For a moment Ress managed to control his coughing, raised his head, and, with what looked to me like a blind stare, took in the slope, the riverbank, the willows. His words came in feverish gasps.
“Yes, they’ll always … be there … those three categories … dozing swine … cynics … and sourpusses with ruined lungs … like me …”
The cough started again and suddenly the hand he pressed to his lips was filled with red. With clumsy urgency he took out a handkerchief and I saw the fabric was already spotted with blood. A fresh spasm in his chest caused a dark clot to erupt from his mouth, then another. I hastened to offer him my handkerchief …
A telling detail: that silk square had been given to me by a girlfriend. Such a gift would seem incongruous today, but was evidently not unusual in the Russia of those years, and this brings home to me the almost cosmic gap that separates us from that period. But that day, as I watched Ress wiping his lips, it was the man’s own past that I was speculating on: “He’s not had many chances to be loved …” Long spells of hard labor, the painful slowness with which a prisoner’s life is then rebuilt, and already another arrest, and very soon health too ravaged for any hope of a new lease on life, born of some fresh encounter, a new dream, a love affair.
He was still bent double, overcome by the lashing of the cough, the handkerchief crushed against his mouth. With the ugly stance of a drunkard overcome by nausea. Disconcerted, I would from time to time stammer a useless reassurance: “It’ll calm down soon … You just need a glass of cold water …” With an intensity I had never before experienced, I sensed the atrocious injustice of life, or History, or perhaps God, at all events the cruelty of this world’s indifference toward a man spitting out his blood into a silk handkerchief. A man who had never had the time to be in love.
Half the sky was already laden with clouds. A scattering of snow-flakes began to float over the rooftops, weaving a swirl of white at the end of the street. In the far distance beyond the river, the light remained dazzling, springlike, as if that morning’s motley parade were continuing over there, leaving us all alone in this little sloping street. The snow, this last snow of the year, brought with it alleviation, a fresh, deeper perspective, the silent harmony of all we could see. This silence also came from Ress getting his breath back at last, a rhythm of short, ever calmer exhalations.
His voice, freed now from the urge to argue or convince, sounded like an echo coming from a time when all he was saying would seem obvious.
“Three categories … The conciliators, the cynics, the rebels … But there are … There are also those who have the wisdom to pause in an alleyway like this and watch the snow falling. Notice a lamp being lit in a window. Inhale the scent of burning wood. This wisdom, only a tiny minority among us know how to live by it. In my case, I’ve found it too late. I’m only just getting to know it. Often, out of habit, I go back to playing the old roles. I did it just now, when I was making fun of those poor wretches on their platform. They’re blind. They’ll die having never seen this beauty.”
What we could see was humble, gray, very poor. Houses from the previous century, their roofs bristling with dead stalks here and there. The dull air was reminiscent of dusk in November, on the brink of winter. We were in May, the whole city was busy with preparations for the festive meal, and the sun’s brutal gaiety would return. But the beauty was there in this moment adrift between seasons. All it took was these pale colors, the untimely chill of the snow, the poignant memory of so many past winters suddenly awakened. This beauty merged into our breathing, all we had to do was to forget who we thought we were.
I do not know the precise circumstances of Ress’s death, whether there was any friendly, or at least solicitous, presence with him at the end. I have my own excuses, which are the best I can come up with: travel, work, and the difficulty of remaining in contact with someone who, like him, did not even have a telephone. Besides, we had never really been close; he was “a friend of a friend of a friend.”
Today, more than a quarter of a century later, as I try to remember Ress and try, as we all do from time to time in addressing people now departed or dead, to embark on a conversation where his voice might join me, what returns to me is a scattered sequence of days, from long before he and I ever met, days going back to my childhood, to my youth. They come to life again in my memory, thanks to Ress’s words spoken then, his lips still stained with blood. Strangely enough, it is these glimpses of the past that offer the best response to his tortured tones. Perhaps because they were moments of tenderness lived through long, long ago, moments of love such as he himself had no time for in his life.
In these words, now silently addressed to Ress, what matters to me is letting him know he was right. We are all capable of stepping aside from the sheep-like procession of parades, with their fanatical chanting, their crushing emblems, their lies.
What matters is contriving to say this without betraying the broken voice of that man who, in one of the camps, was given the nickname of “Poet.”
TWO
She Set Me Free from Symbols
She was not the first woman to have dazzled me with her beauty, with the patient strength of her love. She was, however, the first to reveal to me that a woman with love in her heart no longer belongs to our world but from it creates another one where she dwells, sovereign, untouched by the restless greed of everyday life. Yes, an extraterrestrial.
And to think that our encounter took place upon a stage set devised to represent a life devoid of love!
The symbols used by officialdom are designed to affect our mental state. When we take part in a mass spectacle, each modest self gains the strength of ten, our voices ring out, amplified by the anthems and the brass bands’ din, the long view of History helps our fear of death to fade. In the trompe l’oeil of propaganda each emblem conjures up a road to be followed, a meaning to life, a future. Yes, existential tranquilizers, metaphysical antidepressants.
