The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  Three o’clock in the morning, the day has arrived when Léa will come to collect her cardboard boxes, the remnants of her life in Shutov’s life. After she has left he will go on talking to himself, a little like the old man at the Café de la Gare.

  He realizes he has never said anything to Léa that was vitally important. Has not dared, has not known how to. He has wasted so many days (miraculous days, days made for love) proclaiming the poet’s sacred mission, railing against the intellectual establishment. At first she used to listen to him with the reverence prophets enjoy. Literary Paris fascinated her and Shutov seemed like a very well-established writer. The illusion lasted less than a year. The time it took for a young woman from the provinces to get her bearings and realize that this man was, in fact, no more than a marginal figure. And even his past as a dissident, which in the old days had given Shutov a certain aura, was becoming a flaw, or at least a sign of how prehistoric he was: just think, a dissident from the eighties of the previous century, an opposition figure exiled from a country that had since been erased from all the maps! “The early eighties, the time when I was a baby,” Léa must have told herself. Now her affection became tinged with pity. She sought to extricate Shutov from his isolation. And this was the start of a war neither could win.

  “We’re not in the nineteenth century now!” she would argue. “Books are a product like any other . . . Well, because they’re for sale, of course! All right, go ahead. Do what Bulgakov did. Write to be published thirty years from now. After you’re dead.”

  Shutov would grow heated, give examples of writers who had been rediscovered: Nietzsche, and those forty copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra published at the author’s expense and given to his friends.

  “Fine. Give me your manuscript and in an hour I’ll come back with forty copies. You can sign the first one for your Australian neighbor, and he’ll wedge open his skylight with it. You’ve got the wrong period, Ivan! These days the most popular man in France is a footballer, not a poet . . .”

  “In some countries that period survives!”

  “Really? In Outer Manchuria, I suppose.”

  “No. In Russia . . .”

  These duels had an indirect consequence: Shutov began to dream of the Russia he had not seen for twenty years and where, he believed, a life persisted, rocked to sleep by well-loved lines of verse. A park beneath golden foliage, a woman walking in silence, like the heroine of a poem.

  That image of a skylight wedged open with a manuscript was a milestone. He sensed a certain arrogance in Léa, that pert humor, known as gouaille, so relished by the French (he had never understood why). She began spending time away often, on the pretext of her journalism classes or interning at a publisher.

  One day he had to go out early and downstairs on the lid of a trash can he noticed a large black leather bag. In the metro a doubt assailed him: that bundle had not been a bag. Passing again at noon he did not see it but guessed it had been Léa’s old jacket. A frayed lining, leather curves molded to the shape of her body . . . The intense sadness that overcame him surprised him. Now, at last, he felt capable of putting into words the fleeting images that were the only truth in his life: that old jacket, Léa’s arm flung out across the covers in her sleep . . . She came back in the evening clutching a parcel to her chest. Shutov’s latest manuscript. Returned by a publisher. They ate supper in silence, then very quickly he flew into a rage against the “pygmyism,” as he called it, of the current literary world. Léa must have taken pity on him because she murmured in a less brittle voice, yes, her old voice: “Don’t be silly, Ivan. You’re not a failure at all. You’re like a . . . Yes, an explosion still waiting to be heard.”

  From that evening onward she became even more remote.

  But amid this waning of their love affair, an impressive recovery occurred. Shutov was invited to appear on a television program! Bizarrely, for a novel he had published three years previously, which had enjoyed no success. The publicist resolved the mystery: “You talked about Afghanistan in it: and now, with everything that’s happening there . . .” It was the book in which a young soldier burst into tears at the sight of an old woman and her dog killed in an artillery bombardment.

  In telling Léa about the invitation Shutov chose to feign indifference and even made one or two mocking remarks (“Just you wait. I’ll torpedo their ratings . . .”). But in reality he felt as if he were making his last throw. In this young woman’s eyes he could once again become the writer who initiated her knowledgeably into the secrets of the profession.

