Once Upon The River Love

14

The last time I went to Paris was in June 1914… My father thought I was big enough to go up the Eiffel Tower. I was eleven…"

That was how on an April evening, in an izba buried amid snowdrifts, Olga began her story.

Once we were back from our trip to the Western World – in other words, the Far East – Samurai had decided that we were ripe for initiation into Olga s secret life. He had revealed its significance to us in brief but solemn tones: "Olga is a noblewoman. And she has seen Paris…"

Taken aback, neither Utkin nor I managed to find words for the tiniest question, despite the crowd of queries buzzing in our heads. The reality of a being who had seen Paris was too much for us…

We listened to Olga. The samovar emitted its light hissing and its soft melodious sighs. The snow tinkled on the windowpane. Olga had swept up her gray hair into a becoming wave, held in place by a little silver comb. She was wearing a long dress edged with black lace, which we had never seen before. Her words were tinged with a dreamy indulgence that seemed to be saying: "I know you regard me as an old madwoman. Well… my madness consists in having lived through an era whose richness and beauty you cannot even imagine. My madness is to have seen Paris…"

Listening to her, we learned, with incredulity, of a time when the Western World was practically next door. People went there on vacation! Better still: just to climb up a tower!… We could not get over it. So the Western World had not always been a forbidden planet, accessible only obliquely, via the magic of the cinema?

No, in Olga's memories this planet was a kind of picturesque suburb of Saint Petersburg. And from that suburb there had one day come into her family a certain Mademoiselle Verrière, who taught the little Olga a language with strange r's, vibrant and sensual…

"I already understood enough French," Olga confided in us, "to be able to make out the novels my elder sister used to read and which she hid in her bedside cabinet… It was on the train taking us to Paris that I first succeeded in getting my hands on one of these forbidden volumes. One day, when she went out of the compartment, my sister left her book on the berth. I peeped into the corridor: she was busy chatting with Mademoiselle Verrière. I opened the book and immediately came upon a scene that made me forget everyone else's existence as well as my own…"

Olga pours us another cup of tea, then opens a volume with yellowed pages and begins to read softly…

Did she read it in French and give us a translation, a summary? Or was it a text in Russian? I no longer recall. That evening we retained neither the title of the novel nor the author's name. We simply lived amid the dazzling intensity of the images that had abruptly flooded the room in that snowbound izba.

It was a society dinner in a legendary, romantic Paris. A grand supper party after a masked ball… The splendor of the decor, the shimmering gold of the candles, the elegant and richly costumed guests at a refined banquet. Sparkling women. Exquisite dishes, decanters, chandeliers, flowers. A young dandy, sitting opposite his mistress, is exchanging passionate glances with her. Suddenly, distracted and clumsy, he drops a fork. He bends down, lifts the tablecloth slightly… and the whole world crumbles! His mistress's dainty foot is resting on that of his best friend and gently caressing it. Yes, their legs are entwined, and from time to time they squeeze them together… And when the dandy sits up again, he is greeted by the same loving smile in the eyes of the woman… He flees. He takes flight across the ruins of his love…

Faced with this little feminine foot caressing the perfidious friend's shoe, we were speechless. With those legs intertwined beneath the tablecloth… With that fork… Nothing in our universe corresponded to the voluptuous subtlety of the scene. We cudgeled our brains to think what foot among our acquaintance could be capable of such a caress and such a betrayal. The images that came to mind were of great felt boots and chapped red hands.

Olga continued reading. The despairing dandy counted on finding some solace with his mistress's best friend. She, at least, should understand and share his pain. And the friend showed herself to be very understanding and compassionate. A sisterly soul seemed to be winging its way toward the unhappy man… But in the midst of his tale of woe the hero noticed that this woman's dress, as she sat before the fire, had slipped – inadvertently, of course – so as to reveal her knee and even the delicate flesh of her thigh. The young man was discreet, thinking that this disarray was due to the emotion his story had inspired. He looked away, hoping that his confidante would finally notice this blemish in her dress. A few moments later he takes another furtive look: the knee and the thigh are exposed to his eyes with what seems an even more flagrant nonchalance. An impossible thought crosses his mind: enticing him with her body, this sisterly soul is inviting him to lose himself between her thighs! The dandy meets her gaze: the woman's eyes are misted over with lust.

So what was there that we could compare with the unimaginable emotional complexity of the Western World that had been revealed to us that evening? In what terms could we express the nuanced eroticism of that seduction scene? The woman sitting in her armchair knowingly baring her leg. A woman continuing to listen to the sorrowful confidences of the young betrayed lover, and showing all the signs of compassion, while at the same time imperceptibly raising the hem of her dress… No, we men of the taiga had nothing in our vocabulary to match this sensual dialectic!

Of the three of us, I was the only one who could picture the confidante turned seductress revealing the delicate pink of her thigh. For I had seen her! She was the nocturnal traveler on the evening of our return from the Pacific. It was she. She was also the faithless mistress whose foot caressed that of the perfidious guest beneath the table. I recognized the paleness of her flesh and the elegance of her ankle boot resting on the ledge. "And who knows," I said to myself on the evening of that reading. "If I had not fled like an idiot, maybe the traveler, who turned back the lapel of her cape, might have begun slowly raising the hem of her dress while continuing to stare with exaggerated attention at the dark window!"

So the smile Belmondo was giving us from the end of Lenin Avenue was not so simple. Behind the Western World, seen as a bathing beach for golden antelopes, and the heroic and adventurous West, with its headlong action sequences, lay hidden another one – a voluptuous West, a realm of unimaginable sensual perversions, of refined erotic flourishes, of capricious emotional entanglements…

"We paused on the brink of this unknown continent. As our guide we had a little girl from the start of the century, who had one day opened a novel on the Saint Petersburg – Paris train and hit upon these lines that had bewitched her:

My mistress had made an assignation with me for that night; gazing at her, I raised my glass slowly to my lips. As I turned to take a plate, my fork fell to the ground…

All through those days I never stopped thinking about the red-haired woman in her izba buried under the snow. My memory had become even more vivid. Our discovery of the Western World had removed all the tragic sense from that night of the snowstorm: the red-haired prostitute had been transformed, quite logically, into my first amorous adventure, my first conquest. Ardently I awaited the sequel. I could already picture them arriving, my future lovers: sometimes as glamorous spies with robust tanned bodies that promised torrid grappling on the warm ocean beach; sometimes as languorous vamps with decadent and perverse charm…

The red-haired woman provided the substance for these fantasies, the human clay, the bodily lava that I wanted to keep anonymous. All I needed was her physical weight, the heaviness of her breasts, the bulk of her thighs, the warm mass of her hips. This was the material that I sculpted endlessly, impressing onto it the shape of my dreams of the West. It was the amorphous matter waiting to be shaped by the chisel of the Western mind. The breathless chaos of that night of the snowstorm was refashioned as an amorous intrigue; the Redhead's great body was clothed in fine garments and her legs were covered with the transparent patina of stockings. And all that survived of our uneasy coupling beneath a blinding light-bulb was the sensation of an embrace; and this was refined as it segued, via the discreet lighting of a luxury compartment, toward a salon where, sitting in front of the fire, a woman was imperceptibly revealing her delicate nakedness…

Western clarity banished all the untidy elements of that night. The photos spread out on the blanket, her tears, her drunken woman's clumsiness: these now seemed to me like minor blemishes, scraps of clay to be eliminated by the deft and precise chisel.

All this time the red-haired woman was still there in my mind's eye, as it was invaded by female bodies in gestation. And yet she was no longer there: transformed by my cunning craftsmanship, unrecognizable in her new guises. As for her face, I had forgotten her expression since that night. Snow, fatigue, and drunkenness had left it like a washed-out watercolor. This greatly assisted my erotic modeling.

Oddly enough, however, the more the body of the red-haired prostitute became blurred, the more I felt the need to go back to see her, to undergo that first experience again but with quite a new attitude. To obtain a new supply of carnal lava for my fantasies. To possess that great faded body and draw from its primal matter sensations that I would later refine. To make use of its easy abundance, while waiting for the West.

