Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  “The meeting was brief,” he explained. “Vladimir Ilyich had come to our village to observe the implementation of the Party’s policy of introducing machinery into rural life. The members of the local soviet were most eager to show him a new tractor. And it was during this demonstration that an appalling catastrophe loomed. It looked inevitable …”

  The man’s voice became muted, menacing. He frowned and his nostrils flared, as if he had detected a criminal lurking among us. We listened to him with bated breath, wondering what horrible mishap was about to befall Lenin. We already knew the Guide had suffered an assassination attempt and that in the old days the peasantry, the most ignorant and backward of the working masses, refused to accept the benefits of collectivization. In conspiratorial tones the lecturer whispered, “Although perfectly new, the tractor, the one the soviet was due to demonstrate to Lenin, broke down!”

  A chill silence froze the class. At the age of twelve or thirteen we were old enough to be aware of what happened to engineers incapable of putting the Party’s policies into practice. Under Stalin these “saboteurs” were quickly sent to the camps. The pause, held by the lecturer for some time, was intended to bring home to us the possibility of such an outcome. If at this stage in his narrative, he had proclaimed, “So Lenin gave orders for them all to be shot!” I believe we would not have been enormously surprised. We might even have applauded such an action, harsh but contributing to the achievement of collectivization … Today such a reaction in the children we were then would seem unbelievably cruel. But in those days we lived in a world in which there were enemies everywhere to be unmasked. The indoctrination we underwent, often without our being aware of it, was based upon the hatred of a broad category of human beings hostile to the welfare of our country. Depending on the historical context, the Party decided which of our fellow men fell into this category. More realistically, after all, the consequences of the Nazi invasion were still present in everyone’s memories, and in the bodies of many war wounded …

  The storyteller’s voice, somber until then, suddenly became animated and emotional: “So, by way of encouragement, Lenin asked the mechanic to explain what was not working. Moved to tears by Vladimir Ilyich’s friendly tones, he started to answer his questions. And that’s how, guided by the great Lenin’s constantly judicious probing, he identified the cause of the problem. Within fifteen minutes the engine was running. The plow, drawn by the tractor, was digging its first furrow. The first furrow of the new life!”

  The man clapped his hands together to trigger our dutiful applause. His story was faultlessly constructed. The best juggler in a circus is not the one who immediately demonstrates perfection, but that rare ace who, as he sets ten objects dancing in the air, allows one or two of them to fall so that the public can sense how difficult a feat it is. To whet their curiosity and increase the tension. And at length, when the spectators are beginning to doubt his skill, hey presto! all his playthings pirouette rhythmically in the air together, without a hitch. Our lecturer had used the same device: a tractor goes on strike, all hope seems to be lost, and suddenly the Guide steps in and a miracle occurs. At least that is how we perceived it, because for our generation Lenin remained a cross between a mythical hero and a wonder worker. A benevolent spirit, a just and indulgent grandfather, very different from the ferocious Stalin, whose infamous crimes had recently been acknowledged by the Party and who, as the lecturer hinted, would doubtless have thrown the mechanic into prison.

  We applauded, but our hearts were not in it. His performance had been “over the top,” as we would say nowadays. For this “man who had seen Lenin” was a fairground barker, a ham actor, a spin doctor for official History … He sailed out of the classroom with the lithe aplomb of a pop singer, a winning smile on his lips, and another wink at our beautiful history teacher.

  We were a long way from that austere veteran of Napoleon’s Old Guard, tanned by the smoke of battle.

  Disillusionment caused a group of pupils, of whom I was one, to linger in the classroom. We surrounded the teacher, upset, puzzled.

  “He was a bit too … too neat and tidy,” one of my comrades ventured.

  This description, at first sight out of place (in fact, somewhat untidily used), nevertheless expressed the truth: yes, a man too meticulous, too smooth, lacking the bitter stench of History.

