All Slavic women were named Olga, Eva, or Tatiana, and their mothers too. One evening, very late, on a lamp-lit street corner in Old Montreal, my eyes fell upon a girl with endlessly long legs perched on her high heels. She was making her long blond hair dance in front of her friend’s face as she wrote down her name and telephone number for him on a piece of paper. I heard her say, her voice echoing on the old stones, “My name is Tatianaaa and my mother’s name is Tatianaaa too…”
At age twelve, sitting very straight in the first row of my classroom in front of the blackboard, I memorized the names of the countries and their leaders, the ones we were supposed to admire and the others we had to fear, imagining what I would do if I were the president of the United States, a land whose great qualities we heard so much about. As I dreamed of the bionic woman heading out on a mission for the American government to fight the Communist Mafia, you were dreaming of Vassili Zaitsev, a young hunter who became the star sniper during the Battle of Stalingrad, the guy who made the front page of the papers by picking off the Nazis.
You were Vassili Zaitsev and I was Tania Chernova, the woman he said not a word about in his autobiography, the beautiful Belarusian who had lost her grandparents at the hands of the Germans and who, out of revenge, promised herself she would kill as many as possible. She said they were sticks she had to snap. Tania Chernova dreamed of being a ballerina, but became a sniper. She was a student of Vassili Zaitsev, and fell in love with him. Hollywood portrayed them making love among the soldiers sleeping on the ground in Stalingrad, heaped one against the other, their clothes black with powder and coal. They make love with the desperate pleasure of combat, when the nation and the individual come together as one. When she was wounded, Vassili took Tania to the hospital before leaving for the front. She would never see him again. The day she learned of his death, she sank into a deep depression. Years later, she learned that, against all hope, he was still alive, but by then she was convinced he had never loved her because he hadn’t tried to find her. He continued his life without her, after risking it at her side, as if she couldn’t exist for him off the battlefield or crouching in the ruins of a building, ready to fire. He made love to her in the bed of death, but he couldn’t love her in life.
What separated our countries was more than an ocean, it was a ravine dug by centuries of war and torture, the crematoria America looked on from afar, so astonishing, that smoke, but not really concerned. That was the wound you carried, and when you cast your eyes upon us, you represented your entire nation, the tree for the forest. When you stood before me and the Iron Curtain fell, with it the world you had known fell too, this place of pain you cherished since you had been torn from it too soon.
You used to say, “What’s good for the Soviet is death for the American.”
When you wanted to express that something was incomprehensible or unacceptable, you would say, “It’s not pussy or the Red Army.”
That moment when our bodies start to exist, when everything changes because it’s stronger than anything, when we’re ready to turn our backs on everything, work, family, country, when we’re ready to leave and not look back and start a new life. That moment, that lightning strike—it’s like a declaration of war.
That scene would be the most painful to write, that first time I wore like a precious jewel, and kept in the velvet case of my memory like a treasure. That thing, out of silly superstition, that we don’t dare speak of, afraid words will make it disappear, or make us realize it never existed. The thing inside us we protect with a conviction that resembles faith.
The scene is moving toward me. It’s the row of tanks on Tiananmen Square, or the men of the 103rd Division taking over Prague Castle. It is the knot of history, the touchstone, the stronghold, and I feel smaller and smaller when I come to face it. I return to it out of cowardice, to hang on a little longer. I seek refuge there just as, for months, when the Atlantic kept our bodies apart, I would fall asleep with my face buried in your red scarf, the one you left me.
Later, when you were there, you held me in your arms until sleep came for me.
Even now, at times, those memories are like the white cotton sheets of a luxury hotel, the down comforters under which we stretch luxuriously like a cat. When I give in to those images, I feel like an alcoholic. Every time I say it’ll be the last, the very last last time, but soon I break my promise, I run the film even though I know what kind of hangover is in store. I perjure myself and surrender to the pleasure of wrapping myself in them as if they could still exist, refusing to accept that the moment has passed. Suddenly I am sitting outside at the Café Cherrier, telling Julia how I just met you, I’m in love with you, what people call true love has finally happened to me. Julia is delighted, her mouth opens wide in a smile that says how happy she is for me: “You’re just glowing!”
Two years later, Café Cherrier, take two. She is devastated. Her mouth is sad and she says softly, “It started out so well …”
It’s hellish, replaying that scene. I dodge it, I put it off, I turn my back on it, and when the time comes when I can’t avoid it anymore, the duel begins. I play it several times, I train my guns on it, I retreat until I can advance again. My heart beats faster, cold sweat, trembling, fingers crossed, I am risking my life.
Now, when the tears flow, I turn to this story, I think of it the way I used to think only of you, but I put it between you and me. I burn it onto the hard disk of my memory next to the landscapes of Rome, so much beauty taking the place of nightmares. Sitting in the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square, I think of our first night. I watch the moon rise slowly behind the dome, hanging by a thread in the pink sky turning red, then deep blue like the ocean depths, so blue it’s like a dream. Sitting in the arms of the church designed by Bernini, on the stone warm with the heat of the daytime sun, I breathe in the soft breeze and the sweetness of nightfall.
