Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  He was a celestial clockmaker, who wound up the giant watch spring of this mind-blowing universe, set the southern sun and the languid stars on their courses. And his boxer's lungs breathed life into every soul that revolved around him. The carousel gathered speed, the cascading action sequences were transformed into a burlesque Niagara. And we were carried along on its torrent.

  There were nevertheless times when our hero, while in full amorous and military cry, would suddenly stop and choose to be solitary, sad, misunderstood. Like a god in the midst of his creation when it no longer has need of him… Then a moment later he would fly off into the sky, attached to some fiery helicopter. But we who were tucked away in an obscure corner of his universe had glimpsed that moment of melancholy and solitude…

  The process of exploring the Western World continued, with its setbacks and its victories. One day we finally succeeded in defining the role of the publisher. He was classified: an evil man whose sexual appetite bore no relation to his physical and intellectual insignificance, a being who preyed on the noblest human gift, the capacity to dream.

  This discovery coincided with another one, three or four showings later. We solved the mystery of the doubling of Belmondo!

  The coming and going between the luxurious villas frequented by the master spy and the writer's modest apartment; between the athlete with a sunburned body and the slave to the typewriter who is more or less depressive and ravaged by nicotine addiction – this disconcerting alternation finally yielded its secret. And it was the glamorous spy who greatly assisted our investigation.

  For she, too, was quite ambiguous. Chained to the wall of the underground chamber, she struggled; her struggling was highly provocative. Her tattered dress was on the brink of spilling out a magnificent breast into the lubricious palm of the transmogrified publisher. A superb breast, destined for a sadistic mastectomy. Her emerald eyes, admirably slanting, were those of a captured antelope. Her body had the aerodynamic curves of that noble animal. Her abundant hair rippled over her bare shoulders. The sadist approached, brandishing his blade, and we almost regretted that the hero's chains had yielded so quickly. Another moment, and the publisher-executioner would have stripped the marvelous antelope's body of those useless rags…

  It took us at least ten showings before we began to recognize the features of the antelope in the appearance of the rather pale student who lived in the same apartment building as the writer. This remote prototype for the glamorous spy, this pale shadow, was seen m a very humdrum setting of rainy days in Paris – a tall girl in jeans, her generous outlines erased, flattened out. A thick sweater camouflaged all hint of curves, eliminated all trace of sensuality. Her serious student's glasses dulled the sparkle in her eyes. And yet it was still she, our antelope with the shapely and muscular buttocks, our spy whose heaving bosom swelled full and round beneath the tatters of her dress.

  Yes, it was she. But what a difference! The student in the Parisian rain seemed like an abortive double for the antelope of the tropical nights.

  And it was by comparing this drab replica with the original that we glimpsed the secret of Western man's fantasies. Or rather those of the Western husband… The gorgeous antelope, the original – endowed with all possible physical charms – was his mistress, real or imagined. And the copy, devoid of all the sensual extras, was his wife…

  And how perspicacious our juvenile discovery was! Twenty years later, wandering through the capitals of the West, we would rediscover this erotic ambiguity that Belmondo had suggested to us. The women of male fantasies – on the covers of magazines or in red-light districts – would have breasts capable of tempting any sadistic publisher, and full golden thighs, like those of our fabulous antelope. While the wives would go on show with the bony angles of their shoulders, their nonexistent hips, and their flat chests. People would talk to us about the fashion, the style of the times, the puritan ideal, the equality of the sexes. But we would not be fooled. For we had explored that Western World of ours down to its murky subconscious depths!

  Why Belmondo? Why in those long ago days at the time of the mild spell? In the blue dusk of February? At the six-thirty performance, when they generally showed long war films? In the Red October cinema, half buried in the snow?

  What occurred was a veritable epidemic of Belmondophilia. A Belmondomania that had nothing in common with a passing infatuation for some Italian comedy or a fleeting craze for a Hollywood western. After the second performance the management of the Red October was compelled to put in an extra row of seats. We even saw one spectator sitting on a stool he had brought from home… And the charm did not fade!