  Our teacher decoded the thought behind it and quickly came to the rescue lest we lose our faith.

  “Listen,” she murmured, as if sharing a confidence. “There’s something you have to understand. When he met Lenin he was a child, so, naturally, when he recalls this today it rejuvenates him … But look, I know, well, not exactly personally, an elderly lady … who was very close to Lenin and used to see him when he lived in Switzerland and France … She lives in a village about twenty miles from the city. I’ll try to do some research and discover her precise address …”

  The old lady’s home was not easy to locate. It was not until halfway through June that our teacher gave us the name of the village, Perevoz, which could be reached by taking a little train that served a string of suburbs, hamlets, and simple stops giving access to forestry sites. She even showed us a black-and-white photograph in a big book, where we saw a woman of mature years with powerfully molded features and great, dark eyes. Her posture, both imposing and voluptuous, was evocative of the physical suppleness of Oriental women. Many years later I would realize that she resembled the famous portrait of the aging George Sand …

  Since the lecturer’s visit most of the pupils had had time to forget about such ghosts from the revolutionary era, and on the day of the expedition there were only six of us to go. To cap it all, as no other boy wanted to come, I found myself in the company of five girls.

  For them this outing represented a significant social event, we had never before set out to visit someone who did not belong to the closed world of the orphanage. I noticed they had got hold of some lipstick and had blackened their lashes and eyelids. It is well known that girls of their age mature quickly. I felt like a page boy at a wedding with five brides to escort. On the outward journey, fortunately, the train was almost empty.

  More knowing than I, they must have sensed that there was something intriguing about this sudden appearance of a woman at Lenin’s side. The Guide, that completely asexual being, was all at once acquiring disturbing psychological depths that brought him mysteriously to life, much more substantially than the mummy on display in his mausoleum in Red Square, although that was real. It was like picturing a statue of Lenin starting to stir, making eyes, ready to reveal his intimate secrets to us.

  At the address we were given in the village of Perevoz, we found a long single-story building lined with flower beds where mainly weeds were growing. The walls were painted a very pale blue, the shade of cornflowers on the brink of fading, losing their color.

  There was clearly some mistake, it was impossible for “the woman who had known Lenin” to be living in such a dump. We rang the bell and, after a wait, pricking up our ears at the slightest rustle, pushed open the door …

  The interior presented an even more wretched appearance: a long, dark corridor with little windows along one side, doors on the other, it looked like a barracks or a home for single women. Even our orphanage seemed to us more welcoming than this impersonal lodging. The shadowy depths were lit by a feeble bare bulb and a voice both weary and aggressive shouted out: “She’s not here. Gone to the city. Don’t know when she’ll be back …”

  A housekeeper or caretaker appeared. We repeated the name of the lady we were looking for, certain we would now be given the correct address.

  “Yes, that’s her,” the caretaker replied, “room nine. But she’s not here, I tell you. She’s at her son’s, in Moscow. Come back in a month …”

  She stepped forward, ushering us gently toward the exit.

  Disconcerted, we made a tour of the building, which might have seemed uninhabited had we not noticed ancient, wrinkled faces at two
or three windows, peering out at us between a couple of pots of geraniums. It was a painful discovery: “the woman who had seen Lenin” was ending her days among these faded ghosts! It was rather like a den of witches …

  Not really downhearted, the girls decided to look on the bright side: “Well, at least we can have a smoke here, without the supervisors getting on our backs.”

  They lit up their cigarettes and strutted along the village street like film stars who had just arrived in the back of beyond. A single street, wooden houses with collapsed roofs, a feeling of great neglect, of life on the verge of extinction. It was a gray day; occasionally a gust of wind ran through the dense foliage with a hasty, plaintive whisper …

  Only one inhabitant deigned to view the five young beauties: a man, obviously drunk, sitting in the open window of his izba. He wore a faded undershirt over a body all blue with tattoos. As the divas walked past, his unevenly bearded cheeks creased into a somewhat unnerving grin. And all at once, in an astonishingly fine voice, he recited:

  On a marble island lapped by an azure sea

  A sorceress waits, in her castle’s gilded glow,

  At ease each night beneath a spreading tree,

  She weeps and calls me …

  “Well, she can go fuck herself beneath her tree!” he concluded abruptly, giving my brides a sneering look.

