Once Upon The River Love

by Andrei Makine

  The castellated ramparts of the taiga retained their look of happy abandonment and soft idleness. The curtain of snowy plumes enchanted the eye with its silent eddying. The start of a mild, wan evening… I had an intense feeling for its beauty and its aroused expectations!

  In every movement of the air, woman was present. Nature was a woman! In the intoxicating giddiness of the great flakes as they caressed my face. In the long, languid calls of the jackdaws as they greeted the mild weather. In the heightened tawny color of the pine trunks beneath the damp luster of the melted hoarfrost.

  The soft snow, the cries of the birds, the red bark… everything was woman. And not knowing how to express my desire for her, I suddenly uttered a terrible animal roar.

  And panting heavily, I heard its long echo through the still warmth of the air, into the resounding secret depths of the taiga…

  For a while I followed the metal track, walking on the ties. Then, when the rails were covered in ever-deepening snow, I put on my snowshoes and plunged into the forest. To take a shortcut. I decided to go to Kazhdai. I could no longer wait. I needed to know who I was right away. To make something of myself. To give myself a shape. To transform myself, to recast myself. To test myself. And, above all, to discover love. Outflank the beautiful traveler, that glittering woman from the West on the Transsiberian. Yes, before the train passed, I must implant into my heart and into my body that mysterious organ: love.

  6

  The town was immersed in the dismal daily routine of winter and seemed little inclined to share in my exaltation. Its streets quaked heavily as enormous trucks loaded with the long trunks of cedar trees drove through. Men appeared in the doorway of the only liquor store, thrusting bottles deep into their sheepskin coats. Women, their arms weighed down with shopping bags full of provisions, walked along ponderously, clad in the armor of their thick overcoats. The wind was whipping up and peppering their faces with snow crystals. They had no hands free to wipe them clean. They had to bow their foreheads and from time to time blow noisily, shaking their heads, like horses trying to drive away hornets. Between the men, eager to drown the traces of a hard day in a draft of vodka, and the women, advancing like icebreakers through the raging blizzard, no connection was imaginable. Two alien races. Furthermore, the wind must have caused a power failure. First one side of the street, then the other, was plunged into darkness. The women quickened their pace, gripping the handles of their bags. After a while they all looked so much alike that I thought I was seeing the same faces. As if they had got lost and were walking around and around in that dark town…

  I, too, spent a good quarter of an hour wandering around under the white flurries, lacking the courage to approach the place where everything was to be acted out: that deserted wing of the station. The place where I could find the one I sought. I already knew what you had to do. I had seen it one day with Samurai. She was sitting at the end of a row of low varnished wooden seats, in that annex to the waiting room where no one was ever waiting for anybody. There was also a buffet, where an attendant, half asleep, shuffled the cups and the sandwiches with slices of shriveled cheese in them. And a newsstand with dusty display shelves, forever closed. And this woman, who from time to time got up and walked over to the timetable board and studied it with exaggerated attention. As if she were searching for some train known only to herself. Then she went and sat down again.

  We had seen the man who took a seat beside her, showing her a creased five-ruble bill. We were in front of the newsstand, pretending to be absorbed in the covers of magazines several months old. We had heard their brief whispering. We had seen them go off. Her hair was a dull russet color and covered in an openwork woolen head scarf.

  She was the one whom I now saw in the little deserted waiting room. I crossed the resonant space with tense steps, my boots making footmarks on the slippery tiles. She was there, on her seat. My terrified glance only took in the color of her hair. And the outline of her autumn coat, unbuttoned to show a necklace with two rows of red pearls.

  I walked up to the closed newsstand. I examined the photo of the latest two cosmonauts, with their radiant smiles, then the smooth face of Brezhnev on another cover. There was no sound other than the creaking of the door in the adjoining main hall and the clink of glasses as the drowsy attendant arranged them in her buffet.

