Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  He went on, uttering little laughs, so as to hide his own fear and reassure the gawking crowd. Utkin, who at this moment was becoming Utkin the Duckling, was sitting on the snow, hunched into a damp ball. He looked at the man laughing and wiping his raw hands on his pants. He looked at him with his blurred eye, benefiting from the last moments before the pain swept over him. In an inexpressible premonition, he sensed that this laughter already belonged to quite another period of his life. Likewise the encouraging remarks from the onlookers, as they wondered whether an ambulance should be called or if the Duckling would recover unaided, after drying himself and drinking some hot tea. The sun, too, was a sun from other days. Like the beauty of the spring. And this nickname he had just been given – Utkin – had been given to a being who no longer existed: a boy like any other, who had come to look at the thaw on this very ordinary morning of his life…

  And when, suddenly, the snow turned quite black, when the sun began to resonate and quiver and to penetrate into the burning mass that was his body, when the furrows of the first waves of pain began to lash his face, Utkin for the first time heard that distant voice: "But who is he, that little fellow shouting with pain, spitting up blood from his crushed lungs and twitching in the melted snow like a young bird with broken wings?"

  The fact that the calamity had occurred without haste, in rhythm with the mighty river and the immensity of the ice blocks, impelled Utkin toward a reflection that was strange and very remote from any idea he had had as a child. He began to doubt the reality of everything that surrounded him. To doubt reality itself…

  This doubt arose on the day when they took him home from the hospital. Utkin was sitting in the room in their izba, a very clean room filled with friendly objects, each of which evoked faint echoes of memory, a room that had the gentle tonality of his mother's presence. His mother brought a kettle from the kitchen, placed two cups on the table, made the tea. And Utkin already knew that his life would never again be the same. That from now on the world would come to meet him, mimicking the lunges of his limping gait. That the whirligig of his schoolfellows' games would always fling him away from the center toward the periphery, toward inaction. Toward exclusion. Toward nonexistence. He knew that his mother would always have that assumed intonation in her voice and that somber glint of despair in her eyes, which no tenderness would be able to hide.

  Once more he recalled that slow-motion calamity – the weighty and majestic advance of the ice floes, their titanic collision, the deafening sound of the impact, the piling up of the enormous fragments, revealing blocks of a greenish transparency, more than a yard thick. With infallible precision, his memory played back the syncopated sequence of his thoughts. Standing on the triangle of ice, scrabbling to reach an impossible equilibrium, he was afraid of others laughing at him… And it was no doubt this fear of ridicule that made him clumsy…

  Yes, it had all turned on so little. If he had been a trifle quicker, slightly less embarrassed by the stares of the crowd massed on the riverbank, things would not have changed. If he had drawn back from the water's edge by a couple of inches, the tea he was about to drink with his mother could have had quite a different taste, and the spring day outside the windows quite a different meaning. Yes, reality would not have changed.

  Dumbfounded, he was discovering that the solid, visible world regulated by adults who knew everything was suddenly proving to be fragile, improbable. A couple of inches more, a few mocking looks received, and you find yourself in a quite different dimension. in another life. A life where the comrades of yesterday run away and leave you limping in the melting snow, where your mother makes a superhuman effort to smile, where little by little people get used to the fact that this is how you are, and fix you once and for all with this new appearance.

  This universe, suddenly uncertain, terrified him. But sometimes, without being able to express it clearly, Utkin experienced a heady freedom when he thought about the discovery he had made. It was that all these people took the world seriously, convinced by its appearance. And only he knew that all it needed was a small thing to render this universe unrecognizable.

  It was then that he began to make visits to that sunlit autumn that he had never lived through, among broad yellow leaves that he had never seen. He could not even tell how that day came to be born in him. But it was born. Utkin closed his eyes and breathed the strong, fresh scent of the foliage… From time to time an unpleasant whisper began to hiss in his head: "This day is not real, and the reality is that you are a cripple nobody wants to play with." Utkin did not know what to reply to this voice. Unconsciously he sensed that a reality that depended on a couple of inches and a few titters from gawking onlookers was more unreal than any dream. Not being able to say this, Utkin smiled and gazed with screwed-up eyes into the low sun of his autumn day. The air was translucent, the gossamer threads floated, swaying gently… And this beauty was his best argument.

