Brief Loves That Live Forever

by Andrei Makine

  Our generation has retained this pious respect for wounded soldiers. Very soon, however, my friend remembers she is dealing with a special kind of soldier, one of those who took part in a war waged by an abominable regime. So this is an army man not entitled to the customary consideration.

  “And you still dare to find excuses for those geriatrics in the Kremlin who’ve turned you into a leopard! Have you seen your back in a mirror? It looks like squashed tomatoes. I hope they gave you a medal for your bravery!”

  I hesitate for a moment, then tell myself that, in her eyes, I have nothing left to lose.

  “It was even more stupid than you might think. Our helicopter crashed just before landing. When we jumped clear the chopper was already on fire. I was lucky enough to land on something like a mattress—a very big guy. I don’t know how many of his ribs I cracked. And this saved me from breaking anything myself. And thanks to me, he escaped burns on his face. In point of fact I took all the heat on my back. We used to tease one another at the hospital. He’d say, ‘You smashed my ribs, you bastard!’ and I’d say, ‘Feast your eyes on this, you swine. This is how your face would look if I hadn’t protected you!’ And I’d turn and show him my back. Yes, squashed tomatoes, as you say … So, you see there was no reason to stick a medal on me …”

  Kira laughs again, this time with a hint of contempt. And I regret having told her about my regimental comrade. He and I, she thinks, belong in the same category: we are stupid enough not to have totally rejected the world we were born into and grew up in, which is now dying of a pitiful and often ridiculous old age. I ought to spit out this past, deride the people who had the misfortune to live through it, that way I could satisfy Kira and her friends. How can I explain to her that the past of this country, which is on the brink of disappearing forever, also contains our childhood? And this brief fragment of memory, too: high up on a grandstand, in the middle of a huge park covered in snow, I see the pupils from our class, far away, heading toward the orphanage after clearing the pathways, and there, apart from the others, already bridling at discipline, walks a little girl, whom I can recognize by her red hat … Must that memory also be rejected? And this apple orchard, too? And its intoxicating beauty? Must it be derided, seen as a failure on the part of a society that promised a dreamlike future and has lamentably run aground? But derided in the name of what other future?

  Kira’s laughter calms down, she gives a pitying sigh.

  “Your problem is that you can’t free yourself mentally. You can’t even imagine how people could live and think differently. How life could be radically different!”

  “Wait, this radically different life interests me. So tomorrow communism’s rotten shanty will be razed to the ground. That’s clear. But what, in fact, do you and your friends propose to replace it? What kind of society? What way of life?”

  “We propose freedom! And a civilized society, do you understand? A way of life where you don’t have to stand in line for three hours to get hold of a pair of boots. Where you can travel without a visa. Where you can publish your manuscripts freely. Yes, a material and social life to a modern standard. And where you can happily …”

  “Drive your convertible along Sunset Boulevard …”

  “You satirize everything. That’s another habit of the good little Soviet citizen you’ve never stopped being … Well, why not a convertible? Why despise people who like to own nice things and enjoy life to the full? After all, God created men the way they are …”

  “Well, I think it was more a case of men creating that kind of god. But let it pass … OK, no more satire, I promise. So tomorrow, thanks to your friends, we’ll have freedom. Shoes bought without having to stand in line. Thirty television channels. In a word, a multiparty system plus material comfort for everyone, or almost everyone … And then what?”

  “How do you mean: then what? Well, that’s how it’ll go on being.”

  “And that’s all? Don’t you find the prospect a bit dispiriting?”

  The thought that the society her friends long for might become a matter of routine, might lose its dazzle as a future dream, is an idea that puzzles Kira. I suspect she has never foreseen a sequel to the paradise of freedom and abundance that inspires her dissident activity. She stretches out on the sand again, somewhat sulkily, like a child not wanting to admit reality, and grumbles with a sigh, “OK, if you prefer to remain stuck in the communist lunatic asylum, stay right here in this orchard. You couldn’t have chosen a place more suited to your tastes. Only, as I warned you, these apple trees are barren. You’ll never get a bite to eat here. It’s just like the empty stores in this country …”

  The voice she says it in allows a weary indifference to be heard, a refusal to argue. With a yawn she turns away, stretches out her hand, scoops up a little water, pats her forehead and her neck, then lies still.

