The Life of an Unknown Man

The Life of an Unknown Man
I

One evening they amused themselves by hurtling down a snow-covered hill on a toboggan. The cold lashed them in the face, a fine cloud of hoarfrost blurred their vision, and at the most thrilling moment of the descent, the young man seated behind her whispered, “I love you, Nadenka.” Mingled with the whistling of the wind and the loud roar of the runners, his murmured remark was barely audible. A declaration? The gusting of the snow flurry? Panting, their hearts laid bare, they climbed back up the slope, plunged into a fresh descent and again that whisper, more discreet still, spoke of a love borne swiftly away on the tempest of white. I love you, Nadenka…

“Goddamn Chekhov! In his day you could still write like that.” Shutov pictures the scene: heady cold, the two timid lovers… Nowadays they’d say it was over the top. They’d mock it as “sentimental rubbish.” Hopelessly old fashioned. And yet it works! He judges it as a writer. Chekhov’s touch is there: yes, the deadpan way he has of rescuing a subject anyone else would have drenched in sugary sentiment.

That “I love you, Nadenka,” under cover of whirling snowflakes. It works.

He smiles wryly, used to being wary of his own enthusiasms. “It works all right, thanks to this bottle of whiskey,” he tells himself, replenishing his glass. And also thanks to his lonely existence in this flat, where one of the occupants is a now absent young woman, Léa, who’s coming tomorrow to collect her things, a pile of cardboard boxes beside the door. A tombstone that precludes any hope of love.

He pulls himself together, dreading the self-indulgent gloom that has dogged him for months. Lonely existence? A fine cliché! Paris is a city of loners… unless you’re Hemingway painting the town red in the twenties. No, Chekhov’s little device works because of the way his story slips forward in time: the two lovers part, settle down, have children, then meet again twenty years later in the same park and laughingly board a toboggan. And it happens all over again: the snowy breeze, the gleeful panic as they twist and turn, the strident screaming of the runners… As they reach top speed the woman hears, “I love you, Nadenka…,” but this murmur is no more than a distant music, protecting the secret of her youthful love.

So simple, yes, and yet so right, so evocative! They could still write like that in the good old days. No Freud, no postmodernism, no sex in every other sentence. And no worrying about what some little idiot with slicked-back hair on a television talk show will say about it. Which is why it still stands up. These days you have to write differently…

Shutov gets up, staggers, stoops over Léa’s things, picks up a book, opens it at random, gives a dry laugh. “The scent of roses? Forget it. What passes from the mistress’s mouth to her lover’s is saliva, along with a whole army of germs. It passes from the lover to his wife, from the wife to her baby, from the baby to its aunt, from the aunt, a waitress in a restaurant, to a customer whose soup she has spat in, from the customer to his wife, from the wife to her lover and thence to other mouths, so that every one of us is immersed in an ocean of intermingled saliva that binds us into one salivary commonwealth, a single moist, united humanity.”

Revolting… And it constitutes an entire credo. Formulated by a writer whom Léa idolizes and whom Shutov regards as drearily pretentious. A far cry from Chekhov. Nowadays a hero has to be neurotic, cynical, impatient to share his unsavory obsessions with us. Because his trouble is that his mother still has him on a leash, even when he makes love. That was how Léa’s idol talked.

“If I’d known my mother,” reflects Shutov, “I’d have spoken about her in my books.” The thought revives in him the oldest memory of his life. A child sees a door closing: without knowing who it is that has just left, he senses it is someone he loves with all his tiny, still-mute being.

Beyond the windowpane, a May night, the fantastical collection of ancient facades marching up the slope of Ménilmontant. How often had he longed to talk to Léa about these moonlit rooftops! As if covered in snow. He had found no image to capture the poetry of this sleeping whiteness. Rooftops made nacreous by the moon? No, that’s not it. In any case, what’s the point of trying to find an evocative phrase? Léa has gone and this “dovecote” (which was what she used to call the converted attic) has reverted into being one of those oddly shaped dwellings that real estate agents advertise under the ambiguous heading: “Unusual property.” Shutov’s face twists into a grimace. “That’s probably how they regard me. Unusual…”

And yet… He is the absolute prototype of a man ditched by a woman young enough to be his daughter. The plot for a lightweight novel in the French manner, a hundred pages of Parisian bed-hopping and gloom. All a love affair such as his would be worth.

He crouches down in the corner where Léa’s things are piled up. “You’re not a failure,” she told him one day. “No. You’re not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You’re just unlucky. Like someone… like someone who…” (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she’s understood me, I’m not a professional failure!)- “That’s it. You’re like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You’re an explosion still waiting to be heard.”

In all his life no one had spoken to him like that. He had lived to the age of fifty, done a great deal of reading and study, experienced poverty and fleeting success, gone to war and come close to death, but it had taken a young Frenchwoman to explain to him what other people regarded as a wasted life. “An explosion still waiting to be heard…” Which, in fact, is the common fate of all true artists. Very intelligent, that girl. Dear, good Léa. “My Léa…”

Or else, maybe just a bitch who made use of this dovecote while she had nowhere else to stay and who’s going off now because she found herself a “guy” who’ll give her a roof over her head. A young “babe” setting out to conquer Paris, leaving Shutov to rot, an old madman obsessed with his search for an epithet to describe that lunar whiteness on the rooftops.

“I love you, Nadenka…” He pours himself another whiskey, downs it with the grimace of one who has seen through the universal grubbiness of human nature, but, at the same time, with a writer’s reflex, observes himself and finds his own posture false and exaggerated. No, there’s no point in doing a bitter little Cioran number of his own. For whose benefit, in any case? Freed of the mask of disgust, his face softens, his eyes mist over. “I love you, Nadenka…” If that story still works, Shutov tells himself, it’s because I once knew a love like that. And that was… yes, more than thirty years ago.

Except that it happened not in winter but beneath the translucent gold of autumn. The start of his studies in Leningrad, a feminine presence along pathways redolent of the acrid tang of dead leaves. A girl of whom the only trace now is a tenuous silhouette, the echo of a voice…

The telephone rings. Shutov struggles out of the sofa’s depths, stands-a drunken sailor on a ship’s deck. The hope of hearing Léa sobers him up. His racing thoughts imagine a combination of excuses and backpedaling, which might enable them to get together again. He lifts the receiver, hears a dial tone, and then, on the other side of the wall, a vibrant male voice: his neighbor, an Australian student whose antipodean friends often telephone during the night. Since Léa’s departure Shutov’s ear is constantly cocked (telephone, footsteps on the stairs) and there is little sound insulation in his attic. His neighbor laughs with frank, healthy candor. To be a young Australian with fine white teeth, living amid the rooftops of Paris. Bliss!

Before sinking back into the depths of the sofa he wanders around to the corner where Léa’s cardboard boxes are stacked. There is a bag of her clothes as well. The silk blouse he gave her… One day they bathed in the sea, near Cassis-she got dressed and when she tossed her hair back in a swift movement to tie it up, her wet locks made a pattern of arabesques on the silk… He has forgotten nothing, the fool. And these memories tear at his guts. No, at his eyelids, rather (make a note: the pain rips away your eyelids, making it impossible to banish the vision of the woman who has left you).