You used to say that the opening sequences of a film contain everything, a few shots and we know right away whether what follows will be good or bad. You said the whole story is located in the incipit, and you made that claim as if you were the first to do so. That was one of those truths you would spout night and day in your constant creation of the world.
One day you sent me a message and explained that our love affair was determined the moment our bodies touched for the first time, and that now you understood I had fallen into your arms because I wanted to give myself to you as if you could save me, and you didn’t want to play the part of the saviour. It was the opposite of what you said at the beginning, when our bodies together in the same surrender was the image of the perfect equation for you, and in that perfection lay the special nature of our meeting, the future of our great love just being born.
A year after that first night, almost to the day, you painted the same picture black, turning the story on its head for our anniversary.
People say the devil writes backwards, and I know the goal of your revisionism was to hide the fact that you were looking to find refuge in my body, you wanted to devour me in a dream of fusion where no one would know who the swallower was and who the swallowed.
You sabotaged even our first time. You destroyed the very memory of the first night we swore our oath, our covenant made flesh. You sullied the scene that made the time between our meetings tolerable, those wonderful moments when at last we could make love again. You would not let me keep the memory that slaked my thirst like an oasis. You even trampled on that.
I was struck and I fell both into your arms and at your feet, moved by the blind love I had for you, I gave myself to it, this love I had always dreamed of. When I let myself go, like a soldier dying after a long battle, my desire was so intense I cried. It consumed me from the start. I was in love with you, and everything conspired to block that love, the lives we led, the time that passed, geography that stood between us, so many obstacles to overcome. But I wanted you so badly I forgot to breathe.
That was the moment, crystal clear, that you wanted to destroy. When I crossed the room to be at your side, when you waited for me quietly in the darkness, a cigarette in your trembling hand. I walked to you and banged against the large wooden tables lit by a quivering beam of moonlight. When I stood before you and you reached out your hand to touch my face. You caressed my cheek with your finger and then, in a single act, a single move, I threw myself against you and you wrapped your arms around me, my mouth against your chest, your body against mine, I held your neck in my hands, I opened my lips to kiss it. Our bodies were as one, and when our mouths opened it was like death, a sweet drunkenness, the bride of fear and pain, something like birth and a death sentence at the same time.
At that moment, I truly saw you, and was convinced that life had to be lived with you.
Later, you would compare us to the coloured squares of a Rubik’s Cube.
In the days before our first night together, I lived in the incomparable expectation of making love to you. Desire had taken over everything, I thought only of you, I could breathe only when our bodies were close. Two years later, I live in the suspension of our breakup, in the hope that you’ll say something, that you’ll lift your hand to cure the hurt and stitch up the wounds, that words will appear on my screen to tell me there was a case of mistaken identity, I was wrong, you weren’t the man I had discovered over time, you really were the one I first met. I dream that you’ll ask for forgiveness in a way that will make me understand in my heart that things will change, something has opened inside you, you will admit to my suffering and the pain you caused.
When you cast yourself as Raskolnikov and me as Sonia, you forgot that Sonia had opened her arms to a man who had served his sentence and been transformed by it. You can run all you like, a heavy stone is weighing on you.
Since breaking up with you, I wait uselessly for you to free me by recognizing that what I understood about you is true, that in you a diabolical pact binds love and hate, an endless dance entwines kindness and violence.
Every part of our life together was stained, the ground sown with landmines. I waited for you to point out the safe zone. I looked for a place where I could stay with you, under a great white flag, but it was no use, even our bed was like a trench. I wanted to express the great tenderness I felt for you, but my fingers, when they moved across your skin, set off spasms that revealed your armour, the walls that rose up like a fortress to keep me out.
Einmal ist keinmal. One single time, one evening, after much wine, you gave yourself to my mouth on your neck, and my lips, my teeth, my tongue, eager and insatiable for the infinite sweetness of your skin.
I would have turned you into an alcoholic to make love to you, to make you surrender.
During my Roman wanderings, which have replaced the spiral of our daily disputes, I see the same blue sky, the yellow, pink, and golden stucco, the tall pines perched elegantly, the green valleys and the paths—this was the landscape of our first meeting. This is where Pompey took refuge after Julius Caesar advanced on Rome.
I met you by the sea, in that villa where, come summer, patrons amuse themselves by welcoming artists, offering them the beauty and richness that leads to inspiration. In that place, for ten days we lingered among the jasmine and laurel, in a decor of marble, dark wood, and tapestries, as owls hidden in the rookery whistled in sinister tones and, between the main pavilion and the gardener’s lodgings, the darkness was so thick it felt like the end of the world. Sometimes we stopped at the edge of the pond. Rumour had it that Donna Valentina’s mother ended her days there out of sadness, one evening after a ball, having lost her young lover. The next morning, her body was found, wrapped in a gown of phytoplankton.
As evening fell, we waited for the meal to be served, wandering through the villa’s many salons, Moretti in hand, and in the evening we took up residence in the garden, leaving the way free for the ghosts of the aristocrats who provided the place with its bona fides, and who continued to haunt the corridors. We breathed the immaculate air that burns the lungs, we counted stars, and our laughter cut through the night.
