“Where are you off to, then?”
I put on a hearty voice, as people do when trying to cover up their embarrassment at addressing a social outcast.
“Oh … to the station. You see, I’m going to pick morels …”
His voice is also too loud for this humdrum exchange. The unblemished side of his face turns a little pink. For a moment he has ceased to be any different from other people, someone has greeted him in the street, he has stopped and is talking quite naturally to an old chum.
“Ah, morels, I see. So, are you very keen on them?”
“No, the fact is … I sell them. That sometimes makes me an extra ten rubles a month …”
This confidence embarrasses him, he looks down, mutters, “Well, anyway. Good to see you. I’d better go and get my train. I’ll see you around …”
He gives me his hand, walks away. And he is palpably making a superhuman muscular effort not to reveal his limping gait. The thick shoe on his right foot drags against the asphalt but his shoulders are straight, from a distance his disability would not be noticed …
I catch up with him at the entrance to the train station.
“Listen, I’m coming with you! It’s ages since I went mushroom picking. And, as for morels, I wouldn’t begin to know where they grow …”
He tries to reply but he has a lump in his throat, he merely nods his head in agreement and shows me his basket, emitting a grunt, both happy and embarrassed. We settle into a little local train in which the wooden seats are occupied by town dwellers who are off this Sunday to dig their vegetable plots in the nearby countryside.
I am intoxicated by my role as a male juvenile lead sharing a little of his good fortune with a pariah. I talk with vibrant energy so that everyone can hear us, so that this little hunchback, crammed in opposite me, should enjoy half an hour of illusion and oblivion. I manage to hit a chatty and theatrically natural note that turns our talk into an everyday conversation between two friends of the same age. I refer to our school-day memories, mention several girls’ names.
“Do you remember Kira, the one we called Red Riding Hood, who used to dance like a madwoman? And her friend Svetka? You drew a picture of her on the blackboard. Do you remember?”
This is ancient history, from before the explosion. I am talking about our radiant childhood, laughing, joking, almost managing to erase the gulf between his two lives. And with a delight that is becoming less and less selfish, I notice our neighbors are gradually letting themselves be hypnotized by the gaiety of our chat. I am no longer intercepting alarmed or pitying glances like those directed at my friend during our first minutes of travel. People are no longer paying him any attention, they read their newspapers, yawn, address one another absentmindedly, look out the window. Zhorka’s voice is relaxed now and only a particular attentiveness could detect the hidden tension, like the stage fright behind the smile of a young singer blinded by theatrical lighting.
There are two kinds of disabled people: those who make much of their problem, proclaim their handicap noisily, extorting obligatory compassion from us, and the self-effacing ones, who bear their cross in silence but who, if we come upon them privately, allow us to sense the aura of a constrained but rich existence, one that makes the lives of those of us in good health seem strangely impoverished.
From habit long since instinctive, Zhorka has sat down in a corner, so the disfigured half of his face remains hidden from passengers walking through the coach. He tilts his head toward his shoulder so that only his good eye can be seen. His injured foot with its enormous shoe is tucked under the seat. An unobservant glance would simply see a young man, a little on the squat side, chatting happily with a comrade.
“That drawing of Svetka? Yes, I remember. First the teacher made me erase it in front of the class. Then she gave me two hours’ detention. And she said I was ‘Picasso in his pink period.’ It’s true. I was blushing with shame!”
We laugh and I am no longer searching his face for old scars.
Gradually the amateur gardeners leave the train, the grid of fields gives way to forest. We get off at a stop where the dirt platform makes it look like a simple woodland clearing. The sun is already high, the air is as hot as in July, but in the thickets there is a chill that pricks our breathing with an icy bitterness.
Deep in the shadiest areas the last snowdrifts still lurk in hollows. The noise of the train dies away, we plunge into the mystery of this forest, barely tinged with green and therefore more silent than in summer, when the leaves on the trees all converse in their own languages. Zhorka knows the place well and I allow myself to be led, with the pleasant, childlike acceptance one feels in the company of a forest guide. We climb onto a mound covered in heather, skirt a damp valley, walk beside a little stream in which every stone, caught in a sunbeam, looks like a jewel. At first I try to continue our conversation but the words quickly run out, we no longer have any need to act like old school friends with a lot to say. Zhorka is in his element, the shade of the thickets, the last traces of snow rustling underfoot, silence. From time to time he crouches, carefully moves dead leaves aside, and unhurriedly cuts the stem of a morel. He lets me smell his first catch: a scent that strangely reminds me of a winter’s evening, a forgotten joy … I try to copy him, rummaging in the layer of pine needles, lifting fallen branches, but I find nothing. Strolling aimlessly through this forest on the brink of summer is happiness enough for me. The main thing is not to lose sight of Zhorka’s limping figure, not to trample on the tiny, pale flowers growing up through the rotting leaves here and there, not to breach the secret understanding that links me to this good fellow vanishing and reappearing among the trees.
