The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  Across the street from the dovecote there is a narrow building with faded walls (“It’s been out in the sun too long, it’s peeling,” Léa used to say). The moon moves bit by bit across the little top-floor apartment. The workmen have not closed the windows and the room shines, like a sleepwalker’s dream. An old woman lived there once, then she disappeared, dead, no doubt, the dividing walls have been demolished to make an open-plan studio apartment, as fashion dictates, and now the moon keeps watch over this empty space and a drunkard with sad eyes marvels at it, as he whispers words intended for the woman who will never hear him.

  After making love with her “guy,” she is asleep now in their new “place”… And everything hurts him, the way he imagines Léa’s friends talking and the idea of that young body, so close to him yet irretrievably lost. A body as supple as a frond of seaweed, which, in their intimacy, retained a touching, vulnerable awkwardness. To be dispossessed of those feminine arms, of those thighs, of Léa’s nighttime breathing: the mere thought of it is a blow to his solar plexus. A crude jealousy, a feeling of amputation. It will pass, Shutov knows this from experience. A body desired that now gives itself to another man can be forgotten quickly enough. More quickly, even, than one’s regret at never having spoken of the moon passing over the apartment across the street, of the woman who lived there, suffered, loved. And of the new life that will fill this white shell, bring in furniture, prepare meals, love, suffer, hope.

  On occasion, after their literary quarrels, after making love, they would reflect on such unsettling aspects of human life. At these moments Shutov always felt that this was how he would have liked to be: passionate but detached, sensual, and at the same time conscious that, thanks to their measured conversations, Léa was rising with him to glorious heights…

  A window lights up on the third floor of the building opposite. A young man, naked, opens a refrigerator, takes out a bottle of mineral water, drinks. A young woman, naked as well, goes up to him, embraces him, he moves away, his mouth clamped to the neck of the bottle, splutters, sprays his girlfriend, they laugh. The light goes out.

  “That could be Léa with her boyfriend,” thinks Shutov, and, curiously enough, the scene eases the pangs of jealousy in the pit of his stomach. “They’re young. What do you expect…?”

  He moves away from the window, collapses onto the sofa. Yes, his fatal error was to complicate everything. “She was rising with me to glorious heights…” What crap! A man unhappily close to the age of fifty suddenly has the luck to meet a pretty young woman who is no fool. And genuinely fond of him. He ought to take wing with joy, soaring aloft like a paraglider. Sing, bless heaven. And, above all, make the most of it. In the greediest sense of the phrase. Make the most of her clumsy, because genuine, tenderness, of their excursions (“We’re off to Paris,” they would say, traveling down from their patch in Ménilmontant), of the whispering of the rain on the roof at night. Of all those clichés of a love affair in Paris (oh, that singing of the rain!), intolerable in a book but so sweet in real life. Of this remake of a sixties romantic comedy…

  For their love did last two and a half years, after all. Which is a good deal longer than an affair in one of today’s novels. He could very well have lived out one of those little stories that crowd the bookstore shelves: two characters meet, fall in love, laugh, weep, part, are reunited, and then she leaves or kills herself (according to taste) while he, with a tormented but handsome face, drives away into the night along an autoroute, heading for Paris, for oblivion. They were both of them in good health, as it happened, and with no suicidal tendencies. And, as for autoroutes, Shutov avoided them, not being a very confident driver. Yes, he could quite simply have been happy.

  To achieve this, he should have risked being clear from the start: a young woman from the provinces leaves her parents, or rather her single-parent family, living in a region with a stricken economy to the north of the Ardennes, arrives in Paris where she runs into an “unusual” man who can give her a roof over her head. The young woman dreams of writing (“like all the French,” thinks Shutov) and although he is a writer with a limited readership, he will give her advice, possibly even help her to get published.