In this garden, in front of the house, you appeared for the first time. People hurried to introduce us, I extended my hand politely, I spoke a sentence or two and you immediately interrupted to ask me, with a smile that might have been seductive or sarcastic, if I was the woman you had heard about. My body stiffened, I didn’t feel like having that sort of conversation, I had other fish to fry, and I politely suggested you go on your way. You gave me a poised smile, your look ironic, and you headed for other fields to frolic in. You were handsome, charming, women dreamed of your arms, that was how you broadcast your existence, as the Tom Thumb of love, so they would always take the same path to your door. You attracted them the way light bulbs draw moths. You charmed with your words, you shone with an aura that glowed around you, the net that would catch me too.
At the time, I did not find you pleasing, and I kept my distance. When you spoke to me, it was with deference, as if respecting my sense of propriety. I answered because I had to, I had to socialize, I was raised that way. Later, you told me I reminded you of a little turtle beneath its shell, and I thought you had never really loved anyone, you loved only the image the women who’d loved you had of you, without understanding that loving you meant agreeing to be your prey.
I don’t know what word it was, what glance or sentence, what detail or gesture, but I succumbed to your charm, quickly fell in love, and you took hold of me, the tanks poured across the borders of my country. You stood before me, you were talking, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt I was melting into the chair in which I sat, slumped against the back. An invisible hand was holding me down. I became the hostage of desire. I was Proserpina in the arms of Pluto, and I wasn’t fighting back.
And that was when I saw you, your green eyes and the set of your jaw, the fine goatee drawn upon your chin, your slender body, upright, your muscles stretching with every move. You had a blue tattoo on your forearm, a crisscross of lines that conjured up barbed wire, and I wondered what that said about your life, how it established your identity, like the drawings on Russian prisoners’ bodies. I noticed a hollow spot on your cheek, a dimple that appeared when you smiled, and there, in that hollow place, my desire would come to dwell forever.
Soon, in the theatre of love, I would see only you.
Feeling the beating of my heart, the moisture on the palms of my hands, the cold sweat on my back. Looking for a sign. Straining for a sound. Trembling. Hoping to hear your voice. Sitting close to you. Touching you as you go past. Thinking that you’re listening when I’m talking to other people. Feeling that I have never desired anyone as much as I desire you right now. The impression of wearing blinders, with only you in my field of vision. Inhabiting a kind of fog. Drinking in your words. Imagining your hands on my body. Watching your slightest move. Trying to guess who you are. Spying on you to search out signs of your desire for me. My mind saturated with your image. Not thinking of the dangers. Acting as if you weren’t there. Casting a line for you as I pretend disinterest. Waiting to be reeled in.
The evening of the day you began to exist for me, when you saw me shivering, you draped your dark velvet jacket around my shoulders, then moved off, and I went on watching you. I saw how you held your cigarette, how you lit it, how you drew in the smoke slowly and kept it in, how you leaned your body against the stone wall and closed your eyes. I looked at your well-worn jeans and the white linen shirt you wore open over a threadbare T-shirt. There was a little hole at the base of the neck, pulled threads had opened to show a circle of skin under your collar. My eyes sketched out the nape of your neck, I slipped through that little window of cotton and lay against your skin, I climbed your neck and pictured myself navigating through your body like those scientists who were shrunk in that film from my childhood, injected into their boss’s bloodstream to save his life, a thought that terrorized me at the time. In
the hemorrhage of my desire, you stood motionless, and I examined you. When you came to life again, I awoke with you, I emerged from my apnea, pulled myself from the dream, and there I was with a dagger in my gut, the cutting pleasure of suffering taking over. From then on I preferred pain to its absence.
That evening, in the gazebo at the rear of the largest garden, a young violinist was pouring out the first notes of Romance, Opus 11 by Dvořák. Tears came to my eyes and I held them back. I was alone with the beginning and end of the world, I was drowning inside, and then I split in two, the woman from before and the one who couldn’t breathe, the one who followed you like a detective, who waited to meet your eyes and hear your voice, feel the warmth of your body, your scent a mixture of cologne and tobacco. Once you lifted your head and smiled at me absent-mindedly; I felt that smile was not for me. I didn’t know who you were. I wondered whom I was offering my life to.
Since your arrival in Ostia, several times I caught you intently studying your cellphone. I suspected that someone, somewhere, was writing to you. I heard it was over, and that you were disappointed not to have found love. I tried not to imagine that there was a young woman somewhere, first seduced then terrified, escaping to keep from having her soul broken into pieces. I didn’t dare picture the one who haunted your thoughts. The sinking feeling in my stomach told me it was too late, I had begun to suffer from the fact that there had been other women before me.
My desire was undefined. It broke into foam like the sea, tiny mirrors of what was happening inside me. I marched to the edge of the precipice and fell face first to the ground like an ordinand ready to receive the Holy Spirit. No one could tell, but I lowered my forehead and prepared to surrender.
Later, when you remembered those days, you compared me to a starfish, you said my movements were imperceptible, as if I were floating, waiting patiently for the moment to speak my desire.
The Last Bullet Is for You Page 7