  I do not reply. I have a dawning perception it is not easy to put into words. I simply sense that in this pointless debate, something essential has eluded us. And this essential point is the red hat belonging to the little girl who wanted to be different at all costs. Her revolt arose out of a violent longing for identity in a world that did all it could to impose a collective, leveled-out life and what it called “social equality.” In adolescence she became aware that this equality meant mind-numbing work for starvation wages and cramming several families into one communal apartment. As a young woman, when she wanted to reach for the stratosphere on high heels and bombard the crowd with the staccato of her inimitable footsteps, what she found was dreary queues waiting at counters where cantankerous saleswomen offered ankle boots reminiscent of medieval instruments of torture. She came to loathe this regime, considering that it prohibited her from being unique. All the rest came later: dissidence, drink-fueled secret meetings in kitchens blue with tobacco smoke where, for whole nights at a time, banned artists would read aloud from their unfinished novels, excoriate the Soviet hell, and extol the paradise of the West. There she felt happy, finding in this agitation the opportunity for an incomparable way forward such as she had always dreamed of, yes, the chance to put on her red hat …

  And then time had gone by and on the threshold of being thirty, a formidable milestone for any young woman, she had come across a former fellow pupil from the orphanage, a bit of an oaf, who could not understand how wonderfully exciting her life was and how mind-blowing the project was that she and her friends were developing for their sorry country. And now, to cap it all, this backward-looking comrade has been stupid enough to ask her a ridiculous question that has nevertheless made her thoughtful. “Imagine your dream has come true,” he has said. “The queues disappear, people live in material comfort and travel all over the world the way retired people in rich countries do. But would this collection of benefits totally change the course of your life, give you a happiness unlike any other, the Red Riding Hood hat you used to sport at the orphanage?”

  I know what I should say to Kira is just this: “The unique existence you’ve always been looking for is right here. In this dreamlike apple orchard, like nowhere else on earth. In this fine day poised between spring and summer. In this moment so singular it’s not even a part of your life. It’s a blip in time, a meeting, a fruitless one for you, with a man you’ll never love, me, and the specter of a man you do love. This will never happen again in your life. It’s here, your destiny and yours alone. If I were you I’d utter a long shout of joy in salute to the incredible madness of the regime you hate. For it’s given you this breathtaking flight through the beauty of this mass of white trees, trees, as if laden with snow, just as they were at that moment when I saw you in childhood, walking apart from the others, with your red hat on your head …”

  I wake up, realizing I have dreamed those words, utterly true and equally impossible to share with her. Lying beside the water, her head resting on one arm, Kira is drowsing, too, and the expression on her face betrays a childish disarray. In a murmur I now address this sleeping beauty, this little gi
rl of long ago, who shows through as she sleeps. “You’re right, Kira, these apple trees will never bear fruit. It’s a failed project, like my hope for an ideal city lived in by fraternal men, cured of hatred and greed … But just wait and see. Here, in the realm of this barren apple orchard, beside this half-finished fountain, a single apple is going to ripen, just one, an exception to nature’s logic, a fruit that’ll be here for us, with a flavor no one on earth has ever tasted. We’ll have to return in September …”

  Kira stirs, opens her eyes, shakes her head, gives me a rather defiant look.

  A droning noise fills the air, I recognize a helicopter flying low. It was doubtless this thundering clatter, a sound imprinted in every cell of my scalded body, that woke me just now. A little veil of clouds dulls the sun. A swift breeze passes through the tops of the apple trees, causes some petals to flutter down. Kira shivers, I see the reflection of her face shimmering in the mirror of the water, a strangely wan image, that of a bitter woman, weary of believing and being mistaken … She dresses and we leave.

