Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  The cold was bitter, even for winter in our country. From time to time you could hear a long echoing sound like that of a gunshot. But this was tree trunks exploding, split open by frozen sap and resin. In weather like this, women in our village taking wash down from the clothesline would break it like glass. Truckdrivers would rage around tanks filled with white powder: frozen gasoline. And children would amuse themselves by spitting on the rock-hard road and hearing the tinkling of their spit as it turned into icicles…

  It was by the first rays of the sun that they saw it. On the fork formed by two thick branches of a pine tree. Samurai saw it first and had a moment of hesitation: should he point it out to Utkin? He knew his friend was going to be shocked by it. Always very protective of Utkin, Samurai had become even more so after my departure. So at first he wanted to walk past, as if there were nothing there. But in the absolute calm of the taiga Utkin must have sensed his hesitation, Samurai's intake of breath. He stopped in turn, looked up, and let out a cry…

  On the tree fork, hanging on to the rough trunk, his arms wrapped around it, was seated a man, his face white, covered in hoarfrost, his eyes wide open. His pose had the frightening fixity of death. His legs were not dangling but rigid in space, six feet above the ground. He seemed to be staring at them, directing a horrible rictus at them. The snow around the tree was churned up with the footprints of wolves.

  Samurai studied the frozen face and was silent. Utkin, appalled by this encounter in the sleeping taiga, sought to cover up his dismay. He spoke quickly, volubly, trying to sound tough: "That must be an escaped political prisoner. Sure. I'll bet he's a dissident. Maybe he wrote anti-Soviet novels and they threw him into the Gulag, and then somebody helped him escape. Maybe he has manuscripts hidden on him… Maybe he wanted – "

  "Shut your trap, Duck," Samurai suddenly barked.

  And with malevolent fury, speaking as he had never spoken to Utkin before, he went on: "Political prisoner! Gulag! Who are you kidding? The camp you can see from Svetlaya is a normal camp, Duck. You hear me? Normal! And there are normal men there. Normal guys who have simply stolen something or smashed someone's face in. And these normal guys play cards after work, in a normal way, write letters, or nap. And then these normal men choose their victim, generally a young guy who's lost at cards. You lost – now you have to pay. It's quite normal. And these normal men fuck him in the mouth and up the ass, the whole hut, each one in turn. So that instead of a mouth it's only beef hash, and between his legs it's mincemeat. And after that the poor guy becomes untouchable; he has to sleep next to the shit bucket; he can't drink from the tap the others use. But anyone can fuck him whenever he likes. And to escape that there's only one way: to throw himself on the barbed wire. Then the guard fires a few rounds into his head. Straight to heaven… That one must have got away when they were doing hard labor…"

  Utkin uttered a strange sound, between a groan and a protest.

  "Shut your trap, I tell you," Samurai rebuked him again. "Shut your trap with your stupid fucker's romanticism! That's what normal life is, do you understand? Yes or no? Guys who come out after ten years of that life and live among us… And we're all like that, more or less. This normal life is how we live. No animal would live like that…"

  "But Olga, but Bel… Bel…" Utkin suddenly gasped in a tortured voice, without being able to continue.

  Samurai said nothing. He looked around to mark the place well. Then he picked up his pike and motioned to Utkin to follow him… They did not go to Nerlug that day They missed their six-thirty rendezvous.

  Later, sitting in the smoke-filled premises of the militia at Kazhdai, they spent a long time waiting for an official to be free to go with them to the site. Samurai was silent, shaking his head at intervals. His eyes were focused on invisible images of past days. Utkin watched these fleeting ghosts obliquely. He sensed that soon Samurai's voice would lighten, and in an embarrassed tone he would ask his forgiveness…

  Seated on the windowsill, that was how Utkin told me about the end of Belmondo's era in the land of our youth… It was so strange to hear the sound of his voice in the corridor of our residence hall! His face was that of a young man with his first mustache, but through it shone the features of the injured child of the old days. The child who used to long so passionately for the start of adult life, hoping that he would experience love – like other people – in spite of everything. There was I, already cheerfully enjoying the love life of a carefree young male, and suddenly I perceived the infinite despair my friend carried within him. It was as if his face had been eroded by the indifference in women's eyes. By their blindness, so natural, so pitiless…

  Utkin noticed the intensity of my stare. The shadow of a disillusioned smile flickered on his lips. He turned his head away toward the windowpane, outside which the chilly Leningrad night was turning pale.