Damn those eyelids! Always his scribbler’s mania. The conclusion is simpler than that: a young woman who breaks up with an aging man should never leave him alive. That’s the truth! Léa should have knifed him, poisoned him, pushed him off that old stone bridge in the alpine village they visited one day. It would have been less inhuman than what she did. Less tormenting than the sleek softness of this silk. Yes, she should have killed him.

Which, in fact, is more or less what did happen.

Shutov remembers clearly the precise moment when the execution took place.

They often used to argue but with the theatrical violence of lovers, aware that the fiercest tirades will fade away at the first moans of pleasure. Shutov would rage against the poverty of contemporary literature. Léa would drum up a whole army of “living classics” to contradict him. He would thunder against writers castrated by political correctness. She would quote what she called a “brilliant” passage. (It was, among other things, about a son held on a leash mentally by his mother while he makes love to a woman.) They would loathe one another and, half an hour later, adore one another, and what was really important was the glow from the sunset coming in through the skylight, gilding Léa’s skin and heightening a long scar on Shutov’s shoulder.

For a long while he turned a blind eye. The tone of their arguments changed: Léa becoming less combative, he more virulent. He sensed a threat in this indifference and was now the only one still ranting and raving. Especially that evening when he had received one of his manuscripts back, rejected. That was when, picking her way between words, she had compared him to an explosion unable to make itself heard… After they had split up Shutov would come to perceive that this had been the last flush of tenderness within her.

Then the dismantling began (beneath the windows of his attic workmen were removing some scaffolding: yet another stupid parallel, the writer’s mania) and their union was taken apart as well, a story at a time. Léa came increasingly rarely to the dovecote, explaining her absences less and less, yawning and letting him shout himself hoarse.

“The awesome power of a woman no longer in love,” thought Shutov, peering at himself in the mirror, feeling the crow’s-feet around his eyes, promising to be more conciliatory, a little more devious about his own convictions, to come to terms with her “living classics”… Then took to shouting again, invoking the sacred fire of the poets. In a word, making himself unbearable. For he was in love.

The assassination took place in a café. For ten minutes or so, Shutov made an effort to be nice, gentil, as the French say, then, unable to hold back, erupted (“an explosion!” he thought later, mocking himself). Everything came under fire: the wheeling and dealing of the book world, the fawning wordsmiths who suck up to the hoi polloi as well as the cultural elite, Léa herself (“The truth is you’re just a groupie to that rotten little clique”), even the newspaper poking out of her bag. (“Go ahead! Lick the boots of your armchair socialists. Maybe they’ll take you on as a stringer for their Paris Pravda”)… He felt ridiculous, knowing there was only one thing he should be asking her: do you still love me or not? But he dreaded her reply and clung to the memory of their arguments in the old days, which used to founder, lovingly in an embrace.

At first Léa succeeded in passing off the scene to the customers in the café as a somewhat lively but amicable squabble. Then came the moment when the acrimonious tone was no longer fooling anyone: a middle-aged gentleman was “bawling out” his girlfriend, who was, incidentally, far too young for him. Léa felt trapped. Get up and walk away? But she still had quite a lot of stuff to collect from this madman’s attic and he was capable of throwing it all out into the street. Shutov would never know if such thoughts passed through her mind. Léa’s face hardened. And with a bored expression she aimed her blow where she knew him to be defenseless.

“By the way, I’ve learned what your surname means in Russian…,” she announced, taking advantage of the umpteenth coffee he was downing with a grimace.

Shutov pretended surprise but his face took on an evasive, almost guilty expression. He stammered, “Well, you know… There are several possible derivations…”

Léa emitted a peal of laughter, a tinkling cascade of breaking glass. “No. Your name has only one meaning…” She kept him waiting, then in a firm, disdainful voice, let fly: “Shut means ‘clown.’ You know. A buffoon.”

She got up and made her way to the exit without hurrying, so confident was she of the effect of her words. Stunned, Shutov watched her walking away, followed by amused glances from the other customers, then jumped up, ran to the door, and there, amid the passersby, yelled out in a voice whose pained tones astonished even himself: “Shut means a sad clown! Remember that! And this sad clown loved you…”

The end of the sentence faded away into a cough. “Like the whispering of the young lover in Chekhov’s story,” it occurred to him one evening, as he was staring at the last of Léa’s cardboard boxes, stacked there in the corner of the dovecote.

But that day, on his return from the café, for a long time he was incapable of thought, once more picturing a child in a row of other children, all dressed the same, a boy taking a step forward on hearing his name called and shouting, “Present,” then resuming his place. They are lined up in front of the gray orphanage building and after the roll call they climb into a truck and go off to work amid muddy fields under a fine hail of icy tears. For the first time in his life the child perceives that this name, Shutov, is his only possession here on this earth, the only thing that makes him “present” in other people’s eyes. A name he will always feel slightly ashamed of (that damned derivation!) but to which, however, he will be attached, for it is the name borne by that still-mute little being, who had seen the door closing on the person he loved most in all the world.

Across the street from the dovecote there is a narrow building with faded walls (“It’s been out in the sun too long, it’s peeling,” Léa used to say). The moon moves bit by bit across the little top-floor apartment. The workmen have not closed the windows and the room shines, like a sleepwalker’s dream. An old woman lived there once, then she disappeared, dead, no doubt, the dividing walls have been demolished to make an open-plan studio apartment, as fashion dictates, and now the moon keeps watch over this empty space and a drunkard with sad eyes marvels at it, as he whispers words intended for the woman who will never hear him.

After making love with her “guy,” she is asleep now in their new “place”… And everything hurts him, the way he imagines Léa’s friends talking and the idea of that young body, so close to him yet irretrievably lost. A body as supple as a frond of seaweed, which, in their intimacy, retained a touching, vulnerable awkwardness. To be dispossessed of those feminine arms, of those thighs, of Léa’s nighttime breathing: the mere thought of it is a blow to his solar plexus. A crude jealousy, a feeling of amputation. It will pass, Shutov knows this from experience. A body desired that now gives itself to another man can be forgotten quickly enough. More quickly, even, than one’s regret at never having spoken of the moon passing over the apartment across the street, of the woman who lived there, suffered, loved. And of the new life that will fill this white shell, bring in furniture, prepare meals, love, suffer, hope.

On occasion, after their literary quarrels, after making love, they would reflect on such unsettling aspects of human life. At these moments Shutov always felt that this was how he would have liked to be: passionate but detached, sensual, and at the same time conscious that, thanks to their measured conversations, Léa was rising with him to glorious heights…

A window lights up on the third floor of the building opposite. A young man, naked, opens a refrigerator, takes out a bottle of mineral water, drinks. A young woman, naked as well, goes up to him, embraces him, he moves away, his mouth clamped to the neck of the bottle, splutters, sprays his girlfriend, they laugh. The light goes out.

“That could be Léa with her boyfriend,” thinks Shutov, and, curiously enough, the scene eases the pangs of jealousy in the pit of his stomach. “They’re young. What do you expect…?”