  I stared at the shining faces of the cosmonauts without seeing them, but all my senses, like the antennae of an insect, were exploring the tenuous connection that was in the process of being forged between me and the red-haired woman. The dim air of that waiting room seemed to be wholly impregnated with the invisible matter formed by our two presences. The silence of this woman behind my back. Her feigned interest in the muffled loudspeaker announcements. Her real expectation. Her body beneath the chestnut coat. A body in which my desire was already making its habitation. The presence of a woman whom I was going to possess – who did not yet know it. And who was for me a singular and terrifying being in this universe of snow…

  I detached myself with an effort from the magazine display rack and took several steps in her direction. But involuntarily my trajectory veered away, circled round the seats, and thrust me back in the direction of the main hall. With a thumping heart, I found myself again in front of the timetable board. The Transsiberian was posted there in large letters and several local trains in smaller ones.

  I suddenly experienced a faint glimmer of that infinite sadness the red-haired prostitute must have experienced each evening before this board. The cities, the hours. Departures, arrivals. And always this unique Track One. Yes, all the strange trains she apparently missed week after week. She was forever getting up and consulting the timetables so attentively. She strained to hear every word of the croaking loudspeaker. And yet each train would depart without her…

  Standing in front of the board, I summoned up all my strength before crossing the threshold of the little room. I checked if my shapka was on my head at a good angle – in an "adult" style, tilted toward one ear, with a few curls showing above my temples. In the cossack manner. In my pocket I fingered the note that had become damp from my burning palm. As unfortunately I had no five-ruble bill but only a three, wrapped around two ruble coins, I told myself there was a risk the Redhead would see this greenish three-ruble bundle and send me packing with a scornful little smile. Neither could I spread out all my treasure before her! And as for trying to change it for a single note, that would have given the game away immediately. Any of the sales assistants would easily have guessed, I thought, what these fateful five rubles were the price of.

  In my short sheepskin coat, drawn in at the waist by a soldier's belt of thick leather, with a bronze buckle that bore a well-polished star, I looked like any young logger. This garb, common to all the men in those parts, made my age undetectable. Furthermore, I had a wolf's eyes, gray, tilted back slightly toward the temples. Those of a child born with the eyes of an adult…

  I took one more look at the departure time of some useless train. I turned. All my anxiety and all the frenzy of my desire were concentrated on the handle of the glass door into the little room. Beyond it was a space filled to overflowing by the rosy glitter of her necklace…

  I pulled the handle. This time I went straight toward the red-haired woman without turning aside… I was two steps from her when the light went out. There were several squawks of alarm from passengers in the main hall, several curses, the footfalls of a railroad worker sweeping the darkness with his lamp.

  We found ourselves on the platform, she and I, under the white tide of the storm. It was the only place that was more or less Ht. By the lights of the Transsiberian, ponderously strung out now, as it flowed into the station. Panting and all covered in snow, the locomotive threw a long beam of light through the white blizzard from its front spotlight. The windows of the coaches cast rectangles of soft light onto the platform. The snowy eddies hurtled toward these yellow rectangles, like moths toward the halo of a streetlamp.
/>   Soon the few passengers due to board the train at this station had climbed into their coaches. Those due to get off had already plunged out into the storm, into the winding streets of Kazhdai… We were left alone, she and I. Travelers without luggage, poised to leap onto the footboard when we heard the whistle? Or improbable relatives determined to wait until the end… until the very last glimpse of the face of a dear one as it was carried away into the night?

  At our backs we sensed the gaze of Sorokin, the formidable militiaman, who was pacing up and down on the snow-covered platform, with his nose buried in the broad collar of his sheepskin coat. He, too, was waiting for the departure whistle. He seemed to be hesitating: Should he go and corner the Redhead and extort three rubles from her, his usual tax? Or nab the young peasant, me, drag him off into a little smoke-filled office and have some fun scaring him for part of the night? What disconcerted this obtuse, dull man was us as a couple. Conscious of the menacing presence of this dubious guardian of the peace, we had gradually drawn closer to each other. Together, we were becoming strangely unassailable. In particular, I was protecting her. Yes, I was protecting this tall woman clad in an autumn coat that scarcely covered her knees. With my hand on my belt buckle, I stuck out my chest and fixed my eyes on the lighted square from the window that she, too, was staring at. The militiaman could not quite dissociate the two of us: what if this young village boy were some nephew or cousin of the Redhead?