  "And when we came back to the place with the guys from the militia," he went on, "when we looked again at the escaped prisoner attached to his branch, I felt no more fear. No sadness or pain either. I'm ashamed to say it, but I experienced… a strange kind of happiness. You know… I said to myself- in that language deep inside you that articulates things without using words – I said to myself that if the world's so horrible, it can't be real. And certainly not unique. That's it, I told myself. You can't take it seriously"

  Watching the militiamen, assisted by Samurai, trying to haul the dead man out of the tree, Utkin experienced a mysterious revelation. This young prisoner, whose frozen fingers were now being wrenched open by the men, panting with their exertion, marked a certain limit. As did his own mutilated body? A limit of cruelty, of pain. A frontier…

  The corpse finally yielded. The three militiamen and Samurai carried it toward the four-wheel-drive parked at the edge of the taiga. The prisoner's shapka fell from his head. It was Utkin who picked it up. He followed the others, at every step pointing his right shoulder up into the sky, as if he were trying to take a look beyond that frontier…

  We spent a whole day traipsing around the wet streets of Leningrad. We went into museums, crossed the Neva. I was proud to be showing Utkin the only Western city in the empire. But neither he nor I was really in the mood for tourism. Even at the Hermitage we talked of other things. The previous night, Utkin had handed me three dozen typewritten pages – a fragment of his future novel. "In the tradition of The Gulag Archipelago," he had explained. I was carrying them inside my jacket now; I felt like a real dissident.

  Yes, even in the middle of the Imperial Palace we were speaking in low tones about the horrors of the regime. We criticized everything. We rejected the whole system. The Belmondo of our adolescence and his mythical Western World were transformed into an ideal of liberty, a plan of campaign. We still had a vision of the sun trapped in the barbed wire, impaled on the watchtowers. The gigantic pendulum must be activated! Time, our time, the dictatorship's unhappy victim, must be set free!

  Our angry whispering threatened at any moment to erupt into a shout. Thanks to Utkin, it did.

  "I've got nothing to lose! I shall fight, even in the camp!"

  I started coughing, to cover up the echo of his words beneath the magnificent ceilings. The attendant gave us a suspicious look. We abandoned our regicidal planning session. There in front of us, beneath a red canopy, stood the imperial throne of the Romanovs…

  4

  19

  It is snowing on New York this evening. Or perhaps only on Brighton Beach, a Russian archipelago, where the white turbulence revives so many memories and inspires melancholy in the eyes of all those children of the defunct empire who end up here after arriving in the promised land.

  We remain silent for a long moment as we walk along the boardwalk, beside the ocean. The smell of the wind – now a salt gust from the waves, now the piquant chill of the snowflakes – easily replaces words. The bitter cold of the night air evokes a whole sequence of past days that speak to us in profound, serious tones.

  "I'm so sorry, but
I just couldn't have come any earlier!" I finally say, in an effort to justify myself.

  "It's all right. I understand!" Utkin hastens to reassure me. "When I saw him he was already breathing with difficulty; he could no longer speak. And yet when I looked into his eyes I had the feeling that he recognized me… No, no. I don't think they could have done anything, even here. His body was riddled with steel… Yes, I think Samurai recognized me."

  He shows me a photo, brightly colored like a holiday snapshot. In front of the long mound of the grave, Utkin has been captured, involuntarily standing at attention. This is the Utkin of "twenty years later" with a little Trotsky-style goatee and eyes invisible behind his glasses. Beside him a woman crouches, seen from behind, piling up the earth around a plant with big purple flowers. Her very practical gestures make her astonishingly distant from, foreign to, the tortured gravity of Utkin's expression…

  So does everything come down to this little mound of fresh earth lost somewhere beneath the skies of Central America…?

