Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  Sunk in the torpor of a condemned man, I saw I was in a vast spiderweb, spun from iron. This three-dimensional trellis was everywhere. The sky, the frozen earth, the shadow of the trees and the sun, everything was seen through a grid of solid bars, indifferent to my fevered presence.

  My terror was so profound that, within this prison-like captivity, I must have glimpsed a more immense reality concerning the country I lived in, whose political character I was just beginning to grasp, thanks to snatches of conversation intercepted here and there … Much later the memory of this metallic straitjacket would make me think of my compatriots’ despair in the face of ubiquitous censorship and police control and, above all, the impossibility of leaving the country, breaking through the armature of the Iron Curtain. All across that vast territory the same grandstands, the same slogans from loudspeakers, the same leaders’ portraits. And beneath all the terraces, identical steel traps with no way out. I was not yet familiar with the concept of a “totalitarian regime.” But the intimate sensation of what could be experienced in one took hold of me at that moment, in the chill bowels of that symbolic structure …

  I resumed my journey with the numb movements of a sleepwalker, guided by the vague hope of slipping out beneath the lowest tier of the terraces, at the front of the grandstand. Now with each step I took I had to crouch a little lower. As I progressed toward this improbable way out, the cages became smaller. My calculation was not incorrect, the first tier, some fifteen inches from the ground, could have allowed me to slip through to the outside. But that took no account of the thickness of the ice, a black layer of which held the base of the skeleton in its grip. I lay full length upon the frozen surface, attempted to thrust my head under the bottom tier, which caused my shapka to fall off, with my cheek against the snow …

  No, to escape, I would have had to grind away at that grainy crust or else cause it to melt. The idea of the thaw crossed my mind, but only to confirm the folly of such a notion: yes, remaining there until the fine weather in April …

  I shook my head to rid myself of this vision and at that moment I saw a little spot of red encrusted in the ice. I touched it and recognized the remnant of a child’s balloon, one of those that brought color to the grandstands during the two parades. The notables’ children sometimes let them go, and, as we trod the asphalt in our enthusiastic ranks, we would watch these brightly colored bubbles vanishing into the depths of the sky … At that moment I was stretched out beneath the enclosure where they generally corralled such children and their mothers. The red balloon must have burst, fallen under the terraces, got caught on a beam …

  I felt the gulf that separated me from the child who had lost it. I pictured a boy of my own age, living in a family, watching the parade, not in the middle of a crowd of strangers but on the grandstand, with his parents. I did not think, “a rich kid,” it was more that I sensed the texture of a life so different from my own, a maternal presence at his side, the solidity of a mode of existence this boy would share with some other children in the enclosure. The impossibility of imagining his way of life coincided in my mind with my inability to escape from these steel cages.

  Less surprised than before, I noticed the remnants of another balloon above me, blue, this one, dangling, caught between two bars. I reached up with my hand and …

  It was like a shaft of light in the darkness: just where the collapsed balloon had been caught, the grandstand’s metal supports formed crisscross patterns that, as the tiers rose higher, appeared to lead out into space!

  It was a harsh challenge but hope gave me the strength of a daredevil. I had to lie flat on my stomach across the intersection of the bars, catch hold of the next crossover, haul myself up to its level, like a garment thrown over a fence, catch my breath, and, already feeling the pain of its sharp edges pressing into my diaphragm, resume this upward scramble.

  Heave, balance a moment on a plank, wriggle like a lizard, grip again, thrust again …

  The final lunge was performed with almost excessive vigor, with contempt for the vanquished monster. I gripped the highest bar, pivoted, grasped the topmost platform, straddled it, sat down upon the snow-covered timber.

  I was free.

  And blinded by light, my vision made iridescent by the effort. Deaf too, hearing only the drumming of the blood in my temples. After such a long incarceration everything seemed new to me, especially seen from this height. Tranquil sunlight, the whiteness of broad glades, the majestic calm of tall fir trees laden with snow.