  The fresh snow held the imprint of our footsteps, which had drawn imperceptibly closer to one another. And behind the window, in a snug compartment, the silhouette of a woman could be made out. The calm gestures of the evening; the great glass of hot tea that you have to blow on for a long time; the absent gaze into the white storm rattling against the window. The gaze settles distractedly on two shadowy figures in the middle of the empty platform. What on earth could they be waiting for there?

  Aroused by the whistle, the train moved off and withdrew the illuminated square from under our feet. The station was still in complete darkness. We could exist as a couple for only a few more seconds…

  It was by the light of the last coach that I abruptly produced my five rubles. She saw my gesture, smiled a little disdainfully (no doubt she had guessed the point of my comings and goings in the waiting room), and inclined her head slightly. I did not know whether this was a refusal or an invitation. I followed her anyway.

  We walked for a long time along narrow alleys, beside fences covered in snow. The blizzard had by now spread its wings with unbridled force, hurling volleys of snow against our faces and taking our breath away. I walked behind the red-haired woman, who was holding the woolen head scarf knotted under her chin with one hand and, with the other, beating down the panels of her coat. Every so often I saw her legs uncovered, and then my mind went blank, stunned as I was by the whistling of the wind and drained by the sharpness of my desire.

  "Where are we going?" said a strange, heavy voice inside me. "And what hidden meaning do these powerful legs have, with their broad thighs and their full calves squeezed into black leather boots? And this body with its flimsy coat? What connects it to me?" This body beneath its thin covering of fabric. Its warmth, which I felt had already profoundly entered into me… "Why this warm and vital density, under this cold sky, amid these dead streets?"

  We tramped for a long time through the dark, white town. Advancing through a storm, confronting the snow flurries, makes you weary. The crunch of footsteps; the whispering of the wind sliding in under the fur of your shapka and murmuring into your ear the lament of the snowflakes melting on your face… At one moment I smelled the scent of burning cedarwood, of a fire, floating in the wind. I raised my head. I looked at the woman walking in front of me. I saw her quite differently. It suddenly seemed as if she were taking me to a house that had been waiting for me for a long time, that was my real home; and as if this woman was the being closest to me. A being I had miraculously rediscovered in this snowstorm.

  It was an izba at the very edge of the town, a building tucked away at the bottom of a little snow-covered yard. The red-haired woman – who had not spoken a word to me since the station – all of a sudden smiled and exclaimed almost cheerfully, as she mounted the wooden steps: "Here we are. Welcome to the mariner!"

  Her voice had a strange resonance at this frontier between the white fury of the storm and the dark interior of the izba. A phrase from some ritual she made a point of performing once the frontier was crossed. Here was where I became her man, her client.

  We passed through the shadowy entrance hall and climbed several stairs, which groaned under our feet. She pushed open the door, patted the wall, trying to find the switch, and pressed it several times. Then uttered a forced giggle: "Oh, silly me! The whole town's playing blindman's buff, and there's me saying: Come on, dynamo – get turning!"

  I heard her opening a drawer and striking a match. The room was Ht up by the diffuse halo of a candle. No doubt it was this flickering flame that fragmented my perception. Gestures, words, and smells began to materialize out of the wavering darkness. One by one, randomly. And they cast their own shadows – of gestures, words, and smells.

