Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  We took a step forward, noticing all at once that the billboard was constructed just like a sloping roof deposited on the ground. The other side, identical to the first, also bore a political message, visible to passengers departing southward: “The USSR is the bulwark of peace, democracy, and friendship between peoples!”

  A thunderclap exploded so violently that we stooped instinctively and dived in beneath the roof formed by these plywood panels. We had to cross a hedge of thornbushes, stepping over lengths of wood piled there for the struts … This double billboard was doubtless under construction and the storm must have interrupted work on it that day. On the inside the wood still retained the dry and resinous smell from the scorching heat before the rain.

  We settled down on a heap of planks, relieved to be under cover … Gradually this feeling gave way to an idea both ironic and sad: yes, we finally had our little corner to ourselves, the refuge we had so much missed during our vacation. And what a refuge! On the other side of each plywood expanse we could picture Brezhnev’s stained face and the slogan celebrating democracy and friendship between peoples … Our very own hotel room.

  The silence we maintained did not weigh upon us, the scenario we had acted out for three weeks no longer held sway, everything was becoming simple and natural. Instead of a passionate embrace there was this unmoving caress of a hand upon a shoulder, a cheek pressed against fingers that smelled of the chill of the rain. The storm was moving off toward the sea, the rumbling was becoming more muted and the rain more regular, heavier.

  Flashes of lightning still lit up our refuge and it was against a greenish glow that we observed the arrival of two shadowy figures in the entrance to this makeshift den. The matching crash of thunder now caught up with the lightning, and the smaller of the silhouettes shuddered while the other leaned over in a protective gesture. Our eyes, accustomed to the darkness, managed to see them fairly clearly.

  They were a very elderly couple, both certainly in their eighties. More than their faces or their movements, it was their way of speaking and their demeanor that gave them away as beings who belonged to quite a different era from the one we lived in … They seemed not to have noticed our presence.

  The man, tall and lean, wearing a broad, light-colored hat, ministered to his wife with the care one has for a child. He made her sit down on a plank covered with a sweater that he took out of his bag. Then, shaking a big umbrella, he placed it open in the entrance to the shelter, evidently to keep out drafts. His voice was tinged with firm, genial confidence.

  “There you are, all’s well that ends well … No, I feel much better now. I got a bit hot in that waiting room, that’s all … No, it wasn’t my heart, I promise you. I was just a bit breathless … No, those people weren’t being unpleasant. Just a bit on edge, that’s all. This storm, and the wind. They were frightened, you know. Otherwise, I’m sure they’d have offered us a seat … And it shows they think we’re young. Which is encouraging. And, as for all that pushing and shoving, well, we’ve seen far worse, as you know …”

  More lightning erupted, and the thunderclap drowned out his words. The blazing sky enabled us to see the old man gently clasping his wife, as if to protect her from the debris following an explosion. He began speaking again and we did not know if we should show ourselves and greet them, or simply leave them in their extreme remoteness. The more they spoke the more the distance separating them from us increased, so that our eavesdropping seemed to matter less and less.

  “Remember those stations after the revolution? Now that really was some pushing and shoving! … What? … But we were. Well, we were still disguised as peasants. And then there was that day, with Red Guards all around us, when you began to speak in French … Now that time I really was afraid … Yes, I know. You were exhausted … And the Crimea was no beach resort in those days. Far from it …”

  The crashing thunder interrupted their conversation again and gave us time to gather our wits: in the darkness of our den, almost within touching distance, were two survivors of tsarist Russia, two White Russians, as they used to be called, people born before the revolution, at the end of the nineteenth century, no doubt, and who, for mysterious reasons, had not emigrated to Europe, had grown old in this country, which they could not love, and at the age of more than eighty on a stormy night had wound up beneath a plywood billboard that was being shaken furiously by the squalls.

  The tale continued, always in tones seeking more to reassure the old lady than to revive shared memories. The husband’s voice managed it, his wife, less distressed, was joining in from time to time, to pinpoint some detail of their past. Two or three times we even heard the thin tinkle of her laughter.