Seeing her again now had a symbolic importance for me as well. I could no longer tolerate the destiny of "neither one thing nor the other." I must make a choice. I could no longer live alternating between that half-mad Chinese, caught up in his interminable saga, and the universe of Belmondo. Between the Orient and the Western World. And the choice made must be final. A visit to the prostitute should draw a Une through the saga of Asia. A farewell with no going back.

15

It took me a long time to resolve to go to Kazhdai. The days passed, and I was never alone. The six-thirty performance; tea at Olga's: we spent all our free time together.

It was an April evening, mild and silent, that made this farewell encounter possible…

By the afternoon we had all sensed it in the air: winter was about to fight its last rearguard action. The sky misted over, softened, became pregnant with cloudy anticipation. The great flakes began to swirl around in an increasingly powerful, increasingly giddy breeze. It was the start of the final snowstorm. This last gasp, this indolent gale, was winter's "way of showing off its power to the victorious spring that was close at hand. Like a great bird, wearied by its seven-month journey, it would flap its great white wings frantically and then would fly away at last, leaving our izbas beneath the soft covering of its snowy quilt…

The next day the village woke up entombed. But this time we sensed that it really was the end of the winter. The layer of snow that I dug into with a wooden shovel had a luminous lightness and caved in on itself, collapsing listlessly. And the sun, up on the surface, was already quite springlike. It shone with warm brilliance on a number of chimneys that rose up out of the snow and on the darkened rooftops. A heavy exhalation emanated from the taiga, the disturbing scent of the mighty reawakening of countless plant lives. And a jackdaw, disproportionately large on a poplar tree that was now quite stunted, called out with mad, abandoned glee. Seeing me emerge from my tunnel, it swung up into the sky, filling the air with its heady cries. Then, in the sun-drenched silence, I heard the murmur of drops forming along the rooftop as it grew warm in the solar rays. The secret birth of the first stream…

That evening I headed for Kazhdai. I approached it not from our village but coming from Nerlug. There in the city was where I had just bought something I had never held in my hands before: a bottle of cognac. It was flat and easy to slip into the pocket of my sheepskin coat. I took it out at intervals, turned the cork, which yielded with a pleasant creaking sound, and swallowed a small stinging draft.

All I could see now was the body of the red-haired woman. After each draft I manipulated it more and more deftly, I squeezed it unsparingly. I delved into this flesh to take from it what my dreams would later shape. And I took an increasing pride in my arrogant virility. I saw it as marking the final break with my past. Yes, I must scorn this great amorphous body, humiliate it, impose on it my disdainful strength. And as I slipped across the plain, bathed in coppery light, I thrilled to picture that human clay. My hands were filled with the mass of its breasts, as I pulled and kneaded them. massaging and tormenting their grainy pulp. My hand no longer clung stupidly to her shoulder, as on the first occasion, but plunged into the deep softness of her heavy thighs. I felt I was a sculptor, an artist seeking his raw material in the abundance of a nature that lacked a sense of form. And also a Westerner – a being who focused the proud lucidity of his intellect on his desire, his love, and the female body.

Thanks to Olga's readings, I was daily becoming more familiar with this clarity. I was certain that this marvelous illumination could give an account of our darkest emotions. Even of my visit to the woman I had never loved and whose body frightened me with its weary enormity. My desire to see her again gradually became associated in my mind with the perverse elegance of that woman confidante slowly revealing the soft pink of her thigh. While her eyes retained a light of almost maternal compassion…

Yes, at a certain moment I felt I was perverse. And therefore heroic. Liberated from that whole jumble of sentimental trivia my mind had been dragging along in a confused spate. I was perverse, as I understood it, therefore I was a Westerner! And liberated because I was going to have my way with that body – which was all ready and waiting for me – without the least compunction. And I would walk away from it without the red-haired woman knowing that we should never meet again…

Happy to have reached total comprehension at last, I stopped at the summit of a great snow dune that overhung the valley of the Olyei. Screwing up my eyes at the brilliance of the sunset, I turned the cork and drank a long draft of the brownish liquid whose foreign name had such a fine ring to it. And in my head there reverberated these few sentences that in all their Western limpidity expressed perfectly what I was preparing to experience:

I know not what desperate impulse drove me to it, but I had, as it were, a subdued desire to possess her one more time, to drink all those bitter tears from her magnificent body and then to kill both of us. Ultimately, I both abhorred and worshiped her…

At the station I walked into the main hall with a resolute tread, with the nonchalance of a conqueror. After the Pacific port, everything in this building seemed to me tiny, provincial. The train timetables on the dusty notice board; the dim row of lamps behind their opaque glass bowls; a few travelers with their rustic luggage. I went into the little waiting room. I thought I could already see the glow of her red hair above the rows of chairs… But the woman was not there. Dumbfounded, I made a tour of the main hall: the display case on the newsstand with the faded smiles of the cosmonauts; the buffet with the sleepy attendant; the hoarfrost on the windows… It had not even occurred to me that the red-haired woman might not be there. Especially not on the day of the snowstorm… The day of so important and final a choice!

I went out onto the platform. The coaches were asleep under thick eiderdowns of snow. A cleaner armed with a large shovel was slowly opening up a narrow passageway toward the warehouses. "But where can she have got to at this time of day?" I asked myself with irritation, as I contemplated all this provincial stagnation.

Suddenly the very simple answer came into my mind: What a fool I am! She must be with someone… Someone is in the process of "having" her at this moment!

I felt an ill-natured joy stretch my lips into a malicious smile. With swift steps I crossed the station, and using the passageways cut through the midst of the snowdrifts, I headed for the other end of Kazhdai, toward her izba…

"Yes, I'll wait just outside her door," I said to myself. "I'll wait until it's finished…" My perverse desire grew even more intense. On my lips, stimulated by the alcohol, I could detect the taste of her. The Redhead's body would still be hot. A warmed-up mass, ready to be kneaded…

All that could be seen of her izba was the top of the roof, the chimney beneath its blackened cap. And the birch tree half buried in the snow, with its little birdhouse. The sun had already disappeared below the castellated line of the taiga. In the April dusk, blue and limpid, the branches of the birch tree, the ridge of the roof, and the contours of the immaculate dunes of snow were outlined with a supernatural distinctness. And in the midst of this serenity I had a strangely detached awareness of my own presence, like a tightly wound spring.

I saw the long dark line in the snow: the passage cut through to the door of her izba. I went up to it, taking care that the crunching of my footsteps should not be heard. The passage was already filled with the violet shadows of the evening.

I saw the steps of packed snow leading right down, toward the door. And leaning over this narrow trench, I peered down into its depths…

To my extreme amazement, the door to the izba was not closed. The steps and the threshold of the house were Ht with a soft light. First of all I heard a light knocking, a series of little taps, the sound generally made by a hatchet when you cut small sticks to light the stove. Yes, someone was chopping wood and had opened the door to let some air into the buried izba. This familiar sound disconcerted me. Should I go down straightaway? Or wait a little?

It was at that moment that I heard her voice…

It was a song that seemed to come from very far away, as if it had had to cross infinite spaces before beginning to ripple through this snowbound izba. The voice was almost frail, but it had about it that remarkable freedom, pure and true, of songs sung in solitude, for oneself, for the wind, for the silence of the evening. The words matched the rhythm of the breathing, interrupted from time to time by the crack of split wood. They were not addressed to anyone but melted imperceptibly into the blue shadows of the cooling air, into the smell of the snow, into the sky.

I did not stir as I lent an ear to this voice arising from the depths of the snow.

The tale told by the song was simple. One that any woman might have evoked in the evening, her gaze lost in the fluid dancing of the flames. The despairing wait for a loved one; a bird flying away – happy bird! – over the steppe; frosts that burn the flowers of summer…

I knew the story by heart. All I was listening to was the voice. And now I understood nothing anymore!

Here was this voice, simple and soft; the sky whose darkening vastness was filling with the first stars; the pungent exhalation of the nearby taiga. And the solitary birch tree, its birdhouse still empty, this tree keeping an attentive silence in the violet air of dusk.

