Human Love

1

CUBA WOULD TEACH HIM THE USE OF WEAPONS, the science of revolution, the flesh of woman. Then one evening, in 1967, on a beach bathed in the sunsets copper light, he learned that Ernesto had met his end.

So it was that this death remained forever associated in his memory with the vivid blood-red clouds, the sleepy swell of the waves, and the tearstained face of the young Cuban woman who broke the news to him. Hair stiff with salt, lips on which he silenced her somewhat overartistic lamentation with a kiss: “Che is dead! The Americans have killed him…” Ernesto’s death mingled with the smooth warmth of the first body he had loved, now shaken with sobs.

Elias sensed the coquettish element in her grief. His girlfriend had met him to make love, to which she generally applied herself with fierce, healthy zest, wasting no time on emotional outpourings. The national hero’s death brought a new savor of drama to their encounter. Thanks to these slightly forced tears, he grasped that it was possible for love to be no more than two bodies taking pleasure, parting, tangling with each other again… Sometimes a few theatrical effects could add spice to this sweet physical fulfillment. Slivers of moonlight on the sea, tender little lies tickling an ear, the feeble death throes of a wave, the choking death throes of a guerilla in the Bolivian jungle…

He lay there beside the woman glowing with pleasure and was amazed as one of those thoughts struck him, simple enough to be almost banal in their aptness: So the revolution hasn’t changed any of this!

Three years later, during a mass meeting in Havana, the same idea about love and revolution occurred to him: just as crude a consideration, and just as disconcertingly lucid. And yet he had meanwhile made good progress in the study of the armed struggle, of Marxist theory, and he thought he knew what women, with their beauty, their strength, and their vulnerability, could give, and could not give, a man. But the question that had troubled him in the old days remained as clear and insoluble as ever: If the revolution doesn’t change the way we love, what’s the point of all this fighting?

Motionless in the lineup of his comrades, young soldiers like himself, he was watching the vast open space crowded with the “toiling masses,” who were being warmed up by the speakers before Castro took the floor. Slogans rattled out on the wind with the slashing resonance of Spanish, the applause and shouting erupted in long, foaming waves. From his place behind the platform, Elias could see the speakers’ backs and the reverse side of two enormous banners. The sunlight was so strong that the painted figures showed through and could be recognized: Marx and Engels to the right of the rostrum, Lenin and Castro to the left. He was not listening to the harangues but noting the bizarre features of the spectacle. Unusually, the four mentors of humanity were shown full length, on the canvas of the banners: generally only their heads were portrayed. The reverse side of the canvas was punctuated with nails that held it to the framework of wooden struts. Curiously, the thought that one of the nails had been driven into Engel s’s chest and another had pierced Castro’s beard rendered the speeches both ludicrous and ambiguous. Libertad… movimiento… histórico… poder popular… The faces in the crowd smiled foolishly, as if watching a film, while the backs of the banners revealed fabric frayed at the edges.

A woman with blond hair mounted the platform, and the impression of a staged performance increased. She spoke with a strong accent, gesticulating. Elias experienced the unease that is felt when a person dear to one makes a public appearance. Especially a woman recently held in one’s arms, kissed, pleasured. An inane pride (“They’re cheering a woman IVe just slept with”) and shame, as if the two of them had suddenly exposed themselves naked.

He had known Louise Rimens for several months – a Frenchwoman from a very wealthy family who had broken with her background and “married the revolution,” as she put it. At first Elias perceived hers as a unique and exemplary life story, before learning that the agitation among the young in ‘68 had spawned hordes of apprentice rebels who were now at large in those countries where they could still fan the embers and lead lives capable of shocking their bourgeois parents. Everything Louise did in Cuba was, consciously or not, directed at an imaginary audience back in France.

Now she was calling for the flame of revolt to be spread to other continents. (“For there are no flameproof countries anywhere in the world!” Where on earth did she learn these expressions?) Her voice faltered when she mentioned Ernesto Guevara. And within the enclosed space behind the lectern her feet were arranged in a ridiculous and touching manner: her heels splayed out and her big toes pressed together. Her body was robust but not graceful. The plumpness of a young woman from a good family (plentiful food, riding, holidays in a vast country house), a young woman eager at all costs to take advantage of the benefits of her bourgeois youth in adventures at the other end of the world, among starving populations, upheavals, and struggles.

It all seemed so clear to Elias now! A little girl of twenty-five, a spoiled child, busy crafting a life story for herself. Manipulating the modeling clay that had come to hand: this Cuba in ferment, this Havana crowd drinking in her words like those of a prophet (so she believed), the enthusiastic articles she sent to a Paris newspaper and “Che,” an icon, immortal, because he had died at the right moment… And myself too, an exotic lover, the embodiment of “négritude,” a perfect feature of the whole scenario…

He had never sensed this so plainly before. So all it took was to be located behind the platform, to see the backs of the banners and the nails driven through the bodies of the revolutionaries (There, squarely in Fidel’s crotch, he noted, repressing an untoward smile), to notice Louise’s feet. Her French accent, after the harshness of the Spanish, made one think of a cabaret singer’s rhyming lyrics.

It’s playacting, he reflected, recalling how that young Cuban woman had sobbed three years earlier as she gave him the news of Ernesto’s death. Yes, it’s still the same playacting, except that I now have the enviable role of male juvenile lead in it…

Then it was as if a flood of fresh and disconcerting perceptions suddenly struck him. He reflected that the persona of the black lover, with a legendary warrior’s aura, would certainly turn out to be the heartthrob role white women would adore casting him in. And that a male model like this would attract European women of a very specific type: disaffected young middle-class women with a mania for heroic exoticism, rather plain women who would instinctively home in on that sought-after male, the black man they believe eager to possess a white woman… He suddenly realized that Louise was very similar to his fathers companion, the Belgian woman who had abandoned, or rather betrayed, them in the Congo. And that this Frenchwoman, too, was free to leave whenever the fancy took her. And that he, the black lover, would disappear from her life as soon as the curtain fell. And that in truth she despised this crowd of Cubans, because instead of flying to Che s rescue, they got married, grilled fish in stinking oil, dreamed of buying cars… And that she was consuming the revolution just as, in Europe, she would have consumed food and clothes, and that for her, he himself, his black skin, his body, his genitals, were also consumer goods…

Castros voice broke in on this tumble of bitter thoughts. The orator was speaking with somewhat mournful sincerity, with vehement and at the same time melancholy conviction. The conviction of someone who no longer believes, but who wants at all costs to be believed, Elias would reflect years later.

As for himself, he wanted to hold on to his faith at all costs. That ancient, still childlike hope of seeing a world where it would be impossible to leave a woman to die with a broken collarbone, or to gun a man down, almost absent-mindedly, between two drags on a cigarette.

Toward the end of the speech he felt a light tickle on his back. A whisper brushed his ear: Til be waiting for you at my place. Try to get away” Louise had managed to insinuate herself in between the ranks of the soldiers. Without seeing her, Elias was aware of that great child’s gleeful excitement, her passion for clandestine adventures and secret rendezvous. He looked at his watch (Castro had been speaking for more than two hours) and noted that, in exalting the society of the future, at no point had the orator referred to the love between two human beings.

That evening at Louise’s place he was back again in the masquerade of conspiracy, the falseness of which he now perceived so clearly. A warrior under threat (himself) meets up with his pasionaria (her) in the middle of a hostile country, in an unknown city. That must have been how Louise mythologized their nights together. She opened the door and flung her arms about him as if they had not seen one another for months, as if he had had to cross minefields and pass through bursts of gunfire. He wanted to tell her he had just strolled whistling out of the barracks, and the greatest danger he had been in during the past few months had been that of falling overboard from an inflatable craft during landing exercises. And in that neighborhood everyone was quietly getting on with frying fish… She knew all this but simply did not want to destroy the illusion.

Wholly immersed in her role as a rebel on the run, she gave herself, enjoyed more intense pleasure than ever, thanks to this game, and grew bolder. It was the actress in her that drew him down onto the floor of her room, let herself be ravished there on the ground, amid cigarette ends and the scattered drafts of her articles. It was the make-believe revolutionary who clawed at his belly, moaning and biting her lip, flung herself onto her back in the posture of one crucified, feigning now the self-abasement of a submissive lover, now the mechanical stubbornness of a female slow to be satisfied.

Until very recently these carnal games had flattered him. What he had beheld in the woman’s distraught look, her wild eye, was the reflection of his own virility, the black gleam of his sweating skin, the mark of his new status: he, the African, was servicing a well-known journalist, a white woman who was on close terms with the Cuban leaders and Castro himself.

That evening these masks struck him as a hollow sham. But, to crown it all, he realized that it had been a hollow sham from the start.

Louise stirred on the floor, stood up, still drugged with pleasure, and staggered toward the bed. Comically, a page of typescript clung to her right buttock. Elias stretched out his arm, detached the page, and by the light of a bulb suspended over a typewriter glimpsed this sentence: “Every revolution is at risk from two dangers: the gangrene of bureaucracy in its leaders and the recurrence of petty bourgeois instincts in the workers.” The sickly sweet smell of corn as well as that of fried fish, pungent and oily, floated in through the bedroom window. The alimentary instincts of the petty bourgeoisie, thought Elias, smiling in the dim light.

And she did indeed start to talk about how the revolutionaries of twelve years ago were being visibly tempted today by the siren voices of Florida. “A lack of political consciousness… The American influence… The lure of the dollar…” The sense of her words should have called for brisk, severe tones. But the woman was torpid after her physical exertions and nestled up to the man with the abandon of any romantic young mistress.

He already knew how the evening would go. The impassioned revolutionary, having become a languid lover, was going to mutate into a good Western tourist, with an expert knowledge of picturesque Havana. She would take him out to their “favorite” restaurant, order their “favorite” dishes, greet their “favorite” chef… She would have done the same in Provence, in China, in Senegal.

A Frenchwoman who knows how to explore the local attractions. Revolutionary tourism, he thought, surprised, himself, by the aptness of the phrase.

The dinner began as expected. Except that this time Elias was waiting for an opportunity at last to tell the truth. And this anticipation made the setting seem increasingly artificial: the sea breeze with its “faint whiff of iodine,” as Louise always remarked, the sugary strumming of a guitar, the momentary fire of the rum.

He did not know where to start. Perhaps with the falsity of the parts they were playing – she a tourist in the zoo of revolution, he the symbolic negro breaking the shackles of slavery. Or should he talk to her about the “Che” he had known? Describe him as he had appeared in Africa, a real man still, with all his fears and weaknesses? Yes, tell her the story of just that night amid drunken soldiers laying siege to their “command post.” Tell her how Che and the Belgian woman had fled, frightened by the devastating chaos that prevailed in the bestiary of African revolutions. Say to her, “You’ll cut and run, too, when you’ve had enough. And I’ll end up in your notebook, among the other trophies, a brief episode in your tourist expedition. Yes, my negro’s head hung on the wall in your drawing room, between a Parisian anarchist and a Cuban barbudo

The image of it struck him as comic. He smiled and noticed then that they had both been silent for a moment, casting wary glances at one another and knocking back their rum with equal wariness. Louise had a harsh, scornful grimace. He had a fervent desire to reclaim from this woman all that she had had from him: their nights together, his African body, which she had added to her collection… He again pictured his head as a hunting trophy and realized the extent to which all this was unimportant: his inveighing against the Westerners’ revolutionary safaris, his bouts with Louise in theatrical secrecy, the pleasure this big child had taken, having indeed come here in the hope of indulging in sex, spiced with battles and impassioned speeches… He felt so little involved in this vortex of words and deeds, of the ebb and flow of passions. The essential thing was still that child hiding a wounded bird inside his shirt, a child who found the world’s perfection in the fold of his mothers arm… If only he could tell her about that!

