Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  I saw the halo of a candle and the face of the red-haired woman – an oval, calm, subdued. Her hand was lightly stroking my head.

  Seeing me awake, she smiled at me and blew out the candle. I quickly screwed up my eyes. I wanted to go to sleep again before she took away her hand…

  After tea in the morning she said to me in a neutral voice, as if it were a trivial daily occurrence: "We've got snow up to the chimney. It's midday already, but look at the windows: it's pitch dark."

  "I'll make a passage!" I exclaimed joyfully. "I know how to do it! You'll see…"

  "No, no! You just dig a hole for yourself and then go…"

  I did not argue. I understood that my joy was stupid. I must go. Quickly. Without looking back…

  With my snowshoes attached to my belt, I hurled myself at the wall of snow that rose outside the front door. I became mole, snake, and dolphin all at the same time. I dug, wriggled, swam. I battled away at the heart of a white landslide, climbing up within its tide, which grew darker the farther I moved from the house. The rush of snow even penetrated my body, burned it, making my progress more fraught. I opened my mouth to inhale rare puffs of air and swallowed spurts of crystals that stung. My eyelids were immobilized, weighed down with minuscule ice diamonds. At one stage I felt as if I no longer knew the right direction and had lost my sense of up and down. I was surely crawling horizontally, within this mass where there was less and less air left. Or, worse, I was thrusting down into its depths. Such moments of panic are almost inevitable for someone clearing a way for himself after a great snowstorm. My heart thumped. Convulsively, I realigned the angle of my scaling upward. I mounted toward the light like a fish thrusting upstream against the current in a waterfall…

  With a resounding crack, my head broke the fine layer of ice.

  Dazzled, I stretched out on the smooth, sparkling surface. The sunny air resounded with freshness, seemed as if it were quite a different substance from what I had been breathing hitherto. The sky, revitalized by the mild spell, extended as far as the eye could see. The silence of the taiga was so deep that all the little sounds gathered around me, coming only from my movements – the crunch of snow under my elbow; the echo of my hungry breathing; the resonant slithering of white slabs breaking as they fell from my shapka, from the collar of my sheepskin…

  All I could see of Kazhdai was a few dark patches: the roofs of the tallest houses. Some straight outlines as well: the buried trains sleeping on the tracks. I could identify streets thanks to the columns of white smoke rising from the chimneys. The tiny black dots were the inhabitants busy around these columns, making passageways.

  The house I had just left was a little distance from the town, at the edge of the taiga. Its smoke seemed as if it were rising from the midst of a deserted plain. And on the branch of a birch tree, buried in the snow, I saw a miniature house designed to give shelter to the birds.

  I put on my snowshoes and went up to the solitary chimney. Bending toward its mouth, which was shielded by a pitch-black iron cap, I uttered a resounding yell. It was the custom. The signal for the person left behind… I heard the creaking of the stove door, then an echo that seemed to come from the depths of the earth. A kind of slow sigh that was dissipated in the dazzling clarity of this day after the storm…

  I glided briskly along on my snowshoes, crossing the valley that ran down to the Olyei. The taiga, half awake, stayed beside me at a distance. Great pine trees covered in snow had within their shade the brilliance of a bluish, transparent silver. And their tops glittered, dusted with nuggets of gold.

  From time to time I glanced behind me. The column of smoke in the midst of the plain still marked the entombed izba, that room buried beneath the snow, the flickering light of a candle, that interior where the darkness of a winter's night still reigned. An unreal evening spent beneath the compact silence of the snows… The red-haired woman!

  I remained still for a moment. I gazed at the plain with its thousands of crystals, flooded with sunlight, the endless sky extending its blue freshness; the mother-of-pearl shadow of the taiga. And in the distance, that column of smoke, white, all alone, in the midst of it all… Suddenly, with an unbearable clarity, I understood: I am condemned both to this beauty and to the suffering that it conceals. The snow would melt. Kazhdai would become a dark little town once again. The Transsiberian would move off and make up for its delay. And the red-haired prostitute would return to the waiting room. There could not be any other life.

