Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  Gradually coming to myself again, I looked at the Western Woman. Her face impressed me with its complete calm. The spectacle, it seemed, amused her. Nothing more. As I observed her, I sensed, almost physically, that her transparent aura was much more impenetrable than I had believed. "It's the breakup on the river Amur," one could read on her lips. Yes, that night was labeled, understood, ready to be recounted.

  Whereas I understood nothing! I did not understand where the titanic breathing of the river ended and my own respiration, my own life, began. I did not understand why the light on the knee of an unknown woman was such torture to me and why it tasted the same in my mouth as the mist saturated with marine smells. I did not understand how, knowing nothing about this woman, I could feel so intensely the velvety suppleness of her thighs, imagine their golden softness under my fingers, under my cheek, under my lips. Or why to possess this body hardly mattered once the secret of its golden warmth had been divined. And why spreading this warmth into the wild breath of the night already seemed to me to be an infinitely more vital prize…

  I understood nothing. But unconsciously, I took delight in it…

  The last pillars of the bridge marched by. The Amur vanished into the night. The Transsiberian entered the dense silence of the taiga.

  I saw the nocturnal traveler stub out the rest of her cigarette in the ashtray fixed to the wall… Without closing the door, I began to hurry back through the coaches. I knew that I was returning to the East, Asia and the interminable tale of the ageless Chinese. A life where everything was both fortuitous and fated. Where death and pain were accepted with the resignation and the indifference of the grass on the steppes. Where a she-wolf brought food every night to her six little ones whose paws were bound with wire and watched them eat and sometimes uttered a long plaintive howl, as if she guessed that they would be killed and that their absurd deaths would shortly be followed by the death of their assassin, a cruel and absurd one as well. And no one could say why it happened like that, and only the monotonous saga in the depths of a crowded compartment could take account of this absurdity…

  I walked along empty corridors and corridors where bare feet or feet in woolen socks stuck out; coaches filled with the heavy breathing and the groans of sleepers; and coaches buzzing with interminable stories of the war, of the camps, of the taiga – all those coaches that separated us from the Western World.

  As I climbed onto the narrow plank of the luggage rack, I began to whisper in the darkness for the benefit of Samurai, who was stretched out opposite: "Asia, Samurai, Asia…"

  A single word says it all. There's nothing we can do about it. Asia holds us with its infinite spaces; with the endlessness of its winters; and with this interminable saga that a Chinese, both Russified and mad – which comes to the same thing – continues to recount in his dark corner. This jam-packed coach is Asia. But I have seen a woman – a woman, Samurai! – at the other end of the train. Beyond the piles of dirty luggage and shopping bags dripping with melting fish; beyond the hundreds of bodies chewing over their wars and their camps. This woman, Samurai, was the Western World that Belmondo revealed to us. But you know, he forgot to tell us that you have to choose that coach once and for all: you cannot be here and there at the same time. The train is long, Samurai. And the Western Woman's coach had already crossed the Amur while we were still getting drunk from its wild winds…

  I was tossing these random remarks into the darkness without even knowing if Samurai could hear me. I spoke of the Western Woman, the light on her knee beneath the transparent patina of a stocking, such as we had never seen on the legs of a woman. But the more I spoke of it, the more I sensed the shimmering singularity of my encounter with her slipping away… In the end I fell silent. And it was not Samurai but Utkin (we were lying head-to-foot on our luggage racks) who asked in a nervous whisper: "And us, where are we?"

  Samurai's voice answered him, as if emerging from a long nocturnal meditation: "We are the pendulum… between the two. Russia is a pendulum."