He moves away from the window, collapses onto the sofa. Yes, his fatal error was to complicate everything. “She was rising with me to glorious heights…” What crap! A man unhappily close to the age of fifty suddenly has the luck to meet a pretty young woman who is no fool. And genuinely fond of him. He ought to take wing with joy, soaring aloft like a paraglider. Sing, bless heaven. And, above all, make the most of it. In the greediest sense of the phrase. Make the most of her clumsy, because genuine, tenderness, of their excursions (“We’re off to Paris,” they would say, traveling down from their patch in Ménilmontant), of the whispering of the rain on the roof at night. Of all those clichés of a love affair in Paris (oh, that singing of the rain!), intolerable in a book but so sweet in real life. Of this remake of a sixties romantic comedy…

For their love did last two and a half years, after all. Which is a good deal longer than an affair in one of today’s novels. He could very well have lived out one of those little stories that crowd the bookstore shelves: two characters meet, fall in love, laugh, weep, part, are reunited, and then she leaves or kills herself (according to taste) while he, with a tormented but handsome face, drives away into the night along an autoroute, heading for Paris, for oblivion. They were both of them in good health, as it happened, and with no suicidal tendencies. And, as for autoroutes, Shutov avoided them, not being a very confident driver. Yes, he could quite simply have been happy.

To achieve this, he should have risked being clear from the start: a young woman from the provinces leaves her parents, or rather her single-parent family, living in a region with a stricken economy to the north of the Ardennes, arrives in Paris where she runs into an “unusual” man who can give her a roof over her head. The young woman dreams of writing (“like all the French,” thinks Shutov) and although he is a writer with a limited readership, he will give her advice, possibly even help her to get published.

That, objectively, was their situation. All Shutov had to do was to accept it… But, like so many Russians, he believed that a happiness derived from petty practical arrangements was unworthy of people in love. At the age of fourteen he had read a story by Chekhov in which a couple’s material well-being counted for nothing beside the heady thrill of a moment on a snow-covered hill, on a toboggan run. At the age of eighteen, he had spent weeks strolling up and down in Leningrad’s parks beneath a golden canopy of foliage in the company of a girl: more than a quarter of a century later he would remember this as a vitally important time in his life. At twenty-two, as a young soldier sent to Afghanistan, he had seen an old woman lying dead in the courtyard of a house, clutching her dog in her arms, both of them killed by an exploding shell. Noticing his tears, his regimental comrades had called him a wimp (several years later this choking back of a sob would lead him on to political dissidence…). From his university studies he would retain the memory of a Latin text, words that had inspired Dante: “Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.” He meditated long on a woman “loved as none will ever be loved.” Such a love called for a sacred language. Not necessarily Latin, but one that would elevate the beloved above the mundane. Amata nobis… I love you, Nadenka…

Shutov stirs, woken by a dull cry escaping from his own throat, which was pressed against a cushion on the sofa. The drink tastes like a dentist’s local anesthetic. A useless swig, it would take three or four like that for him to reach a level of drunkenness that would turn Léa’s cardboard boxes into inoffensive, swaying, unreal blurs…

Unreal… That says it all! Asking a flesh-and-blood woman to be a dream. Imagine living with a madman who thinks you capable of walking on a moonbeam! He had idealized her from the first moment. Yes, from the first words they had exchanged on a Sunday evening, one as dreary as any wet February night in the chilly station hall at the Gare de l’Est…

They were telephoning from adjacent booths, two telephones separated by a sheet of glass, in fact. She (he would later learn) was ringing a vague acquaintance who had promised to put her up. He was trying to catch a publisher at home (on his return from his luxury villa in Normandy, purchased, Shutov reflected ironically, with the proceeds from publishing pulp fiction). Suddenly the girl turned around, a phone card in her hand, and he heard a whispered exclamation that was both frantic and amused. Cheerful astonishment, on the brink of tears. “Oh shit! The credit’s run out…” Adding in a louder voice, “Now I’m in a real mess!” Shutov had not caught her eye; at first she did not realize he was offering her his card. (The publisher’s wife had just put him in his place. “I’ve told you already. Call him tomorrow at the off-” Proudly, he hung up on her.) Léa thanked him, dialed the number again. Her girlfriend could not put her up, because… She hung up as well, but slowly and indecisively, slipped the card into her wallet, murmured good night, and wandered over to the arrivals and departures board. Shutov hesitated between versions in different languages. In Russian, word for word, it would be: “And my card, young woman?” In French: “Mademoiselle, may I have my card back?” No. Perhaps: “Hey, you! Aren’t you going to…” Not that either. Well, in any event, he was too old for the retrieval of a phone card to cause more than a moment of embarrassment…

He strolled away thinking about an opening for a story in the style of André Maurois: a woman walks off with the phone card a man has just lent her… What next? Every time she walks past that telephone booth she thinks of him?… No, too Proustian. Better: a foreigner (he, Shutov) runs after the woman to get his card back, calling out in his appalling accent, the woman thinks she’s being attacked and sprays him with tear gas (alternatively: lays him out with a stun gun)…

He had already got a good way up the Boulevard Magenta when a breathless voice called out to him, then a hand touched his elbow. “I’m so sorry. I went off with your card…”

He fell in love with every aspect of Léa. Everything about her that caught his eye had the completeness of a sentence that needs no rewriting. Her old leather jacket with its threadbare lining, a tight-fitting jacket that had ended up being molded to the curves of Léa’s body. Even when it hung on the back of the door at the dovecote this garment retained the imprint of her contours. And then Léa’s notebooks, the slightly childish diligence of her writings, “very French,” Shutov told himself, perceiving in them the obsessive search for the elegant phrase. And yet the mere sight of these notebooks now seemed vital. As did the frozen gesture that, for him, was a poem in itself: an arm flung far out across the covers by Léa in her sleep. That slender arm, a hand with fingers that trembled from time to time, in response to the secrets of some dream. A beauty independent of her body, of the attic awash with moonlight, of the outside world.

Yes, that had been his mistake, his desire to love Léa as one loves a poem. It was to her that he read Chekhov’s story one evening: two irresolute lovers, their meeting twenty years later. I love you, Nadenka…

“An exile’s only country is his country’s literature.” Who said that? Shutov cannot place the name in his confused thoughts. Some anonymous expatriate, no doubt, waking in the night and trying to recall the last line of a rhyme learned in childhood.

For a long time he had lived in the company of the faithful ghosts that are the creatures brought into being by writers. Shadowy figures, certainly, but in his Parisian exile he got on well with them. On a fine summer’s day in Moscow Tolstoy saw the figure of a woman through an open window, a bare shoulder, an arm with very white skin. All of Anna Karenina was born, if we are to believe him, from that woman’s arm.

Shutov told the tale to Léa. What else could he offer her other than that country of his, rediscovered in books? During that very cold winter, two years before, at the start of their love affair, they would read Tolstoy almost every day. The attic was heated by a little cast iron stove connected to the chimney hatch, the scent of tea mingled with that of the fire and the glow from the flames flickered across the pages of the book.

“You see, people are always saying: ‘Oh, Tolstoy. A ver-r-r-y R-r-russian novel. A mighty river, an impetuous, capricious torrent!’ Not true! A mighty river, agreed, but under control, thanks to the lock gates of well-proportioned chapters. Indeed, a rather French structure, you might say.”

Shutov now attempts a mocking sneer but drunkenness has turned his face into a mask too weary for such contortions. Besides, that image of the lock gates is not bad. And the memory of those evenings reading in front of the fire is still so tender, so raw.