I stood upright above the passage and looked about me. The song pouring out beneath the sky, rising up from the purple shadows at my feet, seemed to forge a mysterious connection between the limpid silence of the evening and our two presences, so close and so different. And the more I became impregnated with this secret harmony, the more insignificant my febrile fantasies seemed to me. Within my tipsy young head all the arguments advanced in those debates that had obsessed me for so many days were slowly fading. Now came monotonous words, not unlike those of the old Chinese in our coach. Yes, they said, that's how life goes. Here's a red-haired prostitute whose body will quench the desires of young men and old, all of whom will die when their time comes; and another woman will come, brunet or blond, perhaps, and yet other men will seek in her body the elusive spark of love; there will be more winters and more mild spells. And more snowstorms and more summers as short as the instant of pleasure. And there will always be an evening in the life of this woman when she is seated before the fire, softly singing a song that no one will hear…

Thus spoke the impassive voice of Asia in my head.

Another interrupted it, murmuring: The first time, you were naive and unaware; now try to enjoy your desire as you have conceived of it; your understanding of your desire, the triumph of your intellect. Take this body and the range of your sensations, and compose from them a beautiful love story. Tell it, recount it, think it!

The echo of these words fell silent… Moving away from the red-haired woman's izba, I went and sat in the snow, my back against the trunk of a cedar tree. I took off my shapka, I unbuttoned my sheepskin coat. The rippling wind froze my damp brow. A star low in the sky shone like a hesitant tear. This moment in my life had the fragile purity of a tear too. This whole nighttime universe was like a living crystal, suspended on the fluttering eyelashes of an invisible being. I felt I was being watched by that person's immense eyes. I was inside this fragile tear, within its limpid destiny.

The distant voice of the red-haired woman floated up from the narrow passage. That woman "with her great faded body, her face eroded by the eyes of all the men who had thrashed around on her belly. That woman who waited endlessly for a train to nowhere, with her carefully trimmed photos and her wine-soaked tears…

She was all that. And she was quite different. The voice that soared up toward the trembling of the first star. The white plain overlaid with the blue transparency of the night. The scent of the smoke from the rekindled fire. And those immense eyes that filled the whole vastness of the sky.

My eyelids trembled; everything melted, was troubled. Something warm tickled my cheek as it ran down…

I had never before returned to the village in the middle of the night. I had never spent so long walking on the long ridge of snow above the Olyei, in the shadow of the sleeping taiga. I made slow progress, with no thought of any danger or of the invisible presence of wolves. At moments like this, man is in the hands of destiny, guided by the moonlight like a sleepwalker… I tried hard to remember the red-haired woman's face. In vain. Where I looked for her features there appeared the dim oval painted in watercolors. Suddenly the memory of the photos returned. A young woman holding a child in her arms, her silhouette against the sunlit grass, the glittering of a river… As I walked along, I was looking at these smiling eyes.

And like a monogram detected in the middle of tracery, the dull oval ht up, suddenly became clear. The red-haired woman was looking at me with the eyes of the young stranger in the photos. Her face of long ago returned. In my memory of her.

On my return, my aunt said nothing to me. She opened the door, trying not to meet my eyes, and went back to bed, thinking, no doubt, that I was returning from my first erotic rendezvous, my first adventure as a man…

I woke in the middle of the night. As I slept, I thought I had finally understood why the little birdhouse persistently aroused some vague memory in me. It was because it had been constructed with great care and delicacy. The walls, the sloping roof, and the perch were ornamented with fluting carved in wood. It reminded me of the trimmed edges of the photos. These were the vestiges of a hoped-for life that someone had wanted to be beautiful, even in the trivia of existence. "How he must have loved her, that woman!" I whispered softly in the darkness, surprised, myself, by these words.

Several days later, in the blazing sunlight, the village broke loose from its moorings: the Olyei was on the move, shattering its ice, hurtling southward. Toward the river Amur.

Intoxicated by the luminous freshness of this motion, we were overcome with vertigo. The sky turned upside down in the cascading torrent. Our izbas sailed along amid snows still intact, between the somber walls of the taiga.

We were all three of us there, gazing at the slow slide. Utkin stood a couple of steps behind us. It was the first time after all those years that he had come out to see the breakup…

But here the unleashing of the springtime spate had none of the devastating power of the Amur. Nor was there anything symbolic about it. It was quite simply the disintegration of the river's winter shell. A shell of days, memories, moments, taking itself off toward the south amid the melodious creaking of the ice floes and the lapping of the liberated torrents, bombarded by the sun's rays.

As the slabs of ice floated by, we saw the marks of our snow-shoes and the holes made by our pikes. Then it was the turn of the Devil's Bend, the deep ruts dug in the snow by the wheels of heavy trucks, and the stippling with black oil…

Suddenly there was an unexpected commotion. A broad section of ice near the little izba bathhouse detached itself, slid down onto the shore, and joined the general convoy. Our eyes were riveted to its angular surface. On it one could see distinctly, molded in the snow, the imprints of two naked bodies. These were the ones left by Samurai and myself on the occasion of our last nocturnal bath, two days previously – the marks of our mute ecstasy as we gazed at the starry sky. These two bodies, with their long legs wide open and their outstretched arms, moved off slowly toward the mighty river. Toward the sun of Asia. Toward the Amur…

16

Throughout that day of the breakup Utkin remained a little distracted and vague. On account of his painful memory of the river, we supposed. But in the evening, when we were sitting on the first slope to be freed of snow, he drew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and announced with a tense smile: "I want to read you a poem!"

"A poem by Pushkin?" I asked mockingly.

Utkin made no reply, lowered his eyes, and began to read. In an uneven, hoarse voice, which seemed as if it no longer belonged to him. At the first Unes I almost let out a whisde. Samurai swiftly stopped me with a cold look.

"I know your vigil underneath this snow Is more despairing far than death… I know if I came close to you I'd simply earn a pitying glance. But I will not approach. I'll stay here in the plain's cold fog To be a presence in white emptiness, A distant figure. So that you can dream Of him who comes eternally to meet you But never arrives. …"

At the last words, Utkin's voice became choked. He thrust the paper into the pocket of his sheepskin coat, got up abruptly, and began running along beside the Olyei, sinking into the soft snow. He looked more than ever like a wounded bird attempting to fly…

We were silent. Samurai took out his cigar and lit it with a slow gesture. He looked pensive. Exhaling the bitter smoke, he raised his eyebrows, gently shaking his head to the rhythm of his silent thoughts. Then, noticing that I was watching the course of his reflections on his face, he clicked his tongue and uttered a sigh.

"You know, women are stupid. For a poem like that they should risk perdition! But they like handsome little guys like you or great hefty ones like me. Look at him… he's running along like a madman. There. He's fallen down, poor fellow!… No, no. We should leave him alone right now…"

Samurai fell silent. In the distance we saw Utkin get up, shake off the snow stuck to his sheepskin, and continue his limping progress toward the first trees of the taiga… Suddenly Samurai smiled and gave me a wink.

"Admit it. He would never have had the courage to read us his poem if we hadn't seen Belmondo! Maybe he wouldn't even have written it…"

We returned to the village by the fluid blue light of the springtime dusk.

"Go and knock on his door," Samurai instructed me. "Tell him they're showing the film for the last time tomorrow. Who knows when we'll ever be able to see it again. Either this one or any others. Maybe not before next winter…"

Next day at six-thirty after the achievements of socialist labor and the distribution of decorations at the Kremlin, we entered a fairy city that arose from the depths of the sea. Venice! And the indomitable Belmondo was racing along at the wheel of a speedboat, cutting himself a path between languid gondolas. In flight from his pursuers, he and his ship of fools hurtled straight into the lobby of a luxury hotel, whose first floor was scarcely higher than the level of the canal. The glass doors were smashed to smithereens, the staff took cover in protected corners. And smiling indulgently, he announced with a grand gesture: "I have reserved the royal suite for tonight."

How many lips there were in the heart of our taiga that spring murmuring the magic word "Venetsia!"