He looked up and suddenly became aware that Louise was talking, or rather muttering, in inebriated but lucid tones, and that she was saying precisely what he had been preparing to declare. “Che s soon going to turn into a mascot, a caricature, a label… Do you think I don’t understand that? But people need something to believe in… Otherwise it’s, you know, Orwell, Kafka… Besides, who could replace him? Fidel? A man who goes on jabbering for hours in his sleep? Our European revolutionaries? They never venture farther afield than the last stop on the metro… Go ahead. Tell me, if that’s what you think. Tell me I’m just like them. A spoiled young bourgeoise. Cruising the world to get screwed by guys with ebony skins hung like stallions… You owe it to yourself to think that, don’t you? And what’s more, I’m this hooker who’s trying to get herself a CV to match the bare-breasted girl on the barricades.”

Her tone began to waver, now aggressive, abusive of herself and others, now helpless and tender. She talked about a blind dog she had in Paris, confessed to having betrayed it by going away to make “her little revolution.” Then, without transition, declared: “But did you know the Cuban leaders are hiding the journal Che kept in the Congo? His notebooks. Not the notes that have been published… I’ve tried everything to get my hands on them. Its a state secret, you know! But I did find out from a Frenchman with contacts close to Castro that there was a fragment headed, ‘When Revolutions Die/ It sounds as if he was talking about the Cuban revolution. All those leaders. They’ve started to stink of rancid archives…”

She was almost shouting. Then, when Elias managed to take her out, to escort her home, she wept and babbled with the pitiful and touching incoherence of a drunken woman, whom one would like simultaneously to fold in one’s arms and to slap. She said her father had “the look of someone who’d been in the OAS;” that her mother’s life was “as lively as a barnacle;” that it was better “to be wrong with Sartre;” that her grandmother recited poetry to her flowers and was the only honest person in their family; that power grew “out of the barrel of a gun.” Finally, in a quavering avowal, she denounced the perfidy of a certain Jean-Yves, who had dumped her for a “fat German cow, a friend of Andreas Baader. But I’ll show him, that bastard. I’ll show him,” she gulped. “Here in Cuba, I’m going to…”

Her voice drowned in a sob. Elias drew her to him, cradled the head racked with shudders against his shoulder. As the veil of sleep descended, Louise was still murmuring, calling someone. Her blind dog left in Paris, Elias guessed.

That night was the only one where they felt truly close, liberated from the postures they had imposed on themselves. And for the first time Elias became aware of the paths that led human beings through revolutions and wars, through life. He grasped that within the most stubborn commitment to the most sublime cause could lie hidden the desire to punish a man who went off with a rival, the memory of an old woman who recited poetry to her window boxes, and pity for a dog.

He slept little, listened to the plaintive breathing of the woman squeezed tight against his arm, studied the photos that seemed to meet his gaze in the phosphorescent glow of the nightlight. Hemingway as a boxer in a ring, the charmers smile directed at the photographer. Castro at the center of a crowd, in which, if you looked carefully, according to Louise, you could make her out. Malraux, elegant and ambiguous, like a croupier in a casino. And finally Che, with eyes ablaze and wild hair. And lower down a caricature: de Gaulle transformed into Hitler, with the S S insignia on his shoulder… They must all have had a blind dog in their lives, thought Elias.

During the days that followed Louise avoided him, and when they ran into one another more or less by chance, he perceived that she had fully regained her self-possession. “Wow! That was a hell of a binge!” she exclaimed, very much at her ease. “I must have spouted a lot of crap at you…”

She left Cuba a month later, without letting him know in advance. A note reached him the day after her departure. “I was frankly disappointed with the way the revolution was going,” she wrote. “And I never hid that from you.” She also mentioned that the Paris newspaper she had been working for was offering her a job.

Two years later, by then in Moscow, Elias would learn of the publication of Louise Rimens’s book. The title would be a surprise and yet no surprise to him: When Revolutions Die.

During the rest of his time in Havana he often tried to find a logic in this frenzy of human beings committed to what seemed like a monolith: History, the Revolution. A young woman taking her revenge on a faithless lover by falling in love with Che, wishing to set the whole world on fire, and recalling her grandmothers house with poignant nostalgia. A woman ready to sacrifice millions of human lives on the altar of an Idea but who wept when she thought about her blind dog…

The contradictions of existence, he thought with a smile, recalling his studies in philosophy. Or perhaps quite simply a lack of professionalism on the part of these amateur revolutionaries?

Then he thought about the USSR, the country his fathers’ friends used to give as an example of “a society of the future conceived along purely scientific lines,” In Cuba the Russians seemed to be accomplishing a task that was almost routine for them, that of constructing a world others could only dream about. On the facade of one of the factories they were erecting he had one day read: “Our tasks are resolved, our goals are clear! To work, comrades!” In this slogan, simplistic though it was, could be read an unshakable certainty that was lacking in the dilettantes of the liberation struggles.

On the plane to Moscow he was thinking about the title of “professional revolutionary” that his father laid claim to, as did Ernesto – and that Lenin bore. Then he came to grasp the difference between amateurism and professionalism in revolution. The professional never asks himself the question, What’s the point? only by what means? since he has no life apart from the dream whose realization he is irresistibly and patiently engaged in.

Seventeen years later, at the end of the 1980s, we met in Florida at Fort Lauderdale. It occurred to us that those Cubans who were bailing out from their island in distress might well be landing not very far from these shores. Still more obvious than Cuba’s pitching and tossing, however, was the impending shipwreck of that great ocean liner, the USSR. I had never questioned Elias so frankly about the blindness of those who, like him, sacrificed their lives to a cause. Tve often heard intellectuals declaring that thanks to such and such an event the scales had fallen from their eyes,” he replied. “That they had seen nothing blameworthy in a régime until all at once what had seemed magnificent the day before became contemptible. Yes, the USSR, Mao, and now Castro. Almost twenty years ago I knew a woman, a French journalist working in Havana. She wrote a book to explain how she had suddenly realized that the Cuban revolution was nothing but an appalling dictatorship. Well, you know, I never thought our struggle was perfect or that the people engaged in it were saints. But IVe always believed in the need for a different world. And I still believe in it.”

This answer must then have struck him as too solemn and abstract, too bound up with the ideas of his youth. He inclined his head slightly: “You see that fellow over there, yes, the one in shorts. With a spotted shirt. The steak he s eating weighs at least a pound. His country America, defends this man’s right to eat that amount of meat with all its might. And especially his right not to give a good goddamn that on the opposite shore of the Atlantic children with amputated arms are chewing on bark to assuage their hunger before they die. And yet the two shores are one and the same world. You just need to take the long view, to stand up on tiptoe, like this, to see it.”

He did just this, stood up in the middle of the restaurant terrace where we were sitting.

This is one of the clearest images I shall retain of him: a man upright, straight as a blade, towering above the crowd of diners.

2

WHAT WAS HARDEST, AS ALWAYS, was steeling oneself to kill the children. The offspring of a tyrant, of course, the future élite of an oppressive regime. But once the door to their bedroom was smashed in, Elias turned away in spite of himself to avoid the gaze of the little boy trying to hide behind the curtain, the little girl clutching a big doll in a foam of lace…

The airport had been taken an hour earlier, just after the crushing of the state guard and the occupation of the armory. Commandos held the railroad station, the principal roads, the main banks. The assault was delayed by unexpected resistance around the radio station. But the presidential palace was already reverberating with gunfire. The orders were clear: to liquidate the head of state as well as all the members of his family, without exception. Left alive, one of the sons could have become the rallying point for counterrevolution.

Leading his unit, Elias reached the first floor, passed through the continuous fire of the bodyguard, assisted the engineer to blow in the door to the private apartments. The assault troops machine-gunned every nook and cranny, covering one another on the staircases and at the corners of corridors, threw grenades. And then came that children’s bedroom, the impulse to shoot without killing, keeping one’s eyes shut, or even to be killed before being able to kill… They informed him that the secret police defending the radio station had been dislodged. He had to leap into a jeep, force a way through the bursts of fire, and, once quickly installed in front of a microphone, read out the “Declaration by the Provisional Popular Government” he had drafted the day before: “Comrades! The heroic struggle of the Army of National Liberation has put an end to the bloody and corrupt dictatorship of Marshal X. Power is in the hands of the people, represented by the patriotic forces of the ANL and the Socialist Party of Progress…”

Highly professional work, from the first shots fired in the morning right through to this broadcast, in a studio still smelling of the acrid reek of gunpowder and the sweat of breathless men. Elias read in grave tones, his eyes sometimes straying from the typewritten lines; he knew the text by heart. At one moment, looking up, he noticed a large jar half filled with a cloudy liquid at the other end of the desk. He suppressed a smile: here in the heart of a third world country, right in the middle of a revolution, these marinated tomatoes with their label in Russian…

Each time, in this final phase of seizing power, this jar would make its appearance; someone had left it behind in the building where the Soviet instructors taught the art of overthrowing dictatorships. And each time, moved at having addressed the population of a whole country, Elias would forget to throw away these tomatoes, steeped in their murky marinade.

He had already taken part in a dozen revolutionary training exercises in that military camp close to Moscow. The scenario would vary: the enemy forces would become better armed and differently deployed, the pitfalls would multiply, the “population” (played by soldiers in civilian clothes) was sometimes cooperative, sometimes hostile. The city itself, an artificial city, a replica of a typical urban layout, with its railroad station, the residence of the head of state, the airport and the rest of the key locations, yes, even these prefabricated blocks, would be rearranged before the next revolution. This made the insurgents’ action more complicated: the station was transformed into a barracks, the secret police headquarters became the American embassy, the approaches to the airport were now protected by minefields… Inside the presidential palace the allocation of rooms was not constant either. The tyrants office could be recognized thanks to a large framed reproduction of The Battle of Borodino. And on the threshold of the children’s room they put that great plastic doll wrapped in grubby tulle, with one arm missing.

In each exercise everything would change. Except for that jar of tomatoes in the studio at the national radio station. And also that unease when it came to firing at the phantom children. One day Elias caught himself imagining faces he had seen in Dondo, in Kivu, in Cuba…

A revolution, the instructors used to say, is not just a matter of explosives. It takes long and meticulous preparation. Initially the “popular masses” must be worked on in depth, creating both networks of fighting men and looser ones of fellow travelers and sympathizers, essential to the success of the uprising. The overthrow of a dictatorship cannot be embarked on without first infiltrating the army and the police, winning the approval, or at least the neutrality, of the intellectuals and the media, and sounding out the diplomatic terrain. But ultimately it is a question of having a nose for it: a people ready to support you, a regime ripe for collapse, these things can be smelled. But it still reeks of explosives, thought Elias, sensing the deeply held conviction of his masters in revolution.

And when your nose failed you, the specialists were there to guide you. These instructors had taken part in the overthrow of plenty of regimes; their experience was undeniable. Professional revolutionaries, Elias reminded himself. On one occasion, they would recount, the kin of the former dictator had been spared; the result: civil war broke out again for another two years. In a coup detat in Central America a banker who should have been subjected to “specific means of pressure” (in plain language, torture or watching the simulated killing of his family) had simply been imprisoned and, after a successful escape, had set about financing a counterrevolution, thanks to his foreign bank accounts (which he would certainly have surrendered under torture). In Southeast Asia, negligence over the execution of a British journalist: instead of using a submachine gun taken from the enemy, the soldiers had given themselves away by using their own service weapons…

At the end of all these sessions on insurrection techniques, so ingenious and ruthless were the tricks designed to outwit ones fellow human beings that Elias found himself asking, What s the point? In the mouths of the instructors these tactics for fighting and subversion became art for arts sake, glorious goals in their own right, which eclipsed the goal of the revolution itself. They would spend their whole lives, Elias told himself, perfecting their methods, like chess players hypnotized by the marquetry of their own chessboards. What’s the point?… He hurriedly silenced this question, unworthy of a professional.