He would also quote Chekhov: “In a short story cut the beginning and the end. That’s where most of the lies are told.” Léa listened with daunting eagerness. “Playboys take women out for drives in convertibles,” Shutov thought with a smile. “Destitute writers treat them to the Russian classics.” On a boat just about to leave a Crimea put to the torch by the Revolution, the young Nabokov was playing chess. The game was moving in an unusual and enthralling direction and when he finally tore himself away from the checkerboard, the land of his birth had already vanished from sight! An empty expanse of sea, the cry of a gull, no regrets. For the time being…

“I got carried away like an idiot when I told her about that missed leave-taking…,” Shutov remembers. The aesthete, Nabokov, cared more about an elegant metaphor than the land of his fathers. And Lolita was his punishment. A nauseating book, one that flatters the worst instincts of the Western bourgeoisie…

This verdict, he recalls, provoked one of those sparring matches in which Léa used to come to the defense of writers assailed by Shutov.

“But hold on, listen to this sentence,” she exclaimed that evening. “Nabokov writes: ‘His diction was as blurred as a moist lump of sugar.’ It’s absolutely brilliant! You can feel it in your mouth. You can picture the man talking like that. You must admit it’s very powerful!”

“Herculean! As I sit here, I can just picture our pretty Vladimir sucking his sugar lump. But it’s not ‘brilliant,’ Léa. It’s clever, there’s a difference. And furthermore your Nabo couldn’t care less whose accent this is. If it were a prisoner being tortured it wouldn’t make any difference. He writes like a butterfly collector: he catches a beautiful insect, kills it with formalin, impales it on a pin. And he does the same thing with words…”

Shutov went on reviling Nabokov but Léa’s eyes glazed over; she seemed to be observing a scene enacted beyond the walls of the dovecote, far from their conversation. “She can see a man playing chess on the deck of a ship and his native shore sinking below the horizon.” Shutov fell silent, listened to the hiss of the rain on the roof.

The next day, somewhat embarrassed, Léa had informed him that she must “pay a duty visit” to her mother. They set off together. This trip would mean more to Shutov than the year he had spent in New York, more than all his wanderings across Europe, more, even, than his time in Afghanistan on military service.

And yet it was just three days spent in an unpicturesque region to the north of the Ardennes. Cold, fog, hills covered in shivering woodland. And to crown the lack of tourist appeal, a faded billboard in the middle of a patch of wasteland announcing the imminent opening of a “sport center.”

He found himself back in a period he had never known, not being French, and fell a little in love with it. The designs on the paper lining the wardrobe in his hotel room were like those seen on the walls of houses under demolition. Before the mirror Shutov experienced vertigo: all those faces from bygone days superimposed on one another in the greenish reflection! He ran his hand over the top of the wardrobe (a place that harbors treasures abandoned by travelers). On this occasion the treasure was an ancient copy of the local newspaper, dated 16 May 1981…

Shutov read it while Léa had supper with her mother. He had been given leave not to show himself, to avoid introductions. “You see, the difference in our ages practically makes me a pedophile. On the other hand, if you insist, I could propose to your mother…” Léa had laughed, relieved. “That would kill me…”

They spent those three days going for walks, nestled close together under a big umbrella. Léa showed him her school, the little train station (closed years ago), and, in a loop in the river Sormonne, a grove where in her teens she used to come to write her first poems, believing that this activity called for an appropriately bucolic setting. Now, amid the winter squalls, the river was bleak, hostile. “Bizarrely,” thought Shutov, “this gray atmosphere is conducive to poetry,” and he saw an echo of the same conclusion reflected in Léa’s eyes.

On one of those evenings, wandering the streets alone, he walked into the Café de la Gare, opposite the disused station. The customers seemed to know one another so well that for a stranger their conversational exchanges, in fragments of allusive sentences, remained Delphic. An old man seated at the table next to him began speaking in a tone that, while not directly addressed to the intruder, implied a welcome. Shutov turned to him and, almost without his being aware of it, a conversation was struck up: the streets of the little town became peopled with characters at once humble and heroic. The hills awoke beneath the clash of arms, were covered in soldiers. Close to the bridge (“it was narrower in those days, they altered it after the war…”) infantrymen, their faces grimy with dust, were retreating, firing at the enemy. “We didn’t have much ammunition. We had to cut and run. The Fritzes had got very close. At least the ones spraying us had. Then it was night. We thought we could get to the forest. Well, we hoped we could… It was our machine gunner, a guy named Claude Baud, who saved us. He’d been hit in the leg but he went on firing. He was kneeling there in a pool of blood…”

Customers would come in and greet the man, speaking very loudly: “How’s it going, Henri? In good form, as ever?” The youths playing foosball would repeat: “How’s it going, Henri?” in mocking tones, whispering a rhyme, the sense of which was lost on Shutov. The man seemed to hear neither one lot nor the other. But he replied to Shutov’s questions without asking him to speak up. He even recognized his foreign accent, that r, an incorrigible giveaway… Léa came in, called out: “Hello, Henri. All right then?” and signaled to Shutov for them to go.

That night in his hotel room he thought again about the old man at the Café de la Gare. An ill-lit room, a window looking out over rusty tracks, words from a past that interests no one. He felt very close to this man, to the dreary houses in the little town and the hillsides plunged in frosty darkness. “I could live here. Yes, I could feel at home in this part of the world…” Confusedly, Léa must have sensed that for Shutov this trip would be a journey back to his true self.

The moonlight has moved away from the top-floor apartment in the building across the street. The moon hangs above the rooftops and blue brilliance floods the attic. Enough to read the titles of the books Léa has stacked up ready for her move. Titles that chart the chronology of his love for her. Their readings, their quarrels on the subject of a particular author… Then comes a swift demolition job, it all falls down, crash! He knocks over one of the piles, the volumes scatter on the floor. Which book were they talking about the day the first crack appeared? Maybe it was this collection of short stories. In one of them a woman was reunited with the man she had once loved and together they sped down a snowy slope on a toboggan… Ah, so during that trip to the Ardennes, he had seen himself as a Chekhovian lover. I love you, Nadenka…

Three o’clock in the morning, the day has arrived when Léa will come to collect her cardboard boxes, the remnants of her life in Shutov’s life. After she has left he will go on talking to himself, a little like the old man at the Café de la Gare.

He realizes he has never said anything to Léa that was vitally important. Has not dared, has not known how to. He has wasted so many days (miraculous days, days made for love) proclaiming the poet’s sacred mission, railing against the intellectual establishment. At first she used to listen to him with the reverence prophets enjoy. Literary Paris fascinated her and Shutov seemed like a very well-established writer. The illusion lasted less than a year. The time it took for a young woman from the provinces to get her bearings and realize that this man was, in fact, no more than a marginal figure. And even his past as a dissident, which in the old days had given Shutov a certain aura, was becoming a flaw, or at least a sign of how prehistoric he was: just think, a dissident from the eighties of the previous century, an opposition figure exiled from a country that had since been erased from all the maps! “The early eighties, the time when I was a baby,” Léa must have told herself. Now her affection became tinged with pity. She sought to extricate Shutov from his isolation. And this was the start of a war neither could win.

