Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  This was Belmondo, all right!

  When the tension was at its height, when the whole of the Red October was breathing in time with the pace of the intrepid climb, when everyone's fingers were clinging to the armrests of the seats, in imitation of the fingers gripping the ledge on the top story, when Belmondo was hanging on thanks only to the magnetism of our gaze, the incredible occurred…

  The camera performed a giddy zigzag, and we saw the apartment building stretched out flat on the floor of a film set. And Belmondo standing up, dusting off his cape… A director was haranguing him over some carelessness in his performance. His climb was just a trick! He had been crawling horizontally along a model where the windows were belching forth carefully controlled flames.

  So everything was false! But he, he was more real than ever. He had admitted us into the cinema's holy of holies, its very kitchen, and allowed us to see the magic from the other side. So there were no limits to his confidence in us!

  What this apartment building laid out on the ground represented was, in fact, the link we had dreamed of, a bit like the spy in the can of fish soup. A link to a world more real than that of the hundred and third birthday and the universal doctrines.

  And as initiates into the ways of the West, we now followed Belmondo in his new adventure. Stepping over the windows and walls of the blazing apartment building, he walked out of the film studio.

  We rediscovered the West. A world where people lived without worrying about the somber shadows cast by the sunlit mountain-tops. A world of deeds for the sake of the grand gesture. A world where bodies gloried in the power of their own carnal beauty. A world one could take seriously because it was not afraid to show its comic side.

  But above all its language! It was a world where anything could be said. Where a word could be found for the most confused, the most murky reality: lover, rival, mistress, desire, affair… The amorphous, nameless reality that surrounded us began to structure itself, to classify itself, to reveal its logic. The Western World could read itself!

  And, infatuated, we began to spell out the words of this fantastic universe…

  This time Belmondo was a stuntman. Though still halfway illiterate in the language of the West, we nevertheless sensed in this role a powerful, stylish figure. A stuntman! A hero whose courage would always be attributed to someone else. Condemned always to remain in the shadows. To withdraw from the performance at the very moment when the heroine should be rewarding his bravery. Alas! The kiss was placed on the lips of his fortunate double, who had done nothing to deserve it…

  In one instance this unrewarding role was particularly harsh. The stuntman had to fall several times from the top of a staircase to dodge a hail of bullets from an automatic rifle. The director, who possessed all the sadistic ways of the publisher in the previous film, made him repeat the exercise relentlessly. Climbing back up again became more and more painful, the fall more agonizing. And each time, a female voice yelled in tragicomic despair: "My God! They've killed him!"

  But the hero got up after his terrible fall and announced: "No. I haven't yet smoked my last cigar!"

  This Une, repeated four or five times, struck a surprising chord in the hearts of the spectators at the Red October cinema. Utkin and I thought at once of Samurai's cigars and those of his former idol in Havana. But the resonance of that exclamation went deeper. The line condensed within it what many of the spectators had been trying to express for a long time. "No, no," a good many of them wanted to say. "I haven't yet…" And they could not find the right words to explain that even after ten years in the camps, you could try to make a new start. That even though widowed since the war, you could still have hope. That even in the very depths of Siberia, spring still existed and that this year, make no mistake, there would be a spring bursting with joy and happy encounters.

  "No. I haven't yet smoked my last cigar!"

  The expression had been found.

  And heaven knows how many inhabitants of Nerlug, at the blackest moments of their lives, have since then mentally formulated that response, as they gave themselves a wink of encouragement.

