A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  The filmmaker is visibly moved: the film must be plunging him back into his life of twenty years ago, not really his youth, but an age when so many hopes were still possible … So as not to disappoint him, Oleg begins to express his reactions more animatedly and even to applaud from time to time. The film’s key scene is close at hand—the empress in love with her stallion! The imminence of this absurdity makes Oleg nervous. He’ll have to give a verdict without wounding his German host, who’s being so friendly.

  “Here, it’s just starting!” Pfister announces, becoming almost portentous. It is clear that, twenty years on, he still believes his style of filming was innovative.

  Horses gallop across the screen, white, like Orlik, Catherine’s favorite stallion. The music is similar to Ravel’s Boléro, but even more insistent. Whinnying, reworked by mixing, blends into the sound of a woman moaning. The white bodies collide, forming a nuptial round dance. The tsarina appears, clothed in silk. Lying back on a sheet? No, it’s a trick of the camera—she’s standing upright, her eyes half-closed, her back pressed against Orlik’s flank. She turns around, puts her arms about the stallion’s neck, kisses it, moans. The violet eye of the horse, filmed in close-up, becomes hazy, blends with the woman’s eye. Back to the horses—rearing up, their necks twisting, their manes lashing, gleaming light on their hindquarters. Two horses coupling, then two others. Back to the tsarina, naked, her breasts crushed rhythmically against Orlik’s chest … And again the galloping horses … And again the tsarina—a rapid tracking shot makes her disappear beneath Orlik’s muscular bulk, then finds her again, exhausted, her arms outstretched, her hair mingled with the horse’s mane …

  At the restaurant Pfister maintains the solemn air that Oleg has often observed in directors after a premiere.

  “Even for its time it was very daring. Imagine that nowadays! Since then we’ve been steeped in puritanism for years. Try filming a penis in a vagina now, which is, after all, what happens when two people make love, and you’ll get an ‘X’ rating right away. And in my film it was a horse!”

  The food is brought—great plates edged with geometric patterns: red stars, hammers and sickles, all the socialist kitsch that is becoming fashionable. The restaurant, located in former East Berlin, seems to be following the trend. On the walls, Soviet flags, no doubt retrieved after the troops left, a few East German propaganda posters, and in one corner a dummy dressed in a long military greatcoat.

  Oleg eats without concealing how hungry he was. “People might think I’m part of the decor,” he says to himself, “a starving Russian.” Pfister smokes, drinks, hardly touches the food. He is happy with his “premiere,” pleased with this enthusiastic spectator, now wolfing down his filet of veal in bread crumbs.

  “Yes, how to film the tsarina and her beloved Orlik in a way that avoided outraged cries of bestiality! I rewrote that sequence a thousand times. And then, suddenly! Eureka! The trick was to cut the scene in half. In one half the horses mating (something that’s not forbidden) and alongside that, just hinted at, Catherine’s transports. And visually it was irreproachable, don’t you think?”

  Oleg agrees, and even manages to make a reference to the “ontological ambivalence of human impulses,” while at the same time spearing the last few french fries with his fork, which a waiter is on the point of whisking away. He throws in one or two compliments for the sake of politeness and assures him that the work of a truly creative filmmaker can clearly be sensed in the film …

  But this praise is too much. Pfister grows tense, suddenly narrows his shoulders. The excitement of the premiere is gradually wearing off. From being the forty-year-old director of twenty years ago, Max is turning back into what he is now, a little man whose bald pate gleams beneath a vast overhead lampshade acquired during the postsocialist rummage sales.

  To rescue him from his slide down a slippery slope, Oleg renews his compliments more emphatically. Yes, filming that equine love affair was one hell of a challenge. Pfister must have really had to cudgel his brains … But privately he knows that it’s the weak spot in the film: the whole time one is aware of a straining after tricks in order to portray this absurd coupling. All that effort, and the result is this not-terribly-good, flashy, phony film. An army of extras, that poor Catherine, no doubt made uncomfortable by the weight of her bloated breasts, and a whole herd of horses, whose erotic moods had to be kept under surveillance. All that, just for that!

