Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  Maya’s voice gradually calmed my fears. Hers was a more serious voice than the tones one might expect from a girl of thirteen or fourteen. More melancholy, too.

  “This woman who’d seen Lenin is called Alexandra Guerdt. Her brother was killed in the First World War. After that she had only one dream: to rid the earth of rulers who send young men to their deaths, starve their peoples, and rob the weak. It was a dream of worldwide brotherhood, shared happiness. During the tsarist era she remained abroad, in Europe. That was where she met Lenin. He admired her greatly. He even entrusted her with a number of secret missions. They wrote special letters to one another, with an ordinary text, but, between the lines, words written in milk. Yes, milk! You had to hold the paper over a flame and then the words appeared … After the revolution she worked on his staff. She lived with a man who’d been a major in the Red Army cavalry. At the end of the thirties he was accused of treason and shot. As they weren’t married she only spent two years in prison. She was released because the war against Hitler had just started. She spoke several languages, German in particular. Stalin decided she could be useful … But then, after the war, she got another sentence, at the time of the struggle against cosmopolitanism …”

  “Eh? Com-so-politism? What’s that? Political Komsomols?”

  “No, it’s … well, there were people who were suspected of not loving their country enough. And that was when her husband (she’d met him during the war) disowned her. And worst of all, he brought up his children to despise their mother. She was too shaken by her life in the camps to put up a fight. She lived alone now. Many years later her innocence was recognized. They even returned her Party card and historians wrote about her. Then her family wanted to get back in touch. But she always refused …”

  We reached the spot where the old combine lay dormant. The sky on that June day had become even more gray, and the wind was sweeping through the trees with a sad, autumnal sound. It was time to go back to the station. Maya was silent, her gaze lost in the distant mist over the fields, and from time to time she shook her head gently, as if expressing some refusal in a reverie where I no longer had any place. Yet I so much wanted to exist for her! I must attempt a subterfuge, which is why, in genial and flattering tones, and with a click of my tongue, I exclaimed, “Hey! You’re a real ace at history. I bet you’ve read a lot of books …”

  She roused herself, gave me a vague smile, and murmured, “Not all that many. And in the books, you know, the woman who’d seen Lenin is given the name she assumed as a young revolutionary. The name I told you, her real name, Alexandra Guerdt … not many people know that.”

  She fell silent again and I sensed a cord within her stretched to breaking point. Her voice resonated with a musical quality, close to tears: “I know the name, you see, because Alexandra Guerdt, she’s … my grandmother.”

  She did not burst out sobbing but her breath came in gasps as she tried to speak: “I’ve got cousins who live in your city. But my family lives in Moscow. I lied to my parents. I told them I wanted to spend a week with my uncle and aunt. This was all so as to be able to come here, to Perevoz. Today’s my last day. Tomorrow I go back to Moscow. I’ve never been able to meet my grandmother. My father says she’s an old madwoman. And this village, you’ve seen it. What a wilderness! I’ve asked the caretaker a hundred times. She sent me packing. And she’s lying, in any case. I don’t know where my grandmother could be. She’s too old for long journeys and besides … She’s really very poor.”

  We were walking back up the street toward the station. The drunkard’s window was wide open. I quickened the pace to protect Maya from defilement by oaths or smutty rhymes. But it was from behind a row of raspberry canes that Sashka called out to us, and this time his powerful voice was tinged with a strange lassitude.

  “Get along home now. You’ll never see her, our good Alexandra. She’s not for the likes of two-faced bastards like you. As soon as any meddlers poke their noses in, she locks the door and goes off quick down the valley. She knows the timetables. They come on the midday train, all the stupid pricks who want to see her, and go back on the four twenty. I know the timetables, too. That’s all I do know. So piss off now and leave us in peace.”

  He disappeared as abruptly as the first time.

  Dumbfounded, we stood there face-to-face for a moment, then, with unspoken accord, we started to run toward the valley.

  Just beyond the wreck of the combine harvester the meadow sloped more steeply. From above, beyond the thickets, the banks of a stream could be seen and, amid the willows, a footpath swamped with wild plants. A dark figure, still very far away, was walking slowly along the bank, coming toward the village. Despite the distance I could make out the ample chignon of white hair, an imposing, upright stature. In a fraction of a second the whole tale I had just heard, this tragic life story that had spanned the century, was condensed into a human presence.

  “Go down, Maya! You must go down to her. Don’t wait for her here. Run!”

  My whisper was on fire with emotion.

  “No, I’m scared,” she muttered. “I can’t. She’ll never want to see me. She’ll drive me away. I can’t!”

  I saw tears welling in her eyes.

  “Yes, you can. You’ve got to. But you must go down to her. Go on!”

  I grasped her by the arm to pull her along. She resisted.

  “All right. Please yourself. You’re chicken! A little Moscow bitch! Well, I’ve got my train to catch. I’m not going to waste my time on a dope like you.”

  Turning my back on her, I ran flat out toward the village.

  I turned around once, near the combine. Lower down in the valley I saw Maya embarked on a wild descent, her ribbon had vanished, her hair, untied, flailed about her shoulders. And farther on, at the heart of an endless green-and-silver plain, a very tall old lady was waiting there, where the path climbed the hill.

