A Hero's Daughter

by Andrei Makine

  “Hello there, Salifou! Are your parrots still selling well?”

  “Hopelessly! You’re ruining me with the competition. Soviet parrots are the best in the world….” Salifou showed Olya a photo. “Here, I must show you my latest little one.”

  She saw a young woman in flowery clothes, a baby in her arms, staring at the lens with an assiduous but at the same time half-sleepy air. To her left could be seen the shapes of a tree with dense foliage and a strip of blue-gray sky.

  Olya studied the photograph and could not take her eyes off the young woman’s face. In the calm, distracted gaze of her dark eyes, in the curve of the arm supporting the child, she sensed something that was intimately close and familiar to her. Olya understood that she should say a few words, offer an appropriate compliment. But she continued to stare, fascinated. Finally, without thinking, without detaching her gaze, she said: “It must be very hot there, in your country.”

  Salifou laughed. “Of course! Like a Russian bath … Come and see us. You’ll tan as brown as me, I promise you.

  And, slipping the photo back into his wallet, he went on down the stairs.

  Olya put the Frenchman’s briefcase into the big black envelope, slipped his address book into an inside pocket and placed the envelope near the door.

  In the room a comfortable, somewhat sugary warmth prevailed. The Frenchman slept, the covers thrown aside, his arms wide outstretched. The paler skin around his loins made a striking contrast with the dark color of his tan.

  During dinner he had talked a good deal. And all his remarks were well judged; they all produced the smile, the look, the reply he had expected from his companion. He was in that agreeable state of mind where you feel that everything about you is sparkling, when you have the impulse to say to yourself: “This young man, in his expensive, highly fashionable, jacket, his dark pants with cuffs, and his luxurious golden brown leather shoes: this is me.” His well-groomed hair falls over his brow in a black fan. Nonchalantly, but fine-tuned almost to the millimeter, the knot in his tie is loosened. Even his cigarette smoke coils elegantly.

  He talked a good deal and felt he was pleasing this woman. He experienced this joie de vivre almost physically. The suave flavor of it was something he relished tasting. As he drank the cocktail he began talking about Gorbachev. Before leaving France he had read an article in Libération about the reforms in the USSR. It was all very well explained: why Gorbachev would never succeed in democratizing the régime, restructuring the economy, catching up with the West in the field of electronics.

  “All the same,” he argued nonchalantly, as he sipped his cocktail. “Russia is the land of paradoxes. Who was it began all these shenanigans with perestroïka? A disciple of Andropov. In France they even call Gorbachev the young Andropovian.’ The KGB as the initiator of democratization and transparency? It’s science fiction!”

  “I wonder where he is now,” thought Olya. “That German with his collection of little lighthouses.”

  As he was falling asleep, his thoughts racing, Vincent was considering what he could do to stay in Moscow for one more day, or, more precisely, one more night. Call his boss and tell him he had not had time to sort out all the details of the prices? No, the old fox would catch on right away. You couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes. Maybe a problem with the plane? There were no seats left? Complications at customs? Yes, that’s true, but then there would be the hotel. He would have to fork over for that himself. And then maybe he would have to pay her, this girl, or give her a present. How does that work? Anyway, it’s not a problem. Some trinkets from the Beriozka should do the trick….

  Sleep swept in abruptly. All at once everything that was on his mind began to be swiftly resolved, all on its own. He saw his boss talking to him amicably, walking with him along endless streets, half Muscovite, half Parisian. He extracted wads of notes from the ATM machine that was actually located in the hotel bedroom…. And once again, already dreaming, savored in his mouth the sweet taste of happiness….

  Olya put the briefcase back in its place, carefully slipped the address book, the right way around, into the inside pocket of the jacket. The silence in the room seemed to her strangely profound, unaccustomed. “Perhaps it’s because we’re at the Rossia Hotel instead of the Intourist,” she thought. “There’s less traffic.” She went over to the window, drew back the curtain and suppressed an “Oh” of surprise.

  The first snow was falling. The trees covered in snow, the cars all white alongside the sidewalks. Olya could not resist and half opened the narrow, lateral fanlight. The first gust was difficult to breathe in — so sharp was this first vertiginous scent of winter. “It’s good that the snow’s falling,” thought Olya. “When it freezes I’ll go to Borissov, to the cemetery.” And she pictured herself— feeling no longer grief, but a calm bitterness, lodged somewhere beneath her heart — a gray winter’s day; the frozen earth crunching underfoot on the pathway between each set of railings, the trees bare, and the two graves, covered in snow and the last of the leaves, no longer frightening to her, maintaining their unimaginable, watchful silence beneath the pale winter sky.

  Only the Moskva River was black. And above it, on all sides, swirling up into the sky or hanging motionless in the air, fluttered a white veil. All at once the muted sound of bells trembled within these snowy and icy depths. It was not the Kremlin clock but a thin and distant chime. It rang out from the belfry of a little church lost in all this silent snow, somewhere near Taganka Square. “We each have our cross….” Olya remembered. And she smiled. “And each our first snow

  She shut the window, drew close to the bed and looked at the Frenchman as he slept. “Without his clothes he looks like a boy,” she told herself. “I must have chilled him opening that window.” Cautiously she drew the covers over him and slipped in beside him. Slowly, a little stiffly she stretched out on her back.

  Abruptly everything began to spin before her eyes — snatches of conversation, the sensation on her lips of all the smiling done that day, the people, the faces … the faces…. Just before she drifted off, in the manner of a half-whispered childish prayer, a thought brushed against her: “It would be good if he paid me in hard currency. … I could buy back my father’s Star….”