The Life of an Unknown Man

by Andrei Makine

  The loudspeakers cutting through the musical hullabaloo seem to be in agreement with Shutov: “Welcome to the launch of the Great May Revolution. Everyone to Palace Square. The mayor of Saint Petersburg is going to have his head cut off.” Laughter erupts, masks scowl, another Peter the Great, this time on horseback, towers above the crowd.

  And down below, almost on the ground, a shrill voice rings out: “Let me through, I’m late! Make way!” A dwarf, an elderly man, dressed as a king’s fool, or rather a czar’s fool. This waddling figure scurries along, pushing the crowd aside with his short arms. One of the “Brazilian dancers” is with him, clearing a passage for him, shaking her feathers and her bracelets. Clearly they are expected at Palace Square and their disarray is both comic and touching. “A buffoon,” thinks Shutov, stepping aside for the little man. “A shut…” The half-naked dancer bumps into him, her feathers tickle his cheek, he senses the vigor of this young perfumed body but the woman’s gaze is strangely sad.

  “Hey you, oaf! Why aren’t you laughing like everyone else? How dare you? A head with no smile belongs on the block!” Shutov tries to break free from the hands that grip him, then yields to the game. Actors dressed as executioners surround him, he remembers the orders repeated by the loudspeakers: people with sour faces are enemies of the carnival: off with their heads! There is nothing cruel about the execution: a hilarious sentence, the swing of a plastic ax, with the crowd shouting encouragement… One of the executioners asks him, “So, is it a long time since you were in Saint Petersburg?” but does not listen to the reply and rushes off to hunt down other resisters to the general merriment.

  Once at Palace Square, Shutov begins to grasp what lies at the heart of the changes. A geyser of energy, held in check for a long time. The frenzied search for a new logic to life after the highly logical madness of dictatorship. He sees the mayor mounting the scaffold, yes, the mayor of Saint Petersburg in person! (Would this be possible in Paris or New York?) The firecrackers explode, the crowd hoots noisily, the mayor smiles, almost flattered. An executioner brandishes… an enormous pair of scissors, points them at the condemned man’s neck, seizes his tie and cuts it off! A wave of delirium ripples across the square at the sight of the trophy displayed. A loudspeaker chokes with delight: “A Gucci tie!” Shutov surprises himself by cheering with the others, slapping strangers’ hands, physically bonded with these thousands of living beings. The little clown seen just now climbs breathlessly onto the throne and a magistrate in ceremonial robes declares him to be the governor of the city.

  “A collective exorcism,” he thinks as he goes to his rendezvous with Yana. “Three days of this burlesque May Revolution to undo decades of terror, to wash away the blood of real revolutions. To deafen themselves with the noise of firecrackers so as to forget the sound of bombs. To unleash these merry executioners into the streets so as to blot out the shadowy figures that came knocking at doors in the night not so long ago, dragging men out, still half asleep, throwing them into black cars.”

  Behind the Winter Palace a placard announces a “family portrait.” Seated on folding chairs, a Peter the Great, a Lenin, a Stalin, and, beyond an untoward gap, a Gorbachev, complete with birthmark painted on the middle of his bald head. Stalin, pipe in mouth, talks on his cell phone. A Nicholas II and a Brezhnev (the missing links) rejoin the group, laden with packs of beer. Laughter, camera flashes. The barker, a young woman in a miniskirt, moves among the crowd: “Now then, ladies and gentlemen, spare a coin for the losers of history. We accept dollars too…”

  “They’ve managed to turn the page at last,” Shutov says to himself. And the thought of being left behind, like a dried flower, between the preceding pages, gives him the desire to hurry, to catch up on lost time.

  “You didn’t have time to change?”

  “No… Well, I only brought this jacket.”

  “I see…”

  Their words are drowned by the music. He smiles, ruefully, fingering the lapels of his jacket. Bulging pockets, faded material… The restaurant staff know Yana and greet her with respect. Some of the customers nod to her. She is among her own people, thinks Shutov, unable to guess what criterion, in the new Russia, distinguishes such people from the rest. Friendship, simply? Profession? Politics?

