Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  For a long time I felt great and inevitable pity for Zhorka, an almost obligatory sympathy. Not anymore. For in the end I grasped that he had risen far above our human games, our grudges, regrets, remorse. I bring to mind his limping figure, swiftly retreating, leaving me with a bouquet in my hands. He gives me the flowers, walks away, and, amid the fleeting and forgetful haste of my days, his gesture opens onto the start of a life that endures, like the beauty of that woman’s face made fragrant by the wintry scent of the snowdrops.

  “A gift from on high!” I often say to myself, not knowing how better to express the simplicity with which this little cripple gave me perhaps the truest moment of love of all those I have ever known.

  And, as if to prove the reality of this gift that he bore within him, he froze one day at the edge of a field, paused to steady his breathing and moved forward, his gaze upon the golden outline of an ancient forest far away.

  At this moment his actions and thoughts were no longer addressed to us humans.

  From time to time I also recall his warning regarding those first, very delicate, spring flowers, whose stems can be withered by the brutal heat of our blood.

  Like the souls of the beings we love.

  SEVEN

  Captives in Eden

  For several miles the splendor surrounding us has not varied. Foaming blossom along the boughs, the whipped cream of petals, a white wave spilling the length of an avenue of apple trees where we walk, intoxicated by their scent, which has gradually replaced the air. As if, finding ourselves on an unknown planet, we had grown used to breathing an atmosphere made up of supernatural perfumes instead of the customary combination of terrestrial gases.

  After a while our heads begin to spin, it feels as if we are slowly floating along this aromatic corridor that stretches out before us to infinity.

  I have never in my life seen such an immense orchard, “ten miles by fourteen,” the young woman I am escorting has informed me. It is already an hour and a half since we entered this realm of blossom so that, if we keep straight on along the central avenue, it will take us another two or three hours to walk the length of this gigantic apple orchard. But, more than its extravagant dimensions, what dazzles me is its beauty. Under a powerful sun, this frothy tide washes over us, dazes us with its fragrances, sets us reeling in the dream every man cherishes, that of finding himself walking upon the clouds’ curvaceous vapors …

  There is perfect silence: not one insect, no birds, an unchanging light, the sky deep blue, the immaculate purity of the flower heads, a sweetness hangs in the air. It is paradise!

  And yet we are here to demonstrate that all this is a hell. Such is the task undertaken by my friend, a journalist and a passionate dissident, determined to denounce this “model orchard” in a samizdat article as one of the absurd creations of Soviet socialism in decline.

  “Look, the whole madness of the communist system is concentrated here. A monstrous orchard with a purely ideological purpose: to create the biggest plantation in the world. A triumph of collectivist agriculture! And that’s not all. Whenever the old crocodiles in the Kremlin drive past from Moscow to Kiev, what they see from their limousines is a continuous spread of white. Because the trees, as you can observe, are planted close together …”

  “It’s very pretty …”

  “Pretty! Grow up, for goodness sake! You’ve got a mental age of ten: and you’ve had it ever since we were at the orphanage … ‘Pretty’! What you need to know, my poor friend, is that this orchard is completely unproductive. No bee wants to bust its guts flying five miles to reach the center of this crazy plantation. As a result, the flowers are not pollinated and the trees don’t bear fruit. No apples will ever grow in this ideal apple orchard. It’s sterile! Just like the regime we have the misfortune to live under. Now do you get it?”

  I have concurred, with my head hunched between my shoulders, like a slightly stupid but eager and willing pupil. My friend has now concluded her exposition.

  “Well, it may be pretty. But it’s a beauty that’s perfectly useless.”

  I felt tempted to speak up for the wonderful uselessness of beauty, but this argument suddenly seemed devoid of interest. The white ocean we were slowly immersing ourselves in made all critical judgments increasingly beside the point. Of course one could mock the Soviet obsession with size, the will to transform every detail of reality into a propaganda message. And this inevitable slide into absurdity, a tendency typical of totalitarian regimes in the throes of senility. I could hardly fail to agree with my friend’s caustic comments. But the mind was quickly exhausted, as the white tide turned into an intoxication, one’s gaze dilated and offered quite a different way of seeing, of understanding, of situating oneself in relation to the world.

