Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  Elias noted the moment when the cold suddenly ceased. They walked around the camp, entered a wood of black alders. He took off his scarf and no longer felt the wind’s cutting edge. The young woman facing him seemed breathtakingly close, known to him, as no one had ever been in his life before. He even thought he could recall the voice of the child she had been! As well as all those winter days she had lived through before they met. With the faith of a believer, he guessed at the sadness and beauty of what her eyes remembered. And, like an intoxication, he sensed the silence of the house where, as a small child, she would observe a beam of light from the setting sun on the picture of a soldier, then a branch covered in hoarfrost turning blue outside the window … Now, with the same intensity, he felt at one with the suddenly milder air Anna was breathing, and with the roughness of the bark lightly touched by her hand …

  These were the trees the camp authorities had had cut down to put an end to the birdsong. Elias looked up: high above them the bare branches, encrusted with ice jewels, rang softly in the wind, like an echo of the warbling of long ago … His shapka slipped, fell into the snow. He picked it up but was in no hurry to put it on, he was so hot.

  I’m here at last … The notion took shape, confused, yet expressing vividly what was happening to him. The serene truth of his presence here, in this place of forgotten evil, in the dazzle of a snowy plain, beside a young woman, thanks to whom everything on this day was turning out to be of the essence of things, even the simple beauty of the tips of her eyelashes silvered with hoarfrost. Life was becoming as it ought to be.

  “Mother comes here once a year, at the beginning of June,” Anna said. “On the anniversary of my fathers death. She spends the night here. I came with her once. When you hear the birds you don’t really believe in death anymore and it feels as if he can hear them too … Wrap up well. Its time to go home.”

  He felt at one with every tree, with every glint of the low sun on the snow. Or rather he felt at one with himself in that day, which seemed always to have been waiting for him, and into which he was finally returning. Anna’s hand, adjusting his scarf for him, emerged out of a very old memory, heady with tenderness. He grasped her fingers, pressed them to his face, closed his eyes … When they continued on their way, he unbuttoned his coat; the air seemed to him balmy, aromatic. And already in the darkness on the outskirts of Sarma, his breath became so scorching that he felt that with one puff he could have warmed up all the ancient, chilled izbas of the hamlet.

  That night, amid the furnace of his fever, a moment of great limpidity burst forth. I love her …, he admitted to himself with disarmed simplicity. Anna was standing on the threshold of the room.

  Next day, the eve of their departure for Moscow, Annas mother gave them the money the people of Sarma had collected so that they could return by plane.

  During the nine hours that the flight lasted, breathless from his illness, Elias swung between an absolute certainty of happiness and an awareness of never being able to recapture the radiance of that other life briefly glimpsed. It would have meant returning to Sarma, to live there with Anna in perpetual, humble, slow joy, rhythmed by the ebb and flow of the seasons. His cough had him by the throat; he was breathing like a hunted animal and told himself that Anna had done everything in her power to escape those long, somnolent winters, the bleak memory of the dead. No, he would have had to take her to the islands of Luanda beneath the sun, redolent of the warm algae and the hot timber of the boats. He sat up In his seat and began to talk of the fishermen, silhouetted against the sunsets, of the woman, his mother, waiting for their return. They would go and settle there, she would love the country … Suddenly he remembered who he was: a young African, stateless, a half-monkey to those who occupied Angola. The tangled knot that derived from these thoughts drew ever tighter. At one moment Anna’s face appeared to him shrouded in darkness, unrecognizable. Who was she, in fact, this woman offering him a pill and a glass of water? Was it she who had paused in the midst of endless snows and made alive and necessary every moment that passed? Or a young woman from the provinces who wanted to stay in Moscow at all costs? And what was there to be done about the scent of hoarfrost that her dress exhaled when she climbed back into the train? And about the poem she had loved in her youth: a knight going down into the arena among the big cats and retrieving the glove a lady had let fall? And about the child in a silent izba, talking to the photo of a soldier?

  He felt profound pity for this child, now grown into an adult. Instead of the scraps of dreams he could offer her, she ought to do everything possible to succeed in Moscow, far from those endless winters, from those phantom camps. She ought to marry this Vadim, this nice, gentle Daddy’s boy. If only that could make her happy …

  Had he said all that in a moment of delirium? Had she replied? At all events it was during the flight that she told him her secret: to be admitted to the university she had lied and told them her father had been killed in the war. She lived in fear of being unmasked, sent back, ending up in Sarma …

  Toward evening, during a few minutes of calm, he looked out of the window. Barely tinged with pink by a dull sun, a uniform white expanse lay there, the same ever since their departure. The freedom of these spaces was intoxicating, gave one the desire to travel through them in every direction, to land anywhere, to take off again. And yet amid this immensity Anna’s life traced a fragile line, suspended from a lie, stretched between this dreamed-of Moscow and the ice hell of her native village. A little like the glimpses of a road down below, amid fields under snow.

