Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  “They were supposed to come this way …,” the girl murmured, making it clear to me that the same notion had occurred to us both, the real possibility of calling a halt to this cruel and childish game, this training in brute force, and recognizing that quite a different mode of existence, quite a different world, lay close at hand …

  My prisoner’s face had a simple beauty, somewhat austere, or at least avoiding any facile charm, one of those whose fine features, when first seen, impose an attitude, a tone of voice, a respect for the sovereign mystery of that person.

  “My name’s Vika,” she said, while I, for my part, made nervous by the direction our encounter was taking, introduced myself in a highly military manner, starting with surname, then my first name, as we did at roll call in the orphanage.

  “Reporting for duty, sir!” she replied with a smile and we moved off, without hurrying, in the direction of the shouts of delight announcing the victory of one or other of the camps.

  Knowing which side had won that evening became a matter of indifference to us … Mentally I was pronouncing that name, Vika, like the first word of an unknown language.

  Nowadays people would refer, with a sly grin, to the understanding we had as a “platonic relationship”. The description seems appropriate enough: no physical bonding arose between us during the very brief period of our friendship. Yet that term is also utterly misleading, since at no time during my presence in the little house near the old port did this “issue” concern us. For it was never an issue. We were far from being particularly prudish. At the orphanage, amid the crowding together of the two sexes and several age groups, there was not much I did not know about the joys and sorrows of the human body. My prisoner was probably as well acquainted with them as I was. Soviet society at that time, under cover of an official coyness, was relatively relaxed. But, without our imposing any kind of vow of chastity upon ourselves, we expressed our love in other ways.

  For us the fact of being in love went without saying. But rather than provoking a state of feverish excitement, it made us almost impassive. We became slow, hypnotized by the novelty and power of what was happening to us. I could spend hours in perfect felicity, all it took was the occasional movement of the pale dress through the room bathed in the copper glow of the March sun. To see a lightly curled plait, every hair gleaming as a ray of light picked it out, was sufficient for me to feel happy. And when those eyes, tinged with green and blue, rested upon me, I felt I was starting to exist in an identity that was truly my own at last.

  At that age, when our lives seem endless, I could easily have given away half of the span that was left for me to have the certainty, expressed in one sweet word, of being loved. Doubtless that word would have destroyed the very essence of the hypnotic bliss we were both immersed in. If our relationship had lasted longer, words would, in any case, have come … But in the absence of any such declaration I remained mutely adoring, noting the gestures traced by a hand in motion, the fluttering of eyelashes, the depth of an intake of breath, relishing the chill of the snows when, in the evening, my friend came out onto the house’s little front steps to say good-bye to me and follow me with her eyes as far as the corner. These were silent signs, but when we gaze at the stars, do we not, like Rimbaud, hear their “soft rustling sound” quite clearly?

  And then came a declaration much more unexpected than those words whose tenderness I at once hoped for and dreaded.

  That day the mounting spiral of the petty cares of existence seemed to be doing all it could to give the lie to the slogan I used to read on the factory roof when I went to the village, with its “eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine.” I had a swollen lip, the result of a quarrel, a brief and violent one, as our scuffles at the orphanage always were: an abrupt upsurge of hatred, fists raw from the exchange of blows, the conviction that one could kill … Then there was a bus, packed with bodies crushed against one another, people on the way home to their suburbs, exhausted workmen, aggressive, ready to exchange insults and tear one another to pieces at the slightest jolt of that scrap metal on wheels. “Fraternity … The radiant future …,” I said to myself bitterly. And just beside the stop where I got off four drunkards were fighting, trading soft, clumsy blows, trampling on the one who fell over, falling over beside him …

  The sun threw glaring light on the factory roof with its monumental message of the “eternally living doctrine.” A voice within me was yelling and weeping.

  I turned the corner into the village street and from a long way off I could see the faint patch of a dress lit up by the blue luminescence of the snow. An invisible frontier, compounded of this brilliance and the icy scent of the river, separated me from the world of a moment ago. Only the taste of blood in my mouth reminded me of where I had come from.