  It was after that performance that, for the first time, we spent the night, not with Utkin's grandfather, but in a railroad car…

  Samurai took us to the station at Nerlug, and there, striding across the rails, he headed for the farthest of the tracks, half covered with snow… We approached a train standing beside a patch of wasteland. Several trains were asleep in the sidings. Samurai seemed to know what he was looking for. Walking between two freight trains, he suddenly dived under a coach, signaling to us to follow…

  We found ourselves in front of a passenger train with dark windows. The city, the sounds and the lights of the station, had vanished. Samurai took a fine steel rod from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. A faint click could be heard, the door opened…

  An hour later we were comfortably installed in a compartment. There was no light, but the distant glow of a streetlamp and reflected light from the snow was enough for us. Samurai, who had lit the stove at the end of the corridor, brewed real tea for us – the only real tea there is, the kind they serve on trains on winter evenings. We spread out on the table all the provisions we had not eaten at noon. The scent of the fire and the tea floated into our compartment. The scent of long journeys across the empire… Later, stretched out on our berths, we talked about Belmondo for a long time. This time there were no shouts or big gestures. He was too close to us that evening for us to need to imitate him…

  That night I dreamed about our hero's new companion. The ravishing stuntwoman. My sleep was transparent, like the snow that had started to fall outside the dark window. I woke frequently and fell asleep again a few moments later. She did not abandon me but settled for a few seconds in the compartment next door. My eyes filled with darkness, I sensed her silent presence behind the thin partition that separated us. I knew I must get up, go out into the corridor and wait for her there. I was sure of meeting her – it was she, the mysterious passenger on the Transsiberian. But each time this dream was ready to take shape, I heard the noise of a train going by on a track next to ours. I had the illusion that it was we who were flying through the night. I fell asleep. And she returned, she was there once more. Our coach hurtled westward. Braving the cold and the snow. Toward the Western World.

  So it was not the end of the world. And Nerlug saw two or three more Belmondo films. As if, after a great time lag, these comedies had gone astray, been washed up by the flow of days onto some deserted shore, and waited for long years to come sailing along at last, one after the other.

  Belmondo aged slightly, then grew younger again, changed partners, countries, continents, revolvers, degrees of suntan… But that seemed quite natural to us. We believed him to possess a very special kind of immortality, the most inspiring: one that allows you to journey through time – to backtrack or go forward to the brink of decline – only to enjoy the taste of youth more fully.

  It was hardly surprising that this time-travel involved so many superb female bodies, so many torrid nights, so much sun and wind.

  Belmondo settled in, established his headquarters at the Red October, just halfway between the squat building of the local militia and KGB and the Communard factory, where they manufactured the barbed wire that went to all the camps in that region of Siberia…

  He occupied the large billboard, and what people noticed now as they walked along Lenin Avenue was neither the gray uniforms of the militiamen nor the giant skeins of barbed wire being taken away by trucks; it was his smile.

  Without admitting it to themselves, the inhabitants of Nerlug were convinced that the authorities had committed an enormous blunder in allowing that man, with that smile, to move in on the avenue. Without being able to explain their intuition, they sensed that this smile was going to play a hell of a trick on the city authorities one day… For already, to their surprise, the filmgoers no longer shuddered at the sight of those gray uniforms, or felt any une
ase before the horrible trucks with their vile hedgehogs of steel. They saw that smile at the end of Lenin Avenue, next door to the cinema, and they smiled themselves, feeling a boost to their confidence amid the frozen fog.

  And on the steps of the liquor store, for the first time in our lives, we witnessed not a brawl but an outburst of laughter… Yes, all those coarse men with ruddy faces were laughing uproariously: they were doubling up, not from the effects of blows smartly delivered to the solar plexus, but from merriment. They banged their thighs with their iron fists, they wiped away their tears, they swore; they laughed! And in their gestures, in their shouts, we recognized the latest Belmondo. He was there among those Siberians, those gold prospectors, those sable hunters, those loggers…

  Once again the inhabitants passing the store said to themselves with secret glee: "You know, they were real idiots, those apparatchiks, sticking him up there on the avenue!"

  Imperturbable, Belmondo smiled at us from afar.

  In our dazzled infatuation we attributed every change to his presence. Everything was closely or distantly linked to him. Like the thunder and lightning at the beginning of April, in the still-wintry sky above the snow-covered city.