His study of Marx, which he returned to at Patrice Lumumba University, helped him to forget this dilettante questioning for a time. Despite the dogmatic solemnity with which the doctrine was taught, for him it still held the savor of that first intellectual revelation, his gropings under the direction of Carvalho, the vet in Dondo. He absorbed and expounded for the examiners the dialectical thickets of Das Kapital, but what remained in his memory was the somewhat crude clarity of Carvalho s observations: “The world is governed by human beings’ desire to dominate their fellows. Man’s exploitation of man. Marx was right! Look at the Portuguese and the colonized peoples. And the rich Portuguese and the poor Portuguese… No truce can ever be possible.” And he would go on to talk about the class struggle.

And this struggle, Elias now recalled, meant the impaled heads of Angolans displayed alongside the fields, like scarecrows. “For a capitalist,” Carvalho explained, “everything becomes a commodity, everything!” In Das Kapital Elias discovered the secret of this world up for sale. But one step ahead of his comprehension, his memory turned a spotlight on a room painted yellow, where an ugly little soldier, entangled in his lowered pants, hopped up and down in front of a naked, unbearably beautiful black woman. “Commodity – money – commodity,” was Marx’s formula. This naked body transformed into a commodity produced money that, in its turn, became a commodity again: bread brought by the woman to her child, Elias.

… Later on, during his travels in Europe, he would often hear intellectuals referring, with a little sneer of contempt, to “the Marxist Bible.” Then he would remember his studies in Moscow, aware that his fellow students could all have been accused of taking their expositions of Marx too lightly. Except that for them this much-derided Bible carried with it the crushing weight of the dead, the grief of years of battles and humiliations.

One day doubt assailed him in the most unexpected way He had just been masterminding the seizure of the airport in that mock-up of a city in which so many successful revolutions took place. The coach taking them back to Moscow broke down, and his companions in arms, both the “revolutionaries” and the “henchmen of the dictatorship,” set off toward a suburban railroad station. He decided to return on foot, intoxicated by the softness of the snow silvering the empty fields and low roofs of a few mournful houses – the first snow since his arrival in Moscow. The first snow of his life. He had imagined a stinging, numbing cold. Now, feeling these large, almost lukewarm snowflakes brushing against his face, he broke into a joyful smile.

On what was still partly a country road he noticed a very old woman walking so slowly that it looked as if every step she took was set down with great care upon the delicate white embroidery. In a string shopping bag she carried several packets parceled up in coarse gray paper and a loaf wrapped in newspaper. As she made her way around a puddle of water, she steadied herself on the branch of an apple tree that leaned out over the road. Elias suddenly had a profound perception of the moment linking that aged hand with the gnarled bark. The woman stopped, raised her face toward the whirling snow. He believed she was smiling faintly.

He often thought of that woman again. In a world where the poor, fated to be unhappy, were engaged in their class struggle against the rich, who were inevitably brimming over with happiness, it was difficult to find a place for this elderly passerby on the day of the first snow. Was she poor? Certainly. Markedly more deprived, indeed, than the “popular masses” in capitalist societies battling against the bourgeoisie. But was she unhappy? Elias already knew enough about life in Russia to know the extent to which these unremarked lives could be mysteriously replete with meaning. Besides, would she have been happier if her bag had been bulging with food? If, instead of having passed through wars, purges, famines, she had led a calm and fortunate existence somewhere in the West?

These questions seemed to him childish and even foolish, and yet they disturbed the rigor of the theories he was learning at the university. An old woman, walking slowly on the day of the first snow, leans on a branch, looks up toward the flurry of snowflakes… Impossible to find a place for this human being in the propaganda trio one saw everywhere on the facades of buildings in Moscow: a worker with muscular arms, a kolkhoznik laden with sheaves of wheat, a bespectacled intellectual with his scientific instruments. These three classes symbolized the present and the future of the country. The old woman was not of their time. Like so many others in this country thought Elias. A whole stratum of life was excluded from the philosophers’ fine systems.

From that day onward he traveled a lot on foot, in the hope of discovering behind the facades a world peopled by these unclassifiable human beings who challenged Marx.

One of these strolls on the outskirts of Moscow nearly cost him dearly. He was walking that evening through the heart of an outer suburb where dreary prefabricated dwellings stood cheek by jowl with old wooden houses and structures from the postwar years, those long, single-story erections where in Stalin’s day they deposited the workmen recruited for the reconstruction of Moscow. Occasionally a dark brick wall would rear up, concealing the blackened buildings of a factory. Whether alone or in groups, people walked quickly and in silence, as if to get away from the area.

Elias was familiar with the different reactions his face provoked. Often a discreet but hostile curiosity, a quick, astonished glance: What’s that negro doing here? Some people, especially the young, had no hesitation in saying it. Occasionally, on the other hand, a broad smile that ought to signify tolerance and hospitality, the ploy he feared the most. Rarely simple indifference, which he preferred. But that evening the snow was falling copiously and under the cover of this moving curtain his progress attracted very little attention. His pace was matched by an apparently very simple train of thought: What I can see Is the outcome, admittedly only provisional, of three revolutions, several wars, and the work of two hundred million men and women who for over half a century have been building a new world, in accordance with a grand plan, the dream of humanity…

He did not notice at what moment the lane he was following began to run alongside a snow-covered railroad track, then dipped beneath the crumbling roof of a kind of train depot. He stopped, attempted to retrace his footsteps, and realized that it was already too late to escape.

“Shit! I guess they forgot to shut the cages at the zoo. Look, there’s a monkey! Any minute now well see a giraffe!” Elias met the eye of the man who had just spoken. Then all the men, seated in a semicircle, howled with laughter. They were sitting around a metal stove, whose open top belched out flames and acrid, purplish smoke. One of them withdrew a slender iron spike from the fire and plunged it into a bucket. The hissing of the steam mingled with the last of the guffaws.

“So where did you spring from, sunshine? You climb down out of your tree. You learn to walk. And, fuck me, on your first time out you come round to our place. Well, thanks a lot, you stupid fucker. You Ve made our day…” The men laughed again; the one who had put the spike in the water did an imitation of a monkey jumping out of a tree, starting to hobble along on three legs and scratching the back of his neck with his fourth. Elias tried to back away but, looking round, he saw one of them behind him holding a strip of heated metal, clasped between leather mittens, with a glowing tip that appeared transparent. No threatening gestures, just scorn, almost casual.

This was not one of those little gangs of youths Elias had so far contrived to avoid. These were older men, he noted, caught off guard themselves by his appearance and seeking to divert attention from whatever they were up to through mockery. “You can get the hell out of here now, Mr. Ape. And well have your shapka. You won’t need it in Africa. Go on. Fuck off! Move it! The zoo shuts in an hour…” A hand reached out toward his head. Elias pushed it away, and at once a rapid blow from an iron rod knocked off his shapka. There was a perceptible smell of burning. He spun round and saw a wisp of smoke rising from the bottom of his coat.

“Go on, piss off! Don’t you understand human language? Or do you want to be incinerated?” A white-hot spike began waving around in front of his face.

“I need my shapka… It’s snowing… And as for language, you’re talking like those bastard slave drivers who…”

Several men got up. “Okay, so you don’t want to get out of here on two legs like everyone else. Fair enough. You can go home on all fours like an ape…”

He was able to parry the first blows but suddenly felt a sharp burning on the back of his neck, could not repress a cry of pain, was thrown to the ground, dragged outside. A heavy boot kicked him in the head; his vision clouded over. He came to very quickly tried to pick himself up, but was thrust back into a snowdrift. His cheek was pressing against the snow, and this cold seemed salutary to him. With one hand he picked up a handful of ice, clamped it against his burning neck.

A kind of indifference overcame him. The physical pain was nothing beside the abyss that had just opened up within him. After three revolutions, several wars, over half a century of striving… The dream of humanity…, a faint echo reverberated in his head.

Even the words now ringing out above his body in the darkness seemed of no interest to him at first. And if they finally intrigued him, it was because he could hardly understand a thing. And yet it was Russian. Not the foul-mouthed Russian often spoken in the streets of Moscow, whose smutty coarseness was familiar to him. No, a language whose rhythms he could make out very well, but whose words were quite unknown. Then he turned his head, trying to see whoever it was uttering these brief delphic sentences.

To the left of his face he saw a woman’s shoes, of a heavy and ugly design, their leather all worn. Then coarse cotton stockings and the side of a dark coat made of rough woollen cloth. He pictured an elderly woman; the voice matched these clothes and that age, a dull, rather harsh voice. The old woman I saw on the day of the first snow, he suddenly thought, and strangely, this harebrained notion reassured him.

He heard the crunch of the snow beneath retreating footfalls, then felt a hand touching his head, his cheek. “You can get up now. They Ve gone…”

He sat up and then, gritting his teeth to suppress a groan, rose to his feet. And remained on the spot for a long while, teetering slightly, not collapsing, thanks to the gaze that rested on him and sustained him. At that moment neither the woman’s beauty nor her youth struck him. No word of gratitude formed in his head. There was this silence, the swirling of snow, and a face that seemed to have been traced in the darkness by the incessant fluttering of the crystalline flakes.

He would later come to grasp that this was a beauty of an unusually high order. Others would speak of it to him, sometimes enviously, sometimes with regret: a gift from heaven too rich for a young woman from the provinces. And he would feel incapable of explaining that for him what was beautiful, too, was the touching ugliness of the battered shoes she wore that evening, and the muted music of their footfalls on a snow-covered road, and the resinous smell of the railroad in the icy air…

Throughout his life he would have the impression that he could recall every minute ever spent with her, every twist and turn of the streets they followed together, every fleeting cloud shape above their heads. And yet in the moments closest to death, and therefore the most real, this would be the instant that came back to him, with the patient sorrow of his love: the sharp fragrance of snow, the stillness of a particular dusk, and those eyes that had kept him upright.

“I THOUGHT I’D FORGOTTEN IT, THAT LANGUAGE. And then when I heard those idiots the words came back to me. In an instant. That’s all there was in our village: prisoners who’d been in the camps. They all dreamed of going off to a big city but they could never manage to get away. Those frozen lands held them captive. The truth is, they were scared of not being able to get back into normal life. For a start there was this lingo they spoke in the camps… So they stayed. Even one of my family…” Her voice broke off; she murmured with a clumsy change of intonation, “I’m called Anna…”

Elias introduced himself. This only added to the feeling of unreality. They were walking along beneath great cascades of falling snow, as if in the middle of a flapping sail. He had tied the scarf the young woman had lent him over his head. He let himself be guided, in the insane hope that in the end all that had happened would be miraculously made good. Those men for whom he was nothing but a monkey his shapka thrown in the fire, their hatred. In a country that promised a world without hatred…

“And these prisoners were common criminals, were they?” he asked. His voice betrayed his eager hope of a way out.

“No. The common criminals managed pretty well at making a fresh start. At least a thief knows why he s been put in prison. These were politicals. Absurd cases. A kolkhoznik had dumped some manure on his vegetable patch. It was just his luck that it was Stalins birthday, and they’d hung up his portrait on the house across the road. The fellow got twenty years. After serving his sentence he was still baffled by how a whole life can be buried under a pile of dung. Well, in fact, it was me that couldn’t understand how he could go on living. Because he did live. He went hunting now and then in the taiga. Even made a collection of dried plants… Or there was that student who, when he was taking notes, wrote down ‘SOSialism.’ For a joke. Someone denounced him. When he came back from the camp he was an old man…” She must have sensed a stifled cry in him and guessed that the pain did not come from the blows he had received. “I don’t know why I started telling you all that. Whatever you do, don’t repeat it to anyone! Oh yes. I was talking about the language of the camps…”

She’s afraid, thought Elias. This young woman, who had the courage to intervene just now, is afraid.

“So what did you say to those guys at the depot?” he asked her, assuming a relaxed tone. Anna’s voice responded casually echoing his own: “It was the fact that I was talking the convicts’ lingo that surprised them. Not the sense of what I was saying. You see, what mattered most of all to them was to put you down. Human society’s very similar to the animal world in this respect. I’ve studied it on my ethology course. Except that animals don’t use words to injure one of their own species… Here we are. We’ve arrived. Your hostel’s over there. Now I’m going to take the metro…”

She vanished into the white tempest. Elias took several steps, then ran to return her scarf to her and at the entrance to the metro stopped, stamping his feet amid the piles of snow. He felt himself becoming again what he was for that crowd of Muscovites: a tall black man, vaguely comic, his curly hair white with snowflakes.

