The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  “But hold on, those were people who suffered! He shows how society broke their dreams, how the mediocrity of their period suffocated them…”

  “That’s true… But you see, Léa, Chekhov died in 1904 and very shortly after that, some fifteen, twenty years later, in fact, in the very same country where his heroes had spent their time cursing their woes in the shade of cherry orchards in bloom… In that same country, millions of human beings were brutally exterminated, without any humanist worrying about their ‘broken dreams,’ as you call them.”

  “Sorry, Ivan. You’ve lost me there. You’re surely not going to blame Chekhov for everyone who died in the Gulag?”

  “Why not?… Well, no. Certainly not! Only, after what’s happened in my country, I think I have the right to say this to Chekhov: by all means weep, dear Master, for your petty noblemen, refined and sensitive as they are, but leave us to weep for our millions of wretched yokels!”

  He fell silent, then mumbled in conciliatory tones: “I should have put that a bit differently…”

  The Chekhov story, “Vanka,” that had entranced Léa was one of Shutov’s favorites. But to talk about it over this dinner, which was a replica of their evenings in the old days… No! Léa had been using young Vanka as a backdrop for her masquerade of affection. “Perhaps this is how she wants to take her leave of me. An amicable divorce in an elegiac setting, to avoid a brutal breach. In fact, she set me a trap and I walked straight into it. Poor old writer! What a hopeless expert in the human psyche! An ill-shod shoemaker, indeed…”

  “Look, Ivan, you’ve got it all wrong. That story’s not about a petty nobleman at all. It’s about a little peasant boy sent away to be an apprentice in the city and his master maltreats him. All he’s got is his grandfather. He writes to him. Not knowing the address, he writes on the envelope: ‘To my grandfather, Konstantin Makarych. The country.’ He posts the letter and waits for the reply. That scene bowled me over! What shocks me is your lack of sensitivity. You’re Russian but that story is totally lost on you…”

  “I’m not Russian, Léa. I’m Soviet. So you see I’m filthy, stupid, and vicious. Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about. Sorry…”

  She stared at him with a stubborn, hostile air, her tone of voice refusing to acknowledge Shutov’s rueful smile.

  “That’s just it. Your generation of Russians were so programmed by the totalitarian regime that it’s no longer possible to communicate with you. Even on a mundane level, I mean. You’ve never learned the slightest tolerance. Everything’s all black or all white. In the end it gets tiring. I knock myself out trying to make you see…”

  Léa went on with her speech for the prosecution and he sensed that at any minute now the verdict would be delivered: she would tell him she was leaving. She would not even need to argue her case, he had just made himself a sitting target… The attic without her? “Just a little more pain might make my life unbearable…”

  He ran through all the routes for retreat in his mind: apologize, laugh, feign contrition, admit to being genetically modified by communism… Meanwhile she was saying: “As long as you cling to your past in Soviet slavery…” (In a brief moment of distraction Shutov glanced at Léa’s arms: “She’ll never know how beautiful her arm can be”). “. . . And if you don’t feel free you crush other people. You don’t respect anyone’s inner feelings. I find Vanka writing to his grandfather really upsetting. But you couldn’t give a damn. Well, look, I think we need to have a serious talk because, quite honestly…”

  He choked from the pressure of words held back and, to begin with, his voice was a whisper, broken, expressionless: “Of course, Léa. We’ll have a talk whenever you like. But before that I want to tell you a little story. Quite Chekhovian, by the way. I have it from a friend. He was an orphan. As a child he used to be sent with his comrades to gather vegetables on collective farms. On one occasion it was a type of rutabaga they had to dig up from more or less frozen soil. They were scrabbling about in the mud and suddenly my pal unearthed a skull, then a soldier’s helmet. Their supervisor told him to go and take them to the farm management. He set off and spent a long time floundering across plowed fields, then he stopped and… How can I put it? He realized that he was all alone on this earth. The low northern sky, icy fields as far as the eye could see, and himself with that skull and the helmet in a bag. It’s quite upsetting, you know, for a child to confront such complete, almost cosmic, loneliness: himself, the sky, the mud under his feet, and no one from whom he can expect a word of tenderness. No one in the whole universe! No grandfather to send a letter to… So, you see, I’m quits with Chekhov and his Vanka. As you’ll have guessed, that little lad amid the fields was me.”