  "In other words, nowhere at all," muttered Utkin. "Neither one thing nor the other…"

  Samurai sighed in the darkness, as he turned over onto his back, then he murmured: "You know, Duckling, to be neither one thing nor the other is also a destiny…"

  I woke with a start. Utkin had nudged me with his foot in his sleep. Samurai was also asleep, with his long arm dangling in space. " Asia… the West…" So all that had been a dream. Utkin and Samurai knew nothing of my encounter. I derived a strange comfort from this: their Western World remained intact. And in his corner the Chinese was still mumbling: "… And this neighbor, when he came back from the war, married another one; he has three big children already; and his first wife, his fiancee, he forgot her long ago. But as for her, she waits for him every evening on the riverbank. She still hopes he will come back… Ever since the war she's been waiting for him… waiting for him… waiting for him…"

  3

  14

  The last time I went to Paris was in June 1914… My father thought I was big enough to go up the Eiffel Tower. I was eleven…"

  That was how on an April evening, in an izba buried amid snowdrifts, Olga began her story.

  Once we were back from our trip to the Western World – in other words, the Far East – Samurai had decided that we were ripe for initiation into Olga s secret life. He had revealed its significance to us in brief but solemn tones: "Olga is a noblewoman. And she has seen Paris…"

  Taken aback, neither Utkin nor I managed to find words for the tiniest question, despite the crowd of queries buzzing in our heads. The reality of a being who had seen Paris was too much for us…

  We listened to Olga. The samovar emitted its light hissing and its soft melodious sighs. The snow tinkled on the windowpane. Olga had swept up her gray hair into a becoming wave, held in place by a little silver comb. She was wearing a long dress edged with black lace, which we had never seen before. Her words were tinged with a dreamy indulgence that seemed to be saying: "I know you regard me as an old madwoman. Well… my madness consists in having lived through an era whose richness and beauty you cannot even imagine. My madness is to have seen Paris…"

  Listening to her, we learned, with incredulity, of a time when the Western World was practically next door. People went there on vacation! Better still: just to climb up a tower!… We could not get over it. So the Western World had not always been a forbidden planet, accessible only obliquely, via the magic of the cinema?

  No, in Olga's memories this planet was a kind of picturesque suburb of Saint Petersburg. And from that suburb there had one day come into her family a certain Mademoiselle Verrière, who taught the little Olga a language with strange r's, vibrant and sensual…

  "I already understood enough French," Olga confided in us, "to be able to make out the novels my elder sister used to read and which she hid in her bedside cabinet… It was on the train taking us to Paris that I first succeeded in getting my hands on one of these forbidden volumes. One day, when she went out of the compartment, my sister left her book on the berth. I peeped into the corridor: she was busy chatting with Mademoiselle Verrière. I opened the book and immediately came upon a scene that made me forget everyone else's existence as well as my own…"

  Olga pours us another cup of tea, then opens a volume with yellowed pages and begins to read softly…

  Did she read it in French and give us a translation, a summary? Or was it a text in Russian? I no longer recall. That evening we retained neither the title of the novel nor the author's name. We simply lived amid the dazzling intensity of the images that had abruptly flooded the room in that snowbound izba.

  It was a society dinner in a legendary, romantic Paris. A grand supper party after a masked ball… The splendor of the decor, the shimmering gold of the candles, the elegant and richly costumed guests at a refined banquet. Sparkling women. Exquisite dishes, decanters, chandeliers, flowers. A young dandy, sitting opposite his mistress, is exchanging passionate glances
with her. Suddenly, distracted and clumsy, he drops a fork. He bends down, lifts the tablecloth slightly… and the whole world crumbles! His mistress's dainty foot is resting on that of his best friend and gently caressing it. Yes, their legs are entwined, and from time to time they squeeze them together… And when the dandy sits up again, he is greeted by the same loving smile in the eyes of the woman… He flees. He takes flight across the ruins of his love…

  Faced with this little feminine foot caressing the perfidious friend's shoe, we were speechless. With those legs intertwined beneath the tablecloth… With that fork… Nothing in our universe corresponded to the voluptuous subtlety of the scene. We cudgeled our brains to think what foot among our acquaintance could be capable of such a caress and such a betrayal. The images that came to mind were of great felt boots and chapped red hands.