  At the moment when the central circle is about to be lost to view behind the avenue’s massed branches, I turn: a ray of sunlight picks out the imprint of our bodies on the sand.

  A few years after our expedition to the model apple orchard, the project cherished by Kira’s friends came to fruition. Communism collapsed in a great tragicomic hurly-burly of palace revolutions, liberal promises, putsches, appalling economic pillage, edifying credos, and contempt for the old and weak.

  In fact, History overtook this tardy generation of rebels, and the most exalted of their dreams soon appeared timid beside the savage violence with which Russia was reformed. The nice, cozy bourgeois society whose advent they hoped for found itself submerged under the muddy torrent of a capitalism of predators and mafiosi. By then most of the dissidents had already emigrated to America, where they could meditate on the unpredictable character of their country, quoting this old adage: “Russians never achieve their goals, because they always overshoot.”

  Kira never knew that cataclysmic time. She died in the winter of the year following our brief encounter. As a rebellious militant, she would doubtless have preferred to perish in a camp or on the scaffold. But it was an ill-tended pneumonia. I would learn, much later, that she had contracted it when she went to visit her companion in his exile thirty miles from Moscow. This version, which I have always tried to believe in, had the advantage of allowing my childhood friend a heroic life, sacrificed on the altar of a great cause.

  The man Kira was so in love with has been living in Berlin for several years now. I find his surname, Svistunov (“whistler”), with its comic hint of frivolity, hard to forget, an uncommon name. His profession, on the other hand, is not at all rare among the dissident intellectuals of his generation: he is a journalist, or more precisely a reporter who runs, as it were, an import-export business in ideas. Sometimes in Moscow, sometimes in Europe, he feeds the Western press with terrifying stories about the rebirth of dictatorship in Russia and the Russian press with reports on the perfidious designs of the Europeans and Americans …

  We met recently and he was the one who told me, amid laughter, about this double game. He struck me as a lighthearted, jovial man, barely affected by his former exile. After Kira’s account I had pictured a pale martyr with a feverish look, his lips on fire with the truth. As I stared at him I was trying to work out the incredible physical resemblance he had to someone I was familiar with. Suddenly it came to me: Svistunov’s smooth, pink visage was not very different from the baby face of “the man who had known Lenin.” Yes, that sprightly and youthful apparatchik whose story we had listened to. Only a woman’s blind love could have endowed Svistunov’s humdrum face with an insurgent’s tragic nobility.

  I talked to him about Kira. With an emotion that took me by surprise—I had not expected that day spent in the apple orchard to remain such a vivid memory.

  “Kira … who? Wait, was she a blonde or a brunette? More auburn haired? … No. I’m sorry. I don’t remember her. Are you sure she was one of my … admirers? No. Not even the KGB will make me confess to it, ha, ha, ha!”

  He seemed perfectly sincere and it was the one moment when his face took on an air of frankness, being otherwise overlaid with expressions that were always somewhat elusive and ambiguous, as required by his professional duplicity. No, he was not lying; he really did not remember the young woman who had idolized him.

  “And your novel, that book you were writing in exile, Captives in Absurdia, was it?”

  “Oh, that. That was just juvenile rubbish. Besides, after Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, what is there to tell? They’ve said it all … And, as for girls, well, I was a superstud at the time. And another thing, you know what women are like. They take a great fancy to outlaws, persecuted people, exiles … So many came to see me, hordes of them, in that dump in the sticks where they made me live …”

  He began to tell me about his extremely active and dissolute love life, in total contradiction to the grim picture his generation used to paint of the country crushed beneath the ideology’s puritanism. His voice shook with positively nostalgic vibrato. Yes, he missed that youth made up of clandestine meetings, dissident daydreams, and fleeting multiple love affairs, spiced with danger. I saw his eyes cloud over … Quickly he pulled himself together.