  As it happened, his story would achieve nothing. It might even have furnished one more motive for their breakup: a refusal to share the past of someone you no longer love.

  A wounded man can do no other: Shutov had learned this in the army. When hit, a body struggles against the first wave of pain, flails about, fights, then, overcome, goes rigid. During the final months of their relationship he had behaved like a wounded man embarking on his dance with death, resisting it, clutching it to his heart. Then one day in a crowded café he had gone rigid. “In Russian shut means ‘clown,’” Léa was saying. “A buffoon.” A sad clown, he had added, conscious that the word defined all too well what he had become.

  A gray spring came, without savor: the emptiness of the streets at night, the blue of days that started for him at three o’clock in the afternoon, and this attic, the only place where his life still had any kind of meaning. Thanks to those cardboard boxes Léa was going to take away.

  And if anywhere else existed it was that park of thirty years ago in Leningrad, two shadowy figures walking slowly along, beneath the autumn leaves, their breathing matched to the rhythm of a poem.

  Drink helped him to believe that this country beneath the golden foliage still existed. This certainty became so intense that one day Shutov accomplished something that had earlier seemed inconceivable: he found an agency that obtained visas for Russia and now, once a fortnight, he packed a suitcase, booked a ticket. And did not go.

  In the end he admired the dexterity with which Léa had transformed their relationship into a vague camaraderie. After two months’ absence she began to show signs of life but now in the guise of an old friend, well disposed, devoid of passion. Asexual. It was in this guise that she telephoned him toward the middle of May. Her voice created a distance such that Shutov thought he must be speaking to a woman he had met during another period of his life. At the end of the conversation the old Léa gave herself away but advisedly: “Do you remember the coffee table I bought that’s at your place? And my corner bookshelf? I’m going to come over with a friend who’s got a car. But I wanted to let you know in advance… In fact, I’ve told him we were just good friends and I’d left those bits of furniture at your place for the time being. He doesn’t need to come up if you’d prefer him not to…”

  Shutov protested vehemently, afraid of seeming like a jealous old fogy. And in this way he was able to see Léa’s friend (the figure of a tall adolescent, a fine, harmonious face). He greeted him and retreated to the kitchen, heard them talking about their apartment. They were discussing where they would put the pieces of furniture they were collecting. Involuntarily Shutov pictured himself in those rooms smelling of fresh paint, in their world… He was touched by the fervor they invested in their move. The young man carried the little set of shelves the way one carries a baby. And Shutov felt terribly old and disillusioned.

  All that was left in his attic now was a few cardboard boxes, a bag of Léa’s clothes, and two piles of books. Occasionally Shutov would open a volume, leaf through it: people falling in and out of love, pain and pleasure, wisdom slowly gained and, at the end of the day, useless. Little psychological dissertations the French call “novels.”

  He could have written one of these sligh
t works himself. Picturing Léa sometimes as a female Rastignac, sometimes as a fallen woman rescued by a wanderer with a heart of gold. What else could he invent? A little girl gone astray in the jungle of the capital, a cynical young woman on the make, a sleeping Madonna bathed in moonlight… A provincial woman corrupted by Paris, a Galatea awakened by her Pygmalion. All plausible but false.

  There was more truth in that brief glimpse he had: wriggling through his skylight up to the waist, Shutov watched Léa and her friend crossing the courtyard, carrying the coffee table, and could see the rear of a car parked in the street. An evening in May, this young couple departing toward a luminous sequence of roads and journeys, toward the unpredictable abundance of tiny joys that is life. He felt a lump in his throat (how many times had he mocked authors who used that expression) and could have given all he possessed for this newfound love to be a happy one! The young people set the table down on the sidewalk, the boy opened the trunk. And that was when Léa looked up and her gaze, hesitant at first, focused on the attic and the skylight… Shutov hid rapidly and remained bent double for a moment, panting as if he had been running, ashamed of having gained entry into a life where he no longer existed.

