Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  Yes, at a certain moment I felt I was perverse. And therefore heroic. Liberated from that whole jumble of sentimental trivia my mind had been dragging along in a confused spate. I was perverse, as I understood it, therefore I was a Westerner! And liberated because I was going to have my way with that body – which was all ready and waiting for me – without the least compunction. And I would walk away from it without the red-haired woman knowing that we should never meet again…

  Happy to have reached total comprehension at last, I stopped at the summit of a great snow dune that overhung the valley of the Olyei. Screwing up my eyes at the brilliance of the sunset, I turned the cork and drank a long draft of the brownish liquid whose foreign name had such a fine ring to it. And in my head there reverberated these few sentences that in all their Western limpidity expressed perfectly what I was preparing to experience:

  I know not what desperate impulse drove me to it, but I had, as it were, a subdued desire to possess her one more time, to drink all those bitter tears from her magnificent body and then to kill both of us. Ultimately, I both abhorred and worshiped her…

  At the station I walked into the main hall with a resolute tread, with the nonchalance of a conqueror. After the Pacific port, everything in this building seemed to me tiny, provincial. The train timetables on the dusty notice board; the dim row of lamps behind their opaque glass bowls; a few travelers with their rustic luggage. I went into the little waiting room. I thought I could already see the glow of her red hair above the rows of chairs… But the woman was not there. Dumbfounded, I made a tour of the main hall: the display case on the newsstand with the faded smiles of the cosmonauts; the buffet with the sleepy attendant; the hoarfrost on the windows… It had not even occurred to me that the red-haired woman might not be there. Especially not on the day of the snowstorm… The day of so important and final a choice!

  I went out onto the platform. The coaches were asleep under thick eiderdowns of snow. A cleaner armed with a large shovel was slowly opening up a narrow passageway toward the warehouses. "But where can she have got to at this time of day?" I asked myself with irritation, as I contemplated all this provincial stagnation.

  Suddenly the very simple answer came into my mind: What a fool I am! She must be with someone… Someone is in the process of "having" her at this moment!

  I felt an ill-natured joy stretch my lips into a malicious smile. With swift steps I crossed the station, and using the passageways cut through the midst of the snowdrifts, I headed for the other end of Kazhdai, toward her izba…

  "Yes, I'll wait just outside her door," I said to myself. "I'll wait until it's finished…" My perverse desire grew even more intense. On my lips, stimulated by the alcohol, I could detect the taste of her. The Redhead's body would still be hot. A warmed-up mass, ready to be kneaded…

  All that could be seen of her izba was the top of the roof, the chimney beneath its blackened cap. And the birch tree half buried in the snow, with its little birdhouse. The sun had already disappeared below the castellated line of the taiga. In the April dusk, blue and limpid, the branches of the birch tree, the ridge of the roof, and the contours of the immaculate dunes of snow were outlined with a supernatural distinctness. And in the midst of this serenity I had a strangely detached awareness of my own presence, like a tightly wound spring.

  I saw the long dark line in the snow: the passage cut through to the door of her izba. I went up to it, taking care that the crunching of my footsteps should not be heard. The passage was already filled with the violet shadows of the evening.

  I saw the steps of packed snow leading right down, toward the door. And leaning over this narrow trench, I peered down into its depths…

  To my extreme amazement, the door to the izba was not closed. The steps and the threshold of the house were Ht with a soft light. First of all I heard a light knocking, a series of little taps, the sound generally made by a hatchet when you cut small sticks to light the stove. Yes, someone was chopping wood and had opened the door to let some air into the buried izba. This familiar sound disconcerted me. Should I go down straightaway? Or wait a little?

  It was at that moment that I heard her voice…

  It was a song that seemed to come from very far away, as if it had had to cross infinite spaces before beginning to ripple through this snowbound izba. The voice was almost frail, but it had about it that remarkable freedom, pure and true, of songs sung in solitude, for oneself, for the wind, for the silence of the evening. The words matched the rhythm of the breathing, interrupted from time to time by the crack of split wood. They were not addressed to anyone but melted imperceptibly into the blue shadows of the cooling air, into the smell of the snow, into the sky.