  We often used to go for a walk among the old izbas of the village, strolling down toward the boat landing, toward the shore. Sensing that an unaccustomed tension was mounting within the dreamy calm of our těte-à-těte, we did so that day …

  The mild warmth of March had woven a filigree of melting sheets of ice, lacy rose windows. As I snatched them up they shattered in my hands, just as my friend was noticing their star-studded beauty. We walked down a slope of virgin snow, punctuated only with birds’ footprints. Sinking up to our knees, we could feel the little lumps of ice working their way into our shoes.

  Like an abandoned raft, the old jetty lay amid the pack ice. It was attached by rusty cables to the stumps of steel posts embedded in the bank. We climbed onto this wreck and with incredulous joy touched the surface of the planks: they were already dry and warm from having been exposed to the sun all day. Beneath a partially collapsed lean-to a bench stood waiting for the ghosts of former travelers. We sat down facing the white immensity of the still-sleeping river, our gaze lost in the distance, and gradually recovered the slow pulse of the happiness that always used to set the rhythm for our encounters.

  That day such serenity no longer seemed enough for me. The bitterness I had been storing up since the morning gave me a longing for some vast, radical change, a revolution that would wipe away the hatred from the world’s countenance and from all those grimacing faces I had come across on my way to the village: those of the men and women crammed together in the bus, and before that, at the orphanage, the boy who had punched me in the face, his gleeful guffaw at the sight of my blood. But also the somber mass of workers whom the factory swallowed up every morning and spat out in the evening, a lava of drained bodies and lackluster looks. The march of History toward the promised future, toward that ideal city where men would at last become worthy of the name, must be speeded up.

  For the first time I spoke about this to my friend. I got up from the bench, gesticulating, my enthusiasm growing the more my talking about it made the dream seem close and achievable. Yes, a fraternal society, a way of life that would exclude aggression and greed, a plan that would bond together everyone’s goodwill, at present fettered by the pettiness of individualism. I think I also talked about the disappearance of the State, for which there would be no need, since all men would form a single community, in which police, army, and prisons would be superfluous. I knew Lenin had promised this in his vision of the future … That was it, a community of men destined for happiness!

  “But aren’t you happy now?” Vika asked suddenly.

  The question threw me.

  “Er … Yes … But I’m not talking about myself. What I meant, you see, was that … in general, this new society will allow other people to lead lives of joy …”

  “I don’t understand. All these people you want to bring happiness to in the future. What’s to stop them being happy now? Not hating other people, not being greedy, like you said. Not punching other people in the face, at any rate …”

  “Well … you see … I don’t think they know the true path yet. They need to be shown. They need to be given a plan, a theory … You know, a doctrine!”

  “A doctrine? What for? We’re
happy here, admit it. We’re happy because the air smells of snow and spring. Because the sun’s been warming the planks, because … Yes, because we’re together. Do the others need a doctrine to come down here to the shore and look at the fields beyond the Volga. And watch that bird flying from one branch to another in the willows?”

  I would have preferred to hear a political or moral argument, a theoretical challenge, but Vika’s words expressed a visible and concrete truth, difficult to contradict. The sky, the snow, the noisy trickle of the waters beneath the thick ice floes. To cover up my confusion I exaggerated the intensity of our disagreement.

  “Oh, if it was only as simple as that! Of course they could come here, look at the river, breathe the good air. But they have to work! You forget that we’re talking about the working class …”

  She did not reply at once, remained still for a moment, her eyes blinking gently in the flood of sunlight. Then, in a dry, impersonal voice she asked me, “This working class, do you know what they make at that factory?”

  “I don’t know. Fertilizers, maybe. Or ceramic stuff …”

  “Yes, fertilizers … Very explosive ones. The factory supplies chemical products to other concerns that make the charges for shells and bombs. Don’t repeat that to anyone or you’ll be in trouble.”