  For some time I followed the ample curve of the Olyei, overhung with immense dunes of snow.

  Passing close to the three legendary cedar trees, where they hanged the men in the civil war, I stopped, stupefied. This morning the great rusty nails, which I was used to seeing high above me as I tilted my head back, were within easy reach. Yes, they were there, immediately before my eyes. I went up to them and, taking off my mittens, touched the rough brown metal. A slow cold, accumulated over long decades, invaded my fingers. I quickly withdrew my hand. I caressed the rough scales of the trunk. They seemed to harbor a warmth that was sleeping but alive. And suddenly what had happened long ago at the foot of these giant trees – that brutal but swift death – did not seem to me all that terrible. A moment of sharp pain and then this silence in the sun-drenched air, this secret life, sleeping, in perfect fusion with the breathing of this great trunk, with the sharp smell of the clusters of needles, with the glittering of the resin frozen in the indentations on the bark. This life without thoughts, without memories. This oblivion.

  I gripped the great nail, I leaned my full weight on it. With half-closed eyes, I tried to enter into that narrow zone which separated me from the blissful silence of the trunk…

  Suddenly, through my closed eyelids, I saw them: two black specks were following the blue ridge of the snowdrifts above the riverbank. Soon they were on a level with the three cedars. They hurtled down the ridge and crossed the Olyei. Their tiny silhouettes were becoming more and more distinct. The first of them moved forward with long strides, stopping at intervals to wait for the other one. I recognized them. And I was struck by their rustic and naive appearance. There was something childish about their sheepskins and their faces, which I could see more and more clearly. The earflaps of their shapkas bounced up and down – dogs' ears. They turned the corner by the forest, and in a few moments they were going to pass beside me. I wanted to run away. To hide deep among the snowy pine trees. I was certain I could no longer be a part of their lives…

  But already the first of the skiers, Samurai, had noticed me. His harsh cry broke the silence. He came toward me.

  Smiles, greetings, teasing. They gave me friendly pats on the shoulder. Told me the latest news from the village…

  "They are children," observed some voice deep within me. "Absolute children, carefree and divinely insubstantial."

  It seemed inconceivable that only yesterday morning we had been at school together. That only yesterday I had been like them.

  "Have you swallowed your tongue or what?" exclaimed Samurai, shoving my shapka down onto my eyebrows. "Look at him, Utkin. He's not a Don Juan anymore. He's a bear that's half asleep!"

  Tears came to my eyes. I was so jealous I could have howled. To be like them once again. To glide across the plain, light as the wind, as translucent as this sun-drenched air, as fresh as the breath of the taiga. Innocent!

  Samurai must have noticed my tortured expression. He turned away and called out as he sped off, without looking at me: "Come on! There's no time to lose. Otherwise there won't be any seats left. Get going, you sleeping bear! You sleeping beauty!"

  I followed them automatically, without even asking where we were going.

  After we had been on the move for an hour I saw that Samurai, following an oblique course, was moving away from Kazhdai and heading toward a distant gray cloud that hung above the taiga – toward the city, toward Nerlug.

  Another two and a half hours to go, I thought bitterly. Why am I trailing after them
? What business do I have in that city?

  Now they were walking side by side, chatting. Everything was so luminous, so serene, in the sunny little world that traveled with them. My gaze reached it as if from the depths of a prison cell. From time to time Samurai turned and called out to me cheerfully: "Come on, bear, move your great paws!"