  In the long waiting line, which almost matched that of the visitors to Lenin's tomb, we saw more and more unlikely people appearing. Two brothers Nerestov, renowned sable hunters who rarely came to the city – and then only to pour a fluid stream of furs from their bags… It was so strange to see them lining up in front of the ticket window among the citizens in their Sunday best. Their faces tanned by the icy wind; their enormous silver-fox fur shapkas; their curly beards: everything about them evoked their solitary life in the heart of the taiga…

  And then the legendary home distiller Sova, a robust and intrepid old woman, whom the militia had never managed to catch in flagrante delicto. She carried out her criminal activities, according to some people, in an abandoned mine, whose exit, half caved in, was hidden amid the gooseberry bushes in her garden. We always pictured her in the vaults of this gold mine, beneath the wooden supports, ht by the uncertain light of an oil lamp. A witch busy at her stills… This dark mine was only a step removed from the underground chamber with the beauty in chains, rescued by our hero. Old Sova took that step, her head held high, and came and sat down in the front row one day, dressed in her full brown sheepskin coat, with a monumental fox-fur hat on her head.

  Yes, soon Belmondomania seemed like a powerful ground swell that brought surprising human species to the surface of our life. It was a surge that ran through the most remote villages, seeped into foresters' lodges, and, visibly, even shook the icy calm of the watchtowers. Each performance brought its surprises…

  One day I noticed that the seat next to me was empty. We always sat in the front row. No longer because we had arrived late, but in order to be alone face-to-face with Belmondo, to be able to make our way onto the sunlit promenade without having to step over heads and fox-fur hats… The empty seat on my left did not surprise me unduly at first. Someone had decided to come in after the newsreel, I thought, making use of those ten minutes of Kremlinian news to smoke a cigarette in the foyer. However, the newsreel – on this occasion, apart from the inevitable presentation of medals, we saw some marine fishermen who had overfulfilled the fishing plan by thirty percent – yes, the newsreel came to an end, the lights came on for a moment and then went off again, but the seat remained unoccupied. I was already preparing to move, as the empty seat seemed to me more centered…

  It was at that moment that the huge silhouette of a stooping man slipped across the screen, which was already ablaze with the brilliance of the south, and I felt one of his heavy boots stumbling against my feet in the darkness. The tardy spectator settled in his seat. Before the arrival of the helicopter above the telephone booth, I glanced at my neighbor…

  Recognizing him, I began slowly shrinking down between the armrests. I wanted to make myself very small, invisible, nonexistent.

  For it was Gera. Gerassim Tugai was his real name. A name pronounced by all the inhabitants of the region in tones of nervous respect. He was the one who was "stealing gold from the state," in the opinion of my aunt and her friends. The one who was being frantically sought after by the militia and whom we had passed one summer's day in the heart of the taiga. The one who, hidden away in the wild and inaccessible depths, washed the gold-bearing sand of a little clear, fast-flowing river amid the silence of the centenarian cedar trees.

  Overcoming my fear, I stared at him discreetly. His broad bearskin coat smelled of
the fresh wind of the snowy spaces. His shapka, with earflaps tied at the back of his neck, was reminiscent of a great Nordic warrior's helmet. He sat in a proudly independent posture, his huge silhouette towering above the whole row of spectators.

  The more I examined his profile by the changing and multicolored light of the screen, the more a strange resemblance emerged in his features. Yes, he reminded me of someone I knew very well… But who? On his brow, a lock of hair escaped from below the shapka… A flattened nose, the result of some brawl, no doubt. A determined set to his lips, a slightly carnivorous smile. A powerful, massive jaw. And that lively brown eye…

  Dumbfounded and not daring to trust my intuition, I looked at the screen. Belmondo was emerging from the glittering azure of a swimming pool and settling into a deck chair beside the glamorous spy. I studied his profile. The lock of hair he tossed back from his wet brow, his nose, his lips. His eyes… I turned toward my neighbor. Then toward the screen. And once again toward the man in the bearskin…