  They sit at a terrace overlooking a park where boisterously merry music is being played, so this disturbance is not the fault of the restaurant. The headwaiter offers his apologies. “Oh, this tercentenary…,” sighs Yana.

  They need to shout to be heard, but what Shutov would like to say cannot be uttered in ringing tones. So they do as the others do; smile, eat, then yell and gesticulate. From this intermittent dialogue he learns about what he already knew: Yana’s life after their brief, undeclared love affair. Work, marriage, the birth of a son, divorce, return to Leningrad, which had once more become Saint Petersburg…

  The words that falter within him, rendered fragile by the passage of so many years, are too frail to cut through the noise. “Do you remember that evening at Peterhof,” he would like to say, “the golden haze over the Gulf of Finland…” He also learns what he had not known: the hotel chain where Yana works belongs to her! Well, not to her in person, but to the mysterious “us” she refers to when talking about her life. Her partner and her? Their family business? More than the music it is this language barrier that makes comprehension hard.

  Suddenly the din stops. An amazed silence, one can hear the rustling of the leaves… And the cell phones ring, as if the calls had all been waiting for this pause. No, it was simply that people could not hear them before. They all respond at the same time, delighted at having recovered the power of speech.

  Yana is telephoned as well, and Shutov can already manage to identify the person she is speaking to from the tone she adopts. That slightly irritated voice is reserved for the staff of one of “her” hotels. The sulky, simpering tones for a man whose bad temper has to be soothed and who seems to be a part of this vague but powerful “us.” Her partner, no doubt. Or else a husband from whom she must conceal this lover of thirty years ago? No, that would be too stupid…

  She puts the telephone aside and he hopes that at last he will be able to tell her the purpose of his visit. “We’re having a housewarming party, tomorrow,” she says. “Just a glass of champagne—it’s still a building site, as you saw. There aren’t even any tables. And in the evening we’re inviting everyone to our country place… Some of the key people in Saint Petersburg. I don’t know if you’d be interested. You won’t know anyone… The mayor should be coming…” This is someone Shutov does know: the beheaded man whose Gucci tie was cut short…

  A couple come over to greet Yana. Rapid glances of appraisal at Shutov: Who is he? A Russian? But not dressed smartly enough for this spot. A foreigner? But lacking the ease of manner that can be sensed on encountering people from the West. Shutov reads this judgment in their looks. The embarrassment he had detected in Yana becomes clear to him: he is unclassifiable, difficult to introduce to friends, he has a poor social profile. When the couple move away he tries to assume the relaxed air of a former fellow student: “So this dacha, where did you build it? Yes, I’d like to drop by.” Yana hesitates, as if she regrets having issued the invitation: “It’s an old izba. The plot is a bit constricted for us, less than eight acres. On the Gulf of Finland…”

  A man stops in front of Yana, begins talking to her. “The golden haze over the Gulf of Finland…,” Shutov recalls.

  The man is handsome, young (under forty, or at least at that smooth and tanned age that people with the means know how to fix). “Tall, dark, and asinine,” Shutov thinks. (It was something Léa used to say and they would both laugh…) The malice of it makes him feel guilty. This handsome man can, in fact, be graded by American norms of virility, in such cases the French speak of B-movie heroes… An impeccably cut lightweight suit, the manner of a seducer indulgent toward his victims’ weakness. Yana adopts a voice that is new to Shutov, an assumed nonchalance, slipping in
to frail tones of fond helplessness. Her face, in particular, expresses this, her eyes, as she gazes up at the man: the concerned look of a woman who has lost a loved one in the middle of a crowd. The music starts again, she stands up, draws closer to the man, and this tender anxiety is even more visible when their words can no longer be heard.

  “This must be her lover…” The brutality of the observation irritates him but he no longer has any wish to delude himself. “The golden haze over the Gulf of Finland…” It was idiotic to think that she would still remember it. He calls to mind the different voices Yana employs to speak to her staff, to her husband, to this tall, dark, handsome man. She leads several lives at once and it is clear that this excites her. She stands there before her lover, considerably shorter than him, and her whole body betrays the demeanor of a woman giving herself. Shutov feels like an actor who has just missed his cue.

