingers were stripping off the leaves with scant ceremony. And the woman sitting by the window began, at that moment, to turn her head slowly in my direction… The cry burst forth, shook me, woke me up…