The thoughts we share in our silent wanderings are vivid. I bring to mind our childhood not long after the war and the horrors we escaped. Our generation was able to turn the page, thrusting on toward the future in the round dance of youthful love affairs. Zhorka, for his part, did not have our luck. The past, like a snowdrift dormant in the undergrowth, made him stumble, he fell, was caught, dragged down by an era when dying was so commonplace. The injustice that struck him is repellent, unacceptable, and yet stupidly ordinary, like all the wretched accidents in our lives. If only he had waited thirty seconds longer, lying beside his comrades, the shell would have exploded and …
Ah, these “if onlys”! What devil or stroke of fate impelled him to stand up that day, go down to the fire, and stir the embers? I could have held him back by grabbing his sleeve or tripping him up, or gone myself to the shell baking in the fire. In the latter case it would now have been me hobbling along, disfigured, through these springtime thickets …
He must have turned such ideas over in his head a thousand times since that day. Asking himself: “Why me? What am I being punished for?” The years passed and he grew accustomed to putting up with himself as he now was, the questions remained unanswered.
I also bring to mind that moment frozen in time: a boy’s body suspended amid a cascade of earth thrown up by the explosion. A static liftoff that our terrified eyes cut out and photographed for all time. The moment when fate must have pondered whether it would not be better to kill this child rather than granting him life as a cripple. For Zhorka this toss-up was to become a haunting theme that only suicide could have laid to rest. Was it a step he ever considered?
Is he considering it now, as he walks along slowly here in this forest, crouching, caressing the layer of dead leaves? At intervals he turns, smiles at me, always with his head tilted on one side. What can he expect from this life? A woman’s gentleness, a love affair? Surely not. It is as if his body had been crushed with particular care so as to eliminate the least chance of such an encounter, a tender relationship. So what remains for him? He will sell these morels, buy a bottle of cheap wine, and, overcome with drink, dream. But of what? Of whom?
The image of Zhorka alone, drunk, is so intolerable to me that I fall back on a glimmer of hope, a happy outcome such as we always conjure up for social outc
asts: this disabled man and a young woman, herself a cripple, a little human warmth, a soul mate who might …
I catch myself hoping for this with rare fervor, as if it were a wish I would like to see granted whatever the cost. All at once I feel bereft of my acrobat-lover’s self-assurance, prepared to renounce some part of my own happiness, so that their humble happiness might be possible. I could, for example, accept an end to my own affair, a period of loneliness, separation from the woman I had accompanied to the bus station that morning …
The feeling is sincere, almost a prayer, it makes me realize that something essential is lacking from the freewheeling frivolity of my life.
I snap out of it and shake off these solemn thoughts, picture my girlfriend’s return this evening, being reunited with her, the carefree hunger of desire, a night spent making love, laughing, delighting in juggling with words, caresses, plans for a summer that will soon be here … The prospect of this takes me further still from the purpose of our mushroom hunt, I smile: my setting off at the drop of a hat to meander through a damp wood in the company of a hunchback who looks like a character from a fairy tale is all of a piece with my casual lifestyle. The real charm of it, indeed, is being able to flit like a butterfly from one possibility to another, each one a little anarchic, a little ludicrous. I walk on, relax, no longer thinking about Zhorka …
I locate him from the snapping of a branch at the edge of an aspen spinney. His lame leg has caught on a root. Fallen to his knees, he gets up with tangled clumsiness. I am distressed to see how awkward his disability makes him: it costs him an effort, pushing against the ground with both hands, to stand up …
“We won’t go any farther,” he tells me, showing me a field beyond which the blue glow of a fine ancient forest can be seen, with temptingly majestic trees. “Those fields were mined during the war. There’s no knowing what might still be hidden there …”
His voice is dull, marked by anger held in check, which quickly exhausts itself in weariness.
“There are so many of those damned things still buried …”
“But what about your morels? You’ve not found many, have you?”
I laugh to distract him from the vision of that field where death lurks.
He shakes his basket gently, the mushrooms in it are covered by fern fronds, it is only half full.
“It’s OK. I’ve picked ten. That’ll pay for my ticket. That’ll do …”
He gives me his little oblique smile and we set out on the return journey.
I follow in Zhorka’s footsteps and our jaunt seems to me even more pointless than before. He had gone out to earn a bit of money, with which, no doubt, to buy himself some cheap alcohol, his philter for love and dreams. But he has only gathered enough to pay for the journey. Poor fellow! I try to turn my thoughts away from this short figure, limping along in front of me; I no longer want to expose myself to the heartbreaking stupidity of his tormented life.