  At first my friend had wanted to photograph this example of a “Potemkin village, Soviet style,” as she called it. She took several shots, realized she was defeated.

  “You’d have to go to the moon to get the perspective needed for megalomania on this scale!”

  She put away her camera and we began walking again, no longer venturing any commentary on the floral torrent as it swept us along in its glorious madness.

  Little by little we have lost all track of time and space.

  And yet the moment in history when our walk took place, back in the mid-eighties, was particularly significant. The old crocodiles in the Kremlin my friend had referred to were dying one after the other. A young leader, whose name was hardly known as yet, was giving rise to confused hopes. Our disillusioned compatriots had little faith in this. The existing regime seemed to be destined for a pathetic, protracted old age, encroaching on our thirst for freedom, deluging us with lies, provoking ridicule with creations as monstrous as they were absurd. Yes, this apple orchard among them.

  The little breeze of change that arose that spring produced an unexpected reaction on the part of intellectuals hostile to the regime: instead of rejoicing at these first signs of the thaw, the dissidents attacked the decrepit regime more virulently than ever and, with redoubled intransigence, demanded immediate and radical liberalization. And it was notable that now everyone declared himself to be a dissident. They were not so common in the years when Shalamov was in the Kolyma gulag …

  I did not dare mention the paradox of this tardy militancy to my companion. I was too keen for us to remain friends. First of all, because I had known her since she was a child and was aware that, already in her teens, she was fiercely rebellious, hence her nickname at the orphanage, “Red Riding Hood”: she had moved heaven and earth to get herself a scarlet knitted hat, to thumb her nose at our regulation gray headgear … She had also come to see me a month earlier at the military hospital where I was receiving treatment for burns sustained in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. I was touched by her visit, being already aware that in this life ties of affection can easily be broken, particularly when one goes off to a war everybody thinks is pointless. In reality, she had not come because she carried a torch for me, nor to indulge in nostalgia for our childhood. Her aim was to publish what I had to say in her samizdat newspaper … But I was a poor storyteller, capable only of echoing her own views: yes, a dirty war, a moribund ideology trying to export itself and sacrificing thousands of young lives in the process … My friend was hoping I would talk to her about the opposition, which, according to her, must necessarily be making itself felt in the regiments. I had disappointed her there too: a soldier becomes a fairly basic creature who simply wants to survive, and for this he finds it convenient not to think too much. “So, no way of resisting?” “Yes, there is. Drink. And drugs …”

  When I emerged from the hospital she invited me on this dissident expedition to the model apple orchard. Was she counting on having a little more time to get me to talk about my past as a soldier? Or did she simply prefer to have a man with her on this trip through remote countryside?

  Now we advance in silence, through a soft, white, perfectly unmoving dream. No breath of air can p
enetrate the bloom-laden density of these innumerable trees, no sound: their branches awash with petals do not stir, nor do their shadows along the avenue. I know my friend is there to gather proof of the rank stupidity revealed by such an arboricultural project and yet I can feel she is increasingly disconcerted, her verdict had been reached before our excursion, but she had not foreseen this insane plantation’s magnificent lack of proportion. I glance at her furtively from time to time. She walks with an uncertain tread, looking to the right, to the left, with vaguely distressed incredulity. This white avalanche in which we are drowning is extraordinarily beautiful, it cannot be denied. Beautiful to the point of ecstasy, to the point of swooning, so unbelievably beautiful that, in admiring it, one gradually forgets who one is, even forgetting that at some time one will have to abandon this hazy reverie and return to one’s previous life.

  What life? I read this question in my friend’s wide-open eyes. And the avenue unfolds in front of us, still with the same milky brilliance, an unchanging, hypnotic, endless pathway.