  And then one day – he was already thirteen, two years into his new life – his grandfather gave him a story to read. His grandfather, that taciturn and solitary polar bear, had been a journalist. His text, two and a half typewritten pages, bore the indelible stamp of the journalistic style, almost as tenacious as the letter k in his typescript, which always jumped up higher than the others. But Utkin did not even notice these details in the text, he was so overwhelmed by the story. And yet in this story there was nothing unusual.

  Like a reporter in the country of his youth, his grandfather conjured up a column of soldiers lost in the mire somewhere on the roads of the war in the icy November rain. Their army beaten, scattered, retreating before the advance of the German divisions, seeking refuge closer to the heart of Russia… The bare forests, the dead villages, the mud…

  "Each soldier carried within him the memory of some beloved face, but I had no one. No girlfriend: I believed I was ugly and was very shy. No fiancée: I was also very young. No parents: destiny had wanted it that way. No one I could think about. I was as alone as you can be under the low, gray sky. From time to time a farm cart overtook our column. A thin horse, a pile of trunks, several frightened faces. For them we were the soldiers of defeat. One day we met a farm wagon in open country. A rainy dusk, wind, the road churned up. I was walking behind the others. There was no longer any order in our ranks. A woman with a baby in her arms lifted her face as if to bid us good-bye. Her eyes met mine for a moment… Night fell and we were still marching. I did not yet know that I would remember for the rest of my life the look she gave me. In the war. Then in the camp for seven long years. And even today… Marching along in the dusk, I said to myself: 'At night to each of them comes a memory within him. And now I have the look she gave me.'… An illusion? A fantasy? Maybe… But thanks to that illusion I have come through hell. Yes, if I am alive, it is thanks to that look. That haven where the bullets could not touch me, where the boots of the guards bruising my ribs could not reach my heart…"

  Utkin read and reread this tale, recounted it to himself several times. And one day, returning to his own simple story, he thought: But if what happened to me hadn't happened, I should never have understood what it meant, that look a soldier carried in his eyes all through the long night of the war…

  Utkin was sure of his luminous autumn day. But a man was already awakening within this adolescent's body, within this frail, crippled shell. The world was exuding its sweet-tasting springtime poison, the mortal amber of love, the lava of female bodies. Utkin would have liked to take wing and join us, those of us who were already soaring in these intoxicating emanations. But his upthrust was shattered, his takeoff hurled him down toward the ground.

  He was the same age as me, fourteen, during that memorable winter. At the time of his calamity and for some time afterward the female part of the school had paid a particular attention to him. The maternal instinct toward an injured child. But very soon his condition was accepted as normal, therefore of no interest. These little girls, from being future mothers who could love him as
a sick doll, were turning into future fiancées. Utkin no longer interested them.

  It was then that I began to intercept the look that he focused on my face: a mixture of jealousy, hatred, and despair. A silent but harrowing interrogation. And when, on the occasion of our swim, the two young women strangers observed us naked, Samurai and me, particularly me, through the dance of the flames, I understood that the intensity of this interrogation could one day be the death of Utkin.

  But then came Belmondo… and as we went to see his film for the sixteenth time and Utkin emerged from the purplish shadow of the taiga, he took several steps toward me, regarding me with a dreamy smile, as if he had just awakened in the midst of this snowy plain lit by the mauve haze of the morning sun. And in his eyes I could find no unhealthy hostility. His faint smile seemed to be his response to the earlier interrogation. He waved his arm, gesturing at Samurai, who was pressing on a hundred yards ahead of us. He laughed softly: "What's got into him? Does he want to see more female spies than the rest of us?"