  On the pathway parallel to the river I was stunned to observe a little troop of children walking slowly away, all carrying shovels on their shoulders. I could see they were my comrades, including the girl we used to call “Red Riding Hood,” on account of her hat, a pupil always in revolt against discipline, who was now moving along, apart from the others, and looked as if she were dancing as she went … So my absence had not been noticed and my interminable captivity in those steel cages had, in fact, lasted only a few minutes!

  I began to make my way down the terraces, confused by these two strands of time, which made me doubt my own reality. And, as if to confirm the novelty of such a state of affairs, suddenly there was this young woman.

  She had walked over to the grandstand, doubtless following our footprints in the drifts, had cleared snow from the end of one of the terraces, and was now sitting there, with closed eyelids, bathed in sunlight. On her knees she held an open book.

  I halted in my descent, froze, aware that this occurrence did not belong to the world I lived in.

  It was the first time an awareness of femininity had struck me so openly. Before that, women used to have the physique of the workers we came across in factories and on construction sites, strong women, often marked by physical labor and alcohol, whom life had molded to be able to hold their own against men. At the orphanage femininity was even less in evidence, we all of us, boys and girls, had a neutralized identity: our heads cropped once a month, clothes of the same thick flannel, a way of talking whose male roughness passed unnoticed. Of course there were those women assembled in the family enclosures on the grandstand, the wives of notables and apparatchiks, but they were as unreal as the symbolic figures on propaganda posters.

  So, for me, the young woman I now saw became the first real woman. The slightly arched posture of her body was feminine. As was the knee, clad in the fine wool of a black stocking, left uncovered, with innocent and alarming naturalness, by the hem of her overcoat. And this face, her eyes shut, as if offered for a caress.

  Thanks to her, I suddenly knew what it was to be in love: to forget your past life and exist only to sense the breathing of the one you love, the quiver of her eyelashes, the softness of her neck beneath a gray scarf. But, above all, to experience how blissfully impossible it was to reduce this woman simply to herself. For she was also the abundance of snow surrounding us and the glittering haze floating among the trees, and this whole moment in which there was already a foretaste of the hesitant breath of spring. She was all of this and each detail of her figure’s mere outline echoed this far-reaching radiance.

  The snow crunched under my foot, the woman opened her eyes, and I saw tears glistening upon her lashes. But her expression remained serene, almost glowing.

  I climbed down, with sheepish caution, embarrassed to have disturbed her solitude. She lowered her head toward the book, an envelope had been slipped into it as a bookmark. In a hasty movement she closed the volume, as if I could have stolen the secret of her letter. At once she must have realized that a child, as taken aback by this unexpected encounter as herself, presented no threat. She looked at me for a long time, with a slight smile now. As I reached the lowest tier, I saw such a violently grief-stricken shadow pass across her gaze that I turned away and fled behind the grandstand.

  There the mystery of the trap was resolved: one of the steel bars, simply held in place by a bolt, could be moved aside, and so gave access to the maze …

  At the park’s exit I
passed two elderly women, members of the gardening staff, who were scraping halfheartedly at the frozen earth around some great stone basins. One of them inclined her head in the direction of the grandstand and gave a sigh: “Well, what can you say? … He was a submariner, her man. And if they’re lost at sea they don’t get a grave, or a cross …”

  The other one stopped scraping, leaned on the handle of her shovel, and sighed as well: “Well, as for a cross, you know … Maybe it’s better there’s no grave. She’ll get over it quicker …”

  Catching these words in passing, I ran to rejoin my comrades. Unconsciously I was hoping to get back into our games, to forget the beauty and grief I had just experienced.

  This forgetfulness never came. The young woman sitting on the snow-covered grandstand became much more than a memory. A way of seeing, of understanding, a tonality without which my life would not have been what it was to become. After my fleeting encounter with her I had a quite different perception of the weighty symbols celebrating my country’s messianic project. All those parades, ceremonies, congresses, monuments … Curiously enough, I now had less desire to make fun of them, to criticize the hypocrisy of the dignitaries up there on the grandstand, to denounce them as profiteers for whom the dream of a new society was nothing more than a convenient old lie.

