It was in the midst of this emotional disarray that I heard the voice of Pashka, hidden in the foliage. I looked up. He was smiling at me, half stretched out along a thick branch: “Climb up! I’ll make room for you,” he said, folding up his legs.
Clumsy and heavy in the city, as soon as he was in the wild Pashka was transfigured. On that branch he looked like a big cat, resting before its nightly prowl… .
In any other circumstances I would have ignored his invitation. But his position was too unusual, and in addition I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. I felt as if he had intercepted my feverish thoughts from his branch! He held his hand out to me, and I hauled myself up beside him. The tree was a veritable observation post.
Seen from above, the swaying of hundreds of entwined bodies had quite a different look to it. It seemed at one and the same time absurd (all these creatures pawing the ground!) and endowed with a certain logic. Bodies circulated, coalesced for the space of a dance, separated, sometimes remained glued to one another during several numbers. From our tree, at a single glance, I could take in all the little emotional games unfolding on the dance floor. Rivalries, challenges, betrayals, loves at first sight, breakups, explanations, potential brawls quickly brought under control by the vigilant keepers of order. But above all, it was desire that was visible through the veil of the music and the ritual of the dance. Within that human tide I located the girl whose breasts I had brushed against. For a moment I followed her trajectory from one partner to another… .
In short, I felt all this whirling about reminded me insidiously of something. “Life!” a silent voice suddenly suggested to me, and my lips repeated silently, “Life …” The same mingling of bodies driven by desire and hiding it under innumerable pretences. Life … “And where am I, myself, at this moment?” I asked myself, sensing that the answer to this question would shed light on an extraordinary truth, which would explain everything once and for all.
Shouts rang out beside the path. I recognized my classmates re-turning to the city. I seized the branch, ready to jump. Pashka’s voice, tinged with embittered resignation, rang out uncertainly: “Wait! Look, they’re going to switch off the floodlights. There’ll be masses of stars! If we climb higher we’ll see Sagittarius… .”
I was not listening to him. I jumped to the ground. The earth, ribbed with thick roots, bruised the soles of my feet violently. I ran to catch up with my classmates, who were moving off, gesticulating. I wanted to tell them, as quickly as possible, about my partner with the beautiful bosom, to hear their remarks, to deafen myself with words. I was in a hurry to get back to life. And with cruel glee I parodied the strange question that had formed inside my head a moment before: “Where am I? Where was I? On a branch beside that idiot, Pashka, obviously. On the edge of real life!”
By a freakish coincidence (I already knew that reality is made up of implausible repetitions of the kind that novelists hound down as serious faults) we met again the next day, with that unease experienced by two companions who at night have exchanged grave, exalted, and emotional confidences, have revealed themselves to the very intimate core of their souls, and who meet again in the morning by the mundane and skeptical light of day.
I wandered around outside the still-closed dance floor. I wanted to be the first partner for the dancer of the night before. I wanted time to go into reverse and glue my broken cup back together again.
Pashka appeared in the scrub of the park, saw me, hesitated for a second, then walked toward me. He was laden with his fishing gear. Under his arm he carried a big loaf of black bread from which he tore off and ate pieces, chewing them with relish. Once more I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. He inspected me, scrutinizing my light-colored shirt wide open at the neck, my fashionable trousers, very flared at the bottom. Then, tossing his head as a sign of good-bye, he moved off. I heaved a sigh of relief. But suddenly Pashka turned and called out to me in a slightly coarse voice, “Here, come with me, I’ll show you something! Come on, you won’t be sorry….”
I followed him with a hesitant tread.
We went down toward the Volga, walked beside the port with its enormous cranes, its workshops, its corrugated iron warehouses. Farther downstream we made our way into a broad wasteland littered with old barges; with misty metallic constructions; with pyramids of lengthy, rotten tree trunks. Pashka hid his lines and nets under one of these worm-eaten boles and began to jump from one boat to an-other. There was also an abandoned landing stage, and several pontoon bridges that yielded buoyantly beneath our feet. In following Pashka, I had not in fact noticed the moment when we left dry land to find ourselves on this floating island of abandoned craft. I held on to a broken handrail, leaped into a kind of junk, stepped over its side, slipped on the wet timbers of a raft… .