  Now a bitter contentment inhabited him: the relief of no longer desiring anything, of having so few objects around him, of experiencing no jealousy. Of no longer having to fight.

  He could have lived in this peace of renunciation for a long time. But a week later Léa telephoned him and asked if she could come by the following day to complete the move. “It really will be the very last time!” she said, reassuringly.

  The very last time… “Dying,” he thought, “begins with ambiguous little phrases like this, well before any physical extinction.” He went over to the corner where Léa’s things were stacked, crouched down, stroked the silk of a blouse. And sensed deep within himself someone who still wanted to desire, to love… “Not to be taken for an old piece of furniture!” this other one cried out. To be able to kiss a woman’s arm as she slept.

  But above all, after that telephone call, he realized that he would not have the strength to be present at his own funeral in an attic that was about to be emptied of everything that was his life.

  These are names more mysterious than hieroglyphs on a papyrus eroded by millennia. Out-of-date addresses, curiously brief telephone numbers. A whole lapsed world Shutov is trying to bring back to life as he leafs impatiently through the pages of a notebook retrieved from the depths of an old traveling bag. The bag he had with him when he left Russia twenty years ago… A papyrus, yes, the comparison is no exaggeration: since then a country has disappeared, cities have changed their names, and the faces conjured up by the addresses survive only in Shutov’s memory.

  He glances at the window, which is starting to turn pale. He has made his decision. At ten o’clock in the morning Léa will come with her friend and they will find no one here. The visa in his passport is still valid. He will go at once, as soon as he has found her address, the one who… A silhouette outlined by the autumn sun against the golden leaves.

  She was called Yana. At the end of her studies she left Leningrad to go and work beyond the Urals. This he knows. Nothing more. The addresses in this notebook, like an encoded message, may perhaps lead him to this woman: a sequence of friends, who, stage by stage, may indicate the places where she made her home during that abyss of years.

  One of them lives in western Siberia. Shutov telephones him, apologizes for calling him practically in the middle of the night, then realizes that over there, beyond the Urals, the sun is already at its zenith. What amazes him more is that the friend in question should be so little amazed. “I see, so you’re calling from Paris. I was there with my wife in April… Who? Yana? I think she taught at Tomsk University…” Shutov works through other numbers, talks to strangers, passes through three, five, ten time zones… But it is the surprise of that first conversation that remains the greatest: a man of his own age in a town in Siberia, responding as if there were nothing unusual in this, life goes on, and a couple of months earlier this former fellow student could have run into him in Paris.

  Several sheets of paper lie before him, blackened with figures. He reaches the Far East and in Vladivostok a child’s voice calls a grandmother to the telephone, a student at Leningrad University in the same year as Shutov, thirty years ago. “So I’m old enough to be a grandfather,” he says to himself, conscious that his own exile had banished him from the chronology of human beings. His friends were living their lives, marrying, surrounding themselves with children and grandchildren, while he was transforming himself into an ageless ghost.

  “Listen, Shutov, I know she went back to Leningrad, well, Saint Petersburg. She’d married a fellow who was in oil. Yes, you get the picture. And it didn’t work out… No, not the oil. The marriage. Wait, I’ve got her best friend’s number. She’ll be able to help you…”

  Five minutes later Shutov is writing down the number of Yana’s cell phone. Digits that magically encompass the shade of a remote feminine presence, days filled with autumn gold, declarations never hazarded.

  It is half past eight in Paris, half past ten in Saint Petersburg. Shutov dials the number, but just before it rings he hangs up, goes into the bathroom, thrusts his face beneath the cold-water tap, splashes himself, drinks, clears his throat. Then smooths down his wet hair in front of a mirror. He feels the hallucinatory clarity descending upon him that comes from a sleepless night, extreme tension, drink overcome. The sensation of being about to hurl himself into a void, like in the old days, when bailing out of the cabin of an aircraft, but without the parachute’s reassuring weight.

