A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  He goes off. Oleg does not stir. He ends the sentence Lessya interrupted. “And do you know … I’m toting horsemeat around too …” It had been intended as a joke against himself. The impossibility of retrieving it now is so complete that it brings with it a certain relief. The last tie is cut, that of speech, which yesterday could still bring him Lessya’s voice, her breathing. From now on nothing more. So what was it Zhurbin said? You’ll end up forgetting even the actors’ names …

  His footsteps lead him away from the district where he lives and for an hour this distancing serves as an end in itself.

  The tourists’ Leningrad gives up the ghost, changing into suburban streets, dreary faded walls, ground floors spattered with dirty snow thrown up by trucks. Warehouses, factories, and dwellings whose occupants one pictures with perplexed compassion, yes, some old woman hesitating to cross this thunderous ditch of a road.

  His destination is an apartment building that looks like a lone mountain crag. A narrow structure on three stories, which chaotic urban planning has left behind in a running noose of lines of communication: a cat’s cradle of railroad tracks and viaducts with rusty skeletons. Against all logic, lighted windows can be seen, potted plants behind the panes of glass, little tulle curtains … People are still living there!

  But then, after all, this is where Oleg spent most of his childhood.

  He goes in at the main entrance, cocks an ear to the echo from the stairwell, begins climbing. At the top landing a staircase leads up between floors to an attic door. There is a lock whose creaks and groans he knows how to master. He closes the door behind him, remains in the darkness, waits for the beating of his heart to calm down.

  Feeling his way along the top of some shelving he locates an electric flashlight. He has no need to explore the premises. To the left a corner that served both as kitchen and bathroom. A zinc bathtub is there, thrust beneath the angle of the stairs. And this memory: his father pouring warm water over his back, it is winter, the steam makes a rainbow around the lightbulb … To the right a bed made of thick planks and a little couch, which gives the measure of the body that used to curl up there. There are ankle boots neatly lined up against the wall. Their wrinkled leather reminds him of the pain of the great frosts: the child walks along, counting the crossties, then, having lost all feeling in his toes, remembers tales of frostbite, runs, climbs the staircase, comes in, squeezes up against the great stove on which a bucket of water is heating. Soon it will be paradise, a hot stream of water, the resinous smell of the soap, his father softly whistling a tune …

  Oleg walks over to a drawing board: his father’s “office.” Huge sheets of paper, sketches of pediments, of blind arcades … the beam from the flashlight slips across a tiny window and suddenly conjures a confused structure out of the darkness, a towering mass of columns, galleries, spires, cupolas.

  A model of a palace, at least six feet high, the summit of which touches the attic ceiling.

  The chaotic nature of this construction has a hypnotic effect. The eye follows the curves of a spiral staircase, becomes lost amid flying buttresses … It is a mixture of all styles. Classical facades are loaded with baroque sculptures, surging ogives rest upon antique colonnades … A castle? A cathedral? Or perhaps a whole city compressed by a violent folding of the rocks beneath? Fragments under construction blend in with ruins cunningly re-created.

  There is also this mystery: directed at a certain angle, the beam lights up a forgotten object at the heart of this labyrinth, which looks like a fragment of coral.

  Oleg calls to mind the child who spent hours in front of this model. In his daydreams he thrust open the gates, made his way in beneath the vaulted ceilings. Prophetically, his father’s voice used to ring out: “Here there will be a narthex with unfluted columns. And over there a hall in the form of a basilica … Palladio … Piranesi …” These mysterious mantras were part of the joy of being with his father, the smell of wood glue and the scent of the fire on which their evening meal was cooking … “The Gallery of Mirrors at Herrenchiemsee Castle … The abbey at Ottobeuren.” These strange syllables were lodged in his memory, notations of a happiness that would turn out to be all too transient.

  It never occurred to him that what this palace betokened was a descent into madness. Granted, his father sometimes flew into a rage, smashed a part of the structure. “They said Renaissance perspective was illusionism. Idiots! Everything is illusion. Our lives, our passions … And even matter. Look, I’m going to break this staircase and then it will lead into nothingness!”

  But the child knew he would soon start building again, a pediment would be added, a line of pillars … And that life would return to its simple pleasures: hot water in the bathtub, the spicy odor of the soap, his father whistling tunes to himself.

  He was all the more shocked when the break came because it occurred during one of those periods of calm. One day the teacher told him he would not be going back home because his father had “health problems” … He did not weep. Not thanks to any particular stoicism but because he was overcome by obscure feelings of guilt: he had concealed the fact that his father was constructing this insane palace and that sometimes he used to speak in German …

  Shame helped the child to endure the separation, the transfers from one educational establishment to another and the mockery—his schoolfellows always ended up learning the truth: “Your dad’s crazy, is that it? And I guess you’re nuts too! So are you a Nazi, Erdmann, like your old man?”

  These insults would follow him throughout his school days, even during the months when the doctor allowed his father to return home. Increasingly the boy rebelled against such reunions, dreading the brief paradise and the inevitable subsequent banishment.