Samurai had got it right: after that showing Belmondo took a vacation. As if, now that it was summer, his presence at the end of Lenin Avenue was less indispensable. And it is true that as the trees cloaked themselves in the verdant shadow of the first leaves, they gradually hid the squat building of the militia and the KGB, and softened the angular contours of the barbed-wire factory.

But more than anything, that West which he had sought to acclimatize on the permafrost of our lands seemed to be taking root. The summer will take care of the rest, he must have thought, as he went off on vacation.

Yes, the Western World now seemed firmly grafted into our hearts. Was it by chance that even the stupid newsreels, showing the gold armor plating of those Kremlin medals and the Sta-khanovite weavers, now inspired a kind of tremor in our breasts? We remembered that back in the winter those weavers and those bemedaled old men used to precede the appearance of our hero. Now they were almost dear to us. And to our amazement, it was behind the masks of these propaganda robots that we discovered the first nostalgia of our lives: nostalgia for those long journeys through the snow-covered taiga, the complex constellations of scents, luminous tones, and sensations…

One summer's evening all three of us were gathered around Olga's samovar, listening to her tale. She was telling us about a writer whose novel she could not read to us, first of all because the book was too long – it would take years to read, she said, and a whole lifetime to understand – but also because it was evidently not translated into Russian… She therefore confined herself to summarizing a single episode, which, she claimed, expressed the idea of it… The hero was, like us, drinking tea, although he did not enjoy the benefits of a samovar. One perfumed sip and a mouthful of a cake with an unknown name produced a miraculous reaction from his taste buds: in him were reborn the sounds, the smells, and the spirit of the distant days of his childhood. Without daring to interrupt Olga's story, or to admit this insight, we asked ourselves, astonished, incredulous: "What if an image seen scores of times – that of the weaver; or the cool smell of shapkas covered in melted snow; or the darkness of the auditorium at the Red October – what if all those could take the place of the young French aesthete's cake? What if we, too, could have access to this mysterious Western nostalgia, with the rudimentary means we have at hand?"

With Belmondo, one miracle more or less was not a problem…

But it was the language of the West, even more than the themes of its novels, that was taking root in us.

For us the German that we learned at school had no link with the Western World of our dreams; it was the language of the enemy, a useful instrument in case of war: that is all it was. The language of the Americans was repugnant to us. The children of the local Party elite mouthed it to a greater or lesser extent. They were all even put into a special group created for students of English. Proletarians, on the other hand, had to learn the language of the enemy…

No, for us the only real language of the Western World was Belmondo's. Seeing his films ten, fifteen, twenty times over, we learned to make out on his lips the inaudible traces of those phantom words eliminated by the dubbing. A little trembling at the corners of his mouth when the sentence in Russian was already completed, a swift rounding of his lips, stresses that we guessed were even…

Sometimes Olga read to us in French. Little by little the phantom phrases showed through. Belmondo was beginning to speak to us in his mother tongue. Our desire to respond to him was such that French seeped into us by impregnation, without grammar or explanation. We copied its sounds, like parrots at first, then like children. Besides, thanks to the films, we had been speaking it before we ever heard it. Our lips, imitating the movements observed on Belmondo's, repeated, all unaided, the Unes that Olga read out before the open window in the clear soft evening:

"Impossible union

Of souls through the body…"

In these verses of a poet of long ago all our youthful dreams found vivid expression…

One day Utkin spoke to Olga about English. She gave him an aristocratic smile, the corners of her mouth a little tensed: "English, my dear friends, is nothing other than bastardized French. If I remember correctly, until the seventeenth century French was the official language of the English. As for the Americans, let us not speak of them. They contrive to express the few ideas they have left entirely through the most basic interjections."

Her exegesis delighted us. So in their ignorance, what the little apparatchiks were studying was a vile surrogate for Belmondo's language! And it was, furthermore, entirely replaceable by a series of primitive gestures and interjections. Utkin was the one who derived the greatest satisfaction from this explanation. The Americans were his pet hate. He could not forgive them for the extermination of the Indians. In his perception the North American Indians were none other than our distant Siberian ancestors who had long ago crossed the Bering Strait and settled all over the great prairies of America. "They are our very close brothers," he would often say He envisaged a military alliance with the Indians against the Americans. And when the fighting was over, New York must be razed to the ground and the lands annexed by the whites returned to the bison and the Indians…

Belmondo departed. The great portrait of him beside the Red October cinema disappeared, making way for various glum faces from a film about the civil war. But the West was still there among us. We sensed its presence in the spring air; in the transparency of the wind, in which we sometimes detected the piquant tang of the ocean; in people's relaxed expressions.

And while the three of us, in love with the West, sought out its secret essence in books and in the music of its language, there were other devotees, who discovered it in more tangible portents. The stunning coup de théâtre pulled off by the school headmistress, for example.

This was the woman who, according to rumors as persistent as they were improbable, indulged in sexual orgies on narrow berths in the cabins of the big trucks that transported vast cargoes of timber. A woman who was forever muffled up in a shawl; who wore a jacket and a skirt of very thick wool, as stiff and as solid as that used for carpets; her feet shod in great fur boots that revealed only a couple of inches of her calves, which were further protected by knitted leggings. A woman, in a word, whose body was inaccessible, unimaginable, nonexistent. And whose face was the face of a faded woman, reminiscent of a padlocked door that no one would ever have wanted to open in any case… And, suddenly, this coup de theatre!

On that day in May we saw an extraordinary car pull up in an alleyway that ran beside the school building in Nerlug. A foreign make such as we would come across only in films about the horrors of capitalism in its death throes. And in those of Belmondo, of course… We already knew that by means of astute bartering it was possible to get yourself one of these cars in the Far East from the Japanese. But it was the first time we had seen one "in the flesh."

It was certainly not new. It must have been sprayed and resprayed, repaired several times, tampered with, perhaps. Its license plate looked like that of any old truck. But what did we care? What counted was its noble profile, its streamlined silhouette, its unfamiliarity. In a word, its Western air.

It all happened very quickly. The passersby and we students did not even have time to crowd around the beautiful stranger. Its door slammed; and a tall, well-built man, wearing the uniform of an officer in the merchant marine, emerged and took a few steps, while keeping his eye on the school gate. Everyone followed his gaze.

A woman came down the flight of steps. The headmistress! Yes, it was she… We instantly forgot about the car. For the woman who walked over to the captain was very beautiful. We saw her legs revealed up to the knee, long, svelte, the light shining off her black stockings. We could even see her knees, which were elongated, elegant and delicate. And furthermore she had breasts and hips. Her breasts were slightly uplifted by the fine lace that framed the very modest décolletage of her dress. Her hips filled the fine material with their rhythmic movement. She was quite simply a beautiful woman, confident in her gestures, smiling as she went to meet the man waiting for her. Her swept-up hair revealed the pretty curve of her neck; on her ears sparkled pendants decorated with amber. And her face, in its fresh and open candor, was like a bouquet of wildflowers.

At the moment of their meeting, of course, all we saw was this bouquet. The other features of the transfigured headmistress were imprinted in our eyes but examined only later, with the aid of our collective memory. The coup de theatre was too rapid.

She crossed the spring street. The captain took several steps toward her, with a somewhat mysterious smile hovering on his face. Then, with the flourish of a conjurer, he removed his fine blue nautical cap and bowed to the woman who stood in front of him. The crowd held its breath… The captain kissed the headmistress on the cheek…

So they did know how to do all that! She to dress elegantly, groom her hair, be lively, desirable; he to master that handsome machine, open the door for a lady with a courteous remark. And, above all, to take off Belmondo style!

Yes, he did it for us, driving through the red light, defying the gray uniforms, chewing up the streets of Nerlug with his four fearsome wheels. The roar of the beautiful stranger deafened us; its speed distorted all normal perspectives – trees and houses seemed to be hurtling toward us. And the car, with squealing tires, was already turning into Lenin Avenue. At the open window we saw a flash of our headmistress's pink scarf fluttering in the wind. Like a gesture of farewell.