  We heard a violent storm in the night, as we lay on the berths in our compartment after one performance. A flash froze our astonished faces. The thunder rumbled. We heard it through our dream-stuffed sleep. The motionless train seemed to be hurtling off on a journey in which a marvelous disarray of seasons, climates, and weather reigned. A tropical storm above the kingdom of the snows.

  We were eager to go back to sleep, hoping for particularly sumptuous dreams. But what I saw on that trip turned out to be of an unexpected simplicity…

  It was a little station, much more modest than the one at Nerlug, a house lost amid silent pine trees. A waiting room feebly ht by an invisible lamp. The muffled sound of a very few people, they, too, invisible, the stifled yawns of a railroad worker. The smell of a stove where birch logs were burning. And at the center of the room, in front of a timetable that showed only a few lines, a woman. She was attentively examining the arrival times, looking occasionally at the big clock on the wall. In my dream I sensed that for once her wait was not in vain, that someone was definitely coming any minute now. Coming on a strange train whose arrival was not announced on any timetable…

  The night air, filled with the titillating smell of the storm, penetrated our sleeping coach. It was the freshness of the first breath of air that the traveler inhales as he steps down from the train, at night, in an unknown station where a woman waits for him…

  13

  One night we stumbled onto a brand-new train…

  Yes, the coaches had not so far had passengers in them. The green paint was smooth and shining, and the enamel plaques sparkled like white china. The windows, perfectly transparent, seemed to reveal a deeper, more tempting interior. And this interior, with its smell of the virgin imitation leather of the berths, concentrated within itself the very quintessence of train journeys. Their spirit. Their soul. Their voluptuousness.

  That evening Samurai did not light the stove. From his knapsack he took out a strange flat bottle and shone a flashlight on it. Then, setting an aluminum cup on the table, he poured himself several drops of a thick, brownish liquid and drank slowly, as if he wanted to appreciate fully its flavor.

  "So what's that?" we asked, curious.

  "It's a lot better than tea, believe me," he replied, smiling mysteriously. "Do you want a taste?"

  "Only if you first say what it is!"

  Samurai poured himself some more of the brown liquid and drank it, screwing up his eyes, then announced: "It's liqueur from the Kharg root. You remember? The one Utkin unearthed last summer…"

  The drink had a flavor we did not manage to identify – or to connect with any dish we had ever tasted. An alcoholic taste that seemed to detach your mouth and your head from the rest of your body. Or rather to fill all the rest with a kind of luminous weightlessness.

  "Olga told me," explained Samurai in a voice that was already floating in that aerial lightness. "It's not an aphrodisiac, it's just a euphoriant."

  "Afro… what?" I asked, baffled by these unfamiliar syllables.

  "Eupho… how much?" said Utkin, wide-eyed.

  The very sound of the unknown words had something volatile and hazy about it…

  We lay back on our new berths. Our heads were full of the scene from the film that had most fired our imaginations. It slid imperceptibly into our sleep, which was filled with erotic dreams worthy of the Kharg root…

  In this scene Belmondo's ravishing companion, clad in a mere shadow of a brassiere and a trace of a G-string, snatched away a tablecloth, causing a huge vase with a sumptuous bouquet to fall from the table. And with wild abandon she proposed to our hero that they celebrate their carnal communion on this level playing field. The hero evaded the extravagant invitation. And we guessed that it was our own modesty he wanted to protect. The mere appearance of this bacchante was already producing very special vibrations within the walls of the Red October. Belmondo must have sensed that if he had given free rein to his desire, revolution would have been imminent in Nerlug. With the storming of the squat militia building and the destruction of the Communard barbed-wire factory. So he declined the proposition. But so as not to compromise his virility in the eyes of his audience, he suggested quite a different erotic battlefield.

  "On the table? And why not standing up in a hammock? Or on skis?"