  The story they told could be summed up in a few sentences: the Crimea, the ultimate bastion of the White Army, the waves of exiles who thronged there, hoping to catch a ship, cross the Black Sea, and seek refuge in Europe. This man, a young officer, fights to the end, but at the moment of defeat he does not set sail with his companions in arms because his wife is due to arrive from one day to the next. In fact, she is waiting for him at a neighboring port, convinced her husband’s regiment is due to leave from there. Each of them sees one last ship preparing to depart; the people embarking on it thrust them back, or else try to drag them on board … They remain on the quay, they wait, see the Reds occupying the Crimea. And two months later manage to be reunited in what is already a different Russia. They change their identities, censor their conversations, try to survive, and in the end discover the remedy: in the bloody night that descends on Russia they recall luminous moments that go back to their youth. They perceive that people everywhere carry such bright glimpses of the past within themselves, but are afraid to believe in them, to share them with strangers … Twenty years after their wanderings in the Crimea there is another separation: the man goes off to war against Hitler, now fighting to save this new Russia he had resisted with fury in his youth … Over four years they meet only once, at a railroad station. The wife has become a nurse and is escorting a trainload of wounded due for evacuation toward the rear. He is in command of a regiment preparing to defend the city … After the victory it is once again in the middle of a vast gathering in Moscow that she comes looking for him, on his return from the front in ‘45. “This crowd’s just like the one in the Crimea, do you remember?” he murmurs in her ear, as he clears a way for them through the demobilized troops … The years go by and still they have the sense that the beautiful clarity of their young days is miraculously preserved within them. It even feels as if this radiance grows more limpid, sharper, with increasing age. For the sixtieth anniversary of their marriage they travel to the Black Sea, first a week in the Crimea, then a brief stay on the coast near the Caucasus … On the evening of their departure a storm breaks, they escape from the general melee at the station and find themselves sheltering beneath enormous propaganda billboards. So remote from the world, so present in their own world, which they have never really left …

  The Moscow train was announced beneath a sky already cleared of rain. We heard the station doors banging, countless footsteps rushing out onto the platforms, splashing in the pools of water. The sounds compressed within the stifling space of the station hall exploded into the open air: quarreling, children crying, rallying calls to family members, dogs barking …

  Without giving ourselves away, we allowed the two elderly travelers to move off. We quickly lost sight of them in the crowd, but when we reached the coach Leonora was due to get into we realized it was also theirs. They approached as we were saying good-bye. Now we noticed how different they were from the rest. An ordinary couple of their age would have rushed toward the steps up to the coach with an air of panic, pushing us aside, perhaps, anxious that the train was about to depart, concerned to secure their seats … The old man and his companion at once appreciated that before them stood two young lovers on the brink of parting. They stopped and even drew back a little, remarking quietly that the storm was moving southward …
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  Instead of any conventional outpourings, my friend bowed her head slightly and my lips brushed her brow. This unintentionally chaste kiss seemed to us the most beautiful of all those we had exchanged that summer … Leonora climbed in swiftly. From afar we heard the whistle of the engine. The old man helped his wife to scramble up the high, steep steps and unhurriedly mounted them in his turn, content, it appeared, to feel the train already moving under his feet. I kept my eyes fixed on his tall, straight old soldier’s figure and his wife’s face, her eyes open wide, gazing at the line of mountains outlined by the moon’s dull gold …

  Walking away, I extracted a tiny ball of damp paper from my pocket; it was the scrap on which Leonora had written her address. I reflected that my own must have become just as illegible in her jeans pocket. The loss did not distress me. A much more intense bond united us, a memory that made it unimportant whether we saw one another again. I did not know how to express this conviction, I simply saw the glow of it, calm, constant, detached, unconnected with the flight of the years. And it has not faded since.

  Ten years later the dream Patrick Dewaere had given rise to among the vacationers on the Black Sea that summer was realized. The Berlin Wall fell and hotels sprang up on the soil of the former Soviet empire like mushrooms after rain: lovers could stay at them freely, provided they were not poor.