A week later the city discovered the key to the mystery… On the day of the last snowstorm the headmistress had decided to go and see this film, at the very first showing of the day. So as to be sure of not being surprised there by her pupils. Everyone had been talking about this Belmondo for months. But she had not cared to stoop to that type of mass culture. However, the temptation was great. The headmistress must have sensed a wind of change blowing in the streets of Nerlug…

The day after the storm, hardly had the snowplows cleared the principal thoroughfares of the city than she went to the cinema. Armored in her carapace of thick wool, she noted with satisfaction that she was practically alone in the auditorium…

The captain arrived only after the newsreel. A disciplined man, he found his row and his seat and sat down beside her. He wore the expression he had on bad days – days when he needed to leave the ship and plunge into the bustle of everyday life, become a man like other men. He was on his way to Novosibirsk: his train had been blocked at Nerlug by winter's rearguard action; its departure was not forecast for another twenty-four hours. Exasperated by the futile wait, badly shaved, peevish, the captain ended up in the cold auditorium of the Red October cinema, next to a woman of whom he thought, with disgust: So this is a woman of Nerlug… Heavens above! How can a woman get herself up like this? My sailors could do better. A pretty face, but that expression! She looks like a nun in the middle of Lent…

The lights went out. Colors filled the screen. A legendary city arose from the azure sea. With its palaces, and its towers reflected in the water… And the captain immediately forgot Nerlug and his train and the Red October; and as he recognized the silhouette from the air, he murmured: "Venetsia. "

The headmistress's long lashes trembled…

Belmondo arose, concentrating within his gaze all the magnificence of the sky, the sea, and the city, and sped off along the canals in his crazy boat.

"I have reserved the royal suite for tonight," he declared, crash-landing in the hotel lobby at the wheel of his launch.

A gentle echo vibrated in the hearts of the two solitary spectators: "The royal suite… For tonight…"

And in the suite in question a kind of bacchante, on stiletto heels and wearing very little else, snatched off the tablecloth and invited the hero to a wild orgy: "You're going to have me on this table right now."

The headmistress stiffened, feeling the hairs on her temples grow tense. The captain coughed.

"And why not standing up in a hammock? Or on skis?" retorted Belmondo.

It was too silly for words! Wonderfully silly! Astounding! The captain began to laugh heartily. The headmistress, no longer able to resist the laughter welling up, did the same, pressing a lace-edged handkerchief to her lips…

And once again the city could be seen rising out of the waters of the lagoon, but this time arrayed in its nocturnal beauty. Belmondo appeared, caught in that fleeting moment of a tremor of the soul between two adventures. He was sitting on a granite parapet, with a muted look and a melancholy air. We had always taken these moments to be a necessary pause between the action sequences. But two solitary spectators read quite a different meaning into this silent parenthesis… It was then that the captain, turning his head slightly toward his neighbor, repeated dreamily: "Venetsia. "

As for the rest of us, gawking onlookers fascinated by the Western machine on that day in May, the extent of the upheaval provoked in our lives by Belmondo was clearly borne in on us. If a car newly emerged from one of his films could rip up the frozen perspective of Lenin Avenue and transform our headmistress into a creature of fantasy, something had changed forever. The gray uniforms, we knew, would invade the streets again; the Communard barbed-wire factory would increase its productivity and exceed the plan; winter would return… But nothing would be as it was before. From now on our lives would open out into an infinite elsewhere. The sun, trapped among the watchtowers of the camp, would gradually resume its majestic pendulum swing back and forth.

Nothing would ever be as it had been before. Oh, how we longed to believe this!

17

When did it finally happen?

That young female body taking me, shaping me, inhaling me, absorbing me into its scents, into the ephemeral suppleness of its skin, into the dark smoke of its hair spread out upon the grass. With the strong, warm wind of early summer blowing, the wind from the steppe – such a contrast with the ice-cold torrent of the Olyei, whose crystalline waters in spate surrounded us on all sides. And the hammock swaying in the wind… Yes, a hammock! We had forgotten nothing, Belmondo! That wind. The sky overturned in her slanting eyes, blinded with pleasure, her breathless moaning… When was it?

Belmondo s arrival had interrupted the regular passage of time.

Winter no longer implied endless sleep. Nor the evenings – because of the films – quietude at the end of the day. The hour of six-thirty had imposed itself on everyone with apparent universality. We lived subject to these new rhythms, finding ourselves in Mexico one day, in Venice the next. Any other concept of time was obsolete…

It is impossible for me to remember now whether it was Year One or Year Two of our new chronology. Impossible to say whether I was fifteen, as in that spring when we absconded to the Far East; or sixteen – that is, a year after Belmondo's arrival. I simply do not know. In all probability, however, it was the second spring. For I could not have lived through all that I did in a single year. My heart would have exploded!

Fifteen, sixteen… These methods of reckoning are in any case so relative, given the vibrant intensity of our passions. Here is what I lived through: the age of the night in the red-haired woman's izba; the age of my first mouthful of cognac; the age of the salt taste of the Pacific. The age when I discovered that the fragile beauty of a woman's knee could cause devastating pain, could be blissful torture. The age when the soft white flesh of an aging prostitute haunted me with its insurmountable physicality. The age of the unveiled mystery of the Transsiberian. The age when a woman's body taught me its language, word by word, gesture by gesture. The age when childhood had become no more than a faint echo – like the memory of that great frozen tear in the eye of the wolf stretched out full length on the blue-tinted snow of the evening.

Fifteen, sixteen… Here is what I was. A strange alloy of the winds, silences, and sounds of the taiga, of places visited or imagined. Someone who already knew, thanks to Olga's library, that feudal chatelaines had long bodices, like the bodice of the unhappy Emma Bovary. That the shoulders of a bathing odalisque were tinged with amber… And that only a real boor, like that country squire in Maupassant, would ask a hotel manager to prepare the bed at midday, thus revealing his intentions with regard to his crimson-faced young wife… Having studied Musset, I knew that romantic lovers always choose a cold, sunny morning in December to part forever – the clarity of past passions now spent, the vivid bitterness of feelings now subdued. I was somebody who observed the monstrous decomposition of the flesh of Zola's Nana, shaking my head in violent denial: No, no, beyond this human clay doomed to disintegration, there is something else! There is that song that arose from the depths of the snow and poured out into the dark-purple April sky… And in that hotel bedroom at the Golden Lion I was to perceive something that many readers in the West had not even noticed: on the mantelpiece, glimpsed in a brief phrase, there were two big seashells. You had only to hold them to your ear – had Emma done it? I often wondered – and you could hear the faint roar of the sea. With our mad dreams of the Pacific, how close we felt at such moments to that adulterous woman!

Belmondo gave to the alloy that I was a structure, a movement, a personified outline. With all his joyful strength he brought our present and our dreams closer together. I was at an age when this fusion still seemed possible…

So it must have been at the start of summer. An evening filled with a blue wind from the steppes. On an island in the middle of the river in spate – a narrow grassy strip with a ruined izba and the remnants of an orchard, several apple trees foaming with white blossom.

In the distance, in the golden haze of the sunset, rose the taiga, its feet in the river, reflected in the somber mirrors of the water that now reached into its shady recesses.

The little island floated in the glow of the evening. The noisy rippling of the current mingled with the rustle of the wind in the blossoming branches. The cool little waves lapped insistently, breaking against the sides of the old boat I had moored to the rail of the flooded izba steps. The day was slowly fading, the light was turning mauve, lilac, then violet. The darkness seemed to refine the living harmony of the sounds. "We could hear the slight scraping of the boat against the wood of the steps now, the serene cry of a bird, the silky whispering of the grass.