“We’re not in the nineteenth century now!” she would argue. “Books are a product like any other… Well, because they’re for sale, of course! All right, go ahead. Do what Bulgakov did. Write to be published thirty years from now. After you’re dead.”

Shutov would grow heated, give examples of writers who had been rediscovered: Nietzsche, and those forty copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra published at the author’s expense and given to his friends.

“Fine. Give me your manuscript and in an hour I’ll come back with forty copies. You can sign the first one for your Australian neighbor, and he’ll wedge open his skylight with it. You’ve got the wrong period, Ivan! These days the most popular man in France is a footballer, not a poet…”

“In some countries that period survives!”

“Really? In Outer Manchuria, I suppose.”

“No. In Russia…”

These duels had an indirect consequence: Shutov began to dream of the Russia he had not seen for twenty years and where, he believed, a life persisted, rocked to sleep by well-loved lines of verse. A park beneath golden foliage, a woman walking in silence, like the heroine of a poem.

That image of a skylight wedged open with a manuscript was a milestone. He sensed a certain arrogance in Léa, that pert humor, known as gouaille, so relished by the French (he had never understood why). She began spending time away often, on the pretext of her journalism classes or interning at a publisher.

One day he had to go out early and downstairs on the lid of a trash can he noticed a large black leather bag. In the metro a doubt assailed him: that bundle had not been a bag. Passing again at noon he did not see it but guessed it had been Léa’s old jacket. A frayed lining, leather curves molded to the shape of her body… The intense sadness that overcame him surprised him. Now, at last, he felt capable of putting into words the fleeting images that were the only truth in his life: that old jacket, Léa’s arm flung out across the covers in her sleep… She came back in the evening clutching a parcel to her chest. Shutov’s latest manuscript. Returned by a publisher. They ate supper in silence, then very quickly he flew into a rage against the “pygmyism,” as he called it, of the current literary world. Léa must have taken pity on him because she murmured in a less brittle voice, yes, her old voice: “Don’t be silly, Ivan. You’re not a failure at all. You’re like a… Yes, an explosion still waiting to be heard.”

From that evening onward she became even more remote.

But amid this waning of their love affair, an impressive recovery occurred. Shutov was invited to appear on a television program! Bizarrely, for a novel he had published three years previously, which had enjoyed no success. The publicist resolved the mystery: “You talked about Afghanistan in it: and now, with everything that’s happening there…” It was the book in which a young soldier burst into tears at the sight of an old woman and her dog killed in an artillery bombardment.

In telling Léa about the invitation Shutov chose to feign indifference and even made one or two mocking remarks (“Just you wait. I’ll torpedo their ratings…”). But in reality he felt as if he were making his last throw. In this young woman’s eyes he could once again become the writer who initiated her knowledgeably into the secrets of the profession.

He bought a plain blue shirt, because “stripes cause strobing on the screen,” he explained. Léa went with him, made up as if she were taking part in the broadcast herself.

This was due to go out around midnight. “After the game shows, the football, and the rest. That’s their scale of values.” Shutov quickly resolved not to allow himself any rancor. On television one must smile, be a little simplistic, no nuances. “Break a leg,” whispered Léa, and, tense as he was, Shutov gave a start before remembering this strange custom. From that moment onward it all felt quite surreal to him.

Dreamlike, too, was the late-night scheduling, which made the participants seem like conspirators (or spirits) gathered, ironically, around a garishly lit table. But above all, this obligation to be a smiling idiot. Nobody demanded it, yet a mysterious force clamped these foolish grins onto their faces, made them ogle like prostitutes soliciting customers.

Perched on a high stool (“just like the ones in a pickup joint,” thought Shutov), he studied the “panel.” There was a young black francophone writer, with a grin like in the Uncle Ben advertisement. A Chinese man, with a sly air, his gaze shifty behind his thin glasses. And, for good measure, himself, Shutov, a Russian. Three living proofs of the globalization of French literature. Just across from Shutov the makeup girl was giving the finishing touches to the face of a… What could one call him? Journalist, writer, editor, member of several prize juries, a well-known mediacrat whom Shutov used to refer to as “one of the literary mafia,” and at whom he must now smile. On this man’s left they had just seated a psychologist who specialized in happiness, a state of mind rare in rich countries. The psychologist was talking to his neighbor, a young woman dressed like a Halloween witch. Finally a latecomer appeared, a woman in her fifties with graying hair and a handsome, faded face. Blinded by the lights, she wandered this way and that around the table until an assistant showed her to her seat, next to Shutov. He met her gaze, the intelligence of which was at odds with the smooth pink of her makeup. She was the only one not smiling.

The broadcast began. The African was on first and revealed himself to be a brilliant professional. Everything about his little performance was polished: his voice, his laughter, his lilting delivery: then a veritable comic interlude in which, quoting from his novel, he played the parts of both the rich lover and the cunning mistress, amid a whole host of relatives, storytellers, and tribal magicians. A born actor.

After such a display the Chinese writer, despite his obsequious facial expressions, appeared dull. This was because he could hardly speak French. And yet this was the language he purported to write in and in which he was published by one of the best houses in Paris… What Shutov heard sounded, yet again, like something from a surrealist play. “Yang is joined to yin… so yang with yin is making… And Confucius is saying… Red dragon mountain… Yin completes yang…” These last words were repeated so many times that the presenter himself became confused: “So your character, yin fact-excuse me-in fact…”

But Shutov’s performance was a real disaster. He began with a long, elegant sentence: the duty incumbent on a writer to bear witness, the quest for truth, the way the psychology of the characters can subvert the author’s own preconceptions. For example, a battle-hardened soldier, confronted by the bodies of an old woman and her dog, bursting into tears. The presenter scented danger in this monologue and, with a deft intervention, found a way to limit the damage: “So, according to your book, it seems as if the Russians have a lot to answer for…” This journalistic vagueness created an opening for a recovery. But Shutov was already getting out of his depth. His tirade was compressed like a concertina, in it the writer’s mission, the Taliban, Tolstoy rereading Stendhal to write the Battle of the Borodino, surface-to-air rockets, and the obscenity of aestheticism in a book about the war were all mixed up together… A gleam of compassion appeared in the presenter’s eyes. “So there we have it,” he summed up. “Can it ever be possible to write about war in a novel?” This coup de grâce saved Shutov. He froze, his cheeks burning with shame, and with only one thought in his head: “Léa was watching all that.”

The contributions of the others gradually distanced him from the appalled dummy he had turned into. “When a man caresses his sexual partner,” the psychologist of happiness was saying, “the nucleus of her dorso-median thalamus begins to…” The young witch novelist took up the tale, her eyes widening in a trance: “The other is always the bringer of evil… The evil we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves…” It was already past midnight and the dreamlike aura was rapidly intensifying. Shutov felt less ridiculous. The tension within him finally relaxed, giving way to a melancholy clarity.