He spent several days looking for her at Moscow University, wandering the corridors, waiting as they came out from lectures. This young woman’s own life, he understood, cast doubt upon that future world he had dreamed of. And yet it was she who gave this dream its simple, human, and tragic truth.

It’s not the fact that she’s beautiful… He often began in this way without finishing his thought when, after he’d found Anna again, he picked her out amid the rowdy throng of the students. Hiding behind a pillar in the main hall of the faculty he saw young women just as pretty and much better dressed than her. It was the start of the 1970s, the first post-Stalin generation was coming up to the age of twenty… He watched them passing, attracted glances, sometimes amused, sometimes scornful (the whole range of these expressions was familiar to him). And suddenly this long, shapeless black coat, these old shoes, their heaviness jarring with the slenderness of the ankles. The face looked severe, almost hostile. The eyes, slanting toward the temples, resembled those of a she-wolf.

No, it’s not her beauty…, thought Elias and hastened to go outside, to make his way toward an empty pathway, knowing that very soon he would hear footfalls behind him and would recognize them. A hand would slip round his arm and they would plunge into the maze of little streets over which a winter dusk was falling.

So many things about her should have displeased him! Her clothes, more suited to the peasant women laden with bundles who jostled one another in the railroad stations of Moscow. Her harsh voice, devoid of seductive musicality. The toughness that sometimes showed through the vulnerability of her youth.

With other women he had always known where he was going, what he expected of them, and what they hoped for from him. With her… Anna clasped his arm and they began walking at random, or not entirely so, for she was showing him a Moscow he would never have discovered on any map. They spoke little, without any logic, looking at one another through the rippling of the snow, in silence, as if after years of separation.

Was he right to hide, to wait for her outside in these empty, snow-filled pathways? Like a meeting between secret agents, he thought with a smile. She seemed to be grateful for his discretion. He was not unaware of what it signified in this country, the fact of “going out with a black man.” Sometimes, on the other hand, she showed herself indifferent to what people might think of them as a couple. As on that evening when she stopped in a courtyard beyond the reach of the city s hubbub. They could hear the rustle of the snow against the windows and the slow, grave notes of a piano. On the second floor of an apartment block the interior of a vast room, dimly lit, pictures on the walls and the silhouette of the person playing. People were coming into the courtyard, crossing it, going up to their homes. A few of them turned back to satisfy themselves that this young woman and this African, motionless beneath the falling snow, were not a mirage. Elias felt Annas fingers squeezing his hand. The life that could be guessed at behind the second-floor windows suddenly seemed to him very close to what the two of them could have lived together…

One day, when they were sitting in a tea shop, he asked her, with a little nod toward the other customers: “What do they think when they see us together?”

“If I tell you the truth, you’ll be upset…”

“Go ahead. I’m beginning to be immune.”

“Two schools of thought. The first think I’m simply a slut. The second think I’m a slut who wants to go abroad at any price. There… No, I almost forgot. There must be one charitable soul among them who thinks that in four generations a union such as ours might produce a new Pushkin…”

“You know, one of our instructors puts it with a bit more humor. A countrywoman comes to Moscow. For the first time in her life she sees a black man. ‘Oh, look, a monkey in the street!’ The black man remarks politely: ‘No, citizen. I’m an African.’ The countrywoman: ‘Ooh! And, what’s more, it’s a talking monkey’… After all, the Portuguese didn’t think any differently when they cut our heads off in ‘sixty-one.”

“Let’s leave! The way they’re looking at us makes me feel as if I had glue on my skin. I feel dirty.”

“But why?”

“Because I used to think more or less the same as them!”

Humor often helped them. That glance, at once alarmed and confused, from a lady who found herself next to Elias one evening at the theater. The lights went down and he whispered in Anna’s ear: ‘Tm going to tell her IVe just been playing Othello and didn’t have time to remove my makeup…” The actors were dressed as soldiers in the civil war. and the stale dialogue matched the dust on their costumes. One of them declaimed ecstatically rolling his eyes upward: “The fire of our revolution will give birth to the new man!” At the interval Anna suggested they leave.

The first snowy breeze restored them to the life they loved. They let themselves wander through the labyrinth of little alleys that had survived the follies of reconstruction, walked down to the frozen ponds in a park, hearkened to the wind lashing the turrets of a mined monastery. The world reminded them of the play they had just fled: a pompous and loquacious farce forever shuffling its masks and its ham actors. Not to mention a certain lady in the eleventh row, contemplating the empty seat on her right with relief… They no longer needed that world.

What he felt was so simple he did not even try to put it Into words. It was enough for him to be walking with her beneath the snow, to feel the warmth of her hand, then the absence of this hand, the icy scent of the air, and on the frozen window of a late and almost empty bus, to see the dark circle left by Anna’s breath: she would peer through it from time to time, so as not to miss their stop, and that delicate trace of her breath would quickly become covered again with crystals of hoarfrost. When they got off. it seemed to him as if that rickety bus was carrying away with it a very important fragment of their lives.

He now had a breathless attachment to things that had previously seemed insignificant, invisible. One day, as he waited outside the university cloakrooms, he noticed a black garment in the row of coats and immediately recognized its shape and tired fabric. This gloomy place, bristling with coat hooks, was suddenly filled with an intense and vibrant life for him, much more real than everything happening elsewhere in that great building groaning with marble. He went up to it and saw that the last snowflakes were melting on the black coat’s worn collar. So Anna had only just arrived for her lectures, and the waiting period he must now endure seemed to him very different from the hours and minutes that passed for the others.

He had never lived through such moments in the company of a woman and indeed had never imagined himself capable of living and seeing with this grievous felicity, this hallucinatory sharpness. It was so new for him that one day he felt tempted to make fun of the extreme sensitivity he now felt within himself. “The new man!” he declared, mimicking the costumed revolutionary in the play he had seen with Anna. He smiled, but the description did not seem incorrect: an unknown being was coming to life within him. And when he thought about this new presence, an alloy of tenderness, confidence, peace, and the terrible dread of losing what he loved, a memory came back to him whole: the threshold of a hut at nightfall and the child burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.

He now believed he had found the one to whom he could speak of that child, whose existence he had so far never admitted to anyone.

FOR THE MOMENT THE LECTURE HALL WAS EMPTY. Elias walked right up to the back row, where not even the recalcitrant students bothered to climb. He lay down across the seats and followed the slow awakening of the room as an invisible witness: the first voices, still resonant and distinct, the thumping of bags on the desktops, the rolling of a pen, an oath, then the crescendo of the uproar, laughter and, closer to his row, a tune being whistled, as if apart from the general cacophony. But above all that taut nerve within him, the timid hope of being able to make out Anna’s voice amid all this talk. Finally the rapid diminuendo of the noise, the lecturers abrupt, leonine cough, the practiced rhythm of his percussive delivery.

Lying there, Elias could see the silent, tumultuous precipitation of the white flurries outside the high bay windows. He told himself that from time to time, as she looked up from her notes, Anna might also be noticing this snowy tempest.

“… Creatively and with genius, Lenin thus develops the Marxist theory of socialism. Employing arguments that are historically and logically incontrovertible, he demonstrates that the construction of a socialist society is possible within one country, even if it is surrounded by hostile capitalist neighbors…” Elias listened to the less tedious fragments, including this one, which, without the censorship he usually imposed on himself, provoked the thought: “How true all this is. And how pointless…” Yes, incongruous in the universe where outside the window dusk was slowly falling on a snowy day.

He knew that after these lectures Anna would stay behind in the lecture hall for a few minutes to chat with a tall red-haired girl, her friend, who had transformed her first name into the somewhat improbable “Gina.” On this occasion it seemed to be a conversation embarked on long before, for Anna was merely responding distractedly to Gina s unpleasant and vehement remarks.

“No, you do what you like,” Gina was saying. “Look. When it comes to negroes, I know the score. Hes nice enough today, your Congolese… right, Angolan, I mean. But don’t forget. A black man’s a rutting orangutan. And once he’s screwed you it’s bye-bye babyl And you’ll be left with a little half-monkey on your hands. And taking pills for who knows how many tropical diseases…”

“Listen, Gina, we haven’t got to that stage at all, him and me. And he’s never

“Okay, he hasn’t got into your pants yet, this saint. He’s just biding his time, that’s all. So it’s up to you to choose your day Yes, your day He’s polygamous like they all are down there. And it’ll be your turn to get laid on, let’s say, Wednesdays. After all the rest of the tribe…”

On his way there Elias had been planning to appear in front of them, leaping out from the row where he had hidden, to take them by surprise. He was hoping to get himself accepted by the redheaded Gina. He was even preparing to do his number, emitting the cry of a rutting orangutan, when the true sense of this teasing suddenly became clear to him. All these taunts about the erotic excesses of black men were nothing more than folklore, to which he had long since become accustomed. The true question had the unvarnished and woeful banality of real life: after her studies Anna ran the risk of ending up in some remote corner of her native Siberia, so she must invent a means of remaining in the paradise of Moscow. Marry an African? Gina had considered this and arrived at her verdict: you’d be better off going and teaching Hegelian dialectics to the wolves in the taiga…

At a certain moment the argument began to go around in circles. Elias remained lying there, and with his head tilted slightly backward, he saw the swirling of long plumes of snow around a lamppost. A simple and intense happiness was conjured up by this hypnotic movement. Their wanderings through Moscow beneath surges of white… The little circle of melted hoarfrost made by Anna’s breath on the window of a bus… He closed his eyes, tried not to hear the two voices down at the bottom of the lecture hall, discussing the pros and cons of his blackness.

Anna said very little, in fact. Elias thought he could make out the rather slow intonation that he often noticed when she was speaking. “Look, Gina, of course he s black and all that. But he understands me like nobody else…” There was an exaggeratedly scornful laugh from Gina, the click of a lighter, and this observation: “You’re really stupid, my little Anna. Though… come to think of it maybe you’re made for each another. He’s just climbed down from his baobab tree and you’ve just emerged from your bear’s den.” As if she had not heard, Anna continued in the same dreamy tone: “And then, don’t laugh, but he’s a bit like a knight in shining armor! Yes. You know, I read that poem a thousand times in my teens. You remember. A lady drops her glove into an arena full of lions and tigers. The beasts roar, but this knight goes to retrieve the glove and returns it to the lady… Yes, I know, I know… A childishly romantic German poem… But you see, with him I feel I’m never telling lies. While with Vadim everything becomes false. Even the way I walk. With Vadim even the snow smells like ice from the fridge…”

Elias saw this young man with Anna the following evening. Thanks to the conversation in the lecture hall he knew that Vadim was a Muscovite, the son of a senior government official. “If I were you,” Gina had yelled, Td stick to him like glue. In two years’ time hell have a diplomatic post abroad.” Elias had pictured him as tall, arrogant, athletic, a worthy representative of the capital’s gilded youth. He detested him before having seen him.

Vadim came into the entrance hall of the library and for a few seconds was blinded. He took off his misted-over spectacles, began wiping them, and, with his myopic eyes tightly screwed up, peered into the surrounding haze. He was tall, with a slight stoop and a handsome face spoiled by the childish softness of his lips. In taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his glasses he had dropped a small piece of card, no doubt his library ticket. He leaned forward, looking around him still with this tentative, myopic air. Elias, who was watching the scene reflected in a mirror at the end of the entrance hall, had an impulse to go and help him.

Anna arrived at that moment, picked up the card, walked with Vadim to the exit. They paused a few yards away from Elias, who caught the young man’s half wistful, half vexed words: “No. You know, Mama’s told me I’ve got to be careful about my bronchitis. Especially because out there, in midwinter…” They went out, and Elias noticed that Anna’s gait was indeed no longer the same: the measured steps you take alongside an old man.