  I did not stir as I lent an ear to this voice arising from the depths of the snow.

  The tale told by the song was simple. One that any woman might have evoked in the evening, her gaze lost in the fluid dancing of the flames. The despairing wait for a loved one; a bird flying away – happy bird! – over the steppe; frosts that burn the flowers of summer…

  I knew the story by heart. All I was listening to was the voice. And now I understood nothing anymore!

  Here was this voice, simple and soft; the sky whose darkening vastness was filling with the first stars; the pungent exhalation of the nearby taiga. And the solitary birch tree, its birdhouse still empty, this tree keeping an attentive silence in the violet air of dusk.

  I stood upright above the passage and looked about me. The song pouring out beneath the sky, rising up from the purple shadows at my feet, seemed to forge a mysterious connection between the limpid silence of the evening and our two presences, so close and so different. And the more I became impregnated with this secret harmony, the more insignificant my febrile fantasies seemed to me. Within my tipsy young head all the arguments advanced in those debates that had obsessed me for so many days were slowly fading. Now came monotonous words, not unlike those of the old Chinese in our coach. Yes, they said, that's how life goes. Here's a red-haired prostitute whose body will quench the desires of young men and old, all of whom will die when their time comes; and another woman will come, brunet or blond, perhaps, and yet other men will seek in her body the elusive spark of love; there will be more winters and more mild spells. And more snowstorms and more summers as short as the instant of pleasure. And there will always be an evening in the life of this woman when she is seated before the fire, softly singing a song that no one will hear…

  Thus spoke the impassive voice of Asia in my head.

  Another interrupted it, murmuring: The first time, you were naive and unaware; now try to enjoy your desire as you have conceived of it; your understanding of your desire, the triumph of your intellect. Take this body and the range of your sensations, and compose from them a beautiful love story. Tell it, recount it, think it!

  The echo of these words fell silent… Moving away from the red-haired woman's izba, I went and sat in the snow, my back against the trunk of a cedar tree. I took off my shapka, I unbuttoned my sheepskin coat. The rippling wind froze my damp brow. A star low in the sky shone like a hesitant tear. This moment in my life had the fragile purity of a tear too. This whole nighttime universe was like a living crystal, suspended on the fluttering eyelashes of an invisible being. I felt I was being watched by that person's immense eyes. I was inside this fragile tear, within its limpid destiny.

  The distant voice of the red-haired woman floated up from the narrow passage. That woman "with her great faded body, her face eroded by the eyes of all the men who had thrashed around on her belly. That woman who waited endlessly for a train to nowhere, with her carefully trimmed photos and her wine-soaked tears…

  She was all that. And she was quite different. The voice that soared up toward the trembling of the first star. The white plain overlaid with the blue transparency of the night. The scent of the smoke from the rekindled fire. And those immense eyes that filled the whole vastness of the sky.

  My eyelids trembled;
everything melted, was troubled. Something warm tickled my cheek as it ran down…

  I had never before returned to the village in the middle of the night. I had never spent so long walking on the long ridge of snow above the Olyei, in the shadow of the sleeping taiga. I made slow progress, with no thought of any danger or of the invisible presence of wolves. At moments like this, man is in the hands of destiny, guided by the moonlight like a sleepwalker… I tried hard to remember the red-haired woman's face. In vain. Where I looked for her features there appeared the dim oval painted in watercolors. Suddenly the memory of the photos returned. A young woman holding a child in her arms, her silhouette against the sunlit grass, the glittering of a river… As I walked along, I was looking at these smiling eyes.

  And like a monogram detected in the middle of tracery, the dull oval ht up, suddenly became clear. The red-haired woman was looking at me with the eyes of the young stranger in the photos. Her face of long ago returned. In my memory of her.