As a child I was not remotely aware of this, and yet these addictive symbols were already having their effect on me. They camouflaged the deprivation we lived in, which would be hard to describe today, amid a plethora of convenient, disposable objects. The world I and my comrades saw was transparent with poverty: an iron bed in a dormitory, clothes that, as we grew out of them, were passed on to our juniors, a single pair of shoes, too hot in summer, too thin during the cold weather, which, in those regions of the middle Volga, persisted bitterly right into April. One pen (to be precise, a little rod with a nib holder at the tip of it), a few notebooks, no books other than those we borrowed from the library, no money, no personal possessions, no means of communicating with the outside world.
The exuberance that filled us seemed illogical, almost uncanny. But the only yardstick we measure happiness by is our own lives, whether rich or destitute. After the midday meal we were entitled to a cup of hot liquid in which a few slices of dried fruit were macerating. Having the good luck to come upon a fig would transform one of our number into a “chosen one”; he would relish it, closing his eyes and concentrating completely on the indescribable taste that opened up inside his mouth. We would watch him dumbly, transported to the distant lands where such fruits ripened … Much later, in a book by Solzhenitsyn, I would come across a character in a gulag who was thrilled to trawl a tiny scrap of fish out of his bowl of soup when the ladle chanced to scrape the bottom of a pot. One day, talking to one of the countless prisoners from the Stalin era, I would learn that happiness could be based on even less: a grain left unmilled in a slice of bread …
Alongside these poor people’s pleasures an infinitely richer happiness was available to us, that of things imagined. We possessed so little, and for such a short time, that the whole world was there for us to dream about. That dazzlingly white city, for instance. I can still see its streets bathed in sunlight, its tall, serene inhabitants walking along unhurriedly, entering a store crammed with an abundance of things to eat: one of them selects a bottle of lemona
de, another a chocolate bar (just one and yet there are thousands!), and they go on their way without having to pay anything … In answer to our questions about the nature of communism our teacher gave us this explanation: “Money will no longer exist. Everyone will be able to take what is sufficient for his needs …”
An incredulous murmur ran around the class in response to the vision we had just glimpsed: jubilant hordes storming the shops and running off laden with masses of cakes, chocolates, and ice cream … The teacher must have guessed at the looting we had in mind and hastened to complete her interpretation of the future: “The people who live in communist society will have a different type of conscience from ours. The shops will be full and everything will be free, but people will take only what they need. If you can return next day, why hoard?”
That scene occurred at the start of the sixties. The Party had just proclaimed that communism would arrive within the marvelously brief span of twenty years.
The idea of a new type of conscience struck my child’s mind like a flash of inspiration. Yes, a shining city, smiling, fraternal people, who, amid an abundance of desirable goods and food, do not lose their heads, choose the minimum, enough to feed themselves and devote themselves to a mysterious activity referred to by our teacher as “the edification of the future.” Such a task made ridiculous the desire to stuff oneself, thrusting one’s neighbor aside to grab the choicest piece … Childhood images do not fade or vanish. That shining city has often seemed more real to me than those where I lived.
Official propaganda congealed these dream visions together into tangible, simplified language, common to the country’s whole population. The two great parades of the year, for May Day and the October Revolution, gave substance to the symbolic, ideas were embodied in columns of workers, on Red Square the word was made tanks and rockets, History spoke with the voice of an endless crowd, processing from Moscow to the humblest township, past grandstands on which the leaders stood, saluting this dress rehearsal for the messianic society.
At the time I was incapable of understanding it, as I marched beside my comrades in the ranks, carrying a flag or a portrait of one of the Party leaders. Now what remains is the memory of a mesmerized sense of belonging to this human mass, dazzlement at the sea of red banners, a state of euphoria, ecstasy even, yes, some kind of trance. But I was too young then to perceive it like that, I simply felt happy.
The May Day ceremonies have ended up merging in my memory into a single celebration, resonant with loudspeaker slogans and prolonged cheering, spattered with sprays of sunlight and scarlet flags flapping in the wind.
The autumn parades, on the other hand, have left me with quite a different recollection, an upsetting sensation for a child who truly believed in this spectacle and suddenly felt himself duped by it. That was it, the feeling of a lie guessed at behind the mise en scène.
And yet the mise en scène for that parade, politically more important than May Day, was always impeccable. The strict hierarchy governing the placing of the leaders on the grandstand, the banners proclaiming the imminence of the radiant future or lambasting American imperialism. The nimble tread of those in the parade, grouped according to their professional affiliations, the impressive steadiness of the soldiers in the honor guard, a living bulwark against the enemies of socialism. As for the symbolism, every detail was respected: the people were advancing toward that white city of the future of which I had always dreamed.
And perhaps it took no more than a fine shower of icy rain to transform the meaning of the procession that day. A purely physical discomfort, that was it, irritating to the occupants of the grandstand.
