A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  The telephone wakes him the next day at six o’clock in the morning. A surge of hope: tortured by remorse, Tanya is going to tell him that their breakup was a mistake … No, it’s Zhurbin! A telegraphic, impersonal voice: “I’m calling you from the street. Take your car. Come to the office. Park behind the building. Very important.” And he hangs up.

  Impossible to refuse someone who has hurt you, a point of honor. Oleg grins at this old-fashioned psychology as he gulps down his coffee. Outside it is thirty below, his car is in a deep freeze. The Neva stretches out, as smooth as a snow-covered steppe. “With any luck Zhurbin’s going to tell me the role of the horse will now be taken by a mare, yes, a kind of lesbian bestiality … He’s quite capable of suggesting a deal like that.” Oleg laughs, mainly so as not to fall asleep at the wheel.

  Zhurbin emerges from the service entrance, like an ambush. “Can you keep this stuff at your place?” Without understanding, Oleg helps him to carry half a dozen large cardboard boxes. “Don’t worry. It’s mainly paperwork to do with our series …” The flaps on the last of the boxes are not stuck down and by the hazy light of a lamppost, Oleg can make out the curved shapes of several cartridge clips, for Kalashnikov rifles. “Equipment for Catherine’s guardsmen, I presume,” he jokes. Zhurbin makes no reply, a blank look, an angry abruptness in his gestures. “Hide all this, OK? And come see me this evening. If they haven’t put me inside by then …”

  That evening they meet, not in his office, which has been sealed off, but in the reception area from which everything has disappeared, even the secretary’s computer. Zurbin grumbles: “It’s the rules of the game. You want them to leave you alone and what happens? They slap a revenue department check on you …”

  This remark has doubtless been repeated to a lot of people and Zhurbin utters it without conviction—a truth overtaken by the seriousness of the situation.

  “The fact is, it’s even more stupid than that. A lot of idiots like me took the bait. Go ahead, capitalists of the future, bring out your savings, invest, sell, resell, work day and night, make yourselves rich and put the money you make into holding companies for eels from the salt marshes, five-star hotels, and unlicensed liquor. Cretins like me believed in it. We slaved away worse than convicts. Ask me if I remember a single day when I had an hour to myself—zero! No, I tell a lie. I remember those days they were sending me mutilated toy bears. That’s all … We amassed fortunes, we thought we were hunters on the trail of billions. But we weren’t really the hunters at all, we were merely the hounds, tracking down the quarry. And now the hunters have arrived. They’re snatching the prey from us and kicking us out. And these are not the lot who were sending me toy bears. The real hunters don’t need to use threats. They’re the ones with the power! They’re in the Kremlin, in the Parliament, in the ministries. We’ve done the dirty work and they’re going to dine off the quarry. And when I start complaining, a team of inspectors turns up, armed like an assault commando. The public prosecutor will find enough in the computers they’ve taken away to award me a long stay north of the Arctic Circle … He’s one of the hunters too. And the quarry they’ve bagged, Erdmann, is the whole country!”

  He fills his glass, smiles wrily, shows the label on the bottle. Empress Vodka. The portrait of a tsarina in a gilded frame and underneath, two guardsmen lying beside a campfire.

  “It was this distillery that they got their hands on first. Hooch. That pays. Now they’re going to grab the rest …”

  “But I guess you’ll hold on to a few good bits and pieces …”

  Oleg makes an effort to sound positive, clinks glasses with him, drinks. Zhurbin responds with an old man’s grimace, blinking rapidly. His voice is tense, weak.