  She fell silent, then added in a voice that was calm once more: “This future you talk about is wonderful but too complicated. It’s as if before they can come and look at the river, people have to make reinforced concrete terraces. What’s the point? This old jetty’s enough for us. What needs to be explained to other people is the only true doctrine. It’s very simple. It all comes down to the fact … of loving one another.”

  We returned more slowly than usual. Every step, every glance now had a new meaning for me, the reflection of a world transfigured by this “fact of loving one another.”

  Two or three times when leaving the village, I had chanced to come across my friend’s mother, a thin, short woman, her face hollow with weariness. She was called Elsa. We exchanged a few words, she invited me to come on a Saturday or Sunday to take a meal with them … In one of the rooms in the house I had seen a picture of Vika’s father. He was, according to what she had told me one day, “absent for professional reasons.” I had not sought to learn more about this: at the orphanage all my comrades had fathers who were busy sailing around the world, or they turned out to have been pilots killed in action, outnumbered in dogfights against our country’s countless enemies. To cast doubt on any of this would have been cruel, faith in it made it possible not to lose all hope. Respect for these innocent lies was, for all of us, an inviolable pact.

  A time came when it seemed as if my friend’s mother was returning home earlier and earlier. The notion that she might have wanted to keep an eye on us did not even cross my mind, so natural was the trust that bound us together. There was, in fact, a commonplace explanation for this change in her routine. We were in March, the days were very quickly getting longer, and, as I used to leave at sunset, this time was shifting.

  One evening, leaving the village, I noticed Elsa’s figure walking beside the factory wall. She seemed to be waving a hand in greeting or even beckoning me to follow her. In the dusk it was hard to see and I was on the point of going my way, paying no attention to her gesture. However, an uneasy curiosity impelled me toward her.

  I quickly realized that Elsa had not seen me, her summons had merely been the action of readjusting a canvas bag she carried on her shoulder. As if drawn along in a dream, I walked on beside that interminable wall … It was already fairly dark when the woman I was following disappeared. A minute later I reached the corner, followed around it, and involuntarily took several steps backward …

  A battle was in progress, at once clumsy and ferocious. A crowd of women were pressed up against a plywood partition covering a passage that linked one of the factory exits to the platform beside a railroad track. This long chamber shook beneath the tramp of an invisible host leaving the building and plunging into freight wagons coupled to an engine. The women were thrusting one another aside, using their elbows, weaving their way toward the plywood screen so as to end up in front of a gap two feet wide through which the faces of men walking along the passage could be glimpsed. The violence of the struggle was unthinking, they were unaware of the blows they received or struck. The air seemed to be riven with cries held in check by fear, but which, on account of this restraint, rang out even more savagely. It was mainly men’s names that went flying through the narrow opening toward the column on the move. “Sergei!” “Sasha!” “Kolya!” From time to time, a lean face appeared, a husband managed to stop opposite the gap for a few seconds. If his wife spotted him she endeavored to hand him a package, which he seized before melting into the human flow. Sometimes the package got torn, a hunk of bread and packets of tea could be seen falling in the dirty snow … Some names caused the appearance of a person no one was waiting for, the women would regard him with scorn and begin shouting out a surname as well. Elsa reached the opening, yelled a name in a desperate voice that froze me, and held out her canvas bag to a hand that came through the gap. A violent jolt shoved the hand back and the gap was blocked by a uniform greatcoat. The bag fell, Elsa bent down to pick it up. By the railroad track two armed guards could be seen approaching …

  I ran along beside the wall with a very real sense of no longer existing, no longer being capable of formulating the slightest thought. I was empty, bereft of all I believed I knew, all I hoped for, dreamed of … Back at the orphanage it felt as though my comrades were speaking a foreign language, or rather a language whose words I knew but whose meaning I no longer understood.

