Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  I had to wait longer still before truly recognizing what this humble and precious gift was that I had received from them. The country of our youth has sunk without trace, carrying away with it, as it foundered, the substance of so many lives of which no vestige remains. That girl locating the tune we loved on a long-playing record, her mother thrusting a canvas bag into a prisoner’s hands, myself hobbling about in the mud on my broken leg … And a host of other lives, sufferings, hopes, griefs, promises. And the dream of an ideal city peopled by men and women who would no longer know hatred. And that “eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine,” it, too, carried away by the frenzy of time.

  All that remains now is the March light, the heady exhalation from the snows beneath the sun’s dazzling rays, the wood of an old landing stage, its timbers warmed by a long day of sunshine. What remains is the pale patch of a dress on the front steps of a little wooden house. The gesture of a hand waving me good-bye. I walk on, drawing farther away, turning back after every five paces, and the hand is still visible in the mauve, luminous springtime dusk.

  What remains is a fleeting paradise that lives on for all time, having no need of doctrines.

  FIVE

  Lovers on a Stormy Night

  The moths flung themselves at every light source, collided with things, got scorched, fell, exhausted, regained their strength, hurtled back once more toward the white heat. In the face of this absurd obstinacy, one had to imagine a sublime sexual passion whose intensity made the risk of dying seem trifling.

  Every evening during August that year we saw clouds of kamikaze insects bombarding the little lamps in the restaurants and the street-lights. And hordes of vacationers, seeking the heat of an embrace, the blindness of an affair, with a similar determination.

  The awareness of being a part of this gave rise to ambiguous feelings in us: the joy of belonging to a bronzed, carefree tribe, hungry for love, and at the same time the disappointment of being just one more couple, a holiday romance, ephemeral and feverish, among so many others in that beach resort on the Black Sea …

  This disagreeable feeling that we were imitating all the others was added to by our dependence on pleasure, like that induced by drugs. We had to increase the dosage, step up the frequency of our bouts of lovemaking. And our bodies would give way, exhausted, like those of the moths intoxicated with light. And every night we would be pained by this growing realization of a trite and bitter truth: pleasure only aims at itself, being a marvelous end in itself. A repetitive loop, heady, exhausting, delicious, perfumed with the scent of tanned and salty skin, molded by muscles made firm in lengthy daily swims, spiced with hot dishes and thick wine that tastes of walnuts, a panting flight toward the climax and a spiraling down into the abyss of bed linen saturated with sea spray, beneath a star hanging low among the branches of a pomegranate tree. An intoxicating cul-de-sac.

  My companion during that August proved to be more aware than I of this circular dead end. Every night she watched the moths struggling against the suicidal impulse of their aerobatics … She was an Abkhazian, studying in Moscow and hoping, during her holidays, to experience an adventure essential to the life of a young woman of her origins: to free herself from the moral constraints of her Caucasian homeland, to love without falling in love. Yes, to be a moth fluttering amid a stream of light particles but without burning her wings. She had a name to match the best romantic scenario: Leonora …

  Within a few days this project was accomplished: we met, free, passionate, each eager to offer the other the most attractive image of a physical relationship, to act out a fine drama of love. Our bodies performed superbly, the decor of mountains sloping down to the sea added a cinematic luster to every word, every kiss. We clasped one another with the energy of athletes, with a fierce yearning for perfection, just as if our every move were being projected onto an ever-changing screen of beautiful sunsets.

  At that age one is loath to accept the brevity of pleasure. Still less, the blunting, the anodyne routine of it, ever more unsurprising, insipid. At the end of two weeks, our original thirst quenched, we had forebodings of a suffocating and vaguely matrimonial coziness.

  All young lovers travel this road and all, in their alarm, have only one solution: to put pressure on the limits our poor human bodies impose on us. We doubled the violence of our embraces, seeking now the complicity of the sea at night, now the solitude of waterfalls in the forest. Following the consummation of our ecstasy, the waves would nonchalantly hurl back our entwined bodies onto the chill pebbles, turning us into gasping shipwreck victims. After lovemaking buoyed up by the sea, our walk over the stony beach to retrieve our clothes became torture. We hobbled blindly along in the darkness, groaning and limping, exiled from a paradise we believed in less and less. Or we would sally forth on a cool, misty morning for an amorous expedition upon a wooded hillside, only for it to conclude with a return in full sunlight, under the blaze of a pitiless sky, down a road where the molten asphalt was frankly reminiscent of hell.

  One evening, as we emerged from the sea, we surprised another couple making love in the water. They located their clothes easily: the boy had a diver’s electric flashlight fastened to his waist … We had the strength to find this amusing.

  At the end of the third week there was a day of rain, a dark sea, yes, black, to match its name, with the laughing sob of the seagulls, a prelude to the end of the vacation. We wandered in a park, went down to the beach, picturing our nocturnal swims with a shiver, then returned to the center of town. Everything we had lived through since we met was brimming with happiness and the scenario we had written with our bodies was a palpable success. Yet we could not manage to conceal from one another a feeling of frustration. Our affair was like one of those concertinas of holiday postcards displayed under the noses of tourists. It led to nothing beyond sun-soaked clichés.