He told himself that this mildly weird charade was being played out in a country that had given the world Promethean geniuses, whose words had once confronted exile, death, and, worse still, attacks by philistines. A prophetic daring, lives sacrificed on the altar of truth… In his youth that was how he had seen this great and ancient literature. Now, on the other side of the table there was this elegantly smiling Chinese writer, whose books had been rewritten by an obscure editor (a living author brought to life by a ghost). On his left was this young woman setting out to shock the viewers with her demonic appearance. Facing him, an African from a land covered in millions of corpses was spinning pornographic yarns, lubricious anecdotes laced with folklore of dubious authenticity…

Shutov did not grasp what it was that dispelled this feeling of absurdity. His neighbor, the woman with graying hair, had a faint voice, or, rather, she employed no vocal tricks. It seemed as if she had serenely come to terms with the rules of this stupid game: on television, speaking last at midnight, a woman with her looks has no chance. Pensively, her head bowed, she met no one’s eyes. It seemed to Shutov as if she were addressing him alone.

The story is very simple, she was saying, a woman loves a very young man who is hooked on drugs. After a year and a half of struggle she manages to save him. A month later he meets a girl of his own age and leaves.

“In fact, the book starts when it’s all over for my heroine. I think that’s how it is in our lives. When you expect nothing more, life opens up to what is really important…”

Suddenly, still in her calm voice, she addressed Shutov: “Just now you were quoting Chekhov… Yes, he encouraged us to cut the opening and the ending of a story. But I don’t know if Doctor Chekhov’s remedy can cure a novel. In any event, my heroine comes to life in the part of the story he advised us to cut.”

And without any change of tone, without declaiming, she read several sentences from the book open in front of her. A forest in winter, a woman on a footpath with a brown carpet of fallen leaves, a soothing, acrid scent, grief turning to joy at each step taken down a misty avenue of trees…

The broadcast ended. Shutov remained seated, his eyes half closed. A forest in the mist, a figure disappearing at the end of a pathway… A technician roused him to retrieve his microphone. In the corridor, near the makeup room, he caught up with the gray-haired woman. “Why did you take part in that farce?” He did not have the courage to ask her this, murmuring instead: “I was grateful for Chekhov! Thanks to you I didn’t look so stupid. But I didn’t catch the name of your book…”

“After Her Life. I’ll send it to you. I read yours when it came out. I’ve read all your books. But I didn’t expect to see you here. Why did you come?”

They smiled, imagining the excuses writers generally concoct: my publisher was very insistent, I was there to hold the line against dumbing down… And at that moment he saw Léa.

“That was fantastic!” she declared, kissing him on the cheek. He turned to introduce her to the gray-haired woman but the latter had already gone into the makeup room. “No, it was great,” Léa went on. “It made you want to read the books. Especially that Chinese writer. I really liked him. What he said about the yin and the yang was really deep. But I thought the woman next to you, the one who came on last, was, like, hopeless. Did you see how she was made up? She looked…”

The “hopeless” woman emerged from the makeup room and Shutov saw her moving away. As she walked along she was rubbing her face with a tissue and from a distance one might have thought she was wiping away tears.

In the taxi Léa’s enthusiasm knew no bounds. Shutov reflected that the stupid media magic had given him a makeover and perhaps what had felt like a wretched failure would give their partnership a new lease on life. Léa praised the young witch’s performance. She thought it clever how she had “only just got away with it.” Then she went back to the woman reading a few lines from her book. “I simply can’t make that one out. It was a real mistake putting her on. She’s, like, old and dreary, you know, not sexy at all. And she looked as if she was bored out of her skull. It was lucky for her you mentioned Chekhov. It gave her the chance to show off a bit…”

Shutov touched Léa’s hand and murmured very calmly: “You don’t need to go on, Léa. I know you’re not as moronic as you make out.”

Then he quickly regretted this undiplomatic remark, knowing that people never forgive you for refusing to join in games of self-deception.

Nor was Shutov deceived by Léa’s “infidelities.” The word had a farcical ring to it-he found others (“she sleeps with a friend from time to time”), preferring to act like a writer: to live at arm’s length from the situation so as not to suffer from it and one day to be able to describe it. But the posture of the detached observer is a delusion. He suffered, despised his own suffering, lapsed into mocking cynicism, reemerged to clear his beloved of all suspicion, behaved, in fact, precisely like the hero of one of those psychological novels whose authors meticulously flaunt their knowledge of the human psyche, just the type of book he detested.

What he succeeded best at was turning a blind eye. He had already noticed that, with increasing age, this exercise became easier.

That evening, too, he would have forced himself to see nothing, had Léa not decided to present him with an illusion of love regained.

It was a bleak dusk in early February; reflected in the tarmac was a whole subterranean world into which you could have hurled yourself and disappeared. Shutov was on his way back from a meeting (a publisher had been explaining to him just why the subject of his novel was unsaleable). Unable to brave the crowd in the metro, he had climbed all the way up to Ménilmontant on foot. Just a little more pain might make his life unbearable and what then?… Cut his own throat? String himself up? Such things are fine in a novel, but in real life the final straw took the form of an overturned trash can below their apartment building, a cornucopia spilling out its household garbage. Not something to slit your carotid artery over, my good scribblers!

As he mounted the narrow spiral staircase he could already smell the aroma of a wood fire. Behind the door of the dovecote there was a ripple of silky music but in the time it took to locate the keyhole Shutov experienced conflicting sensations: within his attic a party was in full swing yet he, a man clad in a rain-soaked overcoat, no longer possessed the right key to enter into this convivial life.

Léa had prepared a dinner, lit the fire and candles, the illusion was complete. Right down to the simulation of their readings in the old days. At the end of the meal she declared in somewhat exaggerated tones: “I’ve just been reading Chekhov’s ‘Vanka.’ You know, it’s heartbreaking. I wept… No, I really cried my eyes out!”

Shutov studied her. An attractive young woman smoking nonchalantly, curled up in a feline pose (“a hackneyed image,” he quibbled). And two years earlier that girl rather strapped for cash in a telephone booth at the Gare de l’Est. A striking but natural change: the swift adaptability of youth, the vigor of a life taking wing. Journalism classes, which, in France, lead to everything, a group of friends her own age. And this still useful, aging man, whom it would be easy to get rid of. A man she feels like cheering up, one winter’s evening, by lighting up his garret with a scattering of sparks from her youthful, free, intense existence…

“You know, Léa, I’ve never been crazy about Chekhov.”

In Shutov’s voice there was the hint of an overtaut string stretched too far, despite the banality of his observation. Drowsy as she was, she must have noticed it.

“I see. I thought you… Look, remember you used to swear by him! His sentences like lancet stabs. You were the one who used to say that…”

His elbows on the table, he massaged his brow, then looked at Léa and realized that what she saw was this face creased by a whole evening of pulling forced expressions.

“No, I’m not talking about his style,” he replied. “He’s a storyteller without equal. Concision, the art of detail, humor. It’s all there. I bow to him! What goes against the grain is all that compassion of Chekhov’s. Granted, he’s a humanist. He takes pity on an aristocrat who’s blown all her money in Paris and returns to Russia to bemoan her lot in her beloved cherry orchard. He feels sorry for three provincial women who can’t manage to leave their own backyard and go to Moscow. He laments the fate of a whole crowd of doctors, petty gentry, eternal students and…”

“But hold on, those were people who suffered! He shows how society broke their dreams, how the mediocrity of their period suffocated them…”

“That’s true… But you see, Léa, Chekhov died in 1904 and very shortly after that, some fifteen, twenty years later, in fact, in the very same country where his heroes had spent their time cursing their woes in the shade of cherry orchards in bloom… In that same country, millions of human beings were brutally exterminated, without any humanist worrying about their ‘broken dreams,’ as you call them.”