  Adolescent selfishness liberated him from feelings of guilt. It was now his father who was the accused, a man incapable of finding anything better than his job as a land surveyor and this life in the attic. His son even held their German name against him—“a Nazi name!” But above all this palace, forever growing taller, collapsing, making a spectacle of incredible ruins. No longer seeing this father of his allowed him to feel like the others …

  He must have reached the age of eighteen when, right at the center of the city, close to the Admiralty, he came across this thin little old man, his pate covered with silver threads. His father! The stab of pity Oleg felt was so sharp that the other emotions came only later: his old shame at having such a father and his current shame at having abandoned him. He lacked the courage to go up to him—the old man went on his way, muttering in a mixture of Russian and German, his gaze, now hazy, now piercing, alighting on the facades of buildings. To make up for his cowardice, Oleg went to visit him that same evening.

  On this occasion there was no grand reunion. The old man seemed no longer aware of the passage of time. He spoke as if his son had just slipped out for a moment. “Look, I’ve constructed this colonnade but as time goes by only ruins will be left of it. Ruins are beauty liberated from time. Painters depict ruins without imagining the complete building. But we architects have to create the building and wait for it to collapse … Life is nothing more than waiting for that collapse. We spend our lives amid the ruins of what we have loved …”

  Oleg began coming to see his father every day. The remarks that in the old days had seemed obscure to him now revealed their meaning: the phantasmagoria of the palace brought together projects that had been too ambitious ever to be realized. “Bernini designed the Louvre, but for lack of money his dream never saw the light of day. Fischer von Erlach, for his part, drew up plans for Schönbrunn Castle. Nobody dared to give physical form to such splendor …”

  This architectural utopia epitomized his father’s whole life. His Russian sorrows, his German dreams, that apartment building choked by railroad tracks, monumental structures dreamed of in his ancestors’ fatherland. “Now, you’ve never seen the monastery at Wiblingen and its baroque library … What perfect proportions!”

  On oc
casion he had a great desire to hug the old man, to extricate him from his delusions: “But Papa, you’ve never seen it either!” Oleg did not do so, aware that the delicate equilibrium his father now enjoyed depended on the continuity of his illusions.

  One day, with his head thrust deep into the entrails of his model, his father murmured: “And here I’m going to install a Great Hall of the Knights, like the one at Weikersheim Castle. Part of our family came from there …”

  Oleg whispered to him softly, as one addresses a sleepwalker engaged in his perilous progress: “… so they lived not far from that castle: What did they do in life?”

  His father must have taken these words for the echo of his own thoughts. He continued the story and swiftly told the tale of the life closest to them, the one that had led to them, him and his son, ending up in this building like a mountain crag amid the railroad tracks.

  The disappearance of the family portraits during his boyhood marked Sergei Erdmann, Oleg’s father, more strongly than the great events of the period. Born in 1924, he had spent his childhood amid their solemn black-and-white faces. Russia was shaken by revolutionary challenges, by futuristic promises. Old people still called it St. Petersburg, but when Sergei was taking his first steps it was already Leningrad. Hundreds of men were arrested every night and their deaths behind barbed wire were acclaimed in the newspapers as the welcome fruit of the most humane of judicial systems. Even school textbooks did not escape punishment. Their teacher would order: “Open your books at page …” (he gave the number). “The photograph here shows an enemy of the people recently unmasked by the Party. Black it out with ink! Begin with his mouth which uttered calumnies against our socialist fatherland.”

  From one month to the next a good many pages were sullied by black rectangles. And in his parents’ conversations Sergei detected hints of more discreet disappearances, neighbors on the same landing, colleagues, former acquaintances.

  Only the ancestral portraits seemed calmly aloof. Their calm was disrupted in 1936. The photographs came down from their hooks and took refuge in the depths of a wardrobe. His parents’ answer was evasive: “It’s better to be on the safe side.” Now in his teens, he did not try to discover more: the link between the hiding of these portraits and the inked-out squares in his history book was only too evident.

  What crime had these ancestors committed? Doctors, engineers, merchants, booksellers, soldiers, they had always kept themselves well clear of politics. The 1917 revolution had not turned them into implacable opponents of the regime. His father, an optician, followed a profession little suited to controversy.

  “It’s because we’re German …,” Sergei’s mother murmured one day. German? No! The name of Erdmann had never given rise to suspicion. Not even in 1914. Several Erdmanns had fought at the front, like so many Russians of German origin. It seemed as if the revolution ought to eradicate these survivals: titles, origins, nationalities … And yet the more they preached about “internationalism,” the more this ancient German kinship came under suspicion.

  Sergei’s father died of a heart attack early in 1937. During his final months he used to go to bed fully dressed, convinced that one night there would be a knock at their door. Out in the street a black car would be waiting for him, then there would be long sessions of interrogation, torture … The day he was buried, Sergei’s mother burned their family portraits. For some time now the newspapers had taken to denouncing not only “the enemies of the people” but also “Hitler’s lackeys.”

  All that had survived was this optical toy: a stereoscope equipped with a hundred photographs of European cities, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Rome … Sergei remembered how one day his parents had talked about their trip to Italy, a few years before the revolution. Nowadays thinking of going abroad seemed more unrealistic than traveling to the moon.