  Then, with all my being, I felt I was wildly, desperately in love. Not only with Maya and her dark locks flying in the wind as she ran. But also with the plants that swayed as she passed, and with that gray, sad sky and the air that smelled of rain. I was even in love with that old piece of farm machinery with flat tires, sensing that it was quite essential to the harmony that had just been created before my eyes …

  I arrived five minutes after the due time but the train was late. The crowd was waiting on the platform, tightly packed, ready to pile in, hoping to find seats. Near the station building, through the comings and goings of the passengers, I saw the drunkard Sashka, sitting on the ground. He was much older than I had thought. Gray locks clung to his brow. He was singing, his eyes almost closed. His tattoos could not be seen for he had put on a jacket with several medals from the last war pinned to its front …

  When the train came in the people surged forward toward the track, Sashka was left alone, I threw him a farewell glance and suddenly saw that both his legs were amputated. A dusty cap was flung down in front of his stumps. A pair of crutches stood there, leaning against the station wall. As the crowd rushed into the carriages he recited the verses I had already heard:

  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! I shall never go …

  During the summer we worked far away from the city, as we used to every year, on construction sites and on kolkhozes in the fields. At the end of August, the day of our return to the orphanage, a supervisor handed me a letter that had been waiting for me since June. The only one I had ever received throughout my childhood. Mail personally addressed to a pupil constituted a notable event, exceptional even, and must have aroused some curiosity. The envelope had been opened and the contents doubtless read. But it contained nothing secret. Some news of the capital, the account of a film Maya had just seen with a girlfriend … She had signed it with a single M and, in essence, was simply writing to send me good wishes
for the holidays.

  I was boundlessly happy and, at the same time, terribly disappointed: words so precious and so dull! And also, this bizarre short sentence as a postscript, her advice to me to drink milk. Milk? Very well, I would be sure to drink some milk.

  The next day, rereading her letter for the hundredth time, I saw the light: milk! Poor fool, how could I have failed to understand at once?

  That evening I assembled all I needed: a stub of candle, some matches, a magnifying glass. I hid behind a shed in the orphanage yard and after checking that no troublesome person might interfere with my clandestine activities, I immersed myself in a labor of alchemy. The candle glowed, the flame heated the paper, which slowly began to reveal the hidden message. The faintly yellowed outlines of the words traced by a pen dipped in a drop of milk began to appear, barely visible but decipherable all the same.

  Maya wrote: “Now I know why Alexandra Guerdt wouldn’t talk about her past anymore. In the civil war she worked in Lenin’s secretariat. One day she read a telegram he’d just dictated to be sent to a political commissar. A town was resisting the authority of the Soviets. Lenin said he should kill ‘100—1000’ people, as an example. The number was indicated just like that, with a dash. Yes, Lenin was ordering the execution of between a hundred and a thousand men, by way of reprisal, just as the commissar thought fit … Alexandra was furious: a pencil stroke wiping out hundreds of living beings. They laughed in her face. She stormed out … Today she believes the fraternal world she dreamed of was also destroyed by that dash … I hope to see you again one day. On a marble island, perhaps! And don’t forget, really, to drink some milk. Maya.”

  All through my life, in calling Alexandra Guerdt to mind, I have never been able to picture her unhappy. Quite the contrary, those summer days long ago were suffused with a profound joy, patient and calm, in a remote village where, for me, she still existed. So much so that the very concept of earthly happiness has come to find its incarnation in a muted June day, the pale expanse of an immense valley with tall plants and a very young girl’s headlong descent toward an elderly woman breaking into a gentle smile.

  FOUR

  An Eternally Living Doctrine

  The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures. Seeking pleasures that do not grow stale, lasting attachments, embraces with the vigor of lianas: the tree dies but their enveloping tracery continues verdant. This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise, the only kind we can aspire to in the course of our lightning journey through this vale of tears. These often make their dazzling appearance in places so humble and ephemeral that we refuse to linger there. We prefer to fashion our dreams from the granite blocks of whole decades. We believe we are destined to live as long as statues.

  The paradise that taught me not to take myself for a statue was located in a place difficult to define. An intermediate space between a vast industrial zone and a scrap of an old village that was dying before the onset of a titanic building development: vast concrete structures, steel cylinders thrusting toward the sky, a tangle of thick pipes, the circulatory system that fed the machinery and tanks whose hubbub and hissing could be heard behind the walls.

  After lessons on those sunny days in March, I used to walk through a suburb surrounded by railroad lines, pass beneath a broad, dark viaduct, continue beside factory walls, and, following the rusty tracks that led to an old boat landing on the Volga, arrive at this spot it is hard to find a name for. Six or seven izbas, the remnants of orchards, an abandoned barn that spoke of agricultural activity long ago. Somewhat closer to the river a warehouse in ruins, the relic of a little fishing port.

  I would head toward a house with two low windows facing the street that reflected the sparkle of the snow in the sunlight and addressed me with a look full of resigned wisdom. A girl, aged about fifteen, like me, was waiting for me at the door; visitors were rare in this remote corner, she could see me from a long way off. I sensed the snowy chill lingering over her body beneath her indoor dress. The distance that lay between us—those last few dozen yards—seemed to me to be at once infinite and nonexistent.