  We speeded up a bit, to catch up with Samurai…

  Yes, one day came Belmondo… And Utkin saw that his suffering and the interrogation that went unanswered had long since found classic expression in the Western World: the dreariness of so-called real life versus the pyrotechnics of fantasy; ordinary life and dreams. And Utkin fell in love with the poor slave to the typewriter. This was the Belmondo he felt close to. The one who climbed the stairs painfully, pumping his broken-winded lungs, ravaged by tobacco. In short, that very vulnerable being. Now hurt by his own son's boorishness; now by the unintended betrayal of his lovely young neighbor…

  Yet it was enough for there to be a sheet of white paper in his machine, and reality was transfigured. The tropical night, thanks to the magic philter of its scents, made him strong; as swift as the bullets from his revolver; irresistible. And he never tired of moving back and forth between his two worlds, so as to unite them, in the end, with his titanic energy. The pages of typescript fluttered over the courtyard, and the lovely neighbor embraced this rather unheroic hero. In this happy ending Utkin saw a hope beyond words.

  Now when he was climbing the high staircase at school, painfully dragging his foot, he pictured himself as that writer dogged by the misfortunes of daily life, that Belmondo of the rainy days. In the film, however, at the top of the staircase there was the pretty neighbor brimming with friendly concern. Whereas at school, in the passing throng of mocking faces, nobody was waiting for Utkin on the landing. "Life is stupid," a bitter voice said inside him, "stupid and cruel." "But there's always Belmondo," murmured another…

  Halfway on our journey, in the midst of the highway, bathed in sunshine, we stopped to have a bite to eat. The wind blowing along the valley was bitter. We looked for shelter and settled ourselves under the lee of a snow dune shaped by the storm. The icy blast passed right over its sharp-edged cornice. The day seemed still, without the slightest movement of the air. Sunshine, the dazzling glitter of the snow, perfect calm. You would have said it was already spring. From time to time Utkin or I would lay a palm on the leather of Samurai's sheepskin coat. His short coat, dyed black, was hot. Our friend smiled: "Hey, I've got a real solar battery there, haven't I?"

  We were through March; it was still fully winter. But we had never felt so intensely aware of the covert presence of spring. It was there. You simply had to know the places where it was hiding while waiting for its time to come.

  The cold wind, a little food, and the hot light intoxicated us, plunged us into a blissful drowsiness… But suddenly a gust of wind broke over the cornice of the dune with a sharp hiss and scattered fine snow crystals across our provisions – hunks of buttered bread, hard-boiled eggs. It was time to finish the meal and move on. We put our snowshoes on again and climbed up the white slope, leaving our shelter behind. The icy blast sent long snakes of powder snow to meet us…

  At sunset we lapsed into the stillness of the morning. We conversed less and less and were soon completely silent. Out of the bluish mist on the horizon the silhouette of the city was slowly beginning to appear. We were concentrating before the film…

  It was in the course of this sixteenth journey that I became aware of an astonishing truth: we were each going to see a different Belmondo! And an hour later, in the darkness of the auditorium, I observed the faces of Utkin and Samurai discreetly. I believed I could understand why Utkin did not join in the audience's uproarious laughter when the gasping writer was struggling up the steep steps of the staircase. And why Samurai's face remained hard and closed when the preposterous publisher was approaching the chained beauty in order to remove one of her breasts…

  12

  As we were leaving after the performance we heard a voice in the crowd: "On Saturday they're showing it for the last time. Then that's it. Shall we come on Saturday?"

  We stopped dead, all three of us, stunned. The cinema building, the trampled snow the black sky – suddenly everything seemed as if it had been turned upside down. Speechless, we rushed up to the great billboard, a canvas rectangle four yards by two, showing our hero's face surrounded by women, palm trees, and helicopters. Our eyes locked on the fateful date:

  MUST END MARCH 19

  When Utkin's grandfather saw our faces, his eyebrows shot up. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "Have they finally killed off your Belmondo, is that it?"