  Another sign of the times was the waxworks museum that opened in Moscow, along the lines of Madame Tussauds’s famous crowd of phantoms. A friend dragged me there one day, wanting to show me a character he considered to be “staggering.” The epithet was well chosen, for this was an old man sitting in a rocking chair. An ingenious device, a system of ropes and pulleys, was installed beside the wall. Visitors could pull a handle and the old man wrapped in a tartan blanket would begin to move, rocking to and fro more and more wildly but kept in place by chocks. The sculptor had contrived to endow this old face with a mixture of foolish satisfaction and unease. People were laughing, making rude comments …

  With a strange twinge of bitterness, I recognized the character. It was Brezhnev. Not the face-lifted apparatchik of the official portraits but a human ruin, wrapped in a blanket, lurking in his quarters at the Kremlin, nervously waiting for the end.

  My friend was exultant.

  “Would you believe it? What a symbol! Imagine this little number ten years ago. What am I saying? … Even five years ago! They’d have put us all behind bars just for doing a drawing of this old wreck! And to think that a dummy like this could have blighted our best years, the whole of our youth, in fact! Wait, I’m going to pull this. Look at him rocking. Isn’t that a riot! Go on. You take a turn. It’d be good to tip him right over …”

  He indicated the handle. I hesitated, then refused, on the pretext that I wanted to move on to other figures from history. We walked on through the galleries, encountering the glassy stares of dictators, stars, the founders of empires …

  Then the memory returned to me of that old couple under a stormy sky in a little beach resort on the Black Sea. The White Army veteran and his wife. Who might hold the old man in his rocking chair in more contempt than these two survivors of the Russia of long ago? Who more than they had a right to redress on the part of History? And yet I was absolutely certain that they would never have grasped the avenging handle. For there was no hatred in their hearts. Just the glow from those moments of past time the man talked about so as to restore his companion’s composure during that stormy night. “Do you remember the day,” he had said, as they sheltered under that den made out of billboards, “when I found you again in the Crimea? It was winter. An ice-cold day, brilliant sunshine. And we were starving … Then you picked two bunches of grapes in an abandoned vineyard, the last of them, ones that had escaped both birds and men. They were shriveled raisins but divinely sweet. Like nuggets of light. We ate them and walked on again …”

  On those occasions, all too rare, alas, when I come across two ancient beings as unmistakably filled with tenderness, I always picture their lives as a long journey on a brilliantly limpid, sunny day, each with a golden bunch of grapes in their hands.

  SIX

  A Gift from God

  Trapeze artists must feel as supple as this, bounding from one flight to the next. Their movements slot into one another, airily natural, sculpting space with the broad swing of their bodies.

  This morning we fly across the town like that.

  Waking late, a panic-stricken glance at the watch, actions driven by a backward countdown from a bus timetable. The thrill of seeing how, as hardened night owls, after three hours’ sleep we contrive to make up for lost time. Acrobats and jugglers simultaneously, squeezing into the narrow space of the shower, before our laughing looks meet in the mirror above the washbasin, frenzied toothbrushes, the smell of coffee wafted over by a draft, a hunk of bread, a slice of cheese swallowed without sitting down, a sudden whirlwind of clothes and then a woman’s body, erect, as if after a gymnast’s leap, mounting onto high heels and straightening up, five inches taller.

  We run along the drowsy streets, cutting diagonally over crossroads. No cars in this little town, a Sunday morning, the pigeons move aside lazily as we pass. As we reach the bus station, a shelter with dusty glass windows, we can see a coach embarking on its turning circle, about to depart. Board her now, my hearties! The driver brakes, indulgent as people are for a couple of lovers. We kiss and my girlfriend climbs in quickly. The passengers bite back their routine grumbling and smile at this young woman swaying on her heels, as she makes her way along the bus in a tornado of perfume. The dull gray of one of the windows right at the back is lit up by an animated look and the flick of a mane of fair hair tossed over her shoulder. And already the red spot of the bus is receding, vanishing into the gray air of this spring morning.

  Her departure leaves me with a solitude it is easy to bear (we shall meet again this evening) but also this vague sense of loss: a body that gave itself to me last night will shortly be plunged into the crowds of a big city, the noisy bustle of the Nevsky Prospekt, inviting male curiosity.

  Even more than the bittersweet interrupted continuity of our brief separation, however, what intoxicates me is the floating lightness of it, the weightlessness of a misty May morning, the softly tinted transparency of the first, still pale, foliage. I feel as if I could fly over it. Yes, like a trapeze artist.