  He dials again. In Saint Petersburg a cell phone comes to life. A male voice, strangely rhythmical at first: “The prime minister’s Boeing has just landed. Southern districts of the city will experience extreme traffic disruption…” A woman’s voice, closer: “Yes. It’s to your left just beyond the bridge. But steer clear of the Nevsky…” After a moment Shutov realizes that the male voice is that of a newscaster and that the woman’s voice is speaking to the driver of a car…

  “Hello, what? Oh, Ivan! I was thinking about you only the other day and do you know why? Hold on, I’m just going to park…”

  This interruption allows Shutov to gather his wits, to make a landing, he thinks. His feet touch the ground, the parachute drags him along, then the canopy collapses, deflates on the grass and now, at last, certainty imposes itself: safe and sound.

  “Yes, my son came across your name on a website for French books. He does publicity for a publishing house. He was surprised to see a Russian name. I told him we used to know one another…”

  The banality of these words is disconcerting. Even wounding. Shutov feels it like a pinprick: nothing serious and yet it jars. He interrupts the person who has not yet become Yana: “You see, I’m coming to Lenin—Saint Petersburg, today.”

  “Oh, what a shame!”

  The disappointment is sincere.

  “How do you mean? Don’t you want us to meet?” Shutov’s tone is almost aggressive.

  “But of course I do! It’s a shame because you’ve missed half the celebrations… Wait. Where have you been? The whole world’s been talking of nothing else. Blair’s plane has just landed. It’s the tercentenary of the city… A hotel? That’ll be difficult. But we’ll sort something out, I work in the hotel business. Or if not… Right, we’ll see when you’re here. I’ve got to go now, Ivan. I’m late already. Make a careful note of my new address…”

  Shutov’s departure is a rush to escape. Any minute now Léa and her friend will be knocking at the door. He throws whatever comes to hand into his old traveling bag. Writes a note, rings his Australian neighbor’s bell, gives him the key, runs to catch a taxi. And at the airport, as just now on the telephone, speaks his mother tongue for the first time in many long years. The Russian airline representative reassures him: the flight will be half empty, the stampede took place yesterday, everyone wanted to get
there for the opening of the festivities.

  In the air Shutov hovers between sleep and unreality. He is on his way to see a woman of whom all he can remember, thirty years on, is a luminous silence, the clear outline of a face. Quite a different woman is now driving beside the Neva in her car. And thinking of him? She works in a hotel (he pictures an establishment from the Soviet era, a matron ensconced at the reception desk), she has a son, a “publicist” (how do you say that in Russian?), but above all, she does not seem to be terrified by the interstellar chasm that has come between them. Does she recall their encounters in those parks where the sunsets would come and fade away over the Baltic?

  In midflight he falls asleep, carrying into his dreams the question that causes so much pain: “But if I were not coming, would the lives of the people I’ve been telephoning continue just as before? And Yana’s life? So why come?”

  II

  In his mind Shutov has contrived to add thirty years to the face of the girl he had known. To age her with a silvery patina, a fine web of wrinkles… The woman who opens the door to him has certainly grown older, but differently. He pictured a physical consolidation, a heaviness that, when he was young, women acquired from a certain age, their lives being hardly conducive to refinement. A female worker at the controls of a steamroller was not such a rare occurrence in the old days… Yana kisses him with a twittering welcome, and making a rapid visual adjustment, he has to accept this slim woman with ocherish blond hair and a youthful appearance.

  “She looks like… Léa!” The realization is so disconcerting that now nothing else surprises him. Not the length of the corridor, nor all these rooms leading into one another (a communal apartment?), nor even this invitation of Yana’s: “Come along, I’m going to show you the Jacuzzi…” They arrive in an extremely spacious bathroom, half of which is occupied by an oval tub. Two plumbers are busily engaged around this pink monster. “Hey! Watch out for the gold plating!” Yana calls out, at once severe and teasing. The men respond with grunts of reassurance. She winks at Shutov and leads him into a large empty room.