The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  He opens the window, hears sounds in the background suggestive of a carnival grown weary, a gaiety running out of steam, sustained by dint of street performances now stagnating into pools of noise. Outside couples and groups of friends are passing. A far-fetched but tempting notion occurs to him. To go down and confide in them. “I’ve just come out of a coma lasting twenty years. I don’t understand anything. Explain it to me!” He smiles, closes the window again, and with nervous wariness switches on a large flat-screen television. The sound is deafening—several seconds of panic before he masters the remote control. And a resigned realization: this house is full of objects he will never learn to use properly.

  On the screen is a thoroughbred dog, with a long, haughty, nervous muzzle. Hands with varnished nails fastening a glittering collar about the animal’s neck. A figure appears: 14,500. Fourteen thousand five hundred dollars, the presenter confirms, and specifies the various precious stones that decorate this accoutrement. A sequence of other models: rubies, topazes, diamonds… The numbers lengthen to match the rarity of the gems. The next scene features a dog with clipped hair, whose body, sensitive to the cold, is to benefit from a distinctive garment. Fox fur, beaver, or sable capes… The same range of furs for its ankle boots… The program now moves on to a more difficult species to domesticate. A lynx, which must undergo a pedicure if you care about your carpets and furniture. A vet is seen filing down the animal’s claws… For a dwarf hippopotamus, whose well-being depends on a good level of humidity, the installation of a hygrometer is essential. The brightness of the colors on your python’s skin can be enhanced by a wide range of food supplements…

  Shutov feels anger mounting within him, but the program is more subtle than he thought. This feature about the pets of the new rich is supplemented by a debate between two commentators (one for, one against) with interventions from the audience. “No one escapes us!” Shutov remembers. The less well-heeled members of the audience fulminate and one of the commentators sides with them. The affluent approve and the second commentator defends them. At the end a compromise emerges: if there are madmen willing to buy diamonds for their doggies let them go ahead, this is a democracy. Shutov realizes that he was not far off thinking this himself, so his fury did not make much sense. New wealth makes such extravagances possible, and it would be naive to invoke who knows what moral principle to condemn them.

  What a fantastic device for lobotomizing us, he reflects, hopping from one channel to another. The mind is chloroformed, the rebellious spirit is tamed. Every opinion is present. A procession of Orthodox priests files into a cathedral: the Greeks have brought the relics of Saint Andrei for the tercentenary. And on the very next channel two young lesbian rock singers are explaining that in London they had to “tone down” their concert because European audiences are too prudish. The “non-toned-down” version shows them sitting one on top of the other, massaging their crotches and howling into their mikes… A night scene: young men with shaved heads, Nazi salutes… An American sitcom: three idiots, two white, one black, saying stupid things to one another, intercut with canned laughter… More dogs, this time without diamonds; they are searching for explosives at the Kirov Theater, where the forty-five heads of state invited for the celebration will gather. A football match. An English great-nephew of Nicholas II arriving at Saint Petersburg in a vintage car. An erotic film—the cries of pleasure in Russian are reminiscent of the instructions for a domestic appliance. VIP guests in front of the equestrian statue of Peter the Great; it is raining, Blair shelters his wife under an umbrella, Putin is stoical, Chirac arrives on the double, having been held up at the Hermitage (the commentator explains) by his interest in antiques… Another football match. “To be on time, when every second…” Sequences in black and white: archives from the Second World War, Stalin on a platform, columns of soldiers setting off to defend Moscow. An interview with Madame Putin: “Women should choose personal dressmakers. This would save them from encountering guests at receptions wearing the same Yves Saint Laurent gown as themselves…” Reportage from the Summer Garden, where eighteenth-century courtiers are strolling, wigs, crinolines, lorgnettes…

  Shutov gets up, he has just recognized the corner of a pathway in the park, a statue… Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed. The meaning of the transformation appears clear to him. Russia is attempting to erase the decades that came between her and her destiny: several of Vlad’s books spoke of this Russian destiny, interrupted by the disastrous Soviet digression. Yes, a beautiful river polluted by the sludge of massacres, intellectual slavery, fear. “And the truth is that young Vlad is closer to those crinolines than he is to the phantom of the USSR. He has more in common with Nicholas II’s English great-nephew than with a Soviet dinosaur like me…” Shutov smiles but the perception is painful: over his head history is returning to its course, becoming more limpid… while he remains mired in those accursed times everyone would prefer to forget.