  I sensed that the truth was to be found neither among them nor in the opposing camp, with the dissidents. I perceived it as simple and luminous, like that February day beneath the trees burdened with snow. The humble beauty of the woman’s face with lowered eyelids showed up those platforms and their occupants and the pretentiousness of men prophesying in History’s name as ridiculous. What spoke the truth was this woman’s silence, her solitude, her love, so all-embracing that even this child, a stranger, scrambling down from tier to tier, remained forever dazzled by it.

  This led me to the notion that this loving woman lived in a time that had no connection with the routine of our lives, so regularly punctuated by imposing mass spectacles. Or else, perhaps, that she lived in a world as it might have been without the overbearing aggressiveness of men, without grandstands, without the spiderwebs of their steel bars.

  This hope revived in me my dream of the white city, of the men with new consciences, who, according to our teacher, would inhabit the future society. Yes, those fine, serene beings, who would not hoard and would work passionately for “the edification of the future” …

  Then I became bewildered to realize that one thing was missing from this sublime enterprise.

  “Love …,” an incredulous voice murmured within me. Everything was provided for in the ideal society: enthusiastic work by the masses, incredible advances in science and technology, the conquest of space, taking man into unknown galaxies, material abundance and rational consumption, linked to radical changes of attitude. Everything, absolutely everything! Except …

  I did not think “love” again, I simply had a renewed vision of that young woman amid the great tranquillity of the snows bathed in sunlight. A woman with closed eyes and her face reaching out toward the one she loved.

  Forty years later, when military secrets were made public, I learned the name of the submarine that had foundered at sea, carrying with it the man whose beloved ghost I had glimpsed on the face of the young woman seated on the parade grandstand. The events tallied: our encounter in the park had taken place just over a year after that disaster …

  Now the story seemed clear, from start to finish. The only mystery that remained was this echo of both grief and serenity reflected in the young woman’s expression. A superstitious fear held me back from putting words to this contradiction, I was afraid lest too much quibbling might destroy the frail beauty of the moment I had experienced as a child on top of the grandstand. With time this puzzlement came to form one of those nebulous memories we avoid clarifying, knowing it is the very haziness of our recollection that makes them dear to us. All I had to do to recall it was to pronounce these words, like a magic spell from my childhood: “She was the very first woman I fell in love with.”

  I would have been left with no more than this gentle echo from the past, had I not many years later encountered the same expression of a love, both radiant and tormented, in the eyes of another woman.

  A town in the Var in southern France. I am passing through, between two trains, strolling rather at random. A winter’s day, blinding with sunlight and the mistral, it feels as if the force of the blast is going to blow everything away in its shining fury. And everything takes off, the paper tablecloths and napkins on the café terraces, an old gentleman’s hat, which he manages to pin to the ground with the help of his walking stick, plastic bags that become caught on the bare branches of plane trees, shutters that bang, the skirts of passing women’s overcoats, which they thrust down against their buffeted bodies with the gestures of bullfighters … The wind’s eddies of powdered emery hone the sun’s rays, sharpen sounds. Car horns pierce the eardrums, snatches of words slice through the air in little fragments. The town is an old-fashioned photographer’s magnesium flash.

