The management of the boarding school where Nina lives have no objection in principle to their visit. “We’re a couple,” Oleg whispers in Eva’s ear. “If I were on my own they’d never let me near the child.” The director’s assistant is consulting a large visitors’ book. Suddenly her face tenses, she asks them to wait a minute, and disappears behind the heavy door of the neighboring office. “If worst comes to worst,” they agree, “we could simply ask them to give the fish to the child …”
The assistant returns accompanied by a very plump man with very white skin whose look signals real embarrassment.
“We’re very happy to be able to speak to Mr. Zhurbin’s friends because … well, it’s a rather delicate matter … his payments for the fees are already a month overdue. And for a week, now, we’ve not been able to reach him.”
Oleg surprises himself with his own cool composure. (“My histrionic experience in films has not been wasted.”) In the tones of one who is completely solvent, he says: “Doctor, I’m telling you this in great confidence. Mr. Zhurbin is preparing to take up a highly important post in the Russian government, so this is not a matter of forgetfulness on his part. There’s been an unfortunate malfunction during the breaking in of his new team. He knew I was planning to visit Nina and has asked me, as I was coming, if I could settle this small financial matter. I suppose you accept dollars …”
They leave the office, and guided by a nurse, follow a footpath among fir trees. “I now have a thousand dollars left, and that’s it,” whispers Oleg, looking like a gambler who’s just been cleaned out. Eva smiles: “It doesn’t matter. We’ll eat pasta and sleep in the car …”
The footpath leads around a small pond fenced in by a wooden trellis. Some ten children, accompanied by three teachers, are playing around this patch of water. At a call from the nurse a little girl in a woollen hat detaches herself from the group, runs up, and takes hold of Eva’s hand, as if she had always known her. “Come and see. My fishes talk to me!”
They go up to a narrow gate fastened with a hook. Nina opens it, under the vigilant eye of one of the teachers, goes up to the edge and starts reciting a nursery rhyme. The water quivers, is streaked with fins, flashes with golden scales. The child takes a piece of bread from her pocket, throws crumbs to the fish, calling them by their names. “Naughty things!” she murmurs suddenly, as a light lapping sound can be heard—that of mouths snapping at the last crumbs, or at nothing. “They say the bread was good but they prefer cookies …” The child crouches down, watches the fish swimming away, seems to forget the grown-ups. Her lips are moving in an inaudible conversation. Oleg realizes that these few moments leave him the time to see the sky upturned in the dark transparency of the pond, to hear a bird, to breathe in a more measured way. Yes, to feel he’s alive. “Nina, we’ve brought two more for you, but they don’t know how to talk yet,” says Eva. “You can teach them Russian.” The child opens the bag and whispers: “Take care, the water’s chilly. Don’t catch cold.” With a glint of orange, two bodies vanish into the pond. She stands up, looks at Oleg and Eva, makes an effort to find words not known at her age: “I’ll wait for you … I’ll show you my turtles as well. Next time, Daddy will come with you, yes?”
They do not stop for the night, make themselves very strong coffee, drive on, as if in flight from the child’s question. At the frontier Oleg no longer hides—everything seems trivial to them after Nina’s last words. Her father will get eight years at least. When he comes out Nina will be in her teens and he a derelict, his health ruined by the camps.
Eva talks with a fury Oleg has never heard in her before. “She’s not a maladjusted child at all! It’s our world that’s badly adjusted to beings like her. Can you picture her, she who only knows trusting and loving, can you picture her in St. Petersburg or Berlin?”
“Zhurbin knew he couldn’t remake the world. He chose that little island at Lugano. A third-rate television series meant he could pay six thousand dollars a month for this paradise. And that’s the snare: to create an island free from the filth of this world, we have to dirty our souls. Yes, we have to show Catherine copulating with guardsmen and then with a horse!”
“Your friend, Zhurbin, has an excuse: his child. You’d do better to think of all those men who make the same garbage and buy a ‘Lugano island’ just for themselves and their mistresses.”