We were stretched out at the feet of the apple trees, lying against each other, our eyes wandering amid the first stars. Naked, she and I, the warm wind enveloping our bodies with its breeze steeped in the aromas of the steppe. And above our heads, fastened to the great stunted branches, a hammock swung gently in the wind. Yes, we had remained true to Belmondo, down to the smallest details of the setting for our love scene. We had climbed into that unstable craft and tried to stand up, embracing each other and quickly losing our heads… But either our desire was too violent or the erotic savoir faire of the West still escaped us…

We found ourselves in the grass, scattered with white petals: we hardly noticed our fall. We felt we were still falling, still flying, still loving each other in flight…

Her supple body slipped away, escaping in our fall through the air. I did not succeed in holding onto it. With my frenzied heaving I was pushing it along on the smooth grass toward our island's ephemeral frontier at the water's edge. I had to wrap the cascade of her hair around my fist. As the cossacks used to do in the old days, lying on bearskins in their yurts. My desire had a memory of that gesture…

She was Nivkh, a native of the forest of the Far East where we had once seen a tiger, blazing in the snow… Her face was framed with long, glossy black hair; she had slanting eyes, the enigmatic smile of a Buddha. Her body had skin that seemed to be covered with a golden varnish and the reflexes of a liana. When she sensed that I would not let her go, her body twined around me, molded me, absorbed me through all its trembling vessels. She permeated me with her scent, her breath, her blood… And I could no longer make out where her body merged into the grass filled with the wind from the steppes; where the savor of her round, firm breasts mingled with that of the apple blossom; where the sky of her dazzled eyes ended and the somber depths glistening with stars began.

Her blood flowed in my veins. Her breathing filled my lungs. Her body writhed into me. When I kissed her breast I was drinking the foam from the snowy clusters in the orchard. I thrust myself into that nocturnal space through which the wind had traveled, perfuming itself with a thousand aromas, carrying away with it the pollen of coundess flowers. She cried out as she sensed the peak approaching, her nails tore at my shoulders. A crazy liana intoxicated with the sap of the trunk it held entwined. I flooded her, I filled her with myself. In her I touched the giddy depths of the sky, the cool of the dark waves. Her heart was already beating somewhere beyond the nocturnal taiga…

The wind scattered white petals over our bodies as we lay there in the blissful exhaustion of love. The wood fire we had lit on arrival flared up at intervals into a tall red plume, then quieted down, stretched out on the ground in the silent glowing of its embers. The boat fastened to the steps of the izba, washed occasionally by a wave, gave out a whisper, followed by sleepy lapping. And the hammock, the hammock of our crazy fantasies, swung about our heads amid the bubbling foam of the blossom. It looked like a fantastic net hurled into the dark heavens by a demented fisherman so as to make a catch of quivering stars…

On a gray, calm day in July that same summer I was walking in the streets of Nerlug, a bag of provisions in my hand. The gardens were spilling their abundant foliage over the fences. In the courtyards you could hear the lazy clucking of hens. The sparrows bathed in the warm dust at the sides of the little streets. Everything was so familiar, so ordinary! There was just me, carrying within me, through this tranquil day, the trembling immensity of my first love.

I was waiting in Une with several women in front of the ticket window in the little building at the bus station. Filled with my secret fever, I did not at first pay any attention to their talk. Suddenly the name of the Redhead broke in on my blissful oblivion.

"But what could he do? They fished her out a good three miles below the bridge. Doctor or not, what do you expect him to do?"

"I don't know… Artificial respiration, maybe. They say that helps."

"Well, she was completely rotten already, that one, I tell you. And if it wasn't that, it would have been syphilis or some such…"

"She had it coming to her. When I think of the number of folk she passed on her filth to…"

That last observation seemed to the women too harsh. They fell silent, lowering their eyes and turning away, but internally they must have approved of the remark. It was then that an old woman with fine, pale lips, who had so far said nothing, began to talk, giving little chuckles as if to relax the atmosphere: "I've seen her. , hee, hee! I've often seen her at the train station, that one! She was real crafty, I can tell you. More than most. All the time she pretended she was waiting for a train. She went this way, she went that way. She looked at the clock. As if she was a passenger. , hee, hee!"

"Some passenger! A filthy cow!" cut in one woman, adjusting the straps on her knapsack. "May God forgive me, but I tell you she had it coming to her!"

I left my place in the waiting Une and pushed open the door. As I came away, the sound of that little laugh grated in my head like ground glass… I went to Kazhdai.

I did not have the courage to go right up to her izba. I saw the door barricaded with two long crossed planks, the window with its panes broken. The branches of the birch tree held hidden within their foliage the light, tuneful lives of several invisible birds. A pure and delicate song in this silent garden…

I left, taking the same route as in winter. But at this season the plain that led down to the Olyei was all covered with flowers.

The death of the red-haired woman – or rather the conversation about her suicide – decided me: I must go away. Leave the village, escape from Nerlug, never again set eyes on that country where ultimately the saga of the old Chinese would triumph over the elegance of the Western World and its adventures. Where in some dark corner of a bus station you would hear the grating of ground glass. And once Belmondo had gone again, this grating and grinding would crop up all over the place. It would be the sound of the heavy boots of prisoners taken out in serried ranks to do hard labor; the strident screaming of the saws biting into the tender flesh of the cedar trees; and the clatter of the coupling between the coaches on the Transsiberian – which no one would wait for in Kazhdai anymore. This grinding would once more become the very stuff of the harsh life of all who lived here. Of those, in fact, who did not know how to escape it by fleeing west of Lake Baikal, west of the Urals, beyond that frontier, invisible but so substantial, with Europe.

Yes, I had decided to flee as quickly as possible. I wanted to tear myself away from the liana that penetrated further into my body every night. Flee my love. My mute love. My beautiful Nivkh upturned onto me the starry sky that flashed in her slanting eyes, she drew me in a giddy tumble through the wind of the steppes. Her love mingled our cries with the bellowing of the stags in the moonlit forest skirts; our bodies with the wild flow of the resin on the cedar trunks; the beating of our hearts with the throbbing of the stars. But…

But this love was mute. It did without words. It was impenetrable to thought. And I had already had my European education. I had already tasted the terrible Western temptation of the word. "What is not said does not exist!" this tempting voice whispered to me. And what could I say about my Nivkh's face with its Buddha's smile? How could I focus my mind on that fusion of our desire with the mighty respiration of the taiga and the waves on the Olyei without carving everything up into words? And killing the living harmony?

I aspired to a love story. Told with all the complexity of Western novels. I dreamed of breathless confessions, love letters, seduction strategies, pangs of jealousy, intrigue. I dreamed of "words of love." I dreamed of words…

And one day when we were walking in the taiga, my Nivkh suddenly went down on her knees and carefully parted the tangle of leaves and the tufted layer of moss. I saw a plump brown bulb, from which grew, balanced on a short, pale stem, a flower of an unspeakable delicacy and beauty. Its oblong body, transparent mauve, seemed to be gently quivering in the half shadow of the undergrowth. And as always, Nivkh said nothing. Her hands thrust into the moss seemed to be faintly illumined by the calyx of the flower…

I had made up my mind. And as the intensity of our longings logically gives rise to coincidences that do not occur at normal times, I soon received apparent encouragement…

When I got back from Kazhdai I took a crumpled newspaper out of my shopping bag. It was a rare newspaper, impossible to find even on the newsstands of Nerlug. One of the papers we were always so pleased to pick up off the seat of a bus or in a station waiting room. A Leningrad Evening News, left behind, no doubt, by some traveler whom a bizarre chance had brought to our doomed territories.

I read all four pages straight through, leaving out neither the Leningrad television programs nor the weather reports. It was odd to learn that two weeks previously, in that fabulously distant city, it had rained and the wind had blown from the northeast. It was on the fourth page, between the help wanted and the advertisements for the sale of pets (poodle puppy, Siamese cats…), that my eye lit upon these few lines surrounded by a decorative border:

THE LENINGRAD COLLEGE

OF CINEMA TECHNICIANS IS

OPENING ITS RECRUITMENT OF

STUDENTS FORTHE FOLLOWING

SPECIALTIES: ELECTRICIAN,

EDITOR, SOUND ENGINEER,

CAMERAMAN…

My aunt came back into the room. With a rapid gesture, I hid the newspaper, as if she could have guessed the grand project that was setting me alight. It was no longer a simple desire to escape but a precise objective. Leningrad, a misty city at the other end of the world, was becoming a great step in the direction of Belmondo. A springboard that would project me – I was sure of it – into a meeting with him.