The pupils from our orphanage came right at the end of the parade, given the lack of ideological weight represented by our soberly attired ranks, our close-cropped heads, with the pale, bony faces of poorly nourished children. Just as we reached the foot of the grandstand the apparatchiks abandoned their parade ground immobility, bestirred themselves, and, in emulation of the first among them, began to move off the grandstand, exchanging discreet remarks out of the corners of their mouths. The cheering rumbled on, far too loud for us to be able to hear any of this chat, but the drift of it was clear: the dismal weather, the cold, and the delights of a copious lunch that awaited them.
Without realizing it, I had seen the wrong side of the scenery, a stage from which those sinister actors were making their exit. The grandstand was emptying, losing its symbolic significance. Heady euphoria gave way to worrying surmise, doubts I quickly stifled beneath my comrades’ vociferous chanting and the smell of the red paint on rain-soaked banners … And yet that momentary “What’s the point?” had left its mark on my naive faith.
Two days later a hallucinatory nocturnal vision reinforced my disillusionment … We were often sent to work in big factories on the outskirts of the city, to prepare us for manual labor, which was the lot our condition destined us for. We cleaned workshops, raked yards strewn with scrap metal, picked up waste steel or timber. That evening the truck due to take us back to the orphanage broke down and we waited until late into the night, gathered together in a warehouse … As we were driving back through the city a distressing spectacle confronted those who, like me, were sitting at the back of the van: there on the central square, beneath spotlight beams, workers were dismantling the grandstand! I just had time to see long sections of the terraces and a stack of portraits piled on top of one another, at random …
The shock was as great as if in the middle of the screening of a film I had caught sight of technicians rearranging the furniture or even tickling one of the actresses. The blatant nature of what I saw blinded me: this dismantling was done at night to conceal from the people the fact that it was all no more than scenery, a painted facade, behind which there was nothing. And yet there was something: the asphalt littered with cigarette ends, the sad sleepiness of windows in ugly houses, the bare, shivering trees. The workmen’s gestures spoke of ill-tempered abruptness, weary disgust … The following day the square resumed its ordinary appearance, merely leaving me with a nagging thought: “That whole grandstand, they must hide it in a secret place.”
An even more astounding discovery occurred at the end of the winter: the place was not secret at all!
One afternoon in February they sent us to clear the pathways in a huge park at the edge of the city, and it was there, in an area few people visited, that we came upon the parade grandstand. Nobody had thought of covering it up, except that it was blanketed in thick snow, intensely blue in the sunlight, marked by no human footprint …
The real mystery, however, lay not upon the snow-covered terraces but in the grandstand’s entrails, a dark space, pierced through with steel poles, into which I slithered, following three or four of my comrades. The others, their shovels on their shoulders, were already lining up in ranks to return to the orphanage, just as we embarked on a long exploration of this metallic maze.
For me the adventure had a rather sacrilegious appeal: crouched beneath the terraces that were generally occupied by the Party leaders, I had just gained access to the holy of holies of power, the ladder of fame, at the very heart of a symbol! From below, I identified the place where the chief apparatchik stood, then the enclosure for the intelligentsia …
My reverie was shattered by a shout from outside. My comrades were calling me and their voices were vibrant with baleful glee masquerading as friendly concern. “Hey, come on! Get out of there! It’s time to go back. The supervisor’s going to be fuming again …”
Wriggling between two steel poles, I had to climb over a waist-high barrier of beams, slip with more difficulty between the next poles, crouch to pass under a fresh crossbar.
And suddenly I realized that, although this maze was of open scaffolding, there was no way out of it!
My panic was met by wild guffaws. My comrades were helpless with laughter, pointing at me as if I were a caged animal. Perfidious reassurance was added to their mockery: “Don’t worry. You’ve got lots of tim
e till tomorrow. Night night! Sleep well! We’ll tell the supervisor you decided to bed down under the grandstand, ha, ha, ha …”
And they were already moving off, almost forgetting me. I knew this mixture of hardness and indifference, it was the very stuff of our young lives.
Fear robbed me of all judgment. Like a puppet on strings, I bounded about, making the same moves over and over again amid countless metal poles—crouching, swiveling, sliding, skirting … Reaching the last line of poles, I realized they were closer together than the preceding ones and left me no chance of escape! I also became aware that I had instinctively chosen a route that led toward the sunlight and it was the wrong route.
But all routes were wrong in this labyrinth. I repeated the exercise in the opposite direction, already with a resigned foreboding of failure. The geometry of the steel did not change: crossbars, beams, clamps, heavy joists … Halfway along I was struck by an appalling certainty: I was simply moving from one cage into another …
In fact, the grandstand’s skeleton was nothing but a sequence of cages!
I nevertheless continued right to the end of this tough obstacle course, twisting this way and that, bending double, jumping, crawling flat on my face … At the other end of the grandstand—the same structure, the same trap, with spaces too narrow …
My panic caused the energy of a cornered wild beast to explode within me. I swung around, launched myself into a chaotic charge from one cage to the next, no longer noticing collisions with the flanges of beams, no longer headed in any particular direction … My forehead struck violently against the edge of a platform, my vision became blurred, I stopped and the pain brought me a wild calm, the gloomy acceptance of defeat.
Brief Loves That Live Forever Page 2