  On my return, my aunt said nothing to me. She opened the door, trying not to meet my eyes, and went back to bed, thinking, no doubt, that I was returning from my first erotic rendezvous, my first adventure as a man…

  I woke in the middle of the night. As I slept, I thought I had finally understood why the little birdhouse persistently aroused some vague memory in me. It was because it had been constructed with great care and delicacy. The walls, the sloping roof, and the perch were ornamented with fluting carved in wood. It reminded me of the trimmed edges of the photos. These were the vestiges of a hoped-for life that someone had wanted to be beautiful, even in the trivia of existence. "How he must have loved her, that woman!" I whispered softly in the darkness, surprised, myself, by these words.

  Several days later, in the blazing sunlight, the village broke loose from its moorings: the Olyei was on the move, shattering its ice, hurtling southward. Toward the river Amur.

  Intoxicated by the luminous freshness of this motion, we were overcome with vertigo. The sky turned upside down in the cascading torrent. Our izbas sailed along amid snows still intact, between the somber walls of the taiga.

  We were all three of us there, gazing at the slow slide. Utkin stood a couple of steps behind us. It was the first time after all those years that he had come out to see the breakup…

  But here the unleashing of the springtime spate had none of the devastating power of the Amur. Nor was there anything symbolic about it. It was quite simply the disintegration of the river's winter shell. A shell of days, memories, moments, taking itself off toward the south amid the melodious creaking of the ice floes and the lapping of the liberated torrents, bombarded by the sun's rays.

  As the slabs of ice floated by, we saw the marks of our snow-shoes and the holes made by our pikes. Then it was the turn of the Devil's Bend, the deep ruts dug in the snow by the wheels of heavy trucks, and the stippling with black oil…

  Suddenly there was an unexpected commotion. A broad section of ice near the little izba bathhouse detached itself, slid down onto the shore, and joined the general convoy. Our eyes were riveted to its angular surface. On it one could see distinctly, molded in the snow, the imprints of two naked bodies. These were the ones left by Samurai and myself on the occasion of our last nocturnal bath, two days previously – the marks of our mute ecstasy as we gazed at the starry sky. These two bodies, with their long legs wide open and their outstretched arms, moved off slowly toward the mighty river. Toward the sun of Asia. Toward the Amur…

  16

  Throughout that day of the breakup Utkin remained a little distracted and vague. On account of his painful memory of the river, we supposed. But in the evening, when we were sitting on the first slope to be freed of snow, he drew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and announced with a tense smile: "I want to read you a poem!"

  "A poem by Pushkin?" I asked mockingly.

  Utkin made no reply, lowered his eyes, and began to read. In an uneven, hoarse voice, which seemed as if it no longer belonged to him. At the first Unes I almost let out a whisde. Samurai swiftly stopped me with a cold look.

  "I know your vigil underneath this snow Is more despairing far than death… I know if I came close to you I'd simply earn a pitying glance. But I will not approach. I'll stay here in the plain's cold fog To be a presence in white emptiness, A distant figure. So that you can dream Of him who comes eternally to meet you But never arrives. …"

  At the last words, Utkin's voice became choked. He thrust the paper into the pocket of his sheepskin coat, got up abruptly, and began running along beside the Olyei, sinking into the soft snow. He looked more than ever like a wounded bird attempting to fly…

  We were silent. Samurai took out his cigar and lit it with a slow gesture. He looked pensive. Exhaling the bitter smoke, he raised his eyebrows, gently shaking his head to the rhythm of his silent thoughts. Then, noticing that I was watching the course of his reflections on his face, he clicked his tongue and uttered a sigh.

  "You know, women are stupid. For a poem like that they should risk perdition! But they like handsome little guys like you or great hefty ones like me. Look at him… he's running along like a madman. There. He's fallen down, poor fellow!… No, no. We should leave him alone right now…"

  Samurai fell silent. In the distance we saw Utkin get up, shake off the snow stuck to his sheepskin, and continue his limping progress toward the first trees of the taiga… Suddenly Samurai smiled and gave me a wink.