  At length I myself experience a slight uneasiness: ten miles by fourteen? What if my friend were mistaken and it was not fourteen miles but forty? There are no limits to folie de grandeur. To rid myself of this incipient anxiety I try to find words for all this white spilling over us. Coiners of fine phrases might speak of “bridal” or “arctic” or even “virginal” white … I can only smile, such expressions are so far from what we are actually breathing, seeing, and perceiving with every part of our beings.

  But how, above all, to evoke the presence of this friend at my side, a little girl from the past, Kira, known as “Red Riding Hood,” who has grown into a magnificent young woman with red hair, a finely chiseled face, a muscular body alive in every one of its curves? A woman who, when she came to the hospital, aroused in me hopes of bonding, affection. But who is passionately in love with another, a man involved, like her, in this business of dissidence and clandestine publications, which is all so alien to me. He is the hero of her life. I am merely an old childhood friend, she made this clear to me just as I was preparing to settle into the role of a wounded soldier with whom a woman falls in love …

  I steal a glance at her, her eyes are open wide, her lips are moving slightly, and in her mind she must be anticipating giving an account of our expedition to the man she loves.

  The glorious monotony of the avenue is suddenly interrupted; it broadens out and opens onto a circular space, the topographical center of the giant apple orchard, it seems. Another avenue forms a geometrically precise intersection with ours. We are thus at the heart of this dreamlike universe.

  The middle of this round area is occupied by a ring of concrete, a very shallow basin whose edges are half covered with thick slabs of pink marble. It is a fountain under construction, or rather an abandoned one. Pipes eaten away by verdigris lie amid heaps of gravel and sand. And at the bottom of the basin a very fine trickle of water winds around. It must have been flowing there for years because its persistent current has filled a tiny pool, held in by the gravel barrier. The rains have dispersed the sand, creating a little strip of beach. Flecks of mica gleam in the crystal-clear water, along with a coin, certainly lost by a workman.

  My friend does not conceal her delight. Unease at finding ourselves in an endless avenue is dissipated. This central space is a good indication that we have reached the halfway mark in our journey: another two hours’ walk and we will emerge at the other end of this sterile dream.

  Kira proclaims this out loud with a laugh, referring again to the absurdity of the regime she and her friends are up in arms against.

  “What’s really stupid is that this Soviet era won’t even leave beautiful ruins behind. Just the debris of abandoned construction sites, like this ridiculous fountain … I know, why don’t I take a dip? I’m boiling hot. And I’ve got my swimsuit. I was thinking of going to the pool when we get back. But I’m afraid this jaunt is going to take more time than I thought. Right, you can do what you like, but I’m getting in! I’m going to take the waters, Soviet-style …”

  She goes in among the trees to change, reappears in a bathing suit. The arrogant contours of her body take my breath away, a body already suntanned and more bursting with femininity than I could have imagined. The water in the little pool barely reaches halfway up her calves, but this does not stop her stretching out full length in it, splashing herself with it, even, for my amusement, pretending to be really swimming …

  The cool water renews her energy. She hoists herself up onto a pile of sand and embarks on an impassioned account of “their” struggle. Secret meetings in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev. Manuscripts they contrive to send to the West in diplomatic bags. Long hours at night spent making microfilms that will immortalize these texts upon which the fate of humanity depends. Especially a certain text, tragically unfinished—for it is touched with genius—the novel Kira’s friend has stopped writing. He is hindered by the stifling climate the regime imposes as well as the scale of his literary undertaking (“The seven decades of Soviet rule!” Kira explains to me. And in hushed tones she reveals the title, Captives in Absurdia) … The agonies of creativity are aggravated by the enforced remoteness imposed on this rebellious author.

  In hushed tones, in turn, I ask sympathetically, “Is he in the gulag?”

  I sense Kira’s slight embarrassment.