  “As you know, I can live off nothing, that’s how we lived when we were young. But the thing is … I’ve got my daughter. I went to see her in Lugano. The place where she lives is a paradise. The countryside, teachers, she has a big room that looks out over the mountains … A pond with fish and turtles. Wonderfully peaceful. That costs a lot. And that’s my only problem at the moment. I can go and sell cigarettes at a kiosk in the street, it’s all the same to me. But that wouldn’t bring in enough to pay for that paradise. She’s … quite a special child … As I already told you. She’s not mentally handicapped, no. But she doesn’t understand that somebody might want to harm her. That some people have the impulse to strike out, to say hurtful things, to hit for the pleasure of hitting. And yet that’s what people do all the time. How can you expect her to live here among these mutilated toy bears and the sick people who send them to me? She’s already given names to each of the fish and the turtles, she talks to them …”

  A chime rings out in Zhurbin’s office—twelve brief notes that sound like those of a harpsichord. Oleg remembers the big clock in a mahogany case that stands on a malachite pedestal … The expression on Zhurbin’s face has not changed—the same aged grimace and the tears that seem to be flowing independently of what he is saying. Belatedly the striking of the clock rouses him, he stares at Oleg as if he were a stranger. His voice breaks off, then strengthens.

  “Our series has got to continue, Erdmann! If they were to put me behind bars you’d have enough money to send what’s needed for my daughter. You’ll do it, won’t you? I know you’ll keep your word. But the series about Catherine has to keep going, even if you loathe it. I promise you that at the end we’ll surprise everybody. Here’s my idea: Catherine dies on the commode, her death throes, the pretenders cutting up rough, and then suddenly, a historian appears, a bit like your … what’s his name? … oh yes, Luria. And he says to the viewers: ‘You’ve really been gorging yourselves on this hash of sex and cruelty. You’ve had a great time watching that caricature in a petticoat jiggling about in her alcove. And you didn’t give a good goddamn about what this woman’s dreams might be. Well, now, in this very last episode, you’ll see the man who truly loved her …’ And then you can film what you like, her meeting with Lanskoy, their love, and their dream of escaping …”

  They meet again two days later in a subway station, “like secret agents,” Oleg thinks. Zhurbin says he wants to keep him out of trouble but, no doubt, he is also trying to protect his production company, the only enterprise he hopes to be able to hold on to.

  “We already have a good many episodes in the can. Enough to last two months, if not three. So we don’t need to do any more filming. OK, that scene with the horse … I was unfair to you, Erdmann. I admit it. But I was on edge, I knew they were bound to come and take me away. Now you can take two months’ vacation. Go and visit Germany in the meantime. You could look up that guy who made an erotic film about Catherine. He was the one who showed the horse … Yes, Max Pfister. The Red-Blooded Tsarina, I think it was called. Travel a bit, it’ll do you good. A visa? But you’re an ‘ethnic German’! They’re sure to give you one in a few days …”

  At the moment when they part Zhurbin hands him his card. “No, I’m not the president of all that anymore … But I’ve made a note on it of the place in Lugano where they’re looking after my daughter. When you’re in Berlin, send her a postcard. She’ll be thrilled. She never gets any mail …”

  Before going to the consulate Oleg nervously pictured his “return” to the land of his ancestors. The people he would be dealing with would be elderly, marked by the war. He would be speaking to them in German, and in their voices he would recognize the intonations of his father …

  The person who hands him an application form is very young, barely twenty, an intern, certainly, and she addresses him in Russian. Her youthful chirping is painful. Oleg switches to German, the young woman follows suit with a smile. She must see this Russian German, who has retained some words of his mother tongue, as a strange survivor, like the man in the Hibernatus movie, still young after sixty years in cold storage.

  While he is filling in the form the intern takes out her cell phone: an audio bombardment of onomatopoeia, giggles, and place-names. Broadly speaking, Oleg gathers
she is talking about a visit to London during the vacation that has just finished.

  He hands back his form and hears himself expressing the hope that for an “ethnic German” receiving a visa will not take more than a couple of weeks. The intern adds, in almost wheedling tones, that he might also like to consider moving there, yes, settling permanently in his “historic fatherland” …

  This suggestion enables him to measure, with some force, the extent to which he feels Russian.

  The days of waiting are marked by a feeling of dualism: over forty years of living in Russia and suddenly a German identity concocted for him with a wave of her hand by the young woman in charge of the forms—like those salesmen who drape a garment over your shoulders and, with a bit of sales talk, make it inseparable from your body. He knew from his reading that a short time after her arrival in Russia Catherine fell seriously ill. Thanks to being bled several times (or in spite of this), the princess survived. She even prided herself on what happened to her: “I’ve lost the last drop of my German blood!”