  In short, it did not lead to love. That day, without admitting it, we sensed what we lacked.

  Not having the courage to recognize this, we started looking for someone to blame. And the villain was very quickly unmasked!

  The obstacle to our love was right there in front of us, depicted on a vast billboard that ornamented the train station’s facade. An imposing face, an authoritarian gaze beneath bushy eyebrows. A fine man, in short, with a slightly receding hairline and a solid chin, sporting four gold stars on his black jacket …

  Today his name could serve as a marker for the generations: those who have grown up since the fall of the Berlin Wall will not even remember a certain Brezhnev, images of whom once decorated one-sixth of the globe. And even in this seaside town he was everywhere to be seen: alongside roads, on the walls of holiday homes, at the central point in the big park where all the pathways met … Forgotten nowadays, this old potentate then presided over the destinies of a vast empire, governing the lives of hundreds of millions of people, unleashing wars at all four corners of the earth. A man whose slightest frown would cause barrels of ink to flow in newspapers across the planet …

  Lifting our umbrella a little, we met his gaze and sighed, recognizing with resignation: yes, he was the guilty one. And, beyond him, the regime that held sway in our country and of which he was the deified incarnation.

  What did those lovers pacing up and down in the driving rain need? Not much, in the end. The chance to rent a hotel room and create a little summer vacation love nest where they could feel at home. But in that era hotels were few in number and imposed identity checks more rigorously than the police. If an unmarried couple had dared to present themselves at the reception desk, they would have been suspected of madness.

  The status of free lovers was on a par with that of vagabonds, thieves, dissidents. Which was not mistaken: love is in essence subversive. Totalitarianism, even in the mild form our generation knew, dreaded the spectacle of two beings embracing and escaping its control. It was less the prudishness of a moral order than the nervous tic of a secret police, refusing to admit that a tiny part of existe
nce can lay claim to its personal mystery. A hotel room became a dangerous place: the laws of the totalitarian world were flouted there by the pleasure two people gave one another, with scant regard for the decisions of the latest Party Congress.

  In these circumstances there was only one means of finding accommodation: the “private sector,” as this relic of bourgeois life was then called. Little houses into which the owners struggled to cram an extravagant number of vacationers. Every room, every nook and cranny, the tiniest shed, was packed with beds in which families and couples, as well as people on their own who had come to the seaside to relieve their loneliness, all slept in a tribal lack of privacy. Inviting a person into such a wigwam was not, in principle, impossible. But to avoid the righteous anger of respectable mothers, the carnal act had to proceed at the slow tempo of those silent gyrations cosmonauts perform in orbit. At the first creak of the bed, the lovers would freeze, waiting for the neighboring snores to resume their rhythm. To put it mildly, the ponderous nature of this Kama Sutra did not go hand in hand with the full flowering of sexuality. We had dared to try it once, Leonora and I. We never repeated the experience. Hence our choices of the sea and the forest and a return every night to our respective vacation accommodations.

  Hence, too, this wandering on a rainy day and our gloomy sarcasm at the sight of the portrait decorating the station front. And this joke I told my companion to cheer her up: “Have you heard? Brezhnev’s just had an operation!” “Really? What’s wrong with him?” “They’re trying to enlarge his rib cage so they can hang another gold star on his chest …” With mirthless laughter we repeated what all the youth of our country used to boldly proclaim, sotto voce. The old men in the Kremlin are sabotaging our love lives. They won’t let us travel freely, or read what young people in the West read, or listen to the music they listen to. (“Or drink double whiskeys in a bar on Sunset Boulevard,” some wits would add, “before driving off in our convertibles.”)

  The days when I used to dream of that ideal city in a fraternal society were now very remote …

  We would never have admitted that these recriminations allowed us to forget the brevity of our pleasure, the routine sameness waiting to ambush our amorous passion, and also, quite simply, the tedium of the carnal habit, a bitter reality for which not even the most democratic regime had so far found a remedy.

  This dismal day would by now be quite forgotten if, as the evening approached, we had not decided to take refuge in a cinema. We felt it would have been too infuriating simply to part in the rain, going off to sleep in our respective “private sectors.” We saw a poster, and the title of the film seemed to contain a comic hyperbole in response to our anti-Soviet sulks and pro-Western lamentations: A Thousand Billion Dollars. Yes, double whiskeys, convertibles, the lot. We hurried to the box office.

  We were completely mistaken. Not as regards the quality of the film, a good action picture with talented actors, but the subject. Our fantasy Western world did not emerge unscathed: assaults on its famous freedom of expression, the press under the yoke of big capital, journalists of integrity under pressure … That was why this French film had achieved clearance from the Soviet censorship! Better than any kind of propaganda coming from the Kremlin, the plot exposed the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.