  The man brushes Yana’s cheek with his lips, takes his leave. She sits down, directs a look of radiant blindness at Shutov. They drink coffee without speaking to one another… As he escorts her to her car, Shutov is tempted to warn her to go carefully, as she seems so absent. But she quickly pulls herself together; she has to “dash off to a shareholders’ meeting” and advises Shutov to return on foot, “you take the main alley through the park and then turn left, remember.” She drives off as he embarks on an observation about how vividly he recalls those pathways amid the autumn foliage…

  Emerging from the trees he encounters the Brazilian dancers. They are changing in a small van. Shutov recognizes the one who was running along earlier, clearing the way for the fool. She has taken off her plumage, washed away the mascara, her face is very young and her look a little melancholy, as before. Shutov perceives a tenderness in it, possibly intended, strangely enough, for him…

  As he opens the door to Yana’s new apartment he hears Vlad’s voice: “Listen. It’s quite simple. We need two topless girls for the back cover. Then you call the editorial team. If they won’t include it in the article, we withdraw our ad and that’s that…” Intrigued, Shutov walks toward the voice. As he passes the little bedroom where the old man lodges he catches sight of that same green blanket, a hand holding a book.

  Each title includes a woman’s name: Tatyana, or the Fire Tamer; Deborah and the Chemistry of Pleasure; Bella, a Woman with No Taboos… Vlad is showing Shutov the new series launched by his publishing house. They lifted the idea from Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, he concedes. But Nabokov himself borrowed it from women’s romantic fiction… The young man talks a language Shutov has never heard in Russia. “Market analysis,” “book promotion,” “boosting sales”… For the new series what they needed was a clear definition of the “generational niche,” which, happily, is quite broad: female readers between the ages of thirty and fifty who are “not very intellectual” (coming from Vlad, this is a compliment) and a small minority of men who “have a bit of a problem with sex” and will read these books on the quiet.

  Seeing Shutov’s perplexed expression, Vlad hastens to add, “Fine, we also have more serious brands!” and he mentions various series of historical novels, family sagas, political fiction… But it is the word “brand” that disconcerts Shutov. Vlad translates: “They’re… how do you say it in Russian? Well… Yes. Makes, labels. You see, all these Bellas and Tatyanas, we have to bring them out at regular intervals. That’s how you create reading habits, you know, get people addicted. The problem is that each of these books runs to five hundred pages. No writer can keep pace with that. Unless he’s what my grandfather used to call a Stakhanovite. And so, several of them write under one name, preferably an American one. That’s a brand…”

  Vlad notices that this explanation plunges Shutov even deeper in thought. He leans over, picks up several volumes that are lying there on the wall-to-wall carpet. “Look, there’s some heavyweight stuff as well.” Shutov scans the titles. Secrets of the Kremlin; Stalin, Between God and the Devil; Nicholas II, the Innocence of a Martyr…

  “Are you sure he was really innocent?” asks Shutov, trying to rouse himself from his bemusement.

  “Of course. They’ve just made him a saint!”

  “For having led Russia into revolution…”

  “No, hold on. The revolution was a plot hatched abroad. Look, this book here is quite categorical about it…”

  Menacing shadows on a bloodred cover. The Occult Forces Behind the Revolution. Shutov smiles.

  “Ouch! That’s scary!”

  “That’s the idea. And you should have seen the ad I put together for the launch. There was this Russian monk praying in front of an icon with a crowd of devils dancing all around him…”

  “That’s not very close to the historical truth. Especially if your monk looked like Rasputin.”