We finally found ourselves in a channel that had steep banks all covered in flowering elder trees. Its surface, from one shore to the other, was hidden under the hulks of ancient vessels packed close together, side by side, in fantastic disorder.
We settled ourselves on the thwart of a little boat. Above it arose the side of a barge that bore traces of fire. Craning my neck, I noticed up there, on the deck of the barge, a rope strung out near the cabin: several fragments of faded cloth undulated gently — washing that had been hanging out to dry for years… .
The evening was warm, misty. The smell of the water mingled with the insipid emanations from the elder trees. From time to time a vessel that we could see passing in the distance in the middle of the Volga sent a series of lazy waves into our channel. Our boat began to pitch up and down, rubbing against the black side of the barge. The whole half-submerged graveyard came to life. One could hear the grating of a cable, the lapping of the water under a pontoon, the lisping of the reeds.
“They are great, all these bulwarks!” I exclaimed, using a word whose maritime application was only vaguely known to me.
Pashka gave me a rather confused glance. I got up, in a hurry to return to the Mountain of Joy… . But my friend tugged me force-fully by the sleeve to make me sit down and announced in a nervous whisper, “Hang on! They’re coming!”
I heard the sound of footsteps, the click of heels on the wet clay of the bank, then a tattoo on the wood of a footbridge. Finally a metallic hammering right above us on the deck of the barge… . And already muffled voices reaching to us from its bowels.
Pashka stood up straight and pressed himself against the side of the barge. It was only then that I noticed the three portholes. Their panes were broken and blocked up from the inside with pieces of plywood. The surfaces of these were covered in fine holes made by a knife blade. Without leaving his porthole, my friend gestured with his hand, inviting me to imitate him. Clinging onto a steel projection that ran the length of the side, I glued myself to the left-hand port-hole. The one in the center remained unoccupied.
What I saw through the crack was at the same time banal and extraordinary. A woman, of whom I could only see her head in pro-file and the upper part of her body, seemed to be leaning with her el-bows on a table, her arms parallel, her hands motionless. Her face appeared calm and even drowsy. Only her presence here, on this barge, seemed surprising. Although after all … She kept gently nod-ding her head, which had fair, curly hair, as if she were continually agreeing with an invisible speaker.
I moved away from my porthole and glanced at Pashka. I was perplexed. “But after all, what’s there to see?” But he had his palms stuck to the flaking surface of the barge, and his forehead against the plywood.
Then I moved to the neighboring porthole, peering into one of the cracks that perforated the wood that blocked it.
It was as if our boat were sinking, going to the bottom of that cluttered canal, and the side of the barge, on the other hand, were hurtling up toward the sky. Feverishly I let myself be magnetized by its rough metal, while trying to keep within my sight the vision that had just blinded me.
It was a woman’s buttocks, white, nude, massive.
Yes, the haunches of a kneeling woman, still seen in profile, her legs, her thighs, the breadth of which terrified me; and the start of her back, cut off by the field of vision allowed by the crack. Behind that enormous backside there was a soldier, also on his knees, his trousers unbuttoned, his tunic in disorder. He was grasping the hips of the woman and drawing them toward him, as if he wanted to be swallowed up into that mass of flesh, which at the same time he kept thrusting away from him with violent shudders of his whole body.
Our boat began to slip away beneath my feet. A vessel sailing up the Volga had sent its waves into our channel. One of them managed to unbalance me. In saving myself from falling I took a step to the left and found myself by the first porthole. I pressed my forehead against its steel frame. In the crack appeared the woman with curly hair and an indifferent and somnolent face, the one I had seen at first; leaning on what resembled a tablecloth, dressed in a white blouse, she continued acquiescing with little nods of her head and was distractedly examining her fingers… .