  The dining room of the Russian restaurant, generally half empty, is well filled this evening. The Orthodox Easter. One can see the grizzled manes and noble brows of the first emigration, and some thin faces and embittered expressions from the latest wave; and plenty of Westerners, who have come to sample Slavic charm by candlelight. The musicians and the singer are not there at the moment – the obligatory intermission between two courses. Their repertoire matches the degree of intoxication. After the break come songs more in accord with the quantities of vodka consumed. Conversations become heated, remarks overlap, slowly spreading a confused hubbub across all the tables. And our host, the famous Sasha, like the conductor of an experimental orchestra, directs this cacophony, now coming over to this group, now to that one.

  "Oh yes, Your Royal Highness. The only shashlik of this kind to be made in New York now is ours. After the death of Count Sheremetyev's chef… Yes, my good friend, this wine will help you forget your Moscow fallen into the hands of neo-Bolsheviks… Yes, of course, madam, this follows a purely Russian tradition. And furthermore, you'll see that it will go perfectly with this slightly acid punch…"

  He seats us at one of the last free tables. I sit with my back to the room. Utkin stretches out his leg in the narrow space between the tables and lets himself down, facing me. The big mirror behind his chair transmits back to me the multicolored depths of the room filled with the vivid lights of the candles. On the walls hung with red velvet are the "icons" – pages from illustrated magazines cut out and stuck onto rectangles of plywood and covered in varnish. In one corner, on a cabinet, is a full-bellied samovar.

  After the first vodka Utkin rummages in his great leather bag and brings out a colored volume reminiscent of a children's book.

  "Since it's a time for confessions and faded dreams tonight…"

  I open the volume, putting my glass aside. It is a comic book for adults. Quite "hard," from the look of it.

  "These are my novels, Juan! Yes, all the plots are mine. The situations, the dialogue, the captions, everything… Impressive, huh?"

  I leaf through the colored pages. With some variations, the stories are all similar: the characters are clothed at the beginning, undressed at the end. The backdrop for their nakedness is sometimes a lush tropical wilderness, sometimes the luxurious interior of a villa, on occasion even the weightlessness of a spacecraft… As the pages flick past, a whole firework display surges out of them: curvaceous backsides being grasped by the hands of hairy men; pink or tanned buttocks; genitals being flourished; hungry lips; luminous thighs. Suddenly I understand everything.

  "So it was to write these that you made use of my love stories?"

  Utkin looks sheepish. He pours us some vodka.

  "Yes. But what could I do? You had so much experience. And I had to invent a new one every day!"

  I turn over the very last pages of his book. I come upon a series of images that strike me as strangely familiar.

  Utkin guesses what scene I have just discovered. He blushes, holds out his hand, and snatches the book from me, knocking over my glass. But I have time to take in the final sequence: the woman spread-eagled over the top of the grand piano, the man splitting her body in two and emitting roars in bubbles, like puffs of steam from a locomotive in a film cartoon…

  We mop up the vodka. Utkin stammers excuses. The waiter brings us borscht and sets a vessel of piping-hot buckwheat kasha beside our plates.

  "So you see, I've sunk pretty low," says my childhood friend, with an embarrassed smile.

  "Not at all. In any case, as you probably guessed, my princess was pure invention. I lied to you, Utkin. That whole story. It wasn't the Côte d'Azur: it was the Crimea, a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. I no longer remember. And she wasn't wearing an evening gown the way she is in your pictures, just a faded satin sundress… Her body smelled of rocks baked in the hot sun. And as for the candelabra on the piano, I guess no one had lit the candles in them since the Revolution…"

  We fall silent and stir fresh cream into our borscht.

  "It's stupid. I should never have shown you my masterpiece," he says finally.

  "Of course you should… Besides, the pictures are really good."

  Utkin lowers his eyes. I see that my compliment has touched him.

  "Thanks… It's my wife who did those pictures."

  "You're married? Why didn't you tell me?"