  “No, not exactly. More in exile. Thirty miles from Moscow, maybe even farther. Just picture it. Sending an artist like him among peasants, to a kolkhoz full of drunken idiots, where he has to live in a hut with a leaking roof!”

  She waxes indignant without even suspecting that her words might make me jealous. In fact, I hardly exist for her. I try not to give myself away, not to show that the life she describes seems to me full of contradictions.

  “And this man, your friend, that is. Does he have … a profession? Does he work?”

  Kira flashes a scorching look at me.

  “Him, work? But he’s a creative artist! He’s fighting the regime that frustrates his talent. That’s a full-time occupation! I can see you really don’t get it at all …”

  I stammer out a conciliatory protest: “I do, I do understand now …”

  But what I understand, although I shall not say this to Kira, is the speed at which these dissident artists have come to form an elite caste. Compared with them, the rest of us, the noninitiates, are now becoming peasants, beneath contempt. And yet the author of this Absurdia always contrives to eat three square meals a day, while it is the peasants and scum of the earth who provide his sustenance … I watch Kira slipping languorously back into the water from her pile of sand, extending her glowing golden limbs full length. “A creative artist …” He may, after all, be a good man whose lot I envy. As well as his good fortune in being loved the way Kira loves him.

  She lies there, stretched out in our little pool, her eyes closed, her lips on the move once more, framing unspoken words for the man of her life. Despite her beauty she suddenly strikes me as vulnerable. Furthermore, the vehemence with which she criticizes the regime is a sign of weakness: the Soviet society she detests is already moribund. Kira is wasting the best years of her life savaging a corpse. Or perhaps this ferocious stance is the price she has to pay for being accepted in the world of the capital’s dissident intelligentsia. She, a poor provincial with no connections, a former pupil at an orphanage. Red Riding Hood …

  The memory of our childhood returns, the more than sibling solidarity that bonded us together, a redirection onto our schoolfellows of our longing for a close relative to love. The search indeed for an absent mother in the features of a female teacher, a fellow pupil … As a child, I must have stared at Kira’s face in that way.

  I should like to reassure the little girl whose presence I sense deep inside this beautiful, self-confident young woman, in reality so defenseless.

  “You’re right, Kira. Absolutely right. This society can’t last much longer. And your artist friends, I can understand them
: censorship, the impossibility of traveling, empty shops. Except that … Look at the two of us, for instance. We were brought up in an orphanage, right? Did you ever go without food? No. The same for clothes. It was very simple, but we didn’t walk around in rags. And later on you and I were both able to go to college without rich parents paying for private tutors and lodging for us. But above all …”

  I am interrupted by a mighty shout of laughter. Kira stands up in the pool and hurls great spurts of water at me, with both hands.

  “You’re a hopeless Leninist! Yes, I remember now. You were the one who dragged us off, me and some other girls, trying to find an old madwoman who’d met Lenin, or so she said! Look, by the age of twelve you were already completely brainwashed … It’s unbelievable how people still hang on to that rotten concept of communism! You’d be a first-rate propagandist for the Soviet paradise. Free education, free health care. What are you going to give us next? Free rail travel to the gulag, I suppose?”

  She weeps tears of laughter and for a short while I begin to have doubts about that vulnerability covered up by her self-assurance. She seems like a young woman completely comfortable in the life she has chosen.

  “Go on. Take off your shirt and pants! Do a bit of sunbathing; it’ll drive away your gloom. If you haven’t got trunks it doesn’t matter. We all know Soviet industry only produces a single type of underpants, big enough to fit three fellows like you at once …”

  Embarrassed and reverting to being a schoolboy confronted by a mocking girl, I take off my shirt, murmuring, “Actually the doctor told me to be careful of the sun. On account of my burns …”

  My back, in particular, is still marked with red patches where the new skin is delicate and sensitive. Kira abandons her jeering manner.

  “Go into the shade. But, you know, those wounds will form scar tissue better out in the air …”