  She came to see him every day while he was convalescing. They spoke little, disconcerted by the doomed nature of the choice that their trip had just laid bare: Moscow, Sarma, a calculated happiness here, at the cost of renouncing an improbable happiness back there. Destiny, a precise line that must be followed without deviation. The magnanimity of fantasies, the wretchedness of common sense. And the scent of the forest in winter clinging to a woman’s clothes as she climbs back on board a train …

  One day with the vigor of restored health, he talked about the struggle that could change the face of the world, about playing a part in history … Anna listened to him, made a little uneasy by his enthusiasm. Then he realized that she had been born and lived in a country that had turned history into a divinity and sacrificed millions of lives to create a new humanity. He was disconcerted to realize that what he liked the most in this new world was the very debris of those old lives that had been sacrificed, the “human detritus,” the people of Sarma. It was among these outcasts that he had found true fraternity …

  He tried to explain this to Anna and received a reply that was very just in its cruel candor: “You see, the people who live at Sarma don’t expect anything more from life. Perhaps that’s what makes them fraternal. They’re not … how can I put it … They’re not hungry. But I expect a great deal more from my life. Yes, I’m hungry. Later on, perhaps …”

  For a long time Elias would retain in his memory the paradox of this hunger, which obliges us day after day to fritter away an existence we know to be false and empty, while the radiance of quite a different life is already known to us.

  When the training sessions resumed again, he would reflect during the assault on the “presidential palace” that this scenario of revolution offered a perfect summation of human history: fine words, the thrill of battles and enmities, victories greedy for corpses, and, when its all over, far away from the victors, this calm, gray winters day, the scent of a wood fire, the intense sensation of being at one with oneself.

  During his absence, the celluloid doll that marked the children’s room in the “palace” had lost its frilly dress and looked more than ever like a dead baby.

  4

  JUST AS HE WAS PREPARING TO LEAVE the “presidential palace,” the chief instructor told Elias to follow him. “There are people in Moscow who want to talk to you,” he informed him somberly Pointless to ask for more details; this secretive mentality was well known
to him.

  After an hour in a car they found themselves in an office containing monolithic wooden furniture and an abundance of telephones, as if to emphasize that serious matters were afoot. As two individuals greeted Elias without the faintest hint of a smile, the instructor melted into the background. From the first few moments he sensed that this conversation would be more a game of symbols than a genuine exchange. He, the simple young African, was going to have the privilege of glimpsing the machinery of Soviet power. They were going to dub him, to invest him with a mission … The two men, one tall and massive, who looked like a grizzled mastiff, the other dry and athletic, were not very forthcoming. “The interventionist aims of the USA,” “our military assistance to the forces of liberation,” “the Portuguese colonialists,” “probing the secrets of the enemy”: a few such set phrases merely formed the spoken framework for the scene. What was important was focused on the silence of the chief instructor, who had suddenly become a subordinate, the ringing of a telephone, and the grave reply of the gray-haired man: “Yes. Well be drafting a special report for the Politburo.” But above all, on the almost rocklike rigidity of these bodies, the calm ponderousness of gestures and looks designed to embody the unshakable strength of the regime. And it was only at the end, when everyone stood up, that the man-mastiff allowed himself a more informal tone of voice: “Things will be heating up soon in your Angolan homeland. We must be prepared. Well need you, young man … The commander” — he nodded toward the instructor — “will give you all the details …”

  Elias was about to discover that these “details” encompassed the training he would receive as a future intelligence agent, his involvement in subversive operations undertaken in Africa, and, quite simply, his whole life, which from now on belonged to the Cause. The arrogant solemnity of the two individuals who had informed him of this, without even consulting him, infuriated him. But at once he recalled that these orders emanated from a power capable of flattening the world a thousand times over with nuclear thunderbolts. And that it confronted another, American, power, equally capable of incinerating the planet. And that in this struggle, in which man had long since been left behind, it might be possible to become a tiny cog, turning in the direction of good. And that for him this good would be for his homeland to become one where there were no longer cities out of bounds to black people.

  The months that followed made of him what, as an adolescent, he used to dream of being: a professional revolutionary. What he would be until his death, in fact. Yet when talking to me about that training period, he would tell me: “You know, I became the kind of black man who runs the risk of bursting with the sense of his own importance. One of those Africans who wrinkles his nose up as if the whole world smelt bad. Fortunately some of the comrades with whom I was due to land in Angola were even more puffed up than me. It was really ridiculous. It sobered me up…”

  What brought him down to earth in particular was the serene and pitiless fatefulness of his love for Anna. He was unable to tell her about the direction his life was now taking, but, not without a certain exultation, he gave her to understand that future horizons of dangers and battles in unknown lands were opening up before him. She listened to him in silence, attempting an uneasy smile. Very briefly he experienced a mixture of pity and triumphalism, that infamous combination that is present to a varying degree in all love. He at once felt ashamed, embraced Anna, and swore to return to her, despite the continents separating them. He truly believed in this promise!