  Olga continued reading. The despairing dandy counted on finding some solace with his mistress's best friend. She, at least, should understand and share his pain. And the friend showed herself to be very understanding and compassionate. A sisterly soul seemed to be winging its way toward the unhappy man… But in the midst of his tale of woe the hero noticed that this woman's dress, as she sat before the fire, had slipped – inadvertently, of course – so as to reveal her knee and even the delicate flesh of her thigh. The young man was discreet, thinking that this disarray was due to the emotion his story had inspired. He looked away, hoping that his confidante would finally notice this blemish in her dress. A few moments later he takes another furtive look: the knee and the thigh are exposed to his eyes with what seems an even more flagrant nonchalance. An impossible thought crosses his mind: enticing him with her body, this sisterly soul is inviting him to lose himself between her thighs! The dandy meets her gaze: the woman's eyes are misted over with lust.

  So what was there that we could compare with the unimaginable emotional complexity of the Western World that had been revealed to us that evening? In what terms could we express the nuanced eroticism of that seduction scene? The woman sitting in her armchair knowingly baring her leg. A woman continuing to listen to the sorrowful confidences of the young betrayed lover, and showing all the signs of compassion, while at the same time imperceptibly raising the hem of her dress… No, we men of the taiga had nothing in our vocabulary to match this sensual dialectic!

  Of the three of us, I was the only one who could picture the confidante turned seductress revealing the delicate pink of her thigh. For I had seen her! She was the nocturnal traveler on the evening of our return from the Pacific. It was she. She was also the faithless mistress whose foot caressed that of the perfidious guest beneath the table. I recognized the paleness of her flesh and the elegance of her ankle boot resting on the ledge. "And who knows," I said to myself on the evening of that reading. "If I had not fled like an idiot, maybe the traveler, who turned back the lapel of her cape, might have begun slowly raising the hem of her dress while continuing to stare with exaggerated attention at the dark window!"

  So the smile Belmondo was giving us from the end of Lenin Avenue was not so simple. Behind the Western World, seen as a bathing beach for golden antelopes, and the heroic and adventurous West, with its headlong action sequences, lay hidden another one – a voluptuous West, a realm of unimaginable sensual perversions, of refined erotic flourishes, of capricious emotional entanglements…

  "We paused on the brink of this unknown continent. As our guide we had a little girl from the start of the century, who had one day opened a novel on the Saint Petersburg – Paris train and hit upon these lines that had bewitched her:

  My mistress had made an assignation with me for that night; gazing at her, I raised my glass slowly to my lips. As I turned to take a plate, my fork fell to the ground…

  All through those days I never stopped thinking about the red-haired woman in her izba buried under the snow. My memory had become even more vivid. Our discovery of the Western World had removed all the tragic sense from that night of the snowstorm: the red-haired prostitute had been transformed, quite logically, into my first amorous adventure, my first conquest. Ardently I awaited the sequel. I could already picture them arriving, my future lovers: sometimes as glamorous spies with robust tanned bodies that promised torrid grappling on the warm ocean beach; sometimes as languorous vamps with decadent and perverse charm…

  The red-haired woman provided the substance for these fantasies, the human clay, the bodily lava that I wanted to keep anonymous. All I needed was her physical weight, the heaviness of her breasts, the bulk of her thighs, the warm mass of her hips. This was the material that I sculpted endlessly, impressing onto it the shape of my dreams of the West. It was the amorphous matter waiting to be shaped by the chisel of the Western mind. The breathless chaos of that night of the snowstorm was refashioned as an amorous intrigue; the Redhead's great body was clothed in fine garments and her legs were covered with the transparent patina of stockings. And all that survived of our uneasy coupling beneath a blinding light-bulb was the sensation of an embrace; and this was refined as it segued, via the discreet lighting of a luxury compartment, toward a salon where, sitting in front of the fire, a woman was imperceptibly revealing her delicate nakedness…

  Western clarity banished all the untidy elements of that night. The photos spread out on the blanket, her tears, her drunken woman's clumsiness: these now seemed to me like minor blemishes, scraps of clay to be eliminated by the deft and precise chisel.