Two days later he learned that during the vacation she would be going to her village in eastern Siberia. “Perhaps I could…” It did not feel as if he were asking her, it was the echo of a dream finding expression almost without his knowing it. “It takes seven days, and it can easily reach fifty below over there,” she replied, as if trying to dissuade him.

In the course of the umpteenth assault on the “presidential palace,” Elias stumbled, fell, and sprained his foot. Having succeeded in making the doctor believe this, he gained an extra week of leave.

They set off just as the weather had turned warmer. Moscow smelled of damp turf. During the second night, in a station close to the Urals, Elias climbed down onto the footboard of the coach and found he could not breathe. The frozen air had the cutting hardness of a crystal.

3

EXTREME COLD DARKENS THE SKIN more than sunburn. Elias learned this from observing the Siberian who got onto the train at Krasnoyarsk. A face burned by chilblains, hands rutted with swarthy cracks. “That’s right. It’s the true color of gold,” the man joked, in response to Anna’s quick glance. He was sharing a compartment with them. Out of his bag a meal appeared: an earthenware pot containing salted mushrooms (“We’ll give them time to breathe, the brine’s completely frozen”), smoked elk meat, a couple of pints of dark vodka infused with bilberries. He offered it, too, to an elderly woman who spent every day on her couchette opening and closing a little casket. He talked about his occupation, about extracting nuggets from the permafrost, about how his sleep was plagued by swarms of mosquitoes and the growling of bears. After the third glass he thumped Elias on the shoulder and proclaimed with warm, fraternal emotion, “Last January when it was sixty below and windy as well, I turned blacker than you in the -” He was about to say “face” but stopped himself and uttered a word that was incongruous, because too old-fashioned and poetic in the context, life, more appropriate for the countenance of an icon.

Everyone laughed, and Elias perceived the distance they had traveled since Moscow. His color no longer made a monkey of him, nor a propaganda symbol, nor a totem that required bowing and scraping from humanists. It was visible, of course, but just like the marks of frost on a face. All the man in his clumsy way wanted to say to him was: “The fact that you re black is nothing. Worse things happen.” He talked about one of his comrades who had had an arm torn off by an excavator. The woman told them that what she was carrying in her casket was her husbands ashes, as well as the fragment of a shell that had remained in the old soldiers leg for thirty years…

They were drawing close to the limits of the empire, a place where brutalized lives run aground, human beings considered undesirable in the big cities. This end of the world blended together a multiplicity of ethnic groups and customs, a variegated universe that embraced this African as one more nuance in the chaotic mosaic of humanity. Elias would become aware of this later. For the moment he was trying to befriend a Buryat child, who was out in the corridor staring at him from the narrow slits of his eyes. Who am I for this child? Elias wondered. Maybe simply the closest to what I am…

At the start of the journey Anna seemed tense, vigilant over every word spoken. Traveling in the company of a black man, that’s a bold exploit! he thought, with a smile. The “rutting orangutan” came to mind, and he guessed that she dreaded an even more extreme gesture, a remark that would put her on the spot. To be taken for a monster of lubricity amused him, especially since for days now the only question that had truly preoccupied him was how to explain what the scent of the snow in the folds of that gray woolen dress meant to him. And the footprints they left at a tiny remote station in the middle of the taiga. And the fragrance of the tea she brewed for him each morning. There was more truth in the headiness of these moments than in all the declarations of love in the world. But to say so would already have been a declaration.

The journey lasted so long that one evening he caught himself having forgotten its goal. Or rather the sole purpose of the endless pounding of the track was now these brief lapses into beauty, and he did not know how to talk about them to Anna.

She no longer seemed on her guard; far from it, Elias’s attitude intrigued her. She was clearly hoping for something other than this friendly and attentively protective presence…

The woman with the casket left them at Irkutsk, the gold prospector at a village beyond Baikal. They found themselves alone, their eyes fixed on the fading of the sparks given off by the sunset outside the window layered with hoarfrost. The last night of their journey was beginning. Now they needed to talk, to clarify the situation, or else, without saying anything, embrace, exchange caresses, give themselves… Or instead, laugh, tell jokes, assume the role of good pals. Mentally they were rehearsing these scenarios, but all of them seemed false. The scarlet blaze on the window turned to violet, then was extinguished. There came a moment when it seemed impossible to turn away from the window, to meet one another’s eyes and smile…

A light tapping on the door drew them out of this torpid state. The little Buryat boy was watching them fixedly, with slightly arched eyebrows, pursing his lips, in an expression that seemed to respond to the intensity of what he sensed in them. They exchanged glances and began to laugh softly. Yes, how could he make this young woman understand that the simple freshness of the snow, as it lingered on her dress, was already abundant happiness, a true love story that had unfolded ever since their wanderings through Moscow beneath storms of white? How could she tell this man that he had become important to her, strangely, despite all she thought about men, white or black, and all she believed about herself, tell him that his presence there was obvious and natural, as if he had been at her side long long ago beneath this Russian sky, as if he had always been there, and always would be? She thought he was like that aircraft from the last war set in a block of concrete in the city where she went to high school. It was the district where the city s worthies lived, and there this 11-2 ground attack aircraft, nicknamed “Black Death” by the Germans, proudly reared its dark, elongated silhouette amid pretentious, humdrum lives. Anna suppressed a smile: this far-fetched comparison was perfectly apt but completely unmentionable, as apt things so often are.

The Buryat woman came and fetched her child. They were left in the blue dusk that filled the compartment.

“… In the end this is the one mystery that stays with me from my childhood. Even though my mother was crushed by poverty and the contempt of those who bought her body she was able to give me absolute happiness, peace without any taint of anxiety. I’ve always believed that this capacity for love, which is in fact so simple, is a supreme gift. Yes, a divine power…”

During the last night of the journey he talked about that child on the threshold of a hut in Dondo burying his face in the crook of his mothers arm.

The following evening the declaration they had been waiting for finally arrived and was made wordlessly. Quite simply, they came close to death on the ice of a river that served as a road in winter. A truck driver had left them at this intersection of forest roads. He had sworn his comrade would be along at any minute. It was still daylight. An hour later darkness enveloped the little shelter with three walls where they had taken refuge. They spent that hour jumping up and down, pummeling one another, rubbing one another’s cheeks and noses. The air was clear, no breath of wind. The cold molded itself to their bodies as if they were encased in molten glass. And once they moved, this carapace exploded and they felt as if they were swallowing crushed splinters.

They made a fire, but in order to fetch wood they had to climb a steep bank, plunge waist deep into the snow, battle with branches, using hands that no longer obeyed them. This expedition took a good twenty minutes; the fire had time to die down, and their muscles to go numb, anaesthetized by the cold. At one moment, halfway between the shelter and the forest, Elias wanted to lie down, to sink back into the drowsiness that made him light-headed, unfeeling. He shook himself, snatched up a fistful of snow, rubbed his face furiously, then clambered up and, with gritted teeth, began breaking branches. And all at once stood upright, listened… As he came hurtling down the slope he lost half of the firewood. “I heard… I heard… he said in a whisper, as if his voice might alarm the faintly detected sound. They listened, turning their heads right and left. All that was perceptible was tiny crackling noises from the fire that had almost gone out. The mist from their breath rose upward, drawn aloft by the black gulf of the sky. The stars seemed to be closing in on them, surrounding them… Elias felt the pressure of a hand on his wrist and could no longer make out whether he was giving or receiving the warmth that remained to them. Anna pressed herself against him, and there amid the starry space they formed a frail islet of life.

The driver who picked them up would seemingly have remained just as impassive had he come upon their frozen corpses inside the shelter. Elias studied the hands resting on the wheel: fresh scratches, the blood scarcely dried, and showing through beneath it, a faint tattoo: 46-55 and the name of one of the camps at Kolyma.

The man spoke, offering no excuses but simply to establish what Ellas already knew: “Worse things happen.” Worse was the frosts that followed a brief thaw. The ice on the rivers he drove along became covered in water, and this froze in its turn. One river on top of another, as it were. The wheels sank into it and in a matter of moments were caught, welded in. That was what had happened to him a little earlier. Sometimes trucks were discovered under six feet of snow… Between the two numerals on his tattoo the computation was simple: 1946-1955, nine years of forced labor somewhere beneath this icy sky After that, thought Elias, nothing else can really touch him…

“You should have come to Sarma in the spring,” lamented the driver suddenly. “There’s a copse over there, half a dozen miles or so, full of birds. How they sing, the little bastards! Nightingales. You wouldn’t believe it. Over there. Near where the camp was…”A minute later he began making little clacking noises with his tongue, followed by a whistling and clicking sound. Elias thought he was imitating the trilling of a nightingale. The driver growled: “What a stupid bitch, that dentist! I told her to take it out. She s filled it, that bloody back tooth. And now I don’t need a thermometer any more. As soon as it gets to forty below it has me howling like a wolf.”

As he dropped them at Sarma just after midnight, he whispered to Elias with a wink: “You look a lot like Pelé. I saw him playing a couple of years ago, on television… Off you go. Stoke the stove well!” For a moment they watched the swaying of the long trailer laden with tree trunks. The sensation of parting from a man in the midst of this white infinity had a grievous intensity about it. Nine years in the camp, nightingales, a badly filled molar, Pelé… Elias felt he had made contact, in a brief space of time, with the subterranean and tangled truth of a human being.

This intimacy with the truth, at once poignant and radiant, struck him more than everything else at Sarma. From the very first look Annas mother gave him. She opened the door to them, put her arms around them, without wasted words, incuriously A calm, absolute certainty was transmitted to Elias: he could walk in at this door in ten years’ time, and she would be waiting for him.

“The bath’s still hot,” the mother said. “In this cold, I knew you’d be late.”

To him everything in the tiny bathhouse was amazing: the bitter scent of the smoke-caked walls, the birch twigs with which he was expected to lash himself, the steam burning his nostrils. But this exoticism was nothing beside the blue darkness perceived through the narrow window above a bench. Outside the cloudy glass the cold forbade any trace of life, while here, on the planks drenched in boiling water, was his naked body, more alive than ever.

At Sarma he saw death, survival, and life combining in a secret, constant transfusion.

He awoke dazzled by the abundance of sunlight. And the first thing he saw on this white planet was a dot moving slowly along in the middle of a valley surrounded by the taiga. A man? An animal? Elias watched the sinuous path followed by this little black speck, then made a tour of the room, looked for a long time at the photo of a young soldier. “Smolensk, April 1941,” it read at the bottom of the picture. The wooden front steps groaned loudly under someone’s footsteps. Elias hurried into the entrance hall and saw Annas mother. “She’s gone to see Georgi, the hunter, to fetch a good fur jacket for you. You won’t get far with that coat of yours. It’s forty-eight below this morning… Come and drink some tea.” The surface of the water in the two pails she set down was pearly with ice.

At table the silence that fell was not oppressive. The crackling of the fire, the drowsy ticking of a clock, and most of all, the great tranquillity, all this made words less necessary. And yet Elias felt he needed to give an account of himself, to explain his presence (my African face, he thought, vexed with himself for not finding any way to start a conversation). Then he remembered the driver who had given them a lift the night before, his tale of the nightingales… The woman listened to him then, after a moments hesitation murmured: “Yes. There used to be a lot of birds at the time when the camp was there. Yes. Nightingales more than anything… Then one day, at the end of the forties, I think, the authorities gave orders to cut down all the trees. They d noticed that in springtime, as soon as the birds began to sing, the number of escapes went up. Under Khrushchev they closed the camp. The trees have grown again. The birds have come back…”

Anna returned, bringing a long fur jacket, “There. Put that on and you can go into hibernation. It’s bear.”

Outside, in the valleys blinding whiteness, the same black speck continued its winding course. “And that? Is that a bear too?” asked Elias.