  Years later he would recall that brief moment of boast-fulness and his hasty repentance. He had never been superstitious, but that was the day, he would later tell himself, when his love for Anna, if it were to be preserved, should not have been tarnished by even that tiny degree of infamy. And she herself would much later confess to him that when she heard him talking about his likely departure for foreign lands, she had resolved to die rather than return to Sarma …

  But that March evening he believed they were bound to be together always, wherever it might be. For Anna, too, this seemed so vibrantly evident that she murmured these confused words, as if half in a dream: “You may have to live far away and go for a long time without seeing me, but well still feel we’re together, won’t we?” These clumsily whispered words were at once a declaration of love and a premature farewell.

  From that evening onward everything came in a rush. History bolted: within a few weeks the dictatorship in Portugal collapsed, and there was Increasing talk of decolonization in Angola very soon. Elias remembered the two individuals who had dubbed him. They, too, must have been caught napping by the speed of events. The training he was undergoing was accelerated; he was introduced to the people who would, sub rosa, be “leading the leaders” in the People’s Republic of Angola, the future of which was already being written in Moscow. One of these gray eminences, who went by the name of Joâo Alves, took him out to lunch several times. Once again Elias felt himself to be “an African wrinkling his nose up.”

  He was in this mode the evening he went to Anna’s birthday party. For this her friend Gina had lent her the room she rented in the suburbs. Coming out of the metro station, he slipped on an icy section of pavement and brushed against a group of adolescent youths who were smoking and squabbling around a street kiosk. He ought not to have responded to their curses, should have lowered his head, made off. He stopped, tried to explain. Blows rained down on him, not particularly powerful or well directed, a hail of fisticuffs provoked by the unusual victim. They snatched at the bouquet, which he first tried to protect, knocked off his shapka. Their brutality was different in kind from the aggression at the train depot. Then he had sensed the hatred of mature men. On this occasion these were scrawny young louts whose hands were blue with cold. For them brawling was almost a game, a way of keeping warm. They walked away from him just like children grown weary of an amusement. The whole gang of them abruptly abandoned the attack and ran off toward a more engaging distraction … He felt his face; his nose and lips were bleeding. The trampled flowers lay strewn across the snow. Two buttons were missing from his coat. A little boy walking along with his mother pointed his finger at the tall black man, mopping himself with a handkerchief stained red. Elias had an impulse to thrust both of them out of his way then turned aside and had to make an effort not to weep.

  He went home on foot, muttering reproaches, cursing the country, the slow pace at which the new man was coming into being here, and the stupid knight errant role he had just been playing. He inveighed against Anna, her resignation, and Moscow, this crushing and cold city the Russians and their past as slaves. And yet it was this past that made them close to him. In the end he found bitter consolation in telling himself that in Angola he would know how to avoid all the errors he had observed in the USSR. And that the Angolan revolution would be tarnished with none of these hereditary blemishes.

  Their paths crossed on two occasions during the time before his departure (he concealed the episode of the brawl from Anna, inventing a mission to a military camp in the provinces). The first time he did not notice her. She it was who told him about the scene later: he was coming out of a restaurant with an extremely elegant man (it was Alves) and a pretty laughing woman (the latter s wife); they were getting into a foreign make of car, and Gina, who was with Anna that day, gave a whistle: “There you go, my poor friend, still running after your black prince. But you can see for yourself. He’d rather be screwing that chick with the stiletto heels …”

  The second time, as if in a mirror image, it was Elias who, after two hours of waiting in the university foyer, came upon Anna, accompanied by Vadim and an elderly man (the young man’s father, he was later to learn). Anna was weeping; Vadim was waving his arms about as if to drive away a wasp. The father, with a concerned but determined air, was talking in reassuring and controlled tones. For a brief, fantastic moment the trio reminded Elias of those trios of times past, arranged marriages where suddenly the fiancée bursts into tears. But no. It was ac
tually a family matter in which he had no part to play

  They were left with this double misunderstanding for more than a month; then in a few minutes’ telephone conversation he spoke to her about Joâo Alves, and Anna told him about the anonymous letter that had reached the rector of the university: in it she had been described as the daughter of a common criminal. By using all his connections, Vadim’s father had managed to suppress the affair …

  He was due to leave from a military airport to which she could not have access. They spent the evening of the previous day walking slowly along the sleepy alleyways between the Moskova and the Yauza rivers, amid the early April mist. Their lives had already diverged greatly and would continue to draw further apart, soon having no point of intersection at all. The torment of wars and African revolutions he was to plunge into. The life of the Moscow elite she would have to face up to. And yet that evening these destined life courses seemed to have no connection with their real lives. What was essential had already been found; they carried it within themselves, sharing it. At the moment of parting they did not embrace, but simply looked at one another for a long while. “You know,” he said, “we’ll go back to Sarma one day, and we’ll find that orchid under the snow …”

  In actual fact he did not speak of that return, for fear of making her cry. Simply, throughout the remaining years of his life, at the most painful times during all those years, he would repeat these words, like a silent prayer, which was known to no one but Anna.