“You can count me among them, Eva. There was a time when I earned my living making documentaries commissioned by oligarchs. And with that money do you think I tried to make a film about Lanskoy and Catherine? Not at all! I bought myself a great big car. I rented a big three-room apartment near the Nevsky Prospekt and at one moment I even had two girlfriends. I convinced them I was going to get them dream parts in the movies …”
“And then?”
“And then Kozin died and I got the message: the real death was this life I was leading … And so I decided I would outsmart the world. I began making that television series but in every episode I hoped I could add a touch that would transform everything. I remember there was a scene of rape: one of Catherine’s favorites has abandoned her and married a lady-in-waiting. The tsarina lets loose her henchmen on them. Zhurbin wanted a very raw, physical scene … In the young couple’s bedroom I managed to include a shot of a rag doll that was watching this rape, though in reality it was an outrage that never took place. The episode was a huge success. And, as for the doll, no one noticed it … The world is much craftier than we are. It simply wipes out all our ‘Lugano islands,’ or else it turns them into snares. Go ahead then, sell your soul in the hope of saving that of a child …”
Around midnight they stop, parking beside a little bend in the road up in the hills. The night is clear and the air coming off the mountains smells of ice, a hard, mineral texture, with no breath of life. The stars have the same cutting hardness—indifferent to these two human shadows lost in the darkness. To rid himself of drowsiness, Oleg walks a few steps, fills his lungs, looks at the sky: a void with not the least sign of compassion for what happens beneath its vault. “What’s happening here is Eva’s life,” he says to himself. “A child conceived during the brief return to Germany of a soldier on leave in 1943 … That soldier went back to the eastern front, back to his military service: in a reconnaissance plane he used to fly over Leningrad when it was under siege, where twenty thousand people were dying every day, and he took pictures, so that the Luftwaffe could bomb the city’s defenders and its factories more effectively. One day he saw a railroad junction, children and old people boarding a train to be evacuated. He didn’t photograph the place … His daughter, Eva, was born in April ’44, the soldier had already been taken prisoner by the Russians. Around that time another soldier stopped on terrain churned up by artillery shells. It marked the frontier between Russia and Poland, they told him. He was so exhausted the event made little impression on him. He just gave a faint smile. ‘So I, Sergei Erdmann, being of German descent, have liberated Russia …’ Suddenly his face became tensed up by one of the spasms that had been tormenting him for three years, since that winter’s day when, in the middle of a village torched by the Germans, he saw the bodies of four children burned by a flamethrower …”
Oleg closes his eyes to avoid the sight of this sky that has looked down indifferently on these births, these deaths, the cries of children overwhelmed by a burst of fire, as well as the childhood of that little Eva, who, before she had learned to talk, knew how to distinguish bombers just flying in from those that, having fulfilled their mission, were leaving the city where very few buildings remained intact. The sky saw all that without one of its stars being dimmed by compassion.
In the darkness they find one another and embrace, offering, as a challenge to the icy blackness that stares down at them, this brief moment—a frail bond that is the strongest human beings can hope for in their lifetime.
“I don’t know what Nina will feel when she sees her father after an absence of eight years. Mine was liberated by the Soviet
s in ’48. I was four when I saw him for the first time … Don’t worry, Oleg. We’ll find a solution for her. We’ll go back …”
They resume their journey, feeling as if they were launching a rearguard action. The world is vast, impassive, confident of its right, the right to continue with its perpetual round of wars, departures, disappointed hopes, human lives wiped away, like this flurry of snow sweeping across the road and disappearing, to be replaced by a fresh swirl of snowflakes.
The morning is misty and the road now passes by vast, gray, damp slopes, hillsides where sleeping trees stand sentinel. The air that fills the car is quite different now—the mildness of a weary winter, one that no longer lacerates their lungs. Their thoughts grow lighter, become veiled, lose some of their cutting edge.