“No. It’s the student I told you about. Well, he’s over fifty now. You remember, the one who wrote ‘SOSialism’… He’s out searching for his treasures. But it’d be better for him to tell you about them himself. We’ll go and see him this evening, if you like

Elias was expecting to find a madman undermined by the harshness of exile. The “student” spoke with an irony that presumed a diagnosis along these lines and thus refuted it. “To begin with,” he recounted, “it was just a schoolboy’s bright idea. Most meteorites either land in inaccessible places, oceans, seas, lakes, or mountains, for example. Or else on rocky terrain where these intergalactic visitors remain hidden amid the stones. So this poor student (who was obliged, alas, to interrupt his studies for a time) decided to search for heavenly objects where they’re most visible: on the immaculate whiteness of our beloved Siberia. I have a hundred correspondents more or less everywhere this side of the Urals… And now take a look at my collection!”

In long cases squared off into compartments they saw smooth fragments, some as small as cherry stones, some bulkier, reminiscent of dark Stone Age flints. On a large table covered with a waxed cloth there was an accumulation of chemistry apparatus, a star atlas, a telescope on a tripod. The commentary now delivered soon became at once too technical and too rhapsodic. To follow it all one would have had to fall in love with the tiniest streak on the surface of these aerolites… The “student” realized this, characterized himself as “obsessed with stars,” and, as if seeking their pardon for his astronomical pedantry, proclaimed: I’ve even written a poem.” He took down a sheet of paper that hung above his worktable, put on his glasses, and began to read. It was the tale of a meteorite hunter who constructed a planet for himself from his finds and quit the Earth. The tone was that of the verses one wrote at the age of twenty. He stopped growing up at the moment of his arrest, thought Elias.

They were already at the door, poised to leave, when the “student” led them back into the room. “You know, I want to say this without any political inference. From time to time the human race should judge itself from the point of view of these pebbles from heaven. That might make it less confident of its greatness.”

On the way back, as they passed through the “valley of the meteorites,” they each caught themselves distractedly glancing down at every dark stain. They laughed about it. “You know, he’s never talked like that to anyone before,” said Anna. “You must have impressed him. Yes. Like an extraterrestrial he can finally confide in…”

The next day at the edge of the taiga they came upon a couple who appeared to be seeking to bury themselves under the snow. An elderly man, dressed in a simple quilted jacket, a woman with slanted eyes, probably a Yakut. “Are you digging a den?” Anna called out to them. “Yes, a den for a flower,” replied the man. “This time they won’t go and trample on it.” He went back to thrusting long poles obliquely into the snow. Grasping the principle of this strange scaffolding, Elias helped them to complete it. They all went back together. The man told them that for years he had been watching out for the flowering of the “golden fire,” a kind of wild orchid, which opens at night and dies at dawn. He had located the spot where it grew, but each time he had missed the night when it bloomed. Once winter was over, the plant was often found trampled or uprooted by animals. So he had decided to construct a shelter before the snows melted…

They spent a while in the izba where the couple lived, ate some of the smoked fish prepared by the woman. The man was very eager to offer Elias a shapka. ‘Tve got five of them. I used to hunt a bit in the old days… Choose which one you like. Not that one. That s a museum piece. I wore it at the camp. Well. I got through several over twenty years. This is the last of them. And as for the flower, the golden fire, I mean, it was a thief who told me where to find it. A gold washer, in point of fact. He used to work with his panning trough in secret. He was caught, and for this he got ten years in the camp. Then one day in spring he tried to make a run for it. They tracked him down and the guards had dogs, as big as wild boar, that tore his throat out… He often used to talk to me about the flower, so straight off, I began to imagine I might find it one night when I was free. And now, you see, I tell myself, it was that plant that helped to stop me losing my mind. Because over twenty years there was plenty to make you do that. Especially when I got to thinking about the price I’d paid for three cartloads of muck. You know the story, Anna, but what you don’t know is that in ‘fifty-six, when I came out, they’d already chucked Stalin on the scrap heap. Then this fellow says to me: ‘Come on, Ivan. Take his picture and throw it on the dunghill. That way you’ll be quits.’ Well, I didn’t do it. Because now anyone could do it. Besides, I don’t like to kick a man when he’s down. And most of all, I couldn’t care less. I’d already started looking for the golden fire… Now then. One more glass so you don’t catch cold when you go out.”

They went home, cutting through the forest. Anna’s words sounded like an echo lost among the great cedar trunks. “When he met his wife, Zoya, she was… well, a kind of stray dog. Worse than a dog, a sick, half-mad wild animal, whom everyone despised. There are mines fifty miles away from Sarma. For a time the miners shared Zoya between them. When they went to work they locked her up in a shed and when they came back they raped her. In fact it wasn’t even rape by then, more like a regular routine… Then they got rid of her. Yes, a dog rooting among rubbish. One evening Ivan was passing close by the miners’ huts and, in the darkness, he thought he saw a fox. He was about to shoot it with his gun. Zoya was wearing an old coat scorched by fire… It took her several months to get back on her feet again. And one day Ivan told me he now knew why he went on living. And it was above all for her that he wanted to see that plant flowering in the night, the golden fire…”

Before making the journey Elias had thought he would be encountering human detritus, left over from the great workshop of the future society. Scraps, waste products, inevitable in a project on as grand a scale as that of communism. Yet here, among the materials rejected by the march of history, behold, a secret, tenacious life maintained its vigil. This humble existence seemed perfectly emancipated from the capricious rhetoric of the age. No verdict of history, thought Elias, had made its mark on these two beings who, when spring came, would be searching in the forest for their wild orchid.

One morning he saw Ivan leaving his izba and, a moment later, Zoya running after him. The man must have forgotten the leather bag she was holding out to him. She was dressed only in a skirt and pullover, despite the cold having gone down to fifty below, and this run through the snow, the encounter between the two figures in the middle of a white wilderness, their swift embrace, the tenuousness of the bond created between them for a moment, then broken, all this struck Ellas as total evidence of love. A stray dog, he recalled. Human scraps… Yet now in the silvery cold of the morning, there was this woman on the threshold of her house and this man, gliding along on his snow shoes, tracing an extended blue line across the endless white expanse.

ALMOST NOTHING WAS LEFT OF THE CAMP. The shells of huts. The gap-toothed lines of a double wooden perimeter fence. It shook in the wind, and from a distance it was possible to believe that an Alsatian dog was still trotting around between the twin palisades.

They approached with uneasy caution, not knowing what could be said at such a place. Thousands of lives swallowed up by this enclosed space between the watchtowers. Thousands of pairs of eyes staring long ago at barbed wire, all downy with hoarfrost under a cloudless sky. Were cries of pity called for, or indignation, or resignation? Words lost their meaning here. From a blackened pole hung a steel bar, the gong that had once marked the rhythm of the camps activities. Its silence, perpetual now, was like an invisible but still living presence.

Elias listened to the wind, the crunching of their feet, pictured the man Anna had just been speaking about: one sunny day a prisoner clad in a worn quilted jacket leaves the camp, stops, looks back, perplexed. After twelve years of imprisonment, freedom is a threat. His body worn out by penal servitude, betrays him at every step. He finds it hard to understand the people he passes, their smiles, their concerns. “You should have remarried,” he says to his wife. He is terrified by that wait of twelve years. Terrified and sorrowfully grateful. He would like to thrust this woman away from him, thrust her toward joy, toward the youth she had lost on his account… He dies a year after the birth of their daughter. As a child, Anna will claim she remembers her fathers face. It is, of course, impossible. She has simply seen old photos…

Elias noted the moment when the cold suddenly ceased. They walked around the camp, entered a wood of black alders. He took off his scarf and no longer felt the wind’s cutting edge. The young woman facing him seemed breathtakingly close, known to him, as no one had ever been in his life before. He even thought he could recall the voice of the child she had been! As well as all those winter days she had lived through before they met. With the faith of a believer, he guessed at the sadness and beauty of what her eyes remembered. And, like an intoxication, he sensed the silence of the house where, as a small child, she would observe a beam of light from the setting sun on the picture of a soldier, then a branch covered in hoarfrost turning blue outside the window… Now, with the same intensity, he felt at one with the suddenly milder air Anna was breathing, and with the roughness of the bark lightly touched by her hand…

These were the trees the camp authorities had had cut down to put an end to the birdsong. Elias looked up: high above them the bare branches, encrusted with ice jewels, rang softly in the wind, like an echo of the warbling of long ago… His shapka slipped, fell into the snow. He picked it up but was in no hurry to put it on, he was so hot.

I’m here at last… The notion took shape, confused, yet expressing vividly what was happening to him. The serene truth of his presence here, in this place of forgotten evil, in the dazzle of a snowy plain, beside a young woman, thanks to whom everything on this day was turning out to be of the essence of things, even the simple beauty of the tips of her eyelashes silvered with hoarfrost. Life was becoming as it ought to be.

“Mother comes here once a year, at the beginning of June,” Anna said. “On the anniversary of my fathers death. She spends the night here. I came with her once. When you hear the birds you don’t really believe in death anymore and it feels as if he can hear them too… Wrap up well. Its time to go home.”

He felt at one with every tree, with every glint of the low sun on the snow. Or rather he felt at one with himself in that day, which seemed always to have been waiting for him, and into which he was finally returning. Anna’s hand, adjusting his scarf for him, emerged out of a very old memory, heady with tenderness. He grasped her fingers, pressed them to his face, closed his eyes… When they continued on their way, he unbuttoned his coat; the air seemed to him balmy, aromatic. And already in the darkness on the outskirts of Sarma, his breath became so scorching that he felt that with one puff he could have warmed up all the ancient, chilled izbas of the hamlet.

That night, amid the furnace of his fever, a moment of great limpidity burst forth. I love her…, he admitted to himself with disarmed simplicity. Anna was standing on the threshold of the room.

Next day, the eve of their departure for Moscow, Annas mother gave them the money the people of Sarma had collected so that they could return by plane.

During the nine hours that the flight lasted, breathless from his illness, Elias swung between an absolute certainty of happiness and an awareness of never being able to recapture the radiance of that other life briefly glimpsed. It would have meant returning to Sarma, to live there with Anna in perpetual, humble, slow joy, rhythmed by the ebb and flow of the seasons. His cough had him by the throat; he was breathing like a hunted animal and told himself that Anna had done everything in her power to escape those long, somnolent winters, the bleak memory of the dead. No, he would have had to take her to the islands of Luanda beneath the sun, redolent of the warm algae and the hot timber of the boats. He sat up In his seat and began to talk of the fishermen, silhouetted against the sunsets, of the woman, his mother, waiting for their return. They would go and settle there, she would love the country… Suddenly he remembered who he was: a young African, stateless, a half-monkey to those who occupied Angola. The tangled knot that derived from these thoughts drew ever tighter. At one moment Anna’s face appeared to him shrouded in darkness, unrecognizable. Who was she, in fact, this woman offering him a pill and a glass of water? Was it she who had paused in the midst of endless snows and made alive and necessary every moment that passed? Or a young woman from the provinces who wanted to stay in Moscow at all costs? And what was there to be done about the scent of hoarfrost that her dress exhaled when she climbed back into the train? And about the poem she had loved in her youth: a knight going down into the arena among the big cats and retrieving the glove a lady had let fall? And about the child in a silent izba, talking to the photo of a soldier?

He felt profound pity for this child, now grown into an adult. Instead of the scraps of dreams he could offer her, she ought to do everything possible to succeed in Moscow, far from those endless winters, from those phantom camps. She ought to marry this Vadim, this nice, gentle Daddy’s boy. If only that could make her happy…

Had he said all that in a moment of delirium? Had she replied? At all events it was during the flight that she told him her secret: to be admitted to the university she had lied and told them her father had been killed in the war. She lived in fear of being unmasked, sent back, ending up in Sarma…

Toward evening, during a few minutes of calm, he looked out of the window. Barely tinged with pink by a dull sun, a uniform white expanse lay there, the same ever since their departure. The freedom of these spaces was intoxicating, gave one the desire to travel through them in every direction, to land anywhere, to take off again. And yet amid this immensity Anna’s life traced a fragile line, suspended from a lie, stretched between this dreamed-of Moscow and the ice hell of her native village. A little like the glimpses of a road down below, amid fields under snow.