  The cities in the stereoscope and their buildings inspired in him a taste for architecture, a passion that forever bore the stamp of the trip he pictured his parents making, when young and in love.

  For these Russians, now on the spot because of their German roots, there came a respite, which lasted from August 1939 until June 1941. The pact with Hitler had just been signed, Germany was becoming an almost friendly ally. “This is only borrowed time,” his mother observed. “War will break out and then both sides will regard us as enemies. How can we make them forget about us?”

  She decided to get rid of all the optical equipment her husband used to use. “They could accuse us of who knows what military espionage on Hitler’s behalf.”

  As for Sergei, his intention seemed even more difficult to achieve: to change nationality. In that land of total surveillance his chances of success were minimal.

  He was helped by the chaos of the first days of the war. The bombing caused fires in a number of apartment buildings in their district. Sergei went out into one of the courtyards, threw his papers in the fire, allowed his clothing to become scorched in the flames. Then he rushed to a mobilization center. The military bureaucracy had few scruples. The only hazard was his name, Erdmann. “You’re of German origin!” gasped the official in charge. “No, I’m Jewish …,” replied Sergei. This was duly noted along with more anodyne information: his age (he added an extra year), his status as an architectural student …

  To begin with he was posted to an engineering unit that was preparing the ground for the retreat of troops in disarray. His distance from the fighting allowed him to hold on to the memory of a Germany his parents used to speak of, a fatherland of romantic poets and inspired musicians. An image that survived the sight of fields covered in frozen corpses.

  The Russian counteroffensive would cure him of the Germany he had dreamed of. Enlisted in the infantry, he one day passed through a village that had been torched about seventy miles from Moscow. The spectacle of izbas burned to a cinder was not new to him. What froze him was the line of four charred bodies punctuating the snow alongside a fence. Bodies of children. Little fugitives who had been caught in the jet of a flamethrower. A German soldier must have killed them, more or less out of curiosity, testing whether his weapon would reach them … Behind the fence Sergei saw one who had escaped—a wild-eyed little boy, babbling incoherently.

  There was an intensity about this madness that was contagious, Sergei would never free himself from it, for no words could express the horror of those little faces reduced to the state of smoldering brands.

  His war was going to be a long-drawn-out replica of that burned village. Towns reduced to black shreds, bodies crushed by tanks … The memory of the wild-eyed child often returned, giving rise to a thought that pained him more than the wretchedness of a soldier’s life: “If my ancestors had not left Germany, I should probably have come to that village armed with a flamethrower …” He shook his head to drive away this phantom version of himself, noting that if his family had not settled in Russia he would never have been born. His distress was numbed.

  Before the war he had always felt himself to be Russian. Back from the front in 1945, he felt as if a small part of the German crimes could be laid at his door. He called himself a fool, fingered the medals that jingled on his uniform jacket, told himself that few of his comrades had gone right through the war, from Moscow to Berlin! But the closer he got to Leningrad the more he was tormented by a feeling of being a German fifth columnist.

  This sense of a split personality became unbearable when he learned that from the start of the war Russians of German origin had been deported beyond the Urals. He gathered that his mother had suffered this same fate, made inquiries, and went to look for her in a small town in western Siberia. He was directed to a group of huts where several families lived, a few forlorn old men and three or four young women who had come there as children and grown up without parents. One of them, Marta, told him about how they had fetched up in this deserted spot, the hunger, the snowstorms, the despair, the guilt felt by these innocent Germans, who were being made to pay for the others, Hitler’s lot. This distress kill
ed more of them than disease. Sergei’s mother had died late in the fall of the first year of the war. “She asked me to keep this lamp,” said Marta.

  It was not a lamp but a magic lantern, the old Erdmann family relic.

  The following year they got married. Marta, legally obliged to live there, managed to leave Siberia—thanks to this purportedly Jewish husband, decorated with medals that bore the image of Stalin.

  The apartment where Sergei had lived before the war was occupied. By neighbors who had benefited from the deportation of the “filthy Nazis” … The young married couple rented a room, tried to survive, glad, at least, to see a sky where no bombers flew. Sergei resumed his architectural studies, got through the degree course in two years, completed his qualifying project …

  He was not uneasy when a new witch hunt was unleashed in 1948, under the name of the “struggle against cosmopolitanism in culture and the sciences.” What this was about, he thought, was a reining in, aimed at those intellectuals who had been seduced after the war by the brief opening up toward the West. He talked about it to Marta, explained the secret of the false Jewish nationality noted in his passport … “Well, why not tell them the truth?” she asked him.

  He would have done so if he had not been arrested in the middle of the following night. They tried to make him admit he had been involved in a clandestine Zionist organization. Subjected to increasingly brutal torture, he stuck by the truth: his German origins, his four years at the front. All this was very easy to check. And in the end it was checked and confirmed. The verification of his life history, undertaken with the usual administrative indolence, took two and a half years.

  After his release he found Marta again, and life resumed, but what they lacked now was an essential ingredient: faith in this life of theirs. They were like twigs put into water—the leaf buds open out, they give off a scent of spring, and, where the twig was broken off, they even put forth tiny roots, but these seek solid earth in vain.