  “I was wrong to come…,” he tells himself. But has he really arrived anywhere? A journey from an attic in an apartment building in Paris, where he felt so little at home, to this luxury apartment, where he is even more of a stranger. “I came to see Yana again…” He glances at the clock on the television. Ten thirty p.m. At the restaurant, Yana had promised to call for him at about eight.

  He goes down into the street, into that pale luminescence of northern nights, and begins to walk with a resolute tread, and a feeling that he is staking everything on one last throw of the dice.

  The Hermitage is open all night, it was announced on television. He goes there, is glad to mingle with the throng crowding in at the entrance, laughs at the quip repeated by several voices: “So here we are, storming the Winter Palace again!” The memory of the carnival comes back to him, the tribal warmth, the hope of renewing links with that world on which he is twenty years in arrears. He will catch someone’s eye in front of a painting, strike up a conversation…

  From his first steps inside he freezes, dumbfounded. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a train station. People sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, some of them asleep. Others, perched on the window ledges, are scanning the sky: a son et lumière above the Neva has been promised. Two adolescents stretched out behind a gigantic malachite vase are idly kissing. A tourist in shorts speaks very loudly in German to a female companion, clad in the same brand of shorts (but three times as wide), who nods as she bites into a thick sandwich. A group of Asians passes by, filming every picture in the room with highly disciplined synchronization. A husband explains to his wife: “The metro opens again at five. We might as well spend the night here.” Ladies in crinolines and mustached hussars materialize, like ghosts, in imitation of the ones who used to frequent the palace. But the crowd is too tired to pay them any attention.

  Shutov walks on, observes, and his thoughts about Russia returning to the brilliant high road of her destiny seem to have been too hasty. For there is also a confusion of styles, the disappearance of a way of life and barely the first babblings of a new manner of being… In front of a glass case a little girl is laughing at the exhibits. He pricks up his ears and realizes that the chuckling of this child is, in fact, almost silent sobbing. She has lost her parents in a room where there’s a “big pot.” He is about to alert an attendant, then guesses that the big pot must be that malachite vase. They go to it and the child recognizes her parents: that young couple locked in an embrace whom Shutov took to be teenage sweethearts… As he leaves the child, he thinks he has surprised in her look the pained incomprehension he feels himself.

  He walks out of the museum and allows himself to be sucked in by the throng. Thousands of people, like a sponge ever more tightly squeezed, are waiting for the sky to be set ablaze by the spotlights of a Japanese artist. New arrivals add to the pressure, the most agile climb trees. “Three million dollars, that’s what it’s going to cost us!” a voice proclaims, and a chorus responds with the sum total of the artist’s fees.
The night is not dark enough for the luminous fantasies to materialize. The clouds light up but the wind from the Neva tears them apart instantly. The people rail wearily against the Japanese and begin to disperse.

  All that remains of the jubilant enthusiasm for the carnival is this indifferent clustering of the crowd as it moves from place to place in search of the last stray sparks of the festival. On Palace Square Shutov listens to the performance of a former dissident singer. A familiar repertoire: camps, prisons, blood. The human mass laughs, yawns, moves off, and spills into the Nevsky Prospekt. There it divides up, Shutov is carried along by a section retracing its footsteps. He does not notice the precise moment when what he observes switches into a fantastic dreamscape. Perhaps when a batrachian figure breaks the surface of a canal: frogmen are checking the place where tomorrow the procession of the masters of the world is due to pass. Or else when the smell of urine invading the streets becomes intolerable. “Silks for fine ladies at their toilet,” jokes an elderly man. “But no toilets for the people.” At the English Embankment the crowd is turned aside by a police cordon: a cruise ship is moored there, the floating hotel for the presidents of the former Soviet republics. “Nine suites at six thousand dollars a night,” a woman announces in bizarrely gleeful tones. “I read that in the paper.” Her partner hugs her tightly. “It’s a disgrace,” he retorts. “That’s what you get in a year. And look at Bush. He’s taken over the whole of the Astoria Hotel…”