She came to see him every day while he was convalescing. They spoke little, disconcerted by the doomed nature of the choice that their trip had just laid bare: Moscow, Sarma, a calculated happiness here, at the cost of renouncing an improbable happiness back there. Destiny, a precise line that must be followed without deviation. The magnanimity of fantasies, the wretchedness of common sense. And the scent of the forest in winter clinging to a woman’s clothes as she climbs back on board a train…

One day with the vigor of restored health, he talked about the struggle that could change the face of the world, about playing a part in history… Anna listened to him, made a little uneasy by his enthusiasm. Then he realized that she had been born and lived in a country that had turned history into a divinity and sacrificed millions of lives to create a new humanity. He was disconcerted to realize that what he liked the most in this new world was the very debris of those old lives that had been sacrificed, the “human detritus,” the people of Sarma. It was among these outcasts that he had found true fraternity…

He tried to explain this to Anna and received a reply that was very just in its cruel candor: “You see, the people who live at Sarma don’t expect anything more from life. Perhaps that’s what makes them fraternal. They’re not… how can I put it… They’re not hungry. But I expect a great deal more from my life. Yes, I’m hungry. Later on, perhaps…”

For a long time Elias would retain in his memory the paradox of this hunger, which obliges us day after day to fritter away an existence we know to be false and empty, while the radiance of quite a different life is already known to us.

When the training sessions resumed again, he would reflect during the assault on the “presidential palace” that this scenario of revolution offered a perfect summation of human history: fine words, the thrill of battles and enmities, victories greedy for corpses, and, when its all over, far away from the victors, this calm, gray winters day, the scent of a wood fire, the intense sensation of being at one with oneself.

During his absence, the celluloid doll that marked the children’s room in the “palace” had lost its frilly dress and looked more than ever like a dead baby.

4

JUST AS HE WAS PREPARING TO LEAVE the “presidential palace,” the chief instructor told Elias to follow him. “There are people in Moscow who want to talk to you,” he informed him somberly Pointless to ask for more details; this secretive mentality was well known to him.

After an hour in a car they found themselves in an office containing monolithic wooden furniture and an abundance of telephones, as if to emphasize that serious matters were afoot. As two individuals greeted Elias without the faintest hint of a smile, the instructor melted into the background. From the first few moments he sensed that this conversation would be more a game of symbols than a genuine exchange. He, the simple young African, was going to have the privilege of glimpsing the machinery of Soviet power. They were going to dub him, to invest him with a mission… The two men, one tall and massive, who looked like a grizzled mastiff, the other dry and athletic, were not very forthcoming. “The interventionist aims of the USA,” “our military assistance to the forces of liberation,” “the Portuguese colonialists,” “probing the secrets of the enemy”: a few such set phrases merely formed the spoken framework for the scene. What was important was focused on the silence of the chief instructor, who had suddenly become a subordinate, the ringing of a telephone, and the grave reply of the gray-haired man: “Yes. Well be drafting a special report for the Politburo.” But above all, on the almost rocklike rigidity of these bodies, the calm ponderousness of gestures and looks designed to embody the unshakable strength of the regime. And it was only at the end, when everyone stood up, that the man-mastiff allowed himself a more informal tone of voice: “Things will be heating up soon in your Angolan homeland. We must be prepared. Well need you, young man… The commander” – he nodded toward the instructor – “will give you all the details…”

Elias was about to discover that these “details” encompassed the training he would receive as a future intelligence agent, his involvement in subversive operations undertaken in Africa, and, quite simply, his whole life, which from now on belonged to the Cause. The arrogant solemnity of the two individuals who had informed him of this, without even consulting him, infuriated him. But at once he recalled that these orders emanated from a power capable of flattening the world a thousand times over with nuclear thunderbolts. And that it confronted another, American, power, equally capable of incinerating the planet. And that in this struggle, in which man had long since been left behind, it might be possible to become a tiny cog, turning in the direction of good. And that for him this good would be for his homeland to become one where there were no longer cities out of bounds to black people.

The months that followed made of him what, as an adolescent, he used to dream of being: a professional revolutionary. What he would be until his death, in fact. Yet when talking to me about that training period, he would tell me: “You know, I became the kind of black man who runs the risk of bursting with the sense of his own importance. One of those Africans who wrinkles his nose up as if the whole world smelt bad. Fortunately some of the comrades with whom I was due to land in Angola were even more puffed up than me. It was really ridiculous. It sobered me up…”

What brought him down to earth in particular was the serene and pitiless fatefulness of his love for Anna. He was unable to tell her about the direction his life was now taking, but, not without a certain exultation, he gave her to understand that future horizons of dangers and battles in unknown lands were opening up before him. She listened to him in silence, attempting an uneasy smile. Very briefly he experienced a mixture of pity and triumphalism, that infamous combination that is present to a varying degree in all love. He at once felt ashamed, embraced Anna, and swore to return to her, despite the continents separating them. He truly believed in this promise!

Years later he would recall that brief moment of boast-fulness and his hasty repentance. He had never been superstitious, but that was the day, he would later tell himself, when his love for Anna, if it were to be preserved, should not have been tarnished by even that tiny degree of infamy. And she herself would much later confess to him that when she heard him talking about his likely departure for foreign lands, she had resolved to die rather than return to Sarma…

But that March evening he believed they were bound to be together always, wherever it might be. For Anna, too, this seemed so vibrantly evident that she murmured these confused words, as if half in a dream: “You may have to live far away and go for a long time without seeing me, but well still feel we’re together, won’t we?” These clumsily whispered words were at once a declaration of love and a premature farewell.

From that evening onward everything came in a rush. History bolted: within a few weeks the dictatorship in Portugal collapsed, and there was Increasing talk of decolonization in Angola very soon. Elias remembered the two individuals who had dubbed him. They, too, must have been caught napping by the speed of events. The training he was undergoing was accelerated; he was introduced to the people who would, sub rosa, be “leading the leaders” in the People’s Republic of Angola, the future of which was already being written in Moscow. One of these gray eminences, who went by the name of Joâo Alves, took him out to lunch several times. Once again Elias felt himself to be “an African wrinkling his nose up.”

He was in this mode the evening he went to Anna’s birthday party. For this her friend Gina had lent her the room she rented in the suburbs. Coming out of the metro station, he slipped on an icy section of pavement and brushed against a group of adolescent youths who were smoking and squabbling around a street kiosk. He ought not to have responded to their curses, should have lowered his head, made off. He stopped, tried to explain. Blows rained down on him, not particularly powerful or well directed, a hail of fisticuffs provoked by the unusual victim. They snatched at the bouquet, which he first tried to protect, knocked off his shapka. Their brutality was different in kind from the aggression at the train depot. Then he had sensed the hatred of mature men. On this occasion these were scrawny young louts whose hands were blue with cold. For them brawling was almost a game, a way of keeping warm. They walked away from him just like children grown weary of an amusement. The whole gang of them abruptly abandoned the attack and ran off toward a more engaging distraction… He felt his face; his nose and lips were bleeding. The trampled flowers lay strewn across the snow. Two buttons were missing from his coat. A little boy walking along with his mother pointed his finger at the tall black man, mopping himself with a handkerchief stained red. Elias had an impulse to thrust both of them out of his way then turned aside and had to make an effort not to weep.

He went home on foot, muttering reproaches, cursing the country, the slow pace at which the new man was coming into being here, and the stupid knight errant role he had just been playing. He inveighed against Anna, her resignation, and Moscow, this crushing and cold city the Russians and their past as slaves. And yet it was this past that made them close to him. In the end he found bitter consolation in telling himself that in Angola he would know how to avoid all the errors he had observed in the USSR. And that the Angolan revolution would be tarnished with none of these hereditary blemishes.

Their paths crossed on two occasions during the time before his departure (he concealed the episode of the brawl from Anna, inventing a mission to a military camp in the provinces). The first time he did not notice her. She it was who told him about the scene later: he was coming out of a restaurant with an extremely elegant man (it was Alves) and a pretty laughing woman (the latter s wife); they were getting into a foreign make of car, and Gina, who was with Anna that day, gave a whistle: “There you go, my poor friend, still running after your black prince. But you can see for yourself. He’d rather be screwing that chick with the stiletto heels…”

The second time, as if in a mirror image, it was Elias who, after two hours of waiting in the university foyer, came upon Anna, accompanied by Vadim and an elderly man (the young man’s father, he was later to learn). Anna was weeping; Vadim was waving his arms about as if to drive away a wasp. The father, with a concerned but determined air, was talking in reassuring and controlled tones. For a brief, fantastic moment the trio reminded Elias of those trios of times past, arranged marriages where suddenly the fiancée bursts into tears. But no. It was actually a family matter in which he had no part to play

They were left with this double misunderstanding for more than a month; then in a few minutes’ telephone conversation he spoke to her about Joâo Alves, and Anna told him about the anonymous letter that had reached the rector of the university: in it she had been described as the daughter of a common criminal. By using all his connections, Vadim’s father had managed to suppress the affair…

He was due to leave from a military airport to which she could not have access. They spent the evening of the previous day walking slowly along the sleepy alleyways between the Moskova and the Yauza rivers, amid the early April mist. Their lives had already diverged greatly and would continue to draw further apart, soon having no point of intersection at all. The torment of wars and African revolutions he was to plunge into. The life of the Moscow elite she would have to face up to. And yet that evening these destined life courses seemed to have no connection with their real lives. What was essential had already been found; they carried it within themselves, sharing it. At the moment of parting they did not embrace, but simply looked at one another for a long while. “You know,” he said, “we’ll go back to Sarma one day, and we’ll find that orchid under the snow…”

In actual fact he did not speak of that return, for fear of making her cry. Simply, throughout the remaining years of his life, at the most painful times during all those years, he would repeat these words, like a silent prayer, which was known to no one but Anna.

5

IN APRIL 1977 IN A STREET IN LUANDA he overheard a couple talking. The man was explaining to his wife that she was wrong not to clean the frying pan right away after supper because the grease, when congealed, gave off an intolerably pungent smell of burned fat. As man and wife walked along, they continued their mild altercation, each halfheartedly rejecting the others arguments. Given the price of oil, the woman maintained, it was better to keep a layer of it at the bottom of the frying pan…

A ridiculous echo struck a chord within him: Cuba, a young French pasionaria irritated by the increasingly bourgeois attitudes of the “popular masses,” forever frying their fish amid acrid oil smoke… Now in Angola it was Year III of the revolution. He glanced at the couple as they made their way along the Avenida dos Combatentes. The husband, probably a member of the MPLA, the wife, given how she spoke and dressed, a government official. Both of them quite young. Sad.

The Portuguese had cut and run; the country belonged to the Angolans; areas out of bounds to blacks no longer existed. The intoxication of the brand-new revolution was there to turn every word, every step taken into an adventure, a blaze of fire! If the revolution doesn’t change the way we love… Elias smiled, recalling the exalted dreams of his adolescence. In the distance the couple were still arguing: the man gesticulating with his right hand, no doubt demonstrating the correct way to scour a frying pan.

The intoxication was something he had experienced powerfully as soon as he returned. All the more because the revolutions success had proved to be almost unbelievably dazzling. The colonizers had packed their bags and left, and the MPLA, the Marxist-Leninist party (the only party, according to malicious tongues), had set about building the society of the future. In order to comprehend this rapid progress he had reread a book on the 1917 revolution and verified that the seizure of power had been just as miraculously simple in Russia. Was this a trap set by history for revolutionaries drunk with victory?