“Sorry, Ivan. You’ve lost me there. You’re surely not going to blame Chekhov for everyone who died in the Gulag?”

“Why not?… Well, no. Certainly not! Only, after what’s happened in my country, I think I have the right to say this to Chekhov: by all means weep, dear Master, for your petty noblemen, refined and sensitive as they are, but leave us to weep for our millions of wretched yokels!”

He fell silent, then mumbled in conciliatory tones: “I should have put that a bit differently…”

The Chekhov story, “Vanka,” that had entranced Léa was one of Shutov’s favorites. But to talk about it over this dinner, which was a replica of their evenings in the old days… No! Léa had been using young Vanka as a backdrop for her masquerade of affection. “Perhaps this is how she wants to take her leave of me. An amicable divorce in an elegiac setting, to avoid a brutal breach. In fact, she set me a trap and I walked straight into it. Poor old writer! What a hopeless expert in the human psyche! An ill-shod shoemaker, indeed…”

“Look, Ivan, you’ve got it all wrong. That story’s not about a petty nobleman at all. It’s about a little peasant boy sent away to be an apprentice in the city and his master maltreats him. All he’s got is his grandfather. He writes to him. Not knowing the address, he writes on the envelope: ‘To my grandfather, Konstantin Makarych. The country.’ He posts the letter and waits for the reply. That scene bowled me over! What shocks me is your lack of sensitivity. You’re Russian but that story is totally lost on you…”

“I’m not Russian, Léa. I’m Soviet. So you see I’m filthy, stupid, and vicious. Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about. Sorry…”

She stared at him with a stubborn, hostile air, her tone of voice refusing to acknowledge Shutov’s rueful smile.

“That’s just it. Your generation of Russians were so programmed by the totalitarian regime that it’s no longer possible to communicate with you. Even on a mundane level, I mean. You’ve never learned the slightest tolerance. Everything’s all black or all white. In the end it gets tiring. I knock myself out trying to make you see…”

Léa went on with her speech for the prosecution and he sensed that at any minute now the verdict would be delivered: she would tell him she was leaving. She would not even need to argue her case, he had just made himself a sitting target… The attic without her? “Just a little more pain might make my life unbearable…”

He ran through all the routes for retreat in his mind: apologize, laugh, feign contrition, admit to being genetically modified by communism… Meanwhile she was saying: “As long as you cling to your past in Soviet slavery…” (In a brief moment of distraction Shutov glanced at Léa’s arms: “She’ll never know how beautiful her arm can be”). “… And if you don’t feel free you crush other people. You don’t respect anyone’s inner feelings. I find Vanka writing to his grandfather really upsetting. But you couldn’t give a damn. Well, look, I think we need to have a serious talk because, quite honestly…”

He choked from the pressure of words held back and, to begin with, his voice was a whisper, broken, expressionless: “Of course, Léa. We’ll have a talk whenever you like. But before that I want to tell you a little story. Quite Chekhovian, by the way. I have it from a friend. He was an orphan. As a child he used to be sent with his comrades to gather vegetables on collective farms. On one occasion it was a type of rutabaga they had to dig up from more or less frozen soil. They were scrabbling about in the mud and suddenly my pal unearthed a skull, then a soldier’s helmet. Their supervisor told him to go and take them to the farm management. He set off and spent a long time floundering across plowed fields, then he stopped and… How can I put it? He realized that he was all alone on this earth. The low northern sky, icy fields as far as the eye could see, and himself with that skull and the helmet in a bag. It’s quite upsetting, you know, for a child to confront such complete, almost cosmic, loneliness: himself, the sky, the mud under his feet, and no one from whom he can expect a word of tenderness. No one in the whole universe! No grandfather to send a letter to… So, you see, I’m quits with Chekhov and his Vanka. As you’ll have guessed, that little lad amid the fields was me.”

As it happened, his story would achieve nothing. It might even have furnished one more motive for their breakup: a refusal to share the past of someone you no longer love.

A wounded man can do no other: Shutov had learned this in the army. When hit, a body struggles against the first wave of pain, flails about, fights, then, overcome, goes rigid. During the final months of their relationship he had behaved like a wounded man embarking on his dance with death, resisting it, clutching it to his heart. Then one day in a crowded café he had gone rigid. “In Russian shut means ‘clown,’” Léa was saying. “A buffoon.” A sad clown, he had added, conscious that the word defined all too well what he had become.

A gray spring came, without savor: the emptiness of the streets at night, the blue of days that started for him at three o’clock in the afternoon, and this attic, the only place where his life still had any kind of meaning. Thanks to those cardboard boxes Léa was going to take away.

And if anywhere else existed it was that park of thirty years ago in Leningrad, two shadowy figures walking slowly along, beneath the autumn leaves, their breathing matched to the rhythm of a poem.

Drink helped him to believe that this country beneath the golden foliage still existed. This certainty became so intense that one day Shutov accomplished something that had earlier seemed inconceivable: he found an agency that obtained visas for Russia and now, once a fortnight, he packed a suitcase, booked a ticket. And did not go.

In the end he admired the dexterity with which Léa had transformed their relationship into a vague camaraderie. After two months’ absence she began to show signs of life but now in the guise of an old friend, well disposed, devoid of passion. Asexual. It was in this guise that she telephoned him toward the middle of May. Her voice created a distance such that Shutov thought he must be speaking to a woman he had met during another period of his life. At the end of the conversation the old Léa gave herself away but advisedly: “Do you remember the coffee table I bought that’s at your place? And my corner bookshelf? I’m going to come over with a friend who’s got a car. But I wanted to let you know in advance… In fact, I’ve told him we were just good friends and I’d left those bits of furniture at your place for the time being. He doesn’t need to come up if you’d prefer him not to…”

Shutov protested vehemently, afraid of seeming like a jealous old fogy. And in this way he was able to see Léa’s friend (the figure of a tall adolescent, a fine, harmonious face). He greeted him and retreated to the kitchen, heard them talking about their apartment. They were discussing where they would put the pieces of furniture they were collecting. Involuntarily Shutov pictured himself in those rooms smelling of fresh paint, in their world… He was touched by the fervor they invested in their move. The young man carried the little set of shelves the way one carries a baby. And Shutov felt terribly old and disillusioned.

All that was left in his attic now was a few cardboard boxes, a bag of Léa’s clothes, and two piles of books. Occasionally Shutov would open a volume, leaf through it: people falling in and out of love, pain and pleasure, wisdom slowly gained and, at the end of the day, useless. Little psychological dissertations the French call “novels.”

He could have written one of these slight works himself. Picturing Léa sometimes as a female Rastignac, sometimes as a fallen woman rescued by a wanderer with a heart of gold. What else could he invent? A little girl gone astray in the jungle of the capital, a cynical young woman on the make, a sleeping Madonna bathed in moonlight… A provincial woman corrupted by Paris, a Galatea awakened by her Pygmalion. All plausible but false.