This region of Italy is covered by the old “Lanskoy maps”: Lake Garda, the Valley of the Po, Mantua … They are doubtless driving along within a few miles of the route Catherine intended. She might have even stopped in this village, Grazie, where they decide to take a break …
They leave the car at the entrance to an empty square surrounded by little houses. On one side of the square is a colonnaded gallery and the modest, almost impoverished architecture of a church. They go into it, mainly to escape from the rain, the cafés are still closed.
Santa Maria delle Grazie. They smile—a proud name for such a simple building. A bare, flat facade and they open the door expecting the interior to be similarly austere …
The exuberance that spills out over them has nothing to do with richness or luxurious decoration. No, the nave is of average height, a lack of windows means the light does not come pouring in, the prettily painted vault is not vertiginous. A humble church. What is dazzling is the multitude of body parts—symbols of the most ordinary human frailty. The low columns, halfway up the walls, are covered with ex-voto offerings. Plaster casts of hands, hearts, women’s breasts, and, not immediately identifiable, appalling buboes from the plague. Cures, fertility, lactation, wounds, and illnesses … And between these columns, covered with thousands of organs, are carved images of doomed people, saved by the grace of the Mother of God. One of them is preparing to be hanged, another has already laid his head on a block …
This primitive abstract of human hopes and fears carries through onto votive tablets of an even more disarming candor. A child whom, watched by the Virgin Mary, two men are raising from a well, a carpenter protected from a fall of beams by heavenly intercession, a narrow escape from a fire … This chronicle of misfortunes avoided moves forward in time—the Mother of God, floating on her cloud, rescues cyclists in danger from a locomotive, as well as passengers in car crashes …
Before leaving the church Oleg looks up. The irresistible and childlike appetite for life filling the church finds its ultimate expression there: suspended beneath the vault is a crocodile! A real reptile, stuffed and shackled—its jaws held fast by thick ropes. A gargoyle more real than all the stone monsters.
They pause in front of the church, under a sun still invisible but whose touch can already be felt. A dazzling headiness, the brief feeling of belonging nowhere, a lack of any trace of a past, of origins, of a life history … Beneath their feet, on the asphalt of the square, faded drawings can be made out—large, ephemeral images that go back to some festival when sidewalk artists left these copies of Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian there …
A little café on the corner of the square has just opened, they sit down there, order toast and coffee. They talk about Catherine and Lanskoy and their desire to escape, no doubt to find just this release: to be tsarina and favorite no longer, no longer to have the ages they had, nor their titles, nor everything that time and other people had made of them. To be nothing but that morning, on an empty square, a few steps away from a church that contains the quintessence of the lives of human beings, their suffering, fears, hopes. To go into it, immersing themselves one last time in that abstract of this world and then to emerge, reborn with a new identity, in a different life.
“Catherine and Lanskoy would not have been able to do that in Russia,” says Oleg, when they return to the car and continue on their way. “In St. Petersburg too many constricting ties, too many bruised memories. Nor in Germany either—for the same reasons. We … well, the Germans, are too serious, their thought puts life in a straitjacket. No, the only place to be transfigured, as they dreamed of it, was that village, Grazie …”
Without noticing, he is slipping toward sleep and an hour later is woken by the neighing of a horse. Eva has parked the car on a dirt road and has fallen asleep herself. They shake themselves, see a man on horseback riding away at a vigorous, free pace. The sun is already high, the fields are shining, like lakes.
From Ferrara, Eva calls Aldo Ranieri’s sister. The old woman says she will be back home in the evening.
“We have time to make a little tour …,” murmurs Eva in a somewhat mysterious manner.
They set off once more, amazed at the extreme clarity with which life presents itself to them.