  All this time the red-haired woman was still there in my mind's eye, as it was invaded by female bodies in gestation. And yet she was no longer there: transformed by my cunning craftsmanship, unrecognizable in her new guises. As for her face, I had forgotten her expression since that night. Snow, fatigue, and drunkenness had left it like a washed-out watercolor. This greatly assisted my erotic modeling.

  Oddly enough, however, the more the body of the red-haired prostitute became blurred, the more I felt the need to go back to see her, to undergo that first experience again but with quite a new attitude. To obtain a new supply of carnal lava for my fantasies. To possess that great faded body and draw from its primal matter sensations that I would later refine. To make use of its easy abundance, while waiting for the West.

  Seeing her again now had a symbolic importance for me as well. I could no longer tolerate the destiny of "neither one thing nor the other." I must make a choice. I could no longer live alternating between that half-mad Chinese, caught up in his interminable saga, and the universe of Belmondo. Between the Orient and the Western World. And the choice made must be final. A visit to the prostitute should draw a Une through the saga of Asia. A farewell with no going back.

  15

  It took me a long time to resolve to go to Kazhdai. The days passed, and I was never alone. The six-thirty performance; tea at Olga's: we spent all our free time together.

  It was an April evening, mild and silent, that made this farewell encounter possible…

  By the afternoon we had all sensed it in the air: winter was about to fight its last rearguard action. The sky misted over, softened, became pregnant with cloudy anticipation. The great flakes began to swirl around in an increasingly powerful, increasingly giddy breeze. It was the start of the final snowstorm. This last gasp, this indolent gale, was winter's "way of showing off its power to the victorious spring that was close at hand. Like a great bird, wearied by its seven-month journey, it would flap its great white wings frantically and then would fly away at last, leaving our izbas beneath the soft covering of its snowy quilt…

  The next day the village woke up entombed. But this time we sensed that it really was the end of the winter. The layer of snow that I dug into with a wooden shovel had a luminous lightness and caved in on itself, collapsing listlessly. And the sun, up on the surface, was already quite springlike. It shone with warm brilliance on a number of chimneys that rose up out of the snow and on the darkened rooftops. A heavy exhalation emanated from the taiga, the disturbing scent of the mighty reawakening of countless pla
nt lives. And a jackdaw, disproportionately large on a poplar tree that was now quite stunted, called out with mad, abandoned glee. Seeing me emerge from my tunnel, it swung up into the sky, filling the air with its heady cries. Then, in the sun-drenched silence, I heard the murmur of drops forming along the rooftop as it grew warm in the solar rays. The secret birth of the first stream…

  That evening I headed for Kazhdai. I approached it not from our village but coming from Nerlug. There in the city was where I had just bought something I had never held in my hands before: a bottle of cognac. It was flat and easy to slip into the pocket of my sheepskin coat. I took it out at intervals, turned the cork, which yielded with a pleasant creaking sound, and swallowed a small stinging draft.

  All I could see now was the body of the red-haired woman. After each draft I manipulated it more and more deftly, I squeezed it unsparingly. I delved into this flesh to take from it what my dreams would later shape. And I took an increasing pride in my arrogant virility. I saw it as marking the final break with my past. Yes, I must scorn this great amorphous body, humiliate it, impose on it my disdainful strength. And as I slipped across the plain, bathed in coppery light, I thrilled to picture that human clay. My hands were filled with the mass of its breasts, as I pulled and kneaded them. massaging and tormenting their grainy pulp. My hand no longer clung stupidly to her shoulder, as on the first occasion, but plunged into the deep softness of her heavy thighs. I felt I was a sculptor, an artist seeking his raw material in the abundance of a nature that lacked a sense of form. And also a Westerner – a being who focused the proud lucidity of his intellect on his desire, his love, and the female body.

  Thanks to Olga's readings, I was daily becoming more familiar with this clarity. I was certain that this marvelous illumination could give an account of our darkest emotions. Even of my visit to the woman I had never loved and whose body frightened me with its weary enormity. My desire to see her again gradually became associated in my mind with the perverse elegance of that woman confidante slowly revealing the soft pink of her thigh. While her eyes retained a light of almost maternal compassion…