Toward the end of the month of August, on a very bright evening, which already smelled of autumnal freshness, my aunt called me into the kitchen in a voice that struck me as strange. She was sitting, very upright, at the table, wearing a dress she put on only for holidays, when her friends were coming. Her big hands, with their firm, bony fingers, were absently rubbing the corner of the tablecloth. She was silent.

Finally, taking the plunge, she spoke without looking at me: "It's like this, Mitya. I must tell you… Verbin and I, we have thought about this for a long time and… and we're going to get married next week. We're old, it will make people laugh, maybe. But that's the way it is…"

Her voice broke off. She coughed, put her hand to her mouth, and added: "Wait a moment. He should be coming. He wanted to meet you…"

But we know each other very well! I was on the point of exclaiming. But I held my peace, realizing that it was more a question of a ritual than of a simple introduction…

The ferryman appeared almost at once. He must have been waiting in the courtyard. He had put on a light-colored shirt, with a collar that was very wide for his wrinkled neck. He came in with an awkward gait and gave me an embarrassed smile as he held out his only hand to me. I shook it with a lot of warmth. I really wanted to say something encouraging, something friendly, to them, but the words would not come. Verbin, still with his awkward gait, went up to my aunt and placed himself beside her, as if standing to attention rather indecisively.

"There you are," he said, moving his arm slightly, as if to say: What's done is done.

And when I saw them like that, one next to the other, those two lives so different but so close in their long and calm suffering, when I recognized on their simple and anxious faces the outward show of that timid tenderness that had brought them together, I ran out of the room. I felt a salt lump constricting my throat. I went down the steps outside our izba, removed the plank at the bottom, which was overgrown with wild plants, and took out a tin box. I went back into the room, and before the amazed eyes of my aunt and Verbin, I emptied out the contents of the box. The gold shone. Some sand, some tiny nuggets, and even some small yellow pebbles. All that I had accumulated over the years. Without a word, I turned and fled outside.

I walked along beside the Olyei; then, when I came to the ferry, I sat down on the thick planks of the raft…

What had just happened only convinced me more: I had to leave. These people, who were, I now understood, so dear to me, had their own destiny. The destiny of that enormous empire that had crushed them, mutilated them, bruised them. Only at the end of their lives were they managing to make a new start. They had come to realize that the war was well and truly over. That their memories no longer interested anyone. That the snow crystals that landed on the sleeves of their sheepskin coats still had the same sparkling delicacy. That the spring wind still brought the perfumed exhalation of the steppes… And at that very moment they had seen a remarkable, radiant smile appearing at the end of Lenin Avenue. A smile that seemed to warm the frozen air within a radius of a hundred yards. And they felt this breath of warmth. In the spring they rediscovered the veiled beauty of the first leaves. They learned to hear again the rustling of those transparent canopies, to notice the flowers, to breathe. Their destiny, like an enormous wound, was healing at last…

But I had no place in this life of convalescence. I had to leave.

18

The day I left, in September, was a real autumn day. The ferry carrying me across to the other shore was empty. Unhurried, Verbin pulled on the cable with his paddle. I helped him. The surface of the water shivered with gray wavelets. The timbers of the ferry glistened, soaked by the drizzle…

"One week more and I'll put it to bed," said Verbin, smiling, when the ferry came to a standstill beside the small wooden landing stage.

I picked up my little suitcase and stepped out onto the sand. Verbin followed me, lit a cigarette, and offered me one as well.

We talked about this and that. Already like two close relatives. He did not notice my emotion. Everyone thought I was going to Nerlug to sign on as an apprentice mechanic with a truck company.

It sounded very plausible. A typical career for a young fellow in our part of the world. But I was experiencing a strange emptiness beneath my heart, as I looked at the village, hidden behind a curtain of rain. I did not yet know that it was for the last time…

Suddenly a female silhouette appeared in the hazy distance. A woman dressed in a long waterproof coat was walking on the beach at the edge of the water.

Verbin sighed. We exchanged looks.

"She still waits for him," he said softly, as if afraid that the woman on the opposite bank might hear him. "I saw him last winter, her husband. At Nerlug… Everyone knows he's alive. And she still hopes I'm going to bring him back to her one day on my ferry…"

The ferryman was silent, his eyes fixed on the fragile silhouette, blurred by the rain. Then he gave me a look filled with a somewhat desperate jauntiness and spoke louder, in almost cheerful tones: "But you know, Dmitri, I sometimes tell myself that maybe she's happier than lots of others… I've seen him, her man: fat, pompous. He looks like a Japanese oil magnate; he can't open his eyes, he's so bulging with fat… But she's waiting for someone else, her young, lean soldier boy, with a shaven head and a faded tunic. That's what we were all like in the spring of '45… Your aunt speaks the truth. It's why Vera doesn't grow old. Her hair's quite gray; you've seen her. But she's still got the face of a young girl. And she's still waiting for him, her soldier…"

The few, rare passengers began to gather around the ferry. I shook Verbin's hand and set off along the rain-drenched road… At the corner, when I had to leave the valley of the Olyei and enter the taiga, I glanced behind me. The ferry, a little square on the gray expanse of the waters, was already in the middle of the river.

I arrived in Leningrad after sixteen long days of traveling. Always in third class. Often without a ticket. Sleeping on luggage racks, dodging ticket inspectors, eating the free bread at station buffets. I crossed the empire from one end to the other – twelve thousand leagues. I crossed its giant rivers, the Lena, the Yenisey, the Ob, the Kama, the Volga… I traveled through the Urals. I saw Novosibirsk, which seemed to me like Nerlug, only much bigger. I discovered Moscow, crushing, cyclopean, endless. But overall an Oriental city, and thus very close to my profoundly Asiatic nature.

Finally there was Leningrad, the only truly Western city in the empire… I emerged onto the great square by the station. My eyes were heavy with sleep, but they opened wide. The apartment buildings had quite a different style here: packed close together, svelte and arrogant, overloaded with cornices, moldings, and pilasters, they formed long rows. This European rectitude, but above all the smell – a little acid, fresh, stimulating – fascinated me. I walked with a sleepwalker's tread across the square and suddenly uttered an "Oh!" which made all the passersby turn their heads…

The Nevsky Prospekt in all its morning brilliance, veiled with a light-bluish mist, spread out before my astonished gaze. And at the very end of this luminous perspective, lined with sumptuous facades, shone the gilded spire of the Admiralty. I remained in ecstasy for several moments before the glitter of this golden sword pointing up into a sky that was slowly suffused with a pale Nordic sun. Through the mists that hovered over the Neva, the West was making its appearance.

In a blinding flash my gaze took in everything: the nostalgic charm of Olga's childhood as she walked, long ago, along the elegant streets of this city, to take the Saint Petersburg-Paris train with her parents; the noble soul of this ancient capital that would never become accustomed to the nickname its new masters had bestowed on it; and the shade of Raskolnikov, wandering somewhere in the depths of the foggy streets.

But most of all, I realized that in the midst of this scene tinged with autumn light, I would not have been excessively surprised to have run into Belmondo. In person. The one and only. His presence was becoming seriously conceivable… I readjusted my knapsack and, with a resolute tread, made my way toward a streetcar stop. I did not know if this was the best means for traveling to my college. But the sound of their bells in the morning air was just too lovely…

During my three years of studies, I had little news from Svetlaya. A few letters from my aunt, at first anxious and reproving, then calmer and filled with the details of a daily life that meant less and less to me. Absentmindedly, or quite simply so as to have something to say, she spoke in all her letters about the Olyei and the ferry: I was always watching Verbin repair the timbers or replace the cable… "The saga of the old Chinese still continues," I said to myself, as I walked through the city of our Western dreams…

There was also a card from Samurai. But it did not come from the village. It was, in fact, an amateur snapshot with a few sentences written on the back in a slightly distant tone. Evidently he could not forgive me for my flight, which he and Utkin considered to be a betrayal of our friendship… Samurai reported Olga's death and told me that she had continued her evening readings right up to the last moment and regretted that "Don Juan" was no longer participating… In the photo I was not at all surprised to see Samurai in the uniform of the marines on the deck of a ship. And hardly more so to see the white slabs of apartment buildings and the shadows of palm trees. The inscription in blue ink read: "The Port of Havana." I guessed that the deck of this ship represented a decisive step toward his boyhood project, his crazy dream that he had once told me about at Svetlaya, of joining the guerrilleros of Central America and rekindling the embers of the campaign of Che Guevara…

As for Utkin, he never wrote to me from Svetlaya. But two years after my flight I saw a silhouette I instantly recognized in the dark corridor of our student residence hall. Limping, he came to meet me and offered me his hand… We talked all night in the corridor, so as not to disturb the other three occupants of my room. Perched on the windowsill in front of the frost-covered glass, we talked as we drank cold tea…

I learned that Utkin, too, had fled from Svetlaya. He had even succeeded in traveling farther than me, to the West, to Kiev. He was studying at the faculty of journalism and hoping one day to get down to writing "real literature," as he called it in a grave tone, lowering his eyes.