“What has always struck me about Lanskoy’s story,” says Oleg, “is the hatred his relatives had for him. Generally the nearest and dearest were delighted to see one of their number sharing the tsarina’s life: relations were showered with sinecures. His case is different. He becomes the black sheep of the family, a shame to his lineage. After his death the Lanskoys commission a fresco of the Last Judgment for their manorial chapel: in it their deserving ancestors bask in a green paradise, while Catherine’s poor lover writhes in the flames of hell …”
Eva seems to hesitate as she speaks: “He loved her … A situation without precedent. And, for his relatives, an affront to common sense, an unnatural passion … Lanskoy asks for nothing, angles for nothing, and, as a result, brings no profit to his family. He’s simply in love. It’s intolerable, wouldn’t you say?”
They laugh, the world seems to them so stupid. It was this stupidity that Catherine and Lanskoy wanted to get away from. To cross Russia, Poland, Germany, and Switzerland and find themselves here, on this road lit by winter sunshine, to melt into the light reflected from the bark of the trees, into the rippling of the tall reeds, as their stems rock back and forth beside a pool …
What Oleg feels is utterly new to him, he passionately wants to explain to Eva. Tell her how the sense he has carried with him since childhood of being torn between his Russian and German identities is slipping away and he is going to learn to live without thinking about it. He expresses this in a muddled way, gets confused. Eva smiles, softly recites a line Aldo often, she says, used to quote: “‘Non son chi fui. Perì di noi gran parte’ … Aldo imagined Catherine repeating something like this when preparing for her escape. I am no longer the one I was. A great part of me is dead … She hoped to come back to life. If only for the duration of a few days in February on a little road bathed in sunlight like this one …”
They also talk about their film. The story line for it has never seemed so clear to them. It must start off as Kozin’s did: evoke History, the inevitable, with all its wars, the splendor of its reigns, its verbose solemnity. And then show how it repeats itself insanely, the way it comes around again, like a cartoon film. It is no coincidence that Catherine used the word theater so often … Finally, when this tragic vaudeville has revealed all its absurdity, it must be allowed to exhaust itself—all that will be left on the screen is the deposed emperor leaving St. Petersburg one night in June with his violin under his arm … And that other one, too, emerging from his cell, climbing up onto the fortress wall and seeing the sea that surrounds the keep on every side, where he has spent more than twenty years of his life … And a woman and a man walking through a park covered in hoarfrost, who, suddenly say to one another, without conferring, “Why don’t we escape? Forever …”
At about two o’clock in the afternoon they leave the main road, drive through a village that seems to be fast asleep in the mildness of this winter’s day. They get out of the car. Eva begins walking down an avenue
of poplar trees whose upright branches gleam in the sun. Oleg, detecting a smell of roasted beans, follows the main street, looking for an open café …
When he returns, carrying two cups, full to the brim, Eva is already quite a long way down this road that seems almost white in the luminous air. He takes several steps and, suddenly, he sees!
A line of blue, deeper than that of the sky, cuts across the road at the end of the avenue. He would like to run, shout for joy, greet the sea, but he’s afraid of spilling the coffee.
As he walks, having slowed his pace, he has time to grasp that he has seen this figure of a woman walking along between two lines of poplar trees once before. It was in the Crimea, in a vanished country, in a life where he hardly recognizes himself. In those days he was someone struggling between his two origins, suffering from his past, frantically ambitious to make a success of his future. A man who did not know how to define himself as he confronted the world, inventing complicated identities for himself, alibis, justifications for his existence …
Eva turns around, stops, waits for him. He tells himself that a very brief definition is all he needs now. A simple identity, free as this airy avenue that leads to the sea.
A man being watched by a woman he loves.
ANDREÏ MAKINE was born in Siberia in 1957 and has lived in France since 1987. His fourth novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Le testament français), won both of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Makine’s most recent novels, The Life of an Unknown Man, Brief Loves That Live Forever, and A Woman Loved are all available from Graywolf Press.
GEOFFREY STRACHAN was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1998 for his translation of Le testament français. He has translated all of Andreï Makine’s novels for publication in Britain and the United States.
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