  “So, shall we do it, our little interview? I should tell you straight away, this is for a Russian paper, so …”

  The fact that Kira was totally forgotten by him upset me at first, as if this ideas merchant’s boorishness were directed at me personally. Then I discovered a silver lining in it: for that stroll we took long ago in the middle of the apple orchard’s silent paradise had thus remained permanently apart from the lives of other people. My only fear now was of learning that a new freeway had drawn a line forever through that useless orchard’s beautiful madness. A motorway, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, or some kind of sports center with swimming pools and casinos, celebratory symbols of the recent upheavals.

  One day in a plane flying from Paris to Japan I passed over the region of that giant plantation from the Soviet era. The spring sky was exceptionally clear and on the ground one could see the tiniest dots of houses, the tracery of rivers, the mirrors of lakes. And the line of a road, probably the one linking Moscow and Kiev, which in the old days ran beside innumerable apple trees. At one moment I thought I could see them: a sea of snow-white foam, the vast size of which was surprising, even observed from that altitude. Or was it a long drift of clouds lit up by the sunset?

  My fears of seeing that white dream replaced by a superstore were dispelled then. For now I knew that very distant day when I wandered in Kira’s company was no longer of this world and therefore ran no risk of being destroyed.

  “That apple orchard is still in flower,” I told myself. “Time has passed it by, leaving it behind in a moment that does not pass. An idea that seems as insane as the beauty of those flowering trees that will never bear fruit. But to believe in it gives a supreme meaning to our lives, our encounters, our loves.”

  Then I caught myself mentally addressing Kira, as on so many occasions during these last twenty years.

  The truth is, I have never stopped walking beside her along an endless avenue lined with snow-clad boughs.

  EIGHT

  The Poet Who Helped God to Love

  At first I cannot understand what it is about this scene that intrigues me so …

  The luminous violence of the mistral in these towns, white with sunlight, that look as if they had been drawn on the sails of ships, has left me still dazed. An old friend has arranged to meet me in Nice. Starting the previous day, I have been taking my time, stepping off the train on three or four occasions in places I did not know, as if to get myself used to the idea of meeting someone again after so many years of forgetting. This return to the past was making me somewhat apprehensive …

  In one of these towns, stunned by this winter wind’s sun-drenched ferocity,
I had been stumbling as I walked before finding shelter behind the walls of a cemetery. And seeing that haunting female figure beside a grave. The past, whose summons I was trying to hold at bay, suddenly became very present, close enough to touch at the slightest rekindling of memory …

  My eyes still blinded, I am now watching a strange performance. A heavy, stout woman of about sixty, with a dour expression, emerges from a private room in the restaurant in Nice where I sit at a table with my friend of thirty years ago. Supported under her elbows by a woman and man who could be her children, she begins making her way up a staircase. It is painful to see her contorted legs on high heels, scarcely practical in view of her corpulence. She has a sullen air and mutters observations between her teeth, no doubt railing against the stupid idea of installing lavatories on the second floor. Her escorts concur with comical obsequiousness.

  But it is particularly my friend’s attitude that strikes me: I sense that he is uneasy, his gaze travels around the room, settles on a man just coming in and another, an athletic type with dark hair, suddenly standing up …

  The stout woman mounts the last few steps of the staircase and, panting heavily, broadcasts a critique in more ringing tones: in her view the quality of the cuisine does not match the establishment’s reputation. Suddenly I realize she is speaking in Russian …

  I turn to my friend.

  “Do you know that woman?”

  He seems embarrassed, rubs his brow, then comes out with: “Yes … I know her. She’s a woman who … a woman who, without being aware of it … was loved … in a way one cannot be loved … other than far away from this earth.”

  This friend, Pyotr Glebov, is the former regimental comrade with whom I once endured the circumstance, both dangerous and funny, of our helicopter crashing and catching fire, our tumbling out, Pyotr’s ribs being smashed by my landing on top of him, my back being struck by a jet of blazing fuel, thus saving him from burns on the face … We laugh now as we recall these events, as if it were an ancient schoolboy escapade.