  My eyes dazzled, blinking with dust, I take refuge behind a wall and walk, almost groping my way, until I come upon gravestones and crosses. A cemetery, as white as the facades, but behind a row of cypress trees, sheltered from the wind, one can recover one’s wits, breathe, turn one’s back on the sun’s relentless pounding, slow down again …

  I am preparing to continue on my way, plunging back into the full force of wind and fire, when suddenly I see a dark smudge, motionless beside a gravestone. The smudge trembles, becomes the figure of a woman, turns, walks along beside the cypress hedge. A young face, eyes iridescent with tears … Drawing level with me, the woman gives me a faint smile and moves away toward the exit. When she is out of sight I go up to the grave she has just left, read the name, do a rapid calculation, alive for eighteen years before the year 2000, plus ten years after it. Twenty-eight. A husband? A fiancé? A brother? Dead the previous year …

  In the street the sunlight’s dazzling whiteness reminds me of a brilliant late winter’s day in my native land. An unknown woman seated on that grandstand, profoundly calm, drowsing amid the snows. I have just rediscovered her face in the features of the young woman I passed in the cemetery. Her look of grief and serenity.

  I realize this was a very fleeting moment, and yet a vital one in the life of a tortured being. All the pain is still there but love is already breaking free from it and is alive, briefly, in its absolute truth: the world, with its absurdities, its lies, and all its ugliness, no longer comes between the woman and the one she loves.

  The world … I remember those steel cages where I flailed about as a child beneath the parade grandstand. And those drab hierarchs saluting the crowd. And the wars and revolutions, and the promises of global freedom and happiness that were proclaimed from the eastern frontier to the western. The thought plunges me into boundless amazement: nothing is left of it all!

  At the end of the street I can still make out the young woman in black who has just walked away. An intense feeling of communion. Then her silhouette fades into the impetuous mistral’s blue and gold.

  THREE

  The Woman Who Had Seen Lenin

  First they introduced this man to us. He was in his fifties and very officially exploiting the fact of being one of History’s elect. On Lenin’s birthday, April 22, he was invited into the city’s schools to talk to the pupils about his brief encounter with the Guide, the leader of the proletarian revolution. One morning, as part of his doubtless crowded touring schedule, he visited our orphanage.

  Anticipating his coming was a source of great excitement for us. Without exaggeration, it was perhaps comparable to the sensation that might have been caused by the appearance in a late nineteenth-century French primary school of a veteran from Napoleon’s Old Guard, whose fierce mustache had once brushed the emperor’s chubby hand.

  The man came in, smiled, spoke with amazing fluency, and indeed verve. He left pauses for us to
give gasps of “Oh!” At suspense-filled moments in the narrative he spoke in a whisper. He was a professional. From the very start of his performance we were assailed by doubt.

  In the first place he struck us as far too young. We had pictured a hoary, battle-scarred, bent old man. For, since he came from what, for us, was the dawn of time, the period of the 1917 revolution, he must necessarily have fought in the civil war and also the one against Hitler. Yes, we should have preferred a mustached grenadier, or at least the Russian version of this. But he had a smooth, pink baby’s face and looked like the official image of a good little Komsomol apparatchik.

  Our history teacher, a very pretty woman in her thirties, was herself taken aback by the visitor’s youthful appearance.

  “You don’t look your age at all!” she exclaimed, her cheeks flushing slightly.

  The man threw her a frankly saucy wink and murmured, “Ah, that’s what comes of meeting so many beautiful teachers …”

  Our doubts were only strengthened.

  Could he have been a fraud? This possibility must be ruled out. Ideological education was a highly serious affair and the control exercised by the Party over public lectures of this type was too vigilant. Short of undergoing a lie detector test, the speaker would certainly have been the subject of detailed checks, biographical inquiries, personality tests. For the image of the founder of the State was no laughing matter. Every day in Lenin’s life had been accounted for by an army of historiographers and so there would be no question of allowing an impostor to worm his way into it.

  No, the man was not lying; he must truly have met the theorist of communism.

  His rather youthful appearance was surprising, but, after all, if he was in his late fifties, purely as regards chronology, he could have been alive for a relatively brief period at the same time as Lenin. We were at the end of the sixties, so the man would have been born around 1910 to 1913. Lenin was able to get about without too much difficulty until 1922, before his illness immobilized him completely. The lecturer was nine years old, he told us, at the time of their historic encounter. So it was believable.