The train we catch is packed, we have to travel standing up, surrounded by other passengers. Zhorka lowers his head, like an animal at bay, and can no longer hide the scars on his face from public gaze. People climb on board, hot after a long afternoon of gardening, their faces red from the sun, their voices raw with thirst. They jostle us unceremoniously; some of them notice Zhorka’s disfigurements and move away, not troubling to hide their embarrassment or disgust. In the end he presses a hand to his brow and remains motionless, with the gesture of a person trying to remember something extremely important. His eyes are closed.
On arrival, we take a few steps together, suddenly aware that the trip is over and we are bound to separate now, perhaps for many years, as before this encounter, diverging into lives too different for our paths often to cross. We stop at a road junction, which is indeed the parting of our ways.
“So, it was great to see you again, Zhorka! We really must …”
My tone is almost natural, I manage to convince myself that tomorrow or the next day, who knows, we are going to meet again, renew the ties of our boyhood friendship of long ago … Zhorka nods, his head tilted on one side, then, as I am preparing to say good-bye and make myself scarce, he raises his basket a little, parting the fern fronds that protect his morels …
And he lifts out a round, compact little bouquet made up of a multitude of white flowers, snowdrops, like the ones I saw in the forest.
“Take them,” he says. “You could give them to … to someone. But wrap something around the stalks, or the heat of your hand will wither them. Look, here’s a bit of newspaper … Yes, I was glad to see you, too … Well, good luck.”
He is already walking away without looking back, moving as fast as his legs will allow. I am tempted to go after him, to thank him … But I am afraid of meeting his gaze again. As he gave me the bouquet he stared at me and I believed both his eyes were equally alive, so intense did the fluid sparkle seem to me that flashed out briefly from beneath his eyelids.
I go home walking slowly, mentally repeating his words: “You could give them to … to someone.” This someone is my girlfriend, whom he saw climbing into the bus this morning. He saw our lovers’ embrace, our kiss … And so while walking in the forest he must have been thinking about that young woman, about her beauty, about the love between us. It made him forget his morels and pick mainly flowers, dreaming of the moment when she would come back and find them in the evening.
At home, I put the bouquet in a short vase and the flowers revive, forming a superb, snowy cluster. Their corollas are faintly tinged with blue, like the incrustations of that pale sky that were reflected in the puddles of melted snow in among the trees. I picture Zhorka, alone in his room, thinking about my girlfriend’s surprise when she sees the flowers and asks me, “Goodness, where do these marvelous things come from?” And I shall reply, “An old school friend picked these snowdrops for you …” And so he will feature in the thoughts of a young woman in love, whose affection will extend to him a very little bit through the reflection of the bouquet in her big, beautifully made-up eyes … Yes, he must be living that dream now.
My friend reaches me late, arriving on one of the last buses from Leningrad. She comes in, kisses me, sees the bouquet. And asks no questions. She quite simply leans forward, buries her face in the subtly scented halo of flowers, closes her eyes. And when she stands up, her eyes are misty with tears. “They smell of winter,” she says. “We met in December, didn’t we …”
That night there is an unaccustomed gentleness in the way we make love, as if we had found one another again after a very long separation, having suffered greatly and grown old.
A quarter of a century later a memory returns to me like something out of a run-of-the-mill psychological novel: during that day she spent in Leningrad, my friend had met a man, her future husband. The rest of our love affair has now faded into a hazy glimmering of juvenile frivolity, insouciance, futile sentimentality. With an effort of memory I could reconstruct snatches of jealousy, faint echoes of remarks exchanged at the time we broke up, two or three physical recollections that have survived erasure. Nothing else. Nothing.
But far removed from this slipping away of phantoms, a slow dusk in May persists. The half-light of a room, the bluish glow of a bouquet in a vase. A woman goes up to it, plunges her face into the chill of the flowers, stands up again dreamily, her eyes brimming with a sadness that I do not yet understand. And a night of love persists in which every gesture seems endowed with a new meaning, a fervent tenderness. A night in which we feel very frail, already condemned by time. And in that night utterly immortal.
When speaking of Zhorka’s death, those of my friends who knew him always refer to a fatal accident that occurred when he was twenty-six. So, a few months after we went out to pick morels. An accident …
That day, in October, Zhorka took the same little train, followed the same footpaths, made his way through the forest, this time glowing with golden foliage. He was not carrying a basket, nor a knife for cutting mushrooms. At the edge o
f a broad field strewn with russet leaves he stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, then walked straight ahead … There were two explosions: the first mine killed him; the second was set off by the detonation of the first. A hunter who was in the area raised the alarm.
Brief Loves That Live Forever Page 9