  It is the measure of our love and, indeed, our confidence that this hypothesis was taken totally seriously! Yes, we had cast-iron faith in such a purely Western erotic performance. Two tanned bodies upright (!) in a hammock attached to the velvety trunks of palm trees. The thrust of their desire in direct proportion to the ecstatic unsteadiness beneath their feet. And the passion of their embraces increasing the violence of their rocking. Their fusion, in its profundity, would turn heaven and earth upside down. And those tropical night lovers would come to in the hollow of the hammock, in the cradle of love, whose swinging back and forth would gradually slow…

  And as for love on skis, we were well equipped to picture the scene. Who better than we, who spent half our lives on snowshoes, could imagine the intense heat that fired up the body after two or three hours in motion? The lovers would cast aside their poles, the track would grow double, and all that could be heard would be the panting breath, the rhythmic crunching of the snow under the skis, and the cackling of an indiscreet magpie on the branch of a cedar tree…

  However, we preferred the hammock, as more exotic. That evening we abandoned ourselves to its rocking, as we floated amid the vapors of the root of love. In our sleep we heard the rustling of the long palm leaves; we inhaled the nocturnal breath of the ocean. From time to time an overripe coconut fell onto the sand, a languorous wave spent itself beside our plaited sandals. And the sky, overloaded with tropical constellations, swayed to the rhythm of our desire…

  We woke in the night and lay still for a long moment with our eyes open. None of us dared to confess his amazed intuition to the others. It felt as if the rocking of the hammock were continuing. At first we thought it was a train passing alongside our track and shaking us slightly… Finally Utkin, who was installed on the bottom berth, pressed his forehead against the dark window, trying to penetrate the gloom. And we heard his troubled exclamation: "Hey, where's it taking us?"

  Our train was traveling at a brisk pace through the taiga. This was no mere shunting operation on the sidings at the station but speedy and regular progress in good earnest. Not the faintest glimmer of light was visible now: nothing but the impenetrable wall of the taiga and a strip of snow beside the track.

  Samurai consulted his watch: it was five to two.

  "What if we jumped?" I suggested, gripped by panic but already experiencing the surge of an exciting intoxication.

  All three of us went toward the exit. Samurai opened the door. It was as if a frozen pine branch
had come and lashed our faces, stopping our breath. It was the last cold of winter, its rearguard action. The needles of the wind and the powder snow. The endless darkness of the taiga… Samurai slammed the door.

  "To jump out here would be throwing ourselves straight into the wolf's jaws. I bet we've been traveling for at least three hours. And at this speed… I know only one man who could do it," he added.

  "Who's that?"

  Samurai grinned and winked. "Belmondo!"

  We laughed. Our fear faded. We went back to our compartment and decided to get off at the first stop, at the first inhabited place… Utkin took out a compass and, after minute adjustments, announced: "We're traveling east!"

  We would have preferred the opposite direction. But did we have a choice?

  The rocking of the coach quickly got the better of our heroic resistance to sleep. We all dozed off, picturing the same scene: Belmondo opens the coach's door, inspects the frozen night speeding past in a whirlwind of powder snow, and, stepping onto the footboard, hurls himself into the deep shadows of the taiga…

  It was the silence and the perfect immobility that woke us. And also the luminous cold of the morning. We grabbed our shapkas and our bags and hurried toward the exit. But outside the door there was no trace of human habitation or of any human activity. Only the wooded flank of a hill, whose white summit was being slowly suffused with the brightness of the rising sun…

  We remained at the open door, sniffing the air. It was not icy and dry, as at Svetlaya. It entered our lungs with a supple, caressing softness. You did not have to warm it in your mouth before inhaling it, like the harsh mouthfuls of wind at home. The snows stretching out before our eyes made us think of a strange permanent mild spell. And the forest climbing up the flank of the hill was also different from our taiga. In the lines of their branches the trees had a somewhat sinuous delicacy, a little mannered. It was as if they had been drawn in Chinese ink on a background of softened snow, by the hazy light of the rising sun. And around their trunks writhed the long snakes of lianas. It was the jungle, the tropical forest, suddenly frozen in snow…