  Pfister attempts an uneasy grin. At first, walking into the restaurant, he had posed as a condescending regular, a West German turning up here in the now collapsed German Democratic Republic. With the benevolent loftiness of a colonizer, he had addressed the waiters familiarly, shaken hands with the chef … Now he is no longer acting the part, guessing what this Russian who has finished gulping down his dinner must be thinking: all that, just for that …

  In a last effort at social poise Pfister announces between two swigs of vodka: “By the way, I came across your Tarkovsky a number of times. An original guy, a bit crazy, a mystic—”

  He breaks off, sensing that he has struck a false note. His voice becomes tinged with bitter sarcasm.

  “Oh yes, Tarkovsky, a true icon. A victim of the Kremlin dictatorship. That’s how they portray him in the media. He posed as a persecuted man, as if he were some ex-convict from the Kolyma camps—and all this in his miserable exile in Venice, where he went to live and was welcomed with open arms by generous patrons. The first time I felt like kneeling: a saint, a genius, muzzled by totalitarianism! Then I thought about it … That was in the days when I was trying to scrape together a few million marks to make one of my own films. You know the old story: you beg, you prostitute yourself, you kill yourself to assemble a pittance, three candle ends offered by one producer and a pair of old socks graciously granted by a television channel … And so, I see Tarkovsky, this crucified martyr, I listen to his lamentations about the calvary he suffered to bring out his films in the USSR. And all at once, I ask myself, but wait a minute, who financed them? Well, I’ll tell you who … It was the Soviet State, goddamn it! Yes, those torturers allocated him a budget, often a rather substantial one, you know Tarkovsky didn’t skimp on his decor. So these enemies of liberty were supporting a director who made pictures that were maybe not hostile to, but certainly indifferent to, the ideals of communism. And what’s more these pretentiously complex films were often quite inaccessible to … let’s say the toiling masses. All that aesthetic monkey business in his film The Mirror, I always found it a bit tedious, not to say boring as hell … But that’s not the main point. There, I say to myself, you have somebody who’s forever moaning, but whose films have been made thanks to the taxes paid by poor kolkhozniks who can’t make head or tail of these movies designed for a little blasé elite. And, lo and behold, when this crucified martyr turns up on the Grand Canal it’s the same story all over again! The West doesn’t suit him either and he swamps us with his Nostalghia, which is even more deadly dull than the rest. But there are still idiots ready to take over from the kolkhozniks the financing of our martyr’s latest films of his moods and whims …”

  Pfister rounds off his indictment in the street. He walks along swaying and gesticulating. “He’s a dead ringer for Woody Allen,” Oleg says to himself. With selfish, bitter glee he realizes that his trip to Berlin will have been helpful: Pfister’s film is, in part, what Zhurbin was trying to do. And it’s a clear failure.

  They arrive in front of the building where the filmmaker lives. “Freedom to create, ha, ha, ha! But who’ll let me film another Catherine—that little girl of fourteen who goes off to Russia never to return? I found dough for my Tsarina because everyone wanted to see her lovers screwing her, that was all that interested them—a big German woman being served by horny guardsmen. And as we were right in the middle of the sexual revolution, we had to show the horse as well …”

  He stops, gives Oleg a pained glance. “I went on fighting. Even after that film I still dreamed of rewriting her life. B
ut time passed and it’s too late now. You can stay the night, if you like. What? My girlfriend? We’ll tell her you’re a KGB agent. People always suspect Russians, you know. Oh well. Here’s to the next time …”

  They pause in the snow for a moment more, somewhat hesitant now, both of them aware there’s little likelihood of their ever meeting again and that their encounter has brought together countries now swallowed up, eras now obliterated. And that for Oleg (as Pfister knows), it has been his first real evening in company on his “native soil.”

  In order to avoid painful farewells, Oleg asks: “In Kozin’s film Eva Sander played Catherine. You don’t know what she’s working on now do you?”