He was reminded of this trap when he encountered the spouses discussing their frying pan. Year III of the revolution… He was on his way back from Zaire after an intelligence mission in the absurd war (“a weary war,” he told himself) that put the two countries in conflict. The Angolan government wanted to know how much weight former refugees from Katanga carried in this struggle. The Soviets, for their part, were interested in the possibility of undermining Mobutu’s regime. Out in the field this curiosity on the part of both had led Elias to an Angolan soldier who was slaking his thirst, his face immersed in the water of a river. Drawing closer, he had seen that the man was dead, and little fishes were playing around his head as the current washed over it. In the forest beside the riverbank, the corpses there, too, had had time to settle into the poses of the living. That is how a battlefield appears when one comes upon it after the fighting is over…

He had been hit himself by a shell splinter: that streak above his left eyebrow. “I could really have done without this trademark,” he told himself angrily. This nick was a characteristic feature of his image as a “generic African.” As he looked in the mirror, it suddenly occurred to him that this eyebrow, drawn into a slight frown by the scar, might be seen one day by Anna… For a long time now he had made it a rule to remember only one aspect of that Russian past: the train that halts in the middle of the snowy taiga, a young woman climbing back on board carrying the fragrance of the night in the fabric of her dress… In his profession the drug of memories was a grave danger, on account of their sweetness.

The argument about a badly cleaned frying pan was a trigger, both ludicrous and timely He noted others, just as superficial and serious. For a time he managed not to grant them the terminal significance of: When revolutions die…

The death knell sounds, he thought, one evening at an official dinner, when this type of woman appears. Seated opposite him, the wife of one of the party leaders was puffing out her cheeks to suppress a belch, sighing, using a fork to toy with the food left on her plate. Year III of the revolution, and somewhere, beside a river, that young dead soldier and, on the opposite bank, a village where the children would have been at one another’s throats for the meal that this fork was tinkering with…

Another sign, the impeccably dialectical slanging match between Joâo Alves, now a minister, and an army sergeant, unable to resolve which of them should end up with a fine car that had been smuggled into the port of Luanda.

But perhaps revolutions die when people begin going to visit them like private viewings at galleries. That tall Belgian woman, his fathers girlfriend in Kivu. Louise Rimens, going to Havana as a revolutionary tourist. And now these armchair viewers of the march of history, the Europeans he encountered in Luanda.

In the month of May he forgot about these tiny indications that the revolutionary ideal was flagging. A popular uprising against the MPLA erupted. President Neto suppressed it in a bloodbath. This crackdown on “faction-alists” did away with a number of Elias’s friends. “The death knell sounds,” he told himself, “when revolutionaries start killing one another,” and he was by no means certain of his own survival. His control, who dealt with the Soviet secret service, broke off all contact. Moscow was waiting to see how far the repression would go: should its agent be rescued from the Angolan quagmire, or should he be sacrificed?

Elias was spared. “Young but promising,” he quipped bitterly. The Soviets renewed contact and gave him a new mission: to gain authorization to be present at the interrogation of the “factionalists.” He succeeded. In one cell he saw a woman lying unconscious. Beneath her torn dress broken ribs stuck out.

He recalled that President Neto wrote poetry.

In 1978 Elias formed a part of the Angolan delegation that accompanied Neto to Zaire. This visit to Mobutu by the Marxist president infuriated the Kremlin. Doubtless the countdown had now begun for Agostinho Neto, the poet, Elias thought. An odd journey, in the course of which Elias noted with astonishment that the soldiers polishing Marshal Mobutu’s car were using French eau de toilette in spray form to clean the hubcaps.

In May 1979 he again went to Kinshasa with a team that was to prepare for the new Neto-Mobutu summit. It was there that he learned of the arrest of Antonio Carvalho, the vet from Dondo who had made him read Marx. The man had now retired to the north of the country, playing no part in politics. But the hunt for “factionalists” had a need to unmask enemies everywhere.

Elias left Kinshasa by car, traveling via Kikwit, hoping to reach Lunda Norte the following day. He was held at the frontier, not by the Zairean guards but by the Angolan rebel soldiers of UNITA. All things considered, the cruel tortures they inflicted were futile because the truth they were trying to extract from him was hard to admit: as one of Netos men, he was entering Lunda Norte to rescue someone Neto was going to kill.

They threw him into a wattle-and-daub hut and left him without water for a day and a half. He lost consciousness several times and came to during the second night, when through the mists of his pain he heard whispering in a language he knew. He made an effort to prise open his eyelids, saw two shadows moving in the darkness. Two men the soldiers had recently impounded in this prison with crumbling walls. A dull voice muttered curses directed at the UNITA soldiers, then modulated into snoring. A different, younger one, suddenly murmured very distinctly; “I want to die another way, not like this African…” In Russian.

THE YOUNG PRISONER WAS AFRAID; Elias sensed his panic in the darkness. He was moved by this anxiety on the part of a foreigner, possibly on his first visit to Africa. He would have liked to reassure him, speak to him about an exchange of prisoners such as the UNITA military must have in mind, otherwise they would have killed all three of them – along with the peasants they had just shot. He did not have the strength to say it, or even to make a sign to the Russian. His hands and feet were bound with wire that cut into his skin. But the will to assist the other man helped him to remain on the alert himself.

The soldiers’ voices reached them through the un-glazed window. He realized they were engaged in raping a woman, that fat Zairean woman with a very childish, chubby face whom he had noticed just before being thrown into this “prison” hut… The young Russian stood up to peer at what was happening outside. One of the soldiers must have seen him; the door opened, and thick boots began kicking, somewhat blindly, at the three bodies lying there. The young man shielded his head like a boxer on the ropes. His older comrade knew how to absorb the blows by means of abrupt, muscular swerves of his trained body

Elias pictured the impression this must be making on the young prisoner, who kept whispering a mixture of curses and lamentations at intervals in the darkness. He probably perceived a world cleanly divided into the bastards, these UNITA brutes, who raped and killed and sold themselves to the Americans, and the heroes, or at least people of goodwill, struggling to guide Africa along the prescribed path of history Yes, a clear and well-defined perception of this kind. Tempting clarity…

Such a world, neatly cut in two, did not exist, Ellas knew well. This night alone was an inextricable tangle of lives, deaths, words, desires, abysses. There was that woman with her childlike face and her heavy, fleshy buttocks, whom the soldiers were taking it in turns to violate. By diverting their aggression, this rape had very likely saved the three prisoners from being executed. Anyone skilled at telling fortunes would have shown that their survival depended simply on the pleasure offered by the buttocks of a woman on all fours beneath the soft light of the moon. And on the same night, in the town Elias had failed to reach, an old man, the vet, Carvalho, was being tortured to death. And on the beaten earth floor of a hut there lay this tall African (me, he thought in surprise), a virtual corpse, in fact, its wounds swarming with insects. In his youth this African had seen a man stretched out in a prison courtyard under a blazing sun, whose body presented more or less the same fly-infested wounds. The boy had made a silent vow then to fight against this world where a man could be transformed by his fellow human beings into such verminous flesh. The boy had grown up and fought, and now this echo of the past was so cruelly droll as to make him smile, in spite of the pain.

Men invoke history, politics, morality… This allows them to explain everything, he thought. The leader of UNITA, the wicked Jonas Savimbi, is supported by the wicked Marshal Mobutu, who is supported by the wicked American imperialists. And the MPLAs good president Agostinho Neto, supported by Moscow, is fighting these terrible people so that the ideals of fraternity may triumph. How clear it all is!

Elias opened his eyes: amid the stifling density of the night that drunken child was putting his head through the window frame from outside and threatening the prisoners with a submachine gun. He was capable of squeezing the trigger for sport or in a simple muscular twitch. His face was rigged out in a gas mask with a torn-off tube. The glass was broken, and his misty, drugged eyes appeared now full of hate, now languid, like those of a sick child. For men who liked clarity, this gaze did not exist.

Just as this Africans racing thoughts did not exist (me, Ellas again reflected in amazement, and felt detached from his body covered in bleeding wounds, from the voice that was still alert within him). Two months earlier, that encounter at a diplomatic shindig in Lusaka. Anna with her husband, who now held a post at the Soviet embassy. A young woman very much at her ease amid the absurd exchanges of social chitchat. More beautiful than before, more radiant. And her Vadim, who still had a slight stoop, a mild myopic air. Avoiding them had not been difficult…

The child appeared at the window again, aimed the gun, waved it. Shoot! Go ahead, shoot! Elias caught himself thinking, and was angry with himself for this weakness. But nevertheless the picture crossed his mind: a burst of gunfire, a moment of pain, that puts an end to the long-drawn-out pain of a day and a half, erases Annas face, whose newfound beauty is a betrayal of the face he loves. And after that burst, nothingness, which can only be the fragrance of the snow in the folds of a gray woolen dress…

He came to his senses on hearing a cry. A woman’s voice, a brief exclamation, as if of joy, then the gunshot. Despite the throbbing of the blood in his temples, he picked up what the soldiers were saying: the Zairean woman they had just shot had diamonds concealed in her mouth… The young Russian was at the window again. Elias guessed what he could see. A dead woman, a soldier extracting tiny gray granules from her mouth.

Then it came to him that the only true view of the world was just this one: in the dense humidity of a certain night men cluster around a woman who has just died, gripping her still warm body, which they have all had their way with. Unhurriedly, one of them rummages in the woman’s mouth with his index finger; the moon is almost full (clarity!); a drugged child sleeps, leaning against a tree, and in towns and villages a few dozen miles away life continues, people prepare to go to bed; in Luanda a couple discuss the fat left in a frying pan; in Lusaka a young woman sleeps beside her diplomat husband whom she has never loved; in Paris a female intellectual writes a text about the betrayal of revolutions; while beneath the mud of the Russian plains, beneath the rocky American deserts, gigantic cylinders sleep, crammed with death and capable of taking off at any moment and obliterating this land bathed in the blue light of the moon. And at the very heart of this insane world there is respite, a wooden house, a woman who walks out onto the snow-covered front steps at nightfall and gazes at the white road below the terraced treetops of the dark taiga… He could knock on the door of that house tomorrow, and he would be welcomed as if he were returning forever.

For a moment longer he succeeded in seeing the world thus, in the totality of its interconnected lives. Then his vision became blurred; such a perception was unendurable for one human being. His eyes had only borne it because death was at hand, and this made him more than a man.

Feverish whispers already seemed to be reaching him from the far side of life. He moved his head, and the pain from a cut reopening in his shoulder woke him up. “Why are they taking so long to kill her?” Elias recognized the Russians voice, words distorted by fear. He again wanted to reassure him, tell him about the Cuban commandoes who would doubtless attack at dawn (the previous day he had heard their gunfire, the kind of gunfire that draws the enemy into responding, thus giving itself away). He was going to survive, that young man, perhaps even to end up with a vivid memory of this night: the intimacy with death, a glimpse of madness, and then that dead woman spewing out diamonds… Scenes for a book he might well write in later life, as white people do, to draw a line under their years in Africa. In these pages everything would be clear. Heroes, villains. And everyone would have a life story that began at point A to arrive at point B. And yet when death stares you coolly in the face, you realize that in your life there are just a few hours, of sunlight or of darkness, a few faces, to which you return continually even as you draw further away from them… Fishermen on the island of Cazenga, a woman waiting for them. Then the same woman sitting on the threshold of a hut, a child crouching at her knee, his face buried in the crook of his mothers arm. Then that moment when he was most intensely himself: a halt at a little station in the snow, a young woman climbing onto the footboard of a train… And that winter dusk, too, an elderly woman standing on the front steps of her house, watching a bend in the road…

He regained consciousness as he felt a hand unceremoniously searching through his jacket pockets. In his mind the words formed in Portuguese: “Nâo, nâo sou morto…” His mouth was too dry to articulate, his lips caked with blood. No, in any case, something else should be said. In the darkness he picked up the young Russian’s whispered words as he talked to himself without hearing. Elias knew there was nothing in his jacket pockets; the soldiers had taken his papers, his money, his notebook… The pen! Tucked away horizontally in an inside pocket, as if in a hiding place. The young prisoner was just flushing it out. Lean pickings. And what’s more, he did not know that…

“The ink… The ink’s all dried up… But if you could memorize an address…”