This first porthole. And the second. The woman whose eyelids were heavy with sleep, her dress and her hairstyle very ordinary. And the other. This naked, erect backside; this white flesh into which there plunged a man who seemed slender beside her; those broad thighs; that heavy movement of the hips. In my shocked young head no link could associate these two images. Impossible to join this up-per half of a woman’s body to that lower half!
My excitement was such that the side of the barge suddenly seemed to me to be stretched out horizontally. Lying flat on the surface like a lizard, I moved toward the porthole with the naked woman. She was still there, but the powerful curve of her flesh was now motionless. The soldier, now facing me, was buttoning himself up with limp and clumsy movements. And another one, smaller than the first, was kneeling down beside the white backside. His movements, on the other hand, were of a nervous and fearful rapidity. But as soon as he began wrestling, pushing the heavy white hemispheres with his belly, you could not have told him apart from the first one. There was no difference in their actions.
My eyes were already filling with black needles. My legs were giving way. And my heart, pressed against the rusty metal, was making the whole vessel vibrate with its deep, breathless echoes. A new series of little waves shook the boat. The side of the barge became vertical again, and, losing my lizard?s agility, I slid toward the first porthole. The woman in the white blouse was nodding her head mechanically while examining her hands. I saw her scratching one nail with another, to remove the layer of varnish… .
Their footsteps resounded in reverse order this time: the hammering of the heels on the deck; the tattoo on the planks of the foot-bridge; the slapping of the wet clay. Without looking at me, Pashka stepped over the side of our boat, bounded onto a half-submerged pontoon, then onto a landing stage. I followed him, jumping limply like a rag doll on strings.
Reaching the bank, he sat down, removed his shoes, rolled up his trousers to the knees, and walked into the water, parting the long stems of the reeds. He thrust aside the duckweed and splashed water over his face for a long time, uttering groans of pleasure, which in the distance could have been taken for cries of distress.
It was a great day in her life. On that June evening she was, for the first time in her life, going to give herself to one of her young friends, to one of those dancers who shuffled on the dance floor at the Mountain of Joy.
She was rather frail. Her face had the neutral features that pass unnoticed in the crowd. The color of her pale russet hair could only be detected by daylight. Under the floodlights of the Mountain or in the bluish glow of the street lamps she appeared simply blond.
I had discovered this erotic custom just a few days ago. In the human swarm at the dance floor I saw groups forming — a swirling knot of adolescents came together, wriggling, getting excited, and as they left, they would scatter to be initiated into what sometimes seemed to me stupidly simple, sometimes fabulously mysterious and profound: love.
She must have been passed over in one of those groups. Like the others, she had been secretly drinking among the bushes that covered the slopes of the Mountain. Then, when their excited little circle had exploded into couples, she was left alone: the accidents of arithmetic did not provide her with a partner. The couples had vanished. Drunkenness was already overtaking her. She was not used to alcohol and had drunk too much, out of eagerness, out of fear of not matching up to the others, and also from the desire to overcome her nervousness on this great day… . She had come back onto the floor, not knowing what to do with her body now, every fiber of which was filled with impatient excitement. But already they were beginning to switch off the floodlights.
All this I was to guess later… . That night I simply saw a girl pacing up and down in a corner of the park at night, walking round the wan pool of light from a street lamp. Like a moth held prisoner by a ray of light. Her gait surprised me. She moved forward as if on a tightrope, with steps that were at once floating and tense. I could see that in every one of her movements she was struggling against drunkenness. Her face had a fixed expression. Her whole being was mobilized in this single effort — not to fall over, to let nothing be suspected, to continue walking round on this circle of light until the black trees stopped swaying and leaping when she approached them, waving their noisy branches.
I went toward her. I entered the blue circle of the street lamp. Her body (black skirt, light top) suddenly focused all my desire. Yes, she instantly became the woman I had always desired. Despite her breathless frailty, despite her features being blurred with drunkenness, despite everything in her body and her face that should have displeased me but which at that moment I found so beautiful.
Making her rounds, she bumped into me and lifted her eyes. I saw a succession of masks on her face — fear, anger, a smile. It was the smile that triumphed, a vague smile that seemed to be directed at someone other than myself. She took my arm. We descended from the Mountain.