  The next day I had to join another paramilitary exercise, the final round, in fact, of that set of competitions during which I had captured Vika. I took part in it absentmindedly, allowing myself to be swept along in the assaults, scaling the ice ramparts as if on the brink of sleep. Even the final hand-to-hand battle, in which the two armies confronted one another, could not rouse me from my stupor. I ended up finding myself face-to-face with a youth stationed on the fortification of a defended position, who was fighting gleefully, an aggressive grimace on his lips. He noticed at once that I was not in a very warlike mood. His expression became tinged with scorn and he pushed me over with excessive brutality, evidently intending to topple me right down. I fell, becoming caught on a guardrail made of tree trunks and colliding with a block of ice. Coming to with a bleeding nose, I found myself sitting at the center of the melee, my left foot oddly twisted. Above the ankle, beneath the fabric of my pant leg, I noticed a curiously prominent lump. I looked up, saw the victor’s laughing face, his astonishing delight at having caused harm. The pain was already welling up when, in a muted echo, this thought occurred to me, in a language incomprehensible to the others: “The only true doctrine … the fact of loving one another …”

  My broken leg delayed my return to the village until the middle of May. Arriving there, I thought I must have stepped off the bus at the wrong stop. Instead of the little street leading to the river, a vast terrain, being turned over by bulldozers, extended all along the shore. No, I had not made a mistake for the factory was still there, its endless enclosing wall, the red letters on the roof, “an eternally living, creative, revolutionary doctrine” …

  As for the village, all that was left of it was a single house, the one where an old woman lived whom we sometimes saw going to fetch water from the well. The only trace of the other houses was the wreckage of their timbers. The bulldozers were busy shifting these remains to the edge of the site. The roar of the engines, the acrid stench of their emissions, and, in particular, the pitiless, radiant sun, all this proclaimed the triumph of the life that forged ahead, with its promise of new happiness, victorious dynamism.

  The waters had risen and the jetty was afloat several yards from the riverbank, like an island separated from this new life.

  The other little island was that last house,
which I went to in the evening after the noise of the demolition had ceased and the workers had gone home. The old woman who lived there did not wait to hear my questions. She understood at once why I had come. But what she told me added little to what I could already guess for myself.

  There had been an accident at the factory a month earlier. Several workshops had been flattened in an explosion, becoming a mass grave for the prisoners who were brought in to work there from a nearby camp. No one knew the precise number of the victims but my friend’s father was probably among them. Or else it was the demolition site on the riverbank that had caused Elsa and her daughter’s sudden departure. In the previous year they had come to live in the village to be close to the factory where, for a few seconds, you could exchange glances with the prisoners as they passed through the chamber between the workshops and the freight wagons … With the village demolished, they had to move. So, after the explosion, Vika’s father might simply have been transferred to another workplace. The old woman hinted at this possibility, wanting to give hope a little chance.

  Stunned, I did not have the presence of mind to ask her what she herself was going to do amid this chaos of overturned earth. I went away, vaguely thanking her the way a neighbor certain of seeing her again the next day might have done. Many years later that old woman, whom I left all alone on the little front steps of her doomed house, would inspire feelings of remorse such as recur throughout our lives and for which we never receive absolution.

  It also took me many years to learn how to appreciate, beyond a brief episode of adolescent affection, the luminous happiness my friend and Elsa, her mother, had so discreetly afforded me. Of course, I remembered their hospitality, the gentleness with which they had surrounded the wild young lad that I was, a being hardened by roughness and violence. As I grew older I would come to recognize more fully that the peace they succeeded in causing to reign in such a desolate place, yes, that serenity indifferent to the ugliness and coarseness of the world, was a form of resistance, perhaps more effective than the dissident whisperings I later heard in intellectual circles in Moscow or Leningrad. Those women’s rebellion was not at all spectacular: keeping their little antiquated house perfectly neat and tidy, Vika’s always even-tempered serenity, never revealing her pain, Tchaikovsky’s Seasons, Elsa’s silence and her smile, while still shaken by her vigil among the women fighting to exchange glances with their husbands or sons.