  Oleg tells himself that the notion of having foreign blood has never occurred to him. And yet for families like his, the course Catherine’s life took has always counted. This distant Germanic kinship did indeed become a “family secret,” a private past, sometimes alluded to in that ironic saying (“all this on account of that little German princess”) sometimes by a disillusioned observation: whatever we try to do to be Russian, our origins will be against us, people will always see us as potential traitors …

  After nine days he obtains his visa. The speed of the response ironically underlines his renascent identity: he’s one of the elect, an almost Westerner! The ticket he buys enhances the paradox. The date of February 3, printed in drab official type, signals a journey into a country his ancestors had left more than two centuries earlier.

  The giddy feeling inspired by this notion prompts him to make one last visit to the crag-building.

  The day, halfway through January, is vibrant with cold and sunlight. The suburbs he passes through are wreathed in columns of smoke, the industrial life breath of the big city. He is no longer amazed by the transformation wrought in this district, once squeezed up against the railroad tracks. The little alleyways have been replaced by broad traffic circles and residential enclaves. He encounters the luxury apartment buildings he had come across under construction the year before: penthouses, swimming pools … Wrought iron gates surmounted with gilded spikes, surveillance cameras, sentry boxes for security guards, pathways scrupulously swept …

  A track through the snow skirts the enclosure, he follows it for a hundred yards or so and at first has trouble recognizing the structure he is looking for. The crag-building is still there, but its facade is blackened by fire. Dominated by tall new towers, its four stories look as if they are being thrust back down toward the earth. It is rather skimpily fenced off with strands of barbed wire attached to posts. “Danger! Building under demolition,” a signboard proclaims.

  He is beginning to look for an opening when an old man, out walking with a husky dog, calls out to him: “Watch out, there are lots of hypodermic needles in there. Those goddamned druggies set fire to the place. Or maybe the developers did it, so as to take over the site without compensating the people who live there …” Pulled along by his dog the man trots off in the snow. Oleg parts two strands of barbed wire, performs contortions, manages to squeeze through.

  The inside of the building is layered with soot, the wooden handrail has burned, but the staircases between the floors are intact. Oleg climbs up, stepping over bundles of charred clothing and the carcasses of furniture. The door to the attic consists of charred timbers. He pushes it gently with the toe of his boot, it opens, spilling long threads of ash.

  The skylight window is broken, a draft sets the snowflakes whirling as they tumble in from the snow-covered roof. Everything has burned without collapsing—Oleg recognizes the black silhouettes of the chairs and the two couches. The zinc bathtub, equally blackened, is filled with a strange substance. The little child’s bath is full of potatoes, as hard as anthracite! The thought that somebody has been staying there does not distress him. On the contrary, he is touched by this pathetic effort at survival, establishing a supply of potatoes, breathing the snowy air coming through the skylight.

  The table his father worked on has not moved. However, all that is left of the model is an irregular pyramid of dead embers. Ruins. The very things his father dreamed of. “Their existence freed at last from time’s petty frenzies,” he used to say. Oleg also recalls the lines of poetry his father used to murmur as he gazed at his strange edifice: “So hab ich dieses Schloss erbaut / Ihm mein Erworbnes anvertraut …” (Yes, he had built himself a castle and committed his worldly wealth to it …). These words, in the attic of an empty apartment building, have a poignantly ridiculous ring to them. That “worldly wealth,” this mountain of cinders!

  Using a knife retrieved from the kitchen, Oleg prods the remnants of the burned model. The panels of its charred architecture crumble, revealing fragments of wood that the flames did not consume. Suddenly the metal encounters a more solid object. Oleg probes carefully, pushing aside the little mounds of charcoal. Finally he puts down the knife and extracts what was hidden at the heart of the ruin: two little porcelain figures. A musician with his violin tucked under his arm, and a singer with her hands clasped to her breast. Those objects that in the old days he mistook for a fragment of coral …

  Two naive figurines that, as a tiny child, he used to see on his mother’s night table.