  … When love affairs no longer lay claim to the uniqueness of a grand passion, the poisoned chalice they have to offer is a delicious nonchalance about our feelings. At this stage in our youth we are still too carefree to realize this constitutes agnosticism. What we relish, above all, is the emotional and physical ease with which relationships are formed, flower, give way to the next. Instead of the solemn amatory monotheism of adolescence, with its ecstatic organ music, we are relieved to discover the aimless, multiple idolatry of inconstancy. We learn to whistle Bach …

  This was even truer for those of us who, during the twilight of the messianic Soviet project, wanted to forget the creaking solemnity of its theatrical scenery. My impassioned quest for the fraternal society had long since been set aside along with the dusty relics of other childish dreams. We had got the message: all that mattered was to enjoy life and, in order to avoid getting caught up in the grim rituals of a petrified ideology, we had to skip, airborne as an acrobat on his tightrope, from one love affair to another, from one fleeting pleasure to the next …

  The red glow of the bus disappears around the corner and I prepare to walk home, still intoxicated with a love unencumbered by the weight of passion.

  And it is almost at random, with an absentminded glance, that I notice a contorted figure slipping through the terminal. My recall is instant: I know that young man. For years I have contrived to avoid him …

  I could ignore him again on this occasion. He has certainly seen me: he just had time to spot the two of us together, our quick kiss, my girlfriend’s lithe dash to board the bus. He also knows I have noticed his presence and am
hesitating over greeting him. I am certain he will not do so first, out of shyness and a remnant of pride … Three-quarters turned away from him, I can let him go on his way without feeling too much remorse.

  What impels me toward him is a combination of generosity and conceit: true, I genuinely feel sorry for this fellow, but hailing him is also a way of relishing my luck in being a brilliant lover, a lethargic dandy, on a high after a long night of love …

  I swing around and yell, with exaggerated surprise, “Hey, Zhorka! So, don’t we recognize old friends anymore?”

  If men had hearts of steel, Zhorka would have told me to get lost, mentioning all the times I had avoided him, all the encounters missed when I walked past without stopping, looking the other way as he went on sweeping outside the furniture factory where he worked. On such occasions he must have followed me with his eyes for a long time, telling himself by way of consolation that perhaps I had not recognized him …

  He turns and his disfigured face registers an innocent delight. To be greeted in the street by a friend like this is too rare an event for him to allow himself to spoil it with any rancor. The people waiting at the bus stop watch us going up to one another, and deep down inside me a brief, selfish regret wells up. “I shouldn’t have done this … It’s too much effort!”

  His story is a simple, brutal, and unbearably stupid one. He was born in the decade following that of the war. Our generation: the children who came into the world ten, eleven, or twelve years after the end of the fighting. The distance that separated us from the war then seemed to us immense. As time passed, I would come to realize that those ten years were nothing; the war was still on the prowl, in the mutilated bodies of soldiers, in the danger of abandoned ammunition, which we often unearthed in our games on former battlefields … One day there was this huge shell we found in a trench. We had dragged it out to deal with it in our usual way: a bonfire, with this steel firecracker slowly heating before exploding and shaking the earth beneath our bodies as we lay in wait in a nearby copse. That night there was an icy mist, the fire was slow to catch, what was needed was for someone to get close to it and toss in some dry bark. None of us was foolhardy enough to do so; the shell had been cooking for a long time. Then Zhorka got up, went down into the trench, poked the fire, even had time to take several steps away from it … The noise deafened us and it was in the muffled silence caused by the explosion that a perfectly still image appeared: a small human figure poised amid the clods of earth hurled skyward … Then life began to move again but at what seemed like a sleepy tempo. The dust fell to the ground, we were walking toward the trench as if against the current of time, and I saw a trickle of blood flowing very gently down the trunk of a young tree stripped of its bark by the shrapnel … After several operations our comrade became the way we knew him now, a cripple whose face would remain partly calloused by the fire, a young hunchback confronting the world with the mournful stare of his right eye and a terrifying stare from his glass left eye. He also retained his diminutive name, “Zhorka,” which kept him locked forever into that spring evening when his childhood ended, not to launch him out into adolescence but thrusting him aside onto the verges of life in a dull continuation, without savor, where the transition from one age to the next made no difference.