  All at once he disappeared, as if he had fallen backward onto the floor, the way figures somersault out of sight in a puppet show.

  Hurriedly the girls retreated toward me, their only defender.

  “The train’s at four twenty. We’re going back,” they said, reconciled to the failure of their fashion parade. “We’ll wait in the station café. It’ll be more fun there than in this hole. There’s no point in hanging around here. That friend of Lenin’s won’t come now, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m going to stay. I know she’ll come.”

  “Well, watch out. The four twenty’s the last train. Don’t miss it or those old witches’ll bite off your … ears, ha, ha, ha!”

  They set off toward the station; the street became empty, a cigarette stub lay smoking in the dust. I hesitated, then walked back to the blue building. This time no faces appeared at the row of windows half covered by weeds. The inmates had probably just gathered in the dining room. Or did each one eat lunch in her own room?

  Hesitating over what tactics to employ, I pushed open the front door and found myself face-to-face with the caretaker at a table. She had opened her little lodge and was having a meal there. I particularly noticed a bottle of wine placed on the floor, behind one of the table legs, which would make it possible to conceal this solitary libation in the case of an unexpected visit from a superior. I knew the label on the bottle: a poor-quality wine, a rotgut people referred to as “ink” because it was so dark, the color of walnut stain.

  The caretaker recognized me easily (a boy among five girls!), and instead of the rebuff I was expecting, her greeting was almost affectionate: “No, she’s still not come back, our poor lady … Oh yes, that’s the truth: she’s a poor lady …” Her gaze clouded over with a veil of melancholy. I believe she had just reached the stage of intoxication that, for a while, makes us soft, forgiving, understanding.

  “Come on then, have a bite to eat!” she invited me, noticing how hungrily I was swallowing my saliva. She offered me bread; cut me a slice of sausage. Then, with a hefty movement of her foot, pushed a little stool toward me and watched me eating with a sympathetic air.

  “Oh yes, she’s poor, all right!” she exclaimed after a moment, as if I had expressed reservations about the truth of her remarks. “Not because she’s been dumped here in this shack. When you’re old you don’t need a palace. No, it’s that … she’s got nobody who loves her …”

  The caretaker sniffed, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse, spoke in a broken voice: “Oh, she did have a husband … But he ratted on her, the bastard. It was after the war. Before you were born. She was arrested and her husband disowned her to save his own skin. He even denounced her. Said she was an enemy of the people and a … What do they call it? … A cosmo … a conso … Anyway he said she wasn’t patriotic, you know. And he divorced her. They had a daughter and a son. When Stalin died they let her out, but no one in the family wanted to have anything to do with her anymore. Her husband had married another woman long ago. And her children were in good jobs in Moscow. They were ashamed of their mother, her being fresh out of prison. And what’s more, she hadn’t a penny and nowhere to live … Look what she gave me as a present …”

  The caretaker thrust her hand into a drawer, took out a pretty round comb, and slipped it into her hair with a young girl’s coquetry. Then, catching a look of amazement in my gaze, she quickly removed the comb and gabbled on in haste, to conclude her story: “She gets a pauper’s pension but she’s ready to part with her last kopeck. Even to Sashka, who’s our singer here and tattooed worse than a savage … Right, that’s it. On your way now! That’s enough talk. I’ve told you already, she’s not here and I don’t know when she’ll be back. In any case, she never talks about Lenin. Go on. Away with you!”

  Suddenly in a bad temper, she stood up, giving me little thumps on my back to direct me toward the door. I guessed she needed another draft of alcohol to restore her to the level of intoxication that fills our hearts with floods of benevolence.