  We did not know what to say. Even in this great hospitable izba where one day the Western World had been born, we felt abandoned.

  But life is like that: what we passionately desire often arrives in the guise of what we most dread.

  On the day of our final rendezvous with Belmondo, March 19, the day that was going to mark a real end of the world, we saw a new poster! Both different from the previous one and similar, because animated by the brilliant smile and the sparkling eyes that we recognized from a long way off. And the painter must have been perfecting his art – Belmondo looked more alive, more relaxed. This time the shining face was surrounded by animals: gorillas, elephants, tigers…

  First there was an explosion of wild joy: It's him, he is returning! Then a covert anxiety began to overtake us, a doubt began to gnaw at our fervent hearts: Would he be true to himself? True to us?

  Yes, at first this new Belmondo struck us as a brazen impostor, like one of the false czars that Russian history is studded with. Like the false Dmitri or the false Peter III our history teacher had been telling us about… Our unease could not be shaken off. That seventeenth showing was to be one of great apprehension.

  All through the film we were unconsciously waiting for a gesture from him, a wink. Or a prearranged remark that would have reassured us by testifying to the authenticity of the next film. We focused on him especially in the last scene: now he appears on the balcony, he smiles, he throws down the pages of the typescript… That was where we were hoping for a bridge, a link!

  But Belmondo, his left hand resting on the waist of his lovely neighbor, now won over, remained imperturbable. He seemed to be calmly enjoying the suspense, which for us was real torture.

  Coming out afterward, we looked again at the poster. Our hero's face, re-created with paint that was too fresh, too vivid, seemed to us artificial. For a long time we stared questioningly at his expression, by the pale light of a nocturnal streetlamp. Its mystery disturbed us…

  On the day of the new film we remained silent throughout the journey. Without discussing it, we did not make our usual stopover to eat. Our hearts were not in it. And besides, the weather was not suitable. The frozen fog clung to our faces, stifled our rare words, obliterated the landmarks that guided us. Each of us felt the others to be tense, nervous.

  In a little thicket at the edge of the city we took off our snow-shoes and hid them, as usual. We did not want to look like villagers. Above all, not in front of Belmondo.

  It felt as if we had been waiting a good hour before the lights went down. And as for the newsreel, this time it seemed to last an eternity. We saw a cos
monaut, who looked like a phosphorescent ghost, swimming around his spacecraft with the slow movements of a sleepwalker. We felt we could hear the bottomless silence of space, which surrounded him. But the voice-over, in no way daunted by cosmic hush, announced with vibrant rhetoric: "Today, as all our people and all progressive humanity on the planet prepare to celebrate the one hundred and third birthday of the great Lenin, our cosmonauts, by taking this important step in the exploration of space, offer yet another infallible proof of the universal correctness of the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism…"

  The voice went rumbling on in the infinite depths of the cosmos, while the shining phantom attached to the craft prepared to reenter the capsule. He advanced toward the door, which opened inch by inch with appalling slowness, just as if it were sinking into glutinous jelly in a nightmare. It was then that we became aware that we were not the only ones feverishly awaiting the new Belmondo. When the sleepwalking cosmonaut began to thrust his head through the door of the spacecraft and the commentary declared that this excursion into space demonstrated the incontestable superiority of socialism, we heard the furious exclamation of one irritated spectator: "For God's sake! Get on with it! Get back in!"

  No, we were not alone in fearing the fraud of a false Belmondo. The whole audience at the Red October cinema was anxious about being betrayed…

  From the first moments of the film, everyone forgot these doubts… His muscles stretched to the full, our hero was scaling the wall of a burning apartment building. At every moment, long flames risked setting fire to his black silk cape. And right at the top, on a narrow ledge, the heroine was uttering moans of distress, raising her eyes to heaven, ready to faint…

  The hundred and third birthday, the excursion into space of the sleepwalking cosmonaut, the universal correctness of the doctrine – all that was instantly wiped out. The room froze: would he succeed in snatching the swooning beauty from the flames?