  That, objectively, was their situation. All Shutov had to do was to accept it… But, like so many Russians, he believed that a happiness derived from petty practical arrangements was unworthy of people in love. At the age of fourteen he had read a story by Chekhov in which a couple’s material well-being counted for nothing beside the heady thrill of a moment on a snow-covered hill, on a toboggan run. At the age of eighteen, he had spent weeks strolling up and down in Leningrad’s parks beneath a golden canopy of foliage in the company of a girl: more than a quarter of a century later he would remember this as a vitally important time in his life. At twenty-two, as a young soldier sent to Afghanistan, he had seen an old woman lying dead in the courtyard of a house, clutching her dog in her arms, both of them killed by an exploding shell. Noticing his tears, his regimental comrades had called him a wimp (several years later this choking back of a sob would lead him on to political dissidence…). From his university studies he would retain the memory of a Latin text, words that had inspired Dante: “Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.” He meditated long on a woman “loved as none will ever be loved.” Such a love called for a sacred language. Not necessarily Latin, but one that would elevate the beloved above the mundane. Amata nobis… I love you, Nadenka…

  Shutov stirs, woken by a dull cry escaping from his own throat, which was pressed against a cushion on the sofa. The drink tastes like a dentist’s local anesthetic. A useless swig, it would take three or four like that for him to reach a level of drunkenness that would turn Léa’s cardboard boxes into inoffensive, swaying, unreal blurs…

  Unreal… That says it all! Asking a flesh-and-blood woman to be a dream. Imagine living with a madman who thinks you capable of walking on a moonbeam! He had idealized her from the first moment. Yes, from the first words they had exchanged on a Sunday evening, one as dreary as any wet February night in the chilly station hall at the Gare de l’Est…

  They were telephoning from adjacent booths, two telephones separated by a sheet of glass, in fact. She (he would later learn) was ringing a vague acquaintance who had promised to put her up. He was trying to catch a publisher at home (on his return from his luxury villa in Normandy, purchased, Shutov reflected ironically, with the proceeds from publishing pulp fiction). Suddenly the girl turned around, a phone card in her hand, and he heard a whispered exclamation that was both frantic and amused. Cheerful astonishment, on the brink of tears. “Oh shit! The credit’s run out…” Adding in a louder voice, “Now I’m in a real mess!” Shutov had not caught her eye; at first she did not realize he was offering her his card. (The publisher’s wife had just put him in his place. “I’ve told you already. Call him tomorrow at the off—” Proudly, he hung up on her.) Léa thanked him, dialed the number again. Her girlfriend could not put her up, because… She hung up as well, but slowly and indecisively, slipped the card into her wallet, murmured good night, and wandered over to the arrivals and departures board. Shutov hesitated between versions in different languages. In Russian, word for word, it would be: “And my card, young woman?” In French: “Mademoiselle, may I have my card back?” No. Perhaps: “Hey, you! Aren’t you going to…” Not that either. Well, in any event, he was too old for the retrieval of a phone card to cause more than a moment of embarrassment…

  He strolled away thinking about an opening for a story in the style of André Maurois: a woman walks off with the phone card a man has just lent her… What next? Every time she walks past that telephone booth she thinks of him?… No, too Proustian. Better: a foreigner (he, Shutov) runs after the woman to get his card back, calling out in his appalling accent, the woman thinks she’s being attacked and sprays him with tear gas (alternatively: lays him out with a stun gun)…

  He had already got a good way up the Boulevard Magenta when a breathless voice called ou
t to him, then a hand touched his elbow. “I’m so sorry. I went off with your card…”

  He fell in love with every aspect of Léa. Everything about her that caught his eye had the completeness of a sentence that needs no rewriting. Her old leather jacket with its threadbare lining, a tight-fitting jacket that had ended up being molded to the curves of Léa’s body. Even when it hung on the back of the door at the dovecote this garment retained the imprint of her contours. And then Léa’s notebooks, the slightly childish diligence of her writings, “very French,” Shutov told himself, perceiving in them the obsessive search for the elegant phrase. And yet the mere sight of these notebooks now seemed vital. As did the frozen gesture that, for him, was a poem in itself: an arm flung far out across the covers by Léa in her sleep. That slender arm, a hand with fingers that trembled from time to time, in response to the secrets of some dream. A beauty independent of her body, of the attic awash with moonlight, of the outside world.