  Despite the ideological implications the cinema was full. Partly because the spectators, mostly young couples, had nowhere else to go on a wet night. Besides, it was a good story. A young journalist played by Patrick Dewaere confronts a terrifying multinational, having discovered its certainly ancient but still criminal links to the Nazis. The intrepid investigator is threatened, hunted down, escapes a hired killer, and then, when he is almost ready to drop, goes into hiding in a small provincial town, where a local newspaper is bold enough to publish his revelations …

  The audience responded adequately. Everyone sympathized with the journalist’s plight, on the run from the baddies, waxed indignant at the machinations of the multinational, willed good to triumph over evil. These noble aspirations went hand in hand with quite a few fond hugs and kisses in the dark …

  Suddenly I had a physical sense that the room was growing tense, gripped by a violent muscular spasm. I was aware of creaking seats and the space created by people holding their breath. Leonora, who was squeezing my hand, dug her nails into my wrist …

  The cheer that arose was more volcanic than at any rock concert. I saw spectators leaping up, waving their arms in a feverish salute, embracing their companions in a demented frenzy. The applause drowned all the sounds coming from the screen. People were laughing, yelling, and, in the half-light, I caught several pairs of eyes glistening with tears. The rest of the film, which had almost finished, no longer mattered.

  For the sequence that was being applauded had no dramatic significance and could well have been cut in the editing, so trivial was its place in the story. One evening the young journalist, in flight from his pursuers, walks into a little hotel in provincial France and asks for a room. The receptionist hands him a key, saying, “Here you are, monsieur, room fourteen” (or fifteen, or sixteen, I no longer remember). Nothing more. But it was this brief, completely anodyne exchange that threw the audience into a state of collective hysteria. For suddenly the spectators were witnessing a miracle, which apparently, somewhere in the West, was a perfectly ordinary feature of life. A man walked into a hotel and, without presenting any kind of identification, was given a room key!

  The film continued, but the only image that caught anyone’s eye was simply this: a pair of lovers, following hard upon the journalist’s heels, also asked for a room and the sleepy night clerk handed them a key without any inquisitorial checks.

  At the exit to the cinema the spectators scattered into the darkness with a strangely buoyant tread, that of children taking off from a trampoline and capering about in the air.

  That evening, more effectively than all the dissidents put together, Patrick Dewaere contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  During the days that followed the sun returned and up until our departure the vacation happiness unfurled its concertina of colored cards. There was joy, newfound, along with the azure of the sea’s expanse; the ripening of bunches of grapes above the terraces, the vigor of our suntanned bodies. A joy too radiant not to be a little wistful. And the worst of it was that now we were familiar with that simple action; walking into a hotel and climbing up an ancient wooden staircase to a room that might have been waiting for us. A lot of the visitors to that beach resort spent the last week of August with the name of a certain French village on their minds, as well as that of the hotel there, with its sleepy night clerk taking down a key from a board bristling with little hooks.

  Leonora was due to catch the evening train to Moscow, my plane was the following day. That day, from the morning onward, the weather was unbearably hot, the sky clouded over, low, suffocating. In the afternoon a dull light hung over the beaches, a storm was on the prowl, hesitant to strike. The streets were plunged into tropical darkness, like a flood of scalding ink.

  The first rumbles of thunder surprised us on the road to the station. They rolled out majestically, drowning the noises of the town, the chatter of the crowd gathering alongside the platforms. Peering down from his vast portrait on the station front, Brezhnev arched an eyebrow, as if to say, “A storm? Has it been authorized by the Politburo?”

  The sky turned silver and black at the same time. Sudden downpours, sporadic for the moment, drove the passengers into the little station building as though with great sweeps of a broom. We followed them, but remaining inside was torture: the stifling sultriness was loud with the yelling of children, the curses of harassed parents, and the yapping of several dogs … Then one lady remarked to her husband, “We’ve had no lunch. What we need now is some good hot borshch!” This remark was the last straw. Moving as one, we rushed outside …

  The sky was in turmoil, laying bare the blue rifts of lightning flashes. The thunder responded, ever clos
er and more deafening. Our clothes were quickly wringing wet and in a movement of disarray we turned to one another, as if seeking advice. Our solitude on this empty platform in the driving rain epitomized the status of all lovers with nowhere to stay. Coming to life amid the outpourings from the heavens, the loudspeaker hissed in strangely confidential tones, as if its message only concerned this couple alone in the middle of a deluge: “All trains will be subject to a delay of two to three hours …” As he saw us, a railroad worker, galloping the length of the platform in great jagged leaps, shouted out, “At least!” At a loss, we took several steps, not really knowing where to go …

  And suddenly we saw another Brezhnev.

  This one was mounted on a vast billboard at right angles to the tracks, so that passengers on departing trains took the benediction of his paternal gaze with them on their journey. His face, incidentally, had suffered a serious assault: the features were streaked with two stains from overripe fruit, one beneath his left eye, the other on his chin. The infamous projectiles had doubtless been hurled from a moving train, so as to ensure an easy impunity for the terrorist. A narrow canopy above the billboard kept the rain off his face, which thus delayed the washing away of the trickles of brownish juice, probably from rotten peaches. Curiously enough, this besmirching took away the portrait’s flat and foolish expression, even conferring on it an aura of profundity. This was no longer a fat apparatchik rejuvenated by a servile painter, but an older man, as Brezhnev was in reality, yes, someone who seemed to be looking down with an all-encompassing bitterness at this young couple lashed by torrential rain …