  IV

  The day after his arrival in Berlin he meets Max Pfister, the director of the film The Red-Blooded Tsarina. The filmmaker, now in his sixties, lives in former East Berlin. “I moved here from Cologne right after the Wall came down. My friends said I was mad and now they envy me. It’s much more in here. You’ll see. There’s a lot going on. Soon all the avant-garde in the arts will be moving into these socialist slums they’re renovating …”

  Pfister has fixed himself up an apartment in a building that is a cross between a greenhouse and a gym. A glass roof eighteen feet from the ground affords a pallid light, the inordinate height makes everything seem small—the furniture, the pictures, and Pfister himself, who is, in any case, rather short, bald, and wears tiny round spectacles. His partner appears, a young blond woman who is a head taller than him. She greets Oleg with a sullen gesture and begins wrapping a scarf around her neck. “Would you like to have a drink with us?” Pfister asks and receives a cantankerous snort in reply, followed by a swift slam of the door.

  “She’s a Czech,” he explains. This elucidation is somewhat elliptical and he adds, with a little laugh: “I’m not sure if she’s got a grudge against the Germans for ’38, or the Russians for ’68, ha, ha, ha …”

  Oleg nods without understanding too well. The language he hears is familiar to him but he cannot keep up with the topics under discussion. After all, he’s been doing nothing but walking about all day in the hope of grasping the essence of his phantom fatherland in one long panoramic survey … He collapses onto a sofa in a lethargic mix of hunger, exhaustion, and disorientation. He has a vague sense that the Czech must be fed up with hangers-on like him coming to see her Max. And that, like all women from Eastern Europe, she would be happier in cozier and more affluent surroundings, rather than this aircraft hangar with its glass roof soiled by pigeons. And that … yes, she’s young and Max is old and rather ugly …

  He has always had a vision of Germany as a tragic digest of History, the history of the Erdmann family, among others. The most disorienting thing at the moment is coming upon a couple and their petty tiffs, a banal domestic situation: an aging artist and a young woman from the former socialist bloc who hopes, thanks to this “old man,” to become integrated into life in the West …

  He gets a grip on himself, grasps the glass of whiskey Pfister hands him, seizes a good fistful of salted almonds. “Don’t worry, Oleg, we’ll go and eat soon
. But first I’d like to show you my film …”

  The Red-Blooded Tsarina dates from the midseventies, one can tell this without looking at the credits. From the first sequences the period shows through—not so much in the technical quality as in the choice of shots, the rhythm. But especially in this mix of the claims it lays to sexual freedom and an overemphatic striving for formal novelty … Catherine is played by an actress who wears clothes totally unsuited to the rigors of Russian winters: highly revealing silk dressing gowns and shifts … And when she appears swathed in fur coats one can be sure that their panels are about to burst open to reveal thrusting breasts with scarlet nipples …

  “It’s the archetype of woman as animal,” comments Pfister. “I wanted to step back from history a little, so as to bring the animal nature of desire into prominence, its immediacy, its Dasein …”

  Oleg notices that the German language is particularly well equipped for giving expression to these abstractions. But at the same time this “bringing into prominence” seems to him comic, for instead of a nebulous Dasein, it is, above all, a big pair of breasts that achieves “prominence” …

  He hastens to avoid denigrating the film: no, it’s far from being crap! In fact, the story line is reminiscent of that very first screenplay he wrote himself. The technique of the animated cartoon—the mirror goes up, a naked lover is seen in the alcove, Catherine moves sinuously to accentuate every curve … The mirror comes down and there she is, very much the Semiramis of the North, in the process of signing a decree or receiving Diderot, the comte de Ségur, or Casanova …

  There are happy inventions that even Kozin would not have scorned! The mirror has just covered up the alcove and there is the French ambassador, baron de Breteuil, coming into the salon. They embark on a discussion, Catherine sets out her view of the situation in Europe, the Frenchman gives his rejoinder. Suddenly his eyes grow wider: there in an armchair, like half a man cut in two, “sits” a pair of the favorite’s breeches. “I had a good consultant,” Pfister explains. “He told me they made very rigid leather breeches at that time … But here, of course, it’s a metaphor for the utter emptiness of the whole diplomatic circus …”