  Yes, that had been his mistake, his desire to love Léa as one loves a poem. It was to her that he read Chekhov’s story one evening: two irresolute lovers, their meeting twenty years later. I love you, Nadenka…

  “An exile’s only country is his country’s literature.” Who said that? Shutov cannot place the name in his confused thoughts. Some anonymous expatriate, no doubt, waking in the night and trying to recall the last line of a rhyme learned in childhood.

  For a long time he had lived in the company of the faithful ghosts that are the creatures brought into being by writers. Shadowy figures, certainly, but in his Parisian exile he got on well with them. On a fine summer’s day in Moscow Tolstoy saw the figure of a woman through an open window, a bare shoulder, an arm with very white skin. All of Anna Karenina was born, if we are to believe him, from that woman’s arm.

  Shutov told the tale to Léa. What else could he offer her other than that country of his, rediscovered in books? During that very cold winter, two years before, at the start of their love affair, they would read Tolstoy almost every day. The attic was heated by a little cast iron stove connected to the chimney hatch, the scent of tea mingled with that of the fire and the glow from the flames flickered across the pages of the book.

  “You see, people are always saying: ‘Oh, Tolstoy. A ver-r-r-y R-r-russian novel. A mighty river, an impetuous, capricious torrent!’ Not true! A mighty river, agreed, but under control, thanks to the lock gates of well-proportioned chapters. Indeed, a rather French structure, you might say.”

  Shutov now attempts a mocking sneer but drunkenness has turned his face into a mask too weary for such contortions. Besides, that image of the lock gates is not bad. And the memory of those evenings reading in front of the fire is still so tender, so raw.

  He would also quote Chekhov: “In a short story cut the beginning and the end. That’s where most of the lies are told.” Léa listened with daunting eagerness. “Playboys take women out for drives in convertibles,” Shutov thought with a smile. “Destitute writers treat them to the Russian classics.” On a boat just about to leave a Crimea put to the torch by the Revolution, the young Nabokov was playing chess. The game was moving in an unusual and enthralling direction and when he finally tore himself away from the checkerboard, the land of his birth had already vanished from sight! An empty expanse of sea, the cry of a gull, no regrets. For the time being…

  “I got carried away like an idiot when I told her about that missed leave-taking…,” Shutov remembers. The aesthete, Nabokov, cared more about an elegant metaphor than the land of his fathers. And Lolita was his punishment. A nauseating book, one that flatters the worst instincts of the Western bourgeoisie…

  This verdict, he recalls, provoked one of those sparring matches in which Léa used to come to the defense of writers assailed by Shutov.

  “But hold on, listen to this sentence,” she exclaimed that evening. “Nabokov writes: ‘His diction was as blurred as a moist lump of sugar.’ It’s absolutely brilliant! You can feel it in your mouth. You can picture the man talking like that. You must admit it’s very powerful!”

  “Herculean! As I sit here, I can just picture our pretty Vladimir sucking his sugar lump. But it’s not ‘brilliant,’ Léa. It’s clever, there’s a difference. And furthermore your Nabo couldn’t care less whose accent this is. If it were a prisoner being tortured it wouldn’t make any difference. He writes like a butterfly collector: he catches a beautiful insect, kills it with formalin, impales it on a pin. And he does the same thing with words…”

  Shutov went on reviling Nabokov but Léa’s eyes glazed over; she seemed to be observing a scene enacted beyond the walls of the dovecote, far from their conversation. “She can see a man playing chess on the deck of a ship and his native shore sinking below the horizon.” Shutov fell silent, listened to the hiss of the rain on the roof.

  The next day, somewhat embarrassed, Léa had informed him that she must “pay a duty visit” to her mother. They set off together. This trip would mean more to Shutov than the year he had spent in New York, more than all his wanderings across Europe, more, even, than his time in Afghanistan on military service.