  We greeted one another with a simple nod, a quick smile, without shaking hands, without kissing. And nothing happened during the two or three hours that we were together. None of what might have been expected by way of physical bonding, according to the notions of today’s world.

  We would talk about a novel in which a couple of young adventurers discovered the underwater entrance to Atlantis on one of the Cape Verde islands. We would laugh when a book on our study program struck us as too stupid (one somewhat visionary author declared that the completion of a five-year plan within four years would speed up time throughout the universe). We stayed silent a lot, especially me, without feeling the least bit embarrassed by it. Words were superfluous, for there was this slipping away of the light that would slowly transform the dazzling March afternoon, from the moment when I arrived, into a mauve dusk, signaling the time for me to leave. There was the tranquillity of this little house with two rooms, its extreme cleanliness, the sleep-inducing tick of an old clock. A calm, completely indifferent to the close proximity of the monstrous factory, to the road where batches of huge trucks hurtled along, to all the brutal, busy, thunderous life that threatened the little village in the depths of its snowy silence. There was the happiness of being together, certain that at every moment we were living through the very essence of what life could be here in this world.

  Every time I came from the city I would see enormous red letters mounted on the factory roof, characters cast in concrete, each of them probably ten feet high, spelling out a sentence whose length indicates the dimensions of the building: “Long live Marxism-Leninism, an eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine!” The end of the sentence became lost in the smoke that hung over that industrial site, but the walls continued well beyond the slogan, right out as far as the misty stretch of wasteland and the forest’s gray fringe …

  I was enthralled by this doctrine, which they taught us at school. It put into words what I had previously only been able to picture in a reverie: a white city bathed in sunlight, fraternal men freed at last of all hatred, united by an awe-inspiring plan that carried them toward a radiant future. And also the vision, rashly sketched by our history teacher, of stores bursting with plenty, from which the citizens of the future would take only what was strictly necessary … These childish dreams were now illuminated by the brilliance of texts studied in the classroom, among them The Communist Manifesto, which gave us a glimpse of a world not yet realized, from which brutish rivalry between men, the violence of exploitation, the carnivorous greed of property owners, all these congenital malformations of the tribes of humanity, would be banished. Each day torrents of words in the newspapers or on the radio sought to convince us that this promised future lay at the end of a new five-year plan. Each day reality belied these promises. At length people no longer noticed the letters ten feet high on the factory roof.

  And while I so longed to believe in this fraternal world, I knew that when you passed through our city’s suburbs at night it was better to have a switchblade in your pocket.

  Once I set foot on the street leading to the village I forgot about these contradictions. In the distance, on the doorstep of the house closest to the river, I could see my friend’s pale dress and time took on an altered significance, becoming estranged from the life I had just left behind. The street lined with blue snowdrifts detached itself from reality, slipped by me in a silent progress like those in cities in our dreams, which we recollect with incredulous joy as we leave them on waking. From the river came the echoing rustle of ice floes beginning to melt. The chilly, intoxicating scent of the waters breaking free, still invisible beneath the snows, hung on the air. The sun dazzled me and at first I could not manage to bring into focus the well-loved face that was smiling at me. I blinked, unconsciously sensing that the problem was not just with the sun but with human eyesigh
t’s inability to see beyond the fine features to the elusive beauty being born and reborn at every instant …

  We went in, my friend made some tea, words came or not, the silence of the house was enough for us. Sometimes we listened, but at an almost inaudible volume, to Tchaikovsky’s Seasons. It was always the same section, “June,” which my friend located with a conjurer’s deftness on a large, tired long-playing record. We never turned up the sound, the music was intended only as a faint murmur, it seemed more secret like that, beyond the reach of the life that carried on in the distance, with its din, its pointless speed, its deafness.

  The light painted the passing hours, changing from gold to amber, then turning pale.

  We used to talk about our first meeting, a source of inexhaustible amusement. A month earlier, before we knew one another, we had taken part in paramilitary training where several schools in the city formed two opposing armies. Assaults on fortresses built from ice blocks, hurling practice grenades, field exercises in a park. The bellicose tension was more than playful: we fought ferociously, seeking, for the duration of a war game, to emulate the pantheon of patriotic heroes. The army our orphanage belonged to wore green armbands, our enemies yellow armbands … The light was beginning to fade when I gave chase to a patch of yellow running away into the undergrowth. To capture a prisoner alive was held to be a far more glorious exploit than riddling him with imaginary bullets and shouting, “Lie down, you’re dead!” I caught up with the fugitive in a clearing, knocked him over by pushing him violently in the back, and thrust my plastic pistol against the nape of his neck. The enemy turned around. It was a girl. I hesitated, then helped her up. We paused for a moment, uncertain whether to resume our roles or instead …

  The noise of the battle was now coming from a long way off, almost blotted out by the calm of the great trees asleep under the snow. The warlike passion that had animated us a moment earlier was dissipated in the fading air of a winter dusk, in the silence marked by the two of us panting breathlessly.