  "Well, I did tell you about her once… But we got married a month and a half ago. She's an American Indian… And she's a bit like me… That is to say – er – she's… she's a bit hunchbacked. She fell off a horse when she was little… But she's very beautiful."

  I nod my head with conviction, in a hurry to say something: "So you've found your Eurasian roots?"

  "Yes… Look, I think we're doing less harm with these comic strips than the people who sell all that kitsch that passes for literature in the States… And what's more, if you noticed, in my strips the bodies are always beautiful. My wife wants them to be like that…"

  Utkin opens the book again above his plate and starts showing me the pictures.

  "But the most important thing, you see, is that in each sequence there's a bit of horizon, a space, a panel of sky…"

  I can't help laughing. "Do you really think your readers have time to notice that bit of sky?"

  Utkin is silent. The waiter removes our plates and sets the shashlik before us. We drink our vodka. Sunk in thought, my friend raises his eyebrows, his gaze lost in the bottom of his glass. Suddenly he proclaims: "You know, Juan, the Americans often remind me of monkeys playing with a clockwork toy. They press a button, the spring functions, the little plastic man starts turning somersaults. The object is achieved… And it's the same in their culture. They construct a new genius and inflate him through TV, and nobody gives a shit about his books so long as the machine keeps working. Button – spring – and the little plastic man jumps around. Everyone's happy. It's very reassuring to be able to construct geniuses. With the help of the word… They juggle with ideas as old as the world, put them together in endless combinations, and sacrifice their own lives. Words, words, words…"

  Utkin waves the empty bottle, signaling to the waiter.

  "That's right. The life has gone, but the machine keeps working!" he adds, fixing me with his tipsy prophet's eyes. "And it's a great division of labor, you see! The masses get sustenance from products like my comics and the elite from unreadable word puzzles. And you've seen how solemnly they hand out their literary prizes! It's like Brezhnev pinning a new gold star on some decrepit member of the Politburo. Everybody knows who's going to get the prize and why, but they go on playing at Politburos. It's the deathly ivy closing in on the West. The ivy of words that has killed life."

  At this moment I see the musicians appearing in the mirror behind Utkin's head. The violin utters a light experimental groan; the guitar emits a long guttural sigh; the accordion fills its lungs, whispering melodiously. Finally, still in the sm
oky reflection of the mirror, I see her… her.

  In her black dress, she looks like a long bird's feather. Her face is pale, without a touch of makeup put on for local color.

  Now, this machine, I think to myself, is really working well. Sasha knows just the right moment to serve up the Slavic charm… Their faces are softened by the abundance of food, their eyes misting over, their hearts melting…

  But the song which arises does not seem to be playing Sasha's game. At first it is a very soft note, which immediately tempers the bravura of the musicians. A sound that seems to come from very far away and does not succeed in dominating the noise from the diners' tables. And if this frail voice imposes itself a few moments later, it is because everyone, despite drunkenness and a full stomach, can sense those distant snows unfolding, beyond the walls hung with red velvet and the paper icons. The voice is slightly raised; now the diners cannot take their eyes off the pale face, with its gaze lost in the mists of those days evoked by the song. In the illusory depths of the mirror I can probably see her better than the others. Her body a long black plume; her face without makeup, defenseless. She sings as if for herself; for that cold April night; for someone invisible. The way a woman sang one evening in front of the fire in a snowbound izba… Everyone knows the words by heart. Yet we find our way into that distant night, lost in a snowstorm, not by deciphering the words but by staring at the candle flame until it starts to grow bigger, letting you enter its transparent aura. And the music becomes the cool air of the izba, which smells of a snow squall; the radiant warmth of the fire; the scent of burning cedar; the limpid silence of solitude…

  "That song," murmurs Utkin, "reminds me oddly of a story Samurai once told me. He was angry with himself for talking to me about the prisoners raped at the camp, and all that filth, even though I already knew about it. To him I was a child, and anyway, you know what Samurai was like… When the militiamen had gone off with the frozen prisoner and left us alone, Samurai pointed to his nose. You remember that boxer's nose he had? He told me how it happened."