  He bought a plain blue shirt, because “stripes cause strobing on the screen,” he explained. Léa went with him, made up as if she were taking part in the broadcast herself.

  This was due to go out around midnight. “After the game shows, the football, and the rest. That’s their scale of values.” Shutov quickly resolved not to allow himself any rancor. On television one must smile, be a little simplistic, no nuances. “Break a leg,” whispered Léa, and, tense as he was, Shutov gave a start before remembering this strange custom. From that moment onward it all felt quite surreal to him.

  Dreamlike, too, was the late-night scheduling, which made the participants seem like conspirators (or spirits) gathered, ironically, around a garishly lit table. But above all, this obligation to be a smiling idiot. Nobody demanded it, yet a mysterious force clamped these foolish grins onto their faces, made them ogle like prostitutes soliciting customers.

  Perched on a high stool (“just like the ones in a pickup joint,” thought Shutov), he studied the “panel.” There was a young black francophone writer, with a grin like in the Uncle Ben advertisement. A Chinese man, with a sly air, his gaze shifty behind his thin glasses. And, for good measure, himself, Shutov, a Russian. Three living proofs of the globalization of French literature. Just across from Shutov the makeup girl was giving the finishing touches to the face of a . . . What could one call him? Journalist, writer, editor, member of several prize juries, a well-known mediacrat whom Shutov used to refer to as “one of the literary mafia,” and at whom he must now smile. On this man’s left they had just seated a psychologist who specialized in happiness, a state of mind rare in rich countries. The psychologist was talking to his neighbor, a young woman dressed like a Halloween witch. Finally a latecomer appeared, a woman in her fifties with graying hair and a handsome, faded face. Blinded by the lights, she wandered this way and that around the table until an assistant showed her to her seat, next to Shutov. He met her gaze, the intelligence of which was at odds with the smooth pink of her makeup. She was the only one not smiling.

  The broadcast began. The African was on first and revealed himself to be a brilliant professional. Everything about his little performance was polished: his voice, his laughter, his lilting delivery: then a veritable comic interlude in which, quoting from his novel, he played the parts of both the rich lover and the cunning mistress, amid a whole host of relatives, storytellers, and tribal magicians. A born actor.

  After such a display the Chinese writer, despite his obsequious facial expressions, appeared dull. This was because he could hardly speak French. And yet this was the language he purported to write in and in which he was published by one of the best houses in Paris . . . What Shutov heard sounded, yet again, like something from a surrealist play. “Yang is joined to yin . . . so yang with yin is making . . . And Confucius is saying . . . Red dragon mountain . . . Yin completes yang . . .” These last words were repeated so many times that the presenter himself became confused: “So your character, yin fact—excuse me—in fact . . .”

  But Shutov’s performance was a real disaster. He began with a long, elegant sentence: the duty incumbent on a writer to bear witness, the quest for truth, the way the psychology of the characters can subvert the author’s own preconceptions. For example, a battle-hardened soldier, confronted by the bodies of an old woman and her dog, bursting into tears. The presenter scented danger in this monologue and, with a deft intervention, found a way to li
mit the damage: “So, according to your book, it seems as if the Russians have a lot to answer for . . .” This journalistic vagueness created an opening for a recovery. But Shutov was already getting out of his depth. His tirade was compressed like a concertina, in it the writer’s mission, the Taliban, Tolstoy rereading Stendhal to write the Battle of the Borodino, surface-to-air rockets, and the obscenity of aestheticism in a book about the war were all mixed up together . . . A gleam of compassion appeared in the presenter’s eyes. “So there we have it,” he summed up. “Can it ever be possible to write about war in a novel?” This coup de grâce saved Shutov. He froze, his cheeks burning with shame, and with only one thought in his head: “Léa was watching all that.”