  "Admit it. He would never have had the courage to read us his poem if we hadn't seen Belmondo! Maybe he wouldn't even have written it…"

  We returned to the village by the fluid blue light of the springtime dusk.

  "Go and knock on his door," Samurai instructed me. "Tell him they're showing the film for the last time tomorrow. Who knows when we'll ever be able to see it again. Either this one or any others. Maybe not before next winter…"

  Next day at six-thirty after the achievements of socialist labor and the distribution of decorations at the Kremlin, we entered a fairy city that arose from the depths of the sea. Venice! And the indomitable Belmondo was racing along at the wheel of a speedboat, cutting himself a path between languid gondolas. In flight from his pursuers, he and his ship of fools hurtled straight into the lobby of a luxury hotel, whose first floor was scarcely higher than the level of the canal. The glass doors were smashed to smithereens, the staff took cover in protected corners. And smiling indulgently, he announced with a grand gesture: "I have reserved the royal suite for tonight."

  How many lips there were in the heart of our taiga that spring murmuring the magic word "Venetsia!"

  Samurai had got it right: after that showing Belmondo took a vacation. As if, now that it was summer, his presence at the end of Lenin Avenue was less indispensable. And it is true that as the trees cloaked themselves in the verdant shadow of the first leaves, they gradually hid the squat building of the militia and the KGB, and softened the angular contours of the barbed-wire factory.

  But more than anything, that West which he had sought to acclimatize on the permafrost of our lands seemed to be taking root. The summer will take care of the rest, he must have thought, as he went off on vacation.

  Yes, the Western World now seemed firmly grafted into our hearts. Was it by chance that even the stupid newsreels, showing the gold armor plating of those Kremlin medals and the Sta-khanovite weavers, now inspired a kind of tremor in our breasts? We remembered that back in the winter those weavers and those bemedaled old men used to precede the appearance of our hero. Now they were almost dear to us. And to our amazement, it was behind the masks of these propaganda robots that we discovered the first nostalgia of our lives: nostalgia for those long journeys through the snow-covered taiga, the complex constellations of scents, luminous tones, and sensations…

  One summer's evening all three of us were gathered around Olga's samovar, listening to her tale. She was telling us about a writer whose novel she could not read to us, first of all because the book
was too long – it would take years to read, she said, and a whole lifetime to understand – but also because it was evidently not translated into Russian… She therefore confined herself to summarizing a single episode, which, she claimed, expressed the idea of it… The hero was, like us, drinking tea, although he did not enjoy the benefits of a samovar. One perfumed sip and a mouthful of a cake with an unknown name produced a miraculous reaction from his taste buds: in him were reborn the sounds, the smells, and the spirit of the distant days of his childhood. Without daring to interrupt Olga's story, or to admit this insight, we asked ourselves, astonished, incredulous: "What if an image seen scores of times – that of the weaver; or the cool smell of shapkas covered in melted snow; or the darkness of the auditorium at the Red October – what if all those could take the place of the young French aesthete's cake? What if we, too, could have access to this mysterious Western nostalgia, with the rudimentary means we have at hand?"

  With Belmondo, one miracle more or less was not a problem…

  But it was the language of the West, even more than the themes of its novels, that was taking root in us.

  For us the German that we learned at school had no link with the Western World of our dreams; it was the language of the enemy, a useful instrument in case of war: that is all it was. The language of the Americans was repugnant to us. The children of the local Party elite mouthed it to a greater or lesser extent. They were all even put into a special group created for students of English. Proletarians, on the other hand, had to learn the language of the enemy…

  No, for us the only real language of the Western World was Belmondo's. Seeing his films ten, fifteen, twenty times over, we learned to make out on his lips the inaudible traces of those phantom words eliminated by the dubbing. A little trembling at the corners of his mouth when the sentence in Russian was already completed, a swift rounding of his lips, stresses that we guessed were even…