There was more truth in that brief glimpse he had: wriggling through his skylight up to the waist, Shutov watched Léa and her friend crossing the courtyard, carrying the coffee table, and could see the rear of a car parked in the street. An evening in May, this young couple departing toward a luminous sequence of roads and journeys, toward the unpredictable abundance of tiny joys that is life. He felt a lump in his throat (how many times had he mocked authors who used that expression) and could have given all he possessed for this newfound love to be a happy one! The young people set the table down on the sidewalk, the boy opened the trunk. And that was when Léa looked up and her gaze, hesitant at first, focused on the attic and the skylight… Shutov hid rapidly and remained bent double for a moment, panting as if he had been running, ashamed of having gained entry into a life where he no longer existed.

Now a bitter contentment inhabited him: the relief of no longer desiring anything, of having so few objects around him, of experiencing no jealousy. Of no longer having to fight.

He could have lived in this peace of renunciation for a long time. But a week later Léa telephoned him and asked if she could come by the following day to complete the move. “It really will be the very last time!” she said, reassuringly.

The very last time… “Dying,” he thought, “begins with ambiguous little phrases like this, well before any physical extinction.” He went over to the corner where Léa’s things were stacked, crouched down, stroked the silk of a blouse. And sensed deep within himself someone who still wanted to desire, to love… “Not to be taken for an old piece of furniture!” this other one cried out. To be able to kiss a woman’s arm as she slept.

But above all, after that telephone call, he realized that he would not have the strength to be present at his own funeral in an attic that was about to be emptied of everything that was his life.

These are names more mysterious than hieroglyphs on a papyrus eroded by millennia. Out-of-date addresses, curiously brief telephone numbers. A whole lapsed world Shutov is trying to bring back to life as he leafs impatiently through the pages of a notebook retrieved from the depths of an old traveling bag. The bag he had with him when he left Russia twenty years ago… A papyrus, yes, the comparison is no exaggeration: since then a country has disappeared, cities have changed their names, and the faces conjured up by the addresses survive only in Shutov’s memory.

He glances at the window, which is starting to turn pale. He has made his decision. At ten o’clock in the morning Léa will come with her friend and they will find no one here. The visa in his passport is still valid. He will go at once, as soon as he has found her address, the one who… A silhouette outlined by the autumn sun against the golden leaves.

She was called Yana. At the end of her studies she left Leningrad to go and work beyond the Urals. This he knows. Nothing more. The addresses in this notebook, like an encoded message, may perhaps lead him to this woman: a sequence of friends, who, stage by stage, may indicate the places where she made her home during that abyss of years.

One of them lives in western Siberia. Shutov telephones him, apologizes for calling him practically in the middle of the night, then realizes that over there, beyond the Urals, the sun is already at its zenith. What amazes him more is that the friend in question should be so little amazed. “I see, so you’re calling from Paris. I was there with my wife in April… Who? Yana? I think she taught at Tomsk University…” Shutov works through other numbers, talks to strangers, passes through three, five, ten time zones… But it is the surprise of that first conversation that remains the greatest: a man of his own age in a town in Siberia, responding as if there were nothing unusual in this, life goes on, and a couple of months earlier this former fellow student could have run into him in Paris.

Several sheets of paper lie before him, blackened with figures. He reaches the Far East and in Vladivostok a child’s voice calls a grandmother to the telephone, a student at Leningrad University in the same year as Shutov, thirty years ago. “So I’m old enough to be a grandfather,” he says to himself, conscious that his own exile had banished him from the chronology of human beings. His friends were living their lives, marrying, surrounding themselves with children and grandchildren, while he was transforming himself into an ageless ghost.

“Listen, Shutov, I know she went back to Leningrad, well, Saint Petersburg. She’d married a fellow who was in oil. Yes, you get the picture. And it didn’t work out… No, not the oil. The marriage. Wait, I’ve got her best friend’s number. She’ll be able to help you…”

Five minutes later Shutov is writing down the number of Yana’s cell phone. Digits that magically encompass the shade of a remote feminine presence, days filled with autumn gold, declarations never hazarded.

It is half past eight in Paris, half past ten in Saint Petersburg. Shutov dials the number, but just before it rings he hangs up, goes into the bathroom, thrusts his face beneath the cold-water tap, splashes himself, drinks, clears his throat. Then smooths down his wet hair in front of a mirror. He feels the hallucinatory clarity descending upon him that comes from a sleepless night, extreme tension, drink overcome. The sensation of being about to hurl himself into a void, like in the old days, when bailing out of the cabin of an aircraft, but without the parachute’s reassuring weight.

He dials again. In Saint Petersburg a cell phone comes to life. A male voice, strangely rhythmical at first: “The prime minister’s Boeing has just landed. Southern districts of the city will experience extreme traffic disruption…” A woman’s voice, closer: “Yes. It’s to your left just beyond the bridge. But steer clear of the Nevsky…” After a moment Shutov realizes that the male voice is that of a newscaster and that the woman’s voice is speaking to the driver of a car…

“Hello, what? Oh, Ivan! I was thinking about you only the other day and do you know why? Hold on, I’m just going to park…”

This interruption allows Shutov to gather his wits, to make a landing, he thinks. His feet touch the ground, the parachute drags him along, then the canopy collapses, deflates on the grass and now, at last, certainty imposes itself: safe and sound.

“Yes, my son came across your name on a website for French books. He does publicity for a publishing house. He was surprised to see a Russian name. I told him we used to know one another…”

The banality of these words is disconcerting. Even wounding. Shutov feels it like a pinprick: nothing serious and yet it jars. He interrupts the person who has not yet become Yana: “You see, I’m coming to Lenin-Saint Petersburg, today.”

“Oh, what a shame!”

The disappointment is sincere.

“How do you mean? Don’t you want us to meet?” Shutov’s tone is almost aggressive.

“But of course I do! It’s a shame because you’ve missed half the celebrations… Wait. Where have you been? The whole world’s been talking of nothing else. Blair’s plane has just landed. It’s the tercentenary of the city… A hotel? That’ll be difficult. But we’ll sort something out, I work in the hotel business. Or if not… Right, we’ll see when you’re here. I’ve got to go now, Ivan. I’m late already. Make a careful note of my new address…”

Shutov’s departure is a rush to escape. Any minute now Léa and her friend will be knocking at the door. He throws whatever comes to hand into his old traveling bag. Writes a note, rings his Australian neighbor’s bell, gives him the key, runs to catch a taxi. And at the airport, as just now on the telephone, speaks his mother tongue for the first time in many long years. The Russian airline representative reassures him: the flight will be half empty, the stampede took place yesterday, everyone wanted to get there for the opening of the festivities.

In the air Shutov hovers between sleep and unreality. He is on his way to see a woman of whom all he can remember, thirty years on, is a luminous silence, the clear outline of a face. Quite a different woman is now driving beside the Neva in her car. And thinking of him? She works in a hotel (he pictures an establishment from the Soviet era, a matron ensconced at the reception desk), she has a son, a “publicist” (how do you say that in Russian?), but above all, she does not seem to be terrified by the interstellar chasm that has come between them. Does she recall their encounters in those parks where the sunsets would come and fade away over the Baltic?

In midflight he falls asleep, carrying into his dreams the question that causes so much pain: “But if I were not coming, would the lives of the people I’ve been telephoning continue just as before? And Yana’s life? So why come?”