  Yes, it was he. There are no explanations for magic. Nor did I try to understand. I remained in a strange zone between-two-worlds, between these two perfectly similar faces, brought together within the alchemist's distilling flask that the dark space of the Red October cinema had become. In the midst of a slow transmutation of the real into something more true and more beautiful…

  I came to my senses with a start. My neighbor's great boots had caught on my feet in passing. He was leaving the auditorium one or two minutes before the end. The glass flask was shattered. I almost ran after him, whispering: "Wait, you're going to miss the best scene in the film!" It was the one in which the lovely neighbor was asleep outside the hero's door, revealing her long thigh that was the eighth color of the rainbow…

  I did not run. I did not call out. We could hear the side door softly closing. The man in the bearskin had disappeared…

  When the lights came on among the slow-moving, dazzled, and smiling crowd we could see two uniformed officers. Their epaulets were colored crimson, the distinctive insignia of the units that guarded the camp. The spectators gave them amused, furtive looks, as much as to say: "Aha! You, too…"

  Yes, they, too, had spent time in the magic flask. Alongside the redoubtable Gera…

  I never spoke about him to Samurai or Utkin. They would doubtless have laughed in my face. But after that strange evening I have come to realize that magic is broken precisely because man dares neither speak of it nor believe in it. He shows himself unworthy of miracles by trying to reduce them to some banal material cause.

  Besides, during the time of that mild weather one miracle more or less was not an issue. The day after the mysterious appearance of the man in the bearskin, whom should we see in the waiting line but… Utkin's grandfather! He looked quite embarrassed, like an adult caught red-handed in some piece of childishness. And he hastened to justify himself: "Well, what do you expect? The whole world talks of nothing else… A friend of mine who's a doctor told me one of his patients asked him to delay his operation so that he could go and see this film. So I thought…"

  And to exonerate himself he paid for all four tickets.

  Why Belmondo?

  With his flattened nose, he looked like many of us. Our life – taiga, vodka, camps – sculpted faces of this type. Faces with a barbaric beauty that shone through the roughness of their tortured features.

  Why him? Because he waited for us. He did not abandon us on the threshold of some luxurious palace, but – thanks to the coming and going between his dreams and his ordinary life – he was always at our side. We could follow him into the unimaginable.

  We also loved him for the magnificent uselessness of his exploits. For the joyful absurdity of his triumphs and his conquests. The world we inhabited was based on the crushing inevitability of the radiant future. We were all conscripted into this logic – the weaver darting between her hundred and fifty looms, the marine fisherman trawling the fourteen seas of the empire, the loggers undertaking to cut down more each year. This irresistible progress defined the object of our presence on this planet. The awarding of decorations at the Kremlin was the supreme symbol of it. And even the camp found its place in this planned harmony – a place was certainly needed for those who showed themselves to be temporarily unworthy of the great project, for the inevitable dross of our paradisal existence.

  But now came Belmondo with his pointless exploits, his achievements with no purpose, his gratuitous heroism. We saw a strength that took pride in itself with no thought for the result; the gleam of muscles that were not concerned to break productivity records. We discovered that the physical presence of a man could be beautiful in itself! Without any ulterior motive, be it messianic, ideological, or futurist. From now on we had a name for this marvelous "in itself": Western World.

  And then there was also that encounter at the airport. The spy who was to meet our hero had to have about her person an agreed object, an identifying sign. And it was a… karavai, a loaf of black bread, Russian – you can't get more Russian than that – and called by its Russian name in a French film! A shout of delight and national pride ran through the rows at the Red October cinema… On the way back to Svetlaya this time we spoke of nothing else: so over there in the Western World they did have an inkling that we existed!

  Why Belmondo?