  It was no longer jealousy I felt toward them but a sort of malevolent contempt. Especially toward Samurai. I remembered his long discourses at the baths. About women. About love. His endless quotations from that old madwoman Olga. What was it he had said? "Love is harmony." What an idiot! Love, my dear Samurai, is an izba that smells of cold smoke. And the horrible solitude of two naked bodies under a garish yellow lightbulb. And the ice-cold knees of the red-haired prostitute that I brushed against when it was over, when I slid out from her belly, which had shaken me around in the damp hollow of the bed. And the bleary features of her face. And her heavy breasts, stretched by so many callused, blind, hasty hands. Like the hands of my phantom truckdriver – covered with scars, stained with grease. Oh, Samurai, if you had seen him! Before tackling the Devil's Corner he unbuttoned his pants and with his hand took out this huge swollen flesh; it looked like a huge piece of raw, warm, flaccid meat. Don't talk to me about love… And you will be like him, Samurai, in spite of your cigar and all that rubbish Olga tells you. You won't get away from it! Nor will I, or even Utkin. And we shall stay in this district center where the endless brawling stops only when the light goes out in a snowstorm. In our village, where the only memory is of the war thirty years ago that turned the whole of life into a memory. And in this railroad station, where the only woman one could still love waits for the Transsiberian that will never take her anywhere. This world will not let us go… You both are laughing as you hurry along there in your little circle of sunlight. But just wait. I know how to escape from it all. I know…

  I stopped for a moment. They were moving on, taking with them their aureole filled with ringing voices. I had a vision of the cedar trees with the big rusty nails. How close at hand it was, that final silence, that escape with no return. How good it was!

  "You haven't even asked what we are going to do in the city, Juan!"

  Samurai's voice rang out suddenly and roused me from my daydreams.

  The seething mass of words I had so far been holding in exploded: "And what could you be doing? Going like feebleminded idiots to the post office to listen to the telephone operators: 'Please, who is the stupid fucker who wants to speak to Novosibirsk? Cabin number two!' Wow! Novosibirsk! You're already drooling at the thought of it, both of you!"

  Instead of losing his temper, Samurai burst out laughing.

  "Look, Utkin! The bear's waking up. Ha ha ha!"

  Then, winking at his companion, he announced: "We are going to see… Belmondo!"

  "Bel-mon-do," Utkin corrected him, laughing.

  "No, Belmon-do! Shut up, Duckling. You don't know a thing about films."

  It must have been the air of the taiga that had intoxicated them. For they began to laugh, to shout this incomprehensible word louder and louder, each one insisting on his own pronunciation. Samurai pushed Utkin and knocked him over, as he went on yelling those three resounding syllables. Utkin retaliated by throwing fistfuls of snow at Samurai's face.

  "Belmon-do!"

  "Bel-mon-do! In Italian it's Bel-mon-do…"

  "Is it a man or a woman?" I asked, dangerously serious, baffled by the neuter "o" ending.

  Their laughter became torrential.

  "Hey, Samurai! Just listen to him! If it's not a chick, he won't come with us! Ha ha ha!"

  "Sure, sure, she's a woman, Juan! With a mustache… And with a… with a big… a big…" Samurai could not get to the end of his sentence.

  They were laughing Uke madmen, crawling about on all fours, their feet tied in knots by their snowshoes, which they had not unfastened. The name rang out so strangely in the midst of the taiga…

  No doubt they thought their laughter had won me over. I let myself fall into the snow beside them, shaking my head frenetically and guffawing noisily. And it was the laughter that allowed me to weep all my drunkenness away…

  Then, when the last groans of our orgy had ceased, when we found ourselves, all three, stretched out across a sunlit clearing, our eyes filled with the sky, Samurai whispered in an enfeebled but vibrant voice: "Belmondo!"

  2

  8

  It was the shark that saved me…

  I think if the film had begun differently I would have run out of the cinema and thrown myself under the wheels of the first truck that came by. In the deafening uproar of that brutal engine I would have sought out the blissful silence of the cedar tree…

  The film could so easily have begun with a shot of a woman walking through the streets while the credits roll – a woman "walking to meet her destiny." Or with one of a man at the wheel of his car, his impassive face hypnotizing the bemused spectators. Or even with a scenic panorama… But it was a shark.