  The contributions of the others gradually distanced him from the appalled dummy he had turned into. “When a man caresses his sexual partner,” the psychologist of happiness was saying, “the nucleus of her dorso-median thalamus begins to . . .” The young witch novelist took up the tale, her eyes widening in a trance: “The other is always the bringer of evil . . . The evil we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves . . .” It was already past midnight and the dreamlike aura was rapidly intensifying. Shutov felt less ridiculous. The tension within him finally relaxed, giving way to a melancholy clarity.

  He told himself that this mildly weird charade was being played out in a country that had given the world Promethean geniuses, whose words had once confronted exile, death, and, worse still, attacks by philistines. A prophetic daring, lives sacrificed on the altar of truth . . . In his youth that was how he had seen this great and ancient literature. Now, on the other side of the table there was this elegantly smiling Chinese writer, whose books had been rewritten by an obscure editor (a living author brought to life by a ghost). On his left was this young woman setting out to shock the viewers with her demonic appearance. Facing him, an African from a land covered in millions of corpses was spinning pornographic yarns, lubricious anecdotes laced with folklore of dubious authenticity . . .

  Shutov did not grasp what it was that dispelled this feeling of absurdity. His neighbor, the woman with graying hair, had a faint voice, or, rather, she employed no vocal tricks. It seemed as if she had serenely come to terms with the rules of this stupid game: on television, speaking last at midnight, a woman with her looks has no chance. Pensively, her head bowed, she met no one’s eyes. It seemed to Shutov as if she were addressing him alone.

  The story is very simple, she was saying, a woman loves a very young man who is hooked on drugs. After a year and a half of struggle she manages to save him. A month later he meets a girl of his own age and leaves.

  “In fact, the book starts when it’s all over for my heroine. I think that’s how it is in our lives. When you expect nothing more, life opens up to what is really important . . .”

  Suddenly, still in her calm voice, she addressed Shutov: “Just now you were quoting Chekhov . . . Yes, he encouraged us to cut the opening and the ending of a story. But I don’t know if Doctor Chekhov’s remedy can cure a novel. In any event, my heroine comes to life in the part of the story he advised us to cut.”

  And without any change of tone, without declaiming, she read several sentences from the book open in front of her. A forest in winter, a woman on a footpath with a brown carpet of fallen leaves, a soothing, acrid scent, grief turning to joy at each step taken down a misty avenue of trees . . .

  The broadcast ended. Shutov remained seated, his eyes half closed. A forest in the mist, a figure disappearing at the end of a pathway . . . A technician roused him to retrieve his microphone. In the corridor, near the makeup room, he caught up with the gray-haired woman. “Why did you take part in that farce?” He did not have the courage to ask her this, murmuring instead: “I was grateful for Chekhov! Thanks to you I didn’t look so stupid. But I didn’t catch the name of your book . . .”

  “After Her Life. I’ll send it to you. I read yours when it came out. I’ve read all your books. But I didn’t expect to see you here. Why did you come?”

  They smiled, imagining the excuses writers generally concoct: my publisher was very insistent, I was there to hold the line against dumbing down . . . And at that moment he saw Léa.

  “That was fantastic!” she declared, kissing him on the cheek. He turned to introduce her to the gray-haired woman but the latter had already gone into the makeup room. “No, it was great,” Léa went on. “It made you want to read the books. Especially that Chinese writer. I really liked him. What he said about the yin and the yang was really deep. But I thought the woman next to you, the one who came on last, was, like, hopeless. Did you see how she was made up? She looked . . .”

  The “hopeless” woman emerged from the makeup room and Shutov saw her moving away. As she walked along she was rubbing her face with a tissue and from a distance one might have thought she was wiping away tears.

  In the taxi Léa’s enthusiasm knew no bounds. Shutov reflected that the stupid media magic had given him a makeover and perhaps what had felt like a wretched failure would give their partnership a new lease on life. Léa praised the young witch’s performance. She thought it clever how she had “only just got away with it.” Then she went back to the woman reading a few lines from her book. “I simply can’t make that one out. It was a real mistake putting her on. She’s, like, old and dreary, you know, not sexy at all. And she looked as if she was bored out of her skull. It was lucky for her you mentioned Chekhov. It gave her the chance to show off a bit . . .”