  The rain gets heavier, breaks up the crowd into narrower trickles. One of these expels Shutov onto the edge of the Field of Mars. He crosses the esplanade where groups of young people are hanging about. They are drinking, throwing empty bottles, scuffling, leaping over the flame in the monument to the dead. One of them unbuttons himself to urinate into the fire. Shutov tries to reprimand him but his voice is lost amid the shouting. This saves him, for those who heard him are already bearing down on him, he can hear oaths, almost good-natured in their mockery: “Hey, old man. Do you want your balls fried or roasted?” He edges away, trying to slow his pace so as not to betray the humiliating fear stiffening his back.

  But what saves him is the final coda to this nocturnal phantasmagoria: they start raising the bridges over the Neva and he is forced to hurry, making long detours to avoid the trap of the now disunited islands.

  Catching sight of his own distraught face in the elevator, Shutov concludes with philosophical gravity: “I think I understand it all now.” He does not know whom he is trying to convince, but the lie helps him to hold back his tears.

  Vlad greets him with exaggerated benevolence. “I’ve prepared stuff for your supper. There’s smoked sturgeon, unless you’d rather… And there’s wine, but you’re probably choosy on that front, like all the French… Ma called. Unfortunately she wasn’t able to get away… There’s also some Far Eastern crab… So how was Saint Petersburg by night?”

  His warm friendliness moves Shutov. A man with his back to the wall can feel choked by emotion. Why not make a clean breast of it? This abortive trip, the failed reunion with Yana… He sits down at the table in the kitchen (a place of long sleepless nights for Russians of his generation, during which things both spiritual and spirituous were shared) and begins talking. The crinolines in the Summer Garden, the city as it used to be, so far from festive, and yet…

  He quickly notices that the young man is not listening. Vlad stands there glancing discreetly at his watch, then finally, unable to hold out any longer, ventures: “Let’s talk about it tomorrow, if you like. We’ll have all the time in the world… The thing is… I did have a favor to ask you… You see, I’ve been working at home for the past four days and it’s not easy…” Shutov supposes that Vlad is after some advice linked to his profession, his opinion on an author, on a translation… He even has time to feel important, endowed with great literary experience… And then the nature of the request becomes clear.

  “The truth is, if I’m hanging around here it’s on account of the old man. Ma is terrified that something might happen to him just before the move…” Vlad lowers his voice: “It’s not so much that he might kick the bucket. That’s manageable, we call a doctor, he makes a report and hasta la vista! No, what would be more serious would be… you see, he can’t speak. Who knows what’s going on in his head. Just imagine if he cut his own throat. He’s got a perfectly good pair of hands, he could do it. They might accuse us of maltreating him and who knows what besides. Especially as my stepfather has a very public position! Ma’s worried. I help her as much as I can. It’s just that… Since I got back from the States I’ve seen nothing of my… girlfriend. OK, she did come in this morning to try on the clothes I brought back for her. But with that whole crowd milling around here, it wasn’t very private…”

  Shutov was part of “that whole crowd” himself. Vlad hastens to clarify. “We can’t really kiss one another under the nose of a grandpa! You see, here we are in the middle of these celebrations and I’ve got to look after an ancient ruin! So I’m watching the carnival on TV. It’s worse than being in jail. Then my girlfriend called me. She came straight out with it: ‘You choose. It’s either me or that old basket case!’ Sure, women always go over the top… But that’s how things stand. So I wanted to ask you a big favor. If you could stay with the old man until morning… I promise, on my honor, at half past six I’ll take over from you and at eight o’clock the medics will be collecting him… Are you sure? That wouldn’t be a problem for you?”