  Well, first we saw a man with a shifty face and a shabby light suit. A man trying to call someone from a telephone booth on the sunny promenade of a southern town. He kept glancing around anxiously, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece. He did not have much time. A helicopter appeared in the azure sky… The machine stopped above the phone booth, lowered enormous claws, picked up the booth, and carried it off into the sky. Inside it the wretched spy was shaking the receiver, trying to pass on his ultrasecret message… But the monstrous claws were already opening. The booth fell, plummeted into the sea, landed on the bottom, and there two frogmen secured it very adroitly to a long cage. Using up his last few mouthfuls of air, the spy turned toward the door of the cage… He even managed to draw his pistol and fire. And produced a ridiculous stream of bubbles…

  A splendid shark, which was, we guessed, ravenously hungry, darted into the submerged booth, pointing its snout at the spy's stomach. The water turned red…

  A few moments later Belmondo made his appearance. And the man who was evidently his boss was telling him about his colleague's tragic end. "We succeeded in recovering his remains," he said in very solemn tones. And he showed him a can of… shark's fin soup!

  It was too silly! Gloriously silly! Completely improbable! Wonderfully crazy!

  We had no words to express it. We simply had to accept it and experience it for what it was. Like an existence parallel to our own.

  The feature film had been preceded by a newsreel. The three of us were sitting in the front row – the least popular of all, but there were no other seats left when we got there. The voice-over, both ingratiating and hectoring, was pouring out its commentary on the political events of the day. First we saw the imperial splendor of some hall in the Kremlin, where an old man in a dark suit was pinning a medal to the chest of another old man. "In recognition of the merits of Comrade Gromygin toward the fatherland and the people, and his contribution to the cause of international détente, and on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday," declaimed the voice-over in ringing tones. And the assembled dark suits began to applaud.

  Next appeared a woman in a little polka-dot satin dress who was moving at an incredible speed amid hundreds of bobbins, all turning at maximum velocity. She broke off from her work for a moment just to declare in strident tones: "I'm currently operating a hundred and twenty looms. But to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of our beloved Party, I solemnly resolve to transfer to a hundred and fifty looms." And once again we saw her nimble fingers dancing between the threads and bobbins. Indeed, she now seemed to me to be running from one loom to the next faster than ever, as if she were already preparing to break the record…

  The lights came on again before being switched off for the feature film. Samurai nudged me with his elbow and offered me a handful of roasted sunflower seeds. I gripped them in my palm, while remaining in an opaque, all-enveloping torpor. She's going to operate a hundred and fifty looms, I was thinking. Then maybe a hundred and eighty. I sensed tha
t this record-breaking weaver and the splendors of the Kremlin were mysteriously connected both to our dark district center and to the Transsiberian, with that red-haired woman forever waiting for it… I also knew that as soon as the darkness returned I would fling my seeds to the ground and escape to that road shaken by the passage of giant trucks. Yes, from the moment of those opening scenes, there would be a woman walking to meet her destiny – or a man at the steering wheel of his car…

  But it was the shark! The absurdity of the can of fish soup containing the digested mortal remains of the spy was probably the only means by which I could have been kept on the fragile shores of life. Yes, what was needed was precisely that degree of harebrained madness for me to be snatched from reality and catapulted onto that sunny promenade, into that sunken cage where the mind-blowing execution was being prepared. The secret agent devoured by a shark and ending up in a can offish soup was just what was needed.

  And there were also women on that promenade. Above all, those two who for several seconds hid the telephone booth with their miniskirted silhouettes, their indolent bodies, their suntanned legs.

  Oh, those divine legs! They moved around on the screen, in time with the sensual, swaying gait of those two shapely young creatures. Tanned thighs that seemed not to have the least idea of the presence, somewhere in the world, of winter, of Nerlug, of our Siberia. Or of the camp whose barbed-wire entanglements had ensnared the sun pendulum. These legs demonstrated with extreme persuasiveness – though without seeking to convert anyone at all – the possibility of an existence without the Kremlin, without weaving looms and other achievements of socialist emulation. Magnificently apolitical thighs. Serenely amoral. Thighs outside History. Apart from all ideology. Without any utilitarian ulterior motive. Thighs for thighs' sake. Quite simply beautiful tanned women's legs!