  Shutov touched Léa’s hand and murmured very calmly: “You don’t need to go on, Léa. I know you’re not as moronic as you make out.”

  Then he quickly regretted this undiplomatic remark, knowing that people never forgive you for refusing to join in games of self-deception.

  Nor was Shutov deceived by Léa’s “infidelities.” The word had a farcical ring to it—he found others (“she sleeps with a friend from time to time”), preferring to act like a writer: to live at arm’s length from the situation so as not to suffer from it and one day to be able to describe it. But the posture of the detached observer is a delusion. He suffered, despised his own suffering, lapsed into mocking cynicism, reemerged to clear his beloved of all suspicion, behaved, in fact, precisely like the hero of one of those psychological novels whose authors meticulously flaunt their knowledge of the human psyche, just the type of book he detested.

  What he succeeded best at was turning a blind eye. He had already noticed that, with increasing age, this exercise became easier.

  That evening, too, he would have forced himself to see nothing, had Léa not decided to present him with an illusion of love regained.

  It was a bleak dusk in early February; reflected in the tarmac was a whole subterranean world into which you could have hurled yourself and disappeared. Shutov was on his way back from a meeting (a publisher had been explaining to him just why the subject of his novel was unsaleable). Unable to brave the crowd in the metro, he had climbed all the way up to Ménilmontant on foot. Just a little more pain might make his life unbearable and what then?… Cut his own throat? String himself up? Such things are fine in a novel, but in real life the final straw took the form of an overturned trash can below their apartment building, a cornucopia spilling out its household garbage. Not something to slit your carotid artery over, my good scribblers!

  As he mounted the narrow spiral staircase he could already smell the aroma of a wood fire. Behind the door of the dovecote there was a ripple of silky music but in the time it took to locate the keyhole Shutov experienced conflicting sensations: within his attic a party was in full swing yet he, a man clad in a rain-soaked overcoat, no longer possessed the right key to enter into this convivial life.

  Léa had prepared a dinner, lit the fire and candles, the illusion was complete. Right down to the simulation of their readings in the old days. At the end of the meal she declared in somewhat exaggerated tones: “I’ve just been reading Chekhov’s ‘Vanka.’ You know, it’s heartbreaking. I wept… No, I r
eally cried my eyes out!”

  Shutov studied her. An attractive young woman smoking nonchalantly, curled up in a feline pose (“a hackneyed image,” he quibbled). And two years earlier that girl rather strapped for cash in a telephone booth at the Gare de l’Est. A striking but natural change: the swift adaptability of youth, the vigor of a life taking wing. Journalism classes, which, in France, lead to everything, a group of friends her own age. And this still useful, aging man, whom it would be easy to get rid of. A man she feels like cheering up, one winter’s evening, by lighting up his garret with a scattering of sparks from her youthful, free, intense existence…

  “You know, Léa, I’ve never been crazy about Chekhov.”

  In Shutov’s voice there was the hint of an overtaut string stretched too far, despite the banality of his observation. Drowsy as she was, she must have noticed it.

  “I see. I thought you… Look, remember you used to swear by him! His sentences like lancet stabs. You were the one who used to say that…”

  His elbows on the table, he massaged his brow, then looked at Léa and realized that what she saw was this face creased by a whole evening of pulling forced expressions.

  “No, I’m not talking about his style,” he replied. “He’s a storyteller without equal. Concision, the art of detail, humor. It’s all there. I bow to him! What goes against the grain is all that compassion of Chekhov’s. Granted, he’s a humanist. He takes pity on an aristocrat who’s blown all her money in Paris and returns to Russia to bemoan her lot in her beloved cherry orchard. He feels sorry for three provincial women who can’t manage to leave their own backyard and go to Moscow. He laments the fate of a whole crowd of doctors, petty gentry, eternal students and…”