At first she talked without stopping. Her tipsy young voice would not remain steady. She whispered, then almost shouted. Clinging to my arm, she stumbled from time to time and let fly an oath, then put her hand to her lips with affected haste. Or else she suddenly broke away from me with an offended air, only to snuggle against my shoulder a moment later. I guessed that my companion was now acting out a love scene rehearsed long ago — a performance intended to show her partner she was somebody special. But in her intoxication she was confusing the sequence of these little interludes. While I, a bad actor, remained dumb, enthralled by this feminine presence, suddenly so accessible; and above all by the staggering ease with which this body was about to offer itself to me. I had always believed that such an offer would be preceded by a long emotional journey, by a thousand speeches, by subtle flirting. I was silent as I felt a little feminine breast squeezed against my arm. Next my nocturnal companion, jabbering animatedly, rejected the advance of a overly forward phantom and puffed out her cheeks for several seconds to show that she was sulking; then she enveloped her imaginary lover in what she believed was a languorous look, but which was simply blurred with the wine and the excitement.
I led her toward the only place that could accommodate our love — toward that floating island where at the beginning of the summer Pashka and I had spied on the prostitute and the soldiers.
In the darkness I must have taken a wrong turn. After wandering for a long time amid sleeping boats we stopped on a kind of old ferry — its ramp had broken supports and was half sunk in the water.
Abruptly she fell silent. Her drunkenness must have been gradually wearing off. I remained motionless, confronting her tense expectation in the darkness. I did not know what I was supposed to do. Kneeling down, I felt the boards, and threw into the water first a tangle of worn ropes, then a bundle of dried seaweed. It was by accident that, busy with my clearing up, I brushed her leg. My fingers, slipping over her skin, gave her goose bumps… .
She remained silent until it was over. Her ey
es closed, she seemed absent, abandoning to me her body that quaked with little shivers….I must have hurt her badly with my hasty actions. This act, so dreamed of, blundered into a series of clumsy, thwarted manipulations. Love was apparently like a hasty, nervous excavation. The knees and the elbows stuck out with a strange anatomical stiffness.
The pleasure was like the flame of a match in an icy wind — a fire that has just enough time to burn your fingers before going out, leaving a blinding spot in your eyes.
I tried to kiss her (I believed that one should do so at this moment); beneath my mouth I felt her lip being bitten hard… .
And what frightened me the most was that a second later I no longer needed either her lips or her erect breast in her gaping blouse, or her slender thighs, over which she had pulled down her skirt with a rapid movement. Her body was becoming indifferent to me, use-less. Sunk in my dull physical contentment, I was self-sufficient. “Why is she still stretched out like that, half naked?” I wondered, irritated. I felt the uneven boards beneath my back, several splinters burning in my palm. The wind had the heavy taste of stagnant water.
In this nocturnal interval there may well have been a fleeting moment of oblivion, a lightning sleep of several minutes. For I did not see the ship approaching. When we opened our eyes, all its white enormity, glittering with lights, was already looming above us. I had thought that our refuge was located deep in one of the countless bays cluttered up with rusty wrecks. But the opposite had occurred. In the darkness we had reached the tip of a headland that projected almost into the middle of the river… . The brightly lit passenger ship, cruising slowly down the Volga, suddenly rose up above our old ferryboat, towering with its three decks. Human silhouettes were outlined against the somber sky. They were dancing on the top deck by the blaze of the lights. The warm flow of a tango spilled over us, enveloped us. The cabin windows, more discreetly lit, seemed to lean over, allowing us to enter their intimacy? . The swell caused by the riverboat was so powerful that our raft swung in a half circle, a swirling glissade that made us giddy. The ship with its light and its music seemed to be circling round us? . It was at that moment that she squeezed my hand and pressed herself against me. It seemed as if the hot-blooded denseness of her body could be concentrated entirely in my hands, like the trembling body of a bird. Her arms and her waist had the suppleness of that armful of water lilies I had picked one day, embracing several slippery stems in the water… .
Dreams of My Russian Summers Page 17