And it was in the course of that night that I learned in what circumstances Belmondo had finally left the Red October cinema and disappeared, maybe forever, from the corner of Lenin Avenue.

It was the winter following my flight. Samurai and Utkin were slipping along on their snowshoes through the taiga. It was engulfed in the half-light of the early hours of morning. They were going to Nerlug for the six-thirty performance. Without me. Another film they wanted to see again? Or perhaps so as to demonstrate – to whom? – that my betrayal did not affect their own relationship with Belmondo?

The cold was bitter, even for winter in our country. From time to time you could hear a long echoing sound like that of a gunshot. But this was tree trunks exploding, split open by frozen sap and resin. In weather like this, women in our village taking wash down from the clothesline would break it like glass. Truckdrivers would rage around tanks filled with white powder: frozen gasoline. And children would amuse themselves by spitting on the rock-hard road and hearing the tinkling of their spit as it turned into icicles…

It was by the first rays of the sun that they saw it. On the fork formed by two thick branches of a pine tree. Samurai saw it first and had a moment of hesitation: should he point it out to Utkin? He knew his friend was going to be shocked by it. Always very protective of Utkin, Samurai had become even more so after my departure. So at first he wanted to walk past, as if there were nothing there. But in the absolute calm of the taiga Utkin must have sensed his hesitation, Samurai's intake of breath. He stopped in turn, looked up, and let out a cry…

On the tree fork, hanging on to the rough trunk, his arms wrapped around it, was seated a man, his face white, covered in hoarfrost, his eyes wide open. His pose had the frightening fixity of death. His legs were not dangling but rigid in space, six feet above the ground. He seemed to be staring at them, directing a horrible rictus at them. The snow around the tree was churned up with the footprints of wolves.

Samurai studied the frozen face and was silent. Utkin, appalled by this encounter in the sleeping taiga, sought to cover up his dismay. He spoke quickly, volubly, trying to sound tough: "That must be an escaped political prisoner. Sure. I'll bet he's a dissident. Maybe he wrote anti-Soviet novels and they threw him into the Gulag, and then somebody helped him escape. Maybe he has manuscripts hidden on him… Maybe he wanted – "

"Shut your trap, Duck," Samurai suddenly barked.

And with malevolent fury, speaking as he had never spoken to Utkin before, he went on: "Political prisoner! Gulag! Who are you kidding? The camp you can see from Svetlaya is a normal camp, Duck. You hear me? Normal! And there are normal men there. Normal guys who have simply stolen something or smashed someone's face in. And these normal guys play cards after work, in a normal way, write letters, or nap. And then these normal men choose their victim, generally a young guy who's lost at cards. You lost – now you have to pay. It's quite normal. And these normal men fuck him in the mouth and up the ass, the whole hut, each one in turn. So that instead of a mouth it's only beef hash, and between his legs it's mincemeat. And after that the poor guy becomes untouchable; he has to sleep next to the shit bucket; he can't drink from the tap the others use. But anyone can fuck him whenever he likes. And to escape that there's only one way: to throw himself on the barbed wire. Then the guard fires a few rounds into his head. Straight to heaven… That one must have got away when they were doing hard labor…"

Utkin uttered a strange sound, between a groan and a protest.

"Shut your trap, I tell you," Samurai rebuked him again. "Shut your trap with your stupid fucker's romanticism! That's what normal life is, do you understand? Yes or no? Guys who come out after ten years of that life and live among us… And we're all like that, more or less. This normal life is how we live. No animal would live like that…"

"But Olga, but Bel… Bel…" Utkin suddenly gasped in a tortured voice, without being able to continue.

Samurai said nothing. He looked around to mark the place well. Then he picked up his pike and motioned to Utkin to follow him… They did not go to Nerlug that day They missed their six-thirty rendezvous.

Later, sitting in the smoke-filled premises of the militia at Kazhdai, they spent a long time waiting for an official to be free to go with them to the site. Samurai was silent, shaking his head at intervals. His eyes were focused on invisible images of past days. Utkin watched these fleeting ghosts obliquely. He sensed that soon Samurai's voice would lighten, and in an embarrassed tone he would ask his forgiveness…

Seated on the windowsill, that was how Utkin told me about the end of Belmondo's era in the land of our youth… It was so strange to hear the sound of his voice in the corridor of our residence hall! His face was that of a young man with his first mustache, but through it shone the features of the injured child of the old days. The child who used to long so passionately for the start of adult life, hoping that he would experience love – like other people – in spite of everything. There was I, already cheerfully enjoying the love life of a carefree young male, and suddenly I perceived the infinite despair my friend carried within him. It was as if his face had been eroded by the indifference in women's eyes. By their blindness, so natural, so pitiless…

Utkin noticed the intensity of my stare. The shadow of a disillusioned smile flickered on his lips. He turned his head away toward the windowpane, outside which the chilly Leningrad night was turning pale.

"And when we came back to the place with the guys from the militia," he went on, "when we looked again at the escaped prisoner attached to his branch, I felt no more fear. No sadness or pain either. I'm ashamed to say it, but I experienced… a strange kind of happiness. You know… I said to myself- in that language deep inside you that articulates things without using words – I said to myself that if the world's so horrible, it can't be real. And certainly not unique. That's it, I told myself. You can't take it seriously"

Watching the militiamen, assisted by Samurai, trying to haul the dead man out of the tree, Utkin experienced a mysterious revelation. This young prisoner, whose frozen fingers were now being wrenched open by the men, panting with their exertion, marked a certain limit. As did his own mutilated body? A limit of cruelty, of pain. A frontier…

The corpse finally yielded. The three militiamen and Samurai carried it toward the four-wheel-drive parked at the edge of the taiga. The prisoner's shapka fell from his head. It was Utkin who picked it up. He followed the others, at every step pointing his right shoulder up into the sky, as if he were trying to take a look beyond that frontier…

We spent a whole day traipsing around the wet streets of Leningrad. We went into museums, crossed the Neva. I was proud to be showing Utkin the only Western city in the empire. But neither he nor I was really in the mood for tourism. Even at the Hermitage we talked of other things. The previous night, Utkin had handed me three dozen typewritten pages – a fragment of his future novel. "In the tradition of The Gulag Archipelago," he had explained. I was carrying them inside my jacket now; I felt like a real dissident.

Yes, even in the middle of the Imperial Palace we were speaking in low tones about the horrors of the regime. We criticized everything. We rejected the whole system. The Belmondo of our adolescence and his mythical Western World were transformed into an ideal of liberty, a plan of campaign. We still had a vision of the sun trapped in the barbed wire, impaled on the watchtowers. The gigantic pendulum must be activated! Time, our time, the dictatorship's unhappy victim, must be set free!

Our angry whispering threatened at any moment to erupt into a shout. Thanks to Utkin, it did.

"I've got nothing to lose! I shall fight, even in the camp!"

I started coughing, to cover up the echo of his words beneath the magnificent ceilings. The attendant gave us a suspicious look. We abandoned our regicidal planning session. There in front of us, beneath a red canopy, stood the imperial throne of the Romanovs…