  And yet it was just three days spent in an unpicturesque region to the north of the Ardennes. Cold, fog, hills covered in shivering woodland. And to crown the lack of tourist appeal, a faded billboard in the middle of a patch of wasteland announcing the imminent opening of a “sport center.”

  He found himself back in a period he had never known, not being French, and fell a little in love with it. The designs on the paper lining the wardrobe in his hotel room were like those seen on the walls of houses under demolition. Before the mirror Shutov experienced vertigo: all those faces from bygone days superimposed on one another in the greenish reflection! He ran his hand over the top of the wardrobe (a place that harbors treasures abandoned by travelers). On this occasion the treasure was an ancient copy of the local newspaper, dated 16 May 1981…

  Shutov read it while Léa had supper with her mother. He had been given leave not to show himself, to avoid introductions. “You see, the difference in our ages practically makes me a pedophile. On the other hand, if you insist, I could propose to your mother…” Léa had laughed, relieved. “That would kill me…”

  They spent those three days going for walks, nestled close together under a big umbrella. Léa showed him her school, the little train station (closed years ago), and, in a loop in the river Sormonne, a grove where in her teens she used to come to write her first poems, believing that this activity called for an appropriately bucolic setting. Now, amid the winter squalls, the river was bleak, hostile. “Bizarrely,” thought Shutov, “this gray atmosphere is conducive to poetry,” and he saw an echo of the same conclusion reflected in Léa’s eyes.

  On one of those evenings, wandering the streets alone, he walked into the Café de la Gare, opposite the disused station. The customers seemed to know one another so well that for a stranger their conversational exchanges, in fragments of allusive sentences, remained Delphic. An old man seated at the table next to him began speaking in a tone that, while not directly addressed to the intruder, implied a welcome. Shutov turned to him and, almost without his being aware of it, a conversation was struck up: the streets of the little town became peopled with characters at once humble and heroic. The hills awoke beneath the clash of arms, were covered in soldiers. Close to the bridge (“it was narrower in those days, they altered it after the war…”) infantrymen, their faces grimy with dust, were retreating, firing at the enemy. “We didn’t have much ammunition. We had to cut and run. The Fritzes had got very close. At least the ones spraying us had. Then it was night. We thought we could get to the forest. Well, we hoped we could… It was our machine gunner, a guy named Claude Baud, who saved us. He’d been hit in the leg but he went on firing. He was kneeling there in a pool of blood…”

  Customers would come in and greet the man, speaking very loudly: “How’s it going, Henri? In good form, as ever?” The youths playing foosball would repeat: “How’s it
going, Henri?” in mocking tones, whispering a rhyme, the sense of which was lost on Shutov. The man seemed to hear neither one lot nor the other. But he replied to Shutov’s questions without asking him to speak up. He even recognized his foreign accent, that r, an incorrigible giveaway… Léa came in, called out: “Hello, Henri. All right then?” and signaled to Shutov for them to go.

  That night in his hotel room he thought again about the old man at the Café de la Gare. An ill-lit room, a window looking out over rusty tracks, words from a past that interests no one. He felt very close to this man, to the dreary houses in the little town and the hillsides plunged in frosty darkness. “I could live here. Yes, I could feel at home in this part of the world…” Confusedly, Léa must have sensed that for Shutov this trip would be a journey back to his true self.

  The moonlight has moved away from the top-floor apartment in the building across the street. The moon hangs above the rooftops and blue brilliance floods the attic. Enough to read the titles of the books Léa has stacked up ready for her move. Titles that chart the chronology of his love for her. Their readings, their quarrels on the subject of a particular author… Then comes a swift demolition job, it all falls down, crash! He knocks over one of the piles, the volumes scatter on the floor. Which book were they talking about the day the first crack appeared? Maybe it was this collection of short stories. In one of them a woman was reunited with the man she had once loved and together they sped down a snowy slope on a toboggan… Ah, so during that trip to the Ardennes, he had seen himself as a Chekhovian lover. I love you, Nadenka…