  Pfister whispers, as if sharing a secret: “Take some advice from an old man. Never go back to women from the past. It only leads to unhappiness. Live in the present. It tells better lies because it’s always changing … Ah, here comes my present!”

  Oleg turns around and recognizes the Czech. He thanks Pfister, beats a retreat. The latter, no doubt sobered up by the chilly air, bellows in astonishingly solemn tones: “And forget about Catherine. Impossible to film a woman no man ever loved …”

  Those words of Pfister’s—“a woman no man ever loved”—change everything.

  The next day Oleg was planning to take the train to Kiel, somewhere he has often pictured: a boy of eleven and a little girl a year younger than him, holding hands and watching the snow falling on the sea. The future Peter III’s first meeting with the future Catherine II … He would like to see this place, so as to convince himself that the tsarina’s life could be summed up in these two stories: the young dreamer in her German fairy tale, the “red-blooded” empress in her cruel Russian saga …

  The next morning he locates Eva Sander’s address on the map of Berlin. The likelihood of her still living in the same place is scant, he knows, but he might as well eliminate that hope, too.

  The district, near Heinersdorf in former East Berlin, reminds him of Russian towns—low-rise buildings, streets lined with trees, streetcar tracks, patches of wasteland. A similarity no doubt connected to the war that shaped the towns in the two countries.

  An old apartment building, a courtyard covered in snow. Oleg stops, observes the windows—the stunted plants behind the glass, you would see them in any small Russian town. The main door opens, an old man emerges, turns to greet a woman, a neighbor, who comes out after him … A moment of panic prevents Oleg from recognizing her. On seeing him she makes an about-face and retreats into the entrance hall!

  For a split second he believed she was avoiding him. Then the woman reappears, pulling a shopping cart on wheels. Oleg plucks up courage, struck by the banal nature of the situation: a woman going back up to her apartment to collect a cart and now setting off as she intended.

  Eva Sander, whom he has not seen for fourteen years …

  At this first glimpse, confused by his emotion, he notes that she seems to have grown younger, which is illogical, and yet her face has a vulnerable simplicity, a hint of childlike frailty.

  Oleg lets her move forward, then calls out to her softly in Russian: “Your Majesty, where are you off to, with that conqueror’s stride?”

  He is expecting a great “Oh” of astonishment, a burst of enthusiasm, and, possibly, tears. Eva turns her head, raises her eyebrows. “Oh, but it’s Herr Erdmann in person.”

  She shakes his hand, asks in a matter-of-fact way, “So when did you get here? Are you spending a bit of time in Berlin?”

  Oleg is just starting to reply, with a fixed smile on his lips, feeling the slight pique one experiences after telling a joke to which the listener already knew the punch line. “Perfect,” Eva cuts in. “We’ll have some tea in a little while. I’m just off to do my shopping … If you have no other plans, come with me …”

  He finds himself pushing a shopping cart and notices Eva is adding a few odds and ends to her list for “their” tea. This detail seems to him both comic and irritating: an extra packet of biscuits, the only change occasioned by his coming. At the checkout Eva takes out a handful of coins and lays them out in a row to count them. Oleg cannot tell if this is a case of Western stinginess, or quite simply a lack of cash in former socialist Germany, as it comes up against economic reality.

  On the return journey he learns why his coming caused Eva so little surprise. When the borders were opened the Russians hurried into Europe. “I’ve seen several people from Kozin’s team,” she confides. “They come hoping to find work … When they get here they do what they always used to do in the old days: find my address and ring at my door.”

  “I was going to do just that. Forgive me. I know that in the West you have to telephone your friends six months in advance …”

  Hard to avoid this acid note. But they try to get over it and act out a scene of old comrades reunited.

  Eva’s apartment is large, two vast rooms, but the traces of the former socialist life show through—in the look of the furniture, the tired colors, the kitchen reminiscent of Soviet apartments. The objects from Italy that can be seen here and there look like tourist trinkets.