  Shutov reassures him, mentions the time difference (“In Paris I go to bed at two a.m., which is to say, four a.m. here…”). Vlad stammers out his thanks, gives some instructions: “He’s already had his ration of food, so that’s done. Now if you see his pot’s full… But he doesn’t urinate much. Listen, I’ll be in your debt for life! When you’re back in Saint Petersburg next time, don’t hesitate…”

  The door bangs shut and out on the landing the young man’s voice can be heard yelling the good news to his girlfriend into a cell phone.

  The television opposite Vlad’s office is showing an opera (the eyes of the forty-five heads of state staring at the beads of sweat on Pavarotti’s brow). Through the half-open door to the bedroom can be seen a green blanket, a hand holding a book. From time to time the rustle of a page can be heard.

  Shutov laughs, chuckling inwardly at first, then, recalling that the old man is doubtless deaf as well as unable to speak, stops holding back, his chest shaking with an attack of hilarity. The wistful beauty of the reunion he planned is toppling over into burlesque. Having come as a nostalgic pilgrim, he finds himself surrounded by modernity gone mad, a mixture of American razzle-dazzle and Russian clowning. He has sought to understand this new country and they reject him, along with the worn-out relics of Soviet times, in the company of a bedridden deaf-mute, whose chamber pot he will have to empty.

  He laughs, aware that this is the only way he can avoid lapsing into emotionalism over that lost paradise. His childhood at the orphanage, a paradise? Or his impoverished youth perhaps? Or the history of this country, written between two lines of barbed wire? No, no, let’s laugh about it, for fear of weeping. Occasions for uproarious laughter are not lacking. On the screen Pavarotti’s stentorian rotundity is now abandoned by the camera as it focuses on quite a different vocalist, Berlusconi, who is singing along with half-closed eyes while Putin casts amused glances at him. Shutov changes channels. A feature on the parade of old streetcars. When the Nazis laid siege to Leningrad these vehicles were used to transport the corpses of citizens who had starved to death. Shutov surfs the channels: an Indian film, a woman in raptures, a man on a smart motorbike crushes his enemy. CNN: the stock market is rising, a general talks about restoring peace. The Russian equivalent of CNN and the wonder of these endlessly repeated news items: Madame Putin once more urging women to choose a personal dressmaker, the Greeks yet again handing over the relics of Saint Andrei, and the two female rock singers complaining about the excessive prudery of British audiences… And wh
en, switching to another channel, Shutov hits upon the same erotic film, the position of the bodies creates the illusion that their coupling has been going on uninterrupted for many hours. The commercial for canned cat food. A biker hastens to wash his “dull and tired” hair with nourishing shampoo. A car hurtles toward the sun: “To be on time, when every second counts!” An executioner snips the Saint Petersburg mayor’s tie. An obese young black man in an American sitcom has two slightly idiotic young white men in stitches. In a Baltic state a parade of former SS men. A shaving cream commercial…

  Shutov eats in front of the television (the wine is good, even for a “choosy” Frenchman) and he feels almost happy. Relaxed, at least, thanks to the absurdities flooding the screen. The secret he sought to fathom is simple: Russia has just caught up with the global game of role-playing, its antics, its codes. And the tercentenary celebrations only sharpen this impetus toward the great world spectacular: forty-five heads of state stuffed with our caviar, glutted with our vodka, bored with our Tchaikovsky. Bill Gates and his riches? Better to admire our own millionaires, who have achieved this status in just a few years!

  The two presenters who were earlier commenting on the animal fads of the new rich appear on the screen again. They are talking now about the vacations these tycoons treat themselves to: a pleasure yacht three hundred feet long, with a helicopter and a pocket submarine on board and a gold-plated swimming pool, which, during parties for friends, is filled with champagne. The reporters disagree over the make and the year… Another click and an old streetcar can be seen crossing the starving city during the war.

  Shutov’s laughter subsides into a relieved sigh. No point in cudgeling one’s brains, just accept the world carnival, which the Russians have now joined. All aboard! The merry-go-round revolves and only prehistoric creatures like him still care about the previous century. Nostalgists dreaming of evening mists over the Baltic Sea, while the global merry-go-round, as it gathers speed, hurls them away to bite the dust amid the nettles far from the carnival.