  Her profile appeared sharply on the wall – black on yellow. So did the glass whose brown contents she poured between her lips, lapping them up avidly. She filled the same glass, held it out to me. I recognized the local brew: alcohol mixed with cranberry jam. It flooded into me, like one of the shadows flitting across the bare wall of the izba. It burned, flayed my palate, filled me with darkness. As before, I could see only fragments. But the candle had remained in the room next door, and these shards were fading, becoming dull. Everything was splitting up. One piece: her torso rearing up before my eyes, strongly, terrifyingly white. (One could never have imagined how broad it would be!) The whiteness tinged with yellow shadow. This bright patch was suddenly drowned in the darkness that erupted, causing an explosion of metallic creaks from the bed. Another fragment: her hand, large and red, pulling the blanket over my bare shoulder. With an absurd solicitude and insistence. And then a china statuette on the shelves by the bed: a slender ballerina with her partner. I saw their smooth faces, their unmoving eyes, very close to me.

  And all that happened in the hollow of this bed, with its smell of cold smoke and sugary perfume, was only a series of abrupt, hopeless attempts to join the odd fragments together.

  By accident and in my fear of not doing what a man had to do, I caught hold of a breast, heavy and cold. It did not respond to the clasp of my fingers. I let it go, as one lays a dead bird down in the grass. I tried with all my weight to crush the body that spilled off into the shadows, to keep it together in the unity of my desire. I buried my face in the russet curls. And once more I came up against a separate shard – the drops of melted snow in her hair. And an earring, quite simple and worn, sliding toward my lips…

  I had expected love to have the intensity of my nocturnal plunge into the snow with Samurai, beneath the frozen sky: that unique moment when the heat of the bath and the cold of the stars produced a searing fusion. I had expected that there would be nothing to touch, to feel, to recognize, for everything would be a single incandescent touching. And that I would be wholly outside and inside, the organ of that indescribable touching…

  The red-haired prostitute must have sensed that I was at a loss. She parted her legs heavily to let me slide into her groin. Her body gathered itself up, became taut. Her hand penetrated under my belly, grasped me, thrust me into her. With a precise, deft movement. She seemed to be putting me in tune with her body, plugging me into her flesh… And rearing up slightly, she shook me, pushed me into action.

  I writhed between her broad thighs. I clung onto her breasts, which yielded with a soft, lazy resignation. My belly seemed to be stretching a great hot, sticky wound beneath her.

  So this was the stuff of love: slippery, glutinous. And lovers were heavy, breathless. It was as if each, laboriously, were hauling the other one's body along… But where to?<
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  All that I understood only later. I lived through it again when, bowed under the snow squalls, I was running to get away from the bed with its slimy depths, and the izba that smelled of cold smoke. My cheek was burning from two terrible blows. The red-haired prostitute had slapped me with a hoarse exclamation and a look filled with hate.

  I was running toward the great bridge that spanned the Olyei. I was plunging into the white tide without thinking about what I was going to do. Everything was too clear for it to be thought about. As clear as the white abyss that opened at my feet on the crown of the bridge. It was in this abyss that I must flee the stare of the red-haired woman. Her look and the horrible mess that was love. Climb over the handrail and escape from the vision that was gradually becoming more vivid in my head…

  This vision had arisen when, in the midst of my feverish thrashings on her great body, the light shone. Absurdly, the electricity had come on again. The room was frozen by the ghastly, stunning light of a great bulb. The red-haired prostitute screwed up her eyes, her face twisted into a grimace of disgust. I stared at this broad face.

  This heavily made-up mask. This tired paint. These shining pores. I sensed that the harsh light made it vulnerable, trapped by the stupid return of the current. But I, too, was caught in the trap. I could not turn my gaze elsewhere. The mask held it. I was thrashing around, my face a couple of inches away from that unhappy grimace. I felt a strange pity for the mask, and it was at that moment that my desire exploded.

  I did not know, then, if what I experienced was fear, pity, love, or disgust. There was that face, with its pathetic grimace; the red lips with a sickening breath of alcohol; the dark-red hair spangled with drops of water… And this violent spasm wrenching my stomach – in a warped replica of our nocturnal ecstasy in the snow on the banks of the Olyei.