  “Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet. You know what my boss’s motto is? ‘Only the blind are excused from buying our books.’ And it’s more or less the case. But you need imagination for it. When we were launching the book on Stalin I dug up a cleaning woman who’d worked at his dacha on the Black Sea. Imagine that! She’s a granny aged a hundred now, but I still managed to get her on TV and the interviewer (well, he’s one of our authors) questioned her in such a way that you might have thought she’d been Stalin’s mistress. The next day we’d sold out. That’s historical truth. Or take Bella, with No Taboos. It’s about a brothel where the Moscow underworld go. Well, to launch it on TV we had five prostitutes who swore everything in the book was true…”

  Vlad gets carried away, soon Shutov has not enough arms to hold the rolls of posters, the large-format photographs; Nicholas II adorned with the halo of a newly canonized saint; Stalin with a female figure in the background and a gangster thrusting open the collar of a blouse with the barrel of his revolver to reveal enormous, very pink breasts.

  “The same carnival yet again,” thinks Shutov, violently struck once more by the heady intoxication of the change. What energy this young Vlad has! And this easygoing cynicism, selling books like vacuum cleaners. All these publishing houses have sprung up in just a few years! And already they have this American-style know-how…

  Suddenly, in the armful of documents, Shutov catches sight of a view of a park, with sculptures beneath autumnal foliage. The Summer Garden… The picture vanishes beneath a swatch of color photographs: women embracing, men exchanging tender kisses…

  “That’s our series aimed at sexual minorities,” comments Vlad. “I told you. No one escapes us!” He laughs.

  Shutov remembers the carnival executioners who cut off his head earlier: that’s it, no one is to look sad. The parallel is disturbing.

  “You know, Vlad, in the old days, when I was young, a good many poets were published. The print runs for their books were not vast but there was… How can I put it?… Yes, there was real passion in those of us who read them. Often printed on very poor paper. Poetry was our bible…”

  “Yeah. I can see what kind of books you’re talking about. The old folks heave a sigh and call it ‘Great Literature.’ Listen, I’ll tell you what I think about it. I once met a girl, an American, in the same job as me. And she started giving me a lot of stuff, like: oh sure, we publish crap but that’s so we can publish Real Literature! What two-faced bastards these puritans are! Well, I wanted to put her on the spot so I quoted Marx: the only criterion of truth is the practical result. And in publishing the result is the number of sales, OK? If crap books sell it’s because they’re needed. You should have seen her face!”

  He roars with laughter then, glancing at the television, declares, “But the main thing is, if I published your poets with their small print runs, I’d never be able to afford wheels like that.”

  On the screen (the sound is off) the car races up toward the sunrise. “To be on time, when every second counts!” Vlad’s cell phone emits jazz notes and the conversation breaks into slangy English, incomprehensible to Shutov. Vlad covers the telephone w
ith his hand, winks at Shutov, and whispers: “Only joking!…” Yes, only a joke, that remark about the car, thinks Shutov, as he puts aside the rafts of photographs piled up in his lap. A joke, shutka, the same root as his name…

  Behind the door where the mute old man lodges, the chink of a spoon against a cup can be heard.

  Shutov makes his way back to his room, his halting steps keeping pace with the arguments that jostle one another in his head. Wisdom after the event… He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author. Lines of verse carried the weight of long sentences north of the Arctic Circle where so many poets died…

  He imagines Vlad’s mocking reply: “And you think that was good?” There it is. A naive question like this is hard to counter. Why should the Gulag be a criterion of good literature? And suffering a measure of authenticity? But, above all, who can judge the value of lives, of books? In what way can Vlad’s existence be said to be less meaningful than that of some poor bastard using his last few kopecks to buy a pamphlet by a banned poet printed on wrapping paper? To these young Russians no book is forbidden now. They travel the world (Vlad has just come back from Boston), they are well fed, well educated, free of complexes… And yet they lack something…

  Shutov is trying not to think like a petty, embittered old man. No, Vlad has no reason to be jealous of that Soviet youth of thirty years ago. They had nothing to set him dreaming. Nothing. Except, perhaps, a volume of poems with grayish pages, verses aglow with the golden light of leaves in a park… “I should have told him,” thinks Shutov, and knows he could not have found the right words: a verbal block that makes him unable to explain the richness of that wretched past.