  Because he arrived at the right moment. He erupted in the midst of the snowbound taiga as if propelled there by a fantastic film stunt. Yes, it was one of his action sequences – a dazzling series of leaps, chases, pistol shots and fisticuffs, falls, spins of the steering wheel, takeoffs and touchdowns. That was how he had touched down in the midst of the taiga!

  He arrived at the moment when the discontinuity between the promised future and our own present was on the brink of making us irremediably schizophrenic. When in the name of our messianic project the fishermen were preparing to leave not one single fish in the seas, and the loggers to transform the taiga into a desert of ice. While back in the Kremlin one old man was decorating another and anointing him "three times Hero of Socialist Labor" and "four times Hero of the Soviet Union," and there was no space left on the shrunken chest of the decorated person for all those gold stars…

  When Belmondo took Siberia by storm, all that was part of it. The Kremlin; the hundred and fifty weaving looms; vodka as the sole means to combat the schizophrenic rupture between the future and the present. Not to mention the disk of the setting sun trapped in the barbed wire…

  He leaped from a helicopter hooked onto the end of the Siberian sky, rolled in the snow, and erupted on the screen, inviting us to follow him… It was a stroll beside the warm sea. By constantly turning our backs on the distant silhouette of the radiant future, we advanced gingerly into that terra incognita: the Western World.

  But more than anything else: it was love…

  What did I know of it, what did any of the audience know of it, before his arrival? We knew there was I've-had-her love. The most common currency in the emotional life of our rough country. And eternally-waiting-by-the-ferry love… And there was another kind, the one we generally encountered on the screen at the Red October. I recall one very typical film about love…

  Boy meets girl. On a path in the midst of the fields of rye, in the evening. They walk along silently, artistically shy, heaving eloquent sighs from time to time. The moment of decision approaches. The audience holds still, subsides, waiting for an appropriate embrace. The young kolkhoznik removes his cap, makes a broad circular gesture, and declares: "You know the rye this year, Masha: I bet it yields twelve quintals per hectare!"

  A groan of frustration shook the darkened auditorium.

  Especially because the heroine was very beautiful and her partner definitely virile. If her dress had been ripped into tatters, we would have been able to gaze at breasts just as well rounded as the one Belmondo's ravishing prisoner was in danger of losing. If she had lain down in the grass – which the whole auditorium was ardently longing for – then the
shapeliness of her thighs would easily have rivaled the sensual curves of the spy…

  But all the lovers could see, hovering over the fields in the evening, was the misty outline of the messianic project, the sunbathed peaks of the future. They stifled their natural urges and concentrated on talking about the harvest… The kiss came as a more or less optional extra. It made the screen go dark. And before it Ht up again we heard the first wails of the baby that had appeared in the arms of its happy mother. Clearly these moments of darkness were a filmic expression of the night of the gestation period…

  The gulf between this official modesty and I've-had-her love was the same as that which lay between the prophetic future and Nerlug in the present. And at the bottom of this chasm was the house of the red-haired prostitute. A woman with a heavy, weary body. A woman who weeps as she lays out on a blanket photos with the edges carefully trimmed. Heaven knows why. Showing them to an adolescent who can only think of that dead bird within him – his dream of love. At the bottom of this chasm was that night of snowstorm and the Transsiberian backtracking. The washed-out face of the woman above the candle flame and her fingers caressing my hair…

  Belmondo held out his hand to this adolescent with a dead bird nestling close to his heart. He drew him toward the southern sun. And the terrifying and unspeakable lava of love found words to speak its name with Western clarity: seduction, desire, conquest, sex, eroticism, passion. Like a true professional in love, he even included in his analysis the possible setbacks and disappointments that lie in wait for the young seducer in the early stages of his adventure. We saw him preparing a candlelit dinner to which he had invited his neighbor. He put on a dark suit, went on waiting and… fell asleep in the posture of a vanquished gladiator. She never came…

  Yes, the leap into the abyss of love was also an element in his storming of Siberia. And so that there should be no doubt on this subject, he had come and sat down beside me, disguised as Gerassim Tugai, in the front row of the Red October cinema…