  I left both better informed and less certain of what I knew. “The woman who had seen Lenin” thrown into prison! Forgotten by her nearest and dearest. Sharing her meager funds with a tattooed drunkard … All this was a long way from our history textbooks and the yarn that fresh-faced mountebank of a lecturer had spun us.

  Disconcerted, I loitered for a moment in the village’s empty street, walked past the drunkard Sashka’s house, went as far as the edge of a wood that extended down into a broad valley covered in meadowland that had not been threatened with scything for a long time. A combine harvester, brown with rust, all its tires flat, lay idle there, surrounded by a profusion of grasses and flowers. There was a silence now, as if settled by the imminence of rain. Even the birds had stopped singing. My own presence was painful to me; I felt I had strayed into a time well before my own life. I decided to go back to the station, rejoin my five brides.

  As I walked past the blue building I had an idea that whetted my curiosity. “The woman who had seen Lenin” lived in room nine. Room one was located just next door to the caretaker’s lodge. And, as there was only one window per room, it would be easy to locate room nine. Proud of my deduction, I slipped along beside the wall like a thief, crouching low and glancing rapidly into each room: numbers one, two, three, four …

  I was certain that in room nine, the very last in the row, I should see a portrait of Lenin, possibly even photographs of him in the company of the lady we were looking for.

  Slowly, with a pounding heart, I peered in at the window opening. First I saw a narrow worktable, or rather a desk, on which a few books, a pen, and a stack of paper were arranged in perfect order. One of the volumes lay open, pencil marks on the page showed signs of an interrupted reading … then there was a bed, a blanket drawn tight, military fashion … A very simple lamp of an antiquated type. And finally a portrait. It was not Lenin. A young man, dressed in the uniform of a cavalryman in the Red Army, a long cape and this cap, with its design based on a medieval helmet, the famous budyonovka …

  The woman was not there, the caretaker had not lied. No longer hiding, I became glued to the window, feeling as if I were looking into a display cabinet in a museum showing the reconstruction of a way of life in a remote past. All the little space was filled with books and the remainder of the walls covered in photographs. Views of places where the architecture was very unlike that of our Russian towns. Group portraits, a color verging on ocher, static poses that gave away just how old the snapshots were …

  And then this photograph: a young woman with long, dark hair, a mother holding a child in her arms whose gaze was curio
usly directed to one side.

  “Does that interest you?”

  I gave a start, backing away abruptly from the window and colliding with the person who had just called out to me. I turned around, openmouthed, trying to find excuses, explanations. An adolescent girl, scarcely older than myself, was staring at me fearlessly, but also without hostility, which gave me courage and left me time to study her: a mass of raven hair tied back with a scarlet ribbon, big, dark eyes, and a rather grown-up air that, mysteriously, seemed familiar to me … I hastened to give high-sounding reasons for my espionage. “It’s for our history lessons. I’d like to meet the woman who’d seen Lenin …”

  “So would I,” the girl cut in. “And it’s not the first time I’ve come here. But she’s never at home … My name’s Maya.”

  I introduced myself, a little awkwardly, sensing that she belonged to a world where dealings between men and women, children and adults, were more relaxed thanks to codes of politeness my comrades either knew nothing of or regarded as signs of weakness.

  We moved away from the blue building, walking slowly, following the village’s only street. I felt quite ill at ease, nervous lest I let slip one of those coarse expressions that made up our daily language at the orphanage, grasping, too, that an invisible bond had just been created between this girl and me and that I must be worthy of such a gift from fate. This Maya had a radiant beauty that, from minute to minute, became more magical, almost heartbreakingly so, still hinting at a hidden resemblance to a face I could not identify in my memory. On top of all this the time for the train was close and I was already picturing myself appearing with this new companion in front of my five brides. Their mockery, the teasing glances the passengers would give me in the midst of my harem …