  They drink tea, making a pretense of casualness, but the tension is there, from the effort they are making to put the past behind them, that time when Kozin was shooting his film in Leningrad. The long walks they went on after the day’s filming, far away from the crowded parts of the city … It was the period of the Wall, of watertight frontiers. A world of prisons. And one filled with dreams …

  “Guess what masterpiece I saw last night,” says Oleg, rolling his eyes. He tells her about his visit to Max Pfister and The Red-Blooded Tsarina … “A very athletic scenario: the sex was filmed like a bout between two wrestlers. And then, that horse!”

  He speaks with heavy sarcasm, portraying Pfister as a sexual obsessive, a bitter old man who rails against Tarkovsky, the persecuted genius.

  “I nearly acted in one of Max’s films …,” Eva says softly, glancing out of the window.

  “Oh dear, not his Red-Blooded Tsarina!” exclaims Oleg, feigning prudish alarm.

  “No. It was much later. Already after the Wall came down. A scenario based on my father’s life. I told you about his past as a soldier: aerial reconnaissance over Leningrad … Pfister struggled hard to find a producer … But they thought the subject was out of date …”

  Oleg suddenly grasps what it was the previous evening that had surprised him about Pfister. Yes, this out-of-date aspect of him. A West German, Max really belongs to the period of the war, of the Wall, a generation ultimately very close to Eva …

  He no longer seeks to be ironic.

  “And since then have you done more acting? I imagine a lot of walls have come down in the world of film as well …”

  Eva lays the table—he has not noticed that lunchtime has arrived. Pasta, peppers, olives, and a bottle of Italian wine.

  “Yes … As a good, disciplined German, I’ve made every effort to become integrated into the cinema now proclaiming its victory over totalitarianism. After reunification they offered us well-defined roles: those of poor idiots from the East who, on arrival in the paradise of the West, commit all kinds of blunders because, for example, they’ve never eaten pasta like this, or drunk Chianti. Poor relations, at whom Germans from the other side of the Wall laugh heartily … I had to earn my crust so I acted in three or four of those turkeys. And then …”

  She gets up, switches on a lamp above the table. The afternoon is gray, it is raining, the snow is melting and leaving patches of earth that swallow up the light.

  “And then this cinema, liberated from the totalitarian fetters, began to get interested in the last war and we’ve seen films in which Hitler seemed almost lovable, especially around the time when the Third Reich was collapsing. As a result, it was the Russians who became more and more appalling. They bombed, killed, pillaged. It was so cunningly devised that audiences began to ask themselves: ‘But what on earth did these barbarians come to Berlin for?’ I was offered a part: a w
oman of Berlin raped by a Russian soldier. Rapes have been committed by all the armies in the world. But the USSR had just collapsed and the filmmakers, like good whores, saw which way the wind was blowing and started to rewrite history. Now this was all they were showing: the Russians coming, crushing the German army’s heroic resistance, violating everything that moved … I turned down that part and then another in the same vein. They pigeonholed me as one of the people nostalgic for the Wall and forgot about me …”

  She falls silent, her gaze fixed on the shadows parading past in her mind, hinted at only by the trembling of her eyelashes. Oleg attempts a soothing platitude: “It’s the price you have to pay for freedom, Eva. People say whatever comes into their heads. Sometimes it’s totally crazy: all those Russians obsessed with fornication instead of fighting. It makes you wonder how they ever got from Stalingrad to Berlin. But it’s better to have this craziness than Soviet censorship. I know a bit about that.”

  He sips his wine, adopting the air of a veteran of film in the days of dictatorship. Eva gives him a weary, mocking glance.

  “The problem, my dear Oleg, is that, despite your terrifying Soviet censorship, you managed to make a short film about your father’s life. I’ve seen it, your Return in a Dream. A very fine film! Whereas we, Pfister and I, despite the freedom of the West, were not able to make ours. About my father. It’s a paradox, isn’t it? As for Tarkovsky, he wouldn